Month: December 2020

Persistent. Give them that:

Rep. Louie Gohmert became the latest Republican to file a long-shot lawsuit attempting to reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s victory — this time by suing Vice President Mike Pence.

[…]

The suit asks federal Judge Jeremy Kernodle, a Trump appointee in eastern Texas, to declare that Pence has the “exclusive authority and sole discretion” to decide which electoral votes from a given state should be counted.

The lawsuit filed Monday demands that on Jan. 6 Pence, as President of the Senate, reject electoral votes from a set of swing states Trump lost (because he lost them). Toss out enough of them and Trump’s electoral vote total exceeds Joe Biden’s.

Here is the relevant language from Amendment XII (emphasis mine):

The electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all persons voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate;–The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;–the person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President …

“Shall … open all the certificates” and “the votes shall then be counted” seems cut and dried. “No, this won’t work,” writes election law expert Rick Hasen of Gohmert’s folly.

“If the Twelfth Amendment somehow gave the Vice President the power to unilaterally throw out electoral votes for the other guy in favor of their own party (and even themselves), one might think that one of them would’ve noticed by now,” tweeted Steven Vladeck, professor of law at the University of Texas. “But I guess they were all just idiots…”

If the Twelfth Amendment somehow gave the Vice President the power to unilaterally throw out electoral votes for the other guy in favor of their own party (and even *themselves*), one might think that one of them would've noticed by now.

But I guess they were all just idiots…

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) December 28, 2020

No, they were not. The idiots are anti-democracy cultists backing impeached, one-term president Donald J. Trump, loser of the national popular vote … twice.

The Happy Hollandaise fundraiser goes through the end of the year so if you’re of a mind to kick in a little something below or at the snail mail address on the sidebar, you will help make 2021 brighter.

A post last night to a local politics page in many ways encapsulates 2020:

Thinking about flying somewhere for a getaway? Please don’t. My brother-in-law’s perfectly healthy 34-year-old nephew died yesterday. He and his wife and three children had flown from Georgia to Colorado for Christmas so the kids could see snow. He started to feel bad on the flight back and began vomiting. Once they got back to their house he began vomiting blood. He went outside to get some fresh air; his wife came outside looking for him when he did not return and found him collapsed, dead. He had positive post-mortem covid test. You think it’s not connected? All I know is he was a healthy, fit young man with no pre-existing conditions, period, and now he’s dead.

A couple of commenters sympathized with the neighbor, having lost family of their own to the disease: a brother even younger, a mother-in-law.

We can infer that man had the wherewithal to jet his young family to Colorado for Christmas; that the family had not lost its income to Covid; that it was secure in the belief its income would continue uninterrupted in the new year. We need not infer that vacation travel by air was highly risky behavior. That’s plain. More holiday travelers will meet a similar fate soon enough.

For a few survivors, even a mild case of the illness will have lasting neurological effects. For one, post-Covid psychosis.

A 42-year-old physical therapist with no history of mental illness reported months later “she kept seeing her children, ages 2 to 10, being gruesomely murdered and that she herself had crafted plans to kill them.” She had had only mild coronavirus symptoms in the spring, the New York Times reports:

A 36-year-old nursing home employee in North Carolina who became so paranoid that she believed her three children would be kidnapped and, to save them, tried to pass them through a fast-food restaurant’s drive-through window.

A 30-year-old construction worker in New York City who became so delusional that he imagined his cousin was going to murder him, and, to protect himself, he tried to strangle his cousin in bed.

[…]

Brain scans, spinal fluid analyses and other tests didn’t find any brain infection, said Dr. Gabbay, whose hospital has treated two patients with post-Covid psychosis: a 49-year-old man who heard voices and believed he was the devil and a 34-year-old woman who began carrying a knife, disrobing in front of strangers and putting hand sanitizer in her food.

The psychosis appears treatable, but for some only after weeks of hospitalization and after trying multiple medications. The rest of us were lucky enough to just lose time and income.

This lost year is not unique in the level of global disruption, Joe Pinsker writes at The Atlantic. The 1918–19 influenza pandemic was intense but brief, disrupting life in affected cities by only two or three months. Historians cite the Civil War, two world wars, depressions in the 1870s and 1890s, and the Great Depression as significant disruptions. Pinsker adds 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia leading to “the Year Without a Summer” and the crop failures and food shortages of 1816:

But while the features of 2020 have all arisen in the past, they never arose all at once. “The particular combination of delayed timelines, diminishment of celebrations, and evacuation of public life characteristic of this pandemic is relatively unique,” [Brown University’s Robert] Self said. There really is something distinctive about the lost year we’ve been living through.

Pinsker checks in with numerous people whose lives were put on hold by COVID-19, some students delaying grad school, others trying to decide what to be when finally they grow up. Long-term planning is out this year for many. A 31-year-old audiovisual technician “stuck” in San Francisco explains, “Why bother long-term planning when this is how the world works?” For others, the future ceased to exist in 2020, as did they.

Waiting for normal life to restart will take its own toll “in a culture that ties people’s worth to their accomplishments and work ethic.” People’s sense of time’s passage has been altered too by the isolation, by missed celebrations, human interactions. and a year of lost memories.

Pinsker concludes:

This is one way many people will remember 2020: It was interminable to live through, but swift in retrospect. And as more time passes and the memories people do have degrade, maybe it will start to seem even shorter, and emptier.

Hopefully, the future will be more vivid. “I think the fact that we’re not making memories right now means that when you finally get back out again,” Santos said, “time is going to go by really fast because we’re doing fun things, but it’s also going to be etched in our memory books in a really richer way.” After a gray year, we might see the times to come in Technicolor.

But the pandemic’s direct and indirect effects will not be the only enduring ones from 2020. Armed anti-maskers stormed state capitols and threatened revolution; unknown thousands bought into a conspiracy theory about a secret cabal of cannibal pedophiles; police killings provoked Black Lives Matter protests from coast to coast; and a major political party enabled an unhinged president in his attempt to overturn results of a national election. The virus has undermined all our lives (and terminated hundreds of thousands). Trumpism has undermined the republic. It ain’t over until 2021, if then.

The Happy Hollandaise fundraiser goes through the end of the year so if you’re of a mind to kick in a little something below or at the snail mail address on the sidebar, you will help make 2021 brighter.

The White House prepared a nice little binky for the baby president:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1343673164270858241

It is full of many lies, but this one is especially bold:

https://twitter.com/davidgura/status/1343690885276561408

I think he has convinced himself that he actually won it:

In recent rallies, President Donald Trump has repeatedly conflated winning a Nobel Peace Prize with being nominated for one, and has wrongly faulted the media for ignoring his nomination after making former President Barack Obama’s nomination in 2009 “the biggest story I’ve ever seen.”

The media attention for Obama came after he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump has been nominated, but that’s not the “big thing” he makes it out to be. There are 318 candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize for 2020 — 211 are individuals and 107 organizations.

Any one of thousands of people can nominate someone for the prestigious award. And two people have come forward saying they nominated Trump.

But on its website, the Nobel committee warns not to attach too much importance to a nomination.

“Any person or organization can be nominated by anyone eligible to nominate,” the committee states. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has no input into submissions, though it decides who actually wins the prize. “To simply be nominated is therefore not an endorsement or extended honour to imply affiliation with the Nobel Peace Prize or its related institutions,” the committee states.

Nonetheless, Trump has touted the nomination repeatedly at campaign rallies, on Twitter and in TV ads.

On Sept. 9, Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a far-right Norwegian politician, announced on Fox News that he had nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize.

“For his merit, I think he has done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees,” Tybring-Gjedde said.

In his nominating letter, Tybring-Gjedde cited Trump’s role in establishing relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. He also cited Trump’s “key role in facilitating contact between conflicting parties and … creating new dynamics in other protracted conflicts, such as the Kashmir border dispute between India and Pakistan, and the conflict between North and South Korea, as well as dealing with the nuclear capabilities of North Korea.”

Two days later, Magnus Jacobsson, a member of Sweden’s Parliament for the Christian Democrats, announced via Twitter that he, too, had nominated Trump for the award, along with the governments of Kosovo and Serbia “for their joint work for peace and economic development.”

Nominations for a Nobel Peace Prize can be made by any one of perhaps hundreds of thousands of eligible people, including, according to the Nobel website, “university rectors or chancellors, professors of political and social science, history, philosophy, law and theology; leaders of peace research institutes and institutes of foreign affairs; members of national assemblies, governments, and international courts of law; previous Nobel Peace Prize Laureates; board members of organizations and institutions that have received the Nobel Peace Prize; present and past members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee; and former advisers of the Norwegian Nobel Institute.”

The Nobel committee does not provide a list of the nominees. In fact, the names of nominees, and who nominated them, are not released by the Nobel committee for 50 years, and only leak out when people make them public, as Tybring-Gjedde and Jacobsson did.

The Nobel committee does, however, release the number of nominations. This year, there are 318 candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize — 211 individuals and 107 organizations. That’s the fourth highest number of candidates in the award’s history. The five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee narrows the list of nominees to a small group and then picks a winner.

According to the Nobel Prize website, simply being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize is “not an endorsement or extended honour to imply affiliation with the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Indeed, some of history’s most vilified figures have been nominated for the prize. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was nominated twice: in 1945 for his effort to end World War II and again in 1948 by a professor from the Czech Republic. And fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was nominated in 1935 by two law professors, one from Germany and the other from France. (Adolf Hitler was nominated in 1939 — the nomination was later withdrawn — by “an anti-fascist member of the Swedish parliament who never intended his submission to be taken seriously,” according to Nobel archives.)

This is not the first time Trump has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Tybring-Gjedde, who nominated Trump this month, and another far-right politician, Per-Willy Amundsen, said in June 2018 they had nominated Trump for the honor following Trump’s nuclear weapons summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

In February 2019, Trump claimed in a White House press conference that Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe wrote him a letter in which he said he had nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, also related to his negotiations with North Korea. Abe declined to confirm that, though the Asahi Shimbun newspaper “cited an unnamed government source as saying the nomination came in response to an ‘unofficial’ U.S. request,” according to the Washington Post. Other than publicly disclosing the letter, though, Trump did not otherwise publicize the nomination, and he did not win the prize that year.

But Trump has insisted he will win a Nobel Peace Prize, or at least that he should.

Trump’s talk on the trail about this was just pathetically cringeworthy:

“Can you believe it, in one week they nominated me, not for one, but for two Nobel prizes,” Trump said at a rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Sept. 19. “But you know, you have a president, you love your president, and your president gets honored, because I’m not being honored, you’re being honored with the Nobel Peace Prize, for Israel, what we did with Israel.”

(He wasn’t nominated for two Nobel prizes; he was nominated by two people for the same prize. And, of course, he was not honored — at least not yet — with the prize.)

Trump went on relate a story about how he went home to watch the network news with his wife in hopes of hearing about his nomination.

“This is going to be big,” Trump said he told First Lady Melania Trump. “This is going to be big tonight. We just got honored, this is big. Nobel Peace, can you imagine?”

But to his embarrassment, he said, “I wasn’t covered. I got the Nobel Peace Prize nomination, a Peace Prize, Nobel nomination. And they didn’t cover it.”

And, naturally he whined like a little baby that ir wasn’t faaaaaiiir:

“I think I’ll get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things,” Trump said during a press conference on Sept. 23, 2019. “I think I’m going to get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things, if they gave it out fairly, which they don’t.”

I expect going forward that Trump will just claim he did win it and his cult will believe that anyone who says otherwise is fake news. I’d imagine there will be a lot of that.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here (or at the P.O. box shown in the sidebar):

It’s happened throughout the Trump administration whenever anyone said something Dear Leader didn’t like.

There was no act of vengeance too small for the narcissistic creep:

Today, I worked my final shift at Walter Reed ER. I will miss the patients and my military and civilian coworkers – they have been overwhelmingly supportive. I’m honored to have worked there and I look forward to new opportunities. I stand by my words, and I regret nothing.

— James P. Phillips, MD (@DrPhillipsMD) December 28, 2020

Dr. James Phillips, the Walter Reed physician who criticized President Trump’s decision to greet supporters outside the facility where he was being treated for COVID-19, has worked his last shift at the hospital. “I stand by my words, and I regret nothing,” Phillips wrote on Twitter.

The doctor’s pending removal from the work schedule at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center was reported in early December – two months after Phillips slammed the president’s refusal to isolate himself. His announcement that he has now stopped working at the medical compound brought a new round of praise for Phillips, both for his work as a doctor and for speaking out.

Phillips, who is also the chief of disaster medicine at George Washington University, said in October that Trump’s insistence on riding in a motorcade past supporters gathered across the street fromWalter Reed exposed his security detail and others to a high risk of infection by the deadly coronavirus.

“The irresponsibility is astounding. My thoughts are with the Secret Service forced to play,” the physician wrote in a tweet later deleted. He also dismissed Trump’s outing — which came one month before the national election — as “political theater” that forced other people into quarantine and put them at unnecessary risk.

Phillips also thanked a George Washington University colleague who defended him after Dr. Jonathan Reiner said, “Dr. Phillips spoke the truth, and the truth was uncomfortable for some people. He did nothing wrong. People who claim to be patriots should defend the 1st Amendment as vigorously as they defend the 2nd.”

Phillips was one of many voices critical of Trump’s outing. The president said his foray was meant to thank his supporters. After the event, White House spokesman Judd Deere said that a medical team had cleared Trump’s plan for a brief motorcade tour and that those involved took safety precautions.

The Biden team needs to take a close look at the medical staff in the White House after what we’ve seen from that wingnut robot Ronny Jackson and Dr Sean Conley who acted like Trump’s press agents. The American people were lied to about Trump’s health from the beginning of his presidency, first by his own Dr Feelgood and then the White House military doctors. Something’s not right there.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here (or at the P.O. box shown in the sidebar):

I’m not going back to yesterday’s Republican Party.

THIS IS DONALD TRUMP’S PARTY!

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) December 27, 2020

Is Gaetz a true believer or fellow grifter? And does it matter?

One of the dangerous aspects of this is that we don’t know exactly what defines “yesterday’s Republican Party” and “Donald Trump’s party.”

Take this, for instance. It’s an exchange between former hard right GOP congressman Joe Walsh and current hard right GOP congressman Mo Brooks:

Nope. Sorry Mo. You, me, & all the other Republicans railed about the debt during the Obama years, but then you all didn’t say shit about the debt during the Trump years, so new rule #14,625 says that Republicans are no longer allowed to complain about the debt. Ever again. https://t.co/ZFiC8wFcWK

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) December 28, 2020

Brooks doesn’t care about being a hypocrite, of course. He is shameless and his voters are too. In this respect, Trump is no different than Bush or Reagan or any of the other Republicans who inevitably hike the deficit with outlandish tax cuts and military spending and then try to force the Democrats who take over after they mess everything up to cut programs and funding for people who need it in order to “cut the deficit.” They do this, of course, while insisting that taxes can never be raised and military spending can never be cut. Remember, it was Dick Cheney who said, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”

This is a very old dynamic. Democrats need to quote Dick Cheney and just do what is necessary.

What is new is people like Joe Walsh coming to understand the shamelessnes of the Republican Party and pointing it out. I don’t know if it has any influence. But there are bound to be some people out there who are uncomfortable with the hypocrisy of it. A handful anyway. Will it make a difference? I honestly don’t know.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here (or at the P.O. box shown in the sidebar):

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here (or at the P.O. box shown in the sidebar):

Rasmussen Polls is tweeting Trump propaganda now:

At that moment, the Presidency will be in his hands.

And there is nothing stopping Pence, under the (plenary and unappealable) authority vested in him as President of the Senate, from declining to open and count the certificates from the six disputed states.

2/4

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) December 27, 2020

Per the 12th Amendment: "[T]he votes shall then be counted[.] … The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President[.]"

Reader comments?

4/4

More here – https://t.co/ehnnu84Lgi

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) December 27, 2020

This is wrong, needless to say:

Supporters of President Trump have made similar arguments that Pence, as president of the Senate, has the power to reject Electoral College results.

However, the theory is based on a misreading of U.S. code that simply authorizes the vice president to call on states to submit their electoral votes if they do not do so by the fourth Wednesday in December, according to The Washington Post.

“The Vice President is not supposed to control the outcome of the process for counting the electoral votes from the states. That’s true from the perspective of the Constitution as well as the Electoral Count Act,” Edward Foley, a law professor at the Ohio State University, told The Hill in an email.

“The Vice President chairs the joint session, but does not decide what electoral votes to count,” he added, noting it “was clearly understood…that the Vice President might be a candidate in the election under consideration, and they did not want this conflict of interest to affect the result.”

T. Greg Doucette, an attorney and Trump critic who frequently fields questions about the president’s capacity to legally challenge the results of the election, tweeted that “Pence has no power to ‘strike’ anything. He opens the envelopes, gives the certificates to the tellers, the tellers count.”

All this does is hurt Mike Pence. They are telling the Trump cult that he has the power to hand the election to Trump. If he refuses to do it he will be a traitor to the cause. If he does do it, it will fail and he will still be a traitor to the cause.

But you have to admit, quoting Stalin in defense of Trump is just:

Update:

Fergawdsakes

A group of Republicans including Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas and Kelli Ward of Arizona is suing Vice President Mike Pence in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The Electoral College is scheduled to certify the win on Jan. 6, a procedural task overseen by the sitting vice president—in this case, Pence, who has not yet publicly acknowledged the fact that Trump lost his bid for a second term. In the lawsuit, details of which reporter John Kruzel of The Hill posted on Twitter, Gohmert, Ward, and 10 other plaintiffs such as Students for Trump COO Tyler Bowyer, Arizona Republican Party Executive Director Greg Safsten, and Maricopa County Republicans Second Vice Chair Nancy Cottle, are asking federal Judge Jeremy Kernodle, a Trump appointee, to declare Pence legally authorized to pick pro-Trump electors on Jan. 6.

Since Trump lost his November bid for a second term in the White House, certain members of the GOP have continued to stoke his delusion of having won by floating unlikely—and thus far, entirely unsuccessful—court challenges to President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. Meanwhile, other Republicans have urged the president to gracefully accept defeat. On Monday, Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA) retweeted news of the lawsuit against Pence with an exasperated, “This is NUTS.”

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here (or at the P.O. box shown in the sidebar):

One of the hallmarks of modern conservatism is that its fundamentalist belief in “individualism” means that its adherents simply don’t care about anything unless it happens to them personally. We’ve seen this time and time again when right wing politicians vote time after time against funding for disasters that happen to others or suddenly taking an interest in research for a particular disease once it happens to one of their family members.

Recall that right wing men in congress even said that they didn’t believe health care plans should be required to cover maternity care since they don’t get pregnant. They like to wail about socialism and complain that liberals are collectivist drones, but it really isn’t about that. It’s about the Golden Rule: do unto others and you would have them do unto you.

Here’s a good example of the phenomenon:

The White House has become known as a super-spreader location after several large gatherings that have disseminated COVID-19 to President Donald Trump and his staff, a slew of Republican elected officials and now a member of the Massachusetts Republican Party executive board.

WHDH news reported that after attending a holiday party at the White House, vice chairman of the Massachusetts Republican State Committee Tom Mountain tested positive.

“People would just leisurely and gingerly take off their mask to mingle, to schmooze,” he said about the White House Hanukkah party on Dec. 10. “I don’t even think some people wore masks the entire time. And again, I was guilty as anyone else. I just wasn’t wearing a mask.”

Trump has spent the better part of the coronavirus pandemic refusing to wear a mask, despite experts saying it helped stop the spread of the respiratory virus. While Mountain said he can’t be certain that the party was the source, the timeline suggests it is.

“Well, lets put it this way, when I went down to Washington, D.C. for the White House Hanukkah event, I was perfectly fine, and three days later after that event, I was in the hospital at Brigham and Women’s ready to be put on a lifesaving ventilator,” he told WHDH.

To make matters worse, four of his family members also caught the virus off of him.

Mountain wasn’t a big mask-wearer, but having the virus changed that.

“I was one of the naysayers,” he said. “I am no longer a naysayer.”

He’s now begging anyone celebrating on New Year’s Eve to wear a mask and “stay as far away from people as possible.”

I guess it’s good to have testimonials like this. It’s better than nothing. At least he’s encouraging people not to do what he did, now that he’s experienced it personally. But it shouldn’t have taken that. It’s not as if there isn’t a ton of information, data and evidence that has shown us exactly what the consequences of spreading this deadly virus are.

But it’s frustrating. This man took the risk for himself which is his right. But he spread it to four of his family members and probably to strangers as he traveled. And I just don’t understand why anyone thinks that’s their right as well.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here (or at the P.O. box shown in the sidebar):

Trump had a tantrum and held up the signing of the Omnibus and COVID relief bills for no real reason. It’s likely that his impulse was that he could flex his muscles in a show of strength to get the GOP Senators to hand him the election. But mostly it was just acting out like a child who didn’t get his way upending the playing board out of pique and then flouncing off to his resort to pout for a while. He has the mind and temperament of a three year old:

Getting a cranky, stubborn President Trump to belatedly sign the COVID relief bill, after unemployment benefits had already lapsed, was like being a hostage negotiator, or defusing a bomb.

Driving the news: The deal was closed on a Sunday afternoon phone call with Trump, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy. “This is good,” Trump finally said, an official familiar with the call told me. “I should sign this.”

How it happened: Over many days, Mnuchin and McCarthy — aided by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who golfed with Trump in West Palm Beach on Friday — indulged the president’s rants, told him there was great stuff in the bill, and gave him “wins” he could announce, even though they didn’t change the bill.

Playing to his vanity, they invoked his legacy,and reminded him he didn’t want to hurt people.

They convinced the author of “The Art of the Deal” that he had shown himself to be a fighter, and that he had gotten all there was to get.

Trump’s sweeteners, from his 8:15 p.m. statement: “[T]he House and Senate have agreed to focus strongly on the very substantial voter fraud which took place in the November 3 Presidential election.”

“The Senate will start the process for a vote that increases checks to $2,000, repeals Section 230, and starts an investigation into voter fraud. Big Tech must not get protections of Section 230! Voter Fraud must be fixed! Much more money is coming. I will never give up my fight for the American people!”

Reality check … Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who worked hard to understand Trump, told me: “It may be too late. Too late for him, too late for the economy, too late for Covid, and too late for the Georgia senators.”

“The Senate will start the process…” “Much more money is coming …” Such a bullshit artist.

But I have to laugh whenever I see these people talking about Trump protecting “his legacy.” Here’s his legacy and it’s really special:

His legacy is that he is the biggest loser in American history. The only one who even comes close is Andrew Johnson, previously known as America’s worst president. Trump has won that title, hands down.

The Happy Hollandaise fundraiser goes through the end of the year so if you’re of a mind to kick in a little something below or at the snail mail address on the sidebar, I would be most grateful.

cheers,
digby

Politico this morning published what Josh Marshall describes as “your quotient of comically dumb puff pieces for the day.” Said puff piece portrays a group of freshman Republican women in the House as a counterpoint to the liberal Squad. They call themselves — wait for it — the Force.

Politico begins dreadfully:

On the first day of Congress’ freshman orientation, four incoming GOP members realized they shared a special connection: All had first- or second-hand experience living in communist or socialist countries.

Straw men everywhere shudder in their overalls.

Oliver Willis tweeted, “the consistent failure of ‘this is a conservative version of x’ is one of my favorite tropes. see conservative wikipedia, conservative actblue, conservative dailykos, conservative twitter, it just never ends, never works.” Perhaps the most pitiful of the lot, the mercifully short-lived “The 1/2 Hour News Hour.”

Conservative copycatting is as endlessly tiresome as Republicans’ all-purpose, socialism-on-everything left of Ted Cruz smear. Equate Guantanamo with gulags and they’ll rage for days and demand a public apology. Equate reinforcing the social safety net or a $15 per hour base wage with North Korea and they nod knowingly and warn of the coming of a liberal antichrist.

Socialism, you know? Cue Inigo Montoya.

Shi-Ling Hsu writes at Slate that one man’s socialism is another’s crony capitalism:

Republicans have been remarkably successful in labeling Democrats as socialists. But Democratic proposals that get tagged as “socialism” amount to little more than expanding the safety net, bringing the United States closer to Sweden, Canada, or Germany, all prosperous, democratic, capitalist countries. By contrast, Republicans are the ones that are gumming up the gears of American capitalism, promoting policies to prop up aging, anachronistic industries and, worst of all, enabling the imposition of environmental harms far in excess of what it would cost to avoid them. Republicans say they are in favor of capitalism, but they are actually in favor of crony capitalism, which tips the scales in favor of their favorite industries. Capitalism can be a tough master: The point of capitalism is that competition causes some industries to fail. But protecting industries from failure in exchange for political benefit is far worse: It is a dangerously short step to socialism. And traditional socialism necessarily implies authoritarianism—how else is a country to undertake central economic planning except by an authoritarian government? That is actually where the Republican Party is taking us.

In case you haven’t been paying close attention for decades.

Exhibit A: Three dozen Republican senators insisting he “prevent financial institutions from discriminating against America’s energy sector.” That is, stop them from disinvesting in dying fossil fuel firms. Shi-Ling Hsu notes, “That is the essence of socialism: authoritarian government dictating private investments.”

Exhibit B: Trump has spent over $1 billion to keep coal-fired plants running by trying to capture their carbon emissions.

There is more to his analysis, of course. But with socialism, like so many other right-wing straw men, Republican authoritarians more closely resemble what they want others to fear:

It is not really capitalism if companies produce goods and services while fobbing off costs on the public. Socializing the costs of pollution is socialism, and it is how some of worst environmental catastrophes have occurred. It’s how the old Soviet Union could build Chernobyl, how it could decide to shrink the Aral Sea to become self-sufficient in cotton production, of all things, and why it would build inefficient, polluting pulp and paper mills on the shores of Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world and the most beautiful in the country. It’s also how 6,000 dead pigs can wash up on the riverbanks upriver from Shanghai, how residents of Beijing must suffer daily with choking smog, and how China, a country with more than 300 billionaires, still does not have potable tap water. With the lax regulation and weak enforcement championed by Republicans in the U.S., polluting companies face no incentive to find cleaner ways to produce, passing up inexpensive alternatives that could save many lives and avoid many illnesses. This is the tragedy of the crony capitalism installed by the Republican Party: that so much public health and so many lives could be saved by modest changes but are not. That is also the tragedy of socialism that is not buffered by democratic principles: Industries and production decisions are made by political intervention that protects polluting industries at the expense of citizens.

But the Party of Trump has proved it has no use for democracy, the rule of law, competition that threatens top donors’ businesses, or efforts to address economic inequality. Oligarchy, not capitalism or democracy, is their preferred organizing principle, Dollah be praised.

Ooooh, but what’s the over there?! Savvy, strong, outspoken liberal women of color on the Democrats’ side of the aisle ready to snip parts of their hegemony. Run for the hills!

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here (or at the P.O. box shown in the sidebar):

You know he did not have a flash of conscience or a flicker of concern for his fellow man. Or woman. Especially not for women (Reuters):

PALM BEACH, Fla./WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday signed into law a $2.3 trillion pandemic aid and spending package, restoring unemployment benefits to millions of Americans and averting a federal government shutdown in a crisis of his own making.

He choked (Al Jazeera):

“I have told Congress that I want far less wasteful spending and more money going to the American people in the form of $2,000 checks per adult and $600 per child,” Trump said in a statement announcing he had signed the bill.

White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere said the president was “sending a strong message” that “wasteful items” needed to be removed from the bill and added that a “redlined” version would be sent back to Congress with a requirement that such items be removed from the bill.

Other conditions include a review and possible repeal of Section 230, under which social media giants cannot be held legally responsible for objectionable words, photos or videos that people post to their platforms.

“Sending a strong message.” In other words, Trump choked.

Deere says Congress also agreed to “focus strongly on the very substantial voter fraud” in the November elections. 

Congress agreed to “focus strongly” knowing he’s weeks away from leaving the White House? Not likely. In other words, Trump choked.

Politico:

Republicans both privately and publicly tried to sway Trump to change his mind after days of attacks on the bill.

“I understand he wants to be remembered for advocating for big checks, but the danger is he’ll be remembered for chaos and misery and erratic behavior if he allows this to expire,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) said on “Fox News Sunday” of Trump’s demand for larger stimulus checks.

He’ll be remembered for chaos and misery and erratic behavior whatever he does. He will be remembered for kowtowing to global adversaries, for being the most corrupt and inept president in American history, for being a developmentally stunted knot of personality disorders trying to pass himself off as an adult, and for failing to lead during a deadly pandemic that killed more Americans than any war since the Civil War. And he will be remembered for choking.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here (or at the P.O. box shown in the sidebar):