Why I expect my Senators to Filibuster Any Supreme Court Nominee

The short version is this: Republicans owe us one, and we absolutely should not cooperate until they remedy that situation.

Here is a slightly longer version: Like many tens of millions of Americans, I voted for Barack Obama, twice. When I voted for him, it was because I wanted him to do the things Presidents do, such as nominating Supreme Court justices. My side won those contests, twice, by solid margins. That’s democracy.

When Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans decided that they would not even consider any nomination from President Obama, they also decided that my vote, and millions of others, would be ignored. Democracy be damned, the hell with what the voters want. They would only represent the interests of their own minority party.

It was more than unprecedented, more than brazen. It was an unmistakable assault on democracy, and a slap in the face to those of us who thought our majority vote had meaning.

And if Senate Democrats allow a vote on any Trump nominee, they are saying loud and clear that what Mitch McConnell did was fine, no problem here. And that, too, would be a slap in the face to someone like me who not only voted for President Obama, but also has consistently supported the Democratic Senators in my state (Washington.) What Republicans did was wrong, a bridge too far, and I expect my Senators, and every Democrat in the Senate, to protest with all their might, and to make it clear that we will never accept the Republican refusal to consider Merrick Garland.

Call it the Mitch McConnell rule: “We don’t have to ratify any Supreme Court Justice, ever, and we don’t need any reason.” That is, after all, a very fair reading of McConnell’s stance. Let everyone know that you are only following Senator McConnell’s lead. Then make it clear that the only way to remedy the situation is for Donald Trump to nominate Merrick Garland.

Please, I’m begging you, Senators, take a stand here. Let me know that my voice matters, that you will do everything in your power to right a clear wrong. Let’s face it, if the situation had been exactly reversed and Democrats had done what Republicans did, Mitch McConnell would have had a fit, which means that even Mitch McConnell thinks that what he did was absolutely the wrong thing to do. Let him know you feel the same way. And let your constituents know that you won’t ever back down.

Trump, George Wallace, and Deplorables

"No matter how left out or left behind you feel, voting for Trump is nothing short of a moral failure."

Jesse Berney, Rolling Stone

I posted the second half of that quote and a link to the article on Facebook a day or two before the election. Now that a bit less than half of the voters have chosen Trump, I see no reason to feel any different about it.

At the time, I thought that there were just so many reasons to disqualify Trump from office, any office. The accusations of groping. Bragging about sexual assault. Allegations of rape. The amazing breadth and depth of his lack of knowledge. The stupid, pathetic, groundless, and incessant claims that everything now is terrible, and that he would make everything so great. The boorish behavior. The many, many ugly comments about many women. The Trump University fraud. Multiple instances of stealing from subcontractors. The never-ending stream of lies. The idiotic conspiracy theories. The lack of self-control. The statements in favor of torture.

Actually, looking at that list -- a list that does not even mention the Khan family -- if you voted for Trump, you're an idiot. Sorry, but you are. What the hell were you thinking?

But moving on, now that I have had a couple of weeks to think about it, I think that one issue stands out: Donald Trump is a racist. He is a racist who appealed openly to racists, not just once or twice, but starting years ago with the overtly racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in this country, based on no other evidence than that he is African-American. And the racism continued throughout Trump's campaign. He began the campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers and promising to build a wall to keep them out. At the end, he was claiming that refugees would bring generations of terror to this country. In between, he said that we should ban and/or register all Muslims, and it came out that he had called a Spanish-speaking Miss Universe "Miss Housekeeping." You know, because what else are Hispanic women good for?

You can support someone who wants to legalize marijuana even if you do not agree with that particular issue. You can support someone who is anti-choice even if you are pro-choice. Most of us do not make voting decisions based on a single issue.

But racism is a different matter. If someone runs on a racist platform and directly appeals to racist voters, you cannot vote for them and then claim that you did not support their racism. It is just too important a matter to sweep under the rug and say it was not the reason for your vote. You hated Hillary, you felt left out, you were tired of Barack Obama? Sorry, those are reasons to vote for someone other than Hillary Clinton, but they are not reasons to justify voting for a racist. If you voted for the racist, it is because you saw that Donald Trump, along with his most ardent supporters, is a racist who favors racist policies, and you were OK with that. Or maybe better than OK.

People complained that Donald Trump got a lot of free publicity from the press, and he did. But not all of it was positive publicity. Everyone knew that Trump used racism and sexism to get his base fired up. Everyone knew who he was.

So I come to the conclusion that we are essentially at war in this country, not with Donald Trump, not with the Republican Party, but with the 62 million voters who chose to support the idea that white men are more important than all women and all non-white people. We have a moral obligation to condemn them individually and collectively, and we have to fight them. They won the latest battle, and it was shocking to see the true nature of who we are as a country, but we have to win the war; we cannot let this poisonous philosophy rule over the country that we and our children and friends live in. We have to stamp them out, crush them completely. I am not sure that we can, but we have to try.

You Say You Want a Revolution?

Well, you know, we all wanna change the world.

I told Jackie that in a few years, I would like to have a license plate that says DUN WRKN. She suggested that probably 1,000 other people had already thought of that. I checked the plate for Washington State -- someone already has it. Bummer.

This is really a post about why this Bernie supporter will enthusiastically support Hillary Clinton this fall. So why don't we start by listing some reasons:

1. Donald Trump.
2. Hillary Clinton. Hillary is a perfectly good candidate. She is experienced, smart, capable, very knowledgeable. I have no fears that she will be an incompetent President. Heck, compared to number 1 there, she is Abraham Lincoln reborn. If there were someone I was a bit more excited about, like Bernie Sanders or Barack Obama, I would vote for them, and I did when I had the chance. Now she is clearly the best remaining candidate, and she is a fine choice.
3. But here is the most important point: If you want the changes Bernie Sanders talked about, if you want the revolution, the best way to get it is to vote for Hillary Clinton. No, she is not suddenly going to implement universal health care or free college, but then, neither was Sanders. The best way to move the country to the left is to get out and vote, and vote for the best candidate. And no, that does not mean the Green Party, because that is not really a candidate, not in the sense of having one chance in a million of winning.

To me, what Bernie Sanders really represents is the chance to look at other countries and ask why they have it better than Americans do. Why do they take 6 or 8 weeks of vacation while we start with two? Why do they have better public transportation, more parental leave, a higher minimum wage? How is it that they can afford universal health care, but we cannot get there? Why do their college students graduate with no debt?

Why can't the so-called and self-proclaimed greatest country on earth have some of the good things that other countries have, things that make life better for their citizens? And now the question is, how do we get there, now that Hillary Clinton won the nomination and not Bernie Sanders?

Well, for now we have two major political parties, and between them they control virtually every political institution in the country, If you want to get things done, you almost have to work with one of those parties. So the question is, which one is most receptive to the type of ideas that Bernie
Sanders championed? Which one is closer to being the party that, for example, might want to increase the minimum wage or institute universal health care?

How about the one that supported Bernie Sanders to such an extent that he came reasonably close to getting their nomination? How about the party that actually wants to raise the minimum wage and make college affordable and extend health care coverage to everyone? Certainly, you are not going to achieve any of those things by electing Donald Trump or any other Republican. And you won't achieve anything by voting for a third party candidate who will lose the election and never get into office.

What might achieve something, though, is to elect Democrats, lots of Democrats. Remember Obamacare? That was only possible because Democrats held the Presidency, the House of Representatives, and 60 Senators in the Senate, at least for a while. The more Democrats in office, the more the agenda will move to the left, and the easier it will be to elect more progressive Democrats who will make real changes.

That may sound more like evolution than revolution, but then, when I was born, long ago but not that long ago, segregation was still the law in some places, gays were criminals, and abortion was illegal everywhere. Things change. And the way to change them is to vote, and keep supporting and electing the best people you can. Right now, the best person running for President with a chance of winning is Hillary Clinton. The first step in the revolution is to get her elected.

Twenty Pounds: Past the Set Point

I wrote a fine post about losing weight back in March. March 2015. Then I lost ten pounds and wrote another post in April, 2015. It has been a long time between posts about losing weight.

But this morning I was 20 pounds lighter than when I started back in March of last year, finally. It took a couple of trips to a new endocrinologist, but his approach to treating my diabetes is to get me to stop eating carbs and to lose weight. I have been really trying to limit my carbs for about eight weeks, but when he got me going on the harshest phase of the Atkins diet two weeks ago, I realized that I had still been eating way more carbs previously than this diet calls for.

In addition, the carbs I am eating come mostly from low-carb vegetables, and some dairy, and never from breads, chips, anything sweet, pasta, or even fruit. Things like broccoli do not have very many carbs in them, so I have to eat a decent portion of veggies with every meal to get enough carbs.

The toughest thing about a low-carb diet, especially the strict version, is that it's boring. After a short while, every meal feels like eggs again, ham again, fish again, hamburger again, along with tomatoes again, avocado again, salad again, and maybe a piece of cheese, again. They try to make the list of foods you can eat seem longer by listing twelve types of cheese and ten types of salad dressing, but the list of foods you cannot eat is longer. I can list 15 types of fruit, 18 products made with flour, and 20 desserts easy. Plus rice, corn, and pretty much everything. Plus alcohol.

The thing is though, my blood sugar readings are way down, and I am losing weight. So when the doctor asked me what I wanted to do now, I said that I would stick with the extreme version of the diet longer. To lose 20 pounds, I had to pass a magic weight that is very hard for me to get under. In the past, I have approached that weight many times, but it is very hard to cross below it. Right now though, I am five pounds under, and I think the only way to stay there or go lower is to eat very few carbs.

Atkins

I am seeing a new endocrinologist who is helping me with my diabetes. He put me on an Atkins diet (I asked what I could do other than take more drugs), so I started yesterday.

The extreme phase of the Atkins diet (the first two weeks) is pretty simple. I can eat:

• Meats, fish, fowl.
• Eggs
• Vegetables (plus avocado)
• Cheese
• Not much else.

I also have to drink two liters of water each day, which is not very fun. Too much water.

My doctor said that some people choose to just stay on the extreme version, but I have already decided that I will opt for a less stringent version as soon as I get a chance. I like meat, but I need some variety, and I would like to eat fruit on occasion if I can. Right now all of my carbs (20 a day) are coming from cheese and vegetables, neither of which contain many carbs, so I have been eating a lot of tomatoes and avocado just to get 6-7 carbs per meal.

When I first saw this doctor 6 weeks ago, he gave me a few rules and asked me to record my blood sugar, and I started restricting carbs. My results have already been better (6.0 A1C), so I am hoping it will go down more now. It's a struggle though to keep my sugar down; I increased my Lantus (insulin) based on doctor's orders, restricted my diet, was careful to take all my meds, and I still had good readings only a little more than half the time. I think that as long as my weight is this high, I will have to work hard if I want to keep the diabetes under control.

Perhaps I will lose some weight with this diet. People do. For now I'm just happy if it gets my sugar to go down.

Trump's Problems Are Just Beginning

When Hillary Clinton gave a foreign policy speech a couple of weeks ago, what surprised me about it was the way she approached the issue of Donald Trump. It was really her first post-primary speech, focused on beating Trump rather than beating Bernie Sanders, and I guess I expected that she would contrast her foreign policy ideas and experience with Trump's ideas and lack of experience. But the way she went about it was unusual: she stated her own positions, but when it came to Trump, she really did not acknowledge that he had any positions. Instead of treating him like a political rival, she made him out to be a clown, a fake, a charlatan, a liar, a buffoon, a man who has no idea what he is doing.

It's a great approach, and one that you knew some pundits and surrogates would take. I just did not expect to see Hillary come out swinging like that right off the bat. It's clear that some clever people in her campaign have decided that is the way to go, rather than acknowledge Trump as a legitimate politician. I see a few advantages to her taking the position that Trump is not even fit to run for President:

• It's true.
• It's a narrative that the press can run with. Keep pounding the idea that Trump is in over his head, way over his head, and the press will look for examples and run with the idea, and they will find plenty of examples that fit right into the story line. With any luck, this will be the way voters see Donald Trump by election time.
• I bet there are a lot of people and a lot of incidents from Trump's past that will fit right into this story and will keep coming out of the woodwork between now and November. He has made some enemies over time, and now is their chance to speak out.

In an era when everything a candidate does or says, or has ever done or said, is fair game for media scrutiny, there has never been a more vulnerable candidate than Donald Trump. With a past full of questionable personal behavior and shady business dealings, a severe lack of political knowledge, and a propensity for saying dumb things, Trump is the mother load of negative campaign stories just waiting to be written.

Just since the Orlando nightclub massacre, Trump has:

• Called on President Obama to resign due to the shootings (?)
• Congratulated himself on predicting radical Islamic violence. (By the way, has anyone noticed that the attack in Orlando was not due to radical Islam so much as homophobia? Just because the guy claimed solidarity with ISIS at the last moment does not really make him a part of their movement.)
• Implied that President Obama was in league with terrorists.
• Blamed immigration laws for the shootings, even though the shooter was born in the US and was 29 years old. Trump decided we should not have let the guy's parents in the country.
• Said that Muslims know who the Muslim terrorists in this country are (and are not telling.)
• Claimed that thousands of refugees are getting into the country without any vetting. In fact refugees are vetted more extensively than just about any immigrants.

You never know. Republicans are not going to sit back and watch this happen. But I think the Trump candidacy could easily become a dumpster fire, with everybody and his mama looking into Trump's past, jumping on every mistake he makes, and generally making him out to be an unprepared, bumbling goof who somehow finds himself running for President, like some Adam Sandler movie only not funny, which is actually just like Adam Sandler movies.

We will see, but I think it is just going to get worse from here.

Leading the Republican Party

Four years ago, I wrote a post on Daily Kos suggesting that Mitt Romney was about as good a candidate as the Republican Party could hope for. Not that I thought that Romney would be a good president, just that he was insincere and shifty enough, and able to say whatever he needed to say in a reasonably convincing way whenever he needed to, that he might be able to get elected, And I felt that was the best the party could expect to do.

A couple of comments on that post suggested that I was wrong, that Jeb Bush or Chris Christie would be more formidable, and that they were waiting for a better chance in 2016. But the failures of Bush and Christie illustrate the real problem with finding a standard bearer for the Grand Old Party.

You can't choose a reasonable, decent, rational person to lead an unreasonable, indecent, irrational organization. And the Republican Party has gone so far off the rails that anyone left to claim the leadership is deeply, fundamentally flawed in too many ways to convince the American people that he or she should be President. Not that either Bush or Christie is the epitome of reasonable, decent, or rational, but even they were judged by the raging right to have just a bit too much of those qualities, and they were kicked to the curb pretty quickly in the primaries. Anyone with enough good qualities that they deserve to be elected will be swiftly eliminated from consideration by Republican primary voters.

What's funny is, in that post four years ago, I listed the non-Romney Republican candidates in a loose order of viability: Pawlenty, Perry, Santorum, Gingrich, Huntsman, Bachmann, Cain, Trump. Then I said maybe Sarah Palin should go ahead of Bachmann, three spaces ahead of Trump. Times change, and yet, Trump is no more of a legitimate presidential candidate than he was a few years ago, back when he was the Birther in Chief and said Republicans were making a mistake letting the issue of Obama's birth go because "people love this issue." Yeah he said that -- let's just keep saying this same stupid, stupid, utterly stupid shit, because people love it. Even Herman Cain knew better than that.

To look at it another way, to get elected, a Republican presidential candidate has to believe, or pretend to believe, most or all of the following:

• Obamacare was the worst thing to happen since Hitler, or maybe slavery. Yes, extending health care coverage to 20 million people was such an egregious abuse that it has to be stopped at all costs, and let's get all of those people back to being uninsured again as soon as we can.
• Women should not have a choice in reproductive matters and, by extension, I should have a right to shove my religion down your throat. Because it's really all about God and how much he hates pregnant women.
• The government should help the rich get richer, because that helps everyone, and it should make the poor poorer, because that will make the poor try harder.
• Global warming is a hoax, or "I understand climate science better than those fancy climate scientists with their PhD's and their sophisticated computer models and their truckloads of evidence and their decades of research."
• We should balance the budget by lowering taxes and increasing military spending.

And so on and so on.

But then there is another job requirement: Must be able to convince the American people that you are the right choice to lead the country. And therein lies the problem, and it is only getting worse: You can act like a nutcase and convince the Republican base to vote for you (this we know), or you can act sane and competent and convince the American people that you will be a good President. But man, it's going to take some kind of incredible trick to do both.

Wising Up to the Internet

Jarrod recently got his first job, in retail. He went to Craigslist on his own, applied to a few jobs, interviewed and got hired.

I never worked in retail, but I gave him some advice. Mostly it was keep moving, don't stand around. In a retail store there is probably always something to do, and if not, look for something. Don't stand around.

A couple of weeks later, he told me that had been really good advice. Someone at work -- an important someone, because he is engaged to the store manager -- told Jarrod that he liked it that Jarrod always kept moving. He said that too often young people just stand around and waste time when there isn't anyone telling them what to do, but he noticed that Jarrod keeps busy.

I told Jarrod that the important takeaway from this experience is that you should listen to your old dad.

I click on stuff on the Internet. All kinds of stuff. This is because I am interested in little factoids, like those 14 things you did not know about Ben Affleck. That is what made me good at Trivial Pursuit, back when that was a thing, or would make me a good Jeopardy! contestant, although only if I could play against the type of contestants who play on Family Feud or Wheel of Fortune, not against the actual contestants who show up on Jeopardy!, because those people are really good and would stomp me.

That is a lie, of course, the part about why I do it. I click on stuff because I am bored, because I am just looking for anything to entertain me for a minute or two, and because the clickbait people are very good at finding something that appears to be just interesting enough to get me to click. Also because the sports sites and political sites I like have lots of little clickbait items at the bottom of their articles, and so I can trust them right? And also because I have Norton software and anti-malware software that seem to work pretty well, just in case maybe I should not have trusted them.

I think that I am just starting to come around to obvious stuff that everyone else figured out ten years ago, but I have noticed a few patterns of annoying-ness related to these fun little sites, and I am finally starting to step away a little faster:

• If an article is not what the headline says ("The cameraman just kept recording" equals still photos of cute weather reporters), close it.
• If your article says "jaw-dropping", "the world wasn't ready", "number xx will shock you" (It's never number one. Only the other day I saw one that was, but, foolish me, the trick was they counted down), or some other cliched hook, forget it. On the bottom of a sports site the other day, there were five different clickbait choices. Three of them were jaw-dropping. I find these lines amusing. "One weird trick" and "Doctors hate her" are like the Pong of clickbait lines. The Internet keeps coming up with new ones fast. I guess when a thing works, everyone copies it really quick.
• I suppose that the obvious thing is, if I have to click through your site, when it could easily all be on one page, you don't have anything to say, do you, YOU JUST WANT ME TO CLICK. This seems so stupid when I write it down that it feels...really stupid. I feel so used.

I have noticed that even my good Internet friend George Takei is posting more stuff that feels like clickbait to me. I wonder if George is making money by directing people to click-generating sites. I hope George is doing well. I like George. I wish him the best.

I also noticed that when I Fucking Love Science directs me to a site, the information on that site is always -- always -- easily accessible with minimal clicks. That is because IFLS is a site meant to inform, not to generate clicks that do not benefit the user in a any way. So IFLS is OK.

Anyway, I'm learning.

p.s. "Amazing historical photos." "18 things the producers of [some show] didn't want you to know" (a lie -- almost all of them, the producers couldn't care less.) "You won't believe the net worth of..." "What these [formerly attractive women] look like now will shock you!"

How many of these lines are there?

Baseball Versus Real Life

A True Story of one time when I had a real impact in the corporate world. I was a lowly production scheduler working at Fluke, and I received a copy of their quarterly press release and actually read it. They used the word "verses" over and over when they actually meant "versus," as in "Q1 1996 verses [sic!] Q1 1995." I knew one of the executive secretaries, so I called her and told her that they were using the wrong word. In the next quarter's press release, they changed it to "versus."

Now that's impact.

But this post is more about how baseball players are treated differently from most of us in the corporate world.

Pay Disparities

Baseball of course has a system where a player is tied to one team for about five major league seasons, and that creates a disparity of pay. But beyond that, if you just look at how much free agents are paid, there are huge differences. Robinson Cano plays for the Mariners, and he makes $24 million per year. Chris Iannetta also signed as a free agent and makes $4.25 per year. There are free agents who make less. So one player can make several times what another player makes, even when you compare two starters on the same team. This does not happen because Robinson Cano has a different job from Chris Iannetta; second basemen and catchers are paid comparable amounts around the league. Cano is paid more simply because he does what he does really well.

You may argue that, in most professions, there just are not the same disparities in talent, but my observation is that there are great differences between people. However, the differences in pay are much, much smaller in most professions. When I was a manager, I was able to give my best people maybe a 5-6% raise, while the mediocre ones would get 2-3%. (If someone was clearly below average, you couldn't just pay them less and have them do work suitable to their talents; you had to get rid of them.) After a few years, if the best ones had reached the highest non-managerial level and could not be promoted, they would get to a point on the pay scale where it became harder to give them 5-6% raises, while average performers were always eligible for a decent raise. As a result, less-capable employees drifted toward the middle of their pay grade, while the best people got stuck at maybe 10% - 20% above.

Robinson Cano makes nearly six times what Chris Iannetta makes. That's a lot more than 20% more. And while I am not sure that any Senior Accountant is worth six times what another one makes, I always thought that there were really substantial differences in contribution. If I had been asked to cut staff costs by 50%, I would have kept the most talented people -- either the best ones or ones I thought would become the best -- regardless of salary, and let the rest go, because I always thought my best people were worth way more than the so-so ones. I suspect most managers feel the same way. The differences in salary don't reflect the differences in production.

Promotions

On a related, but not quite the same, note, Robinson Cano was able to climb the ladder to success without ever changing jobs. If baseball were more like the corporate world, Cano would have topped out at some salary, let's say $4 million per year. Then, because he is good at hitting a baseball, he could maybe be promoted to hitting coach. Being good at hitting is no guarantee that one will be good at coaching hitting, but to earn more money, he would have to "move up" to coaching. If he happened to be successful as a hitting coach (which by the way baseball savants say there is really no way to tell if any hitting coach has much of an impact), he might then move up again to manager. If he succeeded as a manager (also very hard to judge), he might get the completely different job of general manager. And that would be his path to a really high salary.

And if he failed as a general manager (and this one is much easier to evaluate)? Maybe he would be able to get work again as a minor-league manager, or as a hitting coach. But all along, he was most valuable as a baseball player. Baseball recognizes this. The corporate world does a little bit with certain jobs, but mostly you have to move "up" to get higher pay, and up means managing.

Baseball Managers Do Not Make the Most Money

This is again a related but not quite the same topic -- baseball managers do not make as much money as a lot of the ballplayers, because in baseball they realize that managers do not have as much impact as individual players. In the corporate world, there is a supply and demand issue, because I think that for the most part being a manager is more work and more stress than being an individual contributor, but that may well be true in baseball as well.

I think it is quite possible that, in many cases, managers contribute less than the people working for them. I know that it is very common that the individual contributors perceive it that way, and people are not stupid, not all of them. After all, managers spend a lot of time dealing with email, attending meetings, distributing work to other people, and communicating with the people above them in the food chain, while individual contributors do the actual engineering, accounting, design, etc. Which things are really the most important?

Evaluation

The ability to evaluate players is one of the most interesting things about baseball, especially when you consider how it relates to most jobs. Baseball players are much easier to evaluate than most workers, because everything they do is in plain sight and being watched by their bosses, and in case the bosses miss something, it is being recorded. Also, a baseball player's goal is pretty clear -- to win games, and there are only so many ways to contribute to a baseball victory.

Nevertheless, when statisticians started paying close attention to the value of baseball players, and to the value of decisions made by managers (like when to try to steal a base or when to bunt), the math guys figured out that baseball teams were often mis-evaluating their players, in some cases very badly, and they were also making some really bad tactical decisions. The book (or movie) Moneyball is really the story of how the Oakland A's took advantage of the the mistakes other teams were making and  began using better information to out-perform other teams with a lot more money. It turned out that the difference between well-informed decisions and the common wisdom of the industry was huge.

And the interesting thing about that is, if experienced baseball people watching their players for decades make such poor decisions about their players that a team with a more rational approach can outperform everyone else by a pretty significant margin, how accurate is is the typical manager in a big company, trying to evaluate people they speak to a few times a week, people doing a wide variety of tasks with a nebulous connection to actually making money for the company? They don't stand a chance. The truth is, it is really very unlikely that such a manager gets it right, or anything close to right.

And so...

One has to think that baseball, compared to the corporate world, does a better job of putting people into the right situations and paying them appropriately, because they live in such a competitive environment, and they get quick feedback to help them refine their methods. I suspect that some or all of the above issues represent shortcomings in the corporate world, things that could be done better if we were better at understanding the value of employees.

And the problem with getting it wrong is, people know it. At some level, a lot of employees sense that something is wrong -- that their manager contributes less than they do, that they are not really paid enough for their good performance, that management has no idea how well they do their job or how well the person next to them does his or her job. In the end, I think most of us accept that working for a big company will never really be just or fair, and that we are probably being underpaid for our contributions, but we make the best deal we can and keep looking for something better.

Caucusing for Bernie

I went to the Washington State Democratic caucuses a week ago and voted for Bernie Sanders. He won Washington with over 70% of the votes, which was not a huge surprise as he has done well in other caucuses. I knew it was likely that Bernie would win Washington with or without my support, and I know Hillary Clinton will almost certainly win the Democratic nomination with or without my support, so I went mostly for he experience, to participate and to observe.

First observation: sooo many white people. I live in a really white place, but even with that, the caucus-goers were probably whiter than the community at large. Several of my neighbors are from India, but they were under-represented at the caucus. Maybe they are not all citizens, but I would think they are. Anyway, white people tend to favor Bernie.

There were a lot of Bernie supporters wearing Bernie t-shirts. I did not see one person who was visibly supporting Hillary, although there were Hillary supporters there.

Young voters overwhelmingly favor Bernie, but there were not that many young people at the caucus. Nevertheless, I think we were probably typical of much of Washington State, which Bernie won with about 73% of the vote. For just my neighborhood, the vote was 24 for Sanders to 5 for Clinton.

I did not observe much animosity toward the Hillary supporters. It was all pretty cordial. In fact, it was all pretty slow and pretty boring. I spent two hours there total, and they were still talking when I left (although I was able to vote first.) Caucuses seem like an inefficient way to vote. Just before I left, someone spoke to the whole room on behalf of Hillary, and then someone spoke on behalf of Bernie. Then someone from my neighborhood spoke on behalf of Bernie, saying that we should vote for him because he was most likely to beat Trump. I thought that was a lousy reason to vote for Hillary, so I didn't think much of it as a reason to vote for Bernie. They had to keep it balanced, so next someone spoke for Hillary. Then they said that someone else wanted to speak on behalf of Sanders, and so they needed a volunteer to speak for Hillary.

And I left. It was interesting to be a part of it, to spend a little time with like-minded people participating in Democracy. I saw a few Boy Scout parents and a former Scout there -- I always think of the Boy Scouts as Republicans, but they apparently are not all. Overall though, give me voting by mail, as we do for all elections other than caucuses.

Shorter Mitch McConnell: Screw Democracy

I posted this to Daily Kos a couple of days ago. It received the usual minimal interest, but a few people recommended it and commented.

Here's the short version: I read and watch discussion about the appointment and confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice to replace Antonin Scalia, and I see and hear words and phrases like "power play," "obstruction," and "unprecedented," and I am disappointed because I think we are underplaying the gravity of what Mitch McConnell is trying to do.

I would use phrases like "coup," "overriding democracy," and "constitutional crisis." And I mean a true constitutional crisis, where the constitution no longer functions. Here's why:

Let's do a little thought experiment. Suppose the Republicans (Donald Trump!) win the White House, but Democrats somehow manage to get 51 senators elected. And Trump makes a Supreme Court nomination. Now those 51 senators could (and I would hope would, in fact), with considerably more justification than Republicans have for blocking an Obama appointment, refuse to confirm anyone other than a clearly left-leaning choice, because look, we got screwed out of an Obama nomination by your horseshit, you owe us one, and we have the power to make that happen or deny you any Supreme Court nominations. So we will. And Trump would almost certainly not concede. And the Supreme Court could remain at eight justices for a long time. Or seven if someone retired. Or six.

And that is an actual constitutional crisis. I am not saying that any of that is likely to happen. But it would be a logical consequence of both parties behaving exactly the way Mitch McConnell is behaving now.

Really, it's worse than that. Using McConnell's reasoning, which is obviously much more arbitrary than "it's an elections year" and really is "I have the power and I am going to do whatever the fuck I want, the Constitution and the American voters be damned," any future Senate majority can block all nominations from day 1. There is really no substantive difference between discrediting one year of a President's administration and discrediting all four; the election year argument is just window dressing (or should I say just bullshit?) And that would mean that Supreme Court vacancies could only be filled when the Senate and the Presidency are captured by the same party. Our Constitution was not meant to work that way. Again, this would create a constitutional crisis and potentially years without a full Supreme Court, and again it is simply a logical extension of what Mitch McConnell is choosing to do.

If we want to talk honestly about what the Republicans are proposing when they suggest that they will not consider any Obama nominees, we need to understand what will happen if every Senator, now and in the future, adopts the same tactics. When you look at it that way, this is about more than a power play. It is an assault on the Constitution, an assault on our democracy. I am not sure you can justify thinking anything less.

Days Like This

I sent this email to my wife yesterday. I had plenty of time during my work day to compose the email.

I did everything I needed to do for the day by about 8:30. I did not have enough to do yesterday either.

Harpo* wants me to help Zeppo* with a hiring proposal, but Zeppo has not given me many specifics. Harpo does not want me to ask questions or find out what Zeppo wants or try to use my own experience to imagine what I would do. He just wants something simple, done without any real knowledge of the situation, the usual superficial slapdash get-something-done approach, even though I am not pressed for time.

It seems to me that there is a very high probability that Zeppo will perceive whatever I do in that case as crappy work.

So I do not have enough to do, and what I do have, I should do a lousy job and get it off my plate as quickly as possible so I can make myself look incompetent and then hurry right back to not having enough to do.

I hate days like this.

Groucho**

Every day at work is like a Dilbert strip, only usually not as funny.

*Not their real names. These are actually names of Marx Brothers.

**Not my real name either. Another Marx Brother.

It's Only a Job

I sit at a cubicle that was abandoned rather abruptly by its former occupant last August. There are four colored pins laid out in a line over a stretch of two to three feet on his cubicle wall. Yesterday I noticed that they were in a pretty good line, except that the yellow one was an inch too low. Today I moved it. The red one was just a shade too low as well. I moved that one too. Now I have my eye on the green one.

One of the joys of working as a contractor is that I never have to be concerned about losing my job. If my contract ends, I didn’t “lose my job;” my contract ended, and now I have to find another one. That’s a part of the model, not some life-changing disaster. This perspective comes in handy when I start feeling, as I have recently, that my current employment is very tenuous and might be ending soon. Because if that happens, it’s OK, because contracts end. No big deal.

(I have to note, even more recently it seems that I might be safely in place for a while longer, but that does not change the point.)

Of course leaving a permanent job is also temporary, so what really is the difference? For me, there is a big one: people always ask why you left (or want to leave) a job. If I was contracting, I can just say that the contract ended, the client did not want to pay me anymore, and that works, and that’s generally true. For permanent jobs though, I have trouble answering. Because I have to lie. Because “my manager sucked” is a bad answer, even if that’s the most honest answer (and, to a greater or lesser degree, it usually is.) Because “I came to hate my job by the end” doesn’t work either. You are not supposed to give any negative answer, because they don’t want to hear that you actually evaluated your last employer and found them lacking, because they know you will also evaluate your next employer too, and they probably aren’t all that great either. You are supposed to say something positive about opportunities and moving forward.

Since I started my accounting career at KPMG in 1987, I have held six “permanent” positions in accounting and finance. I never left even one of them for a positive reason.

In a similar vein -- I guess -- I have begun to think that any position I get now is temporary. My best approximation of how much longer I will work is four to five years. If a “permanent” position helps me fill that gap while earning a decent wage without long periods of unemployment, great. I would actually prefer to work as a contractor, because I like being paid extra when I work extra, but a permanent job might be a better way to fill the time and stay employed, without a lot of gaps. But at the most, my next job will only last a few years.

Anyway, the last time I had a permanent job, I was very, very stressed for a period of a couple of years about possibly losing it. Then I finally lost it, in more ways than one. Never again. Every job is temporary.

Republicans and Machiavelli

I once had to write a paper contrasting the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli and Henry David Thoreau. It was not a great scholarly paper, just a little three-page assignment for a writing class, but I remember it because both Machiavelli and Thoreau were entertaining writers. Also, I was happy with the paper because I came up with a thesis that made some sense, so that rather than having to force words onto a page as I usually had to, I actually found something to say.

My thesis was that the type of government a person wants to see is closely related to how that person sees the rest of humanity. No, I am not the only person who ever thought of that, but it actually did first occur to me with that assignment, and as I look at the current state of the Republican Party, I keep thinking back to that assignment and the way that Machiavelli saw his fellow men. (Given his time, I do not believe that he mentioned women, but I am sure he thought no better of them.)

The Thoreau piece was from Civil Disobedience. Thoreau put his trust in the individual, and so felt that, in matters of morality, a person should not allow the majority of his fellow citizens to decide what is right and wrong, but rather should look to his own conscience. Machiavelli would have never approved of such as thing, however, and his writing (from The Prince) was sprinkled with enjoyably harsh descriptions of the nature of men, which I used liberally to pad my paper. I have no need for padding here, but I will include a couple of Machiavelli quotes anyway, because I find his dark view of mankind entertaining:

 ...love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.” 

“Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.” 

I have seen much written about how American conservatives are more fearful than their liberal counterparts, but it is more than just fear. Conservatives are not going to be harmed by abortions, or by gay marriage, or by a retired person collecting Social Security. It is fear, but also a general mistrust of character, that Other People are not only scary but also thieves, liars, and sinners, fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain. Owing to the baseness of men.

And if that is how we see men, and women, what might we want from the government?

• How about a huge, super expensive military, way more powerful than any other anywhere, to protect us from Them.
• Lots of border security, to keep the rapists and drug runners out.
• A big Homeland Security Department, to spy on the terrorists (but no one else.)
• A strong police presence and prisons to incarcerate all the bad people out there.
• Laws to thwart Sinners, like young women who have sex.
• And don't touch my guns, because I have to protect myself from all the evil people.

And how would you feel about programs meant to help people?

• Welfare: Lazy people use it to buy Cadillacs and live high on the hog.
• Unemployment: Gives people an incentive to not look for a job.
• Disability. I heard a story once about a guy who was "disabled" and then went and played basketball. The world is full of cheaters.
• Social Security: Old people living off the government teat. (Never mind that they paid into the system for 50 years.)
• Universal health care: They are going to take my money and use it to take care of some drug addict.

And so on and so on. This is the part of government that conservatives want to see drowned in a bathtub: the part that keeps people from becoming homeless, or living in poverty, or starving, or going bankrupt or dying when they have some curable illness. In short, it is the part of government that says that I am my brother's keeper, and he is mine. Because Those People out there are not my brothers. They are dangerous. They are sinners. They are lazy and dishonest. And they are on their own.

It is of course ironic that it is Democrats who take the approach that people are brothers and we are our brothers' keepers, while the party of Jesus Christ Himself (or so they seem to think) has adopted the philosophy that helping people is for dupes, but that inconsistency has been well documented before. In any case, it is more than just fear, more than the decline of white male privilege, that drives the Republican mind. It is, I believe, this Machiavellian perspective that most people are of low character, base and unworthy. And I think we have to learn to deal with that mindset.