Stephan: I am running this piece because I think it is telling us something very important about the thinking of those associated with the Republican Party. I am not a Romney supporter; he is not someone for whom I would vote. But he and Liz Cheney do represent a Republican perspective that is at least partially based on facts. His treatment at the Utah Republican convention demonstrates how most Republicans are far to the right of that moderate perspective and not at all interested in actual facts. That tells us that about a third of the country lives in a world that is a non-fact-based fantasy. And that is extraordinarily dangerous for a democracy. I think the 2022 election is going to tell us whether the United States will continue as a democracy or sink into White supremacy christofascist authoritarianism.
Mitt Romney at Utah Republican convention
Mitt Romney was loudly booed at the Utah Republican party convention on Saturday – and called a “traitor” and a “communist” as he tried to speak.
“Aren’t you embarrassed?” the Salt Lake City Tribune reported the Utah senator asking the crowd of 2,100 delegates at the Maverik Center in West Valley City. “I’m a man who says what he means, and you know I was not a fan of our last president’s character issues.”
Romney was the sole Republican to vote to impeach Donald Trump twice – for seeking political dirt on opponents from Ukraine and for inciting the deadly insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January, before which he told supporters to “fight like hell” in support of his lie that the presidential election was stolen by Joe Biden.
Six other Republican senators voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment.
“You can boo all you like,” Romney told a crowd the Tribune said spat insults “like so many poison darts”.
“I’ve been a Republican all my life. My dad was the governor of Michigan and I was the Republican nominee for president in 2012.”
Stephan: The Covid-19 pandemic has stressed the American illness profit system and this has revealed its fundamental failure. Here are some of the facts of this failure. It should be very obvious to anyone who isn't benefiting from this profit-first system that it needs to be changed from the ground up into a universal birthright healthcare system based on creating wellbeing not just producing profit.
Wheeling out the dead from Covid-19, on stretchers to container morgues at the Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York City. Credit: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty
In calculating its human toll, a pandemic is similar to a war. The most precise way public health researchers can get a handle on the impact of something like COVID-19 is to compare the number of total deaths recorded in a specific place during the pandemic with death tallies from prior years.
That analysis will yield a figure known as “excess deaths” — which simply means deaths above and beyond what would normally be expected.
That figure captures not just COVID-19 deaths, but the number of people who were unable to access health care at a moment in their lives when a chronic condition was becoming life-threatening. It also includes individuals whose primary cause of death may have been something else, but who were also infected with COVID-19.
And now that the dust has settled and the data are being tabulated, America’s excess death numbers over the past year are staggering.
The importance of tabulating such a dark statistic is twofold: its record-breaking nature is due to both […]
Stephan: More good news from the Biden administration and the Senate Democrats, accompanied by three Republicans. All the rest of the Republicans, of course, voted against it. Finally, we are seeing some serious action about Methane, a major source of human-mediated climate change.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (left) and Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) speak at a press conference prior to a Senate vote to reinstate Obama-era methane emissions standards, April 28, 2021. Credit: Sarah Silbiger/Getty
Why the Senate’s move to reverse Trump’s deregulation of methane molecules is so critical, and where the resolution goes next.
The Senate on Wednesday took an important step forward on limiting emissions — and meeting its commitments to curb global warming — by voting to limit the unbridled release of methane molecules, often a byproduct of natural gas production, into the atmosphere.
The 52-42 vote reinstates the Oil and Natural Gas New Source Performance Standards, a handful of Obama-era regulations on methane emissions rolled back by former President Donald Trump in August 2020. The measure drew support from every Senate Democrat, as well as Republican Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), who has opposed GOP efforts to deregulate methane emissions in the past; Lindsey Graham (R-SC); and Rob Portman (R-OH). The rule is expected to be taken up and passed by the House of Representatives in May.
Stephan: It is one of modern history's great paradoxes. The Jews who populated Israel came from countries where they had been persecuted and forced to live in ghettoes for centuries. Yet, when they finally got their own country what did they do? They treated the Palestinians exactly as they had been treated, and I think it has poisoned Israel's status in the world. And Human Rights Watch agrees. Here is its judgment.
JERUSALEM, ISRAEL — Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The finding is based on an overarching Israeli government policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians and grave abuses committed against Palestinians living in the occupied territory, including East Jerusalem.
The 213-page report, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” examines Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. It presents the present-day reality of a single authority, the Israeli government, ruling primarily over the area between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, populated by two groups of roughly equal size, and methodologically privileging Jewish Israelis while repressing Palestinians, most severely in the occupied territory.April 27, 2021
“Prominent voices have warned for years that apartheid lurks just around the corner if the trajectory of Israel’s rule over Palestinians does not change,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “This detailed study shows that Israeli authorities have already turned that corner and today are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
The finding of apartheid and persecution does not change the legal status […]
Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate and columnist - The New York Times
Stephan: As usual Paul Krugman is spot on and correct. I think what was once the Republican Party and is now an anti-democratic White supremacy, christofascist cult, must find a way to reinvent itself by deciding what policies its supports, instead of its obsession with victimhood and fantasy.
Credit: Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times
Conservatives beware: If the main elements in Joe Biden’s American Family Plan become law, they’ll be very hard to repeal. Why? Because they’ll deliver huge, indeed transformational benefits to millions.
I mean, just imagine trying to take away affordable child care, universal pre-K and paid leave for new parents once they’ve become part of the fabric of our society. You’d face a backlash far worse than the one that followed Republican attempts to eliminate protection for coverage of pre-existing health conditions in 2017. And that backlash quickly gave Democrats control of the House and set the stage for their current control of the Senate and White House as well.
So what’s the Republican counterargument? Well, much of the party appears uninterested in debating policy, preferring to lash out at imaginary plans to ban red meat or give immigrants Kamala Harris’s children’s book.
The official G.O.P. response to Biden’s speech on Wednesday, by Senator Tim Scott, seemed low-energy; Scott is still complaining about “big government” and denouncing Biden for spending money on things other […]
