Of Drills, and Ills, and Governors

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Yesterday I had been planning to write about COVID vaccinations and a couple of GOP governors, DeSantis of Florida and Noem of South Dakota, who seem to be furthering their own political ambitions by putting citizens in their states at higher risk of catching the deadly disease, but instead I got sidetracked by a pair of tornado warnings.  First my phone alarm went off stating that a tornado warning for my area was in effect, and then the community sirens began blaring.  The sky was blue and the day was sunny, so I snarled out a blog post about inept tornado forecasting - instead of grousing about inept COVID responses.

Not long after posting my morning shot of venom, a couple of kind souls let me know, very politely, that all of the tornado noise had just been a drill - apparently a multi-state affair.  It would be understandable if I was surprised by a local drill because I routinely ignore the local news, but being unaware of a multi-state drill is sort of embarrassing.  I must be spending too much time on Twitter!

So, to insure that I am never caught flat-footed again with a national weather drill, I have now added the National Weather Service (@NWS) to my Twitter feed.  I hope the NWS has a thick skin because I run with a rough Twitter crowd!

Here are some notes that I had ready for yesterday:

I received my second COVID shot this past Friday at my town's large and very well run COVID vaccination clinic.  Missouri's Republican governor, Mike Parson, who used to be the sheriff in a rural county, has taken a lot of guff over what appears to have been a deliberate push to get the vaccines into the rural areas first while letting the state's two very large (and racially and ethnically diverse) urban areas do without until their country cousins were served.   Some are even suggesting that racism may have been an underlying factor in how state officials chose to distribute the vaccine - a charge that Governor Parson, of course, denies.

I am grateful that I had the opportunity to get my shots as early as I did, and I am enraged for the people in St. Louis who had to drive 120 miles south to Cape Girardeau in order to get theirs. 

Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida and Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, both gave speeches at the right-wing CPAC hate-fest in Orlando last week, and both touted their resistance to the federal efforts to control the spread of the coronavirus.  Noem bragged that her state had never closed down anything during he pandemic, but she failed to mention that South Dakota's COVID infection rate was, per capita, one of the highest in the nation.  CPAC roared its approval of these two rebellious governors who refused to be controlled by a deadly disease or federal guidelines.

Texas governor Greg Abbott was apparently paying attention to the noise coming out of CPAC.  Two weeks ago his state was paralyzed by winter weather and an ineffective state-designed-and-run power grid, and had to go hat-in-hand to the federal government and ask for emergency assistance - which President Biden quickly provided.  But now the heat is back on and Governor Abbott is once again feeling his cantankerous oats.  Yesterday he announced that he was ending the COVID mask mandate across the entire state - even though Biden had asked all Americans to wear masks during the first one hundred days of his administration.    Abbott also announced the end of all COVID-related business closures in Texas.

Gregg Abbott apparently feels that the federal government should stand ready to help his state when it is in crisis, even a crisis of its own making, but when times are good Texas should run its own damned affairs and to hell with what Washington, DC, wants!

Texas NEEDS Beto O'Rourke as its next governor!