At City Journal John O. McGinnis reacts to Illinois voiters’ rejection of Pritzker’s graduated income tax amendment:

The defeat of the Graduated Income Tax Amendment will force a rewriting of the Democratic playbook for governing Illinois. Looking for more revenue, Democrats could now simply try to raise taxes—but those taxes must be levied at the same rate on all earners. The amendment’s resounding defeat suggests that pursuing this option would be an invitation to disaster for Democrats at the next election.

Democrats could try to cut the state’s operating budget, in the hopes that the resulting pain would motivate Illinois voters to embrace the progressive tax amendment in the future. But the amendment lost badly, and the personal circumstances of Madigan and Pritzker make them unlikely champions for a successful retry.

The best way out of the state’s corner is to pass real pension reform and a program for economic growth to make the measures less biting.

He’s dreaming. Illinois politicians will continue to borrow until they can’t borrow any more, a day that is fast approaching. Then they’ll raise taxes until raising taxes actually generates less revenue, another day that is fast approaching. The last time the city of Chicago increased its sales tax it generated very little new revenue (as I predicted), driving businesses out of the city. Then they’ll cut back on every state service that won’t get them physically attacked or their houses burned down. Then they’ll try to amend the state’s constitution again. Anything to avoid taking the steps that will actually solve the problems but risk their jobs.

At RealClearPolicy Richard Protzmann has a proposal for lowering the temperature of our political discourse—the title of this post:

The next president may relinquish power to the Congress, but the institution itself must reform. The greatness of the US Congress compromised and major bipartisan legislation a thing of the past. The next president can start a trend in the other direction, but it will take a mandate from the voters, restraint by the executive, and sweeping reforms of the legislature. Simply put, Congress is not equipped to serve its own purpose unless and until it shifts its rules and processes from a power-driven to a service-driven model.

To effect that he suggests the following measures:

• Terms limits
• Restrictions on lobbying practices
• Change the rules for hearings and investigations to encourage “thoroughness and informed witness examinations and deliberations”.
• Take back its oversight responsibilities
• Fund itself sufficiently to do its job

The obvious retort to his plea to “make Congress great again” is when was it ever great? I would remind you of Sam Clemens’s wisecrack about Congress: “there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” That goes back 130 years. Or this one from Will Rogers “Papers say: ‘Congress is deadlocked and can’t act.’ I think that is the greatest blessing that could befall this country.” That’s a century old. Or, more recently, Dave Barry: “We must always remember that, as Americans, we all have a common enemy — an enemy that is dangerous, powerful and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government.”

Mr. Protzmann’s suggestions will meet with opposition from many sides not the least of which is from members of Congress. The status quo suits them just fine. It enables them to avoid taking responsibility for anything, serve lifetime terms, and retire with a pension. What’s not to like? And according to Gallup in the run-up to the November elections 29% of Americans thought that members of Congress deserved re-election while 60% thought their own representatives were deserving of re-election. Just for the record I voted against my own Congressman on Election Day.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is taking a victory lap for Joe Biden’s election with an op-ed in USA Today:

am very proud of the hard work that the progressive community put into electing Joe Biden as our next president.

And let’s be clear: This election was not just a normal election between two candidates. It was much more important than that. It was an election about retaining our democracy, preserving the rule of law, believing in science and ending pathological lying in the White House. And with a record-breaking turnout, the American people voted to reject President Donald Trump’s racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, religious bigotry and authoritarianism. That is very good news.

Even so, truth be told, the election results in the House and Senate were disappointing. Despite Joe Biden winning the popular vote by more than 5 million votes, the Democrats lost seats in the House and, so far, have only picked up one seat in the Senate.

Now, with the blame game erupting, corporate Democrats are attacking so-called far-left policies like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal for election defeats in the House and the Senate. They are dead wrong.

Here are the facts:

â–º112 co-sponsors of Medicare for All were on the ballot in November. All 112 of them won their races.

â–º98 co-sponsors of the Green New Deal were on the ballot in November. Only one of them have lost an election.

I think he completely misreads the election and rather clearly fails to understand how our gerrymandered Congressional districts work. I’ll try to explain.

The way redistricting is done in nearly every state serves to protect incumbents by concentrating minorities together in districts. The majority party concentrates members of the minority party into as few districts as they can, creating “safe” seats both for themselves and for the minority party. But it doesn’t stop there. Regular party members concentrate members of minority factions within their own party into districts, too. To paraphrase Speaker Pelosi’s comment, anybody with a “D” after their name would have won in those districts. The evidence he produces proves nothing.

As I have said before I think this election was a fairly narrow rejection of Trump not a rejection of all Republicans and certainly no embrace of democratic socialism. Could the Democrats have fared better by running more moderate candidates or using a different campaign strategy than they did? I have no idea. Rather than “damn the torpedos; full speed ahead” my advice would be to count your blessings.

As I’ve mentioned before one of our Thanksgiving traditions is for each person at the table, starting with the youngest and finishing with the oldest (now me), to say what he or she is thankful for in the past year. This year although it will only be my wife and me at the Thanksgiving table we plan to continue the custom via Zoom with our frequent Thanksgiving guests.

I’ll say what I’m thankful for on Thanksgiving. Fingers crossed.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post Elizabeth Warren presents her to-do list to an incoming Biden Administration:

As Democrats celebrate the election of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris, we need to have an important conversation about building a 50-state party that can win up and down the ticket. But with a hobbled economy, an international health crisis, a vanishing middle class and widespread racial inequities, we also need to answer another important question — how to deliver on our campaign promises and improve the lives of the American people.

I think she must have missed the last election. Voters were either voting for or against Trump; the results of the election are more that Trump lost than that Biden won. And for every ballot initiative favored by progressives that were approved by voters there was at least one that was shot down including in Deep Blue California. Not to mention J. B. Pritzker’s “Fair Tax”.

She opens her list with things that President-Elect Biden has already pledged to do:

The president-elect has already committed to reentering the Paris Climate Accord, reinstating DACA and ending the travel ban against certain Muslim countries.

I think that reentering the Paris Climate Accord is something between meaningless and counterproductive; I think that the Congress should enact a version of DACA and that the SCOTUS decided wrongly in keeping President Obama’s executive order in place; I think that the “travel ban” is partly symbolic and partly practical. We should maintain travel restrictions WRT Saudi Arabia. In particular state-sponsored Wahhabi clerics should not be allowed to emigrate to the U. S.

Here are some of the other items on her list. I have taken the liberty of highlighting those with which I agree in green and those with which I disagree in red:

• Cancel billions of dollars in student loan debt
• Institute command pricing on “key drugs like insulin, naloxone, hepatitis C drugs and EpiPens”, nationalizing their patents
• Issue enforceable OSHA health and safety standards for covid-19. Specifics?
• Raise the minimum wage for all federal contractors to $15 an hour.
• Establish a Racial and Ethnic Disparities Task Force by collecting and reporting covid-19 data and reviewing racial disparities in pandemic funding. While I agree with this I do think it needs a closely-specified charter.
• Declare the climate crisis a national emergency
• Prioritize strong anti-monopoly protections and enforcement. Specifics?

I find the authoritarian cast of a number of her ideas alarming. I guess it does tell you the direction in which the wind is blowing.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Karl Rove advises President Trump and his supporters that the election is over and Trump lost:

There are only three statewide contests in the past half-century in which recounts changed the outcome: the 1974 New Hampshire Senate race, the 2004 Washington governor’s contest, and the 2008 Minnesota Senate election. The candidates in these races were separated, respectively, by 355, 261 and 215 votes after Election Day.

These margins aren’t much like today’s. Mr. Biden led Wednesday in Wisconsin by 20,540 votes, Pennsylvania by 49,064, Michigan by 146,123, Arizona by 12,614, Nevada by 36,870 and Georgia by 14,108.

To win, Mr. Trump must prove systemic fraud, with illegal votes in the tens of thousands. There is no evidence of that so far. Unless some emerges quickly, the president’s chances in court will decline precipitously when states start certifying results, as Georgia will on Nov. 20, followed by Pennsylvania and Michigan on Nov. 23, Arizona on Nov. 30, and Wisconsin and Nevada on Dec. 1. By seating one candidate’s electors, these certifications will raise the legal bar to overturn state results and make it even more difficult for Mr. Trump to prevail before the Electoral College meets Dec. 14.

While I am confident that the Trump campaign will be able to find incidental wrongdoing on the part of voters, election judges, boards of elections, and others, they’ll need much, much more than that to overturn the election. The remedy for those incidents will be to disqualify a few votes not the large reversals that Trump needs to win. It’s over.

While I like the outside-the-box think of this piece at Wired from Christopher Cox, proposing prioritization for immunization of certain individuals that I suspect will receive exactly zero traction:

WE’VE KNOWN ABOUT Covid-19 super-spreaders since the start of the pandemic. In January, a man transmitted the virus to 23 people during a bus ride on the Chinese coast south of Shanghai; in March, a member of a choir in Washington state passed it on to as many as 52 of her fellow singers; in August, the presence of an infected guest or guests at a wedding in Maine eventually led to more than 175 positive cases; and in September, President Trump hosted perhaps the most famous super-spreading event of all—a party to celebrate the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court that may have infected dozens of the most influential Republicans in Washington, along with members of the White House staff and press corps.

This is a pandemic defined by clusters. Some cause deadly outbreaks in nursing homes, prisons, and meatpacking plants. Others overwhelm families and friend groups. Although the numbers vary from study to study, SARS-CoV-2 seems to follow the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of cases stem from just 20 percent of infected individuals. Indeed, most people who test positive—one study in Hong Kong put the number at 69 percent—don’t spread the disease at all. They get infected, remain asymptomatic or fall sick, recover or die, all without passing along the virus to anyone. And then there are the patients like the lawyer from New Rochelle.

Super-spreading makes the virus especially confounding. It explains why some places had huge outbreaks while others were spared, at least for a while, and why the same risky behavior (an indoor wedding, say) can lead to dozens of cases—or none. But it’s also the virus’s weakness: Eliminate the super-spreaders and you end the pandemic.

as well as appreciating the hat tip to network analysis, I think they’re confusing two different things: events with conditions conducive to spreading the diseases and individuals who through behavior or biology are more likely to spread the disease. I think that actual empirical evidence to support either of those two hypotheses is still, sadly, lacking.

If “super-spreading” can be linked to behaviors and those behaviors can, for example, be associated with cellphone usage, that would be fantastic. It would make it much easier to identify people who are putting others at risk. But to date policy has been heavily targeted to events rather than to behavior, presumably under the assumption that risky behaviors can be linked to certain events. It would sure be nice to have empirical evidence for that. To formulate good policy, whether for prioritizing distribution of the vaccine when we have one or for formulating mitigation policies, we need to be able to disaggregate events from behavior or biology.

In his Wall Street Journal column William Galston makes some suggestions for areas in which President Biden and a Republican-controlled Senate may find common ground:

Suppose that President Biden chose to lead off his legislative agenda with issues that could command bipartisan majorities: expanded federal support for the Covid-19 testing and supplies that schools and other facilities will need to reopen safely; renewed support for small businesses and workers who have exhausted their unemployment benefits; a reasonable compromise on assistance to states and localities; and universal broadband access, which would benefit rural communities as well as low-income students in big cities.

With presidential backing, a compromise on policing and criminal-justice reforms between Republican Sen. Tim Scott’s bill and more far-reaching measures favored by House Democrats should be possible. And according to a recent survey, two-thirds of Americans—including nearly half of Republicans—favor legislation that would give legal status to the “Dreamers,” young adults brought to this country as minors by parents who entered the country illegally. President Biden could begin with this consensus measure while continuing work on a broader package of immigration reforms.

Unless Democrats win both the runoff elections in Georgia in January and take control of the Senate by the narrowest of margins, the relationship between President Biden and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will determine the legislative possibilities for at least the next two years. If Mr. Biden leads with broadly supported measures on which compromise is possible, how will Mr. McConnell respond?

Frankly, I’m skeptical of any of those passing the House, with or without arm-twisting from the president. In most cases the House would rather retain the issues that they can run on than accept solutions that are less than 100% of what they want.

I think the more interesting question is what will President Biden push to satisfy his Democratic supporters? The most likely prospects will be difficult to get through the Senate. So, for example, if Democrats had 50 or more seats in the Senate I would expect the “public option” to be the first thing they tackled, followed by something that could plausibly passed off as addressing climate change.

You might be interested in Isaac Arnsdorf, Ryan Gabrielson and Caroline Chen’s article at ProPublica’s on how prepared the states are for mass innoculations of their residents. Short version: not very:

As the first coronavirus vaccine takes a major stride toward approval, state governments’ distribution plans show many are not ready to deliver the shots.

The challenge is especially steep in rural areas, many of which are contending with a surge of infections, meaning that access to the first batch of COVID-19 vaccines may be limited by geography.

Pfizer announced Monday that its vaccine demonstrated more than 90% effectiveness and no serious bad reactions in early trial results — an impressive outcome that will pave the way for the company to seek an emergency authorization once it collects more safety data for another week or two. But establishing that the vaccine is safe and effective is just the first step.

The Pfizer vaccine is unusually difficult to ship and store: It is administered in two doses given 28 days apart, has to be stored at temperatures of about minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit and will be delivered in dry ice-packed boxes holding 1,000 to 5,000 doses. These cartons can stay cold enough to keep the doses viable for up to 10 days, according to details provided by the company. The ice can be replenished up to three times. Once opened, the packages can keep the vaccine for five days but can’t be opened more than twice a day. The vaccine can also survive in a refrigerator for five days but can’t be refrozen if unused.

Health officials haven’t figured out how to get the ultracold doses to critical populations living far from cities, according to a ProPublica review of distribution plans obtained through open records laws in every state. Needing to use 1,000 doses within a few days may be fine for large hospital systems or mass vaccination centers. But it could rule out sending the vaccine to providers who don’t treat that many people, even doctors’ offices in cities. It’s especially challenging in smaller towns, rural areas and Native communities on reservations that are likely to struggle to administer that many doses quickly or to maintain them at ultracold temperatures.

My naive suggestion is that ice cream trucks and the many reefer trucks already set up for frozen storage transport might be more effective means than retrofitting thousands of FedEx and UPS delivery trucks. It’s still going to be a massive logistical challenge and dealing with the states is like herding cats.