The graph is not so helpful. I don't think suggesting you'll have a very small but erect penis is what people are going for.

Also, they used R for the analysis. SAS is better.

I do like "spreadneck." My sister is back to being livid with colleagues because so many are unvaccinated.

Good news on our extended family vaccine front, our son's MIL (and her boyfriend) have gotten their first shots after resisting for months. We are going there tomorrow for a few days, Baby due in September.

Tell her boyfriend to make an honest woman of her before the baby is born. Illegitimate grandmothering is a growing problem.

Someone has to stand up for legacy platforms in data analysis and interpersonal relationships.

5: He is not completely divorced yet.

That's different. Bigamy is very old-fashioned.

"Spreadnecks" is quite good, but I thought we weren't supposed to be ridiculing or insulting those dumb fucks.

Yes, it's counterproductive to our efforts to keep them from killing themselves off to also express our teeth-grinding anger at their contrarian dimwittedness.

I've heard them called "volunteers" and I am just fine with that.

I've heard them called "volunteers" and I am just fine with that.

I have been waiting for the take to become that the vaccines are causing the more easily-spread variants. Almost certainly that will come up before the mid-terns. And when'if there is truly vaccine-resistant strain, Katie bar the door!

The crank fringe is much smaller here, though there is a considerable overlap with "pastel QAnon"; but one of their websites just came up with "jabbattoir" as a term for vaccination centres. This in the course of a furious rant about how, although the site is called "conservative woman" it utterly despises and loathes the actually existing Conservative party.

I'm not opposed to propensity score matching, though I've never seen it done with such small numbers, but I'm not in a position to know if it was done with the right matching variables. I don't know enough about Italy. In America, getting Covid correlates with being poor (I'm assuming) and being poor correlates with bunches of bad health outcomes, but Italy is probably not as fucked up as we are in health equity.

I have become annoyed at the whole genre of "The CDC should say this" commentary. No doubt messaging could be improved, but massive scientific, political and entrepreneurial resources have gone into the effort to produce idiots, making idiocy highly resistant to a cure.

13: I've certainly seen the take, "don't you think it's suspicious that the only people getting sick are the people who won't comply with their sheeple vaccines?" which is kin to what you're speculating.

16 is right.

I'm tempted to assume causation goes the other way. Not that COVID causes erectile dysfunction, but erectile dysfunction causes insecurity, which in someone already prone to toxic masculinity causes stupid things like refusing masks and vaccines. Unfortunately this seems like it's testable, but I find the idea fun anyway.

Sure you can test it. HIPAA says vaccination status is private, but if you ask any doctor, they have to tell you about any erectile problems in their male patients. That's FOIA 101.

Our local supermarket has a policy for their employees that if they're fully vaxxed they can go maskless. I know this because a masked cashier exulted to me that she had only three days until she could go without the mask. So a quick walk around the store can show you who is and isn't vaccinated (despite the meaningful perk) in our local community. On most days it's 50:50 and yesterday it was about 8 masked to one unmasked. And of course the masked are often wearing them on their chin from long practice. On the one hand this is a very helpful window into my environment. Although white males (red county red state) are almost uniformly unvaxxed, it's not just white males. Some of the unvaxxed are surprising. But on the other hand it takes me back to the anger and contempt of pre-vaccine days.

I have not figured out an equally effective way of assessing their boner potential.

Our local supermarket has a policy for their employees that if they're fully vaxxed they can go maskless. I know this because a masked cashier exulted to me that she had only three days until she could go without the mask. So a quick walk around the store can show you who is and isn't vaccinated (despite the meaningful perk) in our local community. On most days it's 50:50 and yesterday it was about 8 masked to one unmasked. And of course the masked are often wearing them on their chin from long practice. On the one hand this is a very helpful window into my environment. Although white males (red county red state) are almost uniformly unvaxxed, it's not just white males. Some of the unvaxxed are surprising. But on the other hand it takes me back to the anger and contempt of pre-vaccine days.

I have not figured out an equally effective way of assessing their boner potential.

darn it.

13: I saw that yesterday.

If anyone wants to know what I wish the CDC would say/do, it is this: I wish they'd do more population sampling and tracking of "mild" breakthrough cases. In my real life, I know of several instances where a small group of vaccinated people were all exposed, most of them got covid and most of them were symptomatic. In my online life, I've encountered a number of similar stories from people with established online identities and no obvious reason to lie. My understanding is that if the vaccine were strongly protective against breakthrough cases, "the whole group gets sick" would be pretty rare, but in fact the converse seems to be true - I know almost no one who is the only vaccinated person in their household to get sick.

So I think there are a lot more symptomatic breakthrough cases than anyone is admitting. I'd really like to know for sure, though, because I have a vaccinated relative with rheumatoid arthritis and I would like to know what the risks are if we visit indoors. Also, since the most recent Israeli data makes it seem like symptomatic cases do in fact get long covid at about the same rate as the general population, it makes a lot of difference whether the vaccine is, like, 90% effective against all infection or just, say, 34% or something.

The CDC has apparently decided that they will get more people vaccinated if the deemphasize breakthrough cases, but unfortunately, of course, people notice when there are breakthrough cases and then you have neither your persuasive rhetoric nor the trust of the population.

Agree with 25, but note that it is possible for it to both be true that breakthrough infections are rare and that when they happen they'd affect most of a group, namely if the important factor is the initial spreader and not the people catching it. We've known all along that a lot of covid spread is driven by superspreaders, and it seems quite plausible that superspreaders are more likely to cause breakthrough cases. But as you say, you'd need to study it to work out if that's what's happening.

Where I live I know of zero breakthrough cases. And delta hit where I live so hard that most of my vacation plans became impossible.

I'm pretending that I know that the clusters of infections among the vaccinated are all people who use a community toothbrush. I've been at home for too long.

There were a lot of promises that we'd fund robust contact tracing, but it's not clear to me that was ever stood up; it was overwhelmed during the winter surges. Maybe they've been doing better.

Also there should be mandatory apps for people with smartphones; being able to send those "You were exposed! Quarantine!" messages could go a long way

Apparently Lindsay Graham is a breakthrough case. He did say he was glad he had the vaccine.

Literally just now a friend (who is the covid safety officer at his job) emailed me to say that we'd need to cancel our lunches for the forseeable future since 1. a bunch of his friends got breakthrough covid; 2. a bunch of employees at his job are quarantining and 3. data he's seeing suggests that covid may be more transmissable outdoors.

I'm just hoping that the odds of long covid and/or the severity of long covid are reduced by the vaccine. If that's the case, I'm a lot less worried.

I went to the bar Saturday for the first time since covid because I wanted to be sure to get in a trip first if it was going to be unsafe later.

I'm just hoping that the odds of long covid and/or the severity of long covid are reduced by the vaccine. If that's the case, I'm a lot less worried.

This is a load-bearing belief of mine.

25: Not that I want to defend the CDC, but one problem with tracking breakthrough infections reliably is surely that the vaccine is mostly working at preventing severe illness, which means there are going to be a lot of asymptomatic/subclinical cases that are harder to estimate. I honestly think there's just not all that much data yet about how Delta spreads in vaccinated populations.

Moreover, as Commenter noted, your observations are consistent with the breakthrough cases being the result of superspreader events, which is how COVID has spread. It's sort of the analogue of 'everyone I know who has COVID just had the sniffles'. That said, at the level of anedote, breakthrough COVID is hitting my social circles. Mild cases, only, fortunately. I am not looking forward to fall.

I was assigned to case investigation and contact tracing for four months earlier this year. Frankly, the people we called would simply not reveal their contacts. They had very little willingness to do that, even if they knew.

Contact tracing became about gathering data and offering assistance, but in the sense of tracing a chain of infections? That is not what I was doing.

Did you at least ask them about their erectile dysfunctions?

29: we have some kind of app like that here which launched a month ago. I think I asked for the notifications to go away.

I'm worried about any app that tracks my location except if Pokémon are involved.

35: There's been a lot of innuendo about Ptown and bear week. Was it just a gay orgy, are they immunocompromised etc.? Think the main difference is that older gay men are going to cooperate with public health authorities and encourage everyone to get tested.

39 to 30.

I'm just hoping that the odds of long covid and/or the severity of long covid are reduced by the vaccine. If that's the case, I'm a lot less worried.

This is a load-bearing belief of mine.

Same here. I think it's likely to be true, but I'm keeping my eye out for data. This article wasn't as reassuring as I would have liked.

It's hard to imagine a scenario where it doesn't decrease the odds and severity of long covid, the big question though is decrease by how much?

Covid needs to get done soon. Everybody here is so sick of me I got to either get out of the house or start listening.

34: the UK's testing scheme might slightly help here since the government supplies free lateral flow tests to everyone, with the intention that asymptomatic people take them twice weekly. Compliance isn't great, unsurprisingly, and their accuracy is questionable when applied by non-specialists. But it's something, and is probably feeding into our info about how many asymptomatic breakthrough cases with delta there are here.

And there's the contact tracing app. Good thing there aren't any horrendous issues with that.

-nik as a suffix comes from Yiddish, so you are correct that it has no relation to "neck" in redneck.

Not from Russian?

It seems like it's from both. That is Sputnik spawned the popularity of using the Yiddish meaning of the -nik ending (a la "nudnik").

In terms of entering American English specifically, the suffix comes from Yiddish rather than Russian.

Isn't Yiddish basically German-ish?

Right, it comes from Yiddish but got popular more broadly because of Sputnik:

"beatnik (n.)
coined 1958 by San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen during the heyday of -nik suffixes in the wake of Sputnik."

Giant Eagle is going back to requiring masks for all, but not until Friday. I guess so people who really don't want to wear a mask can stock up before.

Technically Yiddish is classified as its own language, but yes it developed from German though with significant Slavic and some Hebrew language influence. There are also different varieties of Yiddish, with Yiddish spoken in Eastern European countries having much more Slavic/Hungarian influence. The Yiddish influence on English primarily comes from Eastern European Yiddish-speaking Jews and not German Yiddish-speaking Jews.

Is that why it has so many slang words for 'penis'?

Maybe it doesn't have a relative abundance but there is no Mel Brooks of the Russians?

What if Tolstoy was the Mel Brooks of the Russians and he misunderstood the assignment?

That nobrooknik.

Leonid Gaidai is who Moby is looking for, although if Wikipedia is to be trusted it's more like Mel Brooks is the Leonid Gaidai of America but with less box-office success.

Thanks, but I prefer to think that War and Peace should have an extended scene where everyone farted around a camp fire. Tolstoy would have made it work even on only the printed page.

How do you know War and Peace doesn't have a scene like that? It's really long. It has a cross-dressing scene, which would make it on-topic for the other thread.

I figure someone would have told me.

Did they tell you about the cross-dressing scene?

Yes.

You were there.

Anyway, obviously a bunch of people getting covid is suboptimal, but we were so never going to do the optimal thing. The surge seems to have restored some urgency to getting vaccinated. Watching someone get sick is a very effective public service announcement. It's better this is happening before school starts and while most of the county is in the part of the year where you can go outside.

My office is now requiring masks in all public areas after requiring all staff to work in the office and forcing me to vacate the office I was using for the last year (on the one day a week I was coming into the office) so now I get to go into the office and wear a mask all day. They are lucky no one else would hire me.

I'm the only one in the office, so I'm going barefaced.

I'm probably going to have to go back to wearing a mask at the gym.

The gym just emailed and I was right.

I am in the office today for the second time since March 13, 2020. I am wearing long pants in the office for the first time since then. My future stance on dress shirts and ties is still up in the air.

Except for my mom's funeral, I haven't worn a tie since October 2019.

I'm thinking of trying out the jacket with no tie thing more often once it gets cool, but nobody else at work ever wears one.

My cheap tennis shoes are much more comfortable than my cheap dress shoes.

I wore tennis shoes to the office yesterday. Because I couldn't find my Keen river shoes. Which I've now found and can wear.

Had to wear a tie twice in July, in court. Probably get through August without.

I am the absolute, unquestioned ruler of the thermostat, which is a nice perk of being the sole office occupant.

||

Looks like Ratface Andy is going down.

|>

NMM without permission in front of Andy's employees.

You'll need to be more specific.

I think that on a physical level, Andrew Giuliani looks more like a rat. Cuomo has a very flat face.

SPY magazine called him that as a young political thug in the eighties, and I've stuck with it. But you're right, he's not pointy-faced at all.

Maybe he has a tail?

73: Are bolo ties accepted in Montana courts?

As precedent? That depends on how long the jury looks at it ("stare decisis" in Latin).

I guess a tail on his face would be really noticeable.

82 to 83.

39. Andrew Sullivan wrote a piece about the PTown outbreak. Huge number of people (tens of thousands in a tiny town), terrible weather sending them packing into every bar or other indoor social space. It's amazing that there weren't more cases. There were up to 500 to 1000 cases but only five(?) hospitalizations and no deaths. His conclusion was that the vaccines work better than we could have hoped. (He was there but wasn't part of the festivities. His description sounds like it was pretty orgiastic whether or not it ended up with actual orgies.)

How many people usually die at an orgy?

Depends on what sort of mushrooms you use for the canapes.

Completely depends on who's organizing it and what their interests are.

OMG, did Cuomo really put out a montage of himself kissing or touching a dozen or more people?

Switching horses midstream is dangerous.

63: I should have planned ahead, and not ruined the joke I was making today. I'm such a disappointment.

89: Everything is in the archives: http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2008_06_08.html#008865

What's the mechanism for bringing him down, and who has to be convinced?

I think the era of politicians resigning is over; brazening everything out seems to work much better for them.

If he's not impeached, it seems like it would still be hard for him to win reelection in next year's primary, right? He only got 65.5% as a sexual-scandal-free incumbent in 2018.

The state Assembly (lower house) has to impeach. If they do, the Senate will almost certainly convict. But he has a lot of allies in the Assembly, some real and many who are afraid of him.

The state Attorney General is a hell of a retail politician. I've talked to her for a few minutes, and I had that experience people talk about with Clinton where I viscerally believe she personally likes and cares about me. I don't know that she's running, but it is traditional.

Only 65.5%? What the fuck does a landslide look like in your world?

86: The little death?

Wishing for Cuomo's downfall, but also over here wishing for Newsom's downfall.

I know it is terrible terrible governance and I will vote against the recall. But I would laugh so hard if he were recalled.

Also, it is starting to look like it could happen.

99: And Newsom's only been running for President since the mid-90s or so.

Any replacement is likely to be far worse, though, isn't it?

97: What would it have looked like if Obama had won 65.5% in the 2012 Democratic primary?

Yes. Every replacement would be far worse. But the next gubernatorial election is in 2022. How much harm could they do in a year?

The Albany DA is announcing an investigation too. Surely if a sausage-maker like Cuomo doesn't have that DA in his pocket anymore, he's in trouble.

102: They could revoke all the mask orders and faff around on vaccinations.

...And he's lost Biden.

Didn't Biden already say he should resign way back when the accusations broke?

Biden always subscribed to Spy.

Looks like he said he should resign if the allegations were borne out.

Looks like the Assembly leader has turned against Cuomo, too.

99-102: I'm out of the loop. Why is there a recall effort? If he gets recalled, what then?

Sorry to not do my own research, but the first article I found about him was just horse-race coverage of the recall, so I might as well ask for commentary here.

109: Various GOP-aligned folks with deep pockets saw an opportunity with COVID and spent enough money on signatures to get it on the ballot.

The recall ballot will have yes/no on recall, followed by a choice between all the forty-plus candidates. Everyone, including "no recall" voters, votes on replacement candidates. Plurality wins - no runoff, unlike how our regular gubernatorial elections work. With no prominent Democrats running, and no standout among the Republicans, some crank could win with 15% of the vote.

It'll come down to turnout among Dems and independents.

IIRC from the last recall farce that it's possible the governor could be recalled but then elected to replace himself?

Anyway there's a French Laundry connection so the only thing that would make the political world even more ridiculous is if it turned out that Cuomo harassed someone at Fresh Salt.

111: I've never heard that. The California Constitution, Article II, Section 15(c), says "If the majority vote on the question is to recall, the officer is removed and, if there is a candidate, the candidate who receives a plurality is the successor. The officer may not be a candidate, nor shall there be any candidacy for an office filled pursuant to subdivision (d) of Section 16 of Article VI." (That last appears to be certain types of judgeships.)

Then this "Navin Gewsom" on the ballot isn't legit?

How much harm could they do in a year?

No offense, friend, but have you seen the 21st century?

110, 113 It's completely nuts. A removal that has the Lt Gov take over actually makes sense if the guy's a crook or whatever.

110, 113 It's completely nuts. A removal that has the Lt Gov take over actually makes sense if the guy's a crook or whatever.

Yep. And we even elect our LG separately from Gov, so that ought to be a no-brainer...

96: I wonder why your AGs get elected governor and ours never win statewide office.

Tradition? Your AG is terrific, though -- you'd be lucky to get her as governor.

Public health communication is very difficult and crisis and risk communication even more so. Messaging can be ineffective or even backfire easily. Would the limp dick messaging work? Maybe so, maybe not. One issue is that people tend to associate concepts together even if they are meant to be opposites. So, people may associate COVID vaccine and erectile dysfunction as two related things, even thought the ad campaign meant them to be opposites.

You can generally take your cue on messaging from the public health organizations like the CDC or WHO. Their messages don't tend to attack or mock anyone. That tends to make people shutdown and withdraw. Since Jelani Cobb doesn't know anything about public health communication I don't really care what he "seriously think(s)" would work.

Their messages don't tend to attack or mock anyone.

Yeah. It's one of those jobs where if you enjoy it too much, you're probably about to get fired.

I guess all jobs are like that.

120: I know. I love her, but everybody says that nobody since Ed Brooke in 1966 has attained higher office after being AG. And I love her not just in a general, good public policy, abstract kind of way. Her office had taken action that made my life better. And the person who helped me was polite, bright and efficient.

A lot of people say that the reason Scott Harshbarger narrowly lost to Celluci in the gubernatorial race was that he had gone after corruption, so some local Democratic leaders threw their support to the Republican candidate.

Governors don't get elected that often, so easy for something that's purely coincidental for 20-30 years to start to look like a pattern and cause self-fulfilling prophesies.

I just realized that there are two different women MA politicians of with names of the form m?r?a ?ley and that they're different people.

A few weeks ago, I started actively avoiding Twitter, but before I did I learned that lots of antivaxer propaganda is about the vaccine impairing your ability to have children. The more I think about it, the more I agree with Bass in 121.1.

We were taking a trip last month and were eating in the park in Harvard square when out of the alley walked two men in suits, and RWM started going off about how one of them reminded her of a dean here who was her old boss and saying "he has the swagger of a mediocre white man" and "he walks dick first" and "I bet he's sexually harassed a lot of women" all just based on a moments glance of him. At that point the cops who were hanging out in the park took a selfie with him, and I said "he's gotta be the governor of Massachusetts." And yup, he was.

Minivet, do you have any avoid-the-worst suggestions for how CA no-on-recall voters should answer the second question, pick a replacement? It seems hard to strategize this one.

I read an article about the candidates and there was a Green candidate guy. Some city councilmember from one of the LA cities. There are a bunch of solid crazies.

I've heard good things about Gary Coleman, but I admit to not following closely.

129: Not sure. In the unlikely event the Dems change strategies & try to coordinate people around a least-worst alternative to limit risk, I'd go with that coordination. In the absence of that, the person who combines some name recognition and credibility with not being a horrid right-winger is maybe Faulconer.

It's now hard not to look at local Greens and wonder which of them is the future Sinema.

Tolstoy?

Who is the Sinema of California?

Or, more optimistically, who is the Manchin of Alabama?

I feel like that's Doug Jones.

133: Are there local Greens of any prominence? I think they started withering to a husk in the Bernie era.

136 is exactly what's so frustrating, Doug Jones is a great person, really was unusually popular for Alabama, and was not annoying at all. I'm not sure which is worse, thinking that Manchin could be like Jones and still win, or whether being an asshole truly is necessary in order to get those last few points.

Doug Jones won because he had the good fortune of running against someone who was too much of an asshole even for Alabama. Once it came time to run against a more ordinary asshole, Jones never had a chance, even as an incumbent.

That seems like the fundamental question of American politics -- what can a candidate be like that both appeals to an appreciable number of 'centrists' and 'moderate' Republicans and isn't an evil shithead. And I don't have any solid beliefs about how to solve it, and maybe it's not soluble.

Let me be the first to suggest lower standards.

It of course used to happen a lot, Tester of course, but someone like McCaskill was perfectly fine. But it seems like assholeness is now a fundamental principal of conservatism, so to be a moderate who can get swing voters you have to be an asshole.

I was just thinking Cuomo would totally save his job if he switched to Republican because then he'd be nothing out of the norm for them.

I literally had a sentence in 142 about whether Cuomo could win in Alabama and then deleted it.

With no prominent Democrats running,

I don't understand this. Why didn't the party coordinate at least enough to have someone prominent say, "The recall is a terrible idea, but if it passes, this is the official democratic candidate"? It's like refusing to run a democratic presidential candidate in 2020 in order to have more leverage on impeachment. Did they learn nothing from the last recall?

The Total Recall.

145 I think this is just about the least surprising thing. Who wants to be the Dem actively campaigning to replace Newsom? Who wants to be the one to suggest to him that it's nothing personal? I'm sure there are situations where a party is more powerful than an elected, but I think that's really the exception. "The Party" is run by an all volunteer board with a smallish (not particularly well) paid staff. I'm sure there are situations where The Party functions as some sort of independent power center, but I think the likelier reality is that at most it's a tool that can be wielded by other actors, within set parameters, to do their bidding.

147: I'm sure there are situations where a party is more powerful than an elected, but I think that's really the exception.

Right, I guess I'm not *really* surprised; I really meant something like "this is another unfortunate consequence of America's broken political system, and shows why having weak parties but strong (negative) partisanship is a very bad thing". And yet, even assuming that News|om is a total sociopath, 90% self-aggrandizement vs 10% public-spiritedness ... wouldn't it have made sense for him to have cut a deal with some B-list Democrat, so that in case he does get recalled, the next governor really owes him? As it stands, won't he be a pariah if he loses?

... actually, never mind. I just checked Wikipedia to see what happened to Gray Davis, and apparently he ended up doing just fine after the recall. What was I thinking -- of course once you're at that level you can coast on ruling-class-welfare jobs for the rest of your life.

And that guy's campaign is going to be 'Gavin's great, and I'm almost as good, so if you don't want him, go for me'? No, I'd think it'd have to be 'hey, here are all the ways that you should like me better than you do Gavin (since, obviously, you don't like Gavin much).'

This is why the recall provision is so fucked up. A recall where there's a built in replacement, like a Lt Gov, should simply be the replacement, end of story. Recall should be personal, not policy. Otherwise, you have that sizable faction that believes that all Democratic governance is always illegitimate, and they're only not doing a recall when it's crystal clear it won't work.

And that guy's campaign is going to be 'Gavin's great, and I'm almost as good, so if you don't want him, go for me'?

Yes, actually, that's what I would envision! That way you consolidate the "No" vote behind this candidate -- which alone is probably enough with a crowded field and close recall vote -- and also target the Megan-ish voters who really hate Gavin, but want Generic Competent Democrat (and the general low-information voters who don't have particularly consistent preferences about politics, but combine anti-Gavin with pro-Dem sentiment).

This is why the recall provision is so fucked up.

... don't get me wrong, I totally agree. It's insane, and why wasn't there a push to change it after last time?

I don't know why, but I can imagine that the question 'who's going to fund the campaign for the initiative' might have been more prominent than 'can we get a 2/3ds vote in each house.' There's a lot of money that backs the idea that all Democratic governance is always illegitimate . . .

They tried running a secondary Dem candidate in 2003 (Cruz Bustamante) and learned the lesson that it really muddles the message. Since we always re-run the most recent campaign, they corrected for that mistake this time.

I don't know. I'm not being fair to Newsom. I think he should absolutely not be recalled for his pandemic response, which was fairly good. I don't think enough people care to recall him for his arcane water policy that I dislike. I suspect that the other huge problems (homelessness, inadequate housing starts, unemployment disbursements) are fairly intractable. The recall alternatives are staggeringly worse. The recall is terrible terrible governance and the threshold for having one should be far higher and it should be an automatic replacement by Lt. Gov.

But. I'd love to see his timid environmental admin (leftover from Brown) turfed out wholesale. And I'd love to see a better Democrat (Yee, Ma) run in 2022.

Thinking about it, I've decided that he suffers from the same thing as Clinton did. Insider favorite clears the field, so weaknesses aren't really revealed. And he's run a very timid and reactive administration in preparation for his presidential bid. He always feels rigorously on-message and that kind of disciplined speech just doesn't feel authentic to voters. The pollsters are talking about "lack of enthusiasm" and I really think that's the problem. It isn't that we hate him. But no one loooooves him either and he just kindof won his election because he called dibs. So voting in the recall is more about caring about good governance and less about him and that's a pretty abstract reason to vote.

Yeah, I still feel it would have been better to put up an alternate candidate and figure out the messaging, so as not to have all our eggs in one basket, but it's definitely a difficult weighing of relative risks.

Can we get a Doppel-Newsom?

The one thing I got out of the Bustamante campaign is that it's when I first learned that Bill Maher is a racist shithead.

If you can't repeal the whole recall law, I wonder if you could just let the current governor run as the candidate on the recall ballot. Presumably even if the recall succeeds, Newsom would easily win the second election part.

153: Yeah, the game theory equivalent is Chicken,where the winning move is to throw the steering wheel out of the car.

Megan - don't remember I where you are in California now (Sacramento?), but San Francisco General will let people request a 2nd shot.

If they got j and j - mRNA is what they give.