One of the things I wanted to get on my Arizona trip was a picture of a long, straight road disappearing into infinity. As it turns out I got several, but this one was the best. It was dead straight; it was a rural road in red rock country; and it started at the top of a low hill, which is the only way to get a proper shot like this.

This is a panoramic photo. I took five shots and merged them together when I got home. As it turned out, I only needed three of them, but I definitely needed those three. A single shot, even with a wide angle lens, simply couldn’t have captured the wide open look of the desert West that I got here.

A black-and-white version is at the bottom, and this is a rare case where I might like it better than the color version. It loses the color of the red rock on the left, but it gains something of an Old West look to it. I could go either way on this.

UPDATE: I’ve replaced the color version with one that has a less overprocessed sky.

Justin L. Stewart/ZUMA

I’m a little curious why I’m not seeing more people admit the obvious: Joe Biden is now virtually 100 percent assured of winning the Democratic nomination. He’s going to come out of Super Tuesday ahead of Bernie Sanders and there’s little reason to think he won’t maintain that lead. And if he’s anywhere close to a majority when primary season is over, the superdelegates will put him over the top easily. Right? I mean, does anyone think that Sanders will win more than 10 percent of the superdelegates if he rolls into Milwaukee with Biden anywhere close to him?

In 2016, I initially gave Sanders a pass when he continued campaigning even after it was obvious he had no chance of beating Hillary Clinton. After all, one of his goals was to amass enough delegates that he could influence the party platform and push it to the left. To do that, he had to keep competing.

But he’s done that. I don’t mean that everyone in the party is sold on his agenda—he was never going to accomplish that—but his agenda is now very much a mainstream option. Things like Medicare for All, free college, wealth taxes, a $15 minimum wage, and so forth have a considerable following. Thanks to Sanders, they are not fringe ideas at all anymore.

So it’s not clear why he should continue running much beyond the end of March. At that point, if he hasn’t produced a stunning turnaround, his chances are over. He’s just running out of spite.

Mike Bloomberg, to his credit, has demonstrated that he really does think Donald Trump is our biggest problem. His wealth and his endorsement are now dedicated to Biden. I hope Sanders does the same sometime soon. His followers and his endorsement are valuable commodities, and a united front against Trump is what’s needed now.

Sometimes revolutions don’t happen on schedule. Bernie isn’t going to get his this year, but he’s had a helluva strong influence on the progressive movement. Thanks to him, a revolution—or something like it—is a lot likelier in 2024 or 2028 than it used to be. That’s something to be proud of.

I got nuthin’ this morning, so feast your eyes on this:

USA! USA!

Apparently $30 million is some kind of threshold for ultra-high net worth individuals (UHNWIs), and it turns out that the ranks of UHNWIs increased by 6 percent last year. I can’t think of anything nonobvious to say about this, except to note that Switzerland still has us beat on a per capita basis:

We’re #2. But perhaps that means we try harder?

This is pure Joe.Scott Varley/Orange County Register via ZUMA

Tonight’s lessons, in order of how clear they are:

1. Mike Bloomberg has provided us a salutory lesson: you can’t just buy a presidential election no matter how much money you have. He flamed out utterly tonight and needs to drop out immediately if he really means it when he says his singular goal is defeating Donald Trump. Continuing to run would accomplish nothing except to embarrass him even further.
2. Elizabeth Warren has been slipping in the polls and will slip even more after being blown out tonight. She should drop out.
3. Joe Biden is also proving that money isn’t everything: not only is he winning solidly, but he’s doing it on a shoestring. However, he should attract a lot more money after his performance tonight, and this will demonstrate that money’s not nothing, either. He’s now in a virtuous circle, with victory bringing in more money and more money helping him win more states, rinse and repeat.
4. Bernie Sanders 2020 sure looks a lot like Bernie Sanders 2016. He has his fans, obviously, but he tops out at 30-40 percent of the vote. Like it or not, there’s just not stronger support out there for a revolution, and Bernie isn’t willing to moderate his message to win over more supporters. That’s admirable, in its own way, but it’s not how you win a nationwide election.
5. It’s obviously Bernie vs. Joe from here on out. Like 2016, I expect that Bernie will stay in until the bitter end no matter how unlikely an eventual victory becomes. I hope he proves me wrong.

And how did I vote today? I was not willing to vote for either Sanders or Bloomberg, so I wavered between Warren and Biden. In the end, though, I voted for Joe Biden. Policywise, I think he’s better than a lot of progressives give him credit for, and in any case it hardly matters since Republicans will allow very little of any Democrat’s policy to pass. On foreign policy, I think Biden learned a lot during the Obama years and is now, deep in his gut, much less interventionist than he used to be. I won’t deny that his gaffes and obvious cognitive slips aren’t concerning, but it’s also easy to overplay those—especially if you support someone else.

In the end, I couldn’t shake free of my central concern over Elizabeth Warren: that she’s too rigid in her beliefs to make the kinds of adjustments politicians have to make if they want to win a general election. I think she’d rather be right than president, and if she won the nomination that’s exactly what she’d be.

Up in the snow, this is life from lifelessness. No, wait: that’s the Genesis project from Star Trek II. This is merely a small plant that can apparently grow in freezing weather. But it’s a pretty little one.

UPDATE: It’s mistletoe!

Joyce Boghosian/White House/Planet Pix via ZUMA

Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is perhaps the one person that virtually everyone trusts to give us the straight dope on the coronavirus epidemic. He is, for example, the only guy who has the backbone—and the credibility—to stand up to President Trump and persist in telling him the bald truth about how long it will take to produce a vaccine (a year to a year and a half, in case you’re curious).

So what’s his prognosis?

“I don’t think that we are going to get out of this completely unscathed,” he said. “I think that this is going to be one of those things we look back on and say boy, that was bad.”

….“It could be really, really bad. I don’t think it’s gonna be, because I think we’d be able to do the kind of mitigation. It could be mild. I don’t think it’s going to be that mild either. It’s really going to depend on how we mobilize.”

This is not a firm prognosis, but that’s natural considering the current state of our knowledge. In a nutshell, Fauci thinks the coronavirus outbreak isn’t going to be mild and isn’t going to be “really, really” bad. It’s most likely to be in the range of normal badness.

That’s a little hard to parse, I admit, but I’d interpret it as: the government needs to get its shit together; people need to take sensible precautions; but it’s not so horrible that anyone needs to panic.¹ Wash your hands a lot and maybe lay in a little extra supply of essential medications. But you really don’t need to stock up on bottled water and canned goods. Be prudent but not panicky.

¹Except perhaps for the elderly. If you’re over 70—and definitely if you’re over 80—coronavirus seems to be very, very dangerous. You really want to take fairly strong steps to keep from getting it.

A quick question: Why do people keep saying that the “Democratic establishment” has chosen Joe Biden to be the party’s nominee? As near as I can tell, the Democratic establishment did diddly squat until the mostly black citizens of South Carolina overwhelmingly chose Joe Biden. The establishment then followed their lead. Feel free to call this either weak-minded or respectful of the Democratic base, whichever floats your boat. But one thing it wasn’t was the Democratic establishment choosing anything.

It’s true, of course, that the Democratic establishment didn’t support Bernie Sanders and was just waiting for a cue to decide who they’d support instead. Once again, feel free to label them a bunch of cowardly, centrist corporatists for this if you wish. But given Bernie’s obvious disdain for the party leadership and everything it stands for, this was hardly a big surprise, is it?

The latest on the coronavirus:

The Trump administration said on Monday that nearly a million tests could be administered for the coronavirus in the United States by the end of this week, a significant escalation of screening as the American death toll reached six and U.S. infections topped 100.

Please keep in mind that if a million people are tested, it’s inevitable that hundreds or even thousands of new cases will be found. Don’t panic when that’s announced. It means only that our knowledge has changed, not the facts on the ground.

NOTE: Shortly after I wrote this post, the Fed cut rates by half a point. Sometimes whining works.

Donald Trump is whining on Twitter yet again that the Federal Reserve is keeping short-term interest rates too high. He’s been beating this drum for a while, so obviously it has nothing to do with the coronavirus. It’s solely because Trump wants the economy to be as strong as possible while he’s seeking reelection.

Putting that aside, it would probably be a good idea for the Fed to loosen a bit anyway. It’s low-risk insurance. At the same time, the thing we (and Trump) should really care about is long-term interest rates, since that’s what affects economic growth the most. In fact, the primary purpose of lowering short-term interest rates—which the Fed controls—is to nudge down long-term rates—which the Fed doesn’t control. But as it turns out, that’s already happened:

Over the past year long-term rates have gone down about 1.5 points. In just the last month they’ve gone down half a point. They are currently at levels below anything Barack Obama enjoyed.

I doubt that Trump knows this, but he’s already gotten the benefit of a huge reduction in the interest rates that really matter. He should quit griping.

Check out this headline from the Washington Post:

Remember how the Benghazi probe morphed into the email probe that eventually led to Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016? This is the same thing. Maybe the Burisma probe will produce something, or maybe it will serendipitously lead to something else that will produce something. Who knows? But it can’t hurt to try, especially after working so well last time.

And this will not be anything close to impartial, either. It will not be farmed out to a professional investigator, as the Russia probe was to Robert Mueller. Nor will it be strictly limited to a single topic so it can be concluded quickly, as the Ukraine probe was. It will be designed to keep going until Election Day and to ferret out anything that might be embarrassing to Joe Biden, whether fair or not. It will also be designed to leak dribs and drabs of unverified dirt to credulous reporters who will claim, after it’s all over, that of course this was all newsworthy and they really didn’t have any choice but to run with it, did they?