Black Ivory – "No If's, And's, or But's" [sic] (1972)

There’s no ifs ands or buts about it

I’ve got to learn to live without you now

If Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election, there’s a pretty good chance Donald Trump would have won in 2020.

If you’re a Trump supporter, would you have taken that trade-off?

What about you Trump haters?  Would you change the outcome of the 2016 election knowing that the 2020 election might have come out differently as a result?

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Before I begin to speculate about what would have happened in the 2020 presidential election if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election instead of Donald Trump, I want to make one think perfectly clear.

You should NOT conclude that if I say that I conclude that Clinton would have won a hypothetical 2020 rematch with Trump that I would have wanted her to win – or vice versa. 

Déjà vu all over again?

Let’s imagine that I was writing about who I think will win Super Bowl LV.  If I say Tampa Bay will win  because Tom Brady is the G.O.A.T. and the Bucs will playing at home, that doesn’t necessarily mean I want Tampa Bay to win – and if I say Kansas City will prevail because Patrick Mahomes is simply unstoppable and the Chiefs are the best team in the NFL from top to bottom, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I want Kansas City to win.    

You may think that it’s a waste of time to speculate about whether Clinton would have beaten Trump in 2020 if she had beaten him in 2016.

You may also think that my analysis is less than convincing.

If so, so be it.  But don’t reject my conclusion because you think that I wanted it to come out that way, and that what I’ve written is merely a rationalization of my predetermined conclusion.  

Nothing could be further from the truth.    

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In the last 2 or 3 lines, I did some major speculating about what might have happened if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election.  (Scroll down to read that post if you missed it.)

In a nutshell, my conclusions included these:

1.  We might have as few as six sitting Supreme Court justices today.

2.  We probably would have a Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a Republican-controlled Senate between 2016 and 2020.

3.  The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 would likely not have become law – no way a President Clinton would have signed such a bill.

4.  The 2020 election would have been a rematch of the 2016 election – Clinton vs. Trump, part two.

5.  The 2020 election would have almost certainly turned on what voters thought about the incumbent’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.  

In this 2 or 3 lines, I’m going to address that last question by evaluating the objective and subjective factors that I believe would have had the greatest influence on how the voters perceived Clinton’s response to covid-19.

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The most significant objective marker of whether a strategy for dealing with the pandemic was effective or ineffective is the number of covid-related deaths.  (The number of hospitalizations and the number of cases are also important numbers, but I think the number of deaths far outweighs any other measure in significance.)

To date, there have been 400,000-plus deaths attributed to covid-19 in the United States.  (Some think that number overstates the actual death toll – others think it’s an understatement.  I’m using the official numbers because I don’t know anything else to do.)

That’s a lot of deaths, of course – but even a high number doesn’t necessarily indicate that the government (or a President) has done a bad job.  After all, the number could have been much higher.

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Let’s begin by considering whether there likely would have been significantly more, significantly fewer, or about the same number of covid-related deaths if Clinton had been the President instead of Trump.

I’m sure we can agree that she would likely have handled things very differently.  For example, I think that she would have pushed mask-wearing much harder than Trump did, and likely would have tried to keep restaurants and schools from reopening  – can we agree on that?

Most people would assume that a more pro-mask, stay-at-home approach by the federal government would have resulted in fewer covid cases and fewer deaths.  Seems like a reasonable assumption, right?

But it’s interesting to look at one set of facts that is very relevant to the issue – namely, the covid-19 death rates in “blue” vs. “red” states.

Comparing those numbers doesn’t lead to a definitive conclusion, of course.  Dividing the states that way is a gross oversimplification – not all blue states are the same, and not all red states are the same.  

But generally speaking, the state and local governments in blue states were more insistent when it came to limiting indoor dining and other gatherings, kept schools closed longer, and so on.

And while there are clearly other factors that might have had an effect on covid death rates – everything from the average age of a state’s residents to population density to even the weather – surely most people would expect a state that was tougher when it came to enforcing mask-wearing and social distancing to have fewer covid cases and deaths.   

But the four states with the highest number of covid-related deaths were all blue states in the northeastern part of the country – New Jersey (which has had 236 deaths per 100,000 residents), New York (220), Massachusetts (206), and Rhode Island (201).

The next highest-ranking state when it comes to covid-19 death rates is a red state, Mississppi (197 covid deaths per 100,000 residents), which is barely ahead of blue state Connecticut (194).

The next four states are all red ones – South Dakota (193), North Dakota (188), Louisiana (185), and Arizona (171) – followed by blue state Illinois (165) and “purple” state Pennsylvania (163).

I find these numbers very surprising.  For example, the South Dakota governor consistently refused to mandate masks even when infection rates shot up dramatically.  Yet the residents of her laissez faire state still suffered fewer deaths per capita than the residents of some of the most restrictive states in the country.

Rather than go down the entire list, I’ll just note that Texas and Florida – two states that have a reputation for being pretty loosey-goosey when it comes to wearing masks and maintaining social distancing – rank right in the middle of the pack, with 122 and 120 covid deaths per 100,000 residents, respectively.  (That puts them in the same ballpark as my home state of Maryland – where schools remain closed, restaurants allow only outdoor dining, and so on.)

The biggest surprise on the list was California, which has suffered 97 covid deaths per 100,000 residents – that’s better than 35 other states, although much worse than its neighbors Oregon and Washington.  (There has been so much in the news about how bad things are in California that I would have thought that state’s death rate was much higher).

Click here if you’d like to see an updated ranking of the states in order of the covid death rate.

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PLEASE don’t misunderstand my point here.  I am NOT saying that it’s a waste of time to wear masks and practice social distancing – as I’ve said before, I’m consistent when it comes to doing both.  

More consistent than the so-called experts have been when it comes to mask-wearing, it would seem.

Last February 27, the director of the CDC told a Congressional committee that healthy people should not wear masks.  Two days later, the Surgeon General tweeted “STOP BUYING MASKS!,” and claimed that masks are not effective in preventing the general public from contracting coronavirus. 

On March 8, Dr. Anthony Fauci told 60 Minutes that “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.”  The CDC did an about-face on April 3 and recommended that Americans wear facial coverings outside of their own households.

But the World Health Organization didn’t recommend the general use of face masks until June 5.

Now some experts are recommending that we wear two masks, or switch to medical-grade N95 masks – although the new CDC director discourages the use of N95 masks, which she believes are too uncomfortable for the average person to tolerate for very long. 

It’s no wonder that people’s opinions about masks are all over the place when the experts can’t make up their mind.

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As I said above, I think it’s reasonable to assume that a President Hillary Clinton – like the governors of California, New York, and other blue states – would have favored a stricter stay-at-home policy than President Trump, who pushed to get schools and businesses reopened. 

Since the death rates in the blue states appear to be no better than the death rates in the red states, it’s not clear that the nationwide death rate would have been significantly reduced if the government had imposed stricter lockdowns.  (Please don’t misunderstand me.  I’m not saying that stricter lockdowns wouldn’t have had an effect – I’m just saying we don’t know for sure.)

What is clear is that such a move would certainly have been very unpopular among much of the population – because it would have meant that unemployment would have been much higher, many more small businesses would have gone bankrupt, and fewer students would have been back in school.

Can you imagine the mishegas in places like Texas and Idaho if the feds and rolled in and ordered everyone to stay at home or else?

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By the way, I think that most people believe that the U.S. has done a worse job managing the pandemic than other countries.  That may not really be the case.

The overall covid death rate in the United States is 127 per 100,000 residents.  Several European countries have higher death rates – including the UK (147 deaths per 100,000 residents).

If you average the death rates in four of the largest European democracies – the UK, France, Italy, and Spain – you get a number that is slightly higher than the death rate in the U.S.  

Did you ever hear that statistic during the recent campaign?  (I didn’t . . . but I was doing my best to avoid all the campaign nonsense last year, so maybe I just missed it.)

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The bottom line is that there’s no way to know whether there would have been a lower covid-19 death rate under our hypothetical President Clinton than there was under our very real President Trump.

I think most people believe that she would have done a better job at controlling the spread of the virus.  I certainly don’t doubt that she would have handled things differently – I’m guessing she would have been more activist, and likely would have pushed the stay-at-home approach harder.

You would think that doing that would have lowered the infection and death rates.  But the numbers say that things weren’t really any better in the blue states that took that approach.  And with the exception of Germany, things weren’t really any better in the large western European democracies either.  So who knows if a different approach would have led to a better outcome?

Once again, I’m not saying that she wouldn’t have done a better job.  I’m just saying that we don’t know that for sure.

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There’s one other aspect of the Trump Administration’s covid-19 strategy that I want to touch on – Operation Warp Speed, which was the name given to the public-private partnership that coordinated efforts to develop and manufacture vaccines and therapeutics.

At first, the vaccine development aspect of Operation Warp Speed seemed a little chaotic.  Nine different companies received billions in either direct or indirect funding, and it was off to the races.

You’ve probably heard that safe and effective viral disease vaccines usually take years to develop.  The unprecedented speed with which not one, but multiple highly effective covid-19 vaccines were developed is even more amazing when you consider that there were extensive previous research attempts to produce vaccines against other coronaviruses (including SARS and MERS) that got nowhere.

From the Washington Post:

[Last February and March] government scientists realized covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, was a “catastrophe in the making,” as one senior administration official recalled.  But they quickly realized some vaccine manufacturers did not share that sense of urgency.

Unsure of how long the outbreak would last, some executives were reluctant to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars or more to develop a vaccine without knowing whether they would have a market when they finished.  Some companies talked about beginning clinical trials in the fall, with the aim of having a vaccine ready by summer 2021.

“The vaccine manufacturers were in a funk,” the senior administration official recalled. “We woke up to that and realized that is not going to fly.”

In early April, [FDA and DHHS officials] began laying the groundwork for what would become Operation Warp Speed. . . .

The thought was that if the government could eliminate most of the financial risk of vaccine development, more companies would be inclined to take on the herculean challenge.  The government would also help speed development by footing the bill to manufacture millions of doses of vaccines without knowing whether they worked, so that normally sequential steps could be completed all at once.

The risky strategy paid off in a big way when Pfizer and Moderna announced shortly after the 2020 election that their vaccines were both highly effective and safe.  (Today we learned that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is also highly effective.)

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It’s hard to believe that any alternative vaccine-development strategy would have born fruit more quickly than Operation Warp Speed did.

Would our hypothetical Clinton Administration have pursued a similar strategy?  Perhaps – but it’s also possible that a less pro-business and more risk-averse President would have insisted on the government having more control over the process.  

That approach would have been at loggerheads with the wishes of Pfizer, the first company to develop an effective vaccine, which had largely been allowed to go its own way by the Operation Warp Speed czar.

From the Washington Post:

Pfizer made a point of not accepting government research funding, a decision its chief executive Albert Bourla said last month on ABC’s “Good Morning America” was “to liberate our scientists from any bureaucracy that could come by accepting money.”  But the company did benefit from the government’s zeal for a vaccine in other ways: it agreed to sell nearly $2 billion worth of vaccines to Warp Speed and was bolstered separately by a strong working relationship with federal regulators.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that a President who was more willing to issue stay-at-home orders and insist on mask-wearing by all might prevented a significant number of covid-caused deaths.  

But if that President had kept a tighter grip on the reins of the vaccine development program, we might not have had those vaccines fas soon – which might have led to a worse net outcome.

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This is all rank speculation, of course.  I happen to believe it is reasonable speculation, but you may disagree – and who knows which of us is right?  

Anyway, let’s cut to the chase.  If Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election, who do I believe would have won a 2020 Clinton-Trump rematch?

Based on the previous discussion, I could assume that there would have roughly the same number of covid deaths under a Clinton administration as there was under a Trump administration.  

You may disagree with that assumption – and you might be right.  

Do you think we might have had 350,000 deaths under a Clinton Administration instead of 400,000?  I’ll give you that without really arguing.

What about 300,000 deaths instead of 400,000?  That’s certainly possible – although I’m not sure what basis there is for assuming that large an effect.  

Let’s go ahead and say 300,000 is the number.  Do you think that the majority of voters would have concluded that President Clinton had done a bang-up job in controlling the pandemic if that had been the number, and therefore deserved to be re-elected?

One problem with that line of argument is that I’m not sure people would have seen 300,000 as a great number.  It’s great compared to 400,000 – I’ll give you that.

But we would have had no way of knowing that her number was 100,000 deaths lower than what it would have been otherwise.  It’s only with 200/20 hindsight that we would say that 300,000 was a good number.

I have a funny feeling that candidate Trump would have tried to make 300,000 deaths the greatest failure by a President in the history of the United States.  (Say what you will about Trump as a President, but he is one hell of a campaigner – as he proved in 2016.)

Not only that, but if you assume that a President Clinton would have battled the pandemic more aggressively, you also have to assume that the economy would have taken an even bigger hit – unemployment would have been higher, more small businesses would have gone kaput, and fewer children would have gone back to school.  (Given that the economy likely wouldn’t have been as strong a year ago under Clinton as it was under Trump, we would have been in the position of needing to dig out of an even bigger hole than it might first appear.)

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I think it would have been close.  

After all, no matter how bad things were after four years of a President Clinton, a lot of voters would have never voted for Trump.  So Clinton probably starts with 48% or so of the vote.

But an equal number would likely have never voted for Clinton.  (Surely you haven’t forgotten that she was just as polarizing a figure as Trump was – very different from nice-guy Joe Biden.)

I think the odds are that Trump would have won a 2020 rematch.  Under our hypothetical scenario, he lost in 2016 but came very, very close to winning.  There’s no reason to think he wouldn’t have at least come close in 2020.  

They say close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.  But if the challenger was close when the 2020 race began, I think that would have been enough to win.  Because I think that the incumbent – whether it was Clinton or Trump – was doomed by the covid-19 pandemic (and the resulting economic downturn) to failure in 2020.    

After all, given the year we just lived through, why in the world would we want to give another four years to whoever was in charge when all hell broke loose?

Which brings us back to the question I asked at the beginning of this long and tedious post.  Assuming that I’m correct – that if Clinton had won the 2016 election, Trump would have won in 2020 – would you have been happier with that hypothetical outcome than with the actual outcome?

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Tell me the truth, boys and girls.  Did you enjoy speculating about what might have been if what actually was wasn’t?  Or did you find the whole exercise a big waste of time?

I’m reminded of the following exchange between Howard Cosell and “Dandy” Don Meredith during a 1970 Monday Night Football broadcast:

Cosell: “If Los Angeles wins, it’s a big one, but San Francisco is still very much in it.”

Meredith: “If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a merry Christmas.”

I think that sums it up perfectly – don’t you?  

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According to Grammarist.com, “The correct spelling of ifs, ands, [or] buts does not involve apostrophes, as these words are plural forms and not possessives or contractions.”

Black Ivory, an oh-so-smooth soul/R&B group that formed in Harlem in 1969, didn’t have access to Grammarist.com, so they used apostrophes in the title of their 1972 song, “No If’s And’s, or But's.”

But they deserve credit for not eschewing the use of an Oxford comma in that song title.

Click here to listen to “No If’s And’s, or But's.”

Lady Gaga – "The Star-Spangled Banner" (2021)

Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Did you watch President Biden’s inauguration on TV last week?

I didn’t – but don’t think that had anything to do with who was (or wasn’t) being inaugurated.

This 2 or 3 lines is about politics, but it’s not political.  Like all 2 or 3 lines posts, it is strictly nonpartisan.  

Of course, some of you will find a partisan implication in what follows.  If you do, that’s on you – because there is no such implication in what I wrote.  (I wrote the damn thing, so I should know.  Right?)

Bernie Sanders at the 2021 inauguration

Of course, some of you would find a partisan implication if I said “Have a nice day!” or “That dress makes you looks fat.”  I could deny it until I was blue in the face, and you wouldn’t believe me.  

So I’m not going to waste any more of my breath. 

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A counterfactual historian attempts to more fully understand an important historical event by thinking about how things would have been different if that event had not happened.

For example, a British historian named Milton Wardman once wrote an essay titled “If Booth Had Missed Lincoln,” which theorizes how American history might have been different if John Wilkes Booth had not assassinated Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in 1865. 

Wardman’s essay didn’t have a happy ending.  He thought that the radical Republicans who dominated Congress in the years immediately after the Civil War and Lincoln would have clashed because Congress would have wanted to severely punish the South while Lincoln would have favored a more forgiving policy.  

Wardman speculated that the House of Representatives might have even ending up impeaching Lincoln, just as they impeached Lincoln’s Vice President and successor, Andrew Johnson, who escaped conviction in the Senate by a single vote.

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Today I’m going to speculate about how the 2020 presidential election might have been different if Hillary Clinton had defeated Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

As I’m sure you recall, Clinton almost did defeat Trump.  If she had only carried Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, she would have won the electoral vote by a 278-260 margin.

The 2016 electoral vote map

Carrying three additional states might sound like a tall order.  But all of those states had favored the Democratic candidate in each of the previous six Presidential elections.

And Trump’s margin of victory in those states in 2016 was razor-thin.  If as few as 38,872 Trump voters in those three states had voted for Clinton, she would have carried them and won the election.  (By the way, that number represents only 0.06% of the 62.984,828 voters who cast their ballot for Trump in 2016.)  

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If Clinton had been elected President, the membership of the Supreme Court would certainly not be what it is today.  

There can be no doubt that she would have nominated very different people to the Court than Trump did.  Trump was able to get all three of his choices for the Supreme Court confirmed because Republicans were in the majority in the Senate throughout his term.  

But unless you assume that the Democrats would have taken the Senate in the 2018 midterms – a very unlikely proposition – it’s possible that no one would have been confirmed to fill the three seats that Trump was able to fill in his first term.  

Think about where the Supreme Court was in 2016 before Justice Scalia unexpectedly died.  Its members included four conservative justices, four liberal justices, and Justice Kennedy, who was often the swing vote.  

When Scalia died, President Obama’s tried to replace him with a considerably more liberal justice – which would have shifted the balance of power on the court.  The Republicans in the Senate balked, and the seat remained vacant until after the 2016 election.

Trump replaced Scalia was a relatively conservative judge, restoring the status quo as far as the conservative-liberal balance went.  But if Clinton had been elected, there’s no way she nominates a conservative.  If couldn’t have gotten a more liberal nominee confirmed, she might have just left the seat open – after all, that would have resulted in the liberals continuing to outnumber the conservatives.

Trump and Clinton debating in 2016

The same scenario might have played out when Justice Kennedy – the Court’s least ideological member – resigned in 2018.  Clinton wouldn’t have appointed a conservative to fill his spot, and the Senate wouldn’t have confirmed a more liberal nominee.  Leaving Kennedy’s seat open would have left the Court with a four-three liberal majority, which might have been just fine with a hypothetical President Clinton.

The balance of power on the Court would have shifted in 2020, when liberal Justice Ginsburg died.  Assuming that Clinton and the Senate Republicans continued to be at loggerheads – the Senate refusing to confirm a liberal Clinton nominee, and Clinton refusing to nominate someone more conservative – we might have ended up with only six sitting justices, divided equally between liberals and conservatives, at least until after the 2020 election.

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 Let’s go a little further down “What If?” Avenue – shall we?

In 2018, the Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives – which led to Trump being impeached.

Would the Democrats have taken the House of Representatives back from the GOP in the 2018 midterms if Clinton had won the Presidency in 2016 instead of Trump?

No one knows the answer to that question for sure.  But the party that holds the White House almost always loses House seats in the midterm election that comes two years later.  

Democrats lost control of the House in both Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s first midterm elections, so it’s hard to believe that history would have flip-flopped in 2018 if Hillary Clinton had been elected President two years earlier.  The odds are that the Republicans would have maintained their majority in the house.  In fact, odds are they would have expanded their majority.

Would a Republican-controlled House have investigated and otherwise harassed – or even impeached – our hypothetical President Clinton, much like the Democratic-controlled House investigated, harassed, and impeached President Trump?

Does a bear sh*t in the woods?

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Stalemate and gridlock would have been the order of the day in your nation’s capital with a Republican Congress and a Democratic President.  Forget new legislation on immigration or climate change or anything else controversial.

And forget the 2017 tax reform law.  There’s no way she would have signed off on anything close to the bill that was enacted by the Republican Congress.  

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Let’s fast-forward to 2020.

If Clinton had been elected in 2016, there’s no way she doesn’t run again in 2020 – and there’s no way Trump doesn’t run again in 2020 as well.

Clinton would have had about a 99% chances of getting renominated – it’s hard to imagine a scenario (short of death or an incapacitating illness) where she doesn’t get renominated.

Trump’s being nominated in 2020 after losing in 2016 is a slightly less certain proposition.  I’d say he would have had only a 98% chance of getting the GOP nod.

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So who would have won a hypothetical Clinton-Trump rematch in 2020?

Studies have found that the economy is a major factor that affects how people vote.  Incumbents almost always get re-elected when voters generally feel good about the economy – which is the case when unemployment is relatively low.  But if there’s recently been an economic downturn, voters are more likely to boot the incumbent out of the White House.

Let’s assume that the economy would have been in roughly the same pre-pandemic condition under Clinton as it was under Trump – who achieved record-low unemployment levels.  

I’m assuming that the 2017 tax reform law wouldn’t have been enacted under my hypothetical Clinton presidency.  That law gave a real boost to the economy, but I’m willing to believe that unemployment  would still have been in reasonably good shape even without the 2017 tax cuts.

So Clinton would have likely entered 2020 as a favorite to win a second term.  But then came covid-19, which turned everything upside down.

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Can we agree that the 2020 election probably came out the way it did because of covid-19?

Remember where we were a year ago, prior to the pandemic.  The economy was humming along, and we know how important a factor that is in presidential elections.  The impeachment kerfuffle had ended not with a bang, but with a whimper – I wouldn’t say being impeached made Trump stronger, but I don’t think it significantly weakened him.

But everything changed when covid-19 slipped out of China and devastated the United States and most of the rest of the world.

“The Oregon Trail” game (2020 edition)

Both Trump and Clinton would have entered an election rematch with a hardcore base of supporters who wouldn’t have voted for the other guy even if hell had frozen over.  But there would have been at least some undecided voters who wouldn’t have been locked into one candidate or the other.

And given how close the 2016 election was, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that those fence-sitters would have held the balance of power in the 2020 election – and that the typical fence-sitter would have based his or her decision on how well he or she believed the incumbent had performed with regard to the pandemic.

Tune in to the next 2 or 3 lines, which will examine the evidence and then speculate wildly about how much success a hypothetical President Clinton would have had with covid-19.

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I already told you that I didn’t watch the recent inauguration.  But I did see a recording of Lady Gaga singing the national anthem – which almost made me gag-gag.

Celebrities in general need to learn that singing the national anthem is NOT all about them.  Lady Gaga should not have used an attention-getting gold-plated microphone, and she should not have worn a Halloween costume to an inauguration.  

One female commentator who actually liked her performance described her outfit as “a massive gold brooch, pinned on what looked rather like the top half of a wetsuit, with a vast crimson skirt”:

Above all, she should NOT have sung the damn song in 4/4 time instead of the usual (and correct) 3/4 time!

Here’s what Bo Emerson had to say about her performance in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

While Lady Gaga didn’t indulge in the vocal gymnastics that tempt many interpreters of the anthem, she did offer one innovation, singing the song in a different time signature than usual.

The old melody that Francis Scott Key borrowed is in 3/4, which is an unusual meter for an anthem.  Gaga used an arrangement that adds an extra beat to every measure, turning it into a 4/4 rhapsody.

I asked friends online whether they noticed, and some couldn’t tell the difference.

[NOTE: Bo Emerson’s friends must be deaf, or unable to count to four even with help of their fingers.]

To be scrupulously accurate, Gaga sang the first 16 bars in 4/4, the next four bars (“and the rockets red glare. . .”) in a deceptive 4/4 that pretended to be 3/4, the next four bars (“gave proof through the night. . .”) half in 3/4 and half in a rubato stop time, the next four bars (“oh say does that Star Spangled Banner yet wave . . .”) in 3/4 and the last four bars in Eastern Standard Time.

This is not the first time a new interpretation has heralded a new president.  Beyonce used a similar arrangement at Barack Obama’s 2013 inauguration.

[NOTE: Does Bo not realize that Barack Obama was not a new president at his 2013 inauguration?  He had held office for four years when Beyonce let it rip eight years ago.] 

It’s not a small change, and unlike the overdone melisma that many singers apply to the song, it’s not unwelcome.

[NOTE:  I second the “overdone melisma” emotion.  Not so much when it comes to “not unwelcome.”]

Three-quarter time is for waltzes.  Almost everything else we listen to is played in a meter that can be divided by two. That’s why our national anthem, an old drinking song that ends in a question, is an unusual piece of music.

Unlike the Spanish, German, Russian and French national anthems, you can’t march to it.  You pretty much have to stand still and sing. . . .

Is 4/4 a better choice for a song that represents a whole nation? Certainly the stomping 4/4 of “La Marseillaise” (see “Casablanca”) rouses the heart.  It also celebrates watering your fields with the blood of tyrants.

Our anthem is less gory. . . . What I like most about it is that it’s not a song about combat, but a song about perseverance.

Click here to watch Lady Gaga singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

 

Elvis Costello – "Less Than Zero" (1977)

Let’s talk about the future now

We’ve put the past away

An over/under bet is a wager on whether a certain number is exceeded or not exceeded by the end of a sporting event.

The most common over/under bet is on the total number of points scored in a game.  For example, the over/under on the final score of the Kansas City Chiefs–Cleveland Browns playoff game this year was 57.  

The Chiefs won 22-17, so there were a total of 39 points scored in that game – that’s less than 57, so if you’d bet the under instead of taking the over you would have won.

Here’s one more example.  The Green Bay Packers–Los Angeles Rams final was 32-18.  The over/under for that game was 45.  Since the two teams combined for 50 points – which is more than the 45 over/under number – those who bet the over won.

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I don’t think any of the online betting sites was offering an over/under bet on how many people will get arrested at the Biden inauguration today – or how many of those people will eventually be convicted.

To come up with a reasonable betting line, I took a look back at the news coverage of Trump’s 2016 inauguration, when 234 people were arrested for smashing store windows, throwing rocks and bricks at police officers, and other crimes.

How many of those people were eventually convicted?  Zero.

The first six defendants who went on trial were all acquitted by the Washington, DC juries who heard their cases.  After going oh-for-six, the U.S. Attorney apparently threw up his hands and dropped the charges against everyone else.

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Part of the reason for the prosecutors’ lack of success in the 2017 cases was the use of “black bloc” tactics by the rioters, who wore black clothing, ski masks, scarves, sunglasses, motorcycle helmets, or other face-concealing and face-protecting items to conceal their identities and hinder criminal prosecution:

From a 2017 article in the Washington Post:

They’ve been around for decades, but in the past three months they’ve been especially visible: protesters in head-to-toe black clothing and ski masks, charging through the streets in public demonstrations, provoking police and leaving a trail of broken windows and flaming piles of debris in their wake.

Pockets of them sowed chaos during peaceful protests in Portland the week Donald Trump was elected president, smashing electrical boxes and spray-painting buildings, and prompting a volley of rubber bullets from authorities.

They turned out by the hundreds at Trump’s inauguration in January, vandalizing [buildings] and torching a limousine in downtown Washington.

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Here’s more on the 2017 inauguration from an article that appeared on a local National Public Radio affiliate’s website:

As the District careens toward Donald Trump’s inauguration, a group of local activists is doing everything in its power to make sure that the day’s events are besieged with bedlam.

“The number of counter protesters showing up is off the charts,” says Legba Carrefour, a participant with the D.C. Counter-Inaugural Committee. “We want to undermine the legitimacy of the incoming administration by ruining the inauguration.”

It is one of around a dozen groups that plan to express their deep displeasure with the results of the election. . . .

Throughout the day, hundreds or thousands of protesters plan to paralyze morning traffic into the city, create blockades at checkpoints, march without permits, and possibly disrupt the [inaugural] parade. . . .

“We’re talking about no peaceful transition,” Carrefour says. On President Barack Obama’s call for a calm, successful transition, he adds: “We really reject that.”

As the French say, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

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How about we just go with the 2017 figures and make 234 and zero the over/under for the number of arrests today and the number of convictions that result from those arrests, respectively?  

If I were a betting man, I’m not sure whether I’d go over or under for the number of arrests.  

As you may have heard, there’s an unprecedented level of security in DC today – for one thing, there are roughly 25,000 National Guard troops in town.  

So I’m guessing that there will be either a lot more arrests today than in 2016, or a lot fewer – but I have no idea which.  Therefore, I’m passing on that bet.

But I’ll happily take the over on the number of convictions for two reasons:

First, I doubt that DC juries will take it easy on any Trump diehards who get arrested today.  

But more importantly, how in the hell can you take the under when the over/under number is zero?  (I’ve forgotten 99% of what I learned in math class, but I’m pretty sure there’s no number that’s less than zero.)

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Elvis Costello’s record company wanted him to play his latest UK single, “Less Than Zero,” when he appeared on Saturday Night Live for the first time in 1977.  

Elvis Costello on SNL in 1977

But Costello was afraid that the song’s references to British fascist politician Oswald Mosley would go right over the heads of Americans.  So after playing a few bars of “Less Than Zero,” Costello and the Attractions suddenly stopped and jumped into “Radio, Radio” instead.

Click here to listen to “Less Than Zero.”

Click below to buy the record from Amazon: