The American Madness Journal

 The author of the American Madness Journal is taking a break, but, I hope will continue writing in 2023 his delightful, on-the-mark observations of what Tom Nichols described as the "infantilization of American life, in which we must accommodate and work around the behavior of grown men and women who not so long ago would have been pushed out of public life either by our collective political disgust or by responsible shareholders who would insist that their corporate leaders get back to work instead of making a spectacle of themselves". 

 Yes, I mean Shower Cap's Blog! Enjoy!

PS: it is too much to hope for that the American descent into madness would cease and deprive Shower Cap of material.  So accept in good humor any good that comes out of this.

The politics of health policy

A paper published in PLOS ONE, U.S. state policy contexts and mortality of working-age adults, results in this USA Today article: "More Americans die younger in states with conservative policies, study finds". 

What is the factual situation that the PLOS ONE paper sets out?

Americans die younger than people in most other high-income countries. With a life expectancy of 78.8 years in 2019, Americans died 5.7 years earlier than people in Japan, the global leader; 3.3 years earlier than their northern neighbors in Canada; and 2.5 years before their closest geopolitical allies in the United Kingdom. Shockingly, U.S. life expectancy falls between two middle-income countries—Cuba and Albania. 

Within the United States, life expectancy differs markedly across geographic areas such as states and counties. In 2019, it ranged from 74.4 years in Mississippi to 80.9 years in Hawaii. U.S. life expectancy has stagnated, largely because of higher mortality among adults 25–64 years of age. According to a comparison of U.S. life expectancy to the average of 16 other high-income countries in 2006–2008, deaths before age 50 accounted for 67% of the shortfall among U.S. men and 41% among women. 

Mortality rates provide another sobering picture of the early deaths among so many individuals in the United States. Based on rates from 2019, for every 100 babies born in the United States, two will not survive to their 30th birthday, six will not reach age 50, and 16 will die before they can enjoy retirement at age 65. Like life expectancy at birth, differences across states in mortality rates among adults ages 25–64 are striking.

In the PLOS ONE paper but not mentioned in the USA Today article are things like this:

Fig 4 demonstrates that, for women and men and across all lag times, lower working-age mortality from alcohol-induced causes was associated with more liberal labor policies and more conservative marijuana policies.

and

We examined four counterfactual scenarios in which all policy domains in all states were set to the maximum liberal score of 1 (Scenario 1) or the maximum conservative score of 0 (Scenario 2); the maximum liberal score of 1 applied to all domains except marijuana and health and welfare, which were set to 0 and 0.5, respectively, because conservative marijuana policies were associated with lower all-cause mortality, and no association was observed for the health and welfare score (Scenario 3, “Hybrid”); and domains trending in conservative or liberal direction were set respectively to their 0 and 1 extremes (Scenario 4,”Status Quo”).

Scenario 1 is "all liberal" and Scenario 3 includes conservative marijuana policy "because conservative marijuana policies were associated with lower all-cause mortality". These are the results:

In their simulation for 2019, Scenario 1 results in 86,181 fewer age-adjusted deaths among women and 84,949 fewer deaths among men, for a total of 171,030 lives saved. Scenario 3 results in 92,057 fewer deaths among women and 109,393 fewer deaths among men, for a total of 201,450 lives saved. So adopting liberal policies for essentially everything but marijuana results in 201,450 - 171,030 lives saved = 30,420. 

That is, the cost of liberal marijuana policy is 30K lives per annum.

 --- 

Now, suppose this above was well-settled science, with widespread validation of the results. How would this inform policy advocacy of the two political parties? 

Among the Republicans of today, there is no regard for science, and driven purely by partisan concerns, they would ignore all of this. 

More interesting are the Democrats, who are much more reality-driven, but who also have a strong faction in favor of liberalizing marijuana. Will they give up their pot dreams in favor of lives? Or will they argue that those 30K lives per annum is an acceptable cost to pay for whatever benefits marijuana liberalization provides (e.g., maybe less incarceration, or some measure of social justice)?

Signal flags

  At amazon.com, in the “Outdoor Flags & Banners” category, the #1 bestseller is this American Flag.

Coming in at #12 is this Trump 2024 flag:

At #18

There is another Trump 2024 at #45, and a Trump 2020 at #47.

This Ted Cruz flag has no sales ranking (i.e., I don’t think any have sold)

There are a number of Ted Cruz 2024 flags with various designs - at least six, of which I find only one that has a sales ranking.  Coming in at #89,633 in the category Outdoors Flags & Banners is:

Another person who has had too much

 C. wrote about putting this notice up on his office door,  thinking about the hard question “How many of us have become too worried about relationships that we sacrifice truth and ethics?”

TO MY CUSTOMERS:

“After living as a proud and patriotic American for 70 years, I find myself living in a time of danger to our nation far beyond any I have experienced before. Political disagreements have always been a part of our history; but now the differences are so great that they threaten to approach the destructive level that resulted in the Civil War. The tone of political discourse has fallen to shameful levels of offensiveness and ignorance; the workings of our political system have degraded to the level of a criminal enterprise.

“Any objective examination of the beliefs and actions of the opposing political systems as they exist today, whether you label them Republican/Democrat, conservative/liberal, or libertarian/progressive, must lead to the fact that there no longer exists any equivalence of principles between those sides. That examination must also conclude that there is no present use in trying to bridge the gap with compromise or mutual respect. The distance separating us is not between points on a spectrum, but between entirely different value systems.

“It is also pointless to argue any political issue with reference to the viewpoint of Republicans “on the merits” since the Republican view no longer has defensible merits on any significant issue I can think of. Republicans are supporting candidates and politicians in office who march in service to the worldview of libertarian, authoritarian billionaires who have spent decades and fortunes funding propagandizing media, faux-professional “think tanks,” and lobbyists, all whom have significantly weakened and marginalized science, environmental concerns, civil rights, and social welfare. The effect of those decades of effort is a country at the brink of authoritarian fascism, extreme inequality, and chaos. The election of Donald Trump is the culminating event of the trend, and a political reality so worrying and repellant as to produce physical sickness

“Those who voted for Trump may not personally be racist, greedy, corrupt, or misogynist. However, they voted for him after having ample opportunity to consider that they were knowingly voting for a racist, greedy, lying, mysogynistic, abusive, and bullying traitor to the US, a person completely inimical to all its best values.

“I still strive to serve every customer who comes here as I always have, with every bit of integrity, professionalism, and skill that I can muster. In 45 years of business, I have made it a point of pride to also serve my customers with a sense of their needs and resources, and consider that those customers have real advantages and benefits in doing business here. I prefer to serve only those who generally share my progressive and democratic sensibilities. Trump supporters and Republicans as presently constituted should know that my viewpoint is not at a bridgeable distance from theirs; that we inhabit worlds completely separate in moral and human values. I can no longer imagine any productive exchange with such persons.

“Sincerely,”

Vindicated

Looking at what Trump and his supporters are putting the country through, I feel fully vindicated in my declaration weeks ago, that anyone who supports Trump utterly lacks in decency. They're just a part of a brutal mob. I continue to not to have anything to do with them in my personal life.

Confirmation Bias?

There are a number of stories about how UnPresident Trump operates:

Caroline Mortimer reports in the Independent,  that Defence Secretary General James Mattis and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, convinced Trump to go along with an anti-terrorist raid in Yemen that turned out poorly, by suggesting that Obama would never have been so bold as to actually go through with it (the conception of the operation lies in the Obama era).

S.V. Date and Christina Wilkie report in the Huffington Post that Trump called his National Security Adviser retd. Lt. General Mike Flynn at 3 A.M. in the morning to ask him whether it was a strong dollar or a weak dollar that would be good for the US economy.

Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman report in the New York Times that Trump was angered that he "was not fully briefed on the details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist {Steve Bannon} a seat on the National Security Council".


There are more examples, but these should suffice.  All of these stories are from unnamed sources (which is why I've taken care to mention the reporters' names), they fit in with how we imagine Trump to be (e.g., based on the content and timing of his tweets) but are they true?

ClimateGate and Clinton's emailGate are parts of one pattern

T.R. Ramachandran (@yottapoint) writes: http://electionado.com/canvas/1480388925211
"To understand Wikileaks you need to understand ClimateGate".

The Failure of Conventional Journalistic Ethics

Margaret Sullivan has an article in the Washington Post: How BuzzFeed crossed the line in publishing salacious ‘dossier’ on Trump.  In it she makes the points:

But at many other news organizations, the rule is caution: “When in doubt, leave it out.”

It’s a bad idea, and always has been, to publish unverified smears.

It’s never been acceptable to publish rumor and innuendo. 

 Let's see how that works in practice.   When Donald J. Trump went on with his birther allegations that Obama was not born in the United States, he repeated rumors and innuendo, and added some of his own unverified smears.

If the rules are as Margaret Sullivan says, why did major news organizations publish what Trump said?

The answer would likely be - the newsworthiness lies in the fact that a celebrity spokesperson is saying something (whatever it is) and not in the fact that what the person is saying is rumors, innuendo and unverified smears.

That puts the news organization in the position that once a celebrity says something, no matter how false, it is newsworthy.  Newsworthiness has been conferred on something by the celebrity uttering it.  If Joe Shmoe has assembled a dossier of unverified allegations, it is not news unless it is verified, and should not be published.

What Margaret Sullivan is arguing has this effect: the news organization ought to be a fact-checker and filter for Joe Shmoe; but is not for the celebrity.

We see the implicit assumption of conventional journalistic ethics here - that we all have a common interest in the truth, and that though what the celebrity is saying is merely rumors, innuendo and unverified smears, the resulting backlash and public disapproval will punish the celebrity.  Therefore, the news organization doesn't need to act as a filter on publishing what a celebrity says.

Well, Trump and his supporters defy this ethical standard.   Trump has zero interest in the truth - he denies saying things that he said that are recorded on video; and his public has zero interest in censuring Trump for lying, repeating rumors, innuendo and unverified smears.

Thus we end up with the 2016 US Presidential campaign.  Trump would have mostly been blacked out of the news had news organizations applied the same rules to what he said to the dossier compiled by the ex-MI6 agent (does knowing that he is Christopher Steele of Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd. change the newsworthiness of what he wrote?  Or does he have to have a TV reality show in order to have whatever he says published by news organizations?)

US Civilian Control of the Military

Retired Army Col. W.P. Lang and his circle who run the turcopolier blog are quite in favor of Trump.  Nevertheless they have concerns, I quote just one:

Mattis lost his job as CENTCOM commander for crowding the Iranians by sending US warships inshore where they were evidently expected to provoke a fight. This was contrary to Obama's policy and Mattis was warned about this behavior before he was replaced. Mattis should be cautioned against exceeding his authorities before being made SECDEF.

General James Mattis was fired by Obama in 2013, the conventional reports don't mention what these military insiders apparently know about that firing.  These reports do agree that the firing was rather unceremonious.

General Mattis is of course Trump's nominee to be Secretary of Defense.

Then there is a matter of a law dating from 1947:

U.S. Code › Title 10 › Subtitle A › Part I › Chapter 2 › § 113
(a) There is a Secretary of Defense, who is the head of the Department of Defense, appointed from civilian life by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. A person may not be appointed as Secretary of Defense within seven years after relief from active duty as a commissioned officer of a regular component of an armed force.

OK, so Congress can give General Mattis a waiver, since he has only three years since active duty, not seven.  The purpose of the law, however,  is to firmly keep the military under civilian control, and if the turcopolier blog writers are correct, General Mattis actually took actions contrary to the President policy.  That is, as a general, he did not show proper respect for civilian authority, and was fired for it (taking turcopolier as true).

Should the law be waived for such a person?

Josh Marshall, at talkingpointsmemo.com,  is not comforting:

This Is Not Normal

We now have three of the four top national and domestic security agencies of the government under the management of recently retired generals. (One might reasonably change the number to five if considered the DOJ which houses the FBI.) We could have a fourth if President-elect Trump chooses David Petraeus as Secretary of State. They are Mattis at the Pentagon; Kelly at DHS; Flynn as the President's National Security Advisor. There is nothing inherently wrong with having retired generals serve in high level administration positions. We've had a number of accomplished retired general presidents—Washington, Jackson, Grant, Eisenhower. Barely more than a decade ago, Colin Powell served as Secretary of State. Brent Scowcroft served as National Security Advisor. Petraeus served as CIA Director under President Obama. But the issue is one of concentration and recency.

All of these men have only recently retired from service. There's a reason why with the Defense Department a retired general is not permitted to serve as Secretary for seven years post-retirement. Mattis is getting a waiver. Concentration is the key issue. I cannot think of any time in history when an administration has been so dominated by retired generals.

This is the time when many precedents are likely to be broken.  Which ones ought to remain unbroken is critically important.

Republican Opposition Research on Bernie Sanders

Kurt Eichenwald writes at Newsweek about the opposition research the Republicans had in case Sanders became the Democratic nominee for POTUS:

I have seen the opposition book assembled by Republicans for Sanders, and it was brutal.

Here are a few tastes of what was in store for Sanders, straight out of the Republican playbook: He thinks rape is A-OK. In 1972, when he was 31, Sanders wrote a fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men. Yes, there is an explanation for it—a long, complicated one, just like the one that would make clear why the Clinton emails story was nonsense. And we all know how well that worked out.

Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.

Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”

The Republicans had at least four other damning Sanders videos (I don’t know what they showed), and the opposition research folder was almost 2-feet thick. (The section calling him a communist with connections to Castro alone would have cost him Florida.)

 Some substantiation of this would be useful.

The business of America is Trump's business

As the HuffPo reports:

President-elect Donald Trump told The New York Times Tuesday that laws around conflicts of interest don’t apply to him, and he can simply keep running his businesses from the White House.


“In theory I could run my business perfectly and then run the country perfectly,” Trump said, according to tweets from New York Times reporters interviewing the president-elect Tuesday. “There’s never been a case like this.”

He is technically correct on both counts.

 The Atlantic has a bit of history about how that came about:

Supreme Follies

Everyone probably has their own list of the worst decisions ever of the US Supreme Court.  My top three can be stated thusly:

1. Slaves are property.
2. Corporations are people.
3. Money is speech.

 A terrible war was fought to overcome the effects of the first ruling.  The last two are insidiously changing the political and economic landscape, to the extent that American democracy may eventually become unsustainable.   They accomplish their effects by making the government increasingly unresponsive to the people.

What passes for political discourse

Many of Professor Krugman's readers of his column and blog at the New York Times are upset with him.  It boils down to this (taken from a reader's comment):

The arguments keep changing with the new ones contradicting the old ones, but the aim stays fixed: to tar Sanders

• He is not popular
• Wait, he is popular but he is not serious
• He is serious but is not electable!
• Ok, he polls stronger against Trump and wins with Cruz (unlike Hillary!) but 4 "wonks" I hang out with think Hillary is more electable.
• He has no concrete plans
• He has concrete plans but cannot carry them out
• Policy proposals of his economist are crazy, say 4 guys working for Hillary citing no numbers
• OK, the economist in question actually supports Hillary not Sanders and better macroeconomists than me say his numbers add up, but Sanders' supporters are mean
• He is mean to point out that Hillary gorges on Wall St money
• I think Sanders also takes contributions! No? Never mind, his supporters are so mean
• Obamacare is great but single payer would be better
• Now that Hillary says single payer will never happen and Sanders proposes it, single payer is crazy
• Some health care VSP who worked for Hillary assumed crazy numbers and proved Sanders wrong
• OK, his analysis was debunked by health policy professors, but Sanders' supporters are just too mean to listen to us wonks.

As I recall it, for months, Krugman's readers were asking for commentary on Bernie Sanders, but none were forthcoming.  Until Sanders starting posing a serious threat to Hillary Clinton.  Then there was a whole series of posts, deriding Sanders' supporters as "Bernie bros", and essentially terming them deluded for supporting Sanders.  Krugman then cited other economists, who it turns out, didn't really do their homework.  Krugman, famously a wonk, did not explain whether the premises behind Sanders' programs are flawed, or whether the reasoning leading to the results was flawed; he simply targeted the rosy projections as absurd.  As they may be.  But the sequence above that Krugman is seen to have gone through does not aid his credibility.

The US was on a particular trajectory of economic growth till 2008; and then the financial crisis hit, and since then the US is on a lower trajectory.  This is the famous "output gap".   The economists who are positive about Sanders' plans essentially believe that it is possible to get back to the previous trajectory,  to close the output gap,  and that is where their rosy numbers come from.  Only now is there some substantial argument that, sorry, that is impossible.  And sorry to say, that did not come from Krugman, who gave us only the big sneer.  Great economist though he is, I think he has jumped the shark. 

PS: see this.