Month: April 2020

I woke up late, to what has so far been a good day. So I’m not going to jinx that by talking about it too much, and that I’m not going to ruin it by looking at too much news today.

I am going to share one of my favorite comedians on Twitter, whose feed is essentially Poe’s Law—“an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied in action“—in action. Ladies and gentlemens, Brent Terhune, Pro 2nd Amendment and follower of Christ:

They want Mike Pence to where a mask??? I DONT THANK SO pic.twitter.com/p1N1ZaLtgV

— Brent Terhune (@BrentTerhune) April 29, 2020

His feed is full of stuff like this—and there are some gems in this one like how Mike Pence has likely worn a mask a few times, “probably the one with the zipper on the mouth”—but it’s the responses that have me laughing out loud. His impression of a Trump supporter is so perfect that people actually believe he’s the real thing. Here’s a quick sampling:

First: *wear / *think because damn your mistakes hurt my eyes.
Second: in Europe we say: we’ll see where you’ll be in 2 weeks : 🏥
People here thought the same until they ended up in hospital.
Third: You want your country’s protection right ? Well right now you are being…

— 𝕭 ❤️ (@U2pictures) April 30, 2020

Another evolutionary miscue wading in the shallow end of the gene pool

— NoneOfTheAbove (@SoulSoldSeprtly) April 30, 2020

Seriousfuckingly, you don’t know the name of the movie “Carrie,” with the name of the character “Carrie” in it? Stupid at its finest! Sounds like a COVID cough, you best get that checked out fuckface!!!!😳

— J Flanigan #ridethewave❄️🌴🍷🌊✌️ (@FlaniganJodi) April 30, 2020

And of course why wouldn’t people think Terhune is an actual Trumpist? Just this morning, on a Facebook conversation about China, a random old man who I have never once met—called me “a commie” and then went on some crazy rant about how I hate America like the rest of the Dumbocrat Socialists. Just last week, the Lysol Company had to issue warnings for folks not to start drinking or shooting up their products. And then of course, there was this display:

Francis Fukuyama wrote during the Soviet collapse that we had seen “the end of history” (which he later postponed. Perhaps I’m a little over my skis, but I do believe the Trump years may be the end of satire.

Stay at home order is BULLSHIT. OPEN UP VEGAS pic.twitter.com/GtTEWfvTLC

— Brent Terhune (@BrentTerhune) April 23, 2020

I mean, how do you parody a movement that’s such an obvious joke?

Photo Credit: Reluctant Habits, “The Unbearable Stupidity of Chris Cillizza,” photo tweaked by me.

When we last saw media thug Chris Cillizza, aka “the punchline to the cruelest work of absurdist comedy in the history of the fucking universe, and that the title of that work is On the Origin of Species,” he was claiming to have learned a lesson about being a real reporter who wears big boy pants. Less than three months later, he was getting trashed in the New York Times for backsliding, and by the end of the year, he was whining that his job requires him to work.

So much for lessons, I guess. Now he’s trying to pull a 2016 “But Her Emails” on Joe Biden, cynically using Tara Reade as his hand puppet—and if Twitter’s any indication, it’s not going too well. A lot of people have figured out Cillizza’s schtick since the last election, and are none too impressed with the caliber of his output. So consider this not so much a judgement on Reade’s allegations—I know as much as Cillizza, meaning “nothing”—but an object lesson in journalistic credibility.

To the best of my knowledge, Cillizza first writes about the Reade allegations on April 27. It immediately gets ratioed. The comments are… cruel.

Cillizza tries again, this time with a short bromide on “character,” and a link to his article, “Why Joe Biden needs to personally address Tara Reade’s allegations,” in case you missed it. No one missed it: Cillizza gets ratioed, again. Readers are not kind in their assessments.

Cillizza begins getting desperate, making another appeal to “character”—as if nobody knows the sitting “president” has been accused by upwards of 25 women of sexual assault and outright rape—and goes a little further. He tries to shame the Biden campaign for rebutting the allegations through “a senior female campaign staffer.” Cillizza—who some say should be “fired out of a large cannon into an even larger cliff face”— also tries to set himself up as some authority that Biden has to answer to. He gets ratioed, again, probably because he’s been well-known as a misogynist dating back more than a decade when he was joking about “Mad Bitch” Hillary Clinton.

Cillizza transmogrifies into a child being potty trained, begging readers to look at his poop before judging it. He gets ratioed, brutally. It is still April 27. This has all occurred in less than 24 hours. PLEASE LOOK AT MY POOPY, MOMMY! LOOK AT IT, LOOK AT THE CORN AND THE PEANUTS MOMMY! I’M A BIG BOY! LOOK WHAT I MADE!

It’s like watching the embarrassing “DEBATE ME, AOC” debacle all over again, but even stupider and with less merit.

ANYWAY—on April 28, our hero takes another stab at it, intoning that Joe Biden needs to use a covid-19 townhall to discuss the Tara Reade allegations. We all know what happens, because Cillizza is too lazy to learn anything and because he has no credibility anymore.

That’s when Bob Cesca (who knows how a lunkhead like Cillizza functions) tries to step in. Chris gets huffy. He also gets ratioed, again.

As it turns out, Biden does NOT address the Reade allegations in his address. So we get a double flusher from Cillizza, who now seems to be lobbing threats at the campaign. “It is impossible to cut off all oxygen to a story like this one,” Cillizza scolds. Maybe he should go speak to the many women who have accused Trump of assault, and ask them about “cut[ting] off all oxygen.” Anyway, these don’t go over well either, because everyone knows Cillizza is insincere, doesn’t care about Tara Reade or her allegations anyway, and is one of the many useful idiots who helped put Trump in the White House.

Finally, we reach the end (no we haven’t, he’s still fucking that chicken) of our very sad story, as Cillizza goes full sour grapes and does a little #metoo cosplay for the rubes. No one’s buying this one either.

The fact is, the story HAS been taken seriously and been found wanting. The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus found numerous red flags. I hate the New York Times a lot, but they also found questions. All of these articles and more are widely available, and were published weeks before Cillizza went on his latest jihad.

But that is neither here nor there. This isn’t to suss out the truth of Reade’s allegations. If there’s substance to what she has to say, it should be thoroughly investigated and let the cards fall as they may.

But that task should not, and must not, fall to a character assassin like Chris Cillizza, who doesn’t give a shit about Tara Reade or accuracy, and who God clowned before he was born by making him Chris Cillizza instead of a shit-eating maggot.

Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan is now seeking the Libertarian Party’s nomination for president and Donald Trump is pretty excited about it.

No, I think Amash would make a wonderful candidate, especially since he is way behind in his district and has no chance of maintaining his Congressional seat. He almost always votes for the Do Nothing Dems anyway. I like him even more than Jill Stein! https://t.co/V8kutnfvIj

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 29, 2020

I suspect Trump is right for once. While it’s true that the Libertarian Party was already likely to have a candidate on most if not all ballots in the country, Amash has good name recognition and more political skills than the typical Libertarian nominee. He will boost the party’s performance.

The next question is obviously whether he’ll pull more votes from Trump or from Biden. In general, the Libertarians are right-leaning just as the Greens are generally left-leaning. This would ordinarily mean that some Republicans would opt for the Libertarian because their ideology is more libertarian than conservative. It’s the same assumption Trump is making with respect to 2016 Green Party candidate Jill Stein–that she helped him by attracting a portion of the left, thereby denying Hillary Clinton some votes.

However, the 2020 election is shaping up to be a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ vote on Trump rather than an expression of ideological preference. The more options people have for saying ‘no,’ the more diluted the ‘no’ vote will be. The simplest way of demonstrating this is to imagine ten voters, five of whom support Trump and five of whom do not. If one of those Trump opponents votes for Amash, then Trump wins 5-4-1.

This is the more likely scenario than the one where five liberals and five conservatives vote, and one conservative opts for Amash, giving Biden the victory. The best situation is the one in which nearly all anti-Trump votes go to Biden. Justin Amash makes that less likely.

Now, this could be somewhat offset by a certain kind of voter. This voter is basically unwilling to cast a ballot for a Democrat under any circumstances, and also unwilling to stay at home or leave the ballot line blank. In a choice between Trump and Biden, they’d choose Trump even though they’re very unhappy with him. Amash gives them a chance to register their displeasure without supporting a party they loath. These people do exist, and Amash will win their votes. The problem is that I believe there are probably just as many people on the far left who would use Amash’s ballot line for the same purpose.

In one sense, Biden can benefit from having another voice amplifying his criticisms of Trump, but Amash will also be looking to attract people on the left who are critical of Biden’s record. He will have some success in this, especially because many of the strongest criticisms of Biden align with libertarian philosophy–think drug war and foreign policy. He also has more credibility with the left than the average Libertarian candidate because he quit the Republican Party and voted to impeach the president.

It’s hard to say with certainty, but I think it’s a good bet that Amash will pull in more potential Biden voters than Trump voters. I also think this is largely out of his control. He can have some influence through what he chooses to emphasize, but he’ll always be more of a receptacle for protest than a true vote-getter.  The protest vote is anti-Trump, so almost by definition he’ll be diluting it.

With John Oliver on hiatus, it’s time to try out some of our other late night hosts. Here’s Seth Meyers:

Infotainment seems to be the word of the day.

Remember: don’t drink or inject any disinfectants/cleaning products or try to insert UV lights into any orifices treat COVID-19. Just because Trump says to jump off a cliff…you know the rest.

If you must drink anything, enjoy your favorite alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverage.

Cheers.

Four years ago, I welcomed Bernie Sanders into the race for the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nomination. I had recently gone through a rough period of depression as I realized that Hillary Clinton would certainly be the nominee. I opposed her personally less than I opposed the people the Clintons have historically relied on to propel them into power. Of all the people in the family and their entourage, I actually liked Hillary the best. But that didn’t mean I wanted Mark Penn calling the shots. A big part of the reason I enthusiastically embraced Barack Obama was because I wanted to vanquish the Clinton machine. Now I had to accept that they were making a comeback. I decided that there wasn’t much point in spending the next year whining about it, however, since it was critical that the Republicans didn’t take over the White House and undo everything Obama had accomplished.

I figured Bernie would make a good case for a lot of progressive issues and keep the pressure on Clinton to hew somewhat to the left. I didn’t expect him to put up a real fight, and I never really considered that he had an iota of a chance. Unfortunately, he did just well enough to make his supporters believe differently, and then Sanders began to believe it himself.

That’s when the trouble started, and that’s when I got annoyed. Still, when the time came for me to vote in Pennsylvania, I cast my vote for a Sanders delegate. By that time, there was no doubt that Clinton would be the nominee, and I had resolved my reservations about that. My vote wasn’t a protest against her, but rather an effort to add a progressive voice to the convention delegation so that they might perhaps have some influence on the party platform.

The party platform isn’t the most important document in the world, but it’s usually the most important thing that is decided at the national convention. A more progressive delegation should produce a more progressive document, and it should have some limited influence over the party’s future direction.

I was able to make that decision because Sanders refused to drop out. I actually would have preferred that he drop out, or at least stop actively campaigning against Clinton, but the upside was that I could still vote for his delegates and they could actually be seated at the convention.

This time around, that isn’t happening. New York State just took Sanders off the ballot since he is no longer an active candidate. In states that have already held their elections and in which Sanders won delegates, many of those delegates will be reassigned to Biden. Some of this is based strictly on pre-established party rules which were agreed to by the Sanders campaign, and some is up to the discretion of state officials, as is the case in New York. Either way, it strips away the influence and much of the work that was put in by the Sanders team.

I think this is unfortunate. I consider it fair under the rules and the unique circumstances of a global pandemic, but it’s also a result of people thinking about primary elections the wrong way.

I said above that I voted four years ago for a Sanders delegate. I put it that way because that’s what I actually did. I did not vote for Bernie Sanders in the primary anymore than I had voted for Barack Obama in 2008. I voted to send someone to the convention who promised to vote for Sanders on the first ballot. That’s what we do when we vote in the primaries.

And it seems to me that we shouldn’t have that vote taken away from us. If the candidate frees that delegate to vote for someone else, that’s fine. But they’re still there to participate in all the other work that the party does at the convention. If you can simply take that representative away and replace him or her with someone else, then why did you ask me to vote in the first place?

It’s not uncommon for people to rally around a candidate who has little realistic chance of winning. But at least they know that if they can get them a decent number of delegates, they’ll still have accomplished something. When you take those delegates away, then all the effort goes for nothing.

Now, New York State basically said that there’s no point in holding an election with Sanders’ name on the ballot because it won’t change the outcome and will just lead to more people showing up and possibly spreading the Covid-19 virus around. This is what happens when you look at the primary as a vote for candidates rather than a vote for candidates’ representatives. From a public health perspective, I can understand the rationale for wanting a low-turnout election, but it’s simply wrong to say the vote would make no difference.

As for the party rules that strip some earned delegates from candidates who drop out, that really ought to be up to the discretion of the candidates. Of course, if they agree to these rules up front, then there isn’t a lot of argument against it. But I think they should rethink those rules.

This isn’t some grand conspiracy, but it’s a bad practice. There should be more than a pittance of Sanders delegates at the convention because they worked for and earned that right. A candidate also shouldn’t be incentivized to stay in a lost race just to protect the delegates he or she has already won.

I think it’s hard enough for Sanders’ fans to stomach losing without having all their work thrown in a garbage bin. It’s probably going to make it harder for the party to reconcile for the general election.

Worst of all, I see very little upside to this. In theory, it might lead to a less acrimonious convention, but that would only be a manufactured illusion.

I hope the rules in 2024 will make more sense.

I don’t think it’s a great idea for Democrats to take advice from Republican strategists, but it’s still interesting to see what they think about the upcoming 2020 presidential election. Tim Alberta gathered several of them in a “smoke-filled Zoom” and picked their brains about everything from turnout theories to who Biden should pick as a running mate. A few interesting themes emerged, some of which are worthy of consideration.

The group, which included 2016 campaign managers “Danny Diaz (Jeb Bush), Beth Hansen (John Kasich), Jeff Roe (Ted Cruz) and Terry Sullivan (Marco Rubio),” tended to agree that most of the motivation the left needs to vote is provided by Donald Trump. With the exception of Ms. Hanson, they all saw Biden’s current relative invisibility as an advantage for him. Partially, this was simply because Biden cannot commit gaffes if no one is listening, but it’s mainly because Trump desperately wants to make this a choice election rather than a simple referendum on his performance in office. He can’t do that if Biden is hidden below the water line. Hanson focused in all her remarks much more on motivating the base, and she thinks Biden is unable to do this from his isolation chamber in Wilmington.

Jeff Roe defined what he saw as Biden’s two main options:

He’s got a decision to make. There’s two schools of thought in presidential politics. I openly subscribe to one of them. You either believe that you win with the middle or you believe that you motivate your base. And when you’re running against an incumbent president, almost always they have a defined electorate, so they motivate their base.

The Democratic primary voters sent a pretty clear message that they believe the way to win this election is not to pander to them but to gather in the middle. But that doesn’t mean that Biden can safely ignore the task of energizing the left. Roe calls this “the difference between a Stacey Abrams or an Amy Klobuchar” as a running mate. “The middle is not where the votes are. It’s the base—and Biden doesn’t have them.”

The general feeling among these Republican strategists is tilted in favor running base elections, but Roe is the most emphatic:

And it is shown time and time again that intensity, when we nominate middle-of-the-road candidates and when they nominate middle-of-the-road candidates, they do terrible. Bob Dole was our worst candidates in a generation, and John Kerry was the worst candidate for them. You can’t do a centrist move in this day and age…

Hanson tends to agree but she’s more interested in walking a fine line.

I would say it goes a little bit beyond base. What it gets him—and you said this just a second ago, Jeff—it gets you enough of the base without freaking people out. And that’s the balance. I would argue that he can’t pick somebody that it’s just going to be so clear it’s not a good fit for who he is. I mean, he does have a reputation of [chuckles] 150 years in politics, and people know who he is, and they know that he is a pragmatic, middle of the road, blue collar, centrist, populist kind of a leader. And so, picking somebody that’s just asynchronous for that, I think will not help him.

Balancing the competing interests of staying on brand and creating some excitement, the group recommended Kamala Harris as his ideal running mate. Elizabeth Warren was ruled out both because they believed she’d scare off the middle and because she’d make it much harder for Biden to raise Super PAC money.

So, that’s the kind of prism they’re looking through for how Biden should position himself, but they also tend to look at the outcome as highly dependent on whether people are focused more on health or on the economy. Jeff Roe came up with the example of a contractor building a beautiful house which then burns down. That’s what Trump is going to argue on the economy. You can trust him to build you another beautiful house. But this won’t work at all if people are still more interested in a president who can contain a global health pandemic. Trump has already lost that argument. Sullivan is skeptical that he can win the economic argument either:

Your house burns to the ground, you’re not thinking rationally. Right now, I don’t know that voters are thinking through this in a logical, rational way, and so I think that they’re not necessarily going to go back to Trump because he presided over it. And the economy is still going to suck by the time we get to the election, even if he’s done amazing things, it’s still not going to be where it was two months ago. And that’s a problem for him.

It may be a problem, but we can sure that the economy will be struggling in November, and Trump has a better shot fighting on that ground than on his record on Covid-19.

Related to that, these Republican consultants are eager to see Biden move to the left. Even when playing Devil’s Advocate, they say he’s better off using identity than ideology to excite the base. They argue that one advantage of him being in non-campaign mode is that he doesn’t have to make big promises to the left. And, above all, they say that Trump is eager to seize on anything, however small, to argue that Biden is a communist just like Warren and Sanders.

The overall impression is a little confusing. They seem to think getting out the base is more important than winning the middle, but their idea of the middle seems to be restricted completely to tax-averse Romney-Clinton suburbanites. What about all those out of work Obama-Trump voters?

When they think about Trump defections, they tend to think of elderly people who are naturally going to be more concerned about their health than the economy. It’s more of a risk for them to vote in person, too, so getting them to the polls will be more difficult than usual in states that don’t have an automatic mail-in option. That’s a subject for a different piece, but low-information working class voters are classic swing voters who make their decisions based on the current economic condition. Trump won them over by arguing that free trade had been a bad deal and promising to blow things up and do things differently in the future. Record high unemployment is going to create swing in this group, but Biden has to capture it. A return to Obamaism might be a good sell in the suburbs, but less so in the sticks.

Overall, I think the flaw in these consultants advice is that they’re describing the kind of campaign that they might be able to support. But how many of them will actually vote for Biden in the fall? In this highly partisan age, it’s hard to win crossover votes from anyone who is politically engaged. The middle among high-information voters is very inelastic, which is why it’s not the middle that matters the most.

Yet, I think all of this is basically wrong. Biden isn’t the one who needs to be chasing voters. When you chase one group too hard, you lose another group. Biden is winning this election right now and he’ll continue to have the upper hand until he blows it. What he wants to do is be welcoming to everyone. He wants to have an argument for why he’s the safe choice. People want some equilibrium. So, Biden doesn’t need to excite his base but he also doesn’t need to stiff-arm the left to appeal to the middle. He has an opportunity to win back a lot of Obama-Trump voters, but he doesn’t need to pander to them or make allowances for their prejudices. He just needs to be steady and offer an unthreatening alternative to Trump, and he’s going to win over most of the swing in the electorate.

Where Biden should bring the heat is as an advocate for everyone who has been screwed over in the last four years and specifically by this pandemic. That’s where he should mine for excitement and enthusiasm.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a hypochondriac because I don’t obsess about my health or eventual death, and I’m generally a functional person. But I have something I can only describe as “episodes.” The first time it happened, I was making a long trip on the turnpike. I was in my early 20’s and in excellent shape, but I started to have weird pains in my torso and it freaked me out. Was I having a heart attack? What was going on? Since I was driving, I had to maintain my concentration, but a cascade of stress hormones started a process that I guess is best described as a panic attack. I’m not expert on these things, and back then I don’t think I’d ever heard of a panic attack. I had no coping skills.

That process repeated itself off an on for a year or so, and it definitely preferred to pick on me while I was driving. It got to the point where knowing I was going to have to make a long drive could trigger it. I never really had a good explanation for why any of that started or why it suddenly stopped.

It came back in my early 40’s, and by then I had some theories. I was drinking too much, smoking too much, and not getting enough sleep. I quit drinking when I turned 45, and the problem disappeared again. If it ever cropped up again, catching up on my sleep seemed to solve it right away.

Then, about two years ago, I started to have a problem where I’d get nerve pain in weird parts of my body. I live in the woods, and I’ve had Lyme disease at least three times. One symptom of Lyme is that you get strange pains, sometimes in your joints, sometimes in your nerves, and sometimes in your muscles. Fortunately, the antibiotic they give you for Lyme is very effective, even if it makes you incredibly sensitive to sunlight. I went to the doctor and told him that I wanted to be tested for Lyme. It came back negative, but that worried me even more. More tests were run, and the doctor even seemed to think cancer was a possibility, which obviously freaked me out. But eventually he sat me down and told me that he believed all the symptoms I was experiencing were entirely a product of my mind.

He didn’t mean I was crazy or that what I was experiencing wasn’t real. He meant my mind was causing the nerve damage. I had trouble accepting that this was possible, but he told me that ever since Donald Trump was elected, he’d seen a number of patients present with these kind of stress-induced problems. I went home that day unsure of what to think, but the nerve damage was gone within a week and it didn’t return.

That was the first time I really understood how my mind can make me sick. But knowing this also gave me new power to recognize the difference between real and imagined symptoms. There was less of a distinction than I had understood, but the two things were still not the same. I now had more control over how my subconscious affected my health.

The Covid-19 pandemic has put these skills to the test in a big way, but I can recognize what’s happening now. Once I read about the symptoms, I started to experience those symptoms. Then, a new article would come out and say that doctors had identified new problems caused by the virus, and I would begin to experience those symptoms, too. But, instead of assuming I had been infected and starting a cascade of panic, I knew it was far likelier that my mind was producing this and that it wasn’t real.

One problem I’ve had with this is common to most men, which is that it’s just very hard to admit to anyone that you have panic attacks. I remember that this was a major theme of The Sopranos, where the lead character sought psychological treatment for the problem but couldn’t let anyone know because it was the kind of weakness a mob boss wasn’t allowed to show. Even locked in my my house with my wife and son, I’m reluctant to tell them that my body is absolutely pulsing with stress hormones and that I need to go lie down.

It’s harder now, too, because I actually do have to be very attuned to my body and any possible symptoms in case I need to separate myself from my family. My wife has asthma, which is fortunately not turning out to be as correlated with Covid-19 death as some feared, but it’s still not something we want her to test. So, if I’m experiencing shortness of breath, I can’t just write it off as stress-induced.

One thing I can tell you is that it’s impossible to write if you’re overwhelmed with stress. I felt fine last night while I was watching television, but as soon as my programs were over, I began to experience symptoms that worried me and made it hard to sleep. The moment I woke up, the same symptoms returned. It would literally have been impossible for me to write about anything other than this today because I can’t take my focus off myself long enough to write about some item in the news. By acknowledging this, and writing about my experience, I was able to calm the stress I’m feeling and along with it a lot of the symptoms.

One thing that’s unusual about this is how it is almost entirely driven by the subconscious. In that respect, it’s no more predictable than dreams, and not a whole lot more rational. I’m not living in waking fear, but am instead sporadically overtaken by fears that operate below the surface.

I know what to do: drink less coffee, exercise, get as much sunlight as possible, and use breathing and other relaxation techniques. I think a different president would help, too.

I hope some other people will benefit from reading about my experiences, because I’m sure I’m not alone. I suspect many people are going through this for the first time and don’t understand how much power the mind has to make you sick. It won’t help to tell you not to panic, but it might help to tell you not to panic about panicking.

Ordinarily, an editorial like this would make me feel worse, but it actually made me feel better. The cure we are seeking is rooted in the truth, and someone who can give us unvarnished versions of it is part of the solution. If the coroner down in Albany, Georgia can say what he’s seeing without sugarcoating it, so can anybody else. It gave me comfort to see someone just lay it out and explain why no one should be going to get a haircut or a tattoo in Georgia, no matter what the governor might have to say about it.

I’m always driving, going back-and-forth between nursing homes, the hospital, and the morgue. All these roads should be empty if you ask me. But now I see people out running errands, rushing back into their lives, and it’s like: “Why? What reason could possibly be good enough?” Sometimes, I think about stopping and showing them one of the empty body bags I have in the trunk. “You might end up here. Is that worth it for a haircut or a hamburger?”

…I’ve lived here my whole life. At least 30 of these victims are people I knew by name or considered friends. Six of our preachers have died. Probably at least seven or eight more from church. Two neighbors. Three school friends. The probate judge who had the office next to mine at the courthouse. These are my contemporaries. I’m 62. We’ve had 36 people here die in their 60s, and at least a dozen more who were younger than that.

I try not to count down the days or make projections about when all of this is going to be over. The truth is, it’s starting to become routine. I always stand six feet away from the families. I always wear my space suit whenever I’m anywhere near a body. I always take off my clothes and have my wife spray me down with Lysol as soon as I get home. The chamber of commerce has gone ahead and given me a tractor trailer with shelves to store extra bodies, which I might need depending on how reopening goes and how many more cases we get.

The phone calls used to wake me up at all hours of the night. Now, I’m usually up waiting.

I wish the truth held better news. It does not. Stay at home.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson/File Photo

I’ve been waiting nearly three (four? I don’t even know what day it is anymore) weeks for my unemployment and my $1200 go away money. Many people I know personally have been waiting even longer. New Jersey’s broken system is down. So is Maryland’s unemployment system. Looks like my friends in Pennsylvania ain’t having an easier time, and the problems in Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida are infamous.

Many of us believe this is on purpose, to deny us our benefits, at least in the red states. You can count me among that group.

I have to say it’s pretty amazing to watch rock-ribbed conservatives turn on their leader when the paycheck suddenly disappears and you find yourself getting treated like a poor. Maybe they’ll remember in November. In the meantime, here’s some Shinyribs doing Rihanna. They speak for me.

Photo credit: Institute for Local Self Reliance

For as long as I’ve had a driver’s license, I’ve been a radio-in-the-car guy. I will admit that my listening habits have changed a lot. Most radio stations don’t play music I like (especially now that I’m temporarily out of Nashville), so I’m more likely to have Apple Music plugged in. Otherwise, it’s news news news. And I have been hearing some remarkable stuff on my 24/7 go-to-station in Philly, KYW: all news, all the time, with traffic and weather on the twos—you give us 22 minutes, we’ll give you the world .

Let me back up for a moment. I’ve grown less and less interested in much of what public radio has to offer these days. “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” remain fine broadcasts, as do the regular news updates, but I simply cannot abide “1A,” “Here and Now,” “The Takeaway,” and all those other opinion shows—which always seem to have the same mealy-mouthed, tote-bagger slant.

KYW, on the other hand, is a CBS affiliate, just like New York AM giants 880 WCBS and 1010 WINS, WBZ in Boston, and WWJ in Detroit, among others. This is meat and potatoes news, no [explicit] opinionating, low-information news. In other words, Kent Brockman news.

That’s not to say that KYW doesn’t have an opinion—it’s just that you have to be able to hear the dogwhistle, as it were. A friend refers to them as “the fascist golfer station,” and indeed they are very very very pro-business. They keep tabs on the markets almost as much as they keep tabs on the weather.

But their audience isn’t just old, rich, white businessmen who don’t like paying taxes or meeting environmental standards. It’s 1.5 million people going to work in the morning who don’t start the day listening to some rightwing nutjob go off on a rant OR the eggheads at NPR talking about whatever it is they talk about over there.

That’s actually what makes a station like KYW so insidious—it quietly pushes the listener in a certain political direction without obviously saying so. But that’s also why the past few days have been so interesting: KYW has been utterly savaging Donald Trump, and with the barest of veils.

Yesterday, their “Reporters’ Roundup” segment focused almost exclusively on Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, noting that Americans trust governors and mayors more the the administration “which can’t even agree on basic facts.” That’s pretty much a verbatim quite. They were openly aghast at the suggestion that Americans inject themselves with disinfectant or put UV lights up our asses. And so on, for about 7 minutes into a show that’s only a half hour, including commercials.

This… this isn’t normally the kind of thing KYW does. At the very least, they would “both sides” the issue. In fact, while writing this I had to stop and make dinner—so I put on the radio, and they were STILL bashing him, noting that Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Birx was openly wincing while Trump spoke, and openly calling out the president for lying. It’s like hearing Fred Rogers casually drop f-bombs as the trolley heads off the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.

I’m generally careful not to get over my skis, but it strikes me as important that Trump seems to have lost the most basic corporate news in a major market, in a state he has to win, and where he is underwater.