Bernie Sanders: NBC News. Joe Biden: CBS News.

Who’s going to win tomorrow? It’s too late for polls to pick up the effect of the Klobuchar/Buttigieg endorsements of Joe Biden earlier today, but even before that it was starting to look like Biden had lifted himself into a dead heat with Bernie Sanders a mere week after he had been left for dead. At the end of the day on Monday:

• Bernie Sanders was projected to win California and every state above the Mason-Dixon line.
• Joe Biden was projected to win Texas and every Southern state—including North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Arkansas.

Over at 538.com, they’re projecting that Sanders will win 509 delegates and Biden will win 439. When you add that to the delegates they already have, Sanders would lead 569-493, with 1,991 needed to win outright. That’s a very tight race indeed. Can Joe Biden be the comeback kid?

Pete Buttigieg is out. Amy Klobuchar is out. Chris Matthews is out.

Wait, what?

Kevin Hagen/Getty

Who is primarily responsible for the wide dissemination of crazy right-wing conspiracy nonsense? Facebook? YouTube? Twitter? Nope. It’s good old Fox News:

Two of the highest quality studies [found] that sharing of “fake news” was highly concentrated in a tiny portion of the population, was largely done by conservatives, and interacted with age—primarily driven by people over 65. In other words, the problem of online dissemination seems to be driven by older conservatives—precisely the demographic of Fox News.

Another thing that made our study unusual among studies of political propaganda is that we used case studies to also connect television with online. Again, consistent with what Pew has consistently found in its surveys of voters, television matters a whole lot, and in fact, we found when we looked that when Fox News on TV pushed a topic, it would explode online much more than when the initial efforts to push propaganda were limited to online. Television is still much more important than we understand.

That’s from Yochai Benkler, a professor of Legal Studies at Harvard and co-author of the recent book Network Propaganda. The craziest stuff might roil around and get its start in social media, but it doesn’t reach very many people unless Fox News decides to pick it up—which they do with lamentable regularity. It’s only at that point that social media starts to explode.

In other words: stop worrying so much about Facebook and Google and Twitter. Worry instead about Fox News, just like we always have.

This is a cow in Colombia. It seemed like nearly all the cows I saw there had black patches around their eyes like this one. What does that mean? Is it typical of a particular breed? Or what? Do I have any cow experts out there who can enlighten us?

A couple of years ago Robert Barro predicted that the Republican tax bill would increase GDP by 1.1 percent in 2018 and 2019. A reader asks:

I’m curious what the official numbers ended up being and you seemed like a guy who could find out and might care to.

Nothing simpler! Growth clocked in at 2.9 percent and 2.3 percent in those two years. So Barro is right only if he initially projected growth of 1.8 percent and 1.2 percent without the tax cut.

That seems unlikely. My best guess, based on both GDP figures and a few other things is that the Republican tax cut, remarkably enough, had virtually no effect on growth. I’m not sure how they managed that since lower taxes should stimulate growth, but apparently Republicans can even screw up a tax cut these days.

Then again, the best way to make a tax cut effective is to give less of it to the rich and more of it to the middle class. If the real goal here was merely to make the rich a little richer, then it worked great and Republicans didn’t screw up anything.

Amy Klobuchar has withdrawn from the Democratic primary. It’s now officially Bernie and Liz in the progressive lane vs. Joe and Mike in the moderate lane. After Super Tuesday I suspect it’s going to be Bernie vs. Joe all the way to the convention.

CDC/Planet Pix via ZUMA

Columbia University virologist Angela Rasmussen on the estimate that two percent of the people who are infected with the coronavirus will die:

That could certainly change. The China CDC published a report in which they looked at like 45,000 patients and calculated that case fatality rate based on that. Prior to that, the fatality rate was being estimated at around 2 or 3 percent. So that is one of the numbers that has remained fairly consistent. My personal opinion, though, is that the case fatality rate could actually be much lower if there’s a bunch of mild cases that we’re not being able to test for.

….We know that once we get past about age 50 or 60, that case fatality rate starts increasing. It’s 0.1 percent or 0.2 percent for people, I think, through age 49. And then ages 50 through 59 goes up to 1 percent. Then it goes up to like 3 percent [for patients in their 60s and 70s] and then it goes, age 80-plus, to like 14 percent case-fatality rate. It really depends on the population that the virus is affecting. Also people with preexisting conditions also have a higher case fatality rate. So that would be like heart disease, diabetes, and asthma.

On what to do if you start to feel sick:

It’s still flu season. I would treat this same way we would treat the flu. Don’t freak out….And if you really do need care, then you should definitely seek it out. You shouldn’t wait until you’re, like, dying of pneumonia before going to the doctor.

….The good news is that because in the majority of patients it’s mild, what we should be telling people is that if you are in a low risk group, you don’t have to rush the hospital. You should stay home and recover. So that the hospitals are not going to be overburdened with, with otherwise healthy people, when they need to be using their resources for treating the people who are likely to have more severe illness….The virus, I’m not as worried about. I’m much more worried about what people’s reaction is going to be — and how our public health system is going to be handling them.

On previous pandemics:

I don’t remember people being this crazy during the 2009 flu pandemic. That had a much higher case fatality rate in some communities — from four up to almost 20 percent. So in that sense, this virus isn’t that different from other pandemic viruses that we’ve dealt with before.

The best thing you can do is wash your hands frequently. Soap breaks down the lipid membrane that surrounds the coronavirus and kills it. Hand sanitizers also work as long as they’re 60 percent alcohol or higher.

Gerald Herbert/AP

Donald Trump in four quotes:

• Why he denounces the press so much: “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”
• How he gets away with lying so much: “Look, you just tell them and they believe it. That’s it: you just tell them and they believe. They just do.”
• Why he can say and do anything he wants: “I have the most loyal people. Did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?”
• On revenge as the central focus of his life: “If somebody hits you, you’ve got to hit ’em back five times harder than they ever thought possible. You’ve got to get even. Get even.”

I can’t read this any better than you can, but unfortunately I don’t need to:

This is the manufacturing PMI release for China, and just like the US version a score of 50 is neutral. Anything below 50 means that manufacturing is contracting, and in February manufacturing in China contracted at its fastest rate in recent history. On the (semi) bright side, US manufacturing is showing softness but hasn’t quite started contracting yet:

Meanwhile, the OECD predicts a significant reduction in global economic growth thanks to the coronavirus. Instead of growing at 2.9 percent, they now figure growth will be 2.4 percent at best.

I got some marketing advice on Friday: if you want to sell the adorableness of your kittens, you need video. Roger that! Here’s some kitten video, short and sweet for the Tik Tok generation.