One of the dopiest things I’ve heard from Trumpist coronavirus downplayers is that if Walmart can be open amidst a pandemic, so can the schools:
“We spent months saying that there were certain things that were essential. That included fast-food restaurants. It included Walmart. It included Home Depot,” [Flordia Governor Ron] DeSantis said in Jacksonville, Fla., CNN reported.
“If fast food and Walmart and Home Depot — and, look, I do all that, so I’m not looking down on it — but if all that is essential, then educating our kids is absolutely essential,” he added.
…”I’m confident if you can do Home Depot, if you can do Walmart, if you can do these things, we absolutely can do the schools. I want our kids to be able to minimize this education gap that I think has developed,” he said [J. Edward Moreno, “DeSantis on Florida Schools Reopening: ‘If You Can Do Walmart,’ Then ‘We Absolutely Can Do the Schools’,” The Hill, 2020.07.11].
Anybody who has walked into Walmarts and schools during normal operating hours understands how faulty is a comparison between safely opening a large store for shoppers to spend 15–20 minutes a day picking out groceries and safely opening a school building for teachers and students to spend 6–8 hours together in crowded classrooms, hallways, lunchrooms, and locker rooms.
But if you wish to cling to the Walmart-school comparison to defend forcing children and teachers to risk their lives for face-to-face education, when we have a perfectly safe and viable alternative means of lesson delivery, then you must cling to it completely and demand that your school district mandate masks for everyone in the building:
Walmart and Sam’s Club are joining Costco, Starbucks, Best Buy and others in implementing a nationwide requirement for customers to wear masks inside their stores. Walmart said it’s creating a new job of “health ambassador,” who will be specially trained to “work with customers who show up at a store without a face covering to try and find a solution.”
…Walmart, in a blog post on Wednesday, cited new spikes in coronavirus cases across the U.S. — four months since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. The company says some 65% of store locations are already in areas with “some form of government mandate on face coverings.”
…”We know this is a simple step everyone can take for their safety and the safety of others in our facilities,” Walmart officials wrote on Wednesday, adding:
“We know some people have differing opinions on this topic. We also recognize the role we can play to help protect the health and well-being of the communities we serve by following the evolving guidance of health officials like the CDC” [Alina Selyukh, “Walmart Will Require Shoppers to Wear Masks; Other Retailers Urged to Follow,” NPR, 2020.07.15].
Walmart’s mask requirement takes effect Monday, July 20.
If Walmart can require everyone to wear masks, why can’t my local school district?
We have no leadership other than corporate leadership. What does that tell you about democracy other than this one has failed. Look to the Asian country’s and to Europe for real governing and leadership. They also have healthcare that fits all of its citizens. BTW, Walmart is getting into healthcare with clinics. Soon you will be able to have your gall bladder removed, a heart transplant and a visit to the podiatrist while shopping for prepackaged chicken and produce all done the same day “Save Money, Live Better”.
Can you imagine all the tomfoolery that would occur in schools where every kid was wearing a mask? grudznick doesn’t go to Walmart but I bet there is a lot of horseplay going on there, too.
Providing kids a safe learning environment should be priority 1. Unfortunately for our kids, wingnuts are more concerned about the economy than kids safety.
drumpf’s hoax hits another milestone and will hit a second one early this evening….
Coronavirus Cases:
3,600,606
Deaths:
139,821
New IMHE predictions says there will be 224k drumpf body count eligible bodies by November 1.
Think of it this way, either way here, we’re screwed.
“si pedias vivir te negaban la ayuda y si pedias morir te negaban la eutanasia” El Roto
if you asked to live they denied you help and if you asked to die they denied you euthanasia.
Gonna be interesting on the enforcement end. What could possibly go wrong??
Bucko, I’m thinking of a guy who believes it’s his absolute right to carry a gun at Costco, but it’s also his absolute right to not wear a mask.. . that could go wrong, very wrong. Yeah it would be interesting to watch but I don’t think I want to be in proximity. Didja all see the one of the gray-haired “lady” who sat down on the floor at Costco and wouldn’t move because she was told she had to put a mask on? I hope those people by the door get hazardous duty pay.
To Jerry’s point: when Walmart provides better guidance on public health than our elected leaders, we’re in trouble.
To salvage a point from Grudz’s tomfoolery: masks make it harder to teach and harder to learn. Teachers and students need to hear each other as clearly as possible; masks muffle voices. Teachers and students learn a lot from each other’s visual cues—students signal understanding and confusion, teachers signal approval and disapproval and (the most crucial yet underdiscussed and undervalued part of in-person classes) caring; masks make it harder to convey and read those visual signals. We convey our teaching presence, our social presence, and our cognitive presence with our faces; masks retard presence.
And when kids learn foreign language, they need to see the teacher’s face as he speaks so they can imitate those movements and improve their sounds, and the teachers needs to see their mouths so he can diagnose and correct errors in how they form the foreign sounds.
It’s not really face-to-face learning if we’re all wearing masks. I would rather teach online and pour heart and soul into designing rock’em-sock’em lessons that work over YouTube and Zoom and Google Docs than have to spend all day in a plexiglass cubicle at the front of the classroom speaking mic’d through a mask to a roomful of half-faceless children.
But that’s pedagogy, not public health. If we can’t safely shop for 15 minutes without masks, we can’t safely crowd 800 children and 100 adults in one building for six hours without masks.
Bucko, Robin, Walmart is going to need to train and pay their staff extra to properly enforce this new policy. They need their most dynamic, thick-skinned, well-spoken, and principled managers up front, looking people right in the eye and making clear they’re dead serious about putting public health first. Mask on or no entry, period. No ifs ands or buts, no making a scene, no debating it, just put your mask on—here’s a fresh clean free one right here if you don’t have one!—or walk away.
I don’t see a lot of top talent like that stocking shelves at Walmart… and I don’t think a lot of Walmart workers signed on to do that kind of hard, public-facing duty.
You’re right, Cory, about training and passion. I did check out that video of a female Costco employee trying to diplomatically convince a screaming guy in a MAGA t-shirt to put on a mask. She was about twice his size, but he had the “advantage” of being crazy. I can’t imagine Walmart putting the funds and effort and care for their customers into training these people professionally. Not gonna happen.
We will probably see a lot of those phone movies showing raging lunatics threatening others, and maybe even a few of their customers melting down in the brain, waving arms, talking very loud and very fast. It should be very interesting to watch.
Just so you all know, grudznick has a mask and wears it to the Lowes and Runnings and Menards. But I will not wear it to Walmart.
Isn’t it interesting, that an entity, which funds, promotes, and teaches science, doesn’t practice it? What do these school districts that do not require masks know, that no one else knows?
As a former member of the SFSD Boundary Task Force, I was astounded how few local SFSD officials were wearing masks at regular board and Boundary meetings during the month of June. The first month where public meetings on the boundary issue were held since late February. You would think school officials would be proactive in promoting science, wouldn’t you?
I noticed the Mitchell School District, however, is going to require masks for the fall. So, what do the school districts in Sioux Falls and Aberdeen know, that Mitchell doesn’t?
With all these big chain stores requiring masks for customers, will our national, state, and local leaders start changing their mind? At some point these leaders are going to be left behind in the mask movement.
It is so sad and makes me extremely angry that we have absolutely no national leadership during a pandemic. Our state leadership was not to bad at first, but now seems to be conforming more and more by a desire to be a cultist Trump loyalist.
Mr. Scott, did you see that Chicago is now banning/isolating anybody from Iowa and Minnesota who try to visit their town, but people from South Dakota are OK? I wonder what’s up with that, there in libbie Chitown.
Menards has required masks from the beginning. I think Lowes does too. Home Depot is owned by a Pandemic Pal lover and big donor so I’m sure his stores will be obsequiously compliant as long as possible.
Menards has not required masks at all stores since the beginning, Ms. Geelsdottir. Your information is incorrect.
I believe the Menard’s mask requirement went into effect at the beginning – of this week.
Nope. They’ve been requiring masks for a couple months, at least in Minnesota and Minnesota doesn’t have a mask rule.
Menards has been requiring masks for months now, they even had a security firm hired to enforce the mask requirement at the entrances and exits (whatdoyoumean I can’t enter through the Exit doors?)…duh! I’ve been doing the Walmart online grocery and pickup for awhile now but last week actually entered a Walmart and felt that I had been covid crop-dusted since no one was wearing a mask unless they were 80 years old.
The Aberdeen Menards put signs on the door last week announcing that all customers would be required to wear masks starting July 13. I haven’t been in this week to check how they’re doing on enforcement.
From Mitchell’s pandemic plan:
Clear masks… it occurs to me that if we moved to spacesuits with bubble helmets and radios, we could do class outside in winter.
Mitchell’s plan also says, “When weather permits, student may be dining outside.” That is an outstanding idea.
Walmart should follow suit by having more tent sales outdoors. Identify the 100 hottest-selling items and move stocks of them outside along with a couple of cash registers and checkers.
Now, if Walmart doesn’t have what I need, I don’t need it. Same goes for hardware, if Menards doesn’t have it, I will do without. Why would I spend my money in a place like Safeway, Family Fare or any other supermarket that doesn’t care about safety? Why would I spend my money on hardware or building supplies from Lowes, Ace or Hardware Hank that doesn’t care about the safety of their shoppers like Menards? The markets make more sense than what we have seen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=101&v=HGDNaB6fZCU&feature=emb_title
1.3 million more filed for unemployment last week in the failed trump/GNOem economy. We would be able to put more of these folks to work providing security to keep the dumb arse no mask wearing people away from the rest of us that wear masks and seek social distancing.
Hire more teachers, more custodians, bus drivers.
Ask yourself, are you doing better now than you were 4 years ago? Do you feel safer than you did even 6 months ago? Are you happy living under the regime of crackpots? Think about this, do you regret not voting for Sutton or Clinton?
Of you are too defiant to wear a mask or reticent to shop even with one, order online and use pickup service. Most stores now have this avalable. Wal-Mart has this down to a fine art as does Sam’s. The new norm.
I saw a picture on line last week of a sign at the entrance to a business.
“If you enter without wearing a mask, we will be forced to take your temperature.
P.S. We only have rectal thermometers.”
The Safeway’s in RC have signs at the entrance requiring the wearing of a mask but it does not seem to be enforced.
I saw a picture online of a sign at the entrance to a business.
“If you enter without wearing a mask, we will be forced to take your temperature.
P.S. We only have rectal thermometers.”
The Safeway’s in RC have signs posted requiring customers to wear a mask but it doesn’t appear to be enforced.
Then no Safeway. Walmart will enforce so that is where I will spend my money. To bad about that as Safeway would be closer, but that is the way the mask folds.
Going to be quite a dilemma for the MAGA hat wearing you-can’t-tell-me-what -to-do folks. Now they will be required to wear a mask if they want to buy Goya beans at WalMart. I’m sure the administration is working on an executive order to get around the restriction on individual rights. !@#%^&*
Target will mandate masks beginning August 1. Booyah! Pretty quick the only place these Magats will be able to go without masks will be the confines of their addled brains. The fake governor will not do anything so it’s up to the corporations (who have always run things anyway) to make us do the safe thing to save them money.
An added twist to Costco, masks and dress code.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/briannasacks/costco-black-lives-matter-masks-dress-code
jerry
Boise-based Albertsons Companies will soon start requiring mask usage in all its stores nationwide. The retailer operates stores under its own name, as well as Safeway, Carrs, Acme, Jewel Osco, Shaws, and others.
“Effective July 21, 2020, we will require customers across all of our locations to wear face coverings when shopping with us, for their protection and for that of our associates,” the company wrote in a statement provided to BoiseDev. “We appreciate everyone’s diligence, cooperation, and support as we all work together to get through these difficult times as safely as possible.”
We are devolving here in zombie land. My advise, get a passport and hope like hell someone will take us UN refugees.
“They wore ‘Trump 2020’ hats and carried little American flags, and every time someone said ‘freedom’ or ‘constitutional rights’ the whole room cheered,” reported the Tribune, neatly summarizing just how far into hell we’ve gotten and providing a good look at the hand basket.
Shrieking Trump supporters going into buzzword-premised spasms in the demand that their kids be exposed to more coronavirus, goddamnit, is the most compelling evidence to date that many humans among us are in fact devolving into a more primitive state. Human evolution could not last forever, after all. Once we started enforcing seatbelt regulations, putting warning signs on heavy machinery, and including little notices telling people to not eat rat poison, that element of mankind that quietly Darwin’d themselves out of existence in past generations began to reach breeding age, and now they’re waving little flags around and wearing red hats. We may have done this to ourselves.”https://www.sltrib.com/news/education/2020/07/15/packed-meeting-utah/
From the “you can’t make this stuff up” file….
July 16, 2020 at 1:21 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard 195 Comments
“Former game show host Chuck Woolery announced his son has tested positive for COVID-19, just days after Woolery accused medical professionals and Democrats of lying about the virus in an effort to hurt the economy and President Trump’s reelection chances,” The Hill reports.
In real life drumpf’s body count surpassed 141k this evening and tomorrow should surpass 3.7 million cases in America.
Irony mfi, irony.
Republicans come here often, angrily attempting to torpedo Democratic efforts to effect change in SD. They maximize their attacks on military Vet jerry, and on “out-of-stater” farmer mfi who lives only a few dozen miles from the regional major population centers of Sioux City IA and Sioux Falls SD, both highly relevant to his interests.
They, jerry and mfi, occupy the front lines of this blog, ALWAYS, always correctly pointing out positive action by liberals in the political struggle of the region and the nation and the world, often tersely in the face of conservative Republicans’ cling to power no matter the deeply devastating consequences to the legitimate overall welfare of ordinary citizens.
Their most recent comments say everything about the absurdity of Republican behavior.
jerry-“do you regret not voting for Sutton or Clinton?”
mfi-“game show host Chuck Woolery announced his son has tested positive for COVID-19, just days after Woolery accused medical professionals and Democrats of lying about the virus in an effort to hurt the economy and President Trump’s reelection chances“
No conservative or Republican can respond intelligently. Ever.
Perhaps however enabler Sen Mike Rounds may “explain” Trump’s idiotic tweet concerning anti-semite Woolery. Trump has no idea what truth is in his pathologic bubble. If you do not get that, you may be left with us “prying your gun from your dead fingers”. GOD https://www.newsweek.com/chuck-woolery-donald-trump-tweet-2020-wheel-fortune-antisemitism-america-1517372
Leslie you’re right about Mike and Jerry. Why wouldn’t neighbors such as Mike and me care about SD? Caring is a virtue.
“Trump has no idea what truth is in his pathologic bubble.”
I believe this is true. He is very, very sick. Yet he is the president of the USA solely due to GOP greed and cruelty. We must get rid of both this November. It is imperative.
leslie, thanks for the kind words. Woolery has had a change of heart about covid since his kid has it.
Noem Nothing was back on Fake Noize basking in their praise for doing nothing, which is exactly what drumpf did and now nearly 142k have died.
To further clarify and add perspective, Covid-19 is real and it is here. My son tested positive for the virus, and I feel for of those suffering and especially for those who have lost loved ones,” Woolery tweeted before his account disappeared.
The message comes after Woolery tweeted Monday denouncing “outrageous lies” being told about the coronavirus, comments that Trump retweeted to his more than 83 million followers.
Someone had a superior come to reality epiphany and it wasn’t Grudzilla.
RC 16 days after Mt Trumpzilla gireworks. 95 news cases today in SD. Yesterday 45ish.
leslie, thanks for your kind words. Something that I think of is the lottery type deal that was set up for the Rushmore thingy. Mr. grudznick said that a couple of the people around him were from out of state and that got me to thinking that maybe that was the whole gist of this…to have people not from the Black Hills area, but others to attend this crap show. I do note that I don’t know how credible Mr. grudznick is regarding the crap show at Rushmore, but he did write what he wrote about the out of staters.
Your number of 95 new cases today is a pretty good bump like double of what it was. Let’s see how this progresses and gets progressively worse before someone says whoa.
As much as grdz “hates” Trump it is not possible he attended the July 3 rally.
Bbc suggests young people be repaid for efforts to protect older citizens from infection. Like selective service registration?
From another news source the number was 83 positives, so reportage is not consistent.
The more I think about it, I agree leslie. Mr. grudznick is full of prunes. Why would you subject yourself to that kind of agony if you “hate” the dude. Tomorrow, there will be places to shop where you can feel a little safer than you felt in those same places today. That is progress! We cannot expect our government to provide us safety so we must find it ourselves in whatever places of business think the way we do.
South Dakota needs to send back the 1.25 BILLION pronto…deficit don’t ya know.
grudznick loves fireworks and free whiskeys. Think about it.
And my good friend Mr. jerry is righter than right. The big money should be sent back, right pronto. Ms. Noem, the Conservative with Common Sense voted this very morning. Send it back!
Whereas, the Conservatives with Common Sense are a Rapid City group that loves the debates over breakfasts, and;
Whereas, the breakfasts are filled with gravy, with the sausage laden gravy being the preferred, and;
Whereas, the fellows who engage in these gravy laden breakfasts are pretty swell, and do the debates better than most and;
Whereas, these Conservatives with Common Sense mock Mr. Trump, the POTUS, at every turn, and;
Whereas, the few libbies in South Dakota, the best state ever, and the one that Out-of-State Name-Callers flock to whine about because of its greatness, are generally insaner than most, and;
Whereas, the Conservatives with Common Sense have the best pulse on the real values of True South Dakotans, those who fly the Trumpists on a sock and those who do not, and;
Whereas, the Conservatives with Common Sense have passed, with a huge majority of the voters, an Act to Empower the CCS to carry forth further,
Therefore, be it resolved the Conservatives with Common Sense, having more sense than most, shall push forward and call up that young Ms. Noem and tell her to send the money back.
I, grudznick, the acting Treasurer and Sergeant at Arms of the Conservatives with Common Sense does hereby enact and set forth my fist and pencil upon the napkin dually signed by all breakfasters on 19 July, the year of the overgodder’s lord numbered 2020, this resolution.
Really, Grudz? “dually”? “have the best pulse”? Did you graduate from 8th Grade?
Blue states are smart and would know the best way to use the money for their state’s protection. Yes, send the 1.25 BILLION TO SMART PEOPLE, we’ve proven ourselves to be to damn dumb to even pour sand out of our shoes little alone to handle the well being of our citizens.
We know that this trooper had a Russian bounty on his head. We are still being killed in Afghanistan as we are right here. Long past time to toss out the traitor trash in our White House.
The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Freedom’s Sentinel.
“1st Lt. Joseph Trent Allbaugh, 24, from Folsom, California, died as the result of a non-combat-related incident, July 12, 2020, in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The incident is under investigation.
Allbaugh was assigned to 2nd Battalion, 44th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, 108th ADA Brigade, Fort Campbell, Kentucky.” https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Releases/Release/Article/2272206/dod-identifies-army-casualty/