Been Away

 I've been working to close up my parents' farm in anticipation of selling it. It's been tough, but I'll write about that later.

It's Time For Vaccine Passports

 Building on Josh Marshall's observations immediately below, Jen Rubin says we need more vaccine mandates. She points to France, where Macron has basically put into place a vaccine passport system. If you don't get vaccinated, there are places you can't go. This led to protests (hey, it's France) but it also led to a massive uptick in vaccinations. Indeed, there is some evidence that vaccinations are going up again in this country in the wake of the fourth wave of Delta.

If Marshall is correct that there are supermajorities who are vaccinated and hoping life will return to normal AND if the GQP is largely identified with anti-vax positions (fairly or unfairly) AND Cleek's Law means that the GQP will freak out and protest vaccine passports...THEN you can cement the GQP's status as the choice of about 40% of the electorate, and make the Democratic Party the party of "life needs to return to normal safely."

Is This Why The GQP Is Changing Its Tune?

 Josh Marshall has been speculating on why the GQP has begun to embrace vaccination, and he may have hit on something. He digs into the numbers that most people gloss over. Only about 50% of America is vaccinated, most dumb reporters parrot. But that number is misleading, because very, very few children are vaccinated. Children also, notably, do not vote. Among voting age population, 60% of Americans are vaccinated and 69% have had at least one dose and among the elderly, it's close to 80%.

The GQP thought they could ride Freedumb to 2022 electoral success, based on the 2010 Tea Party movement, I guess. If they get associated with anti-vax positions, and we have to go back to masking...I think they realize that they will pay a price for that politically.

At least, one could hope.

Air Travel Seems Fundamentally Broken

 I have to fly next week - much to my consternation. I booked a flight to and from my destination. Paid extra to check a bag and have enough legroom, because we want to incentivize people bringing steamer trunks as their carry-on and make people over 5'6" miserable.

I flew on American Airlines once this summer, and they didn't have a plane ready. We had to wait an extra hour and a half and get in VERY late after a cross country flight. Then my son flew on American and they overbooked his flight. So we volunteered to switch it since he wasn't on a tight schedule. They sent him to an airport with no jet fuel.

So, fuck American Airlines, right? I booked in United, and they just told me that my return flight NEXT SATURDAY is being cancelled because of weather and runway construction. Given that there is absolutely no way that they can know the weather next Saturday, it's the runway situation. Which they knew about when they sold me my ticket.

We've all heard stories about people being awful on flights. I don't want to be one of those people. I have not been one of those people. But people who snap because of the way airlines treat them? I don't think they are a complete mystery. 

Way back when we over-regulated airlines. Today, we under-regulate them. It's very simple. We need an Air Travelers Bill of Rights. 

- Every airline must have enough customer service reps at their 800 number. When my son was sent to an airport with no fuel it took them 15 hours to return my call and they hung up on me.

- An airline should be penalized for over-booking. (And there should be some sort of penalty for people who book and cancel.)

- An airline who sells a ticket that they cannot honor for reasons related to airport and airline operations (not acts of Dog) must give 150% of the fare as a refund.

- Airlines must reduce seating so that normal sized people have enough room to sit comfortably.

- Airlines should charge for the second piece of carry-on and not charge for the first checked bag. This will improve loading and unloading the airplane.

I don't know. That's just off the top of my head. In return for these regulations, the Federal government should take on some of the financial burdens that are forcing them into these shitty business practices.

Did Covid Break Us?

 Reading this thread from Paul Krugman, I wonder if we aren't underestimating how much Covid broke us psychologically. He basically went driving and if you've been driving in the past 16 months, you probably noticed that people were driving like maniacs. Of course, we all know about the ubiquitous "Karen" videos from your nearest Costco, of someone freaking out over the basic courtesies of wearing a wee paper mask to stop people from dying. Because of a certain overlap with Trumpist Covid denialism, we tended to simply ascribe this to Trump. 

As Krugman notes, maybe this reckless driving is tied to the spike in murder rates. It's only a correlation, but it's pretty clear that both traffic fatalities and murder went up, as did any other number of anti-social behaviors. 

For many of us, the pandemic was about "In This Together." We saw it as an external threat that could only be slowed and defeated by working together. 

However, all you need a fraction of the population - say 10% - to see the pandemic as an opportunity to go full Mad Max to create a measurable increase in reckless behavior.

I don't know if this is true, but we do know that murders and traffic fatalities spiked during Covid. And the reckless driving predates the George Floyd protests.

Complicated events are not caused by One Thing. It does seem clear that Covid was one of the causes of a lot of bad side effects beyond loss of smell.

Acid Test

 Once upon a time, the bullshit axiom used by election horserace talkers was that you had to win "bellwether" states like Ohio and Missouri. Those were states full of Real Muricans and determined who would be presidenting by appealing to those Real (White) Muricans.

Ohio does remain a little bellwethery,  as Obama won it twice, but Trump won it twice without winning a majority of the vote and losing re-election, because he is a loser who loses.

Missouri? The last time a Democrat won Missouri was 1996. Since then Al Gore and Hillary Clinton won the popular vote without it, Obama won twice and Biden once without it.

In 2012, Obama won 44% of the vote there, basically the same as in South Carolina. Clinton won 40%, roughly the same as South Carolina. Biden won 41% of the vote there and actually did BETTER in South Carolina. So..."Missouri: South Carolina Without the Nice Beaches."

All of this brings me to the Senate race next year. 

Eric Greitens was the governor of Missouri until he was credibly accused of sexual assault. Now, he's working on his comeback by running for the Senate as a the Trumpist candidate in one of the Trumpiest states. But...you know...rapist. Now Trump has also been credibly accused of multiple counts of sexual assault and seemed to sail through those allegations. But at the point those allegations came out, Trump's Bizarro Charisma seemed to inoculate him from repercussions (although, again, never cracked 50% approval).

What happens when you play Trump's lyrics without his calliope music? If Greitens wins the nomination, does he win the seat? If so, does he match Trump's 56% of the vote or does he fall into a neck and neck race?

Keep an eye on the Show Me state.

Bureaucracies Are Necessary, But Not Always Great

 In order to run a large and complex country, you need established bureaucracies to maintain the even distribution of goods and services. We are all equal at the DMV. Most of us never come into contact with the federal bureaucracy (the DMV is local government) and we have no idea how or why they make the decisions they do.

The decision to not give full approval to the mRNA vaccines is a bad one. There is a lot of logic is slow-rolling drug approvals, especially for new drugs. The recent fustercluck surrounding a new Alzheimer's drug is a good example of how the regulatory process should NOT work. But the Covid vaccines have been widely, widely used. There are no weird chemicals in them that might show up later, just a few strands of RNA to teach the immune system how to fight a novel virus.

So much of the vaccine resistance that is killing thousands of Americans every few days is because they have latched on to the "emergency use" tag that the mRNA vaccines have. If the purpose of the EUA was to get as many shots into people's arms as possible, then moving from EUA to full authorization would have the same effect. 

Of course, as soon as the FDA gives full approval, those same idiots will claim it was done under pressure from evil Demoncrats who want to put Bill Gates' computer chips into our arms.

Someone said the Confederacy "died of a theory." The New-Confederacy will "die of a stupid."

I Hate Tankies

 In case you're wondering, "Tankies" is the name for neo-Leninists who actually seem to favor some form of communism. Jon Chait runs through the basic arguments that Tankies are making against liberal democracy, including its historical roots in the Cold War. Chait has been waging a long war against the illiberal Left, and much of his critique ends up covering that well-trodden ground.

I'd like to look at the broader condemnation of liberalism by the Tankie Left. Democratic Liberalism can basically be defined as a respect for rights and liberties, codified by the rule of law and organized through free, fair and competitive elections. It is a product of the British and American revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. It is, as Churchill quipped, the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.

Liberalism (as opposed to "being liberal" which is your attitude towards political change) is at the foundation both of democracy and capitalism. Because capitalism has been allowed to run rampant - in Keynes' phrase "red in tooth and claw" - the stains of capitalism have been visited upon liberal democracy. That is understandable, but unfair. As frustrating as liberal democracy can be, it is infinitely preferable to authoritarianism as a basis for governance. There may be a nice authoritarian regime (Singapore) and a horrific liberal democracy (....) but as a general rule, the more the rule of law exists, the better.

That we have allowed capitalism to create a class of rich people who seem beyond the rule of law is a critical problem, yet one that liberal democracy is uniquely able to tackle. The heavily redistributive regimes of Scandinavia are liberal democracies with social democratic economic systems. There is no reason whatsoever that America cannot embrace a fairer economic system. 

However, the fantasy on the Tankie Left is that America is a uniquely horrible place. Not just on race (which, America is not uniquely horrible) but on class. America is profoundly unequal, but if you think that the poor in America are similar to the poor in Lesotho or Guatemala or, yes, Cuba, you are simply blinkered and provincial in your thinking. 

More likely, you are beginning from ideological principles and forcing the world through that lens. This, as much as anything, is the problem with the Far Left. They are almost definitionally ideologues, and extreme ideologues at that. Therefore, actual evidence is irrelevant. 

I'm currently reading a book on Communist China from 1947-1957. Everyone agrees that Hitler was bad. Almost everyone agrees Stalin was bad, although, hello, Tankies. In terms of absolute number of people killed, neither holds a candle to Mao, who likely killed over 100,000,000 of his own people. This inconvenient fact is invisible to those who insist on lauding an ideology that is fundamentally wrong and has been shown to be fundamentally wrong time and time again.

Much of this is driven by young people who seem intent on ignoring the lessons of history. Or maybe they weren't taught them. Marx makes a few good points, but quickly goes off the rails. Lenin was a mess and Stalin a nightmare. Marx's "beautiful theory" keeps being trashed by the historical record.

The internet echo chamber, however, continues to give this failed ideology an Amen Chorus. As Chait notes, the Tankie Left is a hiccup compared to the cancer of Trumpism, and therefore it's perhaps better to mock them than fight them. They don't deserve real battle.

What Gives?

 Suddenly, the GQP and it's media overlords have gotten religion on vaccination. I'm with Josh Marshall that it's difficult to tease out what is happening here. The GQP is only afraid of one thing" electoral backlash in 2022. As far as they are concerned, 2024 is a lifetime away. Everything is about winning control of one house of Congress so that they can make Biden's life a living hell.

Something must have convinced them that this vaccine-reluctance is bad for the brand. Perhaps is the fact that it is literally killing their voters is enough.

The Climate Crisis Is Here (An Ongoing Series)

 David Von Drehle at the Post has a thumbnail rundown of the water crisis in the West. My sister is a big deal in the Colorado Basin and so I've been hearing about this coming crisis for years.

Basically, as Von Drehle points out, the Colorado Compact was written for a mythical Colorado. There simply isn't enough water even in good years to make it work. In drought years, the problem is amplified. We were just out west in early June and the scarcity of water was profound. Then, of course, you have the flash floods that ripped through Zion Canyon. 

It's all gone wonky.

One of the enduring questions in the climate debate is the degree to which technology might save us, through things like carbon capture and sequestration technologies. When it comes to water, we already have some options. You CAN desalinate sea water but it's expensive. California is simply going to have to find a way to meet that cost, both for its cities and its agriculture. We have irrigation techniques that could help tremendously, but Western farmers are stubborn to the point of being assholes about it. We drove through southern Utah and saw farmers using spray irrigation in the middle of a 100 degree day, rather than drip irrigation at night.  Madness.

Since we live in a world where we literally can't pay those farmers to get a vaccine that could save their lives, I'm trying to think of a way where we can get them to change their farming practices to save water for their grandchildren. Drawing blanks here.

One thing is for sure, we are going to have to price water differently out west in ways that impact usage without immiserating the poor, especially Native Americans. I don't think our politics is up to the challenge.

Bring Charges

 Martin Longman is absolutely right. Trump is hiding behind a stupid norm in American politics: you don't prosecute outgoing presidents. Admittedly, the only one who this really applies to is Nixon. A good norm is not prosecuting presidents because of official actions that turned out badly. That's vindictive partisanship. But charging Trump with his very real crimes is imperative, because the main reason Trump will run again in 2024 is to avoid prison. Put him there before he has a chance!  As Longman notes, numerous other well-established democracies do not have a problem with this. 

We have this norm because most presidents are not venal, self-serving assholes, and the few that were weren't out-and-out criminals. Trump is.  

Bring the charges.

The Depths of Cynicism

 One of the pervasive puzzles of the Republican electorate is why they persist in voting for a party that really only wants to cut taxes for the top 1% of Americans. That should not be a winning electoral formula. OK, you can add on the fact that - as WEB DuBois explained so long ago - white supremacy brings psychological and social benefits, even if it does not bring economic benefits.

However, the GOP makes rhetorical and actual nods towards various social issues like abortion to motivate certain parts of the electorate. They ride their perverse version of "pro-life" (which means anti-abortion but pro-death penalty) to victory. The fact that they are embracing various forms of deregulation that will necessarily impact working class Americans in ways that will actively kill them is just removed enough from direct causality to let the GOP off the hook. If the GOP deregulates a chemical plant, and the people downwind get cancer...whose to say why that happened?

As Greg Sargent notes, the recent Trumpist tilt of the GOP has removed even that thin line of plausible deniability. The Trumpist Party is throwing massive doubt about vaccine safety, even while the same elites who are peddling this shit have themselves been vaccinated. So, Trump gets the virus, it nearly kills him, he gets state of the art treatments unavailable to his cultists, he's probably still been vaccinated just in case, and he is going around telling his cultists not to get vaccinated.

As I mentioned the other day, I think the primary focus for the Biden Administration is working with rural churches. Black or White or Hispanic? Doesn't matter. The White evangelicals will reject the outreach. But if you can get vaccination rates in the Black and Brown communities above 80%, and the members of Cult 45 continue to avoid getting vaccinated...let them. Fuck'em. 

If Trump and Tucker Carlson and the rest want to kill their supporters, I don't see how that is something that should keep me up at night. They have a choice. Both the elite opinion makers and the cultists are making a choice that flies in the face of evidence and common sense. Fuck'em.

These People

 Is it tragedy?

Is it farce?

"A Pandemic Of The Unvaccinated"

 The head of the CDC used that phrase - accurately enough - the other day. It's a terribly depressing turn of events. America is basically giving away vaccines to anyone who wants them. There are now programs to come to your door if you want. 

While I'm not a huge fan of the Covid ActNow map, because I think it's rather alarmist in how it determines risk (any risk factor that is "orange" colors the whole area "orange"), but it's a pretty good source for determining trends. A few weeks ago, the country was overwhelmingly "orange" and "yellow" with a few "green" states thrown in.

Now the green states are gone - even Vermont - and we have "red" states emerging. And of course, they are red in more ways than one.

Let's compare two states. 

Vermont is "orange" because their infection rate is 1.16. That means every person with Covid is passing it one to 1.16 persons. In other words, it's the R0. Frankly, 1.16 is pretty low. Below 1.00 and the disease is disappearing. Also, the positive test rate is a very low 0.8%. In other words, most people who have Covid are likely being caught in the testing. They are recording slightly less than 2 new cases per 100,000 people, which isn't very many (roughly 12 a day). The other things about Vermont is that almost 75% of Vermonsters have been partially or fully vaccinated. So while there are "breakthrough" cases among the vaccinated, the pool of potential Vermonsters who can even get it is shrinking. The pandemic in Vermont will likely burn itself out, if it hasn't already.

No let's look at Missouri. Missouri is currently "red." Their infection rate/R0 is 1.25. Not horrific, but not great. Their positive test rate is over 11%. That means over 1 in 10 people going in for testing are coming up positive. Given that many people can be asymptomatic and some people are simply less likely to go to the doctor, that suggests there are a lot of people wandering around shedding the virus. What makes Missouri "red" is that they are recording almost 30 new cases per 100,000 people a day. Given the population of Missouri, that's roughly 1,800 cases a day. 

So to compare, Missouri is seeing 1800 new cases a day, Vermont is seeing 12. Missouri is much larger than Vermont, but that is still a striking number. The vaccination rate for Missouri? It's 46.2%.

What's more, St. Louis county has been vaccinated/partially vaccinated at roughly 50%. (For some reason there's no vaccination data on the counties that contain Kansas City.) That means rural Missouri is often vaccinated at levels lower than 1 in 5.

Let's look at race in Missouri. African Americans have gotten 9% of the vaccinations, and they are 11% of the population.  Whites make up 82% of vaccinations and 82% of the population. In other words, at least in Missouri, this is not a vaccine hesitancy based on race. A quick scan of the table shows that African Americans are getting the vaccine at roughly the rate of their prevalence in the overall population.

However, given the widespread effort by conservative media to undermine confidence in the vaccine, it strikes me that targeting African Americans - especially rural Blacks through their churches - would be a very efficacious way to improve overall vaccination rates in the swath of "red" Red state - Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and Florida. (Florida especially has a disproportionately law rate of vaccination among Blacks.)

Use the importance of Black churches the rural South to get those vaccinations up! 

Biden As FDR

 Jon Chait makes the argument that Joe Biden is trying to create an FDR-sized presidency that redefines the role government plays into our lives and heads off threats from radical outliers - like FDR did. Roosevelt was the bold reformer who staved off challenges from the Socialist Left and the Fascist Right and created a broad based prosperity that lasted for almost 40 years (and created an powerful Democratic majority).

Biden is doing all this without the benefit of large majorities in the House and Senate. However, FDR often had to negotiate within his fractious caucus, too. Southern Democrats would not countenance any expansion of social benefits to Blacks, for instance. 

What strikes me about this comparison is the similarities between Roosevelt and Biden as men. Both were instinctive politicians - warm and optimistic - and neither were considered especially deep thinkers. If Biden lacks the cool brilliance of Obama, FDR lacked the scholarly insights of a Woodrow Wilson, yet both build off the intellectual underpinnings and failures of their predecessors. 

Because Biden and FDR are not deep philosophical thinkers, they are freer to acknowledge the horse-trading politics of it all. They were comfortable with the "sausage making."

I don't know if Biden will be the next FDR, but today's news is encouraging.