WaPo:
Republicans block cap on millions of patients’ insulin costs
GOP senators move to strip a $35 price cap on insulin under private insurance from the Inflation Reduction Act
Republican lawmakers on Sunday successfully stripped a $35 price cap on the cost of insulin for many patients from the ambitious legislative package Democrats are moving through Congress this weekend, invoking arcane Senate rules to jettison the measure.
Jane Meyer/New Yorker:
State Legislatures Are Torching Democracy
Even in moderate places like Ohio, gerrymandering has let unchecked Republicans pass extremist laws that could never make it through Congress.
Longtime Ohio politicians have been shocked by the state’s transformation into a center of extremist legislation, not just on abortion but on such divisive issues as guns and transgender rights. Ted Strickland, a Democrat who served as governor between 2007 and 2011, told me, “The legislature is as barbaric, primitive, and Neanderthal as any in the country. It’s really troubling.” When he was governor, he recalled, the two parties worked reasonably well together, but politics in Ohio “has changed.” The story is similar in several other states with reputations for being moderate, such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania: their legislatures have also begun proposing laws so far to the right that they could never be passed in the U.S. Congress.
Ken White (aka Popehat)/Substack:
When modern American political culture winds up in court, the effects are similar. The participants are speaking different languages, and using language in different ways. Courts are focused on a taxonomy of words. Are they factual? Are they opinion? Are they literal or figurative? Courts also care about the literal truth of words. That’s central to defamation law — it’s not defamatory unless it was false. Courts are about analysis, and the entire project of the law is about words meaning specific things.
But modern American political culture is emotive and even artistic. It uses language like a musician uses notes or an impressionist uses brush strokes. Whether it’s Marjorie Taylor Greene talking about Bill Gates' efforts to colonize our bowels through "peach tree dishes" or Alex Jones ranting about gay frogs, modern politicians and pundits use language to convey feelings and attitudes and values, not specific meanings. If you demand Alex Jones defend the specific meaning of his words, it’s like demanding your eight-year-old defend his statement that his birthday party was the best day ever when previously that’s what he said about Disneyland. Trump was the Salvador Dali of this movement, his speeches full of melting clocks of ire and resentment. As an artist of lies he was prolific.
Reuters:
Explainer: What's next for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones
Jones faces a separate trial over damages in the same Austin court for defaming the family of another victim of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting. His lawyer said Friday that the case is on pause due to his company's bankruptcy.
Jones is due to stand trial to decide damages in a different case in Waterbury, Connecticut, after he was found liable by default judgment for defaming families of several Sandy Hook victims with falsehoods about the shooting that killed 20 children and six staff in Newtown, Connecticut.
Jones had called the shooting a hoax by the U.S. government, staged using crisis actors to serve as a pretext for taking away Americans' guns. He has since acknowledged that the massacre was real.
The Connecticut trial, which had been set to begin in September, was put on hold after Jones' company, Free Speech Systems LLC, declared bankruptcy last week. Jones said during a Monday broadcast of his Infowars program that the filing will help the company stay on the air while it appeals.
Jacobin:
A Russian Sociologist Explains Why Putin’s War Is Going Even Worse Than It Looks
OREN BALHORN
So, you don’t think the majority supports the war?
BORIS KAGARLITSKY
That’s the most interesting sociological and political problem: Russian people are neither for the war nor against it. They do not react to the war.
Of course, there are opinion polls published by pro-Kremlin media which are enthusiastically quoted by Western and some pro-Ukrainian sources, trying to prove that all Russians support Putin and are fascists. But that has nothing to do with reality. As a sociologist, I can confirm that since the war, the number of people who agree to respond to opinion polls has collapsed to a level that is totally unrepresentative. Before the war it was below 30 percent, which is already very low. Now, it’s considered a big success when 10 percent agree to respond. Usually it’s 5 to 7 percent.
Of those 5 percent, about 65 to 70 percent support the war. There are two interpretations of this data. One, mostly shared by the liberal opposition, is that people are simply afraid to answer. I think that’s not exactly the case. Among those 95 percent who refuse to respond, there could be a considerable number who are against the war but don’t dare say so. My suspicion, however — which of course I cannot prove — is that most people don’t have any opinion at all.
And the explanation of why that is, is fascinating. Must read.
Tom Krattenmaker/OnlySky:
Young progressives have every right to feel disaffected. They should vote anyway.
Democratic leadership might be old and lame, but the Republicans are equally old and actually dangerous.
Overview:
Voting on the basis of which party sucks less is not inspiring. But often that’s what it comes down to in a political system driven by negative polarization and the extreme threat posed by one of the two major parties.
Rex Huppke/USA today:
Lower gas prices, the PACT Act and other ways Democrats are being mean to Republicans
They’re also trying to help veterans and lower inflation. All this governing is an outrage that threatens the long-standing Republican philosophy of only helping the rich.
You may have noticed high gas prices have swiftly and rudely become less high, a trend that, if it continues, threatens to rob Republicans of a glorious midterm election cudgel.
Democrats are undoubtedly to blame, but lowering gas prices isn’t the only way they’re sticking it to well-meaning Republicans. They’re also trying to help veterans and passing legislation aimed at lowering inflation.
All this governing is an outrage and a clear political shot at the long-standing Republican philosophy that says the government shall help only rich people.
Ronald Brownstein/Atlantic:
Democrats Might Avoid a Midterm Wipeout
White-collar suburban voters will play an outsize role in upcoming elections.
Polls indicate that many college-educated center-right voters have soured on the performance of Biden and the Democrats controlling both congressional chambers. Yet in Tudor Dixon, the GOP gubernatorial nominee in Michigan, and Blake Masters, the party’s Senate selection in Arizona, Republicans have chosen nominees suited less to recapturing socially moderate white-collar voters than to energizing Trump’s working-class and nonurban base through culture-war appeals like support of near-total abortion bans. With Trump-backed Kari Lake moving into the lead as counting continues in the Arizona Republican gubernatorial primary, the top GOP nominees both there and in Michigan will likely be composed entirely of candidates who embrace Trump’s lie that he won their state in 2020.
In the intermediate term, most Democratic strategists believe that the party must find ways to combat the GOP’s strong performance during the Trump era with working-class voters, particularly its improvement since 2016 among blue-collar Hispanic voters. But with inflation so badly squeezing the finances of many working- and middle-class families, recovering much ground with such voters before November may be tough for most Democratic candidates. Those working-class voters “know the shoe is pinching,” says Tom Davis, the former chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, quoting the late political scientist V. O. Key Jr.
Paul Kane/WaPo:
Culture wars could be a winning issue — for Democrats
Recent polling shows that gun control and abortion rights are bolstering voter motivations
The pollsters found that 44 percent of voters “strongly disapprove” of Biden’s job performance, while only 19 percent “strongly approve,” and, furthermore, just 44 percent of Democrats “strongly approve” of Biden’s achievements.
That’s an upside-down position heading into midterms when Biden and Democrats will depend on motivating hardcore partisans to get to the polls.
“The softer they approve of the president,” Newhouse, a co-founder of Public Opinion Strategies, said, “the harder it is to turn them out.”
But their work also shows a surging interest among Democratic voters and many independents toward gun control and protecting abortion rights. It’s the type of polling and research that backs up what happened Tuesday in Kansas, when voters in the otherwise very conservative state overwhelmingly approved retaining abortion rights in their state constitution.
The optimost optimist: