So what is President Trump’s long-awaited new plan for Afghanistan? In a half-hour prime-time speech, he didn’t really say. Trump started out by complaining a bit, saying that he had been dealt “a bad and very complex hand,” but one he’d fix because “I’m a problem solver.” The solution, however, was pretty vague. Here were the main changes he announced:

• We will shift from a time-based strategy to one based on conditions. In other words, we may just stay in Afghanistan forever.
• We will no longer talk about numbers of troops. This is most likely because the increase in troops he approved was so minuscule as to be pointless.
• Trump will bring to bear all elements of American power: diplomatic, economic, military. We’ve been doing this for the past decade, but whatevs.
• There will be no more coddling of Pakistan. How? By threatening to cut off money, it sounds like.
• There will be no more micromanagement from Washington. The subtext here is that if we don’t make progress, we should blame Mattis, not Trump.
• The rules of engagement will be loosened, though it’s unclear how.
• There will be no more nation building. We’re killing bad guys, and that’s all.
• But we’ll keep giving lots of money to Afghanistan for, um, bation nuilding.
• “Victory will have a clear definition,” Trump said, though he didn’t really say what that is. However, it appears to mean that ISIS and al-Qaeda are wiped out, the Taliban is transformed into a bunch of moderates, and there is no possibility of new terrorist groups emerging. That sounds good, but it’s just hot air. It will never happen.

All snark aside, I have no idea what this means. There were no details, just a lot of generalized tough talk. Trump basically promised to accept nothing less than total victory, but there seems to be very little in his plan that’s different from what we’re doing already. The only potentially new item was his promise to force Pakistan to stop giving a safe haven to terrorists. We’ll see what that means in practice.

He did, however, take credit for our recent success in Mosul, which certainly takes some chutzpah. The Mosul offensive was entirely an Obama operation, and one that Trump had nothing but contempt for in the past. But it worked, so now it’s a Trump victory.

We didn’t get a total eclipse here in Southern California, but that only lasts a couple of hours anyway. So why not visit this summer and enjoy our lovely beaches? You can spend days or weeks enjoying our golden sunshine. Doesn’t that really sound better?

Somehow, Donald Trump can always find a new way to be stupid. How does he do it?

In this moment, he became president pic.twitter.com/mQNrG7LlsP

— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) August 21, 2017

Here’s a fascinating bit of political science research. It’s a few months old, but I just recently found out about it. In Texas, names are placed on the ballot in different orders depending on the county. The order is selected randomly, which allows an examination of whether being first on the ballot matters very much. Darren Grant of Sam Houston State University did exactly that, and he found that it really, really makes a difference:

Across all twenty-four contests, the effect is invariably positive and, with two exceptions in runoff elections, statistically significant. The smallest effects are found in high-profile, high information races: the Republican primary for U.S. Senator, which featured the incumbent, John Cornyn; the governor’s race, which featured long-time Attorney General Greg Abbott; and Land Commissioner, which featured well-known political newcomer George P. Bush. In these races the ballot order effect is only one or two percentage points.

Larger estimates obtain for most “medium-profile, medium-information” races such as Comptroller, Railroad Commissioner, or the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senator. Most of these fall in a fairly tight band that ranges from three to five percentage points. Estimates are even larger in the low-profile, low-information judicial elections, generally ranging from seven to ten percentage points. Overall, the ballot order effect tends to be larger in contests that receive less attention and in which voters are likely to know less about the candidates on the ballot.

Here this is in colorful chart form:

In medium and low-profile races, the ballot order effect is big enough that it might decide races all by itself. Even in high-profile races, “one or two percentage points” can be a pretty big effect. There are plenty of races for governor or senator that have been won by less.

In states that don’t randomize ballot order, this means that the first candidate on the ballot has a huge advantage. And this could be true even in states that do. If you got lucky and ended up at the top of the ballot in Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio, you’d get an advantage in areas with millions of votes, while your opponent would get an advantage in areas with only thousands of votes. And there are certain unusual circumstances where the ballot order effect can be truly massive:

In an ironic twist of fate, we were recently able to [test our hypothesis] with the March, 2016 Texas Republican primary, held just after the first draft of this paper was completed. Featuring a highly visible Presidential race, it drew twice as many voters as in 2014—and had contests for three Supreme Court positions, one of which was between Paul Green and Rick Green, two men with common first names and identical last names. It was The Perfect Storm, and our logic implies that this should lead to large ballot order effects. This is immediately evident in the histogram of county vote shares presented in Figure 2(a), without even looking at ballot order: in a race won with 52.1% of the statewide vote, virtually no county’s vote was nearly evenly split. Instead Paul Green’s vote shares are bifurcated into two clusters, one around 40%, and another around 60%, suggesting a ballot order effect approaching twenty percentage points. The regression results in Figure 2(c) confirm this: the coefficient estimate is 19.4 percentage points. We have never seen a ballot order effect this large, and may never again.

Since different counties had different ballot orders, this might not have made a difference in the final result. But with an effect that gigantic, getting even a little bit lucky with the ballot order in the biggest cities might have made the difference.

I’m not sure if there’s a policy answer to this. At the very least, ballot order should always be randomized. Beyond that, Grant suggests that if you’re not sure who to vote for, vote for the person at the bottom of the ballot. They could use the help.

Sure, sure, you can do better at the NASA site, with all their fancy telescopes and stuff. But what you really want to know is what the eclipse looked like in my backyard with a cheap camera. Right? Well, here you go:

UPDATE: Hey, this is a perfect opportunity to try out my camera’s HDR function, which cleverly takes multiple shots at different exposures and then combines them. In theory, this means the camera can properly expose both the sun and the surrounding trees. In theory:

Jeez, you really have to hold the camera steady for HDR to work, don’t you? I’m not so good at that. And I guess there’s a limit to just how much contrast HDR can handle. Either that or I need to learn more about it. I just switched the HDR setting to ON and fired away. Oh well. At least I got a moderately interesting effect out of it.

Hopper seems to be OK, thank Ra, but after her close call Hilbert insisted on watching the eclipse with proper eye protection:

Hilbert seems to have a mistaken notion of where the sun is right now, but other than that everything worked out fine.

Bryan Woolston via ZUMA

This weekend the Washington Post ran a story about a huge Confederate statue in Louisville that was dismantled and shipped off to the town of Brandenburg, which thought it might be a good tourist attraction. Apparently everyone was pretty happy about it except for Mildred Brown, an African-American seamstress who’s lived there for 50 years:

She recalled telling him [the judge executive in Meade County] that having the monument was a mistake. It was a symbol of dark times — dark enough that she no longer went to the riverfront. “It doesn’t unify us,” she said. “It separates us.”

He recalled telling her: “Don’t worry, we’re not going to let people come down there and throw a fit and have Confederate flags and call names.” He also said the monument was about preserving a part of history with a lot of nuance. “It had a whole lot more to it than slavery,” he said.

I don’t want to pretend to be naive, but when Southerners talk about these statues representing their heritage, or their history, or their culture, what heritage do they think it represents? Let’s assume they don’t buy the argument that these statues are mostly 20th century monuments to Jim Crow and white terror. Fine. They’re certainly monuments to the Civil War. I can understand why northern states would build monuments to the war, but why would Southern states do it? It was a war of treason. It was a war to protect slavery, even if there were other catalysts too. It was a war of white supremacy. It was a war of personal bravery in defense of the indefensible. It was a war they lost.

From the perspective of 2017, what exactly is there to honor about that? What’s the party line here?

And so it begins:

No, wait, don’t look at it!

Damn.

This is, once again, apropos of nothing in particular. I just happened to come across it:

Household debt wasn’t the driver of the financial collapse in the United States, but it certainly played a role. And since the Great Recession, households have delevered considerably, from 100 percent to about 80 percent.

But in Canada, leverage went up during the recession and has kept going up ever since. They’re now above the highest point of the US housing bubble. Is this a problem?

Did the press go overboard on its coverage of Hillary Clinton’s email server?

She was under FBI investigation as a presumptive party nominee. Not sure how that isn’t a story. https://t.co/b2wVevg5NB

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 21, 2017

I wish reporters would honestly engage with this question. I don’t think anyone has ever suggested that the emails and the FBI investigation weren’t a story. Of course they were. The question is, were they this big a story?

Or this big?

This question isn’t important because it’s worthwhile to relitigate 2016 forever, but because it matters for the future. The press got badly played on the Clinton Foundation story, which was almost completely baseless, and they got played only slightly less on the email story, which was kept alive by a calculated campaign to drip information to the press every week—mostly from sources that should have set alarm bells ringing instead.

Pointing out the failures of Hillary Clinton’s campaign is fine but nonresponsive. The question isn’t whether there were lots of things that decided the 2016 race—there were—or whether Clinton’s emails should have been covered at all—of course they should have been. The question is about editorial judgment in an era of widespread media manipulation. If we don’t want 2020 to be like 2016, political reporters should be willing to ask some hard questions about how and why Hillary Clinton’s emails got such massively outsized attention.