President Trump leaves the White House after a grueling day signing the coronavirus emergency funding bill sent to him by Congress.Stefani Reynolds/CNP via ZUMA

This. Is. Fucking Nuts.

“I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship” — Trump explains that he doesn’t want to let people off the Grand Princess cruise ship because he doesn’t want the number of coronavirus cases in the country to go up pic.twitter.com/ELhZDjiZW9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 6, 2020

Here’s the whole quote regarding the passengers trapped on the Grand Princess cruise ship off the San Francisco coast:

[My experts] would like to have the people come off. I’d rather have the people stay, but I’d go with them. I told them to make the final decision.¹ I would rather—because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.²

A minute later a reporter asks Trump about disbanding the White House pandemic response team in 2018. His answer: “I just think this is something that you can never really think is going to happen.”

This is all so, so unfunny. In just a couple of weeks, Trump has gone from being a boob, but a relatively benign one, to a boob who could end up killing a lot of people. As near as I can tell, he thinks about the rate of coronavirus infections the same way he thinks about Nielsen ratings or golf scores. The only thing that matters is whether the numbers reflect well on him or not.

Holy hell.

¹This is not Trump’s normal MO, but in this case it allows him to evade responsibility for whatever happens going forward. In his visceral way, even Trump realizes that his usual line of BS won’t affect the reality on the ground of people dying from the coronavirus. He wants as little responsibility for it as possible.

²Needless to say, the numbers “count” regardless of whether the victims are on a ship or on dry land. Trump’s idiocy truly knows no bounds.

This is Hopper strolling around in her local forest. Who knows what she might find? Maybe a squirrel. Or a bird. Or a caterpillar. The suburban backyard is, from a cat’s perspective, a marvelous ecosystem of flora and fauna to be explored anew every day.

Via Brad DeLong, here’s an interesting map. It shows the economic growth of every county in the United States since the end of the Great Recession:

This is really disturbing. It would be one thing if there were some counties that had declined since the economy peaked in 2007. It would be another thing if there were some counties that had declined over the course of just a year or two. That’s fairly normal. And it would be yet another thing if there were merely some counties that showed strong growth and some that showed weak growth. That’s normal too.

But if you start at the bottom of a deep recession and then go out eight years—all of which were years of strong economic growth—there shouldn’t be any counties that are literally shrinking. Or, at most, maybe a dozen or so special cases. But just eyeballing this, it looks like there are several hundred counties that have declined since the bottom of the Great Recession. DeLong comments:

If I had seen this pattern of regional growth and decline a decade ago, it would have made me less worried about the gerrymandering that the Constitution has built into the Senate. The people in declining areas are relatively poor, and they have little economic or cultural power, so giving them more political power might have created a fairer overall balance. Yet somehow it does not seem to have worked out that way: their senators are not fighting for a fairer division of wealth, but seem focused on achieving negative sum goals for the country at large—if we can’t be prosperous, you shouldn’t be prosperous either.

One problem is that in nearly every state there are counties that have grown strongly in addition to the ones that have declined. So from a senator’s perspective, nearly all of them represent states that are growing:

I still find this surprising, though. There are nine states that have grown less than 1 percent over a period of eight years, and three that have literally contracted. If you calculate per-capita GDP it’s even worse: six states have shown outright contraction.

I’m not sure what to think of this. But it surprised me, so it might surprise you too.

I suppose other people have already done this in greater detail than me, but I want to take a look at what caused Joe Biden’s recent surge. First off, here’s the RCP aggregate of the national polling over the past three months:

The green dot is February 29, the date of the South Carolina primary. Biden had gained a point or two before that, but he only really started to skyrocket shortly after the primary. So it’s safe to say that his big victory in South Carolina was the proximate cause of his early March takeoff.

But what was responsible for Biden’s South Carolina win in the first place? Here’s the polling:

The green dot is February 26, the day that James Clyburn endorsed Biden. This surely helped, but Biden had started shooting up four days earlier, on February 22. That obviously had nothing to do with Clyburn.

So what happened on or around February 21? The only thing that stands out is the Las Vegas debate, which took place on the evening of February 19. The consensus for this debate was that Elizabeth Warren left Mike Bloomberg bleeding on the floor, but that no one else especially distinguished themselves. I just reread the New York Times summary of the debate, and it barely even mentions Biden except to note that he joined Warren in attacking Bloomberg.

So there’s something peculiar here. The conventional wisdom says that Clyburn’s endorsement powered Biden to a big win in South Carolina, and the big win in South Carolina powered Biden to victory on Super Tuesday. But Clyburn endorsed after Biden had started surging. Something else must have started the Biden surge, but the Las Vegas debate sure doesn’t seem like it was a turning point either.

There’s no question that Biden suddenly began moving up in the polls around February 21 or so. But what happened?

UPDATE: One theory is that the key mover was the 60 Minutes interview of Bernie Sanders that aired on the evening of February 22. Perhaps that tanked Sanders and Biden hoovered up his supporters. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work: Sanders went up in South Carolina polling after the interview. Biden went up a lot more, but he was taking votes away from Steyer, Warren, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar.

For now, the debate still seems the most likely cause. That’s a little unusual, since conventional wisdom says that debates don’t move public opinion much, but maybe this was an exception.

The American economy gained 273,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 183,000 jobs. That’s a pretty strong number, and the January number was revised upward as well. The headline unemployment rate ticked down slightly to 3.5 percent.

Part of the jobs gain was something of a statistical mirage. Nearly 200,000 people dropped out of work in February—double the usual number—and the civilian labor force shrank. The total number of employed people increased by only 45,000 and the employment-population ratio actually declined.

On the bright side, earnings rose smartly. Hourly earnings for blue-collar workers increased at an annualized rate of 1.7 percent after inflation, and weekly earnings increased a whopping 5.4 percent.

All in all, despite the iffiness of the jobs numbers, this is a very strong jobs reports. The number of new jobs was high; the headline unemployment rate went down; and earnings went up. There’s not much to complain about here.

Aaron Schwartz/CNP/ZUMA

You may recall that when the Mueller Report was finally finished and handed over to the Justice Department, Attorney General William Barr decided to immediately release his own four-page summary of the findings. Later, when the full report was released, we discovered that Barr’s summary was less than totally accurate. Barr, it turned out, had put a pretty big thumb on the scale in favor of his boss, Donald Trump.

But that wasn’t the end. Even the full report was full of redactions, which Barr insisted were only those required by law or national security interests. But was Barr to be believed? A federal judge today ruled otherwise:

The Court cannot reconcile certain public representations made by Attorney General Barr with the findings in the Mueller Report. The inconsistencies between Attorney General Barr’s statements, made at a time when the public did not have access to the redacted version of the Mueller Report to assess the veracity of his statements, and portions of the redacted version of the Mueller Report that conflict with those statements cause the Court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller Report to the contrary.

These circumstances generally, and Attorney General Barr’s lack of candor specifically, call into question Attorney General Barr’s credibility and in turn, the Department’s representation that “all of the information redacted from the version of the [Mueller] Report released by [] Attorney General [Barr]” is protected from disclosure by its claimed FOIA exemptions. In the Court’s view, Attorney General Barr’s representation that the Mueller Report would be “subject only to those redactions required by law or by compelling law enforcement, national security, or personal privacy interests” cannot be credited without the Court’s independent verification in light of Attorney General Barr’s conduct and misleading public statements about the findings in the Mueller Report.

In other words: you lied about the Mueller Report, so why shouldn’t I believe that you’re lying about the redactions too?

How often does a conservative federal judge call a conservative attorney general a liar whose word can’t be trusted? Not very often. But Barr is a special case.

This is the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The foreground is the ruins of a Roman wall surrounding the Domus Flavia.

Elizabeth Warren is out. It’s now officially Joe vs. Bernie in a death match to the end.

At the risk of stating the obvious—and the even greater risk of stating it a little too obviously—the most likely reason that Bernie Sanders is losing has nothing to do with his strategy or his toxic followers or Elizabeth Warren refusing to drop out. It’s because he’s too liberal. That’s it.

Even among Democrats, there’s not a majority who identify as liberal, let alone mega liberal. Maybe there will be someday when Millennials and Gen Z take over, but not today.

I know I’m a bit of a broken record on this, but the whole Bernie phenomenon is very much a part of the Twitter bubble. Or maybe it’s just the “online blatherer bubble.” In any case, I belong to a few progressive listservs and support for Joe Biden in those places is approximately zero. On Twitter, you’d think there were no human beings in the country who supported Biden. Even in the more traditional media, there’s an assumption that Biden is just sort of a default choice for some people, but that nobody actively likes the guy.

Maybe so. But out in the real world I think there’s more grass roots support for Biden than he gets credit for. It’s not as loud or as enthusiastic as Sanders or Warren get, but neither is it “establishment” support, as Biden’s weak fundraising shows. Rather, it comes from Biden’s experience; his general likability; his optimism; and yes, some Obama coattails. Polls show pretty clearly that it’s always been there, but it was hidden for a while during the boomlets for other candidates.

I know the red rose crowd doesn’t want to hear this, but America is simply not a super liberal country. Even self-identified Democrats aren’t that liberal. I mean, take a look at who the Democratic nominees have been for the past 30 years: B. Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, and H. Clinton. I’d say this progression shows a party that’s becoming more liberal, but it’s happening damn slowly. It’s just not in Bernie territory yet.

And the country as a whole? Hoo boy. It’s nowhere even close.

This may be common knowledge by now, but just in case it’s not, here is the approximate case fatality rate—i.e., your chances of dying if you get infected—for the coronavirus by age group:

For those under 50, catching the coronavirus is no fun but not very deadly. Things get worse when you hit your 50s and 60s. It’s still not panic territory, but it’s obviously worth taking precautions seriously.

However, above age 70 the coronavirus is very, very dangerous. If you work with the elderly, you need to ensure that they stay safe, self-quarantine when necessary, and follow the CDC’s hand washing advice. This also goes for any media outlet that has an older demographic. If you write for Fox News or the Atlantic, you shouldn’t downplay the seriousness of the coronavirus epidemic. Given the average age of your viewers and readers, that’s just irresponsible.