They can’t stomach the implications of their own beliefs

Happy Pi Day! Today’s date (in America) is 3.14. Back in February I wrote Republicans absolutely would give a microphone to Robert Hur, the special counsel that added a bit about Biden’s age and memory into his explanation on why he wasn’t charging Biden for keeping official documents (which Biden promptly returned when they were found). A couple days ago that mic was given to Hur. And it didn’t go as well as Republicans wanted. Alas, in my regular sources I can’t find a decent summary article. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported that the House Judiciary Committee is realizing their previous methods of attacking Biden aren’t going to work. But that doesn’t mean they’ll stop trying. They are looking for other routes of attack. I had written that Republicans don’t seem to mind that their donations to the RNC and the nasty guy campaign are being diverted to pay the nasty guy’s legal bills. Sumner reported that a Civiqs poll puts numbers to that statement:

Fielded March 9-12, the poll finds that 63% of Republican voters say either that they want the RNC to cover Trump’s legal bills, or that they don’t care if it does. Only 26% of Republican voters oppose using the national party’s funds to cover the cost of Trump’s legal tab.

The poll shows 81% of Democrats disapprove of the RNC covering those legal bills. Sumner says we should be pleased with it.

If whatever cash the RNC can collect is going to Trump, then it’s not going to Republican candidates trying to gain an edge in the Senate. It’s not going to Republican members in the House, every one of whom has to defend their seat this fall. And it’s not going to races for governors, state attorneys general, state legislators, local officials, or judges. The consequence of having an authoritarian party ruled over by a single corrupt family at the behest of a single corrupt candidate is that all the money goes to one person. Trump is a money pit that the RNC can feed but never satisfy. Everyone else will go hungry. Republicans say they are okay with that. Democrats should be too.

Joan McCarter of Kos reported:

The blockbuster news Tuesday was Republican Rep. Ken Buck’s surprise announcement that he can’t bear to stick it out until November and is resigning next week. “It is the worst year of the nine years and three months that I’ve been in Congress and having talked to former members, it’s the worst year in 40, 50 years to be in Congress,” Buck told CNN. The Colorado conservative had already announced that this would be his last term in office, but now he’s decided he can’t tolerate any more. “This place has just devolved into this bickering and nonsense and not really doing the job for the American people,” he added. Buck had a parting shot for Johnson, just to keep him looking over his shoulder. “I think it’s the next three people that leave that they’re going to be worried about,” he told Axios on Tuesday.

Pat Byrnes posted a cartoon of a bunch of elephants in a conference room and one saying:

We have to shut it down. Every day the government is running, it is clearer we have no idea how to run it.

Hunter of Kos reported on another Civiqs poll, this one was asking about whether in-vitro fertilization should be banned. Overall only 6% of voters say IVF should be illegal. Even among Republicans only 11% say it should be illegal. This is not an issue people are “divided” over, as the far right insists. In looking at a couple more questions in the poll Hunter wrote:

And that’s the central problem with the Republican Party's extreme stance on when "life" supposedly begins. You can get almost (but not quite) half of Republican voters to parrot that hard-right line and say a clump of cells not even differentiated enough to have a single nerve or organ constitutes a "child." Only 20% of Republican voters oppose legal protections for IVF patients and providers. That's the difference between an ideological stance and a real-world one: The majority of Republican voters can’t stomach the implications of their own beliefs. Not if it means losing fertility treatments.

Charles Jay of the Kos community reported that a settlement has been reached in the lawsuit brought against Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. The law hasn’t been overturned, which will take more legal work and more time. The settlement will give some relief in the meantime. The law now applies only to some types of classroom instruction. Kids can talk about being LGBTQ and about their LGBTQ parents. Books can return to the library. Anti-bullying training can refer to gay kids. Classroom lessons that tangentially talk about LGBTQ kids is OK. I think what that leaves is such things as a teacher saying this is what homosexuality is. The tide is turning. The enthusiasm of anti-LGBTQ seems to be waning at least in Florida, now that DeathSantis is out of the presidential race. (Hmm.) A sign of low enthusiasm is the Florida legislature adjourned last Friday and left 21 of 22 anti-LGBTQ bills behind, effectively killing them. It’s been about a month since I’ve thought to look for threads by Michael Harriot on Threadreader. In this first thread he talks about becoming a “diversity” hire. Maybe that’s not the right word because he was hired to write for the Amber Ruffin Show where Ruffin is black and the writing room was majority black. Maybe it is the right word. That writing room was in sharp contrast to the usual writing rooms in Hollywood that are mostly to all white. My reason for including this is Harriot included a six minute video of the first thing he wrote for Ruffin. It’s an explanation of why home ownership is rigged against black people. That comes from the “redlining” instituted in a law enacted in the Great Depression to help white people buy houses. It didn’t specifically exclude black people, but it did exclude the areas, colored red on maps, that were majority black. That legacy lives on. The video is a good explanation. In a second thread Harriot poses a Black History Month challenge. Who are three people responsible for saving the most lives in history? Of course, Harriot names three black people who saved millions, maybe a half billion. The first is Henrietta Lacks. Cells from her were harvested without her consent. But the cells (alas not Henrietta) have proved to be immortal and have provided a standard way to test advancements in treating and preventing polio, AIDS, Parkinson’s, COVID, and many other maladies. The second is Dr. Charles Drew, who created the process for collecting and storing blood plasma. He also created the blood bank. He was appointed to lead the Red Cross Blood for Britain project during WWII. The third is Onesimus, an enslaved person, who brought the idea of vaccines to America. That prompted Dr. Edward Jenner to use the cowpox as a smallpox vaccine. Though some states had bans on vaccine mandates, George Washington required his troops to be inoculated, first in Morristown and then in Valley Forge. That was important to winning the Revolutionary War. No Onesimus? Maybe no America. The third thread is about black people and education. Europe was in the Dark Ages at the same time as the Islamic Golden Age. One important tenant of the time was sharing information. That meant information was not for just the privileged. And that meant everyone should be educated. That was helped by Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, head librarian at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. He authored one of the most important books ever, the “al-Kitāb al-Mukhtaṣar fī Ḥisāb al-Jabr wal-Muqābalah.” That got shortened as “Al-Jabr” and we now know it as algebra. By the time the slave trade began Islam, and the idea that all should be educated, had spread across the northern half of Africa.

Although we talk about the spread of Christianity, up to 40% of enslaved Africans came from predominately Muslim parts of West Africa, where education & knowledge were not restricted by wealth & class like in Europe. But because literate slaves were considered dangerous, reading & writing were FORBIDDEN, many enslaved people had to hide their knowledge.

Onesimus (see above) was an enslaved literate Muslim. Since Europeans tended to think education was for the aristocrats, literacy in the American South was quite low. Harriot doesn’t say it, but I wonder if many slaves off the boats were better educated than their masters. So it’s not surprising that by 1740 there were laws that slaves were not to be taught how to read or write and that writing by slaves was banned. Also banned was math. Harriot then looks at a modern math problem. Pundits have talked about the difference black people voting for the nasty guy will have. Yeah, that’s not going to happen. Do a bit of math. All those extra black votes would have made no difference in the nasty guy losing in 2020. So why are there so many stories about the difference the black vote would make when there are so many more white people? Or as Harriot put it:

Why aren't there any stories about how WHITE PEOPLE KEEP WHITE PEOPLEING?

Perhaps it is because about three-quarters of journalists are white? A bit of fun: Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos included, as a brief sanity break, a two minute video of the Boston Typewriter Orchestra.