Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Yes, it’s the media that’s concerning about all this.

 

I don't get why she should wander around without a mask until the next test FOUR days later.

 

People who think that way don’t carry ARs to protests or get irrationally angry at others who want to follow CDC guidelines.

 

And the winner of the COVID-19 press conference quote of the month award is ...

 

This being a board of journalists, I think it's OK to discuss the doings of the media.

 

There isn't one. As I pointed out - that's a problem. Trump gives local leaders no confidence, no cover, no national plan for getting the schools back. It's one of his great weaknesses.

That is not an argument against the schools coming back, though.

 

We're so used to elites and hypocrites believing one things for themselves and lousier things for others - I can think, for example, of pushing for yuckball public school lunches while their kids ate Belgian beef stew over at Sidwell Friends - that, unfortunately, this is one of the first questions people ask.

I'd argue the answer is so obvious to good, consistent leaders that it's not even the right question.

Real leadership doesn't start and end at one's own kids. Hardly that. A parent should, on some level, desire to raise the kids into the kind of people they want their kids to be, which should hopefully be not assholes, and especially not the kind of protective, lazy self-serving assholes that get theirs while the world burns. A leader, then, has to consider the good of a lot of people, and imposing his or her value system on relative total strangers, for their benefit, even when the strangers might think they're full of it.

By and large, when politicians order lockdowns, they're doing it for the benefit of the people. I don't get, for example, some of the BS lockdowns that were in place in Michigan, and I don't get passes for booze when you can't buy, say, a rake, but I think, for the most part their hearts have been in a decent place. Within the range.

School will be different. It should be different. It is different. There, you're weighing the public good of kids learning and socializing vs. how sick we - but more importantly, they - might get. The easiest decision would be to say "well, I'm not going to open up anything, lest someone says I killed a kid." Now, if education goes into the tank, if kids founder and sputter, you can easily pass that off on them having shitty parents, or whatever. It's not public leadership, but it's a kind of leadership.

Public leadership, IMO, is acknowledging the value of education and putting a fire under the asses of everybody who can help with school logistics to figure out how kids get back to school. Ditch whatever obsession anyone may have over a barber on E. 12th street cutting someone's hair illicitly and have an eyeball to the future.

 

Answer the question, Claire. Do you have kids?

 

I think, again, we need to pick a lane.

Either they are a bunch of hillbilly rubes with no education and limited employment prospects made even worse by the shutdown, or they are a bunch of privileged people working from home and playing golf, wanting everyone else to get to work to serve them.

You can't keep changing what they are to fit today's funny tweet.

 

Some men just want to watch the world burn.

Some women, too.

 

Should it be reported like an opera?

 

Another from Taibbi:

Democrats Have Abandoned Civil Liberties


In the last four years the blue-friendly press has done a complete 180 on these issues, going from cheering Edward Snowden to lionizing the CIA, NSA, and FBI and making on-air partners out of drone-and-surveillance all-stars like John Brennan, James Clapper, and Michael Hayden. There are now too many ex-spooks on CNN and MSNBC to count, while there isn’t a single regular contributor on any of the networks one could describe as antiwar.

Democrats clearly believe constituents will forgive them for abandoning constitutional principles, so long as the targets of official inquiry are figures like Flynn or Paul Manafort or Trump himself. In the process, they’ve raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent.