Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Come on, man.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

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

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

Republicans don’t trust women.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

I was promised a recession.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

We still have time to mess this up!

Optimism opens the door to great things.

I really should read my own blog.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Friday Evening Open Thread: TGIF, Truly

Friday Evening Open Thread: TGIF, Truly

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President Biden has a cold, so you can safely ignore all the frantic/gleeful health rumors over the weekend:

Hope he’ll feel well enough to show up for the Kennedy Honors on Sunday:

Reader Interactions

46Comments

  4. 4.

    NotMax

    From the sounds coming from outside, all the rain we didn’t have for like the past two months is now being released from the sky all at once.

  5. 5.

    germy

    New: Mitch McConnell has told colleagues and donors Senate Republicans won't release a legislative agenda before next year's midterms, according to people who've attended private meetings with the minority leader. w @alaynatreene https://t.co/LeMvOBw4h0— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) December 3, 2021

    Really great that, for the second election in a row, one of the two major parties has an agenda so malicious, harmful, and incoherent, so utterly devoid of good ideas, that they refuse to put it in writing. https://t.co/wvasQdfE3X— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) December 3, 2021

  7. 7.

    JPL

    @germy: thanks for that.   I photocopied it for future reference

    Can’t believe they are going to run on trump’s great economy.

  19. 19.

    divF

    @Anoniminous: No excuses for them. There’s a Peet’s Coffee at 17th and Penn. Or if you want to be really Old School, you go to the Swing’s Coffee at 17th and G.

  25. 25.

    scav

    @Kelly: Well, then, I apologize to the army.  Add a badly lip-synced correction to the ad.  I’m equally rubbish at recognizing car models, for the record.

  26. 26.

    Mike in NC

    The Trump Klan boycotted the Kennedy Center Honors for four years because they are a bunch of crude slobs.

  28. 28.

    sab

    I know a guy whose white RWNJ son lives in Texas and had a concealed carry permit. He got rid of it and the gun a couple of years later because the one traffic stop he had scared him so badly. The cop was really jittery when he found out about the concealed carry and gun.

  31. 31.

    trollhattan

    @Mike in NC: Trump was doubtless pissed to learn he, Trump, did not pick out the “winners.” Can you imagine? “For the third year running, Ted Nugent receives his Kennedy Center honor!”

  32. 32.

    Geminid

    @sab: I think one provision of the permitless concealed carry law Republicans are trying to push through the Ohio legislature would  eliminate the requirement that a person inform a cop that he is carrying a concealed weapon. That may be one reason that law has not yet been voted on. It’s a terrible idea. Even when Republicans and the NRA had the upper hand in Virginia ten years ago, they never tried to pass permitless concealed carry.

  34. 34.

    trollhattan

    @Percysowner: “as badly as — or worse”

    Stop the fuck right there, Milbank, did reporting Trump’s daily, hourly actual acts and behavior constitute “bad” treatment? How about after they became weary of the routine and stopped altogether? Bad, or worse?

  40. 40.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @MagdaInBlack: The Big Island has two pretty tall peaks(Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa), one is almost a 14’er, so snow is not uncommon at the higher elevations.  The place in LA that gets snow every year is Mt. Lukins at about 5,000′.

    It also sometimes snows near the summit of Haleakala on NotMax’s rock(aka Maui).

  42. 42.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @MagdaInBlack: Fun fact, in LA, you can ski in the morning and go for a suntan at the beach in the afternoon.  Of course, if there’s traffic, could be a problem

    Our mountains can be pretty close to the coast and the temperature difference can be extreme.

  46. 46.

    Another Scott

    Meanwhile, … STATNews:

    Minnesota is hardly alone. The fractured nature of U.S. health care means that when someone is swabbed for SARS-CoV-2 in a hospital or clinic, the majority of those samples go to one of the large private testing providers like LabCorp and Quest. Some subset of those samples will then be set aside to be sent to county or state public health labs, which either do their own sequencing, or send the samples off to academic labs or other industry partners to decode the genomes of the viruses inside.

    “In a perfect world, we would have a much stronger health system that is more integrated with our public health agencies so we could have testing and sequencing being done within the same network,” Warmbrod said.

    All that form-filling and ferrying about can take days to weeks. Sequencing itself can be as fast as a 24- to 48-hour turnaround. It’s the logistics of moving samples around that’s the real bottleneck.

    “It’s really just stupid stuff,” said Amy Mathers, associate director of clinical microbiology at University of Virginia Health, whose lab team sequences positive coronavirus samples for the state of Virginia. Currently, they receive up to 300 samples a week, delivered in shipments once or twice weekly via courier from the state public health lab in Richmond. And if the public health department flags some samples that are suspicious because of travel history or contact tracing data, they’ll push them to the front of the line.

    “We’re more integrated into the health system than we ever were before the pandemic,” said Mathers. But the data they pull off the sequencer isn’t reflective of real-time infections. Typically it shows what was circulating in the state 10 to 14 days earlier. Right now they’re running samples from mid-November.

    “We tried to and are still lobbying for a system where people can send us positive samples directly,” said Mathers. “But the problem was it was hard to find a way to log them into the public health system. The forms were just too confusing for the hospitals.”

    Her team has yet to find any cases of the Omicron variant, either in their sequence database or in any new samples, including ones taken from travelers and rushed to the front of the line. Mathers said her lab is sequencing every sample that tests positive in her area.

    During the summer Delta surge, the backlog stretched back even further. And in the end, all that sequencing wasn’t that helpful, she said. In the month of September, her team sequenced over 1,000 samples. Every single one of them was the Delta variant. But now, it’s more important than ever to sequence every last vial of virus in the state. “As these new variants emerge we have to do heavy sampling to capture the one Omicron that’s lurking,” she said. “So I know that if someone comes to Charlottesville with Omicron, we’ll find it. But it’s not the same everywhere.”

    Two weeks to know what’s going on in a pandemic is too long. Exponential increases are deadly…

    :-(

    Cheers,
    Scott.

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