Back in 2001 some colleagues of mine and I designed and built a prototype for an electronic voting machine. Our design won an award. That’s as far as we went.

Recently, I noticed that the 2nd generation (or are they 3rd generation?) electronic voting machines bear a remarkable resemblance to the one we designed in the process that they use. They are much more secure and, importantly, auditable, which none of the machines of which, at the least, hundreds of thousands were sold in the aftermath of the 2000 election and its “dangling chads” are.

We should have patented it.

I think it may have been the cartoonist Scott Adams who first pointed out that people are playing two different movies in their heads. I’ve mentioned that notion here from time to time.

I have come to the conclusion that for many Democrats the movie they are playing is Casablanca. They see themselves in either the Humphrey Bogart role or the Paul Henreid role. “Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win”.

Right movie. Wrong role. Arguendo, let’s assume that everything they’ve said about Trump is true. Just assume it. Traitor. Corrupt. Racist. Incipient dictator.
Proximate threat to the Republic. And so on.

They’re no Paul Henreid much less Humphrey Bogart. They’re not even Claude Raines. They’re the Vichy government. Making nasty remarks out of the sides of their mouths and throwing up impediments isn’t the heroic Resistance. It’s the not-at-all-heroic Vichy government, just trying to get by and signal a little disapproval along the way.

If they were really the Resistance, they’d be throwing bombs, placing IEDs, attempting assassinations or destruction.

This must be my day for posting graphs. This graph is what the Federal Reserve tells us we have been importing from China since 1985 right up to and including last month.

Two questions:

1. What story does that graph tell us?
2. What story have we been told is happening?

NASA has settled on “Perseverance” as the name for its new Mars rover. Space.com reports:

NASA didn’t name its next Mars rover Perseverance just because “Percy” is a cute nickname.

The new moniker, which NASA announced on Thursday (March 5), captures the spirit of space exploration remarkably well, said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate.

I’m disappointed. I was pulling for “Rovy McRoverFace”.

The graphs above are from the handy site Worldometers.info. It should be noted that they’re in log scale which means that they tell us about the shape of the curves of the total cases diagnosed and deaths due to the Wuhan coronavirus. As you can see neither is rising as fast as they were a month and a half ago but neither has flattened out, either.

Even if you are convinced that everything we have been told by the Chinese authorities is fair dinkum, we are still far from out of the woods. However, there are (possibly hysterical) theories in Japan that the black rain they’re seeing there is from the ashes produced by the cremations of thousands or millions of COVID-19 victims, either in China or North Korea, or both. I don’t believe it but there are apparently a lot of Japanese people who do.

I have considerable sympathy with the assertion of the editors of the Washington Post that President Trump is wrong in withdrawing the appointment of Elaine McCusker to the post of Department of Defense Comptroller:

ELAINE McCUSKER is a professional. A career civil servant specializing in the technical but crucial area of defense budgeting and finance, with prior experience in academia, the private sector and the Senate Armed Services Committee, she was a logical choice for the office to which President Trump elevated her in 2017: deputy comptroller of the Defense Department. She also was amply qualified for promotion to comptroller, a nomination Mr. Trump submitted to the Senate last November.

Yet she will not be getting the job after all — the latest public servant of integrity to face career consequences in apparent retaliation for Mr. Trump’s impeachment over allegations that he abused his power by withholding military aid from Ukraine to force Kyiv to investigate his political rival, former vice president Joe Biden.

but I don’t think they are asking the right question. They almost get to it here:

Every president is entitled to a senior staff of his or her own choosing.

but shy off. I think the question they should be asking is whether presidents are entitled to senior staffs they can trust? The balance of the editorial actually undermines their case:

All she did, while serving last year as acting Pentagon comptroller, was to tell the White House, via internal emails, that its holdup of the nearly $400 million Ukraine aid package might violate federal law, possibly causing the appropriations to lapse. She reacted with exasperated incredulity when an Office of Management and Budget official, Michael P. Duffey, tried to blame her for putting the funds at risk. In a September email, one of a series made public by Just Security, a website specializing in foreign affairs and defense policy, Ms. McCusker wrote, “You can’t be serious. I am speechless.”

The civil bureaucracy should not be seen as a fourth branch of government, providing an additional check on the White House. They are unelected but interested parties. Whether members of the civil bureaucracy would be as likely to provide such a check on a president they liked as one they despised is a legitimate question.

Here’s are some questions to which I have no ready answers. How can a president trust the civil bureaucracy? How can a president distinguish between members of the bureaucracy who are acting in their professional capacity and with an abundance of public spirit and those who are acting as partisan operatives? I don’t know how we engineer a continuing civil bureaucracy a president of either party can trust.

What caught my eye about Timothy Shenk’s op-ed in the New York Times, declaiming that Elizabeth Warren is “the wrong kind of radical” was its implied taxonomy of political stances. Here’s an example of what I found interesting:

This election was supposed to be Ms. Warren’s opportunity to prove that she could do a better job executing Mr. Obama’s strategy than Mr. Obama himself. Rather than calling for a Sanders-style political revolution, she would remake the Democratic establishment from within. In 2018 alone, she raised or donated more than $11 million for over 160 Democratic congressional candidates. She launched a charm offensive with leading progressive activists and staked out bold positions on subjects ranging from impeachment to reparations to the wealth tax.

Underlying all of this was her conviction that she could rally the Obama coalition — young people, African-Americans, Hispanics and liberal white college graduates, with just enough of the white working class to win the Midwest — behind policies that took on the 1 percent. Then she would staff her administration with the best of the Democratic wonkocracy rather than the next generation of Goldman Sachs alumni.

If Sen. Warren is a radical who wants to change practically everything except the Democratic Party itself, what sort is Sen. Sanders? He, too, wants to change practically everything but he also wants to change the composition of the electorate, bringing in millions of imaginary young people who actually vote (for him).

I am no radical but I see a grave need for reform. I, on the other hand, think that the institutions most in need of reform are our political parties and the politicians that lead them. It should not be possible other than through dumb luck to become a multimillionaire over a lifetime of what is laughingly called “public service” but that is presently too common to be the result of mere dumb luck.

Scenarios like Rahm Emanuel’s, in which after serving in the Clinton Administration he reportedly plopped himself down in the offices of a series of private equity managers, demanding a million dollar salary in exchange for his contacts, something known in the trade as a “Rolodex hire”, after the old-fashioned device for holding address cards, should be deemed sufficient to render one unfit for public office. Instead, influence peddling, pay for play, and other forms of corruption are not just tolerated but expected. They’re a perk of office.

In that respect Sen. Sanders is little different from Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren or practically every other officeholder you can name. That has to end. Unless it does any other reforms will either be stalled or futile. Start by reforming the Democratic Party. Its ties to the financial sector, cemented in place during the Clinton Administration should be severed or at least attenuated. The big banks received their payoff when they weren’t nationalized in 2009.

One might ask why I emphasize the Democratic Party rather than the Republicans who have just about the same problem. Mostly because unless the Democratic Party is reformed we won’t see a lot of reform in my lifetime. In Illinois there’s a real, proximate need. The mayor of my city and all city-wide elective offices, the president of the county board, the governor and all statewide elected officials, my Congressional representative, and both of my senators, are all Democrats and that is unlikely to change in my lifetime whatever else happens. The Republicans could all become saints and Illinois, Cook County, and Chicago would continue to elect Democrats.

Most of Steven Taylor’s observations in his post-mortem of the Super Tuesday primaries at Outside the Beltway are commonsensical but I want to concur with his last observation in particular:

I think that the veep nominee has to be a either a woman or a minority (or a minority woman). I think more than that, the veep nominee has to be a non-septuagenarian. It, therefore, will not be Elizabeth Warren (that’s as bold a prediction as I am willing to make).

A couple of other remarks. First, if Biden becomes the nominee, whomever he picks for a running mate must be no worse a campaigner than he. That’s a very low bar but, since so many of those who’ve been running for president are such lousy campaigners, it bears mentioning.

Second, it has been my observation that the old rules about running mates are obsolete and that there has occasionally been a sort of aspirational quality to running mates. I don’t know what that would say about a prospective Joe Biden running mate. Biden may be a moderate by present-day Democratic officeholder standards but he’s still quite progressive—his ADA rating is a little higher than Barack Obama’s.

And now Chuck Schumer is doing much what I said he should—he’s backpedaling on the remark of which I took note in an earlier post. The Washington Post reports:

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Thursday that he misspoke when he said that two justices appointed by President Trump to the Supreme Court would “pay the price” for a vote against abortion rights, but he defended his passion on the issue, saying his anger reflected that of “women across America.”

Schumer’s remarks on the Senate floor came a day after his comments at a rally outside the Supreme Court prompted a rare rebuke of a sitting member of Congress by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who said in a statement that “threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous.”

“I should not have used the words I used yesterday. They didn’t come out the way I intended them to,” Schumer told Senate colleagues Thursday. “I’m from Brooklyn. We speak in strong language. I shouldn’t have used the words I did, but in no way was I making a threat. I never — never — would do such a thing.”

In case you think the pushback on the remarks is just coming from a bunch of Republicans, here’s Laurence Tribe’s reaction to Sen. Schumer’s original statement:

“These remarks by @SenSchumer were inexcusable,” he tweeted. “Chief Justice Roberts was right to call him on his comments. I hope the Senator, whom I’ve long admired and consider a friend, apologizes and takes back his implicit threat. It’s beneath him and his office.”

I think that what happened was a Kinsley gaffe—Sen. Schumer got carried away in the moment and said what he really thinks.

At any rate I hope this is the end of the matter but I fear it won’t be. As I have pointed out many times before highly agonistic speech is to be expected in this era of video communications. It’s both effective and affective. Social media influencers are not long form journalists.