By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, March 11, 2020)

Try to avoid news coverage of the coronavirus (2019-nCoV). It is everywhere, and rightfully so. This is a serious worldwide health crisis.

And it is far from over.

In the midst of this global turmoil, an unmistakable narrative has dominated the mainstream news media in the U.S. — President Donald Trump and his administration (but mostly Trump himself) are mismanaging the containment of the coronavirus.

Politico’s Dan Diamond sums up the charge against Trump:

“For six weeks behind the scenes, and now increasingly in public, Trump has undermined his administration’s own efforts to fight the coronavirus outbreak — resisting attempts to plan for worst-case scenarios, overturning a public-health plan upon request from political allies and repeating only the warnings that he chose to hear. Members of Congress have grilled top officials like Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Centers for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield over the government’s biggest mistake: failing to secure enough testing to head off a coronavirus outbreak in the United States. But many current and former Trump administration officials say the true management failure was Trump’s.”

Assuming these allegations are true, did this mismanagement impact the U.S. response to the coronavirus? How would we know if it did?

The current worldwide numbers (as of 11 March) for the coronavirus are dispiriting:

121,564 confirmed cases.

4,373 deaths.

In contrast, the U.S. the numbers (as of 11 March) are more subdued:

1,050 confirmed cases.

29 deaths.

While all deaths are tragic, at a 2.8 percent mortality among confirmed cases, the U.S. looks somewhat better than the world-at-large (3.6% mortality rate).

But this highly-aggregated evidence does not address Politico’s accusations about Trump.

Are the confirmed cases in the U.S. a significant undercount of the true number?

If, in fact, there has been a shortage of coronavirus test kits for the limited number of labs capable of testing for the virus, how can we trust the reported number of confirmed cases?

We can’t.

The worldwide reported numbers are known to be an undercount as people with mild (or no) symptoms may not necessarily have gone to a health clinic to get tested for the coronavirus. It will be months, maybe years, after the crisis is over when epidemiologists will be able to estimate the “true” number of people infected by the coronavirus.

As of now, we know the current confirmed numbers are an undercount.

Even so, we do have a more reliable number that is less susceptible to under-counting: Coronavirus deaths.

The U.S. has 29 such deaths.

In the U.S. context, it is unlikely someone in the past two months could die from a respiratory disease and not at least be checked for the presence of the coronavirus. And while the chances are good there have been respiratory-related deaths in the U.S. since January that were not tested for the coronavirus, it is a reasonable hypothesis that this number is relatively small.

If we accept this assumption, we have the basis for assessing the performance of the Trump administration, also assuming we now the true mortality rate (risk) of the coronavirus.

“Folks want to be able to understand what the true risk is. They want to know just how deadly is it, how deadly is it to me? The challenge is, we don’t totally know,” Dr. Rebecca Katz, director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University, told The Hill this week.

While that number is also unknown, epidemiologists are able to make estimates.

“The best estimates now of the overall mortality rate for COVID-19 is somewhere between 0.1 percent and 1 percent,” Assistant Secretary of Health Brett Giroir said last week during a U.S. congressional hearing.

If Giroir’s estimate range is accurate, we can derive an estimate of the range of U.S. citizens currently infected with the coronavirus.

The U.S. has 29 coronavirus deaths and 1,050 confirmed cases. At a 0.1 percent mortality rate, the number of infected Americans would be 29,000. Whereas, at a 1 percent mortality rate, that number would be 2,900.

Given there are only 1,050 confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S., according to the World Health Organization (WHO), the reported number is, at best, a third of the actual number of cases.

Compare the U.S. numbers to Spain, where the coronavirus is particularly prevalent. Spain reports 49 deaths against 2,174 confirmed cases. Assuming a mortality rate ranging from 0.1 to 1 percent, Spain probably has between 4,900 and 49,000 actual cases of the coronavirus. At best, Spain’s reported number of cases is just under half of the true number.

Likewise, in Italy, another European country hard hit by the coronavirus, there are a reported 631 deaths and 10,149 confirmed cases. With a mortality rate between 0.1 and 1 percent, there must be between 63,100 and 631,100 actual cases.

Contrast the U.S., Italy and Spain to South Korea, where they have 54 deaths against 7,755 confirmed cases. Assuming a mortality rate between 0.1 and 1 percent, South Korea probably has between 5,400 and 54,000 actual cases. Their confirmed cases, therefore, fall within the estimated range of actual cases.

Even more distinctive is Germany, with only 3 deaths and 1,629 confirmed cases. In Germany’s case, the true range of coronavirus cases is most likely between 300 and 3,000, with the reported number of cases landing well within the likely true range of cases.

Germany, of course, may stand in contradistinction to other countries as it has a comprehensive universal health care where citizens are more likely to get early diagnoses of the coronavirus and therefore increase their chances of survival.

Nonetheless, if we accept the WHO’s reported case numbers and the scientific communities’ estimate of the true mortality rate for COVID-19, some countries are clearly doing better than others at identifying those with this virus.

The U.S. is not the worst at this task, but the country is far from the best.

As more test kits have been distributed in the U.S. and more non-CDC labs are doing the actual testing, the number of confirmed cases has spiked accordingly.

It is clear the U.S. was behind the curve in being prepared to identify and contain the coronavirus. At the same time, it is also clear that situation is improving.

Whether or not the U.S. news media will acknowledge this improvement is to be seen. That this improvement is occurring is not. That there is far more work to do be done should be equally indisputable.

• K.R.K.

Send comments and suggestions to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, March 10, 2020)

President Harry Truman said of the vice presidency, “Look at all the Vice Presidents in history. Where are they? They were about as useful as a cow’s fifth teat.”

Perhaps no one has summarized the vice president’s job as succinctly as Joe Biden: “It’s easy to be vice president — you don’t have to do anything.”

Of course, that is not exactly true. There are lots of funerals to attend. And if you are a really unlucky vice president, you get stuck leading a task force charged with stopping a seemingly unstoppable infectious disease.

In other words, vice presidents, when they do get to do something, get the sh*t work.

Nonetheless, ambitious politicians still want the job, and for good reason: 14 out of 48 vice presidents have gone on to become president (almost 30 percent).

It can be the stepping stone to political immortality, or, you’re Dan Quayle.

As I sit here on the morning of the Democratic Party’s Michigan primary, the betting consensus is that former Vice President Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee in the 2020 presidential race.

Working on that assumption, the next task for Biden is to pick his running mate. Various lists have already been offered, but I will give you the name of the person most likely to get the VP nod.

But, first, let us look at the pros and cons of the likely choices, as well as a couple of long shot candidates.

Using the PredictIt.com futures market to rank order this list, we begin with…

California U.S. Senator Kamala Harris

Pros: The junior senator from California offers a number qualities ideal for a Democratic Party vice presidential nominee: She is a mixed-race woman already tested on the national stage during the Democratic nomination race (though she backed out long before the first caucus and primary contests). When prepared, she is also a formidable debater — which is important should there be VP debates during the general election. Harris’ recent campaign appearance with Biden in Michigan also suggests Harris wants the VP slot and helping Biden get over the nomination finish line can only raise her stock in that regard.

Harris has also demonstrated her intellectual heft and charisma during U.S. Senate hearings on the nomination of Gina Haspel to Director of the CIA. Her verbal body slam of then CIA Director nominee, Gina Haspel, over the use of torture remains one of my favorite political moments of the last 10 years:

When prepared, Harris, a former prosecutor, is as intimidating as any prominent politician today.

Cons: Unfortunately, Harris has a number of flaws — the biggest being her shameless attempt to smear Biden as a racist (or, at least, for being complicit with racists). In last year’s second Democratic Party nomination debate, she accused Biden of being at worst a latent racist, and at best an enabler to racists. Sadly, Democrats use personal smears in their political arguments as often as the rest of us use adjectives. To some extent, that fact might mitigate any damage Harris’ smear will have on Biden’s VP decision. The past offers mounds of evidence that things said in the heat of battle do not affect the VP selection process. George H.W. Bush calling Ronald Reagan’s economic policies ‘voodoo economics,’ a trope that followed Reagan throughout his presidency, did not stop Reagan from picking the Bush as his running mate.

Harris also revealed another deep flaw in her political game during the nomination race. She was not nearly as charismatic on the campaign trail as she has been during U.S. Senate hearings. Like most politicians, she can’t do comedy and that became brutally apparent at campaign events in Iowa and New Hampshire.

But Harris’ biggest negative is that she offers no help to Biden in the Electoral College. California is already a solid blue state and Harris has shown no ability to attract constituencies outside of her home state. I can’t see one state Biden wins because Harris was on the ticket.

PredictIt probability of being Biden VP choice: 27% (My guess: 20%)

Minnesota U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar

Pros: The Democratic Party establishment loves Klobuchar. Why? The obvious answer is that she’s a woman that looks like the daughter Hillary Clinton would have designed had she the power to do so.

The lifelong Minnesotan also doesn’t tip over any of the Democratic Party’s sacred cows (except among those Democrats who think the U.S. should have a health care system as good as any other in the developed world). The Democratic Party’s mega-donors have nothing to fear in Klobuchar, who proudly supports the interests of the banking, health insurance, military industrial complex, big tech and pharmaceuticals companies — all while claiming this makes her attractive to voters from both parties.

She may be right about her “centrist” credentials, but that is not why Biden might select her. Her stock is high in the Biden campaign given her demonstrable appeal to Midwest voters in Minnesota and Iowa (she finished 5th in the 2020 Iowa Caucuses at 12.3%, but higher than many expected) and likely attractiveness to voters in Wisconsin and Michigan. Three of those four states went to Donald Trump in 2016 (and Minnesota was close). If Biden carries those four states, he just needs six more electoral votes for the presidency.

Yes, Klobuchar is painfully bland, but that may be an additional asset to Biden — who is frequently (though unintentionally) too entertaining on the campaign stump. Add that quality to her possible help with the Electoral College and Klobuchar can’t be ignored.

Cons: It cannot be emphasized enough — Klobuchar is dull and tedious when she speaks, and while she doesn’t beat you down with word volume the way Mayor Pete Buttigieg does, she makes up for it with the deafening banality of her thoughts.

From her candidacy announcement speech:

“We start in this place where about a mile downriver, on a beautiful summer day, a big bridge collapsed into this river. I said on that day, that a bridge just shouldn’t fall down in the middle of America. Not one of the busiest bridges in our state. Not a bridge just a few blocks from our house that John and Abigail and I drove over nearly every day. But it happened.”

Who’s not inspired by a candidate that wants to stop big bridges from falling on beautiful summer days? She must have gone to the See Spot Run School of Political Speechwriting.

During her stint in the Democratic nomination race, I can’t remember one thing Klobuchar as ever said, policy-related or otherwise. Her Midwest Protestantism is not likely to be inspiring to undecided voters outside of her regional base. She’s just forgettable — which might be acceptable to Biden, as long as she can help tilt the balance in favor of the Democrats in Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin.

PredictIt probability of being Biden VP choice: 24% (My guess: 30%)

Former Georgia Gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams

Pros: Abrams is a Black woman who almost won a statewide race in a red state. At the risk of being too glib, that is pretty much her qualification as Biden’s running mate.

To be fair, she has a good television presence — far better than other potential VPs such as Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren — and doesn’t seem intimidated by the national spotlight thrust upon her after he close (and arguably controversial) lose to Republican Brian Kemp in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race.

Still, her main qualification for VP is her identity, not her concrete policy achievements— which is not unusual in the era of hyper-partisanship, divided government, and meager legislative accomplishments.

Cons: While Georgia is politically competitive, the Republicans still control the governor’s seat and both houses of the General Assembly. Furthermore, Trump holds an eight point lead over Biden in a University of Georgia poll conducted in the state this month and there is no reason to think that will change in the next few months before the Democratic National Convention.

Finally, Abrams appeal as a VP candidate is further muted by having never held a national political office.

PredictIt probability of being Biden VP choice: 11% (My guess: 20%)

Massachusetts U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren

Pros: Do you remember when Warren was the front runner among the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls? It happened, sort of. In the first weeks of October 2019, Warren was neck-and-neck with Biden as the most popular Democratic candidate. She was the candidate with ‘a plan’ and the media loved her for that brief moment in time. However, the Warren-surge ended around mid-November when she released her plan on financing Medicare-for-All, which was either a testament to sound economic rationality or clever subterfuge. Regardless of the facts, her support among progressives started to crater after that and she never recovered.

Yet, I can’t help but wonder if the woman many consider to be the smartest person running for president isn’t the perfect counter-balance to Biden, a man not generally regarded for his intellectual prowess. It is not likely that Bernie Sanders-progressives will ever embrace Warren; but for the average Democrat progressive, Warren still has some appeal and picking her as the VP is not the craziest idea. To the contrary, she is the best hope Biden has for appealing to progressives.

Biden will lose to Trump if a meaningful percentage of Sanders-progressives decide not to vote or go for a third-party candidate. To ignore them is certain defeat. Warren offers at least some attempt, no matter how imperfect, to keep them in the fold.

Cons: Warren generated some of the worst visuals I’ve ever witnessed in a presidential campaign. Her pandering to LGBTQ interests in a rainbow feather boa during the 2018 Boston Pride Parade stands out:

To see this former Republican prance around in such an unpresidential manner does not instill confidence in me that she will help Biden win in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Warren is smarter than all of us. I don’t doubt that. But as my father taught me many years ago, being right is not enough. You must engage your skeptics on common ground, void of prejudice. Warren demonstrates no ability to do that.

PredictIt probability of being Biden VP choice: 8% (My guess: 15%)

The best of the rest (Hillary Clinton, Tammy Duckworth, Pete Buttigieg)

These remaining VP possibilities are interesting but mostly propelled by media-generated wishfulness. The dictionary definition of damaged goods is Hillary Clinton. Pete Buttigieg couldn’t win a statewide race in his home state. And Tammy Duckworth, the most interesting of the rest-of-field VP candidates, shows no interest in the VP position.

If I had to pick a long-shot for the Democratic VP nod, I’d take a close look at popular Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. She’s an energetic campaigner and former prosecutor who doesn’t wilt under media scrutiny. Her selection would guarantee Michigan for Biden, which is not a small consideration.

PredictIt probability of Rest-of-Field: 5% or less (My guess: 5% or less)

In the final analysis, however, I believe the Electoral College calculus will dominate Biden’s VP decision. If that is the case, Amy Klobuchar will be Biden’s VP selection.

• K.R.K.

Send comments and ill-tempered partisan tirades to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, March 3, 2020)

The first thing you learn when you work in an Office of the Inspector General (OIG) is that a whistleblower’s grievances should be addressed at the lowest level possible.

Why? Two reasons: For one, in most cases, the supervisors closest to the whistleblower’s complaint are generally willing to solve it. Like most people, they want to do the right thing. Secondly, some OIG offices (and their cousins, Offices of the Special Counsel) will receive thousands of whistleblower complaints each year. With investigatory staffs usually numbering less than 30, it is simply impossible to address every whistleblower complaint. Even a thoughtful triage process used to filter down to the most serious whistleblower issues will still leave a case load too large for the average IG office.

If IG and Special Counsel (SC) offices were staffed to handle all whistleblower complaints, the majority of federal government activities would be reduced to investigating itself.

Problems are best solved at the lowest level possible. [In general, that’s a good rule in life.]

In my experience at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Office of the Inspector General (DIA-OIG), in only a small minority of cases did a Federal employee abuse his or her power in a deliberate and corrosive manner.

Yes, we have the case of a Federal employee using his government credit card to buy breast implants for his girlfriend. That is the wrong use of the government credit card. That shouldn’t require any additional explanation.

But, in most cases, Federal employees who circumvent established rules and regulations, do so either out of ignorance or with honorable intentions — in the latter case, often with a desire to grease (or avoid) the imposing, excessively bureaucratic, gears of government. That is not an excuse, but it does explain most of the law, rule and regulation violations I witnessed.

So when whistleblowers formally lodge complaints against their supervisors or chain of command, it can never be taken lightly, even as it must be placed in a broader perspective. Good people sometimes break the rules.

But my IG office also had to deal with some federal employees misusing the whistleblower laws to lodge personal complaints about supervisors and other employees.

A now-retired Deputy Inspector General in the U.S. intelligence community (USIC) would frequently remind us that whistleblower laws are not designed to address every single employee-supervisor grievance.

They are intended to protect employees from retaliation for calling out substantive violations of law, rules, and regulations. The Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 (WPA) protects Federal employees and applicants for employment who lawfully disclose information they reasonably believe evidences:

• a violation of law, rule, or regulation;
• gross mismanagement;
• a gross waste of funds;
• an abuse of authority;
• or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety.

Under the WPA, certain Federal employees may not take or fail to take, or threaten to take or fail to take; any personnel action against an employee or applicant for employment because of the employee or applicant’s protected whistleblowing. The Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA) of 2012 further strengthened those protections for Federal whistleblowers.

The WPA/WPEA legal protections have entered the public spotlight recently, first with a whistleblower complaint regarding a phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and more recently with a whistleblower complaint regarding unsafe work conditions within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as it dealt with the ongoing coronavirus crisis.

According to the February 27th Washington Post story:

“Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services sent more than a dozen workers to receive the first Americans evacuated from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, without proper training for infection control or appropriate protective gear, according to a whistleblower complaint.

About 14 personnel from the Administration for Children and Families, or ACF, were sent to March Air Force base in Riverside County, Calif., and another team of about 13 ACF personnel were sent to Travis Air Force in Solano County, Calif., according to the complaint and the whistleblower’s lawyer, Ari Wilkenfeld.

The (ACF) deployments took place Jan. 28 to 31, around the time when the first planeload of evacuees arrived at March, and Feb. 2 to Feb. 7, during the time when additional flights were arriving at Travis. The planes each carried about 200 Americans who were repatriated from Wuhan.

The (ACF) workers did not show symptoms of infection and were not tested for the virus, according to lawyers for the whistleblower, a senior HHS official based in Washington who oversees workers at the Administration for Children and Families, a unit within HHS.

In some instances, the (ACF) teams were working alongside personnel from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in “full gown, gloves and hazmat attire,” the complaint said.

The whistleblower is seeking federal protection, alleging she was unfairly and improperly reassigned after raising concerns about the safety of these workers to HHS officials, including those within the office of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. She was told Feb. 19 that if she does not accept the new position in 15 days, which is March 5, she would be terminated.”

The whistleblower’s complaint was filed February 26th with the Office of the Special Counsel (OSC), an independent federal investigative and prosecutorial agency whose “primary mission is to protect federal employees and applicants from prohibited personnel practices, especially for whistleblowing.”

_______________________________________________________________

There is no reason to doubt the charges made by the HHS whistleblower. In fact, the idea that a federal government agency would send its own personnel into a dangerous situation without proper training or equipment sounds way too familiar.

But the whistleblower complaint raises a number of red flags for me.

Firstly, there were only seven days between the HHS whistleblower being told they would be reassigned or terminated and the filing of the complaint with the OSC. Just seven days.

Having been the OIG statistician assigned with tracking whistleblower complaints, my experience was that such actions worked on timelines measured in months, not days.

It is likely powerful forces pushed this complaint up the flag pole.

Secondly, the day after filing the complaint with the OSC, the whistleblower’s lawyers provide the Washington Post with a redacted version of the 24-page complaint. Another red flag for an OIG or OSC adjudicating a whistleblower complaint. Why would a whistleblower release their complaint to the national news media a day after they filed the same complaint with an OSC?

As with the first red flag, this accelerated timeline also suggests a level of political coordination far beyond anything a typical federal employee would have at their disposal. Add the frenzy the HHS whistleblower put the anti-Trump media into and it begins to cast doubt on the motivation behind her complaint.

Thirdly, the whistleblower’s core complaint centered on employee safety; such that, it should have been handled through Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) channels, not an OSC or OIG. And while there is a definite public safety element to the HHS whistleblower complaint — which the WPA specifically cites as grounds for whistleblower disclosures — OSHA experts would have been more qualified than OSC lawyers to address the imminent risks posed by poorly-trained, unprotected HHS employees processing Americans arriving from Wuhan, China.

Finally, the Washington Post story begs a more troubling question: How is it possible Center for Disease Control (CDC) personnel, in full hazmat gear, could work side-by-side with improperly equipped HHS personnel and not correct the situation on the spot? Under Federal guidelines for infectious disease control, the CDC personnel should have been in operational control of the situation at March Air Force Base and Travis Air Force Base.

Somebody dropped the ball, but it wasn’t just HHS/ACF leadership.

The HHS/ACF staff never should have been in situations like those they faced at March and Travis Air Force Bases in late-January and early-February. The ‘all-hands-on-deck’ directive — which many civil servants use to justify deployments to dangerous hot zones — is not a free ticket to ignore federally-mandated safety protocols, which is apparently what HHS/ACF personnel did.

The circumstantial evidence suggests the HHS whistleblower was powered by forces beyond her simple professional interests.

And what were those forces? Most likely, ill-intended partisan forces.

Why does this matter?

If hyper-partisanship is allowed to drive whistleblower grievances, the legal protections provided to whistleblowers — and the IG/SC budgets needed to enforce them — could be irreparably threatened. A party out of power will inevitably seek retribution when they regain power — also known as the Third Law of Politics: For every partisan action in government, at the next turnover in party control of the government, there is an equal and opposite partisan reaction.

This tit-for-tat political dynamic never seems to impact corporate tax law, banking regulations and defense spending, but on other government matters, it can stop the march of progress like a block in the pit-entrance to a theater.

In no way am I suggesting the HHS whistleblower’s complaint is illegitimate. Quite the opposite, the complaint appears to be of such an urgent public health matter that it needed to be handled as impartially as possible — particularly in the context of Washington, D.C.’s highly-partisan political environment where the power of motivated bureaucrats and politicians to gum up the works is well-known.

As it was handled, the apparent politicization of the HHS whistleblower’s complaint significantly jeopardizes its successful and timely resolution.

• K.R.K.

Please send comments and suggestions to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, February 28, 2020)

If you are a Democrat, you may want to sit down before you read this.

According to RealClearPolitics.com’s poll average, President Donald Trump’s current job approval (46.4%) is the highest it has ever been during his presidency (see Figure 1 below).

Figure 1: President Trump’s Job Approval (RCP poll average)

And while Trump’s job approval remains under water (more U.S. adults disapprove of his job performance than approve), he has crossed a threshold (46%) that represents the minimum level needed to win re-election, according to one prominent econometric prediction model.

It should be noted, however, that no incumbent president in the modern polling era has been re-elected with approval below 50 percent on Election Day. Nonetheless, a number of other prediction models are corroborating the importance of the 46%-threshold, including the PredictIt.com futures market (see Figure 2).

Since mid-January, around the time of the U.S. Senate’s acquittal of Trump on the impeachment charges, the PredictIt.com futures market has pegged Trump’s probability of re-election to be higher than 50 percent. As of today (27 February), that probability stands at 56 percent.

Though that represents a competitive presidential election in November — the Democrats are hardly out of it — the trend has been on Trump’s side since October 2019.

It was only a few months ago that I was writing about Trump being too far under water in job approval to get re-elected. I put his re-election chances at effectively zero.

Oops.

That judgement was based on Trump’s job approval having the lowest variability of any president in the polling era, according to the Gallup Poll. In other words, his job approval numbers are hard to move, and that is a problem if a president with low approval wants to get re-elected. Since Trump’s all-time low in approval in December 2017, on average, it takes him about 3 months to gain one percentage-point in approval.

In late 2019, I didn’t think there was enough time to get him near 50 percent approval and thereby ensure his re-election. It looks like I was wrong.

Figure 3: Key Movements in President Trump’s Job Approval (RCP poll average)

But something changed in the fourth quarter of 2019 and first quarter of 2020.

Up to this recent period, Trump has had low approval for his entire presidency, ranging from the current high of 46 to a low of 37 (around the time of the Charlottesville, Virginia Unite the Right Rally in August 2017).

Furthermore, when you break up Trump’s presidency into discrete time frames, you can summarize most of the approval variation in just three periods: (1) Start of the Russiagate Investigation & the Charlottesville March (Jan. to Nov. 2017), (2) North Korea Crisis/Summit (Dec. 2017 to May 2018), and (3) the Impeachment Hearings and Trial (Sept. 2019 to present). I also identify a fourth period where there was no sustained trend in Trump’s approval (“The Period of Relative Quiescence”).

My presumption is that Trump’s recent rise in job approval (from 41.6 percent in late Oct. 2019 to 46.4 percent at present) is directly attributable to the impeachment hearings and trial (a rally effect similar to what Bill Clinton experienced during his impeachment).

That is my assertion, at least. In point of fact, there are many possible explanations that could also explain Trump’s recent rise in approval. Among them are: (1) a growing economy, (2) the particularly brutal Democratic debates that began around the time Trump’s approval rise, and (3) then there is the ascension of Bernie Sanders as the Democratic Party front-runner.

I am willing to dismiss the economy as a primary explanation, given that nothing unusual distinguishes the U.S. economic growth in the last two quarters from prior quarters. That said, research has consistently shown that presidential job approval does move with changes in the economy and, at some level, Trump’s current job approval must be partially a function of the strong economy.

Yet, its the other hypotheses — the savage Democratic nomination debates and Bernie’s rise into the lead — that give me pause when asserting Trump’s impeachment may have backfired on the Democrats.

As seen in Figure 4, Bernie Sanders began to surge in popularity in early December 2019 and, by early February 2020, has put significant distance between himself and the second place candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Figure 4: The Democratic Nomination Race (RCP poll averages)

In a February 2020 Vox.com article, political scientists David Broockman and Joshua Kalla make a compelling data argument that the nomination of Bernie Sanders could drive a significant percentage of swing voters to Trump. Using data from a 40,000-person survey fielded in early 2020, Broockman and Kalla show that “nominating Sanders would drive many Americans who would otherwise vote for a moderate Democrat to vote for Trump, especially otherwise Trump-skeptical Republicans.”

Could this finding also explain why a higher percentage of U.S. adults are now approving of Trump’s job performance? Are swing voters giving Trump a second look now that Sanders is the probable Democratic nominee? Without individual-level panel data at my disposal, I would be speculating if I said ‘yes,’ but I am skeptical that Bernie is driving people into Trump’s arms.

Countering my skepticism, Broockman and Kalla offer evidence that Sanders’ strong head-to-head performance versus Trump in the national polls depends heavily on a strong turnout among young voters in November. They write:

“Sanders’s electability case requires this 11 percentage point turnout increase among young voters in 2020 to occur on top of any turnout increase that would otherwise occur if another Democrat were nominated.

If the turnout of all age groups increases from 2016 to 2020 (as happened from 2014 to 2018), then the turnout among young people must increase by 11 percentage points above and beyond this broader trend, and must do so solely due to Sanders’s presence on the ticket. Finally, youth voter turnout doesn’t usually go up or down by nearly as much as 11 percentage points from election to election; the Sanders boost would have to be truly unprecedented.”

I’m almost convinced. But I hesitate, because in the aggregate, there has been no significant change in Bernie’s head-to-head advantage over Trump in the past three months, despite Trump’s significant increase in job approval (see Figure 5 below).

It is hard to explain the variation in one variable (Trump approval) using a variable showing little variation (Sanders advantage over Trump in head-to-head polls).

Figure 5: Donald Trump versus Bernie Sanders (poll averages from Dec. 2019 to present)

It is possible Broockman and Kalla are correct that head-to-head polls overstate Sanders’ advantage over Trump (due to overly optimistic youth turnout assumptions); while, at the same time, other factors are still required to explain Trump’s recent rise in approval.

Data from one cross-sectional survey (no matter how well designed by Broockman and Kalla) is not enough to convince me that the rise of Bernie Sanders is helping get Donald Trump re-elected. Changes in Trump support over time, by definition, require dynamic models in order to be used for prediction.

Until I see that (time-series panel) data, I’m not drawing any firm conclusions.

• K.R.K.

Send comments to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, February 27, 2020)

The evidence is indisputable. There is no subtle way to say this: The establishment wing of the Democratic Party and the anti-Trump news media, by politicizing U.S. intelligence community (USIC) analyses, are unwittingly working in the interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

How else can you explain the February 20th and 21st New York Times articles alleging the Russians are working to help the presidential campaigns of President Donald Trump and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT)?

I say ‘alleging’ because the New York Times offers no detailed evidence showing the Russians are again interfering in our presidential election. Instead, they quote anonymous sources with direct knowledge of a U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) February briefing U.S. House committee members on the subject of Russian activities in advance of the 2020 election.

This paragraph from the February 20th article summarizes the basic evidence marshaled by the Times:

“In a February 13 briefing, intelligence officials warned House lawmakers that Russia was interfering in the 2020 campaign to try to get Trump re-elected, five people familiar with the matter said.”

After three years of biased and sloppy reporting on the Trump-Russia collusion story (Russiagate), Sanders Democrats and Trump Republicans can be forgiven if they are skeptical of this new reporting by the Times. Some Trump and Sanders defenders have even suggested the USIC, news media, and establishment Democrats are running an on-going influence operation meant to discredit Trump and Sanders — both viewed by many within the D.C. establishment as palpable threats to the political status quo.

As tempting as it is to jump on that bandwagon, it presumes an unprecedented level of dishonesty by the USIC and establishment Democrats. Are the sources for this Times story — probably Democratic House members or staff — actually lying? I doubt it. Were the USIC briefers lying when they suggested intelligence showed the Russians are meddling in another U.S. presidential election? Even less likely. Was the raw intelligence itself in error, perhaps part of an elaborate Russian denial and deception (D&D) effort? Always a possibility, but still unlikely.

If we assume USIC analysts and House Democrats aren’t lying about new Russian interference — and I don’t think they are — the Times story has powerful implications: We can’t trust any information we see or hear on social media (or any information platform) supportive of Trump and Sanders or negative information towards their opponents.

That conclusion is particularly convenient for establishment Democrats trying to regain the presidency by means of any Democrat not named ‘Bernie’ — a bit too convenient, for my comfort level.

Something deceptive is probably going on in the Times story about 2020 Russian election meddling, but this deception does not require labeling USIC analysts, House members or the news media liars.

Instead, it requires an acknowledgement that, for all the effort the intelligence community puts into minimizing the influence of partisan politics on its work products, it is nearly impossible to completely separate politics from intelligence analysis.

Beyond that, USIC analysts must also contend with the many cognitive biases that may prejudice their conclusions. And if that wasn’t enough, we also have adversaries (like the Russians) who can employ sophisticated denial and deception (D&D) techniques meant to deceive USIC analysts.

In my almost five years working within the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Office of the Inspector General (DIA-OIG), I studied numerous intelligence failures — the 9/11 attacks, Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, 1973 Yom Kippur War, 2000 U.S.S. Cole attack, 1993 World Trade Center attack, etc. — and the after-action-reports (AARs) describing those analytic breakdowns.

There were three factors common to these failures: (1) various forms of confirmation bias (i.e., the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories), (2) the ability of our adversaries to disguise their intentions and (3) political pressure.

The first two factors can be overcome with training. The third, not so much.

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I can’t emphasize this enough: Intelligence analysts don’t lie. And, generally, our intelligence agencies do not lie to Congress or the President.

[My Trump-voting friends and anyone that remembers the George W. Bush administration are jumping out of their seats about now. Their disagreement is duly noted. I do consider the last three years an outlier, however. And the Iraq WMD failure was not predicated on lies, but on bad analytic tradecraft and political pressure. We can argue these points at different time.]

In my own study of U.S. intelligence failures, I didn’t see lying. I did see numerous times when the significance of narrowly-defined intelligence findings (i.e., person X did A, B and C) were inflated to fit some larger, preexisting narrative — usually a political narrative being advanced by the president’s administration at the time (e.g., the Iraqis have an active WMD program). Analytic leaps of convenience, I call them.

The underlying intelligence wasn’t necessarily wrong (though that happened too). More frequently, it was the interpretation of the intelligence — often by political appointees or senior intelligence officers — where the analyses went off the tracks. Intelligence analysis is particularly vulnerable when the raw intelligence fails to provide the full context behind the analytic interpretations.

Let us use the Times story on alleged new Russian election meddling as our example.

Almost since Facebook’s inception in February 2004, the world’s intelligence agencies have used the social media platform as a virtual playground for their intelligence activities, such as intelligence collection and influence operations. The same is also true for Twitter and Instagram.

It also must be remembered that these are open platforms — open to everyone, including Russian, Chinese, Israeli, British, Iranian and U.S. (etc.) intelligence operatives. These operatives are breaking no law by spreading disinformation within and across these platforms.

Today, over 13 million Russians use Facebook. Undoubtedly, some of those accounts are associated with Russian intelligence (FSB, GRU). I’d be shocked if the Russians weren’t exploiting these platforms. And, of course, Russian operatives are more than capable of opening Facebook or Twitter accounts from anywhere in the world. It is not hard for intelligence services to disguise their activities on social media platforms.

What makes the Times story on Russian meddling limited in value is that it offers no context by which to judge the story’s importance.

Did Russian operatives post one pro-Trump meme? Or two hundred? Did their bot-amplified Tweets reach a thousand people? Or a million?

Without context and detail, saying the Russians are trying to help Trump and Sanders in the 2020 election is pointless and probably counterproductive. If anything, the popularity of Trump and Sanders may go up because of these smears. [Americans don’t like to be told they are easily duped.]

Worse, leaking such a nebulous summary of U.S. intelligence — as was done for the Times article — merely empowers the Russian effort to sow division among Americans. By not offering specific characteristics of the Russian disinformation campaign, The Times gives readers no ability at least mitigate some of the Russian meddling.

The intelligence leaks supporting the Times story was for partisan political gain. Nothing else.

I cannot imagine a more reckless use of USIC work products — and the damage to the integrity of the USIC may be immeasurable. We may someday be to the point where the Republicans will have their intelligence analysts and the Democrats their own. If that day comes, for all intents and purposes, U.S. intelligence will be nothing more than an extension of the two parties.

For the sake of future U.S. elections, this misuse of U.S. intelligence must stop. And the source of this problem is not the Russians or Trump. The crime against the U.S. electoral system is being perpetrated by the Democratic Party establishment. It’s not treason, but its pretty damn ugly.

If voters reward this partisan faction at the voting booth in the Democratic primaries and in the general election, we will see this negligent use of USIC intelligence products only get worse.

Frankly, the Democratic Party establishment deserves a Trump versus Sanders election. Through their implying pro-Trump and pro-Sanders content on social media is potentially tainted by the Russians, the establishment Democrats are not just politicizing U.S. intelligence, they are doing tremendous damage to the American political system.

_______________________________________________________________

There is a reason the public’s respect for the news media hovers near all-time lows, according to the Gallup Poll. After years of the anti-Trump media (including the Times and Washington Post) publishing thinly-sourced stories insinuating the Trump campaign had conspired with the Russians in 2016, Robert Mueller’s investigation found no grounds for conspiracy indictments against anyone associated with the Trump campaign.

But how does Trump or any person tainted by the new media’s deeply-flawed reporting on Russiagate regain their reputation? After three years of saying every day that Trump was a Russian agent, the feeble, half-hearted coverage of his exoneration barely lasted a week.

As things stand today, at best, our electoral system is too partisan to be as functional as we need it. At worst, it is doing significant harm to the political consensus originally forged by the Founding Fathers over 200 years ago.

And now we have a new wave of the news media declaring The Russians are coming!; and, like Russiagate, the news stories are richly populated with anonymous sources but sparse in their useful details — filled more with speculation than relevant facts.

The American people do need to know the scope and intensity of the alleged Russian election interference. Unfortunately, we can’t rely on the news media, our politicians, or our intelligence services to the extent we need them if we are to understand these activities.

• K,R.K.

Cards and comments can be sent to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, February 20, 2020)

Whenever someone suggests the post-2016 ‘second wave’ of female-led science fiction and superhero franchises are under-performing with audiences, we hear one of three responses from entertainment industry people:

(1) These movies and TV shows aren’t under-performing. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (which centers on the Force-empowered orphan, Rey, portrayed by British actress Daisy Ridley) has made over $1 billion worldwide. How can that be considered a disappointment?

(2) Blame misogynist males. The traditional science fiction and superhero movie audience is still heavily weighted towards males and they are too misogynistic to embrace strong women characters. She-Hulk writer Dana Schwartz even suggests these are mostly nerds seeking revenge over a lack of sex during their teenage and early adulthood years (I hope that isn’t going to be Marvel Studio’s marketing pitch for She-Hulk).

(3) Cherry-picking data. By ignoring the ‘first wave’ female superheroes (Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel), you are throwing out evidence that disproves the original supposition.

All three of these arguments can be genuinely supported and I am certainly aware (from personal experience) that misogyny exists within a segment of the science fiction and comic book movie fan base. But let me offer another hypothesis as to why audiences are not rushing to see TV shows like the CW’s Batwoman, BBC’s Dr. Who, CBS’s Star Trek: Discovery, and HBO’s Watchmen, or movies like Harley Quinn (Birds of Prey), Terminator: Dark Fate, Dark Phoenix and The Rise of Skywalker:

The trauma in Hollywood caused by the 2016 election of Donald Trump opened the door for inferior scripts to get green-lighted after November 2016.

Let me be more direct: To appease their anger over President Pussy-grabber, producers of these aforementioned TV shows and movies have taken a blowtorch to the original source material (some of it undoubtedly created by other pussy-grabbers) and replaced it with depressing, dystopian worlds that alienate original fans and, worse yet, fail to create new ones. Good storytelling has been replaced by incessant moralizing and preachy contempt for half of the potential audience.

If you want to make a better Star Wars-myth than George Lucas’ and have the money to buy the franchise, be my guest. But don’t create a crappy, derivative myth and expect passionate new audiences to magically appear. God knows, Disney will spend the next decade trying to convince parents and their small children that Rey and Kylo Ren are really cool. Good luck.

And I’m not blaming the actors, such as The Rise of Skywalker’s Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, and John Boyega, who are first-rate at their craft and whose careers should follow a similar arc to Ewan McGregor’s — whose portrayal of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequels stood far above the mediocre scripts he was paid to regurgitate in front of green screens.

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There is a place for social commentary in our movies and TV shows. The best movies and shows have often contained sharp critiques on the human condition: Breaking Bad, All in the Family, M.A.S.H., Citizen Kane, Taxi Driver, To Kill a Mockingbird, and obviously others.

Addressing racism, misogyny, violence against women, or our wide glorification of war should be part of our entertainment consumption — but all of that is for naught if it is not contained within a movie (or TV show) with a good script that is well-acted, directed and produced. Unfortunately, good movies can also be betrayed by their marketing. Message movies still need to attract audiences.

How many moviegoers were estranged by Birds of Prey actor Ewan McGregor, who plays a brutal crime lord in the film, with his gushing dissertation to the movie press about how the movie is about misogyny, including its most subtle forms.

Ewan McGregor said at the movie’s premiere that he’s “proud to be involved in a film that was a feminist film that tackled misogyny.”

I like the sentiment, I do — but how does that sell the film to a Harley Quinn fan base that significantly over-indexes on horny dudes?

A sentence that has never been spoken: Kids, do you want to see a movie that deconstructs our patriarchal society and confronts explicit and implicit misogyny?

Well, according to Birds of Prey director Cathy Yan and writer Christina Hodson, girls and women starved for movie heroines that take on misogyny will replace those nerds who, as teens and young adults, never touched a woman’s breast, unless you count their hand-painted Harley Quinn statuette.

That audience didn’t show up for Birds of Prey in the numbers Warner Brothers had hoped. In its second week of release, Birds of Prey has earned $153 million worldwide — which may sound respectable — but considering its $100 million production budget, the film will need at least $200 million in box office receipts to break even. At its current pace, the movie will barely turn a small profit for Warner Brothers — which is not what a movie studio wants from one of its big budget films.

What is the number one rule in marketing? Never forget your core audience. Cathy Yan and Christina Hodson created a movie using an established comic book character with a different fan base than the one they were targeting.

Contrast that to Todd Phillip’s The Joker that made over a billion dollars worldwide on a production budget around $70 million. The general rule of thumb in Hollywood is that a movie must make twice its production budget to break even — and for big budget movies like The Rise of Skywalker (with a $275 million production budget) the box office sometimes needs to be three or four times the production budget to be profitable.

Conservatively, The Joker probably made Warner Brothers about $800 in pure profit. Evidence that angry, white males are still over-indulged by Hollywood? Perhaps, but Todd Phillips knew his audience — young males with a well-developed appetite for on-screen violence — and made a movie for them.

You can virtue-signal until your tongue is blue about why Hollywood should stop making films like The Joker and complain that it attracts a subterranean-audience with a behavioral-attitudinal profile we should be trying marginalize, not monetize.

Fine. But financial Hollywood cares more about butts in seats and this recent micro-burst of heroine-centered projects may be transitory if writers, directors and producers don’t start green-lighting better scripts.

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More positive examples of what Birds of Prey and other films like it should aspire toward are 2017’s Wonder Woman (Warner Bros.) and 2019’s Captain Marvel (Disney) — both female-directed superhero movies with strong female leads (Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman and Brie Larson as Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel).

Why were those two movies financially and critically successful? Well, if my theory has merit, both films were aided from being in development long before November 8, 2016; in the case of Wonder Woman, the initial script was drafted in 2007.

Neither film was forged under the hot Klieg lights of a Trump presidency that many (most) in Hollywood still consider illegitimate — the mass psychosis, colloquially known as Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), did not yet exist.

Instead, Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel are fun, optimistic movies that don’t bury their audiences in grammar-school-level sociology discourses. Even as Warner Brothers and Disney heavily marketed the films as feminist landmarks (for Wonder Woman that made sense), the actual films avoided such pretensions — though Captain Marvel did fall into that trap for brief moments.

Writer and film critic Ben Kuchera says of Wonder Woman: “(Its) a film that is unapologetically sincere and hopeful.”

While promoting the film in the months immediately following Trump’s election, Gal Gadot easily could have fed the prevailing public mood with lectures about female empowerment and the deposing of Hollywood’s stubbornly sexist, patriarchal norms. And, to some extent, she did. But she did something else the actors and producers of Birds of Prey should have learned from — she spoke repeatedly about the inclusiveness of Wonder Woman (Diana), not merely as a feminist icon, but as a human role model.

“We knew we wanted to tell a story that would inspire people: women, men, boys, and girls,” Gadot told Entertainment Weekly before Wonder Woman’s release. Recalling her initial discussions with director Patty Jenkins about her Diana character, Gadot said: “We realized that Diana can still be a normal woman, one with very high values, but still a woman. She can be sensitive. She is smart and independent and emotional. She can be confused. She can lose her confidence. She can have confidence. She is everything. She has a human heart.”

Wonder Woman doesn’t hide her flaws or feel shame for them.

However, the female leads in the latest wave of feminist cinema — Rey Skywalker, Harley Quinn, to name just two — don’t have such vulnerabilities. Even if their back stories contain failures, on film, they always win. Always. Any sign of weakness by a female lead in the Age of Trump is simply unacceptable.

Unfortunately, such two-dimensional characters tend to populate bad movies and TV shows. And, since Donald Trump, more and more of those are filling time on our TVs and movie screens.

• K.R.K.

Send e-cards and comments to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, February 13, 2020)

This is essay is not designed to persuade anyone to support Hawaii U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination.

I have suffered through the Iowa Caucus debacle and the presumably better-behaved New Hampshire primary and have come to this conclusion: The Democratic Party is fundamentally broken.

Conservatively, I believe 70 percent of Democrats are irretrievably brain-damaged. I do blame Donald Trump for their disability, if that’s any consolation.

But, of course, it shouldn’t be.

I support Tulsi Gabbard because I believe her anti-regime-change policy agenda could be implemented on Day 1 if she were President of the United States.

End our counterproductive regime wars in Iran, Syria and Venezuela. Tulsi would do that the minute she finishes the oath of office. The world would be safer for it.

And nobody, not the U.S. Congress, Sean Hannity or MSNBC, could stop her.

Sweet Jesus, I wish she was my president right now.

But we have a moron for a president instead. Thank you, Hillary Clinton, and all of you amoral, intellectually-compromised Democrats that helped make Donald Trump our president. No, I don’t blame the Russians for Donald Trump. I blame you!

I despise the Democratic Party because of the last three presidential candidates it has nominated (…I still like Al Gore. I’m sorry, but I do). The party has betrayed every working-class American since the day Bill Clinton took the oath of office in 1993. I never trusted Bill and the wife he publicly humiliated. I never will. I think they are both grifters.

But they still, ideologically, control the Democratic Party — even more so than the disappointing, billionaire-cavorting Barack Obama.

And that needs to change if anyone, like me, is going to support the Democratic Party again.

________________________________________________________________

Tulsi Gabbard is not perfect.

She fails to fully embrace Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-4-All policy, which is the most economically rational and cost-effective health care reform proposal in current circulation.

Tulsi misses the mark when she unwittingly supports dishonest efforts to outlaw the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

But on the fundamental issues — such as the role of U.S. power in the international security system — she nails it. She understand what the U.S. should — and should not — do.

The U.S. foreign policy and military establishment, under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s leadership, deliberately destabilized Syria and ensured the rise of ISIS. Over 400-thousand Syrian civilians died as a result. Along with Syrian leader Bashir al-Assad, that is blood on Barack and Hillary’s hands.

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Bernie Sanders may be my second choice for president, but Tulsi Gabbard still captures more of my basic requirements for a U.S. president — end the counterproductive regime change wars that are destroying lives of millions of world citizens today and fight for the average American.

I look at the other Democratic candidates (not named Bernie or Tulsi) and I see nothing.

Pete Buttigieg is lying when he suggests he will end ‘endless U.S. wars.’ He is a living, breathing product of those wars and he will never defy the U.S. military establishment if he becomes the next U.S. president. He offers no concrete ideas on how to end these wars except to say, he will ‘end them.’

Just listen to The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal describe the foreign policy ideas of neoliberal Democrats like Mayor Pete:

Pete Buttigieg is not a peace-candidate by any stretch of the imagination. But, worse yet, he doesn’t even support average Americans. When Mayor Pete criticizes ideas such as free-tuition at public universities, he soothes his supporters by saying, “I only want to make promises that we can keep” — which is politi-speak for: I will never work to cut tuition costs for average Americans at the expense of the bloated academic bureaucracies and banking lenders.

You don’t believe me? Watch what happens if we elect Pete Buttigieg or his ideological twin, Amy Klobuchar, as our next president. They will do nothing to help the tuition-debt crisis that looms over this country. They will defend the debt-holders long before they defend the average American student debt-holder. I know that based on the historical evidence.

Oh, at that new Amy Klobuchar media cult? Here is Senator Klobuchar trying to explain why she is uniquely attractive to Trump voters (spoiler alert: she’s not):

I can’t listen to Amy Klobuchar’s voice for more than 10 minutes without wanting to kill myself.

Like I said, I’m not here to persuade you of anything.

I believe Tulsi Gabbard is the best Democrat running for president because she is smart, articulate, and unbowed by the powerful forces arrayed against her candidacy.

Bernie Sanders is my second choice for president. But Bernie has one major problem that Tulsi does not — his policy ideas will never get passed by the special-interest-controlled U.S. Congress.

Never.

There’s a better chance my German Shepherd-Pit Bull mix, James, graduates from Harvard University than Bernie Sanders gets Medicare-4-All passed in the next Congress.

I love Bernie Sanders. But I know what a U.S. president can and cannot do. Bernie aims too high in the context of a U.S. political system dominated and corrupted by special interests that are far too powerful.

Tulsi, in contrast, knows exactly what can be done in this political context.

End our pointless and counterproductive regime change wars; re-invest in the American people.

Tulsi’s agenda will take hold on Day 1 of her presidency. No other change-oriented candidate can say that.

That is why I still support Tulsi Gabbard.

• K.R.K.

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, February 9, 2020)

As an Iowa native, the news coverage of the 2020 Iowa caucuses has been excruciatingly painful to digest. Even my favorite checkout clerk at the local Stop & Shop, knowing I’m from Iowa, teased me this weekend as I paid for my daily donut and energy drink.

“You’re from Iowa, right? Do you want me to help you count your money?” she said, amusing herself.

America, we get it. Iowa screwed up and Iowa’s ‘First-in-Nation’ caucus status is probably a dead man walking. But in Iowa’s defense, the voter caucus system is so poorly conceived, it is like trying to herd kittens while wearing roller skates on an ice rink during a tornado warning.

I don’t think any U.S. state could pull it off any better than Iowa did last week. After all, the Iowa Democratic Party had to tabulate votes for 1,681 precincts (or about 17 precincts within each of Iowa’s 99 counties). In previous caucuses, before the infamous Iowa caucus phone app streamlined the process — sort of — not really, 99 county coordinators would phone in the results to the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters — which had a phone bank of maybe a dozen phones. Sure, it wasn’t as efficient as automated voting machines — as will be brutally apparent when New Hampshire kicks out its primary vote totals within a couple hours after the polls close this Tuesday — but the Iowa caucus system usually gets the job done before midnight.

Oh, who am I kidding?

The Iowa caucuses have always been a collective train wreck that would be improved if they were just simple dumpster fires.

Over 40 years, I’ve attended six Iowa caucuses — five with the Democrats and once with the Republicans (when Ron Paul ran for president in 2012). In every Democratic Party caucus I witnessed one or more of the following on those cold Iowa evenings:

a noteworthy discrepancy between the number of registered voters that had signed in and the final vote count,

bullying and voter shaming as caucus voters grouped to show their candidate preferences (one 2020 caucus voter shared on Twitter a particularly disturbing instance of a Warren supporter bullying an African-American couple),

labor union precinct captains hectoring fellow union members to stay united for the labor-endorsed candidate (as I witnessed for Walter Mondale in 1984 and Richard Gephardt in 1988),

minors included in candidate preference headcounts (one of them being my 10-year-old son who accidentally ended up a Martin O’Malley voter in 2016),

and every caucus I’ve attended has had that one person (who I always assume is a Unitarian — just a hunch) who holds up the whole process by an additional 10 or 15 minutes when they complain about some minute detail in the caucus rules.

Someday the Iowa Democratic Party will realize: they can have smooth-running caucuses or Unitarians, but not both.

And why don’t I include my one Republican caucus experience in the list of caucus meltdowns? For one, the 2012 Republican caucus I attended in Des Moines could not have been run any better.

The Iowa Republicans have long used secret ballots (the only proper way to vote in a democracy); whereas, the Iowa Democrats physically herd caucus-goers based on candidate preferences even as the Party started using paper ballots in this most recent caucus.

But more important than the voting method in bringing order, there are few human gatherings as homogeneous as a group of Iowa Republican caucus-goers: white, Lutheran, and over 60 years old (only a slight exaggeration on my part — some are Episcopalian).

In contrast, Iowa Democratic caucus-goers come from varied backgrounds but share one common characteristic: an inability to play well with others. If you asked an Iowa Republican to list the sports they played in high school or college, they would list team sports like football, basketball, and cheerleading; as opposed to Iowa Democrats, who over-index on hiking, yoga summer camp, and competitive bird-watching (yes, there is such a thing).

Team sports require cooperation and the submission of one’s own ego to a group cause. Yoga requires a level of self-absorption observed elsewhere only among serial killers and NFL wide receivers.

The ugly truth is most Democrats don’t put a high value on placing their own narrow interests beneath a broader, common good. (Well, Tulsi Gabbard does, and look how the Democratic Party treats her.)

In other words, the Democratic Party’s preoccupation with identity politics is not conducive to drama-free caucuses. Add to identity politics a cult-like deference among Iowans for tradition no matter how out of step it may be with modern times — how else do you explain why Iowans didn’t replace 6-on-6 girls basketball with the 5-on-5 game until 1993? — and you get the disaster the world witnessed in real-time last week in Iowa.

Lewis Carroll may have foreseen the Iowa caucuses chaos when he wrote in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland about Alice and a group of river-soaked birds and animals as they contemplated how to dry off:

‘What is a Caucus-race?’ said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that somebody ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.

‘Why,’ said the Dodo, ‘the best way to explain it is to do it.’ (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)

First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (‘the exact shape doesn’t matter,’ it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no ‘One, two, three, and away,’ but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out ‘The race is over!’ and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, ‘But who has won?’

This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, ‘everybody has won, and all must have prizes.’

That pretty much summarizes the Iowa caucuses, which — like Lewis Carroll’s Dodo bird — are about to become extinct and their turbulent glory deeply missed…not really.

• K.R.K.

All comments and vote shaming can be sent to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, February 8, 2020)

“Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge. “

— Lao Tzu, 6th Century BC Chinese Poet

In reality, Lao Tzu is quite wrong — knowledge and prediction are inseparable. Those with the most knowledge are, in fact, the best at prediction. But his admonition of overly confident forecasters (like myself) is duly noted.

A week ago, I predicted the growth of the Wuhan virus (2019-nCoV) would peak at around 17,000 confirmed cases based on a simple application of the Ratkowsky Sigmoidal Growth Model (RSGM) which has been used to model the 2013 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak.

It took the Wuhan virus about two days to blow past my prediction and its spread has continued seemingly unabated. As of today (7 February), over 34,800 people have contracted the Wuhan virus and 723 have died.

What went wrong with my forecast?

Pretty much everything.

First, the RSGM may be too simplistic to generate forecasts in real-time (i.e., during a crisis). The RSGM is good for retrospectively modeling the cumulative distribution of virus cases; however, using it for forecasting a pathogen like the Wuhan virus while it is still dynamic within a population is problematic.

The RSGM estimates three parameters: (1) maximum number of cases, (2) position of the S-curve along the time axis (i.e., inflection point), and (3) the steepness of the S-curve. Forecasting becomes difficult as these parameters are not necessarily constant during an outbreak and any or all of them can vary with the occurrence of a secondary outbreak, multiple outbreak waves (as occurred in Canada with SARS), or when the virus mutates and becomes more contagious and/or lethal.

The net result is that forecasts generated early in an outbreak can be far off the final mark. As an example, Figure 1 shows how the RSGM forecasts for the total number of cases in the 2013 SARS outbreak varied systematically depending on the time of the forecast. The RSGM forecast generated for SARS at the 30-day point predicated only 40 percent of the final number of cases. Not until about 45 days into the SARS outbreak — about the halfway point — did the forecasts start to converge towards the final number. That is probably not a coincidence.

Figure 1: Ratkowsky Sigmoidal Growth Model forecasts for the total number of cases during the 2013 SARS outbreak

Second, my original forecast for 2019-nCoV occurred only eight days into the outbreak, and as I noted at the time, that was probably not enough data to generate a reliable forecast. As seen in Figure 2, at the time of my first forecast, there was a dip in the number of new daily cases (from 1,795 down to 1,472). This one-day decline heavily influenced the RSGM forecast. Had the number of new cases on the eighth day continued the prior upward trend, my forecast for the final number of 2019-nCoV cases would have been around 35,000 cases (not 17,000 as in the original of forecast).

Figure 2: Daily number of new 2019-nCov cases

Finally, I did not incorporate all available information at the time of my first forecast. While I only had eight days of data for 2019-nCoV, I could have incorporated prior information from other coronavirus outbreaks to help estimate the parameters for the 2019-nCoV forecast model. In fact, it was the RSGM parameter that places the S-curve along the time-axis that is most responsible for my first forecast’s poor performance. My first forecast predicted new 2019-nCoV would end at 21 days into the outbreak (see Figure 3 below).

We are 19 days into the 2019-nCoV outbreak (as measured from the point the WHO started tracking the outbreak on its public website) and there is no sign that this crisis is abating soon. The financial news service, Caixin Global, has reported that investment banks and economic forecasters are operating on the assumption this crisis will not end until late March. Even that is starting to feel optimistic.

Figure 3: Daily percent change in cumulative number of 2019-nCoV cases

Had I built into my first RSGM forecast the assumption that the time frame for the 2019-nCoV outbreak would be similar to SARS (i.e, about 90 days), the forecast would have approached 80,000 cases (and 1,760 deaths) before this crisis is over.

An new forecast and some final thoughts

Ten more days worth of WHO data on 2019-nCoV have been added since my first forecast (see Figures 4 and 5 below) and it is clear 2019-nCoV is on a far different trajectory than SARS, a virus with a much higher mortality rate (10%) than 2019-nCoV (2%), but much less contagious.

Figure 4: Comparing cumulative number of confirmed cases (SARS v 2019-nCoV)

Figure 5: Comparing cumulative number of deaths (SARS v 2019-nCoV)

Using the same RSGM forecasting method as my first forecast, the model predicts this 2019-nCoV outbreak will end with 48,300 confirmed cases and 1,060 deaths. Both figures are a significant increase over the SARS outbreak.

But given that we stand at 34,963 cases and 725 deaths as of 4:00pm EST, according to the Johns Hopkins CSSE 2019-nCoV tracking website, and we’ve added 3,200 per day over the past seven days, my original forecasting method appears to produce another significant under-prediction.

However, if I build into the model the assumption that the 2019-nCoV outbreak will persist for 90 days (like SARS), the revised model’s predictions increase substantially: 161,000 confirmed cases and 3,540 deaths.

If reality comes closer to the revised RSGM forecast, 2019-nCoV is not only going to be the largest and deadliest coronavirus outbreak in modern history, it will register death totals nearer the 2018–19 Kivu Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda (2,251 deaths).

As grim as this sounds, some perspective is necessary. The World Health Organizations (WHO) reports that 400,000 Chinese die each year from communicable diseases (e.g., influenza viruses). The Wuhan virus will add no more than a minor blip to that annual statistic. But comparing the Wuhan virus to a seasonal influenza virus is not a fair comparison. The seasonal flu is predictable. We know, generally, how many people will get the flu each year and how many will die from it.

Since 2010 in the U.S., the Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that influenza has resulted in between 9 million and 45 million illnesses, between 140,000 and 810,000 hospitalizations and between 12,000 and 61,000 deaths annually. That computes to a mortality rate of approximately 0.14 percent. The Wuhan virus is 15 times more fatal.

“Despite the morbidity and mortality with influenza, there’s a certainty of seasonal flu,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a recent White House briefing on 2019-nCoV. “I can tell you all, guaranteed, that as we get into March and April, the flu cases are going to go down. You could predict pretty accurately what the range of the mortality is and what the number of hospitalizations will be,” Fauci said. “The issue now with 2019-nCoV is that there’s a lot of unknowns.”

What makes a new virus like 2019-nCoV so scary is that if it infected as many Americans as the the swine flu did in 2009 and 2010 (approximately 60 million Americans), with a mortality rate of 2 percent it would kill over 1 million Americans.

That is why there is so much global attention focused on 2019-nCoV.

• K.R.K.

Please send comments and suggestions to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, January 29, 2020)

Last Sunday night, CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta comforted his audience by noting that this season’s common flu is a far deadlier to Americans than the Wuhan coronavirus — known as 2019-nCov — which is still concentrated mostly in China.

Similarly, on NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday, a Chinese epidemiologist comforted listeners by noting that 2019-nCov was not as lethal as 2003’s severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus which killed 774 people worldwide and infected 8,098 people.

When asked yesterday on the The Hill’s Rising podcast, hosted by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, about whether Americans should be worried about 2019-nCov, former CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden was slightly more alarmist:

“This is a very serious outbreak. It is spreading widely. It appears to be more infectious than the SARS virus was in 2003 and, though it is somewhat less deadly so far than SARS, it is still far more deadly than a mild virus.”

Somewhat less deadly than SARS? Far more deadly than a mild virus? You can be forgiven if you are not sure how concerned you need to be about 2019-nCov. With only 5 known cases in the U.S. — and no deaths, so far — I would not blame any American for ignoring this newest pandemic scare.

But that might be a mistake in this case. The data on 2019-nCov being released daily by the World Health Organization (WHO) is forming a picture of the virus that is trending in a direction significantly more serious than SARS. Figures 1 and 2 (below) show the current trajectory of 2019-nCov relative to SARS in terms of reported cases and fatalities. Each data series plotted below start from the date WHO started tracking these viruses on their public website.

As you can see, from Day 1 both viruses start from a similar position, but over the course of 2019-nCov’s first week it is already significantly higher than SARS in reported cases (2,798 versus 421) and fatalities (80 versus 14).

Figure 1: Comparing SARS and 2019-nCov (Reported Cases)

Figure 2: Comparing SARS and 2019-nCov (Fatalities)

Admittedly, we only have one week of data for 2019-nCov and many factors that will determine its final outcome are yet to be determined (e.g., vaccine, effectiveness of gov’t intervention programs, etc.). Moreover, the WHO could be getting these higher numbers for 2019-nCov because of China’s experience with SARS which may have led to improved, faster diagnostic methods and a higher propensity among individuals with symptoms to receive immediate medical care.

That would be the good news story. The bad news story would be that the steeper trajectory for 2019-nCov — even at this early stage — is indicative of a much more infectious virus than SARS that will, despite having a lower mortality rate, potentially kill far more people.

Already, as of 29 January 2020, Johns Hopkins researchers are reporting 6,057 confirmed cases of 2019-nCov and 132 confirmed deaths on their daily tracking website — which tends to be more up-to-date than the WHO daily situation report. If the Johns Hopkins numbers are accurate, 2019-nCov has already infected 75 percent of the final infection number for SARS, and while 2019-nCov has a long way to go to reach SARS’ fatality numbers, at the current pace 2019-nCov will reach it in 6 to 7 weeks.

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My intent is not to trigger excessive alarm over 2019-nCov. At this early juncture, it does not look like a major pandemic on the scale of the Spanish Flu of 1918–1919 — which killed 50 million people worldwide — or even the Hong Kong Flu of 1968–1969 that killed 1 million people worldwide, including 34, 000 in the U.S.

In fact, the national and international news media should be commended for their restraint in covering 2019-nCov — at least for now. That most of the news stories so far acknowledge the early nature of this current outbreak and make a strong effort to put it into historical context is a positive reflection on the journalists covering the story.

For example, CNN’s Dr. Gupta saying the current common flu season is a bigger threat to American lives than 2019-nCov is an important comparison. This U.S. flu season alone (2019–2020), the low estimate is that over 8,200 people have already died and 140,000 have been hospitalized, according the Center for Disease Control. Furthermore, at least 15,000,000 million people have contracted the flu and between 7 and 10 million have visited a doctor for the flu. These numbers still dwarf anything related to 2019-nCov. [Quick math: The U.S. mortality rate so far for this flu season is 8,200 divided by 15,000,000…or around 55 deaths for every 100,000 flu cases.]

But Dr. Gupta’s calming assurance that 2019-nCov isn’t an immediate, dire threat also runs the risk of making the general public too complacent at the exact time they should be taking precautions (e.g., cancel travel plans to highly-infected areas, limit interactions with people recently traveling in those areas, etc.).

Of course, it may already be too late to change the trajectory of 2019-nCov as its die may have been cast.

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How bad could 2019-nCov get?

Epidemiologists rightfully exercise caution when citing any single number regarding the lethality of 2019-nCov. Viruses can evolve during a single outbreak and later mortality rates can differ significantly from earlier rates.

But we do have early mortality estimates for 2019-nCov. As of 27 January 2020, the WHO reported 2,798 confirmed cases of 2019-nCov and 80 deaths, which is a 3 percent mortality rate. However, according to Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, M.D., this is likely an over-estimate as it is hard to know how many people currently have the virus but are not showing symptoms or have not received medical attention.

In comparison, SARS had a mortality rate of 10 percent (8,098 confirmed cases with 774 people dying) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), since 2012, has 2,494 confirmed cases and has killed 858 people (a 34 percent mortality rate!). Interestingly, MERS is still active with 12 new cases diagnosed in November 2019.

The deadliest flu virus of the past two centuries was the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918–1919 that killed 50 million people worldwide with an estimated mortality rate of between 10 and 20 percent. What made the Spanish Flu so deadly was its infection rate of around 50 percent (# of those infected / Population Size).

In contrast, per Johns Hopkins infection numbers, the current 2019-nCov infection rate in China’s Hubei province is about 10 infections for every 100,000 people. Of course, this cumulative number is going to move up (probably dramatically) in the next few months. The point is simply that 2019-nCov is not even near the magnitude of the Spanish Flu. In fact, it is substantially less infectious than the common flu viruses now spreading across the U.S., which have a current combined infection rate of 4 percent That number will also rise over time as we are only half way through this year’s flu season.

Outside of the coronaviruses, the average Ebola virus outbreak has a mortality rate of around 50 percent, according to the WHO. Most recently, the 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak that hit primarily West Africa generated 28,652 confirmed cases and caused 11,325 fatalities (a 40 percent mortality rate).

So there you go — 2019-nCov isn’t Ebola or the Spanish Flu, so rest easy.

Well, not so fast. Given that the China’s National Health Commission Minister, Ma Xiaowei, said on Sunday that the incubation period for 2019-nCoV could range from one to 14 days, it is obvious the situation remains too fluid for making strong forecasts about this virus.

The reality is, the range of possibilities for 2019-nCov’s final outcome is still broad. If the current numbers are a significant under-count of the true infectiousness of 2019-nCov, or if the virus evolves into something even more infectious, worst-case scenarios start looking more plausible and we’ll see a final death count closer to 10,000 than the 774 deaths during the SARS outbreak.

On the other hand, scientists are moving on a 2019-nCov vaccine at a record pace, thereby raising the possibility of a vaccine being deployed early in 2019-nCov’s evolution, thereby stunting its impact. Other factors as well, including the effectiveness of Chinese government’s mitigation efforts which will most certainly play a large role in determining final outcomes.

The bottom line is, outside of China and its neighbors, there is no reason to be too anxious about 2019-nCov. It is much too early for exhibiting excessive caution. That said, I wouldn’t travel to China’s Hubei province in the near future and I might even consider wearing a face mask if I was doing any international airline travel. But, beyond that, a far more important action you can take is to protect against the common flu already in this country. It is far, far more likely you will contract and die from that than contracting and dying from 2019-nCov.

• K.R.K.

Send comments to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, January 24, 2020)

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This is not a movie or TV series review. However, I will be revealing key plot twists from the latest Disney Star Wars installment — The Rise of Skywalker. If you have not seen this movie, but intend to, consider yourself warned.

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“When it comes to fans, it is a fan’s right to have whatever opinion they want to have, and people are going to be upset, especially when you’re talking about books or games, because you’re never going to be the exact person who they had in their head, or who they played on The Witcher 3, for example. I don’t necessarily consider that toxic, I just consider that passionate.” — Actor Henry Cavill (‘Geralt’ in Netflix’s Witcher series) interviewed on YouTube’s Jake’s Takes.

Actor Henry Cavill, best known for his portrayal of ‘Superman,’ has taken his share of criticism from fans and critics.

Having depicted the comic book realm’s most iconic superhero, Cavill understands the importance of fan expectations when these characters are rendered on the big screen. The source material for Superman alone consists of over 1,000 separate comic book issues since DC Comics’ Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster debuted Krypton’s most famous refugee in 1939 — not to mention the late-Christopher Reeves much loved movie versions of the Man of Steel in the 1970s and 80s.

So when asked about what some entertainment journalists call ‘toxic fans,’ Cavill surprised many of us when he calmly dismissed the derogatory term as mostly a media creation meant to marginalize ‘passionate’ fans by linking them to a small, unrepresentative group of pernicious outliers who are motivated, to varying degrees, by racism, misogyny and whatever else that comes with white male privilege.

[Spoiler alert: Cavill nails it when he says passionate fans should not be smeared this way.]

If the reactions within the Twitter and Podcast community are indicative, Cavill’s stock will stay on a fast rise among sci-fan/fantasy fans — which may explain why the ratings for his newest fantasy-genre project — The Witcher (airing now on Netflix) — have been so strong, despite mixed reviews from critics. Further evidence that mainstream media critics often can’t be trusted, especially when they don’t bother to watch all available episodes for a new series before they review it — as was the case with Entertainment Weekly’s Kristen Baldwin and Darren Franich in their review of The Witcher.

My own review of The Witcher, produced by Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, is based on all eight episodes:

The Witcher requires significant cognitive effort when first following its complex narrative structure; but, by the fourth episode, the investment is well worth it. It is a brilliantly crafted TV series. Moreover, Henry Cavill overcomes the ‘Excessive Attractiveness Bias’ (EAB), which assumes good-looking actors can’t really act, and energizes one of the most multi-faceted, substantive characters found on TV today.

End of my TV review.

Fans of the The Witcher book series had expectations for the Netflix version; and, based on the early audience returns, the show as met or exceeded those expectations.

The success of Netflix’s The Witcher is a happy story for its devoted fans, as well as for those who are new to the series.

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A not-so-happy story has been fan reaction to the Disney Stars Wars trilogy, recently capped by its third installment — The Rise of Skywalker (TROS)— a bad movie by any objective measure of competent film making, but still relatively enjoyable to long time Star Wars fans like myself.

Unfortunately, the J. J. Abrams-directed TROS has brought the ‘toxic fan’ label back to the fore as thousands of passionate Star Wars fans — loosely organized as the Fandom Menace, first emerging with the release of Disney’s The Last Jedi (TLJ) after it unleashed an onslaught of fan criticism — inundated social media with rumors and sharp criticisms of TROS before its December 20th release date (including an August 2019 Reddit post revealing its entire plot!).

Perhaps to stunt the potential negative influence of the nebulous Fandom Menace on TROS’ box office receipts, various corporate media outlets proffered stories charging that the Fandom Menace was, in fact, a thinly-organized, disparate cartel of “unhinged” Star Wars fans motivated by a noxious cocktail of social media-fed paranoia, bigotry and general ill intent. Otherwise known today as ‘trolls.’

From BuzzFeed’s Ryan Broderick:

“The Star Wars fandom is now a nesting doll of speculation, paranoia, and anxiety about corporate overreach — growing more insular and reactionary in the eight years since Disney took over Star Wars.

The misinformation and anger inside the Star Wars fandom is what happens after decades of corporatization and anonymous decentralized networking. It is a glimpse of a future in which anxieties over the motives of the megacorporations that drive our culture — down to our very mythologies — set off conflicts between warring information tribes who inhabit their own artificial narratives. What began with small but vocal insurgent online communities like 4chan or the alt-right has now come for the mainstream.”

Esquire’s Matt Miller dog walked his readers into believing the swelling rise of diversity in Hollywood films is powering most of the Fandom Menace’s rage against TROS:

“A lot has changed since audiences first saw Luke Skywalker gaze off into that binary sunset. Hollywood is slowly, too slowly, becoming a place that embraces performers and stories of all genders, sexual orientations, and races. There’s still a lot of work to do, but progress will not be halted no matter how passionately, how loudly trolls cry online. Abrams’s The Rise of Skywalker will not reverse the progress Disney made when it put a lightsaber in Daisy Ridley’s hands. And for that, fans will still be mad online. They’re not angry with Star Wars in particular, they’re angry at a changing world — one in which their perspective isn’t the only one that matters. I say let them yell, let them whine. Abrams is pissing off the right people.”

The problem with Miller’s beautiful admonition of the Fandom Menace — as with other screeds against passionate Star Wars fans on social media — is that it is unfettered to actual facts.

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In one attempt to bring data to the problem, Washington Post guest columnist and University of Rochester political science professor, Bethany Lacina, systematically investigated online Star Wars-related posts in order to describe the characteristics and motivations of vocal Star Wars fans.:

America’s most iconic movie franchise, Star Wars, has been denounced by the alt-right for unflattering representation of men, casting to pander to diversity and leftist moralizing. That discussion of gender and race in Star Wars went mainstream after the December 2017 release of “The Last Jedi.” The movie has the franchise’s first nonwhite female lead, portrays an elderly Luke Skywalker confronting his failures and leaves the Jedi order in the hands of a young woman.

How did Professor Lacina determine that the alt-right was behind the most toxic components of a tsunami of fan criticism that met the release of The Last Jedi? By looking at Twitter traffic, of course (sigh):

I compared general Star Wars-related tweets to tweets about Kelly Marie Tran, the actress harassed on Instagram, or about Rose Tico, her “Last Jedi” character. The proportion of tweets with offensive language doubled from 6 to 12 percent — and hate speech jumped 60 percent, rising from 1.1 percent to 1.8 percent of all tweets.

Fans complain about Star Wars’ first nonwhite female lead in more degrading language than they complain about other parts of the franchise.

It is not inherently racist or sexist to dislike Star Wars or “The Last Jedi.” The point of the comparison is that tweeting about these movies turns belligerent when it comes to race and gender.

The online-based harassment experienced by Kelly Marie Tran (‘Rose Tico’) after the release of TLJ is despicable. Anybody involved in such a deed has a rusty iron maiden reserved for them in hell.

But how does the fact that a few racists and misogynists exploited Twitter’s broad social media platform to spread hate (collectively summarized by Prof. Lacina as the ‘alt-right’) relate to the far greater number of passionate Star Wars fans — the Fandom Menace — who simply hated the movie because it tossed George Lucas’ Skywalker-centered Star Wars narrative into the fire?

Alt-right is not a well-defined political label and Professor Lacina’s operationalization of the concept certainly doesn’t pass empirical muster. Without knowing everyone’s political orientation in her Twitter-based study, how could Professor Lacina possibly such an inferential leap of faith? By her own admission, it isn’t possible, and when she could measure political orientations, she found significant negativity expressed on Twitter also comes from the ‘cultural left’:

Offensive tweets and hate speech did not come only from those identified as politically right wing. Most posts are too generic to infer political views. But I did find that such belligerence also comes from the cultural left. Female podcasters, in particular, are attacked for not supporting diversity and gender equality strongly enough.

Most people who tweet about Star Wars are congenial and skeptical about “trolls.” But as with other cultural icons — whether it’s an all-female “Ghostbusters” or NFL players kneeling during the national anthem — a significant few respond with anger and hate when gender and race expectations change. We know that from the numbers.

While Professor Lacina does not explicitly lump all passionate Star Wars fans into the “significant few” who account for the offensive or hateful online speech, she did not go out of her way to disentangle them either.

To the contrary, how could anyone be blamed after reading the many anti-Fandom Menace stories over the past few years if they concluded this loose confederation Star Wars fans are just a bunch of white, male crybabies?

Never mind that Lacina’s own numbers, unwittingly, confirm the opposite conclusion: the overwhelming majority of passionate online Star Wars fans are ‘congenial’ and do not infect their critiques with offensive or hate-filled rhetoric. And, even in the low number of cases when a Disney Star Wars critic’s political orientation can be discerned through their Twitter profile or tweets, it turns out extreme lefties are as noxious as extreme righties in the Twitterverse.

Anyone that’s spent 30 minutes on Twitter knows that.

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Regrettably, in the Age of Fake News, such dereliction of journalistic duty by the likes of Broderick, Miller, and Lacina goes largely unnoticed as long as it reinforces prejudices pre-approved by one of the two political tribes and their allies.

If you dare articulate — publicly — the opinion that the Disney Star Wars movie scripts were molded out of the intellectual equivalent of poop, you must be a misogynist, racist or both, according to the basic argument Broderick, Miller and others offer their readers.

Rarely do these anti-Fandom Menace jeremiads mention that the Disney Star Wars movies, while visually breathtaking (the Rian Johnson-directed TLJ is jaw-dropping in its beauty), are storytelling monstrosities that do far more to turn off longtime fans of George Lucas’s groundbreaking trilogy than they do to create a new generation of Star Wars devotees. [My teenage son and his friends are more invested in Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi from Lucas’ last two prequel movies than they are in the original trilogy — which my son thinks has ‘bad special effects’.]

From the collective minds at Disney-owned LucasFilm, Han Solo turned out to be a feckless, deadbeat dad who gets killed by his son, Ben Solo (aka. Kylo Ren), for reasons the filmmakers never bothered to show us (it was explained in a throwaway line in one of three movies, I am told). That is shitty storytelling.

J. J. Abrams (affectionately called Jar Jar Abrams within the Fandom Menace) also thought it was a smart strategic move to never allow the Fab Four (Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewbacca) to get back together for at least one scene in The Force Awakens. Instead, in one scene, he has General Leia Organa ignore Chewbacca, just arrived from a bloody battle with the First Order, as if he was there to fix the high-speed internet connection on Resistance Base D’Qar.

Fine, J. J., if you and Disney thought it was a good marketing strategy to openly reject the deep affection the legion of Star Wars fans harbor for the original characters, go for it. But, in doing so, perhaps…maybe…you should have created memorable characters in their place. Instead, you offered moviegoers three poorly-formed (and very forgettable) characters that will never be the stuff of movie legend.

The names Rey, Finn and Poe are never going to be the cultural reference points for the current generation the way the names Luke, Han and Leia were for my generation — and for generations after that through our children and grandchildren.

[As a matter of fact, my friends and I — fitting the classic nerd profile as defined in the late 1970s and early 80s— considered Leia the most competent member of that trio and cringed for actor Carrie Fisher when she wore the “bikini” in Return of the Jedi. So, I discount charges of misogyny when weaved into any explanation for why so many Star Wars fans are disappointed in the Disney Star Wars movies.]

All Abrams, Johnson, and LucasFilm President Kathleen Kennedy had to do is make three great Star Wars movies and this whole Fandom Menace brouhaha would have been stillborn. But they didn’t.

Instead, they jettisoned the original Lucas-created myth for a new one that is incoherent and just plain dumb. Twenty minutes into The Force Awakens, Rey is flying the Millennium Falcon like a savant, and the film’s explanation is that she read flying manuals in her spare time on Jakku (her home planet). That’s lazy screenwriting.

As a result, LucasFilm’s incompetence will force Disney to invest more billions — beyond the billions already spent to create Star Wars-themed lands at Disneyland and Disney World — if the entertainment behemoth ever expects to get a stockholder-friendly return on its initial $4 billion purchase of the Star Wars brand.

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And who could blame Disney if they tried to stigmatize legitimate criticisms of their Star Wars trilogy movies by linking them to the alt-right? Disney has never held back from intimidating professional movie critics and entertainment journalists, why should the Mouse treat citizen critics any differently?

As for actual hate groups and hate-filled people who love to insert themselves into online discussions where their special brand of venom can taint otherwise legitimate opinions, the social research community would be well-advised to tighten their empirical methods before smearing large groups of people with their broad brushes. [I realize that broad-brush-smears are the norm in today’s hyper-partisan society and will be hard to end.]

Nobody disputes that racists and misogynists exist on Twitter and in the podcast ecosystem. What Professor Lacina failed to answer, however, is what variation exists within those who expressed their disdain for the Disney Star Wars movies and how does this compare to the more general category of those of spread offensive speech?

In lieu of evidence, the corporate entertainment media too often defaults to ad fontem arguments: The most frequent critics of TLJ and TROS are white men, therefore, those critiques must be rooted in racism and misogyny.

In the future, if Disney wants to create new Star Wars icons who embody female empowerment, they should start by green lighting good scripts with fully developed characters.

But we don’t have to look to the future for those female cinema icons, we already have them in characters such as Carrie Fisher’s Leia Organa, Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor (another iconic sci-fiction heroine who was thoughtlessly trash-binned by the most recent Terminator sequel), or Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley from the Alien movie series. All three are infinitely more substantive than Rey Skywalker. Hell, until someone can explain to me how Rey was able to instinctively navigate a catamaran over 50-foot waves, I’ll take Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow or Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn over Rey. And, please, don’t tell me she used The Force.

The problem with the Disney Star Wars saga wasn’t toxic males within the unwashed masses trying to hold down the rise of female-centric story lines. The problem was sub par movie scripts that put political agendas ahead of story and character development.

Bad screenwriting spoiled the Disney Star Wars trilogy, not the long time fans.

If Disney had crafted three classic Star Wars saga movies, there wouldn’t be this exaggerated controversy about the power of the folkloric Fandom Menace. Instead, we’d all be excited about the next Star Wars trilogy up Disney’s sleeve…which, if I can speak for most of my Fandom Menace confederates, we are not.

As it is, I’m officially over Star Wars.

Besides, it is not like Star Wars is as cool as Guardians of the Galaxy, reminds my son. [I know, Disney owns that too.]

• K.R.K.

As always, comments and profanity-rich insults can be sent to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, January 8, 2020)

Occasionally, I pocket my ego and read comments left by readers of my various essays and articles.

Two essays in particular, Trump’s market share problem and Trump should deny his enemies their ultimate victory, attracted an unusually high percentage of negative responses, as both essays seemed to annoy strong partisans on both ends of the political spectrum.

In both essays I argued Trump’s probability of reelection is significantly reduced for three reasons: (1) A shrinking Republican base, (2) a shrinking pool of swing voters who could potentially alter the outcome on Election Day, and (3) Trump’s stubbornly low (almost invariant) job approval rating.

Many readers vehemently disagreed with my conclusion.

Donald Trump supporters disagreed with my pessimism about his chances of being reelected, while Trump-haters suggested I am a Republican troll trying to promote complacency among Democrats and thereby ensure his reelection.

However, as those who know me can attest, I possess no strong affinity towards any party or ideology.

For me, Trump is a market researcher’s dream challenge. How does a president so deeply disliked by nearly half of the U.S. adult population get reelected?

It is not going to be easy.

In the polling era, only one president — Barack Obama — has been reelected with a job performance rating as low as Trump’s is less than one year out from Election Day. At this juncture in Obama’s first term, his Gallup job approval stood at 42 percent (see Figure 1 below), compared to 45 percent for Trump in Gallup’s December 2–15, 2019 survey.

Figure 1: Comparing 1st-Term Job Approval for Trump, Obama & G. W. Bush

However, there is a major difference in Trump’s situation. Obama was above or near 50 percent job approval for the first year of his presidency. Trump has never sniffed 50 percent approval, his highest approval being 46 percent approval, according to Gallup. A strong, though not conclusive, piece of evidence that Trump may have a maximum approval threshold around 46 percent.

Is 46 percent approval enough to win reelection?

According to one of my anonymous readers, 46 percent approval would make Trump very competitive in the next election. For evidence, he/she directed me to a popular vote econometric model created by political scientists Michael Lewis-Beck and Charles Tien (see Figure 2). Their two-variable model predicted Hillary Clinton would win 51.1 percent of the two-party popular vote in 2016 — which was exactly her two-party vote share.

Figure 2: The Lewis-Beck-Tien Presidential Vote Share Model

There is no guarantee the Lewis-Beck-Tien (LBT) model’s bulls eye accuracy in 2016 will be repeated in 2020. In every election, one model is always going to have the most accurate prediction, either by chance or model validity.

Nonetheless, the LBT model has predicted the winner in all presidential elections since 1948 (with the exceptions of 1960, 1968, and 1976).

The LBT model also has the virtue of simplicity — just two variables: Presidential approval in July of the election year and GNP growth in the first two quarters of the election year.

Assuming current conditions remain constant through Election day, what does the LBT model predict for 2020? The LBT model predicts Trump will win 49.4 percent of the two-party presidential vote. Even if we assume no economic growth in the first two quarters of 2020, the LBT model predicts Trump will receive 49.2 percent of the two-party vote if he maintains 45 percent job approval through Election Day.

Accepting the predictive validity of the LBT model — and its failure to predict the 1976 winner (Jimmy Carter) gives me significant pause in this regard — Trump will be competitive in 2020, all else equal.

_______________________________________________________________

Given this evidence, therefore, do I retract my previous conclusion that Trump has little chance of winning reelection in 2020?

Yes and no.

Even before considering the possibility of another Electoral College victory and popular vote loss by Trump, there are other econometric models using presidential approval and the economy — besides the LBT model — to predict presidential popular vote outcomes (descriptions of the most widely cited models are found here). And, currently, these models predict Trump will receive between 45 and 50 percent of the two-party popular vote.

So, yes, I was wrong to assert Trump has a meager chance of winning reelection. In reality, he has more than a punchers chance.

Yet, I stand by my other conclusion that Trump has little room for popularity growth. The Donald Trump we see today — in terms of job approval — is likely the same one we will see in November 2020.

As I stated in my February 2019 essay, “Donald Trump, the candidate, has a market share problem. His support has very little upside and — as of now — has a maximum potential market (vote) share of just 45 percent among eligible voters.”

Given a shrinking political center amidst a highly partisan electorate combined with a Republican base also in demographic decline, Trump has a market share growth problem that is only getting worse. There simply are not enough likely and potential Trump voters to ensure his reelection. Which is way many pundits and forecasters, not just me, have questioned Trump’s base-focused electoral strategy.

Among them, political blogger Kevin Drum, wonders if the Republican Party is prepared for the day of reckoning should it continue Trump’s base-focused strategy in 2020.

In 2012 I thought that the Republican Party had gone as far as it could to get votes from the white working class. There was just no more blood to be squeezed from that particular turnip. But I was wrong — barely. In 2016 they did what no one could have predicted by nominating a guy who was an all but open racist. And it worked, buying them just a few more votes than it lost them. Once again, they gained a few years.

But it can’t last forever. The Republican Party has already gone much further down the road of lashing itself to the cause of white racial resentment than I would have guessed possible. How much longer can it last? Like most bubbles, longer than you think. But someday the bubble will burst. The big question is, what will happen next?

Trump’s limited market growth potential is evident in the December 2019 YouGov.com poll, which found 47 percent of U.S. adults possess a ‘very unfavorable’ opinion of Trump (see Figure 3). No other major politician comes close to the intensity of Trump’s unfavorability. The next closest is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at 38 percent of U.S. adults having a ‘very unfavorable’ view of her.

Conversely, 30 percent of U.S. adults view Trump ‘very favorably’ — more than any other major U.S. politician. The next closest political figure in this regard is Vice President Mike Pence at 22 percent.

It is this large, intense pro-Trump base that fills his pep rallies and gives the media pundits the impression that the incumbent president will be hard to beat in 2020.

“Look at crowd sizes and enthusiasm as a better metric than opinion polls which oversample Democrats,” writes Denver physician and conservative writer Brian Joondeph, MD.

Unfortunately for Dr. Joondeph, the evidence does not support his idea of using crowd size as a proxy for electoral viability. And the YouGov survey plainly shows us why: Trump’s loyal base (30% of the population) is swamped in size by the number of Americans that can’t stand him (47%).

What the YouGov survey also tells us is that most Americans have strong feelings about Trump, whether they be positive or negative. Only 7 percent of U.S. adults lack an opinion on Trump.

Figure 3: Favorability Ratings of Selected Political Figures (December 2019)

At first blush, the 47%-Very-Unfavorable figure does not bode well for Trump’s reelection chances. My analysis of the 2016 American National Election Study found that three percent of eligible voters with a ‘very unfavorable’ view of Trump in October 2016 voted for him anyway (see Figure 4). That some Trump-dislikers did this was apparently driven by their even greater distaste for Hillary Clinton, particularly on their perception of each candidate’s honesty.

Figure 4: Favorability Ratings of Selected Political Figures (December 2019)

Even if we subtract the 1 to 2 percent of Trump-dislikers who will still vote for him (3% of 47%), this puts him in a deep hole as he tries to pull off another Election Day miracle: Trump starts with 45 percent of eligible voters most likely unwilling to consider his candidacy. In other words, Trump has little margin for error to work with heading into the 2020 campaign.

But virtually the same argument could be made from the perspective of the eventual Democratic Party nominee. In a highly-polarized electorate where almost 80 percent of adults have already made up their minds about Trump — and half of all eligible voters find our political system so irrelevant to their lives they don’t even bother to vote — a small percentage of swing voters can tip the balance.

Figure 5 (below) is a back-of-the-envelope exercise that shows how close the presidential popular vote could easily be in 2020 — despite the substantial favorability disadvantage Trump takes into the contest.

Using Trump’s favorability distribution from the December 2019 Economist/YouGov Survey, along with voting ratios estimated from the 2016 American National Election Study (ANES), I generated a two-party popular vote forecast for 2020.

And the winner will be: The eventual Democrat nominee…51% to 49%. This forecast is almost identical to the LBT econometric model forecast detailed earlier in this essay.

Figure 5: 2020 Presidential Vote Forecast

This forecast should not be surprising. American presidential elections tend to be relatively close. And despite my earlier musings on the dire situation facing Trump and the Republicans, I am now convinced Trump has a legitimate chance of getting reelected.

• K.R.K.

As always, please send suggestions and complaints to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, January 6, 2020)

In the basement of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) main headquarters in southeast Washington, D.C. reside two reminders as to why the Democrats should never take an election for granted.

One is a metal filing cabinet that had been broken into during the 1972 Watergate break-in. And the other is a DNC computer server that had been compromised by Russian hackers in the 2016 election.

To be fair, there is no hard evidence that the Watergate break-in affected the 1972 election in which Richard Nixon beat George McGovern in an historic landslide.

In contrast, there is evidence the stolen “Podesta emails,” published by Wikileaks in October 2016, did have a discernible impact on the 2016 outcome by stunting Hillary Clinton’s momentum following her strong debate performances (see my analysis here).

Reminders of the Democrats’ 2016 election debacle are everywhere inside the DNC headquarters building located just three blocks from the U.S. Capitol: an “I’m With Her” sign is displayed prominently in one office; a photo of Hillary Clinton surrounded by supporters sits prominently on another office desk; and Clinton 2016 bumper stickers and banners sprinkled here and there.

One could be forgiven leaving the DNC offices with the impression the Democrats are still fighting the 2016 election. That is, in fact, an accusation leveled by many Republicans, conservative pundits and even a few Democrats.

“Democrats have made a serious mistake by launching impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump,” opined University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner on MarketWatch.com last October. “They are replaying the Republican impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998, a futile exercise that damaged Republicans, enhanced Clinton’s power, and caused institutional damage as well.

But other than the obvious similarities— a president being impeached by a U.S. House under opposition party control at a time when the economy is strong — why might 2020 be different?

For one, 2020 is a presidential election year. Whereas, in 1998, Bill Clinton never had to face voters after his impeachment and Senate acquittal. It was easier for voters to defend Clinton knowing they wouldn’t need to rationalize his insalubrious Oval Office behavior in the context of a vote decision. Indeed, the MoveOn organization formed in September 1998 as sentiments grew that the Republican attempt to impeach and remove Clinton was distracting the government and public from more important matters.

Secondly, for reasons not necessarily understood, Trump’s job approval does not seem to be affected by the relatively strong economy experienced during his first three years in office.

When Vanderbilt political science professor John Sides compared the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment with presidential job approval, he found that higher levels of consumer sentiment translated into higher presidential job approval — except for two presidents: Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

During Trump’s term, as people’s views of the economy have grown more positive, his job approval numbers have barely moved (see Figure 1 for Trump’s RealClearPolitics average job approval ratings over time). The economy is up, but Trump’s approval has been basically flat since May 2018.

Figure 1: Trump’s Job Approval Ratings since January 2017

According to Sides, Trump’s current job approval rating is about 15 points lower than it should be given the historical relationship between economic conditions and presidential job approval.

“Perhaps some of Trump’s relatively low popularity is because he inspires such strong feelings in his detractors. Some of that can’t be ruled out,” conjectures Sides. “But much of this disjuncture between views of the economy and presidential approval isn’t about Trump as a person so much as the growing polarization of our politics.”

Sides also suggests Trump has not done an effective job emphasizing the strong economy; in part, because of the constant distractions constantly swirling around Trump (Russiagate, the Charlottesville protest, the Zelensky phone call, etc.).

Which brings us to the Democratic Party’s strategy on impeachment. Pelosi and the congressional Democrats are doing their damnedest to keep people thinking about Trump’s clumsy misdeeds and not let him receive credit for the economy and other policy successes. If the Sides analysis is correct, the Democrats’ impeachment strategy — with an indispensable assist from the national news media — might be working very well in that regard.

Focusing on the inevitable futility of the push to remove Trump misses its tactical importance for the Democrats. The more time the news media covers the events surrounding a ‘perfect’ phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymy Zelensky, the more Trump is constrained in controlling the nation’s political and media agenda. And, subsequently, the less likely Trump is reelected.

[Though recent events in Iraq and Iran should remind Democrats that a U.S. president has many opportunities and tools to control the public agenda.]

• K.R.K.

Please send comments to: kroeger98@yahoo.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (NuQum.com, December 30, 2019)

Once the news media publishes allegations that you are the ‘Centennial Olympic Park bomber’ or ‘a Russian agent/stooge/tool,’ regardless of your innocence, the scar is permanent.

But that is exactly what happened to security guard Richard Jewell after the 1996 bombing at the Atlanta Olympics and to a host of individuals in the aftermath of the 2016 election. These two independent events illustrate how the U.S. news media can fail at covering important events and how they rationalize their botched reporting by assigning blame to their sources, not reporting standards.

Worse yet, there is no consistent mechanism holding journalists accountable for their botched reporting. To the contrary, if their reporting feeds a compelling and profitable narrative (i.e., attracts audiences), it is handsomely rewarded.

Rachel Maddow today makes around $7 million-a-year for MSNBC and, in covering the Russia-Trump collusion (Russiagate) story, was directly responsible for promoting many of the most baseless rumors about Donald Trump and his campaign.

In a scathing indictment of Maddow’s journalistic integrity, Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple recently laid out this example of her deceptive technique:

When small bits of news arose in favor of the dossier, the franchise MSNBC host pumped air into them. At least some of her many fans surely came away from her broadcasts thinking the dossier was a serious piece of investigative research, not the flimflam, quick-twitch game of telephone outlined in the Horowitz report. She seemed to be rooting for the document.

“Seemed to be rooting for the document”? More like cheerleading for its authenticity, I would say.

When Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News, one of the first journalists to report on the infamous Steele Dossier and, to my knowledge, the only major reporter to retrospectively apologize for his mistakes in covering Russiagate, tried to confront Maddow on her reporting errors during the three-year media frenzy, she promptly brushed him aside. In effect, telling him she always said the Steele Dossier was unverified and she won’t be held accountable for failing to prove or disprove the Dossier’s accuracy.

When the Robert Mueller investigation thoroughly destroyed the entire Russiagate narrative along with the Steele Dossier, Maddow could barely find the energy to devote even one full show to Mueller’s final report.

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The problem, personified by Maddow but far from exclusive to her, is systemic and rooted in what I call the spot news standard endemic to corporate-controlled news organizations.

Just as Maddow refuses to be held accountable for not substantiating the Steele Dossier, the national news media embraced the same cop out, essentially saying, “What? You expected us to determine the veracity of the Dossier? We just report what our sources tell us.”

Hence, the spot news standard: the type of reporting, typically done in the first few hours/days of a news worthy event, which focuses on information provided by official sources (e.g., police, government officials), victims or eyewitnesses. In contrast to spot news reporting, in-depth investigative reporting usually aspires to not only report the ‘facts’ (often as told by sources), but endeavors to independently confirm the quality of such information.

When the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) first reported that Jewell was the FBI’s prime suspect in the Olympic Park bombing, they were merely repeating what an anonymous FBI source had told one of their journalists. By the spot news standard, the AJC did its job. And a federal court would eventually exonerate AJC for that very reason from a civil lawsuit over its Olympic Park bombing coverage.

But the AJC got the Jewell story wrong, as did most of the national news media in their Russiagate coverage. In both events, the news organizations fed their audiences little truths (e.g., quotes from official sources), but botched the bigger, more important, truths.

And, yet, some people still wring their hands wondering why Americans are increasingly distrustful of the news media.

The answer is obvious. Much of what the news media reports today just isn’t true — and this problem cuts across all news media outlets and ideological points of view.

How did the Fourth Estate regress to this lousy state?

Tennessean columnist Saritha Prabhu lays the blame at the feet of partisanship:

In the Trump era, American national media (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, Fox News, The Washington Post, The New York Times) have self-divided into openly pro- or anti-Trump factions.

It isn’t covert anymore, and many media outlets wear it as a badge of honor.

But when a media outlet is strongly for or against a leader or party, the first casualties are fairness, honesty and accuracy.

Prabhu further notes that partisan-biased news reporting is profitable, in essence, creating a reinforcing feedback loop.

But the problem with today’s journalism may be more systemic than just the economic incentives behind partisan news coverage.

The privately-controlled media serve a different master than what we are taught in high school civics. They serve the sensational to the extent it is marketable and profitable; they serve social conflict for the same reason; and they serve the interests of political and economic elites because it is from this orbit most journalists and media pundits originate.

And the news media make no apologies for any of this — and why should they? They are rarely held accountable for even their biggest mistakes. If they had to answer for their mischievous disregard for the bigger truths, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell would have lost his prime time slot after his entirely false report that a Russian oligarch co-signed one of Donald Trump’s business loans with Deutsche Bank.

To his credit, O’Donnell apologized on-air for his amateur-hour mistake. But was his job ever on the line over this incident? I seriously doubt it.

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The deep flaws of our national news organizations were exposed during Russiagate, which is one reason the lessons from Clint Eastwood’s newest movie, Richard Jewell, go beyond just reminding us that the AJC (and other news outlets) did a grave disservice to Jewell during their Olympic Park bombing coverage.

The immediate reaction to Eastwood’s movie is particularly revealing. Before Eastwood’s movie had even been released, lawyers were exchanging letters.

On December 9th, the Monday before the movie’s release, the Los Angeles-based law firm Lavely & Singer sent a letter to director Clint Eastwood, screenwriter Billy Ray, Warner Bros. and other parties, on behalf of The (AJC) and Cox Enterprises, its parent corporation. The letter demands Warner Bros. to publicly acknowledge “that some events were imagined for dramatic purposes and artistic license and dramatization were used in the film’s portrayal of events and characters.”

The central issue is the movie’s portrayal of AJC reporter Kathy Scruggs, who broke the new story, sourced from an anonymous FBI informant, that Richard Jewell was the FBI’s prime suspect in the July 1996 deadly bombing at Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park.

We know today that Jewell was completely innocent.

It would take the FBI three months before they would publicly acknowledge Jewell was no longer a suspect. Eventually, confessed serial bomber Eric Robert Rudolph would be convicted for the Atlanta bombing and sentenced to life in prison.

In response to the release of Eastwood’s movie, the AJC editorial board published this defense of their original Jewell story:

“Far from acting recklessly, the AJC actually held that story for a day to develop additional independent corroboration of key facts prior to publication,” wrote the AJC editorial board. “Law enforcement sources confirmed to the AJC their focus on Mr. Jewell, and FBI activity had been visible at the Jewells’ apartment. The accuracy of the story had also been confirmed with an FBI spokesperson to whom the entire story was read before publication…

…Within days of the July 1996 bombing, investigators came to focus on Jewell. The AJC was first to report, accurately, that the FBI considered him a suspect. Authorities questioned Jewell, searched his and his mother’s belongings and kept him under round-the-clock surveillance before publicly clearing him about three months later…

…The AJC was among numerous entities sued after Jewell was cleared, and the only one that didn’t settle. The litigation naming the AJC was dismissed in 2011, with the Court of Appeals concluding that the coverage was substantially true at the time of publication.”

The AJC defense that their coverage was “substantially true at the time of publication” disregards the damage their reporting did to an innocent man (i.e., based on the spot news accuracy standard, the AJC did their job).

Yet, Jewell saved hundreds of lives by his quick response to an imminent threat and the initial thanks for his effort was a three-month horsewhipping by the national media as a law enforcement wannabe that lived with his mother. AJC, as much as any other news outlet, built and cultivated that narrative through the use of anonymous FBI sources.

[In AJC’s defense, they were the first news outlet to report timeline evidence that Jewell did not have time to both plant the bomb and reach a pay phone used by the bomber to make a warning call.]

AJC’s apparent insensitivity to Jewell’s interests must be understood in the context of journalism’s fundamental reliance on the spot news standard: If the facts are mostly correct at the time of publication, journalists have nothing for which to apologize.

This low test for journalists is predicated on our shared First Amendment speech rights which protect American journalists from legal prosecution for their reporting, even if it is later proven to be substantively flawed. Absent malice or the ire of the American security state, U.S. journalists do not face legal jeopardy for inaccurate reporting. And that is as it should be. It never should be easy to jail journalists and news publishers.

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The low-bar threshold for our Constitution-backed press freedoms is sufficient to protect MSNBC, CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other news outlets from any legal consequences for their three-year crusade of careless reporting on the Russiagate myth — a story propelled almost entirely in the mainstream media by anonymous, often government, sources.

We can draw parallels from the Jewell case to the more recent Russiagate coverage. As in the Jewell story, Russiagate coverage was constructed around faulty, uncorroborated intelligence passed on by anonymous government sources to the press. Whether the anonymous sources knew they were passing along flawed or irrelevant information may never be known, as we are unlikely to ever know the identities of those sources (again, as it should be).

But we know from both the Robert Mueller report and the Department of Justice Inspector General report that there is no compelling evidence to suggest the Trump’s presidential campaign conspired with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton. This narrative was a complete fiction from the very beginning, first promulgated by Clinton’s bitter minions, spread by her equally bitter collaborators in the national news media and *verified* by a vast, nameless infantry of government bureaucrats and intelligence officers.

Russiagate mirrored a standard intelligence community disinformation campaign, its true origins still largely unknown as the national news media has purposefully avoided seeking such answers.

A baseless conspiracy theory is how Rachel Maddow describes the question of whether Trump campaign operative George Papadopoulos’ chance meeting with Malta professor Joseph Mifsud and subsequent bean-spilling conversation with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer were, in fact, a U.S. intelligence community attempt to frame and perhaps turn the former low-level Trump flunky into a government informant.

Or, as still reported in the mainstream news media, was Mifsud a Russian agent tasked with compromising the Trump campaign through Papadopoulos?

Both theories are unproven (though most of the hard evidence resides with the former) and likely will be addressed in Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham’s special investigation into the origins of Russiagate.

Either way, the answers are not coming from the anti-Trump press corps because these answers could undermine the media’s ongoing narrative that the FBI and U.S. intelligence community were objective, upright actors in the Russiagate drama.

Which only further reinforces the bigger question: will the national news media ever be forced to answer for their botched Russiagate reporting.

Just as Kathy Scruggs did in the Jewell story, the national news media did the minimum in covering Russiagate (sans a few adversarial journalists like The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald and The Nation’s Aaron Maté who base their careers on challenging official sources, regardless of partisan affiliation).

The problem is the minimum too often means getting the bigger story wrong (and never needing to say you are sorry).

But if news organizations aren’t going to hold themselves accountable for botching the big stories, who will? It most certainly can’t be the government or an “independent” ombudsman. Putting so much power in so few hands feels like an invitation to unintended consequences.

There is only one irrefutable way to hold news organizations and news entertainers like Rachel Maddow accountable: educated, discerning news consumers empowered to think critically and objectively (to the best extent possible) when consuming news. More importantly, consumers’ judgments will result in palpable carrot-and-stick economic consequences for news organizations.

We, in fact, may be seeing evidence of this dynamic already with the most recent year-to-year decline in TV audiences for both CNN and MSNBC (the most prominent cable news curators of the Russiagate myth).

For the sake of our Fourth Estate, we can hope accountability is making a comeback.

• K.R.K.

Postscript: Clint Eastwood’s movie about Richard Jewell and the 1996 Olympic Park bombing is trying to serve the truth. Unfortunately, he should have first gotten his own truthiness house in order.

Why Eastwood and screenwriter Billy Ray decided to imply Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs slept with an FBI source in order to extract crucial information is incomprehensible. The specific scene in dispute — featuring Scruggs (played by Olivia Wilde) and Tom Shaw (an FBI agent played by Jon Hamm) — could have easily been replaced with something less sexually overt and the movie would have lost nothing.

It just confirms that Hollywood, like corporate news organizations, are not dependable guardians of the truth.