So Andy resigned (yay) and the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed in the Senate (yay).

Regarding Andy, here’s a couple of paragraphs from New York’s Justin Miller:

The report also revealed for the first time allegations by a state trooper that Cuomo ran his hands over her body after picking her out of the ranks to serve on his protective detail.

Cuomo summarized his defense against the complaints as a matter of personal ignorance regarding supposedly changing mores involving the treatment of women. “I didn’t realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn,” he said. “There are generational and cultural shifts that I just didn’t fully appreciate.”

He seriously thought groping a state trooper used to be normal? Well, truth to tell, it probably was, but not for a long time. See Andrew Prokop at Vox on why Cuomo resigned and Trump didn’t.

After the report’s release, leading Democrats said Cuomo had to go. New York’s entire Democratic congressional delegation called on him to resign, as did national Democratic leaders like President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Longtime allies in state politics abandoned him too, from unions to state legislature power brokers. A majority of legislators in the state assembly went on record supporting his impeachment. Voters rejected him too — a Quinnipiac poll found that 70 percent of New York voters wanted Cuomo to quit.

The writing on the wall became clear — he couldn’t win. Furthermore, a conviction in his impeachment trial could have banned him from holding state office in the future. So now, he hopes, he will avoid that trial altogether.

And look for Bill DeBlasio to be very cheerful. Oh, and Trump didn’t resign because Republicans didn’t pressure him to, says Prokop. In case you wondered.

Regarding the bipartisan infrastructure bill, Paul Waldman explains why nineteen Republicans (although not all of the Republicans who had negotiated the thing) voted for the bill. In brief, some Republicans really want big infrastructure projects in their states to get funded. And a few aren’t afraid of being bipartisan. Plus this:

Those interests are now eager for the government to spend on the infrastructure on which they depend, which is why this bill is backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers, as well as many influential CEOs. Those aren’t people Republicans say no to very often.

It still needs to go to the House, where its fate is tied to the reconciliation bill. See German Lopez at Vox for how that’s likely to go.  It could all blow up, but it might not.

In other news — Dominion Voting Systems is suing OAN, Newsmax, and the former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne for $1.6 billion in lost profit and business value. Heh.

Anti-vaccine protesters tried to storm the BBC’s offices. But they had the wrong address. It comforts me that we don’t have all the dim bulbs

.

The conclusions of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ought to be banner headlines everywhere, but we should be grateful it’s made it onto front pages at all. The basic things to know:

• Climate change is happening, and there is no question humans are causing it.
• Changes are bigger and happening faster than predicted, and there’s no going back to the climate we had in the recent past.
• We are locked into 30 years of worsening climate impacts no matter what the world does.
• There is still a window in which humans can alter the climate path. An all-hands-on-deck effort could limit warming after 2050.  Anything less risks catastrophe. Nobody wants to say how bad it could get.

From the Washington Post:

Sometimes I sitll miss the great Media Whores Online, 2000-2004, one of the early leftie political blogs that mercilessly skewered stupidly political punditry. Because heaven knows we still have a lot of stupid political punditry.

Take Chris Cillizza at CNN. Please. Today he parses something Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) said and called her out for handing a “gift to Republicans.” The gift? Rep. Bush told an interviewer that she is paying for private security because of threats to her life (among other things, she was singled out and stalked by Marjorie Taylor Greene, which put a target on her back), and she also called for defunding the police and putting the money into more social services.

Tsk tsk, says Cillizza. But let’s look closer.

Yes, Missouri is a very Red state. But Bush’s district (all of the city of St. Louis and most of northern St. Louis County, which includes Ferguson) has been a safe Democratic House district for years. In fact, Missouri’s 1st Congressional District hasn’t elected a Republican since 1946. Bush won in 2020 with 78.7 percent of the vote. She won the primary against a long-serving and generally well liked Black male incumbent (Lacy Clay, in the House from 2001 to 2021) because she associated herself with Black Lives Matter as well as “defund the police,” and he didn’t. So, first off, that district is no more going to elect some Trumpy Republican next year than it’s going to fly off to Australia.

Even if Bush’s seat is safe, Cillizza says, next year Republicans might try to use some of Bush’s words to bash other Democratic candidates. But Missouri Republicans don’t need Cori Bush for that. They can just make shit up or go through the corrupt secretary of state or attorney general to initiate phoney investigations into Democratic candidates and use that to smear them.

Rep. Cori Bush — Don’t listen to Cillizza. You be you. It’s what your constituents want. And see also With Capitol Sit-In, Cori Bush Galvanized a Progressive Revolt Over Evictions. In brief, Rep. Bush played a big role in nudging the Biden Administration to extend the eviction moratorium this week.

Also this week, progressive and Bernie Sanders associate Nina Turner lost a congressional primary in Cleveland to Shontel Brown, who’d been endorsed by Hillary Clinton. The race was labeled a “proxy war” between the progressive and establishment wings of the Democratic Party. As soon as Turner conceded all manner of pundits celebrated the comeuppance of Turner.  Nina Turner’s loss in Ohio means Biden doesn’t need to keep caving to the left, raved James Hohmann, for example.

People closer to the 11th congressional district said that the locals didn’t see it as a “proxy” war about anything.  Remarks Turner had made about Joe Biden during the general election campaign in 2020 didn’t sit well with a lot of people, probably including many who lean progressive. Bernie Sanders hmself was wholeheartedly supporting Biden at the time.

But it was one election in one congressional district. It doesn’t necessarily say anything about what candidates are viable in other congressional districts, nor does it prove that the progressive movement is over, any more than Cori Bush’s big win in Missouri proved the progressive movement is the future. Everybody needs to chill.

Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri, center, celebrated President Biden’s extension of the moratorium on evictions on Tuesday. Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

Although I can’t find exactly when he said it, I clearly remember George W. Bush chirping that no free people ever chose to live under a dictatorship. And, of course, that was a stupid thing to say. History shows us lots of people living in a reasonably functional democracy who gave it up  — or took no steps to save it — in favor of an authoritative dictator. The rise of Hitler is the classic example, but not the only one.

With that in mind, do read The Fascist-Curious Right by Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark. Here’s just a bit.

Ideas that would have been unthinkable just moments ago are now being normalized and, if anything, the drift toward authoritarianism seems to be accelerating. This includes the explicit embrace of the idea of an American dictator — an American Caesar. Literally and seriously. (This is not a parody.) …

… But now its fetish for coups has morphed into a yearning for even more robust measures. “To survive today’s leftist threat,” argues author Christopher Roach, “we need to be committed to acquiring and using power in the service of a counterrevolution.”

This new “Great America” agenda means that we should be more like Portugal.

Here Sykes describes an article at the right-wing webzine American Greatness that celebrated Portugal’s “fascist-adjacent dictator” António de Oliveira Salazar, who was Prime Minister from 1932 to 1968. His government is most commonly described as “corporatist authoritarian.” “Soft fascism” might work also. He stayed in power by use of censorship and secret police. There certainly have been much worse dictators than Salazar, but he was still a dictator.

Yet, there’s more. Tucker Carlson recently has been promoting Hungary’s Viktor Orban as the kind of guy we need now. Jonathan Chait:

He is laying down a marker in the highest profile way he can that Orban’s iron fist is the future the Republican Party should want. The splashy imprimatur of a Fox News prime-time personality, who is probably the right’s most influential media figure, is an important milestone in the Republican Party’s long evolution into authoritarianism.

Do read It Happened There: How Democracy Died in Hungary by Zack Beauchamp at Vox, from 2018. A bit:

One of the most disconcerting parts of observing Hungarian soft fascism up close is that it’s easy to imagine the model being exported. While the Orbán regime grew out of Hungary’s unique history and political culture, its playbook for subtle repression could in theory be run in any democratic country whose leaders have had enough of the political opposition.

It’s not for nothing that Steve Bannon, who has called Orbán “the most significant guy on the scene right now,” is currently in Europe building an organization — called “the Movement” — aimed at spreading Orbán’s populist politics across the continent. …

…Hungary is a warning of what could happen when a ruthless, anti-minority populist backed by a major political party is allowed to govern unchecked. Americans need to pay attention.

See also U.S. conservatives yearn for Orban’s Hungary by Ishaan Tharoor at the Washington Post.

So, yeah, the American Right is authoritarian and not democratic. What else is new? But why?

The Right claims to be all about freedom. I’ve been writing for a while (example) that they’ve fetishized the word freedom so much that it’s stripped of all meaning. Now it’s just a tribal symbol that has nothing to do with, you know, freedom. To a rightie, the word means something closer to privilege, or maybe license. Or power.

Ultimately, this is all very childish. The Right in many democratic countries around the world are engaged in some kind of massive temper tantrum. They don’t want to share their countries with nonwhite people, for example. They don’t want to be inconvenienced by things like covid or global climate change, and they want those problems to just go away. Maybe if we pretend they don’t exist, they will.

Edward Luce writes at the Financial Times that Covid has shown up western democracy’s childish tendencies that I recommend. The childishness is not limited to the Right. However, IMO this rush to authoritarianism is the Right’s longing for a daddy figure to take care of them. That’s Trump’s basic appeal; they see him as the tough guy who will beat up the father of that other kid they don’t like.  Seriously, look at the fan art. “The common thread here is that Trump is depicted as physically ripped, athletic and heroic – not unlike totalitarian posters of fascist regimes past.” Il Duce had better artists, though.

A supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump holds an anti-vaccine sign while protesting at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2021. Washington’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, urged residents not to engage with any protesters “seeking confrontation” and requested National Guard help in anticipation of potential violence in tied to protests as Congress meets to certify Joe Biden as the next U.S. president. Photographer: Erin Scott/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Looks like Andy’s in a heap o’ trouble. He probably won’t resign, but for the good of the party he ought to. Or, he could offer to not run for re-election next year. Either one works for me.

As I wrote earlier this year, when Andy won re-election in 2018 he won 59 percent of the vote. Very respectable. But in that same election, Kirsten Gilibrand won re-election to the Senate by 67 percent of the vote. That spoke to a certain amount of frustration with Andy among Democratic voters, I believe. After the nursing home stunt, winning a fourth term was going to be a challenge, anyway.

Yeah, a fourth term. He’s been governor of New York since 2011. This is not because he’s been such a wonderful governor. His primary challengers haven’t been that strong, and as a Democrat a can of soup would win election in the general. But he wore out his welcome with me a long time ago. He simply never made much difference that I could see. The same old problems limped along, unattended, year after year.

New York politics, either state or city, never made much sense to me. My impression is that all business is conducted behind such a thick wall of cronyism that there’s no logic to it. And Andy is a creature of that system; no doubt a great many Democratic politicians and officials in New York owe him something. But it’s time to go now, Andy.

Today in same old same old: The bipartisan infrastructure group released the text of the bill, totaling 2,702 pages, yesterday. I assume that there are lots of people good with numbers studying the thing as I keyboard. Chuck Schumer says he thinks it will be voted on in a matter of days. The progressive wing of the Democratic party still vows to hold the bipartisan bill in the House until the reconciliation bill passes.

More evidence that Trump was not making America great again — according to an analysis of data at Bloomberg News, the Trump economy was the worst since Hoover’s. This was not just because of the pandemic. His overall rate of GDP growth was 1.6. The Trump economy was near the bottom according to other measures as well.

Last week’s GDP release included revisions back to 1999, so it’s time for a new set of presidential growth comparisons! Starting with the basic version: annualized growth in real GDP from 1st quarter in office to last https://t.co/4fZWXw60RM pic.twitter.com/gpuNOvwIqU

— Justin Fox (@foxjust) August 2, 2021

Speaking of tweets, Paul Krugman has been crunching numbers for Florida, which had another record high of covid hospitalizations yesterday.  Krugman says that DeSantis isn’t just failing to protect Floridians from the pandemic; he’s also costing the state a lot of money.

So if you put a dollar value on it, DeSantis’s anti-mask, anti-Vax policies are costing his state the equivalent of 13% of its GDP. Winning the pandemic! 6/

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) August 2, 2021

DeSantis enjoyed a lot of luck that Florida didn’t get worse faster, but I believe his luck has run out. It’s now reap what you sow time, guv.

Jennifer Rubin says business is stepping up and doing what Republican governors won’t.

Meanwhile, major corporations such as Disney, Google, Facebook, Uber, Walmart (at its headquarters), Morgan Stanley and The Post are requiring employees returning to the workplace to get vaccinated. … The private sector, which Republicans used to insist should be free to operate as business owners saw fit, now battles to save lives in the face of right-wing politicians who have formed a sort of death cult that elevates “owning the libs” over the prevention of needless death.

I take it DeSantis is still trying to force cruise lines to take unvaccinated passengers. A court ruling that said Viking could restrict its cruises to vaccinated people only was reversed by an appeals court a few days later. But now the cruise lines are saying “screw the appeals court; we’re following CDC guidelines.” Obviously, the last thing they need is more Diamond Princess episodes, leaving passengers quarantined on board while the virus spreads among them. Remarkably, it’s possible that the people who run cruise lines know more about the cruise business than Ron DeSantis does.

Return of the Cabbage — I have managed to avoid David Brooks’s New York Times column for a few years now. But he’s got an article at the Atlantic I started to read, and … it makes no sense at all. Seriously. I read several paragraphs into it with a growing sense that either Brooks is drifting into senility, or I am. If someone else wants to read it and explain it to me, be my guest.

Also at The Atlantic — What I Heard in the White House Basement by Alexander Vindman. You should probably just read this and not waste time on Brooks.

Finally — and maybe you should be sitting down for this one — do see Jane Mayer at the New Yorker, The Big Money Behind the Big Lie. Rich and powerful conservative groups are behind the “stop the steal” hysteria, she says. Further, the Big Lie has become a grift to separate Republican donors from their money. Can you imagine? (/sarcasm)

David Atkins is one of my favorite political pundits. He writes,

Since Biden’s election, the Republican strategy has been simple: sabotage the Biden administration’s goal of vaccine-based herd immunity, thereby damaging the economy and forcing more unpopular measures to control the spread of the Delta variant. Either pandemic-exhausted voters will rebel at the prospect of a new round of controls and mask mandates, or the virus will overload ICUs and kill a million Americans by the midterms–which Republicans will then blame on Biden and Democrats (as Trump just did yesterday.)

But there is reason to believe this strategy may be not only sociopathic but also too clever by half. Most Americans have now been vaccinated, and it is abundantly clear that the Delta variant is primarily a plague of the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated least capable of persuasion are primarily base Republicans, and partisanship is one of the single strongest predictors of vaccination status.

And vaccinated Americans are getting fed up with being put at risk and potentially forced into further restrictive measures by the politically hostile and belligerently unvaccinated. Republicans (and their useful tools like Green Greenwald) have been caterwauling about the prospect of vaccine mandates and passports, soullessly comparing them to the Nazi Holocaust. Many red states have pre-emptively banned any public or private measures to implement restrictions based on vaccination status.

Atkins reminds us that in the early days of the pandemic, when New York and other cities were being slammed, a “response” team tasked with distribution of federal resources to the most hard-hit areas was nixed by Jared Kushner. The areas most being hard hit were Democratic party strongholds, and Kushner made a political calculation that the pandemic could be “their problem.” The states were on their own.

Likewise, Mitch McConnell and other Republicans opposed sending aid/stimulus money to states, calling such funds “blue state bailouts.” The talking point was that this pandemic thing was a blue state problem, and the virtuous and problem-free red states didn’t need the money. Those blue states should just declare bankruptcy (heh).

Well, guess what? By March 2021 the red states already were having a worse time of it, as the blue states were running up their vaccination rates. The differences between red and blue sections of the country are even more pronounced now.

The point is that we know Republicans will stoop to using death and hardship to score political points and hurt their opponents. They’ve tried it already.

Once the Biden Administration took ownership of vaccine distribution (and thank goodness; if Jared Kushner had been put in charge, we’d still be waiting), the next Republican step was to crank up opposition to the vaccines and to any means to encourage people to get vaccines. For example, Republicans stirred up faux outrage over measures such as vaccine passports that could be used to keep the unvaccinated out of theaters, stadiums, restaurants, cruise ships, etc. Atkins notes that “Many red states have pre-emptively banned any public or private measures to implement restrictions based on vaccination status.”

But guess what? Most adult Americans have been vaccinated, and most adult Americans think vaccine mandates and other measures to keep the unvaccinated from spreading covid are really good ideas.

That wasn’t true at first, but polling shows that as time goes on, more Americans want somebody to mandate vaccines and to penalize the unvaccinated in some manner. Because people are pissed.

See also 45% of Republicans support a universal vaccine mandate, as do a strong majority of Americans, a new poll shows, from Business Insider; Vaccinated people are ready for normalcy — and angry at the unvaccinated getting in their way at WaPo; Some vaccinated Americans have lost their patience with those refusing the shot as Covid-19 cases surge and mandates return at CNN.

And see In this rural Missouri county, the vaccination rate is low and opposition high in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This is about Washington County, which I have mentioned here before. The Washington County line is a mile or so from where I am sitting as I write this. The vaccination rate in Washington County is 23 precent, the article says. I liked this part:

Mark Stevens, 46, was over there, selling sweet corn, watermelons, green beans and tomatoes out of the bed of his pickup. He wouldn’t walk across the parking lot to get a COVID-19 vaccine.

“You’d have to drag me dead or alive,” said Stevens, who’s 6 feet 2 inches, weighs 340 pounds and throws around a lot of other numbers he’s gleaned from Newsmax, a conservative cable network and website. Stevens said he watches less of Fox News since it started leaning too far left.

Typical. And, of course, Washington County is solid red Trump country. I’ve been to that farmer’s market, btw.  I won’t be going there this summer.

Atkins thinks that Republicans could be hit with a backlash in the midterms.

If around 70 percent of Americans become vaccinated, partisanship becomes inextricably linked with vaccination status, and 65-70 percent of Americans who actively want to see vaccine mandates and passports implemented are either sickened by an endemic Delta variant or forced by circumstance to limit their enjoyment of life because of a toxic pro-virus movement primarily associated with the Republican Party, that could lead to serious electoral consequences. If Covid does end up felling over one million Americans, conservatives can try to place the blame on Biden and Democrats–but it’s not at all clear that voters will buy that when the variant is doing the most devastation among belligerently unvaccinated Republicans in red areas. And unlike many other issues that favor Democrats electorally, this one is deeply personal and rage-inducing for the vaccinated. …

… The path to House and Senate majorities in 2022 still run through purple suburban districts and states with a balance of urban and rural populations. It is difficult to see how Republicans will succeed if they are associated with a white evangelical anti-vax movement putting 70 percent of Americans directly into harm’s way. Whatever advantage they seek from sabotaging the Biden administration’s public health and economic response may wind up costing them more than they gain–not only in real human lives, but in seats in Congress as well.

Gerrymandering could still help the GOP take back the House. All the Washington Counties in the U.S. will remain red in the foreseeable future.

The Republicans’ problem here is that it’s going to be damn hard for them to pivot to supporting vaccines and other mitigation policies after they’d done such a good job of making vaccine refusal the mark of tribal loyalty. Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis learned that the hard way about a week ago.

But as DeSantis encourages vaccinations — he said “vaccines are saving lives” — he is facing a backlash from the anti-vaccination wing of his political base. It’s the same group that praised him and helped thrust him onto the national stage for his hands-off approach to the virus. DeSantis, with 2024 presidential ambitions, has to walk the line between keeping his conservative base satisfied and keeping his state from becoming more of a disease hot spot.

“Don’t let political correctness get in the way of health choices,” former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn said recently of DeSantis’ comments, speaking on “The Right Side with Doug Billings,” a conservative radio host and podcaster.

Another conservative radio host, Stew Peters, last week called DeSantis a “sellout” and suggested the governor was taking bribes, though didn’t specify from whom.

See also Florida reports highest number of new COVID-19 cases in a single day since the start of the pandemic at CBS News from, um, today. Will this cost the GOP the Florida senior vote?

Finally, see The Anti-vaccine Con Job Is Becoming Untenable by Brooke Harrington at The Atlantic. Harrington is a sociology professor at Dartmouth who explains the sociology of cons.

Many of the people refusing safe, effective vaccination amid a deadly pandemic are enmeshed in a very distinctive type of relationship that sociologists have been studying for more than 70 years: the con job. Con artists gain social or financial advantage by convincing their marks to believe highly dubious claims—and to block out all information to the contrary. …

…To outsiders, the social dynamics of the con appear peculiar and irrational. Those caught up in it can seem self-destructive and, frankly, clueless. But to sociologists, including me, who study fraud, such behaviors obey a predictable logic.

The seminal text in the field—Erving Goffman’s 1952 essay “On Cooling the Mark Out”—observes that all targets of con artists eventually come to understand that they have been defrauded, yet they almost never complain or report the crime to authorities. Why? Because, Goffman argues, admitting that one has been conned is so deeply shameful that marks experience it as a kind of social death.

Mr. Stevens of Washington County, with his sweet corn and watermelons, is unlikely to ever admit he’s been conned. But if the Republican politicians who count on his vote get too “soft” on vaccine refusal, how will that affect his voting enthusiasm next year? Republicans have given themselves a very tiny needle to thread here. And will urban and suburban voters be sufficiently pissed off to turn out in big numbers and overrule the rural areas? That probably won’t make a difference one way or another in House races, but it could impact next year’s election for a new U.S. senator.

A CDC internal memo that got leaked to the Washington Post informed us that vaccinated people can carry and “shed” the covid virus just like unvaccinated people. This is why the CDC recently decided that vaccinated people really ought to be wearing masks in indoor public places, especially if crowded and near hot spots. There have also been some big-headline news stories featuring vaccinated people who became infected (example).

The attention being given to “breakthrough” infections has frustrated the White House.

At the heart of the matter is the news media’s focus on breakthrough infections, which the CDC has said are rare. In some instances, poorly framed headlines and cable news chyrons wrongly suggested that vaccinated Americans are just as likely to spread the disease as unvaccinated Americans. But that isn’t quite the case. Vaccinated Americans still have a far lower chance of becoming infected with the coronavirus and, thus, they are responsible for far less spread of the disease.

“The media’s coverage doesn’t match the moment,” one of the Biden officials told me. “It has been hyperbolic and frankly irresponsible in a way that hardens vaccine hesitancy. The biggest problem we have is unvaccinated people getting and spreading the virus.”

Here’s some data that popped up on Axios: Less than 0.1% of vaccinated Americans infected with COVID-19. Click on the link to see the chart.

Of the 164 million vaccinated Americans, less than 0.1% have been infected with the coronavirus, and 0.001% have died, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Why it matters: While “breakthrough cases” have been getting some media attention, the low numbers show that the pandemic is mostly a threat for the unvaccinated population.

So that’s reassuring, although I’d like to see comparisons to the same data for the unvaccinated. Big numbers confuse me. Well, small numbers confuse me, too.

Regarding the unvaccinated: A writer for Politico reports on the bar scene at Lake of the Ozarks, one of the vacation spots generating Delta variant infections here in the heartland. In a sane world the place would have been shut down to stop the spread. But no; all the bars and resorts and what not are operating at full tilt with no covid restrictions whatsoever.  It begins,

In a county designated a Covid hot spot, in a state with one of the lowest vaccination rates in the nation, and in a region where hospitals are nearing capacity as the Delta variant takes hold, Erin, a bartender at Backwater Jack’s, couldn’t be in a more vulnerable position. She interacts closely with hundreds of maskless customers—sometimes on a single day. She knows most of them are probably not vaccinated. And she doesn’t care. She isn’t either.

“I’m living, breathing proof—I’ve not been sick once. I’ve been as hands-on as you can be with people from everywhere,” Erin said, as a motorboat thundered to the dock and another group of customers climbed out. Like others who spoke for this article, she asked to go only by her first name. She said she’d heard a rumor—common among vaccine skeptics but also plainly false—that “more people are dying from getting the vaccine this week.”

Why we’re doomed. I’m back to wearing masks in indoor public places and going nowhere unless it’s necessary.

Our other vacation spot, Branson, is also operating full tilt. This week we learned that the unvaccinated niece of an old family friend spent July 4 weekend at Branson with her husband. She died on Tuesday; the husband is still in the hospital.

Some employers are stepping up to mandate vaccinations. I suspect that will become more and more common. Vox has a good rundown on who has the legal authority to mandate what.

Stupid Twit of the Day award goes to Sen. Ron Johnson, who said he would support a vaccine madate for a really deadly disease, but not covid.

As near as I can determine from the news stories: A few hours after headlines had declared the bipartisan infrastructure talks in the Senate had fallen apart, new headlines declared the bill was ready to be agreed upon. Okay. And the Washington Post reported:

With that once-elusive agreement finally in hand, the Senate hours later then took its first formal legislative step. Lawmakers voted 67-32 to put themselves on track to begin debating infrastructure reform this week, clearing the first of many hurdles toward adopting a proposal that the White House has described as historic.

But I’m not sure if this means much, considering that in another part of the same story we learn the bill hasn’t been written yet. “Lawmakers must still draft their legislation, which had not been written by Wednesday evening, and calibrate it in a way to survive the narrowly divided Senate,” it says.

So I’m not going to get real excited about the details until there’s a draft. But Vox has dutifully published an article about what’s in the bill that’s not a bill yet, if you want to read it.

A side note: A certain former “president” who made big promises on infrastructure but failed to deliver is now bigly pissed at Mitch McConnell that the Senate appears to be getting ready to pass an infrastructure bill. “Under the weak leadership of Mitch McConnell, Senate Republicans continue to lose,” Trump said in a statement. “He lost Arizona, he lost Georgia, he ignored Election Fraud and he doesn’t fight.”

As I remember it, Trump could have had a similar bill any time he had wanted it. He’s the one who kept blowing off opportunities. Thus it was that “infrastructure week” became a running joke. So much for the Art of the Deal.

As for the promised reconciliation bill, we are not yet in a position to count chickens there, either. Kirsten Sinema is being given credit for her wonderful bipartisan work on the bipartisan bill that isn’t a bill yet. And as soon as it looked like something was coming together that might turn into a bill, she let it be known she was not “on board” with the larger infrastructure package.

Josh Marshall doesn’t think this is necessarily a problem.

First of all while this was played as a rejection of the bill that’s really not how it reads to me. It’s the vaguest of comments that seems focused on the size of the bill. It leaves all her options open and plenty of room to nitpick a few dollars here and there. I would expect that both Sinema and Manchin will work to shave some spending off the size of the bill over the next couple months. That’s similar to what Manchin did during the passage of the original COVID relief bill.

I think this is best interpreted as Sinema throwing up a flag that she’s going to continue to preen and create drama for the purpose of building a reputation as an uber-‘moderate’ and generally have everyone kiss up to her. She wants to come out of this as the person who wasn’t totally down with Democratic priorities and shaved the numbers down, at least a bit. If she really wanted to stop the process she wouldn’t vote to let it begin, which she is. That tells you the story.

I still don’t like her. But Marshall also says that Joe Manchin is moving toward voting for the reconciliation bill. So maybe it will happen.

But what interests me here is that Manchin doesn’t seem entirely in sync with Sinema. And here’s why that’s important. Manchin is from a very red state. He’s got his own politics and set of concerns that seems to work for him in his state but he rarely actually shuts his party down on critical stuff. None of this is new for Manchin. His vote is just more pivotal. Sinema meanwhile is a preening phony. She started out as a member of the Green party. Then she was progressive Democrat. Now she’s an uber ‘centrist’. She’s a total phony and I doubt very much that she will be able to pull any of this off if she’s there alone without Manchin. Without Manchin, she’ll fold.

I get the impression that Josh Marshall doesn’t like Sinema, either.

Paul Waldman is of a similar opinion on Sinema and the reconciliation bill.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) now says she won’t support the $3.5 trillion Democrats had proposed spending on the reconciliation bill; it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that she has no particular substantive objections, but just wants to be seen saying no at the outset so she can cast herself as the independent maverick constraining her party’s ambitions. But when the reconciliation bill is finally completed, Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W. Va.) will likely be on board.

Still, Waldman says, we have plenty of reasons to be pessimistic, and you can read his column if you want to know what they are. I’m pessimistic enough already.

Philip Bump has a column at WaPo that is wonderfully insightful, and I endorse it heartily. It is headlined To many on the right, perceived toughness outweighs patriotism.

Bump noticed, as I did, that there was a big divide over how media reacted to the withdrawal of Simone Biles from the Olympic women’s team gymnastics competition (she has since withdrawn from individual competition also). Looking at all the commentary around the web, the mainstream media is generally supportive of Biles, as are leftie webzines and blogs.

But right-wing media was nearly all nasty and derisive. Typical comments: Biles is a quitter; she’s selfish; she’s a sociopath (?), she should have stuck it out for the team.

Charlie Kirk calls Simone Biles a “selfish sociopath” and a “shame to the country”

“We are raising a generation of weak people like Simone Biles” pic.twitter.com/yDLtblAS35

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) July 27, 2021

And, of course, by ending her Olympic competition Biles is letting down America, because the entire point of the Olympic games is for the United States to demonstrate that it’s so much better than those other countries. Do see this column in the federalist if you don’t believe me.

I always thought the Olympics was supposed to be about competing, and winning, for your country. As an American, the Olympic Games always felt like a unique opportunity to utterly defeat other countries and prove, again and again, that the USA is the greatest country on earth, and other countries suck.

Apparently, things have changed. For some U.S. athletes, the Olympics has become all about them.

First, I am old enough to remember when the USSR and various Soviet satellite countries owned the gymnastics competitions, men’s and women’s, at the summer Olympics. Nobody else need compete. The Soviet men also tended to dominate the “muscle” events, like weight lifting and hammer throwing, as I recall, and the Soviets overall were usually competitive for medals in the other sports as well. If the Games were supposed to demonstrate the supriority of the American Way of Life over Communism, they usually failed. Olympics after Olympics, the Soviets ate our lunch.

(Just for fun I randomly chose the year 1960 and looked up the medal count. Yep; the Soviet Union beat the pants off the U.S. in the medal count. That was true for most Olympics, for a long time.)

Second, I thought the Olympic Games were about, you know, sports. Lots of peak athletes from all over the world getting together for great competition. Silly me.

Of course, a lot of the derision aimed at Biles is plain old racism and sexism. If a white male gymnast had done the same thing, there’d be a lot less hollering. I also thought that her decision seemed less selfish than self-effacing. She may have believed she would have destroyed the team’s chances at a medal. As it was, her team members shined, and the team got silver. I don’t see what’s selfish about that.

But as Philip Bump wrote, “For many Americans, Biles’s choice not to keep flinging herself around the gymnasium despite her uncertainty about where she would land was a grievous offense, an affront to their hard-earned right to chant ‘U-S-A!’ in their living rooms.”

So who’s being selfish? Biles has obligations to her sport, to her team, and to herself, not to some meatball on his sofa in Des Moines. And I don’t see that anyone who hasn’t been in her position (which is most of us) has authority to call her “weak.”

From there, Bump went on to right-wing reaction to yesterday’s testimony at the January 6 hearings. The testimony was powerful, and the officers who testified spoke to the long-term physical and mental challenges of that day.

The Right was incensed that the officers were critical of Trump and the insurrectionists, of course. But Bump continues,

The officers became a focus of aggressive abuse, often centered on a perceived lack of strength. That the officers became emotional was presented by conservatives as weakness, both personal and national. One officer’s testimony about enduring racist abuse was dismissed as invented. Another officer shared a voice mail he’d received in which he was excoriated in shockingly aggressive and homophobic terms.

The through-line to all of this is the idea that American heroes are necessarily stoic and suffering, demonstrating the sort of rigid “masculinity” that the insecure demand of their children. Olympians and other athletes are supposed to shut up and let us enjoy their accomplishments and fame. Members of law enforcement and the military are supposed to keep the bad guys in line and to be tough while doing it. The only emotions they’re allowed to show are anger or triumph.

I like this part:

That belief blends with political culture. Part of Trump’s appeal was his perceived toughness, his aggressive language about immigrants and foreigners and his constant attacks on the left.

This is something that always baffled me. Trump has got to be the biggest candy-ass on the planet. There’s absolutely nothing about him that’s strong; he’s both mentally and physically weak, obviously. But he’s tough! Well, he’s verbally aggressive, which can sorta kinda look like toughness. But his aggression is all about protecting himself. Everything about Trump is self-defense of his tender ego. Strong people can take lumps without whining; Trump cannot.

His followers cannot see that. Just look at some Trump fan art. They see him as some kind of superman, not the soft, whiny man-child he obviously is.

As I wrote last year, Toughness Isn’t Strength, Unless You’re a Brillo Pad. “The word toughness can connote an ability to withstand hardship and adverse conditions,” I wrote. “But we all know that ain’t Trump. Trump’s form of ‘toughness’ is external. It’s hiding behind fencing and steel and bullet-proof plexiglass. It’s having a tough outer shell that protects the marshmallow center.”

The Right hates what they think is weakness, which isn’t true weakness, but never mind. At the Independent (UK), Andrew Naughtie writes about yesterday’s hearing,

If there’s one thing the hardcore American right hates, it’s the admission of personal pain by someone who’s meant to be strong. …

Tucker Carlson, Fox News’s ever-crueler weeknight peddler of disinformation and racist grievance — and his more composed but no less corrosive comrade Laura Ingraham — both laid into the witnesses without mercy, variously accusing them of “curating” their testimony, lying about the pain they’ve experienced, and mocking their tears. They took issue, too, with the empathetic displays of emotion from male members of the committee.

Try to imagine Carlson or Ingraham facing actual hardship with grace and fortitude. I can’t.

I found an older post called Twilight of the Would-Be Gods from 2007, which is obviously way before Trump. But it kind of speaks to the same phoneomenon.

There’s a difference between strength and toughness. There’s a difference between courage and swagger. There’s a difference between results and spin. There’s a difference between resolve and stubbornness. There’s a difference between action and ideology. But try to explain any of that to a rightie. …

… Righties depend on that sugar high of vicarious vainglory mixed with loathing of others to give their lives meaning. But most Americans are sick to death of junk politics and policy. They want real leaders, not the strutting tin soldiers righties mistake for leaders.

I guess they love Trump because he can supply the vicarious vainglory by the truckload. I’ll give him that. But many, many books could be written about how phony John Wayne-style emotional toughness has so thoroughly screwed up too many American men and no doubt contributed mightily to our toxic masculinity problem.

So “toughness” is patriotism and repressing emotions is masculine and the meatballs on their sofas in front of the teevee are pissed that a young Black woman in Tokyo won’t let them get their faux patriotism fix. This is really pathetic.