Month: March 2021

Dan Pfeiffer’s newsletter today brings up an excellent point that sort of follows up on my Salon column this morning. In that piece I make the point that we are still failing to see the power of television in the age of social media. It still matters:

Back in 2013, I was walking down the colonnade in the White House with President Obama. He had just finished a particularly annoying interview where he was peppered with questions from a glorified teleprompter reader about his political standing.

Less than a year removed from winning re-election amidst a slow economy and becoming the first President since Eisenhower to win 51 percent of the vote twice, the media questioned Obama’s political skills and communications chops.

“Why are we always better at getting our message out during the campaign?” he asked me.

“Well, nearly a billion dollars in advertising certainly didn’t hurt,” I responded a bit too quickly.

“You think?” he responded even more quickly.

The bemused, bordering-on-annoyed look on Obama’s face suggested that I failed to recognize the rhetorical nature of his question.

The messaging problems we were confronting in 2013 are the same ones that Joe Biden and his White House are confronting in 2021 as they figure out how to sell the American Rescue Plan. As I learned firsthand, a strategy that depends primarily on the White House Press Corps is doomed to fail. The traditional media has neither the reach nor the inclination to tell the public about the ins and outs of the American Rescue Plan. A reality that was on full display during Biden’s first “formal press conference” and one with which all Democrats need to come to terms. […]

Yesterday’s press conference highlighted the challenge of press conferences — and press coverage — in selling the American Rescue Plan. Biden took questions for about an hour, but none of the questions were about the pandemic, vaccines, or the American Rescue Plan. Honestly, it is shocking there were no questions on the biggest issue facing the country in decades, but there were a couple of questions asked about Biden’s plans for 2024.

Seriously.

Susan Glasser of the New Yorker is a card-carrying member of the Washington media establishment, yet even she was compelled to express her shock and frustration:

There was not a single question, meanwhile, about the ongoing pandemic that for the past year has convulsed life as we know it and continues to claim an average of a thousand lives a day. How is this even possible during a once-in-a-century public-health crisis, the combating of which was the central theme of Biden’s campaign and remains the central promise of his Presidency? It’s hard not to see it as anything other than an epic and utterly avoidable press fail.

[…]

Utilizing the media as the primary communication vehicle means the success or failure of our political strategy depends on the whims of news executives who do not share our interests.

Think of it this way. Our message is the product, and the voters are the customers. A business would never entrust the distribution of its product to a competitor. Yet, that’s exactly what Democrats do when they rely on the New York Times and others to tell voters about our accomplishments and agenda.

The Republicans do not have this problem. They have spent decades building up a robust Right Wing media operation that serves as a party organ communicating the message to the faithful. For all of the Democratic bemoaning of the power of Fox News et al., we generally understate the power of this apparatus. Despite the different entities and personalities that make up the Right Wing machine, it operates with a hive mind-like consistency and discipline. When opportunity strikes, they pivot on a dime to the most politically appealing topics. Right-Wing media coverage of the Biden presser relentlessly focused on a ridiculous New York Post story that falsely claimed Biden used a cheat sheet for the answers. They gravitated to this story because Biden’s steady performance gave them no other opportunity to push their false message that the President isn’t cognitively up to the job.

When Barack Obama was President, the Right Wing media covered the economy as if it was a disaster. They ignored positive news, trumped-up negative news, and just made a lot of stuff up. The moment Trump was elected, they began describing the economy as the greatest in American history even though the pace of job creation had slowed under Trump. Fox News played a similar role during the Bush Administration by pretending the Iraq War was succeeding and savaging any Democrat that wondered why America invaded a country that didn’t attack us on 9/11.

The Republicans do not need the traditional media to get their message out. They do not need to go through the filter. They can deliver their chosen message directly into the cortexes of their voters. Democrats do not (yet) have this ability, and it’s why we need reinforcements.

In the long run, the only way to solve our problem and compete with the Right is to build up a robust progressive media ecosystem. Much good work has been done on this front, but we are still very far behind. In the meantime, Democrats need to supplement their earned media efforts with paid advertising. The great news is that an array of Democratic groups are doing exactly that as part of the effort to sell the American Rescue Plan.

According to an Axios report:

The three major Democratic campaign committees — the DNC, DSCC, and DCCC — are running ads promoting the American Rescue Plan … Outside groups are allocating millions of dollars to run ads across swing states and competitive districts, according to a Democratic strategist tracking the efforts.

One of those outside groups is Unite the Country, a pro-Biden Super PAC. Here’s the ad they are running in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia.

This is an incredibly welcome turn of events. No matter what the media decides to cover, persuadable voters will see a steady stream of content about the American Rescue Plan. The fact that Democratic donors are willing to invest in advertising campaigns this far out from the election represents a huge shift in strategy and an understanding of just how much the media environment has changed.

I am not arguing that Democrats should ignore the media or stop taking their questions. President Biden should have a regular cadence of press conferences and take questions when it makes sense. The media has an important role to play, but it’s not the role many Democrats believe it to be. Communicating through the press should be part of the strategy, but it can’t be the whole strategy. And it’s not enough for the rest of us to sit on the sidelines. We have a role to play too. We can share positive stories, remind our networks about the positive accomplishments, and post the ads on social media. Every one of us can be curators and amplifiers.

And if you don’t believe me. Re-watch that press conference.

They cannot count on the news media to help them tell their story. Trump could because he had Fox News lying for him as if he was a member of his communication team. It’s not the same for Biden.

I don’t think people understand what really happened in Georgia this week. The vote suppression law is terrible in so many ways. But there is one provision that makes it a democracy killer:

Much of the work administering elections in Georgia is handled by the state’s 159 counties. The law gives the State Election Board new powers to intervene in county election offices and to remove and replace local election officials. That has led to concerns that the Republican-controlled state board could exert more influence over the administration of elections, including the certification of county results.

One target for intervention could be Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold that contains most of Atlanta. The heavily populated county has been plagued by problems, including long lines, and it is often singled out by Republican officials. Under the law, the board could intervene in up to four counties at a time and install a temporary superintendent with the ability to hire and fire personnel including elections directors and poll officers.

This is ostensibly to give “the voters” faith that the elections are secure (since the Democrats stole it from Trump, dontcha know.) But I don’t think there’s even the slightest doubt that if there is a close election in 2022 for the Senate race or the presidential in 2024, they will simply refuse to certify a Democratic win. It is going to happen.

And by the way, they are also going to pass a laws in at least a few states that allows the state legislature to overturn elections at will. They have reason to believe there may be five Supreme Court justices who are willing to interpret Article II of the Constitution (which says, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations”) to mean that state legislatures have the power to decide the winner of the election if they want to. That is certainly what dear Leader Donald Trump wants his cult to believe. I have no reason to think the McConnell Court won’t go along with that.

The states are running with these sort of laws and I suspect they feel quite confident that they can get away with it. They know that Democrats won’t do the same thing and, more importantly, that they have nothing to fear from them if they did. The electoral college, Senate distortion and gerrymandering already gives them the leverage to hold minoritarian power as long as they can keep Republicans in the majority in the state legislatures in enough states.

The only legitimate election in the United State in the view of Republicans is one that they win. That is Donald Trump’s philosophy of life and now it is the philosophy of half the country as well.

CDC Director Walensky says she feels "impending doom" as COVID hospitalizations and deaths in the US increase: "Right now I'm scared" pic.twitter.com/ra58BtO9i2

— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) March 29, 2021

I posted this 3 weeks ago:

I find it almost incomprehensible that people are prematurely opening up around the country again. Apparently, it’s simply impossible to learn from experience in this country:

With each day and each vaccination, the US inches closer to the finish line of what has been a brutal battle against Covid-19.But it’s not over just yet.Infection numbers, after weeks of declines, now seem to have plateaued at high levels. The US has averaged more than 60,000 Covid-19 cases daily in the past week. More than 41,000 people remain hospitalized with the virus nationwide, according to the COVID Tracking Project. And an average of more than 1,700 US Covid-19 deaths were reported every day for the past seven days.

And highly contagious variants that are already circulating have experts worried another Covid-19 spike could be just weeks away. More than 2,700 cases of variants first spotted in the UK, South Africa and Brazil have been reported in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — but the agency has cautioned that’s not the total number of cases in the country, but rather those that have been spotted with the help of genomic sequencing

Spring break could be a perfect storm for spreading coronavirus variants. Don’t let that happenThe vast majority of these cases — at least 2,672 — are the more contagious variant known as B.1.1.7, first spotted in the UK. The variant has been found in 46 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, DC.”That strain is increasing exponentially, it’s spiking up,” infectious diseases specialist and epidemiologist Dr. Celine Gounder told CNN Saturday. “So we are probably right now on a tipping point of another surge.”

Speaking on the dangers of that variant, Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, warned CNN on Friday, “that virus is about to take off in the United States.”The variants are a big reason why experts have repeatedly warned that now is the time to double down on measures that work to curb the spread of the virus — and not ease Covid-19 restrictions.

“There are so many reasons why you don’t want to pull back just now,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN late last week. “You want to plan that you will be able, within a reasonable time, to pull back. But not at a time when we have circulating variants and when you have what looks like a plateauing of the decline in the cases.”

I will never understand this nihilism and cruelty. As an older person who is not old enough to get the vaccine for quite some time where I live, I feel more frightened by this virus than I have since the beginning. The idea of anyone getting COVID-19 now, ending up in the hospital and dying is just unbearably sad to me. I can’t understand why people won’t hold out for just a little while longer so that we don’t have thousands and thousands of unnecessary deaths.

We are on the cusp of having vaccines available for everyone, making it possible for all of us to be safe, but we just have to continue to stay vigilant for the next few months. These people who are having little kids burn their masks and insisting that businesses stop following the guidelines before we get to that point is just mindless contrariness that’s going to kill far more people over the next few months.

Aaaand. It’s happening, just as the prophets of doom predicted.

What is wrong with us?

Political analysts are still trying to figure out just what has caused the Republican Party in this country to move so far to the right in recent years, and there are many theories. Much has been made of the Trump-loving white working class’s perceived loss of economic success due to outsourcing and international trade and we’ve endlessly discussed their various grievances about losing the status and privileges they believe they are entitled to. We try to understand their confusion about changing cultural norms and the cascading disinformation that permeates social media. In the end, all we really know is that they are very upset and Donald Trump gave voice to their overwhelming anger and disdain for their fellow Americans.

Last week there was yet another congressional hearing with the top social media executives, this one focusing on the role of their companies in promoting extremism, misinformation, and cyberbullying. Republicans were most concerned about the companies censoring right-wing voices (although interestingly, they didn’t complain much about Donald Trump’s expulsion from all the platforms) and Democrats complained about disinformation and extremism being allowed to flourish on the platforms.

We don’t really know at this point how much of that affected the 2020 election. As Kevin Drum pointed out, we are still awaiting data to tell us just how much people relied on social media for their political information during the election but judging by past analysis of election campaigns, it really isn’t as influential as we might assume. There’s no doubt that Facebook and Youtube and to some extent Twitter can lead people down the conspiracy rabbit hole, and there’s little doubt that right-wing extremism has had a very comfortable home on all those sites. But according to the analysis that Drum cites, TV and talk radio are still where the action is. Fox and OAN and Newsmax may pick up ideas that percolate up through the fever swamps to social media. But really, it mostly goes the other direction.

Journalist Peter Slevin spent some months in Iowa before and after the election to get a sense of what the mostly rural, Republican voters were thinking. He reports in this piece in the New Yorker that basically, they are awash in disinformation and as a result have come to believe that Democratic voters are hardly even Americans anymore. Their own form of “identity politics” has been distilled down to “I am a Republican” in opposition to their enemies.

They believed that Donald Trump was the only person who could control the violent, socialist mob that was threatening their way of life. And they believed everything he said:

I met Kimberly Pont, the vice-chair of the Fayette County G.O.P., at a Mexican restaurant in the small city of Oelwein, and asked her what drove local residents to vote Republican. She said, “People could see the news. They could watch for themselves what was going on, when you have a party that’s not going to denounce rioting.” Pont believes covid-19 death figures are inflated, mail-in voting is dangerous, Biden is a “figurehead,” and Harris is unqualified. “I’m terrified,” she told me. “She is the most left-leaning of all the senators.” When I caught up with Pont this month, she told me that the failure by the courts to identify widespread election fraud left her “disappointed and disillusioned.”

Slevin noticed that in every house and business, right-wing talk radio was on in the background and the likes of the late Rush Limbaugh were saying things like this:

Obama’s been running the Democrats’ show since 2016. He ran the operation against Trump. He ran the Russia sting. He ran the Russian coup. He ran everything, and he’s running this.”

None of that is QAnon weirdness or Alex Jones and Infowars. It is standard issue mainstream conservative media, which millions of Republicans listen to every day and watch on Fox News and the lesser cable channels at night.

Throughout the Trump administration, there was an ongoing question about whether Fox News was the president’s brain or vice versa. I came to believe that it was a feedback loop with disinformation coming from both sides. There were numerous examples of Trump tweeting out some outlandish insult or idea just seconds after it had aired on the network. And the Fox News universe was dedicated to ensuring their audience saw Trump as their savior, often cleaning up his misstatements and amplifying his most effective messages to the faithful. They were a team.

Trump has begun to call into the shows again, clearly unable to keep out of the spotlight any longer. He checked in with Laura Ingraham a few days ago and made this stunning comment about January 6th:

Let's go to the video tape. https://t.co/oaT0nMllf1

— Ernest wilson (@wilson_ernest) March 26, 2021

You will note that at the end he said of “the left”: “they truly hate our country.” That is the message those people in Iowa hear from him and all the talkers on the radio and right-wing cable news.

The question is where they go from here. It’s unknown if Trump will maintain his influence. He intends to, of course, and unless he fades, these blatant lies will continue to be believed by tens of millions of people. He can draw an audience. But he can’t last forever and there’s little reason to believe that his offspring have whatever it is he has that appeals so much to these folks. But one Fox News celebrity is laying out a roadmap:

the right has become very honest about this https://t.co/XGFmce8Btq

— Devin (@devinkoneill) March 29, 2021

You’ll note that this is all predicated on the notion that the liberals are making them do it. Carlson is the most flagrant white nationalist of the big-name Fox News celebrities and he gets the biggest ratings, which I suspect is not a coincidence. Before this guest joined Carlson, the host was nearly hysterical about the migrants at the border. He said:

You’d think that if you’d caused a crisis of this magnitude that was going to change your country forever, possibly for the worse, you’d feel a moral obligation to learn a lot about it because it’s your crisis. You own it, you did it. But Biden hasn’t.”

A moral obligation to learn about a crisis? This is the same person who backed Trump’s COVID response to the hilt and has been recently pushing anti-vax propaganda.

If you want to know what’s fuelling right-wing extremism, you don’t have to dig deeply into obscure corners of the dark web. Look no further than Fox News. It isn’t just a ratings game for them and it isn’t all about money. Fox News is the beating heart of the white nationalist movement in the United States and they are indoctrinating millions of people day in and day out. In fact, Donald Trump himself is one of those people, he just doesn’t know it.

Salon

CNN:

Cairo, Egypt (CNN)The Ever Given container ship has been dislodged and is now floating, after blocking the Suez Canal for almost a week, authorities said Monday.

Tug boats had spent several hours on Monday working to free the bow of the massive vessel after dislodging the stern earlier in the day.

Marine traffic websites showed images of the ship away from the banks of the Suez Canal for the first time in seven days following an around-the-clock international effort to reopen the global shipping lane.

Earlier this morning (Washington Post):

ISMAILIA, Egypt — The giant cargo carrier blocking the Suez Canal was partly refloated early Monday morning, nearly a week after it wedged sideways, threatening the world’s global economy.

Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi declared mission accomplished later in the day, saying in a statement that “Egyptians have succeeded today in ending the crisis of the stranded ship in the Suez Canal.”

He portrayed the efforts as a patriotic victory that assured the world that Egypt could be trusted with overseeing the 13 percent of all global trade that passes through the crucial waterway.

https://youtu.be/Q3Lgq7meghg

Perhaps there was much ululation. Or at least much tug horn-blowing.

THE SHIP MOVED!! Although just 17 metres but this is good indication. The tugboats are all sounding their foghorns in jubilation. 👏👏👏#SuezBLOCKED #suezcanel #Suez #Evergreenship #Evergiven pic.twitter.com/YGuJaQv4mQ

— Guy With The Digger At Suez Canal (@SuezDiggerGuy) March 27, 2021

Crisis over. Resume consuming mass quantities.

The fight in the Senate over H.R. 1, the For The People Act passed in the House, is heating up as Democrats and the Biden administration prepare to go bare-knuckles over how and whether Americans can vote in 2022. The bill would restructure how voting in federal elections is conducted in the U.S. of A. Most importantly, it would restore Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act eviscerated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby decision. Among its other changes, the bill (Vox):

• Creates new national automatic voter registration that asks voters to opt out rather than opt in, ensuring more people will be signed up to vote. Requires chief state election officials to automatically register eligible unregistered citizens.
• Requires each state to put online options for voter registration, correction, cancellation, or designating party affiliation.
• Requires at least 15 consecutive days of early voting for federal elections; early voting sites would be open for at least 10 hours per day. The bill also prohibits states from restricting a person’s ability to vote by mail, and requires states to prepay postage on return envelopes for mail-in voting.
• Establish independent redistricting commissions in states as a way to draw new congressional districts and end partisan gerrymandering in federal elections.
• Prohibits voter roll purging and bans the use of non-forwardable mail being used as a way to remove voters from rolls.
• Restores voting rights to people convicted of felonies who have completed their sentences; however, the bill doesn’t restore rights to felons currently serving sentences in a correctional facility.

Sahil Kapur and Jane C. Timm at NBC News explain that the bill would also make Election Day a national holiday:

The divisions between the two parties are sharp. President Joe Biden and Democrats say federal intervention is needed to stop Republicans from reviving racist Jim Crow-style restrictions that make it harder for minorities to vote. Republicans say Democrats are executing a power grab to remove necessary protections on the voting process and usurp authority from states.

Where they agree: This is about the future of democracy.

The problem is Democrats and Republicans have vastly different definitions for the word, one expansive and the other restrictive. As Donald Trump believes and the Jan. 6 insurrection illustrates, the Republican definition is “heads we win, tails you lose.” As movement conservatism godfather, Paul Weyrich, once observed, Republican “leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Republicans in state after state mean to shrink the pool of eligible voters to improve their chances of winning elections. This they call election integrity.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) decried H.R. 1 as “a grab-bag of changes” that includes more than voting rights. Republicans are digging in and Democrats are strategizing on how to pass their legislation through the Senate with only 50 votes against a Republican filibuster:

“The choice is the republic or the filibuster — there is no third option,” said Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, a national network of progressive activists. “We are at an inflection point in American history. Down one path is a Trump-inspired white plutocracy, and down the other is a representative democracy.”

Levin said he will consider it a “personal, organizational and movement-wide failure of historic, catastrophic proportions” if the voting rights bills, along with making Washington, D.C., a state, don’t pass this year.

But at nearly 800 pages, the bill in present form may be too cumbersome. Rick Hasen (UC Irvine and Election Law Blog) argues a narrower, more-focused bill has a better chance of success than an all-eggs-in-one-basket approach. Furthermore, Hasen writes:

Some parts of it could well be found unconstitutional if it passed, such as a provision requiring states to re-enfranchise all people convicted of felonies who are not currently serving time in a correctional institution. Courts could potentially find that provision interferes with states’ constitutional right to set qualifications for voters.

But potential unconstitutionality of some provisions is not the main problem with H.R. 1. Instead, the problem is that the bill contains a wish list of progressive proposals that make it unlikely to survive debate in the Senate. In addition to sensible provisions protecting voting rights, the bill also contains controversial rules on campaign financing, including the creation of a public financing program for congressional candidates, new ethics rules for the Supreme Court, and a requirement that most candidates for president and vice president publicly disclose their tax returns.

Democrats’ all-or-nothing position on the bill may simply be an opening bid. If so, it means they have not begun by negotiating with themselves before bringing the legislation to the floor as they did with the Affordable Care Act.

Republicans see the demographic handwriting on the wall, refuse to moderate their stances to attract more voters, and are desperate to cherry-pick who can vote. Preserving democracy is not their goal. Preserving minority-rule for themselves is.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said of H.R. 1, “It’s an existential threat, I think, to our election system and to our democracy.” Staunchly opposed to the bill, Cornyn said, “Basically what they want to do is install a permanent partisan advantage and run all the elections out of Washington, D.C., and eliminate ballot integrity measures like voter ID.”

Translation: Democrats seek to extend the franchise and neutralize the structural advantages small states (dominated by Republicans) have enjoyed since the nation’s founding under the Constitution’s system for allocating senators and drawing congressional districts.

Internal migration to southern states such as Georgia is changing their political makeup permanently. Republican’s grip on those states and the country is loosening and there is nothing they can do to stop it. Not that they won’t try.

As Trump would say — sad!

Actually it’s pathetic. He did this at someone’s wedding. That’s how desperate the world’s sorest loser is to persuade people that he isn’t the world’s sorest loser.

It’s been over 4 months since the November election, and Donald Trump is still acting like a sore loser — that, or a belligerent wedding guest.

Check out this video we got of the former President all tux’d up for a reception that went down Saturday night at Trump’s fortress of solitude, Mar-a-Lago, where the former chief himself got on the mic at one point to say a few words for the happy couple, John and Megan Arrigo … but this speech would have nothing to do with the couple… it’s all about him.

Before everyone knew it, he was launching into politics … singing the same ol’ song about false claims the election was rigged.

Watch for yourself — DT rails on the Biden administration over what he considers shortcomings in the early months of his presidency, including foreign policy/deals with China and Iran … plus, Trump goes in on the border situation which is now drawing national attention.

It’s interesting … Trump seems to be saying the way he was handling things before his exit — separating kids from their parents and housing them in cages — was more humane than what’s happening now. At the moment, large groups of people are being sandwiched together in encampments, and the conditions are awful. He did not, however, mention the misery he caused these families when he was in charge.

You can tell he’s champing at the bit to get back in the race — as he harps on the election results once more. Sorry, man … gonna have to wait a bit.

This report is on TMZ which has historically been pretty kind to Donald Trump. They seem to have changed their tune.

I’m just sharing this great WSJ story because you need it. It’s the little things …

Jeff DeMars placed an order for a Cobble Hill Hannah sofa in Dragonfly (translation: green) from ABC Carpet & Home in November. Earlier this week, the 32-year-old program coordinator from Brooklyn received an email from the furniture retailer, signed by its CEO, alerting him that his sofa would be delayed until May.

He looked at the “CC” field and saw 204 other email addresses. His fellow customers weren’t invisibly BCC’d, but there on display.

So began the great couch conversation of 2021, with hundreds of strangers suddenly linked by their lack of a new sofa.

“It was pretty immediate that I was like, oh this is clearly a mistake,” says Mr. DeMars. “I didn’t have any plans for the evening so I figured, oh I might as well follow this and see where it goes.”

There were some inquiries about being refunded for shipping, says Mr. DeMars, but “no one really said ‘please remove me’ right away.”

Then out of nowhere, he says, someone named Zoe mentioned she was single and looking for a Jewish man: “That’s when things got really interesting,” Mr. DeMars says.

The accidental CC, a staple of office email culture for decades, typically sets off a cascade of intentional and unintentional reply-alls that drive its recipients mad: Otherwise smart people start asking, “Why am I getting these emails?” —which makes others on the thread demand to be taken off this list. That begets additional reply-alls telling everyone else to STOP REPLYING ALL. A comedian in the group usually seizes the opportunity like open-mic night.

The phenomenon is a frustrating spectacle of technological absurdity. But 13 months into the pandemic, this particular chain ended up bonding strangers and breaking the monotony of the 54th consecutive Tuesday night when no one had anything better to do.

[…]

Carolyn Ramo, 41, says that as the director of a nonprofit, she’s fastidious about communication and has a very busy inbox, so she was initially irritated by the arrival of the emails. The should-be owner of the Cobble Hill Boutique sofa in Brussels Midnight (also known as navy) made that known in her own reply to the chain. That didn’t stop others from adding their own replies, more than 150 in total, group members estimate.

“I wrote, ‘Yes it’s really insane to not BCC,’” Ms. Ramo says. “This is in all caps, exclamation point times six. Then I wrote, ‘A real amateur-hour move.’ Then I wrote, ‘You should give us all free shipping.’”

But once she was done with work that day, Ms. Ramo saw a reply from a woman who suggested everyone be more understanding given the pandemic. Hadn’t they ever had a bad day? That, along with an offer from a woman who said the group was welcome to hit her up if they needed any tile, made Ms. Ramo see the emails as less of a nuisance.

The tone shifted, Ms. Ramo says, away from couches and delivery times to other matters.

People started offering to set up Zoe on dates. One member of the email chain wondered if the group could manage to get Zoe engaged before their couches arrived. A few group members began taking screenshots of the emails to document the freewheeling exchange, which The Wall Street Journal reviewed.

Eventually chatter turned to all getting together one day, perhaps at one of their homes or at Zoe’s wedding.

Another respondent requested additional details to help the search for a groom: Was Zoe looking for someone Reform, Orthodox or Reconstructionist? An ABC customer on the thread from Seattle said a brother-in-law in Brooklyn was game for being set up.

Someone else chimed in to say she went from “extremely pissed off” to “feeling a degree of human connectedness with strangers” she hadn’t felt in a year.

Ms. Ramo devoured the replies. “We heard more about people’s pets,” she said. Someone’s cat, Spanky, had recently passed away and said the new couch was meant to help with the grief. Spanky had destroyed two couches and a love seat from the same store.

Ms. Ramo suspects that because many of the customers are New Yorkers, herself included, they’re hungry for the kinds of happenstance interactions with strangers that, pre-pandemic, occurred when people were out and about. She says that she plans to set Zoe up with her tennis coach. (Her tennis coach doesn’t know this yet.)

A subset of replies to the thread focused on the ABC fabric swatches some customers received before ordering their sofas: It turns out they double nicely as coasters. Multiple people emailed photos of drinks on their respective swatch-coasters. One noted that the group now knew how the upholstery held up to “repeated exposure to moisture” but wondered if velvet was the best choice.

Katie Bartasevich, 42, says that because she ordered her Cobble Hill Brownstone sectional in Theater Stream (gray) after seeing it in person, she didn’t take a fabric swatch home. When she saw pictures of the coasters, she felt left out. “Apparently I missed out on the coaster trend,” she posted to Instagram. She shared this and other observations over 2½ hours on Tuesday night, relaying the doings of the ABC chain to her followers.

“People are now starting to sign their emails with what couch they ordered,” she wrote. Someone named Karen sought design advice from the email group, asking whether the Geo armchair in Creta 92 (neon yellowish) would go nicely with the couch she had ordered in Vance Rose (pink) velvet.

“These emails came in and one was better than the next,” says Ms. Bartasevich, who works in advertising and lives in Manhattan.

After posting 30 or so email screenshots to an Instagram story until 11 that night, Ms. Bartasevich says she had to stop. Before doing so, she was contacted by her friend’s fiancé, who works for the dating app Hinge. The Hinge employee offered complimentary premium memberships to anyone on the email thread who was single. Ms. Bartasevich notified the group and heard back from six women taking her up on the offer.

Gus Goldsack, 34, a product manager from Brooklyn, initially replied to the thread with a quick joke about how he would look forward to meeting everyone at Zoe’s wedding. But as he got sucked into the thread, he kept seeing people comparing timelines for how long they had been waiting for their sofas and could see there was some genuine frustration.

About 80 emails in, he started to feel a pang of guilt. He replied all. “The weight of feeling like a fraud in this group is too much to bear,” he wrote. He had to “come clean.”

“I got the sofa in February,” Mr. Goldsack says. “It’s beautiful. I love it.”

He confessed to the email chain. Along with his confession, Mr. Goldsack included a photo of his Cobble Hill Brownstone sofa in Theater Stream (with matching ottoman) and his cats, Fred and Didi, curled up on it. He told the group it was worth the wait. Someone replied that the group’s future get-together would have to be at Mr. Goldsack’s apartment, because he was the only one with a place to sit.

ABC Carpet & Home sent the entire group an apology note the day after the initial email.

“Mistakes are a part of being human—it’s what you do with them that matters,” said the note. ABC thanked customers for turning the mistake around for the greater good. In a post-script, the company added it was sorry to hear about Spanky the cat and that it was rooting for Zoe.

An ABC spokeswoman said the CC on the original email was “human error.”

Like many retailers and manufacturers, ABC has experienced delays. The ABC spokeswoman said the hold up was due in part to factories shutting down during the pandemic, then reopening at reduced capacities. Surges in demand for home products also contributed, she said, in addition to supply issues with raw materials.

Several of the ABC customers from the reply-all chain say the best part of being on the thread is that one of its members started a GoFundMe page to buy furniture for a family that has suffered during the pandemic. The coordination of that effort has been moved from email to Slack.

Zoe Weiner, 29, says she has two upcoming dates thanks to the ABC chain. “I am far more normal than soliciting setups from 200 complete strangers might imply,” she adds. “Pandemic times are tough for a single lady in this city.”

We are human after all. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that.

QOTD:

https://twitter.com/stuartpstevens/status/1376250611176517642

This guy …

This piece in the New Yorker by Jonathan Blitzer makes the most important point about our immigration challenge:

[T]he issues involved are genuinely complex and nearly impossible to settle as long as policymakers in Washington continue to regard decency as a sign of political weakness rather than of moral strength.

As I noted in the post below, the media ia making this much more difficult.

He explains:

The emergencies of the past decade are really three chapters of the same struggle: an exodus from Central America has been under way, as families and children attempted to escape violence, poverty, and government corruption. The immigration system at the border, which was built up in the nineteen-nineties, with single, job-seeking adults from Mexico in mind, was not designed to handle a population seeking asylum on this scale. On average, it takes almost two and a half years to resolve an asylum claim, and there’s now a backlog of 1.3 million pending cases, up from half a million under Obama.

Biden faces another burden: by the time Trump left office, he had effectively ended the practice of asylum and left the most vulnerable people to their own devices. Some seventy thousand asylum seekers were forced to wait indefinitely in Mexico, under a policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols. Trump also, in the name of a dubious public-health order issued last March, turned away nearly everyone who sought asylum at the border, including some sixteen thousand children and thirty-four thousand families. That order had the perverse effect of leading people to try to cross multiple times; in the past year, there have been more than five hundred thousand expulsions. Biden planned to phase the asylum program back in gradually, partly for operational reasons and partly for political ones. If the Administration appeared to be floundering, it would give Republicans an opening to attack its broader agenda, which includes legislation to expand the legal immigration system and to provide a path to citizenship for eleven million undocumented immigrants already living in this country.

The number of unaccompanied children, however, has exceeded the government’s ability to move them into the care of the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for placing them with family sponsors. The priority is to keep them from languishing in the holding cells run by the Department of Homeland Security; by law, children are not supposed to be in such facilities for more than seventy-two hours. But the H.H.S. shelters are almost at capacity. Nine emergency shelters have been set up, two in convention centers in Dallas and San Diego, yet the average amount of time that many children are spending in D.H.S. facilities is almost twice the legal limit. “We’re providing for the space again to be able to get these kids out,” Biden said on Thursday, adding that he had “used all the resources available” to free up five thousand more beds, at a Texas military base.

The Administration has rightly said that the problem needs to be addressed at the source. To do that, it intends to provide more aid to Central America, and to target it in ways that circumvent corrupt officials. The White House also wants to restart a program begun under Obama, and ended by Trump, to process children as refugees in their home countries, and to set up regional facilities to expedite their legal claims before the children reach the border. The plans are ambitious and still largely untested, and, as Biden admitted, they will take time—years, not months—to implement.

Trump sought to hide the asylum issue south of the border. Biden is paying a price for bringing it back into view. The question is whether he can withstand the political onslaught long enough to begin to set things right.

Let’s hope so. The right is slavering over the culture war implications of this — they can tickle the racist lizard brain of the American people with far less risk since there are a lot of Americans who have been brainwashed into thinking of these migrants as “invaders” who are coming to take something away from them. And this is because our politics have never seriously reckoned with the morality of closing the door on desperate people in a country that was built by immigrants escaping poverty and oppression and looking for a better life for their kids.