Nope, not Florida. One of two states where this is done.
4 Likes
everyhting you wrote pretty much describes the southern red-neck male and his spouse.
3 Likes
Remember all those oldsters in places like the Villages and DeSantis donors got vaccinated months ago. Instead of having an outreach program for families and kids they let them sink or swim hence the teens now having the highest positivity rate.
9 Likes
Florida teens should just rub some dirt on it. This will toughen them up for life’s challenges.
AND GET YOUR ELBOWS OFF THE TABLE!!
9 Likes
Have you met eastern Washington?
12 Likes
Thanks. I thought they were all appointed, like here in south Florida. Maybe there still are some getting elected upstate.
3 Likes
I think it’s both. (Perhaps that was your rhetorical point.)
1 Like
Article in today’s San Antonio Express News (link not available)
“With fight over mask mandates, Gov. Abbott passes purity test in Trump’s GOP.
For the majority of the pandemic, Gov. Greg Abbott erred on the side of caution — implementing a statewide mask mandate, allowing business occupancy limitations, giving local governments the ability to reinstate some restrictions if hospitalizations surge.
But now, as Texas endures a third COVID wave, Abbott has rejected all of those policies. In fact, he’s banned them.
The 180 has confounded health experts and local officials. But for Abbott, who faces several primary challengers next spring, the refusal to enact any more mandates is a politically advantageous one.
Our analysis shows a strong correlation between the Texas counties with the lowest COVID vaccination rates and [those that voted for former president Donald Trump, whose supporters are key to Abbott’s re-election bid.”
15 Likes
That will forever and always be the case in a country without widespread surveillance testing. Positivity rate basically tells you what percentage of people who think they may have picked up the virus and care enough about it to go through the trouble – and it is trouble – of getting tested have actually picked up a case of the virus. So it gives you a sense of how much it’s spreading, but it is impossible to turn that into a solid number of how many people have it at any particular time.
15 Likes
One (or two) of those jobs are Governor of Florida. And Governor of Texas.
3 Likes
It’s sad the number of almost daily reports of people dead or dying because they refused to get the vaccine. Themselves or surviving relatives bemoaning the error in judgment they’d made.
But it’s not so sad I wouldn’t mind reading about it dozens and dozens of times every day. Dumb MAGA bastards.
7 Likes
I agree, but do not / cannot assume I know the motives of other people. I have thought the same thing for the past 30-35 years. It’s almost as if they act as if they want to degrade the education of others to make it easier for them to control the narrative and remain in office through effectively lying to their constituents. An educated population (i.e., one that has learned to to think and reason with facts, can identify flaws in reasoning of others, and knows how to differentiate truth from fiction based on observables) is their greatest enemy as they can’t pass on their distortions.
I sometimes believe that it is getting worse, as the Republican leadership thought they could control the nonsense but over the past few decades, they’ve lost control of their monster. In fact, the monster (the far right with their anti-intelligence/reasoning/competency/experience) is now in power and in control at the municipal and state levels and have recently won national elections for federal positions (Greene is only one example with her Italian space lasers nonsense).
Too many people also confuse immediate access to information (via electronic devices) with knowledge, but have not yet learned how to discriminate between what is truth and what is fabrication either in part or in full (again, the entire voting machine con). This trajectory is not new, but occurs at each major advance in media and news propagation throughout our history. What is new is the speed at which these lies can be transmitted to the general population and how those speaking the truth can be silenced by sheer numbers of opposition electronic responses that can be controlled by a few individuals (now think FOX News).
For more on this, see a recent link:
We’ll sort through this in time, but this is what culminated in our Trump experience. He used this modern technique to tap into frustration of people enlarged by distortions and willful misdirections to blame their problems on the “elites” who caused others to get things that their base did not (the mother of all lies if one wants to look at safety-net programs and which political party worked to get them passed: spoiler alert, it wasn’t the Republican Party).
An ignorant, malleable population is their friend, so make it harder to education the masses. Certainly and clearly not all Republicans believe this, but that fraction of the Party is too small and has been effectively neutered. That is why I continue to ask how anyone can remain a member of the Republican Party as it now stands. Meanwhile, US citizens are literally dying as a consequence of Republican leadership…and the band plays on.
13 Likes
They would rather die than vote for a Democrat.
FIFY
9 Likes
The unknown unknowns of possible effects not seen now are as worrisome as the further mutations. Risking handicapping your future generation for today’s votes is the stuff of bad fiction, but here we are.
8 Likes
I think there is something to that. There is a movement in some Republican-led states to provide vouchers so that anti-mask and anti-mandate parents can enroll their children in private and parochial schools.
8 Likes
They both want to be president. That means they both have to win GOP primaries next year to get re-elected as governors of their state, which necessitates kowtowing to GOP primary voters, a self-selected group of zealots, dittoheads, and Infowars listeners who would readily toss their asses in favor of Allan West or some such shit if they have to so much as look at a mask. And then they have to win a national primary campaign that is also decided by zealots, dittoheads, and Infowars listeners. So all they’re doing here is the right thing for their prospective constituents.
I remain skeptical that getting kids sick, hospitalized, and killed is a great platform for electoral policy writ large, but it’s fundamental to Republican primary politics.
24 Likes
Hard to tell with this nation. Trump won in 2016 labeling Latinos and Mexicans rapists, murderers and drug dealers. Bragging not paying taxes made him a smart businessman, even though those he was appealing to paid theirs. Calling his women primary challengers horse faces. Denigrating the service of dead veterans and their Gold Star families. Lambasting a Vietnam POW as a phony hero because he was captured. On and on it goes. Yet he won. Who is to say Abbott and DeSantis will pay any penalty for killing kids? With GOP primary and general voters the cruelty is the point. Toss in voter suppression and gerrymandering and they both may be playing a winning hand.
15 Likes
I do not see how promoting likely illness and possible death is an outstanding policy to run on. I just do not see it.
Most young folk, even as teens (especially so in my experience) require direction in their lives. They need to be taught they aren’t immortal. It’s not an easy proposition either. For parent or teen.
8 Likes
DeSantis
3 Likes
2 Likes