Afghanistan: the end game

The New Neo Posted on by

Afghanistan has long been a terrible place to go to war, as Kipling knew:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

So now we’re getting out of Afghanistan. Some commentary from Mike Rogers, House member:

For months, I have pressed President Biden for a plan to avoid the very situation that is now happening in Afghanistan. Now, American lives are at risk because President Biden still doesn’t have a plan. Weeks ago, President Biden promised the American people that we would not have a Saigon moment in Afghanistan – Now, we are watching President Biden’s Saigon moment unfold before us.

“The turmoil happening in Afghanistan is a surprise to no one. Unfortunately, I believe the worst is yet to come.

“Our allies are watching as Afghanistan rapidly deteriorates and President Biden still claims he does not regret his unconditional withdrawal. Make no mistake, the consequences of President Biden’s haphazard withdrawal will be felt for decades.

Among other things, I think the way this is playing out is a sign that the military has become confused and incompetent.

The prognosis is not good:

“The latest U.S. military intelligence assessment suggests Kabul could come under insurgent pressure within 30 days and that, if current trends hold, the Taliban could gain full control of the country within a few months,” the Associated Press reported on Thursday…

The Taliban captured a strategic provincial capital near Kabul on Thursday, the 10th the insurgents have taken in a weeklong sweep across Afghanistan just weeks before the end of the American military mission there.

…[A] resurgent Taliban estimated to now hold some two-thirds of the nation, and thousands of people have fled their homes…

I have read that they now have 17 capitals, and counting.

There’s no dearth of opinions on this, so I’ll add mine. I trust that the Biden administration and the current “woke” military will do this in an incompetent way.

As for what should have been done in the first place, I thought then and I still think now that we were between a rock and a hard place. Afghanistan was harboring Bin Laden, al Qaeda, and large training camps for terrorists. We gave the government at the time (the Taliban, that is) an ultimatum: surrender Bin Laden or we’ll go to war. They didn’t, and we did. We took over the country in a military sense, but what should we have done then?

Afghanistan is recalcitrant to change. Nation-building there has always been an iffy proposition, to say the least. But it always seemed to me that if we were going to make that gamble, we needed to be prepared to pretty much take over the country for a long long time. If we lacked the will to take over for the long haul, then it was a waste to have attempted it.

We did lack that will and that commitment, and yet we did attempt it. So it was almost certainly doomed to failure.

And yet could we have kept some troops there just to fulfill our original goal, which was to discourage the setting up of major terrorist operations there? I don’t have the answer, but I think that was the only reasonable solution at this point. As commenter “TJ” wrote today:

Afghanistan will remain the base for renewed Islamist terror mayhem. The costs of attempting this project in an urban area are now way too low for them not to work towards this aim and the money supporting it too much and too available for it not to go on again…

I don’t like this at all. But there it remains – a threat wielded by Islamic zealots. Against the US and the world

I don’t know whether the prognosis is as bad as TJ states. But I do know that it is a distinct possibility, and that it is the reason we went there in the first place. When people say nothing was accomplished in the Afghan war and all the occupation years after that, I believe they are forgetting that it may have discouraged many more terrorist attacks, and particularly well-organized ones (such as 9/11) at that.

I don’t think the Biden administration has a clue how to manage the fallout. Biden himself certainly doesn’t and I wouldn’t have expected him to have known what to do even if he were still in full possession of his wits. And the generals? There’s this:

That is by design, not by accident. The priority of the Obama administration regarding military personnel was cooperation with the leftist political agenda, and Trump was unable to reverse that.

[NOTE: The parallels with Vietnam are obvious, although hardly exact. But I’m going to link to one of my previous posts about the way our involvement in South Vietnam ended.]

Ballot adjudication in Fulton County, 2020

The New Neo Posted on by

The November 2020 election seems like it took place a very long time ago. Slowly, ever so slowly, more of the details are emerging about how absentee ballots fared. We may never know whether or not the problems they raised actually changed the results of that election, although it’s certainly very possible. However, the rules that were in place in many states were highly vulnerable to both error and fraud, and truly negligent in terms of trying to prevent those things.

For example, let’s take Fulton County, Georgia, and the subject of ballot adjudication. That occurs when a paper ballot is marked in such a way that it confuses the machines reading it and gets rejected. There are rules about what happens next, but they are confusing and subject to exploitation.

The link I’ve just given is to a highly informative article, and I suggest you read the whole thing; it covers more than adjudication. But here’s an excerpt on that subject:

Welcome to the arcane process known as adjudication, where human judgment is substituted for machine scanning in cases where voters incorrectly filled out a paper ballot. Election officials and official observers have dealt with it for years, with everyday citizens mostly oblivious to the process.

But in 2020, adjudication played a much larger role in states like Georgia, which allowed hundreds of thousands of additional citizens to vote absentee for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In all, more than 5,000 of the 148,000 absentee ballots cast — or about 3% — in Georgia’s largest county required some form of human intervention, according to logs obtained from Fulton County by Just the News under an open records act request.

The [Fulton County] adjudication ballots alone are not enough to change a Georgia election in which Biden and Trump were separated by less than 13,000 votes. However, they reveal an imperfect system vulnerable to chaos, subjectivity, or political dirty tricks, especially in a county like Fulton where state officials documented widespread irregularities and misconduct and now want to take over election counting.

Adjudication hardly represented the only problem. But it represented a sizeable wild card introduced into the process, and even if the people doing the adjudicating had been trying desperately to be fair and evenhanded, the rules were so confusing that it would have been difficult. For example:

…[I]n Georgia,…election regulations create two conflicting imperatives. One regulation, which is quoted on each absentee ballot, emphatically declares that a paper ballot should be deemed “spoiled” and uncountable if a voter makes any mistakes or unauthorized marks.

“If you make a mistake or change your mind or change your mind on a selection do not attempt to mark through the selection or attempt to erase. Write ‘Spoiled’ across the ballot and across the return envelope” and get a new ballot, language on each ballot reads.

Just the News reviewed hundreds of ballots that met the “spoiled” definition — ballots that voters had in some way altered, defaced, or corrected — that were still allowed to count after adjudication. The reason? Another Georgia regulation gives election officials broad discretion to try to determine the intent of a confused voter, and actually encourages them to find a way to make flawed ballots count.

The Georgia code stipulates that voting tabulators must be programmed to “reject any ballot, including absentee ballots, on which an overvote is detected,” with those ballots to be “manually reviewed” by a review panel following their rejection.

If a voter “has marked his or her ballot in such a manner that he or she has indicated clearly and without question the candidate for whom he or she desires to cast his or her vote,” the state code says elsewhere, then the ballot “shall be counted and such candidate shall receive his or her vote.”

Yet state law also directs that a ballot should be considered “spoiled” if, in part, a voter has used it to “cast more than the permitted number of votes.” A spoiled ballot “shall not be reinstated,” the code states, suggesting that any ballots deemed as such should not be counted.

…Some counted ballots even had the word “spoiled” written across them and still were counted.

You can find examples on some pictured ballots at the link.

More:

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office said it did not have an immediate response on whether such spoiled ballots should have been allowed to go to adjudication, saying it was studying the matter. Raffensperger has said, however, Fulton County’s election processes are so flawed he believes the state of Georgia should take it into receivership.

Oh, so now he tells us.

There’s a report on this and other voting process problems in that county alone:

Raffensperger’s handpicked election monitor for Fulton County compiled a 29-page report identifying voting irregularities that occurred in the Atlanta vote counting center, including documented problems with spoiled and adjudicated ballots.

Fulton County refused to answer any questions about the records they provided to Just the News.

But Bridget Thorne, who has worked for years in various election jobs in Fulton County, said officials there did not have clear instructions for handling spoiled or adjudicated ballots last fall.

“According to a Fulton County Board member, there were no written adjudication processes given to adjudicators,” Thorne told Just the News. “Processes were given verbally. In the event the Democrat and the Republican adjudicators could not agree, [county executive] Ralph Jones would decide.

“Based on my experience, it is not surprising that they did not have a standard written process for adjudicators,” she added. “An internal audit financial report that came out on Wednesday also states that they are missing Standard Operating Procedures (SOP).”

If I retained my capacity to be shocked at this sort of thing, I would be shocked.

What’s more [emphasis mine]:

The Just the News review shows adjudication judges have the power to “remove marks” and or “add marks” to reflect a voter’s assumed intention and did so hundreds of times in Fulton County alone. They also can reject them. And at least in Georgia last November, they made such decisions one to four days after Election Day had ended, when preliminary vote counts showed who was leading or losing in close races…

Scores of adjudicated ballots ultimately were resolved with the notation “removed mark” next to Trump’s name, in most cases allowing a second mark next to Biden’s name to count. But at times it happened in reverse too, or to the detriment of third-party candidates.

If these problems aren’t eliminated before 2022, the situation will remain highly suspect and vulnerable to error and manipulation.

At least it may be the case that Hunter Biden is now immune to blackmail

The New Neo Posted on by

After all, the myriad awful things we’ve learned about him so far don’t seem to have made a particle of difference.

But this is still disturbing – or would be, in a world where dissipation like that still offended the standards of enough people, and newspapers told the truth:

Hunter Biden claimed Russians stole another one of his laptops for blackmail while he was close to overdosing in a Las Vegas hotel room, DailyMail.com can reveal.

The alleged incident would mean Hunter lost a total of three computers – the first abandoned at a Delaware computer store and the second seized by federal agents – each likely to hold sensitive information on President Joe Biden and the embarrassing pictures, videos and communications of his son.

The third laptop still appears to be missing – and was taken by Russian drug dealers after they partied with Hunter in Vegas, he told a prostitute in a conversation caught on camera.

After filming himself having sex with the woman using his laptop in January 2019, Hunter left the camera rolling as he recounted a Vegas bender in which he spent ’18 days going round from penthouse suite to penthouse suite,’ sometimes costing $10,000 a night.

‘I spent f***ing crazy amounts of money,’ Hunter said. ‘I was with these guys. The one guy was, not like you anyway… each night he’d be like ‘there’s going to be so many people here, crazy f***ing party’ and each night it’s nobody.’

All the people who were horrified by false allegations about Trump’s supposed relations with Russian prostitutes could not care less about Biden’s actual relations with Russian drug dealers and with prostitutes. Just to refresh your memory on how life (Hunter’s) imitates art (the fabrications of those who spread the lies about Trump), take a look (the article is from April of 2019):

Rtskhiladze told Mueller that “tapes” referred to “compromising tapes of Trump rumored to be held by persons associated with the Russian real estate conglomerate Crocus Group,” which had helped host the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant, according to the report (the pageant was owned by Trump for years). Cohen told the special counsel that he spoke to Trump about the issue after receiving Rtskhiladze’s text…

BuzzFeed News published the full, unverified dossier that included the infamous claim that Russian authorities had evidence of Trump watching prostitutes urinate in a hotel suite.

There is no indication that such a tape exists and Trump has vehemently denied it. Rtskhiladze also told prosecutors that he was told the tapes were fake, but that he didn’t convey that to Cohen.

The allegation was not just that Trump did this, but that it opened him up to blackmail possibilities and this was why he was in Russia’s pocket. Something like that.

But Hunter and Joe Biden’s actual vulnerability to blackmail is not the concern of the left at all. They are interested only in suppressing the reports and also discrediting them as “fake news” and “Russian disinformation,” in order to protect Joe Biden for the 2020 election and beyond. Now that it is crystal clear that the Hunter laptop stories are all true and even worse than previously reported, most Biden voters don’t seem to care.

Or perhaps they don’t even know.

Biden’s approval rating has been going down, but it is still ludicrously high considering the situation, which is hardly limited to the laptops but includes the destruction of much of the American economy and the triumph of identity politics and leftist influence. And although those polls are probably inaccurate, I am unaware of any of my liberal Democrat-voting friends who don’t still think Biden is a great improvement on Trump. So my guess is that a lot of Biden-approval does indeed remain intact out there.

The Delta variant: as contagious as chicken pox?

The New Neo Posted on by

No, not really. And strangely enough, it’s NPR that’s reporting this:

In a leaked report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made a surprising claim about the delta variant of the coronavirus: It “is as transmissible as: – Chicken Pox,” the agency wrote in a slideshow presentation leaked to The Washington Post on July 26.

Chickenpox is one of the most contagious viruses known. Each individual can spread the virus to as many as “90% of the people close to that person,” the CDC reports.

Is the delta variant that contagious as well?

The short answer is no, says evolutionary biologist and biostatistician Tom Wenseleers at the University of Leuven in Belgium…

…[T]he leaked document underestimated the R0 for chickenpox and overestimated the R0 for the delta variant. “The R0 values for delta were preliminary and calculated from data taken from a rather small sample size,” a federal official told NPR. The value for the chickenpox (and other R0s in the slideshow) came from a graphic from The New York Times, which wasn’t completely accurate…

I seem to recall that ROs often get changed over time as more data becomes available, as well.

The NPR article also says that as the COVID virus has mutated over time the new strains have become more easily transmitted. What the article leaves out, however, is that this is not unusual for viruses causing disease. It also fails to mention that as a new virus mutates over time and become more easy to transmit it doesn’t necessarily become more virulent as well.

Here’s an attempt to explain, which was written very early in the pandemic (February of 2020):

…[T]he role of natural selection in virus evolution is not easily predicted, rendering rampant speculation around the evolutionary trajectory of a virus during a nascent outbreak investigation especially problematic. The pervasive claim that a virus will mutate to become more virulent during an outbreak is particularly illustrative of this phenomenon, even though this spectre of a ‘super killer’ virus is baseless. In reality, the evolution of virulence is a highly complex topic that has inspired extensive research on evolutionary theory and debate6. Mutations can also make a virus either more or less virulent. A common idea is that virulence will only change — either upwards or downwards — if it increases the transmission rate of the virus, which effectively means an increase in the number of virus ‘offspring’. However, high virulence may (although by no means always) reduce transmissibility if the host is too sick to expose others. Without information on the precise evolutionary forces and selection pressures in operation, predicting how virulence might evolve is an extremely difficult and perhaps futile task.

This is not to say that mutations and natural selection don’t occur during disease outbreaks, but rather that their epidemiological relevance is often hard to quantify….While there are many examples of mutations that alter virulence or cause drug resistance and hence impact human health, speculating about the phenotype of any new mutation can be dangerous during fast-moving outbreaks. It takes a non-trivial amount of effort to experimentally and epidemiologically verify these phenotypes.

These warnings will probably not halt the question as to whether mutations will arise in SARS-CoV-2, enabling it to spread more efficiently between humans or generate a higher case fatality rate. In response, we can look to the 2002–2003 SARS-CoV epidemic. Large deletions in the open reading frame 8 (ORF8) region and mutations in the spike (S) protein were discovered during the early stages of the outbreak and eventually dominated the epidemic, suggesting that these were adaptations to humans. Based on this observation, some hypothesized that virus genetic changes in part drove the SARS epidemic, but this claim is unsubstantiated. So, could SARS-CoV-2 adapt in the same way? Yes. Will adaptation precipitate more deaths? Unlikely.

It is time to reshape our conception of mutations. Mutations are not indicative of outlandish and devastating new viral characteristics. Instead, they can inform our understanding of emerging outbreaks. Any claims over the consequences of mutation demand careful experimental and epidemiological evidence. Mutation is an inevitable consequence of being a virus.

The warning that care and caution must be taken in evaluating new variants has certainly not been honored, because politics took over long ago.

Oregon and the measurement of merit in education

The New Neo Posted on by

Oregon has quietly enacted some legislation on education in the state:

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown privately signed a bill last month ending the requirement for high school students to prove proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic before graduation…

The bill, which suspends the proficiency requirements for students for three years, has attracted controversy for at least temporarily suspending academic standards amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Backers argued the existing proficiency levels for math and reading presented an unfair challenge for students who do not test well, and Boyle said the new standards for graduation would aid Oregon’s “Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.”

That sounds like a straight-up racist statement to me – but hey, what do I know?

However, the bill doesn’t actually suspend all proficiency standards or testing – just certain ones. But it’s not clear what they might be:

“The testing that we’ve been doing in the past doesn’t tell us what we want to know,” Democratic Sen. Lew Frederick told a local ABC affiliate in June. “We have been relying on tests that have been, frankly, very flawed and relying too much on them so that we aren’t really helping the students or the teachers or the community.”

Supporters of the measure said the state needed to pause the academic requirements, which had been in place since 2009, so lawmakers could reevaluate which standards should be updated, and recommendations for new graduation standards are due to the Legislature and Oregon Board of Education by September 2022, the Oregonian added in its report.

Republicans criticized the proposal for lowering academic standards.

“I worry that by adopting this bill, we’re giving up on our kids,” House Republican Leader Christine Drazan said on June 14.

But it turns out that there wasn’t one standardized test recommended statewide in Oregon prior to this law. There was nothing like, for example, the NY Regents tests that were required to obtain an academic high school diploma in NY when I was growing up, which placed a pretty high bar on advancing to the next level. I recall them as being quite rigorous, and if a student failed he or she failed the course and had to repeat it.

No, Oregon had nothing like that:

While some lawmakers argued against standardized testing for skill evaluation, the state of Oregon does not list any particular test as a requirement for earning a diploma, with the Department of Education saying only that “students will need to successfully complete the credit requirements, demonstrate proficiency in the Essential Skills, and meet the personalized learning requirements.”

That’s rather poorly written in terms of the time frame, but I believe it is describing the standards that were in place post-2009 but prior to this new law’s passage.

A little more information can be found here, and it’s about what you’d expect, with the word “equitable” being the key (as well as “a more just Oregon”):

Education non-profit Foundations for a Better Oregon says the law opens the door for more ‘equitable’ graduation requirements.

‘With SB 744, Oregon can ensure high school diplomas are rigorous, relevant, and truly reflect what every student needs to thrive in the 21st century,’ the group said in a statement.

Sure thing. And I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you if you buy that.

In addition:

According to the bill’s language, the state’s Department of Education is directed to develop its new graduation standards with input from representatives for ‘historically underserved students,’ such as those with disabilities, those who are from immigrant or refugee populations or ‘racial or ethnic groups that have historically experienced academic disparities.’

And the following is relevant to my memories of the Regents in NY:

But passing a test has not been a requirement to graduate in the state since 2009, when its essential skills standards were initially put in place.

Students could demonstrate their abilities in math, reading and writing through five separate tests, or complete a classroom project judged by their individual teachers to prove their proficiency, the Oregonian reported.

In fact, only 11 states in the country require passing a test for high school students to graduate, according to Education Week.

And some states that do, such as New York states have proposed removing testing requirements for graduation…

Of course.

Note, also, that the clearest and most informative article I could find about the Oregon law was in a British newspaper. That has become rather commonplace these days – the British papers often (actually, usually) cover our own news better than our own papers do.

Biden channels George W. Bush

The New Neo Posted on by

Because it went so well for Bush:

President George W. Bush seemed to get nothing right when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on Monday, Aug. 29, 2005.

First, rather than visiting the scene of the disaster, he made a flyover in Air Force One a couple of days later, as he returned from a vacation in Texas. Worse, he was photographed staring at the stricken city from his giant jet, thus appearing, as he said in an interview, “detached and uncaring.”

Then, on September 2, he made another blunder…

“Brownie,” he said, “you’re doing a heckuva job.”

“Brownie” was Michael D. Brown, Bush’s 2003 appointee as the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)…

“Brownie,” critics claimed, had not done a “heckuva job” at all. He and his agency were roundly condemned as executing a slow, uncoordinated and ineffective response.

And now we have Joe Biden with this:

President Biden on Tuesday gave a stunning appraisal of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s performance, saying that he did “a hell of a job” immediately following his resignation for sexually harassing subordinates.

Biden lauded Cuomo, who leaves office in 14 days, despite the fact that Cuomo is under investigation by at least four New York district attorneys for assault and the fact that he’s under federal investigation for an admitted coverup of COVID-19 death data at New York nursing homes.

“Well, he’s done a hell of a job. He’s done a hell of a job. And I mean, both on — everything from access to voting to infrastructure to a whole range of things. That’s why it’s so sad,” Biden said.

The president did not express sympathy for Cuomo’s victims, but said that “I respect the decision he made” to resign.

In a tense exchange with CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins about how he could praise Cuomo’s job performance when “he’s accused of sexually harassing,” Biden said he was referring to Cuomo’s work as governor “outside of his personal behavior.”

Cuomo’s “work as governor,” however, also includes his nursing home COVID policy, for which he was starting to be in hot water – and in fact the sexual allegations were probably aired in part in order to take attention from the nursing homes.

Biden also, of course, has his own groping allegations, but they have been effectively covered up by the press and the Democrats, because they needed genial old Joe as their candidate in order to win the all-important 2020 election (or, if voting fraud occurred, at least to get enough votes to make the election close enough so that cheating could put him over the top).

They still need Joe, or he would be out of there. But he certainly doesn’t make the task of his minders and handlers and briefers any easier, does he?

Back when Obama chose Biden as his Vice President, I was stunned. As far as I was concerned, Biden had previously distinguished himself mostly by his mental mediocrity, mendaciousness, and maliciousness in certain battles. But after a short reflection I realized that Biden was a perfect choice for Obama. His age gave the administration a facade of experience – especially foreign policy experience – while at the same time Biden would willingly do whatever Obama told him. And since he had very little following of his own, he wouldn’t be a threat of any kind.

Since then, Biden’s acuity and instincts have faded. A remark such as this one about Cuomo is politically tone-deaf under the circumstances, likely to appeal to neither party. It won’t matter, though. The Democrats and the press will cover for Biden just as long as they feel they need to, and before they ditch him (if they ever do) they will have made sure they have a replacement lined up.

They’re in a quandary now, though, regarding a replacement, because Kamala Harris has turned out to be even more of a dud than was apparent when Biden (or the group) chose her as his running mate. She was chosen for her demographics rather than the extent of her political appeal, which was always weak. Those demographics haven’t changed, but as the public has gotten to know her better, her appeal has lessened even further, if such a thing be possible.

Recalling Newsom

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a piece on the entire California recall situation: what Newsom’s chances are, and how the recall system works there.

For what it’s worth, my prediction is that he will not be recalled but the vote will be close. And since I have only modest confidence in that prediction I’ll add that, if he is recalled, I think that a Democrat will win. The Democratic Party of California is very strong, the GOP very weak, and the Democrats cannot afford to lose this one so they will use every method at their disposal (and they have many, as the article describes) to make sure the party keeps the governorship.

The recall vote is in a special election on September 14th, which is only about a month away.

Andrew Cuomo resigns, effective in 14 days

The New Neo Posted on by

The question, of course, is why now? I have little doubt that Cuomo’s touchy-feely tendencies have been known for ages, and the problems with his COVID policies for nursing homes have also been known for well over a year.

Someone or more likely some group of people decided that Cuomo was no longer worth protecting, because if they had wanted to protect him they would have continued to do so.

Cuomo said this:

I’ve never crossed the line with anyone. But, I didn’t realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn. There are generational and cultural shifts that I just didn’t fully appreciate.

I hate to give Cuomo any credit at all. But since I’m of a generation which knows about that shift, I know that such creepy behavior (which is what it was) used to be winked at, and if it wasn’t exactly standard it wasn’t all that unusual in politics and even in business. But a lot has indeed “shifted” since then, and these allegations are not from forty years ago. Cuomo either is incredibly clueless or thought he could continue on his merry way with no consequences because he was so powerful, or both.

Cuomo also said:

This situation and moment is not about the facts. It’s not about the truth. it’s not about thoughtful analysis. It’s not about how do we make the system better. This is about politics.

And I agree. It is about politics – as I discussed at the very beginning of this post. Cuomo was raised in a political family and was always aware of the political world and how it operates, so he knows whereof he speaks. He also knows the Democratic Party, and he knows they protect those who are useful to it and throws away those who have lost their usefulness.

Andrew Cuomo lost his usefulness somewhere along the way.

And so they were probably going to impeach him:

“The governor has clearly lost the confidence of the majority members,” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said Monday, reiterating what he said last week in the wake of the state attorney general’s report being released.

“Our goal is to bring the matter to a close with all haste,” Heastie added.

It would have been nasty, messy, and probably counterproductive for the party. And Andrew Cuomo was correct when he said:

This situation, by its current trajectory, will generate months of political and legal controversy. That is what is going to happen. That is how the political wind is blowing. It will consume government. it will cost taxpayers millions of dollars. It will brutalize people…

…[T]he best way I can help now is if I step aside…

One of those people “brutalized” would have been Andrew Cuomo. And he knew the outcome would be bad for him – he would be removed.

I think that the sexual allegations were allowed to be aired because the nursing home allegations were actually getting too hot to handle, and if Cuomo was removed because of the former then the latter could be swept under the rug more successfully. Here’s one quote that might bear on that:

“Just on the nursing home question alone there are a half million pages of documentation,” Lavine said in noting the volume of evidence.

The Lieutenant Governor of New York is Kathy Hochul, who will take office. A Democrat, obviously, and a woman so she will be New York’s first female governor. How apropos. She will be filling out the remainder of his term, which was set to expire in 2022.