White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Environmentalists Should Try an Ocean Tack

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Memo to environmental activists: It’s the oceans, stupids.

This summer, hundreds of millions of people in the Northern Hemisphere will flock to beaches to swim, surf, wade, boat, fish, sunbathe, or even fall in love. To these revelers, the oceans are eternal — as certain as the rising and setting of the sun, and a permanent bounty in an impermanent world.

But there is a rub: The oceans are living entities and they are in trouble. Much more trouble than the sun-seekers of summer can imagine.

Mark Spalding, president of The Ocean Foundation, says, “We are putting too much into the oceans and taking too much out.”

In short, that is what is happening. Whether deliberately or not, we are dumping stuff into the oceans at a horrifying rate and, in places, we are overfishing them.

But the No. 1 enemy of oceans is invisible: carbon.

Carbon is a huge threat, according to ocean champion Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. The oceans are a great carbon sink, he explains, but they are reaching a carbon saturation point, and as so-called “deep carbon” resurfaces, it limits the oxygen in the water and destroys fish and marine life.

There is a 6,474-square-mile “dead zone” — an area about the size of Connecticut with low to no oxygen — in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Dead zones are appearing in oceans around the world due to excessive nutrient pollution (especially nitrogen and phosphorous) from agribusiness and sewage. Two great U.S. estuaries are in trouble: the Chesapeake Bay and the Long Island Sound.

Warming in the North Atlantic is disturbing fish populations: Maine lobsters are migrating to Canada’s cooler waters. Whitehouse and other Atlantic coast legislators are concerned as they see fish resources disappearing, and other marine life threatened.

Colin Woodard, a reporter at The Portland Press Herald, has detailed the pressures from climate change on fish stocks in the once bountiful Gulf of Maine. He first sounded the alarm 16 years ago in his book, “Oceans End: Travels Through Endangered Seas,” and now he says things are worse.

The shallow seas, like the Baltic and the Adriatic, are subject to “red tides” — harmful algal booms, due to nutrient over-enrichment, that kill fish and make shellfish dangerous to consume.

Polluted waterways are a concern for Rio de Janeiro Olympic rowers and other athletes. Apparently, the word is: Don’t follow the girl from Ipanema into the water. The culprit is raw sewage, and the swelling Olympic crowds will only worsen the situation.

My appeal to the environmental community is this: If you are worried about the air, concentrate on the oceans. It is hard to explain greenhouse gases to a public that is distrustful, or fears the economic impact of reducing fossil fuel consumption. If I lived in a West Virginia hollow, and the only work was coal mining, you bet I would be a climate denier.

The oceans are easier to understand. You can explain that the sea levels are rising; that it is possible for life-sustaining currents, like the Gulf Stream, to stop or reverse course; and you can point to the ways seemingly innocent actions, or those thought of as virtuous (like hefting around spring water in plastic bottles) have harmful effects.

Plastic is a big problem. Great gyres of plastic, hundreds of miles long, are floating in the Pacific. Flip-flops washed into the ocean in Asia are piling up on beaches in Africa. Fish are ingesting microplastic particles – and you will ingest this plastic when you tuck into your fish and chips. Sea birds and dolphins get tangled in the plastic harnesses we put on six-packs of beer and soft drinks. They die horrible deaths. Sunscreen is lethal to coral.

It is hard to explain the way carbon, methane and ozone in the atmosphere cause the Earth to heat up. It is easier, I am telling my environmentalist friends, to understand that we will not be able to swim in the oceans.

I have met climate deniers, but I have never run into an ocean denier. Enjoy the beach this summer. — For InsideSources

 

The Pernicious Effects of Polling on Elections

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Warning: the political news you are consuming may be synthetic, manufactured in a corporation and served up breathlessly by the media. Like many synthetic substances, it could be bad for your health.

I refer, of course, to the epidemic of polling. Polls have become a political narcotic. There is an appetite for them that knows no bounds. If you do not like or trust one poll, take another.

This, in turn, reflects a time when the science of polling faces challenges. Polling had become fearsomely accurate, but recently it has encountered two bugaboos: Changing demographics and changing telephone usage. These things have cleft polling in two: polls that are conducted through telephone interviews and those that are conducted electronically.

The evidence is that the old way remains more accurate, but it is bedeviled with fewer land lines and more people who do not want to be interviewed, or may not be comfortable speaking English.

It is, I am told, cheaper to poll electronically, but the bugs are not all out of the system and wide discrepancies in results are showing up. Hence, a poll that shows Hillary Clinton beating Donald Trump in the general election is followed by another equally reputable poll that shows Trump defeating Hillary.

The pollsters I have known are a canny lot, and I have no doubt they will get on top of these problems. The most egg that has landed on the face of the polling industry was in getting the last British election so wrong. That fiasco is informing the doubt surrounding polls on whether or not Britain should leave the European Union. They are struggling with a close call and public distrust of polling.

In the United States, polling has gotten the presidential primaries more or less right. But the putative contest between Clinton and Trump has wide swings in polling results; so wide that the pollsters themselves are having difficulty asking the right questions and managing the results.

Not since 1945, when it started seriously, has polling seemed so challenged as in this presidential contest.

But unreliable or not, the debate is fashioned by the polls. Talk radio, talk television and the newspapers are nourished by the latest polls, which pass as news.

For me the argument is not whether the polls are accurate, but rather the damage they do to the system. They are — and I am assuming the pollsters will regain their former omnipotence — an impediment to the political process.

A poll is a snapshot that morphs into a narrative. A second in time becomes a reality, and candidacies are extinguished before they can catch fire.

Commentators extrapolate a grain of truth into a mountain of fact.

Polling has reached a point where not only is it part of the democratic process, but it also distorts that process, picking winners and losers before the electorate has assimilated the facts.

The news media has fallen onto the habit of taking this synthetic news — a suspect commodity for which the great news organizations pay — as the real thing. A poll gets the same weight as the ballot, thus affecting the ballot.

I believe that polls do reveal a truth, but a truth of one brief moment in time. The trouble is that revelation becomes the revealed truth, and the future gets tethered to that moment. Normal evolution in political thinking is hampered by this synthetic truth.

In hiring pollsters, news organizations are unwittingly setting up what is the equivalent of a posed photograph: a photograph that will be reprinted hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of times until it has become a kind of truth and its dubious genesis is forgotten.

Politicians are swayed by polls, fitting their policies to synthetic truths that have been certified as the will of the people: erroneous certifications, as it happens. — For InsideSources

The Great Middle Class Awakening and Its Torchbearer

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By Llewellyn King

The middle class has been taking a shellacking for years. It began in the 1970s, when the business and political elites separated from the people and it has been accelerating ever since, according to Hedrick Smith, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter and editor, an Emmy award-winning PBS producer and correspondent, and a bestselling author. In short, an establishment figure.

Add to Smith’s establishment credentials schooling at Choate, the private boarding school, a stint at Oxford, and you have the picture of someone with the credentials to join the elite of his choosing. Instead Smith is a one-man think tank, a persuasive voice against the manipulation of the public institutions, like Congress, for money and power.

But Smith is not a polemicist. He uses the reporter’s tools, honed over decades in Moscow and Washington and on big stories, like the civil rights movement and the fall of the Soviet Union, to make his points against the assault on the middle class.

It all began with Smith’s looking into what was happening to American manufacturing, which led to his explosive 2012 book, “Who Stole the American Dream?” Encouraged by the book’s success, he created a Web site, reclaimtheamericandream.org, which now has a substantial following. In the past three years, he has lectured at over 50 universities and other platforms on his big issue: the abandonment of the middle class by corporate America and its corrupted political allies.

Smith documents the end of the implicit contract with workers, where they shared in corporate growth and stability. He outlines how money has vanquished the political voice of the middle class.

Instead, according to Smith, corporations have knelt before the false god of “shareholder value.” This has resulted in the flight of corporate headquarters to tax-friendlier climes, jobs to cheap labor, and a managerial elite indifferent to those who built the companies they manage.

In Smith’s well-researched world it is not only the corporations that have abandoned the workers, but the political establishment is also guilty, bowing to lobbyists and fixing elections through redistricting. Two villains here: money in politics and gerrymandering electoral districts.

The result is a democracy in name only that serves the powerful and perpetuates the power of those who have stolen the system from the voters.

Smith cites the dismal situation in North Carolina, where districts have been drawn ostensibly to ensure black representation in Congress, but also to ensure Republican domination of all the surrounding districts. The two districts that illustrate the mischief are called “the Octopus” and “the Serpent” because of the way they are drawn to identify the voter preference of the inhabitants.

The rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are testament to the broken system, says Smith. They are symbolic of the rising up of the middle class against the predations of the elites.

But Smith is hopeful because, he says, the states have taken up arms against the Washington and Wall Street elites. People should “look at the maps,” he says, “They will be surprised to find out that 25 states are engaged in a battle against partisan gerrymandering, or that 700 cities and communities plus 16 states are on record in favor of rolling back ‘Citizens United’ and restoring the power of Congress to regulate campaign funding.”

Smith sees the middle class reclaiming America: a great social revolution that again unites the government with governed, the creators of wealth with the managers of the wealth. Smith is no Man of La Mancha, tilting at windmills, but a torchbearer for a revolution that is underway and overdue.

“My thought is that more people would be emboldened to engage in grassroots civic action if they could just see what other people have already achieved,” he told me.

Smith’s Web site has drawn 82,000 visitors in the past year, and Facebook posts have reached 2.45 million, he says.

Smith cautioned me to write about the Web site and cause and not the man. But the man is unavoidable, and unique. He has as much energy as he had when I first met him in passing in a corridor at the National Press Club in Washington decades ago. At 82, Smith still plays tennis, skis, hikes, swims and dances with his wife, Susan, whom he describes as a “gorgeous dancer.”

At 6 feet 2 1/2 inches, Smith is an imposing figure at the lectern, but his delivery is gentle and collegiate: a reporter astounded and pleased with what he has found in the course of his investigation of the American body politic. — For InsideSources

 

 

Crime, War and Mischief Are the Internet Norms

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By Llewellyn King

The big news coming out of the G7 meeting in Japan will not be about establishing international norms for cybersecurity. That will only get an honorable mention at best. But maybe it should get greater attention: the threat is real and growing.

Consider just these four events of the recent past:

The electric grid in Ukraine was brought down last Dec. 23 by, it is believed, the Russians. Because of its older design, operators were able to restore power with manual overrides of the computer-controlled system.

The Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles was ransomed. This crime takes place when a hacker encrypts your data and demands a ransom, often in untraceable bitcoin, to unlock it. The hospital paid $17,000 rather than risk patients and its ability to operate.

While these ransom attacks are fairly common, this is the first one believed to have been launched against a hospital. Previously hospitals had thought patient records and payment details were what hackers would want, not control of the operating systems. Some of the ransoms are as low as $3,000, with the criminals clearly betting that the victims would lose much more by not settling immediately, as did the medical center. The extortionists first asked for $3.6 million.

In a blockbuster heist on the Internet, the Bangladesh central bank was robbed of $81 million. The crooks were able to authorize the Federal Reserve of New York to release the money held in an account there. They would have got away with another $860 million, if it were not for a typing mistake. In this case, the money was wired to fraudulent accounts in the Philippines and Sri Lanka.

Target, the giant retailer, lost millions of customer records, including credit card details, to an attack in February 2014. Since then, these attacks on retailers to get data have become common. Hackers sell credit card details on what is known as the “black web” to other criminals for big money.

Often the finger is pointed at China, which will not be at the G7. While it may be a perpetrator, it also has victim concerns. There is no reason to think that Chinese commerce is not as vulnerable as that in the West.

China, with the help of the Red Army, is blamed in many attacks, particularly on U.S. government departments. But little is known of attacks Chinese institutions sustain.

Governments want to police the Internet and protect their commerce and citizens, but they are also interested in using it in cyberwar. Additionally, they freely use it in the collection of intelligence and as a tool of war or persuasion. Witness U.S. attempts to impede the operation of the centrifuges in Iran and its acknowledged attacks on the computers of ISIS.

As the Net’s guerilla war intensifies, the U.S. electric utility industry, and those of other countries, is a major source of concern, especially since the Ukraine attack. Scott Aaronson, who heads up the cybersecurity efforts of the Edison Electric Institute, the trade group for private utilities, says the government’s role is essential, and the electric companies work closely with the government in bracing their own cyber defenses.

Still, opinions differ dramatically about the vulnerability of the electric grid.

These contrasting opinions were on view at a meeting in Boston last month, when two of the top experts on cybersecurity took opposing views of utility vulnerability. Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the Department of Homeland Security who now teaches emergency management at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said she believed the threat to the electric grid was not severe. But Mourad Debbabi, a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, who also has had a career in private industry, thinks the grid is vulnerable — and that vulnerability goes all the way down to new “smart meters.”

The fact is that the grid is the battleground for what Aaronson calls “asymmetrical war” where the enemy is varied in skill, purpose and location, while the victims are the equivalent of a standing army, vigilant and vulnerable. No amount of government collaboration will stop criminals and rogue non-state players from hacking out of greed, or malice, or just plain hacker adventurism.

Governments have double standards, exempting themselves when it suits from the norms they are trying to institutionalize. Cyber mischief and defending against it are both big businesses, and the existential threat is always there. — For InsideSources

How the Ghost of Watergate Haunts This Election

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By Llewellyn King

There is a line of reasoning in political circles which says that Barack Obama created the phenomenon of Donald Trump.

I aver that Donald Trump is a creation of the post-Watergate media. Collectively we have made running for office so absolutely awful, so fraught for families and careers that only two types of office seekers have the fortitude for public life: the grotesques, who are outside of the norms of the political culture, and the shopworn.

Both are on display as we trudge toward November wondering how in a country of so much talent so little of it has been on the ballot in this primary season.

The rot, I submit, began with Watergate when publishers and editors came to believe that the mission of the media was not only to scrutinize the policy views of elected officials but also to rip down the bedroom door, peer into the piggy bank and examine every word in print or on tape that a candidate has uttered since high school, whether in jest or earnest.

We confused personal rectitude — or rectitude according to the norms of public morality of the day — with sagacity, statesmanship and talent to lead. In the days before Watergate, Jack Kennedy could do with impunity what got Bill Clinton impeached.

Now that Watergate is 44 years behind us, its legacies are many, but two stand out. The first is that journalists in large numbers were suddenly attracted to covering politics in a way that fewer had been previously. The late Arnaud de Borchgrave, who covered 18 wars, noted disapprovingly that young journalists nowadays aspire to cover politics when they used to aspire to be foreign correspondents.

Even in these days of restrained budgets, Capitol Hill, and to a lesser extent the White House, is flooded with journalists, from the national media to the smallest newsletter. Politics is big news and that is good for business. As the incredibly successful Politico editors like to say, “flood the zone.”

But Congress is a deliberative body and moves slowly, so the news maw is fed with gossip. When the secrets of the budget are not clear or hard to get at, there is always the personal conduct of those working on the budget. If a member of Congress goes out to lunch with someone, anyone, a family member, it will be reported somewhere.

Being in public life is now like being on trial day in and day out without knowing what evidence the prosecution has or when it will bring it forward. In fact, being in public life has become God awful and no talented person ought to want to do it.

No wonder no one holding public office wants to stray from the talking points. A few stray words can bring you down, unless you are so outlandish that you have nothing say but stray words in lieu of coherent ones, like Donald Trump.

Watergate washed away unwritten rules under which what political figures did after hours was not fair game. I once saved a cabinet member from a situation with two “ladies” who did not have his best interests at stake. Everyone knew why a certain congressman liked to travel to Mexico — and it was not for tacos. Publicly, it was debated whether the statesman Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan drank too much and no less a person than that public scold, George Will, defended the New York senator by concluding that the great man drank just enough.

Olin “Tiger” Teague, a revered chairman of the House Science Committee, served drinks to his guests at 11 a.m. — and if you wanted an audience, you enjoyed a glass of bourbon with the Texas congressman. Today, you are lucky to get a plastic bottle of water during a Capitol Hill visit.

A Capitol Hill secretary of my acquaintance was proud of the number of congressmen she had bedded, including some in leadership.

The post-Watergate, unwritten rules of scrutiny, which imply that in private conduct there are clues to public greatness, rather than bringing a new morality to politics, only frightened off the talented, the effective and the patriotic and created a space for the outrageous and the shopworn. Look to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and wonder no longer how we got that unappetizing choice to lead the nation. — For InsideSources  Photo Credit: Pete Sousa

Underwear Goes on the Outside for Charity

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By Llewellyn King

Ronald Davis is a respected professor of biochemistry and genetics at Stanford University, and director of its Genome Technology Center. So why is a picture of him wearing his underwear over his pants superhero-style circulating on social media?

Davis is not alone. Others are joining in making themselves look ridiculous every day.

Ron Davis, ME Undies Challenge

Looking silly for a serious cause

The answer is that Davis is a research scientist whose son is severely afflicted with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), better known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome — a name that dismisses the severity of this little understood and understudied disease that has devastated the lives of perhaps 1 million Americans, and what are calculated to be 17 million people worldwide.

Taking a selfie with underwear worn over outerwear is a new campaign, “Undies on the Outside,” to raise money — desperately needed money — for research on ME. This money possibly should have come through the government years ago, but the principal medical research arm of the United States, the National Institutes of Health, has been parsimonious in funding ME down through the years. Only $5 million a year is devoted to the affliction.

Yet the sick are almost inevitably sentenced to a lifetime of unspeakable suffering — often being confined to bed for months at a time and sometimes years — in pain and hideous isolation. They tell their story on ME/CFSAlert, the YouTube channel that I co-founded.

ME is an equal-opportunity monster: It strikes all ages and both sexes. Dr. Jose Montoya of the Stanford University Medical Center describes it as ordering a “parallel life.”

One of my close friends, who has suffered from the disease for 25 years, is fairly typical in her adversity. She was an athletic woman with a passion for squash and cycling. She said that when she was afflicted she became “like a car that had run out of gas.” That was on good days.

My friend’s life went from one of accomplishment and fullness in all the ways that a life can go right to one of surviving on the margins. For two years, she was bedridden. Every type of exertion is followed by a kind of unreasonable punishment for just trying to be normal. Recently, we spent a few hours together and had lunch in a restaurant. The price she paid was being so sick for two days that she had to stay in bed.

Normal family life, work and simple enjoyments are prescribed by ME. I have been writing and broadcasting about it for five years, during which I have come to think of those who suffer day in and day out, essentially without hope, as the children of a lesser god, alive but denied the joys of being alive. Suicide rates are high, and my e-mail box is full of e-mails from people who say they wish they could die.

Symptoms vary from a patient who told me her limbs seemed to be exploding to many who suffer mental fog, known as dysphasia, and need hours to write a few simple sentences.

ME Undies Challenge Logo

The “Undies on the Outside” challenge was devised by an Australian woman. It came from a party game of residents at cheetah rescue center in South Africa, who relieved the tedium of an evening by dressing up with their underwear over their outerwear. Years later one of those revelers, Kate Booker, now living in London, suffering from ME for 18 years, and bitterly aware of the paucity of funding globally for the disease, was inspired to work up a challenge to raise money.

Everyone photographed wearing their undies over their clothes is sending $10 to the Open Medicine Foundation in the Los Angeles area, and challenging three other people to do likewise. Booker chose the foundation because it is raising money for pure research into ME and is concentrating initially on finding a biomarker, so that people can be diagnosed and not thrown into medical limbo.

The Open Medicine Foundation is run by Linda Tannenbaum, whose adult daughter has been afflicted since she was a teenager.

It is especially sad that this disease seems only to be known and understood by those who have a family member or close friend who has been, as it were, taken from them while still being there, shuttered away in plain sight. — For InsideSources

Beltway Job Seekers Are Rested and Ready for the New President

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By Llewellyn King

If one of the presidential hopefuls, with the exception of Hillary Clinton, wins the presidency, the first thing he will need is the telephone number of a really good recruitment firm.

“Is this the Manpower company? Yes, well this is the president. I want you to come up with 1,400 top executives and, this is important, they must be able to be confirmed by the United States Senate — no lovers, no drunks, no druggies, and no financial cowboys. All right then, how about 100 smart ones and 1,300 warm ones with nice families?”

The fact is that the president has a job that is not always anticipated: personnel officer in chief. Of those who might get the presidency, the one who will be the least challenged in filling out the 1,400 jobs that require a nod from the Senate, Clinton has the best Rolodex of potential appointees. She should have. She has been around Washington since her husband was president. And that means that every Democratic political retread in the capital, will be petitioning for work.

As first lady, senator and secretary of state, Clinton has had plenty of opportunity to stuff her Rolodex. Less so Bernie Sanders, who was a loner in the Senate and who seems not to have sat in on any discussions on foreign policy. He, like so many politicians, knows people who agree with him, which means he has a good grip on the cost of university education to students, or the way medicine was nationalized in other countries.

Likewise, Ted Cruz can probably lay his hands on a few good tax-cutters and gold-standard adherents, but he may be a bit stretched when it comes to people who know about the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict or the supplies of flu vaccine for 2017.

John Kasich knows people from his time in Washington: people who are biding their time in the think tanks, where they have been holed up since past Republican administrations. Talk about Beltway insiders!

Trump knows people in real estate and people in show business, and he is his own adviser, by his own boast. He, more than the rest, is going to need help in getting help. How do you find people able to renegotiate every treaty on the books, which is the core of his foreign policy?

Let alone staffing a government, Trump will have difficulty in staffing even the transition team, so vital in a smooth transfer of power. So much to learn, which is hard when you are stuck in transmission. Does he know that the U.S. Geological Survey is part of the Interior Department, or the Secret Service part of Treasury? Does Sanders know that sensitive areas need career ambassadors, and cronies and buddies are for safe appointments, like Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

There is a long history of presidents who have been hurt or hindered by who they knew when they were elected. Ronald Reagan knew a lot of people and had less than usual trouble in staffing. But even so, his energy transition chief Michel Halbouty, a wildcatter from Texas, was floored when he heard the Department of Energy made and maintains nuclear weapons. Bill Clinton suffered what might be called the “Arkansas deficit” for the first years of his administration.

In the think tanks, left and right, former office holders and those itching to hold office hang out writing op-eds, making speeches and hoping they are headed for government. The has-beens and never-weres are rested and ready.

Trump, with no contacts where he would need them, would blunder, mistaking businessmen for statesmen. He could fall prey to a right-wing think tank, like the Heritage Foundation. Retired military also have agendas, and are keen to implement them on militarily-challenged new presidents.

Cruz is in danger of being taken in by extreme guys like Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, and neocon Elliott Abrams, who urged another neophyte, George W. Bush, into the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Sanders is the man to thrill a bearded-and-sandaled crew from the universities. Maybe some advice from perennial man of the people Ralph Nader.

Hillary will bring out the human equivalent of the best of the political thrift shops: good in their day– yesterday.

The job fair opens Nov. 9.

The Body Language of This Election

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By Llewellyn King

Whenever I go out to dinner lately, along with the first sip of wine, I’m served a pre-appetizer: a short, dispiriting conversation about the politics of the moment, complete with a special kind of head-shaking and eye-rolling that has been perfected for this election season.

First the diner’s head is lowered slightly and shaken slowly from side to side. Then the eyes are raised, as though in supplication by a puppy that has done something wrong but doesn’t know what: What did we do to deserve this?

Donald Trump elicits the most severe reaction. People quickly agree that he is not only unsuitable for high office but quite possibly bonkers, stark-raving mad, round the twist — whatever you call the unbalanced in colloquial speech.

Next comes the Ted Cruz shudder. After the shaking of the head over Trump comes a nervous, whole-body response to the mention of Cruz. It begins in the shoulders and migrates down to the pelvis while the head is stationary, having been stilled after shaking at the thought of Trump. Nobody suggests that Cruz is bonkers but quite the opposite, the extreme opposite. In whispers, the Cruz shudderers say “he is clever” and, ominously, “he has an agenda.” Cruz, it is intimated, is in touch with forces beyond he grave, and on the wrong side of that.

John Kasich doesn’t make the grade for dinner gyrations. With a little shake of the head and shrug of the shoulder, he is dismissed.

On to the Big Sigh.

The Big Sigh is reserved for discussion of Hillary Clinton. It is preceded by the “don’t make me laugh” expulsion of breath over Bernie Sanders. Devout liberals keep Sanders alive in conversation for a few moments, saying they like his views on health care or taxing the rich. But he is gone with the first full exhalation.

The real sighing is for Hillary, the choice of last resort. People declare they will vote for her then elaborate her failings. One is told, “she is overly ambitious,” “she is a terrible manager,” “she has baggage,” “she looks worn out,” and “she has to explain Libya.”

Clearly, she has locked up the hold-your-nose vote.

Look, I haven’t just been supping on sushi in Georgetown, although I’m guilty there, or on Dover sole at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, guilty again, but also on mac and cheese at the humble, working-class Harris Grille in Coventry, RI, and barbecue at Calhoun’s in Knoxville, Tenn.

What amazes is where are the millions who turn out to support Trump so vigorously? Why don’t I run into them, hunt high and low though I may? Are they all sitting at home waiting for a pollster to call so they can give their man further ammo?

Where are the Cruzers? Are they out there testing the fallibility of Obamacare, or demonstrating against world conquest by Planned Parenthood? The rot starts with women’s health and ends with socialized medicine, don’t you understand?

At least one can find the Bernie Sanders legions. They are the young people with the special cellphone posture; who have turned themselves into question marks as they crouch over their devices, looking into the future on their tiny screens.

When they unwind in middle age to look around them, freed of the millennial stoop, will they morph into Republicans? Will there be any Republicans after Trump and Cruz have worked their magic?

What, I wonder, will we be doing at dinner parties after the Republican National Convention in Cleveland? Will we be doing the Trump headshake and confused eye or the Cruz full-body shudder?

After the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, the Big Sigh is predictable at dinner tables across the nation.

In November, after electing President Unsuitable, we will all be holding our heads in a kind mute astonishment. — For InsideSources

Misadventures of Howard Hughes Can Teach Electric Utilities

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By Llewellyn King

Howard Hughes, a pioneer in movie making and aviation (which informed his cantilevered underwire bra design for actress Jane Russell), was blindsided by disruptive technology. Electric utilities might want to heed Hughes’s history as they deal with future shock.

Hughes believed that his 1930 silent movie “Hell’s Angels” — which has some of the finest flying sequences ever shot — could make it even as the age of talkies was dawning. But he was in error; he had remake the movie with a sound track at huge expense.

Something similar happened to Hughes with the H-4 Hercules, the giant, wooden flying boat — nicknamed the “Spruce Goose” by the press — which he built during World War II. Eight reciprocating engines were no match for the potential offered on the horizon by jet engines. And spruce was no match for the superior aluminum alloys that had been developed during the war.

Leaders in the electric utility industry know full well that times are changing. But are they making brilliant silent movies when the talkies are around the corner, so to speak?

Dealing with change is especially hard for utilities because they are in a real-time business. The juice must flow 24-7, which means the new has to integrate seamlessly with the old. Shutting down to retool, as Hughes did with “Hell’s Angels,” is not an option.

Yet in the 46 years that I’ve been writing about the utility industry, I’ve never seen such upheaval, ergo such challenges. There is no aspect of the industry which isn’t beset by technology at the gate: computing and artificial intelligence; drones for line surveillance and security; 3D printing (additive manufacturing) for repairs; superior data from smart meters; and aggressive growth from competitors on the roof – in the form of solar panels — and in the marketplace.

But, to my mind, the most-daunting challenge facing the industry is flat or declining electric demand. For investor-owned utilities, which provide 80 percent of the nation’s electricity, this challenge, this reality has been masked by the good performance of their stocks on Wall Street, which owes a lot to low interest rates and volatility in the market, not to the long-term prospects for investor-owned companies. For now, it is the utility paradox.

The industry, through the Edison Electric Institute, has built a superb lobbying arm that can seek legislative remedies for its troubles — as it did when dividends were under attack. But there are no legislative fixes for an industry in market turmoil, abetted by technological disruption.

There is more hope for relief from regulators. Increasingly, the industry is focused on state commissions: it wants relief from the downside of rooftop solar; relief from intrusive and misleading marketers of solar products; and, above all, protection of the grid’s existing infrastructure.

Additionally, not all technology is disruptive. Utility solar farms are an economic and technological success. Storage is attracting innovators and may yet get a breakthrough. There is the hope that new load may come through electric vehicles — although growth there could be stunted by cheap oil. It behooves the industry to push for better recharging, particularly inductive charging, and to advertise more electric consumption as a remedy for air pollution from the automobile tailpipe.

In 1974, I worked with the then chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, the late Dixy Lee Ray, on an energy study for President Richard Nixon. The study advocated more electrification of transportation – and we had railroads in mind first and foremost. The United States has a few miles of electrified railway in the Midwest and the Amtrak corridor from Washington to Boston – far less electrified railway than other developed countries.

The railroads got away from the electric utilities, and they won’t be corralled now. But there is a powerful environmental and social case for electrifying cars; creating a moral imperative to drive electric, if refueling is solved — and I don’t mean hanging an extension cord out the kitchen window. South Korea has buses that refuel through induction-charging plates at bus stops; smaller batteries, frequent charging.

It will be a lot easier for utilities to argue for regulatory relief to protect their social and shareholder responsibilities if they are extending their social value. — For InsideSources

A Third Way to Fix the Undocumented Workers Problem

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By Llewellyn King

Sometimes a better idea is so obvious and so simple that it is overlooked.

For example, it took automobile manufacturers nearly 100 years to realize that drivers and passengers might like to drink something on their journeys, and might need a place in their vehicles to put their drinks. Then they did not get there without a shove from a chain of convenience stores, which started giving away simple plastic devices that clipped onto a window — woe betide you if you inadvertently opened the window.

According to one man, and his band of dedicated followers, that is what is happening with the immigration debate. He does not propose to solve the issue, but rather to defuse it; to introduce a “third way” which will help those who live in fear of a knock on the door from deportation officers, as well as those who bear the cost of their illegal status.

Illegal immigrants — or undocumented immigrants, if you prefer the gentler term — live in what is, in effect, a kind of open prison. They dare not leave the United States because they cannot return. They flit in the shadows, imposing huge costs on local communities for education, healthcare, housing, policing and prisons.

The man with the idea as simple as a cup holder is Mark Jason, 77, a fiscal conservative, who lives in Malibu, Calif. For six years, he has been at the helm of the Immigrant Tax Inquiry Group, an organization he created and finances.

The core of Jason’s plan is to issue illegal immigrants who are working or want to work with a 10-year, special work permit that can be renewed. No amnesty; no citizenship, nor talk of mass-citizenship. The permit holders and their families would be able to leave the country and return, but that is just part of the plan.

There is a caveat, and it is the key to the plan: A 5-percent tax would be levied on both the workers and the employers, which would raise $176 billion over a 10-year period. Instead of going into general revenue, that money would be employed where the illegal immigrants are distorting local economies.

“The model creates $100 billion to act as a financial salve to help heal our immigration issues, and $76 billion to be used for our needed infrastructure,” Jason said, adding, “We calculate that if we allocate 40 percent of the total revenue of $176 billion, we can create over 1.4 million American jobs at $50,000 each in a wide spectrum of fields, including health, education, law enforcement and construction.”

Under the plan, he said, “we would get people out of the emergency rooms and into healthcare plans.”

Gone would be the 18-percent “nanny tax,” which few employers or immigrants actually pay. Gone too, for the most part, would be the more important Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN), which Jason, a former Internal Revenue Service special agent and university budget officer, says accounts for the loss of more than $50 billion over 10 years in fraud. Fraud occurs, for example, when ITIN tax filers claim imaginary dependents for excessive tax credits.

Anyone can get an ITIN number, and many undocumented workers paying ITIN tax believe that it is a path of sorts to legality; that one day, they will be able to show they have worked, paid taxes and, therefore, are upstanding people worthy of citizenship.

Jason sees himself as a man who fixes things. After graduating from high school in Mexico in the 1950s, he learned to fix diesel engines because he was appalled by the pollution from their exhaust – pollution he found to be worse than that in his native Los Angeles. He also studied animal husbandry, so that he could try to fix the problem of “scrawny cattle and hogs” in Mexico.

In 2007, Jason heard that the California State University system did not have the funds to admit 8,000 new students. “That was the system that gave me the two distinctly different majors that helped me throughout life, and I wanted other students to have the same opportunity,” he said. So he worked on a state tax reform fix.

Now Jason, who has held briefings in Washington, needs to find a member of Congress who will write a bill and introduce it. — For InsideSources