The ghost of the Confederacy hangs heavily over the Tennessee Legislature.
Justin Jones, one of two Black members expelled from the state’s House of Representatives in April 2023, had run afoul of House leadership before. In 2019, as a private citizen, he was arrested following his actions in protesting a bust in the state capitol honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and later Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
While the expulsion of Jones and his colleague, Justin J. Pearson, riveted the nation’s attention, a curious and related event in the Legislature’s other branch, the Tennessee Senate, passed nearly unnoticed.
On Feb. 3, 2023, two state senators issued a formal proclamation commemorating April 2023 as and encouraging “all Tennesseans to increase their knowledge of this momentous era in the history of this State.”
One of the signers is Senate Speaker Randy McNally, who is also the state’s lieutenant governor; the other is Sen. Mark Pody from Lebanon. Though not considered in legislative session and not listed on the Legislature’s website, the proclamation holds an official stature: It was issued on Senate stationery and stamped with the Tennessee state seal.
The proclamation’s wording closely follows that of a proclamation issued by Virginia’s Gov. Robert McDonnell in April 2010, with one striking exception. McDonnell’s proclamation in final form included a paragraph, inserted after protests to an earlier version, stating “that it is important for all Virginians to understand that the institution of slavery led to this war.”
The Tennessee proclamation, which includes eight introductory clauses celebrating “the cause of Southern liberty,” says nothing of slavery at all. Rather, it declares that Confederates conducted “a four-year heroic struggle for states’ rights, individual freedom, local government control, and a determined struggle for deeply held beliefs.”
These people are obsessed with racism and bigotry. They can’t think of anything else. It seems to be what gives their lives meaning.
If you have any question as to whether DeSantis is fit to be president of the United States, his decision to hire this man should answer it. He either did it because he actually believes that the COVID vaccines are dangerous, which makes him a moron or he did it out of a cynical desire to appeal to anti-vax voters. Either way, it was a disgraceful decision and should disqualify him from ever having higher office of any kind:
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo personally altered a state-driven study about Covid-19 vaccines last year to suggest that some doses pose a significantly higher health risk for young men than had been established by the broader medical community, according to a newly obtained document.
Ladapo’s changes, released as part of a public records request, presented the risks of cardiac death to be more severe than previous versions of the study. He later used the final document in October to bolster disputed claims that Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were dangerous to young men.
The surgeon general, a well-known Covid-19 vaccine skeptic, faced a backlash from the medical community after he made the assertions, which go against guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and American Academy of Pediatrics. But Ladapo’s statements aligned well with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ stance against mandatory Covid-19 vaccination.
Researchers with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and University of Florida, who viewed Ladapo’s edits on the study and have followed the issue closely, criticized the surgeon general for making the changes. One said it appears Ladapo altered the study out of political — not scientific — concerns.
“I think it’s a lie,” Matt Hitchings, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida, said of Ladapo’s assertion that the Covid-19 vaccine causes cardiac death in young men. “To say this — based on what we’ve seen, and how this analysis was made — it’s a lie.”
The newly released draft of the eight-page study, provided by the Florida Department of Health, indicates that it initially stated that there was no significant risk associated with the Covid-19 vaccines for young men. But “Dr. L’s Edits,” as the document is titled, reveal that Ladapo replaced that language to say that men between 18 and 39 years old are at high risk of heart illness from two Covid vaccines that use mRNA technology.
“Results from the stratified analysis for cardiac related death following vaccination suggests mRNA vaccination may be driving the increased risk in males, especially among males aged 18-39,” Ladapo wrote in the draft. “The risk associated with mRNA vaccination should be weighed against the risk associated with COVID-19 infection.”
In a statement to POLITICO, Ladapo said revisions and refinements are a normal part of assessing surveillance data and that he has the appropriate expertise and training to make those decisions.
“To say that I ‘removed an analysis’ for a particular outcome is an implicit denial of the fact that the public has been the recipient of biased data and interpretations since the beginning of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine campaign,” he said. “I have never been afraid of disagreement with peers or media.”
He also said that he determined the study was worthwhile since “the federal government and Big Pharma continue to misrepresent risks associated with these vaccines.”
The DeSantis administration referred questions to Florida’s Department of Health.
Ladapo, a Harvard-trained doctor who held professorships at UCLA and NYU, specializes in cardiovascular diseases and gained attention nationally during the pandemic after he authored op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today questioning the safety of Covid-19 vaccines and the effectiveness of mask-wearing and lockdowns.
He was also a supporter of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that former President Donald Trump often praised as a treatment for Covid. The FDA later withdrew emergency authorization for its use.
Ladapo was picked by DeSantis in September 2021 to become the state’s surgeon general as DeSantis waged war against President Joe Biden’s Covid-related restrictions and ordered the state to ban mask-wearing requirements in schools and employer-issued vaccine mandates.
This man may be a qualified cardiovascular doctor but he’s also got a terrible case of Fox News brain rot and should not be anywhere near patients, public health or anything else until he gets treatment for it.
1. He has promoted the “great replacement theory.”
Carlson has repeatedly pushed the “great replacement theory,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center defines as a “racist conspiracy narrative [that] falsely asserts there is an active, ongoing, and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries.” He has argued that Democrats want to replace white people so they can control the country.
2. He said Vladimir Putin wasn’t so bad.
Tucker: It may be worth asking yourself… why do I hate Putin.. Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? pic.twitter.com/0jlXfS0PYy
4. He complained about “the total collapse of testosterone levels in American men.”
Carlson has insisted that masculinity is supposedly on the decline in the United States. While both the theory and his suggested solution—tan your testicles—are ridiculous, they stem from a right-wing belief that attacks on masculinity upset the social order.
In his new special on how to raise testosterone levels in men, Tucker Carlson’s guest suggests “testicle tanning” using infrared light as a “bromeopathic” therapy. pic.twitter.com/PirerBMRyr
Of all the lies from Tucker Carlson, this January claim that criminal white supremacy and right-wing domestic terrorism “doesn’t exist” was always one of the most brazen. https://t.co/8NQCN2CEjH
6. He said the January 6 rioters were “peaceful protesters.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave Carlson access to the security footage from the January 6 insurrection, and the television host used the videos to completely whitewash the riot.
“Taken as a whole, the video record does not support the claim that January 6 was an insurrection—in fact, it demolishes that claim,” Carlson falsely insisted. His coverage was so bad that even a few Republican lawmakers criticized his show.
7. He knowingly lied that the 2020 election was stolen.
Carlson repeatedly insisted during his show that the 2020 presidential election had been rigged in favor of Joe Biden. But court documents published during the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox showed that Carlson knew better.
Text messages and deposition excerpts show that hosts including Carlson knew the election conspiracies were false and that former President Donald Trump’s lawyers weren’t credible, but they spread the conspiracies and invited the lawyers on air anyway. Carlson, who has repeatedly fawned over Trump on his show, even texted someone that he was looking forward to ignoring Trump. “I hate him passionately,” Carlson said of the former president.
8. He called for an insurrection after Trump was indicted.
After Trump was indicted, Carlson called for violence and for people to stockpile AR-15s. He also referred to the indictment as a “political purge.”
Tucker Carlson says Trump's indictment represents a "political purge" against Republicans. Claims the rule of law has been suspended for everyone who would consider voting for him. pic.twitter.com/lIQRiBWm7R
Just a few weeks after the release of his text messages showing how much he hated Trump, Carlson had the former president on his show for an obsequious interview. Carlson barely got a word in during the hour-long show, but he did manage to refer to Trump as “sensible and wise.”
Trump was then given free rein to spout whatever falsehoods and fantasies he wanted. He had been arrested just one week before for 34 counts of falsifying business records.
10. He minimized the severity of statutory rape and said women are “primitive.”
Carlson made weekly calls to a shock jock radio show between 2006 and 2011. During those hour-long calls, he repeatedly made vile comments about women and sex. Media Matters for America resurfaced those recordings in 2019, revealing that Carlson had downplayed the gravity of statutory rape and called women “primitive.”
During one call, Carlson said that child marriage is not “the same thing exactly as pulling a child from a bus stop and sexually assaulting that child.”
“The rapist, in this case, has made a lifelong commitment to live and take care of the person, so it is a little different,” he said, by way of a totally normal and not at all horrifying explanation.
In another call, Carlson called women “extremely primitive” and “basic.” “They hate weakness. They’re like dogs that way,” he said.
Check out even more bonkers things Carlson has said here.
If there’s one thing that seems to be authentic about Carlson, other than his love of money, is misogyny. The rest can be chalked up to his desire to give his audience what he’s discovered they really want which is conspiracy theories and extreme bigotry. But the hatred for women seems to be a real thing.
I get emails and letters from right wingers fairly frequently and they’re mostly insulting rants against me personally. (I get some of those from the left too. This one I thought was interesting because he doesn’t call me any names and seems to be so earnest. You can see the extent of the brainwashing:
I don’t think I need to tell you that virtually everything he says is not true. Nobody is supportive of abortion”up to the minute of birth and after birth.” That’s just not on the agenda and nobody is doing that. Children are not deciding to “attempt to change their sex.” That’s not legal. Their parents are making these decisions on their behalf in consultation with experts and doctors. The seriousness of crimes in our cities is vastly overstated and the three cities he mentions aren’t even in the top ten. There is much more gun violence in red states than blue states. And I suppose it’s irritating that people get shouted down on college campuses but I wouldn’t call it fascist. (At least not in comparison to storming the US Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power…)
He seems like a decent person. At least he doesn’t engage in ad hominum. But he doesn’t have the facts because he’s clearly listening to right wing media. They are lying to him.
But Biden has done a good job and is well positioned to beat him so it is what it is.
What with all the hoopla over the firing of Tucker Carlson this week you may not have heard the big news: Joe Biden is old.
Yes, he’s also running for president again but the announcement was overshadowed by the fact that every single news channel reporting on it accompanied it with reports of polls and and man on the street interviews in which Americans all say that Joe Biden is an old man. And he is. 80 is ancient to be president, much older than the front runner for the Republican nomination, Donald Trump, who will only be a sprightly 78 when he would take office.
I think many Democrats assumed that Biden would simply be an elderly caretaker president who would not do much but would steady the ship after the chaotic Trump years. Then he would pass the baton to one of the next generation of leaders and step aside graciously. But he ended up surprising everyone by accomplishing a whole lot and under very difficult circumstances. Battling a once in a century pandemic he managed to pass some of the most substantial legislation since the New Deal with very narrow majorities in both houses, a couple of obstructionist Senate Divas of his own party and an opposition that’s gone batshit crazy. It’s far more than anyone expected.
To say people are unenthusiastic about a second term is an understatement. A recent NBC poll found that 70% of Americans don’t want him to run again and that includes 45% of Democrats. But as JV Last at the Bulwark points out, that’s actually par for the course:
Every president has a percentage of people who don’t want him to run for reelection, even in his own party. This was true of Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, and Ford. Really. Check out this Washington Post headline from September of 1982:
As it happens, the rap on Reagan was also that he was too old, a criticism he defused in the debate with rival Walter Mondale when he said, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience” and everyone howled. He went on to win one of the biggest landslides in American history. That’s not a line Biden can use on Trump, of course, since Trump is also as old as Methuselah but it shows that while you can’t avoid the issue, it can be dealt with with humor and self deprecation.
In his speech on Tuesday, Biden made his pitch: he wants to finish the job. As this article in Vox lays out, he has made a surprisingly good start. Coming into office having to fix the carnage from the pandemic was no easy task. The economy was in crisis and he managed to quickly pass the American Rescue Plan which paved the way for it to recover quickly. Unemployment is now the lowest it’s been since 1969 and inflation is falling after a steep rise due to the global emergency. Wages are rising quickly, especially in service and manual labor jobs.
Despite all that, the country is still in a funk with most people believing the economy still sucks and having a grim view of the nation’s direction. It’s entirely predictable that Republicans and right leaning independents would feel that way. That’s partisanship. But I think Democrats are still suffering from the collective PTSD Trump has inflicted on the nation. Studies and surveys show that that partisan hostility is at record highs and with the country so closely divided that doesn’t make for a very stable and optimistic environment. Biden’s tepid poll numbers bear this out.
Nonetheless, while Democrats may wish for a younger candidate and are sour on the direction of the nation, most polls also show that they will vote for Biden in a general election anyway. And that’s because of their views of the opposition. The Republicans have become so extreme and are still so enamored of Donald Trump, a man who incited an insurrection and convinced a majority of his own party that the election was stolen despite absolutely no evidence, that they are motivated to vote regardless of who the nominee might be. They are as determined to keep Trump out of the White House and deny the Republicans a congressional majority as they were in 2020. Negative partisanship is driving them and it’s a potent force.
However, it’s foolish to underestimate the positive power Biden, as president, actually has. Incumbency is always a huge advantage and it’s particularly important under these circumstances. As Last noted, “any other Democrat you could substitute for Biden asks voters to take a chance—and in so doing would turn Trump into the incumbent, since he is a known quantity.” Meanwhile, the party remains united and it appears that Biden isn’t going to have a serious primary challenge. (Bernie Sanders endorsed him immediately after his announcement.) The Democrats are in a good position to beat the GOP. Again.
The Republicans, meanwhile, are at each others’ throats. Trump is already facing what is shaping up to be a monumentally ugly primary with several rivals already lining up and possibly more to come. They may hate the Democrats, and Biden especially, but they hate each other just as much. And it’s only going to get worse as the race goes on. The contrast couldn’t be clearer.
Joe Biden has not been anyone’s dream candidate. Nobody is writing songs about how they have a crush on him or lining up for hours to be in his presence. He’s not that kind of politician. But he’s managed to do a pretty good job under difficult circumstances while keeping his usually fractious coalition together. And he has a record of beating Donald Trump.
The Democrats could do a whole lot worse and it appears they know it.
Millennials are not as bad off as advertised, Jean M. Twenge writes in The Atlantic. Reports that they were the first generation not to be better off than their parents was a premature take, post-Great Recession.
“By 2019,” Twenge writes, “households headed by Millennials were making considerably more money than those headed by the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, and Generation X at the same age, after adjusting for inflation.” But shaped by their rough start, they are not feeling it.
John Della Volpe, who heads up the latest Harvard Youth Poll, studies Gen Z (born since ~1997). The latest data shows that three quarters of 18-29 year-olds worry about being homeless, he told The 11th Hour Monday night. A third think it could happen to them, and that’s almost 50 percent among people of color.
Check out a quick Twitter thread here. A sampling:
Fewer than half (42%) of young Americans who grew up in conservative households call themselves Republicans today. Among those who grew up in liberal households, 60% are Democrats.
But left-leaning is not the same as voting. People need motivation to get off their couches.
Over the last decade, we have tracked a significant shift toward young Americans favoring more progressive government interventions including on health insurance, poverty reduction, and curbing climate change. pic.twitter.com/vkZDEWfygw
Most young Americans support policies that make voting easier and more accessible, including 57% who support automatic voter registration and 54% who support sending ballots to every voter by mail.
Most young Americans support policies that make voting easier and more accessible, including 57% who support automatic voter registration and 54% who support sending ballots to every voter by mail. pic.twitter.com/iphWkIcBaW
These are good trends for Democrats. Then there is this:
The problem is that even with heavy voter turnout in 2022 for those under 45, they cannot run the table if they are not sitting at it. There is still vast untapped voting potential for Gen Z and Millennials. (Read: political power.)
Fear of what MAGA Republicans might do to them may not be what motivates them to vote in 2024. Nor are promises of what Democrats might do for them. Democrats have to sell a vision more hopeful than the Handmaid’s Tale one before their eyes. How to do that (and who can) is a need a list of policy precriptions will not fill.
HOPE brought Barack Obama to the White House, including all the dreams and aspirations people read into his candidacy that went unrealized. Repeating that phenomenon in the age of MAGA will be a tougher lift.
President Joe Biden released his opening reelection ad early this morning. First word: Freedom.
That’s an excellent start. Personal freedom is a sacred value Democrats must hammer and reclaim from a movement bent on unmaking America. MAGA extremists’ twisted idea of freedom is standing athwart history, yelling “Stop, or I’ll shoot!” Without the “stop.”
“We are in a battle for the soul of America,” Biden said four years ago. “And we still are.” Our freedoms are under attack from the right (if you haven’t noticed).
Elections are about choices, not poll numbers. So amid Politico’s recent pronouncement that President Biden’s poll numbers are “grim” and NBC’s reminder that Biden is still more popular than Donald Trump, remember that election outcomes hinge on turnout. Voters need a reason to.
Michael Tomasky believes Biden has to go for broke. “What can he and the Democrats do to energize people about the 2024 election?” (The New Republic):
Biden should do something bigger and bolder. He and the Democratic candidates for Senate and House should run a unified campaign. They should say to America: Elect us—give us the White House, 52 Senate seats, and a House majority—and we’ll reform the filibuster and by Memorial Day 2025, we’ll pass a platter of bills all aimed at helping the middle class and fulfilling the Biden motto that the economy grows from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down.
That’s an interesting campaign. That’s a campaign about the future. It implicitly acknowledges that things aren’t great right now, but it does so obliquely enough that it doesn’t sound like an admission of any kind of failure. It says, “We’ve done some good; now, we want to do better. But you have to give us the run of the place.”
Except, Tomasky offers a platter of bills rather than an aspirational vision forAmerica. Biden did not defeat the Republican incumbent in 2020 on policies.
Democrats should run a campaign about the future, a future worth creating. But elections are not a contest of policies, or even personalities, but about values and identity.
Tomasky insists his checklist of bills “says about as clearly as a political party can say to working people that we are on your side, something Democrats haven’t been doing very well for a long time.”
Agreed. But Democrats’ reflexive mistake is assuming voters will infer from their platform that Democrats are on their side and share their values. No. Democrats need to look voters in the eyes and say so. Directly. That’s the cake. The rest is icing.
Here’s where Tomasky and I agree:
I fear that Democrats lack the gumption to carry out a big, unified plan. It’s different, and people—especially politicians—tend to be scared of different.
Lefties are supposedly people who embrace novelty, change, innovation. Except when it comes to campaigns, they are conservatives. Same old, same old.
That’s not going to cut it in the age of Trumpism. What Tomasky offers is a bigger and bolder version of same-old.
I’m a mechanics and logistics guy. I’ll be pitching a novel approach to voter turnout to North Carolina Democrats. Tens of thousands of additional votes for Democrats could turn on it in November 2024. That’s if they can think outside the box in this latest “most important election of our lifetime.”
Supporters have said the measure protects all human life, while opponents contend it will have dire consequences for women and girls.
Republican Sen. Janne Myrdal, of Edinburg, sponsored the bill.
“North Dakota has always been pro-life and believed in valuing the moms and children both,” Myrdal said in an interview with The Associated Press after Burgum signed the bill. “We’re pretty happy and grateful that the governor stands with that value.”
They do not value women. And I doubt they do much for kids once they’re out of the womb either. They can just pull themselves up by their onesies.
