James.galbraith

There’s a big drought menacing the Western U.S. these days. It’s gotten so bad that the governor of Utah has decided to get on the big red phone to Yahweh so that He might open the sluices in the terranean firmament and bless our lands with the precious, life-giving water He’s been withholding for only He knows what reason.

Even if I weren’t an agnostic of long standing, I’d be skeptical of these kinds of intercessional Hail Mary ducks that politicians like to throw around in lieu of effective action.

The Hill:

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) is asking residents to join him in a "weekend of prayer" for rain amid a statewide drought emergency.

“By praying collaboratively and collectively, asking God or whatever higher power you believe in for more rain, we may be able to escape the deadliest aspects of the continuing drought,” Cox said in a video on Friday.

...

“I’ve already asked all Utahns to conserve water by avoiding long showers, fixing leaky faucets, and planting water-wise landscapes. But I fear those efforts alone won’t be enough to protect us,” Cox said in a press release.

Interesting that he says “God or whatever higher power.” I suppose, being an elected representative for all Utahns, he kind of has to say that. But I really don’t know how he’d react if my burnt offerings go to Ba’al … and Ba’al later claims credit for the inevitable deluge. 

That said, there’s little doubt that Cox is talking about the Judeo-Christian God, and that’s fine, I guess—even though it might actually be more effective in the long run to ask Utahns to pray for books on climate change to fall from the heavens and down random chimneys. (Give a man rain, he’ll drink for a day; teach a man to stop climate change, he’ll be turned down for meetings with Republican politicians across the country until the planet is an unlivable hellscape with a few Taco Bell Expresses scattered here and there.)

Of course, it’s doubtful, to say the least, that Cox’s prayers will do any good. I imagine God has earmarked most of the United States’ water ration for flooding “wicked” cities. 

Twitter had some thoughts:

Of course, you may be thinking, “Aw, come on. Longstanding weather patterns can’t turn on a dime. He’s doing what he can. You need time to implement climate change mitigation strategies.”

And that would make sense if 1) Republicans were allowing us to implement even the most basic climate change mitigation strategies and 2) these stupid rain dances hadn’t already been going on for years now.

From a February 2014 Fox News story:

Religious leaders of multiple faiths and farmers in Nevada and Utah turned to prayer this weekend for help easing severe drought conditions gripping the West.

The plea to above comes weeks after the federal government declared parts of 11 parched Western and Central states natural disaster areas.

Faith leaders asked for divine intervention during a special multifaith service Saturday at a Mormon church in the Reno suburb of Sparks. And on Sunday, the Utah Farm Bureau Federation asked the public to join in prayer and fasting for snow and rain for livestock and crops as part of its Harvesting Faith event.

That was, let’s see, seven years ago. We can sit on our hands for another seven years, assuming those hands won’t be a grotesque amalgam of phalanges ‘n’ blisters by then, or we can actually do something other than whisper into the wind.

Then again, state governors have to appear to be doing something in the face of preventable disasters, and since action on climate change is effectively off the table, this is what they’re left with.

Sounds good to their constituents, anyway. I guess that’s all that really matters, huh?

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.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

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Here’s a headline for you. From the Associated Press: "Military leaders wary of changes in sexual assault policy." 

You don’t say! After years and years of admitting under pressure that yes, they have a sexual assault problem, but insisting that no, the system does not need to change to respond to that problem, military leaders … still don’t want changes. Nobody could possibly have predicted this (total lack of) development!

Here’s what’s going on: Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin created an independent review commission on military sexual assault, and that commission recommended moving decisions about sexual assault prosecutions out of the military chain of command and into the hands of a civilian-led Office of the Chief Special Victim Prosecutor—a similar policy to one advocates have pushed for for years, and as Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has repeatedly introduced legislation to do—and some military leaders are pushing back by running to the AP to express their anonymous concern.

According to Austin, who is still deciding on what changes to recommend, “Clearly what we’ve been doing hasn’t been working.” Gen. Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has shifted from his previous opposition to such a policy, now saying “we’ve been at it for years, and we haven’t effectively moved the needle.”

So maybe it’s time to try something new.

Here’s another headline for you, from ABC News last August, which tells you something much more important than the concerns of military leaders who don’t think that cracking down on sexual assault is important enough to try something new after years of failure: "Military sexual assault victims say the system is broken." Yeah. Yeah, it is.

After Kayla Kight, then a second lieutenant, was assaulted by a first lieutenant she met at training and gave a ride home when he was drunk, reported her assault, the Army’s response was such that “I didn't get a good solid chance at a career because I was always starting over.” When Sasha Georgiades, a Navy petty officer, tried to report a sexual assault, “I told [a superior officer] who had done it and he says, 'He's a good sailor. Do you really want to ruin his career? I looked at my [him] and I was like, I guess not. I guess I don't matter.”

Those women’s experiences are far from unique. According to the advocacy group Protect Our Defenders, “sexual violence remains pervasive,” with a majority of sexual assaults committed by someone of higher rank than the victim, and “retaliation is the norm,” with “24% [of victims] separated under less than fully honorable conditions, compared to 15% of all service members.”

This is the system military leaders have fought to preserve. And now that the defense secretary is contemplating real change, the pushback is being leaked to the Associated Press. Those foot-draggers have powerful allies in the Senate, with Democratic Sen. Jack Reed, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, joining Republican Sen. James Inhofe to delay Gillibrand's bill.

At this point, virtually no one in a public-facing position, whether in the military or the Senate, would admit to not caring about sexual violence or its survivors. But the people standing in the way of real structural change, change that does more than just tinker around the edges of years of failure, are telling us where protecting members of the military from sexual assault really ranks on their priority list. Doing things the way they’ve always been done by keeping prosecution decisions in the chain of command matters more to these people than the fact that the way things have always been done leads to high rates of assault. And that goes just as much for Jack Reed as it does for Jim Inhofe or any mid-level officer in a position to protect his buddy from consequences for sexual assault by intimidating or retaliating against the woman who tried to report that assault.

Previously reluctant Senate Democrats are coming around to the reality that the only way to save the nation is to take Mitch McConnell's veto away from him—the filibuster is going to have to go. One of them is Sen. Angus King, the independent from Maine. "We have to defend democracy," King told CNN. "And I'm afraid that our colleagues have put us in that position. I'm very reluctant to modify the filibuster. But I don't feel I can stand by and see our system subverted."

"I spent 23 years defending people's rights to vote around the world so I'm gonna choose defending Americans rights to vote over 100 senators to mount a filibuster any day," Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois told CNN. And what does West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin say to that? "I am adamantly opposed to dividing our country any further on anything that basically, such as a major policy change as that, goes down partisan lines and could be very detrimental, I think, very harmful to our country."

He's kind of a broken record on that score, regardless of who's in the majority. Here he is nine months ago warning Mitch McConnell that pushing through a Supreme Court justice just weeks before a presidential election "will divide our country further." McConnell did it anyway and Manchin apparently learned absolutely nothing in the process. And that's four years after the Republican blockade of President Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland.

Sign and send the petition: Democracy is in danger, and the U.S. Senate must defend it

If you listen to Manchin in that interview from last fall, he would have you believe he's still outraged. "[Garland] didn't even get a hearing," Manchin exclaims. "He didn't even get a meeting. […] They didn't have the courtesy—and I said it was the saddest day of my life, being a U.S. Senator seeing my colleagues didn't have just the decency to sit down and talk to a person."

Here's Manchin after Republicans blocked the Jan. 6 commission: "Choosing to put politics and political elections above the health of our Democracy is unconscionable. And the betrayal of the oath we each take is something they will have to live with. […] I am sorry that my Republican colleagues and friends let political fear prevent them from doing what they know in their hearts to be right."

Did he learn from that? He did not. Here he is telling CNN's Manu Raju that they can bring the bill back and maybe this time it will pass.

"It was wrong, what [McConnell] did. I've said that. He knows how I feel about that," Manchin said. As if McConnell gives a goddamn about what Manchin feels. As if McConnell isn't operating with the full knowledge that Manchin is the key to his power to continue subverting democracy.

The bill "was totally everything [Republicans] asked for," Manchin says. "It was totally bipartisan. I think Nancy Pelosi was very gracious in what she had offered, basically making it totally bipartisan. Chuck Schumer said 'okay, I'll do the same.' They were able to come to this agreement. […] everything was done in the most bipartisan way." All that, and McConnell is "just one person" who blocked it but that bipartisan unicorn of 10 Republican votes will be there next time, for sure. Because . . . reasons.

In that interview, Manchin was at least unwilling to say that he would "never" agree to filibuster reform, so he's a slight step ahead of Kyrsten Sinema, and sounds slightly less clueless.

But, damn. How many times are McConnell and his Republicans going to have to show Manchin who they really are before it finally sinks. When will the realization strike that the only influence he has with Republicans is to give them the power to keep obstructing?

He seems to be enjoying his time in the limelight as the most powerful man in the Senate, the interview everyone wants to get. But at some point even Manchin is going to have to realize that what he's really doing is ceding that power to Mitch McConnell.

If anyone knows how to harm and disappoint the LGBTQ community during Pride Month, it’s Republicans in power. As Daily Kos recently covered, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed an anti-trans bill into law to stop trans girls from participating in girls’ sports teams, following the lead of a handful of other GOP-controlled states. On Wednesday, DeSantis made a stunning number of budget cuts to programs meant to serve the LGBTQ community in the state, including one that offers counseling support to survivors of the Pulse massacre of 2016, a shooting that left 49 people dead.

Those funds totaled a cool $900,000, and would have gone toward mental health and housing services for the LGBTQ community in central Florida. Let’s look at what community members, including Florida Democrats and those in the advocacy space, are saying about the governor’s disappointing series of decisions just a mere few days into Pride Month. 

“Timing matters,” Democratic state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, who is openly gay, pointed out, as reported by local outlet WWSB. “What message are LGBT people meant to receive from Gov. DeSantis other than that this is an insult to them? The Orlando community right now is bracing for the five-year remembrance, and for Gov. DeSantis to veto funding for Pulse survivors and families is just cruel.”

Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat whose district includes the Pulse site in Orlando, described DeSantis as “a homophobe and a transphobe who doesn’t actually care about Floridians who are different from him,” as reported by Click Orlando. Eskamani was among the officials who requested the denied funds.

“He looked me in the eyes and told me that he would always support those of us who had been impacted by the shooting,” Brandon Wolf, who survived the Pulse massacre, told The Washington Post in reference to meeting with DeSantis in 2019.

How did the specifics of this enormous budget cut break down? $150,000 was directed to an LGBTQ resource center in Orlando, called the Orlando United Assistance Center at the LGBT+ Center Orlando. Part of that $150,000 would have gone toward mental health services for survivors of the Pulse massacre as well as impacted family members.

The Zebra Coalition, a youth housing project, would have received $750,000 in funding. Given what we know about disproportionate rates of LGBTQ people (including youth) experiencing homelessness, it’s positively shameful not to give every dollar possible to such a cause.

“Now we are going to have to go back to square one and figure out how we are going to fundraise,” Zebra Coalition Executive Director Heather Wilkie told Click Orlando, adding that they’re not “giving up on the dream” but are, understandably, “disappointed.”

People on Twitter have been calling out DeSantis for his actions during Pride Month.

It’s been said before, but the refrain still stands: The cruelty is the point.

We must act now to urge our senators to vote “yes” to the Equality Act.

Sign and send the petition: The Senate must pass the Equality Act and stop the discrimination against LGBTQ people.

The Endless Frontier Act was meant to show the US can still compete with China. It did the opposite.

Earlier this year, it looked like Congress would do the unthinkable: pass a truly big, bipartisan bill. The legislation, known as the Endless Frontier Act, would provide a huge funding boost to American science research — framed as a way to compete with China. In the Senate, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) led the charge, and it looked like the bill would pass with support from both parties.

But in the past few months, two things happened: As the legislation worked through the Senate process, it was watered down, reducing how much new funding would go to research. Then last week, a vote on the bill was delayed, as Republicans threatened to kill the legislation altogether.

To put it another way: A bill meant to show the US could own China instead proved how dysfunctional the American political system is.

The bill, renamed the US Innovation and Competition Act as it grew in scope, was originally meant to provide a $100 billion boost to research. That would go to burgeoning fields like artificial intelligence and quantum computing, ensuring the US stays ahead of China and other competitors.

The original bill wasn’t perfect. The $100 billion would go to a new technology directorate at the National Science Foundation — coming in at more than double NSF’s traditional funding. Some advocates worried that money would warp NSF’s culture, shifting focus from basic research to the applied sciences work of the new directorate.

Some also criticized the bill for not reforming how science funding works instead of merely increasing it.

Still, it was a promising start — a level of investment into science that advocates had wanted for years.

Then the Senate got its hands on the bill. Since the legislation seemed likely to be bipartisan, Schumer threw it into the traditional Senate process, letting it work through committees and get marked up by lawmakers.

The bill was dramatically changed in that process. A lot of loosely related pieces were added, like a bill to boost computer chip manufacturing in the US.

But most importantly, the $100 billion was effectively cut down: The Senate rolled NSF’s existing funding into the $100 billion, cutting the amount of actual new funding by about half, with a 30 percent boost for the agency. The new technology directorate was cut to $29 billion. And the remaining funds were shifted to Energy Department labs, pushed by senators with such labs in their states.

Meanwhile, only a small fraction of the new funding that is left over would go to research and development. The bulk would instead go to miscellaneous programs, such as scholarships and STEM education efforts.

All in all, the bill was cut down from a massive boost to research and development to only a small increase — still worth passing, some advocates say, but not the transformative legislation once promised.

“The big question is the opportunity cost,” Caleb Watney at the Progressive Policy Institute told me. “Congress likes to pass a big, flashy bill and cross it off the list and not think about the issue for another five years.”

To top it off, whether the bill passes at all is now an open question. Republicans have contested parts of the bill, particularly a provision to require a prevailing wage for chip manufacturers. Those disputes led the Senate to cancel a vote last week, promising to come back to it this month. But who knows if that’ll happen.

Remember the original intent of the bill: The Endless Frontier Act was meant to show the US could still get big things done — to stay ahead of the curve and beat China. Instead, Congress showed that the US maybe can’t do all that much anymore.

House Republicans rallied support around a bill aimed at banning LGBTQ Pride flags from being flown at U.S. embassies worldwide as President Joe Biden offered the first acknowledgement of LGBTQ Pride month by the White House in half a decade on Tuesday.

Originally introduced in January, HR 85, more colloquially known as the Old Glory Only Act, seeks to forbid the flying of any flag other than the stars and stripes at all U.S. embassies and consulates. According to Forbes, the bill added three co-sponsors on June 1: Reps. Louie Gohmert, Rick Crawford and Brian Mast. They join other Freedom Caucus firebrands Reps. Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert as backers of the bill.

“The U.S. Flag is the preeminent symbol of American exceptionalism and should never be used as a prop to promote any agenda or political ideology,” said Rep. Ralph Norman, one of the flag ban’s original co-sponsors.

“The U.S. Flag is the preeminent symbol of American exceptionalism and should never be used as a prop to promote any agenda or political ideology

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC)

The collection of LGBTQ Pride flags would fall under the bill’s classification of alternative flags. The bill would perpetuate similar bans directed from the U.S. State Department during the Trump administration, which directed embassies that flew LGBTQ Pride and Black Lives Matter flags to take them down. Secretary of State Antony Blinken reversed that policy in April, giving the go-ahead for any U.S. embassy to fly the Pride flag alongside the U.S. flag.

This isn’t the first time a version of this bill has been introduced to the House. Similar bills were introduced in 2018 and 2019, and, much like those measures, HR 85 is a longshot to even make it to the House floor much less pass a Democratically-controlled House.

Pride Flag: Previously on Towleroad

Photo courtesy of Gov. Tom Wolf/Creative Commons

You just can’t make some things up. Things like the self-proclaimed Democrat, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who stood next to Sen. John Cornyn, the Texas Republican who had just filibustered the bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and U.S. Congress to declare that the filibuster “protects the democracy of our nation.” No, really, she said that. With cameras rolling.

This is after Sinema herself inexplicably missed that vote, and that missed vote was after she tweeted out a joint statement with her fellow Democratic obstructionist, Joe Manchin, about how important the Jan. 6 vote was. “The events of January 6th were horrific. We could never have imagined an attack on Congress and or Capitol at the hands of our own citizens,” the two wrote. “We implore our Senate Republican colleagues to work with us to find a path forward on a commission to examine the events of January 6th.” 

While she was defending the filibuster on camera while standing next to one of the single most partisan of Republicans, she refused to explain why she missed the vote, saying only, “I had a personal family matter.” Radio silence from her for four days on her absence, and that’s the best she could come up with.

Sign the petition to Senator Sinema: End this charade. The filibuster endangers our democracy.

But back to that “democracy of our nation” bit. Sinema went on to say: “To those who say that we must make a choice between the filibuster and 'X,' I say, this is a false choice.” Like a choice between the filibuster or legislation actually passing? She rejects that. “The reality is that when you have a system that is not working effectively—and I would think that most would agree that the Senate is not a particularly well-oiled machine, right? The way to fix that is to fix your behavior, not to eliminate the rules or change the rules, but to change the behavior," Sinema added, confirming that she’s fully committed to make an utter fool of herself.

Behavior? Behavior? Like posting very senatorial Instagram photos, wearing a “Fuck Off” ring while guzzling sangria? Behavior like that? That’s going to help bring the Republicans around? 

Again, her commitment to making herself a clown is something else, something entirely not helpful when it comes to actually saving this nation. I mean, look at this. She’s standing next to Cornyn, on a “border” trip to align herself with Republicans on immigration, of all things, and she spews this nonsense.

But just in case you misinterpret her providing all that cover on immigration for fucking John Cornyn, she tweets out stuff like this: 

The bill she is refusing to end the filibuster for is “fundamental to our democracy.” Like the filibuster protects our democracy? When the Republicans are vowing to filibuster the “fundamental” For the People Act?

It’s not like the Republicans have demonstrated an iota of good faith here. It’s also not like our democracy isn’t really at stake. It is “truly a five-alarm fire,” says former Senate leadership aide Eli Zupnick, a spokesman for Fix Our Senate. That group, along with more than 100 others, sent a letter to Senate Democrats to highlight just how dangerous the filibuster is.

“Democrats have to make the fundamental choice: Are they going to protect the filibuster or are they going to protect voting rights?” Zupnick says, echoing the letter. "That Republicans could not even support a bipartisan investigation into a deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol reflects dangerously misplaced priorities: They have chosen party over country, obstruction over progress, and Trump over democracy," the groups said in the letter.

Perhaps Sinema will take some time away from her personal family concerns and her stunts trying to demonstrate that she’s “quirky” and “authentic” and “mavericky” and spend some time figuring out what’s going on around her. Like the fact that she’s even losing support from critical former Republican backers at home in Arizona. 

People on all sides of politics have varying opinions on boycotts—namely, whether or not they work and whether or not they’re worth someone’s time. Is an individual refusing to buy from a megacorporation really making a difference? What about people who have limited options due to location or budget? These are the questions that are hard to answer and reinforce the importance of accountability for corporations (and the wealthy people who run and profit from them). But the discussion is absolutely still worth having.

One company that some in the United States boycott is the fast food restaurant Chick-fil-A. Famously not open on Sundays, it’s perhaps not a surprise that the organization leans into a conservative Christian image. While the company has been telling customers for years that it’s stopped donating to anti-LGBTQ organizations, a report from The Daily Beast alleges that the CEO and chairman of Chick-fil-A, Dan Cathy, is actually a donor for the National Christian Charitable Foundation (NCF). Why does this matter? This group helps fund organizations working right now to prevent the Equality Act from becoming law.

Some background on Chick-fil-A donations: In 2011, boycott calls for the company made perhaps the biggest wave in national media as the foundation was caught having donated to organizations that promoted conversion therapy and opposed marriage equality. Cathy also expressed his anti-LGBTQ views on marriage equality while on a radio show in 2012.

So what’s the difference now, if anything? There is, technically speaking, a difference between a CEO (or owner, or so on) donating versus the charity or foundation of an organization donating. Technically. But at the end of the day, when profits are fueling anti-trans hate, discrimination, and exclusion, allies and advocates should be less hung up on the fine print and more focused on the big picture. As the Daily Beast covers, it’s also important to note that the NCF uses a donor-advised model, which means that donors recommend where funds are allocated, but do not have definitive power in how the funds are used once given. 

Still, people on Twitter are not happy with the company.

As LGBTQ Nation highlighted, it’s also worth pointing out that the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is widely believed to be connected to the push of anti-trans legislations. You might remember that Daily Kos recently covered the Virginia elementary school teacher who was put on paid leave after speaking out against a trans-inclusive pronoun policy. His representation released a public statement with the teacher’s side of the story, referencing his religious beliefs as rationale for his refusal to abide by the school’s trans-affirming policy. Who is filing the lawsuit against the district? If you guessed the ADF, you’re right.

The ADF has filed suits in federal courts over trans-inclusive policies before, particularly in terms of schools allowing trans girls to participate in girls’ sports teams. As Daily Kos continues to cover, states are seeing an absolute flurry of anti-trans bills centered around school sports in spite of this subject being a nonissue in daily life. So why the push? As senior legal counsel for the Human Rights Campaign Kate Oakley told them in an interview, it’s important we don’t overlook the possible connection between the ADF and the push for these bills. 

“While ADF wants to use transgender kids as their latest political scare tactic, state legislators should understand that their consistuents — including a large majority of Trump voters — believe transgender people should be allowed to live freely and openly,” Oakley told the outlet. “And that the only thing these bills will do is harm kids who are simply trying to navigate their adolescence.”

Oakley is, of course, correct. We already know that trans youth face distressing barriers and obstacles as it is—the last thing a marginalized group that reports higher rates of bullying, harassment, abuse, and even homelessness needs is to be legislated out of school sports. 

Going back a few years but still related to trans rights, we also know that the number of anti-trans “bathroom bills” introduced across the nation read as eerily similar to a letter sent from the ADF. As reported by Mother Jones back in 2014, the ADF sent a letter to schools that opposed allowing trans students to use the bathroom that connected with their gender identity. Language in that bill rang in far too close for comfort to anti-trans bathroom proposals that later showed up in North Carolina, Nevada, and elsewhere. While federal judges have blocked the ADF’s attempts to overrule trans-inclusive bathroom policies in a number of states, the law firm just can’t seem to help itself from trying to legislate LGBTQ people out of existence. 

Why does it matter if an organization with loads of money is pushing these legislations? Well, in addition to the bills themselves being deeply hateful and divisive, elected officials should be acting on behalf of constituents, not hate groups with money to burn. And yes, the Southern Poverty Law Center designates the ADF as a hate group. And for good reason.

Facebook plans to end its controversial policy that shields politicians from the content moderation rules that apply to other users, a sharp reversal that could have global ramifications for how elected officials use the social network. From a report: The change, which Facebook is set to announce as soon as Friday, comes after the Oversight Board -- an independent group funded by Facebook to review its thorniest content rulings -- affirmed its decision to suspend former President Donald Trump but critiqued the special treatment it gives politicians, stating that the "same rules should apply to all users." The board gave Facebook till June 5th to respond to its policy recommendations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Did you know there’s another Bush politician? No, not warmongering party guy. Not warmongering scary CIA guy. Not the boring guy that Donald Trump used as a punching bag. It’s the son of Jeb and the grandson of George H.—it’s George P. Bush! The “P” stands for psycho-phant Prescott. George P. has announced he will run for Texas attorney general. He’s got a chance as the current attorney general in Texas is Ken Paxton, and unlike Ken Paxton, P. Bush has not yet been indicted for securities fraud.

But what else does a Bush need to run successfully in the Lone Star State? It used to be enough for granddaddy Bush to throw some money around, get some press, and tell Texans that having a Bush as an elected official meant good things for Texas. But times have changed, and MAGA Republicans have moved on to a new dynastic despot: Donald Trump. Donald Trump has said very nasty things about the Bush clan, hasn’t he? Oh yes, he has. In fact, George P. Bush’s own mother was the focus of one of Trump’s more racist attacks on Jeb, saying that the fact that she was of Mexican decent made Jeb soft on immigration. But it seems like George P. Bush has sufficiently kissed the orange-tanned sprayed ring of the Donald enough to feel confident in promoting some truly self-humiliating swag for his campaign.

George P. Bush surprised many by endorsing Trump’s 2016 election bid when many other establishment Republican refused to. While it shows the kind of honest sociopathy of the cravenly ambitious, P. Bush’s decision to support the man who said very unpolitical and shitty things about his father was only one step worse than the rest of the Republican Party, who correctly called Trump a terrible person only to turn around and follow him into a global health and economic crisis. Politico reported last week that Trump, while not endorsing anyone, has publicly referred to Prescott as “the only Bush who got it right.”

Guess what? On Wednesday, P. Bush reportedly took advantage of that perverse cuckoldry-adjacent endorsement.

Watching Trump beat up on the Bush family, from matriarch Barbara Bush on down to Jeb and the Georges, was a guilty pleasure for many Americans during the 2015 Republican primaries. It was a pleasure because the Bush family is terrible. The decisions they’ve made in power have in no small part led to a world where three-quarters of Republicans believe in some truly depressing conspiracy theory concerning wealthy land-owning billionaires and their sex trafficking, while voting for a wealthy land-owning billionaire with nothing but sexual assault allegations against him.

“The thousand points of light, what the hell was that, by the way?” Trump said. “Thousand points of light, what did that mean? Does anyone know? I know one thing: Make America Great Again, we understand. Putting America First, we understand. Thousand points of light, I never quite got that one. What the hell is that? Has anyone ever figured that one out? And it was put out by a Republican, wasn’t it?”

Now, George W. should have been impeached for the Iraq war, something a 2013 Trump agreed with. But Trump’s more level political attacks are always mixed with his strangely personal attacks, and after her death the idea that Trump—a Republican—felt the need to tell the press that Barbara Bush was “nasty to him,” seemed … a little much. Then again, Trump’s buddy Roger Stone, in defending Donald Trump, wrote that Barbara Bush was “Nasty, rude, vindictive, entitled, self-important - that’s the woman I had several unpleasant encounters with.” If you aren’t following, Barbara is P. Bush’s grandmother.

Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for the 2004 Bush-Cheney presidential campaign, told CNN: "The Republican Party has become the party of Donald Trump ... It just tells you a complete story of the Republican Party today that he would abandon his family in this regard and basically suck up to Donald Trump.” Saying Prescott had lost his “family values,” Dowd went on to say that P.’s abandonment of his family for political gain “really does tell a tale of the Republican Party — instead of candidates with principle leaving the party and saying I'm not part of that anymore, they stick it out and in order to stick it out they cozy up to Donald Trump no matter what they have to sacrifice, including family bonds and values."

In reality’s defense, Dowd’s magical Republican Party never existed and the people he worked for are war criminals. George P. Bush, like incumbent attorney general Paxton, are both terrible people with no moral boundaries that power and money cannot move. Besides the indictments against him, people working alongside Paxton have asked for him to be investigated for corruption. Donald Trump’s camp has reportedly not yet said whether he will be able to get away from the ongoing federal investigations into his Trump Organization’s malfeasance to support Paxton or Bush.

A Pennsylvania district attorney has taken a stand in support of racism and forbidden his prosecutors from offering plea deals to a Black attorney who called attention to racism in the criminal justice system. The Tribune-Review obtained an email from Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala Jr. that directly named attorney Milton Raiford.

“On May 13, we experienced another issue of unprofessional conduct in the courtroom of Judge (Anthony) Mariani, this one involving Attorney Milt Raiford,” Zappala said in the email, which is dated May 18. “The transcript will evidence what is presently considered a convoluted critical diatribe. You are being advised of what actions will be taken.” Zappala then specified one of those actions: “no plea offers are to be made.”

“The cases may proceed on the information as filed,” he added, “whether by general plea, nonjury or jury trial. Withdrawal of any charges must be approved by the front office.”

Raiford told the Tribune-Review he made the remarks out of frustration about systemic racism in Pittsburgh that the district attorney’s office offered no statement about. “I can’t tell you the depth of hurt in my spirit that our courthouse has been silent on it,” he said. “They’re not doing anything to assure our community of color that things are going to change. They won’t even acknowledge that things need to change.”

He said on Wednesday in a statement KDKA obtained in response to Zappala’s email that the email won’t stop him from fighting. “I must by virtue of the calling of my life continue to fight for the oppressed, to labor to bring about the world that was seen throughout the eyes of my ancestors and Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Raiford said. “I will always speak out on injustice. My prayer for Mr. Zappala is that he repent for possessing mindset that he has and finds the peace that I found.”

State Rep. Emily Kinkead called for Zappala "to resign or be removed immediately … He just admitted that his office dispenses justice differently based on who is involved in the case and not the facts of the case," Kinkead said in a Twitter thread. “Zappala has betrayed his oath of office.”

She added in the thread:

In case you were not aware, this is what lawyers are taught that prosecutors should be (a far cry from what Zappala has made his office): "A prosecutor has the responsibility of a minister of justice and not simply that of an advocate. The responsibility of a public prosecutor…

...differs from that of a usual advocate; his duty is to seek justice, not merely to convict. Such an attorney is a representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation is to govern impartially; …

and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. The criminal justice system would be a travesty if a prosecutor, holding years of someone's life in their hands, cared about nothing but notching another victory."

Allegheny County Councilor Anita Prizio and State Reps. Summer Lee and Jessica Benham also called for Zappala to resign. “This is unacceptable behavior, consistent with the history of this district attorney’s office that fails to grapple with the systemic racism in our criminal legal system,” Benham told the Pittsburgh City Paper in a statement. “DA Zappala should resign.” 

Allegheny County Councilor Anita Prizio called Zappala's email "shocking and unacceptable" in a tweet. "Justice must be determined based on the facts of a case, not based on whether the attorney is sufficiently deferential to the DA. Zappala must resign,” Prizio said.

Zappala, who's served for more than two decades as Allegheny County's top prosecutor, has been criticized as a racist long before he sent an email all but cementing his planned discrimination. Under his leadership, the district attorney's office charged Black juveniles as adults 20 times more frequently than their white peers, the Pittsburgh City Paper reported. He also backed a decision to refile "failure to disperse" charges against 16 Black Lives Matter demonstrators even after the Associated Press unearthed a Facebook group of current and former cops calling the protesters "terrorists" or "thugs."

Allegheny County Councilor at-large Bethany Hallam said in a statement to the Pittsburgh City Paper that if Zappala doesn't resign, she will lobby the county council to take his directions into account when deciding the office's budget. “The fact that Zappala issued this edict — which is both unimaginably petty, yet extremely troubling — demonstrates to us clearly that he is not fit to lead that office,” Hallam said in the statement. “If he does not voluntarily step down from his position, I promise I will ensure my fellow councilmembers take his actions into consideration in our upcoming county budget discussions.”

One of Trump's most loyal saboteurs still remaining in office might not be able to hold that distinction for a whole lot longer. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is under FBI investigation for campaign finance activity according to the Washington Post. The New York Times advances the reporting by confirming "Mr. DeJoy has received a grand jury subpoena for information connected to the investigation, according to a person familiar with the investigation who was not authorized to talk about information related to the grand jury."

That makes the very careful, very precise statement from DeJoy spokesman Mark Corallo to the Washington Post, confirming the investigation, just a little bit incriminating: "Mr. DeJoy has learned that the Department of Justice is investigating campaign contributions made by employees who worked for him when he was in the private sector," Corallo said. "He has always been scrupulous in his adherence to the campaign contribution laws and has never knowingly violated them." He has never knowingly crimed? He might have accidentally crimed? Seems like now would be a really good time for DeJoy to leave that office, either voluntarily or by having the newly complete Board of Governors fire his ass.

The investigation stems from reporting from the Post last September, detailing how DeJoy's former company, New Breed, was at the center of what looked to be an illegal straw donor scheme to pump more than $1 million to Republican candidates from 2000-14. During that period, DeJoy became a major donor to the GOP in North Carolina and nationally.

The Post investigation found contributions from 124 New Breed employees to Republican candidates and quoted current and former employees who said that managers "received strongly worded admonitions" to give to DeJoy's fundraisers. DeJoy's executive assistant also "personally called senior staffers" to make sure they were attending or to make contributions to Republican candidates. The employees then received bonuses that matched their political donations, which sure looks like an illegal scheme—both federal and state—to funnel corporate money into campaigns and evade campaign finance laws. In April, District Attorney Lorrin Freeman in Wake County, North Carolina, announced she would not pursue an investigation because the matter would better handled by federal authorities. Who are now, in fact, on it.

What's unclear from the Post's reporting is whether the FBI is also looking into further irregularities in donations in subsequent years surrounding the same company, which was bought out by XPO Logistics in 2014. DeJoy retired from his executive position at the company in 2015, but was then appointed to the board of directors and served there until 2018. The Campaign Legal Center, an advocacy organization, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging that the pattern of straw donations continued after New Breed was acquired by XPO, and highlighting donations from employees and from DeJoy's family that look awfully suspicious.

The group alleges that from 2015-18, it found "several instances of XPO employees contributing to the same candidate or committee, during the same period of time, and often in similar amounts," and that "DeJoy family members, including DeJoy's college-aged children, also made contributions on the same day or in the same period as those employees." By 2018, DeJoy had become a Trump donor and former deputy finance chair of the RNC.

During a congressional hearing in September, Rep. Jim Cooper, a Tennessee Democrat, pressed DeJoy about whether he engaged in these campaign-finance irregularities. DeJoy—under oath—denied the claims. Cooper asked DeJoy about his fundraising for the Trump campaign, saying: "you were picked along with Michael Cohen and Elliott Broidy, two men who have already pled guilty to felonies, to be the three deputy finance chairmen of the Republican National Committee."

He asked straight up: "Did you pay back several of your top executives for contributing to Trump's campaign by bouncing or rewarding them?" DeJoy vehemently denied the allegation. Technically, DeJoy's denial of this might not be a lie because the Post's reporting predates the Trump campaign. It alleges that DeJoy did precisely this, but for other Republican candidates. That's not to say that DeJoy kept up the practice after the XPO Logistics acquisition of New Breed (and by the way, XPO has been under investigation for exceedingly lucrative contracts with the USPS).

Precisely what the FBI and the grand jury are investigating isn't clear. The felony statute of limitations on campaign finance violations is five years, so the initial allegations from the New Breed era, which ended in 2014, are likely not it, though the Post suggest those employees have been interviewed. That could be to establish a pattern that continued through DeJoy's tenure at XPO and clear up until he was donating hundreds of thousands to Trump's 2020 convention. Before he was tapped to head the USPS in May 2020, of course.

This should finally be enough. DeJoy crippling the Postal Service should have been enough. The weeks-long delays in mail delivery should be enough. All of it should finally be enough for the USPS Board of Governors and for President Joe Biden. DeJoy has got to go.

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This is mostly a joke, but the canards would actually work.

Today's News:

Add The New York Times to the list of media outlets that has now learned that the Trump Justice Department secretly seized phone records of some its reporters. The Times joins The Washington Post and CNN on that list. As in those cases, the Biden Justice Department revealed the seizures, saying that the Times reporters—Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau, and Michael S. Schmidt—were not themselves targets of investigation. Instead, the Trump administration was looking for information on their sources.

The phone records, dating to early 2017, were seized in 2020. The Trump administration also obtained a court order for their email logs, but didn’t follow through and seize those. The Times was not notified of what story the leak investigation pertained to, but, based on the time frame of the records seizures and the reporters involve, believes it’s likely to be reporting about former FBI director James Comey’s decision to publicly announce the FBI’s recommendation against prosecuting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton relating to her private email server. That reporting mentioned a classified document obtained from Russia by Dutch intelligence.

President Joe Biden has said he will ban secret seizures of reporters’ records, telling CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “It’s simply, simply wrong. I will not let that happen.” And a Justice Department spokesman said after the latest disclosure that “members of the news media have now been notified in every instance” of such records seizures.

”Seizing the phone records of journalists profoundly undermines press freedom,” Times Executive Editor Dean Bacquet said in a statement. “It threatens to silence the sources we depend on to provide the public with essential information about what the government is doing.” He called on the Justice Department “to explain why this action was taken and what steps are being taken to make certain it does not happen again in the future.”

The problem is that while Biden may ban the practice during his time in office, a future Republican administration is likely to pick it back up, along with the other ways the Justice Department abused power under Trump. Like intervening in a lawsuit on behalf of Rep. Devin Nunes, or trying to seize the profits of a tell-all book about Melania Trump, or trying to step in as Trump's personal lawyer in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against him. Time after time, the Justice Department treated Donald Trump’s personal interests as government matters while also, we’ve now learned, secretly targeting reporters’ communications in leak investigations.

Donald Trump’s abuses show the importance of installing formal guardrails. The United States cannot rely on informal norms. As Trump demonstrated, they are easily shattered, and doing the right thing should not and cannot be left up to individual presidents to decide. The imperative to fix this, though, is yet another thing that Republicans could very spin as partisan since we all know that Republicans—especially after they watched Trump’s example—are far more likely to spy on reporters or treat the Justice Department as a personal lawyer. But this is another way Trump has chipped away at U.S. democracy, and if there’s no permanent fix to the damage he’s done, the stage is set for more and worse.

In laying the groundwork to push for competing sentencing outcomes, attorneys in the case of Derek Chauvin painted quite different pictures of the former Minneapolis police officer who a jury found murdered George Floyd in May 2020. “The State respectfully requests a sentence of 360 months, or 30 years ...” the prosecution wrote in its sentencing memorandum filed Wednesday with the District Court of Hennepin County. The state argued that Chauvin, who a jury convicted on April 20 of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter, did not commit a “typical” version of each offense and therefore, should receive a lengthier sentence.

A Black father, Floyd was unarmed when Chauvin kneeled on his neck for more than nine minutes and caused his slow but eventual death. “As this Court put the point, the ‘slow death of George Floyd occurring over approximately six minutes of his positional asphyxia was particularly cruel in that Mr. Floyd was begging for his life and obviously terrified by the knowledge that he was likely to die but during which the Defendant objectively remained indifferent to Mr. Floyd’s pleas,’” the prosecution wrote, citing an earlier court opinion in a pre-sentencing document.  

Chauvin's sentencing hearing is scheduled for June 25. His attorney, Eric Nelson, filed a motion on Wednesday asking the court to limit his client's sentence to between 10 and 15 years. “Mr. Chauvin asks the Court to look beyond its findings, to his background, his lack of criminal history, his amenability to probation, to the unusual facts of this case, and to his being a product of a ‘broken’ system,” Nelson wrote. He also alleged that his client’s offense is “best described as an error made in good faith reliance his own experience as a police officer and the training he had received—not intentional commission of an illegal act.”

If the pre-sentencing document is any indication, it’s not looking good for the defense. Judge Peter Cahill already agreed with four of five of the prosecution's claims that there were "aggravated sentencing factors" to qualify a longer sentence for the ex-cop in a pre-sentencing court document filed last month. Cahill found that Chauvin abused a position of trust and authority; was particularly cruel; committed an act of crime in the presence of children; and committed a crime as part of a group of at least three other people.

Nelson, however, argued for a shorter sentence because of the one aggravating factor Cahill parted with the prosecution on—that Floyd was "particularly vulnerable" in comparison with other murder victims. Cahill determined Floyd was not. "Although George Floyd was handcuffed, he had still been able to resist arrest and to prevent three police officers from seating him in a squad car before he was placed in the prone position, so that, by itself, did not create a particular vulnerability," Cahill wrote. 

Nelson also contended in his motion that Chauvin’s age as a 45-year-old man should be considered in sentencing him. “Independent of the long-term damage a prison sentence would inflict upon Mr. Chauvin’s life prospects, given his age, convictions for officer-involved offenses significantly increase the likelihood of him becoming a target in prison,” the attorney wrote. “Such safety concerns are evident by his presentence solitary confinement in a high-security prison.”

Nelson later added: “Mr. Chauvin still has the ability to positively impact his family and his community. Thus, Mr. Chauvin’s age is a substantial and compelling factor that supports a downward dispositional departure in sentencing.”

Twitter users weren’t swayed by the reasoning. Democrat Jake Lobin tweeted: "George Floyd said, ‘I can't breathe’ twenty-seven times before Derek Chauvin was finished executing him. TWENTY. SEVEN. TIMES. And now Chauvin wants probation because of what a long jail sentence will do to his life prospects?? Oh please. Lock him up & throw away the key!"

Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich disputed the defense’s claim of Chauvin’s clean background pointing to a history of complaints against him. “Before killing George Floyd, Derek Chauvin evaded accountability for at least 17 complaints, thanks to the egregious protections in his police union contract,” Reich tweeted. “Let’s get one thing straight: This is not what unions were created to do.”

RELATED: Judge finds Derek Chauvin 'particularly cruel,' but what will that amount to in sentencing?

RELATED: Derek Chauvin found guilty on all counts

RELATED: Derek Chauvin murders George Floyd in broad daylight, but Black juror is called into question

RELATED: Guilty verdict for white cop won't do: Chauvin defense moves for new trial

When it comes to raw, shameless cynicism, nobody tops McConnell.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton remains indicted for securities fraud, a status he has held since 2015 as everyone in the state apparently conspires to slow walk his trial into the next millennium. He has evidently been using the time gained to commit other alleged crimes; as attorney general, his own subordinates have accused him of bribery and other criminal acts, and his own attempts to delegitimize the 2020 elections appear to have been motivated at least in part by Paxton fishing for a Trump pardon for those crimes.

He is the perfect model of new Republicanism by way of Trumpism, a man who really likes to bellow about the rule of law and the criminality of his enemies while skirting the law himself. These are the pissant little twits that Trump's party would have rule us, that the Fox News propagandists spend countless hours attempting to prop up, and who would head fascism's home office if the next violent insurrection has more success than his last attempt.

In Texas, however, Paxton is just another member in the statewide Republican attempt to undermine elections under the guise of protecting Texans from a wave of "fraud" that nobody can find, no matter how much money or time Republican racists and conspiracy theorists spend hunting for it.

The Houston Chronicle is reporting the latest numbers from Paxton's aggressive search for "voter fraud" in the state, and the numbers are about what you'd expect for an indicted ultrapartisan casting lines everywhere in search of justifications for his party's attacks on voting rights. Paxton's office logged "more than 22,000 staff hours" working on voter fraud cases in the last year, roughly doubling both the law enforcement officers and prosecutors already assigned to those cases. All 22,000 hours were paid for by Texas voters.

How much fraud did Texas Ahab's team find in those 22,000 hours? Sixteen cases. The team closed out 16 cases, all of them for Houston-area residents who wrote "false addresses" on voter registration forms. None of the 16 went to jail for it. That's in keeping with his department's long-term record, which has never found any organized fraud of the sort Paxton continues to insist exists somewhere, just beyond our visible realms.

Sayeth the Chronicle: "In its 15 years of its existence, the unit has prosecuted a few dozen cases in which offenders received jail time, none of them involving widespread fraud."

The Washington Post's Phillip Bump notes that from 2015 (you know, the year Ken Paxton was first indicted for crimes) to last year, there have been only 197 state-filed complaints of election fraud. That's out of tens of millions of votes, for a total percentage of approximately bupkis. It is not a thing that exists. While Paxton's allies have continued to lie outright about widespread supposed fraud, the number of pending cases involving the 2020 election consists of exactly one. Team Indicted Fascist is simply lying on this one. The Republican governor, the Republican legislators—they're all lying on this one. The case for writing new, tighter voting restrictions into law cannot be made because the "fraud" they look to prevent—and that Paxton has blown tens of thousands of hours looking for last year alone—is either paranoid fantasy or outright anti-democratic propaganda.

The reason for new Republican-pushed laws putting up higher obstacles to voting than already exist is the same in Texas as it is in Georgia. As voting trends shift (and after the two Republican presidencies in most recent memory both ended in national catastrophes), Republican candidates are finding themselves in increasingly close scrapes. The toppling of Georgia's two meritless Republican senators, especially, appears to have driven party leaders into outright panic. Any barricade that can hold Black or Hispanic voters from the polls or that can put a single new hour of delay between a working class voter and the ballot box is being hastily thrown up in an attempt to retake government in the next midterms. The threat is considered existential.

And it's considered existential in large part because Republican propaganda has successfully convinced a large portion of their own base that they are losing elections not because of economic crises, pandemics, scandals, and incompetence, but because not-white not-Republicans are "stealing" them out from under the party. The propaganda that underpinned a violent pro-Trump insurrection and that underpins state Republican laws targeting voting rights are one and the same. It is the same effort. The goals of both are to nullify elections Republicans have lost and replace them with "correct" results that the party itself has determined to be more valid.

It's not new. The violence at its edges isn't new either. This is what the Republican Party morphed into after the losers of the civil rights era coalesced together into one large ball of hate and grudges. Trump's innovation was to scrape off the crust and prove to the party that those grudges were close enough and strong enough to hold the party together all on their own. No policy. No need for success, no penalties for failure, and no need to be bound by either decorum or truth. Just the grudge, screamed at everyone in America who was turning it into a less hateful place than they would prefer.

While Ken Paxton is lying about fraud and the Texas governor is threatening to withhold legislature pay unless Democrats allow Republican-demanded voting restrictions to be written into law, Texas Republicans are trying to dodge accusations of outright racism in crafting their new "fixes" to a fake problem. A specific provision in the Texas bill that limited early voting on the Sunday prior to an election to the period from 1 PM to 9PM appears to aim squarely at "Souls to the Polls" efforts by Black churches to encourage voting after Sunday services. (Southern Republicans have focused on Black church voting initiatives in multiple states with, among other devices, rules that criminalize driving voters to the polls unless you're related to them or have filled out a form with the state. Other rules have banned providing voters with water once they're in line. Anything that might make it easier to vote is being targeted by Republican bills; anything that puts new steps between voters and voting is being embraced in the same bills.)

Texas Republicans now claim that the seems-to-be-racist thing was, ha ha, just a little accident when typing things up. The 1 PM opening time was meant to be 11 AM, you see, and not a single Republican noticed it until after attempting to ram through the vote on the measure, despite the clause being specifically singled out across the national media as an apparently racist act.

Sure, right. "We just now noticed that the thing the country is pointing to as evidence of blatant racist intent on our parts was actually, um, a typo." That'll work.

There's not going to be a Republican reckoning here or a backpedaling from these voter suppression efforts. The party genuinely believes it and only it has a legitimate claim to government power, a "right" that is only ever taken from it when the wrong people vote or when too many people vote. It's not Republicanism that's flawed and needs reformation in party minds. It's the voting.

If the House and Senate cannot impose new minimal standards that allow all Americans the same right to vote without state lawmakers throwing up a barrage of new hurdles, this will continue. It will worsen. New Republican laws are granting new supposed powers to circumvent actual vote totals and determine the "correct" outcome of elections—precisely what Republican seditionists stormed Congress to demand—and state Republicans will not hesitate to test those powers if individual midterm races do not go their way.

That even those screaming about "election fraud" the loudest cannot, even with every state resource at their disposal or with the powers of a presidency behind them, find any of the fraud they are looking for is evidence enough that the claims are intended to be propaganda, not fact. The Republican Party is organized around a propaganda campaign in order to convince their base that our current democracy is no longer legitimate and that it therefore must be altered to better meet Republican needs. It is a fascist attack, it follows the path of historic fascist attacks, and it stands every chance of working.

Some people never observe anything.  Life just happens to them.  They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity.

Monday and Tuesday marked 100 years since the Tulsa race massacre, which killed more than 300 people and left nearly 10,000 homeless. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden traveled to Tulsa to mark the occasion, saying: “For much too long, the history of what took place here was told in silence. While darkness can hide much, it erases nothing.”

Biden was there in part to use the presidency to keep wiping away that silence. “We do ourselves no favors by pretending none of this ever happened,” he said. “We should know the good, the bad, everything. That’s what great nations do: They come to terms with their dark sides.”

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Biden also used the occasion to address what his administration is doing to promote racial equity and close the yawning racial wealth gap: White households had average wealth of $189,100 in 2019, while Black households averaged $24,100. During the flight to Tulsa, White House Principle Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre pointed reporters to American Rescue Plan funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). In his remarks, Biden focused on newly announced efforts to expand Black people’s access to homeownership and small business ownership, including a planned 50% growth in federal contracting with small disadvantaged businesses and steps to crack down on housing discrimination. The White House’s plans on housing discrimination include an effort aimed at fighting discrimination in home appraisals after several stories of cases where Black homeowners increased their home appraisals by having white friends take their place during the appraisal process.

But the steps Biden announced on reducing the racial wealth gap fall short of what’s needed, in particular by leaving out the critical issue of student loan debt. Despite White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain saying in early April that Biden had requested a memo on his options for student loan forgiveness, which might come “in the next few weeks,” there’s no word on that as of early June. And student debt disproportionately burdens Black students.

“Components of the plan are encouraging, but it fails to address the student loan debt crisis that disproportionately affects African Americans,” Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, said in a statement on Biden’s latest announcements. “You cannot begin to address the racial wealth gap without addressing the student loan debt crisis.”

In his speech, Biden also addressed the importance of voting rights, calling it a “sacred right” that is “under assault with incredible intensity like I’ve never seen,” and saying he had put Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of promoting that push. But he noted the difficulty of getting congressional action on voting rights, thanks to “a tie in the Senate with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.” Fact checkers will doubtless note that Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema do not technically vote more often with Republicans than with Democrats—but by their refusal to take action to end or amend Republican filibuster power, they hand Republicans the ability to block basically anything they choose. In that Manchin and Sinema effectively if not technically side with Republicans again and again, even as they lament the results of their own actions.

Biden’s visit to Tulsa therefore effectively highlighted the nation’s horrifying history of racist violence, taking steps forward in the history of white presidents addressing racism head on—but also reminding us of how far short current efforts continue to fall, and how Democrats, including Biden himself, are not fully going to the mat to fight for racial equity.

Remember that Memorial Day deadline President Biden gave Senate Republicans for coming up with an infrastructure plan that was real and not ridiculous? And how they kept failing, only to be granted one more meeting with the president or cabinet secretaries or key staff? It's still not over.

"I think we are getting pretty close to a fish-or-cut-bait moment," Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on CNN's State of the Union Sunday. "We believe in this process, but we also very much agree that this can't to go on forever." Talks will continue during the congressional recess, but a final decision about the way forward is unlikely until lawmakers return next week, with Buttigieg saying, "We need a clear direction" by June 7. That's when the Senate returns from the holiday recess.

To that end, Biden is meeting with lead Republican "negotiator" (if what's been happening here can be called negotiations) Sen. Shelley Moore Capito again. "The president is looking forward to hosting Senator Capito on Wednesday afternoon at the White House, where they will continue their bipartisan negotiations about investing in our middle class and economic growth through infrastructure," a White House official told CBS News. 

"I think we can get to real compromise, absolutely, because we're both still in the game," Capito said Sunday, on Fox News Sunday, of course. "We realize this is not easy. I think we bring every idea that's on the table into the negotiations to see how we can achieve this and get it across the threshold." Uh, huh.

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She also said, "I think we are building those blocks towards a really good, solid infrastructure package that has bipartisan support … (Biden) told me on the phone just the day before yesterday, ‘Let's get this done.’ And I think that means he has his heart is in this."

For anyone who has been watching politics in the 21st century, this has an uncomfortably familiar ring to it. Here's Sen. Chuck Grassley, in 2009, writing at Politico: "With bipartisanship, reform is possible." He was talking about healthcare reform.

"In March, Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus and I joined other members of Congress and the president at a White House forum on health care," he wrote. "That day, Baucus and I announced an ambitious schedule for developing a bipartisan health reform proposal." Six months later, Baucus released a plan that Grassley refused to support. Grassley, of course, went on to vote against the Affordable Care Act when it finally passed the following March, a full year after he declared his commitment to bipartisanship.

Baucus spent months and months chasing after Grassley and the mythical Republicans who were going to join him in support, effectively watering down the vision for healthcare reform at every pass. For the next seven years, Republicans refused to give up the effort to repeal the law, at least in Congress. They've never stopped fighting it in the courts. Now, 11 years later, the Supreme Court is poised to rule on another challenge to Obamacare, with yet another in the pipeline in lower courts.

There are Democrats who remember that. Like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who spoke for a lot of her colleagues on CNN Sunday. "We have to answer that moment with bold reforms, and I think waiting any longer for Republicans to do the right thing is a misstep," Gillibrand told Jake Tapper. "I don't think there's necessarily goodwill behind all negotiations, and I think the American people elected us to solve the problem of Covid, to rebuild the economy, rebuild the infrastructure, and I think it's our moment to act."

Yes. That. Of all the people who you'd think would see some parallels here, the guy who was vice president during those ACA negotiations, the one who famously called it a "big fucking deal" when it was finally done—with only Democratic support—would be the first. Particularly when Mitch McConnell is lurking in the background with his promise that he's "100% committed" to fighting Biden's agenda.

Kind of like how he was 100% committed to making President Obama a one-term president. He didn't succeed at that, but he did manage to block most of Obama's second-term efforts and judicial appointments, including a Supreme Court seat, so that there's now a Supreme Court that could conceivably undo the biggest achievement of the Obama years: Obamacare.

But here we go, with yet another extension for Republicans to do a damn thing. Politico—yes it's Politico so lots of salt grains—reports that the "president still has faith in his ability to win over reluctant Senate Republicans and advisers see benefits—reputationally and politically—in working across the aisle." Yes, there's a great deal in there that could be very good for Republicans—it's infrastructure! Millions of dollars for each of their states is out there, within their grasp. But doing what's right for their constituents has really not been the hallmark of the GOP this century. (Except for the really rich ones, with all those tax cuts.)

Still, one Democratic senator who might have some insight thinks he knows what's going on here. "We're not simply seeking a bipartisan deal for the sake of bipartisanship," Pennsylvania Democrat Bob Casey told Politico. "It was to demonstrate to some moderates in our caucus that it was an effort that was undertaken seriously and we saw it through," Casey added. "And I think by skipping that we wouldn't have been able to get to 50 votes." In other words, this is all about Joe Manchin and getting him to go along with doing the bill by budget reconciliation, so it only requires a simple majority vote.

If that's the case, then everyone had better get on the stick. There's very little legislative time left to get it done with other huge, must-pass efforts like next year's budget and a necessary hike to the debt ceiling on the horizon. Not to mention all the other bits and pieces of legislation from the House that are piling up, like the Equality Act, and the For the People Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act, and D.C. statehood.

To borrow Buttigieg’s analogy, there's only so much line Biden can afford to cast out in order to snag Republicans. It's running out.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: With the coronavirus pandemic receding for every vaccine that reaches an arm, the push by some employers to get people back into offices is clashing with workers who've embraced remote work as the new normal. While companies from Google to Ford and Citigroup have promised greater flexibility, many chief executives have publicly extolled the importance of being in offices. Some have lamented the perils of remote work, saying it diminishes collaboration and company culture. JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s Jamie Dimon said at a recent conference that it doesn't work "for those who want to hustle." But legions of employees aren't so sure. If anything, the past year has proved that lots of work can be done from anywhere, sans lengthy commutes on crowded trains or highways. Some people have moved. Others have lingering worries about the virus and vaccine-hesitant colleagues. It's still early to say how the post-pandemic work environment will look. Only about 28% of U.S. office workers are back at their buildings, according to an index of 10 metro areas compiled by security company Kastle Systems. Many employers are still being lenient with policies as the virus lingers, vaccinations continue to roll out and childcare situations remain erratic. But as office returns accelerate, some employees may want different options. A May survey of 1,000 U.S. adults showed that 39% would consider quitting if their employers weren't flexible about remote work. The generational difference is clear: Among millennials and Gen Z, that figure was 49%, according to the poll by Morning Consult on behalf of Bloomberg News. The lack of commutes and cost savings are the top benefits of remote work, according to a FlexJobs survey of 2,100 people released in April. More than a third of the respondents said they save at least $5,000 per year by working remotely.

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The media has focused a lot of attention on those few Republicans—Liz Cheney, for example—who have spoken out publicly as the GOP transformed itself before our eyes into an authoritarian Trump cult, committed to overturning fair elections while disenfranchising as many Americans as possible in the process. You can appreciate this effort in the coverage on MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times and others surrounding the supposedly noble attempts by these dissident Republicans to save their party. And the attention is understandable; just seeing Republicans grant interviews to any media outlet other than Fox News has been quite a novelty in itself.

But if the traditional media is hoping such isolated voices as Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and a few others will somehow shift the course of the rest of the GOP—the vast majority of Republicans who have, for purposes of convenience, continued political viability or whether they actually believe in it, embraced this new ethic of sedition, voter disenfranchisement, and outright violence—they’re going to be disappointed. While the outsized coverage afforded to these outlier voices make for compelling political drama, the reality is that they do not represent the now-overwhelming consensus (at least publicly) of the GOP at both the state and national levels: namely, that the party’s future course is now inextricably tied to its obeisance to Donald Trump, and specifically Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was somehow nefariously snatched from his grasp. While most in the media will acknowledge this transformation and the danger it represents, only a few appear to be willing to explore the reasons why that transformation has occurred.

Elie Mystal, writing for the Nation, points out that what we are seeing in the GOP’s stunningly rapid descent into something indistinguishable from nascent fascism is an inevitable byproduct of where that party has been headed since at least the 1950s. He uses former GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan, the most recent example of Republicans now expressing their indignation at their party’s current trajectory, as an example.

Given that the Republican Party has now mainstreamed infection and insurrection, I get why mainstream media makers might think it’s newsworthy when any erstwhile Republican leader is willing to speak out against the party orthodoxy of lies and deceit. But let’s not make any mistakes about who Ryan still is and what his “principles” are. Before he debased himself into retirement, Ryan was an Ayn Rand sock puppet on a personal crusade to starve the government of resources so it could not deliver services. And the glory days he’s hoping to resurrect are nothing more than that: a return to the days where Republicans expressed their cruelty through charts and graphs instead of tweets and slurs. Ryan just wants the cult of tax cuts to reassert its dominance over the cult of Trump.

Mystal’s central point is that neither Cheney nor Ryan are speaking any language that actual Republican voters understand anymore. That what Trump successfully tapped into: the bigotry, resentment, and grievance—now looming so brightly in everything we see spewed from the pie-holes of new GOP luminaries like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene—is the only thing that Republican voters have ever cared about in the first place. People like Ryan and Cheney, who tout the supposed virtues of conservative free-market ideology and tax policy, are pretending to ignore the fact that these things never, ever attracted many people to the GOP. As Mystal puts it, “The natural constituency for ‘tax cuts for the rich, crumbling roads and bridges for everybody else’ is so small you can fit them all into a moderately sized marina.” Those may be the end goals of Republicans like Cheney and Ryan, but no one should separate those goals from the means used to achieve them.

In fact from the 1930s onward there was never a reliable majority of Americans who bought in to  Republican warped and self-serving theories of social engineering. That is why the GOP had to resort from the very start to scaring Americans into voting for them through a drumbeat of fearmongering, first in the 1950s about Communists and then, in the 1960s, about Blacks.

Mystal notes that as the bogeyman of Communism fell by the wayside and the Civil Rights era passed into history, the GOP suddenly discovered themselves without anything compelling enough to sell their politics of resentment. So through Ronald Reagan they created the specter of the “welfare queen” and all the other myths of lazy, undeserving minorities allegedly poaching from the entitled white Americans’ trough. Seizing the electoral opportunity afforded to them by the all-consuming distraction of the Iranian hostage crisis to the Carter administration, in the 1980s they again turned on the spigot of white resentment, the appeal to bigotry (as Mystal aptly points out) that Reagan deliberately channeled when he symbolically opened up his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three Freedom Riders were murdered for trying to help register Black Americans to vote. 

Bigotry and fearmongering alone, not any conservative philosophical principles, provided the glue that kept the Republican coalition viable for nearly a century. It is the same glue that binds Republican voters and their party together today. 

As Mystal summarizes it:

Republican policies are broadly unpopular and empirically ineffectual, so the people peddling them realized long ago that they must be tethered to some hysterical lie or cultural threat to keep just enough white people voting against their own economic interests. [...]

So when Paul Ryan tells his fellow Republicans to abandon the “cultural battles,” he’s telling them to abandon the only parts of their platform that their voters actually like. If Ryan were right about the appeal of “conservative principles,” he’d still have a job. Instead, Majorie Taylor Greene does.  

Thus, we see the likes of Cheney, Ryan, and others claiming that what really concerns them is the cult-like influence Donald Trump has imposed on their voters, as if Trump’s appeal to racist grievance were something they hadn’t already signed onto decades ago when they attended their first homespun Republican gatherings. As Mystal observes, that implicit bargain with their voting base is common to all Republicans who pledge their allegiance to the party’s so-called principles: “Every one has, at some point, decided to throw their hat in with the MAGA forces before those forces were unified under Trump’s banner, and either explicitly or tacitly given aid and comfort to hate and grievance politics to achieve their otherwise unpopular agenda.”

The traditional media is loathe to acknowledge this basic truth about Republicans, in part because it tends to nullify literally decades of time they spent tortuously skating around that fact, as they continued to credit the GOP with an actual agenda that could be expressed in more genteel economic terms than simple greed fueled by equally simple bigotry.

But probably their worst dereliction was their failure to admit the true nature of the people who put these Republicans into power in the first place. That’s what’s coming to the fore now: the sheer ignorance, fearfulness, and littleness of a vast number of ordinary Americans. It’s the key piece of the puzzle they’ve never wanted to acknowledge, but it’s been right there in plain sight, from every tea party protest to what we saw unfold Jan. 6 on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. 

As Mystal writes, the existence and motivation of a huge segment of Americans has been clear for decades. But few in the media have ever mustered the courage to admit it.

Now that Trump has said the quiet part out loud, there’s no stuffing the message back into a box. This is the Republican Party now. It’s the same one it’s always been, just with their bigoted voters empowered to say what they’ve always believed.

The focus on erstwhile GOP heretics like Cheney and Ryan only obscures the fact that the rest of the GOP, including roughly half of the entire House and Senate, are perfectly content and supportive of throwing out the entire American experiment if it means they can hold onto power. Part of the reason they feel safe in doing so is that they are all, for the most part securely ensconced behind a powerful right-wing media apparatus designed to nurture them, keeping their true aims and motivation under wraps, seldom seen or heard. The other part is that they’ve learned that there are more than enough voters susceptible to their message of resentment and grievance to keep them in power under this country’s existing institutions, as long as a complacent media continues to find reasons to avoid calling them—and their supporters—out for what they are.

Confronting the truth about the Republican Party has always meant confronting the truth about those who support them, and specifically the reasons for that support. The media have been content to avoid that uncomfortable discussion, quite literally for as long as humanly possible. In its place, after Trump’s election we got slews of vignettes about the “economic insecurities” of voters in the so-called heartland, most of which carefully tiptoed around the big elephant in the room—the constant stoking of racism—that has sustained the Republican Party from the very start.

The idea of writing off a huge segment of the American population as irredeemably racist has always been a bridge too far for many in the media. And, for the most part, that’s the reason we find ourselves where we are today.

New terms of use for eBay have come into effect which mean the online auction house will now pay sellers directly rather than through PayPal. The BBC reports: PayPal was acquired by eBay in its early days in 2002, and the two firms have worked in partnership ever since. The changes mean that while eBay buyers can still pay with PayPal, sellers will be paid straight into their bank accounts. But some sellers have threatened to stop using the service over the move. EBay's forums have several posts from sellers who say they are reluctant to use the new system and give eBay direct debit access to their personal bank accounts. But the new terms, effective from 1 June, say the new "managed payments" system is compulsory, and the company has the power to limit or remove listings from sellers who refuse to use it. The company says the new system is simpler, convenient, and gives buyers more payment options - and the rollout will be gradual. It marks a significant change in an almost two-decade partnership with PayPal, which split from eBay in 2015.

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On Tuesday, June 1—which happens to be the first day of LGBTQ+ Pride Month—Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an exclusionary, transphobic bill into law in the state of Florida. As Daily Kos has continued to cover, anti-trans bills have taken the nation by storm from all corners of the country. Some of these bills try to stop physicians from providing gender-affirming, age-appropriate health care to trans youth, while others try to prevent transgender folks of all ages from updating the sex on their birth certificates. Perhaps the bills which have gotten the most national attention are the anti-trans sports bills that seek to stop trans girls from participating on girls’ sports teams.

DeSantis has just signed such bill, misleadingly titled the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act,” into law. In response, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) announced its intention to sue DeSantis. 

This bill, like similar ones pushed by Republicans across the country, insists on students participating on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not their actual gender identity. In Florida, the original birth certificate would be the basis of affirmation, not self-ID. Some bills focus just on high school or college, while others go into effect as early as kindergarten. Either way, it’s isolating, offensive, and downright demeaning for the trans youth who simply want to be like their cisgender peers who have the opportunity to play sports and hang out with friends.

The Florida bill in particular is insidious as it allows students to sue the school if the school allowed a trans girl to play on the girls’ team. 

“Lawmakers across the country who support these bills have failed to provide examples of any issue in their states to attempt to justify these attacks on transgender youth, laying bare the reality that they are fueled by discriminatory intent and not supported by fact,” the HRC said in a statement.

This angle is accurate: Republican lawmakers from across the country have been unable to cite specific instances of issues arising from trans girls participating on girls’ sports teams, though many in the GOP have referred to vague concerns from anonymous coaches and parents that issues could come up. Basically, it’s legislating over nothing and stoking hysteria over a non-issue.

If you’re curious what actual student-athletes think, more than 500 signed a letter to the NCAA urging the organization to withdraw championships from states that implemented anti-trans sports legislations. Openly trans people are also able to compete in the Olympics, making it additionally outrageous that kindergarteners would not able to play on a school team. 

“At the end of the day,” DeSantis said, as reported by The Advocate, “if the price of giving opportunities that can last a lifetime for all girls in the state of Florida is that we lose an event or two, I would choose to protect our girls every day of the week and twice on Sunday.” By losing “an event or two,” DeSantis is likely referring to the NCAA.

With all of this as background, what are Republicans who support these hateful legislations saying? The general party line is to “protect” women’s sports. DeSantis said as much at a recent event, as reported by NBC 6 and the Associated Press, saying, “I can tell you this: in Florida, girls are going to play girls sports and boys are going to play boys sports.” But here’s the thing: Trans girls are girls. Trans boys are boys. Making trans girls participate in boys teams is not making boys play with boys—it’s making a girl play with boys.

Frustratingly, even openly trans woman Caitlyn Jenner kept in line with her party by suggesting that trans girls are only “truly trans" if they’ve gone through some degree of medical intervention—an argument that’s made all the more maddening when one considers that it’s her own party that’s trying to stop trans youth from accessing those precise healthcare treatments to begin with.

As Daily Kos has covered, trans youth—and trans folks of all ages—are uniquely vulnerable, especially when we consider an intersectional lens and narrow in on, for example, trans youth of color or unhoused trans youth. Studies show that trans youth are more likely to be bullied, harassed, and even assaulted in school. They are also more likely to leave high school without a diploma and to become unhoused. As adults, trans folks report disproportionate levels of job and housing discrimination, and even sexual violence; especially trans women of color and trans sex workers.

The absolute last thing a deeply vulnerable, marginalized population needs is even more legislation aiming to keep them on the sidelines, but that’s precisely what Republicans are doing. Anything, it seems, to distract from the party’s colossal failures during the pandemic. 

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Kelly will be striking back soon, but eventually we'll re-achieve equilibirum.

Today's News:

Some QAnon followers think a military coup like the one in Myanmar should also happen in the US.

While speaking at a Dallas conference aimed at QAnon adherents on Sunday, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn appeared to endorse the idea of a military coup to reinstate Donald Trump as president. A member of the audience asked about the possibility of a Myanmar-style coup in the US, and Flynn said there was “no reason” something similar couldn’t happen in America. He added, “I mean, it should happen here.”

After public backlash, Flynn subsequently declared on the encrypted chat app Telegram that the media had manipulated his words, insisting he actually said there was “no reason it (a coup) should happen here (in America).” Still, experts who follow QAnon say Flynn was parroting a Myanmar talking point that’s been building for months within the QAnon conspiracy theory’s online communities.

Flynn’s comments and the resulting backlash show that messages and conspiracy theories associated with QAnon are still getting some traction, including the false idea that Trump will somehow become president again before the 2024 election. Influencers who continue to promote false QAnon theories related to both the election and Trump’s imminent return to the White House seem to be doing well on Telegram, despite being booted from other social media platforms.

“They are still 100 percent in support of Biden being removed and Trump returning to office, whether it’s a coup [or] whether it’s some reinstatement which doesn’t exist,” Mike Rothschild, a researcher who has tracked the QAnon conspiracy for several years and author of the book The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything, told Recode. “The prophecy of QAnon is now that Trump will be restored to office, and whether that’s through violence or through magic, that’s just what they want to happen.”

Since the January 6 insurrection, QAnon chatter on traditional and social media alike appears to have declined. A recent study from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found that after major platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube took action against the conspiracy theory, content and language about QAnon has “all but evaporated from the mainstream internet.”

At the same time, however, QAnon adherents have found a way to flourish on alternative apps such as Telegram, where some QAnon influencers have tens of thousands of followers. That this latest strain of the QAnon conspiracy theory invoking the coup in Myanmar was both previously spread on Telegram and subsequently walked back by Michael Flynn on Telegram demonstrates how the platform has taken on a new importance within the fringe movement.

Discussion of this branch of the conspiracy theory has occurred as part of a broader trend of QAnon followers moving to Telegram. After January 6, extremism researchers noticed the growth of Telegram channels catering to QAnon audiences. Even after President Joe Biden’s inauguration, QAnon activity continued in Telegram groups. Throughout 2021, adherents to the conspiracy theory have used the platform to promote the idea that Covid-19 vaccines are a tool of population control and otherwise dangerous, and some QAnon influencers have used the platform to boost explicitly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

“It’s really all happening on Telegram right now,” Rothschild told Recode. “What they’re able to do with Telegram is just sort of blast these messages out on their own private channels and get tens of thousands of views on them right away and get thousands of comments on them. But the discussion is really one-way, so it’s really changing the way QAnon promoters interact with their followers.”

The conference where Flynn made his conspiratorial comments was called the “For God & Country Patriot Roundup” and held at the Omni Dallas Hotel. While the event was largely branded to focus on “patriotism,” it made clear references to the QAnon conspiracy theory, and the event’s logo explicitly invoked the QAnon catchphrase, “Where we go one, we go all.” Other well-known promoters of the QAnon theory also attended, as did Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell, who at one point during the conference said that Trump could “simply be reinstated” and a new inauguration date could be set before the actual next election.

“Flynn’s appearance at this event was not in a vacuum. He has cultivated QAnon support for a while now,” Alex Kaplan, a senior researcher at Media Matters, told Recode. Last year, Flynn posted a video online of himself sharing QAnon slogans, and has formed relationships with influencers in the QAnon movement.

QAnon conspiracy theorists have long believed the November 3, 2020 election was fake, and they’ve circulated the idea that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, including through voting fraud, Kaplan explained. Since the inauguration, supporters of QAnon have continued to look for ways to support the idea that Trump is coming back as president. For a while, some adherents thought that Trump would be reinstated on March 4, a belief that has obviously been proven false. Following the February military coup in Myanmar, some QAnon supporters looked to the events as inspiration for what could happen in the US.

“The Burmese military has arrested the country’s leaders after credible evidence of widespread voter fraud became impossible to ignore … sounds like the controlled media and Biden admin are scared this might happen here,” predicted one account on the Telegram app, according to a Rolling Stone report from February. “We will see this headline here soon.”

Some QAnon supporters have even tried to make connections between voting technology companies that were drawn into conspiracy theories about the US election, and the events in Myanmar. Similar claims have also been made on apps like Rumble and Gab.

Right now, it’s not clear what will happen next with QAnon, or where its supporters will go. A recent survey from the Public Religion Research Institute found that while a large majority of the country disagree with the idea that the government, media, and finance is “controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation” — a core belief of the QAnon conspiracy theory — about 15 percent of Americans agree with that idea. Other scholars have questioned the idea that QAnon’s following is actually so widespread.

Regardless, Flynn’s comments and the response to them are a reminder that the future of the QAnon conspiracy theory is more complicated than the content moderation decisions of mainstream social media platforms. While people believed similar conspiracy theories before QAnon arrived, QAnon has managed to repackage many of those beliefs, and they’ve endured and evolved, despite crackdowns.

If Friday’s 54-35 vote—the vote where the side with 18 more votes lost—hasn't proven the need to change Senate rules, nothing will. Because that just wasn't the side with an 18-vote majority losing, it was what Republicans were voting against. They were voting against an investigation into an attempted coup against them. They were voting against an inquiry to find out what happened and possibly how to keep it from happening again; an inquiry into how to preserve the institution in which they serve against violent overthrow. And they won on Friday, by losing.

Even Sen. Joe Manchin has to look at that and be utterly chilled. We can't speculate on how Democrat Kyrsten Sinema is reacting, because she's disappeared since skipping Friday's vote. Her office said that they'd get a statement in the Congressional Record stating she would have voted for the commission, but nobody has been able to actually get an explanation from Sinema or her staff for where she was and why she missed the vote.

Manchin and Sinema aside, though, it's now incumbent upon every Senate Democrat to do something about the fact that they can lose when they have an 18-vote majority. That means challenging every cloture vote, the procedural vote that require 60 votes to allow a bill onto the floor, that loses even when it has a majority.

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Everything about Friday's vote was the worst, including the fact that nine Republicans literally had to do nothing to filibuster—talk about a painless filibuster, they didn't even have to show up for work! That can't be allowed to stand. Not anymore. At the very least, every Senate Democrat who wants to get rid of the filibuster should commit to raising a stink about these votes.

The next time they lose on a cloture vote with a majority, they need to fight. One needs to stand up and appeal the ruling of the chair who declares the vote didn't pass. As David Waldman tweeted that would be "a baby step toward a 'talking filibuster.' We’ll call it the 'Yes, you actually at least have to stay here and vote' filibuster."

Who knows, you may end up actually changing a rule that way. They would have passed that bill if the rule had been a 3/5 majority of those present and voting. And been bipartisan while they were at it! If nothing else, this would prove again and again how absolutely absurd it is that the Senate minority can make absolutely nothing happen by doing absolutely nothing. It would demonstrate just how patently ridiculous a thing the Senate has become.

The danger to our nation seems not to have moved them enough to do it, not yet anyway. That might be changing after what happened in Texas over the weekend, when Republicans passed an egregious voter suppression bill and state House Democrats took extraordinary measures—they walked out to deny a quorum—to fight it and win a temporary victory. And they called on Congress to fix it.

President Joe Biden even called out Texas in remarks on Monday. "It's part of an assault on democracy that we've seen far too often this year—and often disproportionately targeting Black and Brown Americans. It's wrong and un-American. In the 21st century, we should be making it easier, not harder, for every eligible voter to vote," he said.

Biden needs to tell it to Manchin and Sinema and the rest of the Senate Democrats who are as of yet unsure as to whether to get rid of the filibuster. And he needs to do it now because Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is readying for that fight. He promised before the Senate left on Friday that when they return on June 7, democracy is going to be on the floor. Among other measures, he's going to bring up S. 1, the "For the People Act," a sweeping voting rights bill.

He warned his colleagues in a letter of what was to come, and explained why he's doing it. "We have also seen the limits of bipartisanship and the resurgence of Republican obstructionism. […] Senate Democrats are doing everything we can to move legislation in a bipartisan way when and where the opportunity exists," Schumer wrote. "The June work period will be extremely challenging. I want to be clear that the next few weeks will be hard and will test our resolve as a Congress and a conference."

If he needs to buttress that message, he can have the 100 scholars of democracy who are calling for the elimination of the filibuster talk to them. These scholars are sounding the alarm about how close to the precipice our democracy is. Literally. "Our entire democracy is now at risk," their statement reads. "History will judge what we do at this moment."

"We urge members of Congress to do whatever is necessary—including suspending the filibuster—in order to pass national voting and election administration standards," they write. "We wanted to create a strong statement from a wide range of scholars, including many who have studied democratic backsliding, to make it clear that democracy in America is genuinely under threat," Lee Drutman, senior fellow at New America and a leading organizer of the letter, told the Washington Post's Greg Sargent. "The playbook that the Republican Party is executing at the state and national levels is very much consistent with actions taken by illiberal, anti-democratic, anti-pluralist parties in other democracies that have slipped away from free and fair elections."

The clarion call should certainly appeal to those supposed institutionalists, Manchin and Sinema, who are insisting it's the preservation of the Senate that they're upholding in their obstinance. "Democracy rests on certain elemental institutional and normative conditions," the scholars write. "Elections must be neutrally and fairly administered. They must be free of manipulation. Every citizen who is qualified must have an equal right to vote, unhindered by obstruction. And when they lose elections, political parties and their candidates and supporters must be willing to accept defeat and acknowledge the legitimacy of the outcome."

That's in large part what the vote on Friday was about—the refusal of 147 Republican members of the House and Senate—who refused to accept defeat and accept the outcome, fueling the flames of the Big Lie.

Schumer seems ready to press the issue. He needs every single Democrat who is not Manchin or Sinema with him. That includes President Biden. It's time for that bully pulpit to be put to best use.