To the privileged, equality feels like a step down

I’m reading the book The Bruce Trilogy by Nigel Tranter. This is the novelization of the historical rise and reign of Robert Bruce, King of Scotland in three novels under one cover. I’ve read 440 pages out of 1050. The story starts in1296 when Robert is 22. At the point I’m reading now the year is, I think, 1307. Robert has been crowned but Edward I of England controls Scotland. Robert is working out how to retake his country. I bought the book 30 years ago while living in Germany and taking business trips to England. It sat on the shelf all this time partly because for much of that time it wasn’t on the shelf of books yet to be read and partly because at over a thousand pages it is daunting to consider starting it. But I’m running low on books – as in 20 on the yet-to-read shelf rather than the more typical 40. With that story on my mind I chose Brave for my Sunday night movie. This is the Pixar movie from 2012 featuring a princess, daughter of the King of Scotland. It supposedly takes place about the same time as the novel I’m reading. A major part of the plot is that she doesn’t want to marry any of the suitors vying for her hand. I can see why – the three young men are a sorry lot. The decision to stay unwed would have been more interesting if the choices were much more handsome and smart. The animation was, of course, excellent (this is Pixar, though not their best movie). I especially liked the mama bear character. It was entertaining. I encountered a glaring error in the Bruce book. Elizabeth de Burgh is described has having hair the color of corn. Later Bruce passes a field of corn. But corn was unknown in Europe until after Columbus came to America two hundred years later. The movie showed the king and clan leaders wearing tartan plaids. But in the goofs page of IMDB for this movie says that tartans were not used until the mid 1500s. Which means the Bruce book made the same mistake. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reported that after the Republicans in the Senate voted not to proceed on a bill for a commission to investigate the Capitol attack, it is now up to Pelosi. She has said the House would proceed with their own investigation, but hasn’t yet said it’s a go. Clawson said Pelosi should, and with all due haste. Clawson also listed several open questions: Why didn’t intelligence warn the right people? Why were the Capitol Police unprepared? Why was the National Guard delayed? What did the nasty guy do during the attack? Why are Moscow Mitch and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy so opposed to the commission? And many more. Mark Follman tweeted:

This Jan. 6 defendant argued he was just joking when he threatened to “put a bullet” in Nancy Pelosi’s head. The judge didn’t laugh one bit as she cited evidence he drove to DC with a Glock 19, an assault rifle and more than 2,500 rounds of ammunition.

Sarah Kendzior added:

Thing is, refusal of Dem leadership to enforce meaningful consequences gives the terrorist’s claim that he was “just joking” credence. He could easily say “Pelosi didn’t want impeachment, didn’t want witnesses, won’t form committee to investigate — she’s not taking it seriously!”

Southpaw tweeted:

Four months of the Democrats’ rare and precious time with a trifecta in government has already gone by. They just sought to get a non-reconciliation bill passed by caving to every one of the Republicans’ demands and saw it get filibustered by Republicans anyway.

ContextFall responded:

These last few months make more sense if you accept that several Dems are throwing the fight on purpose. Others are blinded by vanity, or silenced by those in leadership. The real fighters stand out when you look at actions vs statements.

Kendzior tweeted:

* Garland won't release the memo on Trump and obstruction * Yellen won't release Trump's tax returns * Wray won't investigate the elites behind the attempted coup * Biden won't restructure board to get rid of DeJoy * Dems won't pass voting rights You catching on yet?

In case we aren’t, she quoted her own tweet:

A failed coup is a dress rehearsal. A political party that stages a coup and blocks investigation ultimately wants that coup to succeed. A political party that did not stage a coup but does not assertively, quickly investigate and prosecute it *also* wants that coup to succeed.

Andrew Prokop quoted Matthew Yglesias:

Moderate Democrats preference for bipartisan legislation is totally understandable but what you see with the 1/6 Commission bill is the filibuster discourages this by making the bar for passing anything so high that even successful efforts to court cross-party votes are useless.

And Prokop added:

To be more specific, there's a subgenre of "bipartisan legislation" which is "mostly one party's bill but they picked off a few moderates from the other party." That's the model of legislating the filibuster dooms. Joe Manchin's own attempt at legislating this way, the Manchin-Toomey background check bill, failed. His bipartisan successes — and he does have them — have come in the form of behind-the-scenes deals acceptable to nearly all senators.

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. There have been several stories on NPR over the last few days, including one this evening. There were also a cluster of documentaries on TV last night and tonight. They go into how prosperous the black Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa was – it was called the Black Wall Street – and that over a thousand homes and businesses were destroyed and perhaps 300 people were killed. As part of this commemoration Alisa Chang of NPR replayed a 2018 episode of Radio Diaries in which Olivia Hooker, who was six at the time of the massacre, told her story. Hooker died six months after that episode aired. She was 103. During the riot Hooker hid under the table with a long tablecloth over it, trying to not make a sound.

As those marauders came into the house, they were trying to destroy anything that they could find. They took a huge axe and started whacking at my sister Aileen's beloved piano - whack, whack, whack. It was a good piano, and they thought that was something we shouldn't have. ... To me, I guess the most shocking thing was seeing people to whom you had never done anything to irritate who just took it upon themselves to destroy your property because they didn't want you to have those things, and they were teaching you a lesson. Those were all new ideas to me.

This is part of my understanding of supremacy and the social hierarchy. An important way for me to ensure I’m above you in the hierarchy is to make your life worse. In this example the whites made the blacks look worse my destroying the piano they decided blacks shouldn't have. Yes, they also destroyed houses, businesses, wealth, and lives. We’re better than you because we can control you, take away your wealth, and kill you. Michel Martin of NPR talked to Jack Levin of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University about what motivates people to commit hate crimes. Levin wrote several books, including Why We Hate and The Violence of Hate. Before the 9/11 attacks Levin said most hate crimes were characterized as thrill-oriented. A teen or young adult looked for and found someone to bash. They got bragging rights and felt special and powerful for a few moments. After 9/11 there were a lot more defensive or retaliatory hate crimes. And they’re on the rise, especially after the first black president. Levin said:

Those who commit defensive hate crimes tend to be much older than their counterparts who commit thrill hate crimes. They're not looking for the excitement. Those who commit the defensive hate crimes feel threatened. They feel that they have to protect the advantages that they have in life. And they believe strongly that certain vulnerable groups in society, those who aren't in the mainstream, are there to take those advantages from them. ... Most people who commit hate crimes do not feel like villains. They instead believe that they've been victimized by the groups that they attack. They feel that other people probably agree with them but don't have the guts to carry out the violent acts that they carry out.

In response to some horrible statements by Marjorie Taylor Greene, Iyad el-Baghdadi tweeted a thread about radicalization. He developed these ideas by reverse engineering his own radicalization 20 years ago and watching another generation get radicalized. Excerpts:

What makes someone radicalized? Imprecisely ultra-summarized: 1. Otherization: “I am from one group, they are from another. We are different and separate.” 2. Collectivization: “They are all the same.” 3. Oppression narrative: “They are oppressing us.” 4. Collective guilt: “They are all complicit in oppressing us.” 5. Supremacist narrative: “We are better than them.” 6. Self-defense: “We have to retaliate for their aggression and defend ourselves.” 7. The idea of violence: “Violence is the only way.” Note the centrality of persecution narratives in the roadmap above. Radicalization is basically about creating a community of shared grievance. In this case, no real grievance is to be found, so they basically try to invent one where one doesn't exist. Masks = gas chambers. Short story - to justify extreme self defense (and abandonment of all moral concerns) you need a reality in which you are under risk of imminent extermination. Now, is MTG's white base really persecuted? Reminder that most of the people who stormed the capitol on Jan 6th weren't working class at all, they were middle or upper middle class white people whose main concern is loss of privilege. To the privileged, equality feels like a step down. Understand this and you understand a lot of populist politics today. Now why are these people so ridiculous? It's not that they're unintelligent, it's that their intelligence dedicated towards serving another purpose. In the absence of real, actual oppression, they have to pull a persecution narrative out of their asses. White supremacy, Israeli apartheid, and Arab dictatorship are parts of the same structure. A three-headed monster, an unholy trinity, a blind and genocidal system of oppression willing to burn the world for seven generations before letting go of their supremacism.

I’ve been defining privilege as something I’m allowed to do that I won’t let you do. Because I can do this and you can’t I’m above you in the social hierarchy. My position in the hierarchy is highly important to me. For Memorial Day, Veterans for Peace tweeted out “F--- War.” There is a link to a statement that says in part:

We are tired of parades, memorials and pageantry. Take back your “thank you for your service” and 50% off sales. We want people to live without threats of U.S. bullets and bombs. We are filled with rage as we continue to watch the empty political platitudes from the two largest political parties praising soldiers and veterans as they continue to send them off to wars that line the pockets of the rich. We are frustrated that mainstream media and popular culture glorifies U.S. militarism. We are exhausted from nightmares of our participation and the images of ongoing trauma from a system of violence we once propped up. We live with the wounds of our moral injuries, scabs that we can’t let heal for fear we’d recreate the injury. On Memorial Day we don’t want to remember and we are afraid we will forget.

Stop pretending the filibuster incentivizes bipartisanship

I looked at Michigan’s COVID data today. In the last week the number of cases per day peaked at 837, though this number will likely be revised. In the week before the peak was 1427. This is a great improvement of the April peak above 8000 and cases per day are dropping quickly. The week before last the deaths per day peaked at 43, down from 83 in mid April. I’m still wary of going into a restaurant and sitting down for a meal. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Daily Kos, has a few interesting quotes. Susan Glasser of the New Yorker wrote:

“Turns out, things are much worse than we expected,” Daniel Ziblatt, one of the “How Democracies Die” authors, told me this week. He said he had never envisioned a scenario like the one that has played itself out among Republicans on Capitol Hill during the past few months. How could he have? It’s hard to imagine anyone in America, even when “How Democracies Die” was published, a year into Trump’s term, seriously contemplating an American President who would unleash an insurrection in order to steal an election that he clearly lost—and then still commanding the support of his party after doing so.

Stephen Richer of the National Review:

Even though an IRS audit might annoy you and cause you some stress, you’d eventually realize that you have nothing to fear as long as the audit is done fairly and properly. But you’d likely feel differently if the IRS outsourced the audit to someone who: * Had no applicable professional credentials * Had never previously run a tax audit * Believed that Hugo Chavez had nefariously controlled your tax-auditing software * Had publicly stated prior to examining your taxes that you’d certainly committed tax fraud That is what is happening to elections in Maricopa County, Ariz. — the home of almost two-thirds of Arizona’s voting population.

Steven White tweeted:

If 35 Senators from a single party are able to block a bill supported by a bipartisan group of 54 Senators, at the very least perhaps we can stop pretending that the filibuster incentivizes bipartisanship and cooperation. It's actually genuinely remarkable that 6 Republican Senators joined Democrats on a major bill. But instead of encouraging that to happen more often, the filibuster just prevents this kind of bipartisanship from even being a possibility.

On to other sources. Adam Jentleson, author of a book on the filibuster, tweeted:

One should expect a leader to secure a small number of votes from within their own party for broadly popular legislation backed by a POTUS of their own party and passed by a House controlled by their party. ... Good leaders get the votes - the whole point of being leader is that they have insight we do not possess (or are supposed to). It’s wrong to let them off the hook for doing their jobs. Pelosi got the votes in her caucus.

Evan Weber tweeted:

“Daddy, why are there no beaches? Did it always used to get this hot?” “Well, son. You see there was this thing called the filibuster. If we rid of it we could’ve passed a lot of laws to turn things around. But a man named Joe & a woman named Krysten told a turtle named Mitch…”

Michael Li, a redistricting and voting counsel for the Brennan Center, tweeted a quote from The Atlantic:

The senior White House official told me Biden aides believe that the best way to overcome Republicans’ undermining of upcoming elections is to maintain Democratic control of the House and Senate. And the best way to achieve that is for Biden to pass the agenda he ran on, which includes working to mitigate political conflict and compromising with Republicans where possible. “We have to go win elections in 2022, so we keep control of the House and Senate, which is the single most critical thing to protecting us for 2024,” the official said.

Li responded:

If this accurately reflects the White House view that Democrats can keep the House in 2022 and 2024 despite new voter suppression laws, the White House is seriously discounting the effect of gerrymandering in the upcoming round of redistricting.

Leah McElrath responded to an article from the Washington Post:

Biden’s DOJ just asked a federal judge to dismiss lawsuit against Trump and Barr for the violent clearing of protesters in Lafayette Square by police and the US military. They’re arguing immunity. Which was Trump’s same argument.

That isn’t good. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary.

It's pretty crazy that most students in America are only taught about a handful of important Black Americans. Imagine if it were the other way around: "Welcome to White History 101. We start off with Thomas Jefferson, where it all began. And then, well, nothing really happened until Tom Hanks.” Class dismissed. —Trevor Noah

Stop negotiating with terrorists

One aspect of spring in Michigan is how long will it be between when the furnace is turned off and the air conditioner is turned on. There have been times I’ve used the furnace one day and the AC the next. I was still using the furnace into May, then we had a couple weeks of warm weather – sometimes 85F warm. I managed to not need the AC during this time (and I’m aware others with different circumstances did turn on the AC). So I was thinking there were a good two weeks when I didn’t need either. Then the temp got down to 45F last night and stayed there all day. So the furnace is on. I don’t think we’ll get above 75F for a few days, so there still could be a couple days or more between furnace and AC. I’ve had my current car for 15 years – I bought it before I started this blog. I’m above 193,000 miles and I plan to get a new car once I’m past 200,000. In February 2020, back when I was driving a thousand miles a month I figured I would be getting a new car around November of that year. Then I stopped driving a thousand miles a month. In the last year I realized my next car should be electric. I was going to check out possible models at the Detroit auto show, but that was canceled in 2020 and 2021. I’m now aiming to see what’s available (or will be soon) at an outdoor auto event in September. My electric company has been sending me occasional emails about electric cars. One provided a link to what is available. What I’m looking for – a reasonably priced sedan – isn’t being made yet. On another website somewhere I saw the tax credit for electric cars lasts only through 2021. So this is good news: Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported that the Clean Energy for America Act, has passed the Senate Finance Committee on a party line vote. The current tax advantages for fossil fuels were tacked on to other bills over the years. They don’t form any coherent policy other than favoring the oil and coal companies. So this bill would scrap all those advantages and create advantages for renewables. And the bill would extend and increase the tax credits for electric cars. Along with the electric car, perhaps I should also consider solar panels for the roof and an electric furnace. Alas, I didn’t think of the possibility or urgency of an electric furnace when I got the current one just 18 months ago. The Senate held a procedural vote on the commission to investigate the Capitol Attack. To continue on it needed ten GOP votes. Amazingly, it got six, so failed. I said that’s amazing because Moscow Mitch is so opposed to it I figured there would be only two GOP votes at the most. Greg Sargent tweeted:

Rs can't be shamed into caring about what history will say, and the idea that they're "cowards" implies they have principles they'd prefer to follow but are not solely because they fear the consequences of that. THEY OPPOSE THE COMMISSION BECAUSE THEY ARE IMPLICATED IN THE CRIME.

Garrett Graff tweeted:

Between the Senate GOP’s blockage of the 1/6 Commission—requested by the Capitol Police—and the Texas GOP’s embrace of a no-restrictions open-carry gun bill, opposed broadly by law enforcement, it’s clear that the “Blue Lives Matter” and “Back the Blue” crowd actually … don’t.

Sarah Kendzior commented on an old quote of herself that the Mueller probe from a few years ago would simply run out the clock.

This is the same strategy they're using for 1/6: run out the clock, target low-level operators instead of criminal elites, sell Americans savior syndrome fairy tales while refusing to investigate serious attack. Only it's not just GOP doing it; it's GOP and complicit Dems. All of this is a test of power and impunity. It's not just a matter of the GOP having to pledge allegiance to the Big Lie or face ostracization, but of Dems blocking meaningful investigation and witnesses and generally capitulating to the Big Liars and their donor network.

And in a second thread:

A failed coup is a dress rehearsal. A political party that stages a coup and blocks investigation ultimately wants that coup to succeed. A political party that did not stage a coup but does not assertively, quickly investigate and prosecute it *also* wants that coup to succeed. No officials who value democracy or the survival of this country would approach an attack on the Capitol with anything but the utmost urgency — unless their long-term goals match that of those who back the attempted coup. So they, too, are running out the clock.

Jed Shugerman of Fordham Law School tweeted:

I’d much rather have a special counsel/independent prosecutor investigating the Jan 6 insurrection than a “bipartisan” commission, which would be partisan, dysfunctional & ineffectual anyway. The Senate GOP blocking a commission makes a stronger case for a special counsel.

Sugarman also quoted Rick Wilson:

As someone noted, "If a coup attempt goes unpunished, it's a training exercise."

In response to the news of the vote Garry Kasparov tweeted:

The sooner people admit that the GOP is an anti-democracy party that exists only for power, the sooner necessary actions can be taken. Dragging out that admission has already lost valuable time. The Republicans aren’t the ones denying reality. They admit they cannot win elections fairly. They admit the Jan 6 insurrection reflects their members and their base. They are acting accordingly to seize and hold power. Denying that is the delusion. A disbelieving opposition is the autocrats’ greatest ally in the early stages. Biden and the Democrats risk refusing to acknowledge reality until they no longer have the power do do much about it.

Steve Simberman tweeted a reinforcement of that idea:

Dems, stop negotiating with terrorists. This was terror that struck at the very heart of our democracy. These thugs committed murder to overturn a national election. Focus on putting their leaders in prison and preventing this horror from ever happening again.

Sen. Chris Murphy tweeted:

A Democrat wins a major race, for Governor or Senate, in 2022, in a state controlled by “if a Democrat wins it must be fraud” Republicans, and the state certifies that the Republican won, because, you know, fraud. We all understand there’s a good chance this happens, right?

Model Daughters replied:

This is why Trump *was* worth impeaching in early 2019. This is how he was not "practically self impeaching" This is how he *was* above the law the whole time. This is why we allow witnesses at impeachment trials. This is why we don't keep 137 seditionists in Congress. This is why we *do* use inherent contempt to compel testimony and evidence in Congress. This is why the purse strings should have been leveraged instead of funding a fascist regime. This is why we don't pull punches for fascist "friends". This is why we use the language - "coup", "fascism", "eugenics" ... This is why we don't lie and say "America is back" to a people steeping in MSM pushed RW propaganda. This is why we leverage the media to counter those abusing its reach. This is why we place our highest honor in serving the Constitution and the people over protecting our colleagues. This is why truth matters and has from the start.

Walter Shaub tweeted:

You get that not enough is being done to protect democracy, right? The relative calm you see? That's the eye of the hurricane.

Leah McElrath tweeted about one of the Democrat leaders who didn’t show up for this vote:

I’m sick and tired of feeling like we’re fighting harder for democracy’s survival than leaders we elected. People to whom we give the power of elected office must be held accountable, ESPECIALLY when they are in our own party. It’s OUR responsibility to hold them accountable.

Max Burns referred to Democrat activists as he tweeted:

I don't know a diplomatic way to say that Democrats are really publicly blowing their chance at leading in Washington. ... At this point I share their fear that the sense of urgency has drained from the Senate, and that is creating a similar loss of momentum in the House. You get that lack of urgency from the White House, too, in the ways Biden has chosen *not* to elevate key issues. ... Democrats shouldn't expect any of those activists or voters to give them a second chance in 2022 if we fail to deliver. And why should they? Biden and Democrats made hard, explicit promises to people in desperate need of help. Abandon them at your own peril.

This is just going to play out in perpetuity

Bill in Portland, Maine, who writes a Cheers and Jeers column for Daily Kos, has been keeping score of what Democrats have accomplished with their majority since coming into power in the House, Senate, and White House.

Pandemic relief bill? Yep. Election reform/Voter rights reform? Nope. Immigration reform? Nope. Equality Act? Nope. Infrastructure bill? Nope. January 6 insurrection commission? Nope. D.C. statehood? Nope. Police reform? Nope. Gun violence reform? Nope. Preventing GOP terrorists like Marjorie Taylor-Greene from getting to the House floor with guns Nope. Climate change? Nope.

It seems depressing that so little has been done and our democracy needs so much help and needs it quickly. But this Congress was seated less than five months ago and the president inaugurated just over four months ago. However, with a to-do list like that, what Sen. Joe Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema are doing is news worthy. Joan McCarter of Kos reported:

Here's their latest, a joint statement imploring Republicans to play nice on the Jan. 6 commission. Literally. "We implore our Senate Republican colleagues to work with us to find a path forward on a commission to examine the events of January 6th." Or what? They’ll finally decide to do the right thing to save the nation by voting with Democrats to end the filibuster?

McCarter quoted a tweet from Andrew Solender:

Joe Manchin says he would NOT be willing to nuke the filibuster even if Republicans use it to block the Jan. 6 commission. “I can’t take the fallout,” he told us, laughing loudly.

McCarter added:

He won't nuke the filibuster no matter what—even for the Jan. 6 commission bill—because of the fallout? The only fallout would be from Republican senators. The rest of the nation would consider him a hero if he finally stood up for our democracy. Instead he's worried that the Republicans won't let him sit at their lunch table anymore?

Laura Clawson of Kos wrote in another post:

McConnell’s opposition to an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol is “is extremely frustrating and disturbing. I know he’s an institutionalist. I would like to think he loves this institution,” Manchin said Tuesday. “There’s a time when you rise above. And I’m hoping this would be the time he would do that. What I’m hearing is, he hasn’t.” No, Joe, he hasn’t. Because he’s not an institutionalist if the institution in question is the U.S. Senate.

Clawson wrote that an institutionalist would not have blocked Merrick Garland from the Supreme Court, then rush Amy Coney Barrett onto it. An institutionalist would back an investigation into the Capitol attack. Moscow Mitch is not an institutionalist. Add to that what Mitch is saying about the infrastructure bill and he is playing Manchin for a chump. And chumphood will be his legacy. Ian Millhiser tweeted:

Republicans: "Here is our latest counteroffer to your infrastructure proposal." Biden: "This is just a dirty cocktail napkin with the words 'repeal Obamacare' scrawled on it in crayon." Manchin: "The important thing is that we let this bipartisan negotiation continue."

Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Zach Montellaro of Politico. The title of Montellaro’s article is “They tried to overturn the 2020 election. Now they want to run the next one.” It includes this:

Republicans who sought to undercut or overturn President Joe Biden’s election win are launching campaigns to become their states’ top election officials next year, alarming local officeholders and opponents who are warning about pro-Trump, “ends justify the means” candidates taking big roles in running the vote.

In another roundup Dworkin quoted the New York Times, which discussed another GOP voting proposal of strict punishment for election workers and officials who make errors or violate the rules.

Ms. Phillips is one of millions of citizens who act as foot soldiers of the American democratic system, working long hours for low pay to administer the country’s elections. Yet this often thankless task has quickly become a key target of Republicans who are propagating former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. In their hunt for nonexistent fraud, they have turned on those who work the polls as somehow suspect.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported:

Arizona's Senate Republicans had a great idea: Let's fund a sham election audit that costs state taxpayers millions, compromises ballots and voting equipment, and produces zero credible results that we can then feed to delusional Trump voters desperate to believe they're not losers. Sure, it will be needlessly expensive and laughable to everyone living in the real world, and death threats will surely fly, but who cares—Trumpers will gobble it up like ravenous vultures feasting on a rotten carcass.

The idea of a fraudit (Eleveld’s term) is spreading. A county in northern Michigan tried it (I think the idea was halted by a judge before starting). Alarmingly Fulton County, Georgia (where Atlanta) is trying to start one.

“In a healthy democracy, you have an auditing process, you have legal recourse, and when that period is over, all the candidates who have won take over and you move on,” said Tammy Patrick, an adviser at The Democracy Fund who also used to run post-election audits in Maricopa County. “They are not going to be satisfied,” Patrick told the AP. “This is just going to play out in perpetuity.”

Clawson reported that Republicans in Arizona and elsewhere are so intent on their fraudits that they are willing to arrest anyone who gets in the way – including other Republicans. Clawson concluded:

These kinds of local Republican officials are coming under attack by their fellow Republicans because they stand by the integrity of the elections they conducted and reject conspiracy theories. The House Republican vote to kick Rep. Liz Cheney out of leadership for her insistence that the election was not stolen and the insurrection was wrong has gotten a lot of attention, rightly. But the civil war in the Republican Party goes down to the local level, too, pitting Trump loyalists against Republicans who have any values beyond Trump.

Leah McElrath tweeted:

I make this observation in the hope it will help others—especially people socialized as girls and women—to become more comfortable with people being angry with them. Other people’s anger does not necessarily mean you have done anything wrong. Sometimes it means the opposite.

We do know how to respond to a crisis

I decided I should take the time now to listen to that Greta Thunberg podcast from 11 months ago I mentioned yesterday. So here are my notes as I listened. It is 75 minutes and audio only. She spoke before the United Nations during General Assembly week, which the Secretary General had designated would be all about the climate. She made a big deal of getting from Stockholm to New York by an ecologically friendly ship rather than a highly polluting airplane. She saw her image everywhere. If one cared about that attention one could develop a personality far from sane. She was annoyed with the queue of people who came to her to congratulate her, then take a selfie with her to post on social media with the hashtag #Savetheplanet. Which does nothing to save the planet. A lot of world leaders were there. But speakers were only those who have shown they have solutions. She gave her “How Dare You” speech that became famous. I wrote about it in September 2019. The first stop on the trip was Washington. The big question was who is the adult in the room. She was appalled in the House food court, where junk food is sold and eaten. She asked politicians to act while there is still time. They responded with amazement that she is an activist while so young. They tell her she too can be a politician and make a difference in the world when she grows up. She replied that by the time she finishes her schooling it will be too late. She talked data. They changed the subject. Greta came to the meeting in Pelosi’s office with perhaps 20 other youth, many from indigenous peoples in North and South America. It seemed like two different worlds separated by centuries of racism, oppression, and genocide. A Lakota youth objected to the portrait of Abraham Lincoln, who was responsible for the deaths of many Lakota people. How can there be climate justice when racial injustices around the world are not acknowledged? She spoke to Congress, but that was also awkward. They wanted to hear from her, not the scientists she wanted them to listen to. So she printed a copy of the IPCC report and submitted that as her testimony. Her message is listen to the science and scientists. Which scientists? There are always those who say not enough evidence. But not in the IPCC report, that consensus is overwhelming. In the 2018 IPCC report, the foundation of the Paris climate agreement, if we are to avoid tipping point processes we must keep the global temperature rise below 1.5C. It’s already at 1.2C. A release of 300 gigatons of carbon dioxide will put us above a rise of 1.5C. We currently emit 40 gigatons a year. That means we have only seven years – and that was three years ago. The report included the assumption that there will be massive processes to remove CO2 from the atmosphere – which don’t exist yet. We need to make changes unprecedented in human history. One problem in doing so is there is no absolute deadline date and no estimate of the human cost. There are results of lots of scary models, but none of them take in the whole picture. Even so, the IPCC report is the only reliable roadmap available. Relying on children to get the word out is an epic failure. After New York she and her father traveled around America and Canada for five weeks in a borrowed electric car. They saw a lot – New England, Vancouver, Alabama, Los Angeles. They saw 37 states. And lots of shopping malls. Sometimes there were media crews with them. Every Friday, wherever she was, she held a climate strike. The largest was Montreal – a half million people. She is outraged by the economic inequality and the racism. She saw billboards with anti science campaigns. She saw quite a few oil refineries, but not may wind turbines and solar panels, no serious transition to sustainable energy. America seems to be quite a ways behind Europe. We don’t even have public health care. They went to the Alberta Tar Sands, where the owners consider her a threat. She asked for police protection. She visited Jasper National Park and saw trees dying. The ranger said about 50% of trees were affected. The problem is a pine beetle. Up to a couple decades ago the beetle wasn’t a problem because the winter cold killed most of them off. But now the winters don’t get cold enough and too many of the beetles survive. This is an example of a tipping point. They visited the Athabasca Glacier. With a glacier specialist they walk up to the glacier. Along the way there are signs, each with a year. That was how far the glacier extended that year. At the 1982 sign there is no visible glacier. It has retreated about a mile in the last 120 years and retreats about 16 feet a year. The glacier ice has soot in it from the wildfires burning trees killed by the beetles. Soot absorbs light, causing the glacier to melt even faster. This glacier will be gone completely within this century. Communities depend on glaciers for water and have adjusted their use according to the increased melt flow. When the glaciers are gone the water stops. Two billion people in Asia depend on the water from the Himalaya glaciers. The warming calculated from CO2 in the air doesn’t include the warming caused by air pollution. They visited the town of Paradise, California, which had been destroyed by a wildfire in 2018. The wildfire season is now nearly continuous. The climate crisis is affecting people now, in spite of what some people are claiming. Others say we need to act for the sake of our children. But we need to act for us, now. People are dying today. The people hit hardest will be those already vulnerable – the poor, especially in developing countries, and women and children. There will be one billion climate refugees. What will it take for some people to pay attention? In Sweden the country releases 11 tons of CO2 per person a year. That is compared to 1.7 tons in India or 0.3 tons in Kenya. Too many in the developed world live an unsustainable life and believe that is our right. The crisis won’t be fair. Those harmed the most will have caused the least damage. An interviewer in Stockholm had asked her how to “solve” the climate crisis. First, asking her, a teenager, for the solution is absurd. Second, one doesn’t “solve” a climate crisis any more than one “solves” a war. What we do in a crisis is come together, gather the experts, put other things aside, and adapt to the new reality as quickly and strongly as possible. One finds solutions along the way. People aren’t treating the climate as a crisis because they aren’t aware. Even many people who could do something get important facts wrong and lack basic knowledge. So who isn’t doing the messaging? Thunberg said she isn’t doing this for fame or media clicks. She’s doing it because no one else is. What should we do to avoid a climate disaster? A better question: What should we stop doing to avoid a disaster? We can’t reach the Paris Agreement goals by reducing carbon emissions. We must stop emissions, then soon go into negative emissions. Ways to reduce emissions include: (1) Replace carbon energy with renewables. (2) Capture CO2 out of the air with technology – but that needs to start happening now and technology isn’t ready. (3) Use nature’s way to pull CO2 out of the air. Better than planting trees is to leave the jungles and forests alone – we lose a football field of forest every second and we can’t plant trees that fast. (4) Stop doing harmful things. If we can’t buy, build, or invest our way to a solution we have a mental block. Or we could lie about the problem and blame someone else. That includes such things as stop counting sources of emissions. Every rich country does this. Moving jobs overseas also moves emissions overseas. People in power can say what they want and aren’t challenged. There’s a lot of hype of green investments. But what does “green” and similar terms mean? They’ve been watered down enough to lose meaning. No one is held accountable. Since the truth is unpopular and unprofitable it doesn’t have a chance. So many emperors are naked it’s one big nudist party. The coronavirus pandemic went through a tipping point – things that were unthinkable were suddenly the way they needed to be done. She canceled her climate strikes. The world adapted to the crisis at record speed. International meetings. Economic bailouts. Lockdowns to change behavior. News media set other issues aside. Politicians put differences aside and cooperate for the greater good (yeah, I know the GOP didn’t). Leaders say we must listen to the scientists. Everyone said we can’t put a price on human life. So, yeah, we do know how to respond to a crisis. Yet, every year 7 million people die from air pollution. And here we did put a price on human life. The scientists also say if we don’t protect the environment more and deadlier viruses are coming. Long term sustainability doesn’t fit within today’s political and economic systems. As we emerge from the pandemic there is more talk of a green recovery plan. But this isn’t close to what is required and the targets won’t be ambitious enough. It seems most world leaders have given up without really trying. Even if they wanted to we’re stuck in existing contracts – such as for fossil fuels. We’ll have to tear up contracts on a massive scale. But that’s not economically or legally possible. What we need doesn’t fit within today’s political and economic systems. News editors and politicians may choose to look away. But today’s youth, who will live with this, can’t. Countries need to reduce their emissions by 12-15% a year, starting now. But there really isn’t a way to do that. We can’t solve the crisis without treating it like a crisis. There is hope. It comes of from the people. We can drive though, though the level of knowledge is too low. Society has reached a tipping point in equality, justice, and sustainability. We – Thunberg and you and me – now need to do the seeming impossible. No one will do it for us.

A primarily conservative disease

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos discussed how the efforts to get a bipartisan infrastructure deal are going. Short answer: not well (and we’re not surprised). As part of that discussion McCarter wrote:

Capitol Hill reporter, NBC's Leigh Ann Caldwell, perhaps hit on the larger truth here in a bit on MSNBC Monday morning, in which she characterized the situation as "extremely stalled." Her Democratic and Republican sources, Caldwell said, are telling her that the Biden White House is "engaging in these negotiations on infrastructure for an audience of one, and that is Sen. Joe Manchin," who has said "over and over again he doesn't want to go down the partisan path on infrastructure unless things don't work out with Republicans." That very well may be true.

A hint for Joe Manchin: things aren’t going to work out with Republicans. McCarter quoted a tweet from Meet the Press:

Members of the Republican Party ... are telling their members when they're home in their district to talk about inflation and blame the president for overabundant spending.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos reportd the House GOP is starting to talk about the talking points they will use in the 2022 campaign. After a year of having no platform other than sucking up to the nasty guy and obstructing Biden and Democrats, they will run on ... cutting the social safety net. Again. Yeah, straight out of former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s playbook. Eleveld wrote:

The party that blew an $8 trillion hole in the federal debt is looking around for savings and realized the easiest thing to do was to put voters on the hook for their costly mismanagement. "We make the mistakes, you just pay for them!"—another 2022 GOP gem!

Hunter of Kos wrote that Democratic areas are way ahead of Republican areas in getting the COVID vaccine.

We can begin to see how the next year of the pandemic will unfold. As access to the vaccine becomes more widespread, non-Republicans will become increasingly immune. Diehard Republicans, however, will remain willingly at risk. While a good chunk of Republicans will get vaccinated, the most ideology-obsessed will not. So they'll die. The numbers will likely never reach those of previous pandemic spikes, because ideological fascists do not make up 100% of any community—a good chunk of their neighbors will provide the necessary buffer that slows pandemic spread, with the virus transmitting mostly among fellow cult members—but we may well reach the bizarre pandemic point where COVID-19 is, in this country, a primarily conservative disease.

As appealing as letting all the conservatives die off is, we’re not monsters. There is also the problem that some people can’t be vaccinated – they’re allergic to the components, are immunocompromised, or living in areas that are not good (or are hostile) at getting shots into arms. Juliette Kayyem, an analyst for CNN, tweeted a thread. It’s in response to reckless Marjorie Taylor Greene’s latest:

Greene is disturbed. She is also promoting a familiar violent narrative meant to incite. Greene is equating those who support masking with Nazis. That's obvious. But it is more than horrifying. It is code. If we are Nazis, then violence towards us is justified. Wink and nod. It's a technique Trump mastered; promote violence without saying so, a sophisticated use of stochastic (inciting for random acts of violence) terrorism. "Liberate Michigan!" and they tried to kidnap the Gov. He would deny it. Just a joke, his people would say.

Kayyem added: Voter suppression is the threat of state approved criminal punishment for wanting to vote. That comes with violence. Tucker Carlson of Fox News has talked about “replacement theory.” That is the foundation of violent white supremacy – it is a zero sum game: me or you. Kayyem has gotten threats. She asks us to call out these comments and also explain why the comments are violent. Igor Volsky of Guns Down America tweeted a thread. The threat of and actual violence against politicians is up. Those who believe white people are being discriminated against by black people have much higher support of political violence and are more likely to own guns. These people are targeting Democrats. The weapons of choice are guns and explosives. Yes, Republicans are opposed to increased funding for lawmaker security. They also refuse to make it harder to prohibit guns sales. My conclusion: Republicans want a well armed population ready and eager to commit deadly violence against perceived enemies. Farah Baker, who lives in Gaza, tweeted some photos of community efforts to clean up the rubble from the recent Israeli attack. Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish woman who sparked climate activism, is still working at it. Here’s a bit of the latest. And it shows she has a great sense of humor. Such as this tweet:

Being fat-shamed by Chinese state owned media is a pretty weird experience even by my standards. But it’s definitely going on my resume.

Thunberg responded to an article that included our Climate Envoy John Kerry saying...

"50% of the carbon reductions needed to get to net zero will come from technologies that have not yet been invented" Great news! I spoke to Harry Potter and he said he will team up with Gandalf, Sherlock Holmes & The Avengers and get started right away!

My notes from her five minute video posted a few days ago: Our relationship with nature is broken. The climate crisis, ecological crisis, and health crisis are all linked. We can change that relationship. If we don’t “we are f*cked.” 75% of new diseases come from other animals. Because of our farming and the way we treat nature we increase the chance of diseases spreading from animals to us. 83% of agricultural land feeds livestock. This is the size of North and South American combined. Yet livestock provides only 18% of our calories. If we continue we’ll run out of land and food. We’ll also destroy the habitat of most wild plants and animals, driving many to extinction. If we lose them, we’re lost too. We’ve been waging a senseless and suicidal war on nature. Farming is about ¼ of greenhouse gas emissions. If we shift to a plant based diet we would need 76% less land for farming and nature could recover. Animals show signs of what we call empathy, yet 70% of farm animals live in factories, in America, it’s 99%. We can change how we treat nature. All of us can do something. What will we do? I’ve got another Thunberg video in my browser tabs that’s been there 11 months (yes, really). I found it again (deleting a lot of other old tabs along the way, but there are still lots more) and see why I have been avoiding it – it’s 75 minutes long! I don’t have enough time this evening to get into it. So it may sit there a while yet.

History should make you feel uncomfortable

My Sunday movie was My Beautiful Laundrette. I heard about it when it came out in 1985, but had not seen it. The reviews of the time said it was a touching gay love story, something revolutionary for the time. This is the story of Omar and his extended Pakistani family living in London. The men in the family get Omar involved in the various family businesses, some of them illegal, and finally he settles on managing a dingy laundrette (what we would call a laundromat). Omar calls on childhood friend Johnny to help him run and reform the place. Yeah, the white guy worked for the guy of color. Johnny is a former skinhead and his racist friends lurk in the background. Omar and Johnny of course fall in love. But the story is more about Omar and his family and as people of color trying to fit in to English society than the gay relationship. Omar’s uncle Nassar referred to his home country of Pakistan when he said, “I can’t go back. Religion is sodomizing the country. It’s getting in the way of making money.” Interesting description in a movie with a gay relationship. Omar and his father live in an apartment near where two commuter rail lines cross. Many scenes include trains passing by. That got me wondering whether they timed the scenes to the train schedule or they had their own trains they could run by as needed. Or the trains were added later through special effects. I was a bit surprised that Johnny was played by Daniel Day-Lewis. IMDB, in the trivia for this movie, said that this and another Day-Lewis movie premiered in New York on the same day, demonstrating the range he has as an actor. I had heard that until the last couple decades playing gay tended to damage an actor’s career. Why would Day-Lewis chance it? The big example of the damage was the movie Making Love, from 1982, just thee years before. I haven’t seen it. That, I had heard, had damaged the careers of its male stars Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean. But looking at their filmography on IMDB doesn’t show a gap in their work. Patrick Wyman, who writes about history, tweeted:

Lot of folks out there confuse "history" with "stories from the past that make me feel good about who I am in the present." Most of the time, when somebody's whining about "rewriting history," what they mean is "this knowledge about a real thing that happened makes me feel bad." History should make you feel uncomfortable. Lots of bad things have happened. The past doesn't exist to validate your sense of who you are in the present. People did evil things, heroic things, mundane things, bizarre things, and it's not about you. If your sense of self is contingent on a belief in the unimpeachable righteousness of your chosen ancestors, real or mythical, then I'd say that's a pretty fragile sense of self.

Lauren Floyd of Daily Kos wrote about what the police tell the press and public and many time it isn’t the truth. For example, after George Floyd was murdered...

But an initial press release police officials sent to media representatives about the murder didn’t even mention Chauvin’s involvement. “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction” was the title of the release. An investigation of California law enforcement agencies published by The Guardian newspaper on Wednesday found that this kind of marketing spin on police killings is hardly unique.

Floyd listed several other cases of what the police told the press were misleading or actually lying. Christopher Reeves of Kos wrote about his autistic son graduating from high school. Along the way he talked about the way we view those who are disabled – and we’re all disabled sometime in life, whether it is permanent or temporary.

Watching my son complete a task many would think was impossible for him left me in tears of joy. Listening to the current administration talk about ways to improve the lives of those with disabilities, I heard the words that screamed, “pro-life.” Pro-life, as in actually putting value in those with disabilities. Not with fake bills demanding that they be carried to term, but with actual support after they’re born, when they need the love and care of others.

Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote about the bill to form a bipartisan commission to investigate the Capitol attack. The bill has passed the House and is now before the Senate where it will die unless the filibuster is eliminated. Dartagnan wrote, quoting Max Boot of The Washington Post:

Put simply, you cannot put a thoroughly corrupt political party in charge of investigating its own corruption. The nature of the Jan. 6 attacks itself is inextricably tied to the lie of election fraud, a lie that is at this very moment being perpetuated and furthered by the GOP, at both the national and state level. Since Republicans are wedded to this lie, they cannot be expected to willingly participate in any good faith effort to uncover its origins, its blatant falsity, or its relationship to the Jan. 6 insurrection. As Boot points out, “the Republican leaders have become Trump’s collaborators in a coverup.” To expect them to willingly cooperate, while their ties and affinities to violent white supremacists and other assorted domestic terrorists are revealed and dissected for public consumption is, putting it mildly, preposterous. So there can never be any bipartisan accounting of Jan. 6, by definition.

You need new voting machines

I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data today. The peak of new cases per day in the last week was only 1350 and only 2000 in the week before. We’re now at the level of mid February and a bit below the plateau of July to September of last year. We’re also at a quarter of the peak in early April. That’s all good news. Beyond that, the data looks a bit strange. I displayed a chart of the previous week’s data to make sure. I also looked at the chart from mid February. My program, one I wrote to use the Michigan data, displays new cases per day and deaths per day since March 1, 2020. I now show 15 months of data. Here’s some of the strangeness: Within the last week the data for the early November peak has been reduced from over 9500 to over 8000, about equal of the April peak. The new cases per day during the July – September plateau has been adjusted up by about 50 in the last week and over 600 since February. The variations within each week still have the same general shape, though trend lines aren’t as flat now as they had been in February. In the February data there were a few spikes in cases per day in May 2020 that reached up to 1700. Now those spikes reach past 2500 and one even topping 3500. I don’t have an explanation for this. The most recent data and modeling update – a series of 40 slides full of charts and major points – is based on data now a week old. The state has said numbers might be revised as more data came in, so I understand changes from week to week, though this much revision is unusual. Because there is bill to create a commission to investigate the January 6 Capitol attack, Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reminds us of two things. First, this is still an ongoing crisis for the country. Second, the actions leading up to that day began well before November 4th, the day after the election, and began well before the nasty guy. The nasty guy was pushing voter fraud during the 2016 election, both in case he lost then and to get the idea out there so he could make the same claim this past year. And he pushed that idea a lot. It didn’t matter the claims were not true. They had the desired effect of questioning election integrity. When the claims when before courts, even though they lost, they gained enemies, which is fuel for a conspiracy. In addition, the GOP had been in the voter suppression game for several years before the nasty guy was on the scene. Both then and now the GOP had willing accomplices in the media, and not just Fox News. Even mainstream media repeated the lies. As for now ... Sumner wrote:

The Big Lie isn’t something Republicans are interested in fighting, because it’s their Big Lie as much as Trump’s. They’ve nurtured it. They’ve fed it time and attention. And they’ve staked their future on the ability to execute the strategy based on that lie. The purpose of voter suppression laws is keeping people from the polls, and convincing them that voting is unfair. Both. Win by breaking democracy on Election Day, or win by breaking democracy after Election Day. It’s still a win.

There is a way they can lose: a thorough investigation into what happened leading up to and on January 6th. About that Big Lie ... Laura Clawason of Kos reported Katie Hobbs, Arizona Secretary of State and a Democrat, has said the vote tabulating machines used in the Maricopa County “audit” have been out of custody of certified elections officials. Therefore, she said, she does not support their use in any upcoming election. Replacement cost is millions of dollars. Clawson concluded:

Republicans in the state Senate intended to do damage with their “audit,” even if they didn’t directly intend to cost Maricopa County millions of dollars in lost equipment. The damage to election integrity and public faith in our democracy is far, far more important—but the financial cost underlines how careless and irresponsible the “audit” backers were willing to be.

And about the fate of that commission in the Senate. Because Sen. Joe Manchin doesn’t want to get rid of the filibuster there need to be ten GOP votes for the commission. None have announced support. Sumner reported that Manchin said:

So disheartening. It makes you really concerned about our country. I’m still praying we’ve still got ten good solid patriots within that conference.

All he’s got is prayers? He isn’t talking to his colleagues to find those ten votes? Sumner added:

It’s not as if there is some form of commission that would satisfy them. In fact, here’s the big secret: If Democrats were to agree with Republicans that the commission should also investigate everything that happened over the summer related to Black Lives Matter and protests following the police murder of George Floyd, Republicans would still filibuster the commission. Because they know that any actual investigation of those summer events would show that most of the tales of violence were fabricated for a Fox News audience, and nothing that happened was an existential threat to democracy—like Jan. 6. There is nothing that can get Senate Republicans for vote for the commission, because there is nothing Republicans want except for there to be no commission.

Joan McCarter of Kos reported Biden is advocating for enough funding for the IRS to double its size. Over the last several years the IRS has been underfunded to the point it can’t go after the big, convoluted, and fraudulent tax returns. That means they can only go after the easy returns. Which means, according to Amara Enyia of The Movement for Black Lives, it’s another form of racism. Currently, the IRS can only audit returns of the low and middle income people. That mean a higher percentage of black people are audited. That’s on top of the racist tax laws that favor wealth and white people – things like homes and investments.

Protect us from the rest of you

Aldous Pennyfarthing on Daily Kos asked:

Is there a word for being really shocked and alarmed—and yet not at all surprised—by a new piece of information? Maybe something from German with, like, 80 letters, seven umlauts, and a couple Klingon-worthy expectorations?

What we’re shocked about, yet not surprised, is various GOP Congresscritters taking credit for the American Rescue Plan which passed with zero GOP votes. As they always do. Lying seems to be a traditional value. However, that means voters don’t recognize that the relief came from Democrats. It is up to Democrats make some noise about it. In an article posted just a few hours before the cease-fire in Israel, Mark Sumner of Kos discussed what is going on in Congress. On Wednesday, over 130 House Democrats issued a letter saying the US should use its pending arms sales to Israel to encourage a cease-fire. On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mark Pocan, and Rashida Tlaib introduced resolutions to block $735 million in arms sales that are ready to go. AOC noted American arms sales to Israel contributed to the death and suffering of millions of Palestinians. Sanders said “we cannot simply let another huge arms sale go through without even a congressional debate.” I’ve heard moves like this one are a big difference between this attack on Palestinians and the last one. Perry Bacon Jr. in a column for The Washington Post says there are four huge problems in America and he doesn’t see solutions to any of them. The first problem is the Republican Party. They no longer believe in democracy at the federal and state level. I’ve written a lot about this. The second problem is America is polarized into Team Blue and Team Red. Biden polls well above the nasty guy’s highest rating, but his approval won’t ever be high because so many Republicans will always disapprove of him. In addition, the party not in the White House tends to gain seats at midterm elections. The third problem is media companies avoid describing Republicans as anti democracy. Faced with a choice between neutrality and core values they are choosing neutrality. Also, businesses are backtracking on their pledge to not donate to insurrectionists. The fourth problem is moderate Democrats (such as Joe Manchin) and never Trumpers (such as Mitt Romney) don’t appreciate the direness of the situation or don’t care. Leah McElrath tweeted something that is very important, that I hadn’t thought of in quite these terms.

Some of you don’t understand the stakes, and it shows. Some of us are fighting for democracy because it’s all we have to protect us from the rest of you.

Georgia Logothetis, in her pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Dana Milbank of WaPo:

Pretty much everything the Trump-occupied Republican Party has been doing these days violates the basic tenets of democracy that American schoolchildren are taught. But the Trumpy right has come up with an elegant remedy to relieve the cognitive dissonance: They want to cancel civics education. If the voters don’t know how the government is supposed to function, they’ll be none the wiser when it malfunctions — which has been pretty much all the time.

Laura Clawson of Kos reported Republicans are complaining that Biden is not a good bad guy. He’s so nice and empathetic (plus boring and scandal free) it is hard to portray him as a bad guy, to demonize him. But, that’s OK, there are other people to demonize.

Bigger bogeymen, like Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, if you get the drift. Sen. Bernie Sanders also makes the list, because you can try to demonize an old white guy if he’s a shouty Jewish socialist. And this campaign cycle will probably see at least one antisemitic ad campaign featuring Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. To the extent they talk about him at all, Republicans will try to paint Biden as a puppet of the rest of the Democratic Party.

Marissa Higgins of Kos reported:

Organizers in Heritage of Pride, the nonprofit that plans New York City Pride events, are banning police and corrections officers from participating in Pride celebrations until at least 2025, as reported by the Associated Press. Why? Because having police participate in Pride events, like the parade, can be frightening and exclusionary for many groups who want to attend celebrations freely, like trans folks, undocumented folks, and sex workers. Especially so when we consider ongoing instances of police brutality against people of color in the United States.

Instead, they will use private security, community leaders, and volunteers. Organizers are well aware that the city won’t allow such a huge event to happen without a big police presence, but officers will stay one block away and respond only when necessary.

We are not back to normal

Hunter of Daily Kos discussed the media and began:

It's hard to make the case that the American political press knows how to cover American politics. Time and time again we see stories stuffed into the same structural boxes: Democrats are in disarray; parties differ when describing color of sky; today is the day Donald Golfcheat truly became president. A fascist demand to throw out election results and simply appoint Donald Trump the true winner was both correctly pinned as insurrection and, both before and after its failure, put into its own box so that none of the elected officials who pushed forward fantastical, false claims to justify such demands would require new press treatment going forward—even with the new knowledge that these partisans proved willing to lie to the public, aggressively, in a manner intended to undermine public confidence in democracy itself.

At the moment, wrote Hunter, most of the stories about Washington are “Democratic President in Crisis.” Everything Biden does or fails to do is now a crisis. That after four years of the nasty guy?

The problem, though, is that we are not in a new era. The lies of the insurrection are not past—they are continuing in places like Arizona and Georgia. Lawmakers who shouted in fear as violent coup-backing rioters broke through nearby windows are right now claiming that the same riots did not happen or were of no particular consequence. Republican leaders are still deciding, even today, how far they can go in sabotaging investigation of how the past administration's actions, and their own public statements, fomented the violence and caused the resulting deaths. We are not back to normal, and scurrying back to journalism's safe spaces of four years ago for a bit of solace is doing the same disservice as always.

Sydette tweeted:

The Big Lie has gotten more press than the removal of voting rights from most non white people. Republicans have watched EVERYONE be more willing to cover that Lie than even SPEAK to those affected by it so y’all have fun with that.

She listed a few things the Big Lie is used as a cover: Georgia’s voter suppression laws and the fake audit in Arizona.

But hey let's say more about the Big Lie and not what the Big Lie is getting them.

After the January 6 Capitol attack the media story was there had been an “intelligence failure.” Several police and military officials testified they either didn’t get the word about impending violence or the word didn’t get to the right people. Mark Sumner of Kos discussed a report on NPR. It wasn’t a failure of intelligence, it was the Office of Intelligence and Analysis within the Department of Homeland Security. They’re the ones who are supposed to connect the dots and issue warnings. Reasons for the failure: It is understaffed. It is subject to the whims of leadership. The nasty guy told them to focus on threats along the border, not on interior white supremacist militias. The reports it did produce have gone missing. Part of that is they were pressured to produce reports the nasty guy wanted to see. Bu suppressing intelligence DHS set the police up to fail. This is something more that a commission to investigate the attack needs to look into. Yesterday I mentioned a bill to form such a commission passed the House. The final vote was 252-175 with 35 GOP voting for it. I also mentioned the GOP leadership had told the caucus they could vote their conscience. But, Hunter reported, by that evening the leadership changed its tune, saying the were recommending a no vote, then actively campaigning their members for no votes while declaring their opposition and claiming other agencies were already investigating. The difference was in between the nasty guy bellowed his displeasure. The Capitol Police issued a statement condemning the GOP leadership. And, as Laura Clawson of Kos reported, the House is turning towards Plan B in which various committees do the investigative work. Grerg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Amanda Carpenter of Bulwark. She refutes the GOP claim that other investigations are “duplicative” as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy declared. Carpenter wrote:

None of these efforts, however, has universal jurisdiction to comprehensively evaluate the attack from a 360-degree perspective. And this full and complete picture is exactly the information that must be collected and made publicly available if future attacks on our elections—both in terms of disinformation and physical force—are to be prevented.

GOP members are in opposition because the don’t want to prevent another attack. Rep. Steven Woodrow of Colorado tweeted a nice reminder:

The people who conducted 10 Benghazi investigations want the rest of us to move on from Jan 6th.

A cease fire in Gaza has been announced. Abraham Gutman tweeted:

Palestinians deserve more than not to die. They deserve to live free. A ceasefire only guarantees the former — continued focus on America’s rule in funding and supporting the occupation will help achieve the latter.

Maia Ettiger replied with a comment and a quote:

I’m drowning in rage at my people. If opposing the occupation is threatening Israel’s “right to exist,” than what you’re saying is that the existence of Israel is conditioned on the systemic dehumanization of a people at the point of a gun. And if that’s what you’re saying, then you’re spitting in the face of G-D.

Refaat Alareer added:

but also during ceasefires and "quiets" Palestinians continue to be killed, farmers and fishers shot at, and Palestinian crops near the border sprayed by herbicides by Israeli planes

Not long enough to find your son’s favorite blanket

The bombardment of Gaza has been going on for ten days. I’ve collected several comments about war that have been waiting patiently in my browser tabs. I start with a tweet from Omar Baddar, a political analyst for the Middle East, who summarizes the situation well.

1) Status quo: occupation/apartheid is violence against Palestinians 2) Then Israel escalates through evictions/beatings/shootings 3) Then some Palestinians respond w/violence 4) Then Israel "responds" w/massacres If u start reporting at #3, you're misleading your audience.

And it sounds like Biden also started at #3. Jacqueline Alemany of The Washington Post tweeted:

Scoop: the Biden admin has approved the sale of $735 million in precision-guided weapons to Israel, raising red flags for some House Dems more open to questioning DC’s support of Netanyahu, suggesting the sale be used as leverage.

Sarah Kendzior responded:

This week in Gaza, Israel’s “precision-guided weapons” have hit and destroyed: * Hospitals * Homes * Media offices * Schools * Electricity and water infrastructure In response, the Biden admin offers even more US money for Israel to to check off its war crimes wish list.

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos summarized the attack as of last Saturday. He concluded with:

Asymmetric warfare isn’t a new phenomena. For millennia, small groups of militants defied empires from Persia and Greece, to Vietnam and Afghanistan. The response in most ancient cases was simple and disproportionate. You kill one of ours, we kill a thousand of yours. Then we burn down your city, sell the survivors into slavery, and salt the fields. The end. Except it never was the end. More recently, that kind of disproportionate response has not only been frowned on internationally, it’s also become blindingly clear that, after thousands of years of trying, it still doesn’t work.

A couple days ago Mary Louise Kelly of NPR spoke to Shibley Telhami, a professor at the University of Maryland. Telhami said:

You know, if there is a political winner in all this, it is probably Benjamin Netanyahu - not that he expected this level of escalation and losing control as he had, particularly in terms of what's happened inside Israel. But clearly, politically, he's the winner because, in fact, his opponents were - appeared on the verge of putting together a government without him for the first time as he's facing major legal trouble and, this time, even with the support of one of the two Arab parties in the Israeli parliament for the first time. He is not only distracted from his own legal trouble, but he's prevented his opponents from forming a coalition government.

On the Palestinian side, Hamas controls Gaza. Before this latest violence the residents were angry because they saw no end in sight. In firing rockets into Israel Hamas is capturing that anger and actually doing something. Netanyahu gains from the violence. Hamas gains from the violence. And the people, especially the Palestinians, pay through trauma and death. Leah McElrath retweeted the poem Running Orders by Lena Khalaf Tuffana, who McElrath identified as a Palestinian American. Here’s the beginning and end:

They call us now, before they drop the bombs. The phone rings and someone who knows my first name calls and says in perfect Arabic “This is David.” And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass-shattering symphonies still smashing around in my head I think, Do I know any Davids in Gaza? They call us now to say Run. You have 58 seconds from the end of this message. ... It doesn’t matter that 58 seconds isn’t long enough to find your wedding album or your son’s favorite blanket or your daughter’s almost complete college application or your shoes or to gather everyone in the house. It doesn’t matter what you had planned. It doesn’t matter who you are. Prove you’re human. Prove you stand on two legs. Run.

Emily Hauser of Dame Magazine tweeted a thread in reaction to the White House issuing a statement about Biden commemorating Eid, the holiday at the end of Ramadan.

Statements are not enough, are never enough, but if you're new to the Israel/Palestine beat, let me assure you that this @WhiteHouse statement is remarkable & I'd venture unprecedented. I'll break down why, below, but first: This American-Israeli Democrat thanks you @POTUS. The statement: * acknowledges that Eid celebrations everywhere are made manifestly less joyful by Palestinian suffering * does NOT center Israel (!) * acknowledges the somehow-never-acknowledged fact that Palestinians ALSO deserve security, which is a (quiet) rebuke of Israel ... I'm absolutely certain that blowback from Israel/Israel's US apologists has started in the time it's taken me to write this thread! And the ground is littered w/ good Presidential statements that were ultimately to no discernible good end (*cough*Obama*cough*)! And yet: Wow.

From a couple days later Hauser quoted a White House tweet:

Today the President spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, reaffirmed his strong support for Israel’s right to defend itself against rocket attacks from Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza, and condemned these indiscriminate attacks against Israel.

And Hauser responded:

I was off Twitter for Shabbat & didn't see this until now. These @WhiteHouse tweets are an absolute retreat from the tiny steps forward in yday's statement. Participation in politics requires encouraging small steps & calling out bad ones. This is terrible.

In response to the tweet by Alemany about US arms sales to Israel, quoted above, Yousef Munayyer tweeted: Israel gets $3.8 billion a year to buy US weapons and to invest in its own arms industry. That allows Israel to be a major arms exporter, selling arms to horrible regimes, such as Myanmar.

The US is so deeply complicit in Israel's war crimes, not just because our govt finances them, but it does so more than for any other country and with the fewest restrictions. Our govt also fails to enforce our own existing laws regarding arms exports when it comes to Israel. ... Most Americans do not know about this and would probably be horrified about it all, especially since we are enabling war crimes and crimes against humanity, but for too long our elected officials have not demanded transparency and instead only ensured impunity for Israel.

David Rothkopf tweeted a few thoughts he is able to keep in mind simultaneously. Here are some of them:

* Israel is a powerful state that has systematically deprived Palestinians of their most basic human rights, seized their land, and imposed new laws and policies that are the immediate cause for the current conflict. * Hamas is a terrorist group sponsored by Iran. * There is no justification for the indiscriminate killing or wounding or terrorizing of innocents on either side in the current conflict. * Launching thousands of rockets at Israel is wrong and Israel has a right to defend themselves against such attacks. * Israeli bombing of residential towers, refugee camps and other areas in which the likelihood of civilian casualties is high and not warranted by the military targets that may also be hit is not an appropriate, nor under international law, legal...or moral...tactic. * Israel is an apartheid state. Apartheid states are not democracies. * Palestinian leaders, notably Yasser Arafat, squandered real opportunities to achieve a lasting two-state solution to the problem. * Netanyahu, who like Trump is a corrupt, narcissistic, ethno-nationalist demagogue, will do anything to survive politically even if it is to the detriment of Israel. However, should he be replaced, the situation is not likely to improve dramatically. * There's currently no sign of the leadership the Palestinian people deserve on the horizon. That said, right is right and wrong is wrong. The powerful abusing the weak, the imposition of apartheid, violating human rights, racism, corruption, and using terror as a tool are all wrong and we should vigorously oppose them regardless of the perpetrators.

Christopher Wiebe tweeted:

Absolute shocker that Jared Kushner’s “Vision for Peace” in the Middle East did not work. Read “Hiding in Plain Sight” by @sarahkendzior if you really want to get glimpse of Kushner’s soul (spoiler: he doesn’t have one and you were conned).

Kendzior replied:

Yes in addition to his own kleptocratic practices he did corrupt and vicious acts for other people’s gain (Netanyahu, MBS, and various oligarchs among them) with the longer term aim of rearranging the world order so his criminal cult could profit further.

Marlow Stern of The Daily Beast tweeted:

good to remember that the major reason many hardcore christians are such passionate defenders of israel is because they believe that jews are necessary to usher in the great tribulation, wherein 2/3 of jews will perish and the other 1/3 will be converted to christianity israel is well aware of this but has aligned itself with the christian right anyway (because they think it’s absurd)

Biden came to Dearborn, Michigan yesterday to see the new electric truck Ford is announcing. During the visit there were large of protests from Dearborn’s large Arab community. Kaitlan Collins tweeted that Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian, had a little discussion with Biden. From the photo she is looking him right in the eye. Later, she said:

I hope my president, our president, speaks up & speaks truth about what exactly is happening because I know they know.

It was never about winning, it’s about stealing

Sarah Kendzior tweeted:

The GOP are not afraid of or in thrall to Trump, the individual. They are afraid of and/or willing partners with the extensive criminal apparatus behind Trump which employs threats and blackmail to keep people in line — and offers elite criminal impunity as an incentive. The failure to dismantle this network early, or even call it out for what it is, led the US into its current quagmire. The longer officials obfuscate, the less our chances are of survival. If an attempted coup and the death of over half a million didn’t prompt action, what will?

She then quoted a tweet from Nov. 22, 2020, which is a quote from her book Hiding in Plain Sight.

A crime syndicate that transcends state borders in its pursuit of power and wealth...this elite criminal network has been building for decades...total domination is the outcome they seek...

So if the GOP did pull off a coup they in turn would be controlled by a transnational crime syndicate. The GOP may not be top dogs in the social hierarchy, but they would certainly be above – and have control over – 340 million people. That’s still way up there. In another thread Kendzior tweeted:

The GOP intends to grab power through rigging, not by winning people over. Voter suppression, voter intimidation, threats to state officials, new laws that give states the ability to toss votes. It was never about winning, it’s about stealing — with or without Trump. Facile debates about GOP “needing” Trump are dangerously ignorant of the main threat, which is structural rigging through new voter suppression laws. GOP would not bother with these laws if Trump had mass appeal OR if they were able to win voters over. They’re not even trying. The GOP goal is permanent tyranny of the minority. Popular will doesn’t matter for that goal. Actual vote tallies don’t matter. Appealing to voters is incidental; GOP voters are seen as dupes and pawns. Impunity is the prize of tyranny of the minority, and it’s already here. Dems could end this by killing the filibuster and passing voting rights protection laws. Their lack of interest in doing so — their preemptive surrender — should be examined as closely as the GOP’s open destruction of democracy. Why is Dem leadership making it easy?

That’s the big question. Are Dems naturally wimpy, or are they also compromised by that transnational crime syndicate? Is their opposition only for show? Ruth Ben-Ghiat introduced an essay on CNN with:

January 6 could be viewed as a trial run, as failed coups often precede successful ones. ‘That's what we f**king need to have, 30,000 guns up here,’ said one rioter. ‘Next trip,’ someone answered him.

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported last Friday that a bipartisan deal has been reached to form a commission to investigate the January 6 Capitol attack. There would be ten members, half appointed by each party. The report is to be issued by the end of the year. It was voted on in the House today. I haven’t heard the results. If the chair (Dem) and vice chair (GOP) agree they can issue subpoenas – more likely each preventing the other from issuing subpoenas. However, only the chair can get info from federal agencies, otherwise the commission could accomplish nothing. Yesterday McCarter reported several GOP members of the House have expressed support for the commission. GOP leaders oppose the bill, but have told members to vote their conscience. Sounds good! Alas, there are still several ways for this commission to not happen. First, Moscow Mitch will lead a filibuster. Second, Mitch could delay appointing the GOP members until there isn’t time to do anything by the deadline. Judd Legum responded to the news that the deal had been reached:

I'm unclear why the 9/11 commission in the model here. We now have people who helped provoke this attack by voting to overturn the election based on Trump's lies appointing HALF of the commission that will examine their actions. It's absurd. @GOPLeader should have to testify about his actions on January 6, including his conversations with Trump. He should not be involved in selecting the commissioners.

Steven Dennis tweeted:

Dems gave Rs two *big* asks on the 1/6 Commission: Evenly divided membership and R-picked members have *veto power* over subpoenas.

David Rothkopf added:

You've got to ask...what's the point? This is an exercise in futility and a guarantee that the process will not lead to anything like justice or accountability.

Another way to say that is the point is performative justice – telling the public “Hey, we’re going to bring about justice!” but doing it in a way that makes sure justice is not achieved. Democrats have done this before. I had written about the “audit” in Maricopa County, Arizona of last November’s vote, that there were may election protocols being violated. A few days ago the nasty guy issued a statement claiming the voter registration database in Maricopa County has been deleted. Also, seals on boxes holding ballots had been broken and ballots are missing. Stephen Richter, the Maricopa County recorder (though using his personal Twitter account) wrote:

Wow. This is unhinged. I’m literally looking at our voter registration database on my other screen. Right now. We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country. This is as readily falsifiable as 2+2=5. If we don’t call this out...

Nick Martin responded:

Wow. The Republican who took over Maricopa County elections *after* the 2020 vote is now calling Trump "unhinged" and saying that his party needs to call out the former president's "insane lies."

As for the broken seals and missing ballots, if the claim is true (and knowing who made the claim...), the last people touching it were the audit company. Laura Clawson of Kos reported that the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, majority Republican, sent a letter to the Karen Fann, president of the State Senate, which authorized the audit. The letter called the audit a “sham,” a “con,” and “a spectacle that is harming all of us.” The board also refused to meet with Fann, saying the meeting would be, “political theater broadcast on live stream by OAN,” a network more extreme than Fox. Also in the 13 pages of the letter from the Board, they say they can’t give passwords for various devices because they don’t have them. And Dominion (the company accusing various people for slandering its voting machines) won’t give them out because the company doing the audit is not accredited by the Elections Assistance Commission. The audit people also requested the full chain of custody documentation. The board called that a “spectacular lack of understanding” – that documentation had already been supplied. The letter concluded:

Unfortunately, this has become a partisan issue, and it should not be one. It is time to make a choice to defend the Constitution and the Republic. As County elected officials, we come from different political parties, but we stand united together to defend the Constitution and the Republic in our opposition to the Big Lie. We ask everyone to join us in standing for the truth. The November 3, 2020 general election was free and fair and conducted by the Elections Department with integrity and honor.

Alas, we know the GOP has already made their choice – and it isn’t the Constitution. Dan Price, who cut his CEO pay to share the wealth with his employees, tweeted:

Millennials hold 4.8% of all wealth. There are now 40-year-old Millennials. At the same age, Gen X had 9% of wealth. Boomers had 21%. The largest generation in history did what the system told them to do and became the most-educated in history. Now they're the poorest in history.

He added:

Out of curiosity I ran the numbers and Mark Zuckerberg single-handedly has 2% of all Millennial wealth.

Charles Gaba created a chart placing each state based on the percent who voted for the nasty guy and the percent of population vaccinated. He added a trend line that has the expected slope. Scroll down because the position of New Hampshire is a bit off. I’m not sure what it is with mailing labels, those little stickers that have my address that I can put on the return address part of an envelope. Yeah, they’re rather nice in that I don’t have to actually write out my address. However, it seems a wide variety of charities send them to me in hopes I’ll be so pleased I’ll donate to them. They think that’s going to do it? Today I opened an envelope with another 120 labels inside. That prompted me to go through my collection. I threw out over 500 mailing labels – flowers, kid art, flags. I kept 300. I probably could have thrown out out half of those. One thought is if I use a certain charity’s labels people will also donate to them. But labels that identify the charity go immediately into the trash. So, all you charities out there, skip the labels. Put the money to some better use and stop adding to landfills. My first encounter with a troll – and I don’t mean an internet troll that responds to everything he doesn’t like – was under a bridge in Seattle. Well, a statue of a troll. This particular one even had its hand on a car as if plucked from the bridge above. It is an amusing bit of public art. Now five trolls have taken up residence in the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay, Maine. They are creations of artist Thomas Danbo, who made them out of recycled materials. Elizabeth Blair of NPR talked with the artist. The trolls stand 15-30 feet high. The Gardens are happy to have the trolls because they draw visitors. Danbo has created several other trolls. One was installed in Breckenridge, Colorado, but because he drew too many people, more than the town could handle, he had to be removed. There is a troll outside the Wynwood Walls outdoor museum in Miami and one serving somewhat as a lighthouse on the Puerto Rican island of Culebra. He had to be recreated after Hurricane Maria. The artist’s website, with many more trolls, is here.