John Debay

Lots of good stuff in this article, but this quote in particular is worth reading:

Polls of congressional districts don’t draw the usual attention because so few are made public. But Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report used that data in 2016 to say the election was very close and Trump could win. This time he notes:

the scores of district and state-level polls conducted by the parties to make spending decisions in down-ballot races generally align with national polls showing Trump running behind his 2016 pace, including in key states. In 2016, these same polls had shown flashing red warning signs for Hillary Clinton, particularly in districts with lots of white working-class voters.

A few districts are instructive. In 2018, Sharice Davids knocked off four-term Congressman Kevin Yoder in a district heavily based in Suburban Kansas City. She won by nearly 10 points in 2018, portending the GOP’s collapse in Suburban America (she also won formerly reliably Republican Johnson County by 15,000 votes against a strong candidate in Yoder). Usually a party that lost a seat they held for eight years would ostensibly claim they could win that seat back. But in 2020, every major ratings agency has the race rated as safe/solid Democrat. An internal poll had Davids up 20 points.

The district polls were a phenomenal sign Trump had real strengths in 2016. That’s not happening in 2020. The GOP would release internal polling if they showed Trump doing as well as he did in 2016. Instead, Biden is running well ahead of Trump across the board, and that’s why Wasserman has been so bullish on Biden.

Some crazy reporting in The New York Times:

The Oval Office meeting this past March began, as so many had, with President Trump fuming about migrants. But this time he had a solution. As White House advisers listened astonished, he ordered them to shut down the entire 2,000-mile border with Mexico — by noon the next day.

The advisers feared the president’s edict would trap American tourists in Mexico, strand children at schools on both sides of the border and create an economic meltdown in two countries. Yet they also knew how much the president’s zeal to stop immigration had sent him lurching for solutions, one more extreme than the next.

Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.

The Economist, reporting on the mass shootings last week:

Shortly before he began his attack, Patrick Crusius, the El Paso shooter, appears to have posted a manifesto on 8chan. He wrote that his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas”—a state that until 1836 was part of Mexico. He railed against immigration and environmental damage, and advocated “decreas[ing] the number of people in America using resources. If we can just get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become sustainable.” Towards that end, he travelled from the suburb of Dallas where he was brought up to El Paso, a majority-Hispanic border city, and opened fire in a store packed with back-to-school shoppers from Mexico. One survivor said he specifically targeted people he thought were Hispanic.

“The Hispanic community,” he wrote, “was not my target until I read The Great Replacement.” This refers to a conspiracy theory that blames feckless Western elites for “replacing” people of European ancestry with non-white immigrants. “The Great Replacement” was the title of a book by a French polemicist. Brenton Tarrant, an Australian man who earlier this year murdered 51 people in two mosques in New Zealand, used it as the title of his own manifesto, which Mr Crusius endorsed.

This is an updated version of an older conspiracy theory known as white genocide, which propounds that the world’s white population is being deliberately shrunk and diluted through mass immigration, low fertility rates, multiculturalism and miscegenation (Mr Crusius also inveighed against “race mixing”). Unsurprisingly, many on the far right believe this to be a Jewish plot.

These beliefs, notes Oren Segal of the Anti-Defamation League, “are not just on these fringe internet forums. If anyone operating there turned on Fox News, they would hear similar sentiments.” Tucker Carlson, the second-most-popular host on cable news, has said that Democrats want “demographic replacement” through “a flood of illegals”. Laura Ingraham, another host, has argued that Democrats “want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever-increasing number of chain migrants.”

Prominent politicians have said the same thing. Steve King, a congressman from Iowa, infamously wrote that “we can’t restore our civilisation with somebody else’s babies.” On the House floor Ted Yoho and Louie Gohmert, both Republican congressmen, have compared immigrants to invaders. During a trip to Europe in 2018, Donald Trump said that immigration has “changed the fabric of Europe”, and told a British tabloid, “I think you are losing your culture. Look around.” More recently, his Facebook campaign ads have warned, “We have an invasion…It’s critical that we stop the invasion.” Take this literally and violence becomes a defensive measure.

A reassuring take in The Atlantic:

“Mattis is the last brake on a president that makes major life-and-death decisions by whim without reading, deliberation, or any thought as to consequences and risks,” said a senior U.S. national-security official on Thursday, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to talk freely. “The saving grace is that this president has not been tested by a major national-security crisis. But it will come, and when it does, we are fucked.”

From today’s Axios Newsletter:

Axios has obtained a spreadsheet that’s circulated through Republican circles on and off Capitol Hill — including at least one leadership office — that meticulously previews the investigations Democrats will likely launch if they flip the House.

Why this matters: Publicly, House Republicans are putting on a brave face about the midterms. But privately, they are scrambling to prepare for the worst. This document, which catalogs requests Democrats have already made, is part of that effort.

It has churned Republican stomachs. Here are some of the probes it predicts:

• President Trump’s tax returns
• Trump family businesses — and whether they comply with the Constitution’s emoluments clause, including the Chinese trademark grant to the Trump Organization
• Trump’s dealings with Russia, including the president’s preparation for his meeting with Vladimir Putin
• The payment to Stephanie Clifford — a.k.a. Stormy Daniels
• James Comey’s firing
• Trump’s firing of U.S. attorneys
• Trump’s proposed transgender ban for the military
• Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s business dealings
• White House staff’s personal email use
• Cabinet secretary travel, office expenses, and other misused perks
• Discussion of classified information at Mar-a-Lago
• Jared Kushner’s ethics law compliance
• Dismissal of members of the EPA board of scientific counselors
• The travel ban
• Family separation policy
• Hurricane response in Puerto Rico
• Election security and hacking attempts
• White House security clearances

This is my dream come true. If the Democrats win the House in November, I don’t think moving forward with impeachment makes much sense. They won’t convict in the Senate (they need to win a two-thirds vote), trying gives Republicans a political rallying point, and, frankly, the administration has not been discredited enough in the eyes of the public to justify impeachment.

If Democrats take the House, though, they have subpoena power. Trump’s business dealings have been dirty for years, and with subpoena power they can open up tons of investigations and have them all bear fruit. There will be new revelations in the press almost weekly. It will totally bog down the administration, and put congressional Republicans in a very awkward spot of having to defend what Democrats are exposing.

Hopefully months and months of these investigations will whiddle down Trump supporters to the most devoted followers and not much else. I don’t need impeachment if that means a path to victory in 2020.

A great set of stories from John Carmack on his interactions with Steve Jobs over the years:

One time, my wife, then fiancée, and I were meeting with Steve at Apple, and he wanted me to do a keynote that happened to be scheduled on the same day as our wedding. With a big smile and full of charm, he suggested that we postpone it. We declined, but he kept pressing. Eventually my wife countered with a suggestion that if he really wanted “her” John so much, he should loan John Lassiter to her media company for a day of consulting. Steve went from full charm to ice cold really damn quick. I didn’t do that keynote.

When I was preparing an early technology demo of Doom 3 for a keynote in Japan, I was having a hard time dealing with some of the managers involved that were insisting that I change the demo because “Steve doesn’t like blood.” I knew that Doom 3 wasn’t to his taste, but that wasn’t the point of doing the demo.
I brought it to Steve, with all the relevant people on the thread. He replied to everyone with:

“I trust you John, do whatever you think is great.”

(Not all the stories are this nice.)

Great piece in The New Yorker today by Adam Davidson on what’s likely to unfold from here regarding Trump’s various legal problems:

I know dozens of reporters and other investigators who have studied Donald Trump and his business and political ties. Some have been skeptical of the idea that President Trump himself knowingly colluded with Russian officials. It seems not at all Trumpian to participate in a complex plan with a long-term, uncertain payoff. Collusion is an imprecise word, but it does seem close to certain that his son Donald, Jr., and several people who worked for him colluded with people close to the Kremlin; it is up to prosecutors and then the courts to figure out if this was illegal or merely deceitful. We may have a hard time finding out what President Trump himself knew and approved.

However, I am unaware of anybody who has taken a serious look at Trump’s business who doesn’t believe that there is a high likelihood of rampant criminality. In Azerbaijan, he did business with a likely money launderer for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. In the Republic of Georgia, he partnered with a group that was being investigated for a possible role in the largest known bank-fraud and money-laundering case in history. In Indonesia, his development partner is “knee-deep in dirty politics”; there are criminal investigations of his deals in Brazil; the F.B.I. is reportedly looking into his daughter Ivanka’s role in the Trump hotel in Vancouver, for which she worked with a Malaysian family that has admitted to financial fraud. Back home, Donald, Jr., and Ivanka were investigated for financial crimes associated with the Trump hotel in SoHo—an investigation that was halted suspiciously. His Taj Mahal casino received what was then the largest fine in history for money-laundering violations.

Listing all the financial misconduct can be overwhelming and tedious. I have limited myself to some of the deals over the past decade, thus ignoring Trump’s long history of links to New York Mafia figures and other financial irregularities. It has become commonplace to say that enough was known about Trump’s shady business before he was elected; his followers voted for him precisely because they liked that he was someone willing to do whatever it takes to succeed, and they also believe that all rich businesspeople have to do shady things from time to time. In this way of thinking, any new information about his corrupt past has no political salience. Those who hate Trump already think he’s a crook; those who love him don’t care.

I believe this assessment is wrong. Sure, many people have a vague sense of Trump’s shadiness, but once the full details are better known and digested, a fundamentally different narrative about Trump will become commonplace. Remember: we knew a lot about problems in Iraq in May, 2003. Americans saw TV footage of looting and heard reports of U.S. forces struggling to gain control of the entire country. We had plenty of reporting, throughout 2007, about various minor financial problems. Somehow, though, these specific details failed to impress upon most Americans the over-all picture. It took a long time for the nation to accept that these were not minor aberrations but, rather, signs of fundamental crisis. Sadly, things had to get much worse before Americans came to see that our occupation of Iraq was disastrous and, a few years later, that our financial system was in tatters.

The narrative that will become widely understood is that Donald Trump did not sit atop a global empire. He was not an intuitive genius and tough guy who created billions of dollars of wealth through fearlessness. He had a small, sad operation, mostly run by his two oldest children and Michael Cohen, a lousy lawyer who barely keeps up the pretenses of lawyering and who now faces an avalanche of charges, from taxicab-backed bank fraud to money laundering and campaign-finance violations.

Most frustrating to me is the long list of shady business dealings the Trump Organization is known to participate in for decades, and yet there has been little to no public attention on them since Trump announced his candidacy. As mentioned above, Trump has known associations with New York mob figures, and it’s hard to see how someone could do meaningful real estate business in New York and Atlantic City without maintaining such ties. It seems to be common knowledge among reporters in Washington that Trump has been involved in money laundering for quite a while, maybe for Russian oligarchs. Yet there have been no public exposés, no investigative reports, no nothing. Just the usual obsession with the controversy of the day. It’s the same mistake that was made during the election when Hillary Clinton’s emails was inflated to be something akin to the political scandal of the decade.

Mother Jones captured some choice quotes from a Trump-supporting Congressman:

He may be an idiot, but he’s still the President and leader of my party and he is capable of doing some things right. But dammit he’s taking us all down with him. We are well and truly fucked in November….It’s like Forrest Gump won the presidency, but an evil, really fucking stupid Forrest Gump. He can’t help himself. He’s just a fucking idiot who thinks he’s winning when people are bitching about him.

….If we get to summer and most of the primaries are over, they just might pull the trigger if the President fires Mueller. The shit will hit the fan if that happens and I’d vote to impeach him myself. Most of us would, I think. Hell, all the Democrats would and you only need a majority in the House. If we’re going to lose because of him, we might as well impeach the motherfucker.

….I say a lot of shit on TV defending him, even over this. But honestly, I wish the motherfucker would just go away. We’re going to lose the House, lose the Senate, and lose a bunch of states because of him. All his supporters will blame us for what we have or have not done, but he hasn’t led. He wakes up in the morning, shits all over Twitter, shits all over us, shits all over his staff, then hits golf balls. Fuck him. Of course, I can’t say that in public or I’d get run out of town.