A day less than 90 degrees – Larry Hogan lambasts Donald Trump – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on New York crime – Discontent among New York police – The upcoming Republican Convention – Donald Trump’s campaign staff – Evening statistics
We reached only 87 degrees today and we thus failed to break our previous record of 21 consecutive days in excess of 90 degrees, which comes as a disappointment to no one. It definitely was less hot today than it has been previously and fairly breezy as well, but it was also a bit more humid and hazy – typical July weather, in short. Not many people were out on the streets today, probably discouraged by the continual heat. Mask-wearing is sporadic; some pedestrians use them and others do not. However, nearly everyone gives one another a wide berth when approaching from opposite directions.
Larry Hogan has written an account of the difficulties he has had in obtaining test kits for Maryland residents and he is scathing about the lack of cooperation he received from the President: “instead of listening to his own public health experts, the president was talking and tweeting like a man more concerned about boosting the stock market or his reelection plans.” It was only because Hogan’s wife is South Korean and something of a celebrity in her country of origin that he was able to broker a deal with Seoul that procured the kits that he needed.
The moral is clear: if you happen to be governor of an American state during a health crisis, make sure that your domestic partner comes from a country with a history, unlike ours, of handling epidemics with competence and ability.
My recent comments about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got some reaction from a few readers. I rather expected that they would. I look upon her as one of the great disappointments of American politics. Unlike the overwhelming majority of our legislators, she did not grow up in especially affluent circumstances and she was not at all well-off at the time of her election. Instead of being a high-priced lawyer, like so many other senators and representatives, she earned her living by waiting tables and tending bar. She thus has much better credentials than most of her colleagues for providing truly representative government, from her first-hand experience with living on a limited income with precarious job security, as is the case for a large number of our countrymen. But she seems to have learned nothing from it. From the first she has subordinated the interests of those who work for a living to those who don’t. She has striven to make the burden on the tax-paying portion of New Yorkers as great as possible; while her advocacy of the so-called “Green New Deal” places her firmly in the interests of a small, privileged elite – as in, for example, the manner in which this policy would make air travel all but inaccessible for anyone except the very wealthy.
Her remarks on the surge of crime in New York City are heartless in the extreme: “Maybe this has to do with the fact that people aren’t paying their rent and are scared to pay their rent. And so they go out and they need to feed their child and they don’t have money. So, you maybe have to — they’re put in a position where they feel like they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry that night.” As if petty shoplifting were the main issue at hand! Murders have gone up 23% this year in New York and the number of shooting victims has increased by over 70%. Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks make the perpetrators appear to be latter-day versions of Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean. She cannot be ignorant of the fact that breaking a pane of glass to steal a loaf of bread is a very different matter from hopping out of an SUV and firing at random into a crowd at a barbecue, killing a one-year old infant in the process (to take one incident out of many as an example). So I see no need to modify the disobliging adjectives I used to describe her yesterday.
As to what I said about the police being muzzled – I don’t believe people fully realize what they are doing when they revile those who risk their lives on a daily basis to protect us. It is, of course, not a particularly new phenomenon. Rudyard Kipling wrote of “making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep” in 1890. The recent policy changes and budget cuts have alienated many of the New York police. The number of resignations from the NYPD from June 29 to July 6 is 179, as opposed to 35 during the same time last year – an increase of over 400%. Just one day ago Bill De Blasio signed the so-called “diaphragm law,” which prohibits police officers from “sitting, kneeling, or standing on the chest or back” of a subject. Unfortunately, some subjects are extremely difficult to subdue by any other means. The results of such policies are not difficult to predict. The truly able and responsible people will be alienated from even entering law enforcement as a career, and we will end up with municipal police forces staffed with the equivalent of dozens of Derek Chauvins. I would be delighted to be proved wrong.
President Trump’s transferal of the Republican Convention from Charlotte, NC, to Jacksonville, FL, has already been noted. The idea was that when Roy Cooper, governor of North Carolina, absolutely refused to allow a convention with no requirements either for face masks or social distancing to be held within the state, Trump decided to move the convention to a location that would place no restrictions on the crowded assemblages so dear to his heart. But the recent flood of new virus cases in Florida has inspired a measure of prudence even within the Republican Party. Only the 2,500 designated delegates will be allowed to attend the first three nights of the four-day event. On the final evening, when Trump is scheduled to accept the nomination and address the convention, delegates will be allowed to bring one guest, and alternate delegates will also be invited, bringing the crowd to about 6,000-7,000 people. Obviously, the expected attendance under normal conditions would be much, much larger. At this point more than one person in 70 per capita within the state has been affected by the virus. Florida has been getting daily case increases in the 10,000-15,000 range for several days. In North Carolina, where the daily case count is considerably less and the mortality rate appears to be flattening, the convention might have had more leeway.
The dramatic irony of this outcome is thrown away on Donald Trump, whose motto for every crisis that comes his way is “whenever anything goes wrong, fire someone.” In this case that someone is Brad Parscale, who admittedly has not exactly been fired but merely demoted; he now handles digital and data strategies while the remainder of the campaign is now assigned to the deputy manager, Bill Stepien. Shaking up one’s campaign staff less than four months away from the election doesn’t sound like a winning strategy; one can only hope that Biden will not neglect to capitalize on it. For the present Biden has been content to allow Trump to flounder on his own on the principle of “give a man enough rope,” and it must be said that to date the results have justified this approach.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 13,924,308; # of deaths worldwide: 591,835; # of cases U.S.: 3,683,324 # of deaths U.S.: 141,016. Our increase is less than 67,000 today, which falls short of the amount of increase yesterday. It is still, however, a daily increase of nearly 2% of the total number. Brazil’s case count is now over two million and India’s case count is over one million. Brazil hit the one-million mark during the last week of June, which means that its case count has doubled in less than a month.