gehringer_2

This physical frailty is no illusion and your example is well taken. Generalized vascular dementia becomes an increasing risk with loss of physical activity level. So it could be the plan all along was keep his options open and play it by ear until the last moment and if his preference was always going to be Harris, than waiting until the last minute worked on both levels. There has been a lot of reporting about the supposed rift with Obama over O's support of Hillary's bid. I certainly don't know how much of that is true vs click bait, but if it is, the way Biden has timed it all to insure Harris is the nominee would sort of be the ultimate 'you were still a rookie, kid, this is how it's done' swipe at Obama.

I really have no idea at this point. It could be Biden's health/energy level has declined a lot very recently but a president is so insulated we can't tell that very well one way or the other. There are just a lot of aspects here. To me the biggest indicator that he is actually OK is the very fact that he stepped back. It's a paradoxical situation, by far the most likely thing if he were really losing it would be that he would have dug in and no-one could have done anything about it really. The delegates were his - period. Now, once you posit a man with fully functioning faculties and extremely deep political experience, there is really no limit to how many levels the strategy might have been played to. When I first posted this scenario - more or less tongue in cheek, the one thing I hadn't given much thought to was the lame-duck issue but the more I thought about it, the bigger I saw it to be and the more willing I became to entertain the idea that there could have be 4 yr plan - maybe just partially formed in the background all along. In this era - with a divided Congress and the Senate filibuster and bad faith actors like McConnell, it would be daylight madness for any President to announce he wasn't a candidate for re-election until the last possible moment. He would basically cut himself off at the knees. Plus Biden lived through both the LBJ withdrawal and Carter/Kennedy fiasco that helped elect Nixon and Reagan. Or most likely you have little bits of all different motivations and factors playing into the final total.

or if you want to entertain the opposite conspiratorial thought, Biden and Harris cooked this up (well probably excluding the horrible debate performance) as the only way for Biden not to run without being a lame duck for two years and opening the party to a primary that could have been bruising and left the eventual nominee too damaged to win in November. This way Biden has an effective office for 3 1/2 full years, plus the succession field was frozen through the primaries, which creates the clear path for Harris, who is being duly annointed - all according to plan....... 🤷‍♀️

He needs to enjoy his time in the Sun while he can, the future is cloudy to say the least...

I would have thought we would have seen a lot more reports of furtive scurrying around the Capitol for this to actually be true. I'd actually be more inclined to believe it was donor reluctance to release funds that pushed him to stand down.

This should not have happened but I think your situation is as much a part of a broader one with doctors and patients across the board than just about how science in general generates public understanding on new tech. In today's production line medicine, patients have to get more adamant about what they want when the medical establishment constantly tells us to listen to them like they will have all the answers in that 15 min visit window. Doctors have to listen with more priority to what their patients say even if it violate that 15 min target. Regardless of the what your doc thought he did or didn't know about immuno and what the national conversation was - and I don't recall the practice of getting dual shots ever even being part of the national discussion - this was a case where there was no medical reason for him not to accede to your request for caution if you believed you had reason to be more comfortable with it. You weren't trying to be an anti-vaxxer. Docs sometimes don't like to believe their patients can read or know their own histories in more detail than they do. That's probably because they have a lot more crazy patients than ones than ones whose concerns are well grounded, but that just means people have to be even more willing to tell their docs exactly how they will agree to be treated to cut through the noise. I wish there were some way to put the toothpaste back in the tube for your wife - did she find a new doctor?

She may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but she didn't help herself yesterday or for that matter any time this week. I'll go back to TigerHolics post about accountability. At this point I'd rather see a few people in authority get bounced unjustly (not that I'm even saying that in this case) as long as more get bounced that should be. When you have that kind of responsibility you should be motivated by that fact that you will lose your job if things screw up on your watch. The rest of us live that all the time.

I am not young, so I can tell you that even before the big de-institutionalization movement and the guys started coming back from 'Nam, we had drunks and addicts begging on the streets in Detroit. I think one difference is that there were places we called SROs (single room occupancy) - mostly old run down apt houses, that people could afford to stay in on their SSI (which used to be more generally available). But economic changes have squeezed out all kinds of cheap housing, de-institutionalization has added to the numbers, welfare rules are stricter, more drugs are available on the street, and returning warrior issues are worse than in the past. So we took a problem we didn't know how to solve when it was small and made it worse from multiple directions.

this is the modern disease.

As long as this doesn't turn into a stretch like last season when everytime they got to one under, they lost. Need at to at least break through that barrier as the spring board into next season.

this is such a key understanding. There is nothing you do in immunology that someone somewhere won't have a bad reaction to, but you can't let that chance stop you from doing what you need to do save the masses. If you are that person, it's a tragedy - absolutely, but you can't expect society to sacrifice its well being for your bad genetic luck. It's one of those risks in life like being struck by lightning. The truth is there are no easy answers. It's true that sometime when the benefit to the many is marginal and the risk to the few is great, treatments are not pursued, but this is never an easy calculus for anyone and as a society you have to do the best you can knowing some people will always end up unhappy with the result, and maybe justifiably so. It's another reason you need good politics rather than one dominated by big money and corporate interest groups. Those are the factors that make getting to good faith government decisions harder and less likely to be trusted.

the other interesting question (I think) is whether after another loss, anyone in the rad right wing would try to displace Trump from it's leadership, or whether Trump holds the movement as his own even after another loss. Maybe he doesn't go away - he just keeps agitating from his own media perch. If it's the later, then you can see a scenario where as Trump gets older and less capable a 'trusted lieutenant' could emerge who then inherits the mantle. The thing is, Trump only really trusts family and as you note, none of them seem remotely up to the task, unless maybe Jared and Ivanka pivot back into involvement in the movement, which right know doesn't look likely. Of course, we can''t count our chickens before they hatch, he hasn't lost yet.

Time will tell about the parallels. One possible difference is that what happened in France was just a holding action. If I read the numbers correctly Le Pen is still increasing her vote totals. If Trump looses this time around, I think most people believe the air goes out of that particular political balloon in the US. Of course if it doesn't, especially if a Trump sion can gain the allegiance of the movement and carry it on as Marine has done after her father, then you'd have a parallel in spades.

Wasn’t the management task the Pentagon’s? I’m usually skeptical about black and white. Do you think it possible/likely the Pentagon told the WH they couldn’t do what they were being asked to , or alternately, that the Pentagon had so burned its credibility at the WH that the admin no longer believed what they said? We have a history all the way back to VN of WHs and Pentagons where confidence in each other has been ……lacking. I do agree the US allowed too few to exit under our auspices. That was also a problem after VN. But you can blame Biden plus the entire rest of the government and for that matter the voting public as well for that. The nation's love for the people who risk themselves to ally with us seems to run proportional to their distance away.

Probably should use the past tense.

Sometimes you just can't keep pushing uphill against the realities of the geography. If Afghanistan were not landlocked, and you had a capital either on or with a defensible route to the sea, maybe you could have pacified and protected at least one major population center and let your nation building percolate outward - assuming you could even do that successfully, But Kabul had hostiles over the horizon in almost every direction. With no support for a western agenda anywhere in the hinterlands, and the fractured ethnic situation, Kabul was an ill-omened place to try and plant a western flag.

the BUNT is back

this one could be delayed but rain is supposed be gone be 8 or so.

people haven't adjusted to how much hitting is down across the league.

And that’s the difference isn’t it, that the Ukrainians are fighting for themselves for sometime we both understand in the same way while it was never more than a minority of Afghans that was true for? It’s tragic but it’s also true that there is only so much one society can do for another and those lines are not always easy to see in real time when decisions are made. We were also told we’d be hailed as liberators in Iraq, ~10 yrs ago we were laughing at how foolish that seemed, but maybe today not so much. History has a way of turning things on their heads more than once before it’s done. The US has been no saint around the world in my lifetime, it’s been a very mixed bag, but I have fewer reservations about supporting Ukraine than I’ve had about most of our FP adventures.

There are realities, you can't launch an all out attack on Russia. Once that is off the table, reasonable people can and do disagree on how to manage the situation. You can complain about having to spend the money but other people sometimes do things you have no choice but to respond to and those responses are often not free. If your business was being burgled you would have to buy security to establish your 'stalemate' with the local thieves. Of course you can always just give up. Everyone lives in a world where their choices may not be all they would prefer.

Putin is corroding the Russian nation and society from the inside out. He is a cancer that is going to kill its host. Nothing to be happy about in that whole mess. All the rest of the world can do is prevent his necrosis from metastasizing beyond his own borders.

I would have to guess somebody made sure in advance most of the possible choices would take themselves out of contention in the 1st hour. With Newsom, Whitmer et al coming out with almost instant endorsements, it was over before it began.

More projection apparently?

are these people even for real?