The latest, patently racist, and arguably the most dangerous assault on voting rights in the past 100 years moves from Georgia to Texas. Much hangs on the outcome of this struggle, indeed what our country will look like for decades to come.
Someone should write an expose of Lindsey Graham’s political devolution. Done right, it would reveal not only the crass opportunism of Graham in some detail, but also the tentacles and power of the far flung network of right wing extremism to drag people and politicians into its orbit
The contrasting of Biden to Obama, something that I have observed recently, is a fool’s errand if done outside of the concrete conditions in which Biden governs and Obama governed. The differences in conditions and circumstances between one presidency and the other are differences of kind, not degree. In other words, the hand dealt to Obama a decade of so ago is very different, qualitatively different, than the hand that Biden draws from now. Only by taking into account those differences can any evaluation between the two presidencies be made if one wants to go there.
When Congressional Republicans sat on their hands and did nothing when 20 children between the ages of six and seven were slaughtered at Sandy Hook school by a young disturbed man wielding an assault weapon, I concluded that they would never do anything to support gun control legislation.
And yet each time the lives of innocent people are violently stolen from them by someone with an assault weapon, as happened once again in Atlanta and Boulder in the past week, I make the mistake of thinking that this time is different, that a bridge too far has been finally crossed and Congressional Republicans will reconsider their positions and do the right thing. But invariably I’m wrong.
On
Instead of supporting a ban on assault weapons and other gun control measures, what I and what tens of millions hear is the same old speeches and soundbites from them to justify doing nothing in the face of one unspeakable tragedy after another.
Seems to me that if 60 votes supporting such action can’t be found in the Senate this time, isn’t it time to do away with the filibuster and do what a vast majority of the American people want done?