A Wartime CDC

 Josh Marshall makes a much more comprehensive and logical case for what I've been saying about the lessons we need to learn from the pandemic.  The CDC and especially the FDA are public health bodies intended to manage public health and medicines during normal times. They have done their best in a climate of uncertainty surrounding a novel coronavirus. That has been a mixed result. This mixed result is not unique to the US and it's health organizations, but our perverse definition of "freedom" and the inefficiencies in federalism have made it worse. Going into this long nightmare, the US was ranked #1 in the world in its ability to handle a pandemic.

How's that going?

We can't let this moment pass before we create a new agency for pandemic planning, but one that becomes a central hub for policy when the next pandemic comes. It does not appear we are going to do that.

Harry Reid

 Nice tribute imbedded here.

The Economy Is Starting To Move

 I can't link to the Bloomberg story here, but Biden's economic recovery has exceeded any other president since Carter. This shouldn't be surprising for two reasons. First, the problem in the economy was largely due to the pandemic and partly due to our chronic economic inequality. Second, the Democrats addressed both in their Covid relief packages. By putting a massive influx of money into the bottom of the economy, they increased aggregate demand a lot. The "problems" in the recovery have been related to supply, and they are in the process of sorting themselves out.

It takes months for an economic recovery to sink in with voters. The fact that consumer confidence is rising now is good news for the midterms, so let's hope Covid fucks off and becomes a common cold.

Rand Paul Is Just The Worst

 Paul cites a stupid "article" from The American Conservative and highlights this bold claim:

How to steal an election: “Seeding an area heavy with potential Democratic votes with as many absentee ballots as possible, targeting and convincing potential voters to complete them in a legally valid way, and then harvesting and counting the results.”

The stupidity and gall of this statement has been thoroughly pilloried online, but it's a useful marker for where the bulk of the GOP resides or is quickly moving towards. The article is simply describing an aggressive GOTV effort in Wisconsin. Ironically, the GOP has traditionally benefitted from mail-in voting, because their voters are older. Their efforts to make it harder for people to vote by mail will therefore have to be targeted towards cities and encourage it in rural areas that are already overcounted in our federal structure.

Lots of people on Twitter are claiming that American democracy is slipping away. That's a bit of a misread. Truly universal democracy in America is about 55 years old. Yet, America was plausibly a democracy, even if we wouldn't call it that today. It was certainly more democratic than most countries in the world by a large margin. The second wave of democratization that occurred after World War II forced America to extend democracy to its Black citizens. The third wave led us to believe that democracy was largely inevitable and irreversible. Neither are true.

I don't think democracy in America is doomed, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned. For the most part Trump and Trumpism is a political and demographic dead-end, but the idea that an election that Republicans lose is illegitimate could poison America for a decade or more.

Let's Go Biden

 The nontroversy over Bad Dad Jared Schmeck is a perfect encapsulation of how the Internet has broken our politics. I'm trying to think of literally anything that could be less important than some doofus thinking he was clever by saying a coded "Fuck You" to the President, because he's a MAGA shitheel. 

Somehow, this has been the main conversation on Twitter the past few days.

Lok, there are parts of Twitter and Facebook that I like. I see cool/funny things in my feed. But the minute I start basing my political opinions off the shit I read there, you will know it's time to send me to a farm upstate.

The Unseen Gerrymanders

 If Democrats are ever going to enact real reform, they will need to win state house elections. Republicans are gerrymandering that into impossibility.

America's Crime, Mexico's Tragedy

 The "Drug War" in Mexico is an unmitigated humanitarian catastrophe. More Mexicans died in Felipe Calderon's six-year term than Americans who died in Vietnam. Between 2006 and 2019, somewhere in the neighborhood of 400,000 Mexicans have died in organized crime violence associated with the drug trade.

There is a single gun store in the entire country of Mexico. The country is awash in guns bought in the United States. The demand for the drugs that fuels the Drug War is mostly from Americans. The cartels don't want to target Americans, but the insatiable demand for drugs in this country has created incentives towards violence that have immiserated that country.

Today, we celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace. He may have died for our sins, but perhaps our sins are too many to be truly forgiven.

The Cart And The Horse

 Among the most important questions in America today is whether Trump is the cause or the symptom. I've long felt that Trump - as a good conman salesman - is naturally adept at telling an audience what they want to hear. That has always been the juice in his rallies, both for him and his cultists. He didn't create Trumpism, like everything else he's associated with, he merely rebranded it with his name on it.

Trump's recent foray into recommending the vaccine is another brick in the wall supporting the symptom. Trump bears almost no responsibility for  "Operation Warp Speed" but at least he didn't actively subvert it while in office. Since his defeat, he and all Republicans have moved to an actively supportive of Covid position. His break with that might be the realization that the unvaccinated - Republican voters - are the ones who are dying. 

That they are now fracturing again is telling. The literally mentally ill wing of Trumpist politics - the QAnon nutters, the Flat Earthers, etc - cannot brook reality permeating their perfervid worldview. 

Trump mainstreamed this insanity, but he didn't cause it. It's always been there, but Trump and the internet brought them together and gave them impetus. And we are paying the price for that.

Who Breaks, And Will It Matter?

 Gym Jordan has a history of covering up sordid behavior, but he's been clearly rattled by the subpoena from the January 6th Committee. Greg Sargent runs down what Jordan might know.

Ultimately, the idea that there will be some extraordinary revelation that will change the behavior of either elected Republicans or their feral voting base seems naïve. We've been through Mueller and various iterations, including two impeachments. For whatever reason, the Department of Justice has seemed less interested in prosecuting those in Trump's inner circle, unless there are no other options. 

We know that Trump participated in meetings that pushed the idea of stopping the certification of the election. We know that he pressured state election officials to change results. He's guilty as fuck and additional hearings are just filling in gaps in our knowledge.

As long as Republicans remain in thrall to Trump and his criminality, there will not be a normal reckoning. This is at the heart of the threats to our democracy. 

The Wrong Data

 Yglesias makes the case for keeping schools open. I think he's missing something important that we saw as a mostly in-person school last year: No one learned well last year. The pervasive uncertainty of the pandemic left everyone just a little more stressed than usual. Kids need certainty, and that was gone. Adults could not say that they were going to be safe.

Anxiety and stress are forms of transient brain damage. It's something called cognitive load. How much can you "learn" or "think" varies from person to person, but when you add environmental stressors to that cognitive load, it significantly impedes learning. As Josh Marshall notes, everyone is broken.

Last year, we arrested educational decline rather than taught successfully, and we were largely in-person. Yes, I disagree with keeping schools closed, especially now that we have vaccines and treatments. There is no excuse, as Yglesias notes, for keeping schools closed and restaurants open. 

However, if we are going to properly understand the educational losses created by Covid, then we need to understand that those loses were not entirely created by the loss of in-person class time. 

For Generation Covid, we need to rethink how long a student should be in school. Basically, the overwhelming majority of kids should either do summer school or repeat a year, if we are serious about learning loss.

UPDATE: Good summary of the psychological factors involved here. They don't use the phrase "cognitive load" when talking about students, but it's clearly what they are talking about.

Is There Still A Deal?

 Jon Chait and Matthew Yglesias plot some paths to Joe Manchin's heart.

Rigorous Logic

 Paul Campos lays out the very logical rationale for calling the GOP a death cult. I went walking through America's Saddest Mall in Waterbury, CT yesterday, and I tried keeping a tally of who was wearing masks and who wasn't. I'd say about 60% of people were masked and maybe 5% more were wearing masks as props (around their chins). I've seen a surprising number of elderly people unmasked, which leads me to believe that people have simply given up trying to protect themselves and others.

So, the GOP being a death cult is not - as one would hope - electoral poison. People (and this antipathy is not unique to the United States) are simply too shortsighted to make a month's worth of mild sacrifice to keep people alive.

Doomposting Is Killing Democrats

 This is a wise take on "doomposting" or the never ending scroll of people on Twitter especially who see only gloom and despair. The news today that Manchin cannot support BBB is deeply disappointing. But the Biden Administration has done some amazing things. Perhaps far short of what Bernie promised, but this isn't Amazon, where you order your legislation and it shows up on your doorstep in 48 hours.

It will be very hard to celebrate the real accomplishments of the Biden Administration in the lead-up to both the midterms and the re-election campaign in the face of relentless "emo eeyores" focusing on what wasn't done.

My "favorite" form of doomposting is the nonsense about how Democrats are weak and never get anything done. Leaving aside the impressive slate of legislation passed already, Democrats have won the popular vote in every presidential election but two since 1988. The reason they lost in 2000 and 2016 was not about Democratic fecklessness, but rather huge structural disadvantages that Democrats labor and oftentimes successfully overcome.

Bush managed to expand drug access to Medicare, but aside from that Republicans have not tried any positive legislative agenda. Cutting taxes, gutting regulations, trying to end ACA, confirming judges...those are not legislative pieces that require overcoming institutional inertia. 

Yes, I will remain worried about every election for as long as Republicans embrace anti-democratic politics. But I'm not going to give myself an ulcer worrying about it every day.

Energy Risks

 This is a fascinating story about the dueling priorities of France and Germany when it comes to meeting climate goals. President Macron has made a commitment to re-open and add nuclear reactors. Germany has decided that they are going to shutter their plants. There was a line from the mayor of a German town near a reopening nuclear reactor: "When a vegan business wants to settle, it probably won't move next to a slaughterhouse."

Germany currently produces a great deal more CO2 per capita than France, because as it shutters reactors, it has to open more coal burning plants. But their antipathy towards nuclear feels very much like many vegans I know: a sort of self-righteous virtue signaling. Is nuclear dangerous? Sure, the potential for a really bad outcome exists, because nuclear reactions create nuclear waste. However, the deaths attributable to burning coal and global warming tend to be secondary cause effects. 

The two worst nuclear disasters are Fukushima and Chernobyl. Fukushima - which the Germans reference a lot - killed one person and will likely lead to significantly reduced lifespans for dozens more. Chernobyl killed a few 100 directly and the question as to how many are going to see dramatically shortened lives is an ongoing debate, but let's take a reasonably high estimate of 4.000. Meanwhile, we have a study estimating that rising global temperatures kill 5,000,000 a year. Let's assume that's a ridiculously high number and cut it in half.

In other words, if you were to take Chernobyl and Fukushima combined, they barely make a dent in the yearly deaths from climate change.

Germany is engaged really poor risk assessment. Nuclear accidents are very, very rare. Should they happen they are very bad. Climate change is happening all around us and kills a great many more people, and like a very rare nuclear accident is rendering parts of the world as uninhabitable. (Let's leave aside that solar is a particularly poor option for Germany, given the hours of sunlight they get this time of year.) 

There a two impending crises threatening the world right now. One is democratic backsliding in the Europe, India and the United States. The other is the presence of too much carbon in the atmosphere. The impact of that carbon is rising temperatures, but the actual crisis is the presence of carbon. Nuclear power produces abundant electricity with much of any carbon output. Also, there is a new generation of nuclear reactors coming on line that are smaller and safer than existing reactors. 

Maybe the broad category of "renewables" will be able to produce enough electricity to power our world - a world that should require a LOT more electricity. If we want to produce more electric cars and burn less fossil fuels to heat and cooks with, then we need more megawatts. Adding more, safe nuclear reactors is the quickest way to zero emissions. Period.

The Germans are stuck in the environmental movement of the 1970s while the world burns.

We Need A Health Care GI Bill

 John Cole hit on something I've been thinking about, too. We are about to get hit with our 5th Covid wave by my count. There was the initial wave in spring of 2020, then the fall wave as weather got colder and schools tried to start up, then the brutal winter wave, then Delta and now the Omicron wave is coming.

In certain states or parts of states where vaccination rates are low, medical workers are near or past the breaking point. The next few weeks or months will again see our hospitals overflowing with people sick from an illness that they likely did not need to get. Nurses will be placing otherwise healthy people into body bags, because those people decided not to get a shot that would have saved their lives.

The physical and emotional toil of this will be massive.

These people are veterans of a two front war against a virus and ignorance. When this is over, we should reward them with several things:

- A lifetime of mental health coverage.
- Some sort of GI Bill that could include paying off their student debt or helping them buy a home. Whatever.
- A promissory note against future fucking ineptitude.

That last one will be the hardest.

The Moral Relativism Of Conservative Christians

 This piece from The Atlantic is a fascinating peek into the mind of a certain type of conservative Christian. Judging from the byline, the author is a conservative Catholic, which would seem to mean that he would be stridently opposed to abortion. That's an inference, but I feel it holds water. I imagine he considers himself devoted to a "culture of life."

And he does not give a flying shit about Covid. There's the usual populist digs at city dwellers and the "upper middle class." The usual stupid whataboutism, in this case some other stringent standards surrounding what constitutes problem drinking. And there's the particularism of his specific case: he's not dead of Covid.

If someone transcribed "If it doesn't effect me, I don't care" into Latin, we could make that the motto of modern conservatives.

The irony of his piece is that he lives in rural Michigan. Yeah, dude, we know no one cares about mitigating the disease in rural Michigan, because over 27,000 people in your state at least have died from this disease.

Here's a self-described conservative Catholic who is outraged at the "murder" of zygotes who is all "da fuck do I care?" about tens of thousands of his neighbors dying.

Now, I agree with him on his observation: lots of people no longer care about Covid. They are "over" it. Medical facilities are strained to the breaking point and we are just beginning to enter a winter/Omicron surge that will cripple our hospital systems - even as it becomes less lethal on an individual level. 

Vaccinations (he doesn't explicitly say if he's had his, but he mentions boosters, so I presume he has) are our best defense, but the virus changes quickly when allowed to spread promiscuously. So vaccinations and masks are the way to end this pandemic.

But Real Muricans don't care about...other Real Muricans, I guess.

We Are All Burkeans

 Martin Longman talks about "popularism" and the burdens that Democrats labor under in terms of an asymmetric playing field.

Basically, without saying it, what Longman is describing is temperamental as opposed to ideological conservatism. America is not a "center right" nation when it comes to policy preferences. Ask Americans what they would like, and their views will largely line up with a broad range of "center left" priorities. Of the top of my head, majorities support some form of abortion rights, more gun control, higher taxes on the rich, more government help with health insurance, a better environment, improved public education, workplace protections...I dunno, I'm still ingesting my coffee. Ask them if they "want" these things and anywhere from 51% to 70%  will say, "sure." 

Here's what I think Longman hits on. When you craft your question a certain way, you get a certain answer. If you say, "Anyone should be able to get an abortion whenever they want," that won't be popular. If you say, "Abortion in the first trimester should be available to those women who need it." it will be.

This semantics argument is at the heart of "popularism." That there's some magical phrasing that will make Democrats an enduring majority party.

What Longman hits on, and I think this is more profoundly important than he realizes, is that ANY CHANGE will be unpopular compared to preserving existing structures. At first, this is really discouraging for a party that wants to improve things for most Americans. If you do something like Obamacare, you will get punished for it, because change is scary.

The flip side is that once you've instituted those changes, they become the status quo that becomes hard to change. We saw this with the Affordable Care Act. The GOP had control of both chambers of Congress and the Presidency and they couldn't gut the law. Bush couldn't gut Social Security. 

The temperamental deference to the status quo is a fairly normal human impulse. So how do Democrats navigate this?

First, the wasted time with Manchinema really does hurt more than I thought it would. Not because of the dysfunction narrative - though it doesn't help when you're trying to sell efficient government and they can't function efficiently. Rather any gains that Democrats want to run on in 2022 and 2024 require people understanding exactly what the new status quo is and Democrats effectively saying that they want to protect that.

In other words, you win an election; you issue reforms quickly; Republicans howl about the reforms; Democratic poll numbers drop; people like the reforms; Democrats run on protecting them from Republicans.

What I worry about is that a two year cycle simply isn't long enough to allow this process to give the Democrats working majorities for long enough to truly cement their gains.

If - somehow - Democrats can run and win in 2022 on a fear of a Trump Restoration and the end of democracy as we know it - then there is real hope for creating a virtuous cycle for enough time to bleed off support for Cult 45.

Must Read

 A lot here from Adam Silverman about both the recent revelations surrounding January 6th and the number of estimated insurrectionists. Really good stuff, as per usual from him.

There Is No Penalty For Hypocrisy, Part II: Electric Boogaloo

 The revelation that Fox News "personalities" and even Don Jr were frantically texting Mark Meadows to get Trump to call off his insurrection on January 6th is one of those typical Trumpistan revelations. I'll quote Josh Marshall:

The whole story of the Trump presidency and post-presidency is one of a series of shocks that drove momentary shudders in his followers before they quickly found a way to explain and justify and get about the business of saying everyone does it.

The presence of his own son among those alarmed by Trump's attempted autogolpe is pretty hilarious. The boy who craved Daddy's love is going to be frozen out when Trump finds out. Trump hates "betrayal" and sees it everywhere.

I "get" that the institutional GOP is terrified of Trump's cultists bolting the party if they hold him accountable for trying to overthrow American democracy. It's craven and cowardly and un-American, but I get it. Outside of a handful of elected Republicans, they have sold any principles they once had to serve their Mango-tinted God. It's despicable.

The question is: will facts ever - and I mean at the barest level - penetrate the blinkered world view of the Trump cultists? Will rank and file Republicans ever revolt against a man who tried to violently overthrow the government?

If the GOP broke decisively with Trump, it would cost them their shot in the 2022 midterms. I do think that's true. But it would set the party up for a return to sanity in the long run. Far too many don't care.

Their choice, I guess, but we will all be living with the consequences if they reject reality.

There Is No Penalty For Hypocrisy

 Rand Paul is among the worst people in a GOP filled to the brim with people who learned from Trump that the way to electoral success is being an utter asshole to "those people." Paul has repeatedly attacked disaster spending for other states, and now the horrible tragedy in Kentucky means that he will ask for disaster relief for his constituents.

Kentucky needs all of our help right now, and Rand Paul's utter assholeness should not detract from that. But we should absolutely hang this around his neck every chance we get. 

Will it make a difference? Of course not.

Dollar General Is Evil

 This story is just heartbreaking.

Vaccines Save Lives, Part 3,975,291

 If you were a kid, Covid was unlikely to kill you, however, being vaccinated does dramatically reduce that small chance of death in those ages 18-29. The same roughly holds true for those 30-49, though again, few in that age group will die in the first place.

In the middle aged group, 50-64, we can see Covid spike to around 23 deaths per 100,000 people who are unvaccinated, whereas the vaccinated in that group spiked at .95 per 100,000. That's remarkable efficacy. That number gets even better when we move to 65-79 year olds. During the summer Delta peak, over 75 people/100,000 who were unvaccinated were dying, whereas that number plummets to 3.4/100,000 among the vaccinated. That's 25 times more likely to die if you don't get vaccinated.

Omicron is still somewhat of a mystery in terms of its lethality, as the lag between infection, hospitalization and death can take weeks. The early returns are pretty good. A virus does not want to kill or gravely sicken its host. It can't replicate from a dead host. If Omicron represents a more contagious, less lethal version of SARs-Covid-19, it could be the moment where Covid moves from a global pandemic to an endemic coronavirus that just gets you sick.

Especially if you've been fucking vaccinated.

What Is The "Thinking" Here

 Ron DeSantis is routinely touted as the less insane, less crude, less impulsive Donald Trump.

Ron DeSantis wants to lock up Dr. Anthony Fauci.

So, the "Sane" Wing of the GOP wants to lock up a leading public health expert because...

I worry - with others - that the norm of not locking up political opponents is one that Merrick Garland might be hewing too closely. It seems pretty evident that Trump has committed myriad crimes, even apart from January 6th. However, the entire GOP seems intent on locking up people that they simply disagree with. In much the same way that Democratic states eschew gerrymandering while the GOP runs full speed ahead, Democrats can't unilaterally back down in the face of this authoritarian insanity.

The Nutmeg Laboratory

 James Surowiecki has some Covid stats from here in Connecticut. We have one of the highest adult vaccination rates in the country. Seniors are vaccinated at a 90+% rate. We had 37 Covid deaths here last week and 29 of them were unvaccinated. Anti-vaxxers will say, "See, 8 people died despite being vaccinated!" But 85.3% of all adults are vaccinated. That means the death rate for the unvaccinated is 16 times higher than the unvaccinated.

The pandemic is not going anywhere, for a number of reasons. One is variants, one is anti-vaxxer refusal to create the sort of barrier to spread, and a big one is that people are just "over" the pandemic. The number of people wandering around with no masks or poorly fitted masks is a sign of basic selfishness. Yes, masks suck. They are mildly uncomfortable. They are a hassle.

They are also the only way to properly fully arrest the spread of the disease. The vaccines do a great job, but they need a little boost and masks can give that.

Take it from me. Vaccines are a great way to prevent serious Covid, but they are not infallible. Well fitting, high performance masks are a great way to prevent serious Covid, but they are not infallible. Combine the two, and you're in a very strong position. Connecticut is demonstrating both the efficacy and the limits of vaccines. Because people are stupid and unserious, they aren't able to grok that distinction between extremely effective and infallible. If something prevents something 95% of the time, it still allows it one time in 20.

I think we have to accept the fact that we live in a country that is willing to accept a large number of dead school children every year in the name of "FREEDUMB!!!!1!!1" We are perfectly fine having people die of Covid as long as I don't have to inconvenience myself in any way.

The Biden Boom

 Paul Krugman has a very good question that should be easy to answer but it's not: How is the American economy doing?

So much of the underlying data seems pretty damned good. Employment is high, real wages are rising, the supply bottleneck is easing. As Krugman notes, many of the economic indicators look great. What's especially weird, but maybe unsurprising, is that people think the economy is in bad shape, but they also say their personal economic situation is pretty good. Some of this is a lag between what people feel personally and the tenor of news coverage.

Dana Milbank just launched a broadside against the sensationalist news media. His methodology might not be perfect, but he had a computer program analyze media coverage of Biden over the last 11 months and Trump during the last 11 months of his presidency. You may remember Trump's 2020: mismanaging a pandemic that eventually almost killed him; fueling racial violence in the streets; undermining faith in our democracy through the Big Lie; Infrastructure Weak. I'm sure there was more.

Nevertheless, Biden's coverage has been as bad or worse than Trump's. Most notable was the media freak out over Afghanistan. Most Americans had the opinion of "About time, but I wish it had been handled better." Much of the latter part was from the media's incessant doomsday predictions and negative coverage. Killing a million Americans in a pandemic gets you the same coverage as ending America's forever war.

Much is the same on the economy. Inflation is both a real concern and likely an ephemeral one tied to gas prices. People don't like paying too much for gasoline. However, I can remember when gasoline hit $4.00+ a gallon in 2008. No one freaked out about inflation, probably because the economy was about to Wily Coyote itself into the side of a cliff. Instead, today, we have rising real wages, but that's being eroded by both gas-fueled inflation and supply bottlenecks that inflate prices. As both of those pressures ease, perhaps Biden's handling of the economy will hew closer to reality.

Covid, however, remains the primary focus of dissatisfaction, and I think people express their unhappiness with pandemic restrictions - mild as they are - in economic terms.

Right now, the best hope for American democracy is that the media allows itself to accurately report on a pretty miraculous economic recovery and that Covid fades into the background for good by May.

The Greatest Threat To American Democracy

 is the Republican Party of Donald Trump. This has been building for years, but they are increasingly abandoning basic ideals of democracy.

And they will likely win control of Congress in eleven months.

The Pandemic Should Have Been An Opportunity

 Yglesias goes on one of his "I'm not an expert, but here's how I would completely change a field that I'm not an expert in" bits. It's not clear exactly how much merit there is in this because - wait for it - I'm not an expert.

However, there are undoubted problems with America's health care system. I don't think this is a surprise to anyone. We focus a LOT on access to health insurance, because that's Problem Number One, but there are a bunch of other issues. Massive disruptions tend to generate new policy ideas, however, and it doesn't look like we are "building back better" when it comes to our public health institutions. After 2008, we passed a number of important financial services reforms, because we had an administration who wanted to make government and the economy work. So far in 2021, Biden has focused - wisely - on getting the economy back on track, because that's a playbook that has been run before.

On public health there are a number of issues, some of which Yglesias mentions. Our public health institutions are sclerotic; the virus is agile. As a result, we had the mask fiasco in March and April of 2020. Currently, he points out that it really seems like we should have a longer gap between vaccines. However, the evidence from this comes from other countries like Canada, so we pretend it doesn't exist. The FDA is a MUCH stricter regulatory agency than those in Europe. My guess is that the origins of the FDA at a time of patent medicines, means that their desire to be stringent is rooted in past practices. However, we have to acknowledge that the lobbying power of drug companies makes the idea that Pfizer is just pursuing profits plausible. We live with a regulatory regimen that is paralyzed by the ghost of thalidomide. 

The other issue that Yglesias notes is rapid testing. Speaking from experience, the ability to test frequently and easily has <knock wood> kept Covid from rampaging through our school - a school with both dormitories that function as petri dishes and teenagers who think masks are chin straps. Combined with mandatory vaccinations, when we find someone who's Covid positive, we can rapidly track and trace and alter our behavior until more testing puts us in the clear. Right now, flu is the big illness on campus precisely because we don't test for it.

That we have regulatory barriers to at-home testing because we worry about false results is both understandable and nuts. False negatives are no worse than operating in the dark, which is our current status. False positives would be caught by follow up testing. If we tested large swaths of the population at random, we would do a much better job of tamping down this pandemic. If David Leonhardt is right, the FDA is the reason we do not have widespread, cheap testing kits.

That's inexcusable.

The issue with treatments is a good one, too. When I was hospitalized with Covid pneumonia, they gave me a rheumatoid arthritis drug. That was "experimental" but it sure seemed to work. Yglesias notes the success of an SSRI drug. One of the knock on problems of the ivermectin bullshit is that alternate treatments are also dragged through the guilt-by-association issue.

However, we can go beyond what Yglesias notes to more general issues. 

We have a patchwork of public health agencies that communicate poorly or not at all. We have political whackaloons running public health agencies who have become anti-vaxxers because that's what their Tangerine God told them to do. 

We have no global network for vaccination, despite the very real need. In fact, globally, we are still just as unprepared as we were in 2018.

Dr. Fauci has become the default national face of the pandemic response, but he's very old. Who steps into his shoes for the next pandemic - and there will be a next pandemic.

When 1929 or 2008 broke the world economy, we got a robust response following the old New Deal form of Relief, Recovery and Reform. The reforms coming out of the New Deal and the Obama Administration are really important to prevent economic cataclysms from returning to their 19th century regularity. 

It does not appear we have anything close to a reform movement to prevent a repeat of the Covid pandemic in 15 years.

Russia

It's unclear what Putin's plan is for Ukraine. His goals are pretty obvious. He wants a Ukraine that is separate from the West and largely dependent on Moscow for security. That is not what Ukraine wants, though. Ukraine wants increased integration with the EU and NATO. The problem is that authoritarian regimes can often get trapped in information silos more complete than the ones usually found in democracies. 

For instance, the Bush Administration created an information silo around invading Iraq in 2003. However, there was robust pushback and millions of people protesting in the street. Bush went ahead anyway in one of the worst foreign policy disasters in American history. The dissent, however, was real and substantial, and the self-evident failures in Iraq perhaps put an end to discussions about invading Iran. 

Putin faces none of that. There is no dissenting viewpoint that might interject a stark dose of reality into Kremlin plans. If Putin feels that invading Ukraine will not hurt him, then he will do it. This action if unlikely to occur without serious repercussions for Russia. Can he see that?

Frankly, the US and NATO should make the case that Russian military interventions in Ukraine make NATO membership more likely, not less. 

I've always felt that 9/11 broke something in this country. The specter of Islamist terrorists unleashed the latent racism and xenophobia simmering beneath the surface of American civil life. I wonder if the pandemic has broken something else. Not just here, but globally. There are mask protests and anti-vaxxers in Europe, too.

Covid might have broken something in Russia, and that could introduce instability into an authoritarian decision making system that has dire repercussions for us all.

The Counting Capacity

 Good Yglesias has a nice rundown of how the government does a poor job accumulating and managing data. We live in a world where data is everywhere and levers great power in our economy. Yet we don't know how many people are murdered every year, not precisely. We have no real idea how many vaccines have been given.

I've argued that a central focus of the Biden Administration has to be government capacity. We need to hire good people to do good work. The Reagan Regression created a slow war of attrition on governmental competency. While the argument "government is incompetent" is largely false, it could certainly be MORE competent.

The CDC that Yglesias begins with is a great example. For various reasons, the CDC has been stripped of capacity over time. That - combined with a certain hesitancy to get ahead of the evidence - is why we have had such mind-boggling confusion over masks in the spring of 2020. That confusion is the wedge for the conspiratorial to infect the discourse with a series of whataboutism and false equivalencies. 

Deadly Trolls

 The modern "conservative" movement has degenerated to a simple movement to troll non-"conservatives." That's the best definition of Trumpism and Trump's personal appeal. The insanity of this Christmas card is further and unneeded proof of this dynamic. This is a member of Congress posing with his family with enough weaponry to kill hundreds of people...FOR CHRISTMAS.

As the GOP moves into a post-policy form, whereby it has no real plans for how to run or staff a government, we are increasingly seeing the elites of the GOP embrace trolling as form of politics. This has dire implications, because some wannabe dictator like Trump can leverage this into an attack on our democratic institutions. "Oh, you think voting is important? Well, we are going to oppose voting." Some of this is naked power politics, but some is simply Cleek's Law in overdrive.

If the only coherence your politics has is oppositional, that can win you elections, but it does not provide a rationale for governing the country.

This Is Crazy Cool

 Scientists are able to create an animated map of how the coronavirus lives inside a tiny droplet of aerosol. 

Good News, Bad News, Good News, Bad News

 Potential "good news" on Omicron: while it looks much more contagious and able to evade acquired immunity, it has done so by becoming less deadly.  This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, as the virus wants more hosts and killing the host is ineffectice.

Bad news is that social distancing - which we have used in our dining rooms and athletic practices - really doesn't seem to work much at all.

Good news is that if you add a mask, you significantly reduce the spread of the virus.

Bad news is that the mask has to fit well. Just anecdotally, we have a decent mask policy here on paper, but the number of noses that I see every day is depressingly reminding me about the risk tolerance of adolescents. 

Pro-Life Is Bullshit

 There are any number of ways to catalog the galling hypocrisy present in the anti-abortion movement calling itself "pro-life," when really they mean "forced birth."

There is the argument that the GOP simply does not care one whit for child welfare in this country. They do not care for pre and neo-natal care. They will fight efforts to reduce child poverty.

There are two other cases of this hypocrisy. First, the people who hate abortion usually support the death penalty and they are usually anti-asylum when it comes to migrants.

Pope Francis has at least punctured the hypocrisy by downplaying abortion as an issue for Catholics, and constantly reminding people of the lives currently under siege by bigotry and racial animus. That there is whole sect within the Catholic Church that is opposed to this tells us all we need to know about the priorities of the Forced Birth movement.

My son has a consistent and abiding hatred of religion. There are many wonderful parts of religion and faith, but there really is no defense of much of what modern evangelical and conservative Catholicism has become.

Possible Progress On Gun Violence

 The arrest of the Crumbleys in connection with their son shooting up a school shows a way to begin to impact the scourge of gun violence. We are vanishingly unlikely to put into place legitimate efforts to prevent future mass casualty events, like registering and licensing guns and gun owners. 

However, guns are exempt from any number of normal liability laws. Not just the owners but the manufacturers and the retailers. If a bartender overserves a customer and they drive drunk and kill or injure someone, that bartender can be held liable. If someone leaves a literal loaded gun around the house, nothing.

That seems a small way forward. Like with police violence, at this point we are simply trying to hold people accountable for horrible actions. Actually preventing them is as effective as mask and vaccine mandates.

The Law Of Unintended Consequences

 Many laudable efforts have been made to make policing more responsive to community needs. However, some of these decisions are most likely leading to a spike in property crime. I'm going to predict that the murder spree of 2020 was most likely pandemic related, but cities and states have reduced the penalties for non-violent crimes, and it is having an impact on public safety.

Here in Connecticut there was an effort to reduce criminal penalties for teenagers committing felonies. The laudable goal was to keep kids out of the criminal system. It was an effort to interdict the school-to-prison pipeline. The result, however, has been to create gangs of teenaged car thieves, working for Fagin-like adults, who can steal cars and not face felony jail time.

This is going to lead to a correction. Will it be rolling back these laws - perhaps creating more stringent penalties and diversion programs - or will it be the advent of a more dangerous Nixon (like Trump). Someone who rides a fear of lawlessness to grab power and become lawless themselves?

The Defund the Police movement is exactly the sort of overreach that any political movement is prone to, but unlike the effort to overturn Roe, this really has and will move votes. Democrats need to get ahead of this NOW, before the (false) perception sets itself in stone.

What Does A Post-Roe World Look Like

 The assumption being made after oral arguments is that the Supreme Court will strike down Roe v Wade, either in total or in practical effect. I have no reason to doubt this. I've always felt that most Republican elite don't really care about abortion, but as we have seen time and again, they are captive to their evangelical base. So, they've been perfectly willing to mine evangelical voters with promises of overturning Roe, the smarter among them know that it is incredibly unpopular. 

Campos notes that there has been a whole subset of Center Left and Center Right (Susan Collins) types who have assumed that the noise from the Christianists about overturning Roe was simply noise, and that sensible people like John Roberts would not overturn established and reaffirmed precedent. Now that they have a 6-3 majority on the Court, there does not seem to be the same scruples. I've always felt that Roberts was worried about the legitimacy of the Court, hence his ruling in Sebelius, but that the path to overriding the 6-3 majority seems very much out of reach, so he will go for it. 

The horrible irony is that five of the Justices with lifetime terms were appointed by presidents who assumed office after losing the popular vote. The Court is intentionally "undemocratic" but it has become distressingly so in the era of GOP minority rule.

Anyway, let's assume that the Court effectively or definitively overturns Roe. I would lean towards effectively, as Roberts, Gorsuch and maybe Kavanaugh understand the political toxicity of overturning abortion rights. So they will craft a ruling that gives them a little bit of deniability. 

The key, ultimately, is whether this will move votes. The ruling will come out before the midterm elections. How many fence-sitting suburban women will flip their votes to Democrats over this? I fear the number will be distressingly few. Yes, roughly 60% of Americans believe abortion should be legal. How many of that 60% will base their vote off this belief? I have a detached support for abortion rights. I support it in a rather general way, and I'm sure that applies to the 60%. If you're a "single issue" voter on the subject of reproductive rights, I imagine you are already voting for Democrats.

I suppose that it could serve to rally voter in a critical midterm, but I just worry that middle class white women, who could be a critical tipping point demographic, will always be able to secure abortions for their daughters or themselves. Overturning Roe will fall disproportionately on poorer women, especially teenagers. It will take awhile for the horror stories of backalley abortions and dying women to change people's minds.

I've been saying for years that Christianists or political evangelicals are the greatest threat to American democracy, and the rush to overturn an established right seems to fit into that frame neatly. Is there enough democratic control over our government to make them pay?

Republicans Are Trying To Kill You

 Example one: Donald Trump knowingly exposed Joe Biden to Covid during their debate in October 2020. As Paul Campos and others have noted, this is barely a story. Despite a media that is hungry for Trump-fueled ratings, they are ignoring that the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in 2024 basically attempted biological warfare against his opponent.

Example two: the student who committed our latest school shooting had a Trumpist mom. OK, that's not necessarily a problem, except - as Campos (again) notes - the parents had been informed of his troubling behavior, had in fact had a conference about it the morning of the shooting, and yet still bought him a gun.

Is this "malice murder" or "negligent homicide"? 

Doesn't matter if you're dead.

As it is, Covid is killing off many of the MAGA crowd. So, I guess it's murder-suicide?

Celebrity Culture

 The news that New Jersey resident Dr. Mehmet Oz is going to run for the Senate in Pennsylvania is the latest sign that the GOP is captive to a weird sort of celebrity culture. Oz rose to prominence as a mediagenic star who was able to crossover from being a successful heart surgeon to a quack whisperer selling bogus health treatments. (It is worth noting that Oprah has unleashed this fool AND Dr. Phil upon us.)

Aside from name recognition, what possible qualifications does Dr. Oz for sitting in the Senate? I suppose he has a more credible claim than Donald Trump or Tommy Tuberville, but at this point, the Republican Party's full-scale retreat from policy can be wrapped up in their embrace of reality show celebrities.