<This is going to go away without a vaccine.>

<...'For most of American history, politics stopped when you had the death of a national leader, and the fact that it hasn’t says an awful lot about the current state of our country and our politics, and in particular about Donald Trump,” said Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian. “What you’d want to see is a president acting as graciously and as large-mindedly as possible, in the John McCain spirit, but there is no sign of that yet'.....>

<It is the year 2021. But Republicans and the right-wing movement are trying to pull the American people back to the past.

Their ultimate destination? It could be Jim Crow white supremacist America of the 1950s. It could be the end of Reconstruction in 1876 – or even a time before that.

In that sense, the Republican Party and its allies and followers are time-breakers, not content with harmless nostalgia and happy-pill lies about the past. Their goal? To radically remake society in their own grotesque vision where white, right-wing "Christians" — men, by definition — rule America unopposed and for all time.

Such a world would be a utopia for them and a dystopia for everyone else.

On Monday, philosopher Jason Stanley described America on the precipice of such as horrible moment in a Twitter post:

I find it chilling this odd moment of calm while Dems are in power and state after state is introducing bills that, if passed, will ensure permanent minority party rule and the end of US democracy. We have so little time. Watching history unfold.

Because they cannot win a war of ideas and their policies are wildly unpopular with the American people, Republicans and their allies are attempting to restrict the right to vote all over the country.

Zachary Roth of the Brennan Center for Justice describes this racialized "legislative anti-democracy" and what it entails:

It's upon us: a wave of legislation, in states across the country, aimed at making voting harder. The Brennan Center has tallied over 250 bills in 43 states this year that would restrict access to the ballot. Many would reverse the expansion of vote by mail, which helped lead to the soaring turnout of 2020, or would tighten ID requirements.

But the latest assault on voting shouldn't be seen in isolation. Some of the same Republican state lawmakers behind these measures are also taking steps to suppress any form of democracy that threatens them — afraid, it seems, that the more say voters have in any form, the worse their side will fare. …

It's hard to ignore that this explosion of what we might call "legislative anti-democracy" is coming from some of the same people who helped stoke an even more troubling effort to overturn the will of the people. At least 14 Republican state lawmakers attended the January 6 "Stop the Steal" rally that led to the Capitol insurrection, and they continue to serve. At least one, State Sen. Doug Mastriano of Pennsylvania, has been a leader in his state's effort to pass restrictive voting laws.

These attacks are targeting those Americans at the base of the Democratic Party: young people, the poor and working-class, college students, urban residents and nonwhite people.

Black Americans (especially black women) are arguably the most important members of the Democratic Party's winning coalition. As such, Black Americans have become the near-obsessive focus of the Republican Party and the white right's efforts to overturn multiracial democracy.

These attacks on Black people's freedom and their human and civil rights — which were won in blood — involves dreams of a return to the Jim Crow era of "separate but equal," with literacy tests, poll taxes, felon disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, terrorism and armed intimidation, threats of imprisonment and arbitrary movement of polling places, all designed to make it harder for Black (and brown) people to vote....>

<.....Moreover, these Jim Crow dreams are not private; they are very public.

Texas Gov. Jim Abbott, a Republican, invoked the white supremacist film "Birth of a Nation" and its hateful depictions of Black people when he told Fox News last weekend that the Democrats use cocaine to buy votes.

Last Wednesday, Arizona State Rep. John Kavanaugh, also a Republican, channeled the exact logic used by Southern and other white politicians during Jim Crow to justify not allowing people to vote. He literally said, "Everyone should not be voting" and that he and his fellow Republicans care about "the quality" of the votes.

White Republican voters largely agree with these efforts to stop Black and brown Americans from voting, along with other groups who generally support Democrats. Republican voters overwhelmingly believe in the "Big Lie" that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and that therefore America needs more "election security," i.e., ways to keep "those people" from voting. A significant percentage of Republicans also believe that Trump's coup attempt and the Capitol attack were justified. Public opinion and other research show that Trump-supporting Republicans are willing to give up democracy in order to maintain white supremacy as the dominant and most powerful group in the country. Other research shows that a majority of Republicans are willing to go to extreme measures, including violence, to protect America's "traditional way of life."

In total, today's Republican Party and right-wing movement are not "conservative": They are destructive, revanchist and reactionary.

The Republican retreat from the present and embrace of some of the worst aspects of the country's past is oriented along the color line. The centuries-long struggles of Black and brown people, alongside their white allies, has gradually forced America to be a more full and equal democracy for all people. When Republicans and other "conservatives" attack American democracy, they are attacking that legacy.

Ultimately, "racial democracy," better understood as whites-only democracy, is an oxymoron. Multiracial democracy is the only real democracy possible in America.

The Republican Party's symbol is the wise and patient elephant. From the backlash to the civil rights movement in the 1960s to the Age of Trump and beyond, Republican have now fully embraced white supremacy as one of its central values and beliefs. To better reflect those values, today's Republican Party should replace the elephant with an image of the real "Jim Crow," a 19th-century white minstrel performer named Thomas Dartmouth Rice whose racist buffoon act was modeled on a debased version of a black slave. One of Rice's most popular songs was "Jump Jim Crow." Because he was so successful his "Jim Crow" persona was adopted by other white race minstrels.

In many ways, Rice's Jim Crow performance still has life in the 21st century, when our nation's most important white supremacist organization pretends not to be racist. If Republicans reclaimed Rice's legacy openly, at least they would be honest.>

<....'It has more names than any disease in history. I can name kung flu. I can name 19 different versions of names.'>

<Republicans: End the Filibuster, and We’ll Punish America By Enacting Our Agenda

A spectre is haunting the Republican party. And that spectre, oddly enough, is a future world in which Republicans control government and pass bills that they campaigned on.

Mitch McConnell’s latest defense of what remains of the filibuster yesterday veered wildly between two irreconcilable claims. One the one hand, he warned a majority-rules Senate would be a “scorched-earth,” “disaster,” “hundred car pile-up” in which nothing happens. On the other hand, he warned that once Republicans gained control of government, the chamber would become a smooth-running machine in which conservative priorities are quickly enacted.

Here is McConnell’s complete account of the horrors that await the country were the legislative filibuster to perish:

“As soon as Republicans wound up back in the saddle, we wouldn’t just erase every liberal change that hurt the country.

“We’d strengthen America with all kinds of conservative policies with zero input from the other side.

“Nationwide right-to-work for working Americans. Defunding Planned Parenthood and sanctuary cities on day one.

“A whole new era of domestic energy production. Sweeping new protections for conscience and the right to life of the unborn.

“Concealed-carry reciprocity in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Massive hardening of security on our southern border.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, echoing McConnell (as it usually does) chimes in: “Republicans would be in position to rule the Senate without a filibuster. Imagine what they might pass? Mr. McConnell gave a few examples — defunding Planned Parenthood — but for political flavor think GOP Senators Josh Hawley and Rand Paul unbound.” This, as we’ll see later, is telling.

McConnell has made gridlock so routine that both he and his imagined audience see the idea of a party enacting the proposals it advocates as fantastical and scary. But if you go to any of the 50 states, that is not how political rhetoric operates. Candidates for office advocate positions, then try to pass them into law when elected, and take credit for them if they work. The opposition party either accepts those changes, modified, or runs against them and tries to reverse them if they remain unpopular. Likewise, every democratic government in the world that I’m aware of operates on the same principle.

None of these democracies, domestic or foreign, needs a supermajority to protect against an elected government carrying out its promised agenda. Obviously, temporary majorities need some restraint to prevent excess. But those restraints exist – not only, in the American system, multiple veto points and courts that can curtail unconstitutional laws, but democracy itself. The dynamic that inhibits majorities from exceeding their mandate is the prospect that their policies will create a backlash and be subject to reversal.

In place of this, we have the peculiar dynamic in which the leader of a major party is invoking his own agenda as something that cannot and should not happen....>

<....Obviously, I don’t like the policies McConnell described. What I can’t understand is how McConnell is supposed to feel about them. If he truly thinks they’d “strengthen America,” then shouldn’t he want to have the chance to enact them, and then have his party run on the results?

Democrats think of their agenda this way. They believe their policies would prove popular if enacted. Republicans might think they’ll hate them, once they have seen them in action, they’ll come to realize those policies make most peoples’ lives better. Nancy Pelosi’s frequently mocked line about Obamacare (“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it”) captured this idealistic belief. And her prediction was borne out — once Obamacare was up and running, people understood what it did and wanted to keep it.

The Journal’s version of a scary Republican government (“Josh Hawley and Rand Paul unbound”) is self-evidently preposterous— by definition, unpopular gadfly legislators don’t have the power to amass majorities in two chambers. McConnell’s list combines policies that the last GOP administration enacted without any input from Congress at all (“new era of domestic energy production,” “Massive hardening of security on our southern border”) and policies Republicans would probably be unwilling to vote for (“defunding Planned Parenthood,” “sweeping new protections for conscience and the right to life of the unborn.”)

Maybe I’m wrong about some of these items. Perhaps the next Republican government can pass a sweeping right to life bill, presumably after the courts strike down Roe v. Wade. There are certainly a lot of conservative voters who desperately want this to happen. Has McConnell told them that his plan is that the goa;l they have been pouring their hearts into is impossible, because of rules McConnell is fighting to keep in place? I can’t think of any way to read his comments other than a backhanded admission that what the Christian right considers the murder of the unborn cannot be stopped unless the filibuster is defeated.

Obviously, McConnell would never concede this openly, even though it follows straightforwardly from his logic. His agenda exists in a netherworld where one group of people is told it will happen if they vote Republican, and another group is reassured it never will.

This kind of doublethink is a product both of the unique supermajority requirement in the Senate and the Republican party’s retreat from serious governing. Conservatives are increasingly unable to conceive of legislation as anything other than a zero-sum exercise in punishing and humiliating the other party. They imagine Democratic laws are merely pretexts to expand government power, and then internalize the same logic for their own agenda.

McConnell benefits from rules that allow him to enact all the changes he cares about — lax regulation of business, tax cuts, and confirming judges — either with just the presidency, or the presidency plus a majority. He fears allowing his caucus to actually enact laws carrying out most of their promises. That is why the bogeyman role of Hawley and Paul is so revealing. They represent McConnell’s fear of having to translate conservative demands into concrete legislation. He’d much rather use the passions of his base to get elected, and then use that power for ends McConnell cares about.

That is McConnell’s problem. How much sympathy he deserves is a matter of personal taste. But why should his travails dictate the workings of a great democracy?>

https://medium.com/@DrGJackBrown/bo...

The author (Dr. Jack Brown) in the link claims that Trump is wearing lift shoes to explain the leaning forward posture, but I don't buy it.

I've seen pictures of others wearing those types of shoes and they don't lean forward like that.

I also noticed that his feet (like his hands) are small next to Justin Trudeau.

https://miro.medium.com/max/901/1*h...

The Trump story, a bulls.hitting bonanza of lies, corruption, and grift.

He is a kind of Hitler without wars. He isn't , it seems, keen on wars. He had a very harsh father, according to his niece of sister.

The tragedy of Trump is now it would be hard to invent him and claim you were (if "starring him") writing the Great (American?) Novel....

Guess that's a question for <FSR> if that very Trumpian legal defense could actually hold up in court. It sounds freaking bonkers to me.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...