At LAT:
More than 4,000 personnel are working to contain the stubborn Dixie fire, Carhart said Friday, including firefighters from Arizona, New Mexico and even Florida https://t.co/EwwHZVfs8f pic.twitter.com/fILXd1NA3i
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) July 24, 2021
It's Patricia Mazzei, at the New York Times, "Some Florida Hospitals Have More Covid Patients Than Ever Before":
MIAMI — A month ago, the number of Covid-19 patients admitted at two University of Florida hospitals in Jacksonville was down to 14. Now more than 140 people are hospitalized with the coronavirus, a tenfold increase over five weeks — and the highest number of Covid-19 patients this system has seen during the pandemic. Debra Wells, 65, was among those admitted to one of the hospitals this month when what she thought was a cold grew worse and worse until she could not breathe. “I said, ‘Lord, I feel like I’m dying,’” she recalled. Like most of the patients who hospital officials say they are admitting in Jacksonville and other fast-filling medical facilities in pockets around the country, Ms. Wells was unvaccinated. She had worried, she said, that the shots were not safe. “I was misinformed,” Ms. Wells said this week, after a five-day hospital stay. “I wasn’t ready, and I was scared.” A national uptick in coronavirus cases has led, in sudden and concerning fashion, to a steep rise in hospitalizations in some spots around the country where people have been slower to get vaccinated, a predicament experts hoped might be avoided because the people contracting the infection tend to be younger and healthier. Nationally, hospitalizations remain relatively low, nowhere near earlier peaks of the pandemic. But in some regions with lagging vaccination rates and rising virus cases — such as northeastern Florida, southwestern Missouri and southern Nevada — the highly contagious Delta variant has flooded intensive care units and Covid-19 wards that, not long ago, had seen their patient counts shrink. Covid-19 hospitalizations are trending upward in 45 states. While levels remain well below previous peaks, health care centers in parts of the Midwest, West and South are strained. At the two hospitals in Jacksonville, the number of Covid-19 patients is higher than last summer, when the coronavirus slammed Florida, and higher than over the winter, when the virus surged to devastating levels across the nation. “It’s very frustrating,” said Dr. Leon L. Haley Jr., the chief executive of UF Health Jacksonville. “Each day we continue to go up. There’s no sense of when things are going to curtail themselves. People are stretched thin.” The situation is worrying across northeastern Florida...
Still more.
More on Florida, at Foreign Policy.
Just watch Florida next Tuesday. Florida's results should come right around at 5:00pm, and absentee ("mail-in") ballots are counted before election day. We'll know who's winning in the Sunshine State.
The rest is all fluff. Well, actually, if Trump wins both Florida and Pennsylvania ... well, it's going to be a laugh riot.
See, "In Florida, Many Colombian Americans Fear Biden Is Soft on Socialism."
He's toast, says Nate Silver.
But you gotta click through, at Althouse, for the link.
So that's why the leftist "Latinx" journos at LAT are alarmed.
See, "For Latinos, combating disinformation about the election often starts at home."
Hmm. Florida Hispanics are Cuban. There might be some newer arrivals from other countries, but like Cubans, they're also escaping communism and tyranny. With the Democrats going so far left this year, and the anarchy of antifa and Black Lives Matter, this poll, at AoSHQ, is not surprising.
See, "American Greatness Poll: Trump Takes Four Point Lead in Florida."
NEW THREAD - SAVE & SHARE: The US/Saudi aviation training partnership at Pensacola & other military bases was part of the $30 billion sale of F-15s to the Saudis - engineered by Hillary Clinton & State Dept. /1https://t.co/YJ9prAg9dj
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) December 7, 2019
The town's called Panacea, but when Hurricane Michael hit, the name seemed overly optimistic. Gene Bearden, who's been trying to leave for 4 years, doesn't have much left now. https://t.co/gaNMx0f52O— NYT National News (@NYTNational) October 11, 2018
PANACEA, Fla. — The orders came down to mobile home residents as the menace of Hurricane Michael approached in the Gulf of Mexico: Get out. Get out now.More at that top link.
The evacuation mandate reached Gene Bearden, 76, in this blink-and-you-miss-it town with an aspirational name south of Tallahassee and in an area where a storm surge of up to 13 feet had been forecast.
Mr. Bearden wanted to leave. He had been wanting to leave Panacea, in fact, for four years, but had not mustered the financial wherewithal to do it, and the arrival of a Category 4 hurricane did nothing to change that.
Versions of his story played out across the eastern edge of the Florida Panhandle, home to modest coastal communities where people already hard on their luck had little means to escape the storm’s wrath.
Mr. Bearden had not planned to stay in Panacea when he visited his aunt in 2014. But when he tried to renew his driver’s license, he ran into a problem with his birth certificate, which he couldn’t fix unless he went to Atlanta — he was born in Georgia. He couldn’t make it there. So he stayed, without a license, in an RV park here.
“I got stuck,” he said.
With the storm looming this week, sheriff’s deputies showed up on Wednesday to get residents out. Mr. Bearden explained why he could not just drive away. A kind deputy found a solution, Mr. Bearden said: He wrote him a letter authorizing him to drive, with no license and no current vehicle registration, to a place far enough north to be safe. Mr. Bearden packed up a white pickup and drove — but only to the next town, Medart, where he rode out the storm inside his parked truck.
“It wasn’t fun,” he said on Thursday, back at the RV camp, now almost entirely empty. “Everybody left. They had to.”
John Paul Stevens: Repealing the Second Amendment would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform https://t.co/6USnyIMMDq
— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) March 27, 2018
From @JonathanTurley: A full repeal of the #SecondAmendment is hard work, but it is the only way #MarchforOurLives won't be hijacked by political figures wanting to harness energy and votes more than save lives. https://t.co/iQrqPHPSmI
— USA TODAY Opinion (@usatodayopinion) March 28, 2018
Rep. Steve King’s campaign ties Parkland’s Emma González to ‘communist’ Cuba https://t.co/DSauujUDsF— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 26, 2018
ICYMI, @Emma4Change was proudly wearing a Cuban flag in support of an oppressive communist regime at the #MarchForOurLives. pic.twitter.com/4J8oP9xKjP— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) March 25, 2018
In one of the most publicized moments at Saturday's March for Our Lives, 18-year-old Emma González stood on the stage in complete silence, weeping. She marked the six minutes and 20 seconds that claimed the lives of 17 people at her high school in Parkland, Florida. And on her olive-green jacket, she wore several sewn-on patches, including a Cuban flag.More.
That flag, representing González's Cuban heritage, became the subject of attacks from some conservatives online over the weekend. And on Sunday afternoon, one of those critical messages appeared on the Facebook page for the campaign of a U.S. congressman — Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa.
"This is how you look when you claim Cuban heritage yet don't speak Spanish and ignore the fact that your ancestors fled the island when the dictatorship turned Cuba into a prison camp, after removing all weapons from its citizens; hence their right to self defense," said the post, which also included a photo of González at the podium Saturday.
The meme, which was posted by King's campaign team, prompted hundreds of comments, many of them criticizing the congressman and defending González.
"Are you SERIOUSLY mocking a school shooting survivor for her ethnic identity?!" wrote Brandon Wolf, a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. "When it was my community, where were you? When it was Sandy Hook? Columbine? Were you on the sideline mocking those communities too? Did you question someone identifying as a mother? Did you question whether people like me were crisis actors?
"Emma stood for 6 mins and 20 seconds to honor the lives of 17 gone too soon," Wolf added. "The least you could do is shut your privileged, ineffective trap for 6 seconds to hear someone else's perspective."
King's campaign team promptly and defiantly fired back at individual comments, creating a heated exchange on the Facebook post.
"Pointing out the irony of someone wearing the flag of a communist country while simultaneously calling for gun control isn't 'picking' on anyone," the campaign team responded to Wolf's comment. "It's calling attention to the truth, but we understand that lefties find that offensive."
Reached for comment early Monday by The Washington Post, a spokesman for King's campaign said that the King for Congress Facebook page is managed by the campaign team, not the congressman himself.
"And the meme in question obviously isn't an attack on her 'heritage' in any way," the spokesman wrote in an email. "It merely points out the irony of someone pushing gun control while wearing the flag of a country that was oppressed by a communist, anti-gun regime. Pretty simple, really."
González has become a prominent face of the student-led movement against gun violence since the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. And she has not been shy about explaining her various identities.
"My Name is Emma González. I'm 18 years old, Cuban and bisexual," she wrote in an essay in Harper's Bazaar last month. "But none of this matters anymore. What matters is that the majority of American people have become complacent in a senseless injustice that occurs all around them."
Her father immigrated to New York from Cuba in 1968, Univision has reported. Emma was born in the United States. As Univision wrote, González does not speak Spanish, "but her voice reveals the heritage of the communicative passion of mixed Hispanics with oratory skills perfected at school."
Other images attacking the teenager's Cuban heritage circulated in conservative circles online...
A self-confessed "secret huge nerd," Jaclyn Corin admits she is freaking out on the inside as she tries to balance political activism with schoolwork.
The 17-year-old junior class president has six essays to write for her advanced-placement language and composition class. But after a gunman rampaged through her high school, killing 14 students and three staff members, she is mostly focused on Saturday's March for Our Lives.
"It's very hard to juggle," Jaclyn said one evening last week as she slipped into a booth at Panera with fellow activists David Hogg and Sarah Chadwick and sipped a strawberry banana smoothie.
"We're teenagers and we're leading a national movement," said David, also 17, a wiry, intense senior who has put on the back burner memorizing his 50 psychology vocab words and his environmental science project on mammals. "That's a lot of stress."
The goal of the student-led march in Washington is simple: to demand that Congress pass a comprehensive bill to address gun violence.
While the House last week passed the STOP School Violence Act, which authorizes $50 million a year to bolster school security, students say it does nothing to restrict gun access. It does not even mention the word "gun."
"We need a mass mobilization of the American public on a huge scale," said David, a budding filmmaker who became a key voice of the movement after recording video of his classmates huddling in a small dark closet during the Feb. 14 shooting.
About 1,000 students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland — and hundreds of thousands of supporters from across the country — plan to march on the nation's Capitol. More than 800 marches are planned worldwide — in Los Angeles and Paris; Buenos Aires and Tokyo; Sydney, Australia, and Mumbai, India.
"In the period of one month, we have shaken up the world," said Jaclyn, a small blonde with a chirpy, singsong voice. "But I feel like the adults keep pressing the snooze button. At some point they're going to have to wake up."
Trying to persuade politicians to enact gun legislation, David said, is about as frustrating as instructing adults how to use smartphones.
"You know, when they're like, 'I can't figure out how to take a selfie…,'" he said dryly. "And then five minutes later, you finally take the phone and you just press the button… You just need to go into the settings!"
"That's perfect," Jaclyn said, giggling.
"That's what we're doing with our government," David continued. "'Goddammit, just give it to me!'"
Already, the students have raised more than $3.3 million via GoFundMe to stage the event, bringing in major donations from celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg and George and Amal Clooney. A string of pop stars — Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus, Jennifer Hudson and Demi Lovato — agreed to perform at their rally.
For the organizers, the march is a way to channel their grief and anger as well as send a strong message to President Trump and Congress.
"We know this is what's going to help us heal," said Delaney Tarr, a 17-year-old senior. "But it's also bigger than us.… I think everybody, they want to make the world a different place, and that's what we're working on right now — we have an opportunity to do something."
The students feel a sense of urgency in getting their message out, a fear that the public will lose interest...
I spent 2 months getting the news mostly from print. It changed my life.— Farhad Manjoo: not really on here a lot now (@fmanjoo) March 7, 2018
I was better informed, less anxious, and I had tons of free time.
I distilled the experience into three Michael Pollan-esque lessons:
Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social.https://t.co/09A1Q3vzBK
I first got news of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., via an alert on my watch. Even though I had turned off news notifications months ago, the biggest news still somehow finds a way to slip through.I too have been limited my online and social news gathering. Not completely, but I've always favored news in hard-copy form. I especially like the more deliberative style of news reading you get, the morning paper with a cup of coffee.
But for much of the next 24 hours after that alert, I heard almost nothing about the shooting.
There was a lot I was glad to miss. For instance, I didn’t see the false claims — possibly amplified by propaganda bots — that the killer was a leftist, an anarchist, a member of ISIS and perhaps just one of multiple shooters. I missed the Fox News report tying him to Syrian resistance groups even before his name had been released. I also didn’t see the claim circulated by many news outlets (including The New York Times) as well as by Senator Bernie Sanders and other liberals on Twitter that the massacre had been the 18th school shooting of the year, which wasn’t true.
Instead, the day after the shooting, a friendly person I’ve never met dropped off three newspapers at my front door. That morning, I spent maybe 40 minutes poring over the horror of the shooting and a million other things the newspapers had to tell me.
Not only had I spent less time with the story than if I had followed along as it unfolded online, I was better informed, too. Because I had avoided the innocent mistakes — and the more malicious misdirection — that had pervaded the first hours after the shooting, my first experience of the news was an accurate account of the actual events of the day.
This has been my life for nearly two months. In January, after the breaking-newsiest year in recent memory, I decided to travel back in time. I turned off my digital news notifications, unplugged from Twitter and other social networks, and subscribed to home delivery of three print newspapers — The Times, The Wall Street Journal and my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle — plus a weekly newsmagazine, The Economist.
I have spent most days since then getting the news mainly from print, though my self-imposed asceticism allowed for podcasts, email newsletters and long-form nonfiction (books and magazine articles). Basically, I was trying to slow-jam the news — I still wanted to be informed, but was looking to formats that prized depth and accuracy over speed.
It has been life changing. Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulletins.
Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed (though there are some blind spots). And I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father.
Most of all, I realized my personal role as a consumer of news in our broken digital news environment...
What’s happening today is that certain ideas about gun rights, and maybe gun ownership itself, are being cast in the realm of the morally illegitimate and socially unacceptable https://t.co/2mXNbOi04X
— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) March 2, 2018
I wonder if I’m wrong on the subject of guns. I started this latest round of the debate with the presumption that supporters of moderate gun restrictions are popularly strong but legislatively weak. Since Sandy Hook in 2012, more than two dozen states have passed gun laws and almost all of those laws have LOOSENED gun restrictions. Roughly 360 gun bills have been introduced in Congress, and they have all failed but one, which also loosened gun use.More.
The blunt fact is that Republicans control most legislatures. To get anything passed, I thought, it would be necessary to separate some Republicans from the absolutist N.R.A. position. To do that you have to depolarize the issue: show gun owners some respect, put red state figures at the head and make the gun discussion look more like the opioid discussion. The tribalists in this country have little interest in the opioid issue. As a result, a lot of pragmatic things are being done across partisan lines.
The people pushing for gun restrictions have basically done the exact opposite of what I thought was wise. Instead of depolarizing the issue they have massively polarized it. The students from Parkland are being assisted by all the usual hyper-polarizing left-wing groups: Planned Parenthood, Move On and the Women’s March. The rhetoric has been extreme. Marco Rubio has been likened to a mass murderer while the N.R.A. has been called a terrorist organization.
The early results would seem to completely vindicate my position. The Florida Legislature turned aside gun restrictions. New gun measures in Congress have been quickly shelved. Democrats are more likely to lose House and Senate seats in the key 2018 pro-gun states. The losing streak continues.
Yet I have to admit that something bigger is going on. It could be that progressives understood something I didn’t. It could be that you can win more important victories through an aggressive cultural crusade than you can through legislation. Progressives could be on the verge of delegitimizing their foes, on guns but also much else, rendering them untouchable for anybody who wants to stay in polite society. That would produce social changes far vaster than limiting assault rifles...
Just posted: President Trump's job-approval rating drops to a new low, 38%, in the USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll, and the intensity of feeling is hardening against him. https://t.co/h38qKTGlRs via @usatoday
— Susan Page (@SusanPage) February 25, 2018
The USA TODAY/Suffolk Poll of 1,000 registered voters nationwide, taken Tuesday through Saturday, has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
On guns, a nation that is often divided on issues is remarkably united:
* By almost 2-1, 61%-33%, they say tightening gun-control laws and background checks would prevent more mass shootings in the United States.
* By more than 2-1, 63%-29%, they say semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15, used by the Florida shooter, should be banned.
* By more than 6-1, 76%-12%, they say people who have been treated for mental illness should be banned from owning a firearm.
Even gun owners are inclined to support those three measures. But a majority of Republicans say tighter gun laws wouldn't prevent more mass shootings, and they oppose banning semi-automatic weapons.
Easy test. Run on it. Every single one of you. Run. On. It. Dispense with the euphemisms. Primary everyone who won’t submit. https://t.co/Rdc2m4FnWd
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) February 26, 2018
Also, Republicans & @NRA say *real* agenda of gun control advocates is to ban all semi-automatic weapons. This is supposed to scare the public, but would it?
— Jonathan Cohn (@CitizenCohn) February 26, 2018
Majority favors the idea, 44% "very strongly" in new @YouGov @TheEconomist poll. https://t.co/HqldiyPZXk pic.twitter.com/QiCPCUpZnX
RUN. ON. IT.
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) February 26, 2018
