This lede from The New York Times could be defined as an understatement but I’m not inclined to slam it. At least they aren’t sayihng Mike Johnson is the new Winston Churchill like some people are fatuously contending:
The accolades directed at Speaker Mike Johnson in recent days for finally defying the right wing of his party and allowing an aid bill for Ukraine to move through the House might have seemed a tad excessive.
After all, a speaker’s entire job is to move legislation through the House, and as Saturday’s vote to pass the bill demonstrated, the Ukraine measure had overwhelming support. But Mr. Johnson’s feat was not so different from that of another embattled Republican who faced a difficult choice under immense pressure from hard-right Republicans and was saluted as a hero for simply doing his job: former Vice President Mike Pence.
When Mr. Pence refused former President Donald J. Trump’s demands that he overturn the 2020 election results as he presided over the electoral vote count by Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 — even as an angry mob with baseball bats and pepper spray invaded the Capitol and chanted “hang Mike Pence” — the normally unremarkable act of performing the duties in a vice president’s job description was hailed as courageous.
Mr. Pence and now Mr. Johnson represent the most high-profile examples of a stark political reality: In today’s Republican Party, subsumed by Mr. Trump, taking the norm-preserving, consensus-driven path can spell the end of your political career.
Mr. Johnson and Mr. Pence, both mild-mannered, extremely conservative evangelical Christians who have put their faith at the center of their politics, occupy a similar space in their party. They have both gone through contortions to accommodate Mr. Trump and the forces he unleashed in their party, which in turn have ultimately come after them. Mr. Pence spent four years dutifully serving the former president and defending all of his words and actions. Mr. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, played a lead role in trying to overturn the election results on Mr. Trump’s behalf.
But in two critical moments, when facing intense, sometimes violent, pressure from within their party, they both chose a more difficult path.
I guess it depends on what you think is more difficult: selling out your country or losing your political career which, if there is any justice in this world, you are likely to lose anyway — because you sold out your country. They could very well be defeated in November and beyond, as they have been in every election since 2018, and all this brown-nosing and genuflecting to these far right wingnuts will have been for naught. And anyway there are always purges of loyalists in authoritarian regimes, if only to keep all the sycophants on their toes, and religious goodie two-shoes types like Pence and Johnson usually top the list of potential human sacrifices. There’s no guarantee of survival under Trump whether you back him or not.
Sometimes doing the right thing is also the smart thing.
Kevin Drum noted something very interesting in a recent Economist article about Americans’ lack of trust in institutions. As he says, we are all aware of this but draws our attention to this:
Kevin draws the correct inference in my opinion:
Collapse of trust in government is a purely American phenomenon. Why? Because we have Fox News and the others don’t. Oh, they have tabloids and conservative newspapers and so forth, but nothing like Fox News, which makes its living by spreading outrage over the way the country is run.
The power of Fox News is truly spectacular. Outrage sells, and the fact that one of the two major parties amplifies Fox uncritically means it has a surprisingly large influence in setting the agenda for the mainstream media too.
The truth is that US institutions mostly operate about as well as they ever have. But Fox pushes outrage over Dr. Fauci and trust in the CDC plummets. They push outrage over Donald Trump’s loss in 2020 and trust in elections plummets. They go all in on CRT and DEI and trust in schools plummets. They push climate denialism and trust in science plummets. They insist that the rest of the news media are liberal pawns and trust in the very institution that explains reality plummets.
Has there ever been an institution like Fox News that works so relentlessly from within to destroy faith in a country by its citizens? It’s a real-life version of what conservatives thought the Communist Party was in the ’50s. And we all just let it happen.
That timeline says it all. Yes, the left has had mistrust in certain government institutions since the 1960s but it didn’t completely decimate the public faith in all of them across the board. Some of us, including Kevin, tried to warn the country that something toxic was happening in our culture thanks to the right wing media ecosystem for a quarter century. But the political leaders it benefits and the mainstream media didn’t want to admit so Americans didn’t adequately see the threat.
It looks like Rupert and company have had it with her.
Greene: The people criticizing me are not the American people. The American people agree with me, and I've talked to them, and I've seen it all over. They are outraged. And what they're saying is they don't want to vote for Republicans anymore pic.twitter.com/8j9mSFMeme
Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I have been very critical of MSNBC and CNN for making what seemed to me to be a rather self-righteous decision not to show Donald Trump to their audience. They talked about him incessantly but they refused to show him and that was a mistake. Yes, he lies but people needed to be reminded that he’s a disgusting narcissistic sociopath. Many of them seem to have forgotten.
Donald J. Trump appears to be a stronger candidate than he was four years ago, polling suggests, and not just because a notable number of voters look back on his presidency as a time of relative peace and prosperity.
It’s also because his political liabilities, like his penchant to offend and his legal woes, don’t dominate the news the way they once did.
In the last New York Times/Siena College poll, only 38 percent of voters said they’d been offended by Mr. Trump “recently,” even as more than 70 percent said they had been offended by him at some point.
We didn’t ask a question like this back in 2016 or 2020 for comparison (unfortunately), but my subjective thumb-in-the-wind gauge says that, if we had, more voters would have said yes to the “recently offended” question. Mr. Trump’s most outrageous comments just don’t dominate the news cycle the way they did four to eight years ago.
Similarly, many voters seem to be tuning out his myriad legal challenges. A majority of voters said they thought he had committed federal crimes, but only 27 percent of registered voters in the last Times/Siena poll said they were paying “a lot of attention” to the news about the legal cases against him. That’s much lower than the 39 percent back in October 2019 who said they were paying a lot of attention to the Trump-Ukraine controversy (the “perfect” phone call).
It seems plausible that the lack of attention paid to Mr. Trump contributed to his early strength in the polling. Voters generally still don’t like him — in fact, his favorability rating is unchanged from our 2020 polling. But his liabilities just aren’t in the forefront of people’s minds, making it easier for the “double haters” — those who tell pollsters they dislike both candidates — to back him over President Biden.
Cable news has changed in recent days and it’s long overdue. Hopefully it’s making a difference.
Have you checked your wallet? Are your dollars quantum?
This guy at Trump rally in NC today has some kind of conspiracy that a lot of US dollars are worthless but Trump has made sure that his are real and will let him redeem his dollars for gold when he is president. pic.twitter.com/3BVuJtwpfV
I quit carrying cash during the pandemic and didn’t look back, so my dollars are electronic.
Donald Trump told reporters in Manhattan that he would testify in his trial. This RSBN dude actually believed him.
Right-wing interviewer says he is so excited that Trump promised to testify: “It’s the right thing to do. The man wants to get up there, look those jurors in the eyes, and fight. That’s what he does. He’s gonna get up there, say what he has to say, and fight to his last breath.” pic.twitter.com/zKZeveuKd1
Wow. Trump routinely at the top of his rallies remarks about high winds and bad weather (even when it's fine) and then quips about demanding his pilot land regardless. It's meant to be a sign of his devotion. The energy of this move is different. Some might say … it's low. https://t.co/q6DHe3x7Gm
Churchill may not have said, “The Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” And given the history of the 21st century so far, “always” is way too generous. But occasionally we come up for air after deep dives into the primitive ooze.
Well, the ooze eagerly awaits Speaker Mike Johnson after Saturday’s House vote to furnish $61 billion in American aid to Ukraine’s fight to free itself from Russian aggression. More Russophile Republicans voted against the measure than caucus members less cosy with the Moscow’s Make Russia Greater Again dictator. But it passed over the MAGA extremists’ objections. So if they are on-brand, they’ll be coming for Johnson’s seat. Later, if not sooner.
The last time Congress approved aid to Ukraine was December 2022, and Democrats held both houses of Congress. President Joe Biden requested more last August, Opposition from close allies of former president “Is it Trump Tower Moscow yet,” currently in exile in Florida and on trial in Manhattan, stalled aid until Ukraine has all but run out of artillery shells to fire back at invaders.
Ha! I see now Max Boot referenced the same quotation I used in the first paragraph about finally doing the right thing. He writes:
While House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) wasted months struggling to stand up to his party’s pro-Putin wing, the battlefield situation in Ukraine took an ominous turn for the worse. Russian forces have been advancing since the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive last year. In February, the invaders captured Avdiivka, a strategic city in eastern Ukraine, securing their biggest victory since the fall of Bakhmut in May 2023. In all, since the start of the year, Russian forces have taken 139 square miles, an area the size of Detroit, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank.
Fears have been growing that a Russian offensive, reportedly planned for June, could break through Ukraine’s depleted front lines. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, told PBS NewsHour this week that his forces were being outgunned 10 to 1 in artillery shells, making it impossible to “hold our ground.” CIA Director William J. Burns warned on Thursday that Ukraine could “lose” the war by the end of the year without U.S. aid. The alarms raised by U.S. intelligence agencies — combined with Iran’s attack on Israel — finally spurred Johnson to act on the long-stalled foreign-aid bill.
Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado jeered Democrats on social media, “You love Ukraine so much, get your ass over there and leave America’s governing to those who love THIS country!” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia declared, “Mike Johnson’s House of Representatives, so proud to work for Ukraine. Not the American people!!! It’s despicable!”
No one could accuse these fine, lovers of autocracy of acting French.
On the topic of finally doing the right thing, the United Auto Workers’ successful Friday vote to organize Volkswagon in Chattanooga, Tenn. is a landmark. It’s been long time since I worked in a cotton warehouse between high school and college, but one colleague’s joking on the loading dock about unionizing cost him a visit to the office for a reprimand. Neofeudalists would rather you owe your soul to the company store.
Have all other possibilities have been exhausted? These auto workers think so.
BREAKING: Over 4,000 Volkswagen workers in Tennessee just joined the @UAW in a landslide.
They’re the first American workers to win a union at a non-union car company in decades.
This historic victory will change the auto industry, and the future of American labor. pic.twitter.com/UhB2nsWNoH
Follow the mullet (John Russell). He’s good. More Perfect Union is also on Threads.
The Washington Post states that Volkswagon is the first southern factory to unionize since the 1940s. (That’s factory, mind you. There are other unions here. ) The UAW may have won the vote, but whether they’ve won the war remains to be seen. Nevertheless:
The vote marksthe biggest organizing victory in years for theUAW and for the broader labor movement, which has long faced difficulty in Southern states. The UAW had twice previously failed to unionize the VW plant, in 2014 and 2019. VW Chattanooga will join a handful of other unionized auto factories in the South, where local laws and customs have made it hard for unions to make inroads.
The organizing effort caps off a strong year for the U.S. labor movement, which has won record wage increases in several industries through strikes and tough bargaining. The Teamsters scored big wins for UPS employees, while Hollywood actors and writers, and Kaiser nurses secured better wages and working conditions by staging walkouts. The UAW has had a particularly strong year under its new president Shawn Fain, winning large raises and other perks through an acrimonious strike against Detroit automakers in the fall.
Up next? Mercedes:
The UAW says a majority of workers at Mercedes-Benz manufacturing facilities in Vance and Woodstock, Ala., have already signed union authorization cards supporting membership in the UAW, which workers will put to a vote in mid-May. That election, combined with the results of the Volkswagen vote, could have far-reaching consequences for the labor movement in the region, said Stephen Silvia, a professor at American University who has studied the UAW’s efforts in Southern states.
“If the UAW can prevail, it means that the Volkswagen victory isn’t an anomaly and we’re really seeing a turnaround in attitudes in workers in the South,” Silvia said.
It’s been hard keeping up spirits in a time of MAGA extremism and creeping fascism. The rule of law seems to be slipping away when it’s not being disparately applied. But sometimes all you need is one victory here and there to keep going. Because Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted. Have you heard?
My friends N.C. state Sen. Graig Meyer and admaker Frank Eaton make an issue of unequal justice with an ad you must see.
#420 Fact: Black and White folks use #marijuana at roughly equal rates. But Black folks are almost twice as likely to be arrested and convicted for possession. Don’t let this video kill your buzz but… #ncpol 1/ pic.twitter.com/iwenajULkI
Dreadlocks can’t smoke him pipe in peace Too much informers and too much beast Too much watchie watchie watchie, too much su-su su-su su Too much watchie watchie watchie, too much su-su su-su su
Saturday marks marijuana culture’s high holiday, 4/20, when college students gather — at 4:20 p.m. — in clouds of smoke on campus quads and pot shops in legal-weed states thank their customers with discounts.
This year’s edition provides an occasion for activists to reflect on how far their movement has come, with recreational pot now allowed in nearly half the states and the nation’s capital. Many states have instituted “social equity” measures to help communities of color, harmed the most by the drug war, reap financial benefits from legalization. And the White House has shown an openness to marijuana reform.
The origins of the date, and the term “420” generally, were long murky. Some claimed it referred to a police code for marijuana possession or that it derived from Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35,” with its refrain of “Everybody must get stoned” — 420 being the product of 12 times 35.
But the prevailing explanation is that it started in the 1970s with a group of bell-bottomed buddies from San Rafael High School, in California’s Marin County north of San Francisco, who called themselves “the Waldos.” A friend’s brother was afraid of getting busted for a patch of cannabis he was growing in the woods at nearby Point Reyes, so he drew a map and gave the teens permission to harvest the crop, the story goes.
During fall 1971, at 4:20 p.m., just after classes and football practice, the group would meet up at the school’s statue of chemist Louis Pasteur, smoke a joint and head out to search for the weed patch. They never did find it, but their private lexicon — “420 Louie” and later just “420” — would take on a life of its own. […]
Some celebrations are bigger than others: The Mile High 420 Festival in Denver, for example, typically draws thousands and describes itself as the largest free 4/20 event in the world. Hippie Hill in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park has also attracted massive crowds, but the gathering was canceled this year, with organizers citing a lack of financial sponsorship and city budget cuts. […]
The number of states allowing recreational marijuana has grown to 24 after recent legalization campaigns succeeded in Ohio, Minnesota and Delaware. Fourteen more states allow it for medical purposes, including Kentucky, where medical marijuana legislation that passed last year will take effect in 2025. Additional states permit only products with low THC, marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient, for certain medical conditions.
But marijuana is still illegal under federal law. It is listed with drugs such as heroin under Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, meaning it has no federally accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.
The Biden administration, however, has taken some steps toward marijuana reform. The president has pardoned thousands of people who were convicted of “simple possession” on federal land and in the District of Columbia.
The Department of Health and Human Services last year recommended to the Drug Enforcement Administration that marijuana be reclassified as Schedule III, which would affirm its medical use under federal law.
According to a Gallup poll last fall, 70% of adults support legalization, the highest level yet recorded by the polling firm and more than double the roughly 30% who backed it in 2000.
Nice to see more and more forward-thinking states joining the “over-the-counter”-culture, with a new shopping list: Milk, bread, eggs, and ganja. In Washington state, we’ve been smoking our pipes in peace since 2014. So I thought I would welcome the newbies to our cannabis club by sharing my picks for the top five Rasta movies, in alphabetical order…seen?
Countryman– Writer-director Dickie Jobson’s 1982 low-budget wonder has it all. Adventure. Mysticism. Political intrigue. Martial Arts. And weed. Lots of weed. A pot-smuggling American couple crash land their small plane near a beach and are rescued by our eponymous hero (Edwin Lothan, billed in the credits as “himself”), a fisherman/medicine man/Rasta mystic/philosopher/martial arts expert who lives off the land (Lothan, who passed away in 2016, was a fascinating figure in real life).
Unfortunately, the incident has not gone unnoticed by a corrupt, politically ambitious military colonel, who wants to frame the couple as “CIA operatives” who are trying to disrupt the upcoming elections. But first he has to outwit Countryman, which is no easy task (“No one will find you,” Countryman assures the couple, “You are protected here.” “Protected by who?” the pilot asks warily. “Elements brother, elements,” says Countryman, with an enigmatic chuckle). I love this movie. It’s wholly unique, with a fabulous reggae soundtrack.
The Harder They Come– While the Jamaican film industry didn’t experience an identifiable “new wave” until the early 80s, Perry Henzel’s 1973 rebel cinema classic laid the foundation. From its opening scene, when wide-eyed country boy Ivan (reggae’s original superstar, Jimmy Cliff) hops off a Jolly Bus in the heart of Kingston to the strains of Cliff’s “You Can Get It If You Really Want”, to a blaze of glory finale, it maintains an ever-forward momentum, pulsating all the while to the heartbeat riddim of an iconic soundtrack. Required viewing!
Rockers– Admittedly, this island-flavored take on the Robin Hood legend is short on plot, but what it may lack in complexity is more than compensated for by its sheer exuberance (and I have to watch it at least once a year). Grecian writer-director Theodoros Bafaloukos appears to have cast every reggae luminary who was alive at the time in his 1978 film. It’s the tale of a Rasta drummer (Leroy “Horsemouth” Wallace) who has had his beloved motorcycle stolen (customized Lion of Judah emblem and all!) by a crime ring run by a local fat cat.
Needless to say, the mon is vexed. So he rounds up a posse of fellow musicians (Richard “Dirty Harry” Hall, Jacob Miller, Gregory Isaacs, Robbie Shakespeare, Big Youth, Winston Rodney, et. al.) and they set off to relieve this uptown robber baron of his ill-gotten gains and re-appropriate them accordingly. Musical highlights include Miller performing “Tenement Yard”, and Rodney warbling his haunting and hypnotic Rasta spiritual “Jah No Dead” a cappella.
Stepping Razor: Red X– Legalize it! Nicholas Campbell’s unflinching portrait of musician Peter Tosh (who co-founded the Wailers with Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer) is not your typical rockumentary. While there is plenty of music, the focus is on Tosh’s political and spiritual worldview, rendered via archival footage, dramatic reenactments, and excerpts from a personal audio diary in which Tosh expounds on his philosophies and rages against the “Shitstem. “
One interesting avenue Campbell pursues suggests that Tosh was the guiding force behind the Wailers, and that Marley looked up to Tosh as a mentor in early days (I suspect that it was more of a Lennon/McCartney dynamic). A definite ‘must-see’ for reggae fans.
Word, Sound, and Power – Jeremiah Stein’s 1980 documentary clocks in at just over an hour but is the best film I’ve seen about roots reggae music and Rastafarian culture. Barely screened upon its original theatrical run and long coveted by music geeks as a Holy Grail until its belated DVD release in 2008 (when I was finally able to loosen my death grip on the sacred, fuzzy VHS copy that I had taped off of USA’s Night Flight back in the early 80s), it’s a wonderful time capsule of a particularly fertile period for the Kingston music scene.
Stein interviews key members of The Soul Syndicate Band, a group of studio players who were the Jamaican version of The Wrecking Crew; they backed Jimmy Cliff, Bob Marley, Burning Spear, and Toots Hibbert (to name but a few). Beautifully photographed and edited, with outstanding live performances by the Syndicate. Musical highlights include “Mariwana”, “None Shall Escape the Judgment”, and a spirited acoustic version of “Harvest Uptown”.
Bonus tracks!
OK …if you’d rather chill, here’s a mixtape. Headphones and munchies on standby:
President Trump’s daily coronavirus briefing rallies aren’t even attempting to be relevant to the ongoing pandemic anymore. To the extent it even comes up, it’s entirely Trump bragging about anything that’s gone right and blaming others for everything that’s gone wrong. If you want to know the latest information about the emergency, you’ll need to look elsewhere. These are Trump campaign rallies done for the strict purpose of energizing his base.
If you’re reading this, you have probably read and heard vast amounts of reporting revealing the overwhelming failure of the Trump administration in this crisis. Just this weekend we learned that CDC officials were actually embedded with the World Health Organization in January and repeatedly alerted the U.S. government about the coronavirus outbreak, which completely undermines Trump’s attack on the organization.
Unfortunately, the foot-dragging and the errors continue. The testing that everyone but Trump acknowledges must be in place before the economy can come back to life is still not available. Hospitals and first responders are still in dire need of medical equipment and protective gear. If the Trump administration pushes people back out of their homes prematurely, there’s an excellent chance we’ll have another outbreak well before we’ve recovered from the first one.
It’s now obvious that will happen, at least in some places. In Jacksonville, Florida, officials opened the beaches and people flooded back out, with no masks and in close quarters. All over the country there have been small but vocal protests during the last few days, demanding that governors open their states immediately.
As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye has reported, these “protests” are actually organized by astroturf groups modeled on the Tea Party protests more than a decade ago:
FreedomWorks, the instrumental force behind the Tea Party, “is holding weekly virtual town halls with members of Congress, igniting an activist base of thousands of supporters across the nation to back up the effort” led by right-wing commentator Stephen Moore. the Associated Press reported. Other right-wing groups vocally opposing shutdowns include Americans for Prosperity, an organization funded by the Koch brothers, and the conservative Heritage Foundation. There is even a connection to the family of Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. As Michigan’s governor noted, the DeVos family foundation helped fund Facebook ads for this week’s protest.
Pro-gun activists have gotten in on the act as well. It’s an astroturf Tea Party reunion tour. If there’s one thing that riles up the right wing, it’s apparently the government trying to save lives.
'There's no pandemic…Media's the cancer' — People across the U.S., many of whom are vocal Trump supporters, are protesting stay-at-home orders.
COVID-19 has killed more than 37,000 people in America within the last 7 weeks. pic.twitter.com/2xtbPXfjz9
Trump has personally praised the protesters, as has Vice President Pence, even as they both pretend to care about their new guidelines for opening up the country.
All of this seems odd, considering that common sense and all legitimate scientific advice says that prematurely letting our guard down will likely lead to a resurgence of the epidemic, which means shutting down the economy all over again, with even worse consequences. But there’s a method to their madness. As chaotic and dysfunctional as they are at governing, Trump and the Republicans are united on their electoral strategy. They’ve decided that opening up the economy as soon as possible is their ticket to re-election.
According to Politico, conservatives are still convinced that a highly divisive strategy focused entirely on their base voters divisive, is the way to go, even in the midst of an unprecedented public health crisis:
Trump-supported activists are protesting strict stay-at-home orders. Conservative groups’ internal polling in red-leaning and swing states show a significant uptick in Americans who favor reopening the country. A growing chorus of Republican lawmakers across the nation are on board.
“If you don’t see something start to happen … you’re going to see a conservative revolt by our base,” said Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks, a conservative group which recently polled on reopening the economy. “The worst strategy for him is to keep things shut until August. Trump is basically going to win or lose his election right now, in the next month.”
Yes, that would be the same FreedomWorks that is ginning up the protests, along with the other big money groups financed by the likes of Charles Koch. Big-money donors seem to have activated their astroturf groups to get people out in the streets to make sure that Trump feels the pressure from his beloved base to open up the economy. These donors care about preserving their power, privilege and profit margins, but Trump only cares about the November election. They are manipulating him, and his supporters, to make him believe that his ends are aligned with theirs.
Republicans in Congress are doing their part as well. The bill coming up for a vote this week to refill the small-business bailout fund is missing something vital that Democrats and governors of both parties have been begging for: help for state and local governments, many of which are in dire economic trouble and hamstrung by balanced-budget requirements.
You might think that providing them with federal funds to keep the lights on would be a no-brainer. But according to Axios, Republicans will use this prospect as a cudgel to force states to reopen: “The thinking among some Trump administration officials is that many states should be reopening their governments soon and that additional funding could deter them from doing so.”
If anyone thinks that depriving aid won’t hurt Trump’s political enemies more than his allies, they still don’t understand how he plays this game. (There’s already evidence that more federal aid has gone to red states.) This may end up being the most destructive thing Trump has done, at least in economic terms.
Reality is finding its way into the public consciousness, however. Maybe it’s the growing pile of dead bodies — more than 40,000 of them as of Sunday night — or Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior at these coronavirus briefings, but recent polling shows that Trump’s rally-round-the-flag bump in support has already dissipated. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating down to 43%, from 49% last month, while his disapproval rating is up nine points, to 54%. The latest NBC-Wall Street Journal poll reports that 60% of respondents say that Trump did not take “the threat seriously at the beginning,” with a similar number in the Pew poll saying that Trump was “too slow” to recognize the threat. His overall approval average is headed back down to the low 40s, where it’s been throughout his entire term.
So it’s almost certainly true that the “base strategy” is the Trump campaign’s best bet. They will try to run the table again in the swing states and pull off another narrow Electoral College victory. Maybe he’ll be the luckiest politician in history and can make that work in the middle of an epic public health emergency that he has botched beyond all measure.
Meanwhile, the country is fracturing in ways I would never have believed possible.
Two nurses, who have witnessed first hand the toll Covid is taking in Colorado, stood up and peacefully counter protested. Here is how they were treated. I had join them. pic.twitter.com/iJnNcqZxSv
With doctors and nurses and first responders literally dying trying to save people every day, and all of us just trying to get through this nightmare, Republicans have cynically unleashed the same vicious ugliness we saw during the “Obamacare” debates a decade ago. Dividing the country at a time like this is one of the worst things the Republican Party has ever done. How do these people sleep at night?
Salon
Here was Trump:
Four years ago today
Q: There's bipartisan outcries that there's not enough testing. Why do you think it's a personal attack on you?
Trump: It's mostly partisan. Look at the maps. You have the maps with so many different locations pic.twitter.com/FgIA7XMosW
Four years ago today, Trump refused to invoke the Defense Production Act to help prevent more Americans from dying
Trump: “We don't want to embarrass any of the companies… They don't want to be embarrassed, and I don’t want to embarrass them” pic.twitter.com/Y3S43aaBnm
Sunday’s edition of The Boston Globe contained a shocking visualization of the coronavirus pandemic: page after page after page of death notices.
The obituary section in Sunday’s print edition spanned 16 pages. This time last year, there were seven. The increase is a stark illustration of the devastating toll the pandemic is having on Massachusetts and New England.”It’s literally showing it in black and white how deadly this virus can be,” said Jaclyn Reiss, the Globe’s digital editor, in an interview with CNN.
And while Reiss noted there was no immediate way to determine how many of the death notices that filled pages A-13 to A-28 came from coronavirus victims — death notices don’t always say how the person died — several of them mentioned a battle with the virus.
The section has “been growing every Sunday since the coronavirus pandemic has been surging here in Massachusetts,” Reiss said, adding that the previous Sunday, the paper ran 11 pages of death notices.
Reiss explained that besides the increased death toll — 1,706 people have died as of Monday afternoon — the uptick in death notices could be because families aren’t able to hold wakes and funerals now. With no time constraint to publish a death notice before a scheduled memorial service, families could be submitting their death notices to be published on Sunday when the paper gets higher readership.
The Globe, of course, isn’t the only paper to mark an increase. Newspapers in other hot spots around the country are seeing a drastic rise in the number of obituaries and death notices they are publishing.
In today's @NOLAnews, we had just over 8 pages of death notices. It's been like this the last few Sundays, which is the biggest day of readership. We used to consider 4 pages a lot. All of these beloved family members and friends for so many. And no funerals. pic.twitter.com/xtMypiaNb4
“On the same weekend last year, there were about four pages devoted to obituaries,” according to an article in the Advocate. There were approximately 25,000 cases and 1,328 deaths in the state as of Monday afternoon.
The Hartford Courant has 12 pages of obituaries today.
Do look at this if you have any doubts about how deadly coronavirus is. The video shows a man showing the death notices in a Bergamo newspaper on Feb 9 and the death notices today. It is very sobering https://t.co/GYffwPFemu
By coincidence, I watched a bunch of documentaries about the 1918 flu pandemic about six months ago. I knew we would inevitably have one like this although I had no idea it would be so soon. And in one of them (I don’t remember which one it was) it talked about the death notices. I wondered how people lived through such a thing and carried on with life. Now I know.
It’s like it never happened. Except, of course, to the millions of people who lost loved ones. I guess we just don’t want to look in that review mirror. Half the country apparently wants the good old days of the president telling us to inject household disinfectant and encouraging the country to take up arms against public health officials.
They passed the national security bills in the House and the MAGA extremists are pissed. (What else is new?) Here’s Politico on the state of play with the defenestration of Mike Johnson:
Right now, however, Capitol Hill’s gossip du jour continues to center on whether Speaker MIKE JOHNSON can keep his job.
There’s been some speculation that Rep. MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE (R-Ga.) could file a privileged motion to vacate later today, teeing up a vote when the House returns from a weeklong recess.
But we caught up with her fellow rebel Rep. THOMAS MASSIE yesterday, and the Kentucky Republican laid out a different, slow-burn strategy.
Yesterday Rep. PAUL GOSAR (R-Ariz.) made the openly anti-Johnson camp into a trio, and Massie said he was confident their ranks will grow. Expect a number of conservatives, he said, to endorse the Johnson ouster over the coming days.
“This is like a ratchet — the pressure will just keep building,” he said. “The speaker’s overdrawn on political capital. He’s gonna go bankrupt after this vote.”
Massie’s expectation is that by the time their numbers reach about a dozen, Johnson will see the writing on the wall and, just as former Speaker JOHN BOEHNER did nine years ago, resign on his own accord rather than face his own demise at the hands of his rank and file.
There are some gaping holes in this strategy, we’ll point out: For one, Johnson insists he won’t resign; Massie simply predicts that will change as the pressure builds. For another, there’s the expectation that he will have significant backup from House Democrats on any ouster vote.
In fact, our colleaguesOlivia Beavers and Jordain Carney report that if Democrats end up saving Johnson’s job, the speaker just might be able to hold on through the November election — a potential reset moment for the House GOP leadership fracas.
Massie’s response to the Dems-save-the-speaker scenario was simple: Republicans, he predicted, won’t stand it and will join the anti-Johnson movement in protest.
“Every Democrat who walks across the aisle to try to save the Republican speaker is going to cause two or three more Republicans to join the effort because, at that point, you’re … ceding control of the House of Representatives to a contingent of Democrats,” Massie said.
Notably, Massie wouldn’t say how long he’d give Johnson to exit on his own terms before forcing a vote. And remember that Greene — who isn’t exactly known for her patience — could reject this plan entirely and press the matter on the floor at any time once MAGA-world outrage reaches critical mass. (Note that STEVE BANNONjoined the dump-Johnson bandwagon last night.)
As with just about everything in Republican politics these days, it all might come down to DONALD TRUMP.
We reported last week that Trump was upset with Greene over her threats to throw the House into chaos with another speaker brawl, and Trump himself stood next to Johnson days later and said, “I stand with the speaker.”
But more recently, Trump appears to have stepped back into wait-and-see mode as those around him — including son DONALD TRUMP JR. — slam Johnson all over social media. That, Massie said, suggests the winds from Mar-a-Lago could shift at any time.
“My understanding is that Donald Trump is mostly neutral on this,” Massie said. “And just a couple of days ago, when asked about this issue, former President Trump said, ‘We’ll see what happens.’”
No, the truth is that Trump doesn’t give a shit because he’s worried about his legal troubles and trying to get back into the White House by any means necessary. Keep yoru eyes on his allies. They’ll tell the story.
