Since no one can stop talking about Trump and Comey, I’ll add this

The New Neo Posted on by

I try to apply logic to the situation, and this is what I come up with.

Comey was until recently the head of the FBI, appointed by Obama to universal praise as an honest and fair broker. But beginning last summer, with his press conference re the Hillary Clinton emails, and continuing right up to the day he was fired, Comey was criticized heavily by both parties for a series of decisions that showed a lack of competence and an amount of rule- and protocol- and precedent-breaking that was unacceptable.

Sometimes his decisions seemed to favor one side and sometimes the other, but there were major criticism from both sides. So even now, with all the brouhaha following the firing, no one (or very few people) seems to be saying there weren’t plenty of valid reasons for Trump to have fired Comey. Nor is anyone seeming to say that Trump didn’t have the legal right, the executive power, to fire Comey.

What is being questioned are his motives for the firing, and whether he is being truthful about those motives. Legally, however, he had the cause (as both sides agree, if they’re being honest about it) and he had the power (as both sides agree, if they’re being honest about it).

So, does it matter that he also may have been angry at Comey for a host of reasons other than those stated for the firing? Would it even matter whether Trump—as the left maintains—dearly wished to impede the Russian-connection investigation by Comey’s firing, if in fact Comey’s firing doesn’t impede that investigation at all?

It would certainly matter in political terms if that was Trump’s intent. Whether it would matter legally I’m not sure, although it would definitely matter if enough members of Congress felt it did, and therefore decided to impeach and convict him.

But Trump’s motives, and whether there was an intent to impede the Russian-connection investigation, are purely speculative at this point. The left, Democrats, and the MSM are acting as though these things are a given, but they are not. What we do know is that—as Trump now admits—it wasn’t Rosenstein who sparked Comey’s firing, it was Trump himself:

Trump on Comey: “He’s a grandstander, a showboat” it was my decision

So now Trump is owning up to the fact that he was the impetus for the decision to fire Comey. As Ace writes:

Rosenstein’s role, I’m thinking, was to write a memo informing Trump whether he had justification or cause for termination of Comey. He did this, I would guess, at Trump’s direction, or at Sessions’ request (who, if involved at all, probably was just relaying Trump’s order).

So Rosenstein researched it and rendered an opinion that yes, Trump could fire Comey, and did have cause to do so.

If he wanted to fire him, that is — if he wanted to fire him, he had cause.

But that’s not the same as Rosenstein himself initiating this or directing it or “recommending” it.

So I’m glad that this shabby, poorly-thought-out decision to suggest that Rosenstein Did It is behind us.

Well, it’s not behind us. It will be Maddow’s Top Story for three months.

But at least no one will feel compelled to try to support a claim that seemed pretty implausible almost from the beginning.

If this can be called a lie — I’m not sure it’s a “lie,” straight-up, but more of a manipulation or insinuation/implication by careful wording — it’s a dumb one.

However, I doubt the firing will impede any investigations at all. It might even rev them up. As several people have pointed out, Andrew McCabe (I’ve read somewhere that he’s a Democrat, although I can’t seem to find any information on that at the moment) is now in charge of the FBI as Acting Director. Trump will need to choose a new director, and we can be quite sure that his choice will be greatly scrutinized for objectivity and rectitude before it is approved.

Here’s another question, a more general one: if an FBI director opens an investigation that involves a sitting president or advisors or aides to that president (the latter was true about the Russian investigation so far), does that FBI director then become immune from firing, no matter how egregious his/her errors have been? That would not be a good idea, either. So, although Comey was doing things that deserved firing, how and when could he have been fired by Trump without its provoking a maelstrom of criticism?

On Trump’s perceived honesty

The New Neo Posted on by

This morning commenter “Yankee” wrote: “Mr. Trump is both smarter and more honest than his critics think he is.”

And commenter “Bill” responded:

More honest?

He’s one of the most transparently dishonest politicians I’ve ever been exposed to.

It doesn’t matter the issue. For example, the story of why he fired Comey and why now continues to morph ”“ first they pinned it on the assistant AG, who (rightly) pushed back.

You may love Trump because he’s a “fighter”, or he “gets things done” or (as someone upthread said) ”“ he “has no guilt” (sociopath).

But don’t pretend like he’s honest.

But it occurs to me that both things can be essentially true. That is, Trump can be more honest than his critics think he is (or than they say he is), and yet still be one of the most transparently dishonest politicians we’ve ever seen.

That sounds like a joke, but it’s not a joke. That’s how dishonest Trump’s critics think he is—the sort of dishonesty Mary McCarthy was talking about when she said of Lillian Hellman: “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”

During the Trump campaign, I pointed out many of Trump’s lies. There’s very little question that he lies often, and he lies strategically. But also, as Bill says, he lies transparently—meaning that it’s relatively easy to see through at least some of his lies (perhaps all of his lies?).

Contrast that to the previous president, Barack Obama. His admirers would probably deny it, but he also was a habitual liar. This is true to a certain extent of most presidents, but I noticed that Obama was a bolder and more habitual liar, but in particular a more clever, smoother, and less transparent liar.

If you going to compare the lying of two presidents, it seems to me that the transparent liar is less dangerous than the subtle liar, because the public would find it easier to detect the lies of the former than the latter. What’s more, in the case of Obama, we had a president whose lies were covered up and defended by the press, and in Trump we have the opposite—a president towards whom the press stands in a similar relationship as McCarthy did towards Hellman: his hyperbolic accuser.

[NOTE: McCarthy was essentially correct about Hellman, by the way—she was a habitual liar, although of course not every word.

And there’s little question that Trump lied—or, at the very least, misled—the public about whether he was the main impetus for the Comey firing. He was:

People are tired of being lied to. I know I am. And we actually like getting a dash of unvarnished, unscripted, un-focus-grouped truth every now and again.

Trump is a shitty, obvious, unconvincing liar and he needs to know that about himself.

That’s Ace writing, by the way. Not known for Trump-hate.]

Comey firing roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

A few random articles of special interest—

Take a look at the headline of this article by Matthew Yglesias at Vox: “By firing James Comey, Trump has put impeachment on the table.” Ha! That’s pretty funny. Impeachment has never been off the left’s table. Impeachment has been on the table—in fact, it’s been the main course—for the entire Trump presidency.

On the timing of the firing, from Byron York:

The structure was this: The FBI director reported to the deputy attorney general, who reported to the attorney general, who reported to the president. When Trump fired Comey Tuesday afternoon, that chain of command had been in place for all of 14 days.

First, it took a long time to get an attorney general in office. Facing Democratic opposition, Jeff Sessions, one of the president’s first nominees, was not confirmed by the Senate until Feb. 8. Then, it took a long time to get a deputy attorney general in place. Rod Rosenstein, the deputy ”” and the man who wrote the rationale for axing Comey ”” faced similar Democratic delays and was not sworn in until April 26.

Only after Rosenstein was in place did the Trump team move ahead. That was true not only for chain-of-command reasons but also ”” probably more importantly ”” because Rosenstein had the bipartisan street cred to be able to be the point man in firing Comey.

Alan Dershowitz continues in his tendency to drift away from the liberal reservation:

Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz told CNN’s Don Lemon on Tuesday night that President Donald Trump was well within his rights to fire former FBI director James Comey, and that there was no need for a special prosecutor in the investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

Dershowitz questioned the timing of Comey’s firing, however, and urged a new, independent investigation into the Russia case…

[CNN legal analyst] Jeffrey Toobin had also told CNN’s Anderson Cooper earlier that Trump would likely name a “campaign stooge” as Comey’s replacement at the FBI.

But Dershowitz disagreed.

“Should Comey be the director of the FBI? The answer to that is no,” he said, noting that he had called earlier for Comey to resign. “He lost his credibility. ”¦ A lot of this is his fault.”

A personal observation—

One of the articles on the left about the Comey firing used the word “brazen” to describe it in the headline. Trump is brazen—and generally so, not just in regard to the Comey incident. That’s part of the reason that his behavior so riles up the left (and warms the cockles of the hearts of a large segment on the right) and simultaneously makes the left think their efforts to destroy him will succeed, although so far they have not.

Obama had a very different style, but his word “audacity” meant something quite similar. He wasn’t afraid of making the bold and risky moves, and despite their differences in temperament, presentation, and of course politics, they share that quality.

The why and wherefore of the Comey firing

The New Neo Posted on by

My title was a teaser. Obviously, I’m not privy to the real story of Trump’s motives in firing Comey now. But no one is, except Trump and those closest to him—and maybe not even them.

But I do have some observations, of course. The first is that Trump’s a guy who’s used to firing people, and to doing it with great fanfare and the spotlight shining fully on him. So the Comey firing is a sort of business-as-usual for Trump, although it certainly doesn’t appear that way to an awful lot of outside observers.

The reaction from much of the right has been joy at Comey’s departure. The reaction of the left and the Democrats has been predictable shock and outrage, as well as cries for a special prosecutor. The assumption there—or at least, the suggestion there—is that Trump is covering up something and trying to impede Comey’s investigation of his Russian connection. Here’s a good example of the genre from Politico, painting a believable picture of a fuming, stewing, enraged, frustrated, screaming Trump and a blindsided victim Comey—and this despite the fact that it has long been the left and the Clinton camp who have been bitterly criticizing Comey and blaming him for Trump’s win and Hillary loss. So there’s no small bit of irony here.

To me, Comey’s press conference last summer—the one in which he explained his reasons for not indicting Hillary—made no legal sense, and was a departure from the FBI’s usual commitment to silence in cases where it chooses not to indict. I wrote several posts at the time about Comey’s behavior (see this, for example). Andrew C. McCarthy’s summary from a few days ago is a recap of Comey’s actions back then, and what was wrong with them:

…[I]t is not possible to square [Comeys’ July 2016] press conference and the claim that politics did not influence the FBI’s decision-making. Ordinarily, the FBI does not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation and does not publicize the evidence uncovered in investigations that do not result in charges. In this instance, Comey decided not to follow those strictures. Why? As he put it during the press conference, he was making his “unusual statement” because “the American people deserve those details in a case of intense public interest.” Put aside that a lot of investigations are of intense public interest and yet the usual no-comment rules are followed. What made this investigation of intense public interest was politics, pure and simple.

…[H]ad the protocols been followed, the FBI and Justice Department would have made no statements about the investigation, including no statement that it had been closed. Mrs. Clinton had no right to a clean bill of health from the FBI. She should have had to content herself with being able to note that she had not been charged with a crime and to urge that this meant she was not guilty of one. But she had no right to have voters advised, before going to the polls, that there was no active investigation into her misconduct. Fourth, there is an important reason why the FBI does not make a formal announcement when an investigation is closed without charges: It frequently happens that new information surfaces, justifying the reopening of the file.

McCarthy wrote that almost a week ago, before Comey was dismissed, but it dovetails with the reasons the Trump administration gave yesterday to explain the firing. It is certainly a valid set of reasons. Most people on the right (and some on the left, secretly) are happy to see Comey go, for a host of reasons. But the fact that the firing happened now, when the Trump/Flynn/Russia investigation is still moving forward (albeit slowly), gives Trump’s action at the very least the appearance of suspiciousness/impropriety, an appearance that can and will be fully exploited by the left. The Nixon comparisons abound, however dissimilar the situations may be.

Andrew McCarthy wrote the following yesterday:

The memorandum issued by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to explain Comey’s dismissal Tuesday is well crafted and will make it very difficult for Democrats to attack President Trump’s decision. Rosenstein bases the decision not merely on Comey’s much discussed missteps in the Clinton e-mails investigation ”” viz., usurping the authority of the attorney general to close the case without prosecution; failing to avail himself of the normal procedures for raising concerns about Attorney General Lynch’s conflict of interest. He goes on specifically to rebuke Comey’s “gratuitous” release of “derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal prosecution.” That “subject,” of course, would be Mrs. Clinton.

This (as I noted in a recent column) is exactly the line of attack Democrats have adopted since Clinton lost the election…

I disagree strongly with McCarthy’s statement that the reasoning in Rosentein’s memorandum “will make it very difficult for Democrats to attack President Trump’s decision.” On the contrary, they will find no problem whatsoever in doing so. It doesn’t matter how well-crafted Rosenstein’s enumeration of Comey’s errors is, and it doesn’t matter how many Democrats Rosenstein manages to quote who were in agreement months ago with what he’s saying now about Comey. Those Democrats are on another side of the political divide, and will act accordingly—as McCarthy himself seems to acknowledge towards the end of his piece when he writes:

Or at least it should be tough [for Democrats to criticize]. Trump being Trump, he could not resist saying, in his letter to Comey, “I greatly appreciate you [sic] informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.” On the off chance that the former director’s memory does not jibe with the president’s, Trump’s statement invites Comey to respond that this is not what happened. If Comey seizes on the invitation, the press angle would write itself: Comey, it would be said, was fired because he was trying to conduct the investigation of Trump-Russia ties about which he recently testified, not because of the bipartisan consensus that is described in Rosenstein’s memorandum.

And that, in a nutshell, is what many people say and/or believe—and, although they didn’t really need Trump’s “invitation” or assistance to make them think along those lines, they got it. But the press angle already wrote itself, because it makes sense, whether it’s actually true or not. And with the release of the news on the same day that prosecutors had issued subpoenas in connection with the Flynn investigation, the plot has thickened:

Federal prosecutors have issued grand jury subpoenas seeking business records from people who worked with former U.S. national security adviser Michael Flynn when he was a private citizen, CNN reported on Tuesday.

Citing people familiar with the matter, CNN said the subpoenas were issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Alexandria, Virginia. They targeted people who worked with Flynn on contracts after he was pushed out of his job as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014, it reported.

I don’t know about you, but I agree with Republican Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, who said that “Comey’s firing and…dismissal ‘further confuses an already difficult investigation by the committee.'” Indeed. Burr’s statement does not seem to emanate from any particular Trump animus, either; he was a supporter of Trump and an advisor during his campaign.

Will the Comey firing and the reaction to it matter in the political sense? Or will it be another tempest in a teapot that dies down as the next crisis rears up? That will depend in part on who Trump chooses to replaces Comey, and whether that person is perceived to be proceeding with all the investigations in an objective manner, or whether he/she is seen as being too Trump-friendly and essentially a Trump stooge.

And about that, I have to say this: well see.

Just a few more facts on the GOP AHCA bill and pre-existing conditions

The New Neo Posted on by

Sick of the topic? Well, I am too. But this is well worth reading nonetheless. Despite everything we’ve already learned about pre-existing conditions and the GOP health care coverage bill, some of the following details may be news to you:

You’re not affected [by the change in the law concerning pre-existing conditions] if you get insurance through your employer (155 million people), or through Medicaid or Medicare. You’re not affected if you live in a state that doesn’t request the waiver, a category that will certainly include every blue state and most red states, too. Even if you buy insurance on the individual market and live in a state that gets a waiver, you’re not affected if you’ve maintained insurance coverage continuously and not had a gap in coverage longer than 63 days.

By this point, we’re talking about a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the population. If you do have a pre-existing condition in a waiver state and haven’t had continuous coverage, you can be charged more by your insurer only the first year. The state will have access to $8 billion in federal funds explicitly to ease the cost of your insurance, and the state must further have a high-risk pool or similar program to mitigate insurance costs for the sick.

Clearly, if Republicans set out to recklessly endanger the well-being of people with pre-existing conditions, they didn’t do a very good job of it. The purpose of these provisions isn’t to punish people who are sick, but to create an incentive for people to buy insurance while they are healthy.

The outright lies and the many distortions and scare tactics around how this part of the bill would work are legion, however, and will remain so. I don’t think there is any topic in the Obamacare/Trumpcare argument that lends itself more to emotional blackmail than this one.

Comey’s out!

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, well, well.

By now you may know that Trump has fired James Comey from his position as FBI head, to take effect immediately.

I’m not going to write an in-depth post about this tonight—I’m visiting relatives—but I wanted to provide an open thread for you to discuss it. Tomorrow I plan to have more to say.

You can go almost anywhere to find articles about the event; it’s the talk of the internet and the MSM at the moment, as you might expect. Memeorandum has a varied roundup of sources, if you want to start there.

A sonnet in praise of sonnets

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.]

I write some poetry from time to time,
And gravitate to forms, I must confess.
I crave some meter and a bit of rhyme.
Free verse can be illusory progress.
The sonnet with its prescribed fourteen lines
Presents a special challenge to be met,
A game that Frost, my hero, thus defines:
No point in playing tennis with no net.

Ah, freedom! It’s a lofty modern goal.
And rules? Meant to be broken, don’t you see?
Let’s shed the last vestige of stiff control
And revel in a life and art that’s free!
But rules are guides, not just constraints or chains.
Throw all out, and mere anarchy remains.

For those of you unfamiliar with what it’s like to try to write a sonnet (and I’d guess that might be most of you), please take my word for it when I say that it is really a very demanding form of poetry.

But fun, like a game with rules. If you like to solve double-crostics or crossword puzzles you might have a taste of what I’m talking about.

The form I follow in the above sonnet is the basic Shakespearean or Elizabethan one. Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter (five pairs of stressed/unstressed syllables per line), rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg. The convention of this type of sonnet also involves setting up a theme in the first eight lines and moving in a slightly different direction for the next six, including a sort of summing-up or even reversal in the final couplet.

That’s a lot of rules, to be sure. That’s why Frost’s likening the writing of formal poetry to a sport such as tennis is apropos: the point is to do it well despite the constraints, and to make of it something beautiful and free. Having no rules would spoil the game.

My sonnet here is not one of the greatest examples of the art, to be sure. I wrote it in about fifteen minutes, if that’s any excuse.

Some of the finest examples are to be found in Shakespeare, as one might expect from someone who gave his name to a popular subset of the form. More recent (although not all that recent) famous sonnet-crafters have been Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Gerard Manley Hopkins (what’s up with all these lengthy poet names, anyway?).

The sonnet is experiencing a small modern revival after a period of being way out of fashion. The New Formalists have led the movement.

Some of my favorite sonnets are the subtle ones in which you barely notice the form is being used, and yet all the rules have been followed. Here’s an example from Archibald Macleish (first published in 1928):

THE END OF THE WORLD

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.

Selling health insurance across state lines is not that simple

The New Neo Posted on by

It would seem to be a no-brainer: why not allow insurance policies to be sold across state lines? There are such huge differentials in state regulations and prices and policies, why not let market forces operate and give the consumer more choices that way?

But allowing health insurance to cross state lines is nowhere near as simple as that. See this, for example. The problem is not just a question of state regulations (although that is part of it), it’s economics and the peculiarities of the health care market.

For example:

“Currently individual states can decide whether or not to allow insurers to sell plans from another state in their state,” the Center for Health & Economy wrote…“However, even where this is allowed, various barriers such as the difficulty of building a network and attracting enough customers to create a large enough risk pool make it unappealing to insurers to pursue this option.”

And there’s the rub, which is a similar problem President Obama’s Affordable Care Act has faced with risk pools not having enough healthy people buying policies to pay the mounting costs of the sick.

“Sales across state lines would reduce premiums for those who are healthy at a given time while increasing premiums and reducing access to coverage for those with current or past health problems,” according to an analysis earlier this year by the Urban Institute’s health policy center.

Furthermore, consumers need to have an adequate network of doctors and hospitals in order to get the care they need and that means insurers have to spend more money to pay these providers. Since it’s a costly proposition for the insurers to build these networks of doctors and hospitals in new regions, health plans aren’t generally willing to enter new markets, analysts say.

More here:

Several states, including Georgia, Maine and Wyoming have passed laws allowing companies from other states to come in and compete for patients. The Georgia experiment is particularly noteworthy, given that it was highly praised by Republicans when it passed the Legislature in 2011.

Five years later, there have been no takers. Maine and Wyoming have had no better luck attracting insurers.

“As much as people talk about the Affordable Care Act as a national system, all health care is essentially local,” said Rene Santiago, director of the Santa Clara Valley Health and Hospital System. “It all comes down to the doctor-patient relationship and the willingness of doctors and health care providers to enter into agreements with insurance companies.”…

It’s not just that the market is different from Mississippi. The health care market in Northern California is vastly different from the Central Valley and Southern California markets.

Both of the articles I linked to in this post are written from an anti-Trump perspective. But I had read similar facts before about the difficulty of insurance being sold across state lines, long before Trump’s candidacy and even long before Obamacare was passed.

The American Enterprise Institute has chimed in on the topic as well, explaining somewhat better what the conservative point of view is:

It is clear that regulatory competition can’t work if the federal government is the primary regulator. That is why Republicans also support returning regulatory authority to the states as part of a broader reform of the health system. But even in that context, one should not expect interstate sales to significantly reduce the cost of health insurance.

A health plan offered in New York City will charge a higher premium than the identical plan offered in rural Colorado because of differences in those markets other than regulations. New York City has higher costs for housing, food, and other consumer purchases, and those costs are built into the prices of medical services. New York has an older, less healthy population that uses more medical services. In addition, New York has more local physicians and greater access to expensive medical technologies, which also drives up the cost of coverage.

Supporters of allowing insurers to sell across state lines are making an important policy point. Health insurance in this country is overly burdened by regulations that raise costs without providing value for many consumers. Even with substantial subsidies, enrollment in exchange plans has fallen well below what was expected when Obamacare was enacted. Reforms are needed to make the individual insurance market more responsive to consumers and taxpayers.

Regulatory competition is one tool in establishing a balance between cost and consumer protection in health insurance, but it must be part of a broader reform agenda to be effective.

I’m puzzled by one sentence in that AEI article: “supporters of allowing insurers to sell across state lines…” But it is already completely legal for insurers to sell across state lines; they are allowed to do it, it just doesn’t make much sense to do it at the moment.

If you want to see other possible drawbacks to selling health insurance across state lines, take a look at this. Are these just scare tactics? Or are they valid projection of what would probably happen?

Trump’s EO and the law, revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

In her hearing before the Senate, Sally Yates changed her tune from some of her previous statements on her reasons for not defending Trump’s immigration EO.

In other related news, the legal reasoning several judges used to invalidate Trump’s immigration EOs—that his campaign statements were extremely relevant and indicated his supposedly discriminatory intent in issuing the orders as president—leads inevitably to preposterous conclusions such as these:

ACLU lawyer Omar Jadwat, arguing today before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, told the court that President Trump’s travel order “could be constitutional” if it had been written by Hillary Clinton…

The last part of the audio is rather funny. Jadwat, asked whether the order on its face is valid, says No. Why? “I don’t think so, Your Honor, because the order is completely unprecedented.” To which one of the Fourth Circuit judges replies, with astonishment that seems mostly genuine: “So the first order on anything is invalid?”

In his post, John Hinderaker calls that kind of legal argument “lawless nonsense.” But such lawless nonsense follows directly from the judicial decisions handed down against Trump’s EO. As the rulings were issued it became clear—because of the liberal judges’ reliance on Trump’s supposed thoughtcrime, as evidenced in some of his campaign statements—that no subsequent EO of Trump’s on immigration that involved any majority Muslim country would ever be held constitutional by these judges, no matter how carefully and fairly drafted. Trump had committed the original sin during the campaign, and all the perfumes of Arabia cannot sweeten that little hand.

Time to ditch that Stradivarius?

The New Neo Posted on by

People seem to think that new violins sound better:

In tests at concert halls in Paris and New York, audiences were asked to listen to soloists performing on brand new violins, and three made by master fiddle maker Stradivari.

The ”˜internationally renowned’ violinists performed behind a screen ”“ so the audience could not see what they were playing.

And to ensure the experiment was not influenced by the music makers themselves, they performed blindfolded.

The researchers focused on which violins were louder ”“ allowing audiences to hear them better ”“ and which were preferred.

Not only were the new violins louder, but the audience said they liked them better.

Lest you think the audiences were a bunch of musically unaware Philistines, ponder this:

The audience in Paris were 55 ”˜musically versed’ people including violinists, violin makers and acoustics experts, while those in New York were 82 who were less musically experienced.

What’s more:

The authors say that previous research has found that violin soloists generally prefer new violins in blind tests and cannot distinguish between new and old at better than chance levels.

I guess progress—at least, in violin-making—isn’t an illusion.

Less than a third of Americans approve of the AHCA (Trumpcare, that is)

The New Neo Posted on by

Sounds bad, doesn’t it?

Then again, considering the fevered coverage of Trumpcare, it’s amazing that anyone approves of it at all.

But if you take a look at what the HuffPost/YouGov poll is actually saying, the headline about “less than a third” is true but misleading. Thirty-one percent of respondents were in favor, 44% against, and 25% percent say they don’t know enough yet.

25% is an awful lot of “don’t know enough yet,” but I think that it should actually be 100% in that last category, if people were being honest. How many people know anything about it but the headlines? That would probably be close to 100%, too.

But I cannot tell you how ver many people I’ve heard in the last week or so making casual derogatory contemptuous remarks about the bill. Clearly, the MSM propaganda has made its mark. But the proof of the AHCA pudding—as it was with Obamacare—will be in its actual effects on people’s lives, if and when the GOP ever does manage to pass and implement a final bill.

And then…we’ll see.