Month: February 2022

“54% of American adults between the ages of 16-74 read below a 6th grade level. So that means we have an epidemic of illiteracy,” professor Brittney Cooper told MSNBC’s Ari Berman in a January segment on book banning. It is not just a push from the right to deputize parents for policing public education, but to “systematically undereducate” the public. “If you make people ignorant, then it becomes much easier to control them.”

“I don’t know of any problem that has ever been solved by an actual choice to remain ignorant,” Cooper lamented. Many of the books being banned are alleged to teach “critical race theory,” yet, most “are written by and about people of color.”

Jamelle Bouie concurs in his New York Times column. Conservatives he calls out mean to legislatively censor history in the name of protecting children from uncomfortable details of the American story. Particularly, details of slavery and the battle for civil rights. Broadly drafted bills in several states mean to “suppress debate and stifle discussion in favor of the rote memorization of approved facts.”

Bouie writes:

Last month, for example, the Indiana House of Representatives approved a bill — not yet signed into law — that would limit what teachers can say regarding race, history and politics in the state’s classrooms. Under the law, schools could be held liable for mentioning any one of several “divisive concepts,” including the idea that “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish responsibility, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin or political affiliation.”

The bill would allow parents to allege a violation, file a complaint, sue and even collect damages (up to $1,000). It would also, in the name of transparency, create curriculum review committees for parents and require schools and teachers to post lists of material on websites for parents to inspect.

In South Carolina, lawmakers have introduced a bill — known as the Freedom from Ideological Coercion and Indoctrination Act — that would prohibit any state-funded institution from stating that “a group or an individual, by virtue of his or her race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, heritage, culture, religion, or political belief is inherently racist, sexist, bigoted, ignorant, biased, fragile, oppressive, or contributive to any oppression, whether consciously or unconsciously.” If signed into law, this bill could make it illegal, for instance, for teachers and college professors in the state to criticize members of a white supremacist group since that affiliation might count as a “political belief.”

Schools that “repeatedly distort or misrepresent verifiable historical facts” or “omit relevant and important context” or “advertise or promote ideologies or sociopolitical causes or organizations” could face a loss of state funding, state accreditation or tax-exempt status. As for what these violations would actually look like? The bill does not say.

Book banning and the policing of American history are efforts to put the civil rights genie back in the bottle over a half century after the 1960s ended Jim Crow, and after subsequent movements by marignalized groups once considered deviants gained broader acceptance and protections.

In the latest backlash, the sort of parents who decry children wearing masks want to erase those gains by making their kids wear educational blinders.

For decades, conservative parents, expecially evangelical ones, sent their children to religious schools to prevent their kids’ exposure to ideas that might challenge views they learned at home. This is nothing new. Only more widespread, public, and enforced now in public schools by censorship laws.

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I think we need some sweet rescue stories right now, don’t you?

Krugman has the skinny in his newsletter:

​Good news on inflation has been hard to come by lately. But this week we got two encouraging reports from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — results from its latest Survey of Consumer Expectations, and an analysis of the recent behavior of inflation expectations by New York Fed economists.

Neither report had any bearing on the inflation we’re actually seeing, which continues (so far) to run hotter than it has for decades. Instead, they were all about the hypothetical future. Consumers, it turns out, don’t expect inflation to stay hot. Rather, they appear to believe it will continue for a while, then fade away. In fact, expected inflation over the medium term has actually come down over the past couple of months.

Furthermore, it’s unlikely that a few more bad numbers will create an inflation panic: Consumers appear much less likely to revise up their expectations of future inflation than they were in the past.

Why do we care? It’s not because consumers have some special wisdom, but because expected inflation can feed actual inflation. Actually, it can do that in two ways — although only one is relevant to our current situation. And the apparent fact that medium-term expectations of inflation aren’t rising greatly improves our chance of getting past this difficult episode without a lot of pain.

The irrelevant way expected inflation can matter, by the way, is through demand. When inflation is running high, consumers may rush to spend money before it loses its value. According to legend, when Germany experienced hyperinflation in the 1920s, patrons at beer halls would buy two beers at a time, because they expected the price of the second to rise while they were still drinking the first. When a government can’t stop inflationary money-printing, this urge to spend can lead to even higher inflation.

As I said, this isn’t relevant to the current U.S. situation; no, we don’t need to print money to pay our bills. But we do need to keep an eye out for the possibility that inflation will become entrenched in the economy. What do we mean by that?

Some readers may want to avert their eyes: I’m about to write down an equation. For the past half-century, most policy-oriented macroeconomists have accepted the idea that the inflation rate is determined by a relationship that looks something like this:

Inflation = a – b × unemployment rate + expected inflation + other factors

Why is expected inflation in there? Because in an economy in which everyone expects persistent inflation, companies setting prices or deciding what wages to offer will engage in a process of leapfrogging, raising their prices in the belief that other companies will also be raising their prices. I wrote more about that process here. And this in turn means that once people have come to expect persistent inflation, getting back to sustainably low inflation typically requires going through an extended period of high unemployment during which people keep seeing inflation lower than they expected, and gradually revise their expectations down.

For the past two decades or so, this hasn’t really been a concern, because expectations of inflation have become “anchored”: the public has come to expect low inflation as normal, and doesn’t react much to temporary ups and downs due to things like oil price fluctuations. The big concern about the inflation spike between 2021 and 2022 has been that inflation expectations might lose their anchor, making it much harder to get inflation back down once supply chains and all that are back to normal.

So is that happening? Not according to the New York Fed. Its survey of consumer expectations asks respondents what inflation rate they expect over both the short term — one year — and the medium term — three years. Here’s what that looks like:

Medium-term expected inflation has come down recently, but the larger point is that it never rose nearly as much as short-term expectations. This tells us that consumers do expect higher inflation in the months ahead, but don’t expect it to persist — that is, expectations are still anchored.

The analysis by the New York Fed’s economists took things a step further, asking how short-term movements in actual inflation seemed to be affecting medium-term expectations. They found that expectations are much less sensitive to inflation data than they used to be — in effect, that consumers aren’t quick to revise their views about future inflation in response to recent news. This further supports the idea that expectations are still anchored.

All of this suggests that we should be optimistic about the possibility of a relatively painless end to our current inflation episode. But mightn’t we have said this about past inflations? Actually, no.

U.S. inflation took two big steps down from its heights at the end of the 1970s:

First came the Great Disinflation of the 1980s, which brought inflation down from around 10 to around 4 percent. This was a painful process, which involved a very severe double-dip recession. Then came a second disinflation in the early 1990s, which brought inflation down roughly from 4 percent to 2 percent. This involved a milder recession, but recovery from that recession was sluggish and unemployment stayed high for a long time — remember “It’s the economy, stupid”?

Unfortunately, the New York Fed survey doesn’t go back far enough to cover these episodes. However, the University of Michigan has been asking consumers about both short- and medium-term inflation since 1979. So we can use their survey to compare current consumer expectations with what they looked like at the start of those past disinflations. And they’re very different:

The message from this comparison is that expectations at the end of 2021 don’t look at all like 1980 or even 1990. Back then, inflation was entrenched in the sense that the public expected it to remain high over the medium term, and had to be convinced otherwise with years of high unemployment. This time, the public already expects inflation to subside to low levels within a year or so.

That doesn’t mean that policymakers can just stand by and rely on inflation to solve itself. An overheated economy could keep inflation high and un-anchor those expectations. So I believe that the Fed is right to be signaling plans to gradually raise interest rates, with the goal of cooling things off.

But the state of inflation expectations says that this process doesn’t have to be painful. If the Fed manages to get the right balance, we’ll be able to bring inflation down without a nasty economic slump.

Fingers crossed. The last thing we need is a slump.

I wrote about the very conservative former Judge Michael Luttig’s advice on how to fix the Electoral Count Act the other day Today Politico reports that he was instrumental in getting Mike Pence to refuse to overturn the election. Ryan Lizza interviewed him for his podcast:

J. Michael Luttig:I was first called by the vice president’s outside counsel, Richard Cullen, on the evening of Jan. 4. We now know that that was after the fateful Oval Office meeting that day between the president and vice president, where John Eastman made the argument that the vice president could overturn the election unilaterally as presiding officer.

Ryan Lizza: And you know John Eastman?

Luttig: John Eastman was one of my clerks — over 25 years ago — and Richard Cullen is one of my closest friends in all of life. And we had been, at that point, talking seemingly every day — if not multiple times a day — throughout the entire Trump administration because, of course, our close friend, Bill Barr, was attorney general.

So he called me. I was having dinner. No big deal: this is like your best friend calling. He called the night of the 4th and says, “Hey, Judge, what do you know about John Eastman?” And I said, “He was a clerk of mine 30 years ago.” He says, “Well, what else do you know?” I said, “I don’t know. John’s an academic, he’s a professor, he’s a constitutional scholar — and he’s a brilliant constitutional scholar.”

Lizza: This is sort of shocking to hear you say this, considering the way that most people have been introduced to John Eastman.

Luttig: Well, read everything that was written about him before, you know, Jan. 6.

Lizza:So that’s interesting: the person who was the architect of the attempted coup, essentially — I think it’s fair to use that language — was actually a well-respected legal mind with sound views of the Constitution and not some legal quack.

Luttig: That’s correct: The farthest thing from it. So Richard said, “Well, you don’t know, do you?” And I said, “Know what?” He said, “John’s advising the president and the vice president that the vice president has this authority [to reject electoral votes] on January 6” — two days hence. And I said, “Wow, no, I did not know that. Well, look, you can tell the vice president that I said that he has no such authority at all. And Richard said he knows that, I said OK, and we hung up.

So I told my wife about the call, and I said, “Wow. This is big.” I got up the next morning — I get up about 4:45 — and I’m having my coffee, and Richard calls — which is not unusual. But the call was unusual. He said, “Judge, can you help the vice president?” And I said, “Sure, what does he need?”

He said, “Well, we don’t know what he needs.” And I said, “What do you mean you don’t know what he needs? Then why are you calling me?” He said, “Look, this is serious.” I said, “OK, I understand. What do you want?” He’s talking with Marc Short and the vice president. And he says, “We need to do something publicly, get your voice out to the country.”

At that point, I said, “Oh my gosh, Richard, I don’t even have a job, much less an official one. I have no platform from which to speak.” I’m out here in Colorado at 6 in the morning. I don’t even have a fax machine. I said, “I really don’t even have a thought.” And he said, “This is urgent.” I said, “I understand.” He said, “I’ll call you back in five minutes.” So we hung up, and I sat there, finished my coffee — just racking my brain.

Just try to put yourself in my position. I had not a clue [what to say].

So he calls me back in five minutes: “You got anything yet?” And I said, “No, I don’t, Richard.” He says, “I’ll call you back in 10 minutes.” So he calls back in 10 minutes, and I said, “Richard, honest to goodness, I have no earthly idea what I can do.” And he says, “I’ll call you back in 10 more minutes, but we’ve got to move.” He called back in 10 minutes, and I said, “Alright, I opened a Twitter account a couple of weeks ago, but I don’t know how to use it.” He said, “Perfect.” And I said, “I told you: I don’t know how to use it.” He said, “Figure it out and get this done.” So I called my tech son who works for Peter Thiel, and I said, “How do I tweet something more than 180 characters long?

Lizza: Wait a second. You’re in the position here where the vice president is being pressured by the president of the United States to overturn the results of the election. And you’re the go-to legal mind who’s respected among Republicans that the vice president is looking to to essentially stop a coup. Do I have that right?

Luttig: To answer the question you’re asking: I understood the gravity of the moment and the momentous task that I was being asked to help the vice president with. I had been following all of this very closely in the days leading up to it. It was then — and may forever be — one of the most significant moments in American history. I’m a cut up, but I’m deadly serious when the time comes, and that day, I was as serious as I can possibly be.

Lizza: But first, you’ve got to learn how to tweet.

Luttig:So my son … well, first off, he says, “Dad, I don’t have time for this. You’ve got to learn this stuff on your own. … I’m busy.” To which I said something like, “Just tell me right now how to get this done, or I’ll cut you out of the will.”

The only thing I knew how to do was type out in prose all I wanted to say. Well, that was like 10 tweets [long]. So I go down to my office, and I open up the [Twitter] instructions on my laptop and I copy and paste what I’ve written on my iPhone into my laptop into a Word document, and then I set about to divide it up into 180-character tweets. I read it and reread it multiple times and then, I take a deep breath and I hit “tweet.”

Almost immediately, reporters started calling me: “Judge, what are you doing?” And I say, “What do you mean?” And they said, “You didn’t just tweet what you just tweeted for no reason.” And … I said, “If I tweeted this for a reason, I would not be at liberty to tell you.” Minutes later, The New York Times ran the tweet…

Lizza: And more importantly, the vice president cited your legal analysis on Jan. 6 in his famous letter explaining what his responsibilities and authorities were that day.

Luttig:Yes, that might be the greatest honor of my life. But it came to my attention in the least auspicious way. I got two back-to-back emails on [January] 6th from two of my clerks — both of them to the effect of: “Judge, we know what you’re doing.” And I said, “Guys, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” They said, “The vice president is on his way to the Capitol, and he cited you in his letter to the nation.” And they sent me a copy of it.

That’s the first time that I ever knew what was to happen with the tweet from the day before. No one had ever told me that. I had no idea. And they obviously didn’t want and didn’t intend to tell me — and that’s fine; it’s none of my business. I was floored to read that and honored.

Lizza: That was a total surprise? In the most important moment of Vice President Pence’s life, that letter justifying that no, he cannot overturn the results; his role as simply ministerial — that was a total surprise to you that he cited your legal analysis as the justification for his view?

Luttig: Complete, utter surprise. And the vice president called me the next morning to thank me.

Lizza: Can you tell us a little bit about that conversation?

Luttig: He was the most gracious person in the world. I was at a UPS Store in Vail, Colorado, standing outside freezing, and my wife was sending a package. A call came [on my phone] as spam. I never answer spam calls, but I had nothing else to do. So I answered it. I said nothing for seemingly 15 seconds. And then a voice said, “Is this Judge Luttig?” And I was startled and said “Yes, it is.” And the voice said, “Please hold for the vice president.”

I scurried out to the car so I’d have some privacy. The vice president got on: “Judge, this is Mike Pence.” And I said to the vice president that it was the highest honor of my life that he had asked me and I will be grateful to him for the remainder of my life.

That’s a little bit too Pence-ishly obsequious for my taste but whatever. Luttig is one of the premiere conservative legal minds in the country and he did the right thing, so good for him.

And speaking of Pence, he’s already wavering on his allegedly “strong” condemnation of his Dear Leader. What a marshmallow.

This Times article on Rogan/Spotify is hilarious, infuriating, and most importantly, misses the point. First, the hilarious:

As Mr. Rogan faced growing public criticism, Spotify responded by reaffirming its commitment to free speech, even as dozens of Mr. Rogan’s past episodes have been removed.

Maybe not rising to the level of “gazpacho police” silliness, but it still got me to burst out laughing at breakfast. And let’s remember this sentence the next time a huge corporation beats its mighty chest on behalf of “free speech.”

Of course, if Spotify actually believed in free speech, they wouldn’t be paying Joe Rogan…wait for it, it’s a lot more than you thought:

 …the true value of the deal that was negotiated at the time, which covered three and a half years, was at least $200 million, with the possibility of more, according to two people familiar with the details of the transaction who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss it.

Granted, what with inflation, $200 million doesn’t go as far as it used to, but still, that’s just plain infuriating.

(And while we’re on the subject of free speech, note that Spotify doesn’t hesitate to suppress the speech of those who want to talk knowledgeably about its business practices, despite the fact that, unlike Rogan’s Covid lies, such speech will physically harm no one.)

And then there’s this, where the reporters, by failing to push back, let Daniel Ek (the head of Spotify) get away with entirely missing the point:

Mr. Ek has made it clear that he is wary of taking on the role of censor. “We’re not in the business of dictating the discourse that these creators want to have on their shows,” he told employees earlier this month in a speech first reported by The Verge, adding that “if we only wanted to make content that we all like and agree with, we will need to eliminate religion, and politics, and comedy, and health, and environment, and education, the list goes on and on and on.”

Okay, step by step:

(1) Joe Rogan can say any stupid thing he wants to. BUT…

(2) Rogan does not have a right to be paid to say stupid things. That is entirely Spotify’s choice.

(3) Since Spotify is paying Rogan (and paying him very well), they are fully responsible when he says something. Especially when Rogan says something stupid and dangerous.

(5) If Spotify wishes to duck responsibility for Rogan saying stupid, dangerous things, they should stop paying him.

Yes, it really is this simple. Sure, there are complex issues of artist payment, monopoly, ethics, and access to mass media in a globalized community swirling about Spotify, but none of those issues is relevant here. Again:

Spotify is paying Rogan. They are responsible for what he says. If they were not paying him, they might — might — be able to argue that they are merely providing him a free speech platform. But they are paying him. And they should be held responsible.

PS There are plenty of alternatives to Spotify for music streaming, like Qobuz. As for podcasts, there are lots of free platforms out there.

Huffington Post reports:

Former President Donald Trump spent $375,000 raised from his followers for rent at his financially troubled Manhattan skyscraper last year ― even though his political committees have no presence in the building.

“It’s a huge scam,” said one former aide with direct knowledge of Trump’s political spending. “I can’t believe his base lets him get away with it.”

The ex-aide’s assertion was confirmed by a Trump Tower employee who screens traffic to offices above the floors that are open to visitors. When asked for permission to visit Trump’s political office recently, the employee told HuffPost that Save America and its related entities did not have offices there.

“It’s all being run out of Florida,” he said, declining to give his name.

Trump’s staff at his political committees did not respond to HuffPost queries.

A HuffPost analysis of Federal Election Commission filings shows that Trump’s Make America Great Again PAC spent $37,541.67 in each of 10 months last year renting office space at Trump Tower, the former president’s 57-story mixed-use building near Central Park.

That was the same monthly amount his campaign had spent there from mid-2017 through the end of 2020, when his reelection campaign was actually based in northern Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington.

In all those months, there was at most one person who periodically visited the 7,000-square-foot office in Trump Tower, the former aide said. But Trump insisted on having the campaign continue renting there ― as it had during the 2016 election ― because the building was having trouble finding tenants, he said. “They knew they couldn’t lose that money because the building is hurting so bad.”

After the 2020 election, the Trump presidential campaign committee was reformulated as the Make America Great Again PAC and continued leasing the space. Only now it is not used at all, except to store campaign memorabilia, the former aide said. “No one works at that office,” he said. “It sits there locked up.”

Sadly, his base loves him so much that they’re fine with the fact that he’s scamming poor people out of their small sums to keep his white elephant Trump Tower afloat. They’re happy to do it. After all, they have made Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcasts one of the most successful in the country and he was indicted and then pardoned by Trump for scamming unwitting donors out of millions.

You know it’s campaign season when Democrats start wringing their hands and running around in circles worrying about how to get Real Americans to vote for them. You can expect to see Democratic candidates in camo trucker hats slinging hunting rifles over their shoulders professing their love for pork rinds and re-runs of “Mayberry RFD” within the next few months along with constant refrains about how all those darned city slickers just don’t know how to talk to the folks. It is as predictable as Donald Trump leading “lock her up” chants at a political rally.

On Friday, Axios declared: “Squad politics backfire.” Mike Allen went on to claim that “the push to defund the police, rename schools and tear down statues has created a significant obstacle to Democrats keeping control of the House, the Senate and the party’s overall image.” The column, of course, extensively quoted the co-founder of the centrist group Third Way. The New York Times on Friday identified progressive prosecutors as the source of Democratic discontent to claim that “a political backlash is brewing.”

Earlier in the week, Politico reported that the party is already rending its garments over the fact that the GOP’s culture war attacks on issues such as Critical Race Theory and immigration are “alarmingly potent” which is sending campaigns scurrying to find ways to express how much they agree with Republicans. (They call this “correcting the record” which adds up to the same thing.) The Associated Press made a foray into the wilds of rural Pennsylvania to find that not only are Democratic politicians persona non grata, but average voters are feeling besieged as well:

The party’s brand is so toxic in the small towns 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh that some liberals have removed bumper stickers and yard signs and refuse to acknowledge publicly their party affiliation. These Democrats are used to being outnumbered by the local Republican majority, but as their numbers continue to dwindle, those who remain are feeling increasingly isolated and unwelcome in their own communities. “The hatred for Democrats is just unbelievable,” said Tim Holohan, an accountant based in rural McKean County who recently encouraged his daughter to get rid of a pro-Joe Biden bumper sticker. “I feel like we’re on the run.”

The advice from Democrats like Heidi Heitkamp ,the former North Dakota Senator, is for Democratic candidates to stop talking about farmers and broadband internet (issues that personally affect rural voters) and instead decry the Fox News chimera of “defund the police” which is apparently hugely important to small town America for some reason.

Meanwhile, the centrist reporter Matt Bai published a piece in the Washington Post in which he acknowledged that the Republican Party is completely off the rails and would “if left to its own devices, destroy the foundation of the republic.” Nonetheless, he may not be able to vote for the Democratic Party because of their allegedly far-left views that may lead to “the kind of social upheaval that occurred when foreign empires relinquished their colonies.” I don’t know which Democrats he’s talking about but it certainly isn’t anyone in elected office.

What he does appear to be advising is that Democratic politicians adopt the age-old tactic of denouncing and disavowing the same people the Republicans attack in the hopes of persuading the vast amorphous “middle” that they aren’t extremists. Back in the day we used to call it hippie punching. President Bill Clinton famously demonstrated it when he ostentatiously criticized a rapper named Sistah Souljah in the 1990s. This tactic is not new. It was tried over and over again. And it resulted in a Republican Party that has become progressively authoritarian, racist and culturally retrograde.

This Democratic navel-gazing happens every time the Democrats face a tough election cycle. But there’s something different happening this time that should shake up the tedious, perennial calculation that Democrats are becoming the party leftist extremists: the Republicans are batshit crazy right now.

Take, for example, that AP story above which reports that the Democrats in rural Pennsylvania are frightened of their neighbors. This is portrayed as a problem for these Democrats to solve when it’s actually a serious problem for the country if Republicans have become so unhinged that people who live near them fear for their safety. I suspect that after the events of January 6th and the ongoing crisis of gun violence, vaccine and mask refusal, mass book banning and the intensity of the right’s descent into delusional, anti-democratic authoritarianism, they aren’t the only ones who feel that way.

And I’m not just speaking of Democrats. The GOP is turning on itself as well. Politico reported this week on the massive number of primaries being waged against GOP incumbents and it isn’t pretty:

“Primaries are always fucked up to some degree, but it’s different now,” said John Thomas, a Republican strategist who works on House campaigns across the country. “There’s more self-hate than there was before. Ten years ago, we’d argue about who was more pro-gun, who was more pro-life. Now, my clients are going RINO hunting, which is a level of disdain that was not there before in our party.”

Another describes it as “a cocktail of people being really just mad, beyond the pale of what I would say is traditional political discourse.” Many of these challengers are driven by fealty to Donald Trump who is seeking revenge against anyone he deems insufficiently loyal and all of them are extremists in the Trump mold. They are hostile to Democrats and moderate Republicans alike and filled with loathing for everyone who isn’t onboard their crusade.

At the same time, money is rolling in from small donors is massive numbers, but the party doesn’t know what to do about the fact that most of it is going to Trump who is unreliable, to say the least, when it comes to spending on anyone but himself. Axios reported that Trump’s popularity with the most committed donors means that everyone else has to lean on his brand even more, making the party even more dependent on him.

As for The Big Lie? Well, it’s more potent than ever. The Houston Chronicle asked congressional challengers in Texas whether Biden’s victory was legitimate, and out of 143 only 13 said yes. They are either deluded or lying and neither of those things bodes well for the future of the country if they are elected.

Given the contrast between the two parties, with a Democratic establishment carefully trying to implement policies designed to help working families, deal with a global pandemic and prepare for the challenges of the future while juggling the various concerns of a fractious coalition and a Republican establishment that’s on the verge of being decimated by a group of far right cultists, any self-described liberal or centrist who believes, as Matt Bai apparently does, that Biden’s failure to full-throatedly disavow some campus radicals is a “deal-breaker” needs to get off Twitter and take a look at what’s really going on in this country.

Progressives, liberals, leftists, centrists and even disaffected conservatives can argue policy all day long and fight for what they believe the Democratic Party should stand for. That’s the restive coalition politics Democrats are famous for. But right now, there is nothing more important than maintaining a popular front against this toxic anti-democratic movement that’s consuming the Republican Party and threatening to turn back any progress we’ve managed to painfully eke out over these past couple of centuries.  

Salon

No, it’s not Vladimir Putin. It’s Storm Eunice:

(CNN) — Storm Eunice tore down rooftops and trees, crushed cars and sent planes skidding on London’s runways as millions of people across the United Kingdom hunkered down at home to stay out of hurricane-strength winds.

The UK Met Office expanded its rare “danger-to-life” weather alert on Friday morning to include most of the south of England and some of Wales, before Eunice picked up speed with winds as high as 122 miles per hours (mph), the fastest on record in England. High wind speeds is what make wind storms intense.

A CNN reporter witnessed a rooftop flying off a home in the southwestern London area of Surbiton. The roof crushed a car parked on the street.

No one killed did not last. Storm Eunice: man killed by falling tree in Ireland as England sees 122mph wind

London’s 02 arena is taking damage.

No thanks:

Hurricane force winds in England? Multiple times recently?

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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.

How do we decide who the enemy is? At Slate, Lili Loofbourow ponders how COVID-19 the virus went from being the Them in Us vs. Them to some Americans transferring their fears onto other Americans. We are wired, I’ve argued, to identify enemies by their faces. A virus has none, so we gave it one. Or two or three: Dr. Anthony Fauci, or Big Pharma, or Democrats, or liberal authoritarians, or Bill Gates. Whatever works.

March 2020 was a truly frightening time, and the psychology of dread is not uniform. “Many Americans have a truly phobic relationship to the kind of fear that cannot be dealt with through combat,” Loofbourow writes. “It’s as if FDR’s famous admonition about fear got taken a mite too literally.” They wanted someone to blame. They needed someone to blame. With a face.

Donald Trump’s party was eager to oblige:

It was inevitable, perhaps, that these two ingredients—a drumbeat of division, and an enemy too small to make a worthy adversary—would combine to redirect those fears onto a more tangible target. Conservatives swapped out an enemy that was both hard and confusing to villainize—the virus—for one that was more readily available: Fauci. Or Biden. Or evil doctors enriching vaccine manufacturers by requiring jabs for a virus that isn’t even dangerous. (It should be noted that many safety-first Americans—mostly on the liberal side—have also transformed their fear and frustration into tribalized disdain, with the difference being that mass death was actually happening.) Trump was seeding some of this before the U.S. even had its first lockdowns. “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!” he tweeted on March 9, 2020, from his now-banned account.

Covid restrictions became attacks on freedom, she continues. For many on the right, “any ideology beyond pure individualism risks succumbing to tyranny or socialism or both.”

Let’s face it: There comes a point in the post-9/11 American approach to terrorism where the “live as if the threat isn’t there” mantra fails to satisfy and escalates into a desire for revenge. They want you to be afraid, and defying them becomes an obsession that supersedes everything else—whether it lands you in the longest and most expensive war in American history or causes you to maintain, as you lay dying, that the virus killing you does not exist. Courage may mean shopping, it may mean dining in restaurants, or it may start to mean fighting those who believe in safety measures in the name of freedom.

People want somebody to blame. They need somebody to blame. Whether or not the enemy du jour is guilty of anything is beside the point. Never mind the blindfolded lady holding the scales or the “Equal justice under law” engraved on the Supreme Court building. If a real guilty person is not available for lynching, another will do.

“Does tough on crime include convicting the innocent?” asked Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island. His Republican colleagues on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee think it does, Digby pointed out on Thursday.

Republicans grilling Nina Morrison, a Biden nominee for a judgeship and former attorney with the Innocence Project, made clear their disapproval of correcting travesties of justice. Morrison, often through DNA evidence, helped free citizens wrongly convicted of violent crimes. Meaning, people in prison for crimes committed by violent criminals still loose in the community.

In a series of gotcha questions backed by faux outrage, writes Jennifer Bendery at Huffington Post, Republicans used the nomination to wage a proxy fight to accuse Democrats of being soft on crime and responsible for an increase in violence.

“Why do you keep advising radical district attorneys who let violent criminals go and result in homicide rates skyrocketing?” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas demanded, ignoring the fact that people Morrison helped release were declared innocent.

It is more important to him that 1) someone be blamed, and 2) he scores political points over it. This is an old game with judicial nominations. Justice? Injustice? Whatever scores political points.

The posturing is as naked as the emperor. They don’t just need someone to blame. They need an enemy. Any enemy will do. “As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,” they’ve got a little list.

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This just makes me feel sick to my stomach. The Biden administration has nominated a woman who worked for the Innocence Project for 20 years and Republican Senators are opposing her because they apparently believe that freeing innocent people from prison is being “soft on crime.” It’s mind boggling:

In a hearing on Wednesday that was as performative as it was embarrassingly ill-informed, Senate Republicans tried to blame one of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees — Nina Morrison, an attorney with the Innocence Project who has freed dozens of innocent people from prison — for driving up violent crime across America.

Morrison, 52, is up for a lifetime seat on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District Of New York. She is the senior litigation counsel at the New York-based Innocence Project, an organization focused on exonerating wrongly convicted people through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.

She has been lead or co-counsel on cases that have freed more than 30 innocent people from prison and death row.

[…]

In a series of gotcha-type questions, Cruz pressed Morrison on whether she thinks Philadelphia is safer now than it was before its Democratic district attorney Larry Krasner was elected in 2017. Morrison was an adviser to Krasner’s transition team.

“I do not consider myself an expert on crime statistics,” she began.

“You have no view,” Cruz interrupted.

“I can certainly talk about the cases that I’ve worked on in Philadelphia,” she said.

“So you advised his transition team,” Cruz said, interrupting again. “Let me ask you, when you were advising him on his— and by the way, is the murder rate today in Philadelphia higher or lower than when Mr. Krasner was elected?”

“Senator, I do not know because I have not studied those statistics,” Morrison said.

“So you were part of the transition team but didn’t really care about the results,” Cruz said, cutting her off again while rattling off statistics about crime rates in Philadelphia.

It went on like this for several minutes, until Cruz ran out of time.

“Why do you keep advising radical district attorneys who let violent criminals go and result in homicide rates skyrocketing?” he demanded. “Do you care about the innocent people being killed because of the policies you’re implementing?”

Morrison explained that her work with district attorneys like Krasner has been specifically focused on conviction integrity, or the review of old cases, not on formulating new policies relating to prosecutions. She said there was a link between the two, though.

“It is because when the wrong person is convicted of murder, the person who has actually committed the crime isn’t brought to justice, that I think the work connects and—” Morrison began until Cruz interrupted her again.

“Sadly, your nomination is part of a pattern from this administration and Democrats in the Senate, if they follow their pattern, will vote to [confirm] yet another judge who will let more violent criminals go,” he concluded.

Hawley tried to tie Morrison to a decision by St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner to release people who had been arrested during violent protests in the city in 2020 over George Floyd’s murder. Morrison previously wrote a 2019 article praising Gardner’s work on a murder case in which she found evidence that the person who had been put into prison, Lamar Johnson, was innocent, and went to court to try to overturn the conviction.

“Let’s talk a little bit about her record that you saw fit to praise,” Hawley said, painting a dramatic picture of crimes in the city.

“In the midst of rioting that convulsed the city of St. Louis, police officers were shot at … rioters threw rocks and gasoline and frozen water bottles … firefighters were assaulted … innocent civilians were assaulted,” he said. “[Gardner] said the police were the ones at fault…. Is that the kind of approach that you stand by and think is appropriate for prosecutors to take?”

Morrison said her op-ed that referenced Gardner was specifically about the wrongly convicted man, Johnson — and that the piece had a “heartening” effect among Republican lawmakers in his state.

“The Missouri Legislature, I believe a Republican in both chambers who sponsored the bill, changed the law so that Ms. Gardner could successfully file a motion for a new trial on behalf of the individual referenced, and we were joined by the [libertarian] Cato Institute and others in supporting that bill,” she said.

“In the particular case I was writing about,” she added, “it appeared to reflect a broader consensus about how to handle wrongful convictions.”

Hawley continued on as if Morrison hadn’t just pointed out that Republicans in his own state had supported her efforts on that case.

“I’d say they’re pro-crime. They’re pro-criminal practices,” he said of Missouri prosecutors. “You praised these prosecutors as taking a new approach…. For that reason alone, I cannot support your nomination and I will not support the nominations of judges or any other individuals sent to us by this administration who are soft on crime and soft on criminals.”

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) took issue with a 2019 op-ed that Morrison wrote in The New York Times about prosecutorial misconduct. Lee claimed the piece wasn’t clear enough that prosecutorial misconduct only happens in a small percentage of cases nationwide.

Morrison said the op-ed was very clear that it was a small percentage of cases, and that even so, responding to those cases builds trust in the criminal justice system. In what felt like a subtle burn after Cruz’s attacks on her, Morrison noted that Republicans in his state agree.

“In Sen. Cruz’s home state of Texas, there was a law passed in the name of one of my former clients to try to make it easier for the wrongly accused to get access to exculpatory evidence because of proven misconduct in that case,” she said. “That was unanimously passed by a primarily Republican legislature.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) tried to shame Morrison for taking on one of her clients, Ledell Lee. He was put to death in Arkansas in 2017 for the 1993 murder of a 26-year-old woman, Debra Reese, and previously had been convicted on two rape charges. But four years after he was executed, a different man’s DNA was found on the murder weapon, which was not previously tested. Morrison has taken on Lee’s sister as her client.

“Even after Lee was executed, you continue to try to cast doubt on his guilt with new DNA tests, which proved inconclusive,” Cotton said. “Do you believe that Ladell Lee committed the rapes and murders he was accused and convicted of committing?”

Morrison said Lee’s DNA evidence had never been litigated in the courts, namely because none of his attorneys ever asked the court to allow post-conviction DNA testing, even though Arkansas law provides for it.

“In fact, one of Mr. Lee’s attorneys later admitted that he suffered from a serious drug and alcohol problem and did not provide Mr. Lee with the representation that he was constitutionally entitled to,” said Morrison. “Some of the results were inconclusive, but notably, there was male DNA on the murder weapon that did not come from Mr. Lee.”

Cotton appeared stunned that Morrison was still examining the case, even after Lee’s death and after so many years of court cases. He also didn’t appear to understand the significance and reliability of DNA testing.

“He was convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony and the possession of Ms. Reese’s stolen property,” said the Arkansas Republican.

“Eyewitness identification, which you referenced, is actually the single leading proven cause of wrongful convictions,” replied Morrison.

She said she couldn’t say much more about the case since she is still representing Lee’s sister, but noted that there is “a significant amount of compelling evidence” in favor of Lee’s innocence.

“Compelling evidence that courts somehow overlooked for 22 years until he was executed?” interrupted Cotton, exasperated.

“Senator, I have represented many individuals who were exonerated by DNA who lost dozens of appeals in courts because DNA was not available,” Morrison replied.

“Are you proud that you encouraged such defiance of convicted murderers?”- Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) attacking an attorney who has freed dozens of innocent people from prison

At this point, Cotton just tried to make Morrison feel guilty for taking on the case at all.

“As he walked to the execution chamber, on the night of his execution, he looked at a warden and smirked, and said, ‘This ain’t happening. You all are taking me back,’” said Cotton. “Are you proud that you encouraged such defiance of convicted murderers?”

“Senator, I don’t believe that anything in my career has ever encouraged defiance or disrespect for the process,” Morrison said. “I know that Mr. Lee maintained his actual innocence until his execution.”

“Would you like to say anything today to Debra Reese’s family?” Cotton said.

“There is no question that Ms. Reese suffered a horrible death that no one in this world should suffer,” Morrison said. “I only hope the right person was convicted and executed because the contrary is unimaginable.”

This makes me want to tear my hair out. These people are on the US Senate Judiciary Committee and they apparently believe that innocent people should be left to rot in jail while guilty people run free because it makes the system look bad. Either that or they think the US Justice system is infallible and these exonerations are all wrong but I don’t think even these fascisatic wingnuts are that stupid. They know the system makes mistakes — they just don’t care if innocent people are locked up. It’s monstrous.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island got to the point:

“Does tough on crime include convicting the innocent?” he asked Morrison.

“No, senator,” she replied. “It does not.”