Opinion

It appears that the January 6th commission is getting ready to rumble. The bipartisan probe in the House of Representatives has been taking the testimony of various participants and observers of the events leading up to the insurrection and has issued 19 subpoenas for some who have so far refused invitations to appear.

The most recent recipient is Jeffrey Clark, the former acting assistant attorney general for the Civil Division of the Justice Department who reportedly broke agency rules by working directly with the president and outside lawyers on a plot to overturn the election. Often portrayed as a lowly background player with no profile, according to the New Republic, Clark is actually a high-level conservative movement legal activist with an Ivy League pedigree, a clerkship with a very right-wing judge, a long association with The Federalist Society as well as Kirkland and Ellis, the law firm known for housing right-wing attorneys in between service in GOP administrations. Clark served on the Romney campaign in 2012 as an "energy adviser" and along with his duties in the civil division, he worked as the assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division, where Bloomberg reports he diligently worked to slash and burn existing environmental policy. In other words, he is a full-fledged creature of the Republican establishment. Attempts to portray him as some sort of eccentric gadfly are wrong. Clark is a member of the club.

Democratic voters are depressed, demoralized, and tuning out — and there's no use in denying it.

President Joe Biden's economic agenda is stuck in the mud, supported by 96% of Democrats in the Senate yet blocked by two senators whose massive egos and lobbyist addictions are causing them to turn against the party. Biden failed to enact vaccine mandates early enough or broadly enough so now millions of Fox News-addled Americans still are resisting vaccines, prolonging the pandemic and contributing to the national sense of despair. On top of that, Donald Trump has faced no real consequences for his attempted coup while the various criminal apparatchiks he surrounds himself with are also walking around happy and free. So efforts to stop the next coup are moribund, hitting the wall of Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who love that lobbyist-pleasing filibuster more than they love democracy.

Pushing for a wolf massacre and an open season on sandhill cranes; attacking school board members and trying to force schools to drop COVID safety measures; bringing Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to Madison and then moving his speech because of the University of Wisconsin's “Marxist COVID mandates". What are Republicans and their so-called conservative allies up to?

Neither Hunter Nation, which brought Ted Nugent to the Capitol on Wednesday to call for shooting and eating sandhill cranes, nor Young Americans for Freedom, which brought Cruz on the same day to denounce “lefty students" and “commie professors," and tell people to “take off your damn masks," nor the state Republicans who welcomed them to town want to win hearts and minds. It's all about getting attention — the crazier and more controversial you act, the better.

New dads in Japan can take 35 weeks off with full pay for paternity leave. Spain's news dads? 12 weeks full pay. Sweden: 11 weeks. Iceland's new fathers get 11 weeks of full paid time off. Canadian new dads get between five and eight weeks. In the U.S., no federal law requires paid paternity leave, although the Family and Medical Leave Act allows unpaid time off.

Unlike 86 percent of Americans who support paid paternity leave, Fox News personality and fascism and white supremacism promoter Tucker Carlson opposes it, apparently, and made that crystal clear in the form of a homophobic attack against U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg Thursday night.

Michele Carew is the latest casualty in the Trumpist war on voting. The veteran elections administrator tendered her resignation to officials in Hood County, Texas, on Friday after a brutal campaign by Trump loyalists to oust her. Trump won 81 percent of the vote there, but Carew still found herself in the crosshairs of those seeking to entrench the GOP's control over election administration. They want to see Carew's duties reassigned to a county clerk, who is notorious for (what else?) sharing electoral conspiracy theories on social media.

Carew is one of many local election officials across the country who have chosen to quit rather than absorb right-wing abuse. Among 14 southwestern Ohio counties, one in four of their election officials has already called it quits. Pennsylvania is grappling with a similar exodus.

I want to share a thought with you. It may sound strange. It's that the 2020 presidential election may have been the Republican Party's best and last shot of an authoritarian takeover of the country. Now that it has failed, now that a majority of the American people understands what's going on and what's at stake, everything we are seeing now, no matter how scary it is, is a slow unwinding of an all-but-spent threat.

I'm getting ahead of myself, I know. We don't know what we can't know until the time has come in which knowing is possible. So I might be right about this, but I don't know if I am, because I can't know if I am until months or years from now. But there are small things suggesting to me, yeah, I could be right. What happened yesterday, for instance.

In the Donald Trump era, GOP politics are mainly about trolling. So it's no surprise that Ohio Senate candidate Josh Mandel manifested this week as an in-flesh version of an egg avatar tweeting memes about DEMON-crats and the glories of horse paste. The unlucky recipients of Mandel's trolling were members of a school board in a suburb of Cincinnati, where Mandel showed up to grandstand despite not having children in the district. His complaints were incoherent — a muddled mix of whining about mask mandates, screeching that "children should not be forced to learn about to pick a gender," and something about the district's book-keeping practices — but of course, actually making sense was not the point. The point was to get attention by being a jerk.

So Mandel walked himself through the standard troll protocol: Escalate obnoxious behavior until the target is forced to block you, or in this case, kick you out. Then sanctimoniously declare yourself a victim to your own followers, martyred by the censorious liberals who can't handle the truth bombs you were supposedly dropping.

Upon exposure to harsh political attack ads or campaigns that make outrageous, easily debunked claims, in the old days I'd react with skepticism: “Nobody will believe that crap."

The classic First Amendment ideal would come to mind – that the searing light of truth is the best way to expose falsehoods and lies in the political sphere.

Justice Samuel Alito wants desperately for us to believe that everything is just fine at the Supreme Court. Indeed, in his view the court is a victim.

Before an audience at Notre Dame on Sept. 30, Alito denounced "unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court." He aimed his outrage at the media, at leading legal academics, and at people like me who are concerned about, as he put it, the Supreme Court "deciding important issues in a novel, secretive, improper way in the middle of the night, hidden from public view."

"Women's work"
Standard views by economists as to what determines wages will include worker productivity or supply and demand. Meanwhile, many economic sociologists claim that our societal assumptions about the value of a job influence the wages it can command. If a job is seen as "women's work," the wages for that job decline.

One version of this claim links the five c's — cleaning, catering, caring, cashiering and clerical work — to lower pay, because these jobs are predominantly female. One can see this without any complex analysis.

The thing you are not hearing from the Washington press corps is this: The Democrats are the party of the American majority. Right now, they represent the full range of legitimate politics. That includes the full range of ideologies, from conservative to democratic socialist. They aren't totally alone. There are maybe 10 House Republicans who want to cut deals. Ditto for maybe five Senate Republicans. Other than that, the Democrats are on their own. Frankly, that's how it ought to be.

The Washington press corps has created in recent weeks what Post columnist Eugene Robinson calls The Narrative. That's the story about a Democratic Party that can't get its act together, about a president who can't get competing factions to stop bickering. If they can't do that, then they are headed for defeat in the coming midterms. Yeah, well, Robinson said Tuesday, let's take all that with a grain of salt.

When 37-year-old Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before Congress on October 5, she brought thousands of stolen documents with her. They are the most conclusive evidence yet that the top social media company knows it profits from harming the public.

Like many whistleblowers, Haugen — a member of the civic integrity team — took an exciting job only to be implicated in what she believes to be an ethical catastrophe. Much has been made of her statement on "60 Minutes" that teenage girls who use Facebook are more likely to suffer from depression and self-harm. Endangering children rightly grabs the public's sympathy and concern.

On Tuesday, the Labor Department reported that some 4.3 million people had quit their jobs in August. That comes to about 2.9 percent of the workforce – up from the previous record set in April, of about 4 million people quitting.

All told, about 4 million American workers have been leaving their jobs every month since last spring.