According to FiveThirtyEight, the popularity of Covid vaccination mandates is now increasing (probably in response to the Delta variant). These mandates can come from the hospitality industry, such as bars and restaurants that allow only vaccinated people to enter, employers who require their employees to be vaccinated, schools or universities, or even from federal or state governments.
According to a recent poll, 64% of Americans approve of the government mandating that everyone get vaccinated.
As you might expect, most of the support for mandates comes from people who have already been vaccinated. After all, if you trust the vaccines, and have seen the news that virtually all new Covid cases are happening among the unvaccinated, then of course you want other people to get vaccinated. In fact, right now a fully vaccinated person has a higher probability of getting accidentally electrocuted, than of developing severe coronavirus symptoms.
But here’s the irony: 28% of unvaccinatedAmericans support mandatory vaccination. How could this be?
You want to get vaccinated, but your spouse or (if young) your parents won’t let you. You want someone to help!
Your friends are anti-vaxxers, and you don’t dare cross them.
Like a lemming, if everyone has to, then that will convince you.
Does anyone have any other good ideas? I can’t figure this out!
SeditionTracker.com tracks people who are suspected of participating in the January 6 Capitol riot. This includes:
559 suspects, who have been charged with a crime
Of those charged, so far 267 have been indicted (48%)
Of the indicted, 1 has died, 1 has had their case dismissed, and 26 have been convicted
Of the convicted, 1 has been sentenced
The site shows photos of the suspects. You can also track them by date (the first people were charged on Jan 7), by name, by state, and by status.
Note that people are continuing to be charged. The wheels of justice turn slowly, but at least they are still turning. I’m still hoping they indict the Congresspeople who participated in the insurrection.
In this case, SOS stands for Save Our Snopes. I’m sure all my regular readers know who Snopes is. But do you know that Snopes has been under attack? There is a chance that we could lose them, so they are sending out an SOS call. If you want to find out more about this, and what you can do to help, see https://www.snopes.com/sos/
Comics don’t need to make anything up anymore, because reality is more bizarre than anyone can actually imagine. Trump’s base has absolutely gone off the deep end, and because they can change the result of a Republican primary, they are taking Republican politicians with them. Where do we go from here?
Last week, Newsmax host Rob Schmitt was talking with a Texas A&M professor on the air, and got philosophical:
You know, one thing I’ve always thought, and maybe you can guide me on this because, obviously, I’m not a doctor. But I’ve always thought about vaccines, and I always think about just nature and the way everything works. And I feel like a vaccination in a weird way is just generally kind of going against nature. Like, I mean, if there is some disease out there — maybe there’s just an ebb and flow to life where something’s supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people, and that’s just kind of the way evolution goes. Vaccines kind of stand in the way of that. Do you follow what I’m saying? Does that make sense to somebody in medicine?
This seems very ironic to me. Schmitt is suggesting that nature is purposely killing off some specific population, and we shouldn’t mess with it.
However, maybe he is on to something there, but there is a twist. Almost all Covid-19 cases are among people who have not been vaccinated, and the people who refuse to be vaccinated are overwhelmingly white and Republican (and supporters of Donald Trump).
If these people are unwilling to protect themselves from a deadly disease (over 600,000 Americans have died from Covid), who are we to argue with Mother Nature and convince them to protect themselves?
Was it ever in doubt that as soon as we started getting vaccinated, that people would get complacent and the first holiday weekend that came along would cause a spike in Covid cases? What’s really ironic about this is that the cases are all located in places where people haven’t been getting vaccinated much. You know, places that voted for Trump for president.
So I’m back to wearing a mask in public again. Just in case. Besides, I’ve been wearing a mask so long, it really doesn’t bother me.
I want to wish a happy 75th wedding anniversary to Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. That’s the longest marriage in presidential history. There is a lovely story in the Washington Post about them.
People often talk about the “big lie”, which had its origins with the Nazis. But now we have a new definition, as “big lie” now seems to refer to Trump’s constant assertion that he won the presidential election and is the rightful president of the US.
First, Tucker Carlson claims that the Biden administration is spying on him, in an effort to get him off the air on Fox News. Seriously? You need to spy on Carlson, when he never stops spewing lies and bullshit every day?
Second, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy pulls out his chickenshit plausible deniability to spout a non-accusation, with a call to find answers, when nobody is asking any questions. He tweets:
For the past several months, I’ve seen a disturbing trend at the National Security Agency. The NSA cannot be used as a political instrument.
I’ve asked Rep. Devin Nunes to investigate and find answers on behalf of the American people.
And finally, Gen. Michael Hayden (former director of the NSA) responds with a terse but appropriate reply:
This is not anything new. Remember Benghazi? How about Pizzagate? Don’t worry, as fast as we debunk one conspiracy theory, they come up with another, more terrifying one. In fact, to them the only thing that isn’t a real threat is the Jan 6 insurrection. Those were just tourists!
I’m back from my vacation in Iceland, where I got up close and personal with a volcano, and spent more time than you can imagine hanging out in hot water. I had a wonderful time.
So I come home to the irony that the former occupant actually wanted to use the Justice department to investigate comedy shows that made fun of him. The response from Stephen Colbert is hilarious:
Like Colbert, I’m disappointed that I didn’t get investigated.
Today there is a story that is pretty much a canonical example of irony.
The story comes from CNN, who note that one of the people charged in the January 6 insurrection and riot was caught on video using a bullhorn to heckle Capitol Police by saying that they were “protecting pedophiles”. This appears to be a reference to bizarre QAnon theories about Democrats.
However, in a true case of “I know you are, but what am I?” it turns out that the protestor with a bullhorn is a convicted pedophile who served jail time for having sex with a 14-year-old girl when he was 23. That’s also known as “statutory rape”. At the time of the Capitol riot, he was also on probation for other crimes and has an extensive criminal record. He is currently charged with 8 crimes during the riot, including spraying police with a chemical irritant, and inciting riot with the bullhorn.
Many of the insurrectionists also have previous criminal records, and some of them were also on parole or probation at the time of the riot. That, of course, has not stopped Republicans from pushing the lie that the participants in Jan 6 were law-abiding citizens who were simply exercising their right to protest.
Republicans seem hell-bent on passing off the January 6 insurrection as a normal day of tourism. They will pretend it never happened.
And now Donald Trump is claiming that not only did he win the election, but that he will be reinstalled as the president by August. Is he delusional? Is he acting crazy so that he can use an insanity defense to avoid going to jail? Is this just another grift to remove money from the wallets of his supporters? Or does he really think he can pull off a coup in August?
