I’m looking out my window for horsemen, and checking all beasts for marks, because Chris Cillizza just wrote a good column, refuting Trump and showing a grasp of basic facts and data. (I read it because I thought it was good DougJ bait on Twitter, judging from the terrible headline “You won’t believe what Donald Trump just said about coronavirus testing”.)
So I read a few more of his recent columns — the guy (or his intern) is prolific and most of his latest work is just fact-based, competent news analysis, not his usual garbage.
I guess some people just rise to the occasion, but he’s the last one I’d expect.
A Ghost to Most
Some people rise to the occasion, and some just curate their influence on the internet.
Doug R
Tucker Carlson’s writer fired, Tucker on “vacation”, Bari Weiss “resigns”, Andrew Sullivan “resigns”, it’s all coming up Milhouse!
mali muso
Dunno about the end times, but here is a flicker of good news that will have a positive impact on a vulnerable population. The Harvard/MIT lawsuit regarding international students went to court today and it looks like ICE backed down.
Linky
fixed.
HumboldtBlue
Andrew Cotter, sports announcer in Britain, has been keeping up to date on the competition between his dogs, Mabel and Olive.
Here’s the latest.
Also, this is a powerful short film of a political statement.
Dear Mr. President
Quaker in a Basement
So we can see Cillizza is capable of decent reporting. That knowledge serves to make his empty horse-race reporting all the more disappointing.
gvg
I just checked the news and saw where the University of Florida’s Athletic Director is using the words “if we have a season” matter of factly and also saying that in 1918 the Gators only played 1 game. I hadn’t been checking before, just assumed they were in denial but it doesn’t sound like it.
The University itself is still sounding a bit….behind the times. The financial hit must be bad, but last time in the spring, in hindsight I think they were just so overwhelmed by all the decisions and events changing things before they could announce plans, that they ended up being just really really slow telling us what was happening. Well they have already tested nearly 20,000 employees and they are gearing up to do 50,000 students more than once, so they are working hard.
mali muso
@mali muso: Grr, hyperlink code fail.
Linky
MattF
@Quaker in a Basement: I’ll agree that Cillizza-2020 appears to be a better and more reality-based reporter than Cillizza-2016. Pity that’s bringing up the ‘pigs flying by my window’ feeling.
dmsilev
@mali muso: The AP only has a short blurb so far:
Very good news. Of course, it meant that a whole bunch of students, school administrators, etc., spent the last ten days or so scrambling around desperately before ICE backed down. I’m sure someone found that amusing.
Jeffro
I’m going with the “it’s his intern” theory.
per gvg at #6…there isn’t going to be any (American) football this year, which is a shame because the Chiefs just signed Chris Jones to a 4-year extension and are just LOADED for another run this coming season. Sigh.
NotMax
Jumping onto the tailgate of the bandwagon is Pedestrian Punditry 101.
raven
oops
Martin
The last one? You sure about that?
Baud
Someone here recently posted a tweet of his that was pathetic. He’s not cured yet.
raven
@gvg: Fuck the gators!
counterfactual
When something directly threatens high-paid white male pundits, they’re capable of reporting facts instead of Dem-said Rep-said. Why bless his heart.
JPL
I thought you were referring to the trump administration telling hospitals, cities and states to no longer report cases to the CDC. It will be handled on a federal level, so expect numbers to go down rapidly.
NotMax
@raven
What happens in the Everglades stays in the Everglades.
:)
Baud
FWIW, I thought the end times arrived when Bill Kristol and George Will became our “allies.”
catclub
@Quaker in a Basement: I learned the same thing about Joe Klein.
He was an excellent impassioned writer …. when the injured person was himself.
Jess
Regarding trump’s “more testing = more cases” argument, I’ve been assuming that obviously he means it just looks like cases are increasing because we’re identifying more of them now, but what if he really does mean what Cillizza suggests–that in trump’s spin = reality mindset, testing really does create actual new cases? Surely even he can’t be that crazy–right?
Marcopolo
Alas, just as there is a drip of good news, there is a drop of bad news:
If you don’t think changing the way pandemic statistics are reported almost a half year into said pandemic stinks to high heaven, particularly from this administration, then I dunno, maybe there’s a bridge you should buy somewhere or something.
For starters, how does this change who has access to the raw information so that we can know things are being reported honestly?
download my app in the app store mistermix
@Martin: Is it the Jordan quote that broke it for you? It’s mediocre and doesn’t acknowledge Cillizza’s role in not holding Trump accountable, but it doesn’t spin Trump’s lying as a superpower. So it’s a C- for a usually F student, I’d say.
SiubhanDuinne
@Doug R:
Wait, Andrew Sullivan too?
[scrumbles around in the Googles]
Huh.
JPL
@Marcopolo: That’s one way to show that the virus is actually going down.
Ken
@mali muso: I take back everything nasty I ever said about the undue political influence of Harvard’s alumni network.
download my app in the app store mistermix
@SiubhanDuinne: Rumor has it that he and Bari are going to start a new publication examining the finer details of IQ theory and skull shapes.
Baud
@Jess:
You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a monstrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead – your next stop, Trump’s Brain!
JPL
more news.. https://twitter.com/nahaltoosi/status/1283128109064224768
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@A Ghost to Most:
That’s magnificent.
p.a.
Cillizza must have someone close w covid. Otherwise it would be same old CC
Timurid
The end times are arriving for Louisiana in a more conventional fashion. Governor Edwards just got his marching orders from Pence and DeVos and then had to appear in a hostage video with those two and, of all people, the LSU head coach (‘football is the lifeblood of this country’) to talk about the People’s Great Reopening Plan. The resolution I watched at wasn’t high enough to see if he was blinking in Morse code.
Edwards is a completely different person now from the man who led one of the nation’s most effective covid responses in March and April. I’m more and more convinced he had a Lindsey Graham Moment sometime in May, alone in a room with a GOP rep and a fat folder of kompromat. It may even have come at the hands of Trump himself, with whom he met during that month…
The Thin Black Duke
@Jeffro: I know where you’re coming from. I hate the Pats, but I loved the idea of Cam Newton playing for them. But yeah, I don’t see football happening this year.
trollhattan
@raven:
Ooh, Betty gonna get you for that!
However [clears throat, gargles] fuck the SEC!
Marcopolo
@SiubhanDuinne: From comments on twitter, the general belief is some new “opinion” start up is about to begin where folks like Bari and Andrew will be welcome and big draws. I guess we will find out soon enough.
Baud
@Marcopolo: Like Conservapedia, but for right-wing pundits?
germy
@download my app in the app store mistermix:
They’re gearing up to troll the next Democratic president.
Jess
@Baud: Gaaaaaah!!!
Love those Doonesbury brain voyages…
NotMax
@Marcopolo
“E-mail them to WinstonSmith.gov.”
//
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@dmsilev:
I already dealt with panicked calls from three potentially affected intimate partners of immigrants last week.
Martin
@dmsilev: So, in light of Chetan’s rant yesterday regarding Newsom.
It is impossible to get anything done at the state level because Trump constantly throws every effort at planning into absolute chaos. No sooner do you start to get a plan together he show up and wrecks it. Now, navigating around politicians is something universities do, but politicians are usually predictable, so you can position yourself in front of them, or you can have a contingency if they act.
But Trump is like getting hit by lightning on a clear day. You have no idea what’s coming, when, what it will look like, how it will be implemented and what laws he’ll choose to break along the way. So you wind up wasting 80% of your effort because you come up with something everyone agrees is sensible, except for Trump, who kills it for reasons you couldn’t have reasonably anticipated. This is happening up and down the state, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had someone at the university or state level just lose their shit and break down in a Zoom meeting because they so desperately are trying to fix this and one asshole insists on constantly undermining it, sending you back to where you started.
We wasted a week of reopen planning on this. We can’t get that week back. Every week we lose about 6 days of planning.
I am ashamed to say this, but the most effective plan for dealing with the pandemic right now involves a secret service agent’s service sidearm.
Anonymous At Work
Saddest of all the talents who rose to the previous 3 years with less to write about during Biden’s time. Mostly just looking at Alexandra Petri.
“Unhappy is a land that needs a hero” Galileo Galilee by Bertold Brecht
download my app in the app store mistermix
@germy:
Sully is going to have a cold brush with reality when he learns that it’s not like 2000 when he started his blog – there’s a lot more competition out there and he’s not going to get the audience he wants. And, Democrats are going to treat him like a fart in the wind or a moldy rat turd.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@JPL:
Seb and his “PhD”. ?
rikyrah
EPA Announces Two Lysol Products Are the First Disinfectants That Can Effectively Kill the Coronavirus
These are the first two approved disinfectant products that have been tested against COVID-19.
By Kimberly Holland
July 08, 2020
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved two Lysol products as effective against the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). The two products, the first approved by the EPA for such germ-killing activity, can kill the virus when they’re used on hard, non-porous surfaces.
Lysol Disinfectant Spray and Lysol Disinfectant Max Cover Mist both received the nod, the federal agency announced earlier this week. Both showed in laboratory testing that they could kill the virus two minutes after contact. These two Lysol products are now the first products to show they meet the EPA’s criteria for use against COVID-19 (also known as SARS-CoV-2).
Earlier this year, the EPA released a list of more than 420 products they believed were strong enough to fend off harder-to-kill viruses like COVID-19. However, none of those products had been tested against COVID-19. With this research from Lysol, the list of products that have been tested directly to kill this virus begins.
“The EPA’s approval recognizes that using Lysol Disinfectant Spray can help to prevent the spread of COVID-19 on hard, non-porous surfaces,” wrote Rahul Kadyan, EVP NA Hygiene for Reckitt Benckiser, the parent company of Lysol, in a statement.
No disinfecting or cleaning products can claim that they kill a particular virus or bacterium without EPA authorization. To get that distinction, the brand has to submit laboratory testing for review. If a company claims they can kill a specific pathogen without EPA’s approval, the products may be recalled and the company fined.
https://www.allrecipes.com/article/epa-approves-lysol-kill-coronavirus/?utm_medium=browser&utm_source=allrecipes.com&utm_content=20200714&utm_campaign=595018
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@download my app in the app store mistermix:
Andrew who? He some influencer?
?
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@rikyrah: I initially read that as an IPA is a disinfectant. Which fits – that shit is caustic.
NotMax
@rikyrah
RWNJ twitter feeds light up: “Does one drink it with club soda or with ginger ale?”
//
Elizabelle
@download my app in the app store mistermix: !!! LOL.
mali muso
@dmsilev:
Yeah, I spent pretty much the entire last week and all day yesterday prepping lists, working with academic units who are already SUPER BUSY to try to verify things that aren’t even known yet so that we could satisfy the new paperwork bureaucracy, emailing students, fielding calls. Great use of time that could have been put towards actually getting things closer to ready for fall.
Marcopolo
@Jess: SATSQ: Oh yes he can.
Gin & Tonic
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Hey! Some of us like the taste of hops.
hotshoe
@Doug R: uh, who/what is Milhouse?
Martin
@JPL: Man, the dystopic sci fi that will emerge from this era is going to be wild. The bar gets raised every day.
trollhattan
@Martin:
It does not help one bit when county sheriffs refuse to enforce state and even county mandates. I would like to see their wings clipped by constitutional amendments. Its ridiculous.
Jess
From what I’ve seen, the moderate Dems, including Obama, have spent the past few decades trying not to believe the GOP had declared a jihad on them. But now they finally see that we are, in fact, in the middle of a civil war, and people are dying because of it. And now they’re saying, okay fuck it–let’s go hack up the orcs. Should be a bloody spectacle, but I think we’ll be on the winning side if the country as a whole survives it. Which is not a given.
West of the Cascades
@rikyrah: Was EPA careful to stress that these Lysol products are not supposed to be taken internally?
Martin
@rikyrah: I am not clicking on a link to ‘allrecipes.com’ that involves Lysol. I am not interested in Melania Trump’s indentured chefs recipe for Lysol Creme Brulee.
Brachiator
The press should stop giving Trump deference simply because he is the president. He should be challenged any time he makes a statement about science, facts or the nature of the virus, or medical treatments. If he tries to wave things away with “some say” or “some doctors” he should be pressed for the supposed sources. Any time he disagrees with his own science advisors, he should be asked exactly why and based on what authority.
And he went to a business school, and is supposedly good at math. He should be asked to explain any statistics related to the pandemic. A reporter can even offer Trump a pad and a Sharpie.
Otherwise, the pretense that Trump is an expert or has digested the opinions of experts should come to an end.
Steeplejack
Adventures in the coronasphere:
I drove my friend to work at 1:30 today. Both of us spontaneously remarked on what a nice day it is. I later checked my geezer weather almanac app and saw that it was 85° and, more to the point, only 32% humidity. In NoVA in July, that’s balmy. Bright and sunny but no harsh glare. And a bit of a breeze.
That motivated me to drive out to Micro Center in Fairfax to pick up a couple of things I needed. I missed the geezer shopping hour at 9:00 this morning but thought I’d give it a shot. Drove from downtown Clarendon in Arlington straight out Lee Highway all the way. Fair amount of traffic, and “highway” is a misnomer in places, e.g., downtown Falls Church, but I was in no hurry and it was just so nice to be out and about.
Micro Center was a breeze. When I was there last time, in late April, it was awful. The quarantine was in full effect, and they were letting very few people into the store at a time. I saw the wait to get in and said forget it. Then I read on their website about the geezer hour on Tuesdays, so I went back to the next one of those and had no problem, although it was clear that they were still getting their routine down. Today there was no waiting even in “normal” hours. They had a person stationed inside the door with a display offering masks, wipes and latex gloves. Everybody inside was masked, staff and customers. And there weren’t very many people in the store. In April it was a madhouse, I think because people were outfitting their work-from-home setups.
On the way home I stopped at Arby’s—junk-food jones that must be slaked about every six months—and ate outside. Yes, Arby’s had a few café tables set up for outdoor dining, although they are now open for inside dining, too. (Everybody there was masked, staff and customers.) It was nice to sit out in the breeze and the not-too-hot sun. A big crow was watching me from a power line, so I flipped him a few curly fries about 20 feet from me. Suddenly two other crows and a grackle appeared, so I threw a few more fries and then beat it before the riot started.
Motored home to my rooms in Threadkill Lane and feel very good, considering the general state of things. Maybe almost good enough to check the news, but maybe not. Perhaps I’ll continue catching up on Endeavour before the new season starts. I’m barely into season 5.
Oh, and I don’t know what’s going on with flash-drive prices, but I picked up a 128GB USB 3.1 stick for $10.99. Feel like I got the deal of the century, but someone feel free to tell me the market has collapsed or something. Now kicking myself that I didn’t get two. I’ll use this one to make a bootable backup of my new notebook’s hard drive.
Martin
@trollhattan: Yeah, okay, constitutional amendments. I’m on more of a 12-gauge vibe at the moment. Might be time for an ativan.
Jess
@Martin: I actually just finished Scalzi’s Interdependency trilogy yesterday–it was hilariously and tragically timely. I sent him an email noting that and saying thanks for the good read, and he wrote back!
Marcopolo
So the markets are having a good day. Fuck all knows why. Maybe they are already looking past next week & what will follow:
Knock on wood & assuming Biden wins the election in Nov., the Senate flips blue & then scraps the filibuster, we expand our margin in the House, we turn at least a few states bluer at the state level, pretty much all of 2021 is going to be trying to clean up the gigantic black hole of a mess that Trump & his lackeys have made out of cock up (non) response to Covid-19. And the after effects in lost health, lost income, lost education, and just lost livelihood (happiness & satisfaction w/ life) are going to carry along for a lot of folks for a good chunk if not the rest of their lives. So someone explain to me how exactly do financial markets work?
trollhattan
@West of the Cascades:
Hopefully there are a large-font comic sans edition and a slow-talk spoken edition of the notice, just for Republicans.
SiubhanDuinne
@JPL:
JFC.
MattF
@JPL: Now, the flying pigs are eating BLT sandwiches.
Brachiator
@gvg:
I didn’t know that. History can provide a powerful precedent.
Hoodie
@Timurid: The pressure on these red and purple state governors is intense. Roy Cooper just kind sorta took a knee here in NC, announcing reopening of schools even though the state’s numbers have been steadily trending in the wrong direction (albeit slower than in other southern states). He tried to balance this by extending the current phase of restrictions on businesses and giving individual jurisdictions the option of being fully on line. A lot of people out there want to play Russian Roulette with their own health and the health of others, added to another group of people who tend to engage in wishful thinking based on thin evidence as to the likelihood of transmission in schools. Schools have generally been closed, so there is very little data on this, and the few places that have schools open tend to be places with relatively low general infection levels. I guess we’ll find out this fall if they’re right, but it sucks for my teacher wife who is in her late 50s. Cuomo is one of a few who’s been willing to hold the line, but NY is not NC, although I’m sure parts of upstate NY may resemble it. At least Cuomo has a compliant legislature. Cooper is having to fight off trogolodyte Republicans on a daily basis, I’m sure it’s similar for Edwards.
Steeplejack (phone)
Happy Bastille Day! (Note graffiti.)
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Gin & Tonic:
Or as I call it, battery acid, guaranteed to sour my stomach. LOL
As I say, though, everybody’s palate is different. There are whiskeys that other people love that I’m not fond of, same with various flavors of gin.
Baud
@hotshoe:
https://youtu.be/M67E9mpwBpM
Martin
@Steeplejack: $11 is a good price, but under $20 is pretty normal now. I don’t think I’ve seen one under $15 yet.
Marcopolo
@Jess: I did not know the third book was out. Going to order it now. Thank you for bringing a little joy into my day! I needed it as I just finished my damned taxes.
hotshoe
@Martin: Amen.
J R in WV
OK,
I haven’t read this comment thread, but I had a great optimistic revelation just now!!
The Corona COVID-19 plague is going to save the planet~!!~ It’s going to kill a whole lot of people, which will slow global climate change and save us from the permanent heat wave!!! I mean, not US, us, just the people who survive. I’m old, I won’t live long enough to see us being saved.
But still~!!~
Be optimistic! Why not? It can’t hurt~!!~ ;-) /s not really, WASF!
Jess
@Marcopolo: It’s still at peak price, but I had some Amazon Kindle credit and said what the hell–I need some sanity!
Hoodie
@mali muso: Chaos government. Trump does a lot of this as chaff to keep the media chasing their tails and trigger their conditioned responses, e.g., “he finally wore a mask!.” Note that all of this stuff coincided with the Stone commutation.
misterpuff
@Doug R: “Chris Cillizza. Now in pog form!”
Steeplejack (phone)
@Baud:
Perfect illustration!
Jess
@J R in WV: Sadly, I don’t think the 3% or so that we’ll lose will be enough for that. However, it might cause enough anti-science people to be removed from power that we can actually make some progress on carbon emissions. I’ll take whatever silver lining we can get…
piratedan
@download my app in the app store mistermix: and if he surrounds himself with Shapiro and Weiss there’s absolutely no reason to go there unless you willingly choose to hate read them. Not one coherent thought or idea will emanate from their pieholes/keyboards that can be seriously entertained as having anything to add to the conversation. Nice of them to partition themselves away from where real ideas and concerns can be discussed and tackled.
Steeplejack
@Martin:
I haven’t shopped for them in a while. Last I remember was $30-40. This was a pleasant surprise. I think it was on sale from $18.99. They sell them at the register like impulse-buy candy bars.
Elizabelle
@Steeplejack: I miss Micro Center. Not a tech, but they had some fabulous accessories. Well made and very inexpensive.
Brachiator
@Marcopolo:
People can still make money during the present pandemic. Failing companies, declining real estate prices, etc., present bargain buying opportunities for those with the available revenue.
Aside from that, people should not pay too much attention to either the Dow or GDP reports as giving information about the health of the economy. A good chunk of the world economy is still shut down.
Martin
@Jess: Very cool! I’ve had some nice exchanges with David Brin. Getting a reply from an author almost always guarantees a purchase of the next book.
Pittsburgh Mike
Like a funny “Nancy” cartoon.
Sloane Ranger
@hotshoe: Err, something to do with Nixon I’d guess. Wasn’t his middle name Millhouse?
Gin & Tonic
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: People even voluntarily consume cilantro.
piratedan
@Sloane Ranger: my guess it’s a Simpsons reference for Bart’s ever nerdy comrade in arms Millhouse.
catclub
@Brachiator: also, companies like Apple are doing well because a large fraction of their business is not in the US, and the REST of the world is opening back up. That only marginally affects how markets work.
The market can stay crazy longer than you can stay solvent ( by betting that crazy will end).
WaterGirl
@mali muso: I replaced your link.
hotshoe
@Baud: aw thanks, I mighta known, but I’m not culturally literate ;)
catclub
@piratedan: yes. Nixon’s was Milhouse.
rikyrah
@Marcopolo:
Moscow Mitch doesn’t care.
Nancy Smash and the Democrats do.
Betty Cracker
@Marcopolo: I have no idea. Last night, the mister and I were discussing whether we should stash our meager retirement savings in less risky portfolios or just stay on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.
I remember kicking myself for not moving it before the pandemic crash earlier this year, but it bounced back. This feels like another chance to avoid a loss, but I’m not sure what’s the right move.
I’m just a dumb old English major, but even I know our economy is predicated on consumption. How can that continue with the ongoing ruination? It doesn’t seem sustainable…
Steeplejack
@Elizabelle:
I love the place. They have everything, including stuff I didn’t know existed, and the staffers are very helpful. If I need something right away that’s my go-to. And in the before times I liked to do a deep browse, even if I went in for only one thing.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
dear god, I was hoping the ‘joint venture’ was just a twitter joke
ETA:
@download my app in the app store mistermix:
Yeah, I’m really hoping the novelty of the whole Gay-Catholic-Tory Who Turned on Bush and Iraq War has worn way the fuck off. His niche at NY Mag was pretty small.
Roger Moore
@JPL:
Of course the CDC is at the federal level. It’s just headed by someone Trump doesn’t trust to fudge the numbers for him.
Patricia Kayden
WaterGirl
@germy: Lets hope/pray/do everything we can to make sure there is a Democratic president for them to troll!
Kay
Oh, yeah. She’d flee. Let’s see if they can keep this one alive long enough for it to get to trial. Let’s see if we as a country can manage to keep the international crime ring members alive long enough to try them, or if we’re a completely failed state who fuck up even that.
catclub
That seems kind of rich. I expect that the overseas student who can get into Harvard or MIT is even richer than the average US student who can get in. Do they get federally guaranteed student loans? I doubt it.
I do think it is good that Harvard MIT took the case to court and beat the trump admin, to help students at less privileged places.
NotMax
@Steeplejack
Vaguely recall seeing a three-pack at Costco for under thirty clams. Also have noticed the prices on the tiny attachable to keychain thumb drives with a regular USB plug on one end and a mini plug on the other have plummeted.
mali muso
@catclub: I was referring to international students generally speaking as they all were set to be impacted. If Harvard and mit can use their considerable resources for the greater good, then I’ve no quarrel with it.
joel hanes
@JPL:
It is a violation of applicable law for hospitals not to report their numbers to the CDC.
catclub
me neither. of course, I am more put out that a 2GB stick is still $2, rather than 50 cents. That is all I ever want.
for the boot disk it make sense to get a bigger one.
catclub
@mali muso: yeah, luckily i did not stick my foot too much in that oversight.
Patricia Kayden
These people ain’t right.
Elizabelle
@Kay: Yeah. Ghislaine Maxwell has millions at her disposal and a rotating staff of retired British military types to help her avoid capture. And three passports, one to France which would not extradite?
No surprise. I do hope it turns out she has [access to] the rumored Epstein tapes. The truth must come out. Justice must be done. They have to keep her alive, even with 24/7 surveillance.
gvg
@raven: Back at’cha. Actually I’ve sort of fallen out of the habit of following them for awhile, but I was afraid athletics would be blind.
I still think there will be maybe one week of games before college athletics give up. I’m guessing the AD thinks so too. It sounded like it was the whole conference thinking too.
Roger Moore
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Well, lots of chemists use IPA as shorthand for isopropyl alcohol, aka rubbing alcohol, which absolutely has been recommended for use against coronavirus.
joel hanes
@rikyrah:
Touching contaminated surfaces is apparently not the dominant mode of contagion — breathing in droplets or aerosolized virus particles exhaled by an infected person is the primary vector.
It’s tough to disinfect the air. Most “deep cleaning” is sort of like TSA security:
We must do something.
This is something.
Steeplejack
@catclub:
Yeah, the last time I bought them just to transport and back up files I ended up getting a handful of 32GB ones. They had smaller ones, but the difference in price was so small it almost felt like I would be paying them to give me less space.
gvg
@rikyrah: Great, it hasn’t been in stock anywhere since March unless I go inside maybe. Almost everything else i have found on line including Charmin and masks…..I’m almost out of the Lysol disinfecting spray. Now there will be a run.
Martin
I’ll take a crack. I’ve made decent money in the market, so I’ll assume at least a passable bit of insight into them.
The first thing to know about the market is that it’s a weighing machine, not a measuring machine. You kind of have to assume that there is a fixed amount of money in the market. Now, it does cycle out of the stock market and into bonds, things like gold, etc. but there’s a limit to how much can realistically do that. As such, it’s really just a question of where that money gets allocated, with each potential option being considered for risk, etc.
On top of that we have a lot of constrained money. If you have a mutual fund, that fund has certain rules about where it can and can’t invest. There are funds that are required to hold x% of assets in the dow, or in the S&P500, or if you have an index fund, it needs to do that with all of the funds. So there’s a certain amount of forced investment.
I think there are two dynamics at work here:
You’re seeing additional flights to safety (shifting of dollars from riskier companies to safer ones) with Apple being a good example. They have 4 things working for them right now:
So, money is therefore flowing to firms that benefit from this situation. Amazon, tech, etc. Plus any company that is rising to the challenge. What’s more these tend to be large cap firms so they are lifting the Dow, S&P 500. Almost all of the long-term pain from this will be felt in some key industries – airlines, theatre chains, etc. and from small businesses too big to trade shares in – your local restaurants, etc.
That’s not a good state of things, but it does favor the market.
dmsilev
@catclub: Harvard and MIT were just the fastest universities to file suit, and hundreds of schools signed amicus briefs supporting them.
Also, a large chunk of international students are graduate research students. They generally don’t directly pay tuition, but instead are supported through teaching and research fellowships. True at Giant State Univ, true at Harvard.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
1918 was also a weird year because lots of stuff got shut down for WWI. I know major league baseball was not interrupted for the pandemic, but it was shut down early by the “work or fight” order. Unlike WWII, when Roosevelt intervened to allow entertainment to remain open for morale reasons, they decided sports were non-essential. I don’t know if something similar happened for college sports, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
joel hanes
@Brachiator:
I’m living for the day when a member of the White House Press Corpse poses the followup:
“Mr. President, that’s a lie.”
and walks out.
You know if one reporter does it, they’ll think she’s really fake, and ban her.
And if two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’re both communists and they won’t ever talk to either of them again.
And if three people do it! Can you imagine three people walkin’ in, saying “Mr. President, everyone knows your a liar, and that’s another lie” and walkin’ out? They may think it’s an Organization!
Marcopolo
@catclub: Generally speaking, the foreign students this order would have affected pay full tuition at their universities. Which is why a lot of folks I know in higher ed thought it was done in the first place. Universities need that full tuition for balancing their budgets (though I can’t imagine any U having a balanced budget for 2020 or maybe 2021 at this point), and the Trump administration saw that as leverage to force them to start up on campus in person classes again.
Just Chuck
@Patricia Kayden: Rush has a Modest Proposal, eh?
MisterForkbeard
@Patricia Kayden: I seem to remember that turning to cannibalism was considered to be both horrible AND a result of incredibly bad planning and fucking around when they should have been preparing food or working to better their situation.
Yay, conservatives. Definitely into celebrating our past.
HumboldtBlue
@Martin:
You should have seen me shamelessly stanning on Roy Edroso after we had a Twitter exchange.
Jay
Once Salk’s polio vaccine was proven in 1955, the government approved it within hours.
Church bells rang! A nation rejoiced!
But thanks to problems with manufacturing and distribution, politics, racism and fraud, it wasn’t fully eradicated until 1979.
24 years later. – Bill Weir, CNN tweet
Elizabelle
@Patricia Kayden: Says a man who has to pay or marry people to touch him. Who knows he is wholly inedible, and if so, indigestible.
I think even Hannibal Lechter would retch.
HumboldtBlue
@Roger Moore:
College sports, particularly football were drastically different during the war years and it led to some rather odd and interesting outcomes.
This 1971 Sports Illustrated article sheds some light on that era.
Drdavechemist
@joel hanes: …and somewhere, Arlo Guthrie (who is still alive-had to check to be sure) is smiling.
Elizabelle
LOL. Tweet from Angry Black Lady:
trollhattan
@Steeplejack:
I saw my first 1TB SD card. My mind, it was boggled. Just V30 class and I don’t wanna know how much a V90 edition will go for, but they predictably follow Moore’s law to affordability so in a couple years I, too, shall have infinite image storage in my cameras.
gvg
@Jess: Sorry, he’s been asked about it more than once and it appears he really does think the testing causes the cases. Don’t ask me to explain him, I am sane and want to stay that way.
I think the reporters thought it was just a misunderstanding and expected him to clear that up. It’s hard to get used to someone who is really delusional even after some experience with him.
Orange is the New Red
Just looked on Amazon. $50 for 2 Lysol spray cans of disinfectant. Let the price gouging begin!
Martin
@Roger Moore: And not coincidentally tastes like a lot of IPAs.
IPAs are the spiced pumpkin of alcohol. I will fight anyone on that.
Marcopolo
@Patricia Kayden:
So if you listen to the clip, about 2 1/2 minutes, in addition to referencing the Donner party–“people in the olden days had shit happen to them but they just sucked it up” (which is a paraphrasing of his words), Limbaugh also mentions the 1918 flu pandemic, stating that it just happened, no one did anything, people just dealt with it so why are we all such whiny bitches. This is obviously false: How two US cities responded to the 1918 flu pandemic very differently — and what we can learn from those mistakes.
It’s our own version of 1984 with a little bit of Make Room, Make Room! added in with Limbaugh’s Donner Party comments.
The comments to this tweet posting of it are very funny if you want a laugh or two:
Robert Sneddon
There is a Facebook/Microsoft “who wants to be a billionaire” business opportunity going begging in the US right now — reliable affordable small-office/home-office internet connection. Note that word “reliable”, it’s not the cable company’s idea of a phone support system that takes an hour to navigate by pushing buttons but a business service-level agreement (SLA) of at least three-nines (99.9%) uptime, duplicated backup connections, fallover-capable hardware, engineers on a four-hour callout 24/365. Provide that sort of service for fifty million customers at a reasonable price and you can’t help yourself from becoming rich.
With that sort of trustworthy data infrastructure the need for office real estate would plummet, man-years spent commuting back and forth would be returned to everyone, cats and dogs living together…
Wumpus
AngryBlackLady shouldn’t feel too good about it. Weiss and Sullivan both quit, and almost surely because someone offered them a whole bunch more money.
Place your bet on some mysterious vortex of dark money setting up a new website to produce propaganda for a post-Trump world, and bringing on Weiss and Sullivan as opening-day attractions.
trollhattan
@Martin:
More for us!
Marcopolo
@Martin: Good reply. As a person who is in the market I am aware of most of what you’ve written. It’s just amazing to me the seeming now complete disconnect (with the understanding it was only ever loosely related) between the markets & the actual health of the US economy & US citizenry.
Martin
@Marcopolo: What’s more, most of those students are graduate level, not undergraduate, and they are an important labor force for undergraduate teaching.
The argument coming out of the large research universities was ‘we will fail on most of our federal grants if you send all of our graduate students home’.
catclub
my thought was a smarter trump admin would put pressure on schools to open by making guaranteed student loans dependent on the school opening up for F2F learning. Or just threatening to bog down the administration of them. But the trump admin wants to attack foreigners as well, not just universities.
Baud
@Patricia Kayden:
“had to” or “wanted to because ‘yum'”?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Marcopolo:
Limbaugh’s chauffeur calls the household staff when the car transporting the racist heffalump is fifteen minutes away, so that they can light the scented candles.
Marcopolo
@Baud: Long pig, if you know what I’m saying. And supposedly everything is better with bacon.
artem1s
@Marcopolo:
they can order all they want, but that’s never going to happen.
Jay
catclub
Ma Bell could do that with phones in the old days, but their investment in high quality equipment and people was spread over decades of service. I think that would be mucho expensive. probably cheaper to just have three different cheap services and reduce the likelihood they all fail simultaneously. ma bell also did not generate many billionaires.
Marcopolo
@Martin: Yeah, we’ve hashed this out on the blog many times before but the entire Trump administration approach to immigration is just so bad. Hell, we are in the middle of a pandemic and what percentage of our health care providers are immigrants?
Martin
@Robert Sneddon: That’s what WeWork and other coworking spaces do. And attorneys, etc, have had that kind of gig going on for years.
But the real shift here has been the democratization of tech. Most people have high speed internet, wireless, mobile phone. Employer picks up the tab for the computer, and subsidizes the other stuff. Here in CA the cost of land/construction is so high it’s unviable for a lot of things. Do I spend $1M-$1.5M building and outfitting a new 40 seat computer lab, or do we just make our spaces flexible enough that students can bring their own laptops? We do the latter now – it winds up being cheaper for the student in the long run.
The problem are the institutions that didn’t get around to investing in things like robust VPNs infrastructure, making that a dependency of their other security plans, etc. But I log into my work VPN, and it’s like I’m there other than the commute and face-to-face. I’d been building my tools into the campus infrastructure for a decade, so everything worked flawlessly from home.
I think the real-estate investment is the expense that breaks it. Better remote work tools for meeting, information sharing, etc. look like the new market. Slack, for example.
Marcopolo
@artem1s:
Apparently there is a law to follow regarding this type of reporting:
Of course, it’s the Trump administration so its no surprise they are ignorant (willfully or otherwise) about said reporting policy. Good thing we are learning about it
well aheadjust as it is supposed to be going into effect.Martin
@Marcopolo: Yeah, CDC started to push back and speak independently of Trump. Now they’re going to get gutted by the WH.
Jay
jl
Wait, what? That was a good column, had very useful history I did not know, good for counterarguments to nonsense my Trumpster kin spout. I guess imminent threat to life and limb does concentrate attention. Hope he keeps it up after the crisis has past, and for that matter, as we are forced on our continuing death march through the mess.
If we could muster the effort of more than a dozen other countries, many poorer than we are, we could get most of the problem solved, at least enough to have a good chance to surviving flu season without disaster, by middle of October.
One good sign for election might be the increasingly desperate and lunatic arguments from the wingnuts. Rush Limbaugh is arguing that the Trumpster approach to ‘adapting’ to the epidemic shares the old fashioned virtues of American pioneers resorting to cannibalism when stranded out in the boondocks.
It occurred to me that simply wearing a mask, or even just wrapping a folded bandanna around your face, is also adapting to the epidemic. And, has the advantage of not requiring a person to gnaw off the arms of their neighbors (not that there is anything wrong with that! according to the traditional US values the wingnuts celebrate).
Dan B
@dmsilev: It is good news that ICE backed down but, others may have already posted this, there is already considerable damage. What student watching this unfold hadn’t already researched options outside the US? What parent hadn’t wondered if their investment might be worthless?
ICE and CBP want to keep LGBTQ asylum seekers out no matter how many die as a result. The rules are capricious when they’re not horrifyingly heartless. What is their goal with international students? It seems the same: chaos and cruelty.
Jay
Marcopolo
I was raised an Ethical Humanist (yes, I went to an Ethical Society on Sundays as a kid), so I am not in the habit of praying. That being said, who wants to join me in praying for a hurricane to pay a visit to the FL panhandle the fourth week of August?
joel hanes
@Wumpus:
some mysterious vortex of dark money setting up a new website to produce propaganda
Like Conservapedia ?
Martin
@Marcopolo: Foreign students are a US export. Instead of sending the goods to China, we bring the chinese population here, where they pay local rent, buy local food, employ local faculty. That’s a transference of $50K-$100K per student per year from the foreign market to the US market. With a million students annually coming here and about ⅓ that many US student studying abroad, that’s a net $35B-$70B per year benefit to the trade deficit.
That’s equivalent to the entire US tourism industry net from foreign tourists.
joel hanes
@Marcopolo:
Read up on kuru
Roger Moore
@HumboldtBlue:
I knew about some of the wackiness during WWII. My alma mater, Caltech, had it’s only great football success during the war. That was because the entire Stanford football team transferred to take advantage of Caltech’s Navy V12 program, which Stanford did not offer. But WWI was a different matter. They were crazier about the whole business and shut down lots of things, apparently including college athletic programs, as part of the war effort.
Martin
@Marcopolo: The market has virtually no relationship with the underlying economy. In many ways, it even has an inverse relationship as you can earn your fortune operating prisons.
HumboldtBlue
@Roger Moore:
I didn’t know Cal Tech had a team in those days.
And sorry, I thought you were referrinbg to the second war to end all wars not the first.
Marcopolo
@joel hanes: Ah, those New Guinea cannibals. It only took one contaminated brain to ruin the party for everyone. There’s probably a lesson there if you’re looking for one.
HumboldtBlue
@Marcopolo:
One of the Floridians I believe pointed out in a thread from about a week ago that Jacksonville does not suffer from hurricanes because of the very shallow ocean water off the coast.
But some tropical storm rainfall would be welcome.
jl
@Dan B: True, but some good news is another example that when confronted (bigly and strongly) the Trumpsters often fold, almost immediately, without much of a fight. Probably part cowardice, often their announcements are just bluffs, and fact that anything that suggest that they will have to do any hard work to get anything done makes them drop the whole idea.
As another example, heard on news that they are backing off their idea to use National Guard to gather health stats from hospitals. I do note however, that the National Guard would be very good to help health care providers with covid-19 medical logistics, as General Honore has often pointed out. But, Trumpsters would never do anything that sensible.
MisterForkbeard
@HumboldtBlue: Right. They’ll probably only have the metaphorical covid hurricane instead.
joel hanes
Ruth Bader Ginsburg back in the hospital, suspected infection.
This is the worst timeline.
Barbara
@Marcopolo: The comments are outstanding.
debbie
@rikyrah:
Well, forget about ever seeing either of those on store shelves.
Florida Frog
@Marcopolo: why the panhandle? JAX is on the Atlantic coast. Did the RNC move the convention again?
jl
@debbie: Every clinician I talk with at work says soap and hot water for 20 seconds better than anything else, for your hands, for washing down your kitchen counter.
Edit: they say the virus protects itself with a layer of fat, and whatever dissolves that the quickest and most thoroughly is the best, so sudsy soap and hot water. I like that advice since always been lots of bar and dish soap on the shelves, at least in my area.
Annie
@catclub:
As of a couple of years ago, when a colleague’s child was a high school senior, Harvard was waiving all tuition for an admitted student whose parents’ gross income was less than $100K per year. No loans needed. My coworker’s kid did not get in, but if they had, no tuition.
Ken
I am worried about high school football, especially in Texas – the frequent comparison to a religion is not exaggeration. I can see them going on with it long after the pure insanity has become obvious.
Martin
Ok, this might be a bit of progress.
Are we able to start channeling our police’s murderous instincts into killing people who refuse to wear masks? This feels like a win-win-win.
debbie
Seriously, WTF?
Martin
@NotMax: USB-C is becoming the norm. That form factor is getting less popular.
Martin
@debbie: Won’t someone think of the white people?
debbie
@Martin:
To quote a drunken John Wayne,”it’s getting to be rigoddamndiculous.”
catclub
@Annie: I wonder if they do that for overseas students. Documentation
(that one (or ones parent) is not a gazillionaire) could be trickier.
actually i thought the income limit was under $180k annual income = no tuition.
and given the size of the harvard endowment, they are still being stingy.
catclub
@jl: 20 seconds of handwashing is like… longer than forever.
FlyingToaster
@jl:
Our Governor activated the Guard during the surge in COVID-19 cases back in April. They staffed the two overflow hospitals (Worcester and Boston), ran pop-up testing stations, transported patients from the main hospitals to those overflow sites, and were just incredible.
Trump wouldn’t activate them to “help”. WASF.
Ivan X
@Martin: Ok, can I just take this moment to again express, as I am wont to do every few months, how much I appreciate your insights, across a whole range of subjects, in your comments here. You should be a front pager.
BruceFromOhio
I’m not ashamed to be fully on board with this scenario.
Ivan X
@Martin: But until it is the norm who knows how many years from now, I will still have a bag full of adapters. And even though it’s obviously a worthwhile step forward, it has also created the exciting new world in which cables look identical, but do different things. USB 2? USB 3? PD? DisplayPort? Thunderbolt 3? Some combination but not all of the above? Hey-o!
Jinchi
@debbie: “So are White people”
Well as long as police are killing everyone equally…….
Steeplejack
@jl:
Yes on the washing with soap and hot water!
My brother, a board-certified ophthalmologist who works at a big HMO, did a massive amount of readng at the start of the crisis and has kept up to date on the research. He put in his papers to retire next April, and he has said, “I’m not doing this for 35 years and then get taken out on the last lap.”
His conclusion was that the single biggest risk factor, to which everything else is a distant second, is the need to protect your wet tissues: eyes, nose, mouth (nether regions if they come into play, so to speak). Surfaces are dangerous mainly because we touch them and then touch one of our vulnerable places. Keep your hands clean! Masks and social distancing are also important to protect against airborne dispersal from infected people reaching our wet tissues.
His work time has been divided up so that he now goes to the clinic only a few days a week. He is still seeing some patients live. He does around 10-12 cataract surgeries a week and sees people with serious problems. A lot of elective procedures have been delayed, and he is doing a lot of video appointments from home (his and the patients’). Reduces everyone’s exposure. And at times the HMO has required the doctors to burn vacation and sick days.
jl
@FlyingToaster: I liked the interview where Honore explained that it is essential in complex emergencies, to calculate supply chain needs in terms of ‘days of supply’ for packages of critical items, and how National Guard logistics troops are experts at that. Interesting. I learned a lot from it.
Another Scott
@Marcopolo:
Grrr… on the tweet.
Everyone here knows that the problem isn’t “the federal government”, it’s Moscow Mitch and Donnie and their enablers.
Our leaders aren’t a bunch of gormless Oompa-Loompas grown in a vat somewhere. There are differences between the parties, between the leaders, and between their policies. It’s laziness and malpractice to lump them all together.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Patricia Kayden: I guess old Rush never read or saw “The Lottery” in school.
“No, no! Not ME!!11″
It’s always someone else that should suffer so that he can maintain his exalted status. Funny how that works…
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Martin: OTOH, Apple paid Samsung close to $1B for not meeting display order targets.
Cheers,
Scott.
(“Who agrees that leaving money in the market alone is probably the best course, especially given the upcoming change in administrations.”)
Dan B
@jl: Also true. But this leads to attacking the weakest, kids in cages and LGBTQ asylum seekers have less support. If we could get the Ted Olson’s type pushback it would be nice. Maybe Peter Cook and some other billionaires could pony up.
Brachiator
@Baud:
RE: like pioneers who “had to turn to cannibalism”
The look in her eyes said she wanted to eat me up. Then she pulled out a fork…
Dan B
@Jinchi: I’m not certain of the numbers but 54% of police killings were of POC. Black people were 3.5 times as likely to be killed by police as white people. So, not close.
TerryC
@download my app in the app store mistermix: I got Sullivan to change his mind about bicycle helmets. One of my finer argumentative outcomes.
Fair Economist
@Marcopolo:
Fortunately for our ethical status, since they’re now planning to hold much of the convention outside, a tropical storm will do nicely and we don’t have to wish for the extra damage and loss of lives a hurricane will bring.
(Also, Jacksonville and not the Panhandle, as others have mentioned.)
Dan B
@Brachiator: One of the replies to Rush’s adapt to cannibalism was, “I’m not going to a BBQ at his place.”
J R in WV
@download my app in the app store mistermix:
You left out the all important factors of religio-racial based human sacrifices!!! Sounds like that is of primary importance, esp. to the young woman, Bari, late of the NY Times, perhaps less so to Mr Sullivan. Isn’t he more concerned about Irish babies?
J R in WV
@Martin:
Best snark of the day, so far. Maybe, according to the wife, for the week!!!
Another Scott
High unemployment? FTFNYT is on the case.
Dean Baker at CEPR:
The FTFNYT writers really shouldn’t be so lazy in their writing on the topics they cover. Instead, they always punch down.
Grr…
Cheers,
Scott.
LongHairedWeirdo
To be excruciatingly fair, he *also* said it was fair for Donald Trump (President of the USA, and in charge of being aware of, and protecting America from, foreign threats) to slam Nancy Pelosi (whose job duties do not include being the ultimate boss of the CDC, NIH, or any other such agency) for “*ALSO* being wrong about the pandemic”.
For the exceptionally slow, Pelosi was not the one who was supposed to track Covid-19’s arrival, or risks to America; Trump was; therefore, she is not to blame for being unaware of how dangers things were, because Trump was busy covering up the risks (because, hey, how could *that* go wrong?)
Also, for the stupid, and/or Republican, “foreign threat” means “not originating in the US”. Believe it or not, viruses do not have, or honor, passports. (And as a side note: even if China was guilty of hiding the dangers, why did so many other nations, with competent leadership, do so much better? )
Again for the Republican (I doubt anyone this stupid by nature can read…), that’s also why Trump’s travel ban didn’t do much, if anything. Anyone could get infected by a person who’d been to China, and his ban would have let them in to the US. I suppose we could have tested – HA HA HA, like Trump made sure we had a working test!
And yes, I know, people keep giving Trump his participation trophy, “his travel ban may have bought some time”. I’ll give him that participation trophy, sure, but it doesn’t matter if you buy time if you spend that time insisting it’ll all go away, no problem, please, please, please, don’t panic the stock market by looking at “reality” or “facts”, or worst yet, “unassailable truths”.
So Cillizza’s still stupid, and letting himself get played by idiotic opinions. But he might be learning that you can’t trust anything a Republican says to the press, since they’re perfectly okay with lying to reporters.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Another Scott: Paul Krugman pointed out that, from an economist’s standpoint, the argument is bogus, and, in fact, stone cold stupid.
It’s important to remember what a “shortage” is in economics. If there’s a shortage of vanilla beans, then there are a lot of people who can’t get them, at *any* price. If you can buy them, if you’re willing to spend enough on them, there’s no “shortage”. This example was taken from the textbook he co-wrote; he noted that when such a ‘shortage’ did occur, a lot of people moved to an artificial vanilla flavor (vanillin), while others paid the premium – which is precisely what economics predicts.
So: if there’s a shortage of skills, look for jobs offering higher and higher wages for those skills. You ain’t seeing the price getting bid up? Then there is no shortage; you’re probably just hearing from whiny businesspeople. “I can’t hire someone to do X for roughly the wages they’d get managing a McDonald’s!” means the speaker has a lousy business plan, or won’t make necessary expenditures to run their business more efficiently.
A PPE shortage could easily occur – but it’s not just when you’re paying $5 for a mask that normally costs $0.50; it’s when producers are shipping directly to customers, and have no excess capacity, and when customers won’t give up their PPE to sell for $7.50, or even $10 a mask, because, unlike Ferengi, they value something more than profit.
(Not suggesting Ferengi value their own hides less than profit – but the rules of acquisition seem to suggest that they have less worry about other people’s….)
joel hanes
@catclub:
20 seconds of handwashing
Sing two choruses of this between lathering and rinsing
[to the tune of Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer]
Novel coronavirus
Has a lipid* outer shell
Washing your hands correctly
Sends it straight to virus hell
—
* “lipid” is biochem-talk for “grease”
Marcopolo
@Fair Economist: Dunno why I wrote panhandle. Think my brain farted & I accidentally translocated Jacksonville with Pensacola.
But thanks to all for the corrections :).
Another Scott
@LongHairedWeirdo: +1
Well said. Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
LongHairedWeirdo
@joel hanes: Nice song! And, yes, the lipid shell means soap and water is stone cold death to it. For the bloodthirsty among us, I’ll forget to mention that viruses don’t bleed.
(Technically, people don’t tend to talk about *killing* a virus, because they’re not really alive; they’ll talk about “deactivating” it, so it can’t infect a cell, and hence, can’t reproduce, and is now just a few chemical compounds.)
LongHairedWeirdo
Earlier, I mentioned Cillizza is still an idiot; it’s not just him.
From CNN, though not from Cillizza:
“Trump could criticize her for not taking the virus seriously enough at the time” = “Trump could say ‘you f-cked up; you trusted me!'”
And, I do have to confess, trusting Trump, about *anything*, should make a person feel stupid. Still, the fact remains, Trump was the one who had the positive responsibility to sound the alarm, and Pelosi was just another victim of his attempts to hide the danger to protect his reelection chances.
How’s that working out for you Donny Boy? How’s it feel to know that Donny *OSMOND* will probably be remembered with greater respect than you? (Osmond *can* sing, after all, and doesn’t look like an orange toad with frayed cotton balls glued to his head.)
ballerat
Cillizza is a bad faith actor. This proves it. He can do it. He knows better. He’s always known better.
It’s not a stupid person suddenly getting smart. It’s a smart person who stopped pretending to be stupid.
ballerat
@Martin: Great analogy. Makes total sense.
NS
Maybe he has an editor willing to do their job now instead of being content with Cillizza’s shallow analysis so long as it got a sufficient number of page views.
Too many reporters out there never learned history or economics worth a damn and it shows. Applying higher standards should increase the knowledge base in the profession over time, but applying higher standards is expensive unless self-imposed, which requires reflection and humility, traits not often cultivated in today’s oppositional culture.