Monday, April 13, 2020

The Weekly 'Flatten the Curve' Wrangle *updates

The Texas Progressive Alliance remains committed to flattening the curve as it brings you the best of the left of, about, and from around the Great State over the past week.


Gerald Parker, who served in the Bush administration and is now at Texas A&M, says that we are just at stage two of this five-stage pandemic.


Phase Three would be (a second stage of) containment before we have a vaccine to deploy. I’m optimistic that in three to six months we’ll have (a better treatment for coronavirus symptoms), a therapeutic in our toolkit that can rescue those who become severely ill.

But it's going to be at least 18 months, I believe, before there's a vaccine available to deploy in any meaningful way.

While we wait for a vaccine, we’ll enter a second stage of containment. During this time, we need to restart our economy -- and we need to do it safely.

What's essential to go the next phase is greatly expanded lab testing -- both the antigen and the antibody lab testing -- so we can have a much better view of what's happening in our community. Despite the rapid advancement that's occurred in lab testing over the last month, we're still catching up. And without the lab testing, we're still almost blind to what's really happening in our community.

I think everybody is now familiar with the epidemiology curve -- the curve from “flattening the curve” -- and its peak. Once we’re on the other side of the peak, once we're seeing a decreasing number of cases, we'll be back in a position where we can attempt to contain the virus in our communities with surgically applied social distancing measures -- not community-wide social distancing measures.

We’re going to have to target new infections more aggressively. We’re going to have to isolate those and do contact tracing. It takes a lot of resources to do that.

Our public health authorities don't have the manpower to do this. We need a lot more public-health soldiers.




It's not just the statistics that are lacking ...


Some of our so-called leaders are short on empathy.


Perhaps we should send him a copy of the newspaper.


COVID-19 is not an equal opportunity infection.




And the discrimination goes far beyond the numbers.


In a second Wrangle coming tomorrow, we'll have the latest on the legal developments regarding Ken Paxton's outlawing of women's reproductive freedoms.

Ross Ramsey of the TexTrib via Progrexas asks the right question: is in-person voting during a contagion really the best we can do?

It’s plainly ignorant to tell people to stay away from one another and then to require them to gather in their precincts to cast votes.

Jim Malewitz, a former Texas Tribune reporter who now works for Wisconsin Watch, was on hand this month when that state required many of its voters to line up or shut up. He tweeted a Kenosha News photo of a voter outfitted for the occasion. You should go look.

Voting by mail is well established in other states, but you don’t have to look far to find politicians -- Republicans in particular -- who think it’s a bad idea. Start right at the top, with President Donald Trump, who voted by mail in the last election: “Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to statewide mail-in voting. Democrats are clamoring for it,” he tweeted Wednesday. “Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”

[...]

There are arguments, debunked by election experts, that voting by mail is more vulnerable to fraud. And some argue, with some evidence, that it could be difficult to handle a vote-by-mail election without big investments in voting processes.

That last one is just a good reason to start early instead of waiting until September to make some decisions.

[...]

Maybe it’s not the IQ of voters we’re testing here.


Scott Henson of Grits for Breakfast, feeling better and back on a regular blogging schedule, has the latest on Abbott's court battle to stop prisoners from being released due to the pandemic.

UPDATE: The Supreme Court of Texas on Saturday issued a temporary stay on Judge Livingston's temporary restraining order, meaning Abbott's order for now is back in effect. The court has requested briefings on the subject, with responses from the litigants due on Monday. See coverage from the Texas Tribune.


SocraticGadfly notes that the Freedom from Religion Foundation had a court win over Greg Abbott upheld on appeal, and as with the original filing, it's a case he wishes both could have lost.

The Texas Signal worries about the rise of anti-Asian racism.


And the TO announces their new EIC.


One of Ahtone's last pieces of work at High Country News -- along with several others -- detailed the appropriation of indigenous peoples' lands for public colleges.


And closing out this Wrangle with the lighter side ...

The Lunch Tray deconstructs stress eating and "anxiety baking".  It's Not Hou It's Me shows you where to pick up beer to go in Houston.
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Sunday, April 12, 2020

Sunday 'Male-In' Funnies




News item, 2016: "A Tweet from Hydrox Cookies possibly led to Trump's Oreo protest"







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Thursday, April 09, 2020

Withdrawals


-- Lincoln Chafee, from the Libertarian Party presidential primary.

(That wasn't the news you've been mourning/celebrating?)

When Hillary Clinton dropped out of the presidential race in 2008, she did so in an immaculately choreographed speech before of a mass of supporters at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, where she boasted of putting “18 million cracks” in the political glass ceiling. When Bernie Sanders dropped out in 2016, he did so on the biggest of stages -- at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. But on Wednesday, the democratic socialist senator from Vermont ended his second and likely final campaign for president under far more demure circumstances: a 14-minute address to the nation via livestream, from an office in his hometown of Burlington, Vermont.

The announcement -- the day after a primary in Wisconsin that his campaign not only didn’t contest, but actively discouraged voters from participating in in-person due to the coronavirus pandemic -- came weeks after the race was effectively decided and long past the point when Sanders himself had begun to shift his focus from winning votes to making a point. The pandemic crystallized “what this campaign is about,” to use his favored turn of phrase, even as it made the campaign itself unfeasible.

Joe Biden, who is now the de facto Democratic nominee, had already announced his intention to skip the next debate and had begun discussing his vice presidential picks. Officially, the Democratic primary ended (yesterday). But it felt like it ended a long time ago.


-- And so ... on to the next.


SoO doesn't speak for me, sarcastically or seriously.  I doubt, in fact, that he speaks seriously for any Berner.  But you can decide for yourself.

Now, Matthew Walther at The Week ... he's a snarky bastard.

Barring some unforeseen accident or a top-secret Zoom convocation of party elders bent on replacing him with Andrew Cuomo, Biden is going to be the one to run against Donald Trump in November, regardless of whether thousands of minor functionaries end up assembling in Milwaukee for a week of pointless roll-call votes and binge drinking. The general election has already begun.

I do not think it is even a slight exaggeration to say that Biden is the weakest nominee fielded by a major political party in the modern history of this country.

[...]

(I)n addition to Biden's now-forgotten history of handsy behavior, the recent allegations of what we bloodlessly refer to as "sexual misconduct" (about which there has been media silence so ubiquitous it is all but conspiratorial), his seemingly unacceptable record on issues from foreign policy to race to health care, his undeniable cognitive decline, which becomes more pronounced every time he attempts to communicate, he is a victim of circumstances. Biden is totally irrelevant to the news cycle and will remain so for weeks and perhaps even months to come in a way that no candidate has been since the emergence of the primary system. There will be no travel, no speeches, no closed-door fundraisers with mega-donors, no campaign headquarters or extensive meetings with potential running mates or cabinet members. His campaign is an idea, something that exists on Wikipedia and occasionally on CNN when there is no breaking pandemic-related news, not something that demands the attention of every living American.

In my last WH Update, I mentioned that Joementia is in a hole financially, has a significant enthusiasm gap, and is unlikely to unite the party's left, center, and right wings.

So, putting my betting cap back on, I will agree with Yglesias at Vox that Biden's general election strategy -- as prepared by Ron Klain, that mastermind of Algore's 2000 campaign -- is to mumble "NotMeUs" and mutter 'FUnastyBerniebros' out of the other side of his mealy mouth.

Rather than spend time on a likely fruitless effort to court the left, Biden might want to accept that he’s going to take a lot of crap from the Berniesphere no matter what he does and just lean into his moderate brand. If he does, the left is sure to howl that he’s betraying progressive values -- just as they predicted.

But realistically, he’s going to be seen as a likely betrayer no matter what he does, simply because a certain quarter of the left sees the Democratic Party establishment as a constant source of betrayal and there’s no way for Biden to get away from the reality that he is a lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool member of the establishment.

Matt knows us well, but he hasn't been looking at the polling.

Most Sanders supporters are inclined to back Biden in November, but the former vice president will have some work to do to solidify those figures. The latest Morning Consult poll tracking the Democratic race, conducted March 30-April 5, found 80 percent of Democratic primary voters who said Sanders was their first-choice candidate would vote for Biden in a head-to-head matchup against Trump, while 7 percent said they would defect and back the incumbent Republican. The gap is bigger than among Democratic voters as a whole, but is less than the 12 percent of Sanders supporters estimated to have done so in 2016.

But Yglesias says us defectors are only worth half what a GOP convert is.

The level of defections to third-party candidates, by contrast, really does change a lot from year to year and could make a big difference in November. But every voter on the margin between Democrats and Republicans is worth twice as much as every voter on the margin between Democrats and the Green Party.

So it really doesn't matter what we do, right?  We'll get all the blame, just like in 2016, when Joe is defeated by Trump, but if he should pull off a stunner of an upset, the shitlibs will gloat about not having needed our votes anyway.  It's a lose-lose!

Homie don't play that game.  I won't be choosing between Jonald Bimp or Doe Truden.  I'm not voting for the lesser of two rapists, and the Supreme Court is 5-4 now -- with Biden directly responsible for Clarence Thomas -- so 6-3 without RBG or 7-2 (minus Breyer too)?  Go bitch to Chuck Schumer.


Your weak-ass Jedi mind tricks don't work on me.

-- So: Burn it Down, Cave In, or walk away i.e. #DemExit 2.0 ?  (Sam Husseini at Counterpunch also advocates for a VotePact strategy.)

Here are some options I'm considering:




Read more about the MPP at the end of David Collins' post here.  My good friend edgarblythe, who blogs at Pages of Victory, is assessing Mark Charles, who's been mentioned here several times.  I really like him as well, but do not know his ballot qualification status in Texas.


Cartoonist Ted Rall says let's go for a New Progressive Party.

Among socialist options, there's Gloria la Riva, Alyson Kennedy, Joseph Kishore, and Seattle council member Kshama Savant's baby, Socialist Alternative, which is not running a slate this cycle but building for the future.  Here's their explainer on the difference between them and DSA.



Like Charles, these candidates must petition for signatures in order to qualify on a party line or as a write-in, and the status of each at this time is not known to me, but I will be posting their updates as the news develops.
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