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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Hurricane Hilary nears landfall [1]

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Date: 2023-08-20  

We begin today with Ned Kleiner writing for the Los Angeles Times explaining why Southern California and portions of the Southwest are going through the region's first tropical storm warning ever.

What has kept the hurricanes away from California for so long? The answer lies in two factors that fend off hurricanes: cold sea surface temperatures and high vertical wind shear. Cold sea surface temperatures suppress hurricane formation because hurricanes get their energy and moisture by evaporating surface waters, which is much harder to do when the water is cold. Because of ocean currents, the waters of the eastern Pacific are far colder — by as much as 9 degrees — than the same latitude in the western Pacific or the Gulf of Mexico. [...] So why has Hurricane Hilary grown stronger given the conditions of the eastern Pacific? Mostly because current conditions are not as hostile to hurricanes as usual. July was the hottest month in recorded history, and since the Earth’s surface is mostly water, a lot of that heat has gone into the oceans. At the moment, the waters around Cabo San Lucas are 88.3 degrees — more than 4 degrees hotter than normal and basically the same temperature as the water around Key West. Meanwhile, a growing El Niño event (which occurs when the cold waters that usually rise from the Atacama Trench off Peru are prevented from reaching the ocean’s surface ) has decreased vertical wind shear in the eastern Pacific, allowing more hurricanes. These conditions have led to a string of storms in the region, including Hurricane Dora, which was one of the longest-lived Pacific hurricanes on record and was responsible for the strong winds that added to the devastating wildfires on Maui, Hawaii.

It's all connected.

Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News says that the Eastern Pacific remains an “understudied region” for tropical storm and hurricane formation for various reasons.

Despite some of the clear global trends, the Eastern Pacific remains an understudied region, probably because many of the hurricanes move away from land. The National Hurricane Center doesn’t issue seasonal projections for the Eastern Pacific, like the closely watched Atlantic hurricane season forecast. And the long-term data record for hurricanes in the region was disrupted by a 1988 change in jurisdiction, as record-keeping switched from the Eastern Pacific Hurricane Center in Redwood City, Calif., to the National Hurricane Center in Miami. Inconsistency in the record makes it harder to detect any global warming fingerprints on hurricanes in the region, Wood said. “One of our challenges in the eastern north Pacific is the quality of the data record,” she said. “The transition of information from the old center to new center wasn’t smooth, and some information was lost. So a lot of the analyses that have been done have been looking mostly at the most recent 35 years. That’s not a lot of time to say, ‘Hey, this is what the pattern used to be, and this is how we’re seeing it change into the future.’” Wood said a lack of paleoclimate evidence also makes it harder to assess the effects of global warming on hurricane activity in the Eastern Pacific. In the Atlantic Basin, climate researchers can look at old wave-cut terraces on the shore, and measure the chemical composition of cave formations to explore hurricane activity in past geological eras. There are very few geological formations suitable for such measurements in areas affected by Eastern Pacific hurricanes.

The Washington Post’s Dan Balz and Clara Ence Morse featured a long and somewhat rambling essay on the forces leading to a “cracking” in American democracy; a piece that was linked by learn in the comments section of yesterday’s roundup. Here we look at what Balz and Ence Morse say about the gap between public policy and public opinion.

The gap between public policy and public opinion is one major consequence of today’s frozen federal government. Three of the most talked-about issues reflect that: abortion, guns and immigration. On abortion, most Americans oppose last year’s Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which ended the constitutional right to abortion. On guns, big majorities favor individual proposals to tighten laws, but the gun lobby remains powerful enough to block action. On immigration, there has been a majority for some years favoring tougher border controls along with a path to citizenship, with some penalties, for the millions of undocumented immigrants living here. Every effort to deal with this in Congress over the past two decades has failed, including attempts to resolve the plight of people brought here illegally as children, known as “dreamers.”

Thing is, with so many Americans in "information silos", I think that the polling question may too vague.

Sue Halpern of The New Yorker does a deep dive into the discovery of the plot to tamper with voting machines in Coffee County, Georgia.

The alleged conspiracy came to light as a result of a confluence of a years-long lawsuit challenging the security of Georgia’s election systems, the determination of a private citizen named Marilyn Marks, and a phone call that Hall—who said that he had chartered a plane from Atlanta which took him and the SullivanStrickler employees to Coffee County—made to Marks. In 2017, Marks, who runs a small nonprofit called the Coalition for Good Governance, sued the State of Georgia and its then secretary of state, Brian Kemp, for its reliance on touch-screen voting machines. Because D.R.E. machines, as they are known, produce no paper record of cast ballots, and have been shown to be easily hacked, Marks was pushing for the state to move to hand-marked paper ballots. She won the suit, and in 2020 Georgia replaced the D.R.E. touch-screen machines with the Dominion Voting Systems machines. In the spring of 2021, Hall called Marks and, in the course of the conversation, mentioned that he had been given permission to go to the Coffee County elections office, with others, and that “we scanned every freaking ballot.”(Hall did not respond to a request for comment.) Marks had begun recording the call, without informing Hall, and alerted the secretary of state’s office, though it was months before anyone there acknowledged the breach. (Last year, the secretary of state’s office announced that it had opened an investigation, though no further actions seem to have been taken.) And it was Marks, again, who was able to get officials in Coffee County to release the video showing Latham opening the door to the crew who was going to access the machines. The Times, in an annotation to Willis’s indictment, points out that “the claim that Mr. Trump’s allies were involved in a plan to unlawfully gain access to secure voting equipment and voter data is a new criminal allegation that the Justice Department’s indictment of Mr. Trump did not include.” Were it not for Marks, this part of the conspiracy would not be known. [...] A coördinated effort to copy and disseminate voting-machine software, orchestrated by lawyers working for Trump and facilitated by election officials loyal to him, as alleged in the Georgia indictment, is an unimaginable violation. But the indictment also reveals how limited state action is. A multi-state conspiracy to steal election data is a federal crime, but, so far, these cases have been pursued piecemeal, absent involvement of the Department of Justice. Meanwhile, stolen software that reportedly remains out there has, according to some computer scientists who study election software, potentially dangerous implications for election security in 2024 and beyond. After the presentation during the cpac conference, Kevin Skoglund, the chief technologist for Citizens for Better Elections, told the Los Angeles Times, “Having the software out there allows people to make wild claims about it. It creates disinformation that we have to watch out for and tamp down.” Jena Griswold, the Democratic Colorado secretary of state, made a larger point. “The criminal actions inspired by the 2020 election conspiracies did not stop in January of 2021,” she told me.” In other words, the attempted coup is ongoing.

Barbara McQuade of MSNBC notes the irony of Rudy Giuliani being indicted on a RICO charge.

Donald Trump’s disgraced lawyer made a name for himself prosecuting violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act in the 1980s when he was the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. Now he finds himself on the other side of the “v” in a RICO case as a defendant along with 18 other people in Georgia, including the former president. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ nearly 100-page indictment accuses Giuliani of being part of a criminal enterprise that engaged in a pattern of racketeering activities for the purpose of changing the outcome of the election in favor of Trump. [...] During the Reagan administration, Giuliani famously used RICO to take down notorious Mafia families. Before running for mayor of New York, he bragged about his pioneering use of RICO as a prosecutor, first as a top Justice Department official in Washington and then as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. “Using [RICO] against the [organized crime] commission, that was an idea that no one had until I developed it and went down to Washington and started talking about it,” Giuliani said in 1989. “And I came to the [U.S. attorney’s] office with it.’” Of course, the statute was enacted in 1970 and signed into law by President Richard Nixon for the very purpose of targeting organized crime. Nonetheless, it was Giuliani who used the statute aggressively against the mob in New York, and it was Giuliani who extended its use to go after white-collar crime defendants, such as Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken. After his indictment this week, Giuliani blasted Willis for using the Georgia RICO statute in his case, calling it “a ridiculous application of the racketeering statute. There’s probably no one that knows it better than I do.” Although he acknowledged his use of the statute in white-collar crime cases, he argued that the statute should be used only in “major cases.”

Ed Pilkington of The Guardian looks into what made now-indicted co-conspirator Kenneth Chesebro turn from a former assistant of a liberal Harvard constitutional law professor to a lawyer defending the overthrow of the federal government.

Known by his schoolmates as “the Cheese”, in a nod to the number-one cheesemaking state of Wisconsin where he grew up, Chesebro graduated from Harvard law in 1986. There he associated with a group of students clustered around the venerated liberal constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe. [...] After college Chesebro set up his own law firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he displayed largely liberal leanings. He helped Tribe fight on behalf of the 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore in the supreme court blockbuster Bush v Gore, donated his money exclusively to Democratic candidates, and expressed glowing approval of the rising star of the party, Barack Obama. The cases he took on also had a clear liberal bent. He represented plaintiffs suing big corporations, including Vietnam veterans taking on chemical companies, and acted as deputy special counsel in the Iran-Contra investigation into the Reagan administration’s secret sale of arms to Iran. Had the clock stopped there, Chesebro’s career might have been summed up as successful yet unexceptional. But around 2014 his life took a startling turn.

The editor of the Iowa-based Storm Lakes Times Pilot Art Cullen writes for The Boston Globe that when local news suffers, politics also suffers.

Every four years, presidential hopefuls flock to Iowa to woo voters before the first-in-the-nation caucuses, and we editors and reporters tag along for the ride. Back in 1980 when Howard Baker ran for president, my brother John shadowed him all day with a camera. He even photographed Baker shaving at the Super 8 Motel. I rode in a van with Senator John Glenn while he waxed on about orbiting Earth; I was enthralled next to my childhood hero. George W. Bush called on the phone to say, “Howdy, bud!” and talk up corn ethanol. Lamar Alexander signed the wall in the office of our weekly newspaper. So did Joe Biden. I had a cordial conversation with Dick Cheney; he was not crazy about ethanol. Iowa evoked earnest pining for Oklahoma when we sat down with Elizabeth Warren in 2019. She gets rural. [...] Nobody is calling me to ride on the bus, for sure. They can do without the Register, unthinkable a decade ago. Worse, politicians funded by dark money are trying to sue reporters into oblivion with frivolous defamation suits, another trick learned from Trump. It’s a reflection of our politics, which is purchased, and honest journalism, which is starving to death across the country. A quarter of US newspapers have ceased publication in the past 20 years as advertising revenues flowed to social media, where deceit commands eyeballs. Most of the departed are community newspapers like ours, which mainly concern themselves with covering school, city, and county functions. We report on water rates going up, crime rates going down, births and deaths, how much the meatpacking wage is, and how we need more housing. Pretty much like the Marion County Record north of Wichita, Kansas, where reporting on city affairs and the police chief earned a raid by the cops on the office of the weekly newspaper and the home of 98-year-old co-owner Joan Meyer. She died from the shock, said her son, Eric Meyer, the unpaid editor-publisher.

I can’t help but be reminded of the Paige Williams story in The New Yorker about the about the McCurtain Gazette in Oklahoma from a few weeks ago.

Paul Krugman of The New York Times writes about the resistance to President Biden’s industrial policy.

...now I’m seeing critics of Biden’s policy roll out many of the same arguments that a number of economists, myself included, made against industrial policy in the 1980s: Governments can’t pick winners. Positive spillovers from industrial promotion are hard to identify. Any policy favoring particular sectors can be captured by special interests. So industrial policy is very likely to reduce, not increase, economic growth. Oh, and the Buy American provisions in Biden’s industrial policy may hurt world trade. As I’ve written before, applying these critiques to Biden’s policy seems, sometimes willfully, to miss the point of what’s going on. The policy isn’t about picking winners and trying to accelerate growth. It’s about addressing threats that aren’t counted in conventional measures of the economy: The threat of climate change, the strategic risks created by an erratic, autocratic China. Why address these threats with subsidies rather than, say, a tax on greenhouse gas emissions? Political reality. Carbon taxes simply weren’t going to pass Congress; the I.R.A. did, by the narrowest of margins. And the influence of industries likely to receive subsidies was a feature, not a bug. It was, in fact, the only thing that made action possible. This political logic is still the main justification for the turn to industrial policy. But a year in, it’s becoming apparent that there’s an additional positive effect of Biden’s policy that I don’t think was widely anticipated.

Finally today, Katy Watson of BBC News looks into the ever-widening political violence in Ecuador as it's citizens go to the polls to elect a president today.

While no other presidential candidate has been directly targeted since Mr Villavicencio's murder in Quito, shootouts like this serve to demonstrate just how dangerous Ecuador has become. They are, sadly, part of everyday life, especially in cities like Guayaquil which has been overrun by drug-traffickers. Earlier this week, a similar thing happened during the campaign event of fellow candidate Daniel Noboa. And a local politician was shot dead in northern Esmeraldas province. Candidates are eager to highlight these dangers ahead of the vote. The shooting of Fernando Villavicencio upended campaigning, with candidates now very much focusing on peace and security - because that is what every Ecuadorean wants to be reassured about. Bulletproof vests are also making more of an appearance on the campaign trail - and many candidates dialled down their closing campaign events, with many Ecuadoreans exercising a huge amount of caution ahead of the elections.

Have the best possible day everyone!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/20/2188042/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-Hurricane-Hilary-nears-landfall

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