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Watch The New Episode Of The Josh Marshall Podcast: Burdening The Vaccinated
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is now live! This week Josh and Kate discuss infrastructure progress, the January 6 investigation and the COVID pandemic still raging among the unvaccinated.
Watch below and email us your theme song submissions and questions for next week’s episode. This is the last week for theme song submissions, please send entries in by Sunday 8/8/21 the latest!
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
Institutionalism Can’t Save Us Now
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
We have no shortage of information about how historically bad an Attorney General William Barr was. His tenure was marked by attacks on LGBTQ rights, immigrants, and peaceful protestors. His overt politicization of the investigations into Russian interference in the election, the Mueller report, and Roger Stone’s sentencing are well-documented, and in a continuing headache for the Biden Administration’s DOJ, Barr’s Justice Department’s intervened to protect Trump against E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against him just two months before the election. And yet, as we saw this week following revelations that his DOJ declined to prosecute Commerce Department officials for lying about the provenance of the Census citizenship question, what we know merely scratches the surface.
Judge Tells Jan. 6 Insurrectionist That Trying To Overturn An Election Isn’t Patriotism, Actually
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Wednesday put in explicit terms how Trumpland’s rebranding of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as oppressed political dissidents is utter hogwash.
Democrats Call Republicans’ Bluff On Debt Ceiling As Dangerous Standoff Looms
It’s that time of year again — when raising the debt ceiling, a critical legislative act that staves off full-scale economic catastrophe, becomes a high-stakes game of political chicken.
Continue reading “Democrats Call Republicans’ Bluff On Debt Ceiling As Dangerous Standoff Looms”
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka Dead At 72
Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO labor organization and a close ally of the Biden administration, has died. Continue reading “AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka Dead At 72”
First, She Stormed A State Capitol With Ammon Bundy. Then, She Stormed Congress, Feds Say.
First, she stormed the Idaho state capitol. Then, she stormed the U.S. Congress. Continue reading “First, She Stormed A State Capitol With Ammon Bundy. Then, She Stormed Congress, Feds Say.”
Richard Trumka, Dead at 72
Richard Trumka is dead at 72. Head of the AFL-CIO and a fixture of the American labor movement for decades. Heart attack appears to be the cause of death but that’s still supposition. More to come.
New GOP Message on Surging COVID: It’s Juan’s Fault!
As Delta COVID surges cases across the country and fills hospitals in low-vaccine Red States, Republicans have been test-driving a range of messages to maneuver out of accountability for their reckless policies on vaccines. They’ve tried a belated effort to push vaccines, deny they were ever against them and then sidled back to opposing various kinds of vaccine mandates. But over the last couple days they’ve started pushing a new message: the problem is undocumented immigrants “pouring” over the US-Mexico border. Embattled Florida Governor Ron DeSantis put it this way (emphasis added) in a fundraising email sent out yesterday: “Joe Biden has the nerve to tell me to get out of the way on COVID while he lets COVID-infected migrants pour over our southern border by the hundreds of thousands. No elected official is doing more to enable the transmission of COVID in America than Joe Biden with his open borders policies.”
Continue reading “New GOP Message on Surging COVID: It’s Juan’s Fault!”
As COVID Gallops Across Florida, DeSantis Lashes Out … At Biden
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things.
A Big Mad Governor
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), whose state is positively drowning in COVID-19 cases, is up in arms after Biden said that governors like him who ban mask mandates need to “get out of the way.”
- DeSantis’ rebuttal essentially amounted to “immigrants bad”: “Why don’t you do your job, why don’t you get this border secure and until you do that, I don’t want to hear a blip about COVID from you,” he fumed during a press briefing.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), whose state is experiencing record COVID hospitalizations, to President Biden:
“Why don’t you do your job? Why don't you get this border secure? And until you do that, I don’t wanna hear a blip about COVID from you, thank you.” pic.twitter.com/lqyTV1l9ou
— The Recount (@therecount) August 4, 2021
- DeSantis declared that he very much wants to stand in the way of implementing COVID-19 prevention measures because freedom:
Gov. DeSantis says he'll get in the way of President Biden, says Florida is a free state.https://t.co/dAjFeMz4q6 pic.twitter.com/wF5q7RXKD9
— WPEC CBS12 News (@CBS12) August 4, 2021
- What Biden had said: “We need leadership from everyone, and if some governors aren’t willing to do the right thing to beat this pandemic, then they should allow businesses and universities who want to do the right thing to be able to do it. I say to these governors, please help. If you aren’t going to help, at least get out of the way of people who are trying to do the right thing.”
Pres. Biden: "If some governors aren't willing to do the right thing to beat this pandemic, then they should allow businesses and universities who want to do the right thing to be able to do it."
"If you aren't going to help, at least get out of the way." pic.twitter.com/K74Lx4yUdD
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 3, 2021
How Did We Get Here?
A county coroner in Missouri has been excluding COVID-19 from death certificates at families’ request.
- Also, some people are wearing disguises while getting the vaccine, one doctor (also in Missouri) reports.
‘You Are The Ultimate Knuckleheads’
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) chewed out a group of anti-vaxxers during a press briefing:
Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ) yells at anti-vax protesters:
“You’ve lost your minds, you are the ultimate knuckleheads … people are losing their life … look in the mirror.” pic.twitter.com/eg17NNVfm9
— The Recount (@therecount) August 4, 2021
Maybe Not Such A Fringe Idea After All
Nearly half of Americans (48%) support expanding the Supreme Court, according to a new poll by Marquette University Law School.
Where Did Pompeo’s Fancy Booze Go?
A $5,800 bottle of whiskey the Japanese government gave then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as a gift in 2019 has gone missing, the State Department says.
Let’s Try To Stop Setting The Planet On Fire, Shall We?
Biden is going to set an aspirational, non-binding goal to have 50% of all new vehicles sold in the U.S. be electric by 2030, the White House announced this morning.
- Foreign and domestic automakers, seeing the writing on the wall, will join Biden for a formal announcement later today.
- They put out a joint statement saying they aspired to “achieve sales of 40-50% of annual U.S. volumes of electric vehicles… by 2030.”
We Don’t Stan
“The ‘Cuomosexual’ phenomenon was disgraceful. We’re politicians’ bosses, not their fans.” – Alyssa Rosenberg:
- “Across the political spectrum, it’s long past time for Americans to rediscover some self-respect and to adjust the terms of our relationships with public figures. Andrew Cuomo isn’t a hottie. Even if he was, it wouldn’t matter more than the thousands of dead New York nursing home residents or 11 women he allegedly harassed.”
See also: This beefy rendering of special counsel Robert Mueller (“Robert Moral”) in notorious “Resistance” grifters Brian and Ed Krassenstein’s children’s book
You Aren’t ‘Political Prisoners’
A federal judge ripped into a Jan. 6 insurrectionist in his sentencing hearing, blowing up the myths GOP revisionists are spewing that the Jan. 6 defendants are “political prisoners.”
- “Your vote doesn’t count any more than anyone else’s. You don’t get to cancel them out and call for a war because you don’t like the results of the election,” U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of Washington, DC, told him. “You called yourself and the others patriots, but that’s not patriotism. Patriotism is loyalty to country, loyalty to the Constitution, not loyalty to a single head of state. That’s the tyranny we rejected on July 4th of 1776.”
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