This year I am thankful for everyone in this country who is staying home this Thanksgiving so that we can lower the body count from this pandemic.
And I’m very grateful for the 80 million people who had the good sense to vote out the monster in the White House who issued a Thanksgiving statement yesterday that said this:
“I encourage all Americans to gather, in homes and places of worship, to offer a prayer of thanks to God for our many blessings.”
Monsters.
Take a moment this Thanksgiving to kick back and regroup. Remember what life was before the struggle, if you can. If you are Gen Y or later, I’m afraid you probably have known nothing but.
There was a woman in the theater department who was everyone’s muse. The last time I saw her, a friend and I stopped by her mountainside cottage on the way home from skiing. Back when it snowed here more often. A stream whispered in the woods behind the house. There was bread baking in the oven. Incense burning. Joan Baez (or was it Joni Mitchell?) on the turntable. (Yes, back then. Hate me, I’m a boomer.)
We visited, ate warm, fresh bread, and drank herbal tea. It was chilly outside, but warm and impossibly cozy inside. Home. Someone’s anyway.
It wasn’t Mitchell’s Laurel Canyon. Far more rustic. But as a North Carolina native sang, long ago and far away. Things were far less complicated.
The muse eventually married. An accountant, I think. Ronald Reagan won in a landslide. There were several wars, open and clandestine, with terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. somewhere in there. A couple of economic crises and moral panics. Torture. A plague or two beginning with AIDS. Mass shootings too many to count. Police murders with protests following. Friends and artists who died too early. A wannabe autocrat in the Oval Office, in the streets a cast of supporting fascists. A quarter million U.S. dead from COVID; over 12 million infected. Life takes its twists and turns.
But around the time of that ski trip, I saw Joni Mitchell live in Charlotte. About the only album selections she left out of her set that night were from Blue. Those times came back when a friend as old as this tale posted the story behind this rare 1974 London footage:
“The Blue album, there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals,” Joni Mitchell once said of her masterpiece record. The album has gone down in the annals of music history as the archetypal confessional record but there’s one song on the LP which stands out above the rest. The song is sincerely dripping in sentimentality, orchestrated with authenticity and marvelled at by the music world for being one of Joni’s best, of course, we mean ‘A Case of You’.
Light a fire. Pour yourself a glass of wine. You need it.
I clicked on the story linked below because I misread the headline as “I Miss My Family Restaurant.” Which I do. But the correct reading works too.
Our neighborhood brew pub has been closed to inside dining since March. We would eat there about once a week, sometimes with friends, occasionally just myself. Some of my most creative ideas come while discussing the week’s events there over food and a couple of beers. Except for eating there on a picnic table in the parking lot once this summer, we’ve been ordering take-out pizza to help keep them going until the plague lifts. Same with our favorite Thai restaurant … and Chinese restaurant … and Italian restaurant.
We miss them, the local restaurants, friends who own them, and their staffs. Not eating out this year has been one of the toughest inversions of normalcy beside the Trumpism of the last four. Servers are a kind of extended family for regular customers. You know their names and snippets of their stories. You ask for their sections and tip them well. Having spent a few years on the other side of this arrangement, that comes naturally. We’ve been there.
Sam Stone writes of his coworkers, they were “family because they annoyed the hell out of me but I had to spend time with them regardless.” You find a way to get along because you have to:
My coworkers had become a sort of un-chosen family, and almost four years after that first training shift, when the coronavirus shutdown meant we would no longer see one another every day, I was surprised to find that I, unfortunately, missed them.
I missed the way Tom surreptitiously slid me a bitters-and-soda under the bar at the end of a particularly grueling shift. I missed Robbie waxing poetic about malolactic fermentation while I frantically tapped an order into the computer, my section absolutely burning to the ground. I missed the collective dread of a menu quiz at a pre-shift meeting, and I missed the sweet silence that hung in the air as we sat at the bar after a long shift in the wee hours of the morning, counting tips.
Work at my restaurant was loud and chaotic, and it’s easy to remember it only for its unpleasantness. A shift often felt like seven consecutive hours of wealthy older women screaming at me about bottled water, but as I spent the past months sifting through my years there, I realized that what made it even remotely bearable was my co-workers and the camaraderie we built because we had no other choice.
Not only do we miss our un-chosen pub family today, but our real ones.
A friend’s mother was a British war bride who went through The Blitz huddled each night in the London Underground. My father-in-law would have eaten his Thanksgiving dinner in 1944 out of a mess kit somewhere in Alsace near the German border.
So it boggles the mind how Americans who fantasize themselves Minutemen with AR-15s refuse to defend the colonies by not riding into Tarrytown or Newark for a pint. They pitch public tantrums over being asked to wear simple surgical masks. Tyranny!
It may not look like wartime, but with over a quarter million Americans dead, 90,000 hospitalized, and over 2,000 dying of COVID-19 each day, just because there is no shelling in your town does not mean this is not a war.
We are all just trying to survive it. One Thanksgiving away from families is an unacceptable hardship? Spare me.
Meantime, local restaurants and churches s here are cooperatively bulk-buying free-standing propane heaters for conducting business outdoors as winter sets in. They’ll get no help from a Mitch McConnell Senate.
“If I could make a plea to people,” The Market Place chef and owner William Dissen told local press, “Just be kind.” Obstreperous, rude and rowdy customers only add to everyone’s stress. And there are plenty.
“I’m very thankful my staff have shown how strong they are and wonderful and resilient,” Dissen said. “They’ve had to deal with a lot. This is my restaurant family and my team, and I’ll do what I can to protect them.”
Do what you can to protect yours. May we all find a way to get along because we have to.
Thank you for visiting with us here every day. Happy COVID Thanksgiving.
Yes, he is a clown. But he is a very, very dangerous one, even now. He has succeeded in discrediting our election system and invalidating Joe Biden’s win for more than 50 million Americans without any evidence. And all but a handful of elected Republicans are just fine with that.
Chris Hayes addressed this last night:
This remains a very frightening moment. They are all fine with this:
Alexander Burns in the NY TImes wrote a thoughtful piece on all this that’s well worth reading:
[E]ven without precipitating a full-blown constitutional crisis, Mr. Trump has already shattered the longstanding norm that a defeated candidate should concede quickly and gracefully and avoid contesting the results for no good reason. He and his allies also rejected the longstanding convention that the news media should declare a winner, and instead exploited the fragmentation of the media and the rise of platforms like Twitter and Facebook to encourage an alternative-reality experience for his supporters.
The next Republican candidate to lose a close election may find some voters expecting him or her to mimic Mr. Trump’s conduct, and if a Democrat were to adopt the same tactics, the G.O.P. would have no standing to complain.
Still more important, legal and political experts said, is the way Mr. Trump identified perilous pressure points within the system. Those vulnerabilities, they said, could be manipulated to destabilizing effect by someone else, in a closer election — perhaps one that featured real evidence of tampering, or foreign interference, or an outcome that delivers a winner who was beaten handily in the popular vote but scored a razor-thin win in the Electoral College.
In those scenarios, it might not be such a long-shot gambit for a losing candidate to attempt to halt certification of results through low-profile state and county boards, or to bestir state legislators to appoint a slate of electors or to pressure political appointees in the federal government to block a presidential transition.
Indeed, Mr. Trump managed to intrude on normal election procedures in several states. He summoned Michigan Republican leaders to the Oval Office as his allies floated the idea of appointing pro-Trump electors from the state, which Mr. Biden carried by more than 150,000 votes. And he inspired an onslaught from the right against Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who declined to affirm Mr. Trump’s false claims of ballot tampering. Though Mr. Raffensperger oversaw a fair election, both of Georgia’s Republican senators, channeling the president, called for his resignation.
Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the country had experienced a “‘Lord of the Flies’ moment” that revealed just how willing some powerful actors were to enable an undisguised effort to sabotage a free and fair election.
“It’s easy to laugh at the Trump challenges, just because they’ve been so out there,” Mr. Li said. “But what’s scary is, you step back from that a bit and see how many people were willing to go along with it until fairly deep in the process.”
“There will be closer elections, ultimately,” he added. “This one wasn’t very close. The fact that people are willing to go down dangerous paths should give us all pause.”
It remains to be seen whether Mr. Trump will wind up as a singularly sore loser or as the herald of a new Wild West era in American electioneering. There have been far closer elections this century — including the 2000 vote that plunged the country into a weekslong review of Florida’s rickety vote-counting procedures, and the 2016 election that made Mr. Trump president through a historically wide split between the popular vote and the Electoral College. But no one else has entertained the corrosive tactics Mr. Trump has sought to employ.
Like numerous other presidential schemes over the last four years, Mr. Trump’s plot against the election unraveled in part because of external circumstances — the large number of swing states Mr. Biden carried, for instance — and in part because of his own clumsiness. His lawyers and political advisers never devised an actual strategy for reversing the popular vote in multiple big states, relying on a combination of televised chest-thumping and wild claims of big-city election fraud for which there was no evidence.
Barbara J. Pariente, the former chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court who was among the jurists overseeing the state-level battle over the 2000 vote, said it was essential for Congress to clarify the process by which elections are conducted and resolved or risk greater calamity in the coming years. Mr. Trump’s team, she said, had already breached fundamental standards of legal conduct by filing cases seeking to throw out huge numbers of votes “without any evidence of impropriety, and then asking a court to look further into it.”
“As I look at what is happening now, I think it’s a real attack on our American system of democracy, and it is causing tens of millions of Americans to doubt the outcome,” Ms. Pariente said. “It has grave implications, in my view, for the future of this country.”
This piece by election law expert Edward Foley makes some of the same points.
I would not be as concerned about this if Trump were out there flailing around with Rudy and the GOP establishment was pushing back with any kind of energy at all. They are not. The only people brave enough to stand up are the odd local official and some state-wide elected Republicans who balked at being asked to steal the election for Donald Trump. For the most part they are all just sitting back to see what he can get away with and watch him expose the weak spots they can exploit in the future.
This is very bad. Unless you think the Republican Party is just pretending and will somehow turn into nice, old-fashioned Main Street types who are acting in good faith, you can see that this is a very big problem going forward. After all, they have shown us that authoritarian white nationalism sits just fine with all of them and they have no problem destroying all democratic institutions. You know what that’s adds up to right? (The “F” word.)
Amanda Marcotte at Salon explains why the media fascination with Trump is actually driven by fascination among the readers and then makes a point that I think is very important. I tend to focus on the Republican establishment’s power mad, perfidious opportunism but there’s more to it and she describes it well:
The reason that Trump captures so much attention, year in and year out, is because of his followers. How did this two-bit moron who can barely read manage to attract a loyal following — one that has apparently grown from the 63 million people voted for him in 2016 to the 74 million who turned out in 2020? These people adore him, so much so that a quarter-million Americans dead and millions more unemployed only made them more determined to give it all up for the orange guy in an ill-fitting suit who wants to end democracy as we know it. It’s a legitimately fascinating mystery.
The devotion of the Red Hats is, if anything, more bizarre because Trump is so tiresome. Going to one of his infamous rallies, for instance, is volunteering to be tortured, like being strapped to a chair while the biggest boor in the world rants incoherently at you for over an hour. Listening to him ping-pong endlessly between whining and bragging is a form of boredom that makes solitary confinement seem pleasant by comparison.
And it’s not like his rally-goers felt differently. You could see it on the faces in the crowds, as his supporters would drift away, not really listening except to perk up to applaud at the mention of buzzwords (“Crooked Hillary,” “build the wall”, “Hunter Biden”), but never really paying much attention to what Trump was actually saying.
They weren’t there for him, after all. They were there as a show of force, to let the hated liberals know that they had the numbers and the determination — so much so that they’d sacrifice a night of their preciously short lives listening to a braggart ramble on about windmills and and lie about his own vitality for an hour. Trump will never understand this, but it was never about him. He was there for them, a vehicle for their resentments and, critically, their will to power. He was the weapon they wielded in their war to exert dominance over American politics, even as their actual numbers dwindle.
This movement is what is interesting, because it’s ultimately, about the rise of American fascism. It’s a real threat, as demonstrated by Biden’s uncomfortably close margins in the same swing states Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. Indeed, it’s arguable that these forces still won in 2020, as they (probably) kept control of the Senate, gained seats in the House and have overtaken the federal courts, kneecapping the ability of the majority of American voters, who support the Democrats, to exert their political will.
That the most powerful country in the world is being held hostage by an authoritarian, racist minority drunk on conspiracy theories is the biggest story in politics. It’s part of a larger story about the entire world in the grip of rising authoritarianism. Their power will define Joe Biden’s presidency. Their ability to cripple him will matter more than any of his Cabinet picks or even his executive orders.
Trump is just the shorthand for this very real and ongoing problem. The reason it feels like we can’t quit Trump is that we can’t quit the people who elected him. As Bob Cesca argued this week at Salon, we shouldn’t pander to those people or seek to placate them, but we also can’t just ignore them. Not while they still control so many levers of power.
Nowadays, most educated people reject the “great man” theory of history. We understand, intellectually at least, that even legendary villains like Hitler or heroes like FDR were a product of their time and not acting out of some cosmic destiny.
But it’s still hard not to reduce politics to personality. Our brains are hardwired to focus on individuals, who have agency and psychology that we can understand, rather than the more diffuse motivations of the crowd. A
But Trump could keel over tomorrow, never to tweet again, and he wouldn’t go away. He might even grow in power, made into a martyr now that he can no longer embarrass his followers with his routine bouts of public idiocy, such as when he suggested people inject Lysol. Trump the symbol was always far more important than Trump the man. And no matter what happens to Trump the man, the movement he represents remains a live threat to American democracy, and to the world.
This is what keeps me up at night, honestly. I still can’t wrap my mind around the numbers. Are they brainwashed by right wing media? Sure. But there are others who live in that swamp who don’t buy into this. There is something ugly in our body politic that goes beyond that. It’s a sickness at the heart of our culture and it’s metastasized.
The Daily Beast reports:
There have been many predictions—from instigating nuclear war to pardoning Joe Exotic—about what President Donald Trump might do during his final months in office, but it’s fair to say few people guessed this. According to a report from ProPublica, Trump is trying to rush through a proposed regulation that could see federal executions being carried out by firing squads again. The proposed rule cleared White House review on Nov. 6, according to the report, so it could be finalized any day. However, the archaic method may never be used—all five scheduled federal executions are expected to be carried out with lethal injection, and President-elect Joe Biden opposes the death penalty.
Yes, they are racing to kill five federal prisoners before Trump leaves office. I’m sure they are very disappointed they won’t be able to use the electric chair or the firing squad for their ritualistic murders. (You know they would prefer lynching or maybe something really fun like beheading or drawing and quartering but the damn PC police won’t allow it.)
Slate reports:
This bloodthirsty decision is another and particularly grotesque way in which President Donald Trump and his Justice Department are defying the norms and conventions for modern presidential transitions.
The Death Penalty Information Center reports that the last time an outgoing administration did anything remotely similar was more than a century ago, in 1889. At that time Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat to be elected president after the Civil War and the only president ever to have served as an executioner (when he was the sheriff in Erie County, New York), permitted three executions to proceed in the period between his electoral defeat and Benjamin Harrison’s inauguration in March 1889.
Since then, every outgoing administration has halted the federal death penalty during the transition period. Trump and Attorney General William Barr are not merely failing to engage in a merciful pause: They are rushing to execute persons who might be spared by a new administration.
Indeed, the Biden administration intends to try to abolish the federal death penalty and provide incentives for states to abolish it as well. A spokesperson reaffirmed this intention on Saturday: “The president-elect opposes the death penalty, now and in the future, and as president will work to end its use.”
The changing nature of America’s death penalty politics is also reflected in the fact that the number of executions carried out at the state level has declined to the lowest number since 1983. This year, even the most pro–death penalty states have to some degree recognized the significant health risks associated with carrying out executions during the pandemic and stopped them. All told, seven men have been executed in five different states (Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas), with South Carolina scheduled to carry out one more before the end of the year.
At the same time, the Trump administration has moved full speed ahead with the federal death penalty. Trump and Barr have ignored the threat of COVID-19 and gone ahead with executions, forcing lawyers, religious advisers, and victims’ family members to risk their health if they choose to be present.
They carried out seven executions in a three-month period last summer. If all goes according to the administration’s newly announced plan, it will make history in yet another way.
It will be the first time that the federal government ends up carrying out more executions (10) in a single year than are carried out in all the states which retain capital punishment (8). Those 10 executions would be the most carried out by the federal government since 1896, when Cleveland’s second administration put 16 people to death.
I guess a quarter of a million corpses just isn’t enough to satisfy them.
Aside from the unnecessary swipe at Stacey Abrams, this USA Today piece by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger follows up my Salon piece below quite nicely. He’s pissed and he’s especially pissed at Donald Trump and his little dog Doug Collins:
By all accounts, Georgia had a wildly successful and smooth election. We finally defeated voting lines and put behind us Fulton County’s now notorious reputation for disastrous elections. This should be something for Georgians to celebrate, whether their favored presidential candidate won or lost. For those wondering, mine lost — my family voted for him, donated to him and are now being thrown under the bus by him.
Elections are the bedrock of our democracy. They need to be run fairly and, perhaps more important, impartially. That’s not partisan. That’s just American. Yet some don’t seem to see it that way.
When I took office, I committed to running elections in Georgia with integrity. After any election, half of the voters will be happy and the other half will be disappointed. But I wanted to make sure everyone felt confident in the process and confident in the outcome.
And as Nov. 3 came to a close, Georgia’s voters had every reason to be. Again, short lines on Election Day. Record turnout. Record early voting and record absentee by mail voting.
In the days that followed, a losing presidential campaign refused to accept the facts, following a playbook written by a failed gubernatorial candidate two years before. A failed senate candidate with nothing to do tried to undermine the integrity of Georgia’s elections. A self-described “attorney for the damned” took up the cause. An onslaught of fake news and unrepentant disinformation threatened to tear the fabric of our country apart. People on both sides of the aisle generated controversies out of nowhere to stir up trouble.
Even as Georgia embarked on its first statewide audit, a process that was only possible because of the state’s new printed paper-ballot system, those who requested the full hand recount triggered by the audit of such a close race lined up to undermine its credibility. Those who had so long been beneficiaries of the electoral process sought to tear it apart at its very foundations.
But still, integrity matters.
When the nation is caught in turmoil, as it has been through several presidential terms, the people of Georgia and their fellow Americans will look to leaders with integrity for guidance.
Throughout my two years as secretary of state, I have fought repeatedly to uphold the integrity of elections in Georgia. We worked with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to strengthen signature matching for absentee ballot voters. We outlawed ballot harvesting and implemented a new voting system with printed paper-ballots that voters could hold and review before casting for the first time in nearly 20 years. We fought frivolous lawsuits from fringe groups and a failed gubernatorial candidate seeking to undermine laws passed by state legislators who were actually elected by the voters.
In times of uncertainty, when the integrity of our political system is most at risk, the integrity of our politicians is paramount.
Many of my fellow Republicans are men and women of integrity. They demonstrate it each and every day: fighting for their constituents, fighting for liberty, and fighting for fair and reliable elections.
In times like these, we need leaders of integrity to guide us through.
True. And a few have come through at the state and local level. At the national level they are MIA and they have been for quite some time.
I don’t know what effect the complaints of people like this fellow will have on the January runoff. But it simply cannot be good news for the Republicans that there is this level of infighting in the Georgia party. When you combine it with the massive social media chaos coming from all directions I don’t think we can be sure that their base will come out to vote next month. They probably will, but this is not the atmosphere they would hope for, I’m sure.
Integrity matters. And I cannot help but wonder what in the world this man thought he was getting when he voted for the depraved conman, Donald Trump.
Despite having begrudgingly allowed the General Services Administration to issue an “ascertainment” that Joe Biden is the president-elect and the normal transition process could begin, Donald Trump is still relentlessly flogging the lie that the election was stolen by the Democrats and he is the rightful winner. And he’s sending out a daily fusillade of emails begging for money, with the alleged goal of overturning the results.
There is no record of how much the Trump campaign have raised with his grift. According to some reports, they were taking in $10 million a day shortly after the election was called. It appears Team Trump plans to use most of the money for a post-presidency slush fund, either to finance Trump’s hypothetical 2024 run or to curry favors with Republican politicians. I don’t think we need to wonder whether any of it will wind up in Trump’s pockets, because of course it will.
So far, the legal challenges have all been thrown out of court since they offered no real evidence. Once all the lawyers who cared about their reputations dropped out, the only ones left were a clown car full of fools driven by Rudy Giuliani, with the even more delusional legal sidekick Sidney Powell riding shotgun.
Powell was shoved out the door this week when her conspiracy theories proved to be too much even for the Trump campaign, which should tell you everything you need to know. But for a worked-up, cult-like base primed by the likes of Pizzagate and QAnon to believe anything, Powell’s wild stories about how the election was stolen from Trump make perfect sense.
Powell’s “theory” isn’t worth going into here because it’s utter nonsense. But that’s not the reason she was canned. She made the mistake of saying that Republicans and Democrats alike were on the take, which didn’t sit well with the party. But her bigger error was in focusing on Georgia and ranting against Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, the pair of Republican incumbents who are fighting to hold their seats — and a GOP Senate majority — in the January runoff elections. And Powell had the audacity to air some of the party’s dirty laundry.
Recall that Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia was one of Trump’s made men in Congress, vociferously defending him through thick and thin. When Sen. Johnny Isakson resigned due to poor health, Trump wanted Republican Gov. Brian Kemp to appoint Collins to the Senate. But Kemp preferred the moneyed-up Loeffler — who, together with her husband, New York Stock Exchange chair Jeffrey Sprecher, is reportedly worth at least $800 million — and she was ultimately given the seat. Trump wasn’t happy about that and there’s apparently some lingering bad blood between him and Kemp. You know how he is.
Collins ran against Loeffler in the November special election — a nonpartisan “jungle primary” — and finished third, splitting the Republican vote and leading to Loeffler’s January runoff against the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat. (Powell claimed the vote was rigged against Collins in favor of Loeffler.) Trump then put Collins in charge of his fruitless recount effort in the state — having already completed a hand audit of all the votes, Georgia is now conducting a second machine recount — and there’s a lot of back-stabbing going on among all the players, complicating their ability to show a united front.
Trump has of course waded in, tweeting one bogus claim about voter fraud and election irregularities after another, all of them false. Loeffler and Perdue, the other incumbent Republican senator headed for a runoff in January (against Democrat Jon Ossoff), sought to please Trump by demanding the resignation of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who had the temerity to run an honest election. Collins dutifully echoed Trump’s inane tweeting, garnering a harsh rebuke from Raffensperger, who called him a “failed candidate” and “a liar.” (One can’t help but suspect he was indirectly addressing the big guy, who fits that bill even better than Collins.) Trump has been tagging Kemp with every one of his outrageous tweets, undoubtedly taking pleasure in taunting the Georgia governor for refusing to show proper fealty by appointing Collins in the first place.
So, the Republican Party in Georgia was already a big mess, with its various players and the president engaged in a circular firing squad armed with rhetorical AR-15s. Along came Sidney Powell, seemingly implicating the state party in a massive kickback and voter-fraud conspiracy which had to make Mitch McConnell get a little bit twitchy. Unfortunately for Mitch, Georgia Republicans may not be able to put that toothpaste back in the tube. All this infighting hasn’t just tapped into the paranoid strain among the base, it has revitalized one of the most powerful themes of the old conservative movement: a powerful hatred of “RINOs,” or Republicans in Name Only.
Morning Consult recently polled Republican voters and found that the vast majority see Trump as reflecting their values far more than GOP leaders do:
Nearly 7 in 10 Republican voters (68 percent) said they consider Trump to be more in touch with the party’s rank and file, compared with 20 percent who said the same of Republicans in Congress.
Attacking Republican officials who fail to toe the line is comfortably familiar to GOP base voters. (Just ask former House Speaker Paul Ryan.) They’ve been ruthlessly culling their herd this way for a couple of decades now, and are always eager to show their power.
Across social media, Trump followers are calling for Loeffler and Perdue to step in and demand that the state’s presidential vote be audited yet again, with all signatures checked on absentee ballots. As mentioned above, there has already been a hand count, and a machine recount is now underway. Rechecking signatures is literally impossible, since signed envelopes were already checked and separated from the ballots in order to protect the secrecy of the vote. Right-wing Georgia attorney Lin Wood (who is also representing Kenosha vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse) is one of those leading the charge with threats to withhold his vote if the two Senate candidates fail to take action:
He has not backed off even in light of Powell’s removal, and he’s not alone. The Daily Beast reports that a couple of shady groups affiliated with Roger Stone are involved as well, encouraging voters to write in Trump’s name in the Senate races to show the RINOs who’s boss. A lawyer for one of these groups admits that Stone is a client but denies knowing anything about it. (We know Stone would never be involved in any sort of dirty tricks, so that’s that. )
If Stone is involved, these shenanigans are almost certainly being conducted with Trump’s approval. From his point of view, maybe that makes a certain amount of sense. Trump doesn’t care whether the Senate stays in Republican hands, even if he’s actually planning another run in 2024. The idea that he’s anybody’s team player is laughable, and he may see his personal interest in demonstrating how much power he still has with the base as he plans his next moves. It wouldn’t surprise me if Trump’s inner circle sees an advantage in a narrative that Loeffler and Perdue were defeated because his base rejected Republicans who refused to put it all on the line for Trump.
It’s obvious that Donald Trump is in torturous psychological turmoil right now. Demonstrating a little dominance — over whoever happens to be vulnerable — might be just what the doctor ordered.
Princess Leia: It could’ve been worse.
Han Solo: It’s worse.
“When cases began to surge weeks ago, officials predicted deaths would soon follow — and now they have,” says the landing page at CNN.
Things are projected to get worse. Potentially 20 million cases by January 20:
(CNN) — More than 2,100 Covid-19 deaths were reported in the US on Tuesday — making it the highest one-day coronavirus death toll the country has reported since early May.
The highest Covid-19 death tally reported in a single day in the US was 2,603, on April 15.
When cases and hospitalizations began to surge weeks ago, officials predicted deaths would soon follow. Daily new cases haven’t dipped below 100,000 in three weeks. And for the 15th consecutive day, the US beat its own hospitalization record, with now more than 88,000 Covid-19 patients in hospitals nationwide on Tuesday, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
The coming weeks are likely to get worse, before a possible vaccine can begin to offer some relief. But just how much worse things will get depends on the mitigation steps taken across the country — as well as the kinds of celebrations Americans will opt to host over the coming days, experts say.
With over a million Americans passing through airport security on Sunday alone, “It’s potentially the mother of all superspreader events,” Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine at George Washington University, told CNN on Tuesday.
Imagine the Sturgis motorcycle rally on a massive scale, Reiner said, “with people leaving from every airport in the United States and carrying virus with them.”
Between Trump, QAnon, and COVID-19, the whole world is starting to resemble a Terry Gilliam dystopia.
Wish I could say it didn’t.
