Plasmic Echo

Via the Washington Examiner:

A judge in Florida went on an unsealing spree this week, making public a trove of documents that had previously been filed under seal or in heavily redacted form in former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case.

The documents, which included hundreds of pages of exhibits, motions, and other filings, underscored the close communication the Biden White House and the National Archives and Records Administration had in the year before Trump was indicted.

. . . Trump has consistently maintained that NARA was out to get him and that the agency had been maliciously coordinating with President Joe Biden’s White House from the outset of its pursuit. Newly unredacted court papers showing Trump and Smith battling over access to discovery in February reveal examples of the communication Trump has criticized.

In fact, the records confirm a lengthy history of collaboration among the White House, the National Archives, and the Justice Depatment to identify records issues that could be used to bring charges against Trump, even against the background that transfer of records during presidential transitions is never smooth.

Trump’s defense attorneys also referenced some exculpatory remarks [NARA general counsel Gary] Stern made to Trump aides in the form of a letter draft on May 5, 2021.

“Stern’s draft conceded that ‘things were very chaotic, as they always are in the course of a one-term transition,’ and he acknowledged that ‘the transfer of the Trump electronic records is still ongoing and won’t be complete for several more months,’” defense attorneys wrote.

Stern and the White House had apparently been coordinating efforts as of May 2021, only four months after Trump left the presidency, and we can see by the FBI memo reproduced at the top of this post that by February 2022, the FBI was involved and had given the invesigation into Trump's records the code name PLASMIC ECHO. This piece at The Federalist outlines what the writer thinks are the most significant revelations from the new documents, and the long coordination among the White House, the National Archives, and the Justice Department is on the list:

Following Trump’s departure from office, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) began “to work with the White House Office of Records Management on exaggerated claims related to records handling under the Presidential Records Act (PRA),” a motion to compel discovery from Trump’s attorney’s states.

NARA General Counsel Gary Stern sent a letter to Trump’s PRA “representatives” in May of 2021 in which he said he “had several conversations” with the White House’s Office of Records Management and had raised some “concerns,” presumably about the documents in question, with NARA Archivist David Ferriero, according to pictures of the new, less-redacted filing posted by [reporter Julie] Kelly.

. . . The filing alleges Ferriero then “threatened” one of Trump’s PRA representatives in August that he was presuming that 24 “alleged — and non-existent” boxes of records were “destroyed” and that Ferriero would report his claims of missing documents to the White House and Department of Justice.

By September, Stern was sending around a letter “that we could consider sending to the Attorney General about missing Trump records,” according to the filing. Stern also sent an email admitting he “informally reached out to the DOJ counsel about this issue” and that “WH counsel is now also aware of the issue, and has asked that I keep them in the loop to the extent that we make any reference to [WH-ORM],” according to the filing.

However, the Gateway Pundit reveals another issue that isn't mentioned in other stories:

President Trump said two years after he met Obama before his 2017 Inauguration that Obama was on the brink of starting a war with North Korea. Trump claimed that Obama was “close to starting a big war” with North Korea.

The corrupt and criminal Obama/Biden gang was after documents related to North Korea years later when it raided President Trump’s iconic home of Mar-a-Lago and took President Trump’s documents that he legally had possession of per the Presidential Records Act.

This is reflected in an unsealed after-action memo written following the Mar-a-Lago raid on August 6, 2022 (click on the image for a larger copy):

I always acknowledge here that I have a certain sympathy for conspiracy theories that have a contrarian bias, and the idea that the Mar-a-Lago raid was an excuse to retrieve documents potentially compromising for Obama from a Trump trove is appealing. It reminds me of the argument in the 1991 Len Colodny - Robert Gettlin book Silent Coup

that former White House counsel John Dean orchestrated the 1972 Watergate burglary. His motive was argued to have been to protect his future wife Maureen Biner by removing information linking her to a call-girl ring that worked for the DNC.

. . . In 1992 John and Maureen Dean sued Nixon "plumber" G. Gordon Liddy for libel, after Liddy sought to support the core claims in Silent Coup. Liddy's testimony was the first time he spoke publicly in detail about the Watergate break-in, as he had refused to cooperate with investigators during the Watergate scandal. The libel case was dismissed without prejudice and was later refiled. In 2001 a federal judge declared a mistrial after the jury was deadlocked, and dismissed the $5.1 million defamation lawsuit.

No libel or defamation suit regarding the allegations in Silent Coup has ever prevailed in a trial, although settlements have been paid out of court. The idea that the Watergate burglary was undertaken to retrieve compromising documents is intriguing, as is the idea that there may in part have been a similar motive behind the Mar-a-Lago raid. At minimum, this reflects the threat Trump apparently represented to the White House even out of power, and even during 2021-22, when the likelihood of Trump running for president again seemed remote.

The unsealed documents also contain a reference to an alleged attempt by one of Jack Smith's prosecutors, Jay Bratt, to intimidate Stanley Woodward, counsel for one of the defendants in the Mar-a-Lago case. However, this was already public knowledge as of September, 2023, and the documents reveal nothing new.

There are no earth-shattering revelations in the new documents, but they do demonstrate an overall pattern whereby the White House used the National Archives, the Justice Department, and the FBI to pursue a political agenda against Donald Trump. I suspect the chief effect of this will be a serious effort to dismantle this aspect of the deep state should Trump be elected to another term in November.

The Legal Issues In Trump's New York Trial, In Detail

With the start of the Trump New York trial, the legal theories behind the various Trump lawfare cases are beginning to become clear. Alan Dershowitz gives a 30,000 foot interpretation in this YouTube video. At 7:28, he gives a simplified version of the prosecution's strategy:

Today was the first, pretty much, day of trial for Donald Trump. There's only one problem withthe trial: no reasonable person can figure out what the crime is. For example, today the witness was this guy Pecker from the National Enquirer, this kinda rag, that does "catch and kill", yuou know, he makes money by geting rich people to pay him to buy stories from people who are going to be exposing famous people, and then he buys the story and gets an exclusive with the accuser, and then doesn't run the story.

A pretty sleazy journalism, not a crime! Why did we have a whole day of testimony on something that may be immoral but isn't a crime? And in the next days, we're gonna hear from Stormy Daniels, who'll say, "I got paid hush money", even though she denied it earlier, "becaujse I had sex sith Donald Trump", even though she denied that earlier, but it's not a crime.

. . . They took a minor state misdemeanor well past the statute of limitations . . . . If you list something in a corporate expense form as a legal expense, buit it really was more of a political expense -- people do that all the time. . . . they created this felony out of that by saying, "but his real purpose was to fool the voters and to create election fraud", a federal offense, and so he committed a state misdemeanor in order to commit a federal crime.

But I don't find this satisfying in regard to the actual legal issues, and more important, the options available for Trump to defend the case. This piece delves farther into the complexities:

If you’re looking for the clearest statement of Bragg’s legal theory, you can find it in a November 2023 court filing opposing Trump’s motion to dismiss the case, along with Merchan’s ruling on that motion.

. . . In his filing, Bragg sets out four potential object offenses: violations of federal campaign finance law under the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA); violations of New York Election Law § 17-152; violations of federal, local, and state tax law; and additional falsifications of business records outside the Trump Organization. Merchan allowed Bragg to move forward with the first three theories, but tossed out the last one.

. . . Let’s begin with that last offense. The underlying conduct here concerns records generated not just in the Stormy Daniels payment, but also in the course of another two additional efforts to squelch stories that might have harmed Trump—in both instances, with the central involvement of American Media Inc (AMI), the parent company of the National Enquirer tabloid. The first story, which turned out not to be true, concerned an allegation by a Trump Tower doorman that Trump had fathered a child out of wedlock; the second was to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who says she had an affair with Trump. Trump, Bragg alleges, coordinated these payoffs with David Pecker, who purchased the rights to these stories with no intention of ever publishing them—a so-called “catch and kill.”

But as Dershowitz points out, "catch and kill" isn't a crime. The link continues,

. . . More central to Bragg’s legal theory are violations of federal election law under FECA.

. . . Bragg is arguing that Trump falsified the Trump Organization’s business records with the intent to criminally violate FECA. Ruling on Trump’s motion in limine, Merchan held that Bragg may not point to Cohen’s guilty plea or the Justice Department or FEC agreements with AMI as themselves evidence of Trump’s guilt, but that the district attorney may offer “testimony about the underlying facts … provided the proper foundation is laid.”

Trump has leveled multiple legal challenges against Bragg’s use of FECA as an object offense, arguing in his motion to dismiss that a violation of federal law can’t serve as the “other crime” under § 175.10. Merchan, however, held it could. Trump also argued that FECA preempts state law and thus rules out prosecution under § 175.10 with FECA as the object offense. Merchan rejected this argument as well[.]

. . . This brings us to the final potential object offense, and the one that seems to bear the most weight in Bragg’s presentation of the case so far: New York Election Law § 17-152, a misdemeanor offense that prohibits “conspir[ing] to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.”

. . . During opening statements on April 22, prosecutor Matthew Colangelo emphasized the role of § 17-152 in the district attorney’s case, declaring, “This was a planned, coordinated long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected.” Senior Trial Counsel Joshua Steinglass further underlined the importance of the statute the following day, describing § 17-152 as “the primary crime that we have alleged” as an object offense. “The entire case is predicated on the idea that there was a conspiracy to influence the election in 2016,” Steinglass said.

. . . But § 17-152 requires that a conspiracy be carried out by “unlawful means”—so what “unlawful means” is Bragg alleging? Colangelo . . . gestured at this during his opening statement, describing the conspiracy as carried out “through illegal expenditures . . . using doctored corporate records and bank forms to conceal those payments along the way.”

So far, as we can see from this history, Judge Merchan and the state appeals court have consistently ruled against Trump's challenges to this theory, and this is likely to continue. Gateway Pundit has published a lengthy essay by Paul Ingrassia on Trump's legal options:

[T]he President’s lawyers have multiple grounds on which to appeal this present show trial, which makes a mockery of the rule of law currently underway in lower Manhattan.

. . . The first, more conservative approach, would be a kind of collateral attack on the proceeding – which challenges the case on grounds other than the underlying merits of the claim – through what is called an Article 78 filing under New York law. . . . Article 78 appeals would help streamline the process, given that President Trump’s case was brought in state court already, where such appeals are commonplace.

. . . President Trump’s lawyers have strong grounds to make an Article 78 appeal on the basis of the unconstitutional scope of the gag order that Judge Merchan arbitrarily imposed upon him, which fails to meet normal strict scrutiny analysis under federal law[.]

. . . Another issue that might be included in an Article 78 appeal is the issue of judicial misconduct: in other words, the conflict of interest serving as the basis for the appeal. . . . Under New York law, “[a] judge shall disqualify himself or herself in a proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned…”. An important ground for dismissal is when “the judge knows that the judge or the judge’s spouse, or a person known by the judge to be within the sixth degree of relationship to either of them, or the spouse of such a person … has an interest that could be substantially affected by the proceeding.”

One such interest that can be substantially affected by the proceeding is an economic interest. Namely, the economic interest of Loren Merchan, Judge Merchan’s daughter, who happens to fall “within the sixth degree of relationship” stipulated under the rule.

. . . Separately from the Article 78 proceeding, President Trump’s lawyers also have the option of making an interlocutory appeal directly to federal court – either to the Second Circuit or, better, Supreme Court. Under well-settled federal law, the Supreme Court has permitted interlocutory appeals from state to federal court, in the decision Lauro Lines S.R.L. v. Chasser (1989), if the appeal satisfies the three-prong test of what the High Court called “the collateral order doctrine.”

. . . In President Trump’s criminal proceeding, all three elements are easily met. The matter appealed – the recusal order – would conclusively determine the outcome of the case because if the Judge is found conflicted under New York or ABA canons regulating judicial ethics, there would be strong grounds for a mistrial. Even if President Trump’s attorneys appealed just on the gag order issue, that still would likely satisfy the collateral order doctrine[.]

. . . [T]he advantages to a state court proceeding should be placed alongside the advantages of a direct interlocutory appeal to federal court. These advantages may be described as follows: 1) even though state law is supposed to apply more generous speech protections, considering the current cast of characters in charge of New York’s law enforcement . . . it is improbable that President Trump’s state constitutional rights would be adequately protected. It would thus be incumbent upon federal actors, either judges or prosecutors, to apply New York law faithfully – or, in the alternative, use the federal standard to exonerate President Trump from the endless indignities of New York’s corrupted judicial system. 2) The second reason favoring federal appeal is that federal courts – and the Supreme Court, above all – has the greatest means to establish a national standard for the ongoing criminal (and potential other) proceedings against President Trump.

The summary of the Trump appeals against Judge Merchan in the second link above suggests that Trump's attorneys are fully aware of the basic issues, as well as Trump's continuing options. I've got to assume they're on top of strategies like an Article 78 appeal and an interlocutory federal appeal -- but in the meantime, we shouldn't minimize the effectiveness of Trump's Chicago Seven defense strategy, which is succeeding so far in making Judge Merchan recognize Trump is making a monkey of him.

Judge Merchan Loses His Temper

Although the New York courts have announced that they intend to post transcripts of the Trump trial "before the end of the following business day", this so far hasn't taken place, and the most recent transcript on the site is from Monday. Thus, at least so far, I'm having to rely on incomplete media accounts of the record. Here's the version of vesterday's blowup on Breitbart:

Merchan then asked Blanche to explain if Trump believed he was not violating the gag order when he reposted the Truths.

“I’d like to hear that,” Merchan exclaimed.

Blanche tried to explain, but Merchan said, “Blanche, you’re losing all credibility. I have to tell you right now, you’re losing all credibility with the court.”

There's a not fully helpful account of the proceedings in reverse chronological order on CNN. The exchange above appears to have taken place near the end of the hearing, close to the start of the day's trial at 11:00 AM. The specific issue, according to the CNN link, came up in relation to Trump reposting a comment by Jesse Waters:

Moving onto the post about the jury and Jesse Watters, Judge Juan Merchan asked: "Your client manipulated what was said and put it in quotes, am I right?"

"I wouldn’t use the word manipulation your honor," Donald Trump's lawyer Todd Blanche responded. "But the rest of the quote was not part of the quote."

Merchan said that Trump's post on the jury was not a repost.

"This is something that was said on TV and your client had to type it out. He had to sit there, use quotation marks, the shift key and type every thing out and then add those additional words," the judge said.

Blanche acknowledged that Trump's post about the jury was not a repost.

Judge Juan Merchan said he wants to hear an assertion under oath that Donald Trump believed he wasn't violating the gag order when he made the posts in question.

Merchan said: "How do I know that’s his position? Are you testifying under oath that that’s his position?"

"I'm not testifying, I'm making argument," attorney Todd Blanche replies.

"It's your client's position that when he reposts, he did not believe he was violating the gag order. I’d like to hear that. Or you just want me to accept it because you’re saying it?" Merchan says to Blanche.

This excerpt from Politico isn't covered in the CNN version, but it appears to be in the context of the same exchanges:

Prosecutors argued earlier that Trump's social media post calling Cohen and Daniels "sleaze bags" was a part of the former president's strategy to “condition” his followers.

Merchan also remarked that he would take into consideration the timing of Trump’s messages.

“You said the timing matters, why?” Blanche asked. “Why?”

Merchan responded sharply. “I’m asking the questions, OK?” he told Blanche.

Merchan warned Blanche that he was running out of time before the jury is expected to come back at 11 a.m.

Merchan's mention that they're running out of time is the one feature that caught my attention. Merchan scheduled this hearing to begin at 9:00 AM, to last until 11:00 AM, when the jury would arrive to start the day's abbreviated trial session. The hearing actually started around 9:20, and from what I can see in the CNN version, it spent over 90 minutes going round and round and accomplishing nothing -- Merchan said he wouldn't rule from the bench in any case, so we'll have to wait to see what he rules.

I note that the American Bar Association's statement on the Special Functions of the Trial Judge says in Standard 6-1.5. Obligation to use court time effectively and fairly:

(a) The trial judge has the obligation to avoid delays, continuances, and extended recesses, except for good cause. In the matter of punctuality, the observance of scheduled court hours, and the use of working time, the trial judge should be an exemplar for all other persons engaged in the criminal case. The judge should require punctuality and optimum use of working time from all such persons.

As best I can see, Judge Merchan wasted everyone's time in a rambling hearing in which he went round and round with Trump's attorney Blanche on questions like whether it's a violation of his gag order to repost someone else's opinion, and in the face of Blanche's argument that it was common sense that it wasn't, Merchan lost his temper and, in the media accounts, raised his voice. ABA Standard 6-1.4 says,

The trial judge's appearance, demeanor, and statements should reflect the dignity of the judicial office and enhance public confidence in the administration of justice.

This comment on courtroom etiquette from a working attorney explains the issue of how judges should address attorneys in court:

Judges often address attorneys by their last names, preceded by a courtesy title such as "Mr." or "Ms." This form of address is respectful and maintains a professional tone. For instance, "Mr. Smith, what is your argument regarding this motion?"

. . . Regardless of the specific term of address, judges typically maintain a respectful and professional tone when speaking to attorneys. This upholds the decorum of the court and the impartiality of the judiciary.

For Judge Merchan to addresss attorney Blanche as simply "Blanche" is outside normal courtroom decorum -- but in Trump's civil trial with Judge Engoron, the judge addressed Trump's attorney as "Chris" when he became impatient. This reflects badly on both judges.

The fact that yesterday's hearing ended only because it ran out of time suggests to me that Judge Merchan is simply over his head in this case, and it's confirmed by his losing his temper at Mr Blanche. So far, the case has been stumbling along with repeated recesses, when it would be even to the prosecution's advantage to move things quickly.

But we're also back to the Chicago Seven defense, which Alan Dershowitz, who helped develop it in the original Chicago Seven case, acknowledges the Trump defense has been using, particularly in the New York civil and criminal cases. The strategy is to get under the judge's skin and deliberately cause outbursts like Judge Merchan's yesterday. This in turn damages the court's credibility with the public.

Unlike Abbie Hoffman, Trump isn't wearing costumes or performing street theater in court, but he's doing precisely the things that will set the judge off. He posted before yesterday's hearing:

HIGHLY CONFLICTED, TO PUT IT MILDLY, JUDGE JUAN MERCHAN, HAS TAKEN AWAY MY CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH. EVERYBODY IS ALLOWED TO TALK AND LIE ABOUT ME, BUT I AM NOT ALLOWED TO DEFEND MYSELF. THIS IS A KANGAROO COURT, AND THE JUDGE SHOULD RECUSE HIMSELF!

— Trump on 𝕏 (@trump_repost) April 23, 2024

This thing is going to collapse of its own weight -- and Trump is going to continue to bait Merchan to the point where Merchan will try to put him behind bars.

"Pecker's Up!"

In the middle of her podcast yesterday, while discussing the Trump trial in New York, Megyn Kelly interrupted the discussion to announce, "This just in! Pecker's up!" and proceeded to giggle. This, of course, was a reference to David Pecker, the former publishing executive who is the lead prosecution witness in the trial. Her reference to his being "up" meant that he was taking the stand as they spoke, but the point, of course, was the bawdy implication that could be drawn from the circumstance.

This, it seems to me, is the emerging problem for the prosecution with this trial, and as with anything else, no plan survives contact with the enemy. After more than a week, it's been a bore. During jury selection, we had the usual talking heads outlining the usual defense strategies for choosing jurors, with the usual pontifications about New York juries -- except that the usual things didn't happen. Politico was one of the few outlets to notice:

As if there weren’t enough plot twists in Donald Trump’s legal saga, this week’s jury selection has produced one more: At least two lawyers will sit on his jury.

. . . Typically, prosecutors and defense lawyers alike try to keep lawyers off juries, fearing heightened scrutiny from members of their own profession. But in a Manhattan jury pool that is largely seen as unfavorable to the former president, Trump’s legal team might see a silver lining in having lawyers on the jury.

“They’re not emotional thinkers,” said Galina Davidoff, a Chicago-based trial consultant. “The profession requires them to do analysis, and emotional thinkers get more easily swayed by the side that goes first, that tells a good story.”

But this also reflects the overall dullness of the proceedings so far. No sooner did Mr Pecker come up than the court adjourned for a juror's toothache, and that led some commentators to wonder if the toothache was real, that the tedium might be more than at least that juror could bear.

Trials and hearings can be great television -- look what happened to Fani Willis in Atlanta just a short while ago. Clips and stills from that episode went viral for weeks. But in this trial, there are no cameras and no recordings, and media hungry for visuals can't get them. Did Trump fall asleep? Did he fart? Did he look annoyed? We'll never know. All anyone can do so far, like Megyn Kelly, is make bad jokes where she can find them.

Here's the pre-trial conventional wisdom from legacy media, via Doug Gordon at Newsweek:

According to the most recent New York Times/Siena poll, nearly 6 in 10 voters believe the charges of hush money payments made to a porn star are serious, including 54 percent of Independents. And the bad news for Trump doesn't end there.

Exit polls during the Republican primary showed that around 30 percent of Republican primary voters would not believe Trump was fit for the presidency if he were convicted of a crime. Even if you assume that 95 percent of those Republican voters eventually come home to Trump—a safe assumption—the 5 percent who may not are more than enough to deliver a second term to President Joe Biden.

The problem I see here is that Stormy Daniels was an issue in 2016, along with others like Karen MacDougal and the Access Hollywood tape. None of these hurt Trump badly enough to cost him the election in 2016; the voters factored them in then, and they're still going to factor them in now. The prosecutors seem to be angling to bring them into this trial if they can, but trying to take the audience back to 2016 isn't going to work, especially if they can't play clips of porn stars on the witness stand.

Doug Gordon goes on at Newsweek:

The contrast and opportunity this hands the Biden campaign could not have been any clearer than it was last week. While Trump was confined in court like a common criminal, Biden spent the week barnstorming across Pennsylvania talking about lowering taxes and bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. It's a movie we're likely to see play out over and over again: Trump in court and Biden in battleground states.

Except that Joe wasn't "talking about lowering taxes and bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States", he was talking about Uncle Bosey and fumbling with the takeout box. This won't be Gordon's idea of a movie -- there'll be no film of a fidgety, annoyed, or guilty-looking Trump in the trial, while Joe has an inexhaustible supply of stumbles, gaffes, malapropisms, mispronunciations, and brain freezes that will lead the headlines because there won't be any footage of Trump in the coutroom at all.

Nor can I discount Trump's attorney Todd Blanche's remarks to the jurors in his opening statement,

"Use your common sense. We’re New Yorkers. It’s why we’re here," Blanche said, adding "we trust you" to decide the case on the evidence.

Especially if there are two attorneys on that jury, I'm starting to think this isn't going to turn out like just about everyone has been predicting. Let's not forget the stunned surprise when Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell and Finance Committee Chairman Maurice Stans were acquitted of charges that they had obstructed an investigation in a New York federal trial in 1974. I'm not so sure New York juries are as precictable as everyone seems to think.

Inaccurate Polling

I've kept thinking about a piece I read last week in The Hill, It’s time to retire the laziest cliché in election polling. The author, W Joseph Campbell, is not the better-known Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), the academic quack who promoted myth and folklore. Whether W Joseph even rises to the level of quackery, I'm not sure. His thumbnail says he is a professor emeritus of communication at American University. Here's his argument:

Opinion polling has no lazier cliché than “snapshot in time.”

. . . [T]he phrase is a refuge or metaphoric shield for pollsters when their pre-election surveys misfire. In such cases, “snapshot in time” is cited in attempting to defend or rationalize polls that careen well off-target, as many of them did in the 2020 presidential election.

Joe Biden was elected to the presidency four years ago by margins well short of the double-digit blowout suggested by the polls of CNN, Quinnipiac University, Economist/YouGuv and NBC/Wall Street Journal. Those polls estimated Biden’s end-of-campaign lead at 10 to 12 percentage points over then-President Donald Trump.

Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points.

The discrepancy in 2020 between election results and polls overall was the most pronounced in 40 years, and prompted characterizations that the outcome was a “train wreck” and “a disaster for the polling industry,” as David A. Graham wrote in the Atlantic.

This starts with the assumption that polls are intended to be predictive. If that were the case, it seems to me that there would be a concerted effort among the pollsters' customers -- legacy media -- to increase their predictive accuracy, especially if their performance in the last two presidential election cycles was as disastrous as Prof Campbell says it was.

I think a better starting point is to recognize what Rush Limbaugh understood throughout his career, that polls are intended to manipulate the news, not report it. As he said on September 10, 2012,

The polls are just being used as another tool of voter suppression. The polls are an attempt to not reflect public opinion, but to shape it. Yours. They want to depress the heck out of you, and they want to suppress your vote.

On January 19, 2018, he said,

I don’t trust the polls that are published anymore. As wrong as they were about the general election, as wrong as they were about the special elections that happened last year, the polls are nothing more than a tool for making public opinion. The polls are not taken to reflect public opinion at all. The primary purpose of polls is to depress and dispirit Republican voters by making them feel constantly like they’re in the minority.

The purpose of polls is to reinforce among Republican voters that there’s no hope, that no matter what it might look like, Republican voters are a very tiny minority of the thinking in this country.

He generally explained that the pollsters do this by consistently oversampling self-identified Democrats and undersampling Republicans with various justifications, and their results then reinforce the opinions they prefer -- which are often what their customers, the legacy media outlets, prefer.

In the wake of the 2020 election, the Pew Research Institute did a detailed study on the possible effects of oversampling Democrats in polling, almost certainly in implicit response to Limbaugh's allegations. It looked at potential polling outcomes with an oversampling of Democrats versus a more realistic sampling and found little difference:

The adjustment from the tilted version (a 12-point Biden advantage with a 10-point Democratic advantage in party affiliation among nonvoters) to the balanced version (a 4.4-point Biden advantage with equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans among nonvoters), makes very little difference in the balance of opinion on issue questions. Across a set of 48 opinion questions and 198 answer categories, most answer categories changed less than 0.5%. The average change associated with the adjustment was less than 1 percentage point, and approximately twice that for the margin between alternative answers (e.g., favor minus oppose). The maximum change observed across the 48 questions was 3 points for a particular answer and 5 points for the margin between alternative answers.

One 3-point difference was on presidential job approval, a measure very strongly associated with the vote. In the balanced version, 39 percent approved of Trump’s job performance, while 58 percent disapproved. In the tilted version, 36 percent approved of Trump’s performance and 60 percent disapproved. Two other items also showed a 3-point difference on one of the response options.

But 3 points nationally is still a 3% error, not negligible at all, and this omits the bigger problem in recent presidential elections, where they've hinged not on the national popular vote, but on the outcomes in swing states and their effect on the Electoral College vote. What if we were to revise Biden's numbers in current polls down by 3 points? One thing that now seems to be happening is that polls that have proven highly inaccurate in the recent past, like Quinnipiac, are feeding outlier results into the Real Clear Politics average. This must certainly be deliberate, and RCP is enabling this effect.

Thus we're seeing what I think are troubling indicators of the national mood, like the emrgence of conspiracy theories surrounding relatively minor events like the collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge, or a real uptick in self-immolation protests, contrasting with happy-face statistics like an RCP national polling average showing Trump ahead by only 0.3 points. Real things are happening that aren't being reported.

Frankly, this can't be right. Part of the mainstream obliviousness is Prof Campbell's assumption that the pollsters' customers want accuracy. He quotes David A. Graham's Atlantic piece:

Graham’s essay anticipated the “snapshot-in-time” defense favored by pollsters, writing: “If their snapshots are so far off, where were they aiming the lens? Why bother?” He noted that “the public uses opinion polls to try to understand what happens [in elections]. If the polls and their analysts don’t offer the service that customers are seeking, they’re doomed.”

But I think Limbaugh was much more insightful, the customers want to shape the news, not report it. Prof Campbell completely misses that point.

Reflections On Uncle Bosey

It's taken me a couple of days to absorb fully the implications of Joe's Uncle Bosey remarks, which he gave twice on Wednesday, April 17. Here's the transcipt of the key remarks in the second version that he gave in Pittsburgh, which are also covered in the YouTube clip above:

And my uncle — they called him Un- — Ambrose — instead of “Brosie,” they called him “Bosie.” My Uncle Bosie was a hell of an athlete, they tell me, when he was a kid. And he became an Army Air Corps, before the Air Force came along. He flew those single-engine planes as reconnaissance over war zones.

And he got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea.

The schoolmarms in the media promptly fact-checked this, and I'm not going to spend time repeating the historical version. But several features of the Pittsburgh episode in particular popped out to me. The first is the dutiful politeness of the facial expressions on the union members who stood behind him. This reminded me of a report from another stop he made in Pittsburgh that day:

Biden stopped at a gas station this week to order food in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Upon entering, few flocked to interact with him. Most patrons stood by, did not hold out their hands, and watched the president walk past.

Biden tried to speak with a girl when he entered the station, but after receiving little interaction, he slowly marched on while cameras followed and onlookers pressed themselves up against the wall. Biden posed for a few photos before he walked to the door.

Everyone is being polite -- this is the leader of the free world, after all. Everyone's anxious to get this over with. But now, it seems that even pre-teen girls are wary of him.

The second big takeaway is his delivery. Initially, I was going to approach this from the perspective of The King's Speech, in which the speech therapist Lionel Logue discovers that George VI, plagued with a stammer that's persisted since childhood, can do things like sing or shout cusswords without stammering. At first, I thought that Joe had delivered the Uncle Bosey story without -- or at least, with less of -- the slurring, hypercorrection, and malapropism with which he delivers more scripted remarks.

But reviewing the segment above, I began to recognize several things. The first is that these aren't spontaneous remarks, this is the second time he's told this story that day. In fact, he's clerly glancing down at notes while he's talking about his uncle and the cannibals, and apparently his big point, which is repeated in both the transcripts of the Uncle Bosey story, is that Bosey's heroism stands in contrast to Trump's calling American war dead “suckers” and “losers.”

Well, that got lost in the shuffle when it turned out that Uncle Bosey wasn't eaten by cannibals after all. This is not "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" level oratory, even if someone wrote it out for him. But the second problem is that, although there's somewhat less slurring, hypercorrection, and malapropism in his remarks than there was, for instance in Friday's speech to the electrical workers:

You — by the way, go on out and ask people who know you — that you’re acquainted with who aren’t in the business at all, “What’s it take to be an electrician?” You say, “Oh, well, you just say (inaudible). You get a little bit of training.” Four to five years of training to become an electrician. You’re the best in the world. That’s why it’s the (inaudible). (Applause.)

the slurring, hypercorrection, and malapropism is still there, teleprompter or no.

We're back to Nate Silver's recommendation from last February that I linked again the other day, that Joe get out and do unscripted, improvisational encounters. The problem is that they're all scripted. Someone thought the Uncle Bosey story would look like a spontaneous personal aside, but it was clearly written for him on notes that he looked down to read as he spoke, and he stumbled through the same remarks twice -- and scripted as they were, they were nevertheless dumb remarks that drew all the attention from the intended point.

When the opportunity arises for truly unscripted encounters, as might have happened in the Wawa and Sheetz stores in Pennsylvania this past week, he just shuffles glumly through them. It might be that he comes off as unapproachable, but I almost wonder if, as apparently happens frequently with the pre-teen girls he approaches himself, he comes off as someone people don't want to be approached by, either.

And this brings me back to something I've mentioned before, the features we frequently see in his speech, scripted or spontaneous, include slurring and hypercorrection, which are featues of speech that an experienced police officer would immediately recognize as indicating intoxication. This is borne out in the Pittsburgh clip at the top this post as well -- for much of the segment, his facial fwatures are flaccid, numb, and unexpressive, which I was taught many years ago is how the term s***faced is derived. For that matter, his tone often trails off into maudlin-confidential and barely audible.

His remarks at Scranton the other day, when he breought up Uncle Bosey the first time, included a number of other debunked stories, including

We had just finished spring football practice at the University of Delaware. And I had been named as the likely starting safety that year and — next year.

But the one that I think has the least credibility of all, no matter how many times he tells it, is this one:

I’m the only Scrantonian and the only Irishman you’ve ever met that’s never had a drink in his life because too many people have too many drinks in their life, in my opinion.

This man is plastered, pretty much all day, every day. The big mystery is why nobody has called him on it. I suspect that people who know him even a little bit, from Obama on down, have known this for decades and are keeping quiet.

This Is Rare -- Why Are We Seeing More Of It?

According to Wikipedia,

The Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam saw the persecution of the country's majority religion under the administration of Catholic president Ngô Đình Diệm. Several Buddhist monks, including the most famous case of Thích Quảng Đức, immolated themselves in protest.

The example set by self-immolators in the mid 20th century sparked similar acts between 1963 and 1971, most of which occurred in Asia and the United States in conjunction with protests opposing the Vietnam War. Researchers counted almost 1000 self-immolations covered by The New York Times and The Times.

On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, an anti-war activist, doused himself in kerosene and set himself on fire below the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara at the Pentagon, to protest United States involvement in the Vietnam War.

Wikipedia has a separate entry containing a list of "political" self-immolations beginning in 1948. The vast majority of these took place outside the US, and indeed mostly in India, Southeast Asia, and China. In the West, they were often protests against Communist regimes. But the overall pattern of the list confirms my impression that most in the US took place in the 1960s and 1970s in protest of the Viet Nam War.

Four people, Alice Herz, Norman Morrison, Roger Allen LaPorte, amd Celene Jankowski, set themaelves on fire in the US on 1965, presumably following the Vietnamese examples. Then, after a year, two people, Florence Beaumont and Erik Thoen, set themselves on fire in 1967, followed by one, Ronald Brazee, in 1968. In 1969, Bruce Mayrock set himself on fire, not in protest of the Viet Nam War, but in protest of genocide against Biafra in the Nigerian Civil War.

In 1970, two people in the US self-immolated in protest of the Viet Nam War, Robert Rex Vice and George Winne Jr., both in the immediate aftermath of the Kent State shootings. Things were then quiet for more than a decade until 1986, when Orland Payne McCafferty set himself on fire to protest Reagan's policies. In 1987, Antoine Thurel set himself in fire in Boston to protest conditions in Haiti. In 1988, Mehrdad Imen set himself on fire in New York to protest human rights abuses in Iran.

In 1993, Binh Gia Pham set himself on fire in Boston to protest persecution of Buddhists in Viet Nam. In 1996, Kathleen Chang, going under the name Kathy Change, set herself on fire in Philadelphia to protest conditions in general. In 2011, Thomas James Ball set himself on fire outside a New Hampshire courthouse to protest family court injustice. In 2014, Thu Hoang set himself on fire, apparently to protest a Chinese oil rig. A few days later, Charles R Moore set himself on fire in Texas to protest racism in the town where he grew up.

In 2016, Charles Ingram self-immolated to protest corruption in the Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2018, David Buckel set himself on fire to protest fossil fuels; Chloe Sagal self-immolated to protest homelessness and mental health issues; John Watts set himself on fire to protest corruption at the Department of Veterans Affairs; Nicholas McCrary set himself on fire to protest involuntary celibacy. Four people in 2018 matches the highest number in 1965.

In 2019, Amav Gupta, from India, set himself on fire outside the White House for unknown reasons. In 2020, Linda J. Zhang self-immolated to protest climate change. In 2022, Wynn Bruce (no relation) set himself on fire outside the Supreme Court to protest climate change. In 2023, Chet Bohrer, a non-student, self-immolated on the UC Berkeley campus to protest bullying in Utah.

And now we have two incidents in the sort of quick succession that we haven't seen since 1970; on February 25, 2024, Aaron Bushnell, who set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC to protest the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and just yesterday, Maxwell Azzarello, who set himself on fire outside the New York courthouse in which the Trump trial is being held. His specific reasons appear to involve conspiracy theories that aren't necessarily related to Trump.

So in the US, the self-immolation phenomenon began in the Viet Nam War era, a time of great social change, followed after 1970 by a 16-year interval of no self-immolation protests at all; one a year in the late 1980s, then a couple in the mid 1990s -- and then another 15-year interval ending in 2011, with incidents beginning to ramp up again since then.

Azzarello's motives were unclear. According to the New York Post,

The self-described “investigative researcher” traveled to New York City in recent days from Florida without his family knowing and had been protesting in front of the courthouse where he bashed political leaders from both sides of the aisle.

“This extreme act of protest is to draw attention to an urgent and important discovery: We are victims of a totalitarian con, and our own government (along with many of their allies) is about to hit us with an apocalyptic fascist world coup,” Azzarello wrote in part of a rambling manifesto on the Substack page.

. . . Azzarello was previously arrested three times across several days in the Sunshine State that included charges of disturbing the peace and damage to property last August.

Following his third arrest, Florida cops noted he was suicidal and listed him as unemployed, per police reports.

On one hand, the Azzarello episode and the uptick of those preceding it for the past decade can be attributed to growing issues of homelessness and untreated mental health problems. On the other, we're looking at conditions of social change that are bringing about phenomena that we haven't seen since the 1960s and early 1970s -- except that counterculture fringe figures seized the limelight then, like Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, Angela Davis, and Eldridge Cleaver -- but their mainstream political allies, like Eugene McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy, and George McGovern, proved feckless. There are no equivalent counterculture figures now, while one political agent of change, Donald Trump, is proving highly effective.

These developments are at least driving me to think we're in conditions like the 1960s and early 1970s, but I'm not ready to say much more than that at the moment.