Fluid ImaginationFrom What Joe Manchin Wants, Decoded:
Simply put, Manchin wants to be fully in control of any new mandates or regulations of the coal and energy industry that has fueled his state’s economy for more than a century…He opposes any new energy standards falling under the control of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which has traditionally been dominated by coastal liberals hostile to coal- and energy-producing states.
From Texas elections official faces attacks and pressure from partisan activists:
Last week, Trump issued a public letter demanding an audit in Texas. Hours later, the Texas secretary of state’s office announced that it had begun a “comprehensive forensic audit” in four of the state’s largest counties: Dallas, Harris, Tarrant and Collin. Biden won three of the four.
Take a moment to think about this. Former President Trump demanded an audit in a state he won, and for some reason, despite being under no legal obligation to do so, the Texas secretary of state carried out the old loser’s orders. But he already won the state’s electors, so even if any irregularities are found and the corrected vote significantly increases his lead, his campaign will still have won the same losing number of national electors.
But the story linked above doesn’t spend much time considering that. Instead (and more better-y), it focuses on the harassment of nonpartisan election administrators in counties where former President Trump won with as much as 81% of the vote.
[It]…represents the escalation of a wider push to replace independent administrators with more actively partisan election officials…and reflects a wider rift in Texas among different factions of the GOP…
It’s a good, deep read.
From On Concerns About Debt, and Disregard for Climate and Child Poverty:
The Democrats trying to scuttle Biden’s agenda are more accurately described as the party’s corporate wing than as “centrists.” After all, polls suggest that the policies they oppose are highly popular, so in that sense they’re well to the right of the political center.
But not everyone defining conventional wisdom is on the take. There also seems to be a sort of social dynamic in politics and the media, perhaps reflecting the circles in which opinion leaders move, that treats people who want to make the lives of ordinary Americans harder as courageous, while considering those who want to raise taxes on corporations and the rich flaky and unrealistic.
“I’ve never been a liberal in any way, shape or form,” [Democratic Senator] Manchin said. “I don’t fault any of [my fellow Democrats] who believe that they’re much more progressive and much more liberal. God bless ’em. … For them to get theirs — elect more liberals.”
West Virginia: Please take Senator Manchin up on his suggestion and vote the stonewalling fucker out.
From The Framers Would Have Wanted Us to Change the Constitution:
Some believe that we should refrain from tampering with the Framers’ handiwork. Others suggest that amending the Constitution is impossible or think it wiser to spend political capital and resources on more attainable goals. None of these responses is new. Throughout history, advocates of an unworkable status quo employed the language of constitutional idolatry and pessimism to oppose sorely needed change.
From The Lie About the Supreme Court Everyone Pretends to Believe:
The day Thurgood Marshall retired, he issued a furious dissent to a decision that strengthened the death penalty. “Power, not reason, is the new currency of this Court’s decisionmaking,” Marshall wrote, dissenting from the majority opinion in Payne v. Tennessee. “Neither the law nor the facts … underwent any change in the last four years, only the personnel of this court did.” The same is true of every precedent overturned by the Roberts Court.
From How Humans Lost Their Tails:
Even if geneticists are beginning to explain how our tail disappeared, the question of why still baffles scientists.
The first apes were bigger than monkeys, and their increased size would have made it easier for them to fall off branches, and more likely for those falls to be fatal. It’s hard to explain why apes without tails to help them balance wouldn’t have suffered a significant evolutionary disadvantage.
And losing a tail could have brought other dangers, too. Mr. Xia and his colleagues found that the TBXT mutation doesn’t just shorten tails but also sometimes causes spinal cord defects. And yet, somehow, losing a tail proved a major evolutionary advantage.
“It’s very confusing why they lost their tail,” said Gabrielle Russo, an evolutionary morphologist at Stony Brook University in New York who was not involved in the study. “That’s the next outstanding question: What on earth would the advantage be?”