☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Thursday, February 17, 2022 ☙ NOT PROGRESSIVE 🦠

Progressivism’s Covid infection; CDC signals a pivot; Illinois and Virginia legislators act; progress on military and airplane mandates; Bloomberg finds de-coupling; and trucker updates.

Happy Thursday, coffee swillers and covid news junkies! Today’s roundup includes: more intel from the San Fran recall about progressivism’s Covid infection; the CDC signals its pivot on masks; Illinois legislators act on school masking; progress in the military mandate cases; progress on airplane mandates; Virginia legislators act on school masking; Bloomberg discovers decoupling; and a trucker update.

🗞 *THE C&C ARMY POST* 🗞

🪖 We’ve received tons of resumes and are working through them now. Wow. You guys can’t believe all the amazing people who responded. I’ll be getting back to folks soon (but note that we are preferring in-office versus remote, since we never closed!). You’re going to love what we are doing next.

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🔥 A quick follow up to the post about the San Francisco school board recalls. This (https://tinyurl.com/562mbp5j) article in Reason is a fun read and provides a lot of additional colorful detail about the recalled members who are charitably described as certifiably insane. Sadly, all of us have by this point observed officials equally unqualified to hold public office but who were making critical decisions during a pandemic. Bad ones. Let this be a lesson to us all.

Anyway, this next paragraph from the Reason article sums up the problem traditional Democrats are beginning to have with modern “progressives,” which appears to be to be a serious, if not fatal, infection by Covid. In the quote, the reporter is interviewing the parent who organized the recall effort, Raj:

“I’ve always thought of myself as progressive, but I don’t use that label anymore to describe myself,” Raj told me. “Because when I see the people who call themselves progressive, and I especially see the elected leaders calling themselves progressive, they don’t seem to stand for any of the values that I believe what progressive should be. It is not progressive to stand back and do nothing while the most underprivileged kids in our city have struggled and suffered the most….It is not progressive to put your own political career above the interest of the people you’re supposed to serve. That is not progressive. All that I can see is that the movement that perhaps started with a lot of idealists in the ‘60s and the ‘70s and ‘80s, is now filled with opportunists who only care about using progressive language to advance their careers, but have no interest, no desire, to actually solve the real problems that our kids are facing today.”

Boom. The Covid pandemic experience has unmasked progressive failures to a lot of traditional democrats; things they never would have believed had any republican told them. They’ve seen it with their own eyes — so-called progressive ideals completely dissolving when put under the tiniest amount of stress during the pandemic.

Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I believe we could be looking at a generational awakening. Republicans should start emphasizing all the traditional American values consistent with progressivism’s marketing message: charity, hope, and love.

😷 NBC reported yesterday that the CDC “is expected to loosen its indoor masking guidelines to states soon.” As far as what “soon” means, NBC acknowledged that “nothing has been finalized yet,” but said “the agency’s update could come as early as next week.”

Well, if the CDC does change the guidance next week, that would be super-helpful for Joe Biden to talk about at the State of the Union on the following Tuesday. And in case it wasn’t obvious, NBC even reported that “senior administration officials have asked Walensky to provide an update on masks before President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on March 1.” There you go! And, gosh, how did NBC discover this pending pivot by the CDC? “Several people familiar with the matter” told them! People. Like maybe CDC officials? So, yesterday was the “soft opening” of the CDC’s new guidance.

What will it look like? Well, the CDC learned its lesson last May when it tried to ratchet back masks, if you can keep track of all the different shifts and pivots. Anyway, the CDC took enormous political criticism from pro-maskers and so it bunged the masks right back into the guidance, tout suite. So they’ll be more “scientific” this time. NBC explained that THIS time, “the CDC is considering a new benchmark for whether masks are needed, basing it on the level of severe disease and hospitalizations in a given community.”

In other words, masking will NOT be tied to “cases.” Instead it will be hospitalizations for “severe disease.” And remember, just last week CDC was out fixing hospital Covid reporting so it will be “more accurate.” A nicely executed plan. Guess how NBC found out about these particular details of the new plans: from “two people familiar with the plans, who weren’t authorized to speak publicly.” Oh, okay. That just means they were authorized to speak PRIVATELY.

Disgusting micro-pig Fauci appears to have, finally, pivoted into position. Despite having routinely criticized Americans who cherish individual freedoms, yesterday Fauci said that states relaxing mask mandates was “entirely understandable. At the local level, there is a strong feeling of need to get back to normality.”

At the “local level”? As opposed to what other level? What other level DOESN’T have a strong feeling of need to get back to normal? What a dummy.

I find it difficult to describe the absolute joy I will feel when I never hear the term “new normal” again. May it be forever lost to antiquity. Let the dead terms bury themselves. And so forth.

😷 One official not quite up to speed with the new narrative yet is Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, who appealed a February 4 court order finding the state’s school mask order was illegal, which has thrown the state’s school system into chaos, with some districts defiantly maintaining the mandate pending the outcome of the appeal, and other districts promptly scrapping the face covering requirements.

The judge’s temporary injunction of the mandate was issued in response to lawsuits from parents and teachers from over 150 school districts. That’s a lot.

Pritzker did recently relax the state’s indoor mask mandate, but he also infuriated parents by signing a new executive emergency order extending school masking for 150 more days, which was enabled by an emergency rule from the state’s department of health ordering schools to continue masking during the appeal.

So Illinois legislators responded by revoking the state of emergency empowering the Illinois department of health to issue emergency rules. So there. After the vote, Representative Tom Demmer (R) said, “Today my colleagues and I on the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules (JCAR) voted 9-0-2 to suspend the Illinois Department of Public Health emergency rules requiring masks to be worn in schools. This rule had previously been declared null and void by a Sangamon County court, but that ruling was being appealed by the Governor and Attorney General. Additionally, the Governor has indicated he will be removing the indoor mask mandate in stores, restaurants, bars, etc—but he had filed a new 150-day emergency rule to require masking in schools. Today’s vote repeals that rule.”

So. The tide is turning. And tides have an irresistible force. You can swim against them for a while, but eventually, you get tired.

🔥 We are finally getting some traction in the military cases. A federal judge in Georgia entered an order yesterday on behalf of an Air Force officer — a 25-year veteran — whose request for a religious exemption to vaccination was denied. In fact, as the judge noted, calling it an “abysmal record,” the Air Force had not granted ANY religious exemptions to anyone.

There’s a LOT of good stuff in the order. Instead of trying to summarize it all, here’s a dropbox link for those of you with military connections or general interest in reading the order. I know a bunch of you will want to read it.

In the order, the judge said, “Although the Air Force claims to provide a religious accommodation process, it proved to be nothing more than a quixotic quest for Plaintiff because it was by all accounts theater.” He then noted, “but even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten.”

The judge concluded the order saying he was “unquestionably confident that the Air Force will remain healthy enough to carry out its critical national defense mission even if Plaintiff remains unvaccinated and is not forced to retire.” Indeed.

🔥 And, FINALLY, a significant lawsuit against the airplane mandates. The state of Texas filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration yesterday, seeking to block the federal mask mandate for airplanes, trains, buses and associated facilities.

Other individual plaintiffs have tried to stop the airplane mask mandate. One recent attempt filed by a father and his autistic 4-year-old son died at the Supreme Court last month. But this is the first time a state has challenged a federal mask mandate. That is progress, people. Previously, lawmakers have been too chicken to take on the mask issue like this.

It’s not just Texas. On Tuesday, Governor DeSantis of Florida called the airplane mask mandate “irrational” during a press conference.

If I am right about Narrative 2.0, Texas’ new lawsuit will be moot shortly.

😷 The New York Times reported yesterday that Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin signed a bill ending school mask mandates and limiting remote instruction in that state. Youngkin had already signed an executive order outlawing mask mandates in January on the day he took office, which was immediately opposed by lawsuits from teachers’ unions. So the legislature whipped up a new law, which passed yesterday, mooting all the challenges to the governor’s executive action.

It’s over in Virginia.

🔥 Bloomberg News continued its mission to assist the Administration’s pivot to Narrative 2.0 this week in an article headlined, “Covid’s Great Uncoupling: Gap Widens Between Cases and Deaths.” In other word, Bloomberg has finally discovered UNCOUPLING. The subhead says, “Effective vaccines and milder variants are improving survival rates dramatically in 2022.” How about that?

Here’s the cheerful first sentence from the article: “The pandemic looks a whole lot different in 2022. Vaccines are working, treatments are advancing and—at least for now—the virus itself seems less intent on killing.“

Great news! My gosh! You see what this means: CASES DON’T MATTER ANYMORE. Forget about those stupid cases! Why even test anymore?

And — drum roll please — who was the marvelous genius who shut down the virus? Bloomberg gives us a hint: “The Covid vaccine has changed the course of the pandemic.” Haha, see? I told you so.

Well, maybe it was the vaccines. The assertion does seem a tad … unscientific. But we knew this was coming. Soon I will summarize for you the argument about how poor the evidence for ANY vaccine efficacy is.

🚛 Finally, in Canadian Trucker Protest news, the province of Quebec has announced it is ending its vaxpass for everything except International travel by March 14. And the Toronto Sun published a staff editorial Tuesday headlined, “EDITORIAL: Trudeau Has Gone Too Far.”

The first sentence of the editorial pointedly observes that “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s unjustified invoking of the Emergencies Act is deeply problematic and will have long-lasting consequences for the country.”

Have a terrific Thursday. Be back here tomorrow, same time, with your cup o’ Joe. Not that Joe. Coffee.

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