Hand Foot Mouth Cock Sacky

It's been an eventful two weeks. And I'm not even talking about *gestures vaguely* the world.

Last week, Nathaniel started daycare. A few days later, on Thursday, I had my first day of class, and Nathaniel was diagnosed with hand foot and mouth disease -- aka coxsackie. My mom says the latter name "sounds better" than "hand foot and mouth disease". I'm unconvinced. While "hand foot and mouth disease" sounds like a reason to put a cow down, I'm not sure "cock sacky" is much of an improvement.

Anyway, Nathaniel was, as is his wont, completely unbothered by any of this. But it did send him home from daycare.

On Monday I had jury service. I arrived at the courthouse, checked in, found a seat in the holding pen, and then suddenly lost all color and started sweating profusely (I mean, profusely). I stumbled over to the main desk to ask for some water, which they provided ... along with calling the paramedics because "you don't look right." Thus ended David's jury service, and began several hours at the Kaiser Westside ER. Who doesn't love beginning a jury tenure seeing one of their fellows carted out on a gurney? (I actually asked the paramedics if this happened every week -- I kind of assumed that there was always someone who was "sick" and tried to get out of jury service -- but he told me that no, I was his first jury-pool patient).

I started to feel better Tuesday, except that I started to see some weird and painful blisters on my hands. And my feet. And maybe the back of my throat. And now today, on Nathaniel's first birthday, I think "I probably have hand foot and mouth disease." It's his birthday, but he's giving me presents. What a mensch. The bonus irony is that HFMD rarely is symptomatic in adults, but I guess I'm the reason why they hedge that a bit!

So now I'm tip-toeing around the house (not to keep quiet, but to avoid the painful spots on my heels), and thinking deep thoughts like "how does the blister decide to be on that centimeter of my finger, rather than the centimeter directly to its left?" It's not like the blisters are clustered around veins or arteries, or near parts of my body that are either especially high or low use. It all seems very arbitrary. I'm very curious about tracing the physical pathway of the virus load from when it enters my body to when it manifests in blisters in these very particular spots.

Unfortunately, the medical treatment for HFMD seems to boil down to "take a tylenol and buck up", so now it's just a matter of trying to rest and waiting to see if that ambulance ride from the courthouse to the hospital results in a $94,000 surprise medical bill. What fun.

Sick Baby

Nathaniel is feeling under the weather.

He has a cough, which he caught from me, and before I go any further, he's fine. In fact, he's mostly been handling it like a champ. This really is the first time he's been truly sick-sick (he's had runny noses and such before, but he's frankly scarcely noticed them), and by and large he's being a real trooper.

But last night he got caught in a bit of a spiral where he coughed himself awake, and found that a bit scary and starting crying, which made it a bit harder to catch his breath, which exacerbated the cough ... and all of the sudden, it's a full meltdown. About an hour of screaming and sobbing and coughing, all while he's clearly exhausted. No fun.

Again, to reiterate, he is (and was) fine. We kept a close eye on him to make sure he wasn't actually struggling to breathe or anything like that, and there were no issues there. He was just (understandably) upset, and miserable, and honestly a bit scared, and obviously as a parent you hate seeing your kiddo like that.

As sicknesses go, this really is about as basic as you can get. But even still, as a parent, it's miserable. Nathaniel is a baby. He doesn't understand what's going on. He just knows he's in this bad situation and he's looking to you to help him, and there's really not all that much you can do other than give him cuddles and comfort. (The saddest part for me was that whenever one of us would hold him, he'd reach for the other parent, as if to say "surely, one of you can help me!").

This sort of thing happens to every baby and every parent. That doesn't make it easier; in fact, I suspect most parents would categorize times like this as among the toughest parts of being a parent.

But as I was cuddling him last night, watching him sob uncontrollably and feeling absolutely helpless in the face of his misery, my mind kept drifting to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Because as terrible as this experience was for a normal, non-dangerous childhood cough, I cannot fathom how I would feel grappling with this feeling of helpless impotence in the face of my baby's confused misery if it were a serious illness. Measles. Pertussis. Mumps. Things that could put him in the hospital. Things that could endanger his life.

Take this awful feeling I had last night, and magnify it to an incalculable degree. That is what Kennedy -- and all those who enabled him, a cadre that includes Donald Trump, most Republican Senators, and every one of their voters -- is unleashing on America. That my mind associates last night with that experience is testament to just how little I can comprehend -- am willing to comprehend -- what going through that hell would actually be like.

Having a sick baby should be the flip side of my vaccine post: you want to know what's way worse than the feeling of impotent helplessness watching your baby suffer from a cough? The feeling of impotent helplessness watching your baby hospitalized with the measles. The former is inevitable. The latter is eminently avoidable, and it is infuriating that this conspiratorial maniac is endangering my baby -- all of our babies -- by trying to put safe vaccines out of reach and facilitate the spread of dangerous diseases.

There are so many reasons why we as Americans should be ashamed of the choices we've made as a polity over the past few years. But amidst stiff competition, Robert Kennedy has to be very, very high on the list.

What If Trump Had Been Clear on the Vaccine from the Start?

Kevin Drum flags a new approach from former President Donald Trump vis-à-vis the vaccine: it was my doing and MAGA-land should stop letting liberals take credit for it. Drum says that if this had been Trump's approach from the get-go, "We'd probably be 90% vaxed by now. Hell, Republicans might have a higher vaccination rate than Democrats."

Not sure about that last part. But it is certainly the case that much -- not all, but much -- right-wing antipathy towards vaccines would have never come into being. Some would have still existed -- the conspiratorial anti-vaxx wing of the conservative movement predates COVID and would not have been squelched entirely no matter what Trump did -- but it wouldn't have been amplified endlessly on Fox, nor would it have become a tribal identifier for true Trumpist loyalty.

Would Democrats have simply flipped and become the new anti-vaxx party? Unlikely. We'd still see anti-vaxx sentiment from these sorts of "progressives". And they'd be roundly thought of, and presented as by other liberals as idiots worthy of contempt and scorn (though they'd no doubt be defended vociferously by Glenn Greenwald types). Hippy-dippy anti-vaxx sentiment on the left would have remained a joke, just as it had been for years before it became a conservative domain and suddenly had to be respected as a grave matter of conscience and a deep policy dilemma. The vast majority of Democrats would still get vaccinated, because at least in this domain polarization really is asymmetric and Democrats aren't willing to enroll in a death cult just to do the opposite of whatever Trump does.

Oh, and I also strongly suspect that if Trump had taking this loud pro-vaccine stance from the beginning, there's a solid chance he'd still be President today. So take from that what you will.

Are All Exemptions "Individualized"?

One of the many fun events of the past few years has been the Supreme Court deciding it is going to blow apart and reconstruct First Amendment free exercise doctrine in the middle of a pandemic, often on the shadow docket, with little warning and less argument, invariably in the direction of hamstringing the public authorities' efforts to impose basic common-sense limitations to stop the spread of a highly-infectious, contagious disease. We should all take a moment to pour one out for the courageous American people, who have largely been steadfast and resilient in the face of the federal judiciary's determined efforts to kill us all.

The latest salvo on this front was the 6-3 vote by the Supreme Court to deny emergency relief to health care workers who wanted a religious exemption from Maine's vaccine requirement. Maine allows vaccine exemptions solely for medical reasons; it does not permit religious (or, I believe, any other) bases for exemption. This vote does not necessarily mean that the case will come out the same way if it ever reaches the Court via normal avenues; Justice Barrett, joined by Justice Kavanaugh, concurred but suggested that part of their issue was that the case was inappropriate for resolution on the shadow docket. Glad they finally got the memo!

Justice Gorsuch wrote for three dissenters to stake out what would have been until, well, last week, a truly staggering position: that Maine's choice to exempt from a vaccine mandate only those for whom a vaccine is physically dangerous fails rational basis review, which is such an extreme departure from existing constitutional law doctrine I'm almost in awe of its lèse-majesté. Others can pick at other aspects of the opinion, but one element I wanted to flag was Justice Gorsuch's claim that Maine has a system of "individualized exemptions" in place for its vaccine mandate which it is unreasonably failing to extend to religious objectors.

The "individualized exemption" rhetoric picks up from the Court's halting attempt to harmonize its new free exercise jurisprudence with what had been the prevailing standard in Employment Division of Oregon v. Smith, which held that neutral and generally applicable laws needn't offer religious exemptions even if they happen to impinge upon the religious precepts of certain individuals. Smith distinguished some older cases, notably Sherbert v. Verner, on the grounds that in the latter there was a system allowing for individualized review and assessment of each applicant's claim. In Sherbert, which involved claims for unemployment benefits, the state individually checked to see whether each applicant had demonstrated "good cause" for declining any work offered to them; the case there involved a circumstance where the administrative agency declined to accept that refusing to work on the Saturday Sabbath constituted "good cause". As Smith observed, most laws do not offer that sort of case-by-case, highly-tailored individualized review, and so the Sherbert rule is difficult to reasonably extend to other cases.

Fast forward thirty years, and we have a Court that seems far more inclined to grant religious exemptions as a matter of constitutional entitlement, but has not (as yet) been willing to overturn Smith. So it relies on the "individualized exemption" angle to say that it's not actually making a change. This gives us Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, ruling against a Philadelphia policy which declined to give a religious accommodation to a Catholic organization that wanted to discriminate against gay couples notwithstanding that its anti-discrimination policy allowed for exemptions at the sole discretion of the relevant administrator for any reason whatsoever. Though Philadelphia had never actually granted an exemption, the Court interpreted this provision as essentially having Philadelphia look at each application for an exemption and decide, based on individualized assessment of the particular case, whether to grant one or not. This was akin to Sherbert rather than Smith -- a system of individualized review -- and if one is going to offer that sort of review than religious exemptions have to be permitted as well. Perhaps for that reason, Fulton was a unanimous decision -- it really could fit within the pre-existing doctrine, albeit only because Philadelphia had a crafted a broad and purely discretionary exemption system allowing for individualized assessment of every applicant.

Which brings us back to the vaccine mandate case. Justice Gorsuch, in his dissent, says that the Maine rule is like the Philadelphia rule -- it allows for "individualized exemption." What he specifically says is that "The State’s vaccine mandate is not absolute; individualized exemptions are available but only if they invoke certain preferred (nonreligious) justifications" -- namely, the health-based justification.

Yet Justice Gorsuch seems to be making a conflation here with huge ramifications -- between "exemptions" and "individualized exemptions". Yes, Maine's law has an exemption from its vaccine mandate for persons for whom the vaccine would not be healthful; this is eminently sensible if Maine's ambition is to promote public health. But these exemptions are not individualized in the way that was present in Sherbert or Fulton -- Maine does not make a free-standing commitment to assess every applicant "as an individual" and determine, based on the totality of the circumstances, whether an exemption is appropriate or not. It has a specific exemption for a particular class of persons -- those for whom the vaccine would be physically dangerous. Admittedly, Maine presumably has to do some individualized review to determine whether a person applying for an exemption under this demarcated policy qualifies for the exemption. But that is still not "individualized" review in the Sherbert/Fulton sense, unless every "exemption" in a law necessarily is an "individualized exemption".

Which actually does seem to be Justice Gorsuch's position: all exemptions are "individualized exemptions" -- the word "individualized" is superfluous. His proof that the vaccine mandate has "individualized exemptions" is that it is "not absolute", suggesting that any exception ipso facto qualifies as an individualized exemption which must therefore allow for a religious exemption as well.

This is staggering. One would struggle, I imagine, to think of a law that doesn't have some "exemptions" in it -- pretty much any law of substance has some "provided that such-and-such does not qualify" proviso in it somewhere. Our laws prohibiting stabbings exempt surgeons; our laws prohibiting possession of drugs exempt police officers seizing drugs; our laws prohibiting homicide exempt executioners of the death penalty. Are these all now "individualized exemptions", compelling religious adherents to get a similar exemption as well? In our soon-to-be-post-Roe world, most states which ban abortion probably still will have some "life of the mother" exception; does offering this exemption mean that any person for whom abortion is religiously mandatory in other scenarios must be permitted to have one?* I can't wait for the first Jewish plaintiff to sue on that theory; I can wait for her to inevitably lose because there is no question that the rule being expressed here is not a check liberal religious observers will be entitled to cash as against conservative rules.

At some level, this is all an academic exercise -- the reason we're focusing on the existence or not of "individualized exemptions" is not because Justice Gorsuch has any particular attachment to that as the standard, it's because this is the rhetoric one can find in Smith and so this is the best way to achieve the outcomes Justice Gorsuch wants in a world where there are not yet enough votes to overturn Smith. Nonetheless, the implications of Justice Gorsuch's position really is that any law which has any exemption for any reason must have a religious exemption too -- a position which seems perilously close to covering "all laws". That's a recipe for religious anarchy. I won't say "and that's the point", because again, we all knew who is going to be allowed to ride that train and who won't be. The likely upshot is far more likely to be the typical authoritarian-conservative structure: a favored class for whom the laws protect but do not bind, and a disfavored class for whom the laws bind but do not protect.

* It is amusing to me just how well Justice Gorsuch's logic for why a health exemption to a vaccine  mandate necessarily compels a religious exemption maps onto why a health/life exemption to an abortion ban necessarily compels a religious exemption there too. Justice Gorsuch's position is that we are per se forbidden from ever declaring a "religious" need as lesser than any secular need, including health and safety (this has been referred to as promoting a wrongful hierarchy privileging "life-sustaining" over "spirit-sustaining" needs). The only basis we have for declining a religious exemption is if the religious action uniquely threatens the state's interest in promulgating the general law in a way that the secular exemption doesn't. 

In the vaccine case, Gorsuch's argument goes, unvaccinated persons may be dangerous in a health care setting, but they're equally dangerous regardless of the reason they're unvaccinated -- it's not as if a virus is less transmittable if it's carried by someone who's unvaccinated because of health reasons compared to religious reasons. But so too in the abortion case -- the state's interest in protecting fetal life is equally implicated regardless of whether the reason the fetus is killed is because its necessary to protect the mother's life or because it's necessary to protect the mother's soul. Either way, the fetus is equally dead, and so once the state allows the, ahem, "individualized exemption" permitting abortion in cases where it is necessary to save a mother's life, it must allow them in any cases where a patient sincerely believes them to be religiously mandatory. 

Anti-Vaxxers Aren't Funny Anymore

As recently as, oh, two years ago, if you asked the media to imagine its archetype of an anti-vaxxer, they would have given you some crunchy-granola type who mistrusts vaccines because something-something-natural living-something-something-big pharma. You know, like this:

 

And so long as this was our anti-vaxx image -- a hippy Hollywood Jenny McCarthy sort -- the media was quite happy to laugh and laugh at how stupid anti-vaxxers were. Which, to be clear, was richly deserved.

But now, of course, we see that the image of the anti-vaxxer has shifted. It's no longer some out-of-touch flower child. It's the Republican base. And suddenly, the media has decided that this isn't funny anymore. Now it's a policy dispute, see? Now it is a matter of principles, a dilemma between admittedly important scientific and health care necessities and deeply-rooted American values of freedom. Anti-vaxxers are not silly cranks and are not to be treated that way. We can make fun of left-wing hippies, but heaven forfend we show anything but the utmost seriousness and respect towards exurban churchgoing conservatives.

It's worth noting that there were, well in advance of the COVID pandemic, plenty of signs that the stereotype that anti-vaxx sentiment was a province of the hippy-dippy left were at best outdated. For one, even before anyone was thinking about COVID we were already seeing Republican politicians start to dip their toes into anti-vaxx conspiracy theories. For two, we should not have been so quick to assume that crunchy-healthful-living and conservatism are oil and water. Marjorie Taylor Greene owns a cross fit gym! The anti-vaxx private school academy in Miami, owned by rabid Trump backers, provides meal options that would normally read like the far-right's parody of a soy-boy ("Our menu is consistently 100% organic, 100% non-GMO, gluten-free, light on dairy, no added sugar, never processed, always fresh and locally-sourced when possible. We incorporate Superfoods such as ginger, hemp, quinoa, spices such as cinnamon, turmeric, curcumin, and herbs such as rosemary and basil.").

But it took the pandemic to make it clear that anti-vaxx sentiment in America is primarily a conservative phenomenon. And once we did realize that, and realized alongside it that anti-vaxx paranoia wasn't just a matter of hippie punching, well, the media suddenly decided that it just wasn't that much fun to joke about it anymore.

Softcore Holocaust Denial is the Best Form of Allyship, Say Republicans

The eminent Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt introduced a very useful term into our lexicon when she spoke about "softcore Holocaust denial". Regular, or hardcore, Holocaust denial, is exactly what it sounds like: it claims the Holocaust didn't happen, period. Softcore Holocaust denial, by contrast, concedes that something bad happened, but seeks to minimize it. The most typical form of softcore denial is by spurious analogies -- whenever some minor public inconvenience (or even significant injustice that nonetheless falls far short of systematic genocide) is asserted to be "just like the Gestapo" or "the new Nazism", that's softcore Holocaust denial. 

Softcore Holocaust denial a form of denial because it contests and undermines the actual gravity of what happened. It has to, because once actually engages unflinchingly with the Holocaust was it is impossible to compare it to being insulted on Twitter or having your speech canceled at a public university. These things may be wrong,* but they are not the Holocaust, and the only way to allege they are the Holocaust is to willfully deny what the Holocaust actually was. Of course, the whole purpose behind softcore denialism typically is to preserve and appropriate the emotive gravity of the Holocaust and transport it to a different political context which cannot, on its own two feet, generate such weighty affect. The end result is to sap the Holocaust of its moral force, since it is now reduced to, at "worst", the sort of ordinary trials and tribulations that are a regular part of many people's political experience. But since softcore denialists are usually non-Jews, this is a "cost" they are more than willing to accept.

All of this is a run up to events in Anchorage, Alaska, where we had another iteration of 2021's most popular form of softcore denialism: comparing mask mandates and vaccination policies to the Nuremberg laws. As always, Jewish groups are unhappy to see this utterly spurious and outrageous comparison. And also as always, Republican politicians are defending themselves by lecturing Jews that actually they're doing us a solid:

“We’ve referenced the Star of David quite a bit here tonight, but there was a formal message that came out within Jewish culture about that and the message was ‘Never again,’” [Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson\ said. “That’s an ethos. And that’s what that star really means is, ‘We will not forget, this will never happen again, and I think us borrowing that from them is actually a credit to them.”

This is the face of modern antisemitism: gratuitously insulting Jews, then when called on it explaining that the insult actually is the product of the fondest of friendship. It's even worse than "I have Jewish friends" -- the antisemitic act is what supposedly establishes the friendship.

The only analogue I can think of on the left is folks who categorically deny that any form of anti-Israel discourse can be antisemitic and then respond to criticism by declaring that "what's really antisemitic is falsely conflating Israel with the Jewish people," like their denialism is doing us a great favor. The antisemitism is the allyship. It's grotesque. But one sees it more and more often, and it is positively epidemic among conservatives who simply refuse to listen to Jewish voices telling them just how offensive it is to compare COVID restrictions to Nazism.

* Of course, a huge swath of what is regularly compared to the Holocaust are not even wrongs of lesser gravity, but not wrongs at all -- COVID restrictions being a prime example.

Going Local: My Op/ed on Vaccine Mandates and the Portland Police

Since I'm now an official Portland resident, I decided to write an op/ed for my local paper, The Oregonian: "Portland Police Should Not Be Exempt from Vaccine Mandates."

As some of you know, the city of Portland attempted to impose a vaccine mandate on the Portland Police Bureau, but backed off after union officials threatened a wave of vaccinations. In general, Oregon police have been viciously opposed to vaccine mandates in the state. 

My op/ed's argument is simple. Put aside (though we shouldn't) the fact that COVID has been the most lethal killer of police officers over the last year. The same justifications which support a vaccine mandate for teachers or health workers support a mandate for police officers as well. 

Even if we accept that some government employees need not be covered by vaccine rules, the police are the last agency that should be able to claim an exemption. The police are a public-facing agency that interacts with some of the most vulnerable Portlanders in unpredictable settings on a daily basis. Unlike, say, the Oregon Driver and Motor Vehicles agency, which can enforce a mask mandate or shunt unvaccinated customers into online services, the Portland police largely cannot control when and in what contexts they interact with members of the public. They can’t decline to investigate a crime until they’re certain the criminal is wearing a mask. They can’t refuse to interview a witness until they confirm she’s not immune-suppressed.

Moreover, we can't overlook the thuggish nature of the way in which the Police Bureau responded to the prospect of a vaccine mandate. Threats of mass resignation are characteristic of police departments which simply do not accept the fact that they are under civilian control and subject to civilian oversight. The claimed entitlement to flout local authorities is flatly toxic to principles of rule of law and democratic governance.

In terms of feedback I've gotten, it's about what you'd expect. Some praise, some "why do you hate cops" (I want fewer cops to die on the job from a deadly disease, what's your view on that?), some accusations of being a "bootlicker" for BigPharma because I'm not promoting Merck-manufactured ivermectin. 

The most substantive response has been to note a provision in Oregon code which only allows vaccine mandates for certain public officials if pursuant to a state or federal order. The Portland mandate was initially justified under a state vaccine mandate issued for healthcare workers; the nominal cause of the city's retreat was clarifying guidance from the state saying the mandate "probably" didn't capture police officers. A few readers too-cutely suggested that the reason Portland police were in an uproar had nothing to do with resisting a vaccine mandate per se, but was solely because Portland was jumping ahead of the order of operations specified in state code.

This strikes me as, shall we say, implausible. Nonetheless, in my piece, I said if that provision was the only holdup, then the obvious solution is for Gov. Brown to clarify that police officers are included (or issue a separate rule to that effect). If the backlash has nothing to do with a claimed entitlement to resist lawful regulation, then the Police Bureau and Portland officers should have no problem with the Governor's office issuing such a rule. Indeed, they should welcome it since -- to reiterate -- COVID is the single deadliest threat police officers face today.

Of course, we're not naive and so we know the precise scope of Gov. Brown's orders as authorizing sources for Portland's vaccine mandate is not driving the action. Portland police don't like being told what to do -- that's the prime motivator here. But as public servants, they need to get used to it. Whether it stems initially from the city or the state, vaccine mandates for police is the right public policy, and law enforcement shouldn't be able to bully its way to an exemption.

The End of "Shared" "Sacrifice"

My 9/11 story is not particularly special. I was in high school when the news reached us that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Initially, I thought that meant some small hobbyist plane had missed an approach and smacked into the side of the building. The reality -- a full passenger jet (soon to be two) deliberately ramming the building and bringing it down -- didn't cross my mind until TVs went on and rumor became visual. Even though I lived outside DC, and so we definitely knew folks who worked at the Pentagon, I don't know of anyone who knew anyone directly who died or was hurt in the attack. We could see the smoke from across the Potomac river though.

In the days that followed, America was famously united. President Bush's approval rating -- in the doldrums due to the bitterly controversial way he became president in the first place -- skyrocketed. Everybody came together. Democrats basically stopped being an opposition party. Some of that was good. Not all of it. There is a difference between refraining from taking easy political potshots at tough but necessary sacrifices, or not exploiting understandable collective depression and angst for political gain, versus wholesale refusal to debate serious and sometimes dangerous steps taken under the guise of "national security". Nonetheless, it was undeniably inspiring to witness how, in the face of crisis, we'd at least try to unite as a nation and we'd dig in our heels and sacrifice to get us through the dark period.

I have heard some folks ask, hypothetically, what would have happened if, at the outset of COVID, Donald Trump had come out aggressively for masks and vaccines and lockdowns -- demanding a shared sacrifice and seriousness of act and purpose that befits the crisis of a global pandemic. The insinuation is that the polarities would flip -- in our hyperpartisan age, we'd see the GOP proudly endorse and embrace all of the things they now liken to tyrannical Nazism, while Democrats would be found angrily denouncing masks and spreading conspiracies about vaccines.

The first part may be true. The second isn't. We might have seen a small uptick in woo-woo Malibu sorts refusing to get vaccinated because it contains "chemicals" or something. But the experience of 9/11 suggests that the overall liberal response would have been to embrace the seriousness of the moment. Democrats wouldn't oppose vaccines just because Trump was promoting them; they wouldn't foster chaos just to stick it to the "other side". As much as lockdowns suck, they wouldn't have riled up public frustration at a necessary health measure and thrown it in Donald Trump's face.

Over two hundred times as many Americans have died from COVID as died on 9/11. If you count "excess deaths" (which includes people who didn't have COVID but whose deaths nonetheless can be attributed to it -- e.g., because a swamped health care system couldn't give them the care they needed), we're probably around a million deaths -- about a 9/11 a day, from the time pandemic started in earnest.

The degree to which "shared sacrifice" permeated the national mythos after 9/11 makes it all the more despicable how resistant so many Americans have been to anything that even approximates a "sacrifice" in response to the pandemic. I put "sacrifice" in quotes because some of the things GOP pols are literally comparing to the Gestapo are almost comical in their triviality. Wear an extra square foot of fabric on your body. Get a safe vaccine for free. I'm not saying nothing about the pandemic is difficult (parents with younger school-aged children, in particular, have taken a beating we should all acknowledge). But so much of the "sacrifice" we've asked for is so minimal, and yet people refuse to do it.

There is no "shared" sacrifice in America. There is half the country which is willing to do what's needed to get us through a crisis, and another half whose only concern is of themselves. The "unity" after 9/11 was a mirage -- it was the former group agreeing to be united in a crisis with the latter group doing what it wanted to do anyway. When the roles reversed, and the first group asked the second to actual sacrifice just a smidgeon to keep America safe, they refused to do it, and threw perhaps the largest and longest temper tantrum this nation has seen in my lifetime.

It was always despicable. In the shadow of 9/11, it's even more so.

We Could Be Done

It's the cry of exasperated parents everywhere: "If you'd stop squirming, it would be over already!"

I just read an article about a renewed surge of COVID cases in central Missouri, in an area where vaccination rates are appallingly low. It both saddened, scared, and infuriated me. Simply put: we could be done with this by now. We have the resources to get everyone vaccinated, and reach herd immunity for the few people who have genuine medical reasons not to be (no, the chain message your great aunt Margaret posted on FB does not suffice as a genuine reason to avoid vaccination).

But we're not doing it. People are still avoiding vaccination, in large part because -- let's not mince words -- one of our two political parties has converted into a death cult on this issue. Even a few years ago anti-vaxx sentiment was associated with crunchy granola types in Southern California* -- now, it's de rigueur among any remotely ambition Republican politician. The result is that people are dying who do not need to die. And while right now the vaccine does protect against the most serious symptoms of the disease, the longer we go without outright crushing COVID, the more likely that one of these new variants or mutants will evade the vaccine altogether.

One year ago, the fight against COVID was a race to minimize casualties while treatments were developed. Today, we have the tools we need to beat COVID, and the only reason we haven't is because some people remain too selfish or self-absorbed to do the bare minimum to keep their community and loved one's safe. It is such a sad, outrageous commentary on the state of the American people.

* Maybe the best pro-vaccine PSAs to run to persuade conservative heartlanders are not from doctors, or politicians, or celebrities, but just images of some stereotypical beach bum hippy complaining that vaccines are like, ruining their chakra and are the White man's medicine, and saying "don't be like them." You don't want to be some pinko commie, do you? Get vaxxed to own the libs!

It's pathetic that this might work, but it'd be worth it if it did.

Reading Lists Right in a Pandemic: A Comment on Alabama Association of Realtors and the Eviction Moratorium

Earlier this week, a district court in Alabama Association of Realtors v. Dept. of Health and Human Services invalidated the federal eviction moratorium as exceeding the power delegated to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Lower courts have split on this question -- some upholding the moratorium, others striking it down -- and unlike some I don't view the argument that the moratorium exceeds the statutorily delegated power to be wholly frivolous (at least one judge said the moratorium exceeds the federal government's constitutional authority under the commerce clause, and that argument I absolutely find wholly frivolous).

Reading the AAR opinion, though, it seemed like at least part of the court's analysis was predicated on a basic misunderstanding of the statutory text.  Warning: this is a pretty deep dive into some relatively boring grammar points. But that's a lot of what statutory interpretation is, and I think doing these dives can be helpful (I did something like this in analyzing what the Israel Anti-Boycott Act actually did, and folks seemed to find it useful).

Here's the relevant passage, from the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. § 264(a)):

The [CDC], with the approval of the Secretary, is authorized to make and enforce such regulations as in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession. For purposes of carrying out and enforcing such regulations, the [Secretary] may provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.

One source of controversy is the degree to which the second sentence limits the first -- that is, whether the regulations which "in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases," mentioned in the first section, are only things like "inspection, fumigation, disinfection [etc.]" listed in the second sentence. But accepting that they are, the eviction moratorium may still fall under the unenumerated "other measures" mentioned at the end of the sentence. On that point, the key question is what sorts of regulations can be justified as "other measures". Here's what the district court said on that question:

These enumerated measures are not exhaustive. The Secretary may provide for “other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.”  But any such “other measures” are “controlled and defined by reference to the enumerated categories before it.” These “other measures” must therefore be similar in nature to those listed in § 264(a). And consequently, like the enumerated measures, these “other measures” are limited in two significant respects: first, they must be directed toward “animals or articles,” and second, those “animals or articles” must be “found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings.” 

The court is correct that the contours of a catch-all clause at the end of a list, like "other measures", must be interpreted by the enumerated categories actually listed (this is known as the ejusdem generis canon). But in saying that the "other measures" must be directed towards "animals or articles", the court seems to misinterpret the basic grammar of the statute.

Let's look at the text again.

For purposes of carrying out and enforcing such regulations, the [Secretary] may provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.

One way of reading this list is to say the secretary is empowered to do seven separate things: (1) inspection, (2) fumigation, (3) disinfection, (4) sanitation, (5) pest extermination, (6) destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and  (7) other measures. Each of these are separate entries in the list of items which "in his judgment may be necessary" and don't otherwise modify one another. Broken down, the statute would be read like this:

For purposes of carrying out and enforcing such regulations, the [Secretary] may provide for such 

(1) inspection, 

(2) fumigation, 

(3) disinfection,

(4) sanitation, 

(5) pest extermination,

(6) destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and

(7) other measures,

 as in his judgment may be necessary.

(Notice that I didn't change the word order of the statute at all -- I just added numbering, indents, and line breaks).

But the district court seems to read this passage differently. It thinks that all the entries on the list are actually modifiers of "animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings". So the Secretary can provide for "inspection ... of animals or articles found to be so infected...", "fumigation ... of animals or articles found to be so infected...", "disinfection ... of animals or articles found to be so infected ..." and so on -- and consequently the "other measures" must also be things done to "animals or articles found to be so infected." Understood this way, the statute would be organized like this:

For purposes of carrying out and enforcing such regulations, the [Secretary] may provide for such 

(1) inspection, 

(2) fumigation, 

(3) disinfection,

(4) sanitation, 

(5) pest extermination,

(6) destruction

of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.

But this is a very awkward and I think obviously incorrect reading, for several reasons.

First, not all the elements of the list naturally modify "animals or articles found to be so infected ...". Certainly it makes sense to engage in "inspection of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection", or "destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection." But it's quite awkward to speak of engaging in "pest extermination of animals or articles ...." or "fumigation of animals or articles" (can you fumigate an animal?). That's a hint that these terms are meant to stand alone and not be attached to "animals or articles."

Second, if "destruction" is the last element of the list of things modifying "of animals found to be so infected ...", then it should be preceded by an "and" or an "or" -- something like this:

For purposes of carrying out and enforcing such regulations, the [Secretary] may provide for such 

(1) inspection, 

(2) fumigation, 

(3) disinfection,

(4) sanitation, 

(5) pest extermination, or

(6) destruction

of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, 

and other measures,

as in his judgment may be necessary.

That "or" may be small, but it is crucial -- it's what makes all of the preceding list elements relate to "animals or articles" and so generate the implication that "other measures" must connect to "animals or articles" as well. Consider the following sentence:

You can walk, swim, run for a mile, and engage in other forms of exercise to stay fit.

The most natural way of breaking that down is: 

You can

(1) walk,

(2) swim,

(3) run for a mile, and

(4) engage in other forms of exercise

to stay fit.   

"Other forms of exercise" would be interpreted to be things akin to walking, or swimming, or running for a mile -- so rowing I'd say is probably in, while "brain teasers" probably isn't.

But let's say I intended "for a mile" to modify not just "run" but all the preceding elements of the list ("walk for a mile", "swim for a mile", and "run for a mile"). At the very least, I'd need an "and" or "or" before "run": 

You can

walk, 

swim, or 

run

for a mile, 

and engage in other forms of exercise

to stay fit. 

Without that "or", the sentence is grammatically improper if it's meant to be structured this way (it'd be like if I said "You can walk, swim, run for a mile to stay fit." There the missing "or" really stands out).

That tees up the third problem -- if "and other measures" is meant to be the last item in the list of measures that are directed at "animals or articles", then the text is out of order. You can already spot that  in our exercise sentence with our awkward extra indent for "and engage in other forms of exercise". In that sentence, if we wanted "engage in other forms of exercise" to be the last element of the list of activities one can do "for a mile to stay fit," the sentence would more naturally be drafted like this:

You can

walk, 

swim, 

run,

and engage in other forms of exercise 

for a mile to stay fit. 

Written this way, then it would be sensible to say that these other forms of exercise must also be done "for a mile" (and perhaps, further limits the exercises to the sorts of exercises which can be done for a mile -- so rowing still works, but weightlifting does not). 

Likewise, if we wanted "and other measures" to be the last part of the list, all of whose components which are meant to be tied to "animals or articles", then it is in the wrong order. The text should read:

For purposes of carrying out and enforcing such regulations, the [Secretary] may provide for such 

(1) inspection, 

(2) fumigation, 

(3) disinfection,

(4) sanitation, 

(5) pest extermination,

(6) destruction,

(7) and other measures 

of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.

But the text doesn't say that (partially because the grammar doesn't work, because one can't really have "other measures of animals or articles found to be...", which is yet another reason why this reading is suspect -- really, the better way to go about it would have been to just put the "and" or "or" before "destruction"). 

Put that all together, and the district court's view that "other measures" must be "directed toward 'animals or articles ... found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings'" seems difficult to square with the text at hand.

What difference does this make? Well, recall the key question is whether an eviction moratorium is sufficiently similar to the enumerated items in the list so that it can be reasonably included under "other measures". If all elements of the list must be "directed toward 'animals or articles ... found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings'", then it's fair to conclude, as the district court did, that an eviction moratorium is rather far afield from the enumerated contents. An eviction is not an animal or an article, after all.

But if "animals or articles found to be so infected ..." is tied to only one entry in the list ("destruction", as in "destruction of animals or articles ..."), then the the overall content of the list is much broader. The relevant question becomes whether an eviction moratorium is sufficiently similar to things like inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation ... etc. etc.

So: is it? I'm not sure, honestly (as I said at the top -- I don't think the argument that the eviction moratorium is not authorized by Section 264 is utterly frivolous). Clearly, there are differences between things like inspections or sanitation versus an eviction moratorium. On the other hand, if they were the same, then we wouldn't need the "other measures" catch-all to expand the Secretary's authority. The point of having an "other measures" clause is to permit the Secretary to do things that aren't included in the explicitly enumerated list. And ensuring people have the ability to stay in place during a highly contagious pandemic doesn't strike me as being so utterly disconnected from things like "sanitation" or "inspection" that it fails the ejusdem generis canon (if the "other measures" the Secretary proposed was, say, changing the lyrics of our national anthem to "Please spare us from the dreaded 'rona!", that would be an example of such a disconnect).

Ultimately, I think the better argument is that the Secretary should get deference here. At the very least, I think the district court was wrong in claiming the text is "plain" in demonstrating the impermissibility of the eviction moratorium, and it's worrisome that the court's reasoning to the contrary seems to rely on a basic misreading of the text itself. I worry that there may be, unfortunately, a wave of judges who think of themselves as hard-nosed textualists but who don't always do a good job reading texts, and the result often is the smuggling in of ideological or partisan biases under the guise of austere, legalistic decision-making.

What are the GOP's COVID Relief Ideas?

We keep on hearing complaints from Republicans about how the COVID relief bill needs to be "bipartisan". For my part, I'm all in favor of bipartisanship. I welcome any and all Republicans to vote for the COVID relief bill that Democrats bring to the floor.

But in all seriousness, I have no intrinsic objection to incorporating Republican ideas into the COVID relief bill. The problem is I don't know what ideas Republicans have. So far, their main ask has been to request that the bill do less to help fewer people. That's not an idea, that's a contraction of the Democrats' idea. Does the GOP have any positive suggestions for things that could improve the bill?

The one actual policy idea I recall Republicans proposing in the past is tort immunity for businesses that reopen during the pandemic. That's an idea. It's a profoundly terrible idea, and Democrats absolutely should not take them up on it, but it is at least an idea -- it is not just the negation of a Democratic idea.

Do they have any others? Preferably, ones better than "businesses should be allowed to murder their employees with impunity"? Or is the "party of ideas" stuck at preferring more misery over less?

ZoomZoom Roundup

I just finished my first week teaching over Zoom (undergraduate Constitutional Law). So far, it's going decently well I think -- considerably more interactive than I had anticipated, which is a good thing. But it does take a fair amount of concentration to keep my eyes on the ball for two consecutive hours. Thank god for breakout rooms (just remember to unmute yourself when you bring people back....).

* * *

British voters think Keir Starmer's competence contrasts nicely with Boris Johnson's ineptitude. Amazing what having a leader who isn't a widely-reviled extremist can do for a left-wing party.

When it comes to whether "Jews are indigenous to Israel", I'm less interested in the tiresome Twitter brouhaha than I am in this really thoughtful essay on the subject in Tikkun Magazine.

Long interview with Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe on occasion of his retirement. Come for the stories of him growing up in Shanghai as a Jewish refugee, stay for the tale of how the Supreme Court Justices determined whether movies were "obscene".

A very interesting article by Roseanna Summers in the Yale Law Journal asking what everyday people think counts as "consent".

I'd much rather focus on Zach Banner than on DeSean Jackson, if it's all the same to you.

We could have beaten coronavirus, but unfortunately one of our two political parties has turned into a death cult. July is going to be rough.

Word is that Washington's football team soon won't be named after a racial slur.

Holocaust Trivialization Leads To Holocaust Mockery

A recent news story reports on two Minnesota high school students who released a TikTok video titled "Me and the boys on the way to camp." It was making fun of the Holocaust.

Elsewhere in the country, Republican and conservative leaders have gotten very trigger-happy comparing coronavirus restrictions to the Holocaust. An Idaho state representative insisted that stay-at-home measures were "no different" than Hitler sending Jews to extermination camps. The Colorado House Minority Leader said that Governor Jared Polis' (who is Jewish) efforts reflected a "Gestapo-like mentality".  We all saw the pictures of right-wing protesters in Michigan holding signs saying "Heil Witmer" [sic] with a swastika on them (referring to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer). There are other examples.

These are not the same thing. But they are related. The latter is a form of Holocaust trivialization, where it gets employed in opposition to political moves that fall clearly and obviously short of concentration camps and mass extermination.* The effect of Holocaust trivialization is to make the Holocaust utterly ordinary and mundane; unremarkable save for how it can pack an emotional punch in ordinary and mundane political debates. And once the Holocaust is ordinary and mundane, one can do ordinary, mundane things with. Leverage it in attack ads. Use it as a bit of effective (if perhaps hyperbolic) rhetoric. And, of course, mock it. Ordinary and mundane events in the political sphere are legitimate subjects of parody and mockery. It is the Holocaust's status as something distinct from the ordinary, in a separate class, that justifies keep it insulated from such insults. Take that away, and why shouldn't it get its share of snipes and jabs? There is a direct line from trivializing the Holocaust to mocking it. The kids in Minnesota and the elected officials in the GOP are not doing the same thing -- but there is a familial lineage.

The past few years have seen the GOP talk a very big game about what great friends they are the Jews. They say it every election season, of course, and they always put on such a display of hurt and confusion when that friendship isn't reciprocated. Well, here's part of the reason why. Given the slightest opportunity, they'll cheapen our genocide in service of a destructive, paranoid, and frankly inane political agenda. They won't care in the slightest the damage it does to the Jewish community. Hell, I doubt they even notice it. But we do.

* Here is what I wrote, incidentally, on comparisons of  immigrant detention camps in the U.S. to the Holocaust. I did not and do not like them, though in that case at the very least there is non-frivolous basis for the comparison (though not on the axis of systematic extermination) which made me feel as if litigating the comparison was of subsidiary importance to keeping our eye on opposing the underlying policy. By contrast, there is no remotely plausible basis for comparing stay-at-home protocols aimed at fighting a pandemic to Nazism. It can do nothing but trivialize the Holocaust.

It's Coronatime! Roundup

While I'm dubious that there are actually large numbers of people who will consciously avoid Corona beer because of coronavirus, I still can't fathom what their PR people are going to do with this. It's like all those apartment complexes called "The Isis" -- you hate to see pretty word get ruined like that.

* * *

Trump campaign threatens the operating licenses of stations which run ads critical of Trump's handling of the coronavirus (the ad is damn good too). The real tragedy is that, with college campuses largely closed, there probably isn't some 19-year old Oberlin kid with a stupid protest we can all point to as "the real threat to freedom of speech in America."

Hobby Lobby CEO decides God wants him to keep his stores open, but doesn't really care about giving his workers paid sick leave.

Democrats made the coronavirus bill that passed the Senate much, much better than it was at the start.

Billionaires are ready for American workers to start working again, goddammit!

Technically ex-Rep. Brenda Jones (it's complicated) is seeking a rematch against "Squad" darling Rep. Rashida Tlaib. One might think Jones' unabashed stanning of Louis Farrakhan would present a problem given literally every Jewish opinion piece on antisemitism that's run over the past three years; but you'd be surprised (or not) at how, er, "open-minded" some folks are suddenly capable of being given the opportunity to take out Tlaib (Jones' ongoing praise and admiration for Farrakhan and his organization vs. a solitary article written by Tlaib in an NoI publication 15 years ago -- these probably wash out, right?). The ultimate kicker: Tlaib almost certainly will crush Jones anyway, so all this selling out of deep-seated principles will be for naught.

DOJ intercedes in court to argue that allowing trans women to compete in women's sports (and, one imagines, trans men to compete in men's sports?) is not required by and may indeed violate Title IX.

UK Jewish Community Hit Especially Hard by Coronavirus

In the United Kingdom, Jews represent approximately .3% of the population. They also currently comprise nearly 5% of all coronavirus deaths.

Obviously, my heart goes out to them. But I can't help but think that one of the cruel ironies of antisemitism is that, if Jews were disproportionately unlikely to be victims, it would be proof that we're behind the virus, and if we're disproportionately likely to be victims, it would be proof that we're spreading the virus. There's no winning in the antisemitic imagination.

Keeping the Curve Flat

Much of the Bay Area, including Berkeley, is under "shelter-in-place" guidelines at least through early April. It's basically semi-compulsory social distancing: we're not locked in our houses, but we're only supposed to leave for grocery shopping, medical services, or to go on a walk (six feet distant from any fellow pedestrians).

The goal of all this is to "flatten the curve" of new coronavirus infections. It won't stop new infections, but it will spread them out so the medical system isn't overwhelmed.

I'm supremely lucky in that shelter-in-place isn't a huge burden on me -- I work from home anyway, and I'm enough of an introvert that I frankly don't leave the apartment as often as I should even under the best of circumstances. But society-wide this sort of living arrangement will be tough to maintain over a long period of time. Yet I don't have a clear sense of what sorts of conditions would signify it's safe to lift the guidelines and let public events (anything from sports to school) proceed again. Even if the guidelines work to flatten the curve, wouldn't it get pointy again the moment people started congregating in masses again?

Put differently: shelter-in-place and social distancing rules are a holding pattern. But it's not clear to me at least what we're holding for. Anybody have an answer to that?

The Epidemiology of Antisemitism

The New York Times has hired conservative columnist Bret Stephens, lately of the Wall Street Journal, to provide an additional conservative perspective to the Grey Lady. Controversy immediately erupted, first over Stephens status as a climate-change denier, and then more recently over a 2016 column that characterized antisemitism as "the disease of  the Arab mind" (it came in the context of an Egyptian Olympian who refused to shake the hand of his Israeli competitor).

NYT Cairo Bureau chief kicked off the discussion with this tweet:

Not cool: new NYT columnist @BretStephensNYT once wrote about the "disease of the Arab mind". https://t.co/duylYvCQSd (h/t @hahellyer)

— Declan Walsh (@declanwalsh) April 15, 2017

And his colleague Max Fisher succinctly articulating what I think is our legitimate squeamishness at hearing an entire group of people characterized as possessing a "disease of the mind."

@declanwalsh @BretStephensNYT I guess we just all have to agree to disagree as to whether it is acceptable or correct to call racial groups pathologically "diseased."

— Max Fisher (@Max_Fisher) April 16, 2017

Now, I've responded to a Bret Stephens column once, and it was not one I was impressed by -- a tiresome bit of neocolonialist claptrap seeking to establish which peoples are sufficiently civilized to deserve self-determination. So I don't have any particular interest in defending Stephens per se.

That said, this controversy did interest me because of an angle I don't think I've yet seen explored: the widespread literature on the "epidemiological" approach to racism. I first came across this view in an article by prominent Critical Race Theorist Charles Lawrence III, but it is hardly restricted to him. It is a perspective that is at least familiar to anyone who spends significant time in the literature on contemporary racism and prejudice.

The epidemiological view treats racism as, well, a disease -- a public health crisis that demands intervention. Among the motivations for articulating racism in this way is the belief that an epidemiological approach steps away from the focus on conscious choices (we don't choose to be infected) and with it, the politics of blame (we don't view cancer patients as being morally inferior because they have a disease). Rather, thinking of racism as a disease channels our focus onto (a) the devastating social consequences that can occur when racism is widespread and unchecked, and (b) what we can do to check the spread and, eventually, find a cure.

As it turns out, the use of the epidemiological approach for antisemitism has deep roots -- deeper, perhaps, than its use to analyze racism. Re-reading Lawrence's article while writing this post, I discovered that it actually contains a significant discussion of antisemitism as disease, as an epidemic -- and one that he investigates through the specific case of Black antisemitism right alongside the parallel case of Jewish racism.  Even more interestingly, a 1949 book by Carey McWilliams on "Anti-Semitism in America" claims to have found "hundreds" of examples of antisemitism being defined in epidemiological terms -- a "theme" that runs through descriptions of what antisemitism is. Among the statements he found was the claim that antisemitism is, simply, "a disease of Gentile peoples."

Under this view, then, the rhetoric of epidemiology and disease is meant to be gentler -- not stigmatizing to those it labels, not concerned with separating out the bad people from the good. But as Fisher observes, there is at the very least another set of tropes associated with "disease" rhetoric that is not so benign. Under the latter usage, "disease" connotes those groups which are dirty and mutated; those who need to be isolated, sequestered, or purged. Rhetoric of various outgroups -- including Jews, Arabs, immigrants of all backgrounds -- being "diseased" and therefore dangerous has a been a staple of racist fearmongering for generations. Again, it is not for nothing that we squirm when we hear talk of a group being "diseased".

I don't think that Stephens was intentionally referring to the literature on the epidemiology of racism. But leaving his particular case aside, here's my question: Do the concerns of Fisher et al mean that the epidemiological approach is inherently tainted and must be abandoned? If not, what interventions are necessary so as to use the method (and its necessarily attendant rhetoric of disease, infection, and so on) without triggering these problematic associations?

My familiarity with the epidemiological approach gives me some sympathy towards it -- I think it is at least a useful way of thinking through how racism and antisemitism operate, how they spread, and how they should be combatted. Yet at the same time, my familiarity with how rhetoric of disease is used to degrade and dehumanize means I am sympathetic to the concerns that it would do so here. The questions in the previous paragraph are those made entirely in earnest, and I in turn invite earnest replies.

"!!!!" ... And Let Me Also Say: "!!!!"

Holy schmoly, Todd Kincannon (former executive director of the South Carolina GOP) wants to execute anyone who's ever been in contact with Ebola. This is part of a stream of horror that begins with "People with Ebola in the US need to be humanely put down immediately," continues through "The people of Africa are to blame for why it's so shitty. They could stop eating each other and learn calculus at any time," and concludes by stating "We should put Wendy Davis' vagina in charge of the Ebola outbreak. It will kill all of them without mercy and go to Nordstrom's afterwards."

And you know it's bad when "We need to be napalming villages from the air right now" doesn't even make my top three. My goodness.

Ginsburg Being Treated For Cancer

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is being treated for recently-diagnosed Pancreatic cancer. The cancer was discovered early, but obviously as a prior cancer survivor Justice Ginsburg's risks are heightened. Hopefully, she'll overcome this one as well -- I've been looking forward to many more years with her on the bench.

What's in your Meat?

We have no idea, and thanks to the Bush administration we legally can't find out:

A federal appeals court has ruled that the government can prohibit meat packers from testing their animals for mad cow disease. Because the Agriculture Department tests only a small percentage of cows for the deadly disease, a Kansas meatpacker, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wanted to test all of its cows, but the government says it cannot. Larger meat companies worry that if Creekstone is allowed to perform the test and advertise its meat as safe, they could be forced to do the expensive test, too. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said restricting the test was allowable.

Via Ezra Klein; see also Dean Baker wondering where all the free-marketers went.