What are the odds of Franken actually leaving the Senate?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not sure what the odds are, but I do think that with the defeat of Roy Moore (remember him?), they’ve become a great deal less than they were before.

Franken’s resignation always seemed to be motivated by the need to get Moore—to make him less likely to be elected, and/or to make him easier to censure or toss if elected. If Moore had won, Franken would have had to be sacrificed for the Cause.

But now, maybe not:

At least four senators are urging Al Franken to reconsider resigning, including two who issued statements calling for the resignation two weeks ago and said they now feel remorse over what they feel was a rush to judgment.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who urged Franken not to step down to begin with ”” at least not before he went through an Ethics Committee investigation ”” said the Minnesota senator was railroaded by fellow Democrats.

“What they did to Al was atrocious, the Democrats,” said West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin in an interview…

Franken’s unusual timeline ”” in his departure announcement he said he’d go “in the coming weeks,” without setting a date ”” has fed the fleeting hopes that there’s still time to reverse course. However, Tina Smith, Minnesota’s Democratic lieutenant governor, was named last week as his appointed successor.

People familiar with Franken’s plans said he has not changed his mind and intends to formally resign in early January. He praised the selection of Smith and has begun working with her on the transition.

It certainly was an “unusual” timeline. But when Smith was picked to succeed him, it seemed to me that this was really going to happen. Now, I wouldn’t bet on it. And you may recall that I didn’t think Franken should resign. Here’s what I wrote when Franken gave his sort-of-resignation speech:

It’s difficult to escape the sense that Al Franken is resigning under pressure from the Democratic Party due to their hopes that they can occupy the sexual assault high ground vis a vis Roy Moore, and also expunge the ghosts of Ted Kennedy and Gary Stubbs (for those with long memories, which most people don’t have), not to mention Bill Clinton…

I can’t stand Al Franken as senator (although I happened to like some of his comedy bits on SNL many a long year ago). I can’t stand his politics and a lot else about him. Looking at the accusations, if I had to bet, I’d say most of them are true, or at least enough of them are true to establish him as a slyly opportunistic sexual scumbag of a minor sort.

Note that characterization: minor sort. I believe in proportionality, and even if all the allegations against Franken are true they don’t rise to a very high (or very low) level. If they are true, the proper remedy is a hearing and possibly censure (or expulsion, if that’s the decision), IMHO, and then if the people of Minnesota don’t want to re-elect him (or he doesn’t want to run again) when his term is up, that’s their decision. I’m uncomfortable with forcing people out because of allegations without any sort of due process at all””and I do believe in having at least some sort of official forum in which the allegations are heard and evaluated.

I also believe that those Democrats who supported his resignation and now feel “remorse” don’t feel a particle of remorse. They feel that since Moore lost there’s no more need for Franken to resign.

Baby, It’s Unplayful and Ahistorical Outside

The New Neo Posted on by

The song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was written in 1944 by the brilliant Frank Loesser, composer and lyricist for the musical masterpieces “Guys and Dolls,” “The Most Happy Fellow” (performed less frequently because of its operatic requirements, but absolutely gorgeous and tremendously touching), and the lesser (pun, ha ha) but still great “How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.” He also wrote the songs to the movie “Hans Christian Anderson,” a favorite in my youth.

Note that Loesser wrote the music and lyrics to all those musicals and to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” as well. That’s quite unusual, although not completely unique: Irving Berlin and Cole Porter come to mind as composer/lyricists, too.

And speaking of lyrics—no doubt you’ve heard about the current drive to ban “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” for being insufficiently PC in the sexual assault/harassment realm. After all, the song tells the tale of a man who is trying to persuade a woman to stay for the night, and he uses the cold weather outside as an excuse. But if you actually look at the lyrics, it’s clear that the woman wants to stay, and that her protests are merely for the sake of propriety, and that the whole thing is a flirtatious little game of seduction. In her objections she keeps mentioning what other people will think, not her own feelings. So you might say she’s striking a blow for autonomy and throwing off fusty old custom when she acquiesces at the end.

The entire exchange described in the lyrics is reflective of a previous era when reputation was a big big thing, causing quite a few women to say “no” when they were thinking “yes” and could be persuaded by men who were reading their wishes correctly—as is the man in the song. For young women today, that’s not a description of their mothers’ era, and maybe not even their grandmothers’ era—it’s their great- or great-great grandmother’s era. But that’s the way it often was.

When I was a child—pre-internet, of course—my friends and I used to amuse ourselves in various archaic ways. We not only listened to musicals on a primitive record player that played scratchy 33s, we also played the piano. That is, my friend (who went to Julliard at a very young age and was an excellent player and sight-reader) played the piano, and we both sang. Her family had copies of the Fireside series of songbooks, and so I learned a lot of songs that were considerably older than “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” In one of the Fireside Books (I think this one) you could find this song, written in 1897 (performed here by Johnny Cash):

That’s history, too.

Frank Loesser used to perform “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” with his wife at parties. Here’s the story:

Loesser wrote the duet in 1944 and premiered the song with his wife, [the singer] Lynn Garland, at their Navarro Hotel in New York housewarming party, and performed it toward the end of the evening, signifying to guests that it was nearly time to end the party. Loesser would introduce himself as the “Evil of Two Loessers”, a play on the theme of the song, trying to keep the girl from leaving, and on the phrase “lesser of two evils”. This was a period when the Hollywood elite’s chief entertainment was throwing parties and inviting guests who were expected to perform. Garland wrote that after the first performance, “We become instant parlor room stars. We got invited to all the best parties for years on the basis of ‘Baby.’ It was our ticket to caviar and truffles. Parties were built around our being the closing act.” Garland considered it their song and was furious when Loesser told her he was selling the song. Garland wrote, “I felt as betrayed as if I’d caught him in bed with another woman.”

Well, that was a foretaste of things to come, because while working on “The Most Happy Fella” (1956), Loesser took up with the show’s leading lady Jo Sullivan and left Garland (as told by his daughter Susan):

My mother did a lot of the casting for “The Most Happy Fella.” She was co-producer with Kermit Bloomgarden, and when she heard Jo sing, she said, Boy, this is a voice – this is a voice and a personality Frank would just love.

So she sent Jo to audition for my father, sealing her fate. It was a very hard time for everybody. I – my brother and I were uprooted from our California suburban lifestyle and brought to New York City. We at first stayed with friends and then moved to a small apartment.

My mother was not happy and was drinking more and more, and I had never lived in such close quarters with her before, and that was when I began to see that she was – she had big problems.

Everything changed for all of us. My father was living across Central Park in an apartment of his own and having his affair with Jo, and everybody was – he wasn’t real happy either. It was a very – a time full of turmoil, although for him, I think, it was mitigated a great deal by the great success of “The Most Happy Fella.”

If you ever get a chance to see a decent production of “The Most Happy Fella,” run, don’t walk—before the entire Loesser oeuvre gets erased by the Thought Police.

[NOTE: Here’s a song by Loesser with very clever lyrics, one I’d never heard before. It was written during WWII. In it, the female singer is assuring her boyfriend who’s overseas in the military that she’ll be faithful, because the guys who remain behind are slim pickings:

…I’m either their first breath of spring
Or else, I’m their last little fling
I either get a fossil or an adolescent pup
I either have to hold him off
Or have to hold him up
The battle is on, but the fortress will hold
They’re either too young or too old.

Would it pass muster today?]

The similarities between Obama and Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

I have long thought that this sort of thing may be true (the link is to a piece by Rich Lowry):

But every indication is that Obama and Trump are similar in that their modes of operating work much better for them than their parties.

Both pioneered a different way of doing presidential politics, and built a new coalition for victory. But no one could replicate Obama’s model, and so far, no one has shown any signs of successfully adapting to, let alone copying, Trump’s…

As a result, the only Democrat left standing after the Obama years was Obama himself. Trump could be creating a similar dynamic.

Lowry goes on to criticize the Bannon approach:

This gets to the idiocy of Steve Bannon’s project to try to run Trump-like insurgents everywhere. Bannon is trying to recapture the magic of 2016, without the one indispensable ingredient ”” Trump himself.

I agree about the similarity between Trump and Obama in this respect. But I disagree with Lowry in that I don’t see it as really being about Trump or about Obama. I believe that the election of each of these untested newcomers (Trump even more of a newcomer than Obama) to the highest office in the land was a symptom of a change that had already happened in the US and in the electorate itself.

“We are more polarized now” is a cliche. But it’s true, and it didn’t just happen—it’s been building and building for at least two decades (and almost certainly longer that that). I would add that we are more cynical now, more conspiracy-minded, more disgusted with institutions that used to be more admired: the press, Congress, the FBI, and the “establishment” of both parties. The entire system by which party leaders came up through the ranks and were at least somewhat respected is broken; the electorate isn’t buying it, for the most part. Outsiders and/or charismatic extremists are elected, and then they are found wanting and the pendulum swings to someone seen as an outsider and/or charismatic extremist on the other side.

Obama and Trump (and Bannon, for that matter) didn’t cause this—they are the results of it.

Cornhead and McCarthy on Strzok and company: the FISA warrant is key

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Cornhead” (aka lawyer Dave Begley) often comments here. He also has an intermittent blog, and is a very prolific commenter and sometime poster at Powerline. You may remember that during the 2015-2016 campaign he took on the exceptionally daunting task of seeing all the candidates speak and writing his impressions of their appearances, mostly for Powerline. Cornhead started out disliking Trump but ended up being an enthusiast some time before the election.

But perhaps Cornhead’s greatest claim to fame—here, anyway—was his on-spot prediction on Election Day itelf. When he wrote this comment at 1:21 PM on Election Day, I thought the stress had gotten to him and he’d gone off the deep end. But no:

I am predicting a slim DJT win. He wins NC FL IA MI OH PA WI.

Enthusiasm makes the difference.

He called it, when few others did.

In that comment, Cornhead added, “The Republic is saved.” The jury’s still out on that one.

So with that intro I refer you to an esssay Cornhead/Begley has written on the stopic of the Strzok revelations. In it, he advances some interesting speculative theories as to what went on. Here’s an excerpt:

The key to understanding this matter, in my opinion, is Peter Strzok, bitcoin and shaving points…

So, in my opinion, this is what happened. FBI agent Peter Strzok and other unnamed Clinton friends in the FBI and DOJ were in the right spots in the Deep State. They first tried to get a FISA warrant on the Trump campaign and it was turned down. That is a rare event.

So the DNC and the FBI paid former British spy Christopher Steele money in order to develop a completely fake dossier on Donald Trump. That dossier was probably used in the application for another FISA warrant. The American people need to see that second application. Absolutely critical.

The thing that is astounding to me as a lawyer is that a DOJ lawyer may well have presented a knowingly false document in order to dupe a federal judge and get a court order to spy on American citizens…

Interestingly enough, just today Andrew C. McCarthy has written a piece saying that Americans must see the FISA warrant on which the investigation was based:

To summarize, it is entirely possible that a surveillance warrant for Page was obtained based on no information from Steele, or at least no information the FBI had failed to corroborate independently.

Alas, an alternative theory has gathered momentum due to the drip, drip, drip of disturbing new disclosures, coupled with the fact that the Obama administration was in the tank for Trump’s opponent. The Clinton campaign generated the Steele dossier through lawyers who retained Fusion GPS. Fusion, in turn, hired Steele, a former British intelligence agent who had FBI contacts from prior collaborative investigations. The dossier was steered into the FBI’s hands as it began to be compiled in the summer of 2016…

McCarthy then goes into a possible scenario (too lengthy to present here, but please read what he has to say). The point is that if the dossier was presented as the basis for the warrant and the FBI knew the information in it was false or at least unverified and/or suspect in origin, that is an extremely grave matter.

But back to Cornhead’s post. He discusses the Clinton email investigation and the role of Strzok, and compares it to a point-shaving scheme in sports:

Point shavers make their in-game play look like they are performing at their best. Even when shaving points, they can win the contests. But if a team is projected to win by 7 but the actual win is by 3, who is to say that a free throw or three-point shot was missed on purpose? The beauty of a point shaving scheme is that it only takes one or two players to pull it off…

To my knowledge, the full power and effectiveness of a federal grand jury was not used in the Hillary Clinton private server matter. To the extent search warrants and subpoenas were used, they were not used on a timely and aggressive basis. Point shaving.

Reportedly immunity was given to many witnesses, including Cheryl Mills. But what did DOJ receive in exchange for immunity? Little, if anything of value. Point shaving…

Again, it’s too long and complex to summarize, but the dossier and the FISA warrant figure prominently in it as well. His essay ends with a plea for an Elliot Ness-like figure to restore the rule of law within the FBI.

We don’t know what actually happened, but these speculations need to be answered. To do that we need much more information, and a good start would be seeing the basis on which the FISA warrant was granted.

Sexual harassment, the distaff side

The New Neo Posted on by

It was only a matter of time before the shoe would be on the other foot:

Andrea Ramsey, a Democratic candidate for Congress, will drop out of the race after the Kansas City Star asked her about accusations in a 2005 lawsuit that she sexually harassed and retaliated against a male subordinate who said he had rejected her advances.

Multiple sources with knowledge of the case told The Star that the man reached a settlement with LabOne, the company where Ramsey was executive vice president of human resources…

“In its rush to claim the high ground in our roiling national conversation about harassment, the Democratic Party has implemented a zero tolerance standard,” Ramsey said in a statement Friday. “For me, that means a vindictive, terminated employee’s false allegations are enough for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) to decide not to support our promising campaign. We are in a national moment where rough justice stands in place of careful analysis, nuance and due process.”

Man or woman, Democrat or Republican, the principles are the same—at least on this blog. Settlements are not admissions of guilt; sometimes they’re just a company’s way of making the problem go away. People lie, both men and women, and they certainly lie about sexual harassment, which tends to involve he-said/she-said competing yet unprovable stories. Did Ramsey sexually harass this man? Maybe. I don’t know enough to judge. We don’t know enough to judge. But that’s true of the majority of these accusations, although every now and then we do have enough evidence to feel confident that we know.

But I wonder—I just wonder—what Ramsay said about Clarence Thomas, or about Herman Cain or Roy Moore (I Googled it and couldn’t find anything). I bet it wasn’t “We are in a national moment where rough justice stands in place of careful analysis, nuance and due process.” But she’s correct; we are, and it does.

The new arrival at neo’s

The New Neo Posted on by

I have a small kitchen, and the space for the fridge is very small indeed. Until today I had a conventional freezer-above refrigerator. But it was configured in such a way that the bulk of the food was low. The food was hard to see and harder still to remove, particularly the fruits and vegetables in the two little bins at the very bottom.

I got tired of bending low and almost needing to stick my head in that fridge to see any shelf except the top one, and tired of all the food that rotted in the back of the shelves because I forgot it was there. And so I decided to spring for a new one with the freezer below, but it had to fit that narrow space.

I discovered that there are quite a few really expensive European ones that would do the trick, but I didn’t want to spend that kind of money. No side-by-side could fit, so it had to be a freezer-below type. But I’m pleased to say that the one I finally ordered arrived today, and it’s not tremendously expensive and is quite handsome. Here ’tis (and I got it for a significantly better price than this):

One of the odd but great things about this fridge is that, although it has fewer cubic feet of room in the refrigerator part than my old one did (11.1 for the new, 11.6 for the old), it’s designed in a way that is so much more efficient that I find that there’s far more room now for my food.

This is probably more information than you want about my buying habits (and I should have taken a “before” photo of my old fridge jammed to the gills), but here’s the inside of my new one. Plenty of room to spare, whereas this same amount of food had overwhelmed the old one:

I think the door is key. A lot of the stuff that goes in here had to be in the main part of my old fridge:

Those of you with jumungous refrigerators may find my elation about this new and rather tiny one quite odd. But I think I’ll enjoy it a lot.

Simple pleasures.

Bariatric surgery: poorly understood, highly effective

The New Neo Posted on by

We don’t understand much about why bariatric (weight-loss) surgery works, but it does. It’s actually highly effective at helping the obese to lose weight where conventional methods such as dieting and exercise fail. Not only that, but the weight tends to stay off:

The public, on the other hand, generally believes obesity is caused by a lack of willpower, and that it can be fixed with gym memberships and trendy diets. In one 2016 survey of more than 1,500 Americans, 60 percent of the participants said dieting and exercise were even more effective than surgery for long-term weight loss.

Here’s the thing, though: Weight loss surgery is far and away medicine’s best treatment for severe obesity.

The medical case for bariatric surgery has grown much stronger in recent years. High-quality studies on the long-term health outcomes of people with obesity who got surgery show, on average, that they’re able to lose dramatic amounts of weight, and even reverse or prevent their obesity-related health conditions, like diabetes and high cholesterol. A new study out in JAMA Surgery demonstrated this once again.

It doesn’t really surprise me. Bariatric surgery seems like a big deal, and the complications loom large in people’s minds although apparently the health risks for the obese who would qualify for the surgery are greater if they remain obese. But the idea of changing the anatomy of your digestive system is such a drastic one that it gives people pause, and they’re been told for so long that it’s just a matter of willpower to lose weight by dieting that they believe if they only were strong-willed enough it would finally work.

Bariatric surgery must feel like a desperation move, and I think it is. But it usually works wonders.

Here’s more:

The majority of bariatric procedures in America today involve the gastric sleeve and the Roux-en-Y gastric bypass….

With the sleeve, which now makes up more than 50 percent of weight loss surgeries in the US, surgeons staple off and remove about 80 percent of the stomach, transforming the organ from a wide football shape into a slim banana (or sleeve) shape….

With the gastric bypass, surgeons use staples to make the stomach smaller by creating a small pouch, which can only hold about an ounce (or walnut’s worth) of food. Next, they reconnect the small intestine to a hole in the new pouch, so food flows into the pouch, bypassing most of the stomach, and then into the latter part of the small intestine, bypassing the first half of the intestine…

But an additional reason both the sleeve and gastric bypass surgeries lead to long-term weight loss is likely because of the changes in hormones that occur after these procedures. The sleeve, and especially the bypass, seems to suppress hormones that affect hunger and satiety, like the “hunger hormone” – ghrelin – something no diet will ever do.

Eating is an emotional activity, and it’s instructive to see (for example, I’ve watched some TV programs that follow people who’ve had the surgery) how difficult the post-surgery adjustment period can be. What they’ve experienced all their lives—how they feel when they eat and how much food they can take in—has changed dramatically, often to the point that they feel no hunger at all and have to be forced to eat, and feel full after just a couple of bites. There’s nothing normal about it, and yet usually they adjust and later are able to eat more, and appreciate being freed of the burden of the fat they’ve lost.

Those of us who are fortunate enough to have only ten or fifteen pounds we perennially want to lose (me), and who don’t eat all that much to begin with (me again), and who have always had a setpoint higher than their desired one (yep, me), are well aware of how vigorously the body defends a certain weight almost no matter what we do. These surgeries (which are not available to someone like me) seem to work to change that setpoint:

In a 2014 study, published in the journal Obesity, researchers compared participants from the Biggest Loser reality TV show who had gone on crash diets and exercise programs to rapidly lose as much weight as possible to people who had gastric bypass surgery….The bypass surgery patients saw their metabolisms normalize within a year, to a rate that matched their new body size, while the TV show contestants saw their metabolisms slow down and stay that way – even six years after losing the weight and, on average, regaining much of it back.

Researchers suspect this is because surgery may reset the “set point,” or the body’s habit of vigorously defending a certain weight range. Once a person gains weight and keeps that weight on for a period of time, the body gets used to its new, larger size. When a person loses weight, a bunch of subtle changes kick in – to the hormone levels, the brain – increasing appetite and slowing the metabolism, all in a seeming conspiracy to get back up to that set point weight.

Amazingly, surgery seems to lower the set point, and even weaken the body’s desire to defend it. And that seems to make keeping weight off a little easier.

Insurance pays for surgery for those who need it, but few who need it seek it and have it. But can you imagine the effect on the health care system if all 20 million people started demanding the surgery and insurance had to pay for it? On the other hand, it might save at least some costs down the line, if the positive effects on health are really that dramatic.

Spurlock denounces himself

The New Neo Posted on by

I suspect we’ll be seeing more of this sort of thing—a guy publicly confessing his sexual offenses and vowing things will be different.

Morgan Spurlock—whom I’ve never heard of before—is a 47-year-old “documentary filmmaker, humorist, television producer, screenwriter, playwright and political activist, best known for the documentary film ‘Super Size Me.'” In his essay he confesses to having sex that was ambiguous as to the woman’s desires but later labeled by the woman as rape, and jokingly calling a female assistant “hot pants” or “sex pants.”

Here’s his self-denunciation:

You see, I’ve come to understand after months of these revelations [of sexual acting-out by men], that I am not some innocent bystander, I am also a part of the problem.

I’m sure I’m not alone in this thought, but I can’t blindly act as though I didn’t somehow play a part in this, and if I’m going truly represent myself as someone who has built a career on finding the truth, then it’s time for me to be truthful as well.

I am part of the problem.

He repeats several times that he’s part of the problem. I’m not sure what this public confession is supposed to accomplish other than getting it off his chest before he’s the next person accused, but what caught my eye was that, despite the fact that he seems to indicate he’s only just realized that he’s done wrong, he also says this (quite a bit later in his essay):

I have been unfaithful to every wife and girlfriend I have ever had. Over the years, I would look each of them in the eye and proclaim my love and then have sex with other people behind their backs.

This stopped me in my tracks. Now, that’s not the least bit ambiguous and that’s not just a tasteless office joke. And that’s the sort of thing we’re meant to understand this man has just realized is wrong, as a result of Weinstein and the others? What sort of amoral wasteland has he previously inhabited? (That’s a somewhat rhetorical question, by the way, but not even to have previously realized his compulsive infidelity was wrong seems rather odd.)

This is of a completely different order of magnitude than calling an assistant “hot pants.” This is being an equivocal scumbag, liar, and sexual betrayer.

He goes on:

But why? What caused me to act this way? Is it all ego? Or was it the sexual abuse I suffered as a boy and as a young man in my teens? Abuse that I only ever told to my first wife, for fear of being seen as weak or less than a man?

Is it because my father left my mother when I was child? Or that she believed he never respected her, so that disrespect carried over into their son?

Or is it because I’ve consistently been drinking since the age of 13? I haven’t been sober for more than a week in 30 years, something our society doesn’t shun or condemn but which only served to fill the emotional hole inside me and the daily depression I coped with. Depression we can’t talk about, because its wrong and makes you less of a person.

And the sexual daliances? Were they meaningful? Or did they only serve to try to make a weak man feel stronger.

I don’t know. None of these things matter when you chip away at someone and consistently make them feel like less of a person.

I am part of the problem. We all are.

We all are? Does Spurlock mean to lump all of his behavior together, the minor with the major? Does he really think every single person (or every single man, or whoever he’s referring to when he says “we”) acts like him? I beg to differ.

He offers his sad childhood and his drinking as excuses/explanations and then says they don’t matter. So why bring them up in the first place?

As I said, expect more of this sort of thing. I think most of Spurlock’s confession should be between him and his therapist. But since he’s put it out there, I’m reacting to it.

[NOTE: And whatever his guilt or innocence, this suicide is just sad:

On Tuesday, Johnson held a press conference at his church on Bardstown Road, where he denied the molestation allegations. According to court documents obtained by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, the alleged molestation took place on New Year’s Eve in 2012. The alleged victim, who was 17 at the time, told authorities that she was staying in a living area of the Heart of Fire City Church where Johnson was pastor, when Johnson, who had been drinking a lot, approached her, kissed her and fondled her under her clothes.

Johnson (who was a state representative in Kentucky) killed himself, leaving a note protesting his innocence.]

FCC ends net neutrality

The New Neo Posted on by

The FCC has voted to rescind the net neutrality rules promulgated during the Obama adminstration.

I reacted to the original rules here, but I must confess I’ve had enormous difficulty deciding on what side I stand on this issue. Each side has good arguments, and evaluating policies on net neutrality involve technical questions and hazy prognostications. So far the best article I’ve found that presents both sides of the question is this one (see also this and this for more).

From that first piece I linked:

I don’t think there is room (or patience) left for serious policy discussion in this area, even among “serious people.” This is largely because “net neutrality” has become a token representing different, broader, social values that are quite separate from the technical, legal, economic, &c, issues implicated by regulation of how ISPs handle data traversing their networks.

That’s true of an awful lot of issues, isn’t it?

Doug Jones: members of Congress and “representation”

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “expat” writes:

I hope the Reps learn to use the Jones victory to break the stranglehold of the Clinton/Pelosi/Schumer gang on Dems in other areas. Strange started this by reminding Alabama voters that Jones has to represent them. In WV, Manchin is also not in lockstep with the party elite. Keep up the pressure by evaluating all representatives on how well they are really representing their voters.

Interesting thought. I’ve read comments and articles on other blogs that evince the hope that Jones will be more moderate than the vast majority of Democrats in the Senate and will vote with the Republicans sometimes. The reasoning behind this thought is that Alabama is a conservative state, Jones presented himself during the election as being more a moderate sort of Democrat, and if he wants to have a chance at re-election he needs to represent what Alabamans want and not just vote in lockstep with the other Democrats.

Well, that would be nice, and it’s certainly possible, but I would be very surprised indeed if it were to actually happen. What expat refers to as the Clinton/Pelosi/Schumer gang’s stranglehold on Dems is very firm and I don’t see Jones as especially likely to buck it. I don’t know exactly when the Democrats became such strict party-liners, but it certainly was firmly entrenched during Pelosi and Reid’s tenures (Pelosi became Minority Leader in 2003 and Speaker in 2007; Reid was either Minority or Majority Whip or Leader during just about the entire 21st Century until his recent retirement).

The Democratic Party used to have more diversity of opinion, more moderates who sometimes voted with Republicans. That’s been eroding, and I think the ostracism of Joe Lieberman, which occurred between 2006 and 2008 and contrasted with his nomination for VP in 2000, was a turning point. The Party made it clear there was no room for him, and he obliged by leaving it in many (not all) ways.

Republicans, on the other hand, do not have the same “discipline” and have not just some members with different views but whole wings with different views. Those who bemoan the GOP’s inability to enforce similar discipline to the Democrats ignore the very real differences in the philosophical makeup and balance within each party.

But what of Jones? When he enters the Senate he will be Alabama’s representative, but he will caucus with the Democrats and be subject to whatever pressures are placed on him. My guess is that he will vote straight Democratic when it matters, but might be allowed to stray outside the party line just for show when his vote doesn’t matter. After all, we have a representative government, not a democracy, and once he’s in office the only check on him is the threat of expulsion from the Senate (which does not happen because of the way a member votes) or the desire to please constituents so that he can be re-elected.

Jones has been an attorney his entire life until now, so he has no record as a representative in a legislature, not even at the state level. During the campaign he presented himself as a moderate who would “reach across the aisle”:

Former Alabama Democratic Party chair Giles Perkins described Jones as “a moderate, middle-of-the-road guy.” Describing his own views, Jones said that “If you look at the positions I’ve got on health care, if you look at the positions I [have] got on jobs, you should look at the support I have from the business community; I think I’m pretty mainstream.” Jones’ campaign has emphasized “kitchen table” issues such as healthcare and the economy. He has called for bipartisan solutions to those issues, and pledged to “find common ground” between both sides of the aisle.

Jones’ Wiki entry then goes on to list his actual positions on actual issues that might come up for a vote. On reading them, I conclude that he will almost always vote with the other Democrats because he is with them on almost all issues, no matter how he chose to describe himself during the election in order to appeal to Alabama voters. He’ll due to be in office until 2020, and since he’s not a career politician I don’t see him as necessarily even wanting to be re-elected after that year. He can easily just go back to lawyering if he’s annoyed the people of Alabama by blocking much of what they support during his Senate tenure.

One of the only more moderate stances I see Jones as having is that he favors reducing corporate taxes—although, tellingly, he doesn’t support the GOP tax bill. He also supports more defense spending if it benefits Alabama (“particularly in the areas around NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal”).

Hey, who knows, maybe Jones really will reach across that aisle and support “bipartisan solutions.” I see no real indication of it, however, and I think that in recent years that’s the way it goes for almost every Democrat who’s managed to take office in a more conservative state. The Republicans who are elected in more liberal states—such as, for example, Susan Collins—have a tendency to be far more responsive to their constituents’ more liberal positions. and far more bipartisan, than their Democratic counterparts in conservative states, even if conservatives hate someone like Collins for it.

Strzok/Page and the myth of objectivity

The New Neo Posted on by

From what I’ve seen of the coverage of the Strzok/Page texts, the whole story is already being successfully minimized. The reaction of everyone but some of those on the right appears to be “So what? There’s no proof they did anything.”

But the bias these two demonstrated was extreme and ran a profound risk of being prejudicial. Since they—especially Strzok, from what we know so far—worked on investigating the very people they had such a strong aversion to (Trump) and such a strong approval for (Clinton), how could we ever assume that what they did—that is, the decisions they made in their official capacities—were caused by an objective appraisal of the evidence before them rather than their pre-existing prejudices? I don’t think that’s possible to prove or disprove, in part because we actually don’t know (and may never know) what decisions they were responsible for, and in part because it is very difficult to tell whether a person is capable of being objective or not when there are strong pre-existing opinions. One thing we do know is that opinions like that are difficult to overcome and create a strong presumption of prejudice that could easily affect decisions.

It takes a lot of effort and skill and self-awareness to be objective, because we all have opinions. But the line on lawyers (and on reporters, for that matter) is that they are cool professionals who can put those pre-conceptions and expectations and judgments aside and look at a situation fairly.

I titled this with the phrase “myth of objectivity,” but it’s not really a myth—not totally, anyway. It’s a goal, and I believe some people can achieve it. But I also believe that’s very rare, and it takes some struggle and a great deal of integrity and devotion to the idea that objectivity is of overwhelming importance. It also takes extreme self-examination, because people tend to be unaware of how much their expectations are affecting what they see and the judgments they make.

How can an extremely partisan person be objective? Does it ever happen? And how often does it happen? Is there anyone in public life (or government, or the DOJ) who’s only mildly partisan, or who if extremely partisan is capable of objectivity?

Can people with the degree of partisanship that the Strzok and Page texts reveal ever be objective? Haven’t they passed a point of obvious no-return that invalidates their participation in any investigation of those about whom they’re so very partisan? I certainly believe so.

And at what point does that happen? And how can we ever know? Who makes that judgment? After all, it’s not like they were writing anti-Trump jibes publicly on Twitter, for all the world to see.

Instead we find hidden partisanship, secret hatred, and an intent to save the republic though their jobs. And how would that have been accomplished (Page alludes to a possible “path” by which they can prevent Trump’s election, but it’s rejected as too risky and so we never learn what it might have been)? And how can you prove that something of the sort either happened or didn’t happen? Are the texts enough evidence, or did they communicate it in other ways?

And how many others are there with roles in the investigations who were and who are every bit as partisan as Strzok and Page? The federal government agencies are loaded with them, and the entire legal profession leans very heavily towards the same partisanship (liberal and/or leftist).

Lawyers are generally expected to be able to put aside their own opinions to work fully on behalf of their clients, whoever those clients might be. So lawyers like to think they can be objective and fair no matter what. If they can’t be objective they’re not supposed to take the case.

Andrew McCarthy—whose analyses I usually agree with—takes an interesting position on the Strzok/Page texts:

But I believe that McCarthy has let his status as a lawyer, and his feeling of identification with other lawyers, lead him astray on this. In other words, he is defensive because he has made enormous efforts to be objective, and it is something he believes all lawyers should do and are capable of doing. He says he speaks crudely (and I’m sure in an opinionated way) about politics in private, and the idea is that he is objective when acting in his official capacity as a lawyer.

But I very much doubt he’s ever been tasked with evaluating a politician with so much at stake (the presidency, in this case) and making a decision on whether that person has committed a crime, when he has such strong negative feelings about the election and has concluded that the person is a danger to the country. I can’t imagine that such a situation wouldn’t require recusal from the case. It would take superhuman strength to maintain objectivity in the face of that sort of prejudice, to the point where the person him/herself cannot be the judge either of the politician or of his/her own capacity to be fair.

And there is no parallel to Trump’s tweets—Trump is a politician, not a lawyer tasked with the job of investigating a politician. Trump is expected to be highly partisan, as are all politicians.

California: the homeless poor and the temporarily homeless rich

The New Neo Posted on by

Ironic:

The blaze that swept through the hills of Bel-Air last week, destroying six homes and damaging a dozen others, was sparked by a cooking fire at a homeless encampment in a nearby ravine, Los Angeles officials said Tuesday.

The encampment was nestled in a canyon several hundred feet from Sepulveda Boulevard and the 405 Freeway, hidden from passing cars. For several years, it had been home to an unknown number of people, officials said.

That’s an area I know very very well. I used to pass that way on my journey to my ballet classes years ago.

Investigators said the fire had not been set deliberately and they have not found any of the people who lived there. The camp ”” one of scores of makeshift communities that have grown along freeways, rivers and open space across Los Angeles ”” was largely destroyed in the fire, leaving authorities with little evidence…

Nickie Miner, vice president of the Bel Air-Beverly Crest Neighborhood Council, said residents had long worried about the fire hazard from hillside homeless encampments, but “all the agencies’ hands seemed to be tied.”

“We knew it was only going to be a matter of time before something horrible happened,” Miner said.

Miner said she was skeptical of the proposed campaign to educate homeless people about fire risks. Los Angeles needs a massive regulatory overhaul like the one that followed the 1961 Bel-Air fire, she said, which should include eliminating hillside encampments.

The article goes on to say that the homeless population in the area has been growing. I’m not the least bit surprised, because rents have been growing as well, and the weather in southern California means that tent living is highly possible (compared to an area such as New England, for example). Although Los Angeles is a huge city, it’s mostly suburban and a great many of those suburban areas are surrounded by empty stretches of canyon and hillside, good for hiding such tent dwellings and highly subject to fire because of dry brush.

The homeless problem is a big one, and growing. It’s not even just a question of building affordable housing, although I assume that would be of some help. But a certain proportion (I’ve read differing estimates) of the homeless are mentally ill and/or addicts and/or alcoholics, and resist efforts to treat them or move them into housing, temporary or otherwise.