A Tribe of One

I don't agree with the Republicans, they agree with me.  Not about everything of course, but about more things than either the Democrats or even the Libertarians anymore.

I don't think Michigan's Republican dominated legislature wants to throw everything wide open all at once, they just want the governor to work with them to lift some of the more unreasonable restrictions, especially in the rural counties where the lockdown seems to be causing more of a hardship than the virus.  The governor has expressed an interest in working with the legislature, but only if they do everything her way.  Case in point:  The big hospital in Petoskey, which serves a tri-county area, has only treated 23 corona patients since this thing began.  Four of them are still in the hospital and 17 of them have been "safely discharged".  This leaves two patients unaccounted for.  I assume that they died, but the newspaper article didn't say that in so many words.  The governor's order has forbidden them to perform "elective procedures", which I think means anything that is not life threatening.  The result is that this hospital has had to lay off staff because business is so slow.  Similarly, dentists and even veterinarians are only being allowed to do "emergency" work.  The legislature has been unsuccessful in getting the governor to even consider modifying these rules, which is one reason why they refused to extend her state of emergency beyond April 30 when it legally expired.  You can call this an "intricacy of the law" if you want, but the text I linked to yesterday seemed pretty straight forward to me.  The intricacy arose when the governor claimed that a law that was passed 31 years prior to this law supersedes it.  I have never heard of such a thing but, like I said, I am not a lawyer.

Our governor has insisted that she should retain her emergency powers because the emergency is not over.  A week or so ago, in an attempt to put this corona thing into perspective, I looked up the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 on Wiki.  This thing raged across the land in a succession of waves for some two years before spontaneously extinguishing itself for reasons about which there is little agreement among the experts.  I don't think you can call something like that an emergency, at some point it became an ongoing problem.  When an emergency becomes the new normal, that doesn't mean you quit working on it, but it does mean that you need to start looking at long term sustainable solutions.  I don't think that hamstringing the global economy is one of those.


Our stimulus money was directly deposited into our checking account.  We never asked for it, they just sent it that way.  My wife found out about it when she phoned the credit union to confirm our current balance.  She has not gone there in person since the corona hit the fan because only the drive thru part is open and she hates it.