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Month: April 2021

Beaten, tased, shot, and choked

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 21, 2021
National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, Alabama. Photo by Soniakapadia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

This moment is not a turning point. Not yet. At best, to borrow from Churchill, it is the end of the beginning of police reform. The guilty verdict against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd is welcome. It is the only verdict that could be called justice. The nation has breathed a momentary sigh of relief that its streets will not explode. Not immediately.

Americans took to the streets in protest in the last year over Floyd’s killing. And over the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and dozens of others less well-known who died at the hands of police (image). They were the largest civil rights actions in this country since the 1960s.

But the guilty verdict on Tuesday is not the end. Not a watershed. There were decades of lynchings across this country between the Civil War and the reforms of the Johnson administration.

In a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday on voting rights, Senate Republicans trotted out one of their standard tropes. A century and a half ago it was Democrats in the South that implemented Jim Crow laws, they charged. (It is the Republican equivalent of neener-neener.) Jim Crow unwound the emancipation of Black Americans declared under Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president. That period lasted a hundred years.

What the Republican taunt leaves out is it was the nation’s founders who permitted slavery to stand when crafting the new nation that preceded the Civil War and Reconstruction. That reminder is perhaps the ultimate “both sides do it.”

What Jim Crow, lynchings, the Ku Klux Klan, and hundreds of Republican-sponsored voter suppression bills proposed since last November have in common is a desire by white people to keep minority citizens in their second-class places. Disparate treatment of Black Americans by modern slave patrols works the same way. The goal is to show who is in charge and who is not. Especially now that white people are on their way to being a plurality, not a solid majority, in this ostensibly “one person, one vote” country.

Listen to Zoe Chace’s tale of election rigging and unsubstantiated charges of it against Black activists in Bladen County, NC. White Republicans in Bladen were fine with Blacks organizing so long as they did not win. When they elected a Black sheriff, allegations of cheating began to circulate among Whites until they became gospel. People in power do not like it when their supremacy is challenged.

Nor do police.

Chauvin cruelly and coolly strangled the life from George Floyd, a Black man, in broad daylight, in front of witnesses, on multiple cameras, and under color of law for an alleged nonviolent offense. But if there is one predictable behavior of the sort of person who would do that under those or less-public circumstances. They do not back down. They double down.

This is not over.

Unbelievable chutzpah

Published by digby on April 20, 2021

Who do you think had the chutzpah to say this about Joe Biden’s comments about the Chauvin trial after the jury was sequestered:

“I think it’s the role of the president of the United States to stay back, to not inflame the tensions.I think he should have just reserved comment and said he’s praying for the family as we all are.”

You won’t believe it. The robotic Trump mouthpiece Kayleigh McEneny. I’m sure you remember this:

You may also remember that Trump had this to say about the Kenosha vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse:

“He was trying to get away from them, I guess, it looks like I guess he was in very big trouble. He probably would have been killed.”

How about this?

“You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough and we will not take it any more,” he declared in his roughly 70-minute speech. “And we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Trump added that “we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give —” but did not finish the thought.

But sure. It’s a big mistake to incite violence. She’s right about that.

Update

Check this out:

Music of Richard Einhorn Tonight on Zoom 6PM Pacific Free

Published by tristero on April 20, 2021
from a live performance of Voices of Light/Passion of Joan of Arc for orchestra, chorus, solo vocalists, and sampler

I’ll* be joining the wonderful West Coast music group Salastina on their terrific Happy Hour series tonight. It is at 6pm Pacific / 7PM Mountain 8PM Central and 9 PM Eastern. It’s completely free! Here’s the link.  You’ll need to sign up beforehand.

If Salastina is new to you, they’re a group of young musicians in the LA area with an informal and charming attitude towards concert music of all stripes. They’ve hosted many fabulous performers and composers including Hilary Hahn, Susan Hellauer (Anonymous 4), and Kenji Bunch. I’ll be playing various videos of my music and discussing how/why I wrote it. 

*”tristero” has been my nom de blog since 2003. I usually don’t discuss or mention my music on Hullabaloo but given this event is both free and Salastina is such a fun group, I’ve made an exception.

Please come!

Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs

Published by digby on April 20, 2021

There is some serious crazy in the air and it isn’t just QAnon:


While much of the country has embraced the rapid pace of COVID-19 vaccinations as a sign that a return to normal life is just around the corner, one segment of the population has been ginning up fears that mass inoculation is actually an existential threat to the future of the human race.

This long-simmering idea, which could not only help to steer some people away from vaccines but also fan the flames of already volatile cultural divisions and conflicts, came into stark focus in mid-March, when a meme spread across pandemic denialist Telegram channels, featuring a large image of two sheep fucking, and a block of text that reads: “DO NOT BREED WITH SHEEP.”

“People who are vaccinated will have modified DNA,” it continues. “No one discusses that DNA is passed onto the next generation. The risk that your children will marry into other cultures is possibly now shadowed by the fact that your children may marry into a COVID vaxed gene group potentially shortening their lives and that of others.”

This is, of course, complete nonsense. Although they use genetically engineered components, none of the three COVID-19 vaccines available in the U.S. interacts with, much less changes, our DNA. “I don’t see any way the vaccines could even unintentionally cause genetic changes,” says Paul Knoepfler, a cell biologist and genetics researcher at the University of California, Davis. “It’s just not going to happen.”

Yet despite its wild and unfounded claims, this meme found some traction in niche Telegram dis- and misinformation groups, as well as on conspiratorial blogs with wider readerships; it’s even been reposted a few times on mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. A number of individuals have also been independently voicing similar concerns for months now: As far back as mid-December, a Redditor created a thread on the platform’s COVID conspiracy-obsessed No New Normal forum to ask, “Will the RNA covid vaccine effect the takers children’s DNA?”

Months later on the same forum, another user sparked a discussion essentially vilifying those who get vaccinated with a post complaining about the challenges of finding men to date who aren’t “mindless sheep” and arguing that people who get the jab will have “weird little vaccine effected offspring.” Responding to that post, yet another Redditor suggested that soon enough “only vaccinated people will marry each other while non vaccinated will also get married,” and that this “will split the human race into a fake race. The Vaccinated Race.”

The Daily Beast reached out to a number of individuals who have posted these sentiments, but none of them replied.

These lowkey freakouts about the supposed insidious, intergenerational genetic contamination COVID vaccines and vaccinated people are foisting on all of humanity are not exceptionally common, even in dedicated pandemic and vaccine skeptical spaces. But they are logical extensions of “a core misconception that the COVID-19 vaccines alter your DNA,” as University of Pennsylvania misinformation monitoring expert Kathleen Hall Jamieson puts it, which speak to the length some skeptics’ and denialists’ fears and conspiracies can go. And if these specific ideas gain adherents—as some experts believe they likely will over the coming months and years—they could exacerbate growing rifts between these groups and everyone else.

At their heart, Mark Alfano, a Macquarie University researcher who studies anti-vaxxer digital bubbles, suggests that concerns about vaccines causing fundamental and enduring contamination in people go back to at least the early-to-mid-19th century—before the discovery of DNA. Some folks at the time just couldn’t get past their gut feeling that inserting something created by scientists into a human body was so unnatural that it might “change something essential about a vaccinated person.”

Experiments with DNA in the mid-to-late 20th century, which led to the creation of genetically modified organisms, gave rise to a separate thread of conspiracies about the potential misuse of this tech to warp natural humans. And about the potential for poorly thought-out or controlled mutations to somehow spill into the wider world, causing untold—and usually unspecified—pain and chaos.

So, these sorts of conspiracy theories have been with us forever. I get that. (Some people might even think there are certain religions that fir the definition.) But these ideas today can be mainstreamed in a minute.

Take this, for instance:

The feminist writer Naomi Wolf garnered fame during the 1990s for her book The Beauty Myth and her work as an adviser to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. But in recent years, she’s been better known for promoting an array of unhinged conspiracy theories, most recently regarding the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. This combination has made her a perfect guest for Fox News.

Fox is far more interested in turning coronavirus into a political cudgel than in giving users accurate health information. And so the network’s hosts lean on Wolf’s liberal credentials while giving her a platform to claim that the Democratic response to the pandemic is aimed at dissolving society and enacting a totalitarian state comparable to Nazi Germany.

Since mid-February, she appeared at least seven times on Fox to discuss her views on the pandemic: twice apiece on Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Revolution with Steve Hilton, and three times on Fox News Primetime, the most recent of which came Monday night. Wolf cited the notorious anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during that interview to argue that Dr. Anthony Fauci, Bill and Melinda Gates, the state of Israel, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were engaged in some sort of nebulous but sinister vaccine conspiracy.

It is irresponsible for a news outlet to give Wolf that sort of credulous attention. Her social media channels are littered with absurd claims about the virus and its vaccines. Between her first and second Fox appearances alone, she tweeted that a new technology allowed the delivery of “vaccines w nanopatticles that let you travel back in time”; that the Moderna vaccine is a “software platform” that allows “uploads”; and that due to face masks, children now lack “the human reflex that they when you smile at them they smile back” and have “dark circles under [their] eyes from low oxygen.” 

On Sunday night, Wolf cited purported reports of women who “bleed oddly [from] being AROUND vaccinated women,” pointing her followers to a Facebook group which at one point had been titled “All Vaccines are Fake.”

Here’s Tucker this week:

Not too long ago, he had this to say:

There’s more at Media Matters about Wolf. It’s fine if she’s a nutball. But she’s out there on social media and television spreading this lunacy. People will believe her. And Tucker.

We have an information crisis in this country and it’s getting much, much worse.

Junior’s not a hero

Published by digby on April 20, 2021

George W. Bush has emerged from reputation rehab:

Former President George W. Bush described the modern-day GOP as “isolationist, protectionist, and to a certain extent, nativist” in an interview Tuesday that was packed with implicit criticism of the most recent Republican president.

“It’s not exactly my vision” for the party, Bush told NBC’s “Today” show in a rare live TV appearance. “But, you know, I’m just an old guy they put out to pasture.”

Still, Bush remained hopeful that a more moderate Republican — one who supported reasonable gun reform measures, increased public school funding and a path to citizenship for undocumented workers, among other measures — could succeed in the party’s 2024 presidential primary.

“I think if the emphasis is integrity and decency and trying to work to get problems solved, I think the person has a shot,” he said.

Bush, who was on hand to welcome 30 new U.S. citizens from 17 different countries during a naturalization ceremony on Rockefeller Plaza, also decried the divisive rhetoric that has surrounded the immigration debate in Washington — and reached new levels of hostility under former President Donald Trump.

“It’s a beautiful country we have. And yet, it’s not beautiful when we condemn [and] call people names and scare people about immigration,” he said. “It’s an easy issue to frighten some of the electorate. And I’m trying to have a different kind of voice.”

Oy. Only Donald Trump could make Bush look good by comparison.

In truth he had a nasty streak almost as wide as the Orange Menace. Almost — he did do some things, like go to a mosque after the 9/11 and call himself a “compassionate conservative” particularly when it comes to immigration, but his tenure was marked with cruelty in ways that are even worse than Trump’s.

He legalized torture. Not that Trump wouldn’t have gleefully done the same and even put it on television, but so what? Bush did that. It was one of the most uncivilized decisions this government has made in centuries.

He started a war on false pretenses and led the country during one of the most authoritarian, militaristic periods we’ve ever experienced. We are still in Afghanistan, 20 years later.

Bush is yet another example of how the Republicans keep defining deviancy down. Each successive leader is less and less humane. I shudder to think what comes next. Marjorie Taylor Greene?

And by the way, tell me how this is really any better than Trump? He just usually hid it a little bit better:

In the week before [Karla Faye Tucker’s] execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. “Did you meet with any of them?” I ask. Bush whips around and stares at me. “No, I didn’t meet with any of them,” he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. “I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like ‘What would you say to Governor Bush?’ ”

“What was her answer?” I wonder. “Please,” Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, “don’t kill me.”

Tucker Carlson conducted that interview, by the way. He said at the time that he was startled by it but has later shrugged it off, saying he didn’t really see anything wrong with it. Imagine my surprise.

Look who’s back

Published by digby on April 20, 2021

Very low energy

Nasty little twits. But that’s what the cult craves.

WTF is this?

He can’t figure out why they don’t want the “Trumpcine”? Really? Could it be …

He took credit for Mitch McConnell winning the other day. Of course, it’s not his fault that the Republicans lost both the House and Senate during his tenure.

I will be very surprised if he doesn’t run. He thirsts for revenge.

Greatest hits:

Jesus:

After 3 or 4 times, what???

I really, really don’t miss him. In fact, it’s just surreal to think that this man was president for four years. I still can’t quite believe it.

I wonder if the spell has been broken for any of his cult? He’s been away awhile. Is it possible some of them will hear this idiotic drivel and realize what a freak he really is?

Nah … you’re right.

Outbreak of incivility

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 20, 2021
New York restaurants and bars started remaining open until midnight this week. Photo via “Eater.”

The country has been at war over mask-wearing since the COVID-19 outbreak. Well okay, mask wearing has been among the ongoing culture wars dividing the country, including “F*ck your feelings!” Trumpism, and “Stop the Steal,” and “I’m not a racist. You’re the racist!”

Even as death rates drop, mask-wearing has become habit many will continue even outdoors. I haven’t been sick in over a year. Not even a cold. Isolation and masks will do that. And now?

Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist and professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, tells Yahoo Life that it’s important to be “sensible” about outdoor masking. “If you’re outside walking separate from other people and either by yourself or with someone with whom you live, then you can take off your mask,” he says. “But if you’re walking outside in the city when you’re passing others all the time, it’s a good idea to wear a mask.”

Many will. But people who always rejected mask-wearing as a betrayal of Trump — the mask-shunning science-denier and quack-remedy promoter — are seeing death rates decline and getting even nastier to people who continue wearing them even after vaccination. There is a new outbreak: rudeness.

My friend Hanna Raskin is a food writer in Charleston, S.C. She spoke to servers and restaurant owners exposed to an outbreak of incivility:

Hospitality professionals on the receiving end of rudeness, insensitivity and disrespect peg the escalation to roughly the first week in March, when Gov. Henry McMaster lifted the statewide mask mandate and the nation’s fully vaccinated population surpassed 1 million people.

“It is so different” from the first year of the pandemic, Kwei Fei owner Tina Schuttenberg said of prevailing customer attitudes. “It is just the complete opposite.”

Boorish behavior began spiking as soon as venues re-opened for on-site dining. Incidents that required an email to Schuttenberg’s management team about once a month shot up to two a week since March. As a resident of another tourist town, I could have predicted a lot of the rudeness comes from tourists who want a vacation from any responsibility for others. Not that they were any better at home. But how dare you spoil their vacation by flaunting your responsibility in public?

It’s not just restaurant workers who stand to suffer if discourtesy keeps up. Scholars Matteo Bonotti and Steven Zech of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, contend that society could corrode if people continue to act out in restaurants.

“Consequences of impoliteness can be far-reaching,” the authors of “Recovering Civility during COVID-19” wrote in an email. “Restaurants are important sites for fostering social cooperation and a sense of community.”

In short, they say, an inability to regain some grasp of restaurant manners could inhibit “the opportunity to build a more inclusive and cohesive society” in the wake of COVID-19. When diners accept that a restaurant doesn’t stock their favorite salad dressing or say “please” when asking for another glass of merlot, they’re practicing for more momentous exchanges in the world beyond restaurant walls.

“You live with it,” Schuttenberg said of the meanness. Her business is making people happy. Hard to do when her people are just trying to make a living and stay alive doing it.

Almost like insanity?

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 20, 2021
Members in attendance at Muscogee County GOP annual convention on Saturday in Columbus, Ga. Photo via Georgia GOP Twitter.

Many GOP faithful in Georgia are still stewing over Donald Trump’s loss in 2020. Trump loyalists are at war with Republican elected officials, reports Politico:

After the presidential election, lost by Republicans in Georgia for the first time since 1992, the party crumpled in the January Senate runoffs. In the Atlanta suburbs, once a citadel of conservatism, Republicans were blown out.

Yet if that was cause for any introspection, it was not readily apparent as Republicans gathered at county conventions in recent days to chart their course for the midterm elections and the next presidential race in 2024.

Republicans are still nursing their grievances in Georgia and elsewhere. Almost as if they are addicted. It helps that harboring a grievance “activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics.” Rush Limbaugh based his radio career on it. It’s the right-wing media business model.

A few Republicans recognize how self-destructive it is.

“Huge mistake,” says Deanna Harris,  chair of the Cobb County Georgia Young Republicans, a Black woman reflecting on simmering anger directed at Governor Brian Kemp over his failure to hand Georgia’s electoral votes to Trump. “We’ve got to get out of this mindset. It’s almost like insanity.”

Almost like insanity?

To traditionalist Republicans in Georgia, the infighting between fervent Trump supporters and the establishment wing of the party has become increasingly alarming as the midterm elections come into focus. The GOP is desperate to regain its footing in the suburbs after Trump’s collapse there. But it was moderate Republicans and independent voters, not Trump loyalists, who abandoned Trump in November, and the party’s fixation on the former president may only alienate them further, with potentially disastrous consequences for 2022 and beyond.

Democrats can dream, can’t they? Even though odds are against them, historically, in mid-term elections.

Diversification in Atlanta’s suburbs is shifting power away from Republicans. The mostly white Republican county convention in Cobb elected Salleigh Grubbs as the new chair. Described by a supporter as a “female version of Donald Trump,” Grubbs defeated two other women, one presenting herself as a data expert and the other, a Latina originally from New York, who cautioned the party had “an image problem.”

Salleigh Grubbs (via Cobb Republican Assembly)

The suburbs in Atlanta and elsewhere might still be up for grabs, says Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster. But the infighting could be damaging.

“Picking a fight with your own party’s governor and lieutenant governor and secretary of state,” he said, “doesn’t strike me as the wisest of political moves.”

Anger over the loss of Georgia’s electoral votes and two U.S. Senators is fueling activism however, including attendance at off-year conventions across the state. The negative fallout over Georgia’s new voting (suppression) law has hardened Republican resolve.

But the GOP in Georgia is not yet done cannibalizing itself. Outside the party convention in Cobb County, David Gault, a local precinct chair, said that “people just need to really calm down and, I think, perhaps we just need to mind our own store right now.” The party, he said, should be “all about the future.”

Grievance may motivate Republicans’ declining base. Trump may have pulled in some working-class whites and Latinos. But Trump is not on any ballots in 2022.

Joe Biden in recent polling is far more popular than Trump ever was. If Democrats can add a wildly popular infrastructure bill to the relief package that put dollars in Americans’ pockets, historic trends for mid-term elections could be suggestive rather than determinative. Democrats in Georgia themselves are fired up over the Republicans’ voter suppression efforts. And it is a political eternity until Tuesday, November 8, 2022.

Relax, people

Published by digby on April 19, 2021

I know that everyone’s sick of COVID. God knows I am. But there is a growing sense, at least online, that it’s offensive for people to continue to take precautions even though they’ve been vaccinated. In fact, the consensus is that they should be ashamed of themselves. This is wrong for all the reasons Dave Roberts laid out in this tweet thread:

These guys are so instinctively repulsed by the idea of inconveniencing themselves on other people’s behalf — the idea that someone would do it when they *don’t absolutely have to* just drives them mad.

https://twitter.com/donmoyn/status/1383796638284537865

When people behave unselfishly, it is an inherent challenge to the worldview of those who believe everyone is as selfish as they are. They have to render it false or fake somehow. That’s what the whole “virtue signaling” thing is about.

People who denied, downplayed, or refused to take basic precautions to prevent the virus are responsible for more than a half-million American deaths. People who wear or call for masks even when they’re not absolutely necessary are responsible for…what? What justifies the fury?

For my part, I take lots of walks. I approach lots of people — they pet my dogs, their kids pet my dogs, I pet their dogs, I talk with their kids. They don’t know who I am or whether I’m vaccinated. The mask is just a little pro-social gesture. It puts people at ease. Why not?

Originally tweeted by David Roberts (@drvolts) on April 19, 2021.

Seriously. It’s just a generous communal thing to do until we get through this goddamned thing. What is so hard about that or, at the very least, if you don’t want to wear one, shutting up about other people doing it?

And, by the way, if people wear masks going forward in various situations everyone should just assume they are immunocompromised, coming down with something and don’t want to spread it (thank you!) or are trying not to catch anything. It’s fine. It’s not “virtue signaling” or some kind of shaming of other people. Relax.