Crooked Media - What A Day: Checks, please

In the wake of two horrific mass shootings in under a week, Democrats have raised a radical question: What if Americans could go about their daily lives without the perpetual fear of either a deadly pathogen or a man armed with a high-powered weapon of war? 
 

• A gunman opened fire in a Boulder, CO, grocery store on Monday, killing 10 people. The victims included 51-year-old Eric Talley, who was the first police officer to arrive on the scene. The other nine people killed were Tralona Bartkowiak, 49; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Teri Leiker, 51; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; Rikki Olds, 25; Neven Stanisic, 23; Denny Stong, 20; and Jody Waters, 65.
   
• The 21-year-old male suspect has been charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder. Authorities say he purchased an assault rifle just six days before the attack, on March 16. That was all of four days after a Colorado judge struck down Boulder’s assault-weapons ban, which the city enacted in 2018 as a way to prevent mass shootings exactly like this one—a common-sense response to the school shooting that left 17 people dead in Parkland, FL, earlier that year, and Colorado’s long history of devastating gun violence. 
   
• On Tuesday, President Biden called for a federal ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and urged the Senate to immediately approve two bills recently passed by the House that would close loopholes in background-check requirements. The White House is also considering a number of executive actions to regulate firearms. None of this is controversial among the majority of Americans, who have been traumatized by at least 29 shootings with four or more fatalities in the last five years alone, and would like some stricter gun laws, please.

Well, well, well, if it isn’t another extremely compelling reason to abolish the Senate filibuster.
 

• Democrats aren’t in total lockstep on gun control—Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) said Tuesday that he’s still opposed to the House bills—but what there’s no point in doing is waiting for the GOP to start giving a shit. Back in 2013, Manchin and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) introduced a narrower, bipartisan background-check plan after the Sandy Hook massacre, and in fealty to the NRA, Republicans filibustered it anyway. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell does not appear to want a mulligan on that one.
   
• We know stricter gun control would save lives, we know Americans overwhelmingly want it, and we know that while simply whispering the words “voter fraud” dishonestly into the wind is enough to launch hundreds of voter-suppression bills, no number of real mass shootings in a week will convince Republicans to take action. Until Democrats resolve to do so without them, we’re stuck with the national “normal” Barack Obama described: “We should be able to live our lives without wondering if the next trip outside our home could be our last. We should. But in America, we can’t.”
   

There are several factors that make this a hopeful moment for change: Biden has made clear that he considers gun control an urgent priority, the NRA is weaker than it’s ever been, and a whole country is asking itself why a return to public life means a return to the threat of gun violence. Why not decide to usher in a better normal?

On this week’s episode of Pod Save the People, DeRay McKesson and the crew are joined by author Cleo Wade to talk about her new book, What The Road Said. The story explores the idea that it's okay to be afraid or to sometimes wander down the wrong path. It's a great conversation! Listen and subscribe to Pod Save the People wherever you get your podcasts →

Today in Things Joe Manchin Should Be More Worried About Than Broad Gun Control Legislation, West Virginia lawmakers are trying to criminalize needle-exchange programs amid the worst HIV outbreak in the country. An outbreak in Charleston, WV, has spread to at least 50 people, most of whom are intravenous-drug users. Last month, the HIV-prevention chief at the CDC informed the Charleston City Council that the best public-health response would be to increase needle exchanges. Instead, the state legislature is moving to block them entirely, with a bill that would give local sheriffs final say over needle exchanges, require the tracking and returning of each needle, and impose criminal penalties for operating without a license—a provision aimed directly at shutting down a key volunteer needle exchange in Charleston, which launched after the city’s health department shut down its own needle exchange in 2018. We’ve already seen how moral panic as a public-health strategy works out (thanks, Mike Pence), and it’s not great.

Hospitals that have published their pricing data under a new federal rule have also blocked that information from appearing in web searches, in a creative interpretation of transparency. As of January 1, hospitals are mandated to disclose prices that patients and insurers pay for ordinary items and services. But hundreds of hospitals—including some of the biggest health-care systems in the country—have embedded code on their websites that prevents Google from displaying their pages with price lists, forcing users to click through multiple pages to hunt them down. The information is technically there, but consumers and doctors have to really want to find it. Some of the hospitals said those search-blocking code snippets had been left up unintentionally, while three major hospitals said it was meant to direct patients toward information they considered more useful than the raw pricing data.

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Evanston, IL has officially become the first U.S. city to make reparations available to its Black residents. 

Oakland, CA has become the latest city to launch a universal basic income pilot program, which will allocate $500 per month to low-income families. 

New York City has formed a Racial Justice Commission that will make policy recommendations aimed at dismantling structural racism. 

Kim Janey has become acting mayor of Boston, making her the first woman and the first Black person to occupy the position.