Give it away

I thought of another way to measure my blog output. Up to now I’ve been looking at the number of posts per year, which is easily seen in the upper left of my blog’s home page. I had 333 posts in 2020, a bit above the 296 posts in 2019 and higher than any year since 2014. That year I posted 382 times. The record is 459 posts in 2009. But I realized that doesn’t really cover how much writing I’ve done in a year. For example, in previous years I tended to put longer topics in separate posts – the length of this discussion would usually be enough to get a post of its own. In an evening I might put up 2 to 3 posts. Now I do that rarely. I almost always put all of my writing for a day into one post. However, I’ve kept the practice of keeping all writing for a day in one file, even if it ends up as more than one post. With that I can see how many days I posted in a year. And by putting all the files for a year in one folder I can see from the folder size the volume of writing (though keeping in mind there is a per file overhead in using a document editor). In 2019 I posted on 156 days. That’s a year in which I had a full schedule of rehearsals, volunteer work, and concerts taking up 3-4 evenings a week. The total size of the 2019 folder is 3.76 megabytes. In 2020 with most evening events canceled, I posted on 298 days and the 2020 folder is 12.1 megabytes. That almost twice as many days and more than three times the verbiage. It is also twice the verbiage as the high point year of 2009. On to what’s happening. The Michigan coronavirus data shows increasing cases per day for the fourth week in a row. For three days this past week the new cases per day has been above 2500. The low in mid February was about 1000 cases a day. The governor relaxed guidelines too soon. Waiting another six weeks would have given the vaccine time to prevent an increase in cases. But there’s that GOP controlled legislature. Thankfully, the number of deaths per day has stayed at 20 and below for three weeks. That’s still a lot of deaths. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported on the status of vaccines in America.

Biden purchased more 100 million doses of Moderna, 100 million more doses of Pfizer, and 100 million more doses of Johnson & Johnson. Those purchases alone should be enough to vaccinate 200 million Americans (the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two doses each). Put that together with purchases made during the previous administration, and the U.S. should now actually have about 1/3 more doses of COVID-19 vaccine that it actually needs. ... With all that vaccine still available, the U.S. looks to be headed from vaccine shortage to a serious surplus over the next few months. What to do about this? Give it away.

The US has already said it will give away 4 million doses of the AstraZenca vaccine to Canada and Mexico. That makes sense because this vaccine has not been approved for use here and probably won’t for several months. It has been approved on both Canada and Mexico. Giving doses away is both the right thing to do and a safety measure. As long as the virus is circulating in the world and able to create new versions America is still in danger. Sen. Lindsay Graham has declared that when the voting rights bill comes to the floor and if he has to do a talking filibuster he will. Christopher Reeves of Kos says bring it on.

Have at it, Sen. Graham. Get up on stage and talk for hours and hours about why voter suppression is okay. Talk about why state laws that make it difficult for people to participate are good, and why policies that disenfranchise people are just the right of the state. Explain that in a modern society where computers are possible, we can’t figure out a system to allow people to vote anywhere, basically, and we aren’t doing enough about election security. There are a lot of Republicans running next cycle who would love to hear what you have to say. Democrats too—it certainly will make good campaign ads. You’ve been on the attack against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Wait until someone is busy running ads containing your madness and the madness of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, and asking the question: Is this the party you want to be a part of today?

Dave Catanese tweeted a clip of Stephen Colbert discussing the filibuster with Sen. Chuck Schumer and added:

Do late night shows even attempt to do funny and release us from our day anymore or do they just blandly repeat the previous 24 hour political news cycle? Imagine having the highest platform in all of comedy — a stage comics would cut their right arm off for — and decide, “Let’s book the Senate majority leader and talk about the merits of the f---ing filibuster.” I’m old, but seriously, bring back Letterman.

Will Stancil responded:

What’s happening here is that stupid journalistic conventions about neutrality prevent normal news shows on broadcast networks from having honest discussions about things like the filibuster, so Colbert steps in to do the job as a “comedian.” It may be that Colbert’s interview here isn’t funny, but it’s also an interview that could not appear on his network in any other context.

Joan McCarter of Kos reported Rep. Jim Clyburn, a black man, had something to say about the filibuster being a Senate tradition. Here’s a key point:

This whole thing that the filibuster cannot be changed, that's almost like saying to me Brown vs. Board of Education was wrongly decided. That's what you're saying?

Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported that many Republicans realize they screwed up the first major battle of the Biden era, the huge relief package starting to put money into bank accounts.

Shocker—Republicans got caught up in a useless round of conservative media-fueled demagoguery while the rest of America reeled from the greatest public health disaster in a century. Democrats simply blew right past Republicans to answer the national need. But what confounds GOP strategists is that the Republican party really mounted no concerted effort to oppose the Democratic legislation as it gained widespread traction and was broadly embraced by voters. ... Even Democrats have been baffled by the Republican whiff on such a major battle. John Anzalone, an external Biden adviser and former Biden campaign pollster, was amazed that Republicans settled on framing the package as unrelated to COVID-19 when so many Americans who will get the relief money are specifically reeling from pandemic-related illness, joblessness, and financial struggles. “This is just really mind-boggling,” Anzalone said. “At a time that we’re going through three or four crises at once, they have basically just punted. They've completely punted.” ... The lack of both message and messenger has left Republicans hoping against hope the relief that has already started hitting bank accounts and will continue to target life-saving funds to the nation's neediest will somehow plummet in popularity.

Hunter of Kos reported that many GOP state legislators have been looking at the parts of the big relief package just passed that bring relief to state and local government budgets. The GOP thinking has, of course, been about if federal dollars are going to cover this or that expense than state dollars don’t have to and we can give our wealthy donors a tax cut. They don’t think about restoring services that were squeezed because falling sales tax revenues. They don’t intend for those to be restored. Democrats are getting wise to these tricks and wrote into the law that none of this money can be used to fund new tax cuts even if indirectly. Naturally, GOP legislators are looking for ways around that provision. One is to be creative in defining “indirectly.” The other is to sue the Biden administration claiming the provision is unconstitutional because it is too broad. It doesn’t allow states to cut taxes at all, a violation of the 10th Amendment. Leah McElrath tweeted about the shootings in Atlanta and the actions of the police in this case.

The officer’s actions were out of line and contributed to the suffering experienced because of this crime. He regurgitated the suspect’s sociopathic rationale in full—and thereby set the dominant narrative and lay foundation for the suspect’s defense.

David Neiwert of Kos also discussed the police actions, including one telling detail. This is from the officer who lamented the murderer, not the victims, had “a really bad day.”

Despite Asian women comprising six of the eight victims, the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office seemed to be making one excuse after the other for the 25-year-old white perpetrator—but warning that it couldn’t call the mass killings a hate crime. Then it emerged that the sheriff’s official, Capt. Jay Baker, making all the excuses himself was prone to indulging in anti-Asian bigotry in the form of a Facebook post promoting a T-shirt describing COVID-19 as an “Imported Virus From Chy-Na.”

Baker didn’t want to say the shooter committed a hate crime because Baker is just as racist. Because so many of the victims in this shooting are Asian McElrath offered a pronunciation guide to Asian names. If you want to respect an Asian (or any) person you learn to write and speak their names correctly (or at least try). Andrew Stroehlein of Human Rights Watch tweeted:

Genocides do not begin with mass murder. That's where they end up. Genocides & other mass atrocity crimes begin with words - specifically, with powerful people dehumanizing a powerless minority. Once they are seen as less than human, anything is possible, even mass murder.

Draw a line from south of the Chicago suburbs west across Illinois, about where highway I-80 is. North of that line is Northern Illinois region of the United Methodist Church. It is very progressive and where some of the first pro-LGBT congregations in the denomination are. South of that line, the rest of the state, is the Great Rivers region (named for the Mississippi and Illinois rivers). It is much less progressive than the Northern Illinois region (otherwise why have two regions?). However, it is the Great Rivers region that made some positive LGBT news. Isaac Simmons, an openly gay man, was approved by his district to become ordained clergy, the first for this region. He is also the first drag queen to be approved in United Methodist history. I’m pretty sure he still needs to be approved by the whole region. Pastors in national conservative Methodist organizations predictably had a hissy fit, describing Simmons as the spawn of Satan and “a bad copy of Jack Lemmon’s performance in Some Like It Hot” among other things. But they’ve already agreed to leave the denomination (to be voted on when an international conference can be safely held in September 2022), so their opinion doesn’t count. The article doesn’t say whether Simmons will let his drag persona, Ms. Penny Cost, do the Sunday preaching. That would be an awesome sermon I would want to hear in person.