Pick a City
Madison, WI
Baton Rouge, LA
San Bernardino, CA
Des Moines, IA
Birmingham, AL
Rochester, NY
Tempe, AZ
Modesto, CA
Tacoma, WA
Grand Rapids, MI
Tallahassee, FL
Little Rock, AR
Bill Maher and Bari Weiss made quite a lot of noise on his program on January 21. They insisted that we’re so over the need for restrictions against COVID – masks required in public places, having to show vaccination cards, distancing from one another, school children never seeing the lower half of their friends’ faces and more.
Worse, it just isn’t necessary, they said. Hundreds of millions of us are vaccinated and millions have been sick and recovered, so they have some level of immunity. Bill and Bari are just so done with COVID, they told us. Can’t we just get back to normal?
Nope. Not yet. That’s because we’re killing over 2,000 of our fellow citizens every day with this virus. Here’s what that means.
Pick your favorite city from the list above – your choice. COVID is killing our people so fast that it can completely wipe out everyone in your favorite city in roughly 100 days. Everyone. COVID kills at a rate that could eliminate every man, woman and child in Punxatawney, PA in less than 3 days. That’s
why we still need to continue to practice safe COVID.
Over and over we foolishly succumb to frustration and have the argument about getting back to normal. That’s why it’s Groundhog Day yet again.
To all the Bill’s and Bari’s, whatever their name, who are just so over COVID, read Dan Rather’s piece. Read some of the many comments, too. Then come back here and write in this Comments section about whether you’re still so over COVID.
BTW – There’s life changing news for our anti-vaxxers who refused because the vaccines were “experimental.” The FDA has fully approved both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, so we should be seeing queues of anti-vaxxers in front of their pharmacies and other freebie vaccine dispensing locations. Check out Walgreens and tell me if you see a line of people with their sleeves rolled up. *
Children’s Brains
From STAT:
“Just as a child tax credit for low-income families prompted by the pandemic has expired, new research points to benefits in brain development for babies whose families received unconditional cash assistance through a randomized clinical trial. The study was small and the changes were modest, but its conclusions align with previous observational studies. Published yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the analysis covers 435 1-year-old children and their mothers who got either monthly cash gifts of $333 or monthly gifts of $20 starting shortly after birth. Children in the higher gift group exhibited more high-frequency, rapid brain activity on an EEG, compared with the lower gift group. Because that brain activity pattern is associated with developing high-level cognitive skills, the authors say, the results reveal a link between poverty reduction and early childhood brain activity.”
Good thing we killed the child tax credit. We wouldn’t want babies born in poverty to be smart, right?
That regularly occurring, self-defeating governmental stinginess and neglect of We the People is why it’s Groundhog Day yet again.
And Of Course
Republicans are already criticizing President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, even though he hasn’t yet named one.
Republicans are criticizing how Biden is dealing with Putin, even though they don’t have a clue what he’s doing.
Republicans voted in congressional goose stepping unison to prevent two voting rights bills from even being debated.
There’s no point in extending this list because you already know that Republicans are only interested in opposing everything any Democrat might support, this in order to secure their own minority control. It’s been that way at least since Reagan, that great champion of democracy (for some) and Iran-Contra. And, surely, you remember Mitch McConnell’s brave, anti-democratic words: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
He said that as the economy was in the free-fall of the Great Recession, businesses where closing, millions were losing their jobs and their housing and we were mired in two intractable wars. Nevertheless, all the Republicans focused on was political combat designed to help themselves and harm Democrats. They hadn’t a care about We
the People or our country.**
And, of course, now we have (yet again) the flaming Nazi-like, Fahrenheit 451 Republican states of Florida, Texas, Tennessee and some other wannabe censor states. In their Salem Witch Hunt revival to cast out the evil spirit of education, they want to ban books that speak of that which must not be mentioned. Fine. I’ll do the mentioning.
They want to protect our apparently fragile White children from the realities of racial discrimination, sex, violence, the Holocaust and other topics that might inform students. “Better to keep them ignorant and mindless,” think the geniuses in our book burning states.
John Pavlovitz thinks that in their list of books to be banned they’ve missed the most ban-able book: the Bible. He writes:
“If Republicans want to ban books that perpetuate violence and inhumanity or tell stories of generational racism and discrimination, and they’re being honest—they’d better start with the Bible.
Thanks go to AT for the cartoon
“Christians who are responsible students of history, know that the Bible is the single most weaponized piece of writing on the planet: responsible for unjust wars, systematic genocide, generational anti-semitism [sic], violent extremism, subjugation of women, and pervasive racism. This isn’t really up for debate. From the Crusades to the Inquisition to the Troubles to The Holocaust to slavery, to racism and homophobia in America, the shadow of the Bible looms large.”
The present craze to ban books is just the newest wash-rinse-repeat cycle of Republican purity hypocrisy. We’ve seen these flames before. That’s why with the Republicans, every day is Groundhog Day, as they display their inner rodent.
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* Have a look at this for the entertainment of international temper tantrums based on disinformation.
** Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner regularly declared that the Republicans were all about, “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!” Then he and his Republican majority proceeded to kill every bill designed to stimulate job growth, leaving millions of Americans unemployed. They had to be shamed into passing a bill designed to help military veterans leaving the service get jobs, this after having first killed that bill. That’s how far Republicans were willing to go to prevent President Obama from having a win. They have nothing to lift us; only actions to diminish their opponents. And we and our country pay the price.
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STOP THE GROUNDHOG DAY INSANITY!
.
The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.
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JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
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