Why does Joe Biden want to be president? (And why did Trump want to be president?)

The New Neo Posted on by

I think that Biden’s desire to be president, which has lasted for more than three decades and apparently was formed much earlier than that, is an example of pure ambition of the personal sort. Obviously, virtually all presidential candidates are ambitious. But we prefer their ambition to come at least partly from something more than the naked desire to be such a powerful person.

This isn’t a question of political partisanship. For example, Obama wanted to be president from an early age, but I think it’s fairly clear why. He was personally ambitious, to be sure. But he also saw a chance to not just be president but to be the first black president, which did mean something. He also is a leftist and has been one for his entire life as far as I can tell. He wanted to move the country in that direction, and thought he was just the person to do it.

And he was.

Trump is also an ambitious man and always has been. But he had already achieved great fame and fortune when he announced his run in 2015. He said – and I believe him – that he ran because he saw things that needed doing, and he wanted to Make American Great Again.

This post is about why Biden is running for president, but I’m going to ask you to make a little side trip into Trump’s history and take a look at this NPR article, written around the time of Trump’s inauguration, and offering quotes from about 30 years of Trump’s on-again-off-again presidential ambitions. For the most part there is a remarkable consistency of theme and motivation there. For example, from a 1988 interview with Oprah [emphasis mine]:

Asked if he’d run for president, Trump said:

“I just probably wouldn’t do it, Oprah. I probably wouldn’t, but I do get tired of seeing what’s happening with this country, and if it got so bad, I would never want to rule it out totally, because I really am tired of seeing what’s happening with this country, how we’re really making other people live like kings, and we’re not.”

More about a presidential run and winning. He even uses his signature “believe me:”

“I think I’d win. I tell you what, I wouldn’t go in to lose. I’ve never gone in to lose in my life. And if I did decide to do it, I think I would be inclined — I would say, I would have a hell of a chance of winning, because I think people — I don’t know how your audience feels, but I think people are tired of seeing the United States ripped off. And I can’t promise you everything, but I can tell you one thing, this country would make one hell of a lot of money from those people that for 25 years have taken advantage. It wouldn’t be the way it’s been, believe me.”

Much more at the link. You don’t have to like Trump or agree with him to see that his basic goals are clear and have barely changed in all these years.

But what does Joe Biden want, and why would he think that he’s the man to do it? Is he running merely to stop Trump? That certainly wasn’t true in his previous bids. To bring a divisive America together? But on that score he offers nothing but intermittent and lukewarm lip service. Not rhetoric, not energy, not unity, not a record of achievement, nothing but the desire to be president. one he’s had since he was a very young man:

When [Biden] first met [future wife] Neilia’s mother, she asked what he wanted to do for a living. Biden informed her he intended to become president of the United States.

Biden had met wife-to-be Neilia when he was 22 years old and married her at 24, so this encounter with his future mother-in-law must have occurred during those years between 22 and 24. That’s how early he had the ambition to be president, and had not only formed the notion but it was firm enough that he was willing to state it to his future in-laws as a solid intention and qualification to marry her daughter.

Now, that’s ambition. But again, to what purpose?

I assume that at any point along the way, Biden could have articulated a convincing reason why he – of all the mediocre career politicians in the US – should become president. But I don’t think that reason ever would have been convincing. It certainly wasn’t convincing to the American public each time he ran:

Until Saturday’s [February 29, 2020] South Carolina primary, Biden had won zero presidential nominating contests across three campaigns and 32 years.

But now he’s the last man standing. At least for the moment.

[ADDENDUM: And remember Ted Kennedy?]

Christopher Steele: somehow it all disappeared

The New Neo Posted on by

Why is this no surprise? [Emphasis mine]:

Christopher Steele told a British court last month that he no longer has documents and other information from his meetings with the main source for his Trump dossier, suggesting that the former British spy has no way of backing up his side in a dispute with the Justice Department’s inspector general (IG), according to a deposition transcript obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Steele also told the court that his communications regarding the dossier, including with Fusion GPS, were “wiped” in December 2016 and January 2017, the transcript shows…

It is unclear if Steele made audio or video recordings of the debriefings with the source, or if the retired spy was referring to written or electronic documents. It is also unclear whether Steele got rid of the information himself, or if it was lost through other means…

The status of the information was revealed during an exchange Steele had on March 18 with Hugh Tomlinson, a lawyer for Petr Aven, German Khan, and Mikhail Fridman, the owners of Alfa Bank.

The three Russian bankers are suing Steele for defamation over a memo in the dossier that accused them of making illicit payments to Vladimir Putin…

The lawyer asked Steele about the existence of the documents and recordings that his attorneys mentioned in their rebuttal to the IG report.

“But none of these documents exist, so they have all been destroyed?” a lawyer asked Steele.

“They no longer exist,” Steele said.

Steele indicated that many other records related to the dossier were deleted, including from a personal email account he used for the Fusion GPS project.

“As I understand your position, you have no contemporaneous notes or emails, save for your notes of interactions with the FBI; is that right?” Tomlinson asked.

“I believe that is true, yes,” Steele replied…

“You have no record of anything, have you?” Tomlinson asked.

“I haven’t got any records relating to the creation of 112,” said Steele.

“Or indeed any of the other memoranda?”

“No, they were wiped in early January 2017.”

More at the link.

One of the many things that’s interesting about this (to me, anyway) is Steele’s use of the passive voice without any prepositional phrase telling who the actor might have been. The records were wiped, as though some magic eraser came down from the sky. The documents no longer exist, having evaporated in a puff of smoke.

Wonderful hoped-for news on Sharon W’s husband

The New Neo Posted on by

In case you missed it, I thought you’d like to see the update commenter “Sharon W” posted yesterday:

I am waiting for the oxygen delivery as my husband will be discharged as soon as I receive the home instructions and I arrive to pick him up. I spoke to a nurse on the floor and she told me to call first as the staff intends to line the hallway in honor of his survival. He gave permission for the hospital to do a video about his case. This is truly a miracle and we are grateful for every prayer and blessing. He only needs some oxygen support and no medications. We are humbled and grateful for this hoped-for outcome.

He’s now home. This is extremely good news.

COVID and smoking (also, a little review of H1N1)

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems counter-intuitive, but it may be that smoking confers some sort of benefit regarding COVID:

French researchers want coronavirus patients to wear nicotine patches to study whether it helps prevent or control the disease.

Their review of more than 480 patients with COVID-19 at a large hospital found about 5% of the people to be daily smokers, according to an article on Qeios. An estimated 25% of the French population smoke daily, the researchers said…

The findings are similar to data from China published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine, AFP reported. Out of 1,000 people infected in China, about 12.6% were smokers compared with about 26% in the general population, according to the news outlet.

On reading that, it occurred to me that older people have significantly lower rates of smoking than younger and middle-aged people. Older people also are more likely to have co-morbidities that have caused them to stop smoking, and they are more likely to be the very serious cases that require hospitalization and ICU care and might lead to death.

However, going to what I think must be the actual study (which I always prefer to do if I can find it, because newspaper reports tend to leave out a lot of important information), I noticed that the researchers did correct for age and for sex. So age is not the reason for the lower rates of smoking found.

There were two groups in the study, inpatients and outpatients. Both were compared for rates of smoking to the average French population (adjusted for age and sex):

Eligible patients were those with a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19 at the APHP Pitié- Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris, France, either hospitalized in medical wards of medicine, but not in ICUs (inpatients) or having consulted for this infection in the infectious disease department and who did not require hospital care until the end of the acute infectious episode (outpatients).

You can see that two other groups were not studied: asymptomatic patients, and those in the ICU. So the study didn’t deal with the mildest or the most severe cases, but it did compare the rates of smoking in mildly symptomatic and somewhat severe (hospitalized) cases to each other and to the ordinary French population in terms of present smoking behavior. The milder and more severe hospital groups both resembled each other, and both featured a great deal less smoking than the matched population. The inpatients in the study tended to be older and to have more co-morbidities, and the listed co-morbidities for the inpatients seemed significantly lower than I’ve read for other studies: hypertension (41.4%), diabetes (27.7%), obesity (14.4%). This could possibly have some significance for the results.

The researchers also write:

…[T]hese studies included mostly hospitalized patients, and the low rate of current smokers may be related to high rate of patients with comorbidities (smokers having been advised to quit) and thus to COVID-19 severity. This could therefore introduce a confusion bias…

…SARS-CoV2 is known to use the angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor for cell entry, and there is evidence that nicotine modulates ACE2 expression]which could in turn modulate the nicotinic acetyl choline receptor…

Our findings should be interpreted cautiously and we are aware of its limitations. First, the study was performed in 2020 and the results were compared to data obtained from the French general population’s smoking rate in 2018. However, it is very unlikely that a dramatic decrease in tobacco use may have occurred in France since mid 2018. The SIRs were estimated with the assumption that the studied population who lives in a limited area around a Parisian hospital has the same smoking habits as the general French population. Actually, smoking rates differ across socio-professional categories, and therefore may differ across geographic areas. It should also be noted that in the present study, healthcare workers were over-represented in the outpatient group, due to systematic testing at their work place when they become symptomatic, but not in the inpatient group (data not shown). It is, however, very unlikely that the very low SIRs that were estimated both for the out- and inpatient groups are the result of the study setting. Under or over-reporting of smoking status may also be a concern for studies on smoking habits.

The elimination of ICU patients may be a significant flaw in the study. For example, there’s this:

…[A] study of more than 1,000 patients in China, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that smokers with COVID-19 were more likely to require intensive medical interventions than those who didn’t smoke. In the study, 12.3% of current smokers were admitted to an ICU, were placed on a ventilator or died, as compared with only 4.7% of nonsmokers.

It will be a long time before we understand this disease. I don’t think that makes it so very different from a whole lot of other diseases, either. For example, do really understand why H1N1 killed mostly people under 65? The hypothesis was that older people had been exposed previously to a similar virus, but in an admittedly quick search I can’t find any proof of that. One reason we (the public, that is) are not still puzzling over the details of H1N1 infection is that although the H1N1 virus killed a lot people, it didn’t kill quite as many as feared. And then, a vaccine was developed and has been incorporated into regular flu shots). But this was the toll in the pandemic’s first year:

Few young people had any existing immunity (as detected by antibody response) to the (H1N1)pdm09 virus, but nearly one-third of people over 60 years old had antibodies against this virus, likely from exposure to an older H1N1 virus earlier in their lives. Since the (H1N1)pdm09 virus was very different from circulating H1N1 viruses, vaccination with seasonal flu vaccines offered little cross-protection against (H1N1)pdm09 virus infection. While a monovalent (H1N1)pdm09 vaccine was produced, it was not available in large quantities until late November—after the peak of illness during the second wave had come and gone in the United States. From April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, CDC estimated there were 60.8 million cases (range: 43.3-89.3 million), 274,304 hospitalizations (range: 195,086-402,719), and 12,469 deaths (range: 8868-18,306) in the United States due to the (H1N1)pdm09 virus.

Additionally, CDC estimated that 151,700-575,400 people worldwide died from (H1N1)pdm09 virus infection during the first year the virus circulated.** Globally, 80 percent of (H1N1)pdm09 virus-related deaths were estimated to have occurred in people younger than 65 years of age. This differs greatly from typical seasonal influenza epidemics, during which about 70 percent to 90 percent of deaths are estimated to occur in people 65 years and older…

On August 10, 2010, WHO declared an end to the global 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. However, (H1N1)pdm09 virus continues to circulate as a seasonal flu virus, and cause illness, hospitalization, and deaths worldwide every year.

Also, Obama was president in 2009-2010, which made the press far less likely to criticize our H1N1 response or blow the situation up.

The Getty challenge

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the few good things to have happened during this pandemic is the creativity demonstrated out there among people at large. I love to watch comic videos about the shutdown on YouTube, for example, most of them made by non-professionals who are funnier than most pros.

I’ve already posted a couple of those, and here’s another:

And here’s something I recently discovered: people recreating famous artwork with the objects, humans, and animals at hand. Some are them are pretty funny, too (go to the link and scroll down).

It’s the Getty Museum in LA that has mounted the art challenge (scroll down again). I think my absolute favorite one is this. It’s simplicity itself – except maybe for getting the dog to cooperate.

I’m getting tired of people playing fast and loose with statistics

The New Neo Posted on by

Reading that title, you might say, “Oh yeah, neo? Get used to it, because it will always happen.”

I know, I know. But with this COVID thing, it’s more obvious because nearly everyone is crunching numbers and opining. And that includes me.

I try not to make egregious errors. And I try to go wherever the actual numbers lead me. That’s why this sort of thing makes me gnash my teeth, even if I basically agree with the position of the author:

As we, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, respond to the Wuhan pandemic by hunkering down, whimpering at the thought of society reopening, and searching in vain for a new set of brown trousers to wear with our fashionable face mask, an interesting experiment is underway in Europe. In Sweden, which has done basically nothing at all in response to the virus, the death rate per one million of population remains significantly lower than American states that have instituted the most draconian regulations.

Yes, a few of them. But far from all of them.

Which states have instituted “the most draconian regulations”? I would say that Washington state is way up there on that measure, as is California. The death rate in Sweden is 200 per million as of now. The death rate per million in Washington state is 95 at the moment, and in California it is 37. But it’s not that simple, either, because Michigan is very stringent and is at 299, which is somewhat higher than Sweden. New York is astronomical, but however stringent it might be at present it certainly wasn’t stringent early on. A friend in Ohio tells me that Ohio is strict as well, and I see on that same chart that Ohio is at 56, whereas Florida – not all that strict comparatively speaking – is at 47.

All over the place.

It’s also hard to measure strictness, because there are so many factors involved. I’ve looked at several articles purporting to do that, and haven’t found them all that helpful. Here’s one of the simplest ones. It’s from a month ago – which was an important time for instituting such measures, supposedly – and it lists California, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin as most comprehensive, with Mississippi and Oklahoma as least.

Again, if you look at the death figures for those states, there’s wide variation. I’ve already discussed California, Michigan, Ohio, and Washington. Illinois has a death rate of 122 per million, Indiana is at 106, West Virginia 16, and Wisconsin is 44. Relatively hang-loose Mississippi is at 67 and Oklahoma at 46.

The New York metropolitan area, including parts of urban New Jersey and the suburbs in Connecticut, is one of the very few areas of the country that exceeds Sweden in deaths, and it exceeds it by a lot (1060 for New York state, 431 in Connecticut, and 604 for New Jersey, with the vast bulk of the deaths in the New York metropolitan area). In fact, without the NYC area, the US would have one of the lowest death rates in the developed world.

The only other states that exceed Sweden’s total are Michigan at 299 (mostly Detroit), Louisiana at 343 (mostly New Orleans), and Massachusetts (mostly Boston) at 319, as well as DC at 203 (very similar to Sweden). The urban pattern is clear, and yet there are many US cities that have nowhere near that total – including blue cities, by the way, if you’re tempted to say it’s blue cities that are the culprits.

I’m not saying Sweden shouldn’t be doing what it’s doing. I am watching Sweden with interest, and it may indeed be that similar policies would have been better to have been adopted here in all but the big hotspots. Problem is, we didn’t know in advance what the hotspots would be.

Presently the statistics aren’t pointing with any significant clarity to a pattern that can tell us what is best to do in terms of preventing more deaths, although it is clear that there has already been a great deal of economic damage and hardship as a result of those policies. The damage isn’t limited to economics, either; it almost certainly involves other health costs as well as mental health issues.

[NOTE: I’m not really intent on picking on streiff, who wrote that Red State article I quoted at the beginning. He is by no means the worst offender. It’s something I see just about everywhere, and it grates on me whenever I spot it. I try not to do it myself, but it isn’t easy and perhaps I’m guilty of it at times, too.]

[NOTE II: Also please see the “ADDENDUM” to this post from yesterday, in which I tried to present a clearer view of what the pre-existing-condition statistics involving COVID deaths are all about.]

All things China

The New Neo Posted on by

I grew up in an era when China was not only considered an enemy, but an unknown country that was rarely visited and from which little information came that filtered down to the American people:

US policy toward China during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration remained essentially what it had been during the Kennedy and Eisenhower administrations — non-recognition of the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.), support for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and its possession of China’s seat in the United Nations, and a ban on trade and travel to the PRC

So when China finally was opened up, and I heard that over time it would become more capitalistic and free as a result, I had some doubts about the latter in particular. It made some sense that the two would or at least could go together, but it certainly didn’t seem like any sort of inevitability. And, as time has gone on, it’s become more and more apparent that modernization and world trade have given China the tools to oppress its people in more efficient ways. There is less need for violence these days; control is accomplished for the most part through technological means, and Orwell’s telescreen was rather primitive compared to today’s methods.

It is also apparent that China has long been in an intense competition for world opinion and influence, both political and economic. Trump ran in part on challenging that influence, which was thought by his opponents to be one of his more pernicious goals, and one doomed to failure.

Fast forward to the COVID-19 crisis and we have a situation that has only highlighted what was already going on. Now I’m going to provide a few links that are really just the tip of the iceberg.

The media and China.

China’s disinformation campaign.

What’s going on in the South China Sea, and China’s plans.

The virus came here from China earlier than previously known.

And at Ace’s there’s a list of links in this post that you can find if you scroll down a bit and look under the heading “Foreign Affairs, International.”

In which Michael Moore proves his ignorance to be abysmal

The New Neo Posted on by

I never considered Michael Moore to be a mental giant. But I always thought he was a basically intelligent person, and certainly one who’s smart about manipulating facts to make effective propaganda films.

But he seems until recently to have been ignorant of the most basic – and I mean basic – scientific principles, by his own admission:

Moore said that he, like many people, thought electric cars were a good idea, “but I didn’t really think about where is the electricity coming from?”

“I assumed solar panels would last for ever. I didn’t know what went into the making of them,” Moore added, referring to raw materials, including quartz, and the fossil fuels needed to manufacture the panels.

Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me but – WTF?

I’m no engineer nor am I a physicist. But I did take high school physics. And although I have forgotten far more than I remember of that course, it doesn’t even take high school science to understand certain facts about energy that, if memory serves, were well-learned by 6th or at the latest 7th grade.

Rather simply put, energy has to come from somewhere. It isn’t magic. Does Moore not have any curiosity whatsoever? Could he, like, maybe do a search for the answer to a question for which he doesn’t have an answer? But to do that, a person has to be asking the question. A person has to “really think about where is the electricity coming from.” Or maybe just think about it at all.

As I already said, I’m no scientist. But even seven years ago, when I wrote this post, I had encountered what we might call the Michael Moore theory of electric cars. Here’s what I wrote back then:

I am convinced that a certain not-insignificant percentage of people believe that electric cars don’t have any environmental effects at all — that they run on magic or they run on air, and that electricity comes out of the wall socket in some mystical process that doesn’t need to be considered in the equation.

Yes, indeedy.

A day or two ago I was talking to a friend about COVID and when on earth we might be allowed to resume semi-normal lives. She mentioned that some official (I wish I could remember who it was) mentioned that from now on – meaning, indefinitely – airplanes would need to have six feet between passengers. I chuckled and asked how long the person thought airlines could remain economically viable if that continued. After all, it takes a lot of money (and energy) to fly a plane. She seemed startled by the question and had no answer. But it was clear to me that the issue had never even occurred to her. And she’s ordinarily a very intelligent person.

[NOTE: I used to really like reading the blogger Steven den Beste, back when I first discovered blogs. He gave up blogging long ago, and died a few years ago, but some of his work is still online. He dealt with the problem of energy production/conversion/usage in many of his posts. Here’s one I found just now, written in 2002. I don’t have time to reread it at the moment to check it out, but I recall being impressed by a lot of his work back when I first read it.]

A figure we need to know…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is the percentage of COVID-19 deaths that involve very debilitated people in nursing homes.

Some states are releasing those numbers, although even then they tend to not be easily accessible – for example, Minnesota, which Scott Johnson of Powerline writes about here:

One had to stay tuned in to the briefing’s last few minutes for data I can find nowhere else. Of the 160 deaths to date in Minnesota, 113 are associated with long-term residential care.

That’s over two-thirds. And how many of the rest are people who don’t just have one of the listed co-morbidities – some of which are very common – but are people who have many extremely serious health problems although they are not in facilities?

We need to know, in order to evaluate our own risks as states slowly start to open up.

As a person over sixty myself, with one very common pre-existing condition, I live a basically normal life and would like to go back to it ASAP. But if my risks are high, I will desist. I’d like the tools to know, at least statistically speaking, how high my risks might really be. I know that each case and each person is different, and even young healthy people can be killed by this nasty virus, but figures can help gauge relative risk and I want the right to look at them.

If anyone can find overall figures on this, or something that indicates a lot of states are releasing that information and what it is, please let me know. But in the absence of the availability of such information, I can’t help but suspect that the government powers that be fear that if we knew the true figures we might get too sanguine about the whole thing and defy their orders.

I don’t think I would. I’m a naturally cautious person. But I think we all have a right to know at this point, because by now the health authorities have gathered enough information to give us some valid statistics on it.

[ADDENDUM: I was in a hurry when I wrote this post, and I meant to add – but neglected to add – that an even more important figure for us to know would be the death rate and case fatality rate (two different things) for people in each decade of life, and in particular the death rate and case fatality rate for people in each decade of life with each pre-existing condition and also with various combinations of them.

Plus, I’ve written before about another thing I really really want to know. Without it, those charts of pre-existing conditions are meaingless:

Yes, the disease kills a lot of very debilitated extremely elderly people in nursing homes, the same group that has a high death rate every year from “ordinary” seasonal flu. But COVID also seems to kill younger old people in fairly high numbers, and those with rather common pre-existing conditions such as obesity, asthma, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension.

At least, that’s what we’ve been led to believe so far. But it’s not easy to get good statistics. For example (and I’ve mentioned this before) a lot of people over 60 have one or even several of those conditions. Are we just talking about age being the real factor? Are people over 60 with those conditions dying in higher percentages than the frequency of the conditions in the general over-60 population?

For example, in this NY chart helpfully provided by reader “JFM,” it lists co-morbidities and their percentage in each age decade of COVID deaths. Seems helpful, at first glance. But without knowing what percentage of people with COVID (not deaths from COVID, but COVID cases) are in each decade to begin with – and therefore whether those with each co-morbid condition are more likely than people of the same age without it to die of the disease, and without being able to compare those figures to the percentage of people in each age group in the general population who also have that co-morbidity, the statistic is nearly meaningless.

Let’s just take people in their 70s. You can see from the “Fatalities by Age Group” chart that there have been 4070 COVID fatalities in NY who were in that decade of life. That is about 26% of the total fatalities in the state. But it would be helpful to know what percentage of the general NY population is in that age group.

Then, when you go to the chart titled “Top 10 Comorbidities by Age Group,” you can see that in that same decade the number of people dying of COVID who also have hypertension is 2,537. That would be about 62% of the total number of deaths of people in their 70s in NY. Sounds like an awful lot had hypertension, doesn’t it?

After a quick look for figures in the general population for that age group and hypertension, I came up with this, from US figures from 2013-2016:

Percent of noninstitutionalized persons with hypertension (measured high blood pressure and/or taking antihypertensive medication) (2013-2016)

Men aged 65-74: 61.1%
Men aged 75 and over: 67.4%
Women aged 65-74: 67.4%
Women aged 75 and over: 78.7%

See how high those figures are, as well? Based on that, it doesn’t seem to me that the figures for COVID deaths in that age group are higher than in the general population. And those general hypertension figures for people in approximately that age group are for noninstitutionalized people, whereas the COVID death figures include institutionalized people, whom one might imagine would be more likely to have at least one of the listed co-morbidities.

And that’s not even getting into the number of people with other pre-existing conditions as well. The NY chart provides no information on that. I added up all the figures for comorbidities among those in their 70s (quickly; hope I didn’t make an error) and got a figure of 8157, which is approximately twice the number of people in that age group who died of COVID. So obviously a lot of people who died of COVID in NY have more than one pre-existing condition.

This could all be expressed on the chart, because I am assuming the information exists, but that hasn’t been done. And yet that site is one of the very best I’ve seen.]

I’m starting to think that Joe Biden’s VP pick will be Michelle Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

The only limiting factor is whether she’d accept – in other words, whether she wants the job.

And by “Joe Biden’s pick” I mean Biden or whoever is handling him, which in part may be Barack Obama.

I have long completely resisted the idea that Michelle Obama will be the 2020 Democratic nominee, although others have insisted it’s a good possibility. I have never seen her as wanting the job. And I initially thought the Democratic base would be too angry to accept any substitutions. But the VP position under Biden is different. I’m starting to think that she could be talked into it, in order to save the party and her husband’s legacy, and with a promise that she’d be somewhat of a figurehead for her more experienced husband, who would be the one really steering the ship.

I usually reject such convoluted ideas unless they are extremely plausible. But once it became clear that Biden was the candidate the DNC wanted, as the most “electable” without being an outright and declared socialist, and as Biden’s cognitive limitations would become more and more obvious, I started to consider that Michelle might actually decide to save America from both Trump and Biden by becoming Biden’s running mate.

Everyone would know she was the “real” candidate, and Biden a place-holder. She wouldn’t have to compete with any other person except Pence. She has tremendous popularity. She’s a woman (Biden has said it must be a woman) – in fact, she’s a black woman, which is even better. She would double, triple, or quadruple whatever positives Biden gets from his long partnership with Obama. And it doesn’t involve any controversial shenanigans at the convention. Biden, who has the most votes, would be the candidate, and the candidate ordinarily gets to pick his running mate, who is not limited to those who dropped out of the original race.

Obama himself is still popular, and although he’s not able to run for president himself, I don’t think he’s been happy at relinquishing the reins of power. He still has some power with his party, but I will assume it’s a given that he wants more, and with his wife as president (or shadow president) he would have it. His much-touted legacy would be intact. His old advisors could come back and they could reverse whatever Trump has done, and build on it.

It could be a very seductive prospect indeed for Michelle and Barack Obama, and that would go a long way towards explaining why the DNC has been so eager to have Biden as candidate, and why the Democrats and most of the left are still protecting him. I don’t know whether it will happen. But the only wild cards in the mix would be whether Michelle Obama would accept the Biden offer, and whether enough Americans are nostalgic for another Obama go-round that they would vote for the ticket.

Hillary Clinton was going to continue along Obama’s path in 2016, till that plan was cruelly thwarted. But perhaps it was only delayed for four years, and the Democrats have come up with a plan to reinstate an even better version of it.

Sorry to be a downer. But it’s become something I feel is plausible enough that I need to talk about it.

Trump temporarily suspends immigration

The New Neo Posted on by

Some of the details are coming out during his press conference, occurring right now.

I’ve been watching for about fifteen minutes. Trump seems very sharp, and the MSM grandstanding seems somewhat reduced compared to a while back.

In addition, a deal seems to have been reached on small business relief.

There’s so much news happening each day that I can only begin to scratch the surface. But you can talk about whatever you want in the comments here.