My favorite headline today, so far: Finally, Biden Cracks Down on Unvaccinated Snowflakes. In this article, Matthew Cooper writes,
When you get past all of the enumerated steps outlined in the president’s plan, the bottom line of the Biden approach is cracking down and cracking heads. This was Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino Biden in full “Get off my lawn” angry murmur. “Our patience is running thin,” Biden said to the jab free. There was no more c’mon-in-the-water’s-fine. It was a series of demands. If you work for the feds as an employee or contractor, you have to get a shot—no dodging with frequent testing. If you work for a company with 100 or more employees, you either get a shot or get tested often. We’ll use Medicaid, Medicare, Head Start, and any other program we can to make sure health care workers and educators get shots. He cited Fox News by name for requiring vaccinations—and then attacked Ron DeSantis and Gregg Abbott by name for their war on school districts with mask mandates. “Pandemic politics,” Biden sniffed. He vowed that the feds would reimburse any educators who had their salaries cut for defying the Florida and Texas governors’ anti-mask crusade. Biden also implored where he couldn’t use his power, even asking concert venues to impose vaccination requirements.
The provisions in yesterday’s speech have probably been in the works for a while. I suspect those provisions were written carefully to be sure the administration stayed within precedent and constitutional powers. As I have written in the past, public health emergency powers are generally considered to belong to state and local government. But it seems to me Biden used every loophole he could use.
The Right is going ballistic, as expected. They’re hollering about “civil disobedience” and legal challenges. Amber Philips writes that the Biden provisions are built on solid constitutional law and precedent, and the challenges ought to fail. I say “ought to” because we have too many unqualified Trump judges sitting on too many benches. It’s also the case that it might take a while before we see significant reduction in covid cases.
But let’s be clear what is happening right now. This is from William Saletan, Why the Party of 9/11 Couldn’t Handle Covid-19 at Slate.
Since the beginning of May, the rate of COVID deaths is more than 50 percent higher in red states than in blue states. When you break down the numbers by county, the gap is even worse. Death rates are nearly twice as high in red counties as in blue counties, and there’s a direct correlation between COVID fatalities and support for Trump. In counties where Trump got 60 percent to 80 percent of the vote, the death rate is twice as high as in counties where he got less than 40 percent. In counties where he got more than 80 percent of the vote, the death rate is three times as high.
This catastrophe dwarfs any terror attack. So far, COVID-19 has killed 650,000 Americans. That’s more than 200 times the death toll of 9/11. It’s nearly 100 times the combined number of U.S. military casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past 20 years. In August alone, the virus killed 30,000 Americans. That’s a 9/11 attack every three days.
See also Unvaccinated people were 11 times more likely to die of covid-19, CDC report finds.
And as long as so many people are offering their bodies as petri dishes for the development of new variants, it’s possible some variant will come along that can’t be controlled by any means.
It’s also the case that Republicans seem to be overestimating the political reach of vaccine resistance. About 65 percent of Americans over the age of 18 are fully vaccinated, and over 75 percent have had at least one shot. Older people — a key Republican constituency — are more likely to be vaccinated than younger people. Suburban voters that Republicans desperately need are more likely to be vaccinated than rural voters. Polls show that a solid majority of Americans support mask and vaccine mandates.
Republicans also don’t seem to realize that most large businesses will gladly use Biden’s directives to force their employees to be vaccinated. Many were already doing so. The bleeping pandemic is costing them bleeping money. A vaccinated workforce is more stable than an unvaccinated one. Employers probably will strongly incentivize employees to take the vaccination option rather than submit to weekly testing, which will cost some administrative overhead, at least.
For that large majority of Americans who already are vaccinated, the hysterical screaming coming from the resisters is just ridiculous. Snowflakes, indeed.
As of now, 5.64 billion doses of covid vaccines have been administered worldside. This has been going on for about ten months, right? We have lots of data showing the vaccines greatly reduce hospitalizations, deaths, and the spread of infection. There have not been widespread, severe side effects. Get the bleeping shots, people.
Josh Marshall writes that this isn’t just good policy, but good politics. So does Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo.
Dan Pfeiffer notes that while Republicans think they can weaponize masks and mandates for the midterms, they may be misreading the room. Vaccine mandates enjoy widespread support in a Politico/Morning Consult from August: about 55% including a third of Trump 2020 voters.
To capitalize on that Democrats need to do three things, Pfeiffer writes. They need to make Republicans wear their opposition to vaccine and mask mandates like an albatross and “hold them accountable for enabling the unvaccinated minority to put our children in danger.”
I absolutely agree that Democrats need to be talking from now until the midterms about the ways so many Republican governors and other office holders put children, and all of us, in continued danger. Vaccines work, and masks do reduce the spread of infection if most people wear them. Righties can scream that Biden is an authoritarian, but he’s not the one trying to block local governments from mitigating vaccine spread or forcing cruise companies to accept unvaccinated passengers.
The free market will start turning things around. Insurance companies are already mailing notices to business owners that they won't cover things such as this virus. Meaning the business owner is 100% liable if somebody catches the virus while shopping/dining/whatever in their place of business. Certainly they can gamble, but health insurance companies are already planning to raise rates if you remain unvaccinated.
The choice will become clear. Either do nothing and pay more or save more by paying nothing for a vaccine.
Yes some lucky person may become the incubator for the Epsilon variant. The Mutant variant that has even more super powers than the Delta mutation. The more cases of the virus there are on earth, the higher the probability that will happen.
To me that is a strong argument for all to do their part is getting case numbers down world wide. As I think of it though, the un-vaxxed, the anti-vaxxed, and/or vax-resistant people I know would not be persuaded at all with that notion. To them the jab is taboo, and no notion is stronger than the taboo juju except for perhaps some higher form of juju. So Biden did the best he could at persuasion in a benevolent Irish father figure sort of way. Still these efforts my well be too slow and too ineffective for a win over the virus.
The virus has no brain and no reproductive system of its own, yet is may defeat us in the long run. It has found a host that has transmitted it world wide in but a few months and it is on it's fourth variant at least. It's death toll is large, but the virus itself is "smart" enough without a brain not to kill too high a percentage of it's hosts. It has managed to mutate to a much more transmissible form and can now populate itself faster and to more ages. It has no color vision and is more blind than a bat, but knows red states and red counties have better breeding and mutating grounds. That from a very tiny molecule which only has some of the characteristics of a life form.
So those of us that can understand what we are up against and can translate the threat to high forms of juju need to get busy. We have many breeding hosts and mutation factories that need to be persuaded. Biden did as much as a politician can be expected to do. My command of Juju is too week to do much, All I can do is assess what we are up against, and one big problem is what resembles a voodoo hex on the jab. If we can't find some good hex busters we may all be doomed. At best we are in for some tough times and a rocky economic recovery. That is even without an Epsilon variant.
You know, the pandemic outcomes are what finally triggered me to ask "what did our 'institutions' protect us *from*? From all appearances, they only protected us from the literal overthrow of the Constitutional order by violence."
I mean, when you think of all the places they failed….
If I try to list more than a single example, I'll probably lose my train of thought, so, just as an obvious example: our 'institutions' didn't protect us from having people, dumb enough to conspire to work with the Russian government on an intelligence operation[1], get a security clearance so they could possibly provide intelligence to the Russian government.
And, let me note, this was one of the first failures, occurring significantly before the inauguration.
[1] and if they were so stupid they didn't realize that the "Russian government's support" == "Russian intelligence operation" it really does make the failure that much more vivid, and egregious.
What you say seems to be the situation, but do you have some links for references?
Boy, the Russians can do things on the cheap. It took the US 50 years to bleed the Soviets dry and it took Putin 5 or 6 years to unravel Us. He got us to hate ourselves.
It's about time we went on the offense. More, please!
At a big family event, Biden is Grandpaw, and he’s watching a bitter family dispute, and he's seen enough!
It's time to end this nasty quarreling. Time for Paw-paw to play umpire.
Paw-paw Joe knows that three out of the four family members are on the right (left {correct}) side of the issue.
At issue? Traffic lights and signs. One-quarter think they infringe on our freedom and liberty, and you have the right to disregard them if you like. The three-quarter majority thinks this is NUCKING-FUTS!!!
So Paw-paw Joe pulls the whole family together, and says, " Look folks, this isn't rocket-brain, or science-surgery, or whatever it is you kids say today. EVERYONE has to follow the traffic laws and signs! If you don't want to, don't drive. Stay home. And if someone has to drive you, pay them their cost. Don't be a cheapskate! Now, you can whine and moan all you want, and call me a tyrant or dictator, but that's the way it's gonna be.
"If a quarter of the people don't want to follow the rules, there'll be anarchy on the roadways. Traffic deaths will skyrocket! I mean, are you serious? 'I don't need to stop, I can just slow down some. I don't have to follow any rules about schoolbuses on the roads.' Seriously? That's what you think? What the hell's wrong with you?"
I tried to come-up with a better analogy, but the traffic rules one kept staying my favorite.
I ended Joe's little speech by asking, "What the hell's wrong with you?" And I think that's the right question.
And in the opening segment of tonight's show on MSNBC, Chris Hayes said something that I believe answers that question. But that answer opens up not only more questions, but begs for still more answers.
He gave a five-minute rant in Biden's new policy, and the way our Reich-wingers are reacting. And towards the end, he said something to the effect of, 'I haven't seen one tenth of the energy spent by the RepubliKKKLAN politicians on the people who got sick or died, and the ones who'll sicken and die until we stop this Covid virus, as they're spending on Biden and his Covid policies.'
And then Chris said, "Something is deeply broken with them."
And boy, is he right! Something really is deeply broken with them. And broken IN them, too.
Now what do we do about THAT?
What CAN we do about that?
I don't doubt Joe's sincerity, but he's also politically savvy. The 2022 election posturing has begun. The GOP intends to blame liberal democrats and Joe Biden for everything that's gone wrong since the Kennedy assassination.
Joe is going to make 2022 about Covid, how the politicization of the virus by Trump was kerosine on the fire. And still is. Everyone who got the vax and had good results should resent the "freedom" idiots who are prolonging the pandemic.
The GOP will try to make it about withdrawing from Afghanistan, but that will be a hard sell. People wanted out and the reports that it wasn't smooth will fade. Yeah, I know Joe's not on the ballot in 2022, but Trumpism and the effects of that lucancy should be. Joe's playing it right so far
My theory is that years ago there was a virus going around that showed no symptoms yet reduced cognitive ability by 73.8 percent. These people survived and became subject to right wing media because of a special ray emanating from their devices that dulled the pain of thinking for them.
One remaining side effect was to have the memory of goldfish.
That explains the times Ron Desantis spouts his drivel about dying from covid as a result of mask usage and regeneron is a cure for covid and he doesn't trust the government. Those last four words are an exact quote.
It is apparently only a coincidence that "governor", "govern" and "government" have so many of the same letters, otherwise someone would have pointed his statements mean he can't trust himself.
The goldfish don't even try to understand the incongruity and will happily support him in 2022 and even (I implore god to help me in her infinite wisdom) in 2024.
What to do? I can't even think. (OH MY GODDESS, THEY GOT TO ME TOO! LOOK A SQUIRREL!).
Maha – I'm sure I posted 1-2 Comments here yesterday. Did you yeet them? If so, plz tell me why so I can avoid wasting my time & yours in future.
I just had my 76th birthday; and I was trying to imagine if the stupid anti-vax people had taken the same attitude towards the polio vaccine where would we all be now. Maybe people aren't being crippled; but, they are dying from Covid. Anti-vax people are 11 times more likely to die than those of us who are vaccinated and wear masks. I hate wearing masks; but, I want to see my 77th birthday so I wear them. I have a collection of masks with cute kitties on them, choosing which one to wear makes up for having to wear them.