They respond by being even more extreme and punitive

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been talking about what it was like to be in the Capitol during the insurrection. Marissa Higgins of Daily Kos reported on it:

“I thought I was going to die,” the New York representative stated to more than 100,000 viewers. In the video captioned “What Happened at the Capitol,” Ocasio-Cortez also talked about being a survivor of sexual assault, compound traumas, spirituality, her belief that being told to “forget what’s happened” without even an apology is the same tactic abusers use, and that these stakes are about more than just a difference of opinion; it’s about “basic humanity."

A big reason why Republicans are circling their wagons around the nasty guy, according to David Neiwert of Kos, is because of Republican voters.

It’s becoming much clearer why Republicans in Congress are so reluctant to acknowledge factual reality—such as the reality that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election fairly, or that Donald Trump incited a mob that attacked Congress and ransacked the U.S. Capitol—and have doubled down on their embrace of anti-democratic disinformation that fueled the insurrection. If the Republicans dare admit any of it is real, they risk the insane wrath of the millions of GOP voters out there who have wholly swallowed all that false Trumpian propaganda.

Neiwert’s evidence for this is what the state parties are doing to those who don’t uphold the lies. His list is long. There are, of course, GOP members who keep the crowd stirred up to keep themselves in power. And there are news outlets that do the same to keep their dollars flowing. In contrast, Walter Einenkel of Kos reported thousands of voters across many states that are changing their party affiliation away from the Republican Party. He lists 10,000 in Pennsylvania, about 6,000 in North Carolina, 4,600 in Colorado and similar counts in many other states. The Democratic House leadership is quite annoyed with the incendiary comments of Marjorie Taylor Greene. They said the GOP leadership has three days to remove Greene from committee assignments. If the GOP doesn’t the Dems will. I’ve heard they are preparing the bills to do just that. It would force the GOP members to go on record whether they approve of Greene’s behavior, though that’s not enough. Laura Clawson of Kos reported that Greene tweeted:

If Democrats remove me from my committees, I can assure them that the precedent they are setting will be used extensively against members on their side once we regain the majority after the 2022 elections.

Clawson wrote:

But make no mistake, this is a typical Republican response. The threat is always out there that if Democrats respond to Republican extremism, Republicans will respond by being even more extreme and even more punitive. Democrats bring a knife to a gun fight, metaphorically speaking, and Republicans are so outraged that Democrats didn’t bring a spork that they use it to justify bringing a grenade launcher. So the threat here is that if Democrats take Greene off a committee overseeing education because she mocked the deaths of children in schools, Republicans will use that as an excuse to strip, say, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of her committee assignments just for being herself.

Greene also accused many Republicans of being too wimpy. Sen. Bernie Sanders tweeted:

McDonald’s worker in the US: $9/hr McDonald’s worker in Denmark: $22/hr, 6 weeks of annual vacation, a union, 1 year of paid family leave, life insurance and pension. America must join the rest of the industrialized world and ensure that our working class can live with dignity.

Dan Price, whose Twitter bio says he cut his own CEO pay by a million so his workers are sufficiently paid (at least $35/ hour), tweeted:

So to recap we told people to stay home for the last 325 days and gave them $1,800. That's $5.54 a day. Meanwhile, they pumped about $3 trillion in to the stock market for corporations, which then turned around and did record layoffs anyway.

Meteor Blades, in his night owl column for Kos thinks Biden should go on a hiring spree. Yeah, there are lots of open positions because the nasty guy gutted so many government departments. Blades quoted Eleanor Eagan of the Revolving Door Project, writing for The American Prospect, who wrote the size of the government hasn’t kept up with the size of the population. There aren’t enough of such people as workplace inspectors and tax auditors. It’s one reason why the government fumbled recent crises. There is a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. States that join it agree that their Electoral College vote will divided according to the state’s popular vote, rather than winner take all. This is as close as we can get to a true popular vote until the EC can be repealed. The compact won’t go into effect until states with a combined 270 EC votes join the compact. So far states with a combined EVs of 196 have joined. Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos Elections reported we might be stuck there for a while. Virginia just withdrew a bill to add their 13 EVs to the pot. Nevada’s attempt was vetoed by it governor and Maine rejected their bill (NV would have added 6 and ME 4). And that could be all for a while. There are no more states with Democrats in complete control of the state legislature. And Republicans see that the EC gives them an advantage. Black Lives Matter has been nominated for next fall’s Nobel Peace Prize! A nice start to Black History Month. Aysha Qamar of Kos reported the nomination came from Petter Eide, a member of the Norwegian Parliament. Eide explained his nomination to NewsNation:

I find that one of the key challenges we have seen in America, but also in Europe and Asia, is the kind of increasing conflict based on inequality. Black Lives Matter has become a very important worldwide movement to fight racial injustice. In the United States alone, an estimated twenty million people have taken part in Black Lives Matter protests, and millions more have made their voices heard all over the world. This illustrates that racism and racist violence is not just a problem in American society, but a global problem, including Sweden.