Remember that little more than a week ago Donald Trump was revving up his rally crowd to go lynch the Capitol Police officer who shot the insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt as she broke the last barricaded door protecting fleeing members of Congress. “Now if that were on the other side, the person who did the shooting would be strung up and hung. Now they don’t want to give the name. Who shot Ashli Babbitt? It’s got to be released.” The right wing media has been going full tilt identifying the officer as a black man.

Josh Kovensky digs deeper into the racist fury behind the Ashli Babbitt martyr narrative.

Scratching your head about the inner workings of the Senate? Wondering what on earth is going on with infrastructure and the filibuster? For Inside members, tomorrow at 3pm eastern I’ll be talking with Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii. Please join us live and ask your own questions. Register here.

In Tennessee’s hard move away not only from COVID vaccine outreach but all vaccine this directive stands out to me: “no outreach whatsoever regarding the HPV vaccine.”

I’m seeing lots of mainstream press commentary that Bernie Sanders had to scale back his ambitions a lot, essentially take a loss agreeing to a $3.5 trillion reconciliation framework. He wanted $6 trillion but had to settle for $3.5T. This seems to me a wildly blinkered view, verging on oblivious or tendentious.

You don’t negotiate by starting with what you’ll settle for or even what you want. You start with a high bid as Sanders clearly did here. That’s not a loss. That’s negotiating. The other point to keep in mind is that when you add up $3.5 trillion plus the bipartisan mini-bill plus the spending on the China/innovation legislation you come to a total number pretty close to Biden’s high end original set of proposals.

Continue reading “Bernie’s Big Win” →