Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans in disarray!

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

They spent the last eight months firing professionals and replacing them with ideologues.

In my day, never was longer.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

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

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

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

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

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Bears repeating

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George W. Bush was a terrible president who lied us into a catastrophic war, allowed an iconic American city to drown on his watch, and then presided over the worst economic free-fall since the Great Depression, which was set in motion largely by the deregulatory zeal of the Republican Party. But Bush was fortunate in his timing, which is why he was a two-term president.

I never understood why Americans reelected Bush since it was known at the time of the 2004 election that the Iraq WMD thing was a big fat lie. A stubborn and unforgivable reluctance on the part of our fellow citizens to change horsemen mid-apocalypse, I suppose. But there we were.

And here we are. The Dow is down about 2000 points right now. By the time I hit the “publish” button, it might rebound, but that doesn’t seem likely. I don’t know. Trump sure as hell doesn’t know. The only thing Trump knows how to do is promote himself and re-brand things that other people built.

President Obama shored up the last economy wrecked by Republican stupidity and set it on the path to steady growth. Trump spray-painted it gold and slapped his tacky-ass label on it. Now it’s his, and it looks like Trump might not be as lucky in his timing as Bush II was.

Because he’s an idiot, Chris Cillizza wrote a piece of analysis asking if the coronavirus is “Trump’s Katrina.” No, dumb motherfucker: Puerto Rico was Trump’s Katrina. This is Trump’s Orange Plague coming home to roost on Orange Monday on Wall Street.

We’ve got months to go until the election, and a lot can change. Maybe the markets will have completely recovered and the virus will have dissipated by then, causing less death and havoc than we seem to be on the brink of today. I hope so. But I sure wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. But it always sucks to be neither.

Open thread!

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Here’s a Nice Diversion

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Just a reminder that there really is not much you can do to control what is going on around you. There just isn’t. So basically, my advice to everyone is to wash your hands a lot, avoid large crowds, and don’t look at your 401k if you have one. Try to focus on the things you can do- like working to elect local Democrats, being good to the people around you, and focusing on the things that make your life and those around you better. Personally, I spent a couple hours yesterday getting my seedlings started (the first run- I will start a second bunch in 2-3 weeks). The world is not ending, so just keep on keeping on.

Speaking of moving on, I have mentioned that I play World of Warcraft a bunch of times. I am playing Classic, which is basically a reboot of the version that was out in 2004-2006 before expansions, and I am playing with the same core of people I played with back then. About 15 of us stayed in touch through the years, and we got the band back together and merged with a couple of other guilds in similar situations. My parents don’t understand this, of course “You play with 40 people online every Tuesday and Thursday,” to which I respond- “Yes. Think of it as book club or bridge club, but believe it or not, dorkier.” I mean, it’s basically like any online community, much like here- we may not meet in person, but we are a community and we know each other and establish lifelong friendships.

Two of the members of the guild back then were only 14- one a young lady and one a young fellow. We stayed in touch with them, and it was fun watching them become adults. Both are 28 and 29, and the olds in the guild all are very happy with how our children turned out.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, long story short, one of the “kids,” who plays by the name of Lyn, lost her dog two weeks ago to an aggressive cancer. She got Ollie, a border collie/lab mix, right before I got Lily, and she just loved him to bits. He died from an extremely aggressive cancer that went from diagnosis to death. It was horrible. I did feel fortunate that I had gone through a cancer diagnosis with Lily, as I was able to help talk her through some of the tests, what to expect, what she can do, etc., but that is cold comfort when faced with what is just an awful situation.

After Ollie died, I was hopeful she would quickly adopt, but I did not want to push her. I had a feeling, though, that she would be like me and Tunch and it would only be a matter of days before she was out finding her Steve. And I was right!

This weekend she met and picked up a 2-3 year old rescue named Hazel (OMG I JUST LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS NAME) who had been adopted out and returned twice, and I am pleased to report there will not be a third return, as Hazel is a VERY GOOD DOG. And a looker to boot:

Here's a Nice Diversion 1

Here's a Nice Diversion

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Isn’t she just fabulous? I am so happy for her, and I guess it is a good message for us all in these dark times. It may seem like everything is going or has gone to hell, but life will go on, with or without you. You can only control whether you decide to focus on the positive and be part of the good, or dwell on the bad and give up. I would urge you to do the former, and focus on the things that really matter.

BTW- speaking of very good dogs, here is Lily, sleeping on a pile of clothes on the chair behind me, two years from her March 2018 cancer diagnosis:

Here's a Nice Diversion 3

I will never forget how you all, unsolicited, sent me a ton of money to cover her initial hospital visits and gave me the financial ability to get through the initial sticker shock of 18 months of chemo bills and basically saved my dogs life.

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Tools of Satan

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Like most of us, presumably, I really dislike hand dryers like these. They’ve been around forever, but most newer restaurants and bars have this type of model, which is called a jet air dryer.

The one that was around when most of us were kids, pictured above, is called a warm air dryer. This distinction may seem trivial, but it’s not.

There are two questions about these things. First, does the method of drying make a difference to the cleanliness of your hands? Second, does one of them spread more viruses and bacteria around than the other?

Here are two studies published in legitimate scientific journals that address these questions. The first was from 2000, where the authors determined that using paper towels, rotary cloth towels, warm air dryers or no drying method at all made no difference in the amount of goo left on hands. The second, from 2015, showed that jet air dryers caused “significantly greater and further dispersal” of goo around the bathroom than warm air dryers.

I’m not a scientist or a doctor, and I’m not trying to tell anyone to stop washing their hands. I’m just saying that when I walk into a restroom with one of those jet dryers, I’m going to be damn careful about my handwashing and about what I touch after I wash hands. And I might use some hand sanitizer after I leave the room.

Speaking of hand sanitizer, lots of the stuff on the market isn’t recommended by the CDC for COVID-19 because it uses benzalkonium chloride as the cleaning agent instead of the recommended 60% alcohol. I was wondering about making my own since apparently people are hoarding it. Here are the WHO guidelines for a simple solution of either 80% or 75% alcohol hand sanitizer. The main ingredient for the 80% version is 96% ethanol, which is basically Everclear. The other ingredients are small amounts of glycerin and hydrogen peroxide.

(By the way, the article that referenced the studies mentioned above completely conflates the two questions I asked here, which goes to show that a lot of science journalism is bad.)

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Bullock’s in

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Governor Bullock (D-MT) is about the only Democrat in Montana who has a plausible chance of flipping that Senate seat.

Right now, the Democrats need to net at least three seats and the VP for control or a net of four flips for outright control.

The Cook Political Report has the current state of play as the Dems down a seat (Alabama) with four GOP seats in Toss-up (North Carolina, Maine, Arizona, Colorado). Recent polling by one firm has all four of the Republican candidates trailing by a handful of points. There are a few other “stretch” seats that are currently leaning Republican but could get swept up in a wave. Adding Montana to that list increases the number of plausible pathways to a slim Democratic majority next January.

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Partisan perceptions and pragmatic policy feedback loops

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Last December, the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law published a fascinating article by Sam Trachtman.** He looked at a relevant policy-politics feedback loop. What did ACA premiums look like for non-subsidized individuals in Republican and Democratic leaning counties?

Insurers have increased marketplace premiums at higher rates in areas with more Republican voters. In the preferred model specification, a 10-percentage-point difference in Republican vote share is associated with a 3.2-percentage-point increase in average premium growth for a standard plan….

One way to investigate this dynamic is to look at geographic variation in premiums. In particular, premiums would be expected to be higher in areas with more Republican partisans. Figure 1 demonstrates that in 2017, there was a strong positive relationship between county-level Republican voting and individual marketplace premiums, while this relationship was slightly negative in 2014. This suggests that insurers systematically underestimated health spending in Republican-leaning areas relative to Democratic-leaning areas, a pattern that could be attributable to the interaction between partisanship-motivated enrollment and adverse selection….

Recent scholarship indicates that the uptake decisions that individuals make with respect to the ACA are driven in part by their political partisanship. Using individual-level survey data from Kaiser Health Tracking polls, Lerman, Sadin, and Trachtman (2017) estimate that, ceteris paribus, Republicans are 6 percentage points more likely to forgo coverage than Democrats, 12 percentage points less likely to use the ACA marketplaces, and 7 percentage points more likely than Democrats to purchase plans off-marketplace. Analysis of Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) data yields similar conclusions (Tesler 2015).

People process information through subjective lenses. Partisanship is a major lens through which health and health insurance information has been processed over the past decade.

** Samuel Trachtman; Polarization, Participation, and Premiums: How Political Behavior Helps Explain Where the ACA Works, and Where It Doesn’t. J Health Polit Policy Law 1 December 2019; 44 (6): 855–884. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/03616878-7785787

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Monday Morning Open Thread: We *All* Hate Mondays Now

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I’m slowly moving towards acceptance… when I can be selfishly glad that Elizabeth Warren is still my senior Senator.

Been collecting stories & twitter threads about Warren’s campaign, and the grace & dignity with which she ended it. Worth putting up a post later, or would that just be rubbing salt in the wounds?

Mandatory disclaimer: I got my second (well, third — this was the second booster on the updated vaccine) shingles shot Saturday, and fortunately the vertigo didn’t last, but my arm hurts to move. So my temper is even more untrustworthy than usual. You have been warned.

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COVID-19 Update (Informational / International Edition) – Sunday/Monday, March 8/9

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I suspect we’re reaching the point where these dawn updates become unnecessary, since we’ll be discussing the issue all day long in multiple posts. But I’ve gotten into the habit, so for now…

Excellent resource, for which I owe some commentor (dmsmilev?) a hat tip: “Don’t Panic: The comprehensive Ars Technica guide to the coronavirus“.

… You should be concerned and take this seriously. But you should not panic.

This is the mantra public health experts have adopted since the epidemic mushroomed in January—and it’s about as comforting as it is easy to accomplish. But it’s important that we all try…

… SARS-CoV-2 is here in the US, and it’s circulating—we are only starting to determine where it is and how far it has spread. Problems with federal testing have delayed our ability to detect infections in travelers. And as we work to catch up, the virus has kept moving. It now appears to be spreading in several communities across the country. It’s unclear if we will be able to get ahead of it and contain it; even if we can, it will take a lot of resources and effort to do it.

All that said, SARS-CoV-2 is not an existential threat. While it can be deadly, around 80 percent of cases are mild to moderate, and people recover within a week or two. Moreover, there are obvious, evidence-based actions we can take to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities overall.

Now is not the time for panic, which will only get in the way of what you need to be doing. While it’s completely understandable to be worried, your best bet to getting through this unscathed is to channel that anxious energy into doing what you can to stop SARS-COV-2 from spreading.

And to do that, you first need to have the most complete, accurate information on the situation as you can. To that end, below is our best attempt to address all of the questions you might have about SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, and the situation in the US…

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