Playing catch up

The past few weeks have had my head spinning.  In the 2 lead-off weeks of this year I can barely sketch out a few topics to write on when they are overtaken by events.  So I'm going to run a few of the ones that have managed to remember into my time-patented “bleets” format.  So here are some up-to-280-character nuggets that got stuck on the highly polished bone on the inside of my skull.

$600 stimulus checks are somewhere between slightly irresponsible and not all that bad as a tool for digging out of the hole we dug to “flatten” the pandemic—we are still near 10 million lost jobs deep.  Financing it by deferring new subsidies to state and local governments may have sealed it into the not-bad end of the scale.

$2,000 stimulus checks border on child abuse.  My grandson, age 4, was in town recently.  He doesn’t really understand the10s place yet, so when I told him the wicked Democratic left and Trump conspired to stick him with yet another half a trillion dollars in bills, he just asked “How will Nana bake cookies.”  Shame, shame, shame on ‘em all.

Is it odd that the first time police don’t violently suppress an unruly mob, they get pilloried by the same folks who want them defunded?  Don’t fool yourself about the ruliness of BLM protests.  The police here in DC were pelted with all sorts of stuff to the point reporters have told me it’s much safer to be in the crowd than behind the heat.

Through some tech-left trick, the media’s spellcheckers had apparently been set to add the word “peaceful” before any use of the word protest or any of its derivatives.  I wonder how many hours it took the copy editors to correct this over the past week?

The treasonous violence at the Capitol has to be harshly dealt with.  Track down as many people as may be identified. Try ‘em. Upon any conviction, impose as much of a sentence as the relevant guidelines may suggest—no more, no less.

The gentleman recorded seeking to plant the confederate flag in or on the Capitol of the United States is caught red-handed committing a grossly treasonous act and should be tracked down, tried, and upon conviction, introduced to a tall tree and a short rope. 

Don’t give me that line about the “noble traditions” represented by the confederate flag.  It represents a tradition of treason, bigotry, and chattel slavery.

It’s wrong that the riot was rooted in simple bigotry.  There are kernels of grievance somewhere; Washington Post ran a 2-page piece heaping up a molehill of three: economic shutdown, pandemic social engineering, and disrespect. “For years, … , I’m called a racist, a Nazi, a bigot … it’s not right.” Name calling has consequences.

 CDC stumbles again. They jazzed up a test to unusability early on. Their distribution plan was prey to a jumble of goals.  Our vaccines prevent the disease; it’s unclear if recipients without symptoms can spread the infection. So, once past the health and public safety folks, line us up in reverse order of Covid lethality and jab away.

Even after our shots, we need to stay home as much as possible, mask up and keep what is now a polite social distance if we go out, wash our hands, stop picking our noses, and don’t hang out in bars.  Masks seem much more liberating than ventilators, so stop with the “makes me unfree” bullshit.

The real needs of economic recovery, as I’ve said, are not met by stimulus checks of any size.  Somebody think about the “work-outs” the credit industry—consumer and business—are going to be faced with.  And how to keep those troubled debts from crippling the rating of a bank that’s actually helping.  Democrats, try to live in the real world.

These will also be tweeted on @ Rick Devens (@RickDevens) / Twitter)