Didya Miss Me? [DOT 23/2/21]

23/2/21 MegMegMcGee 33

Thanks to the gang for covering for me while I dealt with a bit of a family emergency. Ya’ll are the best. I’m surfacing slowly…

WTF Texas? I’m way behind on all this, but this seems like a catastrophic failure on so many levels, that was completely expected. I’m going to read Butcher’s DOT at some point, I swear.

Ha Ha dot gif:

Supreme Court allows release of Trump tax returns to NY prosecutor
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/22/politics/supreme-court-trump-taxes-vance/index.html

The adults are in charge. Hopefully we are on the upswing.

Joe Biden to hold memorial as US nears 500,000 Covid deaths
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/22/biden-covid-deaths-memorial

This b out here giving Megs a bad name:

I’m a little out of touch – anything else I’m missing out on? Drop it in the comments!

Have a great Tuesday!

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33 Comments

  2. Welcome back! Things are getting dire for Megs the world over if Meg McCain mentioned simply that she was a co-host of The View and didn’t throw in “John McCain’s daughter.” If it’s any consolation to John McCain’s daughter, I too do not know how or when I’ll be getting the vaccine, so this is nothing personal on Dr. Fauci’s part. 
     
    If she really wants to keelhaul someone over the way the pandemic has been “managed” and how the vaccine rollout (isn’t) going, she can join the mutinous mob who are turning on America’s Bullier-in-Chief, our very own Andrew Cuomo. As that lyric from “Evita” goes, “The dice are rolling; the knives are out.” This eerily reminds me of the fall of the Soviet Union. Cracks appeared, and suddenly restrictions started easing and each concession granted led to the demand for two more. Suddenly to beleaguered New NYC residents word came from on high that indoor dining could, indeed, restart in NYC at 25% capacity (elsewhere in the state, with much worse infection numbers, it’s been 50% all along) and now it’s been bumped up to 35% “in line with New Jersey.” OK. This is what made me snap. I have no intention to dine indoors any time soon, but NYC has a water/river barrier to our western neighbor, The Garden State, but in our eastern neighbor, where there are no barriers at all, you can you can walk from eastern Queens right on into Suffolk County, which is part of the Empire State, and dine at 50%, as you have been able to for months. Suddenly the curfews have been extended from 10 PM to 11 PM. Why now? Why was it ever 10 PM? The disastrous decision to close down the subways from 1 AM to 5 AM, unprecedented in the century+ history of the system, has been curtailed to 2 AM to 4 AM. So…what exactly happened? There was some lunatic rule that despite the capacity of the venue no religious observation could have more than 10 congregants (observed mostly in the breach by one religious group that votes as a single bloc, so many a blind eye was turned.) I think the Supreme Court struck that down, on the theory that if people can crowd into a Wegmann’s with no restrictions people should be able to spread themselves out and listen to a religious figure. 
     
    It’s been very surreal here, but again the cracks are showing and I believe history will show that “the data” and “the science” absolutely indicated no such arbitrary markers. I’m not even going to touch the third rail of public school education in NYC, now just a dim memory for an entire generation of children who haven’t seen the inside of a classroom for about a year, and there seems to be no planning or expectation that things will have changed very much by the time the (nominal) new school year starts next September. I pity all the parents in NYC. 
     
    Anyway, that’s my rant for this morning. I have a busy day today. A visiting nurse will be dropping by again this morning, and then later a new cast member will be joining me, The Physical Therapist. I’m really starting to feel like Downton Abbey character Matthew Crawley, with the parade of leg-related staff showing up here at Downton. It’s even been snowy and chilly, just like Yorkshire, and we have our own black Lab, like Lord Grantham had his, but there is no stalking the grounds of the estate and the surrounding moors like he and Isis did. And unfortunately my Lady Mary is prone to saying things like, “You assigned me to be your medical proxy, so if you want me to pull the plug just say the word.” “Not necessary quite yet, but I see you’re at the bar. Make me what you’re having, for medicinal purposes.”

    • Ohio is going back to in person learning and also apparently have been ‘miscounting’ their corona deaths. “This is why we can’t have nice things!!”

      I hope your leg is on the mend good sir. 

      • I’m not a pandemic denier, by any means, I’m super-cautious and over-paranoid if anything. But I think it was a grave mistake for legislatures around the country to grant their governors emergency powers with unchecked authority to just impose whims kind of out of nowhere. The NYC restaurant scene has been absolutely decimated, and that’s partly because the goal posts move frequently. Outdoor dining. But who can take over part of a sidewalk and street parking spaces? What can the structures look like and do? How are you supposed to heat these things? Where can and should the heating elements be stored? All of this conflicting, the City and State Buildings Departments saying everything is good to go and within days the establishment gets a follow-up visit and the fines rain down like the rain in the Serengeti.
         
        No. All of this would have been handled by small groups with epidemiological expertise empowered to enforce best practices. Governor Cuomo is a graduate of Albany Law School. Mayor de Blasio has a degree from NYU in “metropolitan studies” from the days when NYU was a third-tier commuter school. That sounds rigorous, doesn’t it? But the buck doesn’t stop there. President Biden’s press secretary, the ubiquitous Jen Psaki, recently said that Biden’s head of the CDC was “speaking in a personal capacity” when she dared hint that in-person classroom instruction might not be so unimaginable. Tell that to the UFT!
         
        Well, anyway, this too shall pass. Five hundred thousand dead in the US and counting. World War II saw fewer American deaths, and that was an event that shaped the conscience of the country for two generations. It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out over the next few years.

        • The whole mess goes right back to Trump’s refusal to let the experts craft a national response because his ego is the size of Alaska.  This is why we have people like Cuomo and DeSantis fucking shit up on the regular.
           
          I may have this wrong, but I think that we’ve surpassed the death count for WWI, WWII and Vietnam combined.  But, you know, it doesn’t really exist unless it hits a right winger directly–and even then all they do is acknowledge the existence.  They sure as shit aren’t about to admit they were wrong about the precautions or the means to move beyond it.

          • Places which bit the bullet early and built the infrastructure to test, trace and quarantine reboounded with a tiny fraction of the death toll. And much lower economic costs. And lower overall impact on their people’s freedom.
             
            The ping ponging has clobbered us.

    • The schools thing **kills** me. They 100% could have been opened safely, even pre-vaccine; all it required was planning (maybe doable) union/management cooperation (unlikely) and money (apparently  %^^*&ing impossible in America now). All they needed was PPE and figuring out space; I admit it’s easier in my neck of the woods than it is in NYC, but dear God, it is possible, and the science is very clear: it CAN be done safely, it’s just nobody is willing to actually do it, and from there, the economic meltdown begins, let alone the emotional meltdown for parents. As a working-from-home parent with a school-age kid, I will say quite clearly that it’s NOT possible to do both and do a good job (let alone staying sane).

      • To double-back on my WWII reference from elsewhere, this is the greatest disruption in the workforce since America demobilized after the war. Women were kicked out of the workforce en masse (they provided a huge proportion of the homefront employment base) because “the men needed the jobs.” They’re being kicked out again but only because homeschooling is falling on them, for the most part. It would be interesting to learn what women’s paid workforce employment numbers are like now, as compared to 2019, for example. It’s a great loss for American productivity but I suppose the childless must be kind of thriving. The only problem is, no one would want to live in a society that doesn’t regenerate through children, and since immigration has largely ground to a halt, there aren’t a hell of a lot of young(er) people to pick up the slack. I think, given the way that the virus affected the most vulnerable and oldest among us, the US longevity rate might have declined, so on paper we might be a slightly younger nation, but that would be a very warped interpretation.

        • And this is the point that — so, so, so belatedly — some leftish Democrats finally started making in the past few years: You can’t believe in “family values” and then force people to decide between working and having kids. It’s obvious bunk that should have been called out decades ago.

          Also not helpful is that up until pretty recently the “we need more kids” crowd has mostly been the provenance of nutty religious types or white supremacists. And while the expectation was forever to get married and have kids, I’d argue now there’s far more societal pressure to NOT have too many kids. Meanwhile most places in this country are dying on the vine because there aren’t enough people there, and the ones who stay there are hurtling past working age.

    • It will come as no surprise that I am now on a first name basis (with their permission) of maybe two dozen new “friends” in the medical community. I have a weird feeling that I’m an atypical, friendly, non-complaining, deferential patient, which is coming as a welcome surprise to them. The home visitors seem to be impressed by how large and well-appointed the apartment is, and the sit-com-ish banter among me, The Better Half, and even The Ravenous Hound.

      • I tend to be the same type of patient.  It all goes back to a PSA I saw on television as a kid.  It showed a man sitting down in a doctor’s office (an actual office because this was 1970-something) and then turning into a ventriloquist’s dummy.  The narrator said something like, “when you go see your doctor, do you…dummy up?”  The PSA then went on to explain that the doctors (now healthcare workers writ large) need our cooperation and participation if they are going to be able to help us.  I went on to interpret that as also meaning that I need to not abuse them because they are, you know, trying to help me. 
         
        Of course, the flip side to that is keeping an eye out for the doctors suffering from M-Deity syndrome and making sure they are actually listening to me.  But the PSA taught 7-year old me that I can do it without yelling at them.  Not so much with other people I know.

  8. Welcome back, Meg. 
     
    Here’s one to add to the “no fucking shit” pile. It seems that more and more links are emerging between the organized insurrectionists and law enforcement. Which has been screamingly obvious since January 6. Merrick Garland cannot get in there and start making arrests fast enough. Literally, since delays are allowing the collaborators to conceal evidence. And if you want somebody to conceal evidence, law enforcement excels at the practice. 
     
    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/2/22/2017579/-As-Oath-Keepers-key-role-in-Jan-6-Capitol-siege-grows-clear-ties-to-law-enforcement-loom-larger

    • Sigh.  What happened to my home state?  The fact that 40% of Republicans nationwide now see violence as a legitimate means to achieve their political ends is probably the biggest thing in that piece.  It is truly becoming the party of the violent shitbags–and that is entirely due to the fact that they were wink-and-nodded by the “respectable” Republicans for decades.  Unfortunately, the consequences of their enabling of these psychopaths aren’t just limited to their party.

    • …it’s truly hard to get my head around the extent to which the right is seemingly compelled to adjust the letter of the law until it’s legally permitted to break the spirit of said law with impunity…& to consider that a virtue when it ought to be a condemnation

      …to claim any of these cases (& indeed a fair number of the rulings involved) don’t satisfy the conditions to be denied on the basis of intent (let alone results) isn’t so much turning a blind eye as it is destroying the things like oedipus did when he realised he’d been sleeping with his mother all that time

      …also…john roberts might be a better judge than brett-likes-beer…but with that history on voting rights he really has no business being on that bench much less presiding over the supreme court 

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