Mr. Trump regrets

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been a lot of praise for a prepared speech Donald Trump gave last night in North Carolina that emphasized his role as a voice for the common man/woman against a corrupt elite. That’s a good approach, I think, in terms of tactics, because that’s how his supporters see him—whether he used to be in league with that corrupt elite or not. Trump is many things, but one of them is most definitely a voice, and I mean that in a non-sarcastic way, although I may sound sarcastic.

One thing I’ve always understand is Trump’s appeal, because long long ago I noticed the anger in the populace, and particularly on the right, on which Trump has built that appeal. And his especially harsh, abrasive, nasty, but incisive hard-hitting voice has been very satisfying for a lot of people to finally hear.

One of the things many people find significant about Trump’s NC speech last night was that he issued a very rare expression of “regret” (I wouldn’t call it an apology, although some do) that went like this:

Sometimes in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing. I have done that…

And believe it or not I regret it. And I do regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain. Too much is at stake is for us to be consumed by these issues, but one thing I can promise you is this. I will always tell you the truth.

Before I get into my impression of those statements, I want to add that some people have suggested I should stop harping on Trump, just as some people suggested for years that I wrote too often about Obama. Some have also suggested I write more about Hillary Clinton. But I write about what interests me most, and usually what interests me is something I need to figure out, something I need to learn, not something I already know. Obama was that, Trump is that, and Hillary is not. I also have written about 100 posts on Hillary, so she’s not exactly an untapped subject on this blog. There’s also an almost complete consensus about her on the part of my readers, so why bother? I don’t even think any of the neverTrumpers who comment on this blog (there are only a few, by the way) have any intention of voting for her, or are unaware of how dreadful she is. Everybody gets it.

I have written many times that I have no problem with anyone voting for Trump. Nor am I trying to talk you out of voting for him. What I am trying to do is point out who he is as I see it, and what we may be getting into. I’m not interested in illusions and hopes, although I certainly hope (and have said so many times) that if Trump is elected he’s a much better person and would be a much better president than I think he is or than I think he would be. But I think it’s important to know—as best we can—who he actually is.

So it’s in that spirit that I say that this quoted “apology” is one of the biggest hunks of garbage I’ve ever heard. And no, that’s not because I come to it with an anti-Trump mindset—I’m applying objective criteria I would apply (and have applied) to any apology.

The first problem is that, as with all of Trump’s scripted speeches, the words are not his, although we can be virtually certain that he approved of them. This is true of most politicians’ speeches, but with Trump the gap between his written and extemporaneous words is the size of the Grand Canyon. We can be assured that, as with most people, the words uttered from his own mouth without an intermediary penning them for him are the words that best express his thoughts and best reflect the quality of his mind and his emotional makeup.

But even if we accept the words he spoke in this speech as coming from Trump and not from his speechwriters, there are problems with them, big problems. Let’s take it from the top:

Sometimes in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues…

No, Trump’s defamatory and otherwise nasty remarks were not just in the heat of debate, nor were they remarks dealing with a multitude of issues (unless you consider each person he defamed to be a separate “issue”). The remarks were not for the most part about the issues at all. They were usually spoken in avoidance of some ongoing debate on issues; they were sidesteps to distract from the issues and go for the personal and the jugular, including families rather than merely the candidates themselves. They typically involved people’s appearance and other personal qualities (such as disabilities), or vicious and over-the-top name-calling (recall his slurs towards Ben Carson, to take just one example) and were on a first-grade schoolyard level. These sorts of remarks were not just uttered from Trump’s mouth in the heat of the moment, nor were they a one-off event, they were repeated and repeated and repeated and Tweeted and re-Tweeted by Trump himself, with malice aforethought, in blood both hot and cold. Note, also, that at no point does Trump specifically mention a single one of those remarks or words that he regrets; he leaves it hazy and up to the listener to fill in the blanks with his/her imagination and/or memory.

…you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing. I have done that…

Props to Trump there for using the word “I.”

And believe it or not I regret it.

Oh, he probably regrets it, all right, if he thinks it has hurt him in the election. Otherwise, forgive me if I question the depth of Trump’s regret—because, having studied his life, I have noticed that vicious insults have been his most favorite public tool ever since he was a relatively young man. This is not something new; this is a deep and ingrained characterological trait of his. I believe he thinks it has been very effective and has stood him in good stead for most of his life, and he has no intention of giving it up.

And I do regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain.

May have? A weasel construction.

Too much is at stake is for us to be consumed by these issues…

Who is this “us,” kimosabe? And if so, why have you allowed your campaign to be consumed by them for a year? Because you think they have worked to get you where you are.

…but one thing I can promise you is this. I will always tell you the truth.

That would be novel, because I don’t think it’s necessary to demonstrate that telling the truth is not something for which Trump is known.

Let me reiterate: vote for Trump if you wish and if you think it’s best. I completely understand (and sometimes fall prey to) the “Trump is not Hillary, so one must vote for him” argument. It may indeed be a very valid one. But don’t let him piss on your leg and call it rain. I refuse to sugar-coat who and what Trump is—or what Hillary is, for that matter—and I suggest you not do so, either.

[NOTE: The title of this post is a reference to this very odd song.]

Trump and the black vote—fun with statistics

The New Neo Posted on by

Several commenters have pointed out that Trump made a speech recently that appealed to black voters. Here’s how commenter Richard Saunders describes it, for example:

Trump makes the best speech of the campaign, and is the one of the first, if not the first, Republican to reach out to the black community in 50 years, a brilliant move both substantively and strategically…

I’ve already said, many times, how little I think that any of Trump’s speeches matter to anyone except those who already are predisposed to like him. One of the many many troubles with Trump (as I described at some length yesterday) is that there is an unusally huge (yuge?) gap perceived between his off-the-cuff words and his scripted words/persona, and the former tend to trump (sorry!) the latter because they appear to express his own thoughts rather than those of others. So my first reaction is the same as to any Trump speech.

But let’s put that aside and take the speech on its merits. Several people have indicated that it’s something no other Republican has done in 50 years or more (or very very few, anyway, as Richard Saunders concedes). But on what is that assertion based? Memory? Memory can play funny tricks on you; that’s why Google is our friend.

And just a very quick Googling reveals that both Mitt Romney and George Bush reached out in a similar way during campaigns, as did Rand Paul during the 2016 campaign (see this, this, and this). That’s as far back as I tried to search at first (to search all the Republican presidents and candidates of the last 50 years would take too long), but just now I decided to Google “Gerald Ford speaks to black community” and up came this:

In the months after he assumed the presidency, Ford actively presented his views on domestic policy, including civil rights and urban affairs, to African American organizations, including the National Baptist Convention, and at forums such as the White House Conference on Domestic and Economic Affairs. He used a 1975 speech at the NAACP national convention to talk about the adverse impact of the recession and inflation on low-income workers and the poor. He promised that his administration’s policy of fiscal restraint wouldn’t mean turning the country’s back on problems of employment, housing, education, transportation and health care…

Meanwhile, the president reached out to African American audiences to sell his policies. For example, his 1975 speech to the predominantly black National Newspaper Publishers Association addressed the economy, crime, taxes, unemployment and voting rights. “Blacks in our society have too often been mentally segregated by some thinkers and planners who acted as if blacks did not have the same expectations and problems as other Americans,” he said. “I promised at the very beginning of my administration to be president of all the people, and I am keeping that pledge. The administration will not slice off a small portion of the pie and say, ”˜This is enough for the 25 millions of Americans who are black.’”

There’s a good deal more at the link; the whole thing is an excerpt from a book entitled Presidents and Black America: A Documentary History (can’t find it at Amazon, though), which might correct the record on misconceptions about a lot of presidents.

I have grown tired of people who support Trump asserting he’s the only one who has done this, or that, or the other thing (tough talk on immigration being another) when in fact he’s not all that singular at all. The truth about the GOP and the black community in recent years is that the perception of “Democrats good, GOP bad” by the black community has become entrenched and is probably not amenable to a speech, period.

The MSM has long been engaged in promoting the idea that Republicans ignore black people. It’s said often enough by the left that I don’t think the right needs to repeat the falsehood. And yet, the right often accepts that characterization by the left without questioning or researching it.

During the primaries there was also lot of hype about how Trump was getting or about to be getting a significant amount of the black vote, as expressed in polls. I believe that was something that was not only pushed by Trump supporters for obvious reasons, but was pushed by the MSM to get more support in the primaries for Trump because they felt he’d actually be the weakest opponent for Hillary to face. But when I looked more closely at that claim about Trump’s support among blacks, it tended to evaporate (see this and this).

James Taranto has a recent article on the subject of Trump and the black vote in which he says:

Consider, though, that it would have been all but impossible to assemble a crowd of Trump supporters in a black neighborhood. Several recent polls have shown Trump’s African-American support, both nationally and in battleground states, as low as 1% or even zero.

On the other hand, Trump’s black support wasn’t always so low. This is from a May NewsMax report:

A May 2 Public Policy Polling release showed that in the swing state of Ohio, Donald Trump would garner 15 percent of the African-American vote vs. Hillary Clinton.

According to Van Jones, former aide to President Barack Obama and CNN contributor, that puts Trump in the White House.

“If only 70 percent don’t like Donald Trump, that means 30 percent are open to his argument; if he gets half of those, he’s president,” Jones said in a video posted on his Facebook page. “In order for the Democrats to win the White House, they . . . need 90 to 92 percent of the black vote.”

Of course that 90% to 92% threshold varies depending on turnout and on the candidates’ performances with nonblack voters. But if Trump’s black support has declined from a respectable (for a Republican) 15% a few months ago to 1% or less today, that suggests his detractors””Democrats, media people and even some Republicans””have been successful in their effort to portray him as racist. It makes sense for him to counter that perception, since most voters of whatever race would rather not cast ballots for a candidate they see as racist.

Some commentators have observed that given the margin of error, if a poll shows 1% support, the actual level of support could be negative. That’s impossible, of course: The margin of error does not supersede the absolute lower limit of zero. But the margin of error does work the other way: A poll showing zero or near-zero support could underestimate the actual level. And the margin of error of a small subsample””blacks are approximately one-eighth of the total U.S. population””is considerably higher than that of the entire sample.

It’s possible that the May poll showing 15% support among blacks in Ohio (a state whose African-American population share is close to that of the whole country) is a more reliable indicator than the recent zero or 1% polls. Perhaps social-acceptability bias has made black Trump supporters less willing to admit their true preference.

In any case, an optimistic Trump supporter would point out that the current polls are so low that they leave room for nothing other than improvement. Trump would be a fool not to take advantage of the opportunity.

In analyzing that poll from May, the first thing one has to realize is that in recent presidential elections, Republicans have gotten less than 15% of the vote but hardly zero. Romney (running against black candidate Barack Obama) got 6% of the black vote in 2012; McCain (against the same opponent) got 4% in 2008, while in 2004 George Bush (running against Kerry) got 11% and in 2000 he got 9% (running against Gore). Prior to that, Bob Dole got 12% and Perot 4% in 1996, and in 1992 George Bush got 10%.

Those are the figures for comparison. Remember, however, that the Public Policy poll from May was taken in Ohio rather than nationwide, but fortunately we are able to compare that 15% of black voters who were supposedly for Trump to the vote in Ohio for George W. Bush in 2004 against John Kerry—according to exit polls, it was 16%; pretty similar.

But there’s another problem with that 15% figure for Trump in Ohio back in May. If you actually look at the poll figures, you will see that it was a survey of 799 Ohio voters. 12% of those voters were black, which means (rounded up) that the poll queried 96 black voters. Therefore, Trump’s 15% of those black voters would have been 14 people. For comparison, Cruz got 11% of the black voters in the same poll, which would have been about 10.5 people. The difference seems rather meaningless because the n is just too small to matter. The margin of error for the entire group of 799 was +-3.2%, but for the subgroup of black voters it would be much larger.

I wouldn’t come to any conclusions about much of anything from poll results like that, except that the poll needs a larger n. At any rate, as Taranto points out, Trump no longer appears to be pulling anything like those numbers of black voters nationwide, if in fact he ever did in Ohio, and if in fact we trust that polls can measure this accurately. I somehow doubt that either finding—the 15% in May or the near-0% since then—are valid, and I would guess that the truth lies somewhere in-between, and will remain there no matter how many speeches Trump makes to the black community.

[NOTE: By the way, unlike many of his predecessors such as Romney—who gave his speech to the NAACP—Trump’s speech was given to a white audience. Make of that what you will.]

Defending Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have noticed—really, it was hard not to notice—that one of yesterday’s posts got a link that drew a great many pro-Trump commenters here to express in various angry ways the idea that my post was insufficiently Trump-philic.

I kept most of the comments up there because I think they illustrate something. The blogosphere has never been an especially gentle or polite place, nor do I expect it to be. But this election Year of the Trump I’ve noticed an upswing in bitter/angry commenting on many blogs, not just this one but on blogs in general. This anger predated Trump’s candidacy and he didn’t cause it, but he and blogs that support him act as a lightening rods for it, channeling it and augmenting it giving it direction and form.

On yesterday’s thread in question, the comments were mostly ad hominem and/or strawman attacks from commenters who seemed to be uninterested for the most part in countering my substantive points as expressed in the post. Nor did many of them seem to notice that most of the time in that post I was describing general reactions (particularly of moderate voters) to Trump rather than my own personal reactions. Some of the comments had a nasty tone I’ve long gotten used to from commenters on the left—for example, insisting they don’t give a “rat’s ass” about this or that or the other things that I say, or that I’m a “holier-than-thou neocon” who wants a perfect candidate, or “neocons want perpetual war” (ignoring, of course, all of my posts on the subject of “neocons”).

I didn’t start a blog to parrot what other people say or toe a party line. There are plenty of blogs you can go to for that. I didn’t leave the liberal fold (not that I was ever quite in it; I always veered somewhat from the party line) to join some other fold. There are plenty of collective hive minds on both left and right, and though I study the phenomenon I have no interest in becoming part of that phenomenon.

Commenter “Kyndyll G” (not a troll, but a valued regular here) has this to say about it all:

I may vote for [Trump] because I have to, but I will not be happy when I do it, and I will be even less happy when I cast this losing vote because idiots and paid Internet trolls derailed a year in which the GOP should have won so that we can lose with Trump. Why is this in any way difficult to understand?

I don’t know if the trolls are paid by Trump himself, or simply by the many shadowy forces who want Democrats to win, but I have seen their tactics and manner of writing elsewhere, and they are not typical of intelligent people like the conservative regulars on this forum. It was an army of people who helped tip the scale to usher in a hopeless candidate who had no chance to win, at the expense of many who did…

For a while, the media played him up, in part because he was good for ratings and in part because he was the least likely to beat their Democrat candidate, but now the jig is up and the MSM has turned on the court jester. We all told you this would happen, and you treated us the way Democrats treated us when we said that Obamacare was a bad idea that would inevitably fail. Bet you’re going to blame us for Trump’s defeat, too, even though none of here will be responsible for that. Trump is responsible for his future annihilating loss, and it’s because his boorish behavior and the fact that he has no idea what he’s talking about, is sending disaffected Democrats and fence-sitters (who would love to vote for someone other than Hillary) running and screaming. We find that Trump’s horribleness is an ounce better than Hillary’s horribleness, but they see it the other way around. Berating us will not change that.

Long ago I decided that some of these commenters you started seeing nearly everywhere in the blogosphere once the Trump candidacy got launched were paid, either by Trump or by the alt-right or by the left or by all three. I don’t think most are paid, however; I think they are angry people who saw their moment to say “screw you” to those they were angry at, for example the people they see as RINOs and/or GOPe, those who haven’t managed to fulfill their political wishes.

One of these new visitors, “Maggie Gray,” made a remark—“Come out of your circle of grump and be happy and jump on the Trump Train”—that reminds me so very much of this old favorite, speaking of the hive mind:

On Trump: it’s the character

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter Geoffrey Britain writes:

The press feeling so free to attack Trump is a reaction to the common perception that his positions are so far “beyond the pale”.

That perception is in turn, a perfect barometer of how far astray Americans, in the aggregate are from admittedly inarticulate, truth. As if a truth’s validity is determined by how well it is articulated. The focus upon Trump’s bombast and clumsiness is an excuse for many not to face the essential truth of his concerns.

Any one of his major issues; the illegal immigration of millions who are culturally hostile to America’s founding culture, Muslim migration that is projected to double their numbers in less than a decade and an obscene trade imbalance hanging over our heads”¦ are mortal threats to our republic and will destroy us, if left to half way measures.

Geoffrey touches on something that is at least partly true, but probably irrelevant at this point. Indeed, the press does focus on positions of Trump’s that are perceived by many people (particularly by liberals and the left) as beyond the pale. And the press also criticizes Trump for not articulating those positions well.

But that is not why Trump is losing, IMHO. Oh, it’s why a lot of liberals and of course the left won’t be voting for him, but they were never going to vote for him in the first place. But in fact, one of the main reasons Trump has done as well as he has so far is that so many Americans are in favor of many of his positions, in particular his positions on illegal immigration.

Why he’s not doing even better than he is right now with the general public is based on something entirely different, and it has little to do with the spin of anything the MSM is writing or has written about Trump. The problem—and it’s a big big problem, probably the biggest for Trump—is that, despite some popular policy positions of his, a lot of people do not trust him, and that distrust is based on Trump himself and does not require any distortion or lies by the press (although of course the press will add some distortions and lies).

For example, you couldn’t find someone much more generally critical of the MSM than I am. I don’t base my opinions on the opinions of pundits in the MSM. I pay attention to Trump himself. I read Trump’s own speeches. I watch the debates without watching (or if I watch, without caring in the least) what pundits say about them. I read interviews with Trump and I analyze his words. And I’ve watched his old interviews and new, going way back quite a ways, long before he was a candidate in 2016. I compare what he said years ago, or even what he said yesterday, to what he says today. I’ve looked at the facts of his life and his own words about his own life, as well as lawsuits in which he’s been defendant and lawsuits in which he’s been plaintiff.

And I’ve decided I cannot trust a great deal of what he says. I cannot state strongly enough how little I trust him to keep his political word, or to have any fidelity to the issues he seems to be promoting at the moment. If he did become president, he certainly might turn out to be trustworthy on some of them, but I cannot tell ahead of time which ones they might be or whether there even are any such issues.

I am assuming many many other people see something similar, and they don’t need the MSM to tell them about it. Trump himself gives them reason to feel that way and very little reason to feel otherwise, and he has no political history that would tell us otherwise, either.

Not to mention his many other character flaws: he defames people (and lies about them into the bargain), and he is impulsive, mercurial, and really does act at times as though he is somewhat unbalanced. He’s not crazy, but he has demonstrated many character traits—even during this campaign season itself—that frighten people and make them not trust him in terms of his basic character as a human being in addition to his character as a political candidate. You may think that shouldn’t matter, but it does matter, and it has always mattered.

Now, you can certainly counter with the idea that Hillary Clinton is a liar and extremely untrustworthy, too. And indeed, she is. And I’m not voting for her, but if I were a liberal in tune with her policy positions, I would actually consider her quite trustworthy in terms of her politics, on which she is consistently liberal/leftist. With Hillary, politically, what you see if what you get, and if you like what you see, you might vote for it despite her flaws. She also has a surface manner (as does Obama) that seems relatively steady and statesmanlike (albeit she is a bit older and more unsteady than before), certainly relative to Trump, and people care about that sort of thing.

None of this is just due to media manipulation. It’s due to exactly the same sort of thing that happens with a jury evaluating a witness on the stand, and it’s something known as “demeanor.”

Trump needed to convince many undecided people in the vast middle that he had a trustworthy character in the sense that he could make decisions based on more than impulsiveness and narcissism, and could be relied on to tell the truth at least most of the time. He hasn’t done it with enough of them so far, and I don’t see that changing (in part because people have seen otherwise from him for about a year already). The MSM was always going to be on the Trump attack as soon as he was the GOP nominee, and not only did he have to know that but everyone here probably knew it, too. And yet he has failed, and failed utterly, to act in a way to counter what the MSM was inevitably going to do.

To those who point out that Trump’s teleprompter speeches are often good, my answer is that political speeches are a funny thing. We know that most politicians have input into their own speeches but usually do not write them. We never know quite how much input into their speeches they have, however—some candidates have more, some less. But all candidates rest on a certain fiction that their speeches are the work of the politicians themselves. Even if we know the speeches are written by others, we certainly believe that for the most part the speeches represent the candidates’ political positions and intentions, although we also realize that some things they say in speeches are just manipulative, pie-in-the-sky promises. And for someone like Obama, many Americans who were initial supporters came to realize that many of his healing words were sheer hypocrisy. But the entire enterprise with most candidates rests on the perception of a certain identity, a certain merging between candidate and speech.

Trump is different, because the gap between his extemporaneous remarks (including Tweets) and his scripted speeches is much larger than that displayed by any other politician, so much so that for many listeners it is too wide to cross. Many Trump-watchers cannot escape the idea that his speeches are something that other people write and that he is just reading them, and that they represent the opinions of his aides and advisors, and that for him they are opinions du jour only.

In other words, the fiction that all politicians try to create—that we are hearing a fair representation of the mind of the speaker—breaks down in the case of Trump and becomes unbelievable to a great many listeners (I am one of them, I might add).

[NOTE: You may have noticed that Trump actually agrees with me on quite a few issues (I’m not suggesting I have any influence on him; just that we happen to agree). Some of these issues involve one of the very things that Geoffrey Britain has mentioned, illegal immigration. For example, on this blog I originally criticized his “ban Muslims” suggestions and made a proposal of my own about a political test for immigrants, and he seems to have decided to incorporate something of the sort into his recent foreign policy speech. I think that many people are actually in agreement with many things Trump says (in particular on illegal immigration) and troubled by others (his stance on freedom of speech or telling the military to obey illegal orders, for example). But if it was limited to that—and if he was just “bombastic and clumsy” (GB’s terms) in articulating those positions—it would be much less of a problem, and he would have a lot more support than he does. Unfortunately, Trump’s flaws are much wider and much more basic than that, and they act to make a lot of people distrust him on such a deep level that it negates the policy agreements they might actually have with him.]

Trump’s advisor shakeup

The New Neo Posted on by

The shakeup in the Trump campaign seems to be the story du jour at Memeorandum and elsewhere. With the ascent of Breitbart News Chairman Steve Bannon and pollster Kellyanne Conway as the new leaders in his troubled campaign, Trump appears to be signalling that there will be no “pivot” to the more presidential and/or mainstream.

William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection adds:

This is, in a sense, the inevitable outcome of the Trump campaign.

Trump rose not just on the force of his personality, but on a conservative media machine (what I’ve referred to as “Trumpmedia”) fueled by Breitbart News, Drudge, Hannity, Gateway Pundit and others in social media, which acted as an echo chamber promoting Trump. Breitbart News always was at the center of it, providing the content attacking other Republican candidates particularly on immigration, that then was extrapolated in effect.

Whether that echo chamber can reach beyond a core of Republican voters remains to be seen. It’s not showing up in the polls yet, if it ever does. While hiring Bannon is the logical conclusion of the Trump campaign, it may simply insulate them from reality.

If Trump somehow wins, Trumpmedia will claim the victory as theirs. And in that scenario, they would deserve it.

But if Trump loses in a landslide, as polling now shows is the most likely result, then Trumpmedia and Breitbart News need to own that too.

If Trump loses, it is my opinion that there will be no “owning” of that loss by those entities, or by Trump. The narrative to explain an eventual loss is set: a combination of a “rigged” election and a “stab in the back” betrayal by those people who failed to support the ascendance of Trump the Magnificent.

This current reorganization of the Trump staff is another example of Trump’s refusal to change, or his inability to change. That wouldn’t be a problem if what he’s been doing so far were working. He seems to think that what worked for him in the primaries against all predictions will continue to work for him in the general. I don’t think so, but then again, he’s not asking me.

[NOTE: Steve Bannon used to work for Goldman Sachs, but unlike Trump’s crusade against Heidi Cruz, I guess such a resume is okay with Trump if it’s possessed by an ally of his.]

I’m not optimistic about this

The New Neo Posted on by

Research shows that human beings are not innately optimistic.

Well, I never thought they were. Somehow, I’d missed the news of research that seemed to indicate that optimism was innate. Now they say that such research showing “optimism bias” was “little more than a statistical quirk.”

Here’s something that seems interesting:

…[I]t has been claimed that people fail to learn from bad news, such as being told their chance of getting cancer.

But the researchers said they also failed to learn from good news, such as being told they had a higher chance of living to 90 than they had thought.

They also created a computer program designed to behave in a completely rational way in psychological tests that had been used to apparently show evidence of innate human optimism. This program responded in much the same way that humans did.

Does that mean that humans fail to learn from anything, and yet are completely rational? Sounds a bit irrational to me.

glass

Aetna cutting back Obamacare involvement

The New Neo Posted on by

All is proceeding according to predictions:

In a blow to the healthcare law, Aetna ”” one of the largest health insurers in the country ”” announced Monday that it will significantly scale back its presence on the ObamaCare marketplaces next year.

The move comes as a range of insurers have complained of financial losses on the ObamaCare marketplaces.

The company said it will scale back from participating in 15 states this year to just four states in 2017.

“As a strong supporter of public exchanges as a means to meet the needs of the uninsured, we regret having to make this decision,” Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini said in a statement, citing a loss of $200 million in the second quarter.

The Obama administration offered various reasons why this doesn’t reflect on the success of Obamacare, including the fact that the DOJ is trying to block a proposed Aetna merger, and this was seen as a possible bargaining chip by Aetna. But as the article says, a “range of insurers” have had problems with losses under Obamacare. In addition:

The mix of ObamaCare enrollees has been smaller and sicker than expected. Some experts say that insurers also set their premiums too low. Premiums are expected to rise more sharply in 2017, which could help insurers address some of the losses…

Aetna, like other insurers, has also pressed for changes to an ObamaCare program known as risk adjustment and has spoken with HHS about the issue.

Risk adjustment is meant to shift money from insurers with healthier enrollees to those with sicker enrollees to help with costs, but Aetna has said the payments are inadequate and pushed for the government to go further by actually subsidizing insurers through the program.

That change could require action from Congress, though. HHS recently announced it is working on smaller-scale changes to the program, which Aetna called encouraging.

“In the second quarter we saw individuals in need of high-cost care represent an even larger share of our on-exchange population,” Bertolini said. “This population dynamic, coupled with the current inadequate risk adjustment mechanism, results in substantial upward pressure on premiums and creates significant sustainability concerns.”

Insurers have also suffered from a shortfall in a similar program, called risk corridors. Republicans have denounced that program as a “bailout” of insurers and worked to limit the payments through it.

This “risk corridor” situation was reported on here years ago.

Kathleen Kane, Pennsylvania AG (Dem), convicted

The New Neo Posted on by

This is quite a story, one I hadn’t followed till now. It’s complicated, but here’s the basic outline:

Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane was convicted Monday of perjury, obstruction, and other crimes, after squandering her once-bright political future on an illegal vendetta against an enemy…

Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin R. Steele persuaded jurors that Kane orchestrated the illegal leak of secret grand jury documents to plant a June 2014 story critical of her nemesis, former state prosecutor Frank Fina. Kane then lied about her actions under oath, the jury found…

Kane sought revenge against Fina because she believed he was the source for a March 2014 Inquirer story reporting that she secretly shut down an undercover sting operation that recorded Philadelphia officials accepting cash from a lobbyist. Fina, for many years the head of corruption cases for the Attorney General’s Office, launched the sting before Kane took office.

Michelle Henry, who joined Steele in presenting the prosecution case, painted Kane as heedless of the law as she carried out her crimes.

“She knew it was wrong, she knew it was against the law, and she didn’t care,” Henry told the jury. “She did it for revenge. And after that happened, she covered it up with lies.”

Not a pretty story.

The really really stupid party

The New Neo Posted on by

People on the right have had a long-standing joke about the GOP, which is to call it the Stupid Party.

But hey, it was a joke, fellas. We didn’t think you really were all that stupid. In fact, a lot of people alternated between thinking of GOP leaders (variously and un-affectionately called the GOPe or the Establishment) as stupid, and thinking of them as brilliant but ill-intentioned puppetmasters.

This election cycle it’s been difficult if not impossible to escape the notion that the joke about stupidity was no joke at all, but the absolute truth, and that it was the the evil puppetmaster thing that was the joke. As I see it, this GOP group would be hard-pressed to operate a single finger puppet.

Now, those of you of a more conspiracy-theory-minded bent will no doubt say that what has happened this year was all part of the GOP plot, all part of the GOP plan. And of course, certain elements of it were (although I see no reason to believe the conspiratorial notion that the GOP wants to lose; they are politicians and want to win, if only for the sake of power). For example, I believe that one of the reasons the GOP failed to fight Trump forcefully enough was its fear of nominating the man who turned up as the #2 people’s choice, Ted Cruz. For a while there, they supported Trump as the lesser of two evils (maybe most of them still do), the one they thought they could control. And maybe some of them also really believed Trump would later perform some fancy pivot to a more presidential persona; but if so, that only solidifies their status (in my eyes, anyway) as members of the Stupid Party par excellence.

If they really wanted Jeb at the beginning (and I think they did), that would make sense. But that desire was pretty stupid, too, because anyone should have seen even earlier that Jeb was going nowhere. After Jeb failed, they didn’t really consolidate behind anyone—which would have meant convincing or successfully pressuring the others to drop out, which never happened. If I’d been one of the GOP movers and shakers, I would have applied every ounce of pressure I could to get that to happen, to make the race into a head-to-head race by some Republican against Trump. If they failed to try that, then I think they were stupid. And if they tried it and failed, then they were incompetent as puppet-masters rather than all-powerful.

I see their greatest stupidity, though, as not having realized how dangerous Donald Trump would be to them. But they didn’t seem to see or understand it. He’s not a conservative, but he’s not even a Republican, and he seems to be running against them as much or perhaps even more than against Democrats. He will not listen to their advice, and there was never any indication that he would. He will hurt their chances for election to the House and Senate. If he loses, he will excoriate and blame them. Hitching their wagon to him in 2016 was one of the stupidest things they could have done, a case of throwing away their best chance to win the presidency since 2004 and probably even prior to that.

What should they have done if they were either less stupid or more of the puppetmasters that so many people think they are—besides what I’ve already mentioned, that is, the forcing out of many other candidates? One thing would have been to have changed the convention rules, fixed on an alternative candidate, and pushed that person at the convention. They weren’t ever going to do that, though, for fear of alienating Trump’s already-alienated supporters, and because they couldn’t seem to unify behind anyone. So there was really very little impetus for that.

I believe that the GOP has been loaded with wishful thinking and denial this year. It became clear some time in the summer of 2015 that Trump might very well get the nomination if the field didn’t narrow down, and it became crystal clear by March that there was grave danger of that happening, but they seemed in denial about that. It was always clear that he could harm the rest of the party’s candidates, but they seemed in denial about that, too. And it was clear that he was doing poorly against Clinton in the polls and that there was an excellent chance he would lose, but for the repetition they were in denial about that.

Or maybe they knew, but felt powerless to stop the Trump train or to derail it. Either way, same effect.

Well, maybe they shouldn’t have let Trump declare himself to be a Republican candidate in the first place. Maybe they should have said no, run third-party if you must. Clearly, though, they preferred having him inside the tent pissing out rather than outside pissing in. What they didn’t seem to realize was that he’d be inside the tent pissing in.

Heartwarming and astounding story

The New Neo Posted on by

In a recent thread on gymnastics, commenter “CV” recommended watching this astounding video. I can’t seem to figure out how to find the embed code, so you’ll have to go there in order to watch it. It’s well worth the trip.

The story is related to gymnastics, but it’s not primarily about gymnastics at all. It’s about something that sounds corny—the human spirit—but it’s well worth the 15 minutes of your time it will take to watch it. It’s one of those tales of adoption and lost and found biological relatives. It also demonstrates how important the home environment is and how important heredity is.

Here’s another shorter feature on the same story, and it’s possible to embed this one. But please watch the first one first:

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Milwaukee is the latest in the Black Lives Matter destructiveness

The New Neo Posted on by

In a pattern that’s become all too familiar around the nation, the death of a black man at the hands of a police officer has sparked riots. This time it’s in Milwaukee.

Here’s a lengthy article on the subject in the local Milwaukee paper, the Journal Sentinel. The article manages to impart a great deal of information and offer a great many quotes without ever mentioning two salient facts: that the man who was shot was black, and that the police officer who shot him was also black.

The first fact is very strongly implied by the Journal Sentinel article’s content. But the second fact could not possibly be deduced from anything in that article.

And here we have a ghastly quote from the sister of the deceased man (his name was Sylville Smith and hers is Kimberly Neal), a quote that was apparently truncated by CNN but appears in a more complete version in a video:

CNN did its best to attribute a peaceful element to the protests on Monday morning by featuring one of Smith’s sisters calling for peace. “Don’t bring that violence here,” said Kimberly Neal, one of Smith’s sisters.

Despite CNN’s selective editing, Neal was not calling for peace ”” she was calling for peace in black neighborhoods and requesting that rioters instead target the white community for violence. “Burning down sh*t ain’t going to help nothing,” she continued. “Y’all burning down sh*t we need in our community. Take that sh*t to the suburbs. Burn that sh*t down. We need our weave.”

On the other hand, Smith’s father offered a rambling speech in which he alternately blamed lack of gun control (he seems to be against the Second Amendment) and some vague and powerful “they,” but he also blamed himself and the poor example he set for his son:

I had to blame myself for a lot of things too because your hero is your dad and I played a very big part in my family’s role model for them. Being on the street, doing things of the street life: Entertaining, drug dealing and pimping and they’re looking at their dad like ‘he’s doing all these things.’ I got out of jail two months ago, but I’ve been going back and forth in jail and they see those things so I’d like to apologize to my kids because this is the role model they look up to. When they see the wrong role model, this is what you get.

Can’t argue with that part.

Here’s more background as to why the officer stopped Smith and why Smith was shot:

The incident started Saturday afternoon when two officers stopped two people who were in a car in the north side, according to the Milwaukee Police Department.

“I was advised it was a suspicious stop. This vehicle was behaving in a suspicious manner. It’s a rental car as it turns out. We’ve not ascertained its status as to whether or not it was lawfully rented or stolen,” Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn said Sunday afternoon.

Shortly after, both car occupants fled on foot as officers pursued them, police said.

During the chase, an officer shot one of the two — 23-year-old Sylville Smith, who was armed with a handgun, according to authorities.

“He (officer) ordered that individual to drop his gun, the individual did not drop his gun,” Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said. “He had the gun with him and the officer fired several times.”

Smith at the scene. It’s unclear whether the second occupant of the car is in police custody.

Smith was shot twice — in the arm and chest, the mayor said. His handgun was stolen during a burglary in Waukesha in March, according to police.

Family members told FOX6 News Smith leaves behind a son and daughter.

“The victim of that burglary reported 500 rounds of ammunition were also stolen with the handgun,” police said in a statement.

The officer was wearing a body camera at the time. There were 23 rounds in Smith’s gun. Smith had a history of dismissed charges against him for a number of offenses, as well as a guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge of carrying a concealed weapon.

None of these facts seem to matter to the rioters.