Month: September 2021

As David Frum predicted in January 2018, when “conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” They have rejected more than that. They now reject any rules they don’t like.

Students and their parents refusing to comply with county and school mask mandates, lawlessly endangering classmates and their families. The rule of law works only if we enforce it. https://t.co/P9IKfewRDL

— Barb McQuade (@BarbMcQuade) September 8, 2021

Even police.

Police officers making fake-vaccination cards.

Think about that… https://t.co/JmMaNmXMAL

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) September 8, 2021

Is there anything of America in them beside the wrapper? Responding to the tweet below from future Jan. 6th material witness Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), John Stoehr of The Editorial Board newsletter thinks not:

When Republicans say “Real America,” they are not talking about the real America. They are not talking about the actual sovereign nation where you and I and everyone we know live. They are not talking about 50 sovereign states making up a federation — a union — based on a written Constitution and the rule of law, founded on equality and dedicated to the principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To be sure, they want those things. They just don’t want everyone else to have those things. If everyone else did have them, the Republicans wouldn’t be what they tell themselves they are. “Real Americans.”

When Republicans say “Real America,” they have in their heads a very specific place. It’s not a real place, as I said. It’s a wholly imagined place that, as such, frees them from moral accountability and all manner of mutual obligation to anyone who is not already committed to this wholly imagined place. It is a confederacy of the mind and spirit, unbound by tangible boundaries, a “nation” existing inside the actual United States, where “real Americans” live as God’s chosen people.

In Real America, as opposed to the real America, social relationships and political power are structured according to “the way things are,” according to “the natural order,” according to God’s will. As such, God rules over Mankind, men rule over women and white Christian men rule over everyone else. To GOP confederates, this is not their doing. It’s God’s. As such, anything that threatens ordered power threatens God and is deserving of any kind of response necessary to defeating it. 

Classic Lakoff right there.

The conservative moral hierarchy helps explain Republican attacks on affordable healthcare. Sound familiar? https://t.co/V0HEbgHu77 pic.twitter.com/YCwZMyKhEt

— George Lakoff (@GeorgeLakoff) July 1, 2017

But the Real America they want preserved cannot coexist with democracy, capitalism and liberalism in a world economy driven by technology. Yet their imaginary America needs them all to survive. Stoehr writes, “So the chief goal of this parasitic ‘nation’ is striking a difficult balance between the preservation and perpetuation of the authoritarian collective without killing off the democratic host that’s necessary to the preservation and perpetuation of the authoritarian collective.”

This is an old story. The America right-wing reactionaries want made “great again” is the America of the Truman and Eisenhower years. It is the country where dad “wore the pants.” He went to work and mom stayed home, cooked, cleaned, and raised the kids. As God intended. Black people and other minorities knew their place and knew better than to seek equality or a share of political power.

But reactionaries want their bedroom communities of McMansions, too. And their big-ass trucks and SUVs and cable. They want all that and to pay their bills, by god, but they won’t support an economy in which business owners pay employees enough to support them without a family needing two or three incomes. They hate “entitlements” like universal health care for unReal Americans, yet are the most entitled among us.

They want it all and they want their way and they want it now or they’ll throw tantrums. And do.

https://twitter.com/davenewworld_2/status/1435930740143841280?s=20

Man in Salt Lake City gets arrested on a plane after having a total meltdown pic.twitter.com/ax7uZuRmwW

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) September 7, 2021

“The GOP confederates hate the real America,” Stoehr writes. “They are willing to do anything to stop it from ‘taking over.’ Even prolonging the pandemic.”

The old lobbyist trope about inheritance taxes killing family farms is back. This time, lobbyists are attacking tax provisions in President Biden’s $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” plan. North Dakota’s former senator, Democrat Heidi Heitkamp is doing some of the paid lobbying, the New York Times reports. Among the players are the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and Americans for Tax Reform.

“If Democrats don’t preserve the loophole that allows fabulous amounts of wealth to escape taxation when passed down to wealthy heirs, they might alienate hardscrabble rural voters!” snarks Greg Sargent:

“The argument is a new version of an old scam,” Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, told me. “It is repugnant.”

The argument fails, Rosenthal notes, because Biden’s plan taxes such capital gains only at over $1 million per person, which means it would target a very small slice of the ultrawealthy.

What’s more, the plan would allow owners of family businesses to indefinitely defer such taxes as long as the business remains in the family. “Biden structured his proposal to avoid taxing family farmers,” Rosenthal told me.

The Biden plan does more than protect family farms:

[W]hen estates are passed down to heirs, for tax purposes, assets are assigned the value they have at that point of transfer. If assets are then sold later, they’re taxed based on their appreciation in value from that point, effectively allowing all the appreciation before then to permanently escape taxation.

This is one way billionaires can get away with paying so little in income taxes relative to their wealth, whereas most Americans have income taxes taken from each paycheck.

Biden’s plan would combat this. It would tax those assets based on their appreciation from the original point of acquisition, thus taxing all that unrealized value. That’s what lobbyists want to prevent.

But Heitkamp believes those protections … well, they just won’t work. If there is a way to address economic inequality … well, this ain’t the way. Because rich people always find a way around.

Sargent snarks again:

That’s strikingly circular logic: Because people correctly believe the tax code has been rigged for the wealthy, they will never actually accept that it’s truly being unrigged, so Democrats shouldn’t dare try!

Rural Organizing Executive Director Matt Hildreth posted a thread that fills in some background for those less steeped in how things work outside big, blue cities:

It’s important to note that most rural people-nearly 90%-don’t work in agriculture, forestry, fishing, hunting and mining. More rural people work in education, healthcare, and retail than infrastructure and agriculture. census.gov/newsroom/blogs…

There are only 2 million farms in the United States. Half of those are small family farms. For context, there are roughly 60 million rural Americans. usda.gov/media/blog/202…

.@RuralOrganizing polling shows that rural voters are anti corporate and anti corruption voters. 78% of rural voters think lawmakers should be banned from ever becoming paid lobbyists.

Lobbyists are despised by rural voters because they hide their corporate interest behind a “rural agenda” that always fails to deliver for rural people. This deleted tweet from @iowa_corn gives a peak behind the curtain on cookie cutter corporate agendas.

Because lobbyists are driving “rural agendas” only a tiny fraction of rural voters think rural programs at USDA actually benefit small businesses in small communities.

Rural voters think both parties are “controlled” by corporate lobbyists, yet more rural voters think Democrats are controlled by lobbyists than Republicans. And more rural voters think Republicans are working for working people than Democrats.

In contrast to lobbyist agendas, the reconciliation bill is widely popular. Support for optional public pre-K crosses party lines with 90 percent of Democrats supporting this idea along with three-quarters of independents and 72 percent of Republicans.

Previous polling from @RuralOrganizing showed that two-thirds of rural voters support free community college. Pew found similar support nationally this year. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021…

So, in short, rural people are looking for elected officials who have their backs and will fight for rural people not corporate agendas. Rural folks see Democrats as more corporate than Republicans while also supporting the key policies in the Biden Jobs plan. 

Dems who oppose the widely popular Biden Jobs Plan–especially the policies in the reconciliation bill–will have nothing to run on in rural America in 2022. Corporate agendas destroyed the “Blue Dogs”. But @SenSherrodBrown keeps winning. This is why. 

More rural voters think Democrats are controlled by lobbyists than Republicans. Heitkamp is one reason why.

Oy vey:

A guy in a new Larry Elder California recall ad is really working through some stuff. He says Gavin Newsom reminds "me of the guy in high school who took my girlfriend, then went on to the next girl" (Ad captured by our friends at @Ad_Impact) pic.twitter.com/HQABdDuxIh

— Zach Montellaro (@ZachMontellaro) September 8, 2021

This is actually quite refreshing. Usually they sublimate their pathetic insecurities with this sort of thing:

Watching the latest crop of 2022 Republican candidates for Congress, I’m beginning to notice a theme developing in the campaign ads and social media posts. See if you can spot it in this thread. Jason Paletta and Jake Bequette.

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Mark McClosky and Kelly Tshibaka.

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Anthony Sabatini and Joe Hines.

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Joe Kent and Laura Loomer

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Josh Mandel and Eric Greitens

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Yes, of course. Can’t forget Teddy Daniels.

Mike Collins and Jonathan Lindsey

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Max Miller (OH)

Originally tweeted by Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) on August 3, 2021.

This piece by Garret Epps at the Washington Monthly makes the observation that the anti-abortion zealots aren’t going to just settle for overturning Roe vs Wade out of some fealty to the idea of states’ rights. No, they are going to seek a way to ban it altogether.:

Abortion’s opponents don’t want to stop it only in red states. Abortion-rights proponents don’t want women to have the right to choose only in blue states. Both sides are fighting over choice itself.

This backdrop, I suggest, may well be the context of an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court on July 29 by two eminent conservative intellectuals: John Finnis, a philosopher who taught for two decades at Oxford and now holds an endowed chair at Notre Dame, and Robert George, who teaches legal philosophy at Princeton and runs its James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. Both men are widely respected across the spectrum of constitutional philosophy and have influenced decades’ worth of young scholars. I read essays by Finnis while still in law school, and others by George after I became a professor, and admired everything about them except their religious premises, which I reject. Their ideas are extreme, but no one in law would call them fringe figures or question their sincerity.

Now, as an apparent anti-abortion victory looms, the two suggest that the movement hit the trail for fresh fields and pastures new. Its aim, they say, should be to make all abortion illegal: The prohibition of abortion, they told the Court in their brief, is “constitutionally obligatory because unborn children are persons within the original public meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses.” No state can permit it, they say.

The possibility that the Court will, during the October 2021 term, enact this rule is slim. But the brief is worth noting for a couple of reasons. First is the clear intent to insert into the dialogue the idea that no state can allow legal abortion. In late summer 2021, that may seem radical even to some anti-abortion activists; but, as Samuel Johnson once said, “Reason by degrees submits to absurdity as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness.” Shifting the terms of the discussion is a crucial first step toward winning the debate. Consider that, since Roe was decided in 1973, the needs and rights of pregnant women have been slowly but surely erased from the legal dialogue. The fetus is the star of most “pro-life” propaganda, and the needs of the fetus—its heartbeat, or its capacity for pain, or its constitutional status—are the center of the discussion. With women’s privacy, health, and equality removed from the equation, the only question is what rights an unborn fetus may possess. And the new answer offered by these eminent figures is: fetus, all of them; woman, none.

This brief now asks the Court for one of the most radical doctrinal shifts in American history. We can understand why the two philosophers want such a shift—they believe that any fertilized egg is a full human person, and thus any rule that allows the termination of a pregnancy after conception involves a very serious offense against their morality. To go further, they have at their disposal respectable (if, I think, grievously wrong) philosophical arguments why the law should adopt that philosophical position as a legal rule. But what is appalling about this brief is that, instead of just making those arguments as friends of the Court (“We are two eminent philosophers, and we want to point out to you that philosophically your current jurisprudence is flawed”), they present this not as their own idea—heaven forfend!—but as “the original public meaning” of the Fourteenth Amendment. By amassing a distinctly odd survey of the historical record, they solemnly assure the justices that any “legally educated” member of the public in 1868 would have understood the reference to “person” in the due process and equal protection clauses as meaning the unborn at any stage. That means that the “original public meaning” of the Fourteenth Amendment was that abortion could never be allowed.

I think you are all aware of right wing legal thought cynically using “originalism” as their excuse for turning back the clock. If you read on, you’ll see how bogus these claims are. But they will nonetheless be deployed as an excuse to ban abortion rights in America if the 5 Trump Court extremists have their way.

I would expect that the anti-abortion industrial complex may want to delay that so they can continue to rake in money and grow their influence by fighting abortion in the blue states. But eventually, I have no doubt that this court will ban it. The majority are Catholic extremists (plus Gorsuch, who is an Episcopal extremist.) This will be their legacy and they know it.

“For God’s sakes a livin’, how difficult is this to understand?"

— Gov. Jim Justice (R-WV) is losing it over anti-vaxxers and vaccine conspiracy theorists pic.twitter.com/EzsiEz8W95

— The Recount (@therecount) September 8, 2021

Health expert Andy Slavitt brings us up to date on variants. There is reason to be hopeful!

COVID Update: How big a problem will future variants be?

I got an update from several top scientists.

Quick review. Viruses continually mutate but can only mutate when they replicate. And so far we’re giving SARS-CoV-2 plenty of opportunities to replicate.

Most mutations aren’t worth noting. They don’t increase hospitalizations. They don’t increase infectiousness. And they don’t cause problems for prior immunity.

A fallacy pushed by anti-vaxxers is that vaccinations cause mutations.

It’s false. The more unvaccinated people, the more replication within cells as people mount a slow immune response— the more chances for the virus to mutate.

So far the variants of concern that have taken hold in countries around the world have followed 1 of 2 paths for more cell replication— either evading vaccines or spreading more easily.

But so far none of these variants have combined both problems— evasiveness & contagiousness.

Think of one path as going broad to more people (a more contagious variant is harder to catch) and another path as going deep (within a single individual to more cells).

One that had mutations to be the most rapidly growing & most evasive would be the most concerning.

The vaccines that have caused the most trouble for vaccines in vitro & in reality (Beta, Iota, Delta+, Mu) have so far been outcompeted by the variants that spread more rapidly (Alpha and now Delta).

Problematic variants that can’t grow as fast as Delta will be only a limited problem.

When we read about a Mu (0.1%) being a problem for vaccines, if it can’t outcompete Delta, it won’t take hold.

So Delta, oddly, is defeating variants that would be more challenging for vaccines (and also monoclonals).

And until a variant that causes problems for the vaccine also spreads faster than Delta, it won’t become dominant.

As an aside, Delta causes some problems for the vaccine but in a different way— because it replicates more virus so quickly that w/ lower antibody levels, immune response often isn’t fast enough to prevent symptoms. Cellular immunity does kick if to prevent hospitalizations.

So why hasn’t a variant come along that has both negative characteristics? Will it?

The answer to the first question is largely randomness. There’s no reason why both types of mutations can’t exist in the same virus variant.

The more opportunity, the more random things will happen. So it’s also the length of time of the pandemic, the spread & the too slow, too low vaccination rates that increases the odds.

Will it happen?

We don’t know but we do know that vaccinating the globe and the US more quickly will reduce the odds.

In the scheme of viruses Delta already replicates very fast. Not close to measles, but arguably comparable to chicken pox. That’s a tall order for a mutant.

So we could expect to see a lot of “problematic” mutations for the vaccines that never amount to much because Delta crushes them.

But what happens if we do see one that’s vaccine evasive that Delta doesn’t outcompete— or at least leaves room for it in some regions?

There are a few key ingredients that must be ready: surveillance, vaccine development, regulatory & scaled manufacturing/distribution.

We’ve taken a big step forward in surveillance with the CDC’s new forecasting center. Genetic sequencing need to occur however in many more regions of the US than it does now.

Countries around the world are also improving their ability to spot variants quickly.

Once we identify a new variant, we can test its effectiveness against vaccines in the lab. If one is an evasive mutation, within 100 days we should have the capability to develop a new specialized booster.

By that time we should know if the variant is outcompeting Delta.

The good news is that as long as a virus generates an immune response from the body, we should be able to make a vaccine that works (which is why HIV has been so challenging for scientists).

Over the course of the year the Biden Admin has put together a pandemic resiliency plan that should allow for the rapid production & distribution of vaccines for new variants & new viruses.

The aim is 100 days for a vaccine & 100 days for full production.

200 days sounds like a long time but if we have good surveillance & begin right away, remember how long it could be before a mutation is discovered & its proliferation depending on the origin.

If the original COVID started circulating in China in the 4th quarter last year, it months before it started to spread significantly around the 🌏 .

If we are developing vaccines at pace, it could end up being only a short spike in most countries before a vax is ready.

This will undoubtedly mean suffering in the place of the variant’s origin. And a lot of logistics (imagine a whole new global rollout). We will need to get better & better at it.

And of course each time face anew the challenges of vaccine hesitancy.

Layered protections are essential. A vaccine plus a mask and good ventilation plus awareness of when spread is increasing in your community will keep everyone safest.

Along with the development of an oral anti-viral, we are building the arsenal as a globe & as individuals to manage new variants but we have to use them.

Right now Delta is the devil we know. And while not our friend, it is at least the enemy of our enemy.

If we don’t want to deal with worse variants we know how to reduce the odds. Slow the spread. Accelerate global vaccinations. Take its potential seriously. /end

One of the scientists who informed this thread is Tony Fauci. He’s my guest on @inthebubblepod tomorrow.

Originally tweeted by Andy Slavitt 🇺🇸💉 (@ASlavitt) on September 7, 2021.

I’m seeing a whole lot of people on social media saying that people who are concerned about the virus despite being vaccinated are being ridiculous.

I beg to differ.

Vaccinated people are concerned because they have watched this virus mutate and they know that the millions of people who are inexplicably refusing to get the vaccine are providing a host for a variant that could elude the protection of the vaccine. It could be happening as we speak. They are also concerned about the fact that young kids can’t get vaccinated, “long COVID’ is a largely unstudied phenomenon and the health care system is strained beyond capacity in places where the unvaccinated miscreants are filling up the ICU’s. They see these unvaccinated miscreants having full blown hissy fits over wearing masks, including in schools where those kids can’t be vaccinated.

It is not unreasonable to care about these things. We know we are not out of the woods and simply want people to get the shots and for businesses and other places where people gather to require that they wear masks until most people have complied. It’s common sense.

Greg Sargent shares the bad news:

Of all the insulting lies we’ve heard about Democratic proposals to tax the rich, perhaps the worst is the idea that they would devastate owners and operators of family farms.

Republicans have made this claim for at least 20 years, to help protect large estates from taxation when passed down to wealthy heirs. As president, Donald Trump embellished this further, adding the idea that estate taxes threaten salt-of-the-earth family-owned trucking businesses.

Now a new version of this line is back. Only this time, it’s being pushed by a Democrat who’s advocating against a key tax provision in President Biden’s $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” plan

A swarm of lobbyists is gearing up against Democratic efforts to tax corporations and the wealthy to fund major investments in our people and in preserving the future home of human civilization. One thing the lobbyists want to protect is a loophole allowing untold inherited wealth to escape taxation.

When people say the economy is “rigged,” this is what they’re talking about. As it is, wealth and investment income are not taxed as labor income is, so those amassing large fortunes often already receive privileged tax treatment.

But in addition, when estates are passed down to heirs, for tax purposes, assets are assigned the value they have at that point of transfer. If assets are then sold later, they’re taxed based on their appreciation in value from that point, effectively allowing all the appreciation before then to permanently escape taxation.

This is one way billionaires can get away with paying so little in income taxes relative to their wealth, whereas most Americans have income taxes taken from each paycheck.

Biden’s plan would combat this. It would tax those assets based on their appreciation from the original point of acquisition, thus taxing all that unrealized value. That’s what lobbyists want to prevent. One of them is Heidi Heitkamp, the former Democratic senator from North Dakota. The New York Times reports that her effort is “well-financed,” though details are lacking, and that she’s pushing the argument that taxation at death is bad politics:

Ms. Heitkamp said she was finding a receptive audience among potential swing voters in rural areas, especially owners of family farms, even though Democrats say such voters would never be affected by the changes under consideration. Lobbyists already expect this piece of the estate tax changes to wash out in the lobbying deluge.“This is very consistent with my concern about revitalizing the Democratic Party in rural America,” Ms. Heitkamp said. “You may want to do this,” she said she had counseled her former colleagues, “but understand there will be risk, and risk is the entire agenda.”

If Democrats don’t preserve the loophole that allows fabulous amounts of wealth to escape taxation when passed down to wealthy heirs, they might alienate hardscrabble rural voters!

Funny, we keep hearing Democrats are losing rural voters because they’re no longer the party of the working class (by which critics mean the White working class) and have become the party of cosmopolitan elites, tech billionaires and woke corporate investors.

Now they risk losing more of those voters if they put a tiny crimp in those elites’ efforts to maintain entrenched and inherited privileges across generations? Whatever happened to the narrative that non-cosmopolitan Real Americans went for Trump to protest this rigged political economy?

It makes no sense at all. But please, these Real Americans don’t actually care about any of that in any case. This whole argument is some right wing cant to protect rich people for sure, but the only thing the Real Americans actually care about is keeping racial and ethnic minorities and foreigners down — and owning the libs. The Democrats should do this for the good of the country without expecting any electoral rewards from white, rural America because they won’t get any.

Gov. Ron DeSantis: "I don't know why the masks have politics around it." pic.twitter.com/sLrvxdxVJh

— The Recount (@therecount) September 8, 2021

Right. His campaign is selling these:

What do you notice about Ron DeSantis at the Super Bowl? pic.twitter.com/BqjFX7bthQ

— Mystery Solvent (@MysterySolvent) February 8, 2021

 Governor Ron DeSantis has an explanation, of sorts, after being photographed not wearing a mask while watching Super Bowl LV at Raymond James Stadium.

In a photo that was circulated widely on Twitter Sunday night, DeSantis is shown in a stadium suite — mask-less and far closer than six feet away from someone with whom he is speaking. A person with a mask on is visible in the next suite.

Politico’s Marc Caputo tweeted that when he ran into DeSantis, the governor brought up the above photo without prompting and said:

“Someone said, ‘hey, you were at the Super Bowl without a mask’ … but how the hell am I going to be able to drink a beer with a mask on? Come on. I had to watch the Bucs win.”

However, by taking off his mask, DeSantis disobeyed the Covid-19 rules laid out by the City of Tampa which most notably had a mask mandate for those in the stadium and at any indoor Super Bowl event.

Republicans in California want to recall the Governor for not following the COVID rules during the first week of the pandemic. They have turned this guy into a hero.

BYW: He appears to be drinking a Diet Pepsi…

Back in 2012, Republicans were on one of their tears against women’s rights, thinking that it was the ticket to win the election and oust President Barack Obama from office. They decided to attack contraception, confirming once again that their alleged love for the fetus was really all about restricting reproductive freedom.

The U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held committee hearings and insulted the women who testified about the medical need for contraception. Rush Limbaugh grossly derided one of them on his national radio show, calling a woman named Sandra Fluke a “slut” who is “having so much sex she [couldn’t] afford her own birth control pills … having so much sex, it’s amazing she can still walk.” Ever the classy fellow, Limbaugh added, “If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I’ll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.” (And that was just for starters.) One of their top donors, Foster Freiss, went on television and claimed that in his day, a woman just used aspirin for birth control — by putting it between her knees. Haha! And perhaps the most famous quote of that entire campaign season came from a GOP Senate candidate from Missouri named Todd Akin who was asked about his stance that rape and incest survivors should be forced to bear the child of their rapist and said this:

Well you know, people always want to try to make that as one of those things, well how do you, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question. First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

He later walked back the biologically illiterate comment (and then walked back the walk-back two years later) but it was too late. The Republican “War on Women” was a decisive factor in Obama’s re-election and the Democrats gained seats in both the Senate and the House that year.

Republicans famously performed an electoral “autopsy” after that election in which, among other things, they acknowledged that their reputation as witless misogynists was hurting the party’s image. But the party completely ignored that analysis and went on to elect Donald Trump, a man credibly accused of numerous sexual assaults who was even caught on tape crudely bragging about it.

And as you have no doubt heard, despite their losses in the last two elections, they are at it again.

Aided by the Trump Court majority of far-right conservative Catholic justices, the state of Texas passed a law banning abortion after 6 weeks with no exception for rape or incest. And the Governor of Texas decided to emulate the great examples of Akin, Limbaugh and Freiss by demonstrating his ignorance of human biology, saying that rape victims will have “at least” 6 weeks to get an abortion (not true, and absurd on its face) and then issuing this fatuous declaration he apparently believed would be reassuring to assault victims:

Let’s make something very clear, rape is a crime, and Texas will work tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them and prosecuting them and getting them off the streets. So, goal number one in the state of Texas is to eliminate rape, so that no woman no person will be a victim of rape.”

What a great solution. I wonder why they didn’t think of this before?

This time the party has gotten very creative with this new law in which they are turning private citizens into vigilantes and bounty hunters in order to circumvent federal jurisdiction, And you can expect this clever gambit to become law in many Republican-led states. North Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is considering a similar law and went a step further by issuing an executive order restricting telemedicine abortions and abortion medication. Florida’s Ron DeSantis said he’s going to take a look at it and the Florida legislature is already moving on it.

The Wall Street Journal profiled the Machiavellian legal thinker who came up with the idea to enforce the abortion ban through the civil courts by enlisting the public to file suit. His name is Jonathan F. Mitchell, a former clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia who worked for former Texas Governor Rick Perry and was tapped for a position with the Trump administration but his nomination never came up for a vote. He is also, of course, heavily involved with the Federalist Society. According to the WSJ:

In 2018, Mr. Mitchell drafted “The Writ-of-Erasure Fallacy,” a Virginia Law Review article that articulated the legal theories that would eventually find their way into the Texas abortion law. The article was a deep dive into the subject of judicial review and raised the idea that when a court rules a statute unconstitutional, the law isn’t erased from the books and could be modified to allow for “private enforcement.” He described how laws could be constructed to “enable private litigants to enforce a statute even after a federal district court has enjoined the executive from enforcing it,” without going in-depth about the applicability to abortion laws.

Ed Kilgore at NY Magazine reports that Mitchell worked with an anti-abortion extremist pastor in east Texas named Mark Lee Dickson who promoted the idea of towns calling themselves “sanctuaries for the unborn” and giving citizens the power to legally harass providers, including pharmacies that sell Plan B contraceptives. Mitchell and Dickson did a trial run of this legal strategy in Lubbock, Texas where a federal judge ruled that he had no power to enjoin private citizens. That success laid the groundwork for the state law that the Supreme Court majority washed its hands of last week.

None of this really all that unprecedented, as Kilgore noted:

The idea is reminiscent of the White Citizens’ Council model of fighting desegregation during the Civil Rights era: Once defeated in the courts, white supremacists switched to nonofficial harassment of civil rights workers, threats of terrorism, and essentially (white) community-based civil disobedience.

Unfortunately, this time the Supreme Court is on the wrong side of history and the state governments are using this legal end run to, as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his dissent, “avoid responsibility for its laws.” It’s a very neat trick but one that could end up being too clever by half if Republicans continue to repeat their mistake in believing that everyone in America is as primitively misogynist as they are. One gets the sense that some of them, at least, understand this.

The silence from most national GOP officials has been deafening. Unfortunately, there’s not much they can do about it. By empowering fanatics in the states to go their own way, they’ve completely lost control of the issue. 

Salon

CNN:

Virginia on Wednesday took down a towering statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, the last Confederate statue remaining along Richmond’s historic Monument Avenue.

A pair of rulings from the state Supreme Court last week cleared the way for its removal after intense national debate over the 12-ton statue’s purpose and place along the nearly one-mile, tree-lined street in the city that was once the capital of the Confederacy. The statue, like other symbols of the Confederacy in the commonwealth and and across the country including the busts of Confederate figures in the Virginia statehouse, was removed after the killing of George Floyd prompted a nationwide reckoning with police brutality and racism.

Lawrence West, founder of BLM RVA, told CNN it is “very satisfying, gratifying” to see the statue being removed. His group has occupied the space surrounding the Lee monument — unofficially dubbed by protesters the Marcus-David Peters Circle in honor of a Black teacher who was killed by police while experiencing a “mental health crisis” — since June 2020 amid protests over Floyd’s death.

The monument of a man who betrayed his oath, quit the Army, and led an insurrection that killed 700K+ Americans has been removed after 130 years. It was erected as a symbol of southern, white nationalism, when Jim Crow replaced slavery as a tool of oppression. pic.twitter.com/P3bj7ubVSL

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 8, 2021

All this time and it’s not over. Is it the end of the beginning yet?

Deal with it.

Okay, that may be premature.

I wrote a couple of years ago about the internecine fights between the progressive and establishment wings of the Democratic Party. You have the upstarts dissatisfied with the status quo, and then there are the establishment Democrats who fear democracy breaking out inside the Democratic Party, for whom talent takes a back seat to tenure and fundraising. Progressives and lefty independents tend to prefer playing the outsider antagonists raging against the machine.

An old friend who’s spent his life as a loner once said if he ever found himself on the inside of a social group, he’d have to create a new outside for himself just to feel normal. So what do progressives do when eventually they find they are the mainstream?

Eric Boehlert’s PressRun dispatch this morning raised that question indirectly in noting how the media narrative of a country divided against itself is nonsense. A sort of “Both Sides Now with Chuck Todd.” The topic was Covid, masks and vaccines. Todd naturally framed the question in Republican vs. Democrat terms:

Except that premise is false and it reflects a misguided brand of Both Sides journalism. Instead of the country being “divided” over Covid, including whether to get vaccinated and wear masks, 75 percent of eligible Americans have received at least one shot, and 70 percent support mask mandates in schools. Just “17 percent of adults say they probably or definitely will not get vaccinated,” according to a recent ABC-Washington Post survey.

Meanwhile, a strong majority of Americans support requiring proof of vaccination to travel by airplane, according to Gallup. (39 percent oppose.) And the percentage of parents who plan on vaccinating their kids has climbed to nearly 70 percent.

If there’s an actual Covid divide, it’s among conservatives themselves — 45 percent of Republicans support a universal vaccine mandate. Roughly the same percentage oppose.

The media’s lazy framing of a “divide” is nonsense, Boehlert writes (emphasis mine):

Instead of portraying the dangerous zealots accurately, the media downplay the threat by presenting anti-vaccine and anti-mask fanatics as being the mirror opposite of Democrats and progressives who embrace science and common sense. If there’s a “divide,” that means there are two equal, opposing forces, right? The press much prefers to tell the tale of Both Sides facing off over Covid, instead of detailing a deranged and radical minority waging war on mainstream America.

Think of that, progressives. You are mainstream America. Even if the Democratic establishment has not fully accepted it. How much of your self-image is built upon being outsiders? How will you adapt? Or will you have to construct a new outside just to keep feeling angry, marginalized, and normal?

Boehlert continues:

In reality though, there are three self-identifying political parties in America — Democratic, Republican and Independent, with Independents siding with Democrats on key issues. Independents though, tend to get erased by the media, so journalists can hyperventilate about American being “divided,” pretending we’re a 50-50 nation.

We are not. The recent ABC-Washington Post poll found that, “9 in 10 Democrats and more than 6 in 10 independents support school mask requirements, while nearly 6 in 10 Republicans oppose them.” There’s no way those results suggest a large “divide” on the issue — it’s basically two-against-one.

Not only are there three major parties, but the number of voters who identify as Republican has been steadily shrinking for years. The ABC-Washington Post poll, in order to get what it considered to be an accurate reflection of the U.S. electorate, conducted its survey where the makeup of respondents was 30 percent Democratic, 24 percent Republican, and 36 percent Independent.

Even those percentages are misleading. Independents are no more homogenous than Democrats or Republicans. Suggesting Independents as a whole side with Democrats on key issues is inaccurate. It depends on where they live.

In my very blue county, it depends on in which precinct they live. Although Independents (UNAffiliated in NC) “break” Democrat in their voting almost countywide, the farther out in the county you go, the redder things get and the more the percentage shrinks. In a red NC county where I ran calculations recently (60-40 for Trump in 2020), Independents break Republican in almost every precinct.

As for progressives, be they registered Democrats or Independents, it is past time to reassess how they will view themselves when they are the establishment. “[B]eat drum hard we are winning,” Anat Shenker-Osorio reminded us ahead of the 2020 election.

Stuart Stevens wrote, “Now is when you turn a victory into a rout. We are all tired, but the other side isn’t just tired. They are frightened and confused. As they should be. Because they are losing the fight for the soul of this country. And they know it.”

Seeing oneself as the perpetual outsider is self-defeating. The whole point of progressive politics is gaining power to wield it for the public good. Hard to do when doing so makes you your own enemy.