Opinion

The right to vote isn't a right at all, but rather a privilege that should be reserved only for those "equipped to take part in the process," writes Matt Walsh, a 27-year-old, far-right talk-show host and blogger, at the Daily Wire this week.

Walsh normally would not merit a flicker of attention from normal humans. But in this case, he has provided a valuable service to the non-wingnut world by saying openly what fellow voter suppressors are only thinking. Or perhaps whispering amongst themselves.

Lawmakers and lawyers for an Ohio electric vehicle company are working to undo the United States Postal Service's award of a 10-year, $6 billion contract to build the new fleet of mail trucks that would be mostly fueled by gasoline to Oshkosh Defense.

After USPS announced it had selected Oshkosh Defense, the Ohio startup electric vehicle maker Workhorse Group met with the USPS to discuss its bid-selection process. Whatever transpired in those talks, Workhorse promptly hired the powerhouse law firms Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Field and Mound Cotton Wollan & Greengrass to challenge the contract award.

Ted Cruz just had another one of his many childish tantrums, this time over the indignity of having to care if the Americans he was elected to govern live or die. The bodies of the ten shot dead by a gunman on Monday in Boulder, Colorado were hardly cold, yet Cruz was far more concerned about the tender feelings of gun nuts.

"After every mass shooting," he whined, "Democrats propose taking away guns from law-abiding citizens," holding it out as self-evidently preposterous that someone might want to stop such crimes before they happen.

America is struggling through a season of death. At least 540,000 people have succumbed to COVID-19, and we have suffered two mass shootings in seven days. Last Tuesday, in a possible or likely hate crime, a white man, shot and killed eight people in the Atlanta area, six of them women of East Asian descent. On Monday, another 21-year-old man, reportedly a Syrian immigrant who had lived most of his life in the United States allegedly shot and killed at least 10 people at a King Soopers supermarket in Boulder, Colorado. One of the victims was a Boulder police officer.

Those were not the only examples of large-scale gun carnage in America during that same seven-day period: There were also mass shootings in Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Stockton, California, and Gresham, Oregon.

Why, at this time of desperate need, does the Republican leadership refuse to put its fingerprints on legislation that relieves the American people's suffering? Not one Republican in the entire US Congress voted for the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).

If you scrolled through right-wing social media last weekend, you'd see the top news was not the increased pace of vaccination or the arrival of $1,400 stimmies. It was Joe Biden's triple-stumble on the staircase to Air Force One. A particularly creative meme tweeted out by Donald Trump, Jr. interspersed video of the former president hitting golf balls, which then appeared to hit Biden in the head and knock him down.

The most dramatic change in American capitalism over the last half century has been the emergence of corporate behemoths like Amazon and the simultaneous shrinkage of organized labor. The resulting imbalance has spawned near-record inequalities of income and wealth, corruption of democracy by big money, and the abandonment of the working class.

All this is coming to a head in several ways.

I don't know what kind of name Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa is. I'm no more familiar with Middle Eastern names than most white Americans are. What I do know is the debate over gun control, mass shootings and domestic terrorism is about to flip upside down now that the Boulder shooter had been identified as a man of Middle Eastern descent.

First, the facts. Alissa, 21, is alleged to have entered Monday a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, with a "rifle."1 Ten people are now dead. It looks like he shot himself, the damn fool. Pictures of him being frog-walked to a squad car with blood running down his leg have gone viral. The massacre took place a week after another in Atlanta, where a white man is alleged to have murdered eight people, including six Asian women.

Right on the heels of last week's horrific shooting spree by a 21-year-old at three Atlanta-area Asian day spas that left eight dead comes another mass murder, this time with a death toll of 10 at a Boulder, Colorado grocery store. The suspect, 21-year-old Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa was reportedly armed with an AR-15. While everyone waits for an apparent motive (officials said an investigation would not take fewer than five days to complete) one thing is absolutely certain: Little will be done to address the primary cause of mass shootings. The ease with which any random man with an inchoate grievance can pick up a gun and rapidly snuff out the lives of strangers to make himself feel powerful will remain unchecked.

That's not because Americans oppose stricter gun control laws. In fact, around 90% of Americans polled consistently support background checks for all gun sales. But when House Democrats introduced a bill earlier this month making background checks universal, all but eight Republicans voted against it. And forget about even turning this bill into law. The filibuster's continued existence makes it impossible to get it past Republican obstruction in the Senate.

“Tell this to the families of the murdered Capitol Police officers”

Attorney and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell for months insisted then-President Donald Trump won re-election, that it was stolen from him, and spun an outrageous tale involving a government supercomputer switching votes to Joe Biden amid a communist plot involving Cuba, George Soros, China, Venezuela, the Clinton Foundation, Antifa, dead Hugo Chávez, and Dominion and Smartmatic voting machine companies.

It's important to understand that NBC News' Chuck Todd and other members of the Washington press corps1 are not biased in the sense that they prefer one party over the other, one ideology over the other, or one set of interests over another. They are biased, however, in one truly significant way. Reporters prefer covering partisan conflict, especially conflict that has no foreseeable way of being resolved. Conflict begets attention begets profits—or just a feeling of being pivotal to the country's destiny. The press corps will be at the heart of the action even if its members have to invent the action.

For this reason, the Washington press corps tends to behave one way when there's a Democratic administration, another way when there's a Republican one. The press corps' differing behavior is very often mistaken for bias, but that's not what it is. This is important to note, because the solution is not greater neutrality. The real solution is greater morality. Because of the unquestioned value of competition between reporters, however, a moral press is unlikely to happen. Indeed, the press can be anti-moral.

Donald Trump may be off at Mar-A-Lago throwing childish tantrums on his golf course, but his legacy lives on with Republicans, who are increasingly realizing that the best way to appeal to GOP voters is to ape his strategy of acting more like a shock jock than a politician.

Beyond just acting like crude bigots and jerks, the real goal is to rake in the cash in the aftermath of the outrageous behavior. The politician plays the victim of "cancel culture," thereby sanctifying whatever gross thing they said or did with the holy water of "free speech," which is merely conservative code for the "right" to be free of any pushback or criticism.

Following one of the most controversial debates in the state's legislature to date, the Kentucky State Senate just passed a bill that would make it a crime to insult police officers.

This article first appeared in Salon.

Critics of Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI ) had a field day on Sunday night over an interview the controversial Republican gave to a local TV station about the naming of Greenland to make a point about climate change.

In the interview, reported by the New York Times, Johnson suggested , "You know, there's a reason Greenland was called Greenland. It was actually green at one point in time. And it's been, you know, since, it's a whole lot whiter now so we've experienced climate change throughout geologic time."