So Ken Starr is dead

It must be said ...

You're welcome.

Heh

Stolen from HMS Defiant, which you do read every day, don't you?  Thought so.

This wins the Christmas Sweater contest

My local newspaper had a photo of this.  Heh.

You  can get one here.

The hits keep coming

The Beetles: During the week of 4 April 1964, we held twelve positions on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, including the top five.

Bill and Hillary: Those are rookie numbers.

Nerd memes

This cracks me up, since it's Meme to the power of Nerd squared.

It reminds me of the difference between the temperature scales (Fahrenheit, Celsius, and Kelvin), explained from a practical perspective:

Fahrenheit:

0° - You're cold.
100° - You're hot.

Celsius:

0° - You're cold.
100° - You're dead.

Kelvin:

0° - You're dead.
100° - You're dead.

Yeah, I'm a nerd

The GOP does not represent traditional conservatives

There is a very interesting post over at Peter's discussing political polarization.  A comment left by McChuck jumped out at me:

The "Never Trumpers" are part of the Left, not the Right. They are infiltrators and Wormtongues. They are the approved opposition, the Washington Generals. They have finally being so obvious about their true loyalties that anyone with eyes to see and ears to listen can tell.

"You may think these thoughts, but not those. You may go this far, but no further. Now, the conservative case for eating the flesh of the innocent."

To take a leaf from Polifact, I would rate this "mostly true" - everything after the first sentence is spot on.  And the first sentence is also sort of right, but our "left" vs. "right" thinking is two dimensional, and so has hidden the really nefarious games that the GOP has been playing for decades.  If we expand our thinking just a little, a lot falls squarely into place.

Picture our classic "left" and "right" as a horizontal line but instead of the old labels let's use "Perfectability of Mankind" and "Traditionalist" as the labels.  Much of this captures the social issues that are so divisive in the political conversation today.  The GOP can correctly claim that it exists on the Traditionalist side of that spectrum.

But now let's add a vertical axis, representing the desired size of government (smaller or bigger).  We get something that looks like this:

Conservatives in the way we're used to think about them are in the lower left - traditionalists who believe in smaller government.  Communists (and actually fascists as well) believe in the perfectability of mankind and are quite eager to use a vastly expanded government to bring this about; they inhabit the upper right.  The political establishments are (mostly) about not rocking the boat too much but have a galaxy of hangers-on, all feeding at the public trough; they are in the upper left.  It's important to emphasize that these types really don't want to upset the apple cart by radical changes.  Lastly, there is almost nobody in the lower right: people who want to perfect humankind but don't really want any part of government.  About the only example I can think of is the Branch Davidians who got burned to death by the ATF in Waco.

Now let's populate the current political Who's Who into this quadrant:

Yeah, nobody I can think of is in the lower right.  The upper right is who you'd expect - Big Chief Sitting Bulls**t, Bernie, and AOC.  Obama may or may not be here (more on this later).  But the interesting bit - and the bit that gets to McChuck's comment ("The Never Trumpers are part of the left") is in the upper left quadrant.  Let me explain.

That quadrant is perhaps best labeled as "Grifters".  All of those mentioned are in it for the filthy lucre.  Not one of the republicans listed (all of whom I should point out have impeccable Establishment credentials) lifted a finger to reduce the size of government, and indeed were enthusiastic in their use of big government to oppress their opponents - all of whom were in the lower left quadrant.  Where were all the GOP complaints about the IRS targeting the Tea Party?  Who in the GOP Establishment stood up against the smearing of Sarah Palin?  Who was complaining about ballooning Federal Regulations*?  Where were National Review and The Weekly Standard in all this?  [crickets]

The Establishment is about using ever increasing government to feed their swelling army of clients.  The difference between the Republicans and Democrats is actually pretty small - look at the massive expansion of spending under George W. Bush.  The Deep State lives right there, in the upper left, and all the people listed are 100% Deep Staters.

Now what else is interesting is that the core bases of each party are much more motivated by social issues which the parties play up to distract everyone from, well, the graft.  As long as the rubes keep chasing the laser dot then the Powers That Be can relax and go back to the money machine.  Both parties play this game, with Obama perhaps the most successful Democrat to do so (which is why even though I show him in the upper right he is probably in the upper left/Establishment quadrant).  With him it was a lot of pretty murmurings of transformation to the base while in many ways governing as the 3rd and 4th George W Bush administrations.

In short, the Democratic Party lies to their base and the GOP lies to their base.  They have been for decades.

But Donald Trump breaks this cozy arrangement.  I would tentatively put him in the lower left quadrant.  Yes, the Federal Budget is still out of control, but Congress is firmly in the "Establishment/Grifter" camp and Congress passes the budget.  This isn't something that he can do much about (yet - we'll see if it gets on his radar or not).  But he has been enormously successful in slashing regulations in a very short time, and people vastly underestimate just how important this is.  If he doesn't do anything other than this for the rest of his two terms, this will be a major sea change for America.

And so to McChuck's comment - the Never Trumpers are violently opposed to Trump, but they're all in the upper left.  That's more evidence that Trump is seen as being in the lower left, or he wouldn't get that sort of visceral reaction from them.  Livelihoods are at stake, if Trump can dry up the gravy train - and the best way to understand government regulation is as a gravy train for the connected class.  All of the complaining about Trump's tweets and how he is mean is transparent drivel.  When they say it's all about the principle, it's really all about the money.

* I would like to point out that it was Richard Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency, and George H. W. Bush who established the wetlands protection regulations.

Quote of the Day: In which I agree with a Democratic Candidate edition

Tulsi Gabbard has a bunch of policy proposals that I don't agree with, but I am 100% with her on this:

I'm running for president to undo Mrs. Clinton's failed legacy. From Iraq to Libya to Syria, her record is replete with foreign-policy catastrophes. It's a primary reason why I resigned as vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 to endorse Bernie Sanders. Mrs. Clinton and the powerful media and political network she built up over decades have never forgiven this slight.... Those who are indebted to the war machine and the overreaching intelligence agencies, as well as their cheerleaders in the media, are determined to take me down because they know they can't control me. I'm directly challenging their power.... Democratic candidates adhere to [Hillary Clinton's] doctrine of acting as the world's police, using the tools of war to overthrow governments we don't like, wasting taxpayer dollars, costing American lives, causing suffering and destruction abroad, and undermining America's security.... Only when we recognize the failings of the past -- embodied by Mrs. Clinton and her minions in the media -- can we move forward to a future of peace, dignity, transparency and aloha.

Yup.

The best Halloween mask ever

pic.twitter.com/WrSVQBPvsT

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) October 29, 2019

What, too soon?

pic.twitter.com/m8rrdLa6U8

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) October 17, 2019

What the heck is up with Joe Biden's eye?

This is weird:

Former Vice President Joe Biden appeared to have a blood vessel burst in his left eye while participating in CNN's town hall on climate change.

A broken blood vessel in the eye, also known as a subconjuctival hemorrhage, can be caused by several things, including high blood pressure, bleeding disorders, blood thinners, or even excessive straining.

"Can be caused by several things"?  Hmmmm:

The Amazon is on fire?

Miguel runs down a number of potential causes for why the rain forest is burning.  He left one out:

Are things abut to get spicy?

pic.twitter.com/wwlDJecduW

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) July 8, 2019

The rise of Donald Trump, in a single chart

An old post at The Gormogons discusses a poll from 2014 - before Donald Trump - that explains pretty much everything you need to know to understand why he won the 2016 election:

The Czar of Muscovy explains the poll:

Last week, despite the intense suppression of the main stream media, the generally pro-liberal Quinnipiac polling team released a poll that asked folks who the best and worst presidents have been in living memory (since World War II, which is fair enough). The results were unexpected, at least by the Czar

...

Yes, George W. Bush, the worstest, most awfully unpleasant president ever…no longer holds the title. That’s right! Barack H. Obama has now taken the mantle as the worst president ever. And not by a little… when the difference between Bush and Obama is more than the “don’t know” count, that’s big. And not, pace the Quinnipiac press release writers, “narrow.”

In 2014, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama were seen as failed Presidents.  Both represented the establishment party position which is essentially the same with window dressing to make them look like two parties rather than one.  Extrapolating to 2016, we can see how Jeb Bush didn't have a chance (too closely linked to his brother), why Hillary lost (too closely linked to Obama), and why Creepy Joe Biden's campaign is Dead Campaign Walking.

So Robert Mueller had a press conference

It really won't make any difference.

Sure, it will play great for the Beltway Chattering Classes, but they've lost the ability to move the meter of public opinion.  Sure, it will play well with the hard core Democrats and die hard anti-Trumpers, but they won't feel differently about the situation than they did before his presser.   It also won't change any minds among the hard core Trump base.  They stuck with him through a myriad of "scandals" and "gaffes" and so no minds are getting changed here.

Next year is about the people in the middle - blue collar Democrats, suburban Republicans, soccer Moms, Independents.  This group seems to have decided one big thing about all this Russia Investigation brouhaha, and that is that there is something fishy about the FBI.  Something like two thirds of the American public wants the FBI investigated here.  That's up from around half the public a year ago.

All Mueller really has to go on is "Mr. Clean", and his Agency seems to be (at least questionably) dirty. And so yesterday's huffing and puffing was, in the Bard's immortal words, a tale told by a fool, filled with sound and fury but signifying nothing.

And the poll from a year ago is a very interesting one.  People also want an investigation into how the FBI ran the Hillary Email Server investigation.  A picture tells a thousand words on this:

I'm actually kind of surprised how this is all playing out.  $40M and reading through maybe a million pages of subpoenad Trump documents and there's literally nothing.  Trump is either the cleanest President of my lifetime, or he's perhaps the smartest.

Election 2020 prediction: Trump 522, Whoever 16

I want to be first on the block to call this - Trump will carry 49 States in next year's Presidential Election.  The map will look like this:

This will take some explaining, so here goes.

The Democrats were outraged that Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 but Trump won the Electoral College.  Lacking the votes for a Constitutional Amendment to eliminate the Electoral College, they came up with a sneaky but very clever idea - get individual States to pass laws giving that State's Electoral Votes to the winner of the national popular vote.  I am not a lawyer, so don't know how this would play out in the Courts, but let's run with this idea.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact binds signatory States to assigning their Electoral Votes to the winner of the national popular vote.  The compact comes into force when States representing 270 Electoral Votes have passed the law.  Currently States representing 189 EVs have passed the law and it is under consideration in States representing another 116 EVs.  So there's quite a good chance that it will come into effect, as the Democrats intended.  The States that have passed it or where it has been introduced are shaded light red in the map above. (Note that the dark red States voted for Trump and there's no reason to think they won't next year as well)

So where do I get away with calling a 49 State landslide for Trump?  After all, we haven't seen this since Reagan in 1984.

You see, Trump came within a couple million of winning the popular vote: 62,984,828 (Trump) vs. 65,853,514 (Clinton).  That's a little over 2% of votes cast.  The margin for the Democrats is very thin, and this is using 2016 figures.  Now consider Trump's advantages for next year, when compared to 2016:

1. He is an incumbent, which is a big advantage.  Only five incumbent presidents lost re-election during the 20th Century, and each faced challenges that Trump almost certainly won't: Taft (Teddy Roosevelt split the Republican vote with his Bull Moose Party), Hoover (Great Depression), Ford (only President because Agnew resigned in disgrace and then Nixon resigned after Watergate), Carter (disastrous foreign policy led to Iranian hostage crisis), George H.W. Bush (Ross Perot split the Republican vote).  None of these seem remotely plausible, so count on Trump to pick up some popular vote simply due to incumbency.
2. Republicans like him more than they did in 2016.  A lot of Republicans held their noses when they voted for him in 2016, and presumably some more didn't even come out to vote.  Trump was an unknown (from a policy perspective) then; now he has a record to run on, and it is pretty much a solidly Republican record.  Sure, his personal style is very unusual, but from a policy perspective he's not at all out of the Republican mainstream.  He'll pick up some votes here towards the popular total.
3. The economy is doing well.  Non-Republicans (mainly independents and blue collar Democrats, but count in a bunch of African-American men) will vote their pocketbooks next year.  That's more popular votes for Trump.
4. A shockingly weak Democratic field will depress Democratic voter enthusiasm.  Each of the Democrats who are running are either non-entities (Castro, Gabbard, Ojeda, Delaney, Yang, Buttigieg, Gillibrand, a bunch of others nobody has ever heard of) or have terrible, exploitable weaknesses: "Creepy Joe" Biden, Fauxahontas, "Lock up the parents when the kids skip school" Harris, Commie Bernie, and the "Fake Hispanic" O'Rourke.  Quite frankly, it's hard to see the Democratic base get wound up on any of those, so count that as fewer popular votes for the Democrat, equivalent to more popular votes for Trump.

Remember, Trump only needs a couple million more votes to get all the Electoral Votes from the Popular Vote Compact States.  Quite frankly, items 3 and 4 above will get him close, and the others will put him over the top.  It's really hard to see that those 4 advantages won't add up to 3 million more votes - like I said, that's 2% of all votes cast.

And so the Democrat's cunning plan will turn around to crush them next year.  It's too clever by half.  Of course, this all falls apart if there aren't enough other States signing on to the plan to bring the total up to 270 EVs.  We'll have to see about that.

Rest in Peace, Grumpy Cat

Found dead on May 16.  Cause of death is under investigation.

Lessons of the last election

The Czar of Muscovy muses on the outcome of the vote this week.  As always, your Autocrat is clear, thoughtful, and to the point.  First, the Republicans:

You had a heavy majority and, for once, some mandates. You were supposed to remove and replace Obamacare. But it was too hard, and lots of people were starting to get familiar with it, and messing with it could possibly cost you an election. In fact, you were elected to do hard work, and you definitely lost an election because you didn’t want to do hard work. You were supposed to do immigration reform, but didn’t. You were supposed to cut the size of government, but instead increased it. A lot. You were supposed to reduce regulations, but barely got started. So you were fired. 

Know how you can tell? Because you lost the House. That’s the easiest thing to correct, and the voters seemed to have figured that out. Consider it a two-year probation, because that’s how long you have to fix it. 

Sure, you did cut some regulations, and you did indeed slash taxes and get the economy moving. That’s why you lost only a couple dozen seats and not a bunch. Voters still think Republicans can fix things—just that not all of you seemed to want to. And those guys have been fired.

And then the Democrats:

You aren’t going to change the world with a twenty-odd majority. 

In fact, you should probably ask yourselves if you are superheros or just interim replacements. Your newly appointed roles in the House may be nothing more than temporary help until the permanent hires arrive. You could of course make a strong enough impression that you keep those jobs. But to figure out how to do that, you better look to see why the people your replaced got let go. Not because they were Republicans, but because they were weak. They were culled from the herd. You might want to be a little more strong. 

Of course, you won’t listen.

I think it's more like a ten seat majority, which just underlines the Czar's point.  The problem for the Democrats is that they live in the Media bubble - they think that the American public is much more liberal than they really are.  This is actually the big challenge for the party, to recognize reality as it exists, instead of trying to "shape" that reality.  Their success is tied to offering what the public actually wants, rather than what they think that the public wants.  Quite frankly, this looks like a big hill for them to climb.

The Republican party has had a very difficult last two years, psychology-wise.  They have begun to come around to the view that Donald Trump has offered the voters, rather than the view their establishment donors wanted to serve up.  In the past, the donors had a win-win situation: either the Republicans won and implemented the donor's preferred big government crony capitalism (c.f. George Bush senior or junior), or the Democrats won and implemented the donor's preferred big government crony capitalism (c.f. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama).

Trump changed that dynamic, cutting the donors out and offering something much more palatable to the voters.  This is really all you need to know to understand why Hillary doesn't put her pumps up on the Resolute Desk.

But this change was painful for for the GOP.  It's still not over, as the Czar points out.  A similar change needs to occur in the Democratic party, but it not only hasn't begun yet, but there's nobody obvious to start that ball rolling.

Right now the smart money has to be betting on the Democrats continuing the same game of identity politics, radical socialist red meat for their ideological core base, and quite frankly not very smart handling of the inevitable provocations from Trump.  He excels at leading his opponents to self-destruct, and none of the current Democratic leadership inspires confidence that they will be able to impose the required discipline to keep the party from looking barking mad insane.

So it looks that it's Advantage: Trump.  And will continue to be so as the GOP completes its transformation.

Now *that's* scary

pic.twitter.com/ugZPHIT6VW

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) October 15, 2018

Hey, maybe that will work ...

Maybe if Trump nominates Hillary to the Supreme Court we can finally get that FBI investigation.

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) September 21, 2018

Russiagate, explained

It's funny because it's true.