Biden is getting high marks from the public, even Republicans, on his handling of the pandemic and the economy. Since these are America’s two top priorities, this is good news for the administration. If people were upset about it, it would be bad news indeed.
But the public is less happy with his response to the latest migration at the border and the mass shootings.
Republicans are seizing on the flow of migrants at the southern border as a “crisis” — a term that White House aides have refused to invoke while also acknowledging the troubling circumstances — and accusing the current administration’s hasty rollback of tough immigration policies implemented by former President Donald Trump as the cause.
A majority of Americans (54%) call the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border a crisis, and another 42% believe it is a serious problem but not a crisis. Only 4% of Americans say it is not a serious problem.
The issue of immigration is one of the most polarizing among those included in the poll, with clear majorities of Republicans (89%) and independents (54%) disapproving of Biden, while one-third of Democrats say the same.
Similarly, Biden’s handling of gun violence draws disapproval from 86% of Republicans, 56% of independents and 37% of Democrats — the highest dissatisfaction among members of his own party of the issues asked about in the survey. The disapproval from both sides is likely seen by Republicans as pursuing too many gun restrictions and by some Democrats as not acting quickly enough.
The president suggested on Thursday that he wouldn’t expend his political capital on gun control reform right now, a view that appears at odds with most of the country. Roughly two-thirds of Americans in the poll said that enacting new laws to try to reduce gun violence should be a higher priority now, while 34% believe protecting gun rights should take precedence.
The first issue is almost certainly because the media has gone completely hysterical on the issue of immigration. It offers them the opportunity to show themselves as fair and balanced after being accused of “fake news” for the past four years. Unfortunately, they have been remiss in not telling the whole story or offering the appropriate context. The result of the overwrought coverage is that many in the public are now convinced that Trump was right. It’s the worst outcome possible — it’s encouraging people to believe that immoral solutions to an ongoing, non-emergency are necessary. They have got to do a gut check on this or we are going to end up in much worse shape on this issue that before and it will be their fault.
As for the gun legislation, Biden pretty much said he didn’t think there was much chance of anything meaningful happening and sadly, he’s right. It’s awful to be so pessimistic about something this important but it’s impossible not to be after so much gun violence only making the right even more determined to support the bloodshed. This is a matter of identity on the right and they are not going to budge, and certainly not while a Democrat is in the White House.
As long as Joe Manchin is the 50th vote there will be no gun safety laws. This, aside from the deep festering wound of racism, is the most intractable culture war issue we face. And on this one I feel nothing but despair:
Meanwhile, about that unity thing:
Biden has repeatedly underlined a desire to unify the country after four years with a divisive Trump at the helm, but so far, he’s made little headway.
While 30% of Americans think Biden is making the country more united, the same percentage think he is making it more divided. A plurality of 40% view his presidency as neutral on national unity.
Nearly two-thirds of Republicans (66%) think Biden is further dividing the country, and a combined 33% say he’s either improving unity (5%) or having no effect (28%). Among Democrats, 95% say Biden is making the country more united (55%) or having no effect either way (40%), while 5% say he’s perpetuating divisions. Independents are more split: 28% say more united, 26% say more divided and 46% say neither.
Surprise. Look at the Independents to get a real sense of what’s happening with this. However, Biden needs to “unite” the country around his agenda and as long as a majority backs his handling of their top priorities, he’s doing fine.
The former chief of staff to ex-President Donald Trump on Saturday pushed back against his former boss’ recent attempt to whitewash the history of the January 6 Capitol riot.Mick Mulvaney, who stepped down as Trump’s special envoy to Northern Ireland after the insurrection, called Trump’s comments that his supporters were “hugging and kissing” police officers and posed “zero threat,” despite widespread violence, “manifestly false.”
“I was surprised to hear the President say that. Clearly there were people who were behaving themselves, and then there were people who absolutely were not, but to come out and say that everyone was fine and there was no risk, that’s just manifestly false — people died, other people were severely injured,” Mulvaney told CNN’s Pamela Brown on “Newsroom.””It’s not right to say there was no risk, I don’t know how you can say that when people were killed,” he added.
Mulvaney was one of a handful of senior officials who resigned in the wake of the January 6 riot, including former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and former Trump deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger.Trump earlier this week attempted to rewrite the history of the insurrection, which he stoked by repeatedly and falsely claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him. There is no evidence of widespread fraud, but Trump and many of his conservative allies in the media and on Capitol Hill have continued to push the narrative.
.Calling into Fox News on Thursday night, Trump was asked if he was concerned about the US Capitol’s beefed-up security, including razor-wire fencing, which he derided as “disgraceful” and a “political maneuver.””It was zero threat, right from the start, it was zero threat. Look, they went in, they shouldn’t have done it. Some of them went in, and they are hugging and kissing the police and the guards, you know, they had great relationships,” Trump told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. “A lot of the people were waved in, and then they walked in and they walked out.”
I’m sure Trump will not be pleased to hear that although I’m sure Mulvaney was already on his enemies list for resigning because of the insurrection anyway. These comments aren’t going to help.
Nonetheless, Mulvaney said he’d vote for Trump again. Of course. But I doubt he was emphatically sycophantic enough:
“He’s still a major player in the Republican Party — there’s a lot of folks who were turned off by the last six weeks, and especially the riots, that he’s going to have to do some work to sort of build bridges back with, if he wants to run again.”
Really? Sadly, I see little evidence of that. The people who were “turned off” dont seem to be Republicans.
John Blake argues at CNN that Georgia’s white legislators pissing off the state’s black voters is not exactly a bright idea. Really. Don’t make them angry. You wouldn’t like the outcome when they’re angry:
“No one but Pee Wee Herman believed them when they talked about the ‘integrity of the vote,'” says the Rev. Tim McDonald, an Atlanta-based pastor who founded the African American Ministers Leadership Council. His group created “Souls to the Polls,” a get-out-the-vote movement among Black churches nationwide. Earlier versions of the Georgia elections bill would have virtually eliminated early Sunday voting, which is popular with Black voters.
“Black folks are not stupid. We know their tricks. We know their motivation,” McDonald says. “They are the [Ku Klux] Klan in three-piece suits.”
Republican legislatures across the country have introduced…. Well, you know how many of these BS “election integrity” measures Republicans have introduced.
Republicans actually made some inroads under President George W. Bush, Blake writes, then squandered it all in even proposing to eliminate Sunday voting.
McDonald says that by targeting “Souls to the Polls,” Georgia Republicans didn’t even try to disguise their hostility toward Black voters.”
They know it’s being perceived as racist, but they are so racist that they don’t care,” says McDonald, senior pastor of the First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta.
They. Don’t. Care. Isn’t that obvious?
“There has always been a strand of Black people, particularly Black men, who have been enticed by the conservative rhetoric of the Republican Party,” says Jemar Tisby, author of “How to Fight Racism.” But the GOP has stopped reaching out and that’s gone. “They’re doing voter suppression so they don’t have to reach out to Black voters.”
Black leaders won’t have to push the passion button in Georgia, because that button was pressed a long time ago.
Georgia has some of the most organized and mobilized groups of Black voters, thanks to Stacey Abrams, who may be the shrewdest and most tenacious voting rights advocate in the nation.
Many of these Black voters remember when Abrams lost a close race for Georgia governor in 2018, a contest tainted by allegations of voter suppression. Kemp, Abrams’ opponent, ran for governor while also holding onto his position as the state’s chief elections officer — a position many viewed as a conflict of interest.
The perception that the GOP is trying to suppress the Black vote will only make Black voters in Georgia more determined to vote in 2022, when Abrams is widely expected to run against Kemp again, says the Rev. Jamal Byrant, senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia.”
Georgia is frankly becoming browner and more progressive, and the Republicans are having anxiety about the upcoming gubernatorial election and they’re trying to do everything in their power to stop the wave,” Bryant says.
White conservatives in Georgia are a’feared Black folks are comin’ ta git ’em. So after the Roberts court’s removing the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act in its 2013 Shelby decision resulted in more voting restrictions but no decrease in Black voter turnout, Republicans made sure to give Black voters even more incentive to turn out and to turn out Republicans.
Great plan.
Sen. @ReverendWarnock (D-GA) on new restrictions on voting: "You had legislators who are running scared. So rather than having the people select their politicians, the politicians try to cherry pick their voters. This is an assault on the covenant we have with one another…" pic.twitter.com/lQVVonZgXu
“Washington at Constitutional Convention of 1787, signing of U.S. Constitution” by Junius Brutus Stearns (1810–1885); Public domain.
Americans solemnly venerate their founding document (that was not their founding document) as if God dictated it Himself (naturally). Indeed, many American Christians (and painter Jon McNaughton) believe that just as they do of the Bible. But the U.S. Constitution has its merits, even if mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel thought it contained a fatal flaw.
“Wars make states make constitutions,” Colley writes in a corollary on a thought by sociologist Charles Tilly. (Wars are also vectors for spreading religion, I would not be the first to observe.) The worldwide wars of the 18th century sparked an era of constitution-writing, Colley believes, not noble ideas about the rights of men. (Women nearly always fared less well under them.)
Before constitutions were written, women had informal rights in all sorts of places; constitutions explicitly excluded them, not least because a constitution, in Colley’s formulation, is a bargain struck between a state and its men, who made sacrifices to the state as taxpayers and soldiers, which were different from the sacrifices women made in wartime.
It was acknowledgment of the costs of rulers’ military adventurism that inspired rules for governance that both limited rulers’ itch to start wars and provided for ways to finance them with taxes. Promises of guaranteed rights — often unmet — prompted their acceptance by the populace.
Constitutions and constitution-like compacts, Colley argues, are one kind of paperwork that wars generate. In 1765, ten years after Paoli drafted Corsica’s costituzione, and at the close of the Seven Years’ War, Catherine the Great, the Empress of Russia, began drafting the Nakaz, or Grand Instruction. Having seized the throne in a coup d’état in 1762, and therefore insecure in her rule even as she worked to expand her realm through repeated military campaigns, she sought to provide a framework for government. She relied, in particular, on Montesquieu’s 1748 “Spirit of the Laws,” which also greatly influenced James Madison. (Catherine called it “the prayerbook of all monarchs with any common sense.”) Montesquieu had denounced the militarization of modern life, surveying kingdoms and empires from Spain and France to China, Japan, and India. “Each monarch keeps as many armies on foot as if his people were in danger of being exterminated,” Montesquieu wrote. “The consequence of such a situation is a perpetual augmentation of taxes.” He and his intellectual kin had a solution, which Colley describes as an irresistible lure to sovereigns: “that in an age of rampant, expensive and disruptive military violence on land and sea, innovatory and informed legislators might intervene so as to bind up society’s wounds, re-establish order, remodel their respective states, and in the process burnish their own reputations.”
That, as Colley makes clear, was Catherine’s plan. Faced with unceasing challenges to her authority—as a foreigner who had seized the throne and as a woman—she nevertheless intended to pursue wide-scale warfare against the Ottoman Empire and its allies in an effort to extend Russia’s borders. To that end, she insisted on her sovereignty while guaranteeing her subjects liberty and equality. “The equality of citizens consists in their being all subject to the same laws,” she wrote in the Nakaz. She called taxes “the tribute which each citizen pays for the preservation of his own well-being.”
“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. would say much later. Americans being more provincial (and because Catherine was a woman) took little notice of the Russian monarch’s efforts in crafting their own constitution.
But what gave constitutions weight was ready availability of printed copies. People who knew what was in them could organize to hold leaders to them, or at least make the attempt.
Wars make states make constitutions; states print constitutions; constitutions guarantee freedom of the press. In the nearly six hundred constitutions written between 1776 and about 1850, the right most frequently asserted—more often than freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or freedom of assembly—was freedom of the press. Colley argues, “Print was deemed indispensable if this new technology was to function effectively and do its work, both at home and abroad.”
What made the U.S. Constitution more stable was Article V that allows for its amendment, the first such document to do so. Without that provision, the only other option for addressing deficiencies was overthrow of the government. Colley does not address this feature, Lepore writes, noting now that “ninety-six out of every hundred of the world’s codified constitutions contain an amendment provision.”
Even so, other states amend theirs far more frequently. U.S. amendments tend to come in bursts: “in 1791, with the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments; after the Civil War, with the ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments; and during the Progressive Era, with the ratification of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments.”
It may be time for another round. Yet the obstacle to amending the Constitution is more cultural than structural. The veneration with which Americans view the document makes it difficult even though recent events have exposed some rotting roots. As with the practices of Christianity on this Palm Sunday, custom and usage over time freight the country as much if not more than the age of its core text.
Rather than being amended, the Constitution has been betrayed, circumvented, violated, and abandoned, by force of practice. Can a U.S. President compel a foreign leader to interfere in an American election? Apparently. Can a U.S. President refuse to accept the results of a free and fair election and incite a mob to attack Congress in order to prevent the certification of the vote? Apparently. The U.S. Constitution, no less than the U.K.’s unwritten constitution, is more than the sum of its words; it’s the accretion of practices and precedents.
Kurt Gödel might have been happy to hear that. Gödel’s Loophole really isn’t anything like Fermat’s Last Theorem, because constitutional scholars are pretty sure of what Gödel had in mind. It’s a constitutional version of the idea that, if a genie wafts out of an oil lamp and offers you three wishes, you should begin by wishing for more wishes. In what amounts to a genuine oversight, Article V, the amendment provision, does not prohibit amending Article V. It’s very hard to ratify a constitutional amendment, but if a President could amass enough power and accrue enough blindly loyal followers he could get an amendment ratified that revised the mechanism of amendment itself. If a revised Article V made it possible for a President to amend the Constitution by fiat (e.g., “The President, whenever he shall deem it necessary, shall make amendments to this Constitution, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution”), he could turn a democracy into a dictatorship without ever having done anything unconstitutional. What Gödel did not realize is that it’s actually a lot easier than that.
One of the country’s major political parties can simply exploit “structural biases” in the Constitution to ensure minority rule in what is ostensibly a majority-rule system. Law professors Jonathan S. Gould and David E. Pozen spell out how, Greg Sargent wrote last week:
Their findings are stark. They find that the multiple veto points in the legislative process — the supermajority needed against the filibuster, congressional rules empowering committees to kill legislation, etc. — systematically work against Democrats, because they generally harbor more legislative ambition.
“Veto points that increase the difficulty of enacting legislation,” they note, “have come to impede the policy aspirations of Democrats more than those of Republicans.” The executive branch, they find, is riddled with procedural features that systematically hamper the ability of agencies to regulate.
They detect a similar electoral bias. Two senators representing each state regardless of population advantages the party that overperforms in small states, as does (to a lesser extent) the electoral college.
What’s more, the reliance on single-member congressional districts (created by federal law) benefits the party that overperforms in sparsely populated areas and works against the party that wastes more votes in concentrated ones.
In some cases, a shift in the party’s coalitions could undo those biases. But for now, the authors conclude, our “intersection of constitutional design and political geography” has produced systematic structural biases for the party that is “strongest in small states,” the GOP.
Good luck getting amendments past those states to undo, in the name of fairness, constitutional biases that tip the playing field in their favor. Especially now that minority rule is the only way they can.
I was saddened to learn of George Segal’s passing earlier this week. I confess up front that I have zero awareness of his latter-career television work; but then again, I haven’t followed any network sitcoms with much interest since Seinfeld went off the air in 1998.
For me Segal’s visage will be forever associated with a streak of memorable film roles from the mid-60s through the late 70s (perusing his credits on the Internet Movie Database, I realized that apart from David O. Russell’s 1996 comedy Flirting with Disaster I have not seen any of Segal’s big screen work beyond Lost and Found (Melvin Frank’s disappointing 1979 sequel to his own 1973 romantic comedy A Touch of Class).
I will remember him for his masterful comic timing (he was the king of the reaction shot) but he also had great drama chops. He was also a decent banjo player (I searched in earnest for any instance where he may have jammed with Steve Martin…but alas, if it did happen, there is no extant footage). Here are my top 10 George Segal recommendations:
Bye Bye Braverman – Viewer caution: This film contains graphic depictions of extreme Jewishness (I’m allowed to say that…I’ve lived it). A lesser-known gem from Sidney Lumet, this 1968 comedy-drama follows the escapades of four Manhattan intellectuals (Segal, Joseph Wiseman, Jack Warden and Sorrell Booke) who pile into a red Beetle and spend a Sunday afternoon schlepping around Brooklyn searching for the funeral of a mutual friend who dropped dead following a coronary. Much middle-age angst ensues.
Episodic but bolstered by wonderful performances and several memorable scenes. My favorite involves a fender-bender with the great Godfrey Cambridge, playing a fast-talking cabbie who has converted to Judaism. Another great segment features Alan King as a rabbi giving an off-the wall eulogy. A scene where Segal delivers a soliloquy about modern society while strolling through a vast cemetery will now have added poignancy.
The screenplay was adapted from Wallace Markfield’s novel by Herb Sargent, who later become a top writer for Saturday Night Live from 1975-1995. Also in the cast: Phyllis Newman, Zohra Lampert and Jessica Walter (who also passed away this week, sadly).
California Split – While it has its share of protracted scenes and an unhurried, naturalistic rhythm you expect from Robert Altman, I think this 1974 comedy-drama is the director’s tightest, most economical film; I would even venture it’s damn near perfect.
A pro gambler (Elliot Gould) and a compulsive gambler with a straight day job (Segal) bond after getting roughed up and robbed by a sore loser and his pals in a poker parlor parking lot. Gould invites Segal to sleep over at his place, a house he shares with two self-employed sex workers (Ann Prentiss and Gwen Welles). The men become gambling buddies. Soon they are mutual enablers, spiraling down the rabbit hole of their addiction.
The film doubles as a beautifully acted character study and a fascinating, documentary-like dive into the myopic, almost subterranean subculture of the degenerate gambler. As Roger Ebert put it so beautifully in his original review of the film: “This movie has a taste in its mouth like stale air-conditioning, and no matter what time it seems to be, it’s always five in the morning in a second-rate casino.” Perceptive screenplay by actor Joseph Walsh, who also has a great cameo as a menacing loan shark.
The Hot Rock– Although it starts out as a by-the-numbers diamond heist caper, this 1972 Peter Yates film delivers a unique twist halfway through: the diamond needs to be stolen all over again (so it’s back to the drawing board). There’s even a little political intrigue in the mix. The film boasts a William Goldman screenplay (adapted from a Donald E. Westlake novel) and a knockout cast (Segal, Robert Redford Zero Mostel, Ron Leibman, Paul Sand and Moses Gunn). Redford and Segal make a great team, and the film finds a nice balance between suspense and humor. Lots of fun.
Loving – American Beauty meets The Prisoner of Second Avenue in this 1970 sleeper, directed by the eclectic Irvin Kershner (A Fine Madness, The Flim-Flam Man, Eyes of Laura Mars, Never Say Never Again). Segal is in his element as a freelance commercial illustrator and suburban dad on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Dissatisfied with his own work, on the rocks with both his wife (Eva Marie Saint) and his Manhattan mistress (Janis Young), he’s fighting an existential uphill battle trying to keep everyone in his life happy.
The story builds slowly, culminating in a near-classic party scene up there with the one in Hal Ashby’s Shampoo. Patient viewers will notice the film is well constructed and despite being made 50 years ago, still has much to say about modern manners and mores (all in the space of 90 minutes). The intelligent screenplay was adapted from J.M. Ryan’s novel by Don Devlin.
The Owl and the Pussycat – Segal plays a reclusive, egghead NYC writer and Barbra Streisand is a perfect foil in one of her best comedic turns as a profane, boisterous sex worker in this classic “oil and water” farce, directed by Herbert Ross. Serendipity throws the two odd bedfellows together one fateful evening, and the resulting mayhem is crude, lewd, and funny as hell. Buck Henry adapted his screenplay from Bill Manhoff’s original stage version. Robert Klein is wonderfully droll in a small but memorable role. My favorite line: “Doris…you’re a sexual Disneyland!”
The Terminal Man – Paging Dr. Jekyll! Segal is excellent in the lead as a gifted computer scientist who has developed a neurological disorder which triggers murderously psychotic blackout episodes. He becomes the guinea pig for an experimental cure that requires a microchip to be planted in his brain to circumvent the attacks.
Although it’s essentially “sci-fi”, this 1974 effort shares some interesting characteristics with the post-Watergate paranoid political thrillers that all seemed to propagate around that same time (especially The Parallax View, which also broached the subject of mind control). Director Mike Hodges (who directed the original version of Get Carter) adapted his screenplay from Michael Crichton’s novel.
A Touch of Class – Directed by Melvin Frank (The Court Jester, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) this 1973 film was co-written by the director with Jack Rose and Marvin Frank. Segal and Glenda Jackson make a great comedy tag team as a married American businessman and British divorcee who, following two chance encounters in London, realize there’s a mutual attraction and embark on an affair. The best part of the film concerns the clandestine lovers’ first romantic getaway on a trip to Spain. The story falters a bit in the third act, when it begins to vacillate a little clumsily between comedy and morality tale, but when it’s funny, it’s very funny.
Where’s Poppa? – If you are easily offended, do not go anywhere near this film. But if you believe nothing is sacred in comedy and enjoy laughing so hard that you plotz-see it.
Where do I start? Carl Reiner’s 1970 black comedy (adapted by Robert Klane from his own novel) concerns a New York City attorney (Segal) who lives in a cramped apartment with his senile mother (Ruth Gordon). Honoring a deathbed promise to his dearly departed poppa, Segal takes care of his mother (well, as best he can). She is a…handful.
The beleaguered Segal’s day begins with prepping his mother’s preferred breakfast of 6 orange slices and a heaping bowl of Pepsi and Lucky Charms (interestingly, in California Split Segal himself is served a breakfast of beer and Fruit Loops by the two sex workers).
His businessman brother (Ron Leibman) is too “busy” to help, so Segal must hire nurses to take care of ma while he’s at work. Unfortunately, she has a habit of driving them away with her over-the-top behavior. When Segal falls head-over-heels in love with the latest hire (Trish Van Devere, in a priceless performance), his thoughts about how he’s going to “take care” of ma and keep this blossoming romance abloom become…darker.
Segal was rarely so hilariously exasperated as he gets here, it’s Gordon’s best (and most outrageous) comic performance, and the supporting cast (which includes Barnard Hughes, Vincent Gardenia, Paul Sorvino and Garrett Morris) is aces. Again, this film is not for all tastes (it would never get green-lighted now) …but rates as one of my all-time favorite comedies.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – If words were needles, university history professor George (Richard Burton) and his wife Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) would look like a pair of porcupines, because after years of shrill, shrieking matrimony, these two have become maestros of the barbed insult, and the poster children for the old axiom, “you only hurt the one you love”. Mike Nichols’ 1966 directing debut (adapted by Ernest Lehman from Edward Albee’s Tony-winning stage play) gives us a peek into one night in the life of this battle-scarred middle-aged couple.
After a faculty party, George and Martha invite a young newlywed couple (Segal and Sandy Dennis) over for a nightcap. As the ever-flowing alcohol kicks in, the evening becomes a veritable primer in bad human behavior. It’s basically a four-person play, but these are all fine actors, and the writing is the real star of this piece.
Here are some additional George Segal films worth a look:
King Rat (1965; WW2 drama, dir. Bryan Forbes)
The Quiller Memorandum (1966; Cold War spy thriller, dir. Michael Anderson)
Blume in Love (1973; romantic comedy-drama, dir. Paul Mazursky)
The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox (1976; western comedy, dir. Melvin Frank)
Fun with Dick and Jane (1977; crime caper/social satire, dir. Ted Kotcheff)
Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978; comedy-mystery, dir. Ted Kotcheff)
Flirting with Disaster (1996; comedy, dir. David O. Russell)
By the way, the anti-vaxers are very intermingled with QAnon which makes sense. If you believe one conspiracy theory you are probably susceptible to believing any conspiracy theory, particularly when the conspiracy “community” is giving you tons of validation.
The patients began arriving at hospitals in Porto Alegre far sicker and younger than before. Funeral homes were experiencing a steady uptick in business, while exhausted doctors and nurses pleaded in February for a lockdown to save lives.
But Sebastião Melo, Porto Alegre’s mayor, argued there was a greater imperative.
“Put your life on the line so that we can save the economy,” Mr. Melo appealed to his constituents in late February.
Now Porto Alegre, a prosperous city in southern Brazil, is at the heart of an stunning breakdown of the country’s health care system — a crisis foretold.
More than a year into the pandemic, deaths in Brazil are at their peak and highly contagious variants of the coronavirus are sweeping the nation, enabled by political dysfunction, widespread complacency and conspiracy theories. The country, whose leader, President Jair Bolsonaro, has played down the threat of the virus, is now reporting more new cases and deaths per day than any other country in the world.
Sound familiar? The following is a perfect illustration of what would have happened here if Trump had free reign:
President Bolsonaro, who continues to promote ineffective and potentially dangerous drugs to treat the disease, has also said lockdowns are untenable in a country where so many people live in poverty. While several Brazilian states have ordered business shutdowns in recent weeks, there have been no strict lockdowns.
Some of the president’s supporters in Porto Alegre have protested business shutdowns in recent days, organizing caravans that stop outside of hospitals and blast their horns while inside Covid wards overflow.
Epidemiologists say Brazil could have avoided additional lockdowns if the government had promoted the use of masks and social distancing and aggressively negotiated access to the vaccines being developed last year.
Instead, Mr. Bolsonaro, a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, called Covid-19 a “measly flu,” often encouraged large crowds and created a false sense of security among supporters by endorsing anti-malaria and anti-parasite drugs — contradicting leading health officials who warned that they were ineffective.
Last year, Mr. Bolsonaro’s government took a pass on Pfizer’s offer of tens of millions of doses of its Covid-19 vaccine. Later, the president celebrated setbacks in clinical trials for CoronaVac, the Chinese-made vaccine that Brazil came to largely rely on, and joked that pharmaceutical companies would not be held responsible if people who got newly developed vaccines turned into alligators.
“The government initially dismissed the threat of the pandemic, then the need for preventive measures, and then goes against science by promoting miracle cures,” said Natália Pasternak, a microbiologist in São Paulo. “That confuses the population, which means people felt safe going out in the street.”
They managed to convince the braindead Trump to have the government pay to have vaccines manufactured in advance so they would be ready to roll if they turned out to be effective and it’s literally the only thing he did right. We are just very lucky that he wasn’t re-elected because he would have botched the rollout as badly as he botched everything else — as his soulmate Bolsonaro has done and continues to do in Brazil. And we are lucky that in many states they had sentient leadership that kept the entire country from acting like Florida and making everything worse.
And, by the way, we did lose almost 550,000 people and counting so it’s not as if we did that much better. But this imminent 4th surge will probably result in fewer deaths because they’ve managed to vaccinate 70% of people over 65. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean there won’t be any deaths and it almost all because of the Trumpish attitude that it’s just “a measly flu.” There are still a whole lot of people who believe that.
What does seem clear is that Mr. Manchin is not going to switch parties.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen, although we’d welcome him with open arms,” said Ms. Collins, who has tried in the past to persuade her friend to join Republicans.
It’s not difficult to see why Mr. Manchin remains in his forefathers’ party. A Catholic of Italian descent, he sought John F. Kennedy’s desk when he arrived in the Senate, displays a picture of the slain president in his office lobby and can recall hearing that Massachusetts accent in his kitchen when Kennedy’s brothers came to his parents’ house during the West Virginia primary in 1960.
“Joe reminds me a lot of the old conservative Democrats in Texas,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas. “They were born Democrats. They’re going to die Democrats.”
Why in the world would he switch parties? He’d be a pale imitation of Mitt Romney in the GOP a man without any power at all. As a Democrat in a 50-50 Senate he’s the most powerful man in the country. How silly.
As for the filibuster, Mr. Coons, who was sworn in alongside Mr. Manchin in 2010, said liberals shouldn’t get their hopes up.
Recalling a conversation with somebody who knows Mr. Manchin well, Mr. Coons said this person told him: “If the ghost of Robert Byrd came back to life and said the future of West Virginia itself is on the line he might … think about it.”
Legislation that could make it more difficult for West Virginians to participate in future elections, including by revoking a 2016 automatic voter registration law, passed the Senate without debate Wednesday on a 29-5 vote.
Championed by then-Secretary of State Natalie Tennant, the law to automatically register voters at Division of Motor Vehicles offices when they obtain driver’s licenses has been on the books for nearly five years but has yet to be implemented.
Under Senate Bill 565, people obtaining or transferring driver’s licenses could opt to register to vote at the DMV, but the process would not be automatic. That is the policy currently in effect.
The bill also pushes up deadlines for early in-person voting and for submitting applications for absentee voting by mail.
Under the bill, the window for early in-person voting — currently 13 days to three days before Election Day — would shift to 17 days to seven days before Election Day. The move would eliminate one available Saturday from each election cycle. State law prohibits voting on Sundays.
It also would move the deadline for requesting an absentee ballot from six days before Election Day to 11 days.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Trump, R-Morgan, said Secretary of State Mac Warner had requested the change based on warnings from the U.S. Postal Service of slower delivery times for U.S. mail.
As the Senate was taking up the bill, Warner was in Washington, D.C., testifying before the U.S. Senate Rules Committee in opposition to the federal For The People Act of 2021.
“We want to keep a tight rein. I want to get my guidance from the state Legislature, and not go toward automatic voter registration, mail-in ballots, same-day registration and the other provisions in this bill,” Warner said.
Golly, I think the Republicans might just be going after old Joe himself. Is he cool with being a human sacrifice for the cause of bipartisanship.
“I’m concerned about the House pushing an agenda that would be hard for us to maintain the majority,” Mr. Manchin said about the progressive legislation that House Democrats are stacking up at the Senate door. As for pressure from the left, he said, tauntingly: “What are they going to do, they going to go into West Virginia and campaign against me? Please, that would help me more than anything.” …
As for any pressure that he may feel on the filibuster, Mr. Manchin said he had reminded Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, of how essential he was to providing Democrats a majority.
He said he had told Mr. Schumer, “I know one thing, Chuck, you wouldn’t have this problem at all if I wasn’t here.”
[…]
He crossed the aisle last year to endorse his closest Republican ally, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, and is already co-hosting bipartisan lunches with her. He is plotting the post-pandemic restoration of his pizza-and-beer parties on the boat he calls home while in Washington. (It’s called “Almost Heaven,” the opening lyric to John Denver’s ode to West Virginia.)
Steve Williams, the mayor of Huntington, W.V., who served with Mr. Manchin in the state legislature, said: “This is the closest he has been to how he could be as governor, actually driving the agenda, pulling people together.’’
It’s the last part that most animates the senator. Happily bantering with reporters as he positions himself as a lonely, if well-covered, voice for comity, he shifts questions from policy to process.
“Why don’t you ask people when was the last time they took time to talk to some of the people on this side?” Mr. Manchin told a CNN reporter this week. “Try to convince them, or work with them. Have you had dinner with them? Have you had a lunch with them? Have you had a cup of coffee with them? Try something.”
Do you feel a sense of deja vu? Anyone who has been reading this blog lo these many years knows that I’ve been writing about the Democratic Diva problem for a long, long time. It’s a heady position, one that garners tone of attention, ego stroking, bootlicking and backlash.
It was inevitable. I wrote about it right after the 2006 election — as soon as the Republicans lost power, I knew the gasbags would insist that it’s time to let bygones be bygones and meet the Republicans halfway in the spirit of a new beginning. GOP politicians have driven the debt sky-high and altered the government so as to be nearly unrecognizable, so logically the Democrats need to extend the hand of conciliation and move to meet them in the middle — the middle now being so far right, it isn’t even fully visible anymore.
Today we have none other than the centrist drivel king, David Broder, reporting that a group of useless meddlers, led by former Oklahoma Senator David Boren, most of whom who were last seen repeatedly stabbing Bill Clinton in the back, are rising from their crypts to demand that the candidates all promise to appoint a “unity” government and govern from the the center — or else they will back an independent Bloomberg bid.
Boren said the meeting is being announced in advance of Thursday’s Iowa caucuses “because we don’t want anyone to think this was a response to any particular candidate or candidates.” He said the nation needs a “government of national unity” to overcome its partisan divisions in a time of national challenge he likened to that faced by Great Britain during World War II.
“Electing a president based solely on the platform or promises of one party is not adequate for this time,” Boren said. “Until you end the polarization and have bipartisanship, nothing else matters, because one party simply will block the other from acting.”
Except the one party is called the Republican Party. When was the last time the Democrats blocked anything?
Isn’t it funny that these people were nowhere to be found when George W. Bush seized office under the most dubious terms in history, having been appointed by a partisan supreme court majority and losing the popular vote? If there was ever a time for a bunch of dried up, irrelevant windbags to demand a bipartisan government you’d think it would have been then, wouldn’t you? (How about after 9/11, when Republicans were running ads saying Dems were in cahoots with Saddam and bin Laden?) But it isn’t all that surprising. They always assert themselves when the Democrats become a majority; it’s their duty to save the country from the DFH’s who are far more dangerous than Dick Cheney could ever be.
And here’s that bucket of lukewarm water, Evan Thomas, insisting that Real Americans — as opposed to the hysterics who are actively engaged in politics — are tuning out, even though there’s ample evidence that the opposite is actually true. He even evokes that moth-eaten old trope about Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan being best buddies over scotch and waters at night after battling all day over legislation. (If Sam Nunn and David Boren will promise to force the congress to outlaw ever telling that story again, I’ll vote for the Bloomity 08 ticket myself.)
The idea among these Village elders is that only through bipartisan cooperation can we “get anything done.” Well, if bipartisanship is defined like this, I suppose they are right:
As Congress stumbles toward Christmas, President Bush is scoring victory after victory over his Democratic adversaries. He:
• Beat back domestic spending increases.
• Thwarted an expansion of children’s health coverage.
• Defeated tax increases.
• Won Iraq war funding.
• Pushed Democrats toward shattering their pledge not to add to the federal deficit with new tax cuts or rises in mandatory spending.
[…]
“The Democrats are learning this isn’t the early 1970s, when the Republican Party was Gerald Ford and 140 of his friends,” said Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “There are 201 of us, and we will be heard.”
Recall that the president’s approval rating hovers at 30% and the rating of the is GOP minority in congress far lower. It appears to me that they know very well how to “get things done” not only on a purely partisan basis but with more than 70% of the country disapproving of their actions. They don’t need no stinkin’ bipartisanship.
To be sure, that story includes old GOP deficit hawk Chuck Grassley howling in the wilderness, but the point cannot be missed that when the GOP was in power they spent like drunken sailors and now that the Democrats have the congress the elders are suddenly up in arms about spending. That will, of course, become the new mantra if a Democrat becomes president and the political establishment decides that the government must “get something done” on reducing the deficit and enlarging the military and lowering taxes and fixing social security and ensuring that Americans don’t lose their excellent health care “choices” and keeping foreigners in their place.
I guess everyone is going to have to pardon us cynics here on the liberal side of the dial for being just a teensy bit skeptical of this demand for bipartisanship. The last time the country elected a centrist conciliator who wanted to leave behind the “braindead politics of the past”, he first got kicked in the teeth by fellow centrists Sam Nunn and David Boren over gays in the military and raising taxes on the rich, and then faced an opposition so vicious that it ended with an illegitimate impeachment and a stolen election. A lot more has happened since then, all of it bad.
That is not to say it will play out the same way again. Things rarely do. But it’s depressing that so many Democrats still seem to have this deep conceit that the Republicans are really reasonable people in spite of fifteen long years of being shown otherwise over and over again. And it’s infuriating that after everything that’s happened, the permanent political establishment is still more freaked out at the prospect of the dirty hippies passing universal health care than radical neocons starting World War III. If only the reasonable people could get together over scotch and waters and talk it all through everything would work as it’s supposed to.
It’s a lovely idea, isn’t it? The only problem is that they keep forgetting to tell the Republicans, who view politics as a blood sport. They aren’t interested in compromise and haven’t been since old Bob Michel shuffled off to shuffleboard-land. They play for keeps, which it seems to me, is perfectly obvious after all we’ve seen over the past 15 years or so. They don’t let little things like electoral defeats keep them down. They always work it, no matter what, and in the process they twist the Democratic Party into pretzels.
The bipartisan busybodies just don’t notice (or care) that as a movement which doesn’t believe in government, the conservatives are just as successful in the minority, obstructing any progressive advance the Democrats want to make. They feel no need to “get things done.” Aside from starting wars, building an ever larger police state apparatus and pillaging the treasury on behalf of themselves and their rich friends when they’re in power, they don’t believe government should “get things done.” So, what do Republicans have to gain by cooperating with Democrats?
I suspect that despite all evidence to the contrary many Democrats believe that the conservative movement is dying, if not dead, and that they will have no choice but to meet Democrats across the table and deal with them reasonably. But if that were true we would not see their many wingnut welfare demagogues ramping up a racist immigration campaign like we haven’t seen since the days of George Wallace. They look pretty determined to keep fighting to me. Yes, they are in disarray because they can’t find a single presidential candidate who perfectly embodies their philosophy of Wealth, God and Guns. (Or perhaps, more appropriately, they can’t find a candidate their base is willing to pretend have all those attributes, even though they don’t.) But that has little to do with the conservative movement as a whole, which functions just as well with a minority as majority.
The truth is that they know the Republicans are very, very likely going to lose the presidency anyway. And they are fine with it. It brings them together. Here’s old hand Richard Viguerie making his pitch for GOP to lose in 2006:
[Sometimes a loss for the Republican Party is a gain for conservatives. Often, a little taste of liberal Democrats in power is enough to remind the voters what they don’t like about liberal Democrats and to focus the minds of Republicans on the principles that really matter. That’s why the conservative movement has grown fastest during those periods when things seemed darkest, such as during the Carter administration and the first two years of the Clinton White House.
Conservatives are, by nature, insurgents, and it’s hard to maintain an insurgency when your friends, or people you thought were your friends, are in power.
.
They use their time out of power to grow their movement and one of the main ways they do this is by obstructing anything positive the Democrats want to do. They are organized around the principle of being insurgents — outsiders — victims. It is not in their interest to cooperate with Democrats.
Maybe Broder and Evan Thomas and the rest of the bipartisan brigade think that all of that is in the past and we can begin a new era of good feeling with the red and the blue bleeding into a lovely shade of mauve. But from where I sit, even with the best of intentions, the onus is on the Republicans to prove that after more than two decades of non-stop razing of decent political discourse and partisanship so fierce they are willing to take down the government if necessary, they are finally willing to work with Democrats to “get things done.”
I don’t think they’re there yet, do you?
Paul Krugman made a similar argument the other day much more concisely, by simply pointing out that it’s not Bushism that’s the problem — it’s the conservative movement. From a strategic standpoint it’s just not enough to wish and hope that the conservative movement is going to see the errors of their ways. They are true believers and they are very politically adept at everything but actual governance — assuming you think governance equals serving the people, which they don’t. It is necessary for progressives to fight them and win, especially since Bush’s massive unpopularity has given us the first opening in years to make a case for progressive politics.
Matt Yglesias writes here about how polarization is actually good for the system. I think he’s right. This is a bit country, naturally divided by culture, region and ideology. And that’s ok. We all still identify as Americans and pull together when the chips are down. But we have always had substantial disagreements among us. There have been a few periods of calm, but for the most part we’ve been fighting this out from the beginning. It’s only in the last few years that we’ve seen liberals run away from the battle and pretend that the goal is political comity rather than political progress. Not that I entirely blame them. The well-financed conservative movement has been awesome in its political effectiveness. And, like clockwork, the bipartisan zombies inevitably emerge at any moment of conservative weakness to ensure that the hippies aren’t given even a moment’s breathing room to accomplish something that might benefit someone other than rich people and corporations. (We wouldn’t want them to do anything radical, like allowing a rogue vice president to redefine the constitution or enshrining torture as an American value. Good thing the grown-ups woke up from their naps before something really bad happened.)
I dearly hope the Democrats, both politicians and voters, tune out this crap. If Bloomberg wants to run, let him. They need to run their own game and not let these high priests of irrelevancy influence this race. They don’t have to make every last person in the country agree with them — indeed, it’s impossible. You can’t be all things to all people. And they certainly don’t have to please these villagers who are apparently convinced that the worst thing that could possible happen at a time like this would be Democratic rule. They just need to win and then govern as progressives. It is possible to make improvements, sometimes even real, substantial change. But it doesn’t come easy, as Krugman reminds us here:
…any attempt to change America’s direction, to implement a real progressive agenda, will necessarily be highly polarizing. Proposals for universal health care, in particular, are sure to face a firestorm of partisan opposition. And fundamental change can’t be accomplished by a politician who shuns partisanship.
I like to remind people who long for bipartisanship that FDR’s drive to create Social Security was as divisive as Bush’s attempt to dismantle it. And we got Social Security because FDR wasn’t afraid of division. In his great Madison Square Garden speech, he declared of the forces of “organized money”: “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
I’m sorry it’s unpleasant for some people to contemplate the idea of a progressive government. But if it’s comity they want, it’s in the hands of the “insurgents” who refuse to behave like decent human beings, whether in power or out. It’s not in the country’s best interest to continue to enable them.
And anyway, the partisan divide is where the big battles in American politics are waged. It’s where they’ve always been waged. The only time the political establishment even notices it these days is when the Republicans are on the run and they get nervous. Democrats should ignore them and take their case directly to the country.
This all reminds me of the period before the Iraq war when everyone was trying to figure out some way to explain what they were seeing before their very eyes in light of what everyone was telling them. We aren’t crazy. This stuff really is happening.
We can wish for conciliation all we want, but unless the Democrats can do it without any cooperation from the Republicans, it will be just another game of Charlie Brown and the football. David Broder is fine with that. He’s more afraid of hippies trashing the white house than of fascists* trashing the country, so he’s happy to help Lucy hold the ball. Democratic voters must be clear eyed and willing to fight because if we don’t, they will win again, even if they lose. I don’t think the country can take it.
That was over 13 years ago. And we are still seeing the congress held hostage by “centrist” Democrats who have decided that they were elected to lead the country, not the president or the vast majority of their own caucus.
The problem is the Senate. It is an anti-majoritarian institution regardless of the numbers simply by the fact that the Alaska population of 700,000 people is given the same representation as the 40 million Californians. Add on even more anti-majoritarian characteristics like the filibuster and it adds up to an undemocratic institution at the center of our government which acts as a veto in favor of conservative rural voters. And it is, as I wrote above, all cloaked in the dubious value of “bipartisanship.”
None of this is new. But with ideological and regional partisan polarization and the Republicans rushing headlong into fascism, it’s getting a whole lot worse.
‘These statistics should serve as a warning sign for the American people’ — CDC Dir. Walensky explains why she’s concerned by plateauing COVID-19 case numbers pic.twitter.com/WBMYes5UHm
I think we are trying to plant our petunias in a category 5 hurricane right now. I think the next 3-5 weeks we’re going to see major outbreaks in schools throughout the US. At 2.9 to 3 million vaccine doses a day over the next 6 to 15 weeks when this surge is likely to happen, is not going to take care of the problem at all.
March 26th:
Ayman Mohyeldin MSNBC: Has anything changed over the last 2 and a half weeks?
Osterholm: It sure has. 3 weeks ago today, 14 states were reporting increasing cases over a 7 day average. Two weeks ago that number was at 21. One week ago it was at 26. Today it’s at 33 states, of which 11 of those states have had more than 20% increase in cases just in the last week,
Just as I had indicated in that conversation before, what we’re seeing now is B117, this variant that was originally identified in the UK, which is anywhere from 50 to 100% more infectious than the older viruses and can cause more severe illness in well over 50% of the people it infects, has now become the prominent variant in this country.
We’re seeing major school outbreaks in a number of states. This is the first time we’ve seen kids, young kids ,really involved. We’re watching the rates of hospitalization actually go up quite dramatically in a number of states in the midwest and the northeast even in 20, 30 and 40 year olds. So, unfortunately, this is starting to unfold now.
