Ottawa Citizen:
The “Freedom Convoy” that converged in Ottawa on Jan. 28 began in response to the federal government’s move to require that Canadian truck drivers crossing the U.S. border be fully vaccinated, but has evolved into a protest of all public health measures aimed at fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizers say they will not end their protest until all measures are dropped.
NY Times:
As Protest Paralyzes Canada’s Capital, Far-Right Activists Abroad Embrace It
It may be only a few hundred demonstrators occupying Ottawa’s streets to protest government overreach, but their message has aroused passions around the world.
Some were clearly on the fringe, wearing Nazi symbols and desecrating public monuments. But many described themselves as ordinary Canadians driven to take to the streets by desperation.
“They keep doing the same thing, and it’s not working,” said Nicole Vandelaar, a 31-year-old hairdresser protesting in the capital. “They have to do something else. No more lockdowns. Let us live our lives.”
Harold Meyerson/TAP:
Why Trucking Can’t Deliver the Goods
The yearly turnover rate among long-haul truckers is 94%. And you wonder why you’re not getting your orders on time?
According to a 2019 study by the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley, the median annual pre-tax income of [Omar] Alvarez and his fellow port truckers, once their expenses are factored in, is a munificent $28,000.
“We have no health insurance,” Alvarez says. Like the majority of port truckers, he’s an immigrant who doesn’t qualify for Medicaid. “When I need to see a doctor,” he says, “I drive [not in his truck] to Tijuana.”
Perhaps one-fifth of port truckers actually are independent contractors; nearly everyone else is, like Alvarez, misclassified as independents. Over the past decade, dozens of lawsuits from misclassified drivers have resulted in judgments affirming that they’ve been misclassified and awarding them compensation from the companies that misclassified them. XPO recently paid a $30 million fine to a large number of its drivers. But neither XPO nor any of the other fined companies have stopped misclassification. It’s cheaper for them to pay a fine than to pay their drivers a living wage.
Not surprisingly, given the long waits and meager rewards, a lot of drivers have simply stopped showing up. According to Gene Seroka, the executive director of the Port of L.A., fully 30 percent of the port’s 12,000 drivers no longer show up on weekdays, a percentage that rises to 50 percent on weekends. Once the waits exceed six hours, as they now sometimes do, drivers would run the risk of exceeding the 11-hour federal limit on trucker workdays if they then were to actually get a load—which means the port must turn them away, and they’ll have spent an entire workday for no pay at all.
And you wonder why the supply chain isn’t working very well?
This, however, is not what the Ottawa sitch is about.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
The plan to ‘Trump-proof’ 2024 gets a big boost — from Donald Trump
As frustrating as Sen. Joe Manchin III has been in the past year or so, the West Virginia Democrat may have found the sweet spot on a very big question: How to get 10 GOP senators to support a plan to safeguard our elections against a rerun of Donald Trump’s 2020 coup effort.
That sweet spot is this: Demonstrate that the extraordinary new revelations we’ve seen in recent days about that coup attempt strengthen the case for reform — without mentioning Trump himself.
Manchin is leading a bipartisan group of senators who are examining how to reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887, or ECA, which governs how presidential electors are counted. Manchin declared Sunday on CNN that the coup effort underscored the case for action.
“What really caused the insurrection?” Manchin said. “They thought there was ambiguity” and an “avenue they could go through to overturn the election. Because there was.” …
The core point here is that the bipartisan group appears focused on the actual threats that loom. In 2024, a very real threat is that in an election that comes down to one state, a single GOP governor could send a fake slate of electors and a GOP-controlled House could count them.
The Times:
How fake news infected Britain
When Boris Johnson invoked Jimmy Savile he brought an online conspiracy theory into the heart of public life. We should be braced for even bigger lies to take hold, says Rosamund Urwin
The minister whose job it is to tackle disinformation could only squirm when asked about his boss’s predilection for spreading it. In the House of Commons the day before, Boris Johnson had included the name of Jimmy Savile in an attack on the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer — a conspiracy theory straight out of far-right circles online. Yet Chris Philp, the minister for tech and the digital economy, refused to condemn Johnson during his appearance before the digital, culture, media and sport committee on Tuesday. As John Nicolson, the Scottish National Party MP who quizzed Philp, asks: “If you can’t trust the disinformation minister to handle disinformation, who can you trust?”
Johnson’s smear — and Philp’s failure to admit it was misleading — shows how disinformation and conspiracy theories have taken root at the centre of British life. It is no longer a sickness of the darker reaches of the internet or of our American counterparts; we have caught the disease too. The country is awash with misinformation, from vaccine disbelievers on Thursday night’s Question Time trying to lecture the experts, to our political overlords’ distortions, equivocations and outright lies.
Max Boot/WaPo:
The GOP has become the Jan. 6 Party. It stands for insurrection and authoritarianism.
It’s true that former vice president Mike Pence on Friday belatedly condemned Trump’s attempt to overturn the election as “un-American.” Good for him. But he has much less support than Trump does. He doesn’t speak for the party. The RNC does. That means the GOP has become the Jan. 6 Party. It stands for insurrection and authoritarianism.
Opposing the Jan. 6 committee is only a small part of the GOP’s antidemocratic agenda. Republican legislatures are
limiting voting rights, ostensibly to fight nonexistent voter fraud, while MAGA minions run for positions
overseeing elections to ensure that Trump will never lose again.
David Rothkopf and Bernard Schwartz/Daily Beast:
Biden, Democrats, and America All Have Reason to Be Optimistic
President Joe Biden is an optimist. It’s just who he is. Almost every time he speaks in public he talks about American “possibilities” and his belief that a better future lies ahead.
That optimism might seem out of place based on many of the commentaries marking the completion of the president’s first year in office. But, contrary to conventional wisdom, not only does Biden have reason for optimism as he looks ahead to 2022, so do his fellow Democrats and all Americans…
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement is an example of how the winds of political fortune can blow in the president’s direction. Biden now has the chance to follow through on his promise to appoint the first Black woman to the high court—a choice and a confirmation process that could energize a key part of his base.
In addition—also looking at the court—potentially broadly unpopular decisions undercutting Roe v. Wade or expanding gun rights later this year could produce a backlash against the GOP-dominated court and also mobilize major Democratic constituencies.