This pandemic is so awful, but it’s also brought out the best in a lot of people as these things often do.
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"what digby sez..."
Month: December 2020
I can’t think of a more satisfying metaphor than this and I tip my hat to the person who thought of it as a fundraising opportunity.
For about six years, the ghost of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino has haunted the boardwalk in Atlantic City, N.J., its lingering vastness vacant of life.
But not for long: The skyline highlight-cum-eyesore is scheduled for demolition late next month, and the city is offering you the opportunity to bring it down with your own bare hands — sort of.
“We are selling the experience to push the button to implode Trump Plaza,” says Bodnar’s Auction, an independent auction house that the city has hired to collect bids for the building’s planned implosion on Jan. 29 — just nine days after President Trump’s term come to a close.
“This will be done remotely and can be done anywhere in the world as well as close to the Plaza as we can safely get you there!” the auctioneer exults.
City officials say that proceeds from the auction will benefit the Boys & Girls Club of Atlantic City, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing services for the city’s young children and teens.
“Some of Atlantic City’s iconic moments happened there, but on his way out, Donald Trump openly mocked Atlantic City, saying he made a lot of money and then got out,” Mayor Marty Small told The Associated Press. “I wanted to use the demolition of this place to raise money for charity.”
The Trump Plaza, one of three major properties in the city once owned by the president, formally folded after a final spasm of layoffs in 2014. But by then, Trump had already shuffled off most of his stake in the casino. He retained just 10% of Trump Entertainment Resorts, the casino’s parent company, as part of a deal after the company declared bankruptcy in 2009. (It would file for Chapter 11 protection again in 2014.)
The casino is now owned by billionaire businessman Carl Icahn. While Trump’s other major Atlantic City properties — the Taj Mahal and the Trump Marina — have revived with changes in name and ownership, the Trump Plaza has languished in disrepair for the better part of a decade.
Earlier this year, witnesses filmed as high winds tore off pieces of the crumbling facade and sent them tumbling to the ground from great heights. Demolition work began on the casino earlier this year after Icahn and city officials reached an agreement to have the structure finally torn down.
Now, Mayor Small hopes the right to finish it off will draw bids in excess of $1 million. We’ll find out soon: The AP reports that auctioneers will solicit offers through Jan. 19 and assemble the highest bidders for a live auction 10 days later.
The networks should carry this live.
It says everything about this country that Trump was able to persuade vast numbers of people that he was a genius businessman based on hype and that stupid TV show of his when the evidence of his failures was not only obvious — it was recent! While he was pretending to be a big shot on his game show, his phony empire in real life was imploding. The information was out there. But people just didn’t see it or didn’t want to believe it. They loved his “you’re fired” bullshit and followed him like he was the Pied Piper. Pathetic.
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Everyone has been wondering for some time about this secret company that has been paying Lara Trump and other close relatives big bucks throughout the campaign. It has always been suspicious and for good reason. It stinks to high heaven.
Jared Kushner approved the creation of a shell company that operated like a “campaign within a campaign” and secretly funneled millions of dollars in campaign cash to Trump family members, Business Insider reports. The company, American Made Media Consultants Corporation and American Made Media Consultants LLC, took more than half of the Trump campaign’s massive $1.26 billion war chest and was largely shielded from having to publicly report financial details. However, a source told Business Insider that Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump was the company’s president, Vice President Mike Pence’s nephew was its VP, and Trump campaign CFO Sean Dollman was treasurer and secretary.
The mysterious company caused consternation among other campaign staffers, who had no idea how it was spending money, and the Campaign Legal Center filed a civil complaint with the FEC in June accusing the Trump campaign of laundering $170 million largely through it.
Business Insider got the scoop. It’s a lot more than 170 million:
The Trump campaign spent $617 million through AMMC
From January 2019 through the middle of November, the Trump campaign and an affiliated political committee together spent $617 million through American Made Media Consultants. It was almost half of everything they spent in the failed effort to reelect Trump, according to an Insider review of Federal Election Commission records and analysis provided by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Some Trump advisors have long accused Parscale of trying to hide money from the now outgoing president, occasionally citing AMMC as an example of his obfuscation. But the campaign spent the bulk of the money at AMMC — $415 million — after Trump fired Parscale as his campaign manager on July 15.
[…]
Campaign-law experts have long accused the Trump team of using a corporate pass-through to hide payments. The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, led by former Republican Federal Election Commission Chairman Trevor Potter, filed a civil complaint with the FEC in July accusing the Trump campaign of “disguising” about $170 million worth of campaign spending in large part “by laundering the funds” through AMMC.Brendan Fischer, the Campaign Legal Center’s director of federal reform, said the payments to AMMC were a “scheme to evade telling voters even the basics on where its money is really going” and a “shield to disguise the ultimate recipients of its spending.”
As a civil-law enforcer, the FEC can issue fines to political committees it determines have broken election laws. If the federal government suspects a “knowing and willful” violation of election law has occurred, the Department of Justice has the power to open a criminal investigation into a political actor.While such investigations are relatively uncommon, several former Justice Department and FEC officials previously told Insider that Justice Department officials may already be discreetly investigating Trump’s reelection activity.
Some of Trump’s campaign leaders even seemed stumped by the AMMC arrangement. Generally, they knew that AMMC was being used to buy pro-Trump TV, radio, and digital advertising and pay for other media. But they couldn’t discern precisely how much each AMMC vendor was keeping for itself.
The person familiar with AMMC said the rates its vendors charged the Trump campaign were often cheaper than what an outside political firm would have demanded. Using the shell company also allowed Parscale to keep Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle — the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr. — on his payroll, the person familiar said.
[…]
Delaware has long been one of the best places in the US to hide corporate arrangements.But that could change, as Congress earlier this month passed a corporate-transparency measure directed at combating financial crimes, both domestic and foreign. The measure is part of the veto-proof National Defense Authorization Act and would require anonymous shell companies — including limited liability companies such as American Made Media Consultants — to disclose their real owners to the US Treasury Department.
On the afternoon of January 20, the Treasury Department will fall under Biden’s control.
There is no doubt in my mind that this was a grift. So is the “Stop the Steal” account that Trump has been flogging relentlessly (and which took in more than 200 million between the election and the first week in December.) This is a family of con-artists, led by the greatest flim-flam man in history. This was being used as a slush fund to reward the Trumps and affiliates.
This is just one more example of the unprecedented corruption of this criminal cabal the entire Republican establishment has defended, enabled and collaborated with every step of the way.
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Everyone wants to show the happy videos of people getting vaccine shots.
The Governors in the 12 states that haven’t passed mask mandates especially want to get in on this hopeful news. They will crow about how Their President got them the vaccine. Not said, but implied, is that their refusal to pass a mass mandate was justified before and is not necessary now.
The experts say we will still need masks for months and we should NOT relax the mask protocols. I’ve watched the discussions on MSNBC shows with Dr. Vin Gupta “Face with medical mask!” @VinGuptaMD, Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD @PeterHotez, Dr. Rob Davidson #WearAMask @DrRobDavidson explaining this, but I know it’s not enough.
Here are some ways to use the vaccination press conferences to pressure Governors to pass mask mandates.
Method 1
Have the top medical experts tell the Governors behind the scenes, “You don’t get to be part of the vaccination press conference unless you pass a mask mandate.”
People in the public health medical community still want to believe that Governors will respond to facts and science. They won’t.
Withholding good PR at a press conference isn’t withholding their vaccine, just the reflected success of a vaccine.
But since most public health experts don’t want to be this direct, and the window for these first press conferences is closing, I suggest:
Method 2
PREPARE THE MEDIA for asking Governors why there is no mask mandate now and why they still won’t pass one.
This is especially important now that Trump botched the vaccine roll out!
First prep the experts to point out the EXCESS DEATHS that will happen because there is no MASK MANDATE.
When the Governor still doesn’t respond with a mandate, post photos of DEAD NURSES to call out the GOVERNOR for NOT pushing a mandate before.
REPEAT. THIS. MESSAGE.
VACCINES won’t be making an impact for months, but a MASK mandate can happen now!
Governors can save lives, but refuse to.
If the Governor says. “I’m not against masks. I’m BEGGING PEOPLE to wear a mask, I just don’t think a mandate is the way to go because …”
Prepare for lame answers.
“Governor, I just spoke to OUR STATE’s top expert, he said, “Without a mask mandate an extra [XXX] people will die in our state. Why are you still refusing a mask mandate?”
Prepare for his lame answer.
(If he quotes someone who is NOT an infectious disease expert (like Scott Atlas) prepare with details on that person’s lack of expertise in this area.
If he brings up lame economic “I have to balance things” prepare with economic experts calling BS.
“I spoke to an EXPERT who explained the false choice between the “inconvenience” of masks and how it might “hurt the economy” vs people getting sick and dying from COVID-19.”
The thing is that reporters don’t have to go into “gotcha” questions because politicians are prepared for those, they just need to make it clear what the failure to pass a mask mandate means in terms of human deaths.
Method 3
Start a Death Clock in each state showing numbers of deaths because there is no Mask Mandate.
“Researchers estimated that mask mandates would have produced a 40 percent reduction in deaths, nationally. (Link to MIT study)
“The results hold up,” Chernozhukov says. “Controlling for behavior, information variables, confounding factors — the mask mandates are critical to the decline in deaths. No matter how we look at the data, that result is there.”
BTW, I’m basing my follow up questions on actual responses I’ve seen from Nebraska Governor Ricketts @GovRicketts.
If a public health group wanted to get a mask mandate passed they would create a specifically plan that included different kinds of pressure for each Governor based on the source of their power and weaknesses.
For example, in Nebraska they would quote University of Nebraska Medical Center @UNMC, infectious disease expert Dr. James Lawler and question the advice of Ricketts’ health advisor, Dr. Antone, a bariatric surgeon.
The reporters would be prepared to push back on Ricketts’ lame answers to serious questions (as shown here responding to Becca Costello with NET News @NETNewsNebraska @becca_costello
I’ll allow my human rage to come out for a moment,
The public health medical community is too f’ing polite to Governors whose actions lead to unnecessary deaths.
They can’t just put the truth out there. They also need to attack the diseased messages and messengers like white blood cells going after pathogens.
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I have to laugh when I read all these ” stories of “Dems in Disarray” — a perennial MSM trope — in light of the fact that hard-core right-wingers are actually getting death threats from their own voters because they followed the law in the last election. You want disarray? How about total anarchy?
Anyway, Eric Boehlert’s excellent newsletter Press Run (you can get it by subscribing here) takes a look at the re-emergence of the DID story as Biden takes over. It’s really unbelievable:
Did you know President-elect Joe Biden has badly “botched” his cabinet picks? That a criminal probe “hangs over” his presidency, “potential family conflicts” may be a problem, and that party “factionalism” is threatening to doom his work? As Biden’s orderly transition unfolds on track — in stark contrast to the previous four years of discord and confusion — most Americans wouldn’t think that Democrats are in disarray. Yet that remains the press’ preferred, long-running narrative about how Democrats are in a constant state of confusion and forever outsmarted by Republicans.
It’s jarring that after covering the Trump White House for four years, where incompetence and lies were the hallmark, where staff turnover never paused and Trump tore up his staffing chart because he didn’t like what someone said on Fox News, that the press is now leaning into the idea that the new Democratic administration is struggling to take shape, and that some kind of civil war has broken out inside the party.
The coverage clearly represents a desire by some outlets to create news; to create controversy where none really exists with the incoming administration. Addicted to the adrenaline rush of non-stop news during the Trump years, as he ransacked the White House and obliterated norms, the press seems hungry to continue that same news cycle pace. But Biden, like No Drama Obama, won’t cooperate in terms of generating screaming headlines on a daily basis.
Still, the press keeps trying. In the span of four days, the New York Times ran two big stories about supposed discord that’s brewing within the Democratic Party over Biden’s top picks for his administration. The president-elect is facing a “considerable challenge” while “confronting factionalism and fierce impatience.” Alliances have been “strained,” his choices are “vexing” “frustrated” and ” increasingly skeptical” supporters. Biden has “irritated” Democratic lawmakers who are “complaining.” There’s “mounting angst” over the “ongoing tug of war.” Biden is “hamstrung.”
Oh my! So much disarray, right?
It turns out, some of that disarray has nothing to do with Democrats. “Mr. Biden’s selections of Neera Tanden for the Office of Management and Budget and Xavier Becerra to lead the Department of Health and Human Services have angered Republicans, who view them as overly partisan,” the Times reported. Some Republicans don’t like the new Democrat’s cabinet picks. And that’s supposed to be newsworthy, why?
The Washington Post recently ran a similar Dems in Disarray article about “dissatisfaction” and “discomforted” Democratic allies, which could “hobble” the news president. The piece focused on whether Biden is “relegating racial minorities to lower-status jobs.” Yet as the Post noted in the Saturday article, “Of the 14 Cabinet-level picks announced so far, seven are women, and nine are people of color.”
Is there behind-the-scenes jockeying going on as Biden makes his picks? Is there concern among allies that the new Democratic administration be properly diverse? Absolutely. And that’s a news story that ought to be covered. But the press narrative so far badly overplays the doom and gloom aspect. The heavy handed coverage looks especially odd considering how professionally the Biden transition team is behaving, as well as how qualified and historic his picks are, compared to the chaos that engulfed the virtually all-white Trump White House on a daily basis, where it became almost impossible for reporters to get honest, truthful information from the administration.
During the transition the press is also taking very seriously the news that (surprise!) Trump’s Department of Justice is investigating Hunter Biden’s Ukraine business dealings. The White House, the entire GOP, and Fox News just spent the last twelve months trying to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden and completely whiffed. Spreading lies nonstop, they still couldn’t stop Trump from being impeached for having urged Ukraine to launch a bogus investigation into Biden’s son, and the Hunter ‘scandal’ went nowhere on the campaign trail this year, as Trump lost by seven million votes.
Nonetheless, the Associated Press stressed the Hunter news could make Biden’s presidential transition “even more complicated.” The revelation threatens, “to destabilize a transition that has prioritized a methodical rollout of Cabinet selections.” Why? In part because the AP is already imagining a possible criminal “indictment” against Hunter even though, of course, nothing has been alleged against Biden’s son. (An anti-Biden Senate Republican report this year couldn’t find any evidence of Hunter wrongdoing.)
Turns out the Hunter investigation will make life “even more complicated” for Biden because Republicans are going to harp on it a lot, according to the AP. That’s it. That’s the extent of the so-called scandal — Republicans are going to hype the investigation and the press is going to type that up as news.
The Times was singing from the same GOP-approved choir sheet, stressing that the optics look bad, not matter what. “If [Biden] refuses to appoint a special counsel and his Justice Department opts not to prosecute his son, many will invariably suspect favoritism,” the Times reported, pretending the last four years never happened, and that being suspected of favoritism is now considered a deal breaker inside the Beltway.
And there was this extraordinary Times passage [emphasis added]:
Even if Hunter Biden is ultimately not found to have violated any laws, the investigation could be problematic for a new president promising a clean break from the many conflicts of interest under his predecessor.
Talk about heads you lose, tails you lose. Trump’s politicized Justice Department is investigating Biden’s son, but even if no wrongdoing is found it’s all bad news for Biden.
This is the kind of pretzel logic the press embraces when it’s searching for Dems in Disarray storylines.
This won’t be the end of it. There’s something about the squabbling among Democrats that acts like catnip for the media. Meanwhile, you have the GOP imploding and it’s covered as if it’s politics as usual. Some things never change …
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I saw that map on twitter and found it very intriguing. It certainly shows that our “red-blue divide” is a little bit more complicated than people like to believe. The NY Times’ Jamelle Bouie liked it too and wrote this in his newsletter:
I am a big fan of maps, and the best I’ve seen this year comes from Randall Munroe of the web comic “XKCD.” It is a map of the 2020 presidential election results, but not the traditional blue/red Electoral College map, nor is it a county-level map of the United States or even a map that weights the size of each state by its population. Instead, it simply shows where the votes were.
The goal of the map, Munroe says, is to show where voters are. “My map isn’t great for telling at a glance who won a given state,” he explained on Twitter, but it will help answer a “basic question like ‘Where do most Trump voters in Illinois live?’” To that end, each red or blue figure on the map represents 250,000 votes, and they are placed in a way to show where each cluster is located within each state. There are obviously some voters in the white space of the map, but they are few and far between.
I think this way of representing votes makes Munroe’s map still infinitely more useful than the typical election-result map. First of all, it illustrates the basic truth that few people live in the interior of the country, something even the most detailed red/blue maps tend to obscure.
Second of all, Munroe’s illustration of the results shows how talk of secession — of “red states” and “blue states” going their separate ways — is deeply misguided. Every state, every city, every county, every community has Trump voters and Biden voters. Even in my strongly pro-Biden enclave of Charlottesville, Va., thousands of my neighbors voted for President Trump. As Munroe says, ”You can be a Biden voter in a Trump household in a Biden precinct in a Trump county in a Biden district in a Trump state in a Biden country.” Traditional maps leave the false (and dangerous) impression that we are a nation of rival, sorted, easily definable camps. In truth, however, the political geography of the United States is layered, and there’s no easy way to divide the country into partisan camps.
The thing is, those people aren’t going away (the reverse is also true, for those conservatives who feel similarly about left-leaning Americans). There will be no split. As Munroe’s map shows, we are bound to each other, whether we like it or not. The challenge for the next decade, then, is how do we live together, and more important, how do we govern when even living together is such a challenge?
Our division isn’t really regional, obviously. It’s just that the electoral college gives and edge to places where fewer people live and in those states the national minority has an edge. Get rid of the electoral college and you have a government that’s much more reflective of the national majority.
Think about this for a moment and contemplate just how absurd our system really is:
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2020 is almost over. Hallalujah. I’m no longer young enough to feel comfortable wishing that time would speed up but I will admit that this year was an exception. I was hopeful that Trump would lose, which was everything, so I couldn’t wait for the election. If he had won, this nightmare would have continued for four more years in even darker, more destructive fashion. But it is coming to an end and despite the horrific, ongoing toll of the pandemic, I’m starting to feel a little bit lighter.
The Washington Post asked its readers for their help in simply assessing this weird year:
A global pandemic. A racial reckoning. A presidential impeachment. A monumental election. We all know 2020 was a year like no other. But is it possible to sum it up in one word or phrase? The Washington Post asked readers to do just that and offer their reasoning, hoping that all together we might discover some collective wisdom.
The responses were mostly negative, of course. How could it be otherwise? The top three words they used: Exhausting, Lost, Chaotic.
“All of our challenges have been drawn-out, slow-motion car wrecks. From covid, to the election, to Trump in general, to police shootings, to unemployment, to no sports, to some sports and no fans, it just keeps dragging on. I feel trapped in a corner, and all I can do is try to block the next thing that gets thrown at me.”
“We’ve lost our way as a country. The year was lost for students, families, weddings, holidays, positive human interaction. Lives were lost unnecessarily to disease. It feels like being lost in the wilderness with no compass.”
“Coronavirus, aftermath of general election, inability to acquire simple provisions like toilet paper, racial injustice, Trump and the GOP, Ruth Bader Ginsburg dying and being replaced against her wishes. Families being torn apart. I do not recognize this country anymore.”
Other words include Relentless, Surreal, Heartbreaking, Nightmare, Broken Dreams etc. You get the drift. It’s obvious these are not Trump voters. I suspect they also see the country in negative terms but for entirely different reasons.
People were also asked about their hopes for the future and miraculously, they still have them. Examples are:
What are you hopeful for in 2021:
“Resolution. To the virus, to our political system, to the era of abject hate. And a sense of optimism — I’m really looking forward to relaxing my shoulders again. I’m hoping the country gets resolute, too — and acts to solve some of most pressing problems.”
“Hoping to finally exhale.”
“A restoration of sanity, morality and normalcy.”
“A vaccine. A new president and administration. Renewed belief in science, kindness and inclusiveness. Caring for the environment and our fellow humans.”
“I hope that as we debate about how to open our economy, our homes, our schools and even our respiratory systems that we also open our minds and our hearts. I’m longing for a spirit of decency and kindness to surface in 2021, and I hope it’s as powerful as any vaccine.”
It’s hard to argue with any of that. But again, I don’t think we would find the same sentiments among our Trump voting brethren.
For me, 2020 has just been the Trump era on steroids and I don’t know yet just how much damage has been done to our national psyche because of that. We are in a cold civil war and I honestly don’t know if the tide has finally turned or if we have just managed to hold the line for the moment..
I’ve been writing about this since I started this blog back in the early days of the new century and along with my wingman Tom, old friend Dennis as well as the other occasional contributors, we’ll keep documenting this tumultuous time as long we are able to keep the lights on. We live in interesting times, to say the least, and we are happy to be able to share the experience, as harrowing as it is at times like this, with all of you.
If you would like to help us do that you can do so below or at the snail mail address on the sidebar.
And Happy Hollandaise everyone! 2021 is bound to better than 2020 — it’s hard to imagine it can be any worse.
cheers,
digby
I have been chronicling the atrocities of the Trump era almost daily for five years and I’m exhausted. I don’t think I’m alone. One of Trump’s most insidious talents is to dominate the spotlight to such an extent that you can’t look away even if you want to. He’s everywhere. There is just so much, more than we can fully absorb, so we just keep watching, waiting for the spectacle to end, paralyzed and psychically drained.
And now it’s almost over.
Aside from some short appearances in the press room to declare himself the winner, a couple of desultory interviews with friendly cable news hosts, one low energy rally in Georgia and the extended, puerile whine of his Twitter account, Donald Trump has been blessedly out of sight for most of the past five weeks. There’s been no chopper talk, no televised Cabinet meetings with sycophantic tributes to his greatness, no crude insults toward reporters, nothing.
If one didn’t know better, one might assume that the president is ashamed because he lost the election and doesn’t want to face the public. But that would be wrong. If there’s one thing we know, it’s that Donald Trump has no shame.
We don’t know if Trump will fire more people, pardon himself and his family, start a war or simply continue to sit in the White House raging against his enemies and tweeting out lies about the election but the fact is that this long national acid trip is winding down at long last. Unfortunately, the hangover is going to be titanic. Unless the nation sobers up quickly and takes action, we may never recover.
The good news is that we are seeing signs of life in the U.S. Congress in this regard.
Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, gave notice this week that his committee intends to pursue the subpoena of former White House Counsel Don McGahn. You will recall that McGahn was not allowed to testify before Congress on the basis of a novel legal concept called “absolute immunity” which, if allowed to stand, would render congressional oversight practically impotent.
So while Democrats continue to pursue the subpoena as a means to push back against a legal principle that attempts to usurp their oversight powers, they will undoubtedly follow up on just what happened with all of that obstruction of justice Trump committed. They may not be able to sanction Trump for it, but they need to build the record — after all, this guy may try to bust his way back into power in four years.
Meanwhile, we have also learned that the Manhattan District Attorney and the New York Attorney General’s cases are proceeding apace. These cases are beyond the scope of any federal pardon, as you know, so Trump may be seeing the inside of a courtroom whether he pardons himself or not.
But is any of that enough? It can’t be, particularly when the New York Times and Politico reported earlier in the week something so shocking that it would be a crime not to investigate it.
Two political appointees at the CDC admitted that they had been instructed to slant pandemic advice according to guidance from people such as Ivanka Trump and Kellyanne Conway. And it’s now quite clear that the administration did adopt a herd immunity strategy to deal with the pandemic and lied about it. One incompetent adviser actually wrote “we want them infected” in an email.
We knew this, sort of. Trump had been quoted early in the pandemic wondering why we didn’t just let it “wash over the country” which Dr. Fauci, the head of infectious diseases at the National Institute of Health, explained would result in a horrible death toll. Still, Trump clung to that notion and ended up hiring a radiologist he first saw on Fox News, Dr. Scott Atlas, who promoted the concept. These new reports show the extent to which this policy filtered through the government and negatively affected the response. It was a conscious decision. Now over 300,000 people are dead and counting, many of whom might be alive today if Donald Trump were not the president of the United States when a pandemic hit our shores.
The Atlantic’s James Fallows took a look at the problem of accountability for what’s happened and I think his ideas for how to deal with it make a lot of sense. He suggests that the Biden White House steer clear of most of that work except for the important job of trying to make the executive branch work properly again. Obviously, he should remain hands-off any criminal investigations that might come through the Department of Justice, his only obligation there would be to appoint someone with credibility and integrity to handle whatever cases may already be percolating. So that leaves the Democrats, who control the congressional committees in the House, to create a Good Cop—Bad Cop dynamic between Biden and Nadler which might just be effective if the Democrats stay strong and don’t react to bad faith caterwauling from the Republicans.
Fallows also believes that Biden should appoint three commissions, which I think are vital and I really hope that someone in the administration is listening.
The first would be a commission to look at the pandemic response. This won’t be the last time we face such a crisis and this one was so much worse than it should have been. The country needs to know how it happened and understand how to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
The second commission Fallows recommends would look into the cases of family separation at the border, with an immediate task to find the children and then document meticulously exactly how such a program came to be implemented. As Fallows points out, this didn’t happen by executive fiat. There was complicity at all levels and it has to be exposed and dealt with. This grotesque policy is right up there with the pandemic in terms of sheer cruelty.
And finally, Biden needs to appoint a commission to investigate the Trump administration’s assault on democracy itself. He didn’t invent it, of course, but he’s taken it to a level that is in danger of permanently damaging our election system and people’s faith in their democracy. And he’s done so on the basis of crude lies and propaganda.
Biden doesn’t have to be personally involved in any of this. He can stay above the fray and concentrate on doing the job he was hired to do. But these commissions would go a long way toward reassuring the majority of Americans who are still shell-shocked by what has happened in these four years that at least there will be a public airing and permanent record of what went wrong. Most people are hungry for the truth and while I doubt Trump’s followers will want to hear it, we need the truth for the history books. At some point, their children or grandchildren may want to know what really happened.
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On MSNBC’s “Deadline White House” Thursday, Nicole Wallace mentioned the confusing messaging coming out of the Trump administration on the COVID-19 vaccines. Would the “herd immunity” camp prevent the White House from leaning into encouraging people to get the vaccine? Melanie Trump said if she got the vaccine, she would never tell. Mike Pence would get his shot on camera. Donald Trump spreads disinformation and is MIA on the vaccine.
The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker remarked on the press release saying Pence would be getting his shot this morning to boost confidence in the vaccine. Yet, Parker said (drawing chuckles from fellow panelists), “like everything with this virus, it stands to be undermined by the fact that it’s the vice president and not the president getting that vaccine. It sort of has elements of the vice president being a bit of a ‘food taster’ for the president.”
Throughout the crisis, she added, experts would stand at the White House podium providing scientifically correct information such as “wear a mask,” and then “the president comes and undermines it by not wearing a mask himself or turning to reporters and demanding that they take off their masks.” These communication failures, Parker concluded, have led to the “dark winter” facing the U.S.
Trump could do the country a service and save tens of thousands of American lives by getting the vaccine on camera. But what’s in it for him now that voters have rejected him?
Anyway, here’s his food taster taking one for his king:
Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility it is not. Neither this local church, nor the country’s conservative political party.
Just down the road in the home of incoming Republican celebrity-congressman Madison Cawthorn reside the members of the First Baptist Church of Hendersonville, NC. Like the rest of the U.S., they will be having a Christmas like no other.
A North Carolina church gathered congregants for a musical Christmas celebration earlier this month, and within a matter of days, at least 75 COVID-19 infections had been traced back to the event.
The Henderson County Health Department has linked a growing number of cases of the respiratory infection to one caroling event held at First Baptist Church of Hendersonville. The agency identified a holiday celebration held Dec. 5 at First Baptist as a superspreader event in a press release: “To date, the Health Department has identified 75 individuals who have tested positive as a result of the event.”
We wish them speedy recoveries.
Attendees told the Asheville, NC paper (as reported), “the church was crowded, many people were not wearing masks and choir members, without masks, were singing shoulder to shoulder.”
The rest was predictable. The church will suspend operations for a month. As of Dec. 15, the county reported 4,188 positive COVID-19 cases and 91 deaths. The city is a retirement hub and 791 cases are associated with long-term care facilities.
Another local church has added air filters, removed pews, and placed chairs spaced at least six feet apart. But a spokesperson for the county health department advised that the best way to avoid another superspreader event is “just be socializing with those in your own household.”
The term willful something comes to mind.
Henderson is the largest GOP-majority county in NC-11. This reminds me too how often over the years Republicans have preached the gospel of personal responsibility to everyone else.
Now that the outgoing president is actually on his way out, personal responsibility as a Republican rallying cry against everyone else will make a rapid comeback. “For thee but not for me,” naturally. Deficit hawks will return from their Florida wintering grounds near Mar-a-Lago to inveigh against perceived Democratic profligacy that throughout the last Republican administration was in full flower.
Almost a year ago, Donald Trump told Mar-a-Lago guests, “Who the hell cares about the budget? We’re going to have a country.”
The Washington Post reminded readers:
For most of President Barack Obama’s time in office, Republicans seemed to care very much about the budget, making fears around the national debt and deficit their top talking point. They’ve backed off those concerns under Trump.
One does not need to be an accomplished prophet to know deficit handwringing will return apace, as Paul Krugman notes. Republicans in Congress will cut some sort of budget deal before Christmas to provide aid to the millions out of work and facing economic disaster. But “they are determined to keep the deal under a trillion dollars, hence the reported $900 billion price tag.” That is about more than $1 trillion being a scary number, Krugman writes:
For affordability isn’t a real issue right now. The U.S. government borrowed more than $3 trillion in the 2020 fiscal year; investors were happy to lend it that money, at remarkably low interest rates. In fact, the real interest rate on U.S. debt — the rate adjusted for inflation — has lately been consistently negative, which means that the additional debt won’t even create a major future burden.
And even economists who worry about deficits normally agree that it’s appropriate to run big deficits in the face of national emergencies. If a pandemic that is still keeping around 10 million workers unemployed isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is.
Of course, we know what’s going on here. While Republicans have made the political calculation that they must cough up some money while control of the Senate is still in doubt, they’re clearly getting ready to invoke fear of budget deficits as a reason to block anything and everything Biden proposes once he’s finally sworn in.
Because everything is clean to those who are Republican, but unclean when Republicans no longer control the White House. Lies again will be grievous sin. Insults from Democrats will have Republicans running en masse for their fainting couches. Republicans will declare their freedom from Democratic tyranny.
“What they call ‘freedom’ is actually absence of responsibility,” Krugman wrote in July about resistance on the right to wearing masks. But freedom and responsibility go together. A lot of Americans this holiday season are about to find that out the hard way. Or not. A lot of us are slow learners. Or non-learners.