Liberal Excesses

Betsy DeVos is no liberal's idea of an enlightened mind.
But, as Trumplings are apt to do, she is very good at finding the seams in the liberal armor and striking there.


She has attacked the campus rules governing responses to accusations of sexual assault and harassment.

Listening to a Harvard professor on NPR, who found herself unable to avoid saying the words, "I have to agree, DeVos is right on this one,"  Mad Dog had to begrudgingly agree.


As the professor described the process, where a boy accused of sexual assault, rape or harassment was often called to a meeting without prior notice, unable to confront his accuser, unable to even get a clear statement of the offense, it sounded like something out of an old movie, a "Darkness at Noon," the ultimate in authoritarian nightmare, where the accused has no rights, no chance to defend himself.


This connects to the #MeToo phenomenon, hard to call it a "movement," more of a "cultural revolution" redux, where the dogma, never to be questioned, is that when a woman accuses a man of rape,  fondling, anything really, she is to be believed, which means, ipso facto, if the man denies it, he is to be disbelieved.

Few things have done more to discredit liberal figures than the blind embrace of "the woman is always right," credo. This stance simply rejects the whole notion of fairness, of the importance of discussion, of cross examination.


"Oh, but you then traumatize the victim twice!" is the cry.
Well, what of the trauma to the accused?


If the woman cannot be in the same room as the accused, because she is such a delicate flower, where does that leave justice?


Mad Dog well remembers the first case of "date rape" reported decades ago, in his college alumni monthly, and the few details of the event raised multiple alarm bells in his own mind about whether or not a rape had occurred: Not the least of which was the fact the girl accuser, awakening in the boy's dorm room bed the next morning wrote down her actual, real phone number and gave it to him, presumably so they could repeat the experience. But when she got back to her dorm room, she decided, after speaking with her friends, she had been raped. The boy was expelled from the college, not tried by a criminal court, where rules of evidence, cross examination would have been available. He was tried in a Star Chamber at the college and expelled. In his junior year.

Such things do more than hurt individuals caught in the snare of these events, they utterly destroy the trustworthiness of the liberals, mostly women, who defend and espouse them.
The sine qua non of the liberal mind has got to be an openness of mind, a willingness to hear the other side. Aude alteram partem.
When you lose that, you lose everything.
I would argue the women who embrace the current mess governing campus sexual assault charges are not true liberals. They are Gospel Zealots, Strident Infallibles. But they are not any with whom true liberals should want to be associated.


 

Should America be Soup or Salad?

Reading over the letters to the editor in the "Failing New York Times" this morning, in response to Paul Krugman's piece on the the "Senate America" in which he decried the structure of our government which allocates 2 United States Senate seats to 600,000 Wyoming residents but only 2 to the 40 millions in California, I was struck by the argument that we need to honor local sentiment, folkways, beliefs, customs which distinguish life in the smaller states from that of the "elite" coastal urban states. A law professor from Berkeley, no less, suggested we can have our cake and eat it too if we simply remember the 21st amendment, which struck down a national prohibition against alcohol and allowed local jurisdictions to decide whether or not the risks of demon rum were worth the benefits of legalizing it.

But that professor fails to recognize the 18th amendment which was put into place because of outsized power of Bible Belt states.  Today, 50 United States Senators represent just 17% of the American population, which puts the Bible Belt in the driver's seat.  A man from Terre Haute, MO tells Mr. Krugman, "Quit whining about how stupid the voters are and work harder to convice us in flyover country that your policy beliefs are the best way forward for our nation." 
As if you can actually fix stupid.

But another writer (from New York) noted: "In the 21st century, the United State is not a federation of separate states, as it was in 1776 or 1787. It is a radically integrated nation in a radically integrated world." 

All this crystallized the basic problem: significant parts of the country have not been integrated into the global hole, and they fear and resent the idea that they ought to be.

Of course, the good citizens of Iowa who sent the repugnant Steve King to Congress do not object to being integrated, some would say, "homogenized" into the rest of the country and the world by commercial forces: I have never driven through Steve King's district, but I would be astonished if I did not see Home Depot, McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Staples, Starbucks, Walmart, Target and all the other big national chains, with their recognizable and uniform logos and colors. 

Obadiah Youngblood

It's the "blindfold and the parachute" test: Drop me blindfolded over any big American city: New York, Washington, Boston, New Orleans, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Seattle, Miami, and allow me to whip off that blindfold and look around, walk around for 5 minutes and I will be able to identify where I am. But drop me into any rural area of Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Kansas, Iowa and it's all "Alabama in between." Most of rural and even suburban America looks pretty much the same. You might pick up a regional accent in the South or in New England, but even in Pennsylvania what you will hear is a "rural" accent, not a Pennsylvania accent. 

The fact is, our states no longer are sufficiently different from one another to actually represent distinct entities. Yes, Montana is vast and different from Maine, but the problems of low population density and small industrial base are pretty much the same. And yes, water rights and grazing rights are more ascendant in Utah and New Mexico  than in Connecticut and Vermont, but the dividing lines of thought and concern are not contained within the state lines any more, "state and local concerns"  are historical relics, the shed chrysalis of  the of a country which has metamorphosized beyond its larval stages.

State boundaries do more to hinder the progress, financial and economic well being of the USA than they serve any justifiable purpose in the 21st century. 

Edward Hopper

This is not to say there are not cultural differences between Mississippi and New Hampshire. 

It is entirely possible people in Ohio and Mississippi may decide that life begins at fertilization and will not allow abortions because there are enough people there who cannot be budged from that conviction. Ohio is on its way to passing legislation to forbidding  abortion after a heartbeat is audible at 6 weeks.

Mad Dog, for one, could certainly live with a reversal of Roe v Wade, and sending the question of abortion back to local control. 

Within our current state structure, that would mean if you are carrying an unwanted pregnancy, you would have to leave Ohio or Texas  and get thee to a Northern state for your abortion. Unless, of course, you can buy abortion pills over the internet and have them sent to your home in Akron or Biloxi.


But  even if you are too far along for an abortion pill, you could get a safe, legal abortion. You'd just have to make plans and travel. 

Mad Dog realizes this would mean poor, uneducated women, women with little in the way of financial resources would likely opt to have unwanted children, then give them up, or they might go back to the back alleys.

Edward Hopper

Likely, this will result in a substantial  increase in births of unwanted infants in these states. Ohio, Texas and other states who insist on bringing into the world these children, unwanted, predestined to sad, violent lives would not be the only places to suffer the consequences as these children come of age. 

Likely, many of these unwanted children would be sent North, where adoptive parents would care for them, much as Southern states are now the main source for "rescue dogs" in New England. 

But we can make accommodations for all this. The better educated "elite" in the coastal cities have supported the less educated populations of Ohio, sending government munition contracts to Jim Jordan's district there, and sending defense contracts to the poor Southern States. These less educated, determinedly ignorant are the educated man's burden. 

Trump and all his Trumplings are fond of saying "countries need borders." And Mad Dog emphatically agrees: Nations need borders. If 300 million Chinese and 300 million Indians and Pakistanis decided to immigrate to the USA tomorrow, we would have a country Mad Dog would not recognized or desire. 

But one might ask, why do these United States need state borders? The framers of the Constitution settled on agreements which the current European Union now envy: Louisiana cannot tax goods coming in from Illinois; no passport is required to travel from New Hampshire to Massachusetts; and since Marbury v Madison, a law which forbids denial of voting rights, public education and restaurant use to Negroes/African Americans in South Carolina cannot stand if the Supreme Court of these United States says borders cannot be used to deny basic human rights.

Photo by Obadiah Youngblood

The impulse toward empty space protections, whether it be in Idaho, Wyoming or Montana is an impulse to say, "Leave me alone. I do not want to be part of anything larger. I want to reject the rest of the world and live on my own land, with my six wives, my 20 white children, who will never be vaccinated, never learn to read, and I will be king of my own castle. I will graze my cattle on land no matter who may claim it; if I can string up barbed wire, it's mine. I will teach my children the White Race is under siege and we will live here awaiting the final Armageddon." 

Mad Dog can live with that. Let the Aryan nation claim parts of Idaho.  Hopefully, they'll stay on their reservations. 

Seventy seven years ago, when Pearl Harbor exploded, Americans from very different worlds within the same country amalgamated to form an army, produce war materials and boys from Georgia joined boys from Wisconsin and discovered they were more like each other than they were like Frenchmen, Belgians or Italians or even the English. Exposure to the greater world changed Negro men from Alabama, so when they returned home they were no longer docile. Women who worked in factories  were no longer content to sit home with children and their new refrigerators. 

Photo by Obadiah Youngblood: Lock 8

Until the 21st century, there were only three TV networks disseminating news, and Hollywood formed values and desires. In that sense we were, even then, radically integrated. With the Internet, we can be even more so.

It's a new world now, but we still  have an 18th century government. 

It used to be America was like a salad: you could stick a fork into one part and get a tomato and into another and get an anchovie. Now, it is more like soup--dip a spoon into any part of it and you get to taste the whole of it. Of course, there may be clams in there, like the difference between the cities and the rural areas, but the differences in different parts of the soup are minimal, compared to the salad. 

Fact is, things will not change without a fight. Montana has the power to exert outsized effect and will not give that up willingly. Right or wrong has nothing to do with it. 
But eventually, if we keep pushing, we can change. 

The Reveal: Outmoded in New Hampshire

Finally, at 65% by my Kindle, into "These Truths" Mad Dog stumbled onto what he had been looking for, or, at least, an open window into the room, through which he could see some of  the truth.

Jill Lepore reports on a meeting which occurs at Harvard after every election, in which men who headed the campaigns of each of the candidates sit around and talk about what they had done running those campaigns, like generals after a war, or, as Lepore puts it more pungently, as butchers with no sympathy for the pig.

The managers of each of the 17 campaigns for the Republican primary candidates were there. Now, of course, as Lepore had demonstrated, what the campaign managers wrought was only part of the story, as campaigns get out on the internet and into the public discourse, but there was such an illumination when Trump's campaign manager spoke, you knew there was important truth there. 
Corey Lewandowski said:

"We were going to ...run on our wealth, and not run from it, and to monopolize the media attention by using social media unlike anybody else. What we know is that when Donald Trump put out a tweet, Fox News would cover it live."

Lepore reports: "Field organizing was over, he said. Newspapers, newspaper advertisements? Irrelevant, he said. 'Donald Trump buys ink by the television station,' he said. Trump hadn't run in any lane. Trump had run from a plane."

Lepore noted that during the 2016 campaign 37,000 polls had been conducted using 3 billion phone calls and more than 90% had refused to speak with the pollsters. 

The crisis within the polling community was profound, as an entire industry realized their product was a sham. Nate Silver and his 580 group tried to explain that he had not been wrong to say there was a 70% chance Clinton would win because that meant there was a 30% chance, a real chance, Trump would win. That argument appealed to only the most sophisticated. What we wanted from Silver was the answer and he had given the wrong answer. He had said: Trump wins. And if he did not say it, that is what we heard. Why would we even be listening to Silver if all he had to offer was: Well, nobody really knows. It could go either way. 

Mad Dog finds in this report, great relief. 

At a meeting with Hampton Democrats before the recent Nov 6, 2018 election, he had asked about investing in exit polling and was immediately confronted by the chairman of the Rockingham County Democrats with an irate, "We can't worry about that! We have to worry about winning!"  
The head of the "Senior Democrats" also bellowed, exit polling, any effort other than getting Democrats knocking on doors (canvassing) or writing letters to the editor of the Portsmouth Herald, anything other than what Democrats had done for the past fifty years to win elections was a dangerous, energy sapping formula for defeat. 

Mad Dog looked at these two men and could only groan, inwardly.

Old men, whose identities were tied to old methods, railing against the machine. Cobblers of fine shoes who raged against assembly lines and mass production.
Luddites. 

Why were these men even at this meeting? They were both retired. They found meaning in doing what they do for campaigns. It made them feel important, relevant. It afforded them the sense of still being in control.

But their time had passed. They were like those old, gray haired school teachers who insisted children should still be memorizing Latin declensions. 

Mad Dog had insisted since Nov 8, 2016 the Democrats had no idea what hit them.
He had "canvassed" every weekend for months in the run up to that election and saw teams of Democrats knocking on doors, and never a single Trump canvasser. And yet, in certain towns, Kingston, Hampton Falls, he saw a sea of Trump lawn signs.

Where did all those lawn signs come from? They were like phantoms...no people visible, but signs everywhere.

Now Corey Lewandowski had answered that question. Trump had had no "ground game" because he had an airplane. He had campaigned from the top down, not the bottom up and he had reached millions.

He still disdains retail persuasion--he flies to huge arenas, crows about the lines wrapping around the buildings trying to get in, stokes up 20,000 fans at a time and then flies away. Three times a week. 

Meanwhile, in Hampton, New Hampshire, we have pairs of citizens in blue jeans, knocking on doors, and it's a good morning if 5 out of thirty citizens even bother to answer the the knock at the door. 

When he knocked on doors prior to this "blue wave" election, Mad Dog learned, again, the pollsters and the two old men back at the Democratic headquarters on Route 1 had no idea what was out there, driving decisions.  He heard from men and women who had benefited from the Trump tax cut for the rich who said they were going to vote Democratic, straight down the ticket, "Because of him." And they did not have to say who "him" was.

"But what do you not like about him? What are your issues?" Mad Dog asked. "Immigration? The Wall? Guns? Opioids?"

They'd just shake their heads and say, "Him."

These reticent citizens, it should be noted were educated, wealthy, privileged. 
The best Mad Dog could guess is that Mr. Trump's insistence on rejecting the standards of "reasoned" argument, of basing everything on "you hear that" or "they are terrible people" offended their notion of what reason, intelligence and fairness is all about. 

But we have no real exit studies. We cannot really know.
In medicine, sometimes a single well studied case can tell you more than a study of 20,000 patients who you know little about.
Maybe the same is true here. We just have to study a few voters, but really question them, really keep asking until we figure out how they actually think.

Whatever we do, going forward, we cannot beat the foe who is flying airplanes, by riding along the ground on our horses, waving swords at the air. 

Those two old men and Ray Buckley and all the Democrats in place now claim their methods were proven correct on Nov 6, 2018. Democrats swept into majorities in the state House of Representatives, the state Senate and the Executive Council. 
Of course, the Democrats cannot really explain why they lost the Governorship.

Rockingham County Democrats recently met to congratulate themselves on their success this past election. But looking at the results, one can only conclude the success at the state house did not accrue because of efforts in Rockingham County--it must have been from other parts of the state. It is true, Hampton and Exeter went blue, but Candia, Deerfield, Nottingham, Raymond, Sanddown, Londoderry, Derry, Windham, Salem, Danville, Hampstead, Kingston, Atkinson, Plaistow, Newton, Kensignton, South Hampton, Seabrook, Hampton Falls sent a grand total of two Democrats to Concord, against 54 Republicans.

And we still don't know what hit us.

The Obsolete Notion of States in these United States

Here's a factoid for you: Roughly half (23) of our states have fewer than 4 million people living in them.

Trump Counties in Red

That's the population of the Washington, DC area. 
There are 14 metropolitan areas with more people living in them than 23 of our states.

1	New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA	19,006,798
2	Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA	12,872,808
3	Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI	9,569,624
4	Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX	6,300,006
5	Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD	5,838,471
6	Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX	5,728,143
7	Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL	5,414,772
8	Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA	5,376,285
9	Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV	5,358,130
10	Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH	4,522,858
11	Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI	4,425,110
12	Phoenix-Mesa-Glendale, AZ	4,281,899
13	San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA	4,274,531
14	Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA	4,115,871

Would it not make more sense to give each of these 2 United States Senators than to allow 23 states with fewer than 4 million people to have 2 Senators each?

Clinton Voters in Blue

Thank you, Monsieur Macron

Mad Dog has not yet seen Mr. Macron's speech on youtube, but he is searching for it.
As reported in the States, it sounds delicious.

Hopefully, there will be a reaction shot from Mr. Trump, who was, reportedly, on the dias, when President Macron said:


"Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism,” Macron said. “Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism. By saying our interests first... we erase what a nation holds dearest."

Hopefully, more American politicians will find the courage to say this very thing over the next few months.
Hopefully, more Americans will discuss what actually constitutes patriotism, as Henry David Thoreau defined it, has Smedley Butler defined it, as Lincoln lived it.

We can always hope.

Trump Trumps the White House Press Core

Mad Dog did not see the entire 90 minutes of the Trump show at the White House, but what he did see confirmed his impression that we are not sending our best people to tilt with Trump.

The PBS reporter asked him if his use of the word "Nationalist" meant that he had "emboldened" White Nationalists and that "some people" thought he had.

Of course, Trump is not quite bright enough to dismember that sort of questioner but he did trot out an answer which will make sense to a lot of people in Red States who do not consider themselves racists, and who resent being called racist, and he said the question was racist.

What he could have said was, "I cannot help how other people react to the word 'Nationalist' but I know what I mean when I use it and it's not 'White Nationalist.' If 'some people' hear racial overtones in that word, that's their problem. But you can take this PC stuff to an absurd level: Suppose I said I believe in a democratic process to govern: Would that mean I've switched parties?"

Far too many questions are "qualitative" in nature and Trump will trounce you if you remain vague. Every question directed to him should be numbers based, not a "feeling" or an "implication" or a "isn't that racist" or "isn't that  'misogynistic?' Start with the specific and eschew the judgmental, the slogan.

"Do you consider the current caravan an infestation?"
Then "What is the breakdown of MS13, ISIS, and under 18 year olds among that caravan?"

Let him make up some numbers, or more likely he'll backtrack and say, "Well, some of them" or "I've heard." Then you can get back to the "So why do you say it's an infestation."
So far our "professional" journalists look like a bunch of amateurs.

But the one thing all the reporters missed, is that from the President's point of view, he really did have a good night. He had a good night because all that mattered was controlling the Senate. He could care less about the House--except for investigations.
The reason the Senate is all that matters is the same reason the electoral college matters--it is the one place in the government which games the system so the "people" cannot rule but the moneyed aristocracy can maintain control over the unwashed masses. It's where the system gets rigged. As a UNC professor cited by Thomas Edsall noted:
Voters cast 44.7 million votes for Democratic Senate candidates and 32.9 million votes for Republican Senate candidates — in other words 57 percent of Senate votes went for Democrats.” Despite this huge gap — Democrats won 11.8 million more votes than Republicans — “there will be at least a two-seat gain for Republicans.”

So Trump was right. He won on Nov 6 because he almost had to win; the system was stacked and rigged by our founding fathers who were at pains to ensure the empty, low population states (slave states in those days) could keep control of their slaves, their cotton and their land, while the huddled, hard working masses in the cities, those immigrants and low life, were kept under control. Still works that way today.
Which is why the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and nothing changes. The system is rigged, always was.


As Edsall's article notes:


Democrats scored significant wins Tuesday in 2018 legislative elections — but it was hardly a blowout. Republicans continue to have a robust advantage in legislative and state control, as they have since 2010. Democrats won five legislative chambers from Republicans as well as moving the Connecticut Senate from tied to their column. That’s a shift of only six chambers, well below the average chamber switch of 12 in election cycles all the way back to 1900.


The Blue Wave never happened because the rules of the game would never allow it, as Edsall notes:


If there is one thing the election underscores it is how malapportioned America’s representative institutions are. President Trump, of course, won the presidency while losing the popular vote by millions in 2016. Democrats in 2018 managed to eke out a 35-seat pickup while winning a national popular vote margin that is apparently going to be over 7 percentage points. A 7-point victory almost always produces a wave election type margin when translated into seats. But not this year.


The game is rigged, as Bernie has said.
Amy Walters of the Cook Political Report showed some charts on the PBS News Hour which revealed the problem: In Indiana, a Deep Red state, the usual shift of young voters and educated voters toward Democrats did occur, but in deep red states that shift is not large enough to change the outcome. Red states are red for a reason: The voters there are true believers, and even if the red state gives the GOP a victory by 51-49%, they take all the electoral votes and the two Senate seats.
 In Blue states, or formerly Blue states, (WI, MI, PA, OH) there is a soft Democratic vote which can go red when things are right. And if you lose each of those states by just a few votes, it's winner take all and the electoral college shifts massively to Red, and even if the Democrats win NY, CA and the Pacific Northwest by 20 million votes, the total electoral vote stays red.


The problem is quantifiable. The solution is more difficult.

One happy thought: Chris Kobach got beat in Kansas.

Red Wall Holds, Blue Wall Crumbled Still

Democrats narrowly squeaked out a House majority. They needed 23 and got 26, hardly a Blue Wave. They will have a very thin 219 vote majority. Hardly a resounding repudiation of Mr. Trump, in a midterm. One might almost say--and Mad Dog is sure Mr. Trump will say: VINDICATION!

Republicans beat Tester in Montana, showing the effectiveness of Trump's visits there, and the most slimey of the creepy crawlies, Ted Cruz, beat the Democrat's great Blue Hope, Beto O'Rourke, a seat Cruz owes to Trump, I'm sure Trump will crow.

And McCaskill and Heitkamp were thrown out of the Senate by a Republican Red Wave. Those Senate seats were won by Trump.

There was good news only for the delusional and Mad Dog is sure Mr. Trump will turn last night's results into the BEST RED WAVE EVER!

More locally, Sununu beat Molly Kelley, the Democrats having fielded a weak and retiring candidate to face a Trumpophile.



The one bright spot is Chris Pappas won the seat formerly held by Carol Shea Porter.

Of note, all the Democrats in Hampton running for the House of Representative won!
And Tom Sherman won the State Senate seat after a really slimy last minute poisonous telephone call campaign from Innis, whose minions told voters Tom Sherman wanted to publish a list of all women in New Hampshire who had had abortions. 
A testament to the doggedness of local Democrats who went door to door or maybe just a reflection of a shift in demographics on the SeaCoast.
So Chris and Melanie Muns, Mary McCarthy, Patty McKenzie, and dozens of other who did yeoman's work managed to save the Hobbit.
Looking at lawn signs, one would have concluded Zaino and Emerick would have won, but as Chris Muns once said, "lawn signs do note vote."
New comer and youngster Tom Loughman got himself a seat and he may well be the new rising star, and Cushing and Edgar were rewarded for fighting the good fight, day after day for no reward other than the knowledge they did right.

Bushway 3907

Cushing 4027

Edgar 4028

Loughman 3999

Bean 3541

Emerick 3306

Hurst 3089

Zaino 3493

Sherman 4476

Innis 3762

Could have been worse. 
Should have been a lot better.
But no better than the country is right now.