It's basically incomprehensible why they are taking this approach. Obviously they see some political gain to it all, but to endanger their own children as in the in the Tennessee example by disallowing the health department from encouraging vaccinations makes no sense at all. This all started with Donald Trump initially calling the virus a hoax and then later playing down the seriousness of the virus and making a mockery of mask wearing. And now (again as Lucian stated), they are applauding the fact that Biden's vaccination goals were not reached on July 4. If we had reached herd immunity by now the virus would not have a breeding ground, but of course in the GOP's typical foolishness they have rolled out the red carpet and invited the virus with open arms. All that's missing is a brass band.
I believe the first quote along these lines was in the late 1700's but has since been attributed to several people: In 1848 an article in The Scottish Temperance Review” employed an instance of the cosmic analogy: 3 "Verily, when we think of such insane doings, it not unfrequently occurs to us that this world is in fact the lunatic asylum of the universe, and that we, and the other reasonable men who are with us, are merely here as the keepers thereof."
Just as Trump was vaccinated without publicizing it, these Republicans calling for anti-vaccination laws may be vaccinated themselves. I would bet on it. Under present circumstances, polio would not have been eradicated by the Salk vaccine. As dangerous as McCarthyism and HUAC were decades ago, this is a more dangerous, deadly time for our country.
The question, “What is wrong with these people?” could be asked but the answer has often been answered in this newsletter. The fear of losing a society based on race distorts rational thinking and empathetic responses. Their need to dominate results in a “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” mindset much to our detriment.
Actually, Lucian, the Repugnicans are not a death wish party. They are a death eater party. They WANT people to die. They really do. I was thinking this morning that people who knowingly participate in super spreader events should be charged with involuntary manslaughter and human endangerment.
I just today politely gave a flimsy excuse as to why I "could not join" my sister and her friend for lunch here is small town Tennessee. Disheartening, but not so much that I would risk my life to have lunch with folks who are antivaxxers.
Very Darwinian. The fittest survive. Those who refuse vaccines take enormous casualties. Rural Pakistan is a great example. Polio Vaccines are seen as UnIslamic. So people get Polio.
Since the vast majority of adult deaths and hospitalizations are occurring among the voluntarily unvaccinated, maybe the Biden administration should cease most vaccination efforts in red states—and let those GOP t-rump-worshipping morons DIE. Instead, they should concentrate their efforts on minority communities in those states.
I have a cousin who lives in Florida. She got Covid in January. She survived but because of nerve damage, almost everything she eats tastes like rotting meat. Who knows what other long term damage there will be?
I can only imagine what veteran GOP consultants and strategists are thinking when they contemplate the absolute refusal of the Republican Party apparatus to urge the party faithful to get vaccinated, especially when the recently-arrived Delta variant of coronavirus appears to be lethally effective in spreading itself among nonvaccinated people. With minimal exceptions, anyone and everyone who is currently hospitalized with coronavirus was unvaccinated, to the extent that vaccinated people who later got sick with the virus amounted to 2/10 of a percentage point of those hospitalized were unlucky enough to get sick after they had been fully or partially vaccinated. The more the anti-VAX resistors become ill, the more strident and shrill they become in their opposition to vaccination. This is magical thinking, and is getting people killed. We have seen instances in history were aboriginal warriors donned what they believe to be magical clothing that would protect them from Western firearms. During the Indian Wars, Sioux warriors donned those 'magical' tunics, only to be slaughtered by United States Army cavalryman when the two sides went into battle. These are acts of desperation; but what we are seeing now are adult men and women who are willing to sacrifice their entire families to the killer virus. That is not a winning formula for success. They, the MAGAhats, are winning no converts to their cause. People around them who do not share their fevered imaginings or over-the-top claim of violation of their 'rights' to refuse vaccination are being terrorized by the fears that they too are vulnerable to the new Delta variant.
Republican state legislators are twisting themselves into knots trying to draft laws that effectively would prevent anyone from doing anything to slow down the rates of infection that are skyrocketing in their states. This past week, on television cable news, there were segments in which anti-vaccination witnesses were testifying before legislative panels, telling them that the vaccines magnetized their bodies and made them trackable through the global positioning system. One woman put a key on her forehead, claiming that the key stuck to her forehead because of the electromagnetic effect of that coronavirus vaccine. There were similar cringeworthy episodes in public testimony before legislative or administrative bodies that simply underscored the notion that these people willing to say anything, anything at all, in support of the obvious falsehoods that they were peddling. It was terribly sad to see this sort of thing, because people are generally not predisposed to get up in front of a legislative body and testify falsely; it is just that they do not know what to believe, and they simply parrot whatever they see on Fox News or Facebook. But sad as it is, it cannot be tolerated; and a political party that seeks to submit its power to govern based upon such nonsensical falsehoods is utterly unacceptable. It is simply beyond the pale.
At some point there is bound to be a turning around, when the voters in those states decide that enough is enough, and gerrymandered or not, the Republicans' death grip on the election machinery in those states is going to be broken.
All of this comes at the expense of the Republican Party coming up with some sort of grounded, fact-based, statistically-vetted set of policy choices that is consistent with traditional Republican values. None of that appears to be happening. The Biden administration, and the Democratic majorities in the House of Representatives and in the Senate are putting the final touches on their $3.5 trillion domestic spending program, with their Republican opponents largely immobilized, slack-jawed and glassy eyed, which I would attribute primarily to the looming defeat that they are going to face, not so much at the polls in 2022, but in the kitchens, bedrooms, and living rooms of Americans who just want this god-awful virus to go away. Here in California, led by Los Angeles County with its 10 million residents, the most heavily populated counties are again imposing masking requirements for people congregating indoors. We have been living with masking for better than a year now, so it is no big deal; but what it does has been to remind each and every one of us the price that we are paying for Republican intransigence. In his book published three years ago, Skin in the Game, Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life author Nassim slickness seem Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, devoted an entire chapter to his observation that life is dominated by stubborn minorities who essentially bully others into going along with their peculiar needs, because they will give an inch. Republicans have been getting away with this for decades in matters involving abortion, the elevation of religious practices in the public square, and now coronavirus. Democrats and Independents who themselves may not be especially bothered by these measures have conceded ground simply because the battle was not worth the candle. The people most able to push back against these extremists basically did not do so because it was too inconvenient, and sometimes too expensive, to face them down and battle it out. This is the way it was for taxes, immigration, free-trade, and certain obnoxious business practices that should have been ended a long time ago, but which did not inconvenience enough Democrats and like-minded Independents, to go to war over this. But, as they did in the antebellum years in the run-up to the Civil War, the slaveholding forebears of today's conservatives kept pressing their luck until the rest of the country was sufficiently aroused to oppose them. We are seeing the same sort of thing happen now with coronavirus. I predict that the retribution will be swift and fierce. In 1905, the United States Supreme Court ruled in a Massachusetts case that vaccination could be compelled, by force is necessary, to protect the public health. There are enough people around now who might be willing to dispense with personal choice if it means saving themselves and their families from the tragedy of severe illness, death, or prolonged post-Covid collateral effects that damage the quality of life for those unlucky enough to get infected.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which set into motion the Japanese internment camps for those people of Japanese ancestry living on the states that border the Pacific Ocean. The validity of that order was affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in 1945. We now recognize that the interment was wrongful, it was race-based, and that it was based entirely upon the rabid imaginings of West Coast media and political figures. Nonetheless, it was deemed a wartime necessity, essential to the defense of the United States. Although the application of the principle on which President Roosevelt took his actions has been shown to be fatally flawed, and inconsistent with constitutional guarantees, and even basic decency, that principle is alive and well where the underlying facts to which the legal principle is applied warrant compulsion. We no longer have a selective service to draft people into the military, but that is a policy choice, not a legal prohibition. Given sufficient provocation, we may see this again in the way of compulsory vaccinations, regardless of MAGAhat protests; and there are enough people here today, contemplating the more than 600,000 lives that have been lost to Covid, would agree to compulsory vaccination. The Republicans are playing with fire on this issue, and if the Delta Covid variant continues to spread at the rate it has been, we may yet see it, sooner rather than later, and regardless of Republican protests.
But more than that, Republican recalcitrance and inability to come up with rational alternatives to the Biden administration's domestic spending and governance initiatives is not being coupled by equally irrational and nonsensical measures that Republican-dominated state governments are taking to thwart necessary public health measures needed to drive infection rates down. It is not one or the other, Republican policy issues versus untrammeled freedom of action, regardless of the consequences; it is binary where stubbornness and recalcitrant behavior on one side reinforces the image of the other as being completely irrational, and unworthy of any credence. The bottom line is that the Republican Party has made America ungovernable, and at some point the American people will be done with it. It is not just a matter of time. The party's current strategy of manipulating voting rights in states in which it holds sway is simply part and parcel of its overall nihilism.
Recent polling suggests that American public opinion stands with President Biden by a substantial margin on the most basic issues that will be litigated in the 2022 and 2024 elections. Republicans' continued refusal to deal with the spreading infection rates, coupled with their disingenuous objections to inoculation against Delta Covid, could be the issue that pushes them over the tipping point on the way to oblivion.
I got some pushback today from some conservative guy who was mightily upset that I would suggest that mask wearing an inoculation could be compelled. I wrote back to him without fulfilling the duties and obligations of citizenship could involve military service, resulting in potential death or serious injury to a military service member who is called upon to fulfill his military obligations. I mentioned parenthetically that military service necessarily involve getting vaccinated against multiple diseases that could be encountered during a tour of duty.
That set me to thinking, could the president involve the selective service act to round up every young male between the ages of 18 and 24 for a 30-day tour of duty using the president's Emergency War Powers, and not coincidently, get everybody vaccinated against Covid D. it is an interesting thought. It would certainly break the back of the numbskull brigade, the 'Invincibles' who do so much of the disease spreading. Back in 1952, the Supreme Court told Harry Truman that he could not seize the steel mills to settle a labor dispute that was holding up war production. But that involve the seizure of actual property to be run by the government; and by the time that the Supreme Court had rendered its decision disapproving the administration's action, the labor dispute had been settled in favor of the Steelworkers Union, and so the Supreme Court decision had minimal effect, except as an expression of disapproval. Much the same sort of thing occurred in 1867 when the court issued its ruling in the case of Ex Parte Milligan, which involved the arrest of a Southern sympathizer who also happen to run a newspaper that lambasted the Lincoln administration at every turn. By then, the martyred president had been dead for two years, leaving the court to rule that bringing Mr. Milligan to trial before a military tribunal in what was then effectively a war zone, but not officially designated as such, was unconstitutional. The court went through its usual litany of pietistic reasons why it should not be done, and by then, we were then two years into post-Civil War Reconstruction. Likewise, in the Korematsu case that I referred to in my previous post, the decision on Korematsu was never officially reversed, and for good reason. There are times when government must compel citizens to do their duty if they refuse to step forward voluntarily.
We are now in one of those gray areas or a citizen's duty to respond to his government's injunction to do something does not explicitly involve assuming the onerous burdens of military service. A citizen's duty is determined by circumstances. The 1905 Massachusetts case that I mentioned supporting the idea of compulsory vaccination for the purpose of protecting the public health is in fact such a civic duty, whether it was in the contemplation of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, or a more garden-variety regime of inoculation against smallpox as it was in Massachusetts at the turn-of-the-century. Subsequent to that case, wide variety of public health measures undertaken by states and supported by the federal government were made compulsory. Vaccination against disease was one of the better outcomes; forced sterilization under state-sponsored eugenics programs provide a cautionary tale against what not to do based upon false science. Here, we are dealing with the former, were a crash program to develop anti-Covid vaccines proved to be wildly successful. The government's effort to get people to get vaccinated has met with middling success: good to excellent and Democratic-leaning states and mediocre to terrible in Republican-dominated states. But, echoing Abraham Lincoln's speech to the Cooper Union in February 1860, saying that a house divided upon itself cannot stand, referring to slave states versus free states, and that the United States would either have to become either all slave states or all free states, the same principle applies with even greater force to communicable diseases. Slavery is a legal construct, designed by human legal system and limited only by the human imagination. Contagion is a biological process in which infectious disease spreads arithmetically until all vulnerable entities are either infected; died the infection, in which case the disease spreading parasite also dies; or the disease encounters some sort of biologic barrier that prevents its further spread. It follows that to eradicate coronavirus in whatever variety it may appear, whether in its earlier manifestations, its current Delta version, or some future mutation of the virus, we either hunted down and kill it wherever it is found, or it will kill us. Like HIV or AIDS, the disease can be managed, even if it cannot be fully eradicated. That said, the disease does not respect state boundary lines. It feeds on human laxity and stupidity.
Mother Nature has had the benefit of Donald Trump and the Republican Party working overtime in order to spread the disease as far and wide as possible.The sheer perversity and stupidity of those partisan whack jobs is breathtaking to behold; and something needs to be done about it, and sooner rather than later. The United States Government can invoke the Defense Production Act in order to stimulate and direct the production of masks, gowns, ventilators, and biologics in order to suppress the disease, there is no reason that other provisions of Title 50 of the United States Code and other relevant statutes cannot also be invoked to put the American people on a wartime footing and allow the Government to do its work. This has to be a national effort, and nobody should be allowed to stand in the way of getting the necessary work done, even if it involves compulsion to do, or to refrain from doing, an act that has a material effect on a governmental objective. We are now looking at a third round of vaccinations, this time booster shots that may be required out of an abundance of caution for the purpose of stamping out the disease. We need people to cooperate in this effort. To date we have been begging them, bribing them, cajoling them; importuning, proselytizing — whatever you want to call it in order to get people to get their shots. We are running out of time and we are running out of patience.
In order to succeed we need to shut down the sources of disinformation. Right now, the Internet companies have taken full advantage of the protections offered by the 'safe harbor' provisions of federal law that immunize Internet service providers from toxic content that passes through their portals. I believe something can be done about that. The phrase that comes to mind comes from two cases decided by the United States Supreme Court, the first of which, Terminiello v.City of Chicago, a case decided in 1949, in which Associate Justice Robert Jackson wrote a 24-page dissent in response to the court's four-page decision, in which Justice Jackson coined the phrase, "the Constitution is not a suicide pact." The case arose in the context of a Catholic priest who was convicted of inciting a riot, and who had been prosecuted by the City of Chicago under the city's breach of the peace ordinance. Justice Jackson argued that his brethren on the court had been too tolerant in their First Amendment jurisprudence. The 'not a suicide pact' language was picked up by associate Justice Arthur Goldberg in 1963 case, Kennedy's v.Mendoza-Martinez, in which Justice Goldberg, writing for the majority, ruled that, "The powers of Congress to require military service for the common defense are broad and far-reaching, for while the Constitution protects against invasions of individual rights, it is not a suicide pact". But that is precisely what the Republican Party is doing in its treatment of coronavirus vaccinations. Under Republican dogma, personal freedoms override anything else, thus making the Constitution a de facto suicide pact. Even Donald Trump, as president, in his blundering, inarticulate way, acknowledge that the Constitution, while great, "… does not necessarily give us the right to commit suicide…" The bottom line here is that social media companies need to step up and clean house, and that includes Fox News. They have had a free ride so far, but they need to know that there is a new sheriff in town who is going to make life miserable for them if they do not shape up.
With the foregoing in mind, the Komatsu case is still good law upon a proper, well-developed factual record. Justice Jackson's argument resting on the dichotomy between liberty and anarchy is, in my opinion, well taken, because an unbounded deadly virus capable of spreading anywhere and everywhere, effectively creates anarchy, and we have seen that anarchy time and again under the Trump administration. Justice Goldberg, emphasizing the duty of the citizen to report for military duty anywhere around the world, is within the powers of Congress to require, and protection of individual rights does not make the Constitution a suicide pact. The bottom line is that vaccination can be compelled by whatever means necessary to effectuate that end, regardless of the processes used, which could be civil, administrative, prosecution through the criminal court system, monetary fines, administrative detention, or jail time. With 600,000 dead Americans on our consciences now, to countenance further delay in the face of increasing rates of infection is dereliction of duty on the part of the Government. That is just my opinion.
We need a national scorecard of Covid deaths of the unvaccinated, applauding Trumpers for killing off their own, thus reducing the number who might be voting. In the meantime, push hard for vaccinations, wear masks in public places, and ask businesses to ask the unvaccinated to wear MAGA hats while there.
Fools. Scoundrels. The whole party focus is disgusting. They have a stranglehold on their base and until the base dies off or wises up, we will continue to live this way. It’s utterly selfish and ridiculous. It’s amazing how this has taken hold, no thanks to the MSM who trumpets it every damn day.
It's basically incomprehensible why they are taking this approach. Obviously they see some political gain to it all, but to endanger their own children as in the in the Tennessee example by disallowing the health department from encouraging vaccinations makes no sense at all. This all started with Donald Trump initially calling the virus a hoax and then later playing down the seriousness of the virus and making a mockery of mask wearing. And now (again as Lucian stated), they are applauding the fact that Biden's vaccination goals were not reached on July 4. If we had reached herd immunity by now the virus would not have a breeding ground, but of course in the GOP's typical foolishness they have rolled out the red carpet and invited the virus with open arms. All that's missing is a brass band.
I believe the first quote along these lines was in the late 1700's but has since been attributed to several people: In 1848 an article in The Scottish Temperance Review” employed an instance of the cosmic analogy: 3 "Verily, when we think of such insane doings, it not unfrequently occurs to us that this world is in fact the lunatic asylum of the universe, and that we, and the other reasonable men who are with us, are merely here as the keepers thereof."
https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2021/07/politically-ambitious-health-commissioner-fires-top-vaccination-official-bans-outreach-to-minors-on-all-vaccines/
Just as Trump was vaccinated without publicizing it, these Republicans calling for anti-vaccination laws may be vaccinated themselves. I would bet on it. Under present circumstances, polio would not have been eradicated by the Salk vaccine. As dangerous as McCarthyism and HUAC were decades ago, this is a more dangerous, deadly time for our country.
Where did you see a report that Trump was vaccinated?
Thank you.
Along with his concubine and her brothers. I'm not sure about Melanoma and Barron.
The question, “What is wrong with these people?” could be asked but the answer has often been answered in this newsletter. The fear of losing a society based on race distorts rational thinking and empathetic responses. Their need to dominate results in a “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” mindset much to our detriment.
Actually, Lucian, the Repugnicans are not a death wish party. They are a death eater party. They WANT people to die. They really do. I was thinking this morning that people who knowingly participate in super spreader events should be charged with involuntary manslaughter and human endangerment.
Seems more like voluntary manslaughter to me.
Remember the GQP's obsession with the dreaded Obamacare "death panels"? Now, they are one huge f*cking death panel!
Not surprisingly, the Illinois counties with the lowest vax rates and largest increases in COVID infections all border Missouri.
One would think that such obvious and deliberate measures to ensure deaths might be considered murder...as in the Jonestown Massacre.
I just today politely gave a flimsy excuse as to why I "could not join" my sister and her friend for lunch here is small town Tennessee. Disheartening, but not so much that I would risk my life to have lunch with folks who are antivaxxers.
Time to tell them why, very bluntly. They are willing to subject others to a social/health cost; they should experience the same.
Maybe I will one day.
One or two days may be too late.
Use your energy to fight the battle your way on your schedule. I've been fighting battles all my life; I do not need or want any volunteer coaching.
Very Darwinian. The fittest survive. Those who refuse vaccines take enormous casualties. Rural Pakistan is a great example. Polio Vaccines are seen as UnIslamic. So people get Polio.
I saw the first polio cases I'd seen in 50 years in western Afghanistan in the Pashtun town of Asadabad.
I will probably never see my hometown again. I’m just plain scared to go down there.
Since the vast majority of adult deaths and hospitalizations are occurring among the voluntarily unvaccinated, maybe the Biden administration should cease most vaccination efforts in red states—and let those GOP t-rump-worshipping morons DIE. Instead, they should concentrate their efforts on minority communities in those states.
I have a cousin who lives in Florida. She got Covid in January. She survived but because of nerve damage, almost everything she eats tastes like rotting meat. Who knows what other long term damage there will be?
This is tragedy unfolding, how could this be happening in the USA? Where does this lead?
I can only imagine what veteran GOP consultants and strategists are thinking when they contemplate the absolute refusal of the Republican Party apparatus to urge the party faithful to get vaccinated, especially when the recently-arrived Delta variant of coronavirus appears to be lethally effective in spreading itself among nonvaccinated people. With minimal exceptions, anyone and everyone who is currently hospitalized with coronavirus was unvaccinated, to the extent that vaccinated people who later got sick with the virus amounted to 2/10 of a percentage point of those hospitalized were unlucky enough to get sick after they had been fully or partially vaccinated. The more the anti-VAX resistors become ill, the more strident and shrill they become in their opposition to vaccination. This is magical thinking, and is getting people killed. We have seen instances in history were aboriginal warriors donned what they believe to be magical clothing that would protect them from Western firearms. During the Indian Wars, Sioux warriors donned those 'magical' tunics, only to be slaughtered by United States Army cavalryman when the two sides went into battle. These are acts of desperation; but what we are seeing now are adult men and women who are willing to sacrifice their entire families to the killer virus. That is not a winning formula for success. They, the MAGAhats, are winning no converts to their cause. People around them who do not share their fevered imaginings or over-the-top claim of violation of their 'rights' to refuse vaccination are being terrorized by the fears that they too are vulnerable to the new Delta variant.
Republican state legislators are twisting themselves into knots trying to draft laws that effectively would prevent anyone from doing anything to slow down the rates of infection that are skyrocketing in their states. This past week, on television cable news, there were segments in which anti-vaccination witnesses were testifying before legislative panels, telling them that the vaccines magnetized their bodies and made them trackable through the global positioning system. One woman put a key on her forehead, claiming that the key stuck to her forehead because of the electromagnetic effect of that coronavirus vaccine. There were similar cringeworthy episodes in public testimony before legislative or administrative bodies that simply underscored the notion that these people willing to say anything, anything at all, in support of the obvious falsehoods that they were peddling. It was terribly sad to see this sort of thing, because people are generally not predisposed to get up in front of a legislative body and testify falsely; it is just that they do not know what to believe, and they simply parrot whatever they see on Fox News or Facebook. But sad as it is, it cannot be tolerated; and a political party that seeks to submit its power to govern based upon such nonsensical falsehoods is utterly unacceptable. It is simply beyond the pale.
At some point there is bound to be a turning around, when the voters in those states decide that enough is enough, and gerrymandered or not, the Republicans' death grip on the election machinery in those states is going to be broken.
All of this comes at the expense of the Republican Party coming up with some sort of grounded, fact-based, statistically-vetted set of policy choices that is consistent with traditional Republican values. None of that appears to be happening. The Biden administration, and the Democratic majorities in the House of Representatives and in the Senate are putting the final touches on their $3.5 trillion domestic spending program, with their Republican opponents largely immobilized, slack-jawed and glassy eyed, which I would attribute primarily to the looming defeat that they are going to face, not so much at the polls in 2022, but in the kitchens, bedrooms, and living rooms of Americans who just want this god-awful virus to go away. Here in California, led by Los Angeles County with its 10 million residents, the most heavily populated counties are again imposing masking requirements for people congregating indoors. We have been living with masking for better than a year now, so it is no big deal; but what it does has been to remind each and every one of us the price that we are paying for Republican intransigence. In his book published three years ago, Skin in the Game, Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life author Nassim slickness seem Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, devoted an entire chapter to his observation that life is dominated by stubborn minorities who essentially bully others into going along with their peculiar needs, because they will give an inch. Republicans have been getting away with this for decades in matters involving abortion, the elevation of religious practices in the public square, and now coronavirus. Democrats and Independents who themselves may not be especially bothered by these measures have conceded ground simply because the battle was not worth the candle. The people most able to push back against these extremists basically did not do so because it was too inconvenient, and sometimes too expensive, to face them down and battle it out. This is the way it was for taxes, immigration, free-trade, and certain obnoxious business practices that should have been ended a long time ago, but which did not inconvenience enough Democrats and like-minded Independents, to go to war over this. But, as they did in the antebellum years in the run-up to the Civil War, the slaveholding forebears of today's conservatives kept pressing their luck until the rest of the country was sufficiently aroused to oppose them. We are seeing the same sort of thing happen now with coronavirus. I predict that the retribution will be swift and fierce. In 1905, the United States Supreme Court ruled in a Massachusetts case that vaccination could be compelled, by force is necessary, to protect the public health. There are enough people around now who might be willing to dispense with personal choice if it means saving themselves and their families from the tragedy of severe illness, death, or prolonged post-Covid collateral effects that damage the quality of life for those unlucky enough to get infected.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which set into motion the Japanese internment camps for those people of Japanese ancestry living on the states that border the Pacific Ocean. The validity of that order was affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in 1945. We now recognize that the interment was wrongful, it was race-based, and that it was based entirely upon the rabid imaginings of West Coast media and political figures. Nonetheless, it was deemed a wartime necessity, essential to the defense of the United States. Although the application of the principle on which President Roosevelt took his actions has been shown to be fatally flawed, and inconsistent with constitutional guarantees, and even basic decency, that principle is alive and well where the underlying facts to which the legal principle is applied warrant compulsion. We no longer have a selective service to draft people into the military, but that is a policy choice, not a legal prohibition. Given sufficient provocation, we may see this again in the way of compulsory vaccinations, regardless of MAGAhat protests; and there are enough people here today, contemplating the more than 600,000 lives that have been lost to Covid, would agree to compulsory vaccination. The Republicans are playing with fire on this issue, and if the Delta Covid variant continues to spread at the rate it has been, we may yet see it, sooner rather than later, and regardless of Republican protests.
But more than that, Republican recalcitrance and inability to come up with rational alternatives to the Biden administration's domestic spending and governance initiatives is not being coupled by equally irrational and nonsensical measures that Republican-dominated state governments are taking to thwart necessary public health measures needed to drive infection rates down. It is not one or the other, Republican policy issues versus untrammeled freedom of action, regardless of the consequences; it is binary where stubbornness and recalcitrant behavior on one side reinforces the image of the other as being completely irrational, and unworthy of any credence. The bottom line is that the Republican Party has made America ungovernable, and at some point the American people will be done with it. It is not just a matter of time. The party's current strategy of manipulating voting rights in states in which it holds sway is simply part and parcel of its overall nihilism.
Recent polling suggests that American public opinion stands with President Biden by a substantial margin on the most basic issues that will be litigated in the 2022 and 2024 elections. Republicans' continued refusal to deal with the spreading infection rates, coupled with their disingenuous objections to inoculation against Delta Covid, could be the issue that pushes them over the tipping point on the way to oblivion.
You are right and this is really really smart. One of the two major political parties is committing suicide.
I got some pushback today from some conservative guy who was mightily upset that I would suggest that mask wearing an inoculation could be compelled. I wrote back to him without fulfilling the duties and obligations of citizenship could involve military service, resulting in potential death or serious injury to a military service member who is called upon to fulfill his military obligations. I mentioned parenthetically that military service necessarily involve getting vaccinated against multiple diseases that could be encountered during a tour of duty.
That set me to thinking, could the president involve the selective service act to round up every young male between the ages of 18 and 24 for a 30-day tour of duty using the president's Emergency War Powers, and not coincidently, get everybody vaccinated against Covid D. it is an interesting thought. It would certainly break the back of the numbskull brigade, the 'Invincibles' who do so much of the disease spreading. Back in 1952, the Supreme Court told Harry Truman that he could not seize the steel mills to settle a labor dispute that was holding up war production. But that involve the seizure of actual property to be run by the government; and by the time that the Supreme Court had rendered its decision disapproving the administration's action, the labor dispute had been settled in favor of the Steelworkers Union, and so the Supreme Court decision had minimal effect, except as an expression of disapproval. Much the same sort of thing occurred in 1867 when the court issued its ruling in the case of Ex Parte Milligan, which involved the arrest of a Southern sympathizer who also happen to run a newspaper that lambasted the Lincoln administration at every turn. By then, the martyred president had been dead for two years, leaving the court to rule that bringing Mr. Milligan to trial before a military tribunal in what was then effectively a war zone, but not officially designated as such, was unconstitutional. The court went through its usual litany of pietistic reasons why it should not be done, and by then, we were then two years into post-Civil War Reconstruction. Likewise, in the Korematsu case that I referred to in my previous post, the decision on Korematsu was never officially reversed, and for good reason. There are times when government must compel citizens to do their duty if they refuse to step forward voluntarily.
We are now in one of those gray areas or a citizen's duty to respond to his government's injunction to do something does not explicitly involve assuming the onerous burdens of military service. A citizen's duty is determined by circumstances. The 1905 Massachusetts case that I mentioned supporting the idea of compulsory vaccination for the purpose of protecting the public health is in fact such a civic duty, whether it was in the contemplation of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, or a more garden-variety regime of inoculation against smallpox as it was in Massachusetts at the turn-of-the-century. Subsequent to that case, wide variety of public health measures undertaken by states and supported by the federal government were made compulsory. Vaccination against disease was one of the better outcomes; forced sterilization under state-sponsored eugenics programs provide a cautionary tale against what not to do based upon false science. Here, we are dealing with the former, were a crash program to develop anti-Covid vaccines proved to be wildly successful. The government's effort to get people to get vaccinated has met with middling success: good to excellent and Democratic-leaning states and mediocre to terrible in Republican-dominated states. But, echoing Abraham Lincoln's speech to the Cooper Union in February 1860, saying that a house divided upon itself cannot stand, referring to slave states versus free states, and that the United States would either have to become either all slave states or all free states, the same principle applies with even greater force to communicable diseases. Slavery is a legal construct, designed by human legal system and limited only by the human imagination. Contagion is a biological process in which infectious disease spreads arithmetically until all vulnerable entities are either infected; died the infection, in which case the disease spreading parasite also dies; or the disease encounters some sort of biologic barrier that prevents its further spread. It follows that to eradicate coronavirus in whatever variety it may appear, whether in its earlier manifestations, its current Delta version, or some future mutation of the virus, we either hunted down and kill it wherever it is found, or it will kill us. Like HIV or AIDS, the disease can be managed, even if it cannot be fully eradicated. That said, the disease does not respect state boundary lines. It feeds on human laxity and stupidity.
Mother Nature has had the benefit of Donald Trump and the Republican Party working overtime in order to spread the disease as far and wide as possible.The sheer perversity and stupidity of those partisan whack jobs is breathtaking to behold; and something needs to be done about it, and sooner rather than later. The United States Government can invoke the Defense Production Act in order to stimulate and direct the production of masks, gowns, ventilators, and biologics in order to suppress the disease, there is no reason that other provisions of Title 50 of the United States Code and other relevant statutes cannot also be invoked to put the American people on a wartime footing and allow the Government to do its work. This has to be a national effort, and nobody should be allowed to stand in the way of getting the necessary work done, even if it involves compulsion to do, or to refrain from doing, an act that has a material effect on a governmental objective. We are now looking at a third round of vaccinations, this time booster shots that may be required out of an abundance of caution for the purpose of stamping out the disease. We need people to cooperate in this effort. To date we have been begging them, bribing them, cajoling them; importuning, proselytizing — whatever you want to call it in order to get people to get their shots. We are running out of time and we are running out of patience.
In order to succeed we need to shut down the sources of disinformation. Right now, the Internet companies have taken full advantage of the protections offered by the 'safe harbor' provisions of federal law that immunize Internet service providers from toxic content that passes through their portals. I believe something can be done about that. The phrase that comes to mind comes from two cases decided by the United States Supreme Court, the first of which, Terminiello v.City of Chicago, a case decided in 1949, in which Associate Justice Robert Jackson wrote a 24-page dissent in response to the court's four-page decision, in which Justice Jackson coined the phrase, "the Constitution is not a suicide pact." The case arose in the context of a Catholic priest who was convicted of inciting a riot, and who had been prosecuted by the City of Chicago under the city's breach of the peace ordinance. Justice Jackson argued that his brethren on the court had been too tolerant in their First Amendment jurisprudence. The 'not a suicide pact' language was picked up by associate Justice Arthur Goldberg in 1963 case, Kennedy's v.Mendoza-Martinez, in which Justice Goldberg, writing for the majority, ruled that, "The powers of Congress to require military service for the common defense are broad and far-reaching, for while the Constitution protects against invasions of individual rights, it is not a suicide pact". But that is precisely what the Republican Party is doing in its treatment of coronavirus vaccinations. Under Republican dogma, personal freedoms override anything else, thus making the Constitution a de facto suicide pact. Even Donald Trump, as president, in his blundering, inarticulate way, acknowledge that the Constitution, while great, "… does not necessarily give us the right to commit suicide…" The bottom line here is that social media companies need to step up and clean house, and that includes Fox News. They have had a free ride so far, but they need to know that there is a new sheriff in town who is going to make life miserable for them if they do not shape up.
With the foregoing in mind, the Komatsu case is still good law upon a proper, well-developed factual record. Justice Jackson's argument resting on the dichotomy between liberty and anarchy is, in my opinion, well taken, because an unbounded deadly virus capable of spreading anywhere and everywhere, effectively creates anarchy, and we have seen that anarchy time and again under the Trump administration. Justice Goldberg, emphasizing the duty of the citizen to report for military duty anywhere around the world, is within the powers of Congress to require, and protection of individual rights does not make the Constitution a suicide pact. The bottom line is that vaccination can be compelled by whatever means necessary to effectuate that end, regardless of the processes used, which could be civil, administrative, prosecution through the criminal court system, monetary fines, administrative detention, or jail time. With 600,000 dead Americans on our consciences now, to countenance further delay in the face of increasing rates of infection is dereliction of duty on the part of the Government. That is just my opinion.
I forget who wrote it or something close;
When the enemy is busy defeating himself, stand out of his way.
We need a national scorecard of Covid deaths of the unvaccinated, applauding Trumpers for killing off their own, thus reducing the number who might be voting. In the meantime, push hard for vaccinations, wear masks in public places, and ask businesses to ask the unvaccinated to wear MAGA hats while there.
Fools. Scoundrels. The whole party focus is disgusting. They have a stranglehold on their base and until the base dies off or wises up, we will continue to live this way. It’s utterly selfish and ridiculous. It’s amazing how this has taken hold, no thanks to the MSM who trumpets it every damn day.