Dartagnan

Many of us who maintain a social media presence have at least one acquaintance, “Facebook friend” or real-life, actual friend who has in the past year shared some type of official-sounding, medical jargon-laden post questioning the value of the COVID-19 vaccines—or worse, directly asserting or implying that such vaccines are ineffective, harmful, deadly, or will lead to untold health problems.

According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a U.S.

The response of the Washington, D.C. Capitol Police to the events of Jan. 6 has been closely examined and debated from practically the first moments of the insurrection itself. There have been credible accusations that the police deliberately responded sluggishly or with intentional forbearance given that the thousands of Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol were almost entirely white.

The title is a reference to Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a novel written in 1985 at the height of Ronald Reagan’s presidency that was adapted in 2017 for a highly successful, award-winning TV series, available on Hulu.

By any historical measure this country should not be where it is right now, politically speaking. The worst pandemic to strike this nation in over a century has begun its slow but inexorable transformation into an event now comprehensible in hindsight rather than experienced in the immediate moment.

There aren’t that many columnists in the U.S. media today who have proven themselves to be completely aware of what the Republican Party has transformed itself into in the last four years. Charles Blow of The New York Times is one of them.

For those who haven’t already internalized them, Blow has some sage words of advice to Democrats at this strange point in time. The bottom line: Forget about any ideals of compromise with the Republican Party.

Disgruntled business owners around the country have been complaining loudly about the lack of hired help available to them as the nation slowly emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s easy for Democrats to become frustrated at the “look at me” antics of Joe Manchin, prima donna senator from West Virginia, as he forces the Biden administration to indulge in a pointless exercise of jumping through hoops for Senate Republicans in hopes of achieving some imaginary bipartisan agreement on the president’s infrastructure bill.

I wanted to write about this simply because I didn’t want it to be overlooked. You can make of it what you will. I know what I make of it, and it’s disturbing. As reported by Summer Concepcion, forTalkingPointsMemo:

More than 100 democracy scholars called on Congress to pass national level voting rights legislation as an increasing number of GOP-led state legislatures work to implement restrictive laws at the state level in a statement issued Tuesday.

The media has focused a lot of attention on those few Republicans—Liz Cheney, for example—who have spoken out publicly as the GOP transformed itself before our eyes into an authoritarian Trump cult, committed to overturning fair elections while disenfranchising as many Americans as possible in the process.

There really was no silver lining to this country’s four-year sentence under the kakistocracy of the Trump administration. Beyond a huge, unnecessary tax cut lapped up by a tiny slice of this country’s wealthiest, no affirmative act stands out as actually benefiting American citizens; very nearly every action it took was laced with corruption, self-interest, and habitual, routine disregard for the American public.

Imagine for a moment that you’ve been convicted of a crime, and are awaiting sentencing. The prosecutor hands a computer-generated analysis to the judge that declares, based on a secret analysis performed by a complex algorithm, that you should receive the harshest possible sentence, since according to the algorithm you are highly likely to commit future crimes.

Now that Donald Trump is out of office, the right-wing smear machine has kicked into high gear in its efforts to find something—anything—that might tarnish the Biden administration. It is sadly indicative of how difficult a task they face that the most inviting target appears to be a four-legged member of the president’s family.

Many, if not most political analysts are painting a daunting picture for Democrats retaining their House or Senate majorities in 2022. Even those who acknowledge that the U.S. economy will be in a state of overdrive by the time of the midterms point to the conventional wisdom that dictates the party in power will inevitably lose seats to the opposition, as the glow of the prior national election fades, and the tides of partisan resentment rush back in.

While his failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic will forever seal Donald Trump’s legacy of disregard toward the health and safety of the American people, many of his administration’s less-publicized actions attempted to inflict less visible but potentially even worse long-term harm upon the country.

The millions of Trump voters who have thus far refused to be vaccinated against COVID-19 want us to know that we’re going about it all wrong if we want them to get the shot.

They’re tired of being “bullied,” they say. Besides, as one says, they haven’t gotten sick (yet) despite being “out and about” the entire pandemic. There’s just too much information out there to trust anyone, another says.

We’re regularly treated to conservatives whining about “entitlements” to those they consider undeserving, be they people of a different shade of skin, immigrants, or any other subgroup the right trots out to whip its followers into a race-based frenzy. The typical argument always focuses on how “those people” are spending someone else’s hard-earned tax dollars.

The first major comprehensive study of those arrested for participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol strongly indicates that the true motivation of these rioters was not some quasi-patriotic reaction to Donald Trump’s fanciful assertions of election fraud. Rather, the root cause underlying that day of violence boils down to out-and-out racism by insecure whites, alarmed about the prevalence of darker-skinned Americans in their hometown environments.

The acclaimed science fiction writer and author of the Dune series of novels, Frank Herbert, memorably wrote that “Fear is the mind-killer.”  Since the 1950s the Republican Party in this country has operated under a similar assumption, with the politics of fear as its modus operandi to achieving and consolidating political power.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Republicans, encouraged by the twice-impeached, former one-term president, have persisted in using the phrase “China virus” or “Wuhan virus” to describe the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these same Republicans have insisted, despite an overwhelming scientific consensus to the contrary, that the virus was created in a Chinese laboratory as opposed to originating in an animal host.

When Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert decided it would be a good political move to issue a histrionic email—declaring “I told Beto ‘HELL NO’ to taking our guns. Now we need to tell Joe Biden”—only hours after the news broke about the latest horrific mass shooting in a Boulder grocery store, many people took her to task for the callousness she demonstrated in self-promoting and fundraising off a tragedy.

The “It wasn’t my fault” tour is in full swing. We heard from Robert Redfield, former director of the CDC and one of Trump’s prime stooges during the COVID-19 pandemic, venturing that if only China had been a little more forthcoming, the U.S. response under Trump would have been so, so drastically different.

At some point we should probably acknowledge the fact that the majority of those who supported Donald Trump are just bad people. After all, it seems clear that they intend to go out of their way to prove the point, one by one, time and time again.

As reported by the New York Daily News, a woman, identified as Stephanie Denaro of Queens and accompanied by at least three children, got in line at the Davidovich Bakery on New York City’s Lower East Side.

How do you write a report about police tactics in response to protests over police racism without ever mentioning racism in your report?

There was just “insufficient training,” we’re told. The police “mishandled” the response. There were “major law enforcement agencies across the country” in total “disarray.”

That’s all it was. Really.

Last week 21 Republican attorneys-general, all hailing from “red” states, signed onto a letter complaining about a provision contained within the American Rescue Plan (ARP), which effectively prohibits them from diverting funds, intended to shore up local budgets and services, in order to instead finance tax cuts.

For an issue that has so dominated the media during the past two weeks, the views of ordinary Americans toward the legislative filibuster have received remarkably little attention in the way of polling. What emerges most noticeably from those polls that have been conducted is a remarkable degree of indifference, one that most likely stems from Americans’ overall lack of knowledge on the topic.

In a highly misleading article, The New York Times is attempting to rewrite the dismal history of the Trump administration’s miserable failure regarding vaccine production and distribution.

My dearest Republicans, I know that somewhere, way back deep in the recesses of your memories,  when you ran for elected office—maybe not all, but at least some of you—had some sense that you might actually do something good for the country. That you had something—it may not have been much, but something, at least—to contribute to make this country just a little bit better.

If the total breakdown of a state’s electrical power grid, plummeting millions of people without warning into subzero temperatures for several days, had occurred anywhere else but Texas, most media outlets, including Fox News, would have dutifully covered the story in accordance with their usual practice.

As many Americans are aware, Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger is one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump for his role in inciting the insurrection of Jan. 6. The conservative Air National Guard veteran, currently serving his sixth term in Congress, is one of the few Republicans who declined to fall in behind Donald Trump in the wake of the lethal riots at the U.S. Capitol.

I’m ashamed to admit that this didn’t register the first time I saw video of Donald Trump’s supporters marching through the Capitol, methodically hunting door-to-door for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, smashing down doors and chanting her name.

Thanks to Monica Hesse, writing for The Washington Post, I get it now.

As rioters made their way through the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, some went looking for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.