Month: November 2020

Categories
Pandemic

Premier Kenney’s Uncomfortable Bed

“Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

“Caught between a rock and a hard place.”

There’s no shortage of well-worn clichés to describe the predicament in which Premier Jason Kenney finds himself as Alberta’s COVID numbers skyrocket, filling hospital beds and stuffing intensive care units.

A tsunami of medical misery threatens to crash over Albertans, and the premier’s options to mitigate the coming catastrophe range from crappy to crappier. I (almost) felt sorry for him yesterday evening as he plowed through a press conference announcing a suite of additional restrictions on Albertans’ freedoms — restrictions antithetical to his political soul.

After his presser, predictably, a storm of criticism erupted from all sides: from those who felt that he went too far, to those who felt he didn’t go nearly far enough; from those upset that he didn’t shut down all non-essential businesses and close all the schools (he sent grades 7–12 home), to those angered by further constraints to their lives.

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Categories
Pandemic

Covid’s Return: We’re Stumbling Instead Of Dancing

We were extremely fortunate in Alberta to suffer only a glancing blow from COVID-19 during the first wave of the virus’ march around the globe. We prepared for a tsunami of cases but encountered barely a ripple.

There were a number of reasons why we were spared, as I discussed in some detail last May in This Pandemic is a Three-Legged Beast. In short — to bluntly oversimplify — it had as much to do with luck as it did with brains; as much to do with simple good fortune as with specific government or public health policies.

Yet we didn’t shrink from taking full credit for our “success” — we nearly broke our arms patting ourselves on the back. And we set Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Deena Hinshaw on a pedestal for steering us expertly through virus-infested waters.

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Categories
American Politics

Trump is Toppled — and Democracy Trembles

Trumpty Dumpty sat on his wall

Trumpty Dumpty had a great fall

And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Trumpty together again

Tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash-bang grenades.

That’s what it took to clear peaceful protestors from Lafayette Square last June to make way for a presidential photo-op outside of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C.

Pesky protesters properly banished, President Trump held a Bible high, waving it about as the cameras rolled. 

It’s a sure bet that the President has little working knowledge of the book he brandished that day.  It contains, for instance, these words spoken by Jesus Himself: “So in everything do to others as you would have them do unto you.”

It may take more than tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash-bang grenades, however, to dislodge the just-defeated President from the Oval Office.

Continue reading “Trump is Toppled — and Democracy Trembles”