Fighting Over Scraps

Soon, many Americans will hit the one-year anniversary of spending time at home for work, school and what counts these days as play. Once the novelty and bizarro camaraderie of being home all the time wore off, lots of reasonable people were left with existential dread, illness and a whole lot of anger.

Anger at businesses reopening or building shelters around outdoor tables or not immediately disclosing COVID-positive employees. Anger at schools for staying online or for universities bringing students back to town. Anger at venues for hosting events. And so much anger about masks: wanting people to wear them, having to tell people to wear them, and that months into the pandemic people still needed to be told to wear them over their goddamn noses.

I’ve been angry, including a lot of anger about those who aren’t living up to my expectations of pandemic-safe behavior.

And I’ve heard from good, reasonable people who are angry that I’m angry. They are, after all, working to follow all the guidance they’re getting from public health officials.

How they hell are any of us to know what the hell we’re supposed to be doing or allowing or avoiding? None of us are epidemiologists.

Our governor and state legislators aren’t epidemiologists, either. Nor are our school board members, teachers or school superintendents. And, yet, two weeks from now, our schools will be required to offer five-day in-person classes because non-epidemiologist state politicians have the power to tell non-epidemiologist school boards and administrators that they have to, but they’re also doing it because non-epidemiologist parents are understandably angry that non-epidemiologist school boards and administrators are listening when actual epidemiologists tell them they don’t believe its safe.

This anger, my own included, has often been misdirected. From the very beginning, we’ve been left to be angry about what people are choosing from a menu of bad options: reopen a restaurant at the risk of staff and patrons or put the business and jobs at immediate risk? Try to hold events or tournaments with some risk mitigation or believe that folks are going to do some of this anyway but without any guidance? Get kids into the supported environment of schools at the risk of teacher’s health or force caregivers — disproportionately women — out of the workforce or try to work around school schedules?

All the choices suck. And it makes us angry.

And so we keep getting angry because we’re all worn out. We’re stuck fighting over scraps of normalcy.

Public health crises demand public policy solutions, and our we need real leadership from our federal and state leaders. Leadership means being willing to make hard choices and willing to tell hard truths. Instead, our leaders have continued to too often take the the side of ill-informed anger and frustration and entitlement, squandering so much time and money and trust.

So here we are, with 4,000 people dying every day from COVID-19, racing towards a death toll of 500,000. Angry that we only have bad choices, and fighting over the scraps.

Snapchat is Officially Dead

I find small moments that signal a bigger shift really interesting. This line, from a BuzzFeed story about Kellyann Conway allegedly sharing a nude photo of her daughter, jumped out to me:

The photo, in which Claudia was clearly recognizable, was posted as a fleet, Twitter’s version of Instagram stories, in which posts automatically expire after a day.

That BuzzFeed uses Instagram’s rip off of Snapchat’s thing to explain a Twitter rip off of that same thing says all you need to know about Snapchat’s current and long-term health.

There is No Trump Vaccination Plan for Biden to Inherit

MJ Lee for CNN:

Newly sworn in President Joe Biden and his advisers are inheriting no coronavirus vaccine distribution plan to speak of from the Trump administration, sources tell CNN, posing a significant challenge for the new White House.

Jay Rosen, presciently back in early May:

The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousandbecome a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible— by telling the governors they’re in charge without doing what only the federal government can do, by fighting with the press when it shows up to be briefed, by fixing blame for the virus on China or some other foreign element, and by “flooding the zone with shit,” Steve Bannon’s phrase for overwhelming the system with disinformation, distraction, and denial, which boosts what economists call “search costs” for reliable intelligence.

“Worse than we could have imagined.”

The Praise Rings Hollow

Nick Visser and Amanda Terkel at Huffpost:

One hundred forty-seven Republicans in Congress voted against certifying Democrat Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential election this month. Not only did they try to overturn the election results and give legitimacy to President Donald Trump’s lies of rampant voter fraud, but they essentially tried to erase the mammoth turnout among Black voters that helped Biden win. 

Twelve days after that vote, 107 of those Republicans ― 73% ― tweeted or put out statements Monday praising the work of Martin Luther King Jr., who is perhaps best remembered for fighting for racial justice.

Bernice King:

Please don’t act like everyone loved my father. He was assassinated. A 1967 poll reflected that he was one of the most hated men in America. Most hated. Many who quote him now and evoke him to deter justice today would likely hate, and may already hate, the authentic King.

Biden’s Covid-19 Plan is Maddeningly Obvious

Ezra Klein:

I wish I could tell you that the incoming Biden administration had a genius plan for combating Covid-19, thick with ideas no one else had thought of and strategies no one else had tried. But it doesn’t.

What it does have is the obvious plan for combating Covid-19, full of ideas many others have thought of and strategies it is appalling we haven’t yet tried. That it is possible for Joe Biden and his team to release a plan this straightforward is the most damning indictment of the Trump administration’s coronavirus response imaginable.

“Worse than we could have imagined” is the Trump Administration’s motto.

The Trump Administration’s Vaccine Plan is a Mess

Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post:

Zients pulled no punches in characterizing the challenge. “Uneven at best” was how he described the administration’s effort, which largely consisted of dropping everything in state officials’ laps. “We’re struck by the incompetence across the board,” he underscored. “Worse than we could have imagined,” he repeated.

“Worse than we could have imagined” is the Trump Administration’s motto.

The Cowardly Ben Sasse

Michael A. Cohen, in his new Truth and Consequences newsletter:

Sasse’s constant flip-flops are nearly as odious as the brazen opportunism of Hawley and Cruz. It’s merely opportunism by a different name, cloaked in the gauzy rhetoric of American ideals. The Nebraska Senator is that most loathsome of political figures: a person who preaches the virtues of democracy and political compromise and then violates those words the moment it’s in his political interest to do so.

There’re a lot of ways to be spineless.

“This is Not Justice.”

Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Supreme Court, in a powerful dissent to the court allowing the Trump administration to continue its spree of executions:

After seventeen years without a single federal execution, the Government has executed twelve people since July. They are Daniel Lee, Wesley Purkey, Dustin Honken, Lezmond Mitchell, Keith Nelson, William LeCroy Jr., Christopher Vialva, Orlando Hall, Brandon Bernard, Alfred Bourgeois, Lisa Montgomery, and, just last night, Corey Johnson. Today, Dustin Higgs will become the thirteenth. To put that in historical context, the Federal Government will have executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than it had in the previous six decades. […]

Throughout this expedited spree of executions, this Court has consistently rejected inmates’ credible claims for relief. The Court has even intervened to lift stays of execution that lower courts put in place, thereby ensuring those prisoners’ challenges would never receive a meaningful airing. The Court made these weighty decisions in response to emergency applications, with little opportunity for proper briefing and consideration, often in just a few short days or even hours. Very few of these decisions offered any public explanation for their rationale.

This is not justice. After waiting almost two decades to resume federal executions, the Government should have proceeded with some measure of restraint to ensure it did so lawfully. When it did not, this Court should have. It has not. Because the Court continues this pattern today, I dissent.