DL Open Thread Sunday, Feb. 28, 2021
Now that The Last Guy™ has been reduced to giving speeches to the clowns and rageaholics at CPAC (it stands for Clowns Playing At Competence), the media’s theme for the week was The $15 Minimum: Democrats Are Doing It Wrong, and they might be right. For example, Sen. Bernie Sanders criticized the WalMart-owning Walton family as paragons of greed but ignoring the real problem — the GOP’s “populist” constituency is small business owners who fear the wage hike.
Here’s a messaging tip, Democrats: If employers don’t pay workers enough to live on, taxpayers have to make up the difference. Republicans are still the anti-tax party, aren’t they? So why do they want to tax people to pay for benefits for the working poor? I realize most Republicans are too stupid to recognize a dilemma when they walk into one, but it’s always worth clarifying that for the non-idiot segment of the populace.
Washington Monthly frets that Democrats are doing it wrong on protecting voting rights, and lays out a plan to emphasize the right to vote — a right that’s not in the Constitution but could be established in spite of that.
This week’s Republican Mook of the Week is Madison Cawthorn, the young wheelchair-bound performance artist who lies as effortlessly as The Last Guy™, mostly about himself. He lied about the accident that left him a paraplegic (the driver rescued him; in Cawthorn’s telling, he was left alone to die) and just kept on going. This report followed one from BuzzFeed that found — you might want to sit down for this — that Cawthorn was a sexual predator while attending his “Christian” “college.”
In Covid news, the University of Delaware saw 300 new cases last week and is threatening a campus-wide lockdown if the situation doesn’t improve.
Finally, it appears the meat industry is running scared of artificial meat, funding an anti-Frankenfood propaganda campaign in an effort to stop its runaway growth. They have the resources, mainly because Big Meat operates in near-monopoly conditions that reformers would like Biden to address.
The floor’s yours.
UofD has already closed all the dining halls and is housing kids 1 to a quad. (It was 6 to a quad back in my day). it’s hard to see how much more they can be locked down.
I have a kid in Red Clay 11th grade who loves Zoom school. Red Clay have the option to go in person or remote, so we were happy to choose 100% remote. They keep opening up the onsite school due to parent pressure, but then somebody gets Covid and they have to shut it all down again.
Parents seem divided into two passionate camps, onsite vs. remote. I actually feel sorry for school administrators who have to decide which group to respond to, because the other group will come at them with full fury.
I also feel sorry for parents of younger children who don’t do well with Zoom school, or parents who have to go out to work and need day care.
But a lot of the “demand onsite” crowd is parents whose only interest in school is sports. I don’t feel sorry at all for them.
I would have thought the pandemic would be a good time to pull the plug on high school football, which is both expensive and bad for developing brains.
I always enjoy the claim that football keeps kids from dropping out — as if risking concussions is a valid trade-off for furthering their education.