Another year, another couple of dozen bills in state legislatures that would attack your right to protest peaceably, and if January 6 is the impetus for these bills, as some might presume, how come so many of them resemble pre-January 6 bills? Bills protecting your "right" to run over protestors, or shoot protestors "likely" to use violence, have nothing to do with the sense of entitlement that sparked January 6. But then, a lot of Americans believe, despite the evidence, that antifa and Black Lives Matter engineered the January 6 coup attempt, and politicians tend to chase the drama (particularly the drama they've already stoked!).
Hoo boy: House Republicans want to pass a bill, absurdly called the CONNECT Act, that would ban most municipal broadband networks, and they claim the bill would boost competition. So are they saying private corporations simply can't deliver better products and service than municipal governments could? Or are they saying the natural end-result of restraining government is increasing competition? They might be right about the first one, but they're full of soup about the second -- thanks to our government's hands-off approach, most folks in America don't have the option of dumping their monopoly crappy internet service provider for a better one. But if they had the option of municipal broadband, they could organize and demand better service, and if the municipality failed to redress their grievances, they could make heads roll. This ain't that deep.
Any reasonable person would take issue with some of the numbers offered in this NBC News article entitled "The GOP Is Rapidly Becoming the Blue-Collar Party." Like, for instance, the article doesn't tell you how many white blue-collar voters identified as Democrats in 2010 and 2020 (the numbers are 45% and 57%, respectively, for Republicans), and doesn't tell you how many white blue-collar voters there are, let alone how many Hispanic and black blue-collar voters there are. And going from 23% of Hispanic blue-collar voters in 2010 to 36% in 2020 is impressive, but still doesn't comprise a majority, and we don't learn how what part blue-collar voters comprise of all Hispanic voters. I suppose there might be something to it -- at least in the short run! -- but not as much as NBC News would like us to think.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) says he won't support Neera Tanden as OMB Director, virtually scuttling her nomination unless some Republican comes to her rescue. I'm no great fan of Ms. Tanden, so I don't care that he opposes her per se, but I care about his crappy reasoning (cf. "I believe her overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact" yadda yadda yadda), in which he seems blissfully unaware that just about every Republican says much nastier crap about Democrats than Ms. Tanden has ever said about Republicans. That reasoning is so crappy, in fact, that you might suspect it's a kind of Democrat drama, where Joe Manchin gets to claim a kill and then oppose nothing else of consequence. But I doubt that, and besides, if it perpetuates the myth that we should pursue "bipartisanship" with the people who burn your house down, it's bad drama.
Finally, if you're looking for a eulogy of Rush Limbaugh that doesn't walk on eggshells around his dittoheads, Anthony Dimaggio at Counterpunch writes one, concentrating mainly on Mr. Limbaugh's last decade of birtherism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, LGBTQ-phobia, and neofascism. Good to hear someone else saying Mr. Limbaugh is not a conservative, and his promotion of right-wing violence even after January 6 seals that case, if nothing else does. As pro-Trump as he was, you do have to wonder if the $600 million dollar man resented our former President for inspiring more devotion, such as it is -- after all, a man doesn't get that rich without being that needy.
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