Month: October 2021

If Kyrsten Sinema is playing diva in the hopes that it will cement her reputation as the second coming of John McCain, she’s making a mistake. First of all, she isn’t a disabled former POW war hero nor does she have a “straight talking man’s man” persona which bonded McCain to his right wing constituency on a purely symbolic level. Her quirky outfits won’t bond her to the left the way that those things bonded McCain to the right.

But it’s more than that. CNN’s Harry Enten has the details:

​Democratic hopes for passing big legislation through the Senate rely on Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Both have made things difficult for Senate Democrats because they are moderates who have been hesitant to pass big spending packages.

But while Democrats are lucky to have a Democrat of any ideological persuasion representing West Virginia, they may not be getting the best bang for their buck from Sinema. Sinema has, for the last few years, had the same ideological record as Manchin. As I’ve noted before, Manchin’s ideological record is about the best Democrats can hope for from West Virginia.

But Democrats can hope for more from an Arizona Democrat. Their party has a much easier time winning in Arizona than West Virginia.

Start with what happened in last year’s presidential election. President Joe Biden won the state of Arizona by 0.3 points. West Virginia, unlike Arizona, is a red state. Biden lost the state by 39 points. This came after Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton lost the state by more than 40 points in 2016.

Arizona, on the other hand, is purple and has been chugging to the left. Biden did 4 points better than Clinton, who in turn did 6 points better than Barack Obama in 2012.

Part of what may be happening is that Sinema thinks that Arizona is a redder state than it actually is. That’s understandable insofar as Democrats have only started winning statewide races there with regularity recently. Sinema became the first Democrat to win an Arizona Senate race since 1988.

This feat, however, was repeated by Mark Kelly in 2020. Kelly won by basically the same margin against the same opponent as Sinema and in a tougher political environment. Biden, too, became the first Democrat to win the state on the presidential level since 1996.

Beyond Kelly and Biden, Democrats in Arizona now control two of the five seats on the state’s corporation commission, the secretary of state’s office and superintendent of public instruction office. They also hold five of the nine US House seats.

Compare that to Manchin. He is literally the only Democrat to be representing West Virginia in any statewide or federal office.

Arizona’s electoral environment is more similar to Georgia, which has become more purple in recent years as well. Biden won the state by about the same amount as he did Arizona. The state just elected Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the Senate. They haven’t obstructed Biden’s agenda to anywhere near the same degree.

So what else might explain Sinema’s ways? It’s been reported that Sinema holds up former Arizona Sen. John McCain as a role model. McCain was, of course, a thorn in former President Donald Trump’s side and didn’t always vote in-line with his party.

If she’s trying to copy McCain’s ways, Sinema isn’t doing a great job. McCain usually voted with his party. In his final full year in the Senate, he voted with his party more than 90% of the time on party unity votes (i.e. those where at least 50% of one party voted a different way from 50% of the other party). This was about on par for him. McCain voted with his party less than the median senator, but not that much less.

Sinema is an entirely different legislator. She votes against her party far more than the median legislator on party unity votes, according to the CQ Almanac. From 2013 to 2019, she’s never voted with her party more than 75% of the time.

There is one way though in which Sinema is similar to McCain: She’s upsetting her party’s base. By voting the way she does, Sinema may be leaving herself open to a primary challenge — a possibility certain liberal groups are already eyeing.

And unlike Manchin, who has beaten back primary challenges easily, Sinema is going to face a primary electorate where less than 40% of registered Democrats call themselves liberal.

Democrats in Arizona are about as liberal as the national average, according to both the 2020 primary exit polls and CES. More than 60% of Democrats called themselves liberal in both surveys.

The bottom line is that Sinema may be unnecessarily moderate for her own electoral good. Maybe it’ll work out for her. Still, It’s possible though that not only is she making Biden’s life more difficult, but her own electoral future more difficult as well.

It is idiotic. I guess she’s getting the attention she thinks she needs but it’s a pathetic play that may end her career. If she gets a serious primary opponent she could lose. And I don’t think she could come back by emulating the man she really resembles, Joe Lieberman, by running as an Independent in a “Sinema for Arizona” Party. Republicans want one of their own in there and without them she won’t win.

What a foolish attention seeking gambit and there’s no good reason for it. There are people from much redder states than hers, like Jon Tester of Montana for instance, who have managed to maintain their seats without being showboating “mavericks.”

If only the fetus fetishists cared as much about their “hosts” or “birthing vessels” (also known as “women”) this sort of consequence would prevent what’s about to happen in many states around the country:

Each month, Dr. Andrea Palmer delivers about 20 babies, easily the best part of her job. But some days, she has to deliver difficult news.

“The conversations are just — they’re gut wrenching every time,” she said.

Palmer is an OB-GYN in Fort Worth, Texas. She recently had to tell a woman that her fetus had a condition called anencephaly, “where, essentially, the baby doesn’t have a brain.” It’s always fatal — often during the pregnancy or else soon after birth — and patients are typically given the option to terminate.

“I’ve had some moms who choose to continue the pregnancy because this is the only time they’re gonna have with their baby,” she said. “Which is just heartbreaking to me.”

Texas doctors like Palmer say SB 8, an unusual new state law banning most abortions, is complicating other types of medical decisions. They’re hoping for more clarity soon, as legal challenges continue, including a federal challenge from the Biden administration.

Continuing a pregnancy after a diagnosis like anencephaly comes with additional health risks and, for some patients, additional emotional trauma, Palmer said.

“I have other patients who just, imagining the sorrow that each prenatal visit would bring, knowing that’s never gonna result in a baby they could take home — that is just too much to bear,” she said.

Before SB 8, Palmer would have offered to end the pregnancy by inducing labor. But the new law, which the U.S. Supreme Court allowed to take effect Sept. 1, prohibits abortions after cardiac activity is detectable, except for medical emergencies.

Palmer said her patient, at more than 16 weeks, opted to go out of state for an abortion — something she said many of her patients could never afford.

Some doctors say the law also is complicating medical decisions when women come in for help while experiencing a miscarriage.

“For example, patient comes in, 17 weeks, with her water broken. That’s a nonviable pregnancy. The biggest risk to the patient is that she could become infected,” said Theresa Patton, an OB-GYN in Dallas.

In such cases, Patton said she’d normally offer medication to expedite the miscarriage and reduce the risk of infection, which can trigger a severe condition called sepsis. But she and other doctors say it’s not clear under the law what constitutes a “medical emergency.”

“We don’t want a patient to get sick for a pregnancy that is not going to progress, it’s not going to continue,” Patton said. “Now, am I going to be in legal trouble for offering that termination now? Do I need to wait until she’s septic and imminently in danger herself before I offer that termination? These are all of the things that we have been struggling with what we should do.”

Dr. Jennifer Villavicencio, with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said laws like SB 8 often fail to account for the “liminal” spaces and complexities surrounding pregnancy.

“What do you want your doctor thinking about when you or your family member is in a life-threatening situation?” she asked. “Do you want them thinking about the best possible treatment … or do you want them weighing whether or not they’re willing to risk their personal livelihood, safety and decades of training in order to treat your family member who has their life at risk?”

John Seago, of the anti-abortion-rights group Texas Right to Life, defends the law.

But Seago acknowledges that it removes some options for health care providers.

“We understand that our ethics and our commitment to human life does limit medicine … from being as efficient as it wants to be,” he said. “However, this is protecting innocent human life and seeking to protect these values.”

Apparently, the women who are in danger of dying because of this grotesque, ghoulish obsession are not “innocent” enough to protect. Clearly, they see them as dispensable human carriers for the valuable embryos and fetuses and thus of no real intrinsic value at all.

This is the real issue. It always has been and it always will be. This belief in the woman as nothing more than a vessel for the male seed is ancient:

The ancient patriarchal societies drew many of their values and beliefs from their agrarian experience. This was particularly true with regard to their understand of the conception or birth process. Having witnessed all kinds of seeds sprout in the soil and bring forth new plants, whether they entered the soil by natural means or were deliberately planted by human beings, it is understandable why the ancients in many societies saw the birth of humans and other animal coming forth solely from “seed” deposited by the male.

Just as the soil served as the place where the seed of a plant received shelter and nourishment for it to germinate and grow, so too the uterus of the female provided shelter and nourishment for the “seed” of the make to germinate and grow until it was ready to be born. The female, like the soil, was passive. She contributed nothing biologically or genetically. Every quality and characteristic was derived from the male.

Today people know better. But the underlying value of the woman as secondary to the “seed” remains. The anti-abortion fanatics literally believe her life is less valuable than a pre-viability fetus or embryo and that she should endure the full pregnancy and birth of a fetus that has no brain and cannot live outside the womb.

Women are without value to these people beyond their role as the “soil” for a man’s seed. They are primitive cretins.

If you want to know why you hear celebrities and other rich people on reality shows talking about sums like $20 million being chicken feed, this explains it. As the economy has grown, more and more of the growth has gone to the top 10%. It’s shocking.

Hat tip to Josh Marshal for the gif. That’s essentially what Pelosi said to the so-called moderates yesterday. Their gambit failed:

In a “Dear Colleague” letter issued Saturday, Pelosi said “more time was needed” to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill together with the reconciliation package. The House speaker urged passage of the bipartisan bill by Oct. 31 — the expiration date of the 30-day reauthorization of federal highway programs. The House passed the extension on Friday night.

“There is an October 31st Surface Transportation Authorization deadline, after last night’s passage of a critical 30-day extension,” Pelosi wrote. “We must pass BIF well before then – the sooner the better, to get the jobs out there.”

Pelosi noted “two dynamics” that led to a clash between moderates and progressives in the past week while making clear the need for both infrastructure bills to pass.

“Out of respect for our colleagues who support the bills and out of recognition for the need for both, I would not bring BIF to the Floor to fail,” Pelosi said. “Again, we will and must pass both bills soon. We have the responsibility and the opportunity to do so. People are waiting and want Results.”

Pelosi’s letter was issued a day after President Biden reiterated his commitment to a two-track plan for the passage of both infrastructure bills in a meeting with House Democrats. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told reporters on Friday afternoon that the President endorsed keeping the bipartisan infrastructure plan and reconciliation package linked.

“Look, he said ‘I support the BIF entirely and if I could do it right now I would, but we need to get this reconciliation bill and you know it’s gonna be tough, like we’re gonna have to come down in our number and we’re gonna have to do that work,’” Jayapal said.

“The President said we’re gonna get both bills done and in order to get BIF done, we have to get this agreement on the reconciliation bill,” Jayapal added.

Biden’s reported remarks to House Democrats signaled his support for progressives’ refusal to back down from their vow to tank the bipartisan infrastructure bill if it’s put to a vote before the reconciliation package.

Top centrist Democrats, such as House centrist leader Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), have expressed their frustrations with the delayed vote on the infrastructure bill.

“We cannot let this small faction on the far left … destroy the president’s agenda and stop the creation of 2 million jobs a year,” Gottheimer said in a statement.

Sinema similarly painted the vote delay as “an ineffective stunt to gain leverage over a separate proposal.” Both Sinema and fellow centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) faced backlash from progressives in the past week for their evasiveness on giving a topline nor details of what they’d like to see in the reconciliation package amid their complaints over its $3.5 trillion price tag. Manchin, however, finally announced a topline counteroffer of $1.5 trillion, on Thursday.

On Saturday, Biden acknowledged frustrations among Democrats over the delayed vote.

“Everybody’s frustrated, it’s part of being in government, being frustrated,” Biden told reporters on Saturday, while vowing to ”work like hell” to pass both infrastructure bills.

Here’s the thing nobody seems to get. The “bipartisan” deal only includes a handful of Republicans in both houses and potentially none when all is said and done. They are snakes and you cannot count on them to get it over the line. Kevin McCarthy was whipping against it last week. So the only guarantee to get any of this over the line is for the Democrats to stick together and do it themselves.

Honestly, at this point I think the big Reconciliation bill has the better chance of passage than the BIF. I totally expect the Republicans in the Senate to stab Manchin and Sinema in the back and come up with some transparently bullshit reason that they can’t break the filibuster on the infrastructure bill after all. It’s just how they roll.

Here’s a thread about a NY Times profile of John Eastman, the loon who tried to get Mike Pence to overthrow the government on January 6th:

So it appears that @maggieNYT & @nytmike wrote a profile of John Eastman, Trump’s coup lawyer, but didn’t recount his long record of extremist activity.

Since they omitted this crucial information, here’s a short thread of what’s missing in this article

Eastman is anything but a “little-known but respected conservative lawyer.”

He has a decades-long history leading hate groups, especially those against LGBT people. He is the chairman of the “National Organization for Marriage,” a highly funded group opposing marriage equality

Eastman has called homosexuality “barbarism” and said on video that he supported a Ugandan law that made homosexual acts a life-sentence offence.

Eastman’s NOM group is intimately affiliated with the “World Congress of Families,” a radical anti-LGBT group funded by Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.

Eastman and others have been feted in lavish conferences in Russia that are part of Putin’s destablization efforts

Russia’s efforts with the WCF are part of a long-standing Putin effort to openly fund extremists in the U.S. and many other countries to destabilize their politics.

U.S. journalists have devoted almost no coverage to this subject. It’s very real though

Eastman is also closely affiliated with the Claremont Institute, a far-right “think tank” that has labored for decades to impose Christian supremacism.

As @BulwarkOnline reported earlier, it’s also repeatedly excused right-wing violence

Eastman’s actions urging Mike Pence to impose Trump dictatorship on the U.S. are part of a huge tradition of Christianist thought which obsesses over dying for Jesus and “spiritual warfare” with liberal Christians, atheists, and Muslims

https://flux.community/matthew-sheffield/2021/01/why-do-republican-elites-keep-talking-about-dying-jesus

This tradition has received almost zero coverage in American media because to report on it and to disclose that its adherents are in the very highest echelons of Republican power instantly destroys the “access journalism” that has so corrupted our media.

Eastman and his Christianist colleagues are also working with Charlie Kirk to force their viewpoints onto high school & college students through “critical race theory” activism and an elaborate propaganda program as @MatthewBoedy reported

https://flux.community/matthew-boedy/2021/07/charlie-kirk-and-christian-nationalist-college-team-force-their-views

The links above will give you a good introduction to this dangerous political-religious tradition and its tremendous power, but please also see the work of @JeffSharlet, @anelsona, @RightWingWatch, @splcenter, @mmfa, and @EricBoehlert.

PS: This story graf which strongly implied that John Eastman somehow, magically became corrupted and deranged by affiliating with Donald Trump is what spurred this thread.

Eastman’s coup advice was 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 who he’s always been. His behavior was apotheosis, not aberration.

PPS: In December of 2016, I wrote an extensive article for @Salon about Russia openly funding many extremist groups in the U.S.

It got no media pickup because it wasn’t about speculative Trump gossip. All the issues are still present, however:

https://www.salon.com/2016/12/29/russia-calexit-texit-dissent/

Originally tweeted by Matthew Sheffield (@mattsheffield) on October 2, 2021.

These people have been influential in Republican Party politics for decades and have been considered “the adults in the room” by the political press the entire time. In fact, you can see a very disturbing reversion to the mean in the media’s treatment of the current legislative sausage making: Crazy hippies vs The Grownups.

These are the radicals;. The “crazy” left are the normals. It’s long past time for the media to recognize this evolution. I can’t believe after Trump and January 6th that they haven’t groked it yet.

Make it stop.

A clip the other day from Deep State Radio encapsulated where the Biden human infrastructure bill is failing. Yes, the elements in it are wildly popular. But between talk of government shutdowns and the bipartisan infrastructure framework (BIF) and Build Back Better (BBB) and $3.5 trillion and other Washington-ese, the public does not know which is which or what is on the line for them.

David Rothkopf summed up the problem [timestamp 22:20}:

This has been so far communications debacle, and the reason I think it’s a communications debacle is I don’t think anybody knows what we are talking about.  I mean, with the infrastructure bill, it’s roads and its ports. It’s things. We know what a bridge is, and we do. But this other … nobody knows what reconciliation is. Nobody knows what Build Back Better is. And when you say 3.5 trillion, the Republican say, oh, that’s spending and taxing and a safety net. And that’s what the bill is to them. It’s not Grandma having her teeth. It’s not enabling kids to have early childhood education. It’s not free junior college. The Democrats have failed. And I quote this over and over again, but my old friend Don Baer from the Clinton administration would always say, we’re real, real good at coming up with a thousand reasons to do anything, but never just one.

Reflecting on the lengthy Affordable Care Act fight, E.J. Dionne points out that if you leave milk out too long, it curdles. That’s the risk here when the messaging and debate centers around process rather than on outcomes.

The public doesn’t care about process. They just want to know what’s in it for them.

I’m going back to the brownie example yet again:

“Inspire through outcome, not process,” says progressive messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio, citing an example from a pollster.

“When we are walking through the grocery aisle and want to buy brownies,” she begins, “what is the image on the brownie box? The brownie! What’s not staring you in the face? The recipe! … We need to stop messaging our policy and talk about what our policy achieves.”

[…]

In the 1978 comedy Heaven Can Wait, quarterback Joe Pendleton (Warren Beatty) is “accidentally taken away from his body by an overanxious angel before he was meant to die.” He returns in the body of an eccentric millionaire. Pendleton explains to a boardroom full of executives why their tuna fishing operation should spend more to save “porpoises” (dolphins) and avoid lawsuits and controversy. One “suit” brings up the added expense.

“But we don’t care how much it costs,” Pendleton argues. “We just care how much it makes.”

The same for universal health care. We just care how much it saves and how many people’s lives. Talk about that. Talk about how much more money families will have in their pockets at the end of each month. Talk about not worrying the next health care crisis will bankrupt you.

Your kids will get well and stay well. You’ll be able to go to the doctor without risking your home. We’ll save 68,000 lives per year. One of them might be yours.

If only we were talking about universal health care now. Are we? Who knows? And that’s the problem.

Forget the bill’s costs and paid-fors. Drop the proposed cost over ten years. What does the bill do?

• Adds dental, vision and hearing to Medicare
• Lowers cost of prescription drugs
• Child care benefit for working families
• Universal Pre-K
• Federal paid and medical leave benefit
• Expands child tax credit
• Tuitionless community college
• Extends enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies
• Combats climate change
• Invests more in infrastructure and jobs
• And more

For gods’ sake, where are there even memes promoting those good things? I Googled “build back better meme” and got a flood of right-wing memes smearing the aliterative branding Biden thought so easy to remember. Easy to remember, yes, but, as an exasperated Rothkopf notes, telling the audience nothing about what his proposal does.

The White House needs preparations in place now to declare victory for whatever Democrats manage to pass and to trumpet it from here to 2022 and beyond. “If this is perceived as a flop,” says Rothkopf, and Democrats lose majorities in the House and Senate in 2022, “democracy is screwed.”

Biden’s failure to barnstorm for elements of his signature agenda leaves the media to drive the narratives that are most convenient and least illuminating, says Norm Ornstein of American Enterprise. What we get instead are stories of process, conflict, and dissention in the ranks.

Sen. Joe Manchin wants his infrastructure bill. Likely some compromise will be made on the size of the final Build Back Better legislation that will get his vote. But whatever Biden and over 250 congressional Democrats do, one curtsy and thumbs-down from Sen. Kyrsten Sinema could sink it all.

This is ridiculous and untrue. Playbook projecting a favorite narrative, as they do. This isn’t how the vast majority of Members and staff felt at all.

It isn’t what the President did, it isn’t how the Members understood it, it isn’t what they said coming out of the meeting (you can see large numbers of counterfactuals in politico’s own reporting!) and it isn’t how aides perceived this at all. Just a terrible take

The full story is actually worse, a person reading this in its entirety would have a poorer understanding of what happened and what it means than someone who didn’t.

At the core of why this is bad and wrong is the view that only passing BIF and never passing BBB would be an acceptable if not desirable outcome. This bias pervades the piece. There are exactly 12 Dems who feel this way out of 270 in Congress. Should talk to some of the others!

Originally tweeted by Aaron Fritschner (@Fritschner) on October 2, 2021.

Fritschner is the comms director for Representative Don Buyer. He echoes what every other person I’ve seen or read interviewed about this. It’s possible there are some outliers who are speaking in this Politico reporter’s ears but I have zero reason to believe it is a common belief in the caucus.

This is so easy to understand and so obvious to any observer that you have to assume that Politico is doing this on purpose. As Fritschner says, Politico’s own reporting refutes it. It’s ridiculous.

The whiner in chief can’t stand being off twitter:

Former president Donald Trump has asked a court to mandate that Twitter restore his social media account.

In a filing late Friday, Trump asked a federal district judge for a preliminary injunction enabling his return to Twitter while his lawsuit against the social media giant continues.

“Plaintiff Donald J. Trump respectfully moves for a preliminary injunction directing, inter alia, Defendant Twitter, Inc. and all persons acting in concert with Defendant, to reinstate Plaintiff’s access to Defendant’s social media platform(s),” the filing said.

It argued that Twitter was “censoring” Trump by indefinitely banning him from the platform, adding that the company “exercises a degree of power and control over political discourse in this country that is immeasurable, historically unprecedented, and profoundly dangerous to open democratic debate.”

The filing also argued that Twitter had suspended Trump’s account after being “coerced” by his political rivals in Congress.

Twitter banned Trump from its platform on Jan. 8, stating that two of his tweets had violated the company’s policies and citing “the risk of further incitement of violence.” The unprecedented move came after the riot on Jan. 6 in which hundreds of Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attack that resulted in five deaths and left about 140 police officers injured.

Trump’s office did not immediately respond to a request from The Washington Post for comment early Saturday. Twitter declined to comment.

What a little baby. Give him a bottle and put him to bed.

By the way, his official “spokeswoman” Liz Harrington has a tweeter feed and she tweets out everything he says. Nobody cares.

His blog failed too. Just saying.