James.galbraith

More than a decade after Senate Republicans destroyed the functionality of the upper chamber  through maximal deployment of the filibuster, Democrats are getting serious about reforming the extra-constitutional mechanism and Republicans are running scared.

If Senate Republicans are deprived of the ability to grind the chamber to a halt in the minority, then they'll just torch the entire enterprise, promised Minority Leader Mitch McConnell during a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday.

“Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin to imagine what a completely scorched earth Senate would look like," McConnell said, adding that his past actions to kill the functionality of the chamber would look like "child's play."

Through a series of onerous procedural mechanisms, McConnell threatened to grind the chamber—and therefore U.S. democracy—to a halt. McConnell said he would require a quorum for basically everything, require every bill to be read from the floor in full, and gum up the works even for nominees who have broad bipartisan support.

The quorum threat is intriguing in this 50-50 split Senate because although Republicans could conceivably deprive Democrats of achieving the 51 senators necessary to reach quorum (a threshold Vice President Kamala Harris cannot help break), Republicans could just as conceivably be arrested and forcibly hauled into the Senate chamber for willfully denying quorum, as Daily Kos political director David Nir helpfully explained. 

But perhaps more broadly, McConnell's comments reveal just how fearful he is that Democrats might limit the GOP minority's blockade on nearly everything that can't be passed through reconciliation. They come in the aftermath of the Democrats' No. 2, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, describing the filibuster as becoming "the death grip of democracy" and a "weapon of mass obstruction."

"Senators can literally phone in a filibuster," Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Monday from the Senate floor. “Defenders of the filibuster will tell you that it’s essential for American democracy. The opposite is true. Today’s filibuster undermines democracy.”

Republicans have also taken to threatening Democrats with what they would do if they retook the Senate majority. 

"I would remind my dear friend Angus [King] that the Democrats could be in the minority two years from now," said Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, supposed moderate, "and they will wish that they had not done away with the filibuster if that happens, that I can assure you."

McConnell went so far as to lay out the gleeful agenda Republicans would ram through if they recapture the majority: passing nationwide right-to-work laws, defunding Planned Parenthood, approving "sweeping" abortion restrictions, and overseeing a "massive hardening" of the southern border.

Durbin's response to the scorched-earth threat? We've seen it all before. "He has already done that. He's proven he can do it, and he will do it again." 

It's important to remember a few things about the filibuster and the potential upsides/downsides of reforming it or removing it altogether. First, if Republicans achieve unilateral control of the government again any time in the next decade, the nation is completely helpless to what this group of pro-sedition, anti-democracy marauders would do no matter what. The filibuster will be the least of our worries as progressives who believe in a democratic government.

Second, if Democrats are able to maintain control of either the White House or House or both, then the damage a GOP Senate majority could do is almost exactly what they are planning on doing in the minority anyway—jam a Biden/Democratic agenda. 

Third, Republicans can't legislate worth a damn because their party has become such an unruly beast of self-interested actors. The next GOP Senate majority, whenever it comes, will inevitably include some of the same GOP bomb-throwers who have made the House Republican caucus so ungovernable over the past decade. Republicans will always find ways to damage American democracy since that now seems to be their entire agenda as a party but, with the exception of their 2017 tax giveaway to the wealthy, they have not proven particularly adept over the last decade at passing legislation that stands a chance of being passed into law—even when they control both the upper and lower chambers along with the White House. 

Finally, Republicans as a party are predisposed to blocking forward progress whereas Democrats are predisposed to pushing new ideas and reforms forward. Republicans are the party of obstruction, both in theory and in practice. As such, the filibuster helps them much more when they are in the minority that it does Democrats, and it restrains Democrats much more when they are in the majority than it does Republicans. 

As former Harry Reid aide Adam Jentleson pointed out, Democrats may as well put their eggs in the basket of trying to make democracy work while they have the chance.

Following McConnell's "scorched-earth" threat, Jentleson, author of the filibuster-themed book Kill Switch, tweeted, "Trading this for the ability to actually pass bills like voting rights seems like an easy call. If McConnell's tactics become truly onerous, Dems can always pass further reforms to end obstruction. McConnell's goal is to make government fail, Dems' goal should be to make it work."

A Washington judge identified by several media outlets seemingly forgot his courtroom was being livestreamed and was caught on camera last Tuesday condemning a Black man shot and killed by police last year in a drug sting. In a conversation with District Court Commissioner Abbie Bartlett, Clark County District Court Judge Darvin Zimmerman described Kevin Peterson Jr. as “the Black guy they were trying to make an angel out of.” The judge said Peterson was “so dumb,” that he “had a death wish,” and that if Zimmerman’s son, a law enforcement officer, hadn't been promoted to sergeant, "he could have been the shooter."

“And they’d be marching out at his house with signs saying, ‘You’re a murderer,’” Zimmerman said, calling protests in Peterson’s honor “b------t.” Remarks from the judge, who’s been seated in his elected position since 1986, triggered obvious concerns about bias and how his personal opinion has impacted and may continue to impact how he decides cases. Vancouver Defenders, a defense practice that represented a protester charged with failure to disperse following Peterson’s death, has called on Zimmerman to resign.

“Judge Zimmerman’s conduct erodes the public’s confidence in our judicial system,” the firm said in a statement to The Associated Press. “A judge’s independence, integrity, and impartiality are paramount in making our system work. When a Judge fails to uphold the canons of his profession he is no longer fit to serve. Judge Zimmerman should resign.”

The Clark County District Court said in a statement the AP obtained that it “denounces all forms of racism and will not allow racial bias to pervade our courtrooms … Racial bias displayed by a judge is unacceptable, unethical, unjust and cannot be tolerated,” the court said.

Attorney Mark Lindquist, who is representing the Peterson family, told The Oregonian in a text message that the judge's "lack of empathy for a grieving father, his lack of a sense of shared humanity, is part of the problem … Kevin Peterson Sr.’s son was shot and killed,” Lindquist said. “Imagine his pain. The judge apparently cannot.” Although there are no criminal cases tied to Peterson's death, the judge’s role in any related cases is unclear, The Oregonian reported. Zimmerman told the newspaper in a text message his “lifetime goal has been and will be to be fair to everyone.” He also said he’s spent his “whole life helping and mentoring mainly marginalized youth.”

“I truly wish he was not killed and did surrender,” Zimmerman said of Peterson.

Three Clark County deputies shot Peterson four times, firing 34 rounds to do so, on Oct. 29, 2020 in a drug sting involving Xanax pills and a confidential informant in Hazel Dell, according to court documents the AP obtained. Although Peterson was armed with a gun, investigators have not been able to prove that he actually fired it. The NAACP Vancouver called for a "better way" to handle police interactions at the time. "When someone is stopped by the police it should not have to end with them dying," the organization said in its statement. "No matter what the person’s background is, no matter what the reason is for the stop.”

The Vancouver branch called the judge’s recent conversation “disgusting” but “not surprising” in a Facebook post on Sunday. “On the weekend of a photo circulating around of a vehicle in Clark County comparing George Floyd’s settlement to the cost of slaves; then hearing the racially biased comments of a judge in Clark County is not surprising to us. These two instances reaffirm that blatant and systematic racism is alive and prevalent in Clark County and that’s why we will continue fight for justice,” the NAACP Vancouver said in the post. “Leaders in the judicial system should have the cultural competency to understand why members of the BIPOC community advocate the way they do when they have to interact with the judicial system.

“The light hearted careless conversation of such serious matters was disgusting. Just as how the writing on the back of the window was disgusting. Neither instances show an understanding of human life or the impacts of systemic racism in the United States.”

Read The Columbian’s transcript of Zimmerman’s conversation with Bartlett:

Zimmerman: (Unintelligible) Kevin Peterson, it’s going on five months now.

Bartlett: Who’s Kevin Peterson?

Zimmerman: The Black guy they were trying to make an angel out of. (Unintelligible) The one that was uh said, ‘I’m gonna feed bullets to the cops when I show up, if there’s cops there.’

Bartlett: Which was, was this a local case?

Zimmerman: He’s the Hazel Dell one.

Bartlett: Oh, OK, OK.

Zimmerman: So yeah. He’s the one that said “I’m a racist. I hate white people,” so I guess he hates his girlfriend, too.

Bartlett: Was he the one that was shot by the police in Hazel Dell?

Zimmerman: Yeah.

Bartlett: OK. Yep, yep, yep. Got it.

Zimmerman: OK well, the cops are already back on the road, but my son was there (unintelligible).

Bartlett: Oh.

Zimmerman: Luckily, he got the promotion to sergeant, because he could have been the shooter (chuckles).

Bartlett: Oh my God.

Zimmerman: And they’d be marching out at his house with signs saying, ‘You’re a murderer.’

Bartlett: Yeah.

Zimmerman: All that bullshit. It’s crazy. It is just crazy. Like his dad. His — I know so many people

Bartlett: Uh huh. Yeah, you know everybody.

Zimmerman: In fact, I know more people than the sheriff knows (unintelligible) about this investigation. So I send him the information I find out about it. I ran into the chaplain who said he did the — whatever you call it — the thing after the fact, consoling everybody, you know, trying, you know, whatever about the deal. And he told me that KP’s dad says, ‘Well, yeah, he had a gun. I guess it was justified.’ And then the next day he wakes up with dollar signs in his eyes.

Bartlett: Oh no.

Zimmerman: And George Floyd attorneys had already contacted him. He has a GoFundMe page that said my unarmed son was murdered by the police. He knew his son had a gun. (Unintelligible). That’s like getting money under false pretenses. (Unintelligible). So he had $70,000 as opposed to George Floyd. (Unintelligible) George Floyd (unintelligible). George Floyd family got 20 million.

Bartlett: Wow.

Zimmerman: So these attorneys just reach out to people; that’s their retainer.

Bartlett: Yeah.

Zimmerman: They’re never going to be a filing (unintelligible), because how can you ever win on a case like that? He’s got a gun.

Bartlett: Yeah.

Zimmerman: But that’s the whole thing now. I know (unintelligible) ask well, ‘Why were you a friend of his?’ Yeah, he was kind of a dipshit. We talked once in a while or chatted.

Bartlett: Uh huh.

Zimmerman: Even friends would say (unintelligible). Someone sent me, it was literally 2,367 pages. I said I don’t want this shit on my computer.

Bartlett: Of what?

Zimmerman: Of his hate mail.

Bartlett: Why’d they send it to you?

Zimmerman: Because they knew my son was involved in the incident.

Bartlett: Ah.

Zimmerman: And the county is being sued. (Unintelligible) ‘I hate white people. I’m racist.’ And other people say, ‘Kevin, that’s stupid to say.’

Bartlett: You got to be careful though, like don’t get yourself embroiled in this.

Zimmerman: Oh no (unintelligible) I said, ‘Don’t send it to me, send it to risk management.’

Bartlett: That’s a good, that’s a good (unintelligible).

Zimmerman: (Unintelligible) But do you know?

Bartlett: Mm gosh.

Zimmerman: (Unintelligible) But do you know? You know, most people don’t. Even in the Columbian article, if you really look, get a look at the movie, they attach the movie, then you see, if you look just for (unintelligible) you see it’s little, because they couldn’t take it out of the description on the, whoever it was, was it Pierce County? Whoever released the first movie, it shows right there it says, ‘If you’re cop, if you’re a cop, I’m feeding you bullets.’

Bartlett: Uh huh.

Zimmerman: So when the police go out there, they kind of know he could be dangerous.

Bartlett: Yeah.

Zimmerman: I mean, how do you feed bullets

Bartlett: Yeah.

Zimmerman: if you don’t have a gun? If you listen to that tape, it’s my son Erik saying, ‘Look out! He’s got a gun!’ You know, he’s screaming. It’s the first voice you hear on that video is him warning them that he’s coming around the corner with a gun.

Bartlett: Uh huh.

Zimmerman: You don’t know who he’s going to shoot. He could shoot a pedestrian, I mean shoot somebody out there. But I think he had a death wish (unintelligible). I mean, he calls his girlfriend to say goodbye?

Bartlett: Oh wow.

Zimmerman: And then she won’t release her phone.

Bartlett: Huh.

Zimmerman: So they really don’t know what texts he was saying.

Bartlett: Uh huh.

Zimmerman: He was so dumb. So another version was he thought he was going to go to prison for life, you know, for one deal. (Unintelligible) a year, he might get diversion, he might get drug court, but anyway, he was calling goodbye, and then supposedly, then she comes out with this false narrative that they shot him, you know, 30 times in the back. He didn’t get shot once in the back, you know?

Bartlett: Uh huh.

Zimmerman: But unfortunately he got shot. They were very, very convinced, and it still might be the story that he got two rounds off, because there’s two bullets missing out of the gun, assuming it was full.

Bartlett: Mm hmm, right.

Zimmerman: (Unintelligible) it’s 20, whatever, it’s 12, 12 shots.

Bartlett: Yeah.

Zimmerman: And then you have 10 in to begin with, then I guess it’s not missing two.

Bartlett: Yeah.

Zimmerman: (Unintelligible)

Bartlett: Right.

Zimmerman: They were even checking the guy. Erik said, ‘I was checking him for bullet holes.’ One guy thought he was shot. His adrenaline was going so much, he didn’t even know if he had been shot.

Bartlett: Oh my gosh.

Zimmerman: But they heard shots.

Bartlett: Yeah.

Zimmerman: So they thought he fired (unintelligible) you see the video, hell, they told him a couple times, ‘Drop your gun, drop your gun.’ And he didn’t drop his gun. He’s, you know, it shows him right there. And his dad says, ‘Well (unintelligible) (laughing).

Bartlett: So your son was there for the whole incident?

Zimmerman: What?

Bartlett: Your son was there?

Zimmerman: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Bartlett: How’s he doing?

Zimmerman: (Unintelligible) He actually met, what was it, he met with one of the guys.

Bartlett: Yeah.

Zimmerman: (Unintelligible) yeah, he met with one of the guys, just to go visit with him. Talk. (Unintelligible) They never released once that one of the shooters was Black.

Bartlett: One of the police officers, or?

Zimmerman: Yeah, I guess it doesn’t match some narrative (unintelligible).

Bartlett: Yeah, oh gosh.

Zimmerman: (Unintelligible) If it’s such a big racial deal, then you should (unintelligible). He obviously thought he was going to get killed himself, he shot him. He was Black. It wouldn’t have mattered if the guy was green (chuckles) is the point. But it’s just this narrative that there’s like (unintelligible) killing minorities (chuckles) (unintelligible).

Bartlett: Gosh. Yeah, every, everything…

Zimmerman: There’s even an article I saw that, I sent it to other people, I sent it to my son (unintelligible) NAACP, and I was (unintelligible) a lifetime member. My first job out of college working at an all Black community center.

Bartlett: Uh huh.

Zimmerman: (Unintelligible)

Bartlett: Uh huh.

Zimmerman: (Unintelligible)

Bartlett: That’s good. It’s good to feel what that feels like I think.

Zimmerman: Yeah

Bartlett: It’s important.

Zimmerman: Yeah, but anyway, (unintelligible).

Bartlett: Yeah.

Zimmerman: I coached and counseled

Bartlett: Uh huh.

Zimmerman: and did all kinds of stuff.

Bartlett: Yeah.

Zimmerman: But this lady, she talks about the Blacks being murdered here in Clark County, allegedly armed, allegedly? (Unintelligible) throw that stuff out there. You don’t know the facts; it’s not allegedly.

Bartlett: Mm.

Zimmerman: He had a frickin’ gun, and they got it on video. And you put this uh, you know, distrust out there in the community. It’s still the same thing. They want to argue that because there’s whatever (unintelligible) 4 percent Blacks in Clark County, but there’s 12 percent Blacks in the jail. So does that mean we’re automatically racist?

Bartlett: Mm hmm.

Zimmerman: Does it?

Bartlett: Not necessarily, I mean…

Zimmerman: Well yeah, it doesn’t (Unintelligible) Three Black guys shot and robbed this guy. (Unintelligible) time in the Clark County Jail.

Bartlett: Yeah.

Zimmerman: You know, they won’t go to trial for a year or so,

Bartlett: Yeah.

Zimmerman: … and then they’ll be off to prison for (unintelligible) years for robbery and shooting somebody, and they pistol whipped him, too.

Bartlett: Mm hmm.

Zimmerman: They were not nice kids, put it that way. And he was a Spanish guy, so is that racist? I don’t know.

Bartlett: Every, every, the bottom line is every case is different. We have to look at the facts of every single case.

Zimmerman: Oh yeah.

Bartlett: But there’s so much anger out there now.

Zimmerman: Oh yeah, I agree.

Bartlett: I just feel like we’re falling off a cliff.

Zimmerman: (Unintelligible) I remember this one lady, she accused, it was after the fact, and she was a Black lady and she accused me of being racist, whatever. I said, ‘OK, I was racist because I ruled against you, but you admit that this brand new Brazilian hardwood floors that she didn’t like the color of it, so you rolled it all in white? (Chuckles) And the, you know, the landlord.

Bartlett: Mm hmm.

Zimmerman: I’m trying to remember what they were.

Bartlett: Oh, is this small claim?

Zimmerman: Yeah, small claims. I said, ‘Yeah, because they’re like brand new, $6,000 for the Brazilian floor,’ and they came in and said they need $2,000 to sand off all of the white paint, and they don’t even know if they can get it back to the original thing.

Bartlett: Mm hmm.

Zimmerman: I said, back then (unintelligible) whatever it was I said, it could have been five, but anyway, you know, so I ruled against the, you know, the other minority couple (chuckles), not because they were (unintelligible) or whatever, but because they were right. She just had it in her mind; I mean she was mental.

Bartlett: Yeah.

Zimmerman: She said it was too depressing to have the dark floor (unintelligible).

Bartlett: Oh, and she was just a tenant?

Zimmerman: Oh yeah, she was a tenant.

Bartlett: And she painted all of the Brazilian floors white?

Zimmerman: Oh yeah, white.

Bartlett: And then the landlord wanted to recoup that damage it sounds like?

Zimmerman: Oh yeah, to get it back to…

Bartlett: Oh no, that’s awful.

Zimmerman: It was awful (unintelligible).

Bartlett: Oh, God; that’s awful. How did she not think she’d have to pay for that? Come on now

Zimmerman: I know because she…

Bartlett: Did she think she was improving it, like had made it better? They owe me money for the paint?

Zimmerman: No, she wanted, it was depressing to have dark floors.

Bartlett: Oh, got it.

Zimmerman: You have dark floors, (unintelligible) would you paint them white?

Bartlett: I mean, I don’t know, I guess I can’t know until I’m in that situation. OK so really quickly with the…

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A small rhetorical, procedural bomb blew up on the Senate floor Monday afternoon. Sen. Dick Durbin, the majority whip and chair of the Judiciary Committee, began: "It was August of 1957, a senator took the floor here in this very chamber. He had a remarkable record. he'd served as a Democratic senator, as a Dixiecrat senator, and as a Republican senator before he finally retired." He was talking about Sen. Strom Thurmond, who on that August day embarked on his 24-hour-and-18-minute record-setting filibuster. "For what principled purpose did this senator take such pains and preparation? For what noble reason did he grind the world's greatest deliberative body to a full-scale halt for more than 24 hours?" Durbin asked, and answered himself: "In order to defend Jim Crow racial discrimination and deny equality to African Americans."

Durbin continued: "Today, nearly 65 years after Strom Thurmond's marathon defense of Jim Crow, the filibuster is still making a mockery of American democracy. The filibuster is still being misused by some Senators to block legislation urgently needed and supported by strong majorities of the American people." The filibuster, he said, "is what hitting legislative rock bottom looks like. […] Rather than protecting the finely balanced system our founders created, today's filibuster throws a system out of balance, giving one half of one branch of government what amounts to a veto over the rest of government. It promotes gridlock, not good governance."

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What makes this speech significant is that it happened on the Senate floor. What makes it more significant is that Durbin is the No. 2 guy in the Senate, the majority whip. That it is now the landing page of his Senate web page. It amounts to an announcement, a message to recalcitrant Democrats from their leadership that change is coming.

If you have any doubt of that, check out the unhinged histrionics and threats from Sen. Mitch McConnell Tuesday morning. "Let me say this very clearly for all 99 of my colleagues: Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin to imagine what a completely scorched-earth Senate would look like. None of us have served one minute in a Senate that was completely drained of comity and consent," he blustered. "This chaos would not open up an express lane to liberal change. It would not open up an express lane for the Biden presidency to speed into the history books. The Senate would be more like a hundred-car pile-up. Nothing moving." He's worried. He's also making promises he'll have a hard time keeping, given he's swearing to having all of his members available at every given moment of every day. That's just not going to happen.

As if to emphasize Durbin's point, though, that "Today, nearly 65 years after Strom Thurmond's  marathon defense of Jim Crow, the filibuster is still making a mockery of American democracy," a group of Republican House members introduced a constitutional amendment to permanently strip the vote for president from residents of Washington, D.C. These aren't outliers in the Republican Party—state lawmakers in 43 states have introduced 250 bills that would do largely the same thing to voters they think are predominantly Democratic. That's what this is about, ultimately: Republicans preserving their anti-majoritarian rule no matter what.

So it might have been a mistake when McConnell tried to drag Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema into this fight on his side. Because his side is the white supremacists. At any rate, Durbin didn't take his bluster too seriously. When asked about McConnell's threats of "a completely scorched earth Senate," Durbin replied: "He has already done that. He's proven he can do it, and he will do it again." So, basically, "Bring it, Mitch."

Durbin previewed this fight with McConnell all the way back in September 2020, before the election handed the Senate to Democrats. "Last year in the Senate, 2019, we had 22 amendments voted on in the entire year,” he said on ABC's This Week. "Mitch McConnell has taken the Senate and turned it into something that is not even close to a deliberative and legislative body—we need to make sure that whatever the procedure is in the future that we get down to business." So McConnell isn't brining anything Democrats weren't already prepared for.

Fast forward to this week and what Durbin was potentially previewing on the floor Monday, which is the filibuster reform Manchin opened the door to earlier this month: a painful, talking filibuster. "If a senator insists on blocking the will of the Senate, he should at least pay the minimal price of being present," Durbin said Monday. "No more phoning it in. if your principles are that important, stand up for them, speak your mind, hold the floor, and show your resolve."

The way the current filibuster works is utterly painless for Republicans—they can literally phone it in. They raise an objection to a bill coming to the floor by unanimous consent, forcing a vote on proceeding to the bill. Senate rules (for now) set a 60-vote minimum for it to go forward. In Thurmond's day, he had to take to the floor for more than 24 hours to try to achieve his goal. (He failed.) Now, after a series of "reforms" the filibuster has undergone over the decades, it's become this. Until McConnell became Republican leader, it wasn't so much of a problem.

Durbin might prefer a return to the talking filibuster, but he isn't ruling anything out, on behalf of leadership. Among the suggestions he included are "reducing the number of votes needed to invoke cloture, creating a tiered system of voting in which the filibuster could be broken with successively smaller majorities, and ultimately a simple majority." He is considering "any proposal that ends the misuse of a filibuster as a weapon of mass destruction."

"It's time to change the Senate rules, stop holding this senate hostage," he concluded. "We cannot allow misuse of arcane rules to block the will of the American people. I urge my colleagues to defend democracy by making the changes needed."

Federal investigators were convinced: Google’s push to take over mobile internet searches was illegal. They had the evidence and urged their bosses to sue. But those politically appointed bosses overruled them.

Nearly a decade later, the Justice Department and state regulators are suing Google over the same multibillion-dollar smartphone contracts that investigators for the Federal Trade Commission flagged years ago — and arguing that the deals present some of the strongest evidence that Google has built a monopoly.

Hundreds of pages of unreleased internal FTC memos, obtained by POLITICO, show for the first time that the agency’s commissioners dismissed substantial evidence to support the monopoly claim, including taking the rare step of rejecting a recommendation by staff investigators to sue.

The contracts at the center of the fight made Google the default search engine on almost all U.S. smartphones and locked in that exclusivity for years, giving the company a major advantage just as Americans were starting to flock to smartphones. In its antitrust suit against Google last October, DOJ revealed that the company pays as much as $12 billion a year to Apple alone to keep its search engine as the default on iPhones, iPads and the Safari browser.

The FTC memos suggest Obama-era regulators passed on an opportunity to rein in Google when the company still had viable competitors. Eight years later, Google is the undisputed leader in both online and mobile search — a fact that will make it difficult for today’s prosecutors to craft a remedy even if their current lawsuits succeed.

William Kovacic, a former George W. Bush administration FTC chair who reviewed the 2012 documents at POLITICO’s request, said they reveal agency commissioners overlooking what many experts and regulators would consider clear antitrust violations.

“I always assumed the staff memo was not so specific, direct and clear about the path ahead. A lot of the DOJ case is in there. It’s really breathtaking,” said Kovacic, who was at the FTC when it voted to open the Google probe in 2011, but left the agency three months later when his term expired.

Google declined to comment Monday on the FTC lawyers' recommendation to sue over its mobile contracts. But in a blog post Tuesday, the company quoted from passages in the documents in which the FTC's economists argued that Google was succeeding in the mobile search market because consumers liked it best — not because of any “exclusive deals.”

“The memos also show that the FTC and its staff looked in detail at our Android and Apple distribution agreements (the subject of the Department of Justice’s current case) and, after uncovering evidence that people can readily choose alternatives but 'overwhelmingly' prefer Google, declined to challenge them,” wrote Rosie Lipscomb, Google's competition legal director.

Among the revelations in the documents, which the FTC has never made public: A top Google executive bragged in an email to the CEO that Google could “own the U.S. market” with its exclusive contracts with major phonemakers and carriers. The contracts made Google the default search engine on 86 percent of U.S. smartphones. And the company acknowledged making “humongous” payments to carriers solely to keep rivals like Yahoo and Microsoft from getting prime access to people’s devices.

Those findings came from the FTC’s antitrust attorneys, who concluded that Google was breaking the law by “banishing potential competitors” from mobile phones. They proposed the FTC sue and seek a settlement requiring changes to Google’s contracts. The agency’s economists took the opposite view, recommending against a suit because mobile commanded only a small share of the market.

But those antitrust investigators only make recommendations. The decision on what action to take rests on the FTC’s five commissioners, presidential appointees who operate independently of the executive branch. One of the commissioners, Republican Tom Rosch, was a hold-over from the George W. Bush years. Three others — Republican Maureen Ohlhausen and Democrats Julie Brill and Edith Ramirez — were Obama nominees. FTC Chair Jon Leibowitz was a Bush pick, but Obama elevated him to chair and then nominated him for a second seven-year term.

In most cases, commissioners of both parties follow the advice of the FTC attorneys, widely seen as experts in the cases they investigate, said Kovacic, who spent seven years as an FTC staffer before he became a commissioner and later chair under President George W. Bush.

The Google probe was different. In this case, the commissioners followed the recommendations of their staff economists, who argued that the mobile market for search was too small to pose an antitrust issue.

Kovacic, who is now a director at the U.K.’s competition agency, argued that the commissioners were too reluctant to proceed. “This is such a story of risk aversion,” he said.

The FTC was conducting a broad investigation into a number of Google’s search products in 2012 and has never publicly confirmed that it investigated the mobile phone contracts. One commissioner said after the probe ended that the agency had looked at the contracts and found no problems.

The findings by the agency’s antitrust investigators suggest differently.

In one October 2012 memo, 18 FTC lawyers and paralegals told the commissioners that Google controlled 97 percent of the global market for mobile search and that its contracts with phone providers made it the default search engine on 86 percent of U.S. smartphones.

U.S. antitrust law does not define what market share makes a company a monopoly, but several courts have set 70 percent as a threshold. By that measure, both of the FTC staff’s estimates would qualify Google as a monopolist on mobile.

In an interview with FTC staff in August 2012, Google’s then-Android chief Andy Rubin said the company had made “humongous” payments to the mobile phone providers to assure exclusivity — a move that opens the company to accusations that it overpaid to dominate a market. In a 2005 contract, for example, Google agreed to pay Apple half the revenue it earned from mobile search ads for five years in exchange for being set as the default. Google signed contracts with AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon to pay them between 15 and 40 percent of that revenue.

While the contracts with these companies started out with large payments, Google sought to give them a smaller percentage over time. The Apple contract, for example, dropped from a 50 percent ad revenue payment by Google for the first five years to 40 percent afterward. With Sprint, Google first gave the company 40 percent then reduced it to 32 percent. In an internal presentation, Rubin called the strategy “Change The Rules/Get A Better Deal.”

Rubin also touted internally Google’s plan to corner the mobile phone market — a goal that usually rings alarm bells for antitrust regulators. In a 2009 email to then-CEO Eric Schmidt, Rubin said a pending contract with Verizon to drop Microsoft’s Bing search engine and sign on with Google would let the company “own the U.S. market.”

Another indication that Google viewed the contracts as a potential way to block competitors: A Google business development manager wrote in a 2011 email to other company executives that “the value of entering into contracts” with AT&T depended on the carrier shutting out Bing and Yahoo. “Our philosophy is that we are paying revenue share *in return for* exclusivity,” the executive wrote.

Google argues that companies like Apple choose its search engine because it offers the most useful results to consumers.

And Google has had to contend with the risk that Apple, which exerts tight control over the software on iPhones and iPads, might someday shut Google’s products out of that platform. (Shortly before the probe closed, in fact, Apple made its own mapping app the default for iPhones in place of Google’s.) Another potential danger came from Microsoft, which spent years trying to make its Windows Phone operating system a viable competitor to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.

The future of the mobile market also was not as easy to predict a decade ago. The FTC’s economists, whose arguments swayed the commissioners not to sue, noted in an August 2012 memo that only 8 percent of internet searches came from phones at that time, and that consumers could easily change their phones’ default search engine.

“A few taps to switch to another search provider must be near the lower bound in switching costs,” they wrote, italicizing the words for emphasis. To claim that Google’s agreements limit consumers’ choice, they wrote, “one would have to argue that a few taps is prohibitively exclusionary.”

And senior FTC economist Ken Heyer argued in a September 2012 memo that the competition among search providers for contracts would help mobile carriers snag the higher payments.

In discussions in the summer of 2012, Apple and the four wireless carriers told FTC lawyers that even without the exclusive contracts they would still probably make Google the default search engine on their phones because Google offered a higher rate of return on advertising.

Google’s exclusive contracts, though, blocked companies from seeking better deals elsewhere. Both Sprint and AT&T told FTC lawyers they might be willing to switch to Bing if Microsoft offered a higher revenue share than Google, but they were already locked into the Google contracts.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts may have been passed over for Treasury Department in the Biden administration, but a network of her prominently placed protégés are poised to execute a quiet revolution in how the federal government approaches oversight of the financial industry.

According to Politico, a host of Warren alums and other close allies who share her approach of aggressively overseeing Wall Street and other financial institutions have been cast in key roles throughout government. The Warren charges represent a boon to progressive policy at the micro level and a way for the liberal firebrand to have measurable impact while remaining at her post in the Senate.

Already placed Warren allies/alums include:

• Bharat Ramamurti: Deputy director of the White House National Economic Council
• Julie Siegel: Treasury deputy chief of staff
• Julie Morgan: a senior adviser at the Education Department
• Sasha Baker: senior director of strategic planning at the National Security Council
• Leandra English, a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau alum (CFPB), is chief of staff for the National Economic Council

Nominees include:

• Adewale "Wally" Adeyemo, who helped Warren launch the CFPB, has been nominated to be deputy Treasury secretary
• FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra, another CFPB alum, has been nominated to lead the bureau
• Gary Gensler, who aggressively regulated big banks after the financial crisis, has been nominated for Securities and Exchange Commission chair—"a position that in the past Warren and her staff have invested significant effort trying to influence," writes Politico.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is also a close ally and confidant of Warren, who helped mount a pressure campaign to get Yellen appointed as Federal Reserve chair under President Obama. Warren also reportedly has an open line of communication with Biden Chief of Staff Ron Klain. 

According to Karolina Arias, a former Democratic Senate aide and partner at Federal Hall Policy Advisors, the appointments "confirm that Sen. Warren will be the most influential voice in the financial policy debate under the new administration."

Richard Hunt, president of the Consumer Bankers Association, appeared to offer a more sour grapes perception of Warren's handiwork. "No one should be surprised Sen. Warren has virtually hand-picked the financial and other regulatory nominations she cares deeply about," said Hunt, who has gone toe-to-toe with Warren over financial industry regulation in some cases.   

Warren, who has always advocated a "personnel is policy" approach, told Politico in December that "getting the right people in those slots is really important."

"It's not only the top slots, it's also the deputies and assistants," she said, "The people who do the hard work day in and day out to develop policies and then to execute them."

Warren's far-reaching network in the Biden world gives her key allies as she pushes the administration to take action on everything from student debt cancellation to increased government financing of child care and potentially raising taxes on the nation's wealthiest individuals and corporations. The prominent placement of those allies also represents a distinct change in bent from many of the people who occupied those posts within both the Clinton and Obama administrations.

"Warren has become the center of gravity for people who think the economy has gotten out of whack and that better governance could set things right," said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the watchdog group the Revolving Door Project. Though Hauser said many of Biden's top aides are more traditional Democrats, "it makes sense that when trying to staff an executive branch that can produce real results for people and a legacy for their boss, they looked to people associated with Warren."

In reality, Biden is cleaning up one of Trump's most disastrous messes.

A veteran officer on the Fresno, California, city police force was placed on leave over the weekend when it emerged that he had joined a group of Proud Boys in counterprotesting local citizens who oppose turning over a local theater to an anti-LGBTQ church. But it also turned out that this was nothing new: The officer, a veteran of over a decade named Rick Fitzgerald, had been marching with the hate group for over three years.

It went unnoticed largely because modern police culture, over the past four years, developed an extremely tolerant and often benign approach to dealing with far-right street brawlers like the Proud Boys. As The New York Times explored in depth this weekend, it took their prominent role in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol for law enforcement to recognize that these proto-fascist organizations are a public menace, and the involvement of law enforcement officers both in the groups themselves, and in enabling their violence—often by turning a blind eye to it, while charging their victims with crimes—is a serious problem that police agencies around the country must confront.

From the very outset—beginning with their first public event, in April 2017 in Berkeley, California—the Proud Boys’ entire brand has revolved around generating extraordinary street violence. Yet even as its track record for extremism mounted with each “free speech” and “pro-Trump” event held in a targeted liberal urban center—particularly in Portland, Oregon, and other West Coast cities—the kid-gloves treatment they received from police forces dealing with them became a documented trend.

In spite of that, the FBI and most police forces, as the Times reports, “had often seen the Proud Boys as they chose to portray themselves, according to more than a half-dozen current and former federal officials: as mere street brawlers who lacked the organization or ambition of typical bureau targets like neo-Nazis, international terrorists and Mexican drug cartels.”

“There was a sense that, yes, their ideology is of concern, and, yes, they are known to have committed acts of violence that would be by definition terrorism, but we don’t worry about them,” Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary for threat prevention in the Department of Homeland Security, told the Times. “The Proud Boys are just the guys-that-drink-too much-after-the-football-game-and-tend-to-get-into-bar-fights type of people — people that never looked organized enough to cause serious national security threats.”

Fitzgerald is hardly the first police officer to face scrutiny for involvement with the Proud Boys:

• A female deputy officer from Clark County, Washington, was fired after posing for a photograph wearing a Proud Boys sweatshirt, as well as appearing in a photo shared on a Proud Boys Twitter account accompanied by her contact information in order to purchase “Proud Boys’ Girls” merchandise.
• A former Connecticut cop admitted in 2019 that he had belonged to a local chapter for eight months, but was told his membership didn’t violate department policy; he retired anyway.
• In Chicago, a three-year veteran named Robert Bakker was caught organizing Proud Boys meetups in online chat rooms by local antifascists; Bakker was particularly active in a Telegram channel titled “Fuck Antifa,” where he bragged about working in law enforcement. Bakker denied that he was ever a member and remains on the Chicago Police Department force.

Fitzgerald’s involvement was exposed when a Twitter user, @Borwin10, published photos of the officer—wearing a mask, but exposing his tattoos and wearing a “Sheepdog” name tag—at both the weekend’s protests over Fresno’s historic Tower Theater and at a Sacramento Proud Boys march in November. In another photo, the same man can be seen stealing a rainbow-colored flag from a counterprotester. It also emerged that Fitzgerald was one of eight Fresno officers involved in the 2010 killing of a 23-year-old Fresno State student.

Fresno Police Chief Paco Balderrama promptly announced Fitzgerald’s suspension. Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer confirmed that the man in the photos is a Fresno police officer.

“As I said in my release yesterday, we take matters such as this very very seriously,” Dyer told reporters. “I can tell you as the mayor of this city we will not tolerate any city employee that belongs to or affiliates with — associates with an organization that promotes supremacy, promotes criminal activity or promotes racism.”

If local authorities are indeed now taking involvement with the Proud Boys by their police officers seriously, that would mark a significant sea change. There is a long history of city officials dismissing those concerns.

Investigative journalist Will Carless—who last year cowrote for Reveal News a piece exposing how police officers around the United States participate in extremist Facebook pages, and how their departments permit it—observed on Twitter that in the course of reporting that piece, his team had contacted several internal affairs departments about these officers’ activities, and “as far as we know, they did nothing.”

“After we published our stories, I got calls from several internal affairs departments asking me who the Proud Boys were,” Carless added. “Investigating officers told me again and again they weren't concerned about affiliation with the group.”

As the Times’ law enforcement sources noted, a “blind spot in the culture of law enforcement,” even more than the Trump administration’s antipathy to any focus on far-right groups, produced this failure. “If the Proud Boys was not a white male chauvinist club but a Black male chauvinist club, I think that, sadly, we would have seen a different policing posture,” said Neumann.

“They committed violence in public, used videos of that violence to promote themselves for other rallies and then traveled across the country to engage in violence again,” Mike German of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University remarked. “How that didn’t attract FBI attention is hard for me to understand.”

The cases of the Proud Boys indicted in the Capitol insurrection—particularly Ethan Nordean, one of the group’s primary leaders on Jan. 6—provide a clear illustration of how the police’s biased handling of the organization helped feed these men’s beliefs that their violent tactics had the tacit support of law enforcement and other authorities, as the Times piece explores in detail. Nordean and his cohorts, it notes, had been let off the hook by local police in Portland and Seattle on numerous occasions.

The most notorious of these was a late-June 2018 riot in Portland during which Nordean flattened an antifascist with whom he was brawling, the video of which then went viral, making him a kind of celebrity in far-right circles. Police in fact arrested Nordean that day—but then released him 30 minutes later. He was never charged; instead, prosecutors charged his victim, who suffered a “severe concussion,” with assault. The next week, he was named “Proud Boy of the Week” on the group’s Facebook pages and made an appearance on Alex Jones’ InfoWars broadcast, which he used to recruit new members.

This was part of a consistent and ongoing pattern, particularly with the Portland Police Bureau: Proud Boys would bus in men armed for street combat from out of town, sometimes even driving their pickup trucks through the downtown and shooting pedestrians with paintball guns, while police stood by and did nothing. When a man hurled a pipe bomb at Black Lives Matter demonstrators last summer and he was identified on social media, police chose not to investigate because no witnesses came forward to place the man there.

This was in fact a concrete far-right strategy that evolved between April 2017 and January 2021. A Washington Post feature about the man who organized a “Cruise for Trump” rally in Portland described in clear detail how this all works: A nonresident of a liberal urban center organizes a protest ostensibly around the right-wing cause du jour, which then attracts a horde of other nonresidents, whose supposed purpose is to come tell people who live in those cities how terrible their politics are—but whose underlying purpose, betrayed by the weapons and defensive gear they bring along with an attitude of eagerness to punch “leftists,” is to engage in violence.

The Proud Boys and their cohorts were adept at adopting mainstream right-wing talking points as the ostensible purpose of their rallies. Their earliest events were about “free speech” and defending Donald Trump from leftist critics. Soon enough, the purpose for these events began to vary widely, signaling clearly what had already become obvious to observers: Namely, the designated cause was just a beard for right-wing outsiders to wear while planning street violence in the urban centers they loathed.

• A May 2018 rally in downtown Seattle was officially a protest endorsing “open carry” firearms laws, after the city had attempted to pass an ordinance disallowing firearms in city parks and other public spaces.
• A June 2018 rally in Portland—previewed by a vow from a Proud Boys leader to “cleanse the streets” of the city—was organized to protest the city’s pro-immigrant “sanctuary city” status. This protest eventually broke down into extraordinary violence by members of the Proud Boys.
• A November 2018 event in downtown Portland was dubbed “HimToo”—a reference to the anti-sexual-assault #MeToo hashtag, but in this case turned on its head into a rally in favor of men’s rights, held shortly after the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in which allegations of sexual assault played a major role.
• And sometimes, the Patriot Prayer/Proud Boys contingent would simply organize “flash marches” in downtown Portland with no official purpose, other than to create opportunities for violence—as one such rally in October 2018 did.
• Finally, the marches became causes unto themselves, such as when hundreds of out-of-town Proud Boys gathered in Portland in August 2019 and paraded through the town, sometimes with a full police escort—while more than a dozen counterprotesters were arrested by police.

The Proud Boys themselves never made much of an attempt to disguise their violent intentions on social media, however. Prior to that last 2019 rally, Proud Boys leader Joe Biggs (also currently under indictment for his role in the Jan. 6 attack) openly encouraged would-be participants to embrace the violence.

Biggs urged his Twitter followers: “Get a gun. Get ammo. Get your gun license. Get training. Practice as much as you can and be ready because the left isn’t playing anymore and neither should we.” He followed that with a “Death to Antifa” meme featuring an image of a corpse in a plastic body bag.

Supporters chimed in with memes depicting ISIS-style beheadings of antifascists with large knives, along with comments expressing their unquenched desire to “exterminate” far-left activists. “I fully expect [an] armed conflict to break out on Aug. 17,” one commenter said. “People may die this is the real deal.”

Police provided some of the Proud Boys marchers that day with an escort. Towards the end, they turned their attention to antifascist demonstrators in downtown Portland and arrested 13 of them. A September 2020 Proud Boys rally in Portland had essentially the same outcome, though with many fewer demonstrators involved.

Law enforcement’s cozy relationship with the Proud Boys now appears over—at least on the official level. Rooting it out of the broader police culture—clearly an important component of the task now facing law enforcement in rooting far-right extremists out of their own ranks in order to adequately combat the violent ideologies behind the Capitol siege—will no doubt prove a much harder hill to climb.

*cough*

A Louisiana State Patrol trooper, reportedly caught bragging in text messages about beating a suspect, was arrested with two other troopers on excessive force allegations. Troopers Dakota DeMoss, Randall Dickerson, and George Harper were arrested on February 8 on criminal charges associated with not only excessive force but allegedly trying to hide their actions, the media site Sound Off Louisiana reported. The site revealed a telling text thread that was part of the arrest warrant for DeMoss. In the thread between DeMoss, Harper, and fellow troopers Larry Shappley and Jacob Brown, the men joked about the "ass whoop in" 29-year-old Antonio Harris was subjected to before being taken to jail.

“How was his attitude at the jail?” Brown asked in one text message. “Complete silence,” Harper responded. DeMoss: “lol he was still digesting that ass whoopin”

Brown continued the conversation by suggesting "its gonna take him a couple days" to get over the beating and that "he gonna be sore tomorrow for sure."

"BET he wont run from a full grown bear again," Brown added, to which DeMoss responded: “Bet he don’t even cross into LA anymore”

The troopers went on joking and making light of brutality in the texts listed in DeMoss’ warrant:

George Harper “GRIZZLY Nah he gonna spread the word that’s for damn sure”

Jacob Brown “lmao”

Dakota DeMoss “he’s gonna have nightmares for a long time”

Jacob Brown “lmao…..warms my heart knowing we could educate that young man”

Dakota DeMoss “lolol”

Larry Shappley “haha”

The exchange happened after Harris, who was identified in court documents, surrendered to authorities following a high-speed chase last May in Franklin Parish. DeMoss, Harper, and Brown were accused of deactivating body-cameras and beating Harris after he “immediately surrendered,” The Associated Press reported. Brown, who faces allegations in that case and another, resigned Wednesday, while DeMoss and Harper were put on administrative leave. 

Brown is also accused along with Dickerson of beating a Black man pulled over for a traffic stop on July 16, 2019, in Ouachita Parish. Dickerson allegedly hit the man five times “towards his head” and kneed him allegedly after suspecting narcotics in his vehicle, according to court records the television station KNOE obtained. Louisiana State Police said in a statement the news station WBRZ obtained: “After effecting the arrest, Troopers Brown and Dickerson utilized excessive and unjustifiable force on the handcuffed driver, deactivated body worn cameras, and reported untruthful statements regarding the alleged resistance by the suspect.”

Brown, DeMoss, Dickerson, and Harper were charged with simple battery and malfeasance in office stemming from the 2019 and 2020 incidents. Brown is additionally accused of falsifying a use of force report in Harris’ arrest, earning him an obstruction of justice charge, state police said. “The unjustifiable use of force by our personnel is inexcusable and tarnishes the exemplary work of our dedicated men and women of the Department of Public Safety,” Louisiana State Police Superintendent Lamar Davis said in the statement. “I commend our investigative team for their diligence and professionalism during this investigation. Our agency remains committed to upholding the public trust and providing professional, fair, and compassionate public safety services.”

All four troopers were released on bond less than 24 hours after their arrest, WBRZ reported. Sadly, the alleged actions of the troopers arrested represent just a sliver of the injustices Black Louisiana residents have been forced to live with for years.

In one incident in May of 2019, a gruesome body-camera video shows Master Trooper Kory York dragging Ronald Greene “on his stomach by the leg shackles” after a high-speed chase and subsequent arrest, according to internal records the AP obtained. “You’re gonna lay on your f-----g belly like I told you!” the trooper said at one point in the footage. Greene, a barber, later died in police custody, and the official response was to try to hide the video from the public and instead claim Greene died as a result of injuries in a car crash, the AP reported.

Lee Merritt, an attorney for the Greene family, said flat out "police lied" during a press conference last October. "Ronald immediately surrendered at his first contact with law enforcement. When the vehicle stopped, he put his hands up and said, 'I'm sorry,'" Merritt said. "His dying words were, 'I'm sorry.'"

The punishment authorities thought was most fitting for York was 50 hours of suspension without pay. Trooper Chris Hollingsworth, who admitted to brutalizing Greene in the incident, was at least fired and soon after died in a single-vehicle crash, the AP reported. Another body-camera clip shows Hollingsworth telling a peer: “I beat the ever-living f--- out of” Greene before he “all of a sudden he just went limp.” 

DeMoss was also linked to Greene’s arrest. Louisiana activist Gary Chambers tweeted on Oct. 19, 2020: "Killers. That’s how they should be identified. Troopers Kory York and Dakota Demoss were the other two Louisiana State Troopers who killed Ronald Greene. York and Demoss along with the now deceased Trooper Chris Hollingsworth savagely beat #RonaldGreene."

Chambers added: “They used their tasers on him repeatedly. They beat him bloody. They drug him by his ankles in hand cuffs. They washed the blood off their hands and made horrible statements. They kept their jobs.”

And it’s not going over well.

Two recent tweets from members of Congress illustrate how, in the wake of President Joe Biden signing the Covid-19 relief bill, Republicans are trying to “have their cake and vote against it, too,” as Barack Obama once put it.

That $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which Biden signed into law last Thursday, didn’t receive a single Republican vote, even though recent polling shows a majority of Republican voters have said they somewhat or completely support it. The popularity of the legislation puts Republican members of Congress in a bind: How does one message against a bill that most Americans like, and that will cut child poverty in half, while also juicing an economy that’s been ravaged by the year-long pandemic?

Some Republicans, perhaps understandably, are instead opting to instead focus on culture war distractions like whether Dr. Seuss is being “canceled.” But others are shamelessly trying to take credit for Democratic policy right after they voted against it.

One example of this came last Friday, when Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL) patted herself on the back for a decision made by Biden’s Small Business Administration to extend deferment periods for Covid-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL).

“BREAKING ... So proud to announce that the Biden Administration has just implemented my bipartisan COVID relief bill as part of @SBAgov,” Salazar tweeted, linking to a statement on her website in which she’s quoted as saying, “I am so proud that my bipartisan legislation has officially become SBA policy.”

The timing of the tweet, coming one day after the American Rescue Plan was signed, led many to believe the lawmaker was referring to the Covid-19 relief bill Salazar voted against — that bill contains $15 billion in EIDL funding. But the SBA decision she highlighted is actually distinct from the American Rescue Plan, as National Economic Council (NEC) Deputy Director Bharat Ramamurti explained on Twitter.

“I’ve seen some confusion on this,” Ramamurti wrote, referring to Salazar’s tweet. “On Friday — separate from the American Rescue bill — SBA announced it was letting 3M+ businesses defer EIDL loan payments for an extra year.”

“We’re glad to see bipartisan support for this and other changes we’ve made to help small businesses,” he added.

While it’s not correct to say that Salazar is trying to take credit for the Covid-19 relief bill, her claim that the Biden administration “implemented” her “bipartisan COVID relief bill” is false. The bill in question hasn’t come up for a vote in Congress, and it doesn’t appear that the SBA’s decision was inspired by it. An SBA press release announcing the deferment extension doesn’t mention Salazar.

Salazar on Sunday responded to criticism by trying to turn the tables, tweeting that her statement “has nothing to do with the $1.9T Blue State Bailout. It is a bipartisan policy I introduced separately that was adopted by SBA.”

But while Salazar played misleading semantic games on Twitter, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) announced it’s buying billboards in her district to highlight that she and other Florida Republicans voted against $1,400 relief checks — a part of the Democratic Covid-19 relief bill supported by more than 80 percent of Americans.

Sen. Wicker took credit for a bill he voted against

Even more egregious than Salazar’s tweet was one from Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) lauding the $28.6 billion in aid to restaurants included in the relief bill.

“Independent restaurant operators have won $28.6 billion worth of targeted relief,” Wicker tweeted on Wednesday. “This funding will ensure small businesses can survive the pandemic by helping to adapt their operations and keep their employees on the payroll.”

It’s true that Wicker pushed for restaurant relief — he and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) proposed an amendment to the bill with the funding that passed with bipartisan support. But Wicker ultimately voted against the final bill.

Wicker was roundly dragged for trying to have it both ways.

Speaking to reporters last Wednesday, Wicker dismissed a query about if he was trying to take credit for Democratic legislation as a “stupid question.”

“One good provision in a $1.9 trillion bill doesn’t mean I have to vote for the whole thing,” he said.

But voters don’t really appear to be buying Republican claims that while there are good parts of the bill, it was ultimately too large to warrant support. Recent polling from Vox and Data for Progress showed that twice as many voters preferred the path Democrats went down of passing a big relief bill quickly over a Republican option that was only one-third the size.

There’s precedent for Republicans trying to take credit for legislation they voted against. As Amanda Terkel detailed for HuffPost, they did the same thing for the 2009 stimulus that, like the 2021 one, passed without a single Republican vote:

A similar pattern happened after the 2009 stimulus, when GOP lawmakers who voted against President Barack Obama’s legislation then went back into their home districts and took credit for the money that flowed to their constituents. At the time, ThinkProgress counted 114 Republican lawmakers who blocked the bill while touting its benefits. They sent out press releases taking credit for money that funded projects in their district, even though they voted against it.

On Wednesday, Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY), perhaps mindful of that precedent, said on the House floor that “what we are all concerned about on our side is that the Republicans are all going to vote against this, and then they’re going to show up at every ribbon cutting, and at every project funded out of this bill, and they’re going to pump up their chests and take credit for all of these great benefits that are coming to their citizens.”

The Covid-19 relief package Biden signed is even more popular than the 2009 stimulus. It also comes after many Republicans backed two Covid-19 relief bills while Donald Trump was president, as well as 2017 tax cuts that (coincidentally) were projected to add $1.9 trillion to the national debt while disproportionately benefiting the rich.

But now that Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress, Republicans are suddenly finding reasons to be against spending — even if in a couple of cases they’d like their constituents to believe otherwise.

---

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated how Sen. Wicker voted on an amendment providing relief to the restaurant industry. He voted for it.

How Biden's promise of an ambitious presidency could still founder.

New polling shows a significant amount of hesitancy about getting the Covid-19 vaccine among Republicans.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the United States’ top federal infectious disease expert, and other scientists, estimate 75 to 85 percent of Americans need to get vaccinated in order to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control — new polling, however, has revealed a major challenge to achieving that goal: Hesitancy to take the vaccine, particularly among Republicans.

Fauci called the reluctance “disturbing” and representative of a line of thinking that makes “absolutely no sense” Sunday on Meet the Press.

But three recent polls suggest a number of Americans — particularly those with conservative leanings — prefer to wait to get vaccinated, or plan to not take the the vaccine at all.

Sunday, CBS News released a poll conducted between March 10 and 13 which found 33 percent of Republicans say they won’t get the vaccine when it becomes available to them, while just 10 percent of Democrats said the same. In that survey, 47 percent of Republicans said they’ve already received the vaccine or plan to do so, compared to 71 percent of Democrats.

Those findings follow a recent poll from NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist which found that 47 percent of people who supported former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election say they won’t choose to be vaccinated (versus 10 percent of Biden supporters), as well as a Monmouth University poll released earlier in March that found 59 percent of Republicans either wanted to wait and “see how it goes” before getting vaccinated, or said they were likely to never get one. By contrast, 23 percent of Democrats felt the same way.

NBC’s Chuck Todd asked Fauci directly about the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist polls on Sunday, and Fauci expressed concern and disbelief.

“The numbers you gave are so disturbing, how such a large proportion of a certain group of people would not want to get vaccinated merely because of political consideration,” Fauci said. “It makes absolutely no sense.”

He added, “We’ve got to dissociate political persuasion from what’s common sense, no-brainer, public health things.”

Fauci said during the interview that while new cases of Covid-19 are declining, it would be a mistake to assume life can return to normal without herd immunity, the point at which enough people are immune to the coronavirus that it can no longer easily spread. Experts have noted this is especially important to keep in mind given the rise of particularly infectious variants of the virus like B.1.1.7.

“Even though the decline was steep, we absolutely need to avoid the urge to say: ‘Oh, everything is going great,’” Fauci said. “Don’t spike the ball on the five-yard line. Wait until you get into the end zone. We are not in the end zone yet.”

Political leaders and public health experts are fighting vaccine skepticism

Due to recent polling, politicians in both parties and public health experts are homing in on Republicans as the largest group of Americans who need to be persuaded to overcome hesitation or opposition to taking the vaccine.

“Vaccines are our only way out of this. If we don’t have 80-plus percent of the population vaccinated before next winter, this virus is going to come back raging,” Paul Offit, a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee, told NBC News. “What worries me is if 25 percent of Republicans say they won’t get vaccinated, that’s going to be hard to do.”

In his first major primetime public address as president, President Joe Biden implored all Americans to “put trust and faith in our government” to protect the American people through its public health programs.

“It’s truly a national effort, just like we saw during World War II,” Biden said, making the case to Americans to get vaccinated and continue to wear masks. “I will not relent until we beat this virus, but I need you. I need every American to do their part.”

Some Republican leaders are trying to find ways to reach out specifically to conservatives. NBC News highlighted Iowa Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks’s efforts to convince the hesitant of the vaccine’s safety, and the Washington Post reported Republican pollster Frank Luntz is working with the de Beaumont Foundation to craft pro-vaccine messaging.

But a major issue for Republicans is undoing the damage to public health messaging caused by former President Donald Trump.

While Trump did say, “Everybody go get your shot,” at February’s Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) convention, that was the exception to Trump’s rule of bucking standard public health guidance. Trump secretly received the vaccine in January, but that information only came to light in March.

Throughout his presidency, Trump ignored and downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic, and spread misinformation and disinformation about Covid-19. That in turn has contributed to distrust in the vaccine or beliefs that Covid-19 simply isn’t a serious issue among many of his supporters.

During an interview Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation, Arkansas’s Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson seemed to pin resistance to getting vaccinated squarely on Trump.

“The poll numbers are troubling, because in Arkansas it’s a very pro-Trump state in terms of the last election, and so we see that resistance whenever we’re opening up eligibility for the vaccine,” he said. “We’re moving through it very quickly because we’re not having everybody sign up to take it.”

Hutchinson said he’s employing “influencers” to try to help encourage people to take the vaccine and that he sees numbers changing as more people take the vaccine.

Other advocacy groups are also trying to use signals from influential leaders to encourage comfort with the vaccine. The Ad Council and COVID Collaborative released a public service announcement last week encouraging vaccinations and featuring all living former presidents and first ladies — with the exception of Donald and Melania Trump.

Politico asked the Ad Council whether Trump was invited to participate, and wrote that a spokesperson “reiterated that the project started last year and that one of the videos was filmed on Inauguration Day, when Trump was not in attendance.”

“We just learned last week that President Trump did get vaccinated and were so pleased he advised Americans to ‘go get your shot,’” the spokesperson said.

Today much of the world honors an annual tradition: setting their clocks backwards by one hour. "I hope you enjoy it," writes Boston Globe Jeff Jacoby. In an essay titled "Heed the science and abolish daylight saving time," Jacoby writes "I also hope this is the last year we have to go through this business of shifting our clocks ahead, and that by this time next year we'll be back on standard time for good." I am not a fan of daylight saving time, and if the polls are accurate, neither are most Americans. According to a 2019 survey by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center, 71 percent of the public wants to put an end to the twice-yearly practice of changing clocks... Most of the rest of the world doesn't want it either. In Asia, Africa, and South America, it's virtually nonexistent. Most of Australia and many of the nations of the South Pacific eschew it, as do Russia and most of the former Soviet republics. The European Parliament voted by a large margin to end daylight saving time across the European Union, though whether to implement that change is left up to each EU member state... The point of "saving" daylight was to save fuel: Congress believed that by shifting the clock so daylight extended later into the evening, the law would reduce demand for electricity and thereby conserve oil. But researchers attempting to measure the effects of clock-changing on energy savings have found them pretty elusive... But daylight saving time doesn't just fail to deliver the single most important benefit expected of it. It also generates a slew of harms. In the days following the onset of daylight time each March, there is a measurable increase in suicides, atrial fibrillation, strokes, and heart attacks. Workplace injuries climb. So do fatal car crashes and emergency room visits. There is even evidence that judges hand down harsher sentences. All of which helps explain the growing chorus of scientists calling for an end to daylight saving time. The public-health problems stem not just from the loss of an hour of sleep once a year but from the ongoing disruption to the human circadian clock... We should no longer be thinking about "springing forward" and "falling back" in terms of personal preference or convenience but should be focusing instead on the proven degradation to human well-being. Scientists now understand vastly more about the workings and importance of circadian rhythm than they did when clock-shifting was instituted decades ago. There is a growing medical consensus that what we've been doing with our clocks each spring is unhealthy. It's time to stop doing it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sen. Ron Johnson’s racist comments on a conservative talk show in which he praised the January 6 Capitol rioters has drawn swift condemnation across the political spectrum.

Here’s what the senior U.S. Senator from Wisconsin had to say about the violent insurrection on The Joe Pags Show on Friday:

On January 6, I never felt threatened…and mainly because I knew that those thousands of people that were marching the Capitol who were trying to pressure people like me to vote the way they wanted me to vote, I knew those were people that loved this country, that truly respect law enforcement and would never do anything to break the law. So I wasn’t concerned…Now had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protestors, I might have been a little concerned.

WATCH: Ron Johnson says he never "felt threatened" on 1/6 because "I knew those were people that love this country" but if "those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned." pic.twitter.com/PZcs89bl1T

— America's Worst Senator (@TheWorstSenator) March 13, 2021

Here are just a handful of the reactions cropping up on Twitter:

So let me get this straight: Sen. Ron Johnson is afraid of Black people peacefully protesting police killings, but isn't afraid of white nationalist mobs trying to overturn an election?

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) March 13, 2021

Ron Johnson is an embarrassing bigot.

— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) March 13, 2021

Ron Johnson (Q-WI) openly defended violent insurrectionists who attacked the capitol as "peaceful patriots."

He's running for re-election in 2022.

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) March 13, 2021

Holding Trump #Republican Sen. Ron Johnson accountable is critical to protecting our democracy. He's been a key insurrection enabler as lead Chief Disinformation Officer in Congress. His ongoing rhetoric fans the flames of dangerous movements that are a #homelandsecurity threat.

— Olivia of Troye (@OliviaTroye) March 13, 2021

Your daily reminder that “not all that worried about the white, noose-bearing insurrectionists” Ron Johnson ran out of the Capitol with everyone else on January 6th.

— Joy-Ann Pro-Democracy & Masks Reid (@JoyAnnReid) March 13, 2021

"I knew those were people who love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, so I wasn't concerned.” Thanks for clarification @SenRonJohnson: 1. White people love America more than Black people & 2. You’re afraid of black people. https://t.co/GWjzmi9fZa

— Michael Steele (@MichaelSteele) March 13, 2021

Sen. Ron Johnson said he never felt threatened during the insurrection because the mob was made up of “people that loved this country” instead of Black Lives Matter protesters.

People trying to murder Senators are cool, because they're not Black. Got it. https://t.co/7PQhXOnKZS

— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) March 13, 2021

Last month, Johnson raised eyebrows for saying the Capitol riot “didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me.”

Johnson’s Senate seat is up next year but he hasn’t yet committed to running for reelection. Last week he hinted that retiring is “probably my preference now.”

On Jan. 6, we watched in horror as a Trump-supporting mob attacked the U.S. Capitol—and then walked out past police, going back to their hotel rooms and then dispersing across the country. Despite the lack of arrests that day, though, and despite the suspicious lack of information from law enforcement leaders about what happened that day and how they would do some form of justice after the fact, the FBI and Justice Department have been on the case since.

Saying that the Capitol insurrection involves “likely the most complex investigation ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice,” federal prosecutors have started asking judges for 60-day delays. The complexity stems from evidence gathered through more than 900 search warrants, 15,000 hours of law enforcement video footage from body cameras and surveillance cameras, 210,000 tips, 80,000 witness interviews, 1,600 electronic devices, and searches of text messages on multiple providers.

More than 300 suspects have been charged already, with as many as 100 more people expected to be charged, and to fulfill discovery requirements, the Justice Department is working with the Federal Public Defender’s office to manage the evidence. “The investigation and prosecution of the Capitol Attack will likely be one of the largest in American history,” prosecutors said, “both in terms of the number of defendants prosecuted and the nature and volume of the evidence.”

Some of the cases will be simple: someone who shows up on footage from inside the Capitol being charged with trespassing, for instance. But in cases involving organized extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, prosecutors may be trying to put together far more complex cases of conspiracy, showing how the extremists coordinated with each other and obtained equipment specifically for leading an assault on the Capitol.

In one case, for instance, a Proud Boys leader coordinated a plan in which, prosecutors have argued, “By blending in and spreading out, Defendant [Nordean] and those following him on January 6 made it more likely that either a Proud Boy—or a suitably-inspired 'normie'—would be able to storm the Capitol and its ground in such a way that would interrupt the Certification of the Electoral College vote. Defendant understood full well that the men he was leading as he charged past law enforcement and onto the Capitol grounds were likely to destroy government property, or attempt to do so.”

On Thursday a prosecutor said that a conspiracy case against a group of Oath Keepers could grow from a group of nine defendants to 15 or more, a move that would potentially force the group to be broken up simply due to space constraints in courtrooms.

The investigation into and prosecution of the people who personally attacked the Capitol isn’t the only important investigation, though. Hearings have begun into the intelligence failures and law enforcement preparation failures that left the Capitol vulnerable to attack, and so far what they’ve showed is that we need to know a lot more. A lot more.

These multiple tracks of investigations need to continue, and to be backed with the political willpower to find out what happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again. 

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has always been something of a corporate tool. Historically, he’s been willing to say just about anything the money people tell him to say, including claims that net neutrality consumer protections help pornography production at the expense of health care. Think about that. He really said that and pretended to mean it. He also has a history of saying the quiet thing out loud. Shortly after his strange attack on net neutrality protections, Johnson argued for paid internet “fast lanes,” the literal thing that conservatives and their telecom overlords were trying to pretend wouldn’t be a part of telecommunications’ business model if net neutrality protections were rolled back. He’s done all of this in just four years, while adhering to the racist voter suppression models that his own state’s political party has admitted are only pursued to disenfranchise Black and brown voters. That’s cravenly racist.

About one month after the Capitol building was beset upon, vandalized, and law enforcement members were hurt and died, Johnson told right-wing radio host Jay Weber that the insurgency “didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me.” He went on to basically say that since the group hid their firearms outside of the Capitol building and didn’t walk in with muskets and bayonets, this couldn't be classed as an “armed insurrection.” He followed that up, while in the Senate, by promoting baseless conspiracy theories that MAGA, white supremacists, QAnon extremists, and right-wing militias were not involved in the Jan. 6 insurgency.

On Thursday, Johnson spoke with conservative radio host Joe Pags. Johnson, who has clearly embraced the depths of his dirtbagitude, decided to really elucidate what we all knew he meant when he said the insurrection wasn’t an insurrection.

Johnson first reexplained his alternate dimension take on Jan. 6, 2021, saying: “I’m also criticized because I’ve made the comment that on January 6, I never felt threatened, because I didn’t. And mainly because I knew that even though those thousands of people that are there marching to the Capitol were trying to pressure people like me to vote the way they want me to vote. I knew those are people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break a law, and so I wasn’t concerned.” Before we get to the racist double standard explanation that Johnson gives, let’s break this first part down.

Johnson was voting the way those people wanted him to vote. He wasn’t under any pressure to do anything. The die was cast for old Ronnie, who had weeks before given up even the semblance of integrity in fealty to Donald Trump and his dangerously fake election fraud claims. “These people” love this country?  What are they loving about it, exactly? To be very clear, you don’t have to love much of anything about anything to be a citizen and have a vote and be afforded your civil rights. But it’s unclear what these MAGA faketriots “love,” about our country. I mean, I have some ideas and I’m sure you do too, but I’m not sure Johnson could tell you a single thing they love about our country besides the words “troops” and “flag” and “God,” or something.

But the killer here is this assertion that the people who threw fire extinguishers, who hit, punched, kicked, shoved, and bear-sprayed law enforcement, while also breaking into a federal building and numerous off-limit private spaces in that building, “truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break a law” is not simply laughable: It’s the opposite of true. This is not an opinion. You either “truly respect law enforcement” and therefore you listen to law enforcement when law enforcement is being reasonable, and you never, unless provoked or in fear for your own life, attack law enforcement personnel. Especially when there is an abundance of video evidence, physical evidence, and digital evidence illustrating exactly how many laws you did indeed break.

Here’s the second half of Johnson’s statement:

SEN. RON JOHNSON: Now, had the tables been turned, Joe, and this’ll get me in trouble—had the tables been turned, and President Trump won the election, and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.

Let’s begin here. Donald Trump didn’t win the election. So that’s not a thing. Johnson’s entire racist argument here relies on the concept that it’s okay for U.S. officials like Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Talib, Chuck Schumer, and even Mike Pence to have been “concerned” that they might be hurt and/or murdered by a mob of mislead insurgents because … they represent the opposition to … Donald Trump. That’s not how a democracy is set up to work. The last time we decided on that, it was a bunch of southern barbarians who didn’t want to move into the future and end slavery.

Newspapers in Wisconsin have called on Johnson to resign for being part of a seditious cabal within the Senate along with Josh Hawley. Johnson has said that he’s considering retirement after 2022. In his decade in office, Johnson has already been called a racist. Actually, Johnson called himself out by mistake after Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said the GOP’s opposition to President Obama and the Affordable Care Act were based on Obama being the “wrong color.” Johnson’s faux-emotional attempt to accuse Democratic officials of “using the race card” really reminded people how goddamn racist people like millionaire Johnson are. But, like fellow Daily Kos staff member Hunter wrote back in September, the entire Republican Party has been, and continues to remain, complicit in the racism and the conspiracy bullshit that people like Trump and Johnson and others have been vocalizing for years.

Here’s Johnson saying super racist, double-standard crap.

“When we took office ... I promised the American people that help was on the way,” President Joe Biden says in a new Democratic National Committee ad promoting the COVID-19 relief package that he signed into law on Thursday. “Today, I can say we've taken one more giant step forward in delivering on that promise.” In the ad, Biden lists some of the American Rescue Plan’s high points, including $1,400 direct payments to many people, funding for vaccine production and vaccinations, and slashing child poverty.

Democrats have learned so much since 2009 and 2010, when they passed an inadequate stimulus and failed to highlight the good it did, then spent months begging and bargaining for Republican votes that they weren’t going to get on the Affordable Care Act and got absolutely crushed in the messaging war over the effects of the law. Of that 2009 stimulus, White House press secretary Jen Psaki now says, “We didn’t do enough to explain to the American people what the benefits were.”

That’s not happening this time. Democrats have passed an overwhelmingly popular law over fierce Republican objections, but they’re not assuming the law will speak for itself. They’re making damn sure people know how good it is.

In addition to that ad, Biden, Dr. Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff are traveling around the country next week promoting the law—between them, visiting New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, and Georgia. The critical state of Georgia, which gave Democrats their Senate majority, gets a visit from both Biden and Harris.

Additionally, Reuters reports, “The White House plans to put surrogates and senior administration officials on local TV in markets across the country and mobilize more than 400 mayors and governors to talk about what the plan means for them and their communities.”

That tour comes as $1,400 stimulus checks start landing in bank accounts. Families may start receiving child tax credit monthly payments in July. States are racing to prevent interruptions in unemployment benefits, or to keep those interruptions as short as possible.

Republicans, meanwhile, are trotting out a familiar playbook, complaining about the cost of the law—complaints they somehow didn’t make when it was their own tax law being discussed—and accusing Democrats of including spending not related to the coronavirus pandemic. But according to Republicans, the unrelated spending that shouldn’t have been in the bill includes all the economic relief … that is needed because of the pandemic. Unemployment is sky-high because of the pandemic, so the American Rescue Plan extends and supplements unemployment benefits—something Republicans did twice before. The restaurant industry and airline workers and schools and state and local governments are struggling because of the pandemic, so the American Rescue Plan offers those governments and industries what they need to get through to the other side. Tens of thousands of airline workers have already heard that their layoffs have been canceled because this law passed.

That’s the economic relief that Republicans are hoping to get people angry about because it’s not money directly for vaccinations or testing. Nonetheless, Democrats are absolutely right not to take the law’s popularity for granted. This law will do so much good. Making sure people know about it is good policy and good politics. 

Republicans don't want all eligible voters to be allowed to vote, Chapter 200, give or take.

Today’s gross (yet instructive in its flagrancy) example of this extremely widespread phenomenon comes from Arizona, where Republicans in the state legislature are trying to pass a large slate of anti-voting laws, including ones that would drop people from the state’s permanent early voting roll if they don’t vote for consecutive elections, require people to mail in identification with their ballots, and not simply cut back on early voting but require ballots to be postmarked by the Thursday before Election Day. This in a state where voting by mail has been widespread for years, with 61% of votes in 2012 cast by mail.

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State Rep. John Kavanagh, the chair of the Government and Elections Committee that recently advanced the bill clearing the way for purges of the permanent early voting roll, explained why he thinks people should have to jump through a series of hoops to vote.

"Not everybody wants to vote, and if somebody is uninterested in voting, that probably means that they're totally uninformed on the issues," Kavanagh said. "Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well."

Don’t even get me started on someone from the party of Donald Trump and Fox News—the network that makes its viewers less informed—talking about people being “totally uninformed on the issues.” Just don’t. 

But we need to talk about “quality.” Being a citizen of the United States legally eligible to vote is not enough to be “quality.” 

You have to vote regularly or else take action to prevent yourself from being caught up in a purge. You have to photocopy and mail in identification, and you have to get that in the mail by the Thursday before Election Day or your ballot doesn’t count even if it arrives by Election Day. These things might not seem like a lot to people with time and easy access to printers and photocopiers, but make no mistake, they are intended to get in the way of voting by people these Republican state legislators don’t think are “quality,” with all the racial and class undertones and overtones you could possibly attach to that term.

It’s a message from the same party that, in Georgia, is moving to restrict early voting on the days Black churches turn out the vote and to restrict no-excuse absentee voting to the age groups in which the majority of 2020 absentee voters were white.

It’s a message from the party that is pushing literally hundreds of bills suppressing the vote in dozens of different ways in states all across the country. The backers of such bills should be pariahs, trying to exclude eligible voters from casting their ballots because they’re Black or brown or young or poor or otherwise seen by Republicans as likely to vote for Democrats, but instead these backers continue to get corporate funding from too many companies and they may be on the brink of getting a big assist from the Trump Supreme Court.

Democrats have the legislation to fix all this and end partisan gerrymandering, but of course it won’t pass the Senate as long as Republicans have 40 votes and the filibuster is in place.

In the early 1970s, a psychoanalyst named Herbert J. Freudenberger opened a free clinic to treat poor patients in New York City. It was a bit of a passion project: Freudenberger would work 10 to 12 hours during the day in his private practice, then head over to the free clinic to work until midnight or later. He seemed to realize that he was overcommitting. “You start your second job when most people go home,” Freudenberger wrote at one point. “And you put a great deal of yourself in the work.”

Eventually, he noticed that this free clinic, which had once brought him so much meaning and joy, was starting to wear on him. Many of his fellow physicians were becoming tired, snippy, and cynical. Freudenberger diagnosed himself and his colleagues with what he called “burnout syndrome,” a state of perpetual exhaustion caused primarily by a person’s job. The burned out, he wrote, not only have bad attitudes; they have headaches, stomach problems, trouble sleeping, and shortness of breath.

These days, almost everyone feels like Freudenberger in his 14th hour of work. Those who still have the energy to read the news might encounter dozens of articles about hitting the “pandemic wall” or suffering from “pandemic burnout.” Many people have now spent a year staying inside, avoiding friends and family, abstaining from travel and indoor dining, mourning the loss of hundreds of thousands of people, and maintaining the same pace of work while caring for children round-the-clock and often single-handedly. Even people who have been calmly emailing their way through the apocalypse feel that their limit has been reached and they can go no further.

Research suggests that people tend to be more stressed out when they face conflicts about their various roles—mother, worker, friend to a frazzled co-worker, daughter to an anti-vaccine parent. And this right here is the role-conflict plague. Nearly 3 million American women have dropped out of the labor force since the pandemic began, in part because they’re disproportionately shouldering the burden of all those different roles.

[Read: Work from home is here to stay]

Anyone can feel burned out, even people who might have spent the pandemic relaxing on a COVID-free island with a magically replenishing money supply. The mental pressure of living through a mass-casualty event would be enough to fry the most Zen of brains. There’s also been burnout creep recently—people might talk about “midlife-crisis burnout” or being “burned out on Pilates.” But at its core, burnout is a work problem. Though wellness influencers might suggest various life hacks to help push through pandemic torpor, actual burnout experts say that tips and tricks are not the best way to treat the condition. Instead, they say, burnout is a problem created by the workplace, and changes to the workplace are the best way to fix it.

Scientifically, to be burned out is to be exhausted, cynical and hostile toward one’s work, and down on one’s job performance. “You know, Maybe I’m not cut out for this kind of work; I shouldn’t be here,” says Christina Maslach, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley and the foremost burnout researcher in the United States. The World Health Organization similarly defines burnout as a syndrome “resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” Like Maslach, the WHO says that burnout generates exhaustion, cynicism toward one’s job, and reduced “professional efficacy.”

Six elements of work cause burnout, Maslach says. The first is pure workload—having way too much to do. One reason people feel burned out right now is that they have been working longer hours during the pandemic. In addition to an overstretching of staff and resources, burnout “could also include a cutthroat, bottom-line, results-oriented culture,” Mandy O’Neill, a management professor at George Mason University, said on Harvard Business Review’s Women at Work podcast.

The second factor is how much control or autonomy someone has over their work. As the Stanford organizational-behavior professor Jeffrey Pfeffer writes in his book Dying for a Paycheck, “If through their actions people cannot predictably and significantly affect what happens to them, they are going to stop trying. Why expend effort when the results of that effort are uncontrollable, rendering the effort fruitless?”

The third factor is a lack of recognition or reward for your work. One Philadelphia high-school teacher told the organizational psychologist Adam Grant that her burnout was like being on “a hamster wheel. You’re kind of, like, doing a lot and trying really hard, but is it really changing anything?”

The fourth factor has to do with whether your workplace is more like a community or a viper pit. You can probably guess which one leads to burnout. The fifth relates to whether policies and practices are administered fairly. Does the boss play favorites? Finally, work that doesn’t create meaning or value for workers can lead to burnout. It’s one thing to spend 60 hours a week working to free an innocent person from prison; it’s quite another to spend them trying to collect someone’s medical debt.

One line of research suggests that burnout is actually depression. In several studies on schoolteachers by Renzo Bianchi, a psychologist at the University of Neuchâtel, in Switzerland, the majority of teachers who had burnout symptoms also had symptoms of moderate or severe depression. Other studies have found that “burnout and depressive symptoms seem to cluster together and develop in parallel.” This, according to Bianchi and other researchers, suggests that burnout can be understood as a collection of “work-related depressive symptoms.”

[Read: Give up on work-life balance]

Bianchi told me via email that understanding the similarities between burnout and depression is important because if people identify as merely burned out, rather than clinically depressed, they might delay seeking help. He laid out a way to determine whether work stress will lead to burnout-like depression. “The key question is: When something bad happens to you, is there something you can do to resolve the problem, surmount the difficulty, neutralize the stressor at stake? If yes, depressive symptoms are not to be expected,” he said. “But if there is nothing you can do, no effective action you can take, no way out, you will feel sentenced to passively endure the negative effects that these problems/difficulties/stressors have on you. This is when stress starts threatening your psychological and physical health.” These days, many people feel like they must “passively endure” one of the most stressful situations they’ve ever encountered.

It’s sometimes tempting to try to fix burnout by looking at the burnee. High-achieving workers on the verge of burnout might beat themselves up for not making time to meditate or exercise or pre-slice all their vegetables over the weekend. Many online guides to curing burnout emphasize “self-care” strategies, such as creating a daily routine or seeing a therapist.

In fact, most American organizational researchers, including Maslach, would say that the problem is not with the burned out, but with what burned them. That is, their job. “I get calls from different people: ‘How can we diagnose who’s got burnout in our organization?’” Maslach told me. “And it’s kind of like, If we could just either fix those people or get rid of those people, then we’d have no problems.”

If burnout pervades an organization, “it’s telling you there’s a toxic environment here, that it’s not a really healthy place to be,” Maslach said. Right now, for example, bosses might be urging workers to “do more with less,” or causing workers to worry that they’ll be laid off, or asking them not to let their children appear in their Zoom calls. Maslach resists combining burnout and depression into one category precisely because doing so implies that the problem lies with workers—that all they need is a little Lexapro to become okay with whatever their employer throws at them. “The phrase ‘If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen’—it’s sort of saying: The kitchen is what it is, and you’re going to have to figure out how to deal with it,” she told me. “Without ever saying, really, Does the kitchen have to be that hot?”

Some employers have introduced virtual mindfulness trainings and Zoom yoga classes during the pandemic, even as their expectations for employee productivity remain basically unchanged. A McKinsey study published in September noted that many companies had “expanded services related to mental health, such as counseling and enrichment programs,” but that fewer had “taken steps to adjust the norms and expectations that are most likely responsible for employee stress and burnout.”

Although practices such as yoga and meditation can be beneficial, workers have to feel like it’s okay to take an hour out of their day to do them. “If you, as an individual employee, want to take a mental-health day, but the culture of the organization is not supportive of that, and there’s fear of retribution or backlash, then it’s hard for an individual employee to exercise that benefit,” Nicole Mason, the president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, says. Yoga hour is great, she adds, but child-care credits and flexible or reduced working hours would be even better.

These new virtual seminars are similar to the workplace wellness programs that companies promoted before the pandemic. “The assumption of this and similar programs is that if you improve people’s knowledge about nutrition and exercise,” Pfeffer, the Stanford professor, writes in his book, “these interventions will be sufficient to get behavioral change. The problem is that employers seldom consider the workplace itself and what occurs there as important causal factors affecting individual behavior.”

Instead of providing stress-reduction workshops, Pfeffer told me via email, “employers should reorganize the work environment to, as much as possible, prevent stress. We have come to see stress and burnout as some inevitable condition of work—but they are not. We can design jobs and work environments to reduce them, and then we would not need to try and remedy the problems work causes in the first place.”

After all, burnout did not start with the pandemic. Research shows that the majority of physicians have been burned out for years. In one 2014 study, more than a quarter of Americans reported working between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., a greater proportion than in any other country in the analysis. For his book, which was published in 2018, Pfeffer interviewed an executive coach who said that almost all of her clients work a 10-to-12-hour day, then work more between 8 p.m. and midnight, and also work at least one weekend day. A quarter of U.S. adults have been threatened with firing for taking time off to recover from an illness or to care for a sick relative, a 2014 survey found. Mobile medical clinics roam around Silicon Valley because, as one medical-group executive put it to a Fortune reporter in 2015, “People are so freaking busy they can’t even imagine going out to the doctor.”

The pandemic has only exacerbated burnout: Job expectations haven’t changed, even as workers try to avoid infection, look after their families, and stave off existential dread. O’Neill, the George Mason professor, has found that having “companionate love” at work—close friends you can commiserate and celebrate with—helps guard against burnout. But most American office workers have been separated from these support systems for nearly a year.

On the Women at Work podcast, O’Neill offered tips to avoid burnout, such as getting more sleep, and reducing the time you spend on tasks you don’t like and increasing the time you spend on tasks you enjoy. If you find your colleagues annoying instead of refreshing, ask for an office “a little far away,” or ask if you can work from home more (once working conditions return to normal). But again, all of these changes are up to the employer. Your employer has to reduce your hours so that you can get more sleep or give you permission to work from home. Your employer has to approve your decision to do less of the things you hate.

Managers could be part of the solution too. Companies could try hiring more of them. In his book, Pfeffer points out that positive reinforcement tends to be important to workers, but that “companies run very lean in terms of the number of managers, which makes providing any sort of positive feedback and social support difficult because people are too busy to take care of others.”

Not everyone’s job can instantly become more easygoing right now. Many doctors and nurses feel burned out because of the sheer volume of COVID-19 patients they are treating. However, much of doctors’ burnout comes from the hours they have to spend creating and updating electronic medical records—yet another thing their employers determine.

Where employers are unable or unwilling to give people a break, the government could step in. Unfortunately, it has failed to do that. As meatpacking workers began dying at the beginning of the pandemic, the Trump administration allowed plants to increase their line speeds, making it harder for workers to socially distance. Many states still don’t have a mask mandate, putting frontline workers at risk. The federal government does not require that private-sector employers provide paid sick leave or family leave. The COVID-19 stimulus package President Joe Biden signed into law yesterday includes tax credits for certain employers who choose to offer paid sick leave, but no requirement that they do so. If you get sick, need to quarantine, or need to take care of your family members, “right now you are at the whim of your employer,” says Vicki Shabo, a senior fellow on paid-leave policy at the think tank New America.

Some of these stressors will end with the pandemic, but even then, the cratered economy will create a difficult environment for workers. Even after they’re vaccinated, Americans are still likely to face burnout. On his podcast, Grant, the psychologist, summarized the keys to preventing burnout as “demand, control, and support”: Place fewer demands on people, give them more control over how to handle those demands, and provide support to handle them. All three are within your boss’s power.

By Carly Tennes  Published: March 10th, 2021 

The AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions, called on Democrats Thursday to reform the filibuster, the Senate rule standing in the way of enactment of some of their top priorities for the Biden administration.

“The very survival of our democratic republic is at stake. And standing in its way is an archaic Senate procedure that allows the minority to block the majority—the filibuster,” the AFL-CIO’s executive board said in a statement. “An artifact of Jim Crow. A creature of white supremacy. A procedure that was said to encourage robust debate but has turned into an instrument of government paralysis.”

POLITICO was the first to report the effort.

The labor federation's lobbying could move the needle significantly on efforts to weaken or eliminate the filibuster, as President Joe Biden — a self-described union man — has firmly aligned himself with the labor movement, a large fundraising source for Democrats. Biden, a former longtime senator, has so far not endorsed efforts to get rid of the filibuster, with the White House saying his "preference" is to keep it.

The AFL-CIO's statement didn't suggest any specific changes.

The group's executive council discussed the issue during meetings this week and was planning on speaking out to reaffirm its past stance against the filibuster, sources told POLITICO prior to the statement’s release.

"The abuse of the filibuster doesn’t just threaten our progressive agenda; it threatens our democracy and must be challenged," the powerful union federation said in a statement in 2010, shortly after a union-backed labor reform bill, The Employee Free Choice Act, failed to gain enough Democrats to overcome a Senate filibuster in 2009.

At the time, the union federation's executive council called on the Senate "to reform and democratize its procedures and rules."

But this statement is much more forceful, deriding the filibuster as “a tool used by those seeking to preserve the social, economic and political status quo, that the AFL-CIO has long opposed, as a matter of principle as undemocratic and rooted in racism.”

Already, Biden has demonstrated the influence that organized labor has on his administration, nominating a former union president to be his Labor secretary, firing former Trump officials from the National Labor Relations Board, and releasing a video in support of workers organizing in Alabama.

The new president also has pledged to see the pro-union PRO Act — which would broadly expand workers’ ability to organize — enacted and to more than double the federal minimum wage to $15, which organized labor has sought for years.

However, those changes require approval from Congress. Eliminating the Senate rule — which allows unlimited floor discussion on a bill unless 60 senators agree to limit debate — is likely the only way for union-backed measures like the $15 minimum wage and an expansion of collective bargaining rights to pass.

While Democrats control both chambers, the Senate is tied 50-50. Scrapping the filibuster would allow Democrats to pass legislation through the Senate with just a simple majority of 51 votes, with Vice President Kamala Harris acting as a tie-breaker.

"I don't want to hear, 'Oh my, we don't have 60 votes, woe is we,'” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told POLITICO last week. “Figure out a way to do it. Let's figure out a way to do it."

However, two Democratic senators — Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema — have said they oppose doing away with the filibuster.

Two AFL-CIO affiliates — National Nurses United and International Union of Painters and Allied Trades — had already released public statements against the filibuster ahead of the union federation’s move Thursday.

House passage of the PRO Act Tuesday provided an impetus for unions to come forward. The legislation, which advanced mostly along party lines, would make it easier for workers to form and join unions by empowering the NLRB to levy fines on employers and by extending collective bargaining rights to independent contractors, among other things. Its lack of Republican support — the vast majority of GOP lawmakers deride it as anti-business — means it is extremely unlikely to win the 60 votes in the Senate needed for passage.

A coalition of groups, including IUPAT, Communication Workers of America and progressive organizations such as the Sunrise Movement, are planning to launch a mobilization campaign in support of the PRO Act in the coming weeks targeted at swing-state senators, said a person familiar with the effort.

NNU called for abolition of the filibuster ahead of Tuesday’s vote, calling it “an undemocratic rule that has long been used to block legislation that has widespread public support and is in the broad public interest.”

“It is a sad reality that the Republican leadership used the filibuster to make the Senate almost ungovernable during the prior Democratic administration, and it threatens to act in a similar manner today,” NNU President Jean Ross said in a statement. “We cannot let the minority hold our democracy hostage.”

In addition to the PRO Act and the minimum wage, eliminating the filibuster would also allow potential passage of health care reform, voting rights reform, and workplace violence protections, among other things, NNU said.

IUPAT joined NNU's stance on Wednesday.

“The time is now for the United States Senate to stop hiding behind arcane rules that have prevented pro-worker legislation from being passed for decades,” the union said in a statement. “Our union has been spearheading the campaign to pass the PRO Act and we are willing to do whatever it takes to ensure its passage — not just for our 160,000 members, but for the 90% of US workers who are not afforded the protection of a union.”

Social media continues to shed light on issues of police brutality. In the last year, multiple videos taken by bystanders have spread on social media platforms depicting incidents in which police officials have abused their power. As a result, investigations into the actions of various police departments have been conducted. In the most recent case of a bystander capturing police brutality, a video went viral on social media for depicting an officer aiming his firearm at a child.

The video capturing an officer conducting a traffic stop has resulted in widespread criticism for the San Diego Police Department. While San Diego police insist the gun was never pointed at the child, the father of the child, the bystander who recorded the incident, and the released video footage all say and show otherwise. "From my perspective the officer was pointing a gun towards the child as he was exiting the vehicle," the witness who captured the videos, who wishes to remain anonymous told the SanDiegoVille .

In the video, at least one officer can be seen with his gun drawn toward a vehicle as a driver is ordered to exit. Shortly after the driver exits a child in the passenger side can be seen exiting with his hands raised as an officer points his weapon. The driver in custody can also be heard asking officers: ”can you take that gun off of him, he's 8 years old.”

"I witnessed the police officer on the motorcycle with his siren and lights on but the vehicle was already pulled over," the witness said. “Both the driver's side window and passenger side window were rolled down and the man and boy had their hands outside the window. As I walked by the vehicle I noticed the little boy in the passenger side with his hands outside the window. I turned around and started recording. The officer was pointing the gun at the car [and] used his other hand to direct me to keep walking. I stopped recording and called my lawyer friend who confirmed I had every right to keep recording. So I started recording again."

The incident sheds light on the continued issue of racial profiling and police mistreating Black folks despite calls for reform. "My son had to use the bathroom and my shop is right up the street from where I was stopped," the driver from the video explained, SanDiegoVille reported. He too wished to stay anonymous.

”I was just In Dad mode trying to get my kid to bathroom before he peed himself. I've been stopped by the police for speeding before but I've never been instructed out my car at gunpoint. My kid was crying in the car saying 'dad I don’t want to die. are they gonna shoot us?' At that point I just told him it would be ok and to keep calm I just wanted him to feel safe in that moment but there was no way I could guarantee his safety. I just gave it all to God and did what I was instructed to do so me and my son could walk away alive. I asked the officer multiple times to lower his weapon because my child was freaking out and I didn’t want him to think that my son was reaching for something and he get shot. It was pointed directly at him."

Additionally, body camera footage of the incident reiterates that the father requested the officer multiple times to stop pointing the gun because his child was crying. The body camera footage was released by the department in an effort to “provide clarity” for what they called “misinformation,”  NBC News reported. However, while the department believes the body footage depicts the officer not aiming his gun at the child, viewers still believe otherwise. According to the body camera footage, after the child was in custody officers then attempted to calm him down by explaining why guns were displayed.

“You know, your dad was driving really really fast. Did it feel like that to you? No? Ok,” the officer said. “Did you hear the siren behind you guys for a while? Yeah? Well, so, your dad was supposed to pull over when that siren was going and he didn’t for whatever reason.

“So we don’t know what’s going, and that’s why we had to pull the guns and stuff like that, because we don’t know who he is. We don’t know who you are. We don’t know who’s in the car. So that’s why, bud,” the officer continued. After the incident, a Psychiatric Emergency Response Team clinician consoled the visibly shaken and scared child.

Yet, despite the clear trauma the police department has inflicted on this child and his father, police officials continue to claim they were not aiming the gun at the child and conducted the stop because of the driver’s inability to immediately stop for officers. As a result, they argued the situation became a “high-risk vehicle stop.” High-risk stops are normally associated with drivers or passengers suspected of committing serious crimes. 

"We receive training at the police academy to conduct a high-risk stop with our guns drawn," Lieutenant Shawn Takeuchi, a spokesperson for the police department said. "Each officer is required to articulate facts as to why they are conducting a high-risk stop. In this incident, the facts were a vehicle traveling [sic] very excessively and not yielding to emergency lights and siren. ... I will emphasize this point. The officer’s firearm was never pointed at the child. I am unable to confirm the age of the child."

According to The San Diego Union-Tribune, small protests and calls for the officer who held his gun to step down have taken place in light of the incident. Councilwoman Monica Montgomery Steppe, chair of the City Council’s Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee also called on the Police Department to review how officers treat children. “As we work to reimagine public safety in our city, we must normalize honestly acknowledging when trauma has been inflicted on our residents, which further erodes the fabric of trust within our communities of color,” Montgomery Steppe said in a statement. “My heart is heavy today, as we have seen trauma unfold for this child during a traffic stop.”

Stewart Rhodes, the founder/president of the Oath Keepers, could be forgiven if he spends a lot of time looking over his shoulder this week. It’s become clear, after all, that federal prosecutors are circling around his organization and Rhodes’ role in members’ participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Federal agents arrested two more Oath Keepers—both of whom provided security for Roger Stone, an ex-adviser to Donald Trump, on the morning of the attack—this week for their involvement in the assault on the Capitol, bringing the total of group members arrested for participation to 11. Meanwhile, prosecutors also filed documents in one of those cases indicating that Rhodes, who was present at the Capitol but did not go inside, was in direct contact with some of the people arrested.

The document, filed Monday in the case of Oath Keeper Thomas Caldwell—who coordinated with militia members Jessica Watkins and Donovan Crowl, according to prosecutors, to create a “stack” formation that played a key role in breaking down police barricades—alleges that Rhodes exchanged texts with them before, during, and after the insurrection. Rhodes himself has not yet been charged, but the others faces charges that they conspired to prevent Congress from confirming the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Rhodes used the encrypted platform Signal to chat with Watkins, 38, an Ohio Oath Keepers militia leader, and Kelly Meggs, 52, a militia leader from Flordia who was charged in the insurrection in February, prosecutors said. The filing says he directed them to rally during the siege to the Capitol’s southeast steps, following which members forcibly entered the east side of the building.

Prosecutors said the chat called “DC OP: Jan 6 21” they had recovered on Signal “shows that individuals, including those alleged to have conspired with [others], were actively planning to use force and violence.” The document asserts that Rhodes, Watkins, Meggs, and “regional Oath Keeper leaders from multiple states across the country” discussed plans to “provide security to speakers and VIPs” at events Jan. 5 and Jan. 6 in Washington with members and affiliates.

The messages, combined with Rhodes’ previous statements, “all show that the co-conspirators joined together to stop Congress’s certification of the Electoral College vote, and they were prepared to use violence, if necessary, to effect this purpose,” prosecutors said. “They were plotting to use violence to support the unlawful obstruction of a Congressional proceeding.”

Rhodes responded by text to The Washington Post that the new allegations are “total nonsense.” He said the government was trying to “bootstrap” a few Oath Keepers’ actions into a conspiracy in order to depict his organization as the “boogeyman.”

“They are trying to manufacture a nonexistent conspiracy,” Rhodes said, “I didn’t say ‘don’t enter the Capitol,’ I never figured they would do that. ” He added of federal investigators, “They got nothing, they got a message from me saying, ‘Meet here.’”

Rhodes gave a lengthy interview to the Post last week in Texas in which he denied repeatedly that he had any advance knowledge of any Oath Keepers’ plans to invade the Capitol. He instead blamed members who “went off the reservation.”

“Just so we’re clear on this: We had no plan to enter the Capitol, zero plan to do that, zero instructions to do that, and we also had zero knowledge that anyone had done that until after they had done that—afterwards,” Rhodes said.

He added: “They went totally off mission. They didn’t coordinate with us at all while they were there. They did their own damned thing.” He also claimed that Caldwell was not actually a dues-paying member of Oath Keepers.

Rhodes messaged the group, prosecutors claimed in the filing, about advance preparations for “worst-case scenarios,” claiming, “We will have several well equipped QRFs [quick reaction forces] outside DC.” However, he insisted to the Post that Oath Keepers never did actually successfully muster such a group.

Nonetheless, news reports from local media outlets confirm that a group of men gathered at the Marine War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington on the day of the insurrection, parking numerous vehicles—mostly pickups and SUVs with out-of-state license plates—and appeared to be in communications with others elsewhere. Arlington Now published photos taken that day showing a group of men loitering near the memorial; the Capitol, which at that point was being overrun, is visible in the background. One truck with large toolbox in the back was left running.

A Feb. 11 court document in filed in Watkins’ case includes prosecutors’ description of the purpose of the quick reaction force, based on her chats with Caldwell:

Caldwell referenced “a quick reaction force [QRF] [that would be] bringing the tools if something goes to hell. That way the boys don’t have to try to schelp weps on the bus.” Watkins previously stated that the QRF provided ready access to guns during operations. As she explained to a contact when preparing to attend a November election fraud rally in Washington D.C., QRF was designed so that “If it gets bad, they QRF to us with weapons for us,” but that, otherwise, “[w]e can have mace, tasers, or night sticks. QRF staged, armed, with our weapons, outside the city” and advised “to be prepared to fight hand to hand” while “guys outside DC with guns, await[] orders to enter DC under permission from Trump, not a minute sooner.”

However, Caldwell’s attorney asserted in court this week that the Oath Keepers’ “QRF” plans actually comprised a single person—an obese man in his late 60s with a bad back — who planned to come to their aid if they were attacked by “antifa.”

Meanwhile, two more Oath Keepers were arrested this week, both men part of the security detail the organization had provided to Stone on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6. A total of six Oath Keepers were identified by The New York Times as having guarded Stone during the events. The first of these men to be arrested was Robert Minuta, who was arrested Saturday in Newburgh, New York.

Minuta, 36, lives in Texas and owns a tattoo parlor in Newburgh. The criminal complaint filed in his case says that when federal agents came to arrest him, he demanded to know why he was being targeted for the insurrection instead of Black Lives Matter and “antifa.”

One of his compatriots—Joshua James, 33, of Alabama—was arrested Tuesday. James is facing charges of obstruction of Congress and unlawful entry. His first court hearing is scheduled for Thursday.

Stone denied knowing Minuta in a statement to ABC News, saying he was not "familiar with his name prior to his being identified in earlier media stories where it was alleged that he was involved in illegal events up at the Capitol.

"If he was indeed among those who volunteered to provide security while I visited Washington, D.C., I was unaware of it," Stone said.

The evidence establishing the central role of the Oath Keepers and the militant Proud Boys organization in the insurrection continues to mount, as the Associated Press reports in detail.

These two extremist groups that traveled to Washington along with thousands of other Trump supporters weren’t whipped into an impulsive frenzy by President Donald Trump that day, officials say. They’d been laying attack plans. And their internal communications and other evidence emerging in court papers and in hearings show how authorities are trying to build a case that small cells hidden within the masses mounted an organized, military-style assault on the heart of American democracy.

“This was not simply a march. This was an incredible attack on our institutions of government,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason McCullough said during a recent hearing.

Rhodes has not been charged yet. In a Jan. 19 interview on CNN, he denied planning the attack.

"We weren't part of any decision to go in there and were part of no planning and no one was instructed to do so," he said then. "I fully expect the media to continue to try to spin it as though I was some kind of grand master planner. If I'd have planned it, it would have been a whole lot different."

The battle to protect voting rights needs a field general. Vice President Kamala Harris needs a cause to define her tenure. The second problem suggests the answer to the first: President Joe Biden could designate Harris as the administration’s point person in combatting the onslaught against voter access now advancing in Republican-controlled states.

Both Biden and Harris are speaking more explicitly now than they have in the past about that threat; each delivered forceful statements last weekend on the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when Alabama state troopers brutally attacked protesters marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma. Even though they welcomed the pointed comments, civil-rights advocates I spoke with almost uniformly agree that most Americans remain unaware of the magnitude of the assault on voting rights, an outgrowth of former President Donald Trump’s discredited claims of massive fraud in the 2020 election.

That’s spurring preliminary talk in civil-rights circles about organizing a modern Selma—a contemporary protest comparable to the iconic 1965 march, which provided crucial momentum for the passage of the original Voting Rights Act that year, one prominent national civil-rights leader told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “We’re witnessing the greatest rollback of voting rights since the birth of Jim Crow,” the leader said. “Plans are already under discussion for a potential march in D.C. or Atlanta to highlight the outrage about these state-based attacks on American democracy.”

Civil-rights leaders and democracy-reform advocates are also hoping that the Biden administration will do more to highlight the suppression measures moving forward in states such as Iowa, Arizona, Florida, Texas, New Hampshire, Montana, and, above all, Georgia. There, the GOP-dominated legislature is advancing bills to repeal automatic voter registration and on-demand absentee balloting and to restrict early voting on Sundays that Black churches use for “Souls to the Polls” events. “This is a crisis for democracy … and one thing the White House still has the ability to do is train public attention, even in this fractured media environment,” Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice and a chief speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, told me.

[Read: Democrats’ only chance to stop the GOP assault on voting rights]

Advocates want more attention on the state laws to discourage Republican legislators and governors from passing them. But they also recognize that, as in the Selma era, greater awareness of state restrictions could build support for national action—and particularly for H.R. 1, the sweeping democracy-reform bill the House passed earlier this month. More public awareness, the theory goes, will raise Senate Democrats’ comfort level about establishing a nationwide standard for voting rights through their own version of H.R. 1, even if that requires curtailing the filibuster to overcome lockstep Republican opposition. In an appearance on MSNBC this week, Marc Elias, the Democratic Party’s lead election lawyer, literally pleaded for more attention: “I am begging America and the media to pay attention to this. Right now, we are facing an avalanche of voter suppression” that the country hasn’t seen in decades.

Waldman said that one key reason the attack on voting rights hasn’t captured public attention is that it’s so far confined inside statehouses. “What’s going on in Georgia is naked voter suppression, but by legislation; it’s not billy clubs and dogs,” he said. “During the civil-rights movement, when there was physical violence at people marching for the right to vote, that galvanized the conscience of the country. It’s harder to do that when it’s legislation.”

That same argument applies to a more recent example. The state-level bills are all rooted in Trump’s voter-fraud claims that ignited the January 6 attack on the Capitol. But state legislators in suits changing laws don’t inspire nearly as visceral a public reaction as rioters in combat gear—even if the former’s impact on American democracy is more lasting than the latter’s.

Biden carries the White House’s biggest megaphone, and he has long experience with these issues—he often touts the work he did with Senate Republicans to reauthorize the original VRA. But some advocates fear that his focus on promoting bipartisanship and staying above the partisan fray is already discouraging the White House from spotlighting the state-level threat.

It’s unclear whether Merrick Garland, the newly confirmed attorney general, could lead the resistance to the GOP offensive either. Garland’s overriding message is that he will depoliticize the Justice Department after former Attorney General William Barr functioned largely as Trump’s personal lawyer and legal consigliere. Two other people who could lead the fight are the civil-rights veterans Biden has nominated to top Justice Department positions: Vanita Gupta, the former president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, as associate attorney general and Kristen Clarke, the former president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, as head of the department’s civil-rights division. Both have been in the trenches in recent clashes over voting rights, but neither would be visible enough to truly command public attention (and both are busy fighting Republican efforts to block their confirmations).

Given these competing considerations, Kamala Harris stands out to many advocates I’ve spoken with as the best choice to elevate this struggle. For starters, she appears to have room on her plate. Recent presidents have generally allowed their vice president to take the lead on a specific policy portfolio: Al Gore with reinventing government and climate change; Dick Cheney with national security; Biden with implementing the 2009 stimulus plan and foreign policy, particularly regarding Iraq; Mike Pence, at the end of his tenure, with the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force. But Biden has spoken of Harris as a more general adviser. And while her aides (perhaps with an eye on 2024) are stressing her role in foreign policy, she hasn’t yet become identified with any particular cause or responsibility.

[Read: American democracy is only 55 years old—and hanging by a thread]

Voting rights could be a strong contender to fill that gap. She’s talked powerfully about how she personally benefited from the civil-rights movement. And in the Bloody Sunday anniversary video she recently released, she effectively linked the current wave of state voter-suppression proposals to the confrontations during the ’60s. “Today,” she said, “poll taxes have been traded for long voting lines; property-ownership restrictions for purges of voter rolls; literacy tests for voter ID, voter-registration restrictions, mail-in-voting limitations, cuts to early voting, precinct closures, gerrymandering—it’s all voter suppression by any other name.”

The administration and civil-rights groups don’t have much time to generate more national attention. Republican Governor Kim Reynolds of Iowa has already signed legislation limiting early voting and reducing the hours that polls can stay open on Election Day. Bills in other states are swiftly moving forward. Elias says Democratic lawyers’ success in beating Trump’s legal efforts to overturn the election may be making Democrats complacent about their ability to block these new restrictions if they are approved. “We will do the best we can in court,” he told me, “but I almost worry that people look at the success that some of us had last cycle” and expect the same success now. “I am here to tell you that we can’t assume the courts are going to solve every political ill.”

In Georgia, where some of the most sweeping state-level restrictions are advancing, the crucial decisions on what reaches the desk of GOP Governor Brian Kemp will come this month, says Nse Ufot, the CEO of the New Georgia Project, a voter-mobilization and -registration group founded by Stacey Abrams.

So far, Abrams and her allies have mostly played an inside game in trying to stop the restrictions. They are pressuring Georgia’s powerful corporate community—including Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Home Depot, and Disney (which films much of its Marvel franchise in the state)—to speak out more explicitly against the bills; so far, almost all of the state’s leading companies have stuck to anodyne and vague statements generically defending the right to vote.

“They have some of the most powerful lobbyists in the Georgia legislature. I have to believe they could have killed this [effort] in its infancy if they were serious about protecting the freedom to vote in our state,” Ufot told me. Many of these same companies, she noted, promoted voting during the 2020 campaign; gave their employees the day off on Juneteenth, “because they discovered that’s a thing”; and tweeted out “their favorite Martin Luther King quotes throughout Black History Month ... They have a very clear analysis about the importance of Black history, but when Black futures are under attack, they are silent. And their silence is deafening.”

Like Ufot, Elias said that business leaders should be much more visible than they have been so far. “I don’t think we can say that this is only the job of the president and vice president,” he said. “I think it is the job of the corporate CEOs; I think it is the job of athletes (and I’m proud to see the athletic community step forward); I think it’s the job of influential people in society.” He said corporate America is failing to match the standard it set when many companies publicly opposed the so-called bathroom bills in North Carolina and beyond. (In 2016, the NCAA and NBA, for instance, withdrew high-profile events scheduled to occur in the basketball-mad state to protest the legislation.) If companies took similarly decisive action on voting access now, Elias said, “it would be incredibly influential in many of the state legislatures.”

In the weeks and months to come, the fight over voting rights will unfold on at least four fronts. There’s the wave of laws from state-level Republicans to limit access to the ballot—more than 253 proposals in 43 states, at the Brennan Center’s last count. Then there are the courts: Eight years after the conservative Supreme Court majority eviscerated the original VRA’s keystone “preclearance” standard, Republicans are now pushing the justices to decimate the law’s central remaining provision, which allows after-the-fact legal challenges to voting laws with discriminatory impact. The Justice Department represents a third front: Republicans and conservative groups are mounting a sustained effort to block the confirmation of Gupta and Clarke.

[David H. Gans: The Supreme Court might kill voting rights—quietly]

And looming over all of these skirmishes is the question of whether Senate Democrats can pass their equivalent of H.R. 1, which would require states to offer early voting, on-demand absentee balloting, and automatic, same-day, and online voter registration. (It would also combat gerrymandering by requiring states to use independent commissions when drawing congressional districts; the commissions would operate under strict criteria to promote partisan and racial equity in redistricting.) The fate of that bill, and a new VRA that the House is planning to pass later this year, will turn on whether Senate Democrats are willing to restrict the filibusters that Republicans are highly likely to deploy against both measures.

Although voting-rights advocates often invoke Selma and the ’60s to describe today’s raging battles, some historians say the proper comparison is actually the end of Reconstruction, when southern white people revoked—typically using horrific violence—the voting rights that formerly enslaved people had obtained in the first years following emancipation. Waldman also sees similarities beyond America’s borders: What’s unfolding in states such as Georgia, where Republicans are responding to electoral defeat by openly trying to restrict the vote, is akin to what authoritarian political parties have done in countries such as Turkey, Poland, and Hungary. “The power structure changes the rules to close off democracy,” Waldman said. This GOP offensive may not remain confined to red states: Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida has already introduced legislation that would cement several major restrictions into national law—in effect imposing red-state rules on blue states—and Trump, in his recent CPAC speech, suggested a national ban on early and mail-in voting.

As I’ve written before, it’s no exaggeration to say that these overlapping struggles represent a genuine crossroads for American democracy. And a fight this momentous demands a high-profile leader. Harris, since the election, has lacked a signature public focus. She couldn’t find one more urgent, consequential, or deeply connected to her own story than the generational struggle over voting rights that is now raging through the states.

Covid-19 vaccines truly are coming for everyone soon.

President Joe Biden on Thursday announced that all adults in the US will be eligible for a Covid-19 vaccine by May 1. “All adult Americans will be eligible to get a vaccine no later than May 1,” Biden said. “That’s much earlier than expected.”

Biden clarified that adults won’t all be able to get a vaccine right away, but they will at least be able to get in line. Even then, he said the country will have enough vaccine supply for all adults by the end of May — a claim he’s made before.

It’s a goal that, as Biden said, would have seemed unfeasible just a couple of months ago. But there’s good reason to believe it’s absolutely possible now.

As of Thursday, the US has given at least one dose of the vaccine to 64 million people, with 33 million people fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Currently, the US is administering roughly 2.2 million doses of the vaccine a day.

Even if that rate doesn’t improve at all, the US could fully vaccinate around 130 million to 140 million Americans by May 1. That’s more than half of the nearly 260 million adults in the US today. So even before Biden’s promised date, the majority of adults in America could be vaccinated.

There’s also very good reason to think the rate will go up. By the end of this month, the pharmaceutical companies have indicated they’ll produce and ship more than 3 million vaccines a day. If states manage to turn those doses into shots in arms as they get them, the US could vaccinate around 150 million to 160 million Americans before May — roughly two-thirds of US adults.

And the rate of vaccinations could easily rise above that as supply continues to increase in the coming month and a half.

In other words, Biden’s promise could kick in at a time that only one-third of US adults will still need to get vaccinated, while the country is likely delivering shots at a rate of 3 million doses a day, if not more. At that point, the math simply fits: The remaining 100 million adults or so in America really could be covered over the span of a month. The only obstacle, if it all goes well, will be making an appointment.

That’s not to say the US is destined to do all of this without any trouble. Maybe the drug companies won’t be able to deliver on the supply they’ve promised. Maybe cities, states, and the feds won’t clear all the logistical hurdles to get shots in arms. Maybe something else will break in a fairly complicated supply chain.

And as supply increases, it’s likely vaccine hesitancy will become a bigger issue as more adults simply refuse a vaccine. Overcoming that — to continue increasing the nationwide rate of vaccinations — will require creative education and awareness campaigns, focused on local pockets of resistance. That will pose its own logistical challenges.

But at least this all seems possible. That wasn’t the case when Biden took office, as the country’s vaccine rollout struggled and fewer than 1 million Americans got a shot a day. Back then, it was unclear if we could vaccinate all US adults by the end of the year. It now looks like America could get the job done in just a few months.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechRadar: When the GeForce RTX 3060 was launched on February 25, Nvidia announced that the mining efficiency of the graphics card was deliberately being reduced by around 50% in a bid to get more of the GPUs directly to gamers. However, this limitation appears to have been quickly bypassed by Chinese cryptocurrency miners using customized mods. There was already concern brewing about how well the limiter would stand against savvy miners, but Nvidia has been vocally confident in the hash rate limit. A statement was given to PC Gamer regarding how difficult it would be to get around the protections placed on the GPUs, claiming "End users cannot remove the hash limiter from the driver. There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter." The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 can deliver around 40-45 MH/s for standard performance but this dropped down to 20-25 MH/s if the GPU detected mining-related activity, providing the limiter is in place. A picture spotted by I_Leak_VN reveals a Chinese mod developed to help miners unlock the full hash potential of the GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card, with the image showing the Geforce RTX 3060 delivering 45 MH/s in Ethereum. The hash-rate limiter mod has also been separately confirmed to work by a Vietnamese Facebook group, apparently even capable of outputting 50 MH/s. So far, according to Wccftech, it appears that the cryptomining algorithm in question is for Octopus, which is different than cryptocurrency than Ethereum, which the hashrate limiter was designed to thwart. That means its possible that an updated driver could introduce a limiter for that cryptocurrency as well, but as we explored earlier this month, Nvidia's efforts to thwart cryptomining is likely fraught with legal issues that might prevent such an update.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By March 2020, researchers knew that uncontrolled spread would be disastrous.

A year ago, on March 17, I wrote a piece about how scientists were predicting that we might have to social distance for a year or more. Soon I was hearing from friends and family via chats and text. “Brian, I literally don’t know if I can,” one friend wrote me. Their responses could be summarized as, “SAY IT ISN’T SO.”

Being physically apart from one another for so long has been among the bitterest pills to swallow in the Covid-19 pandemic. But it’s also one of the hardships scientists warned early on we’d have to endure.

By mid-March 2020, “I think we had a pretty good sense of what we were in for,” Stephen Kissler, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard who co-authored an influential paper on a possible timeline of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, told me recently.

Once uncontrolled spread started outside of China, scientists knew what we were in for

By then, scientists who’d long anticipated a pandemic had seen the out-of-control spread of the coronavirus in China and Italy. They had estimated the virus’s transmissibility (i.e., how contagious it was), they knew it spread through the respiratory system (which upped its pandemic potential), they saw how the virus could overrun hospitals, and they knew this was a novel virus and most people would not have natural immunity to it. The whole world was susceptible to this disease.

Plus, they were beginning to see that the virus could spread before people felt symptoms, which makes it harder to contain. All of that added up to a long-haul scenario.

In Kissler’s eyes, last March, there were two extreme potential scenarios given the information epidemiologists had at the time.

One was the catastrophe: The pandemic could have unfolded, without any precautions in place, ripping through the population, killing many more people in the US, over a “roughly nine-month period,” Kissler says. “The early models that showed that we would have catastrophic things happen if we just lived our lives as normal.”

The other was longer, but still painful: “We could extend it out to a year and a half, two years, and try to save some of our infrastructure and reduce overall death. ... There was this overwhelming realization that no matter what we did, the only way that we can keep our hospitals safe and try to prevent too many people from dying was to really be persistent about social distancing for a very long time.”

What scientists didn’t know at the time was how exactly the US and other countries would respond to the clear and present danger.

With social distancing, mask-wearing, business closures, and other precautions, we definitely avoided that first, worst case. It’s also hard to argue the best-case scenario was reached, either. (America failed its Covid-19 challenge on many fronts.) We’ve seen wave after wave of infections in the United States, and at least 530,000 deaths.

Every time precautions were relaxed, cases grew

Many of these waves were predictable. Early in March 2020, I was told that if America lifts social distancing and doesn’t have a strong containment strategy in mind to replace it, the virus was just going to cause new outbreaks. That’s what happened last summer after many states reopened around Memorial Day.

“This is totally predictable, and there have been many warnings,” Sarah Cobey, an infectious disease modeler at the University of Chicago, told me at the time. The big fall wave, too, was predictable: It’s common for respiratory viruses to spread more easily as temperatures drop and people spend more time indoors. Researchers also could anticipate the waves because it’s what they’ve observed before in flu pandemics, which spread in similar ways to Covid-19. “When [pandemic] flu comes in, it spreads in a couple of waves — usually at least three — and it just takes about a year and a half for that to sort of run itself out,” Kissler says.

Opening indoor restaurants and bars and rescinding mask mandates (or failing to ever implement them) before vaccines were available, before better rapid testing was available, was always going to invite more infections and lead to more hospitalizations and deaths.

If anything, it was always going to be more dangerous to relax restrictions when the virus was more widespread. That’s because keeping people safe from the virus also keeps them vulnerable to the virus. Opening up early means exposing these vulnerable people to an environment where the virus is more widespread.

Even a year ago, none of this seemed like it would be easy. The experts knew that.

Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me last March that the social distancing measures might need to be in place for months. “I don’t think people are prepared for that and I am not certain we can bear it,” she said in an email at the time. “I have no idea what political leaders will decide to do. To me, even if this is needed, it seems unsustainable.” She added that she might just be feeling pessimistic, but “it’s really hard for me to imagine this country staying home for months.”

Again, by then, we had some idea of what we were in for. Were there still big question marks? Yes. We didn’t know if there would be good treatments for Covid-19; we didn’t know how long the vaccines would take to test. We were hopeful that with a clearer understanding of where transmission was taking place that we could replace broad business closures with targeted interventions. While it was impossible to precisely predict how the pandemic would unfold, and where, it was easy to see, broadly, which policies would make things worse, and which would make things better.

And now, it’s been a year. There are vaccines. There are treatments. A new spring is about to bloom.

Covid-19 isn’t likely to just go away. It may linger, for a long time, as a common illness. But now, we can feel some cautious optimism that the crisis is easing. It’s unlikely this epidemic will continue for another whole year in the United States, at least.

“Not another full year, hopefully,” Kissler says. “Maybe closer to five, six months.”

Their efforts are so blatantly partisan that they risk a serious backlash from Democratic voters.