Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

No one could have predicted…

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

Shelter in place is one thing. Shelter in pants is quite another.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

This is all too absurd to be reality, right?

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Not all heroes wear capes.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn – Nancy Pelosi

It’s the corruption, stupid.

The willow is too close to the house.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Let there be snark.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

How do you get liars to care about the truth?

Yes we did.

We can agree to disagree, but i’m right.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Reality always wins in the end.

We still have time to mess this up!

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Late Night Open Thread: The Self-Protective Projections of GOP Arsonists

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At some level, Republicans know perfectly well that their guy lost the popular vote, just as he did in 2016. (And as Bush did in 2000, for that matter.) Rather than accept the fact that they’re in the minority (dreadful word!), they choose to insist that only rigging and cheating can win the White House. Ergo, when it’s plain a Democrat has more votes, well…

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The Coming Apocalypse

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Ed Yong, who has done really excellent work throughout the pandemic, has a tragic, terrifying piece up at The Atlantic just now, “The Hospitals Know What’s Coming.”

The story focuses on one institution, the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. It’s a major center of excellence, and as Yong reports was uniquely well-placed to deal with an epidemic:

After the SARS outbreak of 2003, its staff began specifically preparing for emerging infections. The center has the nation’s only federal quarantine facility and its largest biocontainment unit, which cared for airlifted Ebola patients in 2014. They had detailed pandemic plans. They ran drills. Ron Klain, who was President Obama’s “Ebola czar” and will be Joe Biden’s chief of staff in the White House, once told me that UNMC is “arguably the best in the country” at handling dangerous and unusual diseases.

But, as Yong meticulously reports, no amount of preparation can overcome a broad-based failure of basic public health measures.

In the past two weeks, the hospital had to convert an entire building into a COVID-19 tower, from the top down. It now has 10 COVID-19 units, each taking up an entire hospital floor. Three of the units provide intensive care to the very sickest people, several of whom die every day. One unit solely provides “comfort care” to COVID-19 patients who are certain to die. “We’ve never had to do anything like this,” Angela Hewlett, the infectious-disease specialist who directs the hospital’s COVID-19 team, told me. “We are on an absolutely catastrophic path.”

The Coming Apocalypse 1

 

That’s just from the top of the story. Read the whole thing–really. There are well-told human stories throughout, and my admiration for and sense of obligation to everyone working on the healthcare front lines of this have ratcheted way up from already high levels.

 

But the incidents and anecdotes are in service of the larger point, which is tragic and utterly infuriating. The conscious and willful failure of leadership that has persuaded so many people to ignore the risk has created the conditions for utter disaster. When–and it doesn’t appear to be an “if”–the disease exceeds hospital systems’ capacity the death toll will accelerate.
This will be bad everywhere, but worse in the places that are now hardest hit: the more rural states with fewer major hospitals to draw upon.
While cities like New York or Boston have many big hospitals that can care for advanced strokes, failing hearts that need mechanical support, and transplanted organs, “in this region, we’re it,” [critical care Dr. Dan] Johnson says. “We provide care that can’t be provided at any other hospital for a 200-mile radius. We’re going to need to decide if we continue to offer that care, or if we admit every single COVID-19 patient who comes through our door.”
Yong concludes his story with the same truth David Anderson keeps drumming into our thick skulls:
 It takes several days for infected people to show symptoms, a dozen more for newly diagnosed cases to wend their way to hospitals, and even more for the sickest of patients to die. These lags mean that the pandemic’s near-term future is always set, baked in by the choices of the past. It means that Ricketts is already too late to stop whatever UNMC will face in the coming weeks (but not too late to spare the hospital further grief next month). It means that some of the people who get infected over Thanksgiving will struggle to enter packed hospitals by the middle of December, and be in the ground by Christmas.
This is what makes this piece both a sober, meticulously reported and heart breaking story, and a call to action. It’s too late to deal with what’s heading at us, what will happen in the latter half of December and beyond remains subject to our choices, good or bad.
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On that happy note…open thread.
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Image: Gustave Doré, Jesus healing the sick, before 1883.

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Runnin’ Out of Fools

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There sure are a lot of Republican geriatrics contracting COVID.  Rick Scott is 67.  Giuliani’s son, not a senior citizen, was at the batshit crazy press conference in a small room with his dad, and the son is positive.   So, none of Trump’s crack legal team can be part of the effort to steal the election by pressuring Michigan legislators to do (exactly what? I dunno.)


Even with the level of care they’re going to get, odds are that one of these guys is going to either be debilitatingly sick or die.   And one of those guys could be a senator, in a state that might not be flippable in an ordinary election, but specials are, as we all know, special. Or, perhaps a couple of them are senators who will be in the ICU for months, thus denying McConnell a majority even if we don’t completely flip Georgia.

Anyway, thoughts and prayers.

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Stay Home (Open Thread)

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I know Rachel isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (that’s okay — more tea for me!), but this is a powerful message about what’s at stake when people decide they’re bored with the pandemic.

As a natural-born homebody and introvert, I suspect I’m having an easier time than most weathering the social distancing and lack of galivanting, and even I’m fed up after eight months, so I get the restlessness.  The approaching holidays are making it worse. So I needed to hear Maddow’s message, and maybe you do too. Open thread.

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Friday Morning Open Thread: President-Elected Biden Continues To Impress

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GOP Venality Open Thread: Emily Murphy & the Misery of the Mid-Level Death Cult Careerist

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All Ms. Murphy wanted to do was to slow-walk some paperwork, make sure her current employer didn’t badmouth her to potential hires while she was shopping her resume, now that her current gig’s got a hard deadline. She should’ve remembered: Everything Trump Touches Dies! — especially careers.

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