Month: March 2021

About the mask refusers:

Texas governor’s appalling decision on masksThe coffee shop where I work started to require our customers to wear masks when sitting inside and when ordering about a year ago. While the majority of our customers have been happy to comply with the rule, it’s amazing to me how many people still roll their eyes or make snide comments when we ask them to put on their masks. Though they comply with wearing a face-covering, a few wear their noses out, or pull up the collars of their shirts, or wear thin scarves or bandannas. Some customers wear masks into the store but pull them down and lean over the counter (into my face) to order their drinks.

Many of my fellow Texans have adopted a lax attitude towards safety precautions. This indifference, while troubling, is not explicitly aggressive. Generally, those with this mindset comply with our business’s rules. They hold their own beliefs while respecting the health and safety of others.

Their attitude differs from those who have been told, by politicians, the media, or the internet, that being required to wear a mask infringes on their rights and that Covid-19 has been blown out of proportion by liberal politicians and media. These are the people who come into the coffee shop with no intention of wearing a mask, despite our rule, and who verbally attack us when we tell them that they need a mask or that they need to wear it properly.

These customers bear a resemblance to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz when he refused to put on a mask at a press conference. Cruz stated, incorrectly, that he was following US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines and that having been immunized meant that he did not need to wear a mask. These justifications are simply untrue and the public animosity that Cruz showed toward the reporter who asked him nicely to put on a mask shows Texans that to be “with Cruz” means to refuse to wear a mask. The petty politicizing of a simple, affordable, and life-saving piece of cloth is putting Texans at risk and fueling public displays of hatred.Abbott’s framing of the March 10 executive order has played into the polarity incited by those who view refusing to wear a mask as a political statement. While the order protects the rights of businesses to require masks, it has been largely misunderstood and misrepresented to mean that Texans will no longer have to wear masks anywhere for any reason.

The press release from the governor’s office is titled, “Governor Abbott Lifts Mask Mandate, Opens Texas 100 Percent.” Without reading this press release or the executive order itself, some Texans assume that this title means that they should no longer be required to wear masks in businesses and that being asked to do so is infringing on their rights. This makes mask policies difficult and treacherous to enforce, even if they are the legal right of each business.

While it’s all fine and dandy for the governor to trust people to “take the actions that they have already mastered” to keep themselves safe, it’s not fair that many of us in the service industry are getting paid minimum wage to be exposed not only to illness, but also to rage and violence that comes with trying to enforce a mask policy post March 10.

Being a young woman who often works with even younger women, I have felt extremely unsafe when confronting grown men about our mask policy, especially after experiencing and witnessing brutal verbal attacks.

About a week after the March 10th order went into effect, I was working a closing shift with two other young women. A man came in with a mask on but pulled it down to order. My 18-year-old coworker asked him nicely to keep his mask up. He pulled the mask down farther, and she asked him again. He went off the rails: “I am a 40-year-old man, I can scratch my nose if I want to. Give me your manager’s phone number. I don’t think he’s going to be impressed with your attitude. I was going to give a tip to you and your friends, but your attitude just lost it.” And on and on until he finally left.

My co-workers and I were shaken. If we had asked him to leave, he might have gotten more agitated. If my other co-worker or I had stepped in, he might have seen it as a threat and the situation might have escalated. We had heard about violent, even fatal attacks on customer service workers who were trying to enforce mask policies. Despite all the signage on our doors and our manager’s policy to not serve those without masks, we still had to sweetly listen while this man berated a young woman less than half his age who is working to pay her way through college. We felt completely helpless.

While leaving the decision up to businesses and “individuals” sounds like a very Texan way to handle a global health crisis, it’s not protecting Texans.

This is why we have a surge. And it’s why younger people are getting sick and why our country has had such a terrible outbreak compared to other similarly situated countries. It’s people demanding their right to be assholes.

And remember, it’s right wing bullies who insist on their right to open carry their Ar-15s in public for the same reason: intimidation. They believe they have the the right to threaten and kill people whether it’s with a deadly weapon or a deadly virus — as long as they are defending “freedom.” However they define it.

Gallup polled on the vaccine willingness and it’s good news:

Masking … well…

There is still a substantial number of people who don’t plan to get vaccinated and don’t want to wear masks.

I feel so sorry for the people who can’t take the vaccine for a variety of reasons. There are a lot of people out there who just don’t care.

It’s looking very much as if you will not need to wear a mask if you are fully vaccinated. We don’t know yet for sure, so until they do we’ll have to continue to be careful in public. But the signs are good. So people who refuse to get vaccinated and also refuse to wear masks are … bad.

Here’s some more good news from the new Kaiser Foundation Poll:

Unfortunately:

While enthusiasm for getting the COVID-19 vaccine continues to inch up across partisan groups, a persistent divide remains, with about eight in ten Democrats (79%), almost six in ten independents (57%), and fewer than half of Republicans (46%) saying they have either received at least one dose of the vaccine or intend to do so as soon as possible. About three in ten Republicans (29%) say they will “definitely not” get vaccinated, similar to the share who said so in February.

Jonathan Chait explains why state Republicans are moving so quickly to destroy voting rights for Democrats, mostly people of color, in their states. He notes that even as the national Republicans, led by Trump, blame Republican officials for denying Trump his second term, the state Republicans blame Trump’s toxic rhetoric for his loss.

Still:

Both Republican factions heartily agree on the proper corrective steps: a sweeping bill curtailing voting rights and handing new powers to Republican legislators to prevent the unfortunate events of 2020–21 from happening again. After the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, a target of Trump’s rage, signed the measure, the former president offered his hearty congratulations. “They learned from the travesty of the 2020 Presidential Election, which can never be allowed to happen again,” the former President wrote in an official statement. “Too bad these changes could not have been done sooner!”

If you want to understand why this is happening, a timely new paper by University of Washington political scientist Jacob Grumbach helps explain. Grumbach surveys the performance of every state government across a broad array of measures of democratic health, such as indices of voting access like wait times and same-day and automatic voter-registration policies, felon disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and civil rights.

His paper finds that the states that backslid on democratization over the past 16 years were shared a single characteristic: Republicans gained full control of their state government.

In other words, states that are rolling back democratic protections are not responding to demographic change nor to any change internal to their state. They are following the agenda of the national Republican Party. That agenda is spreading throughout the states, which are imposing voter restrictions almost everywhere their party has the power to do so. Restricting the franchise has become perhaps the party’s core policy objective.

Some Republicans frame that agenda in explicitly Trumpist terms: They are acting to stop the next stolen election, having failed to prevent the last one. Those GOP officials who are too embarrassed to openly endorse Trump’s election lies instead offer superficially plausible rationales.

First, they insist they are acting to protect states’ rights to run their own elections. Overlooking the awkward historical resonance of using the exact same justification once put forward to justify Jim Crow–era restrictions, they insist states’ rights are all about preserving local variation. Elections should be run by those “closest to the people, elected by the people, most responsive to the people,” argues one leading Republican. “State legislators are the closest to those we represent,” insists another. “States have long experience running elections, and different states have taken different approaches suited to their own locales and populations,” pleadsNational Review.

And yet this mania for geographic proximity in election administration evaporates completely when they move from the state to the local level. Indeed, the most damaging provision in Georgia’s vote-suppression law removes power from local election boards and concentrates it in the hands of the states. If anybody actually does have local knowledge of election administration, it is the nice librarian who has been volunteering to organize the polls for many years.

But that form of localism has been crushed — because, of course, the whole point is that the state government is run by Republicans. Democrats control the federal government. They also control many local governments where Democrats live and vote. They don’t control many state governments, though, which are beholden to legislatures whose district maps give Republicans an insurmountable advantage. And so the right-wing intelligentsia has discovered a “principle”: The state is the only level of government neither too big nor too small to administer elections.

Second, they claim they seek merely to restore “confidence” in election integrity. And it is true that many Republicans voters lack confidence in the fairness of elections. What is the reason for their lack of confidence? It’s that Democrats won a fair, clean, high-turnout election. (Indeed, they won it in spite of an electoral college system that forced them to beat Trump by four percentage points in order to gain a narrow majority.) It follows that restoring confidence means eliminating the conditions that gave rise to this concern: Democrats winning a clean election.

What gives the game away is that Republican vote-suppression maneuvers include a purge of Republican officials who worked in states Trump lost. The Michigan Republican Party removed Republican Aaron Van Langeveldefrom the Board of State Canvassers after he infuriated Trump and his fans by certifying the state’s electoral votes, thwarting Trump’s attempt to override the election and secure an unelected second term.

In Georgia, Republicans stripped Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of his authority over state elections. Sterling’s chief operating officer, a Republican, told CNN the move was retribution for Raffensperger’s refusal to submit to Trump’s demand to disregard the election results and hand the state’s electoral votes to him.

They are determined to win by any means necessary and they do not care that most of the country is aghast at what they are doing. It’s simply irrelevant since their base is now as shameless as they are.

They all know that Trump is a nightmarish mix of imbecility and narcissism. And many are secretly happy that he lost. But they see the opportunity his Big Lie provides to ensure their minotarian dominance for the foreseeable future and they are taking it.

It’s unnerving to think that the only way to stop fascist actors from perpetrating a Big Lie is through libel law, but it may just be. This Dominion voting machine lawsuit is really something:

With billions of dollars in lawsuits now in the balance, Dominion Voting Systems has quietly expanded its legal armada in recent days, as the election technology company goes after Trumpworld and conservative media giants.

Clare Locke—the legal firm spearheading Dominion’s lawsuits against Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and pillow magnate Mike Lindell—recently brought in seven attorneys from the Texas-based firm of Susman Godfrey, which has experience litigating against the so-called “Kraken” suits filed by one-time Trump attorneys Lin Wood and Sidney Powell.

“There are great synergies between the work that the Susman team had done on the 2020 election and the defamation cases we were pursuing for Dominion,” Tom Clare, from the notoriously aggressive law firm Clare Locke, told The Daily Beast.

“As those discussions unfolded we also discovered the two firms have a great cultural similarity in having a ready for trial approach to litigation,” he added. “I think it’s going to be a very effective team.”

Dominion expanding its legal team is the latest effort to punish leading players in the months-long propaganda push to trash the company and baselessly assail the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential contest.

On Friday, Fox News was hit with a $1.6 billion lawsuit. “Fox News Media is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court,” a statement from the company said.

Other conservative media outlets including Newsmax and One American News Network—also aired post election conspiracy theories and are among the top targets for Dominion’s next round of lawsuits, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Justin Nelson—a Susman attorney who is assisting in Dominion’s defamation cases against Sidney Powell, Mike Lindell, and Fox News—represented Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobb against a “Kraken” suit filed by Lin Wood, Sidney Powell, and other attorneys against Arizona election officials in an attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

That suit, which asked a judge to “set aside the results of the 2020 General Election,” included many of the false claims which Dominion says amounted to defamation, including the allegation that Dominion uses software from a separate voting technology company, Smartmatic, and that Dominion was “founded by foreign oligarchs and dictators to ensure computerized ballot-stuffing and vote manipulation” to install help Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez steal an election in the country.

At the time, Nelson called the suit an “attack on democracy,” and argued that Wood, Powell, and others were “using the federal court system in an attempt to undermine the rule of law and obtain breathtaking, startling and unprecedented relief to overturn the will of the people.”

Susman attorneys also have experience in litigating a number of high profile defamation cases. Davida Brook—who signed on to the case against Powell, Giuliani, and Lindell—previously represented Melanie Kohler, a Los Angeles woman who accused director Brett Ratner of rape in a since-deleted Facebook post. Brook represented Kohler after Ratner filed a defamation suit against her. Ratner subsequently withdrew his suit.

Brook also represented actress Amber Heard, who was sued by ex-husband Johnny Depp after she wrote a Washington Post op-ed which Depp claimed had falsely implied he had “perpetrated domestic violence against her.”

Some of the targets or potential targets of Dominion’s legal wrath have run for cover, or even resorted to deleting articles or covering their tracks. Others have remained reliably defiant, claiming that a court battle and the discovery that comes with it would lead to humiliation for Dominion instead.

Lindell—who was also a major financial backer of pro-Trump attempts to nullify President Biden’s decisive 2020 victory—previously told The Daily Beast that he’d hired private investigators to dig up “dirt” and any evidence of foreign entanglements on both Dominion and Smartmatic, and that he was hoping to file countersuits in the coming weeks.

People familiar with the matter say that the company’s legal team still hadn’t ruled out going after ex-President Trump specifically, but that no final decision had been made yet on if they wanted to open up that can of worms on the former leader of the free world. During his time in office, Trump personally promoted the same kinds of conspiracy theories and lies that the voting-tech executives and their attorneys now claim substantially and groundlessly damaged their business and has put them in danger via numerous death threats.

It’s sad that the only form of accountability in our culture these days may rest on whether or not you harmed a business brand, but I guess that’s better than nothing.

Michael Gerson in the Washington Post:

Amid its many horrors, covid has presented a rare opportunity. On one large national problem, it has allowed for an empirical test of political philosophies. Under President Donald Trump, the federal government largely surrendered its role in the unfolding crisis, leaving both red and blue states to respond according to their ideological proclivities. Republican governors were less likely to implement stay-at-home orders, and, if they did, those orders tended to be of shorter length. Democrat-led states were more likely to impose mask mandates.AD

A recent study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Medical University of South Carolina — analyzing every day of data between March 15, 2020, and Dec. 12, 2020 — calculated the chances of getting covid-19 or dying from covid-19 in every state (and D.C.). After adjusting for factors such a population density, ethnic composition, poverty and age, a clear picture emerged. Democrat-led states were hardest hit early on, as you’d expect given the places where the disease took hold in the United States. But then the balance shifted. By June 3, Republican states had higher case diagnoses. By July 4, higher death rates. By Aug. 5, the relative risk of dying from covid-19 was 1.8 times higher in GOP-led states.

And we know the differences on covid policy that intensified during those nine months. Republican-led states (with exceptions such as Maryland and Massachusetts) pulled back from pandemic-related measures. “In late spring,” one health official told me, “when we were trying to carefully ‘reopen’ the country and the economy by putting out a set of gateway guidelines for the states to follow, states like Florida, Texas and Georgia, among others, essentially disregarded the guidelines. To a greater or lesser degree they opened up too quickly leading to that late spring, early summer surge that we experienced.”

All pandemic policy involves a trade-off between the level of deaths and the level of commercial interaction. But concerning covid, Republican governors tended to put a greater value on economic activity than preserving the lives of the elderly and vulnerable (and others) when compared with Democrat-led states. In doing so, they elevated their views above the sober judgment of experts.

How is this performance by many Republican governors not discrediting, even disqualifying? Does it not concern people in GOP-led states that, at a key moment in the crisis, they were nearly twice as likely to die of covid than their counterparts in Democrat-led states? Why does it not generate more outrage that many Republican governors are continuing these policies even as infections spread and virus mutations accumulate?

Realistically, this is because the economic benefits of covid irresponsibility are immediate and obvious to everyone. And even twice a very small risk is still a very small risk. But this reasoning requires us to abandon our social solidarity with the elderly and vulnerable, who bear a disproportionate cost in Noem’s vision of liberty. And I fear it indicates a wide streak of social Darwinian callousness in the American right.

Yeah. And about that Christian right …

President Joe Biden will announce details of his infrastructure plan in Pittsburgh on Wednesday.

Biden plans to use new tax revenue to offset the costs of planned infrastructure and social safety net investments. White House press secretary Jen Psaki promised Monday, “The president has a plan to fix our infrastructure and a plan to pay for it.” The details may not be finalized just yet.

For now, Forbes asks who the biggest losers will be under a Biden tax plan:

Biden is a proponent of raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%—a major hike, but still 7 percentage points less than the 35% corporate tax rate under Presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton. He wants to impose a 15% minimum tax on big companies too, meaning that even if a company takes a lot of credits and deductions it would still have to pay taxes of at least 15% on its earnings. That’s intended to prevent the country’s largest companies like Amazon from using those deductions and credits to skirt their fair share of taxes. 

Companies with large portions of income from overseas or those who pay effective tax rates below 21%—e.g. data storage company Seagate Technology, casino player Las Vegas Sands, semiconductor maker Broadcom, and money transfer giant Western Union—could be especially vulnerable to tax changes that would target that income, according to Goldman Sachs. Goldman pegs Las Vegas Sands’ foreign income exposure at 83%

According to a recent analysis by Tax Notes chief economist Martin Sullivan, 33 of the 100 largest U.S. companies might be on the hook for Biden’s 15% minimum tax, including giants like AT&T, Nvidia, Adobe, JPMorgan Chase, Intel and Target. Altogether, those 33 companies would owe an extra $20 billion each year if that new tax were enacted by itself, though Sullivan notes that the ultimate effect of the minimum tax will probably be smaller than that since it’s likely to come alongside other corporate tax hikes.

Axios expects Biden’s plans to impose a 28% minimum rate on the wealthy, make it harder for small businesses to claim deductions, and change how estates get taxed may not survive to see a final vote. If so, plans for a dollar-for-dollar tax match may be aspirational.

Axios adds:

Be smart: Biden’s approach to taxes is both ideological and political. He views increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy as a fundamental matter of fairness and a way to reduce income inequality.

• But moderate Democrats could revolt, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer may demand Biden cut taxes by removing the limits on state and local deductions.

The bottom line: Officials expect most of the haggling to happen on the corporate rate, both on the top percent and the global minimum for big multinationals.

• Repealing the Trump tax cuts on the wealthy is a much easier lift. But it raises, at most, around $150 billion — not nearly enough to pay for the massive infrastructure project that “Amtrak Joe” is contemplating.

I knew Biden rode Amtrak, but “Amtrak Joe”? Guess I was out of the loop that day.

It has been a long time since this country invested in infrastracture on a national scale. Not since my childhood. For the longest time Republican austerity fetishists argued that while we may be the richest country in the world, America could no longer afford Americans.

“We used to do big things. I have hope we will again,” Susie Madrak tweeted last fall. Maybe we will all have our hope restored.

Anything Jane Mayer writes is worth your time. But this piece so much so that Dan Froomkin made sure his followers saw at least three paragraphs from her latest report.

The Koch network is floundering in its attempts to respond to the Democrats’ election reform bill. Their biggest concern: Americans all across the political spectrum are aware the top 1% has rigged the economic and political game for themselves. People don’t like it. Or them. But Americans do like what they have heard of the For the People Act, House Resolution 1 and Senate Bill 1.

The New Yorker obtained a recording of a private, Jan. 8 conference call between a senior policy advisor to Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and leaders of several conservative groups, including a Koch-sponsored group. Participants expressed alarm over the bill’s provisions including “the broad popularity of the bill’s provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors,” Mayer writes.

If the act becomes law, its public disclosure provisions likely would stem the flow of dark money from millionaire/billionaire donors in groups like the Koch network. The provisions are so popular that such groups have decided that, rather than mount a public-advocacy campaign to defeat the bill, more “under-the-dome-type strategies” might work best.

Here are the key paragraphs Froomkin spotlights:

Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together, told fellow-conservatives and Republican congressional staffers on the call that he had a “spoiler.” “When presented with a very neutral description” of the bill, “people were generally supportive,” McKenzie said, adding that “the most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description.” In fact, he warned, “there’s a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts.”

As a result, McKenzie conceded, the legislation’s opponents would likely have to rely on Republicans in the Senate, where the bill is now under debate, to use “under-the-dome-type strategies”—meaning legislative maneuvers beneath Congress’s roof, such as the filibuster—to stop the bill, because turning public opinion against it would be “incredibly difficult.” He warned that the worst thing conservatives could do would be to try to “engage with the other side” on the argument that the legislation “stops billionaires from buying elections.” McKenzie admitted, “Unfortunately, we’ve found that that is a winning message, for both the general public and also conservatives.” He said that when his group tested “tons of other” arguments in support of the bill, the one condemning billionaires buying elections was the most persuasive—people “found that to be most convincing, and it riled them up the most.”

McKenzie explained that the Koch-founded group had invested substantial resources “to see if we could find any message that would activate and persuade conservatives on this issue.” He related that “an A.O.C. message we tested”—one claiming that the bill might help Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez achieve her goal of holding “people in the Trump Administration accountable” by identifying big donors—helped somewhat with conservatives. But McKenzie admitted that the link was tenuous, since “what she means by this is unclear.” “Sadly,” he added, not even attaching the phrase “cancel culture” to the bill, by portraying it as silencing conservative voices, had worked. “It really ranked at the bottom,” McKenzie said to the group. “That was definitely a little concerning for us.”

The gold leaf is off the rose.

Seeing that, progressive messaging pro Anat Shenker-Osorio wants lefties to sit up, pay attention, and act right now as if “we’re as popular as the right fears we are and to crow about how great our plans are” instead of wringing their hands about the formidability of their opponents.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars …” 

The wrinkle in that advice is that bad news draws more eyeballs. Eric Boehlert noted days ago that in these early days of the Biden administration the Beltway press is in a kind of withdrawal. For four years Donald Trump made news on the hour “with his cascade of lies, taunts, and erratic behavior. And Beltway journalists loved it — they loved being in the middle of the tumult and being the creators of the roiling content.”

That is true elsewhere on the Net. Responding to Boehlert, Nancy LeTourneau of Washington Monthly, tweeted, “whenever I wrote about something awful Trump did – it got tons of page views. Meanwhile, pieces about actual policy issues were pretty much ignored.”

The key to passing election reform is not simply Democrats somehow overcoming the filibuster in the Senate. Conservative movers and shakers know their program is unpopular. Despite Fox News brainwashing, conservatives in the heartland do, too. They may hate and fear liberals, but they are not keen on billionaires buying elections either. This is another “cut over the eye” moment that requires the left to focus. Republican senators may be unmovable, but they must feel the heat. They need pressure via phone calls and letters and media stories where we can generate them that Americans support these election reforms. We cannot win this fight simply by shouting louder how bad Republican vote suppression is.

Snap out of it

As the call demonstrates, conservative big donors feel they are on the ropes and in the corner.

McKenzie told listeners their best bet was not to engage the Democratic message but to repeat “that Congress shouldn’t be focusing on this right now. Our country has much bigger fish to fry at this moment.” Get the public to focus instead on health care and the economy. “Congress should focus on getting people back to work, not on these kind of niche, donor-disclosure type of endeavors we’re working on.” Now the right wants to focus on health care.

Don’t let them. Biden and Democrats have the upper hand on health care right now. Don’t let the subject be how bad Republicans are but how the Democrats’ package of reforms will help Americans take back control of their democracy from the 1%.

McConnell failed in 2017 to repeal Obamacare in the Senate. The morning of that vote and Sen. John McCain’s dramatic “thumbs down,” I commented, “The Obamacare repeal has been cut over the eye. Don’t let your guard down. Keep punching and work the eye.”

That is still good advice.

Orange Julius Caesar has something to say:

Based on their interviews, I felt it was time to speak up about Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, two self-promoters trying to reinvent history to cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned. They had bad policy decisions that would have left our country open to China and others, closed to reopening our economy, and years away from an approved vaccine—putting millions of lives at risk.

We developed American vaccines by an American President in record time, nine months, which is saving the entire world. We bought billions of dollars of these vaccines on a calculated bet that they would work, perhaps the most important bet in the history of the world. Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx moved far too slowly, and if it were up to them we’d currently be locked in our basements as our country suffered through a financial depression. Families, and children in particular, would be suffering the mental strains of this disaster like never before. 

In a fake interview last night on CNN, Dr. Fauci, who said he was an athlete in college but couldn’t throw a baseball even close to home plate, it was a “roller,” tried to take credit for the vaccine, when in fact he said it would take three to five years, and probably longer, to have it approved. Dr. Fauci was incapable of pressing the FDA to move it through faster. I was the one to get it done, and even the fake news media knows and reports this.

Dr. Fauci is also the king of “flip-flops” and moving the goalposts to make himself look as good as possible. He fought me so hard because he wanted to keep our country open to countries like China. I closed it against his strong recommendation, which saved many lives. Dr. Fauci also said we didn’t need to wear masks, then a few months later he said we needed to wear masks, and now, two or three of them. Fauci spent U.S. money on the Wuhan lab in China—and we now know how that worked out.

Dr. Birx is a proven liar with very little credibility left. Many of her recommendations were viewed as “pseudo-science,” and Dr. Fauci would always talk negatively about her and, in fact, would ask not to be in the same room with her. The States who followed her lead, like California, had worse outcomes on Covid, and ruined the lives of countless children because they couldn’t go to school, ruined many businesses, and an untold number of Americans who were killed by the lockdowns themselves. Dr. Birx was a terrible medical advisor, which is why I seldom followed her advice. Her motto should be “Do as I say, not as I do.” Who can forget when Dr. Birx gave a huge mandate to the people of our Nation to not travel, and then traveled a great distance to see her family for Thanksgiving—only to have them call the police and turn her in? She then, embarrassingly for her, resigned. 

Finally, Dr. Birx says she can’t hear very well, but I can. There was no “very difficult” phone call, other than Dr. Birx’s policies that would have led us directly into a COVID caused depression. She was a very negative voice who didn’t have the right answers. Time has proven me correct. I only kept Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx on because they worked for the U.S. government for so long—they are like a bad habit! 

Donald J. Trump served as the 45th President of the United States. The preceding was released as an official statement from the former President’s office.

He’s lying, of course. About all of it. He’s literally batshit insane.

And he is an irredeemable pig.

… we exist in different realities:

This survey doesn’t go into the whys, but I will never understand what they think he did that was that great. What? He owned the libs? Is that all there is?

And there’s also that little matter of half a million dead bodies and lethal lies about everything.

They are brainwashed. It’s mind-boggling.

Only 5% of Republicans acknowledge what a destructive force he is. No president has ever done more to destroy this country from within. The Big Lie alone, which they all think is true, is just an overwhelming horror for our democracy.

They live in their own reality, largely due to the media they devour. Nothing can penetrate and nothing will change their minds.

Keep in mind that it’s not just Dear Leader. This same disconnect from reality colors their entire understanding of the world around them. This is a very bad situation.

The CNN “autopsy” featuring all the pandemic doctors was difficult to watch. I know they were all between a rock and a hard place and that working with Trump and his henchmen was a nightmare. Nonetheless, with the stakes so high, you have to wonder if they couldn’t have found a better way than the path they chose.

Take, for instance, Deborah Birx explaining that she believes many of the deaths after the first 100,000 were preventable but also saying that she thought Trump did listen to the scientists when he reluctantly agreed to shut down the country a year ago.

Remember, this is how she discussed that on television at the time:

"[Trump is] so attentive to the scientific literature & the details & the data. I think his ability to analyze & integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit” — this is shocking, hackish stuff from Dr. Birx. pic.twitter.com/c2phsRYaJs

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 27, 2020

I think that one appearance did more to damage her credibility than anything else she said. It was an unnecessary fluff job, totally over the top and anyone who knew anything about Trump knew it was 100% Prime bullshit.

Here he was just two weeks later:

We are doomed. https://t.co/6FqBlyTwmz

— MyHeroRosaParks🇺🇦No Nazis/Racists🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ (@KistnerMarcia) April 11, 2020

I wrote a whole column about that at the time. We knew he was lying. We knew it was going to end badly. And apparently, they all knew it too. But they were all paralyzed, compromised or complicit. And many people died.