United States Governors 2

[Smash!]

Interesting Twitter read as to why Republicans oppose masks in schools. Read the whole thread!

 

[GreyhoundFan]

On 8/13/2021 at 3:59 PM, Sarcastically spinster said:

We'll offer a $2100 treatment rather than a $39 prevention.  

#followthemoney?

I wonder if DeSantis' relatives own stock in the company providing the monoclonal antibodies.

[Miranda]

On 8/16/2021 at 5:52 AM, GreyhoundFan said:

I wonder if DeSantis' relatives own stock in the company providing the monoclonal antibodies.

One of his top donors does.

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-08-17/desantis-top-donor-invests-in-covid-drug-governor-promotes

[GreyhoundFan]

No big surprise that Kristi wants to wipe Native American history. She's a typical GQPer, who thinks the history of White people is all that matters.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a great video:

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[Xan]

7 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

 

Maybe Kristi could just stage a rally in some unpopulated area of South Dakota and she could arrange for there to be a group of contagious, virus-laden people who would be willing to share Covid with all the doofuses who are against masks and vaccines.  Fine.  Get Covid and sit around on some campground in South Dakota until you figure out if you're going to live or die.  The remainder of the country is pretty much done with trying to keep all of you alive against your wills.

[47of74]

There was an mass email in my inbox from Cuomo that his people probably sent out.  I hit delete without even looking at it.  Not really interested in whatever self serving stuff he has to say nor how he's the victim of a media frenzy.  Nope. 

1 hour ago, Cartmann99 said:

 

Just wait.  #CovidKim Reynolds will soon be out to try to outdo #CovidKristi.  It's a contest between her, Noem, Abbot, and DeathSatan to see who can be the 50th Best State Governor in the country.  (And 55th Best Governor overall). 

[Smash!]

5 hours ago, Xan said:

The remainder of the country is pretty much done with trying to keep all of you alive against your wills.   you trying to kill or disable us.

Fixed that for you 😊

[Cartmann99]

Mississippi’s GOP governor: We’re less scared of Covid because we believe in ‘eternal life’

Quote

Speaking at a Republican fundraiser this Thursday, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves says the reason some people in the South don’t take as many precautions against COVID-19 is because their religiosity makes them less scared of the virus.

“I’m often asked by some of my friends on the other side of the aisle about COVID … and why does it seem like folks in Mississippi and maybe in the Mid-South are a little less scared, shall we say,” Reeves said, according to the Daily Memphian.

“When you believe in eternal life — when you believe that living on this earth is but a blip on the screen, then you don’t have to be so scared of things,” he said, adding that “God also tells us to take necessary precautions.”

“And we all have opportunities and abilities to do that and we should all do that. I encourage everyone to do so. But the reality is that working together, we can get beyond this. We can move forward. We can move on,” he said.

The Daily Memphian reports that although the event was held outside, there was little social distancing.

 

[47of74]

In case anyone needs a reminder that Chris Christie is a total fuck stick. 

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[fraurosena]

Interesting read.

What legal ground do Republican governors have to push back on vaccine mandates?

Not much, based on a century of Supreme Court precedent

Quote

Vaccine mandates have arrived. And so, too, has opposition led by Republicans. Nineteen Republican governors spoke out against President Biden’s announcement Thursday that American workers in large businesses must be vaccinated or face weekly testing. A half-dozen GOP governors threatened to sue, alongside the Republican National Committee.

But the legal ground they have to stand on appears rather shaky, based on a century of Supreme Court precedent.

The crux of the debate is where one’s personal freedom lies in relation to the broader health and rights of the nation.

About a century ago, in 1905, the Supreme Court was asked a similar question and sided with the vaccine mandates.

In 1905, at the height of a smallpox outbreak and at a time when infectious diseases were the No. 1 killer in America, the court considered whether Cambridge, Mass., could force people to get vaccinated for it. There was intense and passionate resistance to these vaccine mandates, with some people going so far as to burn their arm with nitric acid to make it look like they had smallpox, which left a scar, the New York Times reports.

A local pastor, Henning Jacobson, resisted, claiming and his son had bad reactions to earlier vaccines. He sued Cambridge and argued that “compulsion to introduce disease into a healthy system is a violation of liberty” and that being forced to take the vaccine violated his 14th Amendment rights, which says that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property.”

That was a relatively easy no for the court. In a 7-to-2 ruling in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, it decided that jurisdictions do have the right to require people to get vaccinated. Back then, the government was much more forceful about it, knocking down people’s doors to get them vaccinated, the New York Times says.

Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote, rather presciently for today’s pandemic, that: “upon the principle of self-defense, of paramount necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members.”

He hit at this core idea among vaccine-mandate skeptics that personal liberty must come above all else. Liberty, he wrote, is not “an absolute right in each person to be, in all times, and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint.”

But even as the justices expounded on where the lines of civil liberty are drawn, they didn’t make broad or sweeping determinations about vaccine mandates. It was specific to this Cambridge case.

An anti-vaccination league (not just anti-vaccine mandate) got started up a few years after that, writes Nicholas Mosvick at the National Constitution Center. And over the years, the Jacobson case got rechallenged and re-upheld. The Supreme Court has generally leaned to the side of giving the government authority to protect public health.

“Laws that restrict … liberty rights need only be ‘rationally related’ to any ‘legitimate state interest,’ and the Court continues to accept almost any plausible reason as justification,” three scholars with the state of Massachusetts wrote in 2005, summarizing the court’s various other rulings on this.

The American Civil Liberties Union recently raised another Supreme Court case for people who say they won’t get vaccinated on religious grounds: The 1944 case Prince v. Massachusetts, where the court decided a Jehovah’s Witness could continue to employ her child on the street to sell literature.

But the justices put boundaries on religious freedom, writing: “The right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or the child to communicable disease or the latter to ill health or death.’”

Today, arguably more modern laws and institutions apply to vaccine mandates. The Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration handles workplace safety, and it has the legal authority to mandate vaccines to keep workers safe, says Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney in the Obama and Trump administrations now at University of Michigan Law School. “OSHA’s mission is to ensure safe and healthy working conditions by setting and enforcing workplace standards for private employers,” she said.

That’s not to say what Biden is mandating is completely normal. A former OSHA official under the Obama administration said to my colleagues at The Washington Post that the agency decided against mandating a hepatitis B vaccine for workers who regularly come into contact with blood.

The Biden administration is also offering an out to vaccine skeptics: Face weekly testing if you don’t want to get vaccinated. McQuade said she thinks the administration has the authority to mandate vaccines, period. The testing alternative, she said, “strikes me as a way to make the initiative more politically palatable.”

It’s a fair policy question of whether, in a capitalist society, businesses should be free to make their own decisions that pertain to the health of their employees and customers. “That’s really a free-enterprise decision that should be made by companies, and not the government,” Rick Murray, chairman of the government affairs committee at the Arizona Small Business Association, told my colleagues at The Post.

But now that the government has decided it’s time to force workers to get vaccinated, there doesn’t seem to be much legal ground skeptics have to stand on to say no.

 

[church_of_dog]

Some people are really doubling down on the freedom to make their own choices aspect.  I do support mandates but I suspect one other approach will be more compelling, and that is for health insurance companies to charge much higher rates for unvaxxed folks.

(until we smarten up and go to single payer health care, we might as well make use of private insurance companies in this way while they're still here)

 

not sure how to persuade medicare/medicaid folks though

[Dandruff]

33 minutes ago, church_of_dog said:

I do support mandates but I suspect one other approach will be more compelling, and that is for health insurance companies to charge much higher rates for unvaxxed folks.

I hope that everything possible is put in the way of their comfort and convenience.  The insurance companies are currently stuck not only covering the willingly unvaccinated for COVID treatment, but also the vaccinated folks they infect.  I'd expect this to result in increased premiums for all.  Why should the victims have to help bear an additional financial burden caused by those threatening their health and lives?

[fraurosena]

Typical Republican.

 

[Smash!]

12 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Typical Republican.

 

This is freaking scary. 

[fraurosena]

17 minutes ago, Smash! said:

This is freaking scary. 

Yep. This is the standard Republican playbook now. Every single election that they lose will be attacked in this way. I hope the Dems are preparing themselves for next year. The midterms will be hotly contested, allegations of fraud will fly, and discord, violence and outright acts of terror will be instigated.

[Smash!]

I hope Biden and the Dems find a way to preserve democracy and stop America‘s slide into authoritarianism. 

[Xan]

3 hours ago, Smash! said:

I hope Biden and the Dems find a way to preserve democracy and stop America‘s slide into authoritarianism. 

I have days lately where I feel like we're all in a town that's going up in flames.  About 25% are talking about maybe doing something to put water on the fire.  Another 20% are actively looking for a firehose.  The 50% who are Republicans and/or conservatives are insisting there is no fire or else they're lighting matches.  That leaves 5% of us out on the periphery, screaming.

[ADoyle90815]

California voters voted NO on the recall of Governor Newsom.

[fraurosena]

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Wait, what? "West Virginia’s governor is furious he didn’t get a job coaching high school basketball"

Quote

With record covid-19 hospitalizations and lowest-in-the-nation vaccination rates, the governor of West Virginia has a lot on his plate.

But in recent weeks, Gov. Jim Justice (R) has been lobbying furiously for another job as a high school basketball coach. When some suggested he did not have the time, he took it personally.

He filed a grievance with state government over a local education board’s 3-to-2 vote against hiring him, asserting that his qualifications “tower above those of any other applicant.” This week, with the fallout growing, Justice said he was withdrawing as a candidate — but insisted in a fiery statement that “everyone believes unanimously that if we proceed to court, Jim Justice will be the head boys’ basketball coach.”

“Does the hate of these Board members hurt?” he wrote. “Of course, it does.”

The blowup over athletics at Greenbrier East High School — where Justice already coaches girls basketball — follows much scrutiny of Justice’s entanglements outside governing over his nearly five years in office. The billionaire owns coal mines and a casino that have sparked concerns about possible conflicts of interest, along with a resort that employs a schools superintendent who backed his coaching candidacy.

The fight over youth basketball in Lewisburg, W.Va., has left some constituents marveling at the governor’s audacity.

“I’m kind of offended that he doesn’t think the governor’s office deserves a full-time governor,” said Brentz Thompson, a longtime Lewisburg resident who said he has no stake in Greenbrier High but felt compelled to attend a recent Greenbrier Board of Education meeting and voice his concerns. A Republican, he finds much to like in Justice but said this "didn’t have to be brouhaha.”

His message for board members: “I’m embarrassed for the situation the governor has put you in. And I want you to know that a lot of people I’ve talked with in the area think that you did the right thing. … And I know that you have been pressured.”

One member of the boys basketball team argued on the day of the board vote last month that players deserve a coach who makes all their practices. Parents have spoken out, too.

“How — why is it that the governor of West Virginia in the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu in 1918 — how was he ever even considered for the first basketball coaching job, much less the second head boys basketball job for a AAAA school?” one woman, Stephanie Lilly, asked at yet another board meeting, according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

The governor’s office did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday. But a lawyer who represented Justice in his grievance said in an interview that while Justice has “made clear that his duties as governor come first,” he believes he can coach, too.

“If you know Governor Justice, you know, he cares deeply about West Virginia in general, and he cares deeply about the youth of West Virginia,” said the attorney, Michael Carey. “And he has served as, for example, the girl’s basketball coach for over 20 years, no matter what his other obligations are. And so it’s a big deal to him.”

Justice’s grievance details his passion for student athletics in Lewisburg, where he lives about 75 miles from the state capital: He coached the girls basketball team to the 2012 state championship; he has never cut a player who tried out; he also guided Greenbrier boys basketball for years — retiring in 2017 after he became governor.

When former boys coach Vernal “Bimbo” Coles stepped down this summer and moved to Florida, Justice sought to return.

“It’s a full-time job,” Coles told the Gazette-Mail last month, as Justice argued he could take it on.

The school’s principal said in August that Justice was the “unanimous choice” of an interview team that included the athletic director. But the governor’s comments to the West Virginia MetroNews raised fresh concerns.

“At my age, I’ll have to have great assistant coaches,” Justice assured the paper. “And to be perfectly honest, they’ll have to do the work. I’ll coach the game.”

A MetroNews columnist soon weighed in skeptically, noting rising coronavirus cases and a host of other challenges facing the state: “West Virginia may be a small state but serving as the chief executive is a full-time position. That was never truer than now.”

Justice’s supporters have pushed back. Some of his resort employees and others appeared at a board meeting to sing his praises, the Gazette-Mail reported. The school district’s superintendent, Jeff Bryant — who is also the entertainment director at Justice’s resort — recommended Justice as well and said his job at the Greenbrier resort does not hinder his work in the county’s schools.

Bryant wrote in an email to The Post on Wednesday that he has “not observed a change in Coach Justice’s time commitment and total vested interest in the Lady Spartan Basketball Team, which is supported by their winning record and community support.”

The athletic director did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday, nor did the president of the education board. Another board member said he and his colleagues were advised by a lawyer not to talk. The lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.

Thompson, the Lewisburg retiree who criticized Justice’s coaching bid before the board, said many in the community agree with him — even coming up to him at church this past Sunday to say so. Now, as the spat garners national news coverage, Thompson is hoping the whole thing will just fade away.

The governor said he wants to move on as well: “I refuse to spend time fighting HATE,” Justice wrote in the letter announcing his withdrawal Tuesday.

“My Dad said over and over to me that ‘you should never try to teach an elephant to sing — the elephant will never be able to do it and you’ll only frustrate yourself,” he said. “I don’t have time to be frustrated.”