Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

“But what about the lurkers?”

Nothing worth doing is easy.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Infrastructure week. at last.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Every MSM headline appears to be written by DougJ. i hope he’s getting paid.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

I did not have this on my fuck 2021 bingo card.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

I’m going back to the respite thread.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

No one could have predicted…

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This Is a Pretty Stupid Headline

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This Is Pretty Lazy Analysis

This is pretty stupid, and you can see why in the first few paragraphs:

After being badgered to death by moderate Senate Democrats, the Biden administration has agreed to put stricter limits on who will be eligible for a relief check as part of its big COVID recovery bill.

Centrists such as Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia have spent weeks urging the administration to “target” the new round of $1,400 economic impact payments more narrowly to lower-income families in order avoid spending money on households that might not be facing financial difficulties at the moment. On Wednesday, Democrats said they would phase down the checks more quickly for higher earners than originally planned. As a result, approximately 11.8 million fewer adults and 4.6 million fewer children will benefit from a payment, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Singles who earn up to $75,000 will still receive the full check amount. But the payment will ramp down to zero for those who earn more than $80,000, well below the previous cutoff of $100,000. Married couples who file jointly will still receive their entire check if they make up to $150,000. But payments will fall to zilch for those earning more than $160,000, down from the previous threshold of $200,000.

Maybe it’s just me, but NOT BEING ABLE TO PASS ANY BILL OTHERWISE seems like a pretty good reason to me.

Now Manchin and Sinema and whoever else’s reasons for opposing the bill as is, might be pretty bad, but I would argue the overall reason team Biden is acquiescing to these dipshits is pretty fucking solid.

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3rd Party candidates and second choices

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Building on Adam’s thread on Kanye West (not a sentence I expected to write this year), I wanted to look at the spoiler effect of a third party candidate in a first past the post election. We don’t have great data on that counterfactual, but I think that we can look at Maine’s 2nd Congressional District election in 2018 to get some idea of what percentage of not-first-two party vote is persuadable to vote for one of the two major parties.

Maine using Ranked Choice Voting for its federal elections. A voter sees all the candidates who are running and ranks them from 1 to the number of candidates. The voter has a choice to stop ranking at any point. If there is no clear majority winner in the first round, the ballots of the candidate who received the fewest 1st choice votes are re-allocated on the basis of the second choice. This repeats until there is a clear majority winner.

Maine’s 2nd District went to a RCV run-off in 2018. The first round had the Republican incumbent hold a tiny plurality lead. The Democratic challenger won after the run-off. That is not the interesting part. The interesting part is this paragraph from the Portland Press Herald on the 3rd and 4th choice candidates:

In the end, Golden gained 10,232 votes from the ranked-choice retabulations and Poliquin gained 4,695 votes. That 5,537-vote edge allowed Golden to overcome Poliquin’s 2,632-vote lead. Roughly 8,000 of the ballots cast for the independents did not designate an additional choice or did not select either of the major-party candidates.

Roughly 8,000 out of almost 23,000 minor party voters did not choose a major party candidate. These folks were mobilized specifically for the minor party candidate. However over three fifths of the minor party voters were okay with at least one of the major party candidates. We can assume that most of them would likely have voted for a major party candidate in a first past the post system.

So what does that mean?

Some fraction of a third party candidate’s vote is never in play for a major party candidate. However a decent to large chunk of it is in play. And an ideological or identity based third party candidate is going get most of the in-play voters from the major party closest to it. So, a spoiler candidate is likely to get some small percentage of idiosyncratic voters who were never in play and then a good size sliver of voters from the major party closest to it. Looking at Maine, the 2nd District results had a net swing of about 1.8% which in a close race was a decisive swing.

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Hill Resigns

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Katie Hill, D-CA-25, just announced her resignation after having a threesome with a female campaign staffer and someone else her soon-to-be-ex husband, being accused of having an affair with her legislative director, and after having nude photos leaked to RedState. Hill had previously blamed her soon-to-be-ex husband for leaking the photos and also making accusations about Hill as part of an apparently very acrimonious divorce.

Hill had flipped CA-25 in 2018, which is rated as PVI of Even. Hopefully, another Democrat who isn’t fucking his or her staff will be able to win the special election.

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Byzantine Solutions to Trivial Problems

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I’m sure this is true in many fields, but in software engineering, you’ll often see an engineer or team become very attached to an inferior implementation of some feature. As the problems with this implementation pile up, their attempts to solve them become increasingly bizarre in their desperation to keep their darling. You can only hope that somebody eventually notices during code review.

What made me think of this? Fearing Hackers, D.N.C. Plans to Block Iowa’s ‘Virtual’ Caucuses (NYT):

WASHINGTON — The Democratic National Committee is preparing to block Iowa Democrats’ plans to allow some caucusgoers to vote by phone next year, bowing to security concerns about the process being hacked, according to four people with knowledge of the decision.

[…] The Iowa Democrats’ plan would have allowed voters not attending a traditional caucus to register their preference during one of six “virtual caucuses” over the phone. But D.N.C. security officials told the rules committee at a closed-door session in San Francisco last week that they had “no confidence” such a system could remain safe from hostile hackers.

[…] In August 2018, D.N.C. members adopted new rules for the 2020 presidential primary that encouraged states that held caucuses to switch to primaries and required caucus states to allow for a form of participation that did not require attending a caucus event.

Even when they made my preferred candidate’s victory possible (Obama 2008), caucuses rubbed me the wrong way. They’re unrepresentative nonsense, a throwback to an extremely bygone era. There is a tried-and-true method of making it easy for people to vote that’s fairly difficult to hack–it’s called a primary–but these yahoos are so in love with their inferior implementation of democracy that they’re coming up with increasingly desperate “solutions” to keep it in place.

Sure, you could do it correctly, but it just feels better to do it your special way. This is how systems fail.

Open thread!

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Hey Democrats – How About Some Polling?

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I would like to see more opinion polling on the issues the country faces. There are, of course, the inevitable polls on the horse race, but they tell us (and the politicians) little about the issues that are important to people and how they want their government to deal with them.

Our President continues to damage the country in a multitude of ways. The Republican Party stands by with its program of appointing conservative judges and passing tax cuts for the rich.

Impeachment – the bringing of charges against the President – must originate in the House. Hearings to support a vote of impeachment will take time, and it appears that there is not yet majority support in the House for impeachment. Nancy Pelosi has publicly favored waiting for the 2020 election rather than impeachment. There is some sense to that stand, but Donald Trump is damaging the country right now.

What can be done to stop or slow down the damage? And what needs to be done to build votes to remove Trump from office?

Nancy Pelosi seems to be trying to triangulate between “the Squad” –  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley – and the conservative wing of the House Democratic caucus, some of whom were elected in 2018 in districts that went for Trump in 2016.  Criticizing the Squad to an unfriendly interviewer, however, leaned too far in the direction of protecting the conservative wing from what they might consider radical thought.

Understanding why those districts flipped, however, and how broad support for the ideas of the Squad may be, would seem to be a good idea. My impression – largely from social media, which may not be indicative of the country at large – is that people want to see the corruption and incompetence of the Trump administration called out and policies advanced to turn back from the extreme inequalities Republican policies have inflicted on the country.

I’m not seeing much in the way of polling on those questions.

Should Democrats explicitly call out racists and demand healthcare for everyone? Are people okay with tax increases, particularly on the rich? How many see women of color as the future of the party? How many support the strategy of the House passing bills to make a point, even if the Senate won’t pass them? How many think we should impeach the President? Is there any point in trying to win those Trump voters so frequently interviewed in Midwest diners? Who are the voters who voted for Obama and then Trump, and why? Why did those districts turn around to elect conservative Democrats? Should Democrats call out the crimes Trump has been accused of?

There are a great many more questions. How they are phrased is important. Joe Biden, and perhaps Nancy Pelosi, seem to believe that bipartisan action is what people want. If you ask people whether they think bipartisan action is desirable, they’re likely to say yes. You might get a different answer if you ask whether they think that the current Republican Party is willing to work with Democrats to pass particular legislation.

How many think that the Republican Party needs to be rebuilt from the ground up? Fair is fair, after all the Republicans who are telling Democrats how to run their campaign.

It seems to me that there is a movement away from Trump. On Twitter, the responses to Trump’s tweets are becoming more and more negative. Polls immediately after his racist remarks about the Squad showed large majorities opposed to that racism. Here’s some polling that seems to say that more Americans support the Squad than support Trump.

And here’s a Twitter thread that draws on actual experience in defeating David Duke. The advice is to run explicitly against the racist. Policies are secondary. The whole thread is worth reading. It starts off with a description of the campaign against Duke and the conventional advice from the conventional consultants, which is very like what Pelosi seems to be guided by.

Don’t try to flip those folks in MAGA hats in the diners so beloved of interviewers. Drive up turnout among folks who stayed home in 2016.

Looks to me like this is the way forward. The presidential candidates, particularly Elizabeth Warren, are coming up with a great stock of policies. They’re essential, but not what the party should lead withdemoc

Pelosi could help by, say, one needling statement (NOT tweet) every day pointing out Trump’s racism, dishonesty, incompetence, pettiness – there’s a lot of material there that polling could supply and reinforce. That would have the added advantage of upsetting Trump. Not to fight with him, just to let people know she’s on the job and to keep Trump off balance.

I know I’d feel a lot better if we heard more of this from her.

 

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For the Love of Anyone’s Deity, Would Someone Please Donate a Strategist to the House Democratic Caucus!!!!

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I’m traveling this week, with lots of 0300 starts and wasn’t planning to post, but I just got into the gym at the airport hotel I’m staying at ahead of tomorrow’s pre dawn flight, and MSNBC is on the TV. And the Democrats are actually voting to table (put it to the side and not take up impeachment) an impeachment resolution of the President. This is happening despite only 89 members of the House Democratic caucus publicly stating they support starting an impeachment inquiry!

I have no idea whose idea this is, but I cannot state loudly or strongly enough how galactically stupid this is. Strategic and political malpractice at the highest levels! When this passes, meaning the House will not move to take up impeachment at this time, and it will pass, the President will spend the next week crowing about how he’s been cleared. He’ll use it to chew up the information space that should be devoted to the spillover onto him from the Epstein case, from his publicly going full in on blood and soil herrenvolkism where racism and anti-Semitism in defense of Judaism and Jews equated with Israel and Israelis is no vice, and the upcoming Mueller hearings in the House.

The motion to table just passed: 136 Democrats for, 93 against, and 1 present (abstaining). 194 Republicans and the 1 Independent (Amash?) voted to table it as well. So for now, the House, with overwhelming bipartisan support, isn’t going to do anything more on impeachment and I expect the President will start screaming about being cleared any time now.

Completely irresponsible political theater!

Open thread!

PS: Before anyone asks, I think the House should have a special select committee on impeachment focusing all the investigations through one point leading to either impeachment or exoneration. That’s not what happened with today’s strategic stupidity.

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