Good morning!
Apparently, this voting rights essay by Vann R. Newkirk II of The Atlantic has been posted for some time (since February) but The Atlantic had the essay headlined early this morning it’s still worth a read.
Record turnout in 2020 was the fruit of the immense investment by voting-rights organizations in participation, something that is not sustainable and will likely falter in less pivotal elections. More important, conspiracy theories among Trump’s camp about widespread fraud and cheating were animated primarily by voting in places with a large Black population, and fueled an insurrection in January, when hundreds of rioters overran the United States Capitol, waved the Confederate battle flag in its halls, and disrupted the congressional electoral count by force. Opposition to Black electoral power propels an antidemocratic front that will not likely dissipate with Trump gone. In fact, conservative lawmakers are currently targeting the very changes that helped more citizens vote in 2020.
To wit, in Georgia, where Joe Biden won on the strength of absentee ballots and where Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won riding a record wave of Black votes, Republicans have vowed to pass legislation making absentee voting more difficult, including potentially ending at-will absentee voting and eliminating ballot drop boxes. Texas, Pennsylvania, and Michigan face GOP-led efforts to limit mail-in voting. Even in the middle of an emergency expansion of ballot access necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic, a handful of red states actually tried to make it harder to vote.
Charles Blow of the
New York Times sounds sick, tired, and weary about the futility of even hoping to do something about the nation’s gun violence problem...and who can blame him?
As incessant as mass shootings have become in this country, so has the ritual in their wake to respond to them, a ritual that ultimately, inevitably unravels.
I hate to sound defeatist, but I feel defeated.
Yes, there are common-sense gun safety advocates who are making some headway, particularly on the state and local levels. But comprehensive federal gun legislation remains elusive, if not impossible.
Our anomalous gun culture and the shocking number of gun deaths and the prevalence of guns — including military-style weapons — in our society simply don’t seem to convince enough politicians to take action.
Nor are the tens of thousands of Americans we lose to guns each year enough to inspire action. We have, on some level, simply absorbed that abominable number of deaths as normal, or perhaps collateral damage, in a society with a gun culture like ours.
I noticed that there are quite a few pieces on individual electoral races so we will start here with Geoffrey Skelley’s piece in FiveThirtyEight on the gubernatorial race in Virginia later on this year.
Virginia’s recent political leanings may give Democrats the upper hand, but Republicans might benefit from a friendlier electoral environment because of the potential for a backlash against President Biden and the Democrats. After all, there’s a history of that. From 1977 to 2017, there was only one election — 2013 — in which the party in the White House won Virginia’s governorship. So national Republicans will certainly hope anti-Democratic sentiments show themselves in Virginia this November and act as a harbinger of things to come in 2022.
Primaries, with their broader electorate, traditionally have been seen as more likely to choose nominees who have more appeal with the general electorate, while conventions with their conservative-activist appeal have tended to favor more ideological candidates. But that doesn’t appear to reflect the state party’s thinking this year. State party leaders
decided to go with a convention in December, in large part to
prevent one of their most ideologically divisive candidates from winning: state Sen. Amanda Chase.
Laurie Roberts of the
Arizona Republic writes about the troubles that Senator Kyrsten Sinema is seeing in the polling
If ever there was a reason why Sen. Kyrsten Sinema might change her mind and vote to end the filibuster, here it comes.
A new poll by OH Predictive Insights indicates a majority of independent voters in Arizona – the ones Sinema will need if she wants to be more than a one-term senator – favor an increase in the federal minimum wage.
Fifty-two percent of Arizona independents favor increasing it to $15 an hour, according to the poll, taken just after Sinema's vote against putting a minimum wage hike in the COVID relief bill.
So do 72% of Democrats.
And even 22% of Republicans.
Sinema doesn’t need to concern herself with the 67% of Republicans who oppose moving to a $15 minimum wage.
Or with the 54% of Republicans who, according to the poll, dislike her. She could make like a brick wall and allow Democratic proposals to slam up against her until they turn to dust and 54% of Republicans still will dislike her, even as they applaud her principled stand on maintaining the filibuster.
But Sinema can’t lose independents. She is, after all, not all that popular with Democrats and she's bleeding support from party ranks since her thumbs down vote on the minimum wage earlier this month.
The New York Times’ Trip Gabriel writes about Republican fears that open seats in Alabama and Missouri, seats now controlled by Republicans, could be in danger of flipping.
...in the Trump era, the pursuit of his endorsement is all-consuming, and absent Mr. Trump’s blessing, there is no mechanism for clearing a cluttered primary field. With the former president focused elsewhere — on settling scores against Republicans who advanced his impeachment or showed insufficient loyalty — a combative Senate primary season is in store for the 2022 midterms, when Republicans who hope to regain the majority face a difficult map. They are fighting to hold on to five open seats after a wave of retirements of establishment figures, and even deep-red Missouri and Alabama pose potential headaches.
A scandal-haunted former Missouri governor, Eric Greitens, entered the race on Monday to replace the retiring Senator Roy Blunt. His candidacy set off a four-alarm fire with state party leaders, who fear that Mr. Greitens may squeak through a crowded primary field, only to lose a winnable seat to a Democrat.
In Alabama, the entry of Representative Mo Brooks, a staunch but lackluster Trump supporter, into the race for the seat being vacated by Senator Richard C. Shelby raised a different set of fears with activists: that Mr. Brooks, who badly lost a previous statewide race, would cause waves of Republican voters, especially women, to sit out the off-year election and crack open the door in a ruby red state for a Democrat.
I will link...but not excerpt The Nation’s Joan Walsh’s piece this morning asking whether SCOTUS judge Stephen Breyer should retire.
That’s because I am really digging Miss Walsh’s longer piece on Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
Throughout her life, Yellen has been known as a collector—of rocks, stamps, and also firsts. She is the first person to hold the nation’s top three economic jobs (in addition to being treasury secretary and running the Fed, she chaired President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers). In 1971, she was the only woman to graduate with a doctorate in economics from Yale University. A leader over the last quarter-century in economic policy-making, Yellen will need all that experience in a role that makes her the captain of efforts to right the Covid-19-battered economy while also addressing the underlying inequities the pandemic exposed.
***
Yellen will need more than a stellar résumé, pop culture adulation, and even bipartisan admiration to do her job well. The treasury secretary’s role is crucial, if poorly understood. She (or he) is the top salesperson for the president’s overall approach to the economy. Under Republicans, over the last half century at least, that has meant liberating the so-called free market by pushing tax cuts and corporate deregulation. Under Democrats—but especially, it seems, under Biden, at least so far—it has meant a robust defense of government spending (or investment, as Yellen likes to call it) to heal an economy cratered by Covid and tilted even more toward the white and wealthy by Trump’s financial deregulation spree.
Brad Lendon of CNN writes about the strategic implications of North Korea’s Thursday’s missile launch
Perhaps the most troubling statement in the CFR report is this: "North Korea could have more than sixty nuclear weapons, according to analysts' estimates, and has successfully tested missiles that could strike the United States with a nuclear warhead."
But Japan, America's most important ally in the Pacific and home to numerous US military bases housing tens of thousands of US personnel, was alarmed.
Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga called the twin launches, which were fired in Japan's direction, "a threat to the peace and security" of his country.
Alex Ward writes for Vox on what I believe is a North Korean missile launch from earlier in the week than yesterday’s that does provide evidence the Biden Administration appears to be pretty unbothered by the recent North Korean missile tests...for now.
The administration’s collective shrug is the right response, most experts told me. “It seems to me that these latest launches were probably not actually intended as a challenge to the Biden administration at all,” said Markus Garlauskas, the US national intelligence officer for North Korea from 2014 to 2020.
There are good reasons why. Former President Donald Trump implicitly made a deal with North Korea while he was in office: Test anything you want as long as it’s not an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) or a nuclear weapon that could threaten America. Short of that, go nuts.
That stance wasn’t a wise one, experts told me at the time, as it essentially allowed Pyongyang to steadily improve its arsenal with no repercussions. But experts did note that Trump’s dictum helped lower tensions by not turning every missile launch into a crisis requiring a forceful American response.
It looks as though Pyongyang learned from its experience with Trump and is still abiding by that general deal. North Korea launched what appear to be short-range cruise missiles that don’t violate UN Security Council resolutions on the country’s weaponry. In other words, the North Korean regime had every right to try out its missiles and plunge them into the sea.
North Korea didn’t even announce the test as it usually does, signaling even Pyongyang felt it was all routine. Some experts, and even Biden administration officials, say the launches were part of “normal military activity” by North Korean forces.
George Will of the Washington Post writes about Biden’s “Trumanesque” China policy (yes, it feels weird posting a George Will column here).
Biden and Blinken surely do not expect that the competition with China will end so decisively, if at all. China cannot be described, as the Soviet Union was, as “Upper Volta with rockets.” Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said in the 1980s, while rising Asian nations — although not yet China — were flooding the world with microcircuitry, the Soviet Union was “peddling fish eggs and furs, the trading goods of a hunter-gatherer society.” Because, however, China is woven into the global economy, it has much to lose from rhetoric accurately depicting it as barbarous and dangerous.
Corporate America is making endless woke gestures about this nation’s sinfulness while making fortunes off products of China’s forced labor, and not making a peep that could offend the Leninist tyrants and complicate access to China’s consumers. This straddle is becoming awkward. Five months before the previous secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, made it U.S. policy to categorize China’s savagery toward millions of Uyghurs as “genocide,” candidate Biden described it as such.
Jens Thurau of Deutsche Welle writes about the backlash against German Chancellor Angela Merkel over her most recently proposed COVID lockdown.
The German government is presenting a very sorry picture at the end of March 2021 with regard to its pandemic management. And there is one thought, barely conceivable just a few weeks ago, that is hard to dislodge: Will Chancellor Angela Merkel once again manage to give a meaningful structure to the fight against the coronavirus? Or will she give up? Or even have to step down?
It's not likely to go that far. Who would want to take over in the midst of the most difficult political crisis in decades? But the decline in authority of this internationally respected leader in her own country is breathtaking.
At the beginning of the week, at her energetic behest, the round table of state premiers agreed to a four-week extension of the lockdown, including a stricter shutdown over Easter as a kind of forced rest period. But hardly anybody saw the point in a five-day break like that, especially as most people in Germany didn't seem to feel like celebrating wildly or traveling anyway. However, Merkel got her way. She apparently held a gun to the heads of the leaders, some of whom wanted to allow light forms of Easter tourism, and is reported to have signaled that if they didn't go along with her plan, she would drop the entire agreement.
Belen Fernandez/writes for AlJazeera on the continuing disproportionate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on women worldwide...in a variety of ways.
From Argentina to Malaysia and Sudan to the United Kingdom to the United States, there has been a surge in reports of violence against women. To be sure, there are more opportunities for domestic violence when people are confined to domestic space.
And yet the pandemic has disproportionately affected women in other ways, as well.
In numerous countries, females are overly represented in industries, such as hospitality and food services, that have suffered high job losses.
Globally, unpaid care and domestic work – the brunt of which also inevitably falls to women – has increased greatly in light of school closures and the like. Women in the US and elsewhere have been forced to quit their jobs in order to take care of their children, highlighting one of capitalism’s brutal conundrums: How, in the end, do you “take care” of anyone if you do not have an income?
According to a 2019 survey of 104 countries, women comprise some 67 percent of the healthcare workforce, meaning they are at disproportionate risk on the COVID-19 front lines. They also are, on average, paid less than their male counterparts in the medical sector.
At the same time, in many places, the pandemic has seriously curtailed sexual and reproductive health services, depriving women and girls of their rights.
Rachel Cohrs of STATnews reports that we may be getting some “bipartisan cooperation” on future pandemic preparedness.
Already, a duo of powerful senators has pledged, publicly, to work together on legislation that will “make sure nothing like [Covid-19] ever happens again,” as the influential Democratic Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.) put it. They will work, too, to diagnose the problems and important lessons to be learned from Covid-19. There are several potential ways they could seek to pass a future bill, including attaching it to a major infrastructure package President Biden is planning to push this year.
Murray’s Republican counterpart atop the Senate’s health panel, Sen. Richard Burr (N.C.), even hired a top Trump administration pandemic preparedness official to help with the work. Robert Kadlec, who had a front-row seat to the pandemic as Trump’s HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response, will soon advise the Senate health committee, a committee aide confirmed to STAT.
The lawmakers’ public commitment is the clearest indication yet that the coronavirus pandemic may, as public health advocates hope, snap lawmakers out of a longstanding pattern of funding public health programs in a panic, then letting dollars lag over time.
“While Covid response funding has been extremely important, it is not a substitute for sustained funding. You lose people, and you lose expertise. You don’t need to update your technology once, you need to do it over time,” said Dara Lieberman, the director of government relations for the public health policy group Trust for America’s Health.
It seems as if I’ve been getting irritating phone calls every day that sound like scams, especially calls involving auto insurance. Here’s WIRED’s Ankush Khardori with a similar theme, this one about internet scams and what the DOJ may and should be able to do about them.
Since the start of the pandemic, the scope and frequency of this criminal activity has become noticeably worse. Online fraudsters have stolen government relief checks, sold fake test kits and vaccines, and exploited the altruistic impulses of the American public through fake charities. But the broader failure has wreaked incalculable harm on the American public for years, including those in our most vulnerable and less tech-savvy populations, like senior citizens. The FBI’s most recent report makes it clear that the government needs to dramatically step up and rethink its approach to combating internet-based fraud—including how it tracks this problem, as well as how it can punish and deter these crimes more effectively going forward.
For two decades, the FBI’s numbers on internet crime have been steadily rising. What’s more, these figures probably understate the actual amount by many orders of magnitude. There are two reasons for this: First, the government does not conduct surveys to gather data on the prevalence of financial fraud as it does for other crimes. And second, fraud in general is a notoriously under-reported crime, as many people are embarrassed to report that they’ve been fooled.
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One major reason that internet fraud remains such a persistent and vexing problem is that the Justice Department has never made it a real priority—in part because these kinds of cases are not particularly attractive to prosecutors. Victim losses on an individual basis tend to be relatively small and widely dispersed. A substantial amount of this crime also originates abroad, and it can be hard and bureaucratically cumbersome to obtain evidence from foreign governments—particularly from countries where these scams comprise
a large, de facto industry that employs many people. It is also far more challenging to find and secure cooperating insider witnesses when the perpetrators are beyond our borders. And even under the best of circumstances, the large body of documentary evidence that fraud cases involve can be exceedingly difficult to gather and review. If you manage to overcome all of those obstacles, you may still end up having to deal with years of extradition-related litigation before anyone ever sees the inside of a courtroom. Making matters worse, much of the press does not treat these cases as particularly newsworthy—itself a symptom of how routine internet fraud has become—and
prosecutors like being in the press.
Renée Graham of the Boston Globe writes a very personal piece on the prospect of getting a COVID-19 vaccine when she has a fear of needles.
I have trypanophobia.
Simply put, that’s an extreme fear of medical procedures involving injections or needles. While common in childhood, most people outgrow it. I didn’t. I’ve handled snakes and rats without flinching. I’ve jumped out of a plane at nearly 14,000 feet. But few things have undone me like my fear of needles, which caused me to avoid doctors for decades.
Only after reading about a healthy 39-year-old man who nearly died from the flu, did I finally get another flu shot, my first in about 40 years. In full view of worried co-workers, I squirmed, got teary, and almost fainted. I swore I wouldn’t do it again.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened.
After quarantining and living a life interrupted for months, I was overjoyed when effective vaccines became available. Yet I knew that my needle phobia was nearly as great as my fear of contracting the virus itself.
Finally this morning, the sheer excellence of the writing in this piece by the New Yorker’s Jill Lepore about what history and literature tells us about the end of pandemics is the sole reason I excerpted the essay.
Every plague leaves its mark on the world: crosses in our graveyards, blots of ink on our imaginations. Edgar Allan Poe had witnessed the ravages of cholera in Philadelphia, and he likely knew the story of how, in Paris, in 1832, the disease had struck at a ball, where guests turned violet blue beneath their masks. In Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death,” from 1842, Prince Prospero (“happy and dauntless and sagacious”) has fled a pestilence—a plague that stains its victims’ faces crimson—to live in grotesque luxury with a thousand of his noblemen and women in a secluded abbey, behind walls gated with iron. At a lavish masquerade ball, a tall, gaunt guest arrives to ruin their careless fun. He is dressed as a dead man: “The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have difficulty in detecting the cheat.” He is dressed as the Red Death itself: “His vesture was dabbled in blood—and his broad brow, with all the features of his face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.” Everyone dies, and because this is Poe, they die as an ebony clock tolls midnight (after which, even the clock dies): “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
More often, a remnant of life survives—a reminder of just how much has been lost. In Jack London’s “The Scarlet Plague,” published not long before the 1918 flu pandemic, a contagion kills nearly everyone on the planet; the story is set in 2073, sixty years after the imagined outbreak, when a handful survive, unlettered, “skin-clad and barbaric.” One very, very old man who, a half century before, had been an English professor at Berkeley predicts good news: “We are increasing rapidly and making ready for a new climb toward civilization.” Still, he isn’t terrifically optimistic, noting, “It will be slow, very slow; we have so far to climb. We fell so hopelessly far. If only one physicist or one chemist had survived! But it was not to be, and we have forgotten everything.” For this reason, he has built a sort of ark—a library—hidden in a cave. “I have stored many books,” he tells his illiterate grandsons. “In them is great wisdom. Also, with them, I have placed a key to the alphabet, so that one who knows picture-writing may also know print. Some day men will read again.”
Everyone have a good morning!