Good morning, everyone!
This morning, I was faced with a dilemma concerning two essays with similar themes.
Ultimately, I decided to include both essays in this morning’s round-up.
Former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu writes for The Atlantic on the importance of making the insurrectionists accountable for their actions...for a change.
The government must examine whether the lack of preparedness at the Capitol was a result of implicit bias (not believing that these armed white rioters could be dangerous) or complicity. The authorities must also charge the insurrectionists who stormed the building. Donald Trump’s incendiary actions and House and Senate Republicans’ votes to reject the Electoral College count were traitorous. Trying to overthrow an election is a serious threat to a republic. They must be held responsible too. Impeaching Trump was the right call, but now the Senate must follow through on a conviction.
Accountability also goes beyond that day’s events. Americans must recognize the bigger truths the past four years have exposed. White supremacy is alive and well in our society, a shameful truth many of us already knew. However, white supremacists have now been further emboldened to operate openly with little consequence. Even as hate crimes
quadrupled from 2016 to 2017, the Trump administration showed little interest in white-extremist violence.
Renée Graham of the Boston Globe reminds her readers that we had ample information and warnings in the form of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano’s 2009 report detailing the alarming surge in far-right extremism. (A report that was much discussed here at Daily Kos.)
According to a list compiled by NPR, nearly 20 percent of more than 140 people facing charges connected to the Capitol insurrection incited by former President Trump “have served or are currently serving in the US military.” Three of them — Jessica Marie Watkins, Donovan Ray Crowl, and Thomas E. Caldwell — allegedly recruited others, held training camps, and amassed weapons to take to Washington. Each now faces numerous federal charges, including conspiring to obstruct Congress.
This is what Napolitano feared. Yet reaction to her report didn’t only hamstring efforts to root out racists in the armed forces. It also achieved its larger goal — to overshadow the incessant threat of white supremacist violence.
Now the Department of Homeland Security has issued a new terror bulletin warning that “violent extremists” upset by the presidential transition “as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives, could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence.” Domestic terrorists “may be emboldened” by the Capitol siege that killed five people, including a Capitol police officer.
Turning to policy, The Nation’s Jeet Heer simply goes all the way off on that New York Times editorial and defends President Biden’s use of executive orders.
This editorial is a prime example of the Times’ vulnerability to myopic Mugwumpism, a tendency to focus on small-bore political process while ignoring the actual power dynamics that drive politics. The Mugwumps—late-19th century reformers—fixated on civil service reform as a panacea for all that ailed America, ignoring battles over Reconstruction and the civil rights of formerly enslaved people.
In a like manner, a persnickety focus on the limits of executive orders makes sense only if one ignores the much larger battles around American democracy. Earlier this month, Donald Trump egged on a mob to attack Congress in order to thwart the process of even installing Biden as president. Trump and many other Republican elected officials did everything in their power to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Biden’s win. To this day, some, like South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, refuse to admit that Biden won a free and fair election.
In the context of having his legitimacy called into question, it is crucial for Biden to assert his authority as quickly as possible so that the nation can see he is in fact the president. Biden took a number of decisive early moves to make visible his executive authority, notably firing the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel, Peter Robb, a Trump-era holdover who refused a request to resign. Undoing some of Trump’s worst executive orders was also a way for Biden to make clear that he is president.
Bill McKibben of The New Yorker has a glowing review of President Biden’s executive actions regarding climate change.
The Biden Administration temporarily paused the new leasing of federal lands and waters for fossil-fuel production, while speeding up the process of permitting renewables. The President pledged that the federal government would start buying electric cars in volume. His order sets up or strengthens offices in the Justice Department, the Energy Department, and the Environmental Protection Agency to focus on what he called “environmental justice.” He announced that climate change would become a national-security priority for the Pentagon. And all of this came after his earlier pledges to rejoin the Paris climate accord and to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline. There’s a shock-and-awe feel to the barrage of actions, and that is the point: taken together, they send a decisive signal about the end of one epoch and the beginning of another. And that signal, most of all, is aimed at investors: fossil fuel, Biden is making clear, is not a safe bet, or even a good bet, for making real money. Coal, oil, and gas are the past, not the future. They’re the present, too, of course—but you don’t make big-money bets on the present.
We may not get to that future fast enough to stave off truly disastrous global warming—the natural world made some announcements of its own this week, including the news that the melt from glaciers and ice sheets is in line with the worst-case scenarios that scientists have produced—and we won’t get to that safer future easily. The fossil-fuel industry is already hitting back hard against the Biden announcements, using the only argument it has left: jobs. But the Administration’s team was prepared for the onslaught—Biden styled his announcements as a job-creation scheme, predicting, for instance, that electric cars would create a million new jobs for autoworkers. And his aides made clear that they understood the need to cushion the blow in areas where oil, gas, and coal jobs are disappearing. “We’re going to make sure that nobody is left behind,” the domestic climate czar Gina McCarthy told reporters. “We need to put people to work in their own communities. That’s where their home is. That’s where the vision is. So we are creatively looking at those opportunities for investment, so that we can get people understanding that we are not trying to take away jobs.”
Zia Pacha Khan of International Policy Digest has some suggestions on what can be done with policy regarding the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.
It is yet to be seen how President Biden will approach the Taliban. On the one hand, Biden has said that the “Taliban per se is not our enemy,” while on the other hand, he has actively taken the fight to the Taliban as seen with U.S. troop surges during the Obama era. The Biden administration may come to the same conclusion as the Trump administration: It may be time for the U.S. to simply leave. The following three things must be considered in laying the foundation for a complete and responsible U.S. exit. In other words: “Peace with Honor.”
Strengthen the Hand of Zalmay Khalilzad
President Biden may want to consider keeping and strengthening the role of Zalmay Khalilzad as the Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation at the U.S. State Department. He is an experienced Afghan-American diplomat who led the peace talks with the Taliban in Qatar in 2018.
This wasn’t the first time Khalilzad had been involved in coordinating talks with the Taliban. In the late 1990s, Khalilzad, at the time an oil executive, facilitated direct engagement between the Taliban and the United States – with the Taliban seeking international recognition while the U.S. wanted oil agreements, an agreement to curtail opium production, and measures to counter Iran.
If Biden chooses to pursue negotiations with the Taliban, retaining the services of Khalilzad could be helpful.
Paul Kane of the Washington Post has a report on the efforts of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in helping Congresspersons and their staff deal with post-traumatic stress following the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
Some of her staff members locked themselves in a windowless conference room, blocking the door with office furniture and hiding under a table for 2½ hours as rioters tried to break down the door.
Since then, the speaker’s office has served a leading role in providing the congressional community access to post-traumatic counseling. It convened online sessions for lawmakers and aides less than a week after the riot. On Jan. 21, lawmakers were invited to an in-person session inside a vast auditorium.
And...most Americans have to deal with post-traumatic stress because of the past four years of the previous malAdministration.
Anna North/Vox
For many, the past year has been especially difficult, bringing with it a pandemic; the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black Americans; and the Trump administration’s violent response to the racial justice protests that ensued. “It created an environment where you are constantly in a state of fight or flight,” Lauren Carson, founder and executive director of the mental health nonprofit Black Girls Smile, told Vox.
Among the Black girls and women it serves, as well as among its own staff, the group saw a lot of stress, anxiety, and feelings of being overwhelmed, Carson said. “You are working on 2 percent every day, day in, day out — or negative percent.”
Some of those feelings have also been reflected in nationwide surveys, with a significant increase in stress about the country’s future and political climate after the 2016 election. And in 2020, 68 percent of Americans said the election was a significant source of stress in their lives, up from 52 percent in 2016.
Like the impact of Trump’s policies, that stress doesn’t go away overnight, especially when the conditions that led to his election — systemic racism, anti-immigrant paranoia, and the rampant spread of misinformation — are still very much a reality.
Joel Achenbach and Ariana Eunjung Cha of the Washington Post report on the mixed news about COVID variants and vaccines over the past few days.
All three of the most-scrutinized “variants of concern” — first identified in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil — have arrived in the United States. As of midday Saturday there were more than 430 reported cases involving the U.K. variant, B.1.1.7, and one case, in Minnesota, of the Brazil variant, known as P.1., announced by authorities there Monday.
The mutations have complicated and likely extended the timeline for crushing the pandemic. A truism among epidemiologists is that herd immunity from a more transmissible virus requires a higher percentage of immunized people. Early in the pandemic, scientists estimated that around 70 percent of people would need to be vaccinated or have developed natural immunity to reach the threshold at which the virus would not freely circulate. That number now seems too low.
If a more transmissible strain becomes dominant, “that level of coverage needed for herd immunity would become higher, in the 80 to 85 percent range,” Jay Butler, deputy director for infectious diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Friday.
Eliane Brum, a Brazilian journalist writing for El País in English, reports out a stunning overview and timeline of an “institutional strategy” by Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro to spread the coronavirus throughout Brazil.
The grimmest timeline in the history of public health in Brazil emerges from an investigation of directives issued by the government of President Jair Messias Bolsonaro relating to the Covid-19 pandemic. In a common effort undertaken since March 2020, the Center for Research and Studies in Public Health Law (CEPEDISA) of the Public Health College (FSP) of the University of São Paulo (USP) and Conectas Direitos Humanos, one of the most respected justice organizations of Latin America, have collected and scrutinized federal and state regulations relating to the novel coronavirus, producing a brief titled Rights in the Pandemic – Mapping and Analysis of the Legal Rules in Response to Covid-19 in Brazil. On January 21, they put out a special edition making a strong statement: “Our research has revealed the existence of an institutional strategy to spread the virus, promoted by the Brazilian government under the leadership of the President of the Republic.”
The timeline is composed of three axes presented in chronological order, from March 2020 to the first 16 days of January 2021. The first is regulatory acts of the Union, including regulations adopted by federal authorities and agencies and by presidential vetoes; the second, acts of obstruction to the state and municipal governments’ responses to the pandemic; and the third, propaganda against public health, describing it as “a political discourse that mobilizes economic, ideological and moral arguments, besides fake news and technical information lacking scientific proof, with the aim of discrediting public health authorities, weakening public adherence to health advice based on scientific evidence, and promoting political activism against the public health measures needed to contain the spread of Covid-19.”
IMO, it’s one thing to instinctively know something like the institutional nature of Bolsonaro’s executive actions regarding COVID-19 through a familiarity with the open source reporting over the entirety of the pandemic. It’s another thing to see all of this information in one concise year-long timeline. With footnotes, so to speak.
Here is a downloadable English version of the brief.
Finally this morning, Marcus Hayes of the Philadelphia Inquirer on the importance of the legendary Temple University head basketball John Chaney to college basketball, Temple University, Philadelphia and America.
Jordan was a brand. Chaney was an institution.
But Chaney wasn’t just an institution. Along with a handful of other Black coaches, Chaney helped change an institution -- the insular, powerful world of college basketball coaching. It was a world dominated by Bobby Knights and Dean Smiths; the stately legend of John Wooden; the hoary ghost of Adolph Rupp. It was a world made accessible to people like me by the late John Thompson at Georgetown; by Nolan Richardson at Tulsa and Arkansas; and, in gritty North Philadelphia, by John Chaney, who died Friday. He was 89.
You’ve heard this before, but for Coach Chaney this is true: Like Thompson and Richardson, Chaney will live forever through the lives he so deeply touched; and through lives he never knew he touched.
“They were passionate educators,” said Phil Martelli, the former St. Joseph’s coach and Philadelphia hoop icon. “Basketball was just their vehicle. They wanted to pass on an education about life. They had moved up, and they were going to turn around and lift the next young person up, so that young person could go back and change his family.
“In a way, they were basketball preachers.”
Everyone have a good morning!