Let’s dig right in!
Paul Krugman of
The New York Times says that Republicans are “actively working to make the country ungovernable.”
To some extent it surely reflects a coldly cynical political calculation. Voters tend to blame whichever party holds the White House for anything bad that happens on its watch, which creates an incentive for a sufficiently ruthless party to engage in outright sabotage. Sure enough, Republicans who fought all efforts to contain the coronavirus are now
attacking the Biden administration for failing to end the pandemic.
But trying to shut down the government to block vaccinations seems like overreach, even for hardened cynics. It’s notable that
Mitch McConnell, whom nobody could accuse of being a do-gooder, isn’t part of the anti-vaccine caucus.
What seems to be happening instead goes beyond cold calculation. As I’ve
pointed out in the past, Republican politicians now act like apparatchiks in an authoritarian regime, competing to take ever more extreme positions as a way to demonstrate their loyalty to the cause — and to The Leader. Catering to anti-vaccine hysteria, doing all they can to keep the pandemic going, has become something Republicans do to remain in good standing within the party.
The result is that one of America’s two major political parties isn’t just refusing to help the nation deal with its problems; it’s actively working to make the country ungovernable.
Alex Morris of
Rolling Stone warns that a reversal of the
Roe precedent by the current Supreme Court could reverberate far beyond the curtailment of abortion rights.
But the reversal of the precedent set by Roe would be important for other reasons as well. All of the cases listed by Kavanaugh, all the examples he gave of precedent being overturned, “those were all cases where the court reversed to make individual rights broader in scope,” Julie Rikelman, the co-lead attorney in Dobbs, said in a press conference Wednesday. “To take away a constitutional right after 50 years really would be a monumental thing to do.” In fact, it would set its own precedent: It would establish that constitutional rights affirmed by the Supreme Court can be unaffirmed. And that dubious precedent could imperil the outcomes of the very cases Kavanaugh mentioned. It would demonstrate that, at least where the Supreme Court is concerned, the long arc of the moral universe may not in fact bend toward justice. It could reverse course.
And to be clear, that’s exactly what the conservative movement is counting on. In an amicus brief filed in Dobbs on behalf of Texas Right to Life, Jonathan Mitchell, one of the architects of Texas’ six-week abortion ban, proposed that the court not only overturn Roe but also Obergefell v. Hodges (the case that granted marriage equality) and Lawrence v. Texas (the case that decriminalized sodomy). While striking down Roe would not, Mitchell writes, necessarily jeopardize all legal precedent, it opens the door to overturning a host of decisions that extended basic civil rights to vulnerable people:
The news is not as good for those who hope to preserve the court-invented rights to homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage … These “rights,” like the right to abortion from Roe, are judicial concoctions, and there is no other source of law that can be invoked to salvage their existence … This is not to say that the Court should announce the overruling of Lawrence and Obergefell if it decides to overrule Roe and Casey in this case. But neither should the Court hesitate to write an opinion that leaves those decisions hanging by a thread. Lawrence and Obergefell, while far less hazardous to human life, are as lawless as Roe.
Trudy Rubin of
The Philadelphia Inquirer, noting President Joe Biden’s upcoming and virtual Summit for Democracy taking place Dec. 9-10, thinks it could be the perfect opportunity for the president to look at the internal threats facing U.S. democratic rule.
“The liberal West has been in retreat, and advocacy for democracy has been absent,” says Steven Levitsky, coauthor of How Democracy Dies and a Harvard University government professor. “The summit is an initial step to get democracy promotion back on the agenda.”
I hope that means an open debate at the summit about the internal threats to democracy in the United States.
The dangers posed by the GOP’s continued attacks on the basic constitutional principle of free elections should be obvious. They certainly are to our democratic allies abroad, to most Democrats, and to principled Republicans such as Rep. Liz Cheney.
But in a right-wing bubble, where Fox News hosts praise the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, where Donald Trump still campaigns on the Big Lie of a stolen election, and where the GOP tries to ensure minority rule by legal manipulation, truth is turned on its head.
Jamelle Bouie of
The New York Times reminds us that the theft of American democracy continues to take place “in plain sight.”
When people plot to do wrong, they often do so in plain sight. To the extent that they succeed, it is at least partly because no one took them as seriously as they should have.
And so it goes with the plot to restore Donald Trump to power over and against the will of the voters. The first attempt, prefigured in Trump’s refusal in 2016 to say whether he would accept the results of the presidential election, culminated in an attack on the Capitol this year, broadcast on camera to the entire world. Since then, the former president and his allies have made no secret of their intent to run the same play a second time.
Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser and White House official, hosts a popular far-right podcast where he has urged his listeners to seize control of local election administration. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won. We don’t have an option,” he said in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”
Those listeners were, well, listening. “Suddenly,”
according to a recent ProPublica investigation, “people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local G.O.P. headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers. They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.”
Chris Joyner of
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes that a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan is running for political office. In plain sight.
Here’s a quick reality check on the body politic: Chester Doles is running for office.
Doles, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi National Alliance, filed paperwork earlier this year to run for a spot on the Lumpkin County Board of Commissioners in 2022. He ramped up his campaign this fall, riding a souped-up Jeep in Dahlonega’s annual Gold Rush parade.
[...]
Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior political scientist with the RAND Corp. and an expert on political disinformation, said candidates with Doles’ background have good reasons to see an opening in mainstream politics. The rapid spread of disinformation on social media, a hyperpolarized political environment and the increase power of partisan rhetoric have created fertile ground for such campaigns, she said.
“For candidates who are in the extreme wings of a party, this is an environment in which they see opportunities,” she said. “If you can wrap yourself in the cloak of a party, ... you can win a pretty sizable support base, even if you have other factors that would previously be disqualifying.”
The
editorial board of the
Detroit Free Press proposes “sensible” and “comprehensive” measures to curb gun violence in the wake of the mass murders at Oxford High School in suburban Michigan.
Gun violence has three prongs: High profile massacres like the devastating attack in Oxford, which are thankfully rare; shootings associated with crime and gang activity; and suicide. Public policy solutions should recognize all three.
Let's start with Michigan.
More than 1,200 people die and more than 3,500 are wounded by handguns each year in Michigan, according to the gun reform advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, Most of the fatalities are suicides.
[...]
Poll after poll confirms Michiganders' support for prohibiting guns in schools, daycare centers and churches, enacting red flag laws that would keep guns out of the hands of people who pose an imminent threat to themselves or others, and other precautions ensure the safe storage and handling of firearms. And Democratic lawmakers in the GOP-controlled state Legislature have tried to deliver, proposing laws that would require universal background checks, make gun owners criminally liable for failing to secure weapons where children cannot find them them, ban weapons from state-owned public buildings, and increase funding for violence prevention programs. A bill with bipartisan support would keep weapons out of the hands of domestic abusers.
Alex Smith writes for Kaiser Health News that the climate crisis is taking a mental health toll on environmental activists.
Some amount of anxiety is a natural response to climate change, said
Susan Clayton, a professor of psychology at the College of Wooster and a board member of the
American Psychological Association. She said getting involved in activism or environmental groups can help relieve feelings of helplessness, but, paradoxically, advocacy carries the risk added stress — sometimes leading to a diagnosis of mental illness.
Clayton said that anxiety crosses the line to becoming a true concern when it causes activists to turn away or give up on the problem.
“We have to find that common ground, where we can accept that there are some really serious things going on, but it doesn’t lead us to despair,” Clayton said.
For decades, though, many environmentalists resisted prioritizing their own mental health.
In 2018, Greenpeace International signaled a shift when it launched a major study on why so many of its activists were working themselves past their healthy limits. Agustin Maggio, a campaign manager for Greenpeace, explains that many local volunteers and leaders had bought into a kind of “martyr culture.”
Sure. But intense activism and advocacy takes a mental health toll on most activists of
any cause and always has; one has only to carefully read similar accounts of the mental health toll on activists during the Black civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s.
Black civil rights activists did have something of what I will call a “functioning” mental health restorative, due to the centrality of the Black church in the Black civil rights movement.
I mean, what do you think the Rev. James Cleveland’s “I Don’t Feel Noways Tired”
is about?
YouTube Video Further, the New Age movement of the early 1970s was born, in large part, because of the deteriorating mental health of anti-Vietnam War activists, in my opinion.
Radley Balko of
The Washington Post posits that social protocols imposed because of the COVID-19 pandemic may have resulted in juries becoming more ideologically conservative.
Defense lawyers have long complained that juries
aren’t representative of the
surrounding community. Because of the low pay and required time away from work or home, the poor and those with hourly wage jobs are far less likely to serve on juries. Those who do serve are also more likely to have their own transportation and child care.
Retirees are more likely to serve on juries; younger people, less likely. Those who vocally support police and prosecutors are less likely to be excluded from juries than people openly skeptical of either. People who believe certain classes of laws are immoral or illegitimate — such as drug laws — are
unlikely to serve on a jury at all. And, of course, non-White people are
routinely excluded from juries at disproportionate rates.
Now, defense attorneys around the country say they’ve noticed a new discrepancy since trials have resumed after being suspended at the onset of the pandemic: Covid-consicous people are being excluded from juries, either through self-selection or with dismissals by judges. They worry these juries are even less skeptical of police and prosecutors, and thus are
even more likely to convict. There is some evidence to support their concerns. Polling
has consistently shown a
strong correlation between
political ideology and
attitudes about covid. Those who are more cautious about covid and supportive of precautions tend to be more liberal; those less concerned tend to be more conservative. (While there was a strong consensus among the public defenders I spoke with that covid has made juries more conservative, it wasn’t universal, and I’ll discuss some of the exceptions in a future column.)
Aaron Blake of
The Washington Post observes that the data shows that America’s largest and most densely populated counties are doing a better job with vaccination rates and defeating COVID-19 than smaller, less densely populated counties—by a wide margin.
From the start of the vaccination effort, a pertinent question has been when we might achieve something amounting to “herd immunity,” i.e. having enough people vaccinated to stomp out the virus. Guesstimates often pegged that number at 70 percent or above. That concept has proven elusive, particularly as the delta variant has rendered the vaccines
less effective at preventing the spread — while still extremely effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths.
But those latter metrics remain hugely important. And in the densely populated areas in which we’ve approached overwhelming adoption of the vaccines, the death rates are often a fraction of the national average — a significantly greater gap than
between the most-vaccinated and least-vaccinated states.
Perhaps the most highly vaccinated large county in America, according to
New York Times data, is Montgomery County, Md., just outside the District of Columbia.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show 93 percent of those 12 and older there are fully vaccinated, compared to
around 70 percent nationally. The number dying over the past week is eight times as high nationally — 3.4 per 1 million — as it is in Montgomery County — 0.4 per 1 million — even as Montgomery County is near some virus hotspots.
For now.
Belinda Archibong and Francis Annan of The Brookings Institution note a very important reason for “vaccine hesitancy” in some communities and nations.
In 1996, Nigeria experienced one of the worst meningitis epidemics in its history with 109,580 cases and 11,717 deaths. Bacterial meningitis is an infection of the lining of the brain that is especially virulent in children. Northern Nigeria is also a majority-Muslim region, with around 99 percent of residents in Kano state identifying as Muslim. At a hospital in Kano, Doctors Without Borders treated children with chloramphenicol, a well-known antibiotic endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to treat bacterial meningitis.
Over the same period, Pfizer, a U.S. pharmaceutical company, tried to launch a new antibiotic drug, Trovan. While Pfizer had tested the drug on adults, it had not yet been tested on children. Additionally, early testing on adults had shown some serious side effects of the drug, including liver problems and cartilage abnormalities. After learning of the meningitis epidemic, Pfizer decided to use it as an opportunity to test the efficacy of Trovan in pediatric settings. Pfizer set up a site beside the Doctors Without Borders testing area and over two weeks, selected a sample of 200 children between 3 months and 18 years old to participate. A month later, 11 of the children that had participated were dead. Additionally, numerous parents of children involved in the trials reported disabilities among their children, including paralysis and liver failure.
In December 2000, The Washington Post
published a series of exposés, alleging Pfizer’s fault in the deaths and disabilities of multiple children and accusing Pfizer of conducting unethical experimental trials without attaining informed consent from the participants. Parents alleged that they had not been informed of the experimental nature of the trials, with many reporting that they thought they were receiving the standard medication issued in the neighboring Doctors Without Borders area.
French President Emmanuel Macron met with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (aka Prince Bonesaw) Saturday.
Angelique Chrisafis and Stephanie Kirchgaessner of
The Guardian report that human rights groups are calling out Macron for doing so.
Human rights groups have criticised Emmanuel Macron’s planned meeting with Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia on Saturday, which will mark the first one-on-one public meeting of a major western leader with the crown prince since the state-sponsored assassination of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
For three years since the 2018 murder, western heads of state have avoided direct one-on-one meetings with the crown prince in the kingdom. The US president, Joe Biden, has even
avoided speaking to the future king in what has widely been seen as an attempt to avoid conferring legitimacy on the de facto ruler.
[...]
“Whatever strategic interest France has in
Saudi Arabia, nothing can justify their legitimisation of a ruler who kills journalists, threatens activists, imprisons women human rights defenders, slaughters Yemeni civilians, and deceives the international community. Macron diminishes himself and his own country as he stoops to partnership with MBS,” said Agnès Callamard, a French national who serves as Amnesty International’s secretary general.
I understand the need to keep both backdoor and face-to-face diplomatic channels with Saudi Arabia open, but meeting with Prince Bonesaw should still be off-limits for any national leader of President Macron’s stature.
Finally today,
David Owen of
The New Yorker writes about the top R&B acts that performed at his Kansas City private school during the 1960s (and were paid quite well for their performances).
At first, I assumed that in the sixties big-name performers must have been common at high-school dances everywhere. But that turns out not to be the case. “We didn’t often do student dances,”
Tina Turner told me, in an e-mail, and
Booker T. Jones said, “That didn’t happen very often at all.” (Turner did say that, when she herself was a teen-ager, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson came to her school to perform in a recital.)
Pem-Day, as my school was usually known, didn’t enroll its first Black students, two eighth graders, until 1964, ten years after the landmark Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education (which involved segregation in a public-school district about sixty miles west of Kansas City). Yet most of the musicians who performed at my school’s big dances in those years were Black. Musicians of that era, especially Black musicians, were routinely underpaid for performances and cheated out of record royalties, but the ones who played at Pem-Day weren’t hired because they were cheap. Bo Diddley charged eight hundred dollars, which, adjusted for inflation, is equivalent to something like seven thousand dollars today. It’s also more than three times what Warren Durrett and his all-white eleven-piece orchestra were paid for the prom the year before. Many students at Pem-Day had fathers who were doctors or lawyers or successful local businessmen. But the seniors, of whom there were just thirty-nine in 1962, still had to raise the money for their dances by doing things like selling tiny, overpriced cups of Vess cola at football and basketball games. How, and why, did they do it?
Did I forget something?...feels like I did!
maybe it’s…
The 2021 Big Ten Conference Football Champions
The Michigan Wolverines
????! to the Victors Valiant ????! to the Conqu'ring Heroes ????! ????! to Michigan, the Champions of the West!
pic.twitter.com/X083QBY0af — Michigan Football (@UMichFootball)
December 5, 2021
Everyone have a great day!
