Heather Cox Richardson

March 30, 2022 (Wednesday)

CBS News has hired Mick Mulvaney as a paid on-air contributor. In his first official appearance on Tuesday morning to talk about President Joe Biden’s budget proposal, anchor Anne-Marie Green introduced Mulvaney as “a former Office of Management and Budget director,” and said, “So happy to have you here…. You’re the guy to ask about this.”
Mulvaney was a far-right U.S. representative from South Carolina from 2011 to 2017, when he went to work for then-president Trump as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. While in that position, he also took over as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the government organization organized by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) after the financial crisis of 2008. In its first five years, the CFPB recovered about $11.7 billion for about 27 million consumers, but in Congress, Mulvaney introduced legislation to abolish it. At its head, Mulvaney zeroed out the bureau’s budget and did his best to dismantle it.
While retaining his role at the head of the Office of Management and Budget, Mulvaney took on the job of acting White House chief of staff on January 2, 2019. This unprecedented dual role put him in a key place to do an end run around official U.S. diplomats in Ukraine and to set up a back channel to put pressure on newly elected Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce he was launching an investigation into the actions of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.
As director of OMB, Mulvaney okayed the withholding of almost $400 million Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s protection against Russia. In May 2019, he set up “the three amigos,” Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, special envoy Kurt Volker, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, to pressure Zelensky. When the story came out, Mulvaney told the press that Trump had indeed withheld the money to pressure Zelensky to help him cheat in the 2020 election. “I have news for everybody,” he said. “Get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy.” He immediately walked the story back, but there it was.
This event was the basis for Trump’s first impeachment. While Republican senators refused to hold Trump accountable, the Government Accountability Office found that withholding the money was illegal. Ironically, the GAO report came out during Trump’s second impeachment.
And yet, CBS hired Mulvaney and simply introduced him as a former director of the OMB, saying he was the guy to explain Biden’s budget. (After the episode, the CBS standards department reminded staffers they should always identify people with their relevant biographical information.)
Jeremy Barr of the Washington Post tonight revealed that he had reviewed a recording of a phone call in which the co-president of CBS News, Neeraj Khemlani, suggested they had hired Mulvaney to guarantee access to Republican lawmakers. “If you look at some of the people that we’ve been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms,” Khemlani told staff. “A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”
People on the right have talked about a “liberal media” now for a generation. It has come to represent the idea that the media is slanted toward the Democrats. But initially, the phrase meant media based in facts.
In the 1950s, those eager to get rid of the government system instituted by the Democrats during the Great Depression of the 1930s grew frustrated because people liked that system, with its business regulation, basic social safety net, and promotion of infrastructure. In 1951, in “God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” William F. Buckley, Jr., rejected the Enlightenment idea that rigorous debate over facts would lead toward truth; the fondness of a majority of Republicans and Democrats for the newly active national government proved people could not be trusted to know what was best for them. Instead, he called for the exclusion of “bad” ideas like an active government, and for universities to push individualism and Christianity.
Three years later, Buckley and his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, Jr., would divide the world into “Liberals,” by which they meant the majority of Americans from both parties who liked the New Deal government, and “Conservatives” like themselves, who were determined to overturn that government. Movement Conservatives lumped Soviet-style socialism and the New Deal government together.
With its focus on facts, the media, like the universities, was “liberal,” and Movement Conservatives wanted their ideology to be heard. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan’s appointees to the Federal Communications Commission killed the Fairness Doctrine, which had required public media to present issues fairly, and right-wing talk radio took off. In 1996, Australian-born Rupert Murdoch started the Fox News Channel, calling it “fair and balanced” because it presented the Movement Conservative ideology that fact-based media ignored.
Twenty-five years later, that ideology had become so powerful that true believers tried to stop a legitimately elected Democrat from becoming president, and in the year since, their conviction has only become stronger. Now CBS News has hired a member of the administration that urged the attack on our democracy.
“When, oh Lord, when will the elite political media treat the current Republican Party as the threat to the republic that it most obviously is?” asked Charlie Pierce in Esquire.
Here’s what’s at stake: On the one hand, Biden is trying to rebuild the old liberal consensus that used to be shared by people of both parties, instituted by Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt to protect workers from the overreach of their employers and expanded under Republican Dwight Eisenhower to protect civil rights. To this, Biden has focused on those previously marginalized and has added a focus on women and children.
Biden’s new budget, released earlier this week, calls for investment in U.S. families, communities, and infrastructure, the same principles on which the economy has boomed for the past year. The budget also promotes fiscal responsibility by rolling back Trump’s tax cuts on the very wealthy. Biden's signature yesterday on the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, making lynching a federal hate crime in the United States, is the culmination of more than 100 years of work.
Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken are defending democracy against authoritarianism, working to bring together allies around the globe to resist the aggression of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
On the other hand, the Republican Party is working to get rid of the New Deal government. While Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wanted to face the midterms without a platform, Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), who chairs the committee responsible for electing Republican senators, has produced an “11-point plan to rescue America.” It dramatically raises taxes on people who earn less than $100,000, and ends Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act.
With a 6 to 3 majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans have also taken aim at abortion rights and are now talking about ending other civil rights protected by the federal government after 1950: the right to birth control, interracial marriage, and same-sex marriage.
The Republicans have sided with authoritarianism as they back former president Trump and his supporters, over 2,000 of whom stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. This week, federal judge David Carter wrote that it was “more likely than not” that Trump committed a federal crime when he encouraged the attack, and yesterday we learned that there are more than 7 hours of phone records missing from the official White House logs of that day. At The Guardian, Hugo Lowell today reported that Trump made at least one call from the White House that day that should have been on the logs and was not, opening up the possibility that Trump’s people tampered with the phone records.
And while Putin has launched a war of invasion on our democratic ally Ukraine, just yesterday, Trump asked Putin to help him dig up dirt on a political rival, just as he did in 2016.
Voters cannot choose wisely between these two paths unless their news is based in facts. Earlier this week, fact triumphed over ideology on the Fox News Channel, when anchor John Roberts noted that Senator Rick Scott’s 2022 Republican platform calls for raising taxes on most Americans and ending Social Security. Scott said that Roberts was using “a Democrat talking point.” But Roberts stood firm on facts: “It’s in the plan!” he said. “It’s not a Democratic talking point. It’s in the plan!”

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

March 31, 2022 (Thursday)

Today, Judge Mark E. Walker of the Federal District Court in Tallahassee, Florida, struck down much of the new elections law passed by the Florida legislature after the 2020 election. This is the first time a federal court has sought to overrule the recent attempts of Republican-dominated state legislatures to rig the vote, and Walker made thorough work of it.

Four cases were consolidated into one: the League of Women Voters v. Florida Secretary of State Laurel M. Lee, National Republican Senatorial Committee, and Republican National Committee. In his decision, Walker used Florida as a case study to explain how suppressing the Black vote rigs the system in favor of Republicans. His 288-page decision is a frightening portrait of how Republicans are taking control of certain states against the will of voters.

“This case is about our sacred right to vote,” Walker wrote, “won at great cost in blood and treasure. Courts have long recognized that, because “the right to exercise the franchise in a free and unimpaired manner is preservative of other basic civil and political rights, any alleged infringement of the right of citizens to vote must be carefully and meticulously scrutinized.”

While the defendants who wrote Florida’s new election law, SB 90, argued that the changes to voting rules were minor tweaks to avoid voter fraud, the plaintiffs said the new law “runs roughshod over the right to vote, unnecessarily making voting harder for all eligible Floridians, unduly burdening disabled voters, and intentionally targeting minority voters—all to improve the electoral prospects of the party in power.” Walker concluded that “for the most part, Plaintiffs are right,” and notes that “the right to vote, and the V[oting] R[ights] A[ct] particularly, are under siege.”

Walker notes that the issue at stake is not whether the legislators who wrote the new laws are racist, but rather whether race was a factor in the writing of SB 90. Recognizing that few people would today openly admit their racial motivations, he explains that the court needed to look at the circumstances around the passage of SB 90 to determine if race played a role in the law. “Think of it like viewing a pointillist painting, such as Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” Walker wrote. “One dot of paint on the canvas is meaningless, but when thousands of dots are viewed together, they create something recognizable. So too here, one piece of evidence says little, but when all of the evidence is viewed together, a coherent picture emerges.”

Those dots of paint begin with Florida’s “grotesque history of racial discrimination.” After the Civil War, the Reconstruction legislature limited the vote to white men; when Congress insisted that Black men must be able to vote, Florida legislators changed the law to take their vote away little by little.

First, they changed the constitution to let the governor appoint all statewide officeholders; he appointed only white men. Then they required a sort of early voter ID: a voter had to bring a registration certificate to the polls. Finally, in 1888, the lawmakers passed the “Eight Box Law,” requiring that votes for each state office had to be dropped correctly into eight different boxes in order to count, an impossibility for illiterate farmers. It also passed a poll tax. Although all these new laws were neutral on their face, they drastically cut down Black voting. According to election historian J. Morgan Kousser, between 1888 and 1892, Black voting dropped from 62% to 11%.

For those still undaunted, violence sealed the deal. In 1960, Gadsden County had more than 12,000 Black residents old enough to vote, but only seven of them were registered. Not a single Black congress member was elected between 1877 and 1992. Latinos, too, have had trouble voting, largely because of language barriers.

Historic voter suppression is relevant today because differences in political power help to create differences in economic and social power. While 5.4% of White family households are below the poverty line, 15.8% of Black and 17.7% of Latino family households are. The median White household income ($65,149) is 46.7% higher than the Black median household income ($44,412) and about a quarter higher than the Latino median household income ($52,497). In terms of education, 6.9% of the White population has not finished high school, while 15.3% of the Black population and 20.4% of the Latino population have not.

About 4.8% of White households don’t have a car or a truck, while 7.3% of Latino households and 10.4% of Black households lack them, meaning they rely on public transportation at a higher rate than White Americans and so face longer commutes to work. Walker writes that “these disparities are the stark results of a political system that, for well over a century, has overrepresented White Floridians and underrepresented Black and Latino Floridians,” and he notes that 90% of Florida’s White voting age citizens are registered to vote, while only 83% of its Black and 77% of its Latino voting age population is.

Since 2004, White voters in Florida have been likely to vote for Republicans, but Black voters in Florida have favored Democratic candidates for president and governor at an average rate of about 89.7%. (In contrast, Latino voters tend to swing between parties.) Race and politics thus cannot be separated, and since Florida elections tend to be very close, decreasing the Black vote helps the Republican Party. Getting rid of even a few thousand votes can swing an election. It is “easy to see how Republican legislators who harbor no racial animus could be tempted to secure their own position by enacting laws targeting Black voters,” Walker wrote.

And since the days before the 2000 election, they have repeatedly done so. The infamous 2000 voter purge cut ten times as many Black voters as White voters from the rolls that year before victory in the presidential election came down to a few hundred votes in Florida for Republican candidate George W. Bush. Since then, the state has repeatedly purged its rolls, and legitimate Black voters have been disproportionately removed.

Similarly, when Black Floridians began to use early voting, the legislature changed the laws to limit that practice. So, in 2012, Black voters stood in line for as long as 8 hours, and tens of thousands ultimately were unable to cast a vote. In 2018, voters in Florida overwhelmingly favored restoring voting rights to felons who had served their sentences; the legislature promptly passed a law requiring felons to pay all fees they owed to the state before they could vote, a law that, again, affected Black voters more than White ones.

The 2020 election went smoothly in Florida, but the legislature nonetheless pushed through SB 90 to “instill voter confidence.” A text exchange between a legislator and the chair of the Florida Republican Party called this justification into question: they discussed how the standard procedures for absentee ballots were “killing” the Republican Party because the Democrats had so many more absentee voters the Republicans “could not cut down [that] lead” unless the law changed.

The new law makes it harder for voter-registration organizations to sign up voters. It limits the use of drop boxes and voting by mail, pushing people to vote in person, and then forbids giving food and water to the people who will inevitably be waiting in line to vote.

“This Court finds that the Legislature enacted SB 90 to improve the Republican Party’s electoral prospects,” Walker wrote. He required Florida to get the approval of the federal government before trying to make any such changes for the next ten years.

Florida will challenge this decision, and it may well win before the conservative Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit or the current Supreme Court. Republicans have defended their assaults on voting by citing the Constitution’s provision that “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof;” but Walker noted that there is another clause in the Constitution that follows that semicolon. It reads: “but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations….”

see this is what irritates me about her

"Mulvaney was a far-right U.S. representative from South Carolina from 2011 to 2017" from up one post previous

far-right is what every lefty says and far-left is what every righty says

these adjectives need to be curbed

say what's true. quit with the name calling and the essay serving descriptors

Posted by bagchucker on 4/1/2022 10:20:00 AM (view original):
see this is what irritates me about her

"Mulvaney was a far-right U.S. representative from South Carolina from 2011 to 2017" from up one post previous

far-right is what every lefty says and far-left is what every righty says

these adjectives need to be curbed

say what's true. quit with the name calling and the essay serving descriptors

I disagree and think that description of Mulva is completely accurate. He is what he is.

A vulva.

Heather Cox Richardson

April 1, 2022 (Friday)

The March jobs report came out this morning and, once again, it was terrific. The economy added 431,000 jobs in March, and the figures for January and February were revised upward by 95,000. The U.S has added 1.7 million jobs between January and March, and unemployment is near an all-time low of 3.6%. As employment has risen, employers have had to raise wages to get workers. So, wages are up 5.6% for the year that ended in February.
Inflation in the U.S. is the highest it’s been in 40 years at 7.9%, but those high numbers echo other developed countries. In the 19 countries that use the euro, inflation rose by an annual rate of 7.5% in March, the highest level since officials began keeping records for the euro in 1997. Russia’s war on Ukraine, which is driving already high gasoline prices upward, and continuing supply chain problems are keeping inflation numbers high.
“America's economic recovery from the historic shock of the pandemic has been nothing short of extraordinary,” CNN’s Anneken Tappe wrote today. The nation is “on track to recover from the pandemic recession a gobsmacking eight years sooner than it did following the Great Recession.”
These numbers matter not just because they show the U.S. coming out of the pandemic, but because they prove that Biden’s approach to the economy works. The key to this economic recovery was the American Rescue Plan, passed in March 2021 without a single Republican vote, that dedicated $1.9 trillion to helping the economy recover from the pandemic shutdowns. The vote on the American Rescue Plan indicated the dramatic difference in the way Democrats and Republicans believe the economy works.
After the Depression hit, in the 1930s, Democrats argued that the way to build the economy was for the government to make sure that workers and consumers had the resources to buy products and services. Raising wages, providing a basic social safety net, and improving education would enable the “demand side” of the economy to buy the goods that would employ Americans and increase productivity. Democrats regulated businesses, imposing rules on employers, and funded their programs with taxes that fell on Americans according to their ability to pay.
When this system pulled the country out of the Depression and funded the successful military mobilization of World War II, members of both parties embraced it. Once in office, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower called for universal health insurance and backed the massive $26 billion Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 to build an initial 41,000 miles of roads across the United States, an act that provided jobs and infrastructure. To pay for these programs, he supported the high taxes of the war years, with the top marginal income bracket pegged at 91%.
“Our underlying philosophy,” said a Republican under Eisenhower, “is this: if a job has to be done to meet the needs of people, and no one else can do it, then it is a proper function of the federal government.” Americans had, “for the first time in our history, discovered and established the Authentic American Center in politics. This is not a Center in the European sense of an uneasy and precarious mid-point between large and powerful left-wing and right-wing elements of varying degrees of radicalism. It is a Center in the American sense of a common meeting-ground of the great majority of our people on our own issues, against a backdrop of our own history, our own current setting and our own responsibilities for the future.”
But Republicans since the 1980s have rejected that “Authentic American Center” and argued instead that the way to build the economy is by putting the weight of the government on the “supply side.” That is, the government should free up the capital of the wealthy by cutting taxes. Flush with cash, those at the top of society would invest in new industries that would, in turn, hire workers, and all Americans would rise together. Shortly after he took office, President Ronald Reagan launched government support for “supply side economics” with the first of many Republican tax cuts.
But rather than improving the living standards of all Americans, supply side economics never delivered the economic growth it promised. It turned out that tax cuts did not generally get reinvested into factories and innovation, but instead got turned into financial investments that concentrated wealth at the top of the economic ladder. Still, forty years later, Republicans have only hardened in their support for tax cuts. They insist that any government regulation of business, provision of a social safety net, or promotion of infrastructure is “socialism” because it infringes on the “freedom” of Americans to do whatever they wish without government interference.
The conflict between these two visions came to the fore yesterday, when 193 Republicans voted against lowering the copays for insulin, the drug necessary to keep the 30 million Americans who live with diabetes alive. Twelve Republicans joined all the Democrats to pass the bill. The price of insulin has soared in the U.S. in the past 20 years while it has stayed the same in other developed countries. A vial of insulin that cost $21 in 1999 in the U.S. cost $332 in 2019. Currently, insulin costs ten times more in the United States than in any other developed country.
According to the nonprofit academic medical center Mayo Clinic, the cost of insulin has skyrocketed because people need it to live, there is a monopoly on production, there is no regulation of the cost, and there are companies that profit from keeping prices artificially high.
While all drug prices are high, the reasons that pharmaceutical companies have given for the high pricing of other drugs do not apply to insulin. The drug is more than 100 years old, so there are no development costs. The cost is not a result of free market forces, since the jump in cost does not track with inflation. Indeed, insulin operates in a system that is the opposite of the free market: because people need insulin to survive, they cannot simply decide not to buy it if the price gets too high.
According to experts, there are currently only three clear options to bring down the price if the companies won’t. The government could negotiate with pharmaceutical companies on prices, as every other western country does, but the influence of drug companies in Congress makes such a measure hard to pass. We could shift the cost of the high prices onto insurers: employers and the government, which pays for healthcare through Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, and so on. Or we can keep shifting the cost to the consumers.
Democrats wrote a much more sweeping proposal to lower a range of drug costs into the Build Back Better bill that Senate Republicans killed, and say they want to continue to push for the government to be able to negotiate with drug companies. At the same time, they say, we cannot wait any longer to make insulin affordable for the diabetics who need it. So House Democrats and 12 House Republicans have passed a law regulating the cost that consumers—who will die if they don’t get insulin—have to pay for the product. That cap will shift the cost onto insurers, including the government.
The insurance industry opposed the measure, saying it would not actually bring down costs and might create higher premiums as insurers have to cover the costs consumers won’t. Most Republicans opposed the measure, saying it would give the government too much say in healthcare. The Republican members on the House Committee on Ways and Means said it was a “socialist drug pricing scheme from [the Democrats’] failed radical tax and spending spree.”

You’re an ineffectual and ignorant old man slurping the drops from a repugnant liar. That’s it. That’s all.

NOTHING but a pathetic, canadian joke.

Posted by lostnfound74 on 4/2/2022 8:46:00 PM (view original):

Posted by bagchucker on 3/30/2022 11:10:00 AM (view original):
this is so sweet

they got Capone on tax evasion, they got Nixon on the coverup

Trump is impervious to the law

his bluster and his willingness to go bankrupt and his connections to power and money have always got him through

big miscalculation the eight hour gap

he will blame it on a underling or he will say he sent it and the evil democraps lost it on purpose

boy this is some flour in the roux right here though

Trump has been systematically slandered by the Left and the media. HUGE diff between that and Nixon, and Capone.

I believe they will find NOTHING on him, just like the so called Collusion thing with Russia. I think they (China - Russia) actually hacked the voting machines to get Trump OUT of there..

Now they are talking tough, because they know Biden will do NOTHING, because he has nothing between his ears. . and still claims the real crisis is global warming. Right..

Is there one honest man left standing?? I wonder.

BUT feel free to lap up the poison the MSM feeds you.

Hey, doofuss. Ever wonder WHY you are the only honest man "left standing"??

There is NO MSM! There IS a corporate owned media out to make a profit.
Fox IS a part of that.

The person revealing a huge hollow between the ears is revealed when YOU look in a mirror.
The rest of us seem able to discern reality.

You're still confused and think a purely evil wannabe despot is some sort of folk hero.
Which just shows how purely STUPID (meaning lack of wisdom) you really ARE.

Better pray to your maker for some wisdom and discernment. (Do you know what that means?)
Walk in Beauty friend.

“Our underlying philosophy,” said a Republican under Eisenhower, “is this: if a job has to be done to meet the needs of people, and no one else can do it, then it is a proper function of the federal government.”

that's right b*tches

of the people by the people for the people

Heather Cox Richardson

April 4, 2022 (Monday)

Today the Senate Judiciary Committee deadlocked, 11 to 11, on whether to send Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court to the full Senate for a vote. The Democrats can still move the nomination forward through procedural measures, and three Republicans—Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Mitt Romney (R-UT)—have said they will vote for her, so her confirmation is assured (even if Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), who has not yet said how she will vote, votes no).
Jackson is very popular as a nominee: a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that only 27% of Americans oppose her confirmation while 42% support it (31% say they’re not sure what they think).
Many of the Republicans acknowledged that Judge Jackson is highly qualified for the position, but they cannot abide what they call her “activism,” by which they mean her willingness to use the federal government to protect the rights of American citizens within the states. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who is the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, says he opposes Jackson’s confirmation because he disagrees fundamentally with her “views on the role of judges and the role that they should play in our system of government.”
The “originalist” judges who object to the court’s use of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil rights control the court by a vote of 6 to 3. If she is confirmed, Judge Jackson will not change that split. The Republicans are looking to make their vision take over the court entirely.
The hearings for Jackson had Republicans questioning abortion rights, of course, but also the right to birth control, interracial marriage, and gay marriage. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have suggested they would also overturn Gideon v. Wainwright, the 1963 Supreme Court decision that says states must provide defendants with legal counsel. The attacks on Jackson for her time as a public defender—the element of our justice system that guarantees poor people can have lawyers in court—suggest that the right to publicly funded legal counsel, too, is no longer secure.
Ideologically opposed to Jackson, but unable to find real cause for attacking her stellar record, the Republicans have gone after her for what they claim is her lenient sentencing of child pornographers. These claims have been widely dismissed by legal experts as baseless: even a conservative writer for the National Review, who otherwise opposed Jackson, called them “meritless to the point of demagoguery.” But the party doubled down on the lies.
In the Washington Post, Dana Milbank ran the numbers. In the four days of the hearings for Jackson’s nomination, senators on the Judiciary Committee used the words “child porn,” “pornography,” and “pornographer” 165 times. They used some version of “sex” (“sexual assault,” “sex crimes,” and so on) 142 times. They said “pedophile” 15 times and “predators” 13 times, one time more than the Bill of Rights came up. Sometimes the words came from Democrats defending Jackson, but the overwhelming majority of the comments came from Republicans attacking Jackson. That pattern continued today as senators made statements before their votes suggesting that Jackson had done all she could to turn those who commit sex crimes against children loose on the country.
Their attacks worked on their constituents. Before Biden nominated Jackson, when a Yahoo News/YouGov poll asked people to assess Jackson’s qualifications, 57% of Republicans said she was qualified. Only 19% of Republicans (and 11% of all Americans) said she was not qualified. While the hearings made her lose some support across the board, it still left her popular with Democrats and Independents. Republican opinions, though, have changed dramatically. Now just 31% say she’s qualified, and 47% say she’s unqualified.
With their focus on sex crimes against children, Republicans are openly courting the QAnon vote, even though Republican words do not always seem to match their actions. We learned today that Florida governor Ron DeSantis delayed the release of public records involving a Florida state official, Halsey Beshears, who is linked to the underage sex crimes investigation in that state. Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is also under investigation in that case.
The implications of the focus on sex crimes against children are larger than the next election, though. Republicans are increasingly abandoning the party’s position in favor of small government, a position it adopted under Ronald Reagan, and calling for a strong government to enforce right-wing social policies.
In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis on March 28 signed a bill banning kindergarten through third-grade public school teachers from talking about sexual orientation or gender identity, a measure its opponents have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law. The Walt Disney Company, which is the state’s largest employer with 80,000 employees there, didn’t take a position on the bill until finally, under intense pressure from inside the company, Disney’s CEO Bob Chapek came out against the measure and promised the company would donate $5 million to LBGTQ organizations.
DeSantis called Disney’s opposition “radical” and tore into “woke” corporations. He has suggested that the Florida legislature should cancel Disney’s special status in Florida, a status that essentially makes it a local government. Right-wing commentators have cheered him on, eager to use government power to retaliate against companies that bow to popular pressure in favor of Black rights, LGBTQ rights, and so on.
This has pushed them into the camp of authoritarians, and they are using fears of sexual attacks on children to win support for that authoritarianism. When Hungary’s Viktor Orbán won reelection yesterday, columnist Rod Dreher tweeted: “Viktor Orban wins crushing re-election victory. Groomers hardest hit. [Governor Ron DeSantis], you are onto something!”
Pushing Orbán’s voters yesterday was a referendum on the ballot that included questions like: “Do you support the unrestricted exposure of underage children to sexually explicit media content that may affect their development?” DeSantis’s spokesperson Christina Pushaw tweeted: “Love the referendum idea. Wish the USA could do something similar[.]” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene also applauded Orbán’s approach to “sex ed” and tweeted: “Congratulatons* to Viktor Orban on winning a victory well deserved! He’s leading Hungary the right way and we need this in America.”
As soon as his victory was announced—it was a done deal thanks to his manipulation of the mechanics of elections—Orbán reaffirmed his friendship with Russian president Vladimir Putin and took a hit at Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, who is defending his country against Putin’s invasion.
On that same day that Orbán took the side opposed to Zelensky, we learned more about the atrocities that took place in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, where Russian soldiers raped and executed civilians. “You may remember I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal,” President Joe Biden said today. “Well, the truth of the matter is, you saw what happened in Bucha…he is a war criminal.”
Today, the U.S., Europe, and allies prepared more sanctions against Russia, and the U.S. froze currency reserves Russia needs to make payments on its debt, forcing it closer to default.
--
*Again, my misspelling to avoid those balloons.

FAITH / ROGER HELLE

Hatred Sells

Choose to love your enemies rather than hate them. Their hatred blinds them while our love can help them see.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

April 5, 2022 (Tuesday)

Today, former president Barack Obama returned to the White House at President Joe Biden's invitation to talk about the Affordable Care Act (ACA), popularly known as Obamacare. He noted there have been changes in the White House since he left in 2017. For one thing, "[t]here’s a cat running around," he joked, "which I guarantee you [his family’s dogs] Bo and Sunny would have been very unhappy about.”

Obama signed the ACA into law in 2010. Today, 31 million Americans have healthcare coverage thanks to it. They can’t be denied coverage because of preexisting conditions. The ACA has lowered prescription drug costs for 12 million seniors, and it has enabled young people to stay on their parents’ insurance until they’re 26. It’s eliminated lifetime limits on benefits.

Republicans have loathed the ACA since Obama signed it into law in 2010. This is a modern-day stance, by the way: it was actually Republican president Theodore Roosevelt who first proposed universal healthcare at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Republican president Dwight Eisenhower who first tried to muscle such a program into being with the help of the new department created under him: the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which in 1979 became the Department of Health and Human Services. Its declared mission was "improving the health, safety, and well-being of America." In contrast to their forebears, today’s Republicans do not believe the government has such a role to play.

Last month, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) said the Republicans’ goal is to obstruct Biden and the Democrats until they retake power, and then immediately make good on old promises like repealing the ACA. Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has proposed sunsetting all laws after five years and then passing the popular ones again. Since Republicans kill all social welfare bills with the filibuster, it’s not hard to imagine that Scott has the Affordable Care Act in his sights.

Enrollment in healthcare coverage under the ACA is at a record high since Biden took office, since he helped to push enrollment by opening special enrollment periods and dramatically increasing outreach. The law is popular: a poll last month by healthcare analysts Kaiser showed that 55% of Americans like it while 42% do not.

Today, Biden signed an executive order to increase outreach and coverage still further, and to urge Congress to deal with the “family glitch” in the law that determines eligibility for subsidies based on whether the primary enrollee can afford coverage for herself, rather than for her family. Fixing this glitch would lower costs for about 1 million Americans and open up coverage for another 200,000.

Before the signing, Obama, Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris used the ACA to talk about the difference between the two parties.

Harris noted that “the ACA is the most consequential healthcare legislation passed in generations in our country” and that it was more than just a law, it was “a statement of purpose; a statement about the nation we must be, where all people—no matter who they are, where they live, or how much they earn—can access the healthcare they need, no matter the cost.”

She called on Congress to pass legislation that would let Medicare directly negotiate prescription drug prices with pharmaceutical companies (as every other developed country does). With 60 million people enrolled in Medicare, the program would have significant bargaining power to negotiate prices.

The vice president also called on the 12 states refusing to expand Medicaid to do so, enrolling the 4 million people who are now excluded. Acknowledging those people determined to take away abortion rights, she noted that women without medical care during pregnancy are significantly more likely to die than those who do have it.

Obama then explained why the Democrats worked so hard to begin the process of getting healthcare coverage for Americans. “[W]e’re not supposed to do this just to occupy a seat or to hang on to power,” he said. “We’re supposed to do this because it’s making a difference in the lives of the people who sent us here.”

The ACA shows, he said, that “if you are driven by the core idea that, together, we can improve the lives of this generation and the next, and if you’re persistent—if you stay with it and are willing to work through the obstacles and the criticism and continually improve where you fall short, you can make America better—you can have an impact on millions of lives.”

Then Biden took the podium before signing the executive order, adding that passing the ACA was about dignity. It was about the “countless Americans lying in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, wondering, ‘My God—my God, what if I get really sick? What am I going to do? What is my family going to do? Will I lose the house?’ Discussions we had in my house with my dad when he lost his health insurance—’Who’s going to pay for it? Who’s going to take care of my family?’”

He warned that the Republicans want to get rid of the law. “[P]ay very close attention, folks,” he said. “If Republicans have their way, it means 100 million Americans with pre-existing conditions can once again be denied healthcare coverage by their insurance companies. That’s what the law was before Obamacare. In addition, tens of millions of Americans could lose their coverage, including young people who will no longer be able to stay on their parents’ insurance policy to age 26. Premiums are going to go through the roof.”

“Instead of destroying the Affordable Care Act,” he said, “let’s keep building on it.”

Meanwhile, the Republicans continue to double down on the culture wars that whip up their base. By a vote of 70 to 14, the Oklahoma legislature has just passed a Republican bill making it illegal for doctors to perform an abortion unless the patient’s life is in danger. Violating the law carries a punishment of up to 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. There was little discussion of the measure, since lawmakers unexpectedly added it to the agenda Monday night.

Abortion is a constitutional right, defined by the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. It is also popular in the U.S., with about 60% of Americans supporting Roe v. Wade and about 75% believing that abortion access should be between a woman and her doctor. Only 20% say that access should be regulated by law.

Those culture wars are pushing today’s right wing toward authoritarianism as they seek to enforce their views on the rest of the country.

Today, as we learned of more atrocities by Russian troops in Ukraine, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan resolution that called on the U.S. government to uphold the founding democratic principles of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO): “individual liberty, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.” Since those values “face external threats from authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China and internal threats from proponents of illiberalism,” and since NATO countries have called for a recommitment to the founding values of the alliance, the resolution supports the establishment of a Center for Democratic Resilience within NATO headquarters. The resolution reaffirmed the House’s “unequivocal support” for NATO.

The resolution was introduced by Gerry Connolly (D-VA), who sits on both the Foreign Affairs and Government Oversight Committees, and had 35 other cosponsors from both parties. The vote in favor was bipartisan, with 219 Democrats and 142 Republicans voting yes. After all, what’s there to oppose in a nod to democratic values and diplomacy, when Ukraine is locked in a deadly battle to defend itself against an invasion and brutal occupation by Russian forces directed by authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin?

Sixty-three Republicans—those who tend to support former president Trump—voted against the resolution.