DL Open Thread: Thursday, January 27, 2022

Filed in Featured, Open Thread by on January 27, 2022

Breyer Foils McConnell’s Plans:

Those plans weren’t even secret. McConnell baldly stated last summer that he was “highly unlikely” to allow Biden to fill a vacancy in 2024, should the Senate revert to Republican control in these midterms. He added that he might just refuse to hold hearings in 2023 as well, should a vacancy come up.

“I think in the middle of a presidential election, if you have a Senate of the opposite party of the president, you have to go back to the 1880s to find the last time a vacancy was filled. So I think it’s highly unlikely,” McConnell told Hugh Hewitt in a radio interview back in Jun. 2021. That’s McConnell’s further twisting of the supposed Senate precedent that the Senate shouldn’t confirm a justice case to a presidential election.

Anti-Vaxxers Bring Human Sacrifice To America.  Fascinating article, replete with a history of civilizations that also engaged in human sacrifice:

“Warriors,” “mass human sacrifice”: These were high-pitched figures of speech studding a debate about our political economy—whether and how governments should intervene to keep people and businesses financially afloat, and how many lives were worth how much of a hit to the economy. Beneath the polemics this discourse was at least fundamentally rational, a weighing of social costs against social benefits.

Today, however, the economy is no longer in jeopardy; unemployment rates and salaries have returned to pre-pandemic levels; GDP per person is higher than it was at the end of 2019; personal savings are growing, and businesses are starting up faster than ever; corporate profits and stock prices are at record highs. And for more than a year, we’ve had astoundingly effective vaccines that radically reduce the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19. All of which means that for a long time now the right’s ongoing propaganda campaign against and organized political resistance to vaccination, among other public-health protocols, has been killing many, many Americans for no reasonable, ethically justifiable social purpose.

In other words, what we’ve experienced certainly since the middle of 2021 is literally ritual human sacrifice on a mass scale—the real thing, comparable to the innumerable ghastly historical versions.

A Mega-Hacker Tells You How To Keep Your Data Secure.  You’re welcome.

Omicron Has Peaked.  Not everywhere, but cases are falling rapidly.

NCC Settles Sexual Harassment Lawsuits:

New Castle County announced Tuesday night it has settled a federal lawsuit claiming decades of sexual harassment and cover-ups in its Police Department, largely by an officer who rose to the agency’s second-highest rank.

The announcement came a little over an hour after the County Council passed a pair of proposals to allow the county to dip into its tax reserve to cover legal fees to the tune of about $3 million. About $1.7 million of that will go to “partially fund” settling claims that various members of the county allowed now-retired Lt. Col. Quinton Watson to continue decades of sexual harassment and abuse.

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  1. AQC says:

    John Kowalko is retiring. Time to get another progressive legislator who can actually get things done.