Republican Jason Riley and Democrat William Galston express sharply different opinions of what is likely to happen with the Democratic nomination in the columns at the Wall Street Journal. Jason Riley says that Sanders will be the nominee and that the Democratic apparat will line up behind him:

The reality is that Democrats have been moving in Mr. Sanders’s direction for some time. What he’s offering the country is truth in advertising, and if he becomes the nominee, the media and political left will rally to his defense. Liberal commentators will explain away his past kind words for the Soviet Union, Cuba and Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, who wowed him with “their intelligence and their sincerity.” Those who can’t quite bring themselves to defend Mr. Sanders directly will instead train their fire on his critics. Be prepared for the anti-anti-Bernie brigades.

The reactions may be predictable, but they don’t diminish the huge significance of a presidential race between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Mr. Trump’s defeat of Mrs. Clinton was a defeat of someone promising more of what the country had experienced under Barack Obama. As president, Mr. Trump has more or less pushed a traditional Republican agenda, from tax cuts to deregulation to increased military spending. He came to Washington vowing to upend the place, but his bark has been worse than his bite.

By contrast, we’ve no reason to believe that Mr. Sanders is bluffing. He’s 78 and has been drawing up blueprints for the revolution for most of his adult life. His Democratic opponents keep asking how he will pay for Medicare for All, student-loan forgiveness, a Green New Deal and all the rest. But they’re missing the point. These are not economic issues for Mr. Sanders. They’re moral issues. If you believe that cradle-to-grave government health care is a human right, or that tuition-free college should be an entitlement, the cost of providing it is an afterthought.

Mr. Sanders believes that wealth redistribution is more important than wealth creation. He believes that central planners are better allocators of resources than individuals making their own decisions in a capitalist economy. He believes that Michael Bloomberg got rich on the backs of America’s poor. Such views may have once distinguished Mr. Sanders on the political left, but that’s no longer the case. His Democratic challengers have quibbled with his methods but not with his vision. It may fall to Mr. Trump to explain why socialism isn’t simply unfeasible but foolhardy. As the economist Thomas Sowell has noted, the 20th century is full of examples—Mr. Sanders’s beloved Soviet Union and Cuba among them—of “countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty.”

while William Galston is experiencing déjà vu:

A badly split political party nominates an unpopular establishment-wing presidential candidate, who proceeds to lose the general election. The other party’s equally unpopular nominee wins more than 300 electoral votes despite falling far short of a popular-vote majority. The defeated party’s insurgent wing then succeeds in rewriting the party’s rules to its advantage, and an antiestablishment candidate wins the presidential nomination—only to suffer one of the worst landslide losses in American political history.

Readers of a certain age will recognize this description of what befell the Democratic Party in the tumultuous years from 1968 to 1972. The question is whether history is in the process of repeating itself, as many center-left Democrats fear, with Sen. Bernie Sanders assuming the mantle of Sen. George McGovern, the furthest-left presidential nominee in modern history. The parallels between McGovern’s policies and political game plan and those of Mr. Sanders are striking.

I think it’s quite possible for them both to be right because they’re talking about different things. They both seem to think that Democrats will finally settle on Sanders for their nominee. But Mr. Riley thinks the party apparat will come into line behind him while Mr. Galston doesn’t even consider that aspect, preferring to consider whether, once nominated, Sen. Sanders will be elected or will be defeated as George McGovern was.

Let’s consider those two separately. Whether the “party establishment” will actually support Sanders depends on their assessment of what course of action is likely to preserve their phony baloney jobs, whether those jobs are their elective offices, roles in party leadership, with the media, in finance or what have you. As Mr. Riley notes, Sanders is not bluffing and, if elected, he will not be beholden to the party organization for his election. He’s not a team player and will show them no loyalty.
The party establishment has absolutely nothing to gain by supporting Sanders and much to lose if he fails.

As to whether Sanders will win or lose, progressives may comprise half of the Democratic Party but those affiliated with the Democratic Party are a smaller percentage of the electorate than at any time since FDR was elected. The difference resides in the unaffiliated voters who comprise more of the electorate than either Republicans or Democrats do. Will Sanders’s doctrinaire approach attract them or repel them? That will make the difference.

Let’s look at the observations of three Washington Post columnists on the state of the race for the Democratic nomination for president. Let’s start with Helaine Olen. She begins by quoting (and castigating) Lloyd Blankfein:

Lloyd Blankfein has got a problem with Bernie Sanders.

“I might find it harder to vote for Bernie than for Trump,” Blankfein, the 65-year-old former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, told the Financial Times last week. Asked about Trump’s “autocratic” leanings, Blankfein didn’t answer, pointing instead to Trump’s economic accomplishments.

Blankfein is hardly alone in his reluctance. Politico reports Wall Street is in a collective “freakout” about the septuagenarian socialist’s ascendance to Democratic Party front-runner following his overwhelming victory in the Nevada caucuses this past weekend.

But Blankfein’s beef with Sanders is petty and personal: He doesn’t like it when Sanders bashes billionaires like himself, or when he proposes things like a wealth tax. Like many in the financial sector, Blankfein so hates to see billionaires criticized that he would apparently consider voting for President Trump instead — a man who has mistreated so many people and groups, and who has challenged our democracy in frightening ways.

I could go on against Blankfein’s morally challenged tripe. But instead, I think he should hear from Gloria Pharr, Linda Overbey and Michael Collins. I first interviewed these Nevada voters last spring, and I spoke with the three of them again over the weekend.

After describing the three Sanders supporters and why they’ll vote for Sanders. That’s characterized by Ms. Olen (or the WaPo editors, whoever wrote the headline on her column) as “Democratic voters rallying around Sanders”. A bold assertion about a candidate who hasn’t won a majority of the vote in any of the caucuses or primaries in which he has participated so far this cycle. Maybe that will change.

A more skeptical David Von Drehle suggests we take Sen. Sanders neither literally nor seriously, repurposing Salena Zito’s famous remark about Trump supporters:

How seriously can you take a man who styles himself a great champion of social justice yet makes his career not in his home city of New York, nor in his first adult home of Chicago, but in Vermont, one of the smallest and whitest states in America? How literally can take you a man who volunteers to reengineer the entire U.S. economy when his sole managerial experience is as mayor of a city too small to fill the seats at Yankee Stadium?

Sanders is a gestural candidate. Supporting him is a way of pointing in the general direction of a certain kind of change. He’s not interested in the details. After a half-century of promoting single-payer health care, here’s how far he has come in figuring it out:

“Well, I can’t — you know, I can’t rattle off to you every nickel and every dime. But we have accounted for — you — you talked about Medicare-for-all. We have options out there that will pay for it.”

That was the senator’s reply to Anderson Cooper during a recent “60 Minutes” interview.

What’s striking about that is not his failure to account for every nickel and dime. It’s that a good answer exists yet Sanders didn’t give it. The United States already pays for health care through private insurance, public insurance, state and local subsidies, hospital write-offs, out-of-pocket expenses, charitable donations and so on. All told, that adds up to more than $3.5 trillion per year. That’s a lot of nickels and dimes — and a good down payment on Medicare-for-all.

I’m not saying that single-payer health care is a good idea — that’s for voters to decide. I’m saying that Sanders spends more time denouncing than explaining. It’s as though he wants the public to believe that his plan will be crushingly expensive; he’s gesturing to his voters that he’s ready to drain the bank vaults.

while Henry Olsen is more analytical:

Establishment Democrats are deeply afraid of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) becoming their party’s presidential nominee. They may be right to be concerned, but they are still thinking politics is between left and right. Sanders, like Trump, understands that the new politics emerging worldwide is more about ins vs. outs.

Sanders’s politics may be socialist, but his appeal is that of an outsider. He tells the people dissatisfied with America that tinkering around the edges isn’t enough; the country need radical change. The fact that he has never been a Democrat is, for his supporters, cause to trust him. There’s a reason the PAC spun out of his losing 2016 effort is called “Our Revolution.”

The establishment is, by definition, a collection of insiders. They benefit from the current system and favor only incremental change, not revolution. They may support some of the same goals as Sandernistas, but they aren’t fundamentally angry about America itself. That’s one reason they find it so difficult to respond to Sanders’s challenge. It’s also a reason blasting Sanders as extreme or unelectable won’t make his army smaller.

The one thing I would urge those who long for immediate, transformative change to consider is whether such revolutions have ever helped the “outs” at the expense of the “ins”. A quick review would tell them that they never have. They have always promoted the interests of one group of elites against those of another. That’s true of everything from the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution to the Cuban Revolution. That uniform that Castro affected was just for show. He was actually as elite as Batista. Moreso, probably. And Chavez’s daughter is now a billionaire, presumably living in Europe somewhere.

I think that Frank Bruni’s take on last night’s Democratic presidential candidates’ debate was pretty much on the nose. From his New York Times column:

In case you were at all confused, Bernie Sanders is the apocalypse. Or something very close to it.

That was the message from his six rivals on Tuesday night at the latest and perhaps nastiest Democratic debate, which devolved at times into an oratorical melee of overlapping voices, overheated tempers and dire warnings about what would happen if Sanders, the current front-runner in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination, becomes the party’s nominee. President Trump would get four more years. Several of the Democrats on the stage in Charleston, S.C., essentially guaranteed it.

And they scared the hell out of me. That’s only partly because I fear that they’re right about Sanders, whose past and even present are gold mines for material that Trump can use to portray him as an ideological fringe figure. It’s also because the candidates did it in an angry, panicked way that, if I were Trump, I’d edit into a campaign commercial and blanket the airwaves. Its tag line would be: “Even Democrats don’t trust Bernie Sanders. Why should you?”

Nomination contests often get ugly, with candidates in the same party — candidates with some of the same core values — belittling one another. But this felt different. This felt worse. This felt like a genuine freakout.

Ignore Bernie Sanders’s policy views. Discount his dearth of Senate accomplishments or how thin his resume actually is. Does he have the qualities you want to see in a president? I don’t see anything in his temperament or background which would lead me to believe that he can craft a new Democratic coalition for the 21st century. I do think he has the ability to tear the Democratic Party apart and it was on display on the stage in Charleston last night.

Any of the other candidates on stage would have been better.

Actually, what worries me more is not Sanders but his supporters. Do they truly believe that things are this bad? So bad that we need to tear it right down to the ground and start over? I don’t believe they have any notion of just how bad it could get.

Diana Serra Cary, AKA “Baby Peggy”, to my knowledge the last living bona fide star of the silent movie era, has died. Variety reports:

Diana Serra Cary, the child silent film star known by the nickname Baby Peggy, died on Monday in Gustine, Calif. She was 101.

Born on October 29, 1918 as Peggy Jean Montgomery, Cary began her career in the film industry at the early age of 19 months. During a visit with her mother and a friend to Century Film Studio in Hollywood, director Fred Fishbach became impressed with Peggy’s well-mannered behavior that led to her co-starring in short films. She soon began starring in her own series of films, becoming a major Hollywood celebrity and appearing in more than 100 shorts. She starred in a short film as Little Red Riding Hood in 1922 and in Hansel and Gretel in 1923. She starred in five feature-length films including “Captain January” in 1924 that was later remade as a musical starring Shirley Temple.

Not only was Ms. Cary a silent movie star and not only did her movies create the space that Shirley Temple stepped into in the sound era, in later years she was an advocate for other former child performers.

Her death truly marks the end of an era.

You might be interested in this interview of former Chicago Mayor, Clinton spokesman, and Obama Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel from CBS Chicago. Here’s what he says about Bernie Sanders:

“His candidacy is built on a false premise, strategically and policy-wise,” Emanuel, who served in both Clinton and Obama administrations, said of the far left candidate on CBS This Morning.

Sanders, he said, is playing with political fire by dismissing moderate Democrats.

“Bernie Sanders view is, I don’t want these moderate and fickle voters. We just have to turn out our base,” Emanuel said. “His view is, forget the center, we just want to be left. And that’s never been tried.”

Emanuel pointed to six elections—the four presidential wins by Clinton and Obama and the two midterms in 2006 and 2018—in which a center left strategy and “big urban and suburban turnout” were the keys to victory.

Sanders, who has emerged as the front runner after early primaries, is “an ideological risk policy-wise. I don’t think there are 70 million waiting socialists to be woken, who don’t know they are socialists yet.”

Clinton political strategist James Carville was even more blunt. He called the theory not just stupid but science denial.

Maybe a Sanders campaign can run the table in the general election and maybe it can’t. The risk isn’t just that they’ll lose the election giving Donald Trump another four years in office but that they’ll lose Congressional seats that they should have won in states that are presently thought of as Blue States and give President Trump a huge Congressional majority, i.e. a re-run of 1972.

Moore’s Law is the observation by Gordon Moore that the number of circuits on a microchip was doubling every two years while their costs were declining. It has fueled the rapid rise of technology in our daily lives. Many of the advances in so-called “artificial intelligence” are actually byproducts of the increasing power and declining price of hardware rather than improvements in the algorithms that comprise the field of artificial intelligence. Moore’s law is over.

From an article at MIT Technology Review:

“It’s over. This year that became really clear,” says Charles Leiserson, a computer scientist at MIT and a pioneer of parallel computing, in which multiple calculations are performed simultaneously. The newest Intel fabrication plant, meant to build chips with minimum feature sizes of 10 nanometers, was much delayed, delivering chips in 2019, five years after the previous generation of chips with 14-nanometer features. Moore’s Law, Leiserson says, was always about the rate of progress, and “we’re no longer on that rate.” Numerous other prominent computer scientists have also declared Moore’s Law dead in recent years. In early 2019, the CEO of the large chipmaker Nvidia agreed.

In truth, it’s been more a gradual decline than a sudden death. Over the decades, some, including Moore himself at times, fretted that they could see the end in sight, as it got harder to make smaller and smaller transistors. In 1999, an Intel researcher worried that the industry’s goal of making transistors smaller than 100 nanometers by 2005 faced fundamental physical problems with “no known solutions,” like the quantum effects of electrons wandering where they shouldn’t be.

For years the chip industry managed to evade these physical roadblocks. New transistor designs were introduced to better corral the electrons. New lithography methods using extreme ultraviolet radiation were invented when the wavelengths of visible light were too thick to precisely carve out silicon features of only a few tens of nanometers. But progress grew ever more expensive. Economists at Stanford and MIT have calculated that the research effort going into upholding Moore’s Law has risen by a factor of 18 since 1971.

Likewise, the fabs that make the most advanced chips are becoming prohibitively pricey. The cost of a fab is rising at around 13% a year, and is expected to reach $16 billion or more by 2022. Not coincidentally, the number of companies with plans to make the next generation of chips has now shrunk to only three, down from eight in 2010 and 25 in 2002.

If we are to see improvements in technology like those we have seen over the last 40 years, it will need to come from more efficient software. That in turn means that a transition from the present emphasis on producing software at the lowest possible cost to producing the best possible software.

This article by Gideon Rachman at Financial Times makes it clear that annexation has returned to the foreign policy scene:

A recent opinion poll for the Pew Research Center reveals that startling numbers of Europeans are not satisfied with their nation’s borders. Asked whether there are “parts of neighbouring countries that really belong to us”, 67 per cent of Hungarians replied in the affirmative, as did 60 per cent of Greeks, 58 per cent of both Bulgarians and Turks, 53 per cent of Russians and 48 per cent of Poles. Such sentiments even lurk in western Europe — 37 per cent of Spaniards, 36 per cent of Italians and 30 per cent of Germans also agree with the statement.

In normal times, these kinds of ideas would not matter much. Hungarians, for example, can bemoan the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which, as they see it, resulted in the loss of two-thirds of Hungarian land, without believing regaining that territory is a practical idea. The danger is that these are not normal times. The idea of annexation — long taboo in international politics — is creeping back into the global political discussion.

China’s annexation of islands in the South China Sea, Russian seizure of Crimea, Israeli plans to annex parts of the West Bank, there are dozens of other plans, threats, and initiatives already under way.

IMO what all of this indicates is the end of the Pax Americana. A little less than 30 years ago the U. S. denied Saddam Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait. Since then a series of feckless trade and foreign policy decisions have resulted in, at least, a relative decline in American power which is allowing long-festering resentments and nationalistic plans to bubble to the surface all over the world.

When Kara and I were taking our walk on Saturday morning, we came across these yard signs. Something about the names of these candidates running for judges’ seats caught my eye. I just can’t quite put my finger on it.

Roll Call reports that the members of Congress actually agree on something:

A record-setting 403 lawmakers — 75 percent of Capitol Hill — sent companion letters from the Senate and House to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services expressing strong support for Medicare Advantage, the public-private partnership through which more than a third of Medicare beneficiaries receive coverage today.

Sens. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., and Reps. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., Tony Cárdenas, D-Calif., Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., and Mike Kelly, R-Pa., led the letters. The hundreds of co-signers are as ideologically and geographically diverse as the lead authors and were split nearly evenly between Democrats and Republicans.

This showing of congressional unity amid a polarizing election year should not be missed by the media or the public. At a time when health care policy is increasingly partisan, the supermajority of support behind Medicare Advantage offers us a lesson on the future of health care and where lawmakers can find common ground.

At the Better Medicare Alliance, where I serve as president and CEO, we have long said that Medicare Advantage offers a framework on which to build future health care reforms. It is working for consumers who like the quality coverage and care at an affordable cost, and give it a 94 percent satisfaction rating.

Democratic members of Congress like the security of Medicare Advantage’s coverage, accountability for quality care and its leadership in caring for those individuals with chronic conditions. Enrollees are guaranteed the same benefits as those in traditional Medicare and often receive additional ones such as vision, dental, hearing and wellness programs. Ninety-seven percent of plans provide some combination of these benefits and nearly 6 in 10 offer all four. Most recently, Medicare Advantage has offered services that address social risk factors such as meal delivery, transportation to medical appointments or home care.

Likewise, Republicans on Capitol Hill appreciate the choice that Medicare Advantage offers to consumers, seeing this as an alternative to traditional Medicare’s one-size-fits-all coverage. Private plans can modify their offerings to compete based on quality and cost, enabling beneficiaries to choose the plan that works best for them. Virtually all beneficiaries have access to a Medicare Advantage plan and, for the 2020 open enrollment season, the average beneficiary had 28 plans to choose from based on their unique needs.

Lawmakers of both parties appreciate Medicare Advantage’s cost savings for lower- and modest-income beneficiaries — enrollees save an average of $1,276 a year compared to traditional Medicare — and the ability of plans and providers to innovate new models of care and service delivery, all without adding new costs to the government.

If you are dismayed at the lack of bipartisanship in the Congress, you may find this encouraging. If you think more radical solutions than Medicare Advantage are necessary, you could find it disheartening. It all depends.