Category: Politics and Government

Protesting the Protests

There are some people protesting the stay at home orders – I see videos from outside of DeWine’s daily briefings, and several other states seem to have similar problems. Apart from the question of astroturfing, problem is that there’s very little opportunity for counter-protests. When you go to DC, there are PETA people counter-protesting the people looking to fund medical research (animal testing). There are vegans counter-protesting people looking to increase subsidies in the meat industry. I’ve never seen an abortion protest that didn’t have both sides represented.

These ‘liberate us’ protests? These are people who don’t think they should have to stay at home – they should allowed to hang out at bars, eat in restaurants, shop, party, and … oh yeah … crowd together at protests. The people who think the stay-at-home and shelter-in-place orders are important to protect their health? Seems like a far smaller portion of them would be willing to hang out in Columbus in a protest. Even if they could find masks and whatnot.

Why drive somewhere nonessential? Your car breaks down, and you’re exposed to others (and exposing them to you). You get into an accident and you’re exposed to others (and exposing them to you). Get injured in the accident and you’re adding to the patient load at hospitals. We’re not just staying at home to avoid large congregations. We’re staying at home to create less load for emergency personnel.

Don’t Privatize USPS

Please text “USPS” to 50409 so that a letter on your behalf can be sent to your state officials petitioning to make financial support of the USPS a priority.

Privatizing USPS seems oddly short-sighted from a bunch of people supported by rural voters. Privatizing the post office may be a bit of OK for people who live up in NYC or down in Miami — they can stop subsidizing delivery out to a cabin in South Dakota that sits on 11,000 acres. Never got much mail, so I don’t know if post office had one employee whose daily route was like eight houses or if delivery was once a week. It’s *not* great, however, for large, low-population-density swaths of the country (i.e. a good bit of the Republican base).

As a private enterprise, increasing profitability is the goal. The Post Office has studies that go into new-line-of-business ideas that are quite clever. They’re paying someone to drive by grandma’s house anyway … you pay a few bucks a month and the delivery person will ring the bell once a week to make sure grandma is OK. It’s *possible* the privatized USPS, without restriction on what they’re allowed to do and what they’re allowed to charge for their services, will branch out into a bunch of lines of business centered around “we have someone driving by there every day anyway”. But petrol is expensive, vehicle maintenance is expensive, and people are very expensive. You see anyone going with an all-electric fleet powered by on-site wind and solar? I’d guess contract workers with no benefits.

If I were operating neo-USPS, I’d become the largest interest-based advertising agency around. Sure, targeted advertising wouldn’t be as many pieces of mail as the grocery flyer that is sent to the entire postal code, but my cost per unit would go up because it’s targeted. And reducing the number of recipients cuts delivery cost. I’d probably sell ad space that I stamped onto mail transiting my system. I’m paying someone to get this delivery to you either way; why not make an extra cent by throwing an ad for a pizza chain on it? Throw a jewelry chain’s logo on the cancellation stamp. Stamps themselves are ad space. And when I don’t sell all of this ad space? I’ll donate it (tax writeoff) and have promos for non-profits.

How will mail delivery work in my neo-USPS? Specifically in rural parts of the country? I’d noticed Amazon pick-up lockers outside the one grocery store in town — that might be a way to keep a relatively local pick-up point. But it eliminates “Postal Customer” delivery … which I suspect is a good bit of the current revenue and an increased share of my new company’s business model. Turning the post office into a package delivery service probably isn’t the way to go. The model I’d follow is called “general delivery” now. I have a few friends with remote off-the-grid type homesteads outside of the carrier delivery area who use this free service. Address a letter to “Bob Smith\nGeneral Delivery\nPost Office City, State ZIP” and the letter/package sits at that post office location waiting for Bob to pick it up. The post office holds mail in the back for x days until they swing by. Which then means they’ve got to swing by the post office every so often.

Unlike PO boxes where the outer area is open 24×7 and you can open your box at 7P on the way home from work or 7A on the way to work, you’ve got to arrive when they are opened and staffed. Office in my town is staffed between 8:30 and 5 with an hour-long lunch break at 11:30 (and open 9A and noon on Saturday). But I’m certain privatized USPS will have better hours. Down side, though, is they’ll have far fewer locations. There won’t be an office five minutes from my house — it’s inefficient. There will be a few offices in Cleveland and the major suburbs. I’ll be getting my mail out of Strongsville or Parma. Maybe Brunswick or Medina. And I live in an area with decently high population density. That cabin out in South Dakota? I’d be driving up to Rapid City about two hours (each way). Four hours of driving? That’s a day right there — my quarterly “stock up in town” trip would become a monthly run.

Reopening

I keep hearing Trump talk about his decision to re-open the country (and how it’ll be the biggest decision he’s ever made). Begs the question how. And I don’t mean “what is the plan to resume somewhat normal inter-personal interactions” (although the process question needs to be answered). I mean procedurally how is he going to *open* the country? He’s never closed it! Individual states have enacted various protective measures as they see fit. He really think he can overrule, say, Ohio’s shelter in place order? Issue an executive order mandating we all eat at a restaurant this weekend and … what? The FBI is gonna haul me out of the house if I don’t?

After Bernie

Bernie may get some stuff added to the Democratic platform this summer … but is it anything Biden would be willing to fight for? Especially if he’s not planning to run for a second term (i.e. he doesn’t need my vote again in four years). My hope is that the current pandemic forces Biden to reevaluate some of his positions, *but* his statements in the last debate make me think this is unlikely to occur.
 
Trump is incompetent (and thus less likely to accomplish anything he sets out to do), but odds on a SCOTUS vacancy coming up are high. Returning to decade-old environmental policies are better than continuing a backslide. Maybe Biden would even manage to get the alt-energy tax credits increased and extended instead of the continued reduction to phaseout we’ve got now. An official policy of ignoring marijuana offenses at a federal level is better than active prosecution.
 
I’ll probably vote for Biden. How enthusiastic I am in that vote is going to depend a lot on who he selects as his VP (and hopefully he starts naming cabinet members so I’ll have a better picture of his administration’s composition). I won’t vote for Trump, and I won’t sit home (there are local elections with candidates I actually support). But you don’t have to vote for *every* office on the ballot (and, no, I’m not looking for anyone to yell “blue no matter who” at me — everyone gets to vote their own mind, and I’m intelligent enough to predict what either Biden or Trump as president in 2021 means). Biden picks Cheyney as his token Republican VP, floats Buttigieg for HHS to lead the M4A* (* who aren’t priced out of wanting it because their employer subsidizes private insurance and won’t subsidize their Medicare enrollment) initiative … abstaining gets more appealing. Warren as the VP, AOC over Energy … I’m there, and it has nothing to do with having women in the administration.

Bernie Suspends His Campaign

I expected it — there hasn’t been much campaigning in the past month anyway, and his campaign communications have been requests for charitable donations for the past few weeks — but still a little shocked to hear Bernie suspend his campaign. Listening to his announcement today was a rare occasion where I don’t get what he’s saying — yeah, this movement is an attempt to stand up to massive corporate interests and a corrupt political system. From the perspective of someone who cannot even speak ill of their government without fear of imprisonment, I guess that’s something to celebrate. But that’s not my perspective. America has a long history of letting people voice dissent; unfortunately America is also amassing a long history of ignoring majority dissent. We stood up against crony capitalism and crony democracy, but we didn’t win. Not like Bernie could say it sucks; but, as a voter who really believed that Bernie’s economic, social, and environmental policies are needed … it sucks.

I’m glad Bernie will continue to amass delegates as a tactical maneuver. While my totally impractical self thinks *maybe* people will see how tying health care to employment, how allowing corporations to deny people paid sick leave, how having a minimum wage that means you’re working two jobs to pay rent and feed your family isn’t the right direction so Bernie manages to win 99% of the remaining delegates (or Biden being the nominee makes Republicans think it’s open season on Biden investigations & Biden’s campaign becomes non-viable by mid-summer), I want to see what planks Bernie manages to insert into Biden’s platform. And how Biden manages to *not* look disingenuous adopting those planks.

Trump Impeachment / SARS-CoV-2 Timeline

The timeline below was posted to a FB group today, but I wanted a more visual format to show how much nonsense  the “impeachment was a distraction from this serious pandemic business” story is. I cross-referenced dates in the timeline with the number of US SARS-CoV-2 infections using archived data from Johns Hopkins through 23 March and the dataset from COVID Tracking (which is current but doesn’t go back far enough to provide correlation with the impeachment dates). There is some overlap, but it’s not like Trump was completely focused on impeachment activity before 05 Feb. Campaign rallies and golfing were his choice distractions. Both of which continued well after the impeachment trial ended.
Timeline with a few additional impeachment-related events added and location info for rally and golf events:
Date # US Infections Detail
18-Dec-2019 0 House Impeaches Trump
18-Dec-2019 0 Trump campaign rally – Michigan
21-Dec-2019 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
22-Dec-2019 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
23-Dec-2019 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
24-Dec-2019 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
26-Dec-2019 0 Trump golfs – Florida
27-Dec-2019 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
28-Dec-2019 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
29-Dec-2019 0 Trump golfs – Florida
30-Dec-2019 0 Trump golfs – Florida
31-Dec-2019 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
1-Jan 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
2-Jan 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
3-Jan 0 Trump campaign rally – Florida
4-Jan 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
5-Jan 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
8-Jan 0 First CDC warning
9-Jan 0 Trump campaign rally – Ohio
14-Jan 0 Trump campaign rally – Wisconsin
16-Jan 0 House sends impeachment articles to Senate
18-Jan 0 Trump golfs – Florida
19-Jan 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
20-Jan 1 First case of corona virus in the US, Washington State.
22-Jan 1 “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
22-Jan 1 Impeachment prosecution’s opening arguments and presentation of evidence
23-Jan 1 Impeachment prosecution’s opening arguments and presentation of evidence
24-Jan 2 Impeachment prosecution’s opening arguments and presentation of evidence
25-Jan 2 Impeachment defense presentation
28-Jan 5 Trump campaign rally – New Jersey
30-Jan 5 Trump campaign rally – Iowa
31-Jan 7 Impeachment Senate vote against calling witnesses & travel restriction from China
1-Feb 8 Trump golfs – Florida
2-Feb 8 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
2-Feb 8 “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”
5-Feb 11 Impeachment Senate votes to acquit. Then takes a five-day weekend.
10-Feb 11 Trump campaign rally – New Hampshire
12-Feb 12 Dow Jones closes at an all time high of 29,551.42
15-Feb 13 Trump golfs – Florida
19-Feb 13 Trump campaign rally – Arizona
20-Feb 13 Trump campaign rally – Colorado
21-Feb 15 Trump campaign rally – Nevada
24-Feb 51 “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
25-Feb 51 “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”
25-Feb 51 “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”
26-Feb 57 “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”
26-Feb 57 “We’re going very substantially down, not up.” Also “This is a flu. This is like a flu”; “Now, you treat this like a flu”; “It’s a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for. And we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.”
27-Feb 58 “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
28-Feb 60 “We’re ordering a lot of supplies. We’re ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn’t be ordering unless it was something like this. But we’re ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”
28-Feb 60 Trump campaign rally – South Carolina
2-Mar 98 “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don’t think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”
2-Mar 98 Trump campaign rally – North Carolina
2-Mar 98 “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”
4-Mar 149 “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”
5-Mar 217 “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”
5-Mar 217 “The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”
6-Mar 262 “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”
6-Mar 262 “Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”
6-Mar 262 “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”
6-Mar 262 “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”
7-Mar 402 Trump golfs – Florida
8-Mar 518 Trump golfs – Florida
8-Mar 518 “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.”
9-Mar 583 “This blindsided the world.”
1-Mar 583 Travel lockdown from Europe.
13-Mar 2179 State of emergency declared
17-Mar 6421 “This is a pandemic,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
18-Mar 7783 It’s not racist at all. No. Not at all. It comes from China. That’s why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate.
23-Mar 42152 Dow Jones closes at 18,591.93
25-Mar 63928 3.3 million Americans file for unemployment.
30-Mar 160530 Dow Jones closes at 21,917.16
2-Apr 239099 6.6 million Americans file for unemployment.

 

Non-Bail-Outs

I don’t get why we they’re talking about “bail outs” instead of making purchases that solving other problems. I was seeing news stories about people stuck abroad followed by news stories about airlines needing money because no one was flying — paying for flights to bring people back to the US seemed like an obvious win-win. Now there are restaurants going under & kids who are out of school not getting meals. Hotels with no customers and individuals without a safe home in which to shelter. Instead of floating loans or handing out money, *buy* services and fix two problems simultaneously.

News and Falsehoods

Even without watching the live mid-day briefings (which we do watch), I’m amazed at how much disinformation makes it to the edited evening newscast. Trump’s got a good feeling about some drug that didn’t have production scaled up for a bunch of “wtf, it cannot get worse” off-label use. Or, hell, his seeming claim to have legalized off-label use because it’s the only way we’re going to address the current health crisis.
 
Before this outbreak, it infuriated me to tune into the evening news and hear “Trump said X” when X was verifiably untrue. Sure, ‘Trump said the untrue thing’ was accurate … but without clarifying the veracity of Trump’s statement … saying “Trump said X” comes across as “X” to a whole lot of people. Hasn’t changed just because it’s more dangerous to say “Trump says chloroquine / hydroxychloroquine is a game-changer and is totally safe”. If nothing else, were I writing copy, I’d delve a little into the difference between the two drugs. Hydroxy- is a less toxic derivative … which doesn’t at all sound like “totally safe, slam some and see if it works” to me.

Willful Ignorance

Somehow, in the past month, the number of Republicans who view SARS CoV-19 (COVID-19, ‘coronavirus’) as a threat has decreased. Commercial news needs to address the desire to be misinformed because it makes you happy. My one grandfather used to watch the weather on each of the broadcast TV channels — hit ABC at the top of the hour, CBS for the main weather forecast at 15-past, and head over to NBC for the quick recap just before the end of the show. He went with whichever forecast made him the happiest (e.g. garden getting dry? Go with the one that had a higher chance of rain tomorrow.). This was innocuous — firstly because the three forecasts didn’t have that much variance, but also because he was completely aware of what he was doing. Wasn’t like he’d refuse to water his garden today because channel 9 promised it was going to rain last night.
 
It seems like a lot of people have taken this approach to news in general. Without awareness of their choice, and without a willingness to concede reality. There’s no difference between willful ignorance of the impact pollution has on the environment that allows you to support harmful policies (or the disingenuous belief that the invisible hand will guide companies away from polluting actions) and willful ignorance of dangers posed by this virus. In both cases, you aren’t just harming yourself. You’re harming *everyone*.

Republicanism

“School superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners have taken it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president.“
Reading this, I cannot help but think the response to this pandemic is playing out according to a fundamental tenant of Republican philosophy. Push power down closer to ‘the people’. Each school district, city/township, county, and state gets to decide how to respond to this virus. In other words, it’s a feature not a bug.
Personally, I think it’s important to have a strong federal government to coordinate things that impact everyone — environmental regulations, educational concerns, energy efficiency, public health. I hope people who push for decentralized government think about how chaotic our response is and extrapolate to how their preferred form of governance can react to other important situations, whatever those may be.