Opinion

A lot of people aren't happy with Sen. Joe Manchin.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. As soon as it became clear that President Joe Biden's party would have the slimmest of majorities in a 50-50 Senate, the West Virginian Democrat was transformed into the most influential member of Congress. As the furthest right senator in the caucus from the reddest state of any Democrat, he is the most likely candidate to defect from any of the party's priorities.

On Wednesday, Washington Post White House reporter Seung Min Kim walked up to Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), one of the few Senate Republicans who has not yet announced a position on confirming Office of Management and Budget nominee Neera Tanden, and showed her an old tweet from Tanden critical of Murkowski's support for the 2017 GOP tax law.

In the tweet in question, Tanden said of Murkowski's support for corporate tax cuts, "No offense but you sound high on your own supply." Murkowski claimed to never have seen the tweet before.

We have stunningly good news today: wages in 2020 grew at by far the fastest rate in the last 45 years.

The bad news: it's a statistical anomaly caused by Donald Trump's lethal mishandling of the coronavirus. The pandemic wiped out almost eight million jobs held by lower-paid workers and only two million better-paying jobs.

We spent hundreds of millions of dollars and endless hours of talk, debate and generally insulting campaigns to elect a new president, even undergoing months afterward of one side denying results, leading to an attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Where in all this was the decision to elect the winner to be Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WVa.)?

Donald Trump's insurrection failed. While historians will likely debate for decades how close he really came to succeeding, one thing is for certain: His failure has put his most prominent defenders in a tough spot. Instead of lining up to sing the praises of President-for-Life Donald Trump, which is where they want to be, his sycophants are stuck trying to make excuses for, minimize, or deflect attention from Trump's failure.

First, they tried to minimize Trump's responsibility for the insurrection. That tactic fell apart after an impeachment trial where the prosecutors made such an airtight case for Trump's guilt that even people who voted to acquit him pretended it was on a legal technicality, rather than try to argue for his innocence. Now, some folks on the right are trying a new tactic, one you might call the "go big or go home" strategy. Trump's loudest defenders are now outright denying that the nation saw what we all clearly saw on January 6.

The Equality Act is being voted on in the House this week, a landmark bill that would add LGBTQ people to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and bring protections to millions who live in the majority of states without protections in housing, employment, public accommodations and other spheres of life. It's more vital than ever because Republicans in state legislatures around the country are pushing dozens of anti-LGBTQ bills as Trumpism and its devotion to religious extremists further grips the GOP.

This article was originally published at The Signorile Report

One of the great challenges for public health officials during the COVID pandemic has been establishing trust among the public, particularly racial minorities who have a long history of both exploitation and neglect by the medical establishment and the government. In recent months there has been a lot of discussion about how to get past vaccine hesitancy in this population with efforts at outreach and communication aimed directly at these communities. And thank goodness, after all, Black and brown Americans have been hit the hardest of all demographic groups aside from elderly residents of nursing homes. There has been an unconscionable number of deaths and serious illnesses in these communities so it's vital to get them the latest information, delivered by trusted messengers, as well as easy access to the vaccines.

The good news is that the vaccination program is quickly picking up steam, with Black and Hispanic vaccine skepticism specifically falling substantially over the past few months. There, of course, must be continuing efforts to get the word out and get vaccines in some of the hard-to-reach areas to encourage even more participation, but it now appears that a new group has arisen as the real barrier to achieving herd immunity: white Republicans.

For four years, Donald Trump and his followers mocked Democrats as congenital failures and weepers of "liberal tears." On the 2020 trail, Trump imagined a fistfight he might have with Joe Biden (a famous male weeper), promising his followers that Biden "would go down fast and hard, crying all the way." Madison Cawthorne (R-NC), celebrated winning a Congressional seat last year by tweeting: "Cry more, lib."

It was a ritual in 2020 for Trump supporters to taunt Democrats for crying or, like a bully on a playground, anticipate with delight the tears that would flow from liberal eyes when Trump and his allies scored another victory.

Behold! Death rides upon a pale horse — and Death is a Republican.

The coronavirus pandemic has now killed more than 500,000 people in the United States. This is roughly equivalent to the cumulative number of Americans lost in World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars. These deaths from the coronavirus were largely preventable.

Democrats are unified behind a push for a new round of COVID relief spending even as Republicans coalesce in complete opposition.

The polling has consistently shown that a large majority of Americans, including many Republican voters, support the $1.9 trillion package that President Joe Biden has pushed for. Democrats feel they have the wind at their backs, as the budget reconciliation process will allow them to pass the bill on a party-line vote, and they recently won two Senate seats in Georgia by running explicitly on more relief funding.

On Tuesday, with Office of Management and Budget director nominee Neera Tanden facing likely confirmation failure, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) took to the Senate floor to urge President Joe Biden to withdraw the nomination, taking a swipe at Tanden's political activity on Twitter.

"My friendly advice to President Biden is to withdraw Neera Tanden's nomination and select someone who, at the very least, has not promoted wild conspiracy theories and openly bashed people on both sides of the aisle that she happens to disagree with," said Cornyn.

On Monday, the Supreme Court gave the Republican party an enormous gift when it granted federal prosecutors in New York permission to access tax returns and other financial records for Donald Trump. The former president remains under investigation by the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, who spent much of the last four years going up against the powers of the White House in a bid to force Trump, who is almost certainly guilty of tax fraud and campaign finance violations, into opening his accounting books. Now there's a very real chance that investigation can finally begin in earnest, and Trump may actually face real legal consequences — can we even dream of prison? — for his life of crime.

Vance is a Democrat and Trump has latched on to that fact to paint the entire investigation as a partisan witch hunt. Unsurprisingly, "political Witch Hunt" was his exact wording in a released "statement" that was really more of a diatribe from the Twitter-deprived ex-president. He also whined that this "is all Democrat-inspired in a totally Democrat location, New York City and State, completely controlled and dominated by a heavily reported enemy of mine, Governor Andrew Cuomo," even though Cuomo plays no part in the choices of federal, state or local prosecutors.

On Sunday, NBC's "Meet the Press" interviewed United States Senator Ron Johnson. ABC's "This Week" interviewed House Minority Whip Steve Scalise. CBS's "Face the Nation" interviewed United States Senator Lindsey Graham. "Fox News Sunday" interviewed United States Senator Rand Paul. They're Republicans and they had a message for a combined television audience of millions: Donald Trump won.

Not in those exact words, but that was the clear implication. This thing or that thing—it didn't really matter what thing—meant in their "view" that the former president was robbed and the legitimacy of the current president, Joe Biden, is somehow suspect.