A call to do nothing and call that bipartisanship

Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos looked at the census data released this week. What has been released so far are total populations for each state. This is enough to reapportion the House – redistribute seats based on which stated grew the fastest. Michigan is back above 10 million residents. Alas, it grew more slowly that most other states, so lost a seat. Political strategists expected Texas to gain three seats, Florida to gain two, and Arizona to pick up one. But Texas gained two, Florida one, and Arizona none. Why the difference? Demographic experts and statisticians think it is an undercount of Latino voters in all three states. That means in undercounting Latinx people the nasty guy and his minions prevented the GOP from getting three more seats. Knowing what happened for sure will have to wait until neighborhood data is released. Joe Biden gave a speech. At the top he noted behind him in the Vice President and Speaker seats were two women. I didn’t watch. Sen. Tim Scott gave the GOP response. Mark Sumner of Kos commented on what Scott had to say.

What was missing from the Republican response was a response. That is, anything that looked like a competing vision for America. Scott’s speech was devoid of alternatives. It was simply a call to do nothing and call that bipartisanship. It was a defense of playing defense from a party that doesn’t have a competing vision. ... Biden spent a large part of his speech calling for national unity and working together. Biden’s history in Washington shows that he means it—he won’t just extend an olive branch, he would accept a helping hand, even if that means compromise. But what Republicans are calling bipartisanship is really surrender. And neither Biden, nor the Democratic Party, are in a mood to give up.

Sumner wrote Scott left out the two issues that GOP legislators across the nation are embracing: torturing transgender youth and voter suppression. Actually, there is a third thing that gets GOP legislators excited – anti riot bills. David Neiwert of Kos described the law that was just signed in Florida. It seems to draw the definition of a riot very close to a peaceful protest. For example, one provision says it is illegal to block streets during a protest. That one is important because:

The most disturbing feature of the law is a section granting civil immunity to people who injure or kill people by driving their vehicles into protesting crowds, so long as they claim the protests made them concerned for their own well-being in the moment.

Neiwert described the history of how protecting vehicular homicide got to be a thing. Biden has proposed a $2 trillion American Jobs Plan (I think this used to be called the infrastructure plan). There was a lot of complaining by the GOP. But for quite a while, no counteroffer, so no way to negotiate. The GOP finally produced a plan, proposing a half trillion. But there still isn’t any negotiation because this sounds like their final offer. Eleveld then reviewed comments from Democrats. They’re now saying we tried for a bipartisan bill and that isn’t working. So we’ll do it ourselves. As for the big relief bill that Democrats did all on their own, Eleveld reported now that the money is hitting GOP districts, those GOP reps are showing their delight. That prompted Pelosi to say:

A number of them are trying to take credit for something they didn't vote for—that's not unusual. Vote no, take the dough—that's what the Republicans do.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, reported on some late night commentary.

Last night was President Biden's first address to Congress. And get this: 85 percent of people who watched Biden's speech approved of it. That's amazing. The only other things Americans like that much are Dolly Parton and cheese fries. —Jimmy Fallon Fun fact: for some GOP members of Congress, this is their first time back in the Capitol since those tours they gave to their friends on January 5th. —Trevor Noah

The system is simply overrun

The current COVID hotspot is India and it is hot. In a tweet from five days ago Lina Srivastava wrote:

It's a massacre in India. The country is collapsing. The Indian government has utterly failed Indians. And the Global North, by refusing to lift bans on export materials or provide material assistance, has abandoned India. Infuriating and heartbreaking.

The tweet includes a link to an article in Forbes with the headline India Logs Almost 1 Million New Covid Cases in Three Days Amid Deadly Surge. I didn’t read the article. In the five days since that tweet, India has reported above 350,000 cases a day. That’s a million cases every three days or three million cases in the last week and a half. Aruni Kashyap tweeted:

Indians across the globe are perhaps on the brink of a mental collapse at this point. We are stuck around the world and we can’t do anything for our loved ones except praying and wishing well. Anxiety. Sadness. Rage. Guilt. The thought that an inept government brought this on ...

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos summarized the state of the virus in America, then provided more details of what is going on in India.

On Tuesday, India reported over 360,000 new cases of COVID-19. That’s a new record for any day in any nation. It was just last week that India first surged past the worst days of the United States’ big fall wave, but now even those numbers are starting to recede into the “not so bad” territory. Worse still, it’s painfully obvious that the numbers coming from India, in terms of both cases and deaths, are massively undercounting what’s really happening. At every stage—testing, hospitalization, and handling deaths—the system is simply overrun. As The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, patients in India are now on their own. Families are conducting a mad search for a hospital bed in a system that’s overwhelmed on every level, and where effective communication has been crushed under the burden of simple need. That means ferrying sick relatives from one location to the next, seeking assistance that doesn’t exist. Or desperately trying to find oxygen. It means watching people who could easily survive COVID-19 if they could get basic treatment die in their homes. Then it means hauling them to parks or parking lots to be burned in mass cremations that are burning 24/7.

Sumner then shared other reasons why the collapse of India is a world problem: * The world’s largest democracy is no more safe from disruption than any other. * India is a major source of pharmaceuticals, the “Pharmacy of the World.” It can’t supply enough vaccine for its own population and companies without workers could be unable to supply other necessary drugs to the rest of the world. * India is a nuclear power between two other nuclear powers and has border disputes with both. Might they attack an unstable India? Might India believe they are ready to strike and strike first? * India is so populous the virus will have plenty of opportunity to create new variants. Some of these might laugh at our vaccines. * India’s economy is big enough that a downturn there will be felt around the world. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported on a poll by NBC News. Basic finding: When talking about voting Democrats want to make sure all eligible people can vote. Republicans want to make sure that all ineligible people can’t vote. Hint to the GOP: ineligible voters already can’t. Cases where they try are quite rare. Yeah, I’m very aware the GOP definition of “ineligible” is black people, brown people, and anyone who doesn’t vote Republican. Hunter of Kos discussed a long article by Andrew Prokop of Vox about Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. The article (in Hunter’s words) show Manchin’s

ability to survive in a state now dominated by hard-right Republicanism, and his (ahem) peculiarly optimistic belief in compromise as antidote to all that ails us. Interspersed through the piece are quite a few quotes from Manchin that paint him as someone who ... hmm. How to put it? For a master of getting reelected in a Republican state, the man's observations about the current state of the Senate and of the nation in general feel more aspirational than sensical. ... As one example: Manchin categorically dismisses concerns that Republicans will systemically obstruct Biden and Democratic priorities, even as he appears to acknowledge that that is precisely what Republicans did during the last Democratic administration—the same Republicans, in fact, with Sen. Mitch McConnell leading the way. “I don’t think that can be repeated, or that people would stand for it, or even that the Republican caucus would adhere to that again,” says Manchin. Really? Based on what? No, seriously, what moves have Republicans made, since looking to contest the election and prevent the Biden administration from even coming to existence, since shouting conspiracy theories that stoked violent insurrection, that give Manchin this optimism?

Dr. Reece Jones, Professor of Geography and Environment at University of Hawai’i, tweeted:

Your daily reminder that Border Patrol agents are arrested for crimes at a rate five times higher than regular police.

He then linked to two articles, one on Imtoline about a BP officer who assaulted his wife, and another on QZ about that arrest rate. In my understanding the BP job attracts supremacists, willing to harm those desperate enough to attempt to cross the border. And supremacists want to be supreme in all areas of their lives. When Michael Harriot was young his cousin showed him a jar that could catch sunlight. Harriott couldn’t get his jar to do the same thing. Spoiler alert: glow in the dark paint was involved. He concluded:

Now, my cousin is Black, but that’s when I first understood white privilege. A lot of white people really believe that anyone who is doesn’t succeed in America MUST’VE been doing it wrong. They really believe white people don’t get shot by cops because wypipo don’t resist. They really believe the disparities in criminal justice is because white people aren’t committing crimes. They really think it’s a “poverty problem not a racism problem” that could easily be solved with a little more white education & negro elbow grease. But I get it... That’s how white privilege works. They really think they know how to catch the sun. Even worse, they truly believe we could do it too if we just used the right jar. ...Like the one that was handed to them.

We want the straightforward truth about how much danger we're in

A recent episode of the Gaslit Nation podcast (the one about Joe Manchin) also discussed Russia. A couple days later Biden declared Kremiln aggression to be a national emergency. Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa, hosts of Gaslit Nation, put out a bonus episode about what Biden said and did. So I’m discussing both together. The regular podcast is here. Before this episode posted Tuesday evening, Biden had called Vladimir Putin. As is usual, a summary of the call was released. Kendzior was amazed because the tone was not the “obsequious bowing down” she was used to seeing. The leaders had talked about holding a summit to discuss a full range of issues. There are a few things Kendzior thinks Biden should talk to America about Russia’s cyber attack and election meddling. Then also talk about the other dangers Russia poses. The plan to deploy nuclear missiles capable of causing a nuclear tsunami along America’s east coast. The Russian troops amassing on the Ukraine border, pictures of which are spread on social media. The failing health of dissident Alexey Nvalny. Will Biden invoke sanctions to force the release of Navalny? Chalupa sees a horrible goal ahead: Our idiots (the GOP) aligned with Russia’s idiots, “it's just idiots in power running amok, making things worse and being destructive.” Kendzior said American dealings with Russia need to be more transparent. Alas, Biden’s pick for the Russia Director in the National Security Council is Matthew Rojansky. He used to work for Paul Manafort, who did dirty deeds in Ukraine for the Kremlin. Russia experts, such as dissident Garry Kasparov, are outraged, saying Rojansky may be on the Kremlin payroll. That hasn’t been verified, but even ties to Manafort should disqualify Rojansky. Kendzior said:

We want the straightforward truth about how much danger we're in, what is going on with our elections, what is going on with cyber security, what exactly is going to happen with Ukraine and Russia. We need the most qualified, empathetic and sensible, straight shooting people in charge of this division. That is not Matthew Rojansky.

Chalupa added:

To elevate a guy like Matthew Rojansky would be an invitation to Putin to come on in, let your spies, your cutouts, your assets come on in and flourish and do their thing. This guy just comes across as with no moral compass. ... So, Matthew Rojansky is a big welcome mat for Russian oligarchy and their weaponized corruption, and their golden handcuffs, and buying politicians. America is just too fragile right now to afford to have Matthew Rojansky in such a position of power. ... Instead, they should decolonize foreign policy and put somebody in that position who empathetically and deeply understands the crisis and knows how to stand up to it, like any Ukrainian American, like an Alexander Vindman, who risked his career to call out Trump.

Ten days later ... I’m finally sitting down with that bonus episode, The Russian Sanctions Special. This one doesn’t come with a transcript so I listened to the 48 minutes and took notes. Alas, unless you are a Gaslit Nation subscriber on Patreon, this one, like the other bonus episodes, is locked. The hosts of Gaslit Nation, Kendzior and Chalupa, are delighted that Biden has declared Kremlin aggression a national emergency. They’re delighted because a main purpose of GN is to get authorities to declare Kremlin aggression to be a national emergency. They read the list of sanctions against Russia. The list was originally put out by Sec. of State Blinken – who is not either of the Sec. of State guys who assisted Russia. The sanctions are in response to the Solar Winds hack, the bounties placed on the heads of American soldiers, attempts to interfere in the 2020 US election, and the attempted murder of dissident Alexi Navalny and his continued imprisonment. Actual sanctions include blocking US banks from doing business with ruble based bonds. This will affect the value of the ruble and put more domestic pressure on Vladimir Putin. In general, bad for Russia. There are sanctions against people and companies that were a part of the election interference and the Solar Winds hack. They will reduce the ability for Russia to carry out future interference (unless Saudi Arabia steps up its funding). Since the sanctions came with international support, this is a big embarrassment of Putin, something an autocrat does not want. Chalupa also read Biden’s notification of these sanctions to Congress, explaining why the sanctions were applied. Kendzior had some thoughts on Biden’s order. First, this statement could and should have been made in August of 2016. She reviewed all the reasons for that, which includes hacking into various departments of the government. The problems in 2020 are because the problems were not addressed in 2016. Those problems include a Russian asset occupying the Oval Office for four years and all that means. Kendzior called for cybersecurity and arrests of the Russian mafia members and the complicit Americans. But she does not want an actual war with Russia. Chalupa said it is good to see this from Biden, who didn’t say much while being Obama’s wingman. Obama’s foreign policy was a lot of little things – the Iran deal, trade with Cuba – while ignoring the huge threat from Russia. Biden did understand the threat of Russia and is now able to act on it. It was Navalny who gave the West a list of oligarchs who support the Kremlin. He asked the West to sanction these people. If Biden sanctions all those people Chalupa says he will achieve “Nazi Hunter” status. Some are being sanctioned in Biden’s order, but not all. Kendzior read a statement by Janet Yellen, Sec. of the Treasury, stating they will be implementing Biden’s order. Kendzior noted a problem – in 2018 it was revealed that Russia hacked the Treasury in 2015 (under Obama). It appears the part of the Treasury compromised is the part to root out internal corruption. People that the Treasury should have investigated were instead, under the nasty guy, welcomed with open arms. Treasury was torn apart and could not be trusted. So, did Biden clean out the department? One to be cleaned out is the daughter of Bill Barr. They listed some of the people who did receive sanctions in this round. They are rather nasty characters. Many have been active in undermining democracy around the world since way before 2014. We can blame both the nasty guy and Putin for the pandemic. Without Russian meddling Hillary Clinton would have been president and she would have handled the situation a lot better than the nasty guy did. The reason why Kendzior and Chalupa put out these Gaslit Nation episodes is not to punish people (though that is certainly needed). The point is to protect people (the victims), to protect life, and protect democracy. To keep these corrosive people out of our government. Economics may not trickle down, but the effects of mafia dons in the government does trickle down. So, Biden has issued these sanctions and called Russian influence a national emergency. What will Putin do in response? Another cyberattack? Take down the power grid or water system (which they did in Ukraine)? Continue to back American white supremacist groups? There are additional ways that Biden can tighten screws on Russia. It is up to us to demand accountability.

Unending sense of victimhood

Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reported the GOP of the Arizona state Senate has authorized another “audit” of the November election results for Maricopa County. I’m pretty sure at least one official audit has been done, but the GOP didn’t like them because they didn’t find the fraud they claim is there. This will not go well. This “audit” appears designed to create fraud. The Senate issued a subpoena to seize all 2.1 million ballots in the county. They’ve turned them over to a company called Cyber Ninjas. Here are the problems. * The company has zero experience in elections. * The company head has tweeted election conspiracy theories. * The workers were issued blue pens – which is illegal because the ballot scanning machines read blue ink. * They have the use of the Veterans Memorial Coliseum and the company’s security is lax and has already been breached. * The source of funding is from extreme right One America News and others who want the GOP to win. * The count will be livestreamed, though reporters have limited access. The Democratic Party sued to stop the effort. A hearing was set for Monday. On the previous Friday a judge ordered a pause over the weekend – if Democrats would put up a $1 million bond to cover expenses due to the pause. The party refused. Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed why the nasty guy’s voter’s love him so much and that the GOP is trying to continue that love, to the point that it is their only policy. The nasty guy voters were not working class. The majority earned income well above the national median income. Their education level was not much different than those who voted for previous GOP candidates. Dartagnan discussed an article by Thomas Edsall in the New York Times. Dartagnan wrote:

It is a psychology of injured pride and fear of lost status, an unending sense of victimhood, carefully prodded and cultivated—most visibly by Trump himself since taking office, and now adopted by the rest of the Republican Party as their sole political strategy going forward.

Edsall referenced a research paper by Alexandra Homolar and Georg Lofflmann. Dartagnan quoted the abstract, then translated:

In more simple terms, by constantly stoking this over-arching narrative of perpetual victimhood, a demagogue such as Trump (or anyone else) can motivate his followers to reject the very tools of democratic governance that a country such as the U.S. relies on to resolve political differences.

Dartagnan continued:

These legislators are duplicitous—and in most cases, knowingly so. But as things currently stand, they know that any departure from the victimhood narrative will be met with howls of outrage by their constituents. So they will continue to parrot it, because as Trump amply demonstrated, the tactic works. As astounding as it is, white Republican voters, who by many objective measures are some of the most privileged, pampered people in the world, now consider themselves as victims. As Edsall carefully emphasizes, this does not mean that Trump voters are actual victims. ... It’s why Fox News and other right-wing media organs continually diminish and dismiss the concerns of genuinely marginalized communities. The brand of “victimhood” hawked by Fox News and its ilk is rooted in social status, and tied to a sense of entitlement, not actual rights.

A group taught to feel victimized and humiliated, turns away from collaboration and turns towards leaders who feed its sense of grievance. And the nasty guy fed that grievance with every word he spoke. It didn’t matter that actual policies didn’t address real problems. Edsall also quoted Miles Armaly from the University of Mississippi and Adam Enders of the University of Louisville. There are systemic victims, those actually oppresssed, and egocentric victims. Armaly and Enders wrote:

Egocentric victims feel that they never get what they deserve in life, never get an extra break, and are always settling for less.

Such people don’t acknowledge personal responsibility of their situation. That prevents working out a solution. What they want is more fuel for their grievances. Dartagnan wrote:

That explains why Republicans are more or less united in opposing Democratic efforts to provide COVID-19 relief, and feel compelled even to oppose any efforts to improve the nation’s infrastructure. They don’t want things to improve, because if things improve they will have to find something else for their constituents to feel victimized about. That’s the only glue holding Republicans together. ... Edsall doesn’t offer any specific solutions on how Democrats can combat this strategy, which essentially requires Democrats to convince these people that their grievances are imaginary and being cynically manipulated for political purposes.

So Democrats must focus on protecting voter rights and doing everything possible to get high voter turnout. Phrases such as “lost status” and “sense of entitlement” and “the most privileged, pampered people” who “consider themselves as victims” describes for me people who have been told they are supposed to be at the top of the social hierarchy and aren’t or feel their position in the hierarchy is threatened. Playing the victim is a supremacy thing. Orion Rodriguez of Kos Prism discussed the alarming rise in bills that ban transition for transgender youth or ban transgender women from women’s sports. He wrote:

These laws are designed to erroneously conflate social and medical transition, and criminalize any attempts by supportive adults to affirm the trans youth in their lives. The “problem” they claim to solve doesn’t exist. Their only aim is to inflict psychological damage on trans and gender-nonconforming children as well as threaten and prevent adults for affirming their children’s identities. ... The current slate of laws is shocking due to the sheer number of proposed bills, but while they are cruel, they’re also limited in scope. This is only the first step, and it’s still possible for trans activists and allies to push back before they become established precedent. Activists are engaging in efforts to convince lawmakers not to pass these bills and combat misinformation among the general public. But if these bills pass successfully and are not overturned in court, they will continue to shift the goalposts until it is no longer safe for any trans people to exist in public, regardless of their age.

And they’ll start in on gay people. Michael Harriot has a few things to say about race and police. In one thread he said that white people (at least as a group) have never been right when the discussion is race so why do we listen to them? His examples include slaughtering American natives while calling them savages and stealing Africans and calling them uncivilized.

Historically and presently, if white PEOPLE collectively push a narrative, it is ALWAYS, ALWAYS wrong. ... Well, race in America is the only topic in which the opinion of people with no expertise, experience, or education will be juxtaposed with people who study work in and live the reality of white supremacy.

In another thread he reviews the evidence: Police kill black people at a rate of 6.6 per million, white people at a rate of 2.5 per million. The killings have nothing to do with crime or violence and nothing to do with danger. White people are more likely to have contraband in their car. White people own more guns. White people are more likely to resist arrest. But when they do, they don’t get shot. The shootings have nothing to do with poverty – the second highest targeted group is rich black men.

No one is saying cops are hunting Black people. BUT COPS ARE HUNTING BLACK PEOPLE. Math is saying it. The research shows it. The science proves it. There is literally no other explanation for it. Police shootings don't correlate to crime rates, income, drug use, violence, danger or any other factor. JUST RACE.

In a third thread Harriot wrote ...

I know we like to focus on unarmed victims but it’s crazy how often Cops shoot people with knives, screwdrivers & even nail files FROM AFAR all the time. They don’t even have to deescalate the situation. Aside from people in prison, no one is out here stabbing cops to death. And when I say “no one,” I mean it literally. According to @washingtonpost, Since 2015, cops shot & killed 1,074 people “armed” with knives. Wanna guess how many cops (outside prison) died from stabbing since then? Zero.

Mapping the virus in Michigan

Over the last week I took on a little project. The Michigan government website where I download COVID data each week has a map with each county colored according to the severity of the disease in that county. My problem with the data is that the color is based on the entire duration of the pandemic. The map doesn’t indicate which county was hot in November and which was hot this past March. So I put my computer programming skills to work, skills developed while working as a programmer for 27 years in the auto industry. I had the virus data already – I could use the same data I download every week. Over the last few years I had been writing programs to draw various diagrams and charts for my genealogy research – also the virus chart I generate each week. This should be straightforward. What I didn’t have was map data. Various websites said upload your data with us and we’ll draw maps for you. Others offered a program to buy, but I didn’t want to learn yet another programming language (I’ve already been learning Python, which wasn’t a thing when I did this for pay). A bit of digging led me to the US Census website. They have maps to better look at census data (and they offer a lot more than the number of people in a census tract). I could download geometric data for all the counties in America. This was in shapefile format. This format has both geometry and associated data. So I had to find a Python shapefile reader, then struggled to use it when it didn’t install as expected. Even so, soon the evolving program could draw a map! Once I figured out how to find Michigan counties (strangely, Michigan counties are not consecutive in the file). And once I figured out how the data represented islands. Online examples were a big help. I hadn’t known there was data for sixty little islands around Isle Royale. This first data set had a big problem. It showed the county boundary at the state boundary. That would be no problem for a state like Arizona, but the state boundary of Michigan runs up the middle of Lake Michigan, which is a long way from shore. This also affected counties along Lake Erie, Lake St. Clair, Lake Huron, and Lake Superior. The second data set had some errors. One example was a lake that is in two counties. This data showed the entire lake in one county. It looked like that county reached into its neighbor. So on to a third set. This was also much lower resolution, which was just fine for my needs. But the map looked fat. Oh, yeah. – the data points were latitude and longitude and one degree north-south is a different number of miles than one degree east-west. I added a correction. Much better. Here’s the map before I added virus data. Even with sixteen colors I ended up with adjacent counties with the same color because they aren’t in any particular order.

I read in the COVID spreadsheet and selected colors for my data scale. Then a big problem. What data do I represent? Do I choose the color based on the number of cases in a county? If so, Wayne County with 1.75 million residents will always have a high number of cases and Keweenaw County, with 2116 residents, won’t. Oakland county had 21839 cases one month (out of 1.2 million residents). That’s larger than the population of 22 counties. So I chose the number of cases as a percent of population. That works better. The highest value was Baraga County in November where 3.8% of the population became infected. I first tried one color scale based on one maximum value so that I could compare one monthly map to another. That meant most of the maps showed most counties at the lowest level. I finally settled on the percent of population with the scale recomputed for each map. There is lots of color in these maps. Even so, that isn’t completely satisfactory. The maps for July 2020 and March 2021 have a similar number of brightly colored counties, but the July max is 0.7% and the March max is 3.0%. Then there’s the February, 2021 map that looks quite severe with big areas of orange – but at 0.7% it’s peak is less than a quarter of the peak in March.

The county on the eastern edge in the second row of counties from the south is Wayne County. Within it is the city of Detroit. I added Detroit because the virus data reported Detroit and Wayne County as two separate areas. Adding it meant clicking on the border to read of latitude and longitude. Last Saturday I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data again. The number of cases per day appears to be leveling off. In the week before the week of the download the number of deaths per day hit 65 twice.

Self-reinforcing misogyny machine

Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos discussed the relationship between corporations and the political parties. Corporations used to be tightly bound to the GOP, partly because those politicians could be more easily bought. But now...

What corporations are now weighing is whether they want to deal with a stable party of adults with which they can negotiate or a bunch of mercurial self-interested opportunists who might blindside them at any given moment.

Michel Martin of NPR spoke with Charlotte Jee who wrote an article for the MIT Technology Review on what a feminist internet would look like. The on-air segment started with a clip of John Perry Barlow reading the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace of 1996.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force or station of birth.

Missing from the list is gender. The current internet is not safe for women. They receive an excessive portion of online abuse. Jee said that when a sexist man hears or reads something uncomfortable he is going to get her to shut up, perhaps through trolling campaigns. There is also algorithmic discrimination. A search for “schoolboy” returns innocuous results. A search for “schoolgirl” returns sexualized imagery. The bias in society contributes to a “self-reinforcing misogyny machine.” The misogyny is amplified because engagement is prioritized and trolls are engaged a lot. To get a feminist internet the individual needs more control over Big Tech, starting with privacy and security settings. This is beneficial for both men and women. An example is the fitness tracking company Strava. It allows tracking your running route. But for a woman this data could be used to stalk her. If the person being tracked is in the military the data could also be used to locate military bases. Failing to listen to women also hurts men. Another issue, according to Jee:

There's been this traditional debate around free speech, when in reality it's, like, well, whose free speech? Because you're protecting the free speech of men to abuse women, but what about those women's free speech that are being chased offline?

Women’s internet issues aren’t taken seriously because these tech companies

are founded by and run by relatively privileged men who really can't imagine what it's like to be on the receiving end of this. ... If they wanted to, they could decide that harassment is not something they're willing to tolerate because, you know, they are able to work together on issues like terrorism, child sexual abuse. And right now, it feels like they've decided that women being harassed and receiving rape threats - that kind of thing - is just, like, a cost of doing business that they're willing to pay. When it comes to threats to women's well-being, direct threats, I really do think that they can and should be doing a lot more about that.

As Republicans have been proposing and passing voter restriction laws some of them have been talking about wanting “quality” voters, those who are “virtuous” and “well informed.” Only those people should vote. Steven Strauss, of USA Today’s Board of Contributors writing in an opinion piece in last Sunday’s Detroit Free Press, said go for it. And start with GOP voters. They are not well informed if they: Continue to believe the nasty guy won. Believe the January 6 Capitol attack was either by leftists in a “false flag” operation or was peaceful. Still believe President Obama was born in Kenya. Still deny COVID is real and refuse the vaccine. Get their information from Tucker Carlson on Fox News when the Fox lawyers say that one shouldn’t believe what Tucker Carlson says. Yeah, those sound like low quality, uninformed people who meet the GOP requirement of those who shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

Nice planet you have there

Rather than do anything useful – like help the country recover from a pandemic and convince their base to get the vaccine – the GOP has been doing such things as keeping black people from voting and bullying transgender kids. Their latest dangerous effort, as reported by Aysha Qamar of Daily Kos, is to penalize protesters. There are 81 bills proposed in 34 states. They include such things as denying access to state funded loans, such as for going to college or getting a mortgage. There would also be penalties such as denying government food assistance and unemployment benefits. There are also increased penalties for crimes committed during protest (and who gets to decide the definition of a “crime,” hmm?).

“This is consistent with the general trend of legislators’ responding to powerful and persuasive protests by seeking to silence them rather than engaging with the message of the protests,” said Vera Eidelman, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. “If anything, the lesson from the last year, and decades, is not that we need to give more tools to police and prosecutors, it’s that they abuse the tools they already have.”

Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed those refusing the vaccine. They’re not “hesitant,” they are saying no. Reasons why include (all of them bunk): Submitting to the government will bring on totalitarianism. It’s part of a plan by some billionaire (usually Bill Gates) for social control or genocide. It’s the Mark of the Beast. They hear that they’ll need a booster shot every year (appears they don’t get flu shots). They’ve made their decision and by golly, they’re going to stick to it! And now they feel bullied by people asking them to get the shot. However, they are looking for fake vaccine cards to allow entry into large entertainment venues. Which means the “vaccine passports” that are being talked about need to be secure. I’ve been wondering how those passports will work. A lot of the talk is some kind of app on a phone that links to a vaccine database. So what will they do about people, like me, who don’t have such a phone? Dartagnan wrote:

And this is where we come back to the original mindset of these Trump voters. Nowhere in [Republican pollser Frank] Luntz’s focus group is the slightest hint or acknowledgment that they risk infecting others with their behavior. Forget about herd immunity, forget even about their own health—these people obviously don’t even care what happens to their neighbors and friends, let alone society at large. ... Ultimately, it appears that this vaccine refusal phenomenon is little more than a red herring, an extension of the same selfishness these people exhibited when they voted for Trump in the first place. For some of them, it may feel like their own personal revenge on the country for Trump losing the election, just like 2016 was their personal revenge for the election of a Black president—twice. Whatever their claimed motives are, those who refuse to get vaccinated don’t deserve a pony, and they don’t deserve to be coddled for their ignorance or their obstinacy.

Dartagnan quoted Jennifer Ruben of The Washington Post:

There is no right to remain a breeding ground for dangerous coronavirus variants or a threat to the small number of people still susceptible to the virus despite their vaccinations (known as breakthrough infections). The country is approaching the point when it should stop catering to those bent on being a danger to themselves and others. We have all sacrificed too much for too long to indulge reckless conduct.

Dartagnan concluded:

The most effective means of getting people vaccinated should rely less on emphasizing the benefits if they do, and more on emphasizing the consequences if they don’t.

President Biden has been leading an online climates summit over the last couple days. Mark Sumner of Kos has a good summary. Sumner also wrote about the speech by Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. To Sumner it sounded like a mafia don demanding protection money:

Nice planet you have there. It would be a shame if someone were to, say, burn down a region that holds the greatest biodiversity, plays host to thousands of endangered or not yet discovered species, and provides a home to ancient and isolated human cultures. That’s not exactly what Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said in his speech at President Joe Biden’s climate summit on Thursday, or the content of a proposal that Bolsonaro circulated to world leaders on Wednesday. But it certainly seems to be the implication.

Bolsonaro’s price tag: $1 billion to protect the Amazon rainforest. Sumner wrote:

The same factors that make the Amazon so diverse are exactly those that make it highly unsuitable for long-term occupation by large numbers of humans. The rainforest provides a high level of biological resources as long as it remains intact. As has been demonstrated again and again around the world, rainforest lands make horrible farmlands. The soils and environmental conditions there are utterly unsuited for either farming or ranching, and after only a few years, production from these lands slips to almost nothing while the thin, bare topsoil washes away and goes toward ruining the ecology of both rivers and oceans. In fact, Bolsonaro’s policies in allowing more expansion into the region are making this disparity infinitely worse, resulting in not just more destruction, but more people who feel that their only chance at survival lies in carving ever deeper into a land that cannot sustain them. There’s no reason to either believe Bolsonaro, or to trust that if he had a billion in hand, he wouldn’t go right on encouraging his cronies to burn through the forest.

A few years ago the Supreme Court said that teenagers cannot be sentenced to life without parole. This new Court overturned that ruling. The majority opinion was written by Brett Kavanaugh. That brought a scolding from Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent. It is an important type of scolding. Referring to the cases that prompted the earlier ruling, Sotomayor wrote:

The Court simply rewrites Miller and Montgomery to say what the Court now wishes they had said, and then denies that it has done any such thing. The Court knows what it is doing.

Laura Clawson of Kos explained:

But it comes as no surprise that the man who, red-faced and screaming, lied his way through his confirmation hearing would write opinions lying about what he was doing to precedent once he was on the court. ... It’s chapter infinity in “Republicans lie,” but it’s especially relevant as Kavanaugh lies in his official Supreme Court opinions, while writing for the Trump majority. This court can have no moral standing.

Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Sarah Longwell of Bulwark who noted many Americans don’t think about democracy.

Democracy is the system we have, and have inherited, but most of our experiences with any of the alternatives are so remote that we view democracy as the default state. As something that just is. That isn’t to say that Americans don’t think about politics. Oh, do we. Probably more than is helpful. We have, as a people, some pretty out-there opinions and preferences and expectations about politics.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary. Here’s one of them.

Chauvin's defense, and so much of the defense of racist police abuse writ large, depends on telling us not to believe our eyes. We can see the injustice with our own eyes, but there's a whole industry of people—from police unions to private prisons to cable pundits—whose very lucrative job is to try to convince us that what we can see and hear with our own eyes and ears isn’t real. —Seth Meyers

Artist Tomer Hanuka tweeted:

I’ve asked my 3rd year illustration students at @sva to come up with a post-pandemic New Yorker magazine cover. Here is what they sent in:

Click on each image to see the whole thing.

Bandaid on the fin

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported on another sign of the demise of coal. The United Mine Workers of America used to have 800,000 members. It now has 80,000, though fewer than 20,000 actually work in mines. The entire coal industry has only about 43,600 workers, including management and office workers. The sign that Sumner reported is that in a recent online speech Cecil Roberts, president of the union, wasn’t concerned about keeping miners in mines, but how to transition them to new jobs. He also introduced a plan for “preserving coal country” that includes plugging old oil and gas well, cleaning up abandoned mines, and expanding renewable energy. Since Roberts had worked with Biden there’s a good chance Biden will listen. The decline in coal began in 2008 with the rise of fracking to get cheaper natural gas. The decline strengthened when the cost of installing wind and solar became cheaper than maintaining a coal plant. As for the carbon capture technology to create “clean” coal, it has never worked, would be hugely expensive to try which would make to cost differential worse for coal, and would now be pointless. After many police shootings we find out that evidence released later shows that the first statements by police were lies. Things like that prompted Michael Harriot to tweet:

There’s been a lot of conversations about cops lying in police reports and very little about all the white editors & writers who regard police reports as “objective” sources.

The House passed a bill to give statehood to Washington DC! I saw the name is to become Washington, Commonwealth of Douglass (as in Frederick Douglass). The bill’s progress in the Senate may depend on whether the filibuster is eliminated. In the meantime people have been pondering what an American flag with 51 stars might look like. Here are a few designs, some with big changes from what we have now, though keeping the red and white stripes and stars on a field of blue. One of the patterns of stars certainly looks like a dinosaur... Olayemi Olurin tweeted:

Explain to me why elected officials get on twitter and pretend to be just as helpless as you and I. We don’t all have the power to change the system, that’s frustrating. What’s more frustrating is watching the people we gave the power to change the system pretending they can’t.

Several times I’ve mentioned my doubts about Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She talks a good line but appears to do little to secure democracy, such as limiting the scope of impeachment trials. Here is another reason to doubt her. On the news that Pelosi won’t pursue a submitted bill to expand the Supreme Court, Peter Daou tweeted:

PELOSI EXCUSED BUSH'S WAR CRIMES PELOSI GAVE TRUMP'S THUGS A PASS PELOSI BLOCKED MEDICARE FOR ALL PELOSI IS BLOCKING EXPANDING SCOTUS Notice a pattern? To every Pelosi defender blaming Manchin or some other empty procedural excuse, you're being played by Dems. If they wanted to do something, they'd find a way to do it with their majorities. Pretending they can't is just insulting our intelligence.

WCBS Newsradio announced a new vaccine site will be underneath the blue whale in the American Museum of Natural History. The tweet included a photo of the whale. That prompted Alyssa Franke to exclaim:

He!!! Has!!! A Bandaid!!!! ON HIS FIN!!!!

Tevye of the Kos community told a story that began 20 years ago. Danny Stewart, about to leave a New York subway station, discovered an abandoned baby boy. He and his partner Pete Mercurio were asked by the judge if they were willing to adopt him. They did, with the judge expediting the process. Kevin became their son. In 2011 same-sex marriage became legal in New York. Pete and Danny asked the same judge to officiate. She was delighted to do so. Last fall Pete published a children’s book Our Subway Baby. Kevin is now 20 and considers himself lucky and well loved. Leah McElrath tweeted something important considering the state of the world:

I want you to know you don’t always have to be strong. I want you to know sometimes you won’t be strong enough. I want you to know the world might break you. I want you to know you deserve love even when broken. I want you to know the expectation of resilience is oppression.

Justice is removing the conditions that allow cops to kill

Over the last two evenings I watched the nominees for Oscars in the category of Animated Short Films. The whole show is 95 minutes. I needed two evenings because the video didn’t start and I needed help through a very slow live chat. The shorts was available as one long video through Detroit Film Theater. I could also watch the live action short films, though in the last few years those have tended to include a couple that are brutal. So I didn’t this year. Also available are the documentary shorts, which I don’t bothered with. Here are the nominated short animated films: Burrow – USA. Rabbit can't build his burrow because of all the other underground critters and their burrows. Genius Loci – France. More abstract. I wasn’t sure there is an actual plot. Opera – from South Korea. A large pyramid shape showing dozens of little repeating scenes. It was hard to know where to look. If Anything Happens I love You – USA, A couple tries to heal after a tragedy. Yes-People – Iceland. Simple scenes of life, though all they say is yes (and occasionally no). This video also included honorable mentions, though they were not nominated. Kapaemahu – USA. A legend of Hawaii about healers who were both male and female. The Snail and the Whale – UK/Germany. A snail hitches a ride on the tail of a whale to explore the wide ocean. This one would be a delight for children. To Gerard – USA. A young boy helps a magician and is given a coin. He finds a way to pass it on. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Daily Kos, quoted Zack Stanton of Politico, who wrote about the growing rift between corporate America and the GOP:

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a legendary business professor and associate dean at the Yale School of Management, has watched this split grow in recent years, and has heard it from CEOs he knows and works with. What the GOP cares about and what major businesses care about are, increasingly incompatible, he says. “The political desire to use wedge issues to divide—which used to be fringe in the GOP—has become mainstream,” Sonnenfeld says. “That is 100 percent at variance with what the business community wants. And that is a million times more important to them than how many dollars of taxes are paid here or there.”

Dworkin quoted a bit of another article that I thought I should read in full. It is Republicans and the Great Replacement by Noah Smith. Over the last few years there is increasing talk of American conservatives being “replaced.” It seems to increasingly be a central idea of their beliefs. But what is actually being replaced? Smith has a few ideas. The obvious answer is white people are being replaced. By 2042 whites will no longer be a majority in America. A second answer is political replacement. This is discussed as “Every time they import a new voter ... I have less political power.” Both of those are quite old. The first had a role in the immigration restrictions of the 1920s. The worry of being outvoted extends back into the 19th century. Smith suggests a third answer, one that extends back just a couple decades. There are broad declines in the percent of people identifying as Christian. That strong pillar of American society is not so strong these days. All three of those reasons mean conservatives are saying they are the one dispossessed, and thus oppressed. I think they only thing they are dispossessed from is commanding the top spot in the social hierarchy. Many of us function quite well in lower rungs of the hierarchy and want the whole concept of social hierarchy abolished. In another pundit roundup, Georgia Logothetis quoted Ibram Kendi writing for The Atlantic. One of the refrains from the defense in Derek Chauvin’s trial was that George Floyd would be alive if he had complied with officers. Kendi wrote:

Police officers do risk their lives. But do I risk my life every time I pull over for an armed police officer? When I don’t have my documents in my hand on the steering wheel and I comply and reach for them, an officer can shoot me dead like one did Philando Castile. Compliance is not a lifesaver. When I comply completely, like Toledo did, I feel lucky to survive police encounters.

Too many black people are killed even when they do comply. I’ve written a few times about one should not confuse correlation with causation. As a reminder, correlation is when two things that are measured tend to rise and fall together. The higher the correlation value the more closely they move together. No correlation means the two values do not rise and fall together at all. There is a mathematical formula that can determine a number for correlation. I’m about to make a statement that logic tells me must be true (though I’ll hear from my friend and debate partner if I’m wrong). While high correlation one might want to claim causation (though one shouldn’t), but with low correlation one definitely can’t claim causation. With that in mind AntifacistF12 tweeted a chart that compared police killing rates and violent crime rates. The two values do not at all move together. AntifacistF12 wrote:

There is no correlation to violent crime rates, and police killings. It's a far-right pro-police talking point.

The two items above is from before the verdict was announced this afternoon – Chauvin was declared guilty on all three charges in the death of George Floyd. Here are a couple things written after the announcement. Olayemi Olurin, a public defender, tweeted:

If the police still have the power to kill us, nothing has changed. Justice isn’t whether we convict a cop, it’s removing the conditions that allows cops to kill. The system that killed George Floyd is the same system that killed Daunte Wright, we need to end it.

Leah McElrath tweeted:

PLEASE TAKE CARE OUT THERE. Police all across the country are going to be feeling aggrieved and looking to lash out.

Mascot of obstructionism

Yesterday I looked at Michigan’s coronavirus data based on what the state released on Friday. New cases per day hit a peak above 8300 this week. Last week was revised downward and the two weeks before were revised upward. That gives the appearance of larger jump in mid March and a slower rise (but still a rise) since then. This is still about 1400 below the peak in November. The deaths per day for last week was revised upward so many days were above 40 and one day at 49. The data I get does not show hospitalizations. The news reports this week said that in Michigan the number of people in the hospital for COVID exceeds the peak in November. And still the governor won’t mandate the CDC recommendations. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer spoke to fellow Democrats, laying out their plan of action. As part of that he asked them to find Republican partners willing to work with them on bipartisan priorities. The reason is so they understand the extent to which Republicans intend to obstruct Democratic bills. It would show voters that at least Democrats tried. It would also hopefully demonstrate to Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema that without eliminating the filibuster nothing needing GOP votes will get done. Moscow Mitch also is telling his caucus about Manchen and Sinema. As in instructing his colleagues to butter them up, play really nice, in hopes they’ll thwart Democratic bills and keep the filibuster intact. As the big pandemic relief bill was being pushed through the Senate in March Manchin made a big deal of his demand of reducing the size of unemployment benefits and cutting off payments a month earlier than was approved by the House. McCarter quoted a bit from Politico, saying that Rob Portman (R-OH), by being best buds with Manchin was able to get Manchin to do GOP bidding. It slowed down a few of the more “radical” Democratic goals. Because of Manchin’s obstruction to democracy the women of Gaslit Nation decided it was time to look more closely at him. The women are Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. This episode is titled Joe Manchin Gaslights America. Kendzior began:

Yes, we no longer have a Kremlin asset mobbed up sociopath plague fiend and nuke fetishist as the president, but we still have his criminal backers running around free. As we've long stated on Gaslit Nation, it's the operators behind the scenes—the oligarchs, the mafias, the blood and money drenched right-wing fanatics—who are the true source of control over the American body politic. Getting rid of Trump did not get rid of the core problems, much as his win did not create them. Elite criminal impunity remains the scourge of this country.

Biden and his FBI are ignoring the crimes of the attack on the Capitol. The profiteering over the pandemic. The hijacking and dismantling of our government. The mass abuse of migrant children. And many more. Inaction is inexcusable because there is so little time to act. Biden doesn’t have four years to fix this. He has two. That’s because of the GOP attack on voting rights. That attack could be enough to flip the House and end any hope of reform. For too long Democratic politics has focused on “vote them out next time.” I heard a lot of that over the last two years. But with the current GOP actions there won’t be a next time. Democratic inaction has been full of excuses. For the past two years it has been why show any initiative if Moscow Mitch will block it? Now the excuse is Joe Manchin, who has embraced his role of “mascot of obstructionism.” But appeasement didn’t stop Nazis. And the Senate wasn’t envisioned to be an obstructionist body. Chalupa reviewed the filibuster and its use to protect the oppression of black people. She then talked about conservative justices and that 79% of their decisions on voting rights restricted access to the ballot. The judiciary “are the cage bars of any struggling democracy.” Then there was a discussion of gerrymandering, which I’ve discussed many times. District boundaries are about to be drawn again – based on a census carried out under the nasty guy. And this gerrymandering will be what flips the House – before a vote is cast. And under a GOP House the attack on people of color will escalate. We need to protect people of color. To stop that we need to immediately end the filibuster, pass voting reforms, big climate change legislation, health care reform, and predatory financial corruption. All of them primarily people of color. There is no time to waste. Chalupa said:

All these casual state killings of People of Color, that's not normal, it's dystopian. If this was happening in any other country, tourism would plummet, Western leaders would pass sanctions. Every latest murder adds to the state-sanctioned trauma impacting all communities of color who have to raise their children under the constant threat of White supremacy violence. ... White supremacy has already laid the groundwork to steal the 2022 election from you, and once they do, we may never get our democracy back—not without a generation or two of martyrs sacrificing their lives and freedom, like the people are doing right now in Belarus and Ukraine and in Russia—and those generations in America will look back on Biden, Pelosi and Schumer as those who could have done more when they had the chance, but failed to treat the decline of our democracy as an urgent crisis.

Kendzior said:

We are at a turning point. Within this turning point, you cannot have one individual like Joe Manchin be the node upon which democracy or autocracy triumphs. It's absolutely absurd. It's absurd that it's not called out more. It's absurd that he's not investigated more as to what exactly is motivating his behavior. ... Manchin is a weird one, because he seems just so vacuous. He's like an enigma wrapped in a riddle, wrapped in a lot of money.

So Kendzior went digging into the guy’s background. Manchin has said he doesn’t care if he wins or loses an election. He doesn’t care about his job. Governing is not the point. His refusal to get rid of the filibuster means no voting rights, which would cost him his Senate seat. He likes to define himself as a “centrist.” Kendzior said, “It is impossible to be a ‘centrist’ when the other party is an authoritarian cult. You are merely a cult enabler, one far more to the right than you present yourself as being.” Manchin voted for many of the nasty guy’s most destructive nominees, including Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. Manchin has been a welcome guest at dinners with the pandemic prince and princess. He was a backer of the plot that got Michael Flynn in trouble in 2017 (Kendzior provided details). He supported the nasty guy’s efforts in Israel before Obama was out of office. He voted against the 2015 Iran Deal. He seems fond of other autocratic regimes, such as the King of Syria. In foreign affairs he seems to like everything the nasty guy liked. Is he compromised? No evidence. Which is why Manchin is an enigma. But he needs to be investigated. Chalupa said:

I don't think Manchin is ever going to budge. I think his whole purpose is to wait out the clock until 2022 under this gaslighting campaign of being bipartisan, and that way, nothing gets done and his cronies—his fellow warriors of whiteness—this corruption culture that he lives and breathes, of all these weird connections, they're going to be back in power and they're going to thrive. ... Things will get very, very dark if Democratic leadership doesn't yank Joe Manchin in line, for the literal sake of humanity. I want to point out that, on top of all this, Joe Manchin is a living embodiment of what we say—that White supremacy endangers all of us. He is a living, breathing monument to Neo-confederacy by blocking filibuster reform.

Biden entered office facing for crises: COVID-19, climate change, racial justice and the economy. Chalupa quoted filibuster expert Adam Jentleson in The Atlantic:

A fifth crisis will determine the fate of the rest of his administration, and perhaps that of American democracy itself: the minority rule doom loop, by which predominantly White conservatives gain more and more power, even as they represent fewer Americans. The doom loop consists of four interlocking components; candidates who represent White conservatives; Republicans in our ideologically sorted era begin every election cycle buoyed by voter suppression and gerrymandering—what I call electoral warfare—which makes it easier for them to win; then, anti-democratic features of the American system that have always existed, but never benefited one party over the other in any systematic way, help those same candidates take control of institutions, such as the White House and the Senate, despite winning fewer votes and representing fewer people than their opponents. Once in control of these institutions, these newly elected officials use them to entrench their power beyond the reach of voters. If they are eventually voted out of power, they retain a veto over the agenda of the majority, which they use to block change and feed the conservative case that the government is broken. This hastens their return to power along the very path they greased with voter suppression. The net effect of this doom loop is a growing divergence between the agenda of the government and the will of the governed, an untenable dynamic in any democracy. With Democratic control of Congress hanging by a handful of seats, the next two years might be the country's last chance to stop this cycle.

Kendzior said about this takeover of democracy:

Every month that goes by without even an acknowledgment that this is happening, or that this could potentially happen, is deeply unnerving to me, because if January 6 didn't bring it home, if Trump allowing and wanting over half a million Americans to die of COVID didn't bring it home, I don't know what can bring it home to these people, and I'm left to think well, maybe some of them want it, too. Maybe it's not just the Republicans. Maybe there's the Vichy Democrats in the fold. Because I don't know how you cannot see it. It's just clear as day to me, but anyway.

Chalupa added:

Joe Manchin is gaslighting America. Anybody who would sacrifice our democracy at this critical time by being obstructionist to his own party, to the tens of millions of people that worked so incredibly hard to bring his party into power, anybody who has that in him has something to hide. So investigate the hell out of him. Expose him for who he is. I'm not even confident a guy like that can be bought off because he will always be demanding more. There's greed in this obstructionism. There’s greed. He's doing it for his own self-interest. And the good moments in America's history—the moments when we've moved forward as a nation and finally achieved some human rights and progress—were when people were willing to sacrifice their own self-interest. Joe Manchin refuses to do that now. And don't buy any argument he's trying to justify his excuse. It's all classic gaslighting.

I got this far in the episode yesterday. I had a few periods of lying awake last night thinking of the urgency that this episode has. So this morning I wrote a letter to the appropriate people in government, that being my House rep., both senators, Speaker Pelosi (through Speaker.gov), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (who thankfully doesn’t block messages not from his home state), and President Joe Biden. Here’s what I wrote. Feel free to copy it and send to your six people. Using the email feature in their government websites and simple copy and paste makes the whole thing easy.

I strongly urge the quick passage of the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. With Donald Trump out of office and the next president not elected until 2024 it may seem there is plenty of time to strengthen democracy. I disagree. We have until July, maybe August. This year. Both bills must be passed before the 2020 census data is released and states begin their redistricting process. Failure means GOP controlled states will be heavily gerrymandered. That will mean in 2022 the House will come under GOP control. And democracy in America will die. People of color will be the target of unleashed white supremacy. You may not trust what I say. Please trust the words of Sarah Kendzior and her Gaslit Nation podcast. She studies authoritarian regimes. Which is what the modern GOP has become. See in particular the episode "Joe Manchin Gaslights America." I am very much aware there won't be 60 votes in the Senate. That means the filibuster must be eliminated, at least for voting issues. Two people (Manchin and Sinema) cannot be allowed to mean the difference between democracy and authoritarian rule. Immediately behind those two bills must be a way to prevent a conservative Supreme Court from undoing them. Once passed the GOP will take both bills to court. The recently submitted bill to expand the court to thirteen members is a start. Waiting until the study group put together by President Biden to produce a report in September may be too late. I see these three bills as the most important work of Congress. They are critical and urgent. Without them nothing else will ultimately matter.

Back to Gaslit Nation. The rest of this episode is about Biden’s phone call to Vladimir Putin and the call summary issued by the White House. Two days after this posted on Tuesday evening Biden declared Kremlin aggression a national emergency. Kendzior and Chalupa did a bonus episode about what Biden said. So I’ll combine the rest of this episode with the bonus episode in a later post.

Mass shootings & police shootings are not separate issues

Rachel Martin of NPR spoke to Beth Allison Barr about her new book The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. The link is to highlights of the discussion, though there is also the 7 minute audio of the whole thing. The book began with the realization that what the Bible was saying women were supposed to do (Barr had been teaching about women in the early church) did not match what her Southern Baptist congregation was saying what women were supposed to do. What the church was telling her was straightforward: submit to your man. She went to the church elders to allow them to present her reasoning why women should be allowed to teach Sunday School. She was denied. I’ve heard the about complementarianism as a reason why same sex couples should not be legal and not raise children. The reason was that men and women were different and complementary. To thrive a child needs the firmness of a father and the nurturing of a mother. Of course, that’s bunk. Men can be nurturing and women can be firm. Barr explained complementarianism in an opposite sex marriage:

In the evangelical understanding, complementarianism is this idea that women are created differently from men. And that difference means that women cannot be leaders, that they cannot have authority over men, and that within the marriage relationship they are called to always be under the spiritual authority, the headship of their husbands. So complementarianism is that women are divinely created to be under masculine authority.

Barr explained that the current patriarchal thinking comes from taking a handful of verses from St. Paul and interpreting the rest of the Bible through them. But that obscures that God is always depicted as fighting patriarchy and raising up women into leadership. Even those verses from St. Paul are taken out of context. There is also the doctrine of inerrancy, only a hundred years old, that one must believe the Bible literally – or as men in the early 20th century read it. That made patriarchy part of the Gospel.

If you look throughout the New Testament, when Jesus tells somebody they are of great faith, it's women. And so women are not only recognized by Jesus in a way that their patriarchal society would not have done so, but they are also given the spiritual authority of being recognized as those who see Jesus and understand Jesus for who he is.

Ben Franklin tweeted:

As it becomes clearer and clearer what happened on January 6th, you must ask yourself why the ringleaders of the attack continue to walk. This is not how a serious country responds to a coup attempt. Something is very wrong, no excuses.

Editing the Gray Lady is a bot that highlights the changes on the main page of the New York Times and tweets the differences. This is an example of how a headline can change how we interpret a story. The example is the recent fatal shooting of Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Corner, Minnesota, north of Minneapolis. Headline: Officer Near Minneapolis Kills Motorist, and a Crowd Confronts the Police. Became: Officer Near Minneapolis Shoots Motorist, Who Dies, and a Crowd Confronts the Police. And became: Minnesota Officer Shoots Driver, Protesters Clash With Police. They seem to get more and more vague. The second one implies the death wasn’t because he was shot. The third implies he didn’t die. There was a mass shooting in Indianapolis last night. Emily Hauser tweeted:

I'm begging you to start seeing that mass shootings (Indianapolis, Boulder, Atlanta) & police shootings (Duante Wright, Adam Toledo) are different sides of the same gun violence epidemic. Each reflects *many* terrible truths about this country, but one of those truths is that we're awash with guns & marinated in gun culture, itself steeped in toxic masculinity that demands violence from & in response to men. Violence as power - the greater the violence, the greater the power. Add easily accessed lethal force & death is a foregone conclusion. We know we have more privately-owned guns (>400m) than citizens - but that doesn't include firearms carried by law enforcement, who live in the same culture *and* are elevated & empowered by the state to be violent. Mass shootings & police shootings are not separate issues.

The mass shootings, the police shootings, and the gun culture are all aspects of supremacy. Supremacists have become far more willing to act. Supremacists always act through violence. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Daily Kos, quoted Greg Sargent of the Washington Post. Sargent wrote about Jason Watts, a local GOP committee treasurer, who never voted for the nasty guy.

Watts lamented the GOP’s lockstep loyalty to Trump, because “this undertone of hatred, this fealty at all costs, it’s going to damage us.” ... In so many ways, this story captures our times. But not in a told-you-so kind of manner. Instead, it points to how difficult it may prove to move past the wounds that Trump has inflicted on this nation, and how the eager complicity of many Republicans continues to make them all the worse.

At a meeting where Watts defended himself few wore masks. Later Watts tested positive for the virus. John Stoehr and his Editorial Board explaining politics in plain English tweeted a thread. Washington reporters used to get under the skin of Democrats by laundering right-wing propaganda. They’re baffled because it isn’t working anymore. Reporters feel the dread that they’re on the outside looking in, that Democrats know something. What Democrats know: The GOP doesn’t have policies to offer. They want a country the rest of us don’t want to live in. They’ve lost a feel for what the whole country wants.

Moreover, policies like green energy, which were unpopular the last time they had unified control of the government, are now popular. If the president is acting like he doesn’t need the Republicans, it’s because he doesn’t need the Republicans. And because he doesn’t, the president really is redefining what “bipartisanship” means. Let me put this another way. The Republican Party is the anti-government party. It has been for decades. During the Trump era, however, the party crossed a moral threshold many GOP voters would not. The Republicans became the party of treason. It literally acquitted the former president’s attempt to overthrow the United States government. At the same time, a vast majority of Americans, all living under the smog of the covid pandemic, realize government action was the only way out of the emergency. They couldn’t turn to the Republicans a) because the former president was most responsible for allowing the emergency to become the worst among rich counties and b) because they were the party of anti-government before they became the party of treason. The Republicans turned their backs on the whole of the country when the whole of the country most needed the government to take action. The primary consequence of this, I contend, has been to make government action popular all by itself, regardless of any particular policy.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary. One example:

The industry hit hardest by Covid? Novelty hand buzzers. —Conan O'Brien

How do those good cops plan to hold bad ones accountable?

D’anne Witkowski writes the Creep of the Week column for Between the Lines, the Michigan gay newspaper. In the print edition dated April 1, 2021 the creep was Asa Hutchinson, governor of Arkansas. I specified this was the print version because I did not find the same article online, so I don’t have a link. Hutchinson got the award for vetoing the bill that bans gender affirming care for transgender people. Wait, wouldn’t killing a bill like that be a good thing? Yeah, but he vetoed it knowing the legislature needed only a simple majority to override the veto. So this was merely grandstanding. This, of course, is not the only bill approved or coming up for a vote in states across the country. Witkowski wrote:

The purpose of this bill, and all the copycat bills like it across the country, is to distract from the vitally important issues Republicans are either fine with – like racism – or don’t care about – like COVID-19 – or want to stop – like voting.

Another one of these bills is before the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs. The witness giving testimony was Kai Shappley. She is a transgender girl, 10 years old. She referred to an anti-trans bathroom bill of a few years ago as she said:

I’ve been having to explain myself since I was three or four years old. Texas legislators have been attacking me since pre-K. I am in the fourth grade now. I do not like spending my free time asking adults to make good choices. ... It makes me sad that some politicians use trans kids like me to get votes from people who hate me just because I exist.

The bill is written so that if Kai’s mother Kimberly approved of gender affirming care she could be accused of being a child abuser. Kimberly urged lawmakers not to force her to leave the state. Yesterday I wrote that Biden has said he is open to negotiations with Congress over his infrastructure bill. EJ Dionne of the Washington Post said there is a second component to negotiations:

“We will know how serious Republicans are when we see a meaningful counteroffer. Until then, there is no negotiating partner for the White House.” @JRubinBlogger GOPers can’t complain about Biden acting without them until they tell us what they’d do.

In a way the GOP has told us what they would do: nothing. Hunter of Daily Kos discussed the inevitability of “vaccine passports.”

The idea that certain venues or means of travel may require you to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination, during a deadly worldwide pandemic, is hardly an out-there idea. It's the fastest possible path to returning to "normal," by allowing the known-safe population to fill convention halls, take vacations, attend in-person college classes, and otherwise fill American business coffers with sweet, sweet post-pandemic spending sprees. The idea of allowing the Americans now immune (mostly!) to the virus to again gather together, however, also implies that unvaccinated people who may themselves carry and spread the virus will be left out of those first reopenings. Pandemic denialists are of course particularly irate over that perceived new infringement on their "freedoms" to infect however many Americans they damn well want to, and colloquially calling documents to prove vaccination a "passport" was probably bound to put a United Nations-slash-"globalist"-slash-illuminati tinge to the effort for that very large proportion of the public that sees conspiracy in every coffee cup. ... Proof of COVID-19 vaccination looks like it will become a commonplace requirement among state institutions and private business alike in the coming months because, again, it is the only plausible way to lift emergency pandemic restrictions against large-scale gatherings that have currently shuttered tourism-dependent industries, trade shows, and everything else involving large sums of money provided by large crowds of people.

Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed all the expenses the unvaccinated will cause the rest of us to pay.

The costs of caring for these vaccine denialists who spent months pooh-poohing the vaccines that were made available free to nearly everyone by the summer of 2021 will be passed on to all of us in the form of higher insurance premiums, and probably higher taxes as well.

We will have to deal with new variants of the virus, perhaps getting a COVID shot into an annual event, like the flu. There is also the cost of damage to the economy. People who get sick are usually away from work for several weeks.

So the next time you hear a Republican declaring he or she has no intention to be vaccinated, be sure to ask how they intend to pay for your increased insurance costs. And you might want to offer them the option of setting up an auto-pay, so the checks to you won’t stop when they get sick.

Jared Yates Sexton tweeted:

If you’re going to talk about white evangelicals not getting the vaccine you have to talk about apocalypticism and the Mark of the Beast as tools of political fearmongering and how the church is part of a coalition to protect white, patriarchal, aristocratic power. After all these years, after watching white evangelicals treat Trump as a messiah, after watching the cultish devotion, it’s time to stop treating this like it’s just a religion and isn’t part of a much larger political project.

Curtis Gilbert tweeted:

The Minnesota police officer charged today with killing Daunte Wright isn’t the first cop to mistake a gun for a Taser. It happens every year or two. Departments have tweaked policies to reduce the confusion, but one thing hasn’t changed: Tasers are still shaped like guns.

Leah McElrath responded:

There is no reason for all police to be armed with handguns and live ammunition. There are many other effective tactical options that are less lethal. For certain situations, armed officers with specialized training could be called in, like SWAT teams. There are other ways. The reality is the only way to prevent police in the US from shooting people to death is to disarm them. Again: other tactical options exist that are effective and less lethal. I am talking only about live ammo and handguns no longer being in possession of every street cop. We recruit police by appealing to people who want to be warriors, not peacekeepers or public servants. Then we equip them accordingly. The “blue line” view sees everyone who is NOT a cop—especially folks who aren’t white—as a potential enemy. Other countries do it differently. And if you’re white and think police violence somehow isn’t your concern, who do you think police are ultimately going to be using all that military equipment against? Hungry, thirsty, scared, and displaced people—with little regard to race. That’s where we’re headed.

Four years ago A.R.Moxon tweeted:

Honestly? I don't want to hear anymore about how most cops are good. I want to hear how those good cops plan to hold bad ones accountable.

And this week:

4 years ago, and I still haven’t heard a peep.

Kay Gilbert replied:

A good cop who sees a bad cop abusing their power and does nothing is a bad cop. Training and enforcement both need to send the message that you can't stand by and see the rules broken, and you'll be praised, not retaliated against, for reporting.

A reply from Al Bundy listed eight cops who were fired or driven to suicide for exposing corruption. Ashley Dye tweeted about the governor of Florida:

DeSantis wants to change how Florida verifies mail ballots by making it law for your ballot sig to match the most recent one on file. But would he pass that test? I spent ... a while ... with DeSantis' signatures for this @scontorno report.

Included are fourteen versions of DeSantis’ signature.

They benefit from these inequities

Ian Douglas Rushlau of the Daily Kos community discussed racism in America. Yeah, we had another white cop murder a black man. Rushlau quoted Michael Harriot in The Root. He gave several statistics about the uneven treatment of black people. One of them:

The Stanford Open Policing Project—the largest police stop project that ever existed—found that Black people are 2.5 times more likely to be stopped and 4 times more likely to be searched than white drivers even though white drivers were more likely to have contraband.

Rushlau quoted a tweet from Alex P:

murdering a guy over an (alleged) $300 late fee and then spending a million dollars on cop overtime and humvees to put his community in their place

To another quote of Harriott:

Maybe white people genuinely cannot fathom that white supremacy is responsible for these racial incongruities because, by proxy, it would also mean that they benefit from these inequities.

Harriot then discusses polls, such as 2/3 of white people believe a black person has as good a chance as getting a job for which they are qualified. Rushlau said such a number must include a high number of progressives. He expanded on Harriot as he wrote:

That’s because in a structurally racist society, racist views permeate the entire cultural landscape, and so those who hold them can maintain the illusion that they are not benefitting from and contributing to the racist framework. ... There are too many people here who don’t want to think the problem involves them. Too many who don’t want to undertake uncomfortable self-reflection, or face difficult choices. Too many who want to believe the problem is limited to ‘the real racists’, and ‘real racists’ are easy to spot, and ‘real racists’ are thankfully few in number, and of course are not among their friends, family, neighbors (and for goodness sake not to be found among political comrades).

One phrase of this post bothered me: “they benefit from these inequities.” How does a white person benefit from the oppression of a black person? Without that oppression of the other is the white person’s pay going to be any different? Probably not. Is the white person going to be treated any differently by society? Again, probably not (though I have more below). Is the white person going to be worse off because a black person has just as much? No. So how does the white person benefit? Because of the ways of social hierarchy the white person benefits by knowing there is a class of people below themselves in the social hierarchy. Here’s the more below: In a hierarchical society, which America definitely is, someone is in the lowest level. If that level isn’t taken up by black people or people of color, the society will figure out another way someone else, some group of white people, will be put on that lowest level. So yeah, white people benefit. Even if they are oppressed by the wealthy (and I could talk a lot about that is done) there would always be someone lower. Laura Clawson of Kos started a post with:

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, far-right activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, have quite the scheme going. She takes in dark money contributions to her Tea Party-connected nonprofit, Liberty Central, and organizes Republicans on exactly the kind of issues that often reach the Supreme Court. He sits on the Supreme Court and never recuses himself as justices are called on by federal law to do in certain situations, including ones where their spouses have financial interests.

While court reforms are being talked about Justice Stephen Breyer warned any changes will be seen as political and that would further erode trust in the Court. Laura Clawson responded:

That ship sailed when then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell held open a seat on the court for nearly a year of then-President Barack Obama’s term to give Republicans a chance to fill it. It sailed again when McConnell then rushed through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett weeks before an election. And it has sailed repeatedly thanks to the actions of the Thomases.

The corruption of Ginni and Clarence Thomas is not a new story. People called it out at least by 2010.

So, no, Justice Breyer, expanding the court—something with lots of historical precedent—or otherwise reforming it would not be what undermined trust by creating the perception of political motivation. You have only to look around you on the court to see what’s done that.

As for that court reform, Clawson reported in another post that Biden has created a commission to study what to do and report back to him in six months. As part of her report she quoted a tweet by Ari Berman:

5 of 6 conservative Supreme Court justices were appointed by GOP presidents who initially lost popular vote & confirmed by senators representing minority of Americans. This is why we need to expand/reform the courts.

Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin of WV is critical to getting anything through the Senate and he appears to be glorying in the role of the deciding vote. Yes, there is still the filibuster to get rid of and Manchin is the deciding vote for that too. Biden has proposed a huge infrastructure bill that includes a tax increase on corporations. Joan McCarter of Kos reported Manchin has said the hike is too big, though it would still be far lower than before the 2017 tax scam law. Annoyingly, Manchin has been repeating GOP talking points. One of those talking points is from GOP Sen. Roger Wicker of MS. He said that the proposal is horrible because it would raise taxes on the small business job creators. Except it doesn’t. To be affected by the proposal the business would no longer be small. Wrote McCarter:

This opposition from Republicans—and Manchin—to making big multinational corporations pay more in taxes is not about jobs. It's about protecting shareholders, as usual. Now what will create jobs is an ambitious infrastructure plan creating works projects in every state in the country, like Biden's. ... That's what's at stake here. Actual real jobs rebuilding the country, as opposed to the mythical ones corporations are not going to create if they don't have to pay taxes. The Republican line in the sand is bulls---. Manchin reinforcing it as his excuse to oppose this bill is even worse.

In another post McCarter reported on a meeting Biden had with a bipartisan group of lawmakers, telling them he’s open to negotiations, then listening to what they have to say, during and after the meeting. McCarter wrote:

That could be part of Biden's strategy here. On the one hand, demonstrating that he is willing to consider Republican ideas and inviting them to sit down and talk seems a fool's errand. Because they will never agree to help him. So there's the other hand—leading Manchin to the self-realization that he's an idiot. It could work. Because Republicans, however nice Biden is to them, will never help pass this bill. Meanwhile, Biden is maintaining the position that opposing this bill on the basis of that tax increase is politically very dumb for Republicans (and Manchin) because ordinary people are “sick and tired of being fleeced.” Kerry Eleveld has all the recent (and some historical) polling there, demonstrating that for at least the past six years, more than two-thirds of the American voting public has said corporations “don't pay their fair share” in taxes. On Biden's specific plan, 65% say “yes, raise corporate taxes to do that.” Biden is taking that polling, as well as all the other polls, into his Oval Office meetings with Republicans. He's telling them flat-out that “Republican voters agree with what I'm doing.” His team sends that message every chance they get. “If you looked up 'bipartisan' in the dictionary, I think it would say support from Republicans and Democrats,” senior Biden adviser Anita Dunn told reporters this weekend. “It doesn't say the Republicans have to be in Congress.”