 |
| Carlos Cascos |
In our last Brownsville Observer article we made the following points:
1. The Cameron County Commissioners Court had approved a mask mandate for county buildings.
2. School districts in major cities across Texas, Dallas, Austin and now San Antonio were defying Governor Abbott's ban on mask mandates. Brownsville ISD's Board of Trustees will consider the matter Thursday at 3PM.
3. I posted Carlos Cascos' statement in its entirety, explaining he would support a local mask mandate for BISD. Here's a quote from Mr. Cascos' statement:
We as a community should stand behind our school districts and support them in allowing them to require masks of their students & faculty, along with implementing Covid protocols that each school district determines best for their campuses.
This morning I received a note from Cameron County Republican Chair Morgan Graham, clarifying Cascos' position or perhaps hinting that I'd misrepresented it.
When I told Ms. Graham that I would use her remarks in a subsequent article, she preferred I use Cascos' remarks to the Republican Women and sent this Cascos statement to that group:
What Carlos Cascos says above represents local control. Governor Abbott's banning of mask mandates does not.
As for Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, Republican governors of Texas and Florida, respectively, both have sandwiched themselves into a position requiring courage to exit.
Florida has now become the epicenter for the pandemic while Texas hospitals are at capacity with covid cases surging.
Columnist Megan McArdle of the Washington Post explains:
Presumably, Abbott and DeSantis — and a whole lot of other Republican politicians — assumed their states were already close to herd immunity between the people who’d been vaccinated and the residents who had already had covid-19.
So barring mask mandates or vaccine requirements probably seemed like a cheap way to score political points, without much risk that a state would experience anything more serious than a few mini-outbreaks among young people who wouldn’t get very sick anyway.
Interestingly, Governor Abbott has requested help from out-of-state medical personnel and asked for the state's hospitals to voluntarily postpone elective surgeries.
Brownsville's parents don't care about the political banter. They just want their kids safe as school opens August 17 with K-6 students having no access to vaccination.
Not buying it. Backtracking is the mark of a liar, one who does it for political expediency. Cascos let me down. No vote for him.
ReplyDeleteWell now everybody knows who you are
DeleteRepublican Governors Abbott and De Santis are HYPOCRITES.
ReplyDeleteThey are literally killing their own political base just to "own the liberals".
Abbott is asking for out-of-state medical help. De Santis, however is pleading ignorance that the state of Florida received ventilators from the Biden Administration.
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/567336-desantis-says-he-doubts-reports-of-florida-ventilators-request