Same as it ever was …
h/t to @alisonmartino of Vintage Los Angeles
"what digby sez..."
Month: November 2021
Trying to keep objective.
But looking at the numbers around boosters, my main concern is that the results are being absurdly undersold.Most people are sick of COVID, sick of being told what to do, and are thinking of boosters are a nice-to-have.
They are transformative.
The control trials, and the real-world data agree. Boosters don’t just restore your protection against COVID. They make it *better* than it ever was with two doses.
Result: we boost less than half of 80+s in the UK, and the observations nearly break my graph.
But will this boosted protection – however impressive – also wane eventually?
We don’t have much data yet. But the first person to be boosted now 8+ months clear. And his antibody results are still topping out higher than the test can register.
European countries have plenty of doses; the main obstacle to a safe, healthy, open winter seems to be … a comms issue.
I’ve not heard politicians or media communicating anywhere near how well boosters work.
Please get on with it. All visuals open for use if helpful.
Originally tweeted by Paul Mainwood (@PaulMainwood) on November 18, 2021.
The 2021 recovery is going out with a bang. Could someone please alert the media?
Economists were flooded with new data on Wednesday, most of it good news for the US. Weekly filings for unemployment benefits slid to the lowest level since 1969. Inflation surged higher, but not as high as economists expected. Americans’ spending throughout October was stronger than forecasted.
Taken together, the reports signal the recovery is charging forward faster than expected. It was enough for Wall Street to lift their forecasts for fourth-quarter growth. Morgan Stanley economists boosted their estimate for current-quarter growth to 8.7% from 3% on Wednesday, citing “the wealth of data” that showed fresh strength throughout the economy.
Economists at JPMorgan also lifted their hopes for recovery through the end of the year. The bank raised its estimate to 7% from 5% on Wednesday, similarly basing the bullish shift on the Wednesday data dump. The narrowing of the US trade deficit — how much more the country imports than it exports — was a “notable” surprise and suggests trade won’t be a huge drag on GDP, the team led by Michael Feroli said.
Other reports suggest the supply crisis that’s weighed on the recovery and fueled higher inflation is finally starting to fade, the bank added.
“The overall improvement in the data may be the first fruit of the modest easing in supply chain issues evident in some of the survey data,” JPMorgan said.
It’s not just Wall Street calling for a stellar fourth quarter. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow tool, which uses data releases to adjust its estimate for current-quarter growth, rose to 8.6% on Wednesday from 8.2%.
Everyone, it seems, thinks the recovery is bouncing back.
From third-quarter slump to fourth-quarter surge
The forecasts all sit significantly higher than the 2.1% growth seen through the third quarter. The previous three-month period saw the Delta wave slow hiring and drag on economic activity. The growth rate was the slowest of the pandemic recovery, and the lingering supply-chain crisis raised fears that the economic boom officially ended in the summer.
Wednesday data and bank reactions suggest a new boom started in October. Last month saw the Delta wave fade and retail sales rip to record highs. If the rosiest forecasts come to fruition, fourth-quarter growth will be the strongest since the third quarter of 2020, which itself marked the fastest growth since at least 1947.
The economic boom would also give Democrats a much-needed win in the economics department. President Joe Biden’s approval rating has taken a beating through the fall as Americans blame his administration for soaring prices and weakened economic growth. Consumer sentiment fell to decade lows in November due to “a combination of rapidly escalating inflation combined with the absence of federal policies that would effectively redress the inflationary damage,” Richard Curtin, chief economist at the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers said. Extraordinary fourth-quarter growth would give the party something to celebrate, particularly as midterm elections approach.
The kiljoys who wrote this point out that it probably won’t help Democrats but note that even if the Democrats lose everything it’s good for the country. That’s not exactly true. The Republicans are batshit crazy and they are the ones who inevitably preside over economic hell until the Dems pick up the pieces.
But there’s no reason to despair today. Things are picking up. If only people knew it. So spread the word to your friends and relatives today!
Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
As bleak as the Ahmaud Arbery murder was, and as much as the guilty verdicts for his murderers was an exhale-worthy relief, there are a few lights to be thankful for on this Thanksgiving. James Fallows recounts an effort in Pensacola to come to grips with darkness in the city’s past.
Specifically, a celebrated business, political, and cultural figure of the last century, TT Wentworth, recently was proven to be a local Klan leader. The story, Fallows observes, “resembles many other ‘open secrets’ of many other American communities.” What’s hopeful are efforts to acknowledge this history and no longer deny it.
“Their example can inform other American efforts to acknowledge our racial and racist past,” Fallows writes.
Two presentations from an “Acknowledgement and Lamentation” event publicly acknowledging this past caught Fallows’s attention:
The first of these presentations was the official Acknowledgement statement from the Wentworth Historical Foundation, as read by Sharon Yancey. Nearly all members of the Foundation’s leadership and of the extended Wentworth family signed on in support of this statement about what their forebear had stood for and done.
The statement is long, and I have included it in full at the bottom of the post. It deserves study for its unflinching clarity and directness. Yancey said that her family’s commitment and responsibility was to “excavate the truth, acknowledge the truth, and work with community leaders to do the work of restoration, as warranted.” The rest of the statement spelled out just what that would mean.
There was no rationalizing language—“but those were different times,” or “how could they have known.” No shrinking from the generations-long effects of abuses and inequities. For instance: “if you or your ancestors did not receive the education you deserved because a local Klan leader before TT served as superintendent of public schools, you have been dealt out of the promise of what is possible in America and Pensacola.”
There was no flinching from the involvement of state and local government, religious leaders, and business people in enforcing “white supremacy [as] a defining part of Pensacola’s past.”
“We grieve and we grieve deeply,” she said near the end. “Forgive us.”
It is worth careful reading, and reflection.
‘Today, a better story’
The other presentation I want to mention was from Rev. Freddie Tellis, pastor of the Allen Chapel AME Church in Pensacola.
Early on he expressed his respect and admiration to one of the best-known heroes of Pensacola’s civil rights struggles, who was in the front row for the ceremonies. This was the Rev. H.K. Matthews, a Korean War veteran who was ordained as an AME minister 60 years ago and then led protests, marches, and movements in western Florida and Alabama. A public park in Pensacola has been named for him.
Rev. Tellis told his personal version of the injustices the Wentworth family had acknowledged, starting with his having to drink from the “colored” water fountain at Pensacola’s downtown old Sears and Roebuck store. “I also saw stores where they had three restrooms,” he said. “White men. White women. Colored.”
Where Yancey’s reading of her family’s statement had been quietly intense, Rev. Tellis built the crowd into AME-style call and response. It was particularly powerful in its coda. I’ve posted a somewhat scratchy audio of this section in an accompanying post, which I’ll link to below. But here is the part I want to emphasize, for its rhetorical structure and meaning.
After an unsparing account of racial injustice through his lifetime, Rev. Tellis engaged the crowd to answer him:
All that I’ve said is in the past, and the present. But today—Somebody say “today.” [Crowd response, after a beat: “Today!”]
But today, here in the so-called city of five flags, we start a better story.
Today [crowd answer more promptly, and louder, “Today!”], here in the home of emerald waters, we start a better story.
Today [“TODAY!!”] in the place of sugar-white sands we start a better story.
Today [“TODAY!!”—and the crowd is in the rhythm now, playing its part through the rest of the passage] we start a new paradigm.
Today [“TODAY!!”], we start a shift in a way things have always been…
Today [“TODAY!!”], with the courage, bravery, audacity, resolve, resolution and determination of the Wentworth family, we start a better story.
Today [“TODAY!!”] we will start a movement that will be an example to Florida, America and the entire world.
There is more at the link, including links to Pensacola News-Journal investigations and an audio recording of Rev. Tellis’s “today” speech.
It is hard to imagine the terror of the last few minutes of Ahmaud Arbery’s life. Three Georgia men formed a 21st century slave patrol to hunt the 25-year-old black jogger from trucks as though on safari for African game. They chased him down, ordered him to stop. He didn’t. (Would you?) And when Arbery could run no farther, Travis McMichael shot and killed him after a brief struggle for control of the muzzle of McMichael’s shotgun. On Wednesday, the three white men were convicted of murder and are headed to prison for life:
BRUNSWICK, Ga. — The three Whitemen who chased and killed Ahmaud Arbery in coastal Georgia last year were convicted of murder Wednesday in a case that many saw as a test of racial bias in the justice system.
Travis McMichael, his father, Greg McMichael, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan were found guilty of felony murder in the shooting of Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man. Travis McMichael was also convicted of malice murder, or intent to kill. All three men, who still face federal hate crime charges, will receive life in prison, potentially without parole.
A certain kind of man behaves like this. Racist, clearly. But with the racism is mixed what we see reflected in the figure men like the three above recently chose for president. Chronically (and culturally) insecure. Threatened by difference. Threatened by change beyond their control. Entitled to dominate and to enforce conformity, to veto change initiated by others. Not getting their world their way makes them angry and perhaps violent. Especially over violations of what they consider their turf.
I’ve been thinking about my own, less-deadly chance encounters with that kind of man since the Arbery verdict. I’m a white guy. I survived.
Once in high school, two men chased my cousin and me for miles. Two long-haired kids in a VW bus were an afront somehow to the cultural conformity they felt entitled to enforce. With beatings, if they’d caught us.
In college, I was headed to the farmer’s market for vegetables. Joe Cocker was blaring on my radio singing that old Dave Mason song, “Feeling alright.”
I’m not feeling too good myself, I sang along.
A car shot out of the market and I had to brake hard to miss it. I turned in and parked.
Suddenly, the car reappeared as I stepped out of mine. Some dude got out of his stomped up.
“What’d you say back there?!” he barked angrily.
I had no idea what he meant and said so.
He repeated himself, looking for a fight.
When I stood there dumbly for a few seconds, he returned to his car and his girlfriend and left. He’d seen me singing in my car and thought I was cussing him out, humiliating him in front of his girlfriend.
Another time (still pre-cell phones) I’d taken my car for repairs to an imports garage on the south end of the city. I decided to ride my bike home, about 16 miles along US-25 Bypass, a four-lane highway that ran, as Johnny Rivers sang, through the poor side of town. About halfway home, another of those men decided I was impeding his God-given right to drive with all the alacrity his steel steed could muster. He could have passed in the left lane. Instead, he laid on the horn behind me.
I veered left into the paved median to let him pass. Not good enough. He stopped his car in the right lane in traffic to lean out the window and scream at me over my offense.
“This is a U.S. highway,” I shot back, dumbfounded.
When I stepped back into the pedals to continue on, he pulled into a parking lot yards away and got out. He wanted to fight. I shot up the road, around a curve, and onto a side street out of sight to wait for him to pass. In a Peter Fonda/Dennis Hopper scenario, I might get shot.
Five miles farther on, there he is again, stopped in the right lane, in traffic, in broad daylight, shouting at me and waiting for the duel to which he felt entitled. I kept going, looking over my shoulder the rest of the way home.
Again, I’m a white guy. I survived. But the terror of Ahmaud Arbery’s hunting by armed white men in trucks has me revisiting my less-deadly encounters with certain kinds of men whose sense of self is so easily threatened that they feel the need to defend their honor or their turf with violence.
It’s pathological. As is their champion, the Doge of Mar-a-Lago. These damaged men think they own this country and, by god, there’s no way they’ll share it. Especially not with black men jogging through their neighborhoods.
Here is a lovely Thanksgiving eve story of America welcoming foreigners to her shores. It comes from a woman in MInnesota who worked for years with agricultural specialists in Afghanistan:
The university-educated Afghans helped turn land in an overgrazed, drought-stricken and impoverished region in eastern Afghanistan into verdant gardens and orchards that still feed local families today.
In the process, the 12 agricultural specialists, all traditional Afghan men, formed a deep, unexpected bond with their boss, an American woman who worked as a U.S. Department of Agriculture adviser in the region for two years.
Now Caroline Clarin is trying to save them one by one, doing it all from the 1910 Minnesota farmhouse she shares with her wife, drawing from retirement funds to help a group of men who share her love of farming.
It’s a great story. Read the whole thing if you can. This gay woman farmer lives in the heart of Trump country and she’s helping Afghan refugees settle in the US. Here’s just one of their stories:
Patan arrived in Minnesota with saffron, Afghan almonds, and 5 kilos (11 pounds) of Afghan green tea to share. He also gave Clarin and her wife, Sheril Raymond, seeds of Afghanistan’s tender leeks for their garden.
He was the first member to join Clarin’s team after she was sent to Paktika province. A confident, young university graduate, Patan spelled out what was needed in the region. It would become the basis of her program: Seeds, trees and the skills to plant gardens and orchards.
Patan considers Clarin and her wife family. His three sons and daughter call them their “aunties.”
In fact, he’s decided to live in nearby Fergus Falls, a town of 14,000, instead of moving to a larger city with an Afghan transplant community.
Surrounded by farmland stretching to the North Dakota border, the town’s skyline is dominated by grain elevators and the spires of Bethlehem Lutheran Church, a reflection of the region’s Scandinavian roots.
The only other Afghan family in town is his cousin’s. Sami Massoodi, who has a degree in livestock management, also worked for Clarin’s team in Afghanistan and arrived in 2017. He and his family lived on their farm before they got established in Fergus Falls.
“In Fergus Falls, they have really good people, really friendly people,” Patan said as he drives his minivan down the tree-lined streets to pick up his 5-year-old daughter at a Head Start program.
It is a place where neighbors pay unannounced visits to say “hi” and people greet the postmaster by name. It is also staunchly Republican. Fergus Falls is the county seat of Otter Tail County, which voted twice for former President Donald Trump.
But people in town say friendships and family take precedence over political views, and there is broad empathy for the struggle of immigrants since many people’s parents, grandparents or great grandparents came from Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
Only months after they arrived, the Patan family already feels at home in large part because of Raymond.
She helped enroll their kids in school, find a dentist for 9-year-old Sala’s infected tooth, and sign Patan up for car insurance, something that was new for the 35-year-old.
She lined up English classes and state and federal services for new immigrants. She drove Patan an hour to the nearest testing site for a driver’s license. After he failed twice because his English was not proficient enough, he asked if there was a test in his native Pashto language, like in Virginia and California. There wasn’t. So Raymond found a site, another hour away, that would allow him to review his errors. On his third try, he passed.
Clarin has tracked down a sheep on craigslist for Eid, while Raymond watched YouTube videos on how to slaughter livestock according to halal principles, since the closest halal butcher is an hour away in Fargo, North Dakota.
For Patan, they have been a comfort in a strange place.
“When we are going to their house, we feel like we went to Afghanistan and we are going to meet our close relatives,” he said.
He longs for his homeland, the family festivities. Patan’s wife makes their traditional dishes still, like Bolani Afghani, a fried, vegetable-filled flatbread that Clarin enjoyed with him in Afghanistan.
Over there, Patan and her team were the ones helping her feel at home.
It was the longest she and Raymond had been apart since they started dating in 1988.
Raymond, who cares for the chickens, pigs and other animals on their farm, would do video calls often, staying online even after Clarin had fallen asleep.
Two years after Clarin returned, they married in August 2013 when same-sex marriage became legal in Minnesota.
Homosexuality is still widely seen as taboo and indecent in Afghanistan, where same-sex relations are illegal.
Yet, none of the Afghan families have asked about their marriage or expressed judgment, the couple said.
Patan calls them his “sisters.”
“We have a lot of respect for them,” he said.
___
Both Clarin and Patan speak passionately about farming, describing in detail how to get a good apple crop and ward off disease.
Clarin arranged for the U.S. military to take her team in convoys to remote areas to train farmers, empowering Afghans to teach each other skills. They lined canals to ensure clean water. They worked with farmers to plant trees and build stone barriers to control flooding. They distributed seeds to 1,200 families, who have since shared seeds with more people.
The program trained about 5,000 farmers in Paktika from 2009 to 2011. They provided growers hoop-houses, apple trees, pruning equipment and small grants. They taught farmers tangible solutions, including using buckets with drip lines to irrigate gardens and conserve water.
The Taliban tried to sabotage the trust they built with farmers, Clarin said. Once, an explosive blew up in a red bucket like the ones they used for irrigation.
Patan has stayed in contact with some of the farmers in Paktika and proudly shows photos on his iPhone of the tiny stems he distributed that are now trees several feet tall. One farmer texted him to say his harvest is feeding his family as millions of others in the country face severe hunger.
That offers some solace after seeing his homeland fall to the Taliban. It feels good he said to know his work left something lasting and that “the people can still benefit from it. We educated one generation and those fathers will tell it to their sons.”
Patan misses his career back in Afghanistan. Most U.S. employers do not recognize degrees from Afghan universities so he plans to return to school to earn a U.S. degree. For now, he is training to be a commercial truck driver, a field flush with opportunities: There were 21 job openings in the area when he started his classes this month.
He wants a local truck route to stay close to home, but it will still be challenging for his family. His wife, Sediqa, does not speak English, nor does she know how to read or write, and does not feel comfortable going out by herself.
She also does not drive.
When she started learning English online, she was at “ground zero,” said her teacher, Sara Sundberg at Minnesota State Community and Technical College.
“When she came, she didn’t know what to do with a pencil. We had to show her. She held it kind of like a Henna tube,” said Sundberg, holding together her thumb and index finger tightly at the tip as if squeezing something.
Five months later, her handwriting is “meticulous,” and her pronunciation is excellent, Sundberg said. She’s even learning to say Minnesota with the long “oooo.”
“I’m teaching her how to communicate with the community and I want people to understand her,” Sundberg said. “Everything is brand new for her.”
Sediqa is slowly gaining confidence in speaking with her teacher, but with others she is silent, smiling and staying back with her children.
Everything is new for their children, too. Patan’s sons befriended a neighbor boy and jumped for the first time on a trampoline.
His oldest son, Maiwan, decorated his first pumpkin, while his two younger sons wore their traditional Afghan clothes because their teachers told them that on the Friday before Halloween the kids could “dress up,” something that was lost in translation but went unnoticed as the other kids excitedly showed them their costumes.
They look forward to the weekends with their “aunties” at the farm.
It gives you hope, it really does.
Over the past week we’ve seen Kyle Rittenhouse get off scot free and today the defendants in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery were all found guilty. The first was the fault of the laws that allow people, even teenagers, to walk around with semi-automatic weapons and then shoot unarmed people when they feel afraid. The second shows that vigilantism can still be risky and sometimes a jury will see that saying you were afraid doesn’t make sense. In both cases, there was video of the events and as you can see by the divergent outcomes, it is subjective.
To me, if you are walking around with a loaded gun and you kill an unarmed person, you should have to pay a price just as you would if you get behind the wheel drunk and kill someone. But that’s not what the law says.
There are many more instances of injustice in our legal system that were not recorded and relied on eyewitness testimony. It is a huge problem. This story is one of them:
The rape took place in a Syracuse, N.Y., park in 1981 and was described in raw detail in a memoir published nearly 20 years after it occurred, as the man convicted of the crime struggled to rebuild his life after his release from prison.
The book, titled “Lucky,” launched the career of the author Alice Sebold, who later rose to international fame with “The Lovely Bones,” a novel that also centers on sexual assault and sold millions of copies.
The man who was convicted of the attack, Anthony J. Broadwater, had always maintained he was innocent. On Monday, he was exonerated, as a state judge, his defense lawyers and the Onondaga County district attorney agreed that the case against him had been woefully flawed.
“It’s a long day coming,” Mr. Broadwater, 61, said in an interview on Tuesday, recalling the years of stigma and isolation he faced as a registered sex offender.
He got married and sought work after spending 16 years in prison, but found himself cut off from opportunities because of the conviction.
“On my two hands, I can count the people that allowed me to grace their homes and dinners, and I don’t get past 10,” he said. “That’s very traumatic to me.”
The attack took place when Ms. Sebold was a freshman at Syracuse University. She writes in her memoir, which was published in 1999, about how she told campus security about the attack right away and went to the police.
After evidence was collected from a rape kit, she described her assailant’s features to the police, but the resulting composite sketch didn’t resemble him, she wrote.
Mr. Broadwater was arrested five months later, after Ms. Sebold passed him on the street and contacted the police, saying she may have seen her attacker.
But she identified a different man as her attacker in a police lineup. In her memoir, she writes that Mr. Broadwater and the man next to him looked alike and that moments after she made her choice, she felt she had picked the wrong man. She later identified Mr. Broadwater in court.
Ms. Sebold used a fictitious name for Mr. Broadwater in her memoir, identifying him as Gregory Madison.
In their motion to vacate the conviction, the defense lawyers J. David Hammond and Melissa K. Swartz wrote that the case had relied solely on Ms. Sebold’s identification of Mr. Broadwater in the courtroom and a now-discredited method of microscopic hair analysis.
They also argued that prosecutorial misconduct was a factor during the police lineup — that the prosecutor had falsely told Ms. Sebold that Mr. Broadwater and the man next to him were friends who had purposely appeared in the lineup together to trick her — and that it had improperly influenced Ms. Sebold’s later testimony.
The motion to vacate the conviction was joined by Onondaga County District Attorney William J. Fitzpatrick, who noted that witness identifications of strangers, particularly those that cross racial lines, are often unreliable. Ms. Sebold is white, and Mr. Broadwater is Black.
“I’m not going to sully these proceedings by saying, ‘I’m sorry,’” Mr. Fitzpatrick said in court on Monday. “That doesn’t cut it. This should never have happened.”
State Supreme Court Justice Gordon J. Cuffy agreed, and overturned Mr. Broadwater’s conviction of first-degree rape and five related charges. He will no longer be categorized as a sex offender.
Ms. Sebold had no comment on the decision, a spokesman for Scribner, which published “Lucky,” said. The spokesman said that the publisher had no plans to update the text.
A planned film adaptation of “Lucky” played a role in raising doubts about the case against Mr. Broadwater.
Timothy Mucciante was working as executive producer of the adaptation of “Lucky,” but began to question the story that the movie was based on earlier this year, after he noticed discrepancies between the memoir and the script.
“I started having some doubts, not about the story that Alice told about her assault, which was tragic, but the second part of her book about the trial, which didn’t hang together,” Mr. Mucciante said in an interview.
Mr. Mucciante said that he ended up leaving the production in June because of his skepticism about the case and how it was being portrayed.
He hired a private investigator, Dan Myers, who spent 20 years working for the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office and retired as a detective in 2020, to look into the evidence against Mr. Broadwater, and became convinced of Mr. Broadwater’s innocence.
Mr. Myers suggested they bring the evidence they gathered to a lawyer and recommended Mr. Hammond, who reviewed the investigation and agreed there was a strong case. Around the same time, Mr. Broadwater decided to hire Mr. Hammond based on the recommendation of another local lawyer.
Mr. Broadwater, who was released in 1998, had been scrimping and saving to hire lawyer after lawyer to try and prove his innocence.
He said that he and his wife, Elizabeth, had wanted to have children, but he felt they could not given the stigma of his conviction.
Mr. Broadwater recalled that he had just returned home to Syracuse from a stint serving in the Marine Corps in California when he was arrested. He was 20 years old at the time.
He had gone home because his father was ill, he said. His father’s health worsened during the trial, and he died shortly after Mr. Broadwater was sent to prison.
“I just hope and pray that maybe Ms. Sebold will come forward and say, ‘Hey, I made a grave mistake,’ and give me an apology,” Mr. Broadwater said.
“I sympathize with her,” he said. “But she was wrong.”
As unsatisfying as it is that a 17 year old kid allowed to kill two people and maim another without consequence (and then be feted by the former president of the United States) and as satisfying as it is that the three men who killed hunted down a Black man in broad daylight and killed him will probably spend the rest of their lives in jail, remember that there are many more stories of people mouldering in jail and losing their lives for crimes they didn’t commit.
Right????
The ranks of those submitting jobless claims tumbled to their lowest level in more than 52 years last week, the Labor Department reported Wednesday.
New filings totaled 199,000, a number not seen since Nov. 15, 1969, when claims totaled 197,000. The report easily beat Dow Jones estimates of 260,000 and was well below the previous week’s 270,000.
45 minutes into Inside Politics today John King finally got around to reporting this. This is how it went:
Some positive economic news today. Weekly claims for unemployment benefits are way down. You can see the number there, it’s not only a pandemic but to a level not seen since 1969. Now whether you process that is a different question. That’s a big part of the Biden White House economic and political challenge right now. 48 Million Americans are travelling this Thanksgiving. Gas is up to $3.40 a gallon, that’s the highest Thanksgiving price since 2012. Hoping to help, Biden ordered the largest ever release, 50 million barrels of oil, from the strategic petroleum reserve, but he says be patient.
The roundtable then agreed that the reason people aren’t more happy about all the good news is because Biden isn’t more like Trump and he doesn’t blame others for the bad things and take credit for the good. “It works!” And they agreed that the Biden administration is failing “Politics 101” which is the only thing that matters.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. I mean, he lied about being vaccinated so he didn’t have to be tested. Who knows how many people he exposed?
Here’s the story on COVID toe:
Aaron Rodgers was able to get over his bout with COVID relatively quickly. The Packers’ unvaccinated quarterback missed 10 days of action, but was only out for one game against the Chiefs.
How did he feel after his first game back against the Vikings? Pretty good overall, he said on “The Pat McAfee Show,” but there is one small problem.Trent Williams on playing WR vs. Jags: ‘It’s definitely a lot harder than it looks’PauseNext video0:00 / 0:00Full-screen
“No lingering effects other than the COVID toe,” Rodgers told McAfee.
COVID toe is apparently the painful injury that Rodgers previously referenced after the Packers’ 34-31 loss to the Vikings. But what exactly is it?
According to the American Academy of Dermatology Association, some people “develop discolored and swollen toes” as a result of contracting the coronavirus. Apparently, Rodgers was one of them.
The New York Times explained some of the symptoms more in-depth, and also noted that COVID toes are actually a good sign for the body’s immune system.
The lesions are red or purple in white people, and often purplish or brownish in people of color. They cause painful burning or itching sensations, and sometimes make it difficult for people to wear shoes or walk.
Now a study from France, published in the British Journal of Dermatology, sheds some light on the causes of Covid toes. The research indicates that the lesions may be a side effect of the immune system’s shift into high gear in response to exposure to the virus, which can damage cells and tissues in the process.
Rodgers may have referenced COVID toe in his discussions with McAfee, but he also spoke about how a bone bruise in his foot is causing him pain.
“I’ve mentioned that it was more painful than turf toe and I had turf toe years ago. The problem with turf toe is that it’s that joint in your big toe and it is very painful,” Rodgers said. “So naturally I’m leading people to understand that if it’s worse than turf toe, there must be some sort of bone issue.”
So, Rodgers doesn’t believe that COVID is the only reason his toe is a bit banged up. When will he be 100 percent after this injury? He was mum on his future, though it appears that he is still planning to play through the pain.
“I’ve already talked enough on the show about my medical status. I’ve given you enough information at this point,” Rodgers joked. “I have an injury that’s not going away. And I’m going to be dealing with it for at least the next few weeks.”
His team must be thrilled. After all, if he’d just gotten the vaccine this wouldn’t be happening.
What a dick.
… for his liege lord to respond to a congressional subpoena. That’s not how this works. It’s not how any of it works.
Since when is Bernie Kerik Trump’s attorney? He’s not even a lawyer. But hey, whatever. Trump thinks he can decide who to “release” to testify and he’s just sure that Bernie Kerik is going to blow the lid off the committee with his proof that the election was stolen from Trump. I’m sure the committee looks forward to what he has to say.