Month: April 2021

Good morning!

From The Guardian:

The systematic killing and maiming of unarmed African Americans by police amount to crimes against humanity that should be investigated and prosecuted under international law, an inquiry into US police brutality by leading human rights lawyers from around the globe has found.

A week after the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder in George Floyd’s death, the unabated epidemic of police killings of Black men and women in the US has now attracted scorching international attention.

In a devastating report running to 188 pages, human rights experts from 11 countries hold the US accountable for what they say is a long history of violations of international law that rise in some cases to the level of crimes against humanity.

They point to what they call “police murders” as well as “severe deprivation of physical liberty, torture, persecution and other inhuman acts” as systematic attacks on the Black community that meet the definition of such crimes.

They also call on the prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague to open an immediate investigation with a view to prosecutions.

“This finding of crimes against humanity was not given lightly, we included it with a very clear mind,” Hina Jilani, one of the 12 commissioners who led the inquiry, told the Guardian. “We examined all the facts and concluded that that there are situations in the US that beg the urgent scrutiny of the ICC.”

Just when you thought it couldn’t get much worse (from today’s Democracy Now )…

Outrage is growing in Philadelphia after explosive revelations that the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University have been in possession of remains thought to belong to two children who were among 11 people killed in the 1985 police bombing of the Philadelphia home of the radical, Black liberation and anti-police-brutality group MOVE. We show an excerpt of a training video — now removed from the internet — by an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University who has been using the bones of at least one of the young bombing victims for the past 36 years — without the knowledge or consent of the families — and get response from a MOVE family member. “It makes you wonder: What else do they have?” says Mike Africa Jr., a second-generation MOVE member who grew up with the children whose remains have now been located. “What else are they covering up? What else are they lying about?”

Good God.

This development is particularly egregious if you know the details of the 1985 MOVE incident. And anyone from Tucker Carlson to your drunk uncle at Thanksgiving who tries to convince you that the increasing spotlight on these incidents is some kind of phony human rights crisis being ginned up by Lefties and/or the “liberal mainstream media” has never cracked open a history book. And now it seems that the whole world is not only watching, but judging. As any person with a conscience and a whit of humanity should.

For just a tiny fraction of that history, here’s my original 2013 review of the excellent “found footage” documentary that recounts the 1985 MOVE incident, Let the Fire Burn (currently streaming on iTunes, Apple TV, and Amazon Prime Video).

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on December 7, 2013)

Attack the block: Let the Fire Burn (***1/2)

While obscured in public memory by the (relatively) more “recent” 1993 Branch Davidian siege in Waco, the eerily similar demise of the Philadelphia-based MOVE organization 8 years earlier was no less tragic on a human level, nor any less disconcerting in its ominous sociopolitical implications.

In an enlightening new documentary called Let the Fire Burn, director Jason Osder has parsed a trove of archival “live-at-the-scene” TV reports, deposition videos, law enforcement surveillance footage, and other sundry “found” footage (much of it previously unseen by the general public) and created a tight narrative that plays like an edge-of-your-seat political thriller.

Depending upon whom you might ask, MOVE was an “organization”, a “religious cult”, a “radical group”, or all of the above. The biggest question in my mind (and one the film doesn’t necessarily delve into) is whether it was another example of psychotic entelechy. So what is “psychotic entelechy”, exactly? Well, according to Stan A. Lindsay, the author of Psychotic Entelechy: The Dangers of Spiritual Gifts Theology, it would be

…the tendency of some individuals to be so desirous of fulfilling or bringing to perfection the implications of their terminologies that they engage in very hazardous or damaging actions.

In the context of Lindsay’s book, he is expanding on some of the ideas laid down by literary theorist Kenneth Burke and applying them to possibly explain the self-destructive traits shared by the charismatic leaders of modern-day cults like The People’s Temple, Order of the Solar Tradition, Heaven’s Gate, and The Branch Davidians. He ponders whether all the tragic deaths that resulted should be labeled as “suicides, murders, or accidents”.

Whether MOVE belongs on that list is perhaps debatable, but in Osder’s film, you do get the sense that leader John Africa (an adapted surname that all followers used) was a charismatic person. He founded the group in 1972, based on an odd hodgepodge of tenets borrowed from Rastafarianism, Black Nationalism and green politics; with a Luddite view of technology (think ELF meets the Panthers…by way of the Amish). Toss in some vaguely egalitarian philosophies about communal living, and I think you’re there.

The group, which shared a town house, largely kept itself to itself (at least at first) but started to draw the attention of Philadelphia law enforcement when a number of their neighbors began expressing concern to the authorities about sanitation issues (the group built compost piles around their building using refuse and human excrement) and the distressing appearance of possible malnutrition among the children of the commune (some of the footage in the film would seem to bear out the latter claim).

The city engaged in a year-long bureaucratic standoff with MOVE over their refusal to vacate, culminating in an attempted forced removal turned-gun battle with police in 1978 that left one officer dead. Nine MOVE members were convicted of 3^rd-degree murder and jailed.

The remaining members of MOVE relocated their HQ, but it didn’t take long to wear out their welcome with the new neighbors (John Africa’s strange, rambling political harangues, delivered via loudspeakers mounted outside the MOVE house certainly didn’t help). Africa and his followers began to develop a siege mentality, shuttering up all the windows and constructing a makeshift pillbox style bunker on the roof. Naturally, these actions only served to ratchet up the tension and goad local law enforcement.

On May 13, 1985 it all came to a head when a heavily armed contingent of cops moved in, ostensibly to arrest MOVE members on a number of indictments. Anyone who remembers the shocking news footage knows that the day did not end well. Gunfire was exchanged after tear gas and high-pressure water hoses failed to end the standoff, so authorities decided to take a little shortcut and drop a satchel of C-4 onto the roof of the building. 11 MOVE members (including 5 children) died in the resulting inferno, which consumed 61 homes.

Putting aside any debate or speculation for a moment over whether or not John Africa and his disciples were deranged criminals, or whether or not the group’s actions were self-consciously provocative or politically convoluted, one simple fact remains and bears repeating: “Someone” decided that it was a perfectly acceptable action plan, in the middle of a dense residential neighborhood (located in the City of Brotherly Love, no less) to drop a bomb on a building with children inside it.

Even more appalling is the callous indifference and casual racism displayed by some of the officials and police who are seen in the film testifying before the Mayor’s investigative commission (the sole ray of light, one compassionate officer who braved crossfire to help a young boy escape the burning building, was chastised by fellow officers afterward as a “n****r lover” for his trouble).

Let the Fire Burn is not only an essential document of an American tragedy, but a cautionary tale and vital reminder of how far we still have go in purging the vestiges of institutional racism in this country (1985 was not  that long ago).

In a  strange bit of Kismet, I saw this film the day before Nelson Mandela died, which has naturally prompted a steady stream of retrospectives about Apartheid on the nightly news. Did you know that in 1985, there was a raging debate over whether we should impose sanctions on South Africa? (*sigh*) Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees.

Previous posts with related themes:

Nuremberg: Its Lesson For Today

—Dennis Hartley

Tucker Carlson is now telling his audience to harass people who wear face masks outside.

If they see children wearing masks, Tucker says the response should be no different than when you see a kid being abused — "call the police immediately, contact child protective services" pic.twitter.com/4svVH0JY3s

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) April 27, 2021

… like Howard Beale? Is this a Fox News strategy or Tucker’s own attempt to become a notorious troll? I honestly can’t tell. But it’s getting very, very weird:

Raging against face masks on Monday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson told his viewers they should openly harass anyone they see wearing masks outside and go so far as to call the police or social services on the parents of any children with masks on.

Carlson, who was a proponent of mask-wearing to help stem the spread of the coronavirus pandemic as recently as last March, has since become a fierce critic of face masks and other COVID-19 restrictions, guidelines, and mitigation efforts.

In this vein, and with the Biden administration set to further relax guidance on mask-wearing as coronavirus cases and deaths decrease nationwide as more Americans get vaccinated, Carlson opened up his top-rated Fox News primetime show on Monday night by blasting “neurotic” liberals who have been faithfully wearing face masks amid a deadly pandemic.

“Masks have always been incompatible with a free society,” he fumed. “We used to know that. Masks strip people of their identity as individuals, transform people from citizens into drones. They isolate us and alienate us to shut us off from one another, they prevent intimacy and human contact. If I can’t see your face, I can’t know you.”

Stating that a large portion of liberals suffer from an “actual mental health condition” because a recent Pew survey shows they are critical of others who don’t mask up near them, Carlson called on his audience to instead openly mock mask-wearers in public.

“The rest of us should be snorting at them first. They’re the aggressors. It’s our job to brush them back and restore the society we were born in,” he said. “So the next time you see someone in a mask on the sidewalk or on the bike path, do not hesitate. Ask politely but firmly, ‘Would you please take off your mask? Science shows there is no reason for you to be wearing it. Your mask is making me uncomfortable.’”

He added: “We should do that and we should keep doing it until wearing a mask outside is roughly as socially accepted as lighting a Marlboro on an elevator. It’s repulsive. Don’t do it around other people. That’s the message we should send because it’s true.”

Carlson then took it several steps further by urging his viewers to take far more drastic measures if they see children wearing masks.

“As for forcing children to wear masks outside, that should be illegal,” the Fox News star huffed. “Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid in Walmart. Call the police immediately. Contact Child Protective Services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse, it’s child abuse, and you are morally obligated to attempt to prevent it.”

Further claiming that “fighting back is the only option,” the primetime host told his audience that if “we don’t resist, there is no escape.”

Note that until very recently he was a proponent of mask wearing and other mitigation strategies. Also note that he’s completely skipped over the “mask mandates are government tyranny taking away my freedum” stand to declare that it’s tyranny if other people are wearing them.

He’s either lost it or he’s just decided to go as far as he can to antagonize liberals for ratings and clout. Not that his motives make any difference. He’s a blight on humanity either way.

“Joe Manchin is out of touch with reality if he thinks Republican extremism isn’t the core problem of American politics right now,” tweets Robert Cruickshank. Manchin may be living in the past. But that makes him a problem for Democrats in the present. Cruickshank points to a Vox profile of Manchin that descibes how the man ticks. In his mid-70s, he’s thinking about his legacy:

That legacy will in large part be shaped by what happens in Congress under the Biden administration. For the first time in a decade, Democrats have unified control of government, which theoretically gives them a rare opportunity to pass new progressive laws on a party-line basis. But in practice, the 60-vote threshold to advance legislation past the filibuster dramatically limits what they can do with their party alone (except, again, for budget reconciliation, a process that comes with restrictions and that Manchin has voiced skepticism about using again).

To the immense frustration of progressive activists, Manchin has insisted that this filibuster must stay. He is not the only Senate Democrat with this view — Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) is with him prominently, as are others more quietly. But in March, Manchin perhaps inadvertently gave reformers hope with a series of ambiguous and misinterpreted comments about a rules tweak he could support (requiring filibustering senators to talk on the Senate floor). So he tried to quash those hopes with his Washington Post op-ed in early April.

Some filibuster reformers hope that, as the year goes on, the reality of Republican obstruction will become clear to Manchin and he’ll be driven to change his mind — that Senate rules will in the end be just as negotiable to him as the details of Biden’s stimulus bill. For instance, reformers hoped a GOP filibuster of Democrats’ big voting rights bill, the For the People Act, could spur holdout senators to change the rules to pass it, because it’s so important.

Manchin recoils at the very idea. “How in the world could you, with the tension we have right now, allow a voting bill to restructure the voting of America on a partisan line?” he asked. He says that 20 to 25 percent of the public already doesn’t trust the system and that a party-line overhaul would “guarantee” that number would increase, leading to more “anarchy” like that at the Capitol on January 6. He added: “I just believe with all my heart and soul that’s what would happen, and I’m not going to be part of it.”

That’s the same “But what would the Republicans do?” thinking seen among old-line Democrats for decades. Andrew Prokop writes that then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “concluded that Manchin’s moderation was situational,” and therefore unreliable. “That is, if Republicans ever really needed his vote, they were highly unlikely to get it.” Manchin’s votes with Republicans often were in situations where his vote was not pivotal, but looked good to conservative constituents. Democrat Heath Shuler used to play that game in conservative NC-11, the district now represented by Republican Madison Cawthorn.

The Vox piece references Manchin’s predeliction for cutting deals and having his vote suddenly materialize when the caucus absolutely needed it. What does he want that Biden and Senate Democrats can give him?

A 2006 scare-mongering op-ed in the Wall Street Journal — “It’s the Demography, Stupid” —warned of the threat to civilization posed by Muslim migration to Europe. Muslims’ high reproduction rate relative to Europeans meant creeping Islamization threatened to eradicate nice, white Christian culture as we know it. Tucker Carlson is a latecomer to that party.

That was ten years before Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign warning of the brown peril from south of the border — Mexicans and others “from the Middle East. But we don’t know.”

It is not a hard guess what Carlson, Fox News and conservative commentators will do with the census data released on Monday. Population growth over the last ten years in the U.S. hit its lowest rate since the 1930s (Washington Post):

Unlike the slowdown of the Great Depression, which was a blip followed by a boom, the slowdown this time is part of a longer-term trend, tied to the aging of the country’s White population, decreased fertility rates and lagging immigration.

Five states gained a congressional seat: Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, and Oregon. Texas gained two. Seven states lost one seat each: California, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

NEW: The Census Bureau is planning to start releasing 2020 census redistricting data by Aug. 16, according to a newsletter it released on April 19 (H/T @NCSLorg's Christi Zamarripa)https://t.co/NZbqpHwKXJ pic.twitter.com/4piP0ZiF2m

— Hansi Lo Wang (he/him) (@hansilowang) April 20, 2021

More granular details on race and ethnicity, incuding data used for redrawing state and federal voting districts, will not arrive until later this year. For now, William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, tells the Post:

Based on census estimates, in more than a dozen states, about half the gains are Hispanic people, including Texas, Florida, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada, Frey said. Whites accounted for more than half the growth in only five states, plus the District of Columbia.In 27 states, the number of Whites declined.

Data on race and ethnicity won’t be released until later this year, but some states with high immigrant populations, such as Texas, Florida and Arizona, came in with lower populations than projected. “So I think it is reasonable to ask whether there was some undercount of Latinos,” Frey said.

Carlson’s white-fright screeds won’t wait. Bet money on it.

It’s the Democracy, Stupid

Perhaps most surprising detail is that had 89 more New York residents filled out census forms, the state would have kept its seat and instead Minnesota would have lost one. Had more Latinos there responded, Texas might have gained three seats instead of two.

Participation matters. Voting matters. “Nobody would fight this hard to take something from us that wasn’t powerful,” Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II said of Republican efforts at suppressing opponents’ votes.

Given the last two very close presidential elections, Aaron Blake offers one take on what the data mean and don’t:

All told, five seats will migrate from blue states to red ones — owing to population shifts from the Rust Belt, the Northeast and California to the South and other portions of the West.

Five of the seven seats being added also go to states under complete GOP control of redistricting, with three of seven being taken away coming from states in which Democrats have some measure of control over the maps. Other states have more divided control or redistricting commissions.

That should help Republicans, at least marginally, draw better House maps for 2022. The Cook Political Report estimates the shifts are worth about 3.5 seats which, if no other seat shifted in the coming midterm election, would put the House near-even (either 218-217 or 219-216 in Democrats’ favor, versus the current 222-213).

As for the electoral college in future presidential elections, it’s more of a mixed bag. Two states that are losing seats — Michigan and Pennsylvania — went for President Biden in 2020 but also for Donald Trump in 2016. But those are states Democrats probably need to win in the near future, meaning it’s probably a bigger loss for them.

How those maps will look will wait until perhaps the end of this year because of delays in releasing census data. NPR:

The results had been held up for months due to delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the Trump administration’s interference last year. Under current federal law, these state population numbers were due by the end of 2020. But the bureau had been warning since April 2020 that census results would be delivered later than originally planned. A bipartisan group of lawmakers recently renewed a push in Congress to extend legal reporting deadlines formally for the 2020 count.

Alabama and Ohio have asked federal courts to force the release of data by the end of July so they can complete their redistricting process on schedule.

NPR adds:

Alabama’s lawsuit is also trying to stop the bureau from adopting a new technique, known as differential privacy, for keeping personal information in anonymized census data confidential. If Alabama wins, the data’s release would be delayed by “multiple months” past August, the agency’s chief scientist said in a recent court filing.

Candidates and kitchen cabinets across the country are standing by to analyze how redistricting may affect their chances of winning election should they jump into state and federal races. Delays equal dollars and compress campaign schedules. The longer it takes to get the lay of the land and to find out which officials end up double-bunked, the tougher the prospects for winning as a non-incumbent.

Liz Cheney isn’t ruling out running for president in 2024. Did you think she was defying Donald Trump out of principle? That it wasn’t as much positioning for the “anti-Trump” candidacy if he crashes and burns? Well think again.

Yes, she stood up to Trump. Good for her. You’ll note she only did it after he lost.

I wrote this two years ago:

This awful person could easily become the first woman president of the United States

Published by digby on April 2, 2019

Here’s a nice soft-focus profile of the most dangerous woman in America, Liz Cheney:

Controversial former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was castigated by liberals as the evil genius behind former President George W. Bush, is now a steady, quiet, and influential force behind his daughter Liz Cheney’s climb to the highest echelons of GOP politics.

A political duo since Dick Cheney, 78, left the West Wing in 2009, their partnership has extended to the House of Representatives, where Liz Cheney, 52, was elected the No. 3 ranking Republican after winning just her second term last year in the at-large seat her father once held. The Wyoming congresswoman’s chief of staff is a longtime Dick Cheney aide, and the former veep is a ubiquitous presence at strategy sessions and at fundraisers for her political operation.

“The vice president has been Liz’s top adviser during her brief congressional career,” said Cesar Conda, the elder Cheney’s former chief domestic policy adviser in the White House and now a partner at the Washington lobbying firm Navigators Global. “I can see her dad’s influence.”

Liz Cheney is focused on the job at hand — driving the party’s message on Capitol Hill as House Republican Conference chairwoman and helping the GOP win back the majority. But knowledgeable Republicans say she is not content as the House Republicans’ No. 3 and doesn’t see herself as limited by the pecking order that puts her behind House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La.

She broke with McCarthy and Scalise on an anti-hate resolution initiated by House Democrats, voting against it in a power move that raised eyebrows among Republicans and was interpreted as a signal that Cheney doesn’t plan to sit idle waiting for a leadership post above her to open before she makes a move. Republicans who know the congresswoman believe her sights are set on House minority leader, speaker — or even national office.

To realize her lofty aspirations, Liz Cheney has moved to establish credibility apart from her father and her prominent name, attempting to become a go-to resource for colleagues seeking messaging and policy expertise. The congresswoman also has assembled a kitchen cabinet of experienced Republican operatives, anchored by her father, whose experience in high-level national politics spans five decades, with stints as White House chief of staff, congressman, defense secretary, and vice president.

“She and her dad are very close. She values his advice and counsel,” Jeff Larson, a veteran Republican strategist who advises Liz Cheney, said. “But she is her own person.”

The two Cheneys are like-minded on key issues, especially having to do with U.S. foreign policy and national security, co-writing a book on the topic in 2015. Their advocacy for hawkish American global leadership, in the Republican tradition of former President Ronald Reagan, put them at odds with President Trump’s populist noninterventionism.

More than that, as Liz Cheney’s Republican colleagues in the House have discovered, the former vice president and his daughter are similar in temperament and personality.

Like her father, the congresswoman is outspoken, with little regard for niceties or protocol. And she prefers pulling the levers of power behind the scenes to public showboating. She is hardworking, accessible, and inquisitive, but not the most gregarious or social of politicians. “She has all the warmth of her father,” chuckled a senior House Republican…

There is an excellent chance she will run in 2024. She could be the first woman president of the United States. And despite this chilling observation — as Liz Cheney’s Republican colleagues in the House have discovered, the former vice president and his daughter are similar in temperament and personality — I think she’s even worse than her father. She came up in a crazy era.

Democrats should work very hard to keep the loyalty of women who have left the GOP in recent years. Cheney or Haley could potentially get them back if Dems are perceived to have failed them.

I don’t know if they all have one but as TPM reports, Alaska sure does:

Alaska state Sen. Lora Reinbold (R) had no choice but to drive for more than 13 hours and then take a ferry on Sunday to get to the state’s legislature in Juneau after Alaska Airlines banned her for flouting its mask requirement.

“Alaska I went to new heights to serve you & have a new appreciation for the marine ferry system,” Reinbold wrote in a Facebook post with photos and a video of her ride. “I am keenly aware of the monopoly in air transport to Juneau that needs reviewed!”

The lawmaker thanked her husband “for giving up his birthday to make a long unexpected trip” with her to the city.

Alaska Airlines told the Anchorage Daily News on Saturday that Reinbold “is not permitted to fly with us for her continued refusal to comply with employee instruction regarding the current mask policy.”

“This suspension is effective immediately, pending further review,” Tim Thompson, the airline’s spokesperson, said. “Federal law requires all guests to wear a mask over their nose and mouth at all times during travel, including throughout the flight, during boarding and deplaning, and while traveling through an airport.”

Unfortunately for Reinbold, Alaska Airlines is the only flight company that offers regularly scheduled trips from Anchorage to Juneau, according to the Daily News. It is unclear what route exactly Reinbold took. The Republican would have had to drive hundreds of miles on Sunday to reach the ports in Skagway or Haines, where the ferry to Juneau leaves. She also likely had to drive through part of Canada to get there, as the Daily News noted.

Reinbold claimed in a Facebook post on Saturday that she was “reasonable” with “all Alaska Airlines employees” and decried the airline for talking to the media about the suspension.

“I inquired about mask exemption with uptight employees at the counter,” she wrote.

The lawmaker has accused Alaska Airlines in the past of being “part of mask tyranny” and its employees of being “mask bullies,” per the Daily News’ screenshot of a screed she posted on Facebook last year.

“I honestly hope they get sued for being ridiculous!” Reinbold wrote.

This isn’t the first time she’s faced consequences for refusing to wear a mask; the Republican was banned from most of the Capitol in March after ignoring the legislature’s rules on masks along with temperature screenings and rapid tests.

Additionally, the GOP-controlled Senate voted to strip her of her chairmanship of the chamber’s Judiciary Committee last week.

Nuts. Absolute lunacy.

Despite many Americans’ belief that they live in a bubble, they don’t. The pandemic is raging around the world:

Almost 5.7 million #COVID19 cases were reported to @WHO in the last 7 days… and this is certainly an underestimate of the true number of cases.

The global situation is uneven, and incredibly fragile…

"We're still in the acute phase of this pandemic & the trajectory that we are seeing globally is incredibly worrying," says @mvankerkhove at today's @WHO #COVID19 briefing.

Even if some countries are seeing declines, the world is in its ninth straight week of increasing cases. pic.twitter.com/P0YnEY10VW

— Global Health Strategies (@GHS) April 26, 2021

“The variants, the fatigue, and the fact that we have inequitable and uneven vaccine distribution“ contribute to the global rise in Covid-19 cases, says WHO's Covid-19 technical lead @mvankerkhove. “This virus does not respect borders.”https://t.co/Le3spMSYt9 pic.twitter.com/BvDtx9fDsf

— CNN This Morning with Kasie Hunt (@CNNThisMorning) April 13, 2021

Originally tweeted by Maria Van Kerkhove (@mvankerkhove) on April 26, 2021.

And India is the worst:

This https://t.co/vYCEIqx8cr

— Abraar Karan (@AbraarKaran) April 24, 2021

1/ Most if not all of us who are first generation from #India have close family members who are struggling to fight through this current #covid19 surge

India broke its case record again today with over 330k new cases— no easy answers here either

2/ While a circuit-breaker type event is needed to cut transmission chains, that still means dealing with the backlog of 2 weeks of infections that have already been set in motion today; Moreover, with a large informal sector, small economic shocks can be/are deadly

3/ Need to support people with food/$ security during a lockdown- but we are talking about a very complex environment that has also suffered from serious inequities/extreme poverty even before #covid19

4/ Vaccines will help, but during a large surge like this one, vaccinating your way out isn’t feasible.

Vaccinations must continue but in the meanwhile need to stop ongoing infections & support healthcare system even more than just vaccinating

5/ #Bettermasks– high filtration such as N95- offer immense protection at individual level & can be critically important in very densely populated cities of which India has many

If no access to these, double mask or single still much better than no mask— masks work

6/ At individual level, would strictly avoid indoors, crowds, poor ventilation to the extent possible; easier said than done when need to find food/ shelter etc

Indian government needs to be strict about discouraging/ outlawing large crowded religious gatherings which are cont

7/ With all that being said, international community also needs to step in urgently to assist with capacity— critical resources like O2 and vents, staffing, scaling up vaccine rollout; supporting impoverished communities that may need to lockdown, which can be deadly for them

8/ Humbly, will say even with the above- unsure if anyone can reasonably stop this surge right now

Registering over 330k *detected* cases —> likely more; also, deaths likely undercounted given how slammed hospitals are right now (even before #Covid19 this was a serious issue)

9/ overall, this is a grim situation that the world is watching unfold in shock

The Modi government should have been anticipating any worst case scenarios but instead they/he seem to be focused on his election- sounds like someone we once knew here in the US

Originally tweeted by Abraar Karan (@AbraarKaran) on April 24, 2021.

It is a living nightmare there. And whether we like it or not, we share this planet and their plague is our plague. As the virus mutates around the world there is a good likelihood that one will eventually beat the vaccines. It’s almost inevitable. The US and the rest of the world needs to step.

CNN’s Daniel Dale debunks the latest right wing culture war nonsense. It’s just so, so dumb. But this crap seems to thrill the Trump cult more than anything else so they’re gleefully running with it:

Republican members of Congress, Fox News personalities and other prominent right-wing figures are falsely claiming that President Joe Biden is trying to force Americans to eat far less red meat.”Joe Biden’s climate plan includes cutting 90% of red meat from our diets by 2030. They want to limit us to about four pounds a year. Why doesn’t Joe stay out of my kitchen?” Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert wrote on Twitter on Saturday.

No fewer than five Fox News or Fox Business personalities told versions of the scare story on the air since Friday morning. For example, Fox News host Jesse Watters said Saturday that “Americans are going to have to cut their red meat consumption by 90% in order to reduce emissions to hit Biden’s target. That means you’re only allowed to eat four pounds of red meat a year. That adds up to a burger a month. That’s it.”

In a particularly odd moment on Twitter on Sunday, two Republican governors, Greg Abbott of Texas and Brad Little of Idaho, tweeted their opposition to the Biden red meat policy that doesn’t exist — and cited a Fox News graphic that listed the supposed elements of the nonexistent policy.

Here’s the truth.

Facts First: Biden has not proposed any limit on Americans’ red meat consumption. In fact, he has not proposed any limit on Americans’ consumption of any food. The false claim about Biden trying to restrict people to four pounds of red meat per year appears to have originated with a deceptive Thursday article by the British tabloid The Daily Mail. The article baselessly connected Biden’s climate proposals to an academic paper from 2020 that is not about Biden and says nothing about the government imposing dietary limits.

The paper, by scholars at the University of Michigan and Tulane University, estimates how greenhouse gas emissions would be affected if Americans hypothetically decided to change their diets in various ways, such as cutting their consumption of beef to four pounds per year. The paper does not suggest a mandatory four-pound beef limit — and, more importantly for the purposes of this fact check, the paper is just not related to Biden’s plans.The paper was published before Biden had won the Democratic presidential nomination. The paper does not even mention Biden’s name. And Biden has never publicly mentioned the paper.So…frankly, you can stop reading here if you just wanted to know if it’s true that Biden is trying to take away your sacred right to a rib eye. That claim is complete nonsense.But if you’re interested in how right-wing media figures and elected officials turned a little-known academic analysis into a scary presidential plot to limit Americans’ hard-earned cookout freedoms, read on.

Their most potent culture war weapon is the one that insults our intelligence so often that we end up just giving up in despair because our heads hurt so badly.

BTW: Apparently, “meat-trolling” (which had a slightly different definition when I was young) has been a thing in right wing circles for decades. Rick Perlstein explains.

Rick Santorum:

We came here and created a blank slate. We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.

Rhetoricians have a term to describe Santorum’s strategy.: vas stercore. Go ahead, look it up. And when you’re done, treat yourself to Rumble, a truly amazing movie.

Yes, the movie refutes Santorum but that’s not the reason to watch it. Rick’s too culturally ignorant to bother trying to refute. No, the reason to watch the movie is because the music and the people in it are simply wonderful. And any excuse will do to watch it.

I’m sure you all remember the endless media forays into so-called Trump country after the 2016 election to find out what “the country” was really thinking. The media were fascinated by the fact that Donald Trump managed to pull off his narrow electoral win in places none of them had ever been so they sent out intrepid reporters to rural towns and small cities in the rust belt to find out what Real Americans™️ were thinking. And they went back every few months for years to take the temperature of these folks who always said the same thing: they just loved Trump and supported him no matter what. Trump’s supporters believed with all their hearts that everything the press reported about him was a lie and the whole country was really with them if only the media would tell the truth about it. After all, just about everyone they knew and everyone on Facebook were in total agreement.

So sure, the media was fascinated by this phenomenon and that’s understandable to some extent. It was quite weird. But one might have thought it would be at least somewhat interesting to check in with the other side to see what they were thinking in the months after the recent election. It was quite eventful, after all. Yet you probably won’t be surprised to learn that there haven’t been many forays into the same states that Biden narrowly won. When NBC News did take a trip into the wilds of Pennsylvania recently to see how Biden voters are faring, they found that rather than the worshipful adoration of the Trump voters, most Biden voters have a very different reaction:

Robin Westcott remembers her joy when Joe Biden was elected last fall. Not only had Biden won with a narrow victory in Pennsylvania, but he also had carried Erie County, where Westcott has lived for most of her 62 years. Once reliably Democratic in presidential elections, the voters here in 2016 broke for Donald Trump — the first time they favored a Republican White House hopeful since Ronald Reagan in 1984. The county, which pokes out from the northwesternmost corner of the state and into Lake Erie, became something of a Rorschach test for the Rust Belt…

Nearly 100 days into the Biden presidency, voters who backed him in this political battleground-within-a battleground say they feel a sense of relief.

Or, as one man told NBC News pollsters last week:

“I don’t have to think about what Joe Biden is doing every day,” said a North Carolina man who voted for Biden. “The best thing about Joe Biden is I don’t have to think about Joe Biden.”

In line with those anecdotal sentiments, a spate of public polls was released this past weekend in the run-up to Biden’s 100-day mark, and they all show Biden to have an approval rating ranging from 52% in the ABC poll to 58% in the CBS poll. There is widespread approval for his COVID response, his infrastructure policy and the economy. Unsurprisingly, Biden does poorly on immigration and guns, both of which are intractable issues that have critics among both Democrats and Republicans. And he hasn’t managed to unify the country which is, of course, something he should have been able to do with a flick of his wrist — or maybe a magic wand?

All in all, Biden is doing well, particularly considering that he was given almost no transition time to prepare and had to hit the ground running to deal with a historic catastrophe that killed over half a million people and isn’t over yet. His handling of this issue, about which the vast majority approve, is an impressive accomplishment considering how badly the previous administration handled the crisis and the ongoing lack of cooperation from red-state governments.

One of the more disturbing results in these polls is the fact that so many Republican voters are still resisting the vaccine and frankly, don’t seem to be willing to reconsider. If they don’t, the U.S. is going to have a much more difficult time getting the caseload down to an acceptable level which could, perversely, affect the public’s opinion of the rollout. The same dynamic that blames Biden for the GOP’s refusal to cooperate in Congress could be at work here, but with much more lethal consequences.

That dynamic should also be informing the media’s understanding of why Biden is not able to achieve the kind of approval rating that the presidents before Donald Trump were able to achieve in their first 100 days. Unfortunately, it isn’t. ABC’s headline, for instance, was:

Biden’s 100 days: Low-end approval, yet strong marks on pandemic response. His April approval is lower than most of his predecessors, save Trump and Ford.

Newsweek’s headline was similar: “Joe Biden Approval Rating Beats Only Donald Trump and Gerald Ford’s 100-Day Score: Poll”

What a bizarre way of spinning it after four years of a president who could never get above 45% (and even that was very rare.) It shouldn’t have to be said that none of the previous presidents came into office in the middle of a global pandemic with their predecessor spreading a Big Lie that the election was stolen and inciting an insurrection just days before the inauguration. Neither did any of those presidents have to deal with a level of political polarization not seen since the civil war, thanks to the radical partisanship of the opposition. I’d say that having a 53% approval rating under those circumstances is something of a miracle. Apparently, we are just going to pretend that Donald Trump was an anomaly and that nothing he did had any serious effect on the political system that might not make this administration directly comparable to what came before.

Still, there is some good news in all this. The media can pretend that Joe Biden’s approval rating is a terrible disaster all they want. But nothing will make it as bad as Donald Trump’s, which is currently at 32% in the NBC poll. That’s a drop of 8 points since January, which is unusual because ex-presidents usually gain back some popularity after they leave office. Yet he will maintain control of the party with the supporters he has. And that’s very bad. According to the CBS poll:

Republicans still do not say Biden was the legitimate winner of the election, and six in 10 of former President Trump’s voters now want to see their congressional representatives oppose Biden at every turn. This isn’t just politics. That particular group who wants opposition — while constituting a minority of Americans — also has very different views on issues from most Democrats, moderates and independents as well. For instance, most of them think efforts at racial equality are making American society worse; they say illegal immigration should be the top priority, as opposed to the pandemic or even the economy.

That isn’t enough people to win elections legitimately. But Republican officials are happy to do whatever it takes to please them since they do represent the base of the party. Joe Biden could have a 70% approval rating and it wouldn’t reduce their power. It would be nice if the media spin didn’t obscure that fact.

Salon

Update:

This excerpt from Dan Pfeiffer’s newsletter speaks to the same issue and his advice to the media is excellent:

The conversation around Biden’s poll numbers and presidential approval more generally undervalue two important political dynamics.

First, political analysis often presumes a static electorate from year to year where different results come from voters changing their minds. In reality, the biggest difference is about who turns out. Obama got crushed in 2010 because many of his voters stayed home and won in 2012 because they turned out. Of course, persuasion matters. There are swing voters, but if you don’t turn out your base, there aren’t enough swing voters to make up the difference.

Second, we live in an era of negative partisanship — where hatred for the other party is the biggest driving factor in political action. This is why Biden’s policies can poll in the seventies, and his approval rating can be in the low fifties. Hatred towards Trump was the number one factor in Democratic turnout in 2020.

Therefore, as we think about 2022, we should focus a little more on Biden’s disapproval rating. In the aforementioned ABC/Washington Post poll, only 42 percent of respondents disapprove of Biden’s job performance. Based on recent history, this number is impressively low. At this point in his Presidency, Trump’s disapproval was 53 percent. Biden’s number is only three points higher than Bill Clinton’s at the 100-day mark in a radically less polarized era.

Biden hasn’t gotten Republican voters to like him, but he has prevented them from hating him — a truly remarkable achievement. And one that bodes well for 2022 if it continues. Republicans need high turnout in the midterms, which might be difficult to achieve without Trump on the ballot if they can’t turn Biden into a scary and hated figure.

In the future, I think we should focus less on the overall approval number and look at the gap between approval and disapproval. Politicians that can be loved by their own party while being hated by fewer people in the other party might end up having the most political success.

I recognize this seems like a patently obvious observation, but it is rarely considered in poll analysis. Ultimately, analysts and strategists need to figure out which messages, policies, and candidate attributes drive turnout among their voters and depress it for the other side. Those answers will be impossible to find if we continue to simplistically obsess about Presidential approval ratings.