That’s our Christmas tree this year. I think it’s a pretty tree.

It was a Very Littledeer Christmas for me this year. One of the dogs had chewed up a Littledeer utensil I had received some years ago from a sibling and my wife very thoughtfully replaced it, supplementing it with a bunch of others. They’re both beautiful and functional.

I don’t know whether I’ve ever mentioned it but every ornament on the tree has a story. And we reuse boxes, paper, ribbons, and gift tags from year to year. Some of our boxes are thirty years old or more. They may be getting a little raggedy but they’re full of memories. The same might be said of us.

Happy Holidays to all of my readers (or anyone else who wanders by)!

She’s not one of ours but we are friended with her.

Here’s Karl Rove’s take on the 2020 elections, from his Wall Street Journal op-ed:

So what lessons can each party take from 2020?

One is that money can’t buy victory. Democrats outspent Republicans in every seriously contested Senate race yet flipped only Arizona and Colorado. Democrats showered $132.7 million on South Carolina’s Jaime Harrison against Sen. Lindsey Graham, who raised $109.3 million. Mr. Graham won by 10 points. Kentucky’s Amy McGrath, a Marine veteran, received $96.3 million for her bid against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose bankroll was $69.9 million. He won by 19.6 points.

Money also can’t buy a compelling message. In many races, Democrats had little more to say than that their Republicans opponents didn’t care about people with pre-existing conditions and were lackeys for President Trump.

This fell especially flat when Republicans explained and defended some of Mr. Trump’s policies in ways the president never did, pointing to results from tax cuts, regulatory relief, strong defense and energy independence. Maintaining public safety, standing up to adversaries abroad and socialism at home, and conveying that America was abiding by trade rules while other countries weren’t—all were winning issues.

The Democratic Party’s left had a winning message—but outside of deep-blue districts, it was winning for Republicans who were smart enough to contrast with it. “Medicare for All” became the abolition of private health insurance. “Green New Deal” became shorthand for lost jobs. “Defund the police” meant just that. All helped create a huge target for the GOP: the Democratic Party’s move toward socialism.

There was little ticket splitting, but it mattered a great deal. In Maine, Republican Sen. Susan Collins was outspent $75.6 million to $30.6 million. Joe Biden carried the state by 9.1 points. Yet Ms. Collins won by 8.6 points. Republicans led overall in both Georgia Senate races while Mr. Biden was carrying the state. Two of those three contests would give Republicans control of the Senate.

The modest amount of ticket splitting also gave the GOP House seats and helped them more than hold their own in state legislatures as once-solid suburban Republican voters found their way home down-ballot after voting for Mr. Biden or abstaining from the presidential contest.

American politics remains deeply polarized, with the House and Senate narrowly divided. Mr. Biden won decisively, but enough battleground states were close that it could easily have gone the other way. The combined margin in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin was 42,918 votes. The election would have been a 269-269 tie if those states were in Mr. Trump’s column.

Bipartisan progress in Washington is possible even after a bitter election. Both parties have an interest in looking as if they’re getting things done—but actually doing something will require statesmanship, which will be in short supply since both parties are fractured.

Among the Democrats, the left has the energy, but its policies frighten most Americans. Republicans must figure out how to keep Mr. Trump’s blue-collar followers while regaining strength in the suburbs.

Hostility proved as powerful as enthusiasm in motivating voters. For the entire campaign, Trump supporters said their vote was more for Mr. Trump than against Mr. Biden while Mr. Biden’s supporters said their vote was more against the incumbent than for the challenger. Whatever the motivation, the result was a gigantic 66.2% turnout, biggest since William McKinley’s 1900 re-election.

Republicans learned that diversity is a winner as female and minority candidates won many of their congressional and state legislative victories. Democrats would be wise to realize identity politics is a loser. The idea that anyone of any background can represent American values is more powerful than the notion that people need representatives who “look like” them.

I don’t believe that either party will take any of those lessons seriously, at least judging by conduct since the elections. IMO the only real lessons from the elections are

• Trump managed to get out the vote—both for him and against him.
• More people really didn’t like Trump than really like him.
• A lot of people don’t like either political party very much.
• The politicians who are farthest right and those who are farthest left are really out of touch with the vast preponderance of voters.

What lessons can be taken from the 2020 elections? Acknowledging that they’re not over yet, of course.

In the Washington Post Josh Rogin profiles Eliot Engel:

Engel entered Congress in 1989, in the last days of the Cold War. His interest in foreign policy came from his father, a union iron worker and fervent anti-communist. When asked to rank his top three preferred committee assignments as a freshman, Engel wrote “foreign affairs” on all three lines. “I figured they would get the hint,” he said.

Engel’s role since that time has been to champion a center-left, neo-liberal interventionist foreign policy, one that has fallen out of fashion on both the American right and left — but he still believes in it. The example of its success he points to is the one he helped to shape: the NATO-led intervention in Kosovo in 1999 against Serbia, which stopped the ethnic cleansing of Muslims and birthed a new state, where he is still venerated.

“With Kosovo, this was working against a genocide in the heart of Europe,” Engel said. “And as someone who is very knowledgeable about the Holocaust, I thought we couldn’t just leave it where people in Kosovo would just be slaughtered.”

He admits and laments the mistakes made in other U.S. interventions, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. But Engel believes that the United States must use its power and influence to ameliorate suffering where possible.

His long activism to protect Syrian civilians was driven by the accounts of Syrian atrocity victims, and the evidence smuggled out of Syria by the military defector known as Caesar, who testified before Engel’s committee in 2014. “You look at those pictures,” Engel said. “They were like the Holocaust.”

I think he’s slandering Germany’s Jews in that statement. Syria was “like the Holocaust” if German Jews had been preparing to slaughter ethnic Germans. IIRC that was Hitler’s claim about the Jews—they were determined to benefit at the expense of Germans. But it wasn’t the reality and the reality in Syria is that the radical Sunni Islamists who opposed the Assad government were quite willing to slaughter those who opposed them, especially Syria’s Alawites. What we did in Syria, just as we had in Libya, was to intervene in a civil war in which there were no good guys.

The same was the case in Kosovo. Yes, the Serbian Kosovars were engaging in ethnic cleansing. So were the Kosovo Albanians. At least that’s what Human Rights Watch and the Kosovo government says.

Unless we’re willing to remain as conquerors, the only moral stance is to butt out of such civil wars. And given a choice between butting out and becoming a colonial power, I’ll choose butting out every time. If Mr. Engel prefers that the U. S. be a colonizing power, let him say so. Otherwise he’s just fantasizing. Intervening on one side or another and leaving a just, liberal society behind when we leave is just that: a fantasy.

The only good war is a war of self-defense.

and which center? In a piece in the Wall Street Journal Gerald F. Seib reports that President-Elect Joe Biden is optimistic about crafting compromises with the Congress:

In fact, in a conversation with a few columnists on Wednesday, Mr. Biden delivered a resounding declaration that the political center is alive and well, that he resides there, that he’s always been there, and that he’s going to govern from there. “I believe that [in] the country, in both parties, the center of gravity has moved to the center and center-left,” he said.

Moreover, Mr. Biden insisted that there are enough Republican lawmakers prepared to meet him in the middle that he can get things done in an evenly divided Congress where he won’t have the kinds of Democratic majorities some of his predecessors enjoyed.

“Part of it is that Republicans are beginning to realize that there is a center that has to be responded to,” he said. “And the Democrats are beginning once again to pay attention to our base, which has been my base my whole career: working-class folks, Black and white, people who are busting their neck, and all they’re looking for is just a shot. And I think there is a center there.”

Actually, there are multiple centers. There’s the center of the Republican Party which is far to the right of where it was during most of Mr. Biden’s Senate career, there’s the center of the Democratic Party which is to the left of where it was when he was vice president, and there’s the actual political center of the country.

As I wrote in one of my earliest posts on this site, everyone occupies the center of their own particular world and, consequently, imagine themselves to be much nearer the political center than they actually are. I find that very few people have any idea where the center actually is. I calibrate my own views at least once a year using the questionnaire at the Political Compass. I drift around the very center, sometimes a tiny bit up, sometimes a tiny bit down, sometimes a tiny bit left, sometimes a tiny bit right but always quite near the center. As validation of that I’m accused of being a rightwing nut and a leftwing nut on a pretty regular basis. I think I’m so much in the middle I can be used for calibration. If you think I’m a leftwinger, you’re probably pretty far on the right; if you think I’m a rightwinger, you’re probably pretty far to the left.

I’m skeptical about the president-elect’s confidence but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he’s right but I still doubt it. We’ll see.

Reuters reports that there’s a bottleneck in the inoculation of people with the newly-approved COVID-19 vaccines. It’s just a week until the end of December and it’s estimated that about a million shots have been administered to date. Nearly 10 million doses have been delivered by Pfizer and Moderna. Where’s the bottleneck?

Margaret Mary Health, a 25-bed rural hospital in Indiana, built a drive-thru vaccination clinic at a local fire station and one at a local recreation center to vaccinate healthcare workers in the surrounding counties, according to Chief Executive Officer Tim Putnam.

Putnam, who has done traffic control at the clinic’s drive-thru, said they have used about 400 of 1,100 doses received.

“We’re asking for volunteers from our staff, volunteers from the local community college to step in and build this process from the ground up,” he said.

Some of the largest U.S. hospitals inoculated more than 1,000 people per day, having done dry runs of the vaccine delivery and rollout.

Vermont, Delaware and Idaho were among states that confirmed their states had given only thousands of doses – a fraction of those available to them – during the first week.

Jason Schwartz, assistant professor of health policy at Yale School of Public Health, described the initial tally as “discouraging” and said “the challenges of getting vaccines out as quickly as we’re able to manufacture them will only grow.”

and

Dr. Saul Weingart, the chief medical officer of Tufts Medical Center in Boston, said the hospital had given about 750 doses of the around 3,000 available as of Friday. It started with 100 shots per day and worked up to about 450, he said.

He said experts at the hospital modeled that giving Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine would take 10 minutes, about two to three times as long as a flu shot, due to the procedures needed because the vaccine is stored in a deep freeze. Patients need to socially distance before and after being given the vaccine and be monitored for allergic reactions.

The United States gives 170 million flu vaccinations each year within a few months, but for the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States must give about three times that number of shots – the Pfizer and Moderna shots are two doses – to reach most Americans by July. At its current pace, the U.S. appears to have the capacity to administer less than a third of the shots that are shipped in a given week, underscoring the gap.

A spokesperson for Houston Methodist, a hospital in Houston, Texas, said it had given 8,300 employees the vaccine as of Monday with about 7,000 doses left from the first shipment.

The University of Southern California’s Keck Medicine medical school has vaccinated over 3,000 employees and said it will take six weeks for everyone, similar to its flu vaccination schedule.

It may just be that there’s a lag between inoculations and reporting. Or it may be there’s actually a bottleneck in inoculating people.

Early on in the pandemic I predicted that staffing would be a significant bottleneck. That’s beginning to look right. For mass distribution you need mass production rather than the artisanal approach we take towards health care.

We just need to accept some bumps in the process. Nothing like this has ever been attempted anywhere before.

I agree with this portion of William Galston’s most recent Wall Street Journal column:

The Biden administration must respond with a program that seeks to accelerate economic growth, provide new opportunities for the victims of economic change, and narrow the gaps that the pandemic has widened.

In a closely divided Congress, these measures will need bipartisan support. This will not be easy, because the political parties have different views about the appropriate role of the federal government in the economy. But most people should agree that a high rate of participation in the labor force is good for everyone. If displaced workers stay stuck on the sidelines, everyone will be worse off. The same is true if women retreat from the labor force because their families can’t afford child care. Americans can also agree that the higher the share of workers who earn enough to support themselves and their families, the lower the burden will be on government and private philanthropy. Similarly, helping formerly incarcerated felons re-enter the workforce will rebuild stronger families and communities as well as local economies.

An economic program built on common ground across partisan and ideological lines would serve the needs of the American people. As important, it would help heal the divisions that have disfigured American politics.

I think the greater questions will be ones of priorities. Which is more important? Bipartisan support or party unity? Reducing carbon emissions or bolstering economic growth?

I do wonder about one sentence in the passage I’ve quoted:

But most people should agree that a high rate of participation in the labor force is good for everyone.

I agree that most people should agree about that but I’m not sure that they do. I don’t recall complaints about the Affordable Care Act’s marginal effects on labor force participation (admittedly some deny that it had any).

The editors of the Wall Street Journal helpfully quantify some of the costs and benefits of COVID-19 and especially the federal COVID-19 relief package to state and local governments:

States are also doing very well in this latest Covid bill. Start with the $26 billion for transit agencies, airports and shovel-ready public works. This will help New York’s transit and port authorities reduce their financial holes.

There’s also $22 billion for the states for Covid testing and contact tracing, though insurers and the feds cover the cost of tests. States will use it for more budget backfill. The Los Angeles Times reported last month that 25 LA County firefighters had made more than $100,000 on average in overtime by ferrying test supplies, most of which was reimbursed by federal Cares Act funds.

Education will get a whopping $82 billion, about $54 billion of which will go to K-12 schools though many are closed and employ fewer staff. That’s about as much as the federal government spends on K-12 in a normal year. The bill also provides $3.2 billion for broadband for low-income families, so public schools don’t have to pay for that.

States will also benefit from the federal enhanced $300 weekly unemployment benefits, which are taxable income in most states. The jobless benefit sweetener will especially help states with higher unemployment such as New Jersey (10.2%), Hawaii (10.1%), New York (8.4%), Connecticut (8.2%) and California (8.2%).

New Bureau of Economic Analysis data show how blue states that shut down more businesses have reaped larger federal payments. Transfer receipts grew significantly more for New Jersey (67.6%), California (54.6%), Illinois (51.7%), and New York (44.7%) than for Arizona (35.4%), Florida (26.5%), Wisconsin (22.5%) and South Dakota (20.9%) from the third quarter of 2019 to the third quarter of 2020.

I did want to annotate part of the above. At least in Chicago it is not true that schools “employ fewer staff” during the school shutdowns. To the best of my knowledge no one has been furloughed, terminated, or laid off during the school shutdowns. They’re being paid for working less or, possibly, not at all.

What’s wrong with this claim by the editors?

At the same time, wages and salaries increased significantly more in states that allowed more businesses to reopen such as Arizona (4.7%), South Dakota (5.5%), Florida (1.7%) and Wisconsin (2.9%) than in states that maintained stricter lockdowns like New York (-1.6%), New Jersey (-1%), Illinois (0.2%) and California (2.3%). See the nearby charts.

1.7% (Florida) is a more significant increase than 2.3% (California)? I don’t think so. What that list documents is a point I have been making: policy matters less than other confounding factors in the outcomes. It would be interesting to break those results into results by income quintile. At least it would be nice to know the standard deviation.

I found this statistic pretty eye-catching:

The Golden State is also rolling in tax revenue amid the stock market’s boom and tech initial public offerings. Its November revenues were 16.4% higher year-over-year and so far this fiscal year are 20.4% above the state’s spring estimate.

If that’s total revenues it’s astonishing. If it’s revenues from that source, it’s misleading.

This supports the former conjecture:

The Census Bureau reported last week that total state and local government tax revenues for the 12 months ending in September were up $46.4 billion (3%) year-over-year. Personal income tax revenue has increased 3.3% and property tax revenues 4.7% while sales taxes have dipped a mere 0.4%.

The Federal Reserve’s interventions have lifted housing prices and stock-market capital gains. Increased asset values have also produced a “wealth effect,” which in addition to government transfer payments has boosted spending. The bottom 20% of households account for 9% of consumer spending compared to 39% by the top 20%.

The one thing we should not be doing is monetizing state and local spending but that does, indeed, seem to be what we’re doing.

I like David Ignatius’s take on the Russian SolarWinds hack, expressed in his most recent Washington Post column:

One simple way to think about the threat posed by Russian intelligence in its “SolarWinds” hack is that it exposed the vulnerability of the vast store of supposedly secure personal and corporate data known as the “cloud.”

This wasn’t an attack on classified systems or a sabotage mission, from what we know. Loose talk by Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) calling it “virtually a declaration of war” is misplaced. This appears to have been an especially intrusive version of cyberespionage, which governments conduct routinely around the world.

But make no mistake: The SolarWinds hack, named for the company whose widely used network software was manipulated to plant malware, was a scary snapshot of today’s Internet — a world where personal privacy has all but vanished and nation states or private actors can penetrate systems and steal data almost at will. If you’re used to thinking of the United States as a fortress, forget it. Our information space has become the terrain where people fight their cyberwars: We are the Internet version of Belgium or Lebanon, trampled by so many armies of manipulation.

There’s a reason for the greater reaction from private companies to the hack than from the federal government that Mr. Ignatius calls out: it threatens their business model. The hack is crushing SolarWinds’s stock but it has actually boosted FireEye’s. What this points out is that being hacked is embarrassing for a cybersecurity firm but openness and calling public attention to a massive public problem is beneficial to all of us.

If the federal government weren’t full of arrogant, ignorant dolts, they’d realize that the hack calls their business model into question as well. Counter-attacking would be reckless and no number of defensive layers will help in the presence of centralized decision-making.