Category: Off topic

I was reminded of this brief 4-year-old clip from Canadian interview program As It Happens between host Carol Off and Iowa State Representative Bobby Kaufmann (R-Wilton):

CO: Sorry — just a minute — who are the buttercups that need to suck it up?

BK: Well that would be people that are simply hysterical because an election was lost. That have never understood that life has winners and losers and in their adult life there are going to be times when they have wins and they have losses and there isn’t always going to be someone there to coddle them.

Elamin Abdelmahmoud at BuzzFeed:

But it was also quickly apparent that this was a very dumb coup. A coup with no plot, no end to achieve, no plan but to pose. Thousands invaded the highest centers of power, and the first thing they did was take selfies and videos. They were making content as spoils to take back to the digital empires where they dwell, where that content is currency.

This is why Facebook, Twitch and other platform bans are important and meaningful to Trump and his followers.

But it’s also important to not get led astray. There were, of course, paramilitary apparently ready to take hostages, IDEs and explosives found and threats to take very seriously. And the costumes are part of the we’re-a-bunch-of-jokers aesthetic. From a Talking Points Memo reader, behind a paywall:

Several of the people in my field (theater and performance studies) have been noting in social media that the capitol coup on Wednesday was costumed like a sports event — the facepaint, the viking hats, the furs — in order to camouflage the event as mere fun, and as part of populist entertainment more generally. It helps create the image of a bunch of amateur jokers, and conceals — and claims to diffuse — the truly dangerous and seditious nature of these events.

Benjy Sarlin for NBC News:

Rick Perry tried to warn voters of the dangers of Donald Trump.

In a speech ahead of the 2016 Republican presidential contest in which both men would compete, the former Texas governor framed Trump as an unchecked demagogue and chose a striking historical image to illustrate his point: A mob attack on Washington.

Republicans knew what Trump was but accepted Trump and Trumpism as the price to pay for packing courts, cutting taxes and stripping regulations, which was done quickly and efficiently.

Josh Marshal at Talking Points Memo:

In twenty years of doing this, one thing that strikes me again and again is the critical importance of naming things in politics. If the question is advocacy and persuasion few steps are more important than effectively and consistently naming the key developments, agenda items, threats and prizes and raising them in the public consciousness. There are few things – things that can be controlled by people involved in politics and campaigns, as opposed to the tides of historical change we are awash in – more important for Democrats to do a good job at in the next two years.

Marshal cites “death tax,” but there are so many other examples. “Partial-birth abortion” was a successful rebranding of what doctors call intact dilation and extraction (and became a political focus despite making up just 0.17 percent of abortions). I suspect it’s behind the move from “gun control” to “gun safety”.

We’ve fallen prey to it while trying to mitigate COVID-19 by calling even minimal mitigation or restrictions “lockdown,” “shutdown” and “quarantine” when we still have freedom of movement, many businesses are open just offering services safely and very few people are truly isolating.

Josh Kovensky for Talking Points Memo:

The early warning signs:

1. Three At least 12 states are reporting cuts in their initial allocations of doses.
2. One governor is reporting that the total number of doses projected to be available nationwide has been cut by four million monthly.
3. The vaccine maker reports it is not having production problems and says its has doses in warehouses, but is awaiting direction from the federal government on where to send them.

Vaccines are only useful when people are vaccinated.

I can’t imagine the logistics involved, but I have to imagine it takes attention and planning, neither of which are in the current administration’s wheelhouse.

Andrea May Sahouri and Tony Leys for the Des Moines Register:

The Iowa Department of Public Health announced Wednesday evening that Iowa will receive less COVID-19 vaccine in its initial wave than anticipated — as much as 30% less. […]

Other states will also fail to receive their anticipated volume of vaccine doses as well, the department wrote in the news release. The department did not disclose which states could be affected.

I’m skeptical of the “in the March time period, I think you’ll start seeing more like a flu vaccination campaign,” and this feel like just the beginning of a lot of downward adjustment on vaccination expectations.

Are the high expectations a trap? Human nature? More incompetence? Maybe it’s the truth and it’ll fall along that timeline after all.

Laura Belin rounded up what Iowa elected officials have said:

“Is it time to acknowledge Biden as president-elect?” [Sen. Charles] Grassley dodged: “I don’t have to – the Constitution does.”

Hughes followed up: “And do you acknowledge him as president-elect?” Grassley replied, “I follow the Constitution.”

This is a continuation of Grassley et al. pretending that the Constitution is the beginning and end of the rules and norms they must adhere to. That’s why he blocked Merrick Garland from the Supreme Court under Obama (“A majority of the Senate has decided to fulfill its constitutional role of advice and consent by withholding support for the nomination,” he said) or why he kept voting for unqualified Trump appointees. It’s a form of Originalism but for the legislative branch. And if you strip away interpretations from the Constitution, you can make it fit your raw political motives.

Matthew Yglesias:

Washing your hands is, obviously, a great thing to do in life. But the forget-masks-wash-your-hands era, even if motivated by a concern about medical supplies, carried a larger implication that’s stuck with us — fear dirty things. The correct message should be to fear contaminated air.

Good public messaging is hard, and even harder when you’re dealing with a novel, contagious and deadly virus experts are learning about in the fly. Compound that with motivations driven by supply shortages, and it’s way, way worse.

Incompetence breeds incompetence.

The good news is that poor messaging on ventilation means you don’t have to pay through the nose for an air  purifier.

Noah Weiland and Carl Zimmer for The New York Times:

The coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech provides strong protection against Covid-19 within about 10 days of the first dose, according to documents published on Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration before a meeting of its vaccine advisory group.

The finding is one of several significant new results featured in the briefing materials, which include more than 100 pages of data analyses from the agency and from Pfizer. Last month, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that their two-dose vaccine had an efficacy rate of 95 percent after two doses administered three weeks apart. The new analyses show that the protection starts kicking in far earlier.

What’s more, the vaccine worked well regardless of a volunteer’s race, weight or age. While the trial did not find any serious adverse events caused by the vaccine, many participants did experience aches, fevers and other side effects.

“This is what an A+ report card looks like for a vaccine,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University

Science is amazing. In this case, it’s given us a 95-percent effective vaccine that seems to work equally well across demographic groups in record time. It’s also given us tons of knowledge about how SARS-CoV-2 transmits and simple ways we can protect ourselves.

There’s an alternate reality where there’s a large mass of people who don’t see their religious beliefs in conflict with science. Instead, they hold up science and the knowledge it gives us as an amazing expression of their god, as a confirmation of the brilliant order of the universe, and our inability to fully understand creation.