Here’s First Dog Champ in his younger years:
This PSA was done for the Puppy Bowl back in January when COVID was killing 4,000 people a day. Both Champ and Major were very good boys:
"what digby sez..."
Month: May 2021
I don’t think Democrats are as concerned as they should be about what’s going on with The Big Lie. Earlier today I saw the Club for Grown president on CNN saying that he couldn’t say if the election was legitimate until “all the facts come out” tacitly endorsing the looney tunes “audit” in Arizona and those that are inevitably to come. I’m increasingly concerned that if the Republicans win the House in 2022, they will impeach Biden for stealing the election. (I’m quite sure they’ll impeach him for something in any case … payback is the guiding philosophy of he Trump party.)
Josh Marshall makes the case that they are preparing for 2024:
One of the little-remarked-on dynamics of the 2020 post-election is how many Republicans, mostly at the state level, didn’t go along with The Big Lie or efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election. The key in most cases was that it’s one thing to mouth off or make a protest vote. It’s another to break the law or specifically refuse a legal responsibility of office. Would Brad Raffensperger have stood his ground against overturning a free in fair election if he’d been a Republican member of Congress rather than Georgia’s top election administrator? I tend to doubt it. The same applies to Gov. Kemp, though he took much less of a clear stand.
But since January Republicans who don’t sign on to The Big Lie are being purged from office across the country. We’re seeing the Liz Cheney drama front and center. But comparable things are happening across the country. It’s the personnel component of the wave of voting restriction bills we’re seeing passing in numerous Republican states.
Earlier this week, I heard from one reader who described a situation in California with a proposed recall for a local school board, trying to eject school board members who hadn’t reopened schools quickly enough. Obviously, schools having been a very contentious issue for the last year. So on its face that’s just the pull and tussle of democratic action – a feature of civic vitality rather than a bug. But when I looked into the story it showed an intensity – and a level of extreme agitation out of sync with public opinion – that I was inclined to agree with the reader who said he felt like the community was headed toward a local version of the Capitol Insurrection.
This is all speculative of course. We’re barely three months out from the events of the insurrection and Joe Biden’s inauguration. But we should start seriously thinking about scenarios in 2024 where the local officials who by and large didn’t agree to falsify election returns in 2020 – even when they were standard variety partisan Republicans – will agree to do so in 2024.
Let’s think of Congress. It’s more likely than not that Republicans will recapture the House next year. If that happens, will the House agree to certify Electoral College results if Joe Biden is reelected? I don’t think we can take that for granted – to put it mildly.
As odious as her politics may be in general, Liz Cheney is in the process of being ejected from the House GOP leadership because she won’t embrace The Big Lie and continues to see the Capitol insurrection as a development which presents an existential threat to the future of the democratic order. That is incompatible with being a Republican. The Big Lie and the insurrection aren’t about 2020. It’s about 2024.
Chris Hayes eloquently made that case earlier this week in detail . Watch all the way to the end.
Lindsey Graham is just trying to harness the magic:
Here’s the latest:
Sure they lost the House, Senate and White House under Trump but he’s magic and he’s going to grow the party.
It’s clear to me that he’s really, truly enamored of Trump. It’s not just expediency or craven political positioning. He likes him, he really likes him.
I just saw Frank Luntz on TV trying to share what he’s learned about how to convince people to get vaccines. I understand that we have to be compassionate and understanding of people who are hesitant. But I have no fucks left to give for the Trumpers who are just being obstinate.
Luntz indicates that they need to be coddled and comforted and everyone needs to find ways to make them feel good about themselves. Great. Go for it. Their family doctor or pharmacist or preacher can do that work.
Anyway, I came across this focus group Luntz held about the election which illustrates the political divide. I’ll let you be the judge of which ones in the group are the most obnoxious:
That was back in January. I doubt things have improved.
I’m no fan of Frank Luntz. He was an essential element of the GOP’s embrace of propaganda and demonization of the opposition. But he does seem to have had an epiphany. Which is good. We need at least a few Americans to have epiphanies if we want to keep our democracy.
I don’t know about you but I am shocked, SHOCKED, to learn that Ron DeSantis is a terrible person who mentally tortures people who work for him. I never would have guessed …
RON DESANTIS is looking ahead to reelection next year and quite possibly a 2024 bid for president — but he’s left behind a trail of former disgruntled staffers and has no long-standing political machine to mount a national campaign, DeSantis vets say.
We talked to a dozen or so onetime aides and consultants to the Florida governor, and they all said the same thing: DeSantis treats staff like expendable widgets. He largelyrelies on a brain trust of two: himself and his wife, CASEY DESANTIS, a former local TV journalist.Beyond that there are few, if any, “DeSantis people,” as far as political pros are concerned.
Yes, DeSantis recently hired highly regarded operative PHIL COX. But there’s no savant that he’s been through the trenches with, like a KARL ROVE or DAVID AXELROD — let alone an army of loyalists. That’s probably not fatal to his White House prospects, but it can’t help.
A few key nuggets from our reporting:
— A “support group” of former DeSantis staffers meets regularly to trade war stories about their hardship working for the governor. The turnover in his office and among his campaign advisers is well known among Republicans: In three of his five full years in Congress, he ranked in at least the 70th percentile in terms of highest turnover in a House office, according to data compiled by Legistorm. In the governor’s office, he has only two staffers who started with him when he was a junior member of Congress.
— Within six months of taking office as governor in 2019, DeSantis fired five staffers. One was a 23-year-old scheduler who’d been with him since the beginning of his gubernatorial race. Shortly after she was sent packing, an unnamed member of DeSantis’ administration was quoted in a Florida blog trashing her performance. A month later, his deputy chief of staff left, prompting Florida reporters to press him about the rapid churn in his operation.
— Another story relayed to us by five former staffers: At the beginning of his administration, DeSantis directed the Florida Republican Party leader to fire a party official who had cancer — on that person’s first week back from surgery.
— DeSantis often blames his staff for his own blunders, we’re told. After DeSantis went on Fox News in 2018 and implored Florida voters not to “monkey this up” by supporting his African American Democratic opponent for governor, he and his wife chewed out his campaign staff for not cleaning up the mess, according to three former staffers. Shortly after, DeSantis brought in a whole new group of advisers.
— Aides would lure DeSantis to staff meetings with cupcakes, saying that it was a colleague’s birthday to get him to attend. In the gubernatorial primary, DeSantis visited his campaign headquarters just a couple of times. On election night, he entered the war room after his win and remarked, “Wow, I didn’t know this many people worked for me,” according to four former staffers.
DeSantis’ office didn’t respond directly to these specifics, but called the line of questioning a false narrative. His chief of staff, ADRIAN LUKIS, sent a 5-page document with statements from 14 current and former staffers, consultants and GOP party leaders praising DeSantis, including his former chief of staff SHANE STRUM.
“Throughout my time as Chief of Staff, the Governor empowered me to make sure that everyone who worked for him had the best interests of the state at heart,” Strum wrote. “We didn’t tolerate leakers, and we didn’t tolerate grifters. Fortunately, aside from some individuals we had to part with early in the administration, the Governor has had a strong and loyal team, who he appreciates.”
But many former DeSantis aides we spoke with told a different story. They did not want to be quoted by name because of potential professional repercussions.
“Loyalty and trust, that is not a currency he deals in,” one said. “It’s him and Casey. But everyone else is like a disposable piece of garbage.”
It’s not just staffers whom DeSantis has cycled through, but political consultants who ran his four campaigns. They include top D.C. political hands like BRAD HEROLD at Something Else, BARNEY KELLER at Jamestown & Associates, pollster TONY FABRIZIO and Trump’s top aide SUSIE WILES. Wiles now oversees Trump’s political operation.
Say this much for DeSantis: Whatever he’s doing has worked for him so far. In eight years, he’s risen from 34-year-old freshman congressman to governor of a powerhouse state and potential heir apparent to Trump as leader of the Republican Party.
But the leap from running for Congress or governor to seeking the presidency is obviously huge. And DeSantis, at least as it stands now, would not bring a band of loyal staffers to a grueling national campaign.
DeSantis had better be careful. Trump is pretty much confirming that he’s running again. Recall that when asked about it by Candace Owens he replied:
“The answer is I’m absolutely enthused. I look forward to doing an announcement at the right time. As you know, it’s very early. But I think people are going to be very, very happy when I make a certain announcement. You know for campaign finance reasons, you really can’t do it too early because it becomes a whole different thing. Otherwise I think I’d give you an answer that you’d be very happy with. So we’re looking at that very, very seriously. All I’d say is: stay tuned.”
I’m pretty sure he’s not talking about Democrats being happy that he’s not running…
Formally declaring his candidacy would open Trump up to required financial disclosure forms and election laws that would dictate how he can raise and spend money in the meantime. And raising money is his top priority right now — especially the dark kind he can spend however he wants.
As for Desantis, I think being an asshole is a feature not a bug. Republican voters love that stuff. Personally, I think he’s going to be Trump’s pick for VP. Trump’s already said he would happily put him on the ticket and he’s still pissed at Pence for failing to self-immolate on his behalf on January 6th. And DeSantis can’t say no. Trump would never forgive him.
I don’t think DeSantis has the talent for the “seen but not heard” adoring lover role that Pence played so well though. It would be interesting to see how he takes to the requirement for ostentatious bootlicking. Who knows? He might very well love it. So many of them do.
The Brennan Center has launched a new project to keep tabs on these laws that empower Trump yahoos and white supremacists to harass voters at the polls:
It’s been six months since the presidential election, and Trump’s slander against the election is still corroding our democracy.
As Rep. Liz Cheney, the House Republican whip, tweeted, “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”
Unfortunately, Trump’s baseless claim has become a litmus test for Republicans. It’s tragic. Those who spoke out against Trump’s lies are facing consequences. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who called for Trump to resign after the January 6 insurrection and voted to convict him of inciting it, will face a primary challenger in 2022. Cheney has faced calls to step down from her leadership role in the House.
It’s not hyperbole to say that, because of Trump’s Big Lie, free and fair elections are under withering fire. The foundation of our democracy is being tested by a conspiracy theory. This is apparent in the over 360 bills moving through states that would make voting harder. And among those are 40 bills in 20 different states that would expand the powers of poll watchers.
This might seem innocuous. However, in these polarized times, it’s anything but. Republicans across the nation want to weaponize something that should be nonpartisan and strictly regulated.
Poll watchers are individuals who observe the election process — both at polling places and as ballots are reviewed and counted. Each state has its own laws on what watchers may and may not do, what qualifications and training they must have, who can appoint watchers, and how many can serve at a given location.
Most states have measures in place to protect against voter intimidation and harassment, but 33 of the recently introduced bills would give poll watchers more authority to observe voters and election officials, with fewer limitations on their actions. In Michigan, the New York Times reports, the Republican-controlled legislature wants to ban nonpartisan poll watchers in favor of party hacks.
What, you ask, could go wrong?
Additionally, 30 bills have been introduced to give poll watchers greater access to the ballot counting process, ballot processing activities, and voting data processing. Eleven of these bills are moving, and one, in Georgia, has already become law. Our new resource, “Who Watches the Poll Watchers?” describes these bills and their threat to our democracy.
Violence and intimidation at the polls are not exactly new. They were far too common throughout much of the country’s history. All across the country, partisans would brawl, and Black and immigrant voters would be driven away. (Recall that William Rehnquist’s confirmation for the Supreme Court was roiled over reports that he had gone up to Latino voters in Arizona, purporting to do ballot security, but actually trying to intimidate them.) But over the past half century or so, this bad habit actually largely went away. It has not been a widespread factor in our elections.
These proposals risk bringing back this ugly aspect of America’s past.
There’s no good reason to subject citizens exercising their constitutional right to vote to possible harassment and intimidation. We knew the damage caused by Trump and his Big Lie would last beyond the election. But it’s disheartening, to say the least, to watch it become a uniting factor and driver of policy for one of our country’s major political parties.
Click over to that resource to see what they have in mind. It’s just chilling.
I had never heard of congresswoman Elise Stefanik, R-NY, until the House of Representatives hearings for Trump’s first impeachment. She stormed into the national consciousness by repeatedly whining that Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff was refusing to let her speak and became an overnight sensation. (He was not — she just used the opportunity to rant about how unfair the process was, instantly endearing herself to Republicans all over the country.) Donald Trump was so impressed with her obnoxious behavior that he tweeted: “A new Republican star is born!”
And her star has been rising ever since.
But as it happens, Stefanik was a woman in a hurry long before her breakout role as a pugnacious Donald Trump defender. Prior to volunteering as a Trump henchwoman, she had been seen as a moderate from New York, someone who with reservations about his leadership. She had the perfect GOP establishment resume, having attended Harvard, worked on staff in the Bush White House, on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and participated in such projects as the 2014 Republican “autopsy” which had recommended that the Party moderate and work to appeal to women, and racial and ethnic minorities. She was considered on the moderate side of the dial although she partnered with Congresswoman Liz Cheney at one point on a bill to halt the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan which put her firmly in the right-wing hawk camp. She’s always had her bases covered.
But according to NPR reporter Brian Mann, who covered her since she first ran for congress in 2014, despite the stellar DC resume, Stefanik downplayed her credentials. Her pitch to the voters in her first race in 2014 was that she grew up in a small town in the district but it turned out that nobody there knew who she was. She was an excellent campaigner, however, who won her seat handily, and in the process making it clear to all the powers that be in the party that she was seriously pursuing a national profile.
2016 was a setback with the election of Donald Trump and she carefully calibrated her message to criticize while not making enemies. She sold herself as a “maverick” from a district that had long elected moderates but had voted for Trump by double digits. She voted against the Trump tax cuts, backed equal rights for LGBT citizens and supported the DREAM act. But in Trump’s GOP she was going nowhere with that agenda.
So she switched gears and by the time the first impeachment came around she had become an enthusiastic Trump sycophant, a junior member of the exclusive club of important Trump henchmen like Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows and Devin Nunes. She found a way to leverage her “bipartisan” record as a selling point by fatuously proclaiming that her support for Trump was particularly credible because it came out of her fealty to the Constitution, which is as Trumpy as it gets. By the time 2020 rolled around, she was one of the most vociferous purveyors of the Big Lie, even when some of the others were tiptoeing around the subject. As Mann put it on Twitter:
“Throughout the process [Stefanik] showed steady ambition, an ability to adapt and evolve her politics, and a willingness to shed old loyalties and allies while amplifying factual untruths when necessary. Her brand may be a perfect match for the modern GOP”
It’s clear that she is a shameless political shapeshifter. But it turns out that her real talent is demagoguery and flamboyant outrage which, again, makes her the perfect woman for the moment.
During Trump’s first impeachment trial, after her star turn on the Intelligence Committee, she was chosen to be on Trump’s team of defenders (as opposed to his defense team) along with Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York and Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina. They would gather in the basement of the Capitol every day with members of the press eager to hear their latest broadsides against the Democrats and “the process.” They were obviously working hand in glove with the White House and the defense team to spin the trial although they insisted they weren’t.
The 2020 election found Stefanik in loony Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood territory when it came to The Big Lie. There were lots of Republicans hemming and hawing, trying to walk the line between Trump’s petulant refusal to accept his loss and the reality that they had to move on. But Stefanik was all in, even going so far as to issue a statement explaining her decision to vote against certifying the election on the morning of the January 6th Insurrection, in which she lied blatantly about the vote count in Georgia:
This week she went on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast and enthusiastically backed the asinine Arizona recount in which an outside group is currently examining ballots for signs of bamboo in the paper in order to prove that they were part of a ballot-stuffing scheme sponsored by China.
It was a short trip from maverick, bipartisan, modern Republican to flagrant Trumpian liar in just a few years. Of course, she isn’t alone. Freedom Caucus members like Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan used to pretend to care about “fiscal responsibility” until Trump came along and made GOP politics solely about media attention, owning libs, and fighting the culture wars. (That’s what it had been for a very long time but Trump freed them from having to pretend otherwise.)
So now Stefanik is poised to join the leadership of the party by taking the place of Liz Cheney, the party’s human sacrifice to their angry god, Donald Trump. Both House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and his deputy Steve Scalise of Louisiana have thrown their support behind Stefanik and Trump released a statement on Wednesday giving her his “COMPLETE and TOTAL Endorsement,” calling her a “tough and smart communicator” so she’s pretty much a shoo-in.
There are some distant rumblings from the ragged remnants of the right-wing conservative movement, like Ann Coulter and The Club for Growth, because of her record of squishiness on issues they care about such as immigration and tax cuts. In fact, her voting record is far more moderate than Cheney’s.
But that’s not really relevant, is it?
The Republican party is no longer concerned with old-fashioned notions like “issues.” This is about fealty to the Big Lie and The Big Liar to be sure. But it’s really about maintaining power for its own sake, by any means necessary. Elise Stefanik is a woman who instinctively understands that and has proven over and over again in her short career that she is willing to do whatever it takes.
Economic policy I leave to those better-versed in it. Yves Smith, for one.
A week ago, she addressed “the multi-layered kabuki battle brewing over the indefensible and mislabeled “carried interest” loophole.” Joe Biden is threatening to close it, finally. Cory Doctorow explained it this way:
To understand carried interest, you have to start with capital gains tax. In the US, wages – money you get for working – are taxed at a higher rate than capital gains (money you get because you sold something you own at a profit).
Hedge funds and private-equity firms are crying foul over losing the tax break, Smith snarks. “Biden got far more support from private equity firms and hedge funds. Yet here he is, biting the hands that fed him!” Why, closing the loophole might do more harm than good, say private-equity lobbyists quoted in the Wall Street Journal.
Smith writes:
Understand what these lobbyists are asserting, because it’s a howler. They are trying to say, with a straight face, that investment in private equity might shrink because the pay levels for the top dogs might fall from egregious to merely embarrassingly lucrative. Or to paraphrase supermodel Linda Evangelista, “I never get out of bed for less than half a million a day.”
Pray tell, what could these Masters of the Universe possibly do that that would generate anything within hailing distance of what they earn now? Even if lower after-tax pay were a real threat, they’ve got nowhere to go, even before getting to perks like getting to push around investment bankers and top lawyers and fly private class. The fact that men that are unseemly wealthy like Steve Schwarzman and Henry Kravis are still working well into their 70s says it’s not for the money. They really like the job.
Naked Capitalism readers no doubt recognize the second strained claim, that private equity is good for the economy. The lobbyists have the temerity to talk about health care as if private equity’s involvement has been a plus, when it’s been the moving force behind surprise bills, rising ambulance prices, and finding and creating choke points in must-have services, like dialysis, by becoming mini-monopolists in target markets.
What attracted my attention was Cory Doctorow’s more Biden-ish summary of the issue (emphasis mine):
The idea that people who make money from toil should be punished because they didn’t make money by owning things is obviously fucked up – not least because if you tax workers’ wages it leaves them with less money to buy capital on which to realize gains.
And if you let the ownership class retain more of their income, it lets them buy more stuff on which they can realize those tax-preferenced gains. Preferential tax rates for capital gains are a way to make workers poorer and owners richer, period.
Now hear the word of the Lord!
The practice dates from the 16th century. That’s 500 year or so ago, for those keeping score.
If you run a hedge fund or a private equity firm, you’re typically compensated in a “2-and-20” scheme: every year, you pocket 2% of the money you’ve been given to manage, and 20% of any profits that money has realized.
These are wages, not capital gains. The money in the fund isn’t your money, it’s someone else’s (money managers investment in their own funds is a token sum, 1-3% of the total), and your share doesn’t come from selling something you own, it comes from doing a job.
PE and hedge fund managers make millions – sometimes hundreds of millions – every year this way, and because of the carried interest loophole, they get to treat those wages as if they were capital gains.
That’s how it is that if you work your guts our bending steel at a sheet-metal plant, your wages are taxed at a higher rate than the wages of the distant finance-ghoul who bought that plant, debt-loaded it, and drove it into bankruptcy.
So carried interest is bullshit and yeah, we should kill it. But as Smith points out, that would be a largely symbolic victory: there are many new tax-gimmicks that money-managers could use to shift those wages around and maintain the pretense that they are capital gains.
The only reason that these ripoff plutes are even fighting about the loophole is that they find it aesthetically untenable that the US government should poke holes in the risible fiction that their wages are, in fact, capital gains.
Naturally, the lords of the manor will simply find (or buy legislation to create) new ways of sheltering their wages from the taxman as capital gains.
Thus, writes Smith:
Getting rid of the preferential treatment of capital gains is the biggest step Biden could take to reduce the income and wealth gap between the rich and the rest of us. That plus imposing a financial transactions tax would have the salutary effect of cutting the economically unproductive asset management business down to size. Sadly we are a long way away from seeing these changes implemented.
Ruling class gonna rule. Until the pitchforks arrive, as Nick Hanauer warns.
Mr. Death Tax, Republican pollster and focus-group ringmaster Frank Luntz, spoke to Kara Swisher of New York Times’ “Sway” podcast on Thursday. Luntz reads each and every Trump email posted to “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” the former president’s new blog, God help him. (Luntz, not Trump.)
After considering Trump’s continued Facebook ban, Luntz discussed the potential impact of Trump’s persistent undermining of faith in elections, a.k.a. the Big Lie. Luntz found that 76 percent of self-identified Republicans believe the election was stolen from Trump. What might it mean for upcoming contests?
It could prevent Republicans from winning back the majorities in both houses in 2022.
“What Donald Trump is saying is actually telling people it’s not worth it to vote,” Luntz said. “Donald Trump single-handedly may cause people not to vote. And he may be the greatest tool in the Democrats’ arsenal to keep control of the House and Senate in 2022. If the Republicans lose the majority in the House, they will lay the blame at the feet of Donald Trump for telling people it’s not worth it to vote. Am I being clear?”
The problem for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Luntz says, is “You cannot win with Donald Trump. You cannot win without him.” Lose Trump voters and “Democrats win an overwhelming majority in both institutions.”
Trump would be the “odds-on favorite” to win the Republican nomination in 2024, then be an albatross for Republicans in the fall.
“I would bet on him to be the nominee,” Luntz said. “And I would bet on him losing to whatever Democratic nominee there was.” Because as of now he has lost all the crossover voters he would need to win the presidency again.
Trump is the albatross. Goo goo g’joob.
Mitch is always up front about his plans to destroy democracy, I’ll give him that:
Mitch McConnell in…
2010: “Single most important thing is for Obama to be a one-term president”
2021: “100% of my focus is standing up to the Biden administration”
And remember this from December, 2019:
The Senate majority leader boasted about stacking the courts with conservative judges under Trump.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Thursday night bragged about blocking President Barack Obama’s attempt to fill federal judicial vacancies for two years. Then, he laughed about it as he discussed the Republican Party’s effort to stack the courts with conservative judges under President Donald Trump.
“I was shocked that former President Obama left so many vacancies and didn’t try to fill those positions,” Fox News host Sean Hannity said to McConnell.
Obama didn’t leave those vacancies so much as he was blocked from filling them by a GOP-controlled Senate led by McConnell ― something the majority leader was quick to point out.
“I’ll tell you why,” he said. “I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration.”
Then, he laughed:
“I will give you full credit for that, and by the way take a bow,” Hannity said. “All right, that was good line!”
McConnell not only blocked federal judges, he prevented Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland from even getting a hearing. In 2018, McConnell told Kentucky Today that the decision to block Garland’s appointment was “the most consequential decision I’ve made in my entire public career.”
I’d guess he would say ramming through Amy Coney Barrett in the waning days of the 2020 campaign ranks right up there too. Remember, he didn’t try to hide what he was going to do. When asked years earlier what he would do if faced with a similar situation as the one Obama faced and a vacancy came up in the last year of Trump’s term, he smugly replied, “we’d fill it.” And he did.
Anyone who believes that Donald Trump is the only toxic influence on democracy in the GOP hasn’t been paying attention. The Big Lie isn’t the only game in town.