Miscellaneous material to start your week.
- Paul Krugman notes that hostility toward basic public health protection such as masks represents a stark example of conservatives sacrificing human lives to identity politics - though it's far from the first or the last one. And James Downie writes that the Republicans governments reversing mask mandates know perfectly well that the credence given to anti-social actors makes it impossible for people to take precautions for themselves.
- Colleen Barry reports on the new wave of COVID-19 in Europe due to increasingly dangerous variants. Camelia Dewan contrasts Norway's relative success in requiring everybody to contribute to limiting the spread of the coronavirus against the disastrous results of Sweden's herd immunity strategy (complete with willingness to endanger the lives of elderly people along the way). And Lynn Desjardins reports that Canadians are understandably wary about our long-term care system now that its weaknesses have been exposed.
- Srinivas Murthy writes that the most effective strategy to contain COVID-19 involves making sure vaccines get where they're needed around the globe, rather than being systematically diverted to the wealthiest countries first.
- Joseph Hall observes that economists don't share the right's insistence on putting selective deficit phobia ahead of relief and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Finally, PressProgress follows up on the Pallister PCs' secret legislative agenda.
In all the kerfuffle about the Manitoba government's secret bills, I'm surprised nobody has brought up the point that it's called "First Reading", not "First Titling"--presumably because it's, you know, the first time you READ the legislation. Can you even be said to have introduced legislation if no actual legislation has been introduced, but instead just some titles that could hypothetically become attached to legislation?
ReplyDeleteIndeed, if one is to take that Conservative backbencher seriously, in at least some cases there was in fact no legislation to introduce. So what they introduced was a lack of legislation. This goes beyond illegitimate, into the realm of both the absurd and fraud.