QOTD -- Danger For Democrats!!

 

"We're all supposed to believe that Democrats must practice "popularism" -- they should talk about popular Democratic ideas and only popular Democratic ideas; none of this woke "defund the police" or "Latinx" nonsense. Most Democratic politicians actually do just that, but word gets around that every Democrat is excessively woke because the right-wing media says so. But Republicans practice "unpopularism" -- they oppose even modest gun control measures even after horrific massacres, they oppose abortion even in cases of rape and incest, they block increased taxation of the rich, they prevent increases in the federal minimum wage, they reject state Medicaid expansion under Obamacare -- and none of this is ever described as carrying "real political risk," presumably because they do it so defiantly that voters just shrug and accept it as inevitable.

"In addition, of course, they benefit tremendously from the work of reporters and pundits like Talev who assume that there's political peril in everything Democrats do and nothing Republicans do. And these journalists don't even notice that they're doing it." -- Steve M., at No More Mister Nice Blog, on a piece in Axios by Margaret Talev on the "real political risk" of vaccine mandates to Democrats.  The polls Talev cites are, at best, contradictory;  but, hey, why be bothered with contradictions when you've got a narrative to flog, amirite?!

QOTD -- More Sticks, Less Carrots

"The experience of the nine months since vaccines became widely available is simple. Carrots — benefits such as gift cards and giveaways and lotteries — sound great. Bribing people to take the vaccine — or to put it more politely, incentivizing them — sounds better than forcing them. But it hasn’t worked — at least not nearly well enough — and the audience on whom it might work has now been vaccinated.

"What has produced results, and has the promise of doing much more to reduce the population of the unvaccinated, are mandates. They inevitably invite a game of chicken. People complain; they threaten to quit. Then, for the most part, they cave. Corporate chieftains and elected officials need to call these bluffs, even if it requires taking on public employee unions and terminating a few hundred people here and there to drive home the point: Saying no has a price." -- James Hohmann in today's Washington Post.  Hohmann goes on to point out that the vast majority when faced with the choice of a pink slip or a shot choose the shot -- resulting in 99% compliance in many cases.

Get. The. Damn. Vaccine.