Disney World reopened yesterday, and Florida public schools are supposed to open next month. The Republican National Convention is coming to Jacksonville on August 24. Then there’s this:
Florida breaks nationwide record with 15,300 coronavirus cases
TAMPA — In the last 24 hours, Florida’s Department of Health says 15,300 testing kits have come back positive for the novel coronavirus — shattering the previous record for cases reported by any state in a single day.
It was the highest daily total reported since the start of pandemic, surpassing previous highs — in California July 8 and in New York during mid-April — by more than 3,600 cases, according to data collected by the collaborative Covid Tracking Project.
We are so fucked.
I don’t just mean Florida; I mean America. It’s increasingly clear this virus can’t be controlled without national leadership, and we don’t have any and won’t have any until late January, at the earliest. It would be a kindness for another country to do a humanitarian intervention, but that seems unlikely.
At least the hummingbirds haven’t left us:
Here’s a different wee birb, also from this morning:
Hummingbird hanging out in the bamboo. Check out its vermicelli-like tongue at the :15-sec mark! (Apologies for the caffeine jitters camera work.) pic.twitter.com/oqxAlZPTrW
— Betty Cracker ? (@bettycrackerfl) July 12, 2020
I frequently see aerial sorties when a hummingbird encounters another plying the same firecracker bush and chases the rival away. I swear I’ve seen them fly upside down during these skirmishes. I don’t think I’ll ever manage to get a photo of that. They’re so damned fast.
Open thread.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I gather it’s all Trump’s aids can do to stop Trump from going on national TV and doing a Hitler in the bunker style rant about how unfair the virus is to him.
japa21
They are super fast. I set my camera up for the setting where you just keep your finger down and it keeps shooting. And hope.
One of my very favorite shots was of a hummer coming in for a landing to a feeder, with its talons out and wings wide spread.
My understanding is the positivity rate in FL right now is about 11%. Much better than AZ’s which the last couple days has been 22% (which is better than the 34% it had been) but still not good.
japa21
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: From sources close to him he is whining about that very thing, as if he is the only one suffering due to COVID.
Suzanne
I feel like I am thiiiiiiiiiis close to going off-grid and becoming a hermit.
cope
@japa21: The positivity rate for the past week is above 19%.
joel hanes
Ducks can fly upside down too.
The stop-motion photos in the book Prairie Wings show a mallard upside-down while dodging a tree branch.
germy
@Suzanne:
It’s certainly tempting.
The Thin Black Duke
Never mind debating about whether this country can survive four more years of Trump. Can we survive the next four months?
Omnes Omnibus
A couple of threads down people are starting to get nasty with one another about education and immigration, but the truth is that as long as Trump is in the White House and the GOP controls the Senate, there will be no national leadership on anything productive. This leaves us obligated to do two things. First, we have to keep going and looking for local stopgaps for the short term. Second, we have to ensure that Biden and the rest of the Democrats are elected by overwhelming numbers in November.
trollhattan
It’s so depressing, because with better governance fewer people would die. So much for “the party of life.”
California numbers are bending upwards, but not nearly at Florida’s pace. Florida has 50 positive tests per 100k population to California’s 24, and 20% of all tests are positive (1 in 5!) to California’s 8%. If Florida is like California, there are not enough testing resources at present because the upswing in testing has outpaced the system.
A chilling interview with a Yale epidemiologist this morning, who said we’re newly aware that the most dangerous “silent spreader” time is the two days before symptoms present. We knew that COVID-19 transmits before symptoms, but not that it’s the most dangerous during that time. This is evidently the case also for those who remain asymptomatic. This, to me, means relying on taking everybody’s temperature as the prime screening tool is woefully inadequate and worse, misleading. My kid is supposed to check into her dorm in one month.
germy
@japa21:
PBS had a great hummingbird documentary, with some amazing slo-mo video.
They get mad when you call them “hummers” though.
Shrillhouse
I’m no epidemiologist, but I can’t help but wonder if America might have benefitted from having a functioning federal government.
But again, I’m not a scientist…
Louise B.
The hummingbirds in our garden like to mess with our neighbor’s cat. They like to hover right above her, and when she tries to go after them they fly up vertically out of her reach. They do this over and over again, just like a yo-yo, just to aggravate her. Fun to watch.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@The Thin Black Duke: America survived three years of the Spanish Flue that killed at lest 2% of the population so it’s possible.
Betty Cracker
@germy: Who gets mad? The hummingbirds or PBS? :)
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@japa21: It would be nice to see one of those rants from Trump all over the internet accompanied by tiny violins. I recall some of us were comparing Trump to Nicholas the III of Russia but now I think that is unkind to Nicholas the III.
Baud
Via reddit.
https://i.redd.it/fn1zknar8ga51.png
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Steeplejack
My pessimism grows. On my nightly trips to pick up my friend at work at Trader Joe’s in Clarendon (Arlington, VA), I see more and more activity every Friday and Saturday night. People crowding outside restaurants, no distancing, no masks. It really hit me last night when I saw that the Lot, a beer garden in an empty parking lot, has reopened. It was packed. But it’s outside, so no problemo? ?
Speaking of my friend, I spoke with her last Monday and told her that if her family comes to visit I will not be able to drive her until two weeks after they leave. She was fine with that. Her family decided not to visit from New Jersey this weekend, so the actual situation has not (yet) come up.
Omnes Omnibus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: There was a third Nicholas?
Baud
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Roaring 20s II. Coming soon!
rikyrah
Peale
Florida is just not safe. Period. At this point there is no normal interaction you can have anywhere with a stranger. There’s no going to a convenience store. No stopping to rest on a bench. There’s no way I’d be stopping to pee at a rest stop let alone traipsing through an airport to sit on a plane to get there. And Texas will be there next week.
Baud
@rikyrah: How efficient.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Omnes Omnibus: My history needs adjusting then, but you get the idea, the doofus who screwed Russia up so bad the country collapsed in WWI.
Kelly
Corvallis, Oregon Mask Brigade made a quilt
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZwLH8KozNxobyo6BfsmR5akmUYYw6bQP/view?usp=sharing
Steeplejack
@Betty Cracker:
Heh, my thought exactly.
MattF
About once a decade or so, a huge fight breaks out among aerodynamicists about exactly how regular aircraft stay up in the air. So, hummingbird flight is obviously just a miracle.
James E Powell
@Omnes Omnibus:
Agree with every word. And adding a plea: Can we please be nicer to each other? Let’s grant each good faith and presume positive intentions.
Jinchi
The Florida government’s reaction to coronavirus seems insane, and I realize under Trump that’s just SOP for Republicans. But I wonder how much is due to their reliance on sales taxes for state revenue.
DeSantis seems particularly stupid, and probably considers “everyone ignores the virus” as the best solution to all his problems.
Omnes Omnibus
@James E Powell: Except for Steep. He knows what he’s done.
Salty Sam
Back in ‘05, I was close to becoming a prepper/hermit because BIRD FLU!!! I was convinced it was going to be The Big One, and only calmed down after I went to my Dr. and asked for a ‘scrip for Tamiflu. She gave me some serious side-eye, and asked, “Sam, is this for the bird flu?” I nodded, and she rolled her eyes and said, “Go home Sam, and turn off the news for a week or so. Doctor’s orders!”
I came ‘round to the idea that the only proper way to respond to something like this would be with a well planned and implemented program by a responsible federal government. A few years into No-Drama-Obama’s term, I felt like, even with all the BS Repub/Tea Party obstruction, there would be such a response to any sort of disaster. I got comfortable.
At 12:30 am on 11/9/16, still in shock and horror at what this country had done, I made two predictions:
1- the Nazis are going to be emboldened by this and a lot of white people are going to start behaving horribly. CHECK!
2- at some point in Trump’s reign of terror, there will be some kind of disaster, and he will fuck up the response in an epic way. CHECK!
I’m not taking it well today, after our exposure scare yesterday. I hate this timeline, can’t wait for it to end.
Rick Taylor
It’s not something I like to think about, but would we be that much better off with federal leadership? If Hillary Clinton was president, sure the federal government would be working to coordinate a response for the whole country, but would the red states go along with it? Surely they’d be screaming even louder than they are now that the evil liberal state was seeking absolute power. Wouldn’t the same states power that is currently protecting states who want to respond to this emergency from the vagaries of Trump’s whims, allow conservative states to resist a government that was trying to cooperate in responding to this emergency?
I don’t like to think about it, but maybe horrible things have to happen before conservatives get it through their head that this isn’t about evil liberals want to make them wear masks or close businesses not for any legitimate reason, but merely to exercise power that they must resist.
WaterGirl
just the sounds of the birds in that video are calming.
japa21
@Betty Cracker: I used the word while I was sitting on my patio a while back and the next thing I know I was being dive-bombed by one. I only utter it when I am inside now.
Martin
Positivity % in Florida is 20% and given those high numbers, likely increasing. Nationally we’re at 8.5%, which is still way too high. It needs to get under 1% before you even stand a chance for contact tracing to work. Though CA scored high cases, it’s a bit state. Positivity % is 8% here, so not good, but not in the ‘blowing the fuck up’ category. State estimates are that Reff is slowly dropping statewide.
That’s said, CA’s Reff has never dropped below 1. Our ‘success’ was our ability to tread water early on, and mostly stay there. But we’ve struggled with the will to take the additional steps to bring it below 1. Sooner or later you have to do that, though, and there’s no benefit to choosing later.
The strongest message I sent to campus leadership back in early March was to imagine this virus blowing up – massive infection and fatality rates – and figure out the most extreme steps they would be willing to take to deal with that – and take those steps today. We weren’t yet at the point that we could envision closing the campus, but we immediately (within hours) put in place a bunch of measures – drastic reduction in meetings, no entering administrative suites without an appointment, hourly cleaning of all communal surfaces – door handles, etc. work from home for any employees that could or needed to due to health reasons, and so on. Once people were in that mode of thinking, and seeing that in action, the decision to send students home got much easier to make.
You see that problem in DeSantis’s expression that if we can open Home Depot we can open schools. Behavior needs to be built. You can’t easily jump to the end – it’s too much of a shock – it’s too easy to rationalize away. So yeah, if you let HD be open, that leads you to thinking that opening schools shouldn’t be hard. But if you determine that schools are too hard to open (and despite being an advocate for opening them, I qualify that by saying that yes, it’s incredibly hard to do right, but it’s also important enough that we put in that effort to get it right) then you kind of have to determine that HD also shouldn’t be open until you solve the schools problem and internalize the costs and difficulty of doing that and apply it uniformly.
The profound and widespread laziness is what bothers me. We can solve this like every other nation, we simply are unwilling to expend the effort.
FelonyGovt
@rikyrah: We’re all going to die eventually. That kind of callousness from public officials is just shocking.
Jinchi
I’m glad to hear you came to an amicable solution that everyone was comfortable with. Stay safe.
Omnes Omnibus
@Rick Taylor: Yes, we would.
Jinchi
I really think our best opportunity to kill off the Republican party is to successfully brand it as the “Republican death cult”
MomSense
@Rick Taylor:
It’s impossible to know for sure, but my hunch is that they would go along with federal management of the crisis while simultaneously talking all kinds of BS about government take over and tyranny. The key word is talking. Despite what elected Republicans said about Obama’s “stimulus package, they smiled for the cameras at the ribbon cutting ceremonies.
Suzanne
@Salty Sam: I am just so tired. I’m so tired.
WaterGirl
@James E Powell: I don’t expect MomSense to be nice to someone who said her moral compass is deciding whose boots to lick and that she would turn in her lefty friends for execution without a second thought.
If that’s not a personal attack, I don’t know what is.
Baud
@Rick Taylor:
We wouldn’t have it as good as New Zealand, but things would be much better. She would also be polling lower than Trump is and facing a primary challenger.
rikyrah
@Peale:
say it for the bleacher seats
WaterGirl
@Rick Taylor:
Yes. Yes. Yes. YES. YES! YES!!!
I hope that’s clear enough. :-)
Steeplejack
@Omnes Omnibus:
Damn your eyes, sir!
rikyrah
@Rick Taylor:
Yes, we would be better off because Hillary would have taken it seriously from the beginning. Federalizing what she needed to. Making sure that we had supplies. Federal mask order in place. As well as a shelter in place. We would have been led by the scientists from the very beginning. No Hunger Games for the states trying to get what was needed.
When the breakouts happened in the meat packing plants, they wouldn’t have been declared essential. They would have closed until they were willing to comply with harsh CDC re-opening directives.
NO WAY would 130,000 Americans be dead if Hillary was President.
James E Powell
@WaterGirl:
Just a thought. Remarks like that can be ignored. Castígalos con el látigo de la indiferencia.
Betty Cracker
@Rick Taylor: Good point.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: yeah, if trump were still a gameshow host, we’d still have the weird-ass “My grandfather didn’t storm Omaha Beach so HillaFuhrer could make me wear a MASK to the Piggly Wiggly!” people, but the fools in governors’ mansions might not have been tripping over themselves to re-open if they weren’t terrified of The Beast and his cultists
@WaterGirl: one-name Matt is a self-parody and has been for a while, but I think he topped himself today.
frosty
@rikyrah: You’re going to die too, fucker. Maybe you should die sooner too.
Mike in NC
We were in Florida last almost two years ago. Stopped for breakfast on the way to Jacksonville Airport and the restaurant had run out of orange juice. Glad not to be there now.
Martin
@trollhattan: I don’t think that those days are any worse in biological terms. I think he just means that statistically, this is the problem we’re not dealing with – people that feel healthy walking around spreading it, not wearing masks, going to Disneyworld. If we could solve the problem of those 2 days, we’d have this mostly licked.
And the tests do work in those 2 days, so it’s just a matter of enough testing to test healthy people in a widespread manner. By all accounts, people that feel symptomatic are doing a decent job of staying home.
I wouldn’t say that taking temperature is misleading. It is inadequate, at least at this stage. Think of it this way, CA’s Reff is estimated to be around 1.15. If you could find 15% of the folks that are in that 2 day window, or catch them 15% faster, we’d be onto declining caseload. From the papers I’ve read, it’s maybe in that territory, probably a bit less. Even if it took us from 1.15 to 1.05 that’d be worth it. This really is a statistical game of inches. Masks knock off a few %, temp checks do, etc. It is the layering of efforts that needs to happen.
Baud
@frosty:
What did Omnes say about being nice? Apologize to rikyrah.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: Assuming good faith and positive intentions doesn’t mean ignoring outright attacks.
mrmoshpotato
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Hasn’t the Soviet shitpile mobster bitchwaffle been doing that on Twitter anyway?
Ksmiami
@rikyrah: Exactly but the Republicans would be caterwauling over the 2000 dead so we really need to kill off that party altogether
James E Powell
@rikyrah:
She wouldn’t be putting Marc Mezvinsky in charge of anything.
She wouldn’t be threatening to withhold aid from states with governors that disagree with her. More likely that she would be infuriating us here by being too eager to placate them.
She wouldn’t be ordering the CDC to revise its guidelines to fit her political agenda.
More than anything, she wouldn’t be making the whole thing about her, though the NYT and the Republicans would.
trollhattan
@rikyrah:
How…convenient. Maybe they could I.D. all the at-risk population and give them little gold stars to wear, so as to not waste further medical resources on them. The stars could have six points, like a sheriff’s.
Ivan X
@James E Powell: amen to that. Seconded.
Unfortunately, I don’t see it happening. Between an endless and unknown COVID and social distancing, and the stakes of Election Day, I think our collective nerves will fray further, and our discourse will become worse and more personal, until it gets bad enough that our mighty blogmaster will have to tell us how to behave with one another, as he’s had to in the past (or so I recall, anyway).
It’s just very stressful times, and even though many here will maintain the comity and good faith you’re pleading for, it’s inevitable (I think) that, overall, toxicity levels will only go up between now and November.
Or maybe I’m just feeling pessimistic today.
Jinchi
Yes we would. A sane president would have established national shelter in place criteria. Would have rallied the FDA and CDC to start countering the virus early on, would have coordinated with the Chinese at the start of the outbreak, before it ever reached our shores. Would have used the authorization of the defense production act to mandate the manufacture of tests and PPE. We’d have a set of standards for schools and businesses to deal with potential outbreaks. This is a problem we’ve dealt with before.
More importantly, most of our screwups have been denial and bad management by Trump and the obligation of every Republican politician to follow along his suicidal path. Trump wanted to defund the CDC. He did shut down the office monitoring China. And he convinced every Fox news watcher in the country that the whole thing was a Democratic hoax.
Look at every nation in the world. Countries that took the virus seriously have pretty much beaten down the infection rate. The ones in denial are just getting worse.
James E Powell
@Omnes Omnibus:
Is it really that hard to ignore such things?
Martin
@Rick Taylor: Who cares? I don’t mean that in a ‘everyone in the south should die’ respect, but if the northeast and the west coast was largely virus-free and we had to restrict travel from red states, at the very least we’d have parts of the economy working well and able to coordinate the efforts to eventually get the red states under control. It’d be a smaller problem, at the very least, and even that is better.
If they insist on state’s righting their way to the grave, that’s unavoidable. That’s their choice. We can’t choose a course of action based on what the worst of the bad actors are going to do. You choose the right course of action, and you deal with the bad actors as necessary. That’s just policymaking 101.
trollhattan
@Martin:
That was not my takeaway. She stated the highest rate of transmissibility is in those two pre-symptom days. She has ebola experience and did a compare and contrast with that virus, which is most transmissible when the disease is most active.
It frankly scared the crap out of me.
azlib
Funny how all the predictions from the epidemeologists are coming true when you choose not to follow the science. I wish it was not so, but sometimes reality bites hard.
gkoutnik
@Omnes Omnibus: Not sure it was “nasty;” more like “frantic,” “frustrated,” “life-threatening.” 40 year career in public schools, just retired in January – I’m in tears watching this fall apart. No good answer. Danger everywhere. People tend to get excited. Parents and teachers both are fiercely committed to children’s learning and health. Can’t have both.
Agree with everything else you said.
frosty
@Baud: my apologies, that was not intended for rikyrah, but for the Wyoming fool she quoted. I reread my comment and it could be taken the wrong way, the way you interpreted it. My mistake.
mrmoshpotato
@Shrillhouse: You mean like having an extraordinarily qualified person in charge who happened to also be a woman?
Oh, how nice it would’ve been to know what that would’ve been like. ?
Jinchi
@Martin: Do temperature checks work? I’ve heard conflicting answers to that. Have they actually identified cases and pulled them out of contact with other people?
Jinchi
I suppose we could visit Germany or New Zealand….
Oh wait, we can’t.
JPL
@rikyrah: They criticized President Obama over his response to the Ebola crises, which left two dead, so I imagine Fox news would be in non-stop she’s killing us mode.
Martin
Ms Martin has filled the yard with plants that hummingbirds like, so they’re all over the place here. Sitting in the yard you can almost always see one. They do get used to you with time. It’s not unusual for one to hover a few feet in front of me just checking me out.
We’ve had hummingbirds get in the house multiple times, and there is nothing more stressful than trying to get an alarmed hummingbird safely out of your house while your daughter has a panic attack because she’s afraid you’re going to hurt the ‘honeybird’. We’ve always been successful, but not without the bird going into shock at some point, but seemingly recovering.
James E Powell
@Ivan X:
Okay, I will say one more thing then let it go for now.
Our nerves are frayed, our patience is worn thin. I don’t have a solution for that. But becoming worse and more personal is a option we can decline. I’m the opposite of a pollyanna, but I hate to see my last political haven on the internet become like LG&M or the Great Orange Satan – which by the way isn’t as orange as it used to be.
Steeplejack
@frosty:
I thought Baud was snarking. Pretty clear you weren’t referring to rikyrah.
frosty
@rikyrah: Apologies for my poor wording. Not intended for you but for the person you quoted.
oatler.
Yarrr. Dead men tell no tales.
Ivan X
@James E Powell: well, I’m with you 100%. That’s all I can say.
frosty
@Steeplejack: Didn’t sound like snark to me and in any case I didn’t like how it sounded when I reread it, so clarification can’t hurt.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steeplejack: I thought the reference to me in Baud’s comment made the snark obvious.
mrmoshpotato
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Sorry, gotta pendant.
Flue Flu Flew
Jinchi
I’ve had a hummingbird fly up to an empty feeder, turn back to look at me, look back at the feeder, as if to say – “Dude, feeder’s empty. Get to it.”
Omnes Omnibus
@mrmoshpotato: Pendant?
Steeplejack
@Omnes Omnibus:
Plus it was Baud!
Steeplejack
@Omnes Omnibus:
More snark, I think.
Eric S.
@Rick Taylor: I had this conversation IRL recently. I agree with you. Red states would still be doing horribly. I can’t know this counterfactual, but I wonder if is some locales it would be worse as they “one the libs.”
mrmoshpotato
@rikyrah: How fucking callous.
different-church-lady
What (among many things) pisses me off: because we view everything through a national lens, the Dumb States of America are taking every sacrifice the early-action states made and throwing it away. The extra economic, social, and fatal distress Florida and Texas and the dumb parts of California create is going to be a drag on all the other parts of the country that tried to do things right.
And it’s all because our president is an asshole.
lurkypants
@James E Powell: then why the plea to be nice to each other? Can’t you just ignore it?
MagdaInBlack
@mrmoshpotato:
The fly and the flea fell into the flue. Said the fly, “let us flee,” so they flew through a flaw in the flue
eta: my mother taught me that and I hope I got it right.
mrmoshpotato
@MattF:
Hahaha
Cermet
I can’t think of anything better than the RNC, all its leaders and the fart cloud all pacted together for hours in a closed building spreading Covid together. A dream that I so hope comes true.
Martin
@trollhattan: I think we need to be careful about terminology here. Transmission rate is usually the product of how likely you are to give it to someone times the number of people you interact with.
That’s not normally how we describe the first part of metric alone – if you put two people together, what are the odds that the virus jumps to the healthy person. So it’s unclear to me whether she’s describing the odds of one person giving it to another, or the odds of one person spreading it through the population. We generally accept that for Covid, the the two day window is the worst not because you are shedding virus the fastest (you shouldn’t be because sneezing and coughing are the primary mechanism for for high viral load transmission, and you aren’t doing that by definition – you’re asymptomatic). But because you aren’t being careful, you interact with many more people and in riskier ways, so what you lack in single viral dose, you more than make up for by duration and range of contact. I’ve never seen anything to suggest that those 2 days are when you are also putting out the highest viral load. That may be true, but I’ve seen lots of descriptions of the former, while none of the latter.
Elizabelle
@rikyrah: Which is why there are never any lawsuits when air ambulances go down. Or payouts to cancer vics who die in accidents or from malpractice. Oh. Wait. Wonder what that asshat is a “trustee” for.
@Rick Taylor: I have always thought that the silver lining of Hillary’s being cheated out of the presidency is that it will tank the Republicans and teach those voters and students who can learn how important it is to choose the best leaders and demand a government that works for its citizens.
Had no idea it would come at the cost of so many deaths and pain and so much destruction, and cruelty to many. But this whole thing is an object lesson on why we need good leadership, and there is empirical evidence. It is measurable.
MomSense
I’ve been thinking more about Rick’s question above and I still think the hey would go along with it and cynically complain bitterly. Maine is actually a good test for this. We are one of only three states Johns Hopkins considers to have flattened the curve. The other two are Delaware and Connecticut. I listened to the debate of the Republican candidates running for Congress in CD2. They prefer Trump’s handling of the crisis and all said some version of she is taking away our freedom. LePage made a big splash of returning to Maine from Florida, slapped some Maine plates on his cah and says he is going to run for Governor. I think the majority of Mainers think Janet is doing a good job, but we’ll see what happens in November.
different-church-lady
@Elizabelle: You know what’s really depressing? Even if Biden wins in a landslide, we’re going to have to have this battle all over again in four years. Every four years. Forever. Because asshole is just too permanently ingrained in American culture.
trollhattan
@Jinchi:
Yup, they have needs, see, and it’s the hoomans’ jerb to facilitate meeting those needs. The will sit in the courtyard tree and squawk at the dog while he stakes out their feeder. He may be a bird dog but he’s no match for those six-gram monsters.
trollhattan
@Martin:
The did not get into the deeply technical weeds but my interpretation was that the highest virus shedding occurs during the period under discussion. If that’s the case, then it’s doubly bad because to your point the person will indeed be going about their business presuming they’re healthy.
I’m sure there will be more to come.
mrmoshpotato
@Salty Sam:
I felt the same way, Your Saltiness.
And I’ll add “This Soviet shitpile will be in office during the centennial of the end of WWI and the 75th anniversaries of D-Day, V-E Day and V-J Day.”
Ivan X
@WaterGirl: it was most definitely an ugly, personal attack, and I appreciated that you defended her. Unfortunately, when personal attacks are met with personal attacks, you get war. I don’t know where to draw the line when someone has the appropriate right to defend themselves, but I would prefer that we not go on the offensive and use the pie filter (thanks for that) instead. Others may feel differently, but I have the same concerns as James if hostility is left unchecked. I guess I’m saying I’d prefer that if they go low, we go high. We don’t have malevolent powers like McConnell and Trump in our way.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@rikyrah:
As Sooner Grunt said on twitter, we’re all going to die eventually. Dying sooner is really the issue for all of us.
SiubhanDuinne
@mrmoshpotato:
Reminded of a favourite Ogden Nash limerick/ditty learned in childhood:
Mallard Filmore
@trollhattan:
Save the babies, kill the olds … and the kids too.
Jager
We have a pair of Hummingbirds nesting in our Jacaranda tree in the backyard. A Blue Jay, bathed and had a drink in the birdbath and decided to investigate the nest. The Hummingbirds drove the jay off like a couple of F 16s. The jay hasn’t stopped by for almost a week. The Hummingbirds made the jay look like one of those old prop Russian bombers.
MagdaInBlack
@SiubhanDuinne:
aww, my mom left out some parts. see # 89
Brachiator
@azlib:
Before the virus outbreak began to surge again, I would regularly see comments from right wing nut jobs criticizing “so called experts.” Of course they never offered any real alternative or explained why anyone should believe them.
Now, they are completely unhinged. Whatever Trump says is right and medical experts and Democrats are “wrong,” even if Trump is doing exactly the same thing as a Governor Cuomo.
And of course Fox News pundits refuse to admit that they are contradicting themselves from segment to segment.
There is something similar happening in the UK, where Boris Johnson is blaming care homes and the public for the spread of the virus, not his vile and incompetent government.
dmsilev
@Jinchi:
Same here. Or worse, I’ll have the feeders inside because I’m waiting for the sugar water to cool down before putting them back out, and the birds will hover right underneath the empty hooks.
Right now, the pair of orioles that have also been noshing at my feeders appear to have been successful in raising a clutch; over the past week or so, I’ve started seeing a few juveniles as well as the two adults.
piratedan
the more I think on this, the less I don’t want to say that we don’t have any federal leadership… we do.. the states are following the lead that the Fed have provided, which is to essentially have as little involvement as possible, you folks figure this out on your own. That’s a conscious decision made by the WH, make them own it. Make them own that THIS decision to abdicate the response to the pandemic to the states. This was their choice, their decision. I know its a slice of the semantic pie, but I’m afraid that to couch it in terms that there is no leadership is a cop out. We have a failure in leadership. There’s a guy at the top. He failed, the people he put in place to run the divisions of the government that handle these types of issues, they failed. We have a Senate that has response bills drafted from Congress, they refuse to bring them up for discussion, much less votes. That’s a failure. The fact that the media isn’t hammering this point home to everyone is yet another failure.
Otherwise, we open ourselves up to the “both sides” fairies to pay us another visit, who could have known, too great an issue etc etc etc… never mind that nearly everyone else in the world is coping and they lack our resources and infrastructure and the people in charge failed us. All of us.
Mallard Filmore
@rikyrah:
And yet conservatives get bent out of shape at the idea a person may self select to be put to sleep when cancer pain becomes unbearable.
Gin & Tonic
I just spent an hour trying to photograph the hummingbirds around my monarda. Damn, they’re fast.
MomSense
@Ivan X:
I’ve gotten them here for years. I’m a veteran of the Drone Wars and the whole snowwaldleaks mess. Believe it or not AL called different church lady and I authoritarians over wikileaks. We all feel stressed and we argue – because we care. I don’t think we would be a snarling mass of vicious jackals if what happens to our friends, families, communities, creatures, country and world didn’t matter to us. We care deeply and we fight about it.
BTW- I think my record on our past issues has been pretty spot on! So there! ?
hueyplong
“They were going to die. They just died sooner.”
Said the chairman of the actual Death Panel.
MattF
@Brachiator: In ‘1984’ Orwell called it ‘the mutability of the past’. It’s bonkers, but it’s also a basic trait of cultish regimes.
Betty Cracker
@Martin: Our hummingbirds are used to us watching them too and will also hover at eye-level, seemingly checking us out. We’ve never had one get in the house, thank dog! That would be stressful.
I saw a documentary on hummingbirds recently that showed a scientist putting a band on a hummingbird’s tiny leg. I didn’t know that was possible.
SiubhanDuinne
@MagdaInBlack:
I didn’t see your comment until my edit window had closed, or I would have high-fived you :-)
I have a huge repertoire of songs and sayings and poems and routines I learned from my mother. I’ve checked out many of them as an adult, and it’s surprising the differences and omissions that occur. A case study in oral transmission of folklore and literature.
Martin
@Jinchi: Yes, they do work. The false negative rate is quite high (not detecting a temperature among someone who is infected) but that’s okay because it should never be used as the critical chokepoint.
Temperature checks are effective because you can deploy them widely and easily. We bought a few hundred no-touch digital thermometers in Feb because we figured we could scan every student at the start of every class in a matter of a few minutes. It’s no substitute for a test, but we could test people every time they entered a building, so where tests are rationed and have a signal delay of several days, temperature checks don’t need to be rationed (though they do need to be organized) and they give immediate results. They will be the first indication for many people that they are sick, and if you have a compliant population, and they immediately go home, you will knock your Reff down somewhat simply due to that.
Think of the nasal swab test as getting your car inspected. You don’t do it every time you get in the car and drive it. That’s too expensive, but it’s comprehensive and effective. But we also give you a check engine light. It’s less comprehensive and less effective and communicates less information, and you are free to ignore it if you want, but it does helps people to avoid breaking down or crashing if you pay attention to it. And it’s cheap enough that it works all the time. That’s what a temperature check is.
In the good/fast/cheap engineering pyramid, it’s deep in the fast/cheap corner where nasal swabs are farther up into the good category. One of China’s innovations was the widespread use of portable CT scanners to rapidly image the lungs of people of people who had symptoms. It doesn’t narrowly diagnose covid, because other forms of pneumonia look similar on the scanner, but it’s pretty close and they can do that test in a couple of minutes and get results in seconds. A bit slower than a nasal swab to administer, but the almost immediate results means they can take that person and put them in a bed rather than sending them home to wait for a few days. So, it’s cheaper and much faster at the expense of being slightly less good.
The US never tried that approach.
Elizabelle
@rikyrah: Oh my gosh. Where to start on Kevin Christopherson? Trustee with the Natrona County School Board (Casper, Wyoming)?
With more of the article: it begins:
Note that last paragraph. People, this is not an editorial. It is a straight news story. And a good one, because it takes aim at conservatives’ scoffing that the science and guidance WRT coronavirus-19 change so much. That it’s pretty much the flu.
There are none so blind … luckily for county schoolkids, teachers, and those who care about them, Christopherson thinks eight years has been enough on the school board of trustees, and he is gunning for county commissioner next. He lists his home and cell phone numbers on the Natrona County Schools Board of Trustees page. Suspect they might be ringing.
topclimber
@Omnes Omnibus: We can’t begin changing the essential catastrophe until January 2021 but we CAN do damage control.
I have followed many dead threads about pandemic vs. schools and here is one belated thought: We need to think about delivering education and not be stuck on equating that (necessarily) to opening the schools.
Likewise, we need to address childcare so people (especially single moms) can get to work. Schools are naturals to play a part, but so are firms.
If we switch middle school and older students to a mostly virtual model and run that in the AM, they are then free to spend time with their younger siblings and neighbors in the PM. If Mom has a new shift that starts at noon instead of 8 am, she can watch the kids til she goes to work and only have five hours of day care to pay for in an 8-hour shift. Instead of professionals enforcing social distancing in the care group, we get folks doing it.
Many industries couldn’t handle it, most probably could. And it may be a totally sucky idea. But let’s give ourselves credit for being to able to come up with solutions.
More to say, but everyday, I post post-Kay. Oy vay.
low-tech cyclist
@rikyrah: See, there’s our answer to the “pro-lifers” when they get upset about abortions: “They were going to die. They just died sooner.”
Somebody with an actual platform, as opposed to people like us yammering in blog comments, needs to be talking about how this year has totally discredited the pro-lifers’ claims to be concerned about human life, rather than abortion.
Because this virus is going to kill well over a quarter-million Americans this year, the vast majority of those deaths would not have happened under any remotely competent Administration, and are any of the “right-to-life” groups upset about the carnage? I couldn’t find any.
When I checked a week or two ago, National Right-To-Life’s website made no mention of Covid-19, and that included their very glowing evaluation of Trump. The American Life League only mentioned it as something that they shouldn’t let interfere with their work of restricting abortions. And so it went.
I want to shout at these fuckers, “Life? Don’t talk to me about life! You don’t give a single goddamn about life, and you’ve proved it this year. And don’t say ‘but abortion!’ to me, because if people don’t matter to you once they’re already born, then WTF is the point of getting them born in the first place??
“You should be picketing the White House, and the district office of every Republican Congressperson, with pictures of people dying on ventilators, and pictures of those refrigerated morgue trucks, the way you picketed abortion clinics with pictures of fetuses. But you’re not. I don’t why you’re antiabortion – I can guess, of course! – but it has nothing to do with any sort of overarching concern for the lives of human beings. You’ve proved it, all year long. Don’t talk to me about life.”
(Yes, I’m stealing from Marvin the Paranoid Android. Just seemed to fit.)
Calouste
@different-church-lady: In the end, the severity and longevity of COVID-19 in the US is a mental health issue. And that’s going to take decades to fix.
SFAW
@Omnes Omnibus:
You hanging on his every word?
Martin
@Dorothy A. Winsor: If human life is only to serve as a meat cog in your economic machine, then it makes sense you’d protect the cogs not ready to go into your machine and throw out the ones that had already served their purpose.
Normally you don’t want to inform the meat cogs of that though, or even admit that you only view them as meat cogs.
planetjanet
@James E Powell: Yes, it is.
Jim Appleton
Oregon is on track for between 1,00 and 7,300 new cases per day by August first.
Lacuna Synechdoche
via rikyrah:
We’re all going to die. Eventually. That’s the reward for living.
The point is to prevent it from happening as long as we can. If people under your care are dying sooner rather later, you’re failing. If you find it acceptable to let them die sooner rather later, you’re evil and inhuman.
randy
Another place where Hillary would shine is helping countries that needed help. We would be safer here when the world was safer.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@trollhattan:
It really is. It always has been since we knew about asymptomatic and presymptomatic spread is fairly common.
I finally went back to my job. Everybody wears masks. Customers mostly wear masks. Even saw a guy in a MAGA hat wearing a surgical mask correctly today. People try to maintain distance.
However, in Ohio businesses are required to take the temps of employees. This hasn’t happened the two days I’ve been back so far. If my work isn’t doing it, how many others aren’t?
Kirk Spencer
Every time I try to recall Nash on Fleas, I instead get Seuss (because my daughter wanted to giggle at me every bed time, so …)
— Seuss, Fox in Socks
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@rikyrah:
That’s the dumbest fucking take I’ve ever seen. Who the fuck knows how many years these people had left! The point is that these deaths could’ve been preventable. They didn’t have to die now
WaterGirl
@James E Powell: I had never heard that phrase before. I like it! I’m just saying that I don’t think MomSense can be faulted for responding to an accusation like that.
But point taken.
Martin
@Martin: Speaking of seeing people as meat cogs.
I had missed this until just now. We are all expendable. Citizenship confers no value to the GOP.
Another Scott
@rikyrah: And she wouldn’t have closed the virus office in China, so we would have had experts on the ground from the beginning.
It wouldn’t have been as bad and millions of infections would have been prevented.
But, yes, she would have been attacked continuously no matter what she did. And I’m sure she would have expected as much.
This is such a needlessly horrible timeline. :-(
Cheers,
Scott.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
Sounds like laissez-faire capitalism to me
debbie
@rikyrah:
Fuck him. Let him be #22 if it’s such not a big deal.
MagdaInBlack
@Kirk Spencer:
I had to read it out loud, 3 times, to get it sort of right. I bet she giggled a whole lot =-)
Ksmiami
@different-church-lady: I just hope a lot of the assholes die. Yes, I went there.
Elizabelle
Kevin Christopherson (the “only 21 Covid deaths” guy) brings to his Natrona County Commissioner run a 2015 conviction for Big Game Harassment. Of a whole herd. He paid a $1,500 fine, lost his hunting privileges for a year, plus a year of unsupervised probation and a suspended one-year jail sentence.
May not be what you think. He filmed himself flying over them in an ultralight aircraft; them taking off running ahead of him. He provided Wyoming Game and Fish with a copy of his video, which went viral. They were already hearing about it. Got over 30 tips from “concerned citizens.” [Link to the Casper Star Tribune.]
Here’s a UPI link to the video and recap. They included it under “Odd News.”
chopper
@Jager:
had a huge-ass golden eagle stop and perch on the neighbor’s roof a few weeks back. crows spent an hour dive bombing it to get it to leave the neighborhood and it just sat there, barely even flinched.
Elizabelle
@Martin: Selling Puerto Rico. Buying Greenland. Hmmm. I wonder why.
You really cannot make this shit up. No wonder conservatives seem to believe just about anything they hear.
Chetan Murthy
@Rick Taylor:
A lot of Blue States are trying hard and failing. If the Federal Government were competent, they could be -helping- those Blue States. Ditto Blue cities in Red States. And I’ll bet we’d see better outcomes there. And really, you think that if every Blue State were doing like New York is (was …. groan) doing, that the Red States wouldn’t be screaming that they wanted that too?
I think the power of example would be helping alot. Especially with Federal troops enforcing quarantines on interstate travel. [It’s a pandemic: I’m sure the OLC can write a memo justifying it — they justify torture and murdering 12-year-olds after all.]
Mr. Mack
@James E Powell: Un-lurking to say thank you. It’s like, who knew being told to fuck off is divisive?
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy: And another thing: as a Californian, why should I allow the hostage-takers in Red States to make me not protect myself and my fellow Californians? By which I mean, if President Clinton were only able to help the Blue States to kick this bug, isn’t that already enough? Isn’t that already so much better than where we are, that it’s worth it?
Yeah, Red State residents will continue to die. Just like now. Just like now.
Another Scott
@Jinchi: Temperature checks strike me as being security theater like the guys in hazmat suits sparying everything in sight or trucks disinfecting the streets. Fevers come after people are already spreading virus (if they come at all).
If temperature checks gets people to pay more attention, that’s good. But otherwise, mask and distancing seems much, much more important and effective.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@MattF:
What Orwell did not fully appreciate is the degree to which people, in a democracy, will willingly participate in their own subjection.
Trump will make some ridiculous claim and his base will enthusiastically concur. The GOP leadership will fall in line, and vapid news media will blandly report “today the president announced that he loves masks…”
It is strange to watch something that is not a coup or authoritarian takeover, but a happy surrender to a crackpot leader. Problem is that these fools insist on dragging everyone else down with them.
Another Scott
@mrmoshpotato: I blame autocorrect whenever I see that.
Cheers,
Scott.
Miss Bianca
@Jinchi:
Yep. Hovering outside the windows looking in when the feeders are drained. They all but tap their beaks on the glass to get my attention.
Uncle Cosmo
I hadn’t seen that information before. One might get some interesting conjectures-leading-to-testable-hypotheses out of that. E.g., it might be that in “super-spreaders” the virus gets stopped temporarily in the nasopharynx (maybe there’s a more immediate immune system reaction) & has to increase its numbers before it can sashay down to the lungs. While that increase is going on, the virus could be shedding in copious numbers right into exhaled air.
Whatever. I’m no infectious-disease expert, but it strikes me that finding some common characteristics distinguishing “super-spreaders” from the rest of the population would be really, really useful in stomping Thuh Varss down. Not sure that’s feasible or even possible but it might be worth some serious pencil-chewing amongst those with the expertise.
I will conjecture you meant “not relying” here, since a fair number of those who are COVID+ don’t show significant fever.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
If they’re willing to do that Puerto Ricans , they’re more than willing to deprive their political opponents of citizenship. They’re the REAL Americans, after all
I’ve had this plot bunny kicking around in my head centering around a political dissident in an alt 1960s-1970s where the US mental health system has been weaponized to target and “neutralize” undesirables through institutionalization and forced lobotomies. The USSR used their mental health system to do the same thing. Was thinking about leaving it vague as to whether the protag is actually mentally ill or telling the truth
low-tech cyclist
@Salty Sam:
Twice now. Puerto Rico was (and remains, as far as I can tell) an epic fuckup of a response to the hurricane. Trump should have come out of that looking the way Shrubby did from Katrina.
low-tech cyclist
I know it remains an unpopular opinion here, but there is an intervention the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives could attempt.
My guesstimate is that, under current leadership, the virus will kill another 150,000 or so Americans between now and January 20. (And I really hope I’m not low-balling it. But we’re back up to 5000 Covid deaths per week and rising, and there are 27 weeks until inauguration.)
Black lives matter, all lives matter, how much do these lives matter? That’s the question.
Omnes Omnibus
@low-tech cyclist: Are you talking about a second impeachment? If so, how would it help?
retiredeng
We always have a pair of Ruby Throated raise a family in our yard. When the babies fledge it’s air show on!!
Jinchi
We’ve had a couple in our house. One flew in the kitchen and kept trying to escape through a (closed) window. I assume it didn’t understand that glass was solid. Exhausted itself long enough that Mrs could pick it up in her hands and walk it outside.
The second got caught in the garage attracted by the light behind an open door. We tried luring it out, but it wouldn’t go back into the darkness outside. Left the door open overnight and it found it’s way outside once the morning light showed it the way.
Uncle Cosmo
@frosty: , @mrmoshpotato:
That’s comment out of WY was pretty tactless, but take note of the quality-adjusted life year (QALY), which alludes to the notion that there’s living, and then there’s living, and that a patient might find one sort of outcome preferable to another.
I don’t see any problem making this sort of comparison for different outcomes for the same person. You hit the slippery slope when you apply it between people. Should society permit (let alone encourage), e.g., transplant options where a person in failing health might provide a vital organ to someone otherwise healthy and a major contributor to society who needs it?
With COVID-19 this cuts both ways. A 90-year-old in a nursing home with comorbidities who succumbs to the virus would not in the larger society evoke the same sense of loss as another victim in the prime of active life. OTOH, the evidence we’re now seeing that COVID-19 survivors can take months to recover – indeed, may never fully recover – even after the disease has run its course. IOW, some survivors are losing a lot more in terms of quality living than a few weeks of misery fighting the stuff off.
(I thought QALY might be worth bringing up in the interest of discussion. YMMV.)
Brachiator
@rikyrah:
@Uncle Cosmo:
This is also based on a lie perpetuated by people who don’t understand life expectancy.
So, for example, some of these idiots might say that an 85 year old who gets the virus in April probably would have died anyway before the end of the year. But the average remaining life expectancy for someone age 85 is 6 years.
BTW, there is some troubling evidence that health authorities in Sweden pursued a similar policy by deliberately refusing to admit elderly nursing home patients to the hospital where some of them might have been saved. And this is despite the fact that Swedish ICUs were not over-burdened.
different-church-lady
@Ksmiami:
They were going to die. They’ll just die sooner.
Uncle Cosmo
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): AFAICT the crucial question is, where in a “super-spreader” is the virus living (if you call that living) and multiplying that it’s able to shed massively into the ambient air but isn’t producing symptoms in its host?
My first guess would be in the cilia of the nasal cavity. My second would be in the eustachean tubes. My third would be on the exposed surface (skin, hair, follicles) where it can collect in sweat & then release into the air.
I think we ought to try & find out.
Salty Sam
@low-tech cyclist:
Indeed. Puerto Rico has been handed the short end of the stick on many occasions. And that’s on top of some of their home-grown problems. PR government has a history of corruption that serves as an own-goal often enough.
But since I’ve been living here, I’ve noticed a community sense of…if not exactly pride, a sense of “we’re all in this together, and cannot count on help from Uncle Sam” (no relation ?). They initially took the pandemic seriously, based decisions on best available information, and started locking down sooner than the States.
To my knowledge, not one Puerto Rican (AMERICAN CITIZENS!) has yet to receive their $1200 stimulus check. Disgusting.
Aleta
@SiubhanDuinne: When my mother was fading, her sayings and rhymes and such began to pop into my head, without my intending or forethought. I’d always thought of them as repetitive, boring, trivial. Didn’t think of them as folk sayings but suddenly realized that’s exactly what they were and where they came from. I began to write them down and also asked friends what their mothers’ sayings had been. Was surprised when they each said their mothers didn’t have any particular sayings.
Fair Economist
@Jinchi:
Temperature checks catch maybe 1/3 of people who would be out transmitting. That won’t solve it by itself, but it might, as an example, get California’s Reff of 1.15 (per Martin’s sources) below 1, in combination with the other things we’re doing.
ballerat
Alas, yep. That’s 7 months more of lies, negligence, recklessness, oppositional defiant behavior and stealth genocide by trumpworld. It’s only been 5 months since those infamous first 15 cases. How many cases you figure by late January? I figure 10 million. If we’re lucky.
We’ll have a crescendo of our still-current 1st wave in October after schools reopen, and if schools are still forced to stay open by Christmas, another in January. And a full-blown economic depression.
And after Jan 20 all the hard work necessary to fight the outbreak on a national level will still need to be done. We won’t see the real backside of the first wave until several months after Biden does what is needed on the virus measures and on these fifth-column trumpists and their Rwanda Radio media outlets. So maybe April 2021. Maybe we’ll be close to a vaccine then.
These fucking destructive white people. They decided if they can’t run the country they will burn it down.
J R in WV
@japa21:
Goof friend has a farm in SE Ohio, and at the time had put out a dozen or more feeders, had huge gobs of flowers for them, etc.
She was working in her vegetable garden, when the hummers drained the last feeder, and came looking for her. They harassed her into the kitchen to make more nectar for the killer birbs. Was a hysterical story when she told it, acting it out for us…
ballerat
Absolutely. We have the wealth, the know-how, the industry. We know what to do. We can do it. If enough of us wanted to. Nealy 40% of us don’t.
I disagree though that it’s out of laziness. That 40% get out and vote. They bring guns to their freedumb protests. They spend time out of their day to read and repost Facebook racist shitposters and QAnon sewage. They drive hours to go to Trump rallies. They are out there now, going to bars, restaurants, birthday parties – maskless of course because they don’t give a fuck about public heath or society or common goals or basically other people. They are bigoted, brimming with racial resentment and grievance, selfish and callous to the point of sociopathy but they are not lazy.
They believe this won’t kill them and they know it kills the people they don’t like and in places they don’t live, and they don’t care about others anyway, so they’re not going to lift a finger to stop it.
trnc
I wonder if this is hyperbole, but if not, there’s no reason to think anyone who drives that fast cares about anybody else, no matter where he is.
Amir Khalid
@Uncle Cosmo:
Making an informed decision on how much longer you want to live in a particular health situation is one thing. Being abandoned to your fate by the auhorities, in the face of a pandemic more likely to kill you than kill other people, is another thing. There is a world of difference between these things.
J R in WV
@chopper:
Many years ago, we lived in a wooded old neighborhood in my home town, up in the mountains from where we live now. I went out the door on my way to work, and across the street from our house there was a huge Great Horned Owl on their chimney.
There was also a squadron of Crows dive bombing the Owl. Suddenly Owl leaped up and grabbed a Crow with his talons — one deceased Crow, black feathers flying. That happened a second time, at which point the Owl flew a few feet away into a giant spruce tree.
Was an amazing thing to see. Most local Owls are astonishing big predators. We have a local flock of Barred Owls… second in size to only the Great Horned Owl IIRC.
low-tech cyclist
@Omnes Omnibus:
I guess it depends on whether you think the coronavirus is an issue that voters feel a bit more connected to than they did to the Ukraine extortion.
If you don’t, then you’re quite reasonably not going to see any point in impeaching Trump over his handling of the coronavirus. And that’s fine; sometimes people are operating from different assumptions, and that’s the sort of thing reasoned argument can’t settle.
But if you do, then the point is to get all those GOP Representatives and Senators unambiguously supporting Trump and his abdication of responsibility on this issue.
Because they’re going to try to finesse it as best they can. Those in vulnerable districts/states are going to try to say as little as possible about Trump either way, and especially not in their ads, and run as if all politics is local, in the hopes of getting the votes of the Republicans and GOP-leaning independents that Trump is losing.
This fall, nobody’s going to give a damn how anyone voted on last winter’s impeachment. This is the coronavirus election, period. People will care about whether their Congresspersons voted to keep a President in power who, by November, would be responsible for tens of thousands of additional deaths that happened after a July or August impeachment.
And the higher the death toll climbs, the worse those pro-Trump votes are going to look, and the easier it will be for Dems to wrap those votes around their opponents’ necks.
And the Democrats, across the board this fall, will be able to say, “we fought to save all those people, but the Republicans condemned them to death.” A simple, direct, and relevant message.
And if the coming months are anywhere near as bad as it’s starting to look like they will be, it should be a very powerful and effective one.
J R in WV
@trnc:
I was only in Wyoming once, years ago, camping and rock collecting with a buddy. In much of Wyoming most of the county roads are flat, straight dirt roads with a speed limit of 55. One night I watched a police truck (I think most if not all the police vehicles, at least in the rural country, are 4×4 trucks) drive away from our camp with its blue lights on for 45 minutes, really flat in SW WY.
So I bet on a paved road in the flat country many folks drive 85. The distances out there are as vast as the views, and if you drive 55 you won’t get there today. We didn’t drive nearly that fast, but we were mostly in the mountains. Not flat, not straight.
No One You Know
@Jinchi: Second that. It’s worse when they land and give you The Look.