Vicky and her husband Joe were such malevolent forces in DC for decades.
Oh I know justice never comes for elites, but at least they can squirm and have some legal bills.
Wednesday, May 05, 2021
Toensing
Don't see any new info about Victoria Toensing, who, along with Rudes, had a search warrant against her.
All Crime All The Time
I try to balance legitimate interest in PROSECUTING ALL THE CRIMES with legitimate interest in ignoring everything else related to the last guy.
"We" really don't have to obsess about Palin II.
Rudes
Apparently Rudy is having a hard time getting paid.
This is a shocking development that nobody could have predicted. Writers really outdid themselves with this twist! All the Pulitzers, Oscars, Emmys, for that one.
Tuesday, May 04, 2021
Ignoring The Last Guy
It really isn't hard to do.
Stories about Rudy in shackles can't be ignored, however.
Good Thing She Isn't Fed Chair
Yellen's of a generation of economists raised on the idea that Teh Markets demand that you threaten to kill every first born child if inflation rises above 2% in order to prevent it from happening.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen conceded Tuesday that interest rates may have to rise to keep a lid on the burgeoning growth of the U.S. economy brought on in part by trillions of dollars in government stimulus spending.She started raising rates too early last decade, preventing us from having the horrible fate of full employment, which we finally just about reached under the last guy when, well, you know.“It may be that interest rates will have to rise somewhat to make sure that our economy doesn’t overheat,” Yellen said during an economic seminar presented by The Atlantic. “Even though the additional spending is relatively small relative to the size of the economy, it could cause some very modest increases in interest rates.”
Hopefully Powell has other ideas.
Your Moment of Zen
I made one of those academic paper memes for a... certain type of columnist pic.twitter.com/GgVGeeAGVg
— Ames Grawert (@AmesCG) May 3, 2021
Just Vote
Returning to one of my pet issues from a long time ago, there's a problem with membership organizations that don't ask anything from their members except to give money or vote.
The Democratic Party isn't meaningfully a membership organization at any level (The DCCC calls House Reps its members, not you).
Most people don't want to do more than that, of course, and that's fine. Some people do, and many more want to feel like they could.
A triumph of the Obama campaign was that it gave a lot of people the illusion of involvement, which provided a sense of being involved.
And then they shut it down.
I probably do a version of this post every election cycle, at least, but after election day all organization is shut down, and then they try to crank it back up again the Labor Day before the next election.
This is not the best way to do things.
How Do We Reach The People We're Least Likely To Reach
Aim at vaccinating everyone, but "we" don't have to be obsessed with Trumpkin anti-vaxxers instead of just people who probably aren't being reached through current practices, but who would be more than willing to get a shot. We know plenty of high minority areas aren't being reached, and while vaccine hesitation might play some role there, too, as everywhere, it isn't the Trumpkin "refusing the vax to own the libs" bullshit.I could easily see some future vax promo where you show up at a gun range and get a free hour at a range stall in exchange for being vaxxed.
— Sam Stein (@samstein) May 3, 2021
Everything doesn't have to be directed at imagined Real Americans. Certainly not this.
Monday, May 03, 2021
A Victory
They won't stop with this bullshit, but good to slow it.
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Conservative Republican legislators in Kansas failed Monday to override Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of a proposed ban on transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s school sports.
We Tortured The Shit Out Of Some Folks
Must read from Spencer
A good two paragraph distillation of the monstrous madness of the time.
Once Abu Zubaydah was said to be one of the most important al Qaeda captives of all. An infamous August 2002 memo from the Justice Department, instrumental to authorizing the CIA to torture him—and after him, at least 118 others—called him the “third or fourth man in al Qaeda.” But there were doubts inside the CIA at the outset. According to the landmark Senate torture report, on Aug. 16, 2006 the agency formally concluded that Abu Zubaydah “was not a member of al Qaeda.”I hold grudges because that period showed me how many of our elites are just fucking monsters. Still mad.Instead of freeing him, the U.S. brought Abu Zubaydah to Guantanamo Bay the following month, where he became the forgotten man he currently is. Some politicians, like Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), a former CIA analyst and Pentagon official, have recently declared that the 9/11 era is “over.” But Abu Zubaydah’s ongoing and entirely uncontroversial confinement proves the opposite. He is one of 40 men, few of them charged with any crime even before a dysfunctional military tribunal, who languish at Guantanamo Bay. Abu Zubaydah’s captivity has influenced every one of them.
Couldn't we at least subject them to psychological torture, like tapes of dying rabbits or high-decibel rap? (The military has done that in Panama and elsewhere.) How about truth serum, administered with a mandatory IV? Or deportation to Saudi Arabia, land of beheadings? (As the frustrated FBI has been threatening.) Some people still argue that we needn't rethink any of our old assumptions about law enforcement, but they're hopelessly "Sept. 10"--living in a country that no longer exists.One sign of how much things have changed is the reaction to the antiterrorism bill, which cleared the Senate last week by a vote of 98-1. While the ACLU felt obliged to quibble with a provision or two, the opposition was tepid, even from staunch civil libertarians. That great quote from the late Chief Justice Robert Jackson--"The Constitution is not a suicide pact"--is getting a good workout lately. "This was incomparably more sober and sensible than what some of our revered presidents did," says Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment lawyer, referring to the severe restrictions on liberty imposed during the Civil War and World War I.
Ah, Well, Nevertheless
Chase everybody who wants one. Not the people in the Ohio Diner set in the NYT building.
As a result, experts now calculate the herd immunity threshold to be at least 80 percent. If even more contagious variants develop, or if scientists find that immunized people can still transmit the virus, the calculation will have to be revised upward again."Herd immunity" was generally oversold and misunderstood, and similarly this piece conveys the impression the "not herd immunity" is necessarily super bad, but... get those vaccines in arms!!!Polls show that about 30 percent of the U.S. population is still reluctant to be vaccinated. That number is expected to improve but probably not enough. “It is theoretically possible that we could get to about 90 percent vaccination coverage, but not super likely, I would say,” said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
I am not a public health expert and I don't play one on this blog, but I do think that because the US never had anything resembling a uniform "lockdown," there still isn't an appreciation of just how much locking down mattered (and because the US didn't do it, how Covid cases are still really high!).
Other countries haven't had the greatest track records, either, but the pattern is much easier to see: lock down and cases fall, remove lockdown and cases rise, wait too long and the curve shoots up fast.
When "everyone" but not everyone is vaccinated, there will be zero public restrictions or social restraints. And people will still be getting sick and dying. Probably more than a few. Maybe just "bad flu season" but... that's not so good!
People point to the UK's fast first dose vaccination, but there hasn't been indoor dining in most of the country since November, and in none of it since around Xmas (even now).
Were We Awake During The Campaign
There are many erroneous (and contradictory if you remember yesterday) ways that American politics is covered, and one is that it is often asserted that to win elections, Democrats have to "campaign from the center," and that then, because they are Democrats, they will govern more from The Left.
But this isn't what actually happens and during campaigns "everyone" acknowledges it. It's more the opposite! Certainly in 2008 and 2016, savvy pundits would assert, where people could hear them, that Obama and Clinton were very likely to break their promises to "The Left" and not do those things that they were campaigning on. And this was after the primary was over.
They're just lying, they would say! As if this was a good thing! Vote for the liar!
At "best" you can see this as an attempt to send different messages to different audiences. Have the campaign lie to some voters, and have savvy pundits reassure the people who matter that they are full of shit. (I'm not saying this is what was happening, I just think pundits like to pretend candidates are secretly catering to them).
Then when the new president tries to do anything at all lefty, even the stuff they explicitly campaigned on, it gets reported as some sort of sneaky betrayal of Real Americans who thought they were voting for The Moderate.
But the campaign wasn't all that long ago! I assume reporters wrote about it! Biden was marked as the "moderate" but that isn't how he ultimately ran the presidential campaign, aside from stylistically. The policies he ran on were pretty lefty. Maybe it was "savvy" to think he was full of shit, but that doesn't mean he didn't do it.
In the polls taken in the months leading up to the 2020 election, his ideological score averaged a 69. Americans see Biden as the same ideologically now as they did in the lead up to the election.That's about voter perception, not necessarily reality, but the reality is that Biden is going to more break promises he made "to the left" than he's going to implement communism, as generally happens. Not that he campaigned as Mitt Romney but is governing instead as Bernie, which is entirely made up.Biden is best described as somewhat liberal in Americans' eyes.
Chris Christie Says Biden's Governing as a 'Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren Way-Out Socialist Liberal' https://t.co/PmVqouQky9
— Mediaite (@Mediaite) May 2, 2021
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