The latest jobs numbers are very interesting. Dean Baker reports:
The economy added 467,000 jobs in January, in spite of the spread of the omicron virus. Even pandemic sensitive sectors like hotels and restaurants were big job gainers. It appears that employers’ main response was to reduce hours, with the average workweek falling by 0.2 hours, a decline of 0.6 percent. The unemployment rate was little changed at 4.0 percent.
Revisions Change Our View of the Economy
The annual benchmark revisions, which include different seasonal adjustment factors, give a radically different view of the economy in 2021. With the revisions, job growth in November and December was revised up by 709,000 to show a two-month gain of 1,157,000. By contrast, job growth in June and July was revised down by 807,000, so that these months now show a total gain of 1,246,000.
The new data indicate that job growth was far stronger at the end of 2021 than previously thought, while somewhat less rapid for the summer months. For the year the revisions added 217,000 jobs, putting the 2021 total gain at 6,665,000 jobs. Job loss in 2020 now stands at 9,292,000. We’re now 2.9 million jobs below pre-pandemic level.
Wage Growth is Still Very Rapid
There is little evidence in this report that wage growth is slowing. Comparing the last three months (Nov-Jan) with the prior three (Aug-Oct), overall private sector wages rose at a 6.5 percent annual rate, up somewhat from the 5.7 percent rate over the last year. Wages in retail grow at a 5.8 percent annual rate up from a 5.4 percent rate over the last year. Wage growth in restaurants did slow somewhat, rising at a 10.6 percent rate compared to a 13.0 percent rate over the last year.
So, the perception that the economy is slowing down is BS, it’s actually gaining steam, even during Omicron. People are working and their wages are rising.
Please explain to me how that translates into a locked down country where everyone is restricted so we must be allowed to “go back to normal” right this minute? It sure seems as if everyone is working and that includes at restaurants and hotels.
I guess Americans just don’t want to wear masks (or see other people wearing masks) and they don’t want to hear any more about the pandemic. That’s really all that’s happening right now. Well, except for all the sickness and death (and the collapsing health care system) but I think everyone’s done caring about that.
Update — Lol:
"How is the White House gonna put a happy face on that?"
Fox & Friends preemptively dunking on Biden over what they expected was a dismal jobs number.
Instead, counting the past months revisions and Jan's surprise, the U.S. gained a million more jobs than expected. https://t.co/oDT4TrHIlL
"How did everybody get this so wrong?!" — Steve Doocy reacts to the strong jobs report about two hours after he joked about how it might show 300,000 jobs lost pic.twitter.com/MeDyHk2Prj
Sending bills to committee to die is not unusual, but what’s happened in Arizona is.
Trump culters in the state legislature filed a bill to allow the legislature to reject election results. Among other things, Rep. John Fillmore’s (R-Apache Junction) House Bill 2596 would (Arizona Daily Star):
Repeal laws allowing anyone to get an early ballot, saying only those with an excuse, like being hospitalized, would get that right.
Bar all other forms of early voting, requiring that ballots be cast only on Election Day.
Prohibit the use of Election Day voting centers available to anyone within a county, restricting people to casting ballots only in their home precinct.
“We need to get back to 1958-style voting,’’ Fillmore said.
When many non-White people couldn’t vote, he means.
Be careful, what you ask for, Fillmore. Would that include banning families from owning more than a single black-and-white television carrying only three national networks for news, or more than one automobile to get to the polls?
The bill also provided for the legislature to call a special session after every primary and general election to review and accept or reject the results. If rejected, “any qualified elector” could file suit in superior court to request a new election. That on top of requiring the ballots be hand-counted with results announced within 24 hours.
Speaker Rusty Bowers, a fellow Republican, was not having it.
“We gave the authority to the people,’’ the Mesa Republican said.
“For somebody to say we have plenary authority to overthrow a vote of the people for something we think may have happened, where is it (the evidence)?’’ Bowers said of the unproven and unverified claims made by those seeking a new 2020 vote.
Bowers killed the bill, not by refusing to send it to committee, but by sending it to all twelve of them.
“The point is, when we gave a fundamental right to the people, I don’t care if I win or lose, that right was theirs,’’ Bowers said. “And I’m not going to go back and kick them in the teeth.’’
There’s a message in there from Bowers to Rep. John Fillmore, the Apache Junction Republican who dreamed up this abomination. And to his 15 far-right fellow legislators who co-sponsored the bill, including none other than Rep. Mark Fiinchem, who is hoping to be Arizona’s next secretary of state.
As a longtime Capitol reporter, Arizona Mirror’s Jeremy Duda, put it:
“I’ve never seen a speaker or Senate president kneecap a bill as aggressively as this,” he tweeted. “Triple-assignments? Sure. Been there. But this is Bowers killing the bill, chopping it up, setting the pieces on fire, then digging up the ashes and throwing them into the ocean.”
I’m not holding my breath that Republicans with vestiges of conscience are reasserting themselves against Trump-cult-madness. But we’d all sleep better at night.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
If you’ve never heard of Jonathan Pie, give yourselves a present. He’s British. It’s Friday.
For its many flaws, The New York Times saw fit to ask Pie to teach Americans a little about themeslves while performing another of his classic political rants, this one about Boris Johnson’s Partygate scandal (no embed, sorry).
To explain exactly why the British are so enraged with Boris Johnson, who was already infamous for his troubled relationship with the truth, we produced a satirical Opinion video with Jonathan Pie, a fictional broadcast reporter created and performed on YouTube by comedian Tom Walker, whose acerbic, satirical monologues have gone viral.
Where to begin? Without swearing?
“Boris Johnson, a demonstrable liar, is only out for himself? Don’t know if that sounds familiar to an American audience,” Pie starts as the film crew finished their prep.
“A narcissist with shit hair?”
Pie summarizes Johnson’s involvement in 16 parties at a time when he was urging his constituents not to have any social contacts themselves because of the pandemic. Johnson lied about it. Multiple times. To the public. To the queen.
What to make of him?
One word: entitlement.
Boris comes from a long succession of posh, upper-class, bumbling idiots who are destined for greatness only because no one has ever, or will ever, tell them they’re not. Boris went to Eaton, a sort of Hogwarts for wankers, where you get taught Latin and tax avoidance whilst wearing full evening dress.
Does any of this sound familiar?
“Cannibals,” Pie continues, his blood up getting up.
Self-serving parasites. Tapeworms in tiaras, swimming through the intestines of the state, sucking all the goodness out of it for their own repugnant gratification.
For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
This post from James Fallows’ excellent newsletter is the most perspicacious take on what’s wrong with news coverage I’ve seen in a while. We’ve always talked about this but I think he explains it more clearly that anyone. It’s hugely important:
This post is about the usefulness of the word framing.
Like some other words in the shaggy vocabulary of today’s English, framing is tricky because it can mean opposite things. Similarly: think of sanction, or oversight.
—In the legal world, framing can mean manufacturing evidence or unjustly accusing someone. Naturally that’s not what I have in mind.
—Instead I mean the rhetorical or logical sense of framing an argument, which in turn means the assumptions, the emphases, the supporting structure for the ideas you want to present.
It’s the conceptual counterpart to the physical work of framing a barn, as shown above. The bones of a building don’t set all the details of its final look. But if the bones are askew or shaky, the structure will not stand.
In thinking about the media, and how and whether it can meet the challenges of this moment, I contend that the framing of stories and coverage is what we should be talking about—more than familiar discussion of “bias” or “balance,” or even refinements like “both-sides-ism” or obsession with “the horse race.” I’ll give a few examples of what I mean.
Framing is hardly a new concept in the media-discussion world. Back in 1998, the Pew Research Center had a full study called “Framing the News.” Jay Rosen, of NYU, was a leader of that project, and he writes frequently about frames of coverage on his Pressthink site. Many other figures I’ll mention in the notes¹ have advanced this theme.
But think about some familiar frames:
1. From Fox News: ‘They’re Out to Get You’
Part of the genius of Roger Ailes was discovering, even before Donald Trump did, that an aggrieved audience would be a loyal and attentive one. Thus most stories and narrative themes on Fox boil down to, someone is trying to get you. And they’re probably being hypocritical or cheaters while doing so.
It could be anything. But it’s them. And they’re cheating and scheming against you. And against “people like us.” It’s a sad but true reality of life that as people get older, more of them are predisposed to a “someone’s trying to get me” view of the world. Fox’s audience through the years has been the oldest among the cable outlets (whose audiences in general are older Americans). Ailes’s insight, now embodied in different forms by the Hannity, Ingraham, and Carlson shows on Fox, has been a success in commercial terms, but toxic for civic life.
My point is: Don’t look for the “bias.” Look for the frame.
2. From many mainstream outlets: What’s most interesting about anything, is the politics of it.
When presented with news about migrants drowning at sea, in a failed and tragic attempt to reach America, people might have a range of reactions.
Here was the way the headline writer for the New York Times, and the editors in charge of the print edition, thought to frame the news with a headline that said:
Rise in Migrants at SeaPoses a Worry for Biden
In its online versions of this story, the paper later thought to change the headline to something less heartless and crass. (It now says: “A Surge at Sea: Migrants Seek Entry to the U.S. Aboard Flimsy Boats.”) The point is the initial impulse, that what mattered in the news was: What it meant for politics, and what it meant for “how’s Biden doing?”²
As I mentioned in this previous post, once you start noticing this framing, you’ll see it everywhere. It’s the conversion of something that has happened, to what that something means for the midterms, or for the sitting president’s approval.
Those political implications matter. But usually they’re not what matter most, or to most people. As I discussed 25 years ago in The Atlantic, questions at White House press conferences follow this pattern as well. Most people are interested in the what of government — how it will help them pay the bills or go to school. Reporters are mainly interested in the how of politics. The challenge is to keep the reporters’ own personal framing from controlling what they present to readers.
Watch for this conversion — and when you see it, don’t complain about the “bias.” Rather talk about the frame.
3. Also from most of the media: Grading on the curve, when it comes to Trump and the modern GOP.
On January 6, 2021, both Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, the Republican party’s leaders in the Senate and the House, respectively, seemed genuinely shaken by the attack on their colleagues and their institution. They were clear about Donald Trump’s responsibility for the violence and near-coup.
A few months later, McConnell and McCarthy led their Republican delegations in near-unanimous bloc opposition to the creation of a January 6 Commission to investigate what had occurred.
Through the six-plus years of Donald Trump’s rise, the Republican party as a whole has decided to “grade him on the curve” — and live with behavior, excesses, and abuses that would have been deemed the end of an administration in other eras. (I chronicled this change, and the transformation of Republicans into “Vichy Republicans,” during the 2016 campaign.)
Much of what Donald Trump does, and encourages, has been written off as “that’s just Trump” by many of the Republicans. The mainstream press — aware that one established party now thinks and acts this way — is tempted to adopt this framing in its coverage. Here is one more image from the New York Times, on the day that evidence emerged of Trump’s asking whether the Department of Homeland Security could seize voting machines to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
I’ve noted in red where the story appears.
For comparison, when a new wrinkle in the Hillary Clinton email “scandal” erupted ten days before the 2016 election, the Times devoted nearly all of its front page to the story.
To its credit, after this latest Trump story, the Times had a front-page story the next day about Trump’s efforts to hold onto power, however he could. But again, please watch for framing that normalizes the grossly abnormal.
4. From everywhere: what works is suspect, or boring.
By definition, news is about the abnormal. The 100,000 commercial flights that safely take off and land each day around the world are not newsworthy. The one that runs into trouble may well be.
And that’s normal and fine.
The problem is a framing that is unduly dark, and failure bound. Not everything works, and the press should be on these failures to explain why and how.
But some things do work, and they deserve attention as well. That is the only way to have a sense of the world that is proportionate and whole, which in turn is part of the basic function of the press.
Some illustrations:
America’s job growth in the past twelve months has been an unprecedented success. It has coexisted with other problems, notably related to inflation. But the job-boom news itself, which is an important part of the whole picture, has been under-covered, to put it mildly.
— Free Covid tests through the mail — what could go wrong! This combined a major area of U.S. backwardness in Covid response (testing); with a symbol of government ineptness (health-related web site); and all being run by …. the USPS! (I say this lovingly, as a one-time letter-carrier and parcel-post sorter, and as someone who goes out of his way to send “actual” letters, to create first-class mail business for the Post Office.)
But in fact it largely has worked. And has receded to inside-page coverage in the papers, and no mention at all in broadcast news, as tens of millions of test kits have been delivered across the country.
But as a reminder, here was the framing recently in a big New York Times overview of Biden-and-Covid, headlined “Biden’s Pandemic Fight: Inside the Setbacks of the First Year”: “By year’s end, facing a barrage of criticism, Mr. Biden pledged 500 million free tests for all Americans, followed by another 500 million a few weeks later. The first of those tests have just begun to arrive, and the bulk of them most likely will not arrive until after the administration’s own experts predict Omicron will have peaked later this month.”
— 5G and the airlines: The early coordination of this was a mess, as I described here. Now it’s largely been worked out — and has disappeared from the news.
— The Webb space telescope. This could have been a heartbreaking disaster. And instead it has been a phenomenal, historic success. As has been noted on the inside pages of the major newspapers. For instance, here in the Washington Post, by Joel Achenbach; and here, today, on page D3 of the Times, by Dennis Overbye.
Every one of us knows that if the Webb space craft had blown up on the launch pad on Christmas day, or if the elaborate arrangements necessary to achieve its deployment had gone awry even in small ways, we would be hearing about them still, as yet another metaphor that, today, things fall apart.
A writer friend of mine, who has covered many technology stories, sent me an email about what could have been. He was talking about the telescope, but about “framing” more generally:
Nowhere has anyone, on any media outlet, latched on to and covered the story about the Webb telescope. None that I’ve stumbled over, at least. Two days ago, the telescope reached its L2 orbit, a million miles distant from the Earth. It went unnoticed on the evening news. When a $10 billion project that evolved over 30 years, in the workshops of 13 nations, prepares to peer back in time 13 billion years, to the petri dish of the Big Bang, that’s the news!. Ho-hum. Let’s do the weather.
Once, space exploration galvanized Americans and led the news. Sure, arm wrestling for scientific glory with our Cold War opponent helped raise the bar.
The networks should have raced each other to report on a complex transformer-like telescope unfurling itself into a tennis-court-sized lily pad, lassoing the planet as it orbits the sun. I’ve seen zero TV coverage of the telescope’s many difficult and risky milestones it has mastered over 30 days. “60 Minutes” did a piece, shown weeks before the Ariane launch.
One more crucial development lies ahead. If the 18 golden mirrors, which are at the heart of the mission (and the telescope), fit together to the tolerance of 1/10,000th the width of a human hair, Webb will have saved NASA. Move over Charles Darwin.
Sadly Webb might have been held up and celebrated as a source of national pride, an event that fused the nation to a common purpose. But no, night after night, the Evening News tracks an on-again, off-again snowstorm that might tear up the knickers of the East Coast. My goodness, who would have imagined, snow in the winter.
It’s fitting and proper that news emphasizes what goes wrong. But it can be a problem if it emphasizes only what goes wrong.
As a reminder, rather than talking about “bias,” please look for framing:
Largely intended to make people feel angry or victimized;
The reduces everything to its party-politics ramifications;
That normalizes abnormal behavior; and
That gives a disproportionate view of what works, and doesn’t.
Keep this in mind as you follow the Mainstream Media. It’s not about being liberal or conservative. It’s about their insularity and framing.
There is nothing these people won’t pollute with their lunatic conspiracy bullshit. Nothing:
The National Butterfly Center on the Texas border is closing “for the immediate future” after conspiracy-fueled attacks against the center on social media escalated in recent days.
The butterfly sanctuary, part of the North American Butterfly Association, made the announcement Wednesday. The decision came just days after GOP operatives descended on the site, reviving baseless and false conspiracy theories linking the center to sex trafficking.
This lurid obsession with pedophilia and sex trafficking is going to require massive psychological counselling. We have millions of people who are damaged from this nonsense. The Butterfly Center is the subject of violent threats and has been advised to close for the time being. Think about that — the Butterfly Center. There is literally nothing these people won’t believe.
The butterfly center has been the target of far-right conspiracy theories for years, after the sanctuary in 2017 sued over the Trump administration’s plans to build a border wall through the 100-acre nature preserve.
Two years later, online trolls — led by Brian Kolfage, the head of the allegedly fraudulent “We Build the Wall” fundraising campaign — falsely claimed there were dead bodies and “rampant sex trade” at the sanctuary.
But the situation escalated over the past two weeks, starting with a confrontation between Marianna Treviño Wright, the center’s executive director, and Kimberly Lowe, a GOP congressional candidate from Virginia.
On Jan. 21, Lowe approached the facility and demanded to see “illegals crossing on rafts.” When Treviño Wright refused, the candidate began filming on a phone and accused her of being “OK with children being sex trafficked and raped and murdered.”
Treviño Wright swiped at the phone, and a scuffle ensued. As Lowe left the facility, Treviño Wright says the woman nearly ran over her son, Nicholas Wright, who works there.
Lowe had been in town to attend the right-wing “We Stand America” rally in neighboring McAllen, which took place last weekend. The event, headlined by former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, included a trip to the border. (After her altercation with Treviño Wright, Lowe said she was barred from attending.)
Fearing more trouble, the butterfly center decided to close for three days. While doors were shut, attendees did visit the sanctuary — and shot more videos repeating the lies about the facility.
Ben Bergquam, a correspondent for the far-right news site Real America Voice, posted a minute-long clip to Twitter repeating the sex trafficking lies.
“What really matters to the Democrats are the butterflies, and so we unite with them, if that’s what it’s going to take to shut this border down,” he said. “We unite with them and say: Protect the butterflies, (President Joe Biden). Close down the border — because we know you don’t care about the kids.”
This is so sick. And these twisted people are being manipulated by opportunistic politicians who know very well that it’s nuts.
Sarah Palin on the Masked Singer protecting her reputation
This Palin defamation case is very stupid but it could potentially change journalism and our commitment to the first amendment if a jury finds in her favor:
Attorneys for former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on Thursday argued there was “no link” between their client and a 2011 shooting that left six people dead and an Arizona congresswoman injured, laying out their opening argument in Palin’s long-running libel lawsuit against the New York Times.
Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, filed the lawsuit against the New York Times in 2017 over an editorial that falsely linked her political activities to a 2011 shooting in Tuscon, Ariz., targeting then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.). The editorial erroneously linked Palin’s political action committee, which had distributed a map of electoral targets that placed rifle scope cross hairs over 20 Democrats’ districts, including Giffords’, with the attack.
The former governor’s trial had been scheduled to begin Jan. 24 but was postponed after Palin, who is not vaccinated against Covid-19, tested positive for the virus.
Palin’s attorney Shane Vogt told the Manhattan federal courtroom in opening statements that his team intended to prove that James Bennet, the former editorial editor at the New York Times, recklessly published the editorial and that the piece included false and damaging statements about Palin.
“There was no link established between Governor Palin and that shooting,” Vogt said. “There was no link that demonstrated that Governor Palin was responsible for the death of six people.”
In opening statements, both the plaintiff and defense lawyers addressed the correction issued by the New York Times on the editorial that said it “incorrectly described a map distributed by a political action committee before that shooting. It depicted electoral districts, not individual Democratic lawmakers, beneath stylized cross hairs.”
An attorney for the Times and Bennet, David Axelrod, said that after realizing readers assumed, because of the editorial, that the 2017 congressional baseball shooter acted because of the map, Bennet and the paper issued a correction.
“As soon as he realized how some people were understanding that editorial, the Times recognized it made a mistake and immediately began the correction process,” he said.
The defense argued in its opening statement that the purpose of the editorial was to address “inflammatory rhetoric” and gun policy.
“Bennet and the [editorial] board were especially conscious of not writing a one-sided piece,” Axelrod said. “The goal is to hold both political parties accountable, the political left and the political right, they are both responsible for inflammatory rhetoric unnecessarily demonizing the political enemies.”
This is a very trivial case but it’s clearly being bank-rolled by right wing legal actors for their own purposes. But I have to wonder if they’ve thought this through? When it comes to lying and defaming, it’s the right wing media that’s going to be at most risk from lawsuits if this case becomes precedent. That’s their entire business model. Do they not realize this?
I honestly don’t know how these people can look themselves in the mirror. It’s just so deeply humiliating:
Donald Trump has earned a reputation as perhaps the most litigious American politician in living memory. But, while that defining characteristic has not changed since he left office a year ago, Trump’s most recent campaign finance filings reveal a sharp and dramatic drop in legal expenses.
It’s not because he’s involved in any fewer legal battles, however. It’s because he got someone else to start picking up the tab.
According to financial disclosures filed on Monday, Trump-affiliated committees paid their various lawyers and firms a combined $2.3 million for their services between July 1 and Dec. 31. That may seem like a lot—and in absolute terms it is for any politician—but the amount is actually less than 30 percent of the $8 million in legal expenses Trump’s political groups incurred during the first half of the year.
And yet, while Trump was cutting back, the Republican National Committee saw an unusual off-year bump. When the national party ledgers closed on Dec. 31, they had racked up more than $5.3 million in legal fees during the back half of 2021—a marked increase over the first half of the year, and more than double Trump’s own costs over the same period.
That’s because, in August, for reasons still unknown to the public, RNC officials agreed to cover $1.6 million of Trump’s upcoming legal fees. The RNC claimed that at least part of the pledge would fund Trump’s defense against ongoing criminal and civil investigations into his business practices—practices which predate his candidacy for office.
Or, in the words of an RNC spokesperson, “certain legal expenses that related to politically motivated legal proceedings waged against [ex-]President Trump.”
And that $1.6 million largesse lines up fairly closely with the $1.1 million spike in the RNC’s legal fees.
A review of RNC filings since August shows that the committee has, in that time, paid more than a million dollars to firms who have recently represented Trump in legal disputes. However, the incestuous overlap between committees and law firms makes it difficult to know for sure how close the RNC is to tapping out its $1.6 million budget.
It’s not as if he is indigent. He’s (supposedly) a billionaire. He can easily afford to pay his own legal bills and most certainly should pay the bills he incurred for investigations into his corrupt practices as a businessman. The gall of this.
I guess his followers are fine with paying his bills. This is, after all, their money which was donated to the RNC for political purposes.
According to this from Sahil Kapur and Benjy Sarlin, Build Back Better is still dead but some kind of un-dead version might be possible under another name. Yeah, we’ve heard that before. But Manchin has “hinted” that he may be willing to talk about “some things” and has everyone in DC is on tenderhooks waiting for his latest utterance. Well, here they are:
In an interview Wednesday, Manchin said his priority is to “fix the tax code” — and he’s willing to bypass Republicans and use the filibuster-proof reconciliation process to do it.
“It’s the reason we have reconciliation. And everyone’s talking about everything but that,” he said. “Take care of the debt. $30 trillion should scare the bejesus out of your generation.”
Manchin once again said this week that the Build Back Better Act is “dead,” referring to the $2 trillion-plus bill that passed the House. A nonnegotiable red line for him is that all new programs must be permanent and fully financed.
But even as he says there are no “formal talks” going on about a sequel, he keeps dropping hints about which policies might be worthy pursuits in some hypothetical future bill, perhaps one with a different name.
Clean energy? “We believe that basically, yes, we can do something,” Manchin told reporters, even as he stressed the need to maintain enough fossil fuels for “reliability.” More subsidies for the Affordable Care Act? “Anything that helps working people be able to buy insurance that’s affordable, I’ve always been supportive of,” he told NBC News. Extending coverage in states that limit Medicaid? “I’ve been very receptive on Medicaid expansion to the states that got left behind,” as long as there’s an incentive to expand, he said.
Democrats are listening. Discussions about Biden’s agenda inside and outside Washington are increasingly games of Manchinology, in which policymakers pore over his every pronouncement and look for a new package that succeeds where Build Back Better failed.
“That old name needs to go in the trash can,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii. “I’m not very good at naming things or slogans, but Joe Manchin has been pretty clear he’s not voting for Build Back Better. So we need to work on something else.”
Democrats have already begun to discuss putting some revenues and savings in a new bill toward deficit reduction to attract his support, according to Senate sources.
“That’s music to my ears,” Manchin said. “Deficit reduction, inflation, being fiscally responsible — sounds like something we should be talking about!”
Yes, Deficit reduction is back on the agenda. However, in Manchin’s defense, he doesn’t seem to be talking about cuts:
Manchin said he would support a corporate tax rate hike to 25 percent, a 15 percent corporate minimum tax, a 28 percent capital gains tax “all in,” an elimination of “tax loopholes such as carried interest” and higher rates for the wealthy.
“High-income earners — they should be paying their fair share,” he said. “And there should be a way to do it that’s fair and equitable.”
If they have to do deficit reduction at least he isn’t talking about taking it out of the hides of average working people. Raising taxes on the wealthy is a good move regardless, although I think most Democrats would prefer that it be used to pay for necessary programs. But if we want to fix the insane wealth inequality in this country, this is necessary no matter what the stated purpose.
So, this sounds better than nothing, right? Some climate suff, some health care stuff and raising taxes on the wealthy are all good policies. Let’s do it!
Oh Jesus, I forgot about her:
Some of his tax ideas could crash into objections from centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., another difficult vote to lock down, who has told party leaders she won’t support rate hikes.
She’s been collecting millions from Republican donors and I’m fairly sure this is why. And she is in for three more years.
The only thing that could make a difference is for the Democrats to win a couple more seats in November. It’s not impossible. But it’s a very heavy lift. Still… let’s keep hope alive.
Alexandra Petri explains why we don’t need to be concerned about all the news we’re learning about Trump’s coup plot:
Don’t worry! We keep learning unpleasant things about the tail end of the Trump administration, but the most important thing is that they are all in the past, where nothing can hurt us. (That is why we are so keen to purge all the history books!)
For instance, Donald Trump was recently upset that Mike Pence did not want to overturn the election (his words, which he has now walked back a little, not mine). Just a little light overturning, as you do for a pancake! He is trying to stop the revising of the Electoral Count Act so that future vice presidents will definitely be able to overturn elections, if they want; not for sinister reasons, just because he wants to make sure Kamala Harris has all the power she needs. He loves Kamala! I’m sorry, not “overturn” — “ensure the honest results of the election.”
We also learned that Trump wanted to seize voting machines. He actively pushed Attorney General William P. Barr to do that. Then he had Rudy Giuliani telephone the Department of Homeland Security to see about some seizing. Which Giuliani did! But later, when the plan evolved into issuing an executive order to authorize the military to do the seizing, Giuliani didn’t want to do it, and it did not happen. In other words: The system worked just as designed.
Yes, when we reached the coup stage of “ask Giuliani for his opinion about whether the military can seize voting machines,” Giuliani did exactly what he was supposed to do and spontaneously decided hedid not want to overturn the election. That is the robust protection the Founders built into the system! There was never any doubt Giuliani would for no clear reason determine he did want to support the rule of law and oppose having the military seize voting machines!
All the other people Trump leaned on ignored and disregarded him or pretended not to understand what he was tacitly asking. And it is fine, because those people are still in control of the elections — ah, what? They’re being hounded out? They fear for their safety, and the people who are trying to replace them have a much different attitude to election legitimacy?
Sure, Trump pressured the Arizona and Georgia governors to maybe not certify their states’ results. And we’ve known for a while he called up Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and kept asking if he could maybe see his way to finding 11,780 votes. Personally, himself! But it didn’t work! Not there, nor in Michigan, where they certified regardless, and — the Republican member of the Board of State Canvassers who voted to certify Joe Biden’s win has been removed from his position now? I’m sure that’s fine. When is the next election? Not for a while, right?
All kinds of election-traducing plans, in short, were circulating within the Trump White House like flies in the Oval Office — but without Reince Priebus to swat them. But it’s fine because Trump is gone (now), and he is not being made to face any consequences — because he learned his lesson! And he will definitely pick Pence as his running mate in the future, out of respect for his display of sterling character, so we don’t need to worry about the Electoral Count Act at all.
As long as we don’t read about the attempted coup or ask anyone questions about it when we invite them on the television, it’s nothing to worry our little heads over. It’s one of those bygones that we have to let be a bygone. Our system is foolproof, for the specified degree of fool that has tried, once, to overturn it so far!
The countries that will not reach 70% 2-shot vaccinated by mid-2022. One is the 3rd largest in population and among the richest in the world https://t.co/JHqBAJupv6
This piece by Gregg Gonsalves, the codirector of the Global Health Justice Partnership and an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, is correct in my opinion. We have good reason to be optimistic about COVID. I am hopeful that we’ve “rounded the curve” as Trump would say. Vaccines and the new therapeutics coming online have changed the game immensely. But the last two years should have made us a little bit more humble about what we know and what we don’t know:
We’ve entered a new phase in the Covid-19 pandemic, which we can call bipartisan, unilateral surrender. From liberal and conservative pundits and politicians on both sides of the aisle to the celebrity docs who show up on cable news or in supermarket magazines, we’re being told SARS-CoV-2 is endemic now—which of course has nothing to do with the technical term, but has become popular shorthand for “it’s over.” We’re vaxxed-and-done now and we should be allowed, with no more mask requirements or other efforts to mitigate spread, to resume our pre-pandemic lives with the “urgency of normal.”
I’ve spent two years railing about the irresponsibility and cruelty of many Republicans and their cavalier response to the pandemic, endangering millions with policies destined to simply make people sick: suggesting that vaccination and freedom are incompatible concepts, that grandparents were willing to die for the economy—the whole horrible litany of lies and misinformation churned out by the party and its proxies.
Except the pandemic is not over by a long shot. We’ve been seeing 1,000 deaths a day in the United States for months now; over the past few weeks, as Omicron deaths catch up to the vast number of infections diagnosed weeks earlier, we’ve had far more than that. The last day of January saw over 2,500 deaths in this country. Hospitals are still reeling in many places, and both health care and public health workers on the front line are just burned out and losing their shit. And that word—endemic—which in epidemiological terms connotes a pathogen that has stabilized at a long-term equilibrium in a population—hasn’t really arrived yet, with the pandemic still raging across the globe, even as Omicron numbers start to decline in some places. Then there’s the belief—now popular in the press—that Omicron is the “last” variant of any real concern. We’ll all have been exposed to the virus or vaccinated against it soon enough, and any subsequent strains that may wash over us will be mild, no worse than the flu or the common cold.
I’m not suggesting that we need to be on a state of high alert forever. But we need to shape Covid-19 policies according to the data, not by wishful thinking among people who should know better. To sound the all-clear now or imply that we can in the next few weeks is presumptuous at best. If we want to learn from history, we can simply look at the 20th century’s most fearsome pandemics for guidance. John Barry, the historian of the great influenza of 1918, reminds us that the deadly fourth wave of that catastrophe only occurred in 1920, when millions had already been exposed to the virus, when the lethality of the third wave was subsiding, most people had let down their guard, and no public official was interested in pushing mitigation efforts in the face of the indifference and weariness of a nation. Barry also reminds us that “natural immunity” and vaccination after the influenza pandemics in the late 1950s didn’t stop the virus from cutting a large swath of death in 1960 when it returned with a vengeance. A similar scenario played out in Europe in 1968 and 2009 flu pandemics, when, after a first round of infections and vaccinations, influenza’s second wave crested and washed over the weary continent.
[…]
What we’re seeing now is a combination of what we saw with influenza and with HIV. First, it’s capitulation based on misguided or at least premature hope, frustration, and anger that this has gone on for so long, disrupting our lives. It doesn’t help that America’s political leaders have never really stepped up to address the pandemic with the seriousness of other nations, nor provided the necessary social and economic support to help people survive these past few years. Instead, they have largely left us alone against a virus. While pundits try to spin this as a debate about risk management at an individual level—claiming that some of us are being too cautious as we enter the golden age of endemicity—it’s far more like what happened with HIV: Once people feel like they’re safe enough, the safety of others doesn’t really matter that much.
It really does feel as if some people are moving into an all-American view that it’s every man for himself. And that’s just terrible when you consider how many millions of people in this country are over 60 and have the co-morbidities that make them vulnerable to this virus.
And it’s not as if this country is locked down. In fact, the only restrictions even in this Omicron surge are some places are requiring masks indoors and asking that if you have been exposed that you stay home if you test positive. Is that so onerous? It seems like very basic common sense to me. Everything is open. People are working.
So what exactly is it that the “I’m over it” people want? Well, I have to guess they just don’t want to hear about all the deaths and the strains on the health care system anymore. It’s a bummer, I admit. But not talking about it won’t make it go away.
