tingilinde

a backgrounder on R0

The media is doing a poor job of conveying what it is and isn't ..  here's a nice backgrounder.

 

and a piece from nearly two years ago showing how Trump and his gang damaged American preparedness ... (it's even worse now)

 

 

 

the last time democracy nearly died in america

Jill Lapore writing in The New Yorker.

snip

...

American democracy,” as a matter of history, is democracy with an asterisk, the symbol A-Rod’s name would need if he were ever inducted into the Hall of Fame. Not until the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act can the United States be said to have met the basic conditions for political equality requisite in a democracy. All the same, measured not against its past but against its contemporaries, American democracy in the twenty-first century is withering. The Democracy Index rates a hundred and sixty-seven countries, every year, on a scale that ranges from “full democracy” to “authoritarian regime.” In 2006, the U.S. was a “full democracy,” the seventeenth most democratic nation in the world. In 2016, the index for the first time rated the United States a “flawed democracy,” and since then American democracy has gotten only more flawed. True, the United States still doesn’t have a Rome or a Berlin to march on. That hasn’t saved the nation from misinformation, tribalization, domestic terrorism, human-rights abuses, political intolerance, social-media mob rule, white nationalism, a criminal President, the nobbling of Congress, a corrupt Presidential Administration, assaults on the press, crippling polarization, the undermining of elections, and an epistemological chaos that is the only air that totalitarianism can breathe.

Nothing so sharpens one’s appreciation for democracy as bearing witness to its demolition. Mussolini called Italy and Germany “the greatest and soundest democracies which exist in the world today,” and Hitler liked to say that, with Nazi Germany, he had achieved a “beautiful democracy,” prompting the American political columnist Dorothy Thompson to remark of the Fascist state, “If it is going to call itself democratic we had better find another word for what we have and what we want.” In the nineteen-thirties, Americans didn’t find another word. But they did work to decide what they wanted, and to imagine and to build it. Thompson, who had been a foreign correspondent in Germany and Austria and had interviewed the Führer, said, in a column that reached eight million readers, “Be sure you know what you prepare to defend.”

...

 

 

charles fried on trump and his people

This Newsweek piece is very good..  commentary from what survives of conservatism.

a tip of the hat to Jim

 

 

being prepared to deal with outbreaks like the when coronavirus

The Republicans just cut funding to critical hospitals that deal with them.

 

just saying..

comment seen today

white evangelist   I believe Donald J Trump was sent by God

comeback            Why?  Did he run out of locusts?

 

 

an uneven playing field

Chris Hayes and Howard Bryant talk about racism and politics in sport - an interesting discussion.  Here's a link to the episode (I listen on a dedicated podcast app)  about an hour.

 

 

a recent comment

 

Two paths diverged in the woods

and America took 

the psychopath

(it doesn't follow the original close enough, but gets to the point)

 

dealing with the flu

It can be violent.. 

a tip of the hat to George

 

 

trump's approval rating

According to 538 it may be worse than polls suggest.

snip

...

we (Enns and Schuldt) have worked to develop a hopefully more nuanced approach to measuring presidential approval, where we ask respondents how favorably they feel toward Trump relative to other notable Republicans. By not explicitly asking respondents whether they approve or disapprove of the president, we avoid forcing respondents to take sides, as they do in the standard presidential approval question. Instead, respondents from both parties evaluate Trump in comparison to other Republicans, like former President George W. Bush, the late Sen. John McCain, McCain’s former running mate Sarah Palin, Vice President Mike Pence, and former President Ronald Reagan. (We selected these specific Republicans because they range from the highly regarded Reagan, who is often viewed as the voice of modern conservatism, to Palin, the former Alaska governor whose time in national politics was much shorter and less influential.) We’re most interested in how the public views Trump when they aren’t asked about the president in isolation. Do respondents rate him as highly as other Republicans? Less highly? And does this help clarify whether partisan cheerleading is masking respondents’ actual assessments of Trump in the traditional presidential approval question?

...

 

 

alaska, putin and impeachment

Alan Dershowitz writing in his new book The Case Against the Democratic House Impeaching Trump (note ..  Dershowitz is one of Trumps lawyer for the Senate trail)   Almost every non-Republican and Constitutional scholar considers this position bat-shit crazy.

 

via Google Books (https://books.google.com/books?id=afaBDwAAQBAJ&q=alaska#v=snippet&q=alaska&f=false )

a tip of the hat to Josh Chefetz (law prof)