I know I’ve recommended Judith Curry’s blog before, but I want to do it again because of what she’s written since the election on the issue of Donald Trump and AGW. Curry is one of the most objective and reasonable of the major climate scientists writing today, in an atmosphere in which objecitivty is no mean feat and requires no small amount of courage.
As for Romney…
…there are reports that “some” in the Trump camp think he should be required to apologize to Trump before becoming his Secretary of State. The “some” that the article names is Mike Huckabee:
“There’s only one way that I think Mitt Romney could even be considered for a post like that and that is he goes to a microphone in a very public place and repudiates everything he said in that famous Salt Lake City speech, and everything he said after that,” Huckabee said, referring to a famous anti-Trump speech Romney gave in March.
I dunno, Mike. I think a great alternative would be for Trump sycophants such as yourself to form a line and run Romney through the gauntlet, and then place him in the stocks. After that, make him swear fealty to his lord on bended knee. A hairshirt might be a nice touch, too.
It’s unclear who Huckabee is speaking for, except Huckabee. But I doubt he’s alone. The question is whether he’s freelancing, or doing this at the behest of a group, or whether Trump is also involved in the message. It’s a sort of virtue-signaling (I hate that term, but sometimes it’s appropriate) to Romney-haters and the most avid and nasty group of Trump supporters (not all Trump supporters by any means) that even if Romney is chosen he will be humbled for his perfidy in speaking against The Leader. It’s a bit ironic, since one of the ideas behind choosing Romney as Secretary of State would be to mend fences and unify the Party. So does the Huckabee stance mean the Romney thing is off? Or is it meant as a fish thrown to the Romney-haters prior to choosing Romney, against their wishes?
Your guess is as good as mine.
The obligatory “the electors should vote for Hillary” articles
Here’s one by law prof Lawrence Lessig in the WaPo, and here’s some backup from Martin Longman in the Washington Monthly, with a bit of quibbling on the details.
What are these articles about? After all, it’s pretty much a certainty that there won’t be a revolt by an enormous group of rogue electors. And it’s pretty much a given that most electors have always been free to go their own way (except in the states that forbid them to do so, although Longman seems to think those laws forcing them to comply with their state’s decision wouldn’t stand up in court—see more on that question here).
Electors ordinarily comply with the wishes of their states, and certainly not enough of them have ever defied those wishes to make a particle of difference. The phenomenon is known as that of the “faithless elector”:
Despite 157 instances of faithlessness as of 2015, faithless electors have not yet affected the results or ultimate outcome of any other election for President and Vice President of the United States.
The Electoral College mechanism and the peculiar phenomenon of faithless electors provided for within it, was, in part, created as a safety measure not only to prevent a scenario of tyranny of the majority, but also to prevent the use of democracy to overthrow democracy itself. American founding father Alexander Hamilton writing to Jefferson from the Constitutional Convention argued of the fear regarding the use of pure direct democracy by the majority to elect a demagogue set out to harm the minority rather than work for the benefit of all citizens…
Twenty-one states do not have laws compelling their electors to vote for a pledged candidate. Twenty-nine states plus the District of Columbia have laws to penalize faithless electors, although these have never been enforced. In lieu of penalizing a faithless elector, some states, such as Michigan and Minnesota, specify the faithless elector’s vote is void, though no state has yet had cause to enforce such a provision.
As a commenter to the Longman article points out:
First, the party that wins the state sends its electors to the electoral college, so you’d be asking Republicans to reject their own victor, and I don’t think there’s much hope of that happening. Secondly, doing this would break the system, and would justify relatively extreme counterreaction by Trump supporters. Whether that would rise to level of civil war or not, I do not know, although it is certainly the sort of thing that would have set off a civil war during Roman history.
Not gonna happen, and I submit that the authors of both articles know it’s not gonna happen. So what’s the point of writing them? To stir up anger, hope, and turmoil among Democrats who are eager to delegitimize Trump as president, and also to discredit the institution of the Electoral College, which liberals and leftists tend to believe works against them and the pure democracy they believe would favor them.
That same commenter I already quoted went on to say that “the electoral college is a horrible institution with no redeeming values, and the system is now broken.” That’s a common point of view among Democrats, and it’s absurd. The system is not broken and the Founders did not intend it to be a pure democracy.
The Electoral College was meant to do exactly what it has done: keep a few large population centers from dominating a national election and protect the power of the states as entities. Those who want to abolish the Electoral College should be consistent and abolish the Senate as well, because it is run on a very similar philosophy. Actually, the Senate is even more non-representative of population density than the Electoral College, since in the Senate each state is given exactly the same number of senators (offset by the House, run on the opposite lines), whereas the number of electors from each state in the Electoral College represents a sort of compromise between equality for states and balancing their power along the lines of their actual populations.
It’s that “order Amazon through the neo portal” time of year again
It’s that time. Again.
Christmas, Chanukah, and whatever other holiday might suit your diverse fancies are all coming up sooner than you think. So I’m encouraging you to feel their hot panting breaths on your neck, and to solve all your gift-giving dilemmas by turning to that online colossus, Amazon.
And if you use those widgets on my right sidebar to click through for all your Amazon purchases (now and at any other time of year) you will also be giving a small but still not insignificant gift to neo-neocon (it adds up, folks), and all without spending any extra money yourself. What could be more wonderful?
I thank you all in advance, and I thank all of you who’ve already done your shopping through my blog. I’ll be bumping this up and/or re-posting it every now and then until Christmas.
[NOTE: In case you have ad blocker or something of that sort, and the Amazon widgets don’t show up on your computer, go here. You can also click on any Amazon book link within a post and anything you order during that click-through gets credited to me. I believe it’s true even for things you put in your cart but don’t order till a bit later, although there’s a time limit on how long they can be there and still get credited when ordered (I’m not sure what that limit is, though, so best to order sooner rather than later).]
Happy Thanksgiving!!
I happen to like Thanksgiving. Always have. It’s a holiday for anyone and everyone in this country—except, of course, people who hate turkey. There are quite a few of those curmudgeonly folks, but I’m happy to report I’m not one of them. Even if the turkey ends up dry and overcooked, it’s nothing that a little gravy and cranberry sauce can’t fix. And although the turkey is the centerpiece, it’s the accompaniments that make the meal.
My theory on turkeys is that they’re like children: you coax them along and just do the best you can, but as long as you don’t utterly ruin or abuse them, they have their own innate characteristics that will manifest in the end. A dry and tough bird will be a dry and tough bird despite all that draping in fat-soaked cheesecloth, a tender and tasty one will withstand a certain amount of abuse.
One year my brother and I were cooking at my parents’ house and somehow we set the oven on “broil,” an error that was only discovered an hour before the turkey was due to be done. It was one of the best turkeys ever. Another time the turkey had turned deep bluish-purple on defrosting and was so hideous and dangerous-looking it had to be abandoned. Another terrible time, that has lived in infamy ever since, my mother decided turkey was passe and that we’d have steak on Thanksgiving.
Since I like to eat, I am drawn to the fact that Thanksgiving is a food-oriented holiday with a basic obligatory theme (turkey plus seasonal autumnal food) and almost infinite variations on that theme. Sweet potatoes? Absolutely—but oh, the myriad ways to make them, some revolting, some sublime. Pie? Of course, but what kind? And what to put on it, ice cream, whipped cream, or both?
For me, there are three traditional requirements—besides the turkey, of course. There has to be at least one pecan pie, although eating it in all its sickening sweetness can put an already-sated person right over the top. The cranberry sauce has to be made from fresh cranberries (it’s easy: cranberries, water, and sugar to taste, simmered on top of the stove till mushy and a bright deep red), and lots of it (it’s good on turkey sandwiches the next day, too).
The traditional stuffing in my family is non-traditional: a large quantity of cut-up Granny Smith apples cooked in fair amount of sherry as well as a ton of butter till a bit soft; and then mixed with prunes, almonds, and one Sara Lee poundcake reduced to crumbs by crushing with the hands.
Thanksgiving is one of the few holidays that has a theme that is vaguely religious—giving thanks—but has no specific religious affiliation. So it’s a holiday that unites. It’s one of the least commercial holidays as well, because it involves no presents. It’s a home-based holiday, which is good, too, except for those who don’t have relatives or friends to be with. One drawback is the terribly compressed travel time; I solve that by not usually traveling very far if I can possibly help it.
The main advantage to hosting the day is having leftovers left over. The main disadvantage to hosting the day is having leftovers left over.
This year I’m thankful for many things. The fact that I’m still alive and not too decrepit. Family and friends. America’s chance to take a deep breath and set itself on a better course, if we can.
I wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving Day, filled with friends and/or family of your choice, and just the right amount of leftovers!
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post, somewhat edited.]
Thank you, readers!!!!
Well, this season’s pledge drive is over at neo-neocon (although donations are accepted at any time!), and I want to give a huge and heartfelt thank-you to everyone who donated. You really can’t imagine how grateful and touched I am by your generosity, which helps keep this blog going.
How to talk politics on Thanksgiving
Ah yes. Here we go again.
My suggestions this year are simplicity itself.
(1) Try to avoid the topic entirely.
(2) If a liberal brings it up, just use a pleasant tone and say something like, “I think the best thing to do is to wait and see, and give Trump a chance (you could add “like I did when Obama came into office,” but that has the danger of sparking an angry retort from the listener, so you might do well to desist from adding it).
(3) If you’re on the right but had spoken out against Trump during the campaign, and a fervent Trump supporter starts ragging you about how you were wrong to not support him, just use a pleasant tone and say, “I think the best thing to do is to wait and see, and give Trump a chance—and I’m really really glad Hillary didn’t get elected.”
Then dig into that pumpkin pie. You can’t talk with a full mouth.
Just a bit more about those polls
I’ve already written about how the polls, particularly the national polls, weren’t all that bad this year. But I’m going to add just a bit more.
As of this writing, Clinton is ahead in the popular vote by about 2 million. This amounts to a 1.5% margin, and it could get even larger. It’s not relevant in terms of the election, because the Electoral College still determines the winner. But it is relevant in terms of the national polls, which only deal with the popular vote, and the average of which (according to the person I consider the best poll analyst, Nate Silver, writing two days before the election) predicted a 1.9 margin for Clinton.
Not so far off at all. In fact, quite close.
What this illustrates is several things:
(1) Polls change many times during the campaign year. You can see how much they changed during the 2016 campaign year in a chart here, with the lead changing several times over the twelve months before the election. Clinton was more consistently ahead, though, and was ahead right before the election—and she won the popular vote.
(2) Although national polls seem quite accurate in predicting the winner of the popular vote (especially the closer it gets to Election Day), they are not especially useful in a race that’s at all close, because the Electoral College is the determining factor.
Another important element in this election (and in the difficulty predicting the outcome) was late-deciding voters. Let’s have some figures for how those “undecideds” broke:
Some of the polls were wrong to a degree, yes, but there was also something at work in the final days of the election: People who decided late broke strongly for Donald Trump in the states that mattered, according to exit polls. And without this apparent late surge, Hillary Clinton would be our president-elect ”” not Trump.
In fact, if you look at the four closest states where Clinton lost ”” or, in the case of Michigan, where she’s expected to lose ”” exit polls show late-deciding voters in each of them went strongly for Trump in the final days. In Florida and Pennsylvania, late-deciders favored Trump by 17 points. In Michigan, they went for Trump by 11 points. In Wisconsin, they broke for Trump by a whopping 29 points, 59-30…
And these weren’t small groups of voters. The number of undecided and third-party-supporting voters who were still free agents in the final week was as many as 1 in 8 voters nationally — an uncharacteristically high number for the eve of an election. (As Nate Silver noted, it was just 3 percent in 2012.)
In Florida, 11 percent said they decided in the final week. In Pennsylvania, it was 15 percent. And in Michigan and Wisconsin ”” states where Trump made a late push ”” fully 20 percent of voters said they arrived at their choice in the last seven days.
That’s a lot of people breaking for Trump, and in battleground states it helped turned the tide.
I find these things interesting, and what’s more the subject of polling is bound to come up in the next election (next election? Ugh!) As always, polling is flawed. But not necessarily as flawed as people think.
But what I’m really looking forward to at this point is putting this tedious, stressful election (and its polls) behind me, and hoping that the future is much brighter.
Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t that be great?
And now it’s the Hillary camp…
…that thinks the election might have been rigged, and is suggesting a recount in several close states.
I will go out on a limb and say I don’t think it’s going to happen, in part because so much time has passed since the election. But the myth of the election stolen from Hillary Clinton will go on to have a long, long life of its own.
In other news today, Trump is reported to have appointed Nikki Haley as UN ambassador, despite her lack of foreign policy experience and her merely-lukewarm support of him. But the Secretary of State job remains open, with several hot contenders, including supposed leaders Giuliani and Romney.
Mike Huckabee, one of Trump’s early supporters, says that appointing Romney to that job would be an insult to Trump’s supporters, and Newt Gingrich, another Trump promoter, was not a happy camper either, saying:
I can think of 20 other people who would be more naturally compatible with the Trump vision of foreign policy”…
My guess is that one of them would be Newt Gingrich, although Gingrich was modest enough not to list himself:
Gingrich said that Trump would have to consider whether Romney would be a secretary of state “in the John Kerry tradition” and whether the 2012 Republican presidential nominee would “represent the kind of tough-minded, America-first policies that Trump has campaigned on.”
Gingrich added that his preferred choices for secretary of state over Romney included former Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Hewlett-Packard CEO and Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina.
So, what’s all this anti-Romney talk from Huckabee and Gingrich? Are they speaking only for themselves, or are they saying this at Trump’s behest? And if the latter, what’s the underlying message? That Romney won’t be chosen? Or that Trump is his own man?:
However, the former Speaker [Gingrich] added that if Trump nominated Romney to be America’s top diplomat, “I’m going to support him. But President-elect Trump deserves to have the team he wants.”
I very much doubt Trump would choose Bolton, who is seemingly more hardline and interventionist than Trump. Giuliani is a strong possibility, and would be pleasing to Trump’s supporters because he’s been a Trump loyalist. But isn’t Trump trying to reach out to non-loyalists in the interest of uniting the country? Romney would be perfect for that. And wouldn’t Romney be a lot more likely to sail through his Senate confirmation that Giuliani, who has some possible conflicts of interest?
[ADDENDUM: Nate Silver says the “hacked” claim from the Hillary camp “doesn’t check out”:
We’ve looked into the claim ”” or at least, our best guess of what’s being claimed based on what has been reported ”” and statistically, it doesn’t check out.
There’s no clear evidence that the voting method used in a county ”” by machine or by paper ”” had an effect on the vote. Anyone making allegations of a possible massive electoral hack should provide proof, and we can’t find any. But it’s not even clear the group of computer scientists and election lawyers are making these claims.]
Trump and the Times
Seem to be the best of friends now.
The whole interview is well worth reading, as a glimpse into Trump’s mindset at the moment (he’s looking into this and that), and his ability to work the room. For example:
TRUMP: And by the way, if you see something or get something where you feel that I’m wrong, and you have some info ”” I would love to hear it. You can call me, Arthur can call me, I would love to hear. The only one who can’t call me is Maureen [Dowd, opinion columnist]. She treats me too rough.
I don’t know what happened to Maureen! She was so good, Gail [Collins, opinion columnist]. For years she was so good.
[cross talk]
SULZBERGER: As we all say about Maureen, it’s not your fault, it’s just your turn.
[laughter]
Spambot of the day
This one puzzled me at first:
I am glad to be a visitant of this sodding site.
Until I looked it up. I believe it’s British.
Trump won’t pursue charges against Clinton
Is anyone surprised at this newest iteration of the kinder, gentler Trump?:
President-elect Donald Trump won’t subject Hillary Clinton to a criminal inquiry ”” instead, he’ll help her heal, his spokeswoman said Tuesday.
“I think when the president-elect who’s also the head of your party ”¦ tells you before he’s even inaugurated he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone and content, to the members,” Kellyanne Conway told the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” who first reported that the president-elect would not pursue his campaign pledge to “lock up” Clinton, his Democratic opponent.
“Look, I think, he’s thinking of many different things as he prepares to become the president of the United States, and things that sound like the campaign are not among them,” Conway, who is now on the Trump transition team, said in her interview.
I also think that Trump is probably correct if he calculates that the vast majority of his supporters will forgive him for not pushing the prosecution of Clinton. They are too happy right now about his victory, and the prospects for the future.
At least the Trump administration is admitting Trump lied during the campaign (although they don’t use the l-word). I suppose, if you want to look at it in a good light, that admission of the obvious is somewhat refreshing, compared to denying it.
As for me, I already knew that Trump lies a lot. Most of you—even many of his supporters—were well aware of it, too. The real question is what was he lying about, and when is he telling the truth. It never seemed to me as though he was serious about pursuing Clinton, and I suspect that at least a certain proportion of his supporters just felt it was a fun game to shout “Lock her up!” during the campaign, a kind of cheerleading hyperbole before the Big Game.
I don’t like this business of lying—but hey, I’m not a politician. At least, since Trump was elected, he seems to be jettisoning some of his worst posturing and adopting a more reasonable tone. So he’s been discarding many of the things I wasn’t in favor of, and adopting some I was. Of course, we don’t know if this more reasonable Trump tone is just another pose by a poseur extraordinaire. But time will tell, as action (or inaction, or contrary action) follows words.
[NOTE: Could there be some relation between not prosecuting Clinton and news like this?]