“if you can wait for heat for days, you can book a flight to cancun” said ted cruz probably.
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that’s not what the news is reporting:
The Democratic congresswoman traveled to Florida over the holiday break, and photos of her having an outdoor meal with her boyfriend and appearing at an outdoor drag event were cited as evidence of hypocrisy by Republicans like Gov. Ron DeSantis.
emphasis mine.
maybe she felt like she was being safe and following the guidelines. people make mistakes, and omicron is stunningly contagious
i appreciate that she supports vaccination and mask wearing, that’s an entirely different world from the gop’s behavior
(eta)
not if you can catch them both. unfortunately.
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Absolutely. I just think if she didn’t vote the way she voted… hell… if it were me and I went to florida and got it after partying… I would be directed to maps showing that the last 7 days average case count in florida is the amongst the highest in the nation and castigated for putting people in danger. But she does it, and everyone falls all over themselves to defend her.
It doesn’t matter that it was AOC. It’s someone who travelled to a highly infectious state, in a pandemic, then flew back commercial, infected, to another highly infectious state. If it were my rep I’d be just as freaking pissed about it. If it were my AUNT I’d be pissed.
I’m just tired of doing the right thing and feeling like I’m just wasting away here, while everyone else , even the people I trusted to be good about this, really don’t think the rules apply to them. But I’ll just move on and let it go.
EDIT:
As for following the guidelines, the reason people are flocking to florida in this is because, basically, there ARE no guidelines. So she was following them.
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I get this vibe, completely. I think you’ve got priorities backwards when in comes to AOC, but I hear you about this. I’m cancelling a work trip next week that is really important, but it’s not worth getting sick over, and not even close to worth bringing COVID back to my family for.
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I understand the frustration. At the end of the day, we can only control our own choices and be prepared to deal with the consequences. When the pandemic started, I stayed at home. Skipped all of my annual health screenings in 2020, and waited to be fully vaccinated before going to appointments last year. Health problems meant I needed PT, so I went to every session double-masked and I got the booster ASAP. Still stayed at home otherwise, while some family members went everywhere they possibly could as if the vaccine was a miracle cure. 
Even following the rules is no guarantee, though. There are an increasing number of experts who say it’s only a matter of time before everyone is exposed to some degree. Hopefully, the vaccines will continue to help us avoid severe illness or death. However, once time passes we cannot get it back. So, those opportunities to gather with family and friends that I passed up aren’t going to return. I’ve lost friends and family members to COVID and they aren’t going to return, either. Do I have regrets? Sure. Still, I’m not going to throw up my hands and stop doing what I can to protect myself and others. My plan is to stay the course, tie a knot in the rope, and hold on until this storm is over.
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I can attest. My husband and I have been masking and distancing for 21 months. My husband had to return to his work environment October 1 and he has been double masking at work since Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, he caught this new variant at work and passed it to me.
The only way that we could have avoided infection is if my husband quit his job and he stayed at home.
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I still like her, a lot. If she were my congress critter this wouldn’t disqualify her. I’m not switching parties here. But I am suggesting that we hold her to the same standards we are holding republicans to. She shouldn’t get to be defended like this for going to a plague ridden state without masks to party when I’d be called selfish for going home to visit my dying mother even if I put two weeks on either side of it.
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I’m sorry to hear that, hope you recover easily and quickly! 
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Thank you! 
We have very minor symptoms, but we’re in quarantine for a minimum of 10 days just to be sure we keep others safe.
I mentioned this to let everyone know that even with the two-dose vaccine, a booster, masking, and a 6-12 ft buffer zone, this variant finds a way.
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I’m sorry. It sucks about your mom. But really, don’t but so much onus on other human beings, especially women, and women from minority communities to be perfect paragons to look up to.
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I don’t think anybody here would call you selfish for traveling to see family as long as you’re vaccinated
Omicron is a whole new ballgame, and it’s going everywhere, right now—individual acts of self-sacrifice are not going to slow it down
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i’m sorry to hear you’re going through that.
i know a couple people who have had to figure that out too, including my ex and i before her aunt passed. sometimes i think there are no easy answers, and you just have to do what you feel is best. that might be risking infection to visit, or that might be staying away to better protect you and her.
just no partying in the aisle, or getting into fist fights with flight attendants. those are the only things people would have any right to judge you on.
omicron freaks me out, even boosted. i’m glad you’re doing okay!
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Son of a gun…
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For everyone who is worried about Omicron contagiousness and booster protection, there are two quite reliable sources for comparing data we got on Delta and Omicron so far:
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It’s a tangled mess of several streams of bullshit intersecting.
- Djokevic is an antivax infection spreader, and from what I can see, also a douche.
- The Victorian government was not directly involved in this. The Federal government is saying they are, and the feds are lying. Because:
- The Liberal party get physically aroused by the intersection of xenophobia and border control. As soon as they realised they could make a decision themselves to let him out, or get hardcore about border integrity, they started expulsion proceedings, and retired to their bunks for a while.
- Djokevic may be a douche, but the judge made a good point: he did, as far as is now known, everything that was asked of him. That what was asked of him was stupid is not his fault. A lot of people (myself included) might not like that he’s being allowed in without being vaxxed, but there are rules for how that can be allowed, and he, reportedly, has abided by them.
- He has embarrassed the Federal Liberal Government. You’d think that arbitrarily cancelling his visa “on character grounds” after a court had ruled that he was legally in the country would be a transparent act of vindictive and arbitrary bastardry and retribution, but I will put money on that they are, right now, seriously considering doing it, whatever the visuals.
- There are Djokevic fans in those crowds, there in good faith. There are Serbian nationalists in that crowd, in sometimes dubious faith. And there are certainly going to be random antivaxxers and neo-nazis mingling as there well, deliberately stirring shit up because that’s what they do. Those dickheads want a riot.
- The hotel in which he was kept (which is a couple of blocks from where I work, if I were working at work) is also where some men in Immigration Detention have been kept. For years now. Locked in hotel rooms, with no hope of release. (Because they’ve been told they’ll never be allowed into the country under any circumstances, but they can’t be deported unless they agree to go because they have peskily invoked things like legal processes and international conventions on human rights. So they have the choice between rotting in detention for the rest of their potentially long boring lives, or being sent back to countries from which they fled, in which they will almost certainly spend the rest of their quite short and interesting lives.) They’ve been noticed because the Djokevic fans found themselves standing next to the Free the Refugee protesters, who’ve been there weekly for years without any media coverage whatsoever, and will still be doing it when everyone else has forgotten them.
The whole thing’s an omnishambles, everyone sucks, and nobody wins a prize.
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Yeah, so much for the load of bullshit about ‘sports bringing the world together’.
I’m pissed off about this because footage like that make folks of eastern european decent (including myself) look effing terrible to the rest of the world.
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This is the only upside I can think of. If it makes enough people angry about that horrible situation it will be a positive. Novax could even redeem himself by drawing attention to the detainees there.
He was fortunate enough to lawyer up early and expose the lack of due process in his case which made the striking down of the order inevitable. How many detainees had the same power?
Due to some weird media ownership thing there is regularly a show on Irish TV of border guards in Oz. WTAF? Who watches shit like that? It seems to be an obsession with some people completely divorced from reality.
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Nothing to Declare?
People like to watch punishment porn because it gives them a sense of power over others. See also COPS (USA).
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