Air Pollution, Terror Laws, Pretzeled Trump Supporters, Internet Reform, and Covid-19 Disparities

 #Brooke Jarvis, "The Air in Here," The New Yorker, January 25, 2021. - "The story is a reflection of the remarkable fact that in the twentieth century, an era of astounding medical breakthroughs, simple -- and relatively inexpensive -- public-health interventions saved more lives than clinical medicine did." "Our very breath ties us to one another and to the world around us."

"Lung cancer is by far the deadliest cancer in America, but other cancers receive significantly more funding." "Lung cancer, too, is becoming more common among non-smokers in the United States; someone is diagnosed every two and a half minutes. Worldwide respirator problems are the second most common cause of death, and the No. 1 killer of children under five." "We're still learning all that air pollution can do to our bodies. It can cause not just lung cancer and impaired lung development (in Los Angeles, researchers have found that they could trace the progress of anti-pollution measures by the increasing size of children's lungs)...."

#Moustafa Bayoumi, "No New Terror Laws," The Nation, 2.8-15.2021. "In other words, a terrorism double standard exists, one that is deeply entrenched in both our laws and our culture, that has given rise to the discourse we're now all familiar with: White-guy shooters get labeled as angry or desperate, while Muslim shooters ae defined as terrorists. The former are examined as troubled individuals; the latter no longer belong to humanity." "We should not enlarge the reach of the War on Terror to the point where we all, in one way or another, fall under its umbrella. We should instead be aiming to end it."

#Molly Ball, "Breaking Point," TIME, February 1/February 8, 2021. - "They [Republican supporters of Trump] pretzeled themselves to defend his shifting whims, reframed his outrages as silly showmanship, and rejected his first impeachment as partisan overreach. Absolute loyalty was what their voters demanded; any sign of deviation was swiftly punished." "And how can Republicans win elections if they are trapped between a fanatical base of delusional conspiracies, and a broader electorate that despises Trump?"

#W.J. Hennigan, Alice Park, and Jamie Ducharme, "Another Shot," TIME, February 1/February 8, 2021. - "Lack of federal leadership, first in coordinating distribution of the tests, and later in [failing to support] states to set up testing sites, led to limited access and critical delays in getting results." "Overall, the Office of OWS (Office of Warp Speed) has spent nearly $25 billion in federal money to more than 120 companies to develop, manufacture, and deliver vaccines across the nation."

#Bily Perrigo, "Building a better Internet," TIME, February 1/February 8, 2021. - "Under President Joe Biden, tech reform will take on a new, almost existential urgency for American democracy." "The unaccountable power of the tech platforms lies not just in the algorithms that dictate what posts we see, but also in how that translates to profits. As Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, and author of 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,' argues that the wealth of the Big Tech companies has come from extracting data about our behaviors, and using the insights from those data to manipulate us in ways that are fundamentally incompatible with democratic values." 

A key part of the EU's proposal to rein in large tech companies is to fine them up to 6% of their annual global revenues (several billions of dollars) if they don't open up their algorithms to public scrutiny, and act swiftly to counter societal harms stemming from their business worlds.

#Maria Jesus Mora, "By the Numbers," The Nation, 2.22-3.1.2021. 

50+% - Percentage of Latino immigrants in New York State who experienced Covid -19 symptoms and did not seek care due to fear or a lack of insurance. 

75% - Percentage of New York City frontline workers who are people of color.

14.4M - Number of people excluded from the CARES Act due to their own or a family member's undocumented status.

40.7% - Percentage by which Covid deaths would have fallen if the federal government had enacted a blanket moratorium on evictions from early March through November.

4% - Percentage of the white population in 14 states that received a Covid vaccine by the end of January, compared with 1.9 percent of Black people and 1.8 percent of Latinos.

43 - Number of states that don't release data on racial disparities in Covid testing.

A Focus on Violence and Fear of the Other

 #"Theunis Bates, Managing editor, "Elite's letters," found in TIME, February 1/February 8, 2021. - "Up to 750,000 died during the fratricidal Civil War, and nearly 4,000 African Americans were lynched by white mobs in the Jim Crow South from 1877 to 1950. Today, violence remains a fact of American life. The U.S. has the highest rate of mass shootings in the Western world, and a gun homicide rate 25 times higher than those of similarly developed countries."

#"In September 2020, Adam Dean, a professor of political science at George Washington University, co-authored a study in "Health Affairs," showing that unionized nursing homes were associated with a 30% lower mortality rate at the height of the first coronavirus surge, compared with nursing homes without unions."

#In the wake of the riot at the Capitol on January 6th, a Washington Post/ABC poll among those who consider themselves to be Republicans, 33% said the Party should stop following Trump and take a new direction, and 12% said he should be criminally charged for his actions.

#Nancy Gibbs, "America's moral vacuum," TIME, February 1/February 8, 2021. - "The battle cries of Jan. 6 rhymed with America's insurrection past: the white supremacy, the bloodlust of mobs, the defense of indefensible means to achieve unworthy ends." "Maybe Jan. 6 was more a failure of moral imagination of grasping what people are capable of. And the failure reflects the collapse of moral leadership that we have seen in the past year, not just in our politics, but in what should have been the shared purpose of fighting a pandemic that threatened us all."

#Madeleine Albright, "Our destructive cycle of us-vs.-them thinking," TIME, February 1/February 8, 2021. - "The impulse to choose sides is inherent in our species. Psychologists point to our desire to be safe by joining groups with which we have affinity, our fear of the unknown, and our vanity: we want to think of ourselves as better or smarter than the other. These traits are ingrained." "Many of us would prefer to live in a country where there is no place for the rest of us, i.e. 'them.' Confronted with this reality, many citizens are tempted either to retreat more deeply into their respective group identities or to insist piously that such categories are irrelevant and should not matter."

#Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted on February 4, 2021: "The DC swamp and the fake news media are attacking me because I am not one of you. And they hate me for it." Sen. Mitch McConnell said of Greene: "Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancers of the Republican Party and this country." Yet half of the Republican Caucus gave Greene a standing ovation when she appeared before it to try to save her committee assignments.

#Ken Klippenstein, "Security Blanket," The Nation, 2.8-15.2021. "But despite this sprawling network -- by the DHS's own count, there are currently 79 fusion centers in operation -- DC's Capitol police claimed to have received no warnings about the Capitol riot." "Far from the lofty justification given for their existence -- securing the hundred and so-on -- the titles of the reports they've produced suggest a focus on criminal activity (supposed or otherwise) so mundane, at times comical. Perhaps most surprising is the astonishing umber of incidents labeled 'suicide by cop' -- cases in which a suicidal person attempts to provoke a deadly response from law enforcement."

#Kali Holloway, "Time for Accountability," The Nation, 2.8-15.2021. - "And the portrayal of Trump supporters as a monolith of uneducated, small-town rubes duped into 'voting against their own interests,' as the saying goes, is a classist projection of those who imagine that racism afflicts only poor whites. We knew even before the 2016 presidential election that the median household income for Trump supporters outpaced that of the average American home. That violent manifestation of white backlash has been threatening to consume the rest of us for years."

"The actions of the rioters belied the law-and-order rhetoric trumpeted by Trump supporters throughout his administration." "There are many more examples of heat-packing Trump supporters and other fascists menacing society, but suffice it to say that the normalization of right-wing violence demands that accountability for the Capitol rioters be a national priority."

Media Commentary on Trump and Enablers

The Trump Watch on Trump and His Enablers, Quoted Either in the January 22, or February 15-22 Issues of TIME Magazine, or Quoted Separately

#From Trump's Jan. 6 speech: "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country any more." 

#"Trump's congressional enablers are complicit in the deadly violence," said 'The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 'Senators Josh Howley, Ted Cruz, and other 'two-faced lying populist politicians' failed repeatedly to 'stand-up' and condemn Trump's dangerous rhetoric. Now they deserve to be cast into political purgatory."

#These same Republicans are suddenly calling for 'unity' and 'healing,' said 'The Washington Post.' "There is a minimum price for reconciliation: Issue an 'unequivocal acknowledgment' that there was no vote rigging, and that Joe Biden won 'fair and square.' "

#Paul Waldman wrote in 'The Washington Post': "Their rage will only increase. We may be facing an era in which 'right-wing domestic terrorism' is a regular feature in our politics."

#"The blame game runs far deeper that Trump," says Zach Beauchamp in 'Vox.com.' "The Capitol Hill mob was the logical culmination of years of mainstream Republican politics. For years, the GOP has vilified Democrats as extremists who represent 'an extensional threat' to Americans, and whose election victories are inherently fraudulent."

#Theunis Bates, the managing editor of 'Elite's Letter,' wrote: "Yet the people who stormed Congress weren't some alien other, but everyday Americans who -- fed a diet of conspiracy theories -- believed they were doing the patriotic thing."

#Kali Holloway, "The Failed Coup," The Nation, December 14-21, 2020. - "Bill Barr poked his partisan nose where no other outgoing attorney general had during an election, with a memo urging federal lawyers to look into Trump's groundless accusations." "Trump is still tweeting that mail-in voting is a 'sick joke,' and falsely insisting "I WON THE ELECTION!" 

"From the sidelines, he is cheering on street violence by MAGA thugs and branding political opponents as unAmerican." "After this year's presidential contest, 70 percent of Republican voters surveyed said it was not 'free and fair,' up from 35 percent before the election." "Now, Republicans are casting Black and Brown citizens as illegitimate voters to invalidate the Biden presidency." "Trump will keep denigrating  democracy to elevate himself. Yet again, this president's selfish gains will be America's losses."

#Luke Mogelson, "The Storm," The New Yorker, January 25, 2021. - "It was a peculiar mixture of emotion that had become familiar at pro-Trump rallies since he lost the election: half mutinous rage, half excitement at being licensed to act on it. The profanity signaled a final jettisoning of whatever residual deference to political norms that had survived the past four years."

"In the days before January 6th, calls for a 'real solution' became progressively louder. Trump, by both amplifying these voices and consolidating his control over the Republican Party, conferred extraordinary influence on the most deranged and hateful elements of the American right."

"Throughout the latter half of 2020, Trump had sought to dismiss the popular uprisings that Floyd's death had precipitated by ascribing them to antifa, which he vilified as a terrorist organization -- [yet, antifa is a relatively unorganized grouping of like-minded individuals.]"

"The Proud Boys had seized on Trump's conflation to recast their small-scale rivalry with anti-fascists in leftish strongholds like Berkeley and Portland as the front lines of a national culture war."

"Overnight, 'Stop the Steal!' gained more than three hundred and twenty thousand followers -- making it the fastest-growing group in Facebook history. The company quickly deleted it." "Even if it were possible to prove that the election was not stolen, it seems doubtful whether conservatives who already feel under attack could be convinced." 

"Many COVID-19 skeptics believe that lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccines, and contact tracing are laying the groundwork for the New World Order --" "While the religiously charged demonization of globalists dovetails with QAnon, religious maximization has also gone mainstream."

Senators Graham, Cruz, and Lee met with Trump lawyer, David Shoen, to go over the 'procedures' for Friday's meeting. Social media writers have raised conflict of interest charges. A public defender said she couldn't even use the bathroom with a juror.

Land Dispossession, 'Pickles,' and Trump/McConnell Give-and-Take

 Frencisco Centu, "Dispossession," The New Yorker, January 18, 2021. - "Like much of the American West, the Gadsden region bars unmistakable scars of our nation's drive for expansion and control." Simon Winchester's new book, 'Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World,' "offers us one case study after another of how the once seemingly inexhaustible surface of the Earth has devolved into a commodity, the ultimate object of contestation and control." Winchester "describes how the first conquistadores were emboldened by the fifteenth-century Doctrine of Discovery, in which the Pope affirmed their right to take possession of foreign lands inhabited by non-Christians." "Hugo Grotius and John Locke argued that unclaimed lands were free for the taking, and that it was a Christian duty to own and improve them."

"Early settlers readily concocted laws to authorize the extermination,  enslavement, and forcible relocation of one tribe after another. Expulsion and dispossession are, to be sure, a perennial tactic in the accumulation of land. Centuries before Britain began building its empire, powerful private and state interests set about appropriating land long held in common by English villagers through a variety of legal and parliamentary manuvers (sp?), in a process known as enclosure."

Winchester "reports that America's top hundred landowners now control an area as large as the state of Florida, and that their accumulation of property has increased by fifty per cent since 2007." Winchester writes that: "The houses that they had left behind had often been vandalized, and their possessions stolen; and in many a case the title to the land a Japanese family had somehow vanished, like a will-o'-the-wisp."

#Jane Mayer, "Cretin Hog," The New Yorker, January 18, 2021. - "At the age of forty, Pickles, whose real name is Piccioillo, is a bit old to call himself a 'boy.' But along with thousands of bearded and balding men in dad jeans, he headed to Washington to take part in what he called 'a kind of a last hurrah for Trump, who put so much on the line for us.' "

"Asked whether he was among those who rampaged through the Capitol, Pickles said: 'No comment.' Then he noted, 'I'd never been to the Capitol before - and I have now.' 'I know it looks hypocritical on our end, because of the whole B.L.M. thing,' Pickles said, referring to Trump's slurs against Black Lives Matter protesters. 'But if you seriously believe your country's getting take over by fraud, you're going to get nuts.' " (Pickles can be seen online wearing a shirt saying 'Kyle Rittenhouse Did Nothing Wrong,' about the subject in a double murder of B.L.M. protesters.) "

#Trump and McConnell Give and Take - Trump: "The Republican Party can never again be respected or strong with political 'leaders' like Sen. Mitch McConnell at its helm." "McConnell's dedication to business as usual, status quo policies, together with his lack of political insights, wisdom, skill, and personality, has rapidly driven him from Majority Leader to Minority Leader, and it will only get worse."

McConnell: "There is no question former President Trump bears moral responsibility . His supporters stormed the Capitol because of the unhinged falsehoods he shouted into the world's largest megaphone." "His behavior during and after the chaos was also unconscionable, from attacking Vice President Mike Pence during the riot to praising the criminals after it ended."

Trump: "Mitch is a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack and if Republican Senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again. He will never do what needs to be done, or what is right for our country."

#The Jurisdiction Question - Sen. McConnell had it both ways, because he delayed holding the trial until Trump left office, and then argued that Trump could not be convicted because he was not in office anymore. He suggested that the instant Trump ceased being the president, he exited the Senate's jurisdiction; however, the Senate voted twice that it had jurisdiction.

#Comedian Jimmy Kimmel gets the last word: "I think McConnell blew it. This was his party's best chance to make sure that Trump never ran again."

Tidbits From THE WEEK's Week

 The following items are taken from THE WEEK of January 22, 2021.

#Jonathan Last, in the 'Bulwark,' says: "Despite no evidence of significant fraud, about half the GOP's congressional delegation voted to overturn the presidential election --even after the sacking of the U.S. Capitol."

#"The GOP could really collapse," said Ross Douthat of The New York Times. "The implicit bargain of the Trump era required traditional Republicans to swallow a measure of insanity in exchange for a hold on power."

#"Trump should be criminally prosecuted?" questioned Randall Eliason of The Washington Post: "This  behavior seems to fall comfortably within the legal definition of several crimes, including 'rebellion and insurrection,' 'seditious conspiracy,' and 'incitement of a riot.' "

#David Yalle-Bellamy of Bloomberg.com says: "But a self-pardon has weak legal foundations that fly in the face of the Founders' intention to curb any official's 'absolute power'. In fact, a self-pardon might increase the chances that Trump is prosecuted.' "

#Greg Sargent of The Washington Post.com says: "Trump's presidency will soon be over, but the Capitol siege was 'a propaganda coup' that could energize far-right extremists for a long time to come. "

#Konstantin Kosacher of Roosiyskaye Gazeta (Russia), says: "Now U.S. voters are crying fraud and injustice, and besieging government buildings. Americans have 'tasted the fruits of good and evil,' and their virginity cannot be restored."

#The Times (U.K.) wrote: "It's not as if they were unaware of the dangers. Many Republican leaders loudly denounced Trump as a budding authoritarian during his 2016 run for office, only to go on to aid his campaign to overturn 2020s election results."

#"Viewpoint" by Timothy Snyder, historian in The New York Times, writes: "Trump has presented himself as the single source of truth. His use of the term 'fake news' echoed the Nazi smear (Logenpesse), 'lying press'; like the Nazis, he referred to reporters as 'enemies of the people.' " "Trump lied at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. To believe in all of them was to disbelieve everything else."

#David Frum, "The politics of perpetual victimhood," has this to say: "Since Barack Obama was elected president, a political philosophy that once emphasized personal responsibility has degenerated into a sour collection of grievances and delusional claims of persecution. But if the conservative world is to pull itself out of the moral wreck into which it has been led by Trump, its leaders will have to reckon with their descent into a politics of fear, resentment, and infamous deceit."

#"The pandemic windfall." "The fortunes of the 659 U.S. billionaires grew by more than $1 trillion, making the elite group's wealth double that of the bottom 50 percent of Americans -- 165 million people. Meanwhile, just 12 million jobs of the 22 million lost last spring have been recovered, and more than 400,000 small businesses have closed for good." 

"Tent encampments of homeless people dot cities across the U.S., and in the week before Thanksgiving,  26 million adults said their households were short on food."  

"About 84 percent of the stocks owned by U.S. households are held by the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans."

#"United Kingdom: What has Brexit delivered?" (Dominic Grieve in 'Independent.co.uk') "While no new tariffs will be slapped on the $400 billion of goods we export annually to the Continent, our departure from the EU single market means the U.K. firms will now have to complete reams of customs paperwork, expected to cost some $10 billion a year." 

#Martin Vander Weyer in  'The Spectator': "The deal [with the EU] doesn't cover the service sector, which makes up 80 percent of our economy and 50 percent of our exports. Financial services firms' access to EU markets now depends on compliance with the different requirements of each member state."

#('The Guardian') "The legacy of Brexit could well be the disintegration at the cost of losing much of our country. That would be a terrible price to pay."

#"Pandemic vices: The battle against our new bad habits": "Chronic stress, such as that created by a pandemic, floods the brain with cortisol, hormones that inhibit functions of the prefrontal cortex -- the decision-making part of the brain that helps us resist the urge for immediate gratification." "Psychologists also say that  women are more likely than men to turn to alcohol when coping with issues." 

#"Bytes: What's new in tech." " 'More than 400 engineers and other workers at Google formed a union in January, following years of increased  employee activism,' said Kate Conger in The New York Times. 'It is a so-called minority union, representing a small fraction of Google's workforce, with the intention only to give structure and longevity to activism at Google.' "

#"Some day you may wish to return." "In 2018, Nigeria actually overtook India to become the world leader in desperately poor people, with 87 million people living on $1.90 a day, compared with India's 71 million."

#THE CLOSER: Akash Kapur, "Top of the World," The New Yorker, January 25, 2021. - "Many  millions of people now visit the Himalayan region in a typical year. Some four thousand climbers have attempted to summit Everest in each of the past four decades, a fifty percent increase over the period when [Jon] Krakauer wrote his book. Yet the mountains occupy one of the most politically fraught corners of the world, marked by contested borders and roads, and great power rivalries that are likely to shape international relations the rest of the century."

"According to a recent report, more than a third of Himalayan glaciers may melt by the end of the century, even assuming dramatic reductions in global carbon emissions."

 

 #Daniel Luban, The Nation, 2.8 - 15.2021. - "The 19th century economic order was overthrown not by mass movements or vanguardist parties, but by the modern corporation and the administrative state. 'The difference between a stabilized and regulated statism, and a mechanized and streamlined socialism is not very great,' [Werner] Sombart, [a German sociologist], wrote, 'for in both cases the entire economy rests on the basis of dependulization. Capitalism stems from the specifically hierarchical and individualistic nature of Western cultures, and these underlying traits are likely to persist well into the future. Likewise, the two specific cultural traits are the distinctively Western building blocks of capitalism -- hierarchy and individualism -- raise more questions than they answer. Aren't hierarchy and individualism parts of many different societies, not just Western ones? And couldn't individualism be more an effect of capitalism than the cause of it?"

"Certainly, it reflects a tendency to conceive of capitalism in terms of a set of discrete national economies rather than an inherently interlinked global system. For instance, one suggestive way of conceiving capitalism is in terms of 'market dependence,' the extent to which participation in markets becomes mandatory for survival. Imagine, for instance, a universal basic income program generous enough to ensure a reasonably comfortable standard of living. This guarantee of subsistence would remove the most important form of market dependence. At the very least, anti-capitalists should be prepared to answer the question of those who argue that 'the capitalist/socialist dichotomy is useless,' because it is 'political rather than analytical. In other words, there's no objective set of categories to tell us where one ends and the other begins.' "

#Bankaj Mishra, "Struggle Sessions," The New Yorker, February 1, 2021. - "Much murderous insanity erupted after 1966, but the Cultural Revolution's most iconic images remain those of the struggle sessions: Victims with bowed heads in dunce caps, the outlandish accusations against them scrawled on heavy signboards hanging from their necks."

"According to [Chinese journalist Jisheny] Yang, as many as a million and a half people were killed, thirty-six million persecuted, and a hundred million altogether affected in a countryside upheaval that lasted with varying intensity, for a decade. -- from 1966 to 1976, when Mao died."

"With the Cultural Revolution, he [Mao] seemed to sideline economic development in favor of a large-scale engineering of human souls and minds." "All factions claimed recognition as the true voice of the Chairman. By early 1967, workers had joined the fray, most significantly in Shanghai, where they surpassed Red Guards in revolutionary fervor." "Growing alarmed by the sight of continuous revolution, Mao tried to restore order in the cities, exiling millions of young urban men and women to the countryside to 'learn from the peasants.' "

The great question of China's Maoist experiment looms over the United States as Donald Trump vacates the White House: Why did a rich and powerful society suddenly start destroying itself? 'There were' [Tony] Judt wrote, 'no external inputs, no new kinds of people only the political class breeding itself.' "Trump emerged six years later, channeling an iconoclastic fury at the inbred class and its cherished monuments. But the problems of political representation debilitating society remain treacherously unresolved. From transactional years of Trump passing into history, the United States seems to have completed only the first phase of its own cultural revolution."

#Jon Lee Anderson, "The Vanishing Wild" The New Yorker, February 1, 2021. - "For decades, tourism accounted for about a tenth of the Kenyan economy, largely driven by the country's natural splendor." "Fifty years ago, Kenya had a hundred and sixty thousand elephants. Today, there are thirty-five thousand. A population of twenty thousand black rhinos is down to about a thousand, and only two northern white rhinos remain."

"Land that has always been held communally is split into individual plots --but the new owners often find that their parcels are not large enough to maintain their traditional way of life." "For conservationists, the challenge is to convince indigenous people that tourism and eco-businesses can earn them as much as selling their land or leasing it to commercial farmers."

"The carnivore ecologist Mordecai Ogoda has drawn attention by campaigning against what he calls 'white colonist' control of wildlife tourism and conservation. The Kenyan conservationist, Kahumbu, profiled in 'The New Yorker,' has said: 'Wildlife numbers are plummeting across the continent without the buy-in of Africans. My bottom line on this issue of the apparent racial divide in conservation is that we cannot really complain if we are not taking action. We must be the catalysts for the change we want to see."

"Over the years, more than seventy rangers have been killed in gun battles with poachers; hundreds more have been wounded."

#Jamie Raskin's Jiujitsu Trap- MSNBC's legal analyst has said that: "Jamie Raskin is using a great deal of constitutional jujitsu here." He and his fellow managers "did not issue a subpoena, they just requested or invited him to come, and President Trump declined." The analyst said that the Senate would be able to  take "that negative inference from a defendant's silence, which would set a precedent for any future criminal trial against Mr. Trump."

#In the House debate on impeachment, Jason Smith of Missouri said that impeachment would "bring up the hate and fire more than ever before." Bob Good of Virginia cautioned  that impeachment would "further offend Trump voters." "In the end, it is the Republicans who seem frightened -- paralyzed by fear," -- as Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat put it.

Trump Gets Dumped, and a Man With a Plan, Etc.

 #Jane Mayer, "Trump Gets Dumped," The New Yorker, February 1, 2021. - "Indeed, the most remarkable aspect of McConnell's rupture with Trump may not be that it happened, but rather, that it took so long -- and the leader of the Party in Congress countenanced so much damage along the way." Adam Jentleson, a former top Democratic aide, and the author of 'Kill Switch,' a new book about the Senate, said of McConnell: 'He should be deservingly held accountable for spending more than a month giving credence to Trump's claims of election fraud -- on the Senate floor.' Jentleson added that McConnell, by failing to speak out earlier, had 'offered legitimacy to Trump's war on the truth.' 'Other Republicans took the signals from McConnell and continued to fan the flames. You can blame the rioters, but the entire Republican Party was telling them their claims were legitimate.' "

According to some polls, "as many as eighty-two per cent of Republican voters believed Trump's false claims of fraud."  "It's pretty obvious that for McConnell, one of the reasons he was so indulgent of Trump was Georgia."

"In a combative Senate speech six days after the election, McConnell declared that Trump was 'a hundred per cent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.' "

' "I think McConnell is trying to have it both ways, [Stuart] Stevens [a Republican strategist] told me. 'He absolutely doesn't want to impeach and convict Trump. It would split his base and cause members of his caucus to face primary challengers.' Al Cross, a veteran political reporter, said that: 'I think he sees a chance to make Trump this generation's version of Nixon, leaving in doubt who is at the top of the Republican heap. Barring Trump  would also guarantee that a different Republican will secure the Party's nomination for President in 2024.' "

#Margaret Talbot, "Man With a Plan," The New Yorker, February 1, 2021. "They [the GOP] helped create a climate in which scorn for the purpose and efficacy of government dashed away many Americans' expectations that it would do much for them." Guy Molyneux, a pollster conducting surveys for the 'Center for American Progress,' "has found that non-college whites believe government has let them down, but most have no principled or ideological objections to government playing a strong role in the economy. Although just 20 percent trust the federal government, 50 percent also say that it should take a more active role in solving the nation's economic and social problems."

"But with congressional Republicans still stoking fears of socialism and the 'deep state,' it will take persistent eloquence and empathy from the explainer-in-chief to make the case for government's role. Biden is sometimes compared with Franklin Roosevelt. Both inherited a profound and confounding national crisis and promoted a belief that government can assuage it. Both men's fundamental optimism seems compassionate rather than naive."

Talbot also cites a Kaiser Family Foundation poll that shows "about fifty per cent of Americans hold a favorable view of the A.C.A., and seventy-nine per cent want to retain the preexisting-conditions provision." Other polls show a higher favorable view of the Affordable Care Act, once very unpopular with the U.S public.

#Bryce Covert, "A Wrench in the Works," The Nation, 2.8 - 15.2021. - "The EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] filed just 93 lawsuits in fiscal year 2020, compared with 144 the year before, and 199 in fiscal year 2018." " 'Under [Janet] Ghillon [EEOC chair], the EEOC is really trying to implement the Chamber of Commerce agenda' says David Lopez, who served as the commission's general counsel from 2010 to 2016..." 

"The EEOC recently completed an internal analysis of hundreds of failed conciliations, and found that the two primary reasons they didn't work were because employers declined to participate, and the parties couldn't agree on a monetary figure. And Dhillon pushed forward with the permanent rule before her pilot program [for change] could be analyzed."

"Even with the new demands placed on the EEOC staff, their ranks have thinned. There were 1,937 full-time employees in fiscal year 2020, a decrease from 2,060 in 2019, and the lowest since 2014..." "Dhillon made it clear she didn't want to spend money on hiring staff, according to a current EEOC official."

Congress gave the EEOC litigation authority in 1972, "recognizing that it wasn't effective without it. Without a serious threat that the EEOC will sue, the deterrent effect disappears."

#John Seabrook, "Office Space," The New Yorker, February 1, 2021. - "Managers -- and workers -- are trying to figure out what their post-pandemic offices will look like, and how to balance what appears to be a lasting shift toward no more work with the advantages of the physical workplace." "Thirty per cent of supervisors said that they were more productive at home; only seven per cent said people were getting less done." According to a Danish study, "people working in open offices use sixty-two more sick leave."

"The white-collar workplace has never been regulated like manufacturing,  construction, and health care sectors, where the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) sets health and safety rules." "Fifty-seven per cent of [poll] respondents thought that the stigma of working remotely would linger after the pandemic." "Facebook has said that it expects half its workforce to be remote by 2030. Twitter told its employees that they never have to return to the office."

ADDENDUMS:

*President Biden has removed the terrorist designation from the Houthi rebels in Yemen. He worried that it is bringing more pain to millions of starving people than to the rebels.

*61 House Republicans voted to strip Rep. Liz Chaney (Rep.-Wyo.) of her leadership role.

#Democrats have unveiled a proposal that would provide $3,600 over the course of the year per child under the age of 6, and $3,000 per child aged 6 to 17. It would diminish for Americans earning $75,000 per year, as well as couples jointly earning more than $150,000 per year. The payments would be sent monthly.