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Month: March 2021

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on March 12, 2021

We needed these penguins! And they were there for us:

More penguins?

Even more penguins you say?

He had no plan

Published by digby on March 12, 2021

The Republicans are all shrieking that Trump deserves credit for Biden’s vaccine rollout. It is nonsense. Donald Trump lost interest in the pandemic by early summer as he fretted over his re-election campaign. After the election as numbers started soar with the winter surge the administration did nothing but sit around trying to overturn the election. That went on for three months, leading to an insurrection and the sacking of he US Capitol after which we barely heard from Trump until he slunk off to Mar-a-lago in disgrace on January 20th.

They gave up on fighting the virus a long, long time ago. That’s why we are among the worst deaths per capita in the world. If they had been in charge of the vaccine rollout we’d be waiting until 2023 to get them and our death toll would be even more astronomical.

Recall that for months he said it was “going away”

By the fall he was openly mocking concerns over the ever mounting death toll:

As TPM reports, it is 100% prime BS:

What’s surprising is that he’s been aided in this by the Washington Post and New York Times, both of which have run articles this week arguing that the speed-up in the vaccine rollout under President Biden only builds off of a plan put into place by Trump. In short, they contend that Trump is right: he had a plan to distribute the vaccine that Biden was lucky enough to inherit.  

That’s flat wrong. A look at what actually happened in the Trump administration’s last weeks shows that the White House lacked a plan for the “last mile” of distribution, leaving that to the states while lobbying Congress not to pass much-needed funding that would spur state and local governments to get the vaccine into arms. 

On its own terms, the Trump administration did not have a plan to distribute the vaccine to Americans en masse beyond “let the states figure it out.” 

What the Trump administration left the country with was a partnership with pharmacies to vaccinate nursing homes — the only real footprint of a federal plan to deliver vaccine into people’s arms. And even that foundered amid allegations of inefficiency compared to states that opted out. 

What’s more is that that one plan only covered the first phase of distribution: nursing home residents and hospital workers, who received inoculations from the medical facilities at which they worked. It set the Biden administration up for a “vaccine cliff,” an outcome that was avoided in part due to the outcry over the sheer ineptitude of the effort’s early stages. 

The question here is simple: what did the administration plan to do to get vaccines into arms? After the vaccines got to the states, what was the plan for the last mile? 

The answer is that there was none. The vaccines were dumped onto the states, without any real push to coordinate how they would go from federal custody into the arms of Americans. 

That so-called “last mile” is crucial, as the U.S. learned in December and January, when shipments were missed and vaccine sat unused — or ended up in trash bins. 

There were two main, limited ways in which the Trump administration used federal power to plan for this so-called “last mile.” 

One took place in September, when the CDC asked states to provide plans for how they would prioritize distribution. But what to do for the last mile — actually designing and implementing the distribution — was left to the states. 

The one program that the Trump administration oversaw to directly deliver vaccine to Americans was its nursing home partnership with CVS and Walgreens. That program did succeed in vaccinating the country’s nursing home population — an achievement marred by the program’s extreme inefficiency compared to states that rejected it. 

Some state governments eventually dropped the program midway through because coordination was so poor. 

“There was this philosophical difference in approach that hindered vaccine distribution under the Trump administration,” Josh Michaud, an epidemiologist at Kaiser Family Foundations, told TPM, adding that some of the “seeds” for more effective distribution had been planted under Trump. “It’s been a positive to make a more hybrid approach where you’re not just dumping doses at the feet of the states, and you’re working more in partnership and giving support.”

That didn’t stop senior Trump administration officials from boosting the campaign throughout the year. 

Paul Mango, chief of staff to then-HHS Secretary Alex Azar, told reporters in August that the government would have “hundreds of millions of vaccines, doses, available before year end.” 

Dr. Matt Hepburn, a Trump administration official detailed to Operation Warp Speed, also told reporters that the military’s involvement in the plan would ensure that they would “plan every detail with every contingency.” 

“I hope the American public can be reassured — I don’t see how we can work details more than we have been to address all of those different contingencies,” Hepburn said. 

The administration reportedly went even further than washing its hands of the distribution effort. 

State health officials had been pushing since May for Congress to appropriate money to fund the distribution effort, saying that funds would be needed to plan for vaccinations on the local level and to hire and train vaccinators. 

But top Trump administration officials lobbied Congress to deny state governments extra funding for the vaccine rollout even while officials expressed their dire need for more, according to a January STAT report. 

We Watched It Happen

But as we saw over the winter, the state health officials were right: they did need more money and resources.

While the administration was overpromising and underdelivering — HHS Secretary Alex Azar’s October estimation that we’d have 100 million doses by the end of 2020 was soon downgraded to 40 million doses, then to 20 million — the vaccinating process crawled. 

Vice President Mike Pence said in December that the country was on track to vaccinate 20 million people by the end of the month. Only about 2.8 million people were ultimately vaccinated by that date.

Without any cohesive plan and administrative push to get states more money, historically underfunded state health departments were caught flat-footed, lacking the resources to set up a robust infrastructure ahead of time.

And any planning they could do was routinely thrown into flux by the administration’s false promises. That dynamic persisted into the very last days of the Trump administration. 

The administration also blindsided states by failing to notify them of when precise amounts of vaccine would be delivered. One mid-December scandal saw some states have their vaccine allocations cut by up to 50 percent with only one day’s warning. The Trump administration blamed the states as Pfizer issued a caustic statement complaining that it had “millions more doses sitting in our warehouse but, as of now, we have not received any shipment instructions for additional doses.” 

Azar announced in January that the federal government would release doses of the vaccine held back for second shots, giving health officials the impression that their stockpiles would grow and allow them to dramatically expand the vaccination effort. 

That promise turned out to be entirely hollow — there was no such reserve, as the administration had already been shipping out all the vaccine available, taking second doses right off the manufacturing line. 

One enraged health official, director of Oregon Health Authority Pat Allen, wrote a furious letter demanding an explanation and calling the walkback both “disturbing” and putting his plans to expand eligibility at “grave risk.” 

Azar muddied the waters further by saying that vaccine doses would be allocated based on how fast states have been administering them — a statement that appeared flatly wrong when West Virginia, then moving at the fastest clip, received no additional doses. 

As a sign of how undependable the administration’s word had become by the end, the CDC did not immediately update its eligibility guidance after Azar urged states to expand their vaccinations to adults 65 and older and people with high-risk underlying conditions, as more supply would soon become available. Some federal officials reportedly even did cleanup, tempering those instructions in conversations with state and local officials.

Credit For What? 

But Trump himself made the same mistake that the New York Times and Washington Post did in their stories about the subject. 

He issued a statement earlier this week saying that he “hope[s] everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19…vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all.” 

But it’s a statement that, apart from being utterly typical of the former president, conflates vaccine development with vaccine distribution. 

Those are two separate elements in the campaign to inoculate the country. 

“They were so heavily focused on getting the doses out, but there was a vacuum on the planning side,” Michaud said of the Trump administration’s effort. 

While planning for distribution ended with the nursing home federal partnership, the Trump administration did succeed in spurring the development of the three COVID-19 shots being used to vaccinate the country. 

Dr. Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine scientist and a Star Trek fan, came up with the name for the program and the approach: the federal government would subsidize COVID-19 vaccine development, allowing companies to scale up manufacturing for shots that may not pan out so that if trials confirmed they worked safely, the country would immediately begin to vaccinate en masse. 

That’s the one area where the Trump administration — or rather the career officials therein — deserve credit. The second half — having a plan to vaccinate people en masse — did not exist. 

Marks himself threatened to resign in August after Trump pressured the FDA to authorize a vaccine before the November election. 

That threat succeeded in keeping the vaccine on the timetable of its clinical trials. But when it came time to distribute it to millions of Americans, there simply was no plan.

There was no plan. They were going to have vaccines dropped off in the states, and wash their hands of it, just as they did with testing.

They did not know how to do anything right. The End.

“Pure outrage propaganda”

Published by digby on March 12, 2021

John Amato watches Fox so you don’t have to. Last night featured a particularly pungent puddle of poison:

Joe Biden gave his first national address as president on Thursday night. The speech was cohesive and meaningful. Biden showed that he empathized with the pain felt by the country over the pandemic and lockdown, and also spoke to lift up the hopes of the American people.

Similarly, Fox News hosts didn’t even try to analyze the speech at all and instead foamed at the mouth.

Up until Joe Biden has been elected, any presidential address since I’ve been covering politics (17 years) Fox News would convene their all-star panel, formerly lead by Brit Hume, Brett Baier along with Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace, Megan Kelly, Martha McCallum, Dana Perino, Karl Rove, Charles Krauthammer, Juan Williams, and they would discuss what was said by the president and how they thought the overall speech was, including how the believed the public would view it.

Then after 30 minutes or so Fox News would go back to their original programming.

That wasn’t the case last night at all. Instead we got screams, COVID deniers, anti-Vaxxers and right wing hysteria.

Tucker Carlson immediately attacked Biden and screamed outrage over designating the Fourth Of July as a possible rallying point for the country.

“Who you talking to,” Carlson said. “This is a free people. This is a free country. How dare you tell us who we can spend 4 July with!”

Carlson’s first guest was Covid denier Alex Berenson, a faux COVID expert and anti-vaxxer, who called the entire speech bizarre.

On Fox Business, Mr. Meghan McCain (yeah) Ben Domenech of The Federalist, ranted and raved, “This is another garbage speech full of lies from a senile person who thinks they’re in charge of America but actually isn’t running anything. The reality is this guy who’s been trolled out to us as the being the President of the United States…”

Sean Hannity, the Trump sycophant, was furious Biden didn’t thank Trump, but was forced to admit that Biden was coherent and on point during his speech.

That didn’t stop him from trying to claim the president is mentally ill.

Hannity said, “But I do need to give Joe Biden a congratulations tonight. He stayed up an hour past his beddy time after days and days of practice. He was able to read from the TelePrompTer for almost 20 whole minutes without making a total fool out of himself. Now, the problem with this is, ‘See, Hannity, he did it, he did it!”

Hannity clapped his hands like a trained seal.

“Johnny hit the baseball! Good job!’ Is that the lowest bar possible for a president? Isn’t it a little kind of sad that we even have to wonder or even discuss it? It’s kind of sad to me.”

“This is a guy who is clearly not doing well,’ Hannity proclaimed.

Fox News and its right wing imitators all attacked Biden’s mental acuity through the entire 2020 campaign cycle and their efforts fell flat on its face.

But that’s all they have, along with the faux culture wars.

I don’t think I’ve seen a group of snotty little bitches like this since I was in junior high and overheard a bunch of creepy boys rating the girls’ bodies in their homeroom class. It’s definitely still Donald Trump’s party.

I do have to wonder how all this senility talk is hitting their audience. After all, more than half of Fox News viewers are over 65. It just doesn’t seem like a smart approach. On the other hand, the right is so psychologically damaged that maybe those old, white fogies who love Tuck and Sean can’t see that they’re being mocked as well.

Amato is right about this:

If Roger Ailes was still alive, he would have reconfigured their shows to fit the day and make it even more glossy, but instead, Fox has now taken up the mantle of the deranged QAnon Trump cultists and descended down the road of Newsmax and OANN. Pure outrage propaganda.

Without Ailes, they have lost their way. Bigly.

There’s more at the C&L link.

Oh, and by the way:

Update:

Here’s are a few more Fox highlights you just can’t believe…

I feel sick watching that fatuous nonsense. After five years of Trump bootlicking, which they seemed to genuinely enjoy, they have smoothly transitioned back into full time character assassination. They do love their jobs.

A traditional pol can be transformative

Published by digby on March 12, 2021

A new book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes about Joe Biden’s campaign for president is called “Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency,” which seems like an unnecessarily disparaging title about a man who won a decisive popular vote victory in the midst of a global pandemic. But, I guess, that’s just the way politics goes these days. I haven’t read the book but early reviews focus on the fact that nobody, even Biden’s former boss Barack Obama and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (whom the authors call the “vampire in the bullpen”) thought he had a chance and were, apparently, not afraid to say so. It sounds like the typical campaign book gossip, which is fine as far as it goes, but the truth is that in 2019 I don’t think anyone but Biden’s family and team thought he was the strongest candidate to beat Donald Trump.

It was assumed that the 2020 campaign would be a bare-knuckled brawl and that the Democrats should put up someone who would relish going toe-to-toe with Trump. It was going to be a very big show and Biden’s old school political style didn’t have the razzle-dazzle most people thought would be necessary to compete with The Trump Show. But, as we know, everything changed in the first months of 2020 and the world suddenly got very serious. I don’t know if the Democratic electorate had some sort of collective instinct or it was, as the title of the book implies, just a matter of luck, but in that moment of great fear and anxiety, Joe Biden, with his years of experience and what felt like calm, compassionate wisdom, rose to the top of the field and eventual victory.

That weird political moment provided an opening for a leader with empathy, the word that’s so often referenced in relation to coverage of Biden that it’s become like his middle name. But I wouldn’t call it lucky.

With the country reeling from five years of a bizarre political circus topped off by over half a million dead and an economic catastrophe for tens of millions, good presidential leadership requires equal measures of humanity and competence. And while I think most people had confidence in Biden’s ability to handle the first, the second was harder to predict. So far, it’s looking pretty positive on that front as well.

Because Trump couldn’t bear to admit he’d lost and insisted on contesting the election, Biden didn’t have a normal transition. And the congressional Republicans’ outrageously undemocratic behavior during the post-election and insurrection did not bode well for any kind of productive cooperation between the two parties. Nonetheless, Biden confidently proposed the American Rescue Plan and invited Republicans to the table to offer their ideas. When they showed they had no intention of negotiating in good faith, he accepted that and gave the green light for the Democrats to move the bill as quickly as possible. We are, after all, in the middle of a crisis. Biden signed the bill on Thursday and as Salon’s Jon Skolkik reports, it is very popular.

Biden gave his first primetime address to the nation after signing the bill to note the one year anniversary of the pandemic and announce some new goals for his administration, namely that vaccines would be available to every American by May 1st and, if all goes well, we should be able to gather together with some degree of confidence and safety by July 4th, Independence Day.

The White House also announced that checks will start going out to people this weekend. It’s been an impressive, productive, 50 days.

Last week Bloomberg reported that Biden has quickly reshaped the presidency in his own image as a contrast to his predecessor. And polling shows that the public approves of what they are seeing — a return to a traditional presidency. But that anti-Trump style doesn’t mean that Biden simply plans to undo all of Trump’s policies so he can restore the Obama legacy. As Bloomberg’s Jennifer Epstein puts it, Biden’s so far “unobtrusive presidency masks his desire to dramatically reshape the country.” While we don’t know how possible it’s going to be, that appears to be true, and I don’t think that’s something most of us expected of him. He just doesn’t seem like a transformative guy. And maybe that’s his secret weapon.

The truth, however, is that we are in a period that would offer this opportunity to any leader who has the guts to pursue it. Republican “small government” ideology is moribund and they have cast their lot with demagoguery and manipulation of the voting system to fill the void. More importantly, many of the economic assumptions that undergirded that ideology have proven to be useless at best and destructive at worst, particularly in a crisis. Zachary D. Carter, the author of “The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes” wrote in the New York Times this week that the only reason the US economy didn’t completely collapse this past year is because the government rediscovered Keynes’ fundamentals:

An economic crisis demands a confluence of coordination, expertise and judgment that governments alone can provide. If the government gets out of the way, everything falls apart. And when the government gets out of the way for decades, it can transform a manageable emergency into a national calamity.

Trump was worried that an economic crisis would destroy his re-election prospects and because the stock market was crashing and their donors were panicking, the Republicans did the right thing for a change, despite their self-interested motives, and the first couple of rounds of coronavirus relief passed with bipartisan support. They staved off disaster using traditional Keynesian principles and the Biden administration has taken the necessary next steps with the American Rescue Plan to restore the economy as we emerge from the crisis.

But it’s the latter part of Carter’s comment about the government getting out of the way for decades that pertains to this big Biden agenda. He points out that while the worst of the possible economic disaster was headed off by government action, the overwhelming disaster of Trump’s response to the public health crisis was driven by decades of government neglect, largely due to the dominance of right-wing laissez-faire economics:

The trouble was not spending too much ahead of the crisis, but spending too little — on research, infrastructure and manufacturing capacity…[T]here is more to Keynes than deficits: He was, above all, a thinker for an age of crisis. No one could predict the future, but maintaining state-of-the-art information, transportation and medical infrastructure through sustained public investment could prevent a problem from becoming a calamity.

President Biden has a big agenda that includes working toward equity in race relations, repairing America’s relationship with its allies, immigration reform, etc. His role as consoler-in-chief is obviously a priority for him and the country. But his clunky campaign slogan “Build Back Better” seems to be what animates him on a policy level.

If this president who was elected as a return to traditional politics follows that part of the Keynesian model he could end up being the most transformative president since FDR. If that happens, the lucky ones will be our kids and grandkids.

Salon

One long year

Published by digby on March 12, 2021

One year later:

One year ago Thursday, the scale of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States became obvious. Within hours, the NBA canceled its season, new restrictions aimed at containing the virus popped up in various places and actor Tom Hanks announced that he had contracted the virus while filming in Australia.

The country only had a few hundred known cases at the time, but that was misleading. With limited testing, it was spreading widely and quickly without detection. By the end of March, hundreds of people were dying of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, each day.

It isn’t yet known exactly how many people died of the disease during the past 12 months, nor will we probably have a precise count. We do know, though, that 2020 was almost certainly the deadliest year in modern American history if not American history broadly. The Associated Press reported in December that the toll would probably top 3.2 million — the first time on record that the number of Americans to die in a calendar year has exceeded 3 million.

The only other year so obviously anomalous in the past century was 1918, a year in which there was an influenza pandemic.

That total is misleading, given that there are far more people living in the United States now than there were a century ago. A death toll of 3.2 million would be just under 1 percent of the country’s population — lower than the death rate for much of the early part of the 20th century but higher than at any point since the late 1960s.

Again, not all of these deaths were from covid-19. The current estimate of the number of deaths from covid-19 (an estimate which, again, is almost certainly too low) is that about 529,000 people have died of the disease. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, however, indicate the country saw at least 600,000 excess deaths from the beginning of March last year through the middle of February, a calculation that doesn’t include every death from the past several weeks.

While many of those excess deaths occurred at the outset of the pandemic in the hard-hit states of New York and New Jersey, state-level data show nearly every state saw significant increases in deaths during the past 12 months relative to the number of deaths officials would have expected given past trends.

On average, states saw totals above the excess-death threshold in two-thirds of the weeks since the beginning of March 2020. The highest percentage was in Illinois, where deaths exceeded that threshold in 49 of the past 52 weeks for which there are data. It’s followed by Maryland, where the threshold was exceeded in 48 weeks. The state that fared the best was Hawaii, where deaths were above that threshold in only six weeks.

One year ago, figures like these would have seemed unlikely if not impossible. The idea that half a million people might die of a disease over the next 12 months was near-inconceivable, more than twice the upper limit of the 100,000-to-240,000 range offered by the administration of Donald Trump last spring.

Now, though, the magnitude of the toll has become almost unremarkable.

Sean Hannity says Biden should call Trump and thank him for the vaccines.

Sure. Maybe when Trump apologizes to the country for killing half a million Americans.

It’s relief. Why won’t the press say so?

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 12, 2021

The federal checks coming to you soon are disaster relief, not economic stimulus. That may seem like a fine point, but what we call the checks matters. It expresses our values.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday called them “relief payments.” But almost everywhere one looks in the national press her comments are characterized as being about “stimulus checks.” So far, I cannot find White House or Democratic congressional leaders calling them that. Good. They are not stimulus. That word appears nowhere in the 628 pages of the ‘‘American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.”

The checks are disaster relief, “direct rescue checks,” President Biden called them in his national address Thursday night. Nowhere in his speech did he use the word stimulus.

In paraphrasing quotes, however, the national press uses stimulus checks almost exclusively even when no one quoted used the phrase. I’m making a tinfoil hat. 

Biden says people will start getting stimulus checks this month as soon as House passes Covid relief bill (Biden never called them stimulus checks.)

Psaki says Americans can start seeing stimulus money in their bank accounts ‘as soon as this weekend’ (Psaki called them relief payments.)

Here’s when the IRS will start sending out $1,400 stimulus checks

Biden limits eligibility for stimulus payments under pressure from moderate Senate Democrats

Biden administration set to issue $1,400 stimulus payments

Third Stimulus Check: When Are the $1,400 Payments Coming and Who Is Eligible?

A third round of stimulus checks, part of the Biden administration’s “American Rescue Plan,” has been signed into law.

In fact, it is rare to find them called relief checks:

First round of $1,400 COVID-19 relief checks to start hitting bank accounts this weekend, White House says

Message discipline seems decent for a change among Democrats, as exemplified by House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) in speaking about the $1.9 trillion bill in February. Rescue now, stimulus later:

“That’s enough to rescue this economy [for now]. We’re going to have to stimulate the economy later on,” said Clyburn.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said weeks later:

“I don’t understand the political or economic wisdom in allowing Trump to give more people relief checks than a Democratic administration,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. “People went far too long without relief last year — if anything we should be more generous, not more stingy.”

But the media are conditioned to view policies through the eyes of the economy rather than human ones. When people frame these checks as stimulus, they are showing everyone what they really value.

Point out to them their unconscious bias that puts saving the economy above saving people. The message is as pervasive as it is insidious. Money has a damned good agent. 

Light at the end

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 12, 2021

The light at the end of the pandemic tunnel was visible even before President Biden’s national address Thursday night. It was visible before he signed into law the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act that afternoon. But in announcing his goal that by July 4th the pandemic would be controlled enough to have holiday gatherings again, the light grew bright enough to plant victory gardens.

Biden will order states to ensure by May 1 that all adults are eligible for a coronavirus vaccine, although many may not be able to get one just then. He had previously pledged that sufficient vaccines would be available by the end of May. On Wednesday he announced plans to purchase an additional 100 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. This is, Biden said, “a national effort, just like we saw during World War II.”

Axios reported on Thursday:

  • The U.S. is administering over 2 million shots per day, on average. Roughly 25% of the adult population has gotten at least one shot.
  • The federal government has purchased more doses than this country will be able to use: 300 million from Pfizer, 300 million from Moderna and 200 million from Johnson & Johnson.
  • The Pfizer and Moderna orders alone would be more than enough to fully vaccinate every American adult. (The vaccines aren’t yet authorized for use in children.)

The pandemic threat and the scope of its economic fallout is not unlike the situation FDR faced upon entering office, one that “may not dwarf but eclipse what FDR faced,” Biden said last spring.

Indeed, Biden’s address Thursday at times possessed the tone of an FDR fireside chat. It was as personal as presidential. Occasionally he leaned in, not as Bill Clinton would in a power move, but to convey intimacy. He appealed to Americans to do their part, “to get vaccinated when it’s your turn and when you can find an opportunity, and to help your family and friends and neighbors get vaccinated as well.” Do that, Biden said, and by July 4th “there’s a good chance you, your families, and friends will be able to get together in your backyard or in your neighborhood and have a cookout and a barbeque and celebrate Independence Day.”

To reach that goal, Biden appealed for national unity not just in spirit but in action. Get vaccinated. Keep washing hands and staying socially distanced. And “keep wearing the masks as recommended by the CDC.”

Biden referenced the nation’s last year of suffering and loss in a way Americans had not heard from his predecessor:

We’ve lost so much over the last year.

We’ve lost family and friends.

We’ve lost businesses and dreams we spent years building.

We’ve lost time — time with each other.

And our children have lost so much time with their friends, time with their schools. No graduation ceremonies this — this spring. No graduations from college, high school, moving-up ceremonies.

You know, and there’s something else we lost.

We lost faith in whether our government and our democracy can deliver on really hard things for the American people.

But as I stand here tonight, we’re proving once again something I have said time and time again until they’re probably tired of hearing me say it. I say it foreign leaders and domestic alike: It’s never, ever a good bet to bet against the American people. America is coming back.

Back to contact with reality as well, as Josh Marshall observed in citing the New York Times.

The Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler, dinged Biden for saying there are already more Americans dead from the virus that died in “World War I, World War II, Vietnam War and 9/11 combined.” Not all deaths. If Biden meant combat deaths, okay, but he should say so, Kessler writes.

“I set a goal that many of you said was kind of way over the top,” Biden said. Kessler called Biden “the master of underpromising and then overdelivering” but could find no polling to back up the “way over the top” claim. “Most news accounts depicted Biden’s goal as potentially difficult, but not impossible,” Kessler added. Seriously. Perhaps instead Biden should have used Donald Trump’s patented “A lot of people are saying . . . ”

No Pinocchios awarded last night. A lot of people are saying that until we can have dinners out again that foretaste of normal returning makes their jaws loosen for the first time in years.

Graves To Kennedy: Nix The Hick Shtick @spockosbrain

Published by Spocko on March 11, 2021

On Wednesday’s Senate hearing on dark money’s influence on the Judiciary, Oxford-educated attorney Sen. John Kennedy played his, “I’m just a Southern hick” character.
He pushed the idea that if the dark money isn’t a bribe, it’s okay.

Lisa Graves schooled him. He cut her off.

Sen. Kennedy knows that millions in dark money don’t go out to people in brown paper bags of cash. But pretending that’s the only way the judicial system is influenced is part of his corn porn act. (Or is it corn pone? I don’t know, I didn’t graduate from Oxford with first class honours. I’m just a simple Vulcan from the 23rd Century)

I watched the whole Senate hearing, March 10, 2021.
What’s Wrong with the Supreme Court: The Big-Money Assault on Our Judiciary

Lisa provided a through brief with details that Sen Whitehouse praised.
The right pushed a false equivalency narrative, whined that the dark money on the left is bigger and pretended that the only way to influence people is with huge bags of cash.

The “both sides use massive amounts of dark money to influence the Judiciary” line of BS came from Cruz, Tillis, and Lee. (I would include clips of Cruz, but he makes my skin crawl.)

Finally, at the end of the session Senator Blumenthal asked Graves a question that let her point out just how big Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society’s influence was/is on the judicial system.

I’m glad there was a hearing. I learned a lot, just from Graves’ opening remarks, which I annotated here.

Sen. Whitehouse pointed out that this is the first hearing of its kind. I want to see more and I want more than just a show. I want to see action.

Lisa Graves addressed this in her response to the demand by Ted “My longtime friend Leonard Leo” Cruz that groups on the left instantly disclose donors, without doing the same for groups on the right.

But what matters is that if we had this disclosure, we would all know definitively the answer to those questions. And as Senator Hirono said, quite frankly, the only members of Congress who are supporting this kind of disclosure in HR 1 in the DISCLOSE Act in the travel bill that you propose are Democrats.

And that’s a shame because quite frankly, this should not be a partisan issue. Everyone should be in favor of this kind of transparency and the effort to try to command that a particular group, like a People for the American Way, instantly disclose their donors when there’s not the same parity, is sort of a way to have a show, but not to actually do anything to embrace and support laws that would level the playing field for everyone.

All the World’s a Zoom Meeting, How Do I UnMute?
One of the things that the late Joel Silberman and I talked about was understanding the theater that is part of these events. The means if you are doing the questioning or testifying, you should be prepared with your own narrative, and look for opportunities to shoot down their narratives. The right will use false equivalencies, bad faith arguments and unsupported data all the time. I’ve seen them use so many of the same attacks they can be anticipated, scripted and turned into a clip that I know will be picked up by MSNBC or the late night comedy shows.

But that involves thinking beyond the liberal misconception that “If we just present the facts, people will agree with us!” Make sure your facts are compelling! Don’t let them box you into their bogus frame of “both sides do it” which the press feel compelled to use no matter how ONLY ONE SIDED it is.

Messaging on an issue is about more than putting out your message, it’s also about figuring out how to dismantle theirs at every opportunity.

*Full Disclosure: Lisa is a friend of mine and I’ve worked with her before. I’m not backed by George Soros, but I would happily disclose that if I was.

The press conference saga

Published by digby on March 11, 2021

The media is having a meltdown over the fact that Joe Biden hasn’t held a formal press conference since he became president. It’s just a stupid reflex they constantly turn to when they don’t have anything else to complain about. They bitched about Hillary Clinton failing to do it during her campaign and gave Biden grif for failing to be at their beck and call in 2020.

Here’s a reminder of the one formal press conference Donald Trump gave in his first year in office:

It was an exhausting 77-minute extravaganza, and any five-minute segment would have been enough to make front-page headlines around the world.

For the president of the United States, the simple act of sneezing can be newsworthy. When the president goes on a freeform monologue, occasionally interrupted by questions, that is almost the length of a motion picture, as Donald Trump did on Thursday, the news can be overwhelming. The entirety represents a deluge that is difficult to process.

The result was a spectacle that was sheer entertainment if not terribly presidential. It was more comedian Henny Youngman than President William Henry Harrison as Trump needled reporters and engaged in a brand of insult comedy that was familiar from the campaign trail. At times, reporters couldn’t help but laugh at the president’s jabs despite their best instincts, simply because Trump’s comments were just that wacky and bizarre.

At times, the interactions with reporters went beyond combative into a Twilight Zone. Trump told an Orthodox Jewish reporter who asked him about an upsurge in antisemitic incidents that he had asked “a very insulting question”. He later suggested to an African American reporter who had asked about whether Trump had consulted with the Congressional Black Caucus about his plan for inner cities that she should organize the meeting. “Tell you what, do you want to set up the meeting? Do you want to set up the meeting? Are they friends of yours?” the president asked the reporter about an influential bloc of lawmakers.

Trump suggested that “drugs are becoming cheaper than candy bars”; insisted he only claimed falsely at the beginning of the press conference that he had won “the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan” (in fact George HW Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all won more electoral college votes) because he “was given bad information”; and opined in detail on CNN’s programming and ratings in its 10pm hour.

Biden will have a press conference soon, I have no doubt. And it will not be anything like that which will disappoint the press corps. They are jonesing for some Trump right now.

They aren’t going to get it.