Trump team panics over "f*cking nightmare" meeting

 

It's Our Democracy!

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Today's Top Stories:

"F*cking nightmare": Trump team does damage control after he hosts Holocaust-denying white supremacist Nick Fuentes for dinner
The disgraced ex-president's campaign claims Trump didn't know anything about Fuentes, who joined the rapper formerly known as Kanye West for dinner at the serial grifter's home in Mar-a-Lago. So, fellow sleuths, either Trump knowingly hosted one of the most reviled, xenophobic, mysogynistic white supremacists on the planet for dinner OR has such lax security standards that anyone — and we mean ANYONE — can get inside his vaunted compound where he once stored hundreds upon hundreds of highly classified documents. Trick question, it's both!

Take Action: Demand the DOJ investigate Trump’s new foreign bribery scandal!

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Biden renewing push for ban on "sick" assault weapons following latest spate of mass shootings
“The idea that we still allow semi-automatic weapons to be purchased is sick,” President Biden said. “It has no, no social redeeming value. Zero. None. Not a single solitary rationale for it except profit for the gun manufacturers.”

Take Action: Tell Congress to bring back the Expanded Child Tax Credit!

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Top prosecutor issues BRUTAL news for Trump over special counsel
No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen: Wow.

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom backs President Biden, won't run in 2024
Despite the rumors, the popular California governor has no interest in challenging the most progressive and effective US president in generations.

Take Action: Demand Congress put an end to private prisons!

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Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump schmooze with Qatari royalty at World Cup
While dad was back in Florida hosting racist, antisemites for dinner, Ivanka and her husband Jared were spotted in a private box at the World Cup match between Brazil and Serbia in Qatar, meeting with various politicians and Middle Eastern businessmen during the course of the contest. The duo’s latest dalliance with the region’s ultrawealthy and powerful comes amidst ongoing speculation that Qatar was secretly involved in a $1.2 billion bailout — while Kushner served in Trump’s White House — of a Fifth Avenue property owned by the Kushner family. Surely nothing to see here, folks. Just sit back, sip on some Bud Zero, and watch the bouncy ball get kicked around the pitch.

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Twitter to "manually authenticate" verified accounts under new, multicolored checkmark program, Musk now says
The Apartheid trust fund man child said the revamped program would launch next Friday and take steps apparently intended to prevent the site from burning more of the billions he spent to buy it. A proliferation of hilarious corporate and individual impersonators triggered an exodus of advertisers after Musk first introduced his spectacularly dim-witted Twitter Blue program, which offered lterally any user a checkmark and a veil of legitimacy for just $8 a month.

Take Action: Tell corporations to suspend all their Twitter advertising!

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Walmart shooter left "death note," bought gun day of killing
The Walmart supervisor who fatally shot six coworkers at a store in Virginia legally bought a 9mm handgun just hours before the killings and left a rambling note on his phone accusing colleagues of mocking him and comparing him to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. One witness who survived the massacre said the perpetrator appeared to be "hunting," targeting specific coworkers while letting others go.

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Let's make Joe Manchin irrelevant
OD Action Partner: If we can re-elect Sen. Warnock, we can keep Joe Manchin from derailing the President's ambitious progressive agenda and pass all the legislation we've fought so hard for. Will you contribute to United Rural Democrats to get out the vote in Georgia and expand our Senate majority?

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Marjorie Taylor Greene signals Trump will pardon Jan. 6 insurrectionists if he wins in 2024
We're still two years out, but Trump and his allies may have already locked up the "white supremacists who tried to violently overthrow the US government" vote. Word to the hood wearers, cross burners, and goose steppers — your people have you covered!

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Club Q killer and mother were involved in racist, verbally abusive tirade on Frontier Airlines flight in July clash captured on video
Cell phone video from a fellow passenger showed the club shooting suspect Anderson Aldrich and Aldrich’s mother, Laura Voepel, in a heated confrontation with fellow passengers on a Frontier Airlines to Denver on July 31. Passengers recalled the disturbing, racially charged altercation, including Aldrich's prescient muttering, "I wish I can shoot all of you right now" during deboarding.

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Elon Musk says he'd back Trump rival Ron DeSantis for president
Bad news for Ron since everything the tech bozo touches seems to turn to twit.

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America the beautiful?

2022 deadliest year yet for US mass shootings, new data shows

University of Idaho offers remote classes in wake of unsolved brutal murders

Twitter has lost 50 of its top 100 advertisers since Elon Musk took over, report says

Missouri 19-year-old can't watch her father's execution, judge rules

What a wonderful world?

US reports rocket attacks on military base in Syria

Beijing adds new COVID quarantine centers, sparking panic buying

Landslide tears through village on Italian island near Naples, more than a dozen people missing

Three killed, 11 wounded in Brazil twin school shootings

Trudeau defends use of emergency powers to quell trucker protests

Hope...

Sharp-shooting farm robot can treat 500,000 plants per hour with 95% decrease in chemical sprays

Historic shark protections approved at global wildlife convention

First 3D-printed neighborhood is providing 100 sturdy, affordable solar homes near Austin

"Cleaner air is coming" as London expands vehicle pollution fee to entire metro area

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It’s no longer a pandemic of the unvaccinated

 

It’s no longer a pandemic of the unvaccinated

White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha speaks alongside Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during a press briefing at the White House on Tuesday. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

For the first time, a majority of Americans dying from the coronavirus received at least the primary series of the vaccine.

Fifty-eight percent of coronavirus deaths in August were people who were vaccinated or boosted, according to an analysis conducted for The Health 202 by Cynthia Cox, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

It’s a continuation of a troubling trend that has emerged over the past year. As vaccination rates have increased and new variants appeared, the share of deaths of people who were vaccinated has been steadily rising. In September 2021, vaccinated people made up just 23 percent of coronavirus fatalities. In January and February this year, it was up to 42 percent, per our colleagues Fenit Nirappil and Dan Keating.

“We can no longer say this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Cox told The Health 202.

Being unvaccinated is still a major risk factor for dying from covid-19. But efficacy wanes over time, and an analysis out last week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlights the need to get regular booster shots to keep one’s risk of death from the coronavirus low, especially for the elderly.

Anthony Fauci, the nation’s preeminent infectious-disease expert, used his last White House briefing yesterday ahead of his December retirement to urge Americans to get the recently authorized omicron-specific boosters.

“The final message I give you from this podium is that please, for your own safety, for that of your family, get your updated covid-19 shot as soon as you’re eligible,” he said.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre:

Ratio shift

Cox, like many experts, says she’s not surprised by the ratio shift. There are a few reasons:

• At this point in the pandemic, a large majority of Americans have received at least their primary series of coronavirus vaccines, so it makes sense that vaccinated people are making up a greater share of fatalities.
• Individuals at greatest risk of dying from a coronavirus infection, such as the elderly, are also more likely to have received the shots.
• Vaccines lose potency against the virus over time and variants arise that are better able to resist the vaccines, so continued boosters are needed to continue to prevent illness and death.

The BA.5 omicron subvariant became dominant in July and consistently accounted for the majority of new coronavirus infections across the United States until earlier this month. The highly transmissible strain fueled a surge of new infections, reinfections and hospitalizations throughout the summer.

Boosters

It’s still true that vaccinated groups are at a lower risk of dying from a covid-19 infection than the unvaccinated when the data is adjusted for age. An analysis released by the CDC last week underscores the protection that additional booster shots offer against severe illness and death as immunity wanes. 

Let’s take a look at deaths in August, when the highly contagious BA.5 variant reached its peak:

• That month, unvaccinated people aged 6 months and older died at about six times the rate of those who had received their primary series of shots.
• People with one booster dose were even better protected. Unvaccinated people over the age of 5 had about 8 times the risk of dying from a coronavirus infection than those who received a booster shot.
• Among individuals who were eligible to receive additional booster shots, the gap is even more striking. Unvaccinated people 50 and up had 12 times the risk of dying from covid-19 than adults the same age with two or more booster doses.

David French, senior editor for the Dispatch:

Six-week sprint

Americans’ uptake of the latest booster shots continues to be slow.

Around 35 million people have received the updated boosters that became available to people 12 and over in September and to children as young as 5 last month. That’s a little over 10 percent of the U.S. population, amid concern that cooler weather will bring a surge of covid cases as people move indoors and respiratory infections spread.

Yesterday, the White House announced a six-week push ahead of the holidays aimed at increasing booster uptake among seniors, people who are racial minorities and those who live in rural areas, all of which have disproportionately suffered severe disease and death during the coronavirus pandemic, our colleagues Frances Stead Sellers and Ariana Eunjung Cha write.

Senior officials said the Biden administration would direct some of its remaining resources to fight the pandemic into a $475 million campaign to support community health centers and organizations working to get the elderly and people with disabilities boosted.

The administration’s push coincided with the release of a CDC study offering the first evidence that the bivalent boosters are better at preventing symptomatic infection against newly circulating variants than earlier doses.

“I feel very confident that if people continue to get vaccinated at good numbers, if people get boosted, we can absolutely have a very safe and healthy holiday season,” Ashish Jha, White House coronavirus czar, said yesterday.

Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.)

LINK

November 25, 2022 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

November 25, 2022 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON NOV 26 Yesterday, Representative Mary Peltola (D-AK) won Alaska’s House seat for a full term after taking it this summer in a special election to replace Representative Don Young (R-AK), who died in office in March after 49 years in Congress. Peltola is the first woman to represent Alaska and, as Yup’ik, is the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress. Peltola was endorsed by Alaskans of both parties, including Republicans like Senator Lisa Murkowski. Peltola promised to protect abortion and the salmon fisheries and was elected thanks to Alaska’s recent adoption of ranked choice voting, in which votes from poorly polling candidates are redistributed to those at the top until one gets more than 50%. This method of voting tends to favor moderates. Peltola’s reelection stopped former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, whom Trump endorsed, from reentering politics. Murkowski has also won reelection, defeating a Trump-backed challenger endorsed by the Alaska Republican Party. Trump targeted Murkowski after she voted to convict him for incitement of insurrection during his second impeachment after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The reelections of Peltola and Murkowski illustrate that we are, in many different ways, at a sea change moment in American history. In the past two years, Democrats have successfully pushed back on forty years of efforts to dismantle the business regulation, basic social safety net, promotion of infrastructure, protection of civil rights, and international cooperation that were the fundamental principles underpinning American government after the Depression and World War II. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, along with the Democratic Congress, have rebuilt some of the economic fairness of the old system and invested in infrastructure, while Biden, Harris, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have strengthened the foreign alliances that the former president had undermined. Democratic leadership is also changing in the House of Representatives as Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) have stepped out of the top three leadership roles in the House to make way for members of a new generation, presumably Representatives Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Katherine Clark (D-MA), and Pete Aguilar (D-CA). Pelosi’s team has defended the liberal consensus and expanded it into health care and measures to address climate change; the new generation of Democrats seems likely to center issues like childcare and racial equality more fully than their predecessors did. These changes embrace the demographic change the last election made so clear. Gen Z—the generation born after 1997—is racially and ethnically diverse. Its members want the government to do more to solve problems than it has done in their lifetime, and they are now politically awake. That generation looks much like the Millennials from the generation preceding it—those born between 1981 and 1996—and both groups strongly favor Democratic policies. Peltola reflects another change visible after the election: the record number of women elected to office this cycle. Peltola will add one more woman to the House of Representatives, bringing the total to 124, one more than the record set by the current Congress. Murkowski will bring the total of female senators to 25, which is one fewer than the record of 26, set in 2020 thanks to a few special appointments for unexpectedly empty seats. But the place women’s representation really changed in 2022 was in the number of women elected to govern their states. In 2018, just 16 female candidates ran for governorships. In 2022, there were 36 governor’s contests, and 25 women ran in them. Until now there have been only 45 women governors in our history, and only 9 in office at one time. Beginning in 2023, a record number of twelve women will hold governorships. Incumbent female governors in Alabama, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, New Mexico, Michigan and South Dakota were reelected. Voters in Arizona, Arkansas, Massachusetts, and Oregon elected new governors who are women. And New Yorkers elected Kathy Hochul, who took office initially in 2021 to replace resigning governor Andrew Cuomo. Meredith Conroy and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux of FiveThirtyEight note that historically, voters are less likely to vote for women for solo offices than as group lawmakers, but Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics, told Jennifer Shutt of the Idaho Capital Sun that a number of factors fed the success rate of women candidates this cycle. First, there is now a long enough history of women in high positions of leadership that voters have confidence in them, especially as some of them—like Kay Ivey in Alabama and Hochul in New York—stepped into their positions after their male predecessors resigned in disgrace. Even more key, perhaps, was the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion guaranteed in 1973 by Roe v. Wade. Women turned out to protect their right to healthcare in this election and, not surprisingly, they turned to women governors who made protecting abortion care central to their reelection campaigns. The female governors have a great deal of legislative experience, perhaps in part because their rise through the political ranks has been slow as it has been hampered by resistance. Republicans reelected female governors in South Dakota, Iowa, and Alabama and added Trump’s former White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, as governor of Arkansas. While Sanders has no experience in elected office, the other three—South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, Iowa’s Kim Reynolds, and Alabama’s Kay Ivey—all have significant experience in their state governments and, in Noem’s case, in Congress. The same is even more true on the Democratic side. Maine’s Janet Mills, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, Arizona’s Katie Hobbs, New York’s Kathy Hochul, New Mexico’s Michelle Lujan Grisham, Oregon’s Tina Kotek, and Kansas’s Laura Kelly all have legislative experience; Maura Healey of Massachusetts twice won election as state attorney general. While Noem made headlines for her fervent support of former president Trump, the new Democratic governors all ran as competent administrators who strongly opposed Trump-type politics. Maine’s Mills ran against a former governor who once described himself as “Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular,” and Michigan’s Whitmer was such a target of the former president that she became the target of a kidnapping and murder plot. This focus on competence and moderation clearly boosted Peltola and Murkowski, along with female candidates for governor, but the expansion of representation still does not come close to reflecting the actual percentage of women in the U.S. population. Nor does it reflect racial and ethnic identities. Women representatives are more diverse than in the Senate, but only two women senators—Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI)—are Asian American, and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) is Latina. Since Vice President Kamala Harris resigned from the Senate to take her current office, there have been no Black women in the Senate. Of the women governors, only New Mexico governor Michelle Lujan Grisham is Latina, and voters have not yet put a Black women governor at the head of a state. They did, though, put Karen Bass, a Black former congressional representative, in charge of Los Angeles, with record voter turnout. Bass will be the first female mayor in the city’s 241-year history, and her charge is a big one: the city’s 3.8 million people give it more inhabitants than 22 U.S. states. Voters have also embraced other diversity: the new governors in Massachusetts and Oregon are openly lesbian. That female candidates won so many seats—some contests had women running against each other—is “a really good reminder that women get to be as diverse in their viewpoints and perspectives, priorities, et cetera, as their male counterparts,” Dittmar told Jasmine Mithani of The 19th. “We get to see that being a woman candidate, being a woman doesn't mean the same thing for everybody.” The expansion of our political representation to reflect the many different people in our diverse democracy can only be a good thing. — Notes: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/01/17/generation-z-looks-a-lot-like-millennials-on-key-social-and-political-issues/ https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/11/17/us/election-news-results#jeffries-clark-and-aguilar-are-positioning-themselves-as-the-new-top-three-democrats https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-historic-number-of-women-will-be-governors-next-year/ https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-sarah-palin-don-young-alaska-donald-trump-cf3fa90c1f8bed60b49eaf3162e79c69 https://www.murkowski.senate.gov/press/release/murkowski-votes-to-convict-president-donald-j-trump https://www.npr.org/2022/11/24/1139155670/mary-peltola-wins-alaska-election-congress https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/23/politics/peltola-palin-alaska-election-results/index.html https://worldpopulationreview.com/states https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-11-25/los-angeles-mayor-election-voting-record https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/23/black-mayors-karen-bass-the-fifty-00069497 https://19thnews.org/2022/11/women-representation-governor-house-senate-charts/ https://www.idahostatejournal.com/freeaccess/record-setting-number-of-women-elected-as-governors-in-midterms/article_7b7013c4-660a-11ed-9b21-8be07d05c746.html

 

 

4 deaths, 184 new COVID-19 cases on Cape and Islands

Illnesses up from last week

Assad Jung

Cape Cod Times 

Published Nov. 28, 2022 

There were 4,425 newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Massachusetts, increasing the total number to 1,929,736 since the pandemic began, the state Department of Public Health reported on Thursday.     

In their weekly report, state officials also noted 841 new probable cases of coronavirus for a statewide total of 179,983.     

As of Nov. 22, 179 patients were primarily hospitalized with COVID-19-related illnesses and 562 patients were hospitalized with COVID-19 in total, the state agency reported.   

Sixty-four patients were in intensive care units, or ICUs, and 18 patients were intubated.    

Closer to home, in Thursday's weekly report, state health officials said Barnstable County posted 170 new coronavirus cases, for a total of 46,102 since the pandemic started. Dukes County (Martha's Vineyard) reported 10 new coronavirus cases, for a to-date total of 4,237. Nantucket County reported four new cases for a total of 3,782.    

From the archivesSix deaths, 173 new COVID-19 cases on Cape and Islands

Barnstable County sees rise in cases

Case numbers are higher than last week’s report, which showed 173 new cases on the Cape and Islands. 

The state’s 14-day positivity rate was 5.43%. The 14-day positivity rate for Barnstable County came in at 7.34%, and 2.6% for Dukes and Nantucket counties.     

Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis was treating 13 patients with coronavirus, none in the ICU. Falmouth Hospital reported four patients, none in the ICU.  

State health officials said Thursday there were 64 new deaths statewide among people with confirmed cases of COVID-19, increasing the total deaths to 20,833 since the pandemic began.      

There were 30 deaths statewide from probable cases of COVID-19. The number of deaths from probable cases is 1,564 in Massachusetts.     

Barnstable County posted four new deaths, the state agency reported. The total probable and confirmed deaths from COVID-19 is 684 in Barnstable County. There were no new deaths in Dukes and Nantucket counties combined, for a total fatality count of 23 since the pandemic began in March 2020.        

The two-week COVID-19 case count, total case count and 14-day testing positivity rate for Cape Cod towns follows:         

Barnstable (95; 11,810; 9.44%); Bourne (35; 4,365; 9.88%); Brewster (5; 1,788; 2.46%); Chatham (6; 1,089; 7.64%); Dennis (19; 2,889; 8.07%); Eastham (6; 640; 5.19%); Falmouth (40; 5,757; 5.59%); Harwich (14; 2,572; 5.4%); Mashpee (29; 3,206; 7.13%); Orleans (9; 993; 7.07%): Provincetown (5; 496; 11.54%); Sandwich (21; 4,346; 4.74%); Truro (0; 209; 7.41%); Wellfleet (less than five; 338; 3.03%) and Yarmouth (39; 5,604; 8.33%).        

FOCUS: Robert Reich | Joe, Please Don't Run Again

 

 

25 November 22

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FOCUS: Robert Reich | Joe, Please Don't Run Again
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Substack
Reich writes: "The question 'should Joe Biden run again?' is really four different questions."

Friends,

Hate to drag you from leftover turkeys back into the world of politics (I’ll refrain from the obvious bad joke here), but the question is growing louder about whether Joe Biden should run again for president.

Having turned 80 last Sunday, Biden is already the oldest president in American history. Concerns about his age top the list for why Democratic voters want the party to find an alternative for 2024.

But the question “should Joe Biden run again?” is really four different questions:

(1) Has he done a good job so far? (Answer: By-and-large, yes.)

(2) Should he run again if he wants to? (Almost certainly.)

(3) Will he be the best candidate to beat Trump or whomever else Republicans are likely to nominate? (Maybe, but let’s discuss.)

(4) Would he be a capable leader of the United States when he’s in his mid-80s? (Possible, but unlikely.)

As I’ve said before, I don’t think concern about Biden’s age reflects an “ageist” prejudice against those who have reached such withering heights so much as an understanding that people in their 80s do wither.

I speak with a certain authority. I’m 76. I feel fit, I swing dance and salsa, and can do 20 pushups in a row. Yet I confess to a certain loss of, shall we say, fizz.

Joe Biden could easily make it until 86, when he’d conclude his second term. After all, it’s now thought a bit disappointing if a person dies before 85. (My mother passed at 86, my father two weeks before his 102nd birthday, so I’m hoping for the best, genetically speaking.)

Three score and ten is the number of years of life set out in the Bible. Modern technology and Big Pharma should add at least a decade and a half. Beyond this is an extra helping. “After 80, it’s gravy,” my father used to say.

Joe will be on the cusp of the gravy train.

Where will this end? There’s only one possibility. As the old saying goes, “we won’t get out of this alive.”

That reality occurs to me with increasing frequency. I find myself reading the obituary pages with ever greater curiosity about how long they lasted and what brought them down. I remember a New Yorker cartoon in which an older reader of the obituaries sees headlines that read only “Older Than Me” or “Younger Than Me.”

Yet most of the time I forget my age. The other day after lunch with some of my graduate students, I caught our reflection in a store window and for an instant wondered about the identity of that little old man in our midst.

It’s not death that’s the worrying thing about a second Biden term. It’s the dwindling capacities that go with aging. “Bodily decrepitude,” said Yeats, “is wisdom.” I have accumulated somewhat more of the former than the latter, but Biden seems fairly spry (why do I feel I have to add “for someone his age?”).

I still have my teeth, in contrast to my grandfather whom I vividly recall storing his choppers in a glass next to his bed, and have so far steered clear of heart attack or stroke (I pray I’m not tempting fate by my stating this fact). But I’ve lived through several kidney stones and a few unexplained fits of epilepsy in my late thirties. I’ve had both hips replaced. And my hearing is for shit. Even with hearing aids, I have a hard time understanding someone talking to me in a noisy restaurant.

You’d think that the sheer market power of 60 million boomers losing their hearing would be enough to generate at least one set of quiet restaurants. But no — restaurants seem to be loud as ever. Getting louder, in fact.

When I get together with old friends, our first ritual is an “organ recital” — how’s your back? knee? heart? hip? shoulder? eyesight? hearing? prostate? hemorrhoids? digestion?

The recital can run (and ruin) an entire lunch.

The question my friends and I jokingly (and brutishly) asked one other in college— “getting much?”—now refers not to sex but to sleep. I don’t know anyone over 75 who sleeps through the night. When he was president, Bill Clinton prided himself on getting only about four hours. But he was in his forties then. (I also recall cabinet meetings where he dozed off.) How does Biden manage?

My memory for names is horrible. (I once asked Ted Kennedy how he recalled names and he advised that if a man is over 50, just ask “how’s the back?” and he’ll think you know him.)

I often can’t remember where I put my wallet and keys or why I’ve entered a room. And certain proper nouns have disappeared altogether. Even when rediscovered, they have a diabolical way of disappearing again. Biden’s secret service detail can worry about his wallet and he’s got a teleprompter for wayward nouns, but I’m sure he’s experiencing some diminution in the memory department.

I have lost much of my enthusiasm for travel and feel, as did Philip Larkin, that I would like to visit China, but only on the condition that I could return home that night. Air Force One makes this possible under most circumstances. If not, it has a first-class bedroom and personal bathroom, so I don’t expect Biden’s trips are overly taxing.

I’m told that after the age of 60, one loses half an inch of height every five years. This doesn’t appear to be a problem for Biden but it presents a challenge for me, considering that at my zenith I didn’t quite make it to five feet. If I live as long as my father did, I may vanish.

Another diminution I’ve noticed is tact. A few days ago, I gave the finger to a driver who passed me recklessly on the highway. These days, giving the finger to a stranger is itself a reckless act.

I’m also noticing I have less patience, perhaps because of an unconscious “use by” timer that’s now clicking away. Increasingly I wonder why I’m wasting time with this or that buffoon. I’m less tolerant of long waiting lines, automated phone menus, and Republicans.

Cicero claimed “older people who are reasonable, good-tempered, and gracious bear aging well. Those who are mean-spirited and irritable will be unhappy at every stage of their lives.” Easy for Cicero to say. He was forced into exile and murdered at the age of 63, his decapitated head and right hand hung up in the Forum by order of the notoriously mean-spirited and irritable Marcus Antonius.

How the hell does Biden maintain tact or patience when he has to deal with Mitch McConnell? Or Joe Manchin? And very soon with Kevin McCarthy, for crying out loud?

The style sections of the papers tell us that the 70s are the new 50s. Septuagenarians are supposed to be fit and alert, exercise like mad, have rip-roaring sex, and party until dawn.

Rubbish. Inevitably, things begin falling apart. My aunt, who lived far into her nineties, told me “getting old isn’t for sissies.” Toward the end she repeated that phrase every two to three minutes.

Am I repeating myself?

I’m doing videos on TikTok and Snapchat, but when my students talk about Ariana Grande or Selena Gomez or Jared Leto, I don’t have clue who they’re talking about (and frankly don’t care). And I find myself using words –- “hence,” “utmost,” “therefore,” “tony,” “brilliant” — that my younger colleagues find charmingly old-fashioned. If I refer to “Rose Marie Woods” or “Jackie Robinson” or “Ed Sullivan” or “Mary Jo Kopechne,” they’re bewildered. The culture has flipped in so many ways. When I was seventeen, I could go into a drugstore and confidently ask for a package of Luckies and nervously whisper a request for condoms. Now it’s precisely the reverse. (I stopped smoking long ago.)

Santayana said the reason that old people have nothing but foreboding about the future is that they cannot imagine a world that’s good without themselves in it. I don’t share that view. To the contrary, I think my generation — including Bill and Hillary, George W., Trump, Newt Gingrich, Clarence Thomas, Chuck Schumer, and Biden – have fucked it up royally. The world will probably be better without us. (On the other hand, I think Nancy Pelosi has done a wonderful job.)

Joe, please don’t run. (But if you do, I’ll be 100 percent behind you.)

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