Fundamentally unknowable

Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Daily Kos, quoted three people of interest. I’ll save the third for later in my post. The first is a quote from Richard Florida and Arthur Caplan of USA Today:

Until now, society has pussy-footed around the right of the unvaccinated to inflict harm. We have implored them to do the right thing, creating incentives like free beer and lottery tickets for them to do so. ... But instead of focusing on how to contain spread from unvaccinated people, the CDC put the onus on the rest of us – advising the vaccinated and especially children to again mask up indoors. Why should kids and the vaccinated bear this burden? The right thing to do is to impose restrictions on those who choose to go unvaccinated.

The second quote is a tweet from Max Boot, who linked to and quoted from an article in the New York Times that suggests health insurers could give a financial nudge:

What if the financial cost of not getting vaccinated were just too high? If patients thought about the price they might need to pay for their own care, maybe they will reconsider remaining unprotected.

If a person refuses to get vaccinated and then gets sick, yeah, an insurance company will be paying out a lot of money. I had written about many differences between the original COVID virus and the delta variant. Mark Sumner of Kos, in a post from last week, discussed a Washington Post article about data from the CDC. The main idea: “The war has changed.” The delta variant is different enough that we should consider it a new and more deadly virus though, thankfully, the original vaccine offers a great deal of protection against it. Sumner included details of how deadly, which I won’t repeat. I will repeat his warning. This virus is too deadly for us to just live with it. In a second post Sumner wrote:

While they pouted about whatever Fox News last told them to pout about, the vaccine hostile were really counting on one simple thing, something they’ve counted on their whole lives: Reasonable people would save them. What the holdouts really expected was that things would be fine. Because they’re always fine. They get to scream and make claims about pizza tunnels, while Reasonable People make the world keep spinning. They could be as vaccine hostile as they wanted, because everyone else would get the vaccine. Then they could go around wagging their finger over how America was populated by sheep and robots, while leaning back on the knowledge that those sheep and robots were saving their unvaccinated necks. But the delta variant came along and screwed up that little plan. With [a high transmissibility rate], the “wave my gun and scream about freedom” faction soon found that, this time at least, the Reasonable People could not drag the unmasked ship of fools across the finish line. And now, dammit, it’s get vaccinated or else. Because the Reasonable People are tired of being reasonable.

Sumner then discussed various companies that are defying Republican governors and requiring workers to be vaccinated. Then he discussed Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issuing an executive order banning schools from requiring vaccinations or masks.

If what Abbott’s order is trying to say is that Texans are not going to fight at all, and intend to passively hand their children over to the virus—sure, that’s clear. And it does fit in with Texas’ founding tradition of getting people pointlessly killed in boneheaded stands over causes favored by white supremacists.

Surprising to many of us the nasty guy administration had a COVID testing czar. For some of us that means whatever he says would be tainted. But, as Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos reported, for other people that could be a sign they could and should take him seriously. The testing czar was Adm. Brett Giroir. And on the CNN show Cuomo Prime Time, he said this:

If you're not vaccinated and if you have not had Covid...you're going to get the Delta variant. ... On average, one person will transmit this to nine people, unlike the original virus, which got transmitted to two or three.

Back to Dworkin’s roundup and a third quote. This one is from Greg Sargent of Plum Line:

But while the money angle is noteworthy, what also deserves attention is the core insight motivating these efforts. It’s that the question of whether voter fraud can or cannot be proved is irrelevant. Instead, those making such accusations need to create just enough confusion to enable well-placed Republicans to say the actual outcome of a given election is fundamentally unknowable. The coin of the realm is not concocted proof; it’s manufactured uncertainty. This is what will lay the groundwork for attempting to overturn a future election.

That’s essentially claiming it is not possible to accurately count ballots. Joan McCarter of Kos wrote that we might see the Arizona fraudit as a joke, but election law scholars are not laughing. Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, said, “I’m scared s---less.” He said that to Jane Mayer, writing in The New Yorker. Yeah, all the voter suppression laws are scary, but even scarier are the laws that give a political party control of the election and be the ones who count the votes. Georgia has already passed such a law and started testing its provisions. This drive to take over elections has been going on for a while. Mayer wrote that the effort has been driven by longstanding conservative groups posing as mainstream Republican organizations. They’re funded, as Mayer wrote, “by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives.” The groups include ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that writes conservative legislation that shops it around to conservative state legislators. The groups used to stick to voter suppression. Not anymore. Their legal precedence is the Bush v. Gore decision in 2000. Already, the conservative judge-picking Federalist Society had it’s fingers on the case. McCarter wrote:

In their concurrence on the decision, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, "argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors." That's the underpinning, the "Independent Legislature Doctrine," to attempts by the right and the former guy's lawyers to overturn elections. It's what Republican legislatures are going to point to in order to justify new laws to take over elections. Nathaniel Persily, an election law expert at Stanford, told Mayer, "It's giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument."

The only thing that can end this is new voting rights laws (though I think the current Supreme Court, based on the reasoning above, would overturn any new voting rights laws). And to pass voting rights laws the Senate must get rid of the filibuster. And for that to happen Sens. Manchin and Sinema must stop believing that Republicans are patriotic Americans. About those voting laws... Paul Blumenthal of Huffpost reported that 150 state lawmakers from 30 states have joined the 50 Texas Democrats already in DC to call on members of Congress to suspend the August recess and pass voting rights laws. The Texas Dems have been in DC for 23 days to prevent a quorum, which prevents the GOP from passing voter suppression laws. Supporters of these bills say they need to be passed before August 16. That’s because on that date the Census Bureau will release the data to be used for 2022 redistricting. Passing the bills after that date and states might say too late, we’ve already drawn our district maps. We’ll take a look at the anti-gerrymandering provisions in 2031. As July ended there were lots of news stories (at least to the sources I listen to and read) about the end of the COVID eviction moratorium. Which was not renewed in time. Biden said he couldn’t renew it because the Supreme Court said he couldn’t without Congressional authorization. Pelosi said Biden hadn’t given her time to get a bill through the House before the August recess. Leah McElrath tweeted:

Watching Biden and Pelosi toss the blame potato back and forth is disgusting. ... C’mon, @POTUS and @SpeakerPelosi: You’ve clearly made a decision NOT to extend the eviction moratorium. Since you’re doing nothing to prevent ongoing evictions of Americans, at least have the courage to explain to us the justification for this decision. You owe us that much. ... The refusal of Democratic leaders to intervene to prevent the eviction of Americans during an ongoing pandemic seems to indicate they’ve decided to prioritize economic interests above those of public health at this point. We knew that was going to happen. The question was when. I’d argue that a shift toward prioritizing economic interests in advance of the peak of the Delta wave is deeply misguided. There is no moral justification for allowing people to become unhoused as a far more contagious variant spreads and children are not yet vaccine eligible.

Judd Legum tweeted a thread:

The Biden administration claims it lacks the legal authority to extend the CDC eviction moratorium, which expired Saturday. It says a Supreme Court ruling prevents them from extending it. This is absolutely false.

A group of landlords sued the CDC to overturn the eviction moratorium. A federal court found the moratorium unconstitutional, but the ruling was stayed. The case went to the Supremes. They voted 5-4 to leave the stay in place. So what’s the problem?

In his concurring opinion, Kavanaugh says that Congress would need to pass a law for the CDC to extend the moritorium. But that issue was not before the court. IT HAS NO LEGAL AUTHORITY.

Kavanaugh wrote that as he voted to keep the moratorium in place. So the CDC’s authority to impose a moratorium was not changed. The administration could extend the moratorium and chose not to. Another detail I read along the way: The Supremes ruled at the end of June. Biden didn’t dump it on Pelosi until the day before the August recess. Why didn’t he do anything in July? In response to this game of hot potato, Rep. Cori Bush, former activist from St. Louis spent four nights sleeping on the steps of he Capitol, as reported by McCarter. By Tuesday, three days after the moratorium expired (and evictions began) Biden relented on his demand that Congress fix it and found a way for the CDC to extend the moratorium. Which they’ve now done for 60 days. Congress has already passed $46 billion for rental assistance. Alas, only $3 billion has actually helped people. Biden left distributing the money to the states and they were caught unprepared – and are free to design their own bureaucratic hurdles. In the last day or so I’ve heard $46 billion isn’t enough for everyone who needs rental assistance. Marissa Higgens of Kos reported why Rep. Bush did what she did. She has lived the evicted life, living in her car for a while. That’s one thing that prompted her to be an activist, which prompted her to run for Congress. She vowed she would use her voice for those who don’t have a voice. In sleeping on the Capitol steps (reclining in a chair because actually lying down on the steps is not allowed) she definitely used her voice. Well done. Laurel Hubbard is a trans woman from New Zealand competing in the Olympics in the sport of weightlifting, reported Higgins. Also in these games is Quinn, a non-binary trans athlete on the Canadian women’s soccer team. On Friday the team will play to determine whether they win gold or silver – so Quinn will get a medal, the first non-binary trans athlete to do so. There are also Alana Smith competing in street skateboarding and Chelsea Wolfe in BMX freestyle, both of the US. A great Olympic story: Rhea Mogul of CNN reported both Mutaz Essa Barhsim of Qatar and Gianmarco Tamberi of Italy had cleared 2.37 meters in the high jump. Neither cleared 2.39 meters, which is the current Olympic record. A games official approached them about how to do a tie-breaker. Barshim, a good friend of Tamberi, asked, “Can we have two golds?” The official agreed. The friends celebrated their tie. Even both coaches broke down in tears.