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Poll: Vast Majority Of Voters Support Select Committee Probe

Poll: Vast Majority Of Voters Support Select Committee Probe

Anyone who was paying attention to the polling for the past year around the January 6 insurrection generally concluded two things: 1) Very few Americans held the people who stormed the Capitol in high regard; and 2) Many Americans, though not a majority, wanted to leave the violent event in the past.

A Quinnipiac poll in January, for instance, found that 50 percent of Americans thought the storming of the Capitol should never be forgotten, while 44 percent believed too much was being made of the attack and it was time to move on.

In addition, support for arresting the insurrectionists last year dropped considerably among Republicans and independent voters in the months following the event. From January to July 2021, a Daily Kos/Civiqs survey found GOP support for arrests dropped 35 points to 55 percent, while independent voters' favoring arrests dropped 22 points, from 91 percent to 69 percent (still high, but not nearly as high). Not surprisingly, Democrats remained pretty stable, with 97 percent still backing arrests in July.

But new polling taken in the days following the House Select Committee's first hearing suggests the panel's inquiry has grabbed the attention of nearly two-thirds of Americans—including Democrats, independents, and even a sizable slice of Republicans alike.

The survey by the progressive consortium Navigator Research found that nearly two-thirds of Americans (63 percent) are hearing either "a lot" or "some" about the public hearings, including 70 percent of Democrats, 52 percent of independents, and 59 percent of Republicans. The quality and veracity of that information surely varies, but people across partisan lines are paying attention.

Additionally, by 36 points, Americans overwhelmingly support the work of the House select committee investigating Jan. 6. Once again, nearly two-thirds (64 percent) support the panel's investigation into "what happened on January 6th at the Capitol and the events leading up to it." That support includes 88 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of independents and even 40 percent of Republicans. Just 28 percent of Americans oppose the inquiry.

Overall support for the panel has dropped slightly since Navigator’s April survey, mostly due to a seven-point drop in support among Republicans along with independents moving from "not sure" (22 percent in April) to opposing the panel. Independents now saying they are not sure has dropped to 16 percent while opposition to the inquiry among the group has increased by seven points since April.

Now that Americans have had a chance to see some of the panel's work, a net favorability of 36 points with almost no drop-off in support among Democrats and independents is a good start for the public phase of the investigation.

As I noted in April, Democratic base voters crave accountability for the January 6 attack, but it’s also essential to remind swingy Trump-Biden voters that Trump and his GOP apologists are an ongoing threat to democracy. The select committee seems poised to push both of those objectives forward.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Why Modern Americans Are Behaving Like Medieval Peasants

Why Modern Americans Are Behaving Like Medieval Peasants

Americans are currently experiencing one of the most peculiar public episodes of my lifetime. Amid a deadly worldwide disease epidemic, many people are behaving like medieval peasants: alternately denying the existence of the plague, blaming an assortment of imaginary villains, or running around seeking chimerical miracle cures.

Feed store Ivermectin? I've administered it to horses, cows and dogs. But to my wife? No thank you. It says right on the label that it's not for human consumption. But at least you won't die of heartworm.

Donald Trump's idea of injecting bleach somehow never caught on, although one Florida family (where else?) was prosecuted for fraud after making a bundle peddling the stuff as medicine through their church. The charges were Federal. I'm only surprised Florida's governor didn't award them a medal.

Incapable of dealing with reality, too many exist in an odd state of denial. In essence, as a friend observed recently, "millions of Americans are engaged in a deeply weird suicide lottery."

Strangest of all, of course, is that a genuine miracle cure does exist. A scientific miracle that is: vaccines with the capacity to bring the pandemic to an end. Shackled by ignorance and paralyzed by fear, however, millions of our fellow citizens have refused to take it.

Propagandized by opportunists and madmen, and at war with everything known about communicable diseases since the life of Louis Pasteur (1822-95), many have taken refuge in humanity's most basic pre-rational instinct: tribalism.

And the tribe most Covid Fraidy Cats have chosen is Trumpist Republicanism.

Not all Republicans, of course. But far too many.

"No vaccine for us, we're Republicans." Anything to "own the Libs." Propagandized by the (fully-vaccinated) gang at Fox News—Tucker, Laura, Sean and the rest are all immunized as a condition of employment—millions of self-declared "conservatives" appear determined to defy reason, science and basic common sense to the end.

Even Trump himself took the shot, although when he mentioned it to an Alabama crowd, they booed, and he's since shut up about it.

As a direct consequence, the United States leads the developed world in Covid-19 deaths by astonishing amounts. America's daily Covid mortality rate is three times greater than the United Kingdom's, and four times that of France. As for the rest of the NATO countries, Canada, Germany and Italy currently have Covid death rates a bit lower than one per million of total population. The United States rate is fully SIX TIMES higher, and rising sharply.

In short, it's a self-inflicted wound.

Remember when we Americans prided ourselves upon our common sense practicality, our can-do ability to solve problems together?

That was then. As for now, well…

CNN's Jake Tapper gave Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves a hard time recently about the fact that his state not only leads the nation in Covid mortality, but damn near leads the world. Only Peru among the world's nations has a higher per capita death rate than Mississippi.

Needless to say, the state also has among the lowest vaccination rates. Not for nothing have Arkansans long said "Thank God for Mississippi," on the grounds that whatever embarrasses us here is worse over there.

Tapper asked Reeves what he planned to do about it.

"Deaths unfortunately are a lagging indicator," Reeves said, an unresponsive non-sequitur. He appeared no more capable of being embarrassed than a cow. He recently boasted that Mississippians don't fear death because they believe in the afterlife.

The Mississippi governor was stung because of something President Biden said recently about his fierce opposition to his mandating OSHA to require that workers in large companies get vaccinated as a matter of public safety.

"In Mississippi, children are required to be vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, hepatitis B, polio, tetanus, and more," the president pointed out. "These are state requirements. But in the midst of a pandemic that has already taken over 660,000 lives, I propose a requirement for COVID vaccines and the governor of that state calls it 'a tyrannical-type move'?"

He repeated himself for emphasis: "A tyrannical-type move?!"

Partly, vaccine resistance stems from sheer ignorance. On Fox News and elsewhere, people have been duped by opportunists to think vaccines can kill you, make you sterile, implant microchips in your blood, alter your DNA, or even turn your body into a large magnet. It appears that when people are frightened, no lie is too crazy to find believers.

This stuff isn't just irrational; it's anti-rational.

Of course, few actually believe that stuff. It's more a matter of who's making the argument. If Joe Biden, a known Democrat, is behind it, then the Red Tribe's against it. Even if it means risking death.

Yours, and of more interest to an "elitist" like me, mine.

Republicans invoke "state's rights," which is what they always say when their position is indefensible.

Sometimes, an element of force is required.

Anti-mask and vax protest

Suffer, Little Children: Anti-Vax, Anti-Masking, And The Faces Of Evil

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

The origin of evil is an issue that would seem as difficult to fathom as the meaning of life, or the purpose of the universe. It's not. Evil is not simply when something bad happens. Hurricanes aren't evil. Not even a disease is evil. Evil takes understanding. Evil is when someone displays indifference or experiences pleasure in the face of suffering.

The worst sort of evil comes when empathy and consideration are replaced with a perverse joy, one that doesn't just refuse to acknowledge someone else's pain, but takes pride in dismissing the thought that others deserve consideration. And it looks like this.

What's happening in that Tennessee school board meeting is a tiny subset, a pixel in the larger picture, of what's happening on multiple issues across the country. Another part of that greater image can be seen when CNN asked Dr. Anthony Fauci about a statement by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. And in the responses of a school superintendent from Mississippi.

As CNN reports, children too young to be vaccinated now make up 26% of all new cases of COVID-19 cases. That number has grown enormously as schools have reopened for in-person instruction in districts where masks are not mandated and vaccination for staff is not a requirement. In fact, the total number of children infected across the course of the pandemic has grown by 10% in just the last two weeks.

That's because the reopening of schools, especially in areas where school boards have bowed to pressure—or the executive orders of Republican governors—and refused to institute mask mandates or vaccination requirements and are seeing an "explosions of cases." That explosion generated over 14,000 cases among students in Florida within the first week of classes. It resulted in thousands of cases in Texas, where district after district has been forced to suspend classes.

Florida and Texas may have been grabbing the headlines thanks to the deeply twisted statements from Govs. Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, but they're far from alone. In just four days in August, the Clarion Ledgerreports that over 5,700 students tested positive in a single week, putting over 30,000—6.5% of the state's total student population—into quarantine.

In this interview, Mississippi school superintendent John Strycker explains that he doesn't require masks in his school, even after a teacher died. Strycker says, "I'm confident in what we're doing."

Strycker: I wept. Okay? It's very hard on me. But when I'm making my decisions, I need to do the best I can to make non-emotional decisions.
Reporter: But your non-emotional decision is to do nothing.
Strycker: Right.

Strycker then claims that the children in his care are "safe relative to the other schools." In the first three week of school there, 6.4 percent of students have tested positive for COVID-19.

Following this interview, CNN moves to looking at the large Los Angeles unified school district where the superintendent has made very different decisions. At that school, every member of the staff is required to report their vaccination status and everyone—students, teachers, and visitors—is required to wear a mask. Over the same period, the infection rate in Los Angeles schools was 0.5 percent.

What's become clear across the nation is simply this: School districts that do not have a mandatory mask policy are very likely to see a high incidence of COVID-19 cases within a period of a few weeks. Those levels are very likely to lead to that school district being forced to quarantine a substantial subset of its student and staff population, and almost as likely to result in classes being suspended for a period.

The reason is simple enough: As much as anti-mask forces want to make wearing a mask an emblem of personal fear, it's not. The mask is simply societal responsibility. Masks reduce the rate of transmission of COVID-19, as well as other viruses, but they are really only highly effective if nearly everyone is wearing them. One person wearing a masks in a sea of bare faces gains very little, if anything, in the way of personal protection. If everyone is wearing masks, there is a large decrease in the spread of disease.

The same rule applies to vaccines. As NPR reports, DeSantis has repeatedly dismissed the role of vaccines as anything more than personal protection.

"At the end of the day though," said the Florida governor, "it's about your health and whether you want that protection or not. It really doesn't impact me or anyone else."

And as Dr. Anthony Fauci has made clear, DeSantis is "completely incorrect." Vaccines, like masks, do provide some protection to the individual, but their greater role is in breaking the chain of transmission. A high level of vaccination doesn't just protect the vaccinated, it protects everyone. Whether someone has been vaccinated definitely affects those around them.

"When you're dealing with an outbreak of an infectious disease, it isn't only about you," said Fauci. "There's a societal responsibility that we all have."

And there's that phrase again: societal responsibility—the need to take action that protects not just yourself or your family, but everyone in the greater society. What's missing from every insistence that masks or vaccines are a "personal choice" is that these choices have an impact on others. Saying that masks or vaccines don't affect anyone else is like saying that driving drunk doesn't affect anyone else. Or firing a weapon through a loaded room doesn't affect anyone else. These actions may nothave an immediate impact, but there is a recognized societal responsibility that makes them illegal even if they don't result in immediate loss.

What does evil look like? It looks like someone standing in front of a camera and saying that a decision that can cost the lives of thousands is a personal choice. It looks like that.

It also looks like these events at a charter school in Boise as reported by the Idaho Statesman.

At the beginning of the year, the board of the Peace Valley Charter School passed a mask mandate. But they rolled back that mandate after hearing from Dr. Ryan Cole—the same doctor who referred to COVID-19 vaccines as both "fake" and "needle rape." Following that statement, Cole was made a member of Idaho's Central District Health Board.

At a special meeting of the school board, Cole testified that masks didn't work and that there was "not one study" showing that masks could help stop a viral disease. Cole also testified that masks "retain carbon dioxide" and can cause "inflammation in the brain." None of these things has any basis in fact. (For reference, here's a large study showing that masks work and here's a broad review of the topic which confirms that effectiveness).

At that meeting, board members were also given a packet of documents, which included one titled "COVID-19 Masks Are a Crime Against Humanity and Child Abuse." The board reversed its vote, eliminating the mask mandate.

What does evil look like? It looks like a woman snickering at a child talking about his dead grandmother. It looks like a doctor knowingly passing along false information that places children and teacher in danger. Most of all, it looks like a governor denying that individuals have any obligation beyond self preservation, and pretending that societal responsibilities do not exist.

'Completely incorrect': Dr. Fauci pushes back on DeSantis' vaccine claimwww.youtube.com

Wednesday, Sep 8, 2021 · 11:59:27 AM EDT · Mark Sumner

And as that Idaho school votes to drop mask mandates in response to disinformation …