Month: July 2021

It’s over for him:

Mike Pence was met by a respectful, even warm, crowd in his first trip back to Iowa since the election. Republicans at a picnic in the northwestern corner of the state stood and clapped for him on Friday. In Des Moines later that afternoon, a ballroom full of Christian conservatives did the same.

He was “honorable,” a “man of faith,” attendees at the annual Family Leadership Summit said. Evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats called him “a very consistent conservative voice in Congress and then as governor, and then as vice president.”

What few people said they saw in Pence, however, was the Republican nominee for president in 2024.

Many Iowa Republicans had seen the results of the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll, released just days earlier, in which Pence flatlined, drawing no more than 1 percent support. Before that, they’d watched the video of Pence getting heckled and called a “traitor” at a major gathering of conservatives in Florida last month.

“I don’t imagine he’d have a whole lot of support,” said Raymond Harre, vice chair of the GOP i eastern Iowa’s Scott County. “There are some Trump supporters who think he’s the Antichrist.”

Harre said Pence “did a good job as vice president,” and he called the vitriol directed at him “kind of nutty.” Still, he said, “I don’t see him overcoming the negatives.”

Six months after he left the vice presidency, that is the prevailing view at the grassroots and among the GOP political class. By most accounts, both here and nationally, Pence is dead in the early waters of 2024.

“Who?” Doug Gross, a Republican operative who was a chief of staff to former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, replied flatly when asked about Pence. “It’s just, where would you place him? … With Trumpsters, he didn’t perform when they really wanted him to perform, so he’s DQ’d there. Then you go to the evangelicals, they have plenty of other choices.”

At the moment, Pence occupies a political no-man’s land. Vocal elements of Trump’s base remain furious at him for his refusal to reject the results of the November election, despite him having no authority to do so. Moderates, meanwhile, see too little distance between Pence and the president he catered to for four years. They’re wary the association may turn off the independents and suburban women Trump hemorrhaged in 2018 and again in 2020.

At 62 — and with several contenders in their 40s — Pence is too old to represent a new generation of Republican leadership. His deep well of support among Christian conservatives, which served as a critical validator for Trump, will matter less in a field where the religious right has other candidates to pick from.

“He’s got to justify to the Trumpistas why he isn’t Judas Iscariot, and then he’s got to demonstrate to a bunch of other Republicans why he hung out with someone they perceive to be a nutjob,” said Sean Walsh, a Republican strategist who worked in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush White Houses and on several presidential campaigns.

He’s between a rock and a hard place. His ostentatious sycophancy ruined him for the normal people. And his unwillingness to immolate himself for Dear Leader ruined him for everyone else.

Fuggedaboudit. His future lies in some other field. I really think he’s done in politics.

Of course, I have been wrong before …

Matt Gaetz will only take photos with supporters who acknowledge he is a pedophile. pic.twitter.com/mNL3OIq0yz

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) July 18, 2021

The Marge and Matt show came to California this past weekend. It was … something:

The internet prankster Walter Masterson looks almost too happy to be there.

Dressed in a shirt, shorts and bucket hat all printed in the American flag, he’s standing next to GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, two of the more contentious figures in the House of Representatives. He’s at what appears to be an “America First” rally staged by the two politicians at a beach in Southern California.

Three separate venues in Southern California canceled scheduled events with Gaetz and Greene, resulting in the two holding a protest outside city hall in Riverside — a city an hour away from Los Angeles.

“Oh my God, I’m so excited! I’m so excited!” Masterson tells the two of them during what appears to be a photo opportunity. Both Greene and Gaetz are grinning, holding up a thumbs-up.

“I mean, everyone thinks you’re crazy, I don’t think you’re crazy. People think you’re a pedophile, I don’t think you’re a pedophile at all. I don’t think he’s a pedophile at all.”

In March, Gaetz was placed under federal investigation for allegations of sexual relations with an underage girl. Joel Greenberg, a former associate, pleaded guilty in May for sex trafficking of a minor and bribing an official, among other charges.

Gaetz’s face changes noticeably in these seconds, no longer smiling for the camera. Greene is still grinning and holding up her thumb.

“The charges against you are totally false!” Masterson yells, as he’s escorted away by a security guard.

The video of this incident was shared on Masterson’s TikTok and anti-Trump PAC Meidas Touch’s Twitter, where it has 2.8 million views as of Monday afternoon.

Masterson has done this sort of thing before — crashing school board meetings, anti-vaccine rallies and an event for MyPillow founder Mike Lindell within the last few months.

He explained in a TikTok that the event’s location was changed three times to avoid protesters like him from showing up, but he was apparently invited all three times. It is unclear if the re-locations he’s referencing are due to the last-minute cancellations.

“Just trolled these 2 losers,” he said in a separate post.

Masterson and attorney Ben Meiselas — who co-founded Meidas Touch  — did not immediately respond to a request for comment from SFGATE.

I guess they are In California fundraising? I’d imagine there are quite a few wealthy wingnuts who are willing to support these two clowns. And there are certainly pockets of MAGA fanatics in the state. I wonder how much they made?

What a pair…

Maybe not. Brian Beutler has an astute column in his newsletter today. He is probably one of the fiercest critics of Democratic passivity out there and yet he’s not completely pessimistic, which gives me some hope:

When it passed, and because of the way it passed, the American Rescue Plan stood as the antithesis of the harder-won achievements of the Obama years. I don’t mean political writers, reaching for symbolism, came to see it that way; that’s how the bill’s authors described it. It was a testament to the fact that they’d learned from recent history and wouldn’t allow Republicans to once again drown their ambitions in bad-faith dealing. The “thank u, next” of emergency-relief legislation.It now stands as one archetype of how to govern in a world shaped by GOP nihilism, in contrast to the old way.

And just about everything that’s come since has served as a kind of test of whether Democrats intend to apply those lessons consistently, or whether the ARP was a one-off, too far from the party’s comfort zone to serve as a model for high-stakes times.It’s frustrating, because from the outside the choice seems so obvious; ARP was big and good and enduringly popular, and everyone who voted for it was and remains proud of what they accomplished.

The fact that they aren’t itching to relive that moment makes it tempting to conclude that the party didn’t meaningfully adapt, that relatively little has changed, that it is back together with Pete Davidson. I think the jury’s actually still out on that question, though. And while I won’t pretend to be optimistic about the rest of the Biden agenda or the state of democracy, it’s not all bad news; we should at the very least know how the whole story ends before summer’s out.

That story proceeds along two tracks (or maybe more like two and a half). Democrats’ top priority is passing Biden’s economic agenda; and they’ve divided that goal (for reasons that don’t make logical sense but are seemingly integral to maintaining party unity) between a small, bipartisan, hard-infrastructure bill, and a big omnibus jobs-and-families plan that they hope to pass on a party-line basis through the budget-reconciliation process.

The decision to bifurcate this flank of the agenda has mired it in process fights and allowed Republicans to string things along in a way that’s uncomfortably reminiscent of the 2009 Affordable Care Act negotiations. And at the end of the line, we may conclude history indeed repeated itself. But we shouldn’t sleep on the differences. In 2009, Democrats played patsy to Republicans until autumn; they showed little interest in using the budget-reconciliation process to speed things along, even after Ted Kennedy died, and only relented after they lost his seat in a special election that winter. The whole thing took over a year.

This time around Democrats are much more willing to force the issue, make shit-or-get-off-the-pot demands, so that Republicans know they can’t delay indefinitely. Republicans start to waffle or make excuses for why they maybe can’t support the deal they already cut, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announces the Senate will hold a test vote this coming Wednesday, which will require them to commit one way or another. Dems have credibly threatened to pass everything on their own anyhow, and most of them would be happy to use evidence of GOP obstructionism and bad-faith dealing to build a case to reform the filibuster.

And the upshot is the bipartisan bill might pass! It might not, too, of course; but Democrats have managed to scramble Republican incentives, so that they’re at least torn between the allure of sinking the bill and letting it sail through. If they sink it, they’ll deny Democrats the bipartisanship proof point they want to bring to voters in the midterms, but Dems will press ahead unilaterally anyhow, while building a case for stripping Republicans of their filibuster powers. If they vote for it, it’ll make some Dems very happy, but it’ll also knock the wind out of the filibuster-reform effort, and might even derail the bigger piece of Biden’s economic agenda.So that’s one-and-a-half of the tracks.

The other main track is democracy protection, and…it is clearly not Democrats’ top priority. This becomes obvious simply by watching how Dem leaders and Biden have treated it relative to their attentiveness to the infrastructure agenda. And as a matter of national need, I think this is a mistake; to evaluate everything on a single basis, I’d say our country’s democracy infrastructure is ricketier and in more urgent need of repair than its transportation infrastructure or even its patchwork “human infrastructure” system. If you have to pick one, pick that one.

But ideally you do both! And if that is your intent, you can at least see the argument for making sure nothing derails the economic agenda. Just thinking ahead to all the wailing indignation it would elicit, it’s easy to imagine democracy reform wrecking the jobs-and-families legislation; by contrast it’s at least theoretically conceivable to imagine Dems passing democracy protection once Biden’s signature plans to rebuild the country are already law. I think democracy protection is the more important priority, but in a world where both are going to happen, I’m agnostic as to which should go first, and can at least see the argument for stacking things this way.The problem for democracy protection isn’t that it might get passed out of order; it’s that key party actors are blocking it.

Biden gave a big public speech about democracy this week. It left many of his natural allies unsatisfied, because he didn’t use it as an occasion to advocate filibuster reform, and because some of the language, read out of context, seemed to suggest a call for frightened Americans to simply vote their way out of a GOP election-stealing crisis.

Again, I won’t pretend to be optimistic about the democracy-reform outlook, but I thought the speech was very good on its own terms, and a good omen, too. It’s easy to dismiss tough rhetoric as cheap talk, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. When a president describes the ongoing GOP assault on voting and truth as “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War,” he makes it hard for himself to abandon the issue; if he walks away, it means he was either exaggerating the threat or that he failed in the face of it.

Meanwhile, democracy-protection supporters have begun their inside push in earnest: Texas state Democrats broke quorum to block the election-subversion bill Republicans there want to pass and flew to DC to buttonhole the Democrats standing in the way of the For the People Act. Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), who has a great deal of clout with Biden, has made it clear to the White House he views this as a make-or-break issue. He’s proposed a filibuster exemption for legislation pertaining to constitutional rights, and Vice President Kamala Harris has hinted that she’s taken the idea up with Senate Dems.

They see the challenge, correctly, not as a choice between the two main flanks of the agenda, where one will necessarily crowd out the other, but as a matter of prevailing on the Democrats who are blocking democracy reform to get out of the way. If they do, it will pass. If they don’t, then it won’t, and we’ll have to hope there’s a Plan B.

I obviously think it’d be better if they could all stop squirming and just act. The country would be better off and their interests as politicians would be better served, and we’d know they’d heeded the lessons of 2009-2010 completely rather than partially.ARP is a great example of the general case for a more dynamic Democratic Party, because they actually broke form and it worked out great. But there are no shortage of examples over the past several years where the party remained hidebound, chased polls, feared backlash…and the case for dynamism looks great in hindsight, when it’s too late.

Just this week, we learned senior military leaders were so concerned President Trump might try to steal an unelected second term with a “Reichstag moment” that they made contingency plans for thwarting a coup attempt. But this horrifying revelation, about a country on the precipice of democratic collapse, didn’t come to us through a process of truth and reconciliation established by a confident, winning party. It landed in a news article as part of a book rollout during the long interregnum between when Democrats abruptly reversed their decision to call witnesses at Trump’s impeachment trial and when they finally convened their special insurrection committee.

It’s worth recounting and dwelling on missed opportunities like this, because the party leadership’s natural state is one of impassivity, and they are confirmed in this kind of politics by tons of influential party strategists and intellectuals who counsel them to embrace moderation, stick to what’s predictable and what polls well.I see the party on a knife’s edge between doing what’s needed to save the country, and succumbing to old ways, which makes these next few weeks especially critical. The last-best time to avoid fatalism, treat nothing as a foregone conclusion, and rekindle the collective sense of accomplishment Democrats felt when they passed the ARP.Otherwise the last voices they hear before the moment of truth will be ones echoing the failed logic of the past.

Looking back on the mistakes of the early Obama years, it seemed inconceivable that Democratic leaders—the very same people in fact!—would once again allow themselves to become mired in bipartisan negotiations rigged to go nowhere; would succumb to the temptation to look forward, at the expense of accountability; would allow Republican storylines (about debt or inflation or critical race theory or crime or anything else) to mindfuck them.

But it can happen. It may be the case that those who can not remember the past are doomed to relive it, but it doesn’t follow from there that those who do remember the past are immune to repeating its mistakes. The longer Democrats apply the lessons of 2009-2010 partially, the greater the risk they’ll slip back into their old ways altogether.

Beutler’s writing can be found at Big Tent. It’s always worth reading. He is a very close observer of the Democratic party and always has an informed take on how it operates. I opened the email today expecting to read something depressing about the Biden agenda. This was a welcome analysis — realistic but not entirely pessimistic.

One of the Republican Party’s go-to strategies to counter a Democratic president’s campaign promise to bring the country together is to obstruct everything the president attempts to do, working night and day to keep their people as angry and unhappy as possible so they can call the Democrats a failure for being unable to fulfill their promise. Such a promise is a bit of a sucker’s play by the Democrats, to begin with, but it’s a natural impulse since Republican administrations so often leave office having put the country through an overwhelming trauma with the nation yearning for healing. It takes a lot of chutzpah for the Republicans to pull this over and over again, yet they have no shortage of that particular characteristic. In fact, one might even call them shameless. And, after all, it works, so why should they stop?

You can go back quite a way in history to find this cycle, but I think the recent example of Barack Obama’s presidency is the most vivid.

Obama ran as a guy who signaled a new day in America, one in which a gifted, young, Black politician with a compelling vision of a diverse, multi-cultural society and a smart, technocratic style could usher the country into the new century and put an end to all of the overwrought political turmoil of the post 9/11 era. Obama had big ambitions, not the least of which was an idea that he could take many of the thorniest political arguments off the table with a Grand Bargain that included some offers the GOP supposedly couldn’t refuse. The thinking was that if they could just get past some of these big disagreements, the temperature would be lowered and the Democrats would have running room to fulfill their agenda.

There was more than a little bit of hubris in that idea. The economy was in freefall which meant that it was going to take a whole lot of political capital to stop its descent into chaos. And Democrats also made the big mistake of telegraphing their intentions by holding dinners with members of the press and letting them know the contours of the big Grand Bargain plan even before the inauguration. The GOP took notice. 

Under the circumstances, the new administration assumed the Republicans would eschew crude partisan politics and work with the Democrats for the good of the country. So it came as quite a shock when the most popular right-wing personality in the country, Rush Limbaugh, came right out and said that he wanted Obama to fail. On his show, Limbaugh said he’d been approached by a major publication and asked to write a 400-word essay on his hopes for the Obama administration. His response?

My hope, and please understand me when I say this. I disagree fervently with the people on our side of the aisle who have caved and who say, ‘Well, I hope he succeeds. We’ve got to give him a chance.’ … So I’m thinking of replying to the guy, ‘Okay, I’ll send you a response, but I don’t need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails.’

It did cause quite a stir at the time but Limbaugh was just saying what the Republican establishment was thinking.

Then Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, (who also has a habit of saying the quiet part out loud) famously said the next year, in the heat of very intense negotiations, “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Columnist George Will said on Fox News Sunday, “of course I want Obamacare to fail, because if it doesn’t fail, it will just further entangle American society with a government that is not up to this.” Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio even personally sabotaged a bipartisan immigration reform bill that he’d worked on for years rather than give Obama (and the country) a win. But perhaps the best example of the phenomenon I described above came from the Donald Trump prototype, former VP candidate Sarah Palin, speaking at a Tea Party Convention who said very sarcastically, “I gotta ask his supporters, ‘how’s that hopey, changey stuff working out?’ “

Obama promised hope and change and the Republicans thwarted him at every turn. They then taunted him for failing to deliver. It’s a very cynical ploy in the best of times but seeing them use that tactic in the midst of a global pandemic in order to ensure Biden fails in his ambition to vaccinate the country and save lives is beyond even my most pessimistic view of Republicans.

I had been wondering about the basic logic of these Republican governors and other officials’ stubborn hostility to the vaccines. Obviously, the vast majority of them are not fooled by the massive disinformation campaign that’s keeping so many of their constituents from protecting themselves and others. They can see that cases are surging and that the unvaccinated are getting very sick with the Delta strain that’s much more virulent than the COVID of last year. Yet they are still passing laws banning mask and vaccine mandates for schools and, in some cases, even workplaces. In the state of Florida, where 20% of all the current new cases are, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is running for re-election selling beer koozies that say “Don’t Fauci My Florida.” In Tennessee last week Republicans banned state public health outreach to teenagers for vaccines of any kind, not just COVID.

It is now clear that Republicans are going out of their way to ensure that COVID spreads and kills more people. In any normal society, you’d have to wonder how it could possibly serve these people to let their own voters get sick and die. But obviously, they’re just relying on their old playbook and have decided it’s politically profitable to make Biden’s vaccine distribution program fail. Their constituents are basically human sacrifices for the cause.

clearly this is all Joe Biden's fault https://t.co/VIelKx9gqN

— Culture of Truth (@Bobblespeak) July 18, 2021

Trump made this explicit on Sunday with this statement:

Joe Biden kept talking about how good of a job he’s doing on the distribution of the Vaccine that was developed by Operation Warp Speed or, quite simply, the Trump Administration. He’s not doing well at all. He’s way behind schedule, and people are refusing to take the Vaccine because they don’t trust his Administration, they don’t trust the Election results and they certainly don’t trust the Fake News, which is refusing to tell the Truth

The line is that Biden is failing because some people don’t trust him. And why don’t they trust him? Because Republicans, starting with Donald Trump, are lying to them about what Biden is doing. It’s a neat trick and one they’ve used quite successfully before.

This time they’re actually killing people to own the libs. 

Salon

I have to confess that I’m a little bit sad that Rick Perlstein’s epic series on the conservative movement (and, really, America) from the Goldwater campaign to Reagan is finished. Looking forward to the next volume was something I have really enjoyed over these past couple of decades. It’s the most vivid history of the country I grew up in out there.

The last volume is coming out in paperback and Perlstein is making a wonderful offer to book lovers:

Paperback arrives in a month–absent the embarrassing errors that marred the hardcover (save a pesky one on p. 718). To celebrate that, and my 24 years of work on the series, Zooming into the first 24 book clubs who ask. Email reaganland2020@gmail.com. https://t.co/aQRhrrZ0fz

— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein) July 13, 2021

Indiebooks describes the book this way:

Over two decades, Rick Perlstein has published three definitive works about the emerging dominance of conservatism in modern American politics. With the saga’s final installment, he has delivered yet another stunning literary and historical achievement.

In late 1976, Ronald Reagan was dismissed as a man without a political future: defeated in his nomination bid against a sitting president of his own party, blamed for President Gerald Ford’s defeat, too old to make another run. His comeback was fueled by an extraordinary confluence: fundamentalist preachers and former segregationists reinventing themselves as militant crusaders against gay rights and feminism; business executives uniting against regulation in an era of economic decline; a cadre of secretive “New Right” organizers deploying state-of-the-art technology, bending political norms to the breaking point—and Reagan’s own unbending optimism, his ability to convey unshakable confidence in America as the world’s “shining city on a hill.”

Meanwhile, a civil war broke out in the Democratic party. When President Jimmy Carter called Americans to a new ethic of austerity, Senator Ted Kennedy reacted with horror, challenging him for reelection. Carter’s Oval Office tenure was further imperiled by the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, near-catastrophe at a Pennsylvania nuclear plant, aviation accidents, serial killers on the loose, and endless gas lines.

Backed by a reenergized conservative Republican base, Reagan ran on the campaign slogan “Make America Great Again”—and prevailed. Reaganland is the story of how that happened, tracing conservatives’ cutthroat strategies to gain power and explaining why they endure four decades later.

It’s a great book that speaks to our world today. The right as a force has morphed into something new but the institutions they built back then are still around and they are as powerful as ever.

Go ahead and die if you wanna. It don’t bother me none, argues Brian Kilmeade of “Fox and Friends.”

The whole what you do with your body is your business flip-flop from conservatives has me seriously confused. They believe it’s the the government’s (police, military) job to protect you. Except when they don’t. They believe the government should keep its nasty fingers off your body. Except when they don’t. Not even Fox News’ morning crew can decide amongst themselves.

https://t.co/qTNz73blcf

— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) July 19, 2021

Eric Boehlert has a few choice words about how this Murdoch variant is killing Fox’s own viewers:

While a staff of fully-vaccinated hosts rage against an extraordinarily safe and efficient vaccine, Fox News is doing what no other outlet has done in the history of cable news, or even broadcast television has done — it’s deliberately getting people killed during a public health crisis by feeding eagerly gullible red state viewers a mountain of lies.

With the debate about masks now largely eliminated from the cultural war battlefield, as a majority of eligible Americans got vaccinated and no longer have to wear them, Fox News and the extreme-right media are left with only one target — the miraculous vaccine itself.

The same right-wing crew that this winter demanded Trump receive credit for helping develop the vaccines, has done a U-turn. They’re now urging loyalists not to get the vaccine, thereby prolonging the pandemic.

The Trump cult has taken partisanship to the next level … of hell:

And it’s not just Fox. “Republicans are getting the same message of skepticism about the vaccines and the vaccination campaign from other parts of the right-wing media apparatus, from digital outlets to talk radio to podcast shows to Sinclair Broadcast stations to the new generation of social media influencers,” Media Matters’ Matt Gertz noted.

In 2020, the crass political calculations were obvious — desperate to get Trump re-elected amidst a crippled economy and a once-in-a-century health crisis, Fox News knew the only chance was to downplay the virus and pretend Democrats were overreacting, even though Trump himself nearly died from the contagious disease.

But with Trump now out of office, and even making vague suggestions that people get vaccinated, what’s the political advantage of Fox News becoming a ghoulish hotbed of anti-vaccine hysteria? It’s pure nihilism.

And they want to govern with that.

Update: Someone at Fox must fear lawsuits.

Hannity: Please take COVID seriously pic.twitter.com/mTy4gpYZ17

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 20, 2021

Lies — maybe harmless for the moment, maybe even noble — create a lying world.
— Bari Weiss, “The Great Unraveling“

People are selective about where they get their information and whom they trust. Then there are the manipulators who insist, “Who are you going to trust, me or your lying eyes?” Like imperial stormtroopers to Obi-Wan’s measured tone, the compliant comply.

Owing to such forces, the perception is widespread that crime is on the upswing across America. And why not, writes Eric Alterman? Republicans for decades have mounted political campaigns by fostering that perception backed by a simple message: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

Alterman writes:

In November 2020, the Gallup organization published a study demonstrating that “Perceptions of Increased U.S. Crime [were] at Highest Since 1993,” even though crime was nowhere near its highest levels. In the past, Gallup noted, a perceived rise in crime was usually felt by those who associated themselves with the party out of power. 

“American carnage” was the themes of Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural address. He’d opened his campaign declaring Mexico was sending rapists across the border along with drugs and crime. He doubled down on the steps of the Capitol that day with “some weird shit.”

At the 2020 Republican convention in New York City, Rudy Giuliani declared his city a hellscape of “murders, shootings, and violent crime,” the products of having a Democratic mayor:

In fact, everything this often drunken troll said was a lie. Violent crime in NYC had been in decline for years. The city was experiencing far fewer murders than it did when he was the mayor in the 1990s. Murders did spike in the first six months of 2020—as they did almost everywhere in America at the beginning of the pandemic—but remain on pace to be far lower than they were at the end of Giuliani’s time in office. What’s more, the city is in the midst of “a 2 percent drop in overall reports of all major crimes, the police say. Rape reports, for instance, are down 25 percent, and grand larceny has dropped 20 percent.” And while there had been a recent rise in killings and in gun violence, it came “after seven years of record-breaking calm when murders dipped to below 300 one year—2017—for the first time since the 1950s.”

But reality must give way to perceptions that win elections. Thus saith the GOP playbook. And so as actual crime declines, the perception of crime increases “driven more by media and politicians than by personal experience or day-to-day observation.”

Ghoulish Operating Procedure is to link white people’s misperceptions about crime levels to Black men with guns. This time around, however, doing so presents some challenges for Republicans.

Because what is trending in our “deeply traumatized country,” writes Chris Ladd at Political Orphans, are crimes of general mayhem in public settings committed by “white psycho killers, gonzo stories of ‘Florida-man’ crime,” and tales of “white ladies gone mad,” like the naked one who wrecked an Outback Steakhouse.

Ladd elaborates:

Over the decade prior to the pandemic the FAA acted on 1300 unruly-passenger complaints from airlines. The agency has received 1300 complaints since February. We’re not just talking about rude or boorish outbursts. Attendants are facing a sustained pattern of assaults, often serious, with little or no apparent context. An incident in Southwest Airlines in May led to a flight attendant losing two teeth. Her attacker was a woman. These are not the kinds of crimes Republicans need to fuel their hoped-for racial or class panic. There are no bad neighborhoods at 35,000 feet unless you’re flying Spirit.

It’s not just airline workers feeling this wave of crazy. Service workers all over the country are experiencing it too. A crazy white guy stabbed a restaurant manager in a Houston suburb back in March for asking him to wear a mask. An elderly white woman in The Villages, FL was arrested for assault at a Burger King in May. Upset over the thickness of the tomatoes in her burger, she began hurling racial slurs, then the sandwich, at restaurant workers. Workers in Asian restaurants are facing assaults, tied to a rise in anti-Asian attacks.

The “Karens” have been out in force. Bagel Karen was filmed calling a fast food worker the n-word over a problem with her order. Downtown Karen has been luring the dogs of passersby into traffic. Antivax Karen had to be carted off a Royal Caribbean vessel after she tested positive for the ‘rona but refused to leave. Perhaps the most disturbing and revealing of all this year’s Karens is Victoria’s Secret Karen. She threatened to assault a black woman in a Victoria’s Secret store. Then, when she realized she was being filmed, she collapsed in a fit of hysterics.

In Knoxville, a white man “screaming irately, frantically jumping around and sweating profusely,” exposed himself to drivers while attempting flips on a busy four-lane.

We are well on our way to more than doubling last year’s pace of documented road rage assaults and murders, which was already nearly double the previous year’s toll. The US is averaging ten mass shootings a week so far in 2021. A troubling percentage of these shootings, like the murders at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis in April, defy any attempt at explanation. It’s not merely that the shooters’ motives are flimsy or insane, but there seems to be no motive at all. Many of these killers aren’t bent on revenge for some slight, shouting terrorist slogans or even following orders from their dog. They’re just showing up one day with a gun blasting at whoever is unlucky enough to be there. They die with no explanation or discernible motive.

Though journalists love to talk about crime in Chicago, this gonzo crimewave is neither an urban problem, nor a regional one. Chicago saw a stunning 55% increase in homicides in 2020, but that was only a modest rise compared to many other US cities. Lubbock chalked up a 180% increase in homicides. Murders were up by a stunning 60% on the mean streets of Omaha in 2020. Murders doubled in Mitch McConnell’s Louisville. Murders nearly doubled in white, Republican Colorado Springs.

Those stats don’t include prospective Vegas-style mass shootings police may have prevented over just one week in Chicago and Denver. Such incidents make it tougher on Republicans to make their crime wave narrative stick to Blacks.

Ladd again:

Looking for a poster-child for this gonzo crimewave? Look no further than the unnamed woman who completed her flight last week from Charlotte to Dallas duct-taped to her seat. According to another passenger, Gonzo Karen left her seat in-flight because she “did not want the plane to fly up anymore.” When attendants would not put the plane back on the ground, she lunged for the plane door, trying to open it. Attendants struggled to restrain her, eventually taping her to her seat, with tape over her mouth. We are not okay.

“America is continuing to unravel in this long hot summer of 2021,” writes Will Bunch in reflecting on how attitudes towards facts and science have declined since the moon landing America watched in 1969:

If you’re thinking that something has radically changed in America in the 52 years since Armstrong bounded down the stairs of the lunar module to take “one giant leap for mankind,” you would be correct. A new Gallup poll released last week shows that confidence in science among Republicans has dropped by an astonishing 27% since 1975, shortly after NASA wound down moon exploration. During this same nearly half-century, faith in science has actually increased among Democrats and independents. The gap between the two parties over science is now wider than for all but a couple of American institutions.

Indeed, it’s remarkable how closely this stunning drop in GOP voter confidence in science — a high 72% in 1975, but just 45% today — tracks with America’s growing vaccination divide between “red states” and “blue states.” Likewise, almost 30% of Republicans said in a separate survey last month that they refuse to get the vaccine — a critical reason why experts now fear the United States can’t reach the herd immunity needed for the pandemic to peter out.

“The masses are receptive to misinformation because America is increasingly divided not by its traditional fault lines, but by one huge determining factor: whether or not you attended college,” Bunch writes.

Perhaps. But Bunch omits that by marrying itself to the religious right ahead of the Reagan years, the Republican Party assimilated its anti-science lean dating from half a century before the Scopes Monkey Trial. The post-Reconstruction “Redemption” movement and monuments to the Confederacy still standing today reflected a deep-seated need to control the past. The anti-science posture of the party today reflects the same fundamentalist impulse to control truth itself, even if it kills people. Even if it kills them. Even if it scorches the planet, drowns major cities, and displaces entire peoples.

What is petering out, what is unraveling, is the perception of this country as one nation, and our ability as a species to recognize and correct its own mistakes.

(h/t SR)

President Trump’s locker at Trump International in West Palm Beach, Fla.

Dear Leader is upset about people not wanting to be associated with him:

As almost all of the great players, sportscasters, and golf aficionados know, the greatest site and course of all for The Open is Turnberry, in Scotland. It is truly a magical place, the players want to be there, and at some point in time the players will be there. But this course was not chosen for The Open because they consider a wonderful person, and many-time Club Champion, named Donald J. Trump, to be too controversial—this is, of course, a false reputation caused mainly by the Fake News Media.

He describes himself as “a wonderful person.” Ok. That’s just sad.

And he also brags that he’s a “many-time Club Champion” as if that matters.

Remember this?

 Any visitor to the ornate men’s locker room at his club here, Trump International Golf Club, can see small rectangular brass plaques on his locker, recognizing him as the 1999, 2001 and 2009 club champion, and the 2012 and 2013 senior champion.

And now there’s a new plaque on his locker, screwed into its stained wood with two small Phillips head screws, to commemorate his latest title. It reads:

Yes, Trump was president of the United States for all of 2018.

Yes, Trump turned 72 last year, which would be an impressive age to win even a senior club championship.

But there the plaque is, identifying Trump as the reigning club champion at his spectacular Trump International course.

His most recent win brings Trump’s club-championship haul — all won at clubs bearing his name — to an even 20. That includes senior and super-senior titles, too.

But to be precise about it, the plaque on his locker is two letters short of accurate. Trump is not actually the men’s champion at the club. He’s the co-champion. While that distinction is not found on his locker, it is made elsewhere at the club.

As for Trump’s path to No. 20, it was not conventional.

Originally, a man named Ted Virtue, the 58-year-old CEO of a New York investment firm called MidOcean Partners, had the 2018 club championship title all to himself.

Virtue, a member of Winged Foot and Westchester Country Club in New York and Lost Tree and Trump International in South Florida, won a series of matches en route to his title. He played football and basketball at Middlebury College in Vermont in the early 1980s and his golf is more athletic than poetic. His index is listed as 3.3 and his 20 most recent scores, all from 2018 and this year, range from 73 to 83. Trump has posted only two scores since 2016.

After Virtue won the championship, Trump ran into him at the club, according to multiple sources who recounted the story. Having some fun with him, Trump said something like, “The only reason you won is because I couldn’t play.” The president cited the demands of his job, although he was able to make 20 visits to the club in 2018, according to trumpgolfcount.com. Trump then proposed a nine-hole challenge match to Virtue, winner-takes-the-title.

You could say there wasn’t much in it for Virtue, and you could argue that this is not how these matters are typically, if ever, settled. But consider these factors:

1. Trump owns the course;

2. Trump is the president of the United States;

3. Trump is not your typical golfer.

Virtue said yes.

They played match play (each hole as its own contest) and straight up (no shots were given). As in nearly all amateur golf rounds, no rules official was on hand. Golf’s tradition calls for players to police themselves and, if necessary, one another.

Trump won.

And that is how Trump and Virtue are reportedly listed on a large club-championship plaque on a clubhouse wall, as co-champions. That would mean Trump’s name is now on that plaque four times. Or five, if you include the appearance of his surname on the gold crest at its top.

He cheats at everything. We know that. And when he can’t get away with it he whines like a little baby as we also know.

I guess I’m not surprised that so many people admire this sort of dishonesty. After all his followers cheered when he boasted that he didn’t pay taxes because he’s smart. I’m still surprised that so many admire such a crude and petty whining cheater.

The world sorest loser had a meltdown over the “results” of the Arizona fraudit. It’s all bullshit and I think it’s important to pass on the truth of this, even though I’m sure most of you just accept that it’s bullshit without needing to know the details. It’s not as if they have any credibility and god knows Trump doesn’t.

Still, for the record:

Former President Donald Trump issued three statements in two days falsely claiming that voting fraud and irregularities cost him Arizona’s electoral votes.

Trump relied on comments made Thursday by contractors hired by state Senate Republicans to oversee a partisan review of the 2020 vote count in Maricopa County, which includes metro Phoenix.

The “forensic audit,” as Senate GOP leaders are calling their review, is overseen by Cyber Ninjas, a small computer security firm with no election experience before Trump began questioning the 2020 results. Its CEO, Doug Logan, spread false conspiracy theories about the election before he was hired to lead the Arizona review.

Logan and Ben Cotton, a digital forensics analyst working on the audit, described issues they say need further review. Trump has parroted them as evidence the election results are tainted.

County officials and elections experts say the claims are false and based on a misunderstanding of election materials, which they say creates an appearance of irregularities where none exists.

Trump laid out his claims most specifically in a statement Friday night. A look at the irregularities he alleges in that statement:

TRUMP: “168,000 fraudulent ballots printed on illegal paper (unofficial ballots)”

THE FACTS: All of that is false. The ballots were not unofficial or printed on illegal paper, and even Logan never alleged they were fraudulent.Logan pointed to ballots with the printing slightly offset between the front and back. He claimed this could cause votes to be counted for the wrong candidate if ink from one side bleeds through to another. He said the alignment issues were mostly from polling-place ballots, which are printed onsite, and said about 168,000 ballots were cast that way. The overwhelming majority of Arizona voters cast ballots by mail.

“We are seeing a lot of very thin paper stock being used especially on Election Day,” Logan added.

The allegation harkens back to the debunked “Sharpiegate” conspiracy theory that arose in the days after the election. Election experts say bleed-through doesn’t affect the vote count because bubbles on one side of a ballot don’t align with those on the other. Ballots that can’t be read are flagged and duplicated by a bipartisan team.

Arizona’s election procedures manual says only that ballots “must be printed with black ink on white paper of sufficient thickness to prevent the printing from being discernible on the reverse side the ballot.” Maricopa County uses 80 pound Votesecur paper from Rolland, which is among the papers approved by Dominion Voting Systems, which makes the county’s tabulation equipment, said Fields Moseley, a county spokesman.

Logan did not provide any evidence that alignment problems affected the vote count and said the issue needs more analysis.

TRUMP, citing “74,000 mail in ballots received that were never mailed (magically appearing ballots).”

THE FACTS: No, there were no magically appearing ballots. He is alleging that the number of filled-out ballots received in the mail by election officials exceeded the number of people who had asked earlier for mail-in ballots, by 74,000. But that’s not at all what happened.

The claim mischaracterizes reports created for political parties to track who has voted early so they can target their get-out-the-vote efforts.

One report tracks all requests that voters make for early ballots, either by mail or in person, up to 11 days before the election. The other report tracks all ballots received through the day before the election. That leaves a 10-day window during which people who vote in-person but don’t request a mail ballot would appear on one report but not the other.

TRUMP, claiming “11,000 voters were added to the voter rolls AFTER the election and still voted.”

THE FACTS: There’s nothing untoward about voters rolls growing after Election Day. The rolls are simply updated to reflect people whose provisional ballots are added to the tally after election officials verify that they were eligible to vote.

The allegation that the updated tally was the result of electoral wrongdoing first came from Logan this past week, when he told state lawmakers of “11,326 people that did not show up on the Nov. 7 version of the voter rolls, after votes were cast, but then appeared on the Dec. 4 voter rolls.”

Maricopa County officials said Logan is probably referring to provisional ballots, which are cast by people who do not appear on the voter rolls or don’t have the proper identification on Election Day. They’re only counted if the voter later shows he or she was eligible to vote. To be eligible, such voters must have registered before the deadline.

“These go through a rigorous verification process to make sure that the provisional ballots cast are only counted if the voter is eligible to vote in the election,” Maricopa County officials wrote on Twitter. “This happens after Election Day. Only eligible voters are added to the voter rolls.”

TRUMP, alleging “all the access logs to the machines were wiped, and the election server was hacked during the election.”

THE FACTS: That flies in the face of the evidence. Maricopa County’s election server is not connected to the internet and independent auditors found no evidence the election server was hacked.

Trump’s hacking allegation refers to the unauthorized download of public data from the county’s voter registration system. That system, which is connected to the internet and broadly accessible to political parties and election workers, is not linked to the election management system, the web of ballot counters, computers and servers that tallies votes.

The election management system is “air gapped,” or kept disconnected from the rest of the county’s computer network and the wider internet. Two firms certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to test voting systems found Maricopa County’s machines were not connected to the internet and did not have malicious hardware or software installed.

TRUMP: “Arizona shows Fraud and Voting Irregularities many times more than would be needed to change the outcome of the Election.”

THE FACTS: Not so. The number of potential fraud cases is far smaller than President Joe Biden’s margin of victory in Arizona.

County election officials identified 182 cases where voting problems were clear enough that they referred them to investigators for further review, according to an Associated Press investigation. So far, only four cases have led to charges, including those identified in a separate state investigation. No one has been convicted. No person’s vote was counted twice.

Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes out of 3.4 million cast. Of the four cases that have resulted in criminal charges, two involved Democratic voters and two involved Republicans.

It’s intensely frustrating that this narcissistic moron continues this insanity, but as we are seeing with the vaccine rejectionists, disinformation is a powerful drug. And he’s the biggest pusher there is.

This is an interesting post by Bob Lefsetz that gets to the heart of the facebook/all of social media problem:

“On Saturday, Mr. Rosen said in the blog post that among Facebook’s American users, vaccine hesitancy had declined by 50 percent since April and vaccine acceptance had increased by 10 to 15 percentage points, or to over 80 percent from 70 percent.”  –NYT

How would they know? I didn’t get an e-mail asking my status. No, they sifted through the data, that they collected, while you thought you were connecting with friends. How myopic can you be? Never mind inaccurate.

It’s funny how Facebook and the rest of these tech companies kiss the ass of China, do whatever authoritarians want them to, but when it comes to the United States they believe they’re safe, impenetrable, bigger than the government. Administrations come and go, but Facebook remains.

Misinformation. It’s why people are not getting vaccinated. I know not because I read about it, but because my inbox is full of people e-mailing me false reports. All you have to do is Google to find out these bloviators and their opinions have been debunked. But if you get a vaccine you’re acceding to the power of the government, whereas if you believe some bozo anti-vax philosophy you’re in control. Let me ask you, do you want to be in control of the airplane? How come expertise is meaningless in today’s society?

As for all those computer science students, you know, the STEM people, maybe they needed to take humanities courses, because last time I checked our brains aren’t digital, nor is sex, nor are most of our feelings and decisions. Facebook is like a rogue dictatorship run by someone only barely better educated than Kim Jong-un. And Zuckerberg’s mentors? All data and finance people. And just like Trump thinks he’s entitled to still be president, Zuckerberg believes Facebook has a god-given right to exist. Hell, Apple allows users to turn off tracking and Zuckerberg throws a conniption fit. As if he’s entitled to hoover up our data. Wasn’t he prepared for this? Isn’t being a techie being worried about disruption?

As for disruption, Facebook missed the memo that you’ve got to pay creators and give them a chance for an audience. You can start from zero on TikTok and the platform will seed your video to those not following you to give you a chance. But not on Facebook, which cultivates your feed using black-box algorithms. Do you want to know why our country is divided? WE DON’T SEE THE SAME NEWS! Whether it be on Facebook or Google. It’s like a bad remake of “2001,” the computers are in control, soulless, and in this case only interested in making a buck, and power, of course. The truth is Facebook is in the middle of getting disrupted, it was asleep at the wheel. And Zuckerberg cozied up to Trump but not Biden. But Zuck makes all that money on Trump/right-wing stories, ever see the list of the most shared posts on Facebook? THEY’RE ALL RIGHT-WING! I mean each and every one of them, well, eight out of ten, the others are cat videos and other innocuous trifles.

And now Zuckerberg is telling us he’s not the problem, but the solution. It’s “1984” but in real life. Researchers ask interviewees why they won’t get the shot and they all say because of what they read on Facebook, I’m not making this up, read the studies, but now Facebook says exactly the opposite?

The first rule of thumb?

Never ever respond. And if someone does, in internet land, they find out the joke is on them. Because the silent majority is no longer silent, they’ve all got keyboards, and they let others know how they feel, and suddenly you’re in the crosshairs. Funny how a social media company doesn’t know how you act on social media. Facebook should have said they’ll have a meeting with the government, kick the ball down the road, wait for the story to fade away, which it always seems to do in the fast-paced world of today. But now this is a story…

And the Delta variant is in the news every damn day. Because infections are going up, as are deaths. Furthermore, essentially one hundred percent of the infections are in people who have refused the shot, who are unvaccinated. It’s become Russian Roulette. I gotta ask you punk, do you feel lucky?

There’s more that is uncharacteristically optimistic for him and I take that with a grain of salt to be honest. He thinks people will eventually wake up to the danger and that may be the case. But by that time we will have lost a whole lot more people for no good reason. And he thinks Biden has turned this into a “street fight” which is just beginning and I’m not sure how that tracks.

But the rant about Facebook is right on. It’s a pernicious influence and I have no idea how a free society can do anything about it. People want to be lied to. And people like Zuckerberg love making billions giving them what they want.