Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
A show vote in the Senate reflected a continuing partisan divide that appears increasingly likely to scuttle any recovery package to address the toll of the pandemic before the November election.
By Emily Cochrane & Jim Tankersly @ NYTimes.com, Sept. 10
WASHINGTON — Prospects for any additional stimulus to address the coronavirus pandemic’s devastating toll before the election darkened considerably on Thursday, when a whittled-down Republican plan failed in the Senate on a partisan vote.
Democrats voted unanimously to block the proposal from advancing, calling it inadequate to meet the mounting needs for federal aid, in the latest indication of a lack of political will to reach an agreement, even as critical federal aid for individuals and businesses has run dry.
It was a nearly party-line vote whose outcome was never in doubt. The proposal amounted to a fraction of the $1 trillion plan Republicans had offered in negotiations with Democrats, who in turn are demanding more than twice as much.
A failure to compromise would leave millions of jobless Americans in potentially dire straits, as they exhaust traditional jobless benefits and states run out of additional funds that President Trump steered to the unemployed by executive order last month. It would also strand a wide swath of small business owners who have endured steep drops in revenue as the pandemic chilled economic activity, with little prospect of a return to normal levels for months to come [....]
@ NYTimes Coronavirus Live Updates, 18 minutes ago
The coronavirus may be best known for the brutal toll it has taken on older adults, but a new study of hospital patients challenges the notion that young people are impervious.
The research letter from Harvard found that among 3,222 young adults hospitalized with Covid-19, 88 died — about 2.7 percent. One in five required intensive care, and one in 10 needed a ventilator to assist with breathing.
Among those who survived, 99 patients, or 3 percent, could not be sent home from the hospital and were transferred to facilities for ongoing care or rehabilitation.
The study “establishes that Covid-19 is a life-threatening disease in people of all ages,” wrote Dr. Mitchell Katz, a deputy editor at JAMA Internal Medicine, in an accompanying editorial.b“Social distancing, facial coverings and other approaches to prevent transmission are as important in young adults as in older people,” it said.
Nearly 60 percent of younger patients hospitalized with Covid-19 were men, and a similar percentage were Black or Hispanic. Men were more likely to need a ventilator than women, and more likely to die. Extreme obesity and hypertension were also linked to a greater risk of mechanical ventilation or death.
The study, which was peer reviewed and published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Wednesday, looked at young adults discharged from more than 400 hospitals in the United States between April 1 and June 30. Over all, just over one-third were obese, and one quarter extremely so. Roughly one in five had diabetes, and about one in seven had hypertension. [....]
Asked how costs would be offset, campaign refers to Biden’s previous plan to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans and reverse tax cuts for high earners
To start, I link to the headline story for the print edition of Thursday's Washington Post.
By Perry Bacon, Jr. @ FiveThirtyEight.com, Sept. 8
The overarching story of recent American elections is that 1) voters of color, who have long been Democratic-leaning, are a growing share of the electorate; 2) white voters with college degrees are increasingly shifting to the Democrats; and 3) white voters without degrees are aligning more with the GOP. But those trends, because they get so much focus, can warp our understanding of the electorate as it exists right now. Demographics are not yet destiny in American elections — millions of people don’t align with the party their race and ethnicity or education would predict. Case in point: In 2016, more than a third of President Trump’s support nationally came from non-Hispanic white Americans with college degrees (26 percent) and Asian, Black and Hispanic voters (12 percent), according to Pew Research Center data. On the flip side, about a quarter of Hillary Clinton’s supporters were non-Hispanic white Americans without degrees.
White Americans without degrees aren’t as likely to vote for Trump as in 2016, according to polls — which partly explains why Biden leads in national polls and key swing states like Pennsylvania. But a big reason Trump could still win the Electoral College, despite the poor marks Americans give him for his handling of COVID-19 and his job performance overall, is that the Black, Hispanic and college-educated white voters who backed him in 2016 are largely still with him, particularly in key swing states.
In other words, while Trump is a radical departure from previous GOP candidates in terms of personal style and his frequent racist comments, voters haven’t radically changed their voting patterns amid his rise in U.S. politics — the Americans who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 overwhelmingly backed Trump in 2016 (about 90 percent) and those who backed Trump in 2016 are overwhelmingly behind him in 2020 (about 94 percent).
That fact helps explain how Trump won in 2016 and why he might still come back in 2020. Here’s a more detailed look at those three groups:[....]
‘Kill All You See’: In a First, Myanmar Soldiers Tell of Rohingya Slaughter. Video testimony from two soldiers supports widespread accusations that Myanmar’s military tried to eradicate the ethnic minority in a genocidal campaign. https://t.co/725hzYM2qK
— alain servais (@aservais1) September 9, 2020
By Amelie Thomson-Deveaux and Maggie Koerth @ FiveThirtyEight.com, Sept. 4
[....] For the purposes of this article, when we refer to the militia movement, we are referring to an umbrella term that encompasses paramilitary activists and groups with strong anti-government leanings. But beyond that, modern militias are hard to explain and categorize — what even counts as a militia is up for debate. One thing is for sure: There is no one militia — not in Kenosha that night and not anywhere in the country. Instead, experts say, “the militia” is really a multifaceted movement with fluid boundaries. The key to understanding that movement’s role in the chaos of 2020 is knowing just how difficult it can be to pin down what apparent militia members believe — much less how they’re connected to each other and the broader movement.
[....]Even the organized, club-like militias don’t ascribe to a single overarching ideology, which makes it especially difficult to figure out what motivates individuals like Rittenhouse, or even how to describe them. “It’s almost like people are choosing their own adventure,” said Oren Segal, vice president of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League.
So a crowd like the one that showed up in Kenosha can be made up of individuals, even strangers, with little connecting them except a shared interest in gun rights and a sense that they’re the only ones who can protect their community. And in these trying times — amid a pandemic and protests against racial injustice, plus a president who is giving them more public support than they’ve ever had from the national political establishment — those individuals are taking a collective turn in a direction that, experts fear, is likely to result in more violence [....]
Splains a lot about the erratic nature of shopping lately!
By Anne D'Innocenzio @ AP.com, Sept. 6
NEW YORK (AP) —Gold Medal International is sitting on millions of dollars worth of socks at its North Carolina warehouse that it can’t ship to stores.
The reason? The 66-year-old family-owned sock maker can’t get enough credit insurance to cover potential losses if the stores can’t pay for the goods they’ve ordered.
Without that insurance, Gold Medal — and thousands of other suppliers facing a similar dilemma — would be on the hook for unpaid bills. But not shipping the goods to retailers means losing sales and big write-downs on inventory. The problem will only get worse if retailers can’t stock their shelves and shoppers can’t find what they want heading into the critical holiday season.
“I got the goods, I made them. I don’t have a liquidity problem,” said Paul Rotstein, who’s been president of New York-based Gold Medal for 30 years. ”But if I can’t ship $12 million worth of orders, guess what? I have a big liquidity problem.”
Before COVID-19, suppliers routinely relied on so-called trade credit insurance to get the reassurance they needed to design products, receive orders, and ship to retailers.
Now, with the pandemic creating so much economic uncertainty, many retailers are struggling and credit insurers are unwilling to take on the risk [....]
After Sullenberger, the pilot who safely landed a commercial aircraft on the Hudson River after it's engines were knocked out by sucking in a flight of geese, said "For the first time in American history, a president has repeatedly shown utter and vulgar contempt and disrespect for those who have served and died serving our country," on Facebook. Trump attacked back on Twitter:
"The Hoax on the Hudson destroyed a beautiful, beautiful aircraft because it's incompetent pilot lost power trying to save a flock of geese. New York has too many geese and not enough great pilots! He's not a hero, he's a loser."@RealDonaldTrump
"We want our sons and daughters to know the truth," Trump went on. "America is the greatest and most exceptional nation in the history of the world. Our country wasn't built by cancel culture...."
Orwell: "Ignorance is strength!"
Reichsführer-SS Hermann Göring: "If the Führer calls and commands, each of us must obey without question, whatever he may say."