Archives for 2020

Can you imagine being in her shoes?

BUFFALO — Crystal Knihinicki is 33 years old. She’s a registered nurse, working with COVID-19 patients in the medical ICU at the Erie County Medical Center in Buffalo.

In March, she planned her own funeral.

She sought out a funeral home, wrote the obituary, re-assigned her health care proxy to a trusted nurse practitioner she works with.

“When we got our first few patients, I had been on the phone doing union stuff, and we had people come on from New York City talking about what was happening there and the nurses that were dying,” Knihinicki said, stoic and unwavering in her explanation.

“And so I thought that it would be unfair to ask my husband, while he’s taking care of two young kids, to plan my funeral if I did die,” she said. “It’s overwhelming.”

The damage that’s being done to nurses, doctors and other providers and support staff will be similar to soldiers who fought in a war, but there will be so much pressure from Republicans to stuff COVID down the memory hole that they will only receive a fraction of the recognition, compensation and other assistance that they deserve.

This Story Just Floored MePost + Comments (128)

It’s Festivus, which means a time for an airing of the grievances, but to be honest I am not sure healthy that is for me right now.

Happy FestivusPost + Comments (141)

My wife, who normally gives no fucks about politics, has been paying a lot of hate-focused attention on Trump. So, last night I overheard a good part of Trump’s speech. As Steve M notes, the press went with the $2k stimulus check as the lede and missed a lot of the context. Since my wife doesn’t pay attention to politics much, she’s blissfully unaware of the role of the omnibus bill in the degradation of our political system. Trump’s speech spent a good amount of time reeling off the different items in the omnibus bill linked to the stimulus, which taken individually ($25 billion to fight Asian carp, $1 billion for the Smithsonian) sound completely irrelevant to getting people money during the time of COVID. She hates Trump, but also ended up wondering why that shit was in a stimulus bill.

Good question, and one that the press really doesn’t cover much (so the job falls to people like AOC, who has a good Twitter thread on it, starting here). I take that back — the press covers it, but they use a “gridlock” both-sides template, which is almost worse than saying nothing at all. My answer is simply that legislators found that voting for individual funding bills, with all the debate and press coverage that it entails, got them too close to responsibility, and it turned out that if all the shit that they didn’t want anyone to know about was rolled into a giant turd that had to be passed in one sweaty, straining, unpleasant event, they would get less flack about it. She didn’t seem satisfied with that answer, for some odd reason, but it does have the merit of being simple and relatable.

Every Boy Uses the Same LinePost + Comments (36)