That settles what I’m doing tonight

My wife reminded me that tonight is the Democratic debate. I noted that tonight is also the premiere of the Birds of Prey. I had to think for a moment: crappy super hero movie that I’ll probably dislike, vs. the best show the Democrats have to offer?

Yeah, I’m going to the movies.

I trust my wife to fill me in on any substance offered in the debate. I think both choices are going to be fluff.

The only article about “electability” you need to read

Normally, my brain shuts down when some political pundit uses the word “electability” — I know what’s coming. That’s what media people say when they’re about to start babbling about who is in the lead in a horserace to avoid having to discuss the substance of their policies. Policy is hard, but regurgitating poll results is easy, and if there’s anything we know for certain it’s that the talking heads on the TV are mostly idiots. Maggie Koerth nails it, though, announcing that You’ll Never Know Which Candidate Is Electable.

Political scientists study electability, but electability ain’t no science. Instead, researchers say, it’s basically a layer of ex post facto rationalization that we slather over a stack of psychological biases, media influence and self-fulfilling poll prophecies. It’s not bullshit, exactly; some people really are more likely to be elected than others. But the reasons behind it, and the ability to make assumptions based on it, well …

“[Electability] is this vague, floppy concept,” said Nichole Bauer, a professor of political communication at Louisiana State University. “We don’t know who is electable until someone is elected.”

Please, could someone tell this to Chris Cilliza or Chuck Todd, just to name two among many who need to be punched in the face and sent back to school and told to learn something before they start trying to influence the electorate?

It’s not a conspiracy, it’s incompetence

We still don’t know the full results of the Iowa caucus.

Make all the excuses you want. I’m happy to agree that this result wasn’t planned, it wasn’t the result of interference by the Russians or Pete Buttigieg, there’s no evil mastermind somewhere chortling while stroking his white cat. It’s a fuck-up, pure and simple. The Iowa Democrats bungled everything.

They relied on an archaic mechanism to determine a ‘winner’ — it was so creaky and antiquated that you could predict confusion and flubbed results, yet they persist in sticking with it. Why? Because that’s the way they’ve always done it, and no one has the bones to insist on modernizing it.

It produced humiliating results. Individual caucuses don’t rely on reporting just the numbers, they have to put the results in rank order — so when there’s a tie, they can’t just accept it, they have to flip a coin to make a decision. A coin flip that gets onto the internet and makes the whole process look ridiculous.

Sometimes, worse than ridiculous.

Their only attempt to modernize was to use an app…an app that wasn’t adequately tested, and that people didn’t know how to use.

Shadow’s app seems to fit that definition. Reports suggest that the app was engineered in just the past two months. According to cybersecurity consultants and academics interviewed by the Times, the app was not tested at statewide scale or vetted by the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency. And even if the app was working just fine, reports suggest the roll out of the tool was bungled, to the point where those tasked with reporting via the app weren’t trained to know how to use it.

This is what the Democrats always do. They fuck it up. Best intentions in the world, but total bumblefuckery when it comes to execution. Bush v. Gore, anyone? For that matter, how did W get a second term after he screwed everything up? Because the Republicans are evil, but they’ve got the focus and determination and ideological fanaticism to plow ahead while the Democrats are still trying to puzzle out how to count votes. Also, because the Democrats don’t know what kind of party they are — they’re still spinning in circles trying to claim that centrist middle ground, while the electorate is standing way to the left, yelling at them to come this way.

Oh, except when the Democrats decide to change the debate rules to allow a billionaire to buy his way into the limelight. If that doesn’t tell you how they operate, I don’t know what does. It’s all about money, not principle.

That also explains why establishment Democrats are so hostile to Bernie Sanders. He’s going to shake up their blundering, failed system.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the Republican party must be destroyed, because it’s a malignant blight on democracy. But now this current debacle convinces me that the Democratic party must also be destroyed or radically transformed, because it’s a neoliberal nothingburger populated with incompetent chucklefucks who only care about the status quo…which isn’t working.

I love Elizabeth Warren as a brilliant, hardworking wonk, but I am so fed up with the Democrats that I’ve decided that, in the Minnesota primary, I’ll be voting for Bernie. It’s the only way to break the cycle of failure.

My biggest concern is that we could have a motivated electorate that turns out in droves on election day next November to boot out the boob at the top, but it won’t matter, because the Democrats will fumble the ball at the last moment. It’s not the Republican coup that should make us worry, it’s that the Democrats will botch it all and accidentally hand it all to the forces of evil.

It must be embarrassing to be an Iowan today

Minnesota is not too happy about having that klutz of a state touching our southern border — we’re trying to edge our way up northwards, or lobbying for a different seat with the cool kids, rather than having to eat lunch at the table with these gomers that surround us. How about if we trade places with Nevada, or Idaho? Hanging out with Washington and Oregon would be more our style.

Yeah, Iowa FUBARed their shining moment in the sun, that day when all eyes were on the state with the the first primary election in country, and they flopped hard. We still have no election results today. The candidates have all jetted off to New Hampshire, making vague declarations of “feeling good” about their success, despite all of them having vote tallies of zero. I guess it’s sort of true that they’ve all tied for first place.

First big mistake: Iowa election officials announced that the first votes would be available around 9 or 10 pm last night. They weren’t. They set up the news networks, which had their usual babblers lined up to comment endlessly on preliminary results, and they had nothing. The Big Mouths had to sit on their thumbs all night chattering away about even less information than they usually do. Iowa made enemies.

Second, even older mistake: Caucusing. It’s a weird old-fashioned do-si-do that no one but old grey-haired party apparatchiks understand, and that discourages new people from participating. I’ve been to a couple, and was not impressed. I like that it’s an opportunity to discuss the issues, but what it really means is that you make a preliminary and public declaration of who you support, and then old grey-haired party apparatchiks come to you and try to talk you into supporting their candidate, because he (yeah, he) has the most votes. It’s not great if you support a change candidate.

Also, the caucus just looks stupid.

Third big mistake: they relied on an app, a mysterious unnamed app of unknown origin, to report the results to party leaders. The app failed hard and spectacularly. It doesn’t seem to have worked at all. Their back-up plan was to have precinct leaders just phone in the results, but they didn’t have enough phone operators to deal with the flood of calls, so that failed big-time, too. A few industrious precinct leaders tried to drive to headquarters with their paper tallies, and were turned away.

The DNC really needs to read xkcd.

Fourth big mistake: WHY IOWA ANYWAY? They are not at all representative of the diversity of the United States, but every election cycle the goony yokel elbows its way to the front of the stage, capers for a bit, all the candidates buy a corn dog at the state fair, and they and the media treat it as prophecy. It’s annoying, primitive, and as we’ve seen yesterday, downright embarrassing. This is democracy? Jesus.

I think the truth might be that American elections have been bought and sold to Big Corn Dog.


Lauren Duca isn’t impressed with the system, either. It’s a “fun little block party for white people”.

When leadership matters

There are legitimate fears of a coronavirus pandemic — don’t panic, it’s an emerging threat, not a full blown emergency — and that’s when it’s a good idea to prepare. We should have a strong medical infrastructure, plans in place, people organizing now, just in case. In the US, however, our plan to respond to potential medical threats is a shambles.

For the United States, the answers are especially worrying because the government has intentionally rendered itself incapable. In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion. If the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it is—not just for the public but for the government itself, which largely finds itself in the dark.

Who is to blame for the chaos? It seems Obama had a thorough, if flawed, response team in place. One man and one party have been actively working to dismantle the entire system.

In the spring of 2018, the White House pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era disease security programs, proposing to eliminate $252 million in previously committed resources for rebuilding health systems in Ebola-ravaged Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Under fire from both sides of the aisle, President Donald Trump dropped the proposal to eliminate Ebola funds a month later. But other White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. And the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated.

In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency. The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton pressured Ziemer’s DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10. Meanwhile, throughout 2018, the U.S. Agency for International Development and its director, Mark Green, came repeatedly under fire from both the White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And though Congress has so far managed to block Trump administration plans to cut the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by 40 percent, the disease-fighting cadres have steadily eroded as retiring officers go unreplaced.

But here’s what worries me most: the systemic incentive to continue to wreck what system we have. There is no price the Republicans will have to pay. People will die, the country could be thoroughly disrupted, and the demagogues will just blame it all on the Democrats, or the Chinese, or Islamic terrorists, or filthy disease-ridden immigrants, and people will want to believe them, and everything will just get worse. In fact, catastrophe will strengthen their grip on the country.

Heckuva job, Trumpy.