Any pattern to them other than as roadblocks

My performance group played our fourth and last Christmas concert this afternoon. It went well! We played at a big assisted living residence, so we were required to show our vaccine status when we arrived. For the size of the complex the attendance seemed small. Our equipment is now packed away until rehearsals resume the first week of January. Sen. Joe Manchin has been in the news – which seems to be his constant goal. On Friday Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos reported that a few Democratic senators, notably not ones on the left, have started discussing the filibuster. They haven’t agreed to end it, though they are talking about ways to make it harder. One idea is to force the filibustering party to actually continually hold the Senate floor. Another is to change needing 60 votes to end a filibuster to needing 41 votes to keep it going. Manchin is somewhat in favor of the reforms (his vote is critical, as it is for all things Democrats want to do). He seems to be convinced that the Senate is broken. He saw that in the voting rights bill and in trying to establish the commission to investigate the Capitol attack. So maybe we will get the voting rights bill passed. Also on Friday Laura Clawson of Kos reported Manchin put up more objections to the Build Back Better bill. Biden continued to be patient in negotiating with Manchin. Fellow Democrats said again how urgent the many programs in the bill are. And today, Hunter of Kos reported Manchin went on Fox News (!) to say, “I've tried everything humanly possible. I can't get there. This is a no.” Which effectively kills the BBB bill. The White House released a statement saying Manchin is a liar without actually using that word. Manchin had repeatedly expressed his commitment to Biden over the last few months and on Tuesday had been actively negotiating with the prez. The WH statement said in part:

If his comments on FOX and written statement indicate an end to that effort, they represent a sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position, a breach of his commitments to the President and the Senator's colleagues in the House and Senate.

Hunter added:

The White House, in other words, believes that Joe Manchin lied to both Biden and his colleagues about his intentions. That's not an outrageous supposition: Manchin has continually raised new objections to the framework, one after another, only to balk at something else each time his new demands are met. Manchin, who has heavy financial interests in West Virginia coal mining, the plan to directly attack climate change by modernizing American infrastructure to move away from oil, gas, and coal, has raised objections to everything from lowering the cost of insulin to the Child Tax Credit, but critics have suspected Manchin of acting in bad faith—or even corruptly—so as to defeat a climate change plan that likely threatens the Manchin family's own coal sales. The continual dishonesty with which Manchin has attacked the BBB framework, citing concerns as diverse as inflation and deficits while misrepresenting the bill's effect on both, supports this this theory. But Manchin has also repeatedly flipped back and forth on his stances seemingly spuriously, leading others to wonder whether many of those flips come from a need for showboating that has frequently lapped Manchin's understanding of the facts. ... Manchin's true intentions can probably best be gleaned from his actions. His unending series of new objections to the climate change-tackling package were introduced serially, each new dealbreaker coming immediately after negotiations succeeded in overcoming his objections. This delayed the bill interminably—but at no point did Manchin and negotiators seem any closer to finding the last of his objections, or any pattern to them other than as roadblocks that threatened to poison the legislation for others. ... It seems reasonable to suspect that Manchin's goals have always been the same: Delay the anti-climate-change bill as long as possible, using whatever arguments are required, only "killing" the bill outright after stringing his colleagues along until the last possible moment.

News Corpse of the Kos community summarized more of the WH rebuttal. This includes several points refuting comments Manchin has been saying over the last few months. This post also includes a video of Manchin’s appearance on Fox News and notes that Manchin’s words leave a little bit of wiggle room. So maybe some aspects of the BBB bill can be combined to form another bill. We switch from a Democrat behaving badly to a Republican doing something good (though don’t ever forget she is a Republican and supports all but one of the party’s goals). Eleveld reported that Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming is quite unlikely to be reelected in 2022. The reason is she is the vice chair investigating the Capitol attack and the nasty guy. So she has only a year remaining in office and she looks to make the most of it to bring about some justice. So Cheney is busy laying out the case the nasty guy and his minions committed the crime of obstructing Congress. She has also been pretty good at manipulating the press. She contrasted the on-air coverage of the attack by Fox News while behind the scenes their hosts were trying to get the nasty guy to intervene in the attack. But she isn’t out to score political points, instead justice remains her goal. She is in a race against time to gather enough evidence to force the Justice Department to act. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post:

The good news is that more detailed data shows not many Americans favor political violence as some previous surveys suggested. When the pollsters screened out “inattentive respondents” and provided definitions of various undemocratic behavior, they found “support is 9% for threats, 8% for harassment, 6% for non-violent felonies, 4% for violent felonies, 4% for violence if the other party wins the 2024 election, 4% for violence on January 6, and 5% for violence to restore Trump to the presidency.” The bad news is that still represents millions of people.

Clawson discussed the contrast between states and schools that have passed policies to ban Critical Race Theory (the catchall term for discuss anything about race) and actual incidents of racism. An NBC News report showed the number of schools with racial hate crimes went from 543 in 2016 to 1276 in 2018. Racism in schools is all over the place. Clawson then listed several schools, not all in the South, where students protested the racism. Many note the schools’ administrations support white students differently that students of color. Clawson noted:

All it takes is a small advance in anti-racism for an explosive backlash of white fury that swamps the progress.

Mark Sumner of Kos reported that conspiracy theories such as saying the government is trafficking young girls are not only wrong, but harmful. The theories prompt people to take actions into their own hands causing harm to innocent people. Those believing the theories overload police departments with false reports delaying action on actual crimes. A claim that a specific child has been abducted even though the child is safely at home threatens the child when no one believes she is really safe. Rates of sexual violence against children has actually fallen by more than half since the 1990s, yet to those who believe the theories it doesn’t feel that way.

It’s easy to understand why plotting against a government that you sincerely believe is engaged in this kind of behavior would seem not just acceptable, but admirable. That’s why claims of child sex trafficking are the perfect gateway drug, luring people in to QAnon and other conspiracies. People get hooked by their hearts. Snagged on their sympathies.

Even Pizzagate is making a comeback through young people posting on social media. They just want to help. Amy Coney Barrett of the Supreme Court has been justifying banning abortion by saying carrying a baby to term and giving it up for adoption is no big deal, just a temporary burden. Ashton Lattimore of Kos Prism replied that Barrett is wrong. She listed all the ways pregnancy can permanently change a person’s body and endanger their life. In addition, there are significant costs to pregnancy that are a burden to a person in poverty. So, even though the Court is likely to ignore the question, it is good that Justice Sonya Sotomayor asked, “When does the life of a woman and putting her at risk enter the calculus?” Michael Harriot tweeted a thread about copaganda – the propaganda of shows on television that portray cops in a favorable light. Most people don’t have contact with the police and when they do it is a traffic stop. So our perceptions are based on what we see in the media – on TV news and TV programs. Harriot listed studies that show TV programs make us more fearful of crime and more confident in police. This copaganda began in 1949 when a washed up radio actor wanted to get rid of the image of the bumbling Keystone Cops by portraying the rank and file officers. The LAPD signed on with the condition the officers were portrayed as heroes. They wanted to dispel the image of police as racist and violent. Dragnet premiered on TV in 1951 – just before 8 LAPD officers were indicted for corruption and brutality. The show became the template for every cop show since then. And that shapes how we see police. That perception leads to distortions. People believe crime is rising when it is actually falling. People also believe every crime is solved, that police are the only ones that can solve them, and that a policeman’s job is dangerous (though it really isn’t as dangerous as being a garbageman). People see that two thirds of the victims on crime shows are white but the thugs are always black. Cops shoot more black people more than anyone shoots at cops. And more white people shoot cops than black people do. Cop shows almost always have a “technical consultant” – a law enforcement officer advising the show. In 1974 the US government advised police departments to aggressively push this copaganda.

Why does this matter? Because it's hard to understand why police stop more Black drivers, search more Black drivers & patrol black neighborhoods more even though it is an UNEQUIVOCAL FACT that white people use more drugs and are more likely to have contraband... Unless you know about copaganda. You can't understand why that lady locked her door, grabbed her purse and called the cops to report a "suspicious looking" person in her neighborhood unless you watch copaganda and know that "suspicious" is a code word for "Black" And it's hard to explain how so many people can see videos, statistics, and evidence of police brutality and corruption but still resist reforming the police & the criminal justice system. Unless, of course, you know about the 60-year-old marketing campaign called copaganda.