Democrat Wins in Alafuckingbama
March 27: Bridge collapse … Alabama election … Mifepristone hearing … McDaniel out …
Common Fucking Decency a Bridge Too Far
The Francis Scott Key bridge collapsed into the Potapsco River shortly after 1:30am yesterday.
Before the sun had risen, as first responders were still responding, the Young Conservative Federation Twitter account posted a screengrab of the bio for member of the Maryland Port Commission (MPC). A Black woman named Karenthia A. Barber.
The thread included the other Black person on the six-member commission, and mentioned only one white member, a former longshoreman, “the only member who seems to actually have experience in the industry,” even though the other Black commissioner’s bio named two relevant fields in which he had experience.
A Utah legislator named Phil Lyman, now running for governor, responded to the Tweet about Barber, saying that, “This is what happens when you have Governors who prioritize diversity over the wellbeing and security of citizens.” Lyman added, “DEI = DIE.”
Barber is the first Black woman to serve on the MPC. She joined the commission last August after being appointed by the state’s first Black governor, Wes Moore. Neither Lyman nor anyone else explained how Barber’s work in less than one year led to yesterday’s bridge collapse.
The three other people on the commission include the co-founder of a company that makes artificial seawater for aquariums, a former reporter turned aide to politicians and political appointees, and the top lobbyist for Southwest Airlines.
It remains to be seen whether or how the six-body commission, or diversity, played any role in the collapse.
But we do know something about the diversity of six other bodies. That’s how many people are missing, all of them workers on the bridge.
Those six workers have yet to be publicly identified, but reportedly they include citizens of El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico, and two from Guatemala according to officials from those countries and other reports. It’s not yet clear whether all six were immigrants, so at the moment we have the possibility that all of them were, that none of them were white.
The ship’s distress call led police to stop traffic on the bridge. They had 90 seconds to act, but shut off the flow of traffic quickly enough that not a single driver is yet known to have been killed, saving unknown numbers of lives.
But there’s no indication an evacuation call was made for the workers.
In 50 feet of water, at 46 degrees, those six worker bodies are presumed to be washed out into the Atlantic or “buried under tons of steel,” according to Jeffrey Pritzker, an official with the company that employed the six missing workers, who were filling potholes on the bridge.
At dawn today, the search-and-rescue efforts resumed, only now they’re find-and-retrieve efforts.
Meanwhile, just last year, the Labor Department found that Maersk Line Limited, which chartered the cargo ship responsible for the bridge collapse, had illegally punished workers for reporting safety concerns directly to the Coast Guard, the Lever reports.
That said, we still don’t know what caused the power outage that apparently led the cargo ship to knock down the bridge. But we do know that, at 1:30 in the morning, the guys fixing potholes so that commuters could get to their jobs yesterday included people from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico.
They were literally fixing a bridge named for the guy who wrote our national song. And plummeted into a river, once navigated by Captain John Smith, named in the language of the first people known to live on the land. (I’ve seen various translations, but this account, that “Potapsco” derives from an Algonquin phrase referring the jutting ledge of a rock, seems most authoritative.)
One of the workers reportedly was Miguel Luna, from El Salvador, a father of three who had worked for the company for about 15 years and lived in Baltimore for 19 years. He came here presumably to find a better life, and is now presumed to have died making life better for the people in his chosen home.
Nevertheless, the same right-wing fearmongers who demonize immigrants, with zero facts at hand, pointed the finger of blame yesterday at a Black woman and diversity efforts, even as the bodies of immigrant workers remained submerged in the dark.
Pres. Joe Biden, meanwhile, pledged yesterday to provide federal funds for a new bridge. Which presumably will be tied to increased security at the border to protect us from potential bridge workers.
Democrat Wins in Alafuckingbama
A Democrat won an election in Alafuckingbama yesterday.
A woman Democrat. Who works in mental health. Who ran on a platform of reproductive rights. In Alafuckingbama.
Her name is Marilyn Lands, and she won a special election to fill the state House of Representatives seat vacated last year by the same Republican she lost to in 2022 by seven points. (The Republican resigned last year after pleading guilty to voter fraud.)
In a district that D4FRFP1 Donald Trump very narrowly won in 2020, Lands beat her Republican foe by a 25-percent margin yesterday.
The takeaway that Alafuckingbama Democrats want heard today is twofold. One is that abortion rights motivate voters. Ev. Ree. Where.
The other, however, is that national Democrats shouldn’t write off Alabama just because it’s Alabama. What they should be doing is writing checks to Alabama because it’s Alabama.
And it’s not that abortion is uniquely motivating to voters. It’s that the death of Roe is just the speartip of a much broader, planned assault on individual autonomy in the form of right-wing Christian theocracy. Which is hugely unpopular even in most of Alafuckingbama.
McDaniel’s Selection Deemed Illegitimate
The selection of former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel to serve as a contributor was found to be illegitimate yesterday, after outstanding ballots from on-air talent had been counted.
First, MSNBC President Rashida Jones reportedly had said that McDaniel would not be recognized as a legitimate contributor on MSNBC territory. Then a host of on-air complaints — led by Chuck Todd and, in devastatingly Rachel Maddow-ish fashion, Rachel Maddow — made clear that a number of votes against McDaniel had not been tallied.
Less than a week after word came that McDaniel had been hired by NBC News to make noises on TV with her face hole, and just two days after McDaniel did just that on Sunday’s Meet the Press — without providing a single meaningful new fact or even a semi-profound insight — NBC Universal News Group Chair Cesar Conde announced that McDaniel was out.
“No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned. Over the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal,” said Conde, who was wrong.
I say that because newsrooms are supposed to not be cohesive and aligned, they’re supposed to be grown-up enough to disagree and debate ideas and foster dissent. They’re journalists, for fuck’s sake; they’re supposed to spiteful shits who disagree with everything.
Anyway, the important thing is it doesn’t really matter whether I did or didn’t say yesterday that “it’s worth noting that, at least while I’m writing this, McDaniel is still there.”
My not-yet-wrong point today is that this represents something of a historic inversion in TV news. Historically, the news networks claimed the moral high ground. It was the networks that ostensibly set the standard, turning up their noses at the missteps and craziness of their wild, unhinged cable siblings.
When Brian Williams tarnished the network’s image, he was banished to cable (for network sins, I should add.)
In this case, however, it was the network norms that led to the screwup. And it was the cable news leaders who called it out. And who were right.
Quick insider tidbit: When I was at MSNBC, a former network person there told me that their ratings were about a tenth of what they used to have at the network, but that their impact at MSNBC was about ten times bigger. If anything, they were understating it.
Supreme Court Debates Abortion Drug
A right-wing lawsuit seeking to restrict access to and distribution of the abortifacient mifepristone went to the Supreme Court yesterday. And a majority of judges appear ready to flush it down the toilet.
The suit, brought by the Alliance Defending [sic] Freedom [sic], was filed on behalf of doctors who believe that Jesus hates abortions. The doctors claimed they’re worried that if someone has an abortion, they might have to treat those people, just like they swore they would when they took their Hippocratic oaths.
But as the judges pointed out, doctors are already allowed to let people die if Jesus doesn’t like how they got to the E.R. Which means that the doctors aren’t actually affected by the FDA permitting the use and distribution of mifepristone. Which means, as even the right-wing Christian judges almost said to these doctors, who the fuck let you into my courtroom?!?
And that’s just on the question of standing, the issue of whether the doctors are even really affected enough by this issue to be heard by the court. Then were was the actual substance of the case. There, too, mifepristone appeared to be safe.
“The only justices who appeared eager to discuss whether the FDA acted unlawfully and hinted at sympathy for that argument were conservatives Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito,” according to NBC News, which failed to disclose its own conflict of interest in the case, having recently aborted the TV career of Ronna McDaniel early in the first trimester.
Campaign Watch
FEAR AND ANGER A lot more Democrats are angry and afraid about D4FRFP Donald Trump than Republicans are about Pres. Joe Biden, a new poll finds.
The new poll reportedly says that four out of ten Republicans say they would feel both angry and scared about Biden winning (which is a little confusing to me, because he’s already in office, but whatever). Meanwhile, the number of Democrats who feel the same about Trump is fifty percent higher. Six out of ten Democrats say they’d be angry and scared if Trump won.
While that bodes well for Democratic turnout, the flip side isn’t as rosy. Republicans are more excited about Trump than Democrats are about Biden. Fifty-four percent of Republicans are excited about a second Trump term (which actually strikes me as encouragingly low) while only about forty percent of Democrats are stoked to see Biden II: The Bidening.
And 40% is actually not too bad, I’d say. Democrats aren’t supposed to be excited about their candidates. Voters aren’t supposed to be excited about their candidates. Why? Because we’re not children. We’re selecting the best people we can out of a limited pool for positions that are largely circumscribed by the complex system of checks and balances within which they function.
So, yeah, alleged centrists might not be jazzed by the thought of another four (touch wood) years of Biden kowtowing to special interests. And the left might wanna hurl over the thought of four more years of fossil fuel subsidies.
But come Election Day, excited or not, they’re likely to agree that all of those scenarios are a lot better than the alternative.
TCB
Planning to start work on my draft of this story I’ve been working on today. And I think we need more reporting more than we need more hot takes, so if you want to support my original reporting, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
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Go get ‘em, kids…!
D4FRFP = Disgraced, quadicted, fraudster, rapist, former President.
I thought to myself that Fox News might blame those 6 dead immigrants (illegal, of course) for being on that bridge in the first place.