Until only political stooges are left

I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data again today. Last week’s peak of new cases per day was only 266. That’s only 55% of the peak the week before. And that was 56% of the week before that. In the last week the peak of deaths per day was only 15. That’s still a lot of cases and a lot of deaths, but compared to April, when we peaked at over 8100 cased and 95 deaths per day, this is a big improvement. And the trend is very nicely going in the right direction (though I was saying that in January too). Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos discussed a report from the Brennan Center on voter suppression.

When Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia shot down Democrats' signature voting rights legislation in an op-ed last week, he said that protecting voting rights "should never be done in a partisan manner." But a new Brennan Center analysis of the voter suppression laws sweeping the nation shows what a preposterous and indeed hypocritical position that is. The center's examination of the 24 state-level voting restriction laws enacted as of early June proves the suppression efforts have been an almost exclusively Republican enterprise. "Overall, we find that these new laws were enacted as part of an overwhelmingly partisan Republican push," reads the report. "Republicans introduced and drove virtually all of the bills that impose new voting restrictions, and the harshest new laws were passed with almost exclusively Republican votes and signed into law by Republican governors.” Still somehow Manchin insists that GOP lawmakers at the federal level are both interested in and fundamental to playing a corrective role to their counterparts in the states.

Eleveld then included some of the reasons they say voter suppression is exclusive to the GOP, such as no Democrats sponsored any of the 17 most restrictive bills and no Democrats voted for 13 of the 17. Joan McCarter of Kos reported that activists in West Virginia, home state of Sen. Joe Manchin, and in Arizona, home state of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, are getting tired of their senators being part of the problem rather than part of the solution. In Manchin’s case black voters were key to his most recent narrow victory yet his meeting with black leaders didn’t go well. As for Sinema her favorable rating has dropped 30 points, with most of that drop happening in the days after she refused to support removing the filibuster, which meant a minimum wage increase could not happen. Sinema has been part of a bipartisan team trying for an infrastructure bill. I hear they have an agreement, though it seems they don’t agree what they agreed to. Even so, that team has five Republicans and Moscow Mitch will be very sure there aren’t the ten needed to get past the filibuster. There is also another problem, as reported by McCarter. The more the bill appeals to Republicans, the less it appeals to progressive Democrats. In particular, Republicans insist infrastructure for climate action be taken out. Progressives are saying if that is taken out they won’t vote for it. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted few sources of interest. First, a tweet from Matthew Dowd:

Bipartisanship is like a healthy relationship. It only works if you are dealing w/ someone who has same fundamental values. If you are with someone who lies, cheats, is abusive to those you care about, and is unwilling to be held accountable, then the relationship doesn’t work.

Second, a quote from Reuters discussed the threats Tricia Raffensperger has been getting. She’s the wife of Brad Raffensperger, Secretary of State of Georgia, who refused to alter the vote there to say the nasty guy won. Reuters wrote:

Those messages, which have not been previously reported, illustrate the continuing barrage of threats and intimidation against election officials and their families months after former U.S. President Donald Trump’s November election defeat. While reports of threats against Georgia officials emerged in the heated weeks after the voting, Reuters interviews with more than a dozen election workers and top officials – and a review of disturbing texts, voicemails and emails that they and their families received – reveal the previously hidden breadth and severity of the menacing tactics.

Third is a tweet responding to that report by Ryan Enos:

See, and this is how democracy dies. You can't blame somebody for not wanting to hold this job and put his family at risk. Sooner or later, those with principles are all gone, and only political stooges are left.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos discussed the Reuters article in more detail. It said that one of those receiving threats is Jocelyn Benson, Secretary of State of Michigan. Mark Sumner of Kos reported that Republicans are trying to outdo each other in calling Dr. Anthony Fauci a liar, or demanding he resign, or saying he deserves to be in prison. Yeah, the Dr. Fauci who quietly insisted on getting information to Americans to keep them safe from the virus while his boss, the nasty guy, undermined those efforts. Fauci’s offense this time is he isn’t going along with the story that the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. The “evidence” of a cover up is supposedly in a huge release of Fauci’s emails that were recently obtained. The claim of cover up is because of a lack of such evidence. Sumner wrote:

This isn’t a war on Anthony Fauci. It’s a war on anyone who will not bow down. That the Republicans feel not just empowered, but comfortable, in waging this war against a figure who has the respect of colleagues, decades of experience, and a consistently high level of support in the American public only demonstrates that no one and nothing is off the table. In fact, the way that Republicans are trying to make this about Fauci rather than about a political figure is just another example of how the feedback loop now in play rewards the most outrageous action against the least deserving person. Meanwhile, the supposed evidence on which Republicans launched this fresh assault looks less compelling by the day. Not only did the thousands of Fauci’s emails released through FOIA requests only show a hard-working official struggling to not take a position other than supporting the best available evidence, the articles driving the resurgence of the “lab escape” theory keep falling apart. ... The scandal at the moment is not just that Republicans are attacking Fauci and undermining science to help Trump and generate anger among their supporters, but also that the news media was so quick to jump onto the idea that the lab escape theory was “covered up.” The lab escape theory was investigated and found unlikely. That was reported. That’s not a conspiracy, that’s accurate reporting. That single finding certainly won’t be the end of it. New investigations will bring new evidence, and when it arrives, it may require a massive revision of current thinking. Or not. But for the moment, Republicans have shown once again that all they had to do is raise a claim that media did something wrong, and media will fall all over itself to address that claim … even if it means doing something wrong.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, included late night commentary, including this one:

President Biden flew to Europe on his first foreign trip. Biden's going to England, Belgium, and Switzerland. Biden had some cicada trouble, swatting away one before his flight. Tomorrow that cicada will be on Fox News in a neck brace calling for Biden to be impeached. —Jimmy Fallon