3.31 Michael Grunwald in Politico: Democrats and Republicans now have very different ideas of what counts as infrastructure, not only because of their very different political philosophies and policy goals, but because they now live in very different places with very different needs. . . .As the GOP has increasingly become a party of white families who live spread apart in rural communities and exurbs, Republican lawmakers have increasingly equated infrastructure with new highways that connect rural communities and promote exurban sprawl. Some of them also support dams, drainage projects and rural development programs that help farmers and farm towns. But they see most of what Biden proposed as “Democratic infrastructure,” supporting Democratic policies, Democratic interest groups and Democratic voters who overwhelmingly live close together in racially diverse cities and transit-friendly inner-ring suburbs. It’s true that much of Biden’s plan is not traditional infrastructure.It proposes huge investments in scientific research, clean energy research and medical research — although of course it refers to that spending as “research infrastructure.” It would subsidize electric cars and buses as well as electric “charging infrastructure,” while investing in energy-efficiency upgrades for homes and schools, semiconductor manufacturing, affordable housing, new child care facilities and “community college infrastructure,” more commonly known as “community colleges.” It is supposed to help eliminate racial and gender inequalities in STEM programs and help home health care workers join unions, which arguably doesn’t have much to do with infrastructure. . . . [I]t’s certainly not a classic asphalt plan. It does call for investments in fixing roads and bridges, but it doesn’t call for new sprawl-inducing roads and bridges, and it focuses far more on new rail lines, better airports and seaports, more bike lanes, more pedestrian-friendly streets and better transit. It even includes $20 billion for dismantling highways that have divided minority communities in cities like New Orleans and Syracuse, undoing the infrastructure of the past.
3.30 G. Gordon Liddy dies at 90.
3.29 CDC Director Dr Rochelle Walensky: “I’m going to reflect on the reoccurring feeling I have of impending doom. We have so much reason for hope, but right now I’m scared”.
3.28 Dr. Deborah Birx to CNN: “I look at it this way: The first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge. All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.”
3.28 Lindsay Graham on Fox: “I own an AR-15. If there’s a natural disaster in South Carolina where the cops can’t protect my neighborhood, my house will be the last one that the gang will come to, because I can defend myself.”
3.26 Larry McMurtry dies at 84.
3.26 Biden: “Rolling back the policies of separating children from . . . their mothers, I make no apology for that. Rolling back the policies of ‘Remain in Mexico,’ sitting on the edge of the Rio Grande in a muddy circumstance with not enough to eat . . . I make no apologies for that.”
3.26 There’s a big fucking cargo ship stuck athwart the Suez Canal.
3.25 Bill Gates, in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza: “By the end of 2022 we should be basically completely back to normal.”
3.25 Mika Zibanejad had three goals and three assists in the Rangers’ 8-3 victory over the Flyers. He is the first player in NHL history to notch consecutive six-point games against the same opponent.
3.24 Thomas B. Edsall in the Times: In. . . “A Not So Divided America,” conducted by the Center on Policy Attitudes and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland for a centrist group, Voice of the People. It found that if you compare “the views of people who live in red Congressional districts or states to those of people who live in blue Congressional districts or states,” on “only 3.6 percent of the questions — 14 out of 388 — did a majority or plurality of those living in red congressional districts/states take a position opposed to that of a majority or plurality of those living in blue districts/states.” Of those 14, according to the Voice of the People study, 11 concerned “ ‘hot-button’ topics that are famously controversial — gay and lesbian issues, abortion and Second Amendment issues relating to gun ownership.” The second study, “Hidden Tribes,” was conducted for “More In Common,” another group that supports centrist policies. According to the study, `In talking to everyday Americans, we have found a large segment of the population whose voices are rarely heard above the shouts of the partisan tribes. These are people who believe that Americans have more in common than that which divides them. They believe that compromise is necessary in politics, as in other parts of life, and want to see the country come together and solve its problems. In practice, the study found that polarization is driven in large part by the left flank of the Democratic Party and the right flank of the Republican Party, which together make up roughly a third of the electorate. The remaining two thirds are considerably more ideologically flexible than members of other groups. While members of the ‘wing’ groups (on both the left and the right) tend to hold strong and consistent views across a range of political issues, those in the Exhausted Majority tend to deviate significantly in their views from issue to issue..’’
3.23 George Segal dies at 87.
3.23 In defending Trump lawyer Sydney Powell in a defamation lawsuit filed by voting machine company Dominion, lawyers say that “reasonable people” would not take her claims about widespread election fraud as fact. “Given the highly charged and political context of the statements, it is clear that Powell was describing the facts on which she based the lawsuits she filed in support of President Trump,” Powell’s defense team said in a motion to dismiss. “Indeed, Plaintiffs themselves characterize the statements at issue as ‘wild accusations’ and ‘outlandish claims.’ They are repeatedly labeled ‘inherently improbable’ and even ‘impossible.’ Such characterizations of the allegedly defamatory statements further support Defendants’ position that reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process.
3.22 Gunman murders ten in a Boulder CO supermarket.
3.20 Got my second Covid shot in Clinton. Afterwards, Ginny and Wendy and I toured the arboretum at Hamilton College.
3.19 Former DNI John Ratcliffe said that military pilots and satellites have been monitoring numerous UFO sightings. Asked on Fox News about a forthcoming Pentagon report on “unidentified aerial phenomena,” Ratcliffe said it would document previously unknown sightings from “all over the world.” “There are a lot more sightings than have been made public,” Ratcliffe told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo. “Some of those have been declassified. When we talk about sightings, we’re talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain.”
3.18 Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Capt. Jay Baker describes the man suspected of mass murdering Asian women in the as having a “really bad day.”
3.17 Rangers beat Flyers 9-0. Mika Zibanejad ties Bryan Trottier‘s NHL record with six points in one period.
3.17 Washington Post: Abortion rates have been falling for the past 40 years. There was a spike after legalization, as desperate women came out of the shadows. But from a high of 29.3 induced abortions per 1,000 women of child-bearing age in 1981, the number fell back to the 1973 level of 16.3 by 2012. By 2017 (the year of Guttmacher’s most recent nationwide survey) the rate dropped by a further 17 percent, to 13.5 per 1,000 women.
3.17 Kim Yo-jong, the sister of Kim Jong Un, offered “a word of advice to the new administration that is struggling to spread the smell of gunpowder on our land. . . .If you wish to sleep well for the next four years, it would be better not to create work from the start that will make you lose sleep.”
3.15 The Jesuits vowed to raise $100 million to benefit the descendants of the enslaved people it once owned and to promote racial reconciliation initiatives across the United States.
3.14 Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B. perform at the Grammys.
3.9 Rep. Tim Ryan: “Heaven forbid we pass something that’s going to help the damn workers in the United States of America! Heaven forbid we tilt the balance that has been going in the wrong direction for 50 years! We talk about pensions, you complain. We talk about the minimum wage increase, you complain. We talk about giving them the right to organize, you complain. But if we were passing a tax cut here, you’d be all getting in line to vote yes for it. Now stop talking about Dr. Seuss, and start working with us on behalf of the American workers!”
3.7 Washington Post: What Cuomo has touted as an “aggressive” style goes far beyond that behind the scenes, according to more than 20 people who have worked with him from the 1990s to the present. Many former aides and advisers described to The Post a toxic culture in which the governor unleashes searing verbal attacks on subordinates. Some said he seemed to delight in humiliating his employees, particularly in group meetings.
3.4 Tony Hendra dies at 79.
3.2 FBI Director Christopher Wray to the Senate: “The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now, and it’s not going away anytime soon.”
3,2 Monica Hesse in The Washington Post: “[R]ealizing these things only now displays, if not malevolence, a lack of self-reflection. An unwillingness to look at the world and understand your place in it. If Cuomo really does believe he was just being playful, then perhaps he never interrogated himself on whether his playfulness was the same with men and women, and he never asked himself, honestly, what he was hoping the outcomes of these interactions would be. . . . In the past few years, we’ve seen sexual misconduct patterns that were so much wider, so much weirder, so much worse. Cuomo’s alleged actions seemed to take place in a liminal, discomfiting zone. But then I realized that was the point. The point is that this scandal, more than anything, exemplifies the calculus that a typical female employee encounters every day in casual workplace sexism — the tiring, unsettling, nagging, self-doubting calculus: Is this wrong? Or am I wrong? The point is that Cuomo could allegedly say these things to Bennett, and then go speak at a news conference with a clear conscience. He could dig for details of his employee’s sex life, and then go be a pandemic hero. Because he was, after all, just being playful. He was just adding levity. And if you think otherwise? Well, he’s sorry that you took it that way.