Joe, how much do we hate thee? Let me count the ways. And provide some links.

Manchin wrote an op ed headlined “Why I’m voting against the For the People Act.” Some reactions to this op ed and Manchin’s stated policy of putting “bipartisanship” ahead of everything else follows.

Eugene Robinson, Joe Manchin retreats to fantasyland and sticks America with the consequences. 

“Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) has the right to live in a make-believe wonderland if he so chooses. But his party and his nation will pay a terrible price for his hallucinations about the nature of today’s Republican Party. And even this sacrifice might not guarantee that Manchin can hold onto support back home.

“Manchin’s declaration Sunday that he will vote against sweeping legislation to guarantee voting rights nationwide and that he “will not vote to weaken or eliminate” the Senate filibuster is a huge blow to President Biden’s hopes of enacting his ambitious agenda. There’s no way to spin this as anything other than awful.”

On the plus side, Robinson cites some polls that show Manchin’s voter base in West Virginia isn’t pleased with him, either.

Jonathan Chait, Joe Manchin’s Incoherent Case for Letting Republicans Destroy Democracy. In brief, Manchin’s op ed makes absolutely no sense.

James Downie, Joe Manchin’s mighty delusions.

“Manchin has become the Senate’s Walter Mitty: a man who believes himself the champion of a fantasy and who has hope but no plan. He believes he will save the country by recruiting “10 good Republicans,” even though dreaming doesn’t will into existence that many Republicans who will cast a fair-minded vote. Anything that would snap him back to our partisan reality he either ignores or treats as divisive. Meanwhile, McConnell and the rest of the Republican Party laugh all the way to the ballot box.

“That’s what makes Manchin so infuriating. In his mind, he’s the hero of this story. In truth, he’s the patsy. And the country pays the price for his delusions.”

Jennifer Rubin, Time to call Manchin’s bluff

“It’s time for Manchin to put up or share blame for Republicans’ subversion of democracy. Let him come up with 10 Republicans for H.R. 4 and for a slimmed down H.R. 1. Let him find four more Republicans to support the Jan. 6 commission. If he cannot, then his thesis that the filibuster promotes debate and makes way for compromise collapses and his role in promoting the tyranny of the minority is laid bare.”

Alexandra Petri, Joe Manchin and the Ten Good Republicans Joe sees them everywhere! But nobody else does. And the photos are blurry.

Charles Pierce, Joe Manchin’s Argument Is as Far Removed From Reality as West Virginia Is From Neptune.

“The Reverend William Barber, official preacher man here in the shebeen, has announced that, on June 15, he plans to lead his Poor People’s Campaign in a march on Senators Joe Manchin and Mitch McConnell. By now, Manchin’s appalling decision not only to continue to embrace the filibuster—the primary barrier to any attempt by Congress to counter the national campaign by the Republican Party to destroy the franchise for millions of American citizens—but also to vote against the For The People Act even if it ever came to a vote, has been chewed up and spat out by practically everyone who’s read his misbegotten op-ed in a West Virginia newspaper. …

“… It is more than possible that Joe Manchin simply has got his, and the hell with the rest of us. His support for the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, a less sweeping bill, is primarily camouflage, since I can’t see enough Republican senators supporting that to get it passed, either. His op-ed is so threadbare that it’s compelling evidence that he’s not even really trying anymore. He cannot be so myopic and detached not to be aware of the political reality. Just last week, he pronounced himself baffled by the Republican refusal to authorize an independent investigation into the events of January 6. He’s just a babe in these woods.”

Greg Sargent, How Joe Manchin’s awful new stance could blow up in his face.

Blowing up in his face sounds good to me. How would that work?

“In his CBS appearance, Manchin hailed the handful of “brave Republicans” in the Senate who voted for the failed Jan. 6 commission, and said this suggests Democrats can still get 10 Republicans to vote for the John Lewis bill….

“… once it becomes clear that 10 Republicans will not support any voting protections, Manchin will have to say whether he believes Democrats cannot act alone to secure them when the alternative, by his own lights, will be disastrous.

Here’s a bit of random background. There is a lot of background to choose from, but I just learned this bit today, so it’s on my mind.

In 2019, Megan Montgomery was rushed to a hospital in Birmingham, Alabama, with a gunshot wound in her arm. The shooter was her husband, Jason McIntosh, a local police officer. NBC reports what happened next.

Police took her husband’s pistol away. Nine months later, the state’s top law enforcement agency gave it back, despite pending domestic violence charges and an active protective order. Just 16 days after that, he used the gun to shoot and kill her during another late-night dispute.

Of course he did. Even McIntosh’s lawyer thinks the state was nuts to give him his gun back. In the United States, a woman is killed by an intimate partner every nine hours, the NBC article says. And in spite of laws calling for domestic abusers to lose their access to firearms, these laws are rarely enforced. Why?

Experts say the reason is a combination of deference to gun rights on the part of judges and other officials, the absence of a defined procedure to remove the guns, and a lack of awareness by law enforcement about just how lethal the risk can be.

And, anyway, it’s just women, right? Gun rights are more important.

Megan Montgomery and Jason McIntosh in 2019.

Now, with that in mind, let us turn to California, where a U.S. District Judge named Roger Benitez has overturned the state’s 32-year-old assault weapons ban. Benitez called the ban a “failed experiment” and also compared the infamous AR-15 rifle to a Swiss army knife — “a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment.”

Daniel Polti, at Slate:

U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez said that the way California has described the military-style rifles that are illegal to own means law-abiding citizens of the state can’t have weapons that most other states allow. The restrictions on the use of the weapons are “hereby declared unconstitutional and shall be enjoined,” Benitez wrote.  …

… Benitez also criticized the news media, saying that it’s their fault assault weapons have a bad reputation. “One is to be forgiven if one is persuaded by news media and others that the nation is awash with murderous AR-15 assault rifles. The facts, however, do not support this hyperbole, and facts matter,” he wrote. “In California, murder by knife occurs seven times more often than murder by rifle.”

I do not have data on precisely how murders are committed in California, but in the U.S. as a whole the overwhelming majority of homicides are committed by firearms. “Knives or cutting instruments” are a very distant second. Of course, maybe he’s saying that if Californians could get their hands on more AR-15s, maybe the state’s homicide rate (currently 4.5 per 100,000 residents) could be bumped up to rival Mississippi’s (15.4 per 100,000 residents)!

If you’re wondering, Benitez is a George W. Bush appointee, and he has a history of pro-gun rulings. In a November 2020 news item in the San Diego Union-Tribune, reporter Greg Moran wrote that California Attorney General Xavier Becerra formally objected to a gun law case being assigned to Benitez.

Benitez has issued rulings striking down the laws banning high capacity ammunition magazines and requiring background checks for people buying ammunition in the past two years. He is also now hearing two other cases from Second Amendment advocates, one dealing with the state’s assault weapons regulatory scheme and another on the ban on billy clubs and blackjacks.

I take it AG Becerra couldn’t get the case reassigned.

Although Benitez overturned the assault weapon law, he granted a 30-day stay of the ruling to allow an appeal. And it will be appealed, and I suspect there’s a good chance the law will be reinstated. But let’s go back to Benitez and failed experiments.

Charles Tiefer writes in Forbes, Judge Strikes Down California’s Assault Weapon Ban As Part Of His Crusade Facilitating Mass Killings:

In his 94-page ruling Judge Benitez clearly aims to get the case to the Supreme Court, with its three new Trump-appointed justices, and bring about what he crusades for, a radical doctrine that the Second Amendment extends to weapons of mass killings of helpless, hopeless victims.

After noting Benitez’s pro-weapon history, Tiefer continues,

Benitez was picked although the American Bar Association clearing committee had more than 10 of 15 members giving Benitez an unqualified rating. The ABA said: “Judge Benitez is ‘arrogant, pompous, condescending, impatient, short-tempered, rude, insulting, bullying, unnecessarily mean, and altogether lacking in people skills.’”

Judge Benitez apparently thinks the assault weapons ban is a failed experiment. I have not been an unadulterated fan of assault weapons bans, mostly because “assault weapon” is not really a tightly defined technical term, and a lot of firearms with capabilities very similar to the dreaded AR-15 are not considered “assault weapons.” It’s also the case that one state’s firearm regulations are too easily undermined by laxer laws in other states. But Tiefer provides data arguing that the ban reduced the stockpile of privately owned rifles in California by more than 175,000. Which is better than nothing.

But if you want to talk about failed experiments, let’s look at the experiment we’ve been running in the U.S. This is the experiment to find out what happens when you let any damnfool own and carry guns, including high-velocity semiautomatic rifles like AR-15s. In recent years Republican states have been tripping all over themselves to eliminate even the most modest speed bumps to gun owenership. Licensing and permits are for socialists, you know. All this arm-bearing is supposed to reduce crime, enable public safety, and foster good manners. “An armed society is a polite society,” the Second Amendment advocates like to say.

So how is that working out? The murder rate in the U.S. jumped by 21 percent in 2020, it says here. No doubt a lot of violence was fueled by stress caused by the pandemic, and politics, and social upheavals, but if Americans didn’t own so damn many guns the violence might be a lot less lethal.

See also As Shootings Continue to Surge in 2021, Americans Set to Face a Summer Plagued by Gun Violence in Time; Mass shootings turn America’s gun culture into a killing culture in USA Today; There Have Been, On Average, 10 Mass Shootings In The U.S. Each Week This Year at NPR. Yeah, clearly, that “good guy with a gun” thing is workin’ real well. And are we more polite yet?

Life in the United States — Texas mom accidentally shoots her own child while firing gunshots at roaming puppy.

The woman, 24-year-old Angelia Mia Vargas, was charged with deadly conduct with a firearm after opening fire three times on the 6-month-old boxer puppy but instead wounding her son in the abdomen, reported KTRK-TV.

The puppy had been accidentally left out of the house and was roaming the street; his owner was present and trying to call the pup back to his house.  But Ms. Vargas had a gun handy, so a shooting occurred. The boy and puppy will both recover. Vargas was charged with deadly conduct with a firearm.

Texas lawmakers recently passed a bill to allow open carry of firearms without a permit or required training, which Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is expected to sign into law.

And the carnage will continue. This experiment is not going well. Maybe we should call it off.

Understanding what’s going on with Netanyahu requires a knowledge of Israel’s parliamentary procedures I do not possess. But Juan Cole says that last night Netanyahu missed a deadline for forming a new government. And that means the coalition trying to get him out gets a shot at forming a new government. I wish them luck.

The end of Netanyahu is not a sure thing. The opposition coalition claims to have exactly the number of votes, and no more, to take a new majority and establish a new prime minister. Netanyahu is working to get just one of those votes to switch to his side. So it’s not over.

This just in — The Times of Israel reports,

The eight-party coalition that aims to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is appearing increasingly likely to secure the necessary majority support in the Knesset, Israel’s two main news stations reported Friday night.

The assessment among all members of the “change bloc,” led by Prime Minister-designate Naftali Bennett and Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid, is that the coalition will indeed be sworn in, Channel 12 said, with a wafer-thin 61-59 majority.

Getting rid of Netanyahu won’t mean getting rid of right-wing pro-settlement leadership, as some of the anti-Netanyahu coalition are hard righties, including the guy likely to be the next PM. But it won’t be Netanyahu.

See also Jennifer Rubin, This is what putting country over party looks like.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu listens as Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during a joint statement after their meeting at the Prime Minister’s office, Tuesday, May 25, 2021, in Jerusalem, Israel. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, Pool)

There are multiple reports today that Trump sincerely believes he will be “reinstated” as POTUS in August.

Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August (no that isn’t how it works but simply sharing the information). https://t.co/kaXSXKnpF0

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) June 1, 2021

Charles Cooke of National Review — not one of my usual sources — corroborates what Maggie Haberman says.

I can attest, from speaking to an array of different sources, that Donald Trump does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be “reinstated” to office this summer after “audits” of the 2020 elections in Arizona, Georgia, and a handful of other states have been completed. I can attest, too, that Trump is trying hard to recruit journalists, politicians, and other influential figures to promulgate this belief — not as a fundraising tool or an infantile bit of trolling or a trial balloon, but as a fact.

Cooke continues,

The scale of Trump’s delusion is quite startling. This is not merely an eccentric interpretation of the facts or an interesting foible, nor is it an irrelevant example of anguished post-presidency chatter. It is a rejection of reality, a rejection of law, and, ultimately, a rejection of the entire system of American government.

This is startling? His entire administration was a rejection of the entire system of American government. He never appeared to understand what the entire system of American government is, never mind his particular role in it.

Chis Cillizza at CNN writes that Trump has gotten worse. I don’t see worse. His head was never screwed on all the way. IMO he’s more stupid than crazy, but of course I’m not a psychologist. It’s true he’s not well connected to reality, but I think that’s because reality doesn’t interest him. He sees no profit or pleasure in reality. Bullshit, on the other hand, is gold.

Paul Campos:

Trump is reportedly more obsessed than ever with the idea that the election was stolen from him. Asking whether he really believes that is a category mistake: Donald Trump doesn’t have “beliefs” about those sorts of things in anything like the normal sense of the word. He just says whatever he wants to say with literally no regard for truth, evidence, plausibility, or anything else. As many people have pointed out he’s not so much a liar as a bullshitter in Harry Frankfurt’s classic formulation (TL;DR version: a liar has to care about the truth in order to lie about it; a bullshitter is not even interested in the truth to the limited logically necessary sense that a liar must be).

Maggie Haberman’s tweet was in reponse to something about QAnon and Myanmar, or “MIN-a-mar” as one Trump cultie pronounced it. Apparently the Q-culties have had a thing about Myanmar for a while. See How Q And Trump Deadenders Became Obsessed With Myanmar by Josh Kovensky at TPM. The culties sincerely believe that Trump gave orders to the military before he left office to stage a coup, and this will happen sometime this summer.

I believe I’ve mentioned recently that Myanmar is seriously bleeped up. Nobody wants to be like Myanmar, including Myanmar.

Also — If you missed the Chris Hayes segment on Rand Paul’s obsession with quails on cocaine, here it is. It’s a hoot.

The 2012 Veiled Prophet “maids” and their fathers, Ladue News photo.

I am setting aside our impending implosion into darkness and tyranny to write about a stupid controversy involving an actress I’m not sure I ever heard of who starred in television shows I don’t remember watching. This also involves a bit of St. Louis cultural bric-à-brac that I hadn’t thought about in years. But I take it parts of the Internet are blowing up over this. I feel a need to clarify some stuff.

The actress, Ellie Kemper, was the 1999 Fair St. Louis Queen of Love and Beauty, a fact that shouldn’t be of any real importance to anybody but maybe the Kemper family. Fair St. Louis is an annual event hosted by the Veiled Prophet Organization, which hereafter I will call the VPO.

The VPO, which was once known as the  Mystic Order of the Veiled Prophet of the Enchanted Realm, is a profoundly weird cultural thing run by moneyed St. Louis families. The VPO was established in 1878, which is about the only fact regarding its establishment everyone agrees on. The primary stated purpose of the original VPO was old-fashioned civic boosterism. It was modeled after the New Orleans Mardi Gras; the “Mystic Order” was and is something like a Mardi Gras “krewe,” a social organization that puts on a parade or ball at Mardi Gras time, except in St. Louis there was and is only one krewe and you had to have yacht-fulls of money to buy your way into it. Unlike Mardi Gras, the VPO was never associated with any observance of the church year, I don’t believe. Over the years the dates for the VP festivities — primarily a parade and a fancy debutante ball — have moved all over the calendar.

Preciding over all public VPO festivities is a character called the Veiled Prophet, who wears elaborate robes and a veil that conceals his identity. The Prophet is supposed to be from a mystical kingdom called Khorassan. All that’s known is that the guy behind the veil is one of the VPO members. There are rumors the honor goes to the guy who paid the most money for it that year, but I don’t know if that’s true.

A robed Veiled Prophet and a Queen of Love and Beauty at the debutante ball, undated photo.

Beneath the civic boosterism, there are hints that the original VPO had some less noble purposes. This Atlantic article — which, I warn you, is partly fact and partly bullshit — associates the founding of the VPO with anti-unionism. The organization was also largely about promoting the leadership and privilege of the city’s old, elite moneyed families, which obviously it was. However, the attempt in the article to tie the VPO to the KKK is going too far, and I will explain this in a bit.

The VPO was all white until 1979, when it finally agreed to accept Black members. The Black members still had to have yacht-fulls of money to qualify for membership, so there aren’t a lot of them, but there are a few. Kemper is being slammed for associating with an institution with a “racist past.” As there are few institutions in the U.S. that don’t have a racist past, not to mention a racist present, this seems a bit unfair. I am also seeing claims that the VPO excluded Jews, but I can’t find any corroboration for that. I believe there were Jewish members long before there were Black members, anyway.

Regarding the alleged tie to the KKK — the author of The Atlantic article, Scott Beauchamp, found an old image of one of the early costumes of the Veiled Prophet and noted that it resembled a Klan robe. However, according to several sources the Klan itself didn’t take to wearing their signature robes until some time after 1878. (See, for example, How the Klan Got Its Hood from The New Republic, January 2016.) Also, several sources say both the Veiled Prophet robes and Klan robes are modeled after what were common Mardi Gras costumes of the time, which in turn were modeled after old Catholic penitent robes still worn in Europe here and there. The photo above shows what the Prophet’s robe has looked like for a long time, or at least as long as I can remember, which is not very Klannish.

The VPO isn’t what it used to be, frankly. Back in the 1950s the Veiled Prophet Ball was on local television every year. I remember watching it on our little black and white teevee. In the St. Louis area it was a thing one always watched, like the Miss America pageant and the annual broadcast of Peter Pan with Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard. Anyway, what I remember about it is that the debutantes, or “maids,” wore these poufy princess ball gowns and tiaras with a single feather sticking up on top. And they carried enormous bouquets of flowers. As they were brought forward to be presented to the Veiled Prophet, they had to execute a deep bow that was almost a full prostration, all the while holding the bouquets with both hands, not letting their feathered headdresses fall off, and without tripping over the countless yards of fabric in those gowns. And I assume they were wearing heels.

I was always impressed. They had to have thighs of steel to pull that off.

And yes, the Veiled Prophet maids were all white in those days, but so were the Miss America contestants. However, the VP was more exclusive. Theoretically any pretty girl could be Miss America. But to be a VP maid, your family had to have yacht fulls of money, preferably old money. A little hillbilly girl from a blue collar family, like me, would never have had to execute that bowing maneuver no matter how white she was. For which I was somewhat grateful. It was terrifying just to watch.

In the late 1960s Black activists began to protest the ball and parade. In 1972 a few were able to crash the ball and un-veil the Prophet, who was a Monsanto executive that year. The VPO responded by, eventually, accepting Black members and establishing the Fair St. Louis, a public fair with lots of food and entertainment that anyone can attend. The Veiled Prophet Parade is now called America’s Birthday Parade, and participation is more democratic than it used to be.

The debutante ball is still a debutante ball. It hasn’t been televised for a long time, I don’t think, unless it’s on some funky cable channel I don’t know about.

So that’s the whole story with the Veiled Prophet of St. Louis. Yes, the organization has something of a hinky past, but it’s made some reforms. The current VPO gives a lot of money to charitable causes and is generally harmless, as far as I know.

According to Allegra Frank at Slate, in What It Means That Ellie Kemper Was Queen of the “Racist” Veiled Prophet Ball, on Monday May 31 someone tweeted something about the Veiled Prophet and how weird it is, and then someone else found that Ellie Kemper was once a Queen of Love and Beauty, and then people found the old Atlantic article with its KKK allegations, and before long Kemper was being roasted as the “KKK princess.” And now right-wing sites are screaming that a “liberal mob” is after Kemper and cancel culture and blah blah, but I don’t know of any connection between the Twitter users calling her the KKK princess and liberalism. Anyway, this is all very stupid, and people should just leave Ms. Kemper alone.

President Biden’s Memorial Day address was quite good, I thought. I just want to make note of this part:

What we do now — what we do now, how we honor the memory of the fallen, will determine whether or not democracy will long endure.  We all take it for granted.  We think we learned in school.  You have to — every generation has to fight for it.

But, look, it’s the biggest question: Whether a system that prizes the individual, that bends towards liberty, that gives everybody a chance at prosperity — whether that system can and will prevail against powerful forces that wish it harm.

All that we do in our common life as a nation is part of that struggle.  The struggle for democracy is taking place around the world — democracy and autocracy.  The struggle for decency and dignity — just simple decency.  The struggle for posterity — prosperity and progress.  And, yes, the struggle for the soul of America itself.

More than 100 scholars of political science and related disciplines released an open letter today calling out a serious threat to democracy.

Specifically, we have watched with deep concern as Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures in response to unproven and intentionally destructive allegations of a stolen election. Collectively, these initiatives are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections. Hence, our entire democracy is now at risk. …

… Statutory changes in large key electoral battleground states are dangerously politicizing the process of electoral administration, with Republican-controlled legislatures giving themselves the power to override electoral outcomes on unproven allegations should Democrats win more votes. They are seeking to restrict access to the ballot, the most basic principle underlying the right of all adult American citizens to participate in our democracy. They are also putting in place criminal sentences and fines meant to intimidate and scare away poll workers and nonpartisan administrators. State legislatures have advanced initiatives that curtail voting methods now preferred by Democratic-leaning constituencies, such as early voting and mail voting. Republican lawmakers have openly talked about ensuring the “purity” and “quality” of the vote, echoing arguments widely used across the Jim Crow South as reasons for restricting the Black vote.

You may have heard about the Texas Democrats who stopped passage of partricularly heinous voter suppression bill by walking out of the Texas House and denying the Republicans a quorum. Gov. Greg Abbott is threatening to withhold pay from lawmakers who walked out. There are plans for a special session to take up the bill again.

CNN reports that the Texas Democrats are calling for help from Washington.

Texas state Democratic lawmakers are calling for federal action after they derailed a restrictive voting bill, and President Joe Biden is sending a grim warning about Republican-led state efforts to restrict voting access.

Greg Sargent wrote today,

I’m skipping my usual Memorial Day musings for this bit of current news. This is from Market Watch —

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn said over the weekend that a Myanmar-like coup — in which the military overthrew a democratically elected government — “should happen” in the U.S.

Appearing in Dallas at a QAnon conference, Flynn was asked during a Q&A session that was shared in a Twitter video:  “I want to know why what happened in Myanmar can’t happen here?”

After cheers from the crowd died down, Flynn responded:  “No reason. I mean, it should happen here.”

Here’s the video:

Here is the video of former national security advisor Michael Flynn saying that he thinks a coup like the coup in Myanmar should happen in the US. pic.twitter.com/7mGYjfXg18

— Mamie ? (@MC_Hyperbole) May 30, 2021

The Market Watch article continues,

Myanmar’s military seized power Feb. 1 and imprisoned the country’s democratically elected leaders, on the basis of unproven allegations of voter fraud. At least 800 civilians have died, and thousands have been arrested, in protests that have wracked the Southeast Asian nation in the months that followed.

Supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory have praised the Myanmar coup and called for the U.S. military to do the same, citing unsubstantiated claims of election fraud.

Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, is no stranger to military dictatorship. Its history since gaining independence from Britain in 1947 is mostly a list of insurgencies and coups. It’s been under the thumb of military dictatorship most of that time, especially from about 1962 to about 2008. (Note that it wasn’t the same military junta running things, exactly, during that period. The coups had coups.) It managed to almost sorta kinda function as a democratic nation from about 2011 to very recently, but now the military has taken over again.

Myanmar is unfathomably screwed up. It would take a book to describe how screwed up it is. Just note that the various military juntas that ran the nation through most of its history did not do much good for the people. The juntas did not respect civil liberties or even concern themselves much with whether people had food and shelter.

Buddhism is the dominant religion in Myanmar, and the Buddhist establishment there is also a mess. Part of the reason for that goes back to the independence movement, which was led by monks, but that’s a long story. It’s also the case that during the worst of the earlier dictatorships many families gave their young sons to the temples, to be ordained, so that at least they would have something to eat. This resulted in a large number of Monks With Issues who were more interested in politics and activism than in meditation.

Did I mention Myanmar is bleeped up? So, yeah, let’s try to be just like them! That’s the ticket!

Morons. On the plus side, most U.S. career military officers have more respect for the Constitution and our democratic tradition than do the Republican Party these days. They aren’t going to follow Michael Flynn anywhere.

Myanmar military.

Paul Waldman wrote on Friday:

The Texas legislature is about to send a bill to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk that would not only make it harder to vote; it will also make it easier for the state legislature to overturn results it doesn’t like. Way to go, Texas. See also the Texas Tribune, Texas lawmakers poised to pass sweeping voting bill to restrict voting hours and change election rules.

Meanwhile, delightful duo Margerie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz are touring the country and holding rallies to whip up violence against everybody they don’t like, including Silicon Valley …

Florida Man @mattgaetz, talking about Silicon Valley canceling conservatives says “We have a 2nd amendment in this country and I THINK WE HAVE AN OBLIGATION TO USE IT!” pic.twitter.com/FFEWnyEF0o

— KevinlyFather ???????? (@KevinlyFather) May 27, 2021

… and the government.

Matt Gaetz says the 2nd amendment is about “maintaining within the citizenry the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government” pic.twitter.com/MNATrjBrhr

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 27, 2021

No, the Second Amendment has nothing to do with allowing citizens to overthrow the government.

We’re still looking at fallout from the failure of the January 6 commission bill. Kysten Sinema is being roasted by the Arizona Republic for her role in standing in the way of just killing the filibuster already. “At some point, Sinema is going to have to realize she can’t have it both ways,” writes E.J. Montini. “She can’t support legislation she believes to be vital and maintain her position on the filibuster.” Sinema didn’t even bother to vote on the bill.

And then there’s Joe Manchin. I understand some people are still holding out hope that he will realize the filibuster has to go. If he hasn’t seen it by now, I don’t know what’s going to do it, though.

I am not feeling terribly optimistic at the moment. Well, try to do something fun over the Memorial Day weekend.

Do read Can Democrats avoid the pitfalls of 2020? A new analysis offers striking answers by Greg Sargent. You’ll remember that Democrats didn’t do as well in House races as they had expected to do last year. And now it wouldn’t take much for the Republicans to take back a House majority next year.

Greg Sargent discusses an analysis of campaign advertising that points out how much Democrats emphasized “working across the aisles” to “get things done” while Republicans emphasized “Democrats are demons who want to abolish police departments, turn America socialist, and eat your babies.” Guess which approach worked?

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the vice president of Way to Win, said that, in sum, Democrats in 2020 sent mixed messages: They touted their willingness to work with Republicans, even as Republicans called them socialists and extremists.

“By far their biggest spend,” Ancona told me, speaking of Republicans, was “on vilifying us as extreme in all kinds of ways.”

Meanwhile, Acona said, by constantly touting bipartisanship, Democrats were “effectively normalizing their attacks,” because Democratic messaging essentially said: “We want to work across the aisle with people who are painting us as extreme villains.”

That’s exactly what happened in Missouri. Republican campaign ads were all negative, all the time, and worked hard to hang unrest in Portland, Kenosha, etc. around the necks of Democratic opponents. Videos of flaming cars were frequently featured, as was the word “socialism.” The Dems tried to emphasize how good they were at working with Republicans. That’s exactly what happened. And it workd, for the Republicans.

This isn’t necessarily a new problem. I think Claire McCaskill lost to Josh Hawley in 2018 in part because she was too careful to not come across as “too liberal.” Her big issue was a promise to reduce prescription drug costs. Any issue more hot-button than that was avoided. I don’t recall that she ran any negative ads against Hawley. Meanwhile, Hawley’s ads against McCaskill accused her of all kinds of misuse of funds and personal corruption, and I don’t remember that she answered them.

Yes, Missouri is a red state, but the cities are blue. A big turnout in the cities can overcome the rural votes. But McCaskill cautious campaign didn’t inspire anyone in St. Louis or Kansas City to go out of the way to vote for her. A more full throated defense of urban issues, and a promise to stand up to Trump, might have kept her in the Senate.

Back to the anlysis of 2020:

Successful GOP 2020 campaign ad.