The Georgia Senate Races

Quite an interesting debate the other night between the incumbent Senator, David Perdue, and his Democratic challenger, Jon Ossoff.  Ossoff so eviscerated Perdue that Perdue refused to go ahead with the last debate scheduled for tomorrow, basically waving the white flag of surrender.

Ossoff did a great job of staying on message, pointing out repeatedly that Perdue has voted four times to take away protection for pre-existing conditions, and had said CoVid-19 was no worse than the flu.  Perdue had no answer for Ossoff, except to repeatedly use the phrase "radical socialist agenda".  Perdue is the guy who made fun of Kamala Harris's first name recently.  Surely a man so shallow and ignorant has no place in the United States Senate!

But what stung the most for Perdue is when Ossoff called him a "crook", for his insider trading.  Perdue also was skewered for altering the face of Ossoff in an ad, to make it look like Ossoff's nose was bigger than it is.

In the other Georgia Senate race, Republican candidate Kelly Loeffler also made a fool of herself recently, when she claimed she was not familiar with Trump's infamous Access Holly wood tape.  Loeffler is also guilty of insider trading.

What should we do about the Supreme Court?

 A thoughtful article in the latest issue of The New Republic discusses what the Democrats should do after the election (assuming of course that they win the presidency and the Senate).  

The article argues against "court-packing" by adding justices, as this will only serve to make the Court even more partisan than it already is.  Rather, Congress should  limit the jurisdiction of the federal court system.  One way to do this would be to require a "super-majority" for invalidating a federal law.

How the Court handles the ongoing challenges to state election laws will determine the attitude the Congress will take next year.  Will the Court do the right thing and let validly-enacted state election laws be enforced?  Or will the Court take an "activist" approach and invalidate state laws?  And, most scarily, will the Court uphold state laws enacted by Republicans, and strike down state laws enacted by Democrats?

Time will tell.

The State of the Race

 The second and final debate took place last night.  Biden supporters are breathing a sigh of relief, as the notoriously gaffe-prone Biden held his own, and in fact three overnight surveys had him as the winner.  CNN had eleven undecided North Carolina supporters give feedback afterwards.  They had Biden winning 9-0, and all seven that made up their minds based on the debate were for Biden.

Trump actually restrained himself and did not interrupt like he did during the first debate.  However, the CNN fact-checker had him spouting even more lies than in the first debate.  He insisted we were "rounding the corner" on the virus, when in fact the virus is on the rise in most states.  He falsely claimed Biden would take 180 million people off their health insurance, when he has always been for a public option, and this was actually a bone of contention during the primary season.

There is still angst that the polls might be wrong, as they were thought to be in 2016.  However, I believe Biden will win, for three reasons.  First, the pollsters have adjusted for the demographic weighting errors which skewed the results four years ago.  Second, Clinton arguably lost because of the infamous Comey letter, saying the FBI investigation of her emails had been re-opened, and there is no such "October surprise" on the horizon here.  Third, Clinton supporters were notoriously lacking in enthusiasm, and many stayed home.  This time around, Biden supporters are quite enthusiastic, and the "enthusiasm gap" which we saw in 2016 has disappeared.

Getting inside the head of a Trump supporter

In the past two days I have spent 4-5 hours watching the FOX news channel, in an attempt to understand the Trump supporter.  It was really quite interesting.  The main story on FOX is the New York Post story on Hunter Biden's emails.  FOX keeps stressing that Joe Biden has not denied the story.  Hunter Biden is painted as selling access to his father throughout the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.  In one email he complains that he has to split everything he makes with his father.

People on FOX are complaining that Twitter and Facebook have blocked posts about the NY Post story.  Ted Cruz said angrily that his Tweet about this story was immediately deleted by Twitter.  During a break in the Supreme Court confirmation hearing, he went up to chairman Lindsey Graham complaining about this, and Lindsey immediately ordered that the heads of both Twitter and Facebook be summoned to appear before the Judiciary Committee to explain themselves, possibly as early as Thursday.

By contrast, what CNN and MSNBC are saying about this story is that it is so fictional that the reporter who wrote it refused to allow his byline to be put on the story.  Another reporter's byline was used, totally without her knowledge or consent.

Adam Schiff and other liberals are complaining about Russian disinformation being behind the story, but FOX stresses that the Director of National Intelligence has issued a strong statement saying there is NO evidence of Russian involvement here.  FOX also stresses that there is no dispute that this was in fact Hunter Biden's laptop, which he took into a Delaware shop for repair.

FOX keeps hammering about how Biden is spending 5 of 6 days "hiding in his basement", instead of going out and meeting people.  This way he doesn't have to answer the tough questions about his son Hunter.  The Trump rallies are portrayed in a positive light, with one reporter calling a rally yesterday a "lovefest".  CNN and MSNBC, by contrast, portray the Trump rallies as "super-spreaders", and continually talk about how the people are packed together, most without masks.  It is obvious CNN and MSNBC are determined to defeat Trump.

Look for questions about Hunter Biden to come up in tomorrow's debate.

Concerning the debate, FOX contributors complain bitterly about the Debate Commission setting the rules (mute buttons will be used during the two-minute time that's supposed to be uninterrupted).  They talk about how the moderators are all liberal Democrats.  They say that the Commission should be responsible for basic arrangements like providing the cameras, but the two campaigns should agree on who the moderators will be.  The ironic thing here is that Trump's advisers are all telling him he should stop with the interrupting, as his best chance for a comeback is to let Biden talk and make a fool of himself, as he is prone to do.  Thus, the mute button actually helps Trump, as it will save him from himself.

Why This Time Is Different

Many Biden supporters are expressing angst that the polls might be wrong, given how wrong they supposedly were four years ago.  Many convoluted theories abound--pollsters not understanding the landline vs. cell phone issue, not properly weighting different demographic or age groups, etc.

I suggest we apply Occam's razor, the principle that says the simplest explanation is usually the best.  An article in electoral-vote.com a few days after the 2016 election was headlined "Democrats lost because Democrats stayed home".  A very simple and to-the-point explanation.  What happened is that people who, if they voted would have voted for Hillary, chose to stay home, because they just weren't motivated enough to go to the polls to vote for her.

Donna Brazile, in her book on the Clinton campaign, says she knew the campaign was in trouble when she would visit state campaign headquarters and see a total lack of enthusiasm for the Clinton candidacy.  The problem in 2016 is that the Democrats offered a candidate who generated no enthusiasm whatsoever, no passion at all.  Hillary never made a strong case for why we should vote for her; with her robotic campaigning style, she just was unable to reach the average voter.  Trump, by contrast, generated lots of passion among a certain portion of the electorate.  The result was that many people who would have voted for Hillary, and told this to the pollsters, ended up staying home.

This time is totally different.  There is great enthusiasm for the Biden candidacy; granted, much of this is based on an opposition to Trump, but no matter, the point is there is great enthusiasm there.  People are coming to understand the importance of voting.  Old people have always understood this, because it was impressed upon them in the Civics courses they took in high school  (My mom used to talk often of her Civics course; it was obviously an important part of her formative years.)  Now, the younger generation is getting its civics course through current events, rather than in the classroom.

Other than the 2016 glitch, the polls in recent elections have been remarkably accurate, and I believe they are now also.  The outcome will be positive, provided we turn out the vote!

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"The Executioner's Song", by Norman Mailer

I am a big fan of Norman Mailer, but this book was a disappointment.  He obtained the rights to Gary Gilmore's life story through his partner, Larry Schiller, and he wrote a 1,092-page book giving a day-by-day account of the last few months of Gilmore's life. 

Mailer uses very sparse language, with simple, declarative sentences, using few adverbs.  He gets so into using this voice that even when he is not quoting one of the many Utah figures he writes about, he still uses incomplete sentences and silly slang.  To me this was quite off-putting.

The book really flounders in the last half, when Larry Schiller becomes a major character in the narrative.  The account of how Schiller went about obtaining the rights to Gilmore's story is simply not very interesting.  He wasn't permitted to visit Gilmore himself, so he had to go through Gilmore's two attorneys.  Every day Schiller would come up with a list of questions, and the attorneys would visit Gilmore on Death row and tape record his answers.

This Q and A went on for months, with no real results.  Schiller wanted to get at what makes Gilmore tick, why he killed two people in cold blood like he did.  Gilmore was an intelligent person, but he was unable or unwilling to delve into his own psyche and come up with any coherent explanation for his actions. 

The result is that we are left with a portrait of someone who was an incorrigible child, even, according to Gilmore, when he was as young as three or four years old.  He went to Reform School at age 13, and spent most of his life after that in prison.  When he got out, a few months before the killings, he continued to steal on a daily basis.  He would go into a store and walk out with a six-pack of beer, preferring to do that even when he had money in his pocket.  He just enjoyed the stealing, and was never caught.

Mailer came onto the scene after the execution, and interviewed the other key characters in the story.  But the failure of Schiller and Mailer to come up with any coherent explanation for Gilmore's psyche renders the book a failure.  Nevertheless, there are some interesting aspects which would have made a shorter book of some value.

One of these is the great love affair between Gilmore and his girlfriend, Nicole.  They were truly soul mates, and in fact both tried to kill themselves as part of a suicide pact, with Gilmore using drugs that Nicole managed to smuggle into the prison.  The efforts both failed; Gilmore tried a second time to kill himself, and at one point went on a 16-day hunger strike.  Surely one of the great love affairs in literary history.

The role of Gilmore's attorneys is interesting.  His original set of attorneys tried to appeal the conviction, and were fired by Gilmore who wanted the execution to proceed.  The new set pledged to carry out Gilmore's wishes, and so they were reduced to being messenger boys relaying messages between Gilmore and the outside world.  They really did nothing that we would consider to be actual legal work.

Since Gilmore's own attorneys could do nothing, outside forces tried to intervene on Gary's behalf.  His family tried to intervene, without success.  The ACLU intervened, on the theory that as a taxpayer it had standing.  Another capital punishment defendant tried to intervene, on the theory that Gilmore's execution would make it more likely that his own death sentence would be carried out.  And anti-capital punishment groups tried to intervene, on the theory that the Supreme Court had not yet ruled on the constitutionality of Utah's death penalty statute, and on the theory that a mandatory appeal should be required for any death sentence.

These efforts all came to a head on the day before the execution, when last-ditch efforts resulted in a decision by a federal judge, issued at 1 AM,  putting a stay on the execution, which was scheduled for sunrise that day.  Attorneys for both sides rode in a prop plane all night to get from Utah to to the Court of Appeals in Denver, where an early morning hearing was held.  At 7:35 AM the three-judge panel issued its ruling lifting the stay. 

At this point the warden in charge of carrying out the execution had qualms about whether he could proceed, given that the sentence specified that the execution was to take place at "sunrise", and he could not get it done by sunrise.  The sentencing judge was pressured to issue a modified order stating that it was to take place on that date, either at sunrise or at a later time.

The heart of the case, and the book, centers around issues regarding Gilmore's state of mind.  Specifically, can someone who insists on being executed be sane?  His original set of attorneys tried to raise the sanity issue, but Gilmore refused to go along, and psychiatrists who examined him pronounced him sane.  (Gilmore believed in reincarnation, which was part of why he didn't fear death.)  His mental functioning was completely intact; the conclusion, therefore, was that he had no psychosis, but he was definitely a psychopath and/or sociopath.  There was no mental disease, just a severe character defect.  He knew what he was doing and that it was wrong, but did it anyway, so no insanity defense could be (successfully) raised.

The fact is that people have a right to die, despite the Catholic Church's propaganda to the contrary.  We wonder about why Muslims are so willing, even eager, to die for their cause.  One reason is that the faith teaches that the quickest way to get to paradise is to die in a Jihad.  But what I learned recently which finally explained the suicide bombing phenomenon is that Muslims believe that your time and manner of death is determined at the time you are born.  Now it all made sense to me.  If your death is predetermined, then by dying you are simply fulfilling your destiny.

When Gary Gilmore was executed by a firing squad on January 17, 1977, he became the first person executed in the U.S. in nearly ten years.  Since then there have been 1,526 executions, an average of 35 a year.  The trend, however, is away from the death penalty; in the first nine months of 2020, there have been only 14 executions, and only half of those by the states.  The number of years which elapsed between sentence and execution ranges from 13 to 34.