"Starting Monday (Aug. 2), you can find Saturn shining in the sky as part of a celestial phenomenon called opposition. Earth and the ringed planet will be on the same side of the sun and connected with our star by an invisible line, allowing skygazers on Earth to see a fully illuminated Saturn." And this time the rings won't be edge on.
"DeWine said despite a surge in cases he has no plans to bring back mandates on masks or crowds… The governor, along with state health officials, came out with recommendations for masks in schools. He said that due to the fact that most kids are unvaccinated, they're strongly recommending students continue to mask up at school… 'We leave it up to the local schools, 600 and some local schools, we leave it up to them. We had great success last winter, last school year, we saw virtually no spread in the classroom when all the kids were wearing masks. So we recommend, strong recommendation, that they do that,' DeWine said." That's a failure of leadership. "I highly recommend this, but you do you," is the leadership you give for a spicy dish at a restaurant, not about a deadly communicable disease that we know what works to prevent its spread. Leadership is hard, ask anyone who has done it successfully. It's a series of compromises where usually you get to be the good person, but often enough it means being the bad person when people don't want to change, but you've done the hard work and can see why certain things need to be the way they are. Many young leaders don't know when to be either. And there's a lot of older "leaders" who always wanted to be the good person and never accept the responsibility of being the bad person for the greater good. It's a lot like parenting.
"Provincetown, home to roughly 3,000 year-round residents, was thrust into the national spotlight last week after it became the subject of a study that persuaded the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to change its face mask guidelines."
"Florida's largest school district said it's worried about funding if it does not follow Gov. Ron DeSantis' executive order preventing the implementation of mask mandates in schools."
"Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber blamed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis after the state reported 21,683 new COVID-19 cases Saturday, its highest single-day total during the ongoing pandemic." But we were very confidently told DeSantis aced the COVID response.
"COVID-19 cases are rising sharply in the U.S., thanks to the more easily transmissible Delta variant, but while many Americans may have to mask up again, 'I don't think we're going to see lockdowns,' Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top federal infectious disease expert, said on Sunday's ABC This Week. 'I think we have enough of the percentage of people in the country — not enough to crush the outbreak — but I believe enough to not allow us to get into the situation we were in last winter.'" Uh, yeah, Bob.
"To avoid lockdowns, people in the United States will have to do things that they won't necessarily want to do, such as wearing masks at indoor gatherings even if they're vaccinated and having kids mask up in schools, the director of the National Institutes of Health said Monday." And who thinks that's gonna happen?
"Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team on Sunday urged President Joe Biden to immediately renew and extend the eviction moratorium until Oct. 18 after House Democrats failed to marshal the votes to prevent its lapse this weekend." That's not how it works (except in the game of press releases).
"The New York Democrat and chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee told NPR that the party is hopeful an ambitious, multitrillion-dollar economic agenda trumpeted by the Biden administration will resonate with voters when it's time to head to the polls next fall." Only if you go out and sell it. You can't sit around waiting for people to applaud you, especially in an election. Hey Democrats, can we have a talk here. You tried this exact plan with Obamacare. It didn't work. Because change is hard. Unless you leave your offices and go out to where the people are and explain to them, even if they don't want to hear it, how your plans will change their world for the better, you're gonna lose big. Again. Let's say you actually pass these big bills (and that's still an "if" in case you don't know). And let's say you're able to keep poison pills out of the bills. The money will only be hitting the street just a month or so before the next election. You can't sit in your offices and wait for people to realize that their lives are better. Because they won't tie any of their improvements to your actions unless you tell them directly how the dots are connected. You need a fucking ground strategy.
"Republicans are beginning to catch up with Democrats in online fundraising, creating for the first time in modern history a political landscape where both parties are largely funded by small donations — for better or, some say, for worse."
"Critics note Trump has built an arsenal of political committees and nonprofit groups, staffed with dozens of ex-administration officials and loyalists, which seem aimed at sustaining his political hopes for a comeback, and exacting revenge on Republican congressional critics. These groups have been aggressive in raising money through at times misleading appeals to the party base which polls show share Trump’s false views he lost the White House due to fraud."
"The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act clocked in at some 2,700 pages, and senators could begin amending it soon. Despite the hurry-up-and-wait during a rare weekend session, emotions bubbled over once the bill was produced Sunday night. The final product was not intended to stray from the broad outline senators had negotiated for weeks with the White House." I still don't understand the fetish around the number of pages in a bill.
"Make America Great Again, a super PAC chaired by Trump’s former campaign manager, quietly purchased $300,000 in Ohio television advertising. The buy was intended to provide a late-stage boost to another Trump-backed candidate facing a crowded field of Republicans in a special election on Tuesday."
"A group of Texas Republicans wants to audit the 2020 election results in just the large, mostly Democratic counties across the state. If they get their way, they'll miss many of the real — but minor — errors in the state's vote count… That's according to a team of researchers that conducted a statewide analysis of the results across both Democratic and Republican counties. The group found a series of errors that would not come close to changing Republican Donald Trump's victory in the state or any other statewide race. But the errors stretch across both Republican and Democratic counties." Way to miss what the real purpose of the audits are meant to find. The headlines will be "faults found in Democratic Counties" and nobody will wonder why they didn't find anything in the Republican Counties. It's the same function as "the IRS demanded documents and denied applications (they didn't deny any) of Republican groups!" The IRS did the same with Democratic groups, but none of the "research" focused on them, so the narrative stuck.
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