The curve continues to be flattened—along the wrong axis

I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday. The last time I did this, 9 days ago, I remarked on a peak of one day with 13,099 new cases. I think the cases have been redistributed so the peak is 7440. Not that I have to worry about that being right – the peaks since then have been 17,081 and 20,394 new cases in a day. Yikes! This is more than double the peak of last April. I think the deaths per day is declining, though it is too soon to be sure. In the last week of December the number of deaths per day has been in the 59-76 range. One reason why it is too soon to be sure is I found there is a chunk of data I hadn’t realized was there. Once my data from the state is sorted there are records for some counties at the end that have no date. Up to now this data was just a bit of noise at the edge of the chart. Not this time. This data set shows 1156 deaths that have not yet been assigned a date. Again: Yikes! I revised my graphing program to account for the undated data (I chose to not include it in the graph, trusting it would be next week or so). While I did that I adjusted the Y axis of the chart to draw lines every 1000 cases instead of every 500. And I added the display of the new year. I also ran another program that draws Michigan case distribution maps. In November the hotspot was Keweenaw County in the northern tip of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. No other county was close. The hotspot in December was Detroit, followed by the counties around it – Macomb, then Wayne, Oakland, and Genesee counties. In my personal COVID journey what I’m experiencing is like a cold – sore throat and drippy nose. This should not be taken to mean in general the omicron variant is no worse than a cold. I wasn’t told I have the omicron variant, though since it is now at least 95% of all new cases I’m pretty sure I do. Yesterday I wrote that I had sent a message to my health system the day before asking for a referral to get a COVID test. That referral didn’t come by the time I got a test. It came today, though I wasn’t expecting messages from my doctor’s nurse on a Saturday. I replied I had a test, that it was positive, and what should I do now? I got a response saying I should do the usual things for the sore throat and drippy nose of a cold. I asked what to do if I became worse. I haven’t gotten a reply to that one yet. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos gave another update on the news of the COVID pandemic. In a chart of the number of COVID cases in the country with a sharp rise at the right edge Sumner wrote “the curve of U.S. daily cases continues to be flattened —along the wrong axis.” On the severity of the omicron variant, he wrote what I need to hear:

One study found that the risk of having to go to the ER with an omicron infection was about 5%, down from about 15% for those infected by delta. However, 5% is still quite a high number, and even that two-thirds drop isn’t enough to relieve the overload brought on by rising cases. In terms of ending up in the ICU, omicron seems to be about half as dangerous as delta, with 0.4% being sent to the ICU at the end of December as opposed to 0.8% in the middle of the delta surge. The odds of ending up on a ventilator were cut by 75% when compared to earlier variants. That all sounds somewhat reassuring. Except that still makes omicron many times more dangerous than the flu, even when a patient is getting good treatment. As hospitals flood with new patients, the chances of getting good treatment swiftly decline—100% of patients who need ventilation die when ventilation isn’t available.

On a personal level, meaning just me, having a 5% chance of going to the ER and a 0.4% chance of being in the ICU sounds like pretty good odds. But what goes on around the country is more than just me and there 5% is a big number. Timothy Faust continues with that idea.

one thing covid reveals is that none of us know how to process large numbers. if everyone gets covid and 0.5% of people die from it (half of what we've seen so far) that's 1.7 million people. poof, goodbye Philadelphia. our brains just can't handle it

Conservatives like to say that only 1% will die of COVID. But that’s a big number – 1% of 330 million is 3.3 million. Kurt Pankau has a degree in math and knows big numbers are incomprehensible. So he tweeted an idea of what is meant by a million new COVID cases reported in the US yesterday (meaning Jan. 4, as he wrote this on Jan. 5)

There are 86400 seconds in a day. For a million people to be diagnosed yesterday, that means that roughly 12 people in this country were diagnosed every second. Yesterday. ... There are just shy of 330 million of us in this country. That means that 1 out of every 330 people got diagnosed YESTERDAY. That's 3/10's of a percent, for those playing along at home, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it really is. ... That's the entire state of Delaware. The entire state of Delaware got diagnosed YESTERDAY! ... If you filled Dodger Stadium to its maximum seating capacity, it would take almost 18 of them to hold the number of people who got diagnosed YESTERDAY

He ended with a photo of the crowd at Obama’s second inauguration. That’s how many were diagnosed yesterday. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported on the speech Biden gave on the 1st anniversary of the Capitol attack. This is the first time a sitting president has so thoroughly criticized his predecessor. He attacked the Big Lie, reminding the nasty guy’s base there has never been any evidence. Biden also mentioned Republicans are happy with every aspect of the election – except for the race at the top of the ballot. It was the same ballot on the same day with the same voters. Biden also said the attackers were not tourist or peaceful protests. They are not patriots. One can’t love their country only when they win. The real patriots were the voters, the election workers, and the defenders in the Capitol. He closed by saying he “will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of our democracy.” In a second post Eleveld included clips of the actual speech. I didn’t watch the speech, I only read Eleveld’s reporting of it. My reaction was summed up rather well in another post by Eleveld that reported voting rights advocates weren’t all that impressed with that last pledge. Even White House aides said the speech doesn’t necessary mean a change in posture. These advocates want to hear concrete plans for passing voting rights protections. So far Biden has been way too noncommittal. He hasn’t shown the urgency of the need to protect our vote. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, had an interesting quote from the Wall Street Journal:

To move beyond Jan. 6, 2021, we must put country ahead of party. For Democrats, that means resisting their leadership’s petty habit of aggravating partisan fault lines by indiscriminately condemning all who came to Washington that day. [Many stayed at the Mall, protected speech]. We Republicans have a heavier burden. I’ve been a Republican my entire life, and believe in what the Republican Party, at its best, has represented for decades. There can be no soft-pedaling what happened and no absolution for those who planned, encouraged and aided the attempt to overthrow our democracy. Love of country demands nothing less. That’s true patriotism.

This quote is of interest because it is from Karl Rove, a very destructive crony of Bush II who was another guy who wanted to be a monarch, but at least had the decency to leave at the end of his term. Dworkin also included a quote from The Hoarse Whisperer who tweeted:

Yes, I know how terrible Karl Rove is… however, I didn’t see an op-ed like this coming and it certainly doesn’t hurt our efforts. We NEED there to be at least a schism between the Josh Hawleys and Goehmerts and Boeberts and other Rs.

Duke Kwon is a pastor whose Twitter bio includes, “The function of freedom is to free someone else.” He tackles the claim that “Jan. 6 Had Nothing to Do With Christianity” by posting a thread of 19 images proving his point. The great actor Sidney Poitier died a couple days ago at the age of 94. I think I’ve seen only two of his movies – Lilies of the Field and To Sir, With Love. I was too young for the subject matter for most of the rest. I probably saw a movie or two he directed, though I doubt I knew he was the director. I knew he was the first black person to win an Oscar for Best Actor (Hattie McDaniel had won for Best Supporting Actor back when Gone With the Wind came out). He did that in 1963. The next black actors to win Best Actor were Denzel Washington and Halle Berry in 2001. Of course, the tributes have been pouring in. Bob Mondello, movie critic for NPR, talked about the string of movies from 1958 to 1967 that starred Poitier. His name was soon above the title. Mondello talked about how Poitier navigated the racial divide. Rebekah Sager of Kos talked about how his roles reflected his work towards equality and justice. This post includes a few of the most famous clips. One is In the Heat of the Night in which a white man slaps him and he slaps right back. Quite daring for 1967. Here is a video of his segment in the Kennedy Center Honors tributes in 1995. Why write about him if I barely know his work? Because it is good to hear how groundbreaking and unusual his work in the 1960s was and how important it was for all the black actors since then. Three generations of black actors have succeeded because he blazed the trail. As one voice in the KC Honors said in the 1960s he was alone. Now we see he was the beginning.

Putting the trust ahead of trustworthiness

I’ve quoted election security advocate Jennifer Cohn’s twitter feed several times, such as a recent guide on how we can protect our own vote. So it is good to see her as a guest on an episode of the podcast Gaslit Nation with hosts Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa, who are experts in authoritarianism. This episode is titled How to Hack an Election.

The episode begins with a quote from Hillary Clinton saying if this is a free and fair election the Biden Harris ticket would win. But she is quite concerned about the possibility the election won’t be free and fair. Along the way she asks, “Every American should ask him or herself, do you want a country where your president admires someone who kills, literally kills, his opposition?”

I’m quite aware that some people – the nasty guy’s base – do want a president who admires killers because they want him to do some killing of his opponents here – that being black and brown people.

Cohn said that our view of the 2016 election is confusing because we were affirmatively misled. One must follow the news carefully to determine truth from deliberate misinformation.

Even if voting machines are not connected to the internet (which allows hacking) they are programmed from computers that are. In 2016 at least two swing states that voting machines that had cellular modems connecting them to central tabulators – through the internet.

Is it better to have public trust in the election or actually have a trustworthy election? Before the 2016 election Harry Reid, who was Senate Minority Leader at the time, chose the latter. He sent two letters about election integrity to James Comey, who ignored them, as did the media. President Obama chose the former, trying to act behind the scenes while telling the public that elections are trustworthy.

Even though Obama acted (which is good) we got the nasty guy. But that lack of transparency is part of the problem now.

David Shimer wrote the book Rigged which discusses what happened in the 2016 election. Chalupa asked a question that has been asked about the authors of other tell-all books: Why are people, in this case four Obama officials, willing to talk to authors and not the public? Knowing about these things as early as possible is critical to getting them fixed.

Cohn talked about the phrase that was circulating at the time – “We see no evidence that vote tallies were changed.” The glaring bit is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It’s a CYA kind of statement.

There was an Obama team that monitored internet traffic on election night looking for things that might reflect election tampering. But there was a big hole – they monitored at the state level, not county or city level. Yeah, monitoring at the county level would be hard – there’s about 33,000 counties – and even harder at the city level.

But “we saw no evidence” morphed into “they did not change vote tallies.” And that’s magical thinking about our election system and intelligence community. We simply don’t know if vote tallies were changed. The only way we could know would be to have done a robust manual audit based on a reliable paper trail. And in many places there was no paper trail.

Kendzior and Chalupa were part of an effort to get an audit of the 2016 vote. Chalupa said that in Wisconsin they had to settle for a recount – and recounts are war with nasty guy goon squad lawyers hovering over and intimidating the counters. Recounts are not adequate for forensics of election hacking.

Democrats didn’t support the recount or audit. Cohn thinks they nay have been fooled by the nasty guy. He claimed it would be rigged. Dems overstated the security of the election system. So if they asked for a recount they would have looked like hypocrites. Cohn is afraid the same situation will recur in 2020. She sees signs that it will.

Even if those Obama officials don’t want to admit that vote tampering happened on their watch, why aren’t they, and Dems in general, on the forefront of election security, talking about modems on election machines and other issues?

Cohn talked about the 2004 election, which is even more suspicious than the 2016 election. The GOP Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, in Ohio teamed up with someone referred to as the Republican IT Guru to route Ohio’s results through a backup server owned by a GOP friendly company in Chattanooga. The main server crashed with no explained reasons. Before it crashed Kerry was winning. After the system was restored Kerry was losing. Ohio made the difference. Kerry didn’t pursue it because he knew it would go to the Supremes, who had decided for Bush four years before.

In the 2012 election it again came down to Ohio. There is a memorable scene from election night where on the set of Fox News Karl Rove had a meltdown when Ohio was called for Obama. To some observers it looked like Rove had an inside track on some situation that would turn Ohio to Romney and he was baffled when it didn’t work. Cohn speculates that a hacking group, perhaps associated with Anonymous, had thwarted the electronic meddling that Rove had planned.

They went into detail of other meddling Rove had done before 2012. That made Kendzior wonder why Democrats have been so reluctant to investigate and prosecute Rove and people like him. A lack of a transparent process of oversight, accountability, and prosecution for the guilty is digging the grave of democracy.

There is still the problem of “putting the trust ahead of trustworthiness.” But it shouldn’t be up to grass roots organizers to get the word out about how to protect the vote. There should be a central group to do that for the country.

They talked about the possibility of the news of unsecure voting depressing turnout. Why vote if it won’t be accurately counted? But a concern of hacking was perhaps one of the things that increased the turnout in 2018. Kendzior wrote:

I've been accused over and over like “Sarah said don't bother to vote because there's corruption. I'm like, no! You vote because there's corruption. You vote to try to get people in who will annihilate the corruption and you vote because it's your right and people fought hard for that right. But yeah, there's a propaganda operation. I mean, there are multiple propaganda operations and then I think just other things going on, people don't want to admit that this is possible. They also don't want to deal, I think, with the repercussions of, well, wait, what if our Congress was not legitimately elected?

What does that mean for core appointments? What does that mean for other, political appointments and policies that were voted on by what would be illegitimate actors? I mean, it's just a whole can of worms. No one wants to open it. I understand that on principle, but we're at the point where we're lurching right into full flown fascism. This is the time. We've got nothing to lose. We need total honesty.

On election reporting Cohn wrote:

I think there is this irony that a lot of journalists are trained and correctly so that they don't want to report on speculative claims. So they consider the suggestion that outcomes might not be legitimate speculative. And I actually sort of–I don't agree with it really–but I can sort of see what they're saying, but what they miss is that the official results that they are reporting are also completely speculative because they haven't been verified because we don't allow that in our country and that is the story. And I think there has been headway, but the story is that we don't have a system that allows us to verify these outcomes and that's the subtle middle ground that they're missing. They think it has to be one or the other, and they are reporting on unverified claims of who won the election. That is also unverified. It's not just that the cheating is unverified, the whole thing is.

Cohn talked about the needs to make our elections secure, hopefully by November, but there may not be enough time. We need robust manual audits, including a transparent chain of custody between election night and the audit. We need meaningful paper trails, which means hand-marked paper ballots. No modems on precinct equipment, no remote access software. Paper poll books. Precinct results posted publicly so they can be photographed to compare to state tallies. We need a Right to Know about breaches, though these are tricky to avoid derailing an investigation.

Thank a straight person

The SuperPAC that Karl Rove headed spent $400 million on various campaigns, especially against Obama. What did he and his donors get for that amount of money? Zip. A bunch of billionaire donors are mighty mad at Rove. Couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy.



More election results:
* Stacie Laughton, transgender, won a seat in the New Hampshire House, the first transgender lawmaker.

* Mark Ferrandino, gay, is on track to become Speaker of the Colorado House. Pat Steadman, gay, is expected to run for President of the Colorado Senate. We could have a state legislature where both leaders are gay.

* Tina Kotek, lesbian, is expected to become Speaker of the Oregon House.

* Tim Brown of Ohio is both gay and GOP and the only such state lawmaker in the nation.

* Justin Chenette, gay, was elected to the Maine House. He is also the youngest lawmaker at 21.

* Puerto Rico approved an application for statehood! It passed by almost 54%. But don't hold your breath waiting for Congress to approve it.



Dan Savage gives a big thank you to the straight allies who made marriage equality in Washington state happen.

Gays and lesbians are a tiny percentage of the population. We couldn't do this on our own. A majority of the legislators who voted for same-sex marriage? Straight. The governor who signed the law making same-sex marriage legal in Washington state? Straight. The majority of the folks manning the phone banks for R-74? Straight. The overwhelming majority of people who voted to approve R-74? Straight. The president who took a huge political risk and came out for marriage equality before his reelection campaign? Straight. It has gotten better for us—better, not perfect—but it hasn't gotten better for us in a vacuum. It's gotten better for us because straight people have gotten better about us.

Maybe the theme of the next Pride should be "Thank a str8 person." Or a huge wedding reception to include all the allies.



Ari Ezra Waldman thinks marriage equality will happen next in a state where Democrats control both parts of the state legislature and have a Dem governor. States that have (or will have in January) are Minnesota, Delaware, Illinois, Colorado, and Hawaii. In addition to actually allowing gay couples to marry every state with marriage equality deprives our opponents of one of their big arguments and improves the chances the Supremes will rule in our favor. Within a few weeks they'll decide whether to take cases related to the Defense of Marriage Act and the Calif. gay marriage ban.



Alas, The Christian Civic League in Maine wants a do-over. They're pondering whether to take the marriage equality issue back to the ballot box.



I don't remember where I heard this idea, nor do I remember the exact wording. It goes something like this: We'll know we've completely achieved gay acceptance when at a church sponsored dance the parents comment about what a cute couple Ralph and Don are and how good they are for each other. May that day come soon.

Privatizing marriage

Robert Levy, Chairman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, wrote an op-ed for the New York Daily News. His main point is that denying marriage to gays is unconstitutional. Government may discriminate (no drivers licenses for pre-teens), but to do so it must (1) demonstrate a compelling need, (2) show the laws that implement that discrimination are effective, and (3) narrowly craft the laws so they don't reach more broadly than necessary.

Yet, in the case of gay marriage, no compelling reason has been offered. The stated goals of the discrimination (strengthening straight marriage, protecting kids, ensuring procreation) are not met by banning gays from it. Those goals might be served through banning no-fault divorce (which Karl Rove just took advantage of), banning premarital cohabitation, or banning infertile couples from getting married. Instead, most states and the feds heap benefits on straight couples and deny them from gay couples.

Government can choose what criteria prompt what benefits. This criteria doesn't have to be based on the word marriage, which can be turned over to private institutions.

For those with short memories… Karl Rove engineered a slew of marriage protection votes in 2004 (including here in Michigan) to prompt Fundies to reelect Bush. The big reason for the push was to protect marriage. Yet he sees no need to protect his own. Thus Between The Lines gives him the title of Creep of the Week.

A fascinating first year

Karl Rove, as we so fondly remember, was the master of petty and nasty politics, yet not much of a grasp of political philosophy or strategy (especially of the conservatism he was supposed to be championing). All tactics and politics, no strategy or governance. He is the architect of the biggest and deepest political implosion since Democrats in the 1970s.

Now, I'm not bringing this up to wallow in fond memories, but to contrast Rove with Obama. Our new president has refused tactics that Washington considers political skill. Instead he strategized a path to the presidency. Since the election every symbolic act has been inclusive and sober. After presenting a centrist, bipartisan, moderate, and trustworthy front, he is able to unveil a long-term liberal agenda that will tax the rich and give to the poor.

Yes, there is risk. His plans for the economy may fail, the country end up bankrupt, and he'll last one term. We're in for a fascinating first year.

And if he doesn't show up the fun begins

I wrote yesterday about Rove refusing to acknowledge a congressional subpoena and even if the court ruled against him there was the matter of getting him to actually show up for a hearing. My friend and debate partner wrote:

Not a problem under the rule of law: Congress can have the Justice Dept (the new one that takes its name seriously) serve Rove with a contempt citation for failing to obey the subpoena. U.S. marshals would then "escort" Rove before the committee. America could then watch Rove plead the 5th all day -- a fine way to seed deep public distrust and disgust for the neocon Republicans. To make the spectacle more effective, the committee could call Justice Dept officials as witnesses with Rove in the room to hear their "turncoat" testimony about his crimes. All on TV. Valuable grist for the historians' mills.

Mission accomplished!

All that's required is Democratic Congressional cojones. Under separation of powers, Obama has nothing to say about proceedings in the Legislative Branch and would be foolish to intervene.

The good news is that Conyers has said he will proceed with the investigation and if it had to go through a court, that was fine with him.

Still thumbing his nose

Karl Rove was subpoenaed by congressman John Conyers to answer questions about the politicization of the Justice Department and other misdeeds. Conyers says that Rove can no longer claim executive privilege because Obama ordered that only the president can make that claim. Rove responded by essentially saying he still operates under the rules that were in effect when he was in office and if you don't like that take him to court. Even if the judge rules against Rove there is still the problem of getting him to show up for the hearing.

Trojan Horse

When plans were first proposed of putting the GW Bush library at Southern Methodist University I wrote about my distaste for the choice (probably before I started blogging). One of my sisters disagreed with me, saying that having the Bush papers there will allow good Methodist students to research his presidency and shed light on his secrets, besides lending prestige to SMU.

Turns out I was right in my distaste -- the deal, designed by Karl Rove, is highly rigged. In addition to getting the library itself, SMU must accept an educational institute that is highly partisan and completely autonomous. This institute borrows on SMU prestige, yet will have the goals of rewriting the Bush legacy, making sure secrets stay secret, and pushing the domination of the GOP right wing on American politics. This institute would corrode the neutrality and objectivity of American higher education. SMU doesn't even get compensating dollars for the deal. The lease is for 99 years with a 249 year extension, all for a single dollar. Rove gets to subvert a mainline denomination and recruit, train, support, organize, and deploy the next generation of right-wing political operatives. The United Methodist Church, which wholly owns SMU, will vote on the deal July 15-16. I think the cost is way too high and should be soundly rejected.