Friday, March 22, 2024

Happy Friday

Sitting Pretty — Alyssa Brandt in The New Yorker on finding just the right chair.

I’ve heard people call sitting the new smoking. Others say that sitting is the new sugar. Both wrong. I’m here to tell you that sitting is the new sex. It feels so good, especially with the right partner.

What started as a short fling to ride out a global pandemic became something more. Being confined together for months can test a couple, but the experience deepened our bond. I fell in love. I can’t speak for my desk chair from the office—well, maybe I can, since chairs don’t talk—but I feel like I know its heart.

Chair-a-la is the pet name I’ve been using. Sometimes Chair-Chair. Or Chairy-boo (but only in private). Chair-a-la hasn’t reciprocated, but that’s O.K. Call me superficial, but I’ll take three-hundred-and-sixty-degree arms, adjustable lumbar support, variable seat height and depth, and soil-resistant leather over a lot of empty talk. Words don’t fully convey how reassuring and delicious it feels to be truly held by an inanimate object.

Before Chair-a-la and I got together, I played the field. Once, I met a handsome and elegant bentwood chair at a chic James Beard-nominated restaurant, only to realize, halfway through the house-made country-style pâté, that this clown wasn’t really interested in me, the whole me. Hard, mean, unyielding—you know the type, so I won’t bore you with the laundry list of red flags I noticed that night. I also got stuck with the check, of course, but it was a small price to pay to avoid getting stuck with the wrong chair! You know what they say about kissing a few frogs.

Friends warned me that I was looking for a unicorn: supportive but not obsequious; flexible but not in a show-offy way, like that woman at yoga who just preens through her pigeon pose. Then I realized—just like in the movies!—that my true soul mate, the one I had been looking for, was right next door. Like, literally next door. In the next cubicle. Just like my office chair, but the upgraded model, with the headrest, and without the stain from that turmeric bubble tea that Judy in accounting insisted I try. Yes, I stole for love! I took it home, and the rest, well, you know what they say.

We never said we were going to be exclusive, but my other chairs quickly noticed the favoritism. What did they do? They did nothing. That was the problem. They just sat there, silent and unmoving. I had been with some of these chairs for years. Years! Had our relationships been purely transactional? The thought was humiliating. I was not going to be made a fool of in my own home. I kicked them out. All of them. Kicked them right to the curb, where they remain, because apparently you have to call for a stupid “heavy item” pickup from the Sanitation Department, and I will not lift another finger for those losers. They can rot, for all I care. If the notes that my neighbors keep leaving in my mailbox are to be believed, the chairs are indeed miserable and sad—and wet and beginning to smell bad and attract raccoons. So ha ha ha!

Nearly four years later, Chair-a-la and I are still together. Working together. Eating together. Bingeing “Suits” together. It’s a lot of togethering. I never saw myself as a swinger, but it might be time to bring a standing desk into the relationship.

We’re spending a lot of quality time together.

Thursday, March 21, 2024

A Matter Of Bravery

I think I disagree with Liz Cheney on every policy that confronts our country from reproductive rights to tax policy, but there’s one essential item where we agree: Trump is an existential threat to the nation and the world.  From David Ignatius in the Washington Post:

Liz Cheney doesn’t mince words about Donald Trump. She calls the former president a “liar,” a “con man” and a potential “tyrant” who, if elected again, would “torch the Constitution” and its guarantees of free speech and rule of law.

Cheney landed these rhetorical roundhouse punches in a talk last week at the Connecticut Forum in Hartford. The words were all the more powerful from a deposed chair of the House Republican Conference. Listening to the repeated roars of approval from the nearly 3,000 people in the audience, I couldn’t help thinking that Cheney might be an underappreciated X-factor in the 2024 race.

“I will do everything I can to make sure [Trump] is never anywhere near the Oval Office again,” vowed Cheney. Defeating Trump means reelecting President Biden and rejecting third-party candidates, she said forthrightly. Though she disagrees with Biden on many policy issues, she said his victory in November is necessary to save the country from potential dictatorship.

If Trump wins, Cheney explained, “we’ll be living in a nation that’s unrecognizable, and the danger is so grave that, for the first time in my life, I will be working with every fiber of my body against the Republican nominee for president.” I sometimes find warnings about Trump’s dictatorial ambitions overblown. But, in Cheney’s deeply personal voice, they ring true.

Unlike a lot of other Republicans who are hedging their words and saying shit like “he’s terrible but I’m gonna vote for him,” she doesn’t mince words.

Cheney heaped scorn on Republicans who are so frightened of Trump and his base of fervent supporters that they become his “collaborators,” “enablers” and “accomplices.” Among congressional Republicans, “the number of people who believe his lies is very small,” she insisted. “They are enabling this danger, and they know it’s a danger.”

The Quakers have a saying: speak the truth even if your voice shakes.  Ms. Cheney’s voice is not shaking.  She’s doing a brave thing, but when your world is at stake, bravery is what’s needed.

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Messing With Texas

From the AP:

McALLEN, Texas (AP) — Texas’ plans to arrest migrants suspected of entering the U.S. illegally were again on hold Wednesday after setting off uncertainty along the border and anger from Mexico flared during a brief few hours that the law was allowed to take effect.

A late-night order Tuesday from a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel temporarily put on hold — again — Texas’ dramatic state expansion into border enforcement. Earlier in the day, the U.S. Supreme Court had cleared the way for the strict immigration law, dealing a victory to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and encouraging GOP lawmakers in other states that are pushing for similar measures.

But later in a 2-1 order, an appeals court panel continued the legal seesaw surrounding the Texas law, again putting it on pause ahead of oral arguments that were scheduled for Wednesday. It was not clear how quickly the next decision might come.

During the short time the law was in effect Tuesday, Texas authorities did not announce that any arrests had been made or say whether it was being actively enforced. Along the border in Kinney County, Sheriff Brad Coe embraced the arrest powers but said deputies would need probable cause.

The problem for Texas is that according to the Constitution, immigration and border control is solely under the jurisdiction of the federal government; the individual states cannot come up with their own rules and deport whoever they want. Texas enacted these draconian laws as a way to flip off the feds because they think it’s a political winner: blame the feds for not doing anything.  But it’s the Republicans in the House, including the entire Texas GOP delegation, who have blocked passage of immigration reform for the last twenty years or so because they’d rather run for re-election than actually solve the problem.

Daniel Morales, an associate professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center, said the Texas law “will be a mess, very clearly, to enforce.”

“It’s very clear that Greg Abbott wants to enforce the law so he can get lots of photo ops and opportunities, but it’s gonna take a lot of state resources to implement. And I don’t know, in fact, how much appetite and capacity for that the state government actually has,” Morales said. Texas will find enforcement is “difficult and taxing,” he said.

So if the taxpayers of Texas want to foot the bill for Greg Abbott’s indulgence in his run for the cameras, it’s their money, not his, and blaming the feds for a problem they could have solved is not governing, it’s a tantrum.

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Buddy, Can You Spare A Million?

And maybe 500 million more?  From the New York Times:

Trump’s lawyers disclosed on Monday that he had failed to secure a roughly half-billion dollar bond in his civil fraud case in New York, raising the prospect that the state could seek to freeze some of his bank accounts and seize some of his marquee properties.

The court filing, coming one week before the bond is due, suggested that the former president might soon face a financial crisis unless an appeals court comes to his rescue.

Mr. Trump has asked the appeals court to pause the $454 million judgment that a New York judge imposed on Mr. Trump in the fraud case last month, or accept a bond of only $100 million. Otherwise, the New York attorney general’s office, which brought the case, might soon move to collect from Mr. Trump.

Still, even if the higher court rejects his appeal, Mr. Trump is not entirely out of options. He might appeal to the state’s highest court, quickly sell an asset or seek help from a wealthy supporter.

Mr. Trump’s team has also left the door open to exploring a bankruptcy for corporate entities implicated in the case, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. That option, however, is politically fraught during a presidential race in which he is the presumptive Republican nominee, and for now it appears unlikely.

The judge in the civil fraud case, Arthur F. Engoron, levied the $454 million penalty and other punishments after concluding that Mr. Trump had fraudulently inflated his net worth to obtain favorable loans and other benefits. The case, brought by the New York attorney general, Letitia James, has posed a grave financial threat to Mr. Trump.

The former president has been unable to secure the full bond, his lawyers said in the court filing on Monday, calling it a “practical impossibility” despite “diligent efforts.” Those efforts included approaching about 30 companies that provide appeal bonds, and yet, the lawyers said, he has encountered “insurmountable difficulties.”

This is the guy who said over and over that he’s a billionaire and that he didn’t need money from anyone to run his campaigns.  So the judgment from the court was right: he really is a fraud, a grifter, and a liar.  No wonder no bank or even Fred’s Bail Bonds will touch him.

Monday, March 18, 2024

Unemployment Figures

Nationally, the unemployment numbers look pretty good.  But at the Republican National Committee.. well…  As Politico calls it, it’s a bloodbath.

…Trump’s newly installed leadership team at the Republican National Committee on [last] Monday began the process of pushing out dozens of officials, according to two people close to the Trump campaign and the RNC.

All told, the expectation is that more than 60 RNC staffers who work across the political, communications and data departments will be let go. Those being asked to resign include five members of the senior staff, though the names were not made public. Additionally, some vendor contracts are expected to be cut.

In a letter to some political and data staff, Sean Cairncross, the RNC’s new chief operating officer, said that the new committee leadership was “in the process of evaluating the organization and staff to ensure the building is aligned” with its vision. “During this process, certain staff are being asked to resign and reapply for a position on the team.”

The overhaul is aimed at cutting, what one of the people described as, “bureaucracy” at the RNC. But the move also underscores the swiftness with which Trump’s operation is moving to take over the Republican Party’s operations after the former president all but clinched the party’s presidential nomination last week.

Trump’s campaign took over operational control of the RNC on Monday. On Friday, former North Carolina GOP Chair Michael Whatley was elected the RNC’s new chair, and Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump was elected as co-chair. Both had Trump’s endorsement. Additionally, Trump senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita was named as the RNC’s new chief of staff.

What this means is that no matter what happens in November, Trump and his family will be in control of the RNC, just like the Corleone family consolidated power at the end of The Godfather. Except they did it with guns.

The result is the same: one entity in control, and if Trump loses, he will still run the party and have access to all their money.  I’m pretty sure that was the whole idea in the first place, because while everyone else in the party is out looking for work — or collecting socialist unemployment checks — he’ll have the money to pay his fines.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Sunday Reading

Poll Sitting — John Cassidy in The New Yorker on the long game.

With President Joe Biden and Donald Trump having locked up enough delegates in the 2024 primaries to secure their candidacies in November’s Presidential election, it seems like an appropriate time to look at the latest polling data and electoral-map projections. With nearly eight months to go, the polling shouldn’t be taken as gospel, obviously, but it’s sending a fairly consistent message, and it illustrates the challenge facing Biden.

In the 2020 election campaign, Biden led in the poll averages throughout and ended up winning the popular vote by 4.5 percentage points. But, as of Saturday morning, Biden is trailing Trump, albeit only by 1.7 points, in the RealClearPolitics poll average. In eight national polls carried out since Biden’s energized State of the Union speech, and recorded in the 538 database, two have shown him leading Trump, and six have shown him behind. (In almost all the surveys, the margins were small.) Even more concerning for Democrats is a series of new polls from key battleground states that showed Trump retaining a lead in some places that Biden won in 2020. According to the RealClearPolitics poll averages, on Saturday morning, Trump is ahead of Biden by more than five points in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada, by 3.5 points in Michigan, and by one point in Wisconsin.

It’s worth noting straight away some of the large asterisks that should be attached to the current polling data. The first is that there’s a long way to go. At this point in 1980, Ronald Reagan was tailing Jimmy Carter by double digits in the Gallup poll, and, at this point in 2016, Donald Trump was trailing Hillary Clinton by eight points in the RealClearPolitics poll average. Needless to say, Reagan and Trump both ended up winning. In 2020, in contrast, the early polls and the final result turned out to be pretty similar.

To put it another way, early polls aren’t necessarily a reliable predictor of the final results. This week, in a useful survey of the historical data going back to the postwar era, G. Elliott Morris, the polling director of ABC News, including 538, pointed out that, on average, the polling figures from March of an election year have diverged from the final result by about eight points. Morris wrote that there is “plenty of precedent for a candidate like Biden to gain enough ground to win the election.”

Morris also discussed the reliability of the polling data, a matter that Biden and some of his aides raised with my colleague Evan Osnos, in a recent Profile of the President that was published in this magazine. One big issue is that, right now, response rates to pollsters’ queries are extremely low—one or two per cent, in many cases—and the people who do respond may not be representative voters. (It’s widely assumed that they are more committed than the average voter.) Because of this problem, pollsters often have to reweight their data to get what they think is a representative sample, but this calculation introduces a potential for a “non-sampling error” in addition to the regular sampling error attached to random samples. Putting both of these things together, and other potential issues, Morris says the zone of uncertainty for a poll with a sample of about a thousand people is now six or seven points.

Does this mean we should ignore the polls? No. But, rather than obsessing about individual surveys, we should pay more attention to the poll averages, which have less uncertainty attached to them. They still provide the best snapshot available of public opinion. Also, despite their flaws, individual polls can still provide some valuable information. For example, even if a certain poll is (inadvertently) off one way or another, then, as long as its error remains roughly constant, successive iterations of the survey should indicate how public opinion is shifting over time, or if it’s shifting at all.

One striking thing so far this year is that there has been little movement. On January 1st, the RealClearPolitics poll average showed Trump leading Biden by 2.3 percentage points, compared to the current 1.7 points. This stability expands to many other poll findings. For example, in the first five polls recorded in the RealClearPolitics database this year, Biden’s average approval rating on handling the economy was just 38.8 per cent. In the latest five polls, his average rating was thirty-nine per cent, basically unchanged. That is despite the fact that some other measures of economic sentiment, such as consumer confidence, have picked up since late last year. (The two most recent reports from the Conference Board and the University of Michigan showed the consumer confidence indexes dropping back a bit, but in both surveys the indexes were well above last October’s levels.)

Conceivably, it may take more time for changing perceptions of the economy to feed through to the President’s ratings. And, as the media narrative shifts squarely to Biden versus Trump, and the real possibility of Trump returning to the White House, the over-all dynamics of the race could start to change. In a podcast with The New Republic’s Greg Sargent, earlier this week, the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg compared the situation to a basketball game in which one team is losing by two points after the first quarter. Rosenberg cited a number of factors working in Biden’s favor. In a series of electoral contests since 2020, most recently a special congressional election on Long Island, Democrats have performed better than Republicans, Rosenberg noted. He also mentioned the Democrats’ lead in fund-raising, the formidable grassroots operations that the Party has built up in key states, and Trump’s tendency to say potentially damaging things, such as his suggestion earlier this week (subsequently retracted by his campaign) that he was open to cuts to Social Security and other entitlement programs.

Trump’s gaffe, if that’s what it was, served as a reminder of how unique this election is. For the first time in more than a century, it features a sitting President and a former President. Never before have there been two major candidates who were so old, or, since the dawn of polling, two candidates who were so unpopular. (According to the 538 poll average, Biden and Trump both have favorability ratings below forty-three per cent.) The unprecedented nature of the election is another reason for exercising caution in interpreting it, but, in all likelihood, as in 2016 and 2020, the outcome will rest on the results in a handful of states.

The immediate task facing Biden’s campaign is to secure his current polling leads in some of the states that he won handily in 2020—Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Virginia—and bring together the Democratic coalition in places such as Michigan and Nevada, which the Party has carried in its past three Presidential victories, going back to 2008. If the Biden campaign can accomplish these tasks—which have been complicated by the President’s position on Gaza, and by the presence of third-party candidates—it can look to eke out additional victories in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania which could carry it across the two-hundred-and-seventy-vote threshold for victory in the Electoral College.

Nearly eight months out, such a scenario is largely speculative: lots of things could change the electoral map. But, considering the precedent of recent elections, this year’s contest was always likely to be a close one. Given the threat of another Trump Presidency, and all the chaos it would bring with it, plus the extremism of the Republican Party, particularly on abortion, the Biden campaign is exuding confidence that the dynamics of the race will eventually change, and that Biden will prevail. But, between now and Memorial Day, strategists from both political parties, as well as many concerned voters, will be watching the polls closely to see if, after the end of the primary season and the start of the campaign proper, there is any solid evidence of this shift happening.

Doonesbury — Guess again.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Friday, March 15, 2024

Happy Friday

Because the earth is not a perfect sphere, the times of equal sunlight/darkness don’t fall on the same day as the equinox.  Here in Palmetto Bay, today is the day when we get twelve hours of sun above the horizon.  Does that mean we’re halfway to the summer solstice in June?  I’m not a meteorologist, but I’d say yes, and welcome.

For the record, the equinox — when the sun is directly over the equator — happens on March 20 at 3:06 a.m.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Happy Pi Day

I spent four summers trying to pass math, finally graduating with a C in Algebra II.  But karma is Newtonian, and I had — and still do — a career working with numbers and formulae.  Thank you, Excel.  So, of course I celebrate pi in all its permutations, including the date of 3.14 etc.

Travel Notes

Humor from Ellen Harrold in The New Yorker.

Whether you gladly fork up the extra cash to secure control of the window shade, or are just a plain psycho who doesn’t mind being nestled between two complete strangers on a red-eye flight, here are some things that your airplane-seat choice says about you.

Aisle

You have to pee right now as you’re reading this.

You want to be in and out of this aircraft A.S.A.P.

Your last relationship ended because you wouldn’t move in, and now, late at night, you lie awake wracked with the profound certainty that they’re the one who got away.

You have a perfect view of the TV screen of the person watching the rom-com “About Time” across the aisle, one row up, and you cannot for the life of you peel your eyes off of it, even though you can’t hear any of the dialogue. Every time you try to look away, your gaze wanders back. Rachel McAdams is downright enchanting.

You’ll take advantage of the ability to stretch your legs out into the aisle and fall asleep like that at the very moment the flight attendants start the drink service.

What you will forget in the seat-back pocket: the book that you were pretending to read by the pool on vacation.

Middle

You’re a terrible planner. Like, your accountant can’t stand you. Just kidding, you don’t have an accountant.

You’ll be damned if you don’t get a good out-the-window pic of the wing to post on Snapchat (yes, Snapchat, not Instagram) and you don’t care whose personal space you have to encroach on to get it. Your ex has to see that you’re out here living your best life! (You’ll spend the remainder of the flight trying to get the onboard Wi-Fi to actually work so you can check if they saw it or not.)

You can fall asleep anywhere, like at your sister’s wedding, or on the guy in 26-F’s shoulder.

Someone you used to hook up with is picking you up from the airport. You keep them around for little favors like this.

What you will forget in the crack between your seat and the window seat: your iPhone that has one of those wallet cases containing all of your credit cards. Oh, and your keys.

Window

You snuck a Swiss Army knife through security for the purpose of flashing it at any poor soul who dares to try and start a conversation with you.

You’ll order tomato juice from the drink cart and secretly hope that the attendant spills some on the white dress shirt of the A-hole who’s asleep in the aisle seat as she passes it to you.

You’re wearing a matching loungewear set that cost more than this plane ticket.

You might be dating the person beside you in the middle seat, in which case, congratulations. You win that relationship.

What you will “forget” under the seat in front of you: the knife. They’ll never catch you.

Emergency-Exit Row

You’re six feet tall, so getting the extra leg room is “high-key the move.”

You will not look any of your fellow-passengers in the eye as they pass, let alone assist them in the event of an emergency.

You won’t figure out how to get the TV screen out from underneath the arm rest until the plane has started its initial descent.

You’re actually five feet eleven.

What you will forget sixteen rows back: your girlfriend.

Fly the problematic skies.