A Survival Center Tries to Survive the Pandemic - Bobby Simpson has been distributing food in Kentucky for decades. Now the people who usually help him help others are hurting, too. - link
History Will Find Trump Guilty - The former President avoided conviction in the Senate, but his era will be recalled for its authoritarian politics and lawless compulsions. - link
When Climate Change and Xenophobia Collide - During a hurricane, migrants in the Bahamas were told that they could seek shelter without fear. More than a thousand were deported, reflecting a global trend. - link
Texans in the Midst of Another Avoidable Catastrophe - The state’s independent power grid was couched as a badge of individualism. Then a once-in-a-generation storm hit—and, sure enough, the onus fell on the individual. - link
Blaming the Wind for the Mess in Texas Is Painfully Absurd - Failures in renewable-energy generation accounted for only a small percentage of the state’s recent power outages. - link
From Vox
Rush Limbaugh’s toxic legacy -
Rush Limbaugh receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom during former President Donald Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address. | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images
Rush Limbaugh is dead at 70. The Republican Party he poisoned is very much alive.
Obituaries for talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, who died on Wednesday at the age of 70, have frequently described him as a “conservative provocateur.” This is technically accurate but euphemistic, akin to calling Bashar al-Assad a “controversial leader.” Limbaugh’s stock in trade was bigotry and offense; his career-long defining trait was a willingness to channel the conservative id in unusually blunt and crude terms.
These examples are not cherry-picked. Bigotry dressed up as “jokes” or “entertainment” were the stock-in-trade of Limbaugh’s show; he built and maintained a massive audience across decades not in spite of this commentary, but because of it.
“Rush built upon an already robust right-wing media and organizational infrastructure and married it to lowbrow entertainment culture, appealing to a deeply politicized audience of angry white men who did not consider themselves political,” writes David Astin Walsh, a historian of conservatism at the University of Virginia. “Limbaugh was the fountainhead for an entire generation of radical right-wing GOP politicians who owe their careers to the politics of resentment and white racial rage.”
Foremost among these leaders, of course, is former President Donald Trump.
Though Limbaugh initially supported Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in the 2016 presidential primary, he came around to Trump and Trumpism — becoming one of the former president’s most influential boosters in conservative media. In return, Trump awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest civilian honor — during the 2020 State of the Union speech.
It was darkly appropriate. Limbaugh had more influence on the trajectory of the American right than the vast majority of political leaders; it is not a stretch to say that Trump’s presidency may not have happened without him.
“Rush Limbaugh radically transformed the Republican Party. He elevated conservative media into a coequal branch of party politics, and pioneered a style of rhetoric, argument, and entertainment that would come to define conservative politics,” writes Nicole Hemmer, a historian of talk radio at Columbia University.
That time Rush Limbaugh made fun of Michael J Fox and his Parkinson’s disease. pic.twitter.com/7CuHlE5Lpy
This, according to Hemmer, is very much not a good thing.
“The things we now think of as particularly Trumpian features of conservatism — the insults, the conspiracies, the blend of entertainment and politics and anger — Limbaugh had been doing it for a quarter-century before Trump showed up to the party.”
Rush Limbaugh is dead. The rest of us have to live with his baleful legacy.
Limbaugh’s startling influence over the Republican Party
Prior to Limbaugh’s emergence on the national scene in 1988, the conservative mass media as we know it today did not exist. He was the first of the major talk radio hosts. Fox News arrived eight years after Rush; online conservative outlets like Breitbart were quite literally inconceivable at the time. Limbaugh proved that the particular combination of strident right-wing politics, outrageous commentary dressed up as “humor” or “just asking questions,” and incessant attacks on the “liberal media” could be commercially viable with an extremely large audience.
Limbaugh had a singular talent as a performer: an ability to capture the hearts and minds of his supporters with few parallels. His fans called themselves “Dittoheads” because callers would frequently “ditto” each others’ praise of whatever Limbaugh had just said. The dittohead ranks grew rapidly in the late 1980s and early ’90s, and the institutional Republican Party welcomed it. In 1994, first-term House Republicans — who had just won a majority — named him an honorary member of their class.
After his death on Wednesday, leading Republicans from both the party’s insurgent right and establishment wings lined up to praise him. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) lauded him as someone who “lived the First Amendment and told hard truths that made the elite uncomfortable.” Former President George W. Bush described Limbaugh as “a friend throughout my presidency,” a “controversial” figure who nonetheless “spoke his mind as a voice for millions of Americans.”
But perhaps the most interesting conservative statement on Limbaugh’s death came from Noah Rothman, an editor at the venerable conservative magazine Commentary. Rothman, an anti-Trump Republican who has decried the party’s radical trend in recent years, nonetheless had kind words for Limbaugh as an invaluable counterweight to perceived media bias:
If you know a conservative under the age of 35, Limbaugh influenced them. Whatever you think of his career trajectory, and I have my frustrations in the Trump era, he was a profoundly important check on Democratic narratives in the press. A true legend. Rest in peace.
This has long been the conservative establishment’s approach to “provocateurs” like Limbaugh and his imitators on Fox News: Sure, they might be crazy, but they’re our crazies.
“People were willing to excuse his takes not only because of a kind of longstanding ‘gotta let people troll/free speech’ type ethic, but also because they to some extent agreed with the right-wing critique of liberal media hegemony,” Paul E. Johnson, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies conservative political rhetoric, tells me. “If you really think you’re at the margins, you have to shout to be heard, and who cares if you ruffle some feathers in the process.”
But now, the party’s leadership is under attack by the monster they created, literally: The mob that attacked Congress on January 6, whose members openly stated their intent to kill lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence, was a product of the fact-free, radical media ecosystem that Limbaugh helped build. Networks like One America News, unthinkable absent Limbaugh’s trailblazing, helped convince Republicans of Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen — the belief that directly caused the Capitol Hill riot.
“There’s a lot of people calling for the end of violence,” Limbaugh said. “There’s a lot of conservatives, social media, who say that any violence or aggression at all is unacceptable. Regardless of the circumstances. I’m glad Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, the actual tea party guys, the men at Lexington and Concord didn’t feel that way.”
Now the whole country is suffering the consequences from a Republican base that has been radicalized in no small part by decades of Limbaugh broadcasts blasted into their ears. They’ve been taught that Democrats are mortal enemies, and the media cannot be trusted, by opportunists and bigots like Limbaugh who profit from taking the most explosive and hard-right stance imaginable.
Limbaugh is dead. His brand of poisonous politics will not be laid to rest with him.
Fox News turns Winter Storm Uri into a cudgel to own the libs -
Tucker Carlson speaks at the National Review Institute Ideas Summit in March 2019 in Washington, DC. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
“It seems pretty clear that a reckless reliance on windmills is the cause of this disaster” in Texas, Tucker Carlson lied.
As nearly 3 million Texans languished without electricity Wednesday afternoon amid the ongoing fallout from Winter Storm Uri, Republicans and Fox News have teamed up to turn the disaster into a culture-war wedge issue.
As Vox’s Umair Irfan explained, the blackouts happened when the winter storm created a sudden spike in energy demand and hamstrung production of natural gas, coal, nuclear, and wind energy. The root problems (climate change aside) involve the state’s failure to winterize energy facilities and infrastructure in a region not accustomed to sustained freezing weather.
It’s a somewhat complicated story — unless you get your information from Fox News. Since Monday, various Fox News hosts, including Tucker Carlson and Harris Faulkner, have pushed the narrative that the power outages in Texas are actually the result of Green New Deal-style energy policies that aren’t even in place there.
“It seems pretty clear that a reckless reliance on windmills is the cause of this disaster,” Carlson claimed Monday, establishing a talking point that Fox News continued to hammer into the brains of viewers across numerous shows on Tuesday, with Carlson returning to the theme that evening.
Then, in an episode illustrative of the symbiotic relationship between Fox News and the Republican Party, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) took a break from responding to the disaster to join Sean Hannity’s Fox News show later Tuesday evening. As Hannity agreed with him, Abbott said that “this shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America.”
“Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis,” he continued. “It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas as well as other states to make sure that we’ll be able to heat our homes in the wintertime and cool our homes in the summertime.”
Texas Gov. Abbott blames solar and wind for the blackouts in his state and says “this shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America” pic.twitter.com/YfVwa3YRZQ
It’s not just Abbott — other Texas Republicans, including fellow Fox News regular Rep. Dan Crenshaw and Sen. John Cornyn — are also using Uri and the ensuing humanitarian crisis as a pretext to bash renewable energy.
Bottom line: Thank God for baseload energy made up of fossil fuels.
Had our grid been more reliant on the wind turbines that froze, the outages would have been much worse.
It is true that some wind turbines and other renewable energy facilities froze amid the historic cold snap and had to cease production. But the bigger problem the Abbotts and Hannitys of the world refuse to acknowledge is that the winter storm shut down an even greater proportion of the thermal sources favored by opponents of renewable energy.
As Katie Shepherd detailed for the Washington Post, data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the nonprofit that runs Texas’s electrical grid, refutes the Abbott/Fox News spin:
Although renewable energy sources did partially fail, they only contributed to 13 percent of the power outages, while providing about a quarter of the state’s energy in winter. Thermal sources, including coal, gas and nuclear, lost almost twice as many gigawatts of power because of the cold, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s electric grid operator. Critics have also noted that wind turbines can operate in climates as cold as Greenland if they’re properly prepared for the weather.
Against that backdrop, singling out wind turbines for the ongoing outages in Texas is obviously a fundamental misreading of what’s really going on. But instead of subjecting Abbott’s claims to critical scrutiny, Fox News’s “news side” hosts amplified them on Wednesday by covering them as news.
Faulkner again highlighting laughably false takes as fact, this show intentionally peddles in misinformation
“TX gov says wind turbines failed during the deep freeze and halted natural gas delivery, and says ~the lefts climate agenda~ has played a role in creating this tragedy” pic.twitter.com/yYIIi6yoj6
Fox News’ treatment of Uri illustrates how, for a large segment of the Republican Party, everything is now a culture war. On Fox, the coronavirus pandemic is recast around the struggle of aggrieved business owners and parents to overcome purportedly unnecessary public health regulations imposed by Democratic public officials; the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol becomes about Nancy Pelosi’s alleged failures; President Joe Biden’s efforts to prevent conflicts of interest in and around the White House is covered, while the egregious conflicts of interest in the Trump White House were defended.
And a historic winter storm in Texas made worse by failures to take proper precautions — officials ignored a 2011 federal report recommending that ERCOT take steps to weatherize facilities against cold weather, for instance, and when Abbott isn’t on Fox News, he’s been trying to pin blame for the power outages on the nonprofit — ends up being twisted into a pretext for misleading attacks on renewable energy.
“Republicans and right-wing media, they want to take every policy issue and turn it into some painful culture war idiocy,” said MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Tuesday in a monologue critiquing coverage of what’s going on in Texas. “And there’s an interest to do it. The fossil fuel companies want this too. They want it to turn into a culture war, like ‘the libs don’t want you to have power.’”
The Covid-19 relief bill is also an Obamacare expansion bill -
President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 relief bill would expand Obamacare in several important ways. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Millions of Americans could gain health coverage under the Democrats’ stimulus bill.
The Covid-19 relief package proposed by President Joe Biden and being considered by Democrats in Congress could expand health care coverage to millions of people, the most significant step in the last 10 years toward patching up some of the holes in the Affordable Care Act.
The ACA led to a historically low uninsured rate in the US — 8.6 percent in 2016 — but the number of uninsured Americans started ticking up again during the Trump administration, rising to 9.2 percent by 2019. Then millions of people lost their insurance (along with their jobs) during the coronavirus pandemic.
The Covid-19 relief plan is trying to move the rate back in the other direction. The most effective provision would be a two-year expansion of the ACA’s premium subsidies, which Americans can use to purchase private health insurance on the marketplaces the law established.
The House version of the Covid-19 relief bill would increase the size of the subsidy for those already eligible for assistance (people making between 100 and 400 percent of the federal poverty level). It would also extend subsidies for people earning more than 400 percent of the poverty level, ensuring that nobody would pay more than 8.5 percent of their income for health coverage.
Courtesy of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities
This would provide help to one of the populations left out of the ACA: the roughly 2.6 million people who make too much money to qualify for subsidies and are currently uninsured.
Based on prior estimates of such a proposal, somewhere between 4 million and 5 million people would be expected to gain coverage as a result of expanding the subsidies. The Biden administration has already opened ACA enrollment to everybody until May 15, which would give people an immediate opening to take advantage of the new benefits.
However, there is a catch: The subsidy expansion expires after two years.
The reason appears to be twofold. One, Democrats say they want this package narrowly focused on the Covid-19 pandemic. Two, Democrats are using the budget reconciliation process with the aim of passing the bill without any Republican votes, so they need to be mindful of how much the bill costs. Extending the subsidies permanently would raise the price tag.
But the two-year limit creates an expiration date for these new benefits. To avoid it, Democrats would need to either permanently extend the subsidies in another reconciliation bill later this Congress, or find another way to make them permanent in the next two years to prevent millions of people from losing coverage if the assistance is allowed to lapse.
So the Democrats’ Covid-19 relief bill will deliver important and immediate help to uninsured people in the middle class. Helping uninsured Americans living in poverty, the other big gap in the ACA, is going to be more difficult.
The ACA was supposed to extend Medicaid eligibility to all people in poverty. But the Supreme Court ruled that states could not be forced to expand Medicaid, and a dozen GOP-led states have refused to do so. That has left about 2 million people uninsured, with no other realistic option for affording health insurance.
There is no easy fix for covering those people. During the presidential campaign, Biden proposed creating a new government insurance plan that would automatically enroll them — a public option — but that is not being proposed as part of the Covid-19 relief legislation, and it may not be permissible under the budget reconciliation rules.
Under the Covid-19 relief bill, if a state expanded Medicaid now, it would receive a 5 percent bump in federal funding for its traditional Medicaid population for the next two years.
Because many more people are covered by traditional Medicaid than by the expansion, that funding bump would be expected to more than cover the 10 percent share states are asked to pay for Medicaid expansion under the ACA. It’s a new way to sweeten the expansion deal, which already comes with a permanent 90 percent federal match for expansion enrollees, for the holdout states.
In theory, that would be a way to cover 2 million more people and provide help to another group left out of the ACA. But Republican states have refused expansion as much because of their ideological opposition to the health care law as they have because of the specifics of financing it. Health policy experts sound skeptical that the incentive Democrats are including in their Covid-19 package will be sufficient to change the states’ minds.
Even with this big incentive, my guess is few of the 12 states that have not expanded Medicaid will change course. That’s partly because the incentive is temporary.
That will leave over 2 million uninsured poor people with no options, which is a big gap in our health system. https://t.co/tTcRn7cYkS
The Covid-19 relief bill does include other improvements to Medicaid, however, including new incentives for states to expand home and community-based services, assist the elderly and disabled populations that may have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic, and cover postpartum care for new mothers for 12 months.
Completing the work of universal coverage, which is what Biden’s campaign platform amounted to, will almost assuredly not be accomplished in the president’s first big legislative package. Democrats will likely face a lot of pressure from progressives to go bigger in the next reconciliation bill they pull together.
But this is, nevertheless, a start.
From The Hindu: Sports
Australian Open | Novak Djokovic ends Russian qualifier Aslan Karatsev’s golden run - Djokovic will face either Stefanos Tsitsipas or Daniil Medvedev in Sunday’s final
IPL auctions | Rajasthan Royals buys Chris Morris for ₹16.25 crore to seal the most expensive deal - He surpassed the record of Yuvraj Singh who was bought by Delhi Capitals for ₹16 crore in 2015.
IPL Auction 2021 live updates | RR get Chris Morris for record 16.25 crores, Punjab sign Australian Jhye Richardson for 14 crores - A total of 292 players will be competing for just 61 available slots across the eight franchises
CSA approaches ICC, lodges complaint against Cricket Australia for tour postponement - Australia had earlier this month postponed their tour of South Africa next month, citing “unacceptable health and safety risk.”
Indian pro boxer Lalrinsanga Tlau to fight for vacant WBC youth title next month - The 21-year-old Tlau is four-fight old in the professional circuit and has an unbeaten record.
From The Hindu: National News
Attack on West Bengal Minister due to political rivalry concerning Trinamool Congress: Railway officials - Jakir Hossain had filed a police complaint in 2017 against two Trinamool members, who were giving him death threats, says an official
PAGD wins DDC chairperson posts in two Jammu districts - Both districts were reserved for women candidates.
3 children from State bag bravery awards - Special Award for Ummer Mukthar, General Award for Jayakrishnan Babu, Muhammed Hamras K.
To neighbours, PM moots special visa scheme for medical staff - Doctors and nurses could travel quickly within region during emergencies, on the request of receiving country, he says
Farmers’ protests: Negligible impact of ‘rail roko’ call on train services: Railways - Earlier, around 25 trains were regulated by the Railways on account of the agitation
From BBC: Europe
Belarus jails Belsat TV journalists for filming protest - A judge rules that by live-streaming a protest the Belsat TV journalists incited unrest in Minsk.
Pablo Hasél protests: Violence in Spanish cities over rapper’s jailing - Police clash with protesters in Madrid and Barcelona, as unrest over Pablo Hasél’s jailing spreads.
Georgia PM Giorgi Gakharia quits over order to detain opposition leader - Giorgi Gakharia said the court order to hold an opposition leader could cause “political escalation”.
Bags packed: Russian activist prepares for jail - Anastasia Shevchenko awaits a verdict on charges of being linked to a pro-democracy group in the UK.
Navalny must be freed, European rights court tells Russia - Russia condemns a decision calling for the Kremlin critic’s release because of a risk to his life.
From Ars Technica
Latest Nintendo Direct event led by Zelda: Skyward Sword HD remaster - Splatoon 3, Fall Guys, a Ninja Gaiden 3D trilogy collection, new Mario Golf, more. - link
The world’s second-most popular desktop operating system isn’t macOS anymore - Chrome OS’s rise in market share has been swift and decisive. - link
Steam developer gets banned for “Very Positive” review trickery - Steam UI made it hard to tell if “Very Positive” games had “Very Positive” reviews. - link
Egyptian royal mummy shows pharaoh wasn’t assassinated—he was executed - An earlier X-ray had suggested that the king might have been murdered in his sleep. - link
Facebook goes nuclear, banning all news posts in Australia - Facebook says Australia “fundamentally misunderstands” its relationship to news. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
Penis Van Lesbian -
Back in the 50’s, a man walked into a Hollywood agent’s office. He told the agent that he wanted to be a big star and that he wanted the agent to represent him. The agent asked the man’s name, to which he proudly replied, “Penis Van Lesbian.” Taken aback, the agent said, “If you want to be a big star, you will have to change your name.” The man, somewhat offended, told the agent, “The Van Lesbian name goes back centuries and I am very proud of my name! I will never change my name! Ever!” “Then I won’t be able to represent you.” Said the agent. “Then good day to you, sir!” The man yelled as he stormed out of the office.
Five years later, the agent received a letter along with a check for $50,000, written out to him. He wondered if it was sent to him by mistake until he read the letter.
The letter said,
Dear Sir, Five years ago, I came into your office wanting to become an actor in Hollywood and you told me I needed to change my name. Determined to make it with my God-given birth name, I refused. You told me I would never make it in Hollywood with a name like Penis Van Lesbian. After I left your office, I thought about what you said. I decided you were right. I had to change my name. I had too much pride to return to your office, so I signed with another agent. I would never have made it without changing my name, so the enclosed check is a token of my appreciation. Thank you for your advice..
A waitress walks up to one of her tables in a New York City restaurant and notices that the three Bulgarian businessmen seated there are furiously masturbating… -
She says, “What the hell do you guys think you are doing?”
One of the Bulgarian men says, “Can’t you see? Ve arrrre all verrry, verrry hoongry.”
The waitress makes a stroking motion and says, “So how is whacking-off in the middle of the restaurant going to help that situation??”
One of the other businessmen replies, “The menu say, FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED!”
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Courtesy of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities