Buffalopundit

Reluctant campaigner Byron Brown denigrates the qualifications of Democratic Nominee India Walton.

Yet India Walton is literally the only candidate who was able to get her name on the November mayoral ballot.

Tell me more, Mayor Brown, about how inexperienced and unprepared she is. Because she’s been cleaning your clock since at least June 22, 2021. March 25th, if we want to go by the filing deadline.

During the Democratic Mayoral primary campaign, incumbent Byron Brown pretended as if it wasn’t happening. He did not campaign. He refused to debate his opponent. He refused even to acknowledge her existence or to use her name as part of his ill-fated “rose garden strategy“. Indeed, every act and omission of the absent Brown for Mayor primary campaign was designed to keep turnout low.

India Walton won that campaign because she worked hard and treated it – and the Democratic voters in the city of Buffalo – seriously. She campaigned. She showed up.

You don’t earn a fifth term by telling your voters to stay home.

Byron Brown’s rose garden strategy was, frankly, insulting to the electorate and his constituency. They didn’t show up so he naturally lost. Not only because he did not show up, but because he has always been little more than a caretaker mayor. (Example: if you’re the mayor of a city famous for snow and you can’t plow side streets until days after a storm, you’re not going to be some sort of beloved figure.)

Now that Brown lost, he has suddenly decided to take India Walton seriously. He deigned to debate her (as well as a couple of other write-in candidates no one’s heard of). At that debate, he said:

I am the only qualified candidate to be Mayor on this stage.

— Mayor Byron W. Brown (@byronwbrown) September 9, 2021

He is? He created a brand-new, bespoke little political party line for himself and submitted petitions months too late. He lucked out for a week or so, but on Thursday the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals and the NY Supreme Court’s 4th Appellate Division overturned the lower courts and ruled that he blew a perfectly reasonable and legal deadline and that his name and party line would not be on the November ballot. As a matter of fact, if Brown had taken the primary race seriously and done his little “Buffalo Party” petitions months ago to meet the deadline, he’d have been fine.

He messed it up because he is not qualified to be on the ballot, on the debate stage, or in City Hall, frankly. The developers and fatcats who support him can do their worst, but ultimately they’re funding a write-in campaign that quickly became startling in its blatant illegality.

Byron Brown has had 15 years to become an iconic mayor who would deserve to remain in that role indefinitely. Almost every positive thing that Buffalo has to tout has happened around him or in spite of him. It is state money and county money and federal money, people, and politicians who have helped to improve Buffalo since 2006.

The big appeal of India Walton, which most of her detractors don’t seem to get, is that Byron Brown’s City Hall remains mired in a uniquely Buffalonian nostalgic hangover from the good old days. It’s the 21st Century and it’s high time the city had a leadership that looked out for all Buffalonians, and not just the ones with deep pockets and wallets perpetually opened for “Brown for Buffalo” and his other various political clubs and entities. It’s time City Hall worked well and efficiently for everyone equally, fueled more by excellence rather than patronage.

Mr. President:

Don’t listen to that guy. He’s not right.

I am fully vaccinated American and I am frustrated and angry with my fellow citizens who have chosen to NOT be vaccinated.

I believe that Americans should be required to have something injected into their bodies by law or regulation when necessary to promote public health and welfare, such as those for smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella, and polio. I am also informed enough to know that there is no such thing as the “Nuremberg Medical Protocols of 1946.” I do, however, know that there exists something called the “Nuremburg Code,” which, in 1947, established that medical experiments should not be performed on people against their will. I furthermore recognize that it is, at best stupid and at worst evil, to equate the Covid-19 vaccines with, e.g., Dr. Mengele.

What makes me angry is malicious disinformation and propaganda being laundered as “medical choice.” I know, because I am not an idiot, that herd immunity through mass inoculation is the safest and fastest way out of the Covid crisis, and that disinformation is literally killing people.

Mandating a safe and effective vaccine is safer, cheaper, and more effective than simply allowing people blindly to be exposed to and sickened by a disease that has prematurely killed almost 700,000 of my fellow citizens of all ages, races, classes, and nationalities. Indeed, it is outrageous to me that as we commemorate 9/11, we remember how 3,000 lives taken through violence united us, but now we coddle and excuse exponentially more now-preventable deaths in 2021. We lost more than half a 9/11 from Covid on September 13th alone. There’s no unity now, alas, thanks to malicious disinformation and pseudoscience.

I realize that the virus can only be stopped when it runs out of people to infect. I understand that viruses mutate rapidly to bypass our efforts to halt it and that the continued resistance of people to take a literal miracle shot is ruining it for the rest of us throughout the world.

You have urged people to follow the science, and the science is clear that the frail elderly are at higher risk for COVID, as are people with known and unknown comorbidities. The greatest tragedy is when a healthy young person discovers too late that they have an undiagnosed susceptibility to Covid, and they die. I recognize that while children may not become as sick as older people, it is no help for them to lose a parent or become orphaned. I am intelligent enough and completely not a hack propagandist, so I will not equate a communicable respiratory disease to “dying from drowning” for political gain.

While it is great that therapeutic options exist that can, in some cases, help people suffering from Covid, I understand that prevention of disease is far more effective than treating it once you get it. I also realize that studies conclusively show that wearing masks helps prevent the spread of a deadly virus that is transmitted through aerial droplets, most of which are too large to make it through a mask’s filtration layers. Anti-maskers are killing people, too.

Furthermore, you ridicule the conclusions of trained physicians who dare to differ from the Fauci and mainstream media as “conspiracy theorists.” Thank you for this. It is high time we called things what they are.

Thank you for protecting susceptible, weakened patients already in hospitals from being inadvertently infected by health care workers who refuse to be inoculated. The people at greatest risk deserve the highest form of protection, and “freedom” means that you don’t have a constitutional right to be a health care worker, and if you won’t undertake simple protective measures for yourself or your patients, you should find another profession.

You actually believe the economy is robust under your stewardship, when working Americans are seeing their dollars buying less and less? Inflation is, indeed, a symptom of a re-heated economy, and we see this the European and British economies, as well.

There is a trope flying around about refugees bringing Covid into the country and causing the current wave, which is completely false, ascientific and merely an effort by right-wing authoritarians to heap hatred and scorn on immigrants and refugees.

Mr. President, I know that a local right-wing commentator who once equated President Obama with al Qaeda wrote, “what a sad day for America, where “my body my choice” apparently only applies in some circumstances.” Amazing irony. He apparently supports the Texas ban on abortions even in cases of rape. Even in the case of incest. Mr. Bauerle would, based on this quip, demand that the government force a 13 year-old girl to give birth to a child conceived through the most disgusting and horrific criminal violence, while insisting that one’s “liberty” demands that the government not require vaccination to protect himself and those around him against a deadly disease in limited circumstances. This is beyond pathological. It is psychopathy.

To the unvaccinated: this vaccinated American is frustrated and angry with you, but does not blame you. I realize that your hesitancy or refusal is a direct result of utter bullshit being fed to you by quacks, killers, idiots, charlatans, and propagandists. Everything was looking up in June until vaccinations hit a wall and Delta came to the US from India via Europe. I only hope that you see that the hospitals being overrun right now are overrun by victims of Covid-19, while exactly zero hospitals are being even mildly populated by people somehow sickened by the vaccines themselves. I guarantee you that the science bears out the fact that the risk of contracting Covid puts you at an exponentially higher risk of complication and harm to your body than any side-effect of any vaccine in the US.

Most importantly, I reject the notion that it’s perfectly ok if 1.5% of Americans drop dead from Covid. There are 330 million Americans, so Mr. Bauerle here is directly stating that 5 million preventable deaths is perfectly ok. I do not consider 5 million American lives to be disposable on the altar of misbegotten “choice”. I guess not “all lives matter”, right, Tom?

Your orders as to federal workers and contractors gives me hope that more people will get the vaccine and prevent their own illness or deaths – and the illnesses or deaths of those around them.

In Buffalo, we are used to snow blizzards, but I feel like I just got struck by a bullshit blizzard of epic proportions, thanks to the relentlessly harmful and misguided rhetoric of malevolent talk-show hosts. Shame on Audacy and its management for allowing its talent to urge people to go ahead and die in the name of “liberty.”

And what if everybody affected just said “no” to your mandates? Well, if they’re federal employees or contractors, they’d be fired is “what”.

There is a reason that India is not ruled by England anymore: peaceful civil disobedience led by Mohandas Gandhi. India’s slow vaccine uptake, incidentally, led to the Delta mutation, which is now killing people here in the US.

America has nothing whatsoever to learn from right-wing talk show hosts and everything to gain from a safe and effective vaccination. The Covid vaccines were developed under Trump. Why not own the libs by getting the jab?

And hey Audacy? When your afternoon talk show host’s “opinion” has to come with a disclaimer, you’re part of the problem.

The law does not make an exception for cases of incest or rape.

This means that a school in Texas cannot protect young women against catching Covid-19 through a mask mandate based on “body autonomy”, but the Texas state government can force, say, a 14-year-old victim of statutory rape to carry her tormentor’s baby to term. It is distinctly unconstitutional, based on 50 years’ worth of jurisprudence. It is, truly, medieval and barbaric. It is literally a leap backwards to women being mere chattel with no right to control their bodies.

The same people screaming about not being told by the government whether to wear a mask or take a vaccine during a deadly pandemic based on “choice” are literally legislating away every Texas woman’s right to reproductive healthcare.

Well, not every Texas woman’s. Those with money and connections can always fly to a blue state for a procedure. The men in the Texas legislature who accidentally impregnate their mistresses will undoubtedly find a way to flout these restrictions. So, it’s really a law designed to punish the poor and the underprivileged.

The technical, stated reason why the Supreme Court majority of anti-Roe activists refused to block this patently barbaric law has to do with how it is to be enforced. The statute empowers literally anyone to simply call in a tip and inform on any person who performs, aids, or abets an abortion procedure that is violative of the law. Texas requires women seeking abortions to get “counseling” to discourage abortion, and then wait another 24 hours. This requires two trips to the clinic with the state requiring that the provider ply the patient with propaganda.

This law also empowers private individuals to make anonymous reports to the government about abortions. The law specifically creates a private cause of action allowing people who otherwise have no standing to sue individuals, groups, and institutions that “aid and abet” in providing abortions. This sets up a lucrative incentive for people to lie and engage in punitive behavior and harassment, obviously. But it also empowers average citizens to form anti-abortion bounty hunting posses. That will further act to chill any abortions from being performed – including a D&C of a miscarriage. Yep, a woman with a dead fetus inside of her will be required by law to birth it and not have it surgically removed because there will be no medical providers willing to risk fines or jailtime to do it. Like I said, barbaric. Medieval.

The reason why the right-wing court majority did not enjoin enforcement of this distinctly un-American piece of legislation? Because no one had yet dropped the dime on anyone, so the issue is not ripe. How convenient.

Why do I say this is un-American? Barbaric? Medieval? Because it comes directly from the “my first totalitarian dictatorship” playbook. Under both communist and fascist totalitarian regimes, secret police have regularly recruited and encouraged average citizens to inform on their friends and neighbors. This sort of institutional snitching would result in the informer receiving money or perks, like a citizen of East Germany being granted permission to visit the west. Totalitarian regimes regularly consolidate their illegitimate power through denunciation.

This is how the Texas abortion ban is designed – to institutionalize and legitimize denunciations and to subject women and medical providers to civil and criminal penalties, harassment, and possibly personal harm.

This was predicted when Clinton lost in 2016, and it was predicted when Trump got to pick Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement on the Court. People like Susan Collins and a bunch of male pundits and leftist Clinton haters told people not to worry.

Fully a third of this country – the Trumpers and the political Christianists – no longer support freedom or democratic institutions. They have transformed themselves fully into totalitarian ultra-nationalist one-party authoritarians. This Texas bill is not even the beginning.