Up a bit. Can't take too much meaning from one week, but I expect all the good jobs news is going to start reversing, as the official policy of "Pretending a pandemic with horrifying illness and death counts does not exist" continues, along with the eradication of almost all financial support, except notably the student loan payment pause, that was ushered in under the great and glorious benevolence of The Last Guy.
Mike Lindell has never been more confident about his plan to overturn the 2020 election: "We have enough evidence to put everyone in prison for life, 300 and some million people." Is he planning to imprison basically the entire US population? pic.twitter.com/UYfC1dR7V0
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) January 12, 2022
Americans give President Joe Biden a negative 33 – 53 percent job approval rating, while 13 percent did not offer an opinion. In November 2021, Americans gave Biden a negative 36 – 53 percent job approval rating with 10 percent not offering an opinion.The policies are bad, and the vibes, they are really bad.
I think I used to get mad at things like a Tom Friedman column endorsing such stupidity. Now I just laugh. I'm not entirely sure why, though at least with Tom specifically it's because 10-15 years ago he was indeed a Very Serious Person and now he is a bit of a punchline, and not just to people who read very fine blogs like this one. Though hopefully this very fine blog contributed to that shift, just a little bit!
(CNN)An ex-girlfriend of Rep. Matt Gaetz, who is seen as a key witness in the ongoing investigation into alleged sex trafficking by the Florida Republican, entered an Orlando federal courthouse with her lawyer on Wednesday where a grand jury has been meeting, according to a CNN reporter on the scene.
I think I saw it a bit differently at the time, but my takewaway now is that when you give centrists everything they want, the result sucks, so they're miserable and pretend they didn't get everything they wanted.
(American politics is basically Tom Friedman getting anywhere between 92% to 98% of what he wants in any given year).
The point being his brilliant plan for a transition to a capitalist utopia required doing 5 things precisely right, and if they only managed to do 4 of them and plunge the economy into complete darkness, with severely diminished lifespans and vastly increased poverty and with half the country being siphoned off into the bank accounts of 15 people, 5 of whom were buddies with this economist, THEY HAD NO ONE BUT THEMSELVES TO BLAME.
There's a petulant, "fuck it, taking my ball and go home," attitude with this, rather than, "it's my responsibility to deal with this imperfect mess even if the people aren't all doing exactly what I tell them to do."
A senior administration official argued an effort to send N95 or KN95 masks to Americans would make little difference because "half the country won't wear any mask."Plenty of people wear masks, plenty of people are willing to wear masks, all of those people would happily wear *better masks.* Polls show lots of support for wearing masks, and even if there are corners of the country where this is not the majority view, it's still a substantial minority view and every little bit helps."It may be popular in certain corners of Twitter, but for masking to work as a public health tool, people need to actually wear them," the official said. "To prevent spread, the focus should be maximizing the number of people simply wearing a mask in the first place, not shifting the goal posts to urge everyone to go above and beyond to use high filtration masks to make it less likely they themselves will inhale particles.”
Another reason to do it, like many other things, is to signal that it's important, to model behavior by putting resources behind it. And, sure, you probably aren't going to convince the MAGAs to wear them, but making them available for the people *who will wear them* helps! Every little bit helps!
Encouraging (not even requiring) mask wearing is the lowest cost intervention there is, even if it involves mailing out millions of the fancy ones!
I love the swipe at *twitter,* which always come from the people whose brains are absolutely the most poisoned by social media, but who are convinced it's everybody else with that problem.
And, hey, maybe masks are dumb, but you guys are in charge and you better figure something out, aside from yelling at people to go to work sick.
This is not the Great And Glorious Biden Era I was promised (and no it isn't all Biden's fault).
And people in jobs without insurance are the ones who need available tests the most!
*I know the insurance companies will figure out how to compensate themselves for this, but someone's gonna pay!Has anyone done a deep dive into what in god's name inspired them to take this approach instead of just buying the testings and giving them out directly? https://t.co/G0IYb5InyO
— Laura Marsh (@lmlauramarsh) January 11, 2022
Everything is fine! Stop saying everything isn't fine! [car goes into ditch]
I suppose it bothers me most because I think they should have better things to do, both in terms of actions and comms strategy. Stop your complaining, random nobodies on social media! It's weird.