A piece at Washington Monthly by Steve Waldman attempts to prepare its readers for something they may find unthinkable or at the very least unexpected—President Trump may actually be re-elected:

If the election were held today, Joe Biden would probably win. But there are strong signs that the race is much, much closer than you’d think from the news coverage. Donald Trump has a real shot at being reelected.

First, the president is actually more popular now than on the day he was elected. Yes, that’s right. His personal favorability rating around election day in 2016 was 37.5%. Now, it is 43.2%. There are, in fact, hundreds of thousands of Americans (if not millions) who have grown fonder of Trump.

He goes on to consider polling results in so-called “battleground” states:

Right now (as of 10/20), those three states are looking pretty good for Biden, especially Michigan and even Wisconsin, which once seemed like it might be the hardest of the three to get back in the blue column where it resided from 1988 to 2012. Somewhat surprisingly, Pennsylvania is still a dogfight for Biden despite nearly 50 years in politics in neighboring Delaware and multiple visits to the Keystone State this year:

Pennsylvania — +3.8
Wisconsin — +6.2
Michigan — +6.8

So, remembering that Biden might need to sweep all three of those, my main cautionary note is to look at the Real Clear Politics polling averages for those states way back on October 19, 2016:

Pennsylvania: Clinton +6.2
Wisconsin: Clinton +7
Michigan: Clinton +11.6

As you can see, Joe Biden is doing worse in those state polls than Hillary was. And she, of course, lost them all.

Read the whole thing. We’ve already mused about what is likely to happen should Joe Biden be elected. What will happen if Trump is re-elected? Keeping in mind that I claim absolutely no insight into the workings of the president’s mind, here’s what I would suspect:

• The Biden campaign will on the continuation of counts and recounts, either until Biden is declared the victor or the Supreme Court shuts them down. Democrats have said that’s what they’ll do and I believe them.
• There will be more outbreaks of violence in some of the more progressive cities, where it is more likely to be tolerated.
• Campaign claims to the contrary notwithstanding, federal policy with respect to COVID-19 won’t be much different whoever is elected. The greatest difference would be that President Biden’s press coverage would be more favorable than President Trump’s.
• President Trump will keep doing what he’s been doing.
• Will Justice Breyer last four more years? The actuarial tables say it’s likely. If not, President Trump will appoint yet another Supreme Court justice.

Beyond that reply hazy, try again.

Update

I forgot one thing. If Trump is re-elected but Democrats continue to hold the House, he will be impeached again. If Democrats take the Senate, he will be convicted but if Republicans hold the Senate he will be acquitted. I don’t know what happens if Trump is removed from office by being convicted.

I was quite interested in this piece in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, “New study makes it clear: Mask wearing can save lots of lives”:

If Americans would stop complaining about face masks and wear them when they leave their homes, they could save well over 100,000 lives — and perhaps more than half a million — through the end of February, according to a study published Friday in Nature Medicine.

The researchers considered five scenarios for how the pandemic could play out with different levels of mask-wearing and rules about staying home and social distancing. All the scenarios assumed that no vaccine was available, nor any medicines capable of curing the disease.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the conclusions of the “study” but I was quite disappointed when I sought out the “study” itself because it doesn’t actually confirm the effectiveness of masks. It isn’t empirical at all. It assumes the effectiveness of masks and uses that to model several different scenarios of mask utilization and what their outcomes might be. It’s a waste of effort. Garbage in, garbage out. Their models have problems of their own. For example, they’re deterministic and I’m suspicious of any deterministic model of human behavior. I think that probabilistic models are much closer to reality but, since deterministic models are so much easier, those are mostly what we get.

I did find another aspect of the MST article thought-provoking, this sentence:

Mask wearing has become deeply politicized, and it may feel unrealistic to expect 95% of Americans to cover their noses and mouths whenever they are in public.

Is it actually true that mask wearing has become deeply politicized? Or is a more accurate statement that what people are saying about mask wearing has become deeply politicized? Walking around Chicago, as reliably a Democratic area as you’re likely to find, I have noticed two things:

1. About 30% of people wear masks other than in stores or offices where they’re required.
2. I have yet to see a person under the age of 18 wearing a mask unless accompanied by an adult.

If that’s what it’s like in Chicago, what’s it like in Dallas or some other area that’s much more Republican? My guess is that what’s closer to the truth is that 49% of people think the answer that pollsters expect to hear is that they’re wearing masks all of the time, so that’s what they say. I don’t see any other way the reported numbers line up with what I’m seeing.

I’m still waiting for better studies of the effectiveness of wearing facemasks. The results from health care settings suggest to me that they can be highly effective. Studies from other circumstances with fairly intimate contact suggest that they can be marginally effective. I doubt that the masks that you generally see worn in the way they’re generally worn do much of anything for people walking down the street. Whether they’re doing anything for people in stores or offices, I don’t know.

Following up in the same vein as my last past, in a piece at National Interest Daniel L. Davis minces no words about our present foreign policy:

Whether Donald Trump wins a second term on November 3 or Joe Biden is voted into office, it will be crucial that the Administration make a clean break with past failures. Trump can’t continue with the status quo of the past four years and Biden can’t merely reprise his eight years under Obama.

America needs a new foreign policy construct that is aligned with a realistic and sober recognition of the world as it is, warts and all, and uses the full range of American power—in intelligent and creative ways—to produce outcomes beneficial to our country. If, however, the next Administration continues the establishment foreign policy status quo that has drifted unchecked for decades, we risk international obsolescence at best—or we’ll fumble our way into an entirely unnecessary and pointless war at worst.

As I noted previously, it’s a bipartisan fiasco:

Bush should have then acknowledged the objectives had been attained and withdrawn our military force, transitioning our Afghan mission to a State Department-led humanitarian and diplomatic enterprise. Instead, he refused to take the win and expanded the conflict in ways that still haunt us today.

Since Bush refused to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2002, every Administration since has tried various strategies, varying troop levels from as low as 8,600 to as many as 100,000 yet never succeeded in winning the war or ending the conflict. In October we began the twentieth consecutive year of war in Afghanistan where we remain, mired in a forever-war with no identifiable objective and no means of ever winning.

Moreover, continuing several bad precedents Bush had set, Obama committed U.S. combat or support troops to operations in Syria, Yemen, and Libya. None of the Obama uses of force accomplished their stated objectives: our troops are still in Syria, the Yemen civil war continues without resolution, and nine years after intervention, Libya remains a festering wound of a civil war.

He wants the U. S. to re-embrace realism in its foreign policy. I think he’s whistling in the dark. Whether Republican neoconservatives or Democratic liberal interventionalists foreign policy idealists dominate in foreign policy circles. The hallmark, indeed, the definition of foreign policy interests is the recognition that countries have interests. Denial that any country other than the U. S. could possibly have legitimate interests and mistrusting our own interests have been key aspects of our foreign policy for longer than most of us have been alive. When you add that fortunes have been made under the status quo, there are powerful headwinds opposing change. That the change is necessary to avoid foreign wars or even civil war does not seem to make a difference.

This article at Foreign Affairs by Matthew Duss is a good example of my agreeing with the conclusion reached by the author but being quite skeptical of how the author reaches that conclusion. The conclusion is that the U. S. has never recovered from the attacks on September 11, 2001:

With the declaration of its global “war on terror” after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States went abroad in search of monsters and ended up midwifing new ones—from terrorist groups such as the Islamic State (or ISIS), born in the prisons of U.S.-occupied Iraq; to destabilization and deepening sectarianism across the Middle East; to racist authoritarian movements in Europe and in the United States that feed—and feed off of—the fear of refugees fleeing those regional conflicts. Advocates of the war on terror believed that nationalist chauvinism, which sometimes travels under the name “American exceptionalism,” could be stoked at a controlled burn to sustain American hegemony. Instead, and predictably, toxic ultranationalism burned out of control. Today, the greatest security threat to the United States comes not from any terrorist group, or from any great power, but from domestic political dysfunction. The election of Donald Trump as president was a product and accelerant of that dysfunction—but not its cause. The environment for his political rise was prepared over a decade and a half of xenophobic, messianic Washington warmongering, with roots going back into centuries of white supremacist politics.

I agree that the attacks on 9/11 were deeply traumatic and have affected U. S. foreign policy and politics ever since. But I think the author is too eager to draw a connecting line between George W. Bush and Donald Trump and avoids the more obvious resonance between neoconservative “hubris” and the liberal interventionism of Barack Obama’s bombing of Libya, the effects of which have been disastrous not only for Libya but for Italy and Spain among other southern European countries, and his various interventions in Syria. Note, too, that John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden all voted in favor of the invasion of Iraq, try as they might to deny that’s what they did. Possessed of full information, they calculated wrong. Simple as that. Also unmentioned is the “drone war” prosecuted by the Obama Administration which contributed materially to the present war between Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

My argument at the time and since has been that rather than engaging in security theater and overseas aggression, the politically courageous stance would have been a short, extremely harsh punitive raid on Afghanistan along with greatly strengthened security at home including border security and keeping much tighter rein on foreigners here legally, particularly those on student or tourist visas.

Elected officials, particularly senators and presidents, feel no need to amend the policies they’ve put in place over the last 40 years because they and their families don’t bear the brunt of those policies. I fear that when they inevitably do it will not be pretty.

Both Gov. Pritzker and Mayor Lightfoot are in a lather about a spike of COVID-19 cases in Illinois. From the Illinois Department of Public Health, here’s a graph showing ICU bed utilization in the state that illustrates what they’re worrying about:

I’ve circled the recent bump in ICU bed utilization.

The only hypothesis I can come up with is they won’t be satisfied until the number of cases goes to zero. It is unlikely ever to go to zero.

The editors of the Washington Post are outraged that no one associated with Purdue Pharma is going to jail for the epidemic of OxyContin deaths that began a couple of decades ago, at least in part due to the malfeasance of the drug company:

Now comes the Justice Department to announce retrospective accountability for Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical company whose heavily promoted OxyContin product probably did more than any other to start the first wave, and without which there probably never would have been the other two. Purdue has agreed to plead guilty to misleading the Drug Enforcement Administration in ways that resulted in otherwise-impermissible amounts of its drug reaching the market, and to paying doctors and others kickbacks for helping increase sales. These felony admissions, which cover conduct over the decade ending in 2017, come with an agreed-upon $8.3 billion worth of fines and other payments that also resolves potential federal civil complaints against the company. Members of the Sackler family — the owners for many years of the closely held Purdue — will be required to pay a $225 million civil fine.

noting that little of that money is likely to be collected. Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy a year ago and proving actual knowledge by members of the Sackler family would be very difficult. Civil suits are probably as tough as DoJ can get.

If you don’t like the outcome—blame Congress. They’re the ones who wrote the laws under which the company and the Justice Department are operating. If you don’t like the enforcement of the law, the blame would appear to be bipartisan, with the Bush Administration (2 years of the period in question) and the Obama Administration (8 years of the period in question) both at fault.

I listened to the first hour of the presidential debate last night before it going to bed. It was much better than the previous edition. President Trump behaved himself which proves that he can when it suits his purpose and VP Biden returned to his themes faithfully.

I sometimes wonder whether the art of being a politician consists in actually believing the lies you tell. It’s a facility I’ve noticed in salesmen. I’m not sure what the most egregious lie was there were so many of them. I thought the most astonishing lie was when VP Biden actually re-upped on what Politifact deemed the “Lie of the Year” in 2013—President Obama’s repeated claim that “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it”. Does anyone actually dispute that a national public option would, at the very least at the margins, put private insurance plans out of business?

Did I miss anything by not listening to the last half hour?

ABC 7 Chicago reports on Mayor Lightfoot’s latest decree:

CHICAGO (WLS) — Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced a curfew on businesses in Chicago to go into effect on Friday due to a sharp rise in COVID-19 cases in the city.

Mayor Lightfoot said the curfew will be in effect for the next two weeks. As part of the curfew, all non-essential businesses will be closed from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.

Essential businesses, such as grocery stores, pharmacies and take-out restaurants, will be allowed to operate.

Liquor sales will also be stopped at 9 p.m. Bars without a food license will no longer be allowed to have indoor service.

I would love to see the science on which that is based.

Here’s my modest proposal: if the number of new cases in Chicago does not decrease in seven days, the mayor should be removed and replaced with someone capable of doing the job.

By the way, while I’m on the subject, for the last six weeks we’ve been seeing sealed tents springing up around bars and restaurants. I can understand how open air dining and seating could reduce the transmissions of SARS-CoV-2. Can someone explain how sealed, heated tents do that? Gov. Pritzker and Mayor Lightfoot keep braying about how their policies are based on science. Can someone produce the science that supports the toleration of this nonsense?

Yesterday Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced her budget for the city for next year. It balances a shortfall of $1.2 billion in revenue with wishful thinking, planning for a federal bailout, and loan restructuring that, if it is even possible, may be too expensive for the city to bear. I’m in broad agreement with the editors of the Chicago Tribune:

Given the extraordinary challenges Chicago is facing, the key question surrounding Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s budget proposal unveiled Wednesday is this: Did she do the best she could given the circumstances?

Yes and no. Lightfoot’s budget blueprint for the rest of this year and next year might not look painful to the average Chicago taxpayer. But it relies heavily on expensive borrowing; its balance sheet depended significantly on federal aid from June, not restructuring; and it does not make lasting changes to the tax-and-spend policies that drive deficit spending. The Lightfoot administration says that goal was impossible, given the severity of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Chicago Tribune has been reporting on the city’s questionable borrowing practices since at least 2013. In its series, “Broken Bonds,” the newspaper outlined the precariousness of a borrowing addiction that spent bond money intended for long-term projects on short-term costs. Here is the opening paragraph to that award-winning series that bears repeating nearly a decade later:

“Between 2000 and 2012, Chicago spent $9.8 billion in general obligation bond proceeds with few restrictions and virtually no oversight. In a first-ever accounting, the Tribune found that nearly half of the money went to paper over Chicago’s growing budget problems. The city spent millions in bond funds on short-lived equipment such as Palm Pilot software, spare vehicle parts and items you might find on a weekend shopping list: trash bins, flowers, even bags for dog waste. That’s equivalent to taking out a 30-year mortgage to buy a car and making your children — or grandchildren — pay it off, with interest.”

Scoop-and-toss, as the practice is known, is a financial crutch that involves selling bonds — borrowing — and then using the borrowed money to pay off short term costs or old bonds — sort of like using a credit card to make a payment on another credit card. Under Lightfoot’s budget plan for 2021, the city will rely on $501 million in scoop-and-toss borrowing.

“It is scoop and toss,” Lightfoot said. But given the levers available during a “once-in-a-generation economic meltdown,” the mayor said they had to use “unique tools.”

How much will that borrowing eventually cost taxpayers, along with refinancing planned for the current budget year? The mayor’s budget team wouldn’t say. They would only predict that city taxpayers would come out ahead, once harm to the economy and instability costs were factored in if they didn’t use scoop-and-toss financing in this emergency. In other words, it’s the least worst option.

What goes unmentioned is that the budget contains practically no economization. What percentage of the city’s workforce does the mayor plan to layoff? 1%. That’s while 15% of Chicagoans are unemployed. The city didn’t lay off or furlough any city workers during the city’s lockdown. They were all deemed essential.

In addition practically no one believes that Chicago’s population will be greater next year than this year or greater the year after that than next. That means that fewer and fewer Chicagoans must carry the burden being placed on them by decades of irresponsible borrowing. It’s high time for some shared sacrifice.