Month: June 2021

I think everyone needs to understand that Joe Manchin cares about bipartisanship over everything else. Therefore,nothing is going to get done because he has said this out loud repeatedly and there are not 10 Republicans who agree with him. If he gets 6 Republican Senators to sign on to any legislation but the minority filibusters as everyone know they will, he wil considr it a success. He got 6 Republicans! The republic is saved!

That’s where we are. Unless they can change Manchin’s mind on the filibuster it’s done:

Senate Democrats acknowledge they have to rework their signature voting and elections bill if it’s going to become law. The problem is: they don’t know what changes are needed, and they may have stumbled into a catch-22 that would make changes futile anyway.

The legislation—titled the “For The People Act” but better known by its bill number, S.1—is finally getting a full vote in the Senate later this month. It almost certainly, however, won’t earn any Republican support. But Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has promised to get lawmakers on the record, and many liberals hope the event will generate momentum toward ending the filibuster, the 60-vote threshold in the way of most of the remaining Democratic agenda.

That can only happen if Democrats are unified. And while most are onboard, there’s one familiar exception: Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV).

Manchin is the only Democrat not to cosponsor the legislation. In a recent op-ed, Manchin said he wouldn’t vote for S.1 on the basis that he cannot support an election bill without GOP buy-in.“We’re not going to get 50 written as-is, we’re having to shave and massage it. Joe has a set of concerns that he wants us to address, and we’re going to address them.”— Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA)

Senate Democrats are desperate to draw up a bill that could get Manchin’s support and are talking daily—“hourly,” said one member—about how to make it happen. But Manchin’s logic sets up a nearly unsolvable paradox for his colleagues: if his support remains conditional on Republicans seeing the light, there’s likely no change that will be sufficient for Republicans.

The GOP has fully dug in against S.1, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) describing the bill as a Democratic “power grab” and an attempt to “rewrite the ground rules of American politics for partisan benefit.”

What’s more, it’s unclear how fully Manchin has expressed any substantive concerns he has with the bill to his colleagues and to others who are engaged in the process, according to more than a half-dozen sources who spoke with The Daily Beast.

This is what I love about the American neo-fascist. They can’t help taking credit for being the neo-fascists they are:

In lots of ways, including it tangibly helped Trump in 2016, leading to hundreds of thousands of dead Americans and a violent insurrection. Truly stuff to be proud of ! https://t.co/kiYSNeECdi

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 14, 2021

He is even more responsible than Trump for what has happened to this country.

It’s quite a relief to see President Biden overseas acting like a normal president after the last four years of embarrassment on the world stage. Our traditional allies also appear to be exhaling for the first time since November of 2016 because they know that the U.S., with all of its flaws, is at least in the hands of someone who has a grasp of the job requirements. The latest Pew survey shows that the people of other countries are relieved as well. The numbers have done shifted 180 degrees since Trump left office. 

They can’t be completely reassured, of course, since Trump continues to insist that he is the true president in exile as he issues pseudo-tweets from his lavish golfing palaces and continues to spread the Big Lie. Things are still weird enough here in America that I’m sure the rest of the world still has its guard up. As anyone following events closely knows, there is something very nefarious going on around the country that could upend this brief moment of semi-normality. And while it’s taken a while for many in the media to grasp the novel nature of this latest threat, they are now getting up to speed. Take Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post, who wrote an editorial over the weekend in which he compared the Republicans to termites, “destructive but largely unseen, anti-democracy forces around the country are gnawing at the foundations of America’s free and fair elections.”

State by state, the termites are trying to change the rules to allow Donald Trump or someone like him to succeed in 2024 where Trump tried and failed in 2020: to steal an election that he lost.

That’s putting it starkly — but honestly: It is exactly what Republicans are planning to do.

Most importantly, Hiatt and others in the media are belatedly grappling with the reality that the civil rights groups and Democratic Party officials who have been fighting for the right to vote for years don’t have a lot of experience dealing with this specific type of assault on the franchise. Voter suppression is sadly familiar in American political life. Vote nullification, however, is not. And that’s what all these new laws and regulations are designed to do. If the vote doesn’t go their way, they are putting mechanisms in place to simply nullify the results through a complex set of “legal” maneuvers.

For the most part, at least since the civil rights movement, local and state elections officials have operated in a non-partisan fashion, But Trump’s all-out attempt to cajole, threaten and intimidate officials into stealing the vote for him in close states has opened the floodgates to anti-democratic activity all over the country. Republicans may not have folded in 2020 but they are making sure there are legal means to do it in 2022 and 2024. And some of those means are just rank intimidation. They have put in place criminal sanctions and huge fines for decisions undertaken by election officials and are handing power to partisan players in legislatures across the country. The consequences are already being felt, as the AP reports in an article amusingly headlined, “Exodus of Election Officials Raises Concerns of Partisanship”: 

After facing threats and intimidation during the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath, and now the potential of new punishments in certain states, county officials who run elections are quitting or retiring early. The once quiet job of election administration has become a political minefield thanks to the baseless claims of widespread fraud that continue to be pushed by many in the Republican Party.

Trump’s despicable behavior is the proximate cause of all this, of course. He has accused his political rivals of doing what he and his henchman are planning to do going forward. It’s enough to give you a migraine. But I happened to be reading the new biography of the GOP éminence grise James Baker III by the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser and the New York Times’ Peter Baker this weekend and was struck by the fact that we have thought so little about the precedent that the entire GOP establishment set when they pulled out every stop to make sure George W. Bush prevailed in the 2000 election despite his loss of the popular vote, something which had only happened once, more than a century before.

From the very beginning, Baker insisted that the system was rigged because the rules stated that manual re-counting done by representatives of both parties, overseen by non-partisan officials and even eventually sanctioned by judges themselves, was an attempt to “divine the intent of the voter.” Baker also accused the other side of wanting to keep counting until they magically found the votes they needed. The famous “Brooks Brothers Riot” was all about intimidating voting officials into stopping the count — and it worked.Advertisement:

It was a very close election in Florida, which just happened to be run at the time by Jeb Bush, and there is a mountain of evidence that Baker and the rest of the Republicans ruthlessly used every lever they had available, some of it hugely unethical. For example, the Baker book reveals that he got word of a critical Florida Supreme Court decision before it was announced. Baker was sure from the very beginning that the Supreme Court would decide the outcome, something which most legal scholars assumed was completely out of the question, and he plotted the strategy on that basis. They were not willing to count the votes under the laws that existed in the state before the election.

In 2000, the Republican establishment was in charge of the vote nullification process and they brought in all their heavy hitters including three lawyers who are now on the Supreme Court. They were methodical and professional and the entire party banded together to make it happen. In 2020, it was Trump and a motley crew led by Rudy Giuliani while the establishment sat it out. Everyone professed astonishment that he would undermine the electoral process this way. But it wasn’t exactly unprecedented, was it?

Considering what they did when it was someone they all wanted to see in the White House, from the lowliest intern pounding on the doors of that counting room in Miami to the five Republicans Supreme Court justices, I don’t think we should be too surprised that Republicans are happy to let Trump and his MAGA crew rig the election apparatus in important swing states. They know it will come in handy someday. 

Salon

Duh:

“You do realize that there is no comparison here to the Holocaust” pic.twitter.com/kVXEQXcvM3

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 14, 2021

That ignoramus is one of the health care workers in the Texas hospital who is refusing to take the vaccine. A judge ruled this weekend that hospitals can demand their employees do it what with all the people with immunocompromised health and the sick kids who can’t be vaccinated yet who they might kill with their abject stupidity.

People this stupid and stubborn should not be working in the health care field anyway. They should be working in places where they don’t endanger people’s lives. Time to find a new career.

By the way, vaccinated people aren’t getting sick. Only the foolish refusniks are winding up in the hospital these days:

The trend appears to be occurring at hospitals nationwide.

“I haven’t had anyone that’s been fully vaccinated become critically ill,” said Dr. Josh Denson, a pulmonary medicine and critical care physician at Tulane University Medical Center in New Orleans.

It’s been the same for Dr. Ken Lyn-Kew, a pulmonologist in the critical care department at Denver’s National Jewish Health: “None of our ICU patients has been vaccinated.”

Unvaccinated children, too, seem to be at increased risk for severe illness.

“In our local hospitals, the kids that are getting sick are the ones that are not vaccinated,” said Dr. Natasha Burgert, a pediatrician in Overland Park, Kansas, and a national spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Thanks to the Covid-19 vaccines, the number of patients hospitalized has plummeted, from more than 125,000 on average in early January to just over 15,000 on average this week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The vaccines are working really well,” Denson said. “It’s just ridiculous not to get it.”

Dahlia Lithwick shares concerns that without consequences for Trump & Co. the country puts itself at greater risk. His administration and his Department of Justice engaged in practices that might have made Richard Nixon blush:

In the past few days we have learned—among other object horrors—that Donald Trump’s Justice Department seized metadata records for members of the House Intelligence Committee and their families, whom it suspected of leaking. We learned that Trump supporters have been leveling crippling death threats against state election workers. We learned that White House counsel Don McGahn had been instructed to fire Robert Mueller. We learned that in 2019, Rudy Giuliani, acting in his capacity as Trump’s personal lawyer, pressed Ukraine to announce baseless investigations about alleged Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election. And yet as Richard Painter and Claire O. Finkelstein showed last week, the Justice Department has worked to stymie investigations and litigation that would unearth at least some of these truths, in a quest to protect institutional prerogatives and values.

Meaning the Trump administration ain’t over until the legal paperwork is complete. Republicans on Capitol Hill are working to prevent that. The Biden administration so far seems to be in “moving on” mode. A significant fraction of Americans still believe the sitting president is illegitimate. Republican legislatures that previously used voter fraud as a pretext for restricting voting rights are now moving to allow election rigging by law: theirs.

Without consequences, a Josh Hawley or a Marco Rubio might do it again, Lithwick warns. The Boston Globe urged prosecution. “That’s not a recommendation made lightly,” the Glode wrote:

In the case of Trump, prosecutors would have plenty of potential crimes from which to choose. While Trump may be prosecuted for financial crimes he potentially committed before he became president, what is most important to go after are his actions during his time in office, especially those after the 2020 election, which culminated in fomenting a full-on, violent assault on American democracy.

To assemble a bill of particulars for Trump’s crimes in office, one merely needs a set of newspaper clippings. Putting that all behind us is the kind of behavior the Silents were known for. Joe Biden is one of them. But even they knew enough to prosecute Nixon and enact a set of reforms in the wake of Watergate.

Sweeping Trump under the rug is an invitation to disaster, just as the Savings and Loan debacle presaged the Great Recession. Hundreds went to jail for what was then “one-seventieth the size” of the 2008 financial meltdown that triggered the Great Recession. The Obama administration let the latter financial crimes go virtually unpunished.

Then came Trump, a man who cut his teeth on financial crimes and went on to crimes against the Constitution:

Pretending Trump was a crazy dream and it’s all normal again is now a bipartisan sport. As David Graham warned last week, the only thing more dangerous than the claims that “this is not normal” that pervaded the Trump years is the thin veneer of “normalcy” that characterizes the present illiberal moment. But what is most bizarre, troubling, and painful about this current attempt to move forward and revert to normal without properly reckoning with what has happened is that the message is emanating from the Biden Justice Department and White House. They are now the folks arguing that everything that happened over the course of the Trump years was an aberration and a one-off, and that the best response to all of that is to ignore, ignore, ignore.

Lithwick has no better idea than I of how to de-radicalize a Trump electorate in the throws of mass hysteria. But letting Trump off the hook will further destroy the links between reality and fantasy, truth and lies:

With all due respect to those who would like to continue to lecture us about the mathematically correct ratio of concern to destabilizing danger, we’ve actually done a fairly decent job of understanding that ratio intuitively all along. This is a profoundly dangerous moment, and being told to get over it is just as jarring when it comes from inside the guardrails of democracy as it was when it came from the smirking authoritarians that has replaced. That’s why it doesn’t feel any better. If anything, gaslighting about ongoing threats to democracy might be even scarier when it comes from the very people who were supposed to protect us.

Attorney General Merrick Garland is a Boomer, not a Silent. Any suggestion that his department should just not get involved in Trump investigations because that might seem political deserves a shouted, “OK, Boomer!”

Why not ridicule? Scientist and science fiction writer David Brin asks (essentially) that if shame does not work to quash Stop the Steal (and perhaps other mass hysterias), try ridicule:

The Republican voter fraud fraud is over half a century old by now, old enough to be “genetically” passed on within its ranks. Sam Levine at The Guardian recounts its recent hits. But the contagion metastasized with the GOP’s transition to the Party of Trump:

For years, civil rights groups and academics have raised alarm at the way Republican officials have deployed false claims of voter fraud as a political strategy to justify laws that restrict access to the ballot. But the way Republicans have embraced the myth of a stolen election since Trump’s loss in November, is new, they say, marking a dangerous turn from generalized allegations of fraud to refusing to accept the legitimacy of elections.

If things were bad before (ask me about North Carolina), they are worse now.

“We’ve had disputed elections in the past, but we’ve never had the denial of the basic mathematical reality of counting votes.”

“Voter suppression is not new, the battle lines have been drawn over that for quite some time. But this new concern about election subversion is really worrisome,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies election rules.

The willingness to deny election results comes amid heightened concern that Republicans are maneuvering to take over offices that would empower them to block the winners of elections from being seated. Several Republicans who have embraced the idea that the election was stolen are running to serve as secretaries of state, the chief election official in many places, a perch from which they would exert enormous power over elections, including the power to hold up certifying races.

“I do think it’s a relatively new phenomenon, unfortunately, and disturbing,” said Edward Foley, a law professor at the Ohio State University who has written extensively about the history of contested elections in the US. “We’ve had disputed elections in the past, but we’ve never had the denial of the basic mathematical reality of counting votes.”

As Brin’s post observes, the states where “the Steal” is alleged to have occured were Republican-controlled, either wholly (Arizona and Georgia) or by Republican legislatures and Democratic governors (Pennsylvania).

The stolen election narrative is nonsense, and perhaps a form of mass hysteria. But then in Trump world, up is down, black is white, in is out, and wrong is right. And, by the way, Covid vaccines make you magnetic.

“Na-No, Na-No”

Wow. An anti-vaccine nurse in Ohio tried to prove the Vaccines Cause Magnetism theory in an state legislative committee. The demonstration did not go to plan pic.twitter.com/0ubELst4E8

— Tyler Buchanan (@Tylerjoelb) June 9, 2021

This “vaccines magentize you” conspiracy has spread worldwide so fast that the Centers for Disease Control posted a recent bulletin to attempt to knock it down:

The CDC went so far as to insist itemize “All COVID-19 vaccines are free from metals such as iron, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth alloys, as well as any manufactured products such as microelectronics, electrodes, carbon nanotubes, and nanowire semiconductors.”

As Mork from Ork might say, “Na-No, Na-No.”

The Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri adopted the persona of X-Men villain Magneto. He was as disappointed as someone watching a friend’s amateur magic show:

Nobody, as far as I could tell, was magnetic at all. They also said they would be able to do something involving 5G, but if they could, they never explained what it was, or did it. One nurse who was testifying in Ohio put a key and a bobby pin on herself and they both fell off immediately. “Explain this,” she said, which I could — the surface tension between a flat metallic object and the body’s surface oils that can sometimes hold objects on the body had failed her.

What is really behind the mass hysteria in this country is loss of white-conservative power and something else I mention too rarely:

Demographic changes mean white people may soon (or eventually) be just another minority in this country. These people know how this country treats minorities. They and their ancestors have been doing most of the “treating” for 400 years. As Stephen Stills once said, they’re scared shitless.

What conservatives are most afraid of is that when they are a minority, they will be treated the same way they treated minorities. So they don't want kids learning about just how awful they were because they're terrified of being tested the same way if people learn. https://t.co/rlrTFTkdsY

— 🕷Dante Atkins🕷 (@DanteAtkins) June 14, 2021

But I’m afraid ridicule will not work to snap such people back to reality, satisfying though ridicule may be. Making fun of people’s mental illness as gauche these days as drunk humor. Like other recent mass hysterias, this one may just have to run its course. The question is whether there will be where the United States of America is now a functional democractic republic remaining when the fever breaks.

(h/t/ BF)

Ron Brownstein wonders what in the hell Joe Manchin is talking about:

While Senator Joe Manchin is demanding that both parties agree on any further federal voting-rights legislation, a new study quantifies how completely Republicans have excluded Democrats from the passage of the restrictive voting laws proliferating in red states.

In places such as Florida, Georgia, Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, and Montana, the most restrictive laws approved this year have passed on total or near-complete party-line votes, with almost all state legislative Republicans voting for the bills and nearly all Democrats uniting against them, according to an analysis of state voting records provided exclusively to The Atlantic by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU.

That pattern of unrelenting partisanship has left many state-level Democrats incredulous at the repeated insistence by Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia, that he will support new federal voting-rights legislation only if at least some Republican senators agree to it.

Manchin is “acting like Republicans and Democrats are working together on this stuff, and Republicans in Arizona have completely shut the Democrats out of the [legislative] process,” Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state there, told me in an interview. Similarly, Jennifer Konfrst, the Democratic whip in the Iowa House of Representatives said, “It is unfathomable to me that we would look at this issue and say we have to bring Republicans along, in this political climate, in order to make true change. I don’t see anywhere where Republicans are inviting Democrats along, or inviting Democrats to the table. Why are some Democrats saying ‘I won’t do this unless it’s bipartisan?’”

That’s an excellent question. Because they’re fools?

It’s obvious that these conservative Democrats are living in a world in which the way to beat fascism is to “lead by example.” That is not this world, I’m afraid. These folks aren’t laying by those rules. But I guess if the Republicans win again and some of these walking anachronisms see the total destruction of democracy they might see the error of their ways?

No? Yeah, you’re right.

This time it’s Eric spawn’s wife, Lara. It’s treated as normal discussion on national TV these days.

I don’t know what you tell the people that live at the southern border. I guess they better arm up and get guns and be ready — and maybe they’re going to have to start taking matters into their own hands.

Lara Trump says people who live at the southern border should get guns and take matters into their own hands pic.twitter.com/2JL30va6nF

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 13, 2021

It’s a good thing this woman decided not to run for the Senate. She’s right up there with Marjorie Taylor Greene:

Netanyahu is finally out. But he didn’t go quietly. After claiming the election was stolen and ranting like a madman for weeks, the government finally pushed him out of the PM seat and his parting shots were classic incitement:

Benjamin Netanyahu’s long and boisterous rule came to an end on Sunday with one final broadside against the world.

The embittered ex-leader channeled his inner Trump to claim the election was fraudulent and label his opponents fascists, turncoats and compare them to the regimes in Iran and North Korea. He lashed out at President Biden and claimed the state of Israel faced an existential threat if its government was not powerful enough to say “no” to the United States.

In fact the new government was voted into power democratically on Sunday with a parliamentary vote granting a laser-thin ruling majority to a coalition of opposition parties led by the new prime minister, Naftali Bennett, and new foreign minister Yair Lapid.

Bennett, 49, and Lapid, 57, signed a rotation agreement with Bennett serving as prime minister for the first two years.

Almost unknown outside of Israel, Bennett, a nationalist hardliner, and the centrist Lapid, succeeded where almost a generation of politicians have failed: to replace Netanyahu, 71, whose twelve years in office made him Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and the country’s most dominant modern leader.

Netanyahu did not depart gracefully. He cast aspersions on his rivals and derided the alleged illegitimacy of the new government until his last week in office, declaring its formation “a fraud,” and “possibly the greatest fraud in history.”

In his parting shot in the Knesset, Netanyahu claimed that his ouster could bring about the very destruction of Israel.

He belittled Bennett, who entered politics by serving as Netanyahu’s chief of staff. “Bennett? He doesn’t have the international standing, the ability or the knowledge. An Israeli prime minister must be able to say ‘no’ to an American president… An Israeli government that cannot stand up strongly to the international community, it is no surprise they are celebrating in Iran today.”

Netanyahu also made the totally unfounded allegation that Biden would not safeguard Israel, and compared the Iran deal, which was signed by President Obama and wrecked by President Trump, to the Americans failing to stop the Holocaust.Advertisement

“The new American administration asked me to keep our disagreements quiet,” he said, explaining that replied “No!” to Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin. “But I told them we wouldn’t do it, and I’ll tell you why. The lessons of history are in front of my eyes. In 1944, at the height of the Holocaust, President Roosevelt refused to bomb the trains and the gas chambers, which could have saved our people.”

Netanyahu is expected to continue to serve in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, as opposition leader.

Naftali Bennett faces an uphill battle to reassure and unify Israelis after two and a half years of political upheaval, a brutal month of civil strife and a deadly conflict with Hamas, the militia ruling the Gaza Strip.

His speech in parliament could barely be heard over unending catcalls and jeers from Netanyahu’s allies, who find themselves in the opposition for the first time in twelve years. As Knesset members howled and flashed posters—some were escorted out of the chamber—Bennett’s young children flashed him “love” hand signs from the gallery.

Lapid, the mastermind of the coalition, who will become the next prime minister, was so appalled by the behavior of Likud members that he dropped his speech altogether.

[…]

Netanyahu’s final days in office will be remembered for the avalanche of incitement, insults and threats hurled at Bennett by his supporters. In a warning not heard in Israel in the 25 years since the 1995 assassination of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin the nation’s top interior security official Nadav Argaman warned that the violent language emanating from elected officials could lead to loss of life.

The new government is the most diverse in Israel’s history, and the first to include a majority-Arab party. Raam, the Israeli Islamic Movement’s political wing, and Meretz, the left-wing party headed by the openly gay Nitzan Horowitz, are both members.

I don’t know about you, but this feels strangely familiar and a portent of a very bad global dynamic. It’s an international culture war, isn’t it?

A member of the president in exile’s cabinet was on TV this morning:

Mike Pompeo tells Chris Wallace Trump just needed four more years to get tough on Russia, and defends the Trump administration's human rights record (Jamal Khashoggi is unavailable for comment) pic.twitter.com/KnhprtPobh

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 13, 2021

He just needed four more years …

As for the human rights record, even aside from being an apologist for the authoritarian thugs Vladimir Putin and Jair Bolsonaro, I am reminded of this disgusting exchange from the beginning of his reign:

President-elect Donald Trump told Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte that he is going about his controversial fight against drugs “the right way,” Duterte said.

Duterte says he was greatly pleased with the “rapport” he had with the newly elected U.S. president..

Duterte made the comments to reporters in Davao City on Saturday after a brief phone call last night with President-elect Donald Trump. Government officials earlier passed along snippets of their conversation.

“He was quite sensitive to our war on drugs and he wishes me well in my campaign and said that we are doing, as he so put it, ‘the right way,’ ” the President said.

Washington has been critical of the Philippines handling of drug dealers, including extrajudical killings – government executions without the benefit of judicial proceedings.

Duterte’s verbal tirades and tilt away from Washington have raised many eyebrows since he took office in May.

While on a trip to China in October, Duterte said that “America has lost,” and that he has realigned himself with China’s “ideological flow.” He later clarified his comments about relations with the United States saying he was rather pursuing a “separation of foreign policy” from the US.

But Duterte was pleased over the exchange with Trump.

He described Trump as “animated” and said they talked about “a lot of things.” Duterte said he told Trump Filipinos “are tight with America” and wished Trump success.

“He was wishing me success in my campaign against the drug problem. He understood the way we are handling it and he said there is nothing wrong with protecting your country. It was very encouraging in the sense that I suppose that what he wanted to say was that he would be the last to interfere in the affairs of our own country. “

I don’t think we’ve ever ha a president in history who was so openly disdainful of human rights, at least in the last century or so. (Trump’s fave president Andrew Jackson — once Steve Bannon explained that he was the guy on the $20 — was a notorious exterminationist.)

Mike Pompeo is a monster almost as bad as Trump. But he is missing that level of malevolent charisma that the right wing radicals love so much (Gingrich, Trump, Tucker Carlson.) I doubt he’s going anywhere. But you never know…