Author: Brendan Skwire

Over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Scott Lemieux highlights some NY Magazine (paywall) reporting on the impact of Bidenomics:

[I]t rendered employers more desperate for hired help to keep pace with rising demand. Second, it enabled workers to accrue a cushion of personal savings — and therefore the power to hold out for more-favorable employment opportunities without risking hunger or eviction. In July 2021, America’s unemployment rate was roughly two points higher than it had been on the eve of the pandemic, yet the median worker’s checking-account balance was higher than it had been before COVID.

The result is an exceptionally tight labor market. In August, the U.S. had more job openings than at any time in history. Employers that had refused to interview “unskilled” workers started “offering gift cards to applicants who show up for interviews, along with sign-on and retention bonuses, and sometimes immediate employment before drug screenings and background checks,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

On a related note, Slate reports that after years (decades) of being ghosted by potential employers, job seekers are now returning the favor—and HR doesn’t like it one little bit.

In today’s topsy-turvy job market, a strange new thing is happening. Employers are increasingly grumbling about job seekers “ghosting” them. These job candidates just don’t show up for their scheduled interviews. And in some cases, new hires accept a job only to disappear…

Employers, unsurprisingly, do not like this. It’s rude, they say, and unprofessional. And sure, it is. But employers have been doing this to workers for years, and their hand-wringing didn’t start until the tables were turned.

For years I’ve fielded questions from job seekers frustrated at being ghosted by job interviewers. They would take time off from work, maybe buy a new suit, spend time interviewing—often doing second, third, and even fourth rounds of interviews—and then never hear from the employer again. They’d politely inquire about the status of their application and just get silence back. Or they would make time for a phone interview—scheduled at the employer’s behest—and the call would never come. When they’d try to get in touch about rescheduling … crickets. It’s been so endemic that I’ve long advised job seekers to expect never to hear back from employers, and to simply see it as an unavoidable part of job searching.

But now that the situation is finally reversed, oh the schadenfreude!

Schadenfreude indeed! There’s a truly enjoyable Reddit thread on this very topic—especially if you’re one of the millions of American workers who’s applied for a job, jumped through a dozen different hoops, and didn’t get so much as a basic “we received your application” in response. I’m one of them and stories like these resonate strongly with me.

About 5 or 6 years ago I had a job offer. I accepted. I followed up repeatedly, but was ghosted.

2 months later, I receive an interview offer from the same company. I showed up hoping to find out what happened. When the interview started, I showed the offer email I’d received. The interviewer was not surprised.

I was sent to do the onboarding paperwork at the job site. They said they’d contact me with start date/time. I was ghosted again.

I ended up accepting a different job and began working there. About a month later, I received a call from that first place asking when I was coming to work. I told them what happened.

“Thanks for wasting our time.” Click.

Sure. I wasted your time.

[…]

I made it to the panel interview part of hiring with a large auto manufacturer to work in their technology department. This was during their HQ relocation from California to Texas. After the panel interview, the HR recruiter and I had a call discussing salary and benefits, but was not finalized at that time. Was told would continue on after the panel had completed their interviews.

After reaching out multiple times email and phone, I realized I was ghosted, accepted it and moved on.

Over the next 6 months to a year, I recieved multiple contacts through LinkedIn from other recruiters and headhunters trying to fill this position that I was a “perfect” candidate for. If they only knew…I ignored them all as I had moved on. Just this last month I recieved communication from this company’s own HR/recruiting platform asking if I was interested in a job posting.

[…]

I did a zoom interview for a job over a month ago with the manager and new regional manager that decided to stay hidden which was fucking weird. They asked me the regular bullshit, and the new regional manager’s contribution was to ask me what fucking super hero I want to be. I agree to take the job, and now we’re doing a background.

Fast forward well over a month and I cleared my background check, but obviously I took another job because they fucking ghosted me. The idea that these dipshits think they have carte blanche with prospective employees is beyond laughable. I feel sorry for whatever sucker takes that job.

[…]

This is my company. It took 2 months of them searching for another person to help our team with the insane volume of work before I decided to see what the fuck was posted on the job search platforms. On LinkedIn it showed that over 800! people had applied. When I went to my boss and ask him wtf is going on he simply shrugged with a “we’re having interviews but no one clicks with us yet”. Bs, I later found out that they were offering lower than industry standard wages, and that candidates simply declined such offers (it took 7 months to fill the position).

And so on and so forth. Back when I was still blogging at my place, I had an entire category titled “Great Cover Letters That Don’t Get Jobs.” I have written hundreds of them. When I was on unemployment in Tennessee, I had to send out something like 3 letters/week for work just to keep getting my measly $250/week or whatever they were paying. The vast majority got no response at all, although I did get a few rejections—issued MORE THAN A YEAR after I’d applied. On one occasion, I was called in to interview for a position that I learned, mid-interview, didn’t even exist—they just wanted to see if my personality was a good fit if, by chance, they were hiring at a later date. If I had a nickel for every time I didn’t get so much as an automated acknowledgement for a job application, I’d be able to buy a yacht (or at least have a substantial pile of nickels).

All of these letters took HOURS to research and write. I’d target the letters to the position/employer, and then tailor my résumé accordingly, only to get ghosted or otherwise ignored despite my work history and qualifications. I know for a fact that that’s SOP for most businesses. For example, when I worked at the University of Pennsylvania, I learned the ONLY reason HR even posted “open jobs” was for the appearance of living up to EOE guidelines; in reality they had already chosen who they were hiring (usually an internal candidate), but kept up the front anyway. One of the reasons I went into teaching was that it meant I’d have a guaranteed job—because, for real, I can’t write those letters anymore. I just can’t. It simply got to the point where I’d see an opportunity show up in my email, and I’d just freeze up. I can’t call it a panic attack, exactly—more like an ennui attack. Am I really going to sit here and write another one of these fucking things? And then both upload my résumé AND then paste it in line by line, as required [if you haven’t had to search for a job recently, you’ll be delighted to learn this time-wasting redundancy is a real thing]. And then complete the pointless psychological test to see if I’m the right personality for the company? And then agree to piss in a cup if they require it, even though it’s just a shitty data entry job? And then send it out to some anonymous “HR Manager,” because they specifically say “no calls?” And then send a follow-up letter a few weeks later, and never receive a response to that either? Am I going to do this AGAIN?

This is something I dealt with for YEARS. So yes, I really DO enjoy a nice cupful of HR tears

I work in the public sector and we are seeing plenty of candidates disappearing. Although we have worked on pay the last few years, we are not competitive. Our governing body became very used to the job market conditions during the recession and for several years after where the employer had all the leverage. They are only now beginning to realize how the roles have reversed.

For example, we have been trying to fill one of our entry-level positions for the last year:

First go-around: no qualified applicants

Second go-around: four qualified applicants, only two showed for interviews. Offered the job to both and they declined.

Third time’s the charm, right: We hired somebody and on their third day they didn’t show up to work. Never contacted us and wouldn’t return our calls.

Now we’re in the middle of try number four. We have a conditional offer but the candidate has pushed the start date back twice. We’ll see.

Oh boohoohoo, cry me a river—because (via Slate) “given how many jobs I took the time and resources to apply to, research and show up for an interview who then never bothered to thank me for my time or let me know they filled the position, I can’t even summon up a little bit of empathy for this.”

Is it fair or nice or professional for prospective employees to ghost potential employers? Probably not—but it’s also sauce for the gander. And, it may not even be deliberate—as one of the people interviewed by Slate asked, “If it’s unprofessional and rude to ghost someone in business communications, then why have employers been doing just this for years? It seems perfectly rational to conclude that since they have been ghosting applicants for years, therefore ghosting is normal and acceptable in business.”

And that’s the bottom line, isn’t it? If potential employer X isn’t willing to tell potential employee Y that they’re not qualified/not hired/better luck next time, why should potential employee Y tell potential employer X they’re not interested in the job or found something else.

Employers decided it was a poor use of time to answer every applicant. Those looking for work shouldn’t be excoriated for engaging in the same time-saving behavior. Give people respect and they’ll give you respect back

Earlier this year, I was visiting friends in Tucson, Arizona. as someone who really enjoys regional fast food/burger joints, I was excited to finally have a chance to try In-N-Out Burger. One of the reasons—believe it or not—was that I’d heard that In-N-Out paid their workers better than your average McDonalds, although a quick google search shows that more recently they may have violated California’s labor laws.

Sadly, it looks like I won’t be going back to In-N-Out anytime soon, and not just because I live in Vermont.

Popular California burger chain In-N-Out is refusing to comply with San Francisco’s mandate that restaurants check vaccine cards before allowing customers to dine indoors — a move that resulted in a temporary shutdown of the city’s only location.

“We refuse to become the vaccination police for any government,” Arnie Wensinger, the company’s chief legal and business officer, said in a statement shared with The Washington Post. “It is unreasonable, invasive, and unsafe to force our restaurant Associates to segregate Customers into those who may be served and those who may not, whether based on the documentation they carry, or any other reason.”

The clash comes as the country remains divided about pandemic policies, with vaccination mandates in the public and private sectors prompting unrest and firings. San Francisco, like New York City, requires customers to be vaccinated before they can dine inside, and restaurants are responsible for checking cards at the door…

But Wensinger says San Francisco is overstepping. The burger chain, he said, believes in the “highest form of customer service,” and that means allowing customers to eat indoors regardless of their vaccination status.

“We fiercely disagree with any government dictate that forces a private company to discriminate against customers who choose to patronize their business,” Wensinger said. “This is clear governmental overreach and is intrusive, improper, and offensive.”

OK, first of all, In-N-Out’s stance is kind of bullshit. Diners deserve to be safe, and rather than focusing on segregation and discrimination—which, deliberately or not, conflates public health ordinances with the Jim Crow South—In-N-Out should perhaps consider that their diners shouldn’t have to congregate with potentially contagious customers. Discrimination is generally predicated on circumstances out of the victim’s control—you don’t choose to be Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, Latino, LGBTQ, or a woman. It’s who you are.

Exclusion from certain places and activities because of a personal choice not to get vaccinated against a highly contagious virus isn’t discrimination, any more than a sign reading “No shirt, no shoes, no service” constitutes discrimination against nudists. Laws that prohibit smoking in restaurants and or while filling up your gas tank don’t discriminate against tobacco users. You can be as naked as you want, just not in the 7-11. Smoke as many Marlboros as you like, just not in the Applebee’s or at the Sunoco. And just a reminder—not that anyone reading this blog needs to hear it—Covid-19 isn’t the flu or a cold. It’s disease that can kill you and your loved ones, and in a truly horrible manner. Excluding people who refuse to get vaccinated is no different than these and other similar mandates.

At the same time, having seen plenty of videos of diners and shoppers throwing violent tantrums over mask mandates at their local restaurant or big box store—including leveling physical threats at employees or deliberately coughing on other customers—I am sympathetic to In-N-Out’s claim that it’s not safe for their employees to be checking vaccination cards. The workers shouldn’t have to confront potential lunatics screaming about their freedumbs.

But San Francisco’s mandate at least begins to mitigate that kind of confrontation, by giving In-N-Out and their employees the wiggle room they need to enforce such a rule. “We wish we didn’t have to do this, either—blame the big, bad government.” So I’m not entirely buying In-N-Out’s objections.

That said, a better approach to making employees check vaccine cards—which is time consuming for both staff and customers, and yeah, sort of invasive—would be the kind of vaccine passport I use every time I visit my son, who lives in Montréal (although the website says it’s for citizens, I had no trouble getting signed up).

A person who uses VaxiCode Verif to verify your proof of vaccination cannot see your personal data. In addition to a “green” (adequately protected) or “red” (not adequately protected), VaxiCode Verif only displays the full name of the holder of the proof of vaccination. No other identifying or medical information is displayed. The person verifying the proof will not have access to your date of birth, which vaccines you have received or your COVID-19 screening test results.

Moreover, no information is saved by the telephone or tablet that scanned it at the time of verifying the QR code on your proof of vaccination. Your information will be displayed for 10 seconds. No information is transmitted. There is no history of verifications of proof and no one can find out this information. Therefore, it is not possible to check your verifications, your movements or where you presented your proof.

Everywhere you go in Montreal, outside of some essential services like the grocery, VaxiCode is required to enter.

A vaccine passport is not required for access to essential services like education (primary, secondary, post-secondary).

See the places and activities requiring the vaccination passport according to the sector of activity:

Health and social services
Sports and physical activities
Outdoor events and festivals
Performance venues, cinemas, sports venues
Bars and restaurants
Arcades, theme parks, amusement parks and centres, recreation centres, and water parks
Other areas and locations

Teachers, students, and chaperones are exempt from the requirement to present their vaccination passport while on a school trip.

Customer registers currently required at certain locations or activities will be maintained to facilitate contact tracing.

You can visit the link to see just how many places and activities require proof of vaccination. The Quebec government, led by the otherwise awful CAQ, is NOT fucking around. And neither, so it seems, is the rest of Canada. Even provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan—where vaccine rates are extremely low, and the political culture can be described as Trumpist—are requiring vaccine passports of some kind of another.

Quebec made the VaxiCode design really easy to use. When the border opened and I was able to start visiting again, I didn’t have the app. So everywhere I went, I had to scroll through my phone for a photo of my vaccine card, then pull out my drivers license or passport to show that I was who I said I was. Not the biggest burden in the world, but also kind of a pain in the ass. Scroll, scroll, scroll—there it is! No wait, that’s not it. Dammit. Ah, here’s my card. You can almost see the line building behind me as other patrons waited for me to get my act together.

With the app—which is essentially a giant QR code—the person working the door simply scans the pass, and in I go. It takes less than five seconds. It’s convenient, and I gotta say the security of knowing you’re surrounded only by other vaccinated people really makes me breathe easier (no pun intended).

Several US states, including New York, New Jersey, Hawaii, Louisiana and more, already have some form of vaccine passport (some are voluntary only). Twenty US states have banned those kind of passports entirely, and you can probably guess which ones. Frankly, I think it should be federally mandated, but that probably gets crosswise with the Constitution—and would almost certainly cause a right wing meltdown that would make Chernobyl look like a walk in the park (not that anyone should pay any attention to them, but that’s how we live now).

Bottom line, for me at least: In-N-Out Burger needs to get with the program, and stop pretending that public health protections aren’t a form of discrimination. At the same time, California should provide a standard app like Quebec’s VaxiCode to make the confirmation process smoother, faster, less invasive and standardized so companies like In-N-Out have less justification to throw temper tantrums.

One of the worst aspects of the Trump Era has proven to be the ongoing acts of performative stupidity by right wingers, in order to “own the libs.” I wrote a little bit about this last week, taking specific note of Breitbart writer John Nolte’s ridiculous theory that “the organized left is doing everything in its power to convince Trump supporters NOT to get the life-saving Trump vaccine…by using reverse psychology to trick Trump supporters.” This is because of Cleek’s Law, although Nolte doesn’t use the term: what it boils down to is that if liberals say “up,” conservatives reflexively say “down,” even if they know they’re wrong. So, you see, if the Democrats want people to take the vaccine, the only option available to the right is to refuse—you know, kind of like a two-year old. It’s little more than a clever plot by Democrats to kill Republicans by leveraging their idiocy rank tribalism.

Refusing to get vaccinated against Covid-19 is the most obvious form of this performative stupidity. Prevention is for pussies, after all—so conservatives and anti-vaxxers are willing to try anything to rid themselves of Covid once they inevitably get infected. Instead of a free and FDA-approved vaccine, they take horse dewormer and hydroxychloroquine. They inhale hydrogen peroxide, or take vitamin C and zinc. Many rely on an army of prayer warriors, which has to be the worst army in the world because they never seem to win. Of course, when you’re fighting God’s will—whenever one of these poor, deluded fools dies, that’s how their families explain it, there’s never any reflecting on what THEY could have done differently—the deck is stacked, what with the omnipotence and all.

Today, I offer two highly entertaining—or incredibly sad, depending on your perspective—items in the ongoing Saga of Stupid.

Item! You’ll be delighted to learn that the Deniers have discovered a NEW quack cure for the deadly virus: urine therapy. Apparently it’s a real thing, as gross as it sounds. As a friend of mine quipped, “I guess we’re rapidly approaching real life ‘eat shit and die’ levels of insanity,” which sounds funny until you consider that some moron in Trumplandia will almost certainly suggest it, and then they’ll all sit there with actual shit-eating grins on their faces, insisting through persistent wheezing and a hacking cough that if they only ingest enough of their own waste products they’ll never end up on the vent. Speaking for myself, I have never felt so owned in my life. You should also feel owned as well—which is far worse than your breath smelling like peepee, right? Can I get an “Amen?”

Item! Bloviating right-wing radio host with backpfeifengesicht syndrome Dennis Prager claims he deliberately went around hugging people in a deliberate effort to catch Covid-19.

“I have engaged with strangers, constantly hugging them, taking photos with them knowing that I was making myself very susceptible to getting covid,” he said. “Which is — indeed, as bizarre as it sounded — what I wanted, in the hope I would achieve natural immunity and be taken care of by therapeutics.”

Contradicting studies and recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Prager told his audience that natural immunity was more effective than getting the vaccine, saying a covid infection was “what I hoped for the entire time.” The CDC recommends that people get vaccinated even after contracting the virus — officials point to an August study that showed unvaccinated people who already had covid were twice as likely to be reinfected as those who had been fully vaccinated after contracting the virus.

It’s a well-known alternative fact that the CDC is an agent of the Deep State, and thus a bunch of libs who must be owned, so it’s not surprising that Prager is making this claim whether it’s true or not. As the Post notes,

Prager is one of several conservative radio show hosts to spread misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines, including some who later died of the virus.

In the past three months, at least five right-wing radio show hosts, all of whom discouraged their listeners from getting the vaccine, have died of covid-19. The most recent was Bob Enyart, 62, who in the weeks leading to his infection told listeners to boycott the shots while pushing the debunked claim that the coronavirus vaccines are made from aborted fetus cells.

It would be churlish (if understandable) to wish death on the elderly and out-of-shape Mr. Prager, even though his lies have probably put several of his listeners in the hospital and may have even killed a few. It’s not like he cares about anyone but himself, including his fellow MAGA clowns. In fact, just a few days before Prager came up positive, he’d been out doing appearances with Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl, whose campaign told the local NBC affiliate that they didn’t know anything about Prager’s plan to get infected with Covid, and were now “reaching out to all those who attended to make sure they are informed,” and encouraging them to get tested.

So I wish Mr. Prager luck with his (supposed) self-inflicted battle with coronavirus. If all else fails, Dennis—after you’ve shoved a UV light up your ass or choked down a megadose of horse dewormer—why not try a nice glass of fresh, warm piss?

At the very least, you’ll be owning the libs yet again.

Colin Powell, lying liar who helped spread lies about Iraq’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction, is dead. Although he regretted his role in spreading the lies that led hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women, and children to an early and violent death, that doesn’t make them any less dead. Let’s roll the tape!

Also, too.

Powell’s lies followed him to his grave. Even the Washington Post, of which you’ll read more in a few lines, noted Powell’s disgraceful tap dancing in their hagiography obituary.

Gen. Powell harbored deep misgivings about the timing of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the size of the invading U.S. force. But he ultimately supported the action, lending his considerable credibility to making the public case for war. It was a move he later regretted…

Throughout 2002, Gen. Powell continued trying to slow the march to war with Iraq, warning Bush in a meeting in August that an invasion could destabilize the Middle East and shackle the United States with a great reconstruction burden.

“You break it, you own it,” he recalled saying.

But Gen. Powell eventually threw his substantial public credibility behind the decision to attack Iraq, agreeing to Bush’s request to present the U.S. case for war to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003.

His 75-minute speech, asserting that Iraq possessed chemical, biological and perhaps even nuclear weapons, proved deeply embarrassing when no weapons were found after the invasion. He told an interviewer several years later that the speech would remain a “blot” on his career, which was “painful” for him to accept.

A “painful blot.” LOL, as the kids say. You know what’s REALLY a painful blot? “When you’re feeling your freedom and the world’s off your back, then some cowboy from Texas starts his own war in Iraq,” and the next thing you know you’re burying your mangled wife and children because someone dropped a bomb on your house, or maybe your husband came home with no legs, or maybe in a flag-draped coffin.

But yeah, I guess knowing you’re responsible for all that bloodshed is painful. Omelets and eggs, amirite?

While we’re on the topic of lying liars, Iraq War propagandist and Washington Post editorial page editor/columnist Fred Hiatt has some thoughts to share on the topic of lying.

How does a lie become respectable?

Bit by bit, step by step, cowardly dodge by cowardly dodge.

Case in point: The Japan-America Society of Washington, D.C., inviting Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty (Tenn.) to its annual gala this week as featured guest and honorary chairman…

But Trump is not, really, gone, and Hagerty, to the surprise of many, has emerged as one of his most loyal acolytes — and one of the most complicit in questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

As late as Jan. 2, Hagerty was vowing, along with fellow Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn, to vote in the Senate not to recognize Joe Biden’s victory in the electoral college. They said they had “concluded without any reservation that we will stand against tainted electoral results from the recent Presidential election…”

When the Senate was able to resume business, he and Blackburn both voted to certify the electoral results after all.

He’s been trying to crawl back into Trump’s good graces ever since, including by sponsoring the Protect Electoral College Act, which calls for the Government Accountability Office to audit the use of absentee ballots in 2020…

The Japan-America Society celebrates the friendship between the world’s oldest democracy and Asia’s oldest democracy. I asked Ryan B. Shaffer, society president, whether a willingness to acknowledge the legitimacy of elections, win or lose, shouldn’t be a minimum requirement for becoming an honorary chairman…

There’s an argument to be made that, at times of intense partisanship, it’s more valuable than ever that people from across the spectrum can encounter each other in nonpartisan arenas such as the Japan-America Society…

By the accumulation of uncounted such little-noticed decisions, Trump’s lie is legitimized and an essential pillar of democracy is eroded: that the loser recognizes the winner, knowing another election opportunity will come around.

Apparently Fred’s not a fan of lying anymore. But if anyone knows that a lie becomes respectable “bit by bit, step by step, cowardly dodge by cowardly dodge,” it’s Fred Hiatt who, along with Colin Powell, helped bring death to thousands of innocent people.

At least Powell felt bad about it and went public with his regrets. Hiatt has never, to the best of my knowledge, admitted that he was wrong.

I know I’m a little late to the party, but I’m still gobsmacked by Conor Friedersdorf‘s piece on the hard right’s excuse-making over their low Covid-19 vaccination rate and subsequently high rate of quickly dying. It’s a tale of abdicated responsibility, victimhood and conspiracy theories, and constant blameshifting that’s manifestly resulted in a collective descent into madness.

In Nolte’s account, however, a conspiracy of evil leftist elites are to blame for vaccine skepticism on the right. “I sincerely believe the organized left is doing everything in its power to convince Trump supporters NOT to get the life-saving Trump vaccine,” Nolte writes. They are “putting unvaccinated Trump supporters in an impossible position,” he insists, “where they can either NOT get a life-saving vaccine or CAN feel like cucks caving to the ugliest, smuggest bullies in the world.”

[…]

In a country where elections are decided on razor-thin margins, does it not benefit one side if their opponents simply drop dead? If I wanted to use reverse psychology to convince people not to get a life-saving vaccination, I would do exactly what Stern and the left are doing … I would bully and taunt and mock and ridicule you for not getting vaccinated, knowing the human response would be, Hey, fuck you, I’m never getting vaccinated! …

Have you ever thought that maybe the left has us right where they want us? Just stand back for a moment and think about this…

Taking writer John Nolte’s advice that I stand back for a moment and think about this, I quickly came to the conclusion that you would have to be completely fucking DEMENTED to come up with this line of reasoning, and dumb as a bag of hammers to accept this, um, “theory.” It’s also an open admission that Cleek’s Law is true, and that today’s conservatives are essentially morons: “By telling conservatives to take the Covid vaccine, the liberals are actually trying to get them to NOT take the vaccine because liberals know that conservatism is simply the opposite of what liberals want—so get the vaccine to own the libs!” I mean, if it’s that easy, let’s have AOC run some ads saying subway surfing is dangerous, and maybe get Uncle Bernie to scold people for jumping off highway overpasses during rush hour.

It’s really quite remarkable to watch the conservative movement devolve from the likes of Burke and Buckley to paranoid screeching about Wily Liberals tricking their Conservative Betters into killing themselves by promoting a life-saving vaccine. Thomas Paine is spinning in his grave fast enough to power New Rochelle well into the next century.

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

Movement conservatives have spent decades lying to themselves and to Americans about everything under the sun—tax cuts that pay for themselves, women who line up for third-trimester abortions, WMD in Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s culpability for 9/11, climate change, Trump’s fitness for the presidency—so it’s not entirely surprising they’re lying to themselves about why they’re not getting vaccinated. “I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er,” as Mr. Shakespeare once wrote; there are simply too many lies piled on top of lies to turn back now.

Which brings me to William of Occam and his razor. Given the choice of “Wily Liberals leveraging Cleek’s Law to trick their Conservative Betters into killing themselves by promoting a life-saving vaccine” or “Decades of history shows conservatives distrust science and tell themselves self-serving lies,” I think I’ve figured out why so many right wingers are dying from Covid-19.

I’d tell them why, but they’d never believe me.

Back in the mid-1990s, when I was a much younger man, my then-girlfriend woke up one morning with some news that jolted me a lot harder than the cup of coffee she’d just handed me: she told me she was pregnant. We were both in our 20s, in school, and unprepared for anything like this. So my girlfriend made a decision, because life comes at you fast.

“I love you,” she said to me, “but I’m not ready to have your baby.” Luckily, we lived in Massachusetts, and we were able to very quickly make an appointment at a local clinic.

I remember the drive down like it was yesterday. Yes, it was liberal Western Mass, but we were both worried about what we might run into. Visions of protestors waving signs and harassing us ran through my mind on an endless loop, and my fists were clenched tight the whole way down. To say I was prepared for the worst would be putting it lightly—I was ready to shove a sign up someone’s ass sideways if they so much as looked cockeyed at my girl.

Thankfully, nothing like that was waiting for us. We were buzzed into the clinic where, in a drab, grey room, we waited to be called. I remember the clock ticking on the wall for what seemed like forever.

When the nurse attendant (or whatever that person is called) came up let us know it was time for the procedure, I got up along with my girlfriend. But the nurse said, “I’m sorry, you’ll have to wait out here.”

“Why?” I asked. Both of us were scared, and I wanted to be by her side to support her all the way. “I was going to hold her hand, to help get her through.”

“I’m sure you mean well,” the nurse replied. “But we have a policy. The fact is, too many men have come in that room, and berated or coerced their partner into keeping the pregnancy. Sometimes staff has been threatened—we just can’t allow it. I’m sorry, but that’s the case.” Life comes at you fast.

So, because a bunch of thugs decided to set shitty example after shitty example, decent supportive men weren’t allowed to accompany their partner through a physically invasive and emotionally wrenching procedure. There was nothing to do but wait til my girlfriend came back out, and then I comforted her all the way home and took care of her for the next week or so. It was a miserable day for both of us, although much more miserable for her. At one point she asked me if I was mad, or if I thought we’d done the wrong thing; I assured her that I was on board, 100%.

I’ve been reminded of this episode every single day since the Supreme Court decided to let Texas get away with revoking women’s reproductive rights, and siccing the population on them like the Stasi. I still get emotional over it. In fact, it makes me so mad, I could spit nails. I mean really—who the FUCK do these people think they are? Have they nothing better to do with their time?

It is nobody’s business whether a woman or a couple chooses to have an abortion. It is not Texas’s business, nor Tennessee’s, nor Alabama’s, nor Pennsylvania’s, nor any other state’s business. It’s certainly not your neighbor’s business—it’s the pregnant woman’s business, and hers alone.

The fact that Texas has essentially put a bounty on women and their doctors makes me wish another tree would fall on Governor Greg Abbott’s and finish the job—and maybe take those hacks Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett with him (also, wishing all the worst of luck to THIS prick). The state of Texas and the Court’s far-right majority, for all their blathering about freedom and individual rights, have completely overstepped their bounds. This is why I completely support any effort to expand the Supreme Court. I’ve seen enough tyranny of the minority for one lifetime.

Life comes at you fast, and the partisan hacks and illegitimate “justices” that make up the corrupt conservative court cabal don’t have anyone’s best interests at heart.

I love it when conservatives eat their own…

A conservative website, American Greatness, published a piece Tuesday claiming that, according to “multiple” sources, [South Dakota Governor Kristi] Noem has been having an affair with Lewandowski “for months.” The website did not identify any of the sources.

Lewandowski was Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign manager. He was fired by the campaign in 2016 but remains part of the former president’s inner circle and ran the pro-Trump Make America Great Again Action super PAC…

Noem and Lewandowski have traveled extensively together across the country for political events, and he has promoted her to members of the media. At one event in January, they were spotted partying together late in a hotel bar.

Sadly, the Post goes off on a tangent about Lewandowski’s other problems—apparently he’s back to his old tricks of sexually assaulting and physically abusing women—but thankfully we have one of my favorite punching bags, the ivermectin-guzzling circus clowns at American Greatness to give us the details about the alleged affair (yes, I feel dirty linking to them too).

Lewandowski accompanied Noem across the country as she stumped for Trump’s reelection last year. According to South Dakota Republicans, former Noem chief of staff Joshua Shields left, in part, because of Lewandowski’s butting in. Lewandowski, who is married with four children, still has the former president’s ear, which he reportedly uses to Noem’s advantage.

Noem, a married mother of three, has been eyed as a possible running mate for a Trump presidential bid in 2024. Bloomberg reported in March that Trump’s closest advisors are pushing either for a black or female vice presidential candidate. Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Noem have both been named among the favorites by members of Trump’s inner circle.

On March 5, Donald Trump, Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle hosted a fundraiser for Noem at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and home in Palm Beach. Noem was invited to a second fundraiser there in April. Lewandowski has played a key role in boosting Noem’s clout with Trump.

In a brief interview with the New York Times, Lewandowski praised Noem as having “a huge future in Republican politics.” But these recent revelations, in combination with other challenges, threaten her chances of winning a ticket to the White House.

“There are members of Congress close to Mar-a-Lago who have called the affair ‘an open secret’ and worried that about Noem’s viability as a national candidate and within the movement,” a source familiar with the matter told American Greatness.

Now, much of this may well be driven by right-wing hostility to Noem, who apparently went off the reservation by killing a bill that would have banned transgender women from competing in women’s sports and “refusing to prevent private companies from imposing vaccine mandates on employees” (so much for Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, I guess). The writers at AG are true Trump believers, all with ties to the far-right Claremont Institute, and it looks like they smell blood in the water. As an aside, I used to know editors Ben Boychuk and Julie Ponzi via Facebook—they’re former friends of an old editor of mine, and some of the most miserable, dishonest, and vicious people I’ve engaged with in my whole life. So this may all be a tempest in a teapot, trying to ding Noem before 2024 with anything they can throw at her, for veering even a little bit from the hymnbook—Lord knows the complaints about corruption ring hollow from people who are all-in with Trumpism.

But who cares what the stated rationale is—everyone knows that when it comes to morality and family values, the GOP is the party of “do as I say, not as I do”—the effect is still the same. The GOP is eating their own, and from the sound of things, it’s delicious.

The always-delightful Balloon-Juice contributor known as Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix had a scathing post yesterday scorching Slate’s Lili Loofbourow, who wrote an execrable piece throwing shade at those of us who read the Herman Cain Awards on Reddit.

Yesterday, Lili Loofbourow wrote a piece at Slate where she churned out a bunch of words about the Herman Cain Awards subreddit…

There’s a lot of talk, including in the Slate piece, about how the Hermies are “dark” and the goal of the HCAs is not to change minds so they’re somehow bad. Yes, it is dark to see a bunch of idiots sharing and re-sharing the same cookie-cutter memes that compare Fauci to Hitler, Fauci’s penis size to the size of Hillary Clinton’s penis, etc. Seeing those lies followed by tales of suffering and death is even darker. Still, if anything is clear from weeks of looking at Awardees, it is that these minds are not easily changed. Gentle persuasion is not going to do a fucking thing for a bunch of idiots stubbornly ensconced in a Facebook bubble.

I realize that the HCAs aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. But I refuse to be bullied into being the “responsible liberal” who has to work harder than Dr. Doolittle to talk kanga to these kangaroos, simply because their precious fee fees might be hurt when they learn that people are documenting their needless, stupid deaths (after personally identifiable details are blacked out). This god damned country has been catering to the hurt feelings of a bunch of undereducated, overprivileged white folks for 20 years — all we’ve gained is a clown President and wannabes like DeathSantis who wanted to kill liberals, but now are killing their own.

It’s hard to take Ms. Loofbourow’s complaint seriously, and as a regular reader of the HCAs, I have no sympathy at all for the nominees and award-winners. They are 100% responsible for their predicament, and on top of that they seem to be the nastiest, meanest, shittiest people you could hope to (not) meet. But my hostility to them is amplified because, as Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix writes, “they are hogging resources and causing others to die.” Now, the New York Times gives us an idea of what that looks like.

In chronic pain, Mary O’Donnell can’t get around much. At most, she manages to walk for a short time in her kitchen or garden before she has to sit down. “It’s just frustrating at this point,” said Ms. O’Donnell, 80, who lives in Aloha, Ore. “I’m really depressed.”

She had been preparing for back surgery scheduled for Aug. 31, hoping the five-hour procedure would allow her to be more active. But a day before the operation, at OHSU Health Hillsboro Medical Center, she learned it had been canceled.

“Nope, you can’t come, our hospital is filling up,” she said she was told.

Faced with a surge of Covid-19 hospitalizations in Oregon, the hospital has not yet rescheduled her surgery. “I don’t know what is going to happen,” Ms. O’Donnell said, worrying that her ability to walk might be permanently impaired if she is forced to wait too long.

I added the italics to drive home the point: some 80 year-old lady might lose what little independence she still has because of these selfish shits. Lili Loofbourow says we’re being MEAN and “rejoicing at death.”

In Columbus, Ga., Robin Strong’s doctor told her a few weeks ago that the rising Covid caseloads there would delay a procedure to repair a vocal cord that was paralyzed in a previous surgery.

Because of her condition, she chokes easily and has a hard time breathing. “I just cry all the time because of my situation,” she said.

Compounding the physical discomfort is her frustration that so many people in her state won’t get vaccinated against Covid, and they are getting sick and taking up hospital beds…

“They are punishing people like me,” Ms. Strong said.

A bunch of fools got themselves sick on purpose with a deadly disease—and are now insisting on every possible effort to save their miserable lives while someone who presumably did the right thing and got the jab has to wait for necessary surgery. But don’t say that—it’s “heartless and unrepentant schadenfreude,” according to Lili Loofbourow.

With precious few available intensive-care beds, Idaho hospitals had largely stopped providing hernia surgeries or hip replacements before the new order. Now they are postponing cancer and heart surgeries, too, said Brian Whitlock, the chief executive of the Idaho Hospital Association. The hospitals there “have been doing their level best,” he said.

People who refused to believe in science got Covid, and now folks with cancer have to wait while they take up the resources. The article goes on and on like this—and no joke, these delays, which are entirely the fault of willfully unvaccinated people demanded every single resource even though they’re likely to die, are having a negative impact on everyone else.

Some hospital officials say they have been assessing the effects of delayed care caused by the shutting down of elective procedures earlier in the pandemic. “It was very clear that many of these folks had decompensated or were more acutely ill than they would have otherwise been,” said Dr. Bryan Alsip, the chief medical officer at University Health in San Antonio, Texas.

Again, I added italics for emphasis. Decompensation refers to “the functional deterioration of a structure or system that had been previously working with the help of allostatic compensation. Decompensation may occur due to fatigue, stress, illness, or old age. When a system is “compensated”, it is able to function despite stressors or defects. Decompensation describes an inability to compensate for these deficiencies.”

So what this means is that a patient—again, thanks to covid idiots taking up the beds—has a longer (and more expensive) road to recovery, if they recover at all.

Meanwhile, Lili Loofbourow at Slate is clutching her fucking pearls that Reddit readers aren’t adequately kind and sympathetic to these disease-spreading parasites, who use all the medical resources available in an effort to stave off the death they brought on themselves, while people with other, just as important, medical conditions are forced to wait. Sometimes until they die.

Maybe someday Lili will write about those people—the folks who are unfairly forced to wait for treatment til they die—instead of griping about those of us who are justifiably fucking sick of the pigheaded, disease-spreading, pandemic-prolonging, unreasonable, unpersuadable assholes who are causing these problems to begin with. Or is that not contrarian enough?

I really hate having to write about CNN’s resident idiot, Chris Cilizza—aka “the rankest assbrain in the Western Hemisphere,” “the punchline to the cruelest work of absurdist comedy in the history of the fucking universe, and that the title of that work is On the Origin of Species,” “an amoral rat whose professional existence… is predicated entirely on cynical indifference to truth or fact or consequence”—but here we are. I apologize in advance.

If you’ve read any of Cillizza’s columns, you know that he spent the vast majority of the 2016 campaign celebrating the wit of Donald Trump and generally sucking up to power. Now that Trump’s hog waller of a “presidency” is over, Chris has been trying desperately to scrape off the mud that he was gleefully rolling around in. Today, he’s calling his former muse “deeply childish,” and ticking off a list of Trump’s offenses.

Remember the letter he sent to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer last spring in response to the New York Democrat’s push for more federal involvement in the coronavirus response? As I wrote at the time, the letter “reads like a sort of Mad Libs you might fill out and leave in the locker of your 7th grade enemy.”

Or that time when Trump walked out of a “60 Minutes” interview because he didn’t like being asked so many questions about his response to the Covid-19 pandemic? (The interview was in October 2020 — as the country approached the peak of the pandemic.)

Or all of the nicknames Trump likes to bestow on his political opponents? (Is there anything more fundamentally un-adult then using nicknames to deride people?) Or the hundreds (thousands?) of tweets put out by Trump both before and during his presidency in which he attacked the looks or intelligence of someone he didn’t like?

HAHAHAHAHAHA! Did he just really write that? Because this is where you’d normally hear a record scratch sound effect—whatever the merits of the accusation, THAT FUCKIN’ GUY does NOT get to throw mud at Trump over offensive nicknames. And that’s because Chris CELEBRATED those nicknames. In fact, he called Trump “the Michael Jordan of name-calling,” like it was a good thing, and made a list of his favorites. Chris even put up a Tweet to make sure everyone saw how clever he was. I took a screenshot, for posterity.

We are living in a golden age of political nicknames.

President Donald Trump is the Michael Jordan of name-calling, seemingly upping the ante of what’s possible in the nickname sphere with each passing week.

On Tuesday morning, Trump added another – “Cheatin’ Obama”– in reference to his immediate predecessor in the White House. It’s not clear what exactly where Obama was “cheatin’,” but it doesn’t matter! It’s a nickname! It doesn’t have to make sense!

Where does the latest nickname fit in my definitive rankings of Trump’s nicknames for his political enemies? Good question! Scroll down.

Some of Cillizza’s favorites:

11. “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer”: Every time I hear this one about the Senate Minority Leader, I do laugh. At the same time, Trump has known Schumer for decades – they are both New Yorkers – so the bar for greatness is a little higher.

9. “1 for 38 Kasich”: This moniker for the governor of Ohio is deeply, deeply underappreciated. A dig on Kasich’s lack of wins during the Republican primary season that takes waaaaay longer to say than “John Kasich”? I’m all in.

2. “Lyin’ Ted“: I can’t tell if this nickname is really that good or I am simply biased toward it because I heard it so many times during the 2016 Republican primary campaign.

Back in 2018, Chris was “all in” on the name-calling. They made him laugh, by his own admission. He liked some more than others, especially “Lyin’ Ted.”

But now that Trump is out of power, all of a sudden Chris finds the former president’s “defining trait” to be be “childish,” as if he wasn’t laughing right along with him, all throughout Cheetolini’s reign of error. I’d almost compare his effort to whitewash his own history to that of Jennifer Rubin— except Rubin has utterly parted ways with conservatism and is seemingly trying to turn over a new leaf.

But not you, Chris Cillizza. That brown lipstick is NEVER washing off. NEVER. You’re a suck-up to power, you’ll always BE a suck-up to power, and you will never be anything MORE than a suck-up to power. Like the good folks at Deadspin wrote, America would be better off if you were “fired out of a large cannon into an even larger cliff face.”

Preferably wearing a clown suit.

“The Emperor’s New Clothes, via FreshPlans

Wikipedia tells me that “Brian Patrick Stelter (born September 3, 1985) is an American TV anchor who is the chief media correspondent for CNN and host of the CNN program Reliable Sources. Stelter is a former media reporter for The New York Times and the editor of TVNewser.” But by his own admission today, Stelter is also an enormous coward, one who is clearly afraid of speaking truth to power.

Now, it’s true that most reporters don’t write their headlines, but in this case the hed—”News media faces conundrum as Republicans baselessly cry ‘fraud’ again, this time in California”—was taken directly from Stelter’s article.

The GOP’s hollow cries about cheating are an ongoing conundrum for newsrooms. Outlets that call out the B.S. are tagged as biased or worse. Outlets that overlook it are enabling an undemocratic concept to take root. Here’s a real-time example: On Monday evening reporters like NBC News’ Alex Seitz-Wald noticed that “Elder’s campaign is promoting a website that claims the recall is over, Newsom won, and they found voter fraud through a statistical analysis of the results.”

Why is this even a “conundrum?” When did plain old “telling the truth and standing by it” become such a Herculean task for reporters—people whose JOB is ferreting out the truth? If you can’t take it when some loudmouths and liars accuse you of bias, what are you even doing calling yourself a reporter or, in Stelter’s case, “chief media correspondent?”

Frankly, it’s difficult to call Stelter’s little essay an opinion piece, never mind a news article. It’s an apologia for lazy reporting, and an invitation to reporters to just go along to get along. “Oh noes, someone might yell at us.”

If you’re not willing to report that the emperor is naked, you don’t really belong in a newsroom.

UPDATE: The Post’s Erik Wemple, who has been accused of bias and far more by Tucker Carlson demonstrates the spine that Stelter lacks.