Politics & Stuff

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another day, another mass shooting in gunhumper USA

Multiple Dead in Mass Shooting at San Jose Rail Yard

https://www.thedailybeast.com/multiple-deaths-reported-after-mass-shooting-at-valley-transportation-authority-light-rail-yard-in-san-jose

 

Multiple victims are dead after a mass shooting early Wednesday at a light rail yard in San Jose, California, officials said.

Santa Clara County Sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. Russell Davis said the bloodbath began at the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) rail yard shortly after 6:30 a.m. PT, and VTA employees were among the victims.

Davis provided few details about the shooting but said the gunman was also dead.

“There were multiple injuries and multiple fatalities in this case,” he added.

VTA spokeswoman Brandi Childress told The Daily Beast that the shooting occurred at the Guadalupe light rail maintenance yard, and resulted in “multiple casualties” but “the extent of the injuries is still being determined.”

“All employees were evacuated. The sheriff’s office which is just down the street from the location is the reunification center for employees and family members who may be looking for them,” she added.

 

 

meanwhile in Texas

Texas lawmakers pass bill allowing residents to carry handguns without a licence or background check or training

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/texas-guns-permitless-carry-law-b1853181.html

 

what could possibly go wrong!

 

 

 

[Fulham Broadway 16,393]

Dominic Cummings lashed out at Boris Johnson's fiancée Carrie Symonds today by claiming she distracted the Prime Minister and officials on a day to day basis and a key day early in the pandemic by 'going completely crackers' over a story in the press about their dog Dilyn. In bombshell evidence to MPs this morning, the Prime Minister's former chief aide revealed that on March 12 last year, as Downing Street wrestled with the unfolding pandemic and a US demand by Donald Trump to join in a bombing campaign in the Middle East, 

[Atomiswave 6,072]

32 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Dominic Cummings lashed out at Boris Johnson's fiancée Carrie Symonds today by claiming she distracted the Prime Minister and officials on a day to day basis and a key day early in the pandemic by 'going completely crackers' over a story in the press about their dog Dilyn. In bombshell evidence to MPs this morning, the Prime Minister's former chief aide revealed that on March 12 last year, as Downing Street wrestled with the unfolding pandemic and a US demand by Donald Trump to join in a bombing campaign in the Middle East, 

Geez

[chippy 342]

10 hours ago, Atomiswave said:

Boris, just another clown actor

Doesn't matter to the general public though. 

They see the state of Labour and would rather vote for Coco the Clown than let that lot into power.

[Vesper 27,324]

213 Mass Shootings Later, What Has Biden Done on Guns?

Gov. Newsom expressed his anger at both sides in Washington for enabling a cycle of grief and indifference over gun violence, asking, “What the hell is going on in this country?”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/213-mass-shootings-later-what-has-biden-done-on-guns

Joe Biden once had a term for politicians who were too cautious to push for meaningful gun reform legislation: cowards.

“Why in God’s name can we say that we can’t do anything about 150,000 people being shot dead in the United States of America? Why are guns different?” Biden said during a campaign stop in Las Vegas in February 2020. “Because of cowardness. Because of cowards. Cowards who are afraid to take on these special interests because they are so damn powerful.”

In that address, delivered a few miles from the site of the deadliest mass shooting in American history, Biden promised to send a bill to Congress that would close background check loopholes and end liability protections for firearms manufacturers—on his first day in office.

“I promise you I will not rest until we beat these guys, because it is immoral what’s happening,” Biden said at the time. “I promise you, if I’m your next president they’re going to be held accountable, because I am coming after them.”

But 127 days—and at least 213 mass shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive—into Biden’s presidency, his administration’s approach to firearm restrictions has not been nearly as expansive as he once promised. The long-promised legislation on background checks and liability reform still hasn’t been introduced, the national gun buyback program he once floated has been put on ice, and his first executive orders addressing guns weren’t issued until April, only coming after a series of high-profile mass shootings in South Carolina, Colorado, and Georgia.

On Wednesday, hours after a shooter at a rail yard in San Jose, California, killed eight people before taking his own life, White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the president was “calling on Congress to take action” on gun violence, reiterating similar remarks that press secretary Jen Psaki had delivered in the wake of previous mass shootings.

“What’s clear, as the president has said, is that we are suffering from an epidemic of gun violence in this country,” Jean-Pierre said, noting the smattering of executive actions issued by the president last month. Later on Wednesday, Biden issued a statement lamenting that, “yet again,” he was ordering the nation’s flag to be lowered to half-staff to mark a mass shooting.

And, “once again,” that he was calling on Congress to address the crisis.

“I urge Congress to take immediate action and heed the call of the American people, including the vast majority of gun owners, to help end this epidemic of gun violence in America,” Biden said. “Every life that is taken by a bullet pierces the soul of our nation. We can, and we must, do more.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, however, didn’t hold back his anger at both sides in Washington for perpetuating a cycle of grief and indifference over gun violence.

“There’s a sameness to this and I think a numbness that we’re all feeling," Newsom said at a press briefing with local officials. “It begs the question—what the hell is going on in this country?”

Biden’s piecemeal approach to the issue reflects the limits of his power to address a problem that he has grappled with since his days in the U.S. Senate, gun control advocates say.

“Voters and Americans, by overwhelming margins, support many of these proposals,” said Adam Skaggs, chief counsel and policy director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “It’s only divided in Congress.”

With a razor-thin Democratic majority and generally pro-gun Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) standing athwart any attempts at eliminating the filibuster, Biden’s ambitious agenda on gun control has, for now, been whittled down to the scale of his ability to enact it.

The most recent example is the Department of Justice’s proposed rule change that would update the definition of a firearm to include “unfinished” components sold in gun-making kits. Weapons built from those kits, which don’t have serial numbers and are increasingly popular among weapons traffickers, are known as “ghost guns” for the difficulty of tracing their ownership.

There are a smattering of gun-related bills that would accomplish much of Biden’s agenda on firearms. The Bipartisan Background Checks Act has passed the House of Representatives, and the Untraceable Firearms Act, introduced earlier this month by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) in the Senate and Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) in the House, would make proposed rule changes by the Department of Justice Department on “ghost guns” permanent.

But with Republicans largely hoping to block the nomination to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives of gun-control advocate David Chipman—who appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee only hours before the San Jose shooting—those legislative efforts are currently taking a backseat to Biden’s economic and pandemic-relief agenda. The result? Biden has been left with little more than executive orders and proposed regulatory changes at his immediate disposal.

That’s not to say that gun reform advocates are dissatisfied with what Biden has done so far.

“President Biden pledged last month to treat gun violence like an American epidemic,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, saying that the rule change was proof that Biden was keeping his word. “The Biden-Harris administration’s decision to regulate them like the deadly weapons they are will save countless lives.”

Gun-reform advocates are generally confident in Biden’s personal commitment to the cause, pointing to his successful passage of a federal ban on assault weapons in the 1990s and his close connections with the families of those killed by gun violence.

“We certainly don’t underestimate the challenges of moving legislation through the Senate, but we are pleased that the administration has been fairly clear in what it wants Congress to do,” Skaggs said, adding that the administration hasn’t “sat on their hands” while waiting for Congress to act. “They’ve sent a strong signal that they are going to do what they can, in terms of executive action.”

But whether Biden can navigate a divided Senate to pursue meaningful legislation on guns is another matter.

“We’ve not had anyone in the Oval Office who has spoken about gun violence as the public health epidemic it is, who has acknowledged the role of the executive in funding and in legislation, who has used the bully pulpit, and has had the emotional connection to survivors that he clearly has,” Kris Brown, president of Brady: United Against Gun Violence, told The Daily Beast. “But obviously, any executive action has a limited potential timeframe—another administration can come in and decide that they’re going to reverse the approach taken. It’s very important that whatever is done is then backed up with legislation.”

Biden knows better than most the risks of mishandling a high-visibility push for gun reform. In 2013, weeks after the murder of 20 young children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, then-Vice President Biden was tasked by President Barack Obama to draft an expansive package of gun control measures. But Biden’s deliberative pace and focus on consensus-driven legislation was seen as a drag to the process, and the long legislative result of the efforts—a bill that would have extended background checks to gun shows and Internet sales of firearms—was defeated by the filibuster.

“The United States Senate let down an awful lot of people today, including those Newtown families,” Biden said bitterly after presiding over the bill’s defeat. “I don’t know how anybody who looked them in the eye could have voted the way they did.”

The lesson learned from that failure, advocates said, is a simple one: Don’t weaken your own legislation before you’ve even begun the fight.

“You don’t bargain against yourself… You don’t wait for consensus to emerge on an issue where history teaches it’s difficult, or just about impossible, to reach consensus,” Skaggs said. “The president, I think, learned from the past that these are challenging and difficult issues, but they are also issues that are too important not to fight for.”

But while gun reform advocates are understanding to a point, there are only so many times that background check legislation backed by a large majority of the American people can fall victim to the filibuster before they call for even more fundamental reform.

“We will not accept a vote on a bill that does not get us to a substantially better place with the system than we are now,” said Brown, whose organization shares a name with the Brady Bill, which mandated federal background checks for many firearm purchases, that Biden championed while in the Senate. If that comes to pass, she continued, “we believe the filibuster has to end.”

“As goes our issue, so goes [the For the People Act], so goes the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, so goes his entire agenda, effectively,” Brown said.

If that comes to pass, Biden will be forced to confront his own words on the urgency of gun reform, made in response to a shooting at a grocery store in Colorado in March.

“I don’t need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take common-sense steps that’ll save lives in the future,” Biden said. “And to urge my colleagues in the House and Senate to act.”

 

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Inside the Wild GOP Civil War Playing Out Under the Radar

From Oregon to Arizona, local Republican parties are undergoing a reckoning over Stop the Steal lies. At the hyperlocal level, things are getting even weirder.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-the-wild-gop-civil-war-playing-out-under-the-radar

When Stephen Lloyd showed up at the Multnomah County, Oregon, Republican Party’s most recent meeting on May 17, he was not treated like a man who, until earlier this month, had been the group’s chairman.

“I was met by a group of Proud Boys who had their arms crossed in front of their chest, kind of all puffed up in front of the doorways,” Lloyd told The Daily Beast.

Lloyd was allowed into the meeting, where he began passing out documents detailing his concerns with the party’s recent lurch to the far right. Others in his wing of the Portland, Oregon-based GOP local were not so fortunate.

“I get a text message on my phone from one of our party members saying, ‘Stephen, they’re not letting me in the building,’” Lloyd said. “So I go downstairs. I say, ‘Hey, why aren’t you letting a Republican Party member in the building?’ They said that she’s not a Republican Party member. And I said, ‘Yes, she is. She’s registered as a Republican.’ And then they said, ‘Well, she’s not a precinct chairperson. So she’s not allowed in the building.’” (The party’s acting secretary and chair did not return requests for comment.)

From Oregon to Arizona, local Republican parties are undergoing a reckoning. Some of their members want to look ahead after the chaos of the Trump era. Others are doubling down on election-fraud conspiracy theories and extreme associations, including with paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys.

Those feuds are increasingly playing out in local party elections, including for precinct-level roles. There, far-right voices are urging followers to run for office, forcing longer-standing party members to battle an insurgency that accuses them of being fake Republicans.

Lloyd, who observed a similar intra-party conflict unravel in Nevada this week, said the shift worried him.

“We shouldn’t be trying to measure who’s Republican enough in order to join some secret club,” he told The Daily Beast.

Some newly minted officers in Republican parties across the country might beg to differ. After Donald Trump’s re-election loss, his fans blasted Republican office-holders as traitors for accepting President Joe Biden’s victory. They vowed to replace party foes by running for vacant precinct-level roles.

They didn’t wait long to get started: Just two days after Biden’s inauguration, users on the extremist-friendly social media site Gab set up a group to discuss a takeover strategy.

“Conservatives COULD be RUNNING the Republican Party all the way ‘up’ to the RNC if they would flood into the Republican Party county committees and volunteer to fill the vacant precinct committeeman slots,” the group description read, “because, on average, in every county and state, over half of the slots are VACANT.”

Precinct committee members are generally party officers who act as a liaison between their local GOP and an area it represents. The Gab group was not the first to note that the often-vacant seats are prime territory for people hoping to overhaul their parties. In 2018, a prominent associate of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa quietly won an uncontested precinct seat in Washington. After his victory, he went on an Identity Evropa podcast to encourage others to follow his lead.

“You have a seat at the table,” he said on the podcast. “And that’s the most important thing, getting that seat at the table, and you can get that seat at the table by, yes, showing up, yes, by bringing people in, and again this doesn’t necessarily only have to be IE members.”

His local GOP ejected him the following year. But far-right voices have begun promoting a version of the strategy—which is not necessarily coordinated by any central actor or extremist group—in the Biden era. In a Feb. 6 episode of his podcast, former Trump chief strategist Stephen Bannon hosted Dan Schultz, an Arizona-based attorney who, since the Tea Party movement, has encouraged conservatives to run for low-level Republican office. In the interview, Shultz described a new wave of Trumpist committee members as fundamentally opposed to mainstream Republicans.

“We can take over the party if we invade it,” Shultz, who did not return a request for comment, said on the podcast.

The interview garnered interest in far-right corners of the internet, including on 4chan, Gab, and Telegram channels dedicated to the QAnon conspiracy theory, as Media Matters reported at the time.

Rather than dying off, those calls may be getting more fervent as local far-right factions notch victories—and the Trump presidency fades further into the rearview.

Last week, a far-right podcaster encouraged his more than 70,000 Telegram followers to follow Shultz’s advice. “If we want to drain the swamp, push the Rhino’s out of the party, set the agenda on America First and SAVE OUR REPUBLIC, we will take part, do our Civic duty and follow this plan,” the podcaster wrote.

Followers responded with claims that they were planning to run, or had already taken up party roles in Arizona and Florida. “We had 40 new chair people in April and we will have over 50 in June,” wrote one person, who claimed to be a new committee member in the Sunshine State. The local Republican Party to which the person appeared to belong did not immediately return a request for comment.

Although Shultz characterized new precinct committee officers as an invading force in local Republican parties, some of the new entryists have less than adversarial relationships with the GOP. The podcaster who encouraged his Telegram fans to run for office is slated to speak at a QAnon-heavy conference this week alongside Texas GOP Chair Allen West. West, in turn, recently spoke at the same event as the head of the far-right paramilitary group the Oath Keepers.

In Horry County, South Carolina, meanwhile, one of the earliest QAnon influencers won a leadership role in her local GOP last month. (The QAnon promoter, Tracy “Beanz” Diaz, could not be reached for comment.) The election saw party members accuse each other of being “RINOs” or “Republicans in name only,” a label long predating the Trump era.

Some local parties have drawn lines against the insurgent crowd: Clark County, Nevada’s Republican Party canceled a meeting this week over alleged threats by a set of Proud Boy-tied figures who have signaled interest in running for party leadership, as The Daily Beast reported. (Those far-right figures, in turn, are suing the party for allegedly boxing them out of proceedings.)

But in Multnomah County, the local Republican Party appears to be in limbo as two factions battle for titles. The trouble began, in part, after Lloyd proposed opening up party meetings to a more ideologically diverse crowd, including those who were not registered Republicans.

Opponents within the party balked, claiming the move would enable leftists to attack their events.

“In my opinion, it’s a false framing of the situation because in my time as chairman, we have never once received a threat from antifa,” Lloyd said. “We have never once received a threat from any other organization.”

Nevertheless, the party voted to oust Lloyd as chair in a May 6 meeting, at which an anti-Lloyd wing of the party asked a Proud Boys security group to patrol the nearby residential neighborhood. (A neighbor previously told The Daily Beast that the security group heckled him and other locals outside their homes while the meeting took place.)

On May 16, according to a message reviewed by The Daily Beast, Lloyd emailed party members to complain about the group’s recent contract with the Proud Boys. When he showed up to the party’s meeting the following day, at least one Proud Boy was present. That Proud Boy told Willamette Week that he was at the meeting as a member, not as security.

But while Proud Boys attended the meeting (according to Lloyd, they worked the door), two women from Lloyd’s wing of the party were not allowed entry. One of the women was en route to file paperwork to run for party chair. (Three attendees of the meeting told the Week that the party’s secretary, who had previously signed the security contract with a Proud Boy, barred the women’s entry.)

Irate, Lloyd and most of the meeting-goers left the event and reconvened in a parking lot, where they realized they had enough members to hold a vote. Lloyd, who had been recalled as party chair just weeks earlier, was elected as the new meeting’s acting chair.

“We had an acting secretary and we had an acting chairman,” he said. “We had everything required within our bylaws to hold a meeting. And so we did. We held a meeting out in the parking lot until the rain started.”

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The Last Honest Republican Gives In and Kneels Before Trump

Brad Raffensperger, the GOP secretary of state who stood up to the yuge lie in Georgia, is beginning to roll over for it now.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-last-honest-republican-gives-in-and-bows-before-trump

Democracy is really endangered when Georgia’s once heroic Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who voted for Donald Trump but nonetheless stood up to him, gives in to forces that would overturn the election. For months, the state’s top election official withstood pressure to find votes in a river somewhere (a mere 11,870, Trump specified) to flip the Peachtree State from Joe Biden to the former president.

But this week, after a judge in Fulton County granted a motion to allow absentee ballots to be unsealed and examined for fraud, Raffensperger, up for re-election himself, cracked. Another recount, beyond his three, is OK with him. “From day one, I have encouraged Georgians with concerns about the election in their counties to pursue those claims through legal avenues,” he tweeted, later agreeing that “the county in question has a long standing history of election mismanagement” (not that his audits found it) “that has understandably weakened voters’ faith in its system” (the one he pronounced solid). The audit thus “provides another layer of transparency and citizen engagement.”

And so Georgia joins Arizona in a rogue effort to prove Trump was a victim of massive fraud.

To be fair, Raffensperger is hardly the only Republican who knows better but has decided not to care. In Washington, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell both got over their initial concern with fulfilling their duty and certifying the rightful winner of the 2020 election and now only care about winning elections to come—something they don’t think they can do if they hurt Trump’s feelings with the truth.

With each passing day, they go further past the point of no return in coddling a sore loser and his furious followers. Sure democracy is the best policy but if an election doesn’t go their way, how about a little anarchy? They’ve been recounting for six months, what’s a few more weeks? Even supernumerary counts are “legal avenues” according to the once heroic Raffensperger, part of a party hellbent against any examination of the mob of “lovely people” who smeared blood and feces on the halls of Congress as they proceeded to occupy the Speaker’s office as part of what one Republican congressman called a “normal tourist visit.”

This gang that can’t count straight also seems to think that Arizona’s vigilante “cyber ninjas”—kicked out of a high school gym in Maricopa County for a graduation and now resuming their fruitless search to get their amateur hands on sealed ballots supposedly made of bamboo from Southeast Asia—are legitimate election officials.

Every day it’s clearer that recounts are never going to end and a commission to investigate what happened on Jan. 6 is never going to begin. After Republicans watered down the commission to their liking, Trump blasted it anyway and congressional leaders did too. So much for looking back.

Looking ahead, Republicans want to make sure they never have a squish like Raffensperger foiling their plans again. They’re busy packing races for election officials with partisans more susceptible to pressure, choosing candidates who publicly supported Trump’s specious claims. This raises the real possibility that politicians still trying to undermine the vote in 2020 will do more than try the next time around.

That’s the back-up plan now, just in case the party’s massive state law voter-suppression effort isn’t enough to ensure that the “right” person is elected. The party has proposed and passed 400 laws to improve the integrity of an election system that, in fact, just passed the most stringent, intense test a presidential election has ever undergone with flying colors.

There’s no end in sight. Next week McConnell will kill the Jan. 6 commission with a filibuster, if need be, so as not to be distracted from his “100 percent focus on stopping this new administration.” His number two, Sen. John Thune, said that “anything that gets us rehashing the 2020 elections is a day lost on being able to draw a contrast between us and the Democrats’ very radical left-wing agenda."

But these recounts prove that all they want to do is rehash the election, only on their terms. For a few minutes on Jan. 6, it looked like there would be agreement, except among deniers like Marjorie Taylor Greene, to condemn the mob and take steps to see that it never happened again. But it turns out that as long as Trump’s not giving up on proving he won, neither are Republicans.

Indiana Rep. Greg Pence is a case study in the Trumpism that befouls the party. Just after his brother came within a few minutes of being attacked for carrying out his constitutional duty as vice president—to count the elector’s votes certifying that Biden won—Greg voted, as the insurgents wanted, to stop the count. Last week he voted against the inquiry into what happened on that day, absurdly calling it a “cover-up for a failed Biden administration.”

The Republicans who want to relive Nov. 3 over and over again until it comes out the way Trump wishes it had are the same ones who insist on burying Jan. 6 and never speaking of it again. They’re in good standing with the party, while those who believe the election was valid and the insurrection actually happened are censured and disappeared by the party.

The 10 House Republican who voted to impeach Trump announced this week that they’ve formed their own caucus because, Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger says, “misery loves company.” Member Liz Cheney, out of leadership, deflected one primary challenge to get her out of Congress when a challenger dropped his bid after being exposed for a dalliance with a 14-year-old.

There’s some comfort in the thought of how worse matters might have been had Raffensperger and a few other Republicans not found the courage to do their jobs without fear or favor. What he seems to have forgotten since then, as he’s lost fair-weather political friends and faces the possibility of losing an election, is that doing the right thing has its own rewards: a clear conscience, the respect of your children, a full night’s sleep.

Winning an election is cheap by comparison.

[Vesper 27,324]

The Cold Secession Is Underway As Texas Passes Insane, Archaic Laws

It is not going to happen the way it did in 1861, but it is happening nevertheless.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/the-cold-secession-is-underway-as

WASHINGTON, DC -- For years now, I’ve hesitated to entertain the idea of another secession. The illegality of it was decided in the Civil War, and anyone who markets the idea during modern times clearly doesn’t understand the kind of horror show they’re tempting -- the bloodshed alone would make the elevator in The Shining look like a paper cut -- and, in the end, it’s quite likely the separatist states would be forced back into the Union.

Long story short, it’s just not going to happen the way it did in 1861. Oftentimes, superimposing past events onto modern situations can be enlightening, but more often than not, it can also be deceptive. For example: keeping an eye out for the next Adolf Hitler by watching for a guy in a weird mustache and a swastika arm-band goosestepping into Poland might force us to miss the unique way in which a modern despot, like Donald Trump, might subversively rise to power. Likewise, watching for secession the way South Carolina and the other Confederate states did it might force us to look at the wrong warning signs.

There’s another kind of secession taking place in America today that bears little resemblance to the pre-Civil War dissolution of the Union. Today, there’s a cold secession underway in which the hardcore red states appear to be forcing out anyone who hasn’t been indoctrinated into the far-right Red Hat cult, while also making life in those states more enticing for Republicans to migrate there from blue states. In other words, life in these conservative-controlled states is turning whiter and straighter as people of color and other oppressed groups are driven away by the fascist idiocracy winding its way through the various state legislatures.

Texas is the perfect example. As the state sneaks closer and closer to purple-state status in national elections, the laws are simultaneously growing more and more archaic. 

During this past week alone, two separate laws have been passed that make it considerably easier to buy a firearm -- any firearm -- while infinitely more difficult to abort an unwanted pregnancy. This on top of a new slate of laws that make it nearly impossible for some people to vote based on the voter fraud fairy tales Donald Trump concocted while sitting on the john. 

The Texas abortion law is essentially an outright ban on the procedure. The legislation sets the totally arbitrary cut-off at just six weeks, upon the appearance of a fetal heartbeat, despite the fact that most women don’t even realize they’re pregnant at that point. So, a pregnant woman might discover she’s carrying at six weeks and a day, but she’ll have no choice whatsoever to terminate the pregnancy. The Texas government says she’s required by law to carry to term, and anyone who helps her to acquire a abortion will also be charged with aiding and abetting the abortion.

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, chose to hear case against the Mississippi abortion law, and if the very conservative Court chooses to uphold the ban in that state, the viability standard in Roe v Wade would vanish, practically guaranteeing the Texas law will remain on the books, overcoming any legal challenges. (Roe legalized all abortions up to viability, around the start of the third trimester.)

This week, the Texas legislature also passed a new gun law removing all restrictions to firearm access: no more background checks, no more permits, no more training requirements. Consequently, anyone over the age of 21 (for now), minus convicted criminals (for now), will be able to walk into a for-profit firearm retailer and buy all the guns they want, and no one can stop them. No background checks means no ability to weed out potential maniacs and, once the subsequent crimes are committed, there’s no convenient way to trace the crimes back to the shooters. 

The Washington Post reported:

After informally surveying law enforcement agencies in five of those states, Kevin Lawrence, executive director of the Texas Municipal Police Association, said crime rates increased and police reported challenges after the passage of such a law in at least four states.

It’s not a stretch to forecast the same in Texas. You know, because the Republicans are the “law and order” people.

It’s almost as though Texas passed the law on a dare, just to see if it could get away with it. Perhaps one GOP legislator was having drinks with state senator Charles Schwertner, the chief architect of the bill, and belched, “Hey Chuck, I dare you to introduce a law that’d make it impossible for law enforcement to trace firearms used in crimes.” Chuck stops counting his NRA money long enough to exclaim, “You’re on!” And here we are. 

By the way, it’s possible that by the time this article is posted, Greg Abbott will have signed this monstrosity into law, even though it’s opposed by 59 percent of Texans. But they don’t care about anyone outside of the other 41 percent. It’s about moneyball for the Red Hat Republicans now: as long as they carry key portions of the state, despite broader opposition, they can maintain their voter base and continue to win.

If we look at all this from 30,000 feet, the plot becomes clearer. Angry, white, male Trump voters are being empowered with heavy artillery while oppressed groups -- immigrants, Blacks, LGBTQ, women of all races, and so forth -- are being increasingly pushed to the margins, perhaps to a point where they just decide to bug out and move to more liberally hospitable states.

Already, the signs of mass migration are underway as people with arguably right-leaning or libertarian views move from blue states to red to form “ideological silos.”

These migration patterns could be a sign of the growing political divide in America, according to a recent Penn State report. “It’s a geographic form of polarization,” says Bruce Desmarais, an associate director of the Center for Social Analytics at Penn State. “It’s a phenomenon that political scientists refer to as the ‘hollowing out of the political center.’ Forty years ago, you could find many moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans in Congress. You don’t find that now—and we’re also seeing this dynamic in these migration patterns.” [...] The Penn State study suggests that people tend to want to live in ideological silos, surrounding themselves with others who share their political views.”

But it’s not just about political views for non-white-males, it’s about the ability to survive and live freely as oneself. 

While losing power nationally, the current Trump-controlled Republican Party is fortifying its stranglehold on its trifecta states (both chambers of the legislature, and the governor’s mansion controlled by one party), pandering to its base and making life openly hostile for anyone who’s not indoctrinated into the Red Hat cult. Already, women have had no choice but to travel from red states to blue(er) states for reproductive services, while nine of ten states with the most gun deaths in 2021 alone are red states. 34 mass shootings took place in Texas during the pandemic year of 2020, up from 30 during the previous year. 

If you’re not a gun owner, unwilling to parade around the mall with a loaded weapon, you’re not welcome. If you’re a woman who wants to retain sovereignty over your own body, you’re not welcome. If you’re a Black man or woman who wants equal access to voting rights, you’re not welcome. And eventually, that’ll mean you’ll have no choice but to move to a blue state where none of those impediments exist.

That’s the cold secession.

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How To Force Joe Manchin To End The Filibuster

The Democrats must find leverage on the Senator from West Virginia before he allows Republicans to destroy democracy in America.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/how-to-force-joe-manchin-to-end-the

In response to Mitch McConnell’s announcement that he will be opposing a bipartisan bill investigating the Capitol riot, Joe Manchin called it “disheartening,” and said that he was “really concerned about our country.” Speaking to Politico, Manchin also said that he was “still praying we’ve still got 10 good solid patriots within that conference.”

It is unclear whether Joe Manchin genuinely believes Republicans can still work with Democrats in good faith, but he has not budged an inch from his pro-filibuster position. Manchin, along with his centrist bedfellow Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, are the major roadblocks to passing a host of vitally important Democratic legislative ambitions. From the vital voting rights HR1 bill to infrastructure spending and now an investigation into the attempted coup on January 6th, Republicans are gearing up to filibuster, well, everything.

End the filibuster, or be ended by it

Without ending the filibuster and allowing a simple majority to pass legislation, the Democrats and the Biden administration will be severely handicapped moving forward. If they can’t deliver over the coming months, the Democrats are likely to lose the House and the Senate in 2022 — a blow that could be fatal to the Biden White House.

It is now recognized by most Democrats that there is no point in decrying Republican obstructionism. As most rational observers concluded many years ago, the GOP is not a conservative political party by any meaningful standard and cannot be counted on to act rationally.

Under Trump, the shift towards authoritarianism has been as rapid as it has been extreme. Last year, the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden showed with thorough analysis of the world’s democracies, the Republican Party has gone through what director Anna Lührmann calls “certainly the most dramatic shift in an established democracy” under Trump. The study concluded that, “the data shows that the Republican party in 2018 was far more illiberal than almost all other governing parties in democracies….Only very few governing parties in democracies in this millennium (15%) were considered more illiberal than the Republican party in the US.”

In other words, the Republican Party is now a quasi-fascist organization that has little interest in preserving the tenets of democracy, let alone working with Democrats on meaningful legislation.

Newt Gingrich’s dream

Republican obstructionism in its current form can be traced back to Newt Gingrich’s all out assault on the Clinton administration in the mid 90’s. As McKay Coppins summarized in a piece for The Atlantic back in 2018, “Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump’s rise.” Gingrich’s nihilism has worked incredibly well for Republicans — so well that they have found a way to remain relevant without engaging in real policy debate for almost three decades.

Under Mitch McConnell’s watchful eye, the party now exists solely to obstruct and destroy. There are no policy objectives, no long term plans, and no desire to work with Democrats in the national interest. This obstructionism has now morphed in an even more extreme version based on the maxim of “Owning the Libs”. Trump is the apex predator of Republican nihilism — a manifestation of every red blooded, Fox News watching, white male in America’s fantasy. Trump Republicans Own The Libs by any means necessary, and certainly don’t negotiate with them.

Why, Joe?

Joe Manchin knows by now that a party beholden to these ideals cannot be talked to sensibly. He understands that discussions between the White House and Republican Senators who claim they are willing to compromise is performative. There are two, maybe three Republicans left who would be willing to negotiate in good faith, and there would still be no guarantees of them coming on board in a meaningful way.

If Republican Senators can’t work with Democrats to investigate a violent uprising on Capitol Hill — an assault on their own institution that would have killed many of them had the police not been there — there is no hope on coming together on anything else.

Joe Manchin is a Democrat in a heavily Trump voting state, so there is a clear a political calculation at play here. He has gone to enormous lengths to maintain the illusion that both sides can still work together, no doubt an overture to his audience of Trump-lite supporters in West Virginia. That he has been steadfast in his refusal to even entertain the idea of getting rid of the filibuster is more perplexing though. What is his calculation here?

Manchin is not up for re-election until 2024, so he has room then to make some political sacrifices for the party. To boot, scuppering the Democrats’ chances of passing meaningful voting rights legislation and an infrastructure spending package might make him popular with Republicans in his state, but he still relies on a lot of Democrats votes to get elected. He could, for example, vote to end the filibuster and help his state secure significant resources from Biden’s infrastructure spending plan — all in time for his re-election bid in 2024.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, none of these factors seem to be moving Manchin in the right direction. As Perry Bacon Jr. points out in FiveThirtyEight, “the Democratic Party’s fate is in the hands of a man who doesn’t owe the party anything, can’t support some of its agenda for electoral reasons and probably just disagrees with some of that agenda anyway.”

How to force Manchin’s hand

The only way Democrats can get Manchin to play ball is to find some leverage — and quickly.

Thankfully, the January 6th commission might just provide the perfect opportunity. Should Democrats be unable to find 10 Republicans to sign on to the commission (and they won’t), the party must promptly pin this all on Joe Manchin (and by default Kyrsten Sinema).

The Democrats must not waste time attacking Republicans when they move to filibuster the commission and instead force Manchin to publicly defend his refusal to end the filibuster. They must also give Manchin a deadline to find 10 Republicans who will negotiate sensibly, and vote with them on HR1 and the infrastructure package. Manchin should be tasked with help lead these negotiations and coming up with a bipartisan plan to move the nation forward. Manchin claims “both sides” are not doing enough to bridge the divide, so the Democrats must put their faith in him to reach out and bring the two sides together.

The Democrats must also do everything Manchin asks. They can promise to cut back on spending, modify the HR1 bill, and allow Manchin to craft the parameters of the Jan. 6th commission. Whatever Manchin wants, Manchin will get.

There is of course no chance that Republicans will negotiate in good faith or compromise. But if Joe Manchin has to take the blame for the breakdown of negotiations and the failure to pass meaningful infrastructure and voting rights legislation, he will then have to reconsider his stance on the filibuster.

The clock is ticking though, and Manchin must be made to feel the full weight of his dithering. He might not want to end the filibuster, but he must be forced into a position where he — like his party — has no other choice.

[Vesper 27,324]

ISRAEL-PALESTINE Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Axios that during his visit to Israel he warned Israeli officials against “evictions of Palestinians from their homes where they lived for decades and generations, the demolitions of housing as well ... and of course everything that took place on and around the Temple Mount,” saying that further conflict would lead to renewed “tension, conflict and war.” “He would not characterize the responses of either side to those warnings, saying he’d let them speak for themselves about “how they’re taking all that on board.’” He did say that “the most important aspect of his trip was that he heard directly from Israel and indirectly from Hamas, through Egypt, that both want to maintain the ceasefire. ‘But it’s also important that we avoid various actions that could unintentionally, or not, spark another round of violence,’” reports Barak Rabvid for Axios. The U.N. Human Rights Council voted 24-9 to establish a Commission of Inquiry to look into possible crimes during the 11-day conflict between Israel and Hamas. The resolution was first brought forth by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Palestinian delegation to the U.N., receiving 14 abstentions. Reuters reporting. The commission appears to have an unusually broad remit and is different to previous commissions in two ways: It is ‘ongoing, meaning the panel can pursue the inquiry indefinitely. That gives it a degree of permanence akin to investigative bodies documenting atrocities in Syria and Myanmar … And the commission is not limited to looking just at hostilities in Gaza and the West Bank, but instead has been charged with examining ‘all underlying root causes of recurrent tensions, instability and protraction of conflict, including systematic discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity,’” Nick Cumming-Bruce reports for the New York Times. The U.S. mission in Geneva said the U.S. “deeply regrets” the move to create an “open-ended” commission. AP reporting Egypt has invited Israel, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority for separate talks focused on advancing the reconstruction process in Gaza, an Egyptian intelligence official said Thursday. AP reporting. Lynn Hastings, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Gaza, launched an emergency appeal Thursday for $95 million for Gaza for the next three months, which she said will target one million people for assistance. AP reporting. The World Health Organization has called for access to patients in the Gaza strip and the possibility to be able to evacuate around 600 patients for medical. Reuters reporting. BELARUS The E.U. is weighing a package of sanctions directed at Belarus’s potash exports as well as its oil and financial industry. “Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said the EU should consider hitting the oil sector, while Germany's Heiko Maas spoke of measures to target financial transactions, which diplomats said would probably involve preventing the EU from lending to Belarusian banks,” Reuters reports. The move follows a ban on national airline Avia flying to Europe as well as EU airlines directed to avoid EU Belarus air space. Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to meet with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in Sochi, Russia today. “On May 28, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin and President of the Republic of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko will hold talks in Sochi. Relevant issues on the further development of bilateral ties, the fulfillment of joint projects in the trade, economic, energy, cultural and humanitarian spheres, as well as issues of promoting integration within the Union State are on the agenda,” the Kremlin press service said, reports Russian News Agency TASS. Swiss email provider ProtonMail said Thursday that the email Belarusian authorities claimed contained the purported in-flight bomb threat was sent after the plane was diverted. “We haven’t seen credible evidence that the Belarusian claims are true,” ProtonMail, said, adding. “we will support European authorities in their investigations upon receiving a legal request.” Mary Ilyushina and Isabelle Khurshudyan report for the Washington Post. Russia denied two European flights from landing in Moscow. The decision comes after Air France and Austrian Airlines avoided Belarusian airspace following a recommendation by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). “It is unclear if Moscow’s retaliation is temporary or signals a more lasting standoff, which could in turn lead to countermeasures against the Russian national carrier Aeroflot,” Daniel Boffey and Luke Harding report for the Guardian. The Kremlin said Friday that it was working to rectify technical issues it says resulted in the flights being grounded. Reuters reporting. AFGHANISTAN Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is “slightly” ahead of schedule, speaking before a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing meant to focus on the $715 billion Pentagon budget being released today. He offered no further details of the pace of the withdrawal. Rebecca Kheel reports for The Hill. The Biden administration is “rapidly” developing plans to evacuate Afghans who worked for the American military ahead of the September deadline, Joint Chiefs Chair Gen Mark Milley said: “not just interpreters but a lot of other people that have worked with the United States.” BBC News reporting. U.S. RELATIONS Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman told Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov that the U.S. has decided not to re-enter the Open Skies Treaty. “The United States regrets that the Treaty on Open Skies has been undermined by Russia’s violations,” the department said. “In concluding its review of the treaty, the United States therefore does not intend to seek to rejoin it, given Russia’s failure to take any actions to return to compliance. Further, Russia’s behavior, including its recent actions with respect to Ukraine, is not that of a partner committed to confidence-building,’” reports AP. If “immediate” progress is not made on the conflict and humanitarian crisis in Tigray then the U.S. “will be imposing additional sanctions,” Assistant Secretary of State Robert Godec said on Thursday, saying the administration is reviewing whether war crimes have been committed. Al Jazeera reporting. “The United States is concerned by recent developments along the international border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, including the detention of several Armenian soldiers by Azerbaijani forces. We call on both sides to urgently and peacefully resolve this incident,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in a statement. “We also continue to call on Azerbaijan to release immediately all prisoners of war and other detainees, and we remind Azerbaijan of its obligations under international humanitarian law to treat all detainees humanely,” he added. Tal Axelrod reports for The Hill. Price’s statement came after six Armenian service members were detained by Azeri troops near the countries’ border. AP reporting. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to travel to Central America next week, attending a meeting in Costa Rica of the Central American Integration System, a regional organization including seven Central American countries as well as the Dominican Republic. “But while a senior State Department official said Thursday that Blinken would meet with top Costa Rican officials, she declined to specify whether any other bilateral meetings had been confirmed,” Karen DeYoung reports for the Washington Post. DOMESTIC DEVELOPMENTS Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have been investigating whether several Ukrainian officials tried influence the 2020 election by spreading unsubstantiated claims of corruption about Biden through a number of conduits, including Rudy Giuliani, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The Justice Department-FBI investigation has not previously been reported and apparently started in the final months of the Trump administration. Giuliani is not a subject of the Brooklyn investigation, although subject to a long-running Manhattan investigation. “At one point in the investigation, the authorities examined a trip Mr. Giuliani took to Europe in December 2019, when he met with several Ukrainians …  At least one of the current and former officials Mr. Giuliani met, a Ukrainian member of parliament named Andriy Derkach, is now a focus of the Brooklyn investigation, the people said,” William K. Rashbaum, Ben Protess, Kenneth P. Vogel and Nicole Hong report for the New York Times. The Manhattan District Attorney is weighing a criminal charge against the Trump Organization known as “little RICO,” a New York law resembling the federal racketeering statute known as RICO, former prosecutors and defense attorneys said. “New York’s enterprise corruption statute … can be applied to money-making businesses alleged to have repeatedly engaged in criminal activity as a way to boost their bottom line … and can be invoked with proof of as few as three crimes involving a business or other enterprise and can carry a prison term of up to 25 years, along with a mandatory minimum of one to three years,” reports Josh Gerstein and Betsey Woodruff Swan for POLITICO. The Pentagon budget will “divest and decommission platforms that are in high demand,” warned Rep. Ken Calvert, the top Republican on the House Appropriations Committee’s defense subpanel during a hearing yesterday with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley. Austin said the budget will spend more on advanced technologies such as hypersonics and artificial intelligence, and divest from “older ships, aircraft, and [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] platforms that demand more maintenance, upkeep and risk than we can afford.” “The testimony came amid friction with Capitol Hill over emerging plans from the Navy to decommission two littoral combat ships and buy only eight vessels, and from the Air Force’s plans to curtail procurement of the C-130 airframe and the MQ-9 Reaper drone. It’s a sign of the difficult politics surrounding divestitures from weapons platforms that carry weight for national security as well the communities where they are made, based and maintained,” Joe Gould reports for Defense News. Attorney General Merrick Garland yesterday directed the Justice Department to expand funding to states and municipalities to help tackle the nation’s growing hate crimes record, and ordered prosecutors to ramp up both criminal and civil investigations into hate incidents. “In a memo to Justice Department employees, Garland said that Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta will assign someone to coordinate and serve as a central “hub” on hate crimes by working with prosecutors, law enforcement and community groups to ensure there are adequate resources to investigate and track hate crimes,” Al Jazeera reporting. Lawyers for a Pentagon police officer charged with two counts of second-degree murder and one count of attempted second-degree murder after fatally shooting two men in a Maryland parking lot said in court yesterday that he was acting in self-defense because the men drove directly at him. David Hall Dixon, 40, appeared in court for a bail hearing, where “prosecutors said … that Dixon, who was off-duty at the time and not in uniform, fired his service weapon only after the men were driving out of the parking lot and did not represent any danger to him.” Dan Morse reports for the Washington Post. Three officers will face charges for second-degree murder and first-degree manslaughter over the killing of Manuel Ellis, the first time in history Washington state has criminally charged police officers for the unlawful use of deadly force. The Washington state attorney general’s office said it “charged Tacoma Police officers Christopher Burbank and Matthew Collins with second-degree murder and officer Timothy Rankine with first-degree manslaughter. The charges were filed by Attorney General Bob Ferguson (D) in Pierce County Superior Court ... The office said the second-degree murder charge for persons with no prior criminal history can carry a standard prison sentence ranging from 10-18 years. The standard sentencing range for the first-degree manslaughter charge with no previous criminal history is 6.5 to 8.5 years,” Aris Folley reports for The Hill. The San Jose shooter who killed nine people was detained and questioned by Customs officers in 2016, according to a Department of Homeland Security memo. Customs and Border Protection found “books about terrorism and fear and manifestos…as well as a black memo book filled with lots of notes about how he hates the VTA,” when arresting Samuel James Cassidy Rachael Levy reports for the Wall Street Journal. JAN. 6 CAPITOL ATTACK Four former Homeland Security secretaries yesterday urged the Senate to “put politics aside and create a bipartisan, independent 9/11-style commission to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol.” The secretaries are Michael Chertoff and Tom Ridge, who served in the George W. Bush administration, and Janet Napolitano and Jeh Johnson, who led the Department of Homeland Security under then-President Obama. Brett Samuels reports for The Hill. The self-proclaimed leader of the “Maga Caravan,” which led a fleet of vehicles to Washington, DC, to a rally held by Trump, has been charged with allegedly being one of the first insurrectionists to assault law enforcement at the Capitol on Jan. 6, the Justice Department announced. “Kenneth Joseph Owen Thomas, 38, of East Liverpool, Ohio, was arrested in Alabama this week for federal charges that include assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers; obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder; and engaging in physical violence on Capitol grounds. Thomas made his initial court appearance in the Northern District of Alabama Wednesday, prosecutors said. He has not entered a plea and information about his attorney was unavailable on Thursday,” report Christina Carrega and Katelyn Polantz for CNN. GLOBAL DEVELOPMENTS The U.N. Security Council unanimously approved an Iraqi request for a U.N. political mission to monitor its October parliamentary elections, as well as U.N. special representative Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert to “provide a strengthened, robust and visible U.N. team, with additional staff, in advance of Iraq’s forthcoming election, to monitor Iraq’s election day with as broad a geographic coverage as possible.” AP reporting. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was re-elected Thursday. “Syria’s parliament speaker, Hammoud Sabbagh, announced the final results from Wednesday’s vote. He said Assad garnered 95.1% of the votes. He said turnout stood at 78.6% of the voters, in an election that lasted for 17 hours on Wednesday with no independent monitors,” AP reports. Assad’s two challengers, Abdullah Salloum Abdullah and Mahmoud Ahmed Mari, gained 1.5% and 3.3% of the vote respectively. BBC News reporting. Somalia’s federal government and leaders of most of its regional states announced an agreement Thursday on the long-delayed national elections. “The agreement laid out a path for parliamentary elections to begin within 60 days, with the selection of the president to follow,” Max Bearak reports for the Washington Post. France “was not an accomplice” in the 1994 Rwandan genocide but ended up siding with Rwanda’s “genocidal regime” and bore an “overwhelming responsibility” in the slide toward the massacres, French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday at the genocide memorial in the Rwanda capital, Kigali. AP reporting. The foreign ministers of Ireland, Hungary, Poland, and Serbia will visit China this weekend, the Chinese foreign ministry said. Reuters reporting. CORONAVIRUS The coronavirus has infected close to 33.22 million and now over 593,000 people in the United States, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Globally, there have been over 168.66 million confirmed coronavirus cases and over 3.507 million deaths. Sergio Hernandez, Sean O’Key, Amanda Watts, Byron Manley and Henrik Pettersson report for CNN.  The Food and Drug Administration and Johnson & Johnson expect to announce as early as next week that contamination problems at coronavirus vaccine plant Emergent Bayvie in Baltimore are resolved, clearing the way for millions of more doses to become available. Thomas M. Burton reports for the Wall Street Journal. President Biden said that he would publicly release in full findings of an intelligence community (IC) review into the origins of Covid-19 that he ordered to be completed within 90 days. Assistant Director of National Intelligence for Strategic Communications Amanda Schoch said in a statement that the IC had coalesced around two likely scenarios of the virus’s origin: that it emerged naturally from contact between humans and infected animals or from a lab accident, but that “the majority of elements within the IC do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other.” Morgan Chalfant reports for The Hill. Most of the broader IC, including the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, take the view that there is not yet sufficient information to draw any conclusions, even with low confidence. “So far, according to three officials, there has been no intercepted Chinese communications that provide any strong evidence of a lab leak. Collecting so-called signals intelligence — electronic communications or phone calls — is notoriously difficult in China,” Julian E. Barnes for the New York Times. Intelligence officials told the White House that they still have large amounts of unexamined evidence to get through which requires additional computer analysis that might provide further insight, according to senior administration officials. “The officials declined to describe the new evidence,” Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger report for the New York Times. “The U.S. does not care about facts and truth at all. Nor is it interested in scientific truth. But instead wants to use the pandemic to politically manipulate and to stigmatize,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian. AP reporting. Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), the top Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, called for “structural” reform to the Centers for Disease Control Prevention’s (CDC) due to “mistakes” the agency made in responding to the coronavirus pandemic. “Structural and cultural reforms at CDC are needed to ensure the organization is modern, nimble, mission-focused, and able to leverage cutting-edge science so that the United States is better prepared for the next threat that will come our way,” Burr wrote in a five-page brief. Tal Axelrod reports for The Hill. A map and analysis of the vaccine roll out across the U.S. is available at the New York Times. A map and analysis of all confirmed cases of the virus in the U.S. is available at the New York Times. U.S. and worldwide maps tracking the spread of the pandemic are available at the Washington Post. A state-by-state guide to lockdown measures and reopenings is provided by the New York Times. Latest updates on the pandemic at the Guardian.

[chippy 342]

 In 2018 Victor Davis Hanson, an American classicist and military historian asked this " How, where, and why has the USA now arrived at the brink of cival war."

He is by far from the only one saying and thinking  this nightmare is on the way, so as terrible as it is,  its no wonder Republican states like Texas are letting people tool up unrestricted. 

Only last week while watching a live animal cam, three Americans started talking about the shit going down in their country. After a while one of the members had to leave and parted with the ominous words of "keep your powder dry guys" to which the others replied by saying they sure will.

Two tribes that despise each other and want to live in a very different America from those on the other side and one half of the population being viciously demonized by the other. 

A civil war becomes almost inevitable.

 

 

 

 

[Vesper 27,324]

The Truly Sinister Message Behind the Right’s Defense of Its Lies

 

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-truly-sinister-message-behind-the-rights-defense-of-its-lies

Earlier this month, a lawyer for the busted Capitol rioter Anthony Antonio offered a remarkable defence for his client: It was Fox News’ fault. After losing his job during the pandemic, his lawyer argued, Antonio spent the next six months watching Fox News “constantly.” In doing so, he developed "Foxitus,” which caused him to believe Donald Trump's “stop the steal” lies and then storm the Capitol. While this defence has garnered loads of media attention for its novelty, a much more cynical courtroom defence involving Fox News and right-wing punditry has been largely overlooked.

That defence, dubbed the “No Reasonable Person” defence, has been made by a string of prominent conservatives, including Sidney Powell, Alex Jones, and Tucker Carlson. It argues that “no reasonable person” would believe the statements they make, which ostensibly gives them the right to say whatever they want—no matter how reckless or untrue. The “No Reasonable Person” defence is significant because it shows that conservative media stars and their networks, and even prominent conservative lawyers, are finally admitting that they are not reliable sources of facts: They are opportunists and entertainers, first and foremost.

Take Sidney Powell, Donald Trump’s former lawyer. In March, Powell sought to dismiss a $1.3 billion defamation suit filed against her by Dominion Voting Systems. Her lawyers argued that “No reasonable person would conclude that the statements [Powell made] were truly statements of fact.” The “statements” the motion referred to were Powell’s claims that Dominion engaged in a widespread conspiracy to rig the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden—by, among other things, electronically switching votes cast for Trump to Biden. Those statements were repeated constantly by Fox News and other right-wing outlets, doing untold damage to our democracy by helping entrench the fallacy that the election was stolen (polls show most Republicans still believe this).

As Orwellian as Powell’s defence sounds—she is a lawyer, after all—it was just the latest attempt by a prominent conservative to use this argument to avoid responsibility for making potentially libellous claims. Given the enormous influence Powell (by representing Trump) and these other conservative stars hold on the Republican electorate, the essence of the argument is jaw-dropping. They are arguing, in a court of law, that they should not be held accountable for their statements because most people should know that their statements are not true. Whether their viewers and listeners are “reasonable” is another matter, but one need only look at Antonio and the Capitol riot to know that ludicrous, baseless statements are often widely believed.

Alex Jones is another example. In April 2017, Jones, the host of InfoWars, was in a heated custody battle with his ex-wife, Kelly. In making her case against Jones, Kelly argued that Jones was "not a stable person” and that his manic rants—which included claims that the Sandy Hook mass shooting and the moon landing were staged—were often overheard by their children (since Jones broadcast from home). But Jones' lawyers argued that his on-air rants should not be taken seriously because he was in fact a "performance artist" who was merely "playing a character." To judge Jones based on his on-air personality, his lawyers argued, would be akin to judging "Jack Nicholson based on his performance as The Joker."

But Jones, of course, is not Jack Nicholson nor some random shock jock with a handful of listeners. His fans consider him a valued source of political information. His website, InfoWars, garners 10 million monthly visits, which is more than some highly respected mainstream outlets receive. In 2015, Donald Trump appeared on Jones’ show and told him that his reputation was “amazing.” Jones even helped fund the rally that occurred before the Capitol riot. So however earnest or disingenuous Jones’ public proclamations, they can’t be disregarded as harmless “performance art.” But the question remains: Does Jones believe what he says?

The answer can be found not only in his custody defence but also in the apologies he’s made. After Jones helped spread the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, for example—which claimed that Hillary Clinton and other Democrats were running a sex ring out of a D.C. pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong—the owner of the pizzeria threatened Jones with a libel suit. Jones not only apologized but retracted his allegations. Then, after families of Sandy Hook victims forced Jones to undergo a sworn deposition, Jones acknowledged that the shooting was real and claimed that he had been suffering from “a form of psychosis” when he denied it.

One must conclude that Jones’ custody defence was accurate: He is a showman and an opportunist and should not be taken seriously. On a broader level, it’s time to admit, once and for all, that this is an apt description of the entire conservative political-media conglomerate. Fewer and fewer serious thought-leaders occupy positions of influence on the right. People like the aforementioned and so many of their colleagues are the ones with the stranglehold on the Republican electorate. And they do not exist to enlighten. They exist to sell a product to a demographic that craves a particular worldview. This is not breaking news, of course, but it’s noteworthy that some of the most influential conservative pundits are finally admitting it—even if it’s being forced out of them in a court of law.

This disingenuousness extends to entire networks, as well. Take One America News, an increasingly influential conservative news channel. For a story published in April, Marty Golingan, a producer at OAN, told The New York Times that he believed his channel’s misinformation helped spark the Capitol riot. Moreover, he claimed that most OAN employees did not believe Trump’s voter fraud claims even though the network frequently promoted them. Checking his claims, the Times interviewed 18 current and former employees and found that 16 of them backed Golingan, agreeing that the channel ran stories that were “misleading, inaccurate, or untrue.” (Twelve OAN employees ultimately quit in the wake of the riot.)

While we expect a measure of hyperbole in our political speech—indeed, the First Amendment allows for wide latitude with such speech—we should not allow that speech to become so unhinged from reality that it undermines Americans’ basic faith in democracy. Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” did just that. In fact, Republicans are increasingly cloaking themselves in the First Amendment to justify all kinds of mendacious, destructive speech, apparently unaware that free speech is not absolute. Just as you can’t yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre, you should not be allowed to yell, over and over on popular media outlets, without evidence and for cynical political purposes, that a voting machine company rigged an election. Because in the end, what’s a worse consequence: a mad rush for the exits in a darkened theatre or an attempted coup that kills five?

In spreading his “Big Lie,” Trump was aided by people like Powell, Jones, Carlson, Rudy Giuliani, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs (these last three are being sued by Smartmatic, another voting systems company) and so many like them. But again, these are entertainers and lackeys, not serious commentators. The evidence—indeed, their own courtroom admissions—is increasingly bearing this out.

One more example bears repeating. In September 2020, a federal judge dismissed a defamation suit against Fox News brought by Karen McDougal, the former Playmate who claimed she had had an affair with Trump. What prompted McDougal to file the suit was Tucker Carlson's on-air claim that she had attempted to extort Trump by alleging the affair. But Fox's lawyers succeeded in getting the suit tossed by arguing that Carlson's statements "are not reasonably understood as being factual." U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil agreed, ruling that "Given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer arrives with an appropriate amount of scepticism about the statements he makes."

Tucker Carlson has been widely mentioned as an early frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. An appropriate amount of scepticism, indeed.

[Vesper 27,324]

The ‘culture wars’ are a symptom, not the cause, of Britain’s malaise

Polling shows that Britain isn’t as divided as the right claims. Our supposedly irreconcilable differences are driven by fiction

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/31/culture-wars-symptom-not-cause-britains-malaise

Boris Johnson in 1999, when he became editor of the Spectator. ‘A journalist by trade, a liar by nature, he is all too familiar with the energising power of some well-placed hyperbole.’ Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

 

It’s often said that Conservatives and the rightwing press are good at stoking divisions. What’s perhaps less acknowledged is that they do so mostly by inventing them: those who campaign for more inclusive policies become “the woke mob” and “the looney left”; those who want students to learn about the darker parts of Britain’s history become “people who hate Britain”; judges and politicians who want to follow basic parliamentary procedures become “enemies of the people”, “saboteurs”, and “traitors”, and so on.

In every case, we’re told that the future of the nation is at stake. The relentlessness of this “culture war” narrative leaves us with the image of an irreconcilable rift at the heart of British society: between liberals obsessed with identity politics who live, literally or spiritually, in “north London”, and sidelined social conservatives who live – or rather, are “left behind” – everywhere else (most emotively in “the red wall”). These fantasy constructions are now the twin pillars of Conservative rhetoric.

 

But this image of an irreconcilably divided nation is just that: an image. A spate of polls have shown that we are not as divided as many would have us think. Views in the so-called red wall are largely consistent with the rest of the country and, nationwide, few people know what either the “culture war” or “wokeness” even mean. Yet the right still pushes this narrative relentlessly, railing against a lefty elite that somehow manages to both wield a hegemonic control over Britain’s culture and be hopelessly out of touch with it. The new rightwing television channel, GB News – one of many new ventures to pitch itself as an urgent corrective – will host a segment called Wokewatch, to illuminate and amplify examples of the loony left’s looniness.

As the sociologist William Davies has written, this is the logic of the culture war: “Identify the most absurd or unreasonable example of your opponents’ worldview; exploit your own media platform to amplify it; articulate an alternative in terms that appear calm and reasonable; and then invite people to choose.” Exaggeration is therefore intrinsic to culture wars: it is a battle waged mostly by straw men.

It’s no surprise that Boris Johnson thrives in this environment: a journalist by trade, a liar by nature, he is all too familiar with the energising power of some well-placed hyperbole. As the Daily Telegraph’s Europe correspondent in the 1990s, Johnson wrote all kinds of wild and made-up provocations about the EU’s regulatory overreach: before Wokewatch there was Brusselswatch. The aim of Johnson’s exaggerations wasn’t any particular political agenda, but rather to stoke animosity. “Everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party,” Johnson recalled in his Desert Island Discs interview for Radio 4 in 2005, “and it really gave me this rather weird sense of power.” As prime minister Johnson pursues the same approach, but his plaything is now the nation at large.

The cynicism and bad faith that underlies so much of the culture war should warn us against one of the dominant tendencies within the vast and burgeoning literature on our polarised times: to blame evolutionary biology and an inherent “tribalist” instinct we share. “The mechanism is evolutionary,” New York Times writer Ezra Klein writes in his recent bestseller, Why We’re Polarised, because “our brains know we need our groups to survive”. But by conjuring up a primordial past as the source of our divisions, we lose sight of all the contemporary forces and strategies that are deliberately designed to inflame and exaggerate our differences. The climate crisis wasn’t destined to be such a divisive issue, for instance – it required, in the words of climatologist Michael Mann, “the most well-funded, well-organised PR campaign in the history of human civilisation”. The Flintstones might not have agreed on everything either, but at least they didn’t have Fox News.

The culture war is in this sense the ultimate fiction: what seems like a battle for the soul of our country is a pantomime where we are conscripted to play both gladiator and spectator and obliged to pick a side. The hope seems to be that, amid all the sparring and theatre, we lose sight of what truly frustrates us: in Britain, that is an increasingly harsh economy, imposed by a callous government, which has left us with the worst wage growth in 200 years, public services that are chronically underfunded and a third of children living in poverty – a misery offset by one of the stingiest welfare systems in the developed world. If society now feels coarser, it’s because it is – but the reason is not a sudden decline in civility.

Yet while the Conservatives, in power for over a decade, are the main architects of this dreary, resentful state of the nation, they are also its main beneficiaries. The Conservatives have always excelled at stoking resentment and redirecting it elsewhere; now is no different: they are clear favourites to win the next election, a record fifth in a row.

So even amid this total and unsettling ascendancy, the Tories will still insist that the blame for Britain’s woes lies elsewhere: with Londoners hoarding all the nation’s wealth, with university professors teaching “cultural Marxism” in their classes, or asylum seekers trying to cross the Channel, or any other phantom threat they can think of. This strategy goes beyond the usual “divide and conquer”. It was said of the Romans and their imperial dominance that they “make a desert and call it peace”. The Tories are trying a different tact: make a desert and call it war.

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The Tory fixation on wokeness is all about division. Labour must build bridges instead

The government’s version of identity politics has proved potent. The only response is to change the nature of the debate

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/25/tories-wokeness-labour-identity-politics-government

 

I never thought I’d miss the 2010s, but I do have some nostalgia for them. At least last decade’s “opposite world” meant what it said: whatever the truth was, ministers would blame the opposite. In the creation of poverty, the culprit was the poor rather than the rich; in the nightmare of Brexit, the problem was remainers rather than leavers; in a runaway climate crisis, the root cause was Extinction Rebellion rather than fossil fuels and all those who’d hitched their finances to them.

It was pretty tedious, but it was preferable to today’s opposite world, in which, despite whatever is important – from Covid rates to customs turmoil – ministers will be trying their level best to talk about what is petty. (A piquant, if tangential, example: Monday’s Daily Telegraph, the little drummer boy of the endless culture war, reported approvingly the idea of an “anti-woke Citizens Advice service”.) They create pantomimes, patriots battling straw men over trivia. This would make no sense if it came from a state in the grip of a crisis, but it makes every sense from a state with only one aim – the survival of its ruling party. To the modern conservative, all government business is party business.

 

A typical explanation is that it’s all distraction: while we’re blaming each other for wokeness or bigotry, that’s all energy not directed at the government. The more intense the debate, the more divisions it opens up within as well as between each side, so there is no oxygen for more productive discussions. This theory is true as far as it goes but, like the one about why planes stay in the air, it’s insufficient. An electorate fighting among itself will always be less challenging to its government – yet governments do not typically rely on disunity and sourness, still less work so hard to create them. The question is, what political capital does all this generate?

In the late 1990s, the sociologist Nancy Fraser described how “cultural recognition” – the recognition of difference, what we used to call identity politics – had displaced “socioeconomic redistribution as the remedy for injustice”. It was Fraser’s aim to try and knit recognition and redistribution back together, since justice required both: there was no point being culturally emancipated if you were still materially oppressed by low wages.

Over four grim Brexit years, William Davies, another sociologist, drew out the evolution of “recognition” politics to the present day. Our concept of different identities had shrunk to one: the “left-behind”, AKA the red wall, previously known as the white working class. All other banners that people might congregate behind – ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality – were collapsed into “metropolitan”, which was then elided with “elite” to become de facto inauthentic. Nobody had to recognise you if you weren’t real. It was a bit of a surprise, to be honest; not to find that I’m a despised elite (I knew that), but that so was my whole postcode.

In terms of the left-behind, which may have been newly prominent in 2016 but wasn’t a new construct, the Labour government had typically been good at redistribution but bad at recognition. This reached its apotheosis in Gordon Brown’s famous “bigoted woman” moment. As gaffes go, it would have passed without remark had it not been seen to contain some essential truth – that he and his predecessor despised the very people they claimed to prioritise.

Three Conservative prime ministers, meanwhile, have been very good at recognition and heartbreakingly bad at redistribution. They have systematically impoverished the very people whose worldview they say they champion. Their failure to redistribute needs little analysis: they don’t do it because they choose not to.

Yet this quest for identity-building issues – patriotism, British exceptionalism, nostalgia, monoculturalism – is much more than a simple balancing act: “Here, have this orgy of flag-waving in lieu of liveable sick pay.” It has proved extremely useful to them in neutralising the Labour party, which for more than 10 years has been unable to find solid ground on this matter.

Successive Labour leaders have essayed the acts of recognition that focus groups have told them were required, and either failed quietly, by shuffling away their inconvenient points of difference, or failed explosively – Ed Miliband’s “curbs on immigration” mug, Jeremy Corbyn’s bungled attempt to whip for abstention on a really ugly immigration bill in 2019. The problem is not that they disappoint their beloved liberal elite, but rather that nobody believes them; nobody ever bought that Miliband was anti-immigration, or that Corbyn supported Brexit, or that Keir Starmer has a union flag in his kitchen. If they’re not who they say they are, who on earth are they? They defy definition, and the blurring effect follows them even when they exit enemy territory to talk about the NHS or regional inequality, so that a soft Tory like Jeremy Hunt can sound more convincing on social care than any given Labour MP.

The Conservatives’ culture wars, as boring as they are, have been magnificently effective, partly because they are agile. The current fixation on “wokeness” is an adaptation to the fact that “elitism” as an idea was beginning to fray. Labour cannot carry on surrendering to a Tory version of recognition which will always shape-shift on demand, but nor can it go back to ignoring recognition altogether.

Instead, Labour needs to attack the foundational myth: the Conservatives haven’t done anything complicated; they have merely characterised the red wall exclusively by those features with which all the other walls – the youth wall, the tartan wall, the metropolitan wall – could not possibly agree. But there are other issues on which these constituencies would agree, ideas that may sound economic but actually form the cornerstone of identities: that one ought, for instance, to be able to sustain oneself with dignity and without hardship by working. This has much higher salience than what “woke” does or doesn’t mean. There is opportunity in the sheer silliness of the current debate for Labour to start building their red bridge.

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London is being scapegoated to boost the Tories’ ‘levelling up’ agenda

It may be electorally useful to portray the capital as an enclave of privilege – but for most people in the city, that’s just not true

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/30/london-scapegoated-tories-levelling-up-agenda-capital-privilege

The Chicksand Estate in Tower Hamlets: ‘[In terms of] housing poverty … London is a disaster zone.’ Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

 

It’s fashionable to demonise London as everything from pampered and out of touch to an anti-British “enemy within” that actively keeps the rest of the country down. In this narrative, Labour has been pushed back to the supposedly privileged “metro-liberal” cities – with none more privileged, metropolitan or liberal than the UK capital.

But the notion of London as a city bathing in its own privilege is a ridiculous oversimplification. Tell it, for instance, to the six households from Grenfell Tower who are still stuck in temporary accommodation, four years on from the catastrophic fire, a lethal product of administrative corruption, ignorance and incompetence.

 

Even so, such narratives are likely to intensify in the wake of this month’s local elections, with the political right glorying in its claimed role as the new tribune of “left behind” areas, and the government pushing ahead with its vaguely defined “levelling up” agenda.

Since the end of the second world war, government attitudes to regional inequality have tended to mirror their approach to inequality more broadly – be it postwar Labour’s top-down redistribution, Thatcher’s inegalitarian neoliberalism, or Blairite redistribution by skimming the proceeds of growth.

Boris Johnson and members of his government seem likely to depart from that. Their attitudes to regional inequality sit uncomfortably with some of their other values.

Across large areas of policy, the old Tory instincts prevail. Ministers recently insisted, for instance, that the £20 uplift to universal credit must be withdrawn because “we need to try to get people into work” – implying that without the whip of financial hardship, the unemployed will just sit around on their backsides.

Similarly, the government seems more interested in downplaying or even redefining racial inequality than actually tackling it, as evidenced by the botched Sewell report. Even with socioeconomic inequality, which the government is very keen to contrast with racial inequality as being an Actual Problem, its focus is on the schooling of white working-class boys. Why? Because it sees the government’s role as limited to creating equality of opportunity through the education system. Once those white working-class boys are white working-class men, it’s time to cut their entitlement to benefits.

But with regional inequality it’s different. The government acknowledges it rather than denies it, highlights it rather than downplays it, and promises to shower economically “left behind” areas with taxpayer largesse – especially if those areas vote Tory. Ministers would not now dream of telling the people of Darlington to get on their bikes and look for work; instead the Treasury is getting on its bike and looking for Darlington. Levelling up implies not equality of opportunity but equality of outcome, a historically leftwing approach to inequality that the Tories continue to eschew elsewhere.

Much of this is electoral expediency – ministers follow the marginals, much as they did when the key marginals were in the home counties. But there is also a legitimacy the Tories are willing to grant to regional grievances that they won’t to others. Brexit, after all, descended into a battle of legitimacy based on supposed authenticity – the “industrial” north is considered authentically British, its concerns legitimate; London is deemed inauthentic, and its migrant communities foreign.

Inequality is a power relationship, and in this regional inequality frame London is cast as having the power. Whether or not this is true, there is a difference between a centre of power and the people who live there. The official measure of geographical deprivation – the Indices of Multiple Deprivation – underplays poverty in London by using a formula that attaches far more weight to unemployment measures, where London has scored well in recent years, than to housing poverty, where London is a disaster zone.

But even with unemployment, London is now struggling. The city’s boroughs, hit by the shift to working from home and the enforced closure of the culture and hospitality sectors, have seen some of the biggest rises in unemployment, with universal credit claims from unemployed people trebling in Brent and Newham between February 2020 and March 2021.

In fact, of the 20 British local authorities with the highest proportion of working-age people claiming universal credit while out of work, six are now in London – before the pandemic, none were. More than half the boroughs in London are above Darlington in the table. Islington is worse hit than Coventry, Boston and Bridgend. Meanwhile, job creation in the capital appears to be lower relative to pre-Covid times than any other region or country of the UK.

London’s unemployment will undoubtedly end up concentrated among young black people. Figures published this month show unemployment rising fastest among ethnic minorities, with one in 10 black, Asian and minority ethnic women unemployed in the first quarter of this year. Before the pandemic, unemployment was higher among black people than other ethnic groups.

This leaves London at the confluence of a number of pernicious political trends. First, it is an easy target for the Tories, the capital caricatured as elite and out of touch, and resented as a beacon of privilege in other parts of the country. Deborah Mattinson’s depressing book, Beyond the Red Wall, showed that for many of the “red wall” voters in her focus groups, levelling up is a zero-sum game – London must suffer for other regions to prosper.

Second, the Covid-era increase in public empathy for benefit claimants may not last – particularly regarding those who are out of work. The context matters – in this case being the widely accepted difficulty of finding work during the pandemic and the public health imperative to stay home. As Britain unlocks and the economy recovers, that context will change rapidly.

Finally, there is the racial element. When they’re not portraying it as the home of a gilded, woke elite, London’s rightwing detractors cast it as full of violent black criminals or swarming with Muslim radicals. In a country whose government is trying to downplay the prevalence of racism and undermine the concepts of institutional and structural racism, unemployment among young black Londoners may provoke limited empathy among the public at large.

The fact that Shaun Bailey, the Conservative candidate for London mayor, was not totally humiliated in the election may at least convince Tory HQ that the capital is not a city lost to it in the long term. But even that could play out a number of ways. Yes, the Conservatives could ditch the metro-liberal bashing and try to actually win those voters over – but equally they could double down, ramping up the culture wars to whip up the white, more Brexity suburbs.

The Tories routinely seek scapegoats for their own failings – recently they have used vaccine refusal to shift blame for the spread of Covid variants. If London is hit by long-term unemployment as a kind of economic long Covid, it can expect little sympathy from the media or the wider public. A government with a genuine interest in tackling inequality would provide the necessary support regardless. That is not this government.

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Here is video of former general and National Security Advisor Mike Flynn calling for a Myanmar-like coup to replace the sitting U.S. president with Donald Trump. The talk of war is very real.

 

 

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Roflmaooooo