We had to check every room for jerks

Joe Biden had done another first. Marissa Higgens of Daily Kos reported he is the first president to issue a formal proclamation for Transgender Day of Visibility, which was yesterday. Thank you, sir. His recognition is very much needed with the growing number of state bills that ban trans women from women’s sports and that ban gender affirming health care. As part of Transgender Day of Visibility Jesse Thorn tweeted a thread about being the father of a transgender girl. It has been hard, though parenting is hard.

We still had to (have to) be on guard all the time. Every new care situation (camp, sports, babysitter, friends' parents) had to get a briefing. We had to check every room for jerks. Because being misgendered, or forced to explain yourself is traumatic for a young kid. We basically had to be the professional trainers for every set of grownups that entered our kids' lives. It was and remains exhausting. I can only imagine what it's like for adult trans and gender non-conforming people.

While the Georgia legislature was busy passing their voter suppression bills, Delta Airlines (headquarters in Atlanta) supported that effort. In another post Higgins reported that Delta is now changing its tune, declaring the law “unacceptable” and “based on a lie.” Delta, and other Atlanta corporations, got a lot of complaints about their support, or at least inaction, when the suppression bill moved through the legislature. Did Delta reverse stance to stave off a boycott? Do they really see the bill as a mistake? Higgins included a tweet from Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee:

Ok @Delta you changed your tune... good! Next step, let’s move the words into action. What will you do to address this issue? How are you going to help protect the rights of all American voters? #PassHR1

HR1 is the big voter protection bill passed by the US House, which would nullify what Georgia just did. So, Delta, if you’re serious... This one is important to me because Delta uses Detroit as a hub and I can get to a lot more places and do so more easily on more direct flights on Delta than I can with any other airline flying out of Detroit. Biden’s new infrastructure bills include provisions to tax the rich, though the raises don’t totally roll back the nasty guy’s tax cuts. Sahil Kapur of NBC News tweeted:

Buried in the new Morning Consult/Politico poll is an eye-popping statistic: Voters by a 2-to-1 margin prefer a $3 trillion infrastructure bill that includes tax hikes on $400K+ and corporations over one that excludes those tax hikes.

Adam Jentleson, who wrote a book about the filibuster, responded:

People *want* to tax the rich. It's not some disadvantage Democrats have to work around. It's a political opportunity we can lean into.

Robert Maguire, a former dark money sleuth, tweeted a link to an article by Jane Mayer of the New Yorker describing the efforts of the Koch organization trying to block HR1. Maguire added:

This audio obtained by @JaneMayerNYer is really incredible. In it, an official at a Koch-run advocacy group details frustration at the fact that the pro-democracy, anti-dark money reforms in HR1 are popular among both Democrats and Republicans alike. What do you call the form of government wherein broadly popular, bipartisan reforms are strangled through procedural means in Congress, in the name of protecting billionaires' rights to continue to buy political access and influence in secret? Asking for the Republican party. The Koch group has published a piece putting their spin on the results. It provides yet another example of wealthy white men fighting to keep their political spending secret by comparing themselves—with a straight face—to the NAACP in Alabama in the 1950s.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted a bit of Mayer’s article as a cheer.

[Koch research director Kyle McKenzie] warned that the worst thing conservatives could do would be to try to “engage with the other side” on the argument that the legislation “stops billionaires from buying elections.” McKenzie admitted, “Unfortunately, we’ve found that that is a winning message, for both the general public and also conservatives.” He said that when his group tested “tons of other” arguments in support of the bill, the one condemning billionaires buying elections was the most persuasive—people “found that to be most convincing, and it riled them up the most.”

Campaigning to turn public opinion against the bill won’t work. They are admitting that. That leaves using procedural maneuvers (the filibuster) to keep a vote from happening.