Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[Winstonm]

What's next for Trump's post-acquittal purge - defenestration and Novichok? The ACE* of Trump

 

*American Caligula Era.

[Winstonm]

Alternet commentary:

 

A trumpbot is someone who simplifies and doubt-proofs their life by means of a simple robotic formula expressed with automatic, robotic confidence. Here’s the formula or algorithm could be programmed easily into a natural language AI program:

 

 

If it sounds good, it’s about me. If it sounds bad, it’s about my competitors.

 

To apply this formula, one need not attend to the meaning of words, only to their positive and negative connotations. For example, a trumpbot operating in a culture where “communist” or “capitalist” has positive connotations, will proudly declare that they are a communist or capitalist respectively. In a culture where “communist” or “capitalist” has negative connotations, a trumpbot will accuse his competition of being a communist or capitalist respectively.

 

What “communist,” “capitalist” or any word means is not only unimportant to the trumpbot; it is crucial that the trumpbot ignores all meaning. Their sole and absolute priority is robotic sorting – all positives to them, all negatives to threats to them. To pay attention to the meaning of terms would be a bug in the software. It would complicate the algorithm’s performance, and return the trumpbot to human fallibility.

 

A robotic, confident insistence is, however, important to trumpbots. It’s how they can convince non-trumpbots to attend to the meaning of the words as though the trumpbot cared. It’s also how they can wear opponents down and therefore declare another victory in their uninterrupted, infallible winning streak.

[y66]

The latest Monmouth poll (Feb 6-9), which is rated A+ by 538, finds that Trump’s job rating stands at 44% approve and 50% disapprove, which is statistically indistinguishable from his 43%-52% rating last month. Over the past 12 months, Trump’s approval has ranged from 40% to 44% in Monmouth’s polling, while disapproval has ranged from 50% to 54%.

 

The latest Quinnipiac poll (Feb 6-9), which is rated B+ by 538, shows all of the top Democratic primary contenders beating Trump in the general election: Bloomberg +9 Sanders +8 Biden +7 Klobuchar +6 Buttigieg +4 Warren +4 based on a sample of 1,519 self-identified registered voters with a margin of sampling error of +/- 2.5 percentage points.

[y66]

From Cameron Peters at Vox:

 

Israel runs into cybersecurity trouble with elections app

 

• Days after the disastrous Iowa caucuses, Israel ran into election tech issues of its own — first reported on Sunday by Haaretz — after it was revealed that the personal information of nearly 6.5 million Israeli voters was leaked by the right-wing Likud party as a result of a faulty voter outreach app. [Haaretz / Ran Bar-Zik]
  
• The leak exposed the addresses, full names, genders, and in some cases phone numbers of every eligible voter in Israel for easy download; it has raised fears of widespread identity theft or national security implications ahead of Israel’s upcoming parliamentary election. [NYT / Daniel Victor, Sheera Frenkel, and Isabel Kershner]
  
• The vulnerability in the app has since been addressed, and the app’s security has been heightened, but it’s unclear how many people accessed the information before the flaw was repaired, and whether that data will be exploited. [AP / Ilan Ben Zion]
  
• Israelis will go to the polls for the country’s third election in less than a year on March 2; the result will determine the political future of longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who leads the Likud party and is under indictment on corruption charges. [bBC]

[kenberg]

From Cameron Peters at Vox:

 

 

 

I hope everyone is aware of hacking dangers. How could they not be? Hacking must be addressed.

 

That said, comparison with what happened in Iowa is off base. I don't think anyone is claiming that the caucus results were hacked or that the problems were due to some evildoers. It was old fashioned incompetence. Yes, modern technology was involved but, just as everyone knows about hacking, everyone knows that using an untested app in a large scale endeavor is asking for problems. Problems are what they got.

 

I await the news story that begins: Person X is the one whose name appears on the contract with Shadow, person Y (perhaps X=Y) is the person who was to test the app and organize its usage, and persons X and Y are now looking for work elsewhere.

[kenberg]

Michael Gerson was a speech writer for W, he is conservative, he is religious. I read and, often, enjoy his column in the Post. Today he invoked a strained but amusing analogy for the D candidates.

 

There is a certain charisma that comes from preternatural talent. Following the French Revolution, some Frenchmen wanted the restoration of the old Bourbon monarchy — let's call them the Bidondines. Others wanted a more vigorous application of the revolution through the guillotine — let's call them Bernobins. But those who eventually supported Napoleon — the Butticidaires — were attracted to a man of destiny. (Let's forget, for the purposes of my metaphor, the roughly 5 million military and civilian deaths caused by the Napoleonic Wars.)

Full column here .

[Winstonm]

Michael Gerson was a speech writer for W, he is conservative, he is religious. I read and, often, enjoy his column in the Post. Today he invoked a strained but amusing analogy for the D candidates.

 

[/font]

Full column here .

 

I guess Warren and Klobuchar were too hard of names to work with. B-)

[barmar]

The latest Quinnipiac poll (Feb 6-9), which is rated B+ by 538, shows all of the top Democratic primary contenders beating Trump in the general election: Bloomberg +9 Sanders +8 Biden +7 Klobuchar +6 Buttigieg +4 Warren +4 based on a sample of 1,519 self-identified registered voters with a margin of sampling error of +/- 2.5 percentage points.

These predictions seem to be about the popular vote. Trump lost to Hillary by 2% in the popular vote, but won handily in the electoral college (not the biggest margin ever as he claimed, but still pretty big).

[Zelandakh]

I guess Warren and Klobuchar were too hard of names to work with. B-)

The Bethanots are basically a noisy sub-group of the Bernobins for the moment and the Bucharians are essentially irrelevant.

[awm]

Probably too much is made about the difference between Democratic candidates. Basically we are trying to answer a small number of questions:

 

1. Should we try to convince traditional “swing voters” who are truly undecided between the parties (Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar)? Or is it more effective to go after folks with generally liberal views who are disillusioned with politics and rarely vote (Sanders, Warren)? Can we rely on either of these groups being so disgusted by Trump that they will vote Dem regardless?

 

2. If we win the election, can we expect Republicans to bargain in good faith, especially if the president is an elder statesman with strong personal relationships across the aisle (Biden, maybe Klobuchar)? Or do we need to change the rules somehow to counter the Republican scorched earth tactics combined with their structural advantage in the Senate (Warren, Buttigieg, surprisingly not so much Sanders)?

 

3. Does it matter if our candidate is well over 70 and doesn’t draw big crowds?

 

The various policy differences won’t matter much in practice. Even Biden’s relatively moderate proposals will have trouble passing the Senate (even if Dems have a small majority), and Sanders/Warren’s medicare-for-all bills are pretty much DOA. It’s all just aspirational — should we “aim high” and try to get the youth vote out or “aim low” to avoid turning off the swing voters? Seems like either way could work, but in practice I doubt there will be much difference in government between Dems given the realities of the Senate and Supreme Court.

[y66]

re: the tradeoff between animating young voters and turning off swing voters -- this is the sweet spot Buttigieg has staked out for himself. Seems to be working.

[y66]

These predictions seem to be about the popular vote. Trump lost to Hillary by 2% in the popular vote, but won handily in the electoral college (not the biggest margin ever as he claimed, but still pretty big).

Good point. I think they are intended to measure who has the best chance of beating Trump in November vs what will happen in the electoral college in November. For the electoral college scenario, Dems have to figure out how to get more Sanders' supporters and black voters to the polls in 2020 than they did in 2016 if they want to win. Can Buttigieg figure out how to do this? Maybe if he teams up with Corey Booker.

[y66]

For the swamp file via Tara Lachapelle at Bloomberg:

 

A U.S. judge has ruled in favor of T-Mobile US Inc.’s deal for Sprint Corp., joining President Donald Trump’s competition regulators in their perplexing move to approve a merger that has the potential to go down in history as among the most harmful to American consumers.

 

District Court Judge Victor Marrero issued his decision Tuesday morning, handing a surprise victory to T-Mobile and Sprint. News reports will call it a blow to the group of state attorneys general who brought the lawsuit to try to stop the merger, but it’s a bigger blow to wireless-phone customers. They may see plan prices creep up as a consequence of a more concentrated industry to be dominated by the new T-Mobile, AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., even though the judge wasn’t convinced that would be the case.

 

The companies’ triumph comes as a shock to investors, who rightly saw all legal precedent and conventional wisdom about antitrust regulation pointing to the deal getting blocked. Indeed, previous government administrations did deem a T-Mobile-Sprint deal off limits for the same reasons. In recent weeks, shares of Sprint traded at a massive discount to the value of T-Mobile’s offer — some days a spread as wide as 80% — in a sign of traders’ apprehension about the deal’s fate. Sprint’s stock price shot up Tuesday on word of the ruling.

 

The deal will give T-Mobile a level of market power it’s never had by removing its fiercest and cut-rate competitor, Sprint. It effectively calls off the industry price wars that their own rivalry sparked in recent years. These skirmishes benefited consumers who were presented with affordable unlimited-data plans as smartphones became the center of communication.

 

In court, the state lawyers, led by Letitia James of New York, argued that allowing T-Mobile to buy Sprint would result in costlier service. “No, it won’t, just trust us,” was essentially the companies’ response, with T-Mobile CEO John Legere figuratively waving a 5G-embossed American flag in one hand, his other fingers crossed behind his back.

 

The companies pushed the notion that a combined T-Mobile-Sprint will be better-equipped to deliver the ultra-fast next generation of wireless networks to Americans, creating the illusion that without the deal, the country’s 5G ambitions would be somehow diminished. And yet the biggest beneficiary of this deal’s approval is a Japanese billionaire by the name of Masayoshi Son, whose telecommunications conglomerate, SoftBank Group Corp. of WeWork investment-disaster fame, is also Sprint’s controlling shareholder. Selling to T-Mobile bails him out of a bet gone wrong on the U.S. wireless market’s weakest player and instead hands him a stake in the fastest-growing player. (To be sure, the terms of the all-stock deal are likely to be renegotiated to account for Sprint’s shrinking value since the transaction was initially struck in April 2018.)

 

It all proved to be a persuasive enough argument for Ajit Pai, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, and Makan Delrahim, the Department of Justice’s antitrust chief, who each approved the transaction in exchange for mild concessions. Both were appointed by Trump, who has been cheerleading for the U.S. to lead in the so-called 5G race, namely against China. The states emerged as an unusual last line of legal defense, and their defeat could embolden more companies operating as direct competitors in similarly highly concentrated industries to pursue tie-ups.

 

Ironically, the Trump administration this week asked Congress for more funds to expand its antitrust oversight. “Because God has a terrific sense of humor, yesterday was the day the DOJ announced it was adding 87 new staffers and a 71% budget increase for the antitrust division,” Blair Levin, a U.S. policy and regulation analyst for New Street Research, wrote in a report Tuesday morning. “Is it to deal with all the new cases that, based on this precedent, will now be viable?”

 

Regulators have placed incredible faith in Dish Network Corp. and its wily chairman, Charlie Ergen, to help maintain competition in the wireless market by putting the satellite-TV billionaire on the receiving end of T-Mobile and Sprint’s concessions. Dish, a wireless wannabe, will have access to T-Mobile’s network while it constructs its own using the spectrum licenses Ergen has stockpiled over the years. But Dish has a long way to go to ever fill the hole that Sprint will leave behind.

 

Some say Sprint would be gone soon anyway because of its financial distress, and therefore T-Mobile should be allowed to acquire it before Verizon and AT&T get to dance on its grave. But if the only options are a) allow a merger that makes the market leaders even more powerful, or b) block the merger, allow Sprint to die and open the door for concentration to happen another way, then that right there signals too much market power is already held in too few hands. It’s also hard to imagine that Sprint, a willing seller that has 42 million retail wireless subscribers and a boatload of valuable spectrum, wouldn’t attract other acquirers if a T-Mobile deal were blocked. Now we’ll never know.

 

When the FCC, DOJ and a federal judge all agree that a merger should get the A-OK, the decision may be presumed justified. But fascination with 5G and Dish’s maybe-someday entry doesn’t change this: reducing the market from four to three national carriers can’t possibly be good for consumers. As for Sprint shareholders, it's a good day to buy a lotto ticket.

[awm]

re: the tradeoff between animating young voters and turning off swing voters -- this is the sweet spot Buttigieg has staked out for himself. Seems to be working.

 

While one would think that the first millennial candidate would do well with young voters, Bernie Sanders has a commanding lead with the under 35 set (54% to Warren's 15% with Buttigieg and Biden down at 6%). Buttigieg actually does much better with older voters (latest poll). Apparently a lot of millennials feel that Buttigieg is one of these people obsessed with checking things off on a resume and don't see him as very "real" -- he does remind me a bit of the main character of the Politician. While he took a number of further left positions early in the primary, he has since moved quite a bit to the center.

 

If there's one thing this primary has shown, it's that black voters don't necessarily prefer a black candidate (they like Biden and Bloomberg while Cory Booker and Kamala Harris never really got any traction)... young voters don't necessarily prefer a young candidate (overwhelmingly for Sanders)... and female voters don't necessarily prefer a female candidate (Warren does better with women than with men, but she still polls behind Sanders and Biden -- and Klobuchar actually seems to do better with men than with women).

[Winstonm]

Reagan beat Carter, and a lot of it was due to this:

 

Before the Bush administration, there were only three presidential terms in which the misery index rose at least 4 percentage points over a 12-month span. The first was in 1949-53, and the second in 1973-77. In each case, the incumbent party lost the following election.

 

The third was President Carter’s term, from 1977 to 1981, when the combination of soaring oil prices and recession caused the misery index to peak at 21.9 percent. Ronald Reagan famously asked voters, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” and defeated President Carter.

my emphasis

 

We now have to do the same thing with Trump. I think a great plan would be to take all his lying promises - repeat them - and then say, And what did you get? And the answer: Nothing!

 

Trump said you'd have better healthcare for less money. What did you get? Nothing.

Trump said you'd get manufacturing jobs. What did you get? Nothing.

Trump said he'd bring back coal mining jobs. What did you get? Nothing.

 

Trump is a blowhard who lies with promises but delivers nothing. Put him where he belongs - in the dump!

[Winstonm]

[y66]

From Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

 

That Donald Trump is a sore winner is nothing new. But the extent to which he’s been exercising his vindictiveness over the last week since he survived a Senate impeachment trial is impressive. Politico’s Kyle Cheney lists the lowlights: “In 6 days since acquittal, Trump/WH have: removed Vindman; removed Sondland; vowed payback/retribution; attacked judge in Roger Stone case; attacked DOJ prosecutors for Stone sentencing proposal; attacked FBI Director Wray; withdrawn Liu/McCusker nominations.”

 

All of this and more has a lot of thoughtful people worried about the politicization of the Justice Department and the future of the rule of law in the U.S., and with good reason.

 

What I’ll add is that it’s also really inept presidenting. Trump is, as usual, doing his job badly.

 

After all, most of the retribution he’s attempting is pointless. Take, for example, his decision to remove Alexander Vindman from the White House in a humiliating fashion — having him escorted out — rather than waiting for Vindman to be rotated out of his National Security Council position in a few months. He gained nothing from it other than applause from Fox News and others who would applaud him if he blew his nose. Meanwhile, he risked further (further) alienating plenty of people who respect military service.

 

This reached a new level on Tuesday in the Roger Stone case, when four prosecutors withdrew from the case, one resigning entirely, after they were overruled in their sentencing recommendations in the wake of Trump’s public complaints. Trump’s pressure on Justice is likely to earn him more enemies within the bureaucracy. It may hurt him (or, at least, Stone) with the judge who has the sentencing decision. And all of this is further humiliation for senators who stuck with him on the impeachment vote only to have him increase his lawlessness practically as soon as the gavel banged down on the final vote.

 

Yes, I know what a lot of people say: Trump is getting away with it all. Republicans in Congress will do whatever he wants. But that’s not really true. After all, the other important thing that happened this week is that Trump’s budget proposal arrived on Capitol Hill, and was promptly flushed down the toilet by both parties. Matt Glassman gets it right: “Senate Republicans—if they cared—could *still* demand Trump clean house in WH, install a real CoS, and start running administration in a modestly non-corrupt manner. Yes, they have a collection action problem and face some individual risk, but they have plenty of leverage, too.” After all, as he notes, when they actually do care about substance, “Trump consistently backs down when Republicans tell him too—on NATO, on Korea, on closing border, etc.”

 

We are locked, in other words, not in a power struggle, but in something of a lack of power struggle. Trump is weak; Congress, and especially Republicans in Congress, are even weaker. And around them, institutions of democracy crumble not so much because Trump is a Mussolini but because none of them have any idea what they’re doing — or are so afraid of their shadows that they refuse to do anything.

[y66]

From Noah Feldman at Bloomberg:

 

Following a presidential tweet, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is poised to betray Robert Mueller’s independence — after the fact. Reportedly, Justice will retract the sentencing recommendation that was made yesterday to sentence Roger Stone for seven to nine years for lying to Congress and witness tampering. All four prosecutors quickly resigned from the case.

 

The whole point of Mueller’s status as special prosecutor was to protect his investigation from improper White House influence. Now, Stone’s sentencing is being hijacked by direct presidential influence.

 

None of this is normal. It’s not normal for the Justice Department to reverse a sentencing recommendation already submitted to court. It’s especially not normal when the decision follows the president tweeting that the sentence sought was too high. And it’s the trifecta of non-normalness when the person being sentenced was convicted of lying to protect the president in an investigation of whether the president colluded with a foreign power to get elected.

 

Lest you have forgotten, a reminder: Roger Stone is bad news. A veteran of Richard Nixon’s regime of dirty tricks and self-professed mentee of the late and unlamented Roy Cohn, Stone served as a conduit between WikiLeaks and the 2016 Trump campaign. Questioned about his conduct by the House Intelligence Committee, Stone lied under oath — five separate times, according to the Mueller team and the jury that convicted him. Stone also tried to pressure an associate, the radio personality Randy Credico, to lie to Congress so that their stories would match. And he did it in an especially colorful fashion, telling Credico to emulate the conduct of the character Frank Pentangeli from the film “Godfather II,” who lies to Congress to protect mobster Michael Corleone.

 

The Mueller team discovered Stone’s crimes and indicted him in January 2019. Ordinarily, the federal government lawyers who file an indictment get to try their cases through verdict and sentencing, but because the Mueller team dissolved after its report was filed, Mueller farmed out several criminal prosecutions to different U.S. Attorney’s offices. Two former members of Mueller’s team, Aaron Zelinsky and Adam Jed, continued to work on the case. Both prosecutors left the case today, along with Michael Marando. The fourth prosecutor, Jonathan Kravis, announced he was quitting his job as an assistant U.S. attorney entirely.

 

The sentencing recommendation filed yesterday was certainly at the high end of what the Department of Justice would ordinarily seek for a first-time felon convicted of a nonviolent crime. Yet it fit within federal sentencing guidelines. Explaining the request, the prosecutors pointed out the seriousness of interfering with the 2016 election. They emphasized Stone’s disrespect for Congress and the investigative process. And they mentioned Stone’s contempt for the judicial process, including his outrageous conduct of posting a picture of the presiding judge with crosshairs next to her head.

 

When President Trump heard about the sentencing recommendation, he tweeted immediately that it was “horrible and very unfair.” The Department of Justice will likely claim that it would have revised the recommendation regardless, but that claim is doubtful and in any case impossible to prove.

 

What’s so strikingly bad here is that the entire purpose of appointing Mueller as special counsel was to assure him the greatest degree of independence from Trump permitted by current government regulations. A constant concern throughout Mueller’s investigation was that Trump or those around him would wrongfully try to influence the investigation and its outcome.

 

Now Trump is taking advantage of the fact that the investigation is over to interfere in a criminal prosecution that was filed as part of that very investigation. And he’s going to get away with it, insofar as Attorney General William Barr agrees to do his bidding. The sentencing judge could always choose to impose a longer sentence, of course, but it would be pretty unusual for a judge to give a sentence harsher than the one recommended by prosecutors.

 

It can’t be ignored that Trump’s conduct follows so soon after the Senate voted to keep him in office. Although the timing of the sentencing recommendation is presumably coincidental, Trump’s response surely reflects how completely unconstrained he feels post-impeachment.

 

Trump famously called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy immediately after the release of the Mueller report, which stopped short of stating that he had committed any crimes. Free of the Mueller investigation, Trump committed the conduct for which he was subsequently impeached. Now that impeachment is over, it would seem, Trump is free to settle a score with Mueller’s team.

 

We may have become inured to Trump’s outrageous conduct. But we shouldn’t be. Trump’s intervention in the Stone sentencing is an outrage against the idea of Mueller’s independence. It further undercuts any possibility for the executive branch to monitor presidential misconduct. That’s bad for democracy and the rule of law.

[y66]

Maryland is considering a $4 billion proposal that would lessen dependency on property taxes.

 

From Craig Torres at Bloomberg:

 

The primary school in Crellin, Md., a village of 260 people, sits on a reclaimed coal-loading site in the Appalachian Mountains. On top of reading, writing, and arithmetic, students get to look after chickens and lambs in the barn outside. They also learn about pollution by testing water from the nearby river.

 

It’s a place full of warmth and curiosity—and, like most of the families who send their children there, it’s short of money. “I want them to have choices,” says principal Dana McCauley of the kids in her charge. The school has earned widespread recognition for its environmental education program. But there’s no money for tutors, and funds for the school’s math academy have dried up.

 

Rising inequality is now at the heart of U.S. public debate, looming over just about every policy discussion from trade to interest rates and likely to take center stage in this year’s presidential election. America’s classrooms are one place where the trend could be halted.

 

McCauley and her staff are battling to give children from low-income families a better educational start. That can lead to decent paychecks and a stake in an economy that’s become more oriented toward skills and knowledge. But because of the way the U.S. school system is funded, it often perpetuates inequality instead. The reality is that McCauley’s school would have more resources if the children who went there were better off.

 

Maryland—one of the more prosperous states but also one with pockets of hardship in places including Baltimore and rural areas like Crellin—is trying to disrupt this loop in which underfunded school systems produce poor adults. It’s embarked on what some experts say is one of the biggest education reforms attempted by a state in recent years, with a price tag that runs into the billions of dollars.

 

U.S. schools get most of their money from state and local authorities. The latter typically rely on property taxes to raise revenue and can do it more easily in wealthy neighborhoods. It’s a “uniquely American” system, says Elaine Weiss, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute. And its distributional consequences are “uniquely bad,” she says. “Some kids, just by dint of where they are born, will have much less funding.”

 

In this year’s legislative session, Maryland lawmakers are considering a proposal that would ramp up education spending by state and local authorities, adding $4 billion a year by the end of the decade. The goal is educational outcomes—and ultimately social and economic ones—that are both better and fairer.

 

The commission that drafted the plan said it wants to transform a school system with “glaring gaps in student achievement based on income, race, and other student subgroups.” Less than half of Maryland kindergartners enter school prepared to learn, the commission said, and tests show only about a third of the state’s high school juniors are “college and career ready.”

 

William Kirwan, the commission’s head and a former University of Maryland chancellor, calls the under-education of vast segments of the U.S. population a “ticking time bomb” that’s “right there hidden in plain sight.”

 

relates to American Way of School Funding Is ‘Uniquely Bad’ for Inequality

Crellin Elementary School.PHOTOGRAPHER: KRISTIAN THACKER FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK

The Kirwan proposal is based on a reality that McCauley experiences every day in Crellin: Kids are walking into classrooms with problems and won’t learn much unless those are addressed. It envisages full-day prekindergarten for children as young as 3 years old, an expansion of family support centers, and improved pay and career paths for teachers. Schools with a high concentration of poverty would get counseling and health services.

 

Maryland’s state government would pay for a chunk of the program—and play a redistributive role, directing more money toward poorer areas, such as Garrett County, where Crellin is. By 2030 state spending would rise $2.77 billion above the current law while local funding would rise by $1.23 billion.

 

Paul Edwards has been a mayor, teacher, and coach in Garrett County, where his family has lived for four generations, and now is a county commissioner. It’s going to be “very difficult” to find the money for the proposal, he says, because Garrett recently raised taxes and is worried about chasing residents and employers away. With companies relocating across borders in search of lower costs or into areas that have a technologically skilled workforce, keeping jobs in rural areas is a high priority. He also acknowledges the flip side: The biggest challenge for new business in the county is finding the right workers, and education is vital for that.

 

The Maryland educators’ union, which is backing the Kirwan plan, makes the same point. It argues that the only way to stem population decline in such places is to make them attractive to employers, which means having an above-average school system. The union also says Garrett County will get more money in state aid than it has to pay from its own coffers.

 

The county’s profile illustrates what millions of Americans are missing, even after a decade-long economic expansion left the country better off on aggregate. Unemployment in Garrett is just 4.2%, but taxable incomes are among the lowest of Maryland’s 24 counties.

 

While income inequality across the U.S. has steadily worsened, the performance gap between rich and poor students has at least stopped widening, says Bruce Baker, a professor at Rutgers University who specializes in education financing. “In a modest way I guess that could be called a win,” he says, but it’s going to take a lot of time and resources targeted to high-need districts to narrow the gap. “Some of these states are trying to lean hard” against inequality, Baker says. But “they’re leaning against a very strong force.”

 

Kirwan, who’s 81, says most people his age have retired and left political battles to others. But as a lifelong educator, he’s worried—and not just about his own state. “We have these horrific income gaps in America,” and educational disparities are making them worse, he says.

 

He anticipates a pitched battle as the state legislature begins debating the plan that bears his name. “Who knows if we are going to get it across the goal line,” Kirwan says. Yet he’s hopeful that if it does pass, “it will be a drop of a pebble in a lake that could ripple across our country.”

[kenberg]

I suppose this will be a little simplistic, but let's say there is a "more progressive" group of voters and a "more moderate" group of voters. It was once thought that Sanders and Warren would be the main contenders on the more progressive side, and that Biden would be the clear favorite on the more moderate side. It appears that Warren and Biden are out of it. I realize this could change, of course it could, but surely most observers expected Warren and Biden to be doing a good deal better than they are.

 

The Dems should seriously ponder just why it is that Warren and Biden have fared so poorly. One answer could be that Sanders, Buttigieg and Klobuchar are such really terrific candidates that they just blew away the competition. I think that would be a very optimistic explanation. It's good to look at why the successful were successful, but it could also be useful to look at why candidates Warren and Biden, who were once expected to do well, are faring poorly. It's easier to ask than to answer but I'm working on it.

[y66]

There are some good things happening in Richmond, Virginia where Dems now control both houses in the General Assembly and the governorship for the first time in 22 years. Graham Moomaw has the story at the Virginia Mercury.

 

In a related story at WaPo, Virginia political scientist Stephen Farnsworth said “Virginia has not become the East Coast version of California. But Virginia is clearly being governed in a far more liberal direction than has been the case in decades, if not ever.”

 

I like it.

[Winstonm]

From Noah Feldman at Bloomberg:

 

Using law enforcement to intimidate and attack enemies is a hallmark of totalitarian regimes. Welcome to Trump World.

[y66]

From Martin Wolfe at FT:

 

With one bound, US President Donald Trump was free. With the expected display of naked partisanship, Senate Republicans (with the exception of Mitt Romney) abandoned their constitutionally mandated role as judges of his alleged abuse of power. They have deferred the decision to the voters in November’s presidential election. Mr Trump will possess many advantages: passionate supporters; a united party; the electoral college; and a healthy economy. His re-election seems likely.

 

The most obvious reason why Mr Trump might win again is the economy. Even by his standards, last week’s State of the Union address was a case of exaggeration piled on hyperbole. As Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist, has pointed out, US performance remains poor by the standards of its peers in salient respects, notably life expectancy, employment ratios and inequality. Moreover, output, employment, unemployment and real wages are largely continuing post-crisis trends. Given the scale of the fiscal stimulus, which has delivered huge and enduring structural fiscal deficits, this is no great achievement. Nevertheless, many Americans will feel that the economy is improving. This will surely play a big part in the coming election.

 

If Mr Trump wins, this victory could well be even more significant than his first. For the American people to choose a classic demagogue twice could not be dismissed as an accident. It would be a decisive moment.

 

The most obvious implication of Mr Trump’s victory would be for liberal democracy in the US. The president believes he is above accountability to the law or to Congress for what he does in office. He holds himself accountable only to the electorate (or, rather, to his electorate). He believes, too, that appointed members of his administration, public servants and the elected officials of his party all owe their loyalty to himself, not to any higher cause.

 

The founding fathers feared just such a man. In the first of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton wrote that, “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their careers by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.” In this, he was following Plato, who wrote how a man who gained power as the people’s protector might become “a wolf — that is a tyrant”. In his Farewell Address of 1796, George Washington argued that the “disorders and miseries which result [from factionalism] gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual”. Factionalism is certainly rife in today’s America.

 

We cannot know how far Mr Trump would want to go or how far the institutions of the republic would let him do so. Yet is there anything Mr Trump could do, apart from losing the loyalty of his base, that would persuade Mitch McConnell, Senate majority leader, to turn on him? It is not institutions, but the people who serve them, that matter most.

 

Even if the great republic survived the trial largely unscathed (which is optimistic) the re-election of this man — a demagogue, a nationalist, an incontinent liar and an admirer of tyrants — would have worldwide significance.

 

Despots view Mr Trump as a kindred spirit. Liberal democrats would feel even more abandoned. The notion of the west as an alliance with some moral foundations would evaporate. It would at best be a bloc of rich countries seeking to hold their global position. As a nationalist, he would continue to dislike and despise the EU, as both an ideal and a wielder of countervailing economic power against the US.

 

David Helvey, acting US assistant secretary of defence, recently wrote of the hostility of China and Russia to the “rules-based order”. This ideal does indeed matter. Unfortunately, its most powerful enemy is now his own country, because it has always relied on American vision and energy. With his mercantilism and bilateralism, Mr Trump has aimed an intellectual and moral missile at the global trading system. He even sees his own country as the greatest victim of its own order. The problem, then, is not that Mr Trump believes in nothing, but rather that what he believes is often so wrong.

 

More broadly, his short-term transactionalism and willingness to use all available instruments of US power creates an unstable and unpredictable world not just for governments, but also for businesses. This uncertainty, too, might get worse in a second term. It is an open question whether any sort of international rule of law would survive.

 

There are huge practical challenges that need to be managed. One is the US’s complex and fraught relationship with China. Yet, on this, Mr Trump is far from the most hawkish of Americans. He has a streak of pragmatism. He likes to do deals, however half-baked they may be.

 

Perhaps the most important issue (if one leaves aside avoiding nuclear war) is management of the global commons — above all, the atmosphere and oceans. Crucial concerns are climate and biodiversity. Little time is left to act against threats to both. A renewed Trump administration, hostile to these causes and the very concept of global co-operation, would make needed action impossible. Often, this administration does not seem even to recognise public goods as a category of challenges worthy of concern.

 

We are living through a hinge moment in history. The world needs exceptionally wise and co-operative global leadership. We are not getting it. It may be folly to expect it. But Mr Trump’s re-election could well mark a decisive failure. Pay attention: the year 2020 matters.

Is the other Mr. Wolfe in the house?

[Winstonm]

I suppose this will be a little simplistic, but let's say there is a "more progressive" group of voters and a "more moderate" group of voters. It was once thought that Sanders and Warren would be the main contenders on the more progressive side, and that Biden would be the clear favorite on the more moderate side. It appears that Warren and Biden are out of it. I realize this could change, of course it could, but surely most observers expected Warren and Biden to be doing a good deal better than they are.

 

The Dems should seriously ponder just why it is that Warren and Biden have fared so poorly. One answer could be that Sanders, Buttigieg and Klobuchar are such really terrific candidates that they just blew away the competition. I think that would be a very optimistic explanation. It's good to look at why the successful were successful, but it could also be useful to look at why candidates Warren and Biden, who were once expected to do well, are faring poorly. It's easier to ask than to answer but I'm working on it.

 

I think these are fairly easy to answer: Warren is the female Sanders and Sanders is more charismatic and more like Trump in that he attacks with his answers and does not appear wishy-washy. Warren, at times, does. Biden has been poisoned just as Hillary was poisoned by innuendo and slander.

[Winstonm]

From Martin Wolfe at FT:

 

 

Is the other Mr. Wolfe in the house?

 

The one who thinks fast, talks fast, and drives fast?