Contributed by Will Howard

Many of the things that Trump says off-script do indeed sound incoherent — the ideas just don’t hang together, though he sounds more normal in a well-rehearsed two minutes of debate, as in reading a prepared answer. Here’s a transcript from early September that far exceeds the political norm for mere rambling:

If you get the unsolicited ballots, send it in and then go, make sure it counted, and if it doesn’t tabulate, you vote. Just vote. And then if they tabulate it very late, which they shouldn’t be doing, they’ll see you voted and so it won’t count. So send it in early and then go and vote, and if it’s not tabulated, you vote, and the vote is going to count. You can’t let them take your vote away. These people are playing dirty politics — dirty politics. So if you have an absentee ballot, or as I call it a solicited ballot, you send it in, but I would check it in any event. I would go and follow it and go vote — and everyone here wants to vote — the old-fashioned way. …

The Climate Emergency and the Medical Mindset

Our climate problem has turned into a climate emergency, largely because of surges in extreme weather a decade ago.

Next I focus on the mindset of emergency medicine physicians that we will need to adapt for addressing climate action.

The finale is about urgency, the timescale now needed for a climate fix, one fast enough to prevent the collapse of civilization. We have been insufficiently ambitious.

In emergency medicine, the initial focus is not on the root cause of the patient’s problem. It is about knock-on problems: immediate life threats, such as internal bleeding and shock. While our climate problem has fossil fuel emissions as its root cause, it also has secondary threats such as extreme weather. …

The next time that a public figure or a reporter explains emissions reduction as the fix for our global overheating, consider asking them, “How much does zero emissions cool us off?”

This is considered an unkind question; I would not ask it, except that it is currently important — in the sense of civilization surviving until mid-century.

The proper answer is “It will not cool us at all.” Even a thousand years from now, 19% of the CO2 emitted this year will still be hanging around. And until the rate of CO2 removal exceeds the annual anthropogenic emissions, we will not cool off even a half-degree from the present surface temperature — and that is what it will likely take to back out of the recent surges in extreme weather. …

The Trump Mess and a quicker TrumpExit

Contributed by Will Howard

A post-election “throw him out now” impeachment could quickly end his lame-duck status. Is that even possible? Worth the effort? After Trump fails to get re-elected, some Senate Republicans might not remain faithful followers of a Lame-Duck Loser, one whose opportunities for retaliation were shrinking every day.

GOP senators might blame their party’s downsizing on Trumpism, perhaps painting themselves as fellow victims and citing that super-spreader event of top Republicans at the White House as an example.

Trump’s public health advisors must have explained super-spreaders to him a dozen times since March. Yet Trump likely caused several dozen Covid-19 cases, thanks to wedging his guests in, shoulder-to-shoulder, at his Rose Garden party for celebrating the right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court. Pictures show his guests packed even tighter than in the cheapest coach class. Furthermore, most guests took off their masks, so as to mimic the Presidential recklessness. …

The judges and pardons to come

Contributed by Will Howard

There would be 61 lame-duck days after losing the election, days when President Trump’s lifetime judicial appointments could still be confirmed by the current Senate. For anyone worried about prosecution by a post-Barr Justice Department, it will be tempting to lobby Trump to pack the courts with friendly judges while he can. They would likely become known as the TrumpPack judges.

Judges are also a big issue among religious conservatives, and likely the reason they’ve chosen to hold their noses for so long about Trump’s moral lapses and his repeated dog-whistle promotion of hatred. …

A Lame-Duck Loser Like No Other

Contributed by
WILL HOWARD

Scary? President Trump has repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election. He seems to think that, if he doesn’t win, it could only be because of fraudulent mail-in voting. That’s a puzzle because such voter fraud has become almost nonexistent, so Trump’s obsession raises the possibility of presidential paranoia.

Scary #2. War usually serves to rally voters around the current commander-in-chief. …

thanks to the power of former slave-owning states and their current allies.

Asked to define a democracy, most people would start with “One person, one vote.” Yet we have had two presidential elections, 2000 and 2016, where the Democrats lost despite winning the popular vote — in 2016, Mr. Trump lost by a margin of 3 million votes, yet won in the Electoral College by a comfortable margin. That is because more than thirty states still maintain winner-take-all electors.

It is part of the heritage of slavery, one that we have not yet set right. Because the 1787 Constitutional Convention gave every state two senators, whatever their population, Wyoming with 0.6 million people gets two senators, and so does California with 40 million. If the U.S. Senate were to escape pseudo-democratic status by ensuring that each of the 100 senators represented about 3.3 million people, then California would have 12 senators. Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota would have to share one senator. …

President Donald Trump, arriving in Sacramento for a briefing on Western wildfires, continued to downplay the role of climate change in California’s horrific fire season, claimed the earth will soon begin cooling — and told California and other states to solve the problem by managing their forests more wisely.

Here we go again. Cooling soon? That’s news to scientists.

Better management, as in clearing undergrowth? That too is deliberately misleading. Everything, including wildfires, has multiple causes. People have a tendency to forget this, and so may not be sufficiently suspicious of those who seek to mislead them.

Fortunately, we can consult NOAA’s data on the subject of wildfire numbers and the annual numbers of really big wildfire episodes: those causing more than a billion dollars in damage. Here is the history since 1985, corrected for inflation. …