Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Mark Jacob/Twitter:
Will Bunch/Philadelphia Inquirer:
Adam Serwer/Atlantic:
Jamelle Bouie/NY Times:
Lee Drutman/FiveThirtyEight:
Robert P Jones/Religion News Service:
Brian Stelter/CNN:
Memo to centrists: Progressives aren’t your problem. Manchin and Sinema are.
“We will only vote for the infrastructure bill after passing the reconciliation bill,” declared a statement from Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The reconciliation bill is the multitrillion-dollar social infrastructure bill that is meant to pass the Senate by simple majority.
This posture is provoking frustration from moderates and centrists. Many of them appear to understand this standoff as a conflict between themselves and progressives, each side pushing and pulling to get their preferred outcome.
But while there’s some truth to this, in another sense the most serious problem facing the centrists is not the progressives. It’s their ideological counterparts in the Senate, Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.).
That’s because the Terrible Two are the main impediment to arriving at a reconciliation bill everyone can live with
I spent 21 years working in the senate and I must admit I am losing the plot line every once and awhile right now https://t.co/RtBa3ujwSh
— jim manley (@jamespmanley) September 28, 2021
Mark Jacob/Twitter:
I used to edit Page 1 stories for the Chicago Tribune, including many from Washington. In this thread, I explain why the media (including me) have been unintentionally complicit in the rise of fascism that threatens our democracy.
Mainstream media have long tried to treat Republicans and Democrats equally. Some, like me, thought that was the way to be fair. In fact, it was the way to be lazy and not have to sort out the facts. Just quote a Democrat and quote a Republican and you’re done.
When I edited political stories, I went so far as to count the quotes from Republicans and Democrats, thinking an equal number would make us fairer. I didn’t think I was helping either party. I thought I was helping the readers. I was wrong.
…
The Republicans have overwhelmed the media with corruption. They’ve created scandal fatigue, prompting journalists to do something I call ethics norming. That’s when something that would have been a huge scandal in the recent past is considered normal now.
The Republicans have pulled off quite a trick. If news is defined as something unusual happening, GOP corruption is not news because the party is so widely corrupt. Some media have turned off their outrage impulse and decided that corruption is normal.
I want to clarify something. Whatever the particular approach, what's important is the overall posture: One that sees the limitations of shaming Rs and recognizes that their bad faith gets rewarded by bothsides media coverage. Numerous procedural possibilities flow from this. https://t.co/u1WPOauZuw
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) September 28, 2021
Will Bunch/Philadelphia Inquirer:
NY Times’ cluelessness is wrecking journalism
Hey, New York Times, Trump voters will always hate you. Just write the truth.
Yo, Trump voters in rural Ohio diners! Wake up! It’s time to put your MAGA hats back on, grind some bitter coffee and wipe the layers of grease off that Formica countertop. The New York Times still desperately wants you, and they’re coming back your way! Like, for the umpteenth time.
That may sound over the top, but I don’t know what else to say after learning that America’s most influential newsroom — after more than four years of dozens of stories informing its largely left-leaning readers that Donald Trump voters still love Donald Trump — is doubling down on efforts to persuade media-bashing right-wingers to like them, and maybe even subscribe.
That’s the take-away from a recent report by Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo into what’s behind this month’s somewhat opaque announcement from the Times that it’s launching a high-powered 10-member team, including three prominent journalists, aimed at addressing readers’ trust in the media, particularly in the so-called “Paper of Record” itself. Pompeo’s sources told him the team — a top priority for Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger — is aiming to “sort of win people over” with an amped-up effort to teach people how journalism works, “to show the rigor we use in preparing our report.”
Tom Cotton just asked Mark Milley why he didn't resign when Biden rejected his advice on Afghanistan and Milley just dropped the mic and said there's no way he'd resign because of lawful civilian order. Great answer.
— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) September 28, 2021
Adam Serwer/Atlantic:
Trump’s Plans for a Coup Are Now Public
Some of the plots to overturn the election happened in secret. But don’t forget the ones that unfolded in the open.
Last year, John Eastman, whom CNN describes as an attorney working with Donald Trump’s legal team, wrote a preposterous memo outlining how then–Vice President Mike Pence could overturn the 2020 election by fiat or, failing that, throw the election to the House of Representatives, where Republicans could install Trump in office despite his loss to Joe Biden. The document, which was first reported by the Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their new book, is a step-by-step plan to overthrow the government of the United States through a preposterous interpretation of legal procedure.
Pence apparently took the idea seriously—so seriously, in fact, that, according to Woodward and Costa, former Vice President Dan Quayle had to talk him out of it. Prior to November, the possibility of Trump attempting a coup was seen as the deranged fever dream of crazed liberals. But as it turns out, Trump and his advisers had devised explicit plans for reversing Trump’s loss. Republican leaders deliberately stoked election conspiracy theories they knew to be false, in order to lay a political pretext for invalidating the results. Now, more than 10 months after the election, the country knows of at least five ways in which Trump attempted to retain power despite his defeat.
??? After a German election in which the lead switched among *3* parties & that ended w/ a narrow, upset victory for party widely deemed unlikely to win at the outset, no top candidate has questioned the legitimacy of the democratic process. Sounds trivial, but isn’t.#btw21
— Michael Knigge (@kniggem) September 27, 2021
Jamelle Bouie/NY Times:
We Underestimated Trump Before. It Didn’t Go Well.
Now, 10 months after the election, “Stop the Steal” is something like party orthodoxy, ideological fuel for a national effort to seize control of election administration and to purge those officials who secured the vote over Donald Trump’s demand to subvert it. Assuming that he is in good health, Trump will almost certainly run for president in 2024, and if he does, he’ll do so in a Republican Party pacified of any resistance to his will to power.
The upshot is that we are on our way to another election crisis. Or, as the election law expert (and frequent New York Times contributor) Rick Hasen has written in a new paper on the risk of election subversion, “The United States faces a serious risk that the 2024 presidential election, and other future U.S. elections, will not be conducted fairly, and that the candidates taking office will not reflect the free choices made by eligible voters under previously announced election rules.”
The only thing that's missing to make this a perfect Fox News headline is failing to work Gabby Petito in. https://t.co/wRn6LRUyhg
— Susan J. Demas ? (@sjdemas) September 28, 2021
Lee Drutman/FiveThirtyEight:
Why Bipartisanship In The Senate Is Dying
The political environment most senators inhabit makes public bipartisanship anywhere from difficult to politically suicidal. This is for a variety of reasons, including that so much of our politics is now nationalized, that party leaders keep most potential “bipartisan” bills from reaching the floor and, perhaps most importantly, that the national parties are now geographically isolated, meaning there’s minimal overlap in the interests and values the parties represent.
This is, of course, not limited to the Senate, but for the purposes of this article, I’m focusing primarily on how bipartisanship has largely disappeared from the Senate, as that’s historically where more bipartisanship has taken place.
For health systems that have passed their employee vaccine deadlines, this chart show the total number of employees and the number of employees released due to not vaccinating or receiving an approved exemption. pic.twitter.com/0sJakF3rgG
— Steve Edwards (@SDECoxHealth) September 24, 2021
Robert P Jones/Religion News Service:
White Christian nationalism found fertile soil in post-9/11 America
Since the Bush era, the attitudes of Republicans, including white evangelicals who comprise the party’s base, have increasingly aligned with a worldview rooted in centuries of white supremacist theology.
In the aftermath, we rallied to build memorials to those lost and to repair the physical damage.
- The National September 11 Memorial & Museum honors victims and their stories on the former site of the twin towers, and One World Trade Center — intentionally built to a height of 1,776 feet to reference the nation’s founding — is the most distinct column in the skyline of lower Manhattan and the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.
- The Pentagon repaired the breach in its walls within a year, and the outdoor National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial opened in 2008 to honor the victims who died inside the building and on the plane.
- And near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at the crash site of the fourth plane — the only one not to reach its destination, presumed to be either the U.S. Capitol or the White House — the Flight 93 National Memorial provides a platform for visitors to remember those lost when passengers on the flight heroically attempted to wrest control from the hijackers.
The cultural damage, however, has proved much harder to repair. As we dealt with the grief and anger from that day, the legacy of white supremacy and Christian nationalism, particularly in white evangelical circles, has pulled us apart. For many white conservative Christians in particular, Islam, rather than terrorism, snapped into focus that day as the enemy.
"One Fox News insider…described the anti-COVID-mandate segments and vaccine-resistant commentary as 'great for ratings.’ Another…said the numbers clearly demonstrated…[this issue gets] 'our viewers more excited or engaged than’” virtually every other kind of segment these days https://t.co/Ewxilibem4
— Asawin Suebsaeng (@swin24) September 28, 2021
Brian Stelter/CNN:
Trump's new interviews and appearances show that a storm is brewing
Trump was in the middle of a fact-free rant about "vicious" Democrats cheating on elections when he said "they're destroying our country. Our country will not survive this. Our country will not survive." Then he sniffed and shifted to immigration, saying "look at where they're coming from," clearly mimicking the "great replacement theory" talking points that Tucker Carlson has been mainlining into homes across the country.
These are all signs of the gathering storm. Trump's incessant lies about the last election (Biden "didn't get 81 million votes, there's no way," he told OAN) pose obvious threats to future elections. The so-called "Stop the Steal" movement is "racing forward," ignoring the Arizona audit "humiliation," the NYT pointed out over the weekend.
Most of us can feel the instability in the air the same way a weather forecaster can feel a storm coming on. News outlets need to be providing storm warnings -- but some are ignoring the threat. That's what my opening essay on Sunday's "Reliable Sources" telecast was about. Anti-democratic talking points are being paraded across networks like Newsmax, and averting one's eyes doesn't make the parade go away...
Essential reading from @NancyMacLean5 on what the history of the *education freedom* cause tells us about the movement's ultimate goal. https://t.co/ROsDlmgGGs
— Jennifer Berkshire (@BisforBerkshire) September 27, 2021