If you are voting for Democrats, you can leave now. This isn’t for you.
If you are voting for Republicans, or not voting at all. Stick around. I have a question for you.
What the hell are you thinking?
Do you hear the words, “Democracy is on the line” and chuckle? Don’t. It is.
There are more than three hundred people running for election who believe the Big Lie that Donnie Trump won in 2020. He didn’t. Sixty judges and scores of election officials, many of them Republican, said he didn’t. There is hard physical evidence that HE knows he didn’t. NO evidence of improper voting that changed the outcome of the election was discovered anywhere.
More than one million Americans have died of complications of Covid-19. Can you wrap your arms around that number? Does it seem possible? Everyone I know has been touched by Covid one way or another. I lost my mother-in-law. And it didn’t have to be this way.
American is in many ways like Australia. As reported by the New York Times (the link is probably behind the Times’ paywall, but it is excellent and worthy of credit), both countries are English-speaking democracies with similar demographic profiles. In Australia and in the United States, the median age is thirty-eight. Roughly 86 percent of Australians live in urban areas, compared with 83 percent of Americans. Yet Australia’s Covid death rate sits at one-tenth of America’s, putting the nation of twenty-five million people (with around 7,500 deaths) near the top of global rankings in the protection of life.
Soldier. Diplomat. Politician. America’s First African American Secretary of State. America’s First African American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Colin Powell spent a lifetime setting “firsts.”
President Biden ordered flags flown at half-staff until October 22 in remembrance of Powell, calling him “a patriot of unmatched honor and dignity.”
“Colin embodied the highest ideals of both warrior and diplomat. He was committed to our nation’s strength and security above all,” Mr. Biden added. “Time and again, he put country before self, before party, before all else — in uniform and out — and it earned him the universal respect of the American people.”
There appears to be hope for the Internet. Perhaps that means there is hope for us all.
Coming off the challenging year 2020, and considering the crisis of January 6, 2021, it is often hard to find hope anywhere. But take a look at this. The picture above is a picture of Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont who runs as an independent but caucuses with the Democrats, ran for president as a Democrat and is one of the leaders of that party’s progressive wing.
Sanders is pictured at the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States. He is alone in his folding chair, socially distanced due to the Covid pandemic, dressed in a heavy coat and oversized mittens due to the cold of the January day in Washington D.C.
Funny as the picture is by itself, what is amazing is what has been derived from it. For the few readers who might not know, a “meme,” pronounced “MEEM,” is defined by Merriam-Webster as “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.”
Many memes rocket around the world on the Internet in the form of a composite photograph, taking the image of a person or thing and dropping it into another photograph where it is clearly out of place.
And so we arrive at the Bernie meme. Proof that there is hope that our sense of humor has survived the trying times. Even Senator Sanders has noted his approval and plans to make use of the phenomenon to raise funds for charitable causes.
Update– CNBC is reporting that “Sen. Bernie Sanders said sales of merchandise featuring a viral image of the Vermont independent wearing mittens at the inauguration of President Biden raised a whopping $1.8 million for charities in just five days.”
And so, without further ado, a gallery of Bernie Memes, with thanks to the unknown creators.
The Daily Mail produced the wonderful graphic above to go with a story published October 3, 2020. The photo was taken on September 26 and shows the crowd gathered in the White House Rose Garden as Donald Trump introduced Amy Coney Barrett as his nominee to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, filling the seat which became vacant upon the death on September 18 of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
In its October 3 story the Mail reported that nine of the people who attended this event had, at that point, tested positive for the Covid-19 virus. As the picture demonstrates, few of the 100 or so people who attended wore face masks, and all were sitting close together. On October 9, Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, labeled this as a “Superspreader event.”
An October 5 poll report said more than 9 out of 10 Americans wear a face mask when they leave home. But that clearly does not include Donald Trump, our Covid denying superspreader-in-chief. Nor apparently does it include Amy Coney Barrett, whose nomination was rammed through the Senate on a strict partisan vote and who took her seat on October 27. America’s newest associate justice wants to be sure you can attend superspreader events too.
There is perhaps nothing more shocking than the lies Donald Trump and his surrogates on the campaign trail tell about the administration’s disastrous response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The virus has crippled the nation and killed at this writing 230,000 Americans. For the latest in the death toll, check the site of Johns Hopkins University Medicine.
The Covid Disinformation Campaign
On March 26, 2020, Trump said, “Nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened.” But the record shows he was warned repeatedly, first about the generic pandemic threat and then about this specific threat itself. You can watch his string of denials as they happened for yourself.
Trump was handed a pandemic game plan by the Obama national security team titled, “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.” The Obamas even staged a crisis management exercise as part of the transition. Trump ignored the drill and the plan. Trump disbanded the national security team in place to handle just this kind of crisis. Trump withdrew American epidemiologists already on the ground in China who could have provided early intelligence on the spread of the virus. Trump ignored a 2017 Pentagon report on the impact a pandemic could have on American military readiness.
How do you feel?
Frightened? Anxious? Confused? All of the above? Join the club.
SpaceX’s Dragon Demo-2 flight has ended with the successful return to earth of NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley after spending more than two months on the International Space Station. As I wrote at the time of their launch, this flight marks the return to America of the ability to send humans into space.
After the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2000, Americans who wanted to go the the ISS had to buy a seat on a Russian rocket. NASA began, during the Obama-Biden administration, what is called the “Commercial Crew” program effectively outsourcing this task to private industry. SpaceX is the first to successfully demonstrate this capability. This flight was named “Demo-2.” The first regularly contracted flight of the Crew Dragon is set to take four astronauts, three Americans and one Japanese, to the space station later this year.
As they left the capsule Behnken and Hurley thanks the SpaceX team. The SpaceX communicator said, “Thanks for riding SpaceX.” For America’s space program, a new day has begun.
Scott Gurvey 