I’ve been making my way through your emails about this morning’s post on language. I’ll likely be publishing some of them later. One was from longtime TPM Reader NG who writes: “I am wondering if TPM could do a piece on the African-American use of the term “woke,” which has been appropriated and turned into a culture war cliche that ridicules black history/struggles and either self-victimizes or self-aggrandizes the person who bandies the term about.”
Here’s Some Of The Other Hateful Trash Santorum Has Peddled Since Joining CNN
Former Republican Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, having lost his second presidential bid in 2016, joined CNN as a senior political commentator in early 2017. Now CNN is being slammed with calls to fire Santorum for whitewashing the genocide of Native Americans during a speech at a conservative event last week.
The network has yet to respond to the blowback.
But before Santorum was claiming European colonizers built America out of “nothing” and that Native Americans haven’t contributed anything to American culture, he offered plenty of awful (and fact-free) takes on race, school shootings and victims of sexual assault:
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Right-Wing Media Now Weaponizes Science To Manufacture New Outrage: Masks Are ‘Child Abuse’
Republicans have started to weaponize science — after spending months denying it — in a bid to justify harassing people who wear masks outdoors just as the Centers Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday relaxed some of its outdoor masking guidelines for fully vaccinated people.
Refs Under Pressure: Former CBO Directors Uneasily Track Politicization Of Their Agency
With breathlessly tight margins in the Senate and the filibuster batting down the bulk of the majority’s legislative agenda, lawmakers are increasingly governing unorthodoxly.
‘Ghost’ Candidate Ran In Race With Gaetz Buddy Until Indictments Started Dropping
When Seminole County Supervisor of Elections Chris Anderson looked at tax collector Joel Greenberg’s qualifying form and saw that he had declared bitcoin, he wasn’t surprised.
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Where Things Stand: Might Be Time To Return Carlson’s Befuddled Stare
If you’ve watched even short clips of the Fox News host’s nightly show, you know the look.
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The Contested Terrain of Language
I started the day thinking about two very disparate topics that intersect at a point that has been on my mind a lot recently. If you can indulge me for a moment I’ll try to explain how they connect and the larger point.
Remember Shelby Foote?
I was reminded of him recently because I was reading a couple things about the novelist Walker Percy. And it turns out the two of them had a lifelong literary friendship going all the way back to middle school. Foote, a Mississippian, wrote a bunch of novels and histories about the Civil War. I only know about him because he was a central figure in Ken Burns pathbreaking documentary The Civil War, which came out about 30 years ago and created the model for all the other documentaries he’s done since. Many of Burns’ core techniques seem obvious now. The visual idioms seem like they’re part of the cinematic argot of our culture. But they were actually quite new. It was remarkable at the time how he managed to bring to life a period which had only a limited photographic record, no video and no audio.
In any case, back to Shelby Foote, who died in 2005 at the age of 88.
GOP Doctors’ Caucus Puts Out PSA Urging Constituents To Get COVID Vaccine
The Republican Doctors’ Caucus put out a PSA on Monday endorsing the COVID-19 vaccine amid higher rates of vaccine hesitancy among Republican-identifying Americans — especially the men — compared to the rest of the population.
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Biden To Raise Minimum Wage For Federal Contractors To $15 Hourly
President Joe Biden will issue an executive order on Tuesday raising the minimum wage paid by federal contractors to $15 an hour, according to a White House statement.
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‘Embarrassing Racist’: Native American Orgs Rip Santorum For Claiming There Was ‘Nothing’ Before Colonizers Arrived
The leaders of organizations for Native Americans are raking CNN commentator Rick Santorum over the coals after he claimed that white European colonizers “birthed a nation from nothing” in America and that “there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”