Opinion

Because right-wingers are nothing if not unoriginal, Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, is centering his likely doomed 2024 presidential bid on the played "feminists are man-haters" schtick. It's a bit that was long in the tooth even when Hawley, 41, was running off potential prom dates by sneering at their Lilith Fair tickets. In the era of #MeToo and the Texas abortion bounty hunter law, this "men are the real victims" nonsense is particularly laughable. Still, Hawley is digging in. And, to illustrate why he's going to get trounced in the GOP primary by Donald Trump, he's doing so by attacking two very popular American pastimes: porn and video games.

On "Axios on HBO" Sunday night, Hawley defended a speech he made at a gathering of conservatives last week, in which he insisted that liberals are trying to create "a world beyond men" because liberals hate "traditional masculine virtues" like "courage and independence and assertiveness." In response, the supposedly braver, more independent, and more assertive gender, according to Hawley, is "withdrawing into the enclave of idleness and pornography and video games." True men of courage, it's well-known, react to even the slightest criticism by pouting in their mancaves like toddlers throwing a tantrum.

When President Biden first unveiled the Build Back Better agenda, it appeared that this country was on the path to a new war on poverty. In April, he told Congress that "trickle-down economics have never worked" and that it was time to build the economy "from the bottom-up." This came after the first reconciliation bill of the pandemic included the child tax credit that — combined with an expanded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, and other emergency programs — reduced the poverty rate from 13.9% in 2018 to 7.7% in 2021. (Without such actions, it was estimated that the poverty rate might have risen to 23.1%.) All eyes are now on the future of this Build Back Better plan, whether it will pass and whether it will include paid sick leave, reduced prescription drug prices, expanded child tax credits, expanded earned income tax credits for those without children, universal pre-K, climate resilience and green jobs, and other important domestic policy investments.

For months, the nation has witnessed a debate taking place in Congress over how much to invest in this plan. What hasn't been discussed, however, is the cost of not investing (or not investing sufficiently) in health-care expansion, early childhood education, the care economy, paid sick leave, living-wage jobs, and the like. Similarly missing have been the voices of those affected, especially the 140 million poor and low-income people who have the most to lose if a bold bill is not passed. By now, the originally proposed 10-year, $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, which a majority of Americans support, has been slowly chiseled down to half that size. For that you can largely thank two Democratic senators, West Virginia's Joe Manchin and Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema, unanimously backed by Donald Trump's Republican Party, which would, of course, cut everything.

Bill Maher is mad at me.

And I've never even met the man.

American democracy is on fire. But Merrick Garland and the Justice Department appear to think it's a false alarm.

It's been two weeks since Steve Bannon was referred to the Justice Department by the House, voting to proceed with criminal contempt of Congress, at the urging of the select committee investigating the January 6th insurrection.

Aaron Rodgers is widely acknowledged to be one of the best regular season quarterbacks in NFL history. The three-time MVP routinely posts impressive stat lines and is on course to break numerous records if he stays healthy. He is certain to be inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame.

But he hasn't always dealt well with adversity. Control is important to Rodgers, and when his preternatural cool is challenged—when his team is behind or playing tough opponents in the playoffs—he often chokes.

If you still hate Hillary Clinton for some reason, time to get over it. She was right about Donald Trump and his movement in 2016, and she's right now.

This article first appeared in Salon.

A "pleading" email was sent out to donors this week by Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who is facing a serious challenge from Rep. Val Demings.

Rubio's urgent tone is typical of fundraising solicitations from politicians, but his choice of words was unusually lacking in confidence:

The victory of smooth-talkin' Glenn Youngkin over Terry McAuliffe on Tuesday has Democrats wringing their hands and looking under the couch cushions for excuses. After all, the entire Republican Party and anyone running under its banner should have been deeply wounded by now. They remain, after all, the party of Donald Trump, the single most unpopular political figure in our time. They were the party in charge when the pandemic hit and took 400,000 lives. They are the party that has pushed misinformation about COVID for nearly two years, including loud and repeated lies about vaccines and mask-wearing, causing countless additional deaths. They are the party that has persistently countenanced an attempted coup after the last election and spread the corrosive lie that Trump didn't actually lose.

Republicans should be so knocked back on their heels that they still can't manage to get up, and yet this blow-dried "businessman" running on a platform of transparent lies was able to win the governorship of Virginia. Why? Was it the Democrats in Congress and their failure to pass two incredibly popular bills before Election Day? Was it because McAuliffe carried the baggage of reminding Virginia voters of the Clintons and ran a boring, clueless, inept campaign? Or was his loss simply the predictable product of off-year politics and the bad luck of being the party in power in the White House?

There's a deeper battle happening in Washington than the ones we usually hear about. It's lurking right under the surface of the Build Back Better (BBB) bill. It's woven into the established order in this country. It's something we're afraid to say out loud.

America has become a gerontocracy.

In a bizarre twist of fate, it seems abortion and gun rights are intertwined at the Supreme Court. This past week, SCOTUS has heard oral arguments in two cases concerning SB8 (the Texas bounty hunter law) and a gun rights case from New York state. They also declined to hear two cases with significance for mandating abortion for insurance coverage and transgender healthcare. Shockingly, it's not all bad news out of the court but some of the good news on abortion could be owed to a brief from the Firearms Policy Coalition (yes, seriously).

The two abortion cases heard this past week concern the Texas bounty hunter abortion law (SB8) that places enforcement of a six-week abortion ban in the hands of private individuals suing people who aid in abortions. The court previously allowed this law to take effect (even though it's a blatantly unconstitutional attempt to avoid judicial review) in a shadow docket ruling on September 1.

Tuesday's election, which was shockingly bad for Democrats even in an off-year, was a pandemic election. Sure, at first glance, it may not seem that way. CNN exit polling shows that "coronavirus" ranked third after "economy/jobs" and "education" as issues voters cared most about in the Virginia gubernatorial election. But that's likely because of partisanship — Republicans don't like admitting the virus is real, Democrats don't like admitting things aren't going great right now — than anything else. As others have persuasively argued, "economy" and "schools" are proxy issues for the pandemic.

That's why it's so frustrating that President Joe Biden dragged his heels for months on vaccine mandates. Way back in March, careful observers of the right wing media — including myself — were sounding the alarm about the Fox News/GOP plan to sabotage Biden's pandemic response by convincing their followers not to vaccinate. But rather than respond aggressively with vaccine mandates, the Biden administration told themselves that "persuasion" was the best way forward. It was obvious they were afraid of poking the culture war bear and didn't want to give Republicans an issue to tantrum over.

12 gallons of milk was my last straw. CNN's widely mocked report may have broken me. It seemed like only minutes after the clip on a Texas family struggling with that impact of inflation went viral, it was blasted out by the House Republicans on Twitter:

The report suggests a 40% rise in milk prices over (presumably) the past year. Not only is that not true, but prices are down, in nominal terms from a high in 2007. To be fair, it's pretty clear some prices are going up. But so are wages. Overall household debts have fallen, as well. So I don't mock the family or their milk consumption. I mock CNN for holding up these outliers of cartoonish proportions as a typical, representative middle-class family. And I resent how infrequently they report on actually food-insecure families. CNN could have interviewed people going in and out of a Kroger about how they feel about the stimulus checks as they get their groceries. They could have stopped to talk to a clerk or bagger at the store. Instead, they pre-manufactured a shopping trip using a family whose situation wasn't at all representative.