June 21, 2021

Joe Manchin, at the apex of his power, finds few allies in his quest for bipartisanship

The Washington Post

Annie Linskey, Mike DeBonis 18 hrs ago

FAIRMONT, W.Va. —On a recent Sunday afternoon, Sen. Joe Manchin III called with big news for the mayor of this 18,000-person town nestled in a lush valley where the Tygart and West Fork rivers meet to form the north-flowing Monongahela.

“Hey, buddy,” Manchin said, using his signature greeting, before explaining how a federal stimulus package that had just passed would mean nearly $8 million for the two-century-old town dotted with picturesque red-brick buildings and beset by frequent flooding.

“He said, ‘What do you think about getting the money?’?” recalled the town’s mayor, Thomas Mainella, who, like many civic leaders in the state, has known Manchin for decades. “He was as excited about it as we were.”

One topic that didn’t come up was how Manchin had, at least temporarily, put in jeopardy the $1.9 trillion bill that was the first major pandemic relief effort pushed by the new Biden administration, and the source of the money for Fairmont.

more/NO PAYWALL

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/joe-manchin-at-the-apex-of-his-power-finds-few-allies-in-his-quest-for-bipartisanship/ar-AALfv7W

June 21, 2021

Tight Labor Market Returns Upper Hand to Workers

June 21, 2021 at 6:40 am EDT By Taegan Goddard

Wall Street Journal: “Ballooning job openings in fields requiring minimal education — including in restaurants, transportation, warehousing and manufacturing — combined with a shrinking labor force are giving low-wage workers perks previously reserved for white-collar employees. That often means bonuses, bigger raises and competing offers.”

“Average weekly wages in leisure and hospitality, the sector that suffered the steepest job losses in 2020, were up 10.4% in May from February 2020… Pay for those with only high school diplomas is rising faster than for college graduates.”

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https://politicalwire.com/2021/06/21/tight-labor-market-returns-upper-hand-to-workers/

June 21, 2021

This progressive police reform bill is pretty popular

A new Vox poll shows a majority of Americans are open to the Breathe Act’s ambitious reforms.

By Li Zhouli@vox.com Jun 21, 2021, 8:30am EDT

As lawmakers try to find a bipartisan compromise on police reform, new polling data reveals that a more progressive approach has fairly strong support as well.

Per a Vox/Data for Progress survey, the Breathe Act, legislation that would implement a more sweeping overhaul of policing that has been championed by activists including the Movement for Black Lives, also has 51 percent likely voter backing. The much less ambitious George Floyd Justice in Policing Act has strong support as well, with an even higher 66 percent in backing.

And yet, neither is likely to make it into law. Both bills are more expansive than what lawmakers are currently negotiating, and face roadblocks when it comes to the Senate. While Democrats made the Justice in Policing Act their starting point in negotiations, it doesn’t have the votes to get through the upper chamber and neither would the Breathe Act.

Because of the Senate’s current 50-50 split, the existence of the legislative filibuster, and Democrats’ own internal divisions on police reform, they will have to compromise with Republicans to advance a bill, suggesting that whatever could pass will be more limited than the Justice in Policing Act.

more
https://www.vox.com/2021/6/21/22535672/breathe-act-progressive-police-reform-bill

June 21, 2021

Trump CFO (Weisselberg) Still Not Cooperating

June 21, 2021 at 9:54 am EDT By Taegan Goddard

Washington Post: “As the most senior non-Trump executive at the former president’s private, closely held company, Weisselberg is probably a key figure in prosecutors’ efforts to indict Trump, legal experts say. His central role in nearly every aspect of Trump’s business, revealed in depositions and news interviews over the past three decades, afforded him what former employees say is a singular view of the Trump Organization’s tax liabilities and finances.”

“Yet officials involved in the Weisselberg investigation have grown frustrated about what they view as a lack of cooperation from Weisselberg and believe he continues to regularly speak with Trump.”

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https://politicalwire.com/2021/06/21/trump-cfo-still-not-cooperating/

June 21, 2021

Feds Investigating Whether Roger Stone 'Radicalized' Trump Supporters Who Stormed Capitol: Report

Published on June 21, 2021 at 08:09 AM ETBy Travis Gettys

Roger Stone is reportedly under investigation for his role in planning to Jan. 6 insurrection to undo Donald Trump’s election loss.

Federal prosecutors are building a conspiracy case against right-wing militants who allegedly plotted the insurrection, and investigators are looking into the roles Stone and Alex Jones may have played in radicalizing Trump supporters who joined the assault on the U.S. Capitol, according to Los Angeles Times legal affairs columnist Harry Litman.

https://twitter.com/harrylitman/status/1406714294562177033

“I think they are leaving no stone unturned to kind of portray and determine the color of what happened here, were the insurrectionists influenced by staff, members of Congress, Trump loyalists like Roger Stone and Alex Jones,” Litman told MSNBC’s Zerlina Maxwell. “They’re really wanting to paint a full picture rather than — we see the biggest charges against some of the people, they are criminal conspiracy and insurrection, they pack plenty of wallop already, and that is the overall code they are going after but the picture deservedly is one of terrorism. These were domestic terrorists.”

Stone and Jones have come up in court documents for other defendants, and they both spoke at rallies the night before the attack and the morning of Jan. 6, and Litman suggested that investigators believe they may have helped incite the riot.

more
https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2021/06/feds-investigating-whether-roger-stone-radicalized-trump-supporters-who-stormed-capitol-report/

June 21, 2021

New book offers fresh details about chaos, conflicts inside Trump's pandemic response

At one point, the president mused about transferring infected American citizens in Asia to Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba

Dan Diamond 2 hrs ago

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, as White House officials debated whether to bring infected Americans home for care, President Donald Trump suggested his own plan for where to send them, eager to suppress the numbers on U.S. soil.

“Don’t we have an island that we own?” the president reportedly asked those assembled in the Situation Room in February 2020, before the U.S. outbreak would explode. “What about Guantánamo?”

“We import goods,” Trump specified, lecturing his staff. “We are not going to import a virus.”

Aides were stunned, and when Trump brought it up a second time, they quickly scuttled the idea, worried about a backlash over quarantining American tourists on the same Caribbean base where the United States holds terrorism suspects.

more/NO PAYWALL:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/new-book-offers-fresh-details-about-chaos-conflicts-inside-trump-e2-80-99s-pandemic-response/ar-AALgO6w

June 19, 2021

The martyr who may rise again: Christian right's faith in Trump not shaken

David Smith in Orlando
@smithinamerica

Sat 19 Jun 2021 09.36 EDT

The talk in the carpeted corridors of the Road to Majority conference suggests the ex-president’s big lie has firmly taken root

Young alligators swam in the water or lazed on artificial rocks as a waterfall cascaded nearby. “Alligators are found primarily in freshwater and swamps and marches,” noted a nearby sign. “... Alligators are opportunistic feeders.”

The “Gator Springs” exhibit greeted religious conservatives this week as they made their way through the vast atrium of the Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center in Orlando, Florida, to regroup after Republicans’ loss of power in 2020 and test early contenders for the presidential nomination in 2024.

After riding up an escalator, attendees at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority conference met with a registration sign slapped with two additional labels: “Trump: Take America Back, 2024” and “Trump Store, Vendor Exhibits”.

Beside it was a T-shirt that said: “Jesus is my savior. Trump is my president.”

more
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/19/trump-christian-right-conference-faith-and-freedom

June 19, 2021

The Rosenbergs were executed for spying in 1953. Can their sons reveal the truth?

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sent to the electric chair for being Soviet spies, but their sons have spent decades trying to clear their mother’s name. Are they close to a breakthrough?

Hadley Freeman
@HadleyFreeman

Sat 19 Jun 2021 06.00 EDT

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs…… ” So goes the opening sentence of Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel The Bell Jar, referring to the Jewish American couple, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and sent to the electric chair exactly 68 years ago today. Their execution casts a morbid shadow over Plath’s book, just as it did over the United States, and it is seen by many as the nadir of America’s engagement with the cold war. The Rosenbergs are still the only Americans ever put to death in peacetime for espionage, and Ethel is the only American woman killed by the US government for a crime other than murder.

During their trial, Ethel in particular was vilified for prioritising communism over her children, and the prosecution insisted she had been the dominant half of the couple, purely because she was three years older. “She was the mastermind of this whole conspiracy,” assistant prosecutor Roy Cohn told the judge. But questions about whether she was guilty at all have been growing louder in recent years, and a new biography presents her in a different light. “Ethel was killed for being a wife. She was guilty of supporting her husband,” Anne Sebba, author of Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy, tells me. And for that, the 37-year-old mother of two young children had five massive jolts of electricity pumped through her body. Her death was so brutal that eyewitnesses reported that smoke rose out of her head.

The killing of the Rosenbergs was so shocking at the time and is so resonant of a specific period in American history that it has become part of popular culture. In Tony Kushner’s play Angels In America, Ethel haunts Cohn. In Woody Allen’s Crimes And Misdemeanours, Clifford (played by Allen) says sarcastically that he loves another character “like a brother – David Greenglass”, referencing Ethel’s brother, who testified against her and Julius to save himself and his wife. The most moving cultural response to the Rosenbergs’ deaths was EL Doctorow’s 1971 novel, The Book Of Daniel, which imagines the painful life afterwards of the Rosenbergs’ oldest child, whom he renames Daniel. In reality, the older Rosenberg child is called Michael, and his younger brother is Robert.

It is a bitter, rainy spring day when I interview the Rosenbergs’ sons. Only three and seven when their parents were arrested, six and 10 when they were killed, they are now grandfathers with grey beards and known as Michael and Robert Meeropol, having long ago taken the surname of the couple who adopted them after the US government orphaned them. When their parents were arrested, Michael, always a challenging child (“That’s putting it kindly,” he says), acted out even more, whereas Robert withdrew into himself. This dynamic still holds true: “Robert is more reserved and I tend to fly off the handle,” says Michael, 78, a retired economics professor, whose eyes spark with fire when he recalls old battles. Patient, methodical Robert, 74, a former lawyer, considers every word carefully. We are all talking by video chat, and when I ask where Robert is, he replies that he’s at home in Massachusetts, in a town “90 miles west of Boston and 150 miles north-east of New York City. To be more specific… ” Michael is in his home in New York state, in a town he describes as “just south of Pete Seeger’s home”, referring to the folksinger and leftwing hero.

more
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/19/rosenbergs-executed-for-spying-1953-can-sons-reveal-truth

June 19, 2021

Biden admin moves to make gender confirmation surgery available through Veteran Affairs helth care

Source: CNN



First on CNN: Biden administration moves to make gender confirmation surgery available through Veteran Affairs health care system

By Ellie Kaufman

Updated 10:10 AM ET, Sat June 19, 2021

(CNN) - Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough is moving to make gender confirmation surgery available to transgender veterans through Veterans Affairs health care coverage, according to a VA department spokesperson.

McDonough will announce the move at a Pride event at the Orlando Vet Center in Florida later on Saturday, according to the spokesperson.

"We are taking the first necessary steps to expand VA's care to include gender confirmation surgery -- thus allowing transgender vets to go through the full gender confirmation process with VA by their side," McDonough's prepared remarks state. CNN obtained a copy of the speech.

The change marks a substantial shift in care for eligible transgender veterans. The National Center for Transgender Equality estimates there are approximately 134,000 transgender veterans.

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/19/politics/veterans-affairs-gender-confirmation-surgery/index.html

June 19, 2021

Mark Meadows reportedly predicted 'nobody is going to care' about George Floyd's killing

BRENDAN MORROW
JUNE 18, 2021

Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows reportedly initially dismissed the idea that George Floyd's killing would dominate the news and generate nationwide outrage in May 2020, instead thinking "nobody" would care.

That's according to a new excerpt published in Politico Friday from reporter Michael C. Bender's book Frankly, We Did Win this Election, which details a West Wing meeting the morning after Memorial Day in 2020. The scheduled topic was the COVID-19 pandemic, but adviser Jared Kushner, who appeared "distracted" and "aloof," reportedly interrupted the discussion to bring up the video starting to spread of Floyd's killing at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.

"I'm just going to stop you," Kushner reportedly said. "There is going to be one story that dominates absolutely everything for the foreseeable future. I'm already hearing from African American leaders about the death of George Floyd in Minnesota."

But according to the book, Meadows "brushed" this off, telling Kushner, "Nobody is going to care about that." Meadows disputes this account.

more
https://theweek.com/mark-meadows/1001717/mark-meadows-reportedly-predicted-nobody-is-going-to-care-about-george-floyds