Surprise, surprise, an Anti-Defamation League study of 450 murders committed by domestic extremists in America (like the Buffalo murders earlier this week) concludes that right-wingers commit about 75% of them. (By their tabulation, Muslim extremists commit 20% and left-wing extremists commit a mere 4%.) "(T)he American political right has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left," the article says, but that only means right-wingers will simply redefine "murder" until it includes things like not inviting right-wingers to your barbecues or shaming your right-wing father-in-law for watching Tucker Carlson. I've even heard right-wingers call such things "a kind of death"! You know what's "a kind of death"? Death.
Researchers at Brown University and Microsoft AI Health inform us that if every American adult had gotten vaccinated, we could have saved well over 300,000 lives. Against over 1 million dead, that's a sizable amount. An earlier Kaiser study put that number at 234,000 -- by not counting folks who'd died while vaccinated-but-not-boosted -- and I put more persuasive power in that figure, since not getting boosted was more likely not a matter of ideology. Still, that's more than one out of every five deaths. And the other side's argument is all waaaaaaah personal choice you can't tell me what to do stop the steal!
When I hear that "Online data could be used against people seeking abortions if Roe v. Wade falls" -- a perfectly explicable outcome, since most folks turn to the internet for information about reproductive health care! -- I am reminded that the FCC passed pretty good data privacy rules in 2016, but Congressional Republicans nullified them in 2017 with a quickness, because if it's an instance of government helping you, then Republicans must shit on it. Also too, law enforcement can search your cellphones without even getting a warrant because legislators either don't understand technology or go out of their way not to understand it because big campaign donors don't want them to.
Ho hum, Mississippi, the state that aims to end Roe v. Wade via its 15-week anti-abortion law, also just so happens to be the worst state in the Deep South for providing health insurance coverage to low-income women. Medicaid recipients get only 60 days' worth of post-partum care in Mississippi (though the Affordable Care Act allows expansion of that care to one year), though at least one study found that over 80% of post-partum health care costs come after 60 dats. Why, it's like that was the whole idea! I'd look for big corporations to pressure to pull out of Mississippi, but there ain't hardly any there to begin with; Republicans really are going to run that state into the ground, which will hurt all the good folks who live there.
Buried deep in this excellent Steven Rosenfeld piece about Pennsylvania's Republican nominee for Governor, Doug Mastriano is a description of the first Josh Shapiro attack ad against him, and it's like the ad's makers rolled up as much Democrat weakness as humanly possible into one ad, which you don't even know is an anti-Mastriano ad until the end! Look, here's how to attack Doug Mastriano: call him weak for refusing to accept the 2020 election results and doing his damnedest to overturn them. Republicans love wearing Democrat epithets, from "deplorable" all the way to "ultra-MAGA," as badges of honor; let's see Mr. Mastriano work that alchemy with the word "weak." I'd say I hope it makes him melt down in public, except that public melt-downs aren't the career-enders they used to be. Just ask our former screamer-in-chief, Donald Trump.
Finally, maybe the Buffalo shooter could evade any plagiarism charges Tucker Carlson might level against him, but the part of their collaborative work I can't stand is this anti-diversity argument from Mr. Carlson: "Can you think, for example, of other institutions such as, I don’t know, marriage or military units in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are?" Ahem: civilization is not a marriage or a military unit; these two institutions are parts of civilization, and insisting that the whole of civilization be exactly like any of its parts is small-minded. Even 15 years ago I thought Tucker Carlson was doing the best he could as a conservative; now I think he was just fronting, and his current fascist-worship was the endgame all along.
Comments