Archive: Year: 2022

The House Speaker imagines a GOP that no longer is.Five days after the Republican National Committee voted to censure Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kitzinger because, as part of the Select Committee investigating what happened on January 6th 2021, they are “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate public discourse,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally weighed in. Maybe she should have just kept her mouth shut.At her weekly press conference, after remarks touting the latest jobs report, she turned to the RNC resolution. “The Republicans seem to be having a limbo contest with themselves to see how low they can go,” she started. “They seem to have reached rock bottom with their statement.” She added, addressing...

“Rage-giving” may feel good, but it won’t change who has power.Photo by Jp Valery on UnsplashOne of my young political heroes is Amanda Litman. We’ve never met, but I’ve followed her career since 2015, when she was the email director for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. That’s not why I admire her. It’s what she did next, after Clinton lost, that so impresses me. She, along with Ross Morales Rocketto, a digital campaign manager, started a brand-new organization called Run for Something. It was one of many new groups that burst onto the scene after Donald Trump’s upset victory shocked many incumbent Democratic politicians and liberal advocacy groups. Instead of bemoaning their loss, or, worse, making noises about finding ways to work harmoniously...

New polling shows even some Democrats now applaud the Jan 6th riotJANUARY 6 US CAPITOL INSURRECTION DAY OF REMEMBRANCE / DC VIGIL FOR DEMOCRACY, 6 January 2022 by Elvert Barnes PhotographyHere’s a surprising fact. The percentage of Americans who disapprove of Trump supporters taking over the Capitol building last January 6th has dropped from 81% a year ago to 73% now, according to polls done by The Economist and YouGov.Put another way: nearly one in ten Americans have changed their mind about how they feel about the riot/insurrection/tourist visit that temporarily halted the counting of the Electoral Vote and the certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election.Not unexpectedly, the biggest shift in attitudes toward January 6th was...

The GOP’s leading obstructionist and spin-master slipped on Wednesday.Every now and then, a politician speaks the truth by accident. The columnist Michael Kinsley wrote years ago, “It used to be, there was truth and there was falsehood. Now there is spin and there are gaffes. Spin is often thought to be synonymous with falsehood or lying, but more accurately it is indifference to the truth. A politician engaged in spin is saying what he or she wishes were true, and sometimes, by coincidence, it is. Meanwhile, a gaffe, it has been said, is when a politician tells the truth — or more precisely, when he or she accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head. A...

Billions in Biden’s first rescue package have yet to reach people.President Biden signing the American Rescue Plan into law, March 11, 2021. “Help is here,” he said. Well, kinda.For all the attention devoted to President Biden’s ambitious domestic agenda — the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) that passed back in March 2021, the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure act passed in November, and the currently stalled Build Back Better Act, which is hovering at about $1.8 trillion for social programs and needs — here’s a crazy fact: many states and localities are only now figuring out how they are going to spend the “rescue” money passed almost a year ago. It’s no wonder Biden’s approval numbers have dipped; they aren’t seeing how his signature initiatives...

A DC court ruling has given the FTC the power to potentially take the company apartSource Mark Zuckerberg on stage at Facebook’s F8 Conference, 2014 (photo by Maurizio Pesce)This was a very bad week for Meta/Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, though you probably wouldn’t know it from the way the company has been covered in the news. (And yes, it’s been another week of distracting news on all kinds of other fronts.) The headlines on DC federal district judge James Boasberg’s decision to allow the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against Facebook to go forward were all accurate, to be sure. In the judge’s view, the commission has met the evidentiary bar in its claim that the company has a monopoly...

What a close look at the Senate’s leading obstructionist shows about the voting rights debateSenator Mitch McConnell speaking at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference (photo by Gage Skidmore)According to Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the leader of the Senate Republican minority, the two bills that Democrats are now pushing to address voting rights are a “bald-faced attempt by liberals to rig our electoral systems in their own favor.” That’s what he wrote in an oped in USA Today two days ago.Let’s see what’s actually in the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the legislation in question.First, the Freedom to Vote Act, which was introduced by Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) last September with Senator Joe Manchin...

Times are less bleak when we realize we’re not aloneAlex Kack, aka “Green Shirt Guy,” cracking up at two anti-immigrant wackos at a Tuscon city council meeting, 2019When I was about eight or nine years old, I discovered MAD magazine. I was already a big reader of comic books, like many prepubescent boys, and a fan of science fiction. But MAD was different. If it had a motto, it was “no sacred cows.” Everything was subject to parody, especially uptight straight people and their cultural assumptions. Cold Warriors, Hollywood, the rich, sports, politicians, fashion, commercialism, advertising — they all were lacerated by MAD’s wacky cartoonists. Even the nonconformist hippies got teased for conforming to their own new rules of comportment. Were some of MAD’s...

A year later, many are silent exactly when they should be speaking outFirst they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out —  Because I was not a socialist.Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out —  Because I was not a trade unionist.Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —  Because I was not a Jew.Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.— Martin NiemollerCrickets!Yesterday, many Americans stopped what they were doing to commemorate the deadly anniversary of the January 6th attack on Congress. President Biden gave a powerful speech, calling out former President Trump directly for creating and spreading “a web of lies about the 2020 election.”...

And we are not done crushing itScreencap from Justice Department footage of the January 6th Capitol attackOne year after thousands of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, temporarily preventing the certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election, the most troubling aspect of that day is the way the MAGA faction has managed to suppress nearly all dissent among Republicans about what happened that day and what it means.From Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who will become House Speaker if the Republicans retake the majority next year, to the Wall Street Journal’s editors, the backsliding has been abysmal. In the days after the attack, McCarthy insisted Trump bore responsibility for the mob’s actions. The Journal denounced him for “lying” to his...