Herman Cain, the Republican businessman and former presidential candidate, died following covid-19 complications in July, but not to let death stop him from political engagement, he’s still an advocate for taking off your face mask.
In a Friday afternoon tweet, the ghost of Cain declared that “it’s time for the obsessive mask-wearing to wear off.” What followed was a link to a blog to the official Herman Cain website, where contributors post conservative clickbait. The article was about a man who was forcibly removed from a school board meeting in South Dakota for refusing to wear a mask.
Police arrived at the scene and reportedly asked the man, Reed Bender, to wear a mask. Bender told them, “you’re going to have to drag me out.” So they did, physically removing him from the library where the meeting was being held.
Seems pretty unremarkable that someone was asked to wear a mask indoors and, eventually, forcibly removed for noncompliance. But this might as well be a human rights violation to the brilliant minds behind “The Cain Gang.” As ghoulish as it is, it’s hard not to find dark amusement by this Twitter account’s obsession with posting anti-mask stories, considering the man who used to run it may very well have died due to people’s refusal to wear face-masks.
But optics, apparently, mean nothing in the Cain-verse.
President Trump continues to make dubious claims about the covid-19 vaccine timeline. On Friday, Trump said that the United States will have vaccines for every single American by April 2021.
“Hundreds of millions of doses will be available every month and we expect to have enough vaccines for every American by April,” Trump said.
He added that the United States will manufacture at least 100 million vaccines by the end of the year and that this timeline showcased “historic progress.” He even said that the vaccine is, essentially, already finished.
Unsurprisingly, this contradicts the experts. On Wednesday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield said that Americans shouldn’t expect the covid-19 vaccine won’t be widely available until the fall of 2021. Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that while a vaccine could be available by November or December, the notion that every American will have access to the vaccine by April doesn’t track
On Thursday, Fauci told WTOP, “But if you want to ask the question, what about getting everybody vaccinated so that we can say vaccines have now had a significant impact on how we are able to act in the sense of going back to some degree of normality — that very likely would be in the first half to the third quarter of 2021.”
Personally, I’m putting my money on Fauci, not Trump.
Joe Biden isn’t performing as well with Black and Latino men as he needs to. [Politico]
But this is promising:
The CDC published new—relaxed—covid-19 guidelines without the approval of CDC scientists who know better. [New York Times]
A federal judge is blocking USPS from undertaking even more absurd changes ahead of the election. [Washington Post]
