The editors of the Washington Post lament the shootings of two sheriff’s deputies in Compton:

America is in a moment of rage. Hours before the shooting Saturday in Los Angeles, more than 200 people there protested the death of a Black man, Dijon Kizzee, who was shot to death on Aug. 31 by LA sheriff’s deputies. The sheriff’s office said he was riding his bicycle, fled on foot when the deputies tried to apprehend him for an unspecified violation, then punched a deputy who chased him. The deputies opened fire when they thought they saw him reaching for a gun, the sheriff’s office said. Activists and Mr. Kizzee’s relatives say he was unarmed when deputies shot him in the back.

Systemic reforms are one thing. Wise leaders who exert a calming influence are another. Both are badly needed at the moment.

I think they’re doing a combination of misreporting the incident, obfuscating it, and failing to understand what’s actually going on. The shooting took place in Compton, a city in Los Angeles County. Compton disbanded its own police department in 2000 because it could no longer afford to support its own police force, contracting with Los Angeles County for law enforcement services.

Since 1990 Compton has gone from about half black and a third Hispanic to nearly the opposite. Almost half of LA County sheriff’s deputies are Hispanic compared with about 10% black. When their identifies are finally released I am confident that we will learn that the two sheriff’s deputies shot were both Hispanic while the perpetrator was black.

I have been saying for some time that what the future was likely to bring was that once Hispanics outnumbered blacks there would be a struggle for political power between them. I think that’s going on now. In California the sheer number of of Mexican-American immigrants is an impediment to their assimilation into the general culture. Increasingly, it’s beginning to look as though the assimilation will be in the opposite direction.

I believe that one of the reasons for the vehemence of some of the demonstrations and protests of the last several months is that urban black activists have realized that events are passing them by. Rather than being better able to secure concessions due to white guilt, they will increasingly be coming into conflict for power with Hispanics who don’t feel that they owe them anything.

IMO that’s what’s happening in Compton right now.

Aside from the daily political “gotchas”, the media outlets on which I depend inspiration for my posts don’t have much interest in anything that’s going on. They’re not really interested in the ongoing protests in Portland, the ongoing pandemic, the assassination campaign against police officers that might be under way, or the regular murders on the South Side of Chicago.

I’ll try to find something interesting to write about but it’s an uphill battle.

I’m surprised that this story isn’t receiving more attention. Am I missing something? At Yahoo Michael Isikoff reports:

On the eve of the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a federal judge directed the Saudi Arabian government to make as many as 24 current and former officials available for depositions about their possible knowledge of events leading up to the airplane attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which killed almost 3,000 Americans. Those officials include Prince Bandar, the former ambassador to the United States, and his longtime chief of staff.

The order was immediately hailed by families of the 9/11 victims as a milestone in their years-long effort to prove that some Saudi officials were either complicit in the attacks or aware of the kingdom’s support for some of the hijackers in the months before they hijacked four American airliners and crashed three of them into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon.

He continues:

On the eve of the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a federal judge directed the Saudi Arabian government to make as many as 24 current and former officials available for depositions about their possible knowledge of events leading up to the airplane attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which killed almost 3,000 Americans. Those officials include Prince Bandar, the former ambassador to the United States, and his longtime chief of staff.

The order was immediately hailed by families of the 9/11 victims as a milestone in their years-long effort to prove that some Saudi officials were either complicit in the attacks or aware of the kingdom’s support for some of the hijackers in the months before they hijacked four American airliners and crashed three of them into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon.

Maybe the Saudi government will refuse to cooperate. Maybe the federal government will intervene somehow to prevent it. But this sounds to me like a development that is a long time coming and could have very serious repercussions. I’m kind of interested in how the Saudis rationalize providing diplomatic cover to people engaged in terrorist activities or support of terrorist activities in the United States.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal are shocked, shocked to see the members of Congress putting politics above policy:

Congratulations to Mitch McConnell, who kept all but one of his GOP Senate majority together on Thursday to vote for a $500 billion virus relief bill. Senate Democrats filibustered the bill, though these are the same Democrats who say they’ll kill the filibuster if they run the Senate next year. Thursday’s filibuster exposes that Democratic spending demands are about exploiting Covid to bail out progressive states, not helping the public.

With states reopening and the economy recovering, there’s no great need for new Covid relief. Congress has already appropriated some $2.9 trillion, and hundreds of billions haven’t been spent. The GOP recognized this by seeking to repurpose $146 billion from the $2.2 trillion Cares Act that passed in March, and reduce the size of the backstop for Federal Reserve loans, loan guarantees and liquidity for the financial system.

The GOP bill still offered $257.7 billion more in loans and loan forgiveness for small business under the Paycheck Protection Program. Many small businesses continue to suffer under lockdowns and arguably need the lifeline. The GOP proposal at least required that applicants demonstrate losses, rather than the willy-nilly loan approvals of the Cares Act.

The bill also included liability protection from Covid-related lawsuits for hospitals, health-care workers, businesses, schools, colleges and universities, religious, philanthropic and other nonprofits, and local government agencies. The idea is to create federal causes of action for Covid suits that pre-empt conflicting state laws and protect those who follow safety standards in good faith.

concluding:

Our guess is that Mrs. Pelosi is demanding such a high price because she wants the issue, not the bill. She figures her incumbents will win anyway and, next year, with Joe Biden as President, they can pass everything they want.

Different people would draw different conclusions from the present debate. No doubt yellow dog Democrats will take this as proof positive that Republicans are evil, hard-hearted people with no concern for suffering Americans. And ardent Republicans vice versa.

My suggestion is when contemplating any measure being debated by Congressional Republicans and Democrats, always assume that not only is politics the primary consideration, overwhelming policy, needs, or even ideology, it is the only consideration.

I have little to say about the nineteenth anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001. We have spent trillions. I think we have learned little and not accomplished a great deal. Osama Bin Laden is dead but there are still a lot of radical Islamists who hate us out there. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if there were more today than on September 10, 2001. I think we’re just as much at risk of Islamist terrorism as we were then. We’re still in Afghanistan with no real prospect of leaving.

If anyone sees anything worthwhile being published on the subject, please take note of it in comments.

This morning the Los Angeles Times endorsed Joe Biden for president:

Biden has a record of seeking expert advice and listening to it. Progressives may take issue with his choice of advisers, many of whom are establishment figures he’s known for years. But he clearly has a level of respect for data, science and research that the incumbent does not. As 81 U.S. Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, physics and medicine wrote in an open letter endorsing Biden, “At no time in our nation’s history has there been a greater need for our leaders to appreciate the value of science in formulating public policy.”

Temperamentally, too, Biden seems like an ideal fit for our polarized time. A famously empathetic figure — he lost his wife and daughter in a car accident shortly after Delaware first elected him to the Senate in 1972 — he practices civility, champions compromise and seeks unity in a country Trump has divided with a cacophony of culture-war distractions. The contrast between Biden’s speech accepting the Democratic nomination for the presidency, which was a call for Americans to come together, and Trump’s speech accepting the Republican nomination, which promoted fear and loathing within the country, couldn’t have been more pronounced.

That would have been a pretty convincing endorsement in 2008. 12 years have elapsed since then and VP Biden is now 77 years old. It’s not outrageous to be concerned that he is suffering from some sort of cognitive decline—cognitive decline frequently accelerates in one’s late 70s.

As it works out there are concerns about both VP Biden’s and President Trump’s mental fitness:

More than a majority of voters say presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is mentally fit to be president, compared with less than half who said the same about President Trump, according to a new Hill-HarrisX poll.

Fifty-six percent of respondents said Biden was mentally fit to lead the nation, compared to 44 percent who said he wasn’t. For Trump, 45 percent said he was mentally fit to occupy the Oval Office, with 55 percent disagreeing.

That the concern about either candidate should be that high is a sad commentary.

I find it particularly worrisome in Biden’s case for the simple reason that I do not believe that Kamala Harris is remotely qualified to be president by experience, performance, temperament, or character. Note, too, that more than 98% of Democratic primary voters preferred any other candidate over Sen. Harris.

When my wife and I were watching the morning news program this morning we saw something on the crawl at the bottom of the screen: “2 DCFS Workers Involved in AJ Freund Case Arrested”. If you’re not aware of the backstory, a little boy, AJ Freund, was first reported missing, then found dead. Ultimately, his parents were convicted of killing him. It was pretty big news hereabouts.

Curious, I checked the newspapers and found this story in the DeKalb Daily Chronicle:

A pair of former child welfare employees who had prior contact with slain Crystal Lake boy AJ Freund and his family were arrested Thursday on child endangerment charges.

McHenry County Board member and former Illinois Department of Children and Family Services employees Carlos Acosta, 54, was arrested and charged with two felony counts of endangering the life of a child and one felony count of reckless conduct.

Also arrested was Acosta’s former supervisor, Andrew Polovin, 48, of Island Lake, on the same charges, according to the McHenry County Sheriff’s Office.

What struck me about this story and all of the coverage of it at the various media outlets was how terribly sloppy and poorly-written all of the coverage was. It was as though it were calculated to be obscure and misleading. Nowhere do they actually say that the individuals were arrested on charges related to the Freund case. Look at that first sentence. It contains two facts:

1. Two people were arrested on child endangerment charges.
2. They “had prior contact” with AJ Freund and his family.

It leaves it to you to infer that they were arrested for their conduct in the Freund case without actually saying it. They never quote or cite the actual warrants.

That’s either incredibly sloppy or very deceitful reporting.

As to the actual matter, I’m not particularly surprised. Many public employees, like just about everybody these days, try to get paid as much as they can for working as little as possible. It’s a sad commentary but I think it’s true. I don’t believe these people acted maliciously—I think they were just trying to get the case off their workloads as quickly as possible. But a little boy died who might have lived with a little more industriousness and care.

I want to bring a post by Sean Trende at RealClearPolitics on why we should take the polling results that are being published with a grain of salt to your attention:

On a hunch, I went back and looked at the poll errors for 2013-15, and it became apparent that the errors for 2016 followed much the same pattern: They were concentrated in areas with large numbers of whites without college degrees. Indeed, the size of the poll error correlated heavily with whites-without-college-degree share (p<.001); you could explain about one-third of the difference in the size of poll miss just from knowing the share of the electorate that was whites without a college degree. We all know what happened next. Trump surprised observers by winning states that Republican presidential candidates hadn’t carried since Debbie Gibson and Tiffany fought it out for top placement in the Top 40 charts. The misses were particularly pronounced in the Midwest.

Have pollsters corrected the mistakes they made in 2016?

So, I went back and looked at the Democratic bias in the polls for swing states in 2014, 2016, and 2018. I could not use North Carolina, since there was no statewide race there in 2018. One problem I encountered is that in 2018 many states were under-polled, so RCP didn’t create an average. I’ve gone back and averaged the October polls for those states, if available (note that we don’t have three polls in October for Minnesota in 2016, hence the asterisk there). As a check on this approach, I’ve also included the error from the 538 “polls-only” model for 2018.

The results are something of a mixed bag, but overall it isn’t clear that the pollsters have really fixed the problem at all. While the bias toward Democrats was smaller in 2018 than in 2016, the bias overall was similar to what we saw in 2014, especially in the Midwest. If people remember, the polls in 2018 suggested that we should today have Democratic governors in Ohio, Iowa and Florida, and new Democratic senators in Indiana, Missouri and Florida. Obviously this did not come to pass.

Moreover, almost all of the errors pointed the same way: Republicans overperformed the polls in every Midwestern state except for Minnesota Senate/governor and Wisconsin Senate (none of which were particularly competitive).

The point here is not that the polls are intentionally biased or that we shouldn’t trust them or that we should trust them. It’s that we shouldn’t bet the farm on polls. We don’t know whether they’ll be off this year, by how much, or in which direction.

Both Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker are on the wrong track in managing the city and state, respectively. The editors of the Chicago Tribune observe:

If Lori Lightfoot were CEO and not Chicago’s mayor, the job cuts would be underway. Sometimes organizations must reduce personnel to survive or thrive, and that’s where Chicago government is right now, in financial survival mode due to COVID-19. So cue the layoffs and furloughs … if the city were a corporation.

This thought experiment usually ends quickly in Illinois. While CEOs concentrate on the bottom line, mayors and governors focus on reelection. Government workers in Cook County and Springfield are members of Democrat-led public employee unions that raise money and contribute foot soldiers, and it’s tough to fire your friends. It’s easier for political leaders to borrow money or raise taxes and increase fees, as slyly as possible, than to issue pink slips.

Pritzker’s handling of the state is even worse than Lightfoot’s of the city:

Gov. J.B. Pritzker is in the same boat. Where governors across the country reduced personnel and spending as revenues dropped off this spring, Pritzker did not. The coronavirus pandemic has taken a huge chunk out of tax revenues from restaurants, tourism and the convention trade due to his mandated shutdowns. Other governors separated essential and nonessential services and made appropriate reductions. Pritzker’s only solution so far has been to wait for the federal government and pass the blame. That’s not a plan.

They conclude:

Chicago is not a business, but it is a large organization reeling from a budget crisis. The only responsible way forward is to cut spending, and that means reducing the size and scope of city government, and the number of employees.

Don’t expect responsibility from them—they’re politicians. I strongly suspect they’ll continue to borrow and raise taxes as long as those remain options. They are unlikely to remain options for long. Chicago’s and Illinois’s credit ratings are just about as low as they can go. I wonder what Gov. Pritzker will do if his “Fair Tax” fails to pass the upcoming referendum?