Well, it’s about time. State Rep. Jim Lucas and three others have signed a letter to Governor Holcomb insisting that it is time to stop the stupid and reopen the state. As someone else said on Mad Mike’s Facebook wall, “Kinda too little too late.” But that this is happening at all suggests that there is dissent within the Republican Party over the shutdown, and they’re not interested in seeing their comfy majorities in both Houses eroded over a crashed economy that was primarily due to the Republican governor’s over-zealous attempts to contain the virus.
Lucas makes a number of good points:
- The original orders were based on partial data that, in the event, was grossly overstated, and has since become outdated.
- The predictions of deaths resulting from COVID-19 have gone down drastically as the models have been altered to better match reality (and as models do, the models still suck — my opinion, Lucas doesn’t say it).
- The number of deaths, notwithstanding, is inflated because of the CDC’s misguided directive stating that any death where the decedent was COVID-19 positive should be classified as a COVID-19 death — even if the proximate cause of death wasn’t COVID-19.
- Since the original orders, a number of effective treatments have been discovered and are now in use to good effect.
- Our full attention should be aimed at protecting population segments that have been identified as most at risk from possible infection — the elderly and those with specific underlying conditions.
Here’s the letter, click to embiggenate:
And here’s the link to his Facebook post, which is the only place I’ve seen this so far (other than shared on Mad Mike’s FB page).
This isn’t anything I and others haven’t been saying on blogs, Facebook, and other social media. Yeah, COVID-19, the Chinese Virus, WuFlu, whatever you want to call it, is a nasty little business. I’d prefer not to contract it (though as I have said repeatedly, I think I did, last fall). And I’m one of the people Lucas is trying to protect. Which is fine; I can stay home and work. My wife can’t. We need both incomes and we’re lucky we’re not down one or both of them right now.
That’s no different from the people who were thrown out of work by Holcomb’s orders. The orders may have been wise at first, but after two weeks it was pretty clear all they were doing was hurting the little guy as the numbers fell fall short of predictions. But Holcomb continued to make things worse by extending the orders, and then extending them again. And now it’s likely he’ll extend them yet again if the Legislature doesn’t step up and stop him.
I can tell you right now that I will not vote for Holcomb in November. I won’t vote for the Democrat, either, but I’ll probably hold my nose and vote Libertarian. Holcomb needs to suffer for what he’s done to the Hoosiers who were least able to afford it. The only thing I wish is that Jim Lucas was my district representative, so I could vote for him, because even though this is too little, too late, at least he’s trying to do the right thing.
Will this do any good? I don’t know. It depends on whether the Governor thinks his chances of re-election aren’t being hurt by what he’s doing. If he thinks they aren’t, I think he has another think coming.
For what it’s worth, there is one name conspicuous by its absence on this letter: That of the Speaker of the House, Brian Bosma. But Bosma is a pussy who won’t let Constitutional carry get a hearing in the House, either, so I’m not surprised he’s not beating on Holcomb to lift his orders.
Maybe it’s time to let the Democrats have the reins of the state for awhile. God forbid. But the state’s Republicans sure have managed to fuck things up in 2020, and that’s a fact.
No comments again. Sorry.