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Coming soon?

I’m in the process of reading the latest issue of Connecticut History Review. This issue is an anthology of articles about women’s struggle in Connecticut for equal rights. It contains an article by Claudia Clark about women who worked for the Waterbury Clock Company (later Timex) in the 1920s. Their job was to paint radium onto the dials of self-luminescent watches and clocks. Among other things they were told to use their lips to bring the tip of the brushes to a point. In the process of doing so they ingested radium, which killed many of them. Clark describes how the company got away with it by using its political influence to, among other things, keep the victims from having recourse to the workers compensation system and other forms of legal recourse. She makes the point that they were helped tremendously by the legislature, which was dominated by conservative Republicans. She makes the further point that this dominance was at least in part,and perhaps largely, attributable to the fact that the districts that were represented in the state legislature greatly differed in population. A state representative from a city represented far more people than one from a small town, so his (they were all he’s) constituents lacked the political power of residents of a small town. Of course, the more progressive types tended to live in the cities. They may have outnumbered their rural counterparts, but their political influence was not proportional to their numbers.

This started me thinking about the so-called Supreme Court. It is now in the process of making what were independent agencies political pawns of a mentally ill president, reserving, of course, the right to restrict future presidents should they be Democrats. In order to do that it must, and will, overturn an 80 year old precedent. That same Supreme Court has ruled that, at least in Republican states, gerrymandering is a “political question” outside the purview of the courts, despite the fact that its avowed purpose is to frustrate the will of the actual majority of the people in a state.

One reason Connecticut no longer has a legislature in which a small town (say, North Stonington) has as much political influence as a large city (say, Hartford) is because back in 1962 an actual Supreme Court ruled that the manner in which a state created political districts was not a political question, eventually ruling that each voter was entitled to equal representation in legislative chambers. The case was Baker v. Carr and its progeny. The Wikipedia article gives the full story quite well.

Gerrymandering works, but going back to the days when a legislative district in a small town had as much political power as an entire city would serve Republican interests even more. One has to wonder whether that’s on the agenda. Frankly, I can’t imagine this “Supreme” Court ruling against any red state that chose to go back to such a system. It would, once again, become a “political question”, a position the Baker v. Carr court rejected. Such a system would almost certainly cement Republican control of all current red states, and, should they get a transient majority in a swing state (say, Pennsylvania), it would make such a state permanently red.

One more thing while we’re at it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the legislatures in the states that have gerrymandered or otherwise assured Republican majorities despite what the majority of voters might want will vote to do away with presidential elections in their states. Remember, the constitution does not require, or even envision, popular elections of presidents or of presidential electors. The constitution provides as follows,and this provision has never been repealed or modified by any amendment to the constitution:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number
of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the
State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person
holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an
Elector.

States started adopting statutes that essentially allowed the voters to choose the electors fairly early, but those statutes can be repealed at any time, and it would in fact (as opposed to most of the gerrymandering) be completely constitutional. The Founders were perhaps a bit too optimistic about the future. They must have figured that future legislatures would act in good faith.

Supreme corruption

Yesterday the “Supreme” Court blocked a lower court ruling that conclusively demonstrated that the gerrymanding that took place in Texas was illegal. Naturally, the “court” took no pains to explain its ruling, or why it chose to depart from its own precedent to further enable the rise of fascism in this country. Read more at the link.

Not giving coherent reasons for their decisions is a plus from their point of view for a number of reasons. For instance, when they choose to reverse lower court opinions upholding California’s gerrymandering, which took place in response to that of Texas, they can once again avoid giving a coherent reason that is in any way consistent with previous case law.

Given the prior history of the Supreme Court (see, the Dred Scot decision authored by an outright racist (not that the current “justices” aren’t racist, but they’re not totally outright about it. ) it’s hard to believe that we now have the worst Supreme Court in history, but they’re right up there, contemporaneous with the worst president in history, which also takes some doing.

A few weeks ago I wrote what was meant to be a satirical post couched as a Supreme Court opinion. The fact is, the logic in that post is pretty much equivalent to the logic in recent Supreme Court decisions, and who knows, perhaps we will see the court draw a distinction between thoughts and speech.

A CTBlue Exclusive!

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve come into possession of a draft copy of an upcoming Supreme Court decision. Keep in mind that this decision has been written in advance of the actual case in which it will be applied, so some of the pertinent information, such as dates and names will be filled in at the appropriate time. Along with the decision I have a memo from Roberts to the rest of the fascists conservatives on the court. First, the memo:

I was recently contacted by Attorney General Bondi to let me know about an upcoming executive order to which we will need to give our imprimatur. The nature of the order is described in the draft decision I have attached. Would you please look it over and give me any recommendations you may have. I would particularly appreciate it if any of you could come up with language whereby we can later rule that our opinion does not apply if a Democrat should become president. I have had trouble finding language that leaves that possibility open that is written in such a way that we can deny that is what we are doing. Consider the language in the second to the last paragraph simply a placeholder.

The issue will come to us on appeal from the defendant, as Ms. Bondi intends to bring the case in a certain court in Florida where we need not worry about the trial judge issuing an adverse decision or a friendly jury issuing a finding of not guilty. You will also note that I have cited to a case not issued yet, the one in which we intend to agree that Trump’s executive orders all have the force of law.

The decision follows:

(Judge Roberts writing for the court) The defendant (name to be determined) brings this appeal after (her/his) conviction of thought crimes. On [date] President Trump issued an executive order declaring it a violation of the Insurrection Act to think certain thoughts, namely any thought that he did not like. On [date], in response to this executive order, the defendant orally stated that [she/he] “thought that the President was creating a fascist state”. The thought police, a newly created division of ICE, arrested [him/her}, and charged [him/her] with violating the Insurrection Act. The defendant went to trial, the Honorable Aileen Cannon presiding, and was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Defendant brings this appeal.

[He/she] has appealed on two grounds. First [he/she] challenges the legality of the executive order issued by President Trump, claiming that he does not have the constitutional right to enact laws and that his executive order essentially created a new criminal law. This argument is now moot, as this court has previously ruled in the case of [United States vs. Defendant] that this is a political issue with which this court will not interfere, though we did expressly state that we might reconsider in 2028 depending on future events.

The defendant’s second claim has not previously been decided by this court. Defendant claims that the executive order violates the Free Speech guarantee of the First Amendment. Defendant argues that [she/he] was merely expressing an opinion, in [his/her] telling, one amply supported by the facts. The court hereby sustains the verdict reached in the trial court. Defendant’s claim that [he/she] is being punished for [his/her] exercise of [his/her] free speech rights is belied by the facts. It is certainly the case that the First Amendment protects the Defendant’s right to speak. [He/she] is not being punished for [his/her] speech. [He/she] is being punished for [his/her] thoughts. The words spoken by the defendant were merely evidence about what [he/she] was thinking. Indeed, they amount to a confession that [he/she] was thinking things that offended the president deeply. Defendant appears to claim that thoughts and speech are the same things, but they are not. There is nothing in the First Amendment that guarantees any right to any citizen of the United States to free thought. It follows therefore that the President may declare thoughts that he does not like criminal acts. An individual’s spoken words may be used as evidence as to what they are thinking, but the words themselves are not the criminal act. It is the case, for instance, that a person may make a statement that is completely different than what they think. For instance, it is widely known that politicians of a certain political party often make statements of fact completely at odds with what they know to be true. In such a case a jury should find that there has been no criminal act since the spoken words did not actually reflect what the defendant actually thought. In this case, however, there can be no doubt that the spoken words were strong evidence of what the defendant actually thought. Indeed, the evidence is such that there can be no reasonable doubt as to the defendant’s guilt. This conclusion is further supported by the fact that defendant never, during the course of the trial, denied thinking that the President was creating a fascist state. Indeed, during the trial, defendant conceded that [she/he] did think the President was creating a fascist state, testimony that itself further supports the conviction.

Defendant also claimed at trial that the case should be dismissed because what [he/she] said and thought was true. The truth or falsity of the offending statement is entirely irrelevant. The government must simply prove that the defendant has thought something that displeases the president. This has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Judge Cannon was entirely correct when she excluded evidence from experts on fascism prepared to testify as to the truth of the defendant’s statements and she was also correct when she referred those experts for prosecution since their willingness to testify as to the truth of the defendant’s thoughts was strong evidence, more than establishing probable cause, that they also thought the president was creating a fascist state.

It goes without saying that this decision may not be used as precedent on or after November 2028, depending on how the presidential election turns out.

In this judgment, all six sitting Justices of the Supreme Court concurred. Justices Jackson, Sotomayor and Kagan were unable to participate, as they are currently in detention, charged with thought crimes due to their insistence on claiming, and therefore thinking, that this president has consistently violated the Constitution and, by implication, is creating a fascist state.

There are those who doubt that this is really the product of the current Supreme Court, but is there anything about it that makes those doubts legitimate?

I hope I’m wrong about this

This has come down today:

The Trump administration told states that they must “immediately undo” any actions to provide full food stamp benefits to low-income families, in a move that added to the chaos and uncertainty surrounding the nation’s largest anti-hunger program during the government shutdown.

The Democrats are already attacking it for the cruelty that it is, but at least to me it is somewhat more ominous. Lots of people who were stupid enough to vote for Trump are on food stamps, and this step will just further alienate these people from the Republican Party. Despite what the Republicans want the media to believe and/or endlessly repeat, by and large the American people blame the Republicans for what is currently happening. Trump, and by extension the Republicans generally, have reached new lows in polling and last weeks elections demonstrated that the tide is turning rather dramatically. And while I’m sure someone on Fox will come up with a way to blame Democrats for this latest bit of cruelty, even though there is no logical way you can do that, given that it is an arbitrary act on the part of a Republican controlled government, very few of the affected people will believe it.

So we have a situation in which the Republican Party is needlessly alienating its own potential voters. There are only two reasons they would do that. The first is that they are unbelievably stupid and don’t see the potential harm to their own electoral prospects.

I’d like to believe that is the reason they are doing it, but personally I think the second reason is more likely. They expect, with the help of gerrymandering, a complicit Supreme Court and other devices, to steal enough elections to keep control of the government despite what the majority of voters might want. I would hope that the Democrats in Congress and Democratic leaders nationwide would be aware of this distinct possibility and do what they can to prevent the fascists from doing away with what’s left of our democracy. They should keep in mind that the Republicans have been accusing them of stealing elections for years, and it is a proven fact by now that when Republicans make accusations they are really making confessions.

The less “religious” you are the more Christian you are

This post at Skepchick got me thinking about one of my bugaboos, the willingness of the press and most writers, no matter how liberal they might be, to call a certain brand of fascists that are common in this country “White Christian Nationalists”, a title that confers respectability on horrible people. They are not Christians, if you define a Christian as a person who believes in the teaching of Jesus, and while they may be “nationalists” that term is not one understood for what it is by most people in our polity.

It is a fact in this country that the more a person claims to be a Christian, the more likely they are to commit what the Christian religions formally label sins and the more likely they are to be against all the things for which Christ allegedly advocated. As an example, Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, routinely lies to the press, which according to my understanding (I have an advanced degree in theology from Our Lady of Sorrows grammar school, formerly (god be praised!) in Hartford, Connecticut) violates the eighth commandment, which despite the fact that it was handed down to a Jew, is still binding on Christians. Those same professed Christians are also against things like helping the poor, sick and homeless, all things for which Christ advocated, choosing instead to make it even harder for the rich to get through that proverbial eye of the needle, by making their further enrichment their sole priority.

The post to which I’ve linked is about the fact that studies have shown what I and others who have escaped religion would have predicted: that people who move on from religion are most likely to drift left in their political views. That is, they are more likely to believe that one should actually live according to the principles for which Christ advocated than the people they left behind. I suspect this is particularly true of those, like Skepchick herself, who come from an evangelical background. As a point of information evangelicals are commonly referred to in this blog as “whackjobs”. The post also highlights the fact that more and more people in this country are replying “none” when asked about their religious preferences. This is not truly probative, but I have noticed on my Sunday bike rides that the whackjob churches I pass are generally pretty full, while the parking lots at the “mainstream” churches can be pretty empty. A number of those mainstream churches here in Groton have closed in the last few years, either replaced by whackjobs, or remaining empty, all of which supports the finding that “none” is rapidly becoming the religion of choice for many people, particularly those in the non insane (i.e., blue) states.

So, the long and short of it is that many, if not most, of the people in this country who actually believe in following the teachings of Jesus Christ are people who reject religion itself. They are the only ones who have a right to call themselves Christians. They may not believe in Christ’s divinity, but they agree with his principles.

A Republican rebrand locally

As I write this I am sitting in the room adjacent to the Registrar of Groton’s office. Early voting is going on in the registrar’s office, and we are taking care of new registrants in the room in which I am planted. Early voting for the municipal offices has been ongoing for a week and it’s my understanding that the turnout has been fairly good. I thought when I agreed to work some of these days that I’d be assigned to log in the folks who came to vote, but I am in fact helping to register new voters, and as you can imagine, the number of people coming in to register for the first time is far lower than those already registered who are coming in to vote. In fact, as of the time I write this, the number of new voters is in the single digit. It may be a little more busy here on Election Day itself, but it won’t be like last year’s Election Day, when I also helped register voters and we were pretty busy.

The municipal elections here in Groton may well be a test of how informed the average voter may be. Before the orange fascist came along the Republicans in Groton usually held majorities in our municipal offices and were either the majority or close to the majority in the Representative Town Meeting (RTM). That all changed after Trump’s first election. The year after he won, the Democrats won not just a majority on the Town Council (the Board of Ed and the RTM both have minority representation requirements) but, if memory serves, either all nine seats or all but one.

The Republican Party here in Groton is now a shell of its former self. Until that time years ago it was headed by fairly reasonable people. You know, people whose parents were Republicans in the olden days, who became Republicans themselves and really didn’t focus on what was happening to their party nationally. They have been displaced by whackjobs and the party itself has, this year, been unable to field a full slate of candidates. In the district in which I live, in which a fairly high percentage of Republicans reside (It contains Groton Long Point, a rich person enclave that sticks out into Long Island Sound), the party has failed to nominate a single person to the RTM, despite the fact that at least one of them would win no matter how many votes he or she got.

Realizing that their brand has fallen into disfavor, many of the whackjobs have rebranded themselves as members of the Groton Independent Party, the candidates being indistinguishable from a policy perspective from the Republican candidates. It is not the refuge of those old fashioned Republicans I described above, who have dropped out of politics and/or become Democrats. However, that is something of which not every voter is aware. We will soon be finding out how many people will blindly vote for a rebranded Republican because, after all, doesn’t voting for an Independent prove you’re not a captive of either party?

Another compendium, the dementia edition

A while ago I started a post in which I intended to tally each act of open corruption in which Trump or his henchmen engaged. I admit I’ve fallen down on the job, as there have been plenty since my last update, but I’m hoping to get back to work on it. This post is not about corruption. This post is about dementia, the point being to document the stuff the media largely ignores. I admit I’m coming to this late. There have been 238 days since the fascists took over, so there have been approximately 238 examples. They’ll keep coming, and I’ll try to document them, though I admit I may fall down on the job.

Here we go.

  1. This is an actual quote:
    “That’s true actually.. That heavily reduced most favored nation’s cost. Americans can expect discounts. And as I said, it could be, in many cases, way over 100%. And as an example, one particular drug that’s hot, very hot, 654% on inhalers, COPD, and asthma, as well as certain diabetics, medications, they’re going to be averaging about 654% reduction in price. You believe that one? The Democrats will say, well, you should have gotten more. It’s crazy.” Yes, according to Trump he has reduced the costs of medications by more than 600%, and apparently he’s reduced some by 1,000%.

Now some might argue that this is not a sign of dementia, that it’s just another lie. But in the past Trump’s lies were such that there could have been a reality in which they were true. It is unlikely that there is any planet in the Universe in which a given quantity can be reduced by 1,000 percent and still be a positive number.

2. Who knows. Maybe there is such a thing as a “reverse bathtub”, something about which Trump is an expert. But unlike the folks who are merely deeply confused, referenced at the link, I see it as yet another sign of decline.

3. Multiple instances documented here at Hullabaloo, along with other outrages. Again, one might argue that he’s simply lying, just like he did before the dementia came on, but the nature of the lies is such that the dementia seems clear.

4. I’m sure this will be ignored by the New York Times, but you couldn’t ask for more proof of a deteriorating mental state. More at the link, but this quote conveys a lot of it:””But you always find something new, like, is he in good health?” the 79-year-old president said. “Biden was great, but is Trump in good health? I sit here, I do four news conferences a day, I ask questions from very intelligent lunatics, you people.” It goes on.

Rant

There was a time, many moons ago, when I posted to this blog on a daily basis. Back then, we thought things were going wrong, but within limits that could be rectified. You know, George Bush was an idiot,but we could look forward to replacing him with someone good, and we actually did, and things seemed to be going well for awhile.

We’re living in a different world now, we’re on the brink of a fascist takeover. There’s plenty of things to write about, but it all seems so obvious that it’s hard to come up with a subject that seems worth discussing, since I’m fairly sure anyone reading this blog is totally aware of what’s going on. On the other hand, the obvious stuff appears to totally escape the notice of the mainstream press. I’m pretty sure they’re aware of it, but they hold off discussing it because they don’t want to get attacked. You know, stuff like Trump’s obvious dementia, which would be all over the front pages had Joe Biden exhibited the same symptoms. And then there’s the bending over backwards to make the absurdities sound somewhat sane. For instance, I read an article in the New London Day, which was from the Washington Post, about Trump’s claim that Tylenol caused autism. Every attempt was made to make what is clearly an evidence free assertion sound sane.

Particularly disturbing these days is the inability of establishment Democrats, particularly those in Congress, to understand what is happening in this country. Or, if they do understand, they have made a conscious decision to pretend that they don’t, and that they are still living in the pre Newt Gingrich era when relatively sane Republicans controlled that party. Not only do they pretend to believe they can deal with Republicans, they also kowtow to them in disgusting ways. The reaction to the Charlie Kirk murder is a case in point. Murder is wrong. But the fact that he was murdered does not make Charlie Kirk a saint. He was a despicable racist, a purveyor of hate. Yet a majority of Democrats went along with a resolution honoring Kirk. He doesn’t deserve to be honored. Were he a left leaning individual, Republicans would be praising his killer, as he implicitly praised the man who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband or they would be joking about the killing, as other Republicans did about the Pelosi attack and after the killing of the Minnesota Democratic legislator. I’m not suggesting Democrats should go that route, but they should be as one in insisting that Kirk was in fact what he was, a loathsome individual. That’s only part of it, of course.

For years the Republicans attacked the “liberal media” until they got what they wanted, a media that bent over backwards to “both sides” every issue, which at this point means “double standard”, i.e., ignoring Republican corruption and incompetence, or whitewashing it, because, after all that’s just Republicans being Republicans or Trump being Trump so it’s not news, but it would sure get publicized if a Democrat did it. It’s time that the Democrats started attacking the press for this very thing, but of course they won’t. When I suggested they should do so to one of our Connecticut politicians he responded that Democrats don’t do that because they believe in the First Amendment. It has nothing to do with the First Amendment. Criticizing the press is a form of speech and perfectly legitimate, especially when the criticism is justified.

There has, so far as I’m aware, never been a president before Trump who has traded on the office in order to enrich himself. If any of his predecessors did it, the corruption was small potatoes compared to what he’s done. The media reports it as Trump being Trump and then moves on, and Democrats hardly say a word. They are equally silent or subdued when he engages in a speech that is both full of lies and fully demonstrative of his rapidly increasing dementia. I should note here that the European media doesn’t share the reticence of the American.

End of rant.

The New London Day Bends the Knee

I should start off by saying that I am not a great fan of David Collins, now a former columnist for the New London Day, but I still maintain that his recent firing is yet another example of our media bending over backwards to kiss the ass of the fascists who are taking over this country.

Collins was fired after he refused to consent to a change to a column he wrote.

The column was about Greg Howard, a Republican who represents Stonington, who is also a cop and a fan of ICE. For the most part, the column (never published by the Day, but which Collins has distributed through Facebook) calls Howard out for a false allegation on Howard’s part that Blumenthal, by criticizing ICE, had endangered some of the fascists ICE agents, by identifying them, using the term “doxing”. Of course, the accusation had no basis in fact, so maybe Collins’ first mistake was imagining that the media should make an issue out of a Republican lying. It’s what they do, after all, so it’s not news.

Collins makes several good points, including those contained in this excerpt:

This is what Howard said about masked agents:
“Dems have their own extreme-left, brain-washed criminals that would use that rhetoric (from Blumenthal and other politicians) as a reason to interfere with or harm ICE agents, their homes or their families.
“It is likely for this reason, and the safety of themselves and their families, that ICE agents are trying to conceal their identify from the hundreds of cameras that film them.  I don’t blame them one bit.  This concern for their safety . . . is also likely why the ICE agents are trying to get in and out of areas quickly and in unmarked cars.”
Maybe Howard believes Stonington police should hide behind masks? What’s the difference? Why shouldn’t the transparency in law enforcement that serves professional police departments like Stonington so well apply to federal agents?
The difference is that Trump and Republicans like Howard are endorsing the use of fear tactics, a hallmark of democracy-destroying authoritarians.
Howard notes in his long email that local police traditionally make arrests without warrants, for DWI, domestic assault and drug and weapon possession.
But of course those arrests are based on police observing a crime, not a suspicion based totally on the color of people’s skin or their mastery of English.
Howard and other Republicans have crossed a dangerous threshold in supporting dark and Gestapo-like, masked police tactics here in Connecticut.
I hope voters here in Howard’s district, and the rest of Connecticut, are paying close attention to the fearsome police state Republicans are sponsoring.

He’s right on the law, by the way. Cops can dispense with the need for a warrant only when they arrest someone in the act or under other specific circumstances. Arresting someone because their skin is brown is not among those circumstances. Well, I guess I’m now wrong about that, given the Supreme court’s recent ruling, but it was the law when Collins wrote his column.

The Day ran an editorial (or whatever you want to call it) defending its actions, which you can read here. Among other things it criticizes Collins for having an email exchange with Howard instead of talking to him over the telephone, which seems odd as the dispute arose over the Day’s insistence that it insert an outtake from one of those emails into the piece, an option that would not have been open to them had the exchange been telephonic. And of course, one can understand why Collins would want the exchange in writing, since that would make it harder for Howard to deny whatever Collins wrote about him.

As I said above, I am not a great fan of Collins. He wrote some columns that I thought were unfair about some of our local Democrats, but of course the Day had no problem with those, inasmuch as the subjects were Democrats and, since they were Democrats, were not likely to attack the Day. Many years ago, in what seemed like a coordinated attack against it, the Day was besieged by right wing letter writers demanding that it be, to coin a term, “fair and balanced”, which of course translates into what has become the standard in the media today: bend over backwards to make Republicans look good, or in the case of a certain very stable genius, mentally competent, while doing the opposite to Democrats. Ever since that long ago time the Day has done its share of backward bending, and this is yet another example.

Another easy prediction

One of the frustrating things afflicting Democratic activists, is the establishment Democrat’s seeming insistence that things are perfectly normal, and they should continue to play by the rules that obtained 20 or 30 years ago, when there were still some reasonable and somewhat honest Republicans.

Case in point discussed here. The Republicans don’t have the votes to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government running. It looks like they will repeat their actions of the past, and give the Republicans what they want in exchange for a meaningless concession or two. The meaningless concession discussed at the link is “short-term extension of the Obamacare subsidies which were cut as part of the President’s budget bill.”. This would do some good, but would simply give the Republicans what they want while paving the way for them to ellminate the subsidies altogether, not to mention paving the way for the continuing transition to a fascist state.

At this point, the Democrats should be fighting fire with fire. Were the Democrats in charge, Republicans would be lining up to shut down the government, and then blame the Democrats if they succeeded. I give Newsom credit for recognizing that you can’t sit back and refuse to respond by giving them a dose of their own medicine because, after all, as the Schumer’s of the world would say, Democrats don’t stoop to that sort of stuff, and anyway, what’s all this talk about fascism.

Not only do the Democrats have to start fighting fire with fire, they have to start working the press for its utter failure to cover what is actually going on in this nation. If the government shuts down, not only should the Democrats rightly blame the Republicans, they should ride the press for failing to lay the blame where it belongs.

None of this will happen of course. The Democrats in DC have no ability to get a message out, and the messages they try to get out are insipid. Schumer will likely cave, and even if the doesn’t, Fetterman, who has become a functional Republican, will no doubt give them one of the votes they need.

Speaking of Schumer, by the way, it is impossible to believe (well, no, it’s actually easy) that he is urging the 78 year old Janet Mills to take on Susan Collins in Maine instead of backing the candidate who will appeal to a broader spectrum of voters and one who is actually speaking up for ordinary people.