By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Patient readers, I had a household debacle, and got a very late start. Hence, I will do politics first, since we had Super Tuesday. Then I will do Covid, as part of orts and scraps. Sorry! –lambert UPDATE Covid charts soon.
Bird Song of the Day
Mrs. Moreau’s Warbler, Morogoro, Tanzania. Sounds like a synthesizer making space noises!
Some readers asked for something table of contents-like, so here are a few highlights amidst the density:
High- or Lowlights
(1) Reader query on the CDC.
(2) Open source P2P search software.
(3) Cuomo to be accountable for nursing home deaths?
(4) Super Tuesday.
Politics
“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles
The Constitutional Order (Insurrection)
“The Court’s Colorado Decision Wasn’t About the Law” [George Conway, The Atlantic]. “What little logic that does appear is in the form of a policy argument. The Court correctly points out that, when it comes to the presidency, if states were allowed to enforce Section 3 in federal races, a “patchwork” could result, particularly as to presidential candidates. You could have different states applying different standards under Section 3 in different proceedings with different procedures and on differing records, and they could reach differing results as to a particular candidate for the presidency. This, the Court felt, was bad.” • If you don’t like Justice Chase (“[A] construction, which must necessarily occasion great public and private mischief, must never be preferred to a construction which will occasion neither”), then perhaps Justice Jackson (“[the Constitution is not] a suicide pact”) will do. If Conway thinks that a gaggle of Blue States deciding election 2024 with a “patchwork” of evidentiary standards and entities is the path to a legitimate Biden win, then I want whatever he’s smoking.
Biden Administration
“Security fence to go up at Capitol for State of the Union” [Roll Call]. “A security fence will surround the Capitol as President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union address on March 7, according to three sources familiar with the decision. The Capitol Police Board on Friday approved the installation of the fencing. A security fence went up around the Capitol for last year’s State of the Union speech. The State of the Union is designated as a National Special Security Event, the highest security status the federal government can assign to an event. These are determined by the size, scope and potential threat profile. U.S. Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said people should expect to see a heavy law enforcement presence around the Capitol complex. He noted that there will be technology, plainclothes officers and support teams.”
“The Press Is Ready to Feast on Biden’s State of the Union” [Politico]. “Except for this year’s. Thanks to the stream of memory lapses that burble from the president’s lips like a Rocky Mountain stream, his stiff gait, his falls, his use of the shorter and sturdier set of stairs on Air Force One and even his own self-effacing jokes about his age, Biden has effortlessly attracted the volume of attention that makes him the envy of previous presidents. Unfortunately for Joe, it’s the wrong sort of attention because it makes him look infirm — veering into inept. And it’s happening right as the 2024 presidential campaign is on the verge of being set, as a rematch between Biden and Donald Trump. The amount of media and social media scrutiny that the address will blast at Biden will likely exceed the power of a billion suns. His every handshake coming down the aisle, his every step taken, his every word spoken, will be magnified a hundred times over by the press, his political opposition and voters as they take his measure. And it’s only fair. Biden is asking for another term, and the press is tasked with vetting the candidates the best they can.”
“Ukraine first lady declines State of the Union invitation?” [The Hill]. “Ukraine’s first lady Olena Zelenska was invited to attend President Biden’s State of the Union address but is unable to come, according to the White House…. The White House had also invited Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, but she was also unable to come, according to the White House.”
“Biden’s Best Possible State of the Union Is a Populist Street Fight” [The New Republic]. “Biden is in a near-disaster zone with working-class voters, it’s true. Before we get into that, let’s quickly correct one assertion often made by pundits that’s just wrong. Biden does not need to win the working class. He didn’t in 2020. Exit polls from that year show that Trump won non-college voters—the closest proxy to working class in such polls—by 50 to 48 percent. Trump crushed Biden among white voters with no college degree, 67 to 32 percent. But Biden pummeled Trump by even more among voters of color with no college degree, 72 to 26 percent. If Biden can just keep it close among non-college voters overall (who comprised 59 percent of the electorate in 2020), he can win. But he’s not there right now, especially with the erosion of support among Black and Latino working-class men that we’ve seen in poll after poll. If he can’t change that, he’s in deep trouble.” And: “It’s maddening because middle-out economics—the economic theory that Biden embraces and promotes—is entirely about shifting wealth from the top back to the middle and working classes. The whole idea in a nutshell is that growth comes not from cutting rich people’s taxes and waiting for them to invest, but from making private and public investments, financed in part by rich people’s money, directed toward the middle and working classes so that these people have a fair shot at fulfilling their potential and living better and more secure lives. Throw in his passionate support of labor unions [like the railroad workers], and Biden is more on the side of working-class people than any president since arguably Harry Truman. But the fact that he’s not getting a lot of credit is not puzzling, because either (a) nobody knows about this wealth transfer or (b) they kind of know it, but they don’t really believe it. There are reasons for this: First, Biden has not been a very effective salesman for his ideas and accomplishments. He also suffers for the fact that his party, writ large, isn’t entirely on the same page.” • And by not “on the same page” we mean “vehemently opposed” when their class oxen are gored.
Handy list of Biden’s betrayals on Covid:
hilarious to look back at bidens covid plan and read page after page of stuff he didnt even try to do pic.twitter.com/3NZq11Kn5w
— trevor (@trrvvb) December 16, 2021
Most lethal, consequential “Lucy and the Football” move ever. No doubt Biden will be treating CDC’s “one day” guidance as an enormous victory, even if the pre-SOTU timing was a complete coincidence [snort]. And speaking of those guidelines:
22. He doesn’t have time to spend four years neck deep in research. So, whose advice is this?
Does the WH make use of FarUV technology and increased ventilation? Probably. But not at a cafe in Iowa. Not on the campaign trail.
Does he use a daily antiviral? Which one(s)? /22
— Chalis Montgomery (@TheChalis) March 5, 2024
2024
Less than a year to go!
* * * Super Tuesday: “Takeaways from Super Tuesday” [CNN]. “President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump made their rematch all but official, with both notching huge Super Tuesday wins and Nikki Haley dropping out of the GOP presidential race. More than a dozen states held primaries or caucuses on Tuesday, the biggest day of the nominating races so far as the 2024 presidential campaign accelerates and leaves the one-by-one march through early-voting states behind. Both Biden and Trump saw familiar signs of potential general election weaknesses: progressives casting ballots for “uncommitted” rather than Biden, college-educated suburbanites choosing Haley over Trump.” • Handy maps:
Super Tuesday: “Donald Trump and Adam Schiff Are the Biggest Winners of Super Tuesday” [Cook Political Report]. “Donald Trump’s decisive showing on Tuesday — he won 14 of the 15 contests and 722 delegates — wasn’t surprising. But, at the start of 2023, this outcome was far from a given. At this point in 2023, polling showed Trump polling at just 46% while an ascendent and well-funded Florida governor looked well-positioned to make the race for the nomination a serious contest. A year later, Ron DeSantis is long gone, and Trump’s lone remaining opponent, Nikki Haley, only managed to pick up 46 delegates and one primary state victory (Vermont). Exit polls in North Carolina and Virginia confirmed a long-standing pattern of Trump running up the score among Republican and non-college voters, but narrowly winning, or losing, college educated and independent voters to Haley.”
Super Tuesday: “7 things Super Tuesday just taught us about the November election” [Politico]. The deck: “Biden and Trump romped on Super Tuesday. But there were warning signs for both of them.” More: “If Tuesday night cemented anything, it was that any lingering chance of Trump or Biden not getting through their primaries has become the stuff of fanfic fever dreams. Large swaths of voters in both parties aren’t relishing a 2020 rematch, polls show. And now, they’re going to have to get used to it.” Or, as we say, “live with it.” More: “From Colorado to Virginia, it was clear that the GOP’s down-ballot problems will only be exacerbated by Trump’s problems in the suburbs. In Virginia, the former president lost suburbs like Alexandria and Arlington to Haley, along with the state capital of Richmond and city of Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia. In Colorado, he lost Denver and Boulder. ‘He consistently loses the most educated counties in every state,’ said GOP pollster Christine Matthews. ‘In Virginia, this was definitely true, but it was true in South Carolina, too. And everywhere. … I don’t think he wins them back by talking about how much Black voters love his mug shot T-shirt or let Russia attack NATO allies who haven’t paid their dues.’ Trump set out to remake the GOP into more of a working-class party — and November could test whether trading white-collar voters for blue-collar ones is a winning strategy in swing states.” And: “But it was in Minnesota, which hasn’t gone for a Republican for president since Richard Nixon in 1972, where Biden saw a less surprising but more threatening setback. The ‘uncommitted’ option on the ballot there had as big a night as it did in Michigan, winning 19 percent of the vote with 89 percent counted. The state’s politically significant Somali population, concentrated around the Twin Cities, rebuked Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war…. But come this fall, Biden can hardly afford such a defection in the pivotal blue wall state.”
* * * Super Tuesday: “How did ‘uncommitted’ perform on ballots across the country?” [USA Today]. MN: 18.9%; MI (last week) 13%; NC: 12.7%; MA: 9.4%; CO: 8.1%; TN: 7.9%; AL: 6%; IA: 3.9%. Could be a lot in a close race. More:
“Uncommitted” got a whopping 19% in Minnesota with virtually no organizing, but this graph is even more telling than the overall number. In many places it was over 50%, & in 2 over 75%! They talk about “younger voters”, but note the age range goes up to 34. Not just college kids! pic.twitter.com/yKIGiTX3pz
— Left I on the News (@leftiblog) March 6, 2024
Another view of “protest votes”:
Super Tues states w largest anti-Biden Protest Vote:
Minnesota:
Biden 71
Uncomm 19
Dean 8
Marianne 1Massachusetts:
Biden 83
No Pref 9
Dean 5
Marianne 3Colorado:
Biden 84
Uncomm 8
Dean 3
Marianne 3North Carolina:
Biden 87
Uncomm 13
(Dean & Marianne blocked from ballot)— Krystal Ball (@krystalball) March 6, 2024
Super Tuesday: “How the ‘Uncommitted’ Effort to Protest Biden Has Spread in Super Tuesday States” [New York Times]. “The campaigns have been fragmented, organized with far less time and resources than Michigan’s operation. Many were planned in a matter of days, well after early voting had already begun, and several organizers declined to articulate specific benchmarks for what would constitute success on Tuesday night beyond the goal of seeing Mr. Biden move his position.”
* * * Super Tuesday: “Nikki Haley suspends her campaign and leaves Donald Trump as the last major Republican candidate” [Associated Press]. “Nikki Haley suspended her presidential campaign on Wednesday after being soundly defeated across the country on Super Tuesday… ‘It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him. And I hope he does that,’ she said. ‘At its best, politics is about bringing people into your cause, not turning them away. And our conservative cause badly needs more people.'”
Super Tuesday: “Dean Phillips ends presidential campaign and endorses Biden” [NBC]. “‘I’m going to suspend my campaign and I will be, right now, endorsing President Biden because the choices are so clear,’ he said in a Minnesota radio interview on WCCO’s ‘The Chad Hartman Show.’ ‘The alternative, Donald Trump, is a very dangerous, dangerous man,’ he continued. ‘I would simply ask and invite and encourage Haley supporters, Trump supporters, uncommitted supporters to unify behind decency and integrity.'”
* * * Super Tuesday: AIPAC a paper tiger?
And really a seismic result for Dave Min to fend off nearly $5 million in AIPAC ads and reach the runoff. Will AIPAC endorse the Republican in November? pic.twitter.com/JwU9xPCmt7
— David Dayen (@ddayen) March 6, 2024
Min also has a DUI conviction, so he’s not without vulnerabilities.
* * * Trump (R): “Arizona investigators issue grand jury subpoenas as state’s 2020 Trump election probe accelerates” [Politico]. “Arizona prosecutors in recent weeks issued grand jury subpoenas to multiple people linked to Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, a sharp acceleration of their criminal investigation into efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state… Mayes’ investigators are scrutinizing the so-called “alternate electors” who signed paperwork falsely claiming that Trump had won the state. Prosecutors in Georgia, Michigan and Nevada have already brought charges against pro-Trump fake electors in their states. Mayes’ team has also asked people about Trump himself, as well as former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Trump attorneys John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro. Chesebro, an architect of Trump’s scheme to organize slates of false electors in six states won by Biden, pleaded guilty for his role in that scheme in Georgia, and he has cooperated with investigators in Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin. He agreed late last year to speak to Arizona prosecutors as well.” • To me, this is the most dangerous lawsuit of all, and the one that may have already holed Trump below the waterline, because some of the “contingent electors” were innocents who got sucked in. Voters may well feel that players do what they do, on each side. But when the players start shooting civilians, that’s quite another thing. (I don’t know if the Democrats are capable of playing it that way, since that would imply that all Trump voters are not evil, but if they can bring themselves to, I think it would be the most effective approach.)
Trump (R): “Trump lawfare update” [Washington Examiner]. A useful summary, concluding “The reason for the Democratic panic is this: Some in the party think, sure, President Joe Biden is weak and his polls are terrible, but if he falters, there is always lawfare. We’ve thrown case after case against Trump. Surely one of them will work. Now, there has been a lot of movement with the big six cases. Five of them might not be resolved, or resolved in Biden’s favor, before the election. So it could be that the entire hopes of the Democratic Party and all those who seek to bring down Trump before Election Day rest with Bragg.” Bragg’s case is the Trump’s payments to a mistress: “Bragg[‘s] charges were weak. It’s really a bunch of misdemeanors that Bragg conjured into felonies through a legally questionable maneuver.” Seems like normal practice in New York.” And: “The other cases, bad as some of them are, got more respect and attention, and Bragg stepped into the background, offering to delay trying his case while the others went first. But now all those cases have encountered problems, and Bragg is steaming ahead to a March 25 trial date, less than three weeks away. It’s a bad case, but it’s a case.”
Trump (R): “FAU poll shows 1 in 7 Republicans don’t plan to vote for Trump in November” [Orlando Sentinel]. “The poll asked people — Democrats, Republicans and independents — who said they aren’t voting for Trump in November why. There were two central reasons people cited for their intentions not to vote for Trump in the fall. (1) His track record as president and his performance on Jan. 6, 2021, the day of the attempted insurrection aimed at stopping the official declaration of President Joe Biden’s victory (cited by 30%); (2) The way Trump conducts himself personally (cited by 21%). There were notable differences by political party. Among Democrats, 31% cited his presidential performance/Jan. 6. Among Republicans, 29% cited his personal behavior. The exact question was, ‘Why are you not voting for Donald Trump?'” And, on abortion: “Just 4% said it was their top concern.” • The question reason #1 really was “His track record as president including his performance on Jan. 6th.” If this were a journal paper, I’d say there were confounders.
* * * Biden (D): Yikes:
Oh my Lord. This man is not well. pic.twitter.com/5UoEW90FD6
— Peter Daou (@peterdaou) March 6, 2024
Staffer yelling “Thank you” to get the press outta there…
Biden (D): “The White House is betting the election on a theory of skewed polls” (excerpt) [Nate Silver, Silver Bulletin]. “One of the oddities of my career covering politics is that Democrats have never really been down in the polls of a presidential race — until now…. So it’s easy enough to see why Democratic campaign officials have a certain confidence, sometimes verging on swagger. Or at least those officials most closely associated with Biden, since the one election out of the four that Democrats lost (2016) was the one when Biden wasn’t on the ticket…. If you held the election today, it wouldn’t be a fait accompli: Biden would be in an analogous position to Trump in 2016, within striking distance in the event of a systematic polling error. But Trump would be favored…. This matters more, because one reason polls in March aren’t historically all that reliable is because campaigns have the opportunity to change course and tweak a strategy that isn’t working. And yet, blessed with a lot of runway and faced with abundant evidence that voters have soured on Biden — his approval rating is 38 percent — Democratic officials have mostly reacted with denial.” • Democrats?! Below the fold (sigh), Silver reacts to Osnos’ New Yorker piece yesterday. Another reaction to that article–
Biden (D): “Is Biden in Denial About the Polls?” [Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine]. “The most disturbing possibility of Biden’s posture of polling denial is not that it’s sincere but that it comes from a sense of entitlement. According to Osnos, Biden’s view is ‘I’ve earned this.’ In other words, he believes his presidency has been successful enough that he does not deserve to be facing questions about his effectiveness.” • A posture very appealing to the PMC generally.
* * * * * * “Who Will Win Control of the House in 2024? California May Hold the Key” [New York Times]. “Of the 16 House districts won by Mr. Biden but currently in Republican hands, five are in California, making the state a linchpin of the party’s hopes of retaking the [House], where Republicans currently hold a three-seat majority…. On the whole, Democrats start at a slight numerical disadvantage when it comes to taking back the House. Gerrymandering and the natural sorting of voters between dense urban areas that are heavily Democratic and vast rural districts that are strongly Republican have left vanishingly few in play.” • “Natural”? When you read “natural,” always consider rewriting as “artificial.” • Handy chart on House ratings, from Larry Sabato’s Center for American Politics:
Republican Funhouse
“GOP lawmakers send Andrew Cuomo subpoena over COVID policies” [News Nation]. “A House committee led by Republicans issued a subpoena Tuesday to former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, asking him to provide a deposition on his COVID-19 policies, according to a letter obtained by NewsNation. The subpoena, sent by the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Response and signed by GOP Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, asks Cuomo to give a deposition on May 24. Specifically, lawmakers are asking for information on his COVID policies as they relate to nursing homes during the early days of the pandemic. Cuomo left office in 2021 after a report by New York Attorney General Letitia James concluded he sexually harassed at least 11 women, which he has denied. When it comes to the pandemic, critics have said Cuomo understated the true death toll in nursing homes by thousands, with fatalities fueled by a state order that effectively forced such places to accept recovering COVID-19 patients.” • This is especially great because the Republicans aren’t going for a winger kneejerk talking point, but accountabilty for a real issue: Cuomo’s slaughter of elders (which Democrats could not bring themselves to do. Sexual harassment is bad, no question, but imagine prioritizing it over the deaths of thousands).
#COVID19
“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison
Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).
Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!
Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (dashboard); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).
Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).
Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).
Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).
Stay safe out there!
Testing and Tracking
The United States is not a serious country:
living in europe, i can order a bulk box of 25 SARS-CoV-2 rapid tests for thirty cents a test, aka 7,5€ for 25 rapids. people in the US are getting fleeced. https://t.co/eq1mxnEvF8
— Lola Q. Germs (@LolaGerms) March 6, 2024
Sequelae
“SARS-CoV-2 causes brain inflammation and induces Lewy body formation in macaques” [bioRxiv]. From 2021, still germane. From the Abstract: “SARS-CoV-2 may cause acute respiratory disease, but the infection can also initiate neurological symptoms. Here we show that SARS-CoV-2 infection causes brain inflammation in the macaque model. An increased metabolic activity in the pituitary gland of two macaques was observed by longitudinal positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET-CT). Post-mortem analysis demonstrated infiltration of T-cells and activated microglia in the brain, and viral RNA was detected in brain tissues from one animal. We observed Lewy bodies in brains of all rhesus macaques. These data emphasize the virus’ capability to induce neuropathology in this nonhuman primate model for SARS-CoV-2 infection. As in humans, Lewy body formation is an indication for the development of Parkinson’s disease, this data represents a warning for potential long-term neurological effects after SARS-CoV-2 infection.” • “Monkeys exaggerate, and mice lie.” Nevertheless.
Elite Maleficence
“The CDC’s new, relaxed Covid isolation guidance makes perfect sense” [STAT]. “. Instead, those in charge of public health guidance should consider the burden it imposes on people to change their behavior, balanced against the health benefits the change can offer to them and those around them. The CDC’s new guidance on what to do after a Covid infection has been controversial among some. It says that you should isolate when symptomatic but when the fever subsides and symptoms improve, you can end isolation. Using this lens of burdens and benefits, the new approach makes a lot of sense.” • That’s not the CDC’s job (nor is it the CDPH’s, as I show here). This “balance” is a political choice — one would hope one democratically arrived at — and those decisions are not within CDC’s remit. (I realize this puts me into the box with those who want to destroy the administrative state, but here we are.) Even if the CDC had not butchered testing, masking, aerosol transmission, scientific communication, isolation guidance, and leadership that modeled non-pharmaceutical interventions, the CDC should not be doing this. (My reaction to the headline was: “What is STAT thinking? Then I saw the author.) Readers, I would like very much to follow up on alert reader Steven V’s suggestion of filing a “writ of mandamus.” My first step was to try to determine on what statutory basis the CDC operates (apparently beginning with the Public Health Service Act of 1912 (!). CDC itself is an incredible tangle of re-orgs. Can any readers help me out with some sources on this? Ideally, a law review article with lots of footnotes (maybe even from the ACT-UP era?).
TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts
| Cases | |
| National[1] Biobot March 4: | Regional[2] Biobot March 4: |
 |
 |
| Variants[3] CDC March 2 | ★ Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC February 24 |
 |
 |
| Hospitalization | |
| New York[5] New York State, data March 4: | National [6] CDC February 24: |
|
 |
| Positivity | |
| National[7] Walgreens March 4: | Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic February 24: |
 |
 |
| Travelers Data | |
| Positivity[9] CDC February 12: | Variants[10] CDC February 12: |
 |
 |
| Deaths | |
| Weekly deaths New York Times February 24: | Percent of deaths due to Covid-19 New York Times February 24: |
 |
 |
LEGEND
1) ★ for charts new today; all others are not updated.
2) For a full-size/full-resolution image, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on the chart thumbnail and “open image in new tab.”
NOTES
[1] (Biobot) Biobot drops, conformant to Walgreen positivity data (if that is indeed not a data artifact). Note, however, the area “under the curve,” besides looking at peaks. That area is larger under Biden than under Trump, and it seems to be rising steadily if unevenly.
[2] (Biobot) Regional separation re-emerges.
[3] (CDC Variants) As of May 11, genomic surveillance data will be reported biweekly, based on the availability of positive test specimens.” “Biweeekly: 1. occurring every two weeks. 2. occurring twice a week; semiweekly.” Looks like CDC has chosen sense #1. In essence, they’re telling us variants are nothing to worry about. Time will tell.
[4] (ER) Does not support Biobot data. “Charts and data provided by CDC, updates Wednesday by 8am. For the past year, using a rolling 52-week period.”
[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Not flattening.
[6] (Hospitalization: CDC) Still down. “Maps, charts, and data provided by CDC, updates weekly for the previous MMWR week (Sunday-Saturday) on Thursdays (Deaths, Emergency Department Visits, Test Positivity) and weekly the following Mondays (Hospitalizations) by 8 pm ET†”.
[7] (Walgreens) That’s a big drop! It would be interesting to survey this population generally; these are people who, despite a tsunami of official propaganda and enormous peer pressure, went and got tested anyhow. UPDATE Given the extraordinary and sudden drop-off, I thought I’d check to see if the population being tested changed in some way. Here are the absolute numbers on February 14, at the edge of the cliff:
And here are the absolute numbers on March 3:
As you can see, there’s an order of magnitude decrease in those testing between those two dates. Was there an event on or about February 14 that is a candidate suggesting an account of this massive shift in behavior? Why yes, yes there is:
“CDC plans to drop five-day covid isolation guidelines” [WaPo] (February 13, 2024).
[8] (Cleveland) Flattening, consistent with Biobot data.
[9] (Travelers: Posivitity) Now up, albeit in the rear view mirror.
[10] (Travelers: Variants) Backward revisions remove NV.1 data. JN.1 dominates utterly.
Stats Watch
Employment Situation: “United States Job Quits” [Trading Economics]. “The number of job quits in the United States declined by 54,000 from the previous month to 3.385 million in January 2024, down from December’s revised figure of 3.439 million and touching the lowest level since January 2021.”
The Bezzle: “Worldcoin hit with temporary ban in Spain over privacy concerns” [TechCrunch]. “Spain’s data protection authority has ordered Worldcoin to temporarily stop collecting and processing personal data from the market. It must also stop processing any data it previously collected there. The controversial, Sam Altman-founded eyeball-scanning blockchain crypto project started operations in the market last July, as part of a global rollout. The Spanish authority is using ‘urgency procedure’ powers contained in the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for the temporary data processing cessation order — which means the order can have a maximum duration of three months (so until mid June).”
Tech: Utopia this is not:
If I had an apple vision pro! pic.twitter.com/UdXgm73K1U
— Arron Crascall (@arron_crascall) February 13, 2024
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 75 Extreme Greed (previous close: 74 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 78 (Extreme Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). \Last updated Mar 6 at 1:15:38 PM ET
News of the Wired
YaCy is free software for your own search engine” [Yacy.net]. “Imagine if, rather than relying on the proprietary software of a large professional search engine operator, your search engine was run across many private devices, not under the control of any one company or individual. Well, that’s what YaCy does!” • Interesting, though requires Java or docker. (The demo page is very slow to load, presumably being overloaded by Hacker News traffic.)
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“Ukraine first lady declines State of the Union invitation?” [The Hill]. “Ukraine’s first lady Olena Zelenska was invited to attend President Biden’s State of the Union address but is unable to come, according to the White House…. The White House had also invited Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, but she was also unable to come, according to the White House.”
Now, that *is* interesting, and possibly good news or perhaps just the Administration doesn’t want to signal its priority in a way that Team R can easily use its control of the House to thwart that priority.
As I have said before, I’d love to be wrong.
My first thought is that the grifters do not see any advantage to being there. It wouldn’t be conducive to projects that line their pockets.
Pretty sure, the Biden staff would probably be happy to have them sitting side by side in the gallery.
I dunno, take away United States’ goodwill and their grift would disappear, fast. If Blinken tells them to come, they better come.
Oh I think they need the neocons and the neoliberals who seem to be in lockstep about both Ukraine and Russia, but I am not sure anybody, grifters and ideologues alike, thinks they need Biden. He is a growing impediment to the cause. IMO Vicky is the first not the last “resignation” we will see. if the non elected regulars, similar to. Vicky and her husband, want both the funding and power necessary for this project to continue ultimately Biden and by extension his most visible team members need to go.
Biden is but the figurehead. That is why I specifically chose Blinken and not Biden.
Athough the neocons and neoliberals seem pretty set on Anyone But Trump, even to the point of telling outrageous porkies about Biden’s supposed competence.
invited but encouraged to decline…to help the pivot to asia(sic), and the abandonment and memoryholing of the ukraine adventure.
i find biden especially hard to watch(but i’d generally rather read what was said anyway…nobody does churchillian speeches anymore…the video is boring)
but i’m interested to see how well the drug cocktail works for such a giant solo spectacle.
he’s obviously gone way downhill since the last SotU…from everything i’ve seen.
remember Lil George’ earpiece?
at some important speech….rachel, et al. made a big deal out of it(ie:”he’s a moron”).
i will probably not watch in real time(late in the day for me, unless i’m drinkin, in which case i try not to bother with such things)….but i predict…again, from what ive seen of the guy…that this will be a disaster, and will compel his end in politics…and thus force the issue of “who dey gonna run?”.
and since i’m halfway through a homegrown hogleg as i type….what if he dies on stage?
just stutters, eyes glaze, and he keels over(thats how my grandma went, but at the dinner table, and with choking added on)
do the dems/deep state/cabal/whatever have a contingency for that?
of course…his people could just come out and say that he was called away on important national security matters and kamel(*) will fill in.(which i actually might just watch!)
(*- the only named Ringwraith/Nazgul.–sometimes rendered:”Khamûl”, or “Kamal”….just sayin’…)
.”what if he dies on stage? just stutters, eyes glaze, and he keels over….do the dems/deep state/cabal/whatever have a contingency for that?”
That is why I had been watching Phillips so closely when he started his run. He seemed perfect for the role, but now they are left with Kamala. The rally around Biden on the part of the establishment seems like yet another own goal.
Or freezes like McConnell?
Maybe Olena Zelenska and Yulia Navalnaya bailed because they see that Trump is likely to win in November and want to get in good with him. Can’t do that if they are seen at Biden’s State of the Union address supporting him.
I think Zelenska is motivated by a sense of betrayal, the other, as you say, is biden her time. -a.v.
My data points for this week:
Yesterday, I paid a visit to the campus of my former academic employer to do various chores and give a guest lecture. I saw two former colleagues who were still wearing masks, but nobody else.
I’d forgotten that there was a career fair yesterday, so the halls were crowded with hundreds of students – none of them masked – talking loudly among themselves and with the employer reps staffing several dozen information tables. I quickly found the nearest exit and made the rest of my way across campus outside.
As I was leaving my old building, I ran into a former colleague, a real gem, who had always done a splendid job of the time-intensive prep work involved in running the lab components of my former introductory course. She’s a careful, thoughtful observer of student behaviour, and I always paid attention to what she said.
She reported that this semester’s students in one of the core 2nd year science courses are really struggling, and about 1/3 of the class of ~ 60 had dropped out by the middle of the semester. They’re having trouble with all aspects, but especially the quantitative parts of the course. And there are behavioural frictions – like wanting special treatment for various situations – which are more numerous and irritating than usual. She said that a colleague teaching a 4th year class had reported similar problems. And she noted that the 1st & 2nd year students would have experienced about half of their high school years since the pandemic started, and said that other colleagues are reporting that freshmen seem to be even more unprepared than before to handle university-level work. The whole notion of taking notes in class seems completely outside their experience. She wondered how much “dumbing down” of course content they can be expected to do to help students get through.
Certainly, teachers at all levels have always groused about their students (“kids these days” etc.), but these comments were coming from someone who has never been given to exaggeration, and whose instinct is to give students the benefit of the doubt.
I don’t think that there is any single cause at work; it’s a “polycrisis” of its own affecting young people, including: cumulative impairment from repeat infections, stresses from high costs (tuition, rent) & anxieties from taking on student debt, and time burdens from juggling school with part-time employment.
Much as I loved teaching for the last ~ 20 years of my career, I’m glad to be retired now.
A professor at the local university (teaches freshman Comp Sci) said that the faculty have noticed that freshmen are struggling more than in the past.
A relative who teaches math at the local community college told us the same thing.
This item from this morning’s links undoubtedly has something to do with it. The video game generation, with their younger brothers and sisters further compromised.
Research into 220 Australian families over two years concludes exposure to television, phone and other screens hinders young children’s language skills
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/04/does-children-toddlers-kids-watching-tv-impact-development-learning
I prefer to not say what I do, but the college freshman were at least 8th graders when covid hit. Watch out. It’s going to get worse.
Talked to an old HS science teacher who had similar tales. He’s also glad to be retired. This is doubly sad, because, whatever his other quirks (and he had them), he loved science and he loved to teach and he loved to teach science. Not only that, but he went out of his way to do more of what he loved and to spread what he loved to others, rather than just put his hours in and go home and grade quizzes or whatever.
I’ve been teaching a first year STEM class for 5 years. I also taught this class at a high school level for the first three, which the second to last year was cut short due to COVID lock-downs. Quite a time to be a teacher.
I see the same thing. I’ve had conversations with other teachers/instructors who agree. They are stressed with it all. It’s become a real struggle for all of us, students included.
I expect mass retirement in the not to distant future. Not good.
As a secondary science teacher, I think the NGSS (next generation science standards) focus has been really misguided. We are told to teach less from a book and memorization focus, and more on application. But students don’t know how it applies without the memorization aspect of science. Also, I don’t have a textbook. College level courses are very much focused on read the textbook, go to lecture for information outside of the textbook, take a test. The lab is a different course. It seems like what they want in secondary schools is inverted. Lab time more, classes less. Expect there’s no way my students can do that. They wouldn’t be able to make sense of it.
I teach middle school, so I give them guided notes. I can’t really expect them to know how to take notes yet, so my guided notes are my way of trying to get them to learn to note take. I dislike what is happening at my level, and I can’t imagine how much it’s disrupting higher education.
I teach CAD (computer aided design). Entry level class, no prerequisite, which I don’t agree with, but I don’t make the rules. This is a state college in Ohio. I don’t use a book. I provide the material they need.
The class is mandatory for some disciplines (engineering) but elective for others. Part of my students are sent by their employer, or they take it on their own to better themselves. IMO, it is a great class for anyone. X,Y, and Z is how we have all our nice things. I try to explain how and why.
That said, CAD is math and geometry intensive. So many struggle with even the most basic stuff. I quit the high school gig (refused to go back after 3 years) because it was so bad. They got rid of their own full time instructor and outsourced it to us to save money. I was Sister Mary Elephant. There is not much learning going on there.
I now see the results of that failure in my younger students. They can’t add and subtract, or know the difference between a diameter and a radius. And don’t get me started on basic computer skills. They are really good with phones though.
At this point I think I’m doing it as a public service. I’m going to have a long talk with myself when this semester is over. I don’t know if I can do it anymore.
To be frank, I think our educational system is an utter mess. Best of luck to all involved.
from observing my boys(now 22 and 18) and their respective cohorts, i’d include the influence of the fondleslabs, too.
i call my Youngest “Glacier”….because he drags his feet and procrastinates…largely because he’s glue to the dern fone/tiktok.
i can walk back to the Falcon faster from the last gate than him,lol.
and i do not think that this malaise/disability/whatever can be laid at the feet of any one thing….its in the wind, in the air…that nihilism nietszche referenced.
much more than my genx cohort, back when…which is saying something.
an inchoate,almost numinous, but very ethereal, sense…never articulated…that shits all fucked up.
I read somewhere a few decades ago that the Finnish word-phrase for “cell phone” translated literally to ” Yuppie teddybear”.
I wonder if some of these kids have suffered massive brain-cell mis-wiring and dis-wiring due to massive immersion and marination in remote digital teaching-learning during the Covid shutdown years. Combined with the already established immersion in recreational personal digital devices, getting more forced hours of digital exposure through online learning may have crossed a damage-threshhold to their brains.
The shutdown in the United States was short and lax. So, no.
Yes, but there’s been a percolating ongoing disruption from the overlapping tides of our smorgasbord of opportunistic infections, disrupting both family and academic life, and for primary and secondary education the family/academic mutually compound, particularly where both parents work.
This is like the simmering anger over inflation where everyone is materially worse off and know it. But in this instance everyone is involved, child, parent, faculty, all towards the propagandized goal of “returning to normal”, where this trinity agrees to accept their mutual decay of function and pass the problem along to the next way station.
It’s only at that point where the receiving faculty can admit the diminished capacity.
and remember that the fondleslabs are designed to be as addictive as heroin.
Yes, the fondleslab was the first debilitating virus, we’re seeing that already with new hires.
Involved in mutual denial
When my daughter went back to teaching special-ed after the lockdown it’s been a mess. Kids out sick, in class aides out sick, teachers out sick. At times she was left with no other adults in the room and 8-10 children. Impossible to have any structured learning, basically turned into daycare. It’s gotten better recently, but the kids are not where they should be for inclusion into general education classes.
Yes, college does not have the same excitement as it used to. Really, students are not some separate cohort from the rest of the nation. If all the commentators are feeling doom is in the air, why wouldn’t students as well? Study hard, get good grades, don’t catch the supposedly mysterious disease (again), worry about your family and friends, go into permanent debt, and then go out and get those (non-existing) well paying jobs. All while ignoring the various wars, atrocities, and insane actions all covered with inane words of mainstream media and many bloggers, writers, and others. Oh, and watching what you write or say. As one teacher said IIRC despite this being a college site, the internet catches everything. Don’t write anything that you don’t want everyone to know.”
One of the reasons I switched from political economy/science to philosophy as my major was because I could not handle the constant insanity.
My parents generation had virtually free education, an economy that was good for the working class, and such events as the Apollo program and the eradication of smallpox. Despite the Cold War, there was hope and energy. Wtf do we have now?
we have the declining american empire that no one wants to talk about, at all.
gopteaers will yammer drunkenly about the decline and fall of rome…without really having a grasp of it all…
its more polemic than understanding.
i have no idea what my local dems are talking about…what with them secure in their sundry hillforts, and all.
maybe the untermenchen need to hear what we here talk about…so go forth!
evangelise.
but this time, bringing the Bad News…that its only gonna get worse, and our only hope is to band together, wherever we are.
“love the one youre with”-stephen stills
Thank you, JBird,
It seeems for years I’ve been watching this doom gather not only over this commentariat, but the kids. Maybe it was just the reflection of my own psyche, but it seemed to begin thirty years ago, while I was still mired in academia, waiting for advancement, one funeral at a time. And it seemed to persist among the young into the corporate workplace where new tech grads were replaced annually by more and more H1Bs. I feel so powerless, with my freedom to make an occasional feeble comment to this commentariat. How hard for the young, who are so much less free and less empowered!
Precarity, homelessness , and war.
Not clear to me how to reach these young people if they have been deprived of basic tools.
I wonder how must the push for DEI (the E does not stand for Equality) and various sex issues in the public k-12 and college schools have demoralized or confused kids. I wonder if teachers in private k-12 and colleges are seeing the same things in their students the public school teachers are seeing. Really.
(I heard a table of young college teachers (public uni) discussing how to get more DEI information into their classes and teaching. What? I’m sure that’s an HR directive.)
A third of my fourth year class writes their exams at the access centre because of learning disabilities, giving them extra time on their exams. A colleague reports the same in his large core 2nd year classes. The kids are not doing so well. Working class non-selective university in Montreal. Much stress and anxiety. I am quite worried about a couple of them.
Thanks. I know smart phones/ tablets/ etc can greatly reduce attention span as one hops from one screen thing to the next. Young people growing up with smart phones and their constant attention addiction/distractions might be having an effect on concentration.
From the Guardian. It starts with a private school then branches out to public schools.
What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/17/cellphone-smartphone-bans-schools
This might be one piece of the puzzle of falling student classroom achievement.
Not quite that high a proportion where I was, but still a noticeable uptrend in special considerations of that kind in recent years. At the time, I chose to view it as reflecting less inhibition / shame over seeking help of that kind, and a sign that we were becoming more welcoming to students who might not have enrolled in the past. So a positive trend. Now, not so sure …
> Working class non-selective university in Montreal.
Concordia? I was always so encouraged by Concordia because of the diligence the kids were exhibiting. Lots of energy. And a good theatre department, too. One of the nice things about Montreal was performances everywhere, all the tine. This was in the 90s, of course; perhaps things have changed.
I enjoyed my weekend stay in Montreal back in 2019, one of the last places I ever traveled to, followed by Philly and then DC I think, the museums! Haven’t traveled since. That was the end.
And Montreal was my only experience in what feels like a foreign country. Everyone speaks French by default. It feels foreign. Just about anywhere in America, you’re in America.
When assigned term papers my students tell me they have to score some black market adderall first, as otherwise they can’t concentrate enough to do it. The kids are not alright. Don’t get me going about ChatGPT.
You might be onto something. I still get most of my old work emails (and the Delete button is so satisfying), so it has been obvious that the new Dean is all over this stuff. Just today, I got to learn two new acronyms – DRI, JEDI – in a message about a full-day workshop on having more of both in international education.
“kids these days”
After all these seriously concerning reports about our struggling youth, here’s a lighthearted consideration of the eternal changing of the guard from one generation to the next. The commonality expressed by the two generations is probably not one that would pass muster these days, but was pretty typical of the inter-gender teasing that went on when this song was written.
“Kids These Days” Tom Rush
In addition to Covid, some of these kids might be the product of the no-homework policies that started taking off around 2015.
Whatever the benefits are, I don’t think it’s helping kids develop time management skills. That extra free time in the evening is just being redirected to more screen time.
My husband blames it on cellphones. Not the phones themselves but the radio signals from the cell towers to the phones. He thinks the radio signals being all around us are affecting our brains. No scientific evidence of course. He just sees a lot of disturbing behavior in “kids these days.”
Kids have no reasonable expectation to have attention spans, nothing in their lives would indicate that any of them want one.
They just want their own YouTube channel to get tons of subscribers and sell their merch. That seems like a reasonable goal to them.
I have read all the comments below regarding education of our youth as I have been teaching college courses for over thirty years. I don’t disagree with the comments that state students are doing poorly as much as I disagree with the “why”. In my humble opinion, my students are doing just fine–they repeat false and misleading data and pretend it is factual. The fact is that our high schools are doing a fine job keeping our youth indoctrinated. The textbooks employed and the computer technology provided are all sophisticated tools that lead our students to the “water”, and yet we wonder why these same students can’t articulate a sentence or critically analyze any reading. Our students are rewarded based on how much they can regurgitate neoliberal propaganda. The move from classroom experience to online “learning” is another deceptive tool designed for collecting tuition from questionable students. From where I am standing, covid-19 may be the culprit for those just getting their feet wet but clearly, there were many components that have the accumulated throughout the years that have produced the current student population. The only exception that few have commented on are the student athletes. The athletes, while mostly illiterate, seem to excel in sports. Has anyone seen the degenerative process in sports as they witness in their classrooms?
I updated the politics section. Covid section coming soon!
Finished. Thanks for your patience; I got a really late start. For those who came in on time, do give the entire post a skim; there’s quite a bit of new material!
Wow, that TNR article concludes Biden just needs better PR. That fits the “we just need better messaging” Democratic MO so snugly that it would lead me to believe in the Blob; even if it hadn’t already been observed to exist.
Just tweak the narrative and things will turn in the right … that is ‘our’ … direction. Look how well it has worked in Ukraine. No substance needed. tell that to the nutritionally deficient in Gaza.
Looking at the comments on the Krystal Ball tweet, I have to conclude that they think everyone is as deluded as the voters they allow into their events. Nobody had enough math to realize that if about half of the uncommitted and/or third party voters don’t show up or show up and don’t vote for Biden in November Biden will be facing criminal trials by next March. (And Hunter will have an actual prosecutor running his trial. Because with the exception of Massachusetts he will lose all those states this time or again in November, and thus the electoral college.
I’m don’t trust or much like RFK Jr, but at this rate he is going to be the first person since Perot to be a serious thorn in the side of the two major parties.
I read about half the article, rolling my eyes so much it’s a wonder they didn’t get stuck there. Then the TNR site with all its ads crashed my phone and I decided I’d read too much anyway and was already dumber than I was when I started the article so I just closed the browser.
You missed the part where the author called for an FDR-style economic bill of rights, then (examples being a fair wage, housing, education) Let’s ignore the point about how attaching ‘economic’ to this fatally weakens it already, along with prefixing the word ‘affordable’ to everything. And also ignore the point about how with the current state of the Democratic party, this would become another BLM, where Democrats enthusiastically advocate for a range of outcomes at the same time as setting policies (and entrenching existing ones) that do the opposite.
All of that aside: what is the author smoking? Who does he think Biden actually is? This is the guy that successfully won the nomination advocating against Medicare for All during a pandemic.
Biden
So he does have Alzheimer’s. You could say the same about the Dem party in general or at least the Pelosi/Hillary branch. Over on the right many are pushing Tulsi for VP or maybe Secretary of State because at least she isn’t so superannuated. Of course Trump falls into that category too but we’d get at least one relatively fresh face.
Long ago there was a movie The Candidate with Robert Redford–pushing this fantasy of presidential youth. Now he’s a geezer too and looks terrible. We Boomers may have been in the driver’s seat too long.
Err…isn’t he a war baby?
True and that would apply to anyone I mentioned over 80. Still I wouldn’t say Boomer bashing is gratuitous even if Lambert considers generational analysis to be poor stuff. There was an article the other day that said he cycle of poor but ambitious to child of privilege to grandchild of privilege explains a lot of our upper class psychology. Certainly I would say as a Boomer (if not upper class) I didn’t have anything like the struggles of my parents. Circumstances matter.
And btw The Candidate is about running for senator, not president. We Boomers have senior moments.
Speaking of movies this is somewhat interesting from Counterpunch with a wayback shout out to Pauline Kael (who I once revered but now more at arm’s length).
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/06/the-2024-oscars-the-rise-of-the-new-culture-commissarso/
Here’s the Kael article he references–written after she spent a spell in H’wood before returning to the New Yorker. Her talk about the movie biz in 1980 now seems almost quaint. Things are quite different now and the industry–whatever one may think of it–didn’t wither away..
https://samizdat.co/shelf/documents/2005/07.15-kael/kael.pdf
Now , this is a funny card. And I saw this card in one of the ads I saw here on NaCap. That was an ad worth having read.
https://www.temu.com/1-funny-birthday-card-with-a-funny-picture-of-a-dog-checking-his-eyesight-perfect-gift-for-son-daughter-friends-coworkers-and-family-g-601099532910022.html?top_gallery_url=https%3A%2F%2Fimg.kwcdn.com%2Fproduct%2Fopen%2F2023-11-08%2F1699437649293-87494873889548dbb0d278afb914c5e9-goods.jpeg&spec_gallery_id=2060647088&refer_page_el_sn=209279&_x_vst_scene=adg&_x_ads_sub_channel=feed&_x_ns_prz_type=-1&_x_ns_sku_id=17592286167466&_x_ads_channel=google&_x_ns_lan=en&_x_gmc_account=700351367&_x_login_type=Google&_x_bg_adid=gd2782525-3&_x_ads_account=8311150974&_x_ads_set=21071552300&_x_ads_id=160104156912&_x_ads_creative_id=692601565190&_x_ns_source=d&_x_ns_gclid=EAIaIQobChMIlISNgcrghAMVTZsAAB2dywvrEAEYASABEgJPu_D_BwE&_x_ns_placement=www.nakedcapitalism.com&_x_ns_match_type=&_x_ns_ad_position=&_x_ns_product_id=&_x_ns_target=&_x_ns_devicemodel=&_x_ns_wbraid=%7Bwbraid%7D&_x_ns_gbraid=%7Bgbraid%7D&_x_ns_targetid=&refer_page_name=kuiper&refer_page_id=13873_1709760466695_kwhwr5897c&refer_page_sn=13873&_x_sessn_id=cqufu6c6cr
OMG, that is one long tracker link ya got there. Pro tip: delete everything after the “?”.
The Daily Show on twtr.
Ok y’all…
I’m not saying that the planets are aligned or anything but…
https://twitter.com/SaltyGoat17/status/1765030088410546193
Thank you for the link. I agree that was actually funny. Gasp!
But could it be…maybe…that Robert Kennedy is really the big winner? When you take away all the other options besides the two elderly reprehensibles, is the last other candidate runnng a “serious” campaign not going to be the beneficiary?
> that Robert Kennedy is really the big winner
Good point. Say he gets a percentage of the Haley voters, and a percentage of the uncommitted voters… in swing states…. He could end up with some leverage. (Of course, both or either of the main candidates could come up lame.)
LOL whut? Like when Biden and the Democrats took away the additional benefits for the poor and children? I think everyone that received those benefits viscerally felt their removal by liberal Democrats.
These people are high on their stuff.
And Biden did historically worse with people of color in 2020 than previous Democrat presidents! That he won them that year at such a low rate was cause for concern even then, and noted then.
Also worth nothing, Biden didn’t win any Democrat primary. There was no Democrat primary. You’d have to be brain dead to believe Democrats held an actual, real primary this cycle, what with upending the primary calendar in Biden’s favor and fighting to keep challengers off the ballot in various ways, to say nothing of extreme pressure to prevent anyone from entering the race. No legitimacy to it at all. Republicans at least ran a primary.
Democrats changed the child tax credit to one year earlier, so 18-year-olds didn’t qualify after Jan. 1, costing me $2000, actually. I don’t have a link, but I did my taxes, so I know. I had to look up the change on the IRS website, this would be fiscal year 2023.
Sorry, fiscal year 2022, so doing my taxes last year. My daughter turned 18 in late summer, but the cutoff was January, and this was a new law passed while Democrats con’rolled Congress. Liberals gotta liberal.
They are definitely smoking some of the good stuff. And as for selling all the good the administration has accomplished for average Americans, there is a steady stream of Biden spokesperson who go on CNBC by example,and toot the highest horns imaginable. They could perhaps tout for the industrial policy but those benefits, if any to average people, are years in the making.
America in 2024. Don’t believe your lying eyes and your thinner wallet.
‘Arron Crascall
@arron_crascall
If I had an apple vision pro!’
Saw a video on YouTube where a guy was wearing one of these things at his wedding. Couldn’t be bothered clicking on it.
Willy Loman or whomever that was impersonating the President in the video looked lost at sea~
I’d almost expect an LBJ-like speech tomorrow from Biden, the original was also delivered in March.
‘Lola Q. Germs
@LolaGerms
living in europe, i can order a bulk box of 25 SARS-CoV-2 rapid tests for thirty cents a test, aka 7,5€ for 25 rapids. people in the US are getting fleeced.’
Perhaps it sounds crass but I do believe now that no project can go forward in the US unless a bunch of billionaires/corporations profit lavishly. Doesn’t matter if you are talking about high speed rail or the supply of medical goods, those billionaires/corporations will jam themselves into any project and will not allow anything to happen unless they get a lucrative cut for letting the project going forward. It’s a shakedown of sorts.
Dean wants us all to vote Third Party! Oh…wait…he endorsed Biden?!?….Nevermind…
It appears that Dean Phillips and I have significantly different definitions of decency and integrity.
“One of the oddities of my career covering politics is that Democrats have never really been down in the polls of a presidential race”
They win the vote and still lose it. How many times since 2000 have the dems won, and still lost, statistics man…..
Once for sure. I’ve never been sure about 2004. Well let me clarify, I expect Team Blue to need a 5% cushion to win a 1 vote race. Ohio in 2004 didn’t seem egregious.
2 times out of the last 4 presidents. 50% of the time they win and still lose. And they’ve done nothing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Amfortas, happy as always to read your thoughts. You’re my favorite voice in this here commentariat. Perhaps a call among western protesters should be for their governments to recognize a Palestinian state, if they’re so enamored of the two-state solution, and it’s 1967 borders.
Re: lambert’s question about the statutory basis for the CDC operations, this Twitter thread I read today is interested in the same question. I can’t evaluate any of the merits of what is said…..
https://twitter.com/Derek_a_Franks/status/1765037273383338485
This part is interesting:
Didn’t we just see this movie?
The CDC should be burned to the ground; Any new organization could surely be staffed with people that actually care about public health, as I’d hope many of the people at CDC perhaps do, but with an entirely new management structure and mandate to actually protect public health irrespective of negative effects upon capitalist balance sheets.
Excerpt from The War Prayer, by Mark Twain
“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/19-american-empire/mark-twain-the-war-prayer-ca-1904-5/
Perfect.
Nothing new under the sun. Twain didn’t think much of Teddy who, when he wasn’t promoting war (and losing one of his sons that way), like to slaughter wild life.
Yeah, but you left off the punchline!
A blast from the past on US elections.
Clarke and Dawe – The Presidential Race is Beautifully Poised (Oct 2016)
Transcript: ” …..I really don’t know why they bother”
So fun fact, I actually went out to Rockledge RMC for an American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) event back in 2014 or thereabouts. I never dreamed they’d have bats. What a train wreck that is. Also applied for a job there back then.
You better believe healthcare executives are spreading the COVID!
And what is the 2024-2025 focus areas? So glad you asked!
This is the DEI bit that conservatives are losing their minds over. Can’t really blame them, but for different reasons. COVID affects everyone, so a great way to to foster equity might be to not kill people, especially the most vulnerable. Blacks already have worse health outcomes, why give them all COVID in healthcare facilities?
This is the stupidest timeline.