Bye bye old investigations; hello new investigations

The New Neo Posted on by

As far as the halting of the ongoing House investigations, goes, they can still continue till the end of the term. My sense of it is that a great deal has been uncovered so far—at least, enough to convince those who are paying attention that the rot goes deep. But the trouble is that so many aren’t paying attention, and/or so many are simply reading what the MSM has to say about it all. So those investigations could have gone on for many more years and much of America would have ignored their findings.

That’s how cynical I’ve become.

For the right to win any sort of meaningful and lasting victories, more has to change with our educational system and various other non-political institutions, because until that happens, everything is filtered through the lens of the left. Oops, I guess I’m repeating myself.

And of course, two can play at this game. The Senate, for example:

Florida goes red and votes to turn itself blue

The New Neo Posted on by

In close races, the Republican candidates for governor and senator in Florida were victorious.

At the same time the voters of Florida gave them their wins, about a million and a half felons in the state were automatically given the vote next time (with the exception of felony sexual offenders and murderers). There were about 8 million total voters in the election in that state this year, so you do the math—another one and a half million voters stands to change the voting tendencies of the state to blue, blue, blue.

And the vote to restore these rights was not even remotely close: about 64% pro and 36% con. The measure needed at least 60% to pass, and it got it.

So, why did the voters of Florida do this? To begin with, Florida was an outlier in terms of votes and felons: it was one of only four states that doesn’t automatically restore voting rights on the completion of a sentence, although felons who’d served their time could apply for clemency to the governor and a Clemency Board. To the voters of Florida, automatically restoring their rights instead must have seemed only fair, and a way to bring the state in line with most other states (see this for a map that will tell you the policies in all the states).

However, the political reality is that this change in Florida is likely to make the state reliably Democratic, and those voters who don’t like that fact will have voted for it.

Or is that the case? No one knows for sure how these people will vote or how many of them will actually vote. But I do think it’s much more likely than not that the vast majority of those who do end up voting will vote the Democratic ticket.

Florida is one of the most important states in the US during presidential elections. Anyone who’s been around for the last two decades or so is highly aware of that. So this has potentially enormous national repercussions.

[ADDENDUM: I want to add that noting in this post means that I think that ex-felons shouldn’t be allowed to vote in Florida. I think that’s up to Floridians. In most states, they can vote, and my basic position is that they should be allowed to vote after serving time and parole.

However, I continue to think—depending, of course, on how many choose to vote, and what party they tend to vote for—that because Florida appears to be balanced on a knife-edge in regard to the two main political parties, this change in law is more likely than not to lead to more voters for the Democrats, and therefore has a very real potential of turning the state reliably blue. If that turns out to be incorrect, I will be happy to have been wrong.]

More post-election thoughts: the battle and the war

The New Neo Posted on by

I think of yesterday’s election as a small skirmish, a battle in a long long war.

And yes, that’s a metaphor. But I think it’s an apt one.

During the Obama years the right was worried about a lot of trends that seemed to be pushing the country to the left. Among them were not just demographics, although there was definitely that, but (and I count these as even more important) what’s known as the Gramscian march through the institutions. The particular institutions I’m thinking about have been first and foremost our educational system, which is now so strongly and predominantly on the left that it acts as their basic indoctrination arm. There’s also the media, the entertainment business, and to a growing extent the churches.

These trends did not throw themselves into reverse in 2016 with Trump’s election. In fact, I believe they’ve mostly gotten stronger during the last two years, fueled by the propaganda of extreme Trump-hatred to which so many people have fallen prey.

Trump is a very unique guy. We can argue about how much of his uniqueness is good and how much bad (and we have, we have) but whatever his good traits are (and I believe there are many), they will not and cannot be transferred to the party as a whole or to politics as a whole.

We have term limits for the presidency in this country (fortunately, or I think we’d currently be seeing the third term of President Obama), and Trump will not be president forever, even if he manages to win a second term. We need to find a way to counter the enormous influence of the leftward tilt of the educational system and the press, the combination of which I believe is the reason so many leftists either won their elections or came very close to winning in states that until quite recently would not have considered them for even a moment. As commenter Richard Saunders pointed out:

I am at a loss to figure out how people like Sinema and O’Rourke get to within striking distance in states like Arizona and Texas? They make George McGovern look like a conservative. How does Hirona win handily when she showed herself on national television to be a complete fool?

The source must be attributed to control of the education system by the left, and that terrifies me.

And of course it’s not just the educational system, although that’s a big big part of it. Even though the MSM keeps losing more and more of the public’s trust, people are still very influenced by it. One of those influences is what the MSM chooses not to cover. Whether or not people trust the media, I believe that the vast majority of voters are nevertheless shaped by the MSM whether they are aware of that fact or not.

The solution is not just for Republican office-holders to be successful in what they do, although that helps somewhat. I have come to believe that most people do not vote by taking a good hard calculating look at the facts. Most people vote with their hearts and their guts, and their hearts and guts have a tendency to push them in a leftist direction.

A few more thoughts on the election

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not the least bit surprised by the Menendez win in New Jersey. It’s a very blue state, and although Menendez is a pretty bad candidate he’s still a Democrat, and that counts for a lot.

And of course, although I think Elizabeth Warren has covered herself with shame recently, there was no way that Massachusetts was going to reject her. It was never even going to be close.

Right now I’m watching Arizona with interest. It’s still unclear who will win, although it amazes me that anyone would vote for Sinema. But many things amaze me that are facts.

Scott Walker is hanging on in Wisconsin by a thread. He’s behind (NOTE: and just like that, I checked a few minutes later and he’s ahead), but only by a couple hundred votes. My guess is that there will be a recount. You know what usually happens with recounts.

It’s been a funny night. Although some polls weren’t correct, the general thrust of the polls was. The originally predicted blue tsunami had slowed to a blue wavelet, but (as predicted) it will be enough to take the majority in the House. With the Democrats’ usual devotion to solidarity, they will probably stick together and act as a majority, but I’m not sure what it will get them except the opportunity to impeach anyone they want without a chance of convicting and removing them, and the ability to stop all the House investigations cold and start their own investigations of the opposition. The Senate, on the other hand, will continue on its merry way, confirming Trump’s judges and continuing its own investigations.

I think that tonight the Democrats are happy but not all that happy. And the Republicans are sad but not all that sad. The next two years will tell quite a tale.

ADDENDUM: I just noticed that Rick Scott beat Nelson in the Florida Senate race. Again, a rather narrow victory, but I’ll take it. On the other hand, felons will be able to vote in Florida next time, so there’s that.

And all of a sudden I see that almost all the Wisconsin votes for governor are in, and Walker is still about a thousand votes ahead. That will almost certainly trigger the dread recount.

And Marsha Blackburn beats Bredesen in Tenessee for the Senate. And she did it handily, besting him by about 10 points.

Election Night 2018 results

The New Neo Posted on by

[UPDATES below; scroll down.]

Polls are starting to close, and so here’s the thread for the results.

I haven’t turned on my TV yet. I’ll wait a bit.

UPDATE 9:00 PM

I find that I’m still very reluctant to turn on the TV or even do enough blog surfing to find out what the early returns are saying. Right now I think I’ll wait another hour or so before I do.

Time to eat dinner, which I haven’t managed to accomplish yet.

Talk amongst yourselves.

UPDATE 11:00 PM

Well, I finally forced myself to look—not at TV, which I detest, but at some blogs and some sites that report figures. It seems that the Senate news is good enough, the House not good but not as terrible as it might have been.

If all of this pans out as reported so far, it seems we have a blue wavelet in the House and an okay night for the GOP in the Senate. The Senate is more important because of its power to approve judicial nominations. And any impeachment moves in the House will be the usual mere theatrics without the Senate. No legislation can pass without both houses approving.

So, stalemate, except for judges?

I actually doubt that most Americans usually vote thinking about which party will control which legislative body. I think most voters have tunnel vision in midterm years and vote for the candidates in their state and district that they like the best. Sometimes it’s just that they always vote straight party line, sometimes it’s a catchy ad that strikes their fancy, sometimes it’s the way the person looks, sometimes it’s a promise made that won’t be kept—but sometimes it’s actually for a more substantive reason. Usually, however (IMHO), that reason isn’t who will get to chair committees or who will be Speaker.

More later.

UPDATE 11:35 PM

West Virginia continues to love them some Joe Manchin, although I can’t figure out why.

The real Hispanic beat the fake one in Texas. Cruz pulled it out—but not by much. Trump’s visit may have helped him.

Heitkamp wasn’t as lucky as Manchin. She didn’t vote “yea” on Kavanaugh, and she’s out.

DeSantis wins the governorship of Florida, defeating Gillum. It was way too close, though, considering how radical Gillum is.

There’s much, much more, of course, and I’m not going to list them all or even most of them. You can go to any news site and find the details.

If the Democrats think they’ve pulled some big repudiation of Trump and the GOP, I don’t really believe that’s what we’re seeing. Oh, the Democrats will present it that way. But this is a pretty average midterm election in which the party not in power gains between 25 and 30 seats. It’s unfortunate, but not unexpected, and not the least bit unusual.

I think the fact that I actually expected worse—and have been expecting it for months—made tonight’s results a little more palatable. It will be “interesting” to see what the Democrats in the House try to pull. They are so desperate for some power that they’re likely to gloat and crow and go on the Trump attack. It’s not going to be a pretty sight, and maybe a lot of other Americans will be heartily sick of it by 2020.

One thing I strongly believe is that the GOP in Congress had better figure out a way to do something about Obamacare, and deprive the Democrats of that issue come 2020. I don’t know how they’ll do that with a Democrat-controlled House that would love to use the issue against the Republicans in 2020.

McCain’s “no” vote now looms large. Could the current House and Senate pass something in their lame duck session? I have no idea whether that’s even theoretically possible, much less actually possible.

Election Day open thread

The New Neo Posted on by

[BUMPED UP: I’m bumping this post up to the top for now, so please scroll down to see the newer posts. After the polls close in the east and returns begin, I’ll be starting a new Election 2018 thread.]

It’s Election Day, 2018.

I’m tense. And you?

I’m sure I don’t have to remind you to get out and vote.

I’m trying to remember whether I ever failed to vote in a midterm election back when I was relatively non-political. The answer is “maybe.” I know that I always voted in presidential years, and I’m pretty sure the same was true for midterms, but I can’t be sure.

Two different parties, two different worlds?

The New Neo Posted on by

Not exactly, but sort of:

…[T]he American electorate has separated into two increasingly homogenous political tribes. As Lilliana Mason points out in Uncivil Agreement, “partisanship can now be thought of as a mega-identity.” The Republican mega-identity is religious, middle-class, rural, and white. The Democrat mega-identity is secular, working class, urban, non-white, and gay. But perceptions about group homogeneity can clash with reality.

I’m living proof of that. By sex, religion, education, appearance, general background, probably every demographic marker you can name, I should be a liberal Democrat. And indeed, once upon a time (in the increasingly distant past) I was a liberal Democrat. But when I turned into a conservative (which did not happen overnight), nothing else about me changed.

I do have a quarrel with the list of stereotypic attributes for perceptions of “the Democrat mega-identity” (otherwise known as “stereotype”). Urban, yes. Non-white? To a certain extent—that is, including a much higher percentage of non-whites than the Republican Party does (you can see the actual statistics for 2016 here; both parties are majority white, however, although the percentage for Republicans is much higher than for the Democrats). But “working-class”? Those days ended quite a while ago, not just with Trump. Reagan made the first inroads since the Depression, although I’m having trouble finding some statistics, and I think the political affiliation of this group has been rather fluid over the years. But “working class” does not automatically mean “Democrat” any more.

And “gay”? I would assume that the majority of gay people are indeed Democrats (although of course there are plenty of exceptions, such as this guy—and I also remember going to a Tea Party rally right at the start of that movement, and chatting for a long time with a woman who said she was a Hispanic lesbian who’s a Republican, and could I imagine what that was like for her?). But gay people are very much a minority in terms of percentages of overall numbers, even in the Democratic Party.

I think this is a fascinating statistic:

…Americans are convinced that they are locked in a political grudge match against a homogeneous tribe of outsiders.

As a result, Republicans and Democrats are increasingly unwilling to get married, be friends, or live beside one another. In 1960, only 5% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats disapproved of their child marrying outside their party. In 2014, 30% of Republicans and 23% of Democrats disapproved of inter-party marriage. Compare this to interracial marriage, a former taboo. According to Gallup, 87% of Americans now favor interracial marriage, up from 4% in 1958.

This next statistic surprised me (it’s from 2014):

Along the same lines, 63% of Republicans and 49% of Democrats report being friends primarily with those sharing their political views.

In my experience (and I’ve looked at life from both sides of the political fence) it’s more common for Democrats to shun Republicans as friends than vice versa. Maybe what’s not so common is for them to admit it. Or maybe the question was poorly worded; maybe when a lot of Democrats were answering, they were interpreting lack of sharing of political views as being, for example, a Democrat but not quite as far to the left as they are. Here’s the link to the survey question, which was asked in 2014 during the Obama years (and by the way, the summary results as I read them are actually 42% for Republicans and 33% for Democrats):

I would guess that things have gotten considerably more polarized these days rather than less.

And then there’s this:

Another nationally representative study found that 20% of Democrats and 15% of Republicans believe that their country would be better off if large numbers of people in the other party died.

Whoa! Are those the folks who’d be more than willing to start another Civil War? In this case, it was more Democrats who feel that way.

I once had some guy who I was having dinner with say to me in surprise, “I don’t understand it; you’re so smart, and yet you’re a Republican!” He was being sincere. This was at least ten years ago, and the polarization was already bad enough.

It took every bit of my discipline not to beat the living crap out of Politifact for this stupidity

The New Neo Posted on by

No, not really.

I’ve never beaten the living crap out of anyone, much less a website. I confess that, although as a child I certainly hit some people back when they hit me, I did zero damage and am in fact a rather weak-armed specimen of humanity, as well as a person who tends to fight only with words.

Even as a blogger I’m kind of mild.

But Politifact had to twist and turn and bob and weave to even attempt to make something a bit less offensive out of what Joe Manchin said about his debate on Novermber 3rd, and whether a tweet from the West Virginia Republican Party about it was correct.

Here’s the tweet:

That’s indeed what Manchin had said. But this is what Politifact had to say about it, in order to rate it as only “mostly true” rather than “true, true, true”:

The tweet linked to an article in the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication, that included verbatim text from the campaign appearance in Marmet, W.Va., as well as an audio clip.

Here’s what Manchin said:

“You might have seen the debate the other night. (Applause) I want to tell you something. It took every bit of my discipline not to beat the living crap out of them. You don’t come to someone’s state. You don’t come in here and not knowing who we are and just be spewing out horrible things. Every other word was trust, liberal, trust, dishonest, and I’m thinking, ‘Trust?’ Here’s a man who ran for Congress, Patrick Morrisey ran for Congress in New Jersey in 2000. He ran in the primary and got beat, only got 9 percent of the vote. Who trusts who?”

Morrissey picked up on the “beat the living crap” remark, tweeting that “the national media should look at so-called Mr. Civility in action.”

But the West Virginia Republican Party’s tweet twisted Manchin’s words by not reporting his entire remark.

In Marmet, Manchin did express his frustration with Morrisey’s attacks in the recent debate — enough frustration to feel an impulse to “beat the living crap out of” his opponent.

But the tweet leaves out an element of what Manchin said — that “it took every bit of my discipline” not to do it. In other words, by the time he was speaking in Marmet, he had already extinguished that impulse.

That said, even what Manchin did say does seem to conflict with a prior pledge in favor of civility.

Ya think?

Actually, the West Virginia GOP’s tweet did not “twist Manchin’s words by not reporting the full quote.” The full quote does indeed say that Manchin
wanted to “beat the living crap out of” his Republican opponent. Nor did Manhin say that he had put the impulse behind him before the debate began. That’s Politifact’s imagination. The full Manchin quote indicates that “it took every bit” of his “discipline” to restrain himself from hauling off and belting his opponent during a debate, a war of words. If it takes every bit of discipline to desist from becoming physically violent, that certainly indicates wanting to do it and yet somehow, even with every ounce of your effort, barely managing to restrain yourself.

In addition, the tweet contained a link to an article with this headline that included the “discipline” part of the quote: “Manchin: ‘It Took Every Bit of My Discipline Not to Beat the Living Crap Out’ of Republican Opponent.”

There was nothing misleading about that WVGOP tweet. There is, however, quite a bit that’s misleading about the Politifact article—although you’d have to be pretty stupid to actually be misled by it.

Manchin, by the way, is 71 years old. I doubt he’ll be beating the living crap out of anyone these days. But his opponent isn’t exactly a spring chicken, either, at 50. I have to say, though, that it’s Manchin who looks more like a lean, mean fighting machine, at least in the physical sense.

Do you like coffee? I don’t. Now they’re saying it’s our genes.

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written before about the fact that I hate coffee. So this National Geographic article, which reports that scientists have said that whether we like coffee or have trouble with it is at least partly genetic, is of interest.

Of course, a genetic basis for coffee love and coffee hate isn’t really any sort of a surprise. But my attention was caught in particular by the article’s opening sentence:

A warm cup of coffee is a necessary part of the morning routine for millions of people around the world.

A warm cup of coffee? Even I, non-coffee-drinker extraordinaire, am aware that most coffee-drinkers prefer a hot cup. Isn’t “warm” some sort of abomination?

Which makes me think that the article was written by a non-coffee-drinker like me.

More:

Regular coffee drinkers will develop some level of tolerance to caffeine over time that can be reversed just by backing off the daily cup. But if you avoid coffee because it makes you anxious, sleepless, or nauseous, it could be due to variations as small as a single nucleotide in your DNA—the A, G, C and T of the genetic alphabet…

…[W]hen it comes to caffeine, just two genes handle most of the work. CYP1A2 produces a liver enzyme that metabolizes roughly 95 percent of all ingested caffeine. AHR controls how much of that enzyme you produce. Together, these genes control how much caffeine circulates in your bloodstream, and for how long…

“For someone who has a genetic variant that leads to decreased caffeine metabolism, they’re more likely to consume less coffee compared to someone who has a genetic variant that leads to increased caffeine metabolism,” Cornelis says.

There’s another gene that influences how much anxiety a person feels from ingesting caffeine, and also genes that influence whether you perceive coffee as noxiously bitter or not.

For me, coffee makes me nervous both physically and mentally, upsets my stomach, and tastes bad, too. Not a great combo. Why on earth would I drink it? The only kind of coffee I like is coffee ice cream, which isn’t coffee at all, really. With coffee ice cream, the sugar overrides the bitterness, and the amount of caffeine is negligible. As for an upset GI system—well, since I’m lactose-intolerant, too, that already happens if I eat a large quantity of ice cream.

But—go ahead, enjoy your coffee. I’ll just sit here in the corner by myself.

Tomorrow is Election Day…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and I have no hesitation in saying I’m nervous.

I also freely admit I have no idea what will happen, particularly in terms of the House. And it’s not just me; no one knows. Some prognosticators will be right in their predictions and some wrong, but that will probably be due far more to luck more than to knowledge.

But I’m not quite as critical of pollsters as a lot of people are. Elections are getting more and more difficult to predict. Telephone polling, which has been the usual way to do it for the least umpteen years, has become almost impossible to perform correctly because so many people either have blocks on their phones or simply won’t answer unless they know the source of the call and it’s a trusted friend, relative, or business. So how can a pollster get a representative sample of the electorate?

In addition, enthusiasm is such a huge driver of turnout that relying on samples that use a similar turnout model to the most recent election is probably going to be a flawed method. That’s not pollsters’ fault; it’s just inherently difficult and I believe has become more so.

What’s more, the House races are usually going to be harder to predict than a presidential race or even the Senate. That’s because every single seat in the House is up for grabs every two years. That’s 435 races, folks, and although the majority of them are not what you’d call “competitive”—instead, they’re in districts in which the outcome is pretty much a foregone conclusion—enough of them are in doubt that the polling challenge is formidable. Most districts don’t have neat little borders like states do, the population involved is ordinarily smaller, and there are so many districts needing to be surveryed that it would be quite expensive to keep polls up-to-date. Since viewpoints often change close to election time, the information is not usually so current except in a few very hotly covered races.

So we have even people like Nate Silver hedging their bets:

“So in the House we have Democrats with about a 4 in 5 chance of winning,” Silver told ABC’s “This Week.”

However, he noted that “polls aren’t always right.”

“The range of outcomes in the House is really wide,” he explained. “Our range, which covers 80 percent of outcomes goes from, on the low end, about 15 Democratic pickups, all the way to low to mid 50s, 52 or 53.”

“Most of those are under 23, which is how many seats they would need to win to take the House,” he said.”

“But no one should be surprised if they only win 19 seats and no one should be surprised if they win 51 seats,” Silver added. “Those are both extremely possible, based on how accurate polls are in the real world.”

If Nate isn’t careful, he might just talk himself out of a job.

Looking at 2016, a year in which most people claim the pollsters got it very wrong, I noted just a few weeks after that election that the polls were pretty spot on for the national popular vote. In fact, since I wrote that piece, more votes came in that proved the polls to have been even more spot on than was evident at the time of the post: the final results in the popular vote was that Hillary was two percentage points up, and that’s about what most of the pre-election polls had predicted.

But of course, in a presidential election the nationwide popular vote doesn’t matter, except in some people’s minds. What matters is the Electoral College, and that’s done on a state-by-state basis. That’s where the 2016 polls fell down, but only because many of the states that ended up going to Donald Trump, against pollsters’ predictions, did so by very small margins. That means they were extremely hard to have predicted. And they pretty much all went in the same direction—to Trump.

That’s what often happens in an election. There are trends. One trend is that the bulk of the close races will go to one party or another. This may occur this year in Congress, and is actually pretty well nigh impossible to predict.

Compromised CIA communications during the Obama years

The New Neo Posted on by

This is a very disturbing story:

From around 2009 to 2013, the U.S. intelligence community experienced crippling intelligence failures related to the secret internet-based communications system, a key means for remote messaging between CIA officers and their sources on the ground worldwide. The previously unreported global problem originated in Iran and spiderwebbed to other countries, and was left unrepaired — despite warnings about what was happening — until more than two dozen sources died in China in 2011 and 2012 as a result, according to 11 former intelligence and national security officials….

…[It] started in Iran in 2009, when the Obama administration announced the discovery of a secret Iranian underground enrichment facility — part of Iran’s headlong drive for nuclear weapons. Angered about the breach, the Iranians went on a mole hunt, looking for foreign spies, said one former senior intelligence official.

The mole hunt wasn’t hard, in large part, because the communications system the CIA was using to communicate with agents was flawed. Former U.S. officials said the internet-based platform, which was first used in war zones in the Middle East, was not built to withstand the sophisticated counterintelligence efforts of a state actor like China or Iran. “It was never meant to be used long term for people to talk to sources,” said one former official. “The issue was that it was working well for too long, with too many people. But it was an elementary system.”

By 2010, however, it appears that Iran had begun to identify CIA agents. And by 2011, Iranian authorities dismantled a CIA spy network in that country, said seven former U.S. intelligence officials. (Indeed, in May 2011, Iranian intelligence officials announced publicly that they had broken up a ring of 30 CIA spies; U.S. officials later confirmed the breach to ABC News, which also reported on a potential compromise to the communications system.)

Iran executed some of the CIA informants and imprisoned others in an intelligence setback that one of the former officials described as “incredibly damaging…” A lack of proper vetting of sources may have led to the CIA inadvertently running a double agent, said one former senior official — a consequence of the CIA’s pressing need at the time to develop highly placed agents inside the Islamic Republic.

Please read the whole thing.

Apparently the system was not changed, and the same thing occurred in China. The article also points out that during the entire time, John Brennan was Obama’s Homeland Security advisor, and then shortly after the beginning of Obama’s second term he became head of the CIA.