President Joe Biden in his first days in office issued an executive order seeking to put the U.S. on track to welcome 125,000 refugees in the first full fiscal year of his administration, from a historic low of 15,000 set by the previous occupant of the Oval Office. Until that first full fiscal year, Biden also proposed quadrupling the current fiscal year’s cap, to 62,500 refugees.  Daily Kos’ Laura Clawson noted at the time that Biden’s subsequent visit to the State Department “sen[t] an unmistakable message ... that priorities have changed in the federal government.” But two months later, CNN reports that Biden has yet to sign the presidential determination, which would begin to put his plan into motion. Lacking that final signature, hundreds of refugees in recent weeks have seen their flights to the U.S. cancelled. 

The Biden administration has announced that they are «recommending» a momentary pause in usage of the Johnson & Johnson one-shot COVID-19 vaccine after six U.S. patients out of 6.8 million administered doses developed a rare but «severe type of blood clot» in the weeks after vaccination. The pause is expected to last only days, but already Americans are reporting Johnson & Johnson vaccination appointments for today being cancelled. While the White House asserts that the increased supply of other vaccines means there will be little overall effect on vaccination rates, there's no question the cancellation of appointments will disrupt many Americans' own efforts to get vaccinated, and the news is likely to further convince some vaccine skeptics to avoid getting any of the available shots.

President Joe Biden in his first days in office issued an executive order seeking to put the U.S. on track to welcome 125,000 refugees in the first full fiscal year of his administration, from a historic low of 15,000 set by the previous occupant of the Oval Office. Until that first full fiscal year, Biden also proposed quadrupling the current fiscal year’s cap, to 62,500 refugees.  Daily Kos’ Laura Clawson noted at the time that Biden’s subsequent visit to the State Department “sen[t] an unmistakable message ... that priorities have changed in the federal government.” But two months later, CNN reports that Biden has yet to sign the presidential determination, which would begin to put his plan into motion. Lacking that final signature, hundreds of refugees in recent weeks have seen their flights to the U.S. cancelled. 

Racism is a pandemic that has been present in the U.S. far before COVID-19. Black people have been victims of not only police brutality and state-sanctioned violence for generations, but other forms of racism including incidents that target children. A day care in Georgia has been called out for racism after videos shared online depicted white children being prioritized for lunch.  An online livestream video depicted Black children at Roswell day care waiting to be fed as white children had already received their meals. The incident was reported by a family who saw the footage while checking on their 2-year-old child at the Kids ‘R' Kids Roswell location, CBS News reported.

The police officer who shot and killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright has been identified as Kim Potter, a 26-year veteran of the Brooklyn Center Police Department who recently served as the head of its police union. In body camera video, Potter can be heard shouting, “I’ll tase you,” and “Taser Taser Taser,” before instead shooting Wright with her gun. She is currently on administrative leave. The medical examiner concluded that Wright “died of a gunshot wound of the chest and manner of death is homicide.” Brooklyn Center Mayor Mike Elliott has called for Potter to be fired, saying: “My position is that we cannot afford to make mistakes that lead to the loss of life of other people in our profession.”

Senate Republicans, with an assist from Democrat Joe Manchin, are doing their level best to insist that it would destroy the economy to repeal the 2017 Trump tax scam, and that spending now on keeping all of the systems for the whole goddamned nation from crumbling in to the ground in the next decade is dangerously radical and expensive. On both fronts, they're full of crap. And people who are much better at doing that economics stuff than me say so. Manchin, the self-appointed king of the Senate, has been proclaiming lots of stuff about how the Senate should work lately, much of it ill-informed and all of it delusional. Like the assertion that there are 10 Republicans who would love to pass President Joe Biden's priorities if President Joe Biden was just a little be nicer to them. And let them keep all their tax cuts. Or maybe Manchin is projecting, because Manchin wants to keep that tax cut. His proclamation at the beginning of Biden's first infrastructure week was that raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% is just not going to work for him, but 25% might, and «If I don't vote to get on it, it's not going anywhere.» Not that he is relishing this moment in the sun or anything.

The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Carolyn Fiddler, and Matt Booker, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar. Leading Off ● LA-02: With less than two weeks to go before the all-Democratic April 24 runoff, EMILY's List has launched what Politico reports is a $341,000 TV buy in support of state Sen. Karen Carter Peterson. This appears to be the first negative TV commercial of the campaign directed against Peterson's foe, fellow state Sen. Troy Carter, though a pro-Carter PAC recently launched a spot against Peterson. Carter led Peterson by a 36-23 margin during the March 24 all-party primary, but no one has released any polls since then that might indicate whether Carter still has an advantage for the second round of voting. EMILY's ad features a jazz band (this is a spot airing in New Orleans, after all) playing as the narrator argues that Carter is «out of tune»—here a saxophonist sounds a discordant note—and only «pretend[s] to be progressive.» The commercial goes on to declare that Carter is «endorsed by Republicans» (a statement that's followed by a harsh piano chord bringing the music to a halt) and that he «doesn't support the Green New Deal.» By contrast, the narrator says, Peterson is the one who «is on beat with us» and praises her for «fighting for COVID relief and affordable healthcare for our community» as the band plays harmoniously.

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We begin today’s roundup with The New York Times and its editorial on President Biden’s take on climate change: Anyone with the energy to slog through acres of verbiage will find the elements of a plausible strategy embedded in his $2 trillion recovery plan. The plan is not exactly what his energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, enthusiastically described as a “once in a century” chance to reinvent America’s energy delivery system. (One would hope for more such moments in this century.) But it offers a great deal more than one would deduce from the reactions of left-of-center groups. The Center for Biological Diversity, for instance, complained about the plan’s “gimmicky subsidies,” its fealty to free markets and its failure to end oil and gas drilling much more quickly. [...] The plan has many moving parts, two of which are transformative. One is aimed at reducing emissions from cars and trucks, America’s biggest source of carbon dioxide emissions. Mr. Biden is betting heavily on electric vehicles, which today make up only 2 percent of the vehicles on the road. To “win the E.V. market,” as he put it (China being the main competitor), he proposes $174 billion to build half a million charging stations along the highways — a small fraction of what will be needed, but a good start — plus an array of tax credits aimed at persuading manufacturers to make E.V.s and equip them with batteries that can be recharged as quickly as one can fill up a tank of gas. Also, point-of-sale credits to get people to buy the finished products.

In today's news: More police violence. The Biden administration's budget reverses the Trump course at the southern border. And it doesn't look like corporations intend to heed Sen. Mitch McConnell's warning to leave the cash on the desk and keep their opinions out of it. • Minnesota police shoot and kill Daunte Wright, 20, after traffic stop involving air fresheners • Horrifying video shows police officer who killed Daunte Wright thought she was using her Taser • Biden budget seeks aid for unaccompanied kids, backlog of asylum applications, no new cash for wall • McConnell's 'stay out of politics' warning to corporations doesn't seem to be working • With a difficult midterm looming, Democrats have a short window to ban gerrymandering From the community: • Ash from St. Vincent's La Soufrière volcano spreads, as aid efforts intensify • Funny How Racists Who Break The Law Never Seem To Realize The Power of Cellphones.

We’re regularly treated to conservatives whining about “entitlements” to those they consider undeserving, be they people of a different shade of skin, immigrants, or any other subgroup the right trots out to whip its followers into a race-based frenzy. The typical argument always focuses on how “those people” are spending someone else’s hard-earned tax dollars. Well here’s something for your local COVID-19 denying, anti-vaccine wingnut to chew on. As explained by Edward Isaac-Dovere, a staff writer at the Atlantic, the costs borne by American taxpayers to pay for the medical costs of those who get sick from COVID-19 because they refused to be vaccinated are going to be as astronomical as they are unnecessary.

Stacey Abrams indicated the best way to help Georgia was to stay and fight. For some companies that are not already in Georgia, however, the question is not about staying and fighting, it’s about whether or not to bring new business to the Peach State.  On April 12, 2021, Will Smith, Antoine Fuqua, and Apple Studios decided that starting production on their new Apple TV series, “Emancipation,” in Georgia simply wasn’t worth it, especially in consideration of current events. While staying to fight may be fine, they didn’t feel compelled to inject more funds into a state that had enacted terrible anti-voting rights policies.

If you are unsure about what is happening along the Ukraine-Russia border, congratulations: You have something in common with countless foreign policy experts watching what's happening along the Ukraine-Russia border. Russian tanks and troops are massing on the border in numbers not seen since the 2014 Russian seizure and occupation of Crimea, but the true intent of the buildup is not clear. Analysts have multiple theories, and they range from the usual Russian government showboating to a potential new invasion of Ukraine to things in between.

President Joe Biden on Friday released an initial budget request to Congress that will seek funds to address his administration’s new priorities within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). These funds range from a backlog of asylum applications to caring for unaccompanied children to higher educational barriers facing undocumented young immigrants protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, as well as funds to investigate white supremacist beliefs within federal immigration agencies. The request “is basically a preview of the full budget request coming in May,” tweeted American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. “First, Biden's budget proposes an overall $52 billion DHS budget, which means no cuts to the overall budget. One highlight? The budget calls for funding for a ‘humane and efficient immigration system.’ Very different from Trump's enforcement focus.”

Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor at The Washington Post since 2000, has and an undistinguished career from the beginning. From being an Iraq War cheerleader to a deficit peacock and a climate change denier enabler, his influence on the paper's editorial board has been consistently problematic. Not letting down the troglodyte side, his op-ed page is at it again with this doozie: «Congress should stop attacking DeJoy and consider his plan to fix the Postal Service.» Let's start with the basics of the wrongness of that headline. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's plan is not to «fix» the Postal Service. It's to make the Postal Service provide more expensive and worse service to the customer. That's a given. He wants postage to cost more and delivery to be significantly slower. His motives in doing so are not as transparent, but are right there on the surface.  This is going to drive customers away. It's going to cost the USPS money to lose those customers. Many who do business via the USPS will switch to private carriers, some of which DeJoy has had (and still has) a personal financial stake in. Corruption and corporatism aside, Hiatt's editorial board is ignoring the very real harm DeJoy's cutbacks could bring to millions of people who rely on the post office, particularly communities of color, low-income communities, and postal service workers. The ed board dismisses the issue of harm: «the Postal Service hasn't regularly been meeting its targets since long before Mr. DeJoy’s time anyway; business mailers probably should pay more than the effectively subsidized rates they currently enjoy.» So it seems the argument is «It's bad already, so what the hell, let's make it worse.»

Not only are American corporations readily ignoring Sen. Mitch McConnell's threats to shut their traps about voter suppression laws, now big law firms are getting active in the fight too. Some 60 major law firms are uniting around an effort “to challenge voter suppression legislation and to support national legislation to protect voting rights and increase voter participation,” Brad Karp, chairman of the heavyweight law firm Paul Weiss, told The New York Times. 

«Well that was pitiful,» wrote a would-be participant in a racist “White Lives Matter” protest in Norfolk, Virginia, in a nearly-empty Telegram channel devoted to the event. Among her fellow far-right ideologues, it was a common sentiment. The events, planned at over a dozen locales around the country this past weekend, were intended as a kind of rallying point for white nationalist and far-right groups of varying stripes, but instead turned out to be almost a complete bust, with only tiny handfuls of marchers showing up in most locations. The largest turnout was in Huntington Beach, California, where several dozen “pro-white” marchers were met by several hundred counterprotesters.

Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott finally got called out to his face about being silent during the past four years of anti-immigrant abuses under the previous president—and it happened on Fox News, of all places. During a press conference last week, Abbott made claims about abuse at a facility holding unaccompanied children, providing no specific details but calling for oversight, The Texas Tribune reported. Allegations of abuse under U.S. custody should be treated as serious, especially when it involves vulnerable children, and an investigation is what absolutely should and must happen. Advocates have long demanded this. Greg’s sudden concern for the well-being of kids, however, is brand-new. During a Fox News Sunday appearance, host Chris Wallace challenged Abbott on his silence when similar allegations were made during the previous administration. 

Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz has long been a terrible, terrible person, which for the past 10 years has been a near-requirement for Republican officeholders in general. He made a name for himself as a rabid partisan of no particular values other than devoted sucking-up; his main contribution to his nation has been a vocal defending of Donald Trump each and every time Trump was caught in some new crookedness. That's it. He's known for that, for launching retaliatory strikes against Trump's enemies, for near-obsessive attempts to ingratiate himself with Dear Golfing Leader, and oh, would you look at that, living a not-so-secret life as a House Republican ultraperv now under investigation for drug-fueled sex trafficking. What are the odds: A man who fetishizes Donald Trump and is joined at the hip to Jim Jordan turned out to be a child rapist? Wow, go figure. So we are absolutely allowed to enjoy his downfall, and if the man wants to drag this out in order to tarnish or implicate as many of his fellow House Republican sedition-backers as possible then by all means he should knock himself out with that. Do a backflip on the way down, buddy. The latest humiliation, just so we are all gloriously up to date, is an expected one. Matt Gaetz evidently sought an urgent meeting with Donald Trump «after it was first revealed he was being investigated,» says CNN, but was turned down by Trump's aides. Yes, the man who polished Dear Crooked Leader's boots to a shine in multiple impeachment investigations is being cut loose by the Mar-a-Lago crowd.

Wealthy Republican donors were reportedly ready for a big weekend in Palm Beach with the Republican National Committee, chock full of strategizing, power points, and a clear vision to regaining congressional majorities in 2022. Instead, they received a weekend of misdirection and deflation courtesy of Donald Trump, who delivered the keynote address Saturday night at his Mar-a-Lago resort. But Trump effectively hung over the entire getaway like a dark cloud of grievance, always at the ready to rain on Republicans’ revival parade after he cost them the House, the Senate, and the White House.