Go find a crime that fits in this little box

I got my second vaccine shot today. The whole thing was as quick and as close to painless as the last time, though still the fifteen minute wait to see if there were any reactions. There weren’t. My immune response should be ready to tackle the virus if need be (and hopefully won’t) in a couple weeks. My schedule tomorrow is clear so nothing will be disrupted if I need some recovery time. One thing different was the vaccination center wasn’t as crowded as it was three weeks ago. My forsythia is in bloom! I’m glad it has because the temperature is to get well below freezing tonight. In the past if cold temps come just before the blossoms open they don’t open. The cold isn’t a problem for the open flowers. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported that America is getting close to putting 3 million vaccine doses into arms per day. If we keep up the pace we could get to herd immunity in 50 days. That’s about the third week of May. Herd immunity is when enough people are vaccinated the virus can no longer spread. However, case counts keep rising. And so far the number of people vaccinated isn’t yet high enough to make a difference in the spread of the virus. Michigan might be doing well in getting people vaccinated, but it is currently at the top in new cases per day. So continue to stay home and wear your mask when in public. Brian Dickerson wrote an editorial for last Sunday’s Detroit Free Press. Alas, the article is behind the paywall. Speaking to the GOP controlled state Senate Dickerson titled his piece “Grow up, Senators.” State Republicans have been in a tussle with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for a year. She wants to protect citizens. They don’t, using closed businesses and freedom as their excuses. When the GOP gains an edge case counts go up, as they’re doing now. Recently the GOP requested the state attorney general (also a Democrat) start an investigation into Whitmer’s actions, claiming that she is somehow responsible for the deaths in nursing homes during the first peak of the virus a year ago. The AG declined, saying no evidence. So a few in the GOP have proposed a bill that would offer money to a county prosecutor to investigate the governor. The money would come out of the state funds, also known as taxpayer money. Nearly all the county prosecutors ignored the request. One, Kim Worthy of Wayne County, spoke out, saying we don’t take bribes. “Never in my long career has someone told me, ‘Here’s some money. Now go find a crime that fits in this little box.’ ” The one who showed interest is Pete Lucido of Macomb County, who has already started his own “review” of Whitmer. To actually offer the money the legislature would have to write and approve a bill – which Whitmer would veto. Ellen Barry of the New York Times tweeted:

Every time I include the statistic about Boston's racial wealth gap in a story, I get the same letter. Re: Boston mayoral story today $8 net worth for black families???? Did you mean $80,000? Must be a typo. ... Massive part of this gap is home ownership -- 80% white households own a home, v 30% of Black households, who are also saddled with mortgages & debt.

Jennifer Cohn, election security advocate, tweeted:

When voting machine vendors install software updates, local officials must run a test to confirm that the update or patch is legal, ie, approved/tested/ certified by state or EAC. But they farm this out to ES&S instead. ES&S cld install whatever it wants. You do realize that Rs did much better than the polls predicted, right? ES&S voting machines are in something like 40 states. If they can install whatever they want, you do the math. This shld be national news, but no one will discuss it bc Trump lied about ES&S’s competitor. We only know for sure that Texas has this honor system with voting machine vendor ES&S. @EACgov or @HouseOversight must investigate to confirm how many other states have this. But since ES&S wrote it into their Texas contracts, my guess is that many states have done this.

That competitor is Dominion, who is suing several people and Fox News for those lies which claim Dominion is the less secure system while ES&S is the one less secure. Rep. Matt Gaetz, one of the worst people in the House and an ardent nasty guy supporter, is under investigation for sex with an underage girl and as part of a broader sex trafficking investigation. Rep. Ted Lieu asked:

Why would Rep Matt Gaetz go on national TV and volunteer a new derogatory allegation about himself that hadn’t appeared in the press articles?

Garry Kasparov answered:

A key tenet of Trumpism is doing illegal and unethical things openly, even boasting about them, to normalize them. As a good Trumpist, Gaetz is trying it out. The usual demagogue’s pivot from “I didn’t do it” to “there’s nothing wrong with it” has been nearly eliminated. They go directly into obfuscation and counterattack. They speak only to their tribe.

Sarah Kendzior has said (many times) that the nasty guy and his followers don’t care of they get caught, they care if they get punished. Commenter Georges added:

Getting caught is the point. It's display of strength, proving that laws and rules don't apply to them. And that's why their followers love them so much, they admire that amount of power.

Joe Biden has learned from the mistakes of his former boss. It is important to fill judicial vacancies as fast as possible. So, as Joan McCarter of Kos reported, he has put forth his first 11 nominees. He said he wanted a diverse judiciary, and they are. Three black women for the Circuit Court (one who has been on a Supreme Court short list and likely will again). The first Muslim. The first Asian. He also building on the promise that his nominees will have diverse backgrounds, such as public defenders and civil rights and legal aid attorneys. Hunter of Kos reviewed the usual tactics of Republicans when Democrats talk about gun control. Hunter went as far as calling the GOP “Team Murder.” First step: say that if more citizens had guns everything would be fine. Wrote Hunter:

The death of an armed responding police officer inside a supermarket did not do a damn thing, for example, to dampen the brickheaded proclamations of Team Murder that if only some larger number of amateur gun-toters was present, everything would have been fine. Several of these toads have been longtime public advocates for the all-shootout, all-the-time approach to Making America Safe, and you can bet that no matter how large the firefight inside a King Soopers might have become, in that scenario, they would be on television afterward to proclaim that the problem could have been solved by piling another 20 guns on top of that. Tired? Yeah. I think we're all tired.

Second step:

We are now at the point in the process where United States senators appear on the Sunday shows to tell us that by gum there is a real chance at bipartisan gun reforms this time around—maybe not on the whole constellation of reforms with broad public support but here or there—as long as everyone is super nice and polite about it. Oh, but it will require ditching the most significant reforms. And possibly some of the other reforms. And cutting out those things will not result in Republican support per se, but could maybe lead to it, maybe, if the resulting spirit of bipartisanship reaches up to their little mountain cave and grows their hearts three sizes between now and the point several weeks from now when top national politicians expect the current feelings of horror to have faded and the networks have instead moved on being outraged about shoe advertisements. Hmm. This is aggressively cynical, even for me. This can't be healthy. I mean, it's all accurate, to a near certainty, but it still can't be healthy.

And what Hunter sees as the general plan: * A few GOP senators proclaim they are open to some gun safety measures. * In trying to define what is acceptable to the “moderates” they’ll start pushing back. * They will agree to a small bit of reform that does almost nothing. * The GOP will bury the whole thing in a filibuster. My conclusion: The GOP want their followers armed, ready and able to cause as much mayhem, to inflict as much trauma and death, as possible. It is a very supremacist view. Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed the latest antics of Rep. Lauren Boebert from Colorado in response to the shooting in the Boulder, Colorado grocery store. She’s the one, during the insurrection, who tweeted where various Democrat leaders were. Hours after this shooting she tweeted, “I told Beto ‘HELL NO’ to taking our guns.” She got the expected criticism. Dartagnan wrote:

That criticism was valid, but it misses a more relevant point. Boebert did this intentionally, calculating that the blowback she received would be proportionately less than the credit and acclaim she’d get for her insouciant disregard of human life. In fact, the blowback is what she counted on. After all, the desired effect was accomplished: she’d provoked the “liberal media” into a wholly predictable response. In other words, she “owned the libs”—at least in the eyes of the people who will continue to vote for her. Boebert knew she’d be criticized, and that the criticism would be deserved. But by intentionally baiting her own excoriation, she was reaching for what has now become the sole arrow remaining in the entire Republican quiver. As expressed cogently by Derek Robertson writing for Politico, “owning the libs” is not necessarily a political victory over Democrats, but rather a demonstration of “a commitment to infuriating, flummoxing or otherwise distressing liberals with one’s awesomely uncompromising conservatism.”

Dartagnan, with Robertson’s help, then traces that attitude first to McCarthy. Back then the claim was “at least he stood for something.” Though now about the only thing the GOP stands for is owning the libs.

So “owning the libs” is, at the very least, a scam, a feint, a mask for the Republican Party’s utter indifference to the real-life concerns of their constituents, for whom elected Republicans have had absolutely nothing to offer. It’s distracting entertainment substituted as policy. ... All of these tactics have something in common: They’re performative exaggerations of social and cultural shifts that in reality have little or no tangible impact upon the daily lives of Republican constituents. ... But they’re also symptomatic of a party that has completely abandoned “policy” as a governing principle. Instead, what we see is a Republican Party that has committed itself to one goal only: maintaining its grip on power by totally committing itself to inflammatory cultural issues. ... The whole point of “owning the libs” is to project an in-your-face disregard to norms of decency and morality that most people have grown to expect from our civil society.

Then Dartagnan traces the attitude a bit more, to other far right parties in modern Europe and to fascism. Heather Digby Parton was at the Conservative Political Action Conference and watched all the speakers push hot-button grievances and say very little about policy. Dartagnan, quoting Parton:

The tone and tenor of those speaking reflected the prevailing sentiment of the attendees: “They don't care if these people are right or wrong, it's their unwillingness to back down no matter what that they admire.”

Me talking: “Owning the libs” is the speaker saying they are better than the liberals. That’s a supremacist statement. Being admired for “owning the libs” and for refusing to back down no matter what means they are being admired for their supremacist stance.

We start to reward work, not just wealth

Jamelle Bouie commented on a HuffPost article that said the new voter suppression law in Georgia removed the Secretary of State (they guy who refused to find 11K extra votes for the nasty guy) as the chief elections officer. Bouie tweeted:

if a Democrat wins a GOP-controlled swing state in 2024, I think there’s a very good chance the victory isn’t certified and i think at least one state legislature will try to unilaterally assign its electoral votes.

Perry Bacon responded:

This is why what happened in Georgia is so important. The lesson many Repubs seem to have taken from 2020 was not, “don’t try to overturn the election results,” but, “let’s make sure the system is set up so we can actually execute the overturning next time.”

Michael Harriot, who describes himself as a master race baiter, had a few interesting tweets. One, responding to the new voter suppression law in Georgia, where a black legislator demanded entry to the bill signing ceremony:

If you want to understand how white Supremacy works, 135 white people just rigged an election in broad daylight and they arrested a Black woman for knocking on the door to watch.

Two, with a link to an article in Politico about Georgia being the last Confederate state readmitted to the Union back on July 15, 1870:

After the Civil War, white supremacists flooded into Georgia to slaughter Black people who dared vote. I know I've pointed this out before, but it is always worth repeating: Georgia is the only state to be kicked out of America for being too racist. Why? Because too many Black people were voting. So they rigged the electoral system for the next 90 years. Here's my point: What's happening in Georgia is NOT about politics. It is & has always been about race. It's the textbook definition of white supremacy. The ONLY reason white people in Georgia have EVER been in control is that they have been willing to lie, cheat and kill LITERALLY since they first stepped foot in Georgia.

Three:

Pointing out how white suspects get the benefit of the doubt without being stopped, frisked, beaten, shot or killed is not a call for harsh treatment. It simply means we KNOW cops are capable of treating ppl humanely....just not us. Y’all could use a few more ass-whoopings, tho

Dartagnan of the Daily Kos community wrote that the “not my fault” tour of the nasty guy’s health officials is in full swing. Leading the tour are Robert Redfield and Deborah Birx. Through cowardice they stood behind the nasty guy as he said some dangerous stuff about the coronavirus. At times they even said what the nasty guy wanted them to, putting their professional blessing on the dangerous stuff. And now they are blaming someone or something else in hopes of redeeming their reputations. Dartagnan and other progressives, such as Rep. Ted Lieu of California, are not buying. Wrote Dartagnan:

There’s nothing more sickening than watching people desperately trying to redeem their reputations in the wake of a catastrophe they themselves helped to create. But, I suppose they can always say they were “just following orders.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci is noticeably not on this tour. He managed to say the right things even under the threatening gaze of the nasty guy. I’ve mentioned that a large portion of Republican voters say they won’t get the vaccine. So how do we open up restaurants, theaters, concert halls, cinemas, and churches? Will it ever be safe? Kos of Kos discussed an idea that has been out there for a while, a COVID passport. This card or device on your phone certifies you’ve gotten the vaccine and are now immune or you have a medical reason not to get it. A venue could refuse entry to anyone without a passport. Will that encourage conservatives to get their jab? Kos quoted a tweet:

My passport will be a firearm and I will defend my right to travel freely.

To which Patriot Takes replied:

Good luck getting on a plane with your “passport.”

Perhaps the threat of needing a passport is enough? Ben Franklin tweeted:

Perhaps, you might ask, what the national security apparatus was doing as they watched the intentional maximization of pandemic damage resulting in the death of over half a million people?

He asked similar questions, what were they doing

...as Jeffrey Epstein ran a massive child trafficking and sexual blackmail operation aimed at ensnaring politicians and billionaires? ...as a man with ties to foreign powers, organized crime, and human traffickers waltzed into the presidency? ...as an attack on congress was being plotted in the open and then executed? A disturbing pattern!

Christopher Reeves of Kos reported that Republican candidates are making pilgrimages to Florida.

As for the modern Republican Party: Oh no, call them the party of Trump now. They are so desperate to get Trump’s blessing that they are throwing themselves on the ground and begging at his mansion in Florida.

Reeves quoted a bit from Politico:

The scene illustrated what has become a central dynamic in the nascent 2022 race. In virtually every Republican primary, candidates are jockeying, auditioning and fighting for the former president’s backing. Trump has received overtures from a multitude of candidates desperate for his endorsement, something that top Republicans say gives him all-encompassing power to make-or-break the outcome of primaries.

Reeves continued:

Four candidates from Ohio flew down and begged, groveled, and patted the back of Trump, believing that his blessing would give them the inside track to the nomination in 2022.

One of the nasty guy’s campaigning strengths was talking to the working class voters (not that he ever did anything for them). Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported in the last couple of months it seems Joe Biden has been doing a very good job of speaking that language. Some examples: Biden talked about the need for infrastructure spending: 231K bridges needing repairs, 6-10 million homes getting their water through lead pipes, 100K wellheads leaking methane, and added:

I just find it frustrating. There’s so much we can do that’s good stuff, makes people healthier, and creates good jobs.

And in response to the Georgia voter suppression law, he said:

It has nothing to do with fairness, nothing to do with decency. They passed a law saying you can't provide water for people standing in line while they're waiting to vote. You don't need anything else to know that this is nothing but punitive—designed to keep people from voting. You can't provide water for people about to vote? Give me a break.

Biden talked about the $1.9 trillion relief bill and the GOP opposition:

I set a goal that’s in front of me to get things done for the people I care most about, which are hardworking, decent American people who are getting—really having it stuck to them. I want to change the paradigm. I want to change the paradigm. We start to reward work, not just wealth. Did you hear them complain when they passed close to a $2 trillion Trump tax cut—83% going to the top 1%? Did you hear them talk about that at all? When the federal budget is saving people’s lives, they don’t think it’s such a good idea. When the federal budget is feathering the nest of the wealthiest Americans—90 of the Fortune 500 companies making billions of dollars not paying a cent in taxes ... [but] if you’re a husband and wife, a schoolteacher and a cop, you’re paying at a higher rate than the average person making a billion dollars a year is—something is wrong.

He’s connecting with a group that was critical to the nasty guy victory. I had written about the guaranteed income experiment in Stockton, California. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that Oakland, CA is now going to try it. Mayor Libby Schaff announced the plan will give $500 a month for 18 months to 600 families.

Rainbow roundabout

Yesterday I watched the movie Giant Little Ones. Franky and Ballas are best friends and on the school swim team. Franky’s 17th birthday party has quite a bit of underage drinking. Why Franky’s mom chooses to not be home that evening is a puzzle. Franky is drunk enough that he doesn’t end up in bed with his girlfriend as intended, but instead with Ballas. The next morning Ballas wants nothing to do with Franky. Part of the reason is homophobia. Was this a sign of sexual orientation or just some teenage experimentation? Another part of the story is Franky’s father, who, after several years of marriage and two kids, fell in love with a man, came out as gay, and left the marriage. Yeah, there’s some friction there. As the parents are trying to get the boys to renew their friendship it is only the gay man who wants to talk about the reasons behind the estrangement. But the other parents don’t want to complicate the discussion. During the opening credits there were the list of funding sources, which included this arts agency in Canada and that film agency in Ontario. During one of the scenes in a classroom I saw two maps on the wall, one of Canada, one that included southwest Ontario (the part across the Detroit River). I wondered where it was filmed. At one point Franky visit’s his father’s apartment and we get a view out the window of bridges crossing a sizable river. That view wasn’t held very long. However, it was enough for me to conclude we were in either Sault Ste. Marie or Sarnia. The closing credits said filmed in Sault Ste. Marie, Canada. Spoiler alert: The movie does not end with Franky and Ballas busting out of the closet and into each other’s arms. Several characters have already shown that whether Franky or Ballas are gay is not a big deal – though there is still homophobia in the school. The message is more sometimes it takes a while to figure out one’s orientation. One of Franky’s friends is a transgender boy. He is wearing a strap-on manhood and wants Franky to help him figure out if he’s got a good product, and part of doing that is seeing what Franky has. It is good the movie explores the issue. On Sunday while going out to pick up my lunch I’ve been listening to the NPR show Freakenomics. The show yesterday was all about the advantages of traffic roundabouts over signaled intersections. I’ll let you find the episode and listen (or read the transcript). During the program they spoke to the president of the Roundabout Appreciation Society of the UK. He said the center of the roundabout can contain anything people want to put there. His group gives out awards for best roundabouts and features a calendar of them. One of the international awards went to the Braddon roundabout in Canberra, Australia. The prominent feature is the circle has been painted with rainbow colors. In the center is a flagpole with a rainbow flag. It was done to celebrate Canberra citizens approving marriage equality. More photos here. The ship stuck in the Suez Canal is free! Though this ship appears to be moving slowly through the canal other ships – a full parade of them – are now making their way through the canal. It could be a week or more to get through the backlog. The website vesselfinder will show you where this ship – and all the others – are.

Anonymity remains the kleptocrat’s asymmetric advantage

Michigan Radio News reported over the last couple days that the rate of rise of COVID cases in Michigan is now third in the nation behind New York and New Jersey. A year ago in March Michigan was fourth, but dropped in the rankings as the virus hit hard in other states. We’re back up there. Today I downloaded the Michigan data. The number of new cases per day this past week was much higher than the previous week. The two weeks in middle March were both revised upwards. The peaks in previous weeks: 3/1/21 – 1878 3/10/21 – 2516 3/15/21 – 3534 3/22/21 – 4896 This number of new cases per day in Michigan is now about half of the peak in early November. Back then the case count jumped from about 4200 to 9700 in just two weeks. There is good news in the number of deaths per day. That has not risen. It has stayed below 25 a day for the last five weeks and has mostly been in the 10-20 range. One big reason for this new increase is Governor Gretchen Whitmer lifted some restrictions back in February, such as indoor dining. More have been lifted since then. A big reason why she did it was an attempt to pacify the GOP controlled state legislature – which didn’t work. The legislature has been sending her bills that tie the release of federal relief aid to Whitmer giving up her emergency powers. Those she has vetoed. They have been rejecting her nominees to government positions. She is resubmitting them. They’re at a standoff. Back in 2018 Michigan voters elected Whitmer as governor, Dana Nessel as Attorney General, and Jocelyn Benson as Secretary of State. This was the first time all three statewide offices went to female Democrats. All three are up for reelection in 2022. Brainwrap of the Daily Kos community reported the Michigan GOP has started calling them the “three witches” saying the GOP needs to make sure they burn at the stake. The GOP in the Michigan legislature is working on their own voter suppression laws, working around the details of the voter rights amendment approved two years ago. Even as details, they can be onerous, such as requiring IDs for mail-in ballots and limiting the locations of drop-boxes to inside polling places. Of course, Whitmer will veto them. The GOP is starting to work on the alternate plan. If there are 340,000 signatures on a petition the legislature can approve the measure instead of having it go to the voters. In this case the governor’s signature is not needed and she cannot veto it. Can the GOP get 340,000 anti-voting signatures? They did it once for an anti-abortion measure by gathering signatures in churches. Reaching that goal again may depend on whether GOP voters are as anti-democracy as the politicians or whether they still believe in fairness. Mark Sumner of Kos discussed where we are with the virus and vaccine. Sumner mentioned Michigan as being right up there with rising cases. The good news is that over a third of adults in America have received at least one dose of the vaccine. Doses are being administered at the rate of 2.5 million a day. The bad news is over two thirds of the population, or about 80% of adults, need to be vaccinated to slow and stop the spread of the virus. Add to that over 40% of Republicans are still saying no to the vaccine. That may prevent us from getting to the needed level of immunity. The virus is still winning. Sumner also discussed Joe Biden’s first press conference. One would think with all the muttering by the press that Biden hadn’t done a press conference yet that the press would have been better prepared when Biden agreed to do one. One would also think the press would ask questions that matter to a great number of people. So, no questions about the pandemic.

As Chuck Todd noted after the event, in a rare moment of either wisdom or plain honesty, there were no questions about COVID, because the press corps couldn't think of a negative thing to say about Biden's handling of COVID. And the press corps only asks questions that it can frame in a negative way.

There were questions about the crisis at the border. Their interest came...

as The Washington Post reports, because reporters were following a right-wing frame that pretends that Biden has thrown open the border, allowing in a flood of new immigrants. And no set of statistics showing that the current increase is less than the seasonal increase of past years is allowed to get in the way of that frame. Again and again reporters asked questions that boiled down to claims that because Biden was seen as a decent person who wouldn’t treat children with callous brutality, it’s encouraging children to seek something better than the lives they have. Written into this script was an apparent expectation that Biden would either spurn the idea of being decent to children (he didn’t) and that children hoping to enter the United States is a bad thing (it’s not). Instead, Biden made it clear that if an unaccompanied child shows up at the border, America will, shockingly, take them in and provide decent food and shelter while looking for the appropriate next step.

Biden was most passionate about voting rights, saying the GOP strategy to suppress voting as “sick.” He also talked about ending the filibuster. But that didn’t seem like news. Jon Hansen of the TV show The Jam tweeted about the ship stuck in the Suez Canal with a video:

The former traffic reporter in me couldn’t resist giving you a Suez Canal traffic update...

Lexi Alexander tweeted:

Watching news on the Suez crisis in diff languages. The West is all jokes & market speculations. To hear about seafarers stuck after being away for a year, ships not carrying enough provisions, risks to the region due to rising oil & gas prices, you have to watch news in Arabic.

On Saturdays I listen to the NPR show Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me! as I load the dishwasher and do other housecleaning chores. The guest on this week’s show is Kemp Powers who wrote the play One Night in Miami and co-directed the new Pixar animation Soul. Powers told the story of a black man, working as a driver for Pixar, got suspicious of all the black people he was driving to the white Pixar offices. The audio is ten minutes. Here’s a Twitter thread that’s been in my browser tabs for three months now. This thread is from Casey Michel, author of American Kleptocracy. The thread links to an article in the New Republic for more detail. Kleptocracy is rule by theft. The nasty guy and his backers have been very good at it. They demolished America’s legacy of anti-corrption leadership.

It's tough to try to keep track of all the ways Trump decimated U.S. anti-corruption leadership. But it's clear he'll have the most corrupt presidential legacy since Warren Harding and Teapot Dome, and leaves behind an Augean stables–size mess for the rest of us to clean up.

The nation’s response to Nixon shifted the global tide in corruption. Biden needs to make that happen again.

Biden's administration should build out an entirely new anti-kleptocracy paradigm in the U.S.—by ending anonymity wherever it can. End it in real estate. End it in hedge funds. End it in private equity. End it in trusts. End it in art and auction markets. End as much as it can. Anonymity remains the kleptocrat’s asymmetric advantage. Which means that transparency is the best weapon in the American arsenal. And if these reforms aren't implemented in the here and now under Biden, we might not get another chance.

I occasionally listen to Radiolab podcasts. I tend not to listen to them at the time they’re posted. The one I listened to today is from December. It is titled The Ashes on the lawn. This one looked back to a previous pandemic with an indifferent government. The question is when the situation is dire and nothing seems to work, how do we make change? Yes, this was the AIDS epidemic in 1990. Larry Kramer and his ACT UP organization were trying to get the government’s and media’s attention because gay men were dying. This is the story of some of their protests. Dave’s lover Warren had died of AIDS. Dave and several others marched to the White House and threw the ashes of their lovers through the fence on to the White House lawn. They were saying look, your inaction has killed. A great deal of the ashes came back in their faces. It was a profoundly moving moment. And it made very little difference in getting attention. The story of the AIDS quilt is well known. Organizers said any quilt panels they had by September 15 would a month later be taken to Washington and displayed on the National Mall. Most of the panels they got from gay men were filled with anger. In the last few days they received 800 more. The panels came from across America. They were from mothers who had lost sons to AIDS. These were mothers who could not tell their neighbors and church sewing clubs how their sons had died. The panels were decorated with love and beauty. It was this grief of these mothers that prompted the passage of the Ryan White act a few years later. A hero of today’s pandemic is Dr. Anthony Fauci. He has the same job now as he did in 1989, the director of the National Institute of Health. He was a part of this Radiolab episode to talk about what happened 30 years before. Larry Kramer had a big issue with the NIH. Drugs to treat AIDS were not being approved with the urgency in which they were needed. Clinical trials did not include a diverse population so drugs were only approved for white gay men. Kramer wrote Fauci a very threatening letter. In contrast to many government officials Fauci reached out to Kramer. There were soon dinner parties that included Fauci and people of ACT UP. After a while the ACT UP people realized all they were getting from Fauci were excuses – sorry, I can’t budge senior management. They finally told him we’re going to protest your building in two months if you can’t change minds. The protests at the NIH happened, including colorful smoke bombs and burning Fauci in effigy (photos here). And changes happened – a little more quickly.

Jim Crow returning

Lauren Floyd of Daily Kos reported on the new voter suppression law in Georgia. I didn’t follow the whole story, though I think it started as a two page bill, then at the last minute the GOP added another 90 pages of voter restrictions. It was promptly approved by the state House, dashed to the Senate and promptly approved, then dashed to the governor, who signed it in a closed door ceremony. I think I got this part right: Democrat Rep. Park Cannon demanded to be let in to observe (though since she is a black woman I doubt she would have observed quietly). Capitol police arrested her on something like interfering with government business. Jen Hayden of Kos showed an image of that closed door signing ceremony. Gov. Brian Kemp is flanked by six white men. They made sure to leave space so that over Kemp’s head there is a clear view of a painting. The painting is of Calloway Plantation, which was notorious in how it treated its slaves. When one tours the place today little is mentioned of how the slaves were treated and almost nothing is said about the jail that was built to hold unruly slaves. That ceremony is the image of Jim Crow returning. Stacey Abrams had a few things to say about this bill. A couple years ago Abrams was cheated out of being Georgia’s governor by Brian Kemp. Before and since she has been a strong advocate for black voting rights. Floyd also wrote about attempts to change policies around housing for black people. One example is in Evanston, Illinois. The tax office is now going out to homeowners behind on their property taxes rather than simply sending notices that might not be understood by seniors with dementia. The City Council has also approved money for longtime residents to help buy or renovate houses, or pay mortgage bills. They announced the money isn’t “reparations” for slavery, but to compensate for discrepancy in housing. Cook County, IL, another example, is making a big effort to make homeowners are aware of ways to reduce their property tax bills. In one case to help a woman with dementia they tracked down a son living in Mississippi. The county is also becoming aware of the costs of throwing people into the street over small tax bills that have been unpaid. Mark Sumner of Kos reported that the Brookings Institute introduced a series of papers on the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US.

The conclusion of those researchers: “The United States … could have avoided nearly 400,000 deaths with a more effective health strategy ...” And it could have done so while spending billions of dollars less. The researchers aren’t actually claiming that Trump is responsible for over 4 out of every 5 deaths, because they’re projecting that 400,000 lives saved against an expected total for the pandemic—which they believe will end up being around 670,000 lives lost. Had Trump taken prompt action, they believe the total would have been under 300,000. What would have made this difference? All the things Trump failed to do...

The cost in lives is horrible, but there is also the cost in dollars. The various rescue acts have cost more than $5 trillion. And that doesn’t count the costs to those people and businesses who couldn’t get that aid. Dr. Rachel Levine has been confirmed by the Senate to be the assistant secretary for health in the Department of Health and Human Service. It’s a really big deal because Levine is the first transgender person to be confirmed by the Senate to be a federal official. A big bit of economic news this week is the huge container ship that has been blocking the Suez Canal since Wednesday. It could be days or weeks before it gets unstuck. Yes, huge – a quarter mile long and able to carry more than 20,000 twenty-foot shipping containers. AKALib of the Kos community wrote about the ship, how it got stuck, that it is costing world trade $400 million an hour, and what might be involved in getting it unstuck. There are also photos showing diggers and dozers compared to the size of the ship. Jen Hayden of Kos reported on the effects of the stuck ship is having on the world economy. This ship is making the Canal unusable and about 10% of world trade usually goes through it. So buy an extra pack of toilet paper (but don’t hoard!). Hayden also included several examples of what Twitter is good at – creating images and short videos as jokes on the situation. Commenters added several more. Dan Kois of Slate reported on solutions kids have offered on how to free the ship. My favorite is by Henry, age 8:

They need to start with blowing up the land that the boat is stuck on, without hurting the boat. Like little explosions. The next thing they need are a bunch of helicopters with winches on the bottom. They should attach lines to the front and the back of the boat to the helicopters. Then the helicopters will fly in opposite directions—just a little—so the boat turns free. Oh. First you should rescue the people. Always rescue the people first.

Though the one by Lyra, age 15, is pretty good too.

I think they should force everyone in the boat to undergo intense, rigorous training until one of them develops psychic powers from the stress, and then he’ll snap and levitate the boat out. I can’t think of any possible way that would backfire.

In a column written more than a quarter century ago Molly Ivens (as quoted by Bill in Portland, Maine in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos) seems distressingly accurate for a time with two big mass shootings. Here’s a bit of it.

I do think gun nuts have a power hang-up. I don't know what is missing in their psyches that they need to feel they have to have the power to kill. But no sane society would allow this to continue.

In another Cheers and Jeers column, Bill in Portland, Maine offers a few bits of late night commentary.

President Biden just got a nice shot in the arm. You know how he said he hoped to get 100-million Americans vaccinated by the end of his first hundred days in office? He beat that deadline by six weeks. Isn’t it amazing what you can do when you don’t put Jared in charge? —Jimmy Kimmel According to a new report, since President Biden took office CNN has lost 45 percent of its prime time audience to its biggest competitor: a good night's sleep. —Seth Meyers The Suez Canal is blocked after a giant container ship got stuck, blocking nearly the entire width of the canal. I get it: after a year of quarantine, nothing fits anymore. They should have put that ship into their stretchy canal—you know, the one that looks like denim but gives? —Stephen Colbert

A grievously belated and utterly impoverished response

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos wrote another article about Moscow Mitch declaring he will make bad things happen if Democrats eliminate the filibuster. It took Mitch only a week to go from “scorched earth” to “nuclear winter” to describe the severity of what he will unleash on the Senate. Mitch is also saying stuff like the filibuster has no racial history (until the last decade the filibuster was almost exclusively used to protect Jim Crow laws). That’s been keeping his staff busy walking back his comments. And all his shrieking seems to be doing is stiffening the spines of many Democrats. Commenter Mutare Paradigm summed up what many are thinking about Mitch’s antics.

His threat is basically: I’ll ground Senate business to a halt if you don’t let me continue grinding Senate business to a halt.

It seems every time I read the tweets of Ben Franklin I want to quote a bunch, even though they usually are depressing. So I only read them occasionally. But last night I was done with what I wanted to do for the day and wasn’t quite ready to turn off the computer and go to bed. So scrolled through his feed. This is what still interests me today. One:

The GOP is against gun control because a significant part of their big picture strategy relies on their supporters being as heavily armed as possible. Capitol attack proves they are perfectly happy to use political violence.

Two:

The fact that republicans want as few people voting, and as many people armed, as possible speaks volumes about where things are headed big picture. And they want us to hate the idea of guns to the point we stay unarmed entirely

Three, responding to a tweet saying the goal of supremacists is a white ethnostate:

I respectfully disagree. I think it’s apartheid states. The tension and polarization must be preserved to keep the nationalists in power despite their lack of policies that help people. A permanent enemy is needed. More of a West Bank and Gaza model.

Four, responding to a tweet about low prospects for a commission to investigate the insurrection because of GOP refusal to agree:

This is a total failure of the government to execute the most basic tasks of law and order, of self-defense, of accountability to one of the worst crimes in our lifetime. the government didn't prevent the attack, they didn't respond to the attack, they didn't arrest all the people who did the attack, and now they won't investigate the attack. this behavior isn't just incompetent, it's complicit.

Five, replying to an observation that when the GOP is in power they never make progress on problems they claim are so dire:

Yes, the GOP actually needs their base to be as miserable and angry as possible to direct that anger onto the dems. In fact, I am pretty sure they actively try to achieve it. They have no interest in solving the problems they capitalize on, in fact I think they make them worse.

Neal Pomea tweeted a response with a drawing that sums up the GOP position well. I’ve seen it described this way before. Six:

I expect climate collapse to kill several billion people but this will happen over generations. The earth is not going to become unlivable in a matter of years. It will be a long, slow collapse and we’re in beginning. It will be possible for elite to survive this for generations. They’re gonna hop from a series of geographical “lifeboats” that will get smaller and smaller each time, relying on technology to sustain them. We’ll probably see, before the end of lives, private cities built for the rich specifically to ride out the collapse. ... I think a lot of what we're seeing, from the global rise in authoritarianism to the effort to make the pandemic here worse by Trump, ties into what is largely an ecofascist agenda. And we can't begin to address it without acknowledging it's happening.

Seven:

In my opinion it is more likely than not that the intelligence agencies are aligned with Trump, not against him, which neatly explains how he was able to live a lifelong crime spree with impunity, enter office despite ties to foreign powers, kill 500k, without intervention.

Model Daughters tweeted:

How do you capture a people without a fight? The same way you capture many creatures. Illusion. As long as there is some belief that they they are not captured, and the cage doesn't look like a cage, they will walk right in or even stand there while you erect it around them. "Smoke masks alarm pheromones which include various chemicals, e.g., isopentyl acetate that are released by guard bees" (Wikipedia) While the hive is under the illusion of safety they'll ignore you as you trap them. If people in a binary power structure believe one power is a villain while the other is fighting that villain, they will allow themselves to be trapped while boo'ing the villain and cheering those they believe are fighting for them even if victories are false. Illusion.

After reading about the Great Migration, in which 5½ million black people fled the Jim Crow South, and after enjoying the story, I came across this: Yaa Gyasi wrote the novel Homegoing which is about the long lasting effects of the transatlantic slave trade. Yet, she wrote in an article for The Guardian, the rise in sales, which happened last summer during Black Lives Matter protests, is bittersweet. Yeah, the sales and money are great. But rising sales also means black people have been murdered and white people are doing a “listening and learning” thing.

Why am I being asked questions that James Baldwin answered in the 1960s, that Toni Morrison answered in the 80s? I read Morrison’s The Bluest Eye for the first time when I was a teenager, and it was so crystalline, so beautifully and perfectly formed that it filled me with something close to terror. I couldn’t fathom it. I couldn’t fathom how a novel could pierce right through the heart of me and find the inarticulable wound. ... While I do devoutly believe in the power of literature to challenge, to deepen, to change, I also know that buying books by black authors is but a theoretical, grievously belated and utterly impoverished response to centuries of physical and emotional harm. The Bluest Eye was published 51 years ago. ... So many of the writers of colour that I know have had white people treat their work as though it were a kind of medicine. Something they have to swallow in order to improve their condition, but they don’t really want it, they don’t really enjoy it, and if they’re being totally honest, they don’t actually even take the medicine half the time. They just buy it and leave it on the shelf. What pleasure, what deepening, could there be in “reading” like that? To enter the world of fiction with such a tainted mission is to doom the novel or short story to fail you on its most essential levels. I’ve published two books during particularly fraught election years and the general tenor of many of the Q&A sessions has been one I would describe as a frenzied search for answers or absolution. There’s so much slippage between “please tell me what I’m doing wrong” and “please tell me that I’ve done nothing wrong”. The suddenness and intensity of the desperation to be seen as being “good” run completely counter to how deeply entrenched, how very old the problems are. There is a reason that Homegoing covers 300 years, and even that was only but the shallowest dip into a bottomless pool. A summer of reading cannot fix this. Some may want to call the events of June 2020 a “racial reckoning,” but in a country in which there was a civil war and a civil rights movement 100 years apart, at some point it would be useful to ask how long a reckoning need take. When, if ever, will we have reckoned?

If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky

Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reported on the House Oversight Committee hearings on statehood for Washington, DC. Democrats stuck to the facts, such as there are more residents in DC who don’t have representation in Congress than in the states of Vermont and Wyoming, who do. The GOP didn’t have facts. And some of their reasoning was quite comical. Rep. Jody Hice: DC “would be the only state, the only state, without an airport, without a car dealership, without a capital city, without a landfill.” Rep. Ralph Norman: “They have no source of income. In South Carolina, we have farming. In South Carolina, we have mining. The new state of Washington will have none of that.” Sen. Mike Rounds: “The Founding Fathers never intended for Washington D.C. to be a state. #DCStatehood is really about packing the Senate with Democrats in order to pass a left-wing agenda.” To that last one Jemele Hill responded: “They also never intended for black people to be counted as citizens or human beings, for women to vote and for anyone who wasn’t a White man to own property. Pro tip: Compete for votes with better ideas, instead of creating agendas based on alienation and hatred.” The comments to Clawson’s post have at it. Mother Mags: “Landfill? Have they checked the GOP Senate? Lots of trash there, and not biodegradable.” Joe Buck: “One car dealership, one vote, the way the founding fathers wanted.” Anonymous: If car dealerships is a standard for statehood, then 46 states would not have qualified when they did. The same for airports. Then scroll down to the cartoon about what the Founding Fathers intended. The obvious name for the new state would be Columbia. However, I heard the statehood bill specifies a different name, though I don’t remember what. After pondering it a bit I realized why. Columbia refers, of course, to Christopher Columbus. And he’s not the darling of American history he used to be. Now he’s more of the villain who caused great destruction to the indigenous people. Sidney Powell was one of the nasty guy lawyers who pushed the Big Lie in court. At the time she vowed to “release the Kraken.” Dominion, the company that makes voting systems and was accused of switching votes to Biden (because their system makes it difficult to make black votes disappear), has sued her for $1.3 billion. The reason is her lies cost them business. Darrell Lucus of the Kos community reported that Powell, wanting to dismiss the suit, is now singing a different tune. Her reason for seeking dismissal: “no reasonable person” would believe her claims. My reaction to that comment: Then a great number of unreasonable people did believe her lies and they caused and continue to cause a great deal of damage to our country. That includes several deaths. She needs to be accountable for her comments, reasonable or not. Lucus included tweets from various people responding to Powell’s statement. Some of them: Rep. Ted Lieu:

This shows Sidney Powell views supporters of the former President and @GOP legislators as unreasonable, that only stupid people would have believed her election fraud statements. Problem is, many Republican legislators continue to wrongly believe the election was stolen.

Eve Fairbanks:

This makes me violently angry. My own *mother* believed Sidney Powell. I'm so angry people like Powell claim they are "the patriots." They hate America. This woman thinks her country is a toy--to be played with, snapped in half, and then discarded as soon as it no longer charms.

Kimberly Atkins:

Sooo... she’s admitting to lying in sworn court pleadings, in which case she should be disbarred and sanctioned.

Kathleen Belew tweeted about the grocery store shooting in Boulder, Colorado:

The Boulder suspect was born three days before the Columbine shooting. That's how long we've failed to take action.

Robert Maguire tweeted a video clip of Justice Warren Burger speaking in 1991. Maguire added this text:

Former conservative Chief Justice of Supreme Court Warren Burger: The 2nd Amendment "has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime"

Aysha Qamar of Kos added to the discussion about the way to respect Asians is to learn to pronounce their names correctly. Or at least try. In an attempt to fit in she let others consistently mispronounce her name, frequently “Alisha,” or give her a nickname. She sees this now as a microagression. She learned if fellow students call her by a nickname many times the teachers did too.

For those of you who are wondering, my first name is pronounced Eye-Sh-Ah, and my last Ka-Maar, not Ku-Maar—there’s no U. ... As Orange Is The New Black actress Uzo Aduba eloquently reiterates in her mother’s words: “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.”

The comic strip Frazz took on the phrase “the new normal” last Sunday. Caulfield noted “By the time we know something is normal, it won’t be new.”

Insufficient training

Shortly after the insurrection in January several corporations said they would not give campaign donations to seditionists. A lot of people wondered, yeah, how long is that going to last? The answer turned out to be less than ten weeks. Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos reported no, they aren’t donating directly to seditionists. They are instead donating to the National Republican Campaign Committee. About two thirds of the people the NRCC supports are seditionists. Or they donate to a candidate’s PAC, not to the candidate. Eleveld concluded:

Only one party in this nation's two-party system spent over a month systematically stoking distrust of election results without being able to produce a shred of evidence of voter fraud. Only one party in this nation's two-party system is now systematically working to disenfranchise the kinds of voters it doesn't like. Only one party in this nation's two-party system is systematically working to undermine American democracy—Intel, AT&T, and Cigna now enthusiastically support that Republican party. Other corporate PACs will soon follow suit—that's one way to lead.

The New York Times published a lengthy report on the police tactics in response over protests of police racism. The conclusion: “Insufficient training.” Dartagnan of the Kos community isn’t buying.

Thirty-eight paragraphs into a story examining law enforcement’s heavy-handed overreaction to these protests—protests with the very purpose of highlighting racial disparities in policing— and The New York Times “in-depth” report on the police response includes one small, oblique snippet containing the word “racism” or “race.”

The reviews did not examine protesters’ complaints of racial bias in policing. But activists in Indianapolis told reviewers they wanted an acknowledgment by the department that systemic racism exists. The Portland Police Bureau said it was planning anti-racism training for all officers.

Gosh, you’d think that racism might be a factor in the way these protests were handled. You’d never know it from this report. Not one word about how the nature of the protests themselves may have impacted law enforcement’s response. No, it was all just poor planning. The cops will do better next time.

Darrell Lucus of the Kos community discussed Johnny Enlow, a pastor in Atlanta, who has called for a military coup to get rid of that usurper Joe Biden. Enlow has repeated a claim that other insurrectionists have been making: They weren’t carrying out a coup, they were trying to stop one. Lucus wrote such an argument, if it went before a judge, would declare it “frivolous” or “ridiculous.” He explained:

Cliff Notes version: When a judge says your argument is frivolous, he’s saying that you have no argument, no case, nothing. Claiming that you’re mounting a violent coup in order to stop a coup is the very definition of frivolous.

That’s why a lot of these lies are being presented in the court of public opinion and not before a judge. Georgia Logothetis, in her pundit roundup for Kos, included a couple interesting quotes. First from Jeffrey Rosen at The Atlantic, writing about the insurrection and the distinction between mob violence and political protest.

As it happens, this was a question the Founders thought about extensively. Their political and moral philosophy was based on what they considered a self-evident truth: Only by using our powers of reason to moderate our selfish, ego-based passions and emotions can we achieve the classical virtues—prudence, temperance, justice, and courage—necessary for personal and political self-government. A mob, by contrast, is animated by vices: rashness, self-indulgence, vulgarity, vanity, ambition, boastfulness, buffoonery, and envy, as listed by Aristotle. These are just the sort of traits inculcated online, with likes and clicks rewarding the worst of human instincts.

David Rohde of The New Yorker discussed what approach AG Merrick Garland should take when investigating the nasty guy. Crack down or be more centrist to avoid stoking conspiracy theories? Rohde reminds us:

A core part of Trump’s political project was the discrediting of the idea that nonpartisanship is even possible. In his dark vision of public life, nonpartisan public servants, from public-health experts to prosecutors, were politically biased, incompetent, or corrupt.

When Garland was confirmed he vowed to pursue leads wherever they take us. Close to a year now I’ve been going to a restaurant for takeout for Sunday lunch. It provides a nice change of diet (much tastier than the food I make myself) and it supports restaurants. I wish I could say I support local restaurants, but the good ones in my area (generic suburbia) are chains. The package I take home usually comes with a little packet with utensils and napkin – even when I specifically uncheck the box so they would be left out (though once when I did check the box – because I was going to eat lunch in a park with friends – there were no utensils). So now I have a pile of utensil packets. Laura Clawson of Kos says all these takeout meals in their plastic boxes over the last year are causing a big trash problem. Clawson talks a bit of what can be done about it. Brother, who lives in Germany, told me he sometimes takes his own containers to a restaurant for them to fill. My immediate response was how would a restaurant know the container is clean? Do they handle things properly if the customer has COVID and hands over a container with COVID all over it? There are places that turn that concept around. You take their container of food and bring it back for them to clean. GO Box offers that service in Portland, OR. They supply containers to restaurants and food carts. When you’re done eating you return the container to a GO Box drop site. So far they’ve kept 200,000 containers out of the trash. Other places have or are considering similar services. From the personal end we can nudge our favorite places into more eco friendly choices – like leaving out the utensils (see above) and switching to better packaging. The first comment to this post was from Bender Rodruguez who asked:

Unless you have a medical reason, once you hit 8 years old, why are you using a straw?!

Since I don’t buy drinks I’m not given a straw (though when back to indoor dining I should remember to refuse straws with my water).

Saturday Church

Last evening I watched the movie Saturday Church. It came out three years ago. I think it appeared in area movie theaters, but for such a short time I missed it. At the time the NPR program 1A did a movie club program on it, though starting by saying here be spoilers. So that episode went into my browser tabs, then into browser history. The movie is about Ulysses, who is 14 and black. He likes wearing his mother's shoes, which his conservative aunt wants to stop. Much of the story is him finding his community and he does in what is called Saturday Church. The film could be called a musical, though there are only a few songs (some with dancers!) in its 1:20 runtime. I recommend this one, even though the lead actor at times seems a bit wooden. Featured in the film is a dance contest, with the participants doing the same vogue dancing I saw the youth do at the Ruth Ellis Center here in Detroit. There really is a Saturday Church. It is a place for transgender kids run by St. Luke in the Fields in West Village, NYC. It looks like it offers some of the services as Ruth Ellis Center – food, clothing, a place to shower, access to a counselor, a place to hang out and vogue. A place to be who they are. Alas, only one day a week. So, back to the 1A episode about the movie (and remember, there are spoilers). The host in this episode is Joshual Johnson, who is black and gay. The audio is 36 minutes. The guests in this episode are John Horn, part of the regular 1A movie club, the writer and director of the movie Damon Cardasis, lesbian writer Danielle Hilborn, and Morgan Givens, a black trans man. Johnson says a main theme of the movie is being who you are up against being who your family wants you to be. Horn gave the movie a score 4.5 of 5, Hilborn gave it 4 of 5, Givens gave it 4 of 5. Rotten Tomatoes gave it 91/100. Cardasis told his story. He’s gay and his mother is an Episcopal priest. This was not a conservative religion. She is progressive. He found out about Saturday Church and volunteered for a while. He saw the contrast between their lives and the energy they put into vogueing (and at REC they put a lot of energy into it). And Ulysses is based on a real person he met there. Many in the cast were from the LGBT community, many had not acted before. This film launched a couple of them into the show Pose to become much better known. The dance contest in the movie is based on houses and ball culture. The majority of homeless youth are LGBT and a majority of those are black. They form “houses” to take care of each other. Each house has a person designated as father and as mother. Houses compete at ball events, with the runway, dancing, and costumes with prizes awarded. The costumes are sometimes made with minimal means. Givens confirmed he was part of the ball culture. I’ve heard of the houses at the Ruth Ellis Center. I’ve heard of youth indicating this other person is a parent of a house. I heard the director of the drop in center (where I volunteered) refer to herself as a house mother. Horn said the songs gave us a chance to see the way Ulysses wanted to see the world, in contrast to the way the world was. He thought they were really important to the story. The movie was released both in theaters and through streaming (remember, three years ago). Though that limited which theaters would book it, many smaller towns wouldn’t book it anyway and the kinds of people depicted in the film may not want to be seen in a theater watching it.

There should be 100 votes

Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos sees signs that Biden might be a very progressive president in spite of his reputation of being a centrist. There is an important difference between Biden and his former boss Obama. Obama was irritated by criticism on the left. The loudest voices tended to be frozen out of the White House. In contrast, Biden seems to be welcoming them in. Also, those mentored by Elizabeth Warren (who is quite far left) are being given jobs that have an impact on policy. In such things as filibuster reform Biden has shown to be willing to evolve his position. This could be very good and very progressive. Sen. Rafael Warnock tweeted:

The last time the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized, George W. Bush was president and it passed the Senate 98-0. Now it can’t even get a vote. We have our differences, but there should be 100 votes to make it easier for Americans to make their voices heard in our democracy.

That last reauthorization was in 2006 and provisions were to last for 25 years. Some were overturned by the Supreme Court in 2013, leading to blatant efforts by the GOP to suppress the vote since then, including the big push to enact suppression laws this year. In the seven years the GOP in Congress went from fully on board with voting rights to fully on board with voter suppression. Yeah, Republicans in many state legislatures were never on board with voting rights, which led to that Supreme Court decision in 2013. The Daily Show tweeted a 42 second video on: Want to be a journalist? It’s easy! Ask your dad. The video shows Chris Wallace, son of Mike Wallace; Luke and Tim Russert; Peter and Steve Doocy; Tucker Carlson and Dick Carlson; Anderson Cooper, son of Gloria Vanderbilt; and several more. This is one of the problems of journalism. The major players are concerned about preserving the family empire. They’re not open to minority voices. An example of that, to gain experience those starting out must take an unpaid internship. But only kids of rich families can afford to do that. Sarah Kendzior quoted a tweet from NBC News:

Prospects dim for Jan. 6 riot commission amid partisan disputes; Republican and Democratic leaders can't agree on who will be on the commission and what exactly it will study.

Then Kendzior responded:

Unbelievably dangerous — and suspicious — dereliction of duty.

Then she quoted her own tweets about episodes of Gaslit Nation discussing the terrorist attack on the Capitol and how little is being done to document what happened and to bring the perpetrators to justice. In another tweet Kendzior added:

Refusal to enforce accountability for brazen crimes is as ominous as the crimes themselves. Criminal elites cannot succeed without complicity and cowardice. This is why officials feign shock to avoid accountability — both for the crimes and for their own failure to stop them.

luispunchy responded to Kendzior:

As others have said, Republicans are scuttling any earnest attempt at a fact-finding commission about Jan 6 insurrection bc they want to keep the facts concealed. Investigate themselves? Complicity runs deep into the GOP.

Justin Hendrix added:

The indications are that the idea of a national commission is on life support. We need to demand this of our lawmakers- even if the GOP refuses to participate.

Give it away

I thought of another way to measure my blog output. Up to now I’ve been looking at the number of posts per year, which is easily seen in the upper left of my blog’s home page. I had 333 posts in 2020, a bit above the 296 posts in 2019 and higher than any year since 2014. That year I posted 382 times. The record is 459 posts in 2009. But I realized that doesn’t really cover how much writing I’ve done in a year. For example, in previous years I tended to put longer topics in separate posts – the length of this discussion would usually be enough to get a post of its own. In an evening I might put up 2 to 3 posts. Now I do that rarely. I almost always put all of my writing for a day into one post. However, I’ve kept the practice of keeping all writing for a day in one file, even if it ends up as more than one post. With that I can see how many days I posted in a year. And by putting all the files for a year in one folder I can see from the folder size the volume of writing (though keeping in mind there is a per file overhead in using a document editor). In 2019 I posted on 156 days. That’s a year in which I had a full schedule of rehearsals, volunteer work, and concerts taking up 3-4 evenings a week. The total size of the 2019 folder is 3.76 megabytes. In 2020 with most evening events canceled, I posted on 298 days and the 2020 folder is 12.1 megabytes. That almost twice as many days and more than three times the verbiage. It is also twice the verbiage as the high point year of 2009. On to what’s happening. The Michigan coronavirus data shows increasing cases per day for the fourth week in a row. For three days this past week the new cases per day has been above 2500. The low in mid February was about 1000 cases a day. The governor relaxed guidelines too soon. Waiting another six weeks would have given the vaccine time to prevent an increase in cases. But there’s that GOP controlled legislature. Thankfully, the number of deaths per day has stayed at 20 and below for three weeks. That’s still a lot of deaths. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported on the status of vaccines in America.

Biden purchased more 100 million doses of Moderna, 100 million more doses of Pfizer, and 100 million more doses of Johnson & Johnson. Those purchases alone should be enough to vaccinate 200 million Americans (the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two doses each). Put that together with purchases made during the previous administration, and the U.S. should now actually have about 1/3 more doses of COVID-19 vaccine that it actually needs. ... With all that vaccine still available, the U.S. looks to be headed from vaccine shortage to a serious surplus over the next few months. What to do about this? Give it away.

The US has already said it will give away 4 million doses of the AstraZenca vaccine to Canada and Mexico. That makes sense because this vaccine has not been approved for use here and probably won’t for several months. It has been approved on both Canada and Mexico. Giving doses away is both the right thing to do and a safety measure. As long as the virus is circulating in the world and able to create new versions America is still in danger. Sen. Lindsay Graham has declared that when the voting rights bill comes to the floor and if he has to do a talking filibuster he will. Christopher Reeves of Kos says bring it on.

Have at it, Sen. Graham. Get up on stage and talk for hours and hours about why voter suppression is okay. Talk about why state laws that make it difficult for people to participate are good, and why policies that disenfranchise people are just the right of the state. Explain that in a modern society where computers are possible, we can’t figure out a system to allow people to vote anywhere, basically, and we aren’t doing enough about election security. There are a lot of Republicans running next cycle who would love to hear what you have to say. Democrats too—it certainly will make good campaign ads. You’ve been on the attack against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Wait until someone is busy running ads containing your madness and the madness of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, and asking the question: Is this the party you want to be a part of today?

Dave Catanese tweeted a clip of Stephen Colbert discussing the filibuster with Sen. Chuck Schumer and added:

Do late night shows even attempt to do funny and release us from our day anymore or do they just blandly repeat the previous 24 hour political news cycle? Imagine having the highest platform in all of comedy — a stage comics would cut their right arm off for — and decide, “Let’s book the Senate majority leader and talk about the merits of the f---ing filibuster.” I’m old, but seriously, bring back Letterman.

Will Stancil responded:

What’s happening here is that stupid journalistic conventions about neutrality prevent normal news shows on broadcast networks from having honest discussions about things like the filibuster, so Colbert steps in to do the job as a “comedian.” It may be that Colbert’s interview here isn’t funny, but it’s also an interview that could not appear on his network in any other context.

Joan McCarter of Kos reported Rep. Jim Clyburn, a black man, had something to say about the filibuster being a Senate tradition. Here’s a key point:

This whole thing that the filibuster cannot be changed, that's almost like saying to me Brown vs. Board of Education was wrongly decided. That's what you're saying?

Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported that many Republicans realize they screwed up the first major battle of the Biden era, the huge relief package starting to put money into bank accounts.

Shocker—Republicans got caught up in a useless round of conservative media-fueled demagoguery while the rest of America reeled from the greatest public health disaster in a century. Democrats simply blew right past Republicans to answer the national need. But what confounds GOP strategists is that the Republican party really mounted no concerted effort to oppose the Democratic legislation as it gained widespread traction and was broadly embraced by voters. ... Even Democrats have been baffled by the Republican whiff on such a major battle. John Anzalone, an external Biden adviser and former Biden campaign pollster, was amazed that Republicans settled on framing the package as unrelated to COVID-19 when so many Americans who will get the relief money are specifically reeling from pandemic-related illness, joblessness, and financial struggles. “This is just really mind-boggling,” Anzalone said. “At a time that we’re going through three or four crises at once, they have basically just punted. They've completely punted.” ... The lack of both message and messenger has left Republicans hoping against hope the relief that has already started hitting bank accounts and will continue to target life-saving funds to the nation's neediest will somehow plummet in popularity.

Hunter of Kos reported that many GOP state legislators have been looking at the parts of the big relief package just passed that bring relief to state and local government budgets. The GOP thinking has, of course, been about if federal dollars are going to cover this or that expense than state dollars don’t have to and we can give our wealthy donors a tax cut. They don’t think about restoring services that were squeezed because falling sales tax revenues. They don’t intend for those to be restored. Democrats are getting wise to these tricks and wrote into the law that none of this money can be used to fund new tax cuts even if indirectly. Naturally, GOP legislators are looking for ways around that provision. One is to be creative in defining “indirectly.” The other is to sue the Biden administration claiming the provision is unconstitutional because it is too broad. It doesn’t allow states to cut taxes at all, a violation of the 10th Amendment. Leah McElrath tweeted about the shootings in Atlanta and the actions of the police in this case.

The officer’s actions were out of line and contributed to the suffering experienced because of this crime. He regurgitated the suspect’s sociopathic rationale in full—and thereby set the dominant narrative and lay foundation for the suspect’s defense.

David Neiwert of Kos also discussed the police actions, including one telling detail. This is from the officer who lamented the murderer, not the victims, had “a really bad day.”

Despite Asian women comprising six of the eight victims, the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office seemed to be making one excuse after the other for the 25-year-old white perpetrator—but warning that it couldn’t call the mass killings a hate crime. Then it emerged that the sheriff’s official, Capt. Jay Baker, making all the excuses himself was prone to indulging in anti-Asian bigotry in the form of a Facebook post promoting a T-shirt describing COVID-19 as an “Imported Virus From Chy-Na.”

Baker didn’t want to say the shooter committed a hate crime because Baker is just as racist. Because so many of the victims in this shooting are Asian McElrath offered a pronunciation guide to Asian names. If you want to respect an Asian (or any) person you learn to write and speak their names correctly (or at least try). Andrew Stroehlein of Human Rights Watch tweeted:

Genocides do not begin with mass murder. That's where they end up. Genocides & other mass atrocity crimes begin with words - specifically, with powerful people dehumanizing a powerless minority. Once they are seen as less than human, anything is possible, even mass murder.

Draw a line from south of the Chicago suburbs west across Illinois, about where highway I-80 is. North of that line is Northern Illinois region of the United Methodist Church. It is very progressive and where some of the first pro-LGBT congregations in the denomination are. South of that line, the rest of the state, is the Great Rivers region (named for the Mississippi and Illinois rivers). It is much less progressive than the Northern Illinois region (otherwise why have two regions?). However, it is the Great Rivers region that made some positive LGBT news. Isaac Simmons, an openly gay man, was approved by his district to become ordained clergy, the first for this region. He is also the first drag queen to be approved in United Methodist history. I’m pretty sure he still needs to be approved by the whole region. Pastors in national conservative Methodist organizations predictably had a hissy fit, describing Simmons as the spawn of Satan and “a bad copy of Jack Lemmon’s performance in Some Like It Hot” among other things. But they’ve already agreed to leave the denomination (to be voted on when an international conference can be safely held in September 2022), so their opinion doesn’t count. The article doesn’t say whether Simmons will let his drag persona, Ms. Penny Cost, do the Sunday preaching. That would be an awesome sermon I would want to hear in person.

People don't get to decide whether they are racist

The news has been full of the shootings at massage parlors around Atlanta, resulting in eight dead. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos gives a good overview of what was known as of yesterday morning. Since so many of the dead are Asian women there is discussion of whether this is a hate crime. As is usual, the big news sources, including NPR, tend to leave out or misinterpret important details. That’s one thing Twitter is good at – if one is careful of whether the writer is trying to support supremacy. An example is this tweet from Leah McElrath. After the alleged shooter was arrested (and not shot by police), McEelrath was appalled when one officer lamented the murderer had a really bad day. And the victims? The captain in the sheriff’s office also had a bad day. Michelle Kim tweeted (I think she is quoting police):

“may not have been a hate crime, but instead may have something to do with the suspect's claim of a potential sex addiction” "a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate” HE WANTED TO ELIMINATE *ASIAN WOMEN SEX WORKERS* WHOM HIS SICK WHITE MALE SUPREMACIST BRAIN FETISHIZED

Christine Liwag Dixon tweeted:

The hypersexualization of Asian women plays a HUGE part in the violence we face. I've been cornered on the street as men say "me love you long time." I've been offered money for a "happy ending massage." I've been hit on because I'm Asian and told it's a "compliment." Asian women are so often seen and treated as objects, as trophies and this very real problem is often seen as a punchline i.e. jokes about mail order brides, the portrayal of Asian women in Hollywood. And Asian women are murdered because of it. ... And what's even scarier is how many of us just accept this as a fact of life. We aren't even surprised by it. We just know that being an Asian woman means that we are going to be targeted.

Emily Joy tweeted:

Caitlin just reminded me of that scene in the evangelical Christian movie Fireproof where Kirk Cameron takes a baseball bat and smashes his computer so that he stops look at porn and y’all…this s--- is baked so far in. Also, media outlets without religious literacy don’t understand that evangelical and rightwing Christians use the term “sex addiction” to mean something different than most other people who use that term and I’m worried the lack of understanding is going to cloud this convo. To illustrate this, in my book #ChurchToo I quote a book called Pure Heart: A Woman’s Guide to Sexual Integrity, which teaches that having sex outside of marriage is a sex addiction. This way of thinking of “sex addiction” among evangelicals is incredibly common.

Mia Tsai tweeted a thread about how misogyny and white supremacy put Asian women in danger. It’s a bit too long for me to quote. In it she refers to “incels” and “PUA groups.” I’ve learned that “incel” means “involuntary celibate” – a man so dislikable women won’t date him (certainly not have sex with him) yet because of misogyny he believes women are supposed to be falling at his feet. He gets annoyed – sometimes to the point of violence – when he doesn’t get his way. I’m sure his misogyny is what repels women. I had to look up “PUA groups.” It took a bit to get past the websites for pandemic unemployment assistance to find it stands for “Pick Up Artist groups.” This is about studying group dynamics to see if the guy can get a girl off alone. I’m not sure if I got that right and don’t want to delve into it anymore and don’t want to link to it either. Yesterday afternoon Clawson posted again, this time taking on the police who describe the shooter as having a bad day.

Okay, then. We have a white guy who apparently murdered eight people at three locations, injured one other person, and was arrested unharmed despite police having to force his car off the road to apprehend him. And the first thing police have to tell us is what a bad day he had and about his sexual addiction problems that led him to want to eliminate temptation … by murdering people. First off, let’s be clear that “murdered women because he saw them as a source of sexual temptation” is also very, very bad. Second, a spike in anti-Asian racist incidents over the past pandemic year have disproportionately targeted women, with the founder of Stop AAPI Hate noting, before the Atlanta shootings, “There is an intersectional dynamic going on that others may perceive both Asians and women and Asian women as easier targets.” Third, and this is closely related, gross racist fetishization of Asian women has a long history. Fourth, sex addiction is not a real condition. It’s mostly an excuse for men who do lousy things: “high libido coupled with low impulse control.” Attributing mass murder to sex addiction suggests an illness is responsible where there is no illness. The message from the police seems to be this: Gosh, it’s not good what he did, but … he had his reasons—a really bad day, people!—and despite the racial makeup of his victims, we're going to put a whole laundry list of reasons above racism.

Celest Ng (she says “pronounced ing”) has a good tweet to finish this off:

General rule: people don't get to decide whether they are racist; other people decide this based on their actions.

I would add that a white sheriff doesn’t get to decide either. Senator Rafael Warnock, elected to the Senate in January, gave his first speech on the floor. He talked about his background, introducing himself to his colleagues. He then talked about the importance of voting rights. Towards the end he talked about the filibuster. Walter Einenkel of Kos provided the transcript.

I stand before you saying that this issue—access to voting and preempting politicians’ efforts to restrict voting—is so fundamental to our democracy that it is too important to be held hostage by a Senate rule, especially one historically used to restrict the expansion of voting rights. It is a contradiction to say we must protect minority rights in the Senate while refusing to protect minority rights in the society. Colleagues, no Senate rule should overrule the integrity of the democracy and we must find a way to pass voting rights whether we get rid of the filibuster or not.

Joan McCarter of Kos reported that in an interview on ABC Biden is now talking about filibuster reform. That’s new. At least it should go back to what it was when he joined the Senate. A senator had to take the floor, to work for the filibuster. Alas, two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, still believe that to end a filibuster there must be 60 votes. Sinema even believes that the filibuster should be restored for judicial appointments, which Moscow Mitch eliminated to be able to ram through the nasty guy’s choices. That 60 vote threshold to pass everything seems to be the norm and the way it has always been. In the 53 years from 1917-1970 the filibuster was used 49 times (a guess that most of them were to prevent dismantling of Jim Crow). After Mitch took control of the Senate GOP it has been used and average of 80 times a year. The battle over the filibuster will play out soon. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, has said he’ll bring the first of two voting rights bills to the floor, perhaps next week. Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed that there is no political price for removing the filibuster. Voters don’t care. They are looking for results. That first voting rights bill is HR1. Ari Berman tweeted:

HR1 would thwart virtually every single GOP voter suppression tactic. This is why Mitch McConnell so terrified of it.

Berman included a chart of the various types of voter suppression bills that are being introduced, which states have introduced each one, and whether HR1 would outlaw it. There is only one no. Some of the types of bills are: Limit who can vote by mail, restrict where and how voters can return absentee ballots, eliminate or limit early voting, expand voter purges, and require proof of citizenship to register. Back in 2018 Michigan voters passed a big voters rights amendment to the state constitution. And still the GOP controlled legislature found something to help them with voter suppression, the proof of citizenship to register. The Guardian asked the question “Have you adopted a healthier lifestyle during the pandemic?” That prompted McElrath to respond:

We are NOT moving the pandemic success bar to “adopted a healthier lifestyle.” Nope. We aren’t going to do that. I survived and did my best to ensure that my actions did not cause the suffering or death of anyone else.

Some of the replies to McElrath:

I'm in the "eat an ice cream bar everyday" stage. On Saturday, it becomes breakfast. I have recently come to accept that sometimes dinner = corn chips is going to have to be ok for now. So, no. I'm alive. My kids are alive. My parents are alive. I don't give a f*ck if my pants don't fit. I've gained 10lbs in the last 8 months, and even my Dr is like 'meh, you're mental health is doing ok? I'm not too worried about it'. Granted that's after 2+ years of steady consistent loss.

Scorched-earth Senate

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported that Monday Sen. Dick Durban, the second highest Democrat in the Senate, gave a speech on the floor. He talked a bit about the history of the filibuster – defend Jim Crow – and that it’s time to end it. Durban said the filibuster ...

is what hitting legislative rock bottom looks like. […] Rather than protecting the finely balanced system our founders created, today's filibuster throws a system out of balance, giving one half of one branch of government what amounts to a veto over the rest of government. It promotes gridlock, not good governance.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported that in response to Durban Moscow Mitch threatened the Senate yesterday. If the Senate limits or gets rid of the filibuster, Mitch said,

Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin to imagine what a completely scorched-earth Senate would look like.

Republicans are also threatening Democrats with what they will do the next time the GOP regains the majority. Mitch laid out the agenda: anti-union laws, defund Planned Parenthood, a massive hardening of the southern border, sweeping abortion restrictions. Eleveld wrote, first if the GOP controls the House, Senate, and Presidency any time in the next decade, the filibuster will be the least of our worries. Second, blocking every part of the Biden/Democrat agenda is what they were planning anyway. Third, the GOP caucus is such an unruly beast they won’t be able to legislate anything if they get back in power. Finally, since the GOP goal is to block progress, the filibuster hurts Democrats more than it does Republicans. Eleveld concluded:

Following McConnell's "scorched-earth" threat, Jentleson, author of the filibuster-themed book Kill Switch, tweeted, "Trading this for the ability to actually pass bills like voting rights seems like an easy call. If McConnell's tactics become truly onerous, Dems can always pass further reforms to end obstruction. McConnell's goal is to make government fail, Dems' goal should be to make it work."

McCarter wrote that in response to Mitch’s threats, Durban said:

He has already done that. He's proven he can do it, and he will do it again

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is now the chair of the Subcommittee on Federal Courts, part of the Judiciary Committee. When part of the Senate minority he kept a list of things that he saw as not right. Now that he’s chair, and now that Merrick Garland is Attorney General, it is time to act. Joan McCarter reported first up is why was there a lack of investigation by the FBI when Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court? Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault. Witnesses came forward. None were listened to. A tip line was set up, but Whitehouse wrote: “This 'tip line' appears to have operated more like a garbage chute with everything that came down the chute consigned without review to the figurative dumpster.” Christopher Wray was head of the FBI during the Kavanaugh hearings and still is. He hasn’t been answering Congressional inquiries. Either Garland can shake him loose or recommend to Biden to get rid of him. Then maybe Whitehouse will call for investigations to Kavanaugh, especially into how so much of Kavanaugh’s debt so quickly disappeared in the year before he was nominated. I reported that after the insurrection many corporations stopped donating to Republicans. Funding insurrection was not a good corporate look. Laura Clawson of Kos reported that corporations have also stopped giving to Democrats. All the major Democratic Party campaign committees have seen a drop of more than 90%. Yes, it is good to get corporate money out of politics. Alas, it isn’t the big source of money it used to be. That’s been taken over by dark money, outside groups that run attack ads, have secret donors, and don’t have morals. Clawson laments that in an era filled with shouts of “both-sides do it!” this is one of the worst examples.