Category: Social Cohesion

Saturday Soother – October 23, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Ryder Beach, Truro, Cape Cod, MA – October 2021 iPhone photo by Wrongo.

A few words about the failure of the Protect the Vote Act to get to the Senate floor: Wrongo doesn’t understand why people are so worried about this. We all understood that Manchin and Sinema needed time to go through their attempt at bipartisanship, to find 10 Republicans who believed in voting. These Senators tried, but it didn’t work out. That’s not surprising, and it’s not like we lost a lot of time – once summer comes and we get to August, we’ll…wait – what? Nobody told me it’s October! OMG, Dems fail again.

On to an underreported story. From Military.com:

“More than 9,000 Afghan refugees who had been living in temporary housing on military bases in the US since the fall of Kabul…have been resettled in local communities, many with the aid of a makeshift army of veterans groups, military family organizations and immigration agencies.”

A US official told Military.com that 5,800 of the 9,000 Afghans were resettled nationwide with the support of these non-governmental groups. Another 3,200 Afghans resettled are mostly US citizens, lawful permanent residents and Special Immigrant Visa holders who aided the American military in Afghanistan, or who already had close ties in the US and did not need outside support.

All of the 9,000 Afghans who left the bases went through security vetting by the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense, the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center and other intelligence government agencies, and were required to receive COVID-19 and other vaccinations before being resettled.

That’s a decent start, but the total population of Afghan refugees on military bases inside the US is still around 55,000. The US Transportation Command has resumed flying refugees that were being held at transit points in the Middle East and Europe to America after measles infections ran through the population.

That means around 64,000 Afghan refugees of the estimated 124,000 that were originally evacuated from Afghanistan are on our shores. CNN reported that in a letter by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Sen. James Inhofe, (R-OK) about 44% of the Afghan refugees housed at US military bases are children. He also reported that 7% were US citizens, 5% were lawful permanent residents, and 3% “held some sort of US visa.” Apparently, 85% were “Afghans eligible for a SIV or P1 or P2 refugee status and their family members,” the letter states, referring to Special Immigrant visas and refugee programs.

The military, and particularly veterans who served in Afghanistan, have largely been supportive of the resettling of refugees. A survey, called Pulse Check: Supporting Afghanistan Allies, conducted by Blue Star Families from Sept. 3 to Sept. 7 showed that about 78% of veterans who served in Afghanistan agreed that the US has a duty to help those fleeing the Taliban. In addition, 46% of the veterans who shared that belief had already participated in some form of assistance effort.

A nonprofit called Welcome.US was formed to coordinate with the government and fund the efforts of veterans groups and private immigration agencies, state and local governments, and business organizations to provide resettlement support. Former Presidents Obama, GW Bush, and Clinton – along with their former first ladies, are serving as honorary co-chairs for Welcome.US. Some 25 other veterans service organizations have joined with Welcome.US, including Blue Star Families, Team Rubicon, the Independence Fund, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, and the Wounded Warrior Project.

Despite the anti-immigrant strain in our country, it seems that this is a rare moment of unity. A poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds 72% of Americans say they favor the US granting refugee status to people who worked with the US or Afghan governments during the war in Afghanistan if they pass security checks.

Even with all of our political divisions, only about 9% of Americans say they are opposed.

Let’s hope that if the government can find homes for these 125,000 Afghans, they will also find homes for homeless vets and other Americans.

Time for our Saturday Soother, where we forget about Krysten Sinema playing eleventy-deminsion political chess and think about a fall season without pumpkin spice. In other words, it’s time to grab a seat by a window and watch the leaves fall while we listen to a reborn jazz version of “Autumn Leaves” played by Breeze, a Korean group with violin, cello, piano and drums. The original song is by Yves Montand:

Very nice performance.

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We’d Better Build Back

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Herring Cove, Provincetown MA – October 18, 2021, photo by Karen Riddett

“Men must either govern or be governed.”   ̶  Elihu Root, 1912 Nobel Peace Prize Winner

Wrongo has never cared for Biden’s “Build Back Better” slogan. He prefers “We’d Better Build Back.” The focus should be on what could happen if we remain on the track favored by Sens. Manchin and McConnell, along with McConnell’s Republican colleagues.

We’d better build back from the wreckage of the Trump presidency. We’d better build back from the wreckage caused by Congressional inaction for the past 20+ years.

Wrongo is currently reading “Wildland, The Making of America’s Fury” by Evan Osnos, journalist at the New Yorker. Osnos says in the Prologue, (pg. 13) that September 11, 2001, and January 6, 2021, were two cataclysmic events in American history, and that the intervening 20 years was: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“…a period in which Americans lost their vision for the common good, the capacity to see the union as larger than the sum of its parts. A century and a half after the Civil War, America was again a cloven nation. It’s stability was foundering on fundamental tensions over the balance between individual freedom and the protection of others, over the reckoning with injustice, and over a basic test of any political society: Whose life matters?”

Umair Haque makes the importance of building back clear in a way that only someone living abroad can:

“America has the rich world’s lowest quality of life, by a long way — after all, Americans will die 5–10 years younger than Spaniards or Germans, but even that understates the issue. It is uniquely a dismal life: nowhere else do we see opioid epidemics, kids massacring one another at schools, having “active shooter drills…”

Haque points out that the fundamentals of a decent life: A living wage, universal access to healthcare, affordable education and housing, and a secure retirement are no longer within reach for the average American.

That’s why we’d better build back.

Step one is to deal with the threats to democracy. We will soon know if the Democrats can actually rouse themselves from their Republican-lite slumbers to pass the Freedom to Vote Act to help get this done.

Step two is to pass the Build Back Better Act, Biden’s social spending bill. It’s now clear that the bill will need to shrink in order to pass. And like the House and Senate, America doesn’t agree on which of its big-ticket items are most important, but shrinkage is on the agenda.

The bill has remained popular in the polls. One thing that’s clear from public surveys: People want to pay for the bill by taxing the rich.

A Vox and Data for Progress poll, conducted between October 8-12, found that 71% of voters support raising taxes on the wealthiest 2% of Americans to pay for the bill. Eighty-six percent of Democrats and 50% of Republicans back that idea. Other tax provisions that could be included in the bill, like tax increases on corporations and capital gains, were supported by more than 65%. Increasing corporate taxes is Wrongo’s preferred policy approach to raising revenues.

Vitally important to the job of building a better country is the proposed new spending on health care, long-term care, childcare, and clean-energy jobs. These ideas are supported by 63% of voters in the poll.

The wisdom of the framers has given us an unrepresentative Senate. That unrepresentative Senate has given us the filibuster, which can be changed, but apparently not by our current Democratic Senators.

And despite its popularity, Biden’s social spending bill won’t be passed in its present form until Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema get what they want removed from it. A real question is whether we have moderate Democrats or just mediocre Democrats who are willing to kill democracy as we know it for some phony principle.

But you can bet it’s not just Manchin and Sinema. There are at least 8-10 other Democratic Senators with substantial bases of wealthy contributors who feel the same pressures and are perfectly happy to have the whole package scaled down, delayed, and possibly killed.

This brings us to step three. Elect better Senators, but how? We were taught in school that in a democratic republic, you get the politicians that the voters (or at least those people who are allowed to vote) want.

This means we need better voters.

How do we get them? It’s hard to know how to do that, except you know, PASS THE FREEDOM TO VOTE ACT!

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Do Religious Exemptions From Vaccination Protect Anyone?

The Daily Escape:

Coast Guard Beach,  Cape Cod MA – October 2021 photo by Anna Olivera Alabarg

From Military.com:

“US service members should have the right to refuse the military’s COVID-19 vaccination requirement on conscientious grounds, the Catholic Church’s Archdiocese for the Military Services said Tuesday.”

The statement by Archbishop Timothy Broglio focuses on potential objections over the use of fetal cell lines in vaccine development: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“The Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines were tested using an abortion-derived cell line. That type of a link has been for centuries considered remote material cooperation with evil and is never sinful. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was developed, tested, and is produced, with abortion-derived cell lines. That vaccine is, therefore, more problematic.”

That’s the Catholic Church’s overriding position on Covid vaccines. Since the military has the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines available, no military member needs to take the J&J shot. Where Archbishop Broglio goes off the rails is with this:

“….no one should be forced to receive a COVID-19 vaccine if it would violate the sanctity of his or her conscience.

Individuals possess the “civil right not to be hindered in leading their lives in accordance with their consciences.”

Even if an individual’s decision seems erroneous or inconsistent to others, conscience does not lose its dignity. This belief permeates Catholic moral theology as well as First Amendment jurisprudence. As stated by the United States Supreme Court, “[R]eligious beliefs need not be acceptable, logical, consistent, or comprehensible to others in order to merit First Amendment protection.”

So, every Catholic in the military has a vaccination hall pass from the Archbishop from taking a vaccine that is “never sinful”? The curious thing is that Catholics are the most vaccinated group in the US, according to a recent national survey by the Pew Research Center.

Should religious exemptions from vaccine mandates really be a thing? Exceptions were designed to protect religious faith. But where vaccines are concerned, they often seem to be used in bad faith, as a way to get around complying with a public health requirement.

Some Constitutional history from Wired: The First Amendment restricts the government from prohibiting the “free exercise” of religion. For much of our history, there were no religious exemptions from secular laws that applied to everyone. As the Supreme Court observed in 1879, “To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”

Congress couldn’t tell you what to believe, the Court ruled, but it can tell you what to do.

By the early 1970s, the justices carved out space for religious exemptions. They ruled that if a superficially neutral law conflicted with a religious command, the government would have to meet the “strict scrutiny” test by showing that it had a “compelling interest” in enforcing the law.

In 1990, the Court narrowed its thinking. In a case involving members of a Native American Church who took peyote as part of religious ceremonies, the Court held that religion doesn’t give someone the right to challenge a “generally applicable” law. Ruling otherwise, wrote the conservative Catholic Justice Antonin Scalia, “would open the prospect of constitutionally required exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind.” An example of a civic obligation that Scalia cited for his slippery-slope argument: compulsory vaccination laws.

In fact, religious opposition to vaccines is rare. In 2013, John D. Grabenstein, a vaccinologist and practicing Catholic, surveyed a wide range of world religions and couldn’t find any that had anti-vaccine teachings, except for the Christian Scientists, who teach that the material world, including disease, is an illusion. And the way to overcome disease is through prayer, not medicine or vaccination.

In the 1960s and ’70s, as vaccine mandates for diseases like measles and polio proliferated, a wave of state laws enabled religious opt-outs. Today, 48 states and the District of Columbia allow some form of exemption.

As Aaron Blake asks in the WaPo: How long before Republicans’ coronavirus vaccine skepticism and anti-mandate fervor makes the next logical jump – to the other vaccines that have been mandated for many years?

It’s already happened. Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan tweeted:

“Ohio should ban all vaccine mandates”

Jordan supposedly is vaccinated. But apparently, he wants not only Covid, but whooping cough and measles to be spread as far and wide as possible.

It seems likely that the US will end up with fewer vaccine requirements in some places than we had before this pandemic that has killed over 700,000 people. You know, the one that we have vaccines for.

We live in a country where there’s no agreement on what constitutes the common good.

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Monday Wake Up Call – October 11, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Dusk, Mayflower Beach, Cape Cod, MA – October 9, 2021, photo by Andrei Anca

From Newsday: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“School boards have become the latest political battleground in America, with passions running so high that this week Attorney General Merrick Garland sent a memo to the FBI, US attorneys and state attorneys general asking them to discuss strategies to combat threats of violence against school workers and school board members.”

These school board battles are about Covid-related vaccination and masking policies, and about teaching anti-racism, racial equity, and cultural diversity. Both turn out to be culture-war battles that set groups of parents against each other. Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker:

“…it’s easy to find in YouTube videos, and local news reports by the score—protesters fairly vibrating with January 6th energy as they disrupt school-board meetings, raging against mask mandates and other COVID precautions, or that favorite spectral horror, critical race theory.”

This is not what people had in mind when they said more people would get involved with their local school boards. Adam Laats, professor of education at Binghamton University SUNY, wrote in the WaPo:

“Conservative pundits have talked up these confrontations as part of a larger political strategy….The Heritage Foundation declared July “National Attend Your School Board Meeting Month” and celebrated the “Great Parent Revolt of 2021,” which includes the founding of hundreds of new parent activist groups that might thwart ‘the radical tide of educators, nonprofits and federal education bureaucrats’.”

This is a specific Republican election strategy. CNN reported that Senate Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell told Attorney General Merrick Garland that parents “absolutely should be telling” local schools what to teach during debates over mask and vaccine mandates, the role of racial equity education and transgender rights in schools. Here’s Mitch:

“Parents absolutely should be telling their local schools what to teach. This is the very basis of representative government….They do this both in elections and — as protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution — while petitioning their government for redress of grievance. Telling elected officials they’re wrong is democracy, not intimidation.”

It’s a big issue in 2021’s Virginia gubernatorial election. Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin quickly used comments by Democratic opponent Terry McAuliffe into an attack ad aimed at invigorating base GOP voters and parents ahead of this November’s election.

McAuliffe’s comment was: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Count on a Clinton ally to give Republicans another “deplorable” quote for Republicans to rally around.

This trollification of local politics began in 2009 with the Tea Party taking over politician’s town meetings. In 1970, Tom Wolfe famously referred to the confrontations between militants and hapless bureaucrats as Mau-Mauing the flak catchers. Back then, the militants were Black people who hinted at a Mau Mau uprising in the US, and the hapless bureaucrats who were paid to take their flak.

Now it’s White militants who are “mau-mauing” their school bureaucrats and the elected school board volunteers who we charge with managing our kids’ education.

We think that social media is where this kind of venom is spewed. But since the Tea Party, people are too ready to boo and jeer others in public spaces who express opinions different from theirs. Some militants even accuse school board members of being part of child-trafficking conspiracies.

America has walked away from its social and political norms.

Trump was among the first national politicians who was willing to say the quiet parts aloud. Those who are resentful in the face of societal change, e.g., having their hate speech corrected, found a voice in Trump. And he’s happily encouraged them. He refused to control his racist, sexist speech and behavior, and they respect him because he never did anything he didn’t want to do.

Don’t want to pay your taxes? Trump’s flouted the tax system for decades.

Tired of dealing with women on the job? Just listen to what Trump does to women.

Don’t like the way the last election turned out? Well, here’s what to do while we’re working on the coup.

And there will always be enough grifters and demagogues to throw gas on this dumpster fire. These Trumpy Americans have such a big emotional investment in their false reality, they don’t really care what’s true.

Time to wake up America. There are reasons for societal norms. They stop us from only focusing on the “I” and allow us to remember the “We.” The We protects us from the worst in ourselves.

To help you wake up, listen to Eddie Vedder’s (Pearl Jam) new single “Long Way” from his upcoming solo album, “Earthling”:

You can hear Tom Petty’s influence in Vetter’s tune.

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Amend the Electoral Count Act

The Daily Escape:

Great North Woods, NH – October 2021 photo by Michael Blanchette

Regarding Facebook’s outage: How did anti-vaxxers do their research without Facebook?

On to what’s wrong today: The Jan. 6 coup attempt didn’t succeed, but it came close. And those involved in the plot have learned from their mistakes. This means the country faces a growing risk of electoral subversion by Republicans and by Trump and his supporters.

We’re still learning the details behind Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, including his pressure on state officials, the Eastman memo, and the Oval Office meetings with Mike Pence, attempting to convince him to throw out certified vote totals from certain states during the Jan. 6 Electoral College vote tally. This attack to subvert the will of the American voters didn’t involve the Capitol rioters. It was held in the White House and led by Trump.

But the attempted coup isn’t over. There’s an organized effort by Republicans in many states to fill key, lower profile election jobs with people who will only certify elections that Republicans win. They’re proponents of Trump’s Big Lie and they’re trying to upend our democratic election process.

On Saturday, the NYT had an editorial about a reform that may be both the most urgently needed, and the easiest (relatively) to pass into law, reforming the Electoral Count Act (ECA):

“The Electoral Count Act, which passed more than 130 years ago, was Congress’s response to another dramatic presidential dispute — the election of 1876, in which the Republican Rutherford Hayes won the White House despite losing the popular vote to his Democratic opponent, Samuel Tilden.”

The NYT says that the Electoral Count Act contains numerous ambiguities and poorly drafted provisions:

“For instance, it permits a state legislature to appoint electors on its own, regardless of how the state’s own citizens voted, if the state “failed to make a choice” on Election Day. What does that mean? The law doesn’t say. It also allows any objection to a state’s electoral votes to be filed as long as one senator and one member of the House put their names to it, triggering hours of debate — which is how senators like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley were able to gum up the works on Jan. 6.”

A few legal scholars have argued that parts of the ECA are unconstitutional, which was the basis of Eastman’s claim that Mike Pence could simply disregard the law and reject electors of certain key battleground states. But the NYT says:

“Nothing in the Constitution or federal law gives the vice president this authority. The job of the vice president is to open the envelopes and read out the results, nothing more. Any reform to the Electoral Count Act should start there, by making it explicit that the vice president’s role on Jan. 6 is purely ministerial and doesn’t include the power to rule on disputes over electors.”

Democrats could bring forward an amendment to the ECA. And it’s unlikely that Republicans would filibuster the vote on the amendment, so Democrats could pass it with a simple majority vote. Their amendment should clarify that the vice-president’s role is purely ceremonial. Further, the threshold for objections to state electoral vote counts could be made higher than just one Senator and one House member from the state in question.

Instead of focusing on the ECA, Senate Democrats hope to pass a version of the Freedom to Vote Act. The act would set nationwide voting standards to help counteract anti-democratic laws passed by legislatures in at least 17 states driven by partisan, conspiracy-minded election officials who could sabotage legitimate election results. The Freedom to Vote Act has four principal pillars:

  1. It sets national standards to protect and expand the right to vote.
  2. It would protect the integrity of elections and make it harder for partisan officials to subvert valid election results.
  3. It would prohibit partisan gerrymandering and empower courts to invalidate overly partisan maps, a needed change since many states have already begun their 10-year redistricting process.
  4. It would reduce the power of big money in elections by shining a bright light on so-called dark money campaign spending.

But there’s little chance of this bill’s passage through the Senate. From Sen. Angus King (I-ME):

“I don’t think the Republicans here are interested in short-circuiting what their brothers and sisters are doing in statehouses across the country,”

Maybe Republicans would also reject ECA reform if the Senate tried to change it. We’re in a world where what the majority wants is no longer what will happen politically.

And the window for fixing this is closing before our eyes.

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Monday Wake Up Call – September 20, 2021

The Daily (no) Escape:

More than 660,000 white flags have been put on display at the National Mall in Washington DC in memory of Covid victims. The display is called “In America: Remember”, organized by artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing it, doesn’t go away”  ̶  Philip K. Dick

And a corollary: Delusion requires passionate and unyielding belief to keep pesky facts from intruding. This is why for some people, cults are a viable form of social organization.

The Covid vaccines save lives. America has an abundant supply. The shot is free. But many Americans remain unvaccinated. Some don’t have access, but it appears the vast majority of the unvaccinated are making a decision that appears to be driven in part, by their politics.

The WaPo reports that:

“Since May of this year, more than half of the deaths from the coronavirus have been in states that voted for Donald Trump. There have been 239 deaths per million among red-state residents, compared with 150 per million in blue states.”

And for vaccinations, states that voted for Trump in 2020 have lower vaccination rates. Here’s a chart:

Are Republicans following a political strategy with vaccines? Brian Beutler thinks so:

“To grasp that Republicans encouraged COVID spread to harm Biden, you don’t have to believe, in a conspiracy-addled way, that they convened in secret and built a playbook for maximizing infections. You simply need to observe that a critical mass of conservative elites view undercutting Biden and Democrats as a political lodestar, and make immensely consequential governing and broadcast decisions on that basis alone.”

According to the NYT, that thinking has led to 16,200 preventable deaths since July 1 nationwide. And it’s important to realize that most deaths occurring now are preventable in a way that was absolutely not the case at the start of the pandemic.

Following on Phillip Dick’s quote above, a reality is that Covid is now a preventable disease.

Ignoring reality, Red State governors are actively discouraging vaccination and masking. They are actively encouraging a preventable but deadly illness to spread. They are putting the entire nation at risk of a vaccine resistant variant. They’re threats to our national security.

Polls show that Biden’s approval rate has slipped, in part due to the Covid surge. Covid may be hurting Biden politically, but it’s hurting Red State Republican constituents literally (and seriously). The Red State Covid fatality rate isn’t high enough to really hurt their vote totals except in marginal districts. The Republican bet is that the intensity/turnout advantage they get from anti-Vaxx deniers will pay off in the 2022 mid-terms.

They seem to have internalized that a pandemic combined with pandemic denialism helps them. In 2020, the Republican ground game benefited from the fact that Covid denialists were more willing to go out in public. They used the fact that their voters were more likely to vote in person to push Trump’s Big Lie election-fraud theories.

But here we are. They’re living in a world where the virus is fake, and thousands of people are dying from taking the vaccine. They’re taking Ivermectin and anti-malarial drugs because the fake virus is a little threatening, but not bad enough to take the vaccine. It can be deadly, but “it isn’t for me” because it’s a liberal conspiracy.

But the “reality” is that excess deaths from all causes since February, 2020 according to the CDC is 830,400. Last year, the age-adjusted all-cause mortality rate in the USA rose by 15.9%. This is by far the biggest one-year rise in that rate in the 120 years that official records have been kept for this basic measure of overall public health.

Time to wake up Red Staters! Many of the GOP higher ups (and their media lackeys) think that you’re not masking or taking the vaccine, will hurt Biden and the Democrats. Maybe you should be thinking about the greater harm that following their lead may bring to you and your family.

To help you wake up on this last Monday of summer, listen to the Foo Fighters, who are going through a “disco discovery” stage wherein they call themselves the Dee Gees, cover the Bee Gees’ “You Should Be Dancing”:

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – September 19, 2021

Ruy Teixeira had thoughts on the California recall election: (brackets by Wrongo)

“In the recall election exit poll, the “yes” vote against Newsom [yes meant replace him] was 40% among Hispanics. That far outdistances the [Hispanic] vote for Trump in 2020…(just 23% in the exit poll; 29% in the AP/NORC Votecast survey)….Biden’s approval rating seems to be lagging nationwide among Hispanics. In the most recent Quinnipiac survey, Biden has only 38% percent approval vs. 47% disapproval among these voters.”

Yes, there was room for some optimism in the CA results: Running against Trump (or Trump clones) still looks like a winner. But Biden needs to do better with Hispanics, and he needs America to beat Covid. All of this says the Democrats have work to do before the 2022 mid-terms. On to cartoons.

Newsom won:

Are Republicans willing to die to beat Biden?

Are the Republicans willing to die to beat Biden?

Wrongo extends a greeting to General Milley: Welcome to Antifa. We’re glad to have you:

Abused Gymnasts stick it to the FBI who failed bigly:

Amy Coney Barrett says there aren’t any partisan hacks on the Supreme Court. She said that “judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties.” Her philosophy is “originalist,” which is interpreting the law after consultation with James Madison’s ghost:

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Saturday Soother – September 18, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Great Sand Dune NP – photo by Rick Randall

A disturbing story from Kaiser Health News (KHN):

“Republican legislators in more than half of US states, spurred on by voters angry about lockdowns and mask mandates, are taking away the powers state and local officials use to protect the public against infectious diseases.”

KHN found that at least 26 states pushed through laws that permanently weaken government authority to protect public health. The actions varied but included these:

  • In 16 states, legislators have limited the power of public health officials to order mask mandates, quarantines, or isolation. In some cases, they gave themselves or local elected politicians the authority to prevent the spread of infectious disease.
  • At least 17 states passed laws banning Covid vaccine mandates or made it easier to get around vaccine requirements.
  • At least 9 states have new laws banning or limiting mask mandates. Executive orders or a court ruling limit mask requirements in five more.

Here’s a map showing where these assaults on public health are happening:

Draft legislation created by the American Legislative Exchange Council, restricting the emergency powers of governors and other officials, has inspired dozens of state-level bills, according to KHN. In some states, governors can no longer institute mask mandates or close businesses, and their executive orders can be overturned by legislators.

This toxic stew has led at least 303 public health leaders to retire, resign or be fired since the pandemic began. That means 1 in 5 Americans have lost a local health leader during the pandemic, when many hospitals are full, and people are still dying in large numbers.

This is America in 2021: It’s vitally important to the freedom of True Americans™ that the government be prevented from doing anything to help or protect them, except for cutting taxes.

We live in a dysfunctional democracy, and that seems to be the way we like it. No evil deity could have done better at setting us up to fail.

There are two big ideas that are colliding in the weakening of state-level public health and the subsequent loss of public health officials. One is the doctrine of federalism, our system of government in which the same territory is controlled by two levels of government. The US Constitution has established a system of “dual sovereignty,” under which the States have surrendered some of their powers to the federal government, but also retained sovereignty in others.

These 26 states are using federalism, asserting their power over federal regulations and processes that are designed to keep people safe. It’s unclear what the federal government can do to reverse these actions.

The second big idea is: what are the foundational goals of government? The safety, health and longevity of our people should be the primary metrics for good governance. The decline in the quality of our governance shows clearly in the American people’s decline in both health and longevity.

Public health as a function has been in decline for decades. This attack on public health is the latest step in the systematic effort to discredit the profession, to box it in. Few in public health have direct power; most are working on social/environmental research, information sharing, and creating best practices in regulation of product and worker safety.

Our dysfunctional democracy got that way by catering to corporations and wealthy donors. Politicians are disinvested in the American people; they have disinvested from creating what should be a fair sharing of social gains.

This makes them anti-public health. To the extent they have any interest, it’s in public health’s policing powers, like the bounty hunter policy that’s been enacted in Texas.

But, today’s Saturday, and it’s a legal requirement for this column to help readers find a few moments to leave the clash of cultures behind and relax for at least a few minutes. Leaves are starting to fall on the fields of Wrong, and next week marks the end of summer. We’ve placed a few mums around the yard, and Wrongo got around to calling the shop that’s fixing his snowblower for an update.

To help you relax, grab a seat near a window and listen to Karl Davydov’s Opus 20, No. 2 “At the Fountain”. Davydov was a Russian cellist described by Tchaikovsky as the “czar of cellists”. Here, “At the Fountain” is played by cellist Jérémy Garbarg, accompanied by Samuel Parent, on piano.  Recorded at the Vuitton Foundation in December 2018:

In 1870, Count Wilhorsky, a Russian patron of the arts, presented Davydov with a 1712 Stradivarius cello. This cello is now known as the Davydov Stradivarius. It was owned by the great cellist Jacqueline du Pré until her death and is currently on loan to cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – September 12, 2021

When Wrongo was a kid living in CT, he got a 3-speed English bike, a Humber. One day while riding on the road in front of our house, a truck forced me onto the road’s sandy shoulder. The sand immediately grabbed the bike’s front wheel, stopping it dead in its tracks. Wrongo went headfirst over the handlebars and got up with a displaced fracture of his left wrist.

While Wrongo saw the accident coming, he couldn’t do anything to avoid the sand.

On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, is America being pushed onto the sandy shoulder of our road? We can still avoid a crash, but we’re facing quite a few threats that might push us off the road and into the gutter:

  • Losing our social cohesion
  • Continuing income inequality
  • Continuing racism
  • Increasing threats to the right to vote

Twenty years on, America is more at war with itself than with foreign terrorists. Our society and our democracy are threatened from within in a way that Osama bin Laden could never have managed.

Think about the Delta variant. One Party thinks that people should be free to acquire and transmit to others a deadly and extremely communicable virus. They also think it’s morally wrong for the government to engage in even the mildest coercion to push people to get vaccinated, because that coercion interferes with an individual’s liberty.

They think personal liberty is the highest social value in all circumstances except abortion. On to cartoons.

Our continuing learning disability:

9/11 aftermath:

Texas has only one star in its flag. That’s also its Yelp review:

New rodeo event in Texas:

America’s right wing is constantly sore about everything:

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A Not-So-Soothing Saturday – September 11, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Remembrance of an Idealized WTC. (This is a 2015 screen grab from The Economist)

On this 20th anniversary of the 9/11 disaster, let’s take a short look back, and a longer look forward.

Wrongo and Ms. Right lived 2 blocks from the WTC in the early 1980s. We were urban pioneers, living and working in the Wall Street area. That part of town didn’t have supermarkets, and few stores were open after 5pm.

Occasionally, we would have dinner at Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the North Tower. In fact, one of our children had her sweet-sixteen dinner there, with all of New York at her feet. Back then, I visited the Towers often, seeing friends and colleagues who worked there.

On 9/11/2001, Wrongo was in Maine, visiting a company he had just acquired. Like in Manhattan, we watched a beautiful blue sky as the terrible breaking news turned into harsh reality. We spent the next week vainly trying to work, while mostly sitting in a nearby restaurant with a huge TV wall that was tuned in to all terrorism, all the time.

We had a grandson born in New Jersey on 9/14. I drove to the hospital from Augusta, Maine, while Ms. Right drove east from State College, PA. He’s turning 20.

Today, it gets progressively harder to remember what the US used to be like before 9/11. We forget what it was like to be able to arrive at the airport 20 minutes before a flight. What it was like to walk into a building without going through a metal detector.

Most important, it’s hard to remember what it was like to believe that the US’s version of democracy would remain ascendant for all time. Some context for our 20-year War on Terror comes from Spencer Ackerman’s 2021 book, “Reign of Terror”:

“In response to 9/11, America had invaded and occupied two countries, bombed four others for years, killed at least 801,000 people — a full total may never be known — terrified millions more, tortured hundreds, detained thousands, reserved unto itself the right to create a global surveillance dragnet, disposed of its veterans with cruel indifference, called an entire global religion criminal or treated it that way, made migration into a crime and declared most of its actions to be either legal or constitutional. It created at least 21 million refugees and spent as much as $6 trillion on its operations.”

Quite the achievement, no? We responded in a primitive, unthinking way and unearthed a weakness in our national character that continues to haunt us today. Among 9/11’s legacies are not just mass surveillance and drone strikes, but also the rise of right-wing extremism. More from Ackerman:

“When terrorism was white….America sympathized with principled objections against unleashing the coercive, punitive, and violent powers of the state….When terrorism was white, the prospect of criminalizing a large swath of Americans was unthinkable…”

He’s thinking about the Oklahoma City bombing. Then things changed:

“The result…was a vague definition of an enemy that consisted of thousands of Muslims, perhaps millions, but not all Muslims — though definitely, exclusively, Muslims.”

It’s important to remember that GW Bush insisted that Muslims weren’t the enemy at one moment and then described the War on Terror as a “crusade” the next.

Many authors say there’s a direct line between 9/11 and the rise of right-wing extremism in the US. For example, the Ground Zero Mosque enraged Republicans. The buildings, a few blocks from the WTC, were damaged on 9/11. In 2009, the NYT reported on plans to replace some of the buildings with a mosque and Islamic cultural center. Republicans were still angry enough to complain that the new building was a “victory mosque”.

It is one thing to oppose radical Islamist terrorism. But when Republican politicians redefined the enemy not as violent jihadists but Muslims in general, they also redefined their Party as one welcoming xenophobic rhetoric and candidates.

From Cynthia Miller-Idress:

“…al Qaeda terrorists and their ilk seemed to have stepped out of a far-right fever dream. Almost overnight, the US…abounded with precisely the fears that the far right had been trying to stoke for decades…far-right groups saw an opportunity and grabbed it, quickly and easily adapting their messages to the new landscape. A well-resourced Islamophobia industry sprang into action, using a variety of scare tactics to generate hysteria about the looming threat.”

Will Saletan of Slate connects this to our botched Covid response:

“When al-Qaida struck America on 9/11, Republicans completely reoriented our government to confront terrorism….Republicans instituted new measures to track and halt the spread of terrorism at home. They upgraded domestic surveillance and tightened screening at airports and other public places.

Today, in the face of a far more deadly enemy, Republicans have done the opposite. They’ve belittled the coronavirus pandemic, scorned vigilance, defended reckless individualism, and obstructed efforts to protect the public.”

Their campaign of obstruction and propaganda has contributed to millions of unnecessary infections.

In this respect, Covid was a test of that Party’s character. It challenged Republicans to decide whether they’ve moved from being a party of national security, to a party of grievance and animosity. We now know the answer to that question.

Elliot Ackerman (no relation) in Foreign Affairs observes:

“From Caesar’s Rome to Napoleon’s France, history shows that when a republic couples a large standing military with dysfunctional domestic politics, democracy doesn’t last long. The US today meets both conditions.”

Let’s close with a 9/11 tune. The October 20, 2001 “Concert for New York” can’t be beat. It was a highly visible and early part of NYC’s healing process.

One of the many highlights of that 4+hour show was Billy Joel’s medley of “Miami 2017 (seen the lights go out on Broadway)” and his “New York State of Mind”. Joel wrote “Miami 2017” in 1975, at the height of the NYC fiscal crisis. It describes an apocalyptic fantasy of a ruined NY that got a new, emotional second life after he performed it during the Concert for New York: 

The concert brought a sense of human bonding in a time of duress. It isn’t hyperbole to say that the city began its psychological recovery that night in Madison Square Garden. It’s worth your time.

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