As Martin Luther King Jr. noted, “I think the tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from even voting.”

So the present is not the first time this Senate situation has existed. King was assassinated in 1968. The national holiday in celebration of his birthday is the third Monday in January.

Meanwhile, I had worked hard over several days compiling the blog-limit of 750 words to go with the foregoing heading. But when I went to post it Tuesday morning, I accidentally deleted it instead. As my printer was rendered obsolete by the most recent Apple upgrade, I had no print-out proof with which to back myself up, and I have long since forgotten how to restore a deletion. My notes have been recycled, so I am hurriedly substituting the following.

While I hope to return to the lowness of Rep. McCarthy later, please read about maverick Democrat Joe Manchin by Googling “Manchin Joins Sinema in Destroying Democratic Hopes to Pass Voting Rights” By Brett Wilkins. I like it so well, I’ll print it in part as follows (Jan. 14, 2022):

“As conservative U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin on Thursday joined his right-wing Democratic colleague Kyrsten Sinema in announcing his opposition to abolishing the Senate filibuster, progressive observers excoriated the pair — who recently supported a filibuster carve-out to raise the debt ceiling — for obstructing their party's landmark voting rights legislation.

“Manchin (W.Va.) followed his Arizona colleague in voicing support for protecting the filibuster, which racial justice campaigners call a ‘Jim Crow relic’ because it has been used so many times to block voting and civil rights legislation.

“Mother Jones senior reporter Ari Berman noted that Republican-led states ‘have passed new voter suppression laws, gerrymandered maps, and election subversion bills through simple majority, party-line votes, yet Sinema and Manchin demand [a] bipartisan supermajority to protect voting rights.’"

“Berman said the pair ‘are like spineless Republican senators during end of Reconstruction who supported filibuster of voting rights bill that would've blocked poll taxes and literacy tests,’ actions that ‘ushered in 75 years of Jim Crow.’”

So Senators Sinema and Manchin are true Democrats in name only. Manchin also is financially invested heavily in coal. Brett Wilkins is a San Francisco-based writer and activist whose work focuses on issues of war and peace and human rights.

And here’s the lead of a current Newsweek story: “Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) may be a thorn in the side of his fellow Democrats in Congress. But for some of Manchin's colleagues on Capitol Hill — and those campaigning to join him there — he is also great fodder for donation-raking ads on Facebook and Instagram. Since the House sent President Joe Biden's Build Back Better package up to the Senate in November, 15 Democrats have run more than 700 ads targeting their party bedfellow Manchin on the platforms, as the multi-trillion-dollar plan stalls in large part.

"It is extremely uncommon to name a party colleague in a negative ad outside of a primary — but then again Joe Manchin isn't a typical Democrat," noted Nate Lerner, founder of digital political consultancy Build The Wave, told Newsweek."

In Rolling Stone, Jan. 10, is an interesting story of some length by Jeff Goodell titled, “Manchin’s Coal Corruption Is So Much Worse Than You Knew."‘

Read past the tales of local horrors until coming to the description of Manchin: “The truth is, Manchin is best understood as a grifter from the ancestral home of King Coal. He is a man with coal dust in his veins who has used his political skills to enrich himself, not the people of his state. He drives an Italian-made Maserati, lives on a houseboat on the Potomac River when he is in D.C., pals around with corporate CEOs, and has a net worth of as much as $12 million.

“More to the point, his wealth has been accumulated through controversial coal-related businesses in his home state, including using his political muscle to keep open the dirtiest coal plant in West Virginia, which paid him nearly $5 million over the past decade in fees for coal handling, as well as costing West Virginia electricity consumers tens of millions of dollars in higher electricity rates (more about the details of this in a moment). Virginia Canter, who was ethics counsel to Presidents Obama and Clinton, unabashedly calls Manchin’s business operations ‘a grift’. . .”