Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post says that the Republican Party, obviously, has no interest in governing at any level and must pay the price for not doing their jobs.
No one can seriously pass this off as the impulsive actions of one unhinged egomaniac. This was a detailed, wide-ranging and multi-level plan to stage a coup — one that all but two House Republicans refuse to investigate. Moreover, Republicans’ willingness to overthrow democracy continues to this day, both in their state laws to suppress voting and subvert elections and in their violent rhetoric.
Republican pundits avoid the issue. Nothing to see. Move along. The Federalist Society is mute. GOP lawmakers have nothing to say.
But the constant stream of revelations makes it all the more difficult for the Justice Department to avoid prosecution of the former president or his cronies. Responsible prosecutors would never ignore so much evidence revealing an insurrectionist instigator’s intent (critical in proving serious crimes), nor would prosecutors upholding their oaths miss the seriousness of the plot to overthrow a government. Refusal to prosecute would amount to an invitation to repeat the coup in 2024 and beyond.
Aaron Blake, also of The Washington Post, reviews the overall results of Republican actions that forced government shutdowns, then muses: Given those results, why do they do it?
The question from there is why Republicans are going down this path again, and the answer lies in just how many actual consequences lie ahead. Even as the GOP is almost always judged more harshly in these showdowns, there are disagreements on precisely how much that ultimately mattered in the following elections.
While in 2011 McConnell echoed the conventional wisdom that the 1995-1996 shutdowns hurt the GOP efforts to defeat Clinton in his reelection bid, not everyone subscribes to that. Also, the GOP’s “defund Obamacare” effort in 2013 ultimately preceded an election in which they took over the Senate — though that appeared to have plenty to do with other factors, including the botched rollout of the health-care law.
There’s also the fact that the GOP did at least seem to get something for its trouble, albeit mostly in 2011.
Charles Blow of The New York Times writes about the “thingification“ of Black and brown people.
This is what happens when a country doesn’t see some people as fully human. It’s what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the “thingification of the Negro.”
When you don’t see a person’s full humanity you release any moral obligations to extend to that person the rights and respect given to other humans. And in this state, danger lurks. In this state, atrocities creep.
And it’s not just the Haitians. Latin American children were separated from their families, and many were forced to sleep in cold, open rooms under foil blankets with the lights turned on.
Black and brown people often get flattened into statistics, becoming a mass rather than existing as individual men, women and children. And there is real danger in this.
When I heavily covered the cases of Black people killed by the police, I would explain to the family members I was interviewing the angle of the column: I wasn’t there to litigate the cases; I was there to breathe life back into the dead bodies. I was there to render them whole, as complete human beings who loved and were loved. I was there to force my readers to see them as people.
Austin Sarat of The Hill notes that in striking down a voter ID law, a three-judge panel of the North Carolina Supreme Court offers an example of “anti-racist jurisprudence.”
The court’s decision resurrected an older and often demeaned theory of discrimination and gave the lie to the United State Supreme Court’s recently expressed view that voter identification requirements are nothing more than “mere inconveniences” inevitably associated with any voting scheme.
It echoed Justice Elena Kagan’s argument that “racial discrimination and racially polarized voting are not ancient history. Indeed, the problem of voting discrimination has become worse …Weaken the Voting Rights Act, and predictable consequences follow: yet a further generation of voter suppression laws.”
The North Carolina voter identification law proves the accuracy of Kagan’s prediction: The weakening of the Voting Rights Act has allowed voter suppression laws to flourish.
Indeed, the Supreme Court has provided what The New Republic’s Matt Ford calls “a blank check for Republican state lawmakers: So long as they invoke voter fraud and don’t say anything too egregious, the Supreme Court will have their back.”
Moreover, the court has erected procedural and evidentiary hurdles that make it harder to challenge those Republican efforts.
Gregg Gonsalves writes for The Nation that it is no coincidence that the American South is being ravaged by COVID-19.
What is happening in the American South is no accident. It is not born of ignorance or folly. It is a choice. Consider this comment in a New York Times article by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: “Clearly the vaccines are keeping most of these people out of the hospital, but we’re not building the herd immunity that people hoped,” he said (emphasis mine). Herd immunity. We’re back to Scott Atlas, who would be a footnote in epidemic history—except for the thousands of deaths for which he is responsible. DeSantis was an early adherent of the notion of herd immunity espoused by Atlas and a group of scientists funded by the libertarian American Institute for Economic Research. Governor DeSantis and his colleagues in the South genuinely think they are doing the right thing. Their persistent, horrific quest for herd immunity confirms preexisting biases about the role of the state in our lives—the less the better. In the People’s Temple of the Sunshine State, this faith has led the people’s leader to hand out the Kool-Aid to his own citizens, leading them to their own deaths.
Remember, before Covid-19 the South was already the least healthy region in the country: People there lived shorter lives, with much higher rates of chronic conditions. The South was the epicenter of the American AIDS epidemic—and rife with other infectious diseases. Yet, except for Louisiana and Arkansas, most of the states in the Deep South refuse to expand Medicaid—depriving many of their citizen of access to medical care that can make their lives better. While that, too, may be rooted in a libertarian, small-government impulse, writers like Jeneen Interlandi of The New York Times have made a compelling case that decisions to restrict access to health care in the United States have everything to do with race. This is where American libertarianism meets white supremacy.
Bethany Mollenkof has worked with STATnews for the past six months documenting how COVID-19 has impacted the Black rural South. At the link are videos, photos, and stories, old and new.
One-fifth of the Americans living in rural areas are people of color, mostly concentrated in the South and Southwest — both areas that experienced high Covid-19 death rates.
Even before the pandemic, rural health infrastructure was strained, if not buckling, as hospitals and clinics struggled to stay open. These challenges exacerbate systemic inequities in care. As the pandemic hit, there was a devastating reality: If Black people living in rural areas get Covid-19 and can’t access the treatment they need, they are more likely to get severely ill or die from the virus, or have prolonged and difficult recoveries.
Elizabeth Austin of Washington Monthly reports on data out of the University of Texas showing that over a 15-year period starting with graduation, racial and gender pay equity is a reality for humanities, education, and health graduates of the University of Texas system.
...when officials at UT dug into their data set, which combined university records of almost 550,000 students who attended nine UT system institutions from 2002 through 2018 with 15 years of wage data from the Texas Workforce Commission, they unearthed some unexpected findings. As they sliced the data by student major, gender, race, and family income, they found that Black, brown, and female alums are often massively underpaid compared with their white male peers in many high-wage career paths, such as computer science, engineering, and business. But they also found that students of color who majored in education, health, and the humanities tended to earn roughly the same amount as these disciplines’ white graduates, both right after graduation and 15 years out.
The humanities data is perhaps the most surprising. Unlike education and health majors, who tend to cluster in professions with more transparent pay scales that support wage parity, humanities grads work everywhere. That’s in part because “humanities” encompasses a long list of majors, from American studies, anthropology, Asian cultures and languages, classical studies, and English through geography, history, linguistics, philosophy, rhetoric, and women’s and gender studies. UT’s data set is robust, including 37,266 humanities graduates, of whom 4,231 identify as Black and 28,814 identify as Hispanic. In the first year after graduation, the median incomes of all humanities students regardless of race and gender clustered just below $30,000; that relative wage parity remained durable 15 years after commencement, when white graduates earned a median wage of $60,000 and Black and Latino graduates made a median wage of $58,000.
How is it that UT humanities majors overcome the racial earnings gap? There’s no one clear answer. But there seem to be multiple possible explanations that could help students, instructors, institutions, and employers everywhere—and across all disciplines—reduce pay discrimination.
Jeremy Cliffe of The New Statesman writes about the wide-ranging geopolitical implications of the Aukus deal.
Yet Aukus is more than an arms deal. It is a template for wider American strategy in its century-defining contest with China in the arena in which that contest will be decided: the Indo-Pacific – the maritime regions of southern and eastern Asia and the meeting point of US power (allies such as Australia, Japan, South Korea and India) and Chinese power. Aukus is a glimpse of the future.
Australia’s A$50bn submarine contract with France was signed in April 2016 – since then, Canberra’s sense of its own security has shifted. China, with its endless appetite for Australian mineral resources, once looked primarily like a ticket to prosperity. Yet as Beijing’s military capabilities have grown (China’s defence spending has risen by 27 per cent over the past five years) so its treatment of Australia has become more aggressive; hitting it with trade tariffs, demanding recognition for its claims in the South China Sea and targeting it with “wolf warrior” diplomacy. That has moved Australia into close alignment with the US in its own, wider superpower competition with China.
Aukus, which was struck between the three leaders on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Cornwall in June, is an expression of that shift. “For Australia, it’s a huge deal,” says Rory Medcalf, the head of Australia’s National Security College. “And in a military sense almost existential.” It also reveals three important things about US intentions.
Finally today, Joan Wickersham of The Boston Globe laments the trivialization and maybe even the “loss” of one of the finest bookstores that I have ever been in: “The Coop.”
The books on popular and classical music have been replaced by metal putting cups; the ramp that leads the golf ball into the cup says “Harvard,” and then it says “Harvard” again inside the cup, as if the ball might have become disoriented during the inch-long journey up the ramp and need to be reminded where it is. There are Harvard shot glasses and spoons, Harvard lanyards and water bottles, Harvard medallions and lapel pins and coasters. The old children’s book section is now a children’s sweatshirt and T-shirt section, with a single table of children’s books labeled “For your future freshman.” There are still a few books on the ground floor, mostly books about how to get into Harvard.
The old Coop was a comprehensive four-story bookstore, functionally and symbolically aligned with what is arguably America’s greatest university. It was a broad bookstore and a smart bookstore, big enough to keep in stock the classics that many bookstores don’t have on hand. And the selection was unusual and eclectic, featuring many books from small presses and university presses.
Now in order to find the books, you have to go upstairs to the second and third floors, where each section is a shrunken and dispiriting version of its former self.
By virtue of its architecture and its location, the Coop is the flagship store of Harvard Square. It served not only the Harvard community, but also the very bookish city of Cambridge. Now it’s a souvenir stand — a tourist trap designed to make a quick buck off people who are just passing through. Harvard is nothing more than a logo.
First, the newsstand on Harvard Square was taken down a few years ago, and now The Coop.
I spent hours per day in that place and I am sure that I left many books and magazines coffee-stained—and now The Coop no longer seems to be a place that I can seriously wander and wonder.
Everyone have a good day!