Go find a crime that fits in this little box

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

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

Jennifer Cohn, election security advocate, tweeted:

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

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

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

Garry Kasparov answered:

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

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

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

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

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

Second step:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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