Pick up the phone, Ma!…
Don’t forget to call your moms today, folks. pic.twitter.com/2oQ9mAo3Uh
— President Biden (@POTUS) May 9, 2021
We have a simple choice to make:
We can keep giving tax breaks to the super-wealthy and giant corporations — or we can invest in working families.
I’m going to pick working families every time.
— President Biden (@POTUS) May 8, 2021
Opinion: Biden understands the pace of governance, the media not so much https://t.co/udKiNGgkP2
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 10, 2021
President Biden came into office promising to be a decent, competent and normal president. “Normal” in part entailed no incendiary tweets, no self-dealing for him and his family, and no staffing government with unqualified hacks. If those are the criteria, then he has succeeded.
But “normal” also means patient, often tedious and sometimes imperceptible statecraft. You pass legislation. The economy takes a couple steps forward, seems to hesitate and then continues on. The opposition party takes definitive stances on everything in proposed legislation, and then the White House tries to pick off allies. Major legislation takes months, not days or weeks…
Normal governance means the instant “take” and the premature prediction of doom are often wrong. Instantaneous analysis from people with little expertise and incomplete information might not be the most enlightening form of journalism. Biden understands that governance requires persistent messaging, patience, calm and an appreciation for detail and nuance. That’s what normal governance, at least good governance, entails. Maybe the media will catch on — with time.
======
Meanwhile, in a universe not nearly far enough away…
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) likens GOP to “Titanic”: “We’re in the middle of this slow sink. We have a band playing on the deck, telling everybody it’s fine, and meanwhile Donald Trump’s running around, trying to find women’s clothing and get on the first lifeboat.” pic.twitter.com/L7Wjy87ngV
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) May 9, 2021
Took a LONG time for the press to get here— too long. But it can now be flatly stated in a news report that to be a loyal Republican means to stand for a lie. No "critics say…" needed. And yes, the word "lie" is front and center. This is the @AP talking. https://t.co/2rrwvPv0Om pic.twitter.com/JHczQnNNuz
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) May 9, 2021
On The Road – Albatrossity – Spring 2021 in Flyover Country – Week 3
Mary G
I love this clip of President Joe – leaning on the podium, spitting out communication. “Benefits Everybody!” “Hurts Nobody!”
Not even sure what he’s talking about, but I’m in:
Tacos, too!
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
Welcome to the party, pal!
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Don’t know if “the press” got there but at least one reporter in the AP has.
As for officially believing wacky stuff to be allowed in the club: I was brought up Catholic. Like all Catholic kids, I had to learn rote answers to a few theological questions, called “the catechism”. But it was only as an adult many years later that I learned the real Catechism is an absolutely enormous document with hundreds or thousands of things you are supposed to officially believe, organized by chapter and section.
debbie
Rosen’s right: It took way too long to call a lie a lie. If they’ve become less credible, this is why. ?
WereBear
I am amazed by the Jay Rosen tweet. I’m not saying our Republicans are learning. They are just doing the Heel Turn because the old show is not drawing the right crowds.
debbie
@WereBear:
NPR ran a report on MTG and PervGaetz’s combined rally at the Villages over the weekend. The denizens may skew older, but they are friggin’ loonatics.
Low Key Swagger
@debbie: Maybe it’s the heat.
John S.
@debbie: That’s the Fox News effect on an older, white person’s brain. I’m willing to bet that on a CT scan, it looks the same as dementia.
Baud
God, that WaPo article is refreshing to red. I’m so done with hot takes and grand predictions.
ETA: It’s Jen Rubin.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@John S.: I know I’ve told you all that the TV in the cafe here is usually tuned to FOX and that Mr DAW changes it to CNN, which was also available on the basic cable package the cafe had. Well they’ve changed cable providers and he now changes it to MSNBC. I haven’t seen anyone collapse in a rage in there yet, but we’ll see
WereBear
I think there’s more than one risk factor, but a known big one is not using one’s brain. Abandoning critical thinking for hours in the recliner getting one’s blood pressure ramped up at predictable intervals is not good for brain health.
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
You married a good man.
Jeffery
I never answer the phone due to all the robo calls. If someone I know starts talking I may pick up if I want to talk to them.
Spanky
@WereBear: Pretty well established that critical thinking skills die out as we age. That’s why the elderly are prime targets for con artists.
Now as for all of those Trump supporters in the supposed prime of their lives, we know that some folks never learn how to think. And remember, half the population is below average intelligence.
Baud
Geminid
Whoah! Adam Kinzinger brings the fire! I’ll be watching his primary contest, as well as those of fellow impeachers Peter Meijer (MI) and Anthony Gonzales (OH), to see where midwestern Republicans are going next year. I would not count any of them out. For one thing, they each will probably have more than one trumpist opponent. And trump is a trash magnet who attracts some pretty shoddy imitators.
But if Kinzinger goes down, it looks like he will go down fighting.
debbie
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Rapscallion!
debbie
@Jeffery:
I don’t either. I’m wondering why I still have a landline. It’s filled with nothing but people coming to arrest me.
Kay
When they talk about the big lie they should think about putting it in context. The big lie (and the sticking power of the big lie) shouldn’t have been a surprise because Trump was impeached for making aid and assistance to another country contingent on an announcement from that country that Joe Biden was under investigation.
It started well before the big lie. So desperate to cling to power, so worried they might lose that they orchestrated a whole conspiracy to try to bring (specifically) Biden down.
There’s a Big Lie I and a Big Lie II, both about an inability to beat Joe Biden fairly, both resulted in impeachment articles.
When most Republicans acquiesced to Big Lie I he knew they’d go along with Big Lie II.
There are consequences to not holding people accountable.
debbie
@Geminid:
They’ll have to outcrazy each other to get noticed, which may work out well for the moderates.
Spanky
@debbie:
Hey, it’s not just land lines. I get those calls on my cell.
debbie
@Kay:
There could be debates over which numbered Big Lie we’re at, but it all began when GWHB lost to Bill Clinton. That moment is when power took over principles.
debbie
@Spanky:
I do too, just not as often.
Baud
Via Reddit, apt meme.
https://i.redd.it/ixeq8lmce6y61.png
Spanky
@debbie:
Let me introduce you to a certain bastard named Dick Nixon .
(I’m sure folks will come up with earlier examples in the US. We can find plenty back in ol’ Rome.)
Baud
@debbie:
They’ve been lying about Dems since forever. What’s changed is they have reached a point where countervailing forces don’t constrain them.
debbie
@Spanky:
That was Nixon, not the Republican Party. Howard Baker et al. were appalled at his crimes.
Baud
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone ???
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
Kay
@debbie:
Trump was impeached for misconduct in the 2020 election before it even started. A big chunk of his presidency was devoted to schemes to cheat in his re-election. Democrats said it straight out at the time- they had to impeach him because he was soliciting foreign interference in the 2020 election.
rikyrah
rikyrah
@Kay:
That is true. And, the Democrats were on it.
Baud
@rikyrah:
?
rikyrah
Rachel Cohen (@rmc031) tweeted at 6:18 AM on Mon, May 10, 2021:
“We find robust evidence that reopening Texas schools gradually but substantially accelerated the community spread of COVID-19….school reopenings led to at least 43,000 additional COVID-19 cases and 800 additional fatalities within the first two months.” https://t.co/9sfHGdfXix
(https://twitter.com/rmc031/status/1391714180714074116?s=03)
debbie
@Kay:
Well, he clearly had a reputation for underhandedness.
debbie
@rikyrah:
I’ve become very fond of 5-day weekends myself.
ThresherK
I don’t remember how I happened upon Rosen and PressThink, but as a late adopter of everything else (still watching a CRT TV, still wondering if Netflix or another service is worth it) I like being at this “party” a bit early and watching journos wake up to reality.
Kay
@rikyrah:
Rachel Cohen is a really good reporter. She does this consistently- she never jumps on a bandwagon.
They could have said “there’s risk to opening schools, we don’t really know the extent of the risk, but we’ve determined keeping them closed is worse” but they never did. Instead they all said there was “no risk”. It flew in the face of what you were seeing if your school was open- what you saw was kids who were infected and quarantines. Now, you couldn’t estimate the risk nationally based on that but you knew it wasn’t “zero” because you also knew they were only testing kids who were known to be exposed or had symptoms.
Fester Addams
Kinzinger’s analogie is flawed. TFG was, and apparently still is, the captain of their Titanic. (And his crew stole and sold every piece of safety equipment they could.)
Quinerly
Good Morning! Completely OT… Are BJers traveling this summer? Looks like our national parks and landmarks are completely overrun already. Lines everywhere, required tickets by lottery for the shuttle in Zion and a few others. 3 hr waits to get into the Grand Canyon at the South Tim’s main entrance. Anyone out there in this madness? Sedona looks like Disney World.
Baud
@Fester Addams:
I believe the captain of the Titanic went down with the ship. TFG would take the first lifeboat and auction off access to the rest.
SFAW
Ya know, at some level, I kind of miss waking up to The Traitor’s insane/lying/por-que-no-los-dos? tweets; it gave me an outlet to vent my hatred of RWMFs and (redundantly) elected Rethugs.
No, not really. That mofo can’t get jailed/impoverished soon enough for me, and I am SO happy that I can write “President Biden.”
Kay
@rikyrah:
The most interesting (and revealing) part of the “school reopening debate” was majority white and middle class reporters all saying lower income districts needed to reopen, that parents wanted that, and then schools reported that lower income black and brown parents didn’t think it was safe.
They went for months without finding that out, that part of the resistance to schools reopening was coming from the parents in those schools. This whole “debate” was conducted without the people who actually attend those schools.
rikyrah
Katelyn Burns (@transscribe) tweeted at 1:23 PM on Sat, May 08, 2021:
Isn’t it possible that there’s a labor shortage because many of the 600k people who died from Covid were restaurant workers?
(https://twitter.com/transscribe/status/1391096541138534402?s=03)
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Catholic beliefs a bunch of abstract stuff like the communion wafer being the actual body of Jesus. Young Earth Creationism is what set this up with the Right because it requires Cognitive Dissonance from it’s believers; scientists are involved in a conspiracy about the age of the earth yet are telling the truth about the medication that keeps them alive. The same with the Big Lie; Biden’s election was faked, yet the Republicans who won in the same election won legally.
Anne Laurie
In our household… we thought about dumping the landline, but then there was a snowstorm that knocked out cell service but *not* the landline.
That was a few years ago, and cell coverage against disruption has probably improved since then. But it’s worth factoring in, assuming your landline is cheap enough & the risk of infrastructure failure is high enough.
rikyrah
@Kay:
Kay,
Even in this Urban setting
It was White parents who pushed for in-person school.
Black and Latino parents have been..
No.
I am waiting everyday for that 12-15 year old approval for Pfizer. I want Peanut back to in-person school in September.
I know that she has been hurt by remote learning..but, she is alive and has not been sick. Those are the only two things that matter to me.
ET
His momma is gonna be MAAAAAAAAD. I just bet she gave him a talking two when they did manage to connect.
rikyrah
@Jeffery:
I am thinking about getting rid of the landline. I literally never use it
Geminid
@Geminid: On the other hand, I suspect Republican impeacher Tom Rice (SC) is a dead duck. The radicals are ascendent in South Carolina Republican politics. They may even elect batshit-crazy, carpetbagging attorney Lin Wood the new party chairman.
South Carolina has open primaries though, so Rice may get some help from his district’s independents and Democrats. It’s a safe Republican district, and if I lived there, I’d probably come out and vote for Rice in the primary. If there is a primary; a favorite technique of radical Republicans is to adopt the caucus/convention method of nominating candidates. This gives extra weight to the zealots and cranks who make up their base.
Tom Rice’s congressional district includes Myrtle Beach on the coast and Florence inland. I drove through it last October, on my way home from Huntington Beach State Park. A great place to camp! I noticed that Tom Rice’s signs did not mention his party. They were simple: his name at the top, the word “Congress” at the bottom, with a palmetto tree in the middle.
rikyrah
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
?????
Kay
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I just go with “sore losers” because the whining about Trump on the Right has been a constant. They go on and on about how he was treated “unfairly”. They think they’re unique in believing a President they backed was treated “unfairly”. Democrats thought Obama was treated unfairly. They thought (and think) Hillary Clinton was treated unfairly. They didn’t try to burn the whole system down because of it- only the Right did that.
Boo fucking hoo. So unfair! The refusal to accept the results of the election is just more of their whining, except it’s been coddled so long they’re now more dangerous.
Van Buren
@Quinerly: I have hotel reservations next to Acadia in August, but that might get cancelled as elder son is relocating at the same time and Mrs. Van Buren feels he will probably need some assistance.
NotMax
A dose of morning musical mirth. Funny because it is oh so true. That Song In Every Musical That No One Likes.
Kay
@rikyrah:
I was pro school reopening as you know but I never assumed all parents were. I knew they weren’t. We did sort of “polling” (imprecise, only people with email) in our school and about 25% thought it was too dangerous to go back. That’s a lot!
rikyrah
Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) tweeted at 11:00 PM on Sun, May 09, 2021:
We’re suing the Treasury and State Department for failing to turn over records that could show the public if Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was using his official position to benefit his post-administration pursuits.
https://t.co/8FyLT5kVva
(https://twitter.com/CREWcrew/status/1391604066699128836?s=03)
rikyrah
New Day (@NewDay) tweeted at 7:12 AM on Mon, May 10, 2021:
“I feel her fear,” @AprilDRyan says on Michelle Obama’s worry for her daughters being racially profiled when they drive. “That is reality for some people in this nation, particularly those of color.” https://t.co/TsiaAIYP3r
(https://twitter.com/NewDay/status/1391727737451290627?s=03)
SFAW
@Anne Laurie:
Mrs. SFAW wants to dump ours because Verizon raised the rate to $90-plus per month (from ~$50, which is still pretty effing high). I am resisting cutting it, for reasons similar to yours. [Plus our cell service, here in the wilds of Central MA, pretty much sucks.]
satby
@rikyrah: There’s a lot to the labor shortage, but the haphazard approach to “open schools now— oops, we have to a) quarantine random rooms, b) disinfect on alternate days, c) “good morning, today is an unscheduled virtual learning day due to xxx” is a huge factor. It took scores of people, mostly women, out of the labor pool. Contrary to some folks assertions, I think they should have just kept the year on a stable virtual schedule. It would have allowed some planning and structure to families lives, and at least as documented in Texas, saved thousands from infection and hundreds from death. Sorry, the importance of prom pales in comparison.
It was also an opportunity to teach and model adaptive resilience, the single most important life skill, but most people failed to do that. Instead they constantly griped about all the things kids were missing, when the entire society was missing things. Utter fail.
SFAW
@Van Buren:
Bah Hahbuh? Or on the mainland?
Also: if you haven’t already done so, make a trip to the top of Cadillac Mountain to see the sunrise (first “landfall” in the US).
rikyrah
?????
Joyce Hutchens (@JoyceHutchens3) tweeted at 2:33 AM on Mon, May 10, 2021:
Melinda Gates had been seeking a divorce from Bill since 2019 after his meetings with Jeffrey Epstein became public, the WSJ reports https://t.co/HszrHsJlAI via @Yahoo
(https://twitter.com/JoyceHutchens3/status/1391657560743239681?s=03)
Mike E
@debbie: “Appaulled” must mean, “kept the door of plausible deniability open” since the GOP (including Baker) were no knights in shining armor at the time of Watergate…from Wikipedia:
Quinerly
@Van Buren: Acadia is on my bucket list for 2022! Never been. It seems everyone is heading to Utah and Arizona, so hopefully no horrendous crowds for you. I’m in several NPs FB Groups… The posts are crazy. Trash, injuries, people not understanding AZ heat even this time of year. Some of these people sound like they have never even been in a park. My big getaway is 4 months total… Starts after Labor Day. I was making reservations in December, 2020 for campgrounds in December, 2021 in Southern AZ and in March for campgrounds in September in Southern CO. Price of AWD vehicles through the roof. Was having second thoughts about this 2019 AWD Sienna I bought. Plugged in the info on Carvana… And Carvana now keeps offering me more than I paid at the dealer in February. Cray, cray.
Quinerly
@rikyrah: smart chick.
debbie
@Anne Laurie:
The land line costs almost three times as much as the cellphone. Land lines are great for power outages, etc., which is why I keep putting it off.
Geminid
@Quinerly: I hope to go west in November, after the grass stops growing in central Virginia. Hopefully, things will lighten up by then.
Don’t forget the Lamplighter Inn, Alamosa, Colorado. A little funky now, but architecturally, it has “good bones.” It’s right downtown, three blocks from the park along the Rio Grande. I don’t know if they allow pets, though.
Santa Rosa State Park always seems fairly empty when I camp there. The tent sites are on a ridge that is the windiest place I’ve ever camped. Not a whole lot going on in Santa Rosa, NM, but the Comet II restaurant is pretty good.
germy
I generally despise TV sitcoms, but my wife and I got hooked on Bob Heart Abishola.
A few weeks ago they had a jaw-dropping episode. An older Black nurse explains why she couldn’t become a doctor:
https://www.cbs.com/shows/bob-hearts-abishola/video/o3RfWC4C0DfS_1vTiG7nTdEd8S4_KG2f/bob-hearts-abishola-tlc-tunde-s-loving-care/
Dorothy A. Winsor
Totally OT: I blogged about writing from multiples points of view.
Soprano2
@debbie: We have a land line because my husband refuses to get a cell phone, and because it’s good for some things. At least now it tells us who’s calling, so we don’t answer unless it’s someone we know. I don’t like to talk on cell phones if I can help it; the connection isn’t always good, and it’s hard to hear people sometimes. I’ve talked to people standing outside with the wind whipping across the speaker on their cell phone, and it’s not fun. You keep having to say “What did you say?” and “I didn’t hear that”.
Kristine
Questions for folks who dumped cable:
1) is your internet with that same provider?
2) if yes, did your internet performance degrade after canceling cable?
3) if no, have you managed to find a reliable internet-only service? The ones I’ve researched here in NE Illinois aren’t good.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Quinerly:
We’re holding all our fire for two weeks in Crete in September and probably a free Sandals week somewhere in the mix.
There are two potential alternatives domestically – the Blues/Civil Rights trail through Mississippi, or the “go to as many minor league baseball stadiums as you can” driving trip. I understand that they’re all super fun.
rikyrah
Wow ??
Colin Seeberger (@CMSeeberger) tweeted at 7:01 AM on Mon, May 10, 2021:
Boston pre-k lottery winners “were less likely to be suspended or sentenced to juvenile incarceration. 70% graduated from HS vs. 64% of lottery losers, a substantial difference for 2 similar groups. Winners were more likely to take the SAT, go to college.” https://t.co/9qYwYyvJa8
(https://twitter.com/CMSeeberger/status/1391724989783674886?s=03)
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Kristine:
1. yes
2. no
3. n/a
Dorothy A. Winsor
@rikyrah: It would also be interesting to know how the kid being in pre-K affected the parents.
H.E.Wolf
The FCC, under the Biden administration, is starting to enforce regulations – created in 2019 – to crack down on robocalls and other misuses of the phone system.
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-371745A1.pdf
Geminid
@Mike E: A friend followed the Senate Watergate hearings closely. He observed that Howard Baker said in his opening statement that the critical issues were “what did the President know, and when did he know it?” But when the committee examined it’s witnesses, Baker showed little interest in actually finding out what Nixon knew, and when he knew it.
TerryC
@Quinerly: I am fortunate enough to live on my own 20 acre private park, even though I’m only 5 miles out of downtown Ann Arbor. I’ve probably had one of the more privileged Covid durations of anyone.
Soprano2
This doesn’t surprise me one bit. Middle class white parents wanted their kids to go back to school, and many of them were safely working at home so they didn’t know people who got sick from Covid and couldn’t imagine anyone else feeling differently. Reporters persist in the belief that the middle class white view is the “normal” one, and any other view must be wrong or mis-reported. I think they really thought those reports about lower-income parents thinking it was unsafe to open schools were outliers, because most of the people they knew really really wanted those schools open pronto!
NotMax
@Kristine
Soprano2
Well, that’s not what’s happening here. In my county we had 450 known deaths from Covid, and the majority of those people were over 65. Even if you say it was 1,000, that’s out of a population of over 293,000 in the county. It’s not enough people to account for the acute worker shortages we’re seeing now. It’s not just the restaurant industry, either – EVERYONE IS TRYING TO HIRE PEOPLE. I actually think this is what’s causing the biggest problem – it never happens that so many employers are trying to hire people all at the same time.
Quinerly
@Geminid: I called and tried to make reservations at the Lamplighter. This was several weeks back. They weren’t taking reservations for Sept yet. Thanks for reminding me. I have my Great Sand Dunes campground reservations for 2 nights but wanted a 3rd night in the area in a hotel/motel… Will need a shower at that point. All the CO State parks have great facilities but as I recall no showers at that NP. Very excited about the CO leg of this trip… Never spent any time in that area of the state… Booked at John Martin Reservoir SP, Lathrop SP, Trinidad SP, Navajo SP, Ridgway SP, Mancos SP, North Rim Grand Canyon, and the campground at Mesa Verde. Motel and beach camping in Page/Lake Powell. Motel at Marble Canyon. Need to still figure out one night near Canon City (after I leave a friend in CO Springs) and 3 nights at the end of the month in Farmington, NM (my usual place has gone to long term rentals) and what I want to do re camping at Chaco and Bisti.
Love the Comet! Eat there when I stay in the Motel 6 in Santa Rosa usually coming from Albuquerque and getting a late start coming back to St. Louis. Last time there was in 2018.
Quinerly
@TerryC: ?
SiubhanDuinne
I woke up thinking I’d like a cheese omelette for breakfast, and proceeded to put the ingredients together. But I got the egg-cheese ratio bassackwards, so the finished product is more like a raclette with bits of scrambled egg. Not bad at all (especially with a English muffin), just not really what I had in mind.
Fair Economist
@satby:
Absolutely. With a stable schedule the child care providers could at least have worked part-time if they chose. The way it worked out with constant changes anybody who had to watch schoolkids couldn’t hold any kind of job at all beyond casual freelancing.
zhena gogolia
I love the Kinzinger clip. TFG as Allen Joslyn — I love it!
Quinerly
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I still have to do the complete Blues/Civil Rights Trail. I have been to Morgan Freeman’s place in Clarksdale (I think it has now closed) and to Robert Johnson’s Crossroads? many years ago. Was a regular at King Biscuit Blues Fest in Helena, Arkansas and would hit Clarksdale area for 2-3 days after.
rp
@Soprano2: This seems like a classic multicausal issue. Off the top of my head, we have:
Kay
@Soprano2:
In the last couple of years I’ve really become convinced of the value of “representation”. I think the coverage changes when the people covering it are more diverse, more representative of the places and people they’re covering. Frankly, it becomes more accurate. We’ll have fewer of these disconnects the more diverse it becomes.
I don’t think news media have to go to whether it’s “fairer” or “more woke” or any of that. There’s no need to get into that at all. They should hire a more representative group of people to cover these stories because the stories will be more accurate. Better. More informative.
Why are all the stories about unemployment and the tight labor market from the employer side? Why aren’t we hearing from the (potential or actual) employee side? Half of this is just..missing.
Are they not taking jobs because of unemployment compensation? I don’t know but I think one could ask them. It will be just as reliable as the 5000 stories from employers.
martha
@Quinerly: Next week, we are going to attempt a two week Sequoia-Kings Canyon-Yosemite-Death Valley loop. I have the Yosemite day passes (whoo hoo) and Tioga Pass should be open to get us over to hwy 395, one of my favorite stretches of road in the US. Yes I’m worried about crowds, but we will see. (We live in Colorado and are driving, of course.)
we were thinking about adding Zion into the mix but ruled it out. Sounds insane already.
Soprano2
ITA with this. I kept thinking “It’s one year, kids will bounce back. Why is everyone wringing their hands over this?” In many ways it was actually worse and more disruptive for the parents than the kids. Children for the most part seem to be adaptable compared to adults. I felt badly for the kids who didn’t get a prom, and didn’t have an actual graduation, but again, they’ll bounce back from it. It also seemed that it was the most privileged people who whined the most about their kids “falling behind”, when it was actually the kids of the least privileged who were in the most danger of bad consequences.
Gin & Tonic
@SFAW: Long time ago I went to Cape Spear, Newfoundland, in an attempt to be the first person in North America to see the sunrise.
I didn’t account for the near-constant fog.
Quinerly
@Kristine: for what it is worth, I still have Spectrum cable and internet. Every time I call and complain about the rate going up, they give me a cheaper bundle to get me to stay. I went to Spectrum for my mobile phone. A LOT cheaper. Works off of Verizon towers so still have essentially the same coverage I had with Verizon for a flat $45 a month. No tax, no fees. Flat rate for unlimited data, text, talk.
evodevo
@Quinerly:
Been there…great scenery …..loved it… PLUS lobster eating!
Quinerly
@martha: the pictures coming out of Zion are terrifying (the line up to Angel’s Landing, for sure)
Good luck with your travels… Hearing crazy stuff re Yosemite from a park ranger friend of mine who is there. Death Valley is on my bucket list.
Geminid
@Quinerly: Unless you want to scuba dive Blue Hole, Santa Rosa is pretty much a way station. I usually make the state park my first stop when I am fortunate enough to travel to New Mexico. It’s on the Pecos River, and there is a horsetrail loop that makes for some nice walking. I was on it one morning at dawn, and saw a great horned owl gliding by, hunting up breakfast among the scrubby cedars. I saw him again the next morning.
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
Did someone say omelette?
:)
martha
@Kristine: We dumped cable almost two years ago. Yes, our internet is with the same provider and we’ve been fine. We did notice a few times in the past year (mid morning on weekdays) when things slow down occasionally, but …pandemic Zoom is likely the culprit. And since I try not to turn the TV on till evening, not a big issue. We have a Roku and a Sling subscription. Then we the subscribe to other services we want. I love it.
Soprano2
@rp: That’s the same as my list, which I whip out pretty much every time someone starts whining about the supplemental unemployment and how “they” are lazy and don’t want to work and if only the government would quit giving them money they’d have to work. It is so frustrating to me that people can’t see that this is multi-pronged problem. I figure pretty soon our Republican governor will announce he’s ending the unemployment supplement. I keep wondering what employers are going to say when the market isn’t suddenly flooded with employees they are dying to hire (I sometimes ask them if they want to hire people they believe are just sitting on their asses and milking the system. Some of them will admit that no, that’s not really a person they’d like to hire.)
Another factor is that the people looking for work might not be the people you want to hire, or might not have the skills you need. Just because someone is looking for a job doesn’t mean they’re right for your job. Right now would be a great time to be entering the job market, because a lot of employers would be willing to take a chance on someone they would have turned their nose up at two years ago.
Jo Jo las Orejas
Mamá, camina conmigo AHORA. Además, viajo contigo hoy en MI MINIVAN. Tenemos que recuperar esa carpa hoy. Pongámonos en marcha.
sab
@John S.: So true. My dad used to be a liberal, brought up Republican, always voted Democratic. Now that he has had actual dementia for the last ten years, he is pretty much glued to Fox. He also used to watch the Spanish news channel back when our cable carried it although he doesn’t understand a word of Spanish. I think Fox lures them in with the pretty slutty-looking ladies and then they get hooked on the anger.
Quinerly
@Jo Jo las Orejas:
Looks like “The Princeling” has spoken!
Demanding….. Yes, my Pandemic Puppy is spoiled rotten.
Have a great day, BJers!!
Kay
@Soprano2:
Our whole lower income high school contingent just dropped away. They stopped checking in completely. It harmed them. Just the applications and enrollments in community college fell off a cliff. They need interaction with teachers and guidance counselors to get to the next step, because their parents didn’t go further than high school and they literally don’t know how to navigate the process. They’re really “high touch”, that group of kids. They need interaction.
Obama had a big push for school attendance in 2012. It was national and there was funding. Our public school is 50% low income and was fully on board. There’s a ton of data that says attendance is the most important factor for completion. What they found was they needed to do home visits to get the kids to go to school consistently and that was when the school was open.
I was okay with saying the risk of infection outweighed the risk of them not attending, but the risk of them not attending was real and it did damage. Some of it is timing. If lower income people want to be higher income they have very little room for error. They don’t just have to do X, Y and Z, they have to do X, Y and Z at 18 because they don’t have the luxury of “finding themselves”.
If you asked me what’s the biggest difference low income kids and higher income kids I would say it’s that- that low income kids have no room for error. One fuck up, one year off track and they pay for it dearly.
Soprano2
This is a great point, as is the part about needing views from different viewpoints. Whenever I get the opportunity at work I say that I think meetings and committees where you have people who have different points of view and different life experiences come to better solutions, because they think of things a narrowly-tailored group of people wouldn’t think of. Public works departments tend to be heavily weighted with engineers, who have big blind spots especially about things like public relations. I keep pushing the idea that they need more diverse points of view in order to make better decisions about things. I think this is true everywhere – if everyone in the group making a decision has the same background and point of view, the conclusions you come to are going to be weaker and not work as well.
martha
@Quinerly: this trip, we’re honestly just passing through Yosemite because we couldn’t just drive by. It’s the only one of the four we’ve visited, multiple times. Sounds sacrilegious to say that, but… Death Valley will be hot, but we figure this is a good reconnaissance visit.
Matt McIrvin
@Quinerly: We’re renting a place in Northampton in August and will take a low-key vacation there. Not traveling far.
Soprano2
I know from my tutoring experience that a lot of their parents are low literacy, and even if they graduated high school their reading and math skills are low, so I can only imagine how intimidated they would be by the whole college process. I can’t tell you how many mothers I tutored who told me the reason they were there was so they could read books to their kids, or help them with some homework! It would break your heart sometimes, to see how much they wanted to better themselves but how hard it was for them to do it around their work schedules and their kid’s schedule. I worked with one young man who was in his late 20’s – he was an assistant manager at a Little Caesar’s pizza, and was smart as a whip, but when he was in 9th grade he got in with a bad crowd and dropped out of high school. He wanted to get his high school equivalency so he could move up in management. I often wondered what happened to him.
Kay
@Soprano2:
Lower income people need the “magic of compounding” not less than higher income people but MORE. They need an earlier start and they need to stay on track, because the only “asset” they have is TIME.
They need a 40k job at 20 because they need an extra 10k or 20k – they need to make their own entry stake. The money that establishes them. Middle class kids get that from their parents. Low income kids lose a year they’ll pay for that for the next ten.
Amir Khalid
What to do when you can’t visit family and friends for Eid: dress up the feline members of the family.
JMG
@Kay: The story goes on to say that the bulk of the increased transmissions of the virus came from adults (parents) increasing their out of home activities now that kids were back in school. Which makes sense.
NotMax
@martha
Filmed in Death Valley in the middle 1920s. Story goes it was so hot that von Stroheim had to surround the cameras with ice packs.
Quinerly
@Geminid: ?
Kay
@Soprano2:
There’s much more recognition of it now, which is good. The whole for-profit college industry is built on first generation college students. They were sitting ducks for that scam.
No one was monitoring kids who were home and “doing” online lessons because their parents were at work. They never stopped working. If we wanted to close schools we needed to actually “lock down”.
Kay
@JMG:
In some ways I think closing schools (initially) did a lot to reduce transmission because it convinced most people that this was serious. It’s all fun and games until they close the schools. Then it’s a pandemic.
It was when I knew it was serious and I don’t think I’m alone in that.
Uncle Cosmo
Pro tips to minimize the intrusion of robocalls:
1. Never answer the phone unless caller ID[1] tells you it’s someone you care to speak with. Let the call go through to voice mail, even – especially – if you’re standing right there ready to pick up.
2. Record a long outgoing message on voice mail which provides as little information as possible while encouraging any live callers to leave voice mail. Example:
Many robocall operations use automated dialing: Dozens (if not hundreds) of numbers are dialed simultaneously and, in many cases, are programmed to drop all the rest of the calls once a the first real person picks up the phone.[4] The longer your outgoing message, the likelier that the call to you will be dropped within a few seconds after the phone rings.
I get as many as a dozen robocalls a day, but using this technique, less than one in a hundred leaves a message and it’s easily erased. Which reduces the onslaught to a minor annoyance.
(Notes:
[1] Don’t have caller ID? Get it. Saves no end of hassle.
[2] Can be omitted. I tend to provide the phone number in case the caller has simply misdialed. I would not provide a name – IMO that gives away too much information to an unknown caller.
[3] Always plural, even – especially – if you live alone. No reason to let a cold caller know that…unless you’re hoping for a buzz from a longlost former lover who’d hang up if s/he thought you had a roommate. Your call (so to speak)…
[4] Political campaigns sometimes use a variation of robocalling with a live volunteer on the incoming line. (I made such calls for my friend Martin O’Malley during his 2010 gubernatorial reelection campaign.) It’s not a bad system – the caller has no idea what number s/he’s connected to (though the computer does) and the recipient gets to talk to a “live human being.” As I said that year to one woman irate with all the calls, “If this was a Republican call you’d get a recorded message. The Democrats are at least giving you a real person to yell at!” :^D I got the laugh – and her vote!
martha
@NotMax: Oh, we’ll have to look for that! For some reason, Death Valley sort of gives me a Donner Party sort of vibe LOL. fire versus ice…
Timill
@Kristine:
Yes – no other option
No – not that I noticed
Yes: we retained the existing Comcast Business Internet when we dropped the Xfinity cable deal.
Soprano2
@Uncle Cosmo: My phone allows me to block numbers. I block numbers when I know they’re robocalls or telemarketers.
JMG
@Kay: In Boston, schools in several well-to-do suburbs closed first because kids had been exposed to parents who were at the Biogen superspreader event. That was a heads up, but what really drove it home for people was when the city canceled the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Universal school closings came shortly thereafter.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Geminid: Kinzinger might be making the not unreasonable bet it will be “Trump who?” even in conservative circles by next year. It certainly feels like Trump is starting to be old news
Gin & Tonic
@martha: Death Valley fascinates me. I’ve been there four times, when I was “fortunate” enough to attend a conference in Las Vegas. Always in summer; hottest I saw was 121, and was disappointed it didn’t get to 122, which is 50C, so I could show a photo to my European friends.
There’s a beautiful year-round waterfall in the park, if you didn’t know. Can’t link to it now, but I’ve posted a couple of pictures from it here in the past.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That actually happened on the Titanic, say hello to J. Bruce Ismay, owner of White Star Lines, was on the Titanic and made damn sure he was on one of the lifeboats. Life boats that Ismay thought were uncessery in the first place.
Geminid
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I sometimes think of trump as a particularly toxic radioisotope, whose appeal is decaying now that he is out of office. His half life is yet to be ascertained. Ten months? Twenty?
Bad news from criminal indictments of trump and his minions, civil lawsuits, and business setbacks may play a role.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Geminid: Well, he’s an entertainer, sooner or later his act get stale and people move on. I know it’s not how half lives work with radioactive materials but every six months since 2017 a notable chunk of audience loses interest.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@sab:
My formerly non-wingnut dad mentioned Hunter Biden at least four times yesterday in conjunction with the Baffert story.
artem1s
@Kay:
I think we can trace TFG’s disinformation ratf**ckery to interfere in elections back at least to the Birther lie. TFG’s Birth Certificate Investigation Team in Hawaii: Big Lie I. ButHerEmails LockHerUp: Big Lie II. Benghazi Part 11M: Is Hillary a Secret Lesbian?: Big Lie III. You could include the Invisible Ore That Was Never Sold to Russian: as another Big Lie. But I don’t recall TFG, his campaign or his toadies pushing that one much. Probably because Putin didn’t want one of his oligarchs to lose the mining contract that was approved by 11 other people – lots of them R’s.
All these Big Lies were all part of the same pattern to discredit a candidate and torpedo their campaigns before it could get off the ground. It’s the standard for the GQP going back to Raygun at least. Unlike the Bushes and Rove, TFG allowed a bunch of incompetent lawyers take over the logistics for making it happen and covering it up. Cheney’s only trying to put the organizational genii back in the bottle. She has no intention of changing the GQP pattern of voter suppression, obstruction and disseminating the Big Lie/s to win elections.
If Nancy had the Speaker’s chair in 2017 and/or Bob Barr had ethics equal to even Jeff Sessions, the Mueller report may have resulted in another censure and/or impeachment. And to think Comey’s spreading The Big Lie/s of 2016 could have helped TFG get that first strike for that elusive Impeachment Hat Trick – and all in a single term! Not quite that Nobel Prize TFG wanted but definitely one that (hopefully) will never be repeated in my lifetime.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: But the Republican Party is still 100% Trump’s party, which is why I think Trump still stands a good chance of returning to the presidency.
All the Republicans need to do is get back Congress and enough state legislatures in the 2022 midterms, which has a better than even chance of happening, because that’s what happens in midterms. Then they can simply reinstall Trump as President in 2024 by refusing to accept or certify any contrary swing-state results, applying the theories they spent so much time developing in 2020. How many votes Trump gets in ’24 will literally not matter.
Geminid
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: The Presidency enhanced trump’s stature, beyond the the actual power he exercised. trump was a larger than life figure, both for those who worshipped him and for those who hated him. In his few appearances since he left office, trump’s schtick has been, as you say, stale. Critical audience members sometimes call it a “greatest hits” act.
And trump seems low energy. Sad!
WereBear
@Kay:
GOSH YES. This.
PST
@debbie:
Just wait till you try 7-day weekends!
Uncle Cosmo
Fair enough…but:
Your call. Literally and figuratively.
danielx
Trump’s big lie was predictable as sunrise. I have noted it before, but losing is an impossibility for him because he is Donald Trump – and Donald Trump does not lose at anything, ever. If he appears to lose, it can only be because nefarious forces cheated him.
What still amazes me is the number of people who believed (and believe) him. This is a man who has lied throughout his career and indeed has made lying an integral part of his career. I will never understand it.
CaseyL
@Van Buren: I’m headed out there in the Fall, a 10-day road trip in Maine with 3 days in Bah Bahbah. I’m VERY glad I made my reservations so early, since it seems everyone and their vaccinated dog will be traveling this summer and autumn.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@danielx:
I do. It’s baked into the fabric of this benighted country. White guy in a suit makes grandiose promises, a substantial majority of white people (particularly Appalachian and Ozark Scots-Irish) will display a nearly incomprehensible level of credulousness.
WereBear
@Amir Khalid: Thank you! Adorable :)
PST
@rp:
One can easily see how the elements in that list work together to create a sum greater than the parts. Benefits give people who have every intention of going back to work sooner rather than later a little elbow room to shop around, consider their options, avoid risk, and not jump desperately at the first opportunity.
gvg
@Kay:
I just read a story where someone actually researched the answers…one thing that jumped out at me is that low income high school kids got JOBS to help the family. They don’t want to come back. They like helping the family. For them, we may have to continue to offer online classes or risk them just dropping out.
Jeffery
@rikyrah: I don’t have a cell phone. Still a holdout. Never answering the computer calling gets a computer answering. The number of robo calls has fallen as the dialing computer learns no real person will pick up.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: Polling on the big lie shows that trump may have 70% of Republicans behind him. But upwards of 30% are not, at least on that issue. And in more and more states like my own, Republicans have no path to victory without carrying the independents, and independent support for the trumpist Republicans keeps getting softer and softer.
A comparison of two Wason Center polls of registered Virginia voters certainly does not prove my argument, but it is interesting. Virginia does not have registration by party so the Wason Center asked for party self-identification in November of 2019. The numbers were Democrat, 34%; Independent, 30%; Republican 31%. The numbers reported for February 2021 were Democrat, 37%; Independent, 33%; and Republican, 25%- a six point drop in 14 months. I think of this when I hear Republicans say, well, trump brought a lot of new voters to the party. They are whistling past the graveyard, at least in my state.
JoyceH
I need a landline so when I can’t find my cellphone I can call it from the landline and then follow the ring sound to find the cell.
CaseyL
@Geminid:
I remember, after 2016, a poll watcher who said people came out of the woodwork to vote for Trump. And I saw them interviewed frequently because it was a new phenomenon: people who were dumber than a bag of hair and meaner than a bag of snakes; who knew that about themselves, and were in-your-face proud of it.
Kay
@gvg:
Just be careful though – “they don’t want to come back” and “they want to help the family” could be going on, but one isn’t causing the other :)
We basically listened to our teachers here and our teachers were really worried about them. They know the level of nagging and herding and follow up it takes to keep them going.
I think the little kids will catch up. It’ll be a blip for them. But around age 16 the stakes get higher. I know that’s bad! I wish they could have longer childhoods and more room to make mistakes, the same room more privileged kids get. But they really don’t and we shouldn’t lie to them and tell them they do. Their lives are harder. That’s not their fault but it is their problem.
nclurker
@Spanky: i have a drawer full of old cell phones.
but i did get a cheap track phone for a quick trip out of town for jury duty.
rings two or three times a day.
curious,since i gave no one the number.
Soprano2
@Uncle Cosmo: I’m aware of the spoofing thing. I don’t usually block those because I think that’s a waste of time. I figure it helps some but doesn’t actually stop them. My hope is that after not getting an answer for a long time they’ll stop calling.
MattF
OT. Here, kitty.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yes, there that vibe of nostalgia tour to him now. I wonder if the Wingnuts will talk themselves into replacing Trump with Reagan in their minds? By 2024 they might be claiming Trump was president from 1981 to 1988 , it’s a liberal lie that Trump was president during the COVID pandemic, that was Hilary. and how can the lefties be so cruel to an old man like Trump, kind of rubbish.
Mike in NC
The newspaper today has a column by Marc Thiessen entitled “Trump Only Cares About Loyalty To Him”. I need to sit down now.
Kristine
Thanks for the replies about cable and internet. I’m with Comcast. Service has been fine, but I do believe I’m paying too much for what I get. So many channels I never watch.
Kay
@gvg:
I’m kind of biased against online learning because I saw it prepandemic here. Ohio has horrible, giant online schools for K-12 and IMO (and the opinion of some juvenile judges) they were shunting lower income students into them and it was a disaster for the students. We had a judge who had just had it- if you were in his court and you said you were enrolled in one he would order you to school. In person.
We had one memorable case where the 22 year old girlfriend of a high school boy did his entire senior year in high school for him. He bragged about it. Thank goodness he was 18 or she could have been looking at charges, just for the relationship.
MattF
@Mike in NC: Ugh. Thiessen is unredeemable, not even a little bit.
rikyrah
@Kay:
You are correct. No room for error
Geminid
@CaseyL: I wonder what will happen to those new voters. Some will get caught up in Republican politics and stick around. But some will drop back out. These might go to their grave saying, “I never voted after 2020. We had a chance to make America great again. But then the RINOs stabbed us in the back!”
A lot of those folks are just not very civic minded, and for all their anger and prejudice, they are in practice apolitical, at least without this particular demoguague.
But maybe another, more effective demagogue will capture them. I know there are some people out there planning to take their shot.
Ruckus
@Spanky:
On an Apple phone you can set your ringer not to sound if the caller is not in your contacts. Not sure if you can do that on an Android phone. All my robo calls just show up on the screen but don’t ring. And if it was a robo call I then block the number. And what do you know, I just got such a call as I was typing.
Soprano2
This is my biggest concern about online schooling – how can you guarantee that the student did the actual work? It’s a big problem.
Another Scott
@debbie: [snort]
We mainly keep our old-school land line for when the power goes out. It’s handy if/when the cell towers go down, and the cable usually dies when we lose power, so VOIP/cable telephony isn’t appealing to us.
Of course, we almost never answer it. The inventors of Caller id should get a Nobel Prize…
Cheers,
Scott.
CaseyL
@Geminid: He got 75 million votes in 2020, 6 million more than in 2016. There’s no telling how many of that 75 million were True Believers and how many just automatically vote for the (R) no matter what.
PST
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
That may well be true, but if Trump is soon forgotten (or even becomes anathema) I have a feeling Republicans will still resent and punish those who didn’t stick with the team. They will be like the pre-mature anti-Fascists who fought in Spain, always under a cloud of suspicion even when everyone had become anti-Fascist.
rikyrah
@Kay:
I honestly knew it was serious when, in the span of three days, every professional sports league cancelled everything.
catclub
@debbie:
Sorry, no. They will have at least one crazy in a runoff, and the GOP is then 70%+ Trump crazy.
Low Key Swagger
90% of the spam calls that used to come to my cell were for car warranties. I finally answered, told them how happy I was they called, and asked how much for a warranty on my 1996 Toyota Rav4 with 280k on it. They haven’t called back.
catclub
@Mike in NC:
anybody with half a brain knew that in 2011, or most likely, earlier. Slow learners.
PST
@catclub: They don’t come any slower than that guy.
catclub
Not sure if that is worth $20/month.
isn’t there a google app that will call a cell phone?
catclub
@PST: Sean Hannity would like a word.
rikyrah
@MattF:
Is this the lion in Houston?.
That was some crazy shut???
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: That the party holding the presidency loses seats in the midterm election is considered a truism because it happens more often than not. But I don’t view it as destiny. Especially when I have never seen Democrats so united and motivated, and Republicans so unsettled, if not turbulent.
I too am aware of the Republican efforts to suppress and subvert voting. I do not share your belief that these will be determinative. For one thing, the courts will have their say, especially in states covered by the Voting Rights Act. In North Carolina, a federal court order undid some gerrymandering, and resulted in Democrats flipping two Congressional seats last year. A court order helped the excellent Dan McEachin (VA-4) flip his Richmond area seat in 2016. In 2019, eleven of 100 Virginia state Delegates were elected in districts redrawn by court order, again under the Voting Rights Act that I believe applies to states from Delaware to Arizona.
Voter supression can suppress Republican voters, too. I’ve read that Florida Republicans worry that the advantage they had in absentee balloting may be lost. And like gerrymandering, these voter suppression tactics are resented by all but the most partisan. Republicans will lose some votes because of them.
Next year will obviouly be a hard fought and consequential battle. But I don’t think Republican efforts to shape the battlefield will defeat Democratic strength. The Republicans are on the losing side on every important issue. That’s why they try to distract voters with their threadbare cultural arguments.
So if this were a betting site, which it is not, right now my entry in the midterm Congressional pool would be House: +4 Democrats; Senate, +2 Democrats. And I would put real money down on Stacey Abrams as the next Georgia Governor.
WaterGirl
@rikyrah: Even if you weren’t one of the restaurant workers who died, you surely noticed when your co-workers or former co-workers died.
“Oh well, Susan and Peter died, but what are you gonna do? Sure, I’d love to come back to work. Right away!”
Jeffro
Yup. trumpov ramped up the GQP base and brought out some occasional voters, but he ramped up Democratic voters and occasional voters even more. No way out of that death spiral except to ditch trump and trumpism, GQP!
Ruckus
@Anne Laurie:
I haven’t had a landline in over 20 yrs. Once I got a cell phone I never looked back. I’ve never had an issue with service in any reasonable sized town in the US with service. Nor in New Zealand, which I traveled to 18 yrs ago and had international service every where I went.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Cheny is supposed to be showing she is sticking with team Corporate Conservative in the GOP, I imagine it’s the same with Kinzinger.
Geminid
@Jeffro: I think it will take another two or three cycles of getting thrashed before Virginia’s bible-thumpers and tea party cranks throw in the towel and let establishment Republicans have the driver’s seat again. By then the party may look like a car that has been in a few demolition derbies (people often drive backwards in those, too). Losing the 5th District Congressional seat would help knock some sense into those boneheads. Hopefully, the Democrats can defeat that crappy incumbent next year.
J R in WV
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Holy Shit — 866 pages on the web. amazing. glad I didn’t have to look at each page. That includes the abbreviations and glossary, so the actual meat isn’t quite that big.
Geminid
@catclub: Most states do not have runoff elections, and a plurality wins. I believe that is the case in Illinois, and Ohio and Michigan as well. I think some Wyoming Republicans recently tried to legislate runoffs in that state, but failed this time ’round, to Liz Cheney’s benefit.
I kind of like runoffs, but I think Virginia will probably go to ranked choice voting instead. An instant runoff, so to speak.
PJ
@CaseyL:
That’s incorrect – Trump only got 74 million votes (74,216,154 to be exact) in 2020. Trumpers change that to 75 million to make it sound better, but he still lost to Biden by 7 million votes and 74 electoral votes.
Another Scott
@Geminid: In principle run-offs are a good idea – one wants elected officials to have majority support. But they have a racist history in practice in places like Georgia. It was used very effectively to reduce the chances of Blacks getting elected, or even those who weren’t flag-waving racists. It’s harder for the poor to vote twice…
Instant runoff/Ranked Choice/etc is a way to have at least some of the benefits without a few of the obvious problems.
Cheers,
Scott.
James E Powell
LA Times reports that 7% of Los Angeles high school students came to school last week.
My middle school had 11%.
One big factor mentioned by the students who stayed online is that it is close to the end of the year, so why change?
Geminid
@Another Scott: Yes, I’ve heard that runoffs have a racist history.
J R in WV
@Soprano2:
None of the spam calls we get are displaying the real number they are calling from. I get calls from local phone numbers where I know there is no one with an Indian/Spanish/foreign accent of any kind. Rural area full of very rural white people… So blocking spoofed phone numbers is a waste of my time.
When called ID tells me the call is from George Foster over the ridge, and the caller has an Indian accent, I know the caller ID is spoofed, illegally.
Geminid
@Geminid: Georgia and Louisiana, two jim crow states, have runoffs. But while runoffs may have a racist history, Sonny Perdue and not Jon Ossoff would be Senator if Georgia did not have a runoff. So runoffs may not in practice be so racist at present.
But runoffs vs. ranked choice voting is merely an academic argument at this point. Ranked choice voting is easy, with a quick result, and that’s what people want these days.
burnspbesq
@Quinerly:
Maybe next winter. Big Bend isn’t the most hospitable place in summer, and maybe by then somebody will put an EV charger in Marfa.
Another Scott
@Geminid: It’s used more often than that in the South, but I don’t know the particulars. I do know that there was a GOP runoff between Sessions and Tuberville for the Senate nomination in Alabama.
As always, the details matter, and having people of good-faith running elections matters. There are lots of ways to have fair elections and lots of ways to have elections that reward energized minority factions…
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@J R in WV:
All of the calls I get here in socal are computer calls with a recorded voice and the numbers are almost always non operating numbers. Which of course means they are spoofed. But the computer uses the numbers over and over with no repercussions so they will continue to do so. The actual number they use pays for the call and I doubt the phone company has any idea of what number displays on your phone. The phone company seemingly could care less, they are getting paid for the actual call so no issues on their side and if you complain to them you can’t give them the number making the call. If everyone called to complain about each call they could trace any call placed to your phone at a specific time and also their lines would be bogged down to a stop and they might do something. But I doubt it. They are getting their cut so they could care less.
Geminid
@Another Scott: I think pluralty win elections already reward energized minority factions, and that this is not neccesarily a good thing. For instance, Nina Turner represents an energized minority faction, and she may win the OH-14(?) primary because it has no runoff and a plurality will win. That would be bad news for Democrats, I think.
But I want to see some more results in Maine and other states with ranked choice voting. I can see the potential for negative consequences in empowering third parties.
I was a little anxious about the Virginia 5th Democratic primary in 2020, worried that with four candidates there might be a plurality winner less suited for the general election. In the event, Cameron Webb won an outright majority, and I thought he waged a strong campaign. He came up 5 points short, but I think this was a matter of 5th District demographics, not candidate quality.
The rise of social and other digital media has now made mounting a political campaign both easier and more attractive, so I expect to see more and more five, six, and seven+ candidate races. Eventually, after a few bad plurality outcomes, I think we will see ranked choice voting in widespread use.
Uncle Cosmo
@Soprano2: Mazel tov, but don’t hold your breath. Aside from that one truly bizarre day when the (robo)calls were (allegedly) coming from inside the house I haven’t had that happen again, but they may just have not gotten back to my last 4 digits.
IIRC the EU used to have a regulation that the caller would be charged 100% of the cost of a call. I thought that was a pretty good idea, since calls to mobile phones were fairly pricey, so anyone with a cell as their primary phone was all but immune to The Robo.
However, it may no longer be the case. I sprung for an international calling package on my landline a few months ago, but I have to go through contortions to get one of my friends in Prague to answer, because it doesn’t show up in his cell phone’s caller ID as my number but a different number every time, always from a different country, that he is unable to distinguish from a robocall. My point being that he does get robocalls on his cell, so the bastards may have figure out a workaround for that too. Grrr…..
majii
Sitting there and not answering the phone sounds like something I’d do.
Origuy
@martha: Tioga Pass is not open yet. NPS hasn’t given a date yet.
https://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/tioga.htm