Uh oh: researchers allege that Florida has been undercounting its COVID deaths. Florida has officially lost 30,000 good Americans to COVID, but researchers say it should be more like 35,000, as Florida has undercounted deaths of folks with co-morbidities, although if you shoot a diabetic in the head, no one says they died of diabetes. Anyway, maybe this is why Florida law enforcement raided Rebekah Jones's house a few months ago, although it still seems to me that governing well is far easier than figuring out how to get re-elected doing as little as possible.
Fearing a "tsunami" of evictions at the end of this pandemic, Boston renters are forming tenants' unions to bargain with their landlords. And why not? Why wouldn't any good conservative prefer a tenants' union to the heavy hand of Big Gummint regulation and Big Gummint law-making and Big Gummint handouts? Oh, wait -- because, in these times, "conservatism" is only about manufacturing rage and protecting absurdly high wealth über alles. I must've forgotten which decade we're in.
Per Eleanor J. Bader at TruthOut, "Colleges Are Using COVID as a Pretext to Make Draconian Cuts to the Humanities." Of course they go after the humanities because they don't "make money," and of course you can see the gnarled hand of ALEC behind some of these efforts. But a civilization that only cares about mammon won't be a civilization for long, and as my 18th Century English Poetry professor used to say, you're going to spend your whole life inside your head, and you want that to be a well-furnished place.
New York state Comptroller data informs us that if our minimum wage went up as fast as Wall Street bankster bonuses, it'd be $44/hour. Should we tell Kyrsten Sinema? Perhaps we should, but she's been a tool of Wall Street since the 2008 meltdown, odd as that will sound to future historians. In a completely unrelated development, a Grinnell College study finds that out of every dollar in big corporate tax cuts, somewhere between 15 and 19 cents winds up in a CEO's pocket. This is, of course, despite politicians telling us that corporate tax cuts lead to more jobs, never mind that we had both a 55% corporate tax rate and full employment in the '50s.
A Good Jobs First study finds that corporate tax breaks at the state level cost public schools at least $2.37 billion in 2019. I'm glad they note, at the beginning of the report's summary, that this figure represents a 13 percent increase over the previous year and thus "came during the pre-pandemic period of economic prosperity." Stick a pin in that for next time the politicians say "the economy's bad, so we should cut corporate taxes" -- or, for that matter, "the economy's good, so we should cut corporate taxes." For the politicians, it's never a bad time to shift more of our tax burden from corporations to individuals and small businesses.
I was about to say I felt sorry for the couple who had Donald Trump crash their wedding at Mar-a-Lago and do his WAAAAAAAAH ME ME ME ME ME act, but then I realized that you take that risk when you decide to get married at Mar-a-Lago. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the happy couple expected him to show up, or even hoped he would. I wouldn't even be surprised to learn they paid extra for the experience! After all, if you're getting married at Mar-a-Lago, you're not working within a budget like the rest of us are.
Finally, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), facing sex trafficking charges, goes on the Tucker Carlson show (nice to be able to get that venue last minute!) and actually makes things significantly worse for himself, trying to debunk accusations that haven't yet been made and trying to draw Mr. Carlson himself into his story. When I first heard about this, I supposed the QAnon crowd would say Mr. Gaetz schlepped that 17-year-old girl around the country because he was fighting the deep-state child-sex ring undercover -- and, sadly, I was right.
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