Sep 15, 2021
A Thought
I have to marvel every day at what the billionaires and DumFux News have pulled off so far.
They got wage-earning folk to hate the very people who want them to have better pay (and to enjoy some of those fringe benefit thingies that should go along with every job) - who want them have safe drinking water and clean air to breathe, affordable healthcare, decent education opportunities, and the power to push back against big banks and the giant corporate conglomerates that eat companies and shit people.
It is a wonderment. But I s'pose that's always the way.
@GhostPanther
A Step Forward
Weirdly ironic - or maybe just a case of "Even a blind hog roots up an acorn now and again".
So Trump - the supposed champion darling of the All-Government-Is-Bad-Government crowd - throws a shit ton of money at the vaccine project, and we get some pretty fuckin' great results in a pretty fuckin' big hurry.
I wonder if they're feeling at all conflicted about heaping credit on a government-led success, and if that internal conflict has anything to do with the concerted efforts to shit-talk the vaccines.
Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine (mRNA-1273) is one of the handfuls that has received the WHO's approval so far. The vaccine is rooted in the company's pioneering mRNA (messenger RNA) platform. On Thursday, the US-based biotechnology firm announced promising pre-clinical data and stated that they have managed to successfully put together a single shot against three respiratory diseases—COVID-19, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and the flu.
In a social media post, Moderna said that it was able to combine 6 different mRNAs—one strain of COVID-19 and RSV each, and four strains of flu. Also, in another statement, the vaccine maker disclosed that it is developing a new vaccine that will be a combination of a COVID-19 vaccine booster shot and a flu shot. It also reported that candidates for a crucial cancer vaccine trial have been fully recruited.
"Today we are announcing the first step in our novel respiratory vaccine program with the development of a single-dose vaccine that combines a booster against COVID-19 and a booster against flu. We are making progress on enrolling patients in our rare disease programs, and we are fully enrolled in our personalized cancer vaccine trial," said Stéphane Bancel, Chief Executive Officer, Moderna, in the statement.
There's more, but you get the picture - when we get together and (more or less) all pull in the same direction, something good can happen that helps everybody.
And maybe that's the problem - the "conservatives" are so conditioned to expect nothing but bad news about government - in what should be seen as an obvious attempt to keep us all at each other's throats - that they just naturally assume any common good coming from anywhere is automatically suspect and must be something nefarious on the part of the global cabal or whatever bullshit DumFux News has piped into their brains lately.
And then this from Scientific American, because of course we have to run down every stoopid fucking crackpot notion whenever the rubes get whipped into a rich creamy lather again.
COVID Vaccines Show No Signs of Harming Fertility or Sexual Function
The novel coronavirus, in contrast, can disrupt both things in unvaccinated men and women
Rumors and myths about COVID-19 vaccine effects on all aspects of reproduction and sexual functioning have spread like a Delta variant of viral misinformation across social media platforms, where people swap rumors of erectile dysfunction and fertility disruptions following vaccination. Yet studies so far have not linked the vaccines with problems related to pregnancy, menstrual cycles, erectile performance or sperm quality. The evidence does show that COVID-19 can involve problems in all of these areas.
Health officials have tried to ease concerns by explaining that data from clinical trials and hundreds of millions of vaccinations support the safety of the shots. Scientific American spoke with four experts in reproductive and sexual biology about pervasive myths, the evidence against them and the real damage to health caused by COVID-19. Below is a series of conclusions that can be drawn from studies of vaccinated people and those who have had the disease.
Vaccination is not associated with adverse effects in pregnancy. COVID-19 is the real threat.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its recommendations in early August, strengthening its advice that people who are pregnant or breastfeeding should be vaccinated against COVID-19.
The U.K.’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) found this month that “there is no pattern ... to suggest that any of the COVID-19 vaccines used in the UK increase the risk of congenital anomalies or birth complications. Pregnant women have reported similar suspected reactions to the vaccines as people who are not pregnant.”
If infected with the virus, pregnant people are at highly increased risk for severe disease and complications from COVID-19, compared with their same-age counterparts, says Tara Shirazian, an associate professor and a gynecologist at NYU Langone Health.
The immune system effects of pregnancy itself make an infection about five times more likely, says Jane Frederick, a reproductive endocrinology and fertility specialist and medical director of HRC Fertility in California. “You get infected more quickly, and pregnant women can go downhill fast,” she adds.
People should take the opportunity to get vaccinated before conceiving, but the vaccine is safe across all three trimesters of pregnancy, says Mary Rosser, director of integrated women’s health at the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. In early August, 22 medical groups released a joint statement saying that “the best way for pregnant individuals to protect themselves against the potential harm from COVID-19 infection is to be vaccinated.”
The immune system effects of pregnancy itself make an infection about five times more likely, says Jane Frederick, a reproductive endocrinology and fertility specialist and medical director of HRC Fertility in California. “You get infected more quickly, and pregnant women can go downhill fast,” she adds.
People should take the opportunity to get vaccinated before conceiving, but the vaccine is safe across all three trimesters of pregnancy, says Mary Rosser, director of integrated women’s health at the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. In early August, 22 medical groups released a joint statement saying that “the best way for pregnant individuals to protect themselves against the potential harm from COVID-19 infection is to be vaccinated.”
One origin of fertility falsehoods about the vaccines may be a letter co-written by a former Pfizer researcher and sent to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in December 2020. The two authors asked that all vaccine studies be suspended. They claimed that vaccine-induced antibodies against a protein that SARS-CoV-2 uses to enter human cells might also attack another human protein needed for embryo implantation. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID.
A study published in June 2021 compared the success of transferring embryos to women who carried antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 after vaccination or infection to success rates among those without antibodies. The presence of antibodies did not appear to affect such rates during 171 transfer attempts.
Stress may be responsible for menstrual cycle problems following vaccination.
Some vaccinated women have reported disruptions to their monthly cycle. “We are not dismissing them,” Rosser says. “What they say about their own bodies is important, and they know their bodies best.”
The good news, Rosser says, is that any menstrual effects appear to be transient. “I’ve talked to enough women in the last eight months, and it seems as though whatever it is, it’s short-lived,” she says.
In early August EMA released a report noting that no cause-and-effect association had been established between complaints of menstrual disruptions and COVID-19 vaccination. Separately, MHRA found no link between menstrual disorders and COVID vaccines.
Some descriptions of menstrual problems mention clotting during heavier periods. Shirazian says that the term “blood clot” as it relates to menstrual flow is different from the term used medically to describe a clot in a blood vessel. “They have nothing to do with each other,” she says. The clotting of menstrual blood happens as the blood exits the vessels and is not a risk for blocking flow to tissues.
COVID-19 may affect the menstrual cycle.
Becoming ill with COVID is associated with clotting in the medical sense—producing pulmonary embolisms that block blood flow to the lungs, for instance. Some evidence also points to the effects of SARS-CoV-2 on menstrual cycles. A small study of 177 patients who had COVID-19, published in September 2020, showed that 28 percent experienced cycle disruptions, including less bleeding and a longer cycle.
Infectious diseases themselves also are a stressor, Rosser says. “Illness causes stress,” she adds. And next to any menstrual cycle disruptions that might follow vaccination, “it’s 100 percent worse to have COVID, if you had to choose between the two,” Shirazian says.
Vaccines do not threaten sperm or erectile function, but COVID-19 does.
Ranjith Ramasamy, director of reproductive urology at the University of Miami, has published several studies describing the novel coronavirus in penile and testicular tissue and its effects on erectile dysfunction. He and his colleagues also looked at the potential effects of vaccines in these areas and found none.
To Ramasamy, the most unsurprising observation was how COVID-19 interferes with erections, which rely on blood flow. “COVID affects the blood vessels that supply organs, and the penis is not much different from other organs that require a lot of blood,” he says.
What was more surprising was the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in penile tissue even nine months after an infection. These results were from a small study of people with penile implants because of severe erectile dysfunction. The rich blood supply to the penis seems to have ensured a route for the virus to these tissues, Ramasamy says.
Like many viruses, SARS-CoV-2 also finds its way into the testes, where it can enter cells and cause damage. A biopsy study of testis tissue from six people who died of COVID-19 showed the virus still lingering in a sample from one of the patients and decreased sperm counts in another three. A sample from a patient who had survived the disease also showed persistent SARS-CoV-2 in the testes.
Ramasamy and his colleagues have found no detrimental changes in sperm counts and other fertility measures after vaccination. “One of the biggest myths with the vaccine was that it could affect fertility,” he says, and finding no negative effect on sperm counts “was very reassuring.”
Some last words on vaccination and the ill effects of COVID-19.
All of the experts had the same take-home message: the key to protecting against the reproductive and sexual effects of COVID-19 is to get vaccinated.
COVID-19 Update
So, how come practically every prediction of bad shit happening that Dems warn us about actually happens, and practically everything any Repub tells us turns out to be total horseshit?
It is a wonderment.
U.S. hospitals in crisis as Idaho rations care
Health officials in Idaho said Tuesday that hospitals in parts of the state may soon get the green light to start rationing health care amid a sharp rise in covid-19 cases and lackluster coronavirus vaccination uptake, joining two other districts that activated crisis standards of care last week.
Covid-19 patients, most of them unvaccinated, are flooding Idaho hospitals, and as a result, the Panhandle and North Central health districts of Idaho said they would not be able to provide the same level of health care for patients who don’t have the virus in at least 10 hospitals as of Sept. 7 due to a shortage of staff and beds.
Officials now say hospitals in the Boise-Nampa and Magic Valley regions could be next as Idaho, which has one of the lowest vaccination rates among states, recorded a 44 percent average increase in covid-19 deaths over the past week.
Hospitals across the United States are at a breaking point. At the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Defense recently deployed 20-person teams of military medical personnel to support health-care staff in Idaho and Arkansas, after doing the same in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. In large states like Florida and Texas, 89.2 and 92.1 percent of ICU beds are in use, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. And Alaska’s largest hospital has started rationing care and implemented crisis standards amid a surge in cases there, a hospital official told the Associated Press.
WaPo: (freebie)
U.S. hospitals in crisis as Idaho rations care
Health officials in Idaho said Tuesday that hospitals in parts of the state may soon get the green light to start rationing health care amid a sharp rise in covid-19 cases and lackluster coronavirus vaccination uptake, joining two other districts that activated crisis standards of care last week.
Covid-19 patients, most of them unvaccinated, are flooding Idaho hospitals, and as a result, the Panhandle and North Central health districts of Idaho said they would not be able to provide the same level of health care for patients who don’t have the virus in at least 10 hospitals as of Sept. 7 due to a shortage of staff and beds.
Officials now say hospitals in the Boise-Nampa and Magic Valley regions could be next as Idaho, which has one of the lowest vaccination rates among states, recorded a 44 percent average increase in covid-19 deaths over the past week.
Hospitals across the United States are at a breaking point. At the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Defense recently deployed 20-person teams of military medical personnel to support health-care staff in Idaho and Arkansas, after doing the same in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. In large states like Florida and Texas, 89.2 and 92.1 percent of ICU beds are in use, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. And Alaska’s largest hospital has started rationing care and implemented crisis standards amid a surge in cases there, a hospital official told the Associated Press.
Another Bullet Dodged
WaPo: (pay wall)
LOS ANGELES — Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) was projected to defeat a recall campaign against him Tuesday thanks to a large Democratic turnout and broad fears within the state over the surging coronavirus pandemic.
Newsom rode a large Democratic turnout, which he and his proxies worked on ensuring for months in this very blue state. Even more important were public fears over the new wave of coronavirus cases. He has been among the most aggressive governors in the nation in demanding vaccinations and mask-wearing, policies his Republican rivals opposed.
"We said yes to all those things we hold dear as Californians," Newsom said Tuesday night. "We have so much more in common as a state and a nation than we give ourselves credit for."
Newsom will stay in office for another year; he is expected to seek reelection in 2022.
Don't get happy.
This is a big win, and we should take a moment to celebrate it. But don't ever forget that these assholes are extremely well-heeled and they play a very long game.
The grift continues in order to reward Larry Elder for his participation, but as is always the case, the real emphasis is on eating away at democracy itself. So the point of the exercise is to go on undermining our faith in the institutions that our little experiment in democratic self-government relies on.
We can expect Elder and friends to file lawsuits and challenges and to engage in all manner of shit-fuckery as they try to convince us that their lies are the truth.
embrace the suck
stay in the fight
Sep 14, 2021
Flaming Earth Zits
... and other weird geology shit.
Fake lord help me, I dearly do gotta love me some SciShow nerds:
COVID-19 Update
There's a fair probability that we'll never know exactly what the numbers are.
When the Politics of Stoopid creeps in and colors every aspect of government function, the structures of democracy begin to tremble - further evidence of that old bugaboo Creeping Authoritarianism.
But anyway.
More than 68,000 COVID-19 cases and 16,000 related deaths in US nursing homes may have gone uncounted because they occurred before federal guidelines required facilities to report case and death data in late May 2020, suggests a study yesterday in JAMA Network Open.
Led by a Harvard University researcher, the study compared the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths reported by 15,415 nursing homes in 20 states to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) with those reported to state departments of health by May 24, 2020. Analysis took place from December 2020 to May 2021.
Until May 24, more than 3 months after the first US COVID-19 nursing home outbreak at the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington, the federal government didn't mandate nursing home reporting of COVID-19 cases and deaths. Facilities could have voluntarily reported retrospective data, but many didn't.
For instance, the researchers pointed out that Life Care Center reported no coronavirus cases in the May 24 NHSN submission, even though a March 2020 CDC investigation had identified 81 cases and 23 deaths of residents in that facility.
"The delay in required reporting means that the NHSN data miss a significant period of the pandemic, in which cases and deaths were increasing more rapidly than any other point in 2020 except during the wave in the final months of the year," they said.
Federal data were misleading
Of all nursing homes in the sample, 4,599 facilities were in 12 states that mandated case reporting, while 7,405 were in 19 states that mandated death reporting. On average, 43.7% of COVID-19 cases and 40.0% of related deaths before May 24 in sample states weren't reported in the NHSN submission, suggesting the omission of 68,613 cases and 16,623 deaths, representing 11.6% of cases and 14.0% of deaths in nursing home residents in 2020.
Nursing homes in both analytic samples had significantly more COVID-19 cases and deaths using the NHSN data than facilities in nonsample states (average cases per facility, 8.1 vs 2.4; average deaths, 2.2 vs 1.4). There were no differences in nonreporting before May 24 by nursing home characteristics such as region, ownership, chain affiliation, or star rating.
From 40% to 60% of COVID-19 cases and 30% to 50% of deaths before May 24 went unreported. In the last 2020 NHSN submission on Dec 27, the percentages of unreported COVID-19 cases and deaths had fallen (average, 13.9% of cases, 18.7% of deaths), which the researchers said reflected the continued toll of the virus on facilities after mandatory reporting began.
After May 24, California, Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania's state and federal case and death data were aligned, while Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island had higher cases and deaths in the state data than the federal data. In contrast, state reports of COVID-19 cases and deaths were lower than those in the federal data in New Hampshire, Tennessee, and New York.
The researchers said that academic and policymakers' analyses of nursing home-level determinants of COVID-19 cases and deaths have been compromised by their reliance on federal data.
"Consistent with the fact that states in the Northeast were hit hardest in the early months of the pandemic but generally experienced lower case and death rates in later months, we found that unreported cases and deaths represented a significantly larger share of year-end totals in the Northeast than in the South and West, where most cases and deaths occurred later," the authors wrote.
Federal underreporting of nursing home cases and deaths "may lead to misleading conclusions about the role of different facility characteristics and state or federal policies in explaining COVID outbreaks," the researchers said.
True tallies may never be known
In a commentary in the same journal, Elizabeth White, PhD, APRN, of Brown University School of Public Health, said that future research using the NHSN data needs to account for the significant data limitation uncovered by the study.
"A large body of research has already developed examining various facility- and community-level factors associated with COVID-19 outcomes in nursing homes using the NHSN data," she said. "The study by Shen and colleagues provides important context for evaluating the rigor of these studies."
White noted that only half of US states collected and publicly released nursing home coronavirus data in early 2020 and that the data limitations were compounded by scarce testing resources that limited timely, accurate diagnosis of COVID-19.
The estimates in the study "help to quantify the amount of underreporting in the federal NHSN data but they are just that: estimates," she wrote. "As such, although current measures of COVID-19 prevalence and mortality reflect a devastating public health crisis for the nursing home population, it is likely that even more lives were impacted that will never be fully captured in existing data."
Implicit in this report is the probability that Cases & Deaths across all populations and venues were under-reported for all of 2020, and may still be underreported now, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which (IMO) is fear of political damage and the high probability that any given politician will suffer for it in the next election.
Sep 13, 2021
Today's Reddit
Get the shot, dummy.
(Originally via Reddit, but they took it down - extraordinarily annoying, redditors)
Keeping Up The Fight
Between 15 million and 28 million Americans believe Biden is not a duly-elected legitimate POTUS, and that Trump should be "reinstated" by violent means.
We need a clearer picture of the type of person who attacked the Capitol and what led them to action. Moreover, we need to know how many Americans today support the use of violence to preserve the Trump presidency—the cause most associated with the insurrectionist movement, and who or what most influences this group.
For the past six months, the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) every two to three weeks has been updating its demographic studies of the nearly 600 Americans arrested for the January 6 attack to build as complete and current a picture as possible of this mass political movement with violence at its core.
One might have expected fires to fade, the FBI arrests to have a chilling impact on violence to support Trump, or the de-platforming of Trump himself from Facebook and Twitter to lower the temperature. But our most recent nationally representative survey of 1,070 American adults fielded by the NORC at the University of Chicago in June, paints a different, if not alarming, picture. We found, most strikingly, that nine percent of Americans—believe the “Use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency. More than a fourth of adults agree, in varying degrees, that, “The 2020 election was stolen, and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.”
We also learned that 8.1 percent — that equates to 21 million American adults — share both these radical beliefs. From a statistical point of view, this number is extrapolated from a range between 6% (15 million) to 11% (28 million), where we have 95% confidence that the true number falls within.
There is remarkable consistency in the responses. Specifically, of the roughly one tenth of those who think force is justified to restore Trump, 90% also see Biden as illegitimate, and 68% also think force may be needed to preserve America’s traditional way of life.
Today’s 21 million adamant supporters of insurrection also have the dangerous potential for violent mobilization. Our survey also asked pointed questions about membership and support for militia groups, such as the Oath Keepers, or extremist groups, such as the Proud boys, to which approximately, one million of the 21 million insurrectionists are themselves or personally know a member of a militia or extremist group. Six million showed support for militias and extremist groups. At least seven million of this number own a gun, and three million have prior US military service.
What’s driving people in the insurrectionist movement? Our survey looked closely at the beliefs, news sources, and party affiliations associated with the 21 million adamant insurrectionists.
The research shows, two central beliefs occur among adamant insurrectionists statistically significantly than more commonly found in the general population:
- 63% believe in the Great Replacement: “African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.”
- 54% believe in the QAnon cabal: “A secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is ruling the US government.”
This reinforces our previous findings, already showing that we are dealing with a mass movement with violence at its core that does not fit earlier patterns of right-wing extremism. For example, we are not dealing with disaffected and unemployed young men, but mainly highly competent, middle-aged American professionals.
Concerning political affiliation, the adamant insurrectionists are not only Republicans.
While 51% self-identify as members of the Republican Party, 34% see themselves as Independents and 10% as Democrats.
All this tells us is that the insurrectionist movement is more mainstream, cross-party, and more complex than many people might like to think, which does not bode well for the 2022 mid-term elections, or for that matter, the 2024 Presidential election.
Ironically, the solution may be more local than national. Of the ardent insurrectionists, 47 percent see the Federal Government as an “enemy”, 56 percent feel the same way about state governments, but 73 percent see local governments as non-enemy actors. With the latter being the most trusted sources, mayors could have potentially out-sized influence over the future of the movement.
Without a sound risk analysis of the drivers of American political violence, it is hard to see how developing policies, far less strategies to mitigate the risk of future election-related violence, could be genuinely possible.
As the 2022 election season fast approaches — along with the potential for distorting election outcomes — understanding American political violence must surely be a national priority if democracy is to hold the line.
Joe Manchin
...is just another coin-operated corporate-owned phony.
When a moderate goes against his party, the political media are drawn like moths to a flame. Such was the case with Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) on Sunday, as he appeared on NBC’s, CNN’s and ABC’s Sunday talk shows to explain his opposition to the budget reconciliation bill at the center of President Biden’s legislative agenda.
The West Virginia senator came with plenty of rationalizations. He expressed concern about inflation and the national debt. (“Do we have the urgency to spend another $3.5 trillion right now?” he asked on CNN.) He rejected the idea that the bill needed to be moved in tandem with the bipartisan infrastructure deal he helped broker. “We don’t have the need to rush into this and get it done within one week because there’s some deadline we’re meeting,” he said on NBC of the reconciliation bill. By contrast, he told CNN, “the president went out and campaigned on [the infrastructure deal]. That’s his bill.”
But these arguments apply equally to the infrastructure deal and the budget reconciliation bill. Any concerns about the debt or inflation should surely also apply to the $1 trillion for infrastructure, and there’s no deadline that necessitates rushing it, either. President Biden has campaigned for both bills.
When a moderate goes against his party, the political media are drawn like moths to a flame. Such was the case with Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) on Sunday, as he appeared on NBC’s, CNN’s and ABC’s Sunday talk shows to explain his opposition to the budget reconciliation bill at the center of President Biden’s legislative agenda.
The West Virginia senator came with plenty of rationalizations. He expressed concern about inflation and the national debt. (“Do we have the urgency to spend another $3.5 trillion right now?” he asked on CNN.) He rejected the idea that the bill needed to be moved in tandem with the bipartisan infrastructure deal he helped broker. “We don’t have the need to rush into this and get it done within one week because there’s some deadline we’re meeting,” he said on NBC of the reconciliation bill. By contrast, he told CNN, “the president went out and campaigned on [the infrastructure deal]. That’s his bill.”
But these arguments apply equally to the infrastructure deal and the budget reconciliation bill. Any concerns about the debt or inflation should surely also apply to the $1 trillion for infrastructure, and there’s no deadline that necessitates rushing it, either. President Biden has campaigned for both bills.
So what, then, really distinguishes the two bills for Manchin? The answer seems to lie in an answer he gave on ABC, when asked whether neither bill may end up passing. “If you don’t need bridges fixed or roads fixed in your state, I do in West Virginia,” he replied. “I need Internet in West Virginia. I got water and sewage problems. I have got all the problems that we have addressed in the bipartisan infrastructure bill.”
I, I, I. This isn’t unusual phrasing for Manchin. In a recent New Yorker profile, he described his concerns about West Virginia’s economy as “I can’t lose one job. I don’t have one to spare,” as though his Senate office is the state’s employment center. The decisive factor for Manchin isn’t the debt, the pandemic or the inflation rate. It’s that one bill has what he wants, and the other doesn’t.
This “me first” selfishness has served Manchin well for many years, and not just as a blue politician surviving in a red state. A new report from Type Investigations and the Intercept on the coal companies that made his fortune found that “for decades,” Manchin’s coal firms “have relied on mines and refuse piles cited for dozens of Mine Safety and Health Agency violations, multiple deaths, and wastewater discharging that has poisoned tributaries feeding into the Monongahela River, as hundreds of thousands of tons of carcinogenic coal ash are dumped across Marion County.”
While Manchin doesn’t own the mines and power plants polluting the state, his businesses have benefited handsomely from them. Since he joined the Senate 10 years ago, the investigation found, he has “grossed more than $4.5 million” from his firms, according to financial disclosures. As the article notes, Manchin has said his ownership interest is held in a blind trust.
No doubt Manchin would bristle at the suggestion that his opposition to the reconciliation bill and its climate provisions would have anything to do with their impact on his personal wealth. Even giving him the benefit of the doubt, though, the theme remains the same: Manchin gets his, while everyone else can fend for themselves.
Luckily, Manchin hasn’t gotten what he wants yet — and that gives the White House and the left leverage. Manchin is famously prickly about pressure campaigns, but his desire for the bipartisan infrastructure bill is palpable. Democrats shouldn’t be shy about threatening to tank both bills if one won’t pass.
Similar dynamics have already played out in the House. As the Intercept’s Ryan Grim has reported, for example, progressives on the House Education Committee shut down moderates’ attempts to water down a robust child-care benefit by refusing to vote for a more modest benefit. Sticking to the two-track path is the best chance to ensure that not only does Manchin gets his, but also all Americans get theirs.
In addition to his ridiculous opposition to the two voting rights bills that he's helping Mitch McConnell kill, there's the little matter of getting this country back on the right track for making some real progress towards economic justice, which BTW, goes hand-in-hand with environmental justice and a bunch of other common sense measures that help the very people Joe Manchin pretends to be concerned about.
WaPo Opinion: (pay wall)
When a moderate goes against his party, the political media are drawn like moths to a flame. Such was the case with Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) on Sunday, as he appeared on NBC’s, CNN’s and ABC’s Sunday talk shows to explain his opposition to the budget reconciliation bill at the center of President Biden’s legislative agenda.
The West Virginia senator came with plenty of rationalizations. He expressed concern about inflation and the national debt. (“Do we have the urgency to spend another $3.5 trillion right now?” he asked on CNN.) He rejected the idea that the bill needed to be moved in tandem with the bipartisan infrastructure deal he helped broker. “We don’t have the need to rush into this and get it done within one week because there’s some deadline we’re meeting,” he said on NBC of the reconciliation bill. By contrast, he told CNN, “the president went out and campaigned on [the infrastructure deal]. That’s his bill.”
But these arguments apply equally to the infrastructure deal and the budget reconciliation bill. Any concerns about the debt or inflation should surely also apply to the $1 trillion for infrastructure, and there’s no deadline that necessitates rushing it, either. President Biden has campaigned for both bills.
When a moderate goes against his party, the political media are drawn like moths to a flame. Such was the case with Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) on Sunday, as he appeared on NBC’s, CNN’s and ABC’s Sunday talk shows to explain his opposition to the budget reconciliation bill at the center of President Biden’s legislative agenda.
The West Virginia senator came with plenty of rationalizations. He expressed concern about inflation and the national debt. (“Do we have the urgency to spend another $3.5 trillion right now?” he asked on CNN.) He rejected the idea that the bill needed to be moved in tandem with the bipartisan infrastructure deal he helped broker. “We don’t have the need to rush into this and get it done within one week because there’s some deadline we’re meeting,” he said on NBC of the reconciliation bill. By contrast, he told CNN, “the president went out and campaigned on [the infrastructure deal]. That’s his bill.”
But these arguments apply equally to the infrastructure deal and the budget reconciliation bill. Any concerns about the debt or inflation should surely also apply to the $1 trillion for infrastructure, and there’s no deadline that necessitates rushing it, either. President Biden has campaigned for both bills.
So what, then, really distinguishes the two bills for Manchin? The answer seems to lie in an answer he gave on ABC, when asked whether neither bill may end up passing. “If you don’t need bridges fixed or roads fixed in your state, I do in West Virginia,” he replied. “I need Internet in West Virginia. I got water and sewage problems. I have got all the problems that we have addressed in the bipartisan infrastructure bill.”
I, I, I. This isn’t unusual phrasing for Manchin. In a recent New Yorker profile, he described his concerns about West Virginia’s economy as “I can’t lose one job. I don’t have one to spare,” as though his Senate office is the state’s employment center. The decisive factor for Manchin isn’t the debt, the pandemic or the inflation rate. It’s that one bill has what he wants, and the other doesn’t.
This “me first” selfishness has served Manchin well for many years, and not just as a blue politician surviving in a red state. A new report from Type Investigations and the Intercept on the coal companies that made his fortune found that “for decades,” Manchin’s coal firms “have relied on mines and refuse piles cited for dozens of Mine Safety and Health Agency violations, multiple deaths, and wastewater discharging that has poisoned tributaries feeding into the Monongahela River, as hundreds of thousands of tons of carcinogenic coal ash are dumped across Marion County.”
While Manchin doesn’t own the mines and power plants polluting the state, his businesses have benefited handsomely from them. Since he joined the Senate 10 years ago, the investigation found, he has “grossed more than $4.5 million” from his firms, according to financial disclosures. As the article notes, Manchin has said his ownership interest is held in a blind trust.
No doubt Manchin would bristle at the suggestion that his opposition to the reconciliation bill and its climate provisions would have anything to do with their impact on his personal wealth. Even giving him the benefit of the doubt, though, the theme remains the same: Manchin gets his, while everyone else can fend for themselves.
Luckily, Manchin hasn’t gotten what he wants yet — and that gives the White House and the left leverage. Manchin is famously prickly about pressure campaigns, but his desire for the bipartisan infrastructure bill is palpable. Democrats shouldn’t be shy about threatening to tank both bills if one won’t pass.
Similar dynamics have already played out in the House. As the Intercept’s Ryan Grim has reported, for example, progressives on the House Education Committee shut down moderates’ attempts to water down a robust child-care benefit by refusing to vote for a more modest benefit. Sticking to the two-track path is the best chance to ensure that not only does Manchin gets his, but also all Americans get theirs.
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