It's like racism still exists and has consequences
TALLAHASSEE — Just 7 percent of the roughly 9 million people vaccinated for Covid-19 in Florida are Black, a figure that has Gov. Ron DeSantis administration officials and advocates pledging to do more to boost vaccination rates in Black communities.
Shamarial Roberson, the Florida Department of Health’s deputy secretary for health, told reporters Wednesday that just 658,000 Black Florida residents are fully vaccinated, adding that “we have a lot of work to do.”
She gave her comments during meeting of the Statewide Coronavirus Vaccination Community Education and Engagement Task Force, a panel of faith, community and medical leaders formed in January with the goal of getting between 60 and 70 percent of people of color in Florida to take the vaccine.
More than four months later, however, Roberson told the task force that only about 20 percent of Florida’s overall Black population has gotten the vaccine. About 38 percent of white non-Hispanic residents have been vaccinated in the state.
“So even though you look at the overall big picture, we still have a lot to do in order to get to the concept called herd immunity to get to a point where we can resume life,” she said.
During the meeting, task force members shared ideas to get Black residents vaccinated, including using phone banks, hosting community block parties and deploying trusted community ambassadors. They also discussed the role of disinformation about the vaccines.
“There are people that are making millions of dollars by convincing people ‘don’t get a vaccine, do my thing, buy my product, wear my special thing, etc.,’” said Daniel Van Durme, a professor with the Florida State University School of Medicine. “That’s disinformation. Stuff that is deliberately wrong.”
Tallahassee Rev. R.B. Holmes, who leads the task force, pointed to specific comments made by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) last week on a conservative radio show questioning the safety of vaccines.
“I don’t want to get too political, but I saw a Senator from Wisconsin saying he does not believe in these vaccines,” Holmes said. “And some people in the white evangelical community are also noncommittal. But we just have to be positive, stay focused, and keep our eye on the prize.
The issue of boosting vaccination rates in Florida’s Black communities is not new. In February, when just 5 percent of the 1.7 million vaccinated were Black, Holmes sent an outline of how to better reach minority communities to DeSantis’ office. Holmes said he never heard back.
Later that month, DeSantis opened up six vaccination sites in underserved communities across the state, a step at the time that was seen as helping address racial disparities in vaccinations. Around that same time, the Biden administration opened FEMA-backed vaccination sites in underserved communities.
State Rep. Omari Hardy (D-West Palm Beach), a Black progressive lawmaker who is running for the open congressional seat left vacant after Alcee Hastings died, urged DeSantis and his administration to work harder to reach communities of color.
“Gov. DeSantis and the folks around him need to move heaven and earth to get vaccines to the black community, and as they do this I don’t want to hear them blame their inability to equitably distribute the vaccine to people of color on vaccine hesitancy,” he said.
The percentage of vaccinations in Black communities, however, continues to lag white Floridians who are getting the vaccination.
“In the state of Florida, it’s somewhere around the ratio of two to one in terms of people of color versus Caucasians,” said Larry Robinson, president of Florida A&M, a historically black college in Tallahassee. “That’s unacceptable.”
Robinson, a task force member, said of those getting shots at a regional vaccination site at Florida A&M, about 60 percent are Black.
“Anybody can come and we encourage that, but it looks like it’s getting to that demographic that we all care about here that has been disproportionately impacted,” he said.
Sen. Mitch McConnell must feel pretty damned confident about having Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin in his back pocket in his "100%" commitment to make sure President Biden fails. He's got good reason given Manchin's public statements lately.
After a bipartisan leadership meeting with Biden on infrastructure Wednesday, McConnell made it abundantly clear that he won't be doing any negotiating. "We're not interested in reopening the 2017 tax bill, we both made that clear to the president, that's our red line," McConnell said. That's not very bipartisan-y of him, is it? McCarthy was worse, blasting out a campaign text immediately after talking about "Corrupt Joe Biden" with a "radical Socialist agenda." (Trumpist capitalization all his.)
With all that, Manchin still isn't backing down from his insistence that this and every other bill be done with Republicans. That's despite Republicans stating that they will oppose anything Biden wants out loud, repeatedly. It's explicitly been made official Senate Republican policy. McConnell did that with this "100%" commitment to fighting Biden comment, and Sen. Ted Cruz reiterated it Tuesday, this time on the voting rights and elections reform bill that the Senate Rules Committee took up. The Washington Post's Paul Waldman caught an exchange between Sen. Angus King and Cruz about the numerous Republican amendments they brought to the committee.
"If this amendment and others that you suggest are accepted, would you vote for the bill?" King asked, rhetorically. He knows better by now. Cruz answered truthfully and essentially, no. "To be candid, it is difficult to imagine a set of amendments being adopted that would cause me to vote for this bill—it would have to be a fundamentally different bill." Like one that didn't secure voting rights and didn't keep dark money out of politics. "That being said," he continued, "each of these amendments is a designed to strike out egregious aspects of this bill, so if some of these amendments were adopted, it might conceivably convince some Republicans to support it, if it ceased being a partisan power grab."
In other words, a few Republicans might be willing to support a bill that essentially does nothing. And now Manchin is fully enabling that tactic. He's telling Republicans that using the Big Lie to destroy democracy is a valid tactic.
The asshole actually said this: "I believe Democrats and Republicans feel very strongly about protecting the ballot boxes allowing people to protect the right to vote." He has officially announced that he is going to oppose the For the People Act, but says instead he will support the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.
Which Republicans are also going to filibuster.
"It could be done bipartisan to start getting confidence back in our system," he said. It won't. Manchin also won't support a limited exception to the filibuster rules to let voting rights legislation pass with a simple majority, which is one possible reform. "If you do it for one time you basically destroy the Senate as we know it," Manchin said. Never mind that the Senate as we know it needs to be destroyed because the likes of Manchin and the Republicans he's enabling are keeping it a white supremacist institution that subverts democracy.
Even worse than all of that, he reinforced again the idea that Republicans have a valid claim in saying that our elections aren't secure. "It's about the country," he said. "It's about the fairness of the system. If the voting system in our country can't be secure and it can't be open and accessible to everybody and protected for everybody, no matter what your race, no matter what preference, you have—you have not only a right but a responsibility to vote and we shouldn't make it difficult for you."
Maintaining the minority rule status quo that has allowed Republicans representing a significant minority of the populace to call all the shots on pretty much everything is the only thing Republicans will get behind. Even when that means purging members who have ideological purity when it comes to policy, but refuse to endorse the GOP's ongoing electoral coup attempts.
"It's Kevin McCarthy," read a campaign text from the House GOP Minority Leader on Wednesday, immediately after he met with President Joe Biden in the Oval Office. "I just met with Corrupt Joe Biden and he's STILL planning to push his radical Socialist agenda onto the American people. I need EVERY single patriot to step up in the next six hours."
Shorter McCarthy: I went to the Oval Office so I could trash talk Biden and fundraise off it. Pure class.
Speaking at the White House after the meeting on Biden’s $2.3 trillion jobs proposal, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also extended his middle finger to the president’s outstretched hand in so many words.
"We had a good meeting with the president. Nearly all of it was about infrastructure," McConnell said, as he continued to obsess over what Republicans are willing to call infrastructure.
But here was the real kicker: "We are not interested in reopening the 2017 tax bill," McConnell added. "That's a red line."
Okay, so whatever their quibbles are about the size of the bill and what's included, Republicans still aren't going to sign on to any of the ways Biden has proposed to pay for it—and Biden has unequivocally pledged to find ways to pay for his proposed investments. Actually, Republicans are just into deficit spending these days.
McConnell's position about the size of the plan has shifted a bit over the past couple of weeks—he's clearly putting on a bit of a show. But the one thing McConnell has been rock solid on: He's intent on making sure Biden fails and is certain Biden won't muster a single GOP vote for his proposal to create jobs and invest in America's future.
Different White House, same GOP schtick—we're happy to sacrifice the nation at the altar of our political gain.
For its part, the White House released a read-out of the meeting with congressional leaders that used to be regarded as standard form.
“Today, President Biden hosted the bipartisan, bicameral Congressional Leadership for a productive meeting about how to further make government work for American families during this moment of crisis,” it read. “The President reiterated that he ran to be a leader for all Americans — regardless of who they voted for, that he believes there are many crucial areas where his administration and both parties in Congress can come together, and that in this unprecedented moment the American people expect us to put the interests of families above our disagreements.”
Well, it was worth a shot.
If there's a silver lining here, it's that the American public seems to be on to the Republican charade after they ran it for eight solid years during Barack Obama's presidency. An ABC News/Ipsos poll last week found that 67% of respondents say GOP leaders in Congress are doing too little to compromise with Biden, while just 22% called their approach about right. On the other hand, 60% of Americans said President Biden is either offering the right amount of bipartisanship or too much of it.
Bottom line: Americans are clear that it’s congressional Republicans who are killing any chance at bipartisanship, not President Biden.
If only people knew the racist inner-workings that inform how they get their news, we’d have far more former CNN aficionados retreating into media-free solitude. The racism at work at your favorite news stations, newspapers, and red carpet events is so rampant that many of the Pulitzer-Prize and other award winning journalists shedding light on systemic issues of racism often had to do so at the disapproval of their bosses and on their personal time. I know this because I’ve worked as a journalist for more than a decade and have friends in a wide gamut of media roles, some with Emmys and Pulitzers to boot, some who have yet to receive their roses for their courageous work.
So imagine my disgust when I learned that a spokesperson for Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt had the gall to try to belittle the work of a journalist of color working for a Black-owned media outlet. Sarah Gray, who self-identifies as a "proud citizen of the Cherokee Nation and of Muscogee (Creek) Nation and Kiowa Tribe descent," is a political correspondent and senior writer for The Black Wall Street Times. After Gray asked routine questions about how a commission voted on legislation and the governor’s involvement, Stitt's director of communications Carly Atchison wrote and The Black Wall Street Times screenshot this response: "Hi Sarah, thanks for reaching out but our policy is to respond to journalists, not activists pretending to be reporters. Good luck!"
News flash: Any journalist worthy of the title is an activist pretending to be a reporter. Now, depending on the outlet, some have to pretend a bit more convincingly than others, but if a sense of justice and a desperate need to right some societal wrong doesn’t drive the work of journalism, then it’s not journalism.
Why is Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt refusing to speak with Black news outlets in Oklahoma and allowing his spokeswoman to be directly hostile and disrespectful to the largest Black-owned newspaper in the state? This is as pathetic as it is shameful and racist. https://t.co/VUpumfzFv8pic.twitter.com/c5039XFPCX
“The governor’s message to the more than 1 million readers of The Black Wall Street Times is clear; he has no interest in sharing information with you, the journalists or Black-owned publication you trust,” the media company’s editorial board penned. “This anti-Black dog whistling is nothing new to members of the press who represent Black media. Anti-Blackness has inarguably become a cornerstone of the Stitt Administration’s general policy position.”
The news site fittingly based in Oklahoma, the birthplace of the economically thriving Black Tulsa community that is also the news organization's namesake, was asking the governor about his attendance at a meeting of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission to discuss Stitt’s role on the commission—or more accurately, lack there of. No one from his office showed up to the meeting on Monday despite being invited, while the governor twice “snubbed” the commission, The Black Wall Street Times reported. “Now more than ever, we need policies that bring us closer together – not rip us apart,” the Republican governor said in a statement on Friday. “And as governor I firmly believe that not one cent of taxpayer money should be used to define and divide young Oklahomans about their race or sex.”
Stitt made the speech the same day he signed into law Oklahoma House Bill 1775, which The Black Wall Street Times defined as “a law that shields White students from learning about the trauma and effects of systemic racism if it makes them feel discomfort or guilt.” Let’s not forget, this is in a state where white supremacists burned and terrorized the wealthiest Black community in the country, that of Tulsa, in 1921. The governor promised House Bill 1775 wouldn’t “prevent or discourage” difficult conversations about “our past.” He said “verbatim” it reads: “No teacher shall require or make part of a course that one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex.”
The legislation maintains that no public school employee should require or make part of a course any content that makes any individual “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.” It also includes bizarre language that bans defining “meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic” as “racist or sexist or were created by members of a particular race to oppress members of another race." Still, Stitt wants his constituents to believe the bill is harmlss.
If the bill is as harmless as the governor implies, it’s unclear why his office had such a problem answering The Black Wall Street Times’ basic questions about how each member on the Tulsa commission voted in coming to a collective decision not to support the legislation. “Based on this interaction, it is the Black Wall Street Times Editorial Board’s opinion that Governor Stitt and his communications team are operating with a segregated media policy,” the editorial board wrote.
When working with COVID-19 stories, there are two ways that numbers are usually reported. One is the total number of cases or deaths—and on both those numbers, the United States remains its “lead,” with over 33 million cases and just under 600,000 deaths. These numbers seem straightforward enough, even if there’s a tacit understanding that official test numbers will by their nature omit a large number of cases. Though, considering a recent study that pegged excess deaths attributable directly to COVID-19 over 900,000, these numbers may be of significantly reduced value.
The other way that the severity of the situation is examined is by looking at cases or deaths against population. After all, you’re not going to have 33 million cases in the Netherlands when the total population of the country is only 17 million. Cases/population is likely the best we can do when trying to estimate just how hard any region has been hit, and how well local officials have responded in attempts to contain the disease. By this measure, the United States is still the worst among large nations, with a positive results rate of over 100,000 per 1 million people. In other words, at this point in the pandemic, a full 10% of the American public has tested positive for COVID-19. That’s not as bad as some smaller nations like Andorra (173,000 cases per million), but with much smaller populations, those nations are subject to having their values skewed one way or the other by a relative handful of cases.
But when looking at trends, the best answer might not be either the total numbers or the the cases by population, but how things are changing as a percentage of what happened in past weeks. Cases in the U.S. are currently down 21% compared to the previous week—though that undoubtedly is a reduction due to low testing over Mother’s Day weekend. India is up 3% compared to last week, but compared to the double-digit increases of the last two months, that 3% climb is a relief. On the other hand, the 103 cases in Somalia over the last week represent a 385% increase over the previous week. Considering the small number of actual cases, it’s easy to overlook this increase. But what’s happening in Somalia, Vietnam, and the Maldives is definitely worth a look.
For most Americans, the Republican of Maldives is a nation obscure enough that it merits a brief description. It’s an archipelago of small islands in the Indian Ocean about 400 miles off the coast of India, and with a population of less than half a million, it would barely be a neighborhood in Mumbai or Bangalore. Like its giant neighbor, until recently the number of cases of COVID-19 in the Maldives had been bad—but not that bad. It’s only in the last weeks that cases there have soared. Weekly cases were up 82% last week and show no signs of slowing down.
It’s one of several countries, like Nepal, that has seen sharp increases as the massive and ongoing outbreak in India spreads into neighboring nations. Other areas in Asia that aren’t exactly neighbors—like Vietnam and Malaysia—have also seen increasing cases.
However, if the numbers can be trusted, India itself may finally be rounding the bend, though at horrific cost. Cases remained above 329,000 on Monday (which is generally the lowest reported number of the week), but that’s down from 355,000 cases on the previous Monday. The over 3.7 million active cases in India have the nation’s healthcare system straining at every seam, but this week may actually generate a glimmer of hope.
Meanwhile, the increases in cases in several African states as well as in Asia are a reminder that only 2% of the world population is known to have had COVID-19. The potential for the pandemic to get much worse remains, and widespread distribution of vaccines remains critical.
Booster shoots, get your free booster shots
The evidence remains good that the current generation of COVID-19 vaccines (Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson) are all effective against known current variants of SARS-CoV-2. However, some variants do demonstrate a degree of vaccine evasion due to mutations in the spike protein, and as time goes on these changes are building up. All of the major vaccine manufacturers have been preparing updates that provide a booster shot containing proteins that reflect some of these more recent variants. Right now, it’s unclear when those boosters might be needed since we know that COVID-19 vaccines should be good for at least six months (and likely considerably longer). But there’s a chance that sometime next fall, it may be time for your latest flu shot—and a COVID-19 booster.
When that happens, don’t expect to have to pay for it. COVID-19 boosters, like this year’s vaccine, will be free.
As The Hill reports, David Kessler, chief science officer for Biden’s COVID-19 response team, appeared at a Senate hearing on Tuesday to let senators know that the federal government is picking up the tab for the second round of COVID-19 vaccines, if necessary. The funding for any 2022 vaccines will come out of the money that has already been allocated by the various COVID-19 relief bills, so there’s no need for Congress to pony up more cash to keep vaccination free and vaccination levels high.
Kessler suggested that beyond 2022, it may be time to “transition back to the commercial market.” In other words, if COVID-19 becomes endemic and a regular COVID-19 booster becomes an annual affair, then it’s likely require bringing out a credit card sometime in 2023. Pfizer’s vaccine is currently the most expensive at $39 a dose, but it’s impossible to predict what an individual dose will cost in two years.
A semi-post-mortem for Sweden
As a citizen of the nation that did worst in the world when dealing with COVID-19, it’s fantastic to be able to look at nations like New Zealand and see what the world can be like given competent leadership and a populace willing to work together. The cases per 1 million population there stand at just 528, meaning that the U.S. has a rate that’s 19,000% higher.
On the other hand, it’s also possible to reach out and see that there are other nations that also FUBAR’d this thing so, so, so badly. That’s not exactly comforting. But it does mean that, for the average citizen, we share a kinship … of shame. And horror. So let’s check in on Sweden.
You may recall at the outset of the pandemic, Sweden set out to follow all those rules that U.S. governors like Ron DeSantis and Kristi Noem found so compelling. You could keep your businesses open, keep the schools going, and keep the effects of COVID-19 low as long as you packed the old folks safely away. Or, as was written here more than a year ago, they were conducting a godawful experiment with their citizen’s lives, taking a gamble on a highly controversial theory and cheerfully pretending that if they just closed their eyes and whistled, all would be fine.
In April 2020, the way I covered that was by saying:
In a way, Sweden has done the world a service: it has demonstrated what does not work. But it needs to stop before the price is higher than it’s already proven to be.
At the time, the pandemic in Europe was barely a month old, and though Sweden was outpacing its Nordic neighbors when it comes to cases of COVID-19, it is also larger than neighboring Norway, Finland, and Denmark. Now, a year later, it seems like a good time to check in and investigate the wisdom of libertarians and the Great Barrington Declaration.
So … how’d it go? It went like this.
Total cases of COVID-19 in Scandinavia.
Well, yes, that does look bad. However, Sweden is larger. So how does it look when those values are changed to cases by population?
Per capita cases of COVID-19 in Scandinavia.
All right that looks … remarkably the same. Though the population values have brought down the disparity a bit, cases in Sweden still more than double those of the worst of its neighbors.
But maybe all of this is looking at it incorrectly. After all, the whole purpose of the Great Barrington Declaration was to feed the idea that reaching herd immunity could be done with lower deaths than cowering indoors. Reaching herd immunity means more cases. So the real measure of Sweden’s effectiveness shouldn’t be cases at all, but deaths. How did that turn out?
Per capita deaths from COVID-19 across Scandinavia.
Worse. That’s how it turned out. The discrepancy of deaths between Sweden and its neighbors was actually much worse than the difference in the rate of deaths. Why? In large part because the health care system in Sweden was put under much greater strain because a bunch of geniuses decided it would be a great idea to get more people sick more quickly.
Way back in October of last year, before the worst of the holiday wave of cases, theJournal of the American Medical Associationfound that when it looked around the world, the United States and Sweden made up a unique set of nations. They were not only nations with a high rate of mortality, but were the only countries who failed to rapidly reduce mortality rates over the course of the pandemic. Both started bad. Both stayed bad.
As the medical journal The Lancet made clear, once that new wave of cases was underway last December, deaths in Sweden had reached a level 4.5 to 10 times higher than its neighbors.
This difference between Nordic countries cannot be explained merely by variations in national cultures, histories, population sizes and densities, immigration patterns, the routes by which the virus was first introduced, or how cases and deaths are reported. Instead, the answers to this enigma are to be found in the Swedish national COVID-19 strategy, the assumptions on which it is based, and in the governance of the health system that has enabled the strategy to continue without major course corrections.
Sweden needlessly threw away the lives of 14,000 citizens to test a theory concocted by a libertarian think tank that put a patina of respectability over a policy of doing nothing. But of course, Sweden did hold out through the year with a GDP growth of 1.2%, which was … exactly that of Norway, but slightly better than Finland. All worth it then.
Don’t expect things in Stockholm to get better soon. While Our World in Data shows about 27% of the Swedish population has been vaccinated, the capital has been roiled by a whole series of anti-vax/anti-lockdown protests as the government attempts to take belated action. And, just to make that echo even louder, the largest of these protests was called “The Protest for Freedom and Truth.” As The Local reports, protesters carried signs reading “the mass media is the virus,” “Covid-19 was planned,” and, “The pandemic was invented.”
“I don’t believe in this pandemic,” said one woman at the protest as she complained about the very light social distancing rules that had recently been implemented. “Look how the police are behaving. There’s no longer democracy in our country.”
She said Covid-19 was “just an ordinary virus”, claimed that there was no excess mortality in Sweden, and argued that the virus was “just a way of frightening people”.
It’s not just us. But that’s … not comforting at all.
Impossible Foods has secured Child Nutrition Labels for its Impossible Burger products, which means they can now be part of school nutrition programs in the US. Engadget reports: To obtain the CN Labels, USDA's Food and Nutrition Services had to evaluate the plant-based meat's product formulation, as well as the company's quality control procedures and manufacturing processes. Now that it has acquired CN Labels for its products, the company is launching K-12 pilot programs this month in partnership with several school districts. The Palo Alto Unified School District in California, the Aberdeen School District in Washington, the Deer Creek Public Schools in Edmond, Oklahoma and the Union City Public Schools in Union City, Oklahoma will be using Impossible's faux meat in a variety of dishes for their menu. Those dishes include tacos, frito pies and spaghetti with Impossible meat sauce. Other school districts can easily obtain Impossible products from suppliers to add them to their menus, as well.
Samsung is planning big things for the next release of its Exynos system on a chip. The company has already promised that the "next generation" of its Exynos SoC will feature a GPU from AMD, which inked a partnership with Samsung in June 2019. A new report from The Korea Economic Daily provides more details.
The report says that "the South Korean tech giant will unveil a premium Exynos chip that can be used in laptops as well as smartphones in the second half of this year" and that "the new Exynos chip for laptops will use the graphics processing unit (GPU) jointly developed with US semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices Inc."
There's a bit to unpack here. First, a launch this year would be an acceleration of the normal Samsung schedule. The last Exynos flagship was announced in January 2021, so you would normally pencil in the new Exynos for early next year. Second, the report goes out of its way to specify that the laptop chip will have an AMD GPU, so... not the smartphone chip?
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves followed the lead of his Republican counterparts in Montana and South Carolina by announcing the state will refuse expanded federal unemployment benefits, costing unemployed Mississippians $300 a week in an effort to force them into low-wage jobs—despite a lot of data showing that Republican claims about the effects of the federal unemployment aid boost are simply false.
President Joe Biden pushed back on some of those claims in Monday remarks on the economy, saying “we don’t see much evidence” that people are staying home because of high unemployment benefits, and pointing out: “We still have 8 million fewer jobs than we did when the pandemic started.” At the same time, Biden emphasized that “anyone collecting unemployment who is offered a suitable job must take the job or lose their unemployment benefits.”
In Mississippi, businesses “report that they cannot get employees to return to work because they can earn more from combined federal and state unemployment benefits than their normal wages … These businesses are no longer suffering from a lack of demand due to COVID-19,” Mississippi state House Speaker Philip Gunn wrote in a letter to Reeves. “Rather, they are suffering from a labor shortage caused by unemployment benefits that exceed normal wage levels for productive work.”
Mississippi’s maximum unemployment benefit without the added $300 a week is $235, so the benefits that “exceed normal wage levels for productive work” end up at $13.38 an hour, just under the $13.43 an hour that the MIT Living Wage Calculator says is a living wage for one adult with no children in Mississippi.
Contrary to Republican claims that people are staying home because they don’t want to work, Ashton Pittman reports that Mississippi’s labor force participation rate is back to pre-pandemic levels. People are either working or looking for work, in other words. And nationally, the April jobs data suggests “the exact opposite” of the claim that people aren’t looking for work because they can get more money from unemployment benefits, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently noted. That’s because the highest job growth has been in low-wage industries like hospitality and food service, where unemployment benefits can outstrip wages.
Mississippi Republicans are trying to force people back into low-wage jobs in the state with the lowest vaccination rate in the country—just 41.5% of adults have had one vaccine dose. But they’re part of a broader effort to normalize low wages in any working environment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently called for an end to the unemployment benefits supplement. Many restaurant owners have been on an extended whine campaign—with help from the media—about how they can’t get people to work the exact schedules they want on the low wages they want to pay to deal with often unmasked, belligerent customers.
When reporters focus on what bosses say (which is very much the same as what Republican politicians say), they get a lot of, “When people can make more staying at home than going to work, they will stay at home,” as one McDonald’s franchisee group recently wrote in a letter to its members. But when they talk to workers, they hear, “You couldn't pay me $20 an hour to work in food for the conditions we had to endure there,” as a former Chipotle worker told Business Insider. Or, “Everybody is honestly so tired of being so mistreated, still,” in the words of a Starbucks worker.
”We literally felt abandoned,” one restaurant worker told Washington City Paper. “It left us feeling like if this happened again, we can’t trust that we would be taken care of.”
”We are so sick and tired of [restaurant owners] assuming we want a handout,” another Washington, D.C. area restaurant worker told Eater. “We want to work, but we also want to be treated like human beings. We haven’t been for way too long.”
Suffering a beating or three at the polls is the only way the GOP will change. Otherwise they'll keep doing what they're doing because they think it works. They're a dwindling minority that still clings to power nationally and in many states completely runs the shop.
As House Republicans line up to purge their ranks of any potential truth tellers about Donald Trump's 2020 loss, new reporting from the Washington Post suggests they are living a level of denial that exceeds mere strategic choice about how to retake the majority next year.
Not only are House GOP leaders ousting their No. 3, Rep. Liz of Cheney of Wyoming, for refusing to peddle Trump's Big Lie about rampant voter fraud, they are attempting to deprive their own members of the extent to which Trump could sink them in critical districts. During the caucus' April retreat, the Post reports that staffers from the National Republican Congressional Committee refused to disclose key elements of their own internal polling on Trump.
"Trump’s unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones in the core districts, according to the full polling results, which were later obtained by The Washington Post. Nearly twice as many voters had a strongly unfavorable view of the former president as had a strongly favorable one," writes the Post.
Even when one GOP member posed direct questions about Trump's support, the staffers conducting the briefing refused to come clean.
In short, they are not only living Trump's lie about the last election, they're also spinning their own lie about the next election.
It's the type of self-deluded miscalculation that could truly undercut their chances in critical swing districts, particularly as the party lurches to the right in an attempt to keep Trumpers engaged and activated for the midterms.
As I wrote in a post several weeks back, it's impossible to imagine the GOP hard-core embracing the political fringes of Trump's base without it somehow disrupting its relationship with high-propensity college-educated voters. It’s a group that already has continued to move away from the party in the past two election cycles. And yes, I'm assuming that "core districts" likely refers to swingy suburban districts.
In Georgia, for instance, Biden's win was largely powered by the shift among voters in the suburbs, college graduates, and high-income earners, according to turnout data from TheNew York Times. Here's how they moved from 2016 to 2020:
High-income earners: +7 points more Democratic
Majority college graduates: +6 points more Democratic
Suburban: +6 points more Democratic
Another metric that seems to support what is reported in the Post is Trump's favorable rating nationally among independent college graduates, which is roughly 15 points underwater (17 points to be specific).
To be clear, the lack of specificity of the Post’s reporting on the internal GOP data along with the fact that it's simply too early to game out which districts will be in play make it impossible to draw too many conclusions.
But the GOP’s lurch rightward has been both real and undeniably overt, and Trump's unpopularity with suburban voters is also verifiably real. Bottom line: If Republican leaders are lying to their conference about Trump's overall drag on their candidates, that can't be good news for whatever strategerie they are planning for 2022.
A Kansas City Christian school is under fire after reports that its administration is instructing faculty to expel out LGBTQ students or find another job.
According to local Kansas City publication The Pitch, administrators at K-12 Christian school Whitefield Academy reportedly distributed a letter for faculty members to sign earlier this month with language outlining the desire to oust out LGBTQ students attending the school. Anyone that didn’t sign the letter was expected to maintain employment at the school going forward.
Three teachers that didn’t sign the letter will not be returning to Whitefield in the fall. For one anonymous parent of a Whitefield student, the school’s latest statement on LGBTQ acceptance says out loud what she believed was “unspoken” though widely known.
“It’s been unspoken I suppose up until now, and now they’re now they’re formalizing that in a way that makes me really uncomfortable … we know the suicide rates for kids that are not in affirming families. And when I think about those same kids going to school and knowing that every adult in that school has signed a piece of paper saying they are not welcome there, it just hurts my heart to think about,” she told The Pitch.
Whitefield Academy headmaster, Dr. Quentin Johnston, denied the existence of a letter faculty was required to sign but did say that the school asks “teachers and parents to understand and consent to the standards outlined in our Statement of Faith and core documents.”
While the school’s Statement of Faith doesn’t explicitly state an opinion on LGBTQ identities, its parent and student handbook lists “homosexuality,” “lesbianism” and “bisexual conduct” as “sexual immorality” alongside bestiality and incest. It also targets gender identity and expression: “Rejection of one’s biological gender is a rejection of the image of God within that person.”
If a mass shooting is defined as an event where four or more people are shot, not counting the shooter, well, there were at least nine of those in the United States over the past weekend. At least 15 people died and 30 were wounded in those nine events, as Republicans continue to oppose even the most modest gun law reforms.
U! S! A!
Sorry, what else can we possibly say at that news?
The only one of the weekend’s minimum of nine mass shootings to make widespread headlines was at a birthday party in Colorado. Six people were killed in that one, and the suspected shooter—believed to be the boyfriend of one of his victims—also killed himself. While it’s common for your smaller, home-based mass shootings to involve intimate partner relationships, so much so that many of those shootings don’t get a lot of media coverage, the birthday party angle garnered this one some attention.
In other mass shootings, three were killed and one injured in Woodlawn, Maryland, in a bizarre incident that involved a man shooting and stabbing his neighbors, setting fire to his own home, and ultimately being shot and killed by police. Two people were killed and three injured in St. Louis County, Missouri, when a truck pulled up and bullets started flying. In Compton, California, two people were killed and two injured, while one person was killed and five were injured in a Los Angeles shooting. One person was killed and at least seven were wounded in an altercation at a Phoenix hotel. Four people were injured in each of three mass shootings, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Newark, New Jersey; and Citrus Heights, California.
Truly, mass shootings are a complex and varied tapestry in these United States.
Republicans used to allow new gun laws to pass without being filibustered. That's no longer true in an age where Republicans filibuster everything. President Joe Biden has issued executive orders cracking down on “ghost guns” and stabilizing devices that “effectively [turn] a pistol into a short-barreled rifle subject to the requirements of the National Firearms Act.” But most action to reduce the number of mass shootings—and other shootings, for that matter—would require Congress, and as long as Republicans have the power to block anything, they will block this.
The Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved Pfizer and BioNTech's request to allow their Covid-19 vaccine to be given to kids ages 12 to 15 on an emergency use basis, allowing states to get middle school students vaccinated before the fall. The two-dose vaccine is already authorized for use in people 16 and older. CNBC reports: Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock said the decision brings "us closer to returning to a sense of normalcy and to ending the pandemic." She assured parents that the agency "undertook a rigorous and thorough review of all available data" before clearing it for use in the teens. The companies said in late March that the vaccine was found to be 100% effective in a clinical trial of more than 2,000 adolescents. They also said the vaccine elicited a "robust" antibody response in the children, exceeding those in an earlier trial of older teens and young adults. Side effects were generally consistent with those seen in adults, they added.
Vaccinating children is seen as crucial to ending the pandemic. The nation is unlikely to achieve herd immunity -- when enough people in a given community have antibodies against a specific disease -- until children can get vaccinated, health officials and experts say. Children make up around 20% of the total U.S. population, according to government data. Between 70% and 85% of the U.S. population needs to be vaccinated against Covid to achieve herd immunity, experts say, and some adults may refuse to get the shots. Though more experts now say herd immunity is looking increasingly unlikely as variants spread. The report notes that the same two-dose regimen that's use for people 16 years of age and older will also be used for kids ages 12 to 15. FDA approval for kids under age 12 could come in the second half of the year.
About fucking time, since they've had better chips almost the entire time.
An anonymous reader shares a report: The first few months of 2021 have been absolutely massive for AMD and Intel. According to the latest report from Mercury Research, the first three months of 2021 saw the largest yearly increase in shipments of CPUs in a quarter of a century, and second only to the final moments of 2020 in terms of raw volume. You'd be perhaps surprised to learn that Intel has gained a touch in overall x86 market share in Q1 2021, whereas AMD reportedly lost out. There's only a percentage point in it: a 1% gain for Intel and a 1% loss for AMD, though. Far from major gains in either direction.
Mercury Research puts that down to an increase in budget chip shipments for Chipzilla, which tallies with other figures out of the tech giant as of late. But where Intel has gained in mobile processor market share, it loses out marginally in desktop. That's where AMD's Ryzen processors are seemingly crushing it, and despite some difficulty sourcing the top-tier chips, such as the Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X, AMD is still managing to make gains within the market predisposed to Intel processors for so long. [...] But perhaps the biggest win in AMD's eyes is the 1.8% increase in server market share quarter to quarter, and 3.8 percent year on year. That means its Epyc processors are selling supremely well against Intel's Xeon chips, and the market that AMD will be most determined to get more of a footing in.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, left, talks with Chief Justice John Roberts on the steps of the Supreme Court following Gorsuch’s official investiture at the Supreme Court in 2017. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
Voting rights mean little if the Court refuses to enforce them.
On Thursday morning, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed legislation that restricts absentee voting, discourages voters from registering through voter registration campaigns, and potentially prohibits volunteers from giving food and water to voters waiting in line to cast their ballot.
Many provisions of this new Florida law mirror similar provisions in a Georgia voter suppression bill that became law last March. The Georgia law also takes aim at absentee voting, among other things, but its most troubling provision allows the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to effectively take over county election boards — boards that have the power to disqualify voters and to close polling places.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Texas are pushing legislation that would redistribute polling precincts in urban areas in ways that would make it harder for many voters to cast a ballot, and that would require local election officials to potentially purge thousands of voters from their rolls. In Arizona, Republicans have proposed an array of new hurdles that voters would have to clear to cast a ballot — all whileconducting a haphazard “audit” of the 2020 election that appears designed to justify such laws.
All of this is possible because the Supreme Court has spent the past decade and a half dismantling safeguards against these kinds of laws. Not that long ago, these attacks on democracy would have run headlong into a skeptical judiciary. Now they are likely to be upheld.
A little over a decade ago, federal statutes and well-established constitutional doctrines provided a robust shield against state laws that serve little purpose other than to restrict the right to vote. But the Supreme Court started poking holes in this shield not long after President George W. Bush appointed Chief Justice John Roberts, a longtime crusader against strong voting rights laws, and Justice Samuel Alito, the Court’s most reliable Republican partisan.
States like Florida and Georgia are making in harder to vote, in other words, because they think the courts will let them get away with it. Due to some crucial decisions by the Roberts Court, they’re probably right.
Not that long ago, the Supreme Court would have struck down laws that target trumped-up allegations of voter fraud
Though the right to vote is the essential building block of any democracy, not all laws that make it more difficult to vote are unconstitutional. As the Supreme Court recognized in Storer v. Brown (1974), “as a practical matter, there must be a substantial regulation of elections if they are to be fair and honest and if some sort of order, rather than chaos, is to accompany the democratic processes.”
States may legitimately require voters to cast their ballots at a particular location, and it may require these voters to do so by a particular time and date. They may impose reasonable restrictions on who may qualify as a candidate whose name appears on the ballot. And states may require voters to use a standardized ballot rather than, say, simply writing a bunch of names on a blank sheet of paper and dropping it off at a polling place.
Yet while many election rules are permissible even if they prevent some small cohort of voters from casting a ballot, the Supreme Court as recently as 13 years ago forbade states from enacting laws that serve no purpose other than to restrict the franchise. As the Court held in Anderson v. Celebrezze (1983), when confronted with a law that makes it harder to vote, federal courts must weigh “the character and magnitude of the asserted injury” to the right to vote against “the precise interests put forward by the State as justifications for the burden imposed by its rule.”
Laws that imposed minimal burdens on the right to vote, while serving legitimate state interests, were typically upheld. But laws that burdened the right to vote without achieving any other real purpose would be struck down under the Anderson framework.
Anderson is technically still good law. But the Supreme Court watered down Anderson’s balancing test so severely in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board (2008) that it’s unclear whether Anderson still provides any meaningful safeguard against laws enacted primarily to disenfranchise voters.
Crawford was an early challenge to what was, at the time, a cutting-edge method of restricting the franchise: strict voter ID laws. Proponents of such laws, which require voters to show a photo ID before they can cast a ballot, typically claim that they are necessary to prevent anyone from impersonating a voter at the polls. But this kind of voter fraud is so rare that it barely exists.
A study by Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt, who led much of the Justice Department’s voting rights work in the Obama administration, uncovered only 35 credible allegations of in-person voter fraud among the 834 million ballots cast in the 2000-2014 elections. A Wisconsin study found seven cases of any kind of fraud among the 3 million votes cast in the 2004 election — and none were the kind that could be prevented by voter ID. In 2014, Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz, a Republican, announced the results of a two-year investigation into election misconduct within his state. He found zero cases of voter impersonation at the polls.
The primary opinion in Crawford was only able to identify one case of in-person voter fraud at the polls in the preceding 140 years.
So, under Anderson’s framework, the Indiana voter ID law at issue in Crawford should have been struck down. A state’s power to regulate elections is at its nadir when it targets an imaginary or virtually nonexistent problem.
Yet the Court allowed Indiana’s voter ID law to go into effect in Crawford.
The Court’s conservatives were unanimous in favor of this result, but it’s worth noting that the vote in Crawford was 6-3, with the five conservative justices splitting between two separate opinions. The primary opinion in Crawford was authored by Justice John Paul Stevens, a moderate Gerald Ford appointee who frequently voted with the Court’s liberal bloc.
Stevens later described Crawford as “a fairly unfortunate decision.” And, shortly after Stevens’s death in 2019, election law scholar Rick Hasen speculated that Stevens’s opinion in Crawford may have been a “tactical move that saved the country from a much worse decision” — Stevens’s opinion was joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy, who might have joined a more radical opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia if Stevens hadn’t voted for a conservative outcome.
Regardless of why the justices voted the way they did in Crawford, however, the decision was still a disaster for voting rights. It established that states may enact laws restricting the franchise, even if the only justification for the law is an imaginary or greatly exaggerated problem.
The Court dismantled key protections against racist election laws
Beyond the balancing test recognized by cases like Anderson, federal law is also supposed to provide very robust safeguards against racial discrimination in elections.
The most potent provision of the federal Voting Rights Act was Section 5 of the law, which required that states and local governments with a history of racist voting practices “preclear” any new voting rules — either with the Justice Department or with a federal court in Washington, DC — before those new rules could take effect. The idea was to stop racist election rules from ever having a chance to disenfranchise anyone.
Section 5 also provided very broad protection against racial voter discrimination in the jurisdictions where it applied. Under Section 5, covered states and local governments were required to seek preclearance for any new “voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure with respect to voting.” And preclearance would be denied if the new election rule had either the “purpose” or the “effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color.”
Before Shelby County, in other words, Texas would not have been allowed to implement a law that shuts down voting precincts in primarily Black and brown neighborhoods. Similarly, Georgia’s entire voter suppression law would be subject to preclearance, as would any new action taken under that law — such as a decision by state-level Republicans to take over local election boards in Atlanta, or to use their control of local election administration to shut down polling locations in Black communities.
The premise of ShelbyCounty was that it was unfair to single out the particular jurisdictions that were previously subject to preclearance because those jurisdictions no longer engaged in the kind of “‘pervasive,’ ‘flagrant,’ ‘widespread,’ and ‘rampant’ discrimination” that characterized the Jim Crow era. As Roberts wrote for the Court in Shelby County, “there is no denying ... that the conditions that originally justified [preclearance] no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.”
Perhaps. But, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously wrote in dissent, the fully operational Voting Rights Act was one of the primary reasons Jim Crow voter suppression waned in the latter part of the 20th century. “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes,” Ginsburg clapped back at Roberts, “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
Ginsburg’s warning now seems prescient, as many of the same states that were once subject to preclearance are now racing to enact laws disenfranchising voters.
It’s going to get worse
Decisions like Crawford and Shelby County were handed down when the relatively moderate conservative Justice Kennedy held the balance of power on the Supreme Court, when Justice Ginsburg was still alive, and when Amy Coney Barrett was still an obscure law professor at Notre Dame. Now that Kennedy and Ginsburg are no longer around, the Court’s new majority is likely to make significant new incursions on the right to vote.
The Supreme Court heard a case in March, for example, that could potentially dismantle what remains of the Voting Rights Act. Although several of the justices seemed disinclined at oral argument to eliminate all of the nation’s safeguards against racist election laws in one fell swoop, this case is still likely to weaken the Voting Rights Act even further, opening the door to more voter suppression laws.
The conservative justices, meanwhile, are pushing a radical doctrine that would give state legislatures an unprecedented new power to enact new election laws — even if those laws are vetoed by the governor or struck down by the state’s courts. As Justice Neil Gorsuch described this doctrine, “the Constitution provides that state legislatures — not federal judges, not state judges, not state governors, not other state officials — bear primary responsibility for setting election rules.”
It’s unclear whether the Court will implement this doctrine or how far it will go in doing so. Of the six conservative justices, only four currently endorse Gorsuch’s approach. Roberts has backed it in the past, but he stepped away from that view in an opinion last October. This means that the decision likely comes down to the recently confirmed Justice Barrett, who has not been on the Court long enough to reveal whether she agrees with Gorsuch.
If taken to its logical extreme, Gorsuch’s proposed rule could skew elections even further toward the Republican Party. It could potentially allow gerrymandered state legislatures in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to draw congressional maps that will lock Democrats out of power — and then to enact these maps into law even if the states’ Democratic governors attempt to veto the maps. Gorsuch’s approach might also prohibit state supreme courts from enforcing state constitutional provisions that protect voting rights or prohibit gerrymandering.
The Supreme Court, in other words, is signaling that it is not inclined to protect voting rights — and that it may even be inclined to further dismantle existing rules that protect our democracy. Republican state lawmakers are as capable of reading these signals as anyone else. And so it should come as no surprise that we are seeing the kinds of voter suppression bills that we are now seeing in places like Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Arizona.
A scene from the rally at the Capitol on January 6, before the building was stormed by protesters. | Brent Stirton/Getty Images
Liz Cheney’s downfall shows the GOP threat to democracy is getting worse.
Rep. Liz Cheney (WY), the third-ranking Republican in the House, has officially been removed from her leadership post. Her crime? Voting to impeach Donald Trump and then, subsequently, continuing to rebuke his “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was somehow stolen.
In this, Cheney is hardly alone. At the national and state level, Republicans who challenged Trump’s Big Lie — ranging from Sen. Mitt Romney (UT) all the way down to a member of the Michigan State Board of Canvassers — have either been formally punished or publicly rebuked. The party may not agree on much internally nowadays, but on this point, they march in lockstep: Trump’s falsehoods about the election must not be challenged.
This is not what Joe Biden seemed to think would happen. During the campaign, he predicted that “you will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends” if Trump were defeated. In December, long after it was clear Trump was standing by his false claims of a stolen election, Biden told supporters that “you’re going to be surprised” by how reasonable Republicans could be — though he added that “I may eat these words” eventually.
The events of the past few months have confirmed that Biden’s public optimism was indeed misplaced. Republicans cannot tell the truth about the 2020 election, nor treat him as a fully legitimate president. Trump’s hold over the party is too powerful, his Big Lie widely believed among Republican voters and activists alike.
This state of affairs — the culmination of years of Republican attacks on both the Democratic Party and the legitimacy of the electoral system itself — is dangerous. And it raises a disturbing question: Is the Republican Party even capable of treating a democratic president as legitimate? And if, not, are we heading for future electoral crises dwarfing even the disaster in 2020?
The Big Lie is GOP gospel
Cheney is not alone in suffering consequences for challenging Trump’s allegations.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who defended the state’s counting process against Trump’s attempts to interfere with it, was stripped of his voting power on the State Election Board as part of Georgia’s new voting restrictions law.
In a special House election in Texas held on in early May, the Trump-critical Republican in the race — Michael Wood — got 3 percent of the vote.
At the Utah Republican Party’s convention this weekend, Sen. Mitt Romney — perhaps the GOP’s leading Trump critic — was booed and called a traitor.
At the same time, Republicans who have embraced falsehoods about the election have been elevated.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (NY), who appears likely to replace Cheney in the No. 3 spot, backed Trump’s anti-election efforts to the hilt. Most egregiously, she falsely asserted that there were 140,000 illegal votes in Georgia’s Fulton County alone — which would amount to more than 25 percent of all the votes in the entire Democratic-leaning county. The breakout Republican stars in the House of Representatives, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA) and Lauren Boebert (CO), both egged on the January “Stop the Steal” rally that culminated in the attack on Capitol Hill.
Remaining in the GOP’s good graces requires that elected officials either actively embrace lies about 2020 or, at very least, refuse to condemn them. As a result, 2020 conspiracy theories are exerting a dominant influence on the party — shaping both legislation and the base’s worldview.
Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY).
Across the country, state legislators have introduced over 360 bills that restrict voting rights, per a count by the Brennan Center on Justice — the majority of which aim to restrict absentee voting in way or another. Several have already been enacted, including in key states like Georgia and Florida.
The restrictions on mail-in balloting, pushed primarily by Republicans, are not especially strategic — it’s not clear either party benefits more from expanded remote voting. But the bills serve as a way of codifying Trump’s false claims that these ballots were the key source of Democratic fraud, the reason why he lost and Biden won. Trump’s lies are changing our nation’s laws.
And polling has consistently found Republican voters take Trump’s view of the election. An April poll from Reuters/Ipsos is a representative example: It found that 60 percent of Republicans agreed that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump,” with 55 percent saying the result came from “illegal voting or election rigging.”
From top to bottom, the GOP has been conquered by the Big Lie. Much as North Korean state press proclaims that Kim Jong Il invented the hamburger, Republicans must now proclaim that was something fishy about Joe Biden’s victory.
The GOP elite gave us this party
This dire outcome was not inevitable: the best evidence we have suggests that the rise of the Big Lie is the direct result of strategic choices by Republican leaders.
A new paper by Dan Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzes data from a panel survey, which looks at roughly the same group of people over time, running between 2007 and 2020. The survey asked people to rate the fairness of the US electoral system on a scale of 1 to 5, and tracked the changes over time.
Dan Hopkins
What they found was a striking consistency: “Support for the American system is both high and reasonably stable when assessed via this measure,” Hopkins writes. Though there are some fluctuations, with partisans evaluating the system as somewhat less fair when the other party is in power, generally they’re small.
Hopkins’s last survey wave was in October 2020 — which means the results don’t reflect the false allegations lobbed in the aftermath of Biden’s victory. “The stability documented here was very likely shattered by Trump’s post-election actions,” Hopkins concludes.
Other data confirm this supposition. A report from the Voter Study Group analyzed Pew surveys, conducted after every presidential election since 2004, on whether voters thought their vote was counted fairly. You see the same general stability documented in Hopkins’ paper, with a majority of voters in both parties saying they were “very confident” their vote was counted accurately in every year — except 2020:
Voter Study Group2004’s lower Democratic numbers likely reflect a combination of lingering resentment about the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision and conspiracy theories propagated by a handful of prominent Democrats that Diebold voting machines might be rigged in Bush’s favor.
Taken together, these two results suggest that there’s nothing “natural” about voters believing elections were rigged against them. In fact, even when their party loses, both Republicans and Democrats have historically believed that the process was generally fair and the outcome basically legitimate.
The obvious explanation, as Hopkins notes, is when it comes to the 2020 election, the Republican elites were leading the voters — not the other way around.
“Recent shifts in public opinion were thus not a primary engine of the Trump presidency’s antidemocratic efforts or their violent conclusion,” he writes. “Such stability suggests understanding the precipitating causes of those efforts requires attention to other actors including activists and elites.”
The implication of this research is that we are stuck in a dangerous pattern.
Trump’s pronouncements, endorsed and spread by a number of prominent Republicans, radicalize the base — undermining faith in democracy itself. Republicans inclined to challenge this view realize they’re out of step with the party and mostly stay quiet; those that do speak up publicly, like Cheney or Raffensperger, get marginalized or stripped of their power. This weakens the constituency to challenge any future lies from Trump and other like-minded Republicans.
It’s a one-way ratchet, where a faction of the GOP elite led by Trump pushes the party further and further down an anti-democratic road. And there’s no obvious way to stop it.
Get ready for another possible crisis like 2020
This is not the first time that Republicans have declared a Democratic president as somehow illegitimate. They impeached Bill Clinton on flimsy grounds, after previously accusing him of crimes ranging up to murder; there was a widespread campaign to label Barack Obama an unlawful foreign-born president (led by Trump, but tolerated by GOP elites). These campaigns were effective: A 2019 poll found that 56 percent of Republicans still believed that Obama was born in Kenya.
Nor is this the first time Republican elites have ginned up suspicion of voter fraud for political purposes. After Republicans won a series of statehouse elections in 2010, they spent the next few years falsely claiming that voter fraud was a serious threat in order to pass voter ID laws that were nakedly designed to suppress the vote among Democratic-leaning minority groups. Research has found that, even prior to Trump, this convinced Republicans that voter fraud was a real problem when it’s exceptionally rare.
These earlier campaigns laid the intellectual groundwork for 2020. Republicans were already primed to believe elected Democrats were somehow illegitimate and to believe in widespread fraud in the American electoral system. Trump’s innovation — claiming that an entire presidential election result was fraudulent — was pushing on an open door.
Ty O’Neil/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images
A demonstration in Nevada on February 1.
The modern Democratic party has never attempted anything similar. As much as Democrats disagreed with the 2000 Bush v. Gore ruling, there was never any attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court and have Al Gore declared president. As much as the Democratic base despised Trump’s 2016 victory, both the Hopkins and Voter Study Group studies show that they basically accepted it as the result of a legitimate process.
It’s easy to imagine this sparking another crisis in the near term, especially given that Trump is the clear frontrunner in the 2024 GOP primary. “We should start to very much worry about what Jan. 6, 2025, looks like,” election law scholar Edward Foley told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent.
But the problem goes even deeper than just the next cycle. Since at least the 1990s, the GOP has worked consistently to undermine the legitimacy of its political opponents. In the Trump era, that has fused with their efforts to sow panic about voter fraud into a generalized sense that if Democrats win, it’s because they broke the rules.
So is the Republican Party capable of ever recognizing a Democratic president as legitimate again? It’s a question that no one can really answer — and one that suggests our democracy’s existential crisis is very far from resolved.
“It makes us look like idiots,” one Republican state senator who supported the effort was quoted in The New York Times. “Looking back, I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous. It’s embarrassing to be a state senator at this point.”
That well, huh?
Republicans are trying to have 2.1 million ballots from Maricopa County—where the majority of the state’s voters live—“audited.” So far, the conspiracy theorists in charge of the effort have gotten through 250,000 ballots, which puts them on track to finish in August. They only have the space where they’re currently working reserved until May 14, at which point they will have to find someplace else to move the ballots and equipment, because there are high school graduation ceremonies scheduled at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum beginning on May 17.
A former Arizona secretary of state involved in the effort claims they will finish in June or July, depending which news outlet he’s talking to, after hiring more workers—currently less than half of the tables available for counting are staffed. The hiring process has already led to a former Republican state representative and participant in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol being paid to count ballots, so that should go well. Maybe he can recruit some of his buddies.
A conspiracy theory-inspired effort to find watermarks on the ballots has been abandoned, but the people being paid $15 an hour to inspect and count them are still looking for bamboo fibers due to another conspiracy theory involving a planeload of counterfeit ballots from South Korea. (Apparently Asian nations do not have access to paper without bamboo in it?)
The Justice Department has raised serious concerns about the proceedings, noting that “the ballots, elections systems, and election materials that are the subject of the Maricopa County audit are no longer under the ultimate control of state and local elections officials, are not being adequately safeguarded by contractors at an insecure facility, and are at risk of being lost, stolen, altered, compromised or destroyed,” which could violate federal laws relating to the preservation of election records.
The Justice Department further expressed a concern that the plan to “identify voter registrations that did not make sense, and then knock on doors to confirm if valid voters actually lived at the stated address” and to contact voters in selected precincts to “collect information of whether the individual voted in the election” is potentially in violation of federal laws against intimidating voters, including in the Voting Rights Act. Arizona State Senate President Karen Fann subsequently backed off of that part of the plan.
All of this when the votes were counted the first time, then underwent a partial hand recount and two audits, in a county where the Board of Supervisors is controlled by Republicans who have strongly defended the integrity of the election and the count. The reason is simple: “They lost, and they can’t get over it,” as Grant Woods, a former Republican Arizona attorney general who became a Democrat during the Trump years, told the Associated Press. “And they don’t want to get over it because they want to continue to sow doubt about the election.”
The restaurant business is booming in Florida, propped up by "a huge spring break and tourist influx," reports The Washington Post as prelude to yet another story about how Americans are still not eagerly lining up to take the worst jobs in America even though restaurant owners really, really would prefer they did. But something else is booming in Florida as well, due to that same "huge" spring break: The COVID-19 pandemic.
Florida is not just home to an explosion of new pandemic cases in the weeks following spring break, but now has "the most variant COVID-19 cases in the country," reports ABC News. Nearly 12,000 tested COVID-19 cases involved variants, mostly of the United Kingdom and Brazilian varieties, as the Florida government's continued indifference towards pandemic safety measures turns the state into a springtime stew of variants health experts worry could weaken vaccine protection and jumpstart the U.S. pandemic into another, even more lethal round.
Florida's Gov. Ron DeSantis, however, has already proclaimed the lifting of all local pandemic safety restrictions. If Floridians are going to protect themselves from this new surge of variant cases, they're on their own. DeSantis has long had his eye on even higher office, and winning higher office in the Trumpified Republican Party means declaring victory loudly and often—even while undermining health officials' efforts to bring that victory about.
To reiterate the point yet again, allowing the pandemic to last long enough to produce genetic variants of the virus is extraordinarily dangerous. The more virus exists, the more commonplace genetic mutations of the virus will become; the more mutations exist, the less likely it becomes that current vaccines, or any vaccines, can produce antibodies. Mutations may spread faster than the original virus could, as seems to be the case with the B.1.1.7 mutation, or may mutate into strains no more contagious but far more deadly. Every passing month in which the pandemic is not contain produces new variants. It takes only one to bring us back to day zero—or worse.
In Florida, Brazilian and UK strains predominate, but those and other strains are expected to accelerate further now that local pandemic measures have been shut down by the state. It's not likely DeSantis, who has allied himself with the pandemic since its early days, will respond to the post-spring break surge by pulling back on business "reopenings."
In the meantime, what can a Floridian do? Get vaccinated as soon as you can; continue to wear a mask indoors, even if you are vaccinated; practice social distancing even if there's no public orders demanding it. We don't know for sure that all current vaccines prevent all variant spread, but they do seem effective against the variants currently circulating. Reaching herd immunity is becoming more and more difficult as states allow pandemic-o-rama events and anti-science types furiously demand safety precautions not be followed because Freedoms, but there's no reason to make yourself part of this alarming little experiment. It's too much to ask that Republican governors make the unpopular decisions that might keep their own residents safe, so we'll not bother asking.
Instead, Ron DeSantis and other ambitious governors might be swayed by a new lowest-tier goal: Endeavor to, at the least, not run your state so incompetently that a newly arisen COVID-19 variant gets named after your ineptitude. Having the national news report that the "DeSantis variant" is surging through America, in some hypothetical future newscast, would be quite the test of the theory that all publicity is good publicity. Could someone really run for the presidency vowing to stop a virus named after themselves?
President Joe Biden’s economic agenda is pretty darn popular, so Republicans are desperately looking to whip up a culture war. They’ve hit on Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, and a host of other ridiculous nontroversies. But a few of their culture war efforts have led to state-level legislation that could really cause damage. That includes the multistate campaigntargetingtranskids—and it includes the big multistate move against critical race theory in schools.
Republicans have promoted bills banning critical race theory from schools in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Idaho, and more. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called for funding of curriculums that exclude “unsanctioned narratives like critical race theory.” But what do they mean by that? In short, the words “critical race theory” are being used as a fancy-sounding replacement for the lesson these Republicans really want to prohibit: that racism is real and that it’s structural and systemic.
Critical race theory is an intellectual movement that holds, broadly speaking (and with many strains of thought within it), that, as Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic explain in the introduction to Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, racism is “the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country”; that “large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it”; that race itself is socially constructed; that “the dominant society racializes different minority groups at different times, in response to shifting needs such as the labor market”; that “no person has a single, easily stated, unitary identity” (an idea often discussed as intersectionality); and that people of color know things about their own experiences that white people should listen to.
In the face of continuing disproportionate police violence against Black people and other people of color, and a pandemic that has disproportionately killed Black and Latino people, and economic inequality that has been exacerbated by the economic effects of the pandemic, Republican state legislators are insisting that the law should force teachers to teach essentially that racism ended after slavery, or maaaybe after something having to do with a watered-down account of segregation and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
And some of them go even further when it comes to how we should talk about racism in U.S. history. During a debate of an anti-critical race theory bill in Tennessee, this happened:
Now on the Tennessee House floor, Rep. Justin Lafferty is yelling about how the three-fifths compromise was good. Republicans applaud. Members of the black caucus are huddling in groups.
The sponsor of a bill that passed the Texas state Senate says his bill’s intention is to promote “traditional history.” You know, history that takes white supremacy for granted rather than challenging it even mildly.
By requiring that “a teacher may not be compelled to discuss current events or widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy or social affairs,” that bill directly contradicts State Board of Education standards. “It’s essentially dumbing down our students and keeping them from thinking through real-world conversations and issues—things students are expected to navigate on an everyday basis,” state board member Marisa Pérez-Díaz said.
The Oklahoma bill will “prohibit Oklahoma public schools, colleges and universities from incorporating certain messages about sex and race into any course instruction.” Seriously, though, “certain messages.” The Idaho bill prohibits teaching that “any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior” … A view that it attributes to critical race theory. Some real “anti-racism is the real racism” contortionism there.
Again and again, we see that what Republicans are taking aim at isn’t actually critical race theory as its scholars and practitioners frame it. They’re just mad that kids might learn racism did not magically disappear the moment Dr. King said he had a dream. They’re terrified kids might grow up believing things need to change in U.S. society and law. And in their anger and terror, they’re trying to ban the teaching of actual facts from the schools, and use it as a rallying cry not just the Republican base but for “color-blind” nice white liberals. If we can’t think critically about U.S. history and U.S. laws and structures of power, we can never move forward. That’s what this push against “critical race theory”—which is hardly even about the reality of critical race theory—is all about.
Americans nationwide are being vaccinated in record numbers. To date, over 100 million Americans are considered fully vaccinated with the COVID-19 vaccine. As these individuals post pictures of their vaccination cards, experts are urging them to edit out not only personal information but the batch number of their dose. This is due to the increasing number of fraudulent vaccination cards being offered online and the risk of scammers stealing one's identity.
In a recent incident, a California bar owner was arrested after officials found he sold fake COVID-19 vaccine cards for $20 per card, officials announced Wednesday. The bar owner, Todd Anderson, was arrested Tuesday after selling the counterfeit cards to undercover agents, CBS 13 reported. According to the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, at least eight cards were sold to customers from the bar, The Old Corner Saloon in Clements.
“We were able to purchase four, and then today we located 30 blank cards, laminating machines, laminate, cutters and things to manufacture the cards,” Luke Blehm, a spokesperson from the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, told the local news outlet KOVR. Investigators from the department took over after a local sheriff’s office got a tip that the fake vaccine cards were being manufactured, laminated, and sold out of the bar. They were able to buy the fake vaccine cards on multiple occasions in April, a press release said, noting that the act was “a violation of the California Penal Code.”
According to ABC News, 59-year-old Anderson was charged with falsifying a medical record, falsifying a seal, several counts of identity theft, and possession of a loaded, unregistered firearm, authorities said. Being in possession of a loaded, unregistered firearm is a felony in California, officials said.
In addition to his arrest, the department plans to “file disciplinary action” against the bar, which could cause its liquor license to be revoked. Officials are also investigating if an employee was involved with making and distributing the fake cards, the department told CBS 13.
While experts have warned of the risk of fraudulent cards being distributed, Blehm noted that this criminal case may be the first of its kind. “That we know of, this is the only case that’s ever been done — even nationwide possibly,” Blehm told KTXL. “We did some research to try to find similars. They may be out there, but we just don’t know and haven’t seen them.”
Warnings of fraudulent cards come amid the announcements of easing restrictions for those who get the COVID-19 vaccine nationwide. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, individuals who are vaccinated no longer need to observe the most stringent COVID-19 safety regulations, including wearing a mask.
Additionally, experts believe the cards may eventually be needed for traveling and other activities, thus increasing the demand for them. The vaccination cards are provided to all those who are vaccinated and include the date and location of each shot alongside one’s personal information.
With the increasing demand for proof of the cards, those who refuse to get vaccinated are looking into fake cards. In March, the FBI issued a warning regarding this trend, noting that not only does it increase the risk of COVID-19 but it is illegal to both buy or sell the fraudulent cards, which could be charged under forgery. But like those who distribute fake IDs, those who wish to make and sell fake vaccine cards don’t seem to be afraid. Though in this case, a counterfeit vaccine card carries additional danger than a fake ID does, because of the risk of COVID-19 spread.
"It is disheartening to have members in our community show flagrant disregard for public health in the midst of a pandemic," San Joaquin County District Attorney Tori Verber Salazar said in the statement.
"Distributing, falsifying or purchasing fake COVID-19 vaccine cards is against the law and endangers yourself and those around you," she continued. "The San Joaquin County District Attorney's Office is grateful for the partnership with the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control for their work in this case."
In efforts to decrease the rise in fraudulent cards, cybersecurity experts are urging individuals not to share images of their vaccination cards online. For those who want to still share their cards, experts suggest editing out not only your personal information but the batch number of your dose. For those who would like to post on social media but do not want to share their card, stickers and other graphics are also being shared to encourage others to be vaccinated without risking public safety and threats of fake cards.
Let’s hope this is one of the hot trends of May 2021—the media is noticing how congressional Republicans are promoting funding from the American Rescue Plan despite having voted against the law. The Associated Press is on the story, with a bluntly accurate headline: "Republicans promote pandemic relief they voted against."
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis voted against the COVID-19 relief package, the AP reports, then described funding her district got from the law as one of her “achievements,” and touted “bringing federal funding to the district and back into the pockets of taxpayers.”
Malliotakis is one of a long list of Republicans who’ve gone from voting no to making absolutely sure their constituents knew that federal money was flowing into their districts—usually highlighting either the Restaurant Revitalization Fund or money for community health centers. Rep. Elise Stefanik, poised to oust Rep. Liz Cheney as the third-ranking House Republican, has been especially brazen, going from slamming the American Rescue Plan as “Pelosi’s partisan COVID-19 package” to bragging about Head Start funding as well as the Restaurant Revitalization Fund.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently shredded Republican hypocrisy on this issue, noting how “All of a sudden they are deficit hawks when they were giving away money to wealthy people under President Trump,” but after yelling about the deficit when it was time to pass the stimulus package, “A number of them are trying to take credit for something they didn't vote for—that's not unusual. Vote no, take the dough—that's what the Republicans do.”
The Democratic National Committee is also focusing on this issue, the AP reports, with a digital advertising campaign on local news websites in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire, Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, while putting up billboards in 20 states.
Will any of it stick? That depends in part on the media. The American Rescue Plan continues to be very popular, so it makes sense that Republicans are trying to associate themselves with it despite their opposition. Any time a Republican says anything good about the effects of the law, any media coverage of it needs to note the fact that if it had been up to that Republican, the law would not have passed. Just quoting a Republican saying, for instance, they’re “Happy to announce” federal money going to community health centers in their district—as Rep. Madison Cawthorn did—without correcting the false impression that they supported that funding coming to the district is aiding and abetting them in that falsehood.
On Jan. 6, in the hours just before insurgents overran the Capitol, Republican Rep. Mo Brooks stood on the “Stop the Steal” stage and delivered a message designed to set the stakes for the already riled-up crowd.
“I’ve got a message that I need you to take to your heart and take back home and along the way, stop at the Capitol,” said Brooks. “Today, Republican senators and congressmen will either vote to turn America into a godless, amoral, dictatorial, oppressed and socialist nation on the decline, or they will join us and they will fight and vote against voter fraud and election theft and vote for keeping America great.” And in case that invitation to “stop at the Capitol” was too subtle, Brooks made his intentions absolutely clear.
“Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass,” said Brooks. “Our ancestors sacrificed their blood, their sweat, their tears, their fortunes and sometimes their lives to give us, their descendants, an America that is the greatest nation in world history. So I have a question for you. Are you willing to do the same?” Brooks then repeatedly shouted at the crowd, “Will you fight for America?” before saying, “We, American patriots are going to come right at them!”
In March, Brooks kicked off his campaign for senator in Alabama, with the goal of filling the seat left by retiring Senator Richard Shelby. As CNN noted at the time, Brooks has placed his support for the Big Lie and that speech on Jan. 6 right at the center of his campaign. Brooks is literally running on his support for the insurgency.
But when it comes to facing a court case based on charges of incitement, Brooks is running away.
As Axios reported on March 5, Rep. Eric Swalwell filed suit in U.S. District Court citing both Brooks and Donald Trump as being "responsible for the injury and destruction" of the Jan. 6 attack. That lawsuit states that the deadly attack on the Capitol, including the attempt to kidnap and execute members of Congress, came “As a direct and foreseeable consequence of the Defendants’ false and incendiary allegations of fraud and theft, and in direct response to the Defendants’ express calls for violence at the rally.”
More than a month later, Swalwell says Brooks is continuing to dodge process servers and refusing to be served with the lawsuit. Others charges in the suit, including Trump, have waived service—meaning that the case can proceed to court—but Brooks remains as a lone holdout. He has neither waived service, nor acknowledged the paperwork that has been delivered to his office.
AsForbesreported earlier this week, Brooks is far from apologetic about his speech on Jan. 6. In fact, Brooks is using segments of that speech, and attempts by Democrats to censure him for his call to violence, as cornerstones of his campaign ads.
On Jan. 6, Brooks put out a brief statement that he “always condemns violence.” However, he followed this almost immediately with a tweet insisting that the cause of violence was not the people he had just told to “kick ass” and “come right at them” in an effort to save the nation. Instead, wrote Brooks, the assault was conducted by “fascist ANTIFA”—a term that may set the record for cognitive dissonance.
Brooks has continued to repeat claims that antifa was behind the attack. However, in his campaign he has also highlighted scenes of the Jan. 6 rally and stated that on that day, “I did my duty for my country.” The level of ridiculous self-contradictory elements in Brooks’ statements may seem obvious, but then he is running as the most MAGA of a number of MAGA candidates vying for Shelby’s spot. Being ridiculous is part of the job description.
As Swalwell’s attorney noted, “It seems clear that Brooks is choosing to make a political stunt out of a part of the process that essentially is a formality, which is unfortunate.” But Mo Brooks doing something just because it would draw more attention to his campaign shouldn’t be a surprise. Neither should his unwillingness to go to court and discuss how he deliberately stirred up a crowd and told them to put their lives on the line, go to the Capitol, and prevent America from becoming a “godless, amoral, dictatorial, oppressed and socialist nation.”
Brooks previously ran for the Senate in 2017 in the hopes of capturing the seat that once belonged to Jeff Sessions. He enjoyed the support of Trump along with Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity. He came in third in the Republican primary.
Under Trump’s choice for chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai, the Obama era net neutrality protections were done away with. The silver lining at the time was that Pai and his internet service provider (ISP) overlords were unable to take away the rights of individual states to decide whether or not they wanted to protect their own citizens. One of Pai’s first moves as chairman of the FCC was to announce this rollback and then open up the comment period to the public. Millions of comments flooded into the system and it crashed! Pai claimed that this mess was too much to handle and too hard to figure out and therefore, instead of actually trying to find out what the American public wanted out of their government, Pai would roll back net neutrality protections. It was a naked power grab.
Since that time, a pile of evidence has come out pointing to a lot of anti-net neutrality fraud being perpetrated in connection to the “cyber attack” and comment period. On Thursday, New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office released a report of their investigation into the 2017 FCC comment period debacle. Guess what? “The Office of the New York Attorney General (OAG) found that fake comments accounted for nearly 18 million of the more than 22 million comments the FCC received during its 2017 rulemaking.” That means that more than 80% of the comments received were fraudulent. And guess what again? Many of those fake comments came after “the country’s largest broadband companies banded together to fund a campaign to generate millions of comments for the FCC’s 2017 net neutrality rulemaking proceeding.”
At the time of the comment crash, Pai offered up that maybe John Oliver’s comedy show—specifically his call to send comments to save net neutrality—had crashed the system. Pai furthered his lie and said the FCC had been under a cyber attack, but that most of the comments seemed to asking for Ajit Pai to free Americans from the restraints of net neutrality. What were those restraints? Never you mind, said Pai. And even though early evidence of telecommunication giants’ involvement in dubious shenanigans around a net neutrality repeal was evident, Pai—being a former Verizon lawyer and forever shill—threw his hands up that nothing could be done to untangle a cyber attack and serve the American people. Pai would later admit that the cyber attack was a fraud and that the comments were fraudulent, but he lied during his admission by revising history to say it was the Obama administration that presided over this fraud. The Trump years—crazy, right?
James’ report is a damning statement against the big ISPs in our country. Not only did they allegedly mine subscribers’ personal data in order to fake comments, their fraud included a multipronged fraudulent attack. According to the report, “more than half a million messages to members of Congress purportedly signed by their constituents” were sent by the broadband industry. And because the broadband industry knew it was perpetrating a fraud, they made sure to obfuscate the trail of their dirtbaggery.
The OAG’s investigation determined that the bulk of the broadband industry’s comments — nearly 80% — were expected to be collected through a type of lead generation known as co-registration. In co-registration, consumers are offered rewards — gift cards, sweepstakes entries, or an e-book of recipes, for example — for providing information about themselves and responding to a series of marketing offers. Marketing offers varied widely, and included everything from discounted children’s movies to free trials of male enhancement products, as shown in Figure 1. The broadband industry created solicitations to run alongside these marketing offers, asking consumers to join the campaign opposing net neutrality. Responses would be collected and used to generate comments. The remainder of the comments — roughly 20% — were to be generated using online ads placed on websites across the internet.
To conceal the true source of these comments, the broadband industry created webpages for the conservative-leaning advocacy groups through which visitors could submit comments to the FCC supporting repeal. Few comments were submitted through these webpages. But the pages created the impression that comments the FCC received had originated from the advocacy groups’ websites and reflected true grassroots support
The New York Attorney General’s office says that the broadband “engaged in fraud” all six times they generated leads this way. As a result, “nearly every comment and message the broadband industry submitted to the FCC and Congress was fake, signed using the names and addresses of millions of individuals without their knowledge or consent.” Protocol reports that the “AG's office reached agreements with three of the lead generation companies, Fluent, Opt-Intelligence and React2Media, which collectively agreed to pay more than $4 million in damages.” Unfortunately, James’ office did not find that the broadband industry itself had violated the laws—they just took advantage of lacking oversight.
The Wall Street Journal reports that “a three-year Government Accountability Office investigation into fake comments on regulatory proposals across the U.S. government is expected to be shared with members of Congress later this year.” James’ office found that this isn’t the first rodeo for these “lead generation companies,” and the report to Congress will likely uncover a world of fraudulent activities.
The impotence of a toothless FCC was seen during the global pandemic after Pai scrambled around to try and get various ISPs to sign onto a nonbinding pledge that they wouldn’t cut Americans and American businesses off from the internet during the pandemic for lack of payment; and that they might even lift their “unlimited” data caps so as to not gouge the millions of adults and children, using more bandwidth than ever before, as many were stuck in their homes. The good news is that the general popularity of consumer protections, and a president who isn’t entirely inside of the pocket of Sauron, means that those net neutrality protections should be coming back in the coming year.
The Biden administration has begun asking for a new round of comments on the matter from the American public. Maybe this time instead of the crass scam run by Pai and Republican operatives, a FCC interested in actually hearing what the majority of Americans want will offer to do the bidding … of the American people.
So the GOP is going to cut off benefits to make sure people have no other option than starvation wages. Party of the middle class, my ass.
The persistent—and false—claims that unemployment benefits are keeping people from looking for work are being turned into policy in two states, while unexpectedly weak job creation numbers from April shook up discussions of the economy and highlighted the need for Congress to pass President Joe Biden’s infrastructure and jobs plan—and not only that. “As we see continued evidence that women and working parents have been hit hardest in the economy, we must invest in human infrastructure with the American Families Plan,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said.
But that’s not the Republican instinct. The governors of Montana and South Carolina have announced that their states will start rejecting the federal benefits expansion in late June. “What was intended to be a short-term financial assistance for the vulnerable and displaced during the height of the pandemic has turned into a dangerous federal entitlement, incentivizing and paying workers to stay at home rather than encouraging them to return to the workplace,” South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said.
The problem with that statement is that it’s false, and you can find both data and anecdata to show as much. Bosses are out there whining that they can’t find enough workers, but they’re not raising wages—and when they do, they see applications soar.
News of a much lower than expected jobs number for April—266,000 rather than what was expected to be close to a million, plus a downgrade in the March numbers—startled economic observers on Friday, and unsurprisingly, many of the people claiming that workers just don’t want to go back to work took it as confirmation of their existing views. But the unemployment rate ticked up slightly because labor force participation rate rose, with 430,000 people coming back to look for work. Once again we see the strains the pandemic is placing on women, with men accounting for gains in labor force participation while the number of women went down.
Many of the claims that people would rather stay home collecting unemployment than take jobs have centered on the restaurant industry, so it’s interesting that the leisure and hospitality industries were high points in this jobs report, adding 331,000 jobs—187,000 of them in food services and drinking places. “In sum,” economist Heidi Shierholz tweeted, “today’s data show that leisure and hospitality has gotten tighter, but still suggest that the claims of labor shortages in restaurants are largely the result of frustration on the part of restaurants that they can’t find workers to fill jobs at relatively low wages.”
Expanded unemployment benefits have been a lifeline to millions of people through the coronavirus pandemic. Governors cutting off those benefits before the economy has fully recovered shows the determination to blame workers—mostly low-paid workers, at that—for the state of an economy heavily tilted to corporations and the wealthiest people. It’s wrong, but it’s also not a surprise coming from the likes of Gianforte and McMaster. Look for more of the same from Republicans eager to “move on” by hurting workers.
Rep. Elise Stefanik’s first big interviews since announcing her challenge to Rep. Liz Cheney for a top Republican leadership role, and those interviews said everything about how Stefanik is positioning herself. First of all, she did not go on CBS or CNN or even Fox News. She went on former Trump-whisperer Steve Bannon’s podcast and talked to former Trump official Sebastian Gorka. Talk about sending up a “this is who I am” flare.
On Bannon’s podcast, Stefanik hugged Donald Trump as tight as she possibly could, saying “My vision is to run with support from the president [Trump] and his coalition of voters, which was the highest number of votes ever won by a Republican nominee.” She even described Trump—who she repeatedly called “the president”—as the “strongest supporter of any president when it comes to standing up for the Constitution.”
To further show her fealty to Trump, Stefanik went in on the fake “audit” of the 2020 election being held in Arizona. While Cheney is being ejected from House Republican leadership for insisting that the 2020 election was valid and that Republicans must honor that and the results of future elections, Stefanik embraced the partisan dumpster fire that is that ongoing count aimed at undermining the actual vote in Arizona. The fauxdit is “incredibly important,” Stefanik insisted.
Discussing a procedure being carried out by a partisan firm that has gone to court to keep its methods secret and has several documented departures from the state’s elections guidelines and breakdowns in security, Stefanik said, “We want transparency and answers for the American people.”
”What are the Democrats so afraid of?” she asked. Gee, I dunno, the fact that a firm led by a Trumpist conspiracy theorist is carrying out what one elections expert called “just a fishing expedition by people who are determined to find something wrong,” in service of the months-long whines of a sore loser who has already incited a deadly insurrection that overran the U.S. Capitol to try to prevent the certification of the election?
In another strong sign of the Republican Party’s direction, the woman who is, as one of Cheney’s deputies described it, getting a “coronation” from House Republicans actually has a much less conservative voting record than the woman she is expected to replace. The Club for Growth, for instance, ranks Stefanik among the five House Republicans with the worst records by its execrable standards. But she has been unwaveringly loyal to Trump since she decided that he was her best path to advancement, and that is what matters—is all that matters—to Republicans. Given the choice between a hard-right lawmaker who is willing to criticize Trump in defense of democracy and the Constitution, or a historically more-centrist lawmaker who is all about Trump and ready to promote his Big Lie, today’s Republicans will go with the latter, no question.
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