Month: March 2020

Photo credit: Jason Blackeye

Piggybacking off Martin’s post from yesterday, I have to admit I was utterly perplexed by what the Republican Party is trying to accomplish by propping up Donald Trump during the COVID-19 crisis—especially now that the virus is starting to hit red states, something that the ghouls on Fox News still seem to think is unpossible.

Dinesh D'Souza says the Coronavirus spreads are mainly in the blue states pic.twitter.com/lub06gmBmn

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) March 26, 2020

But I think I’ve figured it out: it’s the sunk costs fallacy in action.

“The sunk cost effect is the general tendency for people to continue an endeavor, or continue consuming or pursuing an option, if they’ve invested time or money or some resource in it,” says Christopher Olivola, an assistant professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business and the author of a new paper on the topic published in the journal Psychological Science. “That effect becomes a fallacy if it’s pushing you to do things that are making you unhappy or worse off.”

This idea often applies to money, but invested time, energy or pain can also influence behavior. “Romantic relationships are a classic one,” Olivola says. “The longer you’ve been together, the harder it is to break up.”

Sound familiar?

I wrote off the rotted brains on House Republicans a long time ago, but I always assumed that Senate Republicans had some grasp on self-preservation, if not reality. Already, this virus has sent several of them into self-quarantine (cutting McConnell’s vaunted majority down to size).

The economy—the only thing the GOP had to offer—is destroyed for the immediate and long term. Their president is likely to lose, and lose badly in November. He will probably have pretty long coattails when he does.

Not only that, Dr. Trump’s medical advice snake oil prescriptions are actually killing their own voters who are much less likely to believe coronavirus is a real threat.

As Martin wrote yesterday, “The only solution, and it’s glaringly obvious, is to remove Trump from office now and put our faith in Mike Pence to at least follow the direction of the experts he’s ostensibly organizing.”

Sane party leaders might look at the piles of dead bodies, the smoldering wreckage of the economy, and their own tenuous hold on power and say “let’s remove Trump before one of us dies, ride out the next few months with Pence, and just dump this mess in the Democrats’ lap.” They’ve already stacked the courts so high that any truly progressive legislation is likely to be stymied for years. Furthermore—as has been noted many times—the GOP does better as an opposition party, jeering from the sidelines instead of governing.

[I]t has now been more than twenty years since the Gingrich Revolution and the Republicans seem to be moving in the opposite direction in every respect. They just lost Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Eric Cantor because the simple act of trying to pass a budget and pay our bills on time was too unpopular with their base. Rather than becoming skilled legislators, they’re always on the brink of shutting down the government or causing a national default.
[…]
The Republicans have had tremendous success with what they know best, which is being a very good minority party. They can counter-message and use procedural tools in obnoxiously innovative ways to obstruct. They can simply refuse to even hold hearings for presidential nominees or insist that those positions don’t even need to be filled. They excel at this stuff, but they do not excel at legislating or doing oversight of the federal government and its agencies.

Why are they not making what seems to be a rational choice? Is it the sunk costs fallacy?

Olivola says it’s not totally clear why we feel so compelled to honor others’ investments about as much as we honor our own, even when they work against us. But people should try to overcome both versions of the sunk cost fallacy, he says.

“What’s done is done,” Olivola says. “There’s nothing you can do to regain money that’s lost — and pursuing something that makes you unhappy not only isn’t going to get your money back, but it’s also going to make you worse off. You’re just digging a deeper hole.”

I don’t know who said it first, but “the first step in solving a problem is recognizing there is one.” At some point—and hopefully it is sooner rather than later—Republicans need to admit they have a problem and cut their losses before they wind up dancing on a Viking funeral pyre.

It shouldn’t have to require the mass culling of their own base or watching one of their colleagues die from coronavirus—but that is what it will probably take.

With no sports on television, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time paying attention to free agency in the National Football League, and its upcoming draft of college players. These are really the only things of any consequence that are still generating interesting articles in the sports world. Recently, the league’s general managers petitioned the commissioner to delay the draft because they aren’t able to do their normal due diligence. Specifically, they can’t bring the players in to get medical examinations or psychological evaluations, and they’re also hampered by being locked out of their facilities where they’d normally be holding meetings to set up their draft strategies. The commissioner ignored their requests and the draft is set to go on as scheduled beginning April 23.

At New York magazine, Gabriel Debenedetti has a piece on Joe Biden’s process for selecting a running mate. Unsurprisingly, the COVID-19 crisis has affected him in much the same way as it has affected the NFL’s general managers.

In a world dominated by social-distancing measures, it’s not clear to them how Biden is supposed to get to know his potential running mates, which is usually an important part of the process, and one on which Biden is likely to put an extra emphasis given his tight relationship with Obama, say those close to him. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carved out time from her busy campaign schedule to spend days on the trail with options like Warren, John Hickenlooper, Sherrod Brown, Cory Booker, and Tim Kaine (her eventual pick) even before submitting them for formal vetting or meeting the finalists for interviews at her home. Biden was only able to hold one rally with [Amy] Klobuchar and one joint event with [Kamala] Harris and [Gretchen] Whitmer before the campaign trail shut down earlier this month.

This is impacting the schedule for making a decision. The pandemic is also impacting the primary schedule as future contests are pushed off.  This delays the date on which Biden will mathematically eliminate Bernie Sanders, and the Biden team is mindful that he’ll need the support of some of Sanders’ supporters. He doesn’t want to antagonize them.

Perhaps the biggest question looming over [Elizabeth] Warren’s chances is how much work Biden thinks needs to be done to win over Sanders’s voters, and how useful Warren would be to achieving that goal.

That question is one reason Biden has been careful not to talk too much about this process in public, especially since Sanders could decide to remain in the race into the summer, as more primaries are delayed to June due to the virus. “We don’t want to piss off Bernie, and rushing to talk about this could end up pissing off his supporters, too,” said the congressman. “Don’t discount this concern.”

Biden has already made a public commitment that he will pick a woman as his running mate, and Debenedetti says that former rivals Klobuchar, Harris, and Warren will be on the eventual shortlist once the initial vetting process is complete. Other people mentioned in the article include governors Michelle Lujan Grisham (New Mexico) and Gretchen Whitmer (Michigan), senators Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan (New Hampshire), Tammy Baldwin (Wisconsin), Tammy Duckworth (Illinois), and Catherine Cortez Masto (Nevada), Representative Val Demings (Florida), and Georgia’s House minority leader Stacey Abrams, former acting attorney general Sally Yates, and Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.

Biden obviously knows some of these women better than others. His problem is that it’s not easy to meet with any of them in person. This would be important in any circumstance, but Biden views his tight-knit relationship with Barack Obama as the key to their successful partnership, and he wants to have confidence that anyone he selects will work with him in the same way. How can he get a feel for that if he doesn’t have a chance to get to know the candidates?

He wants to have an ideological kinship with his vice-president, and this is also something he’d want to explore in person. For someone like Elizabeth Warren who basically got her start in politics opposing a bankruptcy bill promoted by Biden, this could require an extensive feeling out process. Can they get comfortable with each other?

For others who might lack obvious credentials for the presidency, Biden will want to get a sense of what they know about the federal government and how it operates. A lot can be done over the phone, but it’s a poor substitute for having someone sit down in your living room.

Fortunately, Biden has more power over the process than an NFL general manager and he won’t be forced to make any decisions before he’s ready. Yet, he’s not in total control of the schedule.

He’s been quarantining himself in Wilmington, Delaware, but should he become infected with the COVID-19 virus, he wants to party to be in a position to go forward, possibly without him. This, too, is having an effect on his decision process:

When the camera is off, though, a handful of high-ranking Democrats who have the former vice-president and his advisers’ ears have begun agitating for him to expedite the running-mate selection process in the interest of presenting a ticket that can provide a clear signal of presidential readiness to contrast with Trump, can seize the spotlight from him, and can even minimize potential chaos before the party’s convention if something does, indeed, happen to Biden.

So, he’s under pressure to act quickly while still mindful that Sanders has not conceded the race. The convention is still 16 weeks away and his advisers Anita Dunn and Bob Bauer have recommended a veep vetting process that lasts at least eight weeks. That process could get truncated and the field of potential running mates could be winnowed. Just as coronavirus disruptions might cause a college football player with health issues to fall in the NFL Draft, they might keep some candidates from getting a full consideration from Biden. And, just as operating with imperfect information might cause an NFL team to make a bad draft decision, operating under these less than ideal conditions might cause Biden to make a less than ideal choice.

This is not my idea—credit is due to my friend and fellow bass player Sean Dorn—but I have an actual modest proposal for the “Willing to Die” conservatives, including Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick (aged 63), Glenn Beck (aged 56), Brit Hume (aged 76), whoever this dipshit is, and so on.

If you’re waiting for me to say something like “go on TV and show us how it’s done,” you’re going to be disappointed.

My question is this: if all you older conservative commentators “are willing to die to save the American economy,” why are you not volunteering at COVID-19 wards already?

FEMA is understaffed. The country’s nurses are exhausted and frustrated. It’s a huge mess, no matter how you look at it.

So if you are willing to put YOUR life on the line as you claim, why are you not lending a hand, Glenn Beck?

Brit Hume, I’m sure you have something to offer besides your unnecessary opinion.

Lieutenant Governor Patrick, your state has a weak governor system. You are probably almost wholly unnecessary in the state house right now, and you announced on television for the world to see that “if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”

Receding hairline guy, if your law firm is so slow that you have time to dick around on Twitter all day, you have time to help some patients, maybe with last wills and bequests.

And since you’re willing to die for America, you won’t have to use any of the masks, PPEs, and other equipment that are in such short supply for first responders and health care workers.

Here’s your chance to walk your talk, save America’s economy for future generations, and help some of the younger, fitter people (including children) that are winding up in emergency rooms because of your president’s failure to protect us from a deadly pandemic disease. You might die, but you might not—either way, you’d be living up to your stated ideals and making a REAL contribution to mitigating the impact of the disease and treating patients.

Unless you’re full of shit. You’re not full of shit, are you? Say it ain’t so…

A few days ago, I started telling people I know that the coronavirus crisis will begin to overwhelm us in about three weeks’ time. I based that on looking at where other countries are, particularly Italy, and then I just projected forward knowing that we haven’t done enough to prevent or prepare for the worst. The New York Times editorial board put it this way:

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said he’d “love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” which falls this year on April 12. Who wouldn’t? But wishing will not make it so. This crisis has not turned a corner — it hasn’t even hit yet.

I’d love to spend a bunch of time arguing with the president about the advisability of people showing up for Easter services, but events will make the case for me. This reality will not bend to fit Trump’s fantasies.

Speaking of fantasies, that pretty well describes the rest of the editorial board’s piece, because it is basically a long exhortation for the president to do things he will never proactively and voluntarily do.

President Trump needs to call for a two-week shelter-in-place order, now, as part of a coherent national strategy for the coronavirus to protect Americans and their livelihoods.

That will not happen.

We are not suggesting that Mr. Trump has the authority to order a national lockdown, much less advocating that he attempt to enforce one. Instead, we are urging him to use the bully pulpit to put pressure on, and provide political cover for, governors to take the hard steps that are needed.

The opposite of that is happening.

He should announce that, within 24 hours, all nonessential businesses should be shut and residents directed to remain in their homes except for vital trips out, such as to obtain food or medical care.

The president could not have been more clear that he is opposed to this.

Lines of authority and policy aims need to be clarified within the White House. Vice President Mike Pence is the official crisis czar, but Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, has his own response team working on, among other things, outreach to the private sector. Certain senior aides, with business leaders whispering in their ears, are at odds with some health advisers about what restrictions are needed and how heavy the government’s hand should be…

…Federalism is integral to American government, but the administration needs to get serious about running a coordinated national response.

Why, at this point, anyone would expect this administration to be capable of coordinating a response is beyond me. This will simply never happen as long as Trump remains president. And that’s why this is delusional:

This editorial board is reluctant to grant any White House more executive power, much less this one, given its track record. But in this case, there is no one else to coordinate at the national level.

There is not “no one else” to coordinate at the national level, there is no one who can do this period. The only solution, and it’s glaringly obvious, is to remove Trump from office now and put our faith in Mike Pence to at least follow the direction of the experts he’s ostensibly organizing.

We’re past the point of there being any profit in telling Trump what he should do. He will not do it, and will most often make things a hundred times worse. That’s why this is a ridiculous waste of breath:

It’s time to put an end to the free-form daily task force briefings featuring the president, the vice president and a rotating cast of other officials. They are a poor use of time for most of the participants and, worse, have repeatedly served up confusing and even false information. The president should tap a respected figure, preferably someone apolitical and with experience in crisis management, to serve as the point person for these briefings. When developments merit, other officials can be brought in to address specific topics.

That’s the last thing on Earth that will ever happen.

If the Editorial Board wants the president to face reality they should set an example by facing reality themselves. There is only one solution here that can prevent or at least mitigate total disaster, and that’s if the Republicans can be convinced that they don’t want two million deaths on their conscience because they refused to do what was necessary while there was still time for it to matter.

Dropping some Gil Scott-Heron (circa 2010):

Nothing like a fresh take on an old Robert Johnson classic as well as one of Gil’s own signature poems.

This is sort of a continuation from the last Midweek Cafe & Lounge as well as the Froggy Bottom Lounge I put together over the weekend, and finally, last week’s Midweek Cafe and Lounge:

My usual vibe is to keep these light, and have some music and whatnot. Back when Neon Vincent was still a regular, we had some really cool beverage recipes. Probably wouldn’t hurt about now, given the state of life now. Any zombie beverages would be appreciated.

As with the previous cafe/lounge, I want to give you all something a bit more informative in hopes that it at least adds to some straight talk and keeps things in perspective as we come to grips with what is potentially a serious pandemic: Coronavirus COVID-19. First, I want you all to bookmark this map hosted by Johns Hopkins. It appears to be about the most up-to-date map of the number of cases per country, and also keeps record of deaths and recoveries. I also recommended last time this link from the Axios website – Coronavirus: The Big Picture. Axios is useful for its brief capsule summaries for those of us who may be on the go. The Axios global map is okay, but seems to be a little behind the other map. Finally, if you go to the Guardian, you will find daily live blogs of the progress of COVID-19 that provide a global perspective (including what is happening in the US). There is also a COVID-19 Tracker specific to the US that is quite accurate and will give you data about how close you are to the nearest confirmed case or cases.

At the end of the day, I think it is crucial that we have straight talk about what’s going on, rather than the sort of faux happy talk that 45 wants to spin or the bizarre conspiracy theories spread by folks on social media or even by otherwise supposedly responsible politicians (looking at you, Tom Cotton). Straight talk may not be necessarily pleasant, but it will keep you informed and hopefully alive and healthy.

I’ll try to post a video or two if I can actually get myself into the mood to do so. Obviously that’s been a bit difficult. If anyone wants to talk, here’s a space. It’s yours.

In the meantime, cheers.

History has taught us that there is more than one way to kill a few million people. Deliberate famine worked pretty well for Joe Stalin, for example. There’s even a term for this (“Holodomor”) which is a compound of the Ukrainian words holod “hunger” and mor “plague”.

Apparently, historians still debate whether Stalin’s Great Famine of 1932 and 1933 meets the technical definition of genocide. I guess it’s hard to parse between benign and malicious neglect. When does maladministration cross over into a maniacal desire to eradicate a whole people? Who is qualified to say?

We’re at risk now of suffering a “Trumpomor.” This is almost solely because the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate neglected to remove President Trump when they were given good cause. Since he is still in power, he’s in a position to cause a million or more excess deaths in this country and more than that on a global scale. He might do it for no better reason than so he can have people visit his resorts and golf courses before his whole real estate empire goes broke.

He might be less inclined to do this if the Republicans in Congress had forced him to divest from his business interests rather than tripping over each other to patronize them. So, as you can see, I’m building a decent case that congressional Republicans are giving us a Holodomor.

I wonder, however, if Trump is acting in such a reckless manner that the Republicans may be forced to remove him after all.

President Donald Trump has never been known for his patience or long attention span.

Now, as the coronavirus crisis threatens his presidency, and upends his campaign for reelection, Trump is rapidly losing patience with the medical professionals who have made the case day after day that the only way to prevent a catastrophic loss of life is to essentially shut down the country — to minimize transmission and “flatten the curve” so hospitals aren’t overwhelmed with critical patients.

The president also has been furious that his efforts to halt the harrowing drop in the stock market have so far proven ineffective. He has been calling friends and economists at all hours and berated aides and reporters who try to persuade him to recognize the severity of the outbreak.

The man is berating people who try to persuade him to recognize the severity of the coronavirus outbreak. He is inclined to do whatever he can to get people back to work, back on the subways, back on airplanes, back in our public parks, and (above all) back in his hotels. This has the potential to cause two million excess American deaths. When people tell him this, he yells at and insults them.

Congress doesn’t have the luxury of ignoring this. There are members of Congress who are severely ill with COVID-19, and many others who are currently self-quarantining and unable to vote. They’re also responsible for their constituents’ health, and most of them are not outright insane. They know that the best policy is to follow expert scientific advice, and the best politics is to let others take responsibility for any negative economic consequences that result. Taking actions that will lead to a couple of million excess deaths isn’t going to be good for them on any level, especially because it won’t improve the economy.

There may come a point soon when Trump openly defies his health advisors and causes many of them to resign. That will be the point when members of Trump’s cabinet will have to decide whether or not to invoke the 25th Amendment. The prospect of having a couple million deaths on your conscience can change people’s ordinary calculation of what it means for a president to be unfit for office.

If the 25th Amendment ever is invoked, this is how it will look:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Mike Pence would become president, at least temporarily, and considering that he’s listening to health experts every day, that would be a good thing. But it would be up to Congress to decide if Pence remained in charge.

Thereafter, when the President [Trump] transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

A lot of people have been fantasizing about this result for a few years now, but we’re in a different world now.

The president has snapped at aides delivering news that contradicts his relentless belief the crisis will be resolved soon.

Upon his return from a trip to India last month, Trump lit into aides about Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who had provided a dire warning about the virus’ potential impact. He chided Vice President Mike Pence in a West Wing meeting for defending Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a one-time Democratic presidential contender, for his handling of the crisis. And he angrily upbraided medical providers who called on his administration to do more, saying they should be upset instead with their local leadership.

If Trump tries to end the containment policy, he will face resistance.

There is dissent within the Republican Party, however, including from some close allies of the president.
“It would be a major mistake to suggest any change of course when it comes to containment,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) said in an interview. “I just spoke with Dr. [Anthony] Fauci — he believes that, if anything, we should be more aggressive and do more. . . . You can’t have a functioning economy if you have hospitals overflowing.”

There has to be some line beyond which the Republicans will not go in their blind obedience to Trump. This crisis seems perfectly designed to discover exactly where that line is.

I was on my way to the grocery when I learned that Nancy Pelosi Smash released a statement in advance of the Democrats’ third COVID-19 response bill as Mitch McConnell’s second effort to funnel money to himself and his friends (“What friends? Even his dog hates him.”) went down in spectacular fashion.

It’s full of good stuff: no stock buyback, layoffs, or CEO bonuses; unemployment for those of us laid off; money for our first responders, doctors, and nurses; direct payments to families, guaranteed paid family and medical leave for more workers; free coronavirus treatment, and more. And it makes sure that even if we are still in quarantine thanks to the sheer incompetence and malevolence of the Republican Death Cult and their God King, there will be “billions in grant funding for states through the Election Assistance Commission and a national requirement for both 15 days of early voting and no-excuse absentee vote-by-mail, including mailing a ballot to all registered voters in an emergency.” Go read the whole thing.

I like to joke that I’m not particularly smart, but I have smart friends. So if I may pat myself on the back a little bit, I called this last week. While the pundits were declaring Pelosi was outflanked by the GOP, that the Democrats screwed up, that Pelosi was not only “a total failure”, but grotesque as well, I had a very different take.

I should say at the outset that I have largely stopped reading the kind of “analysis” that’s being offered at the linked outlets, and it has REALLY cleared my head. Common Dreams is especially bad (and my former employers should be ashamed for syndicating their garbage to a wider audience), but it’s always the same refrain no matter who you read: doom and gloom, the Democrats are selling us out, I don’t understand. Yeah, no shit you don’t understand, which is shameful because that’s what you get paid to do.

But while I may not be particularly smart, I’ve been around the block a few times. In the entire 15 years or so I’ve been writing about progressive politics, Nancy Pelosi has been a towering, omnipresent figure. I have watched her run circles around every Republican she’s ever dealt with. I watched John Boehner, and then Paul Ryan, go crawling to her on hands and knees for her to bail out their various budget failures, and more than once. I’ve seen Pelosi pilloried by the pundits time and time again, only to watch the more honest among them eat their words. You’d think they’d learn by now.

As I have said, I am not an expert and I am not particularly smart, but Pelosi’s refusal to approve cash payments sure looks like a smart tactic now. Pelosi isn’t stupid: she knows the Republicans are foundering and desperate to do anything that makes them look less awful. But she also knows they are greedy, corrupt, and none too bright. So she allowed Mitch to make a big show of how he was going to give people money, betting that he would do exactly what he did: try to pass a bill that doesn’t do shit for working people.

All of this, by the way, is taking place in the context of a Republican president who’s scaring the shit out of more of America every blessed day, while the bodies keep piling up like cordwood, the stock market keeps making like the RMS Titanic on steroids, at least two Republicans got popped profiting off the pandemic, and the bill contained what could charitably be described as slush fund.

I guess Mitch thought he ram his piece of crap home, but with the Republican-controlled Senate—limping along from a self-inflicted wound ( that is, the cornavirus they have been saying is a hoax for months), the Democrats voted en masse against it. But even if they didn’t it would still have to pass the House, where Congress would almost certainly take that door Mitch and the GOP explicitly opened to cash payments, and open it wider.

If payments had been House’s opening bid, the Grim Reaper would have stopped that dead in its tracks. Now, the Democrats will be making a much more generous counteroffer, and the GOP isn’t in much of a position anymore to put the kibosh on cash.

Maybe Pelosi wasn’t outflanked after all. But that’s just my thinking. Like I said, I’m not a particularly smart guy, I just have smart friends: perhaps some of that rubbed off on me.

I was a grown-ass man by the time planes slammed into the World Trade Center in 2001, and I was nearing forty years of age when the economy collapsed in 2008. Those were enormous events in my life, but they weren’t formative. In many ways, my life in politics has been an effort to battle the way we reacted to those traumas because I think they made most Americans go a little crazy. This is a Generation X type of reaction. It’s a lot different from how younger generations have responded, and this has created a chasm in our culture and even among progressives on the left. Here’s how Maggie Astor of the New York Times describes it:

The oldest of them were just out of college on 9/11; the youngest were not yet born. Over the two decades that followed, they all came of age under storm clouds: of war, of recession, of mass shootings, wildfires and now a pandemic.

The result is perhaps the most profound generational gap since the 1960s: between the Generation X, baby boomer and Silent Generation voters who remember one world, and the millennial and Generation Z voters for whom that world never existed.

I never really thought my generation would be lumped with the Silent Generation since the most fundamental fact of my youth was that the 1960s had ruptured everything. Today, people can look back to the early years of the century and see a recognizable America. Growing up in the 1970s, the 1950’s might as well have been the 1850s.

But I do see the point Ms. Astor is making. You can see the generational gap between Generation X and the Millennials in the massive difference in who they support for the Democratic presidential nomination. And you can see the discomfort Millennials and Gen Y folks have with not getting their way. They’re coming into their own, but it’s Gen X’s time to run the country. We’ve waited patiently for the Boomers to pass the torch and we won’t be skipped over.

At the same time, nothing is ever going to be same after the coronavirus pandemic is over. The old debates about big and small government are over. Many of the death-grip battles of the Boomer generation will be set aside or diminished in importance, and that’s been a lifelong goal of Gen X’ers.

I think we will discover the our destiny was to serve as a bridge between the old and the new rather than a force in our own right. We’re here to keep the porridge from getting too hot or cold.  For the next twenty years or so, Gen X will have the most power in the country, but we’ll be living in a world we hardly recognize. It’s a big responsibility, it’s not what we expected, but I think we’re up to the challenge.

The U.S. Senate tried to invoke cloture on a coronavirus bill on Sunday evening. They needed 60 votes, but Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) only received forty-seven. Technically, he had 48 votes, but for procedural reasons involving his ability to call the bill up again McConnell switched his ‘aye’ vote to ‘nay.’ It didn’t really matter to the outcome, but one reason that the count was so low is that several Republicans are self-quarantining and cannot vote. Chief among them is the other Kentucky senator, Rand Paul, who has tested positive for COVID-19 and has possibly exposed some of his colleagues.

All told, there appears to be four senators who are in quarantine at the moment in addition to Paul: Rick Scott of Florida, Mitt Romney and Mike Lee of Utah, and Cory Gardner of Colorado. If you’re wondering why Bernie Sanders didn’t vote, it’s because he didn’t even show up:

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., missed a crucial Senate vote Sunday to hold a livestream from his home in Burlington with “Squad” members Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.

It’s hard to see what the point of that decision was, but at least it didn’t wind up making any difference. It might become important on Monday if Sanders isn’t present. McConnell’s 53-47 majority is down to 48-47 with the absence of five of his members. We’re on the verge of seeing a functional Democratic majority in the Senate.

The Wall Street futures market reacted negatively to the combination of another dreadful White House coronavirus press conference and the apparent stalemate over a bill in Congress, and the expectation is that the stock market will take another massive nosedive when it opens at 9am on Monday. For this reason, McConnell initially planned to time his second stab at winning a procedural vote to a period of outright panic.

McConnell tried initially to set another procedural vote, after Sunday’s party-line rejection of cloture on the motion to proceed to the underlying legislative vehicle (HR 748), for 9:45 a.m. That was intended for maximum shock value, particularly if the stock market trips its automatic “circuit breaker,” halting trades for 15 minutes, after the 9:30 a.m. open if the S&P 500 drops 7 percent from its previous close.

But Schumer, who had just been meeting with [Treasury Secretary Steve] Mnuchin and [White House legislative affairs director Eric] Ueland, went to the floor and objected. “We are making progress. I think there’s a good chance we’ll have an agreement. But we don’t need artificial deadlines,” Schumer said.

McConnell agreed to move the vote back to noon. “Maybe there will be some miraculous coming together tonight. I hope so. If not, we will now be voting at noon rather than 9:45,” he said off the Senate floor.

Meanwhile, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said before the Senate vote failed that the Democrats and Republicans are so far apart that she’s going to have the Democratically-controlled House mark up their own bill rather than continue to negotiate with McConnell. It’s unclear if she intends to keep that promise.

On Twitter, Paul Krugman argued persuasively that the Republican bill addresses a less urgent problem than what the Democrats want to focus on. The economy does need a jolt, but it can’t be helped while everyone is in lockdown. The more immediate problem is the health crisis and people who aren’t getting paychecks because they’ve lost their hours or job. So, regardless of what kind of selling frenzy greets Congress on Monday morning, the Republican bill can wait.

Pelosi seems to be in total control of the situation, but she has problems of her own. As early as a week ago, the House was talking about extending their recess because lawmakers aren’t eager to expose themselves to the coronavirus. With several senators now in quarantine, returning to Washington, DC is even less attractive. Ideally, they’d show up just to have a quick vote authorizing an economic rescue bill and leave again, but Pelosi’s plan would require long legislative hours and many votes.

Meanwhile, President Trump was his usual assholish self:

President Trump, at a White House news briefing Sunday evening, took an unusually conciliatory tack, declining to criticize Senate Democrats for holding out.

“We all want to get to the same place,” he said.

“We’re very close,” Trump said. “The Democrats want to get there,” and so do Republicans, he said. “I don’t think anybody has a choice.”

Asked if he would swear off receiving assistance for his own businesses, Trump demurred, saying that “it cost me billions and billions of dollars to be president” and that he had gotten no credit for declining his annual salary.

It should be an interesting morning, and an interesting week.

East Coast suburbanite that I am, it’s easy for me to casually root for a booming population of wild horses in the West. I don’t have to worry about any ecological repercussions, just as it’s unlikely that I’ll discover a grizzly bear or mountain lion on my property, or have to contend with a pack of wolves hunting my livestock. I understand that wildlife isn’t abstract to western ranchers and that the land can only sustain a certain level of population in any species before other species or flora begin to suffer as result.

So, I have no strong opinions about what the government should do about the mustang problem, I’m not opposed on principle to rounding them up nor even to culling their numbers, if that’s what experts believe is necessary. It does seem a little crazy to just keep tens of thousands of them in storage, however, at a cost of $3 billion a year.

I like the idea of the plains teeming with bison and the mountain valleys covered in galloping herds of mustangs. I get a thrill out of seeing a wolf pack on the hunt as the sun rises on Yellowstone park, and I have a real fondness (and quite a bit of fear) for the grizzly bear. But I know that everything has to have a balance, and when we protect one species we can put others at risk.

Sentimentality plays an important role in maintaining public support for conservation and species preservation, but it can’t be the driver of actual public land management.

The roundup operation itself is strikingly efficient — a helicopter and a few workers in jean jackets can catch scores of mustangs in a day. The bureau rounded up 7,300 in 2019.

But once they are caught, they have to be fed and cared for. And the costs and frictions of having so many animals on the government’s hands — 49,000 at last count — have pushed the whole wild horse program toward collapse.

The rented pastures and feed lots where they are kept now devour more than two-thirds of the program’s budget, leaving little money for anything else, including looking for ways to get the bureau out of its current fix.

Low on cash, the bureau cut roundups drastically in recent years. But officials acknowledge that the move just made matters worse, by allowing the population on the range to grow rapidly. There are now about 100,000 wild horses and burros on public lands — more than at any time since the days of the Old West. The government reckons the land can sustain only about 27,000.

Bureau officials warn that the mustang herds are a looming catastrophe for the land, and there is no cheap or obvious solution. Capturing all the excess horses and caring for them in storage for the rest of their lives could cost up to $3 billion. Doing nothing may prove costly, too.

In the old days, they used mustangs for dog food and fertilizer, and they tamed many of them and sent them east to work. My guess is that this isn’t something that would have widespread public support today. Yet, I don’t know that there’s a particularly good reason to feed 50,000 or 100,000 or 200,000 horses who never give anything back in terms of work, food, or materials.  The public probably wouldn’t be thrilled with this policy if they knew about it, mainly because it doesn’t make much sense.

One alternative is to remotely sterilize the horses with dart guns. This can avoid a lot of problems, including the ethical concerns (if any) of large culling operations. But apparently it’s not that cheap or easy to do.

A 2013 report by the National Academy of Sciences urged the bureau to shift away from roundups and start using readily available and inexpensive fertility control drugs, which are typically administered by dart gun annually in the field.

Bureau leaders acknowledged the warnings and promised to embrace fertility control drugs, but their use actually declined in the years after the report. Less than 1 percent of the program’s current budget is spent on them.

Nearly all of the fertility control now happening on wild horse ranges is done by local volunteers, often retirees, who have learned to wield dart guns in the field.

If nothing is done, the horses will leave little food for other animals like elk and wild grouse, so this isn’t about being for or against wildlife.  Proper land management isn’t easy and politics always have a way of distorting sensible policies. I’m no expert in this field, nor do I pretend to be.

I do think it’s a pretty spectacular sight, though, to see wild horses on the move. I’m glad they’ve made a strong comeback.