Seats at the Table

Donna Brazile, the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, was thoughtful enough to insist that the Democrats "deserved a seat at the table" of the incoming Trump Administration in setting policy for the USA.

This is the same Donna Brazile who helped fix the Democrat presidential nomination for Hillary Clinton while a contributor to CNN, by feeding her questions that were to be asked at debates, questions that were not provided to Bernie Sanders or Martin O'Malley or Jim Webb, who also happened to be candidates from the Democrat side of the primaries.

That, of course, got her canned as a contributor to CNN, although it's a bit hard to tell if that happened because of her actions or, well, because CNN doesn't get watched as much anymore, possibly because their "contributors" cheat on behalf of their favored candidates.

I have to tell you, I don't think the Democrats "deserve" anything, on the merits.  They lost all manner of elections in November, up and down from the state legislatures to the House and Senate, to governorships and the presidency.  They were rejected, in no small part, because of who actually had seats at the table.

There was Harry Reid, their leader in the Senate, who lied in the protected well of the Senate about Mitt Romney's taxes and then admitted later both that he had lied, and that he lied for political purposes.  There was Al Sharpton, who dined regularly at the White House, although his taxes get paid "erratically", to be kind, and "eventually", to be less kind.  The word Americans would use would be "feloniously", but he had "a seat at the table."  Sure the party of the guy that invited him deserves "a seat."

You know how you get a seat at the table?  You win elections, which is something that has not been an area of success for the Democrats much since 2008.  You forfeit that seat when you act like the Democrats did in 2009, ramming Obamacare down the throats of the USA through a parliamentary fudge move without a shred of Republican support, not a single vote.

Did not the Republicans "deserve a seat at the table" in 2009?  Apparently they did not, as they were not reached out to by the Obamists to comment or consult on U.S. policy.  But Donna Brazile feels that works one way for them and another way for the Democrats.  Why it should be different, she does not say.  Do as I say, not as I do.

The 2016 election, more than any in decades, was a choice of approach for the voting public.  Very important point: The person that Donald Trump is -- the billionaire businessman and celebrity of decades standing -- did not get elected because he was famous, rich and had a TV show.  The person that got elected president was elected because he was someone who tapped into all the frustration about Congress and the White House having not done what the nation wanted; who said he would "drain the swamp", protect our veterans, cut taxes, get jobs going hard from private business.

That person just happened to be Donald Trump.

Do you understand the point?  This was an election of approaches, of policy, and not, as it may have appeared given the celebrity of the victor, an election of personality.  It is precisely that which means the Democrats, who caused the problems in the first place, do not "deserve" a seat at the table of leadership.

We didn't just select Donald Trump the man; we selected an approach that says to "do things differently from the way that have been being done."  That is utterly impossible for Democrats to do.  They need to play the loyal opposition and try to work with the incoming administration to represent their views, but they were "selected out" by the voters.

The new administration should be doing what it was elected to do.  The table is fully seated.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Guest Column: The Future of Nuclear Power

I have wanted to comment about how the removal of shackles on nuclear power under the incoming Trump Administration would have even more of a positive effect in energy prices, adding to more drilling of natural gas and oil, and truly push the USA toward energy independence -- and the political benefits of that.

Unfortunately, nuclear energy and regulation is beyond my ken, so I asked Ed Fenstermacher, who has written a few guest columns before, who is a friend and classmate of mine from the M.I.T. Class of 1973, about 45 years back, to write this column.  Ed is a former Air Force officer, but more importantly nuclear energy is his business, as he is currently a nuclear engineering consultant (and a husband, and proud father of three.)  Ed can be reached at efenster@alum.mit.edu.

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There are several main factors that will determine the viability of nuclear power in the near future, the same factors that affect all its competitors for generating electricity: coal, oil, natural gas, hydroelectric, wind, solar and other “renewable” power sources.  These are the cost of generating power, the availability of the energy source, the environmental impact including waste disposal, and safety.  All of these are also shaped by government regulatory conditions, both at the national level and local level.  All of these fold back into the cost.

As far as availability is concerned, nuclear fuel is widely available.  We are reaching the point where it can be economically extracted from seawater, making it effectively a renewable resource, like hydroelectric power, wind and solar.  Unlike hydroelectric, it is widely available (nearly all possible hydroelectric sources in the US are already in use.)  Unlike solar, it is available at all times of the day; and unlike wind, it is available in all weather conditions.   Nuclear fuel is far more comparable in availability to fossil fuels, such as coal (about 400 years’ worth at present consumption levels).  Fracking has greatly increased the availability and decreased the price of both oil and natural gas, and consequently decreased the price of these fuels as well.

Regulation of nuclear power is done at the federal level for safety and environmental reasons.  Nuclear plants need to comply with a plethora of Federal Regulations issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the EPA, and others.  Fortunately, the NRC and Congress realized some time ago that their regulations had to be more rationally applied, or they would not have an industry to regulate.  Thus, NRC regulations now make it easier to build a nuclear plant than it was 40 years ago.   

At that time you had to get a Construction Permit to build a plant, and a separate Operating Permit to run it.  If rules changed in the years it took to build the plant, though, well, tough!  You would then either have to do costly modifications after the plant was built, or never get to operate it at all.   

This is what happened to the Shoreham Plant on Long Island, which operated at low power just long enough to test and to ensure that the equipment was radioactive, and then shut down before producing a megawatt hour of commercial electricity.  The licensing process is now a single step:  if a utility gets a permit to build the plant, and builds it as planned (meeting all of the quality standards needed), it will be allowed to operate it.

At the state and local level, the regulation is largely economic, and there are rules which require that any new facility be used and usable in order to be included in the rate base.  Unlike Apple, which can use the profits from the iPhone 6 to finance development of the iPhone 7, a public utility has the profit from Nuclear Plant 2 regulated to keep its profits from being excessive, and can’t use them to finance Nuclear Plant 3.  

These rules nominally apply equally to all forms of power, but end up having an impact proportional to how long it takes to build a plant, because interest is accruing during that period that can only be paid off after the plant is operational.  Nuclear power plants take about six years to build under good conditions, while gas-fired plants take only about a year.  Thus, the used and usable provisions hurt nuclear more than other types.

Another type of regulation requires utilities to buy back excessive solar power from rooftop residential generators.  Similarly, they may have wind generation facilities that generate power unsteadily.  Unfortunately, this power may be available when it is not needed.  If the remaining power is nuclear, the excess power is wasted, because nuclear plants cannot change their power quickly.   If that power is gas generated, the plant generation can be easily adjusted to accommodate these changes. 

Despite the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents, any new plants in the United States will be safe.  The Chernobyl design would never have been licensed here, while the Fukushima plant had not had upgrades that are required in the USA.  The designs of new nuclear plants being built now have passive cooling systems that avoid meltdowns under any conditions, short of a nuclear war. With Fukushima, there were no radiation-related deaths or injuries, but considerable and costly environmental damage.  This will not happen with the new designs, because the nuclear industry has an unequaled record of learning from its own safety issues.

Another environmental issue, of course, is disposal of nuclear waste.  The Obama Administration and Harry Reid colluded to kill the Yucca Mountain Waste Repository, with Obama appointing Gregory Jaczko, formerly of Reid’s staff, to chair the NRC.  Jaszko was eventually replaced, after the NRC’s Inspector General found he had been withholding information from the other commissioners, in order to stop Yucca Mountain from being licensed.   

This led all the other commissioners, including the Democrats, to complain about him to Congress.  He was replaced, but that damage had been done.  This is one thing the Trump Administration could, and needs to, reverse.  Objectively, the repository should have been licensed.  Bringing it back would improve the outlook for nuclear power.

What doesn’t help, however, is that the nuclear supply chain has been shut down for decades.  Just as we can no longer build a Saturn V rocket, we have lost the capability to make a lot of the parts required for plants, and we have to tool up to do that.  The parts need to be of the highest quality.  This has become an issue particularly in recent weeks with supply problems with Toshiba’s Westinghouse subsidiary -- causing a precipitous drop in Toshiba's valuation -- and with the discovery of quality problems being covered up by the French nuclear supplier Areva.  These supply line issues raise the possibility that schedules cannot be met, costs will increase, and plants may be abandoned partially completed.

The net result of all of these factors is that right now, the short-term costs of natural gas make new nuclear plants, and even some existing plants, non-competitive.  I would love to see people start thinking about the long-term impacts of their decisions, but the decisions of utilities are driven by the interests of their stockholders and by the Public Utility Commissions that regulate their prices.   

The chances that either group will have a planning horizon of several decades or more is about the same as of the AARP worrying about the viability of Social Security several decades hence.  As much as I would like to believe otherwise, I don’t see a lot of new nuclear construction in the near future, even if Trump adopts policies more friendly to it -- Ed Fenstermacher.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

The Mikado Strikes Again

Last spring, I did a piece regarding the proposed (and, since, executed) production of Gilbert and Sullivan's classic operetta "The Mikado" by the Lamplighters, a repertory theater company in San Francisco.

As you will recall (read the link if you have not yet, please), a local protest by the Bay Area community of Asians in theater -- after having been asked for their input in good faith -- led to the expected result.  The professional protestors insisted that all the roles go to ethnic Asians, so the Lamplighters simply re-staged their proposed production to an Italian setting, cheating some number of Asian-American actors out of professional roles.

The New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players (NYGASP) is a similar company that performs the Savoy operas in New York and on the road as well, but far more frequently during the year.  Since "The Mikado" is one of the classic three operettas of the series, they couldn't drop it from their repertoire, nor could they do anything as drastic as changing the setting to Italy.

Their attempt at a solution included a casting one -- trying to get more Asian-American actors to audition for the company, which was, I have heard, the most difficult of all aspects to do.  This, among other things, was documented in the current issue of the New Yorker magazine, linked here.

This is the quote from the piece that I found most curious:

"After an additional round of auditions, focussed [sic] on “diverse” casting, Viet Vo, a lapsed business major, was hired into the ensemble, and three Asian-American actors were given key roles. A recent study found that, in the 2014-15 theatre season, only four per cent of Broadway and off-Broadway roles were filled by actors of Asian descent. After N.Y.G.A.S.P.’s recent round of hirings, ten per cent of the company was made up of Asian-Americans."

If ethnically appropriate casting matters, it matters.  If it doesn't matter, then it doesn't.

So apparently it does, because the people at NYGASP decided to do something, in the form of engaging a Chinese-American assistant director (curiously, the article mentioned him at least a dozen times without once mentioning the name of the actual director) and three "Asian-Americans" in key roles.

We don't know their names (I couldn't find a link), so I'm not sure if any of the three is actually an ethnic Japanese, but the two names I did see were the assistant director and the "lapsed business major."  One of them is ethnic Chinese, and the other Vietnamese, neither of which, at my last analysis, equated to being any more suitable to lend their talents to make the production more Japanese than I am able to.

I see a lot of things in black and white, of course, but there are shades of gray for me -- when shades of gray are appropriate.  This is not one.

First, how are the protestors supposed to be satisfied with an assistant director and three or four actors in the production being "Asian"?  Is this about authenticity, or is this about winning some kind of battle?  Either the whole company needs to be ethnically authentic or the protestors should not be satisfied.  If the complaint is about authenticity, and it had better be, then nothing short of a full cast of racially suitable actors should be OK.

Second, I don't know how to say this any better, but all Asians are not the same.  Chinese culture is not the same as Japanese culture.  Koreans are not Vietnamese.  Some groups hate each other with a white-hot passion that ... you get the idea. There are obviously language differences, but the cultures are unique, and the racial distinctions are certainly noticeable across the continent.

So how exactly does it satisfy anyone's checklist to say that a Vietnamese-American actor can play a Japanese character, even when the character is only "sort of" Japanese (the characters are meant to represent and satirize Englishmen, in the attributes Gilbert lampooned in "The Mikado", by using a Japanese setting and what I can only call "faux Japanese" characters).

In other words, if (A) you object to "Mikado" because of its portrayal of Japan and Japanese people; and (B) you believe, somehow, that your objection can be satisfied by casting racially suitable people, then how the heck can it possibly satisfy you to have a handful of ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese actors -- not even half the company -- enough to withdraw your protest?

Here's the thing.  Any self-respecting Japanese person, even a Japanese-American, can tell a Japanese from a Vietnamese.  I mean, I can, and I'm a European-American.  My wife is Italian all the way.  Suppose that someone made a movie of Sylvester Stallone's life and cast a blond, obviously non-Italian actor like, say, Owen Wilson, dyeing his hair and making his face up a bit more olive.  Let's face it, Stallone is stereotypically Italian-looking.

Would my wife scream about the casting?  I don't know, maybe, but plenty of other Italians sure would, and some of them live in New Jersey and you don't want to cross them.  Now, I don't know if Asian-Americans of any ethnic background would readily see the difference, but plenty of people would be plenty unhappy.

My point in all this is that parsing ethnicities is a slippery, slippery slope.  I feel that protesters in this case, if somehow they decide that NYGASP's casting solution is acceptable, are totally hypocritical, even if I am somehow rationalizing what the Asian theater people in San Francisco did in insisting on a full casting of Asian-Americans (hint: I'm not; I didn't say they were right, just that they were consistent).

Now -- the facts of this case are (and I checked) that before the production was announced, NYGASP proactively took many steps to ensure that the Asian community in (at least) New York would feel like it had been reached out to.  Props to NYGASP for working very hard at this after the lesson from San Francisco!  Certainly the show did not get the protests before opening night that forced the Lamplighters on the other coast to Italianize their own version.  And NYGASP did work hard with the various purported representatives of Asian New York to show that they truly cared, which they did.
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All this reminded me that earlier this week, the Japanese prime minister, Mr. Abe, was at Pearl Harbor for ceremonies marking the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on the base there.  Lots of news reporters commented, "Ooooh, he didn't actually apologize for the attacks!".

I didn't care.  It's 2016 and the Japanese are our friends now, and my father was in the Army when those bombs dropped.  Anyone who flew a Zero that day and is somehow still alive is over 90 years old and didn't issue the attack orders anyway.  Those who were complicit in the decision to attack us are all dead now.  Their successors have no more need to apologize to the USA or to the families of the lost servicemen than I, who have no ancestors in the USA prior to 1880, have to apologize for slavery.

I digress, but only a little.  Happy New Year!

 Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Scott City is a Nice Place for the U.N.

I have never been to Scott City, Kansas; let's get that out of the way first.  I have seen it on a map, and even know someone who lives there, and I'll assume that you likely do not.

If you were to look at Scott City on one of those map programs that shows you satellite views of what it looks like, you would assume that it is a typical western Kansas town, maybe 4,000 residents, whose residents' primary purpose is to support agriculture on the plains that surround it; that the town itself probably has its share of feed stores and tractor supply places, and you'd be right.

If you look at that satellite view, you will see all those neat circles that are the artifact of the watering machines that travel in circles in order to water crops efficiently.

And it has an airport too, out on the eastern side of the town.  That's plot material.

Last week, the United Nations, of which we pay a healthy share of the budget, decided to issue a resolution condemning Israel for constructing settlements in areas it has occupied for 50 years or so.  The scandals are many, but let's confine ourselves to two -- first, that this was simply the latest of 20 resolutions condemning Israel this year alone, more than five times as many as the U.N.'s resolutions condemning all other nations combined, including Iran, North Korea and Syria; and second that the USA, for only a few weeks more represented by Barack Obama, chose not to veto this resolution.

Notwithstanding the venom of Obama choosing his "way out the door time" to decide to screw our friend and ally in the Middle East, we do indeed need to look at the other scandal, the preponderance of anti-Israel Security Council resolutions.  Because if that is the apparent purpose of the Security Council -- really, can we point to anything that it has done productively since maybe the Kosovo wars? -- then why is the USA even wasting its time?

And that's where Scott City comes into play.

You see, right now, the UN Headquarters are located on otherwise valuable land in Manhattan, by the good graces of the United States of America.  If we are going to start caring about how our taxpayers' money is being spent, then I can think of no better place than our hosting of the U.N.  Why is it necessary to put them on expensive land in New York?

Scott City is a perfect place to relocate the U.N.  There is plenty of land; so someone could not only build a building to serve as Headquarters, but also a big hotel for the ambassadors and their staffs during the active sessions of the U.N.  While the airport is being expanded to support the uptick in travel there, you can fly into nearby Garden City, reachable from, say, Washington-Dulles with only a connection in Dallas, or just a quick Dulles-Charlotte-Dallas-Garden City loop.  There is bus and taxi service up to Scott City.  Viola!

There are so many benefits that I can barely fit them into one column.  For example, people would actually see a part of America they never do, especially the press who would have to go to a new part of the country to cover the U.N.  In fact, precisely because there is little do in Scott City other than buying cattle feed and fertilizer, it is possible that the U.N. might move to a few brief sessions each quarter and have everyone go back home most of the year, where they can do things other than pass resolutions condemning Israel.

Of course if some of the pompous jackals in the U.N. decide that the middle of western Kansas is not splendid enough for them, well, they are free to move U.N. Headquarters to their own countries, like, you know, Kazakhstan or Burkina Faso or Yemen.  Yeah, maybe Yemen.

President-elect Donald Trump is just the kind of person, and just the kind of president, who would consider this sort of thing, so I will be sure to tweet him a link to this article.  I guarantee that if it gets to his attention, he will chuckle and then maybe give it some thought.

Wouldn't you?

 Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Obama's Third Term?

Yesterday I started talking about the odd statement from the outgoing-but-not-soon-enough president, Barack H. Obama, to the effect that he thought he would have won had he been able to go for a third term.  That pesky Constitution, of course got in the way, but some other things might have as well.

There is no denying that Obama's personal popularity has finally gotten to a decent level, at least as far as the polls go.  Now, exactly what is asked in those polls is probably suspect, although I usually don't challenge the methodology of experienced professionals in the business.

They may be wanting (or claiming to be wanting) to know if the respondent is approving of the job performance of the guy, and may actually ask that.  But that isn't exactly ensuring that the respondent is answering that.  There are, after all, polls asking about -- or allowing the respondent to answer about -- personal popularity.

Either way, I don't want to get into a debate about the way people answer those things.  After all, if I get a poll on the phone and someone I don't know asks me if I approve of Barack Obama's job performance or, worse, if I approve of him personally, I'd probably hang up.  I consider the fact that everything negative about Obama that's said in the press is turned by the left into a racial statement.

Ask Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, who declared in Obama's first term that he would try to make him a "one-term president" and was immediately castigated for some kind of racial statement.  Ask the "birthers" who, even this year, were categorized as trying to de-legitimize the "first black president", even though Obama's birthplace had nothing to do with his race.

So I'm not about to comment to a stranger, polling me on the phone, about Barack Obama, no matter how they phrase the question.  Not happening.  There's racism, murder and rape in descending order of animus among the left, and murder is slipping a bit.

That's me.  I'm a big boy who can take it; besides, with nearly 600 essays online and many of them not exactly flattering to the outgoing president, I'm out there as a non-admirer of his enough already for all to see.  Bottom line is that I doubt the accuracy of the polls, not because they're worded oddly, but because we're likely only to have a few weeks more of them, and surely a lot of respondents are saying "Yeah, sure, he was fine, loved him, blah, blah, glad he'll be gone but I'm going to lie to you because it's easier than getting called a racist and by the way, he'll be gone soon, did I mention that?"

Because I really don't believe for a minute that 55% of the USA thinks he did a good job.  After all, 46% just voted for Donald Trump and actually elected him president, and not even 1% could possibly think Obama was worth the time to talk about -- and yet still vote for Trump.  And that's before you throw in the 5% or so that voted for the other extra-party candidates.  Surely a lot of them weren't too happy with Obama either.

But more than anything, Obama, as much as anyone, lost the election himself.  Donald Trump was quite consistent in tying Hillary Clinton to Obama's legacy and calling her a potential "third term of Obama."  Barack Obama himself said the same thing -- that when campaigning for her, he said he would consider it "a personal affront to his "legacy" if she were not elected.  And he certainly campaigned, right out there with Beyonce and Jay-Z and all those other statesmen.

Guess what, Barry -- she was not elected.  And it was your presidency and your legacy -- not your race -- that was on the ballot, and the voters rejected it (outside of California).  They rejected a continuation of your feckless, weak foreign policy.  They rejected abysmal economic growth.  They rejected the steady decay in the percentage of Americans in the labor force.  They rejected your sending Guantanamo detainees back to the battlefield, your inane Iran nuclear deal, your inability to call Islamist terrorism what it is and wondered why it was a stand you would make.

Shall I go on?  Black Lives Matter and the taking the side of the convenience store robber and assailant Michael Brown instead of the cop who kept any other victim from being possibly killed by him?  The apology tour?  Contemptible treatment of our ally in Israel, ending with the vicious action by Obama in the U.N. this past week?

Nope, I don't think Obama was that likely to have won against Trump, as I think about it, unless somehow he got the lemmings to the polls.  Which could have happened.

But if it came to that, I think it would have been tough for Barack Obama the man to have overcome Barack Obama, the president.

Especially with Donald Trump making the case.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Obama Thinks He'd Get Reelected, Eh?

In what might otherwise be a slow news week with all the jackals on vacation, Barack Obama is out there trying to set the stage for his "shadow government" by trying to claim that he is relevant enough.  His protestation this week was that he would have won had he been eligible to run again, which thankfully the Constitution now prevents.  Quoth Obama:

"In my travels around the country, talking to people .... Even people who disagreed with me thought that our vision was the right one."

Now, we don't know whether or not Obama would have indeed won a third term.  He ran twice against Republicans who would not actually take him on -- McCain never made the case that no one knew squat about the guy, while Romney declined, even with the last word in the last debate, to rip Obama apart over Benghazi, at a time when well-rehearsed words would have really helped.

Donald Trump would not have held back in 2016 no matter what color Obama's father was -- and you know that Obama doesn't even get nominated in 2008 if he wasn't half-black, certainly not against Hillary's machine.  Trump spent half his criticism time on the stump ripping everything Obama did, when he wasn't ripping everything Hillary did.

But we'll never know what would have been the case had a third term been legal, of course.

What I do think is that Obama's answer is a bit bizarre.  I mean, how many of those ordinary Americans do you think ever talked to Barack Obama in his "travels around the country"?  When exactly was that, that he talked to Americans, by the way?  On the golf course?

Who were the people who "disagreed with him" that he actually talked to about the direction of the country?  Caddies?  Oops, no, he used a cart.  No, Obama wouldn't even allow people who disagreed with him within a mile of the White House, and their opinions were clearly not welcome, which is why there was a flood of generals and admirals retiring during his administration, rather than work for an autocrat who "knew better" than they.

You have to take statements like Obama's apart before they get any traction.  Barack Obama never talked to anyone who "disagreed with him, but thought he was going in the right direction", because there aren't any, and it doesn't make sense that there are.  Obama is a dogmatic ideologue, so that opposition to him is not on methodology but on ideology.  You disagree with him because he's aiming in the wrong direction.

The existence of such people who do not exist, is the premise for Obama claiming that he would have been re-reelected.  The claim that he would have been the election winner is, in his plan, the premise for his shadow government -- "The people wanted me still to be president, so I should set up a parallel government to represent them."

Look, I don't know if Obama would have won the election.  Trump won, electorally, because he carried states he had to, plus some states like Michigan and Pennsylvania where black voters didn't show up at the polls for Hillary.  They might have shown up for Obama, and they might have not done so.  The ones in New York and California wouldn't have mattered. 

Had Trump been facing Obama, he might very well have pressed the fact that Obama was absolutely horrible for black Americans, even harder than he appealed to them against Hillary with pretty much that message.

Just know this -- Obama is trying to stay relevant.  He is an ideologue, and cannot just go away to some professorship, in some leftist university environment, to teach and be adored.  He has to poke his nose in, and there will always be those who, because of his race, will try to press his relevance.

America knows better, we can certainly hope.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Yes, the "Emperor's New Clothes" Returns Yet Again

Donald Trump is a very, very different fellow.  More importantly, he is going to be a very, very different president.  How that becomes an "Emperor's New Clothes" story without anyone assuming that Trump is playing the character of the Emperor is fascinating -- in fact, it turns out that the rest of government is, but that's plot material.

If you hadn't noticed, Trump has been doing some "president things" lately, beginning with intervening in the move of a thousand-or-so employees at Carrier Air Conditioning in Indiana and, more recently, negotiating rather publicly with Boeing to cuts costs on the two planned presidential and vice-presidential aircraft and now with Lockheed Martin to cut costs on a fighter jet.

My best girl, often unintentionally the source of these essays, commented Friday on the Lockheed story as it was on TV.  "Trump just looks at these things differently", she said.  "He looks at them the way we would look at them, or any businessman would.  It's about time."

She was, of course, right.  [Note for "full disclosure" ... I receive a $30.33-per-month pension from Lockheed Martin, although I never worked for them; it's the artifact of Lockheed's acquisition of the pension fund of the former Singer Company 25 years ago.  I'm pretty sure that $30.33 is not going to affect my ability to write about Lockheed.]

"The way a businessman would look at these things."

Of course.  Why didn't we think of that?  And that's the whole point of the piece.  The USA has been suckered into believing that there was something essentially and innately different between the way a government operates and the way that an ordinary business operates, and it has turned us into lemmings who think government has to operate that way.

Hint: It doesn't have to.

Let us dispense with the fundamentals.  Government is financially no different from a non-profit organization in that its fiscal goal is not to accumulate profit (surplus) for the purpose of distribution to "shareholders" as would a for-profit firm; any surplus is assigned to funds to be used in a subsequent period for the operation of the organization or execution of its services.  Of course, our Federal government wouldn't know a surplus if it bit them.

While a non-profit has an obligation to its donors to maximize its services, Government has an obligation to its "donors" -- taxpayers -- to exercise fiscal restraint, precisely because they are not donors; the money provided is mandated by law to be seized from the citizen as taxes.  A proper government respects that its funding was taken by law and not donated of the citizens' free will.

The law addresses this, beginning with the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, by allowing government to do only what it is granted the rights to do.  That means that for the Federal government to go into debt to pay for services that it is Constitutionally not supposed to perform is fiscally and morally bankrupt.

And that, of course, is the point.  Donald Trump sees government as those of us outside government should see it, but doesn't.  For years, we saw government's right to do whatever it felt like as unfixable.  That was until 2016 when a New York businessman with a lot of hair got us thinking that maybe government should respect a basic fact -- that its funding was not provided under free will, but through the confiscatory nature of tax law.

Government itself was the Emperor.  The encrusted Executive Branch agencies, and the encrusted Congresses of years past, were their own tailor, spinning a tale that it was OK to borrow and spend beyond the taxpayers' means.  We were the people, the lemmings who went along, afraid or unwilling to "say the concept nay" -- or in the case of the left, happy to use the fable to spend, spend, spend to gain and hold control of power.

Donald Trump will not allow himself to see government improperly.  To Trump, the protection of the taxpayer's seized dollar is vital; we should not, as government always has, ignore price when you've confiscated the money to pay for it.  He is showing that in his pre-presidential actions, demanding that fiscal sense becomes a first-tier rationale for spending decisions.

I am optimistic that Washington will not ruin Donald Trump but, rather, Trump will change Washington.  If we are not pretty bloody close to a balanced budget by the end of his (first) term, I'll be disappointed, but also very surprised.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Transporting Audiences

This will be a very intriguing topic; I can only hope the piece lives up to it.

I believe that I've mentioned previously that I am a member of a worldwide email group of aficionados of the comic operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan.  That should be no secret to regular readers of this column, of course, who are aware that I used to perform those works through most of my, er ... "remote" youth.

There has been a long-running thread on that list about the issue of casting people who are not necessarily racially expected in their roles, not just in the Savoy operettas but in entertainment in general.  I wrote about this in regard to a production of The Mikado that was turned into an Italian setting after protests from "professional victims" in the local community.

I am not a fan of racially distracting casting.  If a character is supposed to be black, particularly historically, then don't be using a white actor to play the character.  The piece I did on that topic is one of the most widely-read on this site, and is cited here, primarily because I need to be consistent and not self-contradictory.

At any rate, one recent thread in a topic on the mail discussion list wasn't even about Gilbert and Sullivan, and not so much theatrical stage performances, as it was about the performance of a particular song from a particular musical, in a particular setting.  The song was "Ol' Man River" from the Kern and Hammerstein musical "Show Boat", when done in a concert setting or other non-theatrical show by a singer (i.e., not as a part of "Show Boat").

Now, in context (i.e., in the musical), it is sung by a black character who works at the boat as a stevedore, and the song is meant to provide the dramatic contrast between the suffering of the people and the lack of concern on the part of the Mississippi River (that "just keeps rolling along").  In the context of the musical, it would be difficult for the character to be anything but black, so in that context it makes little sense to think of someone non-black singing the song, unless it is set in some kind of mixed-race, impoverished place.

But that wasn't the context of the discussion.  Aside from the subtopic of purging the most offensive lyrics from any contemporary performance (which is a separate issue completely), the discussion focused on whether it would ever be acceptable for a white performer to sing the song (in a non-theatrical, concert setting).

Obviously, there are a number of members of the discussion group in the U.K., as well as in Australia and the USA.  And one of them made the point, which is the topic of this piece, that it would be perfectly reasonable for a white performer in the U.K. to do the song, as long as it were done well, in that there was not really a cultural barrier to such a performance -- over there.

So I found myself thinking about that concept.  In a sufficiently professional production of "Show Boat", I would not want to see a white actor in a black leading role.  It makes no sense to do so, as you will have reintroduced disbelief and lost the audience.  There is, after all, dialogue to deliver and no amount of good acting will overcome the loss of the audience.

Why, then, do I believe that a concert performance of the one song, in isolation, could be OK?  Why is it the case that we would be open, at least in the U.K. if not in San Francisco, to a white singer presenting "Ol' Man River" in context?

Because it is a challenge, that's why.  When you take that particular piece of music on as a white performer in concert, it is pretty darned hard to transport your audience to where they have a white singer in front of them, convincingly taking on a lyric designed for a black stevedore on a boat on the Mississippi.  And I, if not people in some parts of the USA, am absolutely open to allowing someone to take on that challenge in a concert setting, even though I would not be open to seeing them do it as an actor in the show.

Assumedly the English are open to that as well, and it is to their credit, in my humble opinion, that they do so without some kind of politically-correct mind torture of the kind that the left in the USA wants to jam down our throat.

Either way, I will give a great performer the right to try to transport me, if only in the period of a single song.  Have at it.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

An Especially Merry Christmas

So this past week, Barack Obama was quoted as saying that his definition of "political correctness" and that of Donald Trump, the president-elect, are probably different.

He gave a bunch of examples, and I don't think you could walk away from his words assembling those examples into a coherent definition of what he believed in as being proper behavior.  For example, he said that it should be possible to feel that affirmative action was not the best way to achieve racial opportunity in such things as college applications and workplace hiring, without being labeled "racist."

That was a pretty reasonable statement.

Of course, then he got into the whole "who might be offended" thing, and that's where he slid into the morass that political correctness is and has always been.  Because the problem, of course, is that "offense" is a spectrum.  I do not want to think about whether something I say may offend Paraguayans or Lutherans by exclusion.  At the same time, I would not want to feel it's OK if I were to make a comment ridiculing, say, Catholics, without being acutely aware that a Catholic in earshot would be offended.

By "spectrum", I mean that we truly shouldn't care if we joke about Kazakhstanis or albinos in a passing way, knowing that no one present will be offended.  So when should we be careful?  When does it get absurd to go looking for offended people before we utter a sentence?

I think that was the point of Trump's whole campaign-long tirade against PC behavior -- that if it is allowed to go on unchecked, eventually you will be able to say nothing for fear of offending.  And the corollaries are equally bad -- that people will go looking to be offended, to put themselves into an offendable group so they can play the victim for profit as could be done in this hypothetical case; that we will dumb down our communications; that we will actually become unwilling to do things like ...

Say "Merry Christmas."

It is certainly not a rare thing these days and this season, to hear people far more likely to say "Merry Christmas" in what is a normal Christmas scenario, than the bland, inoffensive "Happy Holidays."  More than once I've heard people actually say that they "feel it's OK to say 'Merry Christmas' now."

And it seemed utterly bizarre when a Kohl's store commercial just appeared on TV as I was writing this, with reindeer and Santa Claus, and the message was "Happy Holidays", as if reindeer and the jolly bearded guy were somehow not explicitly Christmas-specific characters.

I was recently in contact with an acquaintance in another part of the country, looking for a recording of a barbershop version of a Christmas song he had arranged.  Now this fellow, whom I've known for 25 years but only met a few times, and never known well (hence "acquaintance") is extraordinarily successful at our art form, having been both a member of a world championship quartet, and having directed a world championship chorus (not the one that I was in).

In the course of his reply, he casually used the phrase about it being "OK to say 'Merry Christmas' now", and that startled me.  For one, our organization actually has a founding principle that we do not let politics or religion intrude upon our dealings.  My best friends for decades are in the Society, and many of them have political leanings I'm totally unaware of.  So even hinting at something that could be thought to be political is unusual.

What struck me more is that because ours is essentially an arts organization, it is quite unexpected for a member to have such a feeling about Christmas and PC, let alone to hint at it in a passing sentence to someone who is not a close friend.  After all, that would seem to be a conservative leaning in an arts environment.

I was certainly not afraid to reply back with a comparable passing statement, if only to take the bait and let him know I agreed with the notion.  Multiply that interaction by a few million, and perhaps we get to take off the PC blinders, and say "Merry Christmas" to our Christian, or presumed-Christian friends, and say "Happy Hanukkah" to our Jewish or presumed-Jewish friends.  (Apparently the invented "Kwanzaa", whose guiding principles are rather explicitly communistic, by the way, no longer seems to exist in the public forum).

I think that celebrating what our friends celebrate brings us together, a lot better than having others play victim does, to make a better USA.

Merry Christmas, my friends.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Why Rehash the "Emperor's New Clothes", NBC?

The other night, we were treated to a Christmas show on NBC, featuring some of the talent that competed in the final round of the America's Got Talent competition for 2016 that ended in September.  These acts were supplemented by some of the winners from recent seasons as well, including its Season 2 winner, the amazing ventriloquist Terry Fator, now on a long-term gig in Las Vegas, the teenage singer Jackie Evancho (a finalist), who has several top-rated recordings out, and the magician Mat Franco, who is also a Vegas regular.

These latter were among the successes of the show, winners who actually had talent, the kind that you would pay to see, sometimes a lot.  And the singing acts from this past (2016) season who were in the show's opening musical number, well, they were really good singers and polished performers as well.

Which made the absence of this season's winner from the opener all the more telling.

I would like to let the 2016 season of "AGT" go as a distant memory.  I thought I wrote all I needed to about the season in this piece, where I pointed out the utter lack of singing ability of the winner, the 12-year-old "singer" Grace Vanderwaal.  But I also thought that by now either (A) it would all go away, or (B) someone at NBC Universal would get busted for "fixing" the result.  I mean, the girl can't sing!

And I mean "can't sing" like her voice is a 12-year-old's whisper, she is very nervous on stage, and in a "talent" show, other than in her middle school, there was simply nothing to see that said "talent."  You certainly wouldn't pay to see her perform, although she seems like a very sweet, polite little girl I'd be happy to have as a daughter. 

Of course, if she were my daughter I'd have kept her from embarrassing herself on national television.  But that's for another day, and she is getting $25,000 a year for 40 years, if NBC lasts that long.

So when the opening number appeared, and one by one the singers from this season joined the festivities, it was pretty clear that no Grace would be part of that number.  Note -- Laura Bretan, the last singer from this season, an amazing 14-year-old operatic star-to-be, did not or could not appear on this show.  I, for one, missed her, on a show she could have really moved us on.

It was, of course, pretty obvious why Grace was not in that number.  The strong voices of the real singers from the season meant that the opener would need to be at a strong level, one that Grace's weak, whispery voice could not possibly have kept up with. Considering that in every round of the competition, she sort of bent over her ukulele and whisper-sang into a mike with nothing else going on, I don't know what she could have done with anyone else, in an ensemble.


Unfortunately, toward the end of the show, we heard.  To great applause, Grace got her own time on stage, singing, yes, "Frosty, the Snowman" with two lines of singers, presumably from the union, behind her.  Grace was Grace, meaning no projection, whispered words, nervous voice; and she did fine only in terms of her playing skill on the accompanying ukulele.  She played Frosty, and Frosty lost.

Because I'm always willing to let the reader judge, here is that performance.  You tell me; there's a big old comments section below.

Of course, the judges, paid to the end for their services, groveled about how wonderful she was, and NBC tweeted out how "magic" her performance was.  It won't help; I'm dying to see if anyone showed up at the single Las Vegas performance she won as part of her "victory", and what the sales are if she ever records.  Seriously?  A show? People are going to pay to hear a 12-year-old whisper near the right pitch with a ukulele for two hours?

The Emperor's New Clothes were on display for all to see, and a theater audience not realizing -- or intentionally ignoring -- that there was no "there" there.  I just don't understand how NBC thought it was a good idea to trot out their dramatic mistake (or, sadly, their corrupt selection process) once again, as if to rub in our faces the fact that they can do whatever they want.  But they did it.

And we'll see if it affects their ratings next season, for which they are already auditioning.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Negating Obama's 2017 "Shadow Government"

Having failed after eight years as president to have accomplished anything whatsoever to the betterment of the USA, Barack Obama is apparently not done trying to continue his incessant damage to the nation.

Yes, while Obama wants people to think he is going to continue to live in Washington so his kids can stay in the same schools, that's not exactly in the same area code as the truth.  No, he is apparently setting up the equivalent of an alternative government, to try to provide continual opposition to the Trump Administration, although exactly how they plan to operate, and what they will do on a daily basis is a bit of a TBD.

What isn't at issue is how it is going to be paid for, since leftist moneybags like Tom Steyer have committed nine figures worth to pay for it (Steyer has pledged $100 million himself just for commercials).  So Obama will still have plenty of income to support both his golf habit and this subversive activity, in whatever form it might take.

So ... if we assume this to be true, and we assume that he is doing this "shadow government" thing, then what is the best course for the actual, real government, the one voted in by the people?

I have that answer, thanks.

Donald Trump did not run a wonky campaign.  I know that may be the single most superfluous sentence in the history of the written English language, but it is actually the point.  During Trump's campaign, he said he wanted, or would do, the following things and little else:

- An "America First" foreign policy
- Securing the border with Mexico to stop illegal immigration and drug trafficking across it
- Deporting criminal aliens
- Repealing and replacing Obamacare
- Returning jobs, particularly in manufacturing, to the USA and deterring their leaving
- Lowering corporate and personal tax rates
- Beginning to clean up destroyed inner cities.

That was the core of it, plus another item or two here or there.  As I said, this was not a wonky platform, it was a set of goals for which either legislature or executive action (or, in the case of deportation, simple enforcement of the law) would implement the goal.

And that's the point.  Barack Obama can set up a whole alternative government complete with his own putting-green on the bizarro White House he is going to inhabit.  But it will all be for naught if Donald Trump does the things that he said he was going to do, and doing them has the effects he said they would.

And that was the point of the simplicity of Trump's campaign platform.  The economic metrics are pretty easy to predict; in about a year, the unemployment rate will sneak up (it is a fairly useless figure as currently computed) but the labor force and job count will rise, as people who had left the job market and stopped being counted, flood back into the market faster than the economy can produce jobs for them.

Economic growth, let loose by huge reversals of regulations, will be a hiring engine.  Tax revenues will drop at first, but within 24 months revenues will flood into the government, as the economic upsurge from lower tax rates generates more in taxes than ever before, despite lower rates.  Specific companies will start hiring here in the USA, and others will cancel outsourcing and remain here.

Obamacare will be replaced, slashing big chunks from the Federal budget and, before long, cutting individual insurance costs.  There will be a wall on our southern border.

And finally, but not least, something -- I don't know what -- will be done to try to address inner-city crime and high murder rates.  It may or may not work, but it will be more than Barack Obama did in eight years if Trump even lifts a finger.

That is my point here.  If Donald Trump does what he said he wanted to do, which in concept is fairly straightforward, and gets most or all of the above done, the result will be so dramatic -- a roaring economy, lower crime rates, something improving in the cities -- then eventually we will forget Barack Obama and his shadow government entirely.

There is nothing more effective at defusing your enemy than making him completely unnecessary.  And it will be impossible to try to hide a dramatically successful economy and way-higher employment counts from the people.  If he does all that -- and Ronald Reagan did it in a comparable amount of time -- there will be no need for Obama, and he will wither into a pathetic little troll, loved by Hollywood but shown by Trump's successes to be the failure we all know he was.

And I will end this by saying that even a revived economy will be an incomplete result if he can't make at least a little headway in the inner cities.  He very much needs to be visible early on in that specific area.  It will show him to care about the cities more than Obama ever was.

Trust me, all of that will be seen by the voters -- of all colors.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

He Didn't Ask Russia to Hack Hillary!

Josh Earnest is the press secretary for Barack Obama, which means he has to say things that he may not mean, to try to explain away Obama's views on things that Obama may not actually hold and, in fact, that Obama himself may not actually believe to be true.  Got it?

We need to keep that in mind, after Earnest decided to take on the accusations of the Russians hacking into the 2016 campaign.  He said on Wednesday, which is not the first time he has said it, that Trump had "asked Russia to hack into Hillary Clinton's server" to find the 30,000 missing emails that Hillary still has not provided and, obviously, never will.  I don't recall precisely what Earnest said, but he was explicit that Trump had asked the Russians to hack in.

Now, let's start with one inconvenient truth.  At that point, when Trump made that obviously joking reference in the press conference in Florida, the server couldn't be hacked, as it was unplugged and on a shelf in the FBI's evidence locker.  Earnest knew that, Trump knew that and you and I did.  You can't hack an unplugged server, let alone an unplugged one that had gotten BleachBitted into submission.

With that as background, let's look at what Trump said in his exact words (and remembering that this was an answer to a press-conference question, add in with your mind's ear the usual Trumpian sarcastic tone):

"Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Hey, you know what gives me more pause? That a person in our government - Crooked Hillary Clinton - that a person in our government would delete or get rid of 30,000 emails. Now, if Russia or China or any other country has [my emphasis] those emails, I mean, to be honest with you, I'd love to see them."

I heard the press conference live earlier in the year.  There is no question whatsoever that he was making that joke on the assumption that the emails, which could no longer be retrieved from their originating server, were already "out there" in cyberspace, because hacking had already occurred.

The joke was based on this -- Russia and China hack the heck out of the Internet now, and everyone knew it.  If anyone already had those emails, it was going to be Russia (and China).  So Trump's statement, or joke, or whatever, was at least a joke based on the notion that the Russians hack so much that they already had them.  Already.  Got it?  That was the punch line.  "Already had them."

He wasn't telling the Russians to try to hack our servers to get them; he was joking that they probably already had them in their own hacking files, and just needed to find them.  I know that's true because that is exactly what I was laughing at when I watched the press conference live -- that the FBI couldn't find the emails; that Hillary wouldn't turn them over, but the Russians probably already had them in their massive stores of hacked data and would get lots of credit from the U.S. press corps if they'd just find them.

It is contemptible on so many levels for Earnest to say what he did; and it is foolish for the press corps today to try to make an affirmative "Russia, please hack her server" interpretation, out of a joke based on the assumption that Russia already had the emails.

As I was writing that line, Bret Baier of Fox was on the air this second, actually saying that Trump had asked the Russians to hack our systems.  Et tu, Bret?  

If even Fox is casually misquoting that line, the Obamists have won.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

News for Your Election-Denying Friends

Standard line of "Democrat strategists: "Oh, but the Electoral College doesn't matter.  Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by three million votes and she ought to be president."

You've probably heard that before, one or two million times in the last few weeks.  And I am here to give you an article that you can simply send them in reply that should quiet their poor, snowflakey, jangled nerves.  Hint: you're reading the article now.  Please do forward them this piece.

So first, let's start with the numbers, so they're not an issue of contention.

Across the entire country, fifty states and the District of Columbia, Donald Trump received 62,979,616 votes, which got him 306 electoral votes.  Hillary Clinton received 65,844,594 votes, which earned her 232 electoral votes and meant that she had to crawl back to Chappaqua, NY, moaning about the Russians.

That means that Hillary had a higher popular vote, by 2,864,978 votes, totaling the fifty states and DC. 

Here, for reference, is the vote total for one state, the state of California.  Hillary Clinton received 8,753,788 votes in California.  Donald Trump received 4,483,810 votes.  That's plot material.  Hillary won California by 4,269,978 votes.  In fact, according to the state's own board of elections, five counties in California account for Hillary Clinton's entire national margin.

Why is California relevant?  Simple.  The system in which we have operated since 1789 for electing the president is as a representative democracy.  Each state has a voice, including California.  When states are, as they say, "not in play", meaning that the people who live there are assumed to vote in a certain way, for decades the candidates have left them to themselves, and don't campaign there.

Not-in-play states are ignored in the campaign; they are not visited by the candidates and there is no advertising there.  Idaho is not going to vote for a Democrat for president any time soon, and neither is South Dakota or Texas or Alabama or South Carolina.  And California is not going to vote for a Republican for president; nor is New York or Massachusetts.

Why is this important?  Because if you are going to try to claim that "the people" voted for Hillary, and especially if you're going to claim that the campaign swayed anyone's vote, it is relevant that in one state, California, the campaign never happened.  So many of those Hillary voters lived there that in the other 49 states combined (and even including the District of Columbia), Donald Trump out-polled Hillary by almost 1.4 million votes.

California was written off by both campaigns.  It is entirely logical that, had both Trump and Clinton had only California to win, they would have campaigned there, and the results would have been markedly different.  Hillary would have won, sure, but the numbers would have changed quite a bit (if you don't think they would have, then why is there even a campaign?).

Under the rules in play, California was deemed by both candidates to be irrelevant.  Its electoral votes would be a huge block on which Hillary built her electoral base, but they weren't contested.  So it is not as if California's voters aren't relevant; they are, and their fat electoral bloc shows it -- but the margin -- and its impact on the national popular vote -- is not relevant.

In other words, if there were only a popular vote, the campaign would have been played out less in Ohio, Florida and North Carolina, and a lot more in all the urban centers.  It is the fact that the Electoral College system, which is effectively the "vote by state" system, the forces the campaign into the contested states.

So you can't look at the popular vote nationwide, because it includes millions of votes in states where the campaign never existed.  Had popular vote mattered, we would have seen a different campaign; therefore, the nationwide popular vote is an interesting sidelight but not a reflection of anything.

Bill Clinton himself, for example, said this past week that he thought that Hillary should have gone into Wisconsin in the last week to campaign.  What does that mean?  It means that campaigns are indeed relevant, and that the impact of the electoral system on the way that campaigns are run renders the nationwide popular vote an irrelevant curiosity.


So there.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

The Birth of Snowflakes

So a day or two back, Donald Trump, the president-elect, was speaking on his "Thank You Tour" in Wisconsin, amusing the audience with a reprise of some of the basics -- he always spoke in basics -- that he had used in his campaign.

My best girl was watching a news show where a clip of the speech was being shown, and her immediate comment was not about the speech, or any part of it, or even about Mr. Trump himself.

No, it was about the podium.  And that's where we start this morning.

The podium and stage, as you may have readily seen, were festooned with Christmas-season things, trees in the background, and the words "Merry Christmas USA" unmistakably writ large across the front of the podium.  You couldn't have missed it.

And my best girl did not miss it, which got her to thinking, and often that is a good thing as it was in this case.  Now, it did not fall on blind eyes that, to have a president making a speech from a podium with the words "Merry Christmas USA", was a reversal of at least eight years of contemptible secularism from our current administration and from society in general.

Certainly the news programs at least momentarily pointed out that it was not a white-bread, generic "Happy Holidays" message.

So the Missus observed this, and mentioned that she thought the dynamic was going to be interesting.  Donald Trump was elected in a specifically politically-incorrect, or at least a specifically not dogmatically politically correct campaign.  So this means that a peck of politically correct actions from years recent was going to be eliminated in a very short time.

What she noticed was the dynamic.  These little chip-aways had taken place over a long period of time, the result of one person here and there claiming being offended at this or that thing, and then another person a few months later.  Over the years, an accumulated pattern of claimed offense by this or that offended person led to a pattern of utter neutrality.

That neutrality is hammered home in the college campus, where the left breeds, sort of like bacteria in the kitchens of one of those taverns that Jon Taffer fixes on on Bar Rescue.

But her point was that the catering to the offended had been a pick, pick, pick thing over many years, while the expected reversal under Mr. Trump is going to be a fairly all-encompassing effect in a fairly short time -- a year maybe.  The left works that way, she pointed out.  Push the extremes one by one until what we thought was stupid -- not saying "Merry Christmas" -- becomes mainstream.

But all that politically correct stuff over the years had stiffened the opposition, and was absolutely a big factor in the election of Mr. Trump, a very plain talker who made it clear what he thought was right and wrong.

It finally occurred to both of us that it was the children of the pick, pick left who started growing up thinking that they had a right not to be offended by anything, who had become the snowflakes of today.  Nurtured first in the homes of parents who felt that they had to be good little Democrats and go along, and then radicalized on campuses, to the point where the Ft. Hood murders were "workplace violence" and the Ohio State terrorist attack was a "misunderstanding", they became the entitled generation.

When we no longer nurture a "right not to be offended", and the cessation of that acceptance at the Government level happens fairly abruptly, it will be as if a flood of rationality refreshes the USA.  The "pick, pick, pick" that had happened over years had, in fact, been irritating reasonable adults for years at the same time.  The genie is out of the bottle, and the left may never be able to put it back.

Barren of actual productive ideas for governing that have ever worked, the left will first retrench into screaming matches (e.g., the attempt to nullify the election whose results, they fear, would crush them into oblivion for years).  What they do next is anyone's guess.  The colleges, after all, are still there, you know.

Mr. Trump will need to be suitably advised as to who his enemy is and how they may come after him during his administration.  Once the election stuff dies down, the left will have to figure out how to reinstate the political correctness that cost them the 2016 election in the first place.  After all, that's what they want; a compliant population that will mutely allow them to be the ruling class without argument.

But the genie is out of the bottle.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

The IRS Regulation I'd Like Trump to Issue

I'm not a fan of the Internal Revenue Service.  No one is, except possibly John Koskinen, the current IRS Administrator, a political hack for whom an impeachment bill is pending, and an embarrassment to Finnish-Americans everywhere.

I contend that I have more argument than most, having been through the torture of an audit. As recounted here, it resulted in a determination of zero obligation to the government in taxes, but many thousands in accountant's fees to show that I did not owe many thousands -- or even a red cent, for that matter -- to the IRS.

So in a column whose title is about an income tax regulation I'd like to see, you might assume that it might somehow relate to the audit that we had, and be one that would have prevented something so stupid from happening.

Obviously there are a few things that could have helped, but I'm not sure that anything could be put into law.  When your IRS auditor flat-out doesn't understand the law, and it takes my accountant explaining to her supervisor that she had been misapplying the law, to get the audit to be stopped without owing anything, well, the law won't help.  What would help is to make sure that you don't get a letter informing you of an audit until at least two levels of IRS agent agree to its necessity.

Maybe they needed to try to pay for this insult to the taxpayer.

And another thing that would help would be to forbid the IRS from mailing any notices to taxpayers except on Mondays or Tuesdays.  Somehow letters from the IRS which, except for when they contain checks, and are almost never legible and comprehensible, always seem to be mailed on a Wednesday, so they arrive when you get home after work on a Friday.  That means that you can get no clarification or sleep until the following Monday if you're lucky, and your weekend is full of panic and royally hosed.

That could easily stop with an executive order that would be appreciated.

I'd be thrilled if the IRS would be treated like any other law enforcement agency, meaning that the burden of proof for any claim of debt to them, or contention regarding a filing, is handled with a presumption of innocence on the part of the taxpayer, and the burden of proof shifted to the IRS themselves.  Maybe with an impartial arbiter hearing the case.

Man, I'd be thrilled to be a judge in one of those cases.

But my proposal is not related to audits at all.  Now, I have written tons about how the tax code should be written to flatten the heck out of it, particularly (and first) in this piece from 2014 that still represents my opinion.

That may not happen, certainly not before Congress is somehow incentivized to stop social engineering with the tax code.  I have taken advantage of the mortgage interest deduction for years, but I'd trade that in a heartbeat for a flat tax system with a 17% rate on personal and business income and get rid of the tiered structure.

But if it doesn't, let's try this.  "No individual shall have, as a result of his or her filing, any obligation exceeding 25% of adjusted gross income in the year in which the return is filed."  Now, that 25% can be achieved through ordinary deductions that reduce taxable income, or by taxable expenses or whatever.  But when push comes to shove, and the return has to come up with a number to pay, it would have to be the lesser of the computed tax on taxable income, or 25% of the adjusted gross income (meaning everything that came in to the taxpayer less basic adjustments).

Why?  It's very simple.  The United States of America needs to make an affirmative statement that it is immoral for any country to confiscate more than one dollar out of every four that a person makes, for the running of the country.

I think that 25% is a bit high, but reasonable enough and certainly as high as it should be.  But more importantly, it is vital that the Government state affirmatively that there is -- and always will be -- a moral ceiling on what it should ever be paid in Federal taxes by any one individual, relative to his income.  If you recall, that was something that I made a case of when the Obama Administration, as represented by Valerie Jarrett, refused ever to answer the question about how much tax was "too much."

I hope that you understand the difference.  It's not about whether it is 25%, or 20.665% or whatever.  It is about the moral principle that there is indeed a rate that is too high in the eyes of the American people, and that the Government's right to seize our earnings is limited by percentage.

What do you think?

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Five, Ten and Forgotten

As my biography notes, I spent a somewhat brief part of my life performing the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, if not for a living, at least for a few bucks here and there.  So at least for a good number of years I was very familiar with those pieces, both the libretti of Gilbert, and the music of his teammate Mr. Sullivan.

Gilbert's words and Sullivan's notes, so well-paired in actuality, were always a point of contention between the two of them.  Although they certainly respected each other's talents, it had previously been the historic reality in opera that the libretto was simply a canvas upon which the "true" artist, the composer, was able to set his music.

Gilbert and Sullivan's works were certainly the groundbreaking exception.  W. S. Gilbert was a brilliant man, of great talent and skill in the use of the English language.  Arthur Sullivan forever felt that his music was simply regarded as less important and did not take to that so kindly.  Eventually they quarreled enough so that some of their latest works were simply not of the quality -- and popularity -- of their earlier material.

But I suppose I digress, a lot.

I only brought them up because the words in Gilbert's dialogue and song lyrics were written in the era from the 1870s through the 1890s, and they're a reference point.  I have, for example, performed in 75 productions of the various operettas, and there are still, or were until looking them up, words and phrases that would give me pause, to where I had to look up what they actually meant.

Gilbert did some of that intentionally, sometimes to force a rhyme, and sometimes to reflect what a character in that area might have actually said.  The Yeomen of the Guard, for example, takes place a in a setting a few hundred years earlier than its initial performance in 1888.  Gilbert was, of course, a lawyer and a very well-read Victorian man, and knew his English quite well, at a time when it was an admired trait to use it.

There are, in fact, books on their operettas, which print the libretto replete with notes in the margins describing the actual meaning of unfamiliar words and phrases, and most pages are truly full of the marginal notes.

All the above flashed by as I was listening to a Christmas music satellite-radio station in my car, and the song "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" went by in one of its 4,344 recorded iterations.  Mel Torme, I think, was velvetly fogging the line, "Take a look in the five-and-ten, glistening once again ..."

It occurred to me that I had certainly been in a small town five-and-ten many times in my youth (that's a "five and ten-cent store" for the Russians enjoying this piece, by the way, who may have gotten this far).  Many, many times.  God knows that I didn't need to have explained to me what a "five-and-ten" is.

But my imaginary great-grandchildren would likely have no better idea of what a "five and ten" is than they would a phone book or a typewriter or a VHS videotape.  And I got thinking that in, say 50 years, while people will certainly be singing that song (It is, after all, a classic, a catchy tune and a classically-harmonized melody), a great percentage of those listening will have to look up on the 2066 version of Al Gore's Amazing Internet what the reference to a "five and ten" means.

I thought of Gilbert, of course, because I was performing his words 60 years after his death, and still kept looking his words up as long as I was singing them.  We still hear "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" in all sorts of settings, and if you can get through it without having to ask what "mamelon" or "ravelin" may be, or a Chassepôt rifle (no fair saying, "oh, yeah, that's a rifle"), or a "commissariat", then you're probably 114 years old.

The language evolves over time, well, duh.  I don't think that we'll need to remember telephone books, since it will always be a joke for short people and kids to have to sit on one, probably long after the last of them has been printed and thrown away, or in the Smithsonian.  And I don't have any romanticized notion that there should always be a town square five-and-ten (and certainly not that there should always be its current successor, the "dollar store").

But it has been interesting to listen, this season, to Christmas songs the past few days.  Christmas songs, after all, are brought back for a few weeks each year and therefore survive far longer than whatever is being "sung" these days by the usual assortment of pop tarts, to be quickly forgotten.

As each Christmas comes around, a few more of those little phrases will jog the minds of people like me, wondering if fifty years hence, we will hear "as the shoppers run home with their treasures" and ask what that meant, given that Christmas presents will have only been ordered online for decades.

Back to work.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

What's "Too Close for Comfort"?

Rex Tillerson is the CEO of Exxon Mobil, and is, as of this morning, Donald Trump's choice to be the next Secretary of State.  Tillerson would succeed John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, meaning that the bar for success is incredibly low, given where the USA sits in terms of being unfeared by our enemies and untrusted by our friends after the last eight years.  And, oh, yeah, the incomprehensibly bad Iran deal.

Mr. Tillerson is receiving unusually high scrutiny from the left and the press (but I repeat myself), as well as by some Republicans, like Sen. McCain of Arizona.  This, surprisingly, has nothing to do with his tenure and track record at Exxon Mobil and lots to do with, as if we hadn't talked enough about them already, Russia.

You know as well as I.  Mr. Tillerson has raised the eyebrows of his possible opposition because of the fact that he has done business with Russia, as might be expected when the largest energy company in the world deals with one of, if not the, leading energy-producing nations.

In the course of that business, Mr. Tillerson has developed a relationship with Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, that led to his having gotten some kind of award of friendship (the Russian "Order of Friendship") from Putin not long ago, in 2013.  That, of course, gives raw meat to the left as they seek to de-legitimize Mr. Trump's position and fight him at every turn.

With "opposition" as their goal, and not the leadership of the country that they blew by nominating Hillary, this relationship has been characterized as fairly chummy.  However, it is not presented -- and I've been listening -- as to how a preexisting, positive relationship between the Secretary of State and the leader of Russia is, a priori, a bad thing.

I confess to being willing to give Mr. Trump the benefit of the doubt, in that this appointment is a "part of the whole" in the sense of his construction of a government.  So I find myself asking why it might not be a good thing, long before I ask why it might be bad.  But the left is already doing the latter.

And again, I cannot see how it might be bad.

Look, friends, we are not about to change Putin the man; he is still a murderer and an autocrat, and we can only seek to constrain his tendency to do things like invading his neighbors.  In other words, Putin is a reality, and we need to accept that we must face him.  We're not going to replace him; we simply need to get him to keep his troops at home and stop his cyber warfare campaign.

What people do not seem to get is that Donald Trump does not think like a politician.  Politicians are concerned with how things look so they can get reelected; a businessman is concerned with getting things done.  That means that if our goal is to get Putin to keep his troops at home and turn off the cyber warfare, and trust me, we're not going to be doing it by bombing Volgograd, then we need to do it through negotiation, which is the Trump version of what we used to call "diplomacy."

Diplomacy as practiced by the Obamists obviously doesn't work, since Russia is blithely invading its neighbors, practicing cyber warfare on us and meddling in the Middle East.  And, by the way, they're also reading this column.  Trump clearly believes that if we need to get this to stop, there has to be something in it for Putin.

If that's what he believes, then at least to the extent that dealing with Russia is a necessary part of our foreign policy, he needs to have the ability to deal directly with Putin.  It would seem that to do that, a good start would be to have a Secretary of State that has a relationship with him and has worked with him on some kind of negotiating, positive level.  To have that person be one with extensive negotiating experience throughout the world, including some of the ugliest places on earth, seems like a logical thing to me.

It is not logical to the left and the press (but I ...), but they're apparently unable to explain why it doesn't make perfect sense.  Perhaps it does, but they're intent on simply opposing Trump by reflex.  I, however, am willing to listen.  The next time someone provides a good reason why a positive relationship with Putin is a bad thing, I'm listening.  Happy to listen if you can explain it.

Absent that, I will come down on the side of friendship and negotiation as our diplomacy.  Perhaps after eight years of abject failure on the world stage, trying something different is worth the effort.

All for it.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

What ARE the Russians Doing?

Amazingly, this piece is not about the election that was finished last month (or Saturday, depending on whether you include the Senate).  It is not about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, or the leaks of the emails of John Podesta, all of which certainly contributed to the nation's contempt for the way Democrats run their shop, if not to the election result.

After all, Hillary Clinton was simply such a bad candidate that she sank her own ship by being so completely out of touch with the pulse of the nation, and still, based on recent comments, appears to be.

No, it's about the Russians, all right, but I don't have an explanation and I don't have an answer to the question that has been bugging me for a month or so.

Why are the Russians so fascinated with me?

I am, after all. a veritable cipher in the history of our nation.  In my long career, I have done a lot of things, but not accomplished anything lasting that would make me worth a medal, or a holiday, or an MVP award.  No Pulitzer, nor a Nobel Prize for literature is headed my way, although I can say with authority that I have posed for a picture with a Nobel Prize (and its actual winner).

That's me, sans beard, posing third from left with my fraternity brother Dr. Adam Riess, who is holding the prize for Physics he won a few years back for his discoveries regarding universe expansion.  This has nothing to do with Russians, of course, but it is, after all, my column, and if I've got a cool picture, I'm going  to find an excuse to show it.

And I don't think I'm worth reaching out across half the world to read.  OK, I get that the Internet doesn't require much in the way of a "reach", but you get the idea, if not what the heck I'm even talking about.  So let me explain.

The Russians are reading me, and they are reading me regularly and, if I may spin it a bit, they are reading me loyally.

It should not surprise you that the platform on which this site is hosted provides its authors with a reasonable array of statistics on readership.  This is how I know things like what operating systems are used to read the column, and what Internet browsers, and what articles are being read, all on an instantaneous basis, as well as last day, week, month, year and since September 2014, when the first piece was posted on this site.

Now, 544 pieces later, those statistics are telling me that an inordinate percentage of the readers of this column are in, of all places, Russia.  Yes, those good old boys and girls behind what used to be the Iron Curtain, with names ending in "sky" and "ov" and "ev" and"adze" and "in" and the like, are apparently quite interested in what I have to say.

How interested?  Well, I get read in this country, the good old USA, quite a bit, and have some pretty good stats on readership to share if anyone were interested in advertising here.  But over the last week, there were more column-reads (one reading of one column) by Russians than anywhere else on earth, including here.

Other than my opinions, I am not providing any information in this column that is not universally known, unless sharing the fact that "Ted Williams was the greatest Latino baseball player ever" counts.  All you find here other than well-known facts are opinions and, like intestinal tracts, almost everyone has one.  My opinion is every bit as valuable (unfortunately also meaning "every bit as worthless") as anyone else's.

So what, pray tell, do the Russians expect to find here?  That I'm not a fan of Hillary Clinton?  Shoot, if you ask her, she thinks they're the reason she isn't the president-elect now, and that it has nothing to do with her being an out-of-touch leftist with no track record of accomplishment.  Nobody is much of a fan of Hillary any more.  And Bill is probably pretty happy.

But I did want to point out, for the record and for my American readership, that not only are you not alone, but it is imperative that you start going back to earlier columns and enjoying them, because the Russians have zoomed past you in readership.

And darn it, that's a race we need to win.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.