Month: March 2021

Politico reports:

Liberals spent years building a massive dark-money machine. Now conservatives are trying to match them.

Oh FFS. Republicans dominated dark money for years. The Dems caught up in the last few years. And they are still trying to end it, unlike the Republicans.

Anyway, aside from that inane framing, this article shows that Trump and his cronies are creating some new grift vehicles for themselves and the man himself. He needs a way to get his hands on political donations and dark money is the way to do it. They’re going to have to be careful, though, because Trump does NOT like anyone grifting except him:

Major donors are convening at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort next month for a two-day gathering to talk about what went wrong in 2020 — and to build a big-dollar network to take back power

The summit is being sponsored by the Conservative Partnership Institute, an organization led by Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.). Trump is slated to headline the opening-night dinner, and the agenda includes an array of conservative luminaries and former Trump administration officials such as Stephen Miller, Russ Vought and Ric Grenell.

With the dust settling from the party’s 2020 defeat, senior Republicans say they’ve come to acknowledge a massive deficit: the lack of a dark-money infrastructure that can be pivotal to influencing elections and policy fights. Organizers say the gathering is aimed at creating a long-term blueprint for funding policy-focused nonprofits in order to compete with liberals who, through mega-donors like George Soros and Tom Steyer, have developed a well-oiled system for routing cash to a web of big-spending advocacy groups.

“After the most cataclysmic election of modern history, investors and organizers must come together and talk about how and what happened in order to map out an ambitious plan to rebuild conservative power in the states and defend our values against the assault on our election systems,” the agenda for the CPI meeting says.

“We must bring new funds to incubate and anchor conservative organizations that can compete with the Left’s barrage of public-private spending,” the agenda says.

The Meadows-backed CPI, which was founded in 2017 with the mission of providing support to conservative nonprofits, is expected to help spearhead the new push. The organization is partnering with several newly launched groups helmed by former Trump administration officials, including the Center for American Restoration , which is overseen by Vought, and the American Cornerstone Institute, which is led by former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson…

Save America Alliance has begun distributing a prospectus to Republican donors, describing itself as an “invitation-only,” “membership-based organization” whose “goal is to build a vibrant donor community that comes together to strategically invest in America First organizations, issue advocacy groups and candidates.”

The Trump-aligned outfit isn’t being designed to spend money itself on political activities, but rather to help major givers coordinate their donations to an array of vehicles — including nonprofits, candidates and super PACs.

“By joining our network of America First donors across the country, your investments and impact will go much further than ever before,” the prospectus says.

It says members are asked to spend a minimum of $100,000 annually on recommended entities and states that the network’s goal is to inject more than $100 million into conservative causes over the next four years. Save America Alliance staffers “will meet with organizations and candidates to assess their viability,” and also “closely monitor and make contribution recommendations for primary challenges of candidates that actively fought to impair President Trump and his America First agenda.”

According to the document, Save America Alliance is planning several meetings this year, including an October conference in Washington, D.C., where members will be able to hear from the network’s endorsees.

Trump cares about two things: money and revenge. Since politics is now his business he needs to monetize it much more completely. And he has to make his enemies pay. This offers a path to both of those goals.

One year ago today:

This is a surreal clip to watch one year later to the day pic.twitter.com/6cXEtW8LmR

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 24, 2021

One year later:

In case anyone has forgotten why so many right wingers have been acting like fools during the pandemic, this will remind you:

Trump suggests going back to work during a pandemic is really no big deal because lots of people die from the flu and car accidents pic.twitter.com/pRTjmLH7xo

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 24, 2020

This was my reaction at the time:

He has said some very, very stupid things. This may be the stupidest:

Easter’s a very special day for me. Wouldn’t it be great to have all the churches full? You’ll have packed churches all over our country … I think it’ll be a beautiful time.

Two and a half weeks from today he wants people to gather in close quarters, share communion and breathe all over each other so the stock market will go up.

Fox News’ Bill Hemmer earlier called this “American Resurrection.”

I think it’s more aptly called American crucifixion.

I’m going to need to start drinking early today.

*He said many things that were just as stupid in the ensuring 10 months.

For Sen. McConnell to say the filibuster has no racial history is to ignore the obvious. He was an intern on Capitol Hill in the 60s when it was used to block civil rights legislation. Just one of many such examples. pic.twitter.com/bF7aIok7lG

— Senator Dick Durbin (@SenatorDurbin) March 24, 2021

Senate procedure and history expert Sarah Binder schools Mitch, just in case he was busy getting coffee when the civil rights filibusters were happening:

Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell (Ky.), argued Tuesday that the Senate filibuster “has no racial history at all. None. There’s no dispute among historians about that.”

That’s false. Historians know the filibuster is closely intertwined with the nation’s racial past and present. To be sure, senators have filibustered issues other than civil rights over the Senate’s history. But it is impossible to write that history without recognizing the centrality of race.

Here’s what you need to know about the filibuster’s racial past.

The Constitution empowers each chamber of Congress to select its own rules. When the House and Senate adopted their respective rule books in 1789, both sets of rules included a motion known as the “previous question motion.”

Today, when a House majority is ready to vote on a pending matter, a member moves the previous question. If a majority votes in favor of the motion, debate ends and the chamber advances to a vote on the underlying measure.AD

But that’s not the way “the previous question” worked in the first years of the House and Senate. Back then, lawmakers had not yet weaponized the rule into a parliamentary tool for empowering a simple majority to cut off debate. As such, in 1805, Vice President Aaron Burr in his final address to the Senate advised senators to eliminate the previous question motion from their procedural arsenal. Senators heeded his advice and dropped the rule in 1806.

Did issues affecting race, civil rights or slavery drive that 1806 decision? No. But keep in mind: It is highly unlikely that any senator in 1806 anticipated, let alone understood, the consequences of eliminating the previous question motion.

House lawmakers figured it out. Just a few years later, a House majority in 1811 voted to set a new meaning of the rule: If a simple majority voted to move the previous question, debate ended and the House moved to a vote on the underlying matter. When 19th-century Senate leaders tried to adopt the new House version of the previous question motion, filibusters blocked their moves. In other words, senators kept talking to avoid a vote — and the Senate lacked any procedural move to shut them down.

Foremost among filibustering senators in the 19th century were the proslavery faction, led by John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who exploited the Senate’s lax rules of debate to block measures that threatened Southern White landholders’ ability to depend on slave labor.AD

When Steven Smith and I dug up the history of the filibuster in “Politics or Principle? Filibustering in the U.S. Senate,” we identified 40 filibusters (at least those that left footprints for historians to record) between the first one in 1837 and the creation of the cloture rule in 1917, which enabled the Senate to shut down debate with the support of two-thirds of senators present and voting. Of those 40, at least 10 targeted racial issues — including filibusters over statehood for California and Kansas and, after the Civil War, protecting Southern Blacks’ voting rights.

To study filibusters after the Senate created cloture in 1917, Smith and I counted up measures “killed” by a filibuster. We sought evidence that a majority of the House, a majority of the Senate, and the president favored a measure — and yet it still died after debate on the Senate floor.

In doing so, we found that, of measures derailed by filibusters in the 20th century, civil rights measures dominated. Of the 30 measures we identified between 1917 and 1994, exactly half addressed civil rights — including measures to authorize federal investigation and prosecution of lynching, to ban the imposition of poll taxes and to prohibit discrimination on the basis of race in housing sales and rentals.

Keep in mind, the 20th-century filibuster scorched many civil rights measures beyond those that it killed outright. Senators secured passage of several celebrated measures to addressing racial equity — such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — after defeating filibusters by segregationist senators. That history is surely why former president Barack Obama last year called the filibuster a “Jim Crow relic.”

Attitudes on race continue to color contemporary Senate filibusters. Just last year, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) temporarily halted passage of a measure that would make lynching a federal hate crime.

Battles over reforming the Senate’s cloture rule have also often been proxy wars over civil rights. Smith and I identified a key vote associated with each of the dozen major efforts to reform Senate debate rules between 1918 and 1994. In three-quarters of the reform efforts, senators’ positions on civil rights shaped their votes on reform — even after taking account of other forces that might influence their votes. Only after senators defeated civil rights filibusters in the 1960s did attitudes toward rule reform become less tied to attitudes on civil rights.

Today, senators’ positions on racial matters tend to fall along party lines. That means legislative battles over measures to address racial equity — including police reform and voting rights — invariably divide senators along party lines.

To be sure, not every filibuster today — let alone historically — touches on racially charged issues. But it is impossible to recount the history of the filibuster without recognizing its profoundly racial history.

It says everything that legislative matters to address racial equity invariably divide senators along party lines. It makes it very clear — which side are you on?

He was very busy spreading his big lie and ignoring the pandemic so how could his administration possibly have time to deal with the surge of migrants that was already coming over the border? The Biden transition team were worried but Trump and his henchmen did nothing. If I didn’t know better, they were happily setting up an emergency:

In early December, the Biden transition team and career government officials began sounding the alarm on the need to increase shelter space for migrant children, whom they expected would soon be crossing the border in large numbers, but the Trump administration didn’t take action until just days before the inauguration, according to two Biden transition officials and a U.S. official with knowledge of the discussions.

“They were sitting on their hands,” said one of the transition officials, who does not currently work for the Biden administration and spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It was incredibly frustrating.”

The Biden transition team made its concerns about a lack of shelter space known to Trump officials both at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security, laying out the need to open an influx shelter in Carrizo Springs, Texas, and to issue what’s known as a “request for assistance” that would start the process of surveying new sites for expanded shelters, according to the transition officials.

It was not until Jan. 15 that then HHS Secretary Alex Azar issued the request for assistance, which started the multi-week process of surveying and choosing new sites. The Biden administration opened the Carrizo Springs facility on Feb. 22 and announced this week that it would be expanding the capacity of that site.

As of February, HHS was only able to use about half of its congressionally funded capacity because of Covid-19 protocols and a shuttering of facilities under the Trump administration.

Because of HHS’s extremely limited capacity, unaccompanied children are now backlogged in overcrowded Border Patrol stations, reaching a record high of 5,200 children in custody last week, with hundreds held past the three-day legal limit.

DHS and HHS did not respond to requests for comment.

The transition official said the need to open more shelter space was clear in December 2020, based on a growing trend of unaccompanied minors crossing the border that began to emerge in late fall, and it was communicated to Trump officials in multiple meetings, multiple times a week.

“In a transition team, you don’t have hold of the buttons of power. You can advise, you can strongly direct, you can strongly recommend, but at the end of the day, the outgoing administration was responsible for action and they just didn’t take it. They gave no reason,” the Biden transition official said.

Former acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf told NBC News the outgoing administration warned the Biden transition team that rolling back tough immigration policies like “Remain in Mexico” for asylum seekers and stopping construction on the border wall would lead to increased migrant flows.

A former senior Trump administration HHS official said that when Trump left office, “we were confident we had enough beds to handle any pre-existing surge from the last 20 years.”

At a cost of $250 per bed per day, the Trump administration had 13,000 beds and thousands were empty at that time. The administration was hesitant to expand beyond what it needed, the former Trump official said, but it did not account for Covid-19 social distancing restrictions that would keep facilities from using every bed available.

But a U.S. government official who served under both the Trump and Biden administrations said non-political staff also brought up the need to open more space. The official said it was “irresponsible of the Trump administration not to listen to us when we were throwing up red flags.”

“The writing was on the wall,” the U.S. official said. “It was not at this level yet, but if the number of beds needed was going up, what do we do?”

The capacity of HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement was drastically reduced in 2020 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only were existing shelters spacing children further apart, thereby decreasing the number of available beds, the Trump administration used a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention authority to expel all asylum seekers, including unaccompanied children, from coming into the U.S.

Shortly after the election, on Nov. 18, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration could no longer expel children under that CDC authority, leading the numbers of children entering the U.S. to begin climbing. That injunction was later lifted, but the Biden administration made the decision to allow unaccompanied migrant children fleeing violence to enter the U.S. to pursue asylum.

Now, DHS has employed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, usually called in after natural disasters, to help HHS quickly build its capacity in places like Dallas and Midland, Texas. On Tuesday, HHS announced it will expand its capacity at Carrizo Springs to accommodate an additional 500 children. As of Sunday, there were approximately 10,000 children in HHS custody while nearly 5,000 waited to be transferred to those facilities from overcrowded Border Patrol stations

These surges happen on a regular basis. They knew that. And they knew that COVID was going to complicate the matter. They made the decision not to do anything so they could claim that the Biden administration screwed up by refusing to leave those kids in squalid refugee camps on the other side of the border.

Of course they did.

I keep hearing that if the Democrats get rid of the filibuster they’ll be able to pass sensible gun safety regulations. I guess they are assuming there will be at least one Republican who will vote with the Democrats because there is no way in hell this guy is going to do it:

As I wrote in the post below, there was a time when some Republicans would join with the Democrats on this issue. In the past they got as close as 58 votes, which included a handful of GOPers but were unable to get to 60.

That was then. The Republican Party is now fully radicalized and unfettered gun rights are at the center of everything they believe in. Who among them do you see stepping up to vote for gun regulation once the Democrats nuke the filibuster. Which ones will defy Mitch McConnell’s daily threats to turn the Senate into “nuclear winter”? Which ones will defy the inevitable threats from Donald Trump?

Gun rights are the beating heart of the modern Republican party, now more than ever. I will be shocked if we are able to move on this issue in this 50-50 congress.

After a year of illness, death and economic destruction, the vaccines are providing us with a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel. So naturally, as we are all preparing to go back to the office or out to dinner or take a trip, it’s also time for us to start back up with the senseless mass shootings that are as much a part of our culture these days as March Madness and pizza delivery. Within the last five days, we have had two mass shootings killing a total of 18 innocent people in two separate states. Two 21-year-old men were able to get their hands on semi-automatic weapons in the days before they opened fire, one in Georgia and one in Colorado.

As I have confessed before, I’ve become regretfully pessimistic about the prospect for sensible gun laws in this country in recent years. After Newtown, Charleston, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland, Pittsburgh, El Paso and dozens more, it just seems that we watch these horrific events unfold on TV and ask ourselves over and over what kind of civilized country would allow this carnage. Then the gun proliferation enthusiasts rush in with “thoughts and prayers” and make some empty gesture about banning an obscure firearm accessory after which there is grieving, political haggling and then, finally, nothing.

In years past, along with the usual “thoughts and prayers” there would often be some kind of temporary bipartisan agreement that “something must be done” as pundits and analysts insisted that “this time” we’ve come to “an inflection point.” Republican senators would offer some ineffectual band-aid that meant nothing, Democrats would balk after which the NRA, led by Wayne LaPierre, would sweep in and denounce even those small measures and that would be that.

The most heinous example of that dynamic came after the Newtown massacre of a classroom full of 6 years olds and their teachers by a very disturbed young man, once again using a semi-automatic weapon, purchased for him by his mother, whom he also killed. It was one of the most horrific mass shootings in US history, shaking even Republicans and NRA board members who assumed that they had no choice but to accede to some form of gun regulations. LaPierre, however, knew better. In the midst of overwhelming national grief and horror he went to Washington and declared that not only was the NRA not going to acquiesce to the demands of the political establishment and the public, but he was also going to double down. He defiantly declared:

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. What if, when Adam Lanza started shooting his way into Sandy Hook elementary school last Friday, he’d been confronted by qualified armed security? Our children— we as a society leave them every day utterly defenseless, and the monsters and the predators of the world know it and exploit it.

And that was the end of that. The Republicans backed out, the Democrats backed down and the status quo was preserved. It was very politically risky but it paid off. LaPierre was able to demonstrate that not even the senseless murder of dozens of tiny children would make the Republicans defy the gun lobby. That’s real power and he wielded it ruthlessly. To that end, his contribution to the election of Donald Trump was one of LaPierre’s greatest accomplishments.

So, while I may have lost faith that the government would break its gridlock on this issue, I did think that it might start to crack when LaPierre flamed out last year in grand fashion after having been revealed to have financed a very extravagant lifestyle for himself through gross corruption on a massive scale. His ignominious firing and the infighting and recriminations in the organization that followed seemed to spell doom for the lobbying juggernaut’s hold on the Republican party and perhaps opened the door to some common sense.

Sadly, as with so much else in today’s GOP, the opening only made things even more extreme.

As Matt Cohen at Mother Jones reported, a number of extremist groups have stepped into the void. There is the Second Amendment Foundation, which recently filed a number of lawsuits challenging state gun control laws, and the National Association for Gun Rights, which paints itself as a more conservative alternative to the NRA — just in case you thought that organization was a bunch of bleeding hearts. There are also numerous local groups loosely and not so loosely affiliated with Neo-Nazi groups, militia, and others way out on the fringe who are filling the void that the NRA has left in its wake. In January of 2020, 20,000 armed extremists showed up in Virginia on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to protest a gun control law signed by Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam.

And we’ve seen the results of this new extreme gun proliferation activism in Congress with the election of freshmen representatives like Lauren Boebert, R-Co, Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga, and Madison Cawthorne, R-NC, all of whom have flaunted their devotion to firearms, even demanding they be allowed to carry them on to the floor of the congress. There have even been several incidents since the insurrection in which Republican representatives have attempted to bring their guns through metal detectors.

Greene tweeted this after President Joe Biden called for new gun safety regulation on Tuesday:

Molon labe. https://t.co/cc9IvnmDCr

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) March 23, 2021

“Molon labe!”, roughly translated as “come and take them” became popularized among the gun fetishists after they all saw the movie “300” and thought it was totally awesome.

Boebert reacted by rushing to fundraise:

https://twitter.com/davidgura/status/1374211426773000193?s=20

Greene is from Georgia and Boebert is from Colorado, the two states where the mass shootings took place. You can see where their priorities lie.

And they aren’t the only ones. In the Senate on Tuesday, we saw the likes of Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, John Kennedy of Lousiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Tom Cotton of Arkansas all making it clear in different ways that not only don’t they think this gun violence is a problem, they believe people should arm up to “defend themselves” against Antifa and Black Lives Matter, not to mention getting ready for some vigilante work on behalf of the police (who they apparently don’t mind seeing hit over the head with flagpoles and baseball bats as long as it for the cause.) The NRA is no longer necessary to buck up the wobbly Republicans at times like these. They are all Wayne LaPierre now.

Salon’s Amanda Marcotte had a somewhat optimistic take on this issue, pointing out that there is now a strong activist opposition, much more grassroots energy and some institutional support that hasn’t existed in the past. And she’s right that you just have to keep trying. There is simply no choice. But with the right getting more extreme in every way, their obsession with unfettered gun rights may take an even darker turn than we’ve seen up until now with its close ties to the domestic terror threat. It’s hard to believe but we may still not have seen the worst of this yet.

Salon

The redder the county, the shorter the wait for the coronavirus vaccines.

Jen McGrew traveled over 30 miles north from Salt Lake City, Utah to the more-conservative ski town of Ogden to get her first shot of the two-dose Pfizer vaccine. It was the end of the day. No line. She walked in.

“I stopped to ask if there were any leftovers or ‘walk-in’ shots remaining, and within five minutes I was in front of an attendant who got my paperwork started,” McGrew told Salon in an email.

Nicole Karlis details: 

McGrew’s story highlights a peculiar trend playing out nationwide: one in which urban city-dwellers, struggling to find vaccines in their home cities, have found success getting vaccinated in neighboring counties that are more conservative and, in some cases, more rural.

That aligns with polling that shows that those who identify as Republicans are far less likely to get vaccinated. A PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll from this month found that 30 percent of people surveyed stated that, if offered the COVID-19 vaccine, they would not take it. Of those who stated they would reject the vaccine, 49 percent were Republican men, as opposed to 6 percent of Democrat-identifying men. Moreover, 14 percent of Democrat women said they wouldn’t receive the vaccine if offered, compared to 34 percent of Republican women.

Since vaccines are distributed to counties based on population, that suggests that more right-leaning regions should have more of a surplus of vaccines than more liberal regions. And indeed, that seems to be borne out by which states are opening up vaccinations to all adult residents.

I can confirm that based on friends’ experiences here in WNC. The state still has its screening protocol and county services its waiting list. But outlets like Walgreens are more flexible.

Even so, wrangling an appointment in my blue county is challenging. Online signups here disappear fast. Calling Walgreens’ 800-number can help (attendants have access to a broader selection of sites than online) but may take a half-hour on hold. In more rural, redder areas an hour or more east, getting a Covid shot is not a big deal.

Friends scheduled appointments at a Walgreens 75 minutes east and arrived to find no one ahead or behind them in line. Pharmacists in fact fretted about a man who had missed his appointment three times already. They were reluctant to open a new vial only to see it go to waste if he failed to show. His shot could be yours for the effort.

On a more granular level, red counties within both blue and red states across the country appear to have a greater supply of vaccine, suggesting that vaccines are going unused and untaken in those areas. For example, a rural Missouri town on the border of Iowa was left with 1,500 unused doses after a mass vaccination drive.

In February, The Colorado Sun reported that rural counties were vaccinating people faster than urban ones; one southwest Colorado county had already run out of people to vaccinate. While this isn’t true of all rural areas — some have reportedly had messy vaccine roll-outs due to a lack of resources — it does appear to be a trend in some regions.

Experts, like those weighing in on the trend in Colorado, have chalked this up to population differences. Yet vaccine hesitancy may also play a role. As has been reported time and again, rural Americans appear to be less interested in the COVID-19 vaccine — even though many rural states have been hard-hit by the pandemic. In North Dakota, about 1 in 500 residents died from the coronavirus. Yet now, public health officials say the state’s biggest hurdle to get its population vaccinated is vaccine hesitancy.

A relation in Charlotte, N.C. drove just over the border to Rock Hill, South Carolina for hers. At the small-town quick-stop where I gassed up in S.C. on Saturday, maybe one in five customers entering the store wore masks. The rest are not likely competitors for vaccines.

Responding Tuesday to the Boulder, Colo. mass shooting, Amanda Marcotte brought to mind George Lakoff’s theory of Moral Accounting. Marcotte writes:

Pollster Frank Luntz recently held a focus group of vaccine-hesitant Republicans, and one of the justifications offered for refusing to get the vaccine was chilling precisely because the defiance was conveyed so matter-of-factly: “We are not all in this together.”

The comment really cut to the heart of the cultivated stance of sociopathy that has fueled the GOP for decades now. There is much that conservatives think is owed to them, like the icons of their childhood such as Mr. Potato Head or Dr. Seuss to never change with the times, or for Ghostbusters to never be female, or to never have to press 1 for English nor ever see a Black athlete kneel instead of stand during the national anthem. 

But when it comes to what they owe others, their answer is all too often less than nothing.

In Lakoff’s scheme, conservatives (more than liberals) keep unconscious balance sheets: what they are owed, what they owe others. And not owe in the literal sense of money but the “I’m in your debt” sense. Ideally, these “books” should balance. Lakoff’s moral accounting is built on two basic principles:

The sociopathic version is that owing nothing to anyone places conservatives in a superior position, morally speaking. American “rugged individualism” rests upon that foundation. (“And a rock feels no pain | And an island never cries.“) Preserving one’s moral dominance against any erosion becomes a kind of prime directive.

But Lakoff says when it comes to exacting retribution the two principles above conflict:

No matter what you do, you violate one of the two principles. You have to make a choice. You have to give priority to one of the principles. Such a choice gives two different versions of moral accounting: The Morality of Absolute Goodness puts the first principle first. The Morality of Retribution puts the second principle first. As might be expected, different people and different subcultures have different solutions to this dilemma, some preferring retribution, others preferring absolute goodness.

The conservative cult of victimhood, that “cultivated stance of sociopathy,” maintains a sense of moral superiority while demanding payback-plus for past wrongs real or imagined. They are owed. They owe others nothing.

I don’t need to spell out which one the last president prioritizes. Getting “even” is not his goal. Winning this accounting game is, whatever it takes. “If someone screws you, screw them back 10 times harder,” Trump told a meeting of business leaders in Colorado in 2005, and again in Sydney, Australia in 2011. He keeps a mental list of those what done him wrong.

Donald J. Trump is not Patient Zero in this pandemic of sociopathy. He is an avatar. His ascension to the White House validated the Morality of Retribution to which his most ardent followers were already inclined. He gave them permission.

Thus, Marcotte concludes regarding a nation awash in weapons:

Indeed, all we hear is that it’s an assault on their alleged “freedom” to allow their neighbors the ability to go about simple tasks of life without fear of being gunned down by some idiot who is still mad that Becky the cheerleader didn’t want to go to the homecoming dance with him. 

Rejection of civic duty, of common courtesy even, and personal arsenals maintained against the glorious Day of Retribution (or Second Civil War) is how the self-styled downtrodden convince themselves they are moral accounting’s victors. Clutching black rifles they can taunt the fallen Foreign Menace from the top ropes — so long as he is not Russian. In a pinch, the Domestic Menace will do.

Thune warns of a “nuclear winter” in the Senate if Democrats gut the filibuster

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) March 23, 2021

How will we know the difference?

This piece from Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson explains why the Senate GOP leadership is shrieking like a bunch of rabid harpies:

The filibuster is in trouble. President Joe Biden has come out in favor of reforming it, and Democrats in the Senate are weighing alternatives. But the strongest sign that its days are numbered is that the Republican leader Mitch McConnell is threatening Armageddon if the other party touches it. No one presently—or perhaps ever—in the Senate has practiced the dark art of obstruction as relentlessly as the current minority leader. And the Kentucky senator’s most effective weapon, requiring 60 votes for virtually everything the opposing party wants to do, has been the filibuster. Democrats can propose legislation that voters strongly support—a higher minimum wage, a path to citizenship for Dreamers, background checks for gun purchasers, safeguards for Americans’ ability to cast ballots—and McConnell can strangle it off camera with a minimum of notice or fuss.

Like Lyndon B. Johnson, McConnell is a master of the Senate. But although Johnson often used his mastery to pass important bills, McConnell uses his to kill them—while simultaneously generating outrage that yields considerable benefits for his party. McConnell possesses a rare understanding of mass psychology and knows that the American political system is unusually opaque to voters. Not only does the United States have multiple branches and levels of government, but voters elect their representatives in Congress separately from the president (as opposed to parliamentary systems, such as Britain’s and Canada’s, in which the executive is the leader of the majority party or coalition). In this complex system, determining who has done what can be like figuring out a mystery novel. The filibuster, an arcane procedure that prevents those who seem to be in charge from actually passing the legislation they want, only deepens the mystery.

The upshot is that party accountability in the American system mostly centers on the president. Even in midterm elections, when the president isn’t on the ballot, dissatisfied voters tend to punish the president’s party at the polls. This has a certain logic: Figuring out who is president is easy. So is deciding whether you like what you think the president is doing. By contrast, a strikingly large share of voters struggle to identify their representatives in Congress, or even which party controls the House or the Senate. (In 2014, a midterm year, just 38 percent of Americans correctly said that Republicans controlled the House, and the same paltry share correctly said that Democrats controlled the Senate.) In this context, voters are unlikely to punish a minority party wielding the filibuster—and, indeed, are far more likely to punish a president and a president’s party for policy failures caused by the filibuster, even if it is wielded by the other party.

In theory, voters could punish those who filibuster, if they knew who they were and what they were blocking. Today, however, filibusters require little more than a declaration from minority leaders that they have 41 votes against a bill, and so the tactic can be deployed with abandon. Most of the legislation that fails because it has “only” majority support never gets close to the surface of public consciousness. And public understanding of the filibuster itself is weak, to put it diplomatically. A 2020 survey out of Washington University in St. Louis asked, “How many votes are required to end debate and get a vote on normal legislation in the U.S. Senate?” The most popular answer was “not sure” (32 percent); the next most popular was “51 votes” (26 percent)—in other words, majority rule. Just 15.5 percent said “60 votes.” And this was a multiple-choice question with limited options. The other possible answers were “67 votes,” “75 votes,” and “unanimous”—all of which attracted a good chunk of respondents. One wonders how many voters might have gotten it right had they been allowed to come up with their own answers.

Although the use of the filibuster has been increasing since the 1980s, McConnell, the Senate Republican leader since 2007, has perfected its deployment. In 2009, President Barack Obama came into office with an enviable level of public support, and he faced an economic crisis for which the other party was widely blamed. Confronted with unified Democratic control, McConnell did not encourage his party to compromise. Instead, he ramped up use of the filibuster to previously unseen levels. Everything that could be filibustered was—even routine and trivial matters, even bills and appointments that the Republicans ultimately planned to support. McConnell candidly explained his strategy in 2011:

We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals. Because we thought—correctly, I think—that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the “bipartisan” tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.

One thing you can say about McConnell, he always says the quiet part out loud — if you choose to listen. (“one term president”, “we’d fill it.”)

And yes, he is an evil piece of work who cares about nothing but partisan power:

This quote is worth parsing. McConnell was saying that certain legislation Obama wanted to pass could have gotten bipartisan support, which Americans would have then seen as affirming its general goodness. But McConnell didn’t want that legislation to pass, or Americans to draw that conclusion. Fingerprints is the most revealing word. It makes clear that what mattered to him was that Obama would take the blame. For Republicans, the filibuster was a win-win-win: It sharply reduced the range of issues that Democrats could advance; it ensured that even bills that got through were subject to withering attacks for months, dragging down public support; and it produced an atmosphere of gridlock and dysfunction for which Democrats would pay the price.

In short, McConnell recognized that the modern filibuster introduced a serious flaw into the code of American democracy. Far from fostering compromise, the current filibuster has given a unified minority party every incentive to block legislation, no matter how many Americans support it. (In theory, a Senate faction representing about a tenth of Americans can maintain a filibuster under present-day rules.)

The intensifying cycle of political dysfunction has reinforced all of the other potent factors that have encouraged the Republican Party’s antidemocratic shift: a large and passionate base, ginned up by right-wing media and other outrage-stoking organizations and advantaged by the growing rural bias in American politics. The filibuster seeded the ground for an anti-Washington demagogue who claimed that he alone could get things done. And it has furthered the party’s turn toward resisting majorities—through voter suppression, gerrymandering, and an emboldened conservative Supreme Court—rather than persuading them.

The filibuster conveys a particular disadvantage upon Democrats, because they are the party that has big legislative ambitions. In recent years, Republicans’ primary forward-looking goal has been to pass tax cuts for corporations and the affluent, which can be pushed through using the filibuster-proof budget process. The party’s other big goal has been getting conservative judges onto the courts, and McConnell quickly eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court confirmations in 2017 to ensure that it could.

That rule change makes clear that McConnell’s opposition to Democrats’ current proposals has nothing to do with promoting compromise or protecting the Senate’s norms. The reason Republicans like the legislative filibuster is because it stops Democrats from enacting popular elements of their agenda, feeds public discontent with the party ostensibly in charge, and fuels the anti-government extremism that now animates the GOP base. Faced with the prospect of having his best weapon taken away, McConnell has, in effect, admitted that his only real strategy is to hamstring the institution he supposedly venerates and then blame his opponents for the disarray. Democrats should call his bluff, and let voters know what they—and the Republicans—stand for.

I do hope Democrats truly understand what they are up against. I have a sneaking suspicion that this hysterical barrage of threats isn’t having the effect they want it to. Everyone knows that these are empty threats. They’ve already brought the Senate to a standstill for the reasons McConnell openly admitted to doing. There is no upside to Democrats to helping them continue to do it whether it’s as a minority or a majority.

Roger Stone may end up being directly implicated in the January 6th insurrection.

I don’t think Joe Biden will pardon him:

As the federal investigation of the 6 January Capitol insurrection expands, scrutiny of Donald Trump’s decades-long ally Roger Stone is expected to intensify, given his links to at least four far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who had been charged, plus Stone’s incendiary comments at rallies the night before the riot and in prior weeks, say ex-prosecutors and Stone associates.

Although Stone was not part of the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob that shocked America, the self-styled “dirty trickster” – who was convicted on seven counts in the Russia investigations into the 2016 elections but later pardoned by Trump – had numerous contacts with key groups and figures involved in the riot in the weeks before and just before its start.

The night before the riot, Stone spoke at a Washington DC “Rally to Save America” where the former president’s unfounded claims that the election was stolen by Democrats were pushed and Stone urged an “epic struggle for the future of this country, between dark and light, between the godly and the godless, between good and evil”.

Early on 6 January, Stone was seen in cellphone videos near a Washington hotel hanging out with six members of the far-right militia Oath Keepers serving as his “bodyguards”, including three who have been charged in the federal investigation. Stone, according to Mother Jones, also raised funds for “private security” events on 5 and 6 January before the Capitol attack, which included a rambling talk by Trump urging his supporters to “fight like hell”.

Back on 12 December, Stone also spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally that amplified Trump’s erroneous claims of massive election fraud, and urged hundreds of Trump loyalists to “fight until the bitter end … Never give up, never quit, never surrender, and fight for America,” Stone implored the crowd.

Congressional investigators looking into the far-right Proud Boys, including some charged in the riot, have also reportedly been looking into ties that Stone had with their leaders Enrique Tarrio and Ethan Nordean, who were seen in a video in contact with Stone at another demonstration in DC the night before the 12 December rally, according to Just Security

Nordean is one of at least a dozen Proud Boys who have been charged so far in the riot investigation, and one of several who are facing conspiracy charges.

Tarrio, who attended Stone’s trial and had other contacts with him, was arrested in DC two days before the riot and charged with setting fire in December to a Black Lives Matter flag and for carrying high-capacity magazines for weapons.

Back in 2016, Stone first set up the group “Stop the Steal” which raised false claims that the election would be stolen from Trump, a baseless charge that grew exponentially post-election in 2020 to try to undermine Biden’s victory.Advertisement

Last year Trump railed against Stone’s conviction in the Russia inquiry which included lying to Congress and drew a 40-month jail sentence. But shortly before Stone was to enter prison in mid-2020 Trump commuted his sentence, and in December gave him a full pardon.

Former senior prosecutors say that Stone could be a growing focus of the federal inquiry of the riot which has already charged more than 300 people including at least a dozen Proud Boys and 10 Oath Keepers for illegal acts related to their roles in the Capitol attack.

“Prosecutors follow the facts and evidence where they lead, and certainly should be investigating any connections between Stone and those who were responsible for the insurrection on January 6,” Mary McCord, a veteran prosecutor who led the national security division at the Department of Justice at the end of the Obama administration until May 2017, said in an interview.

Other ex-prosecutors go further and see Stone as a potential target.

“As a result of the pardon corruptly granted by Trump, it would not be surprising for Roger Stone to become a federal prosecutor’s holy grail,” said Phil Halpern, who retired last year after 36 years as an assistant US attorney who specialized in corruption cases. “In this quest, the charged Oath Keepers and Proud Boys are merely pawns leading to the ultimate prize. Rest assured, prosecutors will be dangling lenient treatment and other inducements in return for any testimony implicating Stone in the Capitol riot.”Advertisement

But some ex-prosecutors caution that charging Stone will be difficult “absent direct evidence of an intent to commit or aid and abet treason or seditious conspiracy”, said Paul Pelletier, a former acting chief of the justice department’s fraud section.

The Washington Post and other outlets have reported that Stone and Alex Jones, the host of the conspiracy driven InfoWars talkshow where Stone has often appeared as a guest and promoted disinformation, are being investigated related to their ties with figures in the riot and if they had any role in its planning.

Jones, who has boasted he paid $500,000 for the rally on 6 January, and Stone have had close links since at least the 2016 campaign, when Stone spoke glowingly of Jones, declaring in an interview that his show is “the major source of everything”.

In an email, Stone vehemently denied having anything to do with the Capitol riot.

“Any statement, claim, insinuation, or report alleging, or even implying, that I had any involvement in or knowledge, whether advance or contemporaneous, about the commission of any unlawful acts by any person or group in or around the US Capitol or anywhere in Washington DC on January 6, 2021, is categorically false.”

Stone said he just wanted to spur peaceful protests on January 6th. That’s why he was hanging out with a bunch of violent thugs like the Proud Boys on the night before and morning of. Because they are all followers of Gandhi.

Stone’s denials notwithstanding, some former lobbying partners of his at Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly voice dismay at his decades-long fealty to Trump, a client of the firm in the 1980s, about a decade after Stone earned notoriety for playing a small part in the scandal-ridden 1972 Richard Nixon campaign.

“Roger has been totally devoted to Trump for over 30 years and that has clouded his judgment about his own ethical values and led to a criminal conviction,” said Charlie Black in an interview.

“I’m not surprised that the devotion is still there, even post-election and post-pardon.”

Similarly, Stone’s ex-partner Peter Kelly said he had been shocked by Stone’s recent drive to discredit the election results – and similar efforts by Michael Flynn, who was also convicted in the Russia inquiry and pardoned by Trump. “To see people like Gen Flynn and Stone who just escaped a serious encounter with the law, walking the edge again is stunning,’” Kelly said in an interview.

He is an arrogant ass — and he’s still tight with Trump. If there was any conduit to the White House about all this, it was very likely him.