Thanks obf! Some music to celebrate the landing. David Bowie again!

Not even the full extent

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/539347-life-expectancy-falls-1-year-in-biggest-drop-since-wwii-amid-pandemic?rl=1

Life expectancy fell one year in the first six months of 2020 in the biggest drop since World War II as the country dealt with the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report released Thursday.

Initial data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) determined that the life expectancy fell from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77.8 years during the first half of 2020. Men saw a drop of 1.2 years to 75.1 years, while women saw a decrease of 0.9 years to 80.5 years amid the pandemic.

Black and Hispanic Americans experienced an even greater drop in life expectancy, as their communities have recorded a disproportionate number of COVID-19 cases and deaths.

Life expectancy for Black Americans fell 2.7 years to 72, and it dropped 1.9 years for Hispanic Americans to 79.9 years. Meanwhile, white Americans experienced a 0.8-year decrease to 78. The CDC’s initial data did not report the change in life expectancy among Asian or Native Americans.

The drop in life expectancy, which measures how long on average a baby born today can expect to live, shows the early impact of the coronavirus crisis in 2020. Last year was already confirmed to be the deadliest year in U.S. history, surpassing 3 million of all deaths in the country for the first time, according to The New York Times.

“What is really quite striking in these numbers is that they only reflect the first half of the year … I would expect that these numbers would only get worse,” Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, a health equity researcher and dean at the University of California, San Francisco, said, according to The Associated Press.

Hello friends, management deemed mid 20s as warmer and made us go in despite the blackouts and road conditions. Its good to see the world waking up to Texas being a failed state, too bad they will forget by Saturday.

Minimum wage helps blue states’ businesses

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/feb/18/republicans-minimum-wage-small-business

A longtime client of mine, a lifelong Republican, an ardent supporter of Donald Trump, said something very unusual to me the other day. He said: “I support a national $15-an-hour minimum wage.”

This comment kind of seemed out of character. My client runs a 100-person manufacturing firm. He is very conservative in his opinions. He hates “big government”. He opposes the regulations and spending supported by Democrats. He’s a good person, a smart business owner and a fair employer. He strongly feels he should be in charge of his employee’s wages, not “some bureaucrat in Washington”. He would not seem to be the kind of person that you would think supports a higher federal minimum wage.

So why does he? Is this some form of latent altruism? Is it because he wants more pay equality and better income distribution? No, those are not the main reasons. For him, a business owner, it’s all about competitiveness. A $15 per hour federal minimum wage would “simply level the playing field”, he says.

But what has been missed in all of these analysis is parity. We live in an enormous country with hundreds of millions of people. Up until now, the minimum wage issue has been delegated to the states. Which means that there’s been a growing disparity among wages paid. Companies located in Texas can pay their workers less and, thanks to those relative lower wages, the cost of living in those areas is also less. Thanks to Covid, cloud technology, changing workplaces and a newfound appreciation among many for a better work life balance, more companies and startups are tempted to gravitate to such places.

Unfortunately, this is a big problem for all those companies in all those states (California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois. Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Virginia and Washington DC.) that have passed legislation to increase their minimum wage to $15 an hour. According to the US Census Bureau, these states are home to 3.2m companies with employees, or approximately 41% of all the small businesses with employees in the country.

Is it fair that they must pay more for their employees when their American competitors in other states pay so much less? Do you blame these companies for outsourcing work to lower-cost countries just to stay in the game?

So maybe, just maybe, to fix that disadvantage, an increase in the federal minimum wage would actually be a good thing for those business owners. It will level the playing field. It will boost competitiveness. It will keep a lot of work in the United States and not overseas.

“Please,” my right-leaning client says. “Increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. It will be a boost to my business.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/us/politics/biden-immigration.html

President Biden has said repeatedly that he wants to create a path to citizenship for all of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.

But even as he prepares to push hard for the broadest possible overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, he and his aides have started to signal openness to more targeted approaches that could win citizenship for smaller, discrete groups of undocumented immigrants. At a CNN town hall on Tuesday, he said such efforts would be acceptable “in the meantime.”

In a private phone call with activists on Wednesday, top immigration aides to Mr. Biden said they supported what they called a “multiple trains” strategy, which could target citizenship for “Dreamers,” the young immigrants brought into the country illegally as children; farm workers who have toiled for years in American fields; and others.

Smaller bills could move forward as the president tries to build support for the broader legislation, which is scheduled to be introduced on Thursday, according to two people who were on the call.

If he chooses to move step by step, Mr. Biden appears unlikely to anger the most powerful pro-immigration groups, which are embracing a more pragmatic strategy after spectacular defeats under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

For more than two decades, activists have tried and failed to secure passage of a broad overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws that would create a path to citizenship for most undocumented immigrants, a faster path for Dreamers, expanded visa access for highly skilled workers and a new program for seasonal agricultural laborers.

They are betting that Mr. Biden will struggle even more than his predecessors did to win support from a Republican Party that became more anti-immigrant during the Trump administration.

While the activists are willing to let Mr. Biden try for a bipartisan deal this year, they have warned that they will not wait forever.

“We want 11 million people legalized. That is our North Star,” said Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice and a veteran of immigration wars in the nation’s capital for more than 30 years. “But we can’t come home empty-handed. We’re not going to adopt an all or nothing approach. We have to achieve a breakthrough.”

Bernie is senior but the article does not say what his position on this was.

https://static.theintercept.com/amp/senate-generational-power-shift.html

SENIOR SENATE DEMOCRATS recently launched a rearguard attempt to regain power they’d lost in December but were repelled by new members of the Senate in an overlooked but potentially consequential internal caucus battle.

In December, Chris Murphy, the junior Democratic senator from Connecticut, pushed for and won a change to caucus rules that would strip power from the chairs of the most important committees. (Caucus rules can be amended by a majority vote of the caucus.) Then in January, senior Democrats attempted to delay the implementation of Murphy’s rules change and were unsuccessful. Multiple Senate sources, who spoke anonymously to be candid about internal politics, told The Intercept that the discussion was contentious.

Murphy’s success is part of a larger shift in power toward more recently elected Democrats in the caucus, reflecting the rise of members less yoked to the mythology of the Senate as a haven of deliberation and bipartisanship. New members of the party drove partial reform of the filibuster in 2013 and are now pushing to go further, arguing that Republicans are not and won’t ever be willing to be reasonable negotiating partners and that the filibuster should be completely eliminated.

UNDER THE PREVIOUS Democratic caucus rules, committee gavels were doled out by seniority, and those chairs then had first dibs on the most prized subcommittees as well — meaning that senior members could control the flow of legislation through the committee from beginning to end, or could chair a key policy committee, while also chairing the appropriations subcommittee that funded that policy area, giving them additional influence.

In December, Murphy and his colleagues argued that the double-dip of power was too much and proposed a rule that committee chairs couldn’t have their pick of select subcommittees until everyone else in the caucus had a shot. Senior members pushed back, led by Sens. Patrick Leahy, elected in Vermont in 1974 and serving as chair of the Appropriations Committee; Patty Murray, elected in Washington in 1992 and serving as chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee as well as holding a leadership position; Tom Carper, elected in Delaware in 2000 and serving as chair of the Committee on Environment and Public Works; and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, elected in 1996 and serving as chair of the Armed Services Committee.

Passions were high on both sides, said one person on the call. Again, the caucus sided with Murphy and the newer members of the Senate.

The votes were cast by secret ballot, but senators were told by leadership that the tally was “decisively” in favor of moving forward immediately with Murphy’s reform — a Senate version of the Confucian proverb that no one deserves a second bowl of rice until everyone has had a first.

The rules change and the effort behind it have a variety of implications beyond the shuffling of gavels. On the internal politics front, it suggests that Murphy’s cache among his colleagues is rising.

And on the Republican front

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/us/trump-mcconnell-republicans.html

Senator Mitch McConnell’s colleagues may not have deep personal affection for their often distant and inscrutable leader, but there is considerable appreciation for how he has spared them from difficult votes while maintaining a laserlike focus on keeping the Senate majority.

His approach on Saturday at the conclusion of former President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment trial seemed aimed at doing just that. After voting to acquit Mr. Trump of inciting the Jan. 6 riot that invaded the Senate chamber, Mr. McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, began a fiery tirade, declaring him “practically and morally responsible” for the assault. In essence, Mr. McConnell said he found Mr. Trump guilty but not subject to impeachment as a private citizen.

The strategy appeared twofold: Don’t stoke a full-on revolt by Trump supporters the party needs by voting to convict, but demonstrate to anti-Trump Republicans — particularly big donors — that he recognized Mr. Trump’s failings and is beginning to steer the party in another direction.

But it did not exactly produce the desired result. Instead, it has drawn Mr. McConnell into a vicious feud with the former president, who lashed out at him on Tuesday as a “dour, sullen and unsmiling political hack,” and given new cause for Republican division that could spill into the midterm elections. And it has left some Republicans bewildered over Mr. McConnell’s strategy and others taking a harder line, saying the leader whose focus was always the next election had hurt the party’s 2022 prospects.

The miscalculation has left Mr. McConnell in an unusual place — on the defensive, with Mr. Trump pressing for his ouster, and no easy way to extricate himself from the political bind.

If Sen. Cruz had resigned back in January after helping gin up a violent insurrection that killed several people, he could’ve taken his vacation in peace. Texans should continue to demand his resignation.

But don’t blame me for this, my points are on Amtrak! 🚊 https://t.co/CAWCgtxQ73

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 18, 2021

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/02/julia-salazar-andrew-cuomo-new-york-covid-nursing-homes

In 2019, Julia Salazar became the first member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to serve in New York’s state legislature and also the youngest woman elected in the history of the New York State Senate. In 2020, she won the Democratic primary and reelection to State Senate District 18 in landslides.

In office, Senator Salazar has championed tenants’ rights, criminal justice reform, women’s rights, and the decriminalization of sex work. She played a leading role in winning the strongest legislative protections for tenants in New York history.

She spoke to Jacobin’s Hadas Thier about how she and other progressive lawmakers have stood up to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s abuses of power and budget cuts and have fought for an agenda that benefits working-class New Yorkers.

Q: You’ve gone from the last couple of years of being the lone socialist in Albany to being part of a slate of socialists in Albany. What kind of difference does that make in terms of what is possible to win?

A: It is already giving me more hope and confidence in what we are able to win. We now have six democratic socialists in the Senate and the Assembly. I’m realistic about what this means in the context of a legislature of a little more than two hundred people. But it grows our ability to internally organize our colleagues.

And we represent more than just six people. Each of us respectively won, and collectively we won, with a mandate. So we’re not just going to Albany as six people. Collectively, the six of us represent something like a million New Yorkers. That is really powerful. I think that we have the opportunity to advocate for a socialist policy agenda, but also to bring more legislators on board to this policy agenda.

And then there are the things that are not as easy to quantify, but that are obviously really meaningful. We have the most socialists that we have had in the legislature in a century. It is historic that we have this many socialists in the state legislature. That is very meaningful for a socialist movement in the United States as a whole.