Last Call For The Vax Of Life, Con't

GOP disinformation for political posturing,the media's insistence that the unvaccinated cannot be held responsible, and tens of millions of Americans refusing to take any precautions if not actively preventing them being taken by others has now led to a massive COVID-19 delta variant spike in the American South, worse than any point previously during the now 18 months of the pandemic.

The US remains among nations with the highest rate of new Covid-19 cases, driven mostly by a surge in the South, where many states are lagging in getting people vaccinated against the coronavirus. 

"This is starting to look really ominous in the South. ... If you look at rates of transmission in Florida and Louisiana, they're actually probably the highest in the world," Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Friday. 

Infection rates began to plummet in the US in the spring as vaccines became widely available, while the seven-day moving average of daily confirmed cases climbed in other nations, including India and Brazil, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. 

In the month of August, the US has so far reported more than 1.5 million new cases of Covid-19, more than three times the numbers for Iran and India -- which now hold second and third place, JHU data shows. And the seven-day average has topped more than 135,000 cases, well ahead of other nations. 

On a state-by-state comparison, Louisiana has the highest rate of new cases per capita, followed by Florida. 

"That's how badly things have gotten out of hand. There is a screaming level of transmission across the southern states right now. And now we're starting to see this happening among younger age groups," Hotez said. 

Florida on Friday broke its own record high in Covid-19 cases over the past week, reporting 151,415 new cases -- the most infections recorded during a seven-day period since the pandemic upended lives across the globe. 

The surge has been fueled by the more contagious coronavirus Delta variant, overwhelming hospitals across the country. 

New hospital admissions for Covid-19 among adults ages 30 to 39 have reached a record rate, according to CDC data. 

The data show the rate of new hospitalizations reached 2.52 per 100,000 people on Wednesday among adults in their 30s. 

Just a month earlier, on July 11, the rate of new hospital admissions of patients with Covid-19 in that age group was 0.64 per 100,000 people, according to the data.

 

The rate is starting to go parabolic now. It's gotten so bad that even FLorida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis is terrified and taking action.

As the Delta variant drives a surge of Covid-19 cases in Florida, a rapid-response unit will be deployed to administer monoclonal antibody treatments to residents infected with the virus, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday. 

"This is the most effective treatment that we've yet encountered for people who are infected with Covid-19," DeSantis said. "This, applied early and properly, has the ability to reduce your likelihood of being hospitalized." 

Monoclonal antibodies are intensely focused, lab-made versions of convalescent plasma. The antibodies come from people who have recovered from coronavirus. Researchers then take the blood, select the most potent antibodies, and make them into a drug. 

Speaking from Jacksonville, DeSantis said beginning at noon Thursday, the rapid response unit will begin delivering monoclonal antibodies in the city. 

The process will begin with referrals from the health systems, but the state is looking to move to allowing individuals to make appointments, he said. The intention is to expand the model to other parts of the state, the governor said. 

The state will also be deploying strike teams to long-term care facilities as well, DeSantis said, and the state "is going to bring in a lot more Regeneron into Florida." (Regeneron is a company that makes a monoclonal antibody treatment.)

 

DeSantis won't rescind his mask mandate ban however. His political career would end overnight, the state and national GOP would crucify him. Better to see thousands of Floridians die than admit he was wrong. 

And die, they will.

Who Checks The Fact-Checkers?

For years, Snopes.com has stood as one of the big fake news debunking sites, fighting the tide of disinformation for the GOP right and their death cultists. But as the old saying goes, you either fall as the hero or survive long enough to become the villain you fought.

David Mikkelson, the co-founder of the fact-checking website Snopes, has long presented himself as the arbiter of truth online, a bulwark in the fight against rumors and fake news. But he has been lying to the site's tens of millions of readers: A BuzzFeed News investigation has found that between 2015 and 2019, Mikkelson wrote and published dozens of articles containing material plagiarized from news outlets such as the Guardian and the LA Times.

After inquiries from BuzzFeed News, Snopes conducted an internal review and confirmed that under a pseudonym, the Snopes byline, and his own name, Mikkelson wrote and published 54 articles with plagiarized material. The articles include such topics as same-sex marriage licenses and the death of musician David Bowie.

Snopes VP of Editorial and Managing Editor Doreen Marchionni suspended Mikkelson from editorial duties pending “a comprehensive internal investigation.” He remains an officer and a 50% shareholder of the company.

“Our internal research so far has found a total of 54 stories Mikkelson published that used appropriated material, including all of the stories Buzzfeed shared with us,” Marchionni and Snopes Chief Operating Officer Vinny Green said in a statement.

"Let us be clear: Plagiarism undermines our mission and values, full stop," Marchionni added. "It has no place in any context within this organization."

Snopes’ editorial staff disavowed Mikkelson’s behavior in a separate statement signed by eight current writers. “We strongly condemn these poor journalistic practices. … we work hard every day to uphold the highest possible journalistic and ethical standards.”

Snopes told BuzzFeed News it plans to retract all of the offending stories and disable advertising on them. It will also append an editor's note of explanation to each.

Said Mikkelson, “There is no excuse for my serious lapses in judgement. I’m sorry.”

 

Suspended, but he still owns half the company.

 

Not a good look at all, throwing all your integrity away like this. I'd expect this from garbage merchants like Twitchy, Newsbusters, or the Daily Wire. But Snopes?

 

Yeah, won't be citing anything else from there, and it's a shame because the articles, while plagiarized, didn't have any factual errors. Is it fair to hold Snopes to a higher level?

Yes, yes it is. And they failed.

Af-Gone-Istan, Con't

The timetable on the fall of Kabul to the Taliban has moved up to the "days" mark from "weeks", as the remaining 3,000 US troops in Kabul desperately try to buy enough time to evacuate remaining US personnel from the embassy in Kabul.

The Biden administration is preparing for the fall of Kabul and a retreat from any U.S. diplomatic presence in Afghanistan — a stunning reversal of expectations. It's looking increasingly likely to high-ranking aides to President Biden that the U.S. will have no enduring diplomatic presence in Afghanistan beyond Aug. 31 — the date Biden has promised the full troop withdrawal will be complete.

Why it matters: It's a major reversal from even a few weeks ago. The working assumption in Biden’s inner circle had been that Kabul could hold for the short term, allowing the U.S. to stay diplomatically engaged and help Afghan women secure their rights beyond the U.S. withdrawal. The 3,000 Marines and soldiers going in to help with the evacuation will also be gone by Aug. 31, we're told.

Between the lines: Biden is at Camp David this weekend, not at his Delaware beach house. He can relax there, but also has full comms. People can come and go without detection, and he avoids the optics of a beach vacation amid a mass evacuation.

The big picture: The U.S. embassy in Kabul wasn’t just a diplomatic building. It also was a major intelligence center with paper records and equipment there that the U.S. will remove or destroy. Protocols are in place for just such an emergency. Unlike Tehran in 1979, when the Iranian fundamentalists gained access to some sensitive material, the U.S. staff still in Kabul will ensure there’s nothing to gain. American diplomats at the embassy have been instructed to destroy important papers and desktop computers before they leave, according to a memo obtained by NPR.

Despite the efforts to secure intelligence and safeguard U.S. personnel and their Afghan supporters, Biden must brace for the symbolic defeat of seeing the Taliban overrun the space that housed the embassy. That includes the ambassador's residence — and the landmark "Duck and Cover" bar frequented by generations of troops, diplomats and journalists.

The major moment to come: Lowering the American flag that flies over what is essentially sovereign U.S. territory. That's typically done by the Marine Security Guard detachment that's always on post. It's a point of honor for the ambassador or chargé d'affaires to take custody of the flag and bring it back to State or a safe haven.

 

I wasn't around for the fall of Saigon, and I don't remember the fall of Tehran, is was a toddler, but this one I'm going to get to put into context for a long time. We've been in Afghanistan for 20 years, effectively my entire adult life, and it's come to nothing, I guess.

Reports out of the surrounding Afghan cities indicate that the Taliban has captured significant amounts of US weapons, vehicles, and helicopters as well.

It's going to be bad in Afghanistan very soon, folks, but the mission never could have ended any other way.

Last Call For Return To Sender, Con't

OK, can we get rid of corrupt Postmaster General Louis DeJoy now please?

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy purchased up to $305,000 in bonds from an investment firm whose managing partner also chairs the U.S. Postal Service’s governing board, the independent body responsible for evaluating DeJoy’s performance.

Between October and April, DeJoy purchased 11 bonds from Brookfield Asset Management each worth between $1,000 and $15,000, or $15,000 and $50,000, according to DeJoy’s financial disclosure paperwork. Ron Bloom, a Brookfield senior executive who manages the firm’s private equity division, has served on the postal board since 2019 and was elected its chairman in February.

DeJoy’s financial adviser purchased the bonds on the open market, Postal Service spokesman Jeffrey Adams said, and Bloom manages a division of Brookfield separate from the one that sells public securities.

Two ethics experts interviewed about the transaction disagreed over whether the bond purchases could cause conflict-of-interest issues in the agency’s top ranks. One argued that the transactions raise questions about oversight and governance at the nation’s mail service, which has taken on newfound prominence during the coronavirus pandemic and after the November election, in which nearly half of all voters cast their ballots through the mail. The other said financial connections between government officials could give off the appearance of conflicts without necessarily causing ethics problems.

Other elements of DeJoy’s financial ties have drawn close examination from ethics watchdogs. DeJoy-controlled companies lease four office buildings to global shipping behemoth XPO Logistics, DeJoy’s former company. XPO pays DeJoy more than $2 million annually in rent, The Washington Post previously reported. Brookfield also owns more than $500,000 in shares of XPO, according to its securities filings.

“I’m stuck on DeJoy’s purchase of bonds from the company in which his quasi-boss is a managing partner,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor who studies government ethics at Washington University in St. Louis, “because I wonder whether it affects Bloom’s ability to protect the public interest in his assessment of DeJoy’s performance as postmaster general.”

DeJoy’s personal spokesperson, Mark Corallo, referred questions to Adams of the Postal Service. He told The Post that DeJoy’s Brookfield bond purchases adhere to ethics regulations because the Postal Service does not do business with the firm.

Bloom in a statement released through Adams said his private equity division of the company sits “on the other side of an information wall” from other parts of the company that make investments, and that he had no knowledge of DeJoy’s purchases.

Brookfield’s private equity practice acquires and finances private corporations, among them a nuclear power infrastructure firm, Brazil’s largest private water company and an automotive battery manufacturer, according to its website. Brookfield has separate practices for public securities — which invest in publicly traded assets — real estate, infrastructure, renewable power and insurance solutions.

“I receive no benefit whatsoever when Brookfield bonds are bought or sold,” Bloom said in an email to The Post on Wednesday. “Brookfield has no business relationship with the USPS, therefore there is no basis for a conflict.”

 

This would be one thing if it was an isolated incident, but the guy has multiple ethics problems and conflicts of interest. It's far past time to pull the plug.

Let him go, Joe.

The Good Package, Con't

Blue Dog Dems in the House are about to destroy both the $1 trillion infrastructure bipartisan package and the $3.5 infrastructure reconciliation package, and unless Nancy Pelosi can get them in line fast, the Biden presidency is over.

Moderate House Democrats say they would sink a crucial fiscal blueprint outlining $3.5 trillion in social and environment spending unless a separate infrastructure bill is approved first, a new complication for the divided party’s drive to enact President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda.

The centrists’ threat directly defies House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announced plans, and she is showing no signs of backing down. It also completes a two-sided squeeze on the California Democrat, who has received similar pressure from her party’s progressives.

Democrats can only pass legislation in the narrowly divided House if they lose no more than three votes. Solid Republican opposition seems certain.

“We will not consider voting for a budget resolution until the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passes the House and is signed into law,” nine centrists wrote in a letter to Pelosi obtained Friday by The Associated Press.

Congressional passage of the budget resolution seems certain because without it, Senate Republicans would be able to use a filibuster, or procedural delays, to kill a follow-up $3.5 trillion measure bolstering social safety net and climate change programs. That measure, not expected until autumn, represents the heart of Biden’s domestic agenda.

Pelosi has repeatedly said the House will not vote on the $1 trillion package of road, rail, water and other infrastructure projects until the Senate sends the House the companion $3.5 trillion bill.

Pelosi has set that sequence because her party’s progressives have worried that if the infrastructure bill is approved first, moderates unhappy with the separate $3.5 trillion measure’s cost would feel free to vote against it, causing its defeat.

A senior House Democratic aide said the party doesn’t have enough votes to pass the infrastructure bill this month. The aide contrasted the nine moderates to the dozens of progressive Democrats who would vote against that measure unless it comes after the House gets the Senate’s $3.5 trillion social and environmental bill.

The aide was not authorized to publicly discuss the party’s internal dynamics and spoke on condition of anonymity.

“I am not freelancing. This is the consensus,” Pelosi told Democrats of her plans in a conference call this week, according to a person familiar with the private call who described it on condition of anonymity. The speaker added: ”“The votes in the House and Senate depend on us having both bills.”

Leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which includes nearly 100 House Democrats, say many of their members have indicated they would vote against the infrastructure bill until the expansive $3.5 trillion legislation has cleared the Senate.

 

So right now, Pelosi lacks the votes to pass either bill. If Democrats wreck this, I don't see how we keep either chamber of Congress in 2022.  This is a disaster brewing, and Nancy Pelosi now has to solve it somehow.

Or we're all toast, and we get nothing.

Now, Pelosi has been in worse situations, and shepherded the Affordable Care Act through, and a hell of a lot more. But we're going to need that magic one more time, it seems. I know she's capable of it, and I'm expecting a deal soon.

We'll see.

Af-Gone-istan, Con't

As Spencer Ackerman notes, the Taliban is sweeping through Afghanistan now and will almost certainly have taken Kabul by the time our 20th anniversary observance of 9/11 rolls around next month. The Afghanistan debacle is a disaster twenty years in the making, a war we lost in slow motion more than 7,000 days ago, spanning four presidents and most of my adult lifetime, and we did this to ourselves. 

 

But it is the people of Afghanistan left behind to fall into the abyss of Taliban rule that will pay the ultimate price for our hubris as a nation.

THE U.S.’ TROOP WITHDRAWAL FROM AFGHANISTAN is almost at hand, as is the Taliban’s reconquest.

The Taliban have made eye-opening advances in the country’s northern provinces, which they were never able to subdue before the U.S. invasion. They began the week by overrunning or capturing six capitals in five days. They ended it by taking Herat, Lashkar Gar, and the crucial southern city of Kandahar. Zalmay Khalilzad, the longtime U.S. envoy, flew at the start of the week to Doha, Qatar, where the Taliban maintain a diplomatic office, to see if anything remains of the peace process – and, reportedly, whether the insurgents would be kind enough not to sack the U.S. embassy and cause a combination Saigon/Benghazi moment. “He will press the Taliban to stop their military offensive and to negotiate a political settlement,” the U.S. State Department said in their Monday announcement, “which is the only path to stability and development in Afghanistan.” In essence, Khalilzad is asking the Taliban not to win the war.

Nothing is inevitable. But it’s important to be clear about what an outright Taliban victory will mean: revenge killings, refugees and repression, including gendered repression. I’ve spent no serious time in Afghanistan – two months total out of 20 years, and never did I see the country beyond its Kabul, Khost, Paktia and Parwan provinces – so I don’t want to front like I have an emotional connection to it. That said, I met people in Afghanistan, people who treated me warmly when they didn’t have to, and I’m thinking of them with some dread.

When the U.S. withdraws from a war, the ensuing suffering of innocent people becomes, to the “national security” community, an argument for re-escalation. Think of the Yazidis stranded atop Mount Sinjar and the role that story played in returning the U.S. to war in Iraq. (And buy Samuel Moyn’s forthcoming book Humane for an excellent critical exploration of such issues.) We tend to conceive of this kind of suffering not as the result of the war, but as an alternative to it. That has a certain intuitiveness: you cease fighting in a place and disaster emerges there.

But it’s a mistake to think of the disaster as a departure from the war. Remember that the Taliban offered terms in December 2001. Donald Rumsfeld rejected them. Everything that followed made the Taliban stronger. The idea that continuing the war for a twenty-first year will make the Taliban weaker could only occur to an American Exceptionalism junkie in withdrawal. It’s easier to wish-cast about glorious wars that might have been than to cope with the fact that America’s works were an avoidable disaster that built nothing enduring except human suffering. It is far easier to consider the bloodletting that follows the U.S. presence to be merely the result of its absence. But to take that position is to wash the blood from American hands that waged the war, all the while claiming that the retreat is the contemptible hand-washing.

One of the consequences of waging Forever Wars is that they obscure what it means to lose a war. This is what it means: the Enemy wins. The Enemy’s victory will likely be terrible. Among the reasons it is so terrible is that the United States of America is an accessory to it.

Look at who the United States tries to save and who it doesn’t. The Biden administration is engaged in a valiant effort – one that did not happen during the brief interregnum between Iraq Wars – to resettle Afghans who worked for the U.S. military. It is a baseline obligation and a matter of honor.

It is also a moral floor that functions as a moral ceiling: The U.S. will save only those who lent it a service. It is not throwing open the doors to refugees who didn’t work for the United States. Those refugees are bound for, among other places, Iran, whose government, according to the United Nations refugee agency, “has consistently welcomed Afghans fleeing protracted conflict and violence for over 40 years.” The United States, which has fueled that protracted violence and conflict for over 40 years – first through the CIA-Saudi-Pakistani anti-Soviet coalition; then for the past 20 years’ war – cannot say the same.

 

What is coming is slaughter, butchery, and horror that has been two decades in the making. In every way we made this situation worse, and we've been making it worse really through seven presidents and four decades, and nearly my entire lifetime since 1979.

 

The butcher's bill we're going to see over the weeks and months ahead will be the fault of the Taliban, yes. But they will have 335 million American accessories.

Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The initial Census 2020 figures are in, and they show that for the first time in our history, the percentage of white Americans as a whole of the American population has fallen.

The United States experienced unprecedented multiracial population growth and a decline in the white population for the first time in the nation’s history, according to U.S. Census officials who released data Thursday, revealing the most sweeping picture of America’s racial and ethnic makeup in a decade.

“These changes reveal that the US population is much more multiracial, and more racially and ethnically diverse, than what we measured in the past,” said Nicholas Jones, the director of race, ethnicity, research and outreach for the Census Bureau's Population Division.

The white, non-Hispanic population, without another race, decreased by 8.6% since 2010, Jones said during a Census bureau press briefing. He cautioned that some of the changes can be attributed to improvements to the survey. The White, non-Hispanic population is still the largest racial group in the U.S.

The release bolstered expert predictions and estimates in past years that showed continued expansion of the Hispanic, Black and Asian American populations and growing numbers of multiracial residents – only a fraction in past surveys.

“​​The diversity that we're seeing in this country is going to be much more pronounced,” said William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program.

 

We already had fiends like Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs scream about "The Great Replacement Theory" before, that white America was going to "vanish" into the "quagmire" of the multiracial and multicultural liberal future.  After this? 

The white supremacist backlash will be deadly and brutal in America. As Hussein Ibish at The Atlantic reminds us, when white supremacists are openly fantasizing about butchering their political enemies you should probably pay attention.

 

Decades of living in, studying, and writing about the Middle East have taught me that whenever a political faction becomes obsessed with violent rhetoric and fantasies, brutal acts aren’t far behind. And while there’s always been a strain of militancy on the American right and left fringes, there is something unmistakably new, and profoundly alarming, about the casual, florid, and sadistic rhetoric that is metastasizing from the Republican fringe into the party’s mainstream.

For sheer pornographic sadism, it’s tough to beat Jesse Kelly’s encomium to murder and torture published by the right-wing website The Federalist. Kelly doesn’t make any real arguments, other than declaring liberals terrible authoritarians. Instead, in language that the Islamic State would envy, he describes the visceral, almost orgasmic, joy of scalping a dying enemy:

Close your eyes and imagine holding someone’s scalp in your hands. I don’t mean cradling his skull as you thousand-yard-stare at his lifeless face. I mean a real scalp, Indian-style, of some enemy you just killed on the battlefield; somebody you hated and who hated you back.

You killed him, won the day, carved off the top of his skull, and now you’re standing over him victorious on the now-quiet field of battle, with a quiet breeze blowing through your hair. Your adrenaline is still pumping with that primal feeling of victory and the elation of having survived when others didn’t.

Kelly hastens to add that he is discussing “not a real scalping, but a metaphorical one.” But he concludes the essay by warning readers that when they are stuck in a “liberal utopian nightmare,” they will want to know that before the leftists prevailed, they “rode out onto the plains and made them feel pain.”

Again, the unmistakable lesson from the modern Middle East is: When people keep saying they’re fantasizing about how great it would be, and feel, to kill you, believe them.

 

We've already seen some violence. We're going to see a lot more in the months ahead.

 

Retribution Execution, Con't

I called this seven months ago when it happened, but it was dead obvious in January that Donald Trump had then US Attorney for Northern Georgia, Byung J. Pak, fired for not investigating Trump's false election fraud claims in Atlanta/Fulton County so that Trump could then say the Georgia election was under federal investigation.

Now we learn that Pak has testified that's exactly what happened.

 

Byung J. Pak, a former U.S. attorney in Atlanta, told congressional investigators on Wednesday that his abrupt resignation in January had been prompted by Justice Department officials’ warning that President Donald J. Trump intended to fire him for refusing to say that widespread voter fraud had been found in Georgia, according to a person familiar with his testimony.

Mr. Pak, who provided more than three hours of closed-door testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, stepped down with no notice on Jan. 4, saying that he had done his best “to be thoughtful and consistent, and to provide justice for my fellow citizens in a fair, effective and efficient manner.”

While he did not discuss Mr. Trump’s role in his decision to resign at the time, he told the Senate panel that the president had been dismayed that Mr. Pak had investigated allegations of voter fraud in Fulton County, Ga., and not found evidence to support them, according to the person familiar with the statements.

Mr. Pak testified that top department officials had made clear that Mr. Trump intended to fire him over his refusal to say that the results in Georgia had been undermined by voter fraud, the person said. Resigning would pre-empt a public dismissal.

He also described work done by state officials and the F.B.I. to vet Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud, and said they had not found evidence to support those allegations.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is examining Mr. Pak’s departure as part of its broader investigation into the final weeks of the Trump administration and the White House’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to falsely assert that the election was corrupt. The Justice Department’s inspector general is also looking at Mr. Pak’s resignation.

During a phone call with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia on Jan. 2, two days before Mr. Pak resigned, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Raffensperger to find enough votes to reverse the state’s presidential election results and described fraud allegations that Mr. Raffensperger said were not supported by facts, according to leaked audio of the call.

Mr. Pak had refused to support similar election fraud claims because of the lack of evidence, according to two people familiar with his investigation. “You have your never-Trumper U.S. attorney there,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Raffensperger during their phone call.

Audio of that call was leaked to The Washington Post on Sunday, Jan. 3, just hours before Mr. Trump met with top Justice Department officials to discuss the possibility of replacing the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, with Jeffrey Clark, a department leader who was willing to falsely tell Georgia officials that fraud might have affected the election outcome.

 

Pak resigned because Trump was going to fire him for not lying about election fraud.  He resigned because Trump ordered him to say the election was fraudulent. It was not. He quit rather than doing so, two days before the January 6th insurrection.

Trump has to pay for his crimes, folks.

Or we're done.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

Mississippi's hospital system is headed towards collapse, possibly early as next week, if COVID Delta variant hospitalization numbers don't change. Federal disaster officials are already saying they'll need to respond, and Mississippi will only be the first of many states where the Biden administration will need to intervene to save lives because Republican state governors have all failed.

With COVID-19 patients overflowing at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, including in its pediatric center, hospital leaders are warning that the medical system statewide could be on the verge of failing without drastic intervention. Two days ago, Mississippi health officials announced that zero intensive-care beds remained available in hospitals statewide.

“Since the pandemic began, I think the thing that hospitals have feared the most is total failure of the hospital system. And if we track back a week or so when we look at the case positivity rate, the rate of new cases, the rate of hospitalizations—If we continue that trajectory within the next five to seven to 10 days, I think we’re going to see failure of the hospital system in Mississippi,” UMMC Associate Vice Chancellor for Clinical Affairs Dr. Alan Jones said during an afternoon press conference.

“Hospitals are full from Memphis to Natchez to Gulfport. Hospitals are full.”

The dire pronouncement came as representatives from the federal government arrived in Jackson to assist with a field hospital in the medical center’s parking garage, news that Mississippi Free Press reporter broke early today. With UMMC short on staff and lacking in ICU care capacity, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is sending physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists and pharmacists to help. Mississippi has about 2,000 fewer nurses working than eight months ago, and UMMC officials said their teams that remain “are stretched very thin.”

“At the end of the day, we’re not only faced with not being able to hire enough staff because so many nurses have left the state, but today we have 70 hospital employees and another 20 clinic employees that are out on quarantine or have COVID,” Jones said during today’s press conference.

UMMC’s pediatric hospital, Children’s of Mississippi, is also full, Jones said today. In late July, UMMC officials said they did not expect the pediatric hospital to fill up, but a surge in cases among children is happening just as children return to school—in many cases with no mask mandates and fewer precautions than last fall. Children’s of Mississippi currently has 26 pediatric COVID-19 patients, Jones said, with six in ICU care and four on ventilators.

Gov. Tate Reeves has refused to mandate masks in schools, saying late last month that federal guidance to do so was “foolish and harmful.” The Mississippi State Department of Health reported that almost 1,000 schoolchildren tested positive for COVID-19 last week alone.

The garage basement field hospital will be able to hold a maximum of 50 patients, but that capacity could diminish depending on the severity of patients’ illness, UMMC officials said. But UMMC Vice Chancellor Dr. LouAnn Woodward said it was only part of the solution. UMMC officials said the field hospital could be ready as soon as Friday.

 

We've already seen Florida's Ron DeSantis beg for federal help, which was approved with lightning speed. But several other southern red states are in worse shape than Florida and don't have the state's resources, states like Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri and Arkansas, that are all getting crushed by COVID delta. 

It will take video of thousands dying in hospital parking lots before any of these monsters lift a finger, and by then it will be too late. COVID is going parabolic in these areas, worse than it was over the winter in cases and hospitalizations, and the deaths, well, the deaths will catch up very, very soon.

Last Call For The Vax Of Life, Con't

Here in Kentucky, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear has ordered a school mask mandate and Republicans are vowing to overturn it as the court fight over powers stripped from the Governor's office drags on, but the Lexington Herald-Leader has consigned Beshear to the dustbin of history already saying that he went down doing the right thing.

 

For thousands of Kentucky children, the first day of school started with excitement, trepidation . . . and masks.

Yes, another start to school amid a flaring pandemic, only this time caused by many grown-ups’ willful disregard of the science. It’s not hard — if people won’t get vaccinated against COVID-19, and many Kentuckians won’t, then we must wear masks indoors.

Gov. Andy Beshear may have just signed away his chance to win re-election, but he did the right thing. The Delta variant is making more people and more children sick. Voluntary masking, as adopted by roughly two-thirds of Kentucky school districts, will not work. Universal masking, as Kentucky did last spring for a successful end to the school year, will.

His decision was bolstered by a new study out of North Carolina of 100 school districts — and nearly 1 million students —by two pediatric specialists at Duke University.

“Although vaccination is the best way to prevent Covid-19, universal masking is a close second, and with masking in place, in-school learning is safe and more effective than remote instruction, regardless of community rates of infection,” the authors wrote.

Children under 12 cannot be vaccinated yet. So we have to find a way to protect them, and masks are the best way. To Kentucky adults who are not vaccinated and protest masks: You can’t have it both ways. Our children must bear the brunt of our selfishness, and masks are a relatively painless way to do that. The places where masks will not be required? Places that have high vaccination rates, where hospitals are not filling back up with COVID patients.

Yes, our children are anxious. But not because of masks. Because they are living in a pandemic that has been far too deadly, and all they can see and hear are adults screaming about freedom rather than doing all they can to stop the disease.

We know this. We did it last year. Fayette County did a tremendous job of keeping kids safe, healthy and learning, which is, in the end, the real goal.

That COVID-19 has become so politicized, and thus continues its reign is a huge disappointment and frustration.

 

Amen to that.

Honestly, I expect Beshear to lose by double digits in 2023, almost certainly replaced by GOP AG Daniel Cameron. Beshear will be vilified and hated and will probably lose his court battles, but hopefully by then COVID delta will be under control here.  The fatalism I'm seeing here is astounding: "We're all going to get COVID, the faster you accept that the faster this will be over" from the state's GOP and Rand Paul and Thomas Massie.

We can do better, but Republicans are stopping us.

Oh, and Rand Paul should be ejected from the Senate.

 

Sen. Rand Paul revealed Wednesday that his wife bought stock in Gilead Sciences — which makes an antiviral drug used to treat covid-19 — on Feb. 26, 2020, before the threat from the coronavirus was fully understood by the public and before it was classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization.

The disclosure, in a filing with the Senate, came 16 months after the 45-day reporting deadline set forth in the Stock Act, which is designed to combat insider trading.

Experts in corporate and securities law said the investment, and especially the delayed reporting of it, undermined trust in government and raised questions about whether the Kentucky Republican’s family had sought to profit from nonpublic information about the looming health emergency and plans by the U.S. government to combat it. Several senators sold large amounts of stocks in January or February of last year, prompting a handful of insider-trading probes. Most of those investigations concluded in the spring of 2020, according to notifications from the Justice Department to lawmakers under scrutiny.

“The senator ought to have an explanation for the trade and, more importantly, why it took him almost a year and a half to discover it from his wife,” said James D. Cox, a professor of law at Duke University.

Kelsey Cooper, a spokeswoman for Paul, said the senator completed a reporting form for his wife’s investment last year but learned only recently, while preparing an annual disclosure, that the form had not been transmitted. He sought guidance from the Senate Ethics Committee, she said, and filed the supplemental report along with an annual disclosure Wednesday.

She also said Paul’s wife, Kelley, an author and former communications consultant, lost money on the investment, which she made with her own earnings. The purchase was of between $1,000 and $15,000 of stock in Gilead, which makes the antiviral drug known as remdesivir.

The drug was initially invented as a hepatitis C drug a decade ago and tested for possible use against other infectious diseases, such as Ebola. Remdesivir gained emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration in May of last year and was administered to then-President Donald Trump when he was sick with covid-19 in October, before it gained full approval. Results of a WHO-sponsored study released later that month raised doubts about the drug’s effectiveness, prompting the agency to reverse itself and recommend against its use as a treatment for covid-19. The drug brought in $2.8 billion for Gilead last year.

Remdesivir was backed on Feb. 24, 2020 — two days before Kelley Paul’s purchase — by a WHO assistant director general, who described it as the only known drug that “may have real efficacy” in treating the novel virus.

The existence of public information causing Gilead’s stock to rise, said Joshua Mitts, an expert in securities law at Columbia University, doesn’t rule out the possibility that the senator gained additional knowledge in private. Paul is a member of the Senate health committee, which in January hosted Trump administration officials for a briefing on the coronavirus.

“Not everything about the product was necessarily clear from existing announcements,” Mitts said. “There could have been information about interest that certain individuals within administration may have had in the product, or that hospitals here in the U.S. were already loading up.”

Cooper said the senator attended no briefings on covid-19. Eight days after his wife invested in the company behind the antiviral drug thought to be effective against covid-19, Paul cast the lone vote in the Senate against $8.3 billion in emergency spending to combat the emerging outbreak.

 

And people will die as a result in Kentucky and across the country.

The Good Package, Con't

Senate Democrats have passed The $3.5 trillion Good Package™ super infrastructure plan on top of the Biden Infrastructure Bill in the last 24 hours, but now comes the hard work of actually filling in the numbers, and arriving at something that both moderates like Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin can accept that doesn't get sunk by AOC and The Squad in the House may already be an impossibility.

The blueprint now heads to the House, where lawmakers will return early from a scheduled summer recess the week of Aug. 23 to take it up. But moderate Democrats are also agitating for a stand-alone vote on the bipartisan infrastructure package, which could complicate efforts to swiftly pass the measure. Progressives have said they will not vote on the infrastructure bill until the House approves the budget package.

“Democrats have labored for months to reach this point, and there are many labors to come,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader. “But I can say with absolute certainty that it will be worth doing.”

The budget resolution will ultimately allow Democrats to use the fast-track budget reconciliation process to shield the legislation from a Republican filibuster. It will pave the way to expand Medicare to include dental, health and vision benefits; fund a host of climate change programs; provide free prekindergarten and community college; and levy higher taxes on wealthy businesses and corporations.

But months of arduous work remain. That includes not only turning the outline into fleshed-out legislation, but also reconciling the competing demands of liberal and centrist Democrats.

Moderates have begun to express reservations about the size and scope of the legislation. At least one Senate Democrat, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, has said she will not support a final $3.5 trillion price tag, despite voting to advance a budget resolution of that scope, and some House moderates have expressed similar concerns.

But many liberals in both chambers had sought even more spending, and they conditioned their support for the infrastructure deal, which they believe Democrats scaled back too much to secure Republican votes, on passage of the budget blueprint.

Senate Republicans sought to exploit some of those divisions through the so-called vote-a-rama, where an unlimited number of amendments could be offered by both parties. This was the third vote-a-rama this year, after Democrats prevailed through two identical exercises to push their $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package through Congress.

The marathon of nearly four dozen votes also gave Republicans a platform to hammer Democrats for trying to advance a package of this magnitude entirely without their input, as well as distinguish the process from the public works plan many of them had supported hours earlier.

“You’re spending money like drunken sailors,” declared Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the top Republican on the Budget Committee. “You’re putting in motion, I think, the demise of America as we know it. You’re putting in motion a government that nobody’s grandchild can ever afford to pay.”

The proposed changes, many of which were shot down along party lines, were nonbinding and intended more to burnish a political case against the most vulnerable Democratic senators facing re-election in 2022 than to become law. Some Republicans said the brunt of their proposals would wait until the subsequent legislation was finished, when changes could actually be adopted.

“The next vote-a-rama is the one that really matters, because then you’re firing with live ammo,” said Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania. “So I’m much more interested in that one than this one.” 

 

Remember, even if the bill passes the House in a final compromise form and heads back to the Senate, all it will take to sink the bill is one Democrat and all 50 Republicans adding an amendment that wipes out the entire thing. 

And as always, the clock is ticking.

The Best Little Jailhouse In Texas

After wrangling in the courts for a few weeks, Texas Republicans have (as I predicted) ordered the arrest of all Texas House Democrats who left the state to stop a quorum for the state's special legislative session to gut voting rights, and the state's GOP says they will bring in these "fugitives from justice" by any means necessary.

 

Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan (R) escalated a showdown with Democratic lawmakers who broke quorum for the third time over voting rights, signing arrest warrants Tuesday that a spokesman said would be delivered "for service" Wednesday morning.

The move followed approval of a House motion to send for absent members, which enabled Phelan to issue the warrants. The Texas Supreme Court on Tuesday also stayed a trial court judge’s ruling that would have protected absent Democrats from arrest.

Phelan spokesman Enrique Marquez said warrants were signed for 52 Democrats who failed to return during the fourth day of the House’s second special session, leaving the chamber eight members short of a quorum. In the first special session, Phelan signed a warrant for only one member — Rep. Phil Cortez (D) — who fled to Washington with other Democrats, returned to Austin where he checked in on the floor, then left again for D.C.

While lawmakers would not be jailed if arrested, they may be brought into the Capitol by law enforcement once the warrants are delivered to the House sergeant-at-arms to be served.

It is unclear exactly how many House Democrats have returned to Texas since 57 fled to Washington in mid-July in an exodus that again blocked passage of new voting restrictions. In Washington, the Democrats advocated for federal voting rights protections in the U.S. Senate.

In anticipation of a possible Senate vote on a narrower elections-and-ethics bill, 26 of the Texas Democrats have vowed to remain in Washington “for as long as Congress is working and making progress” on the issue of voting rights, keeping themselves outside the reach of Texas law enforcement.

State Rep. Celia Israel (D) returned to her home in Austin but not to the House floor. She said Tuesday night that she did not fear being arrested — but acknowledged that the state chamber was in uncharted waters.

“I think they’re bluffing. Do they really want to arrest a woman of color?” Israel said in a phone interview. “They’re just thumping their chests.”

Asked whether she would be on the House floor Wednesday morning, Israel responded, “Hell no.” She said a legal team was working on the House Democrats’ case, with “punching and counterpunching happening by the hour.”

In a session that can last up to 30 days, Israel said, “every day that we don’t have to deal with these far-right policies is a good day.”

Quorum has been broken previously, but never in Texas have lawmakers had to be rounded up and taken to the House or Senate chambers by law enforcement, Israel said.

“We’ve never been down this road before,” she said.

 

Meanwhile, in the Texas Senate, a measure there is advancing to end the tactic Democrats used to break a quorum with a new state constitutional amendment.

Republicans in the Texas House of Representatives advanced a measure on Tuesday that would allow the legislature to operate without having two-thirds of the members present after House Democrats twice left the state to prevent the passage of an elections reform bill.

The Texas state constitution requires that two-thirds of the House and Senate be present in order for the legislature to operate, which allowed Democrats — 57 out of 150 total House members — to block legislation from passing while they traveled to D.C. to advocate for federal voting legislation.

As the Austin American-Statesman reports, a Texas Senate committee approved a joint resolution that would ask voters to amend the state's constitution so that a simple majority could establish a quorum in the House and Senate.

"Our state cannot allow a minority of lawmakers to wield such a disproportionate power so as to render the Texas Legislature incapable of responding to our state's needs," state Sen. Brian Birdwell (R) said during a hearing on the resolution on Monday, adding that this would prevent "a minority from crippling or disabling the Legislature."

Birdwell noted that Texas is one of only four states that require a supermajority in order to establish a quorum.

The bill must receive the support of at least two-thirds of the House and Senate before it can be put up for voter approval, the Statesman notes. This means three Democrats in the House and 18 in the Senate would need to join with all of their Republican colleagues to support it.

 

I'm betting that arresting Democrats will be a way to try to "gently convince" enough Democrats to back the quorum measure.

 

Of course, this is what Republicans in power do with power: they abuse it.

Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Republicans running for office in 2022 continue to shout the quiet part out loud now when it comes to white supremacists boilerplate bigotry, and they're absolutely counting on it getting them votes and campaign millions from angry white racists.

 

Billionaire tech mogul Peter Thiel’s favored candidate for an Arizona Senate seat went on a recent screed against “anti-white racism,” accusing liberal teachers of turning America’s students into self-hating automatons.

Blake Masters, a 34-year-old venture capitalist and protege of the PayPal founder, recently jumped into the race to face Democratic Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly. Weeks before he officially launched his campaign, he delivered a speech that was harshly critical of Critical Race Theory, which he claimed has permeated America’s classrooms.

“Too much of schooling in America has become a machine to uproot common sense and to replace it with something much more sinister. You’ve heard about Critical Race Theory,” he said. “All it does is teach kids to identify in racial terms. Right? You are good or bad, depending on what you look like. At this point it is straight up anti-white racism. I don’t think we’re allowed to say that. But let’s call it what it is. It is toxic, and it does not belong in our schools.”

“We’ve got to take back the schools and stop the indoctrination,” Masters continued.

The remarks, first reported by The Informant, were made just weeks before Masters officially announced his Senate bid at a May 25 rally in Phoenix. That event, billed as “America’s Comeback Tour,” was hosted by the right-wing group Freedomworks and headlined by right-wing British politician Nigel Farage.

The comments fall in a larger pattern of Republican candidates and operatives seeking to make the fight they’ve invented over Critical Race Theory, a once-obscure legal theory that America’s institutions are indelibly influenced by racism, into a cause célèbre arguing that America’s children are being brainwashed. This has cropped up in races big and small across the country.

And they’re not surprising for a candidate backed by Thiel, who as Buzzfeed News reported has extensive ties with the racist fringe of the GOP.

Masters is running to face Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, and is currently in a crowded primary that includes Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich. And his anti-CRT attack isn’t just a one-off—he warned of “schools that teach our kids to hate our country” in his campaign launch video.

Nearly all of Masters’ career has come under the tutelage of Thiel, the founder of PayPal who was one of the tech tech billionaires to loudly back President Trump. Masters took a Stanford Law class Thiel taught in 2012, and began posting detailed notes of Thiel’s anti-globalization lectures online. Thiel asked him to turn them into a book, and later hired Masters as president of the Thiel Foundation, and later, as COO of Thiel Capital.

These chowderheads want a war, a bloody, deadly, shooting war where they get to live out their dreams of killing those people with righteous impunity, a war they believe will render anyone who isn't white in America a powerless non-citizen.

 

But they'll settle for getting that outcome without having to fire a shot if they can get it.

Cuomo's #MeToo Moment, Con't

The last person in the entire state of New York to realize that Andrew Cuomo had to go just figured it out in real time on national television.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday he would be resigning, effective in 14 days. His resignation comes one week after an investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James that found that he sexually harassed 11 women, including staffers and women who did not work for his administration.

"The best way I can help now is to step aside," Cuomo said at a new briefing.

Shortly before his resignation, his attorney, Rita Glavin, appeared to be outlining his defense. "This is about the veracity and credibility of a report that is being used to impeach and take down an elected official," Glavin said.

The New York Assembly Judiciary Committee said Monday that it is wrapping up its impeachment inquiry into Cuomo. He has until Friday to submit any evidence.

Brittany Commisso, one of the women who is referenced in Attorney General Letitia James' investigation, told "CBS This Morning" and the Albany Times Union that she believes Cuomo knows he broke the law and he needs to be "held accountable."

"There's a difference between being an affectionate and warm person. Sexual harassment is completely different," she said. "The governor knows that what he did to me and what he did to these 10 other women, whether it be a comment or an actual physical contact, was sexual harassment. He broke the laws that he himself created."

One of Cuomo's top advisers, Melissa DeRosa, resigned Sunday night.

 

There were rumors earlier this week that Cuomo wanted to finish out his term and would strike a deal to not run for a fourth term next year. The response, what changed, is the fact the NY General Assembly obviously came back and said that they had to votes to impeach and remove him from office.

 

Democratic Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul will be New York's first woman governor on the 24th. 

I still hope Cuomo gets the book thrown at him by Tish James. There's still a lot that needs to happen here, and it ends with Cuomo in prison.

[UPDATE]: The reason behind the paradigm shift from Cuomo's deal-seeking 24 hours ago to resignation today is almost certainly the revelations in this Ronan Farrow New Yorker piece.

In April, 2014, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo placed a call to the White House and reached Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama. Cuomo was, as one official put it, “ranting and raving.” He had announced that he was shuttering the Moreland Commission, a group that he had convened less than a year earlier to root out corruption in New York politics. After Cuomo ended the group’s inquiries, Preet Bharara, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, issued letters instructing commissioners to preserve documents and had investigators from his office interview key witnesses. On the phone with Jarrett, Cuomo railed against Bharara. “This guy’s out of control,” a member of the White House legal team briefed on the call that day recalled Cuomo telling Jarrett. “He’s your guy.”

Jarrett ended the conversation after only a few minutes. Any effort by the White House to influence investigations by a federal prosecutor could constitute criminal obstruction of justice. “He did, in fact, call me and raise concerns about the commission,” Jarrett told me. “As soon as he started talking, and I figured out what he was talking about, I shut down the conversation.” Although Cuomo fumed about Bharara’s efforts, he did not make any specific request before Jarrett ended the call. Nevertheless, Jarrett was alarmed and immediately walked to the office of the White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, to report the conversation. Ruemmler agreed that the call was improper, and told Jarrett that she had acted correctly in ending the conversation without responding to Cuomo’s complaints. “I thought it was highly inappropriate,” the member of the White House’s legal team told me. “It was a stupid call for him to make.” Ruemmler reported the incident to the Deputy Attorney General, James M. Cole, who also criticized the call. “He shouldn’t have been doing that. He’s trying to exert political pressure on basically a prosecution or an investigation,” Cole told me. “So Cuomo trying to use whatever muscle he had with the White House to do it was a nonstarter and probably improper.”

Cuomo’s outreach to the White House may have opened him up to sanction for violating state ethics rules and could be relevant in an ongoing impeachment inquiry by the New York State Assembly. “It’s highly inappropriate and potentially illegal,” Jennifer Rodgers, a former prosecutor in Bharara’s office and an adjunct clinical professor at N.Y.U. Law School, told me. Jessica Levinson, the director of Loyola Law School’s Public Service Institute, added, “If he, in fact, called a U.S. Attorney’s bosses and implied, ‘Stop this guy from looking into me,’ that could easily amount to an impeachable offense.” (Shortly after publication time, Cuomo announced that he would resign as governor of New York.)

White House officials at the time believed that prosecutors might want to interview Jarrett and assess whether the call had risen to the level of illegality. Instead, the Department of Justice notified Bharara. “Everybody basically just said we’re not going to do anything—we’re not going to stop Preet,” Cole said. “The investigation is the investigation, and I don’t care if Andrew Cuomo calls us or not.” Bharara’s office chose not to pursue charges, but he recalled being alarmed. “Andrew Cuomo has no qualms, while he’s under investigation by the sitting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, trying to call the White House to call me off,” Bharara told me. “Trump did that. That’s an extraordinary thing, from my perspective.”

Elkan Abramowitz, an attorney for Cuomo, said that Bharara’s office had asked Cuomo whether he’d had contact with the White House about Bharara and that Cuomo acknowledged that he had, without providing specifics. Abramowitz added, “If Bharara thought this was obstruction of justice, he would have said so at the time.” A spokesperson for Cuomo declined to answer follow-up questions, saying only, of the allegations that Cuomo interfered with the Moreland Commission, “This threadbare narrative has been litigated and re-litigated to death and no wrongdoing was found.”

Cuomo’s vindictiveness, his attacks on officials who defy him, and his attempts to undermine inquiries about him are recurring themes in a report released last week by the New York attorney general, Letitia James. The report documents both allegations from women who say that Cuomo harassed them and claims that Cuomo and his inner circle threatened and smeared employees and political enemies. It is replete with accounts of state employees who say that they feared they would lose their jobs if they attempted to report misconduct by the Governor or his allies. It concludes that Cuomo and his team’s disclosure of confidential files related to one of his accusers, Lindsey Boylan, constituted illegal retaliation. It notes that Cuomo’s staff pressed former employees to call and secretly record women who had made allegations, apparently to collect information to use against them. When the recordings did not serve that end, Cuomo’s staff destroyed them—an act that legal experts said could also figure in ongoing inquiries. As the attorney general’s investigators worked on the report, Cuomo and his allies worked to discredit its authors; his aide Rich Azzopardi, who was instrumental in the disclosure of Boylan’s files, publicly suggested that James, the attorney general, had designs on Cuomo’s job. “There were attempts to undermine and to politicize this investigation, and there were attacks on me as well as members of the team, which I find offensive,” James said last week, as she announced the results of the probe.

 

So he wasn't going to be impeached just on sexual harassment charges, but ethics charges as well, and that was ballgame in the end.

The Buckeye Battle Royale

Everybody's after Ohio GOP Gov. Mike DeWine's job in 2022 as he faces tough challengers from both parties, the latest of which is Cincy Mayor John Cranley.

 

Two-term Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley joined the race for Ohio governor on Tuesday, pledging to modernize Ohio’s infrastructure and economy with proceeds from legalizing marijuana and to extract money from energy companies for homeowner rebates that will help lift family budgets.

With the launch of his campaign Tuesday, Cranley joins his friend, Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley, in the Democratic field. She announced her bid April 19. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine is expected to run for a second term, a campaign that will begin with a contested primary.

Cranley, 47, had been exploring a bid for the Democratic nomination for months and had raised more than $1.3 million for the effort as of July. Whaley reported raising more than $1.6 million.

First elected mayor in 2013, Cranley is term-limited from running again this year. He points to his record as chief executive of a major city that’s growing while others languish to show his capability to lead the state.

“Ohio needs a comeback and deserves a governor who has led a comeback,” Cranley told The Associated Press in an interview. “It’s not going to be easy to take a state like Ohio, which like so many in the Midwest has been in decline, and to have it come back again, but that’s what we’re going to do.”

He said the GOP-controlled state Legislature has been tainted by corruption and puts the interests of big corporations over workers. He said he will make “jobs, jobs, and more jobs” his priority.

Cranley’s economic plan calls for creating 30,000 new $60,000-a-year jobs annually in such areas as advanced manufacturing and renewable energy, and to improve Ohio roads, water systems and broadband networks.

He proposes using tax revenue from legalizing recreational marijuana, now legal in neighboring Michigan and 17 other states, to pay for his programs. He also would reconfigure Ohio’s privatized job creation office, JobsOhio. He also proposes offering Ohio homeowners $500 dividends paid for from energy company profits.

As mayor, Cranley, who twice lost congressional races against Republican U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot of Cincinnati, aggressively pursued a new soccer stadium project that helped the city land a Major League Soccer franchise and helped Cincinnati police acquire a cutting-edge ShotSpotter gunshot detection system.

His 2018 feud with a city manager who accused Cranley of overstepping his authority to undermine the city manager’s role drew criticism from some fellow Democrats. The city manager eventually resigned with a severance agreement.

Although Cranley, a Roman Catholic, personally opposes abortion, he doesn’t think government should pass restrictions on the procedure that spark expensive, often unsuccessful, legal battles because “it’s just not a good use of scarce resources.”

“I’m pro-choice. I’ve struggled as a matter of faith,” said Cranley, who supports same-sex marriage. As governor, Cranley said he would veto any incursions on the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

While both Cranley and Whaley have managed to keep their noses clean in their respective city's federal bribery scandals on City Council, I just don't see how either one gets more than 40% of the vote in Ohio in 2022.

Of course, I'm expecting DeWine to be replaced by somebody far worse. Former GOP Rep. Jim Renacci has already stepped in on the Republican side and I can bet you dollars to doughnuts that more are coming over the next 12 months.

Stay tuned.