Greetings from your Thursday newsletter person, Timothy Noah.
The death cult is alive and well in the GOP. The Senate voted Wednesday, 52â48, to repeal the Biden administrationâs requirement that businesses employing 100 or more workers compel them either to be vaccinated against Covid-19 or get tested weekly at their own expense. Every Republican senator supported the measure, plus two Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and ⦠no, not Kyrsten Sinema, but Jon Tester of Montana. The bill is unlikely to pass the House, where Democrats have a larger majority, and, even if it did, it would face certain veto by President Joe Biden. But the mandate has already been blocked temporarily by a judge in the reactionary Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.
Republicans were able to force the vote under the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to vote under expedited procedures to repeal a regulation within a restricted time period after the regulation is implemented. Republican Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas told The Washington Post that heâs preparing a second bill to repeal the vaccine mandate for health care workers.
Supporters of these bills say they arenât anti-vaccine, just anti-mandate, but Covid canât tell the difference. A New York Times analysis concludes that Covid cases are up 27 percent from two weeks ago, with hospitalizations up 15 percent, overwhelming hospitals in Michigan, Vermont, and Maine. These are primarily delta variant cases, not omicron, which is only beginning to make landfall. Covid deaths are up 12 percent, the Times reports, with 1,275 people dying from it every day. Most of the dying exercised their Fifth Circuitâgranted liberty to refuse vaccination. The U.S. vaccination rate is about 60 percent, putting us behind the rest of the developed world and quite a bit of the developing world, according to this unbelievably depressing Times chart. (Weâre kicking Guyanaâs butt, though.)
Ukraineâs military intelligence chief told The New York Times that âthere are not sufficient military resources for repelling a full-scale attack by Russia if it begins without the support of Western forces.â The only surprise here is that heâs willing to say this so forthrightly. A Russian attack could occur as early as January or February, though it isnât 100 percent clear whether Putin will launch one. Biden yesterday ruled out deploying U.S. troops (no great surprise there, either), though weâre supplying the Ukranians with Javelin anti-tank missiles. In a video call Tuesday with Putin, Biden said U.S. economic sanctions would exceed those imposed after the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea.
Unemployment claims, at 184,000, fell lower last week than theyâve been since, wait for it, September 1969. The Wall Street Journal says this demonstrates that âemployers are reluctant to lay off workers at a time when jobs are plentiful, consumer demand is high, and the pool of prospective workers remains lower than before the pandemic.â If you ever harbored a desire to make rude comments to your supervisor about his mother, this would appear the moment to indulge it.
At NewRepublic.com, Matt Ford writes that after youâre done guffawing at Representative Matt Gaetzâs plan to install Donald Trump as speaker of the House if the GOP wins a House majority in 2022, take a moment to consider it seriously. Mark Meadows and Steve Bannon have signed on, you donât have to be a member of Congress to be elected Speaker, and Trump maintains a tight grip on congressional Republicans. Kate Aronoff questions the American exceptionalism that undergirds Bidenâs online Summit for Democracy, which starts today. Alex Shephard asks why nobody ever gripes about the inflationary and deficit-expanding effects of throwing $768 billion at the Pentagon. If the price tag for the reconciliation bill is $1.7 trillion, which is what it would cost over 10 years, how about pricing the Pentagon appropriation at $7.68 trillion, which is what that will cost over 10 years? (Except it will be more, because the Pentagon budget never stays flat.) And Jennifer C. Berkshire observes that the new parentsâ rights hysteria to expunge Toni Morrison and other alleged smut-peddlers from public school curricula is a replay of the same prudery and bigotry that we saw in the 1990s, when the bogeymen (and women) were Heather Has Two Mommies, Daddyâs Roommate, and some legal writings on childrenâs rights that thenâFirst Lady Hillary Clinton published two decades earlier. Plus ça change, plus câest la même chose. I wonât translate that from the French because itâs too filthy for a newsletter that high school social studies teachers might share with their students.
âTimothy Noah, staff writer |
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