We should not have to risk our lives to vote

I did a grocery run today, stopping at all three stores I shop at regularly. With the governor’s call to wear a mask and not having one, I tried to improvise. I took a kitchen towel, folded it in thirds lengthwise, and used a chip clip to hold the ends together behind my head. I’m glad no pictures were taken.

It didn’t work very well. Fastening it behind my head meant it kept slipping down. So after the first store (the largest one) I didn’t use it. At the third store, the small health food store that limits the number of customers, they now have a sign that masks are required. The woman guarding the door emphasized that. I said I didn’t have one. I was thinking maybe I could clip on the kitchen towel again when a guy approaching the door offered to let me use an extra dust mask. I agreed. He got it out of his car and I completed my shopping.

I’m now wondering when should I just stay home and use the (hopefully) two weeks of food I’ve got? What if things are worse when I really do need to go out for food? Which two weeks do I reserve that food for?

Today was sunny and a high of 65F. Just before noon when the temp was in the upper 50s I pumped up the tires on my bicycle and headed out. It was a good day for a ride. I was out for almost an hour. I had a particular destination this time. Last fall I noticed some construction in the floodplain park to the west of me. (I’ve mentioned this park before. It runs near my house. As a park it is 17 miles long and at most a half mile wide, twisting as the river does.) The park had created a new paved trail and included a bridge over the river. That’s nice because the vehicle bridge was too narrow to include bikes. I can now explore to the west in a way I couldn’t before.



Over a million people voted in Wisconsin’s primary yesterday. We may not know the results for a while. Now that it’s the day after there are a lot of pictures of people standing in long, well spaced lines. See here and here. Scroll down in the first one to see the contribution from *The Onion* – a tombstone that says “I voted.” A photo taken by Patrician McKnight shows a man holding a sign with the words, “This is ridiculous.” Adam Rifkin added, “We should not have to risk our lives to vote.”



The nasty guy has fired the Inspector General who informed Congress about the whistleblower who revealed the Ukraine scandal. Inspector Generals are the people who monitor whether a government agency or department is meeting ethical standards. I think most cabinet level departments have one. Or did. Now that the nasty guy has figured out what Inspector Generals do – meaning, as Kerry Eleveld of Kos put it, they are people who are…

sure to catch him doing something unethical, illegal, or both, and then say something about it. The whole idea of an independent watchdog—who’s supposed to police the federal government with something called integrity—is anathema to Trump.

So it looks like the nasty guy has now fired 7 IGs at once. That includes the IG overseeing the $2 trillion pandemic relief fund Congress just passed. Yeah, he fired the guy tasked with making sure that huge pot of money is spent on people who actually need it.

Walter Shaub, a former director of the Office of Government Ethics, explains the various constraints on what a president does – oversight, impeachment, and more – with the last one remaining being the IGs. And those were fired without a peep from GOP senators.




Talk about making things worse … The CDC is considering changing rules so those without COVID19 symptoms would be encouraged to go back to work. This comes just after a report that says 80% of cases had been spread by people without symptoms. And it is the opposite of what proved successful in South Korea.