Programming Note: This site has been a one-man operation since Monday, and will continue to be so through next week. That one man lives on the West Coast, and while getting the post up by 6:00 ET on weekdays and 8:00 ET on weekends is the target, it's not always plausible. Please adjust your expectations accordingly.

Debate Details Are Set: Biden Channels His Inner Franklin D. Roosevelt

The first presidential debate of the cycle is a week away, as of yesterday, and so it was time for debate host CNN to finalize some key details.

To start, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is officially not invited. To be on stage, CNN decreed that a candidate had to be: (1) eligible to serve as president, (2) at 15% or more in four national polls and (3) on the ballot in 270 electoral votes' worth of states. Kennedy cleared only one of the three bars, namely the first one. He's got three qualifying polls, but not four, so he came close on #2. As to #3, the Kennedy campaign claims to be on the ballot in 310 EVs' worth of states, but CNN could only confirm 89 EVs' worth.

Of course, Kennedy is not the type to go gentle into that good night. He had already filed a complaint with the FEC, which has taken no action. After getting the bad news yesterday, his campaign put out a whackadoodle statement under the heading "Kennedy Exclusion From CNN Debate Stage Is 'Undemocratic, UnAmerican, and Cowardly.'" The statement includes this assertion:

CNN's published debate criteria require that "a candidate's name must appear on a sufficient number of state ballots to reach the 270 electoral vote threshold." CNN is holding Kennedy to this requirement but is not requiring Presidents Biden and Trump to meet this requirement by claiming they are each the "presumptive nominee" of a political party.

CNN has persisted in this approach even after FEC made clear the phrase "presumptive nominee" is "not in the FEC's debate regulation," and therefore it cannot exempt CNN from the prohibition on excessive campaign contributions. As the Commission on Presidential Debates explains, "Until the conventions take place, we don't know who the official nominees will be."

This means CNN, and every member of CNN who is participating in planning, executing, and holding this debate, is at risk of prosecution, as happened to Michael Cohen, for violating campaign finance laws. This risk is now acute given that any further violation would be knowing and willful, and thus could carry with it serious jail time.

Who knew that when Jake Tapper and Dana Bash agreed to moderate, they were taking the first step on the path to ruin? ABC really oughta make an after-school special about this.

The other bit of debate-related housekeeping required CNN to flip a coin. The Biden campaign correctly called tails, and were allowed to choose either: (1) which podium they want, or (2) whether they would go second in making the closing statements. You might guess they would pick #2, on the theory that you want to have the last word with the audience. However, that's less valuable than it might seem, because by the end of a 2-hour debate, much of the audience will have tuned out, or their attention will have flagged. So, the Biden campaign chose #1, and picked the stage-left podium. That means that Biden will be on the right-hand side of viewers' TV screens.

So, why did Biden want the right-hand side of the screen, even at the expense of whatever (small) benefit might come from going last? The campaign has not explained themselves, as yet, and may not do so. However, it's not too hard to figure it out. There have been some presidents who were experts in the art of stagecraft. Franklin D. Roosevelt was possibly the most expert, maybe because he took drama class in school, or maybe because that is just how his mind worked, or maybe because his wheelchair compelled him to think about visuals more critically. He wasn't the only stagecraft expert, of course; Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan (also with drama backgrounds) were pretty shrewd in this area, and at least a dozen other presidents were conversant.

Anyhow, it is Stagecraft 101 that the right-hand side of the viewers is the position of strength. The most obvious manifestation of this, at least for people without extensive theater backgrounds, is the positioning of the host's desk on TV talk shows. With rare exceptions (the BBC's Graham Norton being the most notable), the host is seated on the right-hand side of the screen. That's true something like 90% or 95% of the time.

So, why is the viewers' right side the position of strength? There are three common explanations, and any or all of them might be correct. First, for centuries, it was customary for the monarch to sit on the right-hand side of the dining table. So, that could have planted the seed in people's minds, one that continues to grow to this day. Second, in nearly all Western languages, people read left to right. So, the eye tends to linger on the right-hand side of the screen. Third, most people (including Biden) are right-handed. So, if you are standing on the right-hand side of the screen, you can gesture as you normally would (for emphasis, or pointing at the other person, or giving them the bird, or whatever) without blocking your face.

It is possible that the Biden campaign is just aware of the general notion that "right side equals strength." It's possible that the campaign is aware of one or more of these sub-reasons (like, say, the gesturing), and that is what they cared about. But the answer is almost certainly contained somewhere in the last few paragraphs.

And as long as we are on this subject anyhow, we got a very good breakdown of the debate rules from reader J.B. in Bend, OR. That means that, in a pretty remarkable coincidence, today's post mentions reader J.B. in Bend, OR, AND reader J.H. in Bend, OR (see below). We assure you they are different people. Anyhow, here is J.B.'s take on the debate rules (we don't know what J.H. thinks, unfortunately):

The debate rules are worth assessing because everyone assumes they favor Biden, as they are all from Biden's campaign:

1. One microphone on at a time: People think this favors Biden because it will prevent Trump from interrupting. Well, maybe. First, Trump himself can still interrupt, it just won't be easily heard. Biden might nonetheless respond to an interruption he hears. More importantly, though, when they debated previously, Trump's constant interrupting hurt him according to polls taken after the debate. By potentially preventing Trump from doing something that hurt him in past debates, this rule may actually make Trump look more in control and "presidential."
   
   
2. No studio audience: I think this may be a wash, even though pundits generally feel it will help Biden. First, it will certainly prevent a huge crowd reaction to some nonsense Trump spews, so the viewing audience will not be influenced to think Trump made a great point. However, Trump feeds off the reaction of the crowd, and without one, he may be less inclined to go off script in an effort to get a laugh or reaction. Without the audience to rile him up, Trump may not ramble on about electric boats and shark attacks. On the other hand, it is possible that without an audience to energize him, Trump may be flat and low energy. It's hard to tell whether this rule will favor Trump or Biden.
   
   
3. Two commercial breaks and no consultation with staff during them: This one favors Biden, I think. The breaks will allow Biden to take a breath and re-focus on his main points. I don't think it helps Trump at all because he is so easily bored, and he will probably be more restless during the breaks. Also favoring Biden is no consultation with staff—Biden knows his stuff, Trump does not. If the moderators are even mildly insistent that Trump actually answer their questions, Trump will look bad.
   
   
4. No notes can be taken to the podium: This one favors Biden. Biden is doing normal debate prep which means he will learn his pre-packaged lines and be ready to use them. Trump is undisciplined and much more likely to give up on any prepared remarks (assuming he actually bothers to learn them).

Of all of the rules, the one that will be most interesting in terms of effect will be the lack of an audience. It could favor Trump by keeping him calm and in control or it could take the wind out of his sails.

Thanks, J.B.! Incidentally, J.B. has some doubt as to whether or not Trump will actually show up. We understand that thinking, and we share those doubts. That said, if Trump is going to bail out, he has to come up with a reason that doesn't make him look weak. And the closer that we get to the debates, the harder it will be to come up with something compelling. For example, if he announced he was skipping the debates because of the microphone on/off switch, then the question would be "Why did it take so long for you to figure that out? Why not a week ago or four weeks or... when you agreed to the switch in the first place?" He'd really need to come up with a "problem" that only emerged recently.

Also, Trump is actively preparing for the debate. He's not holding mocks, but he is meeting with various Republicans for policy briefings. He and his team are also trying to course-correct the narrative they have put out there about Joe Biden, fearing they've set the bar so low that it will be easy for the President to clear it. Trump, who earlier this week went on several harangues about how Biden barely knows where he is anymore, did an interview yesterday in which he declared: "I watched [Biden] with Paul Ryan and he destroyed Paul Ryan... So, I'm not underestimating him I assume he's gonna be somebody that will be a worthy debater." We hope those last few sentences did not give readers whiplash.

We'll likely have another debate item or two next week, but it doesn't hurt to start reminding people now that the debate is on CNN at 9:00 ET Thursday. The network will undoubtedly make a stream available, but they haven't posted it yet. We'll link to it, once it is available. (Z)

Election 2024, Part I: There Goes Biden's Rainy Day Fund

Thar's money in them thar felony convictions. The May fundraising totals are in, and the Donald Trump campaign left the Joe Biden campaign in the dust. The former brought in $141 million and the latter brought in $85 million. If you believe the Trump campaign when it says it brought in $53 million after their candidate's conviction, then that accounts for nearly the entire gap. And if you presume that the conviction continued to goose fundraising beyond the first 24 hours, then the conviction probably accounts for the entire gap, and then some.

As a consequence of the robust May haul for Trump, the two campaigns are now roughly even in terms of how much money they've brought in. In terms of just the campaigns themselves, Trump's campaign had $116.6 million in the bank on May 31, with $91.6 million for Biden. If you add in the RNC and DNC, then it's $170 million for the red team and $157 million for the blue team. If you add in all allied groups, then it's $212 million for the pro-Biden set and... an unknown amount for the pro-Trump set, because the Trump campaign did not report that total. However, one of Trump's PACs did get a $50 million dollar donation from Timothy Mellon, so surely the money that is under the entire Trump umbrella is comparable to, and probably a bit ahead of, Biden's $212 million.

Biden's fundraising is your standard, presidential-candidate operation. With Trump, on the other hand, there are always questions:

• How long will the conviction boost Trump's fundraising? And, for that matter, did it actually boost fundraising, or did it merely cause money he would have gotten at some point in the cycle to be shifted to May?
  
  
• How freely will the billionaire-to-Trump-PAC spigot flow? Mellon, Miriam Adelson and the Uihleins, arguably the three biggest billionaire-backers Trump has, have already announced huge donations. Will they donate more? Will other billionaires step up to the plate?
  
  
• How much of this money is going to the campaign, and how much is going to legal bills?

With Trump, you never know. Sometimes, the FEC doesn't know, either.

On the billionaire front, we'll pass along one other, possibly relevant, note. Yesterday, Melinda French Gates announced her pick for president, the first time she's ever done so. She also wrote an op-ed for CNN explaining herself. A couple of key passages:

As President Joe Biden faces former President Donald Trump in another contest for the White House, the stakes for women and families couldn't be higher.

I've never endorsed a presidential candidate before. My work on gender equality and global health often requires me to work with leaders on both sides of the aisle, so I've avoided talking publicly about who I voted for in past elections.

But this year is different.

After Trump's first term in office endangered the health of women, compromising their safety and robbing them of essential freedoms, I'm supporting Biden this election and asking others to do the same...

The former president imposed restrictions on the federal family planning program, Title X, that made it harder for people from low-income backgrounds to access contraceptives. His often divisive, sometimes violent rhetoric throughout his campaigns and administration—from the sexist attacks he lobbed at women journalists to calling for his opponent to be jailed—has contributed to a hostile political climate for women in office and allowed threats against election workers, most of whom are women, to proliferate.

And he deliberately appointed Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, which resulted in a decision with far-reaching and catastrophic consequences for women and families...

French Gates is well aware that if Trump is reelected, he will likely get to pick much younger replacements for Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. So, as we've written before, this certainly sounds like someone who is likely to get out the checkbook—or the Brinks truck—for Biden '24. That said, since French Gates has plenty of experience with advocacy, she might choose to conduct pro-Biden electioneering independently, under the auspices of her own organization. Whatever the case may be, given her concern about women's rights in general, and reproductive rights in particular, it seems improbable that she's going to offer an endorsement and an op-ed and then just leave it at that. (Z)

Election 2024, Part II: Trump Can't Bear to Let Biden "Win" a News Cycle

We wrote two items this week about Joe Biden's executive order that makes it easier for some undocumented spouses/stepchildren of U.S. citizens to avoid deportation, and to acquire citizenship. The President has gotten a lot of positive response from the groups he was trying to reach with that maneuver.

And now, Biden has gotten a response from Donald Trump. No, not a rant on social media. Trump sat for a podcast interview, and shared his newfound interest in giving green cards to non-citizens who graduate from American universities:

But what I want to do, and what I will do is if you graduate from a college, I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country, and that includes junior colleges too. Anybody graduates from a college, you go in there for 2 years or 4 years, if you graduate, or you get a doctorate degree from a college, you should be able to stay in this country.

You can see what the thought process is. Trump wanted to outdo Biden, and needed to find a group of immigrants that is sympathetic and hasn't already been "taken" by Biden/Obama. College grads are ostensibly respectable, the U.S. has already invested resources in them, and American businesses need educated workers.

However, Trump doesn't think things through. And so, there are several things that clearly did not occur to him. First, in the past, he's been hostile to all immigrants, accusing them of "poisoning the blood of our country." While in office, he specifically targeted student visa programs as a problem area that he said was rife with abuses. Not to mention he just promised a massive deportation this past weekend. Second, the reason that Trump is hostile to immigrants is because his base is hostile to immigrants. That has not changed in the last 48 hours. Third, Trump's base also (largely) hates universities, seeing them as indoctrination centers and hotbeds of radical, anti-American sentiment. Fourth, business owners might want their jobs to go to well-educated people, but Trump's base (largely) wants jobs to go to Americans. Recall "Buy American, Hire American."

And so, there was a lot of blowback from right-wingers as soon as Trump's new policy proposal went public. And within hours, his campaign was walking back at least part of the promise, explaining that green cards wouldn't go to ALL foreign graduates, just those who have been acceptably vetted. Campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt, just a couple of hours after the podcast was published, rushed to explain to reporters that "Trump has outlined the most aggressive vetting process in U.S. history, to exclude all communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters and public charges. This would only apply to the most thoroughly vetted college graduates who would never undercut American wages or workers." Exactly how a future Trump administration would weed out communists (since most people are pretty good at pretending when their livelihood is on the line), and how they would make sure that these folks would never undercut American wages or workers, was not explained.

Needless to say, like most Trump proposals, this one isn't going to come to fruition, even if Trump is reelected. Indeed, it's about a 90% chance it will be forgotten within 2 weeks. We would make that 1 week, except that there's likely to be a question about it at the debate. The real story here is this: Biden's XOs on immigration have clearly helped him; Trump's response shows that the Trump campaign knows it. (Z)

Trump Legal News: Loud and Clear

The New York Times had an interesting story yesterday about Judge Aileen Cannon. According to their reporting, when Cannon was assigned the Trump documents case, she got phone calls from two fellow federal judges. Both of them strongly encouraged her to withdraw from the case and hand it off to a more experienced colleague.

The first judge to contact Cannon, whose name is not known, told her that it would be much better to move the case to Miami's main federal courthouse, as that is where the indicting grand jury sat, and because it has a secured room, so it is already set up to handle classified information. The second judge to contact Cannon was Chief Judge of the Southern District of Florida Cecilia M. Altonaga. Altonaga was a bit more direct, and told Cannon that her handling the trial would be bad optics, in part because she was appointed by Trump and in part because she mishandled the decision about the special master.

Obviously, Cannon ignored her colleagues' advice, making it very clear that she wants to be on this case. There are many reasons we can think of for why Cannon might feel that way:

• She's got an ego, and doesn't like to be told what to do.
• She's got some insecurity, and doesn't want to do anything that suggests she's not capable of doing her job.
• She wants to make "a name" for herself.
• She is angling for a promotion from a re-elected Donald Trump or, failing that, from the next Trumpy president.
• She wants to protect Trump for one reason or another (e.g., as a thank you for appointing her to the bench).
• She likes attention.

As the Times notes, Cannon was entirely within her rights to disregard her colleagues' suggestions.

With that said, Special Counsel Jack Smith surely read this story with interest. He now knows there are at least two judges who are above Cannon on the ladder and who don't think she's the right judge for this case. He also knows exactly why they feel that way. Given her continued foot-dragging, not to mention Roger Stone's having blabbed the Trumpers' expectation that Cannon plans to dismiss the case, Smith has to be getting close to filing a motion to have her removed from the case, right? At this point, he's got relatively little to lose. (Z)

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy: A Mountain Lodge, among the Sequoias

Last week's theme was definitely more doable than the one from the week previous. The first hint we gave was "[W]e originally had a headline today that used the word 'misbehavior,' but then realized that would only work if we were British." The second hint we gave was: "[W]e really wanted to use the word 'aerious' in a headline, but we decided it's too obscure." And now, the answer key, courtesy of reader J.K. in New Orleans, LA:

The answer this week is that each headline contains a word with all the vowels "a,e,i,o,u" in them:

• Trump on The Hill: No Evacuation Needed... This Time
• Trump Slams Milwaukee: Let the Equivocating Begin
• This Week in Conspiracy Theories: No, These are Not Facetious
• Clarence Thomas Corruption Watch: What Regulations?
• I Read the News Today, Oh Boy: On the Lam in an Automobile
• This Week in Schadenfreude: Putin Gets an Education
• This Week in Freudenfreude: Finnish Authorities Reduce Teen Abortion Dramatically

And if you were British, you'd probably try to make a headline about Clarence Thomas and his misbehaviour.

Well done! Today's headline, of course adds "Sequoias" to the list.

Here are the first 40 readers to get it correct:

1. R.S. in Milan, OH
2. G.W. in Avon, CT
3. M.S. in Sharon, MA
4. M.L. in New York City, NY
5. C.R. in Cromwell, CT, who notes, "facetious" even contains the vowels in alphabetical order
6. J.C. in Oxford, England, UK
7. E.M. in Jersey City, NJ
8. A.W. in Brooklyn, NY
9. K.M. in Ypsilanti, MI, who adds, "Also, did you know the name Aurelio uses all five vowels? There have only been three MLB players named Aurelio and all three were killed in automobile-related crashes: Aurelio Lopez, Aurelio Rodriguez and Aurelio Monteagudo."
10. S.S. in Lucerne, Switzerland
11. D.E. in Ann Arbor, MI
12. S.K. in Drexel Hill, PA
13. M.T. in Wheat Ridge, CO
14. D.D. in Philadelphia, PA
15. A.F. in Pittsburgh, PA, who adds, "It doesn't take an aeronautical genius to identify the ostentatious presence of words with all five English vowels."
16. A.D. in Raleigh, NC
17. A.J. in Baltimore, MD
18. J.M. in Estes Park, CO
19. M.W. in Northbrook, IL
20. J.N. in Zionsville, IN, who adds, "After last week's unquestionably difficult, and apparently anisotropically designed theme, I decided to take an abstemiously short break from puzzles. But behaviorally and authoritatively, I was drawn back to this week's puzzle wondering 'y'."
21. N.S. in Los Angeles, CA
22. A.S. in Fairfax, VA
23. B.F. in Madison, WI
24. D.L. in Springfield, IL
25. T.P. in Kings Park, NY
26. D.M. in Austin, TX
27. D.C. in South Elgin, IL
28. R.K. in Indianapolis, IN
29. J.F. in Fayetteville, NC
30. P.M. in McKinney, TX
31. C.A.G. in Athens, GA
32. N.H. in London, England, UK
33. B.B. in Avon, CT
34. D.L. in Uslar, Germany
35. D.D. in Highland Park, IL
36. S.L. in Wavre, Belgium
37. K.P. in Tampa, FL
38. N.K. in Cleveland Heights, OH, who correctly observes, "I'm not surprised you didn't include 'misbehaviour': I certainly expect you to keep your site UNCONTAMINATED by Canadian spellings."
39. G.K. in Blue Island, IL
40. J.L. in Walnut Creek, CA

As you can see, we didn't run out of correct answers at 20, like we did last week.

This week's theme relies on single words in some headlines and multiple words in others. And be careful with the headline of this item when you think you've figured it out. There's an answer that SEEMS to be right but is not, and one that is actually right. The Trivial Pursuit category is Geography, which appeared in the very first edition of the game and many editions thereafter. As to a hint, L.A. sports fans are maybe at an advantage with this one.

If you have a guess, send it to us at comments@electoral-vote.com, preferably with the subject line "June 21 headlines." (Z)

This Week in Schadenfreude: "Trump Supporters" Leech Money from Trump Supporters

Back when Donald Trump was president, there were all sorts of grifters who used his name to cheat Trump supporters out of money. The most famous of those sleazy efforts was We Build the Wall, which involved several high-profile Trumpers skimming money from donations ostensibly meant to be used to build a segment of border wall.

(Sidebar: The most notable Build the Wall grifter was Steve Bannon, who got a pardon from Trump for his alleged misdeeds, leading to his being charged in New York State. Because he has a pending felony case, Bannon is not eligible to serve his upcoming 4-month stint for contempt of Congress in a cushy white-collar prison, and may well end up at Rikers Island for part of his sentence. Yes, contempt of Congress is a federal crime and Rikers is a New York City jail, but if Bannon's NYS trial commences during his prison sentence, Rikers is likely where he would be held so as to be able to be in court each day. That's your bonus schadenfreude of the week.)

In any event, now that Trump himself is busy raising money by the bushel (see above), the grifters are back, too. And we don't just mean the grifters who try to cash in on Trump's cult-like adoration by selling ridiculous commemorative gold coins and chess sets and bobbleheads. We mean people who outright steal money that was intended for Trump.

This comes from a report published this week by Netcraft, which is an anti-cybercrime firm. The scammy websites are running an unsophisticated scheme; they've just registered domain names that are very similar to donaldjtrump.com but aren't actually donaldjtrump.com, like doonaldjtrump.com or donaldbjtrump.com. The folks running these sites update them regularly to track changes made to Trump's actual website. For example, the picture on the left is what the real Trump website looked like on the day that reader J.H. in Bend, OR, brought this story to our attention, while the picture on the right is what donaldbjtrump.com looked like:

As you can see, they are almost identical. That said, the scammers sometimes make tweaks here and there in order to increase their take. For example, the real Trump site invites you to donate $2,000, end of sentence. The fake site invites you to donate $2,000, so you can have dinner with Trump. From where we sit, $2,000 and no dinner with Trump is far and away the preferable option, if we absolutely must choose. But we are not the target demo for these scammers.

In the end, it's another reminder that he who lives by the grift, dies by the grift. Trump has been a sleazy operator, and it's not surprising that an enormous percentage of the people in his orbit are sleazy operators. And, as a complement to that, Trump has spent his entire political career fleecing the sheep. It's entirely predictable that other sleazy operators, whether they are in Trump's orbit or not, would come along and take a crack at the flock. (Z)

This Week in Freudenfreude: Lynn Conway, 1938-2024

The baseball world lost Willie Mays this week, and Hollywood lost Donald Sutherland. Getting slightly less attention, but undoubtedly on the radars of many readers of this site, was the passing of computer scientist Lynn Conway. She actually died on June 9, of a heart ailment, but it took a few days for the news to propagate.

Born and raised in the New York City suburbs, Conway took a B.S. and a Master's degree at Columbia, graduating with the latter degree in 1963. She was recruited and hired by IBM; during her time with the company, she invented generalized dynamic instruction handling. We don't want this item to get too tech-y, especially since it's the historian who is writing this and not the computer scientist. However, that innovation speeds up computers because it allows them to process instructions based on what is the best match for available resources, rather than having to process them in the order they are given. This helped speed up the supercomputer IBM was developing significantly. Nonetheless, the company fired Conway. We'll get into the reason later; for now, here are a couple of pictures. The one on the left was taken a few years after Conway's IBM stint, the one on the right was from about 20 years ago:

After being dumped by IBM, Conway worked at a few low-level jobs, before catching on at the legendary Xerox PARC laboratory. Even historians know that is where the first computer GUI (graphical user interface) was invented. If you think it's easier to delete a document by dragging a picture of a piece of paper to a picture of a trash can, as opposed to typing something like rm -i d.txt, then you can thank Xerox PARC.

Conway did not work on the GUI, but she did work with Caltech professor Carver Mead on very-large-scale integration (VLSI) chip design. Again, without getting too tech-y, this made it possible to fit a lot more stuff on the surfaces of microchips, making them faster and more efficient. Mead and Conway also wrote a book about VLSI, which became the standard for years and years (after all, they invented the thing). The Votemaster once went to a seminar on VLSI that was based on the book, and afterwards there was a banquet at a medieval castle with pseudo-medieval food. The servers said to everyone: "Would you like some mead?" And the attendees answered: "No thank you, I have had quite enough Mead for one day." The servers did not get the joke, of course. Nonetheless, the work that Conway and Mead did was a big enough deal that it's known as the Mead-Conway VLSI chip design revolution.

The work Conway and Mead did was in the 1970s. And so, the broad presumption was that Mead, being male, was the real brains behind the project. Conway grew so annoyed that she eventually wrote an essay describing what she called the "Conway Effect"—that the scientific innovations produced by women or people of color are usually attributed to whatever white man was in closest proximity. She observed in the essay:

In 2009, my disappearance was complete after the Computer History Museum's gala celebration of the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit. Sixteen men were described by the media as "the Valley's founding fathers." They were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for their contributions to microelectronics. Top billing went to Gordon Moore and Carver Mead. I was not invited to the event, and didn't even know it was happening.

Mead did not encourage the perception that VLSI was primarily his but, obviously, neither did he discourage it.

After leaving Xerox PARC in the 1980s, Conway was a key player at DARPA (v1.0 of the Internet) in the 1980s, and then she became a professor at the University of Michigan. She was there for close to 20 years, and was nearing retirement age when circumstances opened a rather different chapter in her public career. A book on the IBM supercomputer, and Conway's work on it, was scheduled to be published in early 2001. And the book was going to include details that made clear exactly why the company had fired Conway.

This being the case, Conway felt she had no choice but to get out ahead of the story. She first told close friends, then colleagues, and then eventually the world at large. The reason for her termination is that when Conway started at IBM, she was outwardly a man. Growing up, she had always felt like a girl trapped in a boy's body, but she had no idea what to do with that information. It was not until physician Harry Benjamin published his textbook The Transsexual Phenomenon that Lynn Conway understood what was going on. With Benjamin's help, Conway began medical treatments in 1967, and became one of the first Americans to undergo hormonal replacement and surgical sex reassignment. IBM disapproved strongly and terminated her. When Conway resumed her career, she told nobody about her earlier identity, operating instead in what she called "stealth mode."

Once Conway was outed, she became an activist for trans equality. She pushed back at theories of sexual identity that she found misguided and degrading. She was a cast member in the first all-trans performance of The Vagina Monologues. She was named one of the "Stonewall 40 trans heroes" on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. She successfully lobbied for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' code of ethics to be LGBT inclusive. She was the subject of Lines in the Sand: The Lynn Conway Story, a graphic novel that tells the story of her life. In an interview near the end of her life, Conway remarked: "From the 1970s to 1999 I was recognized as breaking the gender barrier in the computer science field as a woman, but in 2000 it became the transgender barrier I was breaking."

Times change, of course, and some of the wrongs of the past have been righted. She is now broadly recognized as a trailblazer in the field of computer science. The Computer Museum eventually added Conway's name alongside Mead's. And IBM, more than half a century after firing Conway, formally apologized. "We deeply regret what you went through, and I know I speak for all of us," Diane Gherson, senior vice president of human resources, told Conway.

Earlier this week, we wrote an item in which we observed that when Title IX was adopted by Congress in 1972, trans Americans were virtually unknown. This seemed like a good real-world story that serves to illustrate that point and explain why that was the case. That Conway was a trailblazing computer scientist, feminist and trans activist is a bonus. If that's not a life well-lived, we don't know what is.

Have a good weekend, all! (Z)

Today's Presidential Polls

Emerson has had a rightward lean this cycle (and last cycle). In any case, all of these results are within the margin of error, so it really does look like a coin-flip election at the moment. FiveThirtyEight has it 50% Biden right now and 49% Trump, which is notable because it's Biden's first lead since they implemented their new algorithm. (Z)

State	Joe Biden	Donald Trump	Start	End	Pollster
Arizona	48%	52%	Jun 13	Jun 18	Emerson Coll.
Georgia	48%	52%	Jun 13	Jun 18	Emerson Coll.
Michigan	49%	51%	Jun 13	Jun 18	Emerson Coll.
Minnesota	51%	49%	Jun 13	Jun 18	Emerson Coll.
Nevada	50%	50%	Jun 13	Jun 18	Emerson Coll.
New York	47%	39%	Jun 12	Jun 13	Siena Coll.
Pennsylvania	49%	51%	Jun 13	Jun 18	Emerson Coll.
Texas	39%	46%	May 31	Jun 09	U. of Texas
Wisconsin	49%	51%	Jun 13	Jun 18	Emerson Coll.

Click on a state name for a graph of its polling history.

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---The Votemaster and Zenger