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I’m working my way through your emails on making sense of the post-Trump Era. Please keep them coming. (See the linked post for more details.) They are fascinating but like the topic itself they are hard to bring into focus. There are common themes but they are elusive. I will be publishing a number of them. But I wanted to start with this note from TPM Reader CC, who lives in Australia. It’s a very different perspective given that’s from someone in a foreign country on the other side of the world. But I found it very interesting as a window into what America now looks like from abroad …
Where Things Stand: Bush Describes Modern-Day GOP As ‘Nativist’
“It’s not exactly my vision,” former President George W. Bush said of his Party during a live interview with NBC’s “Today” show this morning.
A very interesting backgrounder from TPM Reader AH on the specifics of the kind of stroke that killed Brian Sicknick …
Hi, Josh! This is a topic I really do know something about – I am consulted to see several patients for stroke every day. The news about Brian Sicknick having died from a brainstem stroke is a bit of a surprise to me, because they are uncommon in general, and for a young, healthy guy to have one raises my eyebrows. To die from one is less surprising – these are the most, or maybe tied for the most lethal strokes you could possibly have.
What To Make of the Death of Brian Sicknick?
What are we to make of yesterday’s news that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died of ‘natural causes’? Sicknick’s death and to a much lesser degree the suicides of two other Capitol Police Officers within days of the insurrection are inextricably bound up in the story of that day and the gravity of those events. The Medical Examiner’s comments to the Post were themselves contradictory, at least in layman’s terms. Francisco J. Diaz found no discrete injury such as a head wound that would have been a proximate cause of Sicknick’s strokes. He also found no sign of acute respiratory constriction, which would be the standard sign of an allergic reaction to chemical spray which also could have caused a subsequent stroke. Yet Diaz also said of the events of January 6th and Sicknick’s confrontation with insurrectionists that “all that transpired played a role in his condition.”
What does that mean?
Arkansas Legislature Sends Sweeping Slate Of Voter Restrictions To Guv’s Desk
Where Things Stand: A Return To The Other Very American Problem
The pandemic has brought to a head the complexities of one very uniquely American problem: the emphasis we as a country put on individual freedoms, which, this past year, has repeatedly run headlong into the need to care for our fellow man during a global health crisis.
It’s also revealed in new ways a more depressing American problem: mass shootings.
Where Things Stand: Anti-Trans Bills Are The GOP’s New Culture War. But Most Americans Aren’t On Board
Without any real policy agenda, Republicans in Congress have largely seized on various fronts in the culture war to distract from Biden’s successes. And GOPers at the state level are doing the same, with a new heightened focus on an element of their socially conservative base’s traditional values: Going after the LGBT community.
Lately, that’s meant a fresh wave of anti-trans rights bills.