Archive for 2021
August 9, 2021
BOB MCMANUS: Scores Soon To Be Settled: The full weight of New York’s political establishment bears down on Andrew Cuomo.
Most of the rest of America knows Cuomo from his pandemic presentations—more than 100 days of daily Covid-19 briefings, beginning in March 2020. They were informative, occasionally somber, but often funny—and hugely optimistic. For a brief moment, he was the nation’s pandemic prince. There was even talk of his supplanting Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket.
But this was a sugar high, fading quickly when the state’s true Covid casualty numbers—still among the nation’s highest—began rolling in. And soon it was reported that the governor’s staff had cooked those statistics to understate vastly the number of elderly New Yorkers killed by Covid after infected patients were forced from hospitals back into nursing homes.
It was a coverup, pure and simple, and while this may have startled outsiders, it came as no surprise to New Yorkers familiar with Cuomo’s career. In the beginning, he was chief enforcer for his dad, quickly learning that the executive chamber is power central in New York’s strong-governor system.
The public contrast between the two Cuomos was vivid, and this was not by accident. Mario could hold a grudge, but he presented as a principled intellectual—and he got away with it because he had Andrew at hand for the dirty work. The son embraced that task with disconcerting enthusiasm—doing sometimes-necessary chores for his father, but regularly giving the knife an unnecessary twist or two and smiling as he did so. Andrew Cuomo’s methods haven’t changed, though he’s been his own knee-capper for 11 years now, still smiling as he goes about it. It would be impossible to overstate the seething resentments he has generated along the way.
His undisguised arrogance, moreover, went hand-in-glove with a casual contempt for rules. Those surprised by the appalling litany of abuses detailed in James’s report simply don’t appreciate Cuomo’s invincible sense of entitlement.
He has gotten away with it until now, for one simple (if well-camouflaged) reason: virtually every dollar spent by state government in New York is constitutionally subject to gubernatorial approval and distribution.
It’s harder to survive a scandal when so many people hate you and want to bring you down.
SPACE JUNK: BETTER PUT UP MY UMBRELLA. RUSSIAN ROCKET BOOSTER TO REENTER EARLY NEXT WEEK.
JIM TREACHER: Obama Knows Masking Is for Peasants.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama did all that just to give Biden some more headaches. As Kyle Smith at NRO notes, Biden gave a very lame excuse for not attending, and Obama has said some really mean things about Biden over the years. I wouldn’t want that old coot around either. Who needs an octogenarian creep wandering around groping all the women and sniffing all the little girls’ hair?
Democrats don’t need masks because they’re better than you. They can party all they want, and Fauci has nothing to say about it because they’re his comrades. But as for the rest of us:
If the Sturgis Rally wasn’t a superspreader event last year, before the vaccine, why are we supposed to assume this one will be? Fauci just loves being on camera and saying any old $#!+.
I really don’t like the Obamas, but they should be able to party however they want, with whomever they want. And so should the rest of us. If you don’t like it, go Fauci yourself.
Which seems odd considering this slightly less sophisticated, and likely un-vaccinated crowd: CNN: ‘Dangerous Trope’ to Say COVID-Positive Illegal Immigrants Spreading Virus.
“MORE SURVEILLANCE” ISN’T A SIDE EFFECT, IT’S THE PRIMARY GOAL: New York City’s Vaccine Passport Plan Renews Online Privacy Debate: The mainstreaming of digital vaccine passes could lead to more surveillance, privacy researchers cautioned.
NOT SO MUCH “UP TO” AS “AT LEAST:” COVID-19 immunity may last up to 7 months after initial infection, study finds. “In some cases, levels of antibodies, or cells produced by the immune system to fight off infections, actually may increase over the course of the seven months, the data showed. . . . Those with antibodies had ‘stable’ levels over the course of the study period, suggesting that they continued to produce antibodies long after their initial infections, the researchers said. About 75% of the study participants with antibodies at seven months actually saw an increase in their levels of the immune cells ‘from month five onward, without any evidence of re-exposure to the virus,’ said Gemma Moncunill, a study co-author and Dobaño’s colleague.”
Plus: “No cases of COVID-19 reinfections occurred among study participants, according to the researchers.”
I’M PRETTY SURE THAT MUCH FEWER DEATHS MEAN THE PROBLEM IS MUCH LESS SERIOUS: Why the U.S. Delta Wave Could Be Far Less Deadly.
The rise of the Delta variant in the U.S. has led to outbreaks of COVID-19 across the country. But as more people get vaccinated, the death toll in the fourth wave of the pandemic may not spike as high as it did in previous surges, according to experts.
Increasing vaccination rates among Americans may result in a decoupling between infections and deaths — meaning that new cases might rise more steeply than fatalities.
This trend was evident across the pond: At the peak of the U.K.’s most recent spike in mid-July, the 7-day average of new daily infections was around 47,000 cases (approaching its 60,000 peak from January). But so far this month, the country has seen around 80 deaths per day.
“In the past with that level of infection, we would have seen over 1,000 deaths a day,” said Graham Medley, PhD, professor of infectious disease modeling at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
Before vaccines, Medley said that the number of deaths was the clearest metric to assess the severity of the pandemic. But since the U.K. has fully vaccinated the majority of high-risk individuals — more than 90% of its oldest and most vulnerable populations, according to government data — “deaths are no longer the most obvious outcome of infection to the public.”
Seems like good news to me.
BUT IT’S MONEY, AND THEY WANT IT: Dems should keep their grubby paws off Americans’ retirement savings.
ON CUOMO, THE MEDIA OWES ITS AUDIENCE AN APOLOGY (AND SOME REFLECTION):
Major media outlets loved Andrew Cuomo, and it absolutely breaks their hearts that they have to report on the sexual harassment scandal now. They didn’t want it to end this way. They wanted him to be a winner through all this.
What these outlets owe their audience is an apology and a promise to reflect inwardly on how their skewing of the coverage created this whole scandal. Yes, Andrew Cuomo is apparently a monster with or without the media’s help, but because they made him out to be such a hero in the first place, they had to ignore clear signs of problems and abuse as they popped up.
Cuomo’s accusers popped up for weeks and received very little coverage. At no point was the media really interested in following the pattern. They absolutely dropped the nursing home deaths scandal as quickly as they could. They wanted nothing to do with any of it, and in the end, their propping up Cuomo actually makes him look like more of a monster because he had that much further to fall in the public’s eyes.
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, who spent the last quarter century propping up Bill Clinton after the Lewinsky scandal, defending Al Gore and his doomsday rhetoric, pretending that John Kerry was the second coming of Patton, that Obama was the second coming of God, and that Hillary and Biden had track records worthy of the White House, and you’ll know that no apologies or circumspection will ever be forthcoming.
VACCINE- AND MASK-SHAMING IS ALL ABOUT THE EMOTIONAL NEEDS OF THE SHAMERS: What do my Facebook friends think they are doing expressing this kind of hostility? “Here are 2 memes I encountered the other day. I suppose the people who put these up think of themselves as funny and scientifically correct. The first one exults in punishment and the second one makes casual use of the Holocaust.”
Many people simultaneously need to feel that (1) they’re morally and intellectually superior; and (2) that they play an important role in the world. Mask- and vaccine-shaming allow them to do so easily and with no sacrifice. The price, of course, is making the world at large a nastier and worse place, while not at all advancing — and probably even setting back — the cause they’re allegedly in favor of. But it’s not about making the world a better place, it’s about feeling good about themselves.
THE JOURNOLIST IS HOPPING: ‘Catching on?’ Media talking points on border surge & Covid-19 have been sent.
READER BOOK RECOMMENDATION: Commenter Red Six Standing By recommends Scott Adams’s book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.
You can view the entire bookclub list here.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA? U. Oklahoma coaches claim they can discipline players for their politics.
WHAT INABILITY TO LEARN FROM EXPERIENCE LOOKS LIKE: UMN prof opposes school hiring police ‘in the city of George Floyd Uprising.’
MOST HARVARD LAW STUDENTS ARE LUCKY TO FIND ONE PERSON TO DATE: Harvard Law supports advocacy for polyamorous relationships.
THE PROBLEM IS, OUR POLITICAL CLASS DOESN’T WANT TO BE NON-COERCIVE: Vindication for the Swedish model of non-coercive pandemic mitigation? Mask-free Sweden had near zero COVID-19 daily deaths in July, fared better than expected economically with no lockdowns in place.
NANCY PELOSI’S SECRET POLICE: This seemingly modest change to the role of the Capitol Police will assume greater, more sinister significance in time.
Nancy Pelosi expects the country to be run by a leftist oligarchy for a long time. In a leftist oligarchy, it’s essential for your faction to have its own chunk of the security services. Mostly for protection from the other factions.
Why is Antifa channeling Billy Crystal channeling Edward G. Robinson in The Ten Commandments?
SALENA ZITO: In South Dakota, the road signs lead to the Wall.
EVERYONE WILL DIE EVENTUALLY, HE JUST HAS A BETTER IDEA OF THE DATE THAN MOST: I Just Learned I Only Have Months To Live. This Is What I Want To Say.
New York Times White House Correspondent Annie Karni discussed the controversy surrounding Obama’s much-criticized Martha’s Vineyard celebration where he was seen not wearing a mask and used the term “sophisticated” crowd, saying that the guests were “following all the safety precautions.”
The clip sparked outrage on social media including from journalist Glenn Greenwald who wondered aloud why more people weren’t concerned about the spread of the delta variant of the coronavirus at Obama’s party.
“A NYT reporter on CNN justifying Obama’s huge maskless birthday bash because he only invited “a sophisticated, vaccinated crowd” is about as emblematic of liberal discourse as it gets,” Greenwald tweeted. “What happened to all the concerns about vaccinated people passing Delta to the unvaccinated?”
In sharp contrast:
As Jim Treacher noted on last week: Democrats Don’t Need Masks Because They’re Better Than You. “The virus knows. It knows what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and it only punishes people who don’t read The Atlantic or listen to NPR. If you can recite a MyPillow ad from memory, you need to wear a mask when you’re told to wear a mask. But if you can pick Lin-Manuel Miranda out of a lineup, you don’t have anything to worry about. That’s how COVID-19 works. That’s just the settled science.”