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Month: December 2020

The U.S. has its personal freedom but not “that guy”

Pallister tells Manitobans to stay apart this holiday season | CTV News
Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister

Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister wants his constituents to stay home this Christmas so they will be alive for the next one:

“I’m the guy who’s stealing Christmas to keep you safe because you need to do this now,” he said.

Pallister said he hoped Manitobans would respect him in the coming years for “having the guts” to tell them to do the right thing even if they aren’t happy with him now.

The premier said Manitobans will have much to celebrate next year, but for the time being, the right thing to do is to protect each other and stay safe by social distancing, wearing masks, and socializing only with people in their household.

“I am that guy” telling you not to go to church or to see your friends or to travel, Pallister said to Manitobans under Code Red restrictions for COVID-19. “I don’t like saying it, but it’s got to be said. Someone’s got to say it.”

South of the 49th parallel, we have Tucker Carlson:

He aired a clip of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, urging people to minimize travel and “indoor-type congregate settings.”

Carlson accused Fauci of using complicated language, telling his viewers, “What Fauci is saying here in English is that you need to avoid going to church. You need to avoid your own family.”

Death? Humbug! says Carlson. Real Americans would rather die first.

“If death is inevitable … maybe we should pause before we destroy the living in the name of trying to eliminate it,” Tucker Carlson declared Thursday night on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

So much for the military liberating prison camps and countries under siege. Got it, Tucker.

No real violence yet

President Trump Is Acting Crazy, so Why Are We Shrugging It Off? | The New  Yorker
The man puzzled by where the 19 in COVID-19 comes from finds early-morning voting results spikes in WI and MI baffling.

Good news. Only threats of violence so far. We’re supposed to be relieved?

Eric Coomer is security director for Dominion Voting Systems. He is hiding out from death threats that began when lawyers for the Trump campaign accused his company of rigging the November election. It started in chat rooms with the standard “hang him, he’s a traitor” talk. That soon escalated, the Associated Press reports:

But then came targeted phone calls, text messages and a handwritten letter to his father, an Army veteran, from a presumed militia group saying, “How does it feel to have a traitor for a son?” Even now, weeks later and relocated to a secret locale, Coomer is getting messages from people saying they know what town he has fled to and vowing to find him.

“It’s terrifying,” he said. “I’ve worked in international elections in all sorts of post-conflict countries where election violence is real and people end up getting killed over it. And I feel that we’re on the verge of that.”

I assumed we would see violent attacks in November. They would start with road-rage shootings by angry Trumpers; it would take cosplaying armed gangs longer to pull something together. But their capacity for denying reality has spared us so far. So long as the president and his legal buzzards can maintain the fiction (and fundraising opportunity) that amidst all their dung-flinging there is still a Trump win in there somewhere, the faithful may keep their guns holstered.

As it stands, the outgoing president is down 7 million votes and nearly four and a half points nationwide. That should be convincing, David Frum tweets. Just not to people who have inhabited an alternate reality now for decades.

Rudy Giuliani’s traveling circus has provided days’ worth of “I know a guy who knows a guy” witnesses to supposed election malfeasance. Plenty of others know little of proper election procedures, but are sure whatever they think they saw is proof of “fraud.” And they saw it, like commies, behind every woodpile, including thousands of ballots supposedly counted multiple times despite vote counts matching poll books. A witness in Alpharetta, Ga. Thursday said this was his third presidential election serving as an observer. Except his first two were in Texas. He spent much of his time documenting what he saw as slackness in Georgia by a monitor from the Secretary of State’s office. On “irregularities” such as these, Trump’s team wants election results thrown out in state after state. So far, judges have found little credible in these anecdotes.

https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/1334345295577165825?s=20

The reality-denying outgoing president gave a 45-minute, online speech Wednesday. He illustrated his conspiracy theories with charts showing the early-morning voting results spikes in Wisconsin and Michigan that put him behind there. (Wisconsin and Michigan are two swing states not allowed to start counting mailed votes until Election Day.)

“Mostly Biden. Almost all Biden,” he said of the Wisconsin spike, “And to this day, everyone’s trying to figure out where did it come from.”

Everyone meaning him. This is the man who in June said “people can’t explain” where the 19 in COVID-19 came from.

Eventually, reality will sink in for them. Eventually, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will take over. The rest of us may have to take cover.

Digby is not getting over the damage wrought over the last four years both by Trump and willing enablers in his party. They want to wash their hands of him and pretend it never happened. But there is no going back now to anything resembling the America or the world that came before.

Dahlia Lithwick feels becalmed in this interregnum. It is “better than waking up at 3 o’clock every morning with your jaw locked and your fists balled up,” but peaceful it is not. “We are waiting for the next thing, even if the most we can call the next thing is Not This.”

She writes at Slate:

Becalmed is that sense that you are going to end up somewhere, but without any sense of where you are headed. It is perhaps a fitting state of being during holidays, in lockdown, waiting for vaccines, and with profound gratitude that, for all the division and strife, nobody is in fact out on the streets murdering one another. Everyone appears to be in agreement that whatever this strange floaty period is, it’s still eminently preferable to civil war.

We can be thankful for that. While it lasts.

I’m not over it

And Susan Glasser of the New Yorker isn’t either. She watched Trump’s looney Tunes speech yesterday and felt the same way about it that I did:

There are only two possible conclusions from listening to this folly: either the President actually believes what he is saying, in which case he is crazy, or he does not, in which case he is engaged in the most cynical attack on American democracy ever to come from the White House. Is Trump “increasingly detached from reality,” as even the dispassionate, strictly nonpartisan Associated Press put it, in recounting the speech? Or is that conclusion, harsh as it is, giving Trump the benefit of the doubt by implying that he is just misguided or uninformed? There is another explanation, after all, for this reckless speech: What if, in fact, the President is not delusional but is the purposeful, malevolent creator of an alternate reality, knowingly spewing disinformation, discord, and division? Either variant, of course, is terrible.

Still, many Americans understandably may tune him out. The newspapers did not put Trump’s speech on the front page. The television networks did not carry it. And I get it. Why placate the President with the publicity for his baseless charges which he so palpably craves? This might have been a holy-shit speech, but it came in the “yeah, whatever” phase of Trump’s lame-duck Presidency. The courts have thrown out his legal team’s cases. The battleground states have all certified their election results affirming Biden’s win. The Electoral College will meet on December 14th, and the outcome does not appear to be in doubt.

And yet there are nearly fifty days until Biden’s Inauguration. This is far, far beyond the craziness of the past four years. Is this the kind of speech from their leader that Americans should just ignore? Trump is reportedly considering using the powers of the Presidency in an absolutely unprecedented way: to pardon himself, Giuliani, and his adult children. He is also reportedly considering firing the Attorney General, William Barr, and the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, after they failed to meet his demands to investigate rivals and back his outlandish election conspiracy theories. Barr, in what appeared to be an act of open defiance to Trump, told the A.P., on Tuesday, “We have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” Trump’s speech seemed a direct response, as did the news reports that he was considering Barr’s immediate “termination,” as the Post put it.

Meanwhile, Trump’s remaining loyalists make ever more outrageous and inflammatory demands. Trump’s former national-security adviser, the retired general Michael Flynn, was pardoned by Trump on Thanksgiving eve, after he pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I.; this week, Flynn endorsed a manifesto calling on Trump to impose “martial law,” and use the military to cancel the election results and force a national “re-vote.”

The temptation is to look away, to move on, to cringe and avert your gaze. That is exactly what the Republicans in the Senate, who have stood by Trump through impeachment and other ignominies, have done this week, pivoting so seamlessly into bashing the new Biden Administration that they never even stopped to acknowledge its existence. Like the vast majority of his G.O.P. colleagues, Senator John Cornyn, of Texas, has yet to publicly admit that Biden won. Nonetheless, he gave a speech on the Senate floor decrying Biden’s choices for top posts. “I will not support any nominee who doesn’t provide full transparency into their work on behalf of a foreign government. I will not do it,” Cornyn said. Never mind, in other words, the past four years of the Trump Administration, when a President and his children profited every single day off undisclosed foreign business arrangements.

[…]

Do Republicans think they have a free pass to pretend that the past four years never happened? Do they think they can simply return to the partisan status quo ante, complaining about nasty tweets and potential conflicts of interest, without anyone bringing up the current President? I don’t think this was what Biden meant when he said, during the campaign, that his Presidency would mark a return to normal. Meanwhile, not a single Republican senator had a word to say about Trump’s insane remarks from the White House on Wednesday, notwithstanding the President’s insistence that it was the most important speech of his tenure.

In many ways, the post-election period has revealed once again the shamelessly craven nature of the Trump-era G.O.P. in Washington—by showing the country that there remains another species of Republicans, comprising the state and local officials who have refused to go along with Trump’s manic crusade against the election results and have even denounced him publicly for it. In a little more than four minutes, on Tuesday, Georgia’s voting-system implementation manager, Gabriel Sterling, managed to give one of the most effective and heartfelt rebuttals to Trump’s recent actions—and to his Republican enablers. “This. Has. To. Stop,” Sterling said, pausing after each word for emphasis, his voice at times shaking with emotion. “All of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this,” he added. Whereas Trump offered a litany of fake complaints, Sterling offered a litany of real wrongs: the Trump promoter Joe diGenova calling for Trump’s fired cybersecurity chief Christopher Krebs—a defender of the election’s integrity—to be shot. A young Georgia election worker who found a noose outside his house. Death threats to those who count the votes. “All of this is wrong,” Sterling said. “It has to stop.”

In its heartfelt outrage, the speech immediately reminded me of the impeachment speeches about Trump a year ago, back before the pandemic and all the other craziness of 2020 meant it was hard even to remember impeachment. Listening to Sterling, I heard Alexander Vindman, the lieutenant colonel who assured his father that he would not get into trouble for testifying against the President, because here in the United States, unlike in the Soviet Union of his birth, “right matters.” And I heard Fiona Hill, another patriotic immigrant, begging Republicans to stop promoting “politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.” Most of all, I heard the echo of Adam Schiff, the House Democrat who led the impeachment case against Trump, who in his closing arguments to the Republican Senate had asked, “Is there one among you who will say ‘Enough’?” Schiff had warned back then that Trump, if left unchecked by the Senate, would surely try to undermine or corrupt the 2020 election, because that was exactly what he had already been doing. Impeachment failed, but the warning, as was evident even at the time, was prescient.

On Thursday morning, I spoke with Schiff. He said he was “heartened” to hear Sterling and other Republicans speak out. “But a part of me also thought, This has been going on for a long time, and it shouldn’t have taken this long for others to recognize the threat to the country,” he added. “We understood during the impeachment process that if the President were left in office, having tried to cheat in the last election, he would try to cheat in the next one. . . . And he did.”

The painful truth is that the defeat of Schiff’s impeachment effort has not made him any less incisive about the threat that Trump posed then and poses now. “It’s all tragically predictable,” Schiff told me, and, of course, he was right. Washington may have already moved on to the salacious matter of Neera Tanden’s tweets.

But, when the President launches a direct attack on the most important traditions of American democracy, I’m not ready to say “Yeah, whatever” just yet.

I’m not either. I never will, actually.

Having watched the Republican party get progressively more cynical and nihilistic over the past 25 years, I don’t think we can afford to let anything go this time. We still have a lunatic president for the next 50 days and a deadly pandemic that the federal government has simply washed its hands of at his direction. Half a million people could easily be dead in a few months because of his ignorance and ineptitude. They let this happen and they’ll do it again. It has to stop.

Corrupt to the core

Who are these people? What kind of a person feels confident enough to do something like this? Are they all malignant narcissists?

The official serving as President Donald Trump’s eyes and ears at the Justice Department has been banned from the building after trying to pressure staffers to give up sensitive information about election fraud and other matters she could relay to the White House, three people familiar with the matter tell The Associated Press.

Heidi Stirrup, an ally of top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, was quietly installed at the Justice Department as a White House liaison a few months ago. She was told within the last two weeks to vacate the building after top Justice officials learned of her efforts to collect insider information about ongoing cases and the department’s work on election fraud, the people said.

Stirrup is accused of approaching staffers in the department demanding they give her information about investigations, including election fraud matters, the people said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.

The effort came as Trump continues to level baseless claims that he won the election and alleges without evidence that massive voting fraud was responsible for his defeat to President-elect Joe Biden.

Stirrup had also extended job offers to political allies for positions at some of the highest levels of the Justice Department without consulting any senior department officials or the White House counsel’s office and also attempted to interfere in the hiring process for career staffers, a violation of the government’s human resources policies, one of the people said.

The Justice Department declined to comment. Attempts to reach Stirrup for comment were not immediately successful.

On Thursday, Trump appointed Stirrup to be a member of the board of visitors of the U.S. Air Force Academy, according to a White House press release.

[…]

Stirrup, who previously was a central figure in the Trump administration’s push for hard-line immigration policies, technically still remains in her position after being placed at the Justice Department by the White House Office of Presidential Personnel.

Apparently, this is something that’s been happening all across the government. Trump has placed these liaisons into agencies and having them report back to the White House rather than their own agencies. Even Ben Carson got angry about it when it happened at HHS, apparently over this same person, Helen Stirrup, who was assigned there before she went to DOJ. And guess what else?

Shortly after the election, the presidential personnel office had also instructed the liaisons to fire any political appointees who were looking for jobs while Trump refused to accept the election results. Trump’s term ends at noon on Jan. 20. Several thousand political appointees across the government will see their jobs end by that date.

The White House personnel office has been headed by former Trump personal assistant John McEntee, who has renewed Trump’s push to rid the administration of those deemed “disloyal” to the president.

I can’t recall who said this but I thought it was a good way of putting it: Trump doesn’t want loyalty, he wants fealty. Fealty is the feudal obligation by which a vassal was bonded to his lord and that’s exactly how Trump sees the relationship. If it means breaking the law to serve him, so be it.

America’s first couple splitsville?

No not Trump and Melania, Trump and Pence:

Since Nov. 25, not a single fundraising email from the Trump campaign or its Republican National Committee fundraising account has featured Pence’s name in the “from” field. And this week, that Republican National Committee joint fundraising committee, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, made another subtle change: a handful of its emails swapped out the official Trump-Pence campaign logo for one featuring just the president’s name.

At first blush, those may seem like minor tweaks to gimmicky portions of Team Trump’s fundraising strategy. A source familiar with the process said the fundraising emails do not go to Vice President Pence’s team for clearance and an RNC official said the digital team was merely testing a new logo around the end of the month deadline. Indeed, some of the joint fundraising committee’s emails this week have included the original campaign logo with Pence’s name below Trump’s.

“It is an open secret [in Trumpworld] that Vice President Pence absolutely does not feel the same way about the legal effort as President Trump does,” said a senior administration official. “The vice president doesn’t want to go down with this ship…and believes much of the legal work has been unhelpful.”[…]

The political marriage between Trump and Pence was always based on simple tradeoff: Pence gave Trump credibility among establishment and religious types and, in exchange, shared the spoils of Trump’s far larger and more unorthodox coalition of voters. But in the aftermath of the 2020 elections, that deal has come under intense strain.

As Trump has tended to his own future, Pence has preferred to place his energies on the critical Senate run-offs in Georgia. Pence, sources say, privately views the Rudy Giuliani-led legal operation to overturn the 2020 election through the mass disenfranchisement of votes as counterproductive and doomed. And, as a former governor himself, he has been particularly uncomfortable with Trump’s attacks on Republican governors in some of the key battleground states that he lost. The president has accused several GOP leaders of incompetence or negligence in their inability or unwillingness to stop the certification of their state’s election results.

No,no,no,no no. Pence does not get to separate himself from Trump now that he’s a big loser. He’s been Trump’s adoring sidekick for four long years. He will be inextricably linked to Donald Trump for the rest of his life.

On Wednesday, Pence went to Capitol Hill where he participated in the swearing in of Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ)—an act that implicitly conceded the validity of the elections in Arizona. Hours later, Trump put out a 46 minute long speech in which he called for the results in six battleground states, including Arizona, to be overturned and for him to remain president. Pence was not by his side.

Oh yes he was. He will always be next to him whether he is physically present or not. Always.

And Pence has his own record of failure which I wrote about a few months back. He’s done.

“You gotta prove it…”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., listens during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2020, on a probe of the FBI’s Russia investigation. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, Pool)

Lindsey Graham seems to think that he is maintaining some shred of credibility by saying this, but of course he isn’t:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Wednesday night urged President Donald Trump’s legal team to actually provide evidence in their court fights backing up their baseless accusations that the election, which was won decisively by President-elect Joe Biden, had been tainted by fraud.

“To the Trump legal team: You’re making all these claims…you gotta prove it,” the senator said during an interview on Fox News. “Doing a video is not proof. You need to take these claims into a court of law and get relief.”

Earlier on Wednesday, Trump posted a 46-minute video on Facebook of him spewing a rant teemed with his usual lies about mass voter fraud and the election being “rigged” in what he claimed “may be the most important speech I’ve ever made.”

The President demanded that somebody, be it the media or judges, validate his false claims that the race had been “stolen” from him and that he was the true victor.

“They know who won the election, but they refuse to say you’re right. Our country needs somebody to say ‘You’re right,’” Trump said.

He knows there is no proof, of course. After all, he was calling around trying to get various officials to throw out legal votes. Obviously, he knew that they didn’t have a leg to stand on.

I keep wondering if these people will be able to erase all this within a few months as everyone moves on. The desire to put this horror show behind us is palpable and I feel it too, particularly as we are still in the midst of this horrific crisis and it won’t be completely over for quite some time.

But the internet is forever and some of us are not going to let this go. I won’t be focusing on Donald Trump except to the extent he may be held accountable for what he’s done. But these people, the Republican accomplices and the people who vote for them, have so much power that we can’t afford to look away even if we want to.

These people blow up the country and then leave the carnage behind for the Democrats to deal with. This pattern is becoming much more dangerous as they are upping the ante every time. Following their dubious “victory” in 2000, they used 9/11 as an excuse to start a war and the financial system collapsed, making Obama’s first term a nightmare. And because the problems were so overwhelming, Obama and the rest of the Democrats decided they couldn’t afford to continue the partisan fighting and they agreed not to “look in the rearview mirror.”

I think that was a mistake. It led to more and more radical nihilism on the part of the Republicans, to the point where they have weaponized obstructionism as a weapon of mass destruction that permeates every corner of government. Let’s just say that this isn’t going to be any better under Joe Biden.

The election grift

“It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it …” Trump, 2000

His “recount” fund is a personal slush fund:

While President Donald Trump has raised many tens of millions of dollars with the promise of overturning his election loss last month, his supporters are mainly donating into a fund he could use for Big Macs, golf equipment and, if he wants, even more hush money payments.

Unlike political campaign and party committees, whose money cannot be converted to personal use by a candidate, Trump’s “Save America” is a so-called “leadership” PAC, with far less stringent rules regulating its spending.

“It’ll be a slush fund,” said Paul S. Ryan, a campaign finance lawyer with the liberal group Common Cause. “Trump could decide to pay himself $1 million a year out of this fund. That’s legal. He could pay [his children] Don Jr. and Ivanka, if he wanted to. It’s pretty clear that this is a classic bait-and-switch scheme.”

Neither the Trump campaign nor the Republican National Committee responded to HuffPost queries about Trump’s post-election fundraising. Save America’s first report for money raised and spent between Election Day and Nov. 23 is not due with the Federal Election Commission until later this week.

The Washington Post reported on Monday that Trump raised $150 million since Nov. 3, while The New York Times reported a $170 million total. Neither outlet broke down how much of that went to Save America versus Trump’s campaign and the RNC.

One top Republican fundraiser close to Trump laughed upon learning of the soon-to-be former president’s ability to use donor money for personal expenses. “Good for him,” he said on condition of anonymity. “I hope he does it to just to piss everybody off.”

Despite the prohibition against personally benefiting from money donated to his campaign, Trump as a candidate in 2016 and then as the sitting president for four years managed to circumvent that restriction by directing money ― both from his campaign as well as the RNC ― to his own businesses. These included his mixed-used Trump Tower building in New York City, his golf resorts, and his hotels, particularly the one just blocks from the White House in Washington, D.C. Those entities collected nearly $8 million between the time he took office and just before the election, according to a HuffPost analysis of FEC filings.

But much of that money went to pay operating costs of those businesses, with some smaller fraction winding up in Trump’s pocket. His Save America committee, in contrast, can pick up his personal expenses directly ― everything from travel and entertainment costs to mortgage payments to legal fees. It could even pay him a salary of however much he chooses to take.

Leadership PACs’ ostensible purpose is for elected officials to be able to raise and spend money to help colleagues win elections, thereby earning loyalty that those officials can use to further their own ambitions. They are typically created by members of Congress hoping to rise in their parties’ leadership ranks.

But while congressional ethics rules restrict members of the House and Senate from accepting income or other personal benefit from those PACs, no such restriction applies to Trump.

“Trump was a grifter before he was in the White House. He was a grifter while he was in the White House. There’s surely no reason to expect him to stop grifting as he leaves and once he’s gone,” said Robert Weissman, president of the watchdog group Public Citizen. “The special problem this time is, in conning his supporters, he’s also sowing deep distrust of the most basic institutions of our democracy, in ways that may have dire, long-term consequences.”

Most of the Trump campaign’s hundreds of texts and emails since Election Day to its list of small-dollar donors, in fact, have falsely suggested that Trump lost the Nov. 3 election because of fraud.

“Please contribute $5 IMMEDIATELY to DEFEND the Election from the Radical Left and you can increase your impact by 1000%,” read a Nov. 22 email.

“Our End-of-Month goal is crucial to ensuring we have the resources to DEFEND the Election, and we don’t want the President to see a list without YOUR NAME on it,” said another one five days later.

“We’re pacing behind our Deadline Goal! Pres Trump is doing something he’s never done before. ALL GIFTS 1000%-IMPACT FOR 1 HR. Donate NOW,” urged a text sent Monday. “We can’t let Biden & Kamala try to STEAL the Election.”

And an email on Tuesday read: “Making sure we have enough resources to protect the integrity of this Election is critical; especially when the Left and Fake News media are working overtime to try to STEAL IT.

Those who click through the donation links wind up on a page for the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, which for four years has been a joint venture between the Trump campaign and the RNC, but which on Nov. 18 amended its mission to include Save America, the committee Trump registered six days after losing the election.

And while an animated color graphic urges donors to “Join the Election Defense Team,” the fine print beneath makes clear that the vast majority of donations will not send a single dime to any “election defense” effort.

According to that explanation, 75% of every donation goes to Trump’s Save America committee and 25% goes to the RNC’s general fund. Only after Save America has received $5,000 from any given donor does the Trump portion of the donation shift to a “recount” fund established within the Trump campaign. And only after the RNC portion of a donor’s total reaches $35,500 does that fraction start passing to the dedicated “legal proceedings” or “headquarters” funds that the RNC maintains.

Meaning that a single person’s donations must hit $6,666.67 before a single penny starts flowing to a dedicated recount fund. Because the emails and texts are sent to donors who typically give in the $20 or $50 range, the chance that any of the money winds up in either of the dedicated election funds is slim.

Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who unsuccessfully ran against Trump for the 2020 GOP presidential nomination, said Trump’s hardcore fans do not care. “I’ve brought it up to his supporters. They don’t believe it,” Walsh said.

“The Trump campaign is running a fraudulent scam with the full assistance of the Republican Party,” added Stuart Stevens, a top consultant to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. “No different than quack doctors selling fake cancer cures to desperate people. It’s shameful but true to form.”

They are saying they will die for him. Surely the are happy to give him all their money. Isn’t that how cults work?

Millions and millions infected

The Fall of the Restaurant Menu. How McDonald's ruined everything and… | by  Jamie Mah | Track and Food | Medium

The numbers of American COVID-19 dead and infected would not raise an eyebrow if posted below the word McDonald’s. If the U.S. ever expects to emerge from this disastrous plague, it will need a plan. A national one. Not the PR-driven, market-based, half-assed, reality-TV hash offered by Donald Trump, either.

Now, President-elect Joe Biden ran for office and won big on providing one. You know, to keep hundreds of thousands more Americans from dying. (Uncle Joe is patriotic that way.)

One might think flag-waving, U-S-A-chanting Americans might be on board with keeping breathing. But E.J. Dionne reminds us their “leaders” in Congress are just not that into them. Not enough to support fixing the disaster Donald Trump made of the COVID-19 response.

So, ending the plague will hinge on what happens in the Senate runoff elections in Georgia on January 5th. Winning both Georgia Senate seats means Biden will at least have a chance bringing down the curtain on this tragedy:

What is at stake: whether President-elect Joe Biden will have a chance to end the scourge of the covid-19 pandemic, get the economy moving again, and enact some bread-and-butter programs to rebuild our nation’s infrastructure and shore up our health-care system.

And voters must understand that as long as Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is the Senate majority leader and the base of the Republican Party is dominated by the far right — including “Stop the Steal” Trumpists — a divided government is not a recipe for compromise. Instead, it’s a ticket to obstruction and the very sort of partisan brawling that moderate voters can’t stand.

If the myth that the country works best under divided government ever had substance, Dionne argues, the times in which it did are long gone. Republicans if left in control of the Senate will simply throw sand in the gears. Less tantrum-y than Trump, perhaps, but no less malicious.

What the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Democrats running for the Senate, need to tell their voters is that Democratic control is the only hope for a robust and widely shared economic recovery.

And they can assure moderate voters that radicalism won’t be on the table since progressives would have to negotiate with middle-of-the-roaders such as Manchin, Warner and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) to get anything passed. But unlike McConnell, all three members of this moderate trio want to get things done — and want the new president to succeed.

Warnock and Ossoff can also remind those who worry about “defunding the police” that the surest way to guarantee cutbacks in police, firefighting and other basic services is for Congress to go along with the Republican right’s refusal to provide financial assistance to state and local governments.

Winning two Senate seats in Georgia is a long shot. But Biden may get an assist from the infighting among Republicans there. At a #StopTheSteal rally in Alpharetta Wednesday featuring ostensible attorneys Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, the pair told Trump’s MAGA supporters to stay home Jan. 5 if they don’t get the reversal of presidential election results they demand. A third recount is underway now with no indication results will change.

You thought it was bad before

True Pandemic Toll in the U.S. Reaches 345,000
Image via New York Times.

News from the White House Coronavirus Task Force and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was grim Wednesday. No, not the fact that the U.S set two new COVID-19 records: 200,000 new infections and topping 100,000 covid-19 patients hospitalized. It was the additional urgency behind actions the public should take now.

In a Nov. 29 report to governors not made public but obtained by NBC News, the Coronavirus Task Force warned:

“It must be made clear that if you are over 65 or have significant health conditions, you should not enter any indoor public spaces where anyone is unmasked due to the immediate risk to your health; you should have groceries and medications delivered.”

Echoing what Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci have stressed in recent days, the report also states: “If you are under 40, you need to assume you became infected during the Thanksgiving period if you gathered beyond your immediate household.”

“Most likely, you will not have symptoms; however, you are dangerous to others and you must isolate away from anyone at increased risk for severe disease and get tested immediately,” it states.

That is more bluntness than we have seen from this group all year.

On MSNBC’s “The Reidout,” Dr. Vin Gupta was composed but serious about what it means: “Cancel your travel plans…. You can’t test or mask your way out of safe travel.”

Gupta had just served a week in an intensive care ward and no COVID-19 patient there knew they had been exposed to the virus. They had not been “going out and having a grand, old time. They got it from a close contact at home who inadvertently exposed them to the virus.”

“Don’t get on a flight. Don’t get in an automobile or on a bus or on a train.” Just don’t, he said. Everyone should be using a high-quality, three-ply surgical mask or the equivalent multi-layer cloth mask. Tens of thousands might be saved if 95 percent of the country used them. Only about 68 percent do now.

For those over 55, Gupta added an “additional wrinkle.” If you must go out into the community handling basics like grocery shopping because no one else cannot do it for you, “put on an eye shield. We’re that desperate right now.”

I wasn’t sure if he meant me to sober up or pour a drink.

Then the New York Times reported on a CDC study of “excess deaths“:

Deaths nationwide were 19 percent higher than normal from March 15 to Nov. 14. Altogether, the analysis shows that 345,000 more people than normal have died in the United States during that period, a number that may be an undercount since recent death statistics are still being updated.

Compiling these numbers involves reporting lags. Many states are running behind, so final CDC estimates may be months away.

From March 15 through Nov. 14, the most recent date with reliable statistics, estimated excess deaths were 41 percent higher than the official coronavirus fatality count. If this pattern held through Dec. 2, the total death toll would be about 380,000.

Vaccines are on the way, but still months away. Britain will begin mass immunizations with the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccines to be delivered next week. Russia begins distributing its less rigorously tested vaccine next week. Here in the U.S., the CDC recommends long-term care residents and health workers get the first doses. Presidents Obama, George W. Bush, and Clinton say they will get their shots on camera to encourage skeptical Americans to do so. They’ll have to be coaxed to save their lives and those of their neighbors.

People living in poorer countries may have to wait until 2024. Let that sink in.