Month: March 2021

They passed the COVID Relief bill today. Thank Goodness. It means we may get out of this hellish spiral after all. I’ll just let this guy explain:

To the progressive movement, it is because of your support that we just passed the most significant legislation for working people in decades. Let’s talk about just a few of the policies in it. pic.twitter.com/6q0VFlp2oc

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 9, 2021

That’s absolutely true and progressives should take a bow. It tooks years to develop the political power to have this level of influence and this is the result.

As for the politics, well ,who knows? Contrarianism always guarantees discussion so it’s not surprising that there would be some regarding this bill. Here, Jonathan Chait discusses why their predictions of doom are unlikely in this case:

Try to imagine we are living in the following hypothetical world: A popular Republican president quickly passes emergency legislation that has the support of two-thirds of the country, while Democrats in Congress refuse to vote for it. This causes pundits to wonder if the Republican president is making a political blunder.

Current reality, of course, is this scenario, but with the parties reversed. The American Rescue Plan is racing toward passage with remarkably little controversy. And yet longtime Washington conventional-wisdom maven Charlie Cook suggests, “When the histories of the Biden presidency are written, there’s a fair chance that this will be looked upon as a serious error of judgement — one that may plague this administration for a good while.” Meanwhile, Politico’s Sam Stein argues “history suggests there may be limited political reward for it.”

Cook’s argument is that Biden “may have … crippled his ability to do grand bargains” by passing a bill without Republican votes. Cook’s argument presupposes, without making any effort to demonstrate, (1) that it would have been possible for Biden to win Republican support for major legislation, but (2) Republicans will refuse to do so because they are angry that he passed a Democratic bill first.

Even if we assume both these things are true, it would seem to make a better indictment of Senate Republicans than of Biden. After all, according to Charlie Cook, there are at least ten Senate Republicans who will now refuse to support a “grand bargain” to do something important for the country (Cook doesn’t specify) out of peevish spite. Democrats had lots of reasons to be angry with Donald Trump in 2020 — the fact that Trump tried to pass two Republican-only bills didn’t even make the list of grievances — yet they overwhelmingly worked with him to pass economic-relief legislation.

I personally think that, if Senate Republicans find an issue where they see it in their interest to cooperate with Biden, his passing a relief bill won’t dissuade them. But Cook seems to believe even the handful of the most mainstream and established Republican senators are so petulant they must be handled like small children.

Stein’s argument leans on the precedent from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Obama administration’s $787 billion stimulus. Citing studies of that 2009 bill, Stein argues the positive effect of supporting Biden’s bill will be “overwhelmed by the massive tides of party polarization,” and that voters who got checks are “likely to be forgetful” when they vote.

This analogy elides two important differences between Obama’s stimulus and Biden’s. First, Obama’s bill was the subject of intense, frequently apocalyptic opposition from Republicans, who relentlessly tagged it a “bailout,” successfully conflating it with the TARP measure passed at the end of George W. Bush’s term. The Rescue Plan has attracted shockingly little opposition. Fox News, the party’s quasi-official messaging operation, has devoted more attention to Dr. Seuss.

Second, Obama’s bill was shaped by a requirement to win 60 Senate votes, forcing him to pare back its size. Because of this pressure, Obama’s bill, considered staggeringly expensive at the time, was still too small to fill in the enormous economic hole that was opening up (a hole that turned out to be much larger than economists believed at the time). They acted quickly at the outset of the crisis, and its worst effects were avoided. But because they acted so quickly, those effects also happened after they acted. This meant that Democrats passed an economic-relief measure only for the economy to deteriorate afterward.

The 2021 Democrats have learned their lesson, writing Biden’s bill through budget-reconciliation rules that allow it to pass with 50 votes. A bill written by the 50 most liberal senators is obviously going to be to the left of a bill written by the 60 most liberal senators. One important ramification is that they can aim to restore full employment much more quickly.

So far every indication of public opinion is positive. Biden’s plan has not only won his party, but pulled over a large chunk of the opposition. A majority of lower-income Republicans support the measure

After four years in which observers marveled at Donald Trump’s appeal to working-class voters, it seems noteworthy that Biden has pulled them over to his side in such heavy numbers.

Of course none of this will matter by November 2022 if the economy hasn’t recovered. But here is the main point, one overlooked by the skeptics: It’s the economic effect of the bill that will matter, not the immediate response to its passage. And economists overwhelmingly predict that effect will be positive. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal have increased their 2021 growth forecasts by a full point, to 5.95 percent. They believe inflation will rise slightly above the Federal Reserve’s target level this year, before settling back down in the following years. They are calculating that quickly restoring full employment will bring rapid wage gains to working-class Americans and produce a wide array of spill-off social benefits.

It’s entirely possible they’re wrong. If the economy overheats, and the Fed winds up curtailing growth to prevent an inflationary spiral, Democrats will be punished at the polls. But if the bill works as forecast, they will reap the political benefit of prosperity. Republicans might find themselves in the position of having to explain why they opposed a popular bill that led to a fast recovery. This might even make some of them eager to work with Biden on another bill.

The Republican decision to vote against Biden in unison, without building much of a case against his bill, seems like the worst of all possible worlds. They are setting themselves against a bill that enjoys sky-high levels of support from both economic experts and a large chunk of their own base. It’s possible this gambit somehow works out. But if anybody regrets their political choices in the early weeks of the administration, the odds are it won’t be Biden.

I think that’s true. It’s always possible that the country will be in much better shape in two years and the Republicans can leverage their culture war nonsense to bring them back into power. But I’m hopeful that Democrats have learned some lessons over he past couple of decades and won’t let them dominate the discussion with their BS.

Susan Collins is upset that anyone would suggest that she might have been responsible for playing hard-to-get and watering down Democratic legislation for no good reason:

Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, fired back at Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer after he pointedly said it was a “big mistake” to shrink the 2009 economic stimulus package in order to win her vote.

“I thought that Leader Schumer’s comments were bizarre,” Collins told NBC News on Wednesday, noting that she was one of three Republicans to support then-President Barack Obama’s $787 billion package to mitigate the pain of the financial crisis.

“He voted for the same package that I did,” Collins said. “So, for Chuck Schumer, who was intimately involved in the negotiations as the assistant leader, to somehow criticize me for taking the same position that he did, is simply bizarre. And I think it reflects regrettably his inability to accept the fact that despite pouring $100 million into defeating me, the people of Maine said no.”

Her remarks came after Schumer, a New York Democrat, was asked Tuesday evening on CNN whether he could have done more to win Republican votes like Collins’ on President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill that passed the Senate on a party-line vote.

“No,” Schumer responded. “We made a big mistake in 2009 and ’10. Susan Collins was part of that mistake. We cut back on the stimulus dramatically and we stayed in recession for five years. What was offered by the Republicans was so far away from what’s needed, so far away from what Biden proposed that he thought that they were not being serious and wanting to really negotiate.”

The recession officially ended in June 2009, but economists widely agree it was a slow recovery.

She’s getting worse. Of course Schumer voted for the bill. He had no choice! It was the bill that was on the table and the country was in an emergency. But the fact that they whittled it down to please Collins and her coterie of handwringing GOP “moderates” is indisputable. And they did it in the name of “bipartisanship” when they had a big majority! That is how it went down. And she knows it.

That’s how it used to work and Collins is just bitter that she isn’t the deciding vote on everything the Democratic majority wants to do anymore. It seems they have learned their lesson. Maybe.

Back in the 1970s and 80s, a group of young Republican campaign operatives and consultants, including familiar names from today like Karl Rove and Roger Stone, took up the baton that was dropped when Richard Nixon’s crooked men all went to jail. One of them was a canny strategist from South Carolina named Lee Atwater, who became powerful and famous first working for hardcore racists in his home state, then joining the Reagan revolution and finally becoming campaign manager for George H. W. Bush in 1998. Atwater gave an infamous interview in 1991 in which he explained how conservatives had been able to win for years by simply screaming racial epithets, only for the strategy to backfire as the country evolved:

So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than [the “N” word.]

Such dog whistles, phrases that only racists understand as racist, are repeated over and over again by the right-wing media and Republican politicians until the subliminal meaning becomes so reflexive that GOP voters can’t articulate why terms like “tax and spend” evoke such an emotional response in them.

Consider the violent reaction against Obamacare, a health care program designed to benefit people of all races who weren’t covered by employer insurance or some other program like the VA. Republicans lost their minds over it and they were never really able to explain why except for some vague notion of a government takeover of everyone’s health care despite the fact that the program was backed by the insurance and hospital industries. Republicans just rejected the reforms rooted in right-wing ideas initially pushed by the Heritage Foundation and Mitt Romney automatically and it’s clear their fury was even more fueled by the fact that such a program had been championed by the first Black president. Obamacare pushed every button the Republican strategists had built into their narrative for the previous 40 years.

So by the time Donald Trump finally committed to running for president as a Republican, he didn’t have to care about or be inconvenienced by even the slightest of subtleties such as a dog whistle. He just spewed blatantly racist rhetoric all over the place and it turned out that it was exactly what those Republican voters had been yearning for.

Back in 2016, I wrote a piece for Salon called “Nothing Left But The Dog Whistle” when it became clear that all the right-wing intellectuals’ worship of Ayn Rand and paeans to free markets had no substantive meaning in themselves to their base voters. They wanted their red meat plain and sizzling and they loved that someone was finally feeding it to them. Five years later, Trump has been defeated, the country is reeling from the wreckage he left behind with the Democrats back in charge trying to clean up the mess. To the extent the GOP establishment cares at all about their former small government, laissez-faire ideology, they seem content to make a few passing comments about “liberal wish lists,” vote against everything and then go back to delivering shrill diatribes about cancel culture to entertain the faithful on Fox News. And as a Media Matters analysis found, the right-wing media’s coverage of the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill expected to pass in the House of Representatives on Wednesday has been lackluster as well. Fox News and company are all much more concerned with the culture war battle of the day.

And whither the venerable conservative economic institutions like the Chamber of Commerce and the Club for Growth? The Chamber endorsed the COVID bill. The fact that GOP officials didn’t even blink tells you everything you need to know. The Club for Growth lobbied GOP senators to vote against President Trump’s first COVID relief bill last March and were similarly ignored. They haven’t been heard from since.

This would have been unimaginable a decade ago. In fact, we don’t have to imagine it. In 2009, they went into hysterics over President Obama’s stimulus package that was half the size of this one.

I suspect the Republicans are betting, as many of the experts have predicted, that the economy is going to rebound sharply once the pandemic is under control and they may be looking at a very robust recovery going into the midterms anyway. Trying to run against that is unlikely to be very popular even with their own voters. So culture war is probably all they’ve got anyway.

CNN’s Ron Brownstein took a look at some recent polling of Republican voters and the results lay out a roadmap for their strategy. He found that in one recent survey of GOP voters, “anxiety about America’s changing identity in an era of growing racial and religious diversity has emerged as the core unifying principle of the GOP coalition” with immigration, lack of support for the police (read: Black Lives Matter), liberal media and moral decline as their top issues. A poll in January showed that “roughly 9 in 10 Trump voters agreed with a series of stark propositions: that America is losing faith in the ideas that make the country great, that Christianity is under attack in the US and that discrimination against Whites ‘will increase a lot’ in years ahead.” Virtually all of these people are convinced that there is no discrimination in America against well, anyone except them.

Citing some interesting research in the journal Political Behavior about the role of victimization in American politics, Parker Molloy at Media Matters reports that it was central to both Donald Trump’s success as well as a necessary component of right-wing media’s hold on its audience. She writes:

The authors found that people who engaged in egocentric victimhood (“I am the victim because I deserve more than I get”) were more likely to support Trump during his 2016 campaign, while people who engaged in systemic victimhood (“I am the victim because the system is rigged against me”) were less likely to vote for Trump.

This is what’s driving the GOP’s current assault on voting rights and their mind-numbing obsession with “cancel culture.” The racist genie is out of the bottle and after four years of Donald Trump giving voice to all their cultural resentment and anxieties it can’t be pushed back in. The Republican establishment has simply lost whatever will they might have had to resist. They have obviously decided that their only chance to stay in power is to join the club.

Salon

I keep hearing that Florida, with its indifferent approach to the virus is doing much better than California which has imposed stricter lockdowns.

Bullshit;

From the earliest days of the pandemic, California and Florida took significantly different courses that came to symbolize the deep divisions across America in how to respond to COVID-19.

California imposed myriad restrictions that battered the economy and have left most public school students learning at home for a year. Florida adopted a more laissez-faire approach decried by public health experts — allowing indoor restaurant dining, leaving masks optional and getting children back in classrooms sooner.

For much of the last year, it seemed that California’s response under Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom had led to a dramatically lower COVID-19 death rate. Florida had a cumulative rate as much as 84% higher than California’s last fall. But the winter surge slammed California, and that gap narrowed to 11%.

Now, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is garnering praise in some conservative circles while Newsom is facing a potential recall over his handling of COVID-19. A recent Wall Street Journal opinion article called the numerical comparison between the two states DeSantis’ “vindication.”

But experts say turning the complex evaluation of the pandemic into a blue-versus-red political showdown is unwise and deceptive, as each state had its own unique vulnerabilities and assets.

The shrinking difference in the death rates is likely the product of California’s higher levels of poverty, density, overcrowding and climate that make it particularly susceptible to coronavirus spread, experts say.

“The comparison of California and Florida is not fair,” said Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. “California is a much harder situation than what Florida has to deal with.”

And still, California better controlled the virus. If California had Florida’s death rate, roughly 6,000 more Californians would be dead from COVID-19 and tens of thousands of additional patients likely would have landed in already overburdened hospitals. And if Florida had California’s death rate, roughly 3,000 fewer Floridians would be dead from COVID-19.

That’s “a lot of people whose lives got wrecked, and a lot of people who aren’t with us anymore,” Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said. It “absolutely is worth it to do everything you can to slow the spread of a deadly virus that wreaks havoc on people’s lives and really almost took down L.A. County’s hospital care system.”

Regardless, the comparison of Florida and California has caught the eye of some public health experts. They are confident that mask wearing and staying home reduce the spread of the coronavirus, but acknowledge that California’s strict rules became less effective as exhaustion set in by late 2020.

“If I had to do it again, I’d still do it the way California did it. But I do think you do have to come away with some humility,” said Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of UC San Francisco’s Department of Medicine. “One might’ve expected that the Floridas of the world would’ve done tremendously worse than the Californias of the world, and they did worse, but modestly worse, and there’s something to be learned there.”

Comparing apples to oranges

When it comes to California and Florida, it isn’t an even playing field.

About 55% of California residents live in counties with a high “social vulnerability” score — a measure of how severely a disease outbreak might affect a region — while only a quarter of Floridians do. California’s rate of overcrowding in homes, a metric linked to coronavirus spread, is also more than double Florida’s.

“In many places we have much greater vulnerability than Florida, so it’s comparing apples and oranges,” L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti said.

The dry air in California may also be a challenge, especially compared with humid Florida. Researchers are still learning about how climate affects the coronavirus, but some studies suggest that when the air is humid, virus droplets fall to the ground faster so that people are less likely to become infected.

California also has a longer flu and pneumonia season, a pattern that the coronavirus tends to follow, Mokdad said. And in the fall, there may have been an extra-contagious strain of the virus circulating locally that further complicated matters.

Because of the many ways California is more susceptible to coronavirus spread, replicating Florida’s relaxed approach may have had devastating consequences here. Arizona, which has lax restrictions similar to Florida’s, has the nation’s fifth-highest COVID-19 death rate. An additional 38,000 Californians would be dead if the state’s per capita deaths matched Arizona’s.

“If California had behaved like Florida, where mask use and physical distancing was not being practiced as thoroughly, our cumulative death rate would have been higher than Florida,” UCLA medical epidemiologist Dr. Robert Kim-Farley said.

“And conversely, had Florida been practicing California’s more rigorous attention to masking and physical distancing, curtailing indoor dining, et cetera, it would have followed a death rate trajectory that would have been the same or lower than California … because their vulnerability index was lower.”

Wildly different approaches to COVID-19

On Friday, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a study of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties that found that mask mandates were linked to a significant reduction in coronavirus deaths. Counties that allowed restaurant dining generally noted an increase in COVID-19 deaths within three months, the study found.

The findings have been echoed elsewhere.

A recent analysis by the American Enterprise Institute showed that since July 1, a turning point in the pandemic due to improvements in the treatment of disease, states with the highest death rates all had loose COVID-19 restrictions: South Dakota, Arizona, Mississippi and Alabama. Florida ranked 19th and California 25th.

“The states that didn’t implement as stringent measures, they did pay a price for it. And I don’t think that you can explain that away,” said Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a resident fellow at the institute and a former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the Trump administration, on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

But not all states’ death rates align perfectly with their policies. Arizona and Florida both had lax rules, but Arizona’s death rate was far worse. And Hawaii and Vermont, whose rules are similar to California’s, have the two lowest death rates in the nation.

“How do we explain that?” asked Neeraj Sood, vice dean for research at the USC Price School of Public Policy. “It is perplexing.”

Sood said other factors, such as demographics, cross-immunity to the virus or climate may be just as, if not more, important than policy in determining states’ outcomes, though he is continuing to study the trends. He added that weak enforcement of COVID-19 rules may also make policies less effective than one would anticipate.

For example, under California’s patchwork of rules, “you can still go to the grocery store, hang out there. We can go to some malls but not others, get a haircut. It’s just kind of arbitrary and there’s no enforcement,” Sood said. “Ultimately, this is a very contagious respiratory virus, and if you have that amount of activity, people are going to get infected.”

Even within California, L.A. and the Bay Area counties have largely maintained generally similar policies throughout the pandemic, yet the Bay Area’s death rate is one-third that of L.A. County’s. This is likely due to L.A.’s huge number of essential workers, extreme levels of overcrowding and population less receptive to restrictions, experts say.

If L.A. County’s deaths are subtracted out of California’s total, Florida’s death rate would measure 39% higher than the state’s. It is L.A.’s vulnerabilities that drove California’s surges and pushed its total death rates so close to Florida’s.

There are a few possible reasons for Florida’s relatively lower death rates despite its lax policies. The warm weather allowed people to congregate outdoors year-round, a low-risk activity that was banned in many parts of California for months — a decision that may have backfired here, Florida epidemiologist Cindy Prins said.

“Are we creating a situation,” Prins said, “where people are just like, ‘Forget it. I’m going to have people over to my house?’”

Prins also said that Florida’s older population may have, perhaps counterintuitively, prevented the virus from spreading as quickly as it did in California. Worldwide, young adults who socialize and mingle, either at work or in social settings, tend to spread the virus the most while older people are more cautious and stay home. Florida’s population is the fifth-oldest nationwide.

Weighing the cost of saving oives

In a recent public address, DeSantis noted that state revenue in the winter far exceeded projections and that public schools have been open since August. He boasted of the state’s COVID-19 death rate that is 25th highest in the nation (California is 29th).

“We don’t want people to have to be isolated in their homes being scared. We want you to be able to have confidence to go out, see your friends and family,” he said. “You see a lot of these other states that are so intent on closing people down. We’ve lifted people up. We’ve trusted Floridians. They’ve responded.”

Since February 2020, 1.63 million jobs have been lost in California and its unemployment rate has more than doubled to 9.3%, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Florida’s unemployment rate increased less, from 3.3% to 5.1%.

But California’s state budget outlook is surprisingly robust. While unemployment rose sharply through much of 2020, millions of middle-class and high-wage workers were able to keep their jobs and work from home. Tax collections also rose after a strong stock market boosted capital gains earned by the state’s wealthiest taxpayers.

While California is forecasting a state budget windfall, Florida is grappling with a state budget shortfall.

Newsom has often defended his approach as one focused on saving lives and professed confidence that the economy would recover strongly after widespread vaccinations. The UCLA Anderson Forecast expects a post-pandemic California will enjoy a pace of economic growth faster than the nation as a whole.

It’s been economic hell all over this country. But we’ve also lost 525,000 people and I’m just not interested in hearing how people are having a good time in Florida and that’s worth some preventable deaths. In fact, it makes me sick.

Nicole Wallace distills Trumpism to its addictive essence:

Playing the clip of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) from an Axios interview over the weekend, MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace said that “listening to him talk about harnessing the magic is like listening to a drug addict talk about taking the good parts out of cocaine.” Graham told Axios that he wants to try and find the good parts of Trumpism and lift those up and keep the “dark side” away.

Even at the risk of bringing his party down on his head. And our republic down on ours.

Graham described former President Donald Trump as a cross between Jesse Helms, Ronald Reagan and P.T. Barnum.

“It’s just this bigger than life deal,” Graham said of Trump. “He could make the Republican Party something that nobody else I know can make it. He can make it bigger, he can make it stronger, he can make it more diverse and he also could destroy it.”

There is nothing left of Graham but Spanish moss hanging off Trump’s withered trunk. Graham was never so crude as Jesse Helms nor as folksy as Reagan, just the sucker born every minute.

President Joe Biden likes to say, “Here’s the deal.” He says it a lot. Here’s something else he and others are saying a lot.

Politico: President Joe Biden spent the first months of his presidency hunkered down as he worked on getting more vaccines into people’s arms ….

USA Today: States and counties are getting better at the nitty-gritty of what’s required to get COVID-19 vaccine into arms, but …

New York Times: How Quickly Are Shots Going in Arms?

Washington Post: Taddeo called for thinking “outside the box” to get more shots in arms.

NPR: As a result, there’s often a delay between when states receive their federal shipments of vaccines and when they get all the shots into people’s arms.

Bloomberg: Since the start of the global vaccination campaign, countries have experienced unequal access to vaccines and varying degrees of efficiency in getting shots into people’s arms.

NBC News: The recently approved Covid-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson is opening up a menu of new ways to get shots into arms …

The Hill: Public health education is the best way to get COVID shots in arms

ABC News scores a hat trick:

Georgia officials have disputed the CDC data for weeks and said some health providers are slow to report when they put shots in arms.

“The supply chain is caught up. They don’t need to be doing that any more. They need to get shots in arms.”

The U.S. government needs to boost vaccine supplies if it wants New Mexico to meet a new mandate for getting at least one shot into the arms of all teachers by the end of March …

What’s the deal? I mean, why not just say shots or injections and be done with it? Why specify in arms? I’m sick of it.

If George Carlin were alive today, he would spin this annoying turn of phrase into a ten-minute comedy routine. Arms have become a bizarre, national fixation. A fetish perhaps imported from Italy. Or somewhere in Asia. Rejected feet no longer feel sexy.

See, every time I hear “shots in arms” I immediately remember a time I got a shot somewhere else entirely.

While working construction at a power plant, a worker assigned to my area contracted hepatitis. Anyone using the nearby drinking water barrel might have been exposed. So they loaded 50 sweaty construction workers onto trucks, drove us into the nearest Georgia town, and lined us up behind a small, red-brick doctor’s office for some minty fresh immune globulin. One by one, the men emerged from the back door rubbing their butts and laughing.

When it was my turn after many before me, I stepped into a small room where sat a tiny, grim-faced nurse with a syringe. She looked up and like a peeved Holly Hunter said, “I need a hip.”

Ho-kay. God knows what those men before me said to the woman.

Lately that memory is like an ear worm. Reporters and public health spokespeople insist on repeating “in arms” as though they are federally mandated to remind Americans into just what body part their Covid-19 vaccine will go.

Just drop it, okay? No, not the pants.

“There’s something about Trump, there’s a dark side, and there’s some magic there. What I’m trying to do is just harness the magic.” — Lindsey Graham

Uhm:

Black magic , or dark magic, has traditionally referred to the use of supernatural powers or magic for evil and selfish purposes. With respect to the left-hand path and right-hand path dichotomy, black magic is the malicious, left-hand counterpart of the benevolent white magic.

He’s definitely under Trump’s spell:

Donald Trump was my friend before the riot and I’m trying to keep a relationship with him after the riot. I still consider him a friend. What happened was a dark day in American history and we’re going to move forward, so here’s what you need to know about me…I want this to continue. I want us to continue the policies that I think will make America strong. I believe the best way for the Republican Party to do that is with Trump not without Trump.

There’s something about Trump, there’s a dark side, and there’s some magic there. What I’m trying to do is just harness the magic. To me, Donald Trump is sort of a cross between Jesse Helms, Ronald Reagan, and P.T. Barnum. It’s just this bigger-than-life deal. He could make the Republican Party something that nobody else I know can make it. He can make it bigger. He can make it stronger. He can make it more diverse. And he also could destroy it.

The party went completely out of power in four years under Donald Trump. He has shrunk the GOP. Graham is delusional.

Tell me again how Democrats are just as delusional as Republicans

Even in 2016 Republicans believed the election was rigged. And they won!

GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio took a look at today’s GOP viewing habits. And it explains why Fox is doubling down on Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head — they seriously have to compete with the amateur networks OAN and Newsmax:

Murdoch is at the helm and I’m not sure he really gets TV. You can definitely feel the loss of Roger Ailes. It just doesn’t have that shiny touch anymore. Instead of Fox making OAN and newmax raise their game now that people have tuned in, Fox is lowering itself to their level.

Have I mentioned that Republicans are all suffering from a mass case of arrested development? When they aren’t crying over Dr. Seuss and Mr Potato Head, they’re acting like 6th grade schoolyard bullies. Yeah…

Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity ridiculed and laughed at CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter for wearing shorts during a television hit, claiming that the sight of Stelter’s “fully exposed” thighs left them “traumatized.”

During Sunday’s broadcast of his program Reliable Sources, Stelter did a somewhat lighthearted segment on news broadcasting during the coronavirus pandemic, pointing out the “ups and downs” of TV hosts and analysts patching in from in-home studios.

At one point, the CNN host said he could “relate” to some of the “embarrassing moments” that have gone viral, sharing an image of himself wearing a suit jacket and tie but no pants while noting he only had only two minutes’ notice before airtime.

Carlson then decided to end his primetime show on Monday night by poking fun at the sight of a pantsless Stelter, using an image of a weightlifting Chris Cuomo to help set up his joke. (Carlson has regularly tweaked and derided Cuomo over his habit of posting images and videos of his workouts.)

“We told you Chris Cuomo was the only CNN anchor who likes showing off his chiseled physique. We were wrong,” the Fox News host quipped. “On Sunday, the dwarf king aired footage of himself—oh, his chief minion rather—wearing no pants!”

(“Dwarf king,” by the way, is Carlson’s favorite nickname for CNN president Jeff Zucker. Carlson has also referred to Stelter in the past as Zucker’s “house eunuch.”)

“The footage shows the little media hall monitor—calves and thighs fully exposed—when he appeared for a television report on CNN. Your move, Chris Cuomo!” Carlson added before laughing maniacally at his own segment.

Signing off, a still giggling Carlson told his fellow Fox News star: “Hannity, see what you can do with that.”

“OK, now you just traumatized me with Humpty Dumpty and I’m going to have that image seared into my memory for the rest of my life,” Hannity moaned, using his preferred monicker for Stelter.

“Did you have to ruin my life? Ohhh, that is traumatic,” the Fox host added as Carlson snickered. Hannity wrapped up the bit by dramatically waving his hands over his face as if he felt faint.

Carlson—who was accused of “fat-shaming” Stelter in 2019 after he sent him jelly doughnuts in a prank—and Hannity aren’t the only Fox personalities who have taken ad hominem potshots at the CNN host over his looks. A few months ago, Fox host Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery likened Stelter to a potato and said he was “ham-headed.”

There’s been a snotty streak on the right as long as I can remember. Bob Dole was a master of the insulting zinger. Rush Limbaugh was a very nasty piece of work and there’s no need to mention Trump the insult dog. But I don’t remember it being this juvenile before. Or this stupid. What’s going on here?