I’ve occasionally said, in these comment sections here at Daily Kos, that from September 1987 to January 1989, I worked in the Post Office of the United States House of Representatives.
My primary responsibilities was to do the actual mail runs in the Longworth Office Building and the Capitol Building, itself. I did the mail runs twice during the work day and I had the use of a small motorized mail cart which, to this day, is the only thing that I have ever driven.
(FTR, I got the job because I was living with my cousin, at that time, and her mother was dying of cancer. She did not want to leave me in D.C. without a job so she went down to the House Personnel Office and “encouraged” them to hire me. I got the call about a week later. So, yes, I have benefitted from nepotism...but I digress.)
I’ve experienced the Capitol Grounds and the various buildings both at their most bustling times and at quieter, more meditative times.
A lot of memories flood in: the time a white boy, about my age, maybe a little younger, separated himself from his Capitol tour crowd and we talked about my job and he pronounced that I must have the most fabulous job that ever existed.
The time that I rolled my mail cart past Speaker Wright’s office and smelled that hot-buttered popcorn that smelled so gooooooooood that I asked his assistant if I could have some popcorn and, after she commented on what a lovely singing voice that I had (the first person ever to do so...a lot of people comment on that bass/baritone nearly operatic voice of mine, nowadays, but she as the first) said that I had to ask the Speaker, himself because everyone who worked in the Capitol abused the privilege of getting that popcorn.
I asked the Speaker and got some popcorn and it was as off-the-chain tasty as it smelled.
Back in those days when a Congressional committee would hold a party for something…anything, really...they very rarely minded if postal workers walked into the committee room and asked for a drink.
One time, around Christmas, a staff member in the office of Minority Leader Robert Michel did a whole and entire Budweiser dump into my mail cart and I had to hide them, drinking a couple of them on the way to the 9:30 pm rendezvous with the postal truck that I HAD to make.
So to see the Capitol Grounds being invaded and trashed yesterday by a bunch of white supremacist insurrectionists and loons at the behest of The Damn Fool: yes, it was a bit much that they were trashing and looting the seat of the national government.
It was also the trashing and invading of a place where I recognized the nooks and crannies; where I would take a minute (if I was ahead of schedule for the 9:30 pm pickup) to stand silently in the Capitol Rotunda and to take it all in.
It was the trashing and invading of a place that was, truthfully, one of the starting points (in many ways) of my growing into young adulthood, taking responsibility for myself, and everything that all of that signifies.
I’m sad and damned angry about the events of yesterday, January 6, 2021, for all of those reasons.
And then some more.
Let’s read some pundits.
For the record, I agree with the Editorial Board of the Washington Post.
The president is unfit to remain in office for the next 14 days. Every second he retains the vast powers of the presidency is a threat to public order and national security. Vice President Pence, who had to be whisked off the Senate floor for his own protection, should immediately gather the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, declaring that Mr. Trump is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Congress, which would be required to ratify the action if Mr. Trump resisted, should do so. Mr. Pence should serve until President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20.
Failing that, senior Republicans must restrain the president. The insurrection came just as many top Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), were finally denouncing Mr. Trump’s antidemocratic campaign to overturn the election results. A depressing number of GOP legislators — such as Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.), Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (La.) — were prepared to support Mr. Trump’s effort, fueling the rage of those the president has duped into believing the election was stolen.
Renée Graham of the Boston Globe gets all of the vocabulary right.
Do not call what’s happening in Washington a protest.
It’s a white supremacist insurrection, a seditious attack on democracy. This riot is yet another battle in a Civil War that has never ended, one that generations of white people have waged through lynchings, murder, intimidation, oppression, odious policies, and systemic racism.
This is what President Trump — who should be arrested for inciting violence, never mind impeached again — wanted. He’s never cared about America, and he’d rather watch this nation burn than see it led by anyone else. Of course, the blame for this riot cannot end at the Oval Office. May it forever stain every Republican who refused to acknowledge Joe Biden as the president-elect. Let it shroud every GOP legislator who turned Trump’s loser pity party into a pointless effort to thwart the will of 81 million voters. Speak with shame the names of the men and women who fought against democracy and tried to pervert voter engagement into voter fraud. They own this horror, each and every one of them.
Anyone that is offended that I called these insurrections “loons” should read Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic.
We will find out shortly if today’s insurrection was also a super-spreader event. What I do know, after spending hours sponging up Trumpist paranoia, conspiracism, and cultishness, is that this gathering was not merely an attempted coup but also a mass-delusion event, not something that can be explained adequately through the prism of politics. Its chaos was rooted in psychological and theological phenomena, intensified by eschatological anxiety. One man I interviewed this morning, a resident of Texas who said his name was Don Johnson (I did not trust this to be his name), told me that the country was coming apart, and that this dissolution presaged the End Times. “It’s all in the Bible,” he said. “Everything is predicted. Donald Trump is in the Bible. Get yourself ready.”
The conflation of Trump and Jesus was a common theme at the rally. “Give it up if you believe in Jesus!” a man yelled near me. People cheered. “Give it up if you believe in Donald Trump!” Louder cheers.
I would not compromise on the matter of my mask, but the woman in the cat costume and her friends allowed me to come along anyway. We turned from 14th Street into the sea of people moving down Pennsylvania Avenue. It did not strike me, even then, that this mob would actually storm the Capitol. I assumed, in a non-insurrectionary failure of imagination, that they would gather on the Capitol’s sloping lawn, sing Lee Greenwood anthems, and curse Mitt Romney. There were Proud Boys—or at least Proud Boy–adjacent boys—in this group; they would not speak to me but were also not overtly hostile. (I noticed on two occasions groups of Proud Boy–looking men smoking marijuana, which, all things being equal, was a good thing.)
Erika D. Smith, writing for the Los Angeles Times, reminds us of the role that social media had to play in yesterday’s insurrection.
Twitter. Facebook. Instagram. YouTube. Google.
For years, the executives of these companies have known that their platforms serve as convenient breeding grounds for dangerous, right-wing conspiracy theories.
Remember when former President Obama warned Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that fake news was being on spread on Facebook and would influence the 2016 election and he dismissed it as “crazy”?
Remember Pizzagate, when a North Carolina man armed himself with a rifle and drove hundreds of miles to rescue children he believed were supposedly trapped in a sex-slave ring run out of a Washington pizzeria by a cabal of Democrats?
I do. Yet, somehow these executives — their fortunes reliant on people spending as much time in their online ecosystems as possible — haven’t done a whole heck of a lot to rid their platforms of such conspiracy theories that lead to real-world consequences. And this is in spite of the many grillings they’ve received by members of Congress, the last one in October.
What happened at the U.S. Capitol, with rioters disrupting the normally peaceful transfer of power between presidential administrations, can in many ways be traced back to the lack of urgency over such situations from social media companies.
Greg Bluestein of the Atlanta Journal Constitution on what Reverend Warnock’s and Jon Ossoff’s wins in the U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia means for Georgia politics.
There’s no doubt about it anymore. Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock swept the state’s U.S. Senate runoffs, a pair of stunning victories that flip control of the chamber and pave the way for Biden to pursue his legislative agenda in Congress.
The defeats of U.S. Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue cemented the transformation of Georgia from a Republican bastion into a full-fledged swing state.
Not only did Ossoff and Warnock edge out the incumbents, they did it in convincing fashion.
They outdid Biden’s margins across most of the state, consolidating Democratic gains not just in crucial metro Atlanta but also the rural “black belt” so named initially for the rich soil of the region, then later for those who tilled that fertile farmland.
And the incumbents struggled to peel away suburban moderates with the promise of divided government. Cobb and Gwinnett counties, former Republican strongholds that are now cornerstones of the Democratic coalition, only turned a deeper shade of blue.
It marked a striking metamorphosis. Until November, Georgia hadn’t voted Democratic in a presidential race since 1992 and hadn’t elected a Democratic statewide candidate since 2006. Over a nine-week stretch, Democrats broke both those losing streaks.
Joan Walsh/The Nation
First, let’s give credit to the nitty-gritty work of the ground game. The Democratic campaigns, the state party, and an uncountable number of outside groups knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors and made millions of calls and texts just since the last Election Day, November 3. After forgoing door-to-door canvassing for most of the fall election, they returned to the doors with a cadre of highly trained, mostly paid, Covid-safe canvassers. They delivered on their goals of elevating the Black vote and maintaining a higher-than-average young, Asian American Pacific Islander, and Latino vote.
They turned out the vote in Metro Atlanta, and its suburban counties that became a center of the resistance when Ossoff ran for Congress in 2017. And thanks to organizing by Black groups, and the candidacy of Raphael Warnock, who presides over the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic Ebenezer Baptist Church, they turned out an unexpected number of Black voters—urban, suburban and rural. In some smaller counties, black turnout was higher than in November.
In short, they manifested the vision of Stacey Abrams, who founded the New Georgia Project in 2013, arguing to many doubters that the state was turning purple, if not yet blue, thanks to demographic change—more voters of color plus more college-educated voters of every race, along with more liberal transplants from around the country. I won’t say Georgia is now blue—but it’s more blue than Iowa or Ohio, states where Democrats traditionally invest lots of money only to see them turn redder by the year. Georgia will get bluer still.
Noah Feldman, writing for Bloomberg, on the probable nomination U.S. Circuit Court Judge Merrick Garland as U.S. Attorney General.
Garland is an insider’s insider when it comes to understanding how the Department of Justice works — and what its proper function should be. Since 1978, when he clerked for Justice William Brennan at the Supreme Court, he has spent his entire career within the gravitational field of the building known as “main Justice,” located at 950 Pennsylvania Avenue. He was a special assistant to President Jimmy Carter’s attorney general Benjamin Civiletti; a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C.; a deputy assistant attorney general; and principal deputy associate attorney general. In between, he spent short stints at the venerable D.C. law firm Arnold and Porter. President Bill Clinton put him on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in 1995. The court is just a few blocks away from main Justice, and it hears many, many cases involving the federal government.
This insider status will be a huge help to Garland in running the Justice Department. The permanent staff will accept and respect him from day one. He knows how power works within the department’s highly complex bureaucracy and he will know how to choose and supervise his political appointees.
Carl Zimmer of the New York Times on how the U.S. needs a serious upgrade to even check for community spread of the U.K. variant of COVID-19.
The United States has no large-scale, nationwide system for checking coronavirus genomes for new mutations, including the ones carried by the new variant. About 1.4 million people test positive for the virus each week, but researchers are only doing genome sequencing — a method that can definitively spot the new variant — on fewer than 3,000 of those weekly samples. And that work is done by a patchwork of academic, state and commercial laboratories.
Scientists say that a national surveillance program would be able to determine just how widespread the new variant is and help contain emerging hot spots, extending the crucial window of time in which vulnerable people across the country could get vaccinated. That would cost several hundred million dollars or more. While that may seem like a steep price tag, it’s a tiny fraction of the $16 trillion in economic losses that the United States is estimated to have sustained because of Covid-19.
“We need some sort of leadership,” said Dr. Charles Chiu, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, whose team spotted some of the first California cases of the new variant. “This has to be a system that is implemented on a national level. Without that kind of dedicated support, it’s simply not going to get done.”
Maria Howard of The Conversation on what it would mean for Los Angeles County to declare and establish crisis standards of care because of COVID-19.
A crisis standards of care declaration takes uncomfortable decisions out the hands of doctors, such as when to reallocate a ventilator from a patient who is unlikely to survive to one whose chances are higher.
It triggers formal hospital or state triage protocols that help determine which patients get which resources. This can help lessen moral and psychological distress for doctors.
For patients, the declaration gives more insight into the level of treatment they can expect as they face medical systems that are short of resources.
Without a formal crisis standards of care declaration, decisions about who gets a hospital bed are made by doctors who are often not trained in this sort of decision-making. Medical training teaches doctors to pursue the best for each patient, but this is often impossible during a crisis. It can mean patients with little chance of survival continue to use scare resources while others who might have a better chance of survival go without.
The Angry Grammarian of the Philadelphia Inquirer wonders: who is “they”?
In his 62-minute call, Trump uttered the pronoun they 152 times: Roughly every 47th word out of his mouth was they, almost double the frequency of anyone else on the call. And in an unsettling number of those instances, it’s impossible to tell from context who they are.
“Early in the morning, they [all emphasis added] went to the table with the black robe and the black shield, and they pulled out the votes … they are burning their ballots, that they are shredding, shredding ballots and removing equipment. They’re changing the equipment on the Dominion machines … they say it’s not possible to have lost Georgia … they dropped a lot of votes in there late at night … why did they put the votes in three times? … they need more time for the big numbers … it is more illegal for you than it is for them because, you know, what they did and you’re not reporting it … they are removing machinery, and they’re moving it as fast as they can … they dumped ballots into Fulton County … there were 18,000 ballots, but they used them three times …”
Feel free to search for context. You won’t find it. The result is a bunch of nefarious actions performed by a shadowy, undefined, antecedent-less they.
Everyone have a good morning!