Mark Byron

Kremlin Gremlins?

Earlier this year, somebody got into the DNC systems and did a data-dump onto Wikileaks. The leaks were mildly embarrassing but not crippling; it showed that the DNC was in the take for Hillary and the party chairwoman was forced out amidst Sanders camp outrage. In addition, some unflattering comments at various demographic groups that played into smug secular liberal stereotypes were revealed.

Neither were surprising. The pro-Clinton bias and the liberal smugness were largely understood, and the Wikileaks data-dump merely confirmed that. However, the Democrats got some mileage out of it, because somebody (likely the Russians) had it in for Clinton, and we can't let that happen to our great democracy.

The Democrats look bad due to some sunlight disinfecting their contempt of swing voters and pro-Clinton bias, and Trump looks bad because (as the meme goes) his pal Pooty-poot had his hackers do dirty deeds dirt cheap. 

[Update 4:45PM-Here's an interesting set of plausible three-carom shots by the KGB's descendants-

It is always possible that Russian intelligence was not sophisticated enough to recognize that what they had was not decisive. There is also the possibility that they wanted to create a damaged presidency. The goal was not so much to break Clinton as to make sure that if Trump won, a shadow would hang over him. In this truly twisted theory, the hack occurred to give Obama the opportunity to launch an investigation that might tarnish Trump. This is a long shot, but given the facts it is as plausible and implausible as the idea that Putin loved Trump and wanted to help him.

There is another theory. The Russians did hack the files but their primary purpose was to create chaos in the United States. In this theory, the Russians are ultra-sophisticated and know that by hacking the files, they could sit back and let the Americans eat their young, as they are bound to do. They had no strategy in mind beyond destabilization.  

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Did that make the difference in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania? Maybe. But who's to say that the Putin-hearts-Trump meme didn't make the difference in Nevada and New Hampshire?

Despite CIA leaks pointing the finger at Russia, we don't have firm evidence of whodunit. Hackers can route things through your laptop, Evil Stevie's thermostat and an Elbonian cell-phone en route to its target; any Russian prints on it could be real or a false-flag operation from elsewhere.

We had a squeaker of an election; with four states being within a percent, three of which went to Trump. It was going to be a squeaker with or without the DNC-Wikileaks episode. Any number of things contributed into that witches' brew, from Comey clearing, then unclearing, Clinton over Servergate to the Clinton team neglecting an old-school, yard signs and door-to-door canvasing ground game in Rust Belt states to our friends at Wikileaks. 

Getting to the bottom of the DNC leaks is a good idea. Holding the Electoral College hostage over it, as Politico seems to want to do, seems to be overkill. If Republican electors want to abandon Trump, they have that prerogative. They have multiple reasons beyond whether Kremlin-sponsored-gremlins were behind the most recent Wikileaks episode. If there were firm evidence of that, we'd likely have seen that come out sooner.

A Good Cop to the UN?

Some interesting picks for the nascent Trump administration today, as two non-Trumpian Republicans got position, Nikki Haley for UN Ambassador and Betsy DeVos for Education secretary.

I don't know much about Betsy DeVos, but I'm familiar about the clan she married into. Her father-in-law was a cofounder of Amway, one of the biggest multi-level marketing firms in the country; they make good stuff, but the money is made by recruiting other salesmen more than actual selling their products. Her husband Dick got the GOP nomination for governor in 2006 and lost.

They've been Republican party regulars for years, and Betsy has been an advocate of conservative school reform, encouraging charter schools (my sister helps runs a charter school here in Midland) and vouchers. The pick thus both gives conservative reformers a bone and gives an establishment Republican a slot as well as giving him an extra woman to give Mr. "grab them by the [crotch]" some coed diversity.

It also give the usual suspects on the left some good anti-corporate digs, letting them bash Amway and Blackwater, for it was Betsy's brother who helped found the security firm that became the biggest target of the left during the Dubya years this side of Halliburton. 

Nikki Haley provides Trump with a good cop at the UN, a daughter of Sikh Indian immigrants who rose to become governor of South Carolina, winning over one of the redneckiest states in the union. She doesn't have much foreign policy credentials other than a few trade-oriented overseas trips as governor, but she provides a diplomatic counterweight to the nativist and misogynistic streaks in the administration. While the Indian government won't roll over and gush over her appointment, her ethnic background should help any low-post innovations to Obama's Asian Pivot. It also shows a degree of inclusiveness; not as much as a black of Hispanic nominee would, but still helpful.

She's also not an early Trump adopter, having been a Marco Rubio supporter in SC's early primary, so this also throws a bone to more traditional Republicans. She and Trump had a few exchanges of urinary products during the campaign, but this is kiss-and-make-up time, it would seem.

Having a John Bolton-type in the job might be fun for conservatives, but if you actually want to get some diplomacy done, having a more diplomatic person on the case could help. Trump has the bad-cop part down cold, so he needs a good cop like Haley to close the deal after he gets into a tweet war with other world leaders.

The early picks for Trump have blended establishment types like Priubus (hey, spelled it right the first time) and early-Trump-adopters like Bannon and Sessions. These two are in the former, although Haley came in as a Tea Party person against the SC establishment.

 

Partly-Visible Man

Both parties have had stretches where their party chairs have been elected officials. Often, there is a division of labor, where the elected party chair serves as a face-man (or woman, as was the Democrat's Wasserman-Schultz) while a campaign-manager type runs the day-to-day fundraising and candidate recruitment type stuff.

The current buzz in the political press over the DNC race is that Keith Ellison seems to be a good person for the job, but the fact that he's a congressman marks him as a part-timer when folks feel the need for a full-timer. As a relatively-young progressive black Muslim, he would serve as counterpoint to an anti-Muslim, oft-rednecky president-elect Trump. That's too good a package for lots of progressive folks to pass up.

Three guys have their hats in the ring, two of them former governors and presidential candidates (Howard Dean and Martin O'Mally) and one is the current SC party chair, Jaime Harrison. Dean has some progressive chops and helped do some innovation on using the online realm and having a "50-state strategy" that chose not to ignore deep-red states. However, he might be a bit dated for modern Democrats.

One viable option would be to hire someone like Harrison (I know next to nothing about him other than what I read just now), who has experience doing the nuts-and-bolts of party organizing on a state level, as the day-to-day party boss, while having Ellison as the front man who can make the rounds of the Sunday talk shows and be anti-Trump personified. That would give the best of both worlds for the Democrats, still paying attention to the details but maintaining a good speaker.

Ballot or Bullet?

I'm thinking of Clausewitz as I read this piece on "progressives" looking to turn the disparate activists on that side of the aisle into a "Tea Party of the left." Politics is the art of getting people to see things your way and to changing the way things are run so that they're more to your liking. In geopolitics, diplomacy and economic "soft power" are ways to change things, as are embargoes, boycotts and wars; "war is the continuation  of politics by other means" is the classic Clausewitz line.

This paragraph (italics added) has a lot of food for thought.

“American activists are finally starting to understand that protest is broken,” wrote Micah White, an architect of Occupy Wall Street, in an email. “The people cannot attain sovereignty over their governments by collective protest in the streets. There are only two ways to achieve sovereignty in this world: Win elections or win wars. Now that street protest is not an option, we will see the Trump resistance split into these two fronts. Some will pursue the strategy of using social movements to elections while others go down the dark path of '70s guerrilla insurrection. I advocate winning elections.”

There are other ways to get things done beyond those two. Protests can sway public opinion in your direction; the civil rights protests of the 1960s were an example of "street theater" done right, appealing to the better angels of American nature to give blacks equal treatment. It had an achievable goal to which the population was open to. Things like the Civil Rights Act were passed and Jim Crow laws struck down not because they voted redneck congressmen out of office but by changing "the hearts and minds" of voters, legislators and judges.

The problem with the Occupy movement is that they didn't seem to have a coherent goal. "Wall Street is greedy" is a given. What do you want to do to solve that or to mitigate that? That was a question the occupiers didn't have a coherent answer to. Without a candidate or a legislative or legal agenda to get behind, there was no good way to channel frustration at corporate excesses and governmental acquiescence to it.

This year's Bernie Sanders campaign gave that frustration a face, and nearly grabbed the Democratic nomination, giving a well-placed Clinton all she wanted and then some in the primaries. I'm picturing Hillary as Apollo Creed at the end of the first Rocky fight, "ain't gonna be no rematch." Creed had won in a split-decision that no one saw comping, since he had knocked everyone else out before then, and he wanted no part of that action again if he could help it.

However, there will be a rematch, if not between Clinton and Sanders. We already have Balboa-Creed II slated for the DNC chair slot, with Keith Ellison in the progressive trunks, and Howard Dean in the establishment shorts.

There isn't a progressive majority in the country at this point. Clinton only got just under 48% of the vote and quite a bit of that was non-progressives that were more afraid of Trump than of Clinton. However, if they can take the close-miss of Sanders and add to it, possibly by including more people of color who voted for Clinton in the primaries, it could prove to be a working majority within the Democratic Party.

That can be done by following the Tea Party playbook of primarying more-moderate legislators, especially in left-listing areas that never elect Republicans. However, the trick then becomes getting those folks elected in swing districts; Tea Partiers were easily cast as radicals not representative of the whole of the district or state. The same fate could well await progressives who manage to win primaries but not general elections.

That takes time. Only a small handful of states have odd-year elections, the next Congressional elections are two years off and there are four years until Trump can be replaced via the ballot. It's the job of these progressive activists to first get their people nominated, then get them elected in sufficient quantities to enact change via peaceful political avenues.

Easier said than done.

For folks with shorter attention spans and more pessimism about the system, the bullet may seem more effective than the ballot. Thankfully, progressives aren't all that big on guns; if the election proved to be a pro-Clinton squeaker, the dystopic movie version would have NRA-Trumpeters grabbing their guns and  start small rebellions.

Could we be seeing such dystopic reactions from the left? If the prospect of waiting four years to oust the regressive bigots from power seems both too long and too difficult, could they try taking things by extra-legal means?

On Saturday, White posted a memo from a newly formed group calling itself Roosevelt’s Army on the front page of OccupyWallSt.org calling for the occupation of the National Mall during Trump’s inauguration along with “Non-violent disruptions of inaugural events and gatherings, including banner reveals, flash mobs, and simply standing as one people in solidarity for the freedoms of all Americans.”

One thing we've seen in other progressive protests is that peaceful protests often draw folks prone to (or sometimes intent on) violent acts; anti-Trump protests in Portland turned violent last week, for example. If tens of thousands of right-leaning folks coming to DC for the festivities are interacting with tens of thousands of protesting leftists primed to hate their guts, more than one violent acts are likely to occur even if organizers have no intent of doing so.

The dystopic movie version in my mind has such protests lurching from flash mobs to flash riots, with protesters stoning or shooting police, trashing businesses or conservative-associated buildings and making day-to-day life impossible. The Palestinian intifada of yore comes to mind, with young progressives playing the Palestinian role and the police and other authorities playing the IDF role. That violent protest/uprising didn't accomplish much other than empower Hamas.

It you couple that with a Red State-Blue State motif, the coastal big cities and the states therein could become prodded into becoming independent of the US if rule from a Trump-lead Washington proved unacceptable and unworkable on the ground 

That's where we might be headed if cooler heads don't prevail.

Lame Duck a l'Orange

One interesting aspect of American politics is the 2.5 month period between a presidential election and the swearing in of the new president. The swearing-at the incoming president happens right away, but we have an awkward period where the incoming president has no direct power and the outgoing president has lessened power, left to make trips abroad and contemplate any last-minute pardons or administrative decisions that could advance his side's cause or his legacy.

In contrast, the transition period in parliamentary systems takes hours rather than months. The day after a British election, the old PM has his stuff hauled out of 10 Downing, he goes to the Queen to tender his resignation, the new PM goes to the castle to be formally asked by the Queen to take over, and the new PM's stuff gets hauled into 10 Downing. There is no lame-duck period to speak of.

President Obama has been rather gracious, publicly hoping for the best from the new administration and assuring the rest of the world that Trump isn't quite the Devil incarnate. His professorial style can come off as condescending if you're on the wrong end of an issue, but that aloofness seems to help take some of the steam out of the frustration of the left. 

Neocons Rn't Us

Here's a possible way to square the circle posed by this Politico piece (and others) over touches of seeming antisemitism at Breitbart.

Nonetheless, Bannon’s critics have cited instances of what they call anti-Semitism on Breitbart.com when Bannon was the site’s editor, including a headline calling Weekly Standard editor William Kristol a “renegade Jew” and a column attacking Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum that conspicuously noted her Jewish identity. 

There is a rift between a polite, comfortable-with-modernity, globalist neoconservatism and a gruffer, old-school and more nativist paleocon bloc. Jewish thinkers, including Kristol's dad Irving, were early drivers of neocon thought, so Jewish=Neocon became a anti-neocon meme, as folks critical of their being both more polite and more cosmopolitan used their ethnicity as a ideological marker; a touch of actual anti-Semitism might well be in the mix as well.

The piece noted that there is a strong pro-Israel stance in that Breitbart universe which seems to run counter to the occasional Jew-baiting. In contrast to the Muslim Arabs in the Middle East, Jews are more normal to a nativist's eye; Haredi might get confused for ZZ Top, but at least they're not violently opposed to Western Civ. 

Post-9/11 (and arguably post-Shah if not post-1972 Munich), Muslims have become the dreaded Other. Since the Cold War, they've become the enemy of choice. Jews (especially the European-descended ones in the US) are seen as one of Us in comparison, passing on Christmas but otherwise part of the American cultural mix and the successes of Israel has given them a badass allure for many on the right. A tighter definition of Us can exclude them, but fewer people will draw that circle that tight these days.

There is an unhealthy chunk of alt-right thought (and alt-left as well) that cast Jewish-Americans as part of the problem, but in geopolitics, they're a feature rather than a bug for all but the Hitler fanboys.

Alt-Right, Alt-Left and Forgiving Trespasses

Just as the media was kicking around the tackily ethnocentric (to be charitable) alt-right as Trump's campaign manager Steve Bannon getting named to a high White House post in the new administration, I saw this story on the CBC's 10PM newscast last night.

Someone had put up a batch of alt-right recruiting posters in a Toronto park with the header "Hey, White Person" and goes on to list a string of grievances against PCness and multiculturalism, then list a string of allied web sites.

A recent Zits cartoon came to mind, where a "microagression" arc was in progress. Mom asked teenager Jeremy if asking him to take out the trash would be a microagression, to which Jeremy agreed. Mom grabs a broom and says that she prefers macroagressions anyway.

There's been a ongoing theme in certain quarters of the right (for at least a couple of decades or so since PC became a term) that since they're going to be deemed insensitive by certain powers-that-be, they might as well be really insensitive; "If you can't live it down, live it up." Like Jeremy's mom, if polite statements are going to be sneered at, they cut to the chase and make impolite statements.

"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us" goes the passage from the Lord's Prayer. Both are important. A lack of forgiveness can lead to a feedback loop of hostility and retaliation, while we (unlike our incoming President) also need to fess up to our own sins.

Using an dated term to describe a demographic group or merely saying something that conflicts with someone's world-view can be enough to have the offended person going to their higher-ups to complain. The "fragile snowflake" isn't all that forgiving.

Too often, the response to that PC-ness is to double down; "if I'm getting ragged on for saying black rather than African-American, I'll go nuclear and drop an N-bomb."  That's just responding to a cry of microaggression with full-on bullying aggression. Not only does that over-the-topness lack in forgiveness for the PC police, but it creates true trespasses of its own.

Note that this isn't just a alt-right thing. There's quite a bit of it in the more animated wing of the BLM movement, where the theme seems to be that if a MLK-style appeal to the better angels of white nature isn't working, calling for a pig roast might.

Transgression gets attention, especially if it taps an aquifer of resentment. Average white bands who don't see any fruit of "white privilege" and see everyone else's culture get honored but not theirs can relate to the alt-right's frustration, while a frustrated black youth who's been given the eagle-eye at a store one time too many and been subjected to a driving-while-black pullover will start to be frustrated with whites in general and cops in particular.

Turning the other cheek is another Gospel concept in short supply. For too many folks, their application of that is that of William Wallace mooning the English.

Swamp Merger

In the early days of blogging, conservative bloggers would tag the more radical/irrational leftist regions of the blogosphere the Fever Swamp. The "alt-right" of the mid-teens seem to be a rightist analog to that; indeed, a quick Google of "fever swamp" generates more digs at the right than at the left.

That came to mind as the announcement of the first two picks of the nascent Trump administration were announced over the weekend, with RNC chair Reince Priebus becoming chief of staff and campaign manager ne Breitbart boss Steve Bannon as "chief strategist." The irony of that is that Trump fans have little love for establishment Republicans, as "clean the swamp" has been a frequent mantra this campaign in the Trump camp.

I'm not sure if Breitbart is full-scale alt-right, but if it isn't in that territory, you can see it from their offices with a so-so set of binoculars. A leading beltway Swamp Weasel is first among equals with a fever swamp piranha in close proximity.

Both will be useful in a just-win-baby sense, but the ship of state seems particularly soulless.

The Election in Bay City Microcosm

Bay County is my mom's home turf and my home-away-from-home as a kid visiting my grandparents. It's not quite as Rust Belty as Youngstown and Gary, but the ship-building and auto-factory jobs have dried up. It's been Democratic, going 52.5-46.5 for Obama in 2012 while the state went 54,3-44.8. Obama underperformed by 3.5% in Bay.

As we go to press, Trump has a 47.6-47.3 lead statewide. In Bay, he leads 53.5-40.9. Hillary underperformed by 12.3% in Bay County.

That's a 8.8% swing in underperformance between Obama and Clinton.

Bay County is only 1.8% black, so you have Trump's target audience in concentrate form; blue-collar whites, especially in factory towns that have badly declined over the last 40 years.

Suburban-vibed Midland Country went from Romney +15.5% to Trump +19.4%. That's a bit surprising, since I was seeing quite a few Clinton and Johnson voters among Republicans in my circle, but rural Democrats  might well have gone Trump to offset the loss of soccer-mom votes.

Saginaw County went from 11.9% Obama to 1.2% Trump. A larger black community (19%) might have cushioned the effect that Bay County felt, as they both have lost a lot of factory jobs.

Very interesting times.

 

 

Baptists and Bootleggers Redux?

Here's an interesting piece on oil pipeline issues; a coalition of Native American indigenous faith-folks and envronmentalists have stalled construction of a North Dakota pipeline via a sit-in and slowed pipeline from Alberta to the Canadian west coast and the Keystone pipeline to the US. The Canadian west-coast one seems to be moving forward even with a green-leaning Liberal government in Ottawa and Keystone could well get restarted if it gets the next president's blessing; a near sure-thing with Trump and not improbable for Clinton.

This closing paragraph tickled my funny bone.

Which, in the context of OPEC's fumbling attempts to aid this process, raises a curious notion: that Saudi Arabia and its peers may be quietly rooting for those protesters in North Dakota.

There are a number of areas where people opposed to an industry and folks in the industry that don't want more competition can join forces. A modern example is gambling expansion, where church groups (both left and right, since the damage gambling does to the poor makes quite a few mainliners queasy) oppose it on moral grounds and existing casinos and race-tracks oppose it for business grounds; the latter has been known to help finance efforts from the former, as the Jack Abramoff story from the aughts points out. 

That effect has been called the Baptists and Bootleggers effect, with the churchmen wanting to keep areas "dry" for moral reasons and the folks selling moonshine wanting to keep legal competition at bay.

Could some of that be at play here? Probably not, since any money sent to leftist groups from Russian, Iranians or Saudis would need to be very well laundered to both save the environmentalists from being tarred and the country doing the dirty deed becoming persona non grata to the US.

I wouldn't put it past the Russians; they have a century of practice manipulating things in the US, especially on the left side of the political spectrum, and almost anything that hurts the US helps them become more of a global power.  It's a notch outside of Persian Gulf folks' toolkit, and a few notches too risky for domestic oil producers with secure pipeline access to try.

Those folks might cheer it on, but probably aren't help it along...probably.

Not Binary, Octal

I've been mulling over my options for the presidential side of the election in ten days. There are two effects to a vote, the message that it sends and the effect it has on electing the next president. People tend to discount the former and focus on the latter.

That's not a bad approach, but it ignores the message effect. A protest vote (assuming that you're not like my friend Rocky who sees his Trump vote as a protest vote) ignores the pick-the-leader effect, which is often short-sighted.

However, protest votes for president are somewhat different than protest votes for legislative seats. The Republicans having 53 senate seats rather than 52 will make a difference in what laws get passed, while the difference between getting 280 electoral votes and 296 won't make a dent in who wins the White House. 

If you're in a very swingy state, your vote well might make a difference, as if your state sends candidate X from 260 to 276, your state is the fulcrum. Kevin's Ohio and Rocky's North Carolina are very hotly contested, with 538 putting the odds of a Trump win at 51% and 36% respectively as we go to press. Those are places where a few extra votes here and there might make a difference.

Trump's a longer shot in my home turf of Michigan, being back 6.2% per RCP and 6.4% per 538. 538 has Trump's odds of winning at 14%. Yes, polls are notoriously imperfect, increasing so as folks opt not to talk to strangers on the phone, making gathering representative samples of the population problematic. However, they're the information we have at our disposal beyond what we see anecdotally with friends and family, and the anecdotes may really not be representative. 

However, OH and NC are on the bubble as the race currently sits. If the polls hold up, Clinton will win comfortably 324 is 538's over/under for Clinton, while 333 is RCP's no-tossup number. For Trump to have a shot, he'll have to pick up a few percent of the vote and get Clinton down under 270. If Trump is to win, current on-the-bubble states like FL, OH, and NC will slide into his camp and longer-shot states start to become on-the-bubble ones.

War-gaming the map to a Trump win would require flipping FL (0.7% back per RCP), NC(2.4%) AZ(1.5%) and NV(1.6%) and holding onto leads in OH, IA. That gets Trump to 266, assuming he holds onto Utah, where he's neck-and-neck with Evan McMullan in recent polling.

Getting that last state will be tricky, as the states get less swingy from there. New Hampshire seems to be the most likely one to get, with a 5.2% deficit for Trump per RCP. PA is 5.0% back, MI is 6.2%, WI is 6.7% and MN is 5% back, although that seems to be redder than I would expect for a traditionally left-leaning state whose niceness might argue against Trump. Michigan is thus the fourth state on that get-Trump-over-the-top list, although I don't quite trust the poll set for MN or PA, making Michigan a notch higher on the to-do list.

If Trump has a 19% chance of winning per 538 and Michigan has a 30% chance of being the swing state given that scenario, the Michigan swing vote has a 6% chance of being determining the outcome. 538 has a table giving MI a 12% chance of being the tipping-point state; I don't quite get their model, for I don't see the 18% for FL, but it's at least an alternative figure to bat around.

Using my top-of-the-head math, we Michiganders have a 6% chance of being the swing vote. A protest vote has a 100% chance of being heard. If you're voting to pick the next president, it's a binary choice, as a commenter here called it. If you are trying to send a message with your vote, you have more than two options. The Libertarians and Greens are on most ballots nationwide. In Michigan, we also have the Natural Law and US Taxpayers parties as options. That gives six ovals to choose from on the ballot. Write-ins are a seventh (Evan McMullin has filed a slate of electors and will have write-in votes counted) and abstaining from voting for president is an eighth.

So, that binary choice turns into an octal (eight-options from geek-speak) one if you're factoring in the protest vote. If you don't feel comfortable with either of those binary choices and see them as too evil to comfortably vote for, you can always send a message with your vote; given that there's only a 1-in-15 chance of it making a difference in who gets in the White House, that might be worth exploring 

Gary and Youngstown with a French Accent

Imagine if you would NAFTA being scuttled by the New York legislature because the deal wasn't in the Empire State's best interest. If we had the old Articles of Confederation still in effect, where things needed to pass unanimously  that might well have happened.

That's what we've seen this week as the Walloon region of Belgium shot down a Canada-US trade deal. The deal needed the OK of all the EU countries and Belgium's federal system makes ail their regions sign off on a treaty, so a subset of one EU country shot down the deal.

For the deal to pass, Belgium's federal, regional and community bodies (seven in all) must give their approval.

Wallonia, a staunchly socialist region of 3.6 million people, has led objections to the deal, demanding stronger safeguards on labour, environmental and consumer standards.

As it turns out, Wallonia is something of the Rust Belt of Belgium.

During the heyday of the industrial revolution, Wallonia became the second most industrialised area in the world after Britain, thanks to its deposits of coal and iron, and was Belgium's richer half.

Since then, however, the tables have turned. Wallonia's smokestack industries collapsed as Flanders developed a dynamic services economy and the Flemish GDP roared ahead. The Walloons are now the poor relations.

Such areas of the US aren't fans of trade deals. I recall a pro-free-trade Democrat from the Akron get knocked off in a primary at the turn of the millennia because he supported NAFTA; redistricting had dumped Youngstown into his district in 2002 and the depressed one-time steel-town's protectionist streak ran Tom Sawyer (no kidding, that was his name) off.

Even though the folks in Wallonia have no beef with Canada to speak of, they have a beef with globalization. They also likely have a beef with being an economic backwater with nothing much to sell but a bit of gritty rust-belt chic.

Protectionism is likely not going to bring those factory jobs back, whether it be in Belgium or the US. Neither Trump or Clinton is likely to Make Youngstown Great Again, for those labor-intensive steel mills are economic and environmental dinosaurs, the latter will make them stay dead if Clinton wins and the former will do the trick in a more autarkic Trump reign.

People often want to go back to the good-old-days. However, time goes but one direction, for life has no rewind button. Striving to go back to the 50s or so, to an era where blue-collar labor was well-paid, would require taking the rest of the world back to the 1950s as well, destroying most of Europe and Japan's infrastructure and putting Maoists and their backward economics and goonishness in charge of China. The US was nearly the only game in town back then, so American industry thrived.

Not so much today. The rest of the world has caught up and the modern economy left Wallonia in its dust.

Liberal Virtues

I just got back from a funeral for the mom of my friend and frequent commenter Anne Wolfe. The chapel in the Methodist church I grew up was SRO; there were so many folding chairs needed, that I told Eileen they needed to bribe the fire marshal to look the other way.

Anne's a smart, good-hearted liberal librarian, and her apple seems to have fallen very close to her mom's tree. She was eulogized as a loving, good-hearted mom, worker and church lady who had a heart for the least of these and saw the good side of folks. Add a healthy dose of feminism (the empowering women type rather than the man-hating "feminazi" stereotype) and a nature-loving streak and I can see where Anne's liberalism came from.

Those are liberal virtues, but they are also virtues, period. We're supposed to care for the needy. We're supposed to treat gals in the workforce as equals rather than second-class creatures. We're supposed to look after God's creation rather than trash it. 

How you apply those virtues is a point of contention. Government programs that look after the needy can be wasteful and stifle initiative, anti-discrimination laws can go awry in having every position mirroring the population to a T, and environmental laws if poorly done can stifle development and freedom that are not seemingly worth the modest gains for Mother Nature.

That conservative caveat said, those laws are generally done from virtuous desires. There can be a bit of jealousy and envy in some of the "afflict the comfortable" vibes, but by and large, liberal's hearts are often in the right place.

Mrs. Wolfe would have probably voted for Clinton had she gotten her absentee ballot in before she passed on. Not everyone voting for Hillary is a devil-worshiping, communist SOB, as a lot of folks are voting for her for virtuous reasons. Likewise, a lot of good, God-fearing, salt-of-the-earth folks are voting for Trump for noble reasons, feeling that despite his many flaws, he'd be better for the country than Clinton.

In short, there are a lot of good people voting for the "bad guy" whoever you think the bad guy is. 

Also, it's worth remembering that people by and large have good sides. Whatever the negative stereotype of a group is, the average member of that group will be good parents, hard workers and generally get along with their neighbors. Only a handful of Muslims are terrorists and only a small percentage of black guys are trouble-makers. However, quite a few folks are afraid of Muslims and black youth due to those stereotypes.

Yes, we do have a sin nature. However, we're also made in the image of God. It wouldn't hurt to see the latter a bit more often.

Cost-Push Deflation, Part 2

One of my most Googled post is this 2002 post on cost-push deflation. It's been flattering over the years seeing college students from various corners of the globe (a couple of Quebec students came by today) and London finance types give it a look-see.

However, it has just short of 14 years since I wrote that, a simpler time and place. Some things are worth revisiting.

A quick review of basic microeconomics will be a starting point. "Cost-push inflation" is econ-speak to describe the stagflation of the late 1970s. Oil prices went up partly because of a weaker dollar as the Bretton Woods system that had the dollar worth a given amount of gold collapsed and partly due to OPEC coming of age and flexing its muscle. That caused the cost of doing business on products needing oil to make or deliver to go up.

Producers then raise prices to try and pass on the added costs, which lowers the quantity demanded of the products. Sales go down, prices go up, and when you apply that across the economy, you see higher inflation and reduced GDP (or GNP, since GDP wasn't our go-to stat back then) once you factor out inflation; fewer widgets are getting sold. Inflation and a stagnant economy, or "stagflation" as it became known.

What happens if "factor prices" that make up the cost of making stuff like, oil of the cost of labor, goes down? Businesses see their costs drop and pass some of that on to consumers. Prices fall, unit sales rise, real GDP goes up and everybody says amen. Well, everybody but atheists and the folks selling those factors, as they're taking a hit.

Oil prices have gone down on balance since the financial crash of 2008. Some of that was due to an economic slowdown/recession that kicked in the late aughts and some of that was due to added oil supply coming on line in North America, as new production techniques such as "fracking" increased US and Canadian oil productions. 

Wages are a major factor price, and a rather stagnant labor market has kept the costs of labor relatively low. While unemployment rates have come down to lower levels, a lot of folks have stopped bothering to look for work, and you have to be looking to work to be considered unemployed. That, and the number of part-time workers, understate the poll of prospective workers, making the labor market much less tight than the simple unemployment rate state would indicate.

As long as external factors, such as a disruption in Persian Gulf oil deliveries due to any number of regional issues (the wars in Yemen, Syria and Iraq, Iranian relations with the US and Saudi Arabia) or political factors, like an increased minimum wage or a government meltdown throwing the country into disarray, are kept in check we might well be seeing lowish factor prices helping keep inflation in check.

However, those bleeping external factors are likely to crop up. Pray that they don't.

 

Getting Out the Graveyard Vote

Roughly 2.6 million people die each year in the US. A story making the conservative rounds has a former Justice Department official noting that four million dead folks are on the rolls. That might well be plausible, as it would have officials having a year and a half of dead folks on the rolls.

Officials want to keep things accurate, but also want to err on the side of not pulling actual live voters off the rolls. This The Hill piece noted Ohio fending off a lawsuit when they wanted to prune folks who hadn't voted in three straight federal elections off the rolls. This passage gives credence to the four-million assertion-

To remedy that problem, [Ohio Secretary of State] Husted said the state worked to bring its rolls into full compliance with federal and state laws, removing nearly 340,000 deceased voters and 1.3 million duplicate registrations.

If Ohio pruned off 340K, four million nationwide isn't too much of a stretch.

However, that's not news. It's only news if you leap to the assumption that those four million are going to be voting Democratic a la the old saws of Daley-machine pols getting the Chicago graveyard vote counted to pad statewide totals.

I'm reminded of the Hugh Hewitt aphorism; "If it isn't close, they can't cheat." That's better read as "If it isn't close, cheating won't make a difference." It wouldn't be that hard to forge a dead person's signature to a absentee ballot application and cast the dearly departed vote (or one of those living non-voters Ohio wanted to purge) to pad your guy's vote total. It would be hard to forge 5,000 of those in a single state without someone double-checking.

Can folks take advantage of lax ID laws to vote in multiple places, or impersonate someone? Yes.

Can folks get out the graveyard vote? Yes.

Could someone hack the computer software in election systems? Yes

Can they do so comprehensively enough to swing an election without getting noticed? Good question.

A systematic effort to run up the graveyard vote should be noticeable. Likewise, a large-scale effort to double-vote or impersonate voters will likely lead to someone talking or a tell-tale e-mail (something our friendly Russian hackers would be happy to scrounge up if they existed) wouldn't stay secret for long. It might well be underplayed by "Democratic operatives with bylines" but there's enough non-MSM outlets for the truth to win out, as well as some honest left-leaning reporters who aren't going to drink that much Kool-Aid.

We're also assuming that it will be the Democrats that are the ones that are doing these shenanigans; a fairly safe, but not iron-clad assumption, for Democrats don't have a corner on political corruption. 

Thus, the rigged-election meme that Trump has been playing with, including last night's debate, is somewhat overblown. We'd need something of a perfect storm for it to come to fruition. 

(1) We'd need the presidential race to be close

(2) We'd need Trump to win the honest vote in a state by a squeaker

(3) We'd need Democratic operatives to be running enough electoral black-ops to swing things over to the Democrats.

(4) Said operatives have to run with enough cunning and secrecy to evade notice.

(5) State officials have to either not notice the black ops or be in on the game.

 Item 5 would require a Democratic state government to be truly effective, since significantly abnormal returns in Democratic areas would be triggers for double-checking. Item 3 assumes a KGB/CIA level of competent spycraft, and the former would seem to prefer Trump.

Lastly, item 1 has to come into play; if the current numbers hold up, suppressing the graveyard vote won't be enough to get Trump over the finish line. 

Could that scenario happen? Yes. It isn't likely and would require a Tom Clancy-thriller level of coordination. They'd have to be both very nasty and very competent to pull that off, and the latter seems unlikely.

 

Good Old [Electoral] College Try

Time for a good poli-sci wonk post on a slightly chilly October day.

We're 20 days out from the election and things are edging in Clinton's direction. Things would have to make a significant turn to give Trump a win...but not that much of a turn.

If we use Real Clear Politics' framework, they have Clinton at 256 electoral votes before toss-ups. Let's give her Minnesota's ten EV and Maine's statewide 2 (they do one each for their two congressional districts and Trump is on pace to win the more-rural Second district) for sake of argument and get her to 268, two short of a 270-vote win.

Trump would then have to win, going east to west, New Hampshire (down 3.6% per RCP) North Carolina (down 2.6), Florida(down 3.6) Ohio (up 0.7) Indiana (up 4.5), Iowa(up 3.7) Arizona (down 0.2) and Nevada(down 4.2). If Trump can run that table, he gets to 270 on the schnoz. 

If he gets a 4% swing from various factors (bad poling, some extra-ugly Wikileaks stuff worse than the confirming-Democratic-stereotyping stuff we saw in the recent batch, a new terror attack, bad health from Clinton) and avoid having another moral hasmat spill like the one that tipped me into the Never Trump camp two weeks ago, it could easily be done.

If we get that 270-268 squeaker, all kinds of wonk's-dream (or nightmare) scenarios could unfold

(1) Hanging Chad-Part Deux. One of those above states will likely be recount close, where it's at least too close to call until the wee hours of Wednesday morning or maybe later. If it is really in recount range (under 0.2% or so), it will be lawyer-time, as every friggin' absentee and provisional ballot will be double and triple checked.

(2) The McMullin Factor. Utah is listed as a Leaning Trump state by RCP, but it might be better placed in the Toss-Up catagory, as he is in a three-way race there with Clinton and former CIA guy and BYU grad Evan McMullin running as a straight-arrow conservative alternative to Trump. McMullin only managed to get on the ballot in 11 states, but his birth state of Utah is one of them.

McMullin has been doing well in Utah polling, enough so that 538 did a piece noting that he could well win Utah. If you envision the 270-268 Trump scenario above and then slide Utah's six EV to McMullin, it becomes 268 Clinton, 264 Trump, 6 McMullin. Then, no one gets a majority and the House (voting by state delegation rather than individual) gets to pick from the top three. The Senate would get to select from the top two, leaving then without the option of slipping us a Mindy Finn (McMullin's running mate) and having to settle on either Pence or Kaine. 

The 538 came before the most recent polling out of Utah which had things 30 Trump, 29 McMullin, 28 Clinton. If that isn't an outlier and more folks become aware of a non-protest-vote option beyond the two standard evils, we could have things thrown to the House.

(3) Unfaithfully Yours- Just because the Republicans get 270, there is no guarantee that Trump will get 270. Most states require electors (generally party loyalists unlikely to go rogue) to vote for the party's nominee, but it is an open constitutional question whether those state-law requirements are enforceable. There's usually a rogue (or "unfaithful") elector every decade or so, but none that's changed an outcome of a presidential election.

If one Republican elector would go rogue, that would knock Trump out of a majority and throw things to the House as in the McMullin scenario. An interesting scenario might emerge if multiple electors go rogue and vote for different candidates. What if things are 267 Trump, 267 Clinton, 1 McMullin, 1 Rubio 1 Cruz and 1 Sanders (as a Democratic elector joins the going-rogue party)? How do you break the four-way tie for third?

Some interesting and real possibilities. Long-shots, to be sure, but very feasible.

Rebel Yell

This Joel Kotkin piece sees the country divided on economic grounds, with a liberal coastal economy revolving around finance, media and computer software versus fly-over country that actual makes tangible things. The intangible economy is more globalized and doesn't need a lot of the dreaded fossil fuels to move their products around.

Kotkin misses another dynamic. His coastal “Ephemeral Zone” is also a secular zone that errs on the side of moral liberalism and utilitarianism and wants religious expression to conform to those values. Moral conservatives and folks who see value in all life from beginning to end are going to run afoul of that attitude.

Given the rhetoric I've seen in the last week supporting Trump as the last, best hope of staving off a dystopic Clinton administration, the "New War Between the States" that Kotkin posits could well become more than figurative. If a Clinton team stacks the Supreme Court with justices that will force the faithful to kowtow to liberal attitudes on sexuality, abortion and euthanasia, adds carbon taxes that will slow down the tangible economy and helps create additional disorder by maintaining lax immigration policy and handcuffing police to keep their Black Lives Matter fans content and voting Democratic, there may well be a number of states that could well look to bolt from that "one nation, indivisible" that we pledged to back in our school days. 

If the Trumpeters are as vehement as their rhetoric suggests, they could well go beyond the mild terrorism of the Tea Party to Lexington and Concord. There are over 10 billion bullets sold in the US each year. Most of them are in private hands. If the cries from the conservative side are real, the Tea Party of 2010 could morph into actual civil war by 2020. If we're lucky, it could be a Czechoslovakian Velvet Divorce, but if we're not, it could be a Yugoslavian bloodbath.

One could see places like Texas and Alabama head out on their own. Rick Perry made noises about succession back in the day and Gov Abbott might actually pull the trigger if things deteriorate inside the Beltway. Alabama has theocon favorite Roy Moore as their chief justice, giving the federal judiciary the middle-digit sal-oot on SSM after getting his first fifteen minutes of fame doing so over a Ten Commandments display in his lower court.

It might not even be the states that act first. If we have enough gridlock in Washington, with conservatives and Clinton at loggerheads, we could be looking at enough gridlock where the government ceases to function. In that scenario, states would wind up picking up the slack left after Washington packs it in and forming new, more homogeneous regions better suited to be under one common roof.

 

Rally Round the Flagg

For some reason, a scene from The Stand came to mind. The bad-guy faction had set up shop in Las Vegas, and some new arrivals (spies from the good-guy faction in Boulder) ran into a police-officer helping run herd on the Strip, noting that in a post-apocalyptic world, this was an oasis of order. This Wikipedia write-up notes his name as Barry Dorgan-

Although he is an ally of Flagg, Dorgan does so only because he thinks Flagg's world is the only society with a chance of regaining a sense of law and order.

Order is attractive, but it isn't always good, especially when the Big Man in Vegas was a charming but demonic figure. His name was Mr. Flagg, Randall Flagg. The cop mentioned seemed to not be some sort of devil worshiper, but merely looking for order in a disorderly world, and was thus willing to rally around the Flagg regime.

A Vegas guy living in the penthouse of a casino promising law and order, Mr Flagg.  Interesting

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. 

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