babylonsister
babylonsister's Journal203 cases of COVID-19 linked to Chicago's Lollapalooza
203 cases of COVID-19 linked to Chicago's Lollapalooza
Associated Press
SOPHIA TAREEN
August 13, 2021, 7:20 AM
CHICAGO (AP) — Chicago health officials on Thursday reported 203 cases of COVID-19 connected to Lollapalooza, casting it as a number that was anticipated and not yet linked to any hospitalizations or deaths.
The four-day music festival, which started two weeks ago, drew about 385,000 people to a lakefront park. Critics questioned holding the event during the pandemic. Footage showed tightly packed crowds at concerts and on public transportation with few masks in sight. Last year's festival was canceled because of COVID-19.
But Mayor Lori Lightfoot and other officials have defended the decision, saying there were safety protocols in place. Festival goers had to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test and city officials said about 90% were vaccinated.
more...
https://www.aol.com/entertainment/203-cases-covid-19-linked-155236851-122021513.html
Eric Boehlert: The media's weird obsession with Biden Delaware trips
https://pressrun.media/p/the-medias-petty-obsession-with-bidensThe media's weird obsession with Biden Delaware trips
Still playing gotcha
Eric Boehlert
1 hr ago
snip//
The pointless media demand carries with it an unmistakable scent of Both Sides baggage. Because Trump abused his power in office by visiting a Trump Organization property on 428 days of his presidency, or one visit every 3.4 days, the press seems to feel the need to needle the Biden White House about the president’s short, innocuous trips to Delaware.
This is the Beltway press returning to normalcy after four years of deliberate chaos. And normalcy for the D.C. media means poking Democrats with stories about optics and how something the president has done doesn't look right, as determined by journalists. It’s the press in search of drama.
snip//
The Associated Press first hatched the Biden/Delaware travel narrative, just weeks into his presidency when on February 4, it published, “Biden to Head to Delaware as CDC Recommends Avoiding Travel.” FoxNews.com immediately followed that up with a sharper attack, “Biden Flying to Delaware Despite CDC Warnings to Avoid Travel.” In the Fox telling — note how “despite” was added to the headline — Biden was portrayed as flaunting pandemic guidelines.
The following day, the AP’s Zeke Miller pressed Psaki about the Delaware visit in light of the CDC guidelines. “Why is the president going to Delaware this weekend?” he demanded. “Is there an exception to that [CDC] policy?”
The obvious fault in the media pursuit was that the CDC in February was urging Americans — most of whom were unvaccinated at that time — not to travel because the CDC wanted people to avoid crowded airports and stuffed airplanes, which was not something Biden had to encounter as the President of the United States. The idea that the fully vaccinated leader of the free world could not safely travel one year into a pandemic made no sense. Biden’s trips in no way ran counter to CDC guidelines. It was a complete non-issue.
snip//
Fast forward to last week when McClatchy reporter Francesca Chambers again brought up the issue of Biden’s unremarkable weekend trips to Delaware:
PSAKI: Because it’s his home. You like going home, right? So, does the President. He’s human too.
Then on August 11 came CBS’s O’Keefe’s pressing query about Biden’s Wilmington-to-Camp David travel plans.
Biden has eagerly embraced a no-drama approach to White House leadership. The press ought to stop trying to invent commotions.
COVID Kills 4 Teachers in One Day in Same Florida School District
https://www.thedailybeast.com/coronavirus-kills-4-teachers-in-one-day-in-broward-county-school-district?ref=homeCOVID Kills 4 Teachers in One Day in Same Florida School District
CLASSROOM CALAMITY
Blake Montgomery, Reporter/Editor
Published Aug. 12, 2021 10:53PM ET
"we can't live forever"
JFC 
https://politicalwire.com/2021/08/12/greene-dismisses-concern-of-hospitals-filling-up/
Greene Dismisses Concern of Hospitals Filling Up
August 12, 2021 at 8:56 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard
Said Greene: “Everybody needs to get back down to common sense and remember that, you know, we’re human, we can’t live forever, we’re going to catch all kinds of diseases and illnesses and other viruses, and we get hurt sometimes.”
GOP Lawmakers Seek to Reward Workers Who Quit
How messed up is this? 
https://politicalwire.com/2021/08/12/gop-lawmakers-seek-to-reward-workers-who-quit-over-vaccine/
GOP Lawmakers Seek to Reward Workers Who Quit
August 12, 2021 at 10:48 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard
Current law stipulates that if an individual is fired or quits a job they are not eligible to receive unemployment benefits.
Biden's Pick To Lead One Of The Top Federal Prosecutor's Offices Could Make History
Biden's Pick To Lead One Of The Top Federal Prosecutor's Offices Could Make History
August 11, 202110:10 AM ET
Jaclyn Diaz
Damian Williams has been nominated to head the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan. Williams would be the first Black man to run the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York.
President Biden has nominated Damian Williams as his pick to lead the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, one of the nation's most high-profile law enforcement departments.
If confirmed, Williams would be the first Black man to lead the prestigious office that covers Manhattan, the Bronx and areas north of New York City, including Westchester County.
The office has been behind several major federal cases in recent years, including the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sex trafficking investigation and recent inquiries into the Trump Organization and associates of former President Donald Trump.
Williams, a Harvard University, University of Cambridge and Yale Law School graduate is the son of Jamaican immigrants and from Brooklyn.
He has close ties with the Justice Department in Washington. After law school, Williams clerked for U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland when Garland was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He also was a clerk to Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.
more...
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/11/1026629241/biden-damian-williams-southern-district-of-new-york-doj
Mary L. Trump: Donald's Plot Against America
/August 12, 2021
Donald’s Plot Against America
Now, he and his GOP enablers are peddling the Second Big Lie: that January 6 was just legitimate protest. It’s the crucial ingredient in convincing America to return them—and him—to power.
I felt as though I had stumbled across a crime scene so violent that I couldn’t process it, let alone synthesize the images in front of me. The parts remained stubbornly separate, and there was no way to grasp the meaning of the whole.
In the early afternoon of January 6, while the mob was still swarming the stairs of the Capitol, I was asked in an interview what I thought of the unfolding situation. I watched the crowd that had been stoked that morning by my uncle, and by Republicans like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Mo Brooks, with their Confederate flags, their MAGA hats, and their Camp Auschwitz shirts; I watched the smoke (the origin of which I couldn’t yet discern) drift through the air, and I heard their shouts of grievance and anger. It looked like a scene from a failed country whose government had just been toppled, a banana republic; but it was the United States of America, my country, our country, and, knowing who was responsible for the chaos here, the first word that came to my mind was “tawdry.”
Of course, it was so much more than that—so much more dangerous and serious than that, as we would eventually find out. At around 2:15, while Republicans Cruz and Paul Gosar were objecting to the legitimate results of the election, the insurrectionists breached the Capitol, Congress was adjourned, and frantic attempts were made to get the vice president and all of the senators and representatives to safety.
Two hours later, the Georgia Senate race was called for Jon Ossoff. It mattered, certainly; it meant that the Democrats would control the Senate. But there was no room for celebration. After four years of Donald’s incessant attacks and ineptitude, we were already exhausted. Joe Biden’s victory was supposed to have offered us some reprieve, but having given Donald room to promote his Big Lie, elected Republicans had now granted him the opportunity to incite an insurrection. So there would be no respite from the madness, from Donald’s particular blend of mendacity, cruelty, and destructiveness. There would be no celebrating.
That horrific day—which we now know General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, referred to as a “Reichstag moment”—was bracketed by Donald’s incendiary speech given just before noon and a video released two hours after the Capitol had been breached that added more fuel to the fire. The speech itself was full of grievances—lies about the “landslide election” that had been stolen from him, threats to Mike Pence, whom he led the crowd to believe had the power to overturn the results of the election, fabulations about people voting as Santa Claus and Democrats’ taking down statues of Jefferson and Lincoln, and calls to action demanding that the crowd force Congress to “do the right thing.” In the 62-second video, Donald says the word peace three times, presumably because somebody convinced him he had to distance himself from the role he played in stoking the mob’s violence; but, because he can never help himself in these instances, he kept hammering away at what was supposedly stolen from them. The video sickened me just as the “apology” video he recorded after the Access Hollywood tape was released had sickened me. I feared the same result—that there would be no consequences.
That night, after I was finally able to turn off the news, the only two things I knew with absolute certainty were: one, that for the first time in our nation’s history there had not been a peaceful transfer of power, because my uncle, who could not accept his resounding defeat and the humiliation that came with it, had attempted to inspire a coup; and two, the next two weeks before Joe Biden’s inauguration would be the most dangerous this country had ever lived through.
more...
https://newrepublic.com/article/163115/donald-trump-plot-against-america
The Rude Pundit: Now Abbott, DeSantis, and Other COVID Accomplice Governors Need to Resign
The Rude Pundit
Proudly lowering the level of political discourse
8/11/2021
Now Abbott, DeSantis, and Other COVID Accomplice Governors Need to Resign
snip//
Over in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis is the discharge from that infected penis of a state, the hospitals in the central part have been inundated with patients at record levels as cases surge to their highest levels in the pandemic. In St. Petersburg, emergency rooms are so full that patients have to wait for at least an hour in an ambulance before being allowed in for, you know, their emergency. Nearly 70% of Florida hospitals will experience a shortage of staff in the next seven days. In Brevard County, where 313 patients are hospitalized with Covid, only 3 are vaccinated. That's over 99% of patients unvaccinated. The Florida Department of Health and Human Services is reported to have requested hundreds of ventilators from the federal government, and it seems like they didn't tell DeSantis about it. Meanwhile, DeSantis and the savages in the Florida GOP are against vaccine mandates and masking requirements, as well as vaccine passports, essentially inviting Covid to speed around the state and fuck up everyone. DeSantis is a sentient hemorrhoid that was cut off Donald Trump's asshole, and fortunately, mayors and county school board superintendents are telling the governor to go fuck himself, even with the threat of legal action hanging over them.
In Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott is the dry cow dung on the bottom of a cheap pair of boots, the ICUs are filling up to capacity with Covid patients. Austin activated its emergency alert system to warn people about the worsening situation, and Houston hospitals are putting up tents to deal with the extra patients. While going to fucking war over mask mandates, Abbott has asked hospitals to postpone elective surgeries to make more room even more sick and dying. At this point, it's like Abbott's tiny, fucked-up brain has been taken over by Covid and it's forcing him to not only allow Covid to spread, but to make it comfortable while it kills Texans. Fortunately, like in Florida, leaders in different localities have told Abbott he can eat their whole asses when it comes to school mask mandates. One judge in Dallas said, "The citizens of Dallas County have and will continue to be damaged and injured by Governor Abbott’s conduct." Of course, Abbott has said he would fight that decision and one in San Antonio because, goddamnit, he has to strangle more children to calm the Covid brain worms.
Where the fuck else do you want to go? Down to Mississippi, where Gov. Tate Reeves, who really looks like he's got a woman pit in his basement, has also shit all over mask mandates and the CDC, even as cases, hospitalizations, and deaths blow up all over the state. By the way, less than 35% of Mississippians are fully vaccinated. Up to Missouri, where Gov. Dipshit Magoo said he thought it "undermined" confidence in the vaccine to ask the vaccinated to mask up, but when you have a toxic soup of disease and assholes in your state, where only 41% are fully vaccinated, then it's pretty fucking hard to trust people to wear masks voluntarily. And, yeah, the hospitals are overwhelmed, too.
Republicans (along with most Democrats) were screaming for the head of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for sexual harassment, and, thankfully, he resigned yesterday. It was the right and decent thing to do because he had demonstrated that he no longer could be trusted to run the state (and, as an employee of the state of New York, I'll just say, "Fuck, yeah" to his departure).
So what about DeSantis, Abbott, Reeves, and Parsons (the aforementioned "Dipshit Magoo" )? They are essentially accomplices to the spread of Covid, helping it thrive and continue, allowing it to take down more children, providing it with incubators for more variants. They are feeding the people of their states to a dragon that promised them electoral gold in exchange for sacrifices. There should be an outcry for them to resign in disgrace because while Covid giddily run rampant through their populations, what the fuck have they been working on? Fucking anti-critical race theory laws? Restricting voting rights? That's not fiddling while Rome burns. That's jacking off on the ashes of the dead.
more...
https://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2021/08/now-abbott-desantis-and-other-covid.html
It's Double 'Jeopardy!': Mike Richards And Mayim Bialik Will Be New Hosts
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/11/1026751579/jeopardy-new-hosts-mike-richards-mayim-bialikIt's Double 'Jeopardy!': Mike Richards And Mayim Bialik Will Be New Hosts
August 11, 20211:05 PM ET
After weeks of celebrity tryouts, leaks and heated speculation by game show fans, current executive producer Mike Richards and actor Mayim Bialik have been named permanent co-hosts of Jeopardy!, marking the first time two people will host one of television's most popular game show. Richards will host the daily syndicated program while Bialik hosts the primetime series and new spinoffs.
Widely-circulated reports that Richard was first in line for the job provoked immediate backlash online. Critics described the choice as unadventurous and pointed to a lawsuit alleging toxic behavior in a previous job. Infuriated fans of LeVar Burton, the beloved television icon known for his work on shows ranging from Roots to Reading Rainbow to Star Trek: The Next Generation were also quick to express displeasure.
In a statement, Ravi Ahuja, Chairman of Global Television Studios and Corporate Development for Sony Pictures wrote, "We took this decision incredibly seriously. A tremendous amount of work and deliberation has gone into it, perhaps more than has ever gone into the selection of hosts for a show – deservedly so because it's Jeopardy! and we are following the incomparable Alex Trebek. A senior group of Sony Pictures Television executives pored over footage from every episode, reviewed research from multiple panels and focus groups, and got valuable input from our key partners and Jeopardy! viewers."
Critical Care Doctors Are in Crisis
Critical Care Doctors Are in Crisis
Who’s caring for the ICU physicians?
By Carolyn Barber on August 9, 2021
As a critical care physician, Kelli Mathew knew her days were spinning in the wrong direction. For one thing, her well of empathy was dry. When unvaccinated people came to her, suffering the effects of COVID, Mathew began snapping back. She had run out of comforting or even neutral things to say.
In the end, Mathew reached out for help, entering counseling to try to understand what had happened. Her doctor-patient relationships were crumbling in front of her, and she knew she was the reason why. “I’ve always been the most empathetic, compassionate person to a fault,” she says. Clearly, something had changed.
For nearly 18 months, critical care workers have been on the front lines of one of the worst medical crises in American history. The intensive care unit (ICU) death toll for COVID-19 patients is almost unimaginable: a mortality rate of approximately 35 percent, according to one meta-analysis. Nurses in the ICU have served, suffered devastating loss and ultimately left the profession in droves. We have read their stories of grief and pain.
Only now, in the long tail of COVID’s run, are we beginning to understand the depth of the toll the pandemic has taken on the physicians on the front lines. Although hardly surprising, the news is not good.
more...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/critical-care-doctors-are-in-crisis/
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