This is just a minor thing, but I figured I’d let you know how things are going since so many of you emailed to wish me good luck. So here it is: My stomach ailments have disappeared and I’m now fine. The stomach problems started on October 19, the first day of my October round of Pomalyst. They ended two days after the end of the October round. Then I had a week off, and a week ago I started the November round. I’ve had no problems since.

My current theory, then, is that I just got a bad batch of Pomalyst. Or something.

Biden Transition Via Cnp/CNP via ZUMA

Caution! Navel gazing ahead.

So Joe Biden has decided on Tony Blinken as his secretary of state. What should we think of this?

On the one hand, I think we all have a pretty low bar these days. Blinken is a fairly ordinary human being. He’s experienced and knowledgable. He doesn’t have any desire to destroy the State Department. Foreign leaders will get along with him just fine. Based on this, hooray! Good choice.

On the other hand, Blinken is fairly hawkish, having supported both the Libya incursion and some kind of military intervention in Syria. Barack Obama, who had finally started to understand the national security blob a little better by then, vetoed any action in Syria, so we dodged that bullet. Unfortunately, it’s not clear if Blinken has learned any of the same lessons. Based on this, meh. We could do better. Why not someone like Sen. Chris Murphy instead?

Joe Biden is not a hard lefty, so it’s hardly surprising to see him choosing pretty mainstream aides so far. That’s what we collectively voted for, and that’s what we’re going to get, especially in the highest profile appointments. What’s more, I’m willing to cut him substantial slack with national security appointments. There is, literally, no progressive wing of the national security establishment with any real influence. Behind all the yelling and screaming, Democrats and Republicans are pretty much the same on NatSec issues, with smallish differences on the margin and not much else. This means that even if Biden did appoint someone more progressive, they’d just run into a brick wall of opposition: in the White House, in Congress, in the intelligence agencies, in the military, and in think tanks. It’s all but impossible to buck this, and Biden probably doesn’t really want to in the first place. He’s got bigger fish to fry.

This is a dangerous way of thinking—whew, at least it’s not a Trumpie!—and it will apply less and less once we get past the top three or four cabinet positions. In other areas, there are big differences between Democrats and Republicans and there are plenty of progressives with real clout. We should expect to see some riskier appointments at Labor, HHS, Energy, EPA, and so forth. If we don’t, it would mean Biden is basically kissing off the progressive wing of the party.

We’ll start to hear more about those appointments in early December, and that’s when we’ll truly be able to get a concrete idea of just what Biden’s administration will look like. Until then, I’d resist jumping to any conclusions.

Surf City, baby!

I went over to Huntington Beach on Saturday just to mill around and take some pictures, and it turned out to be MAGA central. “Stop the Steal” was the slogan of the day, with cars honking their support as they passed by. By the time I left around 5 pm the protesters were all gone, which I thought demonstrated a real lack of commitment to the cause. But no! They were just taking a break. Apparently they all came back later in order to boldly defy Gov. Newsom’s 10 pm curfew.

To make up for this, I’ll post a pretty picture from Huntington Beach later in the week. You know, surfers, piers, sunsets, that kind of thing. Which would you like to see first?

Starmax/Newscom via ZUMA

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Washington DC, earmarks are b-a-a-a-a-ck:

House Democratic leaders are proceeding with plans to bring back earmarks for the 117th Congress, according to Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer….“There are three candidates for chair of the Appropriations Committee. All have indicated they are for congressional initiatives, congressional add-ons with the structure I’ve just talked about — transparency when you ask, when it’s given, when it’s on the floor,” Hoyer said.

So how do I feel about this? In the past, I’ve defended earmarks as a fairly harmless bit of horse-trading that helps Congress run more smoothly and produces a little more bipartisan cooperation. They don’t cost anything, since they redirect spending rather than increasing it, and the total amount of redirected spending is never more than a percent or two of the total discretionary budget. As long as it’s transparent, what’s the harm?

Today, though, I’m a little less sure about this. In the end, I suppose I still favor allowing earmarks, but I’m pretty skeptical about my original reasoning for them: namely that the ability to bestow earmarks helps party leaders build bipartisan majorities for tricky legislation. This was certainly the case back in the days of Tip O’Neill, and as recently as a few years ago I could convince myself that it was still true. But today? We now live in the era of QAnon and Donald Trump, which makes the hardliners of the tea party look like a bunch of creampuffs. At this point, it’s not clear that anything will produce bipartisan cooperation. Mitch McConnell’s singular goal is to produce enough misery to make Joe Biden a one-term president, and that’s it. The rest of his party is behind him on this, earmarks be damned.

But I might be wrong about this. Perhaps members of Congress are more mercenary than I think. Bringing back earmarks is worth a try, but I have to say that I’m more skeptical of their utility than I was even a few years ago.

Paramount Pictures

I’ve gotten a little tired of hearing about Operation Warp Speed and how it’s responsible for producing a COVID-19 vaccine so fast. Here’s a brief timeline just to refresh everyone’s memories:

January 10: China releases genome of virus.

January 11: Scientists around the world immediately begin work on a vaccine.

January 14: Moderna begins development of its mRNA-based vaccine.

January 23: The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations provides $12.5 million in seed money to three companies, including Moderna.

January 26: BioNTech begins work on its mRNA-based vaccine.

February 15: More than two dozen companies have announced that they are working on a COVID-19 vaccine.

March 26: Congress passes the CARES Act, which allots $9.5 billion for vaccine development. It is passed almost unanimously. President Trump signs it into law the next day.

April 16: HHS announces $483 million in funding for the Moderna vaccine.

April 29: Operation Warp Speed is revealed in the press.

OWS seems to have been handled well and I’m happy to give Donald Trump credit for it since it happened on his watch. But vaccine development started long before it was a twinkle in his eye; everyone understood from the start that speed was critical; and it was Congress that allocated the funds to make it possible. Only after all that did Trump wrap a bow around everything by giving it a name. It was hardly a stroke of genius that only he could ever have come up with.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through November 22. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

This is from the Wall Street Journal, of course:

Is there any economic condition that doesn’t threaten to blow up inflation? I don’t think so. I swear we could be under attack from aliens and inflation hawks would be warning that if we prevent them from destroying the earth that’s all well and good, but we’d better start watching out for inflation to rear its ugly head out of the rubble.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through November 21. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Black communities have been far harder hit by COVID-19 than white communities. Why? One theory is that it’s due to disparities in health care. The state of Michigan tested this out:

Garlin Gilchrist II, a Detroit native as well as the state’s lieutenant governor, formed one of the nation’s first state racial disparities task forces on covid-19 back in April…The group focused not only on boosting testing and contact tracing, but also tailoring messages on mask-wearing and other public health precautions to African American communities. It also addressed broader systemic issues, such as access to primary care, and helping those in rural areas access telemedicine.

When state epidemiologists ran the numbers again in September, they found a huge change: Black residents who in April accounted for 29.4 percent of cases and 40.7 percent of deaths now made up only 8 percent of cases and 10 percent of deaths — very similar to their percentage in the population.

But there’s another theory: namely that Black people on average suffer from more comorbidities than white people. Epidemiologist Peter J. Fos was one of the first to notice that COVID-19 was not like the flu, which tends to hit everyone equally:

Coronavirus cases, however, he noticed, seemed to be clustered in mostly poor Black neighborhoods. He called up friends in Mississippi for that state’s data and found similar patterns. The same thing was true in Michigan.

….In the spring, scholars puzzling over such disparities overlaid maps of covid-19 deaths with maps of communities where heart disease, diabetes, obesity and other conditions were highest in the United States. They found that the hot zones matched up. Numerous studies have since borne out the relationship between these health conditions and high covid-19 death rates. When looking at the role of race, smaller studies — based on data from single hospital systems or regions — found that differences in mortality narrowed when controlling for ailments such as high blood pressure, diabetes, lung conditions and obesity.

If this holds up in other studies done in other states, it means that both theories are probably true. The disparity has roots both in chronic medical conditions¹ and in poor levels of health care in Black communities. If this is true, it’s useful insight for responding to the crisis: Michigan, after all, didn’t have to literally uproot centuries of past and present racism. They just had to focus modestly more attention and resources on Black neighborhoods. And knowing about the comorbidities helps too. Once doctors know about these, they can adjust the level of care that makes sense for different patients.

If we had a White House that cared about this, Michigan’s experience could be replicated on a national level. Would it work? There’s no certain way to know, but doesn’t it seem well worth trying?

¹Which, of course, may themselves be rooted in systemic racism.

Lol pic.twitter.com/33pHz0txB8

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) November 21, 2020