SAM: Spending $20 Million to Talk to Men

(Jack Ohman/S.F. Chronicle)

The "gender gap" in the minds of some observers (not all) manifested itself in the 2024 elections, with men voting overwhelmingly for Republicans and women likewise for Democrats. This week the Democrats allotted $20 million to find out how to talk to men.

On Wednesday night, the San Francisco Democratic Party weighed in, endorsing the idea as well. The resolution noted that Donald Trump got 56% of the votes of men aged 18-29, and that “addressing the challenge experienced by boys and men is not only a moral imperative, but is essential to fostering a more inclusive and responsive political movement that truly speaks to the needs of all individuals, and countering the resultant rise polarization and disinformation.”

...The New York Times reported last week that the plan “is code-named SAM — short for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan” — and promises investment to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.” It recommends buying advertisements in video games, among other things.

“Above all, we must shift from a moralizing tone,” it urges.

Yes, that's going to win over the men. "Inclusive and responsive political movement" and "gains attention and virality in these spaces" are precisely how guys talk to each other in the locker room and neighborhood bar.

How about leaving men alone and NOT talking politics 24/7? That's got a better chance of improving your poll numbers rather than working on your "messaging."

James Earl Carter, Jr. (1924-2024)

Former President Jimmy Carter, 100, has died:

The 39th president’s sole term in office was marred by a listless economy and stubborn inflation, squabbles within his party, gridlock in Congress and the seizure of American hostages in Iran. Considered a long-shot Democratic candidate when he announced his bid, Carter would broker a historic peace treaty between Israel and Egypt and set in motion other changes that would dominate global politics in subsequent years.

Many of the achievements for which he was recognized came after he left office in January 1981. He was the most active former president in modern U.S. history, gaining renown for work over four decades monitoring elections around the world, fighting neglected diseases, working to raise living standards for the poor and advocating for human rights. He did much of this work through the Carter Center, the humanitarian nonprofit he founded with his wife, Rosalynn Carter, in 1982.

“Jimmy Carter will probably not go down in American history as the most effective president. But he is certainly the best ex-president the country ever had,” said Gunnar Berge of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in his 2002 speech presenting Carter with the peace prize.

Because of the Iran hostage crisis and moribund economy during his term, Jimmy Carter's Presidency is poorly regarded. But there were some positives:

But he had some notable successes in foreign affairs, including the Camp David Accords. Signed with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, they reshaped the Middle East by bringing a lasting peace to two hostile nations. And domestically, the president was able to push deregulation of airlines, railroads and other industries. He signed a law establishing the Energy Department to regulate existing sources of energy and fund research into new sources and other technologies.

If there's one thing that I remember about President Carter, it's his outspoken Christianity. He was mocked by the Eastern cognoscenti for the Playboy "lust in my heart" interview:

"I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times."

In his defense he wasn't saying anything that most red-blooded American males didn't identify with, but back in the '70's one just didn't talk about such things in public. To his secular supporters he had committed an unforced error by bringing up one of the central struggles of being an evangelical Christian---that God judges men not by their actions but by what is in their hearts:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.---Matthew 5:27

Jimmy Carter spent his post-Presidency showing everyone what it was like to walk the walk over more than four decades. He and Rosalynn lived humbly in Plains, GA and gave generously of their time and money to philanthropic endeavors.

IMHO, Jimmy Carter's failures provide the answer to a question that journalists liked to ask during the recent Presidential campaign: "How can Christians vote for a rapist, serial liar, and convicted felon?" The answer is obvious: we elected a saint once before, and look where that got us. R.I.P.

Post-Election Rally

November 6, 2024: the "fifth-best one-day showing ever"

The stock market rocketed higher over Donald Trump's clear-cut victory last night. [bold added]

Wall Street has rarely been more excited by an election.

U.S. stocks’ capitalization rose by $1.62 trillion on Wednesday, their fifth-best one-day showing ever, following Donald Trump’s decisive election victory. The surge highlights the opportunity that investors, bankers and others in finance are hoping to embrace over four years of tax cuts, deregulation and economic expansion.

While all sectors benefited, investors were particularly enthusiastic about the possibility of a lenient antitrust regime and a less stringent regulatory environment:

Dealmakers expect mergers and acquisitions to come roaring back, with the installation of business-friendly regulators replacing those backed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), a noted dealmaking foe. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were among the strongest performers on Wednesday; those firms are among the most deal-oriented....

Among the biggest beneficiaries of a Trump administration are U.S. banks, a group that has been under regulatory scrutiny that is likely to ease in the next four years.

Bank stocks surged Wednesday in a wager that a strong economy, increased dealmaking and lighter regulation will spur higher profits. Some of the firms that have been under the most pressure from their overseers during the Biden administration surged. Wells Fargo jumped 13% to a new high. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley both rose more than 10%.

IMHO, the stock market is moving too fast. Staffing key positions will not happen immediately, plus senior and mid-level positions are filled with bureaucrats who not only do not support but actively resist Mr. Trump's policies, as we saw during his first term. I won't be a buyer for at least several weeks.

Presidential Material

He does look presidential

I'm entranced by the idea of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) becoming President just for the confusion that it would engender.

There may be no practical difference between "Whitehouse says" and "the White House says," but copy writers would have to guard against using phrases like "Speaking from the White House, Whitehouse..." or "Invited to the White House by Whitehouse..."

If he's going to get to the presidential mansion, Senator Whitehouse should avoid sillinesses like accusing a Supreme Court justice of "improper opining":

Mr. Whitehouse is famous for publicly examining Brett Kavanaugh’s high-school yearbook for subtle messages of, well, we never could figure it out. And now he says Justice Alito committed “improper opining on a legal issue that may come before the court” in his recent interview with this newspaper [the WSJ]...

Our favorite line in Mr. Whitehouse’s letter says that “at the end, Justice Alito is the beneficiary of his own improper opining.” In other words, how dare Justice Alito defend himself from unfair attacks by Mr. Whitehouse, whose real goal is to coerce the Justices into doing his political bidding.

Senator Whitehouse didn't just say it but wrote a letter to Chief Justice Roberts complaining about Justice Alito's "improper opining." The Chief Justice is now obliged to compose a letter in return, and I'd give a penny, or even two, for his thoughts.

Anyone but the Current Incumbent

(Image via Opindia / YouTube)

The WSJ editorial page is more honest about what Democratic power-brokers are trying to do than the Party is with its own membership. President Biden has been a disaster, Democratic leaders don't want him to run again, and it may be difficult to push him off the stage. [bold added]

The New York Times kicked off the kicking with a story quoting various progressive sages suddenly admitting what everyone has known all along: Mr. Biden is the oldest serving U.S. President at age 79, and he’ll be 82 when he finishes his term. He looks and sounds every bit his age. This declaration of the obvious has now moved along the progressive media chorus line to the Atlantic, with a piece that asserts “Let me put this bluntly: Joe Biden should not run for re-election in 2024. He is too old.”

These stories treat this as a revelation, as if Mr. Biden suddenly showed some dramatic decline. The truth is that the President demonstrated he had lost a verbal, and maybe mental, step in the first Democratic candidate debate in 2019. He hasn’t improved. Democrats admitted it privately at the time, but they rallied to him during the South Carolina primary when it looked like he was the only Democrat who could hold off the nomination of Bernie Sanders and defeat Donald Trump.

The rest of the campaign was a long apologia for Mr. Biden’s strategy of limiting his public exposure by campaigning in his Delaware basement. Covid-19 was the perfect excuse, and woe to any journalist who dared to ask if Mr. Biden wasn’t the same man we knew as Vice President. The subject was taboo.

This was one of the great free campaign passes in history. Ronald Reagan’s age was a subject of agonized media concern when he ran for President at age 69 in 1980. He was roasted after he stumbled in the first debate against Walter Mondale in 1984, and he had to defuse the media and public doubts with a quip about Mondale’s “youth and inexperience” in the next debate.

The Gipper was three weeks shy of 78 when he left office, which was younger than Mr. Biden was when he entered the Oval. If the President runs and serves a second term, he’d be 86 on his final day in the job. But Mr. Biden was needed to defeat Mr. Trump, and so all of this age business had to be ignored in 2020.

Why the Democratic turn now? One obvious answer is that the President is down in the polls, and his low approval rating may cost Democrats control of Congress in November. The problem can’t be the party’s ideas, or Mr. Biden’s adoption of the Sanders agenda after he’d campaigned as a moderate. The problem has to be Mr. Biden. He’s suddenly not up to the burdens of the Oval Office that have aged even younger men. He can’t make the case for his ideas. He’s overwhelmed by crises.

You almost have to feel sorry for Mr. Biden, who saved his party from Mr. Trump but is expendable now that he’s a political liability. You can almost hear Mr. Biden shouting at his staff: Where’s the gratitude? You think Bernie or Mayor Pete would have beaten Trump? I’m the guy who saved democracy.

Mr. Biden can be stubborn, and as anyone with older parents knows, taking away their car keys can be a difficult conversation. The President may not want to leave town as easily as some Democrats want him to.

All the more given the lack of obvious Democratic alternatives to Mr. Biden in 2024. Vice President Kamala Harris would run in a millisecond, but nothing she has done or said since her emergence on the national scene suggests she is up to the Presidency.

The obvious candidate "far from Washington"

Democrats know this, which you can tell by all the stories earlier this year about her political struggles. That’s the Beltway insider way of preparing the field for other candidates to consider running. Not that Pete Buttigieg will need any coaxing.

Such is the price of nominating Mr. Biden with so little scrutiny about his capacity for the Presidency. Perhaps Democrats will avoid a drubbing in the midterms, or he’ll rally after the election by using a GOP Congress as a foil. But Democrats may want to begin looking for candidates far from Washington if they want to retain the White House in 2024.

California's governor---handsome, young (57 when he takes office in 2025), Washington outsider, liberal but not woke--checks off the WSJ's boxes. True, the governor will have to explain why following California's energy policy was the reason gasoline prices have doubled nationwide, and why more people are fleeing the State than entering it, but at least he can give a much more coherent answer than the current incumbent.

Sub-Zero Interest in a President Newsom

He does look the part (this nation)

Ever since he worked for Willie Brown in the 1990's, Gavin Newsom had the look of a politician who had his eye on bigger things. He has held in succession the offices of San Francisco supervisor, San Francisco mayor, California lieutenant governor, and California governor. There's now only one higher office to conquer, and he's denied that he's interested. [bold added]

Gov. Gavin Newsom has “sub-zero interest” in running for president in 2024, he told The San Francisco Chronicle editorial board on Thursday.

Newsom is running for re-election to a second term as California governor, which would last through 2026. Asked if he would promise to voters that he wouldn’t run for president before the end of that term, he said he believes Vice President Kamala Harris should be the next president after Joe Biden.

“Yeah, I mean, I have sub-zero interest,” he said. “It's not even on my radar.”

Newsom has made similar claims about having no interest in running for president before, but it hasn’t stopped speculation that he wants to be commander in chief someday. He’s stoked those rumors by positioning himself as a national political figure and publicly sparring with prominent Republicans, including former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

"Sub-zero" is an odd choice of words. It is the name of the highest-end refrigerators that can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Governor Newsom is clearly familiar with the term, just as, unmasked and closely seated contrary to his own directives in 2021, he is used to dining at expensive restaurants like the French Laundry.

Governor Newsom could have said that he wasn't interested in the Presidency until after his presumed second term ended in 2026, but all he would say is that he supports Joe Biden, then Kamala Harris. His answer means that if the prospects are propitious, he would run in 2024 in the midst of his second term as Governor.

The governor is evasive, ambitious, and will sacrifice principles and friendships to get elected. Although I do agree with some of his positions, as I wrote in 2017, I would never vote for him.

Well, That Was a Letdown

Not the deluge we needed.

Saturday's hope for a storm melted away like this year's snowpack. The dryness will resume.

The system that brought heavy widespread rain across the Bay Area Sunday night was moving south, where it was expected to bring scattered showers and isolated thunderstorms south of San Jose in Monterey and San Luis Obispo County counties Monday evening, weather officials said...In the Bay Area, temperatures will start to warm up Tuesday into the week, with highs ranging in the 60s for most areas.

The drought will be added incentive to get out of town, thereby reducing household water usage, and to turn down the sprinklers so that the plants (barely) stay alive.

By the way, why is it that California has dry winters with Democrats as President and wet winters with Republicans? Just trying to figure out the science...

Maybe POTUS Is Just Going Home

An opinion piece in the respectable Wall Street Journal has the attributes of a put-on, but it's not written by a humorist.

The U.S. Should Send a President to Space

(graphic from spaceref.com)

To rekindle the spirit of American adventure, a U.S. president should travel to space by the end of the decade. This will show that space is a priority for American leadership, and it will signal that the best has yet to come...

To launch a U.S. president into space, NASA should form partnerships with the private sector, underscoring the unmatched entrepreneurial spirit of the U.S. The president should also take along the leader of a strong ally or partner like the U.K., France, Germany, Japan or India to show a unified front against China’s space aspirations.

Even if they are serious, a Presidential candidate who announced this ambition would disqualify him- or herself and quite possibly be institutionalized.

Oh, well, the two writers have given us a clue that they're pulling our leg. One goes by the name of Chris Mulder.

Relative Importance

Two Sixties icons: JFK and Pope Paul VI (WSJ)

In the Hawaii of the '50's and '60's nearly everyone I knew was Christian. (The Jewish and Buddhist kids I could count on the fingers of one hand, and absolutely no one would cop to being an atheist.)

One's Protestant denomination was important, while Catholics were "different."

John F. Kennedy's Catholicism was such a big deal during the 1960 Presidential campaign that there was worry that he "would take orders from the Pope."

“I do not speak for my church on public matters,” John Kennedy told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960, “and the church does not speak for me.”

The culture has changed to such an extent that on general principles I admire anyone who takes his or her religion seriously. It usually means that they've thought about life and the relative importance of material things and politics.

John F. Kennedy, who nearly died for his country in World War II and was assassinated 57 years ago, would have understood.

Apple One: Distractions Welcome

Because seven(!) hours a day of screentime is not enough, I signed up for Apple One on Sunday. Apple One is Apple's bundled subscription to a number of its services.

The Premier plan, which has been shared with each member of the household, costs $29.99 a month and is a bargain.

It includes Apple Music, TV, News, Arcade, 2TB iCloud storage, and a soon-to-be-released Fitness app.

I had not heretofore explored the game and music libraries, and they are a welcome distraction from the post-election scrum.

We won't know definitively about who controls the Senate until the runoff elections for two Georgia Senate seats on January 5th. As for the Presidential race, it looks like Mr. Biden will soon have the necessary 270 Electoral votes, but there seems to be evidence of vote fraud that could reverse the result.

So it looks like we'll have at least two more months of politics to obsess over, argue about, and ruin our Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I never thought I'd be saying this, but being distracted by games, music, and video entertainment will be a better use of time than the alternative.

Doing Nothing In Times of Uncertainty

As of this writing, the President and Senate races haven't been resolved, but the trends lean toward Joe Biden and a Republican majority, respectively.

With the House of Representatives secured by Democrats, it is almost certain that the United States will again have a divided government, that is, where the President and at least one house of Congress will be controlled by opposite political parties.

It's been fashionable to lament the brakes the Founders put in to the Constiution--six-year terms of Senators, two Senators for each State regardless of size, the Electoral College, the difficulty in amending the Constitution, even the permissibility of divided government--but when the country is split relatively evenly and the sides are far apart, the wisdom is clear.

It's very difficult to enact major changes; either the sides compromise or nothing happens. And sometimes nothing is the way to go.

The stock market, which has moved upward during the week, likes the prospect of nothing.

So a tip of the hat to the Founders, who knew nothing about the technological and scientific wonders of the 21st century but knew a lot about human nature.

Secure, Transparent, Auditable, and Reliable Voting

Homomorphic encryption: the picture helps a little

Protecting voting systems against hacking is difficult, and the principal reason is not government incompetence or corruption but the requirement of the secret ballot:

modern elections enshrine privacy at the cost of transparency, and try to compensate for the loss with a host of bureaucratic patches: voter-registration schemes to prevent people from voting twice, tally systems that ensure the number of voters matches the ballot total, and centralized polling places where rival election monitors can scrutinize the proceedings, all to impart legitimacy to a system of vanishing ballots.

“If you want to understand why elections are hard, it's because of the secret ballot,” says [MIT Comp Sci PhD Ben] Adida—that's the single variable “that introduces all of the operational complexity and trust.” Not for nothing did a leading technology conference recently declare voting the “hardest problem in IT security.”

A promising solution lies in homomorphic encryption, related to the same technology that produced bitcoin.

In 1987, [Microsoft cryptographer Josh] Benaloh's thesis at Yale spelled out how a homomorphically encrypted voting scheme would come to life. First, voters would need access to a machine that could perform advanced cryptography. When they cast their ballot, each digital vote would start out as a simple binary—1 for Biden, 0 for Trump—but its ciphertext might be thousands of characters long. Rather than send voters home with a binder full of hexadecimal gibberish, the computer would print the ciphertext as something much smaller: a hash code, much like how a URL is shortened into a Bit.ly. That would serve as the voter's unique receipt, which they would keep and carry away with them.

At the end of the night, when the computers stopped whirring, all those encrypted votes would be added together. A small number of election officials—the county clerk, the secretary of state—would possess a key that allowed them to decrypt the sum. They'd compare the columns of votes for each candidate and reveal the winner.

Thanks to the nature of the math involved, those resulting sums would also be verifiable by independent outside observers. After the election, all the encrypted votes could be posted on a public, online bulletin board for all to inspect. Using a set of mathematical operations called Chaum-Pedersen protocols, auditors would be able to crunch all those ciphertexts to arrive at what cryptographers call a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof: “Proof that the vote is correctly captured,” Benaloh explained, but without any way to know whose ballot said what.

But the thing that excited Benaloh most was what this scheme would mean for individual voters. When a voter left the polling place, clutching a receipt that bore their unique hash code, they could go home and perform a search for its twin among all the encrypted ballots on that massive public bulletin board. For the first time, elections would not only be verifiable, but people could be certain whether their specific vote had been counted, all without violating the secret ballot.

Even if STAR (secure, transparent, auditable, and reliable) machines could be produced, convincing election officials and the general public that they perform according to specifications will require extraordinary wisdom and patience. To non-experts--which are most of us--the mechanism looks like a black box, and everyone knows that black boxes 1) can be hacked and 2) have "back doors" built in by the makers.

Maybe homomorphic encryption will be too hard a sell and we should just go back to the way we used to do it. Yes, elections were stolen back then, but the methods weren't mysterious. And paper voting systems can have STAR qualities, too:

the reliance on paper in key states may strengthen voter confidence this year. Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin all have voter-verified paper trails in place for November. This changes the total number of voters using a paper trail to almost 95 percent, according to voting experts. That’s up from 75 percent during the last presidential election.

In two or more weeks the votes will be tabulated. The continuity of the American experiment will depend upon 60 million voters trusting the process even though their candidate lost. Never in the past 160 years has that trust seemed so fragile.

Holding Their Nose and Voting Republican

The Wall Street Journal highlights another consequence of the extended coronavirus lockdown: uncollected garbage. [bold added]

NYC sidewalk, Jan., 2020   (WNYC)

Philadelphia and Baltimore are among the hardest hit cities, though others, such as Atlanta and Nashville, also are having trouble. In Virginia Beach, Va., sanitation workers demanding hazard pay held a one-day work stoppage Aug. 19, putting trash collection behind for days. In New York City, garbage has piled up on some commercial corridors and residential streets after budget cuts reduced trash pickup.

Some residents are taking matters into their own hands. On two occasions the West Passyunk Neighborhood Association in South Philadelphia has trucked trash and recyclables in rented pickups to a city facility, after waiting in vain for municipal crews.

“Our streets looked like the city was abandoned,” said James Gitto, the association’s 29-year-old president. “It’s a daunting task when you look out and there is trash everywhere.”

At its worst, he said, the smell of rotten meat seeped into his home from trash bags piled by the street, and at night he could hear cats fighting over the spoils. He added that some garbage sat so long it stained the sidewalk.

Without knowing the answer in advance (except for New York), your humble blogger looked up the political affiliation of the mayors of the above-mentioned cities. They were overwhelmingly Democrats.

Keisha Lance Bottoms (D), Atlanta
Bernard "Jack" Young (D), Baltimore
John Cooper (D), Nashville
Bill de Blasio (D), New York
Jim Kenney (D), Philadelphia
Bobby Dyer (R), Virginia Beach

According to recent polls the Democrats have a good chance of winning the Presidency and sweeping Congress this year. Well, they might have done so despite the rioting and looting in cities they govern, but garbage in the streets? That may be enough for their constituencies to hold their nose and vote Republican.

When Kimberly Guilfoyle Shouts, People Listen

Kimberly Guilfoyle was derided for her extravagant speaking style by hostile commentators in the mainstream media. Here is what the normally-friendly WSJ had to say about her speech at the Republican convention: [italics added]

Guilfoyle Goes Full Blast
The convention was peppered with dark predictions about the future if Mr. Biden wins the election in November. Trump campaign senior adviser Kimberly Guilfoyle, who delivered her warning to Americans in a nearly continuous shout, said Democrats want to enslave Americans with liberal ideology, steal liberty and freedom and “control what you see and believe.”

“They want to destroy this country and everything we have fought for and hold dear,” said Ms. Guilfoyle.

After that tantalizing review, one has to see the speech for oneself:



Comments:
1) The usual outraged responders to the sexist criticism (if a man talked like that, they would say he was dynamic and forceful) are unusually quiet;
2) Her speech was over-the-top when one knows that there was no live audience; it was entirely appropriate for a speech in front of conventioneers. This will become apparent when the Trump campaign adds cheers, crowds, and confetti through the magic of CGI.
3) Kimberly Guilfoyle was once married to Gavin Newsom. Forget about the Conways and Matalin-Carville. Guilfoyle-Newsom would have sucked all the air out of the room.

Willie Brown is a Lucky Guy

At the Houston debates last September (Chron/AP)

86-year-old Willie Brown still has his fastball:

I got a call from a guy who interviewed me when I was in Dallas for my sister’s funeral in January 2019.

“I asked you what you thought the ideal Democratic ticket would be, and you said, ‘Biden for president. Kamala Harris for VP.’ I even have it on tape,” he said.

“Play if for me,” I said.

He did.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I think that was my lucky day. I just wish you had asked me to pick that day’s lottery number.”

Here’s hoping your day is lucky as well.

Willie Brown rose to the top of Sacramento politics as California's Speaker, then glided through two terms (1996-2004) as mayor of San Francisco before its recent troubles. He's found his calling as the still-stylish political raconteur with friends on both sides of the aisle. He was lucky that day when he made the call, but he has a lot of lucky days.

To Run With Joe

(Chronicle 2003 photo)

Kamala Harris, the junior Senator from California, dropped out of the Presidential race last year. However, she is on the short list to become Joe Biden's running mate.

Her friend and mentor, Willie Brown, advised her against being on the ticket in yesterday's Chronicle:

If Joe Biden offers the vice presidential slot to Sen. Kamala Harris, my advice to her would be to politely decline.

Harris is a tested and proven campaigner who will work her backside off to get Biden elected. That said, the vice presidency is not the job she should go for — asking to be considered as attorney general in a Biden administration would be more like it.

Being picked for the vice presidency is obviously a huge honor, and if Biden wins, Harris would make history by being the first woman to hold the job.

But the glory would be short-lived, and historically, the vice presidency has often ended up being a dead end. For every George H.W. Bush, who ascended from the job to the presidency, there’s an Al Gore, who never got there.

True, the vice president does have an advantage the next time the party needs a new nominee, which in Biden’s case could be four years from now. But in the meantime, the vice president has no real power and little chance to accomplish anything independent of the president.

Basically, no one takes the vice president seriously after election day. Just ask Mike Pence.

Plus, if Biden wins, the Democrats will be moving into the White House in the middle of a pandemic and economic recession. The next few years promise to be a very bumpy ride. Barack Obama and the Democrats saved the nation from economic collapse when he took office, and their reward was a blowout loss in the 2010 midterm elections.

On the other hand, the attorney general has legitimate power. From atop the Justice Department, the boss can make a real mark on everything from police reform to racial justice to prosecuting corporate misdeeds.

And the attorney general gets to name every U.S. attorney in the country. That’s power.

Plus, given the department’s current disarray under William Barr, just showing up and being halfway sane will make the new AG a hero.

Best of all, being attorney general would give Harris enough distance from the White House to still be a viable candidate for the top slot in 2024 or 2028, no matter what the state of the nation.

John Nance Garner, Vice President to FDR, apocryphally said that the office was "not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Willie Brown seems to agree with that assessment, but the veteran California politician is (deliberately?) ignoring the possibility that Joe Biden, if he wins, will not serve the full four years.

If she has the same ambition as almost every elected politician in Washington, Kamala Harris would be crazy not to accept the invitation to run with Joe.

[Update - 8/11/20: Yes, it's Kamala Harris.]

SMOD, 2020

It's a Presidential election year, and the contest is between an incumbent who makes half the country apoplectic and a man who reminds the other half of their nice, hapless grandfather who has trouble with the basics of living.

It's no surprise that the Sweet Meteor of Death is making a comeback. Think we're kidding?

February, 2020:

A majority of New Hampshire Democrats said in a new poll that they would rather a "giant meteor strikes the Earth, extinguishing all human life" than see President Trump reelected.

'Nuff said, or more accurately, snuff said.

Not Guaranteed

Buoyed by polls that show Joe Biden in a double-digit lead over President Trump, many Democrats are saying victory is in the bag. Willie Brown is not so sure. [bold added]

D Trump, W Brown, and others in 1999 (NY Daily News)

Those of you who think President Trump is politically dead and buried, think again.

By my reckoning, Trump still has a 50-50 shot at winning re-election come November.

Democrats are gleefully quoting a recent Quinnipiac University national poll that showed Joe Biden with a 15-point lead over Trump. An NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll had Biden with an 11-point lead.

Given Trump’s missteps and mistakes on everything from his handling the coronavirus pandemic to his racially charged rhetoric, however, Biden should be ahead by much more.

Plus, as we know, there is often a disparity between what people tell pollsters and what they do when they actually fill out their ballots.

So knock Biden’s lead in the polls down by half.

And Trump’s base is still firm. They voted for him in 2016 when he leaned hard on race, crime and immigration, and they will vote for him again.

Put it together and it’s still a five- to seven-point race.

In other words, a toss-up.

My opinion: impeachment, coronavirus, depression-level unemployment, multi-trillion-dollar deficits, civil unrest, cold war with China...2020 is not done with us yet.

It's a long, long way to November, and it's not even guaranteed that the President will be one of those two guys.

Independence Day, 2020: I've Stopped Looking For a Pony

(Business Insider image)

The headlines about President Trump's speech on Independence Day eve were uniformly negative, so I decided to exercise my right to independent thought by reading his speech in its entirety (after the break at bottom) before checking out the reviews.

A generation ago you wouldn't have blinked at most of the speech: praise for American exceptionalism, the words and deeds of the Founders, the great inventions and triumphs ("electricity, split the atom, and gave the world the telephone and the Internet. We settled the Wild West, won two World Wars, landed American astronauts on the Moon"), and a recitation of the accomplishments of the four Presidents on Mount Rushmore.

The latter allowed the President to transition to a condemnation of those who tear down monuments (he was careful not to mention Confederate symbols). He then levied a much broader attack against

“Cancel Culture"— driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and our values...

In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished.

Throughout his term the President has been called every name in the book, including Nazi and dictator, so his opponents won't like it that he's calling them the Fascists and totalitarians.

Actually, I've decided not to read the reviews because I know they're going to say what they've been saying for the past 3½ years: the President is divisive, he's firing up his base, he's a racist and white supremacist.

From Russian collusion to the Ukraine-whatever-that-was to the emoluments clause to the Logan Act to the climate denialism to the #MeToo movement that toppled mostly Democrats to the Trumpian over- then under-reaction to the coronavirus the media has been shoveling a lot of [stuff] since 2016 and affecting outrage throughout.

I used to trust their profession of journalistic principles to believe that they had something, but frankly I've stopped looking for a pony.

What is This Absurdity?

Edward Luttwak (Guardian)

Author and historian Edward Luttwak, 77, is known for his in-depth knowledge and bold predictions, some accurate (Soviet weakness, rise of populism) and some not (Sino-Soviet war, thousands of American casualties in Gulf War I).

He likens China's mishandling of the coronavirus to Chernobyl, which he views as the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. [bold added]

Along with Chernobyl comparisons, Chinese citizens online started describing the regime as “ridiculous,” Mr. Luttwak says. “Not evil, not bad—ridiculous. Suddenly, they’re ridiculous.”...Mr. Luttwak doesn’t go so far as to foretell the fall of Chinese communism, but he’s bearish on Mr. Xi.

Regimes need respect born out of fear or love in order to rule, and they cannot long abide ridicule. However, the U.S. would be unwise to pin its strategy on his prediction, especially since it's very tempting to believe that Chinese Communism will collapse on its own.

In the Soviet Union of 1984-1985 another source of scorn was the appointment of the sickly Konstantin Chernenko, then 73, to General Secretary of the Communist Party.

“He could barely talk. He could barely walk. However, the requirements of the Soviet system were that when a new general secretary is installed, his colleagues are filmed saying that they swoon with delight, as if it’s a beautiful 19-year-old girl in a bikini coming out of the water,” Mr. Luttwak says. Chernenko “never did anything. His name is associated with nothing. And now, they’re all pretending that they are swooning with delight.”

People throughout the Soviet Union, including party elites, were disgusted with the spectacle. They wondered, in Mr. Luttwak’s words, “What is this absurdity?

It looks like Edward Luttwak has a point to make about U.S. Presidential politics as well.