Cats, charts, and politics
We will have at least one presidential debate:
Former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have agreed to a Sept. 10 debate on ABC, the network said Thursday.
Yesterday I was telling a friend that after a bunch of hemming and hawing and blustering, Harris and Trump would negotiate a debate as usual. They both want one, so eventually they'd come to terms. I just didn't expect it would only take a day.
This is the last of my photos of the Eastern Sierra from 2021. I'm not sure why I've never put it up before this, but it's finally getting its day in the sun.
All done! My prostate has been fully fried and now it gets to rest and heal up.
Follow-up testing will tell us how well the radiation treatment worked, but the excellent interim PSA results make me pretty confident that everything went well.
Here is tonight's headline in the Washington Post:
The GOP nominee has grown increasingly upset about Kamala Harris’s surging poll numbers and media coverage since replacing Joe Biden on the ticket.
Poor baby. There's more, of course:
“It’s unfair that I beat him and now I have to beat her, too,” Trump told an ally in a phone call last weekend.... He has grown annoyed with some of the media focus on his campaign staff.... He has asked why Harris is raising so much more money than him, people familiar with the comments say. Trump has also repeatedly raised the large crowds that Harris is getting compared with Biden, people who have spoken to him said.
Awww. And here's the pièce de résistance. It's about Trump's ill-fated appearance before a group of Black journalists last week:
He did not know that Harris was not going to appear, that the journalists were going to ask such tough questions and that there would be a fact-checking component to the event, one person who spoke with him about it said.
He didn't know there would be tough questions. What a petulant little prick. How does anyone put up with him?
You know, I realize Trump's background was litigated thoroughly in 2016, but if there's a debate I sure wish Kamala Harris would bring it up again. I mean, this is a guy who was brought up as a spoiled rich kid attending a string of private schools and then avoiding Vietnam because of bone spurs that mysteriously appeared in his heels. His millionaire father installed him as president of the family real estate business and bankrolled his ventures, but within a few years he blew it all by wildly mismanaging a football team, the Plaza Hotel, the Eastern Shuttle, a string of casinos, and more. He was forced into multiple bankruptcy proceedings and his banks put him on a strict allowance until he clawed his way barely back to solvency—leaving behind a trail of unpaid bills and fleeced mom-and-pop investors. Finally he inherited more money when his father died and has lived in luxury ever since. He has a cook to prepare his meals, a butler to serve them, servants to make his bed, a chauffeur to drive him around, and personal flight attendants to fetch him Diet Cokes on his plane. His golf courses are money losers, his "charitable foundation" was shut down for fraud, Trump University was a con, he owes nearly $100 million to a woman he sexually assaulted, and he owes $500 million to the state of New York for systematically lying to banks about his wealth. Now he wants to be president again.
Seriously?
A recent paper by Christopher Ruhm of the University of Virginia quantifies the value of various efforts to combat COVID-19 in the US. The headline result is a composite score for different states based on what kinds of restrictions they imposed, but I found the detailed national breakdown more interesting. Here are his estimates of how various interventions affected death rates:
By comparing excess death rates in different states with different restrictions in place, Ruhm estimates how effective each one was. The results are pretty simple:
Nothing else has much impact. The effects are all fairly small and in many cases aren't even statistically significant. Restaurant closures are minimally effective, but probably not worth it (though it's almost certainly a good idea for wait staff to wear masks).
This is one study, and its results are hardly the last word. Still, it's striking that an awful lot of research has now been done and it mostly finds that hardly anything makes much of a difference. Masks help a little bit, but aside from that it's vaccines or nothing.
Note, however, that there are several interventions that weren't measured in this study: social distancing, better ventilation, UV light, and remote work. All of these are things that likely have some impact.
I suppose everyone has already noticed this, but it's remarkable to see how much laser-focused pandering Donald Trump has been doing lately:
Everyone does some of this. Ethanol becomes very popular in Iowa every four years. But Trump is certainly carrying it to cynical new heights.
A pair of bored chimps at the LA Zoo.
In the latest YouGov poll, Kamala Harris is two points ahead of Donald Trump, the same as last week. I think she might get another little bump out of Tim Walz and the Democratic convention, but from here on out it's mostly just going to be a three-month grind. The big spikes from newfound Democratic enthusiasm have probably played themselves out.
But I was browsing the poll while I was killing time in the waiting room this morning¹ and found a few other interesting tidbits. One fascinating and promising result is that although Harris is only two points ahead of Trump in voting intent, she's five points ahead when people are asked, "Who would you prefer to have as president?" This suggests that Harris has several points of upside between now and November.
On another subject, Joe Biden's proposals for Supreme Court reform may not be going anywhere, but they're popular. Term limits are supported 67%-23% and a code of ethics is supported 72%-15%. Even Republicans support both of these proposals.
Finally, you'll be unsurprised to learn that inflation is still rated as the most important issue. However, it turns out this is mainly among Republicans. A third of Republicans rate it as the most important issue but only 15% of Democrats. As usual, the two parties are in different universes on the issues they care about. Among Republicans, the most important issues are inflation, immigration, and jobs. Among Democrats, the most important issues aside from inflation are health care, abortion, and climate change.
¹Only one more day of radiation to go!
By now you know everything about Tim Walz. Grew up in Nebraska. Joined the National Guard and eventually rose to the rank of command sergeant major. Moved to Minnesota and became a schoolteacher and high school football coach. Ran for Congress and won. Ran for governor and won. Two kids via IVF. Got his son a dog after winning the governorship.
But there's more!
That's Honey, the cat the Walz family adopted last year after their old cat ran away. So now, when Walz comes home after a hard day at the office and says, "Honey I'm home!" there's no telling who he's actually talking to.¹
¹Marian's late aunt once had a cat she named Honey just so she could say "Honey I'm home" when she walked through the door.
A few weeks ago House Republicans released a 40-page report blasting GARM and its parent, the WFA, for illegal collusion and restraint of trade. The report—
Wait. Who is GARM? I'm glad you asked. GARM is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, an initiative of the World Federation of Advertisers. The Republican report is here.
Second question: should you care? The answer is pretty definitively no. I read the report when it came out—most of it, anyway, until I couldn't take any more—and there's nothing there. Oh, there are lots and lots of words, but when you try to boil them down into actual allegations of misconduct, almost nothing is left. A member once asked a question at a meeting. GARM's head once made an equivocal statement about something. A company once asked for guidance about advertising on Twitter.
Hold on. Twitter, you say? Yes indeed. You might wonder why House Republicans care about GARM in the first place, and the answer is that Elon Musk is mad at them because lots of companies belonging to GARM have stopped advertising on Twitter. So Republicans did Elon a solid by using their congressional subpoena authority to dig up some dirt.
In other words, it's not a coincidence that today, four weeks after the report was released, Twitter has sued GARM for harming their business via an allegedly coordinated advertising boycott. Republicans had already done the oppo research for him.
And you'll never guess where Twitter filed its lawsuit. Are you ready? The Northern District of Texas! Specifically, Wichita Falls, where it will be heard by Republican favorite Reed O'Connor. O'Connor has ruled in the past against gay marriage, Obamacare, COVID vaccines for Navy SEALS, religious nondiscrimination, and, notably, is already the judge in Elon Musk's lawsuit against Media Matters:
The most significant thing about X's lawsuit against GARM are not the allegations, but the Texas judge: Reed O'Connor. He also is overseeing X's Media Matters suit and, in an extraordinary move, allowed discovery to start BEFORE a motion to dismiss was ruled on. That allowed for vast amounts of broad and costly data collection from Media Matters, which the group compared to "harassment," leading to layoffs due to crushing litigation costs — again, before the suit's merit's were even decided.
This whole thing is yet another fusillade in the endless Republican war against supposed censorship of conservative speech. There never turns out to be anything to it except for the fact that Republicans rely so heavily on disinformation these days that even modest fact checking is bound to hit them a lot harder than Democrats. As for Twitter, advertisers have obviously backed off the platform because Musk has turned it into a risky cesspool that they're afraid could backfire on them at any moment. Nor do I imagine it helped when Musk told advertisers "Go fuck yourself" if they didn't like his inflammatory posts.
So that's that. Musk was mad about his loss of advertising. Republicans came to the rescue by issuing subpoenas. And now Musk is using the information they uncovered to file a suit in front of a notoriously right-wing judge. Nice little racket, no?