Peniel Joseph writes for CNN on why the 44th President of the United States (who turned 60 Wednesday), Barack Hussein Obama, still matters.

Last summer, Obama said that “Black Lives Matter” but decried efforts to “Defund the Police” as bad politics that alienated potential allies.

Yet, time out of office has radicalized the preternaturally cautious Obama into calling for an end to the filibuster, if that’s what’s required to preserve democracy. His characterization of the filibuster as “another Jim Crow relic” offered further proof that Obama 2.0 displays a willingness to confront America’s long history of structural racism with the kind of bracing candor he rarely embraced as President.

Obama continues to serve as a Rorschach test for the American political imagination. He likely always will. The first Black president didn’t so much as flip the script of American politics as write himself into it. Obama proved to be a fervent believer in American exceptionalism.

E J Montini writes for The Arizona Republic that the four Capitol Police officers who have died by suicide since (and because of) the Jan. 6 insurrection should be remembered as “casualties of war.”

They range in experience from nearly 20 years on the job to barely five. But when the call went out about a mob breaching the U.S. Capitol, they answered. Now they’re gone.

Officer Howie Liebengood, Officer Jeffrey Smith, Officer Gunther Hashida and Officer Kyle DeFreytag.

They will not get proper credit for being casualties of war.

But that is what they are.

And, sadly, they died as a result of a conflict with domestic – not foreign – terrorists.

Mary C. Curtis writes for Roll Call on the tendency of Republican politicians and other “tough guys and gals” to “punch down” at others.

McCarthy can almost taste the speakership, with voting restrictions in the states and new gerrymandered districts being teed up, and the Supreme Court and a Senate stalled on voting legislation helping to clear the way. He’s already referring to Pelosi as a lame duck. For him and his followers, the angry rhetoric isn’t something to be ashamed of; it’s dessert, a way to rile up the base and rake in the cash.

[…]

Does he remember or care, as he’s piling on, that the rioters particularly targeted Pelosi, defiled her office and called out “Where’s Nancy?” in their best impression of Jack Nicholson’s demented howl in “The Shining”?

Jason Johnson of The Grio (and MSNBC, of course) explains why Nina Turner lost in her bid to succeed Marcia Fudge as the representative for Ohio’s 11th Congressional District.

If you could liquefy schadenfreude and inject it directly into your veins, I know a lot of Democrats who’d be high as a kite right now after Turner’s loss, but dunking on Turner or the Progressive Establishment doesn’t do anybody any good. The progressive model of success, finding a local activist or politician, training and funding them to run against an out-of-touch or do-nothing incumbent is a good model. That’s how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat Joe Crowley and Jamal Bowman beat Eliot Engel in New York; it’s how Cori Bush beat William Lacy Clay in Missouri, and how Ayanna Pressley beat Michael Capuano in Massachusetts.

The Progressive Establishment model didn’t work in Ohio because Turner wasn’t an underdog and hadn’t been in the district recently but also because mainline Democrats ignore progressives at their peril. At the same time, progressives shouldn’t be calling Black voters in Ohio stupid or blaming outside money when they simply ran a candidate who had every technical advantage but couldn’t reconcile half a decade of attacking the Democratic Party with running in a heavily Democratic district.

Speaking of former Rep. Michael Capuano … this morning, Mr. Capuano and former Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas jointly penned an opinion piece for The Boston Globe about various ways in which the U.S. might be able to heal a divided nation.

One reason voter turnout in primaries is low is the lack of attention many primary races garner. What may help draw more attention to primaries would be for each region of the country to move all their primaries to the same day. Another option would be for each state to hold its primary on the first Tuesday of the month, mimicking the presidential election. Instead of having primaries scattered over the course of several months on different days, states should coordinate with each other to develop ideas for consolidating primary dates or other changes that would draw increased attention to primaries.

Dana Rubenstein and Katie Glueck of The New York Times report that in the wake of the release of the damning investigative report detailing the repeated pattern of sexual harassment by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whatever political allies that Cuomo had continue to abandon him.

His only apparent hope is that, during the time it takes to draw up impeachment papers as the State Assembly advances its investigation, the reservoir of public good will he earned early in the pandemic will stifle the sentiment against him in the legislature and elsewhere.

Certainly, in interviews on Wednesday across the state, not all voters saw the report as decisive.

“He is a single man, he is a human being, so mistakes can be made,” said Melissa Edwards, 39, as she began her workout routine in Southeast Queens, suggesting that the accusations paled in comparison to those by women who “are being raped and molested by people — look at Jeffrey Epstein or Bill Cosby.”

Tony Romm and Yeganeh Torbati of The Washington Post report that Infrastructure Week has brought out the lobbyists.

Those groups collectively have spent more than $426 million in their lobbying efforts, which includes trying to sway lawmakers and regulators on far more than just infrastructure, the center’s data show. The activity reflects a dramatic uptick from the same period one year ago, when more than 1,300 lobbying operations sought to target Washington on infrastructure. Their total spending on all issues over that period exceeded $291 million.

Already, these lobbyists have secured a number of victories. A push publicly and privately by conservative advocacy groups including FreedomWorks ultimately helped prompt a bipartisan group of senators to halt efforts to increase new funding for the Internal Revenue Service. Some Democrats, along with the Biden administration, had hoped to include the funding boost as a way of beefing up tax enforcement on corporations and the wealthy, and raising government revenue.

Charles M. Blow of The New York Times writes about two different “kinds” of protest.

But what we have seen recently are different kinds of protest: organized, policy specific protests, sparked not by individual tragedy, but born of plan and strategy. They are nonviolent. Many of their participants and leaders are older. They are crowdsourced on social media and may never go viral.

These protests harken back to the Civil Rights Movement and even borrow some of its language, philosophy and tactics.

As Bishop William Barber II, president of Repairers of the Breach and a co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, told me Wednesday about the difference in protest styles, on the one hand there are those who either “want to ride a wave or have a moment,” and then there are those who engage in protest, “direct actions,” where the act of protesting itself is the thing that “creates tension.”

Phil Galewitz of Kaiser Health News brings the good news that 90% of America’s seniors are now vaccinated against COVID-19.

[…]

Wohl said political leanings that have skewed vaccination rates across the country have had much less of an impact on older adults. “The threat of covid-19 is so real for those 65 and over that it transcends many of the other issues that are complicating vaccination rates,” he said. “Wisdom and fear have really led to impressive immunization rates.”

The pandemic has been especially vicious to older adults. Nearly 80% of deaths have been among people age 65 and up. Nursing homes and other long-term care facilities were hit hard, and many banned family members and other visitors from entering, isolating residents. Even older adults living at home often kept their distance from family and friends as they sought to avoid the coronavirus. So when vaccines became available in December, many states targeted seniors first.

That effort has proved successful, although rates vary among states. Hawaii, Pennsylvania and Vermont vaccinated more than 99% of their seniors, while West Virginia ranks last with 78%.

Stephen M. Walt of Foreign Policy has an interesting take on the positive use of utilizing “nationalism” to defeat COVID-19.

It began with Trump, who was more concerned with what the virus might do to his electoral prospects than he was with the well-being of the nation. It continued with the millions of people—most but not all from Make America Great Again-land—who became convinced wearing a simple cotton mask was not a rather trivial sacrifice for the good of their country and community but a dangerous infringement on their liberty. In other words, their personal comfort and egos were more important than either the health of their fellow Americans or the broad common goal of putting the pandemic behind us. And it has continued with all those against vaccinations, whose selfish refusal to be inoculated has allowed the delta variant to spread rapidly and bring the latest wave of infections.

The most despicable of all are the politicians, pundits, and grifters who have sought to advance their careers by feeding their audiences patently false information and reinforcing vaccine reluctance. Even worse, such dangerous misinformation comes primarily from some of the same people who have their hair on fire about dangers from other countries and are quick to accuse Black Lives Matter protesters of being unpatriotic. They say they want to “make America great,” but their actions are prolonging the pandemic and weakening the nation relative to others. It may not be treason, but it sure ain’t patriotism.

Megan K. Stack of The New Yorker writes about the near-blackout on press coverage in Afghanistan now that the U.S. is ending their military presence in the country.

Finally this morning, of course I am not going to migrate to the Front Page and leave my bestie The Angry Grammarian behind. This morning, he writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer on the evolution of the use of the term “woke.”

Then in the late 2000s, “I stay woke” was the catchy refrain of Erykah Badu’s 2007 song “Master Teacher.” Lead Belly didn’t have Twitter, but after #blacklivesmatter took off as a hashtag in 2014, #staywoke frequently accompanied it. […]

In 2021, conservatives have cannily identified woke’s catchiness — and they’ve pounced.

Donald Trump never once publicly uttered the adjective woke when he lived in the White House, but he seems to have learned the word recently, calling out “woke” generals in June and saying that “woke politics” accounted for the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team’s disappointing Olympics performance. Since the start of 2021, Republican politicians including Pat Toomey, Brian Fitzpatrick, Scott Perry, Mitch McConnell, Elise Stefanik, Mike Pompeo, Brian Kemp, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, Dan Crenshaw, Rick Scott, Jim Jordan, Lauren Boebert, Rand Paul, Matt Gaetz, and Louis Gohmert — to name a few — have all derided “woke” liberals/socialists/military/culture/mobs/banks/whatever.

Everyone have a great day!