If 2020 Gave Us Zombies Instead Of A Pandemic
1
Monthly Archives: November 2020
A Vital PSA From Rachel Maddow
From last night’s TRMS. Stick with it through her technical issues. Is worth it.
Stealing Tweets is Fun
Tonight.
10 p.m. ABC. Also, Cosmos. And This Is Us.
Fun While It Lasted
From March 19 until June 22, 2020, I was as locked down as a person could be. The March date is the date I began working from home. I went in. They handed me a Mac and said guess what. You’re working from home. This was a week after the NBA suspended their season due to SARS-CoV-2. The June date was Father’s Day. On that day, there were 415 active cases in Monroe County. And I’ve been visiting those folks, or at least with my Dad, pretty much every weekend ever since.
On Friday, there were 1,887 active cases in Monroe County. Strong Hospital is at 100-percent capacity. Nationally, more than 184,000 cases were reported Friday. And now, they’re finding that this disease goes for your balls.
Covid cases in Monroe County, New York.
This is not to mention the anecdotes I’m seeing on the TV. The young woman who was wheeled into the ER on Sept. 28 and who is still lying in a hospital bed, too weak to speak in her full voice. The college student who tested positive one day and died alone in her dorm room two days later.
Yeah, I’m staying home.
It’s funny, on my weekly call with my Mom, we shared an experience from Friday, and we both kinda did the same thing. It had been announced that Impeached Preznit Carnage Loser was going to speak at 4 p.m. Bear in mind that he had not yet spoken publicly since he was defeated on Nov. 3. So, I put the television on, muted, with the intention of listening in the off chance that he might concede. He came out at 4:30-ish, and so I turned up the sound.
I muted it almost immediately. As did my Mom. So did you, probably.
It was pathetic. He stood there in same the Rose Garden where he promised magical websites and a testing site on every corner, and he tried to take credit for progress on vaccines, and he told us the economy is wonderful, and he told us the COVID numbers are so terrific, on a day when the number for new cases in the United States was nearly cresting to 200,000 daily. This guy reportedly hasn’t attended a COVID Task Force meeting in five months. I couldn’t listen. I couldn’t stand to. The only words I want out of this idiot’s mouth is “I concede.”
Meanwhile, Martha Raditz is on my TV this morning interviewing these geniuses in Ohio who A) just don’t believe that Joe Biden won the election and who B) just don’t believe in wearing a covering over their schoz.
Guess who they voted for?
Raditz also provided one of the more entertaining exchanges of the Sunday morning shows in her interview with John “Why Are We Still Listening to John Bolton” Bolton, where Bolton was all like, Republicans need to come out and admit that Biden won, and Raditz was all like yeah, but they’re not doing that, and Bolton was all like, yeah, but they should. This is the man who could have provided vital context toward ending this horrible nightmare in January but chose not to because he wasn’t fond of the process. Bolton could have been this decade’s John Dean but chose to sell a book instead. Why is he on my TV?
Look, Trump lost. Joseph R. Biden Jr. is President-Elect, and he will be taking the oath on January 20, 2021. COVID is real and has now killed 245,000 Americans, and the most effective way to avoid its spread is to cover your schnoz and piehole when you go out. And you do that not just for you but for me, too. Because I haven’t sat at a bar for a burger and a beer with my Pop in nine months, and now I’m even nervous about a brief visit.
And none of this needed to happen. It’s ridiculous.
On November 13…
On November 13, Felix Unger was asked to remove himself from his place of residence; that request came from his wife. Deep down, he knew she was right, but he also knew that some day he would return to her. With nowhere else to go, he appeared at the home of his friend, Oscar Madison. Several years earlier, Madison’s wife had thrown HIM out, requesting that HE never return. Can two divorced men share an apartment without driving each other crazy?
(Thanks to my friend Todd, who remembers this date every year.)
Can somebody please explain to Impeached Preznit Carnage 217 Electoral Votes that he did such a good job as preznit that he doesn’t need to serve another term?
Yellow Taxi
Joni Mitchell’s vision is literally happening directly outside of my apartment. “They paved paradise; put up a parking lot.” It seems I can never move anywhere and just be left in peace.
Perfection
Joe Biden did this weird thing today where he made a brief speech and said exactly what was needed to be said. Here is a link to the transcript of his speech today. And here is what I consider to be the nut graf:
We the people will not be silenced. We the people will not be bullied. We the people will not surrender. My friends, I’m confident we’ll emerge victorious. But this will not be my victory alone or our victory alone. It’ll be a victory for the American people, for our democracy, for America. And there will be no blue states and red states when we win, just the United States of America.
He spoke 796 words today. 796 words. And with the words he chose, he offered comfort, and sanity, and leadership. His speech was not about minute-to-minute politics. It was not about winning or losing. It was about comforting a reasonably jagged-feeling America. It was a fireside chat. And it helped.
This is why Joe Biden is the perfect candidate for our times. It’s why he’s the best choice to be president right now. Since his nomination, I have been unable to shake the feeling that the Democratic Party accidentally somehow stumbled into perfection like a guy in a tux who trips in the mud. Without an apocalyptic challenge in front and, let’s face it, all around us, he’d just be Joe Biden, older Joe Biden, who doesn’t cope as easily for his stutter anymore, who seems to yell more than he needs to, who says “look” and “folks” a lot.
But what we’ve been lacking has been a president who rises to the occasion. Impeached Preznit Carnage Weird-Lean Pear-Shaped Hickey is a president who has been offered the greatest opportunity to do that thing a president does when challenged, to grab the bullhorn on top of the smoldering pile of rubble, to yell at the German man to tear down the wall, to say the thing about asking not what your country can do for you, to break out and sing “Amazing Grace.” No president has been more challenged to rise to the occasion, and, weirdly, Impeached Preznit has willfully crossed his arms, pouted, and refused to do so every stinking time.
Joe Biden isn’t even the president yet, and he rises to the occasion every time he’s seen in public.
We’ve had a hard campaigns before. We’ve faced hard times before. So once the selection is finalized and behind us, it’ll be time for us to do what we’ve always done as Americans, to put the harsh rhetoric of the campaign behind us, to lower the temperature, to see each other again, to listen to one another, to hear each other again, and respect and care for one another, to unite, to heal, to come together as a nation.
This is a study in contrasts to how the current occupant of the Oval approaches it:
This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity — for the good of this nation, this is a very big moment. This is a major fraud on our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.
This is a country in sore need of a chief executive capable of rising to the occasion, capable of registering empathy, capable of embarking on a sensible path forward, capable of leading with integrity and by solid example. Joe Biden does nothing but prove himself to be this.
Somehow, the Democratic Party chose the best person for the job, I think nearly by accident. Joe Biden is no mere second banana any longer. He’s not just good.
He’s perfect.
We’ll know more later today. But keep honking your horns, America. We’ve got this.
Count von Count
There’s always a dummy running around promising this thing is going to be a crushing landslide for our side. I have been that dummy. And yet, I’m still here on Nov. 4 staring at a result of Biden 227, Trump 213. I mean, they warned us, they kept warning us that we’d be waiting a while, but I wanted to be the bright light in the room. More than that, I wanted to put the good conclusion out into the universe. I mean, I’m not really a spiritual guy, but I’ve read Richard Bach.
Besides, what if Biden had shot out of the gate with a 290 last night? That would be a neat trick!
Anyway, I won’t apologize for being that guy.
Wait. CNN just called Wisconsin for Biden. 237.
Anyway. That’s the kind of day it is. A real nailbiter. We’re not going to take the Senate; I’m not sure about the House. My guy Joe Morelle is in good shape. Even without the Senate though, we’ll be in better shape with a Biden administration. At least the guy knows how the Senate works. And we’ll have Vice President Harris set up a cot there to be present to break ties.
All right. Time to put on some sweatpants and go to work
***
A Facebook friend shared a horribly spelled Starbucks order, so I shared this. I’ve always liked it and haven’t been able to do anything with it:
I have a whole bit on this, a guy with a name like “Aaron,” with the soft vowel and the soft consonant, and always having the deli guy call out for “Eric” or “Darin, ” and so he starts telling the deli guy his name is “Eddie.” But his co-workers who go to lunch with him think it’s funny, so they start calling him “Eddie” around the office. So one day, he gets into a lather about it and says come on guys. I’m only Eddie at the Deli. I’m Deli Eddie. So of course, the co-workers start calling him “Deli Eddie.” What none of these wisenheimers know is that there’s a local mob family called Deliedie. Hijinks ensue. ::Seinfeld theme plays::
That’s The Trouble With Never
Like them big trucks trying to run the Biden bus off the road, California v. Texas is roaring down on us. Oral arguments start Nov. 10 in the Supreme Court’s hearing of whether or not the Affordable Care Act should be annihilated. From where I sit, the Republicans’ (read: federal government’s) support for this is pretty short-sighted.
Republicans have already painted themselves into a corner. They decided long ago (as documented in Robert Draper’s fine book, Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives) that they could not afford to allow any legislative nor legacy success for President Obama, on the grounds that it would cost the Republican Party politically on a leviathan scale. The covert strategy on the Affordable Care Act, of course, was to throw glass shards into the thing when they could, so states would drag their feet on expanding Medicare, and Marco Rubio would nix high-risk corridor payments, and the federal government would cut back on reminding folks about open enrollment periods. Overtly, the mantra became “repeal and replace.”
The problem being that there are things Obamacare does that people like, one of the most striking of these being the provision that prevents insurance companies from screwing people with “pre-existing conditions” with their pants on. And so you have an impeached preznit who insists that they have already done away with Obamacare, but that, somehow, this protection would remain sacrosanct.
As observed previously by this wonk and others (a fellow Smirking Chimp contributor Miles Mogulescu does an A+ job of laying this out, here), there is quite literally no other way to maintain this promise (besides completely socializing medicine in the United States). The promise to repeal Obamacare but to continue protecting people with “pre-existing conditions” is the elbow-in-your-ear of public policy. It just can’t be done.
However, I do see a possible legislative way forward. It’s stupid. But hear me out.
So what if Congress went ahead and repealed the Affordable Care Act, then introduced a new bill called the “Schmaffordable Shmare Mact.” And instead of exchanges, this thing would have markets. And instead of subsidies, it would have oh, I dunno, call it “assistance for care.” Instead of a mandate, there would be a requirement. And so on. They could say, oh, no, this isn’t Obamacare. This is the Republican plan. It’s much, much better. They could keep their promise. They could save face. And Americans could keep their current coverages. Even Democrats could go for it because the results would be laudable.
Now, as I often remind people, I am not a lawyer. But as I understand it, California v. Texas entertains two clear paths whereby the Supreme Court could completely overturn the Affordable Care Act. That would render anything resembling it as completely vulnerable to constitutional challenge. Therefore, any future legislative efforts toward health care reform could be nothing resembling a mandate, a penalty, establishing state-wide exchanges, regulating shit insurance plans, etcetera.
That leaves only one reform option on the table, Action Jackson. And it rhymes with “Medicare For All.”
You know, Republicans, if you paint yourself far enough into that corner, there’s a little stool and a dunce cap waiting for you. Sit down and wear the hat. You’ve earned it.