Opinion

The Democratic Party enters the 2022 midterm elections in far better position than conventional wisdom suggests for maintaining -- and even increasing -- their slim control of the U.S. Senate.

The reason is simple: Math may mean more than history in the upcoming cycle.

‘Tis the holiday season and the heroes of Fox News are valiantly arraying their forces in the War On Christmas, even as ICU beds are filling up and a new strain of COVID has arrived.

In the spirit of the season I am making a special plea to Rupert Murdoch to deliver a Christmas miracle: stop killing us.

Fascism is terrifying. So most people look away.

Fascism is disorienting: A basic understanding of truth and reality, of what is certain in the universe, is replaced by "malignant normality," a surreal environment. As a democracy slowly succumbs and then quickly collapses — which appears to be what America is experiencing right now — everything that was once familiar and comforting is replaced by a new order. Those who follow the fascist movement are subsumed in mass ecstasy. Others are disoriented as they variously decide to resist, to collaborate or simply to muddle through in their own day-to-day way.

The Founders of this nation, and the Framers who wrote our Constitution, created (as Ben Franklin famously said) a constitutional republic: a government “deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed” through citizens’ (then white men) right to vote.

They referred to this as “republicanism” because it was based on the Greek and Roman republics (then thousands of years in the past but still remembered and idealized), and when put into law they called it “a Republican Form of Government.”

"Whatcha reading for?"

It's the laugh line in a classic bit from Texas comedian Bill Hicks, recounting his encounter with a Waffle House waitress in Tennessee who did not understand why a man sitting by himself in a coffee house would read a book. The bit continues with a truck driver standing over Hicks and menacing him with, "We've got ourselves a reader."

One of the most notorious moments of the presidency of Donald J. Trump has to be that visit he made to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) on March 6th of 2020. COVID-19 hadn't even been named yet and the World Health Organization (WHO) hadn't yet designated it a pandemic but we all knew that something very bad was happening. Cases had shown up in Washington state and California. The whole country was riveted by the plight of a cruise ship sailing off the West Coast with sick people aboard and nowhere to moor. The president was reportedly angry about the whole thing and was resisting dealing with it but finally agreed to travel to the CDC's Atlanta headquarters for a photo-op to show his concern. It was one of the most astonishing presidential performances of all time:

But perhaps the most memorable of all was this:

A healthy democracy, in America or anywhere else, must be based upon shared assumptions about empirical reality, facts and truth. Today's Republican Party and other "conservatives" reject such basic principles, norms and values.

Fascism, which lies at the core of contemporary Republican politics, is the mind-killer: It is anti-intellectual, anti-rational and anti-human. Fascism also seeks to annihilate the world as it actually exists and replace it with a fantasy world created by the fascist movement and its leader.

The United States Supreme Court dominated headlines recently when it appeared ready to strike down Roe (or weaken it drastically). That drew our attention away from another case. I want to focus on it.

Carson v. Makin concerns a Maine law prohibiting the state from funding religious use at religious schools on the grounds that doing so would violate the First Amendment’s separation between church and state. Such restrictions do not apply to schools, public or private, that endeavor to uphold the difference between religion and education.

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin said Sunday he opposes the president’s Build Back Better bill, the second of two infrastructure packages the Democrats have been negotiating for months. (The first one, focused on “traditional” infrastructure, was enacted last month.)

The news is moving fast. Negotiations appear to be ongoing. To get a better idea of what’s going on, I talked to Monique Judge. She was until recently the news editor for The Root. I asked Monique if Manchin’s surprise announcement made any sense, politically or practically.

Rand Paul has long been a laughable lightweight – at Senate hearings, Dr. Fauci beats him up on a regular basis – but now he has outperformed even himself.

In all of the drama of the last few days, in which Donald Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows has now been referred by the full House to the Justice Department to be charged with criminal contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena, House select committee vice chair Liz Cheney three times raised the possibility that Trump committed a felony by not following the pleas of others and stopping the attack.

This article was originally published at The Signorile Report

Our democracy is in a crisis, with many thoughtful and not-prone-to-hysteria commentators wondering out loud if the Republican embrace of Trumpism has gone so far that it may take the entire country over the edge.

A brilliant recent analysis is Thomas Edsall’s article in yesterday’s New York Times, How to Tell When Your Country Is Past the Point of No Return, bookended by Barton Gellman’s shocking piece in The Atlantic, Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun.

By now, we’ve all heard and considered the graceless manner in which Sen. Joe Manchin (D-VW) went on television on Sunday to announce he is personally killing Joe Biden’s big spending bill labeled Build Back Better.

After months of dawdling, negotiating, whittling, spinning, and otherwise trying to get everyone else in his party to turn around his central star, Manchin simply said no more. And he said it publicly first, not even giving a stunned White House notice.