(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: One down, one to go [1] ['Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags', 'Showtags Popular_Tags'] Date: 2023-04-11 Heather Cox Richardson writes for her “Letters from an American” Substack about the reinstatement of Justin Jones as the representative of Tennessee state House District 52. After the vote, Jones led a march of thousands of people—mostly young people, from the look of the video—back to the Tennessee Capitol building where he was sworn back into office on the Capitol steps. Once sworn back into office, Jones reentered the legislative chamber arm in arm with Representative [Gloria] Johnson. To great applause, he walked through the chamber, fist held high, past Republican representatives who sat silent and pretended not to see him, as the galleries cheered. The Shelby County Commission will vote on a replacement for Representative Justin J. Pearson on Wednesday. It can, if it chooses, return Pearson to his former seat until a special election can be held. In a statement yesterday, Chair Mickell Lowery of the Shelby County Board of Commissioners, a Democrat, said, “The protests at the State Capitol by citizens recently impacted by the senseless deaths of three 9-year-old children and three adults entrusted with their care at their school was understandable given the fact that the gun laws in the State of Tennessee are becoming nearly non-existent.“ Mike HIxenbaugh and Daniel Arkin of NBC News report on new measures to decrease LGBTQ visibility in a suburb of Nashville in the wake of the mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville. For the past two years, thousands of people have descended on a public park in Franklin, Tennessee — a suburb 30 minutes outside Nashville — for an LGBTQ pride festival featuring live music, food trucks and crafts vendors. Clayton Klutts, the president of the Franklin Pride organization, viewed the event as a glowing symbol of how far a small, conservative community had come in terms of LGBTQ acceptance. But this year, Franklin Pride’s attempts to obtain a city permit have been met with fierce resistance. What had been a procedural formality in past years has become a bitter flashpoint that mirrors similarly heated debates roiling the United States. [...] The conflict came to a head during a public forum at City Hall late last month, one day after a 28-year-old shot and killed six people at a private Christian school in Nashville — a massacre that some on the right blamed on the suspect’s gender identity. More than 30 people, many of them wearing circular “Choose Decency” stickers, pleaded with Franklin’s mayor and the city board’s eight aldermen to deny the pride permit. [...] In the end, Franklin’s city board voted to delay the decision until it could take up a separate “community decency” policy that would, among other things, ban “sexually suggestive behavior” and excessive “displays of affection” from public spaces. Votes on both issues are scheduled for Tuesday. Tameka Greer of the Commercial Appeal writes about attempts by the Tennessee GOP to criminalize or otherwise sanction protesters as a diversion from the original problem. Why are there more and more efforts to block protests by criminalizing, terrorizing and surveilling demonstrators? Why are policymakers attempting to label those who seek rights afforded by the U.S. Constitution as domestic terrorists? [...] When policymakers criminalize peaceful assemblies, they change the conversation. Rather than dialogue focused on lives lost, the conversation shifts to property damage, and ‘law and order’ debates. But criminalizing protests will have far reaching consequences, including increasing the number of people who have contact with the penal system, and silencing dissent. Jon Allsop of the Columbia Journalism Review looks at the performance of the local Tennessee press during a year when Tennessee news has gone national in multiple ways. Jordan Rubin of MSNBC writes that the extreme ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk—banning the sale of the abortion drug mifepristone—shows that a national abortion ban was the plan all along, of course. No one believes that Kacsmaryk, a longtime anti-abortion activist, cares about the nuance of U.S. Food and Drug Administration protocol. His order purporting to halt the FDA’s decades-old approval of mifepristone is rather a means to the end of banning abortion. The Trump judge’s opinion is full of anti-abortion rhetoric that’s in lockstep with the fetal personhood movement — which promotes the idea that a fetus has the same rights as a person, thus making abortion murder. For example, he approvingly cited the notion when he referred to the “unborn humans extinguished by mifepristone — especially in the post-Dobbs era.” For judges like Kacsmaryk, the Dobbs ruling didn’t return the abortion issue to the states — it placed health care in the hands of right-wing jurists to outlaw by any means necessary. Women in blue states who voted for politicians who support abortion rights can still be thwarted by a red-state judge’s power grab, if Kacsmaryk’s order goes into effect. (Remember, he put it on hold for a week while the government appeals, and on Monday the DOJ filed for a stay in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the most extreme appeals court in the country.) Now, the Trump judge’s unprecedented order, backed by shoddy legal reasoning — if you could call it reasoning — is poised for a Supreme Court resolution. Whatever happens in the 5th Circuit, the justices might have the last word, especially with Friday’s ruling out of Washington state that contradicts Kacsmaryk’s, making high court intervention even more likely. Paul Krugman of The New York Times explains the meaning of a great jobs report. Remember all that talk about Americans dropping out of the labor force? At this point the employed percentage of adults is at or above early 2020 levels for every age group except those 70 or older. (And they should probably get out of the way, anyway. Oh, wait, I’m 70.) The overall unemployment rate is only 3.5 percent; we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969. Black unemployment is at a record low. There’s good news everywhere you look. So whaddya know: Provide enough job opportunities, and lazy video-game-playing Americans will take those jobs and, apparently, demonstrate enough skill that employers want to keep them. Furthermore, it turns out that there are large benefits to full employment beyond the fact that people have jobs. Full employment also turns out to be a powerful force for equality, on multiple dimensions. The gap between Black and white unemployment is now a fifth of what it was when Ronald Reagan proclaimed “morning in America.” A tight labor market has led to big gains for low-wage workers, sharply reducing overall wage inequality. The big question now is whether the good news on jobs is somehow a mirage, based on an unsustainably hot labor market that will have to cool off drastically to contain inflation. Claire Cain Miller and Alicia Parlapiano, also of The New York Times, write that the “European-style welfare state” of the COVID-19 pandemic’s early days is now over. In the early, panicked days of the pandemic, the United States government did something that was previously unimaginable. It transformed itself, within weeks, into something akin to a European-style welfare state. Congress rapidly fortified the social safety net, making it much stronger than at any point. It made policies like Medicaid and food stamps more generous. It created new federal benefits like paid sick and caregiving leave, and free school lunches. And it made some pandemic benefits, like stimulus checks and child allowances, nearly universal. The government is estimated to have spent about $5 trillion helping individuals and businesses since March 2020. Since then, most of it has been disbanded. This week, Medicaid began unenrolling an estimated 15 million Americans who were guaranteed coverage during the pandemic, one of the longest-lasting benefits. Last week marked the end of higher SNAP benefits, or food stamps; most recipients will now receive between $95 and $250 less each month. A few policies — including rental assistance, child care grants and more generous health insurance credits — won’t expire until next year or the year after. But for the most part, the pandemic-era American welfare state is over. John Ganz writes for his “Unpopular Front” Substack that there are a lot of “creepy” things about the varied memorabilia owned by Justice Clarence Thomas’s sugar daddy benefactor, Harlan Crow. Collecting sculptures of dictators and Nazi knick-knacks reveals more than bad taste, which, unfortunately, still cannot be counted as a crime. It is downright creepy. The reason it is creepy is that it shows an unwholesome fascination with power and domination. Crow might earnestly think he is buying this stuff to provide some kind of object lesson about the perils of tyranny, but there is an unavoidable suggestion of idolatry and vulgar power-worship just under the surface. The reason such objects would be impressive and interesting to a person like this and to his guests is that they are almost occult talismans: they are fetish objects, redolent of the power of evil. A certain hocus-pocus attaches to these things that says, “I am competent to handle and own these objects, because I am one of the rulers.” It’s similar to the attitude revealed by Crow’s membership in secret societies like the Bohemian Club: pretensions to membership in the world’s hidden elite. The belief that by privately owning these objects, rather than giving them to a museum or archive, one is somehow helping the world is pretty dubious. He clearly feels the need to hold these baubles close to his breast. Such are the peccadilloes of the ruling classes: like cult practices, they both are a little bit silly and a little bit sinister. The other notable and even quite funny thing is the total consensus among conservatives in publicly defending Crow. I haven’t seen them this together on anything since the Kavanaugh hearings. They clearly know who butters their bread: again, Crow is a major donor to conservative causes. Marco Rubio held a fundraiser at the Crow mansion and now is dutifully returning the favor with stentorian defenses of his patron. Members of the right-wing intelligentsia, surely not all of whom can be direct benefactors of Crow, are mounting the barricades for this magnate. Whatever notions they have of their own little missions and independence, these intellectuals know when their real masters are in need, they must come running. The entire movement and party exists to do the political work of this class. Harlan Crow is a member of the regional, closely-held, and family business fraction of capital that has long been the central constituency of the G.O.P. These are the DeVoses, the Uihleins, the Mercers, the Kochs, the Kohlers, the Millikens, and, the Crows, of the world. Justice Thomas, of course, attacks all the things that bedevil these oligarchs, most especially labor unions and federal regulations. Gustavo Arellano of the Los Angeles Times presents a fascinating look at the differing treatments of two scandalized Angeleno politicians. Latino leaders trampled over themselves in the wake of the racist tape to demand that [Kevin] De León resign, even though his blatherings broke no laws. While a small group of supporters has stood by his decision to remain in office, KDL has turned into the political version of a fart — most officials stay as far away as possible, while his fellow council members hold their nose every time they take a vote alongside him. [Mark] Ridley-Thomas, on the other hand, has drawn more plaudits than punches. After his conviction, Mayor Karen Bass told reporters that her longtime friend was “a policymaker who made a real impact” and that his downfall represented a “sad day for Los Angeles.” Former Councilmember Mike Bonin — whose young Black son absorbed the worst barbs flung by Martinez and De León — released a statement that concluded, “The Mark Ridley-Thomas I know is the tireless champion, the relentless advocate, the unstoppable force,” while mentioning nothing about MRT’s crimes other than being “heartbroken.” So the question that De León supporters and even some opponents posed to me on primary night: Isn’t it a double standard that De León was so quickly vilified, while Ridley-Thomas takes what amounts to a hero’s farewell? Evan Hill, Missy Ryan, Siobahn O’Grady, and Samuel Oakford of The Washington Post have exclusive reporting: A document that was part of the trove of top secret Pentagon intelligence documents released on social media sites shows that Egypt planned to supply arms to Russia. A portion of a top secret document, dated Feb. 17, summarizes purported conversations between [Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-] Sisi and senior Egyptian military officials and also references plans to supply Russia with artillery rounds and gunpowder. In the document, Sisi instructs the officials to keep the production and shipment of the rockets secret “to avoid problems with the West.” The Washington Post obtained the document from a trove of images of classified files posted in February and March on Discord, a chat app popular with gamers. The document has not been previously reported. [...] In response to questions regarding the document and the veracity of the conversations it describes, Ambassador Ahmed Abu Zeid, spokesman for Egypt’s Foreign Ministry, said that “Egypt’s position from the beginning is based on noninvolvement in this crisis and committing to maintain equal distance with both sides, while affirming Egypt’s support to the U.N. charter and international law in the U.N. General Assembly resolutions.” “We continue to urge both parties to cease hostilities and reach a political solution through negotiations,” he said. Jennifer Rankin of The Guardian reports that French President Emmanuel Macron has made the U.S. and some European allies angry, thanks to an interview in which Macron stated that he does not want Europe to be drawn into the China-Taiwan conflict. Speaking to reporters from Les Echos and Politico, Macron said Europe should be a third power in the world order, along with the US and China. While the comments reaffirmed Macron’s long-term goal of “strategic autonomy” for Europe, namely avoiding military and economic dependencies, his remarks on Taiwan stoked anger and alarm on both sides of the Atlantic. According to Les Echos, Macron said: “Do we [Europeans] have an interest in speeding up on the subject of Taiwan? No. The worst of things would be to think that we Europeans must be followers on this subject and adapt ourselves to an American rhythm and a Chinese overreaction.” He added it would be “a trap for Europe”, now it had developed more autonomy since the Covid pandemic, to get caught up in crises “that are not ours”. If there was an acceleration of conflict between the American and Chinese duopoly “we will not have the time, nor the means to finance our own strategic autonomy and we will become vassals, whereas we could become the third pole [in the world order] if we have a few years to develop this”. Macron said the need for Europe’s “strategic autonomy” was now widely accepted and there had never been “such an acceleration of European power” as in recent years. James Kaizuka of The Diplomat writes about ongoing changes in Japan’s approach to national security. Much has been made of the so-called “Gulf War Syndrome” seen in the Japanese political sphere in the aftermath of the eponymous 1991 conflict. Heavily criticized for its “checkbook diplomacy” approach to international security, this period is widely considered to be a turning point in Japanese security discourse. In the following years, other attempts to change the isolationist status quo were met with fierce political and public opposition. In 2003, when Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s administration dispatched the Self-Defense Forces to Iraq, more than half of the public were against it and the opposition even initiated a no-confidence motion. In 2015, when legislation was passed by the administration of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo to allow Japan to engage in collective self-defense, protesters in the tens of thousands arrived outside the National Diet Building. OSA [Official Security Assistance] has thus far seen little or no such opposition. While it is still a fresh initiative and there is, of course, time for such opposition to develop, the immediate reaction has been muted. In Japan’s top daily newspapers, the response has been generally very matter-of-fact and even the Asahi Shimbun has not argued against the principle of OSA, only that it should remain limited to non-lethal aid. A march on Nagatacho has not materialized, nor is it likely to. This speaks to how far the security discourse has shifted in Japan. Security issues are being discussed with increased openness and acceptance, even among those traditionally opposed to overturning the pacifist norms of post-war Japan. In another example, when Abe, after his resignation but shortly before his murder, raised the possibility of Japan entering into a nuclear-sharing agreement, the response was again muted with Abe receiving remarkably little criticism in a country famed for its “nuclear allergy.” Likewise, the prospect of a “Taiwan Contingency” is raised by politicians not only from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), but also from opposition parties, with increasing frequency, and the Ukraine crisis has seen policy shift away from soft cooperation with Russia to full engagement with Western allies in opposition to Moscow. Finally today, Haaretz presents polling that shows that public support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far right-wing coalition has crashed. According to the poll, Benny Gantz's National Unity Party would be the biggest winner, taking 29 Knesset seats – more than double the 12 seats it currently holds. The second largest would be former Prime Minister Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid party, with 21 seats. For the first time, the Channel 13 poll also saw respondents saying that they found both Lapid and Gantz more fit to hold the role of prime minister than Netanyahu. [...] The current coalition, the most right-wing and ultra-Orthodox that Israel has ever seen, holds 64 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. But the poll found that these parties would not fare well in an election now, and garner just 46 seats. The diverse array of parties that made up the previous government would get a 64-seat majority instead. When asked whether Gantz or Netanyahu was more suitable to lead the country, 51 percent of respondents said Benny Gantz, compared to the 34 percent who preferred Netanyahu. When asked to choose between Lapid and Netanyahu, 41 percent supported Lapid, and just 37 picked the current prime minister. Have the best possible day, everyone! 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