Cats, charts, and politics
COVID is back:
Fauci: We ‘need to be prepared’ for likely Covid uptick this winter https://t.co/NSJP0NqjUz
— POLITICO (@politico) September 10, 2023
The good news is that after three years, at least we know how to handle it. We'll be OK as long as no one wears a mask; we stick close to each other; everything stays open; we huddle together in crowded bars; and everyone avoids unsafe booster shots.
Freedom!
Marjorie Taylor Greene says Joe Biden is obviously guilty of.......something, but that's small potatoes. We need to move slowly and deliberately on impeachment in order to unearth the real crimes:
It has become evident that there is a vast amount of people in previous administrations, this administration, and federal agencies that all worked diligently to cover up unbelievable corruption and crimes committed by the Biden’s and Joe himself.
We need a very tedious impeachment inquiry that allows us to take a deep dive to uncover the traitors within that conspired together, not only to keep a criminal VP in office, but then work to propel him to highest office in the land....
Patience will be the virtue that will lead us to the traitors within.
I know, I know: it's just MTG being her usual crackpot self. Why bother spotlighting it?
I don't know. I guess the whole Hunter Biden thing is nagging at me more than it should. It's this whole Republican playbook of releasing an endless fog of "findings" that have nothing behind them but sound faintly suspicious. They did it with the IRS. They did it with Benghazi. They did it with Hillary's email. Now they're doing it with Hunter Biden.
And we keep falling for it. Even lots of liberals think there's something vaguely wrong with Joe Biden's conduct, even though various people have been investigating this for years and they've come up with virtually nothing about Hunter, let alone Joe. The reason is obvious: Hunter was kind of sleazy, but the sleaze was all out in the open. There's nothing much to dig up.
As for Joe, there's no evidence of anything. Evidence. That is: bank accounts, recordings of conversations, messages (to or from Joe himself), living beyond his means, eyewitness testimony, documents, and so forth. All these years of investigation and there's not a scrap of any concrete evidence that he did anything wrong. The obvious conclusion is that he did nothing wrong.
And this is consistent with everything we know about Joe Biden. He's been in national politics for 50 years, and in all that time there's never been even a hint that Biden is money hungry.
But no matter. The Republican playbook works. Even after all these years of doing the exact same thing and never having their investigations pan out beyond uncovering minor embarrassments, we still pay attention to them. Apparently there's nothing to be done about this.
Ron DeSantis is edging toward being a full-on vaccine denier:
Lashing out at what he called the “medical authoritarianism” of mask mandates and other anti-Covid measures, DeSantis accused federal health agencies of being “basically an arm of Big Pharma” as they mulled authorizing [new] vaccines as early as next week.
“Pharma will make more money if this thing is approved and they start pushing it on everybody,” said DeSantis, touting Florida’s “freedom” from vaccine mandates.
This is all based on the advice of DeSantis's surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, a guy who has manipulated data and lied about vaccine side effects in the past. His latest claim is that the newest vaccine variant isn't safe because it hasn't been tested on humans. That's more or less true, but it's true of annual flu shots too. We have enough experience with different versions of the COVID vaccine that we no longer have to spend nine months on a full-blown human trial for every minor new variant.
It's quite the turnaround, isn't it? Two years ago the big gripe was that the FDA was too cautious and hundreds of thousands of people died unnecessarily because it didn't approve the first vaccines soon enough. Now the gripe is that they're moving too quickly.
It kinda makes you think this isn't about COVID at all. People just want to take shots at the big, bad bureaucrats of the FDA, and coming up with a reason is secondary. There's always some reason you can dig up, after all.
You may recall that a couple of months ago a right-wing federal judge ruled that the Biden administration had been engaging in a "regime of mass censorship" straight out of 1984. This was all about the government's effort to fight social media disinformation in the areas of public health and election administration, and the judge's displeasure was largely triggered by his finding that "Flagged content was almost entirely from political figures [etc.]...associated with right-wing or conservative political views." As a result, he banned multiple agencies from any contact with social media companies that was intended to affect their moderation of deceitful content.
The 5th Circuit Court is also famously right wing, but on appeal even they couldn't stomach most of this, as the Washington Post reports:
Doughty’s decision had affected a wide range of government departments and agencies and imposed 10 specific prohibitions on government officials. The appeals court threw out nine of those and modified the 10th to limit it to efforts to “coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”
The 5th Circuit panel also limited the government institutions affected by its ruling to the White House, the surgeon general’s office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI. It removed restrictions Doughty had imposed on the departments of State, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services and on agencies including the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The circuit court killed nine out ten prohibitions and six out of ten agencies from the original ruling. Still, the 5th Circuit is gonna do what the 5th Circuit is gonna do, so it found a way to uphold part of one prohibition on a few agencies who, they said, had adopted a "persistent and angry" tone in certain cases and had sent "intimidating" messages.
That's about it. And yet, the Post opined that this was "likely to be seen as victory for conservatives." I'm not sure where that comes from. A conservative court demolished a conservative ruling, keeping only a small part where they managed to divine coercion. And even that's pretty meaningless since it will be appealed to the Supreme Court.
But the right is louder than the left, and I imagine that "Biden censored conservatives!" will quickly make their Top Ten list. So I guess that makes it a victory for their side after all.
What false things do Republicans routinely believe these days? I'm not talking about wild-ass conspiracy theories like QAnon, or matters of opinion, like whether tax cuts produce higher revenue or CRT is wrecking our schools. No, I'm talking about simple, factual matters that are 100% contrary to expert opinion but are accepted routinely by most Republicans. Here are a few:
Anything else?
The 14th Amendment, passed after the Civil War, says this:
No person shall...hold any office...who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States...shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.
After the Civil War this was a pretty easy provision to interpret: it applied to anyone on the Confederate side of the war.
But what about now? Did Donald Trump give "aid and comfort" to the January 6 insurrectionists? Does that disqualify him from the presidency? Can a state election officer remove him from the ballot upon a finding of disqualification?
It's a popular notion these days, but it belongs in approximately the same category of bullshit as the trillion-dollar coin. The insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment is no different from any other law that declares something illegal. That is, it's not self-enforcing by any old citizen who happens to feel strongly about it. It requires a finding of guilt by a court of law.
This really ought to be pretty obvious to everyone. But even if it's not, it's still true in practice. If, say, the New Hampshire secretary of state decides to remove Trump from the ballot, Trump will sue and the case will.......end up in court. Eventually it gets to the Supreme Court, where I'd say there's about a zero percent chance of a ruling that allows any old state election officer to remove Trump from the ballot in the absence of conviction by a court.
In other words, this ends up in court one way or the other. Got it?
Here's the latest FDA POWER GRAB OVER YOUR DRUGSTORE:
Americans have been wasting billions a year on cold medicines like Sudafed & Benadryl with the active ingredient phenylephrine, despite conclusive evidence they don't work. But a report published yesterday may finally lead to the removal of these drugs from pharmacy shelves. 1/6 pic.twitter.com/eCv7UlR1dZ
— John Arnold (@JohnArnoldFndtn) September 8, 2023
Ahem. Sorry about that. What I meant to say is that the FDA is close to removing a drug for sale that has been shown in multiple studies to be worthless as a nasal decongestant. Here's a typical result from one of the studies, showing no difference between the drug and a placebo:
This whole episode is an unfortunate side effect of the meth panic from the early aughts. You see, the drugs at issue use phenylephrine as their active ingredient. But why use a worthless ingredient? Because the ingredient that works, pseudoephedrine, can be used in meth labs and was put behind locked pharmacy shelves many years ago. This was enough to significantly reduce (legitimate) consumer demand, so pharma companies shrugged and switched to phenylephrine products that could be put out on open shelves for everyone to see and buy. In 2022, worthless phenylephrine products sold at 5x the rate of pseudoephedrine products that actually work but are a little harder to buy.
By the way, one thing that's interesting is that every one of the recent studies shows that phenylephrine actually does have a positive effect. But so does a sugar pill. The power of taking a pill, any pill, is remarkable. But what the FDA cares about is whether phenylephrine is any better than a sugar pill, and sadly it's not.
So that's the end of the road for phenylephrine unless (a) the FDA caves in to corporate lobbying, or (b) Donald Trump convinces his army of fans that this is yet another example of Deep State corruption erasing your rights—and the FDA caves in to that. Stay tuned.
This is Hilbert investigating the camera while I'm taking pictures of him. I did this with the flash on, and as usual it turned Hilbert's eyes almost entirely black. It's really weird, as if his eyes just don't reflect the spectrum produced by the flash unit. I had to do some massive photoshopping to bring them up, but it worked out OK. There's even a good reflection of the dining room wall in the left eye.
Most polls on abortion break up responses into three categories:
The first two are obviously clear enough, but the third encompasses a very wide range of views. For example:
These are very different things, and it doesn't help much to mush them all together into the broad category of "sometimes." For example, here are the figures from Gallup presented in the traditional way:
The "sometimes legal" category is the biggest by far, but this presentation gives you no idea of whether these people are mostly for or mostly against abortion. The answer, it turns out, is that by a wide margin they're mostly opposed to abortion. Here's the same chart, but with the middle category broken into "legal under most circumstances" and "legal only in a few circumstances":
This provides a better picture in at least three ways. First, it tells us that conservative abortion sentiment has generally been ascendant over the past two decades. Second, it tells us that abortion views truly started trending more liberal after 2019. Third, it tells us that abortion views got more conservative in 2023, the first poll taken after the Dobbs decision was handed down. This is very much not the conventional wisdom, and it should give us pause about the notion that Dobbs prompted a backlash against abortion restrictions.
I'm not thrilled with this since I liked the conventional wisdom—and in truth there's still some scattered evidence that national opinion became a little more pro-choice in the wake of Dobbs. However, most of the responses to abortion polling showed the opposite, and I'd rather know that than continue kidding myself that my side has made big gains over the past year.
POSTSCRIPT: It's worth noting that the Dobbs decision certainly prompted stronger feelings about abortion on both sides. How much stronger? I don't think anyone knows for sure. But if it prompted more change in intensity on the pro-choice side it might still be true that, in practice, views on abortion have pushed reproductive politics in a more liberal direction over the past year.
It's also the case that, thanks to the early leak of the Dobbs decision at about the time Gallup was in the field in 2022, we should compare 2023 to 2021 to get a clean presentation. If you do that, the liberal position gained a couple of points and the conservative position lost a couple.
In any case, it's clear that Dobbs either helped the conservative position or, at most, helped the liberal position very slightly. There was certainly no big backlash.
Ron DeSantis thinks the Proud Boy leaders of the January 6 insurrection have received unfairly harsh sentences. I agree with him. However, we have very different reasons for thinking the sentences should be shorter.
DeSantis says that BLM protesters who broke the law got lenient sentences, so the Proud Boys should too. But this doesn't account for the fact that BLM protesters weren't explicitly trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a presidential election. Of course the Proud Boys got longer sentences than the BLM folks.
By contrast, I believe that all American criminal sentencing is far harsher than makes sense. I'd cut every single state and federal sentencing guideline in half—and some maybe more. This would reduce prison populations; cut human suffering; and have no effect on deterrence.
So DeSantis and I are on the same side. But we could hardly have more different reasons.