Eight people were killed, 6 of them Asian, 7 of them women, in a series of deadly shootings on Tuesday aimed at massage parlors in Atlanta, Georgia. The first shooting claiming four lives took place at Young’s Asian Massage around 5 pm on Tuesday; following that at 5:47 pm, three women were fatally shot at Gold Spa and then immediately across the street at Aromatherapy Spa another woman was killed. A 21-year old white male named Robert Aaron Long has been taken into custody in connection with the shootings. Atlanta police began immediately promoting a narrative that the suspect was struck by a “sexual addiction.” Sheriff Frank Reynolds of Cherokee County told press, “He made indicators that he has some issues, potentially sexual addiction, and may have frequented some of these places in the past.” Capt. Jay Baker claimed that he saw the spas as “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” But Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms emphasized that the horrific and deadly violence came at the time when the nation was experiencing a spike in anti-Asian hate and racism.  Mr. Long has just been charged with murder. 

On the same day that the deadly shootings took place in Georgia, the group Stop AAPI Hate released its national report on anti-Asian hate over the past year documenting 3,795 incidents, the majority of which involved verbal harassment. More than 10% of all incidents involved physical violence and Asian women were 2.3 times more likely than men to be victims of hate. The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism also released its new report on white supremacist propaganda in 2020 and found a, “huge increase of incidents from the previous year, with a total of 5,125 cases reported … compared to 2,724 in 2019.” It was apparently, “the highest number of white supremacist propaganda incidents ADL has ever recorded.” 

In other news, President Joe Biden for the first time endorsed a reform of the Senate filibuster rules. With 50 Republicans refusing to consider any Democratic legislation the mere threat of a filibuster is enough to derail all bills except those that can be passed in a limited manner through a budget reconciliation process. Now a day after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell threatened a “scorched earth” policy against changing the rules, Biden said this in an interview on ABC, saying he supported reverting back to the old style of filibuster where Senators had to command the floor continuously through talking while on their feet and that as soon as they stopped, the bill in question had to move forward. 

In other news, Republicans are fighting to use state-aid in the recently passed American Rescue Plan to fund tax cuts. According to the Washington Post, “Twenty-one Republican state attorneys general on Tuesday threatened to take action against the Biden administration over its new $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus law, decrying it for imposing ‘unprecedented and unconstitutional’ limits on their ...