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Ed Asner’s passing hit me a little hard for a celeb death. Anyone my age remembers him as Mary Tyler Moore’s cranky boss. His character later spun off to his own show where he from television producer back to print media moving from Detroit to Los Angeles. The show took on a slew of social issues and his character became much more nuanced. I have memory of a particularly good episode where the reporters went on strike and Lou Grant initially stuck with management but ended up walking the picket line. I wonder if anyone knows of any other example, but I think this may be the only example of American television where a drama spun off from a comedy.
He was deeply progressive in politics. He headed up the Screen Actors Guild in the early 1980s and spoke up against our aggressive policies in Central America. He was a member of Democratic Socialists of America at the time, long before it became fashionable. It’s been rumored that his show was cancelled due to pressure from sponsors over his activism, but Asner himself always disputed this.
I always found it so ironic that he played such crusty conservatives while being such a left winger in real life. He played a psychotic reactionary in JFK (his performance was a bright spot in a very bad movie in terms of historical accuracy).
I was a little let down years later when he got caught up in truther conspiracy theories, but he had donated and raised so much money for progressive causes from the Mumia Abu-Jamal Defense Fund, to ambulances for Central America that I’ve kind of given him a pass.
I saw him live a couple of times – once he did a reading at an Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade reunion in San Francisco. More recently about 15 to 20 years ago I saw him play the part of William Jennings Bryan in a reading of the transcript of the Scopes Monkey Trial at HSU. He was talented and passionate, until the end apparently.
I look forward to reading a biography at some point. Apparently he was born into a very conservative Orthodox Jewish family, but his journey took him into a different direction.
Over the past 30 years he has also become known for his great cartoon voice performances. Here’s a medley of them.
Pretty good sign there will be a robust turnout by the end.
Democrats are so far outperforming their ratio of registered voters returning 54 percent of the ballots while they represent 46 percent. But we know that many conservatives don’t have faith in early voting and will wait until election day.
Progressive areas of the state have been returning them at higher rates. As of Friday, 23 percent of San Francisco’s ballots had been returned, while 2 percent of Kern County’s voters sent theirs in – these are the extremes. Obviously a bunch of ballots were delivered in Friday alone. But that will probably taper off.
Again, you CAN vote “no” and still choose a candidate in the second question, but there is no big name Democrat on the list. I voted for Heather somebody of the Green Party.
The last plane flew out. Several hundred Americans remain in the country, some of them by choice. About 120,000 Afghans were flown out in a logistically miraculous operation. 13 soldiers died to make that happen.
Many supported the invasion to chase Al Qaeda out (they took refuge in Pakistan). But the “mission” went on, and on, and on, and on.
Can we finally accept as a nation that we have no right to play God with other societies? Shouldn’t we have learned that lesson from the last two-decades war? Can we pare down the military industrial complex?
More thoughts later.
Parents in Walnut Creek are pulling their kids out and it’s forced the Mt. Diablo School district to reassign some teachers to online teaching. Of course this is generating a backlash from other parents who demand a return to “normalcy,” whatever that means.
Of course some districts, like Eureka City Schools, has the answer. Just limit the number of students who can enroll in independent study.
A teacher in Marin infected half her class by refusing to vaccinate and refusing to mask as she was sending her spittle out into the room. Nobody should be allowed into a classroom without vaccinating. It’s that simple.
Of course in some parts of the country, parents are pulling their kids out of school over the right to have their kids infect others.
The schools are in a touch spot! But mandates are long overdue.
For weeks now we have seen national and state punditry almost orgasmic over the potential of a “red earthquake” in California as news article after article speculates as to his big fall. The reasons? We have the fires that climate change has induced over the past five years, and yet somehow this time it’s the governor’s fault. And he showed up for a dinner where there wasn’t social distancing and masking. And…. I don’t even know what else. It’s not a very coherent narrative. The economy is recovering nicely and for a large urban population state we are doing surprisingly well with the pandemic. So what’s the issue exactly?
But somehow he’s in “danger” because a recall got onto the ballot after a judge gave the proponents four extra months to raise signatures.
And then came the polls. 538 has it close, within the “margins of error.”
Only take a look at those polls. Affecting the averages is the mother of all outliers in a Survey USA poll, which had the “yes” vote 11 points ahead (9 after 538’s “adjustment” based upon the pollster’s record or something). But every other poll has “no” ahead, though a few of them were within their margins of error. Before the latest poll, there hadn’t been a poll taken in two weeks, and yet everyone from the SF Chronicle to NPR were reporting on them as if they were current.
And then finally this week a Change Research (rated B- by 538) poll found the “no” vote ahead with likely voters by 15 percent (“adjusted” to 12 percent by 538).
I don’t know anything about Change Research, but if they are a liberal interest firm, I don’t think the poll actually serves Newsom’s interest because if Democrats are turning out in larger than expected numbers it’s probably because the race has been reported as close. Is this the reason there’s virtually no coverage of the poll? Or is it because the media has a very hard time changing its course of narrative?
As you can probably tell, I’m not really impressed with what seems to be the prevailing principles of journalism of late. I won’t say “fake news.” But I do think the media become obsessed with their own narrative and it colors not only how they cover subjects, but what they deem to be relevant to the story. Was it always this way? Maybe I’m just noticing it now.
Meanwhile, as of yesterday 12 percent of all voters had returned their ballots. It appears that the early votes are tilted towards progressive areas of the state (23 percent of all SF voters have returned their ballots while the largest red county tally is 11 percent). Of course, many Republicans, because of the conspiracy theories, will probably vote on or close to election day. But so far, more Democrats have returned their ballots than Republicans and independents combined. For whatever reason, none of the usual pollsters are polling – maybe it’s difficult to calculate when you’re polling sample combines those who have voted and those who haven’t? I don’t know. But the media narrative has only slightly altered because it turns out that Larry Elder is kind of a nut.
Of course, that will be the narrative if the recall fails – Newsom dodged a bullet but was ultimately unwittingly saved by Larry Elder, because now Democrats have “motivation” to vote as if the potential tragedy of Elder’s proposed pandemic policies and the potential to lose the Senate majority if Sen. Feinstein leaves office due to illness were not motivating. As if there is even a clear articulate argument for why Newsom should even be recalled. Watch for it – the postmortem media narrative will be that Elder became the “Trump” motivator.
We’ll see what happens of course. I’ve been horribly wrong before, and maybe in a few weeks this post will be my second most embarrassing. But I’m wondering if there was ever any real danger of Newsom losing.
13 dead so far, though it’s not clear how many were American soldiers.
I’m surprised it took this long.
What’s disturbing is that to have even gotten that close they had to have had special visas, or effective forgeries thereof.
At last report about 100,000 had been evacuated over 12 days. I hope that doesn’t stop.
Update: Four marines killed and three wounded. If the earlier number of total deaths reported is correct, that means 9 Afghans.
Second update: Pentagon now reports 12 American deaths, and 15 injured. No numbers on Afghan or other casualties.
The New York Times has the details.
The 10 California counties with the highest rate of people currently hospitalized with Covid-19 have, on average, a vax rate of 40%.
By contrast, the 10 counties with the lowest hospitalization levels have an average vax rate of 61%.
Meanwhile, in Florida an emergency cancer patient was turned away from a hospital because all of the beds were taken by covid patients.
“Florida, which is home to roughly 6.5% of the nation’s population, has about 17% of US Covid-19 hospitalizations, according to data Wednesday from the US Department of Health and Human Services. At least 100,317 people are reported to be hospitalized for Covid-19, of which, 17,164 are in Florida.”
Three years ago the Board moved the County payroll process from the AC office to the Human Resources Department. At the request of the Director of Human Resources and the independent consultant Scott Johnson of Macias Gini and O’Connell LLP (MGO), the BOS has returned the payroll function and responsibilities to the AC office.
The Lost Coast Outpost coverage.
Addendum: Thanks to Access Humboldt for providing the video of Tuesday’s meeting. At about 2:48 hours into the video, Supervisor Virginia Bass asks Scott Johnson about his level of confidence in the AC office to handle the payroll function. He pretty much stakes his professional reputation based upon his long experience in these matters on his confidence in the AC office. This is the guy the Board hired to assess, evaluate, and develop solutions and this is his proposal.
Ryan Hutson’s piece on Sunday’s anti-vax demonstration is now at Redheaded Blackbelt.
The trivialization of the Holocaust over a medical policy is profoundly inappropriate and an insult to the 12 million who died in death camps during WWII, especially the half of them who were Jewish. It’s fine to have your little tantrums over having to wear masks and be responsible towards others and relish in your Typhoid Mary antics, but to exploit the long history of pogroms against Jews for an issue like this is profoundly insensitive and in terms of impact anti-Semitic. I’m sorry but I have absolutely no patience for the ignorance of history displayed with arrogance.
If you really don’t understand how f—ed up this is, please read what the Anti-Defamation League has to say about it.
Whatever your position on masks and vaccinations, please leave the Holocaust and Jewish suffering out of it! It’s very serious and not something to be played with.
If you’re going to insist on the comparison, show me the unvaccinated being beaten on the streets, sexually assaulted by mobs, the windows of their businesses broken, and their places of worship burned. Show me the mass exodus out of the US because of these oppressive “mandates” – the boats of unvaccinated refugees.
So far, the only violence I’ve seen came from anti-vaxers who attacked a reporter in Los Angeles on Sunday.
I’m really disappointed in the “hippies” who were involved in this.
And some data is in. There is no appreciable drop in unemployment rates for those states which cut off the pandemic unemployment rates early. Of the 26 which did, 8 have seen an unemployment rate decline. 9 of the remaining states also had unemployment rate drops. We may have more relevant information over the next few months, but it certainly didn’t lead to an immediate rush of hiring. Maybe because school hasn’t opened and parents simply have no options – benefits or no benefits. But I think the image of working class people sitting at home eating bon bons because they receive a few more hundred dollars a week is not only classist and condescending, but thoroughly debunked.
Meanwhile, those states which cut benefits took an economic hit with the sudden loss of money in the economy. The rest of us are next. Yes, we will probably bounce back as we continue to open up, but it will happen. Some states will retain benefits from their own resources, and that may help mitigate the loss of money.
We could use that influx of infrastructure right about now. But Manchin and Sinema are still in charge.
Sohum Parlance II 
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