The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — I’ve got to write this fast. So listen up.

A massive winter storm named Izzy is on the way from the west, or really swirling in from the southwest. When did they start naming winter storms like hurricanes? Anyway it will hit this afternoon with more snow, freezing rain and wind gusts up to 50 mph, so I’ve got to evacuate the campground and park for the night in a picnic area away from the big trees that could end it all by landing on my head.

Monday is a federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. so I wanted to write about the state of civil rights.

But a major health crisis, a science-climate crisis, a foreign policy crisis, a legal crisis and a political crisis have us on the run in a perfect storm of disasters. Call it Armageddon 2022.

I don’t have to tell you we are still at risk in an ongoing Covid pandemic with the Omicron variant causing sickness and death still, in spite of all the efforts to get people vaccinated, boosted and wearing masks.

You can look out your window and see the climate crisis for yourself. You don’t need me to keep repeating that warning for today. We have not done enough to tackle it and no matter what we do now, we are going to face crisis after crisis on the climate front for the rest of our lives.

I would really rather avoid talking about what Putin is up to lately, threatening freedom in Ukraine and cyber war on the world. I wrote about that for years and people just ignored it like everything else.

The dual investigation of Trump’s insurrection by the House Select Committee and the United States Department of Justice is ongoing, if moving too slowly for most people who have seen the evidence and think more of those involved should be locked up for a very long time — especially the mob boss-dictator-rat king president who incited it all.

At least the Oath Keepers face charges of conspiracy to commit sedition now, and the indictments contain overwhelming evidence, so they will spend a long time behind bars.

Oath Keepers Leader and Cohorts Indicted for Seditious Conspiracy

So what of the political crisis?

The Washington Post and other legacy press outfits are writing about President Joe Biden as if he was as bad as Trump, George W. Bush and Richard Nixon. That’s what fair and balanced reporting gets you. Let’s all prove how critical we can be, and never mind that slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

WP: ‘One of those weeks’: From voting rights to vaccines, Biden experiences the limits of his office — and the fragility of his presidency

The New York Times gets closer to the facts of the matter.

With the door slammed shut this week on federal legislation to create new protections for access to voting, Democrats face an electoral landscape in which they will need to spend heavily to register and mobilize voters if they are to overcome the hodgepodge of new voting restrictions enacted by Republicans across the country.

Democrats rode record turnout to win the presidency and control of the Senate in 2020 after embracing policies that made it easier to vote with absentee ballots during the pandemic. But Republican-controlled state legislatures have since enacted a range of measures that undo those policies, erect new barriers to voting and remove some of the guardrails that halted former President Donald J. Trump’s drive to overturn the election.

Now, Democrats’ best chance for counteracting the new state laws is gone after Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, declared her opposition on Thursday to President Biden’s push to lift the filibuster to pass the party’s two voting access bills.

That failure infuriated Democrats and left them contemplating a long and arduous year of organizing for the midterm elections, where they already face headwinds from Mr. Biden’s low approval ratings, inflation, congressional redistricting and the persistent pandemic.

Democratic officials and activists now say they are resigned to having to spend and organize their way around the new voting restrictions — a prospect many view with hard-earned skepticism, citing the difficulty of educating masses of voters on how to comply with the new rules.

They say it would require them to compensate by spending tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars more on voter-registration and turnout programs — funds that might otherwise have gone to promoting Democratic candidates.

So that’s it. Face facts.

Get busy, Democrats, organizing to get out the vote in November, 2022. You have no choice. The president can’t save you from a couple of greedy, corrupt members of Congress. I don’t think Abraham Lincoln’s lobbyists could buy their votes. You know who I mean. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema.

As CBS News reported on “Sunday Morning,” Biden ran for president on this promise of a return to normalcy … to stop the chaos of the Trump years.

He succeeded, as we reported, because the Democrats for once worked together altruistically to combat the selfishness of Trump.

“The persistence of the pandemic, and the persistence of the pandemic disruption on American society, I think, means that Biden can’t really claim that this has been a victorious year. It’s okay. It’s meh,” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie told CBS’s John Dickerson.

Let’s face it. Joe Biden just can’t muster the MoJo of Barack Obama. Obama was a rock star, and we can’t always find rock stars to run for office, unfortunately.

As Maureen Dowd put it in the Saturday New York Times, what we need is More Mojo, Joe!

Oh, the tribulations of Job Biden! Kyrsten Sinema humiliated him. Mitch McConnell disrespected him. The Supreme Court blocked him. Vladimir Putin scorned him. Inflation defied him. Covid stalked him. Even Stacey Abrams stiffed him.

There are any number of sentiments to feel about what the president is enduring right now, and we should feel all of them. Pity, anger, disappointment, embarrassment — and hope that he can get it going, because the alternative is really bad.

As hapless as Biden and his coterie are, we can’t give up on the president because he’s all that stands between us and the apocalypse at the hands of Trump, DeSantis, Pence, Kristi Noem and future Chief Justice Amy Coney Barrett. …

Joe Biden better Build Better or he won’t be Back. If he doesn’t turn it around, he has cleared the way to a Republican rout in this fall’s midterms. And in 2024, who knows how bad it can get?

Poor us.

Snow on King Holiday

If the weather cooperates, we may head downtown to the Martin Luther King memorial on the national mall on Monday afternoon to get pictures in the snow. I’ve photographed it in the sun and at night and written about it before.

The lesson of this holiday rests in a quote I’ve never seen anyone else report or use from King, demonstrating just how well read he was and how he knew enough to identify the core, root, fundamental struggle us humans face, not just African Americans.

“Everyone must decide whether they will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.” – MLK

E.O. Wilson provides the other clue, for those who have an ear and can hear.

“In a group, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals,” Wilson argued. “But, groups of altruistic individuals beat groups of selfish individuals. Competition between groups selects for pro-social groups. Competition within groups tend to undermine groups. The rest is commentary.”

So instead of viewing this crisis moment as just another health crisis, a science-climate crisis, a foreign policy crisis, a legal crisis and a political crisis, what if we viewed this time as a crisis for human survival on planet Earth and a problem of human evolution?

Whatever You Do, Look Up. Otherwise We’re All Going to Die

___

If you support truth in reporting with no paywall, and fearless writing with no popup ads or sponsored content, consider making a contribution today with GoFundMe or Patreon or PayPal.