Vaccines, Infrastructure, and Kids In Cages: US Politics April 2021

What I think you're seeing here (and maybe I'm wrong, I can't look into the dark souls of these people) is that the struggle between the true-believing loons and the traditional cynical business-suit-wearing "I just don't wanna pay taxes" people within the GOP is not over. The difference between "happy to spout vile anti-trans BS to cynically win votes" and "actually believes they were put in office by The Lord God to enforce genital determinism" may not look like much, but here it is, the difference. Human rights for trans people are not a threat to capitalism, and business-suit Republicans have no reason to alienate tons of people, including some rich people, unless it's to protect capital. Democrats relocate shoe factories too.

Human rights for trans people are not a threat to capitalism

*phew!*

one for the c&p over and over thread

some leftover gaetz schmutz
https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2021/04/02/heres-the-creepy-voicemail-from-matt-gaetz-and-joel-greenberg-left-for-florida-rep-anna-eskamani

:)

Earlier this week, the Times broke the story that Gaetz is being investigated for having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl and violating laws against sex trafficking in the process. The story has since been confirmed by multiple outlets, as well as Gaetz.

https://media2.fdncms.com/orlando/imager/u/blog/29073527/screen_shot_2018-08-21_at_10.31.16_am.png

nightmare material

Matt Gaetz is an extremely dumb motherfucker who, in a just world, would not have been trusted to do a single damned thing, ever.

and yet, somehow he has failed upward at every step

tbh a driving motivation for me to accrue wealth and power is to have the resources to partially inoculate my kids from their inevitable fuckups

The only photo more frightening than that one:

https://i.imgur.com/93dlDpx.jpg

who's da meathead on the right?

that's Joel Greenberg

Infrastructure Week is here!

#BREAKING: Senate parliamentarian to let Democrats bypass GOP filibuster on two more bills https://t.co/2DLODweqZc pic.twitter.com/TUDcfnGUl7

— The Hill (@thehill) April 5, 2021

nice

Oh fuck

Thank you senate parliamentarian!!!!

Infrastructure Week is here!

Yes, but it was all Trump’s idea.

A little over a week ago, I called on the USPS Board of Governors to fire DeJoy.

Today, I received the letter below informing me that, "DeJoy continues to enjoy the Board's full support..."

RT to tell them how unacceptable this is. pic.twitter.com/0QDIxnVJQa

— Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth) April 5, 2021

This article is pretty good, though the first paragraphi is blood-boiling.

When the political scientist Robert Pape began studying the issues that motivated the 380 or so people arrested in connection with the attack against the Capitol on Jan. 6, he expected to find that the rioters were driven to violence by the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession.

Why did he expect that? The author apparently never asked him.

But instead he found something very different: Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.

If Mr. Pape’s initial conclusions — published on Tuesday in The Washington Post — hold true, they would suggest that the Capitol attack has historical echoes reaching back to before the Civil War, he said in an interview over the weekend. In the shorter term, he added, the study would appear to connect Jan. 6 not only to the once-fringe right-wing theory called the Great Replacement, which holds that minorities and immigrants are seeking to take over the country, but also to events like the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 where crowds of white men marched with torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us!”

“If you look back in history, there has always been a series of far-right extremist movements responding to new waves of immigration to the United States or to movements for civil rights by minority groups,” Mr. Pape said. “You see a common pattern in the Capitol insurrectionists. They are mainly middle-class to upper-middle-class whites who are worried that, as social changes occur around them, they will see a decline in their status in the future.”

Well, yeah.

I am just gonna assume based on that first paragraph that Robert Pape is a comfortable white man

https://popular.info/p/mcconnell-versus-the-first-amendment
(worth subbing to imo)

As Georgia considered its bill to restrict voting, Delta refused to take a position. But about a week after it passed, CEO Ed Bastian issued a memo that said the new law is "unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values."

Hours later, Georgia Representative Sam Watson (R) introduced an amendment "to repeal a tax break on jet fuel." The provision was quickly approved by the Georgia House. Georgia House Speaker David Ralston (R) did not try to hide that the measure was retaliation for Delta's statement on Georgia's voting law:

They like our public policy when we’re doing things that benefit them, and they reap the rewards of those benefits and then turn around and do this. As all of you know, I can’t resist a country boy line or two, you don’t feed a dog that bites your hand. You’ve got to keep that in mind.

The provision was not taken up by the Senate and the legislature adjourned, so it will not become law. But Ralston said the issue "could be revisited during next year’s legislative session."

booming Jamelle Bouie column:

The laws that disenfranchised Black Americans in the South and established Jim Crow did not actually say they were disenfranchising Black Americans and creating a one-party racist state.

I raise this because of a debate among politicians and partisans on whether Georgia’s new election law — rushed through last month by the state’s Republican legislature and signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican — is a throwback to the Jim Crow restrictions of the 20th century.

Democrats say yes. “This is Jim Crow in the 21st century. It must end,” President Biden said in a statement. Republicans and conservative media personalities say no. “You know what voter suppression is?” Ben Shapiro said on his very popular podcast. “Voter suppression is when you don’t get to vote.”

The problem with the “no” argument here is that it mistakes both the nature and the operation of Jim Crow voting laws. There was no statute that said, “Black people cannot vote.” Instead, Southern lawmakers spun a web of restrictions and regulations meant to catch most Blacks (as well as many whites) and keep them out of the electorate. It is true that the “yes” argument of President Biden and other Democrats overstates similarities and greatly understates key differences — chief among them the violence that undergirded the Jim Crow racial order. But the “no” argument of conservatives and Republicans asks us to ignore context and extend good faith to lawmakers who overhauled their state’s election laws because their party lost an election.

I haven’t read the article by the person who was shocked SHOCKED to discover the rioters were racists, but in defence of his initial assumption it turns out they were mostly failed business owners and bankrupts. Like literally a majority of them.

Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories.

lol

This maybe the wackiest Civil War memory story in a while. 20 years from now this will make a great vignette in a book on Civil War memory. https://t.co/sc8T1PwbhU

— Dr. Adam H. Domby (@AdamHDomby) April 5, 2021

http://www.al.com/resizer/BFnI2oW2apxmcR9AEUi-OCw0WAU%3D/700x0/smart/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/advancelocal/VP4XCFMJE5FN3AN3KYGCHRQEBE.jpg

I was very confused because I misread the group name as White Lives Matter and I was like "I think irony is irrevocably broken"

In other news: https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/06/politics/alcee-hastings-died-florida-democratic-congressman/index.html

A guy constantly in the news down here for most of my childhood.

I saw the Davis toilet/chair article last night and misread it the same as DJP, provoking momentary, "wha-what?" before I re-read the name.

I would make a nice donation to be able to relieve myself on the Davis toilet/chair.

Valuing that chair at half a million dollars is just a load of stupid pro-Confederacy propaganda. The communique from the group struck just the right tone.

If the Daughters of the Confederacy have seen Black Mirror, they know they're getting off lightly.

how likely is it that they put up the banner?

also i'm holding back on letting you all know what else that chair could be used for and you're welcome

xp, Very unlikely. The chair is worthless except as a token of power, so any act of submission would be far worse than letting their stupid chair be "desecrated".

also i'm holding back on letting you all know what else that chair could be used for and you're welcome

I think everyone here has seen Burn After Reading.

I’m not sure what that is but there are “birthing chairs” from throughout history and some of them look pretty much like that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrzEDyS9Ddw

Amazon backs a corporate tax rate hike https://t.co/81SFbxbx3J

— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) April 6, 2021

"Of course, we'll swiftly move all our financial holdings to Ireland, but we nevertheless support this bold move."

Lol Amazon

Where did that Jamelle Bouie piece run?

NYT

Thanks

The Biden administration next week will launch a funeral assistance program that will provide up to $9,000 to cover the burial costs of each American who died of covid-19 — the largest program of its type ever offered by the federal government.

The program is open to families regardless of their income, as long as they show documentation and have not already received similar benefits through another program.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has reimbursed burial costs before, but it has never offered as large a payment to so many people. In 2017, for example, FEMA paid $2.6 million to 976 people for funeral costs of victims of three hurricanes — an average of $2,664 per applicant.

But the novel coronavirus’s immense toll means a burial assistance program of an unprecedented scale is now being assembled. More than 557,000 Americans have died of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.''

Because the number of people who will be eligible is not known, neither is the program’s ultimate cost — but it will easily be several billion dollars. FEMA is setting up a dedicated toll-free hotline — 1-844-684-6333 — and a call center to answer questions about the program and take applications starting Monday, April 12.

“Although we cannot change what has happened, we affirm our commitment to help with funeral and burial expenses that many families did not anticipate,” acting FEMA administrator Bob Fenton said in a statement.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both New York Democrats, have been pushing to help families pay for burials since last spring, when covid-19 was ravaging their state and mobile morgues were needed to handle the surge of deaths.

“To not be able to give a decent funeral and burial to someone who is near and dear to you is outrageous,” Schumer said at the time. He said people were losing their jobs and without enough money to eat, at the same time that they needed to pay for funerals of loved ones.

Ocasio-Cortez said the pandemic that disproportionately affected Latinos and Black Americans was “decimating an already vulnerable community. . . . The absolute least we can do is to help these families bury their loved ones. It is the very core, basic measure of human dignity.”

Funeral aid was held up during the worst of the crisis last year until then-President Donald Trump signed a nearly $1 trillion covid stimulus bill in the final weeks of his administration. The details were never made clear, but the maximum benefit discussed at the time was $7,000 and the funeral assistance program was to be capped at $2 billion.

After President Biden took office and signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan last month, the program was expanded. The funeral aid — even if it doubles from the $2 billion in the measure signed by Trump — is still a tiny fraction of the $1.9 trillion covid relief bill, which was opposed by all but a handful of congressional Republicans.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/covid-funerals-assistance/2021/04/06/d7d1db20-9659-11eb-b28d-bfa7bb5cb2a5_story.html

i just want to say that this program is very, VERY important to my family right now. thank you to those reading it that pay into it. it's helping us a lot. among my familial duties is waiting for Apr 12 so I can submit the application. for all of our differences, an aversion to wealth runs in my immediate family (it's funny how the expectation of apocalypse can match a cynical view of the monetary valuation of artistic fartput), so this program makes a big difference. my mom is going to be living off of SS now. my dad was due to start his SS payments this very month. he worked his entire career in public service, working 60+ hours a week on multiple jobs his entire life, and now my mom gets $2200 a month. so just covering his $3K cremation is going to be huge.

thank you to you all. seriously, for paying into this kind of thing, and supporting it. i won't be TOO vocal and irritable about it, but i do plan on letting my mother know where this benefit is coming from and which political party actually gave 1/10000000000000000000000th of a flying fuck about covid

but also, fuck this entire country

<3

seriously though - fuck this country

eat shit USA

much love, Z, and I hope you're able to restart your (horribly brief) extrication from family communication after these obligations, if that will still be beneficial to you.

Sending you love, Z.