Sunday, April 05, 2020

Sunday 'Ratings to Die For' Funnies












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Friday, April 03, 2020

Race for the White House Update: Reality endorses Bernie, Blue MAGATs hide Biden



Tom Perez, CNN, and MSNBC have fashioned an alternate reality, however.

Let's start here.

The Democratic National Committee on Thursday, April 2 opted to push back the start of the national convention in Milwaukee from July 13 to August 17 amid increasing time constraints, not to mention public health issues, on the party over the coronavirus pandemic.

Now the Democratic convention will begin just a week before the Republican National Convention in Charlotte. That reverts the convention timing to the model that has been in place since the 2008 cycle.  2020 was to be a break in that one-week-apart model and a return to the month-apart model for national convention timing that had dominated the post-reform era. However, the coronavirus has changed those plans.

The five-week delay in the convention is consistent with the movement of primaries that has occurred on the state level in the wake of the outbreak. Among the states that have shifted delegate selection events back, they have moved on average almost 38 days, a little more than five weeks. The nearly equivalent move by the national convention will allow those states and others stuck between a rock and a hard place in completing their delegate selection in a timely and efficient manner ahead of the new convention's commencement.

What this leaves unanswered is how the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee will handle states that have moved beyond the June 9 deadline by which states are to have held their primaries and caucuses under DNC rules. The rules call for a 50 percent reduction in a state's delegation as a penalty. But the convention move signals even more that the party is more likely than not to grant some latitude to state parties on this front.

The Texas Democratic Party had previously said it would hold its state convention virtually.  Also prior to the DNC's announcement, New York's governor moved his state's primary to June 23rd, understanding the risk of loss of delegates.

Two things worth mentioning about the Empire State:

-- The polling is pretty stale.

-- "Loss of delegates" does not seem to apply to superdelegates.

With regard to next week's Wisconsin primary:

Ten of the 11 states with primary elections scheduled in April have postponed them. Wisconsin is going forward with its April 7 primary election after a federal judge declined to postpone it, saying it is not the “job of a federal district judge to act as a super health department for the state.” U.S. District Judge William Conley scolded attorneys representing the Republican-controlled General Assembly that it should have postponed the elections, saying that would have avoided what may be “a bad decision from the perspective of public health, and it could be excruciatingly bad.”

The Cheese Staters going to the polls next Tuesday is what Joe Biden wants; he's building a big lead in the late polling, just as he did exactly a month ago following the Great Obama Intervention and Centrist Consolidation.

You might recall he and his campaign made this same request of Floridians, who are now among the worst sufferers of the contagion.


Yes, the Republican governor of the Sunshine State might be a bigger idiot than Greg Abbott, refusing to close the beaches and having dawdled about a stay-at-home order.  There was no good reason for Biden to join him, just as there isn't one for him to stand with Wisconsin Republicans gaming the system and screwing over their electorate.

How bad is Wisconsin's vote going to be?  This bad.

Wisconsin is planning to hold an election next Tuesday, April 7, which will include the state’s Democratic presidential primary race and an election for a seat on the state Supreme Court. It plans to hold this election despite the fact that (Gov. Tony) Evers, a Democrat, issued a stay-at-home order a week ago to help slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

The state anticipated a huge shortage of poll workers prior to Evers’s decision to call up the National Guard. In Milwaukee, which typically has 180 polling places open on an election day, city officials expected that they would only have enough workers to keep 10 to 12 sites open. More than 100 of the state’s municipalities reported that they lacked enough regular poll workers to staff even one polling place.

Even with the National Guard working the polls, the state’s attorney general’s office predicts that “the assistance of the National Guard will not satisfy all of the current staffing needs.”

So what's clear is that Team Biden is hoping to throw a knockout punch to Bernie Sanders with the tally next week, whatever it may be.

CNN, MSNBC, and the NYT have been very helpful in this effort.




If all you do is watch teevee news, you wouldn't know any #MeToo controversy even exists.  You would know that the Cuomo brothers have their own reality show, and it apparently is a huge ratings hit.  Just like Trump's daily press briefings pep rallies.

(I haven't watched either one.  I just read the reviews.)


But we do know that Joe has promised women a couple of things -- black women specifically there in that second one -- and Jim Clyburn, widely regarded as Biden's lifesaver, could hold him to it.  We know that he has consulted Obama about his VP pick, and that he might "reportedly soon embrace key planks" of a progressive agenda.  This after Nancy Letourneau's solemn declaration that Biden is already much more progressive than 'one' would think.

I call malarkey.

I can agree that Biden's choice of running mate is very likely to follow him into the Oval Office sooner than later, and I believe he owes Black voters too much to not pick a Stacy Abrams or a Kamala Harris.  (Harris can probably name her price: veep or Justice.)  But he doesn't want to box himself in, which is why you see Amy Klobuchar and Gretchen Whitmer being floated.

The two Midwesterners shore up a geographically weak spot.  But they don't do shit for the South, which means that Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama is DOA.  And a white woman with a bad prosecutor's record might scratch open a scab with Af-Am voters.

Whoever he chooses, Biden is still going to lack the money, the voter enthusiasm, and the Bernie Caucus to defeat Trump.




And in spite of media false narratives, manufactured consent, and just plain obnoxious behavior by agents provocateur like Whoopi Goldberg and Alyssa Milano, Bernie has even more rationale to remain in the hunt in this Brave New COVID-19 World than he did BC.


While Biden went into seclusion for a week, and upon emerging stated that his home had finally been wired for high-speed Internet, Bernie was hosting teleconferences and raising money for coronavirus charities.  The feeble old lecher -- that's being gracious; to tell the truth Biden is both senile and a rapist -- still doesn't support Medicare for All after 10 million Americans have lost their jobs in the past week.  Which means they have no insurance coverage in the midst of a contagion.  And won't be able to afford COBRA, since many of them were living paycheck to paycheck anyway.  And since the stimulus checks are still weeks away, and completely inadequate to boot ...

The crisis is laying bare the brutality of an economy organized around production for the sake of profit and not human need. The logic that the free market knows best can be seen in the prioritization of affordability in health care as millions careen toward economic ruin. It is seen in the ways that states have been thrown into frantic competition with one another for personal protective equipment and ventilators -- the equipment goes to whichever state can pay the most. It can be seen in the still criminally slow and inefficient and inconsistent testing for the virus. It is found in the multi-billion-dollar bailout of the airline industry, alongside nickel-and-dime means tests to determine which people might be eligible to receive ridiculously inadequate public assistance.

The argument for resuming a viable social-welfare state is about not only attending to the immediate needs of tens of millions of people but also reëstablishing social connectivity, collective responsibility, and a sense of common purpose, if not common wealth. In an unrelenting and unemotional way, COVID-19 is demonstrating the vastness of our human connection and mutuality.

Our collectivity must be borne out in public policies that repair the friable welfare infrastructure that threatens to collapse beneath our social weight. A society that allows hundreds of thousands of home health-care workers to labor without health insurance, that keeps school buildings open so that black and brown children can eat and be sheltered, that allows millionaires to stow their wealth in empty apartments while homeless families navigate the streets, that threatens eviction and loan defaults while hundreds of millions are mandated to stay inside to suppress the virus, is bewildering in its incoherence and inhumanity.


-- Mike Bloomberg docked the final paychecks of the people he fired for the taxes he paid on the iPhones and Apple Macs he gave them.

That dude is a class act.

Posts in the works about election security (inspired by the HBO doc Kill Chain) and also the media meltdown as a result of COVID19, a topic Brad Friedman has beaten me to.
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