Tuesday, November 23, 2021

And another day of the US joining the list of ‘backsliding’ democracies, Republican authoritarianism is here to stay, the GOP rigging elections, the broken Democratic brand, 40% of world population can’t afford a healthy diet, and support for gun control craters all comes to a close:

"The conclusion is depressing, but we must face reality: The battle for the Republican Party is over. The Trumpian authoritarians have won — and they’re not going to be defeated by pro-democracy Republicans anytime soon." — Brian Klaas

“To people raised to believe their whiteness makes them superior, anti-racism feels divisive.” — John Pavlovitz

Deaths

US: 796,319 (+1455)

World: 5,182,968 (+8122)

Cases

US: 48,835,216 (+86,659)

World: 259,014,754 (+573,684)

US added to list of ‘backsliding’ democracies for first time. The US has been added to an annual list of “backsliding” democracies for the first time, the International IDEA thinktank has said, pointing to a “visible deterioration” it said began in 2019. Globally, more than one in four people live in a backsliding democracy, a proportion that rises to more than two in three with the addition of authoritarian or “hybrid” regimes, according to the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance…He warned of a knock-on effect, noting: “The violent contestation of the 2020 election without any evidence of fraud has been replicated, in different ways, in places as diverse as Myanmar, Peru and Israel.”…Adding backsliding democracies to the hybrid and authoritarian states, “we are talking about 70% of the population in the world”, Casas-Zamora said. “That tells you that there is something fundamentally serious happening with the quality of democracy.”

Republican authoritarianism is here to stay. What has happened in the United States over the past five years is, in many ways, a classic of the autocratic genre. A populist leader rose to power, attacked the press, politicized rule of law, threatened to jail his opponents, demonized minorities, praised dictators abroad, spread conspiracy theories and lies, and then sought to seize power despite losing an election. When such despotic figures emerge in democracies, their political party has two options: push back against the would-be despot while reasserting democratic principles, or remake the party in his image. Republicans have quite clearly chosen the latter path.

Republicans Are Rigging Elections for the Next Decade. You get the idea. In state after state under GOP control, Republicans are passing extreme gerrymandered maps that will allow them to pick up enough seats to retake the US House in 2022 and lock-in dominance of state legislatures for the next decade. This has not been a fair fight. While Republicans are doing everything they can to consolidate and expand their power, congressional Democrats have failed to overcome four Republican filibusters of voting rights legislation that would ban partisan and racial gerrymandering. That means GOP-controlled states have undertaken extraordinary efforts to undermine voting access and fair representation but Washington Democrats have taken no action to protect the right to vote. This huge partisan asymmetry is occurring because centrist Democrats Joe Manchin and Kysten Sinema claim that the filibuster promotes bipartisanship, an increasingly comical assertion given how Republicans are locking Democrats out of power for a decade on simple majority, party-line votes. “Defenders of democracy in America still have a slim window of opportunity to act,” more than 150 leading democracy scholars wrote in a letter on Monday. “But time is ticking away, and midnight is approaching. To lose our democracy but preserve the filibuster in its current form—in which a minority can block popular legislation without even having to hold the floor—would be a short-sighted blunder that future historians will forever puzzle over.”

The Democratic brand is broken. The infrastructure bill isn’t fixing it. Most of the voters Third Way spoke with in suburban Virginia focus groups, according to the report, “could not articulate what Democrats stand for. They could also not say what they are doing in Washington, besides fighting.” And those were just the people who voted for Biden. Less than a year ahead of midterm elections, in which even Democrats widely expect they will lose the House and, possibly, the Senate, the party is confronting an identity crisis. It isn’t just Biden’s cratering public approval ratings, inflation, or the precedent that the party in power typically loses seats in a president’s first midterm. Just one year after Democrats kicked Donald Trump from the White House, it’s not obvious to many voters what Democrats are doing now that they’re in charge — despite the enactment of major legislation, including a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill earlier this year and an infrastructure bill last week. — The end is nigh.

Jury in Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' trial reaches partial verdict. The case, known as Sines v. Kessler, was the first major lawsuit in years to be tried under the so-called Ku Klux Klan Act, a rarely used federal law codified after the Civil War. It was installed to diminish the power of white supremacists and protect African Americans, prohibiting discrimination for voting and other rights…The jury also agreed to a range of punitive damages on the other claims, including assault and battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress, awarding more than $25 million for the plaintiffs.

Three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet, says UN agriculture agency. Approximately three billion people, almost 40 per cent of the world’s population, cannot afford a healthy diet and another one billion people would join their ranks should further unpredictable events reduce incomes by one-third, the UN food agency said, launching a new report on Tuesday.

Support for gun control just hit its lowest point in almost a decade. Just 52% of Americans polled now say that the "laws covering the sales of firearms" should be stricter than they currently are, the lowest number that Gallup has measured on the question since 2014. That marks a remarkable erosion on the question from just three years ago as the country was still reeling from the 17 people killed in Parkland. At that point, two thirds of respondents favored more strict gun laws.

“I have no interest in killing myself,” Epstein told a jailhouse psychologist, according to Bureau of Prisons documents that have not previously been made public. He was a “coward” and did not like pain, he explained. “I would not do that to myself.”

'It's devastating': how fentanyl is unfolding as one of America's greatest tragedies. “It’s an epidemic within the pandemic.” Deaths from fentanyl were already on the rise across the country, but the pandemic supercharged their speed and intensity.

Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.

Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.