Should Donald J. Trump be impeached?

FRIDAY, MAY 31, 2019

Propagandized by favorites and friends:
Should Donald J. Trump be impeached?

As a general matter, we're not real big on impeachment. In our view, the American system runs on elections, and in the last presidential election, roughly 63 million people voted for Donald J. Trump.

We didn't vote for Donald J. Trump. We regard him as disordered and dangerous, but we also respect the fact that many Others don't see him that way.

It seems to us that Donald J. Trump may be mentally ill or cognitively impaired. But the "journalists" who propagandize us each day aren't willing to stage that discussion.

At any rate, 63 million people voted for Trump. Within the traditional American system, it would be a very serious act to overturn that election.

On the other hand, there's the daily dose of propaganda we liberals now receive—the remarkable dose we're delivered each day by Nicolle Wallace and her "favorite reporters and friends."

Back in the day, Wallace was a spokesperson for the invasion of Iraq and for torture and for ballot proposals outlawing same-sex marriage. Today, she uses her substantial ability, plus her fabulous teeth and hair, to propagandize us liberals.

Wallace has a lot of smarts, but she seems to possess the soul of the slightly disordered den mother. That positions us, her daily viewers, as maybe 8 years old.

Amazing! Each day, Wallace starts her MSNBC program, Deadline: White House, by introducing a panel she describes as "some of our favorite reporters and friends." This is her way of letting you know that you're being seen as a child.

On Wednesday's show, she outdid even herself at the close of the hour:

"I could talk to these friends forever, especially on a day like today," she amazingly said as the close of the hour. As she proceeded to name and thank each of the friends, John Heilemann delivered a playful shove to his friend, Jonathan Lemire.

This is the way these idiots behave when their mother praises them. Wallace then extended her theme. "MTP Daily, with my friend Chuck Todd, starts now," she Stepford-ly said.

The key point about Deadline: White House is this—you'll never hear a single word of dispute or disagreement. The Stepford friends all cluster about, agreeing with their corporate den mother.

No matter what Wallace says, the children rush to second it. Tomorrow, we'll show you a remarkable statement she made on yesterday's program—a remarkable statement which was quickly affirmed by Harry Litman, one of her favorites, live and direct from La Jolla.

On Wallace's show, everybody wants to impeach Donald Trump. All the children favor that stance, as does the children's den mother. For that reason, we recommend today's column in the Washington Post by conservative pundit Mark Thiessen.

Thiessen quotes statements by Mueller the Royal—statements you'll never hear quoted on Deadline: White House. On Deadline, you're with your favorites and your friends. Everybody always agrees, and they select the various things you'll be permitted to hear.

Tomorrow, we'll show you a crazy thing Wallace said. We'll also discuss a peculiar remark by Mueller the Royal. Meanwhile, should Donald J. Trump be impeached?

For people exposed to Deadline: White House, we recommend reading Thiessen's column. After that, at 4 PM Eastern, we can gather for our play date with our favorite reporters and friends.

SAVING CANDIDATE HARRIS: Brilliant young scribes maintain tribal script!

FRIDAY, MAY 31, 2019

Harvard, Yale crash and burn:
With genuine sorrow, major anthropologists constantly say that our basic instinct is wrong.

When do these scholars chide us this way? They say it when we express our pique at the idea that a major White House campaign can be built around misstatements like these:
MELBER (5/20/19): Let's start with this. What does your plan do to combat the gender pay gap?

CANDIDATE HARRIS: Well, first of all, it is just a fact, right? So the reality of this is that we don't have to debate the point, which is that, on average, women make 80 cents on the dollar to men. If you're talking about African-American women, that's 61 cents. If it's Latinas, it's 53 cents.

So there is an obvious issue that we have around, not only disparities but fairness, and equal pay for equal work. So let's get beyond that because it's not a debatable point.

The question becomes, what are we going to do about it? And I think the goal, we would all agree, should be that people should be paid equally for equal work.

[...]

CANDIDATE HARRIS: Look, Ari, it's for real that that woman is getting paid 80 cents on the dollar. It's for real that that other woman is getting paid 61 cents on the dollar.

It's for real that that other woman is getting paid 53 cents on the dollar.
And she's sitting at her kitchen table in the middle of the night trying to figure out how she can pay her bills.

When she wakes up at the same time the next morning as the guy who was working in the cubicle next to her, she performs the same work, but she's not getting paid the same amount. That's for real too.
These scholars agree with us on one point. They agree that it's especially galling to see a major White House candidate repeating inaccurate claims, even while repeatedly saying that the claims in question are "for real" and "a fact," something that isn't "debatable."

"Major gods on Olympus are laughing at that," these disconsolate scholars say. They report to us from the grief-stricken years which follow Mister Trump's Feckless War.

Top gods on Olympus may laugh, but audible groaning takes place in the caves within which these top experts huddle. To these future anthropologists, it isn't funny when a leading candidate "misspeaks" about her own chosen issue on one TV program after another,with the occasional "slip of the tongue" thrown in.

Our future scholars don't think this is funny, since they know where this bullshit led. But they advise us to beat back our vast pique:

"The human being was wired for this," these disconsolate scholars now say. "Within the vastly limited species, it was all about the promulgation of pleasing tribal tales."

At any rate, no, Virginia! According to the Census Bureau statistics to which the candidate referred, women do not "make 80 cents on the dollar [compared] to men" for the same or equal work.

It wasn't true when Rachel said "77 cents on the dollar," then insisted that she'd been right all along (see yesterday's report). And it isn't true now when the candidate says it, ignoring innumerable fact-checks.

Everyone knows it isn't true, but we liberals love to say it! According to these future experts, it's our version of Bill Maher's new toy, the exciting new toy our brother Bill very much didn't want to break! See last Friday's report.

"This is the way the species was wired," disconsolate experts constantly tell us, speaking in the past tense. "You might as well complain about the fact that the sun tends to set in the west."

So this matter was fated to go, according to these future scholars. According to these anthropologists, this also explains the recent journalism of the top kids from Harvard and Yale.

As Candidate Harris announced her plan, she began misspeaking in various cable forums about the problem she vowed to defeat. And sure enough! At the nation's top publications, top youngsters swung into action:

"They were simply Saving Candidate Harris," one anthropologist said.

As the candidate discussed her proposal, she kept making baldly inaccurate statements about the problem she hoped to solve. As we noted last week, the bright young journalist Astead Herndon wrote this in the New York Times:
HERNDON (5/21/19): The most recent studies on the gender pay gap, which are not based on analogous work, show that women who work full time make 80 cents for every dollar paid to men, adding up to more than $400,000 in missed wages over the course of a woman’s career. The numbers are even worse for women who are also racial minorities—about $1 million in missed wages over a career for Latinas, Native American women and black women, according to an analysis by the National Women’s Law Center.
We've highlighted Herndon's key words, as we did last week. Using a slippery phrase no reader would ever decipher, Herndon said the studies in question "are not based on analogous work."

We can now tell you what that murky phrase meant:

These studies do not record, or pretend to record, the amount of payment received by men and women for the same or equal work. That key statistic—"80 cents for every dollar"—has not been adjusted for number of hours worked, or even for type of employment, or for other relevant variables.

As such, it does not record who much women are paid, as compared to men, for the same or equal work.

Similarly, these studies do not record, or pretend to record, what women are paid as compared to men "in the next cubicle" "performing the same work." But instead of saying that in English, Herndon and/or his unnamed editor decided instead to say this:

"The studies on the gender pay gap are not based on analogous work."

No Times reader knew what that meant. This afforded the Times a type of journalistic deniability:

The Times can claim that it reported the key fact about this matter, while knowing that none of its readers will realize that it did. In this slippery, skillful way, the Times was able to Save Candidate Harris and keep tribal script alive.

Herndon is one of the bright young kids the Times has hired to save on salary and to make a better appearance on cable. That said, he didn't go to Harvard or Yale.

Herndon is currently finishing his fourth year out of Marquette (class of 2015). Elsewhere, though, Harvard and Yale kids crashed and burned as they too "kept script alive." Let's start at the Washington Post, where Chelsea Janes (Yale 2012) reported the Harris proposal.

Janes is on the campaign beat fresh from several years as a Post sports reporter. Here's the way she described the problem Harris would solve:
JANES (5/21/19): Studies show that American women overall make 80 cents for every dollar paid to men. For African American and Latino women, the number is closer to 60 cents on the dollar. Statistics on comparable jobs vary.

“When you lift up the economic status of women, you lift up their families, their neighborhoods, and all of society,” Harris said, after telling voters at a Los Angeles rally Sunday that she would soon announce the plan. “And it’s an issue that’s been around for far too long without much progress at all.”

If elected, Harris said, she would require all corporations to receive “Equal Pay Certification” from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. To receive the certification, companies would have to prove they are paying employees comparable pay for comparable work, regardless of gender.
Janes cited the familiar statistics which Harris keeps citing. She then wrote this:

"Statistics on comparable jobs vary."

As with the Times, so too here. Rather than cite the relevant statistics, in which women are underpaid perhaps 5 cents on the dollar (if that) for the same or equal work, Janes cited the more dramatic statistics, then added a murky disclaimer which no one would understand.

Or this could be her editor's doing. There's no way to know that.

Over at Vox, a Harvard kid was handed this task. Li Zhou (class of 2012) started off like this:
ZHOU (5/21/19): California Sen. Kamala Harris has a plan to close the gender pay gap, and it’s founded on hitting companies on one of their most prized markers: their annual profits.

As Harris’s plan is structured, companies with 100 or more employees would be required to disclose pay data to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in order to demonstrate that they’ve closed the gender pay gap between men and women who perform comparable roles. Companies that aren’t able to show they’ve achieved this would be penalized a percentage of their profits.

Her plan aims to fix a pervasive problem: Right now, women are still paid 80 cents on the dollar for what men make, on average, and it’s even worse among women of color. Latina women make 53 cents on the dollar, Native American women make 58 cents, and black women make 61 cents, according to a release from Harris. Those gaps have major implications for women’s economic success and their long-term earning potential.
To her credit, Zhou didn't bother to fake it. She simply said that, under the candidate's plan, companies would have to "demonstrate that they’ve closed the gender pay gap between men and women who perform comparable roles."

She then cited the standard statistics Harris keeps citing—statistics which don't measure amounts of pay for men and women "who perform comparable roles."

For the record, Harris' plan is not designed to fix the "pervasive problem" Zhou describes. Even if fully implemented, i would have little effect (though some) on that larger overall income gap. Zhou even cited "a release from Harris." all the while failing to note that the statistics it contains are not for "comparable" work.

Harris has been on a TV tour concerning this proposal. On this tour, she's constantly been "misspeaking," according to staff, even while committing the occasional "slip of the tongue."

In our view, progressives should be disgusted with candidates who do this. There are giant problems of economic looting to be solved, problems which don't require the invention of utterly bogus facts.

We'd like to see candidates, and the New York Times, address those actual matters of looting. Despondent future anthropologists tell us we're silly to think about that..

"This is just the way this deeply flawed species was wired," one sad scholar recently said, speaking in the past tense. "Hacks like Hannity conned the public about the way the rich were over-taxed. It fell to liberals and progressive to invent and promulgate pleasing group fictions about matters like this."

Let's be clear! As Zhou said, the income gaps cited above may in fact "have major implications for women’s economic success and their long-term earning potential."

How major are those implications? Is there any serious way to address them? That would be a worthwhile debate! That said, we liberals prefer to wander the countryside making claims which are baldly false. Everyone knows that our claims are false, but we love to make these claims, and also Script Never Dies.

At PolitiFact, Louis Jacobson plays the Sisyphus role. He keeps pushing the rock back up the hill. The candidate, and the bright young kids, ignore every word he says.

"This was all the species had," one sad scholar glumly reports. "Much as Professor Harari said, they went to Harvard and Yale to score the chance to advance the mandated fictions!"

That assessment struck us as harsh. And yet, this was a top future anthropologist, despondent yet a star in her field.

What won't the Hamptons-based New York Times publish?

THURSDAY, MAY 30, 2019

In what way did this column make sense?
Kevin Drum is a nicer guy than we are.

We learned that yesterday. We learned it when we read his post about Alice Garza's guest column in the hard-copy New York Times.

Drum noticed the fact that Garza's column doesn't exactly make any discernible sense. That said, he was basically nice about that fact, and he didn't ask the obvious question:

Why would a newspaper like the Times put such material in print?

Our reaction was somewhat different. This is the way Garza's column began. We'll post our reaction below:
GARZA (5/29/19): During election season, I always cringe when I see candidates eating fried chicken next to a bottle of hot sauce in Harlem or taking staged photos with black leaders. These shallow symbolic gestures are not a substitute for meaningful engagement with black voters. And candidates should know that we see right through them.

Candidates and their campaigns are comfortable talking at black people, but few want to talk to us. This limits our ability to influence their decisions and policies. And it’s a bad strategy at a time when black people, black women in particular, form the base of the Democratic Party, are its most loyal voters and mobilize other people to go to the polls.

That’s why, in 2018, I started the Black Census Project, the results of which we are releasing on Tuesday. More than 31,000 black people from all 50 states participated in what we believe is the largest independent survey of black people ever conducted in the United States.
During election season, Garza always cringes when she sees candidates taking staged photos with black leaders.

We're a little bit different. We cringe when we see newspapers like the Times publishing material like this.

As Drum noted, Garza's survey doesn't exactly make sense. It doesn't involve a representative sample, whether of black people on the whole or of some particular segment of the black population.

For that reason, no one can sensibly know what to make of this survey's findings concerning the overall views expressed by its respondents, as Garza does throughout her column.

How unrepresentative were this survey's respondents? Readers of the Times column aren't told, but Drum posted this background information from the survey's web site:
BLACK CENSUS PROJECT: Because traditional surveys too often erase the diverse experiences of Black people and particular segments of the Black community, the Black Census Project intentionally oversampled certain populations: Black Census respondents are younger, more likely to be female, and more likely to identify as LGBTQ+ than the Black population as a whole. The Black Census sample has a higher educational attainment than the adult Black population nationally (nearly a fifth has earned an advanced degree)...
As Drum notes, only 8 percent of the overall black population has an advanced degree. It's hard to see what we're supposed to learn when a survey reports the overall views of such an unrepresentative sample.

The Times, of course, didn't notice this problem. Nor did it notice the silliness of passages like this:
GARZA: The most common response among people who were politically engaged was that no politician or pollster has ever asked them what their lives were like. Fifty-two percent of respondents said that politicians do not care about black people, and one in three said they care only a little.

Yet this doesn’t stifle our participation in politics. Nearly three in four respondents said they voted in the 2016 presidential election, and 40 percent reported helping to register voters, giving people a ride to the polls, donating money to a candidate or handing out campaign materials. Six in 10 women surveyed reported being electorally engaged. These responses debunk the myth that black communities don’t show up to vote — we do and we bring other people with us.
So goes Garza's cheer-leading.

Meanwhile, Earth to the Times—no politician or pollster has ever asked most people of every demographic group what their lives are like. Also, the fact that people say they voted and drove people to the polls doesn't mean that they actually did so.

Meanwhile, the Times also published this, part of Garza's claim that liberal groups should focus more attention on black voters:
GARZA: [W]hite voters are declining in numbers and advancing in age, while communities of color get bigger and younger. It is illogical to overextend resources to soothe the fears of an aging group, shrinking in size, that is fearful of demographic shifts and oblivious to the ways that policies that lift the boats sinking the fastest will lift theirs too. The Democrats’ approach hurts everyone—including the working- and middle-class white voters who want to see change. Nor is it a winning strategy for a party that claims to embrace progress.

Campaigns that fail to understand or try to remedy the ways structural racism damages black people’s lives are doomed. Without this analysis, their solutions will always miss the mark when it comes to black voters.

Some say that politics is quid pro quo, but that hasn’t been true for black voters. Our turnout in the 2018 midterms increased by nearly 11 percentage points over 2014, and voters in the 2018 election chose from the most diverse pool of candidates ever.
Black turnout increased by nearly 11 percent! That's supposed to sound exciting and inspiring. It sounds like that's supposed to identify black voters as the key demographic, the group which is on the rise.

But uh-oh! According to the Census Bureau figures to which Garza links, overall voting rose by more than 11 percent in 2018. Whites, Hispanics and Asian-Americans all showed larger increases in turnout than black voters did. The numbers look like this:
Increase in voter turnout, 2018 over 2014
Hispanic folk: 13.4 percent
Asian-American folk: 13.3 percent
White folk: 11.7 percent
Black folk: 10.8 percent
No, it doesn't actually matter, and all those groups are important.

That said, those numbers make black voters look like the stragglers of 2018—and this is the very data set to which Garza links! In these ways, the New York Times makes us all dumber than rocks, pretty much every day of the week.

(For readers of the hard-copy Times, today's "Noteworthy Facts" are just this side of being noteworthily insane. As always, they're on page A3.)

Why would a major newspaper publish material like this? Answer—because it's the Times, and because Garza is saying things which are currently fashionable in the lower-IQ precincts of the upper-end Hamptons! Few things have to make much sense to appear in the New York Times, an upper-class paper which, despite its egghead branding, just isn't real sharp at all.

As a general matter, we don't like Garza's instinct, now quite common within our tribe, to slice and dice the population into atomized parts. This now includes the common practice, displayed in Garza's column, of voicing invidious distinctions between black men and black women. This now-common practice seems to date to silly statistical claims about voter turnout in the Alabama special election which elected Doug Jones.

(Atomized cheer-leading from paragraph 2: This is "a time when black people, black women in particular, form the base of the Democratic Party, are its most loyal voters and mobilize other people to go to the polls." Useless black men, please report to the underside of the bus! Increasingly, this is the way the "assistant professor left" thinks and proselytizes.)

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. Anthropologists say our liberal team was never especially sharp. Sadly reporting from the years which follow Mister Trump's Completely Inclusive War, they tend to cite the New York Times as a prime example of this existential former problem.

SAVING CANDIDATE HARRIS: We've been reciting this fiction for years!

THURSDAY, MAY 30, 2019

Saving Cable Star Maddow:
We liberals! We've been reciting, and believing, this particular piece of tribal "fiction" for a very long time.

For ourselves, we'd heard the claim a million times as of April 2012. The claim always struck us as highly implausible on its face, but we'd never fact-checked the claim.

And then it happened! Rachel Maddow appeared on Meet the Press and she gave voice to the tale! When she was challenged, she went to great lengths to pretend she's been right all along.

We'll assume that Maddow believed her claim was accurate when she appeared on Meet the Press. In her initial remark, she only said this. Her claim was still technically accurate:
MADDOW (4/29/12): The Romney campaign wants to talk about women and the economy. The— Women in this country still make 77 cents on the dollar for what men make.
That claim could still be defended as technically accurate. But when the claim was challenged by GOP strategist Alex Castellanos, Maddow revealed what she'd actually meant. What she said now was basically wrong, or at best grossly misleading:
CASTELLANOS (continuing directly from above): (Unintelligible interjection)

MADDOW: Women don't make less than men?

CASTELLANOS: Actually, if you start looking at the numbers, Rachel, there are lots of reasons for that.

MADDOW: Wait, wait, no, don't tell me the reasons. Do women make less than men for doing the same work?

CASTELLANOS: Actually, no, because—

REP. CATHY RODGERS (R-WA): Not for the same work.

MADDOW: Wow! OK. Well, we're working from different facts!
"Don't tell me the reasons," Maddow comically said. But as she continued, the corporate star extended her claim:

Women make less than men "for doing the same work," she now said. Later, she said that women were "getting paid less for equal work."

Stripped of attempts at quantification, such statements may even be true. But as the debate rolled on, Maddow voiced the "77 cents on the dollar" framework again—and it almost seemed that Castellanos might be better informed on the topic than the former Rhodes scholar was:
CASTELLANOS (continuing directly): For example, men work, men work an average of 44 hours a week, women work 41 hours a week. Men go into professions like engineering, science and math that earn more. Women want more flexible professions.

MADDOW: Listen, this is not a "math is hard" part of this conversation.

CASTELLANOS: No, no, no. Yes, it is, actually.

MADDOW: No, it isn't. No, listen—

DAVID GREGORY: All right. Let Rachel frame it, though, the way she laid it out.

MADDOW: Right now, women are making 77 cents on the dollar for what men are making. So—

CASTELLANOS: But that's not true.

GREGORY: All right. Let Rachel make her point.
Concerning the possible size of the "gender pay gap," Castellanos had begun to introduce some relevant points. Maddow, claiming that math isn't hard, insisted on making her point, after introducing the 77 cents on the dollar framework again.

Host David Gregory never brought clarity to this dispute. He did let Maddow make her point.

As she continued, she said it was weird that Castellanos was interrupting her—that he wasn't letting her make her point. She closed by saying this to Castellanos and Rodgers:
MADDOW: But it is important, I think, the interruption is important, I think, because now we know, at least from both of your perspectives, that women are not faring worse than men in the economy, that women aren't getting paid less for equal work. I think that's a serious basis—a difference in, a difference in factual understanding of the world.
Maddow said the dispute had revealed "a difference in factual understanding of the world."

Plainly, that was an accurate statement. But according to future anthropologists, we humans had lost the ability to settle such disputes even as early as April 2012.

According to these despondent scholars, this was true to an even greater degree in the last few years before Mister Trump's Fiction-Fueled War.

Let's be fair! Maddow never explicitly said that women were paid 23 percent less for doing the same or equal work. Still, a sensible viewer of Meet the Press would have thought that she was making that claim—a claim our tribe had been making for years, even by that point.

This dispute on Meet the Press produced a bit of buzz. According to future anthropologists, the more interesting part of this dispute occurred the following night, on Monday, April 30.

On that fateful evening, Maddow went on the air for her regular Monday night TV show and hotly insisted that she had no earthly idea what Castellanos and Rodgers had been talking about.

She had tried to figure it out all day. But she still had no idea, she now said.

Good lord! On that Monday evening show, Maddow delivered a long opening harangue in which she plainly seemed to insist that she had been right all along.

Eventually, she presented an academic expert who reported that she had in fact been wrong. But this expert did so in such a skillful way that it sounded like this artful dodger was saying that Maddow had been right!

Maddow even played tape of a discussion Wolf Blitzer had conducted about her dispute with Castellanos. Sadly, though, she only played the part of the tape where Blitzer's guest said that women do earn, on average, smaller incomes overall.

She didn't play the part of the tape where the guest told Blitzer than the 23 percent figure was just massively wrong—that the gender pay gap isn't anywhere near that large for the same or equal work.

Maddow seemed to dissemble and cherry-pick in an astonishing way this night. At one point, she offered her ludicrous uber-claim:
MADDOW (4/30/12): I spent a long time going through the Republican side of this argument today just trying to understand how you could look at these very blunt numbers and come up with the opposite truth.
It seemed to us that this was Maddow's most baldly ridiculous claim. Here's why it struck us that way:

We ourselves had fact-checked Maddow's familiar "23 cents on the dollar" claim right after the Meet the Press program ended. We'd hit upon the basic facts behind this dispute within maybe ten minutes of Googling.

We'd learned that the 23 percent income shortfall was not for the same or equal work. We'd learned that experts and specialists, including liberal experts and specialist, think the pay shortfall is much smaller than that for the same or equal work. We'd learned that some experts aren't sure there's an overall pay gap for the same or equal work at all.

We learned all this within maybe ten minutes, tops. Thirty-six hours later, Maddow went on the air and said she still had no freaking idea, though she'd been doing research all day.

We pretty much didn't believe what the corporate multimillionaire said. But then, we'd been reporting, for years, that Maddow was perhaps a tiny bit less than obsessively honest.

The basics here are simple! The claim about women being underpaid by something like 23 cents on the dollar is not a claim about how much men and women get paid for doing "the same or equal work."

No expert makes any such claim. We learned this fact in maybe ten minutes. Thirty-six hours later, Maddow was still pretending she had no idea.

She cherry-picked and dissembled that night, insisting that she had been right while The Others were crazily wrong. Her academic expert, Heidi Hartmann, actually told her that she had been wrong, but did so in such an artful that very few viewers would have understood.

In a brilliantly disguised way, Hartmann said the actual pay gap for the same or equal work was maybe 4.6 cents on the dollar. Maddow disappeared the part of the Blitzer tape where his expert offered a similar assessment.

In these ways, we liberals were kept from learning the basics that night. As a tribe, we enjoy our wildly embellished claim, and our "journalistic" and academic stars seem determined let us maintain it.

Rachel Maddow was busy that night Saving Cable Star Maddow. The actual facts about equal pay are very hard to establish. But we liberals were being dumbed way down that night by one of our tribe's major stars.

Below, we'll supply the links to the four reports we posted that week. According to despondent anthropologists, the moral to the story is this:

We posted those four reports in early May 2012. Seven years later, Candidate Harris is out on the trail "misspeaking" and committing "slips of the tongue" in these same familiar old ways.

She's actually building a White House campaign around these familiar misstatements! According to future scholars, this is what we humans actually were in the years before Mister Trump's War.

Darling Rachel conned us good! "This was the nature of the species," disconsolate experts now say.

Tomorrow: Saving Candidate Harris! These kid scribes today

Visit our incomparable archives: In real time, we posted four reports about Maddow's performance. According to leading anthropologists, we humans, being incurably tribal, weren't open to such reports.

You can check them out for yourself. The links go exactly like this:
Tuesday, May 1, 2012: We always wonder about this script. Clearly, Maddow doesn't!

Wednesday, May 2, 2012: Former Rhodes Scholar emotes! Reciting a well-known script.

Thursday, May 3, 2012: Maddow’s expert says she’s wrong! But Maddow just blunders ahead.

Friday, May 4, 2012: Do you believe what Maddow said? How we get dumb and dumber!

Drum explains mass incarceration again!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 29, 2019

It's all tribal script now:
Kevin Drum says he "doesn't really care what anyone thinks of Joe Biden."

We don't care about that either. By any traditional standard, Biden's too old to be running for president. He has some qualities we like—he knows how to talk about working-class people; he isn't afraid to tell boyhood stories in which his father calls him "Honey"—but there's nothing especially thrilling about him as a White House hopeful.

That said, he isn't Donald J. Trump, and he could be Trump's next opponent. For that reason, we recommend Drum's most recent report about the actually history of mass incarceration.

If you simply click this link, you'll see a graph Drum has prepared concerning incarceration rates from 1930 on. You'll then see Drum say this:
DRUM (5/29/19): As you can see, the 1994 crime bill had no effect on this trend. Incarceration rates started skyrocketing in the late 1970s as a response to rising crime rates, and after the crime bill passed the increase in incarceration started to slow, eventually peaking in 2000.
We mention this 1) because Vladimir Putin will soon be emailing us liberals, saying that Biden caused mass incarceration with the 1994 crime bill; and 2) because major segments of our "liberal community" will continue stampeding through the streets, reciting this Russkie script.

As we've mentioned many times, it's all narrative now—and we humans seem to have a fatal attraction to scripts which are factually flawed. This fatal flaw even infects us liberals, brilliant though we so plainly are.

We love to claim that women are underpaid by 20 cents on the dollar as compared to men "for doing the exact same work.". We also love to promote faulty or borderlines claims about the 1994 crime bill, often at the prompting of 1) Vladimir Putin or 2) our assistant professors.

According to future anthropologists with whom we consult, this is what we humans always did. At any rate, Drum's longer complaint reads as shown. We post this for a reason:
DRUM: I don’t really care what anyone thinks of Joe Biden, but liberals should stop inventing reasons to blame him for things he isn’t responsible for. The 1994 crime bill (a) included a lot of good ideas, (b) included some bad ideas at the insistence of Republicans, (c) had nothing to do with skyrocketing incarceration rates, (d) was supported by most black lawmakers, and (e) was a reaction to the fact that violent crime really was high, and nobody at the time had any reason to think this was likely to change.
We especially note the fact that the 1994 crime bill "was supported by most black lawmakers," not that facts and perspective actually matter, given the way we're wired.

More precisely, the crime bill was supported by former Black Panther Rep. Bobby Rush; by future NAACP president Rep. Kwami Mfume; and by Senator Carole Moseley-Braun, the nation's only black senator in 1994.

It was also supported by future presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and by the late Paul Wellstone, the Senate's most revered progressive at that point in time. Jesse Helms voted no.

Because it's all anthropology now, none of this actually matters. According to major anthropologists, we human beings always lived for the joy of reciting tribal script, the more misleading the better.

Tribal script made us feel we belonged. It proved we were better than you were.

Final point: One candidate was quoted on this matter in today's Washington Post. She's the one who keeps "misspeaking" about the gender pay gap—and yes, she was blaming Biden.

According to future anthropologists, this is what we humans were like in the years before Mister Trump's War.

SAVING CANDIDATE HARRIS: PolitiFact forced to explain it again!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 29, 2019

The (long-suffering) Fact-Checker's Tale:
When Chaucer penned his famous "Miller's Tale," he let his freak flag fly.

The leading authority on the tale offers such background as this:
"The Miller's Tale" (Middle English: The Milleres Tale) is the second of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1380s–1390s), told by the drunken miller Robin to "quite" (a Middle English term meaning requite or pay back, in both good and negative ways) "The Knight's Tale."

[...]

The general prologue to The Canterbury Tales describes the Miller, Robin, as a stout and evil churl fond of wrestling. In the Miller's Prologue, the pilgrims have just heard and enjoyed "The Knight's Tale", a classical story of courtly love, and the host asks the Monk to "quite" ("repay" or "answer") with a tale of his own. However, the Miller insists on going next. He claims that his tale is "noble", but reminds the other pilgrims that he is quite drunk and cannot be held accountable for what he says. He explains that his story is about a carpenter and his wife, and how a clerk "hath set the wrightes cappe" (that is, fooled the carpenter). Osewold the Reeve, who had originally been a carpenter himself, protests that the tale will insult carpenters and wives, but the Miller carries on anyway.
The Miller carried on anyway! According to future anthropologists, so it went, in our own "modern" times, out on the campaign trail!

According to top anthropologists, glorious Chaucer was able to capture the essence of our "human" nature. In the manifestation under review, a drunken miller tells a tale designed to undermine an earlier tale—a knight's tale of courtly love.

It isn't like that with "The Fact-Checker's Tale," the highly familiar modern story we're forced to revisit today.

The fact-checker to whom we refer is PolitiFact's Louis Jacobson, an experienced Washington journalist who doesn't seem to be drunk or impaired in any discernible way.

Jacobson has been responding of late to The Candidate's Tale. More specifically, he keeps responding to a set of false and misleading claims Candidate Harris keeps making, with her staff persistently saying that her errors are merely "slips of the tongue on live TV" or examples of "misspeaking."

As such, Jacobson has been cast in the Sisyphus role, pushing the facts back up a steep hill to no useful effect. In his most recent attempt to "quite" the hopeful, he referred to this recent exchange between Harris and TV's Stephen Colbert:
HARRIS (5/21/19): The law says that men and women should be paid equally for equal work, but what we know is that in America today, women on average are paid 80 cents on the dollar of what men are paid for the same work. African American women, 61 cents on the dollar, Latinas 53 cents on the dollar. And these are actually not debatable points.

COLBERT: So this is not hours worked, on average. This is hour for hour.

HARRIS: Yeah, and for the same work. Or it could be the annual salary, but it’s for the same work.
Later, staffers told Jacobson that Harris had "misspoken" during that exchange with Colbert. That said, Harris had "misspoken" the exact same way the previous night on The Beat with Ari Melber, an appearance Jacobson didn't mention (see yesterday's report).

Nor had it started there. In late April, Jacobson corrected a giant "pay gap" howler emitted by Harris during a CNN town hall. On that occasion, Harris' misstatement had been a "slip of the tongue," according to The Harris Staffer's Tale.

Meanwhile, nothing makes this stop! Harris misspoke on this topic again last night, this time during an MSNBC town hall with Lawrence O'Donnell.

According to leading anthropologists, so it went among us humans in the years before Mister Trump's War. For today, let's limit ourselves to getting clear about the basic facts which underlie the so-called gender pay gap.

Alas, poor Stephen Colbert! On live TV, with citizens watching, The Candidate told him that "women on average are paid 80 cents on the dollar of what men are paid for the same work."

Colbert's reaction suggests that he may have known, or at least suspected, that this statement was bogus. That said, The Moderator's Tale will rarely include an actual challenge to a top guest of the political party he prefers.

Fact-checkers work by different rules! After quoting what Harris and Colbert had said, Jacobson correctly said this:
JACOBSON (5/23/19): In a nutshell, Harris incorrectly explained the meaning of the gender wage gap. The 80 percent figure is not an apples-to-apples comparison of men and women performing the same work. Instead, it refers to average pay for all jobs held by men and all jobs held by women.

When we reached out to the Harris campaign, they quickly acknowledged that Harris had misspoken, even after being prodded on the point by Colbert. Spokesman Ian Sams pointed out that Harris’ plan does not use the "for the same work" formulation.
Say what? The 80 percent figure is not an apples-to-apples comparison of men and women performing the same work? Harris had "misspoken" when she said that women are paid 80 cents on the dollar, as compared to men, "for [doing] the same work?"

So the staffer said! Pushing the stone back up the hill, Jacobson began to explain:
JACOBSON (continuing directly): The most recent official data on this point, published by the U.S. Census Bureau for 2017, showed that women earned 80.5 percent of what men did. That’s up by a couple percentage points in recent years, though it did not significantly change between 2016 and 2017.

As we’ve written previously, the 80 percent figure does not adjust for such factors as the degrees and jobs women pursue, the time they take off to care for children, the number of hours they work, and the years of experience they’ve had.

So while the 80 percent figure may be used to signify some facets of women’s challenges in the workplace—such as disproportionate representation in fields that offer more flexible work schedules, even if that means earning less—the statistic cannot be used to pinpoint pay discrimination between men and women doing the same work.
According to leading anthropologists, nothing anyone says or does will ever stop Harris, or other modern liberals, from "misspeaking" on this point. With that in mind, let's try to make one part of Jacobson's presentation a bit more clear:

The gender income gap

According to those census figures, there is a definite "income gap" between men and women who work full-time (35 hours or more per week). In 2017, the income of the average woman who worked full-time came to 80.5 percent of the income of the average man who worked full-time.

That is an actual "income gap" between the average man and the average woman. As Jacobson says, this income disparity may help define some actual social problems concerning "some facets of women’s challenges in the workplace."

But the Census Bureau doesn't claim, in any way, that this represents income received for having done "the same work." Indeed, just look at one part of what Jacobson says:

Among other things, that famous figure "does not adjust for such factors as...the number of hours [men and women] work." What can that possibly mean?

The number of hours full-time workers work

The Census Bureau defines a full-time worker as someone who works 35 hours or more per week. They key words are these: "or more."

When it comes to hours of work per week, full-time workers are not created equal! Many work 35 hours per week. Others work many hours more.

On average, male full-time workers work longer hours than female full-time workers. When you adjust for that one factor, the income, wage or pay gap does in fact start to shrink.

Within his widely-ignored tale, the fact-checker says something else. He says that 80.5% pay gap "does not adjust for such factors as...the jobs women pursue."

By that, Jacobson means that the 80.5% figure hasn't been adjusted for the different types of employment held by men and women on average, or for the roles within the various types of employment men and women may, on average, assume.

That is, somewhat more men may be found within higher-paying occupations, but that 80.5 percent figure hasn't been adjusted for that. Even within a given field, somewhat more men may be found within higher-paying niches—working as surgeons rather than as family practitioners, for example.

None of this has been adjusted for by the Census Bureau. When Harris says that 80.5% figure represents income or pay for men and women who do "the same work," she is flatly wrong, and it's very hard to believe that she doesn't actually know that.

On average, to what extent are women being underpaid "for the same work?" On average, are women underpaid for the same work at all?

How much are women underpaid? It's very hard to establish that point, but no specialist actually thinks that women are paid 80 cents on the dollar as compared to men for the same work. As far as we know, no one thinks the number is anywhere close to that.

We did a lot of work on this topic when Rachel Maddow conned her viewers back in April 2012. Tomorrow, we'll review the clown show Maddow staged at that time. To this day, Maddow's performance on the gender pay gap is one of the most amazing con jobs in "cable news" history, ever since that medium began to speed us towards the wages of Mister Trump's War.

For today, we'll draw our wisdom from sacred Chaucer, and from an array of anthropologists sorrowfully huddled in caves. We humans always loved our drunken tales, these future experts sadly say, reporting to us through the nocturnal submissions the haters refer to as dreams.

We loved our tales, these experts say, and we kept rewarding the people who told them. We rarely "held them accountable for what they said," even as we sat on the beach awaiting that onrushing war!

Tomorrow: The Cable Superstar's Ludicrous Tale

Friday: Saving Candidate Harris! These kid journalists today!

SAVING CANDIDATE HARRIS: PolitiFact explains the pay gap again!

TUESDAY, MAY 28, 2019

Grim future scholars respond:
As we noted last Tuesday, it started on MSNBC.

Candidate Kamala Harris had said that she would unveil a proposal to battle the gender pay gap. (It's also called the gender wage gap.) On Monday evening, May 20, she discussed her proposal on The Beat with Ari Melber.

Describing the problem she hopes to solve, Harris made the statements shown below. As we noted on May 21, no expert, authority, griot or specialist actually believes the bulk of what Harris said and implied:
MELBER (5/20/19): Let's start with this. What does your plan do to combat the gender pay gap?

HARRIS: Well, first of all, it is just a fact, right? So the reality of this is that we don't have to debate the point, which is that, on average, women make 80 cents on the dollar to men. If you're talking about African-American women, that's 61 cents. If it's Latinas, it's 53 cents.

So there is an obvious issue that we have around, not only disparities but fairness, and equal pay for equal work. So let's get beyond that because it's not a debatable point.

The question becomes, what are we going to do about it? And I think the goal, we would all agree, should be that people should be paid equally for equal work. And this has not changed over decades.

[...]

HARRIS: Look, Ari, it's for real that that woman is getting paid 80 cents on the dollar. It's for real that that other woman is getting paid 61 cents on the dollar.

It's for real that that other woman is getting paid 53 cents on the dollar. And she's sitting at her kitchen table in the middle of the night trying to figure out how she can pay her bills.

When she wakes up at the same time the next morning as the guy who was working in the cubicle next to her, she performs the same work, but she's not getting paid the same amount. That's for real too.
As we noted on May 21, no specialist actually believes the bulk of what Harris said. More specifically, no one believes that women, "on average," are paid 80 cents on the dollar as compared to the man "in the next cubicle" who's "doing the same work."

Beyond that, no specialist believes that the average black woman is paid 61 cents on the dollar compared to the average man who's "doing the same work." The claim is familiar and tribally pleasing, but no one really believes it.

We even said, in last Tuesday's post, that this familiar old claim "seems absurd on its face." And yet, it remains a familiar and pleasing part of standard liberal discourse as our flailing and floundering nation moves towards Mister Trump's War.

We liberals have heard and repeated such claims for decades, but no specialist believes that they're true. That said, something else is true:

No anthropologist believes that we human beings, on average, actually cared about what was true! That's certainly true of future anthropologists—the disconsolate scholars who report to us from the caves in which they glumly huddle in the gloomy years which have apparently followed Mister Trump's Inevitable War.

Did humans actually care about truth? These anthropologists understand that our species, Homo sapiens, ran on other types of fuel.

According to these future scholars, our species ran on Professor Harari's "gossip" and "fiction," with a strong dose of intolerance thrown in the stew. ("Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark," Harari wrote, still speaking in present tense.)

According to these disconsolate experts, our species, on average, didn't much care about facts, preferring novelized stories instead. And sure enough! Even after we challenged Harris' initial presentation, she went on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and did it all over again!

She repeated the same familiar claims upon which our self-impressed tribe has long fed. And as with Melber, so too here! Colbert played along with Harris' claims, whether from ignorance or perhaps from tribal deference.

Harris appeared with Colbert on Tuesday night, May 21. Two days later, the weary souls at PolitiFact critiqued what she had said.

PolitiFact gave the candidate an overall "Mostly False" rating. Early in its critique, PolitiFact quoted a chunk of what Harris told Colbert.

As President Reagan might have said, there she (and we) went again:
HARRIS (5/21/19): The law says that men and women should be paid equally for equal work, but what we know is that in America today, women on average are paid 80 cents on the dollar of what men are paid for the same work. African American women, 61 cents on the dollar, Latinas 53 cents on the dollar. And these are actually not debatable points.

COLBERT: So this is not hours worked, on average. This is hour for hour.

HARRIS: Yeah, and for the same work. Or it could be the annual salary, but it’s for the same work.
Uh-oh! Colbert's (largely incoherent) question suggests the possibility that he knew that Harris was wrong. He got a flatly inaccurate reply from Harris, then proceeded to let it go.

The session with Colbert occurred last Tuesday night. Last Thursday morning, the long-suffering souls at PolitiFact responded, in an essay bearing this headline:
On Colbert, Kamala Harris flubs wage gap statistic
That headline is likely too kind. It's plain from PolitiFact's critique that Harris's presentation, however familiar, was grossly misleading and/or simply wrong pretty much all the way down.

As usual, PolitiFact tried to straighten things out. Wearily, they noted that they've corrected this type of misstatement in the past. Tomorrow, we'll review their critique of Harris.

Later in the week, we'll look at the way upper-end journalists reported Harris's plan. In effect, these hapless graduates of Harvard and Yale were Saving Candidate Harris. As we'll note on Thursday, liberal academics have tended to behave this way in the past.

Wearily, PolitiFact corrected the record again. More interesting was the reaction from several anthropologists who reported to us from the future.

These disconsolate future scholars rolled their eyes at PolitiFact's attempt to straighten things out. "That just isn't the way this doomed species worked," one grim expert said.

Tomorrow: The fact-checker's tale

Many people have died for TPM's right!

MONDAY, MAY 27, 2019

Starting tomorrow, the gender pay gap:
Our tireless analysts awoke this morning to a peculiar TPM headline.

Anthropologically speaking, that headline was a sign of the times. TPM's headline said this:
Trump Shrugs Off NK Missiles, Bizarrely Claims Kim Called Biden ‘Low IQ Individual’
At first glance, that headline struck us as strange. Upon review, it seemed like a sign of the times.

In fact, Donald J. Trump didn't "claim" that Kim had made that remark about Biden's IQ. Unless we're splitting the finest hairs, Trump was merely stating a fact.

Everyone is aware of that fact. At NBC News, Ben Kamisar reported the history thusly:
KAMISAR (5/26/19): The North Korean Central News Agency, which is run by the state, has taken an increasingly hostile tone towards Biden in recent days, with rhetoric scaling more hostile as Trump increases his own criticism of his potential 2020 challenger.

A report from May 21 pans Biden as “reckless and senseless, seized by ambition for power,” as well as a “fool of low IQ.”
Unless we're splitting the most slender hairs, Kim did call Biden a low-IQ fool. Unless you're scanning TPM headlines, where Trump's tweet to that effect was transformed into his latest "bizarre claim."

We decided to check the TPM report which appeared beneath that headline. Cristina Cabrera had penned the report. This is what she wrote:
CARBRERA (5/26/19): President Donald Trump on Saturday night downplayed North Korea’s missile testing as “some small weapons,” and also claimed that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un called 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden a “low IQ individual.”
Cabrera said Trump had made a "claim." Some headline writer improved the matter, describing Trump's "claim" as "bizarre."

None of this foolishness actually matters, except as a sign of the times. Viewed as a sign of the times, here's what actually happened:
What happened:
First, TPM decided to save a few bucks by hiring a rather young White House reporter. Cabrera is just completing her third year out of college (NYU, class of 2016).

That young reporter then penned a somewhat peculiar report, describing Trump's accurate statement as a "claim."

Some headline writer then came along and made the story more pleasing. He or she turned Trump's accurate statement into a bizarre claim.
A great deal of pseudo-liberal journalism now works off this win/win model. TPM saves money by hiring young reporters. In the process, TPM's readership get rewarded with pleasingly embellished claims.

This silly performance by TPM doesn't actually matter. Tomorrow, we'll start to examine a serious topic, a topic which actually does.

Starting tomorrow, we'll look at recent reporting of Kamala Harris's proposal to counteract the gender pay gap. We'll start by reviewing PolitiFact's analysis of Harris's familiar but inaccurate statements about this important matter.

After that, we'll look at the way Harris's errors were wished away, glossed or ignored by young reporters all across the upper-end mainstream press corps—even by fairly recent graduates of both Harvard and Yale! Class of 2012!

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but our war-inclined species is highly tribal and deeply wired for fiction. Even within our own self-impressed tribe, we simply aren't "the rational animal," or any near approximation of that rarely-seen beast.

Anthropologically speaking, this is simply the way one human tribe was functioning in the years immediately preceding Mister Trump's Bizarre War. Within that one human tribe, the moguls were hiring the kids, and the kids often weren't "all right."

On the brighter side, many people have died for TPM's right to present that silly headline today. We should all remember this fact on this famously sacred occasion.

NARRATIVE GRIEVANCE AND ITS DISCONTENTS: Rough-hewn Buckeye would re-elect Trump!

SATURDAY, MAY 25, 2019

It's time for Siri to go:
Examples of bad sexual politics are pretty much all around us. We thought of this over Christmas break, when we watched the 2000 Tom Hanks film, Cast Away, for the very first time.

Hanks plays a work-obsessed FedEx manager who jets all over the globe, yelling at groups of employees, hoping to make them work faster.

Helen Hunt plays his long-suffering girl friend. She's subjected to old-fashioned jokes at Christmas dinner about her unmarried status. Beyond that, in the opening chunk of the movie, Hunt is forced to perform the old-fashioned scene in which Tommy finally gives her an engagement ring disguised as a Christmas present.

Hunt gasps in joy and surprise. "How lucky I am," we see her thinking. "I get to be married to Tommy the rest of my life!"

Tommy rushes away for his latest jet flight, then goes down in a plane crash. He lives on a deserted island for years, and is assumed to be dead.

When Tommy returns to civilization, Helen Hunt has married her dentist—the man who isn't "the love of her life." At this point, the film's sexual politics really crashes and burns.

Tommy goes to Helen's house, where she tells him, with genuine ardor, that he is the love of her life. Roughly sixty seconds later, she's being sent back into her house, where she'll spend the rest of her life with the dentist who isn't.

Tommy proceeds to flatly misstate what we've seen her tell him. In the film's final scene, he goes off to Texas, where he encounters a smokin' hot cowgirl who practically flashes him as she drives back to her secluded house in her truck.

The moral of the story is clear. Good old Tommy! He's going to end up with someone younger and hotter! On this uplifting note, the popular movie ends.

It surprised us to think that someone like Hanks would see this film as uplifting. Especially in the first chunk of the film, he engages in condescending conduct toward Hunt, but it seems clear that the film-makers—and Hanks was involved in crafting the script—think the behavior in question makes his character more sympathetic, not less.

That said, the film's finale is fairly straightforward. In our view, the sexual politics was comically awful, but it was being sold by one of Hollywood's most-trusted "good values" male stars.

So it has always tended to go on this planet! This brings us to the liberal world's version of Bill Maher's "new toy," the one "you don't want to break."

We refer to a puzzling joke Bill used to tell back in the 1980s. Discussing his adolescent years, he would say something like this:

"All of a sudden, you have a new toy—one you very much don't want to break!"

If memory serves, younger comedians—most likely, Blaine and Patton—told us, years later, what Bill apparently meant. He was referring to his sexual apparatus, which he apparently discovered when he was in junior high.

The boys were surprised that we hadn't understood. Similarly, they'd always been shocked by the fact we couldn't name the characters from The Brady Bunch, a leading marker of cultural literacy in the comedy clubs of that era.

"We were busy stopping a war" was all we were willing to tell them. How their eyes shined when we did!

At any rate, all of a sudden Bill had a new toy—and at this point, so do we liberals! Our new toy is our dull-witted use of "race" and gender, in which we constantly engage in dull-witted attempts to shame, blame and vilify untold millions of Others.

In these ways, we conspire to re-elect Mister Trump. Just consider the rough-hewn Ohio voter the New York Times quoted this week.

This rough-hewn fellow comes to us straight out of a novel by Hardy. On Tuesday morning, Trip Gabriel quoted him in a report which appeared beneath this headline:
There’s No Boom in Youngstown, but Blue-Collar Workers Are Sticking With Trump
As the article proceeded, it became fairly clear that Gabriel was actually discussing white blue-collar workers. Many former Democrats in this demographic had flipped over to Candidate Trump in 2016, Gabriel reported.

According to Gabriel's reporting, they were likely to vote for Trump again next year, keeping the Buckeye State red.

These people shower after work, one local official said. And sure enough! The first such voter Gabriel quoted had offered this rough remark:
GABRIEL (5/21/19): Whatever benefits decades of globalization brought to some parts of the country, there was no effort to reinvest in regions like northeast Ohio, where steel mills once lined 22 miles of the Mahoning River, and which has bled tens of thousands of jobs.

“The communities were cut loose and ignored and then they voted for Trump
because at least he’s punching somebody in the face, and no one else is,” [Congressman Tim] Ryan said.

One of those voters is Darrell Franks, a retired tool and die maker, who was once a Democrat but now votes Republican.

“What I want from a president is the rest of the world to look at him and go, ‘Don’t mess with that guy, he will get even,’” Mr. Franks said one morning in the Yankee Kitchen in Vienna Township, Ohio. “I don’t want kinder, gentler. I don’t want some female that wants her agenda.”
This rough-hewn voter doesn’t want some female that wants her agenda! Presumably, we all know why this comment was quoted, what it's intended to show.

Darrell Franks doesn't want some female who wants her agenda! Two days earlier, Jay Newton-Small had peered into the souls of the millions of white women with whom such rough men consort, attacking them for their "sexism" in the Outlook section of the Washington Post.

Newton-Small's multiply-bungled essay didn't make journalistic sense. On the brighter side, it did let us liberals play with our new favorite toy.

We liberals! We love to direct sweeping attacks at the Others, assailing them for their racism and their sexism.

These indiscriminate, sweeping attacks make us liberals feel morally good. But to the future anthropologists with whom we've consulted in recent months, these sweeping claims have a different feel:

To the disconsolate future scholsrs who report from the years after Mister Trump's War, these sweeping attacks are "typical of the way this war-inclined species always tended to act."

We humans always tended to otherize Others in sweeping ways, these morbid experts insist. At present, this is our liberal tribe's favorite new toy, one future scholar has told us.

Two days after Gabriel's piece, this scholar directed our attention to this slightly peculiar, lengthy report in the New York Times. The report described a slightly peculiar new study issued by Unesco. Megan Specia's lengthy report appeared beneath this headline:
Siri and Alexa Reinforce Gender Bias, U.N. Finds
It's time for Alexa and Siri to go, Unesco's experts have found!

We thought of that Ohio voter when we read this slightly peculiar report. Early on, Specia described a "particularly worrying" phenomenon, one which lent its name to the Unesco report:
SPECIA (5/23/19): ''Obedient and obliging machines that pretend to be women are entering our homes, cars and offices,'' Saniye Gulser Corat, Unesco's director for gender equality, said in a statement. ''The world needs to pay much closer attention to how, when and whether A.I. technologies are gendered and, crucially, who is gendering them.''

One particularly worrying reflection of this is the ''deflecting, lackluster or apologetic responses'' that these assistants give to insults.

The report borrows its title—''I'd Blush if I Could''—from a standard response from Siri,
the Apple voice assistant, when a user hurled a gendered expletive at it. When a user tells Alexa, ''You're hot,'' her typical response has been a cheery, ''That's nice of you to say!''

Siri's response was recently altered to a more flattened ''I don't know how to respond to that,'' but the report suggests that the technology remains gender biased, arguing that the problem starts with engineering teams that are staffed overwhelmingly by men.
How does Siri respond to insults? At Unesco, that question seemed "particularly worrying," and it seems like a source of substantial concern at the Times.

Is there value to that Unesco report? We're prepared to assume that there is. As noted, bad gender politics is everywhere, even in vehicles designed to showcase the excellent values of Hollywood's most trusted male star.

That said, we thought of that rough-hewn Ohio voter when we saw the persistently dull-witted Times lavishing so much attention on the idea that it's time for Siri to go—that we need to "lock her up."

That day's print edition was crammed with reports which fetishized our dopey tribe's devotion to our new toy. Inside that day's National section, for example, the Times had bannered this utterly pointless report across the top of page A17.

In truth, that report was basically daft. But it was treated as more important than this report, which ran beneath it, about the way Democrats' tax plans might lift the whole middle class.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. Truth to tell, our liberal tribe, like other tribes, just isn't enormously smart.

That said, we have a new toy and we love to use it. We often use it in fairly dumb ways—and the Others are able to see this.

When we take our toy out for a spin, we tend to launch indiscriminate, sweeping attacks on the Others. We insult these very bad people tens of millions at a time.

"The species was always inclined to behave that way," disconsolate scholars now tell us.

Huddled in caves, those scholars report to us from the years after Mister Trump's Apocalyptic War. This war followed a re-election brought on by our indiscriminate use of our toy, which we insisted on linking to our instinctive loathing of Others.

"The 'human' race was always wired that way," future anthropologists now say.

Regarding that rough-hewn Ohio voter, we will only say this:

In his instructive report from Ohio, Gabriel quoted David Betras, who recently stepped down as Democratic chairman of Mahoning County.

Betras has made a nuisance of himself this week. Cassandra-like, he's been warning that Democrats may be on their way to losing those "Rust Belt" states again.

On Thursday, he appeared with Chuck Todd on MTP Daily. We thought his closing point was very important:
BETRAS (5/23/19): By the way, Chuck, while I'm talking about "blue color workers," I reject the notion of white blue collar workers.

TODD: That's right.

BETRAS: Blue collar workers come in all persons of color, transgender and gay. They are the ones that are the backbone of this country, that are not paying attention to what's going on in Washington, get up every day, play by the rules. They just want Washington to just give them a fair shot and that's all they want.

TODD: David Betras, it was a pleasure to have you on.
Polls tend to support Betras when he claims that our corporate "cable news" elites are focused on Mister Trump in ways the public is not. Our elites are also love to use our tribe's new toy, often in ways which are transparently dumb.

Betras says that liberals can walk and chew gum. He says you can be for the white working-class and the black working-class at the very same time. You can even support transgender people and gays. It actually doesn't have to be the war of the All against All!

Meanwhile, bad sexual politics exists everywhere you look. We'd like to see boys and young men offered better models. We'd like to see boys encouraged to understand that they should learn to love and respect the girls and women to whom they'll find themselves drawn.

That said, our tribe's elites are self-absorbed, feckless and dumb. They have a new toy which they very much like, and they love insulting Others.

The species was always wired that way, future anthropologists mournfully say, speaking in the past tense.

NARRATIVE GRIEVANCE AND ITS DISCONTENTS: Fetishization and mystification!

FRIDAY, MAY 24, 2019

Recalling Bill Maher's new toy:
We'll acknowledge it as a pet peeve of ours.

We refer to the fetishization of the word "segregation" as applied to enrollment patterns in the public schools. In defense of our reaction to this fetishization, please consider this:

According to future anthropologists, the fetishization of this term was part of the culture of narrative grievance in the years immediately preceding Mister Trump's Unstable War.

Alas! Based upon our nocturnal reporting, future anthropologists now refer to the present era as an age of "grievance-based moral performance art" within our own liberal tribe.

According to these disconsolate scholars, the fetishization of "segregation" was just one part of that widespread tribal artistry. So was the mystification of school "segregation," a mystification performed by Dana Goldstein—she went to Brown—in today's New York Times:
GOLDSTEIN (5/24/19): School segregation is caused by a complex web of factors, including housing policy, how school boundary lines are drawn and the ability of white and wealthy parents to opt out of sending their children to schools alongside low-income students of color.
Goldstein never quite explains what she means by "school segregation." According to future anthropologists, our human wiring led us to accept the gravamen of such phraseology without our feeling the need to get clear as to what was being said.

Fair enough! But note the mystification created in that passage concerning the causes of "school segregation." Goldstein ticks off three alleged causes, part of "a complex web of factors," without mentioning a straightforward cause such as this:
Student demographics, Laredo ISD
White kids: 0 percent
Black kids: 0 percent
Hispanic kids: 99 percent
Asian-American kids: 1 percent

Student demographics, Detroit Public Schools
White kids: 3 percent
Black kids: 87 percent
Hispanic kids: 7 percent
Asian-American kids: 1 percent

Student demographics, Los Angeles USD
White kids: 9 percent
Black kids: 10 percent
Hispanic kids: 74 percent
Asian-American kids: 7 percent
For whatever reason, Goldstein seems to prefer mystification to a rather straightforward statement of fact. To wit:

Many public schools are "segregated" in the way Goldstein seems to mean because very few white kids are enrolled in our big urban school systems.

It isn't hard to state this seminal fact, but Goldstein seems to prefer a more complex presentation involving "housing policy" and "how school boundary lines are drawn." Drawing upon their knowledge of the hard-wired traits of Homo sapiens, our future scholars have suggested one possible reason for this apparent preference:

Dating back to prehistory, we humans were strongly inclined—were hard-wired—to engage in the loathing of Others, these experts have thoughtfully told us. Given that wiring, tribal players preferred a complex web of explanations which suggested bad behaviors by Such People, as opposed to a simpler, more straightforward assertion of blindingly obvious fact.

Why do we have so many "segregated" schools, in the sense intended by Goldstein? In large part, it's because there are so few white kids enrolled in our biggest school districts!

That said, why are there so few white kids enrolled in those big urban systems? In large part, that does relate to "the ability of white and wealthy parents to opt out of sending their children to schools alongside low-income students of color," the third factor Goldstein cites.

Of course, current demographic patterns in our public schools also widely reflect "the ability of [middle-class and wealthy black] parents to opt out of sending their children to schools alongside low-income students of color." And by the way, very few of these villain parents "opt out of sending their children to schools alongside students of color" if the "students of color" are Asian-American kids, our highest-achieving public school cohort.

Here's what we mean by that:

In a recent post which tore back the curtain from certain realities, Kevin Drum identified Irvine, California as the community Where the Racists Are.

According to Drum's analysis,
"hot-blooded racist" families fled to that Orange County location when the giant Los Angeles Unified School District "became too black and too Hispanic."

That said, those same racists don't seem to fear the presence of Asian-American kids. According to recent figures from Professor Reardon, the demographics of the (high-achieving) Irvine Unified School District recently looked like this:
Student demographics, Irvine USD
White kids: 35 percent
Black kids: 2 percent
Hispanic kids: 9 percent
Asian-American kids: 54 percent
Except for the possibility that their kids may develop inferiority complexes, white parents may not mind sending their kids to school with Asian-American kids. But in the fetishized world of liberal "segregation" display, those Asian-American kids are "non-white," full stop. Nothing else needs to be said.

In the fetishized world partly created by UCLA's Professor Orfield, it doesn't count as "integration" if black kids in New York City go to school with high-achieving Asian-American peers.

According to Goldstein's report, "A large body of scholarship shows that nonwhite and poor children perform better academically at integrated schools." But according to fetishized "segregation" thinking, black kids can only be helped by attending school with white kids.

If the kids aren't white, the kids ain't right! Nothing else matters or counts.

According to future scholars, tribal liberals of this era were deeply invested in highly performative "grievance chases." These so-called "grievance performances" were designed to address such concerns as these:
Where the Sexists Are
Where the Racists Are
"Grievance performance" of the era was built around such themes, with sweeping, indiscriminate moral attacks aimed at large groups of disfavored people. And according to the analyses of these regretful future experts, "tout était permis" in the mainstream journalism of the era, just so long as the impression was given that various groups of such bad people were being hunted down.

("So it was with that remarkable effort by Jay Newton-Small," one future expert recently said. "She dropped her S-bomb in paragraph 1. After that, she just scrambled around.")

This highly performative grievance behavior drove enough voters to Donald J. Trump to let the self-described "stable genius" get hold of the nuclear codes. And in the end, it finally happened, disconsolate scholars despairingly tell us during the frequent nocturnal submissions the haters refer to as dreams.

Still, the quest for knowledge never ceases in the future caves where these scholars huddle as they feed on the few tiny scraps they've somehow managed to gather. With respect to the way "grievance performance" drove some voters over to Trump, one gloomy expert referred us to this recent report in the New York Times.

"Just look what that one uncouth voter said," this anthropologist told us. Meanwhile, what about Bill Maher's toy?

We may get to Bill tomorrow.

Tomorrow: At the Times, it's time for Siri to go! The rough-hewn voter's tale

NBC-TV in L.A. counteracts fake news!

THURSDAY, MAY 23, 2019

New York Times gives Harris a pass:
A funny thing happened when Candidate Harris offered her gender pay gap proposal. For background, see Tuesday's report.

NBC4 in Los Angeles offered some very limited push-back against the candidate's statistical claims. The station's slightly uncertain push-back went exactly like this:
NBC4, via CITY NEWS SERVICE (5/19/19): The gender pay gap is the ratio of female-to-male median or average yearly earnings. Liberals customarily attribute it to discrimination. Conservatives have cited such factors as men being more likely to work more hours and marriage and motherhood resulting in lower earnings for women.

"Once we start controlling individually for the many relevant factors that affect earnings, e.g. hours worked, age, marital status and having children, most of the raw earnings differential disappears," Mark J. Perry, a scholar at Washington-based think tank the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan-Flint wrote on AEI's economics blog, Carpe Diem.
The following night, Harris appeared on MSNBC's The Beat with Ari Melber and made a series of familiar yet bogus statistical claims (for transcript, see Tuesday's report). Via City News Service, NBC4 had offered some limited push-back the night before.

In truth, the push-back was very limited. That text suggests that it's only conservatives who dispute the statistical claims Harris offered.

In fact, specialists of all persuasions agree with the claims attributed to Perry. Specialists of all persuasions agree that "once we start controlling for the many relevant factors that affect earnings [including] hours worked...most of the raw earnings differential disappears."

Including "hours worked?" Can that really be what he said?

It was interesting to see NBC4 offer this limited bit of push-back because very few others have done so. Note the way the New York Times kept its readers from understanding what they were being told:
HERNDON (5/21/19): The most recent studies on the gender pay gap, which are not based on analogous work, show that women who work full time make 80 cents for every dollar paid to men, adding up to more than $400,000 in missed wages over the course of a woman’s career. The numbers are even worse for women who are also racial minorities—about $1 million in missed wages over a career for Latinas, Native American women and black women, according to an analysis by the National Women’s Law Center.
We've highlighted the slippery term the Times used to disguise what was being said. The term was employed by a slippery young reporter, Astead Herndon. Or who knows? Maybe Herndon's unnamed editor reshaped the reporter's work!

"Not based on analogous work!" That's the murky term the New York Times used to keep its readers from understanding what they were being told. We used to be embarrassed to see our liberal team playing this way. By now, we've come to see that this is simply the way our human race functions, especially at end-times like these.

"Not based on analogous work!" In the next day or two, we'll note the types of considerations that wonderfully murky term hides. Keep "hours worked" in mind!

Sometimes, though, a certain highly disordered man has a bit of truth on his side when he thoughtfully rails about the demon he calls "fake news."

NARRATIVE GRIEVANCE AND ITS DISCONTENTS: The answer seems to be Irvine, CA!

THURSDAY, MAY 23, 2019

Where the Racists Are:
Maurice Sendak wanted to know "where the wild things are."

In 1963, he wrote a book which bore that title. According to the leading authority on the subject, the book "was voted the number one picture book in a 2012 survey of School Library Journal readers, not for the first time."

According to Sendak's book, the "wild things" largely seemed to exist in a young boy's mind. An array of credentialed anthropologists say this finding had salience for the state of "liberal" discourse in the disordered years preceding Mister Trump's War.

These disconsolate scholars report to us from the future through a type of nocturnal submission which the haters regard as mere "dreams." They have a lot of time on their hands—and deep regrets about the way they may have contributed to the pre-war academic culture they have mournfully come to describe as Professoriate Down.

With respect to Where the Wild Things Were, these future experts now say this:

They say the "human" mind had always been wired to imagine, and to stress, the widespread existence of "wild things" and monsters.

This was once a survival skill, they now glumly explain. In prehistory, this impulse produced an instinctive avoidance of rival tribes who might be inclined to violence.

But alas! By the century preceding the war, this hard-wired human instinct had become a liability, our future sources now tell us.

Within the pre-war "liberal" world, this instinct had devolved into a frequently untethered search for racists, sexists, bigots, homophobes and viewers of Fox News—in effect, for monsters of every known type. By this time, the instinctive flight from the Other had produced a largely unhelpful quest to say Where the Racists Are.

To judge from one recent blog post, we can now say with some confidence where the racists are. According to this recent blog post, they're in Irvine, California.

The blog post was written by Kevin Drum, who has long been our favorite blogger. In our view, Drum's work on lead exposure and lead abatement has been one of the major jewels of the Internet's pitiful history.

Inadvertently, his work on this topic has also helped establish one of the leading discoveries of this era. His work has helped establish the fact that it was impossible to introduce information into the American discourse during the largely disordered years preceding Mister Trump's War.

According to recent work by Drum, "where the racists are" is Irvine, California. We say that based on data from the last four U.S. census reports:
Black population of Irvine, CA
1980: 1.5 percent
1990: 1.8 percent
2000: 1.5 percent
2010: 1.8 percent
Our analysts connected these data to Drum's recent exposé, in which he discusses What The Racists Did.

According to Drum, the racists—indeed, the hot-blooded racists—all moved out of Los Angeles. This explains why there are so few white kids left in L.A.'s public schools:
DRUM (5/18/19): I don’t mean to pick on anyone here. I just want to make it clear that what happened wasn’t really due to cold-blooded forces of either demographics or housing policy. Rather, it was due to the very deliberate, very conscious choice of whites to abandon big city school districts when they became too black and too Hispanic. The middle class did it mostly by moving away, while the affluent did it by moving their kids into private schools.

A lot of things in American life are driven by institutional racism, but this isn’t one of them. This was driven by racism that’s as hot-blooded and as individual as you can get. Over the course of 30 years, millions of whites all over the country made a personal decision that they didn’t want their kids in the same schools as blacks and Hispanics. That’s why big city school districts today are more segregated than they were half a century ago.
When Drum says he doesn't want to pick on anyone, he seems to mean both us and Jonathan Chait. In his post, he cites our own recent report about racial imbalance in public schools—a report which has won many prestigious awards in the future, or at least so we've been told.

For ourselves, we would have thought it was obvious that big urban systems like the three we cited have a paucity of white kids because 1) white families have moved away; 2) white families have stopped moving in; and 3) white families have sent their kids to private and parochial schools.

Drum advanced the analysis by letting us know that the parents who made these decisions are racists—indeed, are "hot-blooded" racists. When we stumbled upon the data for Irvine, we suddenly thought we had an answer to the topic which swamps the liberal mind: Where the Racists Are!

We thought we finally had the answer! "But hold on," future anthropologists have said. "It may not be quite so simple!"

These future scholars note the fact that many middle-class black families have moved away from these urban school districts too.

This happened here in Baltimore, with many black families moving to suburban Baltimore County, whose large school system—the nation's 25th largest—is now 39.4% black, 37.4% white.

As Nikole Hannah-Jones described in a widely-praised report for The Atlantic, it also happened in Tuscaloosa, with black families moving to suburban Tuscaloosa County.

Based upon our own observations, there are reasons to stay in big urban systems, but there are also possible reasons to leave. In a lengthy report in the New York Times magazine, Hannah-Jones described the different ways she and her husband were inclined to assess this matter when it came time to decide where their own daughter would be going to school:
HANNAH-JONES (6/9/16): When the New York City Public Schools catalog arrived in the mail one day that spring, with information about Mayor Bill de Blasio’s new universal prekindergarten program, I told Faraji that I wanted to enroll Najya in a segregated, low-income school. Faraji’s eyes widened as I explained that if we removed Najya, whose name we chose because it means “liberated” and “free” in Swahili, from the experience of most black and Latino children, we would be part of the problem...I was determined not to do what I’d seen so many others do when their values about integration collided with the reality of where to send their own children to school.

[...]

As I told Faraji my plan, he slowly shook his head no. He wanted to look into parochial schools, or one of the “good” public schools, or even private schools. So we argued, pleading our cases from the living room, up the steps to our office lined with books on slavery and civil rights, and back down, before we came to an impasse and retreated to our respective corners. There is nothing harder than navigating our nation’s racial legacy in this country, and the problem was that we each knew the other was right and wrong at the same time. Faraji couldn’t believe that I was asking him to expose our child to the type of education that the two of us had managed to avoid. He worried that we would be hurting Najya if we put her in a high-poverty, all-black school. “Are we experimenting with our child based on our idealism about public schools?” he asked. “Are we putting her at a disadvantage?”
According to Hannah-Jones, "the problem was that we each knew the other was right and wrong at the same time." Even in a New York City home which contained an "office lined with books on slavery and civil rights," the answer to this question didn't seem totally obvious.

Two good people had different reactions to a question debated by many families. Was one of them a racist? Meanwhile, Ta-Nehisi Coates and his wife sent their son to the Manhattan County School (28 percent black). Must they be racists too?

We were struck by Drum's somewhat cold-blooded approach to the topic of hot-blooded racism. We asked our anthropological experts to help us understand why we liberals are now so strongly inclined to reason and speak in the way Drum did.

"The impulse to invent The Other is deeply bred in the bone," these disconsolate future scholars glumly and gloomily told us. They then called our attention to Jay Newton-Small's recent ardent attempt to explain Where the Sexists Are!

We humans! We were always wired this way, these future experts have said. From prehistory forward, our war-inclined species was always wired to see one of the Others under every bed.

This was once a survival skill; in the end, it helped bring on Trump's War. Or at least, so we've been told, in a series of strangely moving nocturnal submissions.

We liberals! Our impulse to say Where the Others Are helped create the pre-war world in which conversation has ceased to exist between two rival, war-inclined tribal groups. The moral certainty crept, but then it spread, eventually taking wide hold.

According to Drum, we now knew Where the Racists Were. They had bought homes in Irvine, CA, seeking relief from the populations Drum himself warmly embraced.

"The instinct seized control," two of our future experts said. They then returned to the hunting, but mostly the gathering, which now consumes their post-conflagration lives.

Tomorrow: Narrative grievance wherever you look! It's time for Siri to go!

Recording the (possible) way they were!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 22, 2019

The way the Others voted:
Candidate Biden had a good line during Campaign 2008.

It dealt with Rudy Giuliani. "There's only three things he mentions in a sentence," Biden would say. "A noun, a verb and 9/11."

According to Biden, that was pretty much all Giuliani knew how to say. We modern liberals are like that. In our case, there are only two things we need in an essay—the name of a group we want to loathe, and any one word from the following list:

"Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it."

That's basically all we know how to say! You saw that formula play out in Jay Newton-Small's piece in Sunday's Washington Post. She called white working-class women "sexist," then wandered about the countryside, making little sense.

Very few things she said made sense at any point. But she had the S-bomb right up front, dropped on a group of people we finer people don't like.

How little sense did her essay make on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis? Consider the passage shown below.

In this passage, Newton-Small seems to be supporting her earlier claim that non-college-educated white women were "the only demographic that moved back and forth dramatically" during the campaign. We don't think the effort goes well:
NEWTON-SMALL (5/19/19): By the first general-election debate, Trump was just 2.3 points behind Clinton in the RealClearPolitics average. Then came the “Access Hollywood” recording on Oct. 7, and by their second debate on Oct. 9, Clinton was ahead by 4.6 points. An Atlantic/PRRI poll found that among non-college-educated white women, Clinton and Trump were even at 40-40. If Clinton had held steady among this group, she probably would have won.

Non-college-educated white women picked George W. Bush by 18 points in 2004. They chose John McCain by 17 points and Mitt Romney by 20. The idea that they’d swing 20 points from 2012 to 2016 was wild. And then FBI Director James Comey reopened the investigation into Clinton’s email in the final weeks of the campaign. Non-college-educated white women ended up voting for Trump by a historic margin of 27 percentage points.

At the heart of it was the perception that Clinton considered herself above it all...
How poorly reasoned is that passage? Let us count the ways:

Newton-Small starts by citing a single poll which had the race tied at 40-40 among non-college-educated white women at one particular point. She says Candidate Clinton probably would have won the election if this group had split down the middle this way.

In her next breath, she notes that this same demographic had supported Candidate Romney by 20 points back in 2012. She says "the idea that they’d swing 20 points from 2012 to 2016 was wild."

We're then told that the group ended up supporting Trump by 27 points. After that, Newton-Small mind-reads "the heart of" the reason why these millions of people cast their millions of votes as they did.

In this passage, Newton-Small seems to be supporting her earlier claim, in which she said the allegiance of this group jumped all around during Campaign 2016. It doesn't seem to occur to her that the one 40/40 poll she cites may simply have been an outlier—a statistical misrepresentation of the actual state of play.

She presents no other evidence in support of her claim that the allegiance of this demographic was jumping all around during the campaign. Nor does the following question seem to have entered her head:

If the members of this group are sexist, why would they have considered voting for Clinton in the first place? Why wouldn't they have been strongly opposed to Clinton all the way through the campaign?

Simply put, Newton-Small's essay is basically a novel outfitted with the word "sexist." Basically, this is the way our deeply unimpressive liberal tribe now plays the game.

We bring almost nothing else to the table. We're skilled at naming some group of Others, then making a sweeping statement about their very bad motives. This helps explain why we're now a nation of two tribes waiting for Mister Trump's War.

In case you're interested, this is the way non-college-educated white women have voted since Campaign 2000, according to Newton-Small:
Campaign 2000: For Bush, by 7 points
Campaign 2004: For Bush, by 18 points
Campaign 2008: For McCain, by 17 points
Campaign 2012: For Romney, by 20 points
Campaign 2016: For Trump, by 27 points
Warning! As best we can tell, those numbers come from the nation's exit polls, which are far from exact. We aren't real sure where the numbers come from because Newton-Small doesn't specifically say, and the link she provides in the paragraph we've posted above leads to her own 2016 Time magazine piece, in which she call Candidate Clinton a "hectoring housewife" but doesn't present those data.

Newton-Small's links are persistently useless in this ridiculous way. Under current arrangements, this sort of thing is apparently "close enough for Washington Post Outlook section work." We spent a long time on Sunday with Newton-Small's essay, but we never found a link to any data set which presented those data.

For Molly Ball's discussion of the problem with the exit polls (also in Time), you can just click here. Her headline:

"Donald Trump Didn't Really Win 52% of White Women in 2016"

According to Pew's more exacting analysis of Campaign 2016, non-college-educated white women actually favored Trump by a substantially smaller margin than Newton-Small reports. Using the exit polls, Newton-Small has this group favoring Trump, 61-34. According to Ball, Pew's more exacting analysis found that only 56% of this demographic actually voted for Trump. On the bright side, that's a whole lot fewer sexists!

Newton-Small's essay was journalistically awful. Basically, you learn one thing—we liberals are supposed to deride a large group of Others as sexist.

According to future anthropologists, this is the way our war-inclined species was functioning in the years before Mister Trump's Sudden War. According to those same despondent scholars, this ugly, unintelligent behavior by our vastly self-impressed tribe helped produce the miseries of that profoundly dispositive war.