I don’t have a lot to say about the substance of Joe Kennedy’s SOTU response, but I feel like I have to at least mention it. I’ve long been of the opinion that (a) it’s impossible to give a good SOTU response, and (b) it should be done in front of an audience. Well, Kennedy gave a terrific response and he did it in front of an audience. So it’s not impossible after all.

I might as well be up front here: I missed a chunk of Trump’s speech and was only listening to the rest with half an ear. It struck me as a bog ordinary Trump speech, the only difference being that someone else wrote it and Trump stuck to the script. He interrupted the speech eight times to introduce a full 18 different American heroes, surely a record for a SOTU, and most the rest was just Trump boasting about how great America was after a year of Trump’s reign.

Naturally there was some culture war stuff: standing for the national anthem, Americans are dreamers too, and the ranks of illegal immigrants are full of killers and gang thugs. Offhand, I can’t think of any truly new proposals for the coming year. Nothing but a few brief tough-guy platitudes about North Korea. Nothing about Afghanistan or Syria except for some bragging about how he single-handedly defeated ISIS. Nothing about Russia sanctions. Nothing much about veterans except that he supports them 100 percent. Nothing about opioids except that he’s against them. Nothing much about trade except that “the era of economic surrender is over.” Etc.

So…it was OK. The culture war stuff is going to piss off a lot of people for no real gain. The rest of it sounded fine, and I’m sure most non-liberals were OK with it. The speech didn’t accomplish much, but neither did Trump make any mistakes. A transcript is here.

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10:29 pm – Trump’s peroration is pretty good. It would be a lot better if I thought he believed a word of it.

10:19 pm – This whole speech is little more than a recap of all the stuff Trump has been talking about for the past year. It’s more like one of his rallies than a typical SOTU.

10:10 pm – Another heroic story.

10:09 pm – Trump defeated ISIS in only one year! It’s a good thing he had a great plan from his predecessor that he could continue.

10:05 pm – How many stories of heroic Americans are we going to get tonight? I haven’t been counting, but it’s sure been a helluva lot more than usual. Is it impolite to think that there ought to be a limit to this stuff?

10:04 pm – Trump is dedicated to winning the opioid war. It would be nice if he put his money where his mouth is.

10:02 pm – Lotsa immigration stuff. Nothing new, though.

9:54 pm – “Americans are dreamers too.” FFS. Is this the 2018 version of “All lives matter”?

9:51 pm – Sorry, but I had to suddenly take care of something, so I’ve barely heard anything Trump said for the past 15 minutes. But has he talked at all about concrete proposals he wants Congress to take up? That’s usually what the SOTU is about.

9:36 pm – Clean coal! I swear, Trump thinks that the official name of everything that comes out of a coal mine.

9:28 pm – I have suddenly switched all the timestamps to Eastern time. Sorry about that.

9:23 pm – On the other hand, I’m not sure that wages are rising quite as strongly as Trump seems to think. Here’s the raw data.

9:22 pm – The economy is doing great blah blah blah. There’s not much point in fact checking this. Trump’s details might be off, but yes, the economy is doing fine. He said something about manufacturing jobs, but I didn’t quite catch it. Regardless, here’s the basic data showing the growth in manufacturing workers over the past few years. We currently have about 200,000 more manufacturing workers than we did a year ago, an increase of 1.6 percent.

9:17 pm – After his tribute to Steve Scalise, Trump says it’s “not enough to come together only times of tragedy.” Is this the start of the much feared appeal to bipartisanship that the New York Times reported this afternoon? “His most fervent supporters,” they say, “are anxious that he will squander the most high-profile moment of his presidency with a soft speech that bends more to the predilections of the political establishment in Washington and less to the populist army that sent him there to drain the swamp.”

9:05 pm – The president is in the house.

9:01 pm – As usual, the Secretary of Agriculture is our designated survivor.

8:58 pm – Melania Trump has made her first public appearance since the Stormy Daniels story broke. CNN reports that Melania arrived separately from Donald, but they will be departing together. ZOMG!

8:57 pm – What else? Marcy Wheeler reports that the Pentagon “has decided that the effort in Afghanistan is failing so badly that a complete lid must be placed on information that provides details that can be used to document that failure.” Surely that’s hyperbole? It’s true that the Defense Department’s inspector general has been reporting on various metrics of progress for the past couple of years. It’s also true that the Defense Department has told them that although the most recent numbers are unclassified, “they are not releasable to the public.” That is odd, isn’t it? But perhaps this is just part of Trump’s canny strategy of never letting the enemy know our plans? That must be it.

8:52 pm – So what’s going on while we wait for Donald Trump’s triumphant entrance? Let’s see. Howard Fineman reports that Trump is formulating a Plan B in case Robert Mueller doesn’t absolve him of all his sins. The plan is to “discredit the investigation and the FBI without officially removing the leadership.” Huh. That sounds like the current Plan A to me. So what’s Plan C? “Trump is even talking to friends about the possibility of asking Attorney General Jeff Sessions to consider prosecuting Mueller and his team.” Now that’s cooking with gas! Prosecute Mueller for having the gall to investigate Trump! I love it.

8:48 pm – The Trump motorcade is heading for the capitol!

Since I made a big hoo-ha over the weekend about still being an old-school blogger blah blah blah, I guess I have to liveblog the State of the Union address tonight. I’m totally not up for this, but hey, this is what you guys pay me for. So come back around 9 pm Eastern and I’ll begin the snark.

Seriously. That’s the answer. The Milky Way wrapper adhered to the book via static charge for 42 hours. It’s been pretty warm and dry around here lately.¹

¹Also, oddly enough, neither of the cats were interested in making it into a cat toy.

This chart shows the rate of women who die in childbirth or, more generally, of pregnancy-related complications:

Here is the same chart for the United States. Due to differences in methodology, you can’t directly compare the raw numbers for Europe and the US. But you can certainly see which way the trend is going:

The top chart is adapted from a ProPublica story published last year. Click the link for all the gruesome details, but the bottom line is that no one truly knows why maternal mortality has been rising in the US for three decades:

The reasons for higher maternal mortality in the U.S. are manifold. New mothers are older than they used to be, with more complex medical histories. Half of pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned, so many women don’t address chronic health issues beforehand. Greater prevalence of C-sections leads to more life-threatening complications. The fragmented health system makes it harder for new mothers, especially those without good insurance, to get the care they need. Confusion about how to recognize worrisome symptoms and treat obstetric emergencies makes caregivers more prone to error.

….Earlier this year, an analysis by the CDC Foundation of maternal mortality data from four states identified more than 20 “critical factors” that contributed to pregnancy-related deaths. Among the ones involving providers: lack of standardized policies, inadequate clinical skills, failure to consult specialists and poor coordination of care. The average maternal death had 3.7 critical factors.

….“It’s never just one thing,” said Roberta Gold, a member of the Council on Patient Safety in Women’s Health Care, whose daughter and unborn grandson died from a pregnancy-related blood clot in 2010. “It’s always a cascading combination of things. It’s a slow-motion train wreck.”

This may all be true, but other rich countries have somehow managed to reduce these slow-motion train wrecks by nearly half since 1990. It’s hardly an intractable problem.

It’s insane that the maternal death rate in the US has more than doubled since 1987. It’s even more insane that black women die at higher rates than in Uruguay, Kazakhstan, China, Vietnam, and Libya, just to name a few. What the hell is wrong with us?

It’s winter,¹ and that means it’s time for our backyard squirrel to dig up its buried pine cones and enjoy the fruits of autumn’s labor. And that’s exactly what he’s doing. She’s doing? Can you tell male and female squirrels apart by coloring or something? Either way, he or she made quick work of this pine cone.

¹Yes, yes, it’s 80 degrees here in Southern California. Squirrels don’t care. They still think it’s pretty chilly.

Atrios is unimpressed with self-driving delivery vehicles:

Like Segways, I think the usefulness of all of these self-driving ideas (even if they work!) is much more limited than people think….Self-driving vehicles have a “last 200 feet” problem, and delivery vehicles have a “last 20 feet” problem. Whether pizzas or groceries, if it doesn’t come right to my door it’s a lot less appealing.

FWIW, I agree—although it’s always possible that the Silicon Valley geniuses behind this have clever solutions that I haven’t thought of. Ditto for self-driving taxis and self-driving buses.

But forget all that. I think that the biggest market for self-driving cars by far will be—brace yourselves—ordinary people who like the idea of not having to drive their cars. That’s it. You tell your car where to go, and then spend the trip chattering on the phone or watching TV or posting nasty tweets or reading Eschaton. Lots of people claim that they actually like driving cars, but most of them are either lying or delusional. Even if you drive a Ferrari—in fact, especially if you drive a Ferrari—it’s just no fun driving on jammed freeways or packed city streets or long stretches of interstate highway. We’d all rather be doing other things.

So that’s it. Forget all the weird little applications that startup companies are pitching in order to sound cool. The real market is the 200 million ordinary folks who would just as soon spend their commuting time amusing themselves instead of cursing at traffic.

Ruy Teixeira has performed his own analysis of recent elections and offers this conclusion about the Alabama Senate race won by Doug Jones:

Jones’s triumph was not attributable to his strong showing among black voters alone, or even a combination of black voters and white college graduates. My analysis indicates that Jones benefited from a margin swing of more than 30 points among white non-college voters, relative to the 2016 presidential race in the state. The swing toward Jones was for sure even larger among white college graduates. But without the hefty swing among the white non-college population, particularly women, there is no way Jones would have the state, or even come close.

It was the huge swing among white voters who couldn’t stomach Roy Moore that powered Jones to victory. This doesn’t make the organizational or turnout efforts among blacks any less important, but it does mean that it wasn’t really the key to Jones’s victory. It was white votes.

Now, the circumstances in Alabama were obviously pretty special. Moore was not as popular as your usual white Republican in the first place, and after the sexual assault allegations he became such a pariah that it was at least possible for a Democrat to win. Obviously Democrats can’t count on that sort of thing very often. However, in a longer analysis done for the Center for American Progress, Teixeira and two coauthors argue more generally that the 2016 exit polls badly misjudged the turnout of various demographic groups, and that the white working class is actually more important than even conventional wisdom has it:

This is controversial for two reasons:

• It suggests that working-class whites were a far bigger share of total turnout than anyone guessed.
• Latino turnout wasn’t bigger than the exit polls say. It was smaller.

We’re going to see a lot of reports like this one over the next few years as more data becomes available. In this case, the authors based their conclusions on “a multitude of publicly available data sources including the American Communities Survey (ACS), the November supplement of the Current Population Survey (CPS), the American National Election Study (ANES), the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (CCES), our own post-election polling, and voter files from several states.”

I don’t have the chops to judge the methodology in this report, but others can and will. The key thing here is to conduct this argument without ideological blinders. Latino lobbies aren’t going to like the idea that their turnout is lower than everyone assumes. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party isn’t going to like the idea that working-class whites still retain enough power that they have to courted. And maybe it will turn out that Teixeira is wrong about this. But burying our heads in the sand won’t help. Much of politics is about passion and vision, but this particular part isn’t. It’s about detached analysis and the best possible data. Let the games begin.

OK, physics nerds, here’s your chance for glory. I tossed an empty fun-size Milky Way wrapper on the floor, but instead it stuck to a book on a nearby shelf. It is hanging there purely by the power of static electricity, not because it’s got sticky chocolate residue on it:

How long will it stay there? I want no excuses about not knowing what the weather is like or how much the wrapper weighs or precisely what kind of paper the publisher used for the book jacket for Quicksilver. I just want educated guesses on this question that’s of critical importance to ordinary citizens. What do you say?

My brother weaseled out by claiming it was “really more of an engineering question.” I hope I can expect better from my readers.

Six months ago President Trump reluctantly signed the “Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act,” aka the Russian Sanctions Act. As punishment for interference in the 2016 election, the act requires the president to impose a variety of sanctions on Russia and Russian individuals. The deadline for this was up yesterday, but Trump instead announced that he didn’t really feel like doing anything:

Today, we have informed Congress that this legislation and its implementation are deterring Russian defense sales. Since the enactment of the…legislation, we estimate that foreign governments have abandoned planned or announced purchases of several billion dollars in Russian defense acquisitions.

Well OK then! As near as I can tell, the real loophole in the act is that although the president is required to impose certain sanctions, he has to do so only “with respect to any person that the President determines” has done something bad. So Trump merely has to determine that no one has done anything, and then sit back and do nothing. Trump could also argue that the whole thing is an unconstitutional imposition on his plenary power to run foreign policy, but I guess he’s not bothering with that.

So here’s the interesting question. This bill passed 419-3 in the House and 98-2 in the Senate. In other words, virtually every Republican in Congress supported it. Now Trump says he’s not going to bother with it. So far, there’s been barely a peep about this. Here’s The Hill:

Democrats excoriated Trump, whose campaign is the subject of a special counsel investigation over possible collusion with Russia, for declining to follow Congress’ directive. Some Republicans also expressed concerns about the lack of new sanctions.

….Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Mnuchin he hopes the administration issues new sanctions soon, and said in a statement that “it is clear the administration is working in good faith, and I am committed to applying pressure, as needed, to ensure further implementation.”

This is yet another bit of evidence that Republicans have fallen ever further into the Trump black hole over the past six months. In August they were willing to openly and unanimously defy him by imposing sanctions he opposed. Today, when he blows them off in the most cavalier way possible, a few Republicans mumble a bit about Russia being a bad actor but then shrug their shoulders. Whatever Trump wants to do is OK with them.

Republicans have voted to release the Nunes memo! omg omg omg! Maybe Trump will project it onto the ceiling of the House chamber during tomorrow’s State of the Union address. Wouldn’t that be amazeballs!?!

I am so excited I’ll barely be able to sleep tonight. This is going to be the biggest political own of all time!!!