Katherine Johnson, hard at work at NASA back in the day.
Very quickly here at the end of the day:
- New SC poll shows Biden in stronger position — Good news, and I hope it’s right, but part of it goes against my sense of what’s happening. It says it’s a two-man race between Joe and Bernie, with Joe having a good lead. It discounts Tom Steyer, and that feels off to me. The guy has spent millions here (it was $14 million a month ago on broadcast ads alone, and he seems to have stepped things up since then), in South Carolina trying to eat into Joe’s support among black voters, and it’s hard to believe that’s not having some effect (and of course, the effect would be to help Bernie by hurting Joe). But we’ll see…
- SIDEBAR: Buttigieg rallies with SC McDonald’s workers — And apparently has a run-in with some Black Voters Matter counter-protesters. Apparently, it got kinda rowdy, with the protesters chasing after Pete and yelling at him as he left after his remarks… No, wait — that was members of a group called the Black Youth Project. I don’t know. I wasn’t there, and didn’t have a program.
- SIDEBAR: Elizabeth Warren urges supporters to keep fighting during Charleston event — What else would she urge them to do? “Fight” is her favorite verb…
- Harvey Weinstein Is Found Guilty of Sex Crimes in #MeToo Watershed — So it’s official: He’s a slimeball. Had you doubted it? I had not…
- India’s Modi Welcomes U.S. Leader With An Epic Party — He speaks to a cheering crowd of 100,000 alongside India’s nationalist leader, his good bud.
- Coronavirus cases spike outside China; Italy confirms 5th death — Now it’s breaking out in Italy?
- Katherine Johnson, ‘hidden figure’ at NASA during 1960s space race, dies at 101 — As a big fan of the space program, I honor her. And I need to see that movie; I haven’t yet.
- Julian Assange Extradition Hearing Begins In London — I hope the Brits have a really big book, and that they throw it at him. Remember, this guy helped give us Trump.
I couldn’t find the embed code for that 2010 SNL sketch in which Bill Hader played Assange. So just click on the image.
Related Posts
You need an open thread,instead.
These subjects are depressing…
Yeah, I tend to put in more fun stuff when it’s an Open Thread. Maybe tomorrow.
There was just so much news today, figured I should do a VFP.
Back when I was a young front page editor in the 80s, the idea of deciding whether or not to do a front page would have been pretty alien to me. You did a front page every day, or… well, I don’t know what, but I would have assumed the world would come to an end.
I guess in a way it’s nice to have the freedom to do one or not. But on the other hand, it was nice to get paid to do one every day…
tomorrow or just another day…
Good news, and I hope it’s right, but part of it goes against my sense of what’s happening. It says it’s a two-man race between Joe and Bernie, with Joe having a good lead.
-Brad
That’s in a PPP poll which tends to have a bit of a Democratic Party establishment bias. A Marist poll, a pollster with an A rating by Fivethirtyeight, gives Biden a slim 4 point lead among likely voters (only 1 point among registered voters). Cherry picking polls will make you look foolish. Best to cite polling averages. Biden’s lead is clearly shrinking. He may hang on in SC but he probably won’t get 36% of the vote. Maybe we should all vote for Bernie and put this disastrous primary season behind us once and for all.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary-d/
maybe,not
Bud, I did not “cherry pick” a poll.
I decided to do a VFP. I went to thestate.com. (The first thing I do when I’m about to do a VFP or an Open Thread is open eight tabs on a browser — The State, the WSJ, the NYT, the BBC, NPR, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and the Post and Courier. That was The State’s top story. The thing it said about a “two-man” race made me want to argue with it. So I used it, and expressed my doubts. Then I moved on to the next thing….
My top story would have been the stock market slide in response to the coronavirus. In a related story Rachael Maddow was reporting tonight on the number of senior officials purged, and not replaced, at the DHS. We are woefully unprepared to deal with a world health pandemic.
You make a good case, bud. I went with the political stuff since it’s the week of the primary, but I didn’t quite follow the Buzz Merritt rules of What Constitutes a Lede. Buzz would probably have chewed me out for leading with a poll instead of with something that had happened. He was a stickler about that.
So I can see it either way. I just went with what’s hot in SC, in keeping with the proximity factor in deciding news play.
And I went with the spreading-to-Italy factor instead of the stock market because I thought we had already been seeing the effect on the market for a number of days. Still, the market effect was more dramatic today than it had been before.
Right now, the Post is leading with “Markets’ plunge over coronavirus fears underscores political risk for Trump“… I thought about that one when I was putting this VFP together, but I didn’t like the “what’s the political effect” angle they took with it. Seemed like they were going with a legitimate hard news story, but cheesing it up with the political angle. So I went with people dying in Italy…
Coronavirus can’t compete w/Carolina car crashes…