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Month: May 2021

Good luck to Trumpers in blue states

Published by digby on May 17, 2021

Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney hit the Sunday shows to reiterate her position that former President Donald Trump is a danger to the republic. It’s impossible to argue with her on this particular issue. If there is going to be a popular front to fight the GOP’s crude usurpation of democracy, it’s going to take people like Liz Cheney to join up. Unfortunately, there aren’t many of them left in the Republican Party.

CBS News released a poll over the weekend that showed 80% of Republican voters back the GOP’s decision to oust Cheney from her House leadership position. A majority of Republican voters believe she doesn’t have the right message, that she isn’t supportive enough of their maximum leader, and that she’s wrong about the 2020 election. 34% of them believe that “disloyalty should be punished” (a phrase that sounds better in the original German.) 66% believe that being loyal to the whiny loser Trump is “important.” And they are more or less split on whether the GOP strategy going forward should be to try to get more voters with policies or ideas or whether they should just change the voting rules. Seriously.

The good news is that there is a small rump, 20%, that thinks there should be room in the Republican party for different views or agree with Cheney that Trump lost the election. Unfortunately, they also happen to be the least likely to vote in the primary elections which means that only full-blown Trump cultists will be deciding who becomes the face of the GOP. Cheney’s got a very heavy burden to turn any of that around.

It’s clear though that there is some discomfort among certain Republican officials who jumped on the Trump train and now have to defend it. Granted, they are few and far between as most Republicans are more than happy to just flagrantly lie or openly defend the indefensible. Take for instance Andrew Clyde, the Republican congressman from Georgia who claimed in a House hearing last week that the violent mob that stormed Capitol on January 6th was not staging an insurrection and could have been mistaken for tourists:

People like Clyde do not suffer from emotions like shame or embarrassment.

But there are some who have a bit of a difficult time completely relinquishing any claim to reason or truth so they attempt to finesse their Trumpism with a rational dialog about why it’s important to let bygones be bygones. One such Republican appears to be Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw. He has tried to make a reputation for himself as a “reasonable” Republican, famously appearing on Saturday Night Live to demonstrate his generous absolution for a crude joke about him that missed. He appeared on Meet the Press on Sunday and ran up against an uncharacteristically aggressive Chuck Todd. It didn’t go well:

He can run but he can’t hide. Crenshaw’s insipid insistence that the party just has a “disagreement” about the election being met with Chuck Todd going back in his face with “there’s not a disagreement about the facts so do any of your critiques come across as credible if you can’t accept the fundamental fact that our democracy held a free and fair election?” is not something I ever expected to see — but it sure is welcome.

Crenshaw was spouting the party line that says Republicans want to “move on” from all of the unpleasantness over the 2020 election and the January 6th insurrection so that they can concentrate on “policy” and I’m sure many of them would love to change the subject and just quietly work on suppressing as many votes as possible without all the hoopla. But, as Todd pointed out, Donald Trump and his ecstatic followers are obsessed with “the Big Steal” and there is no escaping that fact.

Crenshaw is obviously ambitious and recognizes that this Trump folly could easily go sideways and if he plans to ascend to higher office he wants to be prepared to go in whatever direction that requires. He’s from Texas so it’s unlikely that his Trumpist leanings will hurt him too much. But what of Blue State Republicans who might want to run state-wide in the future?

Elise Stefanik, R-NY, the very determined congresswoman who took Cheney’s place in the House leadership conference demonstrated an impressive pirouette from “moderate” to hardcore, Trumper which isn’t very challenging in today’s party. (They don’t care about much of anything as long as you show undying fealty to their undisputed leader.) But there’s another politician from New York who is making a bid for governor and is currently twisting himself into a pretzel trying to spin the other way and finesse his years of delirious Trump worship in a state Joe Biden won by 23% points.

Rep. Lee Zeldin of Long Island came to Congress in 2015 as a standard-issue law and order Republican New Yorker. But he became one of Trump’s staunchest defenders from the moment he took office and stuck with him through thick and thin. He was a designated point man during the first impeachment, thrilling the president by calling the process a “charade” and a “clown show” and proudly becoming the congressman who spoke more in the impeachment depositions than any other Republican, at least 550 times according to NBC:

His attempts to steer the depositions away from Trump’s conduct and toward a host of tangential matters— including the Biden family, a conspiracy theory about the 2016 election, and even the witnesses’ own credibility — have driven counsel for multiple witnesses to their wit’s end.

Zeldin stuck with the president all the way through the post-election denialism, even issuing this dark warning on January 2nd:

Of course, he also voted against certifying the election.

Zeldin is now trying to walk back his Trump sycophancy and it’s almost comical. He told Newsday:

“So, you had tens of millions of people that came out and voted for each of the candidates. Their votes were counted. They’re counted once, and you ended up with an outcome. And that’s how President Trump, uh … President Biden became the president, was by winning the November 2020 election.”

“I believe in our country and the sanctity of our process, and I’m not going to participate in calling elections illegitimate ever. This isn’t a Third World country, and it will tear our country apart if we end up living our lives and calling elections in the past illegitimate.”

Evidently, he thinks he will be able to convince people that there is a different Lee Zeldin out there who used to say exactly the opposite of everything he’s saying now.

Will it work?

Contradicting everything you’ve ever said and acting as if it’s perfectly normal resulted in a nice promotion for his fellow New Yorker Stefanik so who knows? Maybe GOP politics are now so surreal that you can literally reinvent yourself from one month to the next without ever being held accountable for anything. How convenient?

LGMs are back

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 17, 2021

There was a flurry of UFO sightings in the 1950s and early 1960s. Books about them landed on the “paranormal” shelf. People interested in them were deemed cranks. Then sightings stopped for a long time. Or at least they stopped making news. In the last few years they are back. “60 Minutes” ran a story Sunday night. The military now calls them unidentified aerial phenomena — UAP.

These comment struck me as familiar from a similar investigation:

Christopher Mellon served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence for Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush and had access to top secret government programs. 

Chris Mellon: So it’s not us, that’s one thing we know. 

Bill Whitaker: We know that? 

Chris Mellon: I can say that with a very high degree of confidence in part because of the positions I held in the department, and I know the process. 

Mellon says he grew concerned nothing was being done about UAPs, so he decided to do something. In 2017, as a private citizen, he surreptitiously acquired the three Navy videos Elizondo had declassified and leaked them to the New York Times. 

Chris Mellon: It’s bizarre and unfortunate that someone like myself has to do something like that to get a national security issue like this on the agenda. 

He joined forces with now civilian Lue Elizondo and they started to tell their story to anybody who would listen: to newspapers, the History Channel, to members of Congress.

Chris Mellon: We knew and understood that you had to go to the public, get the public interested to get Congress interested, to then circle back to the Defense Department and get them to start taking a look at it.

My friend Barry Summers has been pursuing something similar for years. He has tried to alert the public that the military in conjunction with military contractors such as General Atomics has been working since at least 2012 to comingle large, remotely piloted military drones with civilian aircraft in U.S. air space. Drone integration programs (in the six states with them) are run by former military officers, Summers notes.

These are not hobby quadracopters. They are Reapers (rebranded the SkyGuardian for the commercial market) and Global Hawks designed for persistent surveillance. The latter have wingspans greater than a 737. They have less-than-stellar safety records. One or more were used for surveillance over Minneapolis during the George Floyd protests there last year.

A Reaper crashed on takeoff last year in Syracuse, N.Y. Another quarter mile and it might have gone through the front door of a Circle K convenience store. The Air Force told no one. It was not the first drone crash in that area. Another crashed into Lake Ontario in 2014. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection drone lost contact with its ground controller and crashed into the Pacific Ocean off San Diego in 2014. Another crashed in the desert north of Las Vegas in 2016.

The City of San Diego last year “kicked around the possibility of using the SkyGuardian drone for vehicle enforcement on the freeway — but asked General Atomics not to discuss that information publicly.” A scheduled test flight of a military-grade drone over San Diego last year was cancelled.

But it has been as frustrating as drawing attention to the UAP issue to get anyone to take drone integration seriously. Not until one crashes into a school.

Swallow coffee before reading

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 17, 2021

CNN:

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Sunday that people have to be honest with themselves when deciding whether to wear a mask after the agency lifted masking requirements for vaccinated people.

Honest?

“Well, I’m entering a bar at 11 a.m. Did you really think I was vaxxed?” asks Saturday Night Live’s Beck Bennett as “Man walks into a bar” without a mask during the show’s cold open.

“We’ve had a collapse of truth in this country,” Rep. Liz Cheney told CNN’s Jake Tapper Friday night. The House Republican caucus ousted Cheney from her leadership position last week for refusing to lie about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

A member of Cheney’s caucus was photographed helping Capitol security barricade the doors to the House chamber during the Jan. 6 Trump insurrection. Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia claimed last week it was little more than “a normal tourist visit.” To call it an insurrection is “a bold-faced lie,” he said.

You can trust him to be honest about his vaccination status.

Conservative New York Times columnist Brett Stephens dubs theirs the Reprobate-tarian Party “in thrall to a mendacious Mussolini manqué whose only saving grace is that he lacked the guile of a Vladimir Putin to competently steal the election.”

That’s more brutally blunt than honest. And it is a sad commentary on the sort of people who turned mask-wearing into a front in the culture war while promoting hydroxychloroquine as a cure for a disease they claimed was a hoax no worse than the flu as hundreds of thousands of corpses stacked up and supplies of body bags ran short. When COVID-19 vaccines finally arrived, they claimed the serum contained tracking microchips.

Sure, CDC, people like that need to be honest with themselves.

“Democrats see competence, Republicans see chaos” in President Joe Biden’s tenure so far, read a Washington Post Sunday headline.

“It is a crisis. It’s chaos. It is a catastrophe,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said at a news conference about the situation on the U.S.-Mexico border.

But nothing Donald Trump couldn’t cure with anaphora, aliteration, and a hefty dose of human rights violations.

As for the pandemic, new cases have plummeted since Biden took office and control of vaccine distribution.

Chart via Johns Hopkins.

I think that people who were not inclined to wear a mask were not inclined to wear a mask before Thursday,” Walensky told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” when asked if she trusted that people would wear a mask if they were unvaccinated.

A bit of honesty mixed with wishful thinking then.

These people belong in jail

Published by digby on May 16, 2021

I could hardly get through this article it made me so furious. Every single person involved should be indicted for fraud. If there was any other legal punishment I could think of they should have that too. I hate them with a passion:

In a lifetime of working with horses, Gary Kidd, 73, had never adopted an untrained wild mustang before. But when the federal government started paying people $1,000 a horse to adopt them, he signed up for as many as he could get. So did his wife, two grown daughters and a son-in-law.

Mr. Kidd, who owns a small farm near Hope, Ark., said in a recent telephone interview that he was using the mustangs, which are protected under federal law, to breed colts and that they were happily eating green grass in his pasture.

In fact, by the time he spoke on the phone, the animals were long gone. Records show that Mr. Kidd had sold them almost as soon as he legally could. He and his family received at least $20,000, and the mustangs ended up at a dusty Texas livestock auction frequented by slaughterhouse brokers known as kill buyers.

When asked about the sale, Mr. Kidd abruptly hung up.

The Bureau of Land Management, which is in charge of caring for the nation’s wild horses, created the $1,000-a-head Adoption Incentive Program in 2019 because it wanted to move a huge surplus of mustangs and burros out of government corrals and find them “good homes.” Thousands of first-time adopters signed up, and the bureau hailed the program as a success.

But records show that instead of going to good homes, truckloads of horses were dumped at slaughter auctions as soon as their adopters got the federal money. A program intended to protect wild horses was instead subsidizing their path to destruction.

“This is the government laundering horses,” said Brieanah Schwartz, a lawyer for the advocacy group American Wild Horse Campaign, which has tracked the program. “They call it adoptions, knowing the horses are going to slaughter. But this way the B.L.M. won’t get its fingerprints on it.”

The bureau denies the allegations, noting that the government requires all adopters to sign affidavits promising not to resell the horses to slaughterhouses or their middlemen. But a spokesman said the bureau had no authority to enforce those agreements or to track the horses once adopters have title to them.

People who dump mustangs at auctions, the spokesman said, are free to adopt and get paid again

He knew what he was doing. He lied about it. And, by the way, any BLM employees who knowingly participated in this grotesque slaughter? They should be indicted too if they are shown to have participated.

The human species is so flawed, I think we probably deserve to go extinct.

Update: The Trump administration acting director of the BLM, William Pendley (a real piece of work) had this to say in an interview when asked what he thought was the greatest threat to pubic lands:

“I’ll get really in the weeds. I think the biggest issue I see is the wild horse and burro issue. We have 88,000 wild horses and burros on our Western federal lands. They are causing havoc on the lands.”

They knew. They encouraged it.

Both sidesing reality

Published by digby on May 16, 2021

Trumpers saying that the Biden administration is chaotic, undisciplined and out of control is the kind of thing that costs me my sleep at night. It would be one thing if they tried to spread this Orwellian delusion and nobody believed it. But Republicans are buying it and now we have the news media acting as though it’s a reasonable interpretation of events.

It’s ridiculous:

President Biden’s administration by the middle of last week was confronted with images of long lines at gas pumps. The Middle East had erupted in violence. Headlines were warning that fears of inflation could threaten a fragile economy.

“Don’t panic,” Biden urged on Thursday afternoon. He meant it as a plea to drivers worried about filling their tanks, but it captured his message on the flurry of crises he is suddenly facing.

A president who prides himself on choreography and planning has seen in recent days a burst of unexpected events that showcase the need for political agility. The White House is approaching the problems — all politically sensitive — with a degree of calm and caution, even as some allies want Biden to be more forceful before events spiral further.

As Biden and his aides seek to project steadiness, many Republicans are offering an alternative interpretation: The world is increasingly engulfed in chaos on Biden’s watch as gas prices surge, crime rates rise, border crossings grow and the costs of consumer goods threaten to spike.

The dueling political messages have created a Rorschach test for voters in upcoming elections: Do they see Biden as an agent of competence or chaos?

Biden’s aides do not deny the problems cropping up on his watch, but they say his response demonstrates his effective leadership and his ability to marshal resources, summon experts and tackle multiple crises.

“If the start of the week was supposed chaos, look where the week ended up,” said Kate Bedingfield, the White House communications director. “By the end of the week, he’s saying the pipeline is online and gas is going to be back up to capacity soon, and we’ve gotten so many vaccines in arms that you don’t have to wear a mask in most instances anymore.”

“We’re not interested in a debate about competency versus chaos,” she added of the Republican criticism. “President Biden is doing the work, and the American people can judge for themselves.”

But it’s clear that in many ways, recent days have presented new tests for a young White House.

What bullshit. The gas lines were driven by morons with too much time on their hands, the Middle East erupts with regularity and it’s a normal part of any presidency to deal with it and the inflation paroxysm in the press was wildly overblown and, at the very least, premature.

The right is pumping this up because it tracks with their portrayal of Biden as a feeble old man who can hardly stay awake over his breakfast. Meanwhile, the NY Times published a long profile of Biden and the White House, clearly intended to show him as a demanding, short-tempered martinet who demands vast amounts of detail from his underlings and puts them through their paces as he deliberates over his decisions.

How those two pictures are supposed to be of the same man, I don’t know. If the wingnuts read the latter they would certainly be confused. But, of course, they will only see the distorted picture the right wing presents. I do wonder why they think they can persuade people that their lives are demonstrably worse off after the last year of hell we’ve all been through but as we know, those Trump cultists will believe anything so it doesn’t take much.

Needless to say, the whole point of this is to reach some people in the middle and convince them that the country is coming apart at the seams because of Sleepy Joe Biden. I’m not entirely sure it won’t work — many Americans have become addicted to grievance — but so far it isn’t happening. Biden’s approval rating is hanging tough in at the low 50’s while his disapproval is somewhere in the low 40s.

They don’t call it a death cult for nothing

Published by digby on May 16, 2021

82 percent of Democrats but only 43 percent of Republicans say that they’ve already been vaccinated. Among seniors, 90 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of Republicans say they’re vaccinated.

It’s not just tribal. It’s geographic as well (which also tracks to the tribal divide as well.) TPM took a look at that aspect:

Click here and scroll down to see an interactive version the map.

It shows doses per 100k residents. Precisely how this factors out in vaccinated people is a touch blurry since the great majority of vaccinations are two-shot course. States range from just over 50,000 to just over 100,000 doses per resident.

What jumps out first is how tightly the vaccination data maps to the country’s political geography. It’s not a perfect match. Generally Democratic Nevada is relatively low at ~73k doses per 100k and the Dakotas are better vaccinated than similarly Republican states. But by and large the line is pretty complete.

We shouldn’t assume this is all politicized vaccine resistance. Deep South states generally have poorer health in general than other parts of the country. So some of it is likely more tenuous public health infrastructure. But it seems clear that the driving factor is ideology and partisan identity.

They are now actively killing themselves. For Donald Trump. I will never understand it.

Update: Astonishing!

h/t

Chuck Todd FTW (Really!)

Published by digby on May 16, 2021

That’s not something I would normally say, as you know. But he did a good job this morning with that phony Dan Crenshaw who is dancing on the head of a pin trying to have it both ways. Here’s the full write-up from the Daily Beast:

Meet the Press host Chuck Todd repeatedly confronted Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) on the Republican Party’s willingness to embrace former President Donald Trump’s election lies, asking the conservative lawmaker point-blank on Sunday why anyone should “believe a word you say” since the GOP has lost credibility.

Days after House Republicans booted Liz Cheney (R-WY) from leadership over her refusal to go along with the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, Todd asked Crenshaw—who claimed on Sunday he’s no “Trump loyalist”—whether he agrees she was ousted for not carrying Trump’s water.

“No. Fundamentally, I don’t,” Crenshaw stated.

Claiming that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) felt that there was a “disagreement” over the election and it’s “time to move on,” Crenshaw went on to say that they now “need to talk about the things that American people care about.” He proceeded to list off a number of issues he wanted to address, such as inflation, the border crisis, and labor shortages.

“These are things that affect people, not this internal drama. One of the reasons I agreed to come on your show is to say that. This isn’t that important to people,” the conservative congressman added.

“But why should anybody believe a word you say if the Republican Party itself doesn’t have credibility?” Todd fired back.

After airing a clip of Cheney saying Republicans have “got to be able to tell people you can trust us” and therefore need to reject Trump’s lies about the election, Todd pushed back on Crenshaw’s insistence that it was merely about a “disagreement” on the election results.

“There’s not a disagreement about the facts,” the Meet the Press host said. “So do any of your critiques come across as credible if you can’t accept the fundamental fact that our democracy held a free and fair election?”

Asserting that he can only speak for himself, Crenshaw wondered aloud if Todd was aware of his own stance on whether Joe Biden’s election victory was legitimate. Todd, meanwhile, said he was aware that Crenshaw did not object to the electoral results in Congress but did sign onto the Texas attorney general’s lawsuit that looked to toss out votes from several swing states.

“You guys in the press painted that as some extreme action. Of course, it wasn’t,” Crenshaw complained in response. “That amicus brief was a simple question of the Supreme Court in saying, can you please speak to this question of whether process changes in the election last minute, not approved by the legislature, can be deemed constitutional? It was a question. They didn’t want to answer that question. I said it’s unconstitutional for us to overturn the election in Congress. I voted to certify.”

“This is the issue many people have,” Todd retorted. “You’re sitting here trying to say, ‘No, no, no, I just had a specific question.’ Yet, what you did gets weaponized by the former president.”

Todd also pointed out that the Republican official in charge of the Maricopa County audit recount recently called Trump “unhinged” after the ex-president falsely accused the county of deleting its election database.

“I understand you want to put this behind you, but he is the leader of your party and he doesn’t stop talking about this nonsense,” the anchor exclaimed.

“He’s one of many leaders in the party. He’s a former president,” Crenshaw replied. “We’re five months into President Biden’s presidency. There is a time to move on. You guys in the press love doing this, and I get it, right, that the press is largely liberal.”

Cutting the congressman off, Todd shot back: “No, no, no. Don’t start that. There’s nothing lazier than that excuse!”

Crenshaw said he was “not going to take the bait,” prompting Todd to insist he was only trying to figure out why the GOP is “basically rallying around this bizarre lie and mythology” that Trump is peddling.

“I already debunked the notion that there’s no space in the party for that. Remember, Liz won that first election—won that first leadership vote,” Crenshaw said.

“She’s not there now,” Todd fired back.

Unfortunately, here’s Chuck letting this slippery snake have the last word and it’s complete bullshit. Baby steps:

Killers

Published by digby on May 16, 2021

This is the beating heart of Trumpism:

“No entity can force people to take the vaccine.” She’s not talking about the government, she’s talking about private businesses. That’s where this argument is going.

She is also trying to get attention and it’s working. In fact, it’s working so well that she’d better be careful. There’s another blond monster out there who wants credit for those bogus vaccines and who really doesn’t like it when somebody competes to be the most outrageous asshole in politics. She’d better watch her step.

Trumpism IS Republicanism

Published by digby on May 16, 2021

The Washington Post spreads the conventional wisdom about the GOP’s vote suppression strategy and it’s just wrong:

The continuing claim by Republicans that some states violated their laws in expanding ballot access may have helped foster the belief among many in the party’s base that the election was stolen.

A CNN poll released in April found that 70 percent of Republicans said that Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to be elected. The survey found a deep split between party members about election security, with 76 percent of Democrats saying it was too hard to vote, while 87 percent of Republicans said the rules weren’t strict enough.

Geoff Kabaservice, who chronicled the transformation of the GOP in his 2012 book, “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party,” said in an interview that party members are clinging to Trump’s false claims about the election to protect their own reelection.

“These people are afraid of their base,” Kabaservice said. “They know that if they actually come out and forthrightly tell these 70 percent of Republicans who believe Joe Biden did not legitimately win the election, that the base will turn against them, that they’ll end up with a primary challenge, Trump himself will get involved and they’ll lose and they’ll be out of politics.”

Even McCarthy, as the leader of House Republicans, feels compelled to deliver conflicting message out of self-preservation, Kabaservice said.

“He can say one thing, either behind closed doors or to reporters in a place like Washington. But he’s not going to go out on the road with Trump and say everyone acknowledges that Joe Biden is a legitimate president. He’s not going to do it. People don’t want to stand up against Trump on this issue.”

They aren’t cowards, they are craven opportunists and willing destroyers of our democratic system.

Republicans have been trying to disenfranchise as many of their political opponents as they can for decades. They are just seizing the opportunity that Dear Leader has provided to really crank up the distrust in the system so they can degrade the system even more. Until everyone understands what the game is on this, they are are going to get away with it.

Disenfranchising the Democratic Party is their electoral strategy. It’s been their strategy for years. Trump heard all the chatter about “voter fraud” and used it for his own purposes but he didn’t come up with it on his own any more than he came up with “Make America Great Again.” His entire agenda piggybacked on various things he heard from talk radio and added a couple of his own eccentric obsessions like trade wars and hammering NATO. Voter fraud was one of them and it fit his purposes perfectly.

Trumpism is Republicanism. They are all in. I’m sure they wish that the Dear Leader of their anti-democratic, autocratic, corrupt “movement” was someone with a little bit more finesse but I’m sure they also realize that his crude, ignorant, bullying style is actually the reason so many voters love him so much.

Trump gets their voters out and they are working hard to make sure the Democrats cannot do the same. That’s the only way they can win. They just don’t have the numbers and they know it.