Eric the Blue

Mostly politics, sports, literature, arts reviews

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Nerdy Minnesotan

  • Tough times for Erics

    I’ve found it quite informative to uber around a teenager who recently completed the classroom component of driver’s education.

    Another big mistake I’ve made is commenting on political posts I see on social media. My guiding principle has been that, though entitled to their own opinions, users should not take shelter in what George Conway’s ex once called “alternative facts.” I’ve therefore been lured into occasionally contradicting the lies and correcting the factual assertions of MAGA enthusiasts. Since this involves “interacting” with their “content,” the algorithm now fills my feed with their posts, and also those of their demented friends, with the resuIt that I can only with difficulty avoid the conclusion that everyone in the country is losing their mind.

    On a related point, is innocence of the distinction between “your” and “you’re” a prerequisite for membership in the cult? I probably qualify as a scold for even noticing, but what about when the confusion turns up in a screed about how the other side is dragging down educational standards? I’ll also volunteer, for the edification of Karoline Leavitt and many of her fellow travelers, that it’s not a flip-flop to alter your course or opinion by 360 degrees. You mean 180, but alas and alack, if you said what you meant you’d still be wrong. Your deficiencies are multifaceted and layered like an onion. Sad!

    If three people read this, one will say I’m picking on the barnacles that attach to any hull. Maybe, but it happens that Jack Smith was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, and one of the senators, Eric Schmitt, a well dressed barnacle from Missouri, accused the witness of having been to a basketball game in Atlanta a day after a local prosecutor there admitted to an affair with a colleague while they were investigating Trump’s effort to reverse the result of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. If Smith had been in Atlanta . . . well, I’m not sure where the line of questioning was headed, but the text messages that the senator thought placed the witness at an Atlanta Hawks home game, thereby establishing that he is a liar and a “total dirt bag,” were actually referring to an Iowa Hawkeyes game many hundreds of miles away, in Maryland. “Yes, yes, Senator, on the day in question I saw Caitlin Clark play for the ‘Hawks’ against Maryland near my home in the D.C. area. What’s this about Atlanta again?” You can watch the amusing exchange below–it takes Amy Klobuchar around 8 seconds to figure out that the elaborately planned gotcha moment fails on account of the false assumption that a basketball team named the Hawks could only be the Atlanta Hawks. (It would have failed anyway because so what if Smith was in Atlanta? Another instance of layered dumbassery.)

    The cameos are also prize worthy. If you watch the clip, check out the senator from Louisiana over Schmitt’s left shoulder. Apparently chewing his cud is part of the hillbilly act he’s spent a career in the Senate perfecting. It’s as if Trump has managed to dumb down the entire Republican party to his level. A few years ago, I would not have placed it at a sufficient altitude to fall this far. They have to hit hard ground soon, right? Maybe first week in November.

    Was it a week or a day ago that a Republican senator from Alabama was bewailing, on the floor of the Senate, all the furries working as airline pilots?

    In a way, it’s too bad that the news out of the hearing will be Schmitt’s clownish ineptitude, because the focus belongs on the president’s criminality. Fortunately it’s not necessary to wait until Election Day to vote. I can report that it’s quite satisfying to fill in the ovals next to the names of everyone all these sad sacks snort and snarl at, whether it be on Facebook or in a Senate hearing room.

  • R’s commit to the bit

    Though not a fan of the Republican party, I harbor within myself a kind of grudging admiration for what, if the R’s were trying to be funny, might be called their wobbly “commitment to the bit.” They hate DEI, because everyone should rise only as high as their own merit merits–which explains why their candidate for US Senate in South Carolina is Lindsey Graham’s sister. And has Laura Ingraham instructed Sophie Cunningham to “shut up and dribble”?

    Regarding Ms Cunningham, I haven’t been so tempted to find political significance in athletic outcomes since in 1938 Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling, a representative of the master race, 2 minutes and 4 seconds into the first round. The YouTube video of the entire fight is around 5 minutes long, including introductions and slo-motion replays of Louis just beating the crap out of him. I read about that as a kid, but the other night I watched on live TV the Fever play the Lynx and, having formed the impression that Cunningham played poorly, made a point to check out her line in the box score: 16 minutes, 0 points, 4 missed shots, 2 rebounds, 0 assists, 3 turnovers. Her plus/minus was negative 20, and in her defense, that’s not as bad as it sounds considering that her team also lost by 20. She’s done worse. Back on August 8, she logged a negative 28 in a game her team won by 4 points. Gotta be some kind of a record. Can’t really blame her for trying her hand at punditry.

    A couple of weeks ago I saw a clip of someone, probably a Communist, interviewing people who were protesting all the trans players who are taking over the WNBA. When he asked individual protesters to name some of their favorite players., the most common response was Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham followed by an attack of brain freeze. Maybe he suppressed an interview with someone who knew the names of some other white players. Yes, DEI really sucks–it’s so unfair! By the way, in that game I watched the other night, Clark scored 2 points on 1-for-12 shooting and was a negative 27.

    Having seen Lindsey Graham’s sister on the campaign trail, Cook Political Report has switched its characterization of the Senate race in South Carolina from “solid Republican” to “likely Republican.” Lindsey’s sole heir appears to be several bricks shy of the proverbial full load, but it’s South Carolina, and there will be an R after her name on the ballot. Her opponent, a medical doctor, is probably trying to discern the outlines of the vaunted Meritocracy. To be fair, one of the Republican Senate incumbents is also a medical doctor. He practices in the areas of obstetrics, gynecology, and debt collection from poor women. According to this New York Times article, the lead in the below campaign ad could have been played by 81 women if you had to be arrested, or by hundreds if you only had to be sued:

    Also, he doesn’t live in the state he represents. It seems that the 18 per cent interest paid by his sued patients helped pay for his 7-figure home in Sarasota, FL. Smell the coffee Kansans, South Carolinians, et al. These people have no interest in your problems.

  • Lunchroom repartee

    Still enjoying my conversations in the school lunchroom. About a week ago, I sat down with a class of 1st-graders. Adopting the closest thing I have to a cheerful and enthusiastic tone, I say, “How’s school today guys?” Little girl across from me immediately gives an emphatic thumbs down, like John McCain voting against his party.

    Me: Oh no! Did something bad happen?

    Her: No, I just hate school.

    Today I forced myself on a 2nd-grade class. We were talking about teeth, mainly because several of them were missing a few. One of them pointed out that my teeth “aren’t that white.” Not wanting to blame red wine consumption, I said it was because of all the coffee I drink. At this point, someone who had been listening in silence spoke up for the first time–a girl with very black skin and a head covering said, in a distinct British accent, “Have you ever considered drinking tea?” I was surprised by the diction and the accent and I think I just gazed at her like a dope because after a second or two she added, as if she thought she had better elaborate on her recommendation, “My papa drinks a lot of tea.”

  • State of play

    I meant to make fun of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who, according to the Wall Street Journal, is planning a “State of the Force” address in which only servicemen who exhibit “impeccable grooming” and appropriate “waist-to-height” ratios will be invited to attend. Short little slobs like General Grant aren’t good enough for Pete. Besides, Grant fought for the wrong side, and could hold his liquor.

    But that was two days ago, and it slipped my mind because–well, this kind of bullshit is quotidian in Trumplandia. Yesterday I saw that RFK Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, gave a speech in which he promised to look into the possible harmful health effects of electromagnetic fields and chem trails (aka contrails, the water vapor trailing jet planes in flight). His audience applauded enthusiastically these contributions to numbskullery. What will it be tomorrow? Perhaps a controlled study designed to get to the bottom of whether stepping on sidewalk cracks is bad for anyone’s back.

    As I’ve said before, the Daily Show performers get too much credit. All you have to do is roll the tape, then cut to Josh Johnson or one of his colleagues looking into the camera with a dazed expression.

    Horse race journalism has a bad name, but if your own thoughts about public affairs don’t extend much beyond the prospect of getting rid of these buffoons, or at least limiting their power to do damage, there’s no hotter topic. According to my researches, the vibe is more favorable than the numbers. Republicans are nervous, Democrats expectant, but, regarding the House of Representatives, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report thinks there are 208 seats in which a Republican is favored, and 206 in which a Democrat is favored. This leaves only 21 “toss-up” races. The gerrymandering wars were in the end won by Republicans and had the effect of lifting the floor and dropping the ceiling for both sides. If Democrats were to win 16 out of 21 toss-ups, and have three more upset victories than Republicans, the next Congress would have 225 Democrats and 210 Republicans. No “wave” by standards developed back in the day when voters chose their elected officials instead of the other way around.

    The situation is similar in the Senate, where in Cook’s view the Republicans, barring upsets, will have at least 47 seats, to at least 46 for the Dems, after the election. The majority, then, currently appears to hinge on the outcome in seven states: New Hampshire, Maine, Ohio, Michigan, Texas, Iowa, and Alaska. Two years ago, Trump carried five of these states, which is the number Democrats likely must win for a majority. Trump has never lost four of the seven. In those four–Ohio, Texas, Iowa, and Alaska–his winning margins in 2024 were, in order, 11%, 14%, 13%, and 13%.

    On the bright side, Cook has already put two Trump-state Senate seats in the “lean Democratic” column–Georgia, where incumbent Jon Ossoff is ahead, and North Carolina, where Democrat Roy Cooper leads in a race for a seat left open by the retirement of Republican Thom Tillis. It’s not impossible that the trend could spread, though if it does it will be to states considerably more Trump-friendly than Georgia and North Carolina have been. The battleground for control of the Senate shows just how unfriendly that terrain always is for Democrats. Trump lost the popular vote two out of three times, yet there are 25 states that he’s never lost. Of course those 25 states have 50 seats in the Senate, and right now all 50 are held by Republicans. With Trump in the White House, that alone is sufficient for a Republican majority.

    Probably the “vibes” shouldn’t be completely dismissed. They are for sure enjoyable in the moment. It was pleasant for me to read the other day in The New York Times that what I had taken to be the stinginess of Trump’s super PAC, named MAGA Inc., probably has an explanation even more embarrassing to Trump World–namely, that campaign laws require ads to include the name of the payor, and Republicans worry any ad could be spoiled by the tag “paid for by MAGA Inc.” There are also an accruing number of telling little details like this one, from the same New York Times story:

    On Tuesday Representatives Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks, both Iowa Republicans, voted with Democrats to direct the president to end the war with Iran. Their votes came as [Ashley] Hinson, [the Republican Senate candidate in Iowa], boasted in a new television ad about how she had “worked with Democrats” in Congress.

    [Vice President] Vance is scheduled to speak at a rally on Friday for Iowa Republicans–but Ms Hinson said she would not attend.

    Two years ago, Trump won Iowa by 13 points. Ms Hinson, as the Times’s style sheet insists she be called, would have been there.

    I have a theory about why Republicans are so nervous. It relates to their gerrymandering successes. The old-fashioned way of winning elections is to persuade people that you’re a better choice. Failing that, you can draw circles in different places, so that the same number of votes yields more seats and more power. The drawback to this method is that at some point the greediness leaves you more vulnerable than you otherwise would have been. For example, the “average” Republican district in a state might formerly have been rated R+15. But the effort to squeeze out some more Republican seats almost inevitably reduces the expected margin in the “average” Republican district–let’s say, to R+10. Most current polling indicates that, asked which party they want to control Congress, Americans prefer Democrats by 5 to 8 points. That’s enough to win a majority but not enough to crash through the gerrymandered dam. If the margin were to creep a little higher, however, an extra one or two percent could suddenly yield 3 or 4 or 5 more seats in just one Republican gerrymandered state–and there are a lot of Republican gerrymandered states.

  • The current political scene

    I like to keep up with the topics and arguments of the other side, which is why I sometimes scroll over to the website of National Review–America’s foremost journal of conservative political opinion, according to National Review. Last time I visited, a day or two ago, I took a picture of what I saw on the home page, and now I’ve pasted it in above. I think the question asked by the first headline is answered in the affirmative by the second headline.

    Not that all conservatives are witless. I believe Jonah Goldberg used to write for National Review before the rise of Trump startled him half way to sanity. I heard him being interviewed on public radio while driving to work one day this week. The topic was the Trumpalooza, or whatever they’re calling it, that’s ongoing in Dallas. The question came up whether, given Trump’s roughly 1-in-3 approval rating, it helps the Republican cause for him to make the campaign all about himself. Goldberg said the situation reminded him of the sales guy who, when informed that the company was losing money on every transaction, replied that he’d fix that with his high volume.

    Obviously I don’t know what’s going to happen but it’s sure fun to watch Republicans squirm. Trump’s MAGA PAC has been sitting on a sum best expressed in scientific notation and it just made its first outlay–the Texas Senate race. Squirm, squirm.

    “I’ll give you $5,000 to vote for me!” Squirm, squirm; crime, crime.

  • Almost heaven? West Virginia?

    Don’t worry, I’m a subscriber, so didn’t pay anywhere near $10.99 for the current New Yorker. Although, considering that it’s a weekly and I’ve usually not glanced at the last one when the next one shows up, a financial adviser would probably tell me not to renew. The main loss would be that I don’t get to work the crossword at the back of the magazine with my daughter. The puzzle is labeled either “challenging,” “moderately challenging,” or “beginner friendly.” We work the two easier kinds. If it’s “challenging,” I’m on my own, and generally can finish it only with some assists from Google.

    But the above issue is a gem: a nice tribute to Dolly by Kathryn Schulz; “Anatomy of a Siege,” about Operation Metro Surge, reported by Minneapolis native Emily Witt; “The Scare” about divorced parents fighting over whether to vaccinate their kids; a short story by Helen Simpson about some middle-aged London women facing mortality by way of aging parents; a book review I haven’t yet read that’s tagged “Jamaican gay life in Marlon James’s new novel”; a couple of poems more comprehensible than is common; a “challenging” crossword, &c.

    I read Witt’s article first, and it was engrossing, but the piece on family court and children’s medical care was a punch in the stomach. It features a divorced West Virginia couple. The mom is a kind of displaced hippie into “natural healing” and other such rubbish, including preeminently RFK’s MAHA agenda–predictably, she didn’t want her kids to receive the normal childhood immunizations. I feel I know that type, but her ex is arguably a more interesting case: a Trump-supporting Covid skeptic who is driven, partly by the impulse to disagree with his ex and partly by the sight of his sick and vulnerable children, to accept the recommendations of orthodox medical practice. The last straw for their marriage occurred when the fellow, noticing his wife’s increased and secretive preoccupation with her phone, got his hands on it late one night. He was expecting to discover texts to a boyfriend but found instead that she was corresponding with an online “spiritual adviser and healer.” The article reproduces a couple of the exchanges; here’s one–Donnie is one of their sick kids:

    “Offering.” “I thought I said 20.” “What time tomorrow.” Jeezus. These are people whose troubles included having their mortgage foreclosed.

    The article highlights medical disagreements and legal struggles, but honestly, I just ended up feeling awful for their three kids. The oldest is 8 years old. What chance do they have in life? At one point, it is revealed that they are being home schooled by their mom. Of course! The woman who is sending Bitcoin to the fraudster she found online! That’s who’s in charge of the kids’ education! In an intrusion of sanity, a family court judge ruled that the children had to attend public school, but, all things considered, my dim view of West Virginia lives on.

  • Family matters

    I ran into my stepkid at a coffee shop. Are the bonds of step-fatherhood severed by divorce? I’m still claiming him. I was nursing 2.5 cups of coffee through around 25 pages of a book, Donald Hall‘s A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety. It’s a sequel of sorts to Essays After Eighty, which I read a few years ago. Next on my list is Roger Angell’s This Old Man, published after the author had passed ninety. Hall didn’t quite make it. Angell was 101 when he died in 2022.

    As time proceeds, it seems I’m more and more attracted to geriatric literature.

    Stepkid had his school laptop and was going to study until it was time to meet me and his half-sister at the local spot where we have supper once a week. He mentioned that the coffee shop across the street, though in some ways superior to the one we were in, closed at 6. I already knew that and mentioned that Caffetto, on 22nd Street just west of Lyndale, is open till midnight. He already knew that. Thinking about it now, seems like maybe “nerding out in coffee shops” is determined more by nurture than nature. His genes aren’t telling him to do it, I know that. Could just be coincidence. I got my nurture and nature from the same two people, and neither one of them read books. One didn’t even drink coffee.

    Our party is smaller because stepkid’s other half-sister now lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where there is a so-called university. Every reminder of her absence makes me sad, even though many of the tokens have a (thoroughly routed) pleasant aspect. The bill at the restaurant was well under a hundred dollars. I walked into her bedroom and it was neat as Van Gogh’s. It occurred to me that I hadn’t washed clothes for a couple of days and when I went to prosecute the task, the basket was just half full.

    Sister of the absent girl is unafflicted. “Lydia didn’t take a lot of her clothes!” she jubilantly reports.

  • Michelle Tafoya says/thinks . . .

    Michele Tafoya grew up in SoCal, where she attended high school in the affluent surfer ‘burbs of Redondo Beach and Manhattan Beach. She then went to college at Cal-Berkeley followed by business school at USC. Her first media job was in Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s hard to tell from Wikipedia and other online sources at what point Minnesota became home (or maybe it would be more apt to say “center of operations”). Maybe her husband is from here? Anyway, she isn’t, and now that she’s a candidate for the entry level political job of US senator, she’s committed a few gaffes that are the source of a meme relating to her ignorance of local cultural byways. I’ve spent the morning reading through a page where individual specimens are collected, and a lot of them are laugh-out-loud funny. At least, I laughed out loud. Here are some of my favorites. It seems vaguely apt that almost no one knows how to spell her name so I’m going to preserve the misspelling.

    Michelle Tafoya isn’t sure whether or not Drew Pearson pushed off.

    Michelle Tafoya takes the last bar from the pan.

    Michelle Tafoya says “excuse me” instead of “ope, just gonna sneak pastcha here.”

    Michelle Tafoya needs a map to get around at the state fair.

    Michelle Tafoya thinks “hot dish” is a warning.

    Michelle Tafoya never drove to Hudson on Sunday for a case and a handle.

    Michelle Tafoya’s all-time favorite Viking is Herschel Walker.

    Michelle Tafoya pronounces it “Weigh-zattah.”

    When Michelle Tafoya’s neighbor gets stuck in the snow, she closes the curtains.

    Michelle Tafoya likes Soul Asylum because she thinks it means “only one refugee allowed.”

    The aforementioned collection is here. Hat tip to Greg Walker for performing this community service.

  • Guernicas

    According to pablopicasso.org, the artist was living in occupied Paris during World War II when some Nazi soldiers invited themselves into his apartment. Seeing Guernica (above) displayed on a wall, one of them asked, “Did you do that?”

    “No, you did,” Picasso is said to have replied.

    I read that today. It must’ve been a big apartment because the painting is 25.5 feet long (and 11.5 feet high). I hope the anecdote is true. It’s true that the Nazis did it. From the Wikipedia article:

    Guernica is a large 1937 oil painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. It is one of his best-known works, regarded by many art critics as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history. . . . Prominently featured in the composition are a gored horse, a bull, screaming women, a dead baby, a dismembered soldier, and flames. Picasso painted Guernica at his home in Paris in response to the 26 April 1937 bombing of Guernica, a town in the Basque Country in northern Spain, by Nazi Germany’s Condor Legion and the fascist government of Italy.

    In other art news, the Minnesota State Fair opened today. This city slicker has been bored by all the agricultural stuff ever since spending interminable tracts of time, maybe a half hour or more, with my grandpa on Machinery Hill. But if I go this year I’m going to check out the crop art, as I understand there are a lot of works addressing news made in Minnesota since the last State Fair. Here, for example, is the entry of Jennifer Nelson, from Fridley, Minnesota:

    I like to imagine a fair-goer wandering through the crop art displays right after having picked up some buttons at the GOP booth. “Did you do this?” they might ask someone standing by Ms Nelson’s composition.

  • Addenda

    Regarding the outpouring of love for Dolly Parton, here is a tweet from Eminem in which he posts a note he received from her on the occasion of his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame:

    And, regarding “Huckabee swings, hits a fair ball,” here is a link to an interview, conducted by The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, with a retired IDF commander who is now working as a volunteer for Looking the Occupation in the Eye, a group that tries to protect Palestinians from settler violence in the West Bank. I’m sure it’s behind a paywall so here are some excerpts:

    Q: What does protecting Palestinians in the West Bank entail for a group like yours?

    A: The settlers are trying to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in lots of ways, and one of them is with violence. There are other ways that they are trying that have to do with the Israeli legal system, but when the government cannot do things legally, the settlers try to expel Palestinians from their villages and their homes. So what we are doing is coming to these communities or villages–and we aren’t big enough to go everywhere–and we are staying there twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and when the settlers attack, we try to stand between them and the Palestinians. Sometimes we call the police or the army. They don’t help all the time. Sometimes they do O.K. We also try to take the settlers to court. But we try to place our bodies between them . . . .

    Q: So the hope is just that settlers won’t commit as much violence with a Jewish Israeli like yourself present?

    A: Their main aim is to expel the Palestinians from their villages. We want them to stay and not let the settlers expel them. We know, and the Palestinians know, that they will start by attacking people on the outskirts of the village, rather than the center of the village. And if those people run away, the next houses will be the ones closer to the village. So we try to protect them and stop them from having to run away, and we do what we can. But the first thing is to protect them. And we set up cameras. We also try to help with water and electricity . . . .

    Q: So [the current Israeli government wants] to change facts on the ground before the election?

    A: Absolutely, they want to occupy as much as they can . . . .

    Q: How have your conversations with Palestinians changed over the past few months?

    A: They are very worried about what is happening. There are many more people that need help than we are able to help. People call asking for help, but we cannot help everyone. What can I say? Many of them are very brave. I don’t have one good sentence to put in your piece. They have families. And they don’t want to give up their homes.