I must be really, really old

When the news broke yesterday evening that former vice-president Dick Cheney had declared creepy Donald Trump a threat to democracy and that he would be voting for Kamala Harris, I wrote that this was major news. After all, Cheney was vice-president in the period 2001-2009 for two terms under George W. Bush and was reputedly the most powerful vice-president ever, amassing a degree of executive power and influence that no vice-president before him had. He was also a pillar of the Republican establishment. He had served as a congressman, a defense secretary under president George H. W. Bush, and chief of staff to president Gerald R. Ford.

And yet, when I tuned in to NPR’s news programs All Things Considered on Friday evening and Weekend Edition Saturday this morning, neither program, even though they both run for two hours, saw fit to find room to even mention this. Given that NPR’s audience skews older, I can only conclude that they felt that this would only be relevant to a much older demographic than even what they have, and that their audience may not even know who Cheney is or see any significance in his switching his allegiance
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Liz and Dick Cheney endorsements of Harris may signal the beginning of a trend

Recently, I linked to an article by Tim Miller, a writer for The Bulwark, a site that is home to the group of former Republicans known as ‘Never Trumpers’, who bemoaned the fact that there were not more high-profile Republicans who had spoken at the Democratic conventions and endorsed Kamala Harris. Former congressman Adam Kinzinger was the most prominent. Miller pointed out that many Republicans, including those who had occupied high positions in the administration of creepy Donald Trump, had been sharply critical of their former boss but had refrained from endorsing Harris, and he singled out Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, and Mike Pence by name. Pence has only said that he would not vote for creepy Trump, not that he would vote for Harris.

On Wednesday, Cheney came out with just such an endorsement of Harris and went even further.
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How much do ‘issues’ matter in US elections?

The short answer seems to be ‘not much’, although much lip service is given to it. During election season, voters will often say that what they are concerned about are major issues like the economy, inflation, immigration, and so on. Reporters will often ask them about these things and it makes both reporters and voters look like serious people who are not swayed by superficial matters. But the replies elicited are often generic and do not suggest that the voters are looking for specific proposals in order to make up their minds. They seem to be looking for candidates who view as important the same things as they do.

I am becoming convinced that issues are not that important in people deciding how they vote, while acknowledging that the word ‘issues’ covers a lot of ground. My suspicion is that people decide who to vote for based on a whole host of intangible feelings or general perceptions, like which party or candidate seems like they would do things that the voter would generally agree with, especially on emotionally charged issues, which party they have generally voted for in the past, which candidate they like/dislike/fear more, and so on. At this stage, the genuinely undecided voter is a rarity and is usually a low-information voter who may well not vote at all or vote more or less based on a last-minute impulse.
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The steady decline of Trump’s Truth Social stock

I do not really understand how the stock market works other than at the most naive level. I know that in theory, the price of a company’s stock should reflect the value of the company, so that if the company is making profits and pays good dividends to its shareholders, then the stock price should rise, while if it is losing money and risks going out of business, then its price should drop.

But in the modern world of high finance, there are many more factors that seem to be in play, such as the predictions of future earnings and profits and prospects for growth. Those can raise a company’s stock price even as it is losing money. And there are even more esoteric factors that only the mavens know about.

This brings us to creepy Donald Trump’s social media company Truth Social. I wrote back in April about how it merged with a publicly traded shell company Digital World Acquisition Corp and the initial value of the creepy Trump’s stock was a whopping $6.3 billion. But as economic journalist David Cay Johnson wrote, the underlying value of the stock was effectively zero since its revenues were a paltry $4 million while having an operating loss of $58 million.
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The IVF problem is coming next for Trump

Creepy Donald Trump has tried to have it both ways on abortion, claiming credit for appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade while trying to wash his hands of the extreme anti-abortion measures that some states have imposed in the wake of that overthrow. That attempt to walk a fine line got destroyed when he was forced to say how he would vote on the Amendment 4, referendum measure that seeks to overturn Florida’s extreme law that bans abortion after six weeks and, after trying to waffle on the issue and getting pushback from conservatives, he said that he would oppose the Amendment.

He will face a similar dilemma with IVF treatments. These are very popular and the decision by the Alabama supreme court that said that frozen embryos are children under state law effectively banned the practice since IVF clinics feared prosecution if unused embryos get discarded. That decision sent shock waves across the country and resulted in Republican politicians trying to find ways to dance around the issue without alienating their base.
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Understanding the US presidential election system

Today is the day after Labor Day in the US and traditionally it is seen as the start of the race for the elections to be held in November. This is, of course, laughable because in the US we have effectively a permanent election season, but the conceit is that other than political junkies, most people do not pay much attention to politics until after Labor Day. How true this is is anybody’s guess.

Another curious feature of US politics that can be bewildering to those outside the US (and even to many in the US) is the electoral college system that is used to decide who the presidential winner is. Each state is assigned a number of electoral college votes made up of two (for the two senators) plus the number of congressional seats it has. So Michigan, which has 13 congressional districts, has 15 electoral college votes. Washington DC is not a state but it has been assigned three electoral college votes as if it were a state with just one congressional district. So the total number of electoral college votes is 538: 100 (for the total number of senators) plus 435 (for the total number of congressional districts) plus 3 (for Washington DC). Hence a candidate needs 270 electoral college votes to win. In 2020, Biden defeated creepy Trump 306-232. This need not correlate with winning the popular vote nationwide. In 2000 and 2016, George W. Bush and creepy Donald Trump won the presidency despite losing the popular vote.
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‘Weird’ is spreading to right wing UK politicians

Move over weird JD Vance, you’ve got company.

The Conservative party in the UK is going through the leadership search process after the shellacking they got in the last general election. It turns out that in some surveys, voters see them as being a little weird.

Conservative politicians have started to be seen as “weird”, and few members of the public – even including the party’s own voters – are able to identify the Tory leadership candidates, research suggests.
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The research by More in Common said the party struggled with relatability, particularly in Liberal Democrat areas, by focusing on topics “which excite the base, or the highly politically engaged” but were distant from ordinary people’s lives.

In a similar vein to the attack that US Democrats have levelled against Republicans, especially the vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, the research found “there is a danger that the Conservatives have started to become seen as ‘weird’”.
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It said that in seats won by the Lib Dems “voters would explain that they were voting Lib Dem in these traditionally Tory strongholds because Ed Davey’s party just seemed more ‘normal’”.

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Trump learns that abortion politics is quicksand

For creepy Donald Trump, the politics of abortion must have once seemed so simple. I strongly suspect that he does not care one way or another about this issue so he could decide what to do purely on the basis of expediency, of what serves his own interests best politically and personally. Conscience or moral and ethical considerations would play no role, though there is little evidence that those factors ever play any role in his thinking.

When he ran for president in 2016, he made a big play for Christian fundamentalist and evangelical support, and abortion has always been a big issue for them. They hated the 1973 US Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade that enshrined the right to an abortion in the constitution. So creepy Trump made a promise to them that he would appoint Supreme Court justices that would overturn that ruling, and he did so. He said that the abortion issue was now in the hands of the states to decide how they wanted to deal with it, and he seemed to think that he could now walk away from it. As far as he was concerned, that should have been the end of that. He should have been able to bask in his success as the man who had done what previous Republican presidents had failed to do, and thus earned the undying gratitude of the anti-abortion community.
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Update on comments policy

Just a reminder of the new comments policy that I instituted a couple of weeks ago.

That policy laid out certain rules that I expect commenters here to follow. I want to make it perfectly clear that I have zero tolerance for people who try to find ways to skirt the rules, such as, for example, skirting the three comment limit by continuing it on another thread.

Readers may have noticed that there are no ads on any of the blogs on this network. Nobody is making any money at all. In fact, it is a money sink and PZ Myers pays for the costs of the servers out of his own pocket. The bloggers here blog because they want to create spaces for conversations on issues that they care about. ‘Clicks’ have no monetary value. That means that I do not care how many people come to the site.

For me, and I suspect for the other bloggers on this network, the rewards of blogging lie in creating space for a community of people to exchange ideas and views on a variety of topics. But that is pleasurable only if people post comments that are polite and respectful towards others, even while disagreeing. Some time ago, I wrote a post that a good philosophy of life is “Don’t be a jerk”. That would be a good rule to keep in mind when posting comments as well. There is absolutely no call for anyone to be rude or sneering or condescending towards others.

Almost all the commenters on this blog contribute positively and it is a pleasure to read their contributions and interact with them. It is a very few who think that a sneering, condescending, or abrasively argumentative tone is appropriate. My patience has been worn thin by some of their comments in the past. If I think, for any reason whatsoever, that someone is behaving like a jerk, I will ban them. I am in no mood to argue about this. I will not make any public announcement about who is banned. They will simply find that they can no longer post comments. If you are not sure if a comment that you are thinking of posting violates any of these rules, that is a good indication not to post it.

I also reserve the right to make exceptions to the rules at any time, if I feel it is warranted.

These decisions will be solely mine and will be final. There will be no discussion, debate, or appeal. If anyone objects because they think that I am being arbitrary, they are of course free to leave and never return.