September 9, 2021

The Rude Pundit: Don't Tell Me Not to Mock People Who Hate My Guts

https://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2021/09/dont-tell-me-not-to-mock-people-who.html


The Rude Pundit
Proudly lowering the level of political discourse
9/07/2021
Don't Tell Me Not to Mock People Who Hate My Guts


snip//

The pleas for kindness or empathy cross ideological lines. In The Atlantic, Elizabeth Bruenig asks us to "Stop Death Shaming" the unvaccinated and says, "It’s worth considering what an honest persuasion effort aimed at the unvaccinated or vaccine-hesitant would look like," although the answer is "It would look like exactly what was done when the vaccine first came out." Writer Conor Friedersdorf asks us to stop "mocking people" for sucking down horse paste and instead do the "tedious work" of convincing them not to suck down horse paste. In the National Review (motto: "Democracy dies in the darkness we created" ), longtime right-wing dickstain John Fund wants us to be nicer to people who ingest Ivermectin because there is a version for humans. That's a common refrain: there's a human version that is widely prescribed in places where parasitic worms are an issue (and I don't mean the Republican Party, hey-yo!), so, you know, those who think it's worth a chance to take it shouldn't be instantly dismissed and insulted.

And all I can say is "Don't be fucking ridiculous. Of course, we're gonna make fun of them. All of them." First, on the Ivermectin insanity, yeah, rich pricks like Joe Rogan can pay a doesn't-give-a-fuck doctor to get the human prescription version, but most of the people doing it aren't rich pricks. They're poor and middle class pricks whose doctors are telling them, "The fuck is wrong with you? Fuck, no, I'm not prescribing the anti-lice and worm drugs for you" so they go to the ol' feed and seed and pick it up. Or, for ten bucks, some Walmarts. It's a tube of paste, for real, often apple flavored, and dumb motherfuckers are sucking it down to prevent or cure their Covid. It's gotten so bad that the FDA and other health officials, as well as the makers of Ivermectin, Merck, have issued statements saying, more or less, "Would you dumb rednecks stop sucking down the sheep goo?" And the goo is selling out at farm stores because you don't need a veterinarian's prescription to get it for your horse or sheep or cow (there is an injectable version that does need a prescription). A Memphis feed store can't keep it on the shelves. A Las Vegas store wants you to prove you have a horse before you can buy it. While, sure, the story about Ivermectin overdoses preventing gunshot victims from being seen at a hospital in Oklahoma was, at best, overblown, the fact is that people are calling poison control in huge numbers after taking the horse drug and they are ODing and taking up space in the ERs with their stupidity.

And you can make all kinds of statements about how we need to understand why people might do this absolutely fucking moronic thing. You can talk about the unfair medical system and rural areas without access to proper care or how desperate people do desperate things. You can blah, blah, blah all fucking day trying to fluff that sympathy cock into a full-blown erection, but it fails for one simple reason. There's a goddamn vaccine. It's free. It works. That's the answer. Anything you try to say after that is bullshit. It's all a lie. You don't want the vaccine because it's "experimental," but you'll eat the horse goo even though it's totally untested for Covid. That's fucking hilarious. You don't want the vaccine because you heard it might harm you and then you got Covid and died. That's so fucking miserable that I better make fun of it or I'll scream at your grave about what a shit-souled loser you were.

I don't hate them. I pity them and feel superior to them because, well, I am (and so is everybody who gets vaccinated and doesn't put a tube of cow paste to their lips). I won't treat them like children. As I've said repeatedly, they are adults who made an adult decision to listen to assholes instead of doctors. So I save my hatred for Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan and Ron Johnson and every scum from the garbage pail bottom who keeps telling their viewers or listeners or voters not to get vaccinated and to try this bullshit drug or that bullshit cure.

No, I don't hate the willfully unvaccinated, but I don't have sympathy. I lost that a long goddamn time ago. And that's because the people we are trying to convince to get vaccinated hate our fucking guts and dream of slaughtering us or at least exiling or concentration camping us. So, yeah, I'm gonna keep mocking them for their refusal to do the easiest goddamn thing in the world. I'm gonna do it because they scare the fuck out of me by their actions that might end up dragging us all down into the ditch with them and joking about it keeps me sane amidst this genuine insanity. Being nice about it is a waste of goddamn time.

Plus, c'mon, finding out that some of these idiots are eating so much horse paste that they shit out their intestinal lining and think it's worms and then think that's a good thing? That's comedy gold.

(Just to note about the opening story: He wasn't a good friend or anything. Just someone who I always enjoyed seeing when a particular group gathered, so his loss doesn't leave a hole in my life. More of a "Huh. That's fucked up." )

September 9, 2021

Sean Spicer Flips Out at Jen Psaki After Biden Kicks Him Off Military Board

https://www.thedailybeast.com/sean-spicer-flips-out-at-jen-psaki-after-biden-kicks-him-off-military-board?ref=home

Sean Spicer Flips Out at Jen Psaki After Biden Kicks Him Off Military Board
‘DON’T YOU DARE!’
Jamie Ross
News Correspondent
Published Sep. 09, 2021 4:33AM ET
Newsmax



https://twitter.com/i/status/1435729646197293060

September 9, 2021

Twenty Years After 9/11, a Cloud of Pessimism Hangs Over the Country

I'm feeling this and it's depressing.


https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/09/twenty-years-after-911-a-cloud-of-pessimism-hangs-over-the-country

9/11 Anniversary
Twenty Years After 9/11, a Cloud of Pessimism Hangs Over the Country
In a time of near constant crisis, new polls show that most Americans think the attacks changed the country for the worse.

By Eric Lutz
September 8, 2021

snip//

That mayor, of course, was Rudy Giuliani, who, in the 20 years since he gave that address went from “America’s mayor” to opportunist crank to corrupt clown working—clumsily—to subvert democracy on behalf of Donald Trump. It’s a transformation that encapsulates much of the disappointment and decay and destruction of the last two decades: The promise not to “engage in any form of group blame or group hatred” was broken practically in the same breath it was made, with a rise in hostility toward Muslims that persists today. The “stand” against terrorism that Giuliani, then-President George W. Bush, and members of both political parties demanded led to nearly ten years of war in Iraq and twenty years of war in Afghanistan, the latter of which ended last month with the chaotic withdrawal of American forces and the takeover of the country by the Taliban—the group whose control was overthrown when the U.S.-led coalition began its operations in the nation in 2001. And the “unity” elected officials spoke of in those fevered days after the attacks? If it ever truly existed, it was for a brief spell that leaders can now only recall with an ache of nostalgia. Far from bringing Americans together around shared values, the last twenty years have seen the country cleaved apart—so much so that basic tenets of reality and common sense are now matters of heated political controversy.

There’s been progress and cause for optimism in those years, to be sure. But there has also been a prevailing mood of pessimism hanging over the country, as a new Washington Post/ABC News poll released Wednesday underscored. A vast majority say the 9/11 attacks changed America, and far more respondents than not—46% to 33%—say the country has changed for the worse. Perceptions of the course the country has taken over the last two decades may be colored by the pandemic, which has not only dramatically altered American life on its own, but underscored the dysfunction that has long plagued the nation. But the poll also suggests a sense of gloom that has grown steadily, rather than with a single event: On the one year anniversary of the attacks, 55% of respondents said the event had changed the country for the better. On the ten year anniversary, that number was down to 39%. Now, it stands at just 33%.

That was not inevitable, of course; it is, in many ways, the product of two decades of bad choices and bad faith. What leaders vowed would unify the country instead fueled assaults on civil liberties; two devastating, intractable wars; and grievance politics that would eventually help lead to the rise of Trumpism. It’s perhaps no surprise that liberals in the Post/ABC News poll tended to have bleaker views about the direction of the country since 9/11; the ugly forces in our politics that were underscored by the attacks have only seemed to gain in strength over the last twenty years, while Democrats have frequently proved ineffective in confronting them. It can be hard to hear the progress over the constant hum of crisis, which our leaders and institutions have not only struggled to avert and respond to, but in many cases exacerbated. “The United States—as both a government and a nation—got nearly everything about our response wrong, on the big issues and the little ones,” the journalist and historian Garrett M. Graff wrote in the Atlantic on Wednesday.

That has implications not only for the current predicament we find ourselves in—suffering the equivalent of a 9/11 twice a week over the course of the last year and a half in a pandemic that continues to rage, despite the availability of life-saving vaccines—but for our ability to climb out of it. “We are,” as Graff wrote, “confronting the current crisis with little of the hope, goodwill, and unity that 9/11 initially created.” One rather hopes that the spell can be broken—that, if it wasn’t inevitable that the U.S. would get on this course, it is also not inevitable that it has to continue down it. But Americans in recent polls suggest they aren’t so confident.

September 8, 2021

Whatever happened to Kevin McCarthy's Jan. 6 investigation?

Whatever happened to Kevin McCarthy's Jan. 6 investigation?
Whatever happened to the partisan Jan. 6 investigation that McCarthy said he was launching? Nearly two months later, it doesn't appear to exist.
Sept. 8, 2021, 10:38 AM EDT
By Steve Benen


House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's record related to the Jan. 6 attack is deeply unfortunate. For example, the California Republican famously agreed that Donald Trump bore responsibility for the insurrectionist riot, before the congressman ultimately decided that it'd be in his political interests to change his mind.

Similarly, McCarthy initially endorsed an official investigation into the assault on the Capitol before he changed his mind, helped derail the creation of an independent commission that his own point person had helped shape, and tried to sabotage a bipartisan congressional select committee. As of last week, the GOP leader even took steps to obstruct the federal investigation.

It's against this backdrop that a question looms: Whatever happened to the partisan Jan. 6 investigation that McCarthy said he was launching?

As regular readers may recall, it was in mid-July when the House minority leader declared that House Republicans would "pursue our own investigation of the facts." At a Capitol Hill press conference yesterday, McCarthy added, "We will make sure we get to the real answers."

Nearly two months later, The Daily Beast reported that the partisan alternative to the bipartisan select committee does not appear to exist.



more...

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/whatever-happened-kevin-mccarthy-s-jan-6-investigation-n1278696

September 8, 2021

Why Jim Jordan should avoid fights over what's 'un-American'

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/why-jim-jordan-should-avoid-fights-over-what-s-un-n1278683

Why Jim Jordan should avoid fights over what's 'un-American'
To hear Jordan tell it, "real" Americans believe that vaccine mandates are at odds with our national traditions, even when history proves otherwise.
Your Video Begins in: 00:04
Sept. 8, 2021, 9:20 AM EDT
By Steve Benen


Republican Rep. Jim Jordan has earned a reputation as a highly controversial politician, though I was a little surprised to see him cause a stir this week with a short tweet. As The Washington Post reported:



At this point, we could point to the American tradition and note that George Washington, among others, embraced mandatory inoculations. Indeed, by some measures, the United States might very well have lost the Revolutionary War were it not for a policy that Jordan apparently considers "un-American."

We could also point to many examples throughout American history in which key societal institutions — including public schools and the U.S. military — embraced vaccine mandates as a matter of course. Ohio State required vaccinations for students while Jordan was a coach there, and he didn't seem to care at the time.

We could also note that if we're really going to have a conversation about what is and isn't "un-American," we should probably discuss those who supported efforts to overturn the results of an American presidential election because a group of extremists didn't like voters' judgment. I suspect the Ohio congressman may not like where that conversation ends up.

more...

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/why-jim-jordan-should-avoid-fights-over-what-s-un-n1278683

September 8, 2021

Joe Manchin's Symphony of Disingenuousness

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/building-back-america/infrastructure-summer-joe-manchins-symphony-of-disingenuousness/

The American Prospect
Home Housing and Transportation Building Back America
Infrastructure Summer: Joe Manchin’s Symphony of Disingenuousness
He mumbles about inflation to try and stop a bill that’s primarily concerned with reducing inflation.
by David Dayen
September 7, 2021


Let’s say I didn’t know anything about the big budget reconciliation bill working its way through Congress this month. (Believe me, I’d love to say that; things would be much easier if I didn’t.) If non-aware me read through the entirety of Joe Manchin’s op-ed in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, which said that the bill is too expensive and just not right at this time, I wouldn’t know anything more about it. While Manchin ably demonstrates how a conservative Democrat representing a red state can preen about concepts like inflation and the deficit and spending trillions of dollars, he explains nothing about what the bill he opposes actually does, whom it would help, and what specific parts he disfavors.

Evidently, Manchin doesn’t want you to know too much about the bill he’s trying to kill. Or at least, he doesn’t want you to know why he doesn’t like it. Because if Manchin were truly concerned that we’ve let costs for working families run out of control and we must avoid passing a terrible future on to the next generation, he would be the first in line to pass the reconciliation bill.

snip//

The thing about these tax reforms and drug price reductions is that they are extremely popular. Adding tax increases makes the various infrastructure bills under consideration more popular, in fact. Manchin and his Republican colleagues made sure that the bipartisan infrastructure bill had no tax changes of any kind. He’s been murmuring about trimming tax reform for months. But now he doesn’t want to make a frontal assault on behalf of the rich people and corporate executives who fund political campaigns. So he talks about deficits and inflation, which have no real application to this legislation, to hide the ball on his real goal.

President Biden’s American Jobs and Families Plans, which include all the elements in the proposed reconciliation bill, are even popular in West Virginia. In May, Data for Progress found both favored by double digits, despite Biden’s unpopularity in the state. Manchin doesn’t want to actually come out against an unpopular policy in his own state. Instead, he leashes his opposition to some garbled nonsense about inflation, when in fact, this is an inflation-fighting bill. He doesn’t want people to know that he’s trying to prevent his rich pals from having to chip in to allow middle-class families to better keep up with the cost of living.

September 8, 2021

Eric Boehlert: Sorry Chuck Todd, America is not hopelessly "divided" over Covid

https://pressrun.media/p/no-chuck-todd-america-is-not-divided

Sorry Chuck Todd, America is not hopelessly “divided” over Covid
Both Sides nonsense
Eric Boehlert
1 hr ago


snip//

Make no mistake, there is a loud and dangerous right-wing minority in this country building roadblocks and creating havoc as we try to put the pandemic behind us. They often stage noisy and demented protests at local school board meetings, leveling unhinged attacks on local officials who are trying to keep children and teachers safe. (In Tucson, police were called when protesters threatened to make a citizen's arrest on a school principal and zip tie her.) The media’s constant desire to portray them as representing half the country is lazy and inaccurate.

Instead of portraying the dangerous zealots accurately, the media downplay the threat by presenting anti-vaccine and anti-mask fanatics as being the mirror opposite of Democrats and progressives who embrace science and common sense. If there’s a “divide,” that means there are two equal, opposing forces, right? The press much prefers to tell the tale of Both Sides facing off over Covid, instead of detailing a deranged and radical minority waging war on mainstream America.

The country as a whole is not divided over Covid in any traditional sense, so how and why does the press keep pushing that narrative? One way journalists pull it off is by using fuzzy math. They do it by pointing to polling data that shows Democrats and Republicans on polar opposite ends of the issue and loudly announcing that America suffers from an incurable political and cultural rift.

snip//

So when the media breathlessly hypes polls that show 70 percent of Republicans oppose mask mandates, that doesn’t mean 70 percent of one half of the country opposes the rule. It means 70 percent of a shrinking minority party in this country stand opposed. (i.e. Roughly 20 percent of the total U.S. population contests mask requirements for schools today.)

We’re only truly “divided” when it comes to the Covid carnage in this country. In blue states in the Northeast the pandemic remains essentially over. That’s where low case, death, and hospitalization numbers remain the norm. In Florida and Texas, the virus is claiming victims at will, as Republican governors do everything in their power to put citizens at risk. Soon, the number of Covid deaths in both Florida and Texas could surpass the number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War.

The press ought to focus on that divide, and detail how the Republican Party and its leaders have made a conscious decision to prolong a deadly pandemic, even though a free and effective vaccine is available to stop it. It represents a stunning chapter in American history. Instead of focusing its attention on a conservative movement that is quite clearly killing its own, the press wallows in the shallow confines of its Divided narrative.

September 7, 2021

America needs to decide how much Covid-19 risk it will tolerate

America needs to decide how much Covid-19 risk it will tolerate
A realistic Covid-19 endgame requires accepting some risk. The question is how much.
By German Lopez@germanrlopezgerman.lopez@vox.com Sep 7, 2021, 7:30am EDT
This story is part of a group of stories called
Future Perfect
Finding the best ways to do good.


More than a year and a half into the Covid-19 pandemic, America still doesn’t agree on what it’s trying to accomplish.

Is the goal to completely eradicate Covid-19? Is it to prevent hospitals from getting overwhelmed? Is it hitting a certain vaccine threshold that mitigates the worst Covid-19 outcomes but doesn’t prevent all infections? Or is it something else entirely?

At the root of this confusion is a big question the US, including policymakers, experts, and the general public, has never been able to answer: How many Covid-19 deaths are too many?

The lack of a clear end goal has hindered America’s anti-pandemic efforts from the start. At first, the goal of restrictions was to “flatten the curve”: to keep the number of cases low enough that hospitals could treat those that did arise. But that consensus crumbled against the reality of the coronavirus — leaving the country with patchwork restrictions and no clear idea of what it meant to “beat” Covid-19, let alone a strategy to achieve a victory.

The vaccines were supposed to be a way out. But between breakthrough infections, the risks of long Covid, and new variants, it’s becoming clear the vaccines didn’t get rid of the need to answer the underlying question of what the Covid-19 endgame is.

America is now stuck between those two extremes: The country wants to reduce the risk of Covid-19, but it also wants to limit the remnants of social distancing and other Covid-related restrictions on day-to-day life.



more...

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22651046/covid-19-delta-vaccines-social-distancing-masking-lockdowns

September 7, 2021

The Rude Pundit: Have You Read That Destructive Texas Anti-Choice Law? It's Hot, Harmful Garbage

The Rude Pundit
Proudly lowering the level of political discourse
9/03/2021
Have You Read That Destructive Texas Anti-Choice Law? It's Hot, Harmful Garbage


First and foremost, this is a tragedy for women in Texas. The incredibly cruel, physically and mentally harmful, and intentionally divisive anti-abortion law that the Supreme Court allowed to go into effect on Wednesday night will end up with women being maimed or killed or forced to be vessels for fetuses that they do not want to carry, including the products of rape and incest (which, let's be clear, is almost always rape no matter what other word you wanna use), including the fetuses of abusive men. They will be forced to carry those fetuses when they know that they cannot afford the baby (and one reason they cannot afford the baby is because those who are forcing them to carry the fetus provide almost nothing to support the baby). It is a tragedy because it tells a woman that whatever existence she thought she might have, it must become secondary to "mother" once she gets pregnant and doesn't abort the fetus prior to six weeks of gestation, before many women even know they're pregnant. The mostly men who passed this law are savages who cannot wait to bathe in the blood of botched abortions. That will sanctify their brutal, backwards actions and satisfy their desire to kill those who oppose their Christian extremism.

snip//

Not dickish enough? Not only can the random, greedy fucknut win at least $10,000 from you for showing that you intended to drive your friend to get an abortion, but you have to pay fucknut's legal fees.

Not dickish enough? If greedy fucknut sues you and loses, you are still stuck with your legal fees. That's right. There is no disincentive for just bringing a whole bunch of lawsuits and seeing what the fuck sticks. How many skeevy lawyers are gonna make bank on this?

The goddamn law just goes on and on, foreclosing nearly any avenue that might show even a bit of compassion for women. The bounty hunters have up to four years from the date when anyone did anything to help a woman get an abortion after six weeks. And you can't bring up that Roe v. Wade is allegedly still the law of the land as a defense.

It's a fucking mess. It purposely turns citizens against each other. It pays people for playing Abortion Batman. It victimizes the women of Texas who were already being victimized by some of the most blindingly dickish anti-choice laws in the country. I mean, why would you talk to your friends about your choices after you find out you're pregnant? You'd be completely justified in thinking that you might get them in trouble or they might turn against you. Shit, a rapist can sue anyone who would try to help his victim get an abortion if he impregnated her as a result of the, you know, rape. Goddamn, fuck you, Greg Abbott and the Texas legislature. Just fuck you.

more...

https://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2021/09/have-you-read-that-destructive-texas.html

September 7, 2021

The Latest COVID-19 Surge Is Just the Start of a New Nightmare

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-latest-covid-surge-is-just-the-start-of-a-new-nightmare?ref=home


The Latest COVID-19 Surge Is Just the Start of a New Nightmare
ENDGAME
With schools reopening and hospitals buckling again, an exhausted, defiant, and heavily unvaccinated nation is entering a new and scary phase.
Peter J. Hotez
Updated Sep. 07, 2021 2:52AM ET / Published Sep. 06, 2021 9:51PM ET


snip//

For the U.S., the latest University of Washington-Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) projections forecast that by the fall, we could hit over 2,400 deaths per day, and reach between 700,000 and 800,000 Americans dead by Dec. 1. In so doing, we will have exceeded the estimated number of Americans who died from the Spanish flu.

Reaching these grim milestones will have a profound and adverse impact on the health and security of the nation. There are two major attendant concerns, and while they echo problems since the pandemic began well over a year ago, they are specific to this moment.

Since the beginning, we have seen how hospitals and ICUs can struggle when overwhelmed with a surge of COVID-19 patients, which in turn is increasingly impacting everyone else—even vaccinated people who are not infected, but need other care. Such findings are confirmed by a recent NIH study.

But in this latest phase, it’s not only an influx of patients but also the accumulating losses of trained health professionals that is so worrisome. Burnout has been a problem throughout the pandemic. Yet overwhelmed nurses and other hospital staff are leaving the profession and their posts due to a combination of factors that include exhaustion and the demoralization of taking care of so many dying young and middle-aged patients who refused vaccines. As The New York Times reported this past week, there were some 2,000 fewer nurses working in the state of Mississippi—currently deep in the throes of a COVID-19 explosion—than there were as recently as Jan. 1 of this year.

snip//

Even these measures may not get us to the last mile. It’s hard to estimate the number of last holdouts who are deeply suspicious and resentful of vaccinations, but we must recognize that this group will likely become the ones responsible for both continuing this current surge and even the potential evolution of new virus variants, and that some might even act on their anger and resentment. While we need a more assertive White House making the case to the American people that full and complete vaccinations are essential to our safety, we also need to brace for an even uglier wave of pandemic backlash.