Category: Elections

Holes in the ground!

The case for a large pumped storage programme in Appalachia

Senator (and Presidential pre-candidate) Kamala Harris and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (not a candidate but lefty star) have published a draft Climate Equity Act. Here it is (pdf). It provides for principles, an Office, reports, consultations, and a platform for “frontline communities” to share their pain with the denizens of the Beltway. It reads like the work of a New Age therapist working in the bureaucracy of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Missing: any proposals for action that would actually do something for unemployed American coal-miners in say Harlan County, Kentucky.

Here’s my idea.

A 100% renewable electricity grid – actually a 90% one – based on cheap wind and solar electricity needs a lot of backup or firming to cover the gaps when there is no solar output (called “the night”) or little wind (week-long lulls mainly created by the procession of anticyclones that drive the weather in middle latitudes). Today, there is enough legacy baseload coal and nuclear power to reduce the problem, and natural gas to deal with what’s left, but they are all going to phase out soon in the GND. Actually the coal will go anyway regardless of the GND from price competition, and nuclear from age, but this plan is for GND supporters.

There is a longish list of technically feasible solutions or part-solutions. None of them are really cheap; but then, a good part of the cost of the electricity you buy today is to cover the rarely used peak generation capacity and the unused reserve. There are no free lunches here.

Sources: personal guesses except for deployment, for which here (pdf)

There is a lively argument in the “100% renewable” expert trade about the best method of firming. Very lively. Mark Jacobson went so far as to sue Christopher Clack for a hostile rebuttal of his first scenario for the USA, relying for firming on a rather peculiar scheme, since dropped, of retrofitting all existing US hydropower dams to run in burst mode, at much higher outputs for much shorter periods. I don’t include this false start.

Some of these technologies are in flux, others mature. It is therefore impossible to predict now the lowest-cost firming mix ten years ahead. The problem is that in a ten-year GND transition, there isn’t time to let things settle down. Some big spending decisions will have to be taken in the next few years, and some of them will turn out to be wrong in the sense of diverging from the optimum – there is not much risk of being stuck with an asset that simply does not work. The priority is as always to ensure a reliable supply, not to assure ratepayers suffering from power cuts that you were prudently trying to save them every last cent on their bills. The compressed timescale also calls for a strong federal policy lead and assumption of risks.

I want to make a case here for off-river pumped hydro storage (PHS).

It may not work out the cheapest in the end, but it’s a mature technology with no technical risk, known and reasonable costs, long working life, modest environmental impact (note off-river), and scaleable to any volume you want. Existing plants (pdf) provide 95% of the current US utility storage capacity. Its problem is that dams take a long time to build: at best five years, though with much less construction risk than nuclear plants. If the USA is going to rely on pumped storage to any significant extent, it will have to start building it out by 2025. There is no technical reason not to start sooner. Storage replaces peak gas immediately as soon as there is a worthwhile volume of wind and solar, which you already have.

Satellite view of Bath County PHS dams. The penstocks are inside the mountain. The height difference is 385 metres. Source

At least one expert, Andrew Blakers of the Australian National University, strongly recommends pumped hydro as the basis for firming a wind/solar power supply, along with more HVDC transmission. He has constructed 100% renewable scenarios (pdf) for the Australian NEM (the grid covering the populated East and South) using just these four technologies, with hourly balancing to match the current demand. This balancing costs an additional midpoint US$21 per Mwh on top of the raw wind+solar LCOE of midpoint US$49, a markup of 43%. His paper gives the (narrow) ranges and offers a large number of variants tweaking the assumptions in different ways. His base case calls for 16 GW of storage for 31 hours, making 490 Gwh, balancing a total annual demand of 205 Twh. The capital cost of the storage, based on replicating a standard unit costed by a hydro engineer, is US$600 per kw or US$9.6 bn for the whole package.

To get an order of magnitude for a US programme on the same lines, we will just scale up Blakers without any apology or attempt at adjustment. US consumption of electricity is 4,070 Twh a year, so the model calls for 318 GW of capacity at a cost of $191 bn. (Cross-check: the one-off PHS plant at Bath County, originally 2.1 GW, cost $1.6 bn in 1985, so on that basis 318 GW would have been $242 bn. The order of magnitude is OK, and there has been technical progress since in reversible generators and in tunnelling.)

Since we don’t know whether the alternatives will be cheaper or dearer, it does not make sense to put all the eggs in one basket. However, we can be pretty sure that PHS, as the dominant historical storage technology and still much the cheapest, will play a significant part. Picking with a pin, a 100 GW initial programme looks reasonable. As of 2017, 40 new PHS sites were already under active investigation by utilities and licenses applied for with eight, so we won’t start absolutely from scratch. But if we do, it will cost a ballpark $60 bn. In the context of the multi-trillion overall cost of the GND, this is clearly doable. The plants are long-lived revenue-earning assets: storage has a price, sometimes a high one. I don’t know what the ROI will be, and doubt if it matters very much.

PHS plants are very flexible on size and can adapt to different geographies. The world’s largest PHS plant, at Bath County in Virginia, has a capacity today of 3GW / 24 Gwh. But many working plants are much smaller, down to 100 MW or so. The programme could be met with 33 Bath Counties or 1,000 100 MW plants, or anything in between. The power generated is proportional to the head, and you can get more work from a given size of reservoirs if you can site the upper one higher. This all gives the planners a great deal of flexibility.

Where should the dams go? As a climate justice measure, it has to be Appalachia, since that is where most of the unemployed miners are and will be.

The mountain range is very extensive, seismically inactive, and high enough with typical crests of 900m. You only need 300m or so height difference for a decent PHS scheme. The number of potential sites is so large that the choice can often be made on grounds of economic deprivation. Socially, dam-building is a nearly ideal economic stimulus. The jobs are manly to match an old-fashioned culture, moderately skilled (highly skilled for tunnelling), and last for several years. Contrast suggestions that unemployed Appalachians should be retrained for installing solar in a foggy climate, or wind turbines on the few suitable hilltop sites, clashing with recreation.

How many jobs will be created? At its peak, Bath County had 3,400 workers on site. Applying the same ratio to our 100 GW programme, that would give 113,000 jobs. This is not realistic: smaller dams have different demands to big ones, the employment peaks won’t be synchronised, tunnelling machines are much better, and so on. But it is certainly enough to put a sizeable dent in unemployment across the region, before counting the spending multiplier in local communities. The ambition of the whole programme may even be constrained by the availability of workers. The jobs are only for a decade, but this buys time to develop other opportunities.

How to set up the programme? It is both large and specialised. The obvious solution is to copy Roosevelt’s TVA and set up the Appalachian Storage Authority, under a joint federal/inter-state governance structure, with borrowing and eminent domain powers and so on. It could have a fixed 20-year life, and sell the dams on to states or utilities before winding up. A programme of earmarked federal grants to states would risk sabotage by GOP state governments, which have shown on the Medicaid expansion that they are prepared to sacrifice the welfare of their citizens to ideology. Centralisation and standardization should also work out cheaper in design and project management. There are risks either way.

I don’t know if the scheme can realistically be extended to the Powder River Basin miners in Wyoming. Since their mines are open-cast and highly automated, the miners are far fewer – 5,535 in the state in 2018.  The Rockies have even more and better potential sites for PHS than the Appalachians but they are not SFIK anywhere near the mines. I suspect the climate justice warriors will have to think of something else.

Question to Senator Harris and Representative Ocasio-Cortez:

  • Do you support this plan or something like it?
  • If not, what is your alternative plan that gives former coal miners decently paid jobs where they and their families want to live?

Suppose you both win your political and electoral battles. If you content yourselves with just creating a cool new federal bureaucracy for climate justice, the miners will say: you may be prettier and better spoken than Mitch and Manchin, but in the end you are just another pair of politicians who spin fine words and let us down. They won’t be entirely wrong.

Footnote 1

In this post I have ignored the steelworkers and other groups in Appalachia whose situation is often just as bad as that of coal-miners. The issue here is framed by the two representatives as climate justice, implying specific action for those who must lose their jobs to secure the essential energy transition. In Appalachia, that means coal-miners, and they are the measuring-stick for my plan and for any alternative. The plan will of course benefit other groups as well, and these wider benefits should be considered in the planning.

I have no idea what to do for Texan oilfield roustabouts. They are doing all right for now, but that won’t last. Let’s think of something.

Footnote 2

The title is, as alert RBC readers will have spotted, a h/t to this famous passage of Keynes:

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.

General Theory, Chapter 10, section VI

My dams, being useful, are “houses and the like”.

Footnote 3

As in Australia, the national grid is a good way of keeping storage costs down through geographical smoothing. The Australian population, and hence the variability of demand, is crammed into a single vertical time zone. An HVDC line from Sydney to Perth captures useful smoothing of wind and solar supply but not of demand. From New York to San Francisco, it does both. The grid has an even higher payoff in the USA, lowering the storage costs.

Footnote 4

If anybody wants to talk to someone who really knows about this stuff, Andrew Blakers is in the phone book: +61 2 612 55905, andrew.blakers@anu.edu.au

Update 08/08/2019

Blakers points me to a world atlas his team has prepared with 616,000 (not a typo) potential pumped hydro storage sites identified from satellite images. The theoretical collective storage capacity is a hundred times anything we are likely to need. Some of them are in places like Patagonia and Kamchatka that are fairly safe from the bulldozers, but that still leaves innumerable more useful locations. The database lists 33,000 site pairs in the USA, the majority in the Rockies  but a good number in the Appalachians - eyeballing, a few thousand. Total US potential storage 1.5 million Gwh. (The huge spreadsheet does not help you find geographical locations, to explore you have to work off the detailed zoomable map, example here, and then copy and paste the coordinates into Google Earth). Some of these sites will be home to protected snail darters or the like, others would drown the governor’s hunting cabin. That still leaves plenty.

Unpublished Op-Ed

Mark Kleiman and I wrote this in February 2017, but never had it published. I thought that it might be worth posting at this time.

Some Words of Advice for Federal Employees

Receiving directives inconsistent with good government – if not worse – creates one of the most difficult situations a civil servant can face. As former Justice Department staffers, we have some advice to offer Federal employees when such situations arise, as they seem likely to do often under the current regime.

1.       When told to implement a policy that is counter to statute, regulation, or the stated and authorized goals of the agency, take good notes; such directives rarely come in writing. Then go back to your office and write down your understanding of the recommended policy, making sure you have correctly described what you were told. Then send that account as a memo to your superior.

2.       Whether or not you receive a reply, follow up with a detailed list of issues and concerns, both pro and con, involved with proposed policy or action. Describe them in full context and cite the relevant legislation, executive orders, and constitutional issues. Send that, too, up the chain of command.

3.       You may also be at the receiving end of threats or other problematic situations that are meant to intimidate you. Write a memo to yourself and share it with a trusted friend as soon as possible, to establish a time line.

4.       Do not use your office phone or computer (or cell phone while in the office) for personal reasons, least of all to complain about these situations, as this may open you up to attack. If your agency expects you to be available for phone calls and text messages around the clock, get a cell phone that you use only for official business. You might want to use a text messaging app that encrypts the message, and ask your recipients to do the same.

5. Maintain a contemporaneous, written log on a ruled ledger with a sewn binding, so removal of any page will show. Enter every meeting, call, and significant email on successive lines in ink, leaving no spaces. Fill in any space on the right with a slash, so nothing can be added. Note the date, time, attendees, subject, and conclusions. Absent minutes, no one else will remember what happened a day later, so your record will become dispositive. This approach, laborious though it is, can provide valuable protection for anyone from a GS-1 to a cabinet officer.

6. If you decide to talk to a reporter, get the ground rules clear first. “On background” means you can’t be identified, but your agency can; “deep background” means that even your agency isn’t mentioned.  Any communication to the press about official business not previously cleared by your agency’s public information office will probably put you out of bounds; consider whether you’re willing to take the consequences. If you’re later asked about whether you were the source of a story, either tell the truth (and be prepared to find a new job) or refuse to answer.

There are already reports that White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon has taken steps to erase the paper trail behind various Executive Orders. All the more reason for career civil servants and the political appointees more loyal to the country than to the ruling cabal to make as much of a record as possible.

Michael Maltz is Emeritus Professor of Criminal Justice and of Information & Decision Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was a research analyst with the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice during the Nixon administration and had to deal with some questionable directives.

Mark Kleiman was Professor of Public Policy at the New York University Marron Institute of Urban Management. He served as Director of Policy and Management Analysis for the Criminal Division in the Carter and Reagan Administrations, never receiving an improper order.

Liveblogging the Midterms, Part V

10pm: We are back at the top of the hour. Democrats are doing well in the House, though it’s not a wave. Florida and Georgia are especially disappointing. It looks like the nation is getting strong turnout from those who strongly dislike President Trump, but also from those who strongly favor him.

Some heartening developments, too. Jared Polis was elected the first openly gay governor in Colorado. Sharice Davids is also a gratifying victory. Laura Kelly is a great win in Kansas, defeating Kris Kobach.

Democrats estimated to have 80-90% probability of taking House, with an estimated 225 or 226 seats.

Republicans will win close Senate races in Texas, Arizona, Florida. Very frustrating. Re-enfranchisement bill in Florida will make a difference. Note: Arizona still too close to call, with slight Democratic edge.

House now has 95% probability of Democratic majority. The night looks a little less dour with strong Democratic House victories. Nice governor pickups, too. Especially Walker and Kobach. Michigan, too.

Steve King is losing in Iowa. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

And as disappointing as the narrow losses in Florida are, the passage of the felon enfranchisement initiative - expanding the electorate by something like 1 million voters - probably makes Florida a Blue state from now on. That’s a big win; try to draw a map where the Republicans take the Presidency without Florida or Pennsylvania. It basically can’t be done.

Most of all, the Democrats’ popular-vote edge was somewhere above 8%, just where the pre-election polls had put it. I admit to being disappointed; I thought all the money and enthusiasm and organizing effort would lead the Dems to over-perform. But winning the two-party vote 54-46 means that this isn’t, and never will be, Trump’s country.

Good night.  It’s still a republic, and we still have to keep it.

My mom’s not bluffing, young non-voters



If you don’t vote, my mom will come to your house. Where she will offer unsolicited, yet eerily perceptive commentary about your relationship and about your BAE. And no. I don’t know what a BAE is. But my mom does. And she just friended yours, on Facebook.

Fear of Crime and Information Theory

An appropriate lead-in to this post is the quote attributed to Stalin: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” This fits very nicely into the structure of information theory, as formulated by Claude Shannon sixty years ago. His measure of information is equivalent to the reciprocal of the probability of occurrence of an event (specifically, the logarithm of this number). That is, if the probability of an occurrence is 100% (1.0), that is, if it’s certain to occur, then its information content is the logarithm[1] of 1, or 0; if the probability is 10%, its information content is 1; if its probability is .001, its information content is 3. In other words, the less likely the event is to occur, the higher the information content of its occurrence. That’s why it’s also called a measure of “surprise,” because the occurrence of a highly unlikely event is more surprising than one that is highly likely to occur.

What, pray tell, does this have to do with fear of crime? A lot, it turns out. As Steven Pinker has shown, violence and violent death has declined markedly over the past few centuries, and we are much, much less likely than our ancestors to die at the hands of others, either through wars or by crimes of violence. But this very fact means that (per the quote at the top of this post) each violent death nowadays has a greater surprise value than it did in the past. And that greater surprise value translates directly into greater fear – fear that oneself or one’s family is going to be harmed by others.

So we have this paradox: the safer we make ourselves, the more fear we have – of the unknown, of “them” (any outsider), of MS-13, of the person walking toward you (“Quick, get out your gun before he gets his out”). And of course, it is all so easy to stir up fear in a population, especially when those in power, whom we expect to be responsible adults, are the ones stirring it up.

‘Nuff said.

[1] To make it easy to follow, I’m using logs to the base 10. For those who slept through math class, the logarithm of a number goes up much more slowly than the number itself, so in the examples above the log of 1 is 0, of 10 (the reciprocal of 1/10) is 1, and of 1000 is 3. End of lesson.

Justice Department releases FISA warrant applications on Carter Page

My quick analysis:
400-something pages, mostly redactions, and the rest mostly boilerplate that gets repeated from application to application.
Still, what’s left is interesting. And, naturally, the documents make complete nonsense of the conspiracy theory Devin Nunes and his House Intelligence Committee Republican colleagues have been pushing.
Everything about the Steele Dossier - including Steele’s decision to talk to the press just before the election - was fully revealed to the court, and there was plenty of non-Dossier support for the idea that Page was acting as a Russian agent. Moreover, the extension applications continue to recite that the Bureau believes “Source 1’s” (that is, Steele’s) “reporting herein to be credible.” If the wiretaps conducted under the warrant had in any way disconfirmed Steele’s material, the Bureau could hardly continue to recite that Steele’s reporting was credible.
First application in October 2016, extended January, April, July. (90 days is the limit for a FISA warrant; an extension requires a new application.
Each application is signed by the FBI Director and the Attorney General (or substitute after the Sessions recusal). October and January applications are signed by Sally Yates as AG.
Last two are signed by Boente (April) and Rosenstein (July). Comey signs as FBI Director the first three times; Wray signs in July.
[Footnote: I was close to the parallel process for wiretap applications, requiring sign-off by an Assistant Attorney General. That was taken enormously seriously, the signature was not a rubber stamp. Each application was read in detail by someone on the AAG’s personal staff, and more than one application was sent back or refused outright. Hard to believe FISA applications aren’t taken comparably seriously.]
Presumably much of the redaction is about the product; every extension has to show that the previous 90 days were productive. The Times counted pages: 66 pages  in the original, while the extensions counted 79 pages, 91 pages and 101 pages, suggesting that there was significant product. But that was already clear from the fact that the extensions were requested and granted. Courts frown on continuing to drill dry holes.
Basis of the first application was the FBI belief that Page was “collaborating and conspiring with the Russian Government” and that “the Russian Government’s efforts [to mess with the campaign] were coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with Candidate 1 [Trump]
Can you say “No collusion”? I was sure that you could.
Update: Leah McElrath points out that this assertion - like the assertion of the reliability of Steele’s reporting - is repeated verbatim in the three extension applications, which it couldn’t be if the wiretaps had failed to confirm it. More detail from Twitter account @PwnAllTheThings.
The application recites that Carter was a knowing intelligence agent, recruited by three named SVR officers acting under Non-Official Cover, one of whom, Buryakov, was arrested in January 2015 and pleaded guilty to a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by acting as an unregistered foreign agent in May 2016, getting 30 months.
Page’s mission is said to have been “clandestine intelligence activities (other than intelligence gathering activities).” If that applied to Buryakov, that might explain why he was charged with a FARA violation rather than the more serious charge of espionage.
Comic relief: In February, 2017, Page asks the Voting Rights Section of the Civil Rights Division to investigate whether the Clinton campaign had engaged in “severe election fraud”  involving “disinformation, suppression of dissent, hate crimes, and other extensive abuses” by saying mean things about Page.
Conclusion: The warrant was issued on the basis of the FBI’s belief that Carter Page, a Trump adviser, was knowingly working for the Russians, and that other Trump campaign personnel might be doing the same. It was then extended three times, strongly suggesting that the taps yielded, and continued to yield, valuable counterintelligence. And the terms of those extension applications strongly suggest that the Steele Dossier, and the claim that Page was conspiring with Russia to help Trump, kept looking good.
It gets harder and harder to credit the good faith of anyone who still insists that there is doubt that Russia, as a matter of national policy, interfered with the 2016 election to secure victory for its favored candidate, and that at least one Trump campaign official knowingly helped.

Gillibrand bets on Tobin

Gillibrand stakes out a brave and wonkish position.

A progressive group of Democrats, “We the People”, have just held an early beauty contest of five presidential hopefuls and possibles: Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Kamala Harris of California, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

In this report, I only saw one interesting position.

Gillibrand … in response to a question … said she supports a tax on financial transactions.

Presidential hopeful at work

A Tobin tax!  It’s a wonk’s dream, tailor-made to appeal to the all-important RBC reader demographic: something like 0.003% of the US electorate, concentrated in a handful of blue states where Ricky the Spider-raccoon on the Democratic ticket would be a shoo-in.

It has three other characteristics.
1. It’s a genuine policy proposal. Other countries have tried it (Sweden for equities and bonds). It’s tricky, but there’s a big literature. It isn’t handwaving like Sanders’ “break up the banks.”
2. Though the tax really does stick it to Wall Street, it won’t be easy to explain this to the Rustbelt voters. How many know there is a highly organised worldwide foreign exchange market, let alone that it turns over $5 trillion a day?
3. The tax is anathema to Wall Street, a huge lobby in Washington and in Gillibrand’s home state, and a major source of political donations. Maybe their counterattack will help with problem 2.

Any Democratic nominee in 2020, whether it’s one of this five or Ricky the Raccoon, will run on the same basic platform: joined-up honest government, expanded health care, fighting climate change, reversing tax cuts for the rich, rebuilding alliances, letting the Dreamers stay. But to get the nomination, the winner will have to mark out something distinctive, in character and policy. Was Gillibrand improvising or flying a kite? She does not strike me as an impulsive politician. Walking back the proposal would damage her chances as a “flip-flop”. It looks to me like a calculated risk, and a pretty brave one. Have any of the other contenders staked out comparable positions on anything difficult?

Note on the FX market. The $5trn a day is from here. The real total is higher, as not all trades are cleared through the New York clearing-house. Physical global trade is about $16 trn a year, or $44 bn a day.  Add services and long-term investment flows, and you might double that. What economic purpose is served by inflating this 50 times, with banks and dealers taking a cut – a small one, but a cut - on each artificial transaction?

Update one day later

The comments thread below confirms my point about the RBC readership. The Tobin tax is public policy catnip to you. Good, but nobody has picked up on the electoral politics. Gillibrand has moved the financial transactions tax from a nice academic speculation to live policymaking. She may well not become President, and may not prioritize the proposal if she does. On the other hand, a successful rival may take it on board - like Edwards’ health plan in 2008 that eventually became ACA. Folks, there is now a decent chance the Tobin tax will happen. Reporters should take an interest. Just who has Gillibrand been getting advice from? I’m sure Shiller, Krugman, Stiglitz, Arrow or deLong would take her calls.

Deflection

One of my pet peeves is that newspapers will publish stories about some court opinion or other public document, but not provide any link to the documents themselves.  As a consequence, readers will walk away with only the reporter’s view of why the document was of significance, which view is likely further circumscribed by an editor who is hard put to limit the amount of information in the story due to space considerations.

Sen. Ron Wyden sent a letter to the NRA.  His letter was prompted by his interest in determining “the possibility that Russian-backed shell companies or intermediaries may have circumvented laws designed to prohibit foreign meddling in our elections by abusing the rules governing 501(c)(4) tax exempt organizations.”  Sen. Wyden asked for material relating to four specific areas of inquiry.  He received from the NRA only  a partial response to the four specific requests.  I have posted, as a single file, Sen. Wyden’s letter and the NRA’s response with my markups.

The response is, at best, an attempt to deflect the inquiry.   For instance, the NRA was asked:

  • To “identify any remuneration, transaction, or contribution that involved any of the 501(c)(4) entities associated with your organization and any entity or individual associated with any Russian official, Russian national, or Russian business interest.”  The NRA simply ignored that request; and
  • To provide “all documents related to any remuneration, transaction, or contribution” and to identify all such documents that “have already been turned over to United States authorities.”  Both requests were ignored.

Without being specific, the NRA assured Wyden that it always complied with federal election laws. Ultimately, it offered this: “As a longstanding policy to comply with federal election law, the NRA and its related entities do not accept funds from foreign persons or entities in connection with United States elections.” (Emphasis supplied.)

In other words, the NRA did not deny that it was, in terms of its lobbying and “educational” efforts, a mouthpiece of the Russians, but merely that Russian cash had not found its way into any direct political contribution fund.

Nothing to see here.

Cross-border election meddling and “whataboutism”

The Russian government intervened, overtly and covertly,  in the 2016 U.S. elections to damage Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump. Whether the primary goal of that activity was actually to elect Trump, or instead merely to weaken Clinton in the event of her expected victory, isn’t really an answerable question.

The obvious things to say about this are:

  1. That was a wicked thing for Putin & Co. to do.
  2. Encouraging that help, accepting it, exploiting it, and subsequently covering it up was and is a wicked thing for Trump & Co. to do. It should mark everyone who engages in it and defends it as profoundly disloyal, and make all of them political pariahs.

The defenders of Putin and Trump make four responses: Continue reading “Cross-border election meddling and “whataboutism””