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Rashad Robinson/USA Today:
The Senate filibuster has a racist past and present. End it so America can move forward.
The filibuster hurts all of us, not just the Black community. Anyone who needs real change or help loses out to the Republican obsession with power.
The nature of the filibuster, its rules and norms, is hardly an iron-clad tradition. It has changed and adapted greatly over the years since it first became popular in the civil rights era. But what hasn’t changed is its enduring connection to racism. The filibuster has always stood in the way of racial progress, whether employed by Southern Democrats of the Jim Crow era or the Republican Party today after a major shift in the party’s stance on racial equality. When you understand the filibuster’s racist past, it becomes clear that it has a racist present as well — and that we need to get rid of it.
First Read:
Here’s why Democrats are still going big on their Covid relief bill
By now, you’ve heard the criticism about the $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill from policy experts and even some Biden allies — it’s too big, the economy seems to be getting better (see today’s jobs report), more Americans are already getting vaccinated and state budget situations aren’t as bad as previously thought.
But as our colleague Benjy Sarlin reminds us, none of this has moved Democrats who are still haunted by the ghosts of 2009, when inadequate stimulus (partly due to overly-rosy forecasts) failed to quickly boost the economy. The collapse in government revenues also led to layoffs and funding cuts that persisted a decade later, making it a particular area of concern this time.
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The other lesson Democrats learned: Pay attention to the politics as much as — if not more than — the economics.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Biden has decided not to wage war on ‘Neanderthal’ GOP governors. Here’s why.
I can identify several reasons why Biden’s team is proceeding with caution around these culture-war landmines.
The first was pinpointed by Ezra Klein: Biden has muted his public presence to minimize the social and cultural conflict his predecessor relished. Refraining from needlessly activating the sort of negative polarization — which presidents are uniquely positioned to trigger — that poisons our substantive debates also creates space to go bigger on policy.
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As John Ganz has noted, this sort of mythologizing depends heavily on a very crude dichotomy that is a constant in our politics. It pits an alienated but virtuous and mystically authentic nation of workers and small business owners against a corrupt and hypocritical “professional managerial class.”
Christopher Mathias/HuffPost:
Paul Gosar Spoke At A White Nationalist Conference. The GOP Doesn’t Care.
The congressman was the keynote speaker at a conference run by a virulent racist and anti-Semite. HuffPost tried to find a Republican lawmaker to rebuke him.
The crowd — a motley crew of unabashed racists and anti-Semites — broke into a chant of “Gosar! Gosar!” to which the congressman responded with a wave, a smile and what looked like an earnest, heartfelt “Thank you.”
AFPAC’s organizer, white nationalist figurehead Nick Fuentes, took the stage next, telling the crowd that “white people are done being bullied” and that America needs to protect its “white demographic core.”
The next day, Fuentes and Gosar sat down for coffee, according to a photo Fuentes posted to Twitter.
“Great meeting today with Congressman Gosar,” tweeted Fuentes, a 22-year-old Holocaust denier who once compared Jews killed in Nazi gas chambers to cookies baking in an oven. “America is truly uncancelled.
Tim Miller/Bulwark:
Paul Gosar: MTG In Lifts
An insurrection-planning, white-nationalist-collaborating congressman remains uncensored and unchallenged. Why?
Part of the explanation for Gosar’s relative anonymity is structural. During the last round of redistricting (in 2012) he emigrated from the swingy Arizona 1st congressional district to the conservative Arizona 4th and faced an easier than expected primary after his opponent, Sheriff Paul Babeu, was outed as gay.
Thanks to his new ruby-red district, Democrats haven’t made a concerted effort to target Gosar. And since he’s never caused the Republicans a Steve King-style media headache, he hasn’t gotten an intra-party challenge in the vein of Randy Feenstra.
Kaleigh Rogers/FiveThirtyEight:
Why QAnon Has Attracted So Many White Evangelicals
While we’re still learning about the demographics of QAnon believers, surveys that look at evangelicals’ other beliefs can help explain why they may be susceptible to falling down this particular rabbit hole. A majority of evangelical Christians identify as Republicans — 56 percent according to the Pew Research Center’s 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study — and they are more likely than Democrats and the general public to express belief in QAnon. In a Morning Consult survey from late January, 24 percent of Republicans said the QAnon conspiracy was at least “somewhat accurate,” compared with 19 percent of Democrats. Republican belief in the conspiracy dropped noticeably after the attack on the Capitol, as a series of surveys months before, immediately after, and several weeks after the attack showed, but Republicans remained more likely to support the belief than the general public (18 percent).
Evangelicals are also significantly less trustful of news media, meaning journalists’ fact-checking and debunking of QAnon is less likely to be convincing.
“I’m actually not surprised that evangelicals are more likely to believe those kinds of things,” said Samuel Perry, a professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma. “Evangelicals are not socially isolated, but they are informationally isolated.”
Will Bunch/Philly.com:
50 years later, an historic act of civil disobedience in Delco is finally getting its due
On March 8, 1971, Philly-area activists burglarized an FBI office and exposed massive corruption — a heroic act that still resonates.
On the night of March 8, 1971, or 50 years ago this Monday, a lot of things were going through Bonnie Raines’ mind as she waited in a Media motel room that was a command hub for arguably the most audacious act of civil disobedience in modern U.S. history — a burglary at a small, nearby FBI office aimed at exposing the extent of government spying on anti-Vietnam War activists.
Bonnie, who then ran a day-care center, and her husband John, a popular Temple University professor of religion, were understandably worried that one misstep would send them to a federal prison for years, meaning their three young children would grow up without them. Even if the break-in and theft of government documents succeeded, what if there was no evidence of illegal activities?
What Bonnie Raines concedes she never could have dreamed of on that long winter night — when radios everywhere blasted “the Fight of the Century” between Muhammad Ali and Philadelphian Joe Frazier — is that so many would come to see their burglary as an act of bravery that one day Pennsylvania officials would agree to celebrate it with a historical marker.
“Fifty years ago, we were criminals, and now we’re heroes,” Raines, now 79, told me with a hearty laugh when I caught up with her by telephone this week.
A note of personal privilege: I want to take a moment to tell the community how much I love Tim Lange (Meteor Blades) and how much I will miss his presence here in his retirement. While I don’t go back quite as far as he does on the site, I joined only a short time after. His writing skills were eclipsed only by his heart and soul. He’s irreplaceable and I especially enjoyed the brief times we spent in person. That guy has stories to tell.
We’ve been blessed with talented people, and there’s no dearth of it in the newer generation here. But there’s only one Meteor Blades, the guy we wouldn’t allow to drop his handle when we started using our own names.
Good luck in retirement, Tim. We’ll miss you.
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