January 26, 2022

Why Is The Press Sabotaging Biden?

If Biden were the failure the press keeps insisting he is, they wouldn’t be working so hard to create that narrative.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/why-is-the-press-sabotaging-biden

Joe Biden’s marathon press conference last week was an embarrassment for the United States. Did you think I was talking about Biden? No. He did fine — I’m talking about the press desperately trying to frame the narrative that Biden is a failure. They’ve been at it for the better part of a year and the frustration is clearly mounting that Biden himself won’t play ball. Looking back at Biden’s first year, it’s easy to see why the press is so confident in their assessment.

“Failure” on top on “failure”

Biden ended America’s longest war which is exactly what the overwhelming majority of the country wanted him to do. This was definitely Biden’s “Fall of Saigon” moment because the press made sure to mention it about 5000 times. And it was exactly like the Fall of Saigon minus enemy troops overrunning the base and the American military fleeing in a panic under constant attack. Oh, and we left of our own accord.

Sure, it was messy and chaotic at first, but no American was left behind who did not choose to remain. Over 120,000 people were evacuated, making it the largest airlift in American history. The press knew Biden could have ended a losing war in a more orderly fashion but no one could seem to explain how. That the public was not still talking about Biden’s failure after a few weeks left many journalists grinding their teeth. In their eyes, it was an irredeemable debacle Biden must be punished for.

If anyone in the press has any teeth left after Afghanistan, they surely finished grinding them to dust once their predictions for a Christmas catastrophe failed to pan out. The naked anticipation of the “liberal” press for empty shelves was pretty gross to watch. It was going to be the worst Christmas ever and it was going to be all Biden’s fault. Then Biden used the muscle of the federal government and, poof, no empty shelves! The President ordered the two main ports in California to run 24/7 and slapped a $100/day fine on cargo containers that companies left sitting on the docks. Like magic, companies found a way to get those containers moving and product on the shelf. A Christmas miracle! And one that the press quietly discussed after weeks of loud and breathless “Doom is upon us!” headlines. Biden saved Christmas and barely received any credit at all.

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January 26, 2022

Confessions of a Liberal Heretic

Ruy Teixeira was co-author of one of the most influential political books of the 21st century. Now, he says, Democrats are getting its lessons all wrong.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/25/us/politics/ruy-teixeira-democrats.html

A funny thing happened on the way to the emerging Democratic majority. Twenty years on, the co-authors of a hugely influential work on the subject acknowledge that their party took a detour. In 2002, the political scientist [link:ruyteixeira11@gmail.com|Ruy Teixeira] and the journalist John B. Judis published a book that struck a chord among liberals despondent over the success of George W. Bush, a president who was then so popular that he gained seats in that year’s midterm election.

“The Emerging Democratic Majority” took note of the demographic change pulsing through the country, and boldly predicted that the Democratic Party was poised to dominate American politics for the foreseeable future. “Over the next decade, this bloc of voters is expected to continue to increase and, extrapolating from recent trends, could make up nearly a quarter of the electorate,” Teixeira and Judis wrote. “If these voters remain solidly Democratic, they will constitute a formidable advantage for any Democratic candidate. Democrats could suffer from an embarrassment of political riches.”

Six years later, the American public elected Barack Obama, an African American president whose rainbow coalition seemed to vindicate the thesis. A Time magazine cover from May 2009 pictured an elephant below the headline “Endangered Species,” capturing the feeling that Republicans’ demographic reckoning had finally arrived. But it unraveled quickly with the election of Donald Trump, who not only discovered pockets of white working-class voters that few knew existed, but also appealed to more voters of color than anyone had expected.

Now, as President Biden sinks in the polls, Teixeira finds himself fighting against what he says is a caricature of his famous book. His Substack newsletter, The Liberal Patriot, delivers “no-holds-barred, reality-based analysis,” unafraid to take on what he calls a “race-essentialist” dogma that is dominating the Democratic Party. Teixeira is unsparing about the party strategists who he believes are leading Democrats astray — and unapologetic about offending many on his own side. His newsletter has become a kind of samizdat for like-minded liberals who aren’t as willing to speak their minds.

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January 26, 2022

Why should we worry that the U.S. could become an anocracy again? Because of the threat of civil war

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/24/why-should-we-worry-that-us-could-become-an-anocracy-again-because-threat-civil-war/

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Anocracies are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic; their citizens enjoy some elements of democratic rule (e.g., elections), while other rights (e.g., due process or freedom of the press) suffer. In the last weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, the respected Center for Systemic Peace (CSP) calculated that, for the first time in more than two centuries, the United States no longer qualified as a democracy. It had, over the preceding five years, become an anocracy. That rating improved to “democracy” just this month, but to put it in perspective, the current U.S. score is the same as Brazil’s 2018 rating (the most recent available for that country), which was two points below Switzerland’s.

This might come as a shock to many Americans. While we were going about our daily lives, our executive branch continued its decades-long accumulation of power to the point where a sitting president refused to accept an election result. Democratic backsliding had happened incrementally, like the erosion of a shoreline. The process is especially difficult for Americans to recognize because exceptionalism is baked into our founding myth: We are a city on a hill. We are different.

Or not. The CSP ranking, called the “Polity Score” — well regarded partly because of its historical and geographic scope — uses various criteria to place governments on a scale ranging from -10 (most autocratic) to +10 (most democratic). Anocracies are in the middle, between -5 and +5. The United States’ Polity Score dropped from +10 in 2015 to +5 — an anocracy — for 2020.

Our political tailspin began in 2016, when the CSP cited international observers’ conclusion that the election was not entirely fair: Election rules had been changed to serve partisan inter­ests, voting rights were infringed, and a foreign country (Russia) interfered on behalf of a candidate (Trump). The score dropped again in 2019, after the president refused to cooperate with Con­gress and again at the end of Trump’s term, when he sowed distrust in the election and attempted to halt the peaceful transfer of power.

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January 26, 2022

Jim Cooper from Tennessee becomes latest House Democrat to not seek reelection

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/591302-rep-jim-cooper-becomes-latest-house-democrat-to-not-seek-reelection

Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) announced Tuesday that he will not seek reelection this year, citing new congressional district lines that split up his home city of Nashville, which he's represented in Congress for decades.

Cooper acknowledged that he doesn't see a path to reelection under the state's new redistricting plan that would divide Nashville into three congressional districts.

"Despite my strength at the polls, I could not stop the General Assembly from dismembering Nashville. No one tried harder to keep our city whole. I explored every possible way, including lawsuits, to stop the gerrymandering and to win one of the three new congressional districts that now divide Nashville," Cooper said in a statement. "There's no way, at least for me in this election cycle, but there may be a path for other worthy candidates," he added.

Cooper said he wanted to announce his decision now so that other candidates have time to enter the race and that he will return campaign donations he's already received.

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January 26, 2022

Gallego went to New York to meet Sinema donors amid talk of primary challenge

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/591275-gallego-went-to-new-york-to-meet-sinema-donors-amid-talk-of-primary

Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) reportedly met with some of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (D-Ariz.) donors amid speculation swirls the congressman will mount a primary challenge against the freshman senator.

Punchbowl News reported on Monday, citing sources close to the situation, that Gallego traveled to New York this weekend to meet with some of Sinema’s donors about a potential Senate run in 2024, when Sinema faces reelection.

Gallego, a four-term congressman representing Arizona, told CNN last week that he has received “a lot of encouragement” from elected officials, senators, unions, traditional Democratic groups and big donors to wage a primary bid against Sinema.

Gallego’s comments come as Democrats are becoming increasingly frustrated with Sinema, who along with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has delayed two of the party’s top legislative priorities. Sinema refused to commit to supporting the party’s roughly $1.2 trillion social spending and climate package, and she objected to changing the Senate filibuster to help pass voting rights legislation.

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Arizona Democrat says some senators urging him to challenge Sinema with party at a 'breaking point'

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/20/politics/ruben-gallego-kyrsten-sinema-arizona-democrats-senate/index.html

January 26, 2022

Henry Cuellar's Azerbaijan Scandal Is a Very American Tale of Oil Addiction

The FBI’s raid on the Texas congressman’s home is a reminder of how much we normalize ties to foreign (and domestic) oil.

https://newrepublic.com/article/165127/henry-cuellars-azerbaijan-scandal-american-tale-oil-addiction

Last week, a team of FBI agents raided the Laredo, Texas, home of Congressman Henry Cuellar, known as “Big Oil’s Favorite Democrat” for his right-leaning representation of his deep-blue district, as well as the $1.1 million he’s received from energy and natural resource company PACs since his first successful campaign for the House in 2006. From the scarce details available so far, the raid appears to have been connected to Cuellar’s attempts to extend his cozy relationship with the U.S. fossil fuel industry to its counterparts abroad. While it’s early days yet, it’s already looking like the Cuellar scandal is going to showcase the fine line between when it’s legal to shower support on international oil and gas producers and when it’s not.

Cuellar’s home and office were each raided as part of a federal grand jury probe into a number of companies and nonprofits, several of which have ties to the government and state-owned oil company of Azerbaijan. The FBI is involved, along with the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Unit, charged with overseeing “the investigation and prosecution of all federal crimes affecting government integrity, including bribery of public officials, election crimes, and other related offenses.” Cuellar and his wife and at least one campaign staffer were subpoenaed as well. “I’m fully cooperating with law enforcement and committed to ensuring that justice and the law is upheld,” Cuellar said in a video released Tuesday afternoon from his reelection campaign Twitter account. “There is an ongoing investigation that will show there was not wrongdoing on my part.”

It’s not known what Cuellar’s, his wife’s, or his staffer’s place in the probe may be, though reporting in the days since the raid has dug up a long history of Cuellar’s connections to the oil and gas–rich country. A nonprofit called Assembly of the Friends of Azerbaijan reportedly played a “special role” in getting him onto the Congressional Azerbaijan Caucus in 2013. The group was later found to be operating as a front for SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil company, which transferred money to it to sponsor a congressional delegation in the spring of 2013 that Cuellar did not join.

Cuellar and his wife had already traveled to Azerbaijan in January of that year, on the dime of another nonprofit called the Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians. As Lee Fang and Ryan Grim reported for The Intercept, that organization’s president, Kemal Oksuz, was a campaign donor to Cuellar who later pleaded guilty to concealing the fact that SOCAR had sponsored the spring congressional delegation, using the Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians and the Assembly of the Friends of Azerbaijan as cover. “Records suggest that this individual used the entities interchangeably,” a Congressional Ethics report stated of Oksuz. Cuellar worked with Oksuz, as well, to organize a partnership between Texas A&M University and the Azeri government that resulted in a “Baku Summer Energy School,” which itself had backing from both ExxonMobil and SOCAR. It seems Cuellar saw a kinship between the two oil and gas–producing regions. “Given San Antonio’s role as a rapidly growing city with an unlimited export potential, there is a vast opportunity to strengthen South Texas’s relationship with Azerbaijan,” Cuellar said in a 2015 event with Azerbaijan’s ambassador to the United States, Elin Suleymanov.

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Henry Cuellar’s Corporate Ties: The Texas Democrat and members of his staff have unsettling links to the oil and private prison industries.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/henry-cuellar/

It’s no secret that Representative Henry Cuellar, the conservative Texas Democrat whose home and campaign office were raided as part of an FBI investigation this week, has deep corporate ties. Cuellar, a nine-term incumbent, is known as “Big Oil’s favorite Democrat.” He’s a top congressional recipient of oil and gas money, as well as private prison industry cash, and has been caught providing favors to lobbyists. Business interests, from Koch-linked groups to the immensely powerful US Chamber of Commerce, prop up Cuellar. And he returns the generosity, using his power in Congress to cater to their preferences and safeguard capital. It also helps when the special interests and corporations dominating the political system have a direct channel to the representative’s office.

One of Cuellar’s recent chiefs of staff, Amy Travieso, has a particularly alarming history, swinging through the revolving door to lobby or work for several organizations that have heavily donated to the Texas Democrat—including the oil and gas industry’s most powerful lobbying group, which bankrolled a dark-money effort that backed his 2020 primary campaign. Travieso first joined Cuellar’s office in 2011 as a deputy chief of staff, a position she held for nearly six years. After her first stint on Cuellar’s team, Travieso registered to lobby on behalf of two groups: the US Chamber of Commerce, where she served as director of congressional and public affairs from February 2017 to December 2017, and the American Hotel and Lodging Association, where she was the vice president of government affairs from January 2018 to June 2020. While working for these organizations, Travieso lobbied for at least 10 pieces of legislation that Cuellar either cosponsored or voted for, according to OpenSecrets data.

In many of these cases, Cuellar was one of a small handful of Democrats voting for Republican-sponsored policies, including votes to kill environmental regulations, stop worker protections, and undermine the Affordable Care Act. Travieso lobbied against the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, Democrats’ sweeping labor reform legislation. Cuellar just happened to be one of seven Democrats to eventually vote against it. But Travieso wasn’t done, and spun through the revolving door yet again. She went back to Cuellar’s office in June 2020, this time as his chief of staff. A year later, she left the high-ranking position to join the American Petroleum Institute, where she’s currently senior director for federal relations. Though she’s not officially registered as a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, its federal relations team is dedicated to advancing “the organization’s advocacy goals in Washington,” according to its website.

Since 2011, the American Petroleum Institute has contributed $17,000 directly to Cuellar’s campaign committee. During the 2020 primary, the American Petroleum Institute gave over a million dollars to a mysterious dark-money group, American Workers for Progress, that poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into boosting Cuellar in the final weeks of the wildly competitive race. The three lobbying groups Travieso has worked for have given nearly $80,000 to Cuellar’s campaign, and ramped up the contributions in recent election cycles, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The American Hotel and Lodging Association gave Cuellar $2,000 in the 2008 cycle, but its spending shot up in 2016. In the 2018 and 2020 cycles, when Travieso worked there, the hotel industry group spent a total of $20,000 on Cuellar’s reelection campaigns.

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More background on Cuellar (his district has never once elected a Rethug in its entire history)


MJ Hegar fires back at fellow Democrat Henry Cuellar for helping her GOP opponent fundraise

https://www.texastribune.org/2018/09/13/mj-hegar-fires-back-henry-cuellar-helping-her-gop-opponent-fundraise/


NARAL Pro-Choice America Denounces Rep. Henry Cuellar for Vote Against Women's Health Protection Act

Rep. Cuellar was the lone Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives to vote against critical legislation to safeguard the federal right to abortion

https://www.prochoiceamerica.org/2021/09/24/naral-pro-choice-america-denounces-henry-cuellar-for-vote-against-womens-health-protection-act/


In Texas, a Lone House Democrat Has an ‘A’ Rating From the N.R.A.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/us/politics/henry-cuellar-nra.html


He has went on Fox News and attacked Biden and Harris multiple times:

https://www.foxnews.com/media/democrat-henry-cuellar-biden-border-crisis-staged-visit

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/henry-cuellar-knocks-biden-delegation-border-trip

https://www.foxnews.com/media/cuellar-biden-immigration-activists-border-patrol-police-texas-communities

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/parisattacks/texas-rep-moved-on-from-asking-kamala-harris-for-help-at-the-border/vi-AASsRvZ

January 25, 2022

4 threats to US democracy: Election theft, minority rule, voter suppression, and an unfit GOP

https://www.vox.com/22798975/democracy-threats-peril-trump-voting-rights



Leading Democrats, many academics, liberal commentators, and left-leaning activists agree: American democracy is in grave peril. It’s besieged on all sides, the threats culminating so far in Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election from Joe Biden. More tumult likely lies ahead. But there’s a surprising amount of murkiness about what, exactly, this peril entails — and what can and should be done about it.

Several dark scenarios for the future have been posed, but each is quite different. One is the threat of a stolen election — Republicans could outright steal elections Democrats won, as Trump tried to do, perhaps enhanced by mob violence. Another is the minority rule threat, in which Republicans could consistently win according to the rules but without getting a majority of votes nationwide, due to advantages in the Senate, Electoral College, and redistricting. There has also been much discussion of the threat of voter suppression, in which Democrats worry that GOP policy changes making it more difficult to vote could thwart a majority’s will.

Another fear is less about the way Republicans win power, but is more about what they’ll do with it. Let’s call this the irresponsible party threat. For the people with this point of view, any Republican win — even one with sweeping voter majorities — is dangerous, since a faction that does not respect democracy is influential and arguably dominant in the party. There’s a great deal of debate on just how plausible, and how worrying, each of these scenarios is. Some argue they’re all unfolding at once and are all immensely serious — and that’s part of why this problem is so difficult to solve.

There’s also disagreement about root causes here, most notably, on how much of the problem comes from Donald Trump personally, and how much comes from broader forces in American society or institutions. Too often, though, all this tends to be conflated and treated as similarly urgent in what has become a thinkpiece-industrial complex about democracy’s peril, and by a liberal establishment mostly concerned with offering reasons to vote for Democrats rather than Republicans. These threats may well have a common root, but they are distinct problems that would have separate solutions.

The threat of election theft.......

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January 25, 2022

COVID's Turbo-Mutation Is Killing This Vax Dream, So What's Next? (good news)

The aspiration to tackle new variants with specific vaccines is falling apart because the dominant strain changes so quickly. The good news is that there might be a better plan.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/covids-turbo-mutation-is-killing-this-vax-dream-so-whats-next



Two months after scientists in South Africa alerted the world to the new, highly transmissible Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus, the global surge in infections resulting from the variant is finally subsiding. To be clear, exhausted health-care workers in overcrowded hospitals are still fighting to save lives. But many epidemiologists are beginning to look ahead to a post-Omicron world.

The pandemic experts The Daily Beast spoke to were unanimous. Omicron is not the end. New variants–“lineages” is the scientific term–are coming. Worse, a host of entirely new coronaviruses lurk in animal populations and could make the leap to human beings at any time, seeding a whole new pandemic after or on top of COVID-19. A new vaccine that works equally well against all lineages of SARS-CoV-2, as well as any future coronavirus, could blunt both. A “pan-coronavirus” vaccine is the holy grail of public health. Dozens of labs all over the world, including several in the U.S., are working overtime to develop one.

Scientists hope universal vaccines will hugely simplify global efforts to end the current pandemic and prevent the next one. Some insist it’s a better approach than trying to tailor vaccines for particular lineages. An Omicron-specific jab, for instance. “We are going to have to come up with long-term vaccine solutions that don’t necessitate chasing the latest variant,” James Lawler, an infectious disease expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, told The Daily Beast.

A pan-COVID vaccine gets ahead of the pathogen. Lineage-specific vaccines chase after it. Barton Haynes, an immunologist with Duke University’s Human Vaccine Institute, called the latter approach “whack-a-mole.” “Wait until something happens, then do something about it.” The solution, Haynes told The Daily Beast, is “greater uptake of the vaccines we have and good use in the future of the vaccines being developed in the second generation of COVID vaccines–i.e., pan-coronavirus vaccines.”

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January 25, 2022

Biden Could Deploy 50,000 Troops if Putin Overruns Ukraine, Says Report

https://www.thedailybeast.com/biden-could-deploy-50000-troops-if-putin-overruns-ukraine-says-report

The White House is reportedly making plans to fight back as Vladimir Putin gathers more and more Russian troops at the border of Ukraine.

Up until now, President Joe Biden has sounded cautious when asked about the prospect of a military intervention in the event of a Russian invasion. But, in a report from The New York Times, it’s claimed Biden is now moving toward a more forceful strategy.

The Times reports Biden was presented with a plan at Camp David on Saturday to deploy an initial 1,000 to 5,000 troops to Eastern European nations, with the option to “increase that number tenfold” if the situation worsens. However, none of the plans under consideration include sending U.S. troops to Ukraine itself, the report states.

Meanwhile, NATO confirmed Monday that it was putting troops on standby and bolstering Eastern Europe with more ships and fighter jets in preparation for a possible invasion. The Kremlin has denied it has any plans to invade, despite amassing some 100,000 troops.

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January 25, 2022

'The Books of Jacob,' a Nobel Prize Winner's Sophisticated and Overwhelming Novel

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/books/review-books-of-jacob-olga-tokarczuk.html



The Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk was, in 2019, a youthful winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was 57, dreadlocked, mischievous of politics, a vegetarian. Her novel “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” had recently been turned, by Agnieszka Holland, into the film “Spoor,” a slice of existential and ecology-minded dread.

Tokarczuk (pronounced To-KAR-chook) was not among those laureates the Swedish Academy sometimes seems to prop up in the crypt for a final viewing. Her career was, and is, in full gallop. Her novels — they are often both pensive and mythic in tone — are slowly making their way into English. In addition to “Drive Your Plow,” these include the philosophical and often dazzling “Flights,” about travel and being between stations. It won the 2018 Man Booker International prize.

Tokarczuk’s most ambitious novel — the Swedish Academy called it her “magnum opus” — has long been said to be “The Books of Jacob,” first published in Poland in 2014. It’s here now. At nearly 1,000 pages, it is indeed magnum-size. Even its subtitle (rare, on a novel) is a mouthful. The first third reads: “A fantastic journey across seven borders, five languages and three major religions, not counting the minor sects.”

If you sense you are about to step into a sword-and-sandal epic with a mud room, you would not be altogether wrong. If you detect a saving, dill-scented note of satire, you would not be wrong either. Set in the mid-18th century, “The Books of Jacob” is about a charismatic self-proclaimed messiah, Jacob Frank, a young Jew who travels through the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, attracting and repelling crowds and authorities in equal measure.

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