;)
The Commentariat -- May 23, 2021
Afternoon Update:
Travis Gettys of the Raw Story: Right-wing WashPo columnist George Will "appeared on ABC News' 'This Week,' where he told the roundtable participants that the bipartisan commission to investigate the causes of the deadly riot was controversial among Republicans for one reason. 'We have something new in American history,' Will said. 'We have a political party defined by the terror it feels for its own voters. That's the Republican Party right now.'... Every elected official is ... afraid that a vote for this would be seen as an insult to the 45th president.... I would like to see January 6th burned into the American mind as firmly as 9/11 because it was that scale of a shock to the system.'...'"
Belarus. Anton Troianovski & Ivan Nechepurenko of the New York Times: "The strongman president of Belarus sent a fighter jet to intercept a European airliner traveling through the country's airspace on Sunday and ordered the plane to land in the capital, Minsk, where [Roman Protasevicha,] a prominent opposition journalist aboard was then seized, provoking international outrage. The stunning gambit by Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, a brutal and erratic leader who has clung to power despite huge protests against his government last year, was condemned by European officials, who compared it to hijacking. But it underscored that with the support of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Lukashenko is prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to repress dissent." The AP's story is here.
John Harwood of CNN: In 2012, Tom Mann & Norm Ornstein wrote a Washington Post op-ed which concluded "that the GOP had become 'ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.... "Let's just say it: The Republicans are the problem.'... [The essay] did not gain wide acceptance then. Many journalists joined leading Republicans in dismissing them.... [But] piece demonstrates more than the foresight of its political scientist authors.... It shows the disease within the Republican Party had spread long before Trump metastasized it." MB: Of course the Constant Weader linked the op-ed here. I don't think it surprised any Reality Chex readers. The only thing about it that surprised me is that Mann & Ornstein had the guts to write it, especially in the heyday of both-sider "journalism."
Goodbye to All That. After decades of being at the center of Washington, D.C., society, Sally Quinn writes in the Washington Post's magazine: "I don't think Washingtons social scene after Trump and covid will ever be the same. We almost lost our democracy, and many even lost their lives. If nothing else, what we've been through surely focused the mind on what is important."
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Eileen Sullivan of the New York Times: "The Biden administration on Saturday extended special protections to Haitians living temporarily in the United States after being displaced by a devastating 2010 earthquake, reversing efforts by the previous administration to force them to leave the country. The decision, announced by the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, makes good on President Biden's campaign promise to restore a program that shields thousands of Haitian migrants from the threat of deportation under the restrictive policies put in place under ... Donald J. Trump. Mr. Mayorkas said the new 18-month designation, known as temporary protected status, would apply to Haitians already living in the United States as of Friday." The BuzzFeed News story is here.
Amy Wang of the Washington Post: "Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is being widely lambasted for comparing the continuing coronavirus restrictions in the U.S. Capitol to what Jewish people suffered during the Holocaust.... Some of the most pointed pushback came from the minority of voices in Greene's own party. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) ... decried Greene's comparison as 'evil lunacy.'... The American Jewish Congress called on Greene to immediately retract her comments and apologize. 'You can never compare health-related restrictions with yellow stars, gas chambers & other Nazi atrocities,' the group stated. 'Such comparisons demean the Holocaust & contaminate American political speech.'... [Speaker Nancy] Pelosi has defended her decision to keep a mask mandate on the House floor by citing the relatively large number of Republican lawmakers who either have refused to be vaccinated against the coronavirus or who do not want to disclose that they had been vaccinated. A CNN survey last week found that 100 percent of House Democrats have received their vaccines, but only 95 out of 212 House Republicans said they had." MB: That is, everyone has to wear masks in the House -- because of Republicans, not Pelosi.
~~~ Sarah Rumpf of Mediaite: "Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) doubled down on her controversial comments comparing Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to the Nazis because of her mask rules for the House, telling a local Arizona reporter that she had said nothing wrong, and 'any rational Jewish person['] should also oppose 'what's happening with overbearing mask mandates.'"
Bad News All Around for Trumpists:
Joshua Zitser of Yahoo! News: "US authorities have confiscated roughly $90,000 from a man who sold footage of a protester being fatally shot during the January 6 storming of the Capitol, according to court filings seen by Reuters. John Earle Sullivan, a 26-year-old from Utah, recorded videos capturing the chaos of the Capitol riot, Reuters said. He claims to have been there as a 'documentarian' but now faces a total of eight criminal counts relating to his involvement in the insurrection, Insider previously reported. One of the videos he recorded, which included the shooting of Ashli Babbitt by a police officer, was sold to several unnamed news outlets for a total of $90,000, according to a seizure warrant seen by the news agency. Sullivan licensed parts of the video footage to the Washington Post and NBC, The New Yorker reported in February."
The following story should shatter some Trump-loving QAnon enthusiasts: ~~~
~~~ Jason Wilson of the Guardian: "Police intelligence documents show that Washington's Trump Hotel raised its rates 'as a security tactic', in the hope of deterring Trump-supporting QAnon supporters from staying there in early March, on a day which some believed would see Trump restored to office. The information, which police gleaned from a Business Insider version of a story published in Forbes on 6 February, was confirmed in an 8 February intelligence briefing stolen by ransomware hackers from Washington's Metropolitan police department (MPD). The hackers from the Babuk group subsequently published those documents online, and transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets redistributed them to news outlets.... As Forbes reported in February, Trump International hotel in Washington raised its rates to 180% of the normal seasonal charge for 3 and 4 March this year. That was a date upon which some adherents to the QAnon conspiracy movement believed would see Trump once again sworn in as president...." MB: Seems Trump doesn't love you back, kids.
Oh Lordy, let this be the last time we even think of accessing Santorum.com. ~~~
~~~ Jennifer Bendery of the Huffington Post: "CNN has terminated its contract with senior political commentator Rick Santorum after racist, inaccurate remarks he made about Native Americans.... Santorum, a former Republican senator and two-time failed GOP presidential candidate, sparked outrage last month after claiming there was 'nothing' in America before white colonizers arrived and that Native people haven't contributed much to American culture, anyway." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) The Washington Post story is here.
Bob Brigham of the Raw Story: "Senior Donald Trump advisor Jason Miller has been ordered to pay Gizmodo Media Group $41,868.23 following a failed defamation lawsuit. Miller had sued Gizmodo over a 2018 story by Splinter News, which is owned by the company, over a 2018 story titled, 'Court Docs Allege Ex-Trump Staffer Drugged Woman He Got Pregnant With 'Abortion Pill.'... Splinter quoted directly from the legal filing." MB: Don't worry, Jason, your billionaire boss will gladly pay your legal fees. Ha ha.
Climate Change Is a Hoax. Claire Fahy of the New York Times: "An iceberg nearly half the size of Puerto Rico that broke off the edge of Antarctica last week is now the world's largest, researchers said. The iceberg, known as A76, following a naming convention established by the National Ice Center, naturally split from Antarctica's Ronne Ice Shelf into the Weddell Sea through a process known as calving, the center said. It measures about 1,668 square miles (4,320 square kilometers), making it larger than A23a, an iceberg that formed in 1986 and had a total area of more than 1,500 square miles (4,000 square kilometers) in January."
Damien Cave, et al., of the New York Times: "All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history.... The demographic forces -- pushing toward more deaths than births -- seem to be expanding and accelerating. Though some countries continue to see their populations grow, especially in Africa, fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else.... A planet with fewer people could ease pressure on resources, slow the destructive impact of climate change and reduce household burdens for women. But the census announcements this month from China and the United States, which showed the slowest rates of population growth in decades for both countries, also point to hard-to-fathom adjustments."
Steven Johnson of the New York Times: "... during the century since the end of the Great Influenza outbreak, the average human life span has doubled. There are few measures of human progress more astonishing than this.... When the history textbooks do touch on the subject of improving health, they often nod to three critical breakthroughs, all of them presented as triumphs of the scientific method: vaccines, germ theory and antibiotics. But the real story is far more complicated. Those breakthroughs might have been initiated by scientists, but it took the work of activists and public intellectuals and legal reformers to bring their benefits to everyday people."
The Pandemic, Ctd.
Lenny Bernstein & Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post: "For the first time in 11 months, the daily average of new coronavirus infections in the United States has fallen below 30,000 amid continuing signs that most communities across the nation are emerging from the worst of the pandemic.... The pandemic map remains speckled with hot spots, including parts of the Deep South, the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Northwest. At the local level, progress against the contagion has not been uniform as some communities struggle with inequities in vaccine distribution and in the health impacts of the virus."
The New York Times' live updates of Covid-19 developments Saturday are here: "Vaccinations in many American prisons, jails and detention centers are lagging far behind the United States as a whole, prompting public health officials to worry that these settings will remain fertile ground for frequent, fast-spreading coronavirus outbreaks for a long time to come. Nationally, more than 60 percent of people ages 18 or older have received at least one dose of vaccine so far. But only about 40 percent of federal prison inmates, and half of those in the largest state prison systems, have done so. And in immigration detention centers, the figure is just 20 percent.... Many inmates say they mistrust both the vaccine and the prison authorities who try to persuade them to get inoculated. Beyond that, some prison vaccination efforts have been hampered by mistakes." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
Beyond the Beltway
New York Times Editors: "No reasonable officer could make the case that [George] Floyd's killing was justified. Yet thanks to a half-century-old judge-made doctrine, they don't have to. The doctrine, known as qualified immunity, has developed over the years into an impenetrable barrier to relief for many victims of police brutality -- or, as in the case of Mr. Floyd, for victims' families.... In a series of rulings starting in the late 1960s, the Supreme Court decided that an officer is immune from liability unless it can be shown that he or she broke 'clearly established' law in the process. The burden is on the plaintiff to make this showing, and the bar is absurdly high.... In practice, qualified immunity has become what Justice Sonia Sotomayor has called an 'absolute shield' that 'tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.'... Ending qualified immunity has become ... a bipartisan effort.... The Supreme Court started this mess, and it could just as easily end it."
Louisiana. Lauren Aratani of the Guardian: "Two years after Ronald Greene, a 49-year-old Black man, died after a confrontation with white police officers in May 2019, the Louisiana police department released footage of the incident.... Footage released by the police on Friday was similar to the video released by the Associated Press this past week, which showed inconsistencies with the police's claim that Greene had died from a car crash.... Two investigations, an internal inquiry from Louisiana police and a federal civil rights investigation, began at the end of last summer -- over a year after Greene's death. Greene's family has also filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the officers involved. Citing these investigations, police refused to release footage until Friday. Col Lamar Davis, the state police superintendent..., said he intends to fire one of the state troopers involved, according to the Advocate. A second trooper died in a car crash last year, shortly after he was informed of his imminent termination. A third officer received a 50-hour suspension."
Minnesota. Paulina Villegas of the Washington Post: "A federal court judge on Friday sentenced a former St. Paul, Minn., police officer to six years in prison after a jury found him guilty of a civil rights violation for beating an unarmed Black man who was mistaken for a suspect nearly five years ago. A federal jury in 2019 convicted former St. Paul officer Brett Palkowitsch of using excessive force against an unarmed civilian after he brutally kicked and severely injured Frank Amal Baker and let a police dog maul him.
News Ledes
New York Times:"Twenty-one people, including two of China's top marathon athletes, died after freezing rain and high winds struck a 62-mile mountain race in northwestern China, local officials said on Sunday. Liang Jing, 31, an ultramarathon champion, and Huang Guanjun, the winner of the men's marathon for hearing-impaired runners at China's 2019 National Paralympic Games, were among those found dead, according to state news media. The deaths prompted outrage in China, with online commentators questioning the preparedness of the local government that organized the race...."
Washington Post: "Fifteen people have died in a volcano eruption in Congo late Saturday that turned the sky above a fearsome red and sent thousands fleeing from a city that was devastated by lava flows in 1977 and 2002. Government spokesman Patrick Muyaya said on Sunday night that two people had burned to death in the eruption of Mount Nyiragongo, nine died in a traffic accident while attempting to flee and four prisoners who had tried to escape their cells were also killed. He said property damage was reported in 17 villages surrounding the volcano, including Goma's suburbs."
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Reader Comments (8)
The younger generation appears to be mostly oblivious to the
pandemic which has now been around long enough for them to be
aware of the dangers of ignoring it.
I don't normally shop but was coerced into doing so yesterday by
my partner (business and life) since we needed supplies for the
business. I'm not a shopper. If I need something I go to the store
that has it, buy it and return home.
Of the five places we bought stuff, every single older person and all
the clerks were wearing masks. I saw not one young (20 to 30)
person with a mask. Do they think youth makes them immune?
Are they ill informed? Are they ignorant? Who knows.
We live in an area of West Michigan where thousands
of tourists from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio descend upon us every day
and as I am outside most of the time, I see very few masks as they
pass each other on the sidewalks.
When not working at clients, we plan to stay mostly in the back
yard propagating and dividing plants, at least until millions more
are vaccinated. It may be a long wait, but better safe than sorry
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/23/health/us-coronavirus-sunday/index.html
Looks like there just might be a connection among sanity, coastal elitism, and red state resentment.
A nice way (and funny) to treat a bigot: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/snl-cecily-strong-toss-one-112300679.html. Now, SNL can take on MTG the queen of mean from Georgia for next season.
@Forest: Earlier this week the mister and I ventured to that vast nursery in Hamden Ct., Broken Arrow, to select more bushes to fill in some empty spaces in the back yard. This nursery goes on for acres and acres and while there I was lost in a sort of reverie looking, feeling. touching–-just being there among such prolific growth brought to mind once again that nature, in all its guises, triumphs human endeavors in so many significant ways and protecting this wonder IS the most important issue for our time and time is running out.
Old men plant trees they will never see.
The many and multifarious criminal concoctions and bilious bonbons boiled and bubbled by the Trump Criminal Enterprise over decades during which the Don tested out grifts, grafts, and grandiloquent grasping of the greenbacks (and despicable grabbing of other things along the way, as his narcissism and disgusting urges required) now being (at long last) investigated may result in some sleepless nights in Rikers for some lower-downs in the organization, but hopes of seeing the Orange Menace perp-walked or jumpsuited will ultimately come to naught.
At least that is my belief.
After years as a crime boss, the Fat Fascist, like many other career crooks, has learned that the art of the steal demands serious buffering. He no doubt has become expert at keeping his fingerprints off the worst of his capers. I’d love to believe that John Law will finally run him to ground, but, like the snake that he is, he has succeeded in slithering out of everything from trespass to treason.
It might have to be enough to see his crime family’s organization torn down and paved over.
No doubt he’ll try to weasel the contract for the paving and overcharge the state by 300%.
Way back B.T. (Before Trump), I hoped Tony didn't get shot & killed in the seconds after the show ended forever. Not sure I feel that way now. Badda-boom.
Marie,
The difference between Tony Soprano and Donald Trump (and no, it’s not that Trump never killed or brutalized anyone; with half a million bodies to his credit he’s more Pol Pot than Mafia capo) is that we can see Tony’s dual nature clearly displayed in almost each episode. Yes, he’s a murderous thug prone to violent outbursts, but he also has genuine concern for his kids (strangling a mob turncoat while taking his daughter on a college campus visit epitomizes this duality).
Trump has only one speed: what’s in it for me? He refers to his kid as “a retard”.
Tony has panic attacks and sees a therapist. Trump attacks women and sees lawyers about suing anyone who stands up to him.
Yes, yes, Tony Soprano is a fictional character, but both Trump and Soprano-like Mafia figures attract the sort of weird admiration (on the part of some) that comes from seeing a character who just takes what he wants and knocks down any who get in the way.
On this score, Trump is far worse than any crime boss. Crime bosses might send a goon after you to break your legs. Trump sent armed soldiers out to gas hundreds of peaceful protesters for a photo op. He sicced the entire Justice Department on his perceived enemies. He put babies in cages like dogs to terrorize their parents.
If at the end of “The Trumps” something bad happens after a fade to black, it would be an appropriate end to a horrible story.
@PD Old men also gaze in wonder at trees they planted when they were younger. I've two 50+ year old live oaks that shade the house and an even older sweet gum that somehow has made made it over 65 or so years.
Just an investment in beauty and life.