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Republicans are dangerously close to killing something the American public loves – and desperately needs
March 01, 2021
In the wee hours of Saturday morning, the House of Representatives passed the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill requested by the Biden administration. The vote was 219 to 212, with two Democrats — Jared Golden (D-ME) and Kurt Schrader (D-OR) — voting no. Not a single Republican voted for the bill.
This article was originally published at Letters from an American
<p>The coronavirus relief bill illustrates a crisis in our democracy.</p><p>This measure is enormously popular. On Thursday, the day before the House took up the bill, a poll by Morning Consult/Politico showed that 76% of Americans liked the measure, including 60% of Republicans. It <a href="https://twitter.com/mattmfm/status/1365731340558172166" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">includes</a> $1400 stimulus checks which, together with the $600 checks in the previous package, get us to the $2000 checks that former president Trump, a Republican, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/12/22/trump-stimulus-video-bill/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">demanded</a>.</p><p>It includes increased unemployment benefits of $400 weekly, provides $350 billion in aid to state and local governments, establishes tax credits for children, provides money to reopen schools, funds $8.5 billion to distribute vaccines, and gives small business relief.</p><p>The <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/local-republicans-support-biden-covid-relief-plan/2021/02/14/9791d4ba-6d65-11eb-9ed1-73d434b5147f_story.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">bill is popular among Republican mayors and governors</a>, whose governments cannot borrow to make up for tax revenue lost because of the pandemic and who are facing deficits of $80 to $100 billion even with money from the last relief packages. The deficits will require devastating cuts on top of the 1.3 million jobs that have already been cut in the past year. Relief is "not a Republican issue or a Democrat issue," Fresno, California, mayor Jerry Dyer <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/local-republicans-support-biden-covid-relief-plan/2021/02/14/9791d4ba-6d65-11eb-9ed1-73d434b5147f_story.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">told</a> Griff Witte of the <em>Washington Post </em>earlier this month. "It's a public health issue. It's an economic issue. And it's a public safety issue."</p><p>Those in favor of the measure <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/27/gop-coronavirus-stimulus-471815" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">note</a> that while there is still close to $1 trillion unspent from previous coronavirus relief bills, currently unspent money has been assigned already: it is distributed among programs that are designed to spend it over a period of time. This includes federal employment benefits, which are distributed weekly; the Paycheck Protection Program, which is held in reserve for employers to apply for funds from it; enhanced medical matching funds to be distributed as the pandemic requires; and tax breaks to be spent as people file their tax returns.</p><p>The chair of the Federal Reserve, which oversees our banking system, Jerome H. Powell, has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/02/28/fed-biden-inflation-19-trillion-stimulus/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">backed the idea of increased federal spending</a>; so has Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Powell was nominated to his current position by Trump (he was nominated to the Federal Reserve Board by President Barack Obama); Yellen is a Biden appointee.</p><p>This is a bill that should have gotten some Republican votes in the House of Representatives.</p><p>But it didn't. Republican lawmakers are complaining about the partisan vote and scoffing that President Biden promised to unify the country. But the problem is not the bill. The problem is the Republican lawmakers, who are determined to oppose anything the Democrats propose.</p><p>The American Rescue Plan bill now goes to the Senate, where Republican senators appear to be united against it. In a statement, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) complained about the Democrats' "deliberately partisan process" in writing the bill, but the Republicans willing to meet with President Biden — McConnell was not one of them– proposed a measure that provided less than one-third the relief in the present bill. There is enormous urgency to passing the bill quickly, since <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/11/covid-stimulus-updates-nancy-pelosi-says-relief-bill-will-pass-by-march.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">current federal unemployment benefits expire on March 14</a>.</p><p>The Senate is evenly split between the Democrats and the Republicans, with each party holding 50 seats (technically, Senators Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont are Independents, but they currently work with the Democrats). Although each party effectively holds 50 seats, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/11/6/21550979/senate-malapportionment-20-million-democrats-republicans-supreme-court" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the Democrats represent 41.5 million more Americans than the Republicans do</a>, in nation that has 328.2 million people.</p><p>In addition to their disproportionate power in the Senate, the Republicans can stop legislation through the filibuster. This is a holdover from an earlier era, in which a senator could stop a bill approved by a majority by refusing to stop talking about it, which would prevent the bill from coming to a vote unless senators voted to invoke "cloture," a process that limits consideration of a pending bill to 30 additional hours. Today, cloture requires 60 votes.</p><p>The filibuster was rarely used before about 1960; in the early twentieth century, southern senators used it primarily to stop civil rights legislation. But as the volume of business in the Senate raised the need to streamline debate, the Senate reformed the filibuster so that a senator could simply threaten a filibuster to kill a bill.</p><p>Our current Republican lawmakers use these "holds" to kill any measure that cannot muster 60 votes, effectively turning the Senate into a body that requires not a majority to pass legislation, but rather a supermajority. Those who defend the filibuster argue that this supermajority requirement will make senators create bills that are bipartisan, but in fact it has meant that a small minority controls the Senate.</p><p>So Democrats will have to pass the American Rescue Plan through a procedure known as "reconciliation," which enables certain budget bills to pass with a simple majority rather than the 60 votes currently necessary for a regular bill. But the Senate can only pass three bills a year through this process, and there are strict limits to what can be in them. The Senate parliamentarian, a nonpartisan judge of the procedural rules of the Senate, has <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/02/26/971793277/who-the-senate-parliamentarian-who-ruled-against-a-minimum-wage-increase" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">decided</a> that the $15-an-hour federal minimum wage in the current bill does not meet the requirements of reconciliation. Fifty-nine percent of Americans like the idea of raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2025, as the bill sets out, but the hike cannot be included in the convoluted process necessary to get the bill through without the supermajority the current filibuster system requires.</p><p>Senate leadership can overrule or fire the parliamentarian, but that really doesn't matter in this case because at least one Democrat, Senate Joe Manchin (D-WV), <a href="https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-politics-of-the-tug-of-war-over-the-minimum-wage" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">opposes the increased minimum wage</a>. His opposition would sink the entire measure because the Democrats need every one of their 50 votes.</p><p>The American Rescue Plan will likely pass—without the increased minimum wage—but it will do so only because the Democrats won both Georgia Senate seats in January, giving them an equal number of senators to the Republicans.</p><p>The Democrats will be able to pass a bill popular with more than 3 out of 4 of us only because they have a slight majority in the House and can use a special budget measure to work around the Republican senators who represent 41.5 million fewer Americans than the Democrats do.</p><p>The coronavirus relief bill illustrates just how dangerously close we are to minority rule.</p>
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The social-media network Gab -- the most recent refuge for conservative and alt-right extremists -- has been victimized by a massive hack, including private data, Wired.com has reported.
The transparency group DDoSecrets says it will make the 70 GB of passwords, private posts, and more available to researchers, journalists, and social scientists, according to Wired.
<p> "The incident comes weeks after far-right platform Parler was hacked just prior to being knocked offline," reports Wired.</p><p>"When Twitter banned Donald Trump and a slew of other far-right users <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/tweets-got-trump-banned-far-from-worst/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">in January</a>, many of them became digital refugees, migrating to sites like Parler and Gab to find a home that wouldn't moderate their hate speech and disinformation. Days later, Parler was <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/parler-hack-data-public-posts-images-video/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">hacked, and then it was dropped by Amazon web hosting</a>, knocking the site offline. Now Gab, which inherited some of Parler's displaced users, has been badly hacked too. An enormous trove of its contents has been stolen—including what appears to be passwords and private communications."</p><p> The Wired story, which comes just days after Gab officials denied the existence of the hack to Wired writer Andy Greenberg, reports:</p><p> "Among the users whose hashed passwords appeared to be included in the data were those for Donald Trump, Republican congresswoman and QAnon-conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, MyPillow CEO and election-conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, and disinformation-spouting radio host Alex Jones."</p><p> The hack was huge: </p><p> "On Sunday night the WikiLeaks-style group Distributed Denial of Secrets is revealing what it calls GabLeaks, a collection of more than 70 gigabytes of Gab data representing more than 40 million posts," Wired reports. "DDoSecrets says a hacktivist who self-identifies as "JaXpArO and My Little Anonymous Revival Project" siphoned that data out of Gab's backend databases in an effort to expose the platform's largely right-wing users. Those Gab patrons, whose numbers have swelled after Parler went offline, include large numbers of Qanon conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and promoters of former president Donald Trump's election-stealing conspiracies that resulted in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill."</p><p> As the Verge <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/1/22307013/gab-hack-data-ceo-demon-hackers" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reports</a>, the folks at Gab were not pleased.</p><p> "Right-wing social media website Gab has reportedly been hacked, and CEO <a href="https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1366123617847828483?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Andrew Torba said on Twitter</a> that "demon hackers" were to blame, using a transphobic slur to describe them."</p><p> You can read the entire Wired report <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/gab-hack-data-breach-ddosecrets/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a>.</p>
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WATCH: Neo-Nazi calls Black security guard a 'monkey' before viciously assaulting him
March 01, 2021
A white supremacist leader was caught on camera assaulting a Black security guard shortly after one of his associates referred to the guard as a "monkey."
Australia's The Age reports that Thomas Sewell, a leader of the far-right National Socialist Network, assaulted the security guard after the guard had forced him and his associate to vacate the Channel Nine building in Melbourne.
<p>
Sewell was at the building to protest against a news segment that was about to run on his organization, and at the start of the video Sewell complains that Channel 9 is trying to portray his organization -- which he openly admits "advocates for white people" -- as terrorists.
</p><p>
The security guard approaches Sewell and asks him and his associate, who is filming the encounter, to leave the building.
</p><p>
They do so reluctantly, and the guard follows them outside.
</p><p>
Shortly after exiting the building, the man filming Sewell says, "Dance, monkey!" to the security guard, who angrily tells him not to call him that.
</p><p>The man with the camera then tells the guard not to touch him, although it's unclear from the video whether the guard is making physical contact with him.</p><p>
Right after that, Sewell can be seen punching the guard in the face.
</p><p>
According to The Age, the guard was subsequently treated at a nearby hospital and then released. The publication also notes that Victoria Police possess footage of the attack on the guard and are investigating the assault.
</p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xeNJIeUdZhw" width="560"></iframe>
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