Month: January 2021

“What took Biden so long to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement?” I posted to a left-leaning local Facebook group. “Should I perceive an incipient stab in the back and start searching for a 2024 primary challenger?” A few did not get the joke.

In fact, before dinnertime on Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed an executive order for the U.S. to rejoin. Another order cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline. There was a stack of orders (Down To Business) prepared for signature by the end of his first day.

One upside of the global pandemic was the elimination of all those frivolous inaugural balls that get in the way of getting down to business. The Biden Inaugural Committee took its celebration largely online like the DNC convention before it. Both were an improvement on the usual pomp and nonsense. Four years of Trump tweets, a year in quarantine, 400,000 Americans dead, and an attempt to overthrow the government have blessed us with fresh perspective.

President Biden begins signing a tall stack of executive orders during his first Oval Office appearance for press. pic.twitter.com/oh1JqG0iJP

— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) January 20, 2021

With so much mess for Biden to clean up and so many crises, some on the left will be primed, as always, to be stiffed by a president not progressive enough for their tastes. They will look for any early signal Biden has sold them out, stabbed them in the back, or whatever. Give the guy a break. You don’t want his job.

One example (CNN):

Newly sworn in President Joe Biden and his advisers are inheriting no coronavirus vaccine distribution plan to speak of from the Trump administration, sources tell CNN, posing a significant challenge for the new White House.

The Biden administration has promised to try to turn the Covid-19 pandemic around and drastically speed up the pace of vaccinating Americans against the virus. But in the immediate hours following Biden being sworn into office on Wednesday, sources with direct knowledge of the new administration’s Covid-related work told CNN one of the biggest shocks that the Biden team had to digest during the transition period was what they saw as a complete lack of a vaccine distribution strategy under former President Donald Trump, even weeks after multiple vaccines were approved for use in the United States.”

Team Biden will have to start from scratch, “sources” say.

Maybe that is the new administration lowering expectations that Biden will be able to deliver on his pledge to see 100 million Americans vaccinated against COVID-19 in his first 100 days. Already there are signs it will be a tough hill to climb. But given the Trump administration’s incompetence, its long aversion to admitting the coronavirus was a serious problem, and its efforts to sabotage the incoming administration, maybe that’s not just CYA on Team Biden’s part.

But getting right to work on Wednesday was an admission of how much there is to mitigate as well as work that needs doing in the next year while Democrats control both houses of Congress. Derek Thompson at The Atlantic writes that getting control of the pandemic and mitigating its economic fallout come first. Biden has had time to recognize the mistakes the Obama administration made in not moving faster while it had its maximum leverage:

Instead of seeking to change Americans’ behavior with subtle technocratic nudges, as Barack Obama’s team did, Biden should aim to make his signature policies as stupidly straightforward as possible. Instead of threading the needle of deficit neutrality, as his predecessor did, he should make a strong case to blow out the budget immediately to fill the hole left by the pandemic recession. Where the Obama administration’s approach was too often clever and strewn with budgetary wonkiness, the Biden formula should embrace the opposite: big, fast, and simple.

“Awesomeness matters,” Thompson writes. While Republicans under Trump tried to leverage relief efforts to their advantage for the fall elections, Biden must get help to people now because it is the right thing to do:

For non-mysterious reasons, polls show extraordinary support for giving $2,000 to every American household as a kind of stimulus-qua-consolation gift for making it through the year from hell (one study indicated that seven in 10 Republicans support the direct payments). With stimulus checks, Biden could endear himself to the persuadable middle of the U.S. electorate, which might enjoy liking an American president, for once.

And for once Democrats, if they can deliver, need to remind Americans again and again, loudly and proudly, just who helped them while Republicans sat on their hands or wrung them over born-again deficit-hawkism.

I’ve cued up the start of the parade in the Youtube below in case you didn’t watch it. There was a lot going on. I especially recommend the Andra Day “Rise Up” with the figure skater at Black Lives Matter Plaza and the reunited New Radicals whose song “You Get What You Give”, as I mentioned yesterday, was Beau Biden’s theme song when he was sick and also Kamala Harris and Doug Elmhoffs walk on song during their rallies. It’s at the end. But take a look at all the folks around the country, especially the kids, who participated in this thing to celebrate the inauguration. It’s nice. It’s wholesome. We could use a little bit of that.

On his first day, President Biden signed 17 Executive Orders in an attempt to start the process of turning this big old ship of state on to a better, safer course.

He appeared in the Oval Office and signed the Executive Orders without a bunch of fawning sycophants crowding around him telling him how great he is and he didn’t even hold each orders up and show it around like some kind of 6th grade art project. It was almost strange until you remember that’s how it’s usually done. In fact, he only signed 3 orders on camera and then they shooed the press out of the room.

• An executive order requiring that people wear masks, and keep their distance from each other, on federal property.
• The launch of a “100 Days Masking Challenge” to encourage Americans to wear masks.
• The reversal of Trump’s decision to remove the US from the World Health Organization.
• An executive order that creates the position of Covid-19 response coordinator and restores the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, a team in charge of pandemic response, within the National Security Council.
• Calls to Congress to extend Covid-19 aid, and requests to various departments to extend eviction and foreclosure moratoriums and pause payments for federal loans.
• An “instrument” that will allow the US to re-join the Paris Agreement on climate change within 30 days.
• An executive order reversing actions Trump took that Biden’s agencies judge to have been harmful to the environment, public health, or the national interest, and asking agencies to revise these standards to tackle climate change.
• An executive order with the aim of “embedding equity across federal policymaking and rooting out systemic racism and other barriers to opportunity from federal programs and institutions.” This order will also disband the Trump administration’s 1776 Commission.
• An executive order reversing a Trump administration order that excluded undocumented immigrants from the Census.
• A memorandum directing officials to “preserve and fortify” the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.
• An executive action repealing two proclamations, informally known as the “Muslim ban.” that restricted entry into the US from majority-Muslim countries.
• An executive order revoking Trump’s “harsh and extreme immigration enforcement” and directing agencies to set immigration policies more “in line” with the Biden administration’s “values and priorities.”
• A proclamation that will pause the construction of the border wall with Mexico and determine how to best divert those funds elsewhere.
• A memorandum to extend a designation allowing Liberians who have been in the US for a long time to stay.
• An executive order directing the government to interpret the Civil Rights Act as prohibiting workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, not just race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.
• An executive order enacting new ethics rules for government officials.
• An executive order reversing “regulatory process executive orders” enacted by the Trump administration.

I am very glad that he’s off to a running start and I hope his team is ready to do the same because this was very dangerous. Let’s hope the new administration can pick up the pieces:

The Pentagon blocked members of President Joe Biden’s incoming administration from gaining access to critical information about current operations, including the troop drawdown in Afghanistan, upcoming special operations missions in Africa and the Covid-19 vaccine distribution program, according to new details provided by transition and defense officials.

The effort to obstruct the Biden team, led by senior White House appointees at the Pentagon, is unprecedented in modern presidential transitions and will hobble the new administration on key national security matters as it takes over positions in the Defense Department on Wednesday, the officials said.

Biden openly decried the treatment his aides were receiving at the Pentagon in December, calling it “nothing short, in my view, of irresponsibility” after meetings were canceled ahead of Christmas. He said his people were denied information on the SolarWinds hack, and said his team “needs a clear picture of our force posture around the world and our operations to deter our enemies.”

But people involved with the transition, both on the Biden team and the Pentagon side, gave POLITICO a more detailed picture of what was denied, saying briefings on pressing defense matters never happened, were delayed to the last minute, or were controlled by overbearing minders from the Trump administration’s side…

“They really should not be allowed to get away with this. It’s just completely irresponsible and indefensible,” said one transition official. “To play politics with the country’s national security is just really unacceptable.”

[…]

But people with the transition said the outgoing team’s conduct went far beyond the norm and pointed to loyalists installed by the White House as the main reason for the obstruction. Pentagon officials under President Donald Trump refused to provide information about current operations, particularly in the special operations realm, because they are “predecisional.” That means the Biden team now has limited visibility into key operational issues, including what counterterrorism missions are in the works.

Another area where the transition felt they did not have adequate access was Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s effort to develop and distribute Covid-19 vaccines. The Pentagon initially rebuffed the transition’s request to meet with Gen. Gustave Perna, Warp Speed’s chief operating officer.

Perna was present at a meeting between the Pentagon and Health and Human Services transition teams in mid-December, but he did not answer any questions. It wasn’t until last week that the DoD transition team got to meet with Perna in a smaller setting.

Transition officials said the delay in getting answers about Warp Speed will hamper the Biden administration’s plan to dramatically scale up the nation’s vaccination distribution effort over the next three months.

The Trump people lied and said this didn’t happen, of course.

But across the department, even when the transition team did meet with DoD officials, both civilian and military, they were often tight-lipped, as if they were given explicit guidance about what they could and could not talk about. Those suspicions were confirmed when the first transition official bumped into a “very high-ranking” military official a week after their meeting, and the officer apologized for his clipped answers.

“We were alone, and he told me ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t able to tell you more, but I was given very strict instructions,’” the transition official said.

In another interview with a combatant commander, the Biden team asked detailed questions about pressing national security matters, and received “very vanilla answers.”

Some of this reticence may have been due to the fact that in nearly every transition meeting, “minders” from the Defense Department General Counsel’s office were present and frequently cut off the civilian Pentagon officials, citing “predecisional operational matters.”

What the hell was this really about? Even if the Big Lie had worked and Trump somehow pulled of his steal, there was no harm in letting the Biden transition do their work just in case. What were they trying to hide?

I kind of hope we never find out because whatever it was didn’t happen. The stonewalling on the pandemic is just inexplicable.

The Washington Post added up all the lies — all 30,573 of them. That’s right, 30, 573.

You’ll notice the massive spike at the end of the year. His Big Lie was not only the worst lie he told, he told it a lot. But the most repeated lie is also a very important one:

“We also built the greatest economy in the history of the world…Powered by these policies, we built the greatest economy in the history of the world.”

FACT CHECK:

This is Trump’s favorite false claim, so there should be no surprise he said it twice in his farewell address. (In this database, we only count a falsehood once per venue.) By just about any key measure in the modern era, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton presided over stronger economic growth than Trump. The gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 2.3 percent in 2019, slipping from 2.9 percent in 2018 and 2.4 percent in 2017. But in 1997, 1998 and 1999, GDP grew 4.5 percent, 4.5 percent and 4.7 percent, respectively. Yet even that period paled in comparison with the postwar boom in the 1950s or the 1960s. Growth between 1962 and 1966 ranged from 4.4 percent to 6.6 percent. In 1950 and 1951, it was 8.7 percent and 8 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate reached a low of 3.5 percent under Trump, but it dipped as low as 2.5 percent in 1953. (After the novel coronavirus tanked the economy, Trump jacked up his claim even more, falsely saying it had been the greatest economy in the history of the world.) This marks the 493rd time that Trump used a variation of this line, meaning he said it on average every other day.

Republicans all repeated that bullshit lie as well and point to it as the greatest example of his great legacy. It is a lie. It should not be allowed to stand.

And then there are the insults. This New York Times list is just the twitter insults so it’s hardly comprehensive. He was insulting almost every time he spoke in public. Nonetheless, it’s quite a list and it goes on forever. Here are a couple of Republicans who came in for his nastiness:

Bob Corker FORMER U.S. SENATOR

“Liddle’ Bob,” “totally unelectable,” “Little Bob Corker,” “poll numbers TANKED when I wouldn’t endorse him,” “responsible for giving us the horrible Iran Nuclear Deal,” “Bob wanted to run and asked for my endorsement. I said NO and the game was over,” “had zero chance of being elected,” “Now act so hurt & wounded!” “helped President O give us the bad Iran Deal,” “couldn’t get elected dog catcher in Tennessee,” “dropped out of the race in Tennesse when I refused to endorse him,” “now is only negative on anything Trump,” “sad,” “lightweight,” “incompetent,” “doesn’t have a clue,” “liddle’ Bob Corker,” “set the U.S. way back,” “Liddle’ Bob,” “Was made to sound a fool,” “‘begged’ me to endorse him for re-election,” “I said ‘NO‘ and he dropped out,” “largely responsible for the horrendous Iran Deal!” “a negative voice,” “in the way of our great agenda,” “Didn’t have the guts to run!” “gave us the Iran Deal, & that’s about it,” “Strange,” “constantly asking me whether or not he should run again in ’18”

John Bolton FORMER TRUMP NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER

“one of the dumbest people in Washington,” “so stupid,” “one of the dumbest people in government,” “A sullen, dull and quiet guy,” “added nothing to National Security except, ‘Gee, let’s go to war’,” “illegally released much Classified Information,” “A real dope!”“Wacko,” “such a jerk!” “dumb warmonger,” “one of the dumbest people I’ve met in government and sadly, I’ve met plenty,” “with the exception of Hillary, by far the worst offender of them all!” “lowlife dummy,” “a war mongering fool,”“really dumb,” “Washed up Creepster,” “a lowlife who should be in jail,” “Crooked Hillary,” “was incapable of being Senate confirmed because he was considered a wacko,”“was not liked,” “turned out to be grossly incompetent,” “a liar,”“Wacko,” “was all washed up until I brought him back and gave him a chance,” “He likes dropping bombs on people, and killing them. Now he will have bombs dropped on him!”“Wacko,” “A disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war,”“Never had a clue,” “was ostracized & happily dumped,” “What a dope!”“incompetent!” “Just trying to get even for firing him like the sick puppy he is!” “Wacko,” “stupid,” “dumb,”“set us back very badly with North Korea,” “was very publicly terminated,” “He said, not that it matters, NOTHING!” “couldn’t get approved for the Ambassador to the U.N. years ago, couldn’t get approved for anything since,” ““begged” me for a non Senate approved job,” “many more mistakes of judgement, gets fired because frankly, if I listened to him, we would be in World War Six by now,” “He was holding me back!”

What a leader, eh? I don’t have space to print all the insults he gave to Democrats. They are legion.

Having Trump off of twitter is a breath of fresh air. But this list makes it clear how much better off this country and the world would have been if he had never been on twitter at all.

Trump waved to the press on his way out of the White House and said “I just want to say goodbye, but hopefully it’s not a long-term goodbye.” Later at Andrews he said:

Parody is impossible https://t.co/W0QTmRHRCe

— Freud Durst (@MakeLeninade) January 20, 2021

Perhaps he thinks he is going to be reincarnated as a squirrel?

He’s back at Mar-a-lago licking his wounds. But the rumor mill says he’s thinking of starting a 3rd party. I’d guess his most recently pardoned crony has something to do with that:

As his presidential term ends, Donald Trump has discussed creating a new independent political party with several close aides, The Wall Street Journal reports. He would call it the “Patriot Party,” echoing the names and rhetoric of many of the militant far-right groups around the country that support him. Trump reportedly said he hopes to potentially use his own party as a way to continue to exert influence over national politics even after he leaves office and Washington, D.C. It is unclear how intent on the venture Trump is, and the White House did not confirm the news. The news of his plans for a new party comes after he attacked Republican leaders who have assigned blame to him for the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol building. 

I suspect this will all depend on what helps him raise the most money and command the most attention. In which case, he’ll stay a Republican. He already knows that’s where the money is.

Women of all racial and ethnic backgrounds can feel a great sense of pride (and relief) today. It’s been a long time coming.

It sounds like this prayer is subtweeting Trump — but then again that's basically the case for any prayer, since they embody values that are completely antithetical to Trump

Lady Gaga arrives

Here's Lady Gaga's entire rendition of The Star Spangled Banner

Kamala Harris is given the oath of office by Justice Sotomayor

Joe Biden is sworn in as President of the United States

"It is now my great privilege and high honor to be the first person to officially introduce the 46th President of the United States, Joseph R Biden Jr"

"At this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed" — President Biden

Biden: "I know speaking of unity can sound to some like a foolish fantasy these days. I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real. I also know they are not new … unity is the path forward."

"We must reject the culture to which facts themselves are manipulated and manufactured" — Biden

"Here we stand just days after a mob thought they could use violence to silence the will of the people, to stop the work of our democracy, to drive us from this sacred ground. It did not happen. It will never happen. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Not ever." — Biden

"To all of those who do not support us, let me say this. Hear me out as we move forward. Take a measure of me and my heart. If you still disagree, so be it. That is democracy. That is America. The right to dissent peaceably is perhaps this nation's greatest strength." — Biden

"Recent weeks and months have taught us a painful lesson. There is truth and there are lies. Lies told for power and profit. Each of us has a duty and a responsibility as citizens, as Americans, especially as leaders … to defend the truth and defeat the lies." — Biden

"Here's the thing about life. There's no accounting for what fate will deal you. Some days, when you need a hand — there are other days when we are called to lend a hand. That's how it has to be" — Biden

"We will repair our alliances and engage with the world once again" — Biden

Biden observes a moment of silence for the 400,000 Americans who have died during the pandemic

Biden: "I close where I began, with the sacred oath before God and all of you. I give you my word. I will always level with you. I will defend the Constitution. I will defend our democracy. I will defend America, and I will give all of you everything I do in your service."

Garth Brooks sings "Amazing Grace"

Originally tweeted by Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) on January 20, 2021.

https://twitter.com/MaddowBlog/status/1351944971163738116

Congratulations to my friend, President @JoeBiden! This is your time. pic.twitter.com/LXzxGnBAfz

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) January 20, 2021

One of the great ironies of life is that as you get older time seems to pass much more quickly. But I have found that the last four years have been an exception. I can hardly remember a time before Donald Trump dominated our political culture. But it’s over now. Today Trump flies off to Mar-a-Lago to plot his next comeback and Joe Biden moves into the White House to plot a comeback for America.

Four years ago today, Donald Trump proclaimed, “American Carnage stops right here and stops right now.” He should have said, “American carnage starts right here, right now.” There isn’t room here to list it all. And Lord knows, we don’t want to relive it anyway. But it’s important to remember that Trump’s crimes in office go beyond “norm busting” and being a pathological liar. He was corrupt on an unprecedented level and he abused the power of the presidency repeatedly putting his own needs ahead of the national interest time and again. He showed reckless disregard for the greatest public health crisis in over a century and the ensuing economic crisis. And he promulgated an egregious disinformation campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election, incited his supporters to sack the US Capitol and then stood by and did nothing as they stormed the halls of Congress chanting “hang Mike Pence!”

As historian Tim Naftali writes in The Atlantic, compared to the worst presidents in American history, from James Buchanan to Warren Harding to Herbert Hoover or Richard Nixon, Trump is at the bottom on every measurable scale. Others have done bad things — many of which Trump did as well — but none of them attempted a coup to stay in power.

But he didn’t do it alone. He was aided and abetted by the Republican collaborators who backed him every step of the way, some even helping to incite those same insurrectionists. They excused his ignorant, crude behavior and his abuse of power and closed their eyes to the blatant corruption that had him pocketing vast sums from taxpayers and those seeking favors. They protected him from legitimate oversight and allowed him to repeatedly put himself before the country. They were in it with him all the way and Trump’s ecstatic voters rewarded them for it. That he has turned on so many in his last days is further proof that no good deed goes unpunished.

CNN’s Ron Brownstein writes that Trump is leaving America at its most divided since the Civil War. It’s not that it wasn’t polarized before he took office, but Trump accelerated it and took it into new territory:

Trump relentlessly stoked the nation’s divisions and simultaneously provided oxygen for the growth of White nationalist extremism through his open embrace of racist language and conspiracy theories. In the process, Trump has not only shattered the barriers between the Republican Party and far-right extremists but also enormously intensified a trend that predated him: a growing willingness inside the GOP’s mainstream to employ anti-small-d-democratic means to maintain power in a country demographically evolving away from the party.

That anti-democratic means to maintain power has been with us through all the years of Jim Crow voter suppression and beyond, of course, but Trump gave it new life with the introduction of the violent anti-government faction, bizarre conspiracy theories and a sophisticated propaganda operation that came together to define the mainstream right during the Trump era. It tore the country apart and we are still in shock. It’s going to take a while to come out of it.

On the eve of his inauguration, Joe Biden, his vice president, Kamala Harris, and their spouses oversaw an elegant, spiritual memorial at the National Mall to commemorate the 400,000 people who have died in the pandemic in this country. It was a moving ceremony and our first national observance, a fitting beginning to Biden’s stated goal to restore the soul of America. He is obviously quite serious about trying to bring people together and it’s what any decent president has to at least try to do.

But what happened over the past four years wasn’t an anomaly and a quick fix isn’t going to work. It’s been slowly dawning on Americans just how badly we’ve failed to live up to our ideals for a very long time and this great clash between those who refuse to admit it and those who want to face it and fix it was inevitable. What’s needed now is not just a restoration of norms and regular order. And neither can we simply hold Trump and the Republicans who acted as his accomplices accountable, although all of that is vital. We’ve come to an inflection point in our history in which we must admit our nation’s failures and challenge ourselves to be better. Can Joe Biden do that?

This piece by Finan O’Toole in The Guardian makes the case that Biden’s life experience with pain and suffering makes him uniquely qualified to pick up the pieces and begin the process of rebuilding from a different place than where we started. It’s an interesting view of Biden’s “dark Irishness” that I haven’t seen before.

He begins with a story that Biden likes to tell about a house in Nantucket which he and his family used to take pictures in front of every summer. One year it was gone, having been washed away by the tide. This story apparently serves as a sort of life metaphor for Biden and O’Toole sees it as a metaphor for America that he might relate to: a house slowly crumbling and “no longer able to hold its ground.” He points out that just as you cannot rebuild a house on “land that has been washed away” you also have to rebuild the country somewhere else, “away from the hollow promises of the American dream and towards a new awakening of real equality.” He writes:

[H]is familiarity with the dark can be Biden’s great strength. In his own life, he has been there and come back. He knows that it cannot be denied, but that it can be transcended. He can invite America to encounter its own darknesses – the legacy of slavery, the persistence of official and unofficial white supremacist violence, the failure to provide the access to education and healthcare necessary for the equal dignity of citizens – while reassuring its people that after such acknowledgement can come real change for the better.

That is an optimistic scenario. And it doesn’t account for the challenges of a right-wing faction determined to wage war on its fellow citizens. Still, Biden seems to be planning to go big and so far, hasn’t seemed to be afraid to challenge the previous orthodoxy. We’ll see how that goes. But who knows? Maybe out of Biden’s transcendence of suffering and the ashes of Trump’s American Carnage will rise a better country with a soul that all Americans can claim as their own.

Salon

“sir, there are a million songs are you sure this is how you want to end your presidency” https://t.co/uGr8y1Tg2R

— BenDavid Grabinski (@bdgrabinski) January 20, 2021

Yes, he actually played himself off stage to his theme song — a notorious hook-up disco song from the 1970s. Perfect.