Month: January 2021

I think we all need to have our faith in humanity restored once in a while, don’t you?

Nearly a year ago, I told you about a small act of kindness to a homeless man and his corgi that had grown into something much larger for all those it touched.

It pulled at a lot of your heartstrings — in good part, I think, because dog love runs deep, and corgi lovers are particularly ardent.

I told you about the man and his corgi and the couple who had stepped in to help them early last March, less than two weeks before COVID-19 shut down California.

And, despite how many more people have found themselves in dire straits in the ensuing crisis, I’ve never stopped hearing from those eager for the latest on how dog and man were faring.

I’m glad to say that the update I’m bringing you at long last may offer some respite from the current grim news. It gives me pleasure to say, too, that much of the good I have to share springs directly from the generosity of readers.

Still, that’s really not my reason for telling it. I do so in this time of widespread need to reiterate the central point I set out to make in my first corgi column — about the enormous potential benefit to both givers and receivers of doing something, however little, to help others.

But first, a recap.

The corgi I introduced you to last March had been having a hard time since his person lost his good job, then his home. Over four tough years, man and dog had ended up homeless — and neither had adjusted easily.

The corgi’s person had a PhD and had worked for years in a highly specialized field with few job openings. He was earning six figures in the job he lost, and when he couldn’t find another one, his circumstances steadily worsened until he and his corgi no longer had a place to live. They bounced around, with stops at a group home and a single-room occupancy hotel on skid row in downtown L.A.

The man started driving for Uber while he tried to teach himself skills for a new line of work. When he no longer could make payments on his car, he rented cars from Uber by the hour — working longer for less gain, with less time to spend prepping for a new career and less chance of climbing out of his hole.

And all the while, as he reached out to social-service organizations for short-term emergency housing, many doors remained closed because he had a dog.

Which is where the initial act of kindness came in.

Loath to be alone, but desperate, the man wrote a Craigslist post in the fall of 2019 asking for someone to step in and help him by fostering his corgi for a few months. A friend of Ted and Sandy Rogers of Hollywood forwarded the post to them, thinking that helping the dog might also help them as they grieved the loss late that summer of their own beloved corgi, Sienna, due to cancer.

Ted has diabetes, and Sienna alerted him with licks when his blood sugar dipped low. Sienna had been the center of their lives.

The foster corgi they took into their home was traumatized from all the instability. Ted and Sandy made it their mission to restore his sense of calm and security.

Meanwhile, the corgi’s person showed up on Sunday afternoons to visit — and while he and his dog cuddled and played, he gradually opened up and told Ted and Sandy all that he’d been through. He also needed their emotional support, and they gave it to him.

The corgi’s person, I have to stop and say here, continues to feel a good deal of shame for his fall. Even now, after the pandemic has imploded so many other previously secure lives. For that reason, he continues to ask me to maintain his anonymity — which I do, as I pray that he will stop beating himself up over time.

When I wrote the first column about him, he was still searching for a job, still separated from his corgi. I asked if anyone could help him find a stable home or a job in data science, the field he was trying to enter. I also said I hoped that soon he and his corgi would be reunited and that Ted and Sandy would find a new dog to love.

I put those wishes out to the universe, which instantly began delivering.

Some people sent the corgi’s person loving notes, telling him that what had happened to him could happen to any of us. Others donated to a GoFundMe campaign set up to make his life easier. And within hours of the column’s appearance, multiple people had written with job leads and offers to help him with housing.

One of the first came from Mike Kilroy, a real estate investor who offered the corgi and his person — sight unseen, no strings attached — a studio apartment in Palm Springs, rent-free for a year. Whenever Ted and Sandy wanted to visit, he said, he’d give them a free place to stay, too — and same for me if I wanted to come see how dog and man were doing.

“It was something I could do, so why not?” Kilroy told me simply when I asked him about it this week. “It’s all well and good to talk about solving your problems and moving ahead. But you can’t do that without a stable base.”

The warmth of the offer proved irresistible, even if it meant relocation. On March 22, just a few days after California’s stay-at-home order kicked in, the man went to get his corgi from Ted and Sandy and take him to their new Palm Springs home.

Around the same time, he got a job offer in data science. And even though he was told that, because of closures, it would not start until May, he had more than $4,000 in GoFundMe donations to help tide him over until his first paycheck.

Ted and Sandy, meanwhile, found themselves once again dogless and missing their foster corgi terribly. Then Sandy lost the job she’d had for 18 years, doing accounts payable for a suddenly shuttered office. (Any leads, anyone? You’ve come through before.)

Their stint at fostering had readied them for a new dog — and they wanted to rescue a corgi in need. But once the pandemic hit, people everywhere suddenly seemed to want a pet for companionship. When their corgi rescue searches came up empty, they started looking at other breeds and on the websites of corgi breeders.

Many corgi enthusiasts reached out. Ted and Sandy felt like rock stars as their fame spread online through corgi groups. One corgi lover who had read the column recognized Ted, Sandy and the foster corgi at Trader Joe’s. Another who works in tech started trying simultaneously to find a job for the foster corgi’s person and a corgi for Ted and Sandy.

Julie, who for privacy reasons asked that I use her first name only, said she’s active with a local corgi rescue group that, pre-pandemic, organized frequent social hikes. She’d also researched breeders when looking for her own corgi, Truffle (who has her own Instagram profile), and had learned of one in Wyoming who is the friend of a friend she’d met running overnight relay races.

One Saturday in July, she saw a newly listed corgi puppy on that Wyoming breeder’s site and immediately told Ted and Sandy. They put down a deposit that day. And because Ted and Sandy don’t drive and feared public transportation because of the virus, Julie and her running friend did a relay of sorts to bring the 3-month-old corgi to them.

Julie’s friend picked the dog up in Wyoming and drove her to Utah. Julie rented a car and drove from L.A. to Utah to bring the puppy to Ted and Sandy. Ted, Sandy and Julie met for the first time in person on delivery — and realized they were neighbors. Now Ted and Sandy’s puppy, Tazzy, short for Tasmanian Devil, sometimes meets Truffle for neighborhood play dates.

I met Tazzy the other day. She smooched me, as she smooches everyone she meets, person and dog alike. She zooms around Ted and Sandy’s apartment, causes havoc, destroys toys and delivers endless joy. Ted and Sandy are thoroughly smitten, even though she likes to pull Sandy’s hair.

As for dog and man in Palm Springs, the corgi’s person sent me a selfie he took when they moved back in together that could serve as a visual definition of love. It hasn’t all been easy. He initially felt lonely in a new city in a pandemic. His first job didn’t last because he failed to get security clearance within six months — likely due to the many moves in his recent history.

But then a friend in his old field asked him for a job reference — and he asked her if she’d return the favor for the job she was leaving. He got that job. He’s now back to six figures. He credits his rent-free year with giving him the grounding to be capable of leaping at the chance when offered. He, Ted and Sandy text back and forth every day. He paid the expenses for Tazzy’s travels from Wyoming to Hollywood. He credits Ted and Sandy with rescuing him just as much as they rescued his corgi.

And he credits every single person who offered up words of encouragement, donations, positive thoughts, advice and assistance with playing a part in his comeback. He said he wished I could name every name.

Alas, I can’t — I can’t even name his — but I offer my thanks to all who helped him in so many ways.

Here’s a report on how South Dakotans are reacting to the refusal of the second most powerful GOP Senator, John Thune, refusing to object to the electoral college vote and issuing the mildest of rebukes of Trump’s incitement. Trump is a cult leader and as far as these people are concerned, Republicans can either join up and use their power to support Dear Leader or … get out:

Longtime South Dakota Republican voter Jim Thompson is ready to leave the GOP, hoping that an exodus of Donald Trump supporters like him will punish the state’s preeminent politician, Sen. John Thune, for defying Trump.

Thompson, a retired rodeo announcer and broadcaster, watched Trump’s calls for supporters to come to Washington to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election victory and he saw the ensuing assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 . But as Congress tries to hold Trump accountable for his actions, Thompson sees an agenda to banish the former president from politics and return the party to establishment figures such as Thune, the second-ranking GOP leader in the Senate.

“We were tired of the way things were going, we were tired of political answers and spin,” Thompson said.

Thune was among the Republicans who condemned the insurrection at the Capitol, calling it “horrific” and pledging to “hold those responsible to account.” But like most of his GOP colleagues, the senator this past week signaled he was not speaking about Trump.

All Republican senators except five voted against holding an impeachment trial. While their votes were not enough to stop the upcoming trial, the tally was a rapid climbdown from the talk of punishing Trump. It’s easy to find the political incentives behind their decision in the small towns of South Dakota, where voters still loyal to Trump will decide whether to send Thune back to the Senate next year.

While Republican leaders in Washington flirted with punishing Trump, many of their constituents never dreamed of it. They believe the baseless claims by Trump and his right-wing allies that the election was stolen, and that the mob that stormed the Capitol was goaded by antifa activists. They view the attempt to blame Trump for the deadly siege as just another attack on a president establishment Republicans never accepted.

There was no widespread fraud in the election, which a range of election officials across the country including Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, confirmed. Republican governors in Arizona and Georgia, key battleground states crucial to Biden’s victory, vouched for the integrity of the elections in their states. Nearly all the legal challenges from Trump and his allies were dismissed by judges, including two tossed by the Supreme Court, which includes three Trump-nominated justices.

“I think the whole impeachment thing is a joke,” said David Buchanan, the president of a small Bible school in South Dakota who proudly displayed a Trump flag over his home. “They’re trying just to destroy President Trump. They see him as a threat.”

Buchanan is among those who would like to hear Republicans undertake a more robust defense of Trump. Instead, most have argued that an impeachment trial is unconstitutional, not that Trump is blameless for the riot.

Buchanan said he was frustrated to hear Thune on the radio countering Trump’s allegations of widespread election fraud.

“What we’re seeing is the destruction of the United States of America as it was founded,” he said.

Embedded in these views is a deep skepticism about the mainstream media coverage and a belief in an alternative narrative — by now a defining characteristic of Trump’s most ardent backers, even those who once trusted the news.

Brie Korkow, a 37-year-old from Pierre who runs a family rodeo business, used to love to research political issues while on a debate team in college. But recently, she has given up hope of trusting national media outlets and struggles to know what to believe. She trusts her local newspaper, but feels that even fact checks from national outlets are no longer reliable.

“It goes back to being able to find the truth about something,” she said. “With social media, it’s almost impossible.”

Although uncertain about what really happened at the Capitol, Korkow does believe Trump’s election claims helped unleash the insurrection. But, echoing Republican senators, she believes an impeachment trial will only be more divisive. She hopes the Senate will “just let bygones be bygones.”

Besides, by the end of Trump’s four years in office, Korkow says she was no longer shocked by Trump.

But Republican lawmakers can still feel his pointed jabs. When Thune disputed the baseless allegations of election fraud, Trump declared the senator’s “political career over” and suggested GOP Gov. Kristi Noem, a Trump fan favorite, make a primary challenge in 2022. She quickly bowed out from challenging Thune next year.

Still, talk of a primary has not died.

A private Facebook group called “Primary John Thune in 2022” has attracted over 3,000 members. One of them, Bruce W. Whalen, said Thune’s refusal to support Trump’s claims of fraud has fueled interest.

“We can’t understand as South Dakotans why Thune, (Sen. Mike) Rounds and (Rep. Dusty) Johnson can’t see what we see,” he said.

Anyone with a modicum of common sense would think about that for a few minutes, assess whether it’s reasonable that judges at all levels throughout the country and other GOP officials say otherwise and consider that maybe they are the ones not getting the right information.

Polling shows that about 25% of Republicans do understand this:

In the meantime, some longtime state Republican figures are frustrated with their senator’s hesitation to convict Trump.

“He deserves to be convicted,” said David Volk, a former state treasurer.

Volk has observed a steady rightward lurch in Republican politics over the years that has culminated in widespread support for Trump. Though he believes that Thune won’t face much much trouble being reelected, Volk feels Noem has ensured that Trump’s brand of politics lives on in the state.

“There’s a lot of people who would like to see this go away, Trump go away,” he said. “But there’s no way they’re going to get him to go away.”

Others, like Tom Barnett, a former director of the state’s bar association, have given up on the Republican Party. Last year he changed his party affiliation after 50 years with the GOP, saying he could no longer support officials who would not stand up to Trump.

He said Trump “not only stole the party, he ruined the party.”

I’m glad that they see this. But John Thune and others opportunistically used Trump to get their agenda enacted in exchange for letting this malignant cult take hold. And if any of these Republicans had paid attention to what their right wing media was poisoning their voters with for the last quarter century, instead of valorizing bloodthirsty propagandists like Rush Limbaugh, it might not have come to this.

They knew what he was. Most of them said it outloud before he became president and then lined up like a bunch of good little Nazis and let this thing become the grotesque pile of offal it’s become.

Here’s Marjorie, in case you were wondering:

These people have lost their minds. I’m just going to leave this NY Times article here for the record. It is astonishing. If you want to actually hear them talking, you can do so at the link.

For the past three weeks, a group of Trump supporters and QAnon believers met online, swapped theories and eagerly awaited the conspiracy’s violent climax. I was listening in. This is what they sounded like.

“We have to trust that there’s going to be military tribunals and we’ll get to watch all kind of executions.”“They’re guilty. Treason. Behead ’em all.”“Bring in the firing squad.”

As President Biden’s inauguration ticked closer, some of Donald Trump’s supporters were feeling gleeful. Mr. Trump was on the cusp of declaring martial law, they believed. Military tribunals would follow, then televised executions, then Democrats and other deep state operatives would finally be brought to justice.

These were honestly held beliefs. Dozens of Trump supporters spoke regularly over the past three weeks on a public audio chat room app, where they uploaded short recordings instead of typing. In these candid digital confessionals, participants would crack jokes, share hopes and make predictions.

“Look at the last four years. They haven’t listened to a thing we’ve said. Um … there’s going to have to be some serious anarchy that goes on. Otherwise, nothing is going to change.”

I spent the past three weeks listening to the channel — from before the Jan. 6 Washington protest to after Mr. Biden’s inauguration. It became an obsession, something I’d check first thing every morning and listen to as I fell asleep at night. Participants tend to revere Mr. Trump and believe he’ll end the crisis outlined by Q: that the world is run by a cabal of pedophiles who operate a sex-trafficking ring, among other crimes. While the chat room group is relatively small, with only about 900 subscribers, it offers a glimpse into a worrying sect of Trump supporters. Some conspiracists like them have turned to violent language in the wake of Mr. Trump’s electoral loss.

“If the Biden inauguration wants to come in and take your weapons and force vaccination, you have due process to blow them the [expletive] away. Do it.”

There’s a persistent belief that the online world is somehow not real. Extreme views are too easily dismissed if they’re on the internet. While people might say things online they would never do in person, all it takes is one person for digital conspiracies to take a deadly turn. That should be clear after the Capitol riot, which was largely organized online and resulted in five deaths.

Listening to the conspiracists — unfiltered and in their own voices — makes that digital conversation disturbingly real.

To participants, the channel is mainly a way to share and “fact-check” the news, cobbling theories together from fringe right-wing websites, posts on Facebook, and private channels on the messaging apps Telegram and Signal. They say their main focus is reinstituting paper ballots.

The most commonly used phrase is some version of “I heard,” followed by a theory:“There’s people that are actually sleeping inside that building to watch over the area, I guess. Um, I have no link to confirm this. Just from people that I’ve heard that should know what they’re telling me.”

“But if you look into it and read the post, it’s actual emails from Pence trying to get Trump out before he even won the election.”

“I just read somewhere that Biden just lowered the age of consent to age 8. Has anybody heard anything about that?”“You know, you laughed about Tupac and Biggie? 
He was murdered, and I think it was the deep state that murdered him.”

Sometimes the chat is lighthearted, like when supporters swap details about grocery runs or wish one other happy birthday. But the conversation can also turn dark, like when they speak longingly about “brutal” televised executions or simply ask, “Can the people declare war inside the country if they wanted to?”

Key to sustaining their beliefs is the expectation that the other shoe is always about to drop. One prediction, concerning “10 days of darkness,” was perpetually about to come true in the form of media blackouts, social media bans or power outages.

Nearly every day, there were signs that the “10 days of darkness” had begun in some form. Power outages in India and at the Vatican were possible signs. Then blackouts were reported across the world. Then state-of-emergency orders were circulated for various storms, recalling a Q catchphrase, “The storm is coming.”

“It’d be wise to stock up water, canned foods, ammo and cash, gasoline in your vehicles,” one said days after the Washington rally.

The Q delusion requires fitting unexpected events into a bigger narrative. The riot in Washington was one such opportunity. The day before, many in the chat room were worried about antifa attacking their friends. Yet it was also clear they wanted a confrontation.

“I wish they’d storm the Congress and the Senate and pull all them treasonous guys out of there.”

As the rally began, participants uploaded dispatches from the ground. The mood was positive, even emotional. In the chat, they shared their real-time reactions as Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol.

“Patriots are in the building. It’s beautiful.”

And when Mr. Biden went on television to demand an end to the siege, one chatter asked, “Does he not realize President Trump called us to siege the place?”

Another remarked, “Honestly, I think the patriots should have been allowed to go in there, grab those S.O.B.s and pull them out of the building and, you know, have an execution right there.”

But by the next morning, members who had called for the siege had changed their tune. Now it was antifa that was responsible for the Capitol raid and any violence that followed.

Over and over again, confusing decisions, unexpected outcomes and a lack of evidence were recast as part of Mr. Trump’s master plan.

“I’m hoping that he was planning on antifa showing up there and doing what they did,” one woman said. “And he has a master plan behind that. I’m hoping.”

They believed Mr. Trump would use his Washington rally to announce mass arrests and release long-awaited evidence supporting Q’s theories. None of that happened.

Instead of coming to grips with that loss, they moved on to another idea: Mr. Trump needed to allow the vote to be certified to spot his enemies. He could use the Insurrection Act at any moment, putting America under martial law and using the military to seize control of the government.

“I am ready to see something go down. I want to know that this is all real, or we’ve just been being yanked around by a bunch of idiots sitting in their bedrooms, throwing all this fake information out there. I mean, I want to believe that Trump is holding all the cards, and that he’s just being deceitful right now so that he can nail everybody.”

They had been through this cycle so many times before, with promises of lawsuits that could overturn the election or a Supreme Court intervention that Mr. Trump had planned for months. None of it came to pass. Still, they had hope.

“It’s very hard to be patient ’cause we — you know, remember, we’re like, ‘Oh, the executive order,’ and ‘We’re waiting for D.N.I. report.’ We’re waiting for this, we’re waiting for that, that passed, and then Jan. 6, and that passed, and then … it’s hard, but we have to stay focused, and I think we’re so close. I mean, there’s just a couple of days left.”

As the inauguration approached, signs were adding up in their favor. Thousands of National Guard troops were deployed to the city, and many of them were deputized to perform arrests — surely a sign that Mr. Trump’s plan for martial law would come true.

Days went by, and nothing. Yet, as the inauguration drew closer, it was still raised as a possibility.“It’s taking longer than it should be, but possibly he could announce what he’s going to do next. We still have the Insurrection Act.”“If anything goes down, it’ll be today or Inauguration Day. I don’t think it would be Monday.”“If it does get signed, if the Insurrection Act gets signed, it’ll be today or tomorrow. Not a day later.”“The source I follow, I heard, said, Trump can file — or call martial law even up to five minutes before Biden’s inauguration if he has to.”“I think midnight — there’s going to be a lot of stuff happening.”

One member described her prediction in vivid detail: “His farewell speech is going to be, he declares martial law, and then as he’s doing that, they’re arresting the people, like Biden’s administration and all those corrupt suckers, and that’s why they have all the security around the White House, Capitol Hill area. And as they’re doing that, he’s going to read to us all the evidence, show us everything, and lay it all out right there.“

But when Jan. 20 came, Mr. Trump left the White House, rattled off some accomplishments, said, “Have a good life,” then boarded a jet to Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Biden was inaugurated. Nothing they predicted came true.

When Mr. Biden’s inauguration played out as normal, participants were frustrated. By rejecting mainstream news, they embraced liars who fed them exactly what they wanted to hear.

“We know not to watch CNN. We know not to watch these people. But when we have people that we trust on the right, and we’re pushing that information out — because we don’t have many media sources, so the ones that come out, they need to be pretty damn good. And for them to take advantage of people’s hope? We cannot have that.”

If the Q movement had a slogan, it would be “Do your research.” The conspiracy is designed like a game. Discovering clues that clarify Q’s cryptic missives produces a eureka effect, which offers a hit of dopamine and improves memory retention. It’s the same satisfaction that comes from solving a puzzle or finding the answer to a riddle.

Believers apply the same approach to everyday news: Find information that confirms any existing beliefs, then use it to augment their understanding of the conspiracy. Reject facts or information that counter the existing beliefs. It’s one of the reasons they struggle to recruit their family members, unless they’re persuaded to do research themselves.

I wondered what would happen in the days after Mr. Biden’s inauguration. Rather than re-evaluate their approach in the wake of Q’s failures, many doubled down. The problem wasn’t that the whole worldview was false, just that they had been led astray by inaccurate reports and misinterpretations. Their response was to improve their process. They would develop a list of sources, vet credentials, link to original material, and view unconfirmed information skeptically. They were, in a sense, inventing journalism.

Others made excuses. Theories spread that Q was actually part of a deep state plot to keep Mr. Trump’s supporters complacent. A few members tied Q’s strategy to a C.I.A. psychological operation. And if that was true, their prophets, like Q and Mr. Trump and major personalities in the community, weren’t everything they hoped they would be.

“By us believing that, you know, there’s all these things going on behind the scenes. It’s preventing us from doing anything because we’re just sitting down, waiting and watching for all this to secretly happen. And I don’t think it’s happening,” one said.

“We can’t be digital warriors our whole life. We can’t be keyboard warriors our whole life,” another said, recommending they focus on banking, education and passing real laws instead. He added: “We can’t put all our eggs in one basket like we’re doing and waiting on Trump. Our forefathers never relied on one man. We rely on each other going forward.”

If the current version of the Q conspiracy theory dissolves, what happens to its followers? They already found a community, and their friendships weathered Mr. Biden’s inauguration. If anything, their bonds have been strengthened. The channel was thriving, keeping hope alive for dozens of followers. Right-wing activists were organizing with fervor on Signal and Telegram. A few in the chat discussed plans to meet in person.

“It didn’t play out the way we wanted, but it showed that we can — we’re powerful when we’re together,” one said. “It’s created a whole new era. It’s not done. It’s far from over.”

After the inauguration, Ron Watkins, one of the main pushers of QAnon’s theories, who some suspect is actually Q, seemed to signal the end of the movement. In a message to followers, he focused on the strength of the community, writing, “As we enter into the next administration please remember all the friends and happy memories we made together over the past few years.”

The original version of the conspiracy seems in tatters, but the community is strong. And that will be harder to unravel.

“Trump has changed things forever. It’s a lot of seeds that he planted. And history is going to be very kind to him and the people that fought on the right side of the war.”

The article ends with a call for sympathy for these people because they are dealing with things and they feel alienated from both parties so they turn to Trump. I’m not quite as sanguine about giving them lots of hugs and more understanding. The whole world is in crisis because of the pandemic and these people have it better than most. They are not children. And I don’t think the answer is to treat them that way.

I think these people have agency and they enjoy the thought of executing politicians and killing their enemies — people like me. This cultish demonization of half the country combined with a clear bloodlust and weird lurid obsessions isn’t the equivalent of joining a weird religion that thinks the world is going to end on a particular day. It’s much more like the fantasies of Islamic jihad. They’re being radicalized online and are turning to violence — they’re even talking about beheadings.

The political and religious leadership that is allowing this to fester and grow are doing this for the most cynical of reasons. They don’t want to pay the price of facing the wrath of those who have been radicalized and misled. They are the ones who must be pressured to help break this fever. Donald Trump has lost his platform and if they would simply ignore him and move on, it would go a long way, I think. This will go on for a while but without the oxygen of Trump himself I think the bubble will start to dissipate.

Stephen Miller, bemoaning the fact that Biden isn’t being the president of right wingers who spent the last four years worshipping the man who said California didn’t deserve any federal aid for wildfires because it refused to rake the (national) forests.

GFY.

This morning the news is obsessed with the 10 GOP Senators who say they are willing to vote for a COVID package worth $600 billion in new spending, basically spitting on Biden’s proposal while declaring they are the very picture of bipartisan comity:

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a member of the group, estimated the legislation would cost roughly $600 billion. Senate Republicans contend there are hundreds of billions of dollars left over from previous bills, undercutting the need for the amount proposed by Biden.

“If you want unity, you want bipartisanship, you ought to start with the group that’s willing to work together,” Cassidy said on “Fox News Sunday.” “They did not.”

That certainly sounds like a promising negotiation …

Does anyone remember any caterwauling about bipartisanship when the Senate rammed through massive tax cuts for the wealthy via Reconciliation during the Trump years? I don’t remember it even being raised. Neither was it considered a massive scandal when they also rammed through Obamacare repeal via Reconciliation (which ended up failing to even get enough GOP votes to pass.) These were the only two big legislative initiatives of the Trump years. Was there even one story about Reconciliation being a slap in the face to the millions of people who voted for Hillary Clinton?

Biden may have run on restoring the nation’s soul but I don’t think that meant he would gladly just pass the Republican agenda in the name of bipartisanship. That’s what they mean by this.

And even if Biden were to agree, losing a huge number of Democrats in the Senate in the process, the Republicans would pull the football at the last moment anyway. In fact, this measly offer actually seems pretty halfhearted, with even the so-called Rod Portman emphasizing that they don’t think there really needs to be much money put toward the pandemic crisis and Bill Cassidy saying the whole idea of making schools safe is just a sop to Teachers Unions. This hardly seems designed to result in an agreement.

I doubt Joe Biden is dumb enough to engage in a long negotiation with people who obviously have no intention of actually agreeing to anything. (At least I hope he isn’t still dumb enough …) I’m positive Ron Klain isn’t. I just hope that Schumer has enough savvy to keep his Democrats in line for Reconciliation. That’s the real game at the moment.

Update:

Life comes at Rob Portman pretty fast

GOP IN CONTROL: He told @JenniferRubin that using 50-vote threshold "would be great" and "we ought to do that"

GOP NOT IN CONTROL: He tells @DanaBashCNN that if Democrats use a 50-vote threshold they would "poison the well"

Weird, huh?

Originally tweeted by Jesse Ferguson (@JesseFFerguson) on January 31, 2021.

A man who represents himself, has a fool for a client.

The Washington Post:

The House impeachment article charges Trump with “incitement of insurrection” in the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 by a pro-Trump mob. Since the House voted to impeach Trump, he has struggled to put together a team to mount his defense, in part because prominent lawyers seemed unwilling to associate themselves with Trump’s continued false claims that he won the election. That claim inspired his supporters to attack the Capitol.

The former president demands his lawyers argue he was defrauded in the November election rather than defend him against charges he incited a violent attack on the Capitol in January. Five Trump impeachment lawyers have left his team in the last week.

Naturally. Their prospective client is a fool. They don’t wish to make fools of themselves:

A person familiar with the departures told CNN that Trump wanted the attorneys to argue there was mass election fraud and that the election was stolen from him rather than focus on the legality of convicting a president after he’s left office. Trump was not receptive to the discussions about how they should proceed in that regard.

Of course not. Trump is the eternal winner. He could not have lost. How dare his attorneys argue on technical grounds that he cannot be prosecuted? How dare they defend him against “incitement of insurrection” rather than promote his baseless fraud allegations? Also, Trump is delusional.

Anyway, I just ran across this little ditty from Jan. 8. So if you missed it….

The lunacy afoot inside the halls of Congress and in the streets outside, while dazzling to behold, is a shiny distraction from deeper societal ills. Our sound-bite, video-clip culture chews up complex information and regurgitates it in bite-size pieces that obscure the whole. It may be how you eat an elephant but, not unlike like the blind men of the parable, it leaves us with little idea what it is we are eating.

Shoshana Zuboff, author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” offers a detailed look at the “fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup marked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge.” That’s an academic’s way of saying “surveillance capitalism” is more than a threat to privacy, but to democracy as well as to society as know/knew it.

Zuboff believes that if knowledge is power, surveillance capitalists have progressed in stages to concentrate it in their hands. Surveillance capitalism “now vies with democracy over the fundamental rights and principles that will define our social order in this century.” By now, the effects of epistemic chaos “are felt in the real world, where they splinter shared reality, poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics and sometimes instigate violence and death.”

Her New York Times essay is too long to summarize, but a few paragraphs may suffice to see where she is headed. A couple of metaphors are clarifying:

We are meant to believe that the destructive effects of epistemic chaos are the inevitable cost of cherished rights to freedom of speech. No. Just as catastrophic levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere are the consequence of burning fossil fuels, epistemic chaos is a consequence of surveillance capitalism’s bedrock commercial operations, aggravated by political obligations and set into motion by a 20-year-old dream of total information that slid into nightmare. Then a plague came to America, turning the antisocial media conflagration into a wildfire.

Disinformation about COVID-19 is killing people. A social-media-driven breakdown in trust has fractured society, making us all less safe.

Think about traffic: There are not enough police officers in the world to ensure that every car stops at every red light, yet not every intersection triggers a negotiation or a fight. That’s because in orderly societies we all know that red lights have the authority to make us stop and green lights are authorized to let us go. This common sense means that we each act on what we all know, while trusting that others will too. We’re not just obeying laws; we are creating order together. Our reward is to live in a world where we mostly get where we are going and home again safely because we can trust one another’s common sense. No society is viable without it.

The consequences of that breakdown are still reverberating.

Mr. Trump and his allies prosecuted an election-fraud disinformation campaign that ultimately translated into violence. It took direct aim at American democracy’s point of maximum institutional vulnerability and its most fundamental norms. As such, it qualifies as a form of epistemic terrorism, an extreme expression of epistemic chaos. Mr. Zuckerberg’s determination to lend his economic machine to the cause makes him an accessory to this assault.

Some of us anyway are looking for an exit.

Democracy is under the kind of siege that only democracy can end. If we are to defeat the epistemic coup, then democracy must be the protagonist.

Zuboff offers some ideas for ending the madness. The antitrust approach of the Gilded Age addressed concerns of a different century and was never that effective. Assertion of digital rights is one area she believes has promise, including a person’s right not to be reduced to product.

Stop untrammeled data collection. “The algorithms that recommend, microtarget and manipulate, and the millions of behavioral predictions pushed out by the second cannot exist without the trillions of data points fed to them each day.”

We might “prohibit commercial practices that exert demand for rapacious data collection. Democratic societies have outlawed markets that trade in human organs and babies. Markets that trade in human beings were outlawed, even when they supported whole economies.” There is precedent.

But Zuboff’s focus on surveillance capitalism still misses a much of the elephant. One could argue that the core issue with surveillance capitalism is capitalism. I have argued that even that is not necessarily the issue so much as one particular style for organizing a capitalist enterprise that has become dominant over the last few centuries: coporate capitalism. It has become so ubiquitous — the water we swim in — as to be nearly invisible and difficult to analyze as a thing in itself. Yet we invented it. We can reinvent it. If democracy is the protagonist in reining in surveillance capitalism, it might still be the protagonist in civilizing corporate capitalism. Admittedly, I am not optimistic.

Where once we held the corporate leash, now humans wear the collar. The Market wants what it wants. The Giant Pool of Money wants to grow and reproduce. The corporation as well. Mary Shelley warned us.

ICYWW:

MORE ON THAT MAR-A-LAGO MEETING: The McCarthy-Trump relationship has been quite the soap opera lately, as we and a million other reporters have written. First, McCarthy said Trump was to blame for Jan. 6. Then Trump called McCarthy a “pussy.” Then McCarthy backtracked to say Trump didn’t “provoke” the riot.