Tag Archives: #COVID19

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The Kentucky Supreme Court slaps down Governor Andy Beshear But don't get too complacent; it might not be over just yet.

I was surprised, and a bit frustrated, when I heard that the Kentucky Supreme Court finally released its ruling on Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) attempts to have declared invalid several laws passed by the General Assembly, over his vetoes, which restricted his emergency powers. Why frustrated? Because I wanted to write about them earlier, but I had to pick up the family at the airport in Louisville, and I had no computer available to me!

But the ruling? Not frustrated about that at all, save for the inordinate amount of time it took.

    Kentucky Supreme Court: New laws limiting Beshear’s emergency powers are valid

    By Jack Brammer and Karla Ward | August 21, 2021 | 3:43 PM EDT

    Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY)

    In a momentous legal defeat for Gov. Andy Beshear, the Kentucky Supreme Court in a rare Saturday decision ruled on the Democratic governor’s challenge of Republican-backed laws that limit his authority to enact emergency orders to help control the coronavirus pandemic.

    In a 34-page order, the state’s highest court unanimously said Franklin Circuit Court abused its discretion in blocking the new laws from taking effect and sent the case back to the lower court to dissolve the injunction and hear legal arguments about the constitutionality of each law.

    The challenged legislation was lawfully passed and the governor’s complaint “does not present a substantial legal question that would necessitate staying the effectiveness of the legislation,” the seven-member court ruled.

Which is what I have been saying all along!

    Beshear had sought injunctive relief against the new laws, arguing that the legislation undermined his ability to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and created a public health crisis that would result in increased disease and death. The governor sued the legislature and Attorney General Daniel Cameron.

    The Supreme Court in a decision written by Justice Laurance B. VanMeter of Lexington largely agreed with Cameron and lawmakers. Cameron argued that the challenged legislation does not prevent Beshear from responding to emergencies and simply requires him to work collaboratively with other officials — including the legislature — in emergencies that last longer than 30 days.

The Governor’s argument was simple: he just had to have the authority he claimed, because COVID-19 was so serious! Work collaboratively with other officials? On July 10, 2020, Mr Beshear stated that he wouldn’t involve the legislature because he believed that they wouldn’t do his bidding.

    Beshear was asked at Friday’s news conference on COVID-19 why he has not included the legislature in coming up with his orders. He said many state lawmakers refuse to wear masks and noted that 26 legislators in Mississippi have tested positive for the virus.

And now he has found out that he isn’t a dictator!

Republican candidates for the General Assembly ran against the Governor’s authoritarian decrees, and the voters of the Commonwealth rewarded the GOP with 14 additional seats in the state House of Representatives, and two more seats, out of 17 up for election, in the state Senate. Republicans hold a 75-25 majority in the House, and 30-8 majority in the Senate. It takes only a ‘constitutional majority,’ more than 50% of the full membership of each chamber, to override a gubernatorial veto, not a 2/3 supermajority, as people are familiar with when it comes to the federal government, but the GOP has more than a 2/3 majority in each chamber.

    A spokeswoman for the governor responded to the decision Saturday afternoon, saying Beshear “has had the courage to make unpopular decisions in order to keep Kentuckians safe — the court has removed much of his ability to do so moving forward.”

    Crystal Staley said in a statement that “the court’s order will dissolve Kentucky’s entire state of emergency for the COVID-19 pandemic. It either eliminates or puts at risk large amounts of funding, steps we have taken to increase our health care capacity, expanded meals for children and families, measures to fight COVID-19 in long-term care facilities, worker’s compensation for front-line workers who contract COVID-19 as well as the ability to fight price gouging.”

    “It will further prevent the governor from taking additional steps such as a general mask mandate,” she said.

And that, of course, is exactly what Kentucky’s voters were trying to do, what they wanted done, when they gave Republicans such strong majorities in the General Assembly.

Miss Staley continued to say that the Governor is assessing whether calling the legislature into special session — the Governor has the authority to call our part-time legislature into special session, but the legislature itself does not have the authority to call itself back into session — would do any good, whether the General Assembly would give him anything he wants. The Governor’s toady jurist, Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd, who always sided with Mr Beshear when he was Attorney General, trying to frustrate then Governor Matt Bevin’s (R-KY) actions, blocked House Joint Resolution 77, in which the legislature authorized extensions of some of the Governor’s executive orders, because HJR 77 assumed that Senate Bill 1, which limited the Governor’s emergency decrees to 30 days without legislative approval for extension, was valid, and Judge Shepherd had stayed that law as well. HJR 77 did not grant approval to extend the hated mask mandate.

The legislature, in fact, indicated a willingness to work with the Governor, but Judge Shepherd didn’t want any of that!

    The most prominent he has in place now is his Aug. 10 executive order requiring almost all teachers, staff and students in K-12 schools, child care and pre-kindergarten programs across Kentucky to wear a mask indoors. It applies for 30 days and leaves open the indefinite possibility for renewal. A U.S. district judge’s ruling Thursday temporarily blocked that order in at least one school district. Beshear has asked that it be dissolved.

    The state Board of Education on Aug. 12 implemented its own emergency regulations requiring a mask mandate for students for most of this school year, and the Department for Public Health did the same for child care facilities. A legislative panel has since found those regulations deficient, but Beshear overrode that decision. One of the new laws might limit those emergency regulations to 30 days.

That order included not just public schools, over which the state Board of Education has some authority, but private schools and private daycare centers.

The state Board of Education claimed that today’s decision has no legal impact on their emergency regulations, which run for 270 days, the entire school year. I had previously speculated that Governor Beshear already knew that he lost his case with the Supremes, and pushed to get those regulations put in place to that his authoritarian decrees would continue despite the loss. The Kentucky School Boards Association urged that interested parties go slow in responding, which means that they don’t want anybody filing lawsuits challenging the KBoE’s emergency regulations.

Of course, the KBoE acted because, after the Governor urged, but did not mandate, that local school boards institute mask mandates, some local boards chose against such mandates, so the Governor, who had asked for cooperation decided that he was just going to make it an order.

However, this is not a complete victory. The state Supreme Court remanded the decision back to Judge Shepherd[1]Cameron v Beshear, 2021-SC-0107-I (2021), page 2., with an order to dissolve the injunctions, but that does not in any way prevent the Governor’s toady from finding for Mr Beshear again.

This part is important:

    Another rule of interpretation is that we “‘presum[e] that the challenged statutes were enacted by the legislature in accordance with constitutional requirements.’” Acree, 615 S.W.3d at 805 (quoting Cornelison v. Commonwealth, 52 S.W.3d 570, 572 (Ky. 2001)). “A constitutional infringement must be ‘clear, complete and unmistakable’ in order to render the statute unconstitutional.” Caneyville Volunteer Fire Dep’t v. Green’s Motorcycle Salvage, Inc., 286 S.W.3d 790, 806 (Ky. 2009) (quoting Ky. Indus. Util. Customers, Inc. v. Ky. Utils. Co., 983 S.W.2d 493, 499 (Ky. 1998)). Considering that the General Assembly is the policy-making body for the Commonwealth, not the Governor or the courts, equitable considerations support enforcing a legislative body’s policy choices. In fact, non-enforcement of a duly-enacted statute constitutes irreparable harm to the public and the government.[2]Cameron v Beshear, 2021-SC-0107-I (2021), pages 16-17.

The Court affirmed that it is the General Assembly which makes the laws, not the Governor.

But here’s the kicker:

    These items noted, we do not believe this issue has been adequately addressed by the parties and therefore make no definitive pronouncement concerning the constitutionality of thirty-day limitation contained within the 2021 legislation. . . . .[3]Cameron v Beshear, 2021-SC-0107-I (2021), page 22.

    In sum, considering that the challenged legislation was lawfully passed, the Governor’s Complaint does not present a substantial legal question that would necessitate staying the effectiveness of the legislation. And as the equities clearly favor implementation of the legislation pending an adjudication of its constitutionality, we conclude that the Franklin Circuit Court abused its discretion in finding otherwise. Thus, we remand this case to the Franklin Circuit Court with instructions to dissolve the injunction. This case is reversed and remanded to the Franklin Circuit Court for further proceedings consistent with this Opinion. In the event certain sections of the 2021 legislation may be ultimately found invalid, the likely remedy may be severability.[4]Cameron v Beshear, 2021-SC-0107-I (2021), page 27.

If, upon hearing the arguments at trial, Judge Shepherd decides that the 30 day limit in Senate Bill 1 is unconstitutional, it could, once again, empower the Governor to issue draconian decrees. We waited half a year for the state Supreme Court to rule that Judge Shepherd’s injunctions were improper, half a year in which the authority of the General Assembly in passing the laws was violated, half a year in which some of our constitutional rights were violated. The Court made clear that the Governor’s authority is not implicit, but is defined by the state legislature, so it would be a high bar that the Governor would have to clear to argue successfully that Senate Bill 1 is unconstitutional, but, with a sycophant judge like Mr Shepherd, anything is possible.

References

References
↑1 Cameron v Beshear, 2021-SC-0107-I (2021), page 2.
↑2 Cameron v Beshear, 2021-SC-0107-I (2021), pages 16-17.
↑3 Cameron v Beshear, 2021-SC-0107-I (2021), page 22.
↑4 Cameron v Beshear, 2021-SC-0107-I (2021), page 27.
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Paul Krugman waxes wroth because you didn’t take your medicine!

We have previously noted Amanda Marcotte’s article on Salon, It’s OK to blame the unvaccinated — they are robbing the rest of us of our freedoms. Miss Marcotte was upset, very upset, that the gym of which she was a member responded to Philadelphia’s new regulations to either impose vaccination requirements, complete with “Ve need to see your papers” enforcement, or require all staff and patrons to wear a mask, and the gym chose the latter. She is, she sand, “incandescent with rage” at the willfully unvaccinated.

Of course, Miss Marcotte, while she does have a following, is still relatively unknown, at least as far as the big picture is concerned. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, however, is well known, and if he didn’t use the phrase “incandescent with rage,” you can tell that it it would fit:

So how do you feel about anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers? I’m angry about their antics, even though I’m able to work from home and don’t have school-age children. And I suspect that many Americans share that anger.

The question is whether this entirely justified anger — call it the rage of the responsible — will have a political impact, whether leaders will stand up for the interests of Americans who are trying to do the right thing but whose lives are being disrupted and endangered by those who aren’t.

To say what should be obvious, getting vaccinated and wearing a mask in public spaces aren’t “personal choices.” When you reject your shots or refuse to mask up, you’re increasing my risk of catching a potentially deadly or disabling disease, and also helping to perpetuate the social and economic costs of the pandemic. In a very real sense, the irresponsible minority is depriving the rest of us of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Actually, getting vaccinated and wearing a mask are personal choices. Dr Krugman himself, exercised his personal choice to get vaccinated, as did Miss Marcotte, and as did I. What Dr Krugman wants is for the rest of us to not have a personal choice in this matter

Dr Krugman spent 834 words telling us how evil conservatives are, and, reading it, it could have been written by Miss Marcotte! But then there was this:

Recent polling suggests that the public strongly supports mask mandates and that an overwhelming majority of Americans opposes attempts to prevent local school districts from protecting children. I haven’t seen polling on attempts to prevent businesses from requiring proof of vaccination, but my guess is that these attempts are also unpopular.

Really? I’ve pointed out dozens of times that when Republican state legislative candidates in Kentucky ran against Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) executive orders, the voters rewarded the GOP hugely.

But it wasn’t just the Bluegrass State, which President Trump carried by a wide margin. In Pennsylvania, which Joe Biden won, the state legislature put two constitutional amendments on the May 18, 2021 primary ballot, measures which would limit the governor’s executive authority, and both of them passed, 53.3% to 47.7% and 53.2% to 47.8%.

One thing, however, ought to be obvious: if the public really do “strongly support” mask mandates, why aren’t we seeing that out on the streets? I had to go to Lexington again today, and drove through part of the University of Kentucky; had I been able to find a place to park, I would have gotten lunch at the Local Taco. Alas! I couldn’t find a parking space, but the other thing I couldn’t find were students, most of whom are normally more liberal than the population as a whole, wearing masks.

I spotted one, one! lady coming out of Sqecial Media wearing a mask, and she was visibly older than the usual student population.

As I made a right turn off South Limestone Street onto Vine Street to head home, I saw one lawyer-looking type wearing a mask.

That was it. Kentucky was very much a red state, with President Trump winning 62.09% of the vote, but Joe Biden carried Fayette County, 59.25% to 38.50%. In 2019, Attorney General Andy Beshear beat Governor Matt Bevin (R-KY) by 65.51% to 32.95% in Fayette County. If anyplace in Kentucky was going to “strongly support” a mask mandate, it would have been the areas around UK and downtown Lexington.

Lexington, however, isn’t the only place I saw. The NFL Network had the preseason game between the Boston New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles. It’s only pre-season, so the games don’t count, but I was happy to see the Patriots stomp the Iggles, 35-0. What I noticed, because I was deliberately looking for it, was that when the cameras panned the crowd at Lincoln Financial Field maybe, maybe! 1% of the crowd were masked.

In Philadelphia, which gave Mr Biden 81.44% of its votes.

Of course, as we have note previously, the City of Brotherly Love does not have an 81.44% vaccination rate, and the Philadelphia zip codes with the lowest vaccination rates are heavily minority.

Well, I think the pro-public health majority is also getting increasingly angry, and rightly so. It just hasn’t been vocal enough — and too few politicians have sought to tap into this righteous rage. (Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, is trying. He’s pointing out, correctly, that voting for his recall would probably install an anti-vaccine, anti-mask fanatic as governor, with dire consequences for the state.)

So it’s time to stop being diffident and call out destructive behavior for what it is. Doing so may make some people feel that they’re being looked down on. But you know what? Your feelings don’t give you the right to ruin other people’s lives.

How, I have to ask, is Dr Krugman’s life being ruined? He is, or so I have inferred from his column, vaccinated, he is able to work from home, and he is perfectly capable of wearing a mask. His chances of contracting COVID-19 have to be pretty low, but, in the end, it’s not about his chances of catching the virus that have him outraged. No, what has him so angry is that not everybody is doing what he believes they should be doing.

The left are like that these days.

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When it comes to #VaccineMandates, workers have the power!

We have previously noted that one of the problems with vaccine mandates is that not everyone will comply, and if people’s jobs are lost, then companies will have their own problems.

From The Wall Street Journal:

    How Hard Should Employers Push Vaccines? Inside One Company’s Dilemma

    As Delta variant spreads, Taylor Farms nudges 22,000 employees toward vaccination

    By Jesse Newman | August 19, 2021 | 11:25 AM EDT

    In a sprawling food processing plant on the outskirts of Nashville, Jon Matthews is expected to be everywhere. He oversees one million pounds of produce that flow into the plant daily to be sliced and separated into salads and sandwiches.

    For months, Mr. Matthews’ employer, produce giant Taylor Farms, has been engaged in an all-hands effort to cajole its 22,000 employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19, offering on-site vaccination clinics and cash incentives. The company founder, Bruce Taylor, recorded a public-service announcement that plays in the hallways, employees said.

    Mr. Matthews, 50, is among the many unpersuaded. The inventory supervisor is uncomfortable with the novel technology behind the vaccines and remains unconvinced it will protect him from infection, particularly in light of the Delta variant, which appears to break through faster than earlier strains.

    “Thirty percent of me says it might be the smart thing to do,” Mr. Matthews said.

    Mr. Taylor, his boss, has no such doubts. “I believe the vaccine is a miracle,” he said. “Why wouldn’t we take advantage of it?”

In a sane and free world, individuals will have the right to believe as they wish. In George Orwell’s 1984, the government of Oceania had its Ministry of Truth, which was supposed to manipulate all information, to push the people into all thinking one way. The Soviet Union tried the same thing, with the government in control of all publications and media, and with Правда (“Truth”) and Известия (“News”) as people’s primary sources of information, their thoughts were as government-guided as they could be.

Alas! Today’s left do not seem to believe that other people have a right to think differently, which is why they want Twitter and Facebook to censor things, in their favor, of course.

    An impasse over vaccinations is bedeviling the corporate world. On one side are employers and employees eager to see theor co-workers be vaccinated, both out of health concerns and to head off the risk of an outbreak that slows production or shutters a workplace. On the other are the workers who see it as their right to decide when and if to vaccinate.

    Some large companies, including Walmart Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Tyson Foods Inc. have imposed vaccine mandates. But the balance of power isn’t necessarily with every employer. Taylor’s 14 U.S. plants, which supply restaurants like Taco Bell Corp. and grocers like Whole Foods market, are already short some 1,500 employees. The tight labor market means that Mr. Taylor and others must be careful not to alienate workers who might go elsewhere.

    “As much as I’d like to say it’s 100% required, I don’t want to lose 10% of my workforce,” Mr. Taylor said.

He doesn’t want to lose 10% of his workforce, huh? Some nursing homes in Kentucky are worried about losing “the majority of (their) staff,” and the high “potential to lose members, especially nurses, when there are few replacement opportunities in my area.” Of course, patient care personnel are licensed, unlike hamburger flippers, meaning that it’s difficult to just go out on the street to find people to fill those jobs.

There’s more at the original. But in something unusual for the Journal, the reporting that Walmart has imposed a vaccine mandate isn’t quite accurate:

    Walmart, for example, will require all of its corporate and regional staff to be vaccinated against Covid-19 by October 4 unless they have an “approved exception,” namely, a religious or medical reason not to be vaccinated. But it isn’t asking the same of store associates and warehouse workers, to whom it is instead offering a $150 incentive for getting vaccinated (it previously offered $75) and paid time off. McDonald’s has taken a similar approach and is requiring its US corporate workers to be vaccinated by September 27 while offering restaurant employees at the locations it owns four hours of paid leave to get a vaccine (most McDonald’s locations are owned by franchises and not directly by the company). AT&T is mandating vaccines for managers and starting negotiations with unions about a similar rule for other workers. Uber and Lyft are requiring their corporate employees to get vaccinated to return to the office, but they’re not mandating shots for drivers.

Translation: corporations are issuing vaccine mandates for the more highly paid positions, the ones in which they have far more leverage in that the people in those positions have far more to lose if they resign or get fired for failing to get vaccinated, while the lower-paid hourly positions, the ones where employee losses can be far more quickly replaced with people who will require minimal training, and the ones in which people have less to lose if they do not obey a vaccine mandate, don’t get ‘mandated.’

    Taylor Farms is in no position to impose a mandate. On average, the company has raised its hourly wage 18% in the past year and a half, with particularly steep raises in competitive labor markets including Florida, Tennessee and Texas. Wages in one location increased 42%, the company said.

He probably shouldn’t have said that last part, as now other Taylor employees will be demanding that 42% raise!

    The produce giant’s Tennessee plant competes with Tyson Foods Inc. and General Mills inc. for workers, and is short 180 employees. It cannot afford to alienate any would-be recruits. “We hold a job fair and 10 people show up,” Mr. Taylor said. “Five people take the job and no one shows up on Monday.”

And so it goes. For the most part, employees have the power, not employers. Due to the ridiculous extensions of unemployment, people are being paid enough not to work that there’s no incentive for the minimum skill people to go out and get a job. Then, when you include health care workers who have to be licensed in some way, you have another group of workers who can decline the vaccine and companies have to either accept it, or lose very difficult to replace workers.

It’s already happening. Here in the Bluegrass State, Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) noted:

    “To our south, where it always starts, where we can see our future, we are continuing to see state after state not only get very low, but completely run out of [intensive care unit] beds,” Beshear said at the state Capitol. “In Kentucky, our hospital capacity, really the capacity that we have based on the staffing that we have, is reaching a critical point. We are going to be out of hospital capacity very, very soon.”

It seems that our Governor doesn’t have much respect for our Southern brethren!

    The governor said 21 hospitals across the commonwealth now face “critical staffing shortages,” as the number of new cases and rate of Kentuckians testing positive for the virus continues to rise. To “allow for additional help,” Beshear said he signed an order on Wednesday that grants licensed health care providers in other states permission to practice on an emergency basis in Kentucky.

How, I have to ask, is President Biden’s executive order — which currently applies only to nursing homes, not hospitals — going to help anything? Kentucky cannot afford to lose a single nurse!

This is what happens when Our Betters decide that they Know Best What’s For Our Own Good; they can never see the big picture, never can see what’s outside of their own little minds. Laughably, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte called forced vaccination opponents “authoritarians” and wrote, in the same article, “The irony of all this is that the best way to make this problem go away is to do the very thing that the anti-vaxxers hate most: Impose as many vaccine mandates as possible, in every way possible.” Sometimes the left can’t even see themselves.

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The unintended consequences of the do-gooders * Updated! *

It looks like Bishop John Stowe isn’t the only one threatening his employees with termination if they don’t take the vaccine:

    Cheryl Bettigole, MD, from her Twitter biography.

    Many Philadelphia health workers remain unvaccinated two months before shots will be required

    by Laura McCrystal | Wednesday, August 18, 2021

    Acting Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole said many institutions have applauded Philadelphia’s new vaccine mandate for health care workers, but noted that many employees remain unvaccinated.

    More than a dozen long-term care facilities in Philadelphia have less than 50% of their staff vaccinated, she said.

    ”If you’re more committed to not getting the vaccine than to the safety of your patients, it’s time to do something else,” she said at a Wednesday news briefing. “Health care is not for you.”

Let’s tell the truth here: health care employees at all levels have been exposed to constant, continuous education and pleas to get vaccinated. If they actually wanted to get vaccinated, they would have by now. One might ask why, in a city which gave 81.44% of its votes has so many unvaccinated people.

Like so many on the left,[1]Given this tweet of hers, I think there’s sufficient evidence to associate Dr Bettigole with the political left. Dr Bettigole not only knows what’s best for other people, but insists that it’s her way of the highway. The problem with that is that many, who have already resisted the months’ long pressure to take the vaccines, are going to continue to refuse. What will happen to health care facilities in our nation’s sixth largest city if, say, 25% or 35% of the workforce has to be discharged because they have refused to be vaccinated?

Employers across the nation are complaining that they cannot get people to fill job openings, and people working in health care settings aren’t just burger flippers at McDonald’s, who can be trained in short order. It takes two years to train an Associate degree Registered Nurse, four if she is going for her baccalaureate degree. It can take between four and twelve weeks to train a Certified Nursing Assistant. Requirements to become a CNA in Pennsylvania can be found here, requirements which include a criminal background check.`

Registered Nurses are a lot harder to find than CNAs, and there is only so much that Licensed Practical Nurses (LPNs) are allowed to do.

As we have previously noted, of the fifteen city zip codes with the lowest vaccination rate, only two are plurality white; in the other 13, four are plurality Hispanic, and nine are plurality black. Seven of those plurality black zip codes have an over 80% black population.[2]19131, 19132, 19138, 19139, 19141, 19142, and 19151, including the neighborhoods of Wynnefield, Overbrook, West Philadelphia, North Philadelphia, Strawberry Mansion, West Oak Lane, East Germantown … Continue reading Of the fifteen most heavily vaccinated zip codes, two are plurality white and twelve are absolute majority white. Black Philadelphians have been more vaccine resistant that whites, Asians and Hispanics; if Dr Bettigole carries through with her regulations to fire non-vaccinated health care employees, she will be firing a disproportionate number of black employees.

Tell me just how that’s going to work, will you?

    The city will require all health care workers to be vaccinated by Oct. 15, unless they have medical or religious exemptions. Employees and students of higher-education institutions must also be vaccinated, Bettigole announced last week.

    The mandate for health-care workers includes employees, contractors, students, and volunteers who work in-person at an organization that provides health-care services. Home health aides and nursing home employees are also included.

Home health aides, huh? Home health aides must pass CNA requirements in Pennsylvania, as well as others. What happens if 10% or 20% decline to be vaccinated? Are the clients they serve simply going to go unserved?

    Bettigole said the city hasn’t received much pushback about the mandate, and has “heard from some very happy people.” But officials have also received questions in the last week about health care workers who do not want the vaccine, she said.

    ”We all know that it is simply unacceptable to take the risk of passing a potentially fatal infection to the patients who come to us for help,” Bettigole said.

As Governor Greg Abbott’s (R-TX) case shows, fully vaccinated persons can contract the virus. Being vaccinated means that, if you contract the virus, you will probably have less serious, and perhaps no, symptoms, but you can still contract the virus; vaccination does not stop a person from passing the virus on to others.

Nursing homes have always had problems keeping people, because, to be blunt about it, they are miserable places to work. Dr Bettigole, however, wants to make it doubly hard, and can a significant percentage of the workers already in such settings. I suppose that she thinks that this will be the ‘stick’ to get the rest of the employees vaccinated, but I have to ask: has she considered that, in an environment where we have been very free about granting eligibility for unemployment compensation, and where many ‘workers’ have chosen not to work because the state and the federal government are paying them not to work, that some of those facilities might just have to close?
———————-
Update! 5:00 PM

Well, that didn’t take long!

    AP Source: Biden to require vaccines for nursing home staff

    By Zeke Miller | 4:31 PM EDT

    WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration will require that nursing home staff be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition for those facilities to continue receiving federal Medicare and Medicaid funding.

    Biden will announce the move Wednesday afternoon in a White House address as the administration continues to look for ways to use mandates to encourage vaccine holdouts to get shots. A senior administration official confirmed the announcement on condition of anonymity to preview the news before Biden’s remarks.

    The new mandate, in the form of a forthcoming regulation to be issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, could take effect as soon as next month.

    Hundreds of thousands of nursing home workers are not vaccinated, according to federal data, despite those facilities bearing the brunt of the early COVID-19 outbreak and their workers being among the first in the country to be eligible for shots.

    It comes as the Biden administration seeks to raise the costs for those who have yet to get vaccinated, after months of incentives and giveaways proved to be insufficient to drive tens of millions of Americans to roll up their sleeves.

There’s more at the original.

But the same problems exist: there are a lot of nursing home staffers, RNs, LPNs and CNAs, as well as those who are not involved in direct patient care, who have chosen against the vaccines. President Biden is going to force all nursing homes to mandate vaccination, which means that all nursing homes are going to lose a significant amount of staff.

The more the government tries to force people to do things, the more resistance will be encountered.

References

References
↑1 Given this tweet of hers, I think there’s sufficient evidence to associate Dr Bettigole with the political left.
↑2 19131, 19132, 19138, 19139, 19141, 19142, and 19151, including the neighborhoods of Wynnefield, Overbrook, West Philadelphia, North Philadelphia, Strawberry Mansion, West Oak Lane, East Germantown and West Philadelphia.
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No #FakeNews here, huh?

The Washington Post tweeted:

And here’s the story:

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has sought to ban mask mandates in schools, tests positive for the coronavirus

    by Felicia Sonmez | August 17, 2021 | 5:48 PM EDT

    Abbott is among the Republican governors who have resisted public-health mandates aimed at stemming the tide of the virus’s delta variant, which has caused a new spike in cases as the country attempts to reopen schools, restaurants and other businesses.

    A spokesman for Abbott said the governor is “fully vaccinated against COVID-19, in good health, and currently experiencing no symptoms.” Texas first lady Cecilia Abbott has tested negative, and everyone with whom the governor was in close contact Tuesday has been notified, the spokesman, Mark Miner, said in a statement.

    However, videos and photos posted online by Abbott’s gubernatorial campaign show him delivering remarks and mingling with a large, maskless crowd of more than 100 people indoors at an event in Texas on Monday night.

    Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether it had contacted those who were present at the event in the wake of his positive diagnosis.

    “The Governor has been testing daily, and today was the first positive test result,” Miner said Tuesday. “Governor Abbott is in constant communication with his staff, agency heads, and government officials to ensure that state government continues to operate smoothly and efficiently. The Governor will isolate in the Governor’s Mansion and continue to test daily.”

This is a screen cap of the Post’s tweet, in case the paper deletes it. Click to enlarge.

There’s more at the original. But here’s the important part: though the Post was trying to slam the Governor for resisting mask mandates, today was his first positive test, and he has been “fully vaccinated” against the virus.

The other important part? The Post’s tweet was only 106 characters and spaces, meaning that there were 174 more characters and spaces available, yet the Post tweet couldn’t take the effort to note that the Governor is fully vaccinated. While it’s in the third paragraph of the story, and before the first ad, it can’t be considered ‘burying the lede,’ Washington Post stories are hidden behind a paywall,[1]Yes, I’m spending good money to subscribe to the Post, because both of my readers deserve good content. and some people who saw the tweet couldn’t access the story. How many thousands and thousands of others read, and perhaps retweeted, the tweet without ever checking?

So, the Governor is fully vaccinated, and being tested daily, but the Post wants to slam him because he opposes mask mandates, something which puts him within what the people of the Lone Star State want.

References

References
↑1 Yes, I’m spending good money to subscribe to the Post, because both of my readers deserve good content.
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The Lord hears the cry of the poor So, why would Bishop John Stowe make some Catholic employees poorer?

One of the hymns sung frequently at Mass, at least in my parish, is The Lord hears the cry of the poor.

So, in a Church which is very concerned about the poorer among us, I have to ask: why would the Most Reverend John Stowe, O.F.M. Conv., Bishop of Lexington, throw people out of work if they refuse to be vaccinated against COVID-19?

    The Most Reverend John Stowe, Bishop of Lexington

    Diocese Mandates COVID-19 Vaccination for Catholic Center Employees

    August 17, 2021

    LEXINGTON — Employees at the Catholic Center of the Catholic Diocese of Lexington will be required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of their employment, starting on Sept. 1, Bishop John Stowe, OFM Conv. of Lexington announced today. Pastors who choose to implement this policy at the parish level on Sept. 1 have his support; further mandates may be forthcoming. The bishop also reinstated the policy of requiring masks for all employees at work at the Catholic Center.

    “This is an urgent matter of public health and safety. There is no religious exemption for Catholics to being vaccinated, and Pope Francis has repeatedly called this a moral obligation,” said Bishop Stowe. “The health care system is now overwhelmed by a crisis caused primarily by those who refuse to protect themselves and others by getting vaccinated. This is unacceptable, and our diocese now joins those employers who have already made this basic commitment to the common good a requirement.”

    The Catholic Center is located on W. Main Street in Lexington. The Catholic Diocese of Lexington covers 50 counties in Central and Eastern Kentucky, with 59 parishes and missions serving some 46,000 Catholics.

It’s one thing to require COVID-19 vaccination of any new hires; it’s something entirely different for the Bishop of Lexington, who, supposedly, does hear the cry of the poor, to throw people out of work if they refuse to take the vaccine.

I will admit it; I have been critical of the political positions of Bishop Stowe. Wikipedia noted:

    In January 2019, Stowe wrote an op-ed that condemned Nick Sandmann and other students for sporting apparel supporting President Donald Trump during the 2019 March for Life rally in Washington, D.C. He said the slogan “Make America Great Again” “supports a president who denigrates the lives of immigrants, refugees and people from countries that he describes with indecent words and haphazardly endangers with life-threatening policies”.

While Bishop Roger Foys of Covington later apologized for jumping the gum in criticizing Mr Sandmann and his group, if the Most Reverend Stowe ever did, I have missed it.

The USCCB opposes the legislation due to the fact that it does not contain sufficient protection for matters of religion and conscience, and might require Catholic diocese and other organizations to hire or retain open homosexuals or transsexuals living in a state of open scandal. We have previously noted Bishop Stowe’s support for homosexuals, and that the diocese hosts St Paul’s Catholic Church, which is very openly “LGBTQ+” accepting, only a couple of miles from the cathedral parish, Cathedral of Christ the King, where the Bishop resides and has his seat. Bishop Stowe is fully aware of St Paul’s ‘mission.’

But now? The Bishop, who hears the cry of the poor, would, apparently, make any employees who decline to take the vaccine poorer, even though many other American bishops have recognized an exception for conscience. “John, our Bishop,” as our pastor says in Mass, would consign current employees who have moral objections to the vaccine to unemployment. While the linked article does not specifically state that they would be fired if they do not take the first dose of the vaccine in the next two weeks, making such a “condition of employment” can mean nothing else.

YouTube video of the hymn below the fold. Continue reading →

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Yup, we could see it coming!

Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) imposed yet another mask mandate, this time on all public and private schools, but it seems as though masks do not stop the spread of COVID-19. It looks like we can count on yet another wasted school year. From the Lexington Herald-Leader:

    Ky. superintendent closes schools due to COVID-19: ‘This will be a tough year.’

    By Valarie Honeycutt Spears | August 16, 2021 07:40 AM

    Lee County Public Schools will be closed Monday through Wednesday after a surge in COVID-19 cases, Superintendent Sarah Wasson said.

    The district in Beattyville is one of the first in Kentucky to shut down this school year as a result of the coronavirus.

    “This will be a tough year and we don’t want to have to shut down this early, but if we can determine who is positive now we believe we can stay in school longer,” Wasson said in a statement released Sunday night.

There’s more at the original.

Interestingly enough, the article was originally entitled “COVID-19 shuts down Lee County Public Schools for three days,” or at least that’s what the browser tab says. I guess that by not revealing to readers in the headline that it was in small, poor, rural Lee County, far from Lexington, the editors think more people will open the story to read it. Continue reading →

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The left blame evil reich wing Republicans for lower vaccination rates, but black Americans are the least vaccine compliant

It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s Twitter photo was taken in a bar.

Whenever I need a good chuckle, I will go to see what new articles Amanda Marcotte has posted on Salon. She wrote, at 1:07 PM EDT on Thursday, August 12th, It’s OK to blame the unvaccinated — they are robbing the rest of us of our freedoms. As usual, Miss Marcotte has blamed the evil reich-wing Trump supporters as the problem:

    I really wanted to get back to my spin class. And for a couple of months, I did just that. Exercising at home for the past year was fine, but nothing beats a 45-minute spin class for leaving one red-faced and sopping wet with sweat. But it’s that “sopping wet” part that became a problem this week when the gym sent out a memo bringing back their indoor mask mandate. This isn’t a 5-minute jaunt in a grocery store with a mask. Exercising with a sweat-soaked mask is like being waterboarded. So I canceled my class and sent a polite but angry note to my gym. Philadelphia’s new regulations allow businesses to choose between mask and vaccine mandates, and they chose poorly, penalizing those who did the right thing to coddle those who refuse. Masking the already vaccinated to protect the unvaccinated helps a little, but is a little like trying to cover someone in a rainstorm by holding an index card over their head.

Miss Marcotte is just hopping mad that her rights are being violated! Of course, she wants other people’s rights, their privacy rights — something, as an abortion-up-until-the-final-contraction supporter she otherwise strongly supports — to take a back seat to her being able to go to her spin class. When it comes to other people’s rights, she’s kind of like Dirty Harry. Continue reading →

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If it’s just those evil reich wing Trumpelstiltskins who are refusing to be vaccinated, why doesn’t Philadelphia have an 80% vaccination rate?

Our good friends on the left love to blame evil reich wing Republicans for lower COVID-19 vaccination rates than they believe are acceptable. Of course, only 100% vaccination compliance is acceptable to the left, because the needs of the state outweigh the rights of the individual.

Surprisingly enough, that “anti racist news organization,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, loath as they are to print anything which could be construed negatively on BIPOCs[1]Black, indigenous, people of color., included an interactive map of city vaccination rates by zip code:

Philadelphia’s least-vaccinated zip codes at the beginning of the summer remain its most undervaccinated now, despite door-to-door outreach, targeted clinics, a lottery, and advertising to encourage people to get COVID-19 inoculations.

As the delta variant spreads, and the threat of other variants looms, these parts of the city are the most vulnerable to serious illness and death.

Five of the city’s zip codes had less than 40% of their residents fully or partially vaccinated as of Aug. 9, according to city data — rates that are on par with Arkansas and Louisiana.

You can click on the image, which is a screen capture, to enlarge it, but it is not interactive on this site. I did, however, rather painstakingly create a Microsoft Excel file of the of the data contained in the interactive file, including percentage having received at least one dose of vaccine, the median household income, racial demographics,[2]In the Inquirer’s interactive map, “white” is not capitalized, but “black”, “Latino” and “Asian” are. and the neighborhood names, something traditionally important in Philadelphia.

You can click on the image to enlarge it.

Of the 15 most heavily vaccinated zip codes, white Philadelphians are the plurality in 14 of them, with over 50% of the population in 12 of them, and 49% and 47% in the other two. Only in zip code 19104 are whites not the plurality.

In only two of the fifteen zip codes with the lowest rates of vaccination, 19116 and 19135, do white Philadelphians compose the largest racial/ethnic group. In nine if the fifteen zip codes with the lowest vaccination rates, blacks make up 70% or more of the population, and over 90% in zip codes 19132 and 19138.

It’s true enough that it takes an [insert slang term for the rectum here] like me to notice the racial disparity in those statistics, but I’d bet I’m not the only one. One wonders: just whom publisher Elizabeth Hughes will fire for looking up and printing those racially disparate statistics.

In the 2020 elections, Philadelphians gave 603,790 (81.44%) of their votes to Joe Biden, and only 132,740 (17.90%) to President Trump; Mr Biden’s margin of 471,050 votes in the city was far larger than his 81,660 statewide margin; without Philadelphia, President Trump would have carried the Keystone State by 389,390 votes.[3]This is clearly evidence that Philly needs to be walled off, like Manhattan in Escape from New York, all the inhabitants therein considered convicted felons and not be allowed to vote. If the vaccination resistance is all among the evil reich wing Trumpelstiltskins, why aren’t over 80% of people in the City of Brotherly Love vaccinated?

References

References
↑1 Black, indigenous, people of color.
↑2 In the Inquirer’s interactive map, “white” is not capitalized, but “black”, “Latino” and “Asian” are.
↑3 This is clearly evidence that Philly needs to be walled off, like Manhattan in Escape from New York, all the inhabitants therein considered convicted felons and not be allowed to vote.