Reforming Public Health Institututions

 Yglesias builds on some of the points I was raising yesterday and adds to them. It's distressing that the enormous bill that is BBB has seen a steady erosion in funding for pandemic defense. There are a host of reasons why we were unprepared for Covid, but there is no excuse to not be working double overtime to stop it now and prevent the next pandemic.

The languishing state of mRNA vaccines before Covid is a great example of how regulatory slowness in our public health institutions needs to be changed. It's like they are operating in a pre-computer/Internet timeline.

I would hope that some of this gets addressed in the Pentagon's budget. No one in DC objects if the military gets money.

The CDC Should Not Be Trying To Figure Out Politics

 As we await - nervously - the impact of Omicron, we are relying as we should on the CDC and WHO to determine how dangerous this new variant really is - especially to the vaccinated. The immediate move to shut off air travel with the south of Africa has been widely panned by health officials. The problem with this is that they are looking at the issue as a medical one, yet proposing political solutions.

True, Omicron is probably out of the bag and loose in the Global North. However, it is also most likely more widespread in southern Africa. Ideally, you get a delay to figure out how to fight this - and travel bans DO give you a delay. If there are 100 people in the US with Omicron, that's objectively better than 1,000. The argument health officials make is that travel bans create a false sense of security, and we really need to be testing, tracing, vaccinating and masking.

Well, of course we do. Most people advocating for travel bans would also advocate for testing and tracing, and they are already pushing vaccines.

The reality is - and the CDC and WHO seem oblivious to this obvious fact - that there is a sizable portion of the world who simply will not take any additional measures to stop the spread of Covid. In fact, the people who DO want to stop the spread of Covid have often been held back by health officials. I would like my 17 year old son to get a booster, but he can't because reasons. 

The point of public health is to achieve what is possible. Wiping out Covid appears to be impossible, simply because the politics of the virus has warped ideas of public good. Some communities are on board and some aren't. Navigating that landmine of patchwork effectiveness means that ANY delay in the spread of Omicron should be worth it.

UPDATE: Marshall makes the point better, as per usual.

Invisible Biden Isn't The Problem

 There's a media narrative that Biden needs to be more visible and improve his messaging.

Paul Waldman explains why this is bullshit, so that I don't have to.

Lowest Common Dumb-nominator

 This snippet of news about Marjorie Traitor-Greene threatening Kevin McCarthy by withholding her support for his Speaker bid next year (presuming they win the House) shows the problem that the GOP poses to American democracy.

Traitor-Greene is a monstrosity of the QAnon world vomited forth by rural Georgia voters to "own the libs" and pursue the vindictive, brainless politics that Trump elevated from the shadows into the mainstream of American politics. Kevin McCarthy is a spineless idiot who will constantly cater to insurgents like Traitor-Greene because he knows that she represents a sizable wing of his political party. 

As long as the GOP has to bend to the will of people like Traitor-Greene, Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorn and Ur-Morons Paul Gosar and Louis Gohmert, one of the two viable political parties will be constant threat to democratic institutions. I would doubt very much that the Moron Caucus could pass a basic civics or citizenship test, and yet they could be calling the tune in Congress as soon as 13 months from now.

Who Needs Some Good News?

 The Omicron variant has us all on edge. I think we know that if a new variant comes along that evades vaccines (zero evidence of that yet), we are basically going to sit back and let hundreds of thousands of people die rather than go back to square one. I know that we are planning on flying next month and I will be shopping for N95 masks prior to that. If we do return to the worst days of Delta, then - yes - I fear hope for the midterms is lost. This is about as favorable a Senate map as Democrats will face for a while, so that's pretty huge. All the doom-posting about Democrats based on Virginia seemed misplaced (if entirely in character for Dems), given that the single biggest issue is Covid.

So, we need some good news!

Gas prices are stabilizing and should start dropping as countries ramp up pressure and production. Gas is unusually vulnerable to price manipulation, and Biden threatening oversight is a good step. Hopefully, more people follow the clues and do what our family did and move to hybrids.

The Biden Administration will be helping underserved communities find health care workers. Elections matter! Good policy is good policy.

Shipping delays are starting to ease, as Biden Administration puts the boot to port facilities.

The Charlottesville racists have been fined enough to bankrupt them.

We are making it harder to drill for oil on protected land and easier to build windfarms. 

The frustrating thing about American politics is that Democrats have plans and ideas to make the country better. Republicans do not, because their basic idea is that government can't do anything and anything it does do is tyranny. It's frustrating, because a proper, unified response to Covid would have shown that the government CAN do big things. But we have an incompetent fraud in charge and a million Americans have died.

Ideally, Democrats could have a nice 12 year run of control of the government to set things right in this country, but I'm not terribly optimistic. 

Sorry, this was supposed to be optimistic.

Not Great

 There are two bad Covid stories running neck and neck right now.

The first is an expected surge as people move indoors due to cold weather. Again, hospitalizations is the key metric here, and those are rising. How many of them are unvaccinated is unclear, and I doubt they will publish the data, because there will be a sizeable portion of vaccinated people hospitalized, simply because a majority of Americans are vaccinated, not to mention the need for boosters.

The second and even scarier story is the Omicron variant, which has appeared in Africa. Europe has banned travel from southern Africa and frankly the rest of the world should follow suit. The sad reality is that China is central to the world economy in ways that Africa is not. At the moment, there are not many people sick with the Omicron variant, but that is why it's essential to quarantine the area. As we have seen recently, the world is simply sick of being sick. Masking measures provoke protests in Europe as well as America, vaccine uptake is not where we would hope and might not be effective against this variant.

If anything, Covid has taught us how woefully unprepared we are for global pandemics and how high the costs can be. Quarantining southern Africa is extreme, yes, but we need to finally take the measures necessary to keep new outbreaks under control.

Lynching Is Not OK

 The guilty verdicts for the three men who lynched Ahmaud Arbery have drawn a contrast between a rural Georgia county and the decision to exonerate Kyle Rittenhouse for killing two people on the mean streets of small town Wisconsin. 

There are two parts to the Arbery case that bear scrutiny, and they are contradictory so unlikely to get much play in the Hot Take Hothouse of American Discourse in 2021. 

First, Arbery's murderers were almost never charged. The implicit and explicit racism at play in the initial decision not to charge the McMichaels and Bryan is part of the Good Ole Boy South. Charges were only brought when video leaked out. This is the Bad Old South and America.

Second, once the broader public became aware of what happened, there have been and potentially will be consequences for both the murderers and the law enforcement personnel who abetted the cover-up of their lynching.

On the one hand, this is a stark demonstration of the "Two Americas" dynamic. There were the people who killed Arbery and those who were OK with that. The subsequent elections of new DAs and the conduct o the judge and the jury stand in contrast with the judge in Wisconsin and those who tried to hide Arbery's murder. The judge in Rittenhouse's case was such a buffoon, that it almost seems incumbent on the DOJ to file weapons charges against Rittenhouse. 

But we also need to appreciate that what we saw in the case is that - to survive - racism has to remain in the shadows in 2021. As I mentioned the other day, racism and prejudice usually declines the more you interact with people different than you. The South is increasingly a tri-racial society, but has always been biracial. Even in the height of Jim Crow, virulent hatred of Black people was rarer than we tend to appreciate. By 1900, the brutalization of Black people in the South creating a self-replicating apartheid state that required fewer exemplary killings. As long as Blacks "knew their place" everything hummed along. I was always struck by the vehemence of racism when I came North in 1982.

Racism in the South is very real, but it's way more complicated than Hollywood films about Mississippi Burning portray it. The Arbery case showed that racist actions in the deepest South have to be hidden from public view to survive. 

It's not enough, but I think it's important to recognize progress where it exists. If you don't, what's the point of fighting for progress at all? To recognize the progress in the South - while also recognizing that absent the video evidence, those three men go free - is to turn away from despair and take renewed purpose to the fight. 

Collective Narcissists

Nancy Le Tourneau has a nice summary of the psychology of Trumpism and really the entire Republican Party. It's been called "grievance politics" and that is accurate up to a point. As Le Tourneau notes, it is the fear that's the real driver of these politics in America and elsewhere.

I belong to a Facebook group in my rather conservative hometown. It is...quite the experience. You get a lot of "kids these days are out of control" and "bring back the Indian mascot" and "crime is everywhere." Sure, you also get the "nice" conservative small town stuff like buying local and thanking a neighbor who helped someone move. The most engaged posts are those that deal with this constant state of fear that A) the country is changing from the one that they are most comfortable with and B) American Carnage. 

When Trump gave his inaugural address, it was routinely marveled over by those of us in the reality-based community. But Trump's vision of an American falling apart at the seams, with blood running in streams through the streets of our cities and people as destitute as if it had been 1932 was both designed for and emblematic of Rightist media. Trump marinated in that world and spoke its language naturally.

It is also clearly a conscious strategy on the Right to depict America as descending into a Mad Max hellhole. Fox is always screeching about something stupid - migrant caravans! Ebola! Socialism! - and they are losing market share to the even shriller screechers at OANN and NewsMax. 

Here's the problem for Biden and Democrats: Thing are measurably improving. With an improved economy and pent-up demand, we are seeing inflation (which of course, Fox and Company are beating the shit out of). This inflation should peter out over the winter, as gas prices fall, ports clear and the labor market stabilizes. 

The real issue remains Covid. It sucks. I don't like wearing a mask, but I do, because I'm not a selfish prick. I don't like the impact it has on our teaching and coaching, and we are fairly free of restrictions. But a winter surge is likely coming. Whether it impacts our school specifically, we are going to see another surge, because winter drives people indoors. Yglesias the other day spoke about how poor a job the CDC has done in public messaging. I agree, but that's more important over the next four to five months. We will get a surge, but it is VERY unlikely to be a deadly surge, given both the vaccination rates and the availability of oral anti-virals to treat the ill. 

If Covid becomes an annoyance by May, I think that gives Biden and Democrats enough time to point to genuine good news. It's always risky to claim things are good when they are not. Right now, just enough is not good to make those claims ring hollow, but we are still capable of setting things right with enough time to have an impact on the mid-terms. 

But if Covid spirals out of control, we are fucked.

The Great Resignation

 Josh Marshall points out the central truth of the "Great Resignation": most of the people who quit bad paying jobs did so to get better paying jobs. Some of this is two-wage families where one member has stayed home with young kids because day care is too expensive or too risky. But the central point is that this is not a normal jobless recession. If anything the Great Resignation's focus on better paying jobs may explain part of the inflation conundrum we find ourselves in.

It strikes me that this is also a latent product of Trumpism. Specifically, we need more low-income immigrant labor. As people decide that certain jobs aren't worth the money, we need to find laborers that are willing to do that work. Historically, that has meant immigrant labor. The workforce is essentially mobile - slow-moving, but mobile. There was some talk about Biden retroactively giving green cards to people who were denied them during the slowdown under Trump. There is an obvious political downside to this, as certain Americans hate immigrants. However, people also hate not being able to grab a quick meal at Burger King, because they have to close early for lack of workers. (The situation in my home town.)

For those that would complain that this is exploitive, I suppose the counter argument that if your choices are working a subsistence farm in Honduras and hoping that local drug gangs don't kill you or living in an apartment with electricity and hot water while doing menial labor...which one is more exploitive?

Working at Burger King is...not great. If we want our Impossible Whoppers, I think the answer is in Guatemala, Honduras and Haiti, rather than in the Federal Reserve.

Beating That Dead Horse

 Matthew Yglesias makes the point that I've made before: There is not a lot of evidence that DEI training actually works. Some of this, I believe, is because a great deal of DEI training is coming from Education Departments that aren't - shall we say - tremendously rigorous in their methodology.  

Yglesias points out that the single best way to overcome racism is to have people actually meet and interact with people of other racial, ethnic and gender groups. There is a lot of shit given to (mostly) Republican politicians who respond to some sort of sexual crime with "As the father of a daughter...", because theoretically, you shouldn't need to have a daughter to know that sexual assault is wrong. However, the traditional doubts about false accusations tend to melt away, when you consider someone you know either surviving a sexual assault of being vulnerable to it. So...I get it. They should be more empathetic to a theoretical person, but the reality is, we aren't wired that way.

Yglesias goes on to mention the very real possibility that not only does DEI training not work, but it might actively make prejudices worst. Most corporations undergo DEI training for the purpose of avoiding getting sued. I've always felt that we have a certain formula at our school for responding to these issues, that seems more about "doing something" than solving the actual problem.

The insight that people who are told that stereotyping is bad wind up stereotyping more, because - after all - stereotyping is prevalent does not seem far-fetched to me.

Thing of it this way: the modal person you are trying to reach with this training in a school is a white boy or girl who has very little personal experience with people of color. In our school, these young people are usually the very picture of privilege. You tell them, repeatedly, that they are privileged and that they have benefitted from racism and that they walk around with unconscious biases. It seems likely that you are subtly instructed them that this is simply who they are. At the very least, you activate the native oppositional streak in teenagers. 

Tell a person that they are unconsciously racist enough and they will eventually come to agree with you.

On the other hand, there is some evidence that focusing on progress leads to more progress. I center race and slavery in my US History class during the first semester. There are basically two main events - the Revolution and the Civil War - that function as focal points for causation thinking. Slavery is fundamental to the latter. In the second semester, the focus is on change. Tracing the actual history of racism, Jim Crow and the "Second Reconstruction" of the Civil Rights Era, shows progress. I have to be clear that this progress is incomplete, but if I simply harp on the negative aspects of race in America, I will eventually lose the very students I'm trying to reach.

Both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass focused on the Declaration of Independence over the Constitution when opposing slavery. This is the paradox of Thomas Jefferson: the slaveholder, who loosed the ideals that would eventually end slavery.

When studying the arguments during the Civil Rights movement (for African Americans and others) the essential insight was universalist arguments when over particularist arguments. King, especially, simply wanted a seat at the table, whereas X and Carmichael explicitly talked about throwing the table over. Similarly, "same sex marriage" or "gay marriage" was how George W Bush won Ohio and a second, disastrous term. "Marriage equality" currently enjoys a 64% approval rating, including a 50-50 split among Republicans under the age of 45. 

It's unclear what - exactly - would constitute an effective form of DEI training. I know that my immature attitudes towards homosexuality changed completely, simply by being around homosexuals. The small Georgia town that my parents lived in went out of their way to protect the Mexicans living in their community without documentation, because they knew them and liked them. There is a presumption in America - and this is new - that racism is wrong. It's not a universally held belief, but close enough. (This is why Republicans freak out when they are called racists. It does sting.) However, we could be activating biases through the very efforts we are taking to make racism and bias unacceptable. 

Anthony Bourdain used to say that the only solution to the world's problems was for everyone to have sex and make babies with everyone else until we were all the same color. He was joking, but the idea that simply hanging out with those different from you is not a joke and seems the most effective way to combat the worst effects of racism. Not sure how you scale that up, but that's the clearest way forward.

The Reality Gap

 Nancy LeTourneau points out that so much of the Doom and Gloom narrative surrounding the Biden Administration is a product of a largely media created gap between reality and those narratives.

Afghanistan is a perfect example of this, as people wanted out of Afghanistan, Biden did it, some of it wasn't media-genic, the War Pigs raised a holler and here we are. Biden did the right thing, the media hit him for it and a "narrative" is created.

Inflation is "real" but it's not terrible for coming out of a pandemic induced recession. You should see growth after a slowdown. That's a good thing! Gas prices are largely cyclical and a huge part of consumer perceptions about the economy. Gas around us is about $3.50 a gallon. I would prefer it wasn't but I can remember $4.00 a gallon in 2008, and we survived that just fine.

Josh Marshall has observed that the Washington Media is "hardwired for the GOP." It's not because they are Republicans or even sympathetic to the Republican party. But they must have drama, they must have a horserace, and they can't very well point out that one of the horses is a rabid jackal. "Opinions differ" is a lazy, narrative vs analysis driven way to cover the news. Plus, they have to be seen as "fair" for criticizing Trump for trying to overthrow American democracy, so they are going to hit Biden for a marginal increase in the price of gas.

The Very Online will aver that this is a product of "poor Democratic messaging," but it's really not. There is no "messaging" that will overturn the biases of the Fox addled or the Terminal Beltway Brains. 

Hopefully, Covid fades away, as we reach critical densities of immunity and therapeutics improve. With that people might just notice that things have actually improved.

Our Laws And Culture Are The Problem

 This explanation of the legal issues in the Rittenhouse case is very good and thorough. There are two reasons why Rittenhouse escaped the most significant consequences of his actions.

The first is that our laws give broad latitude to people defending themselves. The most extreme case was the Trayvon Martin case, that bears a fair amount of similarities to what happened in Kenosha (and which the author references). The "Stand Your Ground" laws are invitations to lethal force. They are nothing less than fetishizing the myth of the "good guy with the gun."

The second stems from this, which is our sickening gun culture. I own some guns that we inherited, family heirlooms. We keep them in a safe. My son has gone hunting with them on a few occasions. That's fine. But that's a LONG way from where the gun culture is in America today. We elevate guns through open carry and Stand Your Ground laws. Our laws encourage people to walk into a Burger King with an assault weapon on their hip. 

This is absurd and obscene. No one, and I mean no one, needs to be packing a weapon capable of mass casualties in order to get a burrito at Chipotle. Some of this is the warping of gun culture the NRA has been doing since the 1980s. The way they have done so is to stoke fears of American Carnage. Trump's rhetoric was of a piece with this trend to make Americans terrified of other Americans. Many of our issues with police shootings stem from the police reasonably worrying that every traffic encounter could involve a firearm.

This is then amplified by the paranoid conspiracy theories about the American government and the need for Bubba to pack major weaponry to defend against the tyranny of infrastructure spending and increased access to health care. The idea that Mr. Open Carry is going to defend his community against antifa and Biden's black helicopters is ridiculous, but it becomes a major problem when we add the ubiquity of these weapons to the mix.

From Sandy Hook to Orlando to Las Vegas, we have shown repeatedly that we simply do not care how many of our countrymen die, as long as we don't threaten the fragile masculinity of our ammosexual population.

Welcome To Thunderdome

I held out some hope that Kyle Rittenhouse would at least be found guilty of manslaughter. 

Nope.

Presumably, there will be protests over this verdict. What's to prevent someone from showing up with a weapon and shooting protestors because they feel threatened? Apparently not the laws or courts of Wisconsin.

Unless of course, the person showing up with a long rifle over their shoulder is Black, in which case he will be gunned down in the streets.

Pretty fucking sickening.

How Bad Was 2019-2021?

 The idiocy of the anti-vax movement is well on display at sites like SorryAntiVaxxer. The two pronged assault of idiocy runs along the axis of 1) TYRANNY! and 2) Covid is just the flu. The "Microchips in the injection" or "the vaccine alters your DNA" are less examples of idiocy than the outright delusions characteristic of the conspiracy minded.

The "getting a shot is the end of liberty" is a weird sort of projection from people who cheered on efforts to end democracy and carry long guns to Chipotle as form of performative penis extensions. The stupidest defense, though, has to be "It's not that bad a disease."

This comes back, once again, to American innumeracy. They hear 2% mortality rate (it's a bit higher than that) and compare it to the flu. Now, the flu is unusually deadly for the elderly, like Covid. However, before the vaccine, we had terrible results for Covid. In the 2018-19 flu season, 21,261 people over the age of 65 died of the flu or flu complications. That's not a number we talk about, because it's simply the nature of being old. However, in 2021 - even after the availability of the vaccine and its widespread use among the elderly - roughly 264,000 people over the age of 65 will have died of Covid. That number needs to be added to the 311,000 who died in 2020, before the vaccines became available.

As Paul Campos notes, more Americans will have died from Covid in 2021 than in 2020, even though the vaccine became widely available last spring and early summer. We know that vaccines drastically reduce both cases and especially deaths, so the fact that more Americans have died of Covid while unrolling a life-saving vaccine is just a staggering display of idiocy. On thing I found striking was that deaths under the age of 60 have roughly doubled from 2020 to 2021. These are the people who decided that Covid was "just the flu" and that, while they might get sick, they wouldn't die. They don't let the flu determine what they can do, why should Covid do that?

I'm not a fan of the CovidActNow webpage, because their metrics are pretty strict. Here in Connecticut, they list as being at High Risk, because we have a rising number of cases and our infection rate is a little high. But 82% of Connecticut residents are at least partially vaccinated. Some of those positive cases are simply people who test positive or have a mild, vaccine-blunted case. Compare that to, say, Montana with its 58% vaccination rate. Somehow their "infection rate" is measured lower than Connecticut's despite having three times the cases. Their ICUs are 76% of capacity while Connecticut's is 17%. Eleven people a day are dying in Montana, despite having significantly fewer people, whereas only three people a day are dying on average in Connecticut.

People have been referring to the fall as the "pandemic of the unvaccinated." I think that covers the whole of the Delta Surge this summer, too. I was quite sick, but my life was not in jeopardy. The states with high vaccination rates are going to see Covid cases lingering around, but they aren't going to see ICUs maxxed out and refrigerator trucks used as morgues. 

What is clear and becoming clearer is that Covid was a demographic event of enormous significance. We are still losing a 9/11's worth of people every three days. That also does not capture the "deaths of despair" including drug overdoses that have claimed even more lives. When I went looking for a good graph or chart on excess deaths, most of what I saw was crap or inaccessible to laypersons. However, ballpark estimates are roughly an additional 200,000 to 400,000 deaths. 

While these deaths fell - as they ordinarily do - heaviest among the elderly, I don't think we've completely assimilated the disruption to the demographics of our world. 

UPDATE; Josh Marshall points out the good news in anti-viral therapies that should change our thinking a great deal about Covid. There is no longer much reason for Covid to be any worse than the flu, though I would argue that insufficient testing is still a bit of a glitch.

Good Matt, Bad Matt

 I was prepared to disagree with Yglesias' take on the AMA adopting more inclusive language. He has a tendency to be pointless and aggressively contrarian. However, I think he strikes an important point that I've made in the past as well. Too often, groups engage in eyewashing issues like racist policies by changing language and symbols rather than actual policy. It's so much easier to produce a PowerPoint about how to talk about race than to inconvenience yourself with changing how things are actually done. For instance, our school does a lot of the right things surrounding language, but we still could increase the number of students of color, if we shifted more resources towards financial aid.

The specific take about the medical community is just a real stark example of how "doing something" really doesn't do anything, if the real problems lie unaddressed.

The Rittenhouse Trial

 I've only paid sporadic attention to it, but the conduct of the judge in the case certainly seems problematic. Ruling out the gun charge would seem to take away the murder charge. I can't speak for the laws of Wisconsin, but usually when you kill someone while committing another felony, that's automatically murder one. By removing the gun charge - for reasons that seem spurious - the judge makes it easier to acquit.

Frankly, Murder Two or even manslaughter seems most appropriate, but if he's completely acquitted, that basically gives license to any murder-minded fuckwad to insert themselves into any situation, kill someone and then claim self-defense.

Tek Rrr Jahbs

 Yglesias makes the economic case for increasing immigration at a moment when we have real labor shortages driving up costs. He's a "more immigration is good" anyway so this isn't surprising, but he's right that Americans - because of the pandemic and other reasons - are leaving the workforce and haven't been replaced. Especially in low wage fields like agriculture, there's a huge demand.

As far as solutions, he's a little light. But he mentions the idea that Trump dramatically scaled back legal immigration. Perhaps Biden could retroactively award the "missing" Green Cards from the Trump years.

Bringing legal immigrants from Guatemala and Honduras would serve two purposes. First, it would obviously provide the needed labor force to put food on our table. Second, it would incentivize staying in Guatemala and Honduras rather than trekking across Mexico and showing up, desperate, at the southern border.

This would, inevitably, invite a certain backlash from the Right, but if it's done via legal channels, I have to wonder if it wouldn't mute the xenophobic "Tek Rrr Jahbs" crew.

Despicable

 It's not 100% clear what is going on between Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic States, especially what the motivations of Putin and Belarusian strongman, Aleksandar Lukashenka, are. However, if Putin is orchestrating it, he's trying to destabilize the West, because that is always his priority. As Covid ravages Russia, a little saber-rattling probably makes him feel good.

However, it's HOW Belarus and Russia are pressuring the West that's really awful. They are flying refugees in from the Middle East and then trying to release them into Poland or Lithuania. They are basically using refugees - people already suffering untold hardships - as a pawn to elicit a fierce blowback from a bunch of racist Europeans who don't want Muslims in their lands.

Very ugly.

Patience, Grasshopper

 The DOJ indicted Steve Bannon, because of course they did. There has been a swelling chorus of "WHY ISN'T GARLAND DOING ANYTHING?!1!?" because people have the attention span of gnats and the craving for immediate gratification. Usually, in a situation like this, the DOJ is trying to negotiate with the party in question so they don't have to indict. The point is to compel the testimony. So it took a few weeks. Mark Meadows will be next, but it won't happen Monday. 

Twitter Legal Eagles need to relax and let the professionals do their job.

Trump's Cheka

 This piece is just one of those Holy Shit Artifacts that we will continue to unearth about Trumpistan. Basically, it's what we already know but in Technicolor. Trump hired awful, awful human beings who were - not coincidentally - completely unqualified to do the jobs he gave them. The only qualification to work in the Trump Administration was unqualified fealty to the person of Donald Trump. Expertise or relevant work experience was unnecessary. One detail stuck out to me:

McEntee’s underlings were, for the most part, comically inexperienced. He had staffed his office with very young Trump activists. He had hired his friends, and he had hired young women—as one senior official in the West Wing put it to me, “the most beautiful 21-year-old girls you could find, and guys who would be absolutely no threat to Johnny in going after those girls.”

There it is. Trumpism in all it's repellant glory. A cult of personality intended to squeeze as much benefits from government work - the people's work -  as possible, especially gratuitous appeals to sexism. Nepotism, combined with cluelessness with a dollop of television ready attractiveness in women...it really is the apex of how fucking stupid Trumpism is.

Higher Education Is Kind Of Broken

 News that a prestigious university like USC engaged in horrible behavior to harvest students and bilk them of tuition for bad online courses should not be a shock to anyone.

A number of years ago, I remember reading how automation, computers and fast communications (the internet) were increasing labor efficiency by leaps and bounds, but two sectors were immune to this: education and medicine. Medicine has subsequently found a way to use the internet to improve efficiency. When I had Covid pneumonia, I was in a little hospital on Nantucket, but my chest CT scans were read by a radiologist in Boston (I think).  The ability to share data quickly has lead to some real improvements in healthcare delivery.

Which leaves education. 

Public high schools are struggling with poor working conditions, mediocre salaries and now batshit insane parents and school board members threatening to burn books. But ultimately high school education is "always broken" and always trundling along, doing better than you think but not as good as it should.

Higher education is much worse. Because it's not universal, there is no need to create common requirements and standards. The advent of bloated bureaucracies of administrators has ballooned the budget without necessarily adding to the quality of the educational experience. Adjunct professors - the Uber drivers of academia - are now the standard. A university scrimps on teaching and scholarship, while building expensive new building to sell on the tours to harvest more full-pay students to pay more administrators.

Online "education" has a narrow potential to create a few good graduate level programs with flexible hours and workloads for people who need to keep working while they get an advanced degree. Because a prosperous life is now largely correlated with a BA-or-better degree, colleges can harvest students without actually providing them with a useful education. This isn't a "teaching" problem, it's an institutional problem.

We need national standards for online education, because it is rife with opportunities to scam students.

We Have To Change Our Metrics

 I'm seeing a lot of things like this tweet, that talk about rising cases in America. You see the same issue on Covid ActNow, which is a reliance on "cases" to talk about spread. As testing is still fairly pervasive, we have a much better idea of who is currently carrying the virus. If you look at the map at the tweet, you can see that Africa has almost no cases. Really? Given how poor their vaccination rates are?

Much more likely is that much of the developing world simply doesn't know who is infected, because they lack the testing infrastructure. However, knowing someone is infected does not determine whether they are sick. My county is currently listed as dark orange or "high" risk. Currently these are the numbers they list at Covid ActNow: Litchfield has about 14 new "cases" per 100,000; our R0 is 1.03; our positive test rate is 3.8% and 77% of residents have at least one dose of the vaccine.

One metric that they DON'T use is hospitalizations, especially ICU. They have it on their website though, and only 29% of ICU beds are filled. Deaths are sporadic. In fact, ActNow rates our vulnerability as Very Low, even as they rate our risk level as High.

That simply doesn't add up.

Covid is not going anywhere. We need to understand that. Andy Slavitt, an epidemiologist whose been a voice of sanity on Twitter (of all places), wants to stress that we are not at the end of this pandemic. Certainly new variants are pretty terrifying, as we saw with Delta. Reasonable precautions should be followed, but "reasonable" varies from person to person.

It seems we are finally moving past the Hot Take Season over Democrat's poor performance in Virginia and New Jersey, though everyone wants to focus on CRT and liberal culture war overreach. If you want to know my theory as to why Democrats suffered and why Biden has low approval ratings? Simple, Covid continues to bedevil our lives - both in terms of schools and the economy. There are still some school districts that are virtual or partly virtual. The disruptions to the economy are real, and people are unhappy. When they are unhappy they take it out on the President's party.

As we move into a world where vaccines and therapeutics greatly reduce the number of Covid deaths, we need to adjust how we deal with Covid. In the US, deaths are falling after the DeSantis Wave of early fall. Not quite to the rate of the giddy months of June and July, but deaths lag cases by several weeks, especially as we get better at treating the disease.

I wear a mask to class; I wear a mask to shop; but I'm not typical in my community. Lots of people in stores are going unmasked. It could very well be that they have Covid and are simply asymptomatic. There are small measures that we should continue to take. I don't really care about wearing a mask, but I very much want this wrestling season to happen. My athletes have missed a season that they will never get back.

We can no longer set policies, though, based on the idea that we have to get to zero infections, but as close to zero deaths as possible. Back in 2020, Trumpist talking points were that Covid was "just like the flu." That was bullshit. But that IS what we need to be willing to accept, and I wonder how we are going to measure that.

Measuring DEI Success

Professional Contrarian Matthew Yglesias has written a pair of articles drawing into question various practices surrounding DEI efforts in schools. His point is not to jump on the ludicrous CRT bandwagon, but rather to note that some of the controversial ideas of CRT are imbibed in graduate programs in education and come out in flawed practices.

Notably, he takes issue with the idea that poor performances by students of color on standardized testing means that the test are basically racist. In fact, it seems the evidence is much more suggestive that poverty, poor school infrastructure, poor school meals and poorly paid and trained teachers is a much more plausible root cause of poor performance. The stress of poverty, in fact, functions almost as a form of transient brain damage, no different than a concussion. Generational poverty therefore functions more like CTE. 

Another point he makes - and again, I can see the merit here - is that parent anger about public schools is less about CRT and more about prolonged school closures. This goes back to the long internecine warfare between people like Yglesias and Jon Chait over teacher's unions. Teacher's unions are reliable voting pools for Democrats, yet they often stand in the way of needed reform. Bad teachers should not be rewarded with lifetime sinecure. Mediocre teachers should be given the resources and a mandate to improve. Good teachers should be rewarded. However, because "good" and "bad" are often measured by standardized testing, there is a powerful incentive for unions to decry the merits of a metric that might hold them accountable for their classroom performance.

I have long been skeptical of education schools' scholarship. Here is a good example of why. Rigorous, evidence-based social science is REALLY hard. Political science really struggles to account for causation vs correlation, and using evidence that does not come with some form of inherent or implied bias (in an academic, not a racial sense). It very often fails, but the field sees the wrestling with the nature of evidence as a critical part of its scholarship. Very often, education studies rely on small data sets and don't filter for confirmation bias. 

Yglesias notes how phonics education for reading has really proven to work, yet schools stepped away from phonics. There was a really interesting comment from a parent whose child was struggling - to the point of tears - with algebra 1, because she had never memorized her multiplication tables. Phonics and memorization are "boring," our director of learning and pedagogy decries any attempt to drill into students basic facts via memorization. All the literature says "engagement" is more important.

If all this is true, how were we ever educated in the past? Of course, many millions were not educated well. Public education as "always been failing." And to a certain degree, pedagogy is malleable - a relationship between teacher and student. When I speak to current and former public school educators and they tell me that they have 160 students across six sections, I'm left speechless. It is almost impossible to find a pedagogical solution to those ratios. If I have 160 students, you're damned sure I'm going to give more multiple choice tests and fewer essays. At this point in the year, I'm starting to know exactly how each of my students write, what their relative strengths and weaknesses are, and what interventions they prefer, if any. Without knowing that baseline information, any blanket pedagogy is unlikely to help.

My school is excellent. It's not perfect, but it's excellent. We have amazing kids who are motivated to do well, both because they self-select to come here and because the environment promotes a culture of excellence. We have tailor-made supports for students who need them. It costs a shitload of money.

But I think it works, and I'm most proud of the dozens of students each year who come from the sort of backgrounds that typical don't produce four-year college students that we send on to very fine schools. We can change lives that way. Now, they self-select, they usually come through foundations that help prepare them to come here, they are not selected at random. However, it still works. And the evidence is, frankly, yes, some standardized tests like APs, and our college admissions picture. I had a wrestling captain whose parents lived over the bodega that they ran. He went to Johns Hopkins for pre-med. Those are my favorite stories, but they come with a measurable result.

So much of our DEI work has been...good? I guess? I know there's a playbook. We had a series of horrible acts of racist graffiti a few years back. We went through a series of meetings and ad hoc committees. After George Floyd, we added various affinity groups, held innumerable workshops, brought in guest speakers like Eddie Glaude, training over the summer...all the things the playbook says to do.

Maybe they helped? I don't know. I don't think we ever measured whether they helped. I would guess that affinity groups have helped students who are clearly a small percentage of our overall student body, feel safe to discuss certain things. But they also silo those experiences away from the White majority. What we have NOT done is measure the effectiveness of all those steps. We did not measure racial attitudes before and after we took those steps, especially among White students. If anything, the anecdotal evidence I got from my two (White) sons is that some of it may have unsurprisingly backfired. Our director of pedagogy is quick to note that lectures are often poor forms of instruction, and then we set off on a nine month sermon that probably reinforced racist or bigoted attitudes in exactly the sort of students we would have most liked to reach.

As a US History teacher, I feel very comfortable saying both that Thomas Jefferson was an extraordinary humanist, who introduced and advocated for popular rule and natural rights that was truly revolutionary, while predicating those amazing ideas upon a foundation of white supremacy. For democracy to challenge social hierarchies and castes, it had to be built upon racial hierarchies and castes. It can be both. And those ideas sowed the very seeds that destroyed the idea of racial castes and chattel slavery, even if their founder could not have imagined that.

In other words, education is messy and nuanced and incredibly human. If we are going to engage in improving it, we should probably account for that. And we should be skeptical of One Weird Trick pedagogies or the latest fad from the academy. My wife and I argue over the merits of having grades. The examples of schools that DON'T use grades and have success is great, until you realize that those schools have about 50 students over six grades. That's not a school, it's a tutorial. The "evidence" is not very rigorous.

As we - rightly - try and create a school system that is inclusive and is tasked with overcoming the history of racism in this country, we should make damned sure the methods that we use are actually working. I have no idea if they are.

Consequences

 There is understandable frustration with the pace of the January 6th investigation and other investigations surrounding Trump. I think the House 1/6 Committee should plan on having a final report and set of indictments ready for the day after the midterm election. I really don't think you want to indict prominent Republicans before the midterms, because you will fire up the Deplorables who think when the rule of law is applied to them it's socialist, Maoist, communist, Stalinism. Indicting Ambulatory Hamsack Steve Bannon, though? Who cares, do it!

However, the recent video shared by Rep Paul Gosar should probably elicit an immediate and forceful response. To spare you from watching it, it shows Sentient Beef Jerky Stick Gosar as an anime character attacking Democrats, including killing AOC and attacking Joe Biden with swords. I "get" that the Republican Party is not so much a vehicle for a coherent political ideology and more an elaborate nesting doll of online trolling. "Owning the libs" is pretty much all they want or know how to do. I personally thinking Joe Biden should start wearing a "Brandon" button to troll them right back for "Let's Go Brandon."

What Gosar has done is explicitly depict himself engaged of acts of targeted violence towards fellow members of Congress and the President of the United States. Censure isn't really enough. The House should vote to expel him. If possible, line up a few of the sane Republicans like Cheney and Kinzinger to vote to remove him.

Gosar is a horrific human being whose own family hates him. Of course, most Republicans will rally around him, but I really thing a winning strategy for 2022 and 2024 is constantly and forcefully remind voters that the GOP has become an authoritarian cult of personality that is perfectly fine with political violence to advance their aims. 

Force the House GOP to defend Gosar.

Federalism Mostly Sucks

 This article about Jackson, Mississippi is just depressing. During the worst excesses of Trumpism, living in an indigo Blue state was a blessing, but for the most part a federal system that allows state governments to thwart needed services in cities is really bad. We saw it first with the Affordable Care Act, where states like Texas and, yes, Mississippi turned down billions of federal dollars to make sure that their citizens would never believe that the government can make their lives better. Now we see a case where critical dollars appropriated explicitly to fix problems like Jackson's might not go where they are supposed to.

I'm sure this is really just a messaging problem, though.

How Is This A Sustainable Political Party?

 On Friday, House Democrats and a handful of Republicans voted for the BIB infrastructure bill. It got votes from Republicans in both the Senate and House. That makes it bipartisan, kids!

The House Republican response to this is...unhinged.

There are several themes in the GOP reponse.

The first is that Biden's economic plan has led to inflation and supply chain issues. This is transparent bullshit, but it's normal political bullshit. Same with deficit concerns. Bish, please.

The second is that somehow the time of day matters. Lots of talk about a midnight bill. What the actual fuck? I know most GOP voters can't stay up past 10pm, but who honestly cares?

The third is, of course, socialism. Now, the BIB is a lot of things, but if it is "socialism" than ANY spending is socialism, which might actually be how batshit insane the GOP has become. What is going to be interesting is seeing what happens to public opinion about socialism. If "popular things" is socialism, then why is socialism bad?

I do think that the bullshit socialism label hurt Biden with some South Florida Hispanic voters, and maybe some along the Rio Grande - two places he underperformed. It was a combination of "socialism," the Defund the Police gaffe and the power of incumbency. The problem with this line of attack should be obvious: infrastructure spending - and much of the BBB bill - is broadly very popular.

When Biden runs against in 2024 - presumably against Trump - the label of "socialism" is simply not going to stick.

The Heat Death of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Spoilers, I guess)

 In physics, there is a concept known as the "heat death of the universe." An open scientific question is whether the universe is somehow finite or bound or whether it will simply keep expanding and expanding until it grows colder and colder as it grows vaster and vaster. Marvel is testing that from an artistic platform.

The "phases" of the MCU were designed both to lead up to the Avengers: Endgame extravaganza while setting the stage for future movies. Amazingly, Marvel more or less stuck the landing with Endgame, which prompted the question: What next?

Sadly, Marvel has decided to go bigger and bigger, vaster and vaster, risking the heat death of physics. I have not seen the latest MCU Disney+ offering of "What if..?" simply because I haven't gotten around to it. I've seen Loki. Falcon and the Winter Soldier and WandaVision. Because the MCU is really more of a massive television show than a series of movies, these fit in well with what came before. All of them expanded on the storylines of characters who were important, though not central, in the lead up to Endgame. Loki, in particular, suggested where the franchise was headed, building off themes from Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, themes which will be expanded upon in the upcoming Spider-Man movie: No Way Home. 

Basically, rather than tell a coherent story about Tony Stark and Steve Rogers bickering over how to save the earth from extraterrestrial evil, we will now have multiple, parallel universes - similar but unique. 

While it is not a multi-verse story, The Eternals suggest the peril that Marvel now face. 

Look, The Eternals was...fine. It wasn't "bad." It simply never gripped me. Oh, the earth is in trouble from a celestial being? OK. I'm going to go ahead and predict our heroes will save it. (What made Thanos so compelling was eliminating half of all life. There are still stories after that, so his initial victory made great narrative sense.) OK, Celestials are now a thing to worry about? But the galactic screw-ups, the Guardians of the Galaxy, took down a Celestial so...how really hard can it be? The fact that Circe, one of the least powerful of the Eternals, took down the Celestial and there was nothing metaphorical about her power...it just kind of...yeah.

Left me chilly.

By any objective standards, the MCU has kicked DC's butt. Batman is compelling, but Superman is not cinematic, unless you find a way to make him Not-Superman. I mean, he's good and all-powerful. Batman shares with the MCU heroes a certain set of flaws and fallibilities that make for better cinema, which is why we get pretty good Batman moves and shit like the Justice League.

It is the small bore humanity and humor that makes the MCU hum. The Galaga joke in The Avengers; whatever riff Robert Downey, Jr. rips off; Tom Holland's endearingly dorky Peter Parker; the outright hilarity of Thor: Ragnarok - a lighthearted romp about the end of a world. 

The multiverse suggests narratives so huge and multitudinous that it drains them of meaning and emotion. Emotion is why the MCU took over the multiplexs. Every move can dazzle with CGI, but the sagas of Steve Rogers, Bruce Banner, Tony Stark and Natasha Romanov were ultimately human stories. For all the apocalyptic scale of Infinity War and Endgame, it was the emotional beats that made it work.

If we are now headed for a "cinematic universe" where if "earth" gets destroyed, we know there is another "earth" in a different, parallel universe, we are headed for a set of stories empty of human stakes and human meaning. 

I can understand why Disney would want to keep expanding outwards and outwards, creating more "IP" cornering more of the global market. I fear, however, the MCU could grow colder as it grows more vast. Ultimately, it would die out with a sputtering irrelevancy, like the last dying star.

I honestly hope I'm wrong, but if The Eternals is a harbinger of what's to come, I fear I'm not.

Infrastructure Week!

 At long last, "Infrastructure Week" - a running a joke during the Trump years - has come to pass. It remains to be seen whether Manchinema will act on BBB absent the threat of their infrastructure bill not passing the House. But it always seemed at least a little bit of an empty threat. The BIB is a good bill and should be passed and signed because it's a good bill. It budgets $110B to repair existing roads and bridges, $66B to boost rail, $55B to replace lead drinking water pipe, and $60B to improve the electrical grid and access to broadband internet. It also includes $50B to deal with climate crises.

Sadly, making a bipartisan bill meant reducing or eliminating tax increases on the wealthy. This could make the bill slightly inflationary, but I doubt seriously if we will still be talking about inflation in 6-9 months time. Also, taxing the rich has to happen. At some point, we have to address rampaging inequality and taxation is the clearest path to do so.

Still, this is good news, providing we get a half-way decent BBB bill in the next few weeks.

It IS Good News!

 John Cole wonders if economic good news is, in fact, good news. Economics seems to be a field especially fraught with very smart people who fall into confirmation bias, despite pretensions of objectivity. The Inflation Debate has seemed pretty silly to me, as it does to Cole. We just has a massive contraction. After a contraction, you have an expansion, especially since the contraction was not caused by a fundamental weakness in the economy (say a housing bubble), but a global pandemic.

Today's robust job numbers are excellent news, and should these trends continue even a little bit, we should see a more robust economy in the spring of 2022. If we can keep the damned pandemic at bay, that should mean things will be getting much better by the summer.

The so-called collapse in Democratic support on Tuesday is really just some dispirited Democratic leaning voters staying home. Covid came roaring back, the economy seems weird, kids still have to wear masks in school... If we put much of that in the past by the spring - it takes a few months for good news to cement itself - Democrats should be in a stronger position next fall.

It really all comes down to Covid. 

Laws Are For Little People

 This piece is just <chef's kiss>. It's pretty long, so let me summarize. The DC police lodge - basically a social club for all the police unions in the capitol - started selling inscribed bottles of Jack Daniels for a huge mark-up. They made a ton of money off it, and it was startlingly illegal.

The conduct of police unions is problematic in the extreme. Some of the actions of teacher's unions (disclosure: there are no unions in private schools) during the pandemic have been unnecessary. Yet, workers need the protection of unions against things like a Trumpist purge of the public sector jobs or exploitive working conditions in the private sector.

Yglesias yesterday proposed using robotic cameras to enforce minor traffic laws to stop racially motivated in-person stops. On the surface, this seems smart, though the parameters of when they would issue a ticket would be critically important. 46 in a 35? When is a rolling stop a stop? In what neighborhoods will the cameras be placed? Just because a technological solution seems cleaner doesn't mean it's better. As Ferguson, Missouri taught us, Black and Brown communities can be exploited as cash cows for municipal governments. 

But reining in cops - especially those protected by unions who themselves are capable of the sort of criminal behavior that would be leverage against a poor person - seems an imperative.

Ding, Ding, Ding

 We have a winner!

Schools

 Jon Chait writes about his priors, like so many others analyzing Tuesday's election. Chait has been writing about illiberal leftism for a while, and though I share many of his concerns, I don't know if his article really advances anything valuable.

Yes, I do believe that there are certain aspects of anti-racist teaching that are reductive and counterproductive. There can be a certain aspect of rubbing a dog's nose in its own poop - or in fact another dog's poop - to the pedagogy surrounding DEI education. Doesn't work for dogs, won't work for kids.

However, most of this is cherry picked nonsense. Far more dangerous is the trend on the Right to ban books and phrases from being taught in school. Chait will no doubt note this in subsequent columns, and there is a truth to the idea that you can only affect the actions of your partisans. It's pointless to wait for the GOP to not be awful on this stuff; being awful on this stuff is their key to winning elections.

I spoke with an old, rich White guy the other day. He was thrilled that Youngkin had won in Virginia. He decried the teaching of CRT, even as he acknowledged that CRT was not really being taught in schools. (He went on to note that he had many Black friends. I mean...)

On the one hand, equating a law school theory with basic DEI teaching is bullshit. It is thinly veiled racial panic. "Please don't make me feel uncomfortable about my dad/granddad/great uncle." On the other, it's clear that efforts to teach responsibly on issues of race are going to be used as a cudgel by Republicans to re-elect neo-fascists who support Trump enough to imperil American democracy. On the other other hand, no matter what happens, Republicans are going to call any efforts to teach legitimate American history as making White kids hate themselves. 

Apparently, when I teach that Thomas Jefferson was an amazing humanist and advocate for democracy, but that he built that democratic humanism on a foundation that explicitly denied the equal humanity of Blacks and Native Americans, I'm making White kids feel bad about themselves?

Bummer

 It obviously doesn't matter to me personally who the governor of Virginia is. There are a lot of reasons why a Republican won. As I said the other day, this election is really just going to prove everyone's priors.

The sad part is that we are now going to get 12 straight months of Republicans harping on Critical Race Theory being taught to 7 year olds, which is of course bullshit. If we can take some solace in last night's results, it's that the GOP will now promptly overdo it on the CRT nonsense.

Covid isn't gone; the economy is wonky; crime is perceived to be up; Washington seems dysfunctional (though it's not). To a certain degree ending Covid and getting the economy straightened out is simply a function of time at this point. 

For all the talk of harbingers of doom for Biden and Democrats, at this point (and there are still votes to count) Youngkin has fewer votes than Trump got in 2020 when he lost by 10 points. Off year elections are weird. However, this will hopefully kick Manchin in the arse and get him to follow through on Democratic policies. No one care how narrow the margins are in the Senate: Dems didn't vote last night and some of that was because they haven't seen the progress they hoped for.

This morning NPR was running a story on a CRT referendum in a Gilmore, CT school system. Only at the very end did they note that CRT was not being taught in public schools. If that's the sort of political coverage we can expect, I'm not sure how the Democrats can tweek their messaging apparatus.

Election Day

 Today is one of America's stupidest political traditions: off-year elections. Americans vote more frequently than almost any other country, and that creates weird voter fatigue. Our town votes in May for the budget. Just moronic. 

The only race anyone cares about is the Virginia governor's race. It is unexpectedly tight for a state that seemed to be trending hard towards the Democrats. On the other hand, Ralph Northam was in a tough race and won easily.

As someone said, the results of the Virginia election will simply confirm your prior beliefs about the Democratic Party. For instance, if you believe that the Democrats are feckless politicians who can't sell a narrative, anything but a blow-out win for McAuliffe will confirm that. In the unlikely event McAuliffe does win by more than 7 points, that will prove that only Dems outside DC are able to sell a narrative, or that Youngkin shows that Dems will try to slink along on anti-Trumpism for as many elections as possible.

The California recall was supposed to be close and it wasn't. By a long shot.  Hopefully Virginia shows the same trend.

Voting Their Feels

 This "analysis" of Virginia voters on the eve of their gubernatorial election is both dumb and depressing. The idea that Biden could somehow end the pandemic while facing massive vaccine hesitancy is nuts. The bigger question about "what has Biden done" is infuriating.

Let's assume Manchin gets off his fucking hobby horse and we get a BBB in the neighborhood of $1.6T. Combine that with the pandemic relief plan and the infrastructure plan and it represents a massive set of spending priorities.

Manchinema's feckless fuckery has created a narrative that Democrats can't get things done. No one who isn't a political junkie cares about the fact that it's a 50 vote margin. No one cares that they are on the verge of a massive spending bill. All they know is the narrative, and Manchinema have made that narrative. This Twitter thread from Chris Murphy adds needed perspective.

So far, the Biden Administration has

- cut child poverty in half
- negotiated the largest infrastructure bill in history
- made the biggest investment in clean energy
- funding for 1,000,000 more housing units
- cut the cost of child care by $10,000
- funded universal pre-school

Chris Murphy is very good at Twitter, but the fact that September and October has been a daily case of Lucy and the Football with Manchinema is why we are in this state.

So, to recap: we have one political party that is on the verge of a massive investment in aid to families and green energy, but can't message its way out of a wet paper bag and another party that is currently making peace with their party leader trying to overthrow American democracy.

And the second party could win a reliably Democratic governor's seat.