A CBS News poll released Sunday reveals stark differences in opinion along party lines about the conviction of Derek Chauvin as nearly half of the Republicans surveyed said they believe jurors reached the wrong verdict. Good lord. That’s a lot of people.
The jury’s assessment—which found Chauvin guilty of second degree murder, third degree murder and second degree manslaughter—was broadly rated as the “right verdict” by the over 2,500 Americans surveyed for the poll.
Three-quarters of respondents said they agreed with the outcome, with just 25% diverging—a group composed of more men than women and that is disproportionately white and mostly conservative.
Political affiliation emerged as the most divisive dictator of opinions on the trial’s outcome, with 90% of Democrats saying jurors reached the right verdict, while a slim majority (54%) of Republicans said the same.
Nearly half (46%) of the Republicans surveyed felt the jury had come to the wrong decision in convicting Chauvin of murder versus just 10% of Democrats and 25% of Independents who thought the verdict was wrong.
It’s chilling that that many people could watch that videotape and think it can be excused. I will never understand it.
Digby wrote about lynching-by-car on Saturday (“A Second Amendment for Cars“), but I’m still trying to wrap my brain around it. Slate is, too:
Over the past 11 months of anti-racism protests, demonstrators have had to protect themselves: from police, sometimes; from white supremacists, occasionally; and from cars. Since the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, more than 100 incidents of hostile drivers ramming into activists have been documented. These assailants have included police officers, gun-toters, and even, in one instance, a Ku Klux Klan leader. Many, though not all, of these aggressors were charged under local statutes—but now, a growing number of Republican state lawmakers are trying to ensure that, in the future, such vehicular attacks get a pass.
On Monday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an “anti-riot” bill that allows harsher police crackdowns on demonstrators—an apparent response to the “defund the police” and Black Lives Matter movements. (“This bill actually prevents local governments from defunding law enforcement,” DeSantis said.) A public gathering of three or more people can be classified as a “riot” under the law, and anyone who “willingly” participates in such a gathering can be charged with a third-degree felony. Plus, participants in rallies that turn violent can be also be charged with a third-degree felony even if they had no involvement with the violence. Most jarring of all, the law grants civil immunity to drivers who ram into protesting crowds and even injure or kill participants, if they claim the protests made them concerned for their own well-being in the moment.
Uh-huh. Oklahoma’s bill grants protester-killing drivers criminal immunity, it seems.
Seventeen states have passed 30 anti-protest bills and executive orders, writes Nitish Pahwa. Many have expanded the definition of “incitement and riot, heightening requisite penalties, and granting state officials further power to crack down on grassroots demonstrations on both public and private property.”
And on the SCOTUS beat, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern tweets more unsettling news this morning. First this:
This case is likely to pave the way to the Supreme Court declaring a constitutional right to concealed public carry, overriding many state and local restrictions on the ability to bear concealed arms in public. https://t.co/SDD4adTFhx
The Supreme Court takes interest in a case involving Trump's Title X "gag rule" on abortion providers, asking the Biden administration—which is trying to rescind the rule—if it intends to keep enforcing it in the meantime. A bit of an ominous sign. https://t.co/1M4y8BHh3Jpic.twitter.com/ULBcrxC2g3
Just last month, the conservative Judge Jay Bybee penned an extraordinary 127-page opinion canvassing the history of firearm laws and concluding that there is plainly no constitutional rights to public carry. Do not expect his view to prevail at SCOTUS. https://t.co/SuPl6w2tj3
Jessica Bruder, the author of “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century,” wrote over the weekend about her exploration of a growing American subculture. The film based on her book won Best Picture last night at the Oscars.
I did not watch the show, but I did see Nomadland. The unsettling film stayed with me for weeks. Later, it hit close to home.
One of the best field organizers I’ve known called on Sunday. He invited me to meet him in a nearby neighborhood for a free concert by the Firecracker Jazz Band, The band was preparing for its first live gig in over a year and had arranged an outdoor rehearsal on the front porch of a corner house on a narrow street.
A small, socially distanced crowd built, some standing, others sitting on the grass or in camp chairs across the street. A few in masks, others not. Several young women stood in the street spinning multi-colored hula hoops. With the warm, spring weather, neighborhoods are coming alive for the first time in over a year. My friend is preparing to leave that behind.
He will embark on a nomad journey of his own. He fitted out his car with a sleeping deck. He’s studied Bob Wells‘s YouTube videos on nomad living. There are compromises involved in his build: what he’d like vs. what he can afford. He hopes a persistent issue with his rack-and-pinion is finally resolved. But he’s been sleeping in the car the last few days to try it out before abandoning his apartment finally and hitting the road. More road trip than full nomad life perhaps, but that’s uncertain.
Bruder believes the film’s scene is depicting Fern, played by best actress-winner Frances McDormand, getting “the knock” is chilingly accurate.
“No overnight parking! You can’t sleep here.”
The knock, Bruder explains, “is a visceral, even existential, threat,” one nomads evade by hiding in plain sight. “Make yourself invisible. Internalize the idea that you’re unwelcome.” Homeless save for your vehicle.
Bob Wells, 65, has a popular video, “Avoiding the Knock,” and has been lecturing on the topic for ages. I first heard him talk about it seven years ago in the Sonoran Desert, at a gathering called the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. He shared tactics for “stealth parking,” such as creating police-friendly alibis and making your van look like a contractor’s work vehicle.
At first listen, I thought about how clever and resourceful those strategies were. But after hearing them a few times, I reached a second conclusion: In a better world, people wouldn’t have to go to such lengths to stay out of sight.
The nonprofit National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty keeps tabs on over 180 urban and rural cities across America, more than half of which have enacted laws that make it hard or nearly impossible to live in vehicles.
Over the past decade, Tristia Bauman, an attorney at the center, has seen the regulations multiply. Some places forbid overnight parking. Others outlaw inhabiting a vehicle outright. Penalties can pile up fast. Unpaid, they lead to the cruelest punishment of all: towing. Failing to pay an impound fee means losing not just a car but a home.
Bruder spent three years and 15,000 miles crisscrossing the country in her van to research her book. I covered that distance in three months one summer, but camping along the way. There were the sorts of sweeping landscapes seen in Nomadland. Destinations planned for places to sleep for the night (or two). But knowing your whole life is in your car takes a psychic toll.
A break-in or a breakdown can undo your entire world. Will the car be safe in the Canadian wilderness while I hike for a couple of days? Or on a city street for a couple of hours while I sightsee? I got the knock one night while stopped at a pulloff in Yellowstone. Rangers warned there was no vacancy in any campground. Move along. Instead, I tucked in beside some employees’ cars behind a lodge and slept in my front seat. Knowing there was a place called home with no uncertainty about where to sleep each night was an anchor. Uncertainty is exhausting even if the scenery is dazzling.
People ask Bruder what they can do for the nomads:
Letting vehicle dwellers exist in peace would be a fine start. Individuals have the power to help. When you see someone living in a car, van or RV, don’t call the police.
💉Half the eligible population has had a first dose. 🕐Vaccine lines and waits are disappearing. 📦Supply is soaring.
📉The end of the “mass” part of the U.S. vaccine campaign is coming to an end. The rest will be much different.
👓I’ve been watching the U.S. vaccine rollout every day for the last four months. It started slow, gained momentum, took off like a rocket and has likely now peaked.
⚠️Success going forward is going to look very different. The metrics from March are not the metrics for May.
In March, we saw many states with 90%+ of delivered supply used. That was very efficient vaccine usage, but also tight supply.
Those % figures are now falling, as they probably should. Tight supply is not what you want when you’re targeting harder-to-reach/convince populations.
The Biden admin says they’re pursuing a policy of “overwhelm the problem”. That means:
💉Lots of vaccine sitting around, ready 🏪At lots of locations 📆Many open appointments
If you saw that in March, you’d say “this is a failure.” This is a different point in the rollout.
The Biden team was very happy, as were lots of people, about big dose numbers a month ago. Here’s how they’re talking about it now, which more or less matches w/ my read:
“Going forward, we expect daily vaccination rates will moderate and fluctuate.”
“We’ve gotten vaccinations to the most at-risk and those most eager to get vaccinated as quickly as possible.”
“It’s OK if there’s not a long line of 1,000 people… That’s good, that was the plan.”
I think that’s correct. It doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of work to do! It just means that work, and the numbers, look different.
“Mass” vaccination is useful when you have a huge mass of people who all need and want to be vaccinated at once.
What’s next is more boutique.
📽️Think of it like a blockbuster movie release (remember those?)
🧑🤝🧑Mass vaccination is everyone who rushed to see it in theaters on week one.
📺We’re about to start the “I’ll catch it on Netflix in a couple weeks” crowd.
There is some very good news here. There are a LOT of people who have gotten their first shots. Almost all of them seem likely to complete their second. (I know there’s a sort of doomsy piece in the Times today, but… it’s still 92% completion)
Right now, the U.S. is about where Israel was in mid-Feb. (This uses our apples to apples “enough for X% metric, which helps create good comparisons).
They kept vaccinating after that point to about 50% of their pop. (and are now at ~60%).
Look at the case curve.
(The usual caveats: The U.S. isn’t Israel, etc etc etc)
I hope this helps people as they think about how to read the numbers going forward. In short:
📦Supply % is gonna go up 📉Vaccine numbers are going to go down 🧑🏭The next phase means reaching people at a grind, not a rush 🕯️That’s probably fine
Here’s our full vaccine tracker, which I hope you’ll give a look at bookmark:
This article in the Atlantic about the spread of anti-vax conspiracy propaganda is scary. It’s bigger than we think:
“There are reasons to believe those in fact aren’t the real numbers,” the Fox News host Tucker Carlson speculated hours after the FDA and CDC announcement. His 15-minute segment treated the government’s abundance of caution as evidence of nefarious intent. Carlson said:
Now [Anthony] Fauci has declared that because the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has injured six people—and if that’s true, by the way, would make that vaccine much safer not just than birth-control pills, but safer than many other vaccines we’ve distributed in the past—because this one vaccine has hurt six people out of 7 million, we need to stop using it immediately. Does that make sense to you? No, it really doesn’t. It seems possible there may be more going on here.
The segment was a master class in spreading conspiracy theories under the guise of merely asking questions. On a typical night, Carlson has a TV audience of a few million people. He got an additional boost on Facebook, where his video was the most popular post about the Johnson & Johnson pause. Forty-five thousand people shared it on the leading social-media platform—which was already awash in friend-of-a-friend stories about supposed side effects from COVID-19 shots, aspersions against vaccines more generally, and portrayals of pandemic-related public-health measures as affronts to personal liberty.
[…]
Influencers with huge audiences have amassed enormous power over public perception. And no matter what the official policy happens to be—toward vaccines, masks, or other precautions—someone will have the motive and the means to undermine it.
My team at the Stanford Internet Observatory is part of the Virality Project, a collaborative research effort to track misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine rollout around the world. When we saw a spike in social-media content within anti-vaccine communities portraying the Johnson & Johnson halt as evidence of terrible problems with COVID-19 vaccines, and vaccination writ large, we were not surprised; anti-vaxxer echo chambers are full of conspiracy theories. Although anti-vaccine activists remain few in number, their propaganda occasionally spreads to Pat Buchanan fans, corgi fanciers, neighborhood-swap groups, and other seemingly unrelated niche communities.
The conversation about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines has expanded to include influencers with a following many orders of magnitude larger than that of the average anti-vax activist. These influencers can more easily reach Americans who are genuinely hesitant—people who have received other shots and have had their children vaccinated but are wary, even under threat from a deadly coronavirus, of getting new medical intervention that lacks a long track record of safety. The drivers of hesitancy are varied: deep-seated aversions grounded in religious beliefs, bad prior experiences, or distrust of the pharmaceutical industry; more immediate doubts about the safety of a specific vaccine relative to the risk of the disease it prevents; and the influence of a person’s friends, relatives, and social group. The effect of what one sees or reads, the weight of the prevailing opinion of one’s social group, is both powerful and hard to measure. Researchers can’t say which tweet or YouTube video tipped someone into a decision not to vaccinate. We can see only which posts people are liking and sharing, and which commentators and news outlets are getting the most attention.
News articles from most media properties, including Fox News, reported on the Johnson & Johnson pause with accuracy and nuance, my colleagues at the Virality Project noted. (In researching this article, I asked Fox for comment about the striking contrast between its reporting and Carlson’s commentary and have not yet received a response.) Many publications even described the pause as evidence that the regulatory system was working.
How that news coverage was subsequently interpreted is another matter. Facebook users regularly share links with their own comments on top. Of all such posts about the Johnson & Johnson situation, one of the most popular came from the self-described “news analyst & hip-hop artist” An0maly—an influencer, but not a mainstream media personality by any definition of the term. He reposted a CNN article, adding his own commentary about government dishonesty. An0maly has 1.5 million Facebook followers.
The day after Carlson’s video appeared on Facebook, Fauci criticized his comments on CNN as “a typical crazy conspiracy theory.” Carlson hit back with another segment declaring that he believed in science and was not anti-vaccine. Then he once again began asking tendentious questions. Alluding to Fauci’s calls for continued caution among vaccinated people, Carlson asked of the vaccines, “If this stuff works, why can’t you LIVE like it works? What are you really telling us here?” (Facebook added a pop-up warning to the second video, with a link to some fact-checks.)
Americans’ loss of faith in authority has become highly consequential during the pandemic. In some cases, institutional experts have undercut their own credibility. A year ago, leading health agencies were slow to call for masks. Some experts went so far as to construct a noble lie, downplaying masks’ benefits as a way of keeping the general public from buying up equipment that health-care workers needed. Fortunately, some prominent commentators urged people to wear masks before the CDC or World Health Organization did, but that only reinforced the perception of institutional bumbling. In a noisy communication ecosystem within a low-trust social environment, expert opinion becomes just one input among many. Institutional experts’ disadvantage is compounded by the fact that many nonexperts are far more visible in health debates, despite having built their following on other topics entirely. The era of the influencer has replaced the era of the expert. If you have a massive audience that trusts you, your opinion—like Carlson’s—is one that scientists must reckon with, even if it is wrong.
Why people trust that snotty little twit, especially about anything to do with science, I will never understand.
Nonetheless, the scientists have to tell the people the truth even if it might muddle the message. Otherwise, they lose their credibility and we end up worse off than before:
Institutional authorities are caught in a quandary: If they acknowledge uncertainty about something important (such as whether masks are helpful) or admit that they are playing for time (because they are still figuring out the cause of a rare blood clot), they risk losing public confidence. Precise explanations may be too complex. Oversimplified but easily grasped messages may backfire—and create an opening for people bent on discrediting official expertise. Perhaps the most important thing the FDA and the CDC can do is straightforwardly explain what they know as a given situation evolves. This requires communicating with frequent updates and considerable nuance—not something that state or federal health agencies have been particularly adept at doing during the pandemic.
So what do they do? Well, there is some advice but I don’t now how effective this would be:
Competing for attention in the current media ecosystem means doing more than tweeting out official press releases and making Fauci available for cable-news interviews. Public-health authorities can focus on getting information to noninstitutional experts—people who are not in positions of authority but have developed their own audiences, can convey nuance, and understand the communication techniques of influencers. Research has shown that one of the most effective ways to reduce vaccine hesitancy related to childhood immunizations is via direct conversations between parents and trusted pediatricians. That’s difficult to scale, and those interactions tend to be much more limited than one’s constant interactions with a peer group or social-media influencers. So pediatricians have made themselves visible on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and other online spaces where parents discuss their children’s health, growing online communities for which they make videos and reply in the comments. On the subject of COVID-19 vaccines specifically, Black physicians have created Clubhouse rooms to engage directly with their community. They have day jobs but have determined that prioritizing communication is a key vector in improving health outcomes.
We all are living through a transition in how information circulates. Sorting out the new dynamics of influence—the processes of how media and social media can best curate and promote authoritative information, on health and other matters—will take years. Research into debunking misinformation consistently reiterates the value of more credible messengers and more tailored messages. The influencers who spread misinformation understand how to gain the confidence of people they will never meet, make content that captures attention, and persuade audiences to take action.
Meanwhile, public-health institutions have not evolved, and whether a better institutional communications strategy is the solution at this point isn’t clear anyway. An updated model of distributed expertise would empower more trusted local experts and activate community organizations that can engage empathetically with the concerns of vaccine-hesitant groups. Fauci can’t personally counter every social-media conspiracy theory about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, but family doctors, religious leaders, and other community officials can do plenty to reassure the public.
I suspect the problem with that lies in the fact that family doctors, religious leaders and other community officials are just like the rest of the country — half politically insane and half normal.
I don’t have the answer for this. But it’s bigger than public health.
Update:
"This is not a free speech argument," former alt-right YouTuber @CaolanRob says about algorithms. "I'm not saying they should be censored and banned. … This is about YouTube, the biggest video platform on the planet recommending and pushing content that is extreme…" pic.twitter.com/k9RD7kQsMi
Kevin McCarthy refuses to answer Chris Wallace’s question about whether it’s true that Trump told him, “Well Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are” when McCarthy called and urged him to call off the insurrectionists on January 6
It’s pretty obvious that Jaime Herrera Beutler’s recollection of the January 6th Trump- McCarthy’s exchange is true. It also seems that Chris Wallace has heard some other thing:
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) repeatedly dodged Fox News anchor Chris Wallace’s pointed questions on Sunday about the top Republican’s Jan. 6 call with former President Donald Trump, insisting his conversations with the former president are a personal and private matter.
Towards the end of a wide-ranging Fox News Sunday interview, Wallace brought up reports about the GOP leader’s phone call with Trump that occurred just as the insurrectionist mob stormed the Capitol to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election victory. The Fox anchor specifically referenced Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler’s claims about the call.
“She said while the January 6th riot was in full force, you phoned President Trump and ask him to call off his supporters and, according to you, she said, the president responded, ‘Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election then you are,’” the veteran anchor explained. “Is she right? Is that what President Trump said to you?”
McCarthy immediately deflected, instead claiming he was the first person Trump spoke to after the seditious crowd broke into the building and that the then-president promised him on that call that he’d do something to stop the violence.
“And that’s what he did,” the congressman added. “He put a video out later.”
“Quite a lot later and it was a pretty weak video,” Wallace retorted, referencing Trump’s statement in which he told the rioters “we love you” while still peddling the election lies that led to the riots.
“But I’m asking you specifically: Did he say to you ‘I guess some people are more concerned about the election than you are’?” Wallace once again pressed McCarthy.
“No, listen, my conversations with the president are my conversations with the president,” the California Republican replied. “I engaged with the idea that we could stop what was going on inside the capitol at that moment in time, the president said he would help.”
The Fox News Sunday moderator further grilled McCarthy on the continued investigations of the insurrection, including a congressional commission. Notably, Wallace wanted to know if McCarthy recently had specific conversations with Trump about the content of that call.
“Has the president ever reached out to you since that report came out to discuss what you and he talked about in the Jan. 6 phone call and did you say to him ‘I can’t because we are under oath’?” Wallace asked.
“No,” the House minority leader answered, prompting Wallace to wonder aloud if he was saying this never happened.
“Never happened—never even close,” McCarthy insisted.
“And if it did happen, you agree that would be witness tampering?” Wallace pushed back.
“Yeah, but it never happened,” the congressman again denied. “Never even came close. Never had any conversation like that. Never even heard that rumor before today.”
Okaaay. That’s a pretty specific charge there and it’s hard to imagine that Wallace just made it up. Someone has said that this happened. And it’s perfectly believable. Trump is on record witness tampering dozens of times and I totally believe he would have wanted to talk to McCarthy about this because it implies that he was disloyal. And we know how Trump feels about that.
And surely he hasn’t forgotten about this either:
Days after the deadly Capitol riot, McCarthy said on the House floor that Trump “bears responsibility” for the violence, adding that the then-president “should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.” At the same time, while saying Trump’s actions deserved a congressional response, he declared that he didn’t support impeachment.
Just three weeks after the insurrection, however, McCarthy had already kissed and made up with Trump, visiting the ex-president at this Mar-a-Lago gold resort to discuss the future of the Republican Party.
“I would say my goal is to not be a hypocrite,” Meijer told Phillip. “To be able to call balls and strikes fairly and have a voice that is credible even if somebody might not have the same beliefs or agree on the political side.”
That’s nice, but being a hypocrite is a defining characteristic of Republican politics. He thinks it means being equally critical of “both sides” which it really has nothing to do with:
He said Republicans need to stop living in “a perpetual state of denial” about the way they lost power in 2020.
“We lost the presidency in 2020. We lost the Senate in 2021. So we need to get back to a point where we could be offering some solutions, and earning the trust of the voter and get that rare privilege of governing on behalf of the American people,” he said.
How nice. I look forward to hearing his conservative solutions. Tax cuts I presume? Meanwhile:
“If you’re a progressive, you’ve seen a lot of just wild sums of taxpayer dollars thrown toward — or just thrown vaguely in the direction of things that you like,” he said. “If you were hoping to see some bipartisan consensus, if you’re hoping to see governance from the middle, I think you’ve been sorely disappointed.”
Ah, the lukewarm water politician is not entirely extinct. But almost. Which is actually good. Because all they do is blather on about how nobody is a reasonable as they are and never actually do a thing. And that’s even more true on the Republican side where radicalism truly does reign.
The beltway loves these folks though. From Susan Collins wringing her hands over everything but never actually doing anything meaningful to Joe Manchin throwing his weight around to guys like this who just want to “tell the truth” except they criticize the Democrats for failing to “work in the middle” and refuse to recognize they belong to a party that thinks “meeting half way” actually means my way or the highway (and even then they’ll tank the deal just to own the libs.) These people are hypocrites and phonies even as they strut around extolling their own moral authority and fiscal responsibility while allowing themselves to be pawns of the most radical people in the country. And that’s not AOC and the squad.
Meijer is better than Marjorie Taylor Greene, of course. Better a bucket of lukewarm water than a barrel full of battery acid. But they don’t do very much good either. If you are a Republican today, you are a member of the party of Donald Trump. That’s what it is. Pretending to be something else is the ultimate hypocrisy.
According to the poll, 53 percent of adults say they approve of Biden’s job as president — including 90 percent of Democrats, 61 percent of independents but just 9 percent of Republicans — while 39 percent of all respondents say they disapprove.
Biden’s job rating is higher than Donald Trump’s was at this same point in time in the poll (40 percent approve, 54 percent disapprove), but it’s lower than Barack Obama’s was at 100 days (61 percent approve, 30 percent disapprove).
Among registered voters in the new poll, Biden’s job rating stands at 51 percent who approve, 43 percent who disapprove.
The president gets his highest marks on handling the pandemic (69 percent approve), on dealing with the economy (52 percent approve), on uniting the country (52 percent approve) and on race relations (49 percent approve).
“I think I just like how he’s handling the Covid crisis more than Trump did,” said one Democratic poll respondent from Iowa.
But Biden’s lowest scores come on dealing with China (35 percent), handling the gun issue (34 percent) and dealing with border security and immigration (33 percent).
“He opened floodgates for illegal immigration,” said one female Trump voter from Texas.
And by a 55-to-34 percent margin, respondents believe that Biden has returned the country to a more typical way that past presidents have governed the country.
“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.”
The NBC News poll also found that Biden’s top legislative priorities are fairly popular with the American public.
Forty-six percent of Americans say the Covid-19 relief bill he signed into law in March is a good idea, versus 25 percent who call it a bad idea, with another 26 percent who don’t have an opinion.
And 59 percent say his infrastructure plan — which would upgrade roads and bridges, expand broadband access and pay to care for the elderly and disabled — is a good idea, while 21 percent disagree; 19 percent don’t have an opinion.
By party, 87 percent of Democrats, 68 percent of independents and 21 percent of Republicans support Biden’s infrastructure plan.
“America may be a divided country, but the data here reveal that Americans are not evenly divided on the path that the Biden-Harris administration is taking,” said Horwitt, the Democratic pollster.
What’s more, 56 percent of respondents say they feel more hopeful when looking at Biden’s leadership and plans for the country, compared with 42 percent who say they feel more doubtful.
That 42% is the Trump average approval rating throughout his entire term. That’s the base.
I’d say Biden’s doing pretty well. He was handed a hideous problem to solve instantly and was denied a normal transition period to get up to speed. He’s done quite well.
Is this a honeymoon? I guess. I can’t imagine it will last but maybe if we have a strong economic recovery and Biden is able to get a serious infrastructure bill passed, people will give him credit and his first term will be a success. But people are counting on this administration to do some other very big things and they aren’t going to be easy. And there are always problems. We’ll have to see.
A lot of Biden’s approval so far has to be that he just isn’t a screaming jackass all day, every day. For as many people who just loved that Trump freakshow, there were more that really hated it. The contrast with Biden couldn’t be more stark.
And former President Donald Trump’s favorable/unfavorable rating in the poll is 32 percent positive, 55 percent negative, while Biden’s score is 50 percent positive, 36 percent negative.
Trump’s getting less popular the longer he’s out of office. Usually the ex-president gains in popularity. This doesn’t bode well for Trump 2024. Which is good, since the Republicans probably don’t have any choice but to nominate him if he wants it. That 32% is the core of their primary vote.
Update:
Fox has a poll out today too. They have him at 54% approval. Look how they discuss the poll:
That’s the best news in the poll for Biden.
Views on the economy are more than two-to-one negative: 29 percent rate it as excellent/good and 69 percent say only fair/poor. That’s little changed since the end of Trump’s term, when it was 33-66 percent. However, in January 2020, before the pandemic, 55 percent rated economic conditions positively, including a record 20 percent saying “excellent.”
Lol! As if comparing the economy today to last January says anything at all! It was before the pandemic! Might as well compare it to 1920!
But that’s nothing to the way the ABC poll is characterized:
Intense partisanship is holding Joe Biden to a tepid job approval rating — the third-lowest for any president at 100 days in office since Harry Truman — along with continued economic dislocation, pandemic impacts and questions about Biden’s view of the size and role of government.
All told, 52% of Americans in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll approve of Biden’s work in office, lower than any president at 100 days in office since 1945, save Gerald Ford in 1974 (48%, after his unpopular pardon of Richard Nixon) and Donald Trump at 42% in 2017. For the 14 presidents from Truman to Biden, the 100-day average is 66%.
President Joe Biden commemorated the 106th anniversary of the mass killing of Armenians by twice calling it a “genocide” — a word no U.S. leader since Ronald Reagan has used to describe the event for fear of alienating NATO ally Turkey.
Turkey, in response, summoned U.S. Ambassador David Satterfield to Ankara, and said it rejected Biden’s characterization of the events of 1915.
But of course Turkey did.
The Washington Post offers a brief summary of what happened during World War I, including this detail (plus grisly photos in a tweet I will not repost here):
At this point in the war, the United States was still neutral. Henry Morgenthau Sr. was the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and witnessed many of the atrocities. In a July 16, 1915, cable, he told the State Department: “It appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress.”
He pleaded with Ottoman officials to stop it, and with President Woodrow Wilson to intervene. (He didn’t.) Eventually, Morgenthau fundraised for Armenian refugees and published a book recounting the horrors he had witnessed.
How to characterize what happened has been contentious ever since, for Turkey if not for historians. Atrocities took place, yes, but those happens in a civil war, Turkey insists. There was no coordinated campaign to destroy the Armenian people.
What happened at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 is in no way comparable, but the denialism follows a similar pattern.
Democrat Moe Davis lost the race last fall for the congressional seat in NC-11 to Republican Madison Cawthorn. The seat was left open when Rep. Mark Meadows left to work for the Trump White House.
Davis tweeted this morning in response to a local letter to the editor denying the assault on the Capitol even happened.
“That [@RepCawthorn] encouraged a deadly attack on the Capitol is preposterous. The logic is fallacious because it was not an attack. It was a rally that the left wing establishment cleverly used to flip the narrative against … Trump.”
— Moe Davis (U.S. Air Force, Retired) (@ColMoeDavis) April 25, 2021
Damned clever, those establishment lefties. There was no insurrection on Jan. 6, just a 1st Amendment rally by patriots egged on by profiles in courage like media-hungry Cawthorn.
What happened to Armenians in 1915 was not genocide. The Civil War was not about preserving slavery. The Confederate battle flag is about heritage.
An unarmed man was shot by a Virginia sheriff’s deputy about an hour after the same deputy gave the man a ride home, Virginia State Police confirmed to CNN.
Isaiah Brown, 32, was shot while on the phone with a 911 dispatcher, according to authorities and 911 audio released Friday, as the deputy returned while responding to a “domestic incident.”
Brown was 50 feet away from the officer early Wednesday morning. He is in the hospital with serious but non-life-threatening injuries, CNN reports.
“After viewing the Spotsylvania County Sheriff’s deputy’s bodycam video and listening to the 911 call, it is evident that the tragic shooting of Isaiah Brown was completely avoidable,” David Haynes, an attorney for Brown’s family, said in a statement. He said Brown was “on the phone with 911 at the time of the shooting and the officer mistook a cordless house phone for a gun.”
A police veteran from Savannah, Ga. considers the Derek Chauvin conviction a wake-up call for him and his profession. Several things need to happen now, Patrick Skinner believes. The first is what needs to not happen: for police to circle the wagons. “’Not all cops’ is exactly the wrong reaction,” he writes. And irrelevant. So Chauvin was convicted. The system worked. Also irrelevant (Washington Post):
Here’s the second thing that needs to happen: We police need to fight the destructive reaction we have resorted to before in places like New York, where members of the police union had an unofficial but announced slowdown in 2019 after the dismissal of an officer implicated in the killing of Eric Garner by police in 2014. We have to stop saying, in effect, that if we can’t do our job the way we have always done it, well then, we won’t do our job at all. We might still collect a paycheck, but we will stop a lot of work because of an exaggerated fear of running afoul of the “new rules.” Rules such as “Don’t treat your neighbors like robots of compliance,” “Don’t escalate trivial matters into life-or-death confrontations” and “Treat your neighbors as if they were your neighbors.” That anyone would consider these rules “new” is a problem in itself. Few police officers reading them aloud would take issue with such anodyne statements, but put accountability behind the statements and now they’re an attack, not just on all police but the very foundation of American policing. The truth is that we do not get to tell our neighbors — those whose communities we police — how we will do our job. They tell us.
Faced with criticism that perhaps police should not be turning a traffic stop over an unarmed person’s vehicle registration sticker into something to be resolved at gunpoint, some will say, “What are the police supposed to do, let all criminals just run away?” There is a lot wrong with that reaction. To begin with, let’s slow down on calling someone with registration issues a criminal. And then let’s slow down everything, because we police are rushing to make bad decisions when time is almost always our friend. Tamir Rice most likely would not have been killed for having a toy gun if the Cleveland police officers had not rushed right up to him and shot him. There was no violence going on; the 12-year-old was alone in the middle of a park. Slow down, I tell myself in almost every police encounter. The risk to my neighbors in my rushing to a final judgment in very uncertain and fluid situations far outweighs the risk to myself. I’m often wrong in the initial assessment of chaotic scenes, and so I try to be wrong silently, allowing my judgment to catch up to my reactions, to allow my perception to catch up with my vision. Slow down.
Dismissing criticism of police because he wasn’t personally responsible is the wrong approach, Skinner now believes:
I think I have to take it personally: I have to be offended, I have to be outraged, and I have to act. That means I need to understand the goal of every 911 call, and that the compliance of those I encounter is not a goal; it might be a path to a goal but it’s not the goal. It means putting my neighbors first at every instance. It means often to act slower, to give my neighbors the benefit of the doubt because they are the point of my job.
“Warrior cop” training instills a “We have met the enemy and he is You” mindset that turns every encounter into a potential ambush and every civilian into a potential enemy combatant. It pits cops against the people they are supposedly there to serve and protect. Intrinsic bias or outright bias does the rest when it comes to ethnic minorities.
Add to that inadequate training. Budgets are slim and training lopsided towards violence, writes Olga Khazan at The Atlantic:
Police in the United States receive less initial training than their counterparts in other rich countries—about five months in a classroom and another three or so months in the field, on average. Many European nations, meanwhile, have something more akin to police universities, which can take three or four years to complete. European countries also have national standards for various elements of a police officer’s job—such as how to search a car and when to use a baton. The U.S. does not.
[…]
American police training resembles military training—“polish your boots, do push-ups, speak when you’re spoken to,” Brooks told me. In an article for The Atlantic last year, she described practicing drills and standing at attention when senior officers entered the room. “I don’t think I’ve been yelled at as much since high-school gym class more than three decades ago,” she wrote. Reformers worry that this type of training teaches recruits that the world runs on strict power hierarchies, and that anything short of perfect compliance should be met with force and anger.
Though he generally agrees with the push toward less militaristic police academies, Slocumb thinks the stress of military-style drills can be a useful proving ground for new officers. “You don’t want the first time that you have to make a decision while people are screaming in your face to be out in someone’s living room,” he told me. “It needs to be something you’ve been accustomed to during training.”
“Soft skills,” emotional intelligence, stress management, etc., take a back seat to having to “win” every situation. That way leads to excessive use of force.
There is much to do to end the epidemic rebuild confidence. Even after all the killings and shootings, the country and police are not there yet.
