You may recall that during the Obama Administration I never complained about excesses on the party of the Attorney General or question the president’s authority to direct the Justice Department or to appoint an attorney general that suited him. I did, however, point out that for as long as I can remember, i.e. thirteen different presidents, attorneys general been doing the White House’s dirty work. I don’t know how long that has been the case. Maybe since Edmund Randolph. I don’t like it but that’s the reality.

David von Drehle expresses concern about the potential for an upcoming shambles that will make the Iowa caucus look well-run in his Washington Post column:

Handwriting, meet wall. With so many candidates and this set of rules, can anyone win a majority? We have eight highly ambitious, well-funded people hunched feverishly at the craps table, some rolling hot dice, others sure their luck’s about to change. No one’s ready to walk away.

The field may eventually thin, but not before a lot more votes are cast. And the closer we get to the finish line without a clear winner, the less incentive exists for candidates to drop out. They’ll cling to their pledged delegates as potential bargaining chips.

If the new rules fail to produce a majority, an unholy spectacle of threats, cajolery and attempted deals will surely fill the weeks before the convention. Sanders is already laying the predicate, saying that a failure to anoint him as the nominee if he arrives with a plurality “would be a very divisive moment for the Democratic Party.”

No doubt he’s right, but arguably he’s the one doing the dividing. He spent his whole life outside the Democratic Party, but now he wants to own it. Besides: I’m not sure anyone in the party has enough sway to force a deal.

Suppose no one wins a first-ballot majority in Milwaukee. Chaos. The rules say that every delegate becomes a free agent, free to choose virtually any U.S. citizen over 35. What’s more, some 770 superdelegates (yes, them again) are added to the mix. Do they draft Oprah? Michelle Obama? Does anyone have Al Gore’s phone number? Did Hillary just enter the arena? Is that Bloomberg in a helicopter overhead, dropping cash to the delegates below?

Perhaps this could be avoided. Warren could throw her muscle behind Sanders and try to boost him past 50 percent. She doesn’t seem so inclined. The moderates could draw straws — again, not likely.

Maybe Sanders has a plan. Maybe his reshaping of the rules was intentional and strategic, and not the poorly thought-out tantrum it now appears to have been. But unless he can quickly accelerate from the roughly 25 percent share of voters he won in Iowa and New Hampshire to win decisive majorities from coast to coast, he has set the party on a course to unmapped territory.

The irony is that Sanders is the least-suited candidate for the melee of horse-trading and vote-swapping that may lie ahead. He has few friends in politics, having flaunted his purity through the muddy streets of government for decades, disdaining all who compromise. He makes no deals, so he has no chits to call in. He has offended key unions in the party’s labor base by insisting on an end to private health insurance. Grumpy, sanctimonious and unreflective, Sanders would be ill-equipped to strike the bargains necessary to win the nomination on a second or third — or fourth — ballot. A very divisive moment, indeed.

As a thought experiment let’s consider an entirely different model for presidential candidates. What if the objective were to pick the candidate best prepared to craft a new coalition to suit the changing times every four years? Whatever your views of Barack Obama as a president, you’ve got to admit that he left the Democratic Party in a weakened position after eight years in office. He just wasn’t interested in the job of creating a new, stronger Democratic Party.

Hillary Clinton wasn’t that person, either. And neither is Bernie Sanders.

David Moscrop’s op-ed in the Washington Post illustrates one of my pet peeves:

Pierre Trudeau, the late Canadian prime minister and father of current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, characterized the relationship as akin to sharing a bed with a beast. “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant,” Trudeau said, “no matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast. … One is affected by every twitch and grunt.” He was right. So, it’s understandable that at least some protests against those twitches and grunts take the form of self-satisfied repudiation by comparison.

But the ongoing 2020 U.S. election process is a reminder that some of the remonstrations are on the mark. It’s clear that U.S. democracy is structurally damaged and in need of repair. In this case, duct tape won’t suffice; the mending will require heavy equipment and a willingness to tear the place down to the studs. And at least some of the instructions for getting the job done can be found in the constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy up north.

Canadian elections are among the most secure, reliable and legitimate in the world. They are run by Elections Canada, a national, nonpartisan body that reports to Parliament. On election day, each elector goes to their polling station to vote according to rules set by a federal act and agency procedures that govern everybody. The process is far less politicized and unpredictable than the model of state-by-state responsibility in the United States. Moreover, voting technology in Canada is as simple as it is elegant: paper, pencil, cardboard screen. No voting machines. No punch cards. No Florida in 2000. No Ohio in 2004.

In Canada, federal electoral districts are recalculated and redistributed every 10 years, after the census. The process is led by electoral boundaries commissions in each province, chaired by a judge and undertaken by the chair and two other members. It isn’t without the occasional controversy, and some Canadian ridings are home to considerably more electors than others, but the outcome of seat redistribution in Canada doesn’t suffer from the same partisan — and sometimes racist — failures of the state-based redistricting model that allows for gerrymandering. Contrary to the impulse of the uber-democrat who believes that democracy means chaining each element of the state to an elected office, the Canadian system recognizes that the further politicians are from the process of determining electoral boundaries, the more fair and legitimate elections will be.

The influence of money might be the single most significant shortcoming in U.S. electoral politics — and beyond it. In Canada, elections are affected by money, but parties are forced to rely on small, individual donations by citizens and residents — currently capped at 1,600 Canadian dollars (about $1,200) per year for each party, and the same amount for candidates or riding associations, independent candidates and leadership contestants — since corporate, association and union donations are forbidden. Public funding helps level electoral contests through reimbursement for some election expenses and tax rebates, while strict and modest election spending limits further constrain the corrosive force of money.

The pet peeve is that countries are systems. Big, complicated systems. It is impossible to pick one feature or another cafeteria-style and import them into another country. Which of Canada’s other features should we import? What are the critical features which caused Canada to become what it is?

• Have longer winters
• Be more ethnically homogeneous
• Remain a colony of Great Britain for another two hundred years
• Not assume the role of the world’s policeman

just to name four major differences between Canada and the United States among the thousands.

I like Canada. In many ways I admire Canada. But Canada is not the United States. Our politics has always been more rough-and-tumble than Canada’s. And we have much less social cohesion than the Canadians do.

I agree that we need reform but to achieve that reform we’ll need to look within. We should strive to be the best United States we can become rather than trying to emulate other countries whose differences are as great or greater than their similarities with us.

The editors of the Washington Post salute Xu Zhangrun’s throwing down of the gauntlet to the present Chinese authorities:

THE NEW coronavirus sweeping China has produced images of a government acting with urgency: erecting hospitals almost overnight, cordoning off megacities, declaring a “people’s war.” But from inside China comes a darker message. Xu Zhangrun, a professor at Tsinghua University who was punished for his unsparing critique of President Xi Jinping, declares that China has reached a dangerous dead end and the coronavirus has exposed the bankruptcy of its rulers. Mr. Xu courageously insists that democracy is the only way out.

[…]

Mr. Xu writes, “The coronavirus epidemic has revealed the rotten core of Chinese governance.” He recalls the rise of a new generation of competent technocrats in earlier years. Now, he says, President Xi’s campaigns for stricter controls and a return to Maoist ideology has led to a “system-wide collapse of professional ethics and commitment.” The Chinese government system now “values the mediocre, the dilatory and the timid,” he says, and is mired in “inoperability.” The mess caused by local officials in Wuhan who covered up early signs of the disease “has infected every province and the rot goes right up to Beijing.”

Two points. The valuing of “the mediocre, the dilatory and the timid” didn’t start in January. It has been a feature of the Chinese system for at least a decade and probably a lot more. It is a feature of all authoritarian governments.

Second, there are many, many more possibilities than liberal democracy for China and IMO all of them are more likely than that. For example, the authoritarian fist could tighten. That is by far the greatest likelihood. The Chinese military might be a threat to other countries but it is definitely a threat to the Chinese people themselves.

Another possibility is fragmentation. I don’t know enough about internal CCP politburo politics but it may be that some of its members have the power to carve out little kingdoms of their own. It’s happened before.

I strongly suspect we’re seeing the beginnings of unrest in China. We will learn soon enough if, to paraphrase Metternich’s wisecrack, when China sneezes the world gets a cold.

This remark from Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and quoted by Fox Business struck me as unnecessarily paranoid:

“The situation is very grave in part because … China was lying from the beginning, and they’re still lying today,” Cotton, R-Ark., said. “And also because there are so many unknowns about this virus. For example, how many people one person can infect once they have the virus?”

[…]

He also brought up the “questions” surrounding the biosafety level 4 “super laboratory” in Wuhan, the city where the virus is believed to have originated.

“This virus did not originate in the Wuhan animal market,” Cotton said. “Epidemiologists who are widely respected from China who published a study … have demonstrated that several of the original cases did not have any contact with that food market. The virus went into that food market before it came out.”

“We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases. Now we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning we need to at least ask the question,” Cotton continued.

The one thing about Wuhan coronavirus about which we should have confidence is that it’s not a bioweapon. The characteristics of a good bioweapon include infectivity, virulence, toxicity, pathogenicity, incubation period, lethality, and stability. Nothing we actually know about it suggests it has any of the characteristics of a useful bioweapon and everything suggests a naturally existing pathogen.

Besides I think the Chinese are more competent than that.

We have enough nutty ideas floating around without spreading more.

There’s yet another take on why the United States should adopt a single-payer system, this time articulated by Igor Derysh at Salon:

The cost of administering health care in the United States costs four times as much as it does in Canada, which has had a single-payer system for nearly 60 years, according to a new study.

The average American pays a whopping $2,497 per year in administrative costs — which fund insurer overhead and salaries of administrative workers as well as executive pay packages and growing profits — compared to $551 per person per year in Canada, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine last month. The study estimated that cutting administrative costs to Canadian levels could save more than $600 billion per year.

It’s being treated like a new finding but that health care administrative costs are lower in Canada has been well known for years. I recall reading an article in the New England Journal of Medicine more than 15 years ago that found that health care administrative costs in Canada were about 15% of costs while those in the U. S. about 30% of costs. Those costs aren’t just insurance companies. They also include the cost of administration for hospitals, group practices, and individual physicians’ offices. It pays to hire administrators.

For decades, after I’d spent time working in Germany, I supported a single-payer system for the United States. I no longer do. Bill Clinton’s failed attempt at reforming the health care system convinced me that such efforts were in vain. The problems with our system won’t be fixed by changing who pays.

For one thing everything undertaken by our governments costs more than the same things in other developed countries including road-building, education, and national defense. Health care really doesn’t look so different in that respect.

To convince me that a single-payer system is a good idea for the United States you’ll need to convince me of the following:

• Health care really is different from education.
• The scale of our system has nothing to do with its expense. We are almost three times the size of the next largest developed liberal democracy. Bureaucracies tend to increase in cost with scale.
• Costs in our system can be substantially reduced without cutting the wages of people working in the health care sector OR people working in the health care sector will gladly accept a cut in wages.
• Americans will be willing to accept a system that is acknowledged to be tiered.
• There’s no difference in efficiency or public support between a system administered by the national government and one administered by the states. Canada’s system is administered by its provinces.
• The system you propose isn’t any more lavish than those of other liberal democracies.
• We will be willing to bar immigrants from our health care system OR eliminate illegal immigration.

I think that the high costs of our system are due to a combination of scale, lack of social cohesion, pursuit of profits, and politics.

My wife and I decided to send our DNA samples into AncestryDNA and last week I finally received my results. There were really no surprises on my side. Mostly it confirmed what I already knew—my ancestry is 100% northwest European. My mom was actually mostly Irish with a little French or, perhaps, northwest German in the mix. I didn’t get an answer to one of my enduring questions: were the Schneiders French or German? Yes, I know Schneider is a German name but lots of Alsatian French people have German surnames. I’ll need to keep searching for that answer.

And my dad was entirely northwest European. No real signs of the Swabian ancestry he joked about.

The most important leads I received were in the form of connections with other people with related DNA. One of them is a descendant of my great-grandmother Emma Bader’s sister, Rosa. I have reached out to her and, if luck is with me, she knows more about the Baders than I do. The Baders are another of my lines about which I have questions. If she doesn’t, I’ll gladly share what I know with her.

If you’re wondering about that 2% Norway finding, that’s easy enough to explain. My maternal haplotype is also the most common maternal haplotype in Norway. Those Norsemen got around, leaving evidence of their passing in Ireland.

As Yogi Berra put it (or Niels Bohr, depending), prediction is hard, particularly about the future. I’ve been interested in mathematical models for more than the last half century. Here’s the dirty little secret about them: the results you get out of them can be no better than the data you put into them.

I’ve been reading up on the disease models’ projections of the course of the Wuhan coronovirus outbreak. Not to put too fine a point on it but they don’t make sense. They don’t comport with what seems to be happening at all. Funny thing, though. Several of them would be right on the money if the numbers of infected and killed were much, much higher than are being reported from China.

Even as we speak economists are industriously trying to predict the run-on effects on the economy of the outbreak. BusinessInside reports:

Economists predict China’s economy will slow to to growth levels not seen since the 2008 financial crisis, a Reuters poll showed on Friday. The 40 economists surveyed said gross domestic product will fall to 4.5% in the first quarter, while full-year 2020 growth could be 5.5%, down from 6.1% last year.

Further, a recent report from Bloomberg found that analysts now see China GDP going as low as 3.8%. That would be an especially problematic growth rate, as it sits below 4.15% — a threshold that, when breached, would send the so-called bad loan ratio at China’s biggest banks up five-fold, Bloomberg finds.

For context, in 2019 the sector saw record loan defaults and the first bank seizure in twenty years in 2019 — and that was when the economy was expanding at a much more robust 6%.

The U. S. economy is anticipated to be affected but not nearly so much. You would expect the stock market to be more affected. Most of the present boom is derived from increases in the values of just five stocks and one of those, Apple, is more dependent on a robust Chinese economy than the others. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on how you look at it) the stock market is almost entirely divorced from the real economy. So far it doesn’t really seem to be responding to the outbreak. Stock market recoveries from previous serious outbreaks have been quite rapid.

I’m skeptical than we can make any sort of informed predictions about the Chinese or U. S. economies based on the data about COVID-19 that are coming out of China. It makes a difference whether the outbreak started in January or November and whether there have been 68,000 infections or 680,000. Making projections from reliable data is hard enough.

At Gen Democrat Karlyn Borysenko explains her reactions after attending a Trump rally in New Hampshire:

Today, I voted in the New Hampshire Democratic Primary for Pete Buttigieg. I genuinely feel that Pete would be great for this country, and maybe he’ll have his opportunity in the future. But tomorrow, I’ll be changing my voter registration from Democrat to Independent and walking away from the party I’ve spent the past 20 years in to sit in the middle for a while. There are extremes in both parties that I am uncomfortable with, but I also fundamentally believe that most people on both sides are good, decent human beings who want the best for the country and have dramatic disagreements on how to get there. But until we start seeing each other as human beings, there will be no bridging the divide. I refuse to be a part of the divisiveness any longer. I refuse to hate people I don’t know simply because they choose to vote for someone else. If we’re going to heal the country, we have to start taking steps toward one another rather than away.

I think the Democrats have an ass-kicking coming to them in November, and I think most of them will be utterly shocked when it happens, because they’re existing in an echo chamber that is not reflective of the broader reality. I hope it’s a wake-up call that causes them to take a long look in the mirror and really ask themselves how they got here. Maybe then they’ll start listening. I tend to doubt it, but I can hope.

For me the message here is don’t demonize other people. Ever. Simply that they are human entitles them to our consideration and respect. Disagree with their actions if you will but don’t attribute evil motives to them. Motives are tricky things.

When the demons are found to be ordinary, decent people with whom you just disagree, it is perfectly natural to become suspicious of those doing the demonization, believing, as Booth Tarkington might have said, that they deserve their comeuppance.