On the heels of yesterday’s testimony by former acting attorney general Jeffrey A. Rosen before the Senate Judiciary Committee, former president Trump hit the Fox News Channel to try to turn the conversation back to an attack on President Joe Biden’s handling of the coronavirus.
Rant coming, and I'm aware that I'm preaching to the choir.
The NYT has a recent opinion piece titled What to Do with your Covid Rage. I'm too angry to even read it. My anger is all that's keeping me moving and from falling into despair.
I am a fully vaxed RN and also LMT. I saw a fully vaxed client last week , close contact obviously, and both of us wearing masks, a practice I reinstated recently as I kept hearing about "breakthrough cases". That evening, she called to tell me her adult daughter who lives with her and is an RN at a hospital but refused vaccination, had tested positive. My client tested positive the following day. Now here I sit, ranting to you, instead of the activities with others I had planned for my week. I'll lose a good chunk of income from this quarantine but the worst is not being able to visit with my son, DIL and grandson as planned for the first time in two months (you see where some of the despair comes in).
This is not the fault of immigrants, nor the CDC, nor Biden's administration as Faux would have us believe. This is the fault of a spoiled. entitled, ignorant young woman who, despite having become a nurse, has shunned science, and accepted conspiracy theories as a personal practice. Not only did she refuse vaccination, but in the face of rising cases and a dangerous variant, did nothing preventively to protect her parents at home from sharing the virus with them. No mask, no distancing. I imagine she would defend herself by saying, "Well, if the vaccine is so great, why do I need to do any of that?"
I've been thinking a lot about my mother in law. Dot and I did not always see eye to eye. She may even have voted for Trump in 2016 as she had come to increasingly refer to Obama as a socialist. But she was rightly proud to be a Massachusetts General Hospital School of Nursing graduate and worked as an RN her whole life. She and her colleagues worked like slaves as students at the hospital with no gloves, cloth masks, no protection against needle sticks. She felt nursing as a calling and was devoted, not in a smarmy way but a smart way, to the best possible patient care. She thought critically about things and didn't often hesitate to tell a doctor what she really thought or was afraid was going on with a patient. She nursed before a polio vaccine. I remember talking about universal precautions when I became a nurse in the early years of the HIV epidemic and she said, "you can't tell from looking at who you think your patient is whether they carry a dangerous infectious disease in their blood or body fluids or respiratory tract; we don't know what might be there that hasn't even been discovered yet.". She was a thinking nurse who cared at least as much about her patient's well-being and the public good as her own health and that of her family. She understood that her family's health was tied to the health of the community. She died in 2017 and she would be so appalled that nurses are turning away from what evidence has shown us is a safe, effective vaccine against serious illness from Covid, because they believe, against all evidence, that it might be worse for them than the virus itself. That it's all about them, not the patients, not the 60+ parents, not the public's health, is what she wouldn't be able to comprehend. She suffered no illusions about humanity and she cared for the ridiculous as well as any other patient. But that RNs all across the country could behave this way, that would be shocking to her. I wonder what she would have done with her Covid rage.
Jane Mayer, in her August 9, 2021 report on the rich conservatives funding Trump's Big Lie about the 2020 election, documents the myriad dirty tricks wealthy, anti-democratic forces such as the Bradley Foundation deploy in their attempt to overthrow what's left of representative democracy in America and maintain the oligarch's hold on power. It's a grim account of the Trump republicans ongoing assault on voting rights and the lies they spread to distort the perceptions of ordinary Americans.
"Since the 2020 election," Mayer writes, "this movement has evolved into a broader and more aggressive assault on democracy. According to some surveys, a third of Americans now believe that Biden was illegitimately elected, and nearly half of Trump supporters agree that Republican legislators should overturn the results in some states that Biden won. Jonathan Rauch, of the Brookings Institution, recently told The Economist, 'We need to regard what's happening now as epistemic warfare by some Americans on other Americans.'"
Mayer's valuable piece confirms that we are now indeed on a wartime footing in our politics in this country, a war started by Trump and his band of miscreant outliers. By identifying the players and in exposing their deceits, including their attempts to falsely blame Biden's immigration policies for the spread of the Delta variant, Mayer has performed a valuable service by making it clear who the enemies of democracy are and thus helping lay the groundwork for prosecutors as they work to hold these grifters accountable.
I don't know if this administration can actually get to the point where they are willing to play hard ball. Biden apparently (according to reports over the weekend) is contemplating holding up funding for schools that refuse to have mask and vaccine mandates. Somehow I doubt that will work.
In my world this is a "Time's Up" moment but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the mindset of the White House. My suggestion: start hitting Fox Not-the-News with dozens of lawsuits and start making a lot of noise about it. Start talking about sedition laws and introduce legislation that makes disinformation--the deliberate lying--about crisis situations subject to them. It's a little John Adams-onian but it would be interesting to see what happens. Use Op-Ed people as mouthpieces of more extreme round 'em up and stick 'em on an island tactics. Yes: I really am done.
In the meantime, Garth Brooks, who has never been someone I think of as a hero, told people who wanted tickets to his concert in KC that they could get a ticket to the front row if they got vaccinated AT THE CONCERT. I am not sure but I think ticket sales were dependent on vaccination status (I think his entire tour is vaccinated-only). Apparently so many people who claimed they were having "trouble" getting vaccinated (it's free at EVRY CVS DRUGSTORE IN KC) lined up for the jab to get a ticket. Hmmmmmmm.
Where are the moderate leaders Republicans like Mitt Romney? Why are they not standing up and taking the megaphone away from demagogues like Ron Desantis and Rand Paul? Their silence is as much to blame for the state of our country as the screed coming from the immoral power hungry autocrats.
If immigrants were truly bringing and spreading COVID, all the more reason to protect ourselves: vaccines for all who can and masks in schools. These methods have been proven effective by the credentialed scientists who study them, the highest authority we have on medical issues. Any politician who claims to know better is delusional and dangerous.
Authoritarianism does not happen suddenly. It’s like the collapse of the Florida condominium. Just like the concrete, over time democratic principles erode slowly, and suddenly our democracy comes crashing down.
Having done well for themselves for forty years by squeezing Americans economically and using the resulting distress and money to blame “those other people”, Republican politicians have gone one step further by effectively promoting the coronavirus pandemic. Their apparent goal is to weaken the country further, creating chaos and fear to feed their fascist campaigning.
Deadly lies. Twisted information. We are at risk for more than Delta. It has nothing to do with immigrants. Who is behind this quest for fascism? Who wishes to fell America to the idjts of authoritarianism? Why? This grand experiment quivers in the cross hairs of some potential despot. And other, perhaps more lethal, variants will arise. Fearful of our future, waiting for actions of congresscritters and DOJ to be timely and meaningful.
Heather Cox Richardson is 100% right. A million percent right!!! We are being led by FOX FIX Tucker and Sean and Trump and Rupert Murdoch to follow Viktor Orban and Hungarian fascism. Mussolini and Hitler are smiling.
It seems to me that is is rather clear that Fox News is a prime source of the disinformation going round, from all the references to what they purvey. And beyond that is the sea change in our communications media as a result of the FCC Fairness Doctrine being revoked in 1987, which allowed outlets a free hand to broadcast lies. There is little hope of a shared set of facts under these circumstances.
Another super spreader in Sturgis right now. No masks. Hospitals filled up again. Fox. Rand Paul. Big dark money. Florida. Texas. Send the children back to school. Stones. Glass houses. Nightmares. Lies. Stupidity. Colossal nerve of x45 iDJT mass murderer to even show his face in public. Blaming immigrants! Can you imagine?
Well, I'd simply amend by saying it takes us one step closer to civil conflict. I recently watched a prospective "If there were a second civil war, what would happen video." A lot of it was impossibly contextualized or supposed. One thing it, interestingly, restated (it was a 2nd version) was that the threat of gun-owning/leave-me-alone types actually DON'T band together and move to violence as a cohort very well. I'm not enough of a historian or sociologist to agree or disagree, but what I think we DO know is that many leaders of The Right, are willing to do exactly that: do whatever it takes to stir up, keep stirred up and yes, as we saw on Jan 6, move people to violence. In fact, I think Jan 6 made them more dangerous in a way. I think several of them, since then, have inured themselves to any previous fears they had about the consequences of civil unrest. I believe they WANT to push for the next step. Again, as I say almost daily: vigilance. We must remain aware of exactly WHAT is going on, what it means, and the ramifications. Ordinary citizens cannot let their weariness--of the bickering, the lies, the pandemic, etc--allow them to withdraw and not pay close attention.
To me it’s pretty simple with respect to the anti-vaxxers: Don’t want to get vaccinated? Okay. But, freedom of choice does not mean freedom from consequences. So, that means that your health insurer should be completely free to hike your rates and deny coverage for any Covid treatment that you may require. Hospitals should be able to bill you whatever they want for Covid treatment. Oh, and lest I forget, any medical bills necessitated by Covid treatment should not be permitted to be discharged in a bankruptcy filing.
Note: None of this would apply to anyone who has a medical issue that prevents them from getting vaccinated.
For the hope the letter of Aug 7 brought, this one dashes that little spark. I'm so tired of reading about the lies being spewed by Faux Follies. Where are the truth tellers, and why aren't they given equal time? Why has insanity become the norm?
Here is an interesting quote by Bertolt Brecht (10 February 1898 - 14 August 1956). He was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director of the 20th century. You may remember the song "Mack the Knife" which he wrote.
"The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn't hear, doesn't speak nor participate in the political events. He doesn't know the cost of life, the price of the bean, or the flour, of the rent, or the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn't know that from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician corrupted, and flunky of the national and multinational companies."
Rant coming, and I'm aware that I'm preaching to the choir.
The NYT has a recent opinion piece titled What to Do with your Covid Rage. I'm too angry to even read it. My anger is all that's keeping me moving and from falling into despair.
I am a fully vaxed RN and also LMT. I saw a fully vaxed client last week , close contact obviously, and both of us wearing masks, a practice I reinstated recently as I kept hearing about "breakthrough cases". That evening, she called to tell me her adult daughter who lives with her and is an RN at a hospital but refused vaccination, had tested positive. My client tested positive the following day. Now here I sit, ranting to you, instead of the activities with others I had planned for my week. I'll lose a good chunk of income from this quarantine but the worst is not being able to visit with my son, DIL and grandson as planned for the first time in two months (you see where some of the despair comes in).
This is not the fault of immigrants, nor the CDC, nor Biden's administration as Faux would have us believe. This is the fault of a spoiled. entitled, ignorant young woman who, despite having become a nurse, has shunned science, and accepted conspiracy theories as a personal practice. Not only did she refuse vaccination, but in the face of rising cases and a dangerous variant, did nothing preventively to protect her parents at home from sharing the virus with them. No mask, no distancing. I imagine she would defend herself by saying, "Well, if the vaccine is so great, why do I need to do any of that?"
I've been thinking a lot about my mother in law. Dot and I did not always see eye to eye. She may even have voted for Trump in 2016 as she had come to increasingly refer to Obama as a socialist. But she was rightly proud to be a Massachusetts General Hospital School of Nursing graduate and worked as an RN her whole life. She and her colleagues worked like slaves as students at the hospital with no gloves, cloth masks, no protection against needle sticks. She felt nursing as a calling and was devoted, not in a smarmy way but a smart way, to the best possible patient care. She thought critically about things and didn't often hesitate to tell a doctor what she really thought or was afraid was going on with a patient. She nursed before a polio vaccine. I remember talking about universal precautions when I became a nurse in the early years of the HIV epidemic and she said, "you can't tell from looking at who you think your patient is whether they carry a dangerous infectious disease in their blood or body fluids or respiratory tract; we don't know what might be there that hasn't even been discovered yet.". She was a thinking nurse who cared at least as much about her patient's well-being and the public good as her own health and that of her family. She understood that her family's health was tied to the health of the community. She died in 2017 and she would be so appalled that nurses are turning away from what evidence has shown us is a safe, effective vaccine against serious illness from Covid, because they believe, against all evidence, that it might be worse for them than the virus itself. That it's all about them, not the patients, not the 60+ parents, not the public's health, is what she wouldn't be able to comprehend. She suffered no illusions about humanity and she cared for the ridiculous as well as any other patient. But that RNs all across the country could behave this way, that would be shocking to her. I wonder what she would have done with her Covid rage.
Jane Mayer, in her August 9, 2021 report on the rich conservatives funding Trump's Big Lie about the 2020 election, documents the myriad dirty tricks wealthy, anti-democratic forces such as the Bradley Foundation deploy in their attempt to overthrow what's left of representative democracy in America and maintain the oligarch's hold on power. It's a grim account of the Trump republicans ongoing assault on voting rights and the lies they spread to distort the perceptions of ordinary Americans.
"Since the 2020 election," Mayer writes, "this movement has evolved into a broader and more aggressive assault on democracy. According to some surveys, a third of Americans now believe that Biden was illegitimately elected, and nearly half of Trump supporters agree that Republican legislators should overturn the results in some states that Biden won. Jonathan Rauch, of the Brookings Institution, recently told The Economist, 'We need to regard what's happening now as epistemic warfare by some Americans on other Americans.'"
Mayer's valuable piece confirms that we are now indeed on a wartime footing in our politics in this country, a war started by Trump and his band of miscreant outliers. By identifying the players and in exposing their deceits, including their attempts to falsely blame Biden's immigration policies for the spread of the Delta variant, Mayer has performed a valuable service by making it clear who the enemies of democracy are and thus helping lay the groundwork for prosecutors as they work to hold these grifters accountable.
A friend of mine who asked an acquaintance if she had been vaccinated got the response "Of course not - I'm a Republican".
Blaming immigrants is despicable. I know it is simplistic, but parallels with 1930s Germany are unavoidable
I don't know if this administration can actually get to the point where they are willing to play hard ball. Biden apparently (according to reports over the weekend) is contemplating holding up funding for schools that refuse to have mask and vaccine mandates. Somehow I doubt that will work.
In my world this is a "Time's Up" moment but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the mindset of the White House. My suggestion: start hitting Fox Not-the-News with dozens of lawsuits and start making a lot of noise about it. Start talking about sedition laws and introduce legislation that makes disinformation--the deliberate lying--about crisis situations subject to them. It's a little John Adams-onian but it would be interesting to see what happens. Use Op-Ed people as mouthpieces of more extreme round 'em up and stick 'em on an island tactics. Yes: I really am done.
In the meantime, Garth Brooks, who has never been someone I think of as a hero, told people who wanted tickets to his concert in KC that they could get a ticket to the front row if they got vaccinated AT THE CONCERT. I am not sure but I think ticket sales were dependent on vaccination status (I think his entire tour is vaccinated-only). Apparently so many people who claimed they were having "trouble" getting vaccinated (it's free at EVRY CVS DRUGSTORE IN KC) lined up for the jab to get a ticket. Hmmmmmmm.
Where are the moderate leaders Republicans like Mitt Romney? Why are they not standing up and taking the megaphone away from demagogues like Ron Desantis and Rand Paul? Their silence is as much to blame for the state of our country as the screed coming from the immoral power hungry autocrats.
Thank you, Heather.
If immigrants were truly bringing and spreading COVID, all the more reason to protect ourselves: vaccines for all who can and masks in schools. These methods have been proven effective by the credentialed scientists who study them, the highest authority we have on medical issues. Any politician who claims to know better is delusional and dangerous.
Authoritarianism does not happen suddenly. It’s like the collapse of the Florida condominium. Just like the concrete, over time democratic principles erode slowly, and suddenly our democracy comes crashing down.
Can it be repaired before it does?
Having done well for themselves for forty years by squeezing Americans economically and using the resulting distress and money to blame “those other people”, Republican politicians have gone one step further by effectively promoting the coronavirus pandemic. Their apparent goal is to weaken the country further, creating chaos and fear to feed their fascist campaigning.
Deadly lies. Twisted information. We are at risk for more than Delta. It has nothing to do with immigrants. Who is behind this quest for fascism? Who wishes to fell America to the idjts of authoritarianism? Why? This grand experiment quivers in the cross hairs of some potential despot. And other, perhaps more lethal, variants will arise. Fearful of our future, waiting for actions of congresscritters and DOJ to be timely and meaningful.
Heather Cox Richardson is 100% right. A million percent right!!! We are being led by FOX FIX Tucker and Sean and Trump and Rupert Murdoch to follow Viktor Orban and Hungarian fascism. Mussolini and Hitler are smiling.
The Republicans are complicit and quiet.
This is deadly.
It seems to me that is is rather clear that Fox News is a prime source of the disinformation going round, from all the references to what they purvey. And beyond that is the sea change in our communications media as a result of the FCC Fairness Doctrine being revoked in 1987, which allowed outlets a free hand to broadcast lies. There is little hope of a shared set of facts under these circumstances.
Another super spreader in Sturgis right now. No masks. Hospitals filled up again. Fox. Rand Paul. Big dark money. Florida. Texas. Send the children back to school. Stones. Glass houses. Nightmares. Lies. Stupidity. Colossal nerve of x45 iDJT mass murderer to even show his face in public. Blaming immigrants! Can you imagine?
Well, I'd simply amend by saying it takes us one step closer to civil conflict. I recently watched a prospective "If there were a second civil war, what would happen video." A lot of it was impossibly contextualized or supposed. One thing it, interestingly, restated (it was a 2nd version) was that the threat of gun-owning/leave-me-alone types actually DON'T band together and move to violence as a cohort very well. I'm not enough of a historian or sociologist to agree or disagree, but what I think we DO know is that many leaders of The Right, are willing to do exactly that: do whatever it takes to stir up, keep stirred up and yes, as we saw on Jan 6, move people to violence. In fact, I think Jan 6 made them more dangerous in a way. I think several of them, since then, have inured themselves to any previous fears they had about the consequences of civil unrest. I believe they WANT to push for the next step. Again, as I say almost daily: vigilance. We must remain aware of exactly WHAT is going on, what it means, and the ramifications. Ordinary citizens cannot let their weariness--of the bickering, the lies, the pandemic, etc--allow them to withdraw and not pay close attention.
To me it’s pretty simple with respect to the anti-vaxxers: Don’t want to get vaccinated? Okay. But, freedom of choice does not mean freedom from consequences. So, that means that your health insurer should be completely free to hike your rates and deny coverage for any Covid treatment that you may require. Hospitals should be able to bill you whatever they want for Covid treatment. Oh, and lest I forget, any medical bills necessitated by Covid treatment should not be permitted to be discharged in a bankruptcy filing.
Note: None of this would apply to anyone who has a medical issue that prevents them from getting vaccinated.
For the hope the letter of Aug 7 brought, this one dashes that little spark. I'm so tired of reading about the lies being spewed by Faux Follies. Where are the truth tellers, and why aren't they given equal time? Why has insanity become the norm?
Here is an interesting quote by Bertolt Brecht (10 February 1898 - 14 August 1956). He was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director of the 20th century. You may remember the song "Mack the Knife" which he wrote.
"The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn't hear, doesn't speak nor participate in the political events. He doesn't know the cost of life, the price of the bean, or the flour, of the rent, or the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn't know that from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician corrupted, and flunky of the national and multinational companies."