The oppressor is really the victim

I downloaded the latest Michigan coronavirus data today. Several days earlier this month the state has reached or passed 6000 new cases per day. I had been used to seeing a large hill of cases and deaths in March and April. But as the upward scale of my charts is adjusted for the latest highs the hill last spring now looks rather small. We’re now at four times the cases per day as we were when the first lockdown happened. Deaths per day has risen to 50 over the last week, double what it was a month ago, though still a third of what it was in April and well below what the current cases per day might indicate. I get the data from here. Another of the law firms representing the nasty guy in his post election lawsuits has withdrawn, reported Joan McCarter of Daily Kos. This time the suits are in Pennsylvania. The lawyers said the campaign didn’t provide any evidence and didn’t justify why they needed to intrude on the state’s sovereignty. Earlier this week a law firm in Arizona withdrew. The had dealt with a case in Maricopa County, where there was seven hours of testimony that would affect 191 votes in a county where Biden is ahead by 45,000 votes. Former Ambassador Susan Rice has worked through three presidential transitions, the last from Obama to the nasty guy. She wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times about the danger of Biden not getting the top intelligence briefings. The incoming guy needs to know the various challenges and threats around the world and what the departing administration has been doing about them. Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed Rice’s article (I didn’t read it directly). Then Dartagnan proposed another reason why Biden isn’t getting briefings. When Biden’s team does get access, Dartagnan wrote, …

they are going to be appalled at the degree of inaction and wholesale lack of any efforts whatsoever to address these challenges. They will find instead a network of utter incompetence and indifference to planning, strategy or policy, staggering in its depth, and the Trump people know this. They will find security threats and intel festering, ignored, or shunted aside in favor of groveling to Trump’s every chimerical whim. They will find communications from our overseas allies to have shriveled into nothingness, and our intelligence services put at risk, if not wholly ignored. They will find corruption, graft, kickbacks, and politicization to have completely replaced national security policy.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito confirmed what we knew about him when he gave a speech at the highly conservative Federalist Society (the group that chose Amy Coney Barrett for us) a few days ago. Yeah, we knew this, but sometimes we let justices hide behind a mask of impartiality. This speech has been called the most political speech by a justice in recent time. Kerry Eleveld of Kos says the mask is off. Alito grumbled that he and fellow conservatives are suffering grievous persecution at the hands of liberals, Democrats, and even fellow justices. Eleveld wrote:

Now there's some pretty audacious privilege at work after four years in which white supremacy was culturally mainstreamed by an administration that sought to elevate it in both policy and rhetoric.

The first attack was against marriage equality. Somehow there’s no problem when a same-sex couple is discriminated against by a cake shop. He said there’s no harm because the couple got a cake elsewhere. But religious liberty (including the liberty to discriminate) must be protected. The oppressor is really the victim, he claims. Alito saw that with the legalization of same-sex marriage conservatives would be able to express their beliefs only in the recesses of their homes. Except Alito didn’t supply evidence that bigoted speech has been limited in the last five years. Eleveld mentioned some other topics:

But Alito's pro-discrimination advocacy wasn't his only partisan play. He also decried any future efforts by congressional Democrats to limit the court's right-wing reign over a center-left country, comparing it to autocratic intimidation. … Perhaps fittingly, Alito also directed a good portion of his speech at skewering current public policies intended to limit spread of the coronavirus. "The pandemic has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty," he said. "We have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive and prolonged as those experienced for most of 2020."

Alito’s liberty is more important than my life. Got it. Though it was already obvious he didn’t care for anyone other than himself and fellow straight white Christian males. Rev. Dr. William Barber tweeted:

Why are Democrats talking about compromise & moving to the center with Mitch McConnell, who has never compromised with them? The only center Dems should move to is the moral center of policies that establish justice. Democrats will have the House, the presidency, and a majority of Americans. Stop talking about compromise and lay out a comprehensive vision for binding the wounds of the nation. Help Americans see how extreme McConnell’s obstruction is.

Sharon Sikala tweeted an image from Ridin’ with Biden that says:

How many Republicans does it take to change a light bulb? None. Trump just SAYS it’s fixed and the rest of them sit in the dark and applaud.