Seattle Police Likely To Defund Themselves Over Vaccine Mandate
So far, according to a Seattle Police Department spokesperson, 111 officers have requested religious or medical exemptions. They apparently all joined some kooky death cult after meeting the normal vaccination requirements to attend public schools. Seattle and Portland, Oregon, both tied a few years ago as the least religious city in America, so this seems more like political resistance than anything else. True, most Seattle police don't live in Seattle (and they could actually afford it!), but 70 percent of all eligible Washington state residents are fully vaccinated. They're out of step with the state as a whole.
However, even if these cops legitimately worship the god of respiratory diseases, Durkan is standing firm about protecting the public from a Typhoid Mary police squad, no matter how devout.
"If there is a valid religious or medical exemption, then we have an obligation to determine whether we can accommodate them with other jobs that will not put them in that position where they could expose others," she says. "And if we can't, then they will not be able to continue in their employment."
The police are sure to pout because Durkan is prioritizing the public good over whatever it is these anti-vax cops are doing. Durkan bent over backwards to appease them last year when they were crying “don't defund us, even during a pandemic!" She's now effectively paying them to stay alive: All city employees who show proof of vaccination are eligible for an additional 40 hours of paid leave for COVID-19-related needs. That's on top of the existing 40 hours of supplementary pandemic leave.
"I really wanted to provide, to all city employees, uniform benefits for the work that they have done — showing up every day during this pandemic — and also to incentivize people [to get vaccinated]," Durkan says.
Durkan has presumably met cops, so she should know they'd want the incentives and perks without any personal obligation. They're not into Spider-Man's whole “power and responsibility" kick. It's also a good bet that rightwing media will blame any corresponding rise in Seattle's violent crime rates on the vaccine mandate instead of anti-vax cops not fully comprehending the concept “protect and serve."
Fox 13 in Seattle writes that the police department is “bracing" for mass firings, as if the cops have no control over this situation. An especially whiny cop said:
The environment has been pretty toxic and negative. Not just from this whole mandate, but prior to that as well. I'm not sure this would be a good place for me to work long-term for my mental health. It has been very stressful.
Wow! Police work is stressful. Someone should've mentioned that to him before he applied. It's unclear why anyone this emotionally fragile was given a gun.
The New York Post article about the Seattle vaccine mandate contained this insulting bit of copaganda:
The Seattle Police Department has already lost more than 300 officers since Black Lives Matters riots and the "defund the police" movement roiled the city in 2020, putting officers in the crosshairs of political and public ire.
The article literally doesn't contain the name “George Floyd," whom a former Minneapolis cop murdered while other cops watched. This is what led to overwhelmingly peaceful protests. (There was a far smaller percentage of “riots" than there are vaccine holdouts in the Seattle police department.) And to the extent that there's even a “defund the police" movement, that was in reaction to years of hashtags for Black victims of police violence without any meaningful reforms.
Durkan is still optimistic that most cops will come around and get vaccinated, but if they don't, she says that's their choice, for which there's a stated consequence. However, that implies that cops are capable of an emotional maturity they've yet to collectively demonstrate. They'll just continue playing the victim.
[KUOW / New York Post]
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OH NO JOBS REPORT IS ... Oh, It's Fine Bordering On Just Okay? Carry On, Then
was another blow to Republicans who claimed repeatedly that generous unemployment aid was keeping people from work. Millions of people lost all aid or had it significantly scaled back at the start of September. But there was not an immediate wave of workers returning to jobs.
The report also reflected the bind many women find themselves in as the pandemic hangs on:
[An] alarming number of women had to stop working again to deal with unstable school and child-care situations.
The numbers are striking: 309,000 women over age 20 dropped out of the labor force in September, meaning they quit work or halted their job searches. In contrast, 182,000 men joined the labor force, Labor Department data showed.
And as with other monthly employment reports in our weird pandemic economy, the timing of the Labor Department sample had an effect on the overall outcome that it wouldn't in normal economic times. Again, here's CNBC's explanation:
The survey week of Sept. 12 came just as Covid cases were peaking in the U.S. The delta variant spread since has cooled, with cases most recently dropping below an average of 100,000 a day.
President Biden referred to that in his remarks today on the employment news, pointing out that since the week of the survey, "we've seen the daily cases fall by more than one-third and they're continuing to trend down, and we're continuing to make progress." Assuming that trend continues, and that vaccination rates improve as both the federal government and private industries mandate vaccines, that ought to mean a better jobs report for October.
Oh look, it is video!
Biden's remarks focused primarily on the positive parts of the monthly report, like the improvement in the unemployment rate, increased wages, a big decline in long-term unemployment, and the overall trends in employment, "on average, 600,000 new jobs created every month since I took office."
Biden downplayed the significance of the jobs report falling short, particularly because of the distortions caused by the pandemic, and argued that overall trends remain strong:
Right now, things in Washington, as you all know, are awfully noisy. Turn on the news and every conversation is a confrontation. Every disagreement is a crisis. But when you take a step back and look at what's happening, we're actually making real progress. [...] Maybe it doesn't seem fast enough. I'd like to see it faster and we're going to make it faster. Maybe it doesn't appear dramatic enough. [...] We're making consistent and steady progress, though.
For its part, Fox News treated Biden's remarks as an absolute catastrophe, calling the jobs report "bleak" and "dismal," although those are usually words you'd expect in a report on jobs losses, not slower-than-hoped jobs gains. Fox also griped that Biden didn't take questions from reporters, because what is he hiding from, huh? The Fox story delicately hinted that maybe it's because Biden is actually a senile vegetable who may in fact already be dead, saying he has "repeatedly implied that his handlers set the rules and determine when and where he's allowed to take questions from the press." The link is to a story about Biden joking that he'd "get in trouble with my staff" for taking questions at an appearance when no Q&A had been scheduled. See? Total puppet! Who's really running things?
We'd like to suggest the most sinister explanation of all for Biden's not taking questions after the remarks on the jobs report: He had a pretty full schedule today, and shortly after the jobs report, held another event to announce his order restoring the full boundaries of national monuments that Donald Trump had shrunk.
Or maybe Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton told him to do it.
Also too, Yr Dok Zoom is taking a much needed vacay and will be back Tuesday, Oct. 19, so here is a photo of Thornton the cat. He is, as ever, photogenic AF.
[Bureau of Labor Statistics / CNBC / CNN / WaPo / Fox News]
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