We’ll start with some Marcia Ball…

From Washington Post: A visual timeline of the train derailment and its impact in East Palestine, Ohio.

Shared as subscriber gift link so that everyone has access.https://t.co/AnnxFUAzTY

— Connie Schultz (@ConnieSchultz) February 18, 2023

My Valentine’s Day Date With Bernie Sanders

The senator had no idea it was Valentine’s Day. “When is that? This weekend?” Bernie Sanders asked when I greeted him for dinner on February 14 at Young Chow, a Chinese restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue that he likes. No, I told him, it is Valentine’s Day currently, right now, as this very meal is taking place. He was grumpy. “Why is Valentine’s Day in the middle of the week?”

Not that I was expecting a softer, sweeter Sanders just because of the holiday. Or even because he is 81 years old and has been a politician for much longer than I’ve been alive. This date would have no frills. We drank ice water. We ordered right away (him: pork noodle soup; me: dumplings). He wasn’t in the mood for chitchat. “Are we talking about my book?” he replied, when I asked if the flying objects that had been shot down over the United States in the past few days were aliens. (The eventual answer was deadpan: “Don’t you think if people from another universe were gonna come to the United States, they could do a little bit better?”) When a young woman rushed into the back room where we were sitting to ask for a photo, he kindly but bluntly told her to take it quickly. “You’re Bernie Sanders. Are you serious?!” she kept repeating. He was.

His book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, out next week, is a riff on themes from his presidential runs in 2016 and 2020: America is an oligopoly, politicians are complicit, and the media is biased. Not a lot is new, but this time Sanders has defined an even sicker system he calls Über-capitalism. The oligarchs are greedier and acting with near-total impunity. As he put it to me, “Every goddamn thing is money, money. And lies and lies. And corruption and corruption and corruption.” He talked in numbers and facts, a relentless drumbeat of injustices from which it was hard to steer him away: Did I know BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street control $20 trillion worth of assets? Was I aware that the weekly wage for many American workers, adjusted for inflation, is actually lower than it was 50 years ago?

“No one says to me, ‘Bernie, what do you think about three people owning more wealth than the bottom half of American society?’” he complained. “Isn’t that because we already know what you think?” I asked. “It’s not just me!” he shot back. “They don’t ask anybody!” When our dinner arrived, it was served by the owner of Young Chow and her teenage daughter, who was breathing heavily, having jumped in her car, driven all the way from McLean, and run into the restaurant to serve Sanders his soup.

Sanders may remain a dyspeptic outsider in disposition, but he is more powerfully entrenched than he has ever been, having recently been appointed chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which gives him a perch to go after some of his favorite targets: Big Pharma executives and insurance companies, union-busting bosses like Howard Schultz of Starbucks, predatory for-profit colleges, railroad companies refusing to provide adequate sick leave. I told Sanders I read a Politico story that was basically a bunch of lobbyists saying they are afraid to work with him. “Good,” he said. “They should be.”

Despite how angry he is, Sanders seems to be finally enjoying himself. Maybe it’s because he can vent his spleen without being called insane or ridiculous or a communist by members of his own party. After the president’s State of the Union, in which he called for a billionaire tax, The Wall Street Journal declared, “Joe Biden Is Bernie Sanders.” The senator has undeniably shaped the agenda of the very centrists who wrested the Democratic nomination from him on Super Tuesday 2020 more than they probably care to admit. He is proud of making big government great again and helping Biden aspire to an FDR-size presidency, no matter how far he has fallen short. “If, five years ago, somebody said, ‘We’re gonna spend $1.9 trillion on the needs of the working class of this country,’ people would’ve said, ‘You’re crazy,’” Sanders said of the American Rescue Act, which he helped draft as chair of the Senate Budget Committee in 2021. “Well, no one said it this time. Biden was there. It was very popular.”

He’s also clear-eyed about what happened after: the debacle of the Build Back Better–bill negotiations, which constituted what he calls in his book “one of the most difficult, demanding, and demoralizing years” of his three decades in Congress. “It would’ve done for working people what had not been done since the 1930s,” he said of the bill, laying the blame squarely for its failure at the feet of his colleagues Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who “sabotaged it and we lost. They played a horrific role.”

So did Biden get pushed to the left by progressives, or did he subsume them? If there’s still so much capitalism to be angry about, so much left to do, why has no challenger, Sanders included, stepped up to take on Biden in 2024? And for all the disappointments of his presidency from the left’s perspective, what is the need for revolutionary fervor if Democrats in Congress have proved themselves capable of passing not only the Rescue Act, but an infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, and other major legislation? “There is a general consensus out there that Biden is by no means the kind of progressive that we would like to see,” Sanders agreed. “But on the other hand, he’s better than people anticipated.” He got prickly when I pushed him on the relative docility of Biden’s left flank. “You’re getting off the subject of the book,” he chastised. “You’re asking me about my political future, why I’m not running against Biden. Well, I am not the only person in the world.”

If Sanders seems resigned, even defensive, it’s because he knows he doesn’t have many options. He will be 83 when his seat comes up for reelection in 2024, and the current Congress is mired in partisan muck. “Am I gonna accomplish Medicare for All? No, I will not,” he told me matter-of-factly as we finished eating. “But can I greatly expand primary health care in America? Can I lower the cost of prescription drugs? Maybe. Is it revolutionary? No. Will it impact the lives of tens of millions of people? Maybe.” You could say, at this stage in his career, that he’s a kind of incrementalist by necessity. He’s a movement, but he’s also just one guy — “an elected official,” he reminded me.

When the time came to pay the bill, the owner of the restaurant was joined not just by her daughter but by her son and two friends, who stuck a pile of printed-out pictures of their parents and history teachers for the senator to sign. They all wanted photos. “How many you got for me?” he bellowed and signed them all, drawing the line at recording a TikTok in support of a lacrosse team. The owner told Sanders her father had only graduated from the sixth grade; now her older daughter was at Stanford. He put both his hands on her shoulders and told her his father didn’t graduate high school. As we stepped out the front door, he told me, a little wistfully, “It’s a beautiful story.” I suggested that maybe he should send a text to his wife, Jane, since it was Valentine’s Day. “Okay, okay,” he said, waving me off.

Nearly 1,000 contributors protest New York Times’ coverage of trans people<

Nearly 1,000 New York Times contributors, in addition to tens of thousands of subscribers and readers of the Times, signed an open letter on Wednesday to the paper’s standards editor condemning the publication’s coverage of transgender, non-binary and gender non-conforming people.

A second letter organized by the nonprofit Glaad (the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) on Wednesday spoke against what it called “irresponsible, biased coverage of transgender people” in the Times.

The Times has asserted that its reporting is nuanced and fair, saying: “GLAAD’s advocacy mission and The Times’s journalistic mission are different.”

“As a news organization, we pursue independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care,” said Charlie Stadtlander, the Times’ director of external communications in a statement that was provided to several media organizations.

In recent months, the Times has published several stories on healthcare for trans youth, as well as opinion pieces on the subject.

The contributors’ letter said that “plenty of reporters at the Times cover trans issues fairly” but criticized the organization and specific reporters for publishing “over 15,000 words of front⁠-⁠page Times coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children” over the past eight months. That letter, signed by 30,000 supporters as of late Friday, includes Chelsea Manning, Cynthia Nixon and Roxane Gay.

The Times’ increased coverage comes at a time when anti-trans attacks have become a major part of the GOP’s electoral strategy. Republican state legislators across the country are introducing an unprecedented number of bills designed to regulate treatment of trans youth in public schools and restrict healthcare that trans people can receive from doctors.

The contributors’ letter notes that the Times’ reporting has been cited in support of anti-trans legislation, including in an amicus brief by Republican attorneys general in support of an anti-trans law in Alabama.

The contributors’ letter also criticized the Times’ framing of gender diversity as a new phenomenon and suggested that the paper’s current leadership was repeating the mistakes it made during its early coverage of gay rights and the Aids epidemic.

The second letter, from Glaad, the Human Rights Campaign and other advocacy groups, was signed by more than 100 organizations and public figures including actor Gabrielle Union and Jeopardy! champion Amy Schneider. It included specific demands: that the Times “stop printing biased anti-trans stories”, hold community meetings with trans community leaders every two months and hire at least four trans people to full-time positions within the paper.

In an internal memo, Joe Kahn, executive editor of the Times, and opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury defended the paper’s coverage of trans people as “important, deeply reported and sensitively written”. They said individual reporters have “endured months of attacks, harassment and threats”.

The memo also included a full list of the Times’ coverage of transgender issues and said it was against the spirit of the organization’s ethics policy for reporters to be engaged in the campaign. “We also have a clear policy prohibiting Times journalists from attacking one another’s journalism publicly or signaling their support for such attacks.”

A day after the open letters went public, the Times faced additional criticism for publishing an op-ed written in defense of author JK Rowling, who has come under fire for her controversial statements about the transgender community.

A spokesperson for the Times, Danielle Rhoades Ha, told the Guardian on Friday that the paper had published multiple recent opinion pieces advocating for trans rights, including one by a Times columnist, and that the paper’s editorial board “has long championed trans rights”, including in a series of editorials in 2015.

“We reject any claim that our coverage is biased,” Rhoades Ha said in a statement, pointing to “the breadth of our coverage on transgender issues across both news and opinion.”

A billboard truck also drove around the Times’ Manhattan office on Thursday, with several messages, including “Dear New York Times: Stop questioning trans people’s right to exist & access medical care,” reported NBC News.

Biden pleads with Congress to pass gun control after six killed in Mississippi

Joe Biden is once again pleading for Congress to pass meaningful gun control after a man shot six people to death – including his ex-wife and stepfather – at three different locations in a small, rural Mississippi community on Friday.

“Enough,” the president’s statement said, noting that there had been at least 73 shootings in which at least four victims were wounded or killed in the first 48 days of this year.

Invoking a phrase that pro-gun advocates often use to deflect from discussing action after mass shootings, Biden’s statement added: “Thoughts and prayers aren’t enough. Gun violence is an epidemic and Congress must act now.

“We need – need – commonsense gun law reforms.”

Biden specifically mentioned requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning firearms with high capacities for ammunition, prohibiting domestic abusers from legally having weapons regardless of their relationships to those they have preyed on, requiring the safe storage of guns, and allowing firearms manufacturers to face civil liability for “knowingly [putting] weapons of war on our streets”.

“We owe action to American communities being torn apart by gun violence,” Biden said.

Biden’s remarks came after authorities alleged that 52-year-old Richard Crum unleashed a deadly rampage in Arkabutla, an unincorporated community with fewer than 300 people in Mississippi’s Tate county.

Armed with a shotgun and two handguns, Crum, authorities said, went to a convenience store about 11am on Friday and fatally shot a 59-year-old man named Chris Boyce, who was sitting in the driver’s seat of a pickup truck outside. Boyce’s brother was sitting next to him but ran away without being physically harmed.

As Tate county sheriff’s deputies arrived at the store, they received emergency calls from the home of Crum’s 60-year-old former wife, Debra. Crum had shot her to death shortly after returning from the office of a doctor treating her for a stroke she suffered recently, according to the local TV news station WMC, based about 45 miles north in Memphis, Tennessee.

Debra Crum’s husband, George Drane, described to WMC how he tried to – but couldn’t – fight off the attacker.

“I wrestled with him, and I lost, as you can see,” Drane said, with his head wrapped in a bandage and holding back tears. “We had a good day at the doctor’s office. We ate some soup when we got home and we were going to go into town.”

Deputies tracked Crum down to the home of his stepfather, 73-year-old George McCain. Crum allegedly shot dead McCain, his stepfather’s 78-year-old sister Lynda McCain, and two repair workers who happened to be there: John Rorie, 59, and Charles Manuel, 76.

One of the murdered repair workers was in the road, and the other was in a car, authorities said. Police said they found Crum inside a car, and he was arrested after surrendering to them, though not before businesses and a school had to temporarily lock down.

The local coroner’s office said Friday that five of the dead were from Coldwater, a community that neighbors Arkabutla. Boyce was from Lakeland, Florida.

Arkabutla sits on a reservoir that is a popular fishing and recreation spot. It is also known for being the home town of James Earl Jones, the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony-winning actor.

The local sheriff, Brad Lance, said investigators had not immediately determined a motive. Lance could not recall any prior encounters between his agency and Crum, who is facing charges of capital murder and was being held without bond.

Later on Friday, Biden said he and first lady Jill Biden were grieving with the families of the victims, who were murdered four days after three were killed in an unrelated shooting on the campus of Michigan State University.

“We are … mourning … as we have for far too many Americans,” the president’s statement said.

Biden last year signed bipartisan legislation passed by Congress that expanded background checks for the youngest gun buyers while funding mental health and violence intervention programs.

But mass shootings persist despite what was hailed as the first major firearms safety bill to pass Congress in nearly three decades. The president has long argued that much more must be done to curb gun violence in the US.

Chances of more gun control measures passing on Capitol Hill seem slim, however. Biden’s fellow Democrats hold only a slender numerical advantage in the Senate, and their Republican opponents have a thin majority in the House of Representatives.

Few have done so much good for so many post-presidency.

Keeping the Carter family in my thoughts this weekend.

💙 https://t.co/8WRDbwxRo7

— Brandon Richards (@BrandonRichards) February 18, 2023

Sherrod Brown on derailment: "They never look out for their workers. They never look out for their communities. They look out for stock buybacks & dividends. Something's wrong with corporate America & something is wrong with Congress… listening too much to corporate lobbyists" pic.twitter.com/PxTtn3HZAi

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 19, 2023

Helga Zepp-LaRouche addressing the crowd after a video that describes how a nuclear exchange between US/NATO and Russia would destroy life on earth. pic.twitter.com/W19mUKlVVI

— David Weigel (@daveweigel) February 19, 2023

Tara Reade takes the stage. pic.twitter.com/YbRbOVUSI9

— David Weigel (@daveweigel) February 19, 2023

Today, 70 lawmakers sent a letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to implement reforms to Big Insurance's Medicare Advantage (MA) plans and improve health care for seniors and people with disabilities.https://t.co/DrXKHfqA83

— Wendell Potter (@wendellpotter) February 16, 2023

Visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace @MattDuss and @codepink‘s @medeabenjamin debate the trajectory of the war in Ukraine and the Biden administration’s involvement in the war. pic.twitter.com/LRqTTXlTuU

— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) February 20, 2023

Quite a dichotomy of opinions about how Biden is handling our interventionist war.

Norfolk Southern must live up to its commitments to the people of East Palestine.

And as USDOT continues to do our own work, I wrote NS to make expectations clear: industry’s pattern of resistance to safety regulations must change. pic.twitter.com/VCqn73sMxC

— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) February 20, 2023