;)
The Commentariat -- June 6, 2021
Late Morning Update:
Kim Willsher of the Guardian: "On Sunday, the names of 22,442 soldiers under British command who died on D-day and the subsequent Battle of Normandy were engraved in stone as a permanent reminder of their sacrifice as a new British Normandy memorial was unveiled. The ceremony on a hill at Ver-sur-Mer overlooking Gold Beach, where thousands of British and allied soldiers swarmed ashore on the morning of 6 June 1944, heard a video message from the Prince of Wales, the patron of the Normandy Trust, who said he regretted that Covid had made it impossible for him to be present in France.... Today, 77 years on, the surviving veterans of D-day were defeated in their efforts to return to France, not by war or even growing old unlike their fallen comrades, but by coronavirus.
The New York Times' live updates of Covid-19 developments Sunday are here.
~~~~~~~~~~
President Joe Biden, in a Washington Post op-ed, lays out his agenda for his trip to Europe this week: "On Wednesday, I depart for Europe on the first foreign travel of my presidency.... In this moment of global uncertainty, as the world still grapples with a once-in-a-century pandemic, this trip is about realizing America’s renewed commitment to our allies and partners, and demonstrating the capacity of democracies to both meet the challenges and deter the threats of this new age.... And, as America’s economic recovery helps to propel the global economy, we will be stronger and more capable when we are flanked by nations that share our values and our vision for the future — by other democracies.... Those shared democratic values are the foundation of the most successful alliance in world history." ~~~
~~~ Jeff Stein of the Washington Post: “Finance ministers for the G-7 advanced economies announced an accord that could reshape the tax obligations of multinational corporations around the world. The deal reached at the G-7 meeting in London Saturday by Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. is a major breakthrough for the Biden administration’s efforts to enact a floor on the taxes paid by corporations worldwide.... 'The G-7 Finance Ministers have made a significant, unprecedented commitment today that provides tremendous momentum toward achieving a robust global minimum tax at a rate of at least 15 percent,' [Treasury Secretary Janet] Yellen, who led negotiations on behalf of the U.S., said in a statement.” (Also linked yesterday.)
Amy Wang of the Washington Post: “About 31 million Americans now have health-care coverage through the Affordable Care Act, the White House announced Saturday, setting a record since the law, colloquially known as 'Obamacare,' was enacted in 2010 under President Barack Obama. According to a report from the Health and Human Services Department, about 11.3 million Americans were enrolled in health-care plans through the Affordable Care Act’s federal marketplaces as of February, with 14.8 million people newly enrolled in Medicaid through the law’s expansion of eligibility as of December. The report also counted an additional 3.9 million Medicaid-enrolled adults who would have been eligible even before the Affordable Care Act but credited 'enhanced outreach, streamlined applications, and increased federal funding' from the law for the numbers.The report also said 1 million people were enrolled in the Affordable Care Act’s Basic Health Program option, which covers people whose incomes are just slightly too high to qualify them for Medicaid, as well as for some immigrants.” ~~~
~~~ Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar & Aamer Madhani of the AP: “President Joe Biden turned to his old boss, former President Barack Obama, on Saturday to help him encourage Americans to sign up for 'Obamacare' health care coverage during an expanded special enrollment period in the pandemic. Biden used his weekly address for a brief Zoom chat with Obama to draw attention to the six-month expanded enrollment period that closes Aug. 15.” See President Biden's conversation with Barack from Chicago in the right-hand column.
Charlie Savage & Katie Benner of the New York Times: "The Biden administration said on Saturday that no one at the White House had been aware that the Justice Department was seeking to seize the email data of four New York Times reporters and had obtained a gag order in March barring a handful of newspaper executives who knew about the fight from discussing it. The disavowal came one day after a court lifted the gag order, which permitted a Times lawyer to disclose the department’s effort to obtain email logs from Google, which operates the Times’s email system. It had begun in the last days of the Trump administration and continued until Wednesday, when the Biden Justice Department asked a judge to quash the matter without having obtained the data about who had been in contact with the reporters." ~~~
~~~ Eric Tucker of the AP: “The Justice Department said Saturday that it no longer will secretly obtain reporters’ records during leak investigations, a policy shift that abandons a practice decried by news organizations and press freedom groups. The reversal follows a pledge last month by President Joe Biden, who said it was 'simply, simply wrong' to seize journalists’ records and that he would not permit the Justice Department to continue the practice. Though Biden’s comments in an interview were not immediately accompanied by any change in policy, a pair of statements from the White House and Justice Department on Saturday signaled an official turnabout from an investigative tactic that has persisted for years.... White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement Saturday that ... 'the issuing of subpoenas for the records of reporters in leak investigations is not consistent with the President’s policy direction to the Department.'... Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley said that 'in a change to its longstanding practice,' the department 'will not seek compulsory legal process in leak investigations to obtain source information from members of the news media doing their jobs....' In ruling out 'compulsory legal process' for reporters in leak investigations, the department also appeared to say that it would not force journalists to reveal in court the identity of their sources.”
Noise. Quinn Scanlan & Mark Osborne of ABC News: "... Donald Trump returned to the stage on Saturday night, delivering a speech at the North Carolina Republican Party State Convention, and claiming America is backsliding under President Joe Biden.... Trump referred to 'bad things' happening in the 2020 election, while saying the GOP would have a 'tremendous 2022' in the midterm elections. Trump teased -- slightly -- a 2024 run as well.... Trump's supporters gathered early in the day outside the Greenville Convention Center, some carrying 'Trump 2020' flags while others were already displaying 'Trump 2024: I'll Be Back' banners. Many wore 'Trump won' hats, being sold outside the arena. About 1,200 attendees were expected in the room...." MB: "I'll be back"? Really? That's Arnold Schwarzenegger's signature line, and Trump has been calling Schwarzenegger a loser for several years. ~~~
~~~ Meredith McGraw of Politico: “Never before in U.S. history has a former president returned to the campaign trail to claim that his election loss was fraudulent. But in his informal reemergence on the political scene before the GOP faithful at the North Carolina GOP convention in Greenville, Donald Trump did just that, insisting — falsely — that the 2020 race was stolen and corrupt. 'The evidence is too voluminous to even mention,' Trump said at one point. Tellingly, he never mentioned it, choosing instead to insist that dead people had voted, that Facebook had encouraged get out the vote drives in liberal enclaves, and that 'Indians' were paid to vote (ostensibly referring to Native Americans) — none of it supported by fact.... He was met with a standing ovation when he demanded China pay $10 trillion in 'reparations' for its role in the coronavirus pandemic and again when he called for the banning of critical race theory in schools, the culture wars issue du jour for the GOP.... At times, it gave off the vibe of an entertainer in the twilight of his career, playing the hits for a Vegas crowd.”
** Katie Benner of the New York Times: "In Donald J. Trump’s final weeks in office, Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to investigate unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, according to newly uncovered emails provided to Congress, portions of which were reviewed by The New York Times. In five emails sent during the last week of December and early January, Mr. Meadows asked Jeffrey A. Rosen, then the acting attorney general, to examine debunked claims of election fraud in New Mexico and an array of baseless conspiracies that held that Mr. Trump had been the actual victor. That included a fantastical theory that people in Italy had used military technology and satellites to remotely tamper with voting machines in the United States and switch votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. None of the emails show Mr. Rosen agreeing to open the investigations suggested by Mr. Meadows, and former officials and people close to him said that he did not do so.... But the communications between Mr. Meadows and Mr. Rosen ... show the increasingly urgent efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies during his last days in office to find some way to undermine, or even nullify, the election results while he still had control of the government." (Also linked yesterday.) Mother Jones has a summary story here. ~~~
~~~ Marie: Over there. It's the Venezuelans! No, it's the Chinese! No, it's the Italians! I'm surprised we haven't heard that those UFOs Navy pilots have been seeing zapped voting machines & turned real Trump votes to fake Biden votes.
Texas Trumpist AG Says Trump Would Have Lost Texas without Voter Suppression. Jason Lemon of Newsweek: "Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, said ... Donald Trump would have lost in Texas in the 2020 election if his office had not successfully blocked counties from mailing out applications for mail-in ballots to all registered voters. Harris County, home to the city of Houston, wanted to mail out applications for mail-in ballots to its approximately 2.4 million registered voters due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the conservative Texas Supreme Court blocked the county from doing so after it faced litigation from Paxton's office. 'If we'd lost Harris County — Trump won by 620,000 votes in Texas. Harris County mail-in ballots that they wanted to send out were 2.5 million, those were all illegal and we were able to stop every one of them,' Paxton told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon during the latter's War Room podcast on Friday.... Notably, the Texas attorney general conflated mail-in ballots with applications for mail-in ballots in his remarks to Bannon. Harris County did not attempt to mail actual ballots to registered voters—just applications to request them if the individual voter wanted one." MB: Still, Paxton has a point. ~~~
~~~ Marie: And that's precisely why Joe Manchin opposes the For the People Act. Oh, and the Senate filibuster: ~~~
~~~ Sen. Joe Manchin (DINO-W.Va.), in a Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette-Mail op-ed: "Democrats in Congress have proposed a sweeping election reform bill called the For the People Act. This more than 800-page bill has garnered zero Republican support. Why?... The truth, I would argue, is that voting and election reform that is done in a partisan manner will all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen. With that in mind, some Democrats have again proposed eliminating the Senate filibuster rule in order to pass the For the People Act with only Democratic support." MB: IOW, if everybody gets to vote, Republicans know they will lose, and that's a bad thing.
Neil Irwin of the New York Times: “The relationship between American businesses and their employees is undergoing a profound shift: For the first time in a generation, workers are gaining the upper hand.... The erosion of employer power began during the low-unemployment years leading up to the pandemic and, given demographic trends, could persist for years. March had a record number of open positions, according to federal data that goes back to 2000, and workers were voluntarily leaving their jobs at a rate that matches its historical high. The 'reservation wage,' as economists call the minimum compensation workers would require, was 19 percent higher for those without a college degree in March than in November 2019, a jump of nearly $10,000 a year....” MB: “Reservation wage”? That seems like a rather unfortunate term. On the other hand, I suppose they could have gone with “plantation wage.”
Ray Jenkins of the Washington Post: “John Patterson, an intractable segregationist Democrat of the 1950s and 1960s who served as Alabama’s attorney general and then governor and belatedly said he came to regret the stances that helped him rise to power in a tumultuous era, died June 4 at his home in Goldville, Ala. He was 99.... Exactly 50 years after his election as governor, he announced he would vote for then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who became the nation’s first Black president. 'Having a record of supporting segregation,' Mr. Patterson said in an interview for this obituary, 'is a terrible burden to bear.'” MB: If you like to read obituaries, you'll enjoy this one.
The Pandemic, Ctd.
The New York Times' live updates of Covid-19 developments Saturday are here. (Also linked yesterday.)
Fractured History. Matt Viser & Yasmeen Abutaleb of the Washington Post: “Donald Trump and his Republican allies have spent the past few weeks trying to rewrite or distort the history of the pandemic, attempting with renewed vigor to villainize Anthony S. Fauci while lionizing the former president for what they portray as heroic foresight and underappreciated efforts to combat the deadly virus.... 'They’re using Dr. Fauci as a way to direct attention from what actually was a massive government failure from the White House and individuals Donald Trump put in place to handle some of this pandemic,' [Amesh] Adalja [of Johns Hopkins] said.”
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Reader Comments (14)
Any day now we’ll be reading that Fauci (whose real name is Fao Chi), is a Chinese agent who is personally responsible for creating COVID 19 in a Petri dish in his bathroom, then shipped it off to his fellow socialist scientists in China who spread it around the world to make Trump look bad. The Donald saved the planet, however, from Fao Chi’s nefarious plot. Praise Jesus!
Don’t laugh. Idiots believe Biden stole the election. They’d believe this shit in a heartbeat.
@Akhilleus: @Patrick made a good, if farcical, case yesterday that all that election fraud that cost Trump his rightful second term really was an Italian job. Trump claimed earlier that it was a Chinese effort. So whether it's when he takes on the role of Fao Chi -- thanks for exposing that malevolent alter-ego -- or when he's plain ole Antonio Fauci, mild-mannered scientist from Brooklyn, it seems likely to me that the person who developed & spread the coronavirus is the very same (Chinese or Italian) guy who stole the election for Biden.
Trump has been right all along. He has a very good brain, and listening to himself has paid off.
Well....it is Sunday.
"George Soros must be very sad these days. To spend all that money on causes the Right loves to hate, like education, voting rights and democracy, and then to be forgotten.
For years, billionaire George Soros supported liberal causes around the world, inviting the Right’s ire from Poland and Hungary to the United States. everywhere that democracy is under attack by autocrats.
But despite Mr. Soros' long record as an irritant to the Right, since last November they seem to have forgotten to fear him.
Instead, the Right has introduced other specters, resurrecting Karl Marx (boo!) and the ghostly “socialism” they trot out every time the nation elects a Democrat as President. Because they still fear black and brown folks, especially if they are women, Senate Republicans vigorously fight their confirmation to government appointments (nonprofitquarterly.org), and Red states surely don’t want those Black people to vote.
Recently the Right has added Critical Race Theory to their daily horror show and expanded its cast to include any acknowledgement of the undeniable racist component of our past and present. Accurate history, too, is something they fear.
Whether their fears are real or not, Republicans revel in fright.
Because Republicans are far more likely to fear the Covid vaccines than Democrats are, Red states lag behind Blue states in the proportion of their citizens vaccinated. Right Wing websites tell Republicans to be afraid—and they are—despite clear evidence that the parts of the country with higher vaccination rates have proportionately fewer Covid cases (cnn.com).
In the horrible days of the polio epidemic, researcher Thomas Rivers remarked, “Our main problem now is not that anything is wrong with the Salk vaccine, but that something is wrong with the people who won’t take it.”
It’s another history lesson the Right would rather not learn."
Native Americans remember long ago D-Day (77 years):
D-Day, Native American soldiers honored in Schaumburg on ...https://www.dailyherald.com › news › d-day-native-ameri...
And every day is D-Day for bugs:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pesticides-are-killing-the-worlds-soils/
“I’ll be back!”?
R’s tend to be preternaturally dense when trying to swipe pop culture touchstones for their own benefit. Reagan tried to use Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” as a re-election anthem but clearly none of his handlers actually listened to the song which portrayed a lost soul, scarred by his time in Vietnam, kicked around, unemployed, and forgotten, “I’m ten years burnin’ down the road, I got nowhere to run, nowhere to go [except I was] born in the USA”. Sounded more like mourning again in America.
And as tone deaf as that was, Fatty’s invocation of Arnold’s famous line from “The Terminator” is either more egregious or more accurate. The line is uttered by a murderous cyborg from the future sent back to kill the mother of a man who tries to save humanity from extinction. Oh, and the cyborg makes this remark just before storming a police station and killing every cop in sight.
But hey, what’s another bit of wildly inappropriate appropriation on the part of a dim witted thief and thug?
I’m gonna suggest that the Fat Fascist instead steal the big tag line from Arnold’s second outing in the Terminator series. It’s perfect as a reminder of his place as one of history’s biggest losers: “Hasta la vista, baby”.
Oh, and don’t forget “Chill out, dickwad”.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HvK1TxC5aF8
@Ken Winkes: My husband and I were driving along the Normandy coast sometime around D-Day in the late 1990s. We were surprised at how many young American soldiers we saw along the way. When we stopped to visit a museum, we parked near a jeep surrounded by a group of American soldiers. Uh, but they were speaking French. Turns out all those "American" soldiers were French re-enactors.
I can't recall if my uncle flew a mission on D-Day, but he flew several over northern France in the days before D-Day, prepping for the invasion by dropping bombs on likely German sites. He was not the pilot, but the co-pilot on those runs, and the most amazing part to me is that he was 18 years old when he flew those missions.
Funny thing to me was that he was a pilot because he didn't want to get killed. He had tried to join the Coast Guard, which he figured would keep him away from the theaters of war. He would have been a good fit because he had been a sailor since he was a child. He and my mother shared their own sailboat. But the Coast Guard didn't agree with that & rejected him.
So he decided "pilot" would be the next safest job. I read somewhere that it was statistically impossible for a pilot to complete 29 missions. My uncle flew 36, which was the requirement by the time he served from a base in England. Overall, bomber crews suffered a 46 percent casualty rate. Just staggering.
The Fattest Little Rascal
I see where Fatty got a yuuuge round of applause from the MAGA morons when he demanded that China fork over $10 trillion because COVID! Yeah! Yeah!
Is he six? This is the sort of stuff that little kids say: “Oh yeah? Well I betcha 50 million trillion dollars that my dog is faster than your dog!”
Ever the loudmouthed childish bully. Adulthood never caught on with this short-fingered vulgarian. He is a perpetually spoiled and colicky baby in a fat man’s body, always grasping for his next ba-ba.
(I do like the idea of Trump as a one-time minor star, reliving the glory days as a Vegas act, warbling the oldies for the MAGA geriatrics. But please, if he shows up in a gold lamé Fat Elvis suit, avert your eyes. Brain damage would be certain and swift.)
@ Marie.
Thanks for the reminiscence.
History. Make of it what we will, and we do, especially when we have no personal connection to it, as do you to D-Day through your uncle's remarkable story.
We often hear often the plaintive cry of "Lest we forget," because we do. We do forget, both as individuals and as nations.
I wonder what D-Day means today to those who didn't live through it or didn't read or see the accounts of the war produced soon after. Today, even movies about WWII are rare, we skip over Korea and Vietnam is passe.
The past may not be dead, but for many it exists somewhere way off to the side of their lives, far out of view.
And we don't have to search too hard or dig too deep into the past to see that inborn human blindness. For millions of Americans, Covid never happened.
" ... 'Indians' were paid to vote (ostensibly referring to Native Americans) ..."
Here we can see that Bonespurs has attained some degree of restraint in his MarredLardo salad days -- he refrained from saying that they were paid in whiskey and rifles.
I listened to a bit of that on CSPAN this morning, and realized once again how nice it has been the past several months NOT to hear that whiny lying drivel. I suppose CSPAN should put such events out over the Marconi waves, but I hope not too often. He is one irritating vocal presence, even when you realize his words mean nothing more than that he has a larynx and a diaphragm.
Manchin's problem with the For the People Act is that if it gets enacted most of Joe's friends might not be in DC anymore.
The racist legacy many birds carry
The marks of the racist past are everywhere.
“They [honorifics that birds carry] are also a reminder of how Western ornithology, and natural exploration in general, was often tied to a colonialist mind-set of conquering and exploiting and claiming ownership of things rather than learning from the humans who were already part of the ecosystem and had been living alongside these birds for lifetimes.”
Took me a day to think (very briefly) of this one item from yesterday's news.
Have always liked those gun buyback programs. Per that CA judge it would maker sense. offer one Swiss Army knife in trade for an automatic rifle. Guess if gun owners don't leap at the opportunity, he might have been wrong.
And if such an experimental even-steven exchange doesn't turn out to be as popular as the judge's comparison might suggest, would that be grounds for CA's promised appeal?
@Ken Winkes: Now, that is one excellent idea. Let's ask the judge to set up the program, to prove his well-considered point. Why, I'm sure he'll wind up with so many weapons, he could make a small fortune in the scrap-metal business. Nincompoop.