Last Call For The Road To Gilead, Con't

Americans are overwhelmingly in support of Roe v Wade as settled legal precedent and access to abortion as a Constitutional right, but that of course doesn't matter in the slightest, only the opinions of nine SCOTUS justices do.

Americans say by a roughly 2-to-1 margin that the Supreme Court should uphold its landmark abortion decision in Roe v. Wade, and by a similar margin the public opposes a Texas law banning most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The lopsided support for maintaining abortion rights protections comes as the court considers cases challenging its long-term precedents, including Dec. 1 arguments over a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

The Post-ABC poll finds 27 percent of Americans say the court should overturn Roe, while 60 percent say it should be upheld, attitudes that are consistent in polls dating to 2005. More broadly, three-quarters of Americans say abortion access should be left to women and their doctors, while 20 percent say they should be regulated by law.

While Americans have long supported limiting access to abortion after the first trimester of pregnancy, the poll suggests Americans widely oppose recent efforts in conservative-leaning states to enforce more severe restrictions.

Asked about a Texas law that authorizes private citizens anywhere in the country to sue anyone who performs or aids someone in obtaining an abortion in Texas after about six weeks of pregnancy, the Post-ABC poll finds 65 percent say the court should reject the law, while 29 percent say it should be upheld. The Supreme Court is considering the role federal courts can play in evaluating the Texas law, which was intended to avoid federal court review. A separate question finds 36 percent support state laws that make it more difficult for abortion clinics to operate, while 58 percent oppose such restrictions, including 45 percent who oppose them “strongly.”

 

Americans are overwhelmingly for a lot of things that Republicans in Congress and conservatives in the courts are against, but it sure doesn't seem to matter when it comes to voting the GOP out of office. Republicans keep blocking gun safety legislation, voting rights legislation, civil rights legislation,  women's rights legislation, and LGBTQ+ equality legislation, all popular with a broad spectrum of American voters including Republicans, but they keep electing the people against it.

Then they complain about why the Democrats can't pass anything if they control Congress, and go back to watching Ben Shapiro videos on Facebook, and decide that voting is for suckers anyway because both sides screw the little guy, so why bother?

And down the road to Gilead we go.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

Republicans are threatening retaliation for the indictment of Trump regime chancre Steve Bannon, as if somehow the first this House Republicans would do if they took over in 2023 wasn't retaliation.

 

Republicans are rallying around former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon after his indictment on charges of contempt of Congress on Friday, warning that Democrats’ efforts to force Bannon to comply with what they say is an unfair subpoena paves the way for them to do the same if they take back the House in 2022.

Bannon, like former president Donald Trump, has refused to comply with an order from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection to turn over records and testify about his actions leading up to the attack, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol trying to stop the certification of President Biden’s electoral college win.

Bannon is expected to turn himself in to law enforcement Monday ahead of a court appearance that afternoon. Democrats and a handful of anti-Trump Republicans argue that the indictment was necessary to enforce subpoenas issued by the Jan. 6 committee to Trump associates who are resisting cooperation and to witnesses summoned by other congressional panels.

Many GOP leaders, however, are seizing on Bannon’s indictment to contend that Democrats are “weaponizing” the Justice Department, warning Democrats that they will go after Biden’s aides for unspecified reasons if they take back the House majority in next year’s midterm elections, as most political analysts expect.

“For years, Democrats baselessly accused President Trump of ‘weaponizing’ the DOJ. In reality, it is the Left that has been weaponizing the DOJ the ENTIRE TIME — from the false Russia Hoax to the Soviet-style prosecution of political opponents,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the third-ranking House Republican, tweeted Saturday.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) suggested that Republicans would seek payback if the GOP regained control of the House, signaling that in challenging the doctrine of executive privilege, Democrats were making it easier for Republicans to force Biden’s top advisers to testify before a future GOP Congress.

“Joe Biden has evicerated Executive Privilege,” Jordan wrote on Twitter. “There are a lot of Republicans eager to hear testimony from Ron Klain and Jake Sullivan when we take back the House.” Sullivan is Biden’s national security adviser and Klain is the White House Chief of Staff.

 

First of all, Bannon's indictment for refusing to testify on a seditious conspiracy and the threatened indictment of Biden advisers is not exactly apples and apples, folks. Second, when Republicans help Lois Lerner and Erick Holder in contempt, both of them were cooperating, and Republicans still sent them up for prosecution, which not even the Trump DOJ would do.

Second, Boebert and her goon friends are promising politically-motivated indictments of Democrats for crimes to be created later. Does anyone care that Republicans are openly threatening to abuse power to harm opponents? Isn't that the real story here?

Third, why is this being reported as "but both sides disagree" by the broken media here? Boy, they really want the GOP back in power to sell clicks, papers, and access, don't they?

It's all ridiculous.

Retribution Execution, Con't

Donald Trump is about to claim another head of a Republican who didn't bow to him, because the only thing that matters to Republicans is loyalty to Dear Leader.

Rep. Fred Upton (Mich.), one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Trump in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, revealed on Sunday that he has not yet decided if he will run for reelection in 2022.

Asked by co-host Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union” if he is committed to running for another term next year, Upton said he is unsure because redistricting is still underway in Michigan.

“Well, we don't know what our districts look like yet,” Upton said.

“We're in the midst of looking at maps. Michigan loses a seat. We will evaluate everything probably before the end of the year in terms of making our own decision. We have never made a decision more than a year out,” he added.

If Upton ultimately decides not to run for reelection next year, he will be the third GOP lawmaker who voted for Trump’s second impeachment to announce their retirement this year.

Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio) declared in September that he would not seek a third term in Congress, and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) revealed last month that he will not run for reelection when his term expires.

Gonzalez in a statement said it is “clear that the best path for our family is not to seek re-election next fall,” but added that the “current state of our politics, especially many of the toxic dynamics inside our own party, is a significant factor in my decision.”

Kinzinger, in a video announcing his retirement, recalled a moment from his first campaign when he told himself, “If I ever thought it was time to move on from Congress, I would,” adding, “That time is now.”

The Illinois Republican also cited deep political divides in Washington.

“In this day, to prevail or survive, you must belong to a tribe. Our political parties only survive by appealing to the most motivated and the most extreme elements within it. And the price tag to power has skyrocketed, and fear and distrust has served as an effective strategy to meet that cost,” Kinzinger said.

“Dehumanizing each other has become the norm. We’ve taken it from social media to the streets. We’ve allowed leaders to reach power selling the false premise that strength comes from degrading others and dehumanizing those that look, act or think differently than we do. As a country, we’ve fallen for those lies, and now we face a poisoned country filled with outrage blinding our ability to reach real strength,” he added.

 

There's a reason why I say there's no good Republicans left, because not only are the ones who oppose Trump like Upton being eliminated, but the ones on the way out like Kinzinger still blame both sides, as if Democrats are somehow as awful as the GOP right now. 

"Just enough bravery to stick your head up to get it chopped off" isn't a virtue, folks. 

And speaking of getting their heads chopped off, GOP Rep. Liz Cheney needs to check her neck.

The Wyoming Republican Party will no longer recognize Liz Cheney as a member of the GOP in its second formal rebuke for her criticism of former President Donald Trump.

The 31-29 vote Saturday in Buffalo, Wyoming, by the state party central committee followed votes by local GOP officials in about one-third of Wyoming’s 23 counties to no longer recognize Cheney as a Republican.

In February, the Wyoming GOP central committee voted overwhelmingly to censure Cheney, Wyoming’s lone U.S. representative, for voting to impeach Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Cheney has described her vote to impeach Trump as an act of conscience in defense of the Constitution. Trump “incited the mob” and “lit the flame” of that day’s events, Cheney said after the attack.

It’s “laughable” for anybody to suggest Cheney isn’t a “conservative Republican,” Cheney spokesman Jeremy Adler said by text message Monday.

“She is bound by her oath to the Constitution. Sadly a portion of the Wyoming GOP leadership has abandoned that fundamental principle and instead allowed themselves to be held hostage to the lies of a dangerous and irrational man,” Adler added.

Cheney is now facing at least four Republican opponents in the 2022 primary including Cheyenne attorney Harriet Hageman, whom Trump has endorsed. Hageman in a statement called the latest state GOP central committee vote “fitting,” the Casper Star-Tribune reported.

“Liz Cheney stopped recognizing what Wyomingites care about a long time ago. When she launched her war against President Trump, she completely broke with where we are as a state,” Hageman said.

 

The vote was symbolic, and I don't think Kevin McCarthy would reject her from the GOP Caucus, but I don't see how Cheney survives the primary. She could always pull a Lisa Murkowski and run as an independent, but I don't know enough about Wyoming politics to know if that would open the door for a Democrat.

It's going to be messy either way.

Last Call For The Vax Of Life, Con't

After temporarily blocking the Biden administration's vaccine mandate for private employers last month, the conservative 5th Circuit has now officially ruled the entire vaccine mandate unconstitutional.

A federal appeals court in New Orleans has halted the Biden administration’s vaccine or testing requirement for private businesses, delivering another political setback to one of the White House’s signature public health policies.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, helmed by one judge who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan and two others who were appointed by President Donald Trump, issued the ruling Friday, after temporarily halting the mandate last weekend in response to lawsuits filed by Republican-aligned businesses and legal groups.

Calling the requirement a “mandate,” the court said the rule, instituted through the Labor Department, “grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority,” according to the opinion, written by Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt and joined by Judges Edith H. Jones and Stuart Kyle Duncan.

“Rather than a delicately handled scalpel, the Mandate is a one-size fits-all sledgehammer that makes hardly any attempt to account for differences in workplaces (and workers) that have more than a little bearing on workers’ varying degrees of susceptibility to the supposedly ‘grave danger’ the Mandate purports to address,” they wrote.

They said they believed that the ruling imposed a financial burden on businesses and potentially violated the commerce clause of the Constitution.

“The Mandate imposes a financial burden upon them by deputizing their participation in OSHA’s regulatory scheme, exposes them to severe financial risk if they refuse or fail to comply, and threatens to decimate their workforces (and business prospects) by forcing unwilling employees to take their shots, take their tests, or hit the road,” they wrote.

The New Orleans-based 5th Circuit is considered one of the country’s most conservative appeals courts.

The vaccine mandate was released by the Biden administration last week after weeks of deliberation. It says private employers with more than 100 employees must require staff to get vaccinated — or face weekly testing and mandatory masking. Workers who don’t work on-site or with others are able to be exempted.

Even though the testing option makes it softer than many of the requirements instituted by private companies and state and municipal governments, it has faced strong blowback from a chorus of conservative groups, businesses and mostly Republican officials.

The court halted the policy, scheduled to take effect Jan. 4, and ordered the Occupational Safety and Health Administration not to take further steps to implement or enforce the mandate. It is not clear whether the 5th Circuit will determine the fate of the mandate. The Biden administration had asked the 5th Circuit to hold off on ruling until a judicial lottery can take place next week to consolidate several challenges to the mandate before a single appeals court.

Federal officials spent weeks hammering out the policy, aware of the high number of legal challenges it would face but believing that the order was well within the Labor Department’s powers to keep workplaces free of “grave dangers” in times of emergency.

If the 5th Circuit is right, there's basically no government agency with the authority to regulate anything.

Which, as I said last week, is what they're going for.

Knowing that this would be the perfect case for the Federalist Society ghouls on SCOTUS to dismantle everything since the New Deal, the Justice Department says it will defend the mandate anyway.

We'll see how far it goes.  But I think by July 4th, we'll have a drastically different new legal landscape in America.

Kamala Chameleon

It's hard enough trying to cat herd all the Dems in one direction these days, but the one thing that all Democrats seem to agree on is that Kamala Harris is somehow a "major problem".

Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff -- deciding there simply isn't time to deal with them right now, especially at a moment when President Joe Biden faces quickly multiplying legislative and political concerns. 

The exasperation runs both ways. Interviews with nearly three dozen former and current Harris aides, administration officials, Democratic operatives, donors and outside advisers -- who spoke extensively to CNN -- reveal a complex reality inside the White House. Many in the vice president's circle fume that she's not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined. The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she's able to do politically. And those around her remain wary of even hinting at future political ambitions, with Biden's team highly attuned to signs of disloyalty, particularly from the vice president. 

She's a heartbeat away from the presidency now. She could be just a year away from launching a presidential campaign of her own, given doubts throughout the political world that Biden will actually go through with a reelection bid in 2024, something he's pledged to do publicly and privately. Or she'll be a critical validator in three years for a President trying to get the country to reelect him to serve until he's 86. 

Few of the insiders who spoke with CNN think she's being well-prepared for whichever role it will be. Harris is struggling with a rocky relationship with some parts of the White House, while long-time supporters feel abandoned and see no coherent public sense of what she's done or been trying to do as vice president. Being the first woman, and first woman of color, in national elected office is historic but has also come with outsized scrutiny and no forgiveness for even small errors, as she'll often point out. 

Defenders and people who care for Harris are getting frantic. When they're annoyed, some pass around a recent Onion story mocking her lack of more substantive work, one with the headline, "White House Urges Kamala Harris To Sit At Computer All Day In Case Emails Come Through." When they're depressed, they bat down the Aaron Sorkin-style rumor that Biden might try to replace her by nominating her to a Supreme Court vacancy. That chatter has already reached top levels of the Biden orbit, according to one person who's heard it. 

She's perceived to be in such a weak position that top Democrats in and outside of Washington have begun to speculate privately, asking each other why the White House has allowed her to become so hobbled in the public consciousness, at least as they see it. 

"She's very honored and very proud to be vice president of the United States. Her job as the No. 2 is to be helpful and supportive to the President and to take on work that he asks her to take on," said Eleni Kounalakis, the lieutenant governor of California and a longtime friend. Kounalakis spoke with the vice president last Monday morning before Harris departed for a diplomatic mission to France. 

"It is natural that those of us who know her know how much more helpful she can be than she is currently being asked to be," Kounalakis said. "That's where the frustration is coming from." 

An incumbent vice president should be a shoo-in the next time the party's presidential nomination is open. But guessing who might launch a theoretical primary challenge to Harris has become an ongoing insider parlor game. Other politicians with their own presidential ambitions have started privately acknowledging that they are trying to figure out how to quietly lay the groundwork to run if and when Harris falters, as they think she might.

 

I'd say all this is CNN slander against the first Black woman veep, but as J. Jonah Jameson reminds us in the first Spider-Man film on the subject of slander, "It is not. I resent that. Slander is spoken. In print, it's libel."

 

The knives are definitely out for Harris, and in an America that treated Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as badly as they did, here in 2021 Harris is getting the worst of both. Everyone it seems wants to dunk on her, and while Joe Biden could actually put a stop to it among Democrats, apparently he doesn't want to right now.

I shouldn't be surprised by this. Nobody should. This is what happens to Black women with even a modicum of power, they are dismantled and destroyed, their careers ended. We've seen it time and time again, because it's so easy to do in order to clear the decks for others to come in, corporate, entertainment, political. Every time.

And I will do my best to every time call it out.

StupidiNews!

• The Trump organization is expected to sell Trump's DC hotel in the Old Post Office building to a Miami-based investment firm for $375 million, the hotel will be renamed the DC Waldorf Astoria.
  
• Japan's now former princess Mako is heading for the US after marrying her husband being forced to leave the Japanese royal family upon marriage.
• Florida's legislature will be in special session this week to pass bills to level heavy penalties against any business or local government that requires the COVID-19 vaccine of employees.
• UK PM Boris Johnson is calling the COP26 climate summit deal the "death knell" of coal power in Europe at least, but India, China and other developing economies will continue coal use.
• Texas power regulators have ruled that natural gas customers in the state will be paying for February's record cold snap to the tune of $3.4 billion over 30 years.
  

Last Call For Insurrection Investigation, Con't

Jonathan Karl, like Bob Woodward and Robert Costa before him, has a book about the Trump regime to sell, and that means doling out "book-exclusive" tidbits of criminality and sedition to a public that should have been informed months ago, in this case a Trump regime memo instructing VP Mike Pence exactly how he was expected to steal the 2020 election in January.

In a memo not made public until now, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows emailed to Vice President Mike Pence's top aide, on New Year's Eve, a detailed plan for undoing President Joe Biden's election victory, ABC News' Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl reports.

The memo, written by former President Donald Trump's campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis, is reported for the first time in Karl's upcoming book, "Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show" -- demonstrating how Pence was under even more pressure than previously known to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Ellis, in the memo, outlined a multi-step strategy: On Jan. 6, the day Congress was to certify the 2020 election results, Pence was to send back the electoral votes from six battleground states that Trump falsely claimed he had won.

The memo said that Pence would give the states a deadline of "7pm eastern standard time on January 15th" to send back a new set of votes, according to Karl.

Then, Ellis wrote, if any state legislature missed that deadline, "no electoral votes can be opened and counted from that state."

Such a scenario would leave neither Biden nor Trump with a majority of votes, Ellis wrote, which would mean "Congress shall vote by state delegation" -- which, Ellis said, would in turn lead to Trump being declared the winner due to Republicans controlling the majority of state delegations with 26.

The day after Meadows sent Ellis' memo to Pence's aide, on Jan. 1, Trump aide John McEntee sent another memo to Pence's chief of staff, Marc Short, titled, "Jefferson used his position as VP to win."

Although McEntee's memo was historically incorrect, Karl says, his message was clear: Jefferson took advantage of his position, and Pence must do the same.

The plan was for Pence to steal the election by scrapping the electoral count in enough states to send it to the House delegations where Trump would have won. The planned insurrection was political cover. We were supposed to look at the footage of terrorists storming the US Capitol as heroes, as an expression of the people's will that Donald Trump should have been granted another term.

It failed only because Pence chickened out at the last minute.

We only have a democracy because Mike Pence got cold feet.

That's how close we came, but we're going to give this country back to the insurrectionists anyway it seems, because Junior doesn't want to feel bad about slavery.

Jesus wept.

The Job-Jobbing Job

In a 2021 America heading into 2022, there's a record number of job openings. But employers still want a 2018 workforce: overqualified, underpaid, and overworked, doing the work of three people in the office, making a 2-hour daily commute without overtime, 6 days and 60 hours a week.

If you've been unemployed for more than a few months, you don't even get a first look.

Laviana Hampton spent years mixing drinks as a bartender at a popular nightclub in downtown San Antonio, but the pandemic has made her rethink her job. Hampton has seen covid infections hobble and kill some of her friends, making her far less willing to take any risks. A friend’s 70-year-old mother, who was like a second mom to Hampton, died last month of covid after spending three months in the hospital. Another bartender that Hampton knows contracted covid after returning to work and ended up in the hospital on a ventilator. Few in Texas wear masks in bars and restaurants.

For months Hampton, 40, has been scouring job sites for work-from-home positions in customer service and other fields so she won’t have to return to bartending in a packed club.

“I have every right to work in a safe working environment,” she said. “I want to work from home, I want to keep safe.”

There’s a growing preference for remote work among job seekers. Some 55 percent of people on ZipRecruiter reported looking for a job that would allow them to work from home. The vast majority said either workplace safety concerns or child or family care needs were driving their preference for remote work.

Hampton has not been able to land anything and is getting desperate since her unemployment ended over the summer. With no recent experience in many of the jobs she is applying for, companies are reluctant to give her a chance.

“I send out so many applications a day and nobody gets back to me. In the past eight months, I’ve only had three telephone interviews,” she said. “It’s affected my mental health greatly. I cry all the time. I’ve never been on unemployment before.”

Hampton is among 2.3 million Americans — about a third of the unemployed ― who have been out of work more than six months. The Labor Department refers to them as “long-term unemployed.” The nation has only had this many long-term unemployed twice before — during the Great Recession and during the early 1980s downturn.

Black and less-educated Americans are disproportionately likely to be long-term unemployed, but during the pandemic crisis, White women with college degrees have also had unusually high numbers of long-term unemployment due to women who stopped working to care for children. Older Americans and those with an arrest or felony record face additional struggles to get hired, research and interviews show.

Complicating the job search for the long-term unemployed is the explosion of companies using robots to sort through job applicants, at least in the first round. This highly automated process excludes anyone who is not a near perfect fit on paper for a job. Nearly half of employers say they quickly reject candidates who haven’t worked in more than six months, according to a recent Harvard Business School study.

Jerry Vimont, 62, thinks his age is working against him. He wants a retail job in San Antonio and has over two decades of experience working for many of America’s biggest retailers as a cashier and manager, but he has not been able to get a job. He’s been applying actively on websites like Indeed and the Texas Workforce Commission since June, after he was vaccinated.

A big problem for Vimont is he stopped working before the pandemic, back in 2019, due to a wrist injury. He is cleared to work again, but the vast majority of retail jobs require an online application and he is finding it hard to get past the algorithms that scan applicants, since he now has a large gap on his resume. He has only had three interviews since June and no job offers. In one interview, a store manager bluntly stated that he only wanted to hire someone who would be around a long time, implying Vimont might not because of his age.

“With their algorithms, the hiring system is simply weeding out a lot of applications so companies don’t even see them,” Vimont said. “These are applications for jobs that I’m very well qualified for.”

He was recently rejected from an $11 an hour assistant retail manager job that he said would have been ideal.

“People are applying to job postings thinking a human being is going to look at their submission, but they rarely get through if they have a gap in their job history or don’t have the exact right key words,” said Joseph Fuller, a management professor at Harvard Business School and lead author of the recent study that found more than 90 percent of major employers now use automated screening of job applications.

 

Jobs are going unfilled because huge corporations can still afford to ignore applicants who actually want more than wage slavery. They then complain about supply chain issues, and blame workers for not taking crap jobs with crap wages.

But enough Americans are fighting back that it's noticeable now.

Sunday Long Read: Nowhere You Gotta Go

Our Sunday Long Read this week is from Elizabeth Zuko at Bloomberg's CityLab, answer your burning questions about the absolute lack of public bathrooms in a post-lockdown America.

 

Surviving a pandemic has a way of forcing people to focus on the basics: health, food, shelter, the need for human connection — and going to the bathroom.

This became evident during the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020, when panic buyers emptied store shelves in the first weeks of U.S. stay-home orders. As Covid closures continued, the pandemic revealed a different toilet-related problem that predated the novel coronavirus: a dire lack of public restrooms. Though facilities in bars and retail establishments are often thought of as “public,” widespread shutdowns served as a stark reminder that they’re really not — and that few genuinely public bathrooms remain in American cities.

That reality was underscored as the pandemic dragged on. Infection fears led cities to padlock the few public restrooms that were available. Stories emerged about Amazon and Uber drivers resorting to peeing in bottles, while unhoused individuals relied on adult diapers or five-gallon buckets filled with kitty litter. Public urination complaints spiked in cities like New York and Washington, D.C., especially when crowds flooded the streets in the summer of 2020 to protest the murder of George Floyd.

“The state of public restrooms in the U.S. is pretty deplorable, with certain exceptions,” says ​​Steven Soifer, president and co-founder of the American Restroom Association. “Public restrooms are a half-assed job. This is a public health concern, especially with Covid. It’s been a mess.”

The lack of public restrooms in the U.S. hasn’t gone unnoticed. In 2011, a United Nations-appointed special rapporteur who was sent to the U.S. to assess the “human right of clean drinking water and sanitation” was shocked by the lack of public toilets in one of the richest economies in the world. A full accounting of truly public facilities is elusive, says Soifer, but government-funded options are exceedingly rare in the U.S., compared to Europe and Asia; privately owned restrooms in cafes and fast-food outlets are the most common alternatives. According to a “Public Toilet Index” released in August 2021 by the U.K. bathroom supply company QS Supplies and the online toilet-finding tool PeePlace, the U.S. has only eight toilets per 100,000 people overall — tied with Botswana. (Iceland leads their ranking, with 56 per 100,000 residents.)

The presence or absence of restrooms in public spaces has long been an indication of a particular group’s place in society, says Laura Norén, a postdoctoral associate at New York University and co-editor of Toilet: The Public Restroom and the Politics of Sharing. From women to people of color to those with disabilities, vulnerable communities have struggled to have this most fundamental of needs accommodated. Most recently, transgender individuals have found themselves targeted in bathroom-backlash debates.

“It's basically the same script that just plays over and over and over again — and these social tensions often meet in the bathroom,” Norén says. “Who gets access to the bathroom really could be summarized as who should have access to public space and public discourse. Somehow, that crystallizes around the bathroom, because people’s fears are the highest in the bathroom.”

So how did Americans end up with so few places to go? Understanding this requires a look back at the societal and sanitary conditions behind public restrooms in American cities — and the moral panics that propelled both their creation and downfall.

 

The answer is like every other infrastructure need in America since Reagan, nobody wants to pay for them, nobody wants to pay for people to maintain them, and cities and counties want to save money by closing them because too many local governments are busy giving billions away in tax incentives to corporations rather than, you know, cleaning up park bathrooms.

Still, the history of the public bathroom in America is pretty interesting.  Give it a read.

The Ups And Downs Of Senior Life

Nobody in the media seems to care that Social Security benefits went up nearly 6% for COLA increases to help with costs in 2021. That's $90 a month on average, but I guarantee you everyone's going to go berserk over Medicare Part B going up one third of that.

The federal government announced a large hike in Medicare premiums Friday night, blaming the pandemic but also what it called uncertainty over how much it may have to be forced to pay for a pricey and controversial new Alzheimer's drug. 

The 14.5% increase in Part B premiums will take monthly payments for those in the lowest income bracket from $148.50 a month this year to $170.10 in 2022. Medicare Part B covers physician services, outpatient hospital services, certain home health services, medical equipment, and certain other medical and health services not covered by Medicare Part A, including medications given in doctors' offices. 

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services played down the spike, pointing out that most beneficiaries also collect Social Security benefits and will see a cost-of-living adjustment of 5.9% in their 2022 monthly payments, the agency said in a statement. That's the largest bump in 30 years. 

"This significant COLA increase will more than cover the increase in the Medicare Part B monthly premium," CMS said. "Most people with Medicare will see a significant net increase in Social Security benefits. For example, a retired worker who currently receives $1,565 per month from Social Security can expect to receive a net increase of $70.40 more per month after the Medicare Part B premium is deducted." 

The increase, however, is far more than the Medicare trustees estimated in their annual report, which was released in late August. They predicted the monthly premium for 2022 would be $158.50. 

 

But thanks to Republicans in Congress continuing to block the Biden Build Back Better program, which would lower prescription drug costs, and Big Pharma rattling off massive price increases in drugs in the last few years under Trump, the bad guy here is...the Democrats!

 

The actual spike -- the largest since 2016 -- could hurt some seniors financially. 

It "will consume the entire annual cost of living adjustment (COLA) of Social Security recipients with the very lowest benefits, of about $365 per month," said Mary Johnson, a Social Security and Medicare policy analyst for The Senior Citizens League, an advocacy group. "Social Security recipients with higher benefits should be able to cover the $21.60 per month increase, but they may not wind up with as much left over as they were counting on." 

Medicare premiums have typically increased at a far faster rate than Social Security's annual adjustments, the league said. And much of the 2022 increase in Social Security benefits will be eaten up by inflation, which is also rising at a rapid clip. 

CMS said part of the increase for 2022 was because of uncertainty over how much the agency will end up paying to treat beneficiaries to be treated with Aduhelm, an Alzheimer's drug approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in June over the objections of its advisers. Some experts estimate it will cost $56,000 a year. Medicare is deciding whether to pay for it now on a case-by-case basis. 

 

Call me nuts, but maybe the problem with Medicare costs is stuff like "Alzheimer's drugs costing $56,000 per year" rather than "inflation of a global economy coming out of mothballs to 2019 demand levels".

The Big Lie, Con't

The more I think about Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis considering going through with a grand jury to investigate Trump's election interference in 2020, the more worried I get for the safety of the people involved.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is likely to impanel a special grand jury to support her probe of former President Donald Trump, a move that could aid prosecutors in what’s expected to be a complicated and drawn-out investigative process.

A person with direct knowledge of the discussions confirmed the development to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, saying the move could be imminent.

Some legal observers viewed the news, first reported by the New York Times, as a sign that the probe is entering a new phase.

“My interpretation is that she’s gotten as far as she can interviewing witnesses and dealing with people who are cooperating by producing documents voluntarily,” former Gwinnett County DA Danny Porter said of Willis. “She needs the muscle. She needs the subpoena power.”

Special grand juries are rarely used but could be a valuable tool for Willis as she takes the unprecedented step of investigating the conduct of a former president while he was in office.

Her probe, launched in February, is centered on the Jan. 2 phone call Trump placed to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he urged the Republican to “find” the votes to reverse Joe Biden’s win in Georgia last November. The veteran prosecutor previously told Gov. Brian Kemp, Raffensperger and other state officials that her office would be probing potential violations of Georgia law prohibiting criminal solicitation to commit election fraud, intentional interference with the performance of election duties, conspiracy and racketeering, among others.

The investigation could also include Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who promoted lies about election fraud in a state legislative hearing; and U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who was accused by Raffensperger of urging him to toss mail-in ballots in certain counties. Both men have denied wrongdoing.

The main benefits a special grand jury would provide are continuity and focus, former prosecutors said.

A regular Fulton County grand jury is seated for two months. Jurors typically hear hundreds of felony cases before their service ends.

But a special grand jury, which typically has 16 to 23 members, is focused on a single case and remains active for as long as prosecutors need. That could be beneficial given how complicated the issue of investigating a former president is.

Prosecutors will be able to save time not having to send out new jury summons or present the case from scratch every two months to get new jurors up to speed, according to veteran prosecutors.

“In complex matters it helps to not have to reacclimate a new set of grand jurors,” said Gwendolyn Keyes Fleming, previously a DeKalb County DA. She co-authored a Brookings Institution report earlier this fall that analyzed all available public evidence and concluded that Trump’s conduct leaves him at “substantial risk of possible state charges predicated on multiple crimes.”

Like a regular grand jury, special grand juries can subpoena witnesses, compel the production of documents, inspect and enter into certain offices for the purposes of the investigation. But they can’t issue indictments. In order to secure one, prosecutors would need to present evidence to a regularly impaneled grand jury.

The DA’s office, a superior court chief judge or local elected official can request a special grand jury. The request must be approved by a majority of the county’s superior court judges.

Melissa Redmon, a former Fulton County deputy DA, noted the backlog some 11,000 criminal cases that Fulton’s two other grand juries are currently working their way through.

“Especially when you think about the backlog created by COVID… the main advantage of having a special grand jury is that they could be focused on just this investigation,” said Redmon, an assistant clinical professor at the University of Georgia’s law school.

Should the case move ahead, many legal observers are expecting Trump to fight every request made by prosecutors, which could drag out the investigative process for months.

What's unsaid here is the notion that Willis will be allowed to continue this probe into Trump without interference from Gov. Deal and the state GOP, that mob-style corruption, silencing, or even violence isn't somehow expected here.

Trump is going to be calling up Republicans in the state and demanding that his case go away. We know this because he's done it before. There are certainly state Republicans who are going to throw around the idea of removing Willis from office for "misconduct".

There are also those who will want to remove Willis from this Earth. January 6th proved Trump can ignite those riots when he wants.

What I'm saying is, as a Black man, I do not trust the assumption that Willis is in any way safe here.

Neither should anyone.

Last Call For Our Mainstream GOP White Supremacist Domestic Terrorist Problem

2021 will be remembered as the year Republican political terrorist violence became expected behavior, if not completely normalized.

At a conservative rally in western Idaho last month, a young man stepped up to a microphone to ask when he could start killing Democrats.

“When do we get to use the guns?” he said as the audience applauded. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” The local state representative, a Republican, later called it a “fair” question.

In Ohio, the leading candidate in the Republican primary for Senate blasted out a video urging Republicans to resist the “tyranny” of a federal government that pushed them to wear masks and take F.D.A.-authorized vaccines.

“When the Gestapo show up at your front door,” the candidate, Josh Mandel, a grandson of Holocaust survivors, said in the video in September, “you know what to do.”

And in Congress, violent threats against lawmakers are on track to double this year. Republicans who break party ranks and defy former President Donald J. Trump have come to expect insults, invective and death threats — often stoked by their own colleagues and conservative activists, who have denounced them as traitors.

From congressional offices to community meeting rooms, threats of violence are becoming commonplace among a significant segment of the Republican Party. Ten months after rioters attacked the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, and after four years of a president who often spoke in violent terms about his adversaries, right-wing Republicans are talking more openly and frequently about the use of force as justifiable in opposition to those who dislodged him from power.

In Washington, where decorum and civility are still given lip service, violent or threatening language still remains uncommon, if not unheard-of, among lawmakers who spend a great deal of time in the same building. But among the most fervent conservatives, who play an outsize role in primary contests and provide the party with its activist energy, the belief that the country is at a crossroads that could require armed confrontation is no longer limited to the fringe.

Political violence has been part of the American story since the founding of the country, often entwined with racial politics and erupting in periods of great change. And elements of the left have contributed to the confrontational tenor of the country’s current politics, though Democratic leaders routinely condemn violence and violent imagery. But historians and those who study democracy say what has changed has been the embrace of violent speech by a sizable portion of one party, including some of its loudest voices inside government and most influential voices outside.

In effect, they warn, the Republican Party is mainstreaming menace as a political tool.

Omar Wasow, a political scientist at Pomona College who studies protests and race, drew a contrast between the current climate and earlier periods of turbulence and strife, like the 1960s or the run-up to the Civil War.

“What’s different about almost all those other events is that now, there’s a partisan divide around the legitimacy of our political system,” he said. “The elite endorsement of political violence from factions of the Republican Party is distinct for me from what we saw in the 1960s. Then, you didn’t have — from a president on down — politicians calling citizens to engage in violent resistance.”

In the end though, it really comes down to millions, maybe tens of millions of Republican voters asking that simple question.

When do we get to use the guns? 

The answer, I fear, is soon.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

 Reminder: I absolutely did call this one on Trump's fight with the National Archives.

 

Me, I fully expect the National Archives to be blocked by an appeals court injunction this week and for the case to go before SCOTUS.  There's no way the National Archives gets the documents to the January 6th Committee without a court fight.

 

 Well lo and behold.

A federal appeals court on Thursday temporarily blocked the release of White House records sought by a U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, granting — for now — a request from former President Donald Trump.

The administrative injunction issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit effectively bars until the end of this month the release of records that were to be turned over Friday. The appeals court set oral arguments in the case for Nov. 30.

The stay gives the court time to consider arguments in a momentous clash between the former president, whose supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, and President Joe Biden and Congress, who have pushed for a thorough investigation of the riot. It delays the House committee from reviewing records that lawmakers say could shed light on the events leading up to the insurrection and Trump's efforts to delegitimize an election he lost.

The National Archives, which holds the documents, says they include call logs, handwritten notes, and a draft executive order on “election integrity.”

Biden waived executive privilege on the documents. Trump then went to court arguing that as a former president, he still had the right to exert privilege over the records and releasing them would damage the presidency in the future.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Tuesday rejected those arguments, noting in part, “Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.” She again denied an emergency motion by Trump on Wednesday.

 

This wasn't a hard call by any means. Judge Chutkan all but begged for the law to be enjoined "by court order" in her earlier denials.

 

We won't see a ruling on this into well into 2022, and Trump will appeal to SCOTUS when he loses.

Roberts and the conservatives will find a way to pay Trump back next summer with a narrow ruling that states executive privilege of a former president applies to everything by that person without an express act by Congress, which of course will never happen.

Like the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act, Roberts will scold the legislative branch for refusing to update the law, and that will be the end of that.

That remains the most likely outcome here. It's Chief Justice Roberts's specialty.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

As Attorney General Merrick Garland's Justice Department continues to either thoughtfully craft a bulletproof contempt of Congress charge for Steve Bannon (if you believe his supporters) or dragging their collective feet until the January 6th committee can be dismantled (if you believe his detractors), former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is betting on the latter, and that if Bannon can get away with refusing to cooperate, so can he.

 

The House select committee investigating January 6 is demanding former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows appear for a deposition and turn over documents Friday or risk a criminal contempt referral, according to a letter Thursday from panel Chairman Bennie Thompson. 

Meadows has been facing new pressure to cooperate with the committee after he was notified earlier Thursday that President Joe Biden will not assert executive privilege or immunity over documents and testimony requested by the panel, according to a copy obtained by CNN. The move to set a final compliance date for Meadows comes after his attorney issued a statement Thursday saying he would not cooperate with the committee until courts ruled on former President Donald Trump's claim of executive privilege. 

The committee on Thursday took its first step toward possibly referring Meadows to the Department of Justice for contempt of Congress if he fails to comply with Friday's deadline. 

"The Select Committee will view Mr. Meadows's failure to appear at the deposition, and to produce responsive documents or a privilege log indicating the specific basis for withholding any documents you believe are protected by privilege, as willful non-compliance," Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, wrote. "Such willful noncompliance with the subpoena would force the Select Committee to consider invoking the contempt of Congress procedures in 2 U.S.C. §§ 192, 194—which could result in a referral from the House of Representatives to the Department of Justice for criminal charges—as well as the possibility of having a civil action to enforce the subpoena brought against Mr. Meadows in his personal capacity."

 

We'll see what happens here, but the one think I do know is that Bannon and Meadows wouldn't be fighting these subpoenas this hard if they didn't believe they would be in legal peril if what they knew about Trump's soft coup was revealed to January 6th investigators and the country as a whole.

My fear remains a protracted court fight is exactly what Bannon and now Meadows are counting on.

Meanwhile, the latest Trump tell-all from a Beltway reporter, this time Jonathan Karl of ABC News, is on its way next week, and the major Trump info kept from the public for the book (to the detriment of the country, selling copy is more important than saving the republic, they all do it, it seems) includes the fact that Trump openly told Karl in a March 18th interview that January 6th insurrectionist terrorists chanting to hang VP Mike Pence was simply "common sense".

Jonathan Karl: "Were you worried about him during that siege? Were you worried about his safety?"

Trump: "No, I thought he was well-protected, and I had heard that he was in good shape. No. Because I had heard he was in very good shape. But, but, no, I think — "

Karl: "Because you heard those chants — that was terrible. I mean — "

Trump: "He could have — well, the people were very angry."

Karl: "They were saying 'hang Mike Pence.'"

Trump: "Because it's common sense, Jon. It's common sense that you're supposed to protect. How can you — if you know a vote is fraudulent, right? — how can you pass on a fraudulent vote to Congress? How can you do that? And I'm telling you: 50/50, it's right down the middle for the top constitutional scholars when I speak to them. Anybody I spoke to — almost all of them at least pretty much agree, and some very much agree with me — because he's passing on a vote that he knows is fraudulent. How can you pass a vote that you know is fraudulent? Now, when I spoke to him, I really talked about all of the fraudulent things that happened during the election. I didn't talk about the main point, which is the legislatures did not approve — five states. The legislatures did not approve all of those changes that made the difference between a very easy win for me in the states, or a loss that was very close, because the losses were all very close."

 

Karl is a prime example of another Beltway access journalist who failed their duty to the country in order to sell a book and make millions, but the real danger is how Trump casually threw Pence, someone Trump considered a traitor to him, to his cultists. He wouldn't have batted an eye if Pence had been hurt or worse.

 

And we're rocketing towards a 2024 election theft that will be the last free election in our lifetimes.

StupidiNews!

• US Olympic gold medal gymnast Suni Lee is reporting she was attacked by pepper spray in a racist incident in Los Angeles last month.
• Researchers at Northwestern University say trials in mice of a new stem cell treatment to reverse paralysis are promising enough to seek FDA approval for human trials next year. 
• President Biden and Chinese President Xi are expected to address other Pacific Rim nations Friday in a virtual summit of leaders over trade, military, and climate change issues.
• The Pentagon is warning that Russia may be seeking to send troops into Ukraine as US officials briefed EU allies this week as Moscow continues border troop and tank buildup.
• Researchers say much more risk assessment and vulnerability studies are needed before the world considers Arctic outposts made possible by melting ice caps and warming climate.
  

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

The question for the Republicans trying to take the Glenn Youngkin path to Trumpism without the Trump is how long they can avoid the "without the Trump" part.

Donald Trump is expected to maintain a prolific schedule of campaign rallies to boost Republicans in next year's midterms. But on the heels of Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin's victory in Virginia -- accomplished without a single Trump cameo -- some of the former President's aides and allies warn there could be parts of the country where he may now be encouraged to keep his distance. 

The "stay away strategy," as one aide described it, would involve Trump steering clear of states or districts where a confluence of factors -- such as his popularity and the demographic makeup -- could mean his presence might sabotage Republican chances. 

"There are absolutely places he shouldn't go. I wouldn't put him in Maryland, New Hampshire, or Arizona," said a person close to Trump. Despite the former President previously campaigning in those states for his own campaigns or other candidates, this person suggested Trump harm GOP Senate or gubernatorial hopefuls if he were to make appearances next year. 

The approach assumes an unusual level of deference from the prideful ex-President, who has long insisted his support is the most essential ingredient in any Republican candidate's quest for victory. Trump has relished his position atop the GOP since leaving office and has spent much of the past week huddling with aides and outside advisers at Mar-a-Lago to discuss his involvement in 2022 and where he should be most active on the ground. Trump has already endorsed Republican primary challengers and incumbents at national and statewide levels in Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Wyoming, Ohio, Alaska, Texas and several other states. 

It also poses a challenge to candidates who determine it would be best for them if Trump focused his attention elsewhere, but do not wish to run afoul of the former President by asking. 

"They will have to make a strong case and it can't be, 'I just don't want him around,' because at the end of the day many of these guys are running on his policies," said the person close to Trump, adding that it's "a delicate balance that certain candidates are going to have to dance, but the whole point of elections is to be strategic and to win, not to appease a former President."

 

Hard truth time again, folks.

 

They're not going to be able to do both. 

 

Trump is cunning, but he cannot keep his raging malignant narcissism in check. The more stories like this that the press runs, that Trump is a liability to 2022 Republicans in general elections, the more rage Trump will burn with. You won't be able to keep him out of Arizona, for example, or Wisconsin, or Georgia. He's gonna show up, he's gonna do rallies, and he's going to remind everyone why he's a loser.

He'll burn down the party rather than stay home, and we all know it. It's the one thing Dems truly have going for them in the elections ahead.

The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

As I told you previously, as I warned you about for months, the most likely outcome of the infrastructure bill was House progressives folding and passing the Senate bill into law, and then President Manchin and VP Sinema killing the Build Back Better plan slowly. We're well into phase two of that plan.

Red-hot inflation data validates the instinct of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to punt President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda until next year — potentially killing a quick deal on the $1.75 trillion package, people familiar with the matter tell Axios.

Why it matters: The data released Wednesday set the president and White House staff scrambling. Slowing down work on the massive tax-and-spending plan is against the fervent desire of the administration and House progressives. 

With a limited number of legislative days left in the year, Manchin is content to focus on the issues that need to be addressed, Axios is told. They include funding the government, raising the debt ceiling and passing the National Defense Authorization Act. Manchin, like a group of House moderates, also wants to see a Congressional Budget Office analysis of the true cost of each of Biden’s proposed programs, as well as the tax proposals to fund them.

The big picture: Progressives have long worried that after centrists got their $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, they'd find excuses not to move on the budget reconciliation package. It includes billions to expand the social safety net and fight climate change, among other Democratic priorities. 

Business groups also are stepping up their attacks on the package, warning congressional Democrats about its overall costs, potential effects on inflation and $800 billion in corporate tax increases.

Manchin still hasn't agreed to the specifics of Biden's plan to spend $555 billion to combat climate change. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer convened a call today with senators who participated in COP26, where they discussed how climate provisions in both bills were well received in Glasgow. During the call, the senators also strategized about how to get Manchin to agree to Biden's climate provisions — a recognition they have more work to do.

Driving the news: Prices rose 0.9% from last month for an annual inflation rate of 6.2%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The president labeled it "worrisome, even though wages are going up." He told a crowd in Baltimore: "[O]n the good side, we're seeing the highest growth rate in decades, the fastest decrease in unemployment ... since 1950."

White House chief of staff Ron Klain tried to couch Biden's spending plan as a long-term strategy to lower inflation. "What it does is it makes sure that our federal spending meets the things that families really need: bringing down the cost of child care, bringing down the cost of drugs, bringing down the cost of elder care, bringing down the cost of preschool, cutting taxes for middle-class families," he told CNN's Jake Tapper:

Between the lines: Manchin has been warning about inflation since the summer. He's argued Congress should take a “strategic pause” on the bigger package until Congress had more time to assess the effects of the nearly $5 trillion COVID stimulus spending in 2020 and earlier this year. His statements on Wednesday amounted to an I-told-you-so. 

“By all accounts, the threat posed by record inflation to the American people is not ‘transitory’ and is instead getting worse,” Manchin said. “From the grocery store to the gas pump, Americans know the inflation tax is real and D.C. can no longer ignore the economic pain Americans feel every day.”

 

Here's the hard truth.

 

Manchin has been calling the shots on this since July, folks. 

He's got the bill he wants, and now he can keep the BBB plan in the basement and torture it for months. He had the most hard and soft leverage in the fight, and the most willingness to use that leverage to accomplish his own goals.

It's time to ask Manchin what his future plans are, because he definitely has them. He's the Democratic version of John McCain, and McCain had his national ambitions too.

Just saying.

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Five Thirty Eight's Hakeem Jefferson and Michael Tesler dive into why racist White Republicans will vote for Black Republican candidates over any Democrat whatsoever, and yeah, tribal loyalty in the Trump cult is definitely a thing if you haven't been keeping up with, I dunno, the last 5 years of politics.

Can white voters who back a Black candidate still hold racist beliefs and views?

That question has come to the fore in the wake of Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial victory in the blueish state of Virginia. Conservatives were quick to counter claims that Youngkin’s win represented the effectiveness of stoking racial fears with results from Virginia’s down-ballot election for lieutenant governor — a contest where the Republican candidate, Winsome Sears, made history by becoming the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginia. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, for example, emphatically mocked the notion that “voters called white supremacists elected a Black Lt. Gov.” Conservative commentators on Fox News and Twitter, including Sears herself, also used the historic victory as an ostensible shield against accusations of Republican racism.

But supporting a Black candidate hardly precludes voters from harboring racist beliefs and motivations. Republicans are increasingly more likely than Democrats to hold prejudiced views of minorities, so Black Republicans like Sears often draw especially strong support from white Americans with otherwise anti-Black views simply because they draw most of their support from Republican voters.

A clear example of this was in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, when Ben Carson made a bid to become the GOP’s first African American presidential nominee. Support for Carson was positively correlated with the belief that Black Americans have too much influence on U.S. politics, according to data from Washington University in St. Louis’s American Panel Survey (TAPS) in late 2015.

Whites who thought African Americans had “far too little” influence disliked Carson and preferred Hillary Clinton by 60 percentage points in a hypothetical general election matchup. Meanwhile, Carson was very popular among whites who were most concerned about African Americans having “too much” influence in politics. So much so that whites who thought African Americans have “far too much” influence preferred Carson to Clinton by 45 points.

Again, much of that relationship is down to partisanship — Republicans are more likely to hold prejudiced views and also more likely to support a Republican candidate. But that’s the point: For many white GOP voters, anti-Black views don’t seem to get in the way of supporting a Black Republican.

You can see a similar pattern in the January 2016 American National Election Studies Pilot Study. Carson received more favorable evaluations among the sizable minority (40 percent) of overtly prejudiced whites who agreed with the racist stereotype that “most African Americans are more violent than most whites.” This group rated Carson significantly more favorably on a 0-100 scale than the white moderate Republican presidential candidate, Jeb Bush (52 to 39, respectively). Then-candidate Donald Trump was the only politician in the survey who was rated higher than Carson among overtly prejudiced whites.1

The contrast between how prejudiced whites rated Carson and Obama is rather revealing, as well. The sharp negative relationship between support for Obama and the endorsement of anti-Black stereotypes is consistent with several studies showing that prejudice was an unusually strong predictor of opposition to Obama from the 2008 election through the end of his presidency. These patterns also fit well with other political science research showing that racially prejudiced whites tend to be more opposed to Black Democrats than to white Democrats.

To make sense of why racially prejudiced white Americans are willing to support some Black candidates, it is worth considering why they so strongly oppose Black Democrats in the first place. Given the racialized nature of the two-party system in the United States, most Black political candidates are Democrats who embrace liberal positions on issues of race and justice. When asked whether they would support such a candidate, research shows that racially prejudiced white voters worry that these candidates will represent the interests of Black Americans, both because of a shared African American identity and because Democrats are perceived as the party more supportive of Black interests. So, it makes sense that racially resentful white Americans oppose candidates like Obama, as his racial identity and partisanship signaled to voters that he was more supportive of Black interests than prior presidents.

Put another way: Racially prejudiced white voters are not opposed to Black candidates simply because they are Black, but because they believe that most Black candidates will fight for “those people” and not “people like us.”

 

Yep.

 

It's the "those people" rule again.

It's why white voters, especially white women, abandoned Hillary Clinton in 2016 and a big part of why Trump won.

Racist Republicans love candidates that will fight for white folk and actuvely hurt Black and brown folk. Trump and Carson were the candidates who were best seen as making these racist views not only permissible, but possible as US policy.

They saw Hillary as a race traitor, more interested in helping Black America than white America. Winsome Sears on the other hand is a Black former Marine and small businesswoman openly posing with a rifle in her arms, and she won easily. (Same went for Jenean Hampton here in KY in 2015).

Permission to be racist is what they want, and you don't get much more permission to be a racist than "Well I voted for Virginia/Kentucky's first Black woman Lieutenant Governor and she won, so we're clearly not racists, YOU ARE, LIBTARD!"

That's it. That's what they want, that's what they got. Useful idiots serving the cause of white supremacy by bowing down to it, no matter how many of their own they hurt. A Black woman advancing the cause of white America? That's how it should be, to the Trump cultists.

They couldn't be happier.

StupidiNews!

• As Americans observe Veteran's Day, the Pentagon is allowing the public to lay flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier for the first time in 96 years to commemorate the Tomb's centennial.
• New Jersey state Democratic Senate President Steve Sweeney has conceded last week's race to Republican Ed Durr in a close race.
• US climate envoy John Kerry and China have issued a joint agreement to lower emissions and protect forests at this year's COP26 Glasgow climate summit.
• US Secretary of State Tony Blinken says America and its allies would "take action" if China directed military action towards Taiwan.
• As federal vaccine mandate rules continue to face court battles, the Biden administration says that private sector and local government mandates have lowered the number of unvaccinated by 40%.
  

Last Call For Sinema Verite', Con't

More evidence that if President Manchin doesn't kill the Biden Build Back Better reconciliation bill in the weeks ahead, Vice President Sinema almost certainly will now that the Bipartisan Senate bill has been passed.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema took a victory lap Monday, saying the $1.2 trillion physical infrastructure bill passed by the House of Representatives is evidence her approach to bipartisan legislating is backed by the American public.

The package, which delivers key components of President Joe Biden’s agenda, makes historic investments in the nation’s deteriorating roads, bridges, airports, water systems and ports-of-entry, and will expand access to broadband internet in urban centers and far-flung areas of the state and across the nation left behind in the 21st century.

Sinema, D-Ariz., co-brokered the deal in the Senate with Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, in a process that began more than eight months ago in the basement of the Capitol, where she, Portman and staffers huddled with what she called their “nerdy” spreadsheets and a long list of goals.

Along the way, 10 Democratic and Republican senators helped the bill pass the Senate only to see it languish in the House for months as Democrats wrangled over the separate human safety-net measure that Democrats are advancing through the budget reconciliation process. That process requires just a simple majority of support in a divided Congress.

The House passed the physical infrastructure bill late Friday, clearing the way for Biden’s signature. The president is expected to sign the bill in the coming weeks.

Next Sinema will turn her attention to ensuring the money, which includes $550 billion of new funding, is spent and that the money flows quickly to entities across the U.S., she said Monday in a call with Arizona reporters.

Some projects could begin in the next couple of months.

After the holidays, Sinema said she anticipates employing the same bipartisan across-the-aisle approach with the “Gang of 10” senators to move on other key issues, from immigration reform to hiking the federal minimum wage.

The group has met several times to discuss its next round of bipartisan work, she said.  

Sinema said she is unmoved by criticism by the left wing of the Democratic Party and some moderates who have blasted her demand to scale back the budget reconciliation bill and threatened to recruit primary challengers to run against her in 2024.

Sinema's comments came after Republicans won the Virginia governor’s race and saw a surge in support in New Jersey, voting trends that signal trouble for Biden and Democrats ahead of next year’s 2022 midterm elections, when the party that holds the White House traditionally loses seats in Congress.

“The lesson that I take from (the) elections, whether they be my own or others, is that folks — they expect results,” Sinema said. “They’re less interested in the talking heads on television and the partisan talking points on cable TV. They’re less interested in the tweets. What they are interested in is who is delivering results that make a difference in their lives. And so what I pledge to you and to folks throughout Arizona is to continue to do what I’ve always done, which is just put my head down, stay focused on the work, and deliver results for Arizonans.”

On the budget reconciliation front, Sinema said she continues to work with the Biden administration, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and others to pass a package with a price tag that she helped shrink to an estimated $1.75 trillion from Democrats’ original $3.5 trillion.

“I’m looking forward to getting this done,” Sinema said. “I continue to work in good faith with President Biden and his team, as well as Sen. Schumer and all of my Democratic colleagues in both the House and Senate to find a package that we can all agree on and get this done.”

 

Sinema got 100% of what she wanted: glowing bipartisan reviews,  national news coverage, and fawning commercials from her lobbyist friends to keep her in office doing their bidding.

 

She's already running as an independent. Why wouldn't she kill the BBB plan and make it official?