James.galbraith

Residents of Arizona and Georgia will be the first to try out a new kind of biometric ID system.

Driver’s licenses stored on our phones are not too far down the road.

Residents of Arizona and Georgia will soon be able to use their iPhones and Apple Watches as digital driver’s licenses or ID cards. People living in Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, Iowa, Utah, and Connecticut will get the feature next. Meanwhile, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is going to designate lanes at specific airports to start processing these new digital IDs in order to clear people to travel.

When residents add their state ID to their Wallet, Apple explained in a Wednesday press release, they’ll have to send a picture of their card and a photo of their faces, and they’ll also have to “complete a series of facial and head movements during the setup process.” It’s then up to the states to verify the ID before people can use them. In effect, this system appears to be a new form of government-supported biometric ID verification that goes beyond a regular photo in a process that potentially provides new data to state governments as well as to Apple.

At the new TSA lanes, for example, Apple users will be able to tap their iPhones or Apple Watches to an identity reader. They will then be shown the information being requested by the TSA and authorize their devices to send that data to the TSA by using Face ID or Touch ID. This, Apple says, “ensures that just the required information is shared and only the person who added the driver’s license or state ID to the device can present it.” The company added, “Users do not need to unlock, show, or hand over their device to present their ID.”

Apple is not not the only one rolling out digital driver’s licenses in the United States. New York State is working with IBM on the possibility of expanding its Excelsior Pass vaccine passport system to include driver’s licenses, according to a New York Times report. The federal government is also on board with the concept. In April, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it was looking for input on upcoming rules for mobile digital driver’s licenses.

But are digital IDs a good thing? From a privacy and security perspective, it’s unclear — but they also seem to be inevitable.

The pandemic has helped some people get more comfortable with storing personal information on their phones, which might explain why states and tech companies are forging ahead with the idea of digital driver’s licenses. These efforts are flanked by an ongoing and highly polarizing debate over digital vaccine passports, which provide people with an easy way to prove they’ve been inoculated so that they can do things like board a plane or go to a concert. Several states, including Florida and Texas, have banned or restricted vaccine passports, which suggests that some Americans still are not comfortable storing certain highly personal information on their phones.

Though the technology that powers them is similar in many ways, digital driver’s licenses are not the same thing as vaccine passports, as health records aren’t necessarily involved. Many of the plans and proposals being considered — including Apple’s imminent digital driver’s license system — simply call for a secure, verifiable way to store all the information that’s currently on your physical driver’s license on your phone. Proponents of these digital state identification systems say this tech will make it more convenient to show your ID and will give people more control over their information. Privacy and civil liberties advocates warn that normalizing carrying identification cards on our phones could have very bad consequences, including endangering our digital privacy.

Despite apparent support on the state and federal level, some have sounded the alarm on potential problems with digital IDs. In May, the American Civil Liberties Union released a detailed report raising issues about a digital state ID system, including concerns about police access to users’ phones, privacy, and surveillance risks, and the possibility that people will one day be coerced into downloading government apps. The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project also obtained a contract revealing that the state of New York has bigger plans for its Excelsior Pass than it initially disclosed, which could reveal the risks of similar digital ID programs.

“It’s hard to trust the claim from officials that these apps are only going to do X or Y,” Albert Fox Cahn, an attorney at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, warned in June, pointing to the potential expansion of the Excelsior Pass. “We see this clear pattern of them being installed for one purpose and then expanded for another.”

Completely digital wallets are just around the corner

The arrival of digital IDs shows how tech companies increasingly want to be involved in all the things you do with your physical wallet. Both iPhone and Android users can already store credit cards, plane tickets, and event tickets in digital wallets. Now, with the impending introduction of digital driver’s licenses, Apple is getting closer to making your physical wallet completely obsolete.

“To be fully free of your physical ID, there’s one more thing we need to bring to iPhone, and that’s your ID. So we’re bringing identity cards to Apple Wallet,” said Apple Vice President Jennifer Bailey at the company’s developer conference on June 7. “It’s that easy! Your ID information is now in Wallet.”

The federal government appears to support the idea. While the DHS is establishing new standards for the technology that powers digital IDs, the TSA is already working with Apple to accept a version of an iPhone-based digital ID that can be used in airports. Several states had previously laid the groundwork and rolling out digital driver’s licenses that could work with Apple Wallet (states are generally responsible for issuing ID cards in the US). In a statement on Wednesday, Bailey said that Apple was in communication with other states and that the company was “working to offer this nationwide in the future.”

Apple isn’t the first or only major tech company trying to bring digital IDs to smartphones. Google has also been working on a system for a digital driver’s license, and last fall, the company detailed new privacy and security standards for developers to handle identity documents on mobile devices. IBM has also been researching digital driver’s licenses and expressed enthusiasm for how they might rely on blockchain technology.

A French security company called Idemia has already launched digital IDs in partnership with several US states, including Arizona and Oklahoma. The company argues that digital IDs make it easier to quickly authenticate someone’s identity, while also allowing a person to share less of their personal information. With an app, for instance, users can opt to just share their age with someone verifying that someone is old enough to buy alcohol without also sharing their address, Idemia explains on its website.

The technology behind digital IDs is inevitably not dissimilar to the tech behind vaccine passports. Opponents to vaccine passports, however, have argued that requiring detailed health information to enter businesses and other public areas hurts people’s privacy and liberty. Nevertheless, some states that have banned vaccine passports are charging ahead with digital driver’s licenses.

In Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has banned vaccine passports, the DMV is expected to launch its mobile state ID system soon, and in Texas, whose state legislature has restricted the use of vaccine passports, lawmakers are considering a pilot program for digital driver’s licenses. Iowa, which has also limited the use of vaccine passports, also plans to launch a mobile ID system later this year. In Nevada, where vaccine passports remain a contentious issue, Gov. Steve Sisolak in May formally signed off on digital licenses, and the DMV says they could arrive within just a few years.

In any case, it’s clear that residents of several states will soon be able to store their driver’s license on their phone. What remains unclear is whether we’re headed for a country where there are 50 different digital driver’s licenses and 50 different opportunities for issues and problems.

Update, September 1, 2021: This piece has been updated with new information about how Apple’s digital state ID would work, including which states would use the system first.

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Senate Republicans successfully blocked Democrats’ bill to narrow the gender wage gap Tuesday in the party’s second use of the filibuster to block majority-backed legislation.

The Paycheck Fairness Act would require employers to demonstrate that any gap in pay between a man and a woman was due to job performance rather than gender.

It would also bar employers from retaliating against workers for sharing salary information and from inquiring into or taking into consideration an employee’s wage history. Another provision would authorize the creation of a grant program that would train women on salary negotiations and require public education regarding wage discrimination, among other things.

“We're hearing about how women are not returning to the market right now because of a number of reasons, including that they just aren't getting paid enough to pay for child care and the other challenges they have,” Senate HELP Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the bill’s Senate sponsor, told POLITICO. “So if we want our economy to grow, we need to pay women what they're worth.”

The bill, voted down 49-50, would have required 60 votes to advance.

Most GOP lawmakers oppose the measure, which they say is redundant and a burden on employers. Gender pay discrimination is already illegal, they point out.

“I don’t think it’s a good bill,” Sen. Richard Burr (N.C.), the top Republican on the Senate HELP Committee, told POLITICO. “We have three statutes on the books that don’t allow pay discrepancy today. We need a fourth one?”

They also worry the language could open up businesses to frivolous lawsuits.

The bill would be “exploiting the cause of pay fairness to send a windfall to trial lawyers,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor Monday.

Women’s annual earnings were 82 percent of their male counterparts’ in 2020, according to the Labor Department. That gap widens dramatically by race: Black and Latina women holding a bachelor’s degree take home 65 percent of what white men with the same level of education do.

The pandemic has exacerbated the disparity, with women disproportionately impacted by layoffs, school closures and a child care shortage. As recently as February, women’s labor force participation rate was 56 percent — the same as it was in 1987, according to the Labor Department.

“The economic crisis that we are starting to come out of due to the pandemic has really hurt working women, especially women of color, and [the Paycheck Fairness Act] will really help women today as they try to recover from this pandemic, get back in the workforce and make sure that they are getting equal pay,” Murray said.

“This should not be a partisan bill,” she added. “Any senator who agrees that women deserve to be paid fairly, for the work they do and who wants our families in our economy to fully recover from the economic harm of this pandemic should [have voted] for this legislation.”

The House passed the legislation 217-210 in April. Just one Republican, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), voted in its favor.

The bill doesn’t have a single GOP sponsor in the Senate.

“At this stage of the game, it is a no,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said. “In my state, we’re a right-to-work state. We’re going to have lots of opportunities over the next couple of years to find consensus on different ideas. If you can’t find consensus on these issues, these aren’t going anyplace. Everybody knows that.”

Democrats are seizing on the failed vote as kindling for their push to eliminate the filibuster.

“Senate Republicans’ decision to block the Paycheck Fairness Act is an insult to the millions of women who are doing the same job as their male counterparts for lower pay,” House Education and Labor Chair Bobby Scott (D-Va.) said. “This is further evidence that the U.S. Senate is no longer a functioning legislative body.”

“When something as simple as ‘equal pay for equal work’ cannot break through Republican obstruction, it is obvious something needs to change,” he added.

This isn’t Democrats’ first unsuccessful bid to get the legislation through the upper chamber. After the House first passed the bill in 2019, Murray attempted to bring it to the Senate floor that April by asking unanimous consent. But former Senate HELP Chair Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) objected to the request, stalling the bill.

“The first vote I took in the Senate was for paycheck fairness, and it is far past time for these inequalities to be addressed,” moderate Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said Tuesday. “As an original cosponsor of this legislation I am disappointed that the Senate was unable to pass this much needed legislation, but I will continue the fight for equal pay across the United States.”

ProPublica anonymously obtained billionaires’ tax returns. Combining the data with Forbes’ billionaire wealth estimates, ProPublica calculated a “true tax rate” for America’s 25 richest people:

The results are stark. According to Forbes, those 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, the IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%.

It’s a completely different picture for middle-class Americans, for example, wage earners in their early 40s who have amassed a typical amount of wealth for people their age. From 2014 to 2018, such households saw their net worth expand by about $65,000 after taxes on average, mostly due to the rise in value of their homes. But because the vast bulk of their earnings were salaries, their tax bills were almost as much, nearly $62,000, over that five-year period.

As you might guess, a lot of the disparity has to do with wealth held in unrealized capital gains. The other part is how the ultrawealthy still pay for everything when most of their money is in investments and how that factors into deductions.

Tags: billionaires, money, ProPublica, taxes

It’s probably a good thing that Matt Gaetz keeps getting chastened like this. I don’t want him to get a big(ger) head. I mean, how trashed does your reputation have to be to get turned down by Newsmax? It’s like getting turned away from a North Dakota cockfight over a dress code violation.

But, hey, Gaetz is a special kind of breed. (Sorry for using “Gaetz” and “breed” in the same sentence. I’m still growing and learning as a writer.)

Reuters:

Conservative media outlet Newsmax, a favorite of former President Donald Trump's, rejected embattled Republican U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz's request for a job, a spokesperson for the website said on Monday.

Gaetz contacted Newsmax early this year, a source at the outlet said. That was around the time that news broke Gaetz was the subject of a federal investigation into possible sex trafficking of a minor.

Nice to see that Newsmax draws a line somewhere. They’re all-in on trashing our democracy and propping up Hitler’s least charismatic ass polyp (which has since metastasized into a giant ocher fart golem that can't accept it’s just a fart in the wind), but I guess (allegedly) trafficking underage girls is a bridge too far.

That said, Newsmax has no problem having Gaetz on its shows:

Interviewed in May by Newsmax, Gaetz said: "The anonymous allegations against me range from total distortions of my life to these crazy and wild conspiracy theories that will never be proven, but they always come for the fighters."

The fighters? Is that what you call mocking mask-wearing on the floor of the House in order to undermine public confidence in government health guidance? Fighting? There’s lots of killing involved, but I don’t see a whole lot of “fighting.”

That said, there is plenty of squirming going on.

Gaetz’s BFF and partner-in-grime, Joel Greenberg, recently pleaded guilty to trafficking a 17-year-old girl, and Gaetz is currently under investigation for allegedly paying the same girl for sex. 

Maybe Gaetz thought that having his own Newsmax show would somehow shield him from public scrutiny. That said, he shouldn’t lose all hope. If he beats the rap—he is a powerful white man from a wealthy family, after all—Newsmax will probably offer him a nightly two-hour slot. Assuming he doesn’t want to stay in Congress to … keep doing whatever it is he does.

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Just $12.96 for the pack of 4! Or if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

A bid by Democrats to go after dynastic wealth would also hit some people who'd never be confused for the jet set, and that is causing major headaches for lawmakers.

They want to end a longstanding provision in the tax code that enables the rich to pass assets on to heirs tax free by forgiving capital gains taxes on things like company stock and land when people die.

The trouble is their plan would also hurt other, more average Americans: farmers, small business owners, people who are well off but not extremely wealthy and even a few people who don't necessarily make all that much money.

While they'd be a small share of those affected, those people represent an outsized political problem for Democrats.

“They’re fine catching really high-income people, but they don’t want to catch my Aunt Jo,” says Rick Grafmeyer, a former top tax aide in Congress now at the firm Capitol Tax Partners.

It’s an example of how Democrats will face a whole new set of challenges even if they end negotiations with Republicans and go it alone with their plans for another big-spending package.

Democrats want to fund a big chunk of their spending package by curbing the nearly century-old provision, sometimes called the Angel of Death loophole and technically known by the clunky term "stepped up basis at death." Along with a related plan to raise capital gains rates on millionaires, it is projected to raise more than $300 billion over 10 years.

But the idea is running into intense opposition, with even some Democrats uncomfortable with the proposal. Last week, House Agriculture Chair David Scott (D-Ga.) called the administration’s plan “untenable.”

At issue is a plan to require a lot more people to pay taxes when they die — something only the very wealthy currently have to worry about.

They’re subject to the estate tax, which is a levy on the transfer of wealth to their heirs. Republicans have been loosening the tax for years, which now only kicks in once a single filer has more than $11.7 million in assets. Just a couple thousand taxpayers typically pay it each year.

Democrats are not proposing to tinker with the estate tax, but their bid to end the capital gains exemption would amount to creating a new tax due at death.

Here’s how it would work: Normally, when someone sells an asset, like a stock, they have to pay the capital gains tax on any growth in its value. So if someone sells a stock for $100, and it originally cost them $25, they pay tax on the $75 difference.

But a different set of rules apply when someone dies: the starting point for calculating the tax — known as the “basis” — is increased, or stepped up, to current values. So the heir receiving the stock originally purchased at $25 would only owe taxes on any appreciation beyond its current $100 value.

The provision has been part of the tax code for nearly a century though it is widely considered unfair by tax experts, in part because it can allow the wealthy to escape taxes on huge fortunes.

For instance, if Jeff Bezos were to sell all of his Amazon stock while he is alive, he’d owe taxes on all the appreciation since the founding of the company. But if he simply waits until he dies, that tax would evaporate, even if his heirs sell the stock the next day.

“It’s a loophole for the American aristocracy,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.).

Now, the Biden administration wants to require people to pay taxes on the appreciation of unsold assets when they die.

To avoid hitting average Americans, it would give people a $1 million-per-person exemption, along with a $250,000 per-person housing allowance. Couples would get twice that.

The Treasury Department says fewer than a half-percent of taxpayers would be subject to the tax — a tiny share overall, though still be a big increase compared to the number now subject to the estate tax.

In some ways, it would be a throwback to the 1970s, before Republicans began relaxing the estate tax. In 1976, when the estate tax kicked in when people had assets worth more than $60,000, almost 8 percent of everyone who died paid it. By comparison, fewer than 0.1 percent of decedents today pay the estate tax.

Advocates of Biden's plan got a boost Tuesday when ProPublica reported that Bezos, Tesla Founder Elon Musk and others at the pinnacle of the earnings ladder have paid little or no income taxes even as the value of their unrealized capital gains soared.

To shield itself politically, the administration is proposing special rules for two of the most politically important groups that would be affected by its plan: farmers and small businesses.

Farmers worry about having to pay tax on land that’s been appreciating for decades while small business owners are concerned about being able to hand down their companies to children.

While farms and small businesses would lose the step-up treatment, the administration is proposing to allow them to postpone paying the resulting tax until their business or farm is sold or ceases to be family-owned and operated.

What’s more, they’d then get 15 years to pay off the bill. (Details like which family members would count would be worked out by Congress).

But the influential American Farm Bureau Federation is rejecting the administration’s attempt at compromise — which will put Democrats from rural areas in a tough spot. The National Federation of Independent Business, another group with clout, is similarly opposed.

“No exemption or carve out is better than current law,” says Courtney Titus Brooks, NFIB’s senior manager of federal government relations. Small business owners "would still have a tremendous tax liability hanging over them.”

Those aren’t the only politically sensitive groups that could be hit by the plan.

It could also affect people who are well-to-do but not extremely wealthy. Think of someone who has owned a home for 30 years in a high-cost city like Washington, D.C. If they also have a vacation home and a stock portfolio swelled by the recent runup on Wall Street, they could find themselves on hook for the tax.

“This isn’t just affecting the Jeff Bezos’s of the world or the folks in the Hamptons or the people in Malibu,” said Kenneth Van Leeuwen, who runs Van Leeuwen & Company, a financial planning firm in Princeton, New Jersey.

There would also be a small number of people with incomes below $400,000 who would be subject to the tax — even though the administration has said it won’t raise taxes on people making less than that — because they are sitting on a pile of unrealized capital gains.

It could be someone who never earned more than, say, $80,000 during their working lives, but who purchased shares in their companies through employee stock option programs that have been growing in value for decades. The Tax Policy Center figures 2 percent of decedents who made less than $400,000 could be liable for the tax.

“It seems inevitable that some people with incomes under $400,000 are going to be affected,” said Robert McClelland, a senior fellow with the group.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Treasury official said that would not violate the administration’s pledge because if someone had enough unrealized gains at the time of their death to owe the tax, then that person, by definition, would have made more than $400,000.

Jonathan Blattmachr, a longtime estate tax lawyer who supports Democrats’ plans, says its critics are focusing on the wrong people.

While the tax would technically be paid by the person who died, in reality, he says, it would be borne by their heirs — because they’re the ones who are still alive.

“The person who bought the Tesla stock is never going to pay the tax if he doesn’t sell it during his lifetime — you’re not hurting him,” he said. “It’s the heirs who will pay.”

And he would not feel badly for them.

They are merely “the lucky winners of the sperm lottery — who were born into a wealthy family who will inherit a tremendous amount of money for nothing they did.”

Earlier this week, Democrats in the Texas House broke quorum, preventing a vote on a Texas voting bill that many have referred to as Jim Crow 2.0. The move did more than prevent Texas from becoming the latest state to restrict voting rights based on Trump’s Big Lie, although it certainly did that. It also showed that minority legislators have tools to stop a reckless majority when the stakes are high enough.

In other words, Texas Democrats have demonstrated that a minority that’s actually interested in legislating doesn’t need a “filibuster” to stop an out-of-control majority.

Here are four lessons that Democrats, particularly Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) who claim to want to preserve the Senate filibuster as a way to protect the right of minority legislators, should learn from events in Texas.

First, there is a proper role for a minority caucus to play in preventing an out-of-control majority from abusing its power, but it has nothing to do with an archaic filibuster that lacks accountability. In the weeks prior to breaking quorum, Texas Democrats used every tool at their disposal to engage in the legislative process. They participated on committees, asked questions, encouraged testimony and proposed amendments. On some days and nights, this participation in the process forced them to be present in the chambers until 3:00 or 4:00am.

At times, they even demonstrated they understood the text of the proposed voter suppression bills better than the bills’ sponsors. This was evident when Democratic Rep. Rafael Anchia questioned Republican Rep. Briscoe Cain and informed Cain that the bill’s explicitly stated purpose, “to preserve the purity of the ballot,” was in fact Jim Crow-era language that was designed to prevent Blacks in Texas from voting.

In spite of these efforts, the Republican majority in Texas repeatedly used tactics designed to prevent the minority party from fully engaging. These tactics included releasing versions of bills and the conference committee report with little time for legislators to review what were often significant and lengthy modifications. The final version included a major provision that would have made it easier to overturn election results, even though this provision had not been included earlier in either the House or Senate versions of the bill.

In short, Texas Democrats in the legislature engaged in all the ways that Republicans in the U.S. Senate fail to do, and in ways which the current filibuster rules allow the minority party to avoid. Currently, U.S. senators are not required to debate their positions when they filibuster. They are not even required to be present, let alone cast a vote. Last week, as Republicans filibustered the creation of a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, nine Republicans missed the actual vote.

There should be no confusing the process used by Texas Democrats with that being abused by Senate Republicans. The former is an example of democracy at work; the latter is an example of democracy in decline.

Second, when dealing with an opposition which has proven that it is committed to maintaining its power at all costs, you cannot hold back because of potentially negative consequences in the future. Or to put it another way, senators should not fail to stop bad actors today out of concern that they may act even more badly tomorrow. The strategy of appeasement has never worked.

In the case of Texas, there was concern by some Democratic lawmakers as well as a few activists that a legislative walkout could open the door to a special legislative session, and that any resulting voter suppression bill could be even worse than the version that was ultimately defeated. Indeed, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has already announced his intention to call such a session. Nevertheless, in spite of this potential threat, Texas Democrats decided that it was far better to defeat the current attempt to restrict voting rights and then regroup, even if that is two or three months later.

In so doing, and with millions of voters having been inspired by their actions, they may find themselves in a stronger position to avoid a special session, or to defeat future voter suppression attempts, than had they not taken a stand.

The same applies to the battle over federal voting rights legislation and the demand to end the filibuster. There are those who worry that ending the filibuster will open the door for Republicans to do bad things if and when they regain power. But this concern about future possibilities ignores that fact that Republicans across the country are doing really bad things, particularly on voting rights, right now. It does little good to be overly concerned with future attacks on democracy while we are watching democracy under attack right in front of our eyes.

In fact, the excessive concerns over what Republicans will do if they regain control of Congress runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. These concerns will lead to a paralysis and failure to pass major legislation, and this failure will in turn create the environment for Republican victories. The only way to protect an even-handed voting system is by taking bold action here and now.

Third, there must be a strong relationship between the legislative process and grassroots organizing. While the decision by Democratic legislators to break quorum has received the bulk of the attention in recent days, it should not be forgotten that the stage had been set by months of grassroots organizing ahead of the walkout. Organizations such as the Texas Organizing Project, MOVE Texas and many others had been attending hearings, texting voters and facilitating phone calls to legislators. My organization, Black Voters Matter Fund, along with Fair Fight Action helped provide lessons from our corporate accountability campaign in Georgia, and groups like the Communication Workers of America and Next Generation Action Network led protests outside of AT&T offices.

This has always been the case when it comes to protecting and expanding voting rights in America. There would be no voting rights for women without the suffrage movement, and Lyndon B. Johnson would not have been able to wrangle votes for the 1965 Voting Rights Act if not for the voting rights movement, which in Alabama led to Bloody Sunday and ultimately the Selma to Montgomery March.

Similarly, in order to survive the current attacks on voting rights, legislative and grass-roots activism needs to work together. The U.S. House has begun the legislative process, and hundreds of grassroots groups across the country are joining forces to advocate for federal legislation. From the John Lewis National Day of Action on May 8, to the upcoming Freedom Ride for Voting Rights culminating on June 26 and other actions planned for later this summer, voters and activists are doing our part. But we need help from the White House and from the Senate.

Finally, the Texas example shows that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. Texas Democrats recognized that the current debate over voting rights is already far beyond any traditional disagreements over policy. The current battle is an existential one, as the Big Lie has been buttressed by a million little lies, including the recent Texas Republican claim that an attack on Sunday voting used largely by Black churches was the result of a “typo.”

In contrast, in both the U.S. Senate and, to a lesser extent, in the White House, there is still a sense among some that senators blocking voting rights protections simply need to listen to the better angels of their nature. Even President Joe Biden, who has clearly stated that the wave of voter suppression bills represents an “assault on democracy,” has not quite put the full force of his office behind thwarting that assault. The selection of Vice President Kamala Harris as the point person on passing voting rights is a step in the right direction, but is still a rather traditional approach to what is far from a traditional situation.

If Democrats in Washington, particularly those from West Virginia and Arizona, heed these four lessons, there is still time to pass the For the People Act (H.R.1/S.1), to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act (H.R.4), and cut off ongoing attempts to restrict voting rights at the state level. But if they ignore these lessons, there’s a good chance we will have allowed the U.S. experiment with democracy to be damaged, perhaps fatally.

The white chairwoman of the West Virginia Democratic Party tried to run through the process of approving a drafted state affirmative action plan in less than three minutes. It’s a plan that is already more than four decades late, having been required by the national Democratic Party since 1974, and the first draft included not a single voice from the diverse committee tasked with creating it. State chairwoman Belinda Biafore, who was reportedly hand-picked by Sen. Joe Manchin, pushed for a motion to approve the draft before approving the affirmative action committee at a meeting initially covered by West Virginia Metro News.

Cheri Heflin Callaghan, an entrepreneur and small business advocate in West Virginia, tweeted after the executive committee meeting live-streamed last Thursday that Biafore “steamrolled” Black and brown voices in a “state desperate for leadership.” Democrat Hollis Lewis, who co-chairs the affirmative action committee, called "the treatment and disrespect on display" during the meeting "unconscionable." “As a Black West Virginian, this is a slap in the face,” Lewis said.

Biafore started her introduction of the affirmative action plan during the meeting with an explanation that it’s “customary” for party officers and staffs to create drafts for various committees to consider, and this one was created with a quickly approaching deadline from the rules and bylaw committee in mind. “When we first adopted this plan the affirmative action committee as we know it now was not into place,” Biafore said. “I certainly didn’t expect them to come up with a plan overnight, but again let me stress this is simply a draft.” She said the draft went out to the executive and affirmative action committees on May 28 and she went to the affirmative action committee for feedback last Wednesday. “So the passage of an affirmative action and outreach plan by this executive committee does not prevent further amendments and revisions in the future,” Biafore said. “As a matter of fact we encourage them, and we want to work with them to make it happen, so (...) at this time I’ll entertain a motion to adopt a plan as was presented to you all, and then we’ll open it up for discussion.”

Walt Auvil, another executive committee member, raised what really should have been an obvious point that it makes more sense to establish the affirmative action committee before passing the affirmative action plan. “My point is it defeats the purpose of having an affirmative action committee if they don’t have input on the affirmative action plan,” Auvil said. Teddie Grogan, president of the Ohio County Democratic Party, interjected with: “But we don’t know who these people are. I was hoping that maybe we could have bios.”

Auvil responded: “Well, respectfully none of that matters because it’s not our choice. It’s the affirmative action committee’s choice who they choose.” Former West Virginia Democratic Chairman Pat Maroney described the issue as a matter of putting the cart before the horse and said there can be no affirmative action committee without an affirmative action plan first—an argument that didn’t sit well with multiple participants in the Zoom call and several Democrats that held a press conference after the meeting.

Susan Miley, business manager for the Miley Legal Group, posed a question during the executive committee meeting that seems to perfectly sum up the problem with the Democratic establishment’s approach to change: “Why are white people drafting a plan for Hispanics and Black people? Why?” she asked. Her peers didn’t answer.

Grassroots reformers pushed for two years to get the affirmative action plan requirement passed, and those efforts ended with a memorandum of understanding requiring the state party to update its bylaws to include the plan requirement, according to a press release from Democrat Selina Vickers. Democratic leaders added in the release:

“The newly formed (Affirmative Action) AA committee met for the first time on June 2, 2021. The members received an email from Chair Biafore 5 days before that included a draft AA plan, but also instructed them to not share or discuss it with anyone – not even themselves. In the email, Biafore informed them that the AA Plan would be voted on by the Exec Comm on June 3rd. They were not asked to review or provide input at that time.

On Wednesday night at the AA Committee meeting, Biafore tried a variety of methods to coax them to accept the draft, however, the AA Committee unanimously rejected it. They did, however, start the process for drafting their own plan, as required in the bylaws, with input from all the diversity caucuses that were recently established and chose members to fill at-large positions on the Executive Committee.”

Lewis tweeted after the executive committee meeting: “You cannot claim to ‘include’ someone and then not give merit to their perspective.”

The national Democratic Party denied West Virginia an extension to fulfill the affirmative action plan requirement in a letter last Thursday. Miley, however, said that shouldn’t have prevented the state party from respecting the voices of people of color. “I don’t understand why an arbitrary deadline that we have no control over, that we have no say in whatsoever, and I’m sure has been looming longer than five days — much longer than five days — why all of a sudden that is the deciding factor versus the voices of the people that actually live here, that actually care about this affirmative action plan,” she said.

Kim Felix, another Democrat in the state, said in remarks that later appeared in Metro News that her initial reaction to not one person of color participating in drafting the affirmative action plan was “one of sadness in that young persons like myself and people who identify as people of color have attempted to be proactive and involved and engaged in the Democratic Party.”

“Incidents like what occurred yesterday really signal and send a message to young people that we are not valued, nor are people of diversity welcomed into the party,” Felix said. “It would be my hope that we would be welcomed with open arms. What we’re hoping for today is to signal to the Democratic Party that this can’t continue.”

Watch the state party’s executive committee discussion of the affirmative action plan, starting at the time marker 31:42.

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The dominant performance of Democratic Rep.-elect Melanie Stansbury in last week's special election for New Mexico's 1st Congressional District held some potential midterm strategies for Democrats, but many Republicans are also airing their takeaways, and they basically boil down to one axiom: Trumpism doomed us.

Politico has a totally enjoyable exploration of what went wrong for Republicans after their candidate, state Sen. Mark Moores, lost by a whopping 25 points—a bigger rout than really anyone imagined. As the article noted, when Donald Trump was elected to office in 2016, Republicans were still competitive in the state. GOP Gov. Susana Martinez had recently won reelection, Republicans had gained control of the state House, and Republican Richard Berry was also serving out his second term as Albuquerque’s mayor. Today, Democrats control the governorship and both state legislative chambers by wide margins, along with Albuquerque's mayoral seat. 

Many New Mexico Republicans attribute the state party's declining fortunes to Trump, and the margin by which Moores lost last week's special election is yet another sign of how far the party has fallen since Trump became the GOP’s standard-bearer.

“Nobody’s surprised that Melanie won,” Darren White, a former sheriff of Albuquerque-centered Bernalillo County and the 2008 GOP nominee for the district, told Politico. “I think everybody was somewhat shocked at the margin,” he added.

Overall, turnout was higher than in any of the four other special House elections held this year. But Rod Adair, a GOP consultant who represented a southeast New Mexico state senate seat from 1997 to 2013, marveled that Republicans didn't get more of a boost from Democrats' unified control of Washington. 

“The striking thing about the results is that you would expect, in a special election, for the party opposite the White House to get a little bit of a bump,” Adair said. “It was actually worse.”

In fact, Stansbury didn’t just win the race, she also won Moores' Albuquerque state senate district by several points. 

According to these Republicans, Moores' biggest problem wasn't necessarily his focus on crime and law and order, which didn't get much traction with voters. Rather, he was caught in a Trump pickle. He couldn't afford to totally disavow the Big Lie that the election was stolen or heavily criticize the Jan. 6 insurrection, for example, even though every reality-based voter in the district knew that both were driven by delusional right-wing thinking fomented by Trump.  

During a debate in May, for instance, Moores refused to hold Trump responsible for the Jan. 6 insurrection. “I think everyone deserves, including us, fault for that riot,” he said, noting that he meant “us as a nation.” He did, however, concede that Joe Biden won the election during the debate.

But the state part is now run by Steve Pearce, a Trumper and former Tea Party activist who lost his 2018 gubernatorial bid to Democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham by 14 points. Politico writes:

Following Trump’s loss in November, the state party under Pearce fully embraced the narrative of a stolen election—seeking to impound ballots in Bernalillo County; working with the Trump campaign on a lawsuit against the New Mexico secretary of state that sought to invalidate the results of the election; promoting a meeting of unofficial, Republican-appointed electors at the state capitol on December 14; and supporting the Texas election lawsuit before the Supreme Court.

All these efforts surely thrilled Trump's base, but at the near-total expense of the state GOP retaining any crossover appeal. 

“I think a lot of us—that aren’t saying the election was rigged and that Covid is like the flu, and all the other things that Trump stirred up—are so tired of the Trump message,” said Mark Veteto, a major GOP donor and president of Me-Tex Oil and Gas. “The party’s being ripped down the middle, and I think I’m gonna blame Trump for that,” Veteto added.

Following the GOP's shellacking last week, the party issued an email statement attributing the loss to depressed Republican turnout due to disillusionment over the 2020 election results. “Republican voters were angry from 2020—many questioned election integrity—and stayed home,” said the statement.

Looks like Republicans repeatedly telling their voters that elections are rigged and 2020 was stolen isn't a great motivator for the base, not to mention a nonstarter with many swing voters. The notion that Trumpism alienated swing voters along with depressing GOP turnout is also a best case scenario for Democrats next year. 

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Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson’s Disney+ charm offensive works.

Loki is undoubtedly one of the most compelling characters Marvel has ever created. Played by the perpetually grinning Tom Hiddleston, Loki carried the first two Thor movies and pound-for-pound outshines every Avenger not named Tony Stark or Steve Rogers in the charisma department. He’s also the most memorable villain in all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — and please don’t ask, “What about Thanos?” because while menacing, Thanos couldn’t muster even a whiff of sympathy or compassion from me.

While so many of Marvel’s villains end up being one-shot wonders, Loki stands out not just because he survives past one movie but because he never feels truly evil. Yes, he’s very into alien invasions, turning Earthlings into his servants, and sometimes indirectly hurting his family, but he’s also the product of a terrible childhood during which, because of his true nature (Loki is actually an adopted frost giant), he was never as loved or respected as his Thunder God brother, Thor.

Maybe if he’d experienced a little more love and empathy, he’d be a little less diabolical and horny for backstabbing. MCU history has shown that when push comes to shove and the apocalypse is nigh, he will do the right thing. Love for Loki justifiably runs strong and deep.

Fittingly and finally, Marvel has capitalized on that love and given its most beloved antihero his own TV show. Well, sort of.

Loki is about a specific version of the character who, thanks to some time-meddling Avengers, is temporally displaced from the MCU’s main timeline amid the events of the 2019 blockbuster Avengers: Endgame. The ripple effect of the Avengers’ time-jumping in that film leads to there being two different Lokis — the one who would defend Asgard and die at Thanos’s hand in Avengers: Infinity War, and this one, the one who gets his own TV series on Disney+ to inevitably show us what happens when the character gets a second chance at life with this twist of fate.

Two of Loki’s six hour-long episodes were sent to critics for review ahead of the show’s June 9 debut. Here are some initial thoughts about what feels like a promising new addition to Marvel’s ever-growing collection of movies and television.

Loki is about Loki’s existential crisis

Marvel

Loki is the third television series in Marvel’s very young but super-ambitious Disney+ slate. It follows the weird and stylish WandaVision and the more rigid bromantic dramedy The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and it’s difficult not to compare it to its predecessors.

Loki looks more in line with WandaVision, as the show has a very distinct mood and aesthetic — there are a lot of browns and muted earthy palettes, and the set pieces are purposely anachronistic, placing the show in some distant future that also looks like a sharp office from the 1960s.

Loki also deals heavily in existential emotion and grief, and similar to WandaVision, it juxtaposes those themes with a problem that could spell the end of the world.

Loki takes place in a specific pocket of time sketched out by Avengers: Endgame — and please forgive me, this gets complicated — when the Avengers travel backward in time to 2012 to retrieve the Infinity Stones so they can ultimately defeat Thanos. The heroes deduce that the Infinity Stones were all in New York during the Chitauri invasion and decide to jump back to that particular moment to retrieve them.

Not everything goes to the Avengers’ plan, and the 2012 version of Loki escapes with the Tesseract, which houses one of the Infinity Stones. Instead of pursuing him, the present-day Avengers do one more time jump, and kinda sorta let Loki off the hook. (Also, If you can’t recall the events of Infinity War and Endgame, do not fret; this is all recapped as Loki begins.)

But it turns out Loki isn’t quite in the clear.

Loki reveals that his escape triggers an alert from an almost-omnipotent organization called the Time Variance Authority (TVA for short). The TVA’s job is to maintain the main timeline in the MCU, and events like Loki’s escape are seen as threats because they have the potential to screw up what’s supposed to happen in the main timeline. To be clear, the TVA exists in Marvel’s comic books — but on TV, the secret organization becomes infinitely more useful as a story device to keep the current MCU timeline and all the links between various movies and shows intact. The TVA has the ability to reset time itself and “prune” or dissolve all threats.

Apprehended by the TVA and shown his future death in Infinity War, this Loki falls into a massive existential crisis. Remember, this is a character who has always compensated his internalized feeling of being less-than by searching for and cozying up to power. The TVA is more powerful than anything Loki has ever known because it oversees everything. Thanos, the Infinity Stones, every single apocalypse — it doesn’t happen unless the TVA determines it.

This raises several questions about who’s running the TVA and their own sense of order and morality. I’m sure we’ll learn more about the organization soon enough, but for now, Loki asks what happens to Loki when you take away everything he thought he knew about what drives the universe. Absent his taste for power, is this character good or evil? And could he be heroic and less wicked if given a new purpose?

Loki is also a twisty whodunnit

The show’s other driving force is a whodunnit mystery.

Despite all the powers that the TVA seemingly has at its disposal, the organization is having problems with a killer. Someone has figured out how to track its time jumps, and has gotten really good at murdering members of its strike force, the Minute Men. What’s concerning isn’t just how dangerous this person is, but ultimately what their plan might be for the MCU’s main timeline. And maybe Loki is the key to unlocking this unidentified villain’s plan.

Wow, am I a fan of Owen Wilson now?

Marvel

Similar to my feelings about carrots and celery, I have never had strong opinions on Owen Wilson. He’s been aggressively fine to good in the movies I’ve seen him in, and I haven’t thought about him much, positively or negatively.

Perhaps in its greatest accomplishment, Loki has now changed my perspective on Wilson — for the better!

Wilson plays TVA Agent Mobius, who’s in charge of investigating the recent spate of Minute Men deaths. Wilson plays the character warmly, making him seem a little aloof and maybe a bit in over his head. Compared to Loki’s rakish charisma, Mobius is decidedly unhip, a rule-follower of the bureaucracy that is the TVA. However, there also seems to be something simmering beneath the surface of Mobius’s “aww shucks” facade.

At the core of the character appears to be a lot of frustration and desperation over being stuck, quite literally, in time. Mobius and Loki are both looking for a way out, it seems. That shared desire manifests itself onscreen with Hiddleston’s Loki giving us more of his familiar chin-stroking scheming, while explaining exactly how he’ll outmaneuver the seemingly simple Mobius. Wilson goes along with it, giving his character a seemingly all-too-trusting earnestness. The two play off of each other brilliantly.

Yet Wilson’s portrayal reminds us — with the slightest shift in body language or the smallest sharpening in his face — not to confuse feeling sympathy for his character as weakness.

Loki is full of MCU world-building — for better and for worse

There’s one debate when it comes to Marvel and its slew of movies that I fully believe will endure long after I’ve shuffled off this mortal coil: Is there actually any art to Marvel’s world-building, or is everything Marvel does just another trailer for the next Marvel project?

The studio has spent the past decade or so creating a complex, interconnected world where all of its movies link up with and expand on each other. The events in Avengers: Endgame involved an intricate, self-referential plot centered on plucking Infinity Stones from a specific moment that happens in 2013’s Thor: The Dark World and assembling a vast team of superheroes that are sometimes only connected through end-credits scenes.

Now, with three television series on Disney+, there’s even more stuff that’s connected and growing each branch of the MCU.

Usually, the way any given viewer feels about Marvel’s intricate design hinges on how much that viewer loves Marvel. Fans love the Easter eggs and theorizing how each moment in a specific movie or TV series might play into the bigger picture. Less enthusiastic observers believe this method undercuts the storytelling, that the result is essentially a pile of cogs coming off an assembly line that’s building a profit machine, rather than a collection of artistically interesting films strong enough to stand on their own.

Regardless of how you may feel about that debate, I’m here to report that there’s even more world-building and interconnectedness in Loki. In the first episode alone, there are a few mentions of multiple timelines, the “multiverse” at large, and how the TVA is worried about “madness” that will sink in if the timeline is left uncorrected.

To Marvel fans, this is a huge, flashing sign that the TVA and Loki are connected to the upcoming 2022 movie Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, which will also star Wanda Maximoff a.k.a. the Scarlet Witch. Loki and Doctor Strange had a previous run-in in Thor: Ragnarok, where Strange informed Thor that his brother was a threat to Earth. Wanda, with her newfound ability to manipulate reality that we witnessed in WandaVision, would be someone whom both the TVA and Doctor Strange would keep tabs on. So it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to imagine that Loki, at the conclusion of his television show, would make an appearance alongside Wanda in the Doctor Strange sequel.

And, well, now I’ve gotten way ahead of myself and should say that it’s still possible to enjoy Loki on its own terms — even if Marvel wants you to be thinking ahead.

Loki gets off to a very good start

Marvel

It’s impossible to judge an entire show by two episodes, even if those episodes comprise a third of its season. That said, I had a good feeling about WandaVision after its first three installments, and that show turned out to be pretty well-loved (despite a polarizing season finale). Similarly, I had a lukewarm feeling about The Falcon and the Winter Soldier after one episode, and that series ended up going out with a whimper.

Based on what I’ve seen of Loki so far, the show is off to a great start. I’d even say it’s more promising than WandaVision at the outset: The show’s murder mystery coupled with Hiddleston and Wilson’s chemistry makes me want to watch more. With the time-jumping and the double-crossing and satirical bureaucracy, the show’s writers have a lot to play around with. I also hope that we see more of Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who plays the imposing authority and time judge Ravonna Renslayer, in upcoming episodes.

Anything could happen in Loki’s remaining four episodes, but the show has the makings of a big hit.

Loki starts streaming June 9 on Disney+.

Through omission, the report shows how devoted Republicans are to protecting Donald Trump.

(709): Her pegging playlist is all heavy metal so stay away if you wanna keep your ass intact.

No Democratic legislation beyond reconciliation? Check. Stage set for a 2022 GOP takeover? Check. Thanks Sen. Manchin.

The West Virginia Senator has a way out, if he chooses to take it.

I can not make this stuff up. Although a study shows the federal government gave nearly 100% of former President Donald Trump's trade war bailout to white farmers, Trump allies are suing the U.S. Department of Agriculture claiming reverse discrimination under President Joe Biden’s administration. Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller is listed as a plaintiff in the suit filed on Wednesday in federal court. The complaint is sponsored by America First Legal, a legal group Trump’s former senior advisor Stephen Miller created with other Trump enablers.

It is taking aim at about $5 billion in coronavirus debt relief for Black, Indigenous, and Latino farmers signed into law earlier this year by the president. That relief has yet to reach the farmers it was intended for due to mounting lawsuits against the U.S. Department of Agriculture. White farmers sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture, crying reverse discrimination in April, and the Texas lawsuit builds on the claim, asking a federal judge to stop all aid defining socially disadvantaged as having faced racial or ethnic discrimination. "The Court should declare unconstitutional any statute limiting the benefits of federal programs to 'socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers,'" plaintiffs wrote in the suit. 

The organization also included with the suit a preliminary injunction promised not to force the USDA to “withhold loan forgiveness from minority farmers and ranchers” but to require defendants to “award loan forgiveness to farmers and ranchers without any regard to race." Problem is, the federal government tried the all-farmers-matter approach to subsidies, and Black farmers were repeatedly left out. Trump's Market Facilitation Program (MFP), the largest subsidy source for farmers initiated to help farmers suffering as a result of the country's trade war with China, has “almost exclusively benefitted white men and their families, who appear to be disproportionately upper middle-class or wealthy,” the journalism nonprofit The Counter wrote on July 29, 2019.

“As of today, USDA has distributed more than $8.5 billion to farm operations through the MFP. Of the approximately $8 billion distributed to operations whose owners’ race could be identified, 99.5 percent went to white business owners,” the nonprofit wrote.

Yet somehow, Stephen Miller is arguing it’s his organization launching the “landmark civil rights case.” He added in his statement:

“Farmers and ranchers cannot be excluded from government debt relief programs based solely on their race or ethnicity. This program is not only legally impermissible, it is virulently unconstitutional and morally reprehensible. The stakes in this case could not be higher: the government must not be allowed to use its awesome authorities to punish, harm, exclude, prefer, reward or damage its citizens based upon their race or ethnicity. Therefore, on behalf of its clients, AFL has today filed a motion for both a Preliminary Injunction and Class Certification. The remedy we seek is straightforward: we want these unconstitutional racial exclusions enjoined for a class of all farmers currently excluded from such programs. Everyone should be treated equally under law as the Constitution requires.  AFL will press onward every day in its fight to uphold civil rights and defeat institutional discrimination.”

A federal court ruled last month that ethnic and racial backgrounds can not be considered when determining who would receive aid intended to be prioritized for restauranteurs of color. Cornelius Blanding, executive director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, told NBC News he's worried chopping federal programs for farmers of color would lead to cutting other federal programs intended for people of color. "We're concerned. ... You never know how it's going to go," Blanding said.

Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, said in a statement NBC News obtained that the federal government’s effort to help Black farmers comes after “decades of systemic discrimination and exclusion." "Throughout the 20th century, Black farmers were denied the loans and subsidies available to white farmers, and untold generational wealth has been lost as a result," Morial said.

In a historic class action lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Black farmers successfully laid out years of racial discrimination and settled with the government for more than $1 billion, which was followed by a related settlement earning claimants $1.2 billion in added funding. John Boyd, president of the Black Farmers Association and a fourth-generation farmer, helped lead the charge, he told Al Jazeera. “I called the USDA the last plantation,” Boyd said. “The way that they’ve treated Black farmers, we’ve been degraded and humiliated.”

RELATED: File this under: Big banks are not here to help Black farmers

RELATED: Tracking Biden's promises to Black America: Those we wish he never made and ones we pray he'll keep

RELATED: 'Colored farmers': YouTube host uses unbelievably racist video to critique Biden policy

With the Senate back in session this week after the Memorial Day break, and the House out of session but still working in committees, the usual summer legislative crunch is setting it. Between now and the end of this fiscal year, the Senate has just 48 legislative days scheduled, and that's if you are being ridiculously generous about their work ethic and count Mondays and Fridays.

That's 48 days to do infrastructure, voting rights, LGBTQ rights, equal pay AND budget and debt ceiling. Judging by past and current performance, that's not happening. There are also nominees, some still left over on the executive side as well as judicial nominations, that need to be confirmed. What this means is that along with other reforms we need to see from the Senate—starting with Joe Manchin producing 10 Republicans who will stand beside him and will publicly declare with cameras rolling that they will vote with Democrats on all the stuff that matters—the Senate needs to cancel all the recesses until this stuff gets done.

The House gets to go on recess. After all, they still work. They've sent a bunch of bills over already, and even during this recess are holding hearings and having meetings and doing work. They get to have some breaks. The Senate? The Senate deserves no rest.

Campaign Action

Let's start with the Manchin part of this. This is assuming that if Manchin finally breaks and agrees to do something with the filibuster, like lowering the vote threshold to 55 instead of 60 votes as a possibility, then Kyrsten Sinema won't have his cover and will start thinking about the likelihood that she'll have to face a primary in 2024. But one arrogant, preening, attention-loving asshole at a time.

Biden and Schumer need to have a sit-down with Manchin in which they explain everything they've done thus far to give Republicans a chance to play nice which is a massively frustrating lot, and then they give him a job. Get those 10 Republicans he insists are good people who want to help to say so, publicly. If he can line up those votes, then he gets to help shape legislation. If he doesn't, there won't be any bridges in West Virginia bearing his name.

In the meantime, have that vote on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, the one one Republican is saying she'll support. That one Republican is Alaska's Lisa Murkowski. Let that be filibustered. Let it get another majority vote, maybe 53 or 54 if Susan Collins and Rob Portman and maybe Pat Toomey feel like the need to help Manchin out on this.

Perhaps this group will discover what has been glaringly obvious to the rest of us for months: their real power would come from becoming a swing caucus. Someone in that group must give a damn about accomplishing something while in the Senate.

If they succeeded in support a modification to the filibuster—following the precedence of Manchin's predecessor Robert Byrd—to lowering the threshold to 55 votes, they could hold all the cards. It would not be ideal to give any cards to Republicans, but as it is Manchin has pretty much given them the deck.

If one, say Schumer, wanted to be really Machiavellian about it, he could point out just how much power one Republican, say Murkowski, could have if the filibuster were entirely eliminated, but let's not get greedy. The point now is finding a way to break Manchin's stranglehold and to make him do some damn work.

Taking away his recess is one way to try that. It also just needs to happen. The Senate has got far too much to accomplish to be swanning off for more than half the summer.

On Sunday, Fox News decided not to take advertiser money in order to make a very principled point: The insurrection at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021 wasn’t a big deal. That’s the basic position of both the GOP and conservative media writ large, at this point. Their end game is oligarchy and being the financial and power beneficiaries of that anti-democratic system.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Fox News higher-ups nixed airing a political commercial that highlighted law enforcement’s clashes with rioters and insurgents at the Capitol on that tragic day. Ben Meiselas, co-founder of the liberal MeidasTouch political action committee (PAC), told the Times, “We couldn’t have fathomed in our wildest imaginations that even a Fox News would reject an ad that simply condemns the insurrection, and condemns people who support the insurrection.” It’s hard to read tone and doubly hard to know whether Meiselas is being tongue-in-cheek here or simply naive.

In Fox News’ defense, the short commercial is damning to Republican leadership, face-checking Jan. 6 deniers like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde, and Wisconsin Rep. Ron Johnson. Writing “racist” as a descriptor fits for each of the previous names, though the PAC commercial chooses to stick with their underplaying the seriousness of the Jan. 6, events. It features testimony from different law enforcement personnel recollecting experiences from that fateful day. The advertisement ends with title cards reading “The GOP Betrayed America. We Will Never Forget.”

The fact they want to cancel and censor the voices of law enforcement who bravely guarded the Capitol. It’s the height of hypocrisy, and it’s un-American.

—Ben Meiselas

MeidasTouch booked nearly $185,000 of air time to play the ad on Fox News between June 6 and 15, starting with Chris Wallace’s Sunday show and continuing for seven days on “Fox and Friends” as well as two spots on daytime programs and one more on Wallace’s show next weekend.

The MeidasTouch team points out the hypocrisy of a network like Fox News, which has spent so much time giving lip service to the faux boogeyman of “cancel culture,” in essence canceling this advertisement. “The fact they want to cancel and censor the voices of law enforcement who bravely guarded the Capitol. It’s the height of hypocrisy, and it’s un-American,” Meiselas told the Times. 

It isn’t a surprise that Fox News’ interest in freedom of speech is disingenuous. Their No. 1 interest at this point is amplifying whichever Trump-inspired lie will keep the MAGA rubes shelling out money. And Donald Trump spent a good deal of his time in the most powerful seat in the known worldtrying to censor and cancel any and all dissenting opinions. In fact, Donald Trump’s No. 1 nemesis in regard to free speech was reality and our temporal world.

Fox News’ rejection of the advertisement has given it a longer life, as MeidasTouch has been able to use the Trump-loving network’s stark hypocrisy to very successfully promote the commercial online. The PAC, founded by three brothers, has successfully gotten Fox News’ goat before. During the Georgia runoff, an advertisement made by the PAC highlighting claims of insider trading against former Sen. Kelly Loeffler included Fox News personalities speaking to the charges against the vacuous GOP candidate. Fox News sent a cease and desist letter to the PAC, but MeidasTouch decided to tell the Murdoch crew to shove it. Fox News responded by shutting up and saying nothing.

More recently, the group has targeted Fox News and the GOP’s move toward overt white supremacy and extremism.

So Sen. Joe Manchin has taken his place in the long history of using the filibuster to strip voting rights from Black people. Protecting the right to vote, Manchin wrote in a Charleston Gazette-Mail op-ed, “is a value I share, should never be done in a partisan manner.” Translation: If one party doesn’t want to protect the right to vote, then it should not happen, according to Manchin. 

Manchin declared his opposition to the For the People Act, which includes an array of voting reforms: It would establish automatic voter registration through some federal agencies, same-day voter registration, and online voter registration. It would establish times for in-person early voting, require paper ballots for official records, and provide funding to upgrade election security infrastructure. It would put an end to partisan gerrymandering through nonpartisan redistricting commissions and other means. It would clean up corporate campaign finance. Manchin opposes it, he says, because it’s too partisan—by which logic, Republicans get to decide how Joe Manchin votes.

”The truth, I would argue, is that voting and election reform that is done in a partisan manner will all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen,” Manchin wrote, as Republicans in state after state pass viciously partisan, racist voter suppression laws. And Manchin wrote this to declare his opposition to a bill he cosponsored in 2019. When the For the People Act wasn’t going to get a vote because then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wouldn’t allow it, Manchin was for it. Once it was going to get a vote, he was in self-righteous opposition as if his very opposition didn’t show that he is a dishonest hack.

This is a man who has told us time and time again that he values the traditions of the Senate—he’s just not especially thoughtful about which ones, apparently. The ones used to keep Black people from voting, like the filibuster? Yes. The ones where the party in power can actually get its way? Nope. Manchin watched McConnell twist and manipulate the “traditions” and “norms” of the Senate for years and now he wants us to believe that he thinks comity and bipartisanship can be rescued.

Was this what he was looking for?

Because if it was … Joe, honey, are you really stupid enough to think that’s going to matter in the 2024 campaign? Donald Trump isn’t going to the mat for you, and Senate Republicans and the very same dark money groups you’re protecting by opposing the For the People Act are going to the mat for your Republican opponent. No matter how you vote. The only question is the legacy you leave, and right now, you’re going with enabling racist voter suppression as a legacy.

Meanwhile, Trump continues pushing his Big Lie about a stolen 2020 election, and state-level Republicans are using that lie to shape their voter suppression efforts. And Joe Manchin is effectively signing his name to every bit of that. Never let that fact be obscured. By refusing to take action to reform the filibuster and then end gerrymandering and protect voting access, Manchin is letting Republicans reshape voting rights in this country.

Whether Manchin is just that stupid, just that determined to cash in after leaving the Senate, or just that personally opposed to voting rights, it doesn’t matter. He’s doing what he’s doing.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman on Monday said Sen. Joe Manchin “has become the new Mitch McConnell,” denouncing the West Virginia Democrat for maintaining his support of the legislative filibuster while opposing his party’s expansive election and ethics reform bill.

In an interview on CNN, Bowman (D-N.Y.) invoked past comments by McConnell that cast the Republican Senate leader as a partisan obstructionist to the agendas of former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden.

“Now,” Bowman said, “Joe Manchin is doing everything in his power to stop democracy and to stop our work for the people, the work that the people sent us here to do.”

A spokesperson for Manchin did not immediately return a request for comment on Bowman’s criticism.

The remarks from Bowman — a progressive freshman lawmaker who in 2020 displaced then-Rep. Eliot Engel, a more moderate 16-term incumbent — come after Manchin on Sunday authored an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail announcing he would not back the election reform bill.

In a subsequent interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Manchin described the so-called For the People Act as “the wrong piece of legislation to bring our country together and unite our country,” saying it “would divide us further” as a nation.

Bowman rejected that premise on Monday, asserting that Manchin “is not pushing us closer to bipartisanship. He is doing the work of the Republican Party by being an obstructionist, just like they’ve been since the beginning of Biden’s presidency.”

Bowman’s comparison between Manchin and McConnell referred to the Senate minority leader’s comment to reporters in Kentucky last month that “100 percent of [Republicans’] focus is on stopping this new administration.”

The statement was reminiscent of another McConnell quote from 2010, when he told the National Journal that “the single most important thing [Republicans] want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Manchin’s opposition to the election reform bill — which received the symbolically significant titles “H.R. 1” in the House and “S. 1” in the Senate — deeply imperils the fate of the legislation Democrats had hoped could counter a wave of state-level Republican laws limiting ballot access.

And although Manchin on Sunday restated his support for another voting rights measure named after the late Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), that bill also faces a difficult road to Senate passage.

Further complicating Democrats’ election reform efforts is Manchin’s enduring refusal to abandon the legislative filibuster. In his op-ed on Sunday, Manchin reiterated his support for the 60-vote threshold now in place for most bills.

Former President Donald Trump — who repeatedly urged Senate Republicans to end the filibuster during his time in office, when McConnell was Senate majority leader — praised Manchin on Monday for his position. “He’s doing the right thing, and it’s a very important thing,” Trump said in an interview on Fox Business.

Bowman, however, called the filibuster a “Jim Crow, white supremacist relic.” He also said his office had “reached out to [Manchin] multiple times to engage in conversation around saving and rescuing our democracy,” but that he had “yet to hear back from Sen. Manchin, and this was months ago.”

“It’s easy for us to say what we’re not going to vote for, what we’re not going to do,” Bowman added. “It’s much harder to build a coalition to meet the needs of our democracy.”

At WWDC today, Apple announced an update to its Wallet app that will let you add information from an ID card in certain supported U.S. states. One of the first partners to support the digital identities will be the U.S. Transportation Security Administration. AppleInsider reports: All of the information in Wallet will be stored in a secure and encrypted fashion. Like an actual ID, it will include a person's legal name, date of birth, photo, and Real ID status. In addition to the support for IDs, Apple is also expanding the types of keys that users can add to Wallet. That includes keys to a smart home lock, keys to hotel rooms, and work badges that can be scanned to gain entry to a workplace. For example, Hyatt is rolling out its support for digital keys in Wallet to more than 1,000 properties later in 2021. The company says your license or state ID will be encrypted and stored in the iPhone's secure enclave. It's also working on adding features for unlocking cars from various manufacturers using their ultra-wideband chip (UWB) found in the new iPhones and Apple Watches.

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Android and Windows users will finally be able to join FaceTime calls. From a report: During its WWDC keynote, Apple announced that FaceTime is going to be available on the web so users can call in from Android devices and Windows PCs. The video calling service was previously only available on iOS and Mac devices. Apple is turning FaceTime into a bit more of a Zoom-like video calling service with this update. FaceTime is also going to allow you to grab a link to a scheduled call, so that you can share it with people in advance and join in at the right time.

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"A new kind of COVID-19 vaccine could be available as soon as this summer," reports NPR: It's what's known as a protein subunit vaccine. It works somewhat differently from the current crop of vaccines authorized for use in the U.S. but is based on a well-understood technology and doesn't require special refrigeration. In general, vaccines work by showing people's immune systems something that looks like the virus but really isn't. Consider it an advance warning; if the real virus ever turns up, the immune system is ready to try to squelch it. In the case of the coronavirus, that "something" is one of the proteins in the virus — the spike protein. The vaccines made by Johnson & Johnson, Moderna and Pfizer contain genetic instructions for the spike protein, and it's up to the cells in our bodies to make the protein itself. The first protein subunit COVID-19 vaccine to become available will likely come from the biotech company, Novavax. In contrast to the three vaccines already authorized in the U.S., it contains the spike protein itself — no need to make it, it's already made — along with an adjuvant that enhances the immune system's response, to make the vaccine even more protective. Protein subunit vaccines made this way have been around for a while. There are vaccines on the market for hepatitis B and pertussis based on this technology. And meanwhile, the article points out, there's also another company — the pharmaceutical giant Sanofi — that's also working on its own protein subunit vaccine against the coronavirus.

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Today ZDNet's "Technically Incorrect" columnist Chris Matyszczyk discussed a new pop-up message that's now appearing in Windows 10's notification center. It's warning Windows users that "Microsoft recommends different browser settings. Want to change them?" The notification adds that you'll get "Search that gives you back time and money." And "fast and secure search results with Bing." Oh, yes. Bing, the MySpace to Google's Facebook, is still being pushed. I learned that this Bing-pushing is pushing Windows users' buttons. There's a little Reddit thread where you'll see laments such as: "You're not the first to have this Microsoft Annoyance. Apparently, there are thousands in front of you." The most poignant, perhaps, was this: "Miserably I get this despite using Edge AND having Bing set as my default search engine... (the latter of which for Microsoft Rewards). I think the 'problem' is that not ALL of my browsers had Bing as the default search engine? Which is ridiculous because I never use Chrome or Firefox anyway. But after clicking the popup, it ludicrously opened up all my browsers...." What's most distressing is the lack of any attempt at charm or humor in these notifications. Are they all written by engineers? Or robots, perhaps...? Perhaps Microsoft believes that irritation works. Perhaps it simply has no better ideas to persuade anyone to try Bing. And really, it's not as if Redmond is alone in pursuing this sort of communication. Why, I've even had Apple notifying me of its angry feelings whenever I open, oh, Microsoft Edge.

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blyat

It's been argued that technology (especially automation) will continue weakening the position of workers. But today the senior economics correspondent for The New York Times argues a "profound shift" happening in America is instead something else. "For the first time in a generation, workers are gaining the upper hand..." Up and down the wage scale, companies are becoming more willing to pay a little more, to train workers, to take chances on people without traditional qualifications, and to show greater flexibility in where and how people work. The erosion of employer power began during the low-unemployment years leading up to the pandemic and, given demographic trends, could persist for years. March had a record number of open positions, according to federal data that goes back to 2000, and workers were voluntarily leaving their jobs at a rate that matches its historical high. Burning Glass Technologies, a firm that analyzes millions of job listings a day, found that the share of postings that say "no experience necessary" is up two-thirds over 2019 levels, while the share of those promising a starting bonus has doubled. People are demanding more money to take a new job. The "reservation wage," as economists call the minimum compensation workers would require, was 19 percent higher for those without a college degree in March than in November 2019, a jump of nearly $10,000 a year, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York... [T]he demographic picture is not becoming any more favorable for employers eager to fill positions. Population growth for Americans between ages 20 and 64 turned negative last year for the first time in the nation's history. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the potential labor force will grow a mere 0.3 to 0.4 percent annually for the remainder of the 2020s; the size of the work force rose an average of 0.8 percent a year from 2000 to 2020. The article describes managers now "being forced to learn how to operate amid labor scarcity... At the high end of the labor market, that can mean workers are more emboldened to leave a job if employers are insufficiently flexible on issues like working from home..." But it also notes a ride-sharing driver who switched to an IBM apprenticeship for becoming a cloud storage engineer, and former Florida nightclub bouncer Alex Lorick, who became an IBM mainframe technician, "part of a deliberate effort by IBM to rethink how it hires and what counts as a qualification for a given job." [IBM] executives concluded that the qualifications for many jobs were unnecessarily demanding. Postings might require applicants to have a bachelor's degree, for example, in jobs that a six-month training course would adequately prepare a person for. "By creating your own dumb barriers, you're actually making your job in the search for talent harder," said Obed Louissaint, IBM's senior vice president for transformation and culture. In working with managers across the company on training initiatives like the one under which Mr. Lorick was hired, "it's about making managers more accountable for mentoring, developing and building talent versus buying talent." "I think something fundamental is changing, and it's been happening for a while, but now it's accelerating," Mr. Louissaint said.

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