On this day is 1944, Russian-born painter, theorist, and teacher Wassily Kandinsky died in France. Impermanence is swift.
The waxing gibbous moon set at 2:27 a.m. last night (technically, very early this morning) and will rise again at 2:22 p.m. this afternoon.
The average number of new covid cases in Georgia is now 1,458 cases per day, up 37% from two weeks ago. As the coronavirus pandemic approaches the end of a second year, no group has suffered more than elderly Americans. All along, elderly people have been known to be more vulnerable, but the scale of loss is only now coming into full view. Seventy-five percent of people who have died of the virus in the United States have been 65 or older.
One in 100 elder Americans has already died from the virus. One percent of the population over the age of 65. For people younger than 65, the ratio is closer to 1 in 1,400. Many elderly Americans continue to endure isolation and fear, long after millions of younger people have largely resumed normal lives.
Last year, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, helped stop the attempts of disgraced, twice-impeached, so-called "president" Trump to reverse the 2020 election results. But state legislators here in Georgia have since weakened his powers, and Republican Jody Hice, a Trump-backed candidate, is running to replace Raffensperger next year. Hice was one of several U.S. House members who objected to certifying Biden’s victory in Georgia, and last December, Hice was one of 126 Republican members of Congress who unsuccessfully urged the Supreme Court to stop several key states from certifying Biden’s victory. Hice has since tried to re-write history by portraying the January 6th insurrectionists as "the real victims" of that lawless day. If elected as Secretary of State, there is no reason to believe that Georgia will send electors to Washington that represent the popular vote of the people.
Georgia Republicans have also passed a law that gives a commission they control the power to remove local election officials. There was much discussion of the portion of the law that forbids people from providing food or water to people waiting on line to vote, which is cruel and unnecessarily punitive, but very little attention to the much more significant issue of dismantling locally-elected vote-oversight officials.
Georgia's moves are part of a nationwide anti-democratic movement, inspired by Trump but much larger than him, that is making significant progress. In those swing states that decide modern presidential elections, this movement has already changed some laws and ousted election officials, with the aim of overturning future results. It has justified the changes with blatantly false statements claiming that Biden did not really win the 2020 election.
Disturbingly, the movement has encountered surprisingly little opposition. Most leading Republican politicians have either looked the other way or supported the anti-democratic movement. In the House, Republicans ousted Liz Cheney from a leadership position because she called out Trump’s lies.
Most Democratic officials, for their part, have been focused on issues other than election security, like the covids and the economy. It’s true that congressional Democrats tried to pass a new voting rights bill, only to be stymied by Republican opposition and the filibuster. But the Democratic efforts have been sprawling and unfocused. They have included proposals — on voter-ID rules and mail-in ballots, for example — that are almost certainly less important than a federal law to block the overturning of elections.
All of which has created a remarkable possibility: In the 2024 presidential election, Republican officials in at least one state may overturn a legitimate election result, citing fraud that does not exist, and award the state’s electoral votes to the Republican nominee. If this occurs, America will no longer be a functioning democracy but instead become an autocracy, and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.
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