Author: Muttrox

A wonderful guitar instrumental. I have no idea who this band is, just stumbled across this track. Yes, this is just one guitar.

The GOP suddenly wants to count every legal vote. Suddenly they are aghast at all the problems in how elections are run. It warms the heart. We can see in their actions whether they are hypocrites or not. Now, they should be supportive of efforts to make things better, eh?

The Federal Election Commission is a nightmare. Decades of political appointees who seem put there mostly to gum of the works. They can’t even really operate, because they don’t have enough members for a quorum. They had a fourth member to get a quorum for a while, but….

“That changed on Tuesday when the Senate confirmed a fourth member: James E. Trainor III, a Republican lawyer from Texas. President Trump’s nomination of Mr. Trainor, who goes by Trey and who worked for the 2016 Trump campaign, marked a departure from the tradition of presidents nominating commissioners in pairs, typically from different parties.”

No, you don’t say? Trump broke the norms for naked political advantage?

“Even with four commissioners, the body may end up frequently deadlocked, given that taking action will require unanimity among the four: two Republicans, one Democrat and an Independent who largely aligns with the Democrat.”

No, you don’t say? The independent aligns with the party that cares about running elections that reflect the popular will of all the citizens?

I look forward to the newly woke GOP working with Democrats to properly lead, staff, and empower the Federal Elections Commission.

They might also partner with the Democrats to stop pretending that Russian interference didn’t happen and isn’t ongoing. They might also pass some bills that improve the situation.

And let’s throw in a rant about voting machines. The USA should develop it’s own code around voting. This is largely a solved technical problem. Getting votes so that they are all counted properly, all anonymous, but verifiable, this can be done. This is exactly where a government agency should be developing these algorithms and technology as a shared resource for the entire country. Failing that, they should force the big companies (Diebold) to make their code public and peer-reviewed.

This is a wonderful opportunity for both major parties to improve elections even more. If the GOP fails to do so, it just further displays their election hypocrisy.

I spent yesterday and today as an observer at the deKalb county recount*. A few random observations:

The system is very good. Every step has multiple independent workers who check each others work. Each part is checked and cross-checked in a few different ways. There is simply no way for anyone to commit meaningful fraud anywhere in this part of the system. If there is fraud it is either far upstream (e.g. hacking the voting software, creating thousands of fake ballots) or downstream (e.g. hacking the counting software).

It’s one thing to see on TV that deKalb early and mail-in voting was predominantly Biden. It’s another thing to see a huge stack of Biden ballots next to a pitiful pile of Trump votes.

The Democrats and Republicans have common interest in this phase. Both sides want to be assured that all the rules are followed properly and a credible count is produced that everyone can believe. And for the most part, all observers followed the rules faithfully. GOP observers were definitely more zealous than the Democrats. Although most were fine, there were a few GOP bad actors. These came in two varieties. First was the kind who continually broke the observation rules, harassing and interfering with the counting, in the hopes of starting an incident. The second was the kind who came in determined to find fraud that they simply knew was there already, and was incensed at their inability to find it, which simply made them angrier and more certain of the fraud. Both kinds were jerks, but not more than that. (The GOP observers also seemed less trained on what the proper process was, and the rules for monitors.) During my shifts it never got bad enough that they were kicked out, but there were several expelled in other shifts and in other counties.

There were monitors from the Democrats, the Republicans, the Carter Center, the ACLU, even the Constitution Party. Sometimes it seemed like there were monitors than workers.

COVID precautions were very good. Masks and face shields were given to everyone. Informal gatherings were quickly broken up for social distancing. Multiple medical personnel circulated.

This is the first federal election the Carter Center has been involved with. They are hoping to serve as a credible 3^rd party that everyone can believe in. Good luck, but it’ll never happen!

Congratulations to deKalb county. They recounted over 370,000 ballots by hand in a day and a half. That’s quite an achievement. I left feeling very positive about Democracy in Georgia.

* Technically it is not a recount. Since the original counts haven’t yet been certified, they aren’t counted, and so can’t yet be recounted. This is an audit, but every vote cast is being manually re-counted, rather than a sample.

Trump took Florida by 375,000 votes. Florida illegally disenfranchised about 1.5 million ex-felons.If that hadn’t happened, what would have been the impact?

The voting rate among ex-felons is around 30% (better sources welcomed). Let’s goose that to 35% given the high participation rates in this 2020 election. That’s 525,000 voters.

How do they vote by party? It seems to be around 70% for Democrats. Let’s say 80%, again given the particulars of this 2020 election. That leads to a net of 315,000 votes that should have been in Biden’s column.

315,000 is less than 375,000, so I wouldn’t say Florida was stolen. And the input numbers aren’t very solid. This also doesn’t recognize that it was possible for felons to vote, just crazy difficult for many of them. So, there may have been a good number of ex-felon voters already.

Still, the impact likely bring the results of the Florida count within 100,000. Since 1996, the Democratic party has won the popular vote four of their last eight elections. (I am including 2000. The Supreme Court travesty aside, Gore was clearly the voters choice.)

If nothing else,Florida is not a red state. It’s very purple.

Back in 2016, Garry Kasparov said this, and it applies today as well.

“That nervous feeling you have about tomorrow, Americans? That’s democracy working. Unpredictable elections, what a luxury!”

On the day before the election, my thoughts go back six months. The Democrats had proposed a stimulus package for COVID-19 that included many provisions to maintain and improve voting systems during the pandemic. Trumps response:

“The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

The predominant reaction from the center and left was, omigod, he just gave away the game. He said it out loud finally – the GOP suppresses the vote because they can’t win unless they do.

My reaction is a bit different. Let’s go back four years, when the GOP made a choice to stand for positions in the minority. After the 2012 Romney loss to Obama, they did an well-known autopsy report. They understood that in order for them to win, they needed to (among other things) moderate their position on immigration and reduce the tolerance for racism within the party. Instead chose a different path, of doubling down on anti-immigration and anti-minority speech and policy. It was a foolish strategy. It was not a strategy at all, it was the radicalized base defying the more sensible parts of the party. And it certainly would never have worked if Trump hadn’t been fortunate enough to be running against the hated Hilary Clinton.

Now here we sit four years later. Trump got worse and worse on everything the GOP took from their 2012 shellacking. And when Trump can’t get enough voters to win on policy, he doesn’t think about changing policies. The policies are the given to him. What is not a given is voting rights. Rather than fight for policies the majority of the country supports, he chooses to fight instead against the law and Democracy.

I wonder if he ever made the choice consciously. I wonder if he even considered for five minutes how easy it would be to get re-elected if he would simply do what Americans asked him to do. I don’t think he ever thought about it. His policies are the given. Voting rights are not.

(I have used Trump and the GOP interchangeably here. In this regard, they are the same thing.)

The Supreme Court decision on Monday barred the counting of mail-in ballots in Wisconsin that arrive after Election Day. That was probably the right decision. State do have the rights to run their elections as they please to a large degree — tie goes to the state. But Kavanaughs opinion is ridiculous and disturbing.

He wrote that Election Day mail-in deadlines were devised “to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after Election Day and potentially flip the results of an election.”

Justice Kagan had it right: “There are no results to ‘flip’ until all valid votes are counted.” Until all votes are counted, there are no results. Only projections and predictions. That is why states don’t certify their election results for a couple weeks after Election Day.

If projections and predictions legally matter, than Hillary Clinton should be president. She was projected and predicted to win. There is no qualitative difference between refusing to count some ballots and all ballots.

Nice to have a few more readers.

Seeing The Who again this week got me thinking about my relationship with my favorite band. I was born the same year as Tommy. The Who has been my favorite band for thirty six years, I’ve been seeing them live for most of that time. Writing about this last show made me remember many of the good times I’ve had as a Who concert goer (I’ve seen them around 20 times). Here are some of them.

• Tommy is released in May of 1969. I was two months old. Two months later humans would land on the moon. These are all equally important events!
• Age 13, at camp I had a cassette tape with Pinball Wizard, Baba O’Riley, and Won’t get Fooled Again on it. I played it a lot, but didn’t know much about them. I thought Roger was the only singer, and didn’t yet know that Pete Townshend was what I really liked.
• Age 14, on a day like any other, I returned to the house worn out after ultimate frisbee. I snuck into my oldest brothers room and put on side one of Tommy album. Those next twenty minutes would change my musical life. Half-awake, I was transported by those songs. It was like nothing I had ever heard. I sunk into a state of rapture. I haven’t come out of it yet.
• 1989, thirty years ago, I saw them live for the first time. The tour was derided for its prominent Budweiser branding, “Who on Ice” feel of many musicians, semi-deaf Pete Townshend playing acoustic in a glass box, and mostly that they were on tour at all after having called it quits publicly only seven years earlier. I didn’t care. They blew me away. (In retrospect, the thin air of Colorado may have added to my euphoria.)
• 1993 (?) Pete Townshend on the Psychoderelict tour. It was my first time meeting fellow hard-core fans, as the local contingent of the Odds & Sods listserv gang went whale watching in the morning. We hit it off with another couple and were fast friends for the next several years. The show was fantastic. It closed with a full choir for Listening to You. The best part was when everything went wrong. The enormous then-cutting-edge video screen failed several times. Townshend stopped the show, went backstage to yell at somebody. He came back pissed off, picked up the electric counted 1-2-3-go and launched into a furious rendition of Magic Bus. (I would see him do that another show, Magic Bus seems to be his default when he’s angry.)
• 1996, driving to New York City and seeing three of their tour-opening Quadrophenia shows at Madison Square Garden, featuring a one-eyed Daltrey. The first time I heard John Entwistle play a bass solo (during 5:15), literally dropped my jaw.
• 1996? Dragging the young girls from the office to see them. Roger was over fifty, but still made one of them say, “ohmygod, for five minutes with that man…”
• 1996? Catching Simon Townshend (Pete’s little brother) for his first album  (he should have released Medicine as the single) twice. Great shows. Not surprising at all he went on to be the second guitarist in The Who, and frankly plays the hard guitar parts these days while Pete gets all the credit.
• 1998, on a vacation out west with my new girlfriend. Driving through New Mexico, the radio announce that John Entwistle would be playing that night. We changed our plans right there to see the show. It was terrible! A ratty little bar and Entwistle played so loud our ears rang the next two days. Couldn’t hear a damn note, just a wall of noise. (The trip was so great, it later turned out we were independently thinking, I could see being with this person forever. We’re at nineteen years and going strong.)
• 2000, two weeks before my wedding catching another show. I still remember the crushing huge notes to end the guitar solo of Love Reign O’er Me – three simple notes played with such incredible authority and tone over those wonderful strings and chord changes. Simon had played great lead most of the night (including breaking a string during the complicated instrumental Quadrophenia song and simply switching to other voicings of the notes in real time), but Pete taught him a lesson right there.
• 2007? In an otherwise average Who show, Townshend rips the living hell out of Eminence Front.  Much like this performance (from Vancouver 2006).
• 2012, Quadrophenia. Bringing my 9-year old, for his first rock show. We ponied up for 3^rd row seats. It’s a whole different concert. Probably the last time I was truly blown away by the whole show.
• 2015, The Who Turn Fifty.  After seeing them in Atlanta, flew back to Boston and took my cousin. I had paid a princely sum for 2^nd rows seats, figuring it was the last time I’d ever see them. It was a good show, but retroactively disappointing – the first time I felt Roger just couldn’t cut it, and the sound mix was terrible.
• 2019, I’m no longer willing to pay lots of money. I get front row of the “100s” section, and have an enjoyable night. I think, “60% of the greatest live band ever is still more than most any other band will ever get”. There are just enough great moments to keep me going, and then the closers of Love Reign O’er Me and Baba O’Riley are transcendent and I leave with an unusually open smile on my face for the next hour.

Fifty years of my life and thirty years of live shows sprinkled throughout my adult life. If there’s never another one, it’s been a great ride. Thank you boys!

The Who (now in their 70s) performed with an orchestra. They kicked things off with a suite of Tommy songs.

• Overture/Didn’t Hear It: The first notes of the overture played with a full orchestra had the audience going early. Unfortunately the mix was poor, a common complaint of mine the last few tours. Except for the bass and snare drums, Zak was inaudible. Together with the bass, there was a thudding noise instead of the engine that drives the music and the many dynamics in the songs. The orchestral timing was often subtly off from the rest of the band, removing the sharpness of hitting the notes just so on the beat. And The Who is all about hitting the beats hard.
• 1921: A wonderful short song that usually doesn’t get their live treatment.
• Amazing Journey / Sparks
• Pinball Wizard: Here is the dynamic these days. Simon does the real work on the acoustic guitar. Pete idly strums on the electric. The screens focus on Pete doing not much interesting musically and the crowd goes crazy. It’s amazing how much of the real work is being done by Simon.
• We’re Not Gonna Take It / Listening to You

• Who Are You: Ah, now we’re getting warmed up.
• Eminence Front: Hey, Pete’s awake! The old man is suddenly starting to play that guitar like he means it.
• Imagine A Man: Much like on Daltrey Sings Townshend, the orchestra makes this song work. A wonderful deep cut.
• Hero at Ground Zero: One of their two new songs. It’s hard to judge songs by a live performance, but it sounded ordinary. I could swear the chorus used the same backing chords as The Punk Meets the Godfather.

The orchestra left for a while. This was good, the less people on stage, the more the band could let loose.

• The Kids Are Alright
• I Can See For Miles
• You Better You Bet
• Won’t Get Fooled Again: One of the high points of the night. Pete on acoustic, Roger singing, and nothing else. A modern reprise of Pete’s performance on Secret Policemans Ball. Did you know that together with Bon Jovi, that was the genesis of MTVs: Unplugged. Yep, look it up.

Now the orchestra starts sliding back in.

• Behind Blue Eyes: Featuring a violin and cello.
• Ball and Chain: Their other new song, stronger than the first. The verse/chorus is overly simple, but the musical break between verses is quite interesting. On the subway home, I was informed this song is derived from a Pete Townshend solo song, Guantanamo.

On to the Quadrophenia suite (with Orchestra) and closing:

• The Real Me
• I’m One: This should always be acoustic. Roger played blues harmonica over it. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. Now the orchestra and the band are sounding great together.
• 5:15: Seems sad to have no bass solo.
• Quadrophenia (the song): Nice to see Simon and Pete trading off the parts with each other. The orchestra is wonderful. Simon rules.
• Love Reign O’er Me: I have never heard of Loren Gold, but I’m a fan now. He took the piano intro and made it his own. He captured all the melancholy feel of the album but with an extended classical take on it, a few minutes worth. Roger now sings the lyrics correctly (on the album, he reversed the lines, The night is hot as black as ink/I sleep and I lay and I think” which makes far less sense). After the song was over, Pete introduced the band with the piano player as “The gent who played that incredible piano part for two and half hours or so.” This is a song that’s hard to get right. Pearl Jam comes the closest, but somehow misses. Even with Roger unable to hit so many notes with power, all the feel and emotion comes across. With a full orchestra, this was a wonderful closer to the main show. And thanks be to heaven, they didn’t play the ridiculous fake encore game. (Lights go off. Everyone claps. They cheer some more. The band comes back on. Repeat at next venue.) There was a few minutes pause as they talked to the audience for a bit, then launched into the closer.

• Baba O’Riley: Goddamnit, what a song. I don’t care how old they are, how bad the sound is, that Pete almost falls over while closing the song out or anything negative. This is just the best. The violin player (Katie Jacoby) absolutely destroys it (start at 3:15). That same huge grin on her face was planted on mine the rest of the night. To quote Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, “Marvelous.”

Notable cuts from the setlist: I Can’t Explain (their traditional opener), My Generation, Tea & Theatre.