Richard Trumka is dead at 72. Head of the AFL-CIO and a fixture of the American labor movement for decades. Heart attack appears to be the cause of death but that’s still supposition. More to come.
As Delta COVID surges cases across the country and fills hospitals in low-vaccine Red States, Republicans have been test-driving a range of messages to maneuver out of accountability for their reckless policies on vaccines. They’ve tried a belated effort to push vaccines, deny they were ever against them and then sidled back to opposing various kinds of vaccine mandates. But over the last couple days they’ve started pushing a new message: the problem is undocumented immigrants “pouring” over the US-Mexico border. Embattled Florida Governor Ron DeSantis put it this way (emphasis added) in a fundraising email sent out yesterday: “Joe Biden has the nerve to tell me to get out of the way on COVID while he lets COVID-infected migrants pour over our southern border by the hundreds of thousands. No elected official is doing more to enable the transmission of COVID in America than Joe Biden with his open borders policies.”
I want to flag again what I discussed here yesterday. Only a handful of jurisdictions across the country are tracking and publishing COVID data broken down by vaccination status. As far as I can tell all of two states – Oregon and Virginia and one county, San Diego County in California – are tracking so-called breakthrough infections in any way that gives us a helpful understanding of the state of the pandemic.
As at least one Republican governor expresses regret over a state law that bans mask mandates at the local level, Texas and Florida’s top officials are doing the opposite.
