667,000 and Counting: In America, Fucking Remember

  

SAY WHAT? - At 3 a.m. Tuesday, in what its creator likens to a much-needed "collective sigh," volunteers began planting the first of 662,000 white flags on D.C.'s National Mall in mournful tribute to America's staggering, unholy, largely preventable COVID death toll, which just passed the record mass casualties of the Civil War and is now surging to over 1,800 deaths and 170,000 new cases every day. The numbers confound: Over 42 million Americans, or one in seven, have had COVID, one in every 500 have died, and experts agree those confirmed numbers drastically under-report the dire reality. Today's pandemic of the stubbornly, stupidly unvaccinated, fueled by Delta and maskless kids going back to school, is concentrated in southern GOP-run states widely seeing severe staff and bed shortages, ICU units at or over capacity, and hospitals "at the brink of collapse in many communities." In Kentucky, where 70% of hospitals have reported critical shortages, doctors lament that, thanks to anti-science idiocy, "Most of the education happening now is based on tragedy, personal tragedy.” And the stories of it keep coming.

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SCOTUS Is Definitely Not A Bunch of Partisan Hacks Says Partisanest Hack Ever

 

 

Because irony isn't quite dead yet, SCOTUS Judge Amy Coathanger Barrett gave a Very Earnest speech Sunday about the integrity of the Supreme Court at the University of Louisville's McConnell Center, which was founded by Mitch McConnell, who gave Barrett a glowing introduction after having last year rammed her nomination through the Senate before the body of RBG was cold - protest signs at the time declared "Respect Her Dying Wish Mother F**kers" and "Supreme Farce" - and mere weeks before the election though he'd nefariously blocked an Obama SCOTUS confirmation for over a year, but that was then when it only seemed like an increasingly right-wing Court was working hand-in-sweaty-hand with the GOP, and this is now, when we know they are.

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An Unwillingness To Abide Lost Cause Idolatry Any Longer: Robert E. Lee Comes Down At Last

  

SAY WHAT? - After 131 ignoble years, officials in the former capital of the Confederacy have finally taken down the massive 12-ton statue of loser, traitor and slavery zealot Robert E. Lee, who led hundreds of thousands of young Americans to their misbegotten deaths to defend the dubious right of white people to own black people as property. Wednesday's overdue action removed the country's largest monument to the Lost Cause, the last Confederate statue along Richmond’s historic Monument Avenue, and the longtime, incendiary symbol of a southern white nationalism that birthed Jim Crow, the KKK and all the sordid tenets of systemic racism that followed.

For many, both Lee and Richmond represent "Ground Zero" for the fight against racism. Contrary to a popular myth of the "kindly general," Lee didn't just viciously beat his own slaves; he also massacred black Union soldiers who tried to surrender at the Battle of the Crater, paraded survivors through the jeering streets, and refused to accept Ulysses Grant' condition for a prisoner exchange that black soldiers - aka “negroes belonging to our citizens" - be exchanged just like white soldiers, thus leaving his own men to suffer. Like other Confederate monuments to white supremacy, Lee's statue - because "a big lie requires a big statue," 21 feet tall atop a 40-foot pedestal - took shape a generation after the war. Erected in 1890, 25 years after his surrender at Appomattox, it told both southern white bigots their fight wasn't over, and southern blacks who was still in charge. Hint: Not them.

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It Looks Heroic, But You Broke Us

 

SAY WHAT? - Grisly milestones, one after the other. On Tuesday, the U.S. hit 40 million COVID cases since the start of the pandemic, with four million in the last four Delta-inundated weeks, over a quarter of them kids. This Labor Day weekend, the number of hospitalized COVID patients was nearly 300% higher than the same time last year, and the number of deaths was over 86% higher.

Today, some 100,000 Americans are hospitalized, almost as many as during January’s COVID peak; we are at over 1,500 deaths per day - almost a 9/11 a day - and climbing. Surges are still spreading across GOP states, many of them southern, where vaccination rates are about 40% lower than in the Northeast and malignant "stooge hack dickdrip" idiots like Gym Jordan are still saying things like, "Vaccine mandates are un-American," never mind George Washington ordering smallpox vaccines for the Continental Army. With Delta now spreading into western and Midwestern states, COVID-swamped Idaho officials on Tuesday announced they'll start rationing health care - aka GOP death camps - by activating protocols for "crisis standards of care." Meanwhile, the usual GOP suspects continue to infect and kill their constituents at unfathomable rates. 

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Grand Bargain’ of Workers’ Compensation Under Siege

  

SAY WHAT? - The COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve been told, changes everything and that may include one of California’s oldest social support systems, workers’ compensation.

Legislative tinkering and a potentially disruptive lawsuit threaten to undo what was termed a “grand bargain” of workers’ compensation struck more than a century ago.

Employers agreed to compensate, with medical care and cash payments, employees who suffer work-related illnesses and injuries as an “exclusive remedy,” thereby protecting employers from individual lawsuits for disabilities.

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Leaving the Bitter Graveyard of Empires: In Afghanistan, Everything Is Crying

 

SAY WHAT? - America's forever war - misbegotten, intractable, fatally awash in hubris - is over. Contrary to "incandescently self-righteous" fulminating on the right, the mayhem left in its horrific wake belongs not to Biden, but to 20 years - 60, really - of ruinous decisions by political and military leaders chasing delusional empire, "Never mind the facts. Never mind the losses. Never mind the lessons." The largest non-combatant evacuation in U.S. military history - over 122,000 people, most in under two weeks - ended Monday night, soon after Islamic State fighters in one of the world's poorest nations reportedly attacked the airport with jerry-rigged rockets mounted on the back seats of a four-door sedan.

Despite charges by the hawkish likes of Wall Street Journal of "a botched" withdrawal" from a place we never should have been that damaged U.S. "honor and credibility" - like, really, is there any left? - many noted "there is no graceful way to evacuate vulnerable people from a country at war. There are better ways & worse ways, but none look good from the outside (or inside)." Up to the end, a network of veterans and other volunteers frantically worked to help get out those who had helped them. "It's the most hopeless, helpless, frustrating, infuriating experience," said one. "It's, 'If I can get him out, it won’t have been for nothing.'"

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Repugnant, Still: Hunger for the Blood of Black Citizens

 

SAY WHAT?-As our macro horrors drag on -- surging plague, burning planet, grim detritus of a senseless war - it's cold comfort to learn America's more prosaic atrocities also persist unabated. 

After a two-year legal battle, the Associated Press has forced the release of harrowing body camera footage of a Louisiana State Police trooper pummeling an already handcuffed, prone black man 18 times in the head with a heavy-duty, department- issue flashlight for the crime of. . .wait for it, "improper lane usage" -- one of countless such attacks on black residents now, finally, the subject of a federal probe. The savage attack in May 2019 on Aaron Larry Bowman, 46, came shortly after a traffic stop near his Monroe home. 

A prodigious crowd of sheriff's deputies had already removed Bowman from his vehicle and taken him to the ground when they were joined by Jacob Brown, 31, a white officer and sociopath who later told investigators he "was in the area and was trying to get involved.” Within two seconds of his arrival at the scene, Brown -- who in just four years had tallied 23 use-of-force incidents,19 targeting black people -- jumped out of his car and began bludgeoning Bowman on the head and body with an aluminum flashlight reinforced with a pointed end to shatter car glass. 

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