Month: December 2020

You can’t make this stuff up. They just live in an alternate universe.

Here’s Philip Bump of the Washington Post on Atlas from a couple of weeks ago:

How thrilled President Trump must have been earlier this year when he tuned into his nightly Fox News programs and saw someone — a doctor, no less! — advocating precisely the sort of laissez-faire approach to combating the coronavirus pandemic that he himself hoped to advocate. Here was Scott Atlas, a physician affiliated with Stanford University — not too shabby! — telling Tucker Carlson in late June that the increase in new coronavirus infections occurring at that point was not a big deal.

“We expected more cases with more social mingling and, of course, as your show and others have seen, we’ve had a lot of social mingling in the last few weeks. And with that social mingling, we’re going to see more cases,” Atlas said. “By the way, with more testing, we’re going to detect more cases.”

This, of course, was Trump’s line: The increase (which Vice President Pence had a few weeks prior insisted wasn’t occurring) was simply a function of more testing, itself a triumph of the administration’s efforts. Go on, Dr. Atlas! Tell us more.

“The fact is, the overwhelming majority of these cases are younger, healthier people. These people do not have a significant problem. They do not have the serious complications. They do not die,” Atlas continued. “And so it’s fantastic news that we have a lot of cases but we don’t see deaths going up. And what that means is that, A, we’re doing a better job protecting the vulnerable, B, we’re in good shape here. We like the fact that there’s a lot of cases in low-risk populations because that’s exactly how we’re going to get herd immunity, population immunity.”

Great. Cases up because stay-at-home orders were scaled back, but no increase in deaths? A best-case scenario for a president looking to rationalize quickly ending efforts to contain the virus with an eye to seeing a big economic boost before his upcoming reelection bid.

When Atlas made those comments June 29  there were already signs that his assessment was overly optimistic. The number of new cases was in part a function of increased testing, but the rate of positive tests was also climbing as data from the Covid Tracking Project show. The number of new deaths each day had been falling, but it wasn’t hard to see how a surge in infections might eventually reverse that trend. After all, a positive test doesn’t immediately lead to the worst-case outcome. That tends to take a while.

By the beginning of August, the number of new cases had flattened, as had the positivity rate, but — again, predictably — the number of people being hospitalized had surged, as had the number of people dying of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The country had not somehow magically shunted all of its new infections to populations who could gain immunity while avoiding death. It was simply letting more people become sick and letting more people die.

On July 23, Atlas appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show. Since his appearance on Carlson the prior month, the number of new cases each day was up by two-thirds, the number of new hospitalizations was up 90 percent, and the number of new deaths each day had increased by 55 percent to nearly 900.

Atlas was unfazed. Asked whether he agreed with Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s leading infectious-disease expert, that the pandemic posed a perfect-storm threat to public health, Atlas insisted it didn’t.

“Actually,” he said, “I’m cautiously optimistic because we actually know a lot now. We know the fatality rate is much lower, and we know who to protect. We are doubling down on the high-risk group. We are doing better with patients in the hospitals. I think we have to tell the American people, this is not out of control here.”

A month earlier, he celebrated that deaths weren’t increasing. Now he celebrated that deaths weren’t as high as they used to be.

He went on to praise the president’s approach.

“The strategy here that has been outlined by the briefings this week is very clear,” Atlas said, referring to the White House briefings. “We know that more relaxation is going to get more cases. By the way, you don’t eradicate a virus by locking down. That’s just a complete misconception. We know that with socializing, we are going to get more cases. We need to protect the vulnerable, double down on that. We need to make sure that hospitals are not overextended, and, in fact, most hospitals are not.”AD

This was the central component of Atlas’s approach: let it spread but protect those at risk. He maintained that position throughout his tenure at the White House, pushing back against the idea that it constituted an embrace of “herd immunity” — that is, slowing the virus’s spread by letting more people be exposed to it and building antibodies against it. But while he objected to the term, he was clearly open to the concept, as he had been in that June appearance on Carlson’s show.

Trump tapped Atlas to join his team in mid-August. He quickly butted heads with Fauci and other government experts who recognized the risk posed by the virus both in terms of death and long-term complications. But Fauci’s position didn’t change — and Trump was clearly inclined to heed Atlas’s advice. After all, that’s pretty obviously why he asked Atlas to join his team in the first place.

Only one part of Atlas’s three-part approach to combating the pandemic was actually enacted. That, unfortunately, was the part where Atlas shrugged at the spread of the virus itself. From the day that Atlas joined the task force to the day he resigned (Monday), the number of tests being conducted each day doubled but the number of new cases tripled. New hospitalizations were up 20 percent and deaths up a third — though those figures and the data on new cases are almost certainly too low as states scramble to catalogue data from the Thanksgiving holiday.

The other parts of Atlas’s plan — protecting those most vulnerable and ensuring that hospitals weren’t overwhelmed — have largely been neglected, as we’ve reported previously. Nursing homes and long-term care facilities continue to make up a disproportionate number of deaths from covid-19. Hospitals are facing significant bed shortages in a number of states. California, the country’s most populous state, may implement a new stay-at-home order as hospitals fill up.

[…]

Since Atlas joined the White House, the number of people who’ve contracted the virus has more than doubled and an additional 101,000 Americans have died of covid-19. That latter figure will almost certainly increase rapidly over the next few weeks, even as Atlas returns to the private sector.

He accomplished what he came to Washington to do.

We are at nearly 320,000 people dead and climbing fast and this miscreant quack is taking a victory lap.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time. If you’re of a mind to drop something in the old Hullabaloo Christmas stocking, you can do so below.

cheers,
digby

Trump and his favorite nutcase Michael Flynn have been musing about staging a military coup. The idea Flynn is floating is to declare martial law in the swing states and have the military re-run the presidential election. It’s ridiculous. But then a lot of ridiculous things these days omehow end up happening.

The military is not supposed to follow an illegal order. Let’s hope they are all still on board with that. Assuming they are, this is how the process would go:

In the unlikely scenario that Trump were to issue an order to use the military to prevent the transfer of power, the order would go to the secretary of defense. In the unlikely scenario that the secretary were to decide to enforce the order (which, it should go without saying, would be illegal), he would relay the order to commander of the Northern Command, Gen. Glen VanHerck. There, VanHerck would consult with his team of legal advisers, who would inform him that the order was a grotesque violation of the Constitution, and VenHerck would refuse the order and send it back to the secretary of defense. Because, as Gen. Milley said, VenHeck’s loyalty lies with the Constitution, not a king or queen, and certainly not Donald Trump.

At noon on January 20, Biden will be sworn in as president, and the military will immediately recognize him as the commander in chief, even if Trump refuses to concede. Concession is not a constitutional requirement but a ceremonial act, and the transfer of power does not require it.

The scenario that would allow for martial law, as Flynn is promoting, would be massive unrest in the streets in those places where they need it. I suppose it’s possible that the right wing crazies could try something but I doubt they are that organized. At least not yet … And there is no precedent for the military to run elections in individual states. That’s just nuts.

They also point out that for all the talk among Democrats and others that the military would escort Trump out of the White House if he refused to go, that’s not how that would work either:

Americans need not worry about a military coup, and they certainly should stop asking for military intervention either to keep Trump in power or to remove him from office. If he refuses to leave the White House after Biden is inaugurated, he will simply be a trespasser and will be removed by the Secret Service (part of the Department of Homeland Security)—not the military.

This is a good point. If Trump were to dig in his heels we have plenty of ways of evicting him without bringing in the military.

The shocking thing is that we are even talking about this.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time. If you’re of a mind to drop something in the old Hullabaloo Christmas stocking, you can do so below.

cheers,
digby

One of the more interesting things that has happened recently is a defamation claim being filed against right wing media resulting in the media actually backing down. It’s a rare thing that’s usually reserved for lowly liberal bloggers and twitter users who can’t afford to have big time lawyers on retainer.

But it happened to Newsmax, OAN and Fox over their insane conspiracy mongering about the voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion. I have no doubt that there are plenty of questions about the relative safety of those machines in various ways, but this particular conspiracy is just stark, raving nuts. They fought back and won. The three networks all walked back their accusation, no doubt resulting in some very confused Trump cultists.

I don’t know that this will result in any lasting changes, although Ben Smith of the NY Times posits that this defamation claim could have disastrous results for Newsmax and OAN which are both seeking financing for an expansion. Fox can ride it out, of course, but the fact that they quickly issued a “fact check” on the shows that had been pushing this false claim is telling nonetheless.

We don’t know what Trump will do when he leaves office but you can be sure that he’s thinking about something in media. (He’s even been talking about doing The Apprentice again.) Maybe he’ll end up investing in Newsmax or OAN and turning them into his private media vehicle. But if he’s smart he’ll be looking more at something like this, which puts money directly into his pockets:

The conservative media company that owns BlazeTV has quietly been building a massive subscriber base, a direct threat to any digital TV effort being floated by President Trump and his allies, sources tell Axios.

Blaze Media — which was created as a result of the 2018 merger between The Blaze, a pay-TV network founded by Glenn Beck, and CRTV, an online subscription network that owns Conservative Review — now has 450,000 paid subscribers to BlazeTV, paying on average $102 a year.

Blaze Media’s business model offers a blueprint for how to build a successful partisan media network with little overhead, in a post-cable world.BlazeTV, the OTT channel, is the cornerstone of the business. But the company also runs a sizable podcast platform, the Blaze Podcast Network, which caters to personalities that already have massive radio and social media followings, like Mark Levin and Glenn Beck.

The company also has a 24/7 digital TV channel called Live, which is available to BlazeTV subscribers and is also available on ViacomCBS’ free streaming channel Pluto TV.. Its digital linear radio stream, Blaze Radio, is available on its website and on the iHeartRadio app.The podcast network, along with Blaze Live, Blaze Radio and its website, serve as a marketing funnel to its lucrative BlazeTV product, while also bringing in additional ad revenue.

Prior to the merger, The Blaze had a traditional TV channel. It yanked the channel off the air to focus on building a digital empire that it thought would have more staying power and give the company greater control of its distribution.

“It wasn’t without risk because we were walking away from a substantial amount of revenue, but we wanted to focus on better positioning ourselves for where we see things going within the next 3 to 5 years,” emails Blaze Media CEO Tyler Cardon. “It was the right call, even in the short-term. Ad revenue is up 70% year-over-year.”

 Unlike Fox News or even cable upstarts like Newsmax and One America News Network (OANN), Blaze Media is truly an identity brand. Its business has been built around outspoken conservative personalities that have already proved successful in building massive, loyal audiences, like Levin and Beck, as well as Dave Rubin, and Phil and Jase Robertson from “Duck Dynasty.”

If you want an “identity brand” Trump is it. You can easily see the possibilities.

The big problem, of course, is that Donald Trump is the world’s most famous TV addict. I doubt very much that he would be willing to give up being on the boob tube. He’s too old to get into the brave new world of digital media. But if Jared can talk him into it, it could be a big money maker for him. His cult has already shown they are willing to spend hundreds of millions to prove their fealty to Dear Leader.

I don’t know if Trump will run in 2024 but I do know that he’s going to keep the possibility open as long as he can make money from it. And he desperately needs to stay in the public eye if he’s going to do that. Luckily for us, we will not have to pay much attention to him once he’s out of office and can focus on what government is actually doing instead of the circus sideshow we’ve been subjected to for the past four years.

However, here at Hullabaloo we will also keep one eye on what’s going on with this right wing cult because there are whole lot of them and they are not going away. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the decades I’ve been writing this blog is that it’s important that we not ignore what’s happening on the right, even when it seems as if they are nothing more than fringe players. Failing to understand them, particularly as they influence the way elected officials wield their power, is a good part of the reason we got Donald Trump.

There’s always a lot to cover and we can’t do it all. But hopefully we can provide some of the stories and analysis that will enrich your understanding of what’s happening in politics and maybe offer up a little culture and humor from time to time as well.

If you’d like to help keep the lights on for another year, I would very much appreciate your kind contribution. And Happy Hollandaise, everyone!

Cheers,
digby

These “final days” stories are getting worse and worse. He is working himself up into a total frenzy:

President Trump, in his final days, is turning bitterly on virtually every person around him, griping about anyone who refuses to indulge conspiracy theories or hopeless bids to overturn the election, several top officials tell Axios.

Targets of his outrage include Vice President Pence, chief of staff Mark Meadows, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Secretary of State Pompeo and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Trump thinks everyone around him is weak, stupid or disloyal — and increasingly seeks comfort only in people who egg him on to overturn the election results. We cannot stress enough how unnerved Trump officials are by the conversations unfolding inside the White House.

Top officials are trying to stay away from the West Wing right now.

Trump is lashing out, and everyone is in the blast zone: At this point, if you’re not in the “use the Department of Homeland Security or the military to impound voting machines” camp, the president considers you weak and beneath contempt.

Trump is fed up with Cipollone, his counsel. Some supporters of Cipollone are worried that Trump is on the brink of removing him and replacing him with a fringe loyalist.

A source who spoke to Trump said the president was complaining about Pence and brought up a Lincoln Project ad that claims that Pence is “backing away” from Trump. This ad has clearly got inside Trump’s head, the source said.

Trump views Pence as not fighting hard enough for him — the same complaint he uses against virtually everybody who works for him and has been loyal to him.

Pence’s role on Jan. 6 has begun to loom large in Trump’s mind, according to people who’ve discussed the matter with him.

Trump would view Pence performing his constitutional duty — and validating the election result — as the ultimate betrayal.

A new fixation: Trump has even been asking advisers whether they can get state legislatures to rescind their electoral votes. When he’s told no, he lashes out even more, said a source who discussed the matter with the president.

And in an Oval meeting Monday night, Trump spoke with House Republicans about voting to overturn the result on Jan. 6 — a desperate vote that even Trump has privately acknowledged he’s bound to lose.

The person who has the worst job in Washington, according to multiple administration officials: the incoming head of the Justice Department, Jeffrey Rosen.

The consensus is he has no earthly idea the insanity he is in for.

The next month will be the longest of his life.

Another reflection of Trump’s state of mind:

As Axios reported Monday night, the president got his personal assistant to email Republican lawmakers a PowerPoint slide (above) attacking McConnell for being “the first one off the ship,” and absurdly claiming credit for the Senate majority leader’s victory in his Kentucky re-election.

That’s quite a message to send two weeks out from crucial runoff races in Georgia, where Republicans need to stay unified.

Where’s Jared? A source told Axios that Kushner, who yesterday participated in a tree-planting ceremony in Jerusalem Forest’s Grove of Nations, “is focused on the Middle East.”

It’s a perfect visual encapsulation of Kushner’s absence — on the other side of the world, planting a tree with Bibi and accepting plaudits, while Trump discusses mayhem with Sidney Powell.

We can’t possibly be shocked by this. He’s a malignant narcissist who cannot face being publicly humiliated. Of course, it’s a public humiliation that happens to someone in every election — there’s always a loser —- but Trump’s disordered personality simply can’t cope.

I suspect that, just as with Richard Nixon in his final days, people in the government have fashioned some fail-safe mechanisms in case he does something catastrophic. Maybe. Let’s hope foreign adversaries have the same mechanisms in place and don’t get it in their heads that now would be a good time to do something stupid.

One more month, people. One more month.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time. If you’re of a mind to drop something in the old Hullabaloo Christmas stocking, you can do so below.

cheers,
digby

It seems COVID-19 is creating havoc with some victims’ sleep patterns. “COVID-somnia,” the British Sleep Society began calling it last summer. Is it inflammation? Is it nerve damage associated with “brain fog”? Whatever it is, radiologists and neurologists do not see post-COVID-19 encephalomyelitis as irreversible, but it could be related to “myalgic encephalomyelitis, sometimes called chronic fatigue syndrome,” writes James Hamblin for The Atlantic.

Get adequate sleep is a recommendation to add to wearing masks, social distancing, and frequently washing hands as a way of fending off the virus in the first place:

Sleep is sometimes likened to a sort of anti-inflammatory cleansing process; it removes waste products that accumulate during a day of firing. Without sleep, those by-products accumulate and impair communication (just as seems to be happening in some people with post-COVID-19 encephalomyelitis). “In the early stages of COVID-19, you feel extremely tired,” says Michelle Miller, a sleep-medicine professor at the University of Warwick in the U.K. Essentially, your body is telling you it needs sleep. But as the infection goes on, Miller explains, people find that they often can’t sleep, and the problems with communication compound one another.

Russel Reiter, a cell-biology professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, recommends melatonin as a standard treatment for COVID patients. But Asim Shah, a psychiatry and behavioral-sciences professor at Baylor College of Medicine, recommends a more behavioral, less medicinal approach:

The general recommendation is that getting your body’s melatonin cycles to work regularly is preferable to simply taking a supplement and continuing to binge Netflix and stare at your phone in bed. Now that so many people’s days lack structure, Shah believes a key to healthy pandemic sleep is to deliberately build routines. On weekends, wake up and go to bed at the same time as you do other days. Take scheduled walks. Get sunlight early in the day. Reduce blue light for an hour before bed. Stay connected with other people in meaningful ways, despite being physically distant.

Even small daily rituals can help, says Tricia Hersey, the founder of a nap-advocacy organization called the Nap Ministry. Light a candle. Have a cup of tea in a specific place at a certain time. “Repetitive rituals are part of what makes us human and ground ourselves,” she told me. They’re also perhaps the most attainable intervention there is. Wherever you are, Hersey says, “you can daydream. You can slow down. You can find small ways to stop and remember who you are.”

Here in this … fortress of solitude … the morning posts provide routine. A daily 4-mile walk afterwards provides the exercise and sunlight. Breaking news late in the evening makes getting enough sleep trickier. But an afternoon nap with the cat makes up the difference. COVID-free so far.

Hamblin concludes, “Draw boundaries for yourself, and sleep like your life depends on it. Hopefully it won’t.”

Does it help? It couldn’t hoit!

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Pat Robertson is moving on from Donald Trump. Republicans think you should too. Especially from holding them complicit.

Greg Sargent calls out the New York Times for aiding and abetting the Republican effort to wash its hands of Trumpism so they can get back to the business of business. He tweeted Monday morning, “Stop saying Trump and his supporters ‘actually believe’ the election was stolen from him. They support overturning *legitimate* election results. They’re angry because democracy *worked,* not because it failed.”

The Times reports that Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is looking forward to not having to respond to Trump tweets. Perhaps the Democrats will face bitter internal divisions? A T-party of their own? Won’t that be nice?

“Our problem is tone, their problem is policy,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). He wants to get back to advocating his party’s failed policies, to trigger-fishing after a new shark, and to enjoying a mint julep on his porch swing.

Meanwhile, Trump is asking advisors about declaring martial law so he can redo elections in enough swing states to undo his reelection loss, for heaven’s sake. Rudy Giuliani wants to seize voting machines and invalidate hundreds of thousands or more votes for him.

Sargent writes:

Those ideas were shot down. But the damage from Trump’s active efforts to overturn the election is ongoing. As Rosie Gray’s reporting demonstrates, Trump is potentially creating a mass of followers behind the idea that election outcomes are only legitimate when they get their way, and that overturning hated results is not just acceptable, but is correct.

Cornyn and his ilk will soon piously insist Trump’s electoral subversion amounted to a few “tweets.” They will pretend they merely wanted to let Trump and his voters down easy, because Trump was “in denial” and his voters “actually believed” Trump won, leaving them in a “difficult” spot.

But once again, Trump and his supporters do not actually believe Joe Biden didn’t win. They want to invalidate a legitimate election, because they lost it. As Tom Nichols says, it’s time to stop treating these “feelings” as vaguely legitimate. These folks are angry not that democracy failed, but that it worked, and they claim the right to reverse this.

Nichols recommends what I have. Do not try to understand Trump’s “completely incoherent” base or win them over. They must be defeated. Not every Republican voter is so far gone, Nichols adds, but people who “buy weird paintings of Trump crossing the Delaware, or who believe that Trump is an agent of Jesus Christ, or who think that Trump is fighting a blood-drinking ring of pedophiles.” To argue with them is to legitimize their beliefs. “I don’t want to treat our fellow citizens with open contempt, or to confront and berate them,” Nichols writes. “Rather, I am arguing for silence.” I argue for making them a footnote to history and Trump a public example.

The Obama Department of Justice looked away and the last Republican administration walked away from war crimes it committed under color of torture memos from the Bush Office of Legal Council. Trump’s enablers hope to walk away from hundreds of thousands of Americans dead as a result of their complicity in Trump’s non-handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Republicans had a chance to remove him from office on February 5 for crimes detailed in articles of impeachment just before 320,000+ Americans started dying. They looked the other way too.

But having found Trump’s base easily suggestible, Republicans will try to “instill mass amnesia about the wreckage unleashed in part by their ideology” and avoid culpability for “one of the biggest governing disasters in modern times.” It worked for the Bushies.

Sargent adds:

We know how they’ll do this. As the Times piece notes, Republicans want to get past Trump, to get back to attacking “the most extreme ideas on the left.” This is a polite way of saying that Republicans want to get back to conventional GOP plutocratic economic orthodoxy, advanced under cover of fictions about Democratic extremism.

Do not let state-level Republicans evade their complicity either, argue two North Carolina Democrats. Nicole Ward Quick and Martha Royal Shafer lost state House races in 2020 and 2018 respectively. They condemn state Sen. Bob Steinburg for urging Trump to suspend habeas corpus and “invoke the Insurrection Act” to detain his enemies and overthrow the results of the November election. Steinburg told WRAL, “for whatever period of time it takes to round them up, then yes.”

Who exactly are the real radicals? the women ask. Because Steinberg is not an outlier:

[T]oday’s Republican leaders in North Carolina are the radicals, a term they often used to unfairly slander us in their campaigns. If you need any more evidence, continue to check the headlines; if the past is any guide, we’ll keep seeing our elected officials pop up there, and not in a good way.

For far too long, American exceptionalism has excepted top leaders for culpability for their actions. For federal crimes. For international war crimes. For crimes against the U.S. Constitution. Trump and his believers know he lost the election. They just believe they are so God-blessed exceptional that they should not have to live with the results. “Fuck Your Feelings” is now “Fuck Your Election.” Their leaders among the GOP believe they should be excepted from complicity in the four years in which Trump reduced the United States to a pitiable international laughing stock. The world watched in horror as the U.S infantilized itself and Republicans watched Americans die.

Nero fiddled. Trump tweeted. Republicans coddled. The world owes them contempt not a makeover.

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So very Trumpie. Right wing protesters attempt to take over the Oregon state capitol:

A group of about 300 demonstrators attempted to force their way into two separate entrances of the Oregon State Capitol on Monday, outraged lawmakers were holding a special session closed to the public.

The crowd was a loose collection of members of the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer and other far-right groups, many of them are armed with pistols and rifles. At one point during the demonstration, which began around 9 a.m., a woman tried to climb in a window on the west side of the government building. Oregon State Troopers, however, repelled her—before two more troopers showed up to insist that she get off the ledge.

Those troopers were quickly chased off by screaming protesters, many of them toting long black rifles.

Minutes later, the crowd moved to the building’s north entrance and attempted to push their way in. A dozen more troopers arrived at the door, declared it an unlawful assembly, and pushed the crowd back, using some kind of deterrent in a series of “pop” sounds, at which point the protesters swarmed back out again, their eyes watering and coughing.

Some 100 protesters soon entered the lobby anyway, and state troopers again attempted to compel them to leave. The Salem Police Department told The Daily Beast that the streets surrounding the Capitol building had been closed and residents were being asked to avoid the area if possible due to the ongoing protest.

“I’m here to support the constitutional rights of people and of Oregon business [owners.] These people are unemployed and their lives are being ruined by this situation and most importantly by a government that seems to have taken totalitarian views,” one protester who would identify himself only by his first name, Duane, told The Daily Beast.

“You are traitors to the American people,” one demonstrator shouted at the troopers inside the building.

This stuff apparently went on for hours.

It’s Oregon. Protests are a way of life up there. The right wingers do it too and one of the big difference is that they are usually armed.

I guess it all ended ok. But I thought this little detail was interesting:

Despite the chaotic protest, some protesters managed to continue selling pro-Trump merchandise at a tent set up outside the Capitol—including “Stop The Steal” sweaters. The tent, surrounded by Trump 2020 flags, also offered USA and Trump hats.

Say what you will about Antifa, they aren’t shilling for Joe Biden at their protests or selling “Build Back Better” gear. I doubt many of them even like him much. Or any politician. These people, on the other hand, for all of their caterwauling about tyranny and liberty are just cosplaying members of the Trump cult. With guns.

Update: Check this out. Crazy.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time. If you’re of a mind to drop something in the old Hullabaloo Christmas stocking, you can do so below.

cheers,
digby

It appears that AG Bill Barr has become concerned about his legacy and possibly even about the president he has been collaborating with to undermine our democracy. After all, Trump has gone stark, raving, batshit over the past few weeks. Anyway:

Outgoing Attorney General William P. Barr said Monday that he saw no basis for the federal government seizing voting machines and that he did not intend to appoint a special counsel to investigate allegations of voter fraud — again breaking with President Trump as the commander in chief entertains increasingly desperate measures to overturn the election.

At a news conference to announce charges in a decades-old terrorism case, Barr — who has just two days left in office — was peppered with questions about whether he would consider steps proposed by allies of the president to advance Trump’s claims of massive voter fraud.

Barr said that while he was “sure there was fraud in this election,” he had not seen evidence that it was so “systemic or broad-based” that it would change the result. He asserted he saw “no basis now for seizing machines by the federal government,” and he would not name a special counsel to explore the allegations of Trump and his allies.

“If I thought a special counsel at this stage was the right tool and was appropriate, I would name one, but I haven’t, and I’m not going to,” Barr said.

Similarly, Barr said he would not name a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden, President-elect Joe Biden’s son, who revealed earlier this month he was under investigation for possible tax crimes. Barr said the investigation was “being handled responsibly and professionally” by regular Justice Department prosecutors, and he hoped that would continue in the next administration.

“To this point, I have not seen a reason to appoint a special counsel, and I have no plan to do so before I leave,” Barr said.

The story goes into Trump growing disappointment with Barr for failing to help him sabotage Joe Biden and steal the election for him. I hadn’t heard about this though:

Trump told Fox News recently that Barr “should have stepped up” and publicized the case — which would have violated Justice Department policy.

“All he had to do is say an investigation’s going on,” Trump said, adding later, “When you affect an election, Bill Barr, frankly, did the wrong thing.

I’m sure that sounds familiar. It’s what Donald Trump extorted the Ukrainian president to do — and why he is only the third president in history to be impeached.

In addition to breaking with Trump on election fraud, Barr also seemed to put himself at odds with Trump in attributing recently uncovered cyberhacks of the U.S. government to Russia. Though Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had already done so, Trump later suggested on Twitter China might be the culprit.

“From the information I have, I agree with Secretary Pompeo’s assessment,” Barr said. “It certainly appears to be the Russians.”

That’s big of him, after everything he did.

I’ll just let Marcy Wheeler have the last word:

Let's look at how thin these breaks are:

1) He spent MONTHS, with no evidence, delegitimizing vote-by-mail.
2) He appointed a hack USA to investigate Biden on TOP of DE USA.
3) He spent years undermining RU investigation, in spite of all evidence. https://t.co/QKzedmOKkd

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) December 21, 2020

He gets no credit for “breaking” now that Trump is 30 days away from being a permanent resident of Mar-a-lago. He’s Trump’s top henchman. Unless he confesses to everything he did and spills the beans on what he knows, we don’t need to hear from him.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time. If you’re of a mind to drop something in the old Hullabaloo Christmas stocking, you can do so below.

cheers,
digby

Grown ass man throwing a tantrum at Costco because he was told to wear a mask. Location: Lantana FL from r/trashy

That is literally what a 3 year old in a store does when he wants to stage a tantrum in a public place.

I noted that former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote an op-ed over the weekend in which he actually blamed Republican voters and observed that this is something only Republicans can do without being accused of being intolerant elites. (They are accused of being RINOS, which isn’t the same thing.) Here’s another one, this time from Jonathan V Last at the Bulwark (and formerly of the Weekly Standard) who calls out the Trump voters as suckers:

Normally this is the part where I insist that I’m not doing this to dunk on these poor marks. But like Kayleigh McEnany, I made a promise. I will never lie to you. So, yes. This is what I’m doing.

But I have a point, too: None of this is rational. This is the monetary equivalent of Eric Metaxas saying that it doesn’t matter what he can “prove” because he just knows that Trump won.

How do you argue with that? You can’t.

And when people stop being rational actors who respond to normal incentives, then things get dangerous.

By any reasonable metric, Donald Trump’s job approval rating right now should be far below what it was in 2018. We have over 315,000 dead Americans. Millions are jobless. We are in the middle of the worst cyber attack in American history. Trump lost the election and has continued to embarrass himself and his supporters for six weeks. And yet . . .

Trump’s job approval today: 44.8 percent. Trump’s job approval in December of 2018, when Americans were fat and happy and alive: 43.6 percent.

It’s ticked up over the last two years.

Put this all together and you have only two possible explanations:

(1) Trump supporters are irrational, which makes them wholly unresponsive to incentives—mass death, losing their jobs, losing bets about Trump.

(2) Trump supporters are rational, but their incentives are non-traditional. Which is to say, the benefits for them are more psychological than material, and are tied less to what happens in the real world than to the things Trump says. Such as insisting that he won the election in a landslide, that he wants the results overturned, etc.

I don’t know which of these is correct. But I also don’t really think it matters. Because either way it means that we have a large bloc of voters in this country who—for whatever reason—behave in ways which are antithetical to democracy and liberalism.

Yes, yes we do. And I would suggest that many of them exhibit both of those explanations, sometimes simultaneously. I also maintain that Trump has tapped into a mass case of arrested development on the part of a certain sub-set of white Americans who are simply unable to accept that they are not the center of the universe, entitled to always do exactly as they please. It’s a puerile version of the 60s counter-culture. They are stuck in infancy rather than adolescence.

I mean, just look at that guy above, having a toddler tantrum in the middle of Costco. That’s not normal, people. It really isn’t.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time. If you’re of a mind to drop something in the old HUllabaloo Christmas stocking, you can do so below.

cheers,
digby

I have been gathering links from experts on this new COVID variant in an attempt to understand what we know and don’t know. Luckily, I came across this nice breakdown from Josh Marshall (whose “expert epidemiologist” twitter list I subscribed to several months ago.)

He writes:

You’ve probably seen a flurry of news about this new variant of the COVID virus spreading in the United Kingdom. Focus on it has increased rapidly over the last 48 hours and Canada as well as a number of countries in Western Europe have instituted temporary bans on plane flights from United Kingdom. (As I write, the US has not followed suit.) Good information has been hard to come by both because it tends to be highly technical and also because the most knowledgeable people have very limited information.

Fears about the new variant can be roughly classed into three categories. First, that it spreads more efficiently than earlier COVID variants; second, that it might be making people more sick; third, that it might be more resistant to the new vaccine.

Obviously the science and technical details are entirely beyond my knowledge. So I will try share what I’ve found and point you to trusted sources. As far as I can tell the only substantial concern based on what is currently known is the first I mentioned, that this variant may spread more efficiently than earlier strains. But even that is not clear. The best overview I’ve seen is this one by Kai Kupferschmidt in Science, published yesterday evening. It’s probably the best place to start. Deeper into the technical details here’s the report of an expert advisory group (NERVTAG) advising the UK government which found “moderate confidence that [the new variant] demonstrates a substantial increase in transmissibility compared to other variants.”

The big question I’ve had is: could the efficacy of the vaccine be in doubt? As best as I can tell, from the takes of the people who should best be able to answer that question, the answer is no or if there is an impact it should be marginal. Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett is the COVID vaccine lead at the Vaccine Research Center at NIH. She designed the modified spike protein that is the basis of the Moderna vaccine. She posted this thread on twitter earlier this morning.

Key portions: “Unlike monoclonal antibody therapies, vaccines (especially those using the whole spike protein) make polyclonal antibody responses. This means that the antibodies your vaccinated body will make will be able to bind the coronavirus spike in multiple places… not just one … In all, please don’t be alarmed any more than you have been through this pandemic. The precautionary measures (ie. no travel) in the UK are in line with sensible measures following a regional virus spike.”

Again, she has more detail in the thread which you can see here.

Looking forward there does seem to be evidence of evolutionary drift that may make it necessary to update the COVID vaccines in the future and perhaps require inoculations in the out years. Trevor Bedford, the genomic sequencing researcher at the Fred Hutch research institute in Washington State published a lengthy thread on this on Saturday. See here. It was Bedford who first pried open the genetic evidence of the cryptic spread of the virus in Washington state in the earliest days of the pandemic. I’ve learned to see him as one of the most knowledgable and reliable people in the field and, critically, able to explain developments in a way that is accessible to an educated lay reader.

I would summarize his view this way: there’s probably nothing we’re seeing that should meaningfully disrupt the roll out of the vaccine in 2021. However, there’s accumulating data that COVID is capable of evolving a bit more like influenza (more protean) than say measles (less protean). That means that in the years to come updated vaccines and some level of re-inoculation may be necessary.

The upshot from both Corbett and Bedford is that the current vaccines can grab on to COVID in a bunch of different places. So a single mutation or even a few mutations on the “spike” that the vaccines target aren’t going to make the vaccine suddenly not work. But over time this may require updates to the vaccine, to keep up its efficacy.

I’ve been watching the reporting on this evolve over the last three or four days. Last week this wasn’t being treated that seriously outside of the UK. I even saw some people suggesting the the UK government was focusing on it to sort of deflect responsibility for the rapid growth of cases. The weight of opinion has now shifted on that front. There is significant evidence that this variant is more transmissible. But that evidence isn’t conclusive. The people who know what they’re talking about are pretty clear that we just don’t have enough evidence to know either way. What does seem a little more clear to me than it did yesterday is that we should be pretty confident that this is not going to be a game changing development either in terms of infection acquired immunity or the vaccines that are now rolling out around the United States and the world.

So basically, we don’t know what we don’t know. But so far, it doesn’t sound as though this “variant” is going to make people sicker, just that it is more transmissible, which isn’t good. In fact, it seems quite odd that our experts aren’t more concerned about travel from the UK. But whatever… in these cases we just have to put ourselves in the hands of the experts.

The whole country is a hot spot right now and those of us who live in places like Los Angeles, where it seems to be hurtling out of control, are hunkering down anyway. But because so many people are going to be traveling this week, the idea that people will be bringing this more contagious variant into this situation is unnerving.

I guess I won’t even be going to the grocery store for a while. They deliver, thank goodness. But I do feel sorry for all the people who make that possible for me. It’s just infuriating, to be honest. We couldn’t have avoided all of this. But we sure as hell could have done a whole lot better than we have.

Stay safe, everyone. Happy Hollandaise —

cheers,
digby