Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

Let me file that under fuck it.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Tick tock motherfuckers!

In after Baud. Damn.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

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Playing to Win: Day 8 (Thursday, March 12)

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Note for the day:

The Playing to Win Resources page has been added as a link under Calling All Jackals.

Let’s use this thread today to discuss what impact the COVID-19 virus may be having on the actions you’re taking in support of voting, voter registration, Get Out The Vote, etc.  (As well as anything you would normally talk about in this thread.

Going forward, I’d kind of like to highlight a different opportunity in the Note for the Day on each post. Maybe one donation opportunity and one action opportunity each time?

I would need each of you to take the lead by providing me with a short blurb for the donation opportunity and/or the action opportunity that is nearest and dearest to you.  If you share that in the comments, or send it to me by email, I can feature one in each post.  If you like this idea, let me know in the comments.  If not, we’ll drop it.

Here’s a primer for anyone who is new to the Playing to Win posts.

What is Playing to Win?

The goal is a poll-free, spin-free, prognostication-free, media-free, what’s-wrong-with-the-other-candidate-free-zone – a political thread where the focus is on ACTION:  What can be done to help our candidates, and what are we doing to help them, every day?

The hope is that this will help provide inspiration, and encourage action, as an alternative to anger, frustration and despair.

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On Our Own

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Josh Marshall posted this last night and I think he’s right:

As I said, we seem to be entirely on our own, with a half-decapitated national government depending on limited executive leadership, a rebounding and critical role for national public health agencies with a lot of the lead taken by states, localities and the private sector.

We all feared a serious event managed by our incompetent, corrupt President, and here we are. I don’t know about you, but I don’t bother listening to his addresses to the nation. It’s easy enough to read a news story afterwards and find out what stupid, or at best half-smart, thing he’s doing. There’s no time that I miss Obama more than times like these, times when his steady, calm and competent leadership would be such a change from what we have now.

That all said, I don’t feel hopeless or even negative about the fact that we’re alone. Better to recognize it and act. Most of what needs to be done now — containment — doesn’t require much federal intervention. We had our first confirmed case in Rochester yesterday, and our St Patrick’s Day parade was just cancelled. Our health department and new Democratic County Executive are on top of it. Our world-class teaching hospital, and excellent community hospitals, are all preparing. We will do the best we can, and what Trump says or doesn’t say won’t have god damned thing to do with our survival.

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Work requirements and pandemics

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Healthy working age adults who are not clinically trained have a critical public health role to play in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our mission is to create massive externalities that can be used to break infection chains. We do this by social distancing. Many universities and colleges are closing or severely limiting operations in order to minimize immediate disease spread. Non-critical, non-clinical personnel are being sent home. I’m working from home for the foreseeable future. I’m lucky, 98% of my work can be done almost anywhere in normal times and since no one else is in the office, I am not needed to move heavy things under the direction of people who are half my body mass.

Staying home and socially distancing is unlikely to produce readily internalizable mortality gains for myself or my immediate family. We’re very low risk. Instead, we are trying to break the infection chains that could lead up to a 73 year old cancer survivor getting or not getting infected. We don’t know who that person that we protect from our actions. But that is the job of healthy, working age adults right now.

And that is a damn difficult job to do if critical aspects of one’s life is dependent on public policy work requirements.

Those 700,000 folks will be facing a decision to go to work to eat OR engage in social distancing that gneerates highly needed externalities.

A lot of people will go to work as food is an immediate need while acting in a way that may or may not save someone’s faceless grandparent is much further along the hierarchy of needs.

The same logic applies to work requirements in TANF and Medicaid.

We as a society need to make it really easy for people to generate highly valuable externalities in a public health crisis.

Right now, we’re not.

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (International) – Wednesday/Thursday, March 11-12

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Chaos Under Heaven

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Trump's Dow Lifeboat Fails - Jack Ohman

(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)
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Foreign Policy editor in Beijing:

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On The Road – p.a. – Not a place; water

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Good morning all,

We do live in interesting times, don’t we?

 

Been planning something like this for a while, this is just some I’ve already collected. Most from film prints scanned on a *meh* scanner. Hope they transfer ok.

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On The Road - p.a. - Not a place; water 2
Grand Lake Stream, Maine

Big Lake (the name as well as the description) from Shoreline Camps.

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (Domestic) – Wednesday/Thursday, March 11-12

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Some of this will be, as a former Repub once said, inoperative by the time most of you read it, but… for the record.

I plan on scheduling one or more posts for daylight hours Thursday, where they may or may not mess up the timeline…

Also good news, Gov. Cuomo finally convinced the organizers of NYC’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade — ‘the oldest & largest in the world’ — to “postpone” having two million people crowd together to watch 150 thousand marchers. (Apparently over the head of Mayor de Blasio, failed presidential candidate.)

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