February 6, 2021

199 House Republicans have embraced anti-Semitism and violence

By Dana Milbank

For more than five years, I begged Republicans to reject the creeping anti-Semitism Donald Trump brought to the party, noting on the eve of the 2016 election that “when a demagogue begins to identify scapegoats, the Jews are never far behind.”

But I never expected I would see in my lifetime, in the United States of America, what occurred on the floor of the House this week. One hundred ninety-nine Republican members of Congress rallied to the defense of a vile, unapologetic anti-Semite in their ranks who calls for assassination of her opponents.

This is more than a Republican problem; it’s an American problem. You don’t have to be a scholar of 20th-century Europe to know what happens when the elected leaders of a democracy condone violence as a political tool and blame the country’s ills on the Jews.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), who is quickly becoming the de facto face of the Republican Party, has suggested that the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, where white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us,” was actually an “inside job” to “further the agenda of the elites.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/05/199-house-republicans-have-embraced-anti-semitism-violence/

February 6, 2021

Virginia legislature votes to legalize marijuana, abolish the death penalty

Source: Washington Post

Virginia's legislature has agreed to legalize marijuana and abolish the death penalty, a dramatic turn for a state once so opposed to change that it mounted "massive resistance" against school integration and stood by its Confederate statues for 155 years after the Civil War.

Friday's votes in the General Assembly make it all but certain Virginia will become the first Southern state to allow legal marijuana sales and end capital punishment. Although both bills need details ironed out, Democrats who control the Senate and House of Delegates wield enough votes to send the measures to the desk of Gov. Ralph Northam (D), who has promised to sign them.

"It is historic, it is transformational," House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn (D-Fairfax) said in an interview. "Virginia is changing, and some of these historic pieces of legislation — it's what the public wants."

Two Republicans joined all Democrats in the House of Delegates on Friday in approving the death penalty bill, 57 to 41. The Senate had approved a similar bill on Wednesday.

The House and Senate both voted Friday for plans to legalize marijuana that call for retail sales to begin in 2024.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/virginia-death-penalty-marijuana/2021/02/05/2ac37662-6708-11eb-8c64-9595888caa15_story.html

February 6, 2021

The Scariest Thing About Marjorie Taylor Greene? She's Not Alone.

For the United States Congress, she’s still a little on the extreme side. But out there in red America, there are millions of Marjorie Taylor Greenes. Yes, millions.

It’s been a big week for Georgia’s own Marjorie Taylor Greene. She was made fun of by Jimmy Kimmel, and she was ignored by Jen Psaki. Some hope that she’ll be expelled from Congress for her refusal to wear a mask or her involvement in “Stop the Steal.”

But I’ve got some bad news about the GOP’s most famous freshman congresswoman: She’s not an aberration. She’s actually very representative of the boomer moms in her district (a district she moved to because the district she lived in was too competitive).

Taylor Greene is an odd mélange of all the worst elements of Trump’s Republican Party. She’s got all the crazy of a Louie Gohmert mixed with the virulent racism of a Steve King with a dash of the weird paranoia of a Devin Nunes. Her social media is a virtual oppo research file filled with some of the craziest, most disturbing Boomer brain worm content imaginable, from QAnon conspiracy theories to the preposterous idea that 9/11 was an inside job. And even before she was sworn in, MTG was at the White House having a “planning session” with the Trump team about how she was going to stop Joe Biden from “stealing the election.”

But probably the scariest thing about Taylor Greene isn’t her insane beliefs. It’s that she’s not alone. For starters, she is the representative of Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, a place where “more than six thousand recently signed a petition to save a local statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.”

Pulling the camera back, Taylor Greene represents a real part of the Boomer mom conspiracy-minded Trump base. She may be a little on the extreme side for Congress. But we have every reason to believe that out there in red America, there are millions of people who think everything she thinks and believe every word she says. Yes, I said millions.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-scariest-thing-about-marjorie-taylor-greene-shes-not-alone

February 6, 2021

The QAnon Rep Isn't Owning the Libs. She's Leading the GOP's Space-Laser Suicide March.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is Sarah Palin, but not occasionally charismatic. Steve Bannon, but not occasionally smart. Donald Trump, but not occasionally funny.

As millions in this country struggled with the economic realities of life under the pandemic, as schoolchildren and their parents fell into social isolation-related depression together, as women dropped out of the workforce because what we’re asking of them is simply impossible, as minimum wage “essential workers” pondered paying for health care with memories of condescending evening applause, as the number of “deaths by despair” climbed, as the number of Americans who have died from COVID-19 sped toward the half-million mark, the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday voted to kick a woman who used to film herself yelling at the parents of kids who died during school shootings off of the committee on education.

The vote was mostly along party lines, with just 11 of 208 Republicans joining every Democrat to relieve freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments. One hundred and ninety seven Republicans went on the record supporting one of the most repulsive people to serve in congress in my lifetime (and that includes prolific child molester Dennis Hastert and prolific sexual abuse ignorer Jim Jordan).

It’s a shame, too, because while Greene’s theatrics may be raising her own profile by putting her sassy masks on the news a lot, they’re doing so at the expense of her own constituents. What do they get when their representative has no power? Nothing. Not even liberal tears. The libs have not been owned. The libs are in charge. Greene isn’t living rent-free in Democrats’ heads. Greene’s theatrics are paying their rent. And yet, Republicans stood behind Greene. This is the hill they’re going to be space-lasered to death on. This is their platform: We stand with the crazy assholes.

The polite thing to say would be that it brings me no joy to write these words. But the polite thing wouldn’t be the true thing (besides, politeness died with the rise of the “fuck your feelings” party). While everybody who works in and around the Capitol complex deserves to work in a place where they don’t have to risk crossing paths with somebody as deranged as Greene, it brings me (and, judging by how eagerly she pounced on Greene, Speaker Pelosi) incredible satisfaction to witness the GOP finally implicitly admitting that Greene is who they are now.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/qanon-rep-marjorie-taylor-greene-isnt-owning-the-libs-shes-leading-the-gops-space-laser-suicide-march

February 5, 2021

Jamaica faces marijuana shortage as farmers struggle

Heavy rains followed by an extended drought, an increase in local consumption and a drop in the number of marijuana farmers have caused a shortage.

Jamaica is running low on ganja.

Heavy rains followed by an extended drought, an increase in local consumption and a drop in the number of marijuana farmers have caused a shortage in the island’s famed but largely illegal market that experts say is the worst they’ve seen.

“It’s a cultural embarrassment,” said Triston Thompson, chief opportunity explorer for Tacaya, a consulting and brokerage firm for the country’s nascent legal cannabis industry.

Jamaica, which foreigners have long associated with pot, reggae and Rastafarians, authorized a regulated medical marijuana industry and decriminalized small amounts of weed in 2015.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/nation-world/2021/02/05/jamaica-faces-marijuana-shortage-as-farmers-struggle/

Damn climate change.

February 5, 2021

The Senate Has Become a Dadaist Nightmare

No one would ever design a legislative body that worked this way.

By Ezra Klein

This week, congressional Democrats advanced a budget resolution — the first step in using the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process to pass President Biden’s $1.9 trillion fiscal rescue plan. I recognize that is not the most thrilling start to a column. But now that Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have pledged their undying fealty to the filibuster, the budget reconciliation process is where Biden’s agenda will live or die. Oy, is that depressing.

Budget reconciliation reveals the truth of how the Senate legislates now. To counter the minority’s abuse of the filibuster rule, the majority abuses another rule, ending in a process that makes legislation systematically and undeniably worse. The world’s greatest deliberative body has become one of its most absurd, but that absurdity is obscured by baroque parliamentary tricks that few understand.

“Budget reconciliation.” It sounds sober, important and official. But it’s farcical — or it would be, if the consequences weren’t so grievous.

It’s understood, by now, that the filibuster has mutated into something it was never intended to be: a 60-vote supermajority requirement on almost all legislation considered by the United States Senate. I have made my case against the filibuster in detail before, and I won’t repeat it here. Suffice to say, in a closely divided Senate, with highly polarized parties, it’s almost impossible to get 60 votes on major legislation. But there’s a workaround, and that workaround is getting both wider and dumber.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/opinion/democrats-senate-reconciliation.html

February 5, 2021

Republicans are about to prove the depths of their bad faith

Opinion by Paul Waldman

It’s looking more and more like Democrats’ covid-19 relief bill is going to pass — and it will have to pass without any Republican help. While some advocates of “bipartisanship” might consider that a problem, it’s better seen as good news, proof of how broken the process of legislation has become and how it absolutely must change — and right away.

Both houses of Congress have now passed resolutions — on purely party-line votes — that begin the process toward passing the final bill through the Senate under reconciliation rules. That will allow it to succeed with a majority of votes and not the supermajority required to defeat a Republican filibuster.

While a group of Republican senators recently went to the White House to present President Biden with a covid relief counterproposal, no one seriously thinks more than one or two of them — if any — will wind up voting for the bill. So Democrats have no choice but to proceed with reconciliation.

Nevertheless, Democrats responded to the Republican suggestion by paring down their proposal for $1,400 stimulus checks, lowering the income limit from $75,000 for an individual and $150,000 for a couple to $50,000 and $100,000 respectively.

The White House now argues that the bill is “bipartisan,” because even though it will get complete opposition from congressional Republicans, lots of Republican voters support it. You could call that just clever rhetoric, but it happens to be true. A new Quinnipiac poll finds that 68 percent of Americans support the relief bill as a whole, and 78 percent support sending $1,400 checks. The latter number includes 64 percent of Republicans, and 37 percent of them said they support the relief bill even though it was presented to them as Biden’s doing.

That’s an important thing for Democrats to appreciate: Even on a hugely popular bill that addresses an urgent crisis, absolutely no Republican cooperation will be forthcoming. After this experience, not even the most nostalgic advocate of bipartisanship could convince themselves that the right amount of compromise or cajoling will secure a bipartisan solution to any of the other many challenges the country faces.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/04/republicans-are-about-prove-depths-their-bad-faith/

February 4, 2021

Greene regrets 'words of the past,' without specific apology

Source: Tampa Bay Times

The Georgia Republican has supported calls for violence against Democrats and claims of fake school shootings.

Embattled Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, facing a House vote to strip her of committee assignments, said Thursday that she regrets some “words of the past,” but she did not specifically apologize for racist and violent rhetoric.

The newly elected Georgia Republican asserted in a House speech that she was “a very regular American” who posted conspiracy theories from QAnon and others sources before she began campaigning for Congress, but that those views did not represent her.

She said Democrats who are criticizing her don’t know her, and that she was a political newcomer when she embraced former President Donald Trump and started delving into theories on the internet. She said she was “allowed” to believe certain ideas and she blamed the media for her political problems.

“These are words of the past and they do not represent me,” she said.

Democrats were expected to move forward later Thursday with a vote that was all-but-certain to strip Taylor of her committee assignments. The political dilemma for Republicans underscores the tension that has riven the party over its future since Donald Trump lost the White House.

Read more: https://www.tampabay.com/news/nation-world/2021/02/04/greene-regrets-words-of-the-past-without-specific-apology/

February 4, 2021

At Fox, Rupert Murdoch Is Reportedly Stepping In To Right The Ship

As the network’s ratings fall behind those of CNN, the nearly 90-year-old Fox cofounder is apparently taking a special interest in programming changes designed to get Fox back on top. Will it be enough?

From the Drudge Report’s online takeover and Rush Limbaugh’s radio dominance during the Clinton years to the rise of right-wing digital powerhouses like the Daily Wire and Breitbart News as opposing forces to Barack Obama, modern Democratic presidencies have typically seen outsize success for the era’s conservative media du jour. But with the country transitioning into the Joe Biden era, Fox News has not been able to capitalize on the current Democratic administration. For the first time in two decades, the network is losing the cable-news ratings war to its mainstream and left-leaning rivals. Fox’s streaks as the most watched cable-news network overall and in prime time ended in January; CNN is now the reigning ratings champ. Fox not only lost its throne, but it didn’t even place second, as MSNBC also averaged more viewers last month. This leaves Fox News in third place among monthly cable-news prime-time viewerships for the first time since September 1999.

The ratings slide hasn’t gone unnoticed by Rupert Murdoch, who cofounded the network, and his eldest son, Fox Corp. chief executive Lachlan Murdoch. “Rupert is watching to see what these interim moves can accomplish,” one source told The Washington Post. Fox News has responded to the slump by rolling out a swift series of programming changes, including moving Martha MacCallum from her prime-time slot and filling the 7 p.m. hour with yet another opinion show that features a rotating cast of hosts––presumably because Fox’s nightly conservative opinion shows have always been the network’s bread and butter. (Last month MacCallum’s show was bumped down to the 3 p.m. hour.) The network also reportedly laid off at least 16 staffers, including political editor Chris Stirewalt.

The Fox cofounder reportedly supported the dismissal of Stirewalt, who, according to the Post, “was laid off for his part in what Murdoch viewed as the mishandling of the network’s aggressively early—but ultimately accurate—election-night projection that Joe Biden would win the state of Arizona.” However, Murdoch told the Post that “Stirewalt’s leaving had nothing to do with the correct Arizona call by the Fox decision desk.” He added, “Lachlan, myself and [Fox News CEO] Suzanne Scott have complete confidence in [Fox News president] Jay Wallace.”

On Inauguration Day, when CNN led with an average of 7.9 million viewers and MSNBC brought in 5.3 million––with a respective 10 million and 6.5 million viewers tuning in for Biden’s address––Fox News lagged behind with an average of 2.2 million viewers in the same five-hour block. These numbers mark a 77% decrease for Fox when compared to the last Inauguration Day, when it rang in Trump's presidency by topping all cable and broadcast ratings with 8.8 million viewers throughout its coverage and 11.8 million during Trump's speech. On the day of the storming of the Capitol building, CNN had a record day and beat out its rivals with an average of 5.9 million viewers, while MSNBC followed with 4.5 million viewers on average. But only 3.4 million viewers on average watched Fox’s January 6 coverage.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/02/fox-news-rupert-murdoch-stepping-in

February 4, 2021

Marjorie Taylor Greene's Republican Party Hates Democrats, Democracy and America

Have Republicans looked inside their tent lately? If they removed the kooks, they’d have a lot of empty space. The truth is that Greene’s no outlier. She’s at the party’s center.

You’ve got to see both sides: In 2021, the United States has one major political party and one authoritarian, white nationalist cult cosplaying as a political party.

If we want to preserve this fragile but vital experiment called democracy, it’s time to acknowledge, confront and call out this obvious, painful truth. One side, regardless of its flaws, is still committed to the democratic project. The other side — the one whose leader just encouraged a failed, violent insurrection at the nation’s capitol and whose other leaders don’t think he should be held to any account for that — has mutated into a counter-majoritarian extremist force stuffed with kooks, cranks, crazies and racists.

Don’t take my word for it. A recent study to measure the health of the world’s democracies found the Republican Party to be “far more illiberal than almost all other governing parties in democracies.” And that was in 2018 — before Donald Trump and a majority of elected Republicans promoted the big lie that led to the siege of our capitol and before the party sent a gun-toting, mouth-breathing, openly QAnon promoting and Jew and Muslim loathing representative to Washington.

The V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden found that the GOP now resembles ruling nationalist parties in autocratic societies open to demonizing and encouraging violence against their opponents. Comparisons are made to Hungary, where leader Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party have created the first non-democracy in the European Union. Orban is an authoritarian leader heading towards single party rule. However, the GOP is different from Fidesz: experts say the GOP is actually more hostile to minority rights, no small feat considering Orban’s obsessive anti-Muslim bigotry and immigrant fear-mongering.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/marjorie-taylor-greenes-republican-party-hates-democrats-democracy-and-america