Tweet Of The Day- Vaccination

Until all hospitals require employees and any clinician walking thru the doors to be fully vaccinated it'd be hard to apply such a standard. Hospitals need to get their own house in order before they can make the safety argument.https://t.co/Vy9ww0HUZQ

— Jill (@TheRealJill_S) July 18, 2021

Well, tweet of yesterday, anyway.

On Saturday, The New York Times reported

Overall, Arkansas ranks near the bottom of states in the share of population that is vaccinated. Only 44 percent of residents have received at least one shot.

“Boy, we’ve tried just about everything we can think of,” a retired National Guard colonel, Robert Ator, who runs the state’s vaccination effort, said in an interview. For about one in three residents, he said, “I don’t think there’s a thing in the world we could do to get them to get vaccinated.”

For that, the state is paying a price. Hospitalizations have quadrupled since mid-May. More than a third of patients are in intensive care. Deaths, a lagging indicator, are also expected to rise, health officials said....

Even health care workers have balked. Statewide, only about 40 percent are vaccinated, Dr. Romero said.

In April, the state legislature added yet another roadblock, making it essentially illegal for any state or local entity, including public hospitals, to require coronavirus vaccination as a condition of education or employment until two years after the Food and Drug Administration fully licenses a shot. That almost certainly means no such requirements can be issued until late in 2023.

It's extraordinary when health care workers are not vaccinated, especially in what we hear constantly is an "exceptional" country.

As tweeter "Jill" argues, failure to be vaccinated cannot be used as a rationale for not treating an individual as long as hospitals permit their employees to work without vaccination. Of course, even if they impose a mandate, denying treatment to a patient raises very obvious and serious ethical issues.

Admittedly, many hospitals may be in a situation in which the demand for health care workers outstrips supply of qualified workers, thus preventing the institutions from mandating vaccines.(although not everywhere).

Maybe. But there is one industry which has no excuse: health insurance.

This gang of thieves remains in private hands. As private entities, they're permitted to exercise considerable discretion, usually to the detriment of the consumer, which discretion is restricted only by specific anti-discrimination laws pertaining to protected classes.

So most health insurance companies in most markets discriminate- as, for example, against smokers. Similarly, they could charge non-vaccinated individuals more than they charge the vaccinated. As a plus, it would be easier to confirm vaccination status than tobacco usage because everyone receives proof of vaccination upon getting the shot(s).  All that would be necessary is for a vaccinated consumer to present her company a copy or a screenshot of vaccination confirmation.

"We're all in this together" goes the popular coronavirus advertising slogan of 2020. It's less common now, perhaps because it is clearer that it is an inaccurate portrayal of the sentiment of Republican politicians and the men and women who love them. It's understandable, though possibly unfortunate, that hospitals are not requiring employees to be vaccinated and denial of treatment to patients who are not vaccinated would be extremely controversial. But health insurance companies have no such excuse, and their irresponsibility here is one more symptom of an industry which is too important to leave (primarily) to the private sector.

 

Share |

Tweet Of The Day- IRS Enforcement

Remember when the US made fun of what a failed state Greece was bc they couldn't collect taxes? https://t.co/OJJgnhgcdU

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) July 18, 2021

The Administration hopes the $80 billion for the Internal Revenue Service in the Democrats' bill would raise $700 billion over the next decades because it is intended 

to toughen IRS enforcement efforts as part of its "American Families Plan" proposal earlier this spring, as well as specific policy changes such as hiring agents to tackle complex returns, forcing firms to disclose more information and overhauling outdated technology. 

But the ghost of Johnny Paycheck hangs over the body politic. If the bill passes, it will be with very few if any GOP votes. Republicans would try to hang Democrats with the charge that the latter have imposed a massive middle class tax increase.

When Republicans cut IRS allocations during the Obama Administration, the agency responded as expected, going after the middle and working classes because their returns were low-hanging fruit. If the Internal Revenue Service gets more money from legislation supported exclusively (or almost so) by Democrats, the latter can't attack Republicans for merely protecting the rich (or even more impotently, for refusing to pay for spending).

They would have to name names. Attack the GOP for being the servile statements of this industry and that, this company and that. It would strike corporations which contribute to both parties as mean, and Democrats might recoil from their responsibility to call Republicans out. But unless they can convince voters that the GOP is representing their donors, those voters will believe Democrats are coming after them.

Share |

Not As A Bat Or Otherwise

Linking to a great video, the tweeter asks a legitimate question, one which in slightly different terms many people have asked:

I alone can fix it
Is he batshit crazy? pic.twitter.com/yeCRkcR5Gn

— Katie Johnson2020 (@KatieJohnson214) July 15, 2021

 

In the last few weeks of Donald Trump's presidency

As Trump ceaselessly pushed false claims about the 2020 presidential election, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, grew more and more nervous, telling aides he feared that the president and his acolytes might attempt to use the military to stay in office, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker report in “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year.”

Milley described “a stomach-churning” feeling as he listened to Trump’s untrue complaints of election fraud, drawing a comparison to the 1933 attack on Germany’s parliament building that Hitler used as a pretext to establish a Nazi dictatorship.

“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides, according to the book. “The gospel of the Führer.”

A spokesman for Milley declined to comment.

Portions of the book related to Milley — first reported Wednesday night by CNN ahead of the book’s July 20 release — offer a remarkable window into the thinking of America’s highest-ranking military officer, who saw himself as one of the last empowered defenders of democracy during some of the darkest days in the country’s recent history.

General Milley believed Trump might instigate a military coup to stay in office. 

Yet, though Donald Trump was impeached twice, he was acquitted twice. Several GOP members of the Senate and most GOP members of the House voted against certification of the electoral tally ratifying Trump's defeat for re-election. Nearly every Republican member of the House and Senate voted against establishing a bipartisan commission to investigate the attempted overthrow of the USA government, which was inspired and possibly instigated by President Trump  Seventy percent of the ballots in an anonymous straw poll at last weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference were cast for the former President..

Trump made more than $1.6 billion in outside income and revenue while in office. In the first five-and-a-half months since he left office, he billed the Secret Service more than $50,000 for lodging at Mar-a-Lago and Trump Bedminster (NJ).

He swindled the nation's taxpayers royally while he was President. He has not been indicted for anything (yet, anyway) and more than a third of those taxpayers want him to be President again, where he could again leverage his office, power, and influence to fleece those taxpayers. And there he'd be free from the hangman's noose because of the ludicrous legal opinion(s) that a sitting President cannot be charged with a criminal offense.

The ex-President remains far and away the most popular politician among rank-and-file Republicans and GOP members of Congress bow to his every whim. Moreover, in the unlikely circumstance in which he'd be elected President again, Trump would put into effect that "Fuhrer gospel" far more than he did in the previous four years.

The rhetoric and actions of Donald Trump are so far removed from human decency that some individuals in the left or the center cannot imagine that he could not be at least slightly deranged. But he understands learned behavior and knows what he can and cannot get away with to satisfy his every desire. That is not a mentally unwell man. That is an evil man.

 

Share |

Would Be Game Over

"Have you no sense of decency, sir?" Rebecca Onion has written

During the televised Army-McCarthy hearings in June 1954 Army counsel Joseph Welch famously asked that question of Sen. Joseph McCarthy after McCarthy brought up the details of a young lawyer’s past membership in a left-wing professional association accused of communism. We tend to recall the query as a narrative coup de grâce coming out of nowhere. But the “no sense of decency” line worked because most of McCarthy’s party, at that point, was finally done with him. The Army-McCarthy hearings were a product of President Eisenhower’s decision to try to curb McCarthy’s power. Bringing McCarthy down required the leveraging of moderate Republican distaste for McCarthy’s personality and methods, the novelty of the televised hearings, and a little bit of sexual panic.... 

The end of McCarthy, which we remember as so satisfyingly final, did not actually mean the end of McCarthyism. Anti-Communist crusading began before McCarthy took it up, and it persisted in various forms, perpetrated by politicians of both parties, long after he was censured in December 1954 and died in 1957. And if you look at some of McCarthy’s other populist political tools—his twisting of the truth, his hatred for “elitist” intellectualism, his insider-outsider “true American” rhetoric—it becomes clear that we’ve still got plenty of McCarthyism with us today.

Onion wrote those words, and that passage, in Slate in July, 2018. Almost exactly three years ago to the day, it is clearer still that we still have plenty of McCarthyism with us, after the Joe McCarthy+ of today has been beaten, thrown out of office, exposed as a full-time criminal grifter, and still controls his Party.

So when Joe Biden gave his voting rights speech yesterday at perhaps the safest spot in nearly the most Democratic city in the USA, National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, he knocked the Republican Party by name a few times. However, he was unable or unwilling to name names, ostentatiously avoiding the words "Donald Trump" or "President Trump" or "Trump."

He did, however, promise “We’ll be asking my Republican friends in Congress, in the states and cities and counties, to stand up, for God’s sake, and help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our election and the sacred right to vote. Have you no shame?”

"No, in fact, they don’t. And he knows it," writes Charlie Pierce, who is right about the first and, evidence suggests, wrong about the second.  After all these years, Democrats still don't completely understand that Republicans, hard at work in states across the USA denying the right to vote and undermining democracy, do not work in the context of shame or guilt.  It's not in their DNA, figuratively. Asking them for shame is akin to asking Calvinist Protestants about the Assumption of Mary or Roman Catholics about Limited atonement. It doesn't compute.

Seemingly unaware, Joe Biden asserts he will "be asking my Republican friends in Congress" and across the country to stand up for "the sacred right to vote."  He demands they do it "for God's sake," which comes across to those "friends" only as a pitiful plea from a faux tough guy. He begs in the name of the Almighty for cooperation from a Party which (like he) recognizes only one god, but in its case a Queens millionaire.

Nor would Joe Biden utter the four-syllable word "filibuster," this a tactic which chokes off legislation which would ensure that sacred right to vote. He meanwhile remains committed to infrastructure reform, calculating that no one can be opposed to infrastructure and that Democrats in competitive states could use a win. However

You can’t declare that we’re facing the worst threat to democracy since the civil war, then go back to working your heart out for infrastructure instead of democracy. Please, somebody — 𝒂𝒏𝒚𝒃𝒐𝒅𝒚 — tell the president it’s 2021 and not 1991.

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) July 14, 2021

To President Biden, it's 1991 (or 1954).  If he gets infrastructure legislation, there will be plaudits from the left and the center, traditional and non-traditional media, politicians and pundits alike. But if the Democratic Party fails to reform the filibuster and gain passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the We the People Act, Joe Biden and the country win the battle and lose the war.

 

Share |

Not About History

Merriam-Webster: The Jig is Up (idiom)- (US, informal + old-fashioned)—used to say that a dishonest plan or activity has been discovered and will not be allowed to continue

The jig is up: where did you hide the stolen goods?

 

The jig is up. 

The National Education Association, energized by critical race theory and the 1619 Project- and by efforts in several states to restrict or prohibit teaching them- on July 3 at its national convention, adopted "New Business Item 39."  Randy Weingarten, president of the other major teachers' union, the American Federation of Teachers, vowed three days later  "Mark my words: Our union will defend any member who gets in trouble for teaching honest history. Teaching the truth is not radical or wrong. Distorting history and threatening educators for telling the truth is what is truly radical and wrong.”

Responding to controversy, the NEA scrubbed the provision from its website on July 6, though the union has helpfully, and courageously, chosen not to delete it from its Twitter feed.

Item C includes "it is reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed by academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory." Presumably, the NEA means ".... by academic frameworks, including critical race theory, for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society." An English teacher on the organization's board would be a welcome addition.

A history curriculum- one hopes that it is limited to that- should consider academic frameworks for interpreting the impact of the past on current society. Alas, that is not the intent of the NEA, which in item B vows 

to provide an already-created, in-depth study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of society....

As I type this, blogger spellcheck informs me that "cisheteropatriarchy" is not a word, evidently because it is made up by the union's Ethnic Affairs Caucuses. (Yes, that's plural, as in caucuses, one being insufficient.)  Unfortunately, it cannot explain the connection of patriarchy, ableism, and anthropocentrism to ethnicity.

These are words created to support an ideological agenda so extreme and brazenly elitist that it includes several words- indigeneity, ableism, anthropocentrism, and the aforementioned cisheteropatriarchy- which most people have never heard of.  (For the record, I myself am in favor of being able to throw a football as Patrick Mahomes does. I cannot, thus am the victim of ableism, evidently.)

The key, however, is that the NEA speaks not of the history of the nation, of its founding and development, including slavery, lynching, discrimination, and the like. It refers- in the present tense- to the "forms of power and oppression at the intersection of society."  This educational demand is an integral part of the movement Wesley Yang labels "the successor ideology," which

is about: the end of due process, the rejection of even an attempt at objectivity, a belief in active race and sex discrimination (“equity”) to counter the legacy of the past, the purging of ideological diversity, and the replacement of liberal education with left-indoctrination.

It is not even intended to be an honest evaluation of our nation's history, to teach the past in all (or any of) its complexity. It is about  indigeneity, ableism, anthropocentrism, and the aforementioned cisheteropatriarchy, sins which the educational anti-isms believe define- not affect, but define- American society today. (The video below was posted on June 20, well before the NEA inadvertently exposed the myth of CRT as pertaining predominantly to history.)

Enter stage left the critical race theorists of the NEA, AFT, and their ideological allies begging a backlash. If their approach is adopted, there would  be a significant exodus of the middle class from public schools. Ironically, this has been a primary aim of the education "reform" movement, which has promoted vouchers, charter schools, and other privatizing schemes the past quarter century. 

Racial and economic segregation will be enhanced. (It's not coincidental that the father of critical race theory criticized the decision in Brown v. Board of Education.) The public school system will be plunged into crisis, an unintended, but very likely, consequence of a successful crusade by the teaches' unions. 

 

Share |

The Surge That Was Exaggerated

In its ongoing series on "George Floyd and America," The New York Times recently published "Support for Black Lives Matter Surged Last Year. Did It Last?"  The piece was written by Hakeem Jefferson, an "assistant professor political science at Stanford University," and by Jennifer Chudy. an "assistant professor of social sciences and political science at Wellesley College." (Political science is not a social science at Wellesley?)

Among their findings, based on data from Civiqs, was that support for Black Lives Matter:

a) surged within the USA following the killing of George Floyd, though most among Latinos, followed by "others," then "blacks," and least of all among whites (though still a substantial rise);

b) a year after the crime, has dropped slightly among blacks and considerably among the other three ethnic groups;

c) is lower now among whites (and Republicans) than it was prior to the killing on May 25, 2020.

Yes, that's right. Both whites and Republicans, whose numbers overlap, support Black Lives Matter much less than they did prior to 2020, and generally oppose it.

That's astounding, or at least it would be- were it to notice- in the mainstream media, most of which was giddy upon finding widespread support for Black Lives Matter following the murder of George Floyd. A new era of respect for black Americans and, possibly, of contempt for local police forces was eagerly anticipated.

Survey results, as well as conclusions drawn from them, are always suspect. That's particularly the case here. Jefferson/Chudy analyze support for the upper-case Black Lives Matter, yet eight times refer to the movement. The survey itself exclusively utilized the upper-case

That's a critical distinction because messaging matters. In the video below, Charles Blow can be seen (at 2:38) asking 

There have been some politicians, including James Carville and even former president Barack Obama, who have suggested that the invocation of the phrase "defund the police" has been actually harmful to Democrats because it was harmful in the way people- the general public interpreted it. I assume tgat they mean in the way that white people interpreted it. Do you believe that has some impact on the way white people and Republicans supported or did not support Black Lives Matter?

 

Chudy was equivocal, odd because it is inarguable that GOP exploitation of the phrase "defund the police" has hurt Democrats, even though few Democratic politicians and/or officials have invoked the actual phrase, other than to warn against using it. Nonetheless, Republicans have been able to pin the phrase on Democrats. While murders have gone up in the USA, most crime- including serious crime- has not. Yet, the  mainstream media has dutifully propagated the notion that crime generally is rising, helping the GOP scare voters at a time when Democrats control the presidency, the House of Representatives, and (technically) the Senate 

Most jurisdictions have not made significant police reforms since Floyd's murder. However, the American people, stoked by a media which was cheered by the possibility of significant reform, likely believe otherwise. People hear that police have been demoralized since the Floyd protests, and seeds for a backlash are planted.

Moreover, messaging is not only important, but possible determinative. It was difficult to resist the slogan "black lives matter" because few people would deny that black lives matter. Many other people would refuse to admit to a pollster opposition to "black lives matter" (or Black Lives Matter). The person on the other end of the phone line rarely if ever sounds like the prototypical conservative- white; not young; not college-educated.  Giving the answer the pollster expects or would prefer is the path of least resistance.

It's a dirty little secret that neither academicians, journalists, nor pundits (certainly not politicians!) will admit: people lie. They lie to families, friends, co-workers, and especially strangers. Someone calling in June, 2020 to ask their opinion about a racial matter is a stranger. One year out, it's becoming ever clearer that America as a whole has not been as enamored of the movement as we were led to believe.

Share |

What, No "Bolshevism"?

In 2018 Taylor Swift urged voters to reject the bid for the U.S. Senate of Republican Marsha Blackburn in favor of Democrat Phil Bredesen. Blackburn won easily but not before Swift had blasted her in an Instagram post, remarking

I cannot vote for someone who will not be willing to fight for dignity for ALL Americans, no matter their skin color, gender or who they love. Running for Senate in the state of Tennessee is a woman named Marsha Blackburn. As much as I have in the past and would like to continue voting for women in office, I cannot support Marsha Blackburn. Her voting record in Congress appalls and terrifies me. She voted against equal pay for women. She voted against the Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which attempts to protect women from domestic violence, stalking, and date rape. She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples. She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values. I will be voting for Phil Bredesen for Senate and Jim Cooper for House of Representatives.

Taylor hit (almost) all of the (relatively safe) cultural g-spots- supporting equal pay for women, same sex marriage, and racial civil rights while opposing domestic violence, date rape, and discrimination against gay individuals.  She left out reproductive freedom and discrimination rationalized by alleged religious faith, but, hey, she has a career to protect.

So now the Tennessee Senator has taken to denouncing Swift:

Marsha Blackburn appears to be confusing socialism with Sharia. Is there an IQ test you have to fail to be a Republican politician? https://t.co/pMLxE7U5a0

— Duty To Warn 🔉 (@duty2warn) July 9, 2021

Taylor Swift may oppose rule by the wealthiest .1%, but it's not a priority, unless those rulers are from an unapproved racial or sexual group. Although Senator Blackburn is describing Sharia, she probably is aware that Swift's beef with her is not over monopoly, anti-trust, government deregulation, or taxation or anything obstructing the lower or working classes. 

Nonetheless, Blackburn ends her attack on Swift with "They don't allow protection of private intellectual property rights."

Private. Property. She is singing from the old GOP playbook in which one economic class is entitled by divine right to rule over the others.

It may be no coincidence that President Trump's once sobriety-deprived quack of a doctor is going the same route:

Rep. Ronny Jackson describes Democrats as "socialist communist Marxist" pic.twitter.com/C5owdD9wHv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 9, 2021

Republicans promote anti-minority policies, the most notable and significant being voter suppression. However, they often are afraid of confronting the culture wars directly.  The "socialist" thing is safer because it shields Republicans from being labeled "misogynistic" or, worse yet, "racist." so over the next 16 months, there will be more of this.

Democrats are not defenseless. Try"if helping mothers with child care...," "if regulating Big Tech...." or "if public education of our children...."  Otherwise, there is the old standby: "Republicans used to call Social Security and Medicare 'socialist.'"  Sometimes, truth is the best defense and offense.

Share |