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Month: March 2020

Before voting today (Super Tuesday)

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 3, 2020

Consider not thinking yourself into knots before you vote today. This is from a February article in Nautilus:

Last summer, in a New York Times article about Warren, a voter stated, “I love her enthusiasm. She’s smart, she’s very smart. I think she would make an amazing president,” before adding, “I’m worried about whether she can win.” The voter’s sentiment is reflected in a 2019 poll in which 74 percent of Democrats said they would be comfortable with a female president, yet only 33 percent of them thought their neighbors felt the same way.

We do this all the time. We go straight from hope to despair, from possibility to worst-case scenario without stopping for a breath. It’s flawed thinking, but tough to identify from inside your skull.

Bella DePaulo, Ph.D. commented on the phenomenon calling it “pluralistic ignorance” (no offense):

The pluralistic ignorance process goes like this: You feel a certain way. So do most other people. But you don’t realize other people feel the same way you do. You think it’s just the opposite. You behave based on your false beliefs about other people, rather than behaving in a way that is true to yourself. 

It’s “pluralistic” because you are holding onto two sets of beliefs at once — your true beliefs and what you think other people believe. It is “ignorance,” because you are wrong about other people’s beliefs. 

It is also a shared ignorance. You think your favorite candidate can’t get elected because you assume most people would not vote for that candidate. Lots of other people are doing the exact same thing – they have the same favorite candidate that you do, but they also assume that other people won’t vote for the candidate. That candidate can end up dropping out of the race or getting defeated, not because people didn’t believe in that candidate, but because of the pluralistic ignorance of thinking their own belief in the candidate was not shared, when it was. Too many people end up voting based on their mistaken beliefs about other people’s preferences, rather than their own preferences, which really are popular. 

As a shy kid, I always fretted that people were looking at me and judging. It took way too long to realize other people were too busy worrying about how others perceived them to bother paying attention to me. That mistaken belief cost me a lot of years disappeared into the wallpaper. I don’t do that anymore. You should not either.

Please go vote and be true to yourselves. Bring a friend or two.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. 2,600+ counties contacted, roughly 900 “opens,” over 400 downloads. (It’s a lead-a-horse effort.) Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

The Best and the Brightest fail again

Published by digby on March 2, 2020

This piece by George Packer may be the best analysis of what’s happened to our government — and why — than anything else I’ve read:

When Donald Trump came into office, there was a sense that he would be outmatched by the vast government he had just inherited.

The new president was impetuous, bottomlessly ignorant, almost chemically inattentive, while the bureaucrats were seasoned, shrewd, protective of themselves and their institutions. They knew where the levers of power lay and how to use them or prevent the president from doing so. Trump’s White House was chaotic and vicious, unlike anything in American history, but it didn’t really matter as long as “the adults” were there to wait out the president’s impulses and deflect his worst ideas and discreetly pocket destructive orders lying around on his desk.

After three years, the adults have all left the room—saying just about nothing on their way out to alert the country to the peril—while Trump is still there.

James Baker, the former general counsel of the FBI, and a target of Trump’s rage against the state, acknowledges that many government officials, not excluding himself, went into the administration convinced “that they are either smarter than the president, or that they can hold their own against the president, or that they can protect the institution against the president because they understand the rules and regulations and how it’s supposed to work, and that they will be able to defend the institution that they love or served in previously against what they perceive to be, I will say neutrally, the inappropriate actions of the president. And I think they are fooling themselves. They’re fooling themselves. He’s light-years ahead of them.”

The adults were too sophisticated to see Trump’s special political talents—his instinct for every adversary’s weakness, his fanatical devotion to himself, his knack for imposing his will, his sheer staying power. They also failed to appreciate the advanced decay of the Republican Party, which by 2016 was far gone in a nihilistic pursuit of power at all costs. They didn’t grasp the readiness of large numbers of Americans to accept, even relish, Trump’s contempt for democratic norms and basic decency. It took the arrival of such a leader to reveal how many things that had always seemed engraved in monumental stone turned out to depend on those flimsy norms, and how much the norms depended on public opinion. Their vanishing exposed the real power of the presidency. Legal precedent could be deleted with a keystroke; law enforcement’s independence from the White House was optional; the separation of powers turned out to be a gentleman’s agreement; transparent lies were more potent than solid facts. None of this was clear to the political class until Trump became president.

But the adults’ greatest miscalculation was to overestimate themselves—particularly in believing that other Americans saw them as selfless public servants, their stature derived from a high-minded commitment to the good of the nation.

When Trump came to power, he believed that the regime was his, property he’d rightfully acquired, and that the 2 million civilians working under him, most of them in obscurity, owed him their total loyalty. He harbored a deep suspicion that some of them were plotting in secret to destroy him. He had to bring them to heel before he could be secure in his power. This wouldn’t be easy—the permanent government had defied other leaders and outlasted them. In his inexperience and rashness—the very qualities his supporters loved—he made early mistakes. He placed unreliable or inept commissars in charge of the bureaucracy, and it kept running on its own.

But a simple intuition had propelled Trump throughout his life: Human beings are weak. They have their illusions, appetites, vanities, fears. They can be cowed, corrupted, or crushed. A government is composed of human beings. This was the flaw in the brilliant design of the Framers, and Trump learned how to exploit it. The wreckage began to pile up. He needed only a few years to warp his administration into a tool for his own benefit. If he’s given a few more years, the damage to American democracy will be irreversible.

This is the story of how a great republic went soft in the middle, lost the integrity of its guts and fell in on itself—told through government officials whose names under any other president would have remained unknown, who wanted no fame, and who faced existential questions when Trump set out to break them.

He goes on to interview a number of these people and it is revealing. I’m sympathetic to the idea that these professionals all thought Trump would be easily manipulated. He is very dumb. But I never believed that. It was clear that he was too dumb to even know there were lines he couldn’t cross, and too rash and shameless to be unwilling to cross them if he did.

He is a textbook narcissist, used to being flattered and feted, and is convinced of his own omnipotence. He believes his ability to land on his feet, no matter how much disaster he lands in, is a kind of magical power. Contemplating the possible loss of the House in 2018 he told his rally crowd:

“It could happen. And you know what you do? My whole life, you know what I say? ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll just figure it out.’”

“Don’t worry about it, I’ll just figure it out.” Of course, for most of his life, his father bailed him out. In politics, the corrupt and decadent Republican Party has bailed him out. But he is an egomaniac who believes it’s his “gut” that’s bailed him out and he was never going to listen to anyone.

Read the whole article if you can. It’s actually quite frightening because it discusses in detail just how much carnage he has caused within the institutions of government. It’s laid bare just how vulnerable they always were. And someone smarter but equally conscienceless as Trump will be able to take advantage of that in a much more systematic way.

Tweety Out

Published by digby on March 2, 2020

It was a dignified, classy sign-off.

He had his big 20 year anniversary celebration a while back. His colleagues gave him many tributes. It makes sense for him to leave now.

I have a long, long history of bashing Matthews and good reasons. But I’ll just leave it at that.

A national scandal

Published by digby on March 2, 2020

Here’s what they’re doing in South Korea:

 From inside his car, a driver is checked for any fever or breathing difficulties by medical staff in protective clothing and goggles who lean in through the window at a new drive-thru coronavirus clinic in South Korea.

He drove off after the brief test showed he was clear.

Others queuing in their vehicles in the city of Goyang were instructed to stop briefly to submit a sample of secretions for closer examination, with the entire procedure taking less than 10 minutes.

“I initially went to a community health center and had to wait more than one hour, so this is easier and faster,” the first driver told local broadcaster YTN.

The first confirmed case of the outbreak of coronavirus disease in South Korea was announced on January 20. By March 2, South Korea has 4,335 cases, 26 deaths, with almost 100,000 people having been tested.

We’ve tested about 500 people. And we already have 6 deaths.

Here’s a story from January 28th about China’s slow testing response:

Yang Zhongyi was still waiting on Monday for a coronavirus test in the Chinese city of Wuhan two weeks after she started to show signs of a fever, even though doctors privately told her family that she almost certainly has been infected, her son, Zhang Changchun, told Reuters.

Yang, 53, is just one of many Wuhan inhabitants finding it difficult to get tested or receive treatment for the new form of coronavirus, which authorities say has infected 4,515 people and killed at least 106 in China, a situation that may be contributing to the spread of the disease.

Yang has been unable to gain full-time admission to a hospital, her son said. She has been put on drips in unquarantined areas at four separate hospitals in the city to treat her deteriorating lungs, he said, while he is doing what he can to get her tested or admitted full-time.

“My brother and I have been queuing at the hospital every day. We go at 6 and 7 in the morning, and queue for the whole day, but we don’t get any new answers,” Zhang told Reuters. “Every time the responses are the same: ‘There’s no bed, wait for the government to give a notice, and follow the news to see what’s going on.’ The doctors are all very frustrated too.”

Officially known as 2019-nCoV, the new form of coronavirus was first identified as the cause of death of a 61-year-old man in Wuhan on Jan. 10, when China shared gene information on the virus with other countries. Some, such as Japan and Thailand, started testing travelers from China for the virus within three days.

Yeah, that was a problem. The US has had a lot of lead time to get prepared. Apparently, we didn’t.

It’s doubtful that our system will become that overwhelmed. But it’s ridiculous that we didn’t at least have the testing ready to go.

It’s also ridiculous that we have a president who says things like this:

He is a disgrace.

Update:

Celebrating psychos on 60 Minutes

Published by digby on March 2, 2020
gallagherteam0.jpg
Gallagher’s unit, with Gallagher in the middle, posing with the dead ISIS prisoner

For some unknown reason they decided to do a friendly profile of the war criminal Eddie Gallagher last night. I’ll bet Gallagher is feeling pretty darned good about this morning. His former SEAL team and his victims probably not so much.

Gallagher acknowledges that people either love him as an American hero or despise him as a war criminal. He was charged with the premeditated murder of an ISIS prisoner in Iraq.

“Did you stab that fighter?” Gallagher was asked by 60 Minutes correspondent David Martin.

“No, I did not,” Gallagher said.

The ISIS fighter had been wounded in an American air strike during the battle for Mosul in 2017. Iraqi soldiers brought him to a compound they shared with the Navy SEALs. A half hour later he was dead and Gallagher posed for this photo holding his knife.

“That’s a trophy photo if I ever saw one,” Martin said to Gallagher.

“Yeah, yeah that’s what it was taken as,” Gallagher said.

“You were trying to make it look like you killed him?” Martin asked.

“I was trying to make it look tough, yeah,” Gallagher said. “I know how bad it looks when it gets out into the public, which it never was supposed to.”

It looked even worse when he sent it to a buddy with this text: “Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife.” 

“That’s pretty incriminating,” Martin told Gallagher.

“Yeah, it is. It was like a joke text. Dark humor,” Gallagher said.

“It’s not often you see a photo of the accused murderer holding the alleged weapon at the throat of his victim,” Martin said.

“That is true, yeah, but they ran a test on the knife, the sheath. No blood anywhere on it. And if you look at the picture close, there’s no blood on the knife. There’s no blood anywhere on me,” Gallagher said.

When he was brought in, the fighter was barely conscious, probably suffering from internal injuries caused by the blast which struck the building he was in. Gallagher said he didn’t feel sorry for him.

“That’s war,” Gallagher said. “He was out there trying to kill us.”

Gallagher was a trained medic and if you listen closely to video captured by a fellow SEAL who was there, you can hear Gallagher say, “I got him.”

Gallagher said that meant he was going to treat him. He grabbed his medical bag and started working on the prisoner none too gently.

“You know, he’s an ISIS fighter I don’t want his hands anywhere near me. So, I pushed him back down forcefully,” Gallagher said. “He wasn’t breathing properly so I performed an invasive procedure, which is a crike.”

“A crike. And that’s basically sticking a breathing tube in his throat?” Martin asked.

“Correct,” Gallagher said.

There’s no video of that because the SEAL recording the scene turned off his helmet camera, but you can clearly see the breathing tube in a photo taken after the prisoner died – along with several other medical devices implanted but by other SEALs. Over the next few hours, the team mistreated the body, buzzing it with a drone, posing for their own trophy photos, then for a group shot with Gallagher front and center. 

“But, you knew this was wrong,” Martin told Gallagher.

“It’s wrong. I’ll say it’s wrong now,” Gallagher said. “And I’ve definitely learned– learned my lesson.   Yeah, it’s distasteful.”

“Well, it’s more than just bad taste. It’s against the law of war. It’s illegal,” Martin said.

“I’m pretty sure I’m the first person ever to go to a general court-martial for it–  for taking a picture,” Gallagher said. “It’s been done on previous deployments.”

60 Minutes goes on to tell the story of Gallagher’s saga with the courts, talking to his lawyer and basically making it seem as though it was a hard call.

Here’s a small taste. Don’t watch the whole thing.

There was one man who loved that motto, I’m sure:

I’m not sure Dear Leader will like that “helped” business. But he’ll probably let it slide since he’s a psychopath. He’s Trump’s kind of guy.

Heckuva job, Pencie

Published by digby on March 2, 2020

Last Wednesday as the stock market dropped precipitously for the third day in a row, President Trump was reluctantly forced to admit that the nation was in the midst of a major global public health crisis. So he held a desultory press conference, handed out some misinformation and blamed Democrats for the stock market slide. And then he named Vice President Mike Pence to be the point man for the crisis, reportedly because he thinks Pence “doesn’t have anything else to do.” It was hardly reassuring. In fact, Pence might be the very last person one would want to put in charge. His history with public health is abysmal.

When a rural county in Indiana had an HIV outbreak during Pence’s tenure as governor, he completely dropped the ball. And he’s lying about it. He told Fox News host Sean Hannity last week, “I don’t believe in needle exchanges as a way to combat drug abuse, but in this case, we came to the conclusion that we had a public health emergency, and so I took executive action to make a limited needle exchange available.”

Many Trump supporters on social media have apparently concluded that the virus itself is some kind of liberal hoax perpetrated to hurt Trump:

By Saturday, between Trump’s hoax comment and reports that Pence had issued orders that no public health officials were allowed to speak publicly without clearing it through him, the situation was hurtling out of control and the White House scheduled another press conference. Trump struck a slightly more sober tone but it became clear that for doctors and other scientific experts to do their jobs, they would have to genuflect to the president’s greatness prior to being allowed to deliver information to the public.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, denied that he’d been muzzled. But in fact, Fauci had been scheduled to appear on the five Sunday morning shows and canceled them all. Mike Pence showed up instead. It wasn’t pretty.

The vice president of the United States was not able to say that Democrats aren’t rooting for millions of people to die so they can stop President Trump from all his winning. He too is muzzled. They all are.

More importantly, Pence is spreading more misinformation. When queried by Fox News host Maria Bartiromo as to why the U.S. has been so slow to administer tests, compared with other countries, he had a slick misdirection at the ready:

Concerning domestic testing, Pence revealed that “we believe we are in the process of resolving the issues about testing kits” that have been sent to states.

“Yesterday, we have now approved a new arrangement so that states can conduct these tests on their own,” Pence said. “As we speak, literally more than 15,000 kits are going out to the relevant areas, and we’ll soon be sending another 50,000 that are going to be made commercially available out to states.”

When Bartiromo pushed back, saying only 500 people had been tested in the U.S. and that other countries allow drive-through testing or testing at home, Pence noted that “we’ve actually screened 47,000 people coming through designated airports in the country.”

It sounds as if he’s initiating yet another Trump administration cover-up. Airport screening is not testing. It’s not even close, particularly now that we know the virus can be spread by people who have no symptoms.

The fact is that the U.S. bungled the testing protocol. It has cost valuable time, and will probably cost lives:

The World Health Organization (WHO) has shipped testing kits to 57 countries. China had five commercial tests on the market 1 month ago and can now do up to 1.6 million tests a week; South Korea has tested 65,000 people so far.

Authorities are sorting this stuff out now, but the idea that the U.S. response has been “the best in the world,” as Trump has claimed, is obviously nonsense. His designated point man is spinning like a top, insisting that everything is going swimmingly.

So far, Pencie’s doing a heckuva job.

By the way, here’s our role model:

Mike Pence, who Donald Trump appointed to lead the administration’s response to a coronavirus outbreak, was caught wiping his nose moments before he shook hands with US officials as the president announced plans to combat the virus.

My Salon column reprinted with permission

They Don’t Believe Him

Published by tristero on March 2, 2020
Image result for I don't believe it

Americans are stocking up on hand sanitizer. They’re clearly really worried about their health and the health of those they might come into contact with. And all across the nation, Americans are laying in supplies of canned goods and other non-perishable foods.

This means that, when it comes to their health, Americans don’t trust Donald Trump at all. They know he’s lying about the seriousness of the Covid-19 outbreak and they know he’s incapable of leading a competent response. They are 100% right.

Now, if only we can convince our fellow citizens that there is no reason to trust Trump on anything…

Folks linin’ up outside just to get down-ballot

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 2, 2020

Out here in the hinterlands, testing grounds for conservative policies cooked up in places like ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), who controls the presidency this time next year could have less impact on our lives than who controls the levers of power at the state and congressional levels.

Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley points to several down-ballot races from Massachusetts to Texas to watch in between updates in the presidential primaries Tuesday night. Tomorrow may hold some clues to whether Texas is turning as purple as Democrats hope.

The primary in Texas 28 features a Democratic centrist and a progressive. Incumbent Rep. Henry Cuellar, 64, faces Jessica Cisneros, 26, endorsed by ” not just by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren but also by more conventionally mainstream Democratic groups like EMILY’s List and the Texas AFL-CIO.” There is no real polling in the races to predict where this one will go, Mathis-Lilley writes. Stay tuned.

The Texas Tribune notes that several primaries in the state hold enough candidates to fill an entire ballot. Five Republicans and a dozen Democrats will compete for a shot at Sen. John Cornyn’s seat this fall.

This will be only “the first cut” in many races. At least 24 Democrats “won’t have to get out of bed early Wednesday” after the first round of sorting in  seven congressional races.

But even while voters in many Texas districts won’t make their final choices until May runoffs, what makes Texas a state to watch is how Democrats are making moves there:

Republicans are playing defense in Texas this year, working to hold their numbers in the congressional delegation and their majority in the Texas House. For the opposite reasons, Democrats are playing offense, contesting seven congressional seats now held by Republican members of Congress (while defending two they took away from Republicans in 2018) and trying to add nine Democrats in the state House, which would give them a majority. At the same time, the Democrats are defending 12 seats they won in the House in 2018.

For down-ballot candidates — and all of those races come after the noisy presidential race on the ballot — the contestants at the top could decide which voters show up. Another twist while we’re at it: There will be no straight-ticket voting in Texas this year, which could change those up-ballot, down-ballot dynamics. Some voters will slog their way through, voting for the candidates (maybe the parties) of their choice. Some will probably vote in the top race and leave it at that.

Making sure that “undervote” does not happen falls to under-resourced and neglected county party committees off the beaten track. Out in the boonies where the presidential races and gubernatorial races and U.S. Senate races don’t set up shop, Democrats routinely get their clocks cleaned. I have a modest tool (below) for helping them address that. Read a little parable about the “Last Mile” problem here.

UPDATE (h/t M.S.): It’s a line I’ve heard before, Texas is not a red state. It’s a nonvoting state. Poll closings across the state are impeding turnout. Guess where?

The analysis finds that the 50 counties that gained the most Black and Latinx residents between 2012 and 2018 closed 542 polling sites, compared to just 34 closures in the 50 counties that have gained the fewest black and Latinx residents. This is despite the fact that the population in the former group of counties has risen by 2.5 million people, whereas in the latter category the total population has fallen by over 13,000.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. 2,600+ counties contacted, roughly 900 “opens,” over 400 downloads. (It’s a lead-a-horse effort.) Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

National Treasure

Published by digby on March 1, 2020

All the presidential candidates except Sanders were there with him today. He’s fighting stage 4 cancer. We don’t know if he’ll be there for the next anniversary.

He is a national treasure.

Look who’s giving CPAC new ideas

Published by digby on March 1, 2020

This is not good:

In October, Eduardo Bolsonaro made a shocking statement. The son of Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right authoritarian president of Brazil, suggested in an interview that his country may need to return to the tactics employed by its former military dictatorship to help crush his father’s enemies on the left. He asserted without evidence that Cuba was behind recent protests in Latin America and Argentina’s election of a moderate Peronist was part of a conspiracy to bring about a new leftist “revolution” in Latin America.

“If the left radicalizes to this extent [in Brazil] we will need to respond, and that response could come via a new AI-5,” he said, referring to the notorious Institutional Act Number Five, a notorious 1968 edict issued by the military government that indefinitely outlawed freedom of expression and assembly and shuttered the National Congress. The act began an era of intense political repression and media censorship. Hundreds of dissidents were tortured, killed and disappeared during the dictatorship, which ended in 1985.

Elected officials in the country quickly denounced Bolsonaro’s comments as “repugnant” and a “serious attack on democracy.” American conservatives, on the other hand, invited Bolsonaro to take the stage at one of DC’s biggest political events of the year, this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). ..

One of the Brazilian president’s three sons, Eduardo Bolsonaro will join them to show off his brand of populism on three different panels, including one called “CPAC Exile: The Unshackled Voices of Socialist Regimes,” where he will be joined by other international CPAC representatives. Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, which sponsors the conference, tweeted in January that the 35-year-old former police officer would “share how our conservative movement inspires freedom-loving people across the globe & how the US & Brazil can work together to stop socialism.”

This is how blatantly fascist ideas become normalized. If Trump gets a second term, we know what the agenda will be.

I wish I could understand why this isn’t the centerpiece of the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign. I get that we want progressive policies to be enacted. That’s great. But I’m afraid that if the Democrats don’t focus on the immediate threat of a Trump re-election all of that may be looked back on as fiddling while Rome burned.