No more sneaking around to steal elections for Republicans, they’re doing it in plain sight

Coming to an elections board near you.

Joan McCarter

Daily Kos Staff

Monday November 29, 2021 · 9:23 AM MST

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When Republicans started laying the groundwork for widespread, institutionalized voter suppression back under President George W. Bush—when then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales fired a U.S. attorney for refusing to manufacture voter fraud cases to prosecute—they couldn’t have imagined what they were unleashing because they couldn’t have imagined a Trump. For one thing, that was actually a scandal and Gonzales ended up resigning—Republicans wouldn’t support him. Then we had the nation’s first Black president and there is nothing Republicans won’t do to punish the nation’s voters for allowing that to happen—including not just electing Trump, but allowing his Big Lie to consume the party.

It’s not that they didn’t see it coming. In 2019, well before the election, Trump was harping on voter fraud, creating a narrative for his eventual defeat at the polls. One former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party, Fergus Cullen, sounded downright prescient in retrospect. “People hold riots after their favorite football team loses the Super Bowl. […] There’s just no telling what people will do when they’re incited to it. We’ve never been in a situation like this, where there’s so much dry kindling across the landscape and we’ve got someone all too willing to light the match.” Again, that was Aug. 2019.

When a riot did happen at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, when blood was shed, even that wasn’t enough to turn Republicans from Trump. He unleashed a mob that would have happily harmed Republican as well as Democratic lawmakers, and still, not a single one of them with national stature is challenging the Big Lie. That could be in part because in that, they see their path to victory in 2022 and 2024.

They’re probably not wrong, because the proponents of the Big Lie are seizing control of election processes all over the country, and particularly in battleground states.

The Michigan GOP has installed election canvassers at the local level who back the Big Lie, and has a fraudster running for Secretary of State and another running for attorney general—both endorsed by Trump. Election fraudsters in two Pennsylvania counties won election to election inspections positions this fall.

There’s a movement in Colorado to stack elections offices with 2020 fraudsters. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who blew the whistle on Trump’s efforts to overturn the election in that state, is being primaried by the Trump-endorsed U.S. Rep. Jody Hice who would happily “find 11,780 votes” for him if need be.

“The attacks right now are no longer about 2020,” Colorado’s Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold told the Washington Post. “They’re about 2022 and 2024. It’s about chipping away at confidence and chipping away at the reality of safe and secure elections. And the next time there’s a close election, it will be easier to achieve their goals. That’s what this is all about.” A Post tally finds 10 Big Liars running for Secretary of State positions around the country, and 8 running for attorney general.

“This is a great big flashing red warning sign,” said another former GOP chair from Michigan, Jeff Timmer. “The officials who fulfilled their legal duty after the last election are now being replaced by people who are pledging to throw a wrench in the gears of the next election. It tells you that they are planning nothing but chaos and that they have a strategy to disrupt the certification of the next election.”

The key to fighting this is to pass strong elections protections and voting rights legislation which includes protections for elections officials and safeguards for the process. That legislation exists. The only way to pass it, however, is to end the filibuster on it. The only way to do that is to convince Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin that the fate of our democracy is in their hands. If they can be distracted from all that fundraising from GOP mega-donors that is.

From the restroom stall to the voting booth, Kyrsten Sinema's recalcitrance is having a negative impact on small enclosures - and on the fairness and inclusiveness of elections.

Cartoon: Kyle's world

 

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Kyle Rittenhouse embodies the vigilante justice system that runs alongside our other legal justice systems here in the USA. (the one for rich and white people, and the one for the rest of us)

"The Lady doth Protest too much"... She "never gave out such Tours in the 117th Congress," trust her

It was all just "harmless fun" -- just trust them ... NOT!

jamess

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Friday November 26, 2021 · 4:16 PM MST

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Let her be clear — you know those rally organizers helping out the 1-6 Investigation: 

— They are ALL Liars!

U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert this week denied any involvement in the Jan. 6 rally and riot at the U.S. Capitol following a report by Rolling Stone that some Republican members of Congress and their staffs — including Boebert’s office — communicated with event organizers.

“Let me be clear. I had no role in the planning or execution of any event that took place at the Capitol or anywhere in Washington, D.C., on January 6th,” Boebert said in a news release.

www.denverpost.com — October 26, 2021

Pay no attention to those 1-6 rally organizers behind the coup-coordinators ‘curtain’ ...

[...]

Along with Greene, the conspiratorial pro-Trump Republican from Georgia who took office earlier this year, the pair both say the members who participated in these conversations or had top staffers join in included Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas).

“We would talk to Boebert’s team, Cawthorn’s team, Gosar’s team like back to back to back to back,” says the [insurrection/rally] organizer.

 www.rollingstone.com — Oct 21, 2021

Nor shouldst thou listen to the Congressmen who can place her at the right time and place ...

[...]

Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) said on Monday that he and Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) had both seen Boebert in the tunnel outside the Cannon House Office Building with a group sometime in the three days before the riots. He said he didn’t know who was in the group or if anyone with Boebert later participated in the attack.

“Congressman [John] Yarmuth refreshed my recollection yesterday,” Cohen told Jim Sciutto on “CNN Newsroom.” “We saw Boebert taking a group of people for a tour sometime after the 3rd and before the 6th. … Now whether these people were people that were involved in the insurrection or not, I do not know.”

[...]

“I haven’t given a tour of the U.S. Capitol in the 117th Congress to anyone but family,” Boebert said on Twitter.

www.washingtonpost.com — Jan 19, 2021

Nevermind those documents that track her unauthorized movements on Capitol grounds, either.  Mind you, the bombastic Boebert was only Representative-elect at the time, and had not yet been sworn in.

On the night of Dec. 12, 2020, the day of the first Stop the Steal rally in Washington and three weeks ahead of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, several guests of then-Rep.-elect Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., received an exclusive after-hours tour of the Capitol building from the far-right firebrand.

There are several unanswered questions about this visit, which appears to have violated normal Capitol protocol in various ways. It's not clear who authorized it, since Boebert was not yet a member of Congress and had no official standing in D.C. It's perhaps even stranger that it occurred on a Saturday night, when the Capitol complex is closed. Later, in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack, Boebert repeatedly denied rumors that she had offered "reconnaissance tours" to would-be rioters shortly before that event. But her ambiguous comments appeared to avoid any specific discussion of this unexplained December tour.

According to materials reviewed by Salon, the Dec. 12 tour led by Boebert involved various parts of the Capitol complex, including the staircase in the Senate's empty Brumidi Corridors, Senate room S-127 and the Senate briefing room, as well as the then-vacant Capitol Rotunda.

[...]

Her choice of words was notably specific, and potentially significant: "I haven't given a tour of the U.S. Capitol in the 117th Congress to anyone but family," she said, specifically not addressing the unauthorized tour she seems to have given during the 116th Congress.

www.salon.com — Aug 4, 2021

Here she is - the pride of Colorado - backwoods shitkicker Colorado, that is.

 

Spending as if the Future Matters

 

Paul Krugman. (photo: MasterClass)

Paul Krugman / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette  

27 November 21

 

readersupportednews.org     

For centuries, America has invested taxpayer money in its future. Public funds built physical infrastructure, from the Erie Canal to the interstate highway system. We invested in human capital, too: Universal education came to the United States early, and America basically invented modern public secondary education. This public spending laid the foundations for prosperity and helped make us an economic superpower.

With the rise of the modern right, however, America turned its back on that history. Tax breaks — essentially giving wealthy people money and hoping that it would trickle down — became the solution to every problem. “Infrastructure week” became a punchline under Donald Trump partly because the Trump team’s proposals were more about crony capitalism than about investment, partly because Mr. Trump never showed the will to override conservatives who opposed any significant new spending.

Now Joe Biden is trying to revive the tradition of public spending oriented toward the future.

The Build Back Better legislation that passed the House recently isn’t a pure investment plan; in particular, it includes substantial health care spending that is more about helping Americans in the near term than about the future. But about two-thirds of the proposed spending is indeed investment in the sense that it should have big payoffs in the future. And if you combine Build Back Better with the already enacted infrastructure bill, you see an agenda that is about three-fourths investment spending.

Here’s how I read the Biden program as it now stands. Total new spending would be about $2.3 trillion over a decade. This total would include $500 billion to $600 billion of spending on each of three things: traditional infrastructure, restructuring the economy to address climate change, and children, with the last item mainly consisting of pre-K and child care but also involving tax credits that would greatly reduce child poverty.

There’s every reason to believe that all three types of spending would have a high social rate of return.

Snarled supply chains have reminded everyone that old-fashioned physical infrastructure remains hugely important; we are still living in a material world, and getting stuff where it needs to go requires public as well as private investment.

As far as climate investments are concerned, the damage from a warming planet is becoming increasingly obvious — and droughts, fires and extreme weather are only the leading edge of the disasters to come. Build Back Better’s investments wouldn’t come close to ending the danger, but they would mitigate climate change, partly protect us against some of its consequences and make it easier for the United States to lead the world toward a more comprehensive solution. So the money would be well spent.

Finally, there is overwhelming evidence that helping families with children is a high-return investment in the nation’s future because children whose families have adequate resources become healthier, more productive adults.

So what’s not to like about this agenda? No, it wouldn’t be inflationary: Don’t take it from me, but listen to credit rating agencies, which are saying the same thing. The approved and proposed spending would be fairly small as a share of gross domestic product — which the Congressional Budget Office projects at $288 trillion over the next decade — and largely paid for with new taxes, so it would have very little inflationary impact.

Oh, and while some of the “pay-fors” are questionable — as it happens, mainly on the traditional infrastructure bill; Build Back Better is more or less paid for — which means that the spending would probably add somewhat to federal debt over the next few years, that debt increase would be small relative to GDP and, given low interest rates, would barely add to debt service costs. Over the longer term, the payoff to public investment might well be enough to reduce the deficit.

Still, Republicans are denouncing the Biden agenda as socialism because, of course, they are. Hey, by their standards America has been run by socialists for most of its history — people like DeWitt Clinton, the New York governor who built the Erie Canal, and Horace Mann, who led the Common School movement for universal basic education a couple of decades later. And don’t even get me started on Dwight Eisenhower, who presided over huge government investment and a top tax rate of 91%.

Admittedly, the Biden plan would reduce economic disparities, both because expanded benefits would matter more to less-affluent families and because its tax changes would be strongly progressive. But public policy that reduces inequality, like public investment, is squarely in our national tradition. America basically invented progressive taxation, and as economist Claudia Goldin has noted, the high school movement was “rooted in egalitarianism.”

So don’t believe politicians who are trying to portray President Biden’s investment agenda as somehow irresponsible and radical. It’s highly responsible, and it’s an attempt to restore the all-American idea that government should help create a better future.

Greta Thunberg is delivering the message we all need to get, and we better get it now before the  Q-anonsense inmates take control of the asylum again.

On Voting Rights, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema Need to Face Reality

 

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin. (photo: AP)

Eugene Robinson / The Washington Post 

27 November 21

 

readersupportednews.org

The holiday season has just begun, and I already know what I want for Christmas: full and fair voting rights for all Americans. Note that I didn’t say please. This is a demand, not a request.

I’m talking to you, Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). I’m talking to other Democratic senators who might also value the filibuster over voting rights but haven’t been so public about it. And I’m talking to the brick wall of Republicans in the Senate and the House who once routinely supported guaranteeing the right to vote but who now fear and loathe the basic mechanism of our democracy.

The last time the landmark Voting Rights Act was reauthorized, in 2006, it was approved by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in the House and unanimously in the Senate, with unctuous hosannas from Republicans. But this month, only one Republican — Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) — voted to even allow the Senate to debate the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore and update the “pre-clearance” requirements of the 1965 law that were voided by the Supreme Court in 2013.

Those provisions required states with a history of electoral discrimination against African Americans and other minorities to obtain approval from the Justice Department before changing laws about voting. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the 5-4 majority that “history did not end in 1965,” indicating he believed the kind of discrimination we suffered back then no longer exists.

Boy, was he wrong.

Republicans have practically fallen over themselves in a rush to enact laws that limit or dilute the voting power of Americans of color — who, not coincidentally, tend to vote for Democrats. They limit the number of polling places in selected neighborhoods so that voters of color have to wait in long lines. They try to structure rules on early and absentee voting in ways that disadvantage minorities. They draw congressional district boundaries to dilute the Black and Hispanic vote — and do the same with state legislative districts so that Republicans can continue to be the ones who make, and distort, election rules.

This year, with GOP voters bewitched by the “big lie” about purported voter fraud, some Republican-held states are going even further to seek control over how votes are counted. Georgia, for example, has given its GOP-controlled state legislature a role in deciding who won an election and who lost. In January, the state elected two Democrats to the U.S. Senate, and Republicans seem determined not to let anything like that happen again.

All attempts by Congress to guarantee that all qualified citizens in every state have the right and ability to vote have been stymied by the Senate filibuster. The John Lewis Act is no radical departure; essentially, it would just return us to the status quo before 2013. If there are not the necessary 10 Republican votes to do even that, the prospects for stronger and more comprehensive pro-democracy legislation are nonexistent.

The right to vote should not be a partisan issue. But it is.

The Republican senators who voted in the past for the provisions of the John Lewis Act should vote for them again now. But they won’t.

It is past time for Senate Democrats to deal with reality as it is, not as they wish it to be. The Senate is not the comity club it used to be. It has become basically a smaller, less efficient version of the House, where members vote along party lines rather than being guided by conscience. Democrats need to recognize that preserving our democracy is much more important than Senate tradition, and at a minimum they need to change the rules so that the John Lewis Act can be passed by simple majority.

The argument against eliminating the filibuster — even for the one fundamental issue of voting rights — is that Democrats will regret such a move when Republicans are back in charge of the chamber. Imagine what they would do if Democrats have no power to use the filibuster to stop them.

My response: But look at what Republicans are doing right now. This very minute. As we speak.

Manchin and Sinema have said they are unwilling to eliminate or circumvent the filibuster. But they have also said they understand the importance of guaranteeing voting rights, and surely they see what Republicans are doing to unfairly tilt the political playing field in the GOP’s favor.

This isn’t about saving the Democratic Party. It’s about giving all Americans a vote, and thus a voice, in electing our leaders. Senators, do the right thing.

You've heard of two peas in a pod?  Here we have two traitors in an elevator.

Uh-oh. RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel just admitted 'Joe Biden won the election'

 

Don't look now, but Ronna has just unleashed the savage idiot-beast.

Aldous J Pennyfarthing

Community

Thursday November 25, 2021 · 5:52 PM MST

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This won’t go over well with … uh … certain people. Donald Trump’s decades-long campaign to pretend he’s a winner who always wins—despite his conspicuous inability to make money running a casino, selling liquor, or sponsoring a fraudulent university—hit a bit of a snag last November when he lost the presidency to Joe Biden. Since then, Republicans have generally been forced to tiptoe around his purpling carcass, hoping he’ll eventually be swept out to sea with the rest of the flotsam. Sadly, he’s still beached, and it’s getting harder and harder to ignore the smell.

On Thursday, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel finally stated the obvious: Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, and that’s why he’s president.

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said Thursday she recognizes President Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States, even as she claimed there were “lots of problems” with the 2020 election that Republican candidates should address.

“Painfully, Joe Biden won the election and it's very painful to watch. He's the President. We know that,” McDaniel said at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor in Washington, DC. 
 

While the RNC has for months criticized Biden in press releases and rapid response materials, McDaniel's comments Thursday marked the first time the party chairwoman has clearly stated that Biden “won” the 2020 election.

Ruh-roh. The Eye of Sour-Don must be narrowing its gaze as we speak. McDaniel also said it was time for Republicans to focus on the 2022 midterms and forget about Donnie Distracto: “I think every Republican right now should be talking about 2022,” she said. “I’m not talking about anything else other than what Biden is doing to destroy our country: high gas prices, an open border, an opioid crisis. Everybody else can do their own thing, but I think we should be talking about Joe Biden.”

 

Yes, McDaniel certainly does want to focus on anything other than Donald Trump’s whiney nonsense. She’s so laser-focused on Biden she’s trotting out some big-time nonsense of her own:

Hey, everyone! Look how many pounds of drugs the Biden administration seized in October! This proves they’re not focusing enough on … seizing drugs! Close those borders already! You know, the ones Biden keeps successfully shutting off to drug trafficking.

And yeah, gas prices are high. But they’ve always been volatile. And guess what! Inflation is high everywhere around the world right now, not just in the U.S. That’s what happens when you take a moribund economy and bring it back to life this abruptly.

Of course, the last thing Donald Trump wants to do is focus on the future. He knows his 2016 Electoral College win—and popular vote loss—was a fluke, and he certainly doubts his ability to win legitimately in 2024. So his ego will do what it has to—pretend he’s not an enormous, snowflakey loser.

But he is—and the RNC leader’s acknowledgment of that simple fact is likely to ratchet this giant, pulsating orb of gooey rage up to DEFCON 1. 

Wait for it. You know it’s coming.

"The Eye of Sour-Don must be narrowing its gaze as we speak. "

Why the Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict Doesn't Matter

 

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. (photo: Etienne Laurent/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

It's a Misdirection to Keep Us from the Real Issue

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar / Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Substack 

25 november 21

readersupportednews.org

 Kyle Rittenhouse was a seventeen-year-old kid who made a decision to travel to another state, pick up a rifle, and insert himself in a volatile situation—a decision that resulted in the loss of two lives. Both the men he killed would probably still be alive if Rittenhouse had stayed home and let the police do their job. Those are the facts. But these facts seem to be irrelevant to both those who condemn and those who celebrate Rittenhouse’s not-guilty verdict. Instead, both sides have inflated Rittenhouse into a blimp-sized symbol of racial tension in America like a giant cartoon character balloon floating over a used car lot. And like those balloons, it’s all gas with little substance.

Much of that lighter-than-air intellectual gas comes from the conservative media bullhorns gleefully chirping about how the verdict will result in more freedom of self-defense and how this proves that the justice system works. They know none of that is true but the bright, waving Rittenhouse balloon gets your attention so they can launch into their simplistic soliloquies about Freedom this and Freedom that. People of Color are worried about vigilantes who think they’ve just been issued a 007 license to kill roaming the streets looking for targets darker than beige. Their interpretation of the verdict is more realistic since they’ve seen how injustice breeds more injustice.

But this is the wrong case to make into such a massive symbol.

We should start by recognizing that a not-guilty verdict was inevitable, not because of racism but because of the law. Sure, the judge seemed a bit biased at times and of the 20 jurors only one was a Person of Color. But, from what we were able to piece together through news reports, the prosecution did not present a compelling case. The state laws about self-defense did favor Rittenhouse’s actions. In the end, the verdict did not seem to be the result of racial bias that favored him because he was white. The fact that we may not like why Rittenhouse was in Kenosha, or that the police were clearly prejudiced in supporting him as he wandered the streets with a loaded rifle, or that he’s become a poster boy for white supremacists and right-wing pundits, doesn’t justify conviction if the case presented in court doesn’t merit it.

America’s past is too littered with the bodies of people lynched, executed, or imprisoned because of what they represented rather than any legal evidence. We sent 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry to prison camps during World War II as symbols rather than verifiable threats. Two Black Muslim men convicted of the assassination of Malcolm X were exonerated this week, 55 years after their conviction, when it was discovered that the FBI and the NYPD withheld information from the defense that would have likely resulted in their acquittal.

If we are to be outraged by miscarriages of justice in the courtroom, we can’t be outraged by a verdict that is justified based on the case presented. However, if the three defendants who killed Ahmaud Arbery are found not guilty, that would be justified outrage.

Systemic racism in America won’t get worse because of this verdict. Actually, it’s hard to imagine it getting worse. Over 150 years after the end of slavery and Black people are facing legislation in nearly half the states to make it more difficult for them to vote while rampant gerrymandering insures that when they do vote, their effect of their votes will be diluted. Anyone who wanted to know the truth could read the hundreds of studies that prove Black Americans are disadvantaged from birth in terms of education, health, medical care, job opportunities, life expectancy, and the legal system. And if you think this disparity is something from the distant past, Scientific American’s December 2021 issue reveals studies that show how Black children fare worse than white children with routine surgeries because when they are brought into the hospital, they are less promptly diagnosed and less promptly treated than white children. These Black children had medical complications at a rate 18 percent higher than white children and were three times more likely to die. If these statistics were reversed and white kids were at greater risk, hospital reform would be instantaneous.

Hiding, obscuring, and denying these facts about systemic racism from the American public was always the real goal of the right’s obsession with the Rittenhouse trial. When everyone gets into heated arguments about the minutiae of the trial or the possibility of more vigilantism or what would have happened if he’d been Black, we’re distracted from the most important issue involving the case. The right aren’t just celebrating Rittenhouse’s verdict, they’re gloating because to them this proves that the Back Lives Matter protests that inspired up to 26 million Americans to take to the streets in the largest protest in American history had little real-world effect. The actual protest that brought Rittenhouse out of his room from playing Call of Duty to take to the streets gets minimized: Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, was shot seven times in the back by a white police officer (against whom no charges were or will be filed).

The Rittenhouse verdict is the magician’s misdirection. While we’re wringing our hands over the trial, the actual sleight-of-hand was to silence African Americans’ voice in conversations about America. The conservatives’ twisted logic is that if Rittenhouse goes free, that is proof that whatever BLM was protesting is not legitimate. It’s the equivalent of having a doctor tell you that you need to exercise more or you’ll have a heart attack and instead you dig up dirt on the doctor which proves you don’t need to exercise. The doctor isn’t out to destroy you anymore than protests are out to destroy the country but rather to improve it.

There are good reasons to fear vigilantes. Vigilantism has been so romanticized in our culture that we can’t really be surprised when some impressionable kid wants to be a superhero. From Spider-Man to Batman, the Marvel and DC Universes are almost entirely vigilantes. Colorful costumes and angsty origin stories don’t change that. Our heroes are rule-breakers who think they know what’s best for people more than the judicial system or elected officials. That’s what made Trump appealing to so many: he was a soft-core vigilante who thought he knew better than everyone else. He didn’t, and the economy was damaged, civil rights were repressed, and thousands of people died unnecessarily as a result. Ironically, the vigilante and the villain live by the same code that they should be permitted to act outside the law because they alone know what is best. While that makes for entertaining fictional stories, in real life it creates chaos and injustice and we can’t and won’t tolerate it.

Don’t waste any outrage on the Rittenhouse verdict. Instead, be outraged that very few people are still marching for Black Lives Matter, even though all the reasons for it still persist. Be outraged that the restrictive Texas abortion law—being copied by Florida, Arkansas, Ohio, South Carolina, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and South Dakota—isn’t bringing millions to actively protest and boycott those states that are taking away women’s rights and treating them as second-class citizens. Be outraged that Critical Race Theory is being demonized as an attack against whites rather than an educational adjustment to school curriculums that deliberately excluded the contributions of most People of Color in American history.

Ignore those who worship the bloated Rittenhouse balloon as a justification for their white exceptionalism. We need to stay focused on the real evils behind the curtain and not get distracted by those making slimy mud pies and thinking its all-American apple pie.

Our heroes are rule-breakers who think they know what’s best for people more than the judicial system or elected officials.

Shelves aren't empty, oil prices are heading down, but Republicans are locked into a disaster story

 

So where is that turkey shortage that Republicans are whining about?

Mark Sumner

Daily Kos Staff

Tuesday November 23, 2021 · 10:50 AM MST

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On Tuesday morning, President Joe Biden announced that he would be making available 50 million barrels of oil from the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The release is designed to ease a perceived tightness in supply and lower gas prices that have been rising in advance of the holiday travel season. Of those 50 million, 18 million had already been authorized by Congress.

Republicans have seized on claims of rapidly rising gas prices, along with fear-mongering over “empty store shelves” to create a narrative that not only is inflation soaring, but both Thanksgiving tables and Christmas living rooms are going to be bare. And somehow, all of this can be blamed on Biden.

The truth is that gas prices were already in decline even before the strategic reserves were tapped. The Houston Chronicle reports that while prices remain higher than they were a year ago—when travel restrictions and a greater fear of the pandemic strongly impacted consumption—they’ve fallen over the past week. When it comes to product availability, The Wall Street Journal reports that the “shelves overfloweth” at the nation’s largest retailers.

But Republicans are riding a disaster narrative. Don’t expect that train to stop soon.

Prices at the gas pump weren’t stable even before the pandemic set in. Oil that was $107 a barrel in 2014 dropped to $29 by 2016 as overproduction plagued the market. When Trump took office, oil companies were struggling to deal with what’s been called a “perfect storm” of factors that reversed long-term trends. Fracking had seen U.S. production rise to such levels that pipelines and processing plants became the bottleneck; squabbles within OPEC meant that efforts by Saudi Arabi and others to regulate supply were ineffective; and all over the planet, storage facilities were simply full.

Adjusting supply and demand in this changing market has made for a series of rises and plunges, as well as the failure of many smaller oil firms. Then mergers and buyouts allowed larger firms to reassert much of their earlier control overproduction. Prices were following a general trend back up over the last three years … until the absolute mishandling of the pandemic generated an abrupt price crash in the spring of 2020 that actually turned the price of oil negative for a period. Local imbalances were further aggravated in the spring of 2021, when a cyberattack took out a major pipeline supplying the East Coast.

When comparing the current price to the price a year ago, gas looks more costly because those 2020 prices were the lowest since the economy crashed in 2008. Otherwise, it takes going back to 2004 to find any extended period in which gas prices were comparable to 2020. So when that Houston Chronicle article notes that gas prices are “still $1.26 a gallon higher than a year ago,” they’re comparing against prices that were hovering at historic lows.

The price of oil, and gas at the pump, rose over the last year in part because of growing assurance that the pandemic was not going to spell long term economic doom, and partly because large producers finally got the kind of control they needed to adjust their output to reduced demand. That second factor is why Biden asked the FTC last week to investigate oil and gas companies are engaging in illegal conduct to drive up prices.

It’s unclear how much effect the release of the oil from the strategic reserves will have on the market, but the U.S. isn’t alone in making this announcement. China, India, Japan, South Korea and the U.K. are all taking actions to release oil from stockpiles or reduce targets for storage. India has announced that it will be releasing 5 million barrels. 

What is clear is that Republicans have been pushing out emails and fundraising efforts which blame increase in gas prices on Biden “canceling the Keystone XL pipeline”—a pipeline that was designed to carry the dirtiest oil on the planet, and which was never completed because the developer canceled it. Since it never delivered a gallon of tar to the U.S., and wouldn’t have been completed for years, it’s ludicrous to draw any connection between the Keystone XL pipeline and the cost of gas at the pump today. But Republicans aren’t letting ludicrous stop them.

For months, Republicans have been pushing—and the media has been eagerly forwarding—a narrative that says U.S. consumers face a crisis of bare shelves and prices that make buying 12 gallons of milk a week intolerable. That narrative means the family facing what they claim is almost $10 a week in increased milk expenses is in trouble because it fails to mention that they’re getting at least $250 a month, per child, in new child tax credit payments authorized by President Biden. That article could also have mentioned that, thanks to those payments, child poverty has dropped by a third. It didn’t mention that, of course.

Across the country, news media has been pushing the idea that America is going to go without turkey this year because of shortages that don’t exist. It’s been pushing the idea that parents will be without options for Christmas, when retailers say that’s not true. It’s been fixated on the idea that goods are stacked up at docks, while giving little attention to how rapidly that situation is improving—or the action that President Biden took to break the stalemate.

There’s no doubt that inflation has increased in the last months. it’s gone from just over 1% in January, to 5% through much of the summer, to 6% in October. That’s the biggest increase since 2009, and that top number is the highest monthly value since 1990.

By no coincidence. In 2009, the nation was recovering from the economic crash under Bush. July 1990 marked the end of the longest peacetime recession in the nation’s history under the other Bush. Recession was up in the fall of 1990, and in the fall of 2009 specifically, because the nation was recovering from the economic battering it had taken under Republican presidents. And that’s what’s happening now.

The same thing is happening in 2021. Inflation is increasing because the nation is once again being pulled out of the ditch by Democrats. And if some of those numbers are currently unusually high, that’s because Trump was such an incredible low.

Joe is on it, folks, and that's something you could never say about The Donald, whose Covid non-policies caused at least 200,000 American lives.

PENNYFARTHING IS BAAAAAACK! Psst, gas prices are falling, partly thanks to President Biden. Someone alert the GOP

Aldous J Pennyfarthing

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Friday November 19, 2021 · 1:08 PM MST

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Gas prices are falling now? Fine, but this doesn’t come close to making up for the gelding of Mr. Potato Head or the fiendish plot to make children’s books marginally less racist.

Heading into the holiday season, Republicans are clearly rooting for bad news. To the extent that they can engineer bad outcomes, they’re doing just that—largely through their noxious resistance to proven COVID-19 mitigation efforts (remember COVID-19?), and their attempted quashing of progressive policies that flout a plutocrat-friendly status quo and put cash back into working people’s coffers.

One key pillar of their campaign to undercut their president is their promotion of a false narrative—namely, that inflation is the worst thing ever to happen to the economy and it’s all Joe Biden’s fault. And that would likely be an effective message if this were a major election year, but it’s not—and we’re now seeing the first signs of progress, in no small part because of President Biden’s leadership.

What? Oil prices are dropping?

Carl Quintanilla

@carlquintanilla

Lowest since Oct 7. Worst week since Aug 20. #OOTT

7:16 AM · Nov 19, 2021

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Well, that must mean gas prices will be … FUCK! Quick! Send a news copter to Central America! There has to be a migrant caravan assembling somewhere, right? If we’re lucky, one of the migrants is selling Ebola monkeys out of the back of his El Camino.

Even worse for Republicans, this appears to be the doing—at least in part—of President Biden himself.

Bjornar Tonhaugen, head of oil markets at the consultancy Rystad Energy, [said] that the biggest factor driving prices right now is the expected release of strategic reserves from the United States and China.

According to the White House, US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping discussed the "importance of taking measures to address global energy supplies" during their virtual summit this week. That sparked chatter about a coordinated move initiated by the White House to put millions of barrels of oil on the market.

In other words, Biden and Xi put a bug in traders’ ears about releasing strategic oil reserves, and that appears to have put downward pressure on prices. Meanwhile, Biden has asked the FTC to investigate potential price gouging. So he’s taking action to address the nation’s problems … instead of endlessly and fecklessly tweeting about them.

Of course, Biden’s potential actions on gas prices are at best stopgap measures, but then that may be all he needs to restore some measure of stability, CNN reports:

But more lasting relief could be coming. The IEA said in a report this week that it expects global oil supplies to rise by 1.5 million barrels per day over November and December as some production in the United States picks up again.

Fuel prices have an oversized impact on inflation, so this is definitely a positive step. And if supply lines start to get sorted out as well, it will force Republicans to come up with boogeymen that are even more fake and phantasmagorical than the supposed scourge of critical race theory. 

Oh, I have no doubt they can do it. For instance, the War on Christmas season is right around the corner, and as you can see, they’re going hammer and tongs at their newest yellow peril, Big Bird. 

CPAC 2022

@CPAC

Big Bird & Big Gov. Mandates? NO  THANK  YOU 

7:08 PM · Nov 17, 2021

This isn’t to say Democrats will sweep the midterms, or even that they’re a lock to hold the White House in 2024. But the current manic coverage about Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ supposed floundering—just 10 months into their first term—is a bit much, especially less than a year removed from The Former Guy’s straight-up coup attempt.

So let’s all calm down and see how this plays out. In a year, we could be a lot closer to normal than we’ve been in a long time. Hopefully, that will be enough to keep the GOP wolves at bay.