Cheers and Jeers is a weekday post from the great state of Maine.
The Frosty Faceplant
Our neighbor’s daughter, who just turned one, has volunteered to share how she’s coping during these uncertain and perilous times in virtual lockdown. She’s developed a simple and reliable four-step routine that combines the dual benefits of stress reduction and adequate caloric intake, and she’s waiving her normal consultant’s fee to share it with the greater community.
Continued…
Step 1: Find a comfortable chair.
Step 2: Find a comfortable cake.
Step 3: Cease all muscular function and let gravity take over.
Step 4: Repeat as needed.
Trust me, it works. I’m already up to three a day.
And now, our feature presentation...
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Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, March 24, 2020
Note: If you have an itch on your face, it is best to lightly dab the affected area with the corner of a clean tissue, not rake a rusty cheese grater across it. I realize that now, and I apologize for giving out bad, non-CDC-approved advice. Again. —Mgt.
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By the Numbers:
Days 'til the annual Earth Hour: 4
Minimum number of Americans now on virtual lockdown: 100 million
U.S. adults who say, in the latest Commonwealth Fund survey, they completely trust Trump and completely don't trust Trump, respectively, to give accurate information on the coronavirus pandemic: 16%, 40%
Percent of Americans who say they're washing their hands more often, according to the latest AP-NORC poll: 88%
Percent chance that the information Russia is putting out about how great their coronavirus response is going lacks any basis in reality, according to—[Checks notes]—the entire history of their country: 100%
Approval in North Carolina of, respectively, Trump, Sen. Thom Tillis (R), and Gov. Roy Cooper (D) in the latest PPP poll: 46%, 31%, 51%
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Puppy Pic of the Day: If dogs and cats had to practice social distancing, we'd be so screwed…
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CHEERS to what’s up, doc. Barbra Streisand sent me this via a perfumed letter (okay, she tweeted it), and she'd like you to read it because she insists "this makes everything clear." Barbra's brainwaves and mine are perfectly in synch here, a symbiotic meeting of the dendrites that kinda makes me responsible for half of her success and, therefore, fortune. But that's a legal issue for another day. The point is: Barbra Streisand and I both believe you should read this Wired interview with renowned epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, who helped eradicate smallpox and has some enlightening things—some positive, even—about the situation in which we find ourselves, including the performance of the orange ogre who has turned out to be the virus's biggest enabler:
[D]id we get good advice from the president of the United States for the first 12 weeks? No. All we got were lies. Saying it’s fake, by saying this is a Democratic hoax. There are still people today who believe that, to their detriment. Speaking as a public health person, this is the most irresponsible act of an elected official that I've ever witnessed in my lifetime. But what you're hearing now [to self-isolate, close schools, cancel events] is right. Is it going to protect us completely? Is it going to make the world safe forever? No. It's a great thing because we want to spread out the disease over time.
Flatten the curve.
By slowing it down or flattening it, we're not going to decrease the total number of cases, we're going to postpone many cases, until we get a vaccine—which we will, because there's nothing in the virology that makes me frightened that we won’t get a vaccine in 12 to 18 months. Eventually, we will get to the epidemiologist gold ring. … That means, A, a large enough quantity of us have caught the disease and become immune. And B, we have a vaccine. The combination of A plus B is enough to create herd immunity, which is around 70 or 80 percent.
And then we can get back to—wait for it—the way we were.
JEERS to stupid Republican tricks. As Mitch McConnell debuts his latest poutrage performance art against Democrats for nixing his bailouts-for-billionaires slush fund, check out Chuck Grassley’s public display of pandemic management, stuffing Covid molecules up his nose faster than a Union corporal loading cannonballs during Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg:
Stay tuned for his new page-turner coming soon: Quarantine Among the Cornfields.
JEERS to the other modern-day black plague. Thirty-one years ago, at 12:04am on March 24, 1989, Captain Joseph Hazelwood was dreaming happy dreams when his tanker, the Exxon Valdez, was running aground and spilling 11.3 million gallons of crude all over Prince William Sound. After three decades of false promises to "put things right" and endless legal wrangling on the part of the oil giant to minimize its liability, a simple lifting of most any shoreline rock reveals that the damage is still readily apparent. Conservation writer Tim Lydon wrote on the 30th anniversary:
Dig a shallow hole into certain beaches along Alaska’s Prince William Sound and you will still find oil from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill. As your shovel scrapes through gravel, the crude will mix with the water seeping into the small hole.
The first time I did this was nine years ago, while visiting researchers studying the spill’s lingering impacts. Holding an oil-stained stone in my gloved hand, my mind flashed to March 24, 1989, when I first heard the news that the Exxon Valdez, a 300-meter tanker, had run aground on Bligh Reef. […]
As the spill recedes into a more distant past and climate change accelerates, it becomes harder to tease out the disaster’s continuing effects. Less debatable is the lingering damage to the area’s wilderness resource, specifically amid the 8,000 square kilometers of western Prince William Sound that fall within America’s largest congressionally designated wilderness study area. With oil beneath beaches, certain species unrecovered, abandoned structures, and garbage still present, the wilderness remains injured.
In fact, time has pretty much elevated a theory into a law as immutable as anything Newton ever came up with: the only thing you can trust an oil company to do is something terrible.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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CHEERS to happy answers to valid questions. As I leave the medical advice to others, so too will I defer to the legal beagles to sort out the various law-related issues popping up during the pandemic. Like, for instance, a niggling issue rattling around in the back of many of our minds: can the head of the Trump crime family use the coronavirus lockdown to cancel or delay the election? Aaron keller at Law & Crime says:
The answer, simply, is that no, he can’t. […] the president does not control how the election proceeds: the states do. And, if there is a failure, 3 U.S.C. § 19 controls: "If, by . . .failure to qualify, there is neither a President nor Vice President to discharge the powers and duties of the office of President, then the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall, upon his resignation as Speaker and as Representative in Congress, act as President."
I think the idea of President Nancy Pelosi nixes any idea the Republicans might have in postponing the election. Vox's Ian Milhiser also has the issue on his mind and goes deep in the weeds, concluding: "In the exceedingly unlikely event that the 2020 election is canceled, the result isn’t likely to be an extended term for President Trump. The most likely result is chaos." In other words: an improvement.
CHEERS to those meddling maple leafers. On today's date in 1837—78 years before our Supreme Court finally cleared a "theoretically"-unobstructed path to the voting booth—the ever-sensible Canadians gave black people the right to vote. It happened in Nova Scotia, where government-designated black communities were settled. And although they still weren’t fully included in government decision-making, it gave them the impetus to develop their own ideas on leadership. During the next century Canada would beat us by two years in letting the womenfolk cast ballots. But when it comes to putting idiots on the ballot, our Republicans clean their clock.
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Ten years ago in C&J: March 24, 2010
CHEERS to boxing the bastards in. Wow, I'd forgotten how noisy the aftermath of an historic moment can be. Thanks to the intertubes, everyone has an opinion on the new health insurance bill (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) and they all get published—a good thing, but overwhelming nonetheless. I like Robert Reich's take on it, especially in light of how much Republicans hate it:
[D]on't believe anyone who says Obama's health care legislation marks a swing of the pendulum back toward the Great Society and the New Deal. Obama's health bill is a very conservative piece of legislation,building on a Republican rather than a New Deal foundation. The New Deal foundation would have offered Medicare to all Americans or, at the very least, featured a public insurance option.
The significance of Obama's health legislation is more political than substantive. For the first time since Ronald Reagan told America government is the problem, Obama's health bill reasserts that government can provide a major solution. In political terms, that's a very big deal.
Meanwhile, Mistermix at Balloon Juice adds a cherry on top by gently suggesting that Republicans may have really screwed themselves:
The minute Obama signs the bill, the Democrats can say that health insurance cannot be denied for a pre-existing condition, and that they had to fight every single Republican for this right. That message is simple, it hits people where they live, and it addresses a universal concern.
The commercials cutting from a kid with diabetes to John Boehner yelling "Hell No You Can’t" are probably already being made. They will be the Willie Horton ads of the 2010 election.
Boehner's "Macaca moment," as it were. Thanks for the ammo, Orangey. [3/24/20 Update: As the ACA turns 10, Boehner is long gone from the House and now peddles marijuana from the back of a VW bus with giant flower decals on the back. The only way that makes sense is if you’re stoned. Which he can help you with.]
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And just one more…
CHEERS to gently tapping the brakes. It's probably not going out on too much of a limb to suggest that the ugliness is coming at us pretty fast these days. Whether it's Senate Republicans trying to ram through a gigantic slush fund disguised as "coronavirus relief" to benefit their corporate buddies, the flood of minute-by-minute pandemic reports from every country, state, city, and hamlet, or trying to find a reputable dealer in hand sanitizer on the black market, we're all absorbing a crush of information flying toward us at lightning speed. That's why I've started watching an episode or two of The Slo-Mo Guys—a pair of droll British-born nerds with a let’s-throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-what-happens-at-an-insane-number-of-frames-per-second attitude—before I go to bed. I especially like what they do with paint, like that time they poured it inside a speaker:
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Try it tonight and see if it doesn't reduce your brain waves to a gentle simmer before your head hits the pillow. Bonus benefit: some really cool dreams.
Have a tolerable Tuesday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial
What does "splash in the Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool" really mean? It's not really as bad as it sounds, according to an expert.
—Vox
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