The View from Right Field

Break

I’m taking a short break from blogging to decorate the tree, address the Christmas cards, and do some other holiday things.  I hope to be back in a week to ten days.

How to Make the Most Expensive Gubernatorial Election in History Look Cheap

Spending in the Illinois gubernatorial election in 2018 is expected to reach $300 million or more, making it the most expensive gubernatorial election in U.S. history.  (The previous record was $260 million in California in 2010.)  That seems like a lot of money – until you compare it to Illinois’s unfunded pension liability, which is $251 billion, according to Moody’s Investors Service.¹

Which means that for every dollar spent in the most expensive gubernatorial election ever, anywhere, in U.S. history, the state of Illinois, i.e., the people of Illinois, owes almost $1,000 of unfunded pension debt.  In another way of looking at it, the cost of the most expensive gubernatorial election in U.S. history will be just a little bit more than 1/10 of 1% of the state’s unfunded pension debt.

Looking at it that way, if $300 million can elect a governor who will help solve our unfunded pension debt problem, and even just some of the state’s other problems, it will be money well spent.  
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¹ As of June 30, 2016.  It’s more now.  Illinois claims the total is “only” $130 billion.

One of the Problems With President Trump’s Tweets, Exaggerations, and Misstatements

The United States is starting work on a missile that will violate the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987.  The reason we are doing this is because Russia is already violating the agreement, and we hope that, by starting work on our own missile, we can get Russia to stop their violations of the agreement.

Not surprisingly, Russia is denying they are violating the INF agreement. This is a lie, of course.  The Obama administration first called the Russians out for violating the agreement in 2015.  Still, the Russians are denying it, like they deny everything.  Like they initally denied they sent men into Crimea.  Like they have denied they sent people into Ukraine.  They just lie.

Hillary Clinton Keeps Making Richard Nixon Look Better

In an interview with Mother Jones published yesterday, Hillary Clinton said, “there are lots of questions about [the] legitimacy” of last year’s presidential election.  Former Secretary of State Clinton cited both Russian interference and alleged voter suppression in places like Wisconsin as affecting the outcome and possibly costing her the election.  She went on: “We don’t have a method for contesting that in our system.  That’s why I’ve long advocated for an independent commission to get to the bottom of what happened.”

Former Secretary Clinton seems to be having problems accepting the result of last November’s election.  And she continues to challenge the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s election.

Sexual Harassment: Rewrite the Rules But Focus on Those Who Deserve Condemnation the Most

Megan McArdle writes an excellent column on the allegations of sexual harassment that are coming out.  She asks:

“As the accusations of sexual harassment snowball, how ready are we for the consequences of rewriting the sexual rulebook so drastically, all at once?”

And she responds to her own question:

“The question when confronted with reports of decades-old misdeeds is not ‘Would this guy be a creep if he did this today?’  Better to ask: ‘Was he better or worse than his environment?’  And also: ‘Is there reason to believe he might have changed since then?’”

Richard Cordray Resigns as Head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Who Loses?

In The Washington Post’s article on Richard Cordray’s resignation yesterday as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ("CFPB"), the Post said:

“It also comes just a month after the CFPB suffered a major rebuke from Republicans in Congress who took the unusual step of blocking an agency rule that would have allowed consumers to sue their banks for the first time.”

This is wrong not only in fact but also in spirit.  Consumers had the right to sue their bank long before the CFPB’s rule.  What the CFPB rule would have done was to prohibit banks from including an arbitration requirement in their agreements with their customers.  Obviously, banks have a lot of power with respect to what is in agreements with their customers.  If a bank wanted to include a provision requiring disputes with their customers to be handled in arbitration, as opposed to courts (and particularly class action lawsuits), the bank would be able to do so.  But the fact is that not all banks included an arbitration rule in their agreements with their customers.

Gun Control: Get Whatever You Can

I have said this before, but it probably needs to be said again: Strict gun control laws¹ are not going to stop mass shootings in the United States – for at least two reasons.  First, regardless of how obvious such laws may seem to some people, the Constitution prohibits them (at least until either a constitutional amendment is adopted [the estimated effective date of that being f-o-r-e-v-e-r] or the composition of the Supreme Court changes).  Also, lots of people oppose them.

But even if strict gun control laws were passed, that wouldn’t solve the problem of the tens of millions of guns already in the United States – unless you are going to conduct a house-to-house search for illegal guns.  Some people say we should have never allowed all those guns to be here.  But they are here now – and we have to deal with the situation as it is, not as how we wish it were.

Stopping Sexual Harassment – Without Overreacting

In Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan wrote of the good that is coming from what appears to be society’s understanding, at last, of the harm and wrongness of sexual harassment.  But she also warned, “[t]he challenge is to pursue justice while keeping a sense of humanity.” 

She told of her yearly visit to the doctor.  As they talked of how to stay healthy in New York, including keeping back from the curb as trucks cut corners too tight, Ms. Noonan told her doctor: “I take the arms of cellphone zombies and guide them a step back to keep them safe.  I’d done it recently with a young woman.”

Ms. Noonan continued: “[The doctor] got a poignant look.  ‘I can’t do that now,’ he said.  If he put his hand on a strange woman’s arm, it might be misunderstood.”  I understand.

Linus and the Great Pumpkin. Cubs Fans Understand.

Every year at Halloween, Linus waits in the pumpkin patch for the Great Pumpkin to appear.  And every year, so far, the Great Pumpkin has failed to come.  In today’s paper, Lucy urges Linus to forget the Great Pumpkin, to curse him in fact, and to set himself free.  But as you can see, Linus refuses:

Chicago Cubs fans understand Linus’s faith.  And they can tell him that, when next year finally comes for him, as it did for them last November, the joy will be even greater because of how long he has believed and how true his faith has been.
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PS I wonder how many people today understand the reference to Job’s wife.

UPDATE (11/5/17 10:20 am):  This was, as is true of all Peanuts comic strips now, a reprint of a strip that appeared earlier.  In this case, the original cartoon appeared, at least in the Chicago Tribune, on November 1, 1970. 

Draining the Swamp – and the First Amendment’s Forgotten Right

In the campaign last year, Donald Trump pledged that he would “drain the swamp” in Washington.  I don’t know how well he has done in that regard,¹ but Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller seems to be doing his bit. 

The indictments of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates were all about draining the swamp, as opposed to whatever the Trump campaign was doing last year (though the indictments do tend to show that President Trump, when he was a candidate, did a lousy job in picking some of his campaign advisers).  Mr. Manafort was not charged with colluding with the Russians while a Trump adviser or lying about colluding with the Russians.  Rather, he was charged with the good old American crime of trying to evade taxes on his income, in this case payments by a former government of Ukraine for lobbying services.