More than 14,700 people have died from the new coronavirus in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University. More than 432,000 people across the country have been sickened by COVID-19.
The grim milestone comes as New York recorded its highest daily death toll: 779. Governor Andrew Cuomo said that while social distancing is working, and the number of patients who are hospitalized is down, “It’s not a time to get complacent.”
He got complacent.
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This column from the Orlando Sentinel says it all about Matt Gaetz and the Florida political swamp he springs from. It’s so perfect that Trump has wound up down there:
The past week has been like watching an atomic bomb detonate in slow motion across Florida’s political landscape.
One sordid detail and accusation after another involving Matt Gaetz and Joel Greenberg.
Suddenly, politicians who’d been happy to cozy up with these guys for years are eager to spill the beans.
CNN reports that members of Congress now say Gaetz was known for showing nude images of women on his phone.
One legislator finally discloses to the Sentinel that Gaetz told him he believed any nude images sent his way were “his to use as he wanted to, as an expression of his rights.”
Fox News is suddenly interested in year-old reports of a legislator who described a sex game Gaetz created, where Florida’s male legislators scored points for bedding lobbyists, aides and fellow legislators.
And all of Seminole County’s power crowd is suddenly acting aghast after Greenberg racks up his 33rd federal indictment.
Just stop it. All of you.
You don’t get to snuggle up to two guys who made one ugly headline after another when it served your political interests — and then start clutching your pearls when they become liabilities.
You people aren’t the whistle-blowers. You’re the enablers.
So are the voters.
Sure, the depravity of some of these latest accusations are new. And let’s be clear that, right now, these are only accusations and charges. No one has been convicted of anything.
But there are plenty of unseemly things we know these guys did — things documented in the pages of this newspaper — that many people seemed happy to ignore. Or even encourage.
The headlines were abundant:.
“Seminole County tax collector accused of impersonating police officer”
“Matt Gaetz’s State of the Union guest? A white nationalist from Vegas”
“Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg gives $3.5 million in consultant contracts, salaries to friends and associates”
“U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz was the lone vote in the House against an anti-human trafficking bill.”
“Groups call on Seminole Tax Collector Joel Greenberg to resign for ‘Islamophobic’ Facebook post”
All these headlines ran long ago. Yet none of the politicians shaking their heads and whispering in journalists’ ears today said squat back then.
I sure don’t remember hearing any member of Congress saying: “Matt Gaetz is flashing nude images on the House floor. It’s behavior that’s beneath Congress and humanity in general.”
After Greenberg was investigated for acting like a cop and pulling over a fellow motorist — and given a free pass by local prosecutors — I don’t remember Seminole GOP leadership saying: “This man is not fit for public office.”
To the contrary, these two guys remained political causes célèbres, being invited to fundraisers and the White House and shooting selfies with Roger Stone and ousted-legislator-turned-lobbyist Chris Dorworth.
Greenberg was so convinced that local voters loved his extremist ways, he talked of mounting a campaign for Congress just last year.
And Gaetz’s antics only seemed to help him rise in prominence. One day he was mocking COVID fears by wearing a gas mask on the floor of Congress. A few days later, he was flying in Air Force One.
One day, Floridians were dropping jaws after a lone Republican, State Rep. Chris Latvala, came forward to say Gaetz created a “game where members of the FL House got ‘points’ for sleeping with aides, interns, lobbyists, and married legislators.” The same week, we read stories identifying Gaetz as “a close DeSantis ally.”
These stories were well circulated.
In fact, it wasn’t the latest salacious accusations that we at the Sentinel have been scrutinizing for years. Rather, it was things like Gaetz’s role as a DeSantis adviser, even on issues in Orlando, 400 miles from Gaetz’s Panhandle district. Gaetz boasted about helping DeSantis make appointment choices for Orlando’s airport board. You remember that, right? The new appointees were part of a coup that tried to orchestrate a lucrative no-bid legal contract.
Gaetz was screaming about draining the swamp in Washington while helping fill it with sludge back in Florida.
Maybe before these guys were first elected, people didn’t know better. In fact, I understand why Seminole County voters first elected Greenberg, since he was trying to oust another tax collector with a troubling, conflict-of-interest track record. Seminole residents were trying to clean up one mess and accidentally made another.
But the new mess was quickly apparent. After Greenberg took office, he put friends on his payroll, struck weird cryptocurrency deals and had repeated run-ins with local authorities.
Meanwhile, Gaetz just laughed and scoffed as serious people asked serious questions about the conspiracies he peddled, the company he kept and the sex games his former legislative colleague said he played.
Everybody knew who these guys were. And few people in power seemed to care.
I think there were many among them who thought these guys were awesome.
Even now, Gaetz is still scheduled to headline a “Women for Trump” fundraiser in South Florida later this week. And I have little doubt that Greenberg would still have his supporters and cheerleaders if he were still in office, mocking Muslims and handing out cushy jobs instead of sitting in jail facing nearly three dozen federal charges.
The people who encouraged and indulged all this past behavior had no problems with it back then, no matter how aghast they want to act now.
They got precisely the kind of leaders they wanted.
The problem is that the rest of us did, too.
There is no bottom.
U.S. intelligence officials have little comfort to offer a pandemic-weary planet about where the world is heading in the next 20 years. Short answer: It looks pretty bleak.
On Thursday, the National Intelligence Council, a center in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that creates strategic forecasts and estimates, often based on material gathered by U.S. spy agencies, released its quadrennial “Global Trends” report.
Looking over the time horizon, it finds a world unsettled by the coronavirus pandemic, the ravages of climate change — which will propel mass migration — and a widening gap between what people demand from their leaders and what they can actually deliver.
The intelligence community has long warned policymakers and the public that pandemic disease could profoundly reshape global politics and U.S. national security. The authors of the report, which does not represent official U.S. policy, describe the pandemic as a preview of crises to come. It has been a globally destabilizing event — the council called it “the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II — that “has reminded the world of its fragility” and “shaken long-held assumptions” about how well governments and institutions could respond to a catastrophe.
At the same time, the pandemic accelerated and exacerbated social and economic fissures that had already emerged. And it underscored the risks from “more and cascading global challenges, ranging from disease to climate change to the disruptions from new technologies and financial crises,” the authors write.
In language that will resonate with just about anyone who has tread water in the past year, the authors write of a “looming disequilibrium between existing and future challenges and the ability of institutions and systems to respond.”
Within societies, fragmentation is increasing — political, cultural, economic — and “large segments of the global population are becoming wary of institutions and governments that they see as unwilling or unable to address their needs,” the report says.
The effects of the pandemic will linger, and could shape future generations’ expectations of their governments, particularly as a warming world leads to new human conflicts, including, in the most dire scenario, global food shortages that spawn mass violence.
Global power was contested long before the pandemic, and those trends haven’t abated.
The report sees the international stage as largely being shaped by a rivalry between China and the United States, along with its allies. No single state is poised to become the dominant global force, the authors write. And competing powers will jockey for position, leading to “a more conflict-prone and volatile geopolitical environment.”
Technology, with all its potential to boost economies and enhance communication, also may aggravate political tension — as it already has.
People “are likely to gravitate to information silos of people who share similar views, reinforcing beliefs and understanding of the truth,” the report concludes.
Prediction is an inherently risky business, and intelligence practitioners are quick to emphasize that they can’t see the future. But the National Intelligence Council imagines five scenarios on a kind of sliding scale that may help tell us where the world is turning as we approach 2040.
On the rosiest end, a “Renaissance of democracies” ushers in a new era of U.S. global leadership, in which economic growth and technological achievements offer solutions to the world’s biggest problems and Russia and China are largely left in the dust, authoritarian vestiges whose brightest scientists and entrepreneurs have fled to the United States and Europe.
At the dark end of the future is “tragedy and mobilization,” when the United States is no longer the dominant player, and a global environmental catastrophe prompts food shortages and a “bottom-up” revolution, with younger people, scarred by their leaders’ failures during the coronavirus pandemic, embracing policies to repair the climate and tackle long-standing social inequality. In this scenario, a European Union dominated by green parties works with the United Nations to expand international aid and focus on sustainability, and China joins the effort in part to quell domestic unrest in its cities affected by famine.
In between those extremes, the report imagines three other possibilities: China becomes a leading state but not globally dominant; the United States and China prosper and compete as the two major powers; and globalization fails to create a single source of influence, and the world more or less devolves into competing blocs, preoccupied with threats to their prosperity and security.
The present has a lot of say over the future. And there, the authors find reason for alarm.
“The international system — including the organizations, alliances, rules, and norms — is poorly set up to address the compounding global challenges facing populations,” the authors write.
But the pandemic may offer lessons on how not to repeat recent history. The authors note that although European countries restricted travel and exports of medical supplies early in the crisis, the European Union has now rallied around an economic rescue package. That “could bolster the European integration projecting going forward.”
“Covid-19 could also lead to redirection of national budgets toward pandemic response and economic recovery,” they add, “diverting funds from defense expenditures, foreign aid, and infrastructure programs in some countries, at least in the near term.”
But overall, the pandemic leaves the authors with more questions than answers — and humbled.
“As researchers and analysts, we must be ever vigilant, asking better questions, frequently challenging our assumptions, checking our biases, and looking for weak signals of change,” they write.
Their work is not all doomsaying. The forces shaping the world “are not fixed in perpetuity,” the authors say. Countries that exploit technology and planning, particularly those that plan ahead for the seemingly inevitable consequences of climate change, will be poised to best manage the crisis. And countries that harness artificial intelligence could boost productivity and expand their economies in ways that let government deliver more services, reduce debt and help cover the costs of caring for aging populations.
Ultimately, the societies that succeed will be those that can adapt to change, but also forge social consensus around what should be done, the authors write. In a splintering world, that may be the hardest scenario to imagine.
I’m just leaving that here to think about. I don’t think anyone can really tell the future. But the volatility is real and I don’t think we’ve yet understood just how serious that is, even with the experience of the last year — well, actually, the last five years. We are in flux and it could go either way. I’m not sanguine about America’s ability to adapt to it. We used to be a pragmatic society. I’m not so sure we still are.
Well, I guess that’s it:
I have said it before and will say it again to remove any shred of doubt: There is no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster. The time has come to end these political games, and to usher a new era of bipartisanship where we find common ground on the major policy debates facing our nation.
That is an unequivocal statement which just gave away all his power to the Republicans. No more guessing, no more worrying. They know that all they have to do is stage a little kabuki dance pretending that Biden and the Dems are rejecting their good faith efforts and that’s the end of that. Even if Biden were to whittle down his plans to be so small they could fit on a matchbook cover they will never get 10 Republicans to vote for it and not even one would vote to push it through reconciliation. Not even Mitt or Susan. It simply will not happen.
The only way they will be able to get 10 Republicans to vote for Democratic legislation is to agree to repeal Obamacare, defund Planned Parenthood, cut taxes on the wealthy and require every American to be armed at all times. In other words, there can only be “bipartisanship” if the Democrats agree to enact the Republican agenda. And even then, I don’t think they’ll be able to get 10 votes. Recall that Obama offered them cuts in Social Security and Medicare, their Holy Grail for 60 years, and they walked away. Of course, that was because the Democrats wanted some minor tax hikes in return and they simply won’t stand for that.
The deal is that Democrats get nothing.
They must bend the knee, beg the Republicans to please, please help them out and then they will walk away anyway, triumphant that they owned the libs. That’s how this works.
Supposedly, the White House isn’t concerned:
White House communications director Kate Bedingfield on Thursday brushed off concerns over Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) reiterating his opposition to eliminating or weakening the filibuster in a Washington Post op-ed, as Democrats work to push their sweeping voting rights bill and other major legislation forward.
In his op-ed published Wednesday night, Manchin argued that the filibuster, a Senate procedure that requires 60 votes to pass legislation, is “a critical tool to protecting that input and our democratic form of government.”
Manchin, a moderate Democrat who plays a key role in the 50-50 Senate, also signaled that he opposes using budget reconciliation to pass Democratic legislation, and that he will not make an exception for his fellow Democrats’ voting rights bill nor President Biden’s massive infrastructure package.
Asked to respond to Manchin’s vehement defenses of keeping the filibuster as is, Bedingfield denied that the West Virginia senator poses a threat to the President’s agenda. She asserted that senators raising their concerns is simply part of the process behind advancing legislation.
“Absolutely not, he remains a key partner,” Bedingfield said when asked whether Manchin’s comments were a blow to Biden. “Look, this is how the process works. Senators will come forward. They’ll raise their concerns, they’ll raise their issues.”
Bedinfield emphasized that Biden wants a “collaborative process” where Democrats and Republicans put their concerns on the table.
“I mean, what the President has said is that the only thing he finds unacceptable here is inaction,” Bedingfield said. “So he knows this is going to be a process where there are going to be compromise. There is going to be negotiation.”
Bedingfield reiterated that Manchin remains a key partner and that the White House is working on outreach to members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, especially when it comes to Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan.
Don’t be surprised to see Manchin destroy Biden’s agenda and then have the Republicans take him out in 2024. It’s how they roll.
I’m reminded once more of my favorite lines from Lincoln’s Cooper Union which remain relevant to this day:
The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.
These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.
I think he may have been too generous. Mitch McConnell, the gravedigger of democracy, figured out that total obstruction actually works better for them than gaining the opposition’s acquiescence. The pre-civil war South cared about something — slavery. They wanted to preserve it and because it was a disgusting, immoral institution, they wanted everyone to join them enthusiastically in preserving it. The congressional Republicans today care about nothing but maintaining power and they are totally shameless. They know that to pass anything on a bipartisan basis, even their own agenda, means that the other side will share the credit and that means they may share the power too.
There are always one or two Democrats who think they are powerful in these situations, too, and they get high on it and do the kind of thing Manchin is doing today. But they are silly fools. They’re actually handing it over to the Republicans who laugh and laugh at them behind their backs.
Where we were:
President Donald Trump‘s trade adviser Peter Navarro, who the president recently tapped to help implement the Defense Production Act amid the coronavirus crisis, is publicly pushing back against the nation’s top infectious disease expert.
“Doctors disagree about things all the time,” Navarro, an economist, told CNN’s “New Day” Monday. “My qualifications in terms of looking at the science is that I’m a social scientist. I have a Ph.D., and I understand how to read statistical studies, whether it’s in medicine, the law, economics or whatever.”
The comments come after Axios first reported that on Saturday, Navarro, in the Situation Room, lashed out at Fauci after he questioned the trade adviser on the science behind his promotion of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19.
“On Saturday, and if we didn’t have disagreement or debate in the Trump administration, this administration would not be as strong as it is,” Navarro told CNN, appearing to confirm the argument took place.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images, FILEEconomic Advisor Peter Navarro and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Aller…Read More“The issue wasn’t about me offering my medical opinion,” Navarro continued. “The question was whether we should take the 29 million doses in the FEMA storehouses and surge them into the zones, and it was unanimous in that task force meeting to do so. So, that’s the only question I posed.”
President Trump has put more stock in hydroxychloroquine than his top medical experts, having previously described the drug as possibly one of “the biggest game-changers in the history of medicine.”
Fauci, meanwhile, has cautioned against putting too much promise in any “anecdotal evidence” before clinical trials are complete, emphasizing social distancing instead.
If you think that stuff didn’t make a difference, think again. Just the fact that that fool Navarro was working on procurement and arguing with Fauci says it all.
Some assembly required (CNN):
At least one of the Capitol riot defendants has flipped against the Proud Boys, agreeing to provide information that could allow the Justice Department to bring a more severe charge against the group’s leadership, according to an attorney involved in the case.
The development is the first indication that people charged in the insurrection are cooperating against the pro-Trump extremist group. Federal prosecutors have made clear they are focused on building conspiracy cases against leadership of the Proud Boys and paramilitary groups like the Oath Keepers.
Court records have made murmurs for weeks about cooperators and plea deals in the works, and prosecutors revealed that a rioter wearing an Oath Keepers hat was in talks to cooperate earlier this week.
The course of the prosecution may follow the pattern of organized crime or drug rings, CNN adds.
At least one defendant, Jon Schaffer, a guitarist with the heavy metal band Iced Earth, is considering cooperating, according to a filing on Monday. Schaffer allegedly charged at police officers in the Capitol insurrection and is in jail while he awaits trial. In court, he has distanced himself from the Oath Keepers.
Still, Schaffer did “debrief interviews” starting in March, according to the filing, which prosecutors intended to share in court confidentially and mistakenly made public.”
As usual, Marcy Wheeler has been tracking these developments pretty closely. She reviewed the filing regarding Schaffer on Tuesday. If the cooperation deal with Schaffer happens, it will be the first among 350+ Capitol Riot defendants. But any agreements could still be weeks away.
Republicans really are serious about becoming a minority-rule party. The party’s vote-suppression legislation in state after state is simply their most bald-faced effort in that direction. But not the only one.
The party is making a concerted effort to undercut widespread public support for President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan. Why, this element isn’t infrastructure, and that isn’t infrastructure, they complain. Only roads and bridges (and maybe airports) count as infrastructure, conservatives argue.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell declared last week that Biden’s plan “is not going to get support from our side.” McConnell said he will fight Biden’s agenda “every step of the way.”
Meaning, what the majority of American people want the Republican minority will oppose. That’s some real “outside the ballot box” thinking there.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Wednesday evening pointed to a Politico/Morning Consult poll (above) showing majority support for elements of Biden’s infrastructure package. Even among Republican voters.
That does not mean congressional Republicans will not pull out all the stops to persuade Americans that they don’t want their government to do what they want their government to do.
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent consulted Sean McElwee of Data for Progress about how Democrats (with no help from Sen. Joe Manchin) might push back. Ditch “caregiving infrastructure” for “health care jobs,” McElwee suggests:
“You’re basically setting up a situation like 2018, where Democrats wanted to give you health care, and Republicans wanted to strip it away,” McElwee told me.
McElwee said the particulars of Biden’s plan could play well in 2022 precisely because they are focused on funding health care for the elderly.
“Older voters are most likely to be engaged and mobilized in a midterm environment,” McElwee said.
Referring to “health care jobs,” McElwee suggested, casts the concept of a care economy or a caregiving infrastructure as a blueprint for creating jobs while making more health care available to more people.
“I don’t think it’s bad for us to be talking about this as part of an infrastructure bill,” McElwee told me. “It’s the strongest grounds for us to be talking about it.”
And a place Republicans do not want to be again after their disastrous losses in the 2018 mid-term elections.
As the millennial generation ages, they will soon be caring for older parents:
“Home health care and eldercare — that’s a millennial issue,” McElwee told me, adding that branding Democrats as the party that wants to invest in these things could pay off just when millennials start voting “at much higher rates.”
Combine that with this poll data from Gallup:
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In Gallup polling throughout the first quarter of 2021, an average of 49% of U.S. adults identified with the Democratic Party or said they are independents who lean toward the Democratic Party. That compares with 40% who identified as Republicans or Republican leaners. The nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage is the largest Gallup has measured since the fourth quarter of 2012. In recent years, Democratic advantages have typically been between four and six percentage points.
The Grim Reaper and his minority-rule party have Joe Biden just where they want him.
You may recall that at one point the GOP was sued by Donald Trump for using his name to raise money. They settled that complaint (because Trump had no leag right to do it) and so they are really going for it.
I’m sure you recall the story about the massive con job perpetrated on unsuspecting Trump supporters during the campaign in which they were misled into giving weekly donations and contributing to “money bombs.” I wrote about it in depth, here.
The NRCC — the GOP’s congressional campaign arm — is taking it to an even more malevolent level. Tim Miller at The Bulwark reports on this latest pitch:
Ominous. But literally every single word in the text is untrue. (Except “Timothy.”)
Let’s break it down:
For starters, Donald Trump has not started a new social media site yet, he’s just talked about it. And if we learned anything from Infrastructure Week, the Trump healthcare plan, The Great, Beautiful Wall That Mexico Paid For, and his sacred landslide re-election victory, it’s that vaporware is Trump’s primary product.
But even if Trump Social does come into existence, the NRCC—which is a Republican party committee not affiliated with Donald Trump—would have no operating control or ability to sign people up for this private enterprise.
Which creates an ontological conundrum: Can an offer that doesn’t exist expire in 10 minutes? And finally: I promise you that the NRCC will in fact ask for my money again with another limited-time offer.
So the NRCC is offering early access to a product that you have to presume there will be a lot of demand for and just pocketing the cash for themselves while the user, who you have to assume was excited about Trump Twitter—not supporting some random House Republican’s re-election campaign—gets nothing but the bill.
Once you click on the link in this text spam, you’re taken to a landing page where you’re asked to make a contribution in order to be “the first to join” this nonexistent social media site—over which the NRCC has no control.
Then this:
I know we must feel some sympathy for the people who get suckered by this but it’s getting hard. This is so monumentally stupid and obvious that you have to wonder if they know it’s ridiculous and they just don’t care.
And by the way …
Former Vice President Mike Pence is looking at a possible 2024 run at the presidency with the help of the Advancing American Freedom advocacy group, which the Washington Examiner says is “designed to merge traditional conservative thinking with Trumpism.”
The group’s advisory board includes former members of the Trump administration such as Kellyanne Conway and Larry Kudlow.
“Advancing American Freedom plans to build on the success of the last four years by promoting traditional conservative values and promoting the successful policies of the Trump administration,” Pence said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “Conservatives will not stand idly by as the radical left and the new administration attempt to threaten America’s standing as the greatest nation in the world with their destructive policies.”
Even Trump gave a statement to The Washington Examiner with a good a word for his former VP. “It was the most successful first term in American history,” he said. “Nice to see Mike highlighting some of our many achievements!”
Is that a good word for his former VP or for himself? Lol.
And anyway, their term was a fucking disaster. The president was impeached twice, the US became a rogue state/laughing stock, and more than 500,000 Americans died, most of those deaths avoidable if the federal government had been functional There was also a violent insurrection and half the public has been brainwashed into believing a monumental lie even bigger than the one that says this presidency was successful. Nothing in American history even comes close and in world history, comparisons to nuts like Caligula come to mind.
It doesn’t seem that Trump is very worried about a Pence 2024 run. I’d guess he’s right. I don’t make predictions about politics but my gut instinct tells me that Mike Pence’s chances of becoming president are somewhat less likely than Britney Spears.
As for Kellyanne Conway and Larry Kudlow — please. If they think they are going to rehab their reputations, they have another thing coming. Pence can’t either, of course. But his is somewhat different than theirs. Pence is the guy who spent four years publicly fluffing Trump so blatantly that it even made Trumpers nauseous and then he betrayed their Dear Leader at the end. I don’t think that’s going to be forgivable.
Conway and Kudlow are crude Trump henchmen and nothing more now. If they aren’t on his team they are enemies. Trump will not forgive them if he decides to run. And nobody who isn’t a Trump loyalist will ever trust them.
It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. Watch who gives them money.
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