Progressives did well on Tuesday

Ryan Grim and Akela Lacey wrote last week about some interesting Democratic primary races where progressive candidates were competing against establishment incumbents or establishment-supported candidates to replace retiring incumbents.

So how did they do? Pretty well, it turns out.

One big win was that Jamaal Bowman defeated Eliot Engel in the Bronx congressional district in New York City. Engel has been in Congress since 1989, was high in the party leadership, and the party establishment pulled out all the stops to try and help him retain his seat, seeing this as another major threat to its control, the way that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez upset another senior party leader Joe Crowley in 2018. But it was to no avail.

Incidentally, Engel is one of the most loyal members of the Israel lobby, a position increasingly unpopular in the Democratic party as its membership increasingly recognizes that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in unjust.
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The deep-rooted nature of police brutality

You would think that given the recent focus on police brutality in the US that has led to massive demonstrations across the country and calls for even defunding the police, police departments would have emphasized to their officers that they need to dial back the use of force so that they do not invite even more media scrutiny. But it is a sign of how deeply embedded is the instinct to respond with overwhelming force to many situations that such acts have continued, sometimes using the very same chokehold that caused the death of George Floyd, even after its use was banned in that state.
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TV review: Opiods, Inc

The investigate public TV program Frontline just released an episode with the above title that looked at how the company Insys Therapeutics deliberately set out to make people addicted to its formulation of the powerful pain killing drug based on fentanyl so that it could make huge profits. Because it is such a powerful addictive (100 times as strong as morphine), the drug is only meant to treat the excruciating pain experienced by certain types of cancer patients but the company, under the direction of its founder John Kapoor, pushed its sales team to bribe doctors to prescribe much more widely and in much larger doses than recommended, resulting in huge profits. Naturally, Wall Street investors did not look too closely at a company that was giving them huge returns on their investments.
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A big question following the court’s LGBT decision

Religious organizations that discriminate against the LGBT community have been stunned by the US supreme court’s ruling handed down last week that it is against the law for employers to fire LGT employees because of their sexual orientation or identity.

The ruling would have “seismic implications” for religious freedom and would potentially set off years of lawsuits for religious organizations, said Russell Moore, the president of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.
…

“I am deeply concerned that the U.S. Supreme Court has effectively redefined the legal meaning of ‘sex’ in our nation’s civil rights law,” the president of the Catholic bishops’ conference, Archbishop José H. Gomez, said in a statement. “This is an injustice that will have implications in many areas of life.”
…

But what conservative religious groups may see as a religious freedom issue, secular and progressive religious groups see as an excuse to discriminate.

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Samantha Bee on the Supreme Court’s historic Title VII opinion

While welcoming the ruling that said that firing someone because they are gay or lesbian or transgender violates the law, she says that there is much more that needs to be done to protect the transgender community. She highlights the particularly precarious and dangerous situation in our society of the black trans community who get the whammy of racism added to the homophobia and transphobia. And black transwomen have to deal with the added sexism as well.

What is appalling is that so many people try to act as if the non-trans community has to be protected from the trans community, when the reality is the other way around.
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Ok, this is even more stupid

Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ was always a stupid slogan. Trump and his supporters never specify when it was that America was great before, because to name any particular period in the past would be to say that the injustices that existed then, and there would be many, are preferable to what we have now.

But the Trump campaign has now come up with something even stupider. As I have mentioned, I am now on Trump’s email list and it has been a source of endless amusement to see their desperate gambits to get money from me.
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The parties really know how to pick ’em

Just after virulently anti-gay Bob Good won the Republican nomination for a Virginia congressional seat, another hateful nutjob is likely to win the party’s nomination for a seat in Georgia. (Thanks to commenter Tadas.)

The House’s highest-ranking Republicans are racing to distance themselves from a leading GOP congressional candidate in Georgia after POLITICO uncovered hours of Facebook videos in which she expresses racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic views.

The candidate, Marjorie Taylor Greene, suggested that Muslims do not belong in government; thinks black people “are held slaves to the Democratic Party”; called George Soros, a Jewish Democratic megadonor, a Nazi; and said she would feel “proud” to see a Confederate monument if she were black because it symbolizes progress made since the Civil War.
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John Oliver on the prison scandal

At the best of times, the state of US prisons are a scandal but what is happening during the pandemic is unconscionable, with inmates kept in conditions that guarantee that almost all of them will be exposed to the virus. John Oliver examines the problem and provides some common-sense steps that could be taken to ameliorate the situation but of course they are not being done because being seen as soft on criminals is seen by many politicians as a electoral death sentence, even though there is no way to confine the virus to just the prison population.

We are witnessing a sea change in racial attitudes

Dahlia Lithwick amasses a wealth of evidence to argue that we have seen a significant positive shift in the attitudes of white Americans on the issue of race during the Trump presidency. While that is good for the country, it does not bode well for him or the Republican party.

To be clear, Republicans have got a majority of the white vote in elections for the past 56 years and will likely get it again this year. But the large margins that they obtained previously are dwindling, and it is their determined efforts at gerrymandering and driving down the minority vote that has enabled them to stay in power despite alienating every other group. As that margin of white majority becomes smaller, it may not be enough to compensate for their losses elsewhere. So we can expect even more desperate efforts at increasing the white vote with racist and xenophobic fearmongering, coupled with even more intensive efforts at minority voter suppression. But that too can backfire. As we have seen in recent state elections, the efforts at voter suppression have angered minority voters who have become even more determined to vote despite the obstacles placed in their way.
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