Whatever you think you know about WV voters is wrong, for all values of you including Joe Manchin. Yes, they are hugely Trumpish, and claim to support the filibuster, but they are incredibly on board with Biden’s agenda on covid, jobs, and voting. We have the numbers. Even the coal miners have come out for renewable energy and jobs. (Data and links below)
For those who have not been following L’Affaire Manchin closely, here is him pretending to explain why he won’t vote for a voting rights bill that he sponsored.
Charleston Gazette-Mail
Joe Manchin: Why I’m voting against the For the People Act
I have always said, “If I can’t go home and explain it, I can’t vote for it.” And I cannot explain strictly partisan election reform or blowing up the Senate rules to expedite one party’s agenda.
Oh, yes, Joe, of course.
Because expanding voting rights has always been bipartisan, right? During Dred Scott, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Plessey v. Ferguson, all of the filibusters against the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, Massive Resistance, the Dixiecrats, the Republican Southern Strategy…
/s
Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, but that was back when we had a three-party system of
- Republicans still sometimes remembering they were the party of Lincoln
- Northern increasingly liberal Democrats
- Southern Segregationist Democrats
any two of which could claim at any moment to have always been in an alliance against the third, just like in Orwell’s 1984. So the Republicans and the liberal Democrats were in an off-and-on alliance right up until the moment when they weren’t, and never had been, and Democrats were Communist spawn of the Devil.
But no more. Now Democrats are a clear majority nationwide, big enough to overcome all of the previous gerrymanders and voter suppression tactics. And look! in West Virginia, too!
West Virginia Opinion on Biden Proposals
|
support |
oppose |
American Rescue Plan (Covid Relief) |
64% |
31% |
American jobs plan |
68% |
29% |
for the people act |
79% |
15% |
End Citizens United/Global Strategy Group/ALG Research 4/14-4/18, +/- 4%
So we pass those bills, and b-I-N-G-O we start winning in the seemingly deep dark red states, such as Georgia used to be.
Wait, let’s see a picture of what was in that table.
79%!!!
In West Virginia!!
79%!!!
In West Virginia!!
Wait, wait, wait. What? Can that be true? 76% of Republicans in West Virginia told pollsters that they support the For the People Act? And Joe Manchin can’t explain supporting it to these same people?
Here are those numbers again in tabular form.
FOR THE PEOPLE ACT
wEST vIRGINIA LIKELY VOTERS
|
dEMOCRATS |
INDEPENDENTS |
REPUBLICANS |
SUPPORT |
81% |
79% |
76% |
OPPOSE |
15% |
15% |
16% |
End Citizens United/Global Strategy Group/ALG Research 4/14-4/18, +/- 4%
If that still doesn’t work for you, Joe, listen to this then. This is you, Joe. Your dream come true.
WOULD YOU VOTE FOR SEN. MANCHIN IF HE SUPPORTED VOTING AND ELECTION LEGISLATION?
MORE LIKELY |
33% |
LESS LIKELY |
12% |
End Citizens United/Global Strategy Group/ALG Research 4/14-4/18, +/- 4%
And this.
FILIBUSTER
wEST VIRGINIA LIKELY VOTERS
ELIMINATED |
11% |
REFORMED |
32% |
DOESN’T MATTER |
8% |
NO CHANGES |
43% |
End Citizens United/Global Strategy Group/ALG Research 4/14-4/18, +/- 4%
That’s an actual majority, 11%+32%+8%=51% for either eliminating or reforming the filibuster or not caring which. Joe, only a few months ago you were saying that you were willing to bring the pain to the Rs with a talking filibuster, or even a reverse filibuster. (That would mean Rs having to have 40 Senators on the floor to keep a filibuster going.)
Manchin wants to make filibuster 'painful' to use
Who got to you, Joe? It wasn’t the voters, we know that.
Other Voices
In exchange for job retraining, wage replacement, and preferential hiring for out-of-work coal miners, the United Mine Workers of America would support the transition away from carbon-polluting fossil fuels. It’s also calling for tax incentives to build portions of the renewable energy supply chain in coal country.
Manchin suggested that pieces of the electric vehicle supply chain could be moved into the region to add jobs, particularly in the area of battery manufacturing. The US has not taken adequate steps to make batteries domestically, he said. “It’s a shame that we’ve gone down this path, but we’ve made no provisions at all to manufacture and have the right resources it takes to manufacture batteries,” Manchin said.
I wrote about that more than a year ago.
The death of coal in the United States has not been exaggerated. Employment has dropped by nearly half over the past decade as cleaner and cheaper alternatives pushed the once-dominant fuel to the wayside. And what’s more, President Joe Biden’s plans could speed up the trend.
It’s against this backdrop that the United Mine Workers of America, the country’s largest union representing coal miners, announced on Monday that it supported a renewable energy future — provided that miners get “good-paying jobs” in return. The union indicated that it would support Biden’s climate policies if the administration laid out a comprehensive strategy for helping communities whose livelihood still relies on coal.
Jobs, cleaning up the environment, and sticking it to the coal barons. What more can you ask?
Covid
President Biden is set to announce that the United States has bought 500 million doses of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine to donate to COVAX, which is distributing vaccines to countries that cannot afford to buy enough shots.
Biden To Announce Plans To Donate 500 Million Pfizer Vaccines To Countries In Need
With an option to buy 200 million more.
Excellent. As I was saying only yesterday about a private donation of 50 million doses for Africa, we don’t need much more than a dozen times this. There is plenty of opportunity here. China? Europe? Not India right now, but maybe next year? Russia? Um, with what strings attached?
Animals
Wanna watch a hippo destroy a full watermelon with one bite? Of course you do. A female hippo's bite is measured at 1,800 lbs-force per square inch, according to Popular Science
Deep conversation between father & daughter | Leo & Lilly |Leo The Beagle
Science
This is an important collection of articles about race in the histories of archaeology. #OpenAccess
Bulletin of the History of Archaeology
Special collection of short articles reflecting on the historical construction of inequality and race in the histories of archaeology #inequality #race #historyofarchaeology #openaccess http://doi.org/10.5334/bha-660
LIGO Scientific Collaboration News
Results of a search for intermediate-mass black holes
31 May 2021 --The LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA collaborations report the results of a dedicated search for intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs), using data from the third observing run of the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors. The paper describing these new results is now available on the ArXiv preprint server or from here. In this new search we again found the event GW190521, the first confirmed intermediate-mass black hole — as previously reported in September 2020 — but with higher significance. We also found some other possible IMBH candidates, but none qualify as significant. However, the results of our search have improved our understanding of the astrophysical merger rates of IMBH binaries. Read more about this analysis in the the science summary.
LIGO/Virgo detectors place constraints on dark photon dark matter
27 May 2021 --The LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA collaborations have performed the collaboration's first search for dark photon dark matter using data from LIGO and Virgo's third observing run. The search used two methods to strongly constrain the interaction of dark photons with gravitational-wave interferometers to less than one part in 1046 for a wide range of the parameter space. The paper describing these new results is now available on the ArXiv preprint server. Though no signal was found, the constraints obtained from this search surpass existing ones by several orders of magnitude and show how interferometers can be used as particle physics laboratories. Read more about this analysis in the science summary.
First I’ve heard of dark photons.
The dark photon (also hidden, heavy, para-, or secluded photon) is a hypothetical hidden sector particle, proposed as a force carrier similar to the photon of electromagnetism but potentially connected to dark matter.[1] In a minimal scenario, this new force can be introduced by extending the gauge group of the Standard Model of Particle Physics with a new abelian U(1) gauge symmetry. The corresponding new spin-1 gauge boson (i.e., the dark photon) can then couple very weakly to electrically charged particles through kinetic mixing with the ordinary photon[2] and could thus be detected. The dark photon can also interact with the Standard Model if some of the fermions are charged under the new abelian group.[3] The possible charging arrangements are restricted by a number of consistency requirements such as anomaly cancellation and constraints coming from Yukawa matrices.
Боже мой! Thees, I know, from nahthink! (H/T Tom Lehrer)
Well, I recognize all of the words, at least.
Webinar to discuss recent search for lensing signatures in gravitational wave observations
24 May 2020 -- On 27 May 2021, at 10:00am Eastern US time (2PM UTC) the LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA Collaborations will host a webinar on "Search for lensing signatures in the gravitational-wave observations from the first-half of LIGO-Virgo's third observing run." This will present results from our recent paper: arXiv:2105.06384. An abstract and additional details can be found at this pdf flyer. The Zoom webinar is open to the public; register for it at this link. A recording can be found below.
Weirdness
The transcript of Don McGann’s not-actually-secret but not televised testimony to Congress was released yesterday.
Two years after TFG tried to get McGann to commit multiple obstructions of justice.
I will leave comments on this development to others.
President Biden quietly begins efforts to start closing Guantánamo ahead of 20th anniversary of 9/11.
Doctor Who: Nomination for best line in all the show