Month: July 2021

They love America so much that if they can’t have her for theirs and theirs alone, they’ll burn it to the ground. Sharing? That’s like telling the truth and playing fair, something we teach children but don’t really practice ourselves.

Michelle Goldberg recounts the history of evangelical Christianity’s political ascendancy under George W. Bush. They knew that with God on their side they would reclaim the kingdom, put the sleeper hold on Satan, or whatever. Goldberg spoke with Public Religion Research Institute chief executive Robert P. Jones about its poll that suggests those visions are turning to dust:

On Thursday, P.R.R.I. released startling new polling data showing just how much ground the religious right has lost. P.R.R.I.’s 2020 Census of American Religion, based on a survey of nearly half a million people, shows a precipitous decline in the share of the population identifying as white evangelical, from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent last year. (As a category, “white evangelicals” isn’t a perfect proxy for the religious right, but the overlap is substantial.) In 2020, as in every year since 2013, the largest religious group in the United States was the religiously unaffiliated.

One of P.R.R.I.’s most surprising findings was that in 2020, there were more white mainline Protestants than white evangelicals. This doesn’t necessarily mean Christians are joining mainline congregations — the survey measures self-identification, not church affiliation. It is, nevertheless, a striking turnabout after years when mainline Protestantism was considered moribund and evangelical Christianity full of dynamism.

In addition to shrinking as a share of the population, white evangelicals were also the oldest religious group in the United States, with a median age of 56. “It’s not just that they are dying off, but it is that they’re losing younger members,” Jones told me. As the group has become older and smaller, Jones said, “a real visceral sense of loss of cultural dominance” has set in.

Now White evangelicals are just another subculture. The sense that they are losing the culture war has produced rage, resentment and paranoia.

“This sense of ownership of America just runs so deep in white evangelical circles,” says Jones. Donald Trump promised to restore them to their rightful place atop the cultural pecking order. Not in the sweet by and by, but now, today.

QAnon is “not unlike a belief in the second coming of Christ,” Jones told Goldberg. “That at some point God will reorder society and set things right. I think that when a community feels itself in crisis, it does become more susceptible to conspiracy theories and other things that tell them that what they’re experiencing is not ultimately what’s going to happen.”

I’ve been writing about people’s response to that feeling for almost 30 years. Adrift in a cold, mechanistic world of seeming chaos, New Agers sought empowerment in a transcendant world of secret or lost knowledge, and in the sense that wise guys in the spirit world or in the stars had everything under control. For Trumpists it was the their orange-hued god-man and/or the all-knowing “Q” and “The Plan” and “The Storm.”

Goldberg concludes:

I was frightened by the religious right in its triumphant phase. But it turns out that the movement is just as dangerous in decline. Maybe more so. It didn’t take long for the cocky optimism of Generation Joshua to give way to the nihilism of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. If they can’t own the country, they’re ready to defile it.

Republicans have reason to fear the religious right as well. One knock against Democrats is that they take minority groups for granted because there is nowhere else to go. The same could be said of the religious right and Republicans. But Lilliana Mason’s recent study indicates that the Trump-supporting faction in control of the Republican Party is not there for tax cuts, small government, and alleged family values. It is Trump’s blatant animus against minority groups keeping them in the GOP camp, not party loyalty. When Trump goes, what will the religious right do?

They are prepared to go “Banks of the Ohio,” to scorch the earth in retreat — country, Republican Party, and all.

Let’s hear it for nature’s engineers!

Seven years ago, ecologists looking to restore a dried-out Placer County floodplain faced a choice: Spend at least $1 million bringing in heavy machines to revive habitat or try a new approach.

They went for the second option, and turned to nature’s original flood manager to do the work — the beaver.

The creek bed, altered by decades of agricultural use, had looked like a wildfire risk. It came back to life far faster than anticipated after the beavers began building dams that retained water longer.

“It was insane, it was awesome,” said Lynnette Batt, the conservation director of the Placer Land Trust, which owns and maintains the Doty Ravine Preserve.

“It went from dry grassland. .. to totally revegetated, trees popping up, willows, wetland plants of all types, different meandering stream channels across about 60 acres of floodplain,” she said.

The Doty Ravine project cost about $58,000, money that went toward preparing the site for beavers to do their work.

In comparison, a traditional constructed restoration project using heavy equipment across that much land could cost $1 to $2 million, according to Batt.

The project is supported by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, through its Partners for Fish and Wildlife program. Since 2014, it has worked with the Placer Land Trust to restore and enhance habitat for migratory birds, waterfowl, salmon and steelhead by unleashing the beavers, a keystone species.

Damion Ciotti, a restoration biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who led the project, said he predicted the Doty Ravine project would take a decade to reconnect the stream to the floodplain, but to his surprise, it was restored in just three years.

Ciotti and other restoration ecologists are working on more beaver restoration projects with the Maidu Summit Consortium at Yellow Creek in Plumas County and the Nature Conservancy at Childs Meadow in Tehama County. Ciotti estimates there are likely dozens of other smaller projects throughout the state using these approaches.

“It’s gaining popularity quite a bit,” Batt said of the beaver restoration projects. “The federal agencies are starting to move this direction and offer trainings. And then just lots of nonprofits, universities have really gotten on board.”

Why beavers?

Known as nature’s engineers, beavers can change a landscape to cater to its needs better than any other animal after humans.

That’s their advantage against their predators in the wild.

“The beaver on land is like a chicken nugget walking through the landscape for predators,” said Emily Fairfax, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Resource Management at California State University Channel Islands. “They’re fat and they’re slow and anything would be glad to have them for a meal.”

But beavers are quick and agile in water, able to protect themselves from predators. They build dams that push flowing stream water over the banks to create ponds and dig canals into the landscape to form an expansive wetland.

In the 1600s, beaver populations thrived in North America, and particularly in the American West, building dams and structuring water systems.

“At its peak, there were about 400 million beavers in the North American continent,” Fairfax said. “Some estimates say that it was like one beaver per kilometer of habitable stream.”

European demand for beaver pelts drove down their population until the early 1900s, when interest in beaver hats and coats died out and the population gradually rebounded. Today, Fairfax said there are roughly 15 to 25 million beavers in North America.

“So they’ve definitely made a comeback, but nowhere near historic populations,” Fairfax said. “And one of the big things that is stopping them from reaching their historic numbers is us.”

How to bring beavers back to a landscape

Beavers and humans like to live in similar places — near water sources ideal for agriculture — so the two species come into conflict. When beavers dam up a stream to make their homes, the ensuing flooding impacts nearby landowners. Or, when people invest in expensive tree-planting projects, beavers may take a liking to those trees and cut them down.

As a result, trapping is a common solution to beaver nuisance.

That’s why the first step to beaver restoration is to stop trapping them and wait for beavers to return.

In some places, beavers may not already be living nearby, ready to jump in and start building. In these cases, restoration ecologists build beaver dam analogs — essentially man-made fake beaver dams.

“We try to design a structure that looks like a beaver dam with the hopes that maybe the beaver will take over, or if not, will mimic the effects of the beaver,” Batt said.

Beavers are native to most of North America, but where there aren’t native beaver populations, Fairfax said, it’s best not to move them.

“I wouldn’t recommend it in a place where there’s going to be a really high potential for conflict,” Fairfax said. For instance, she said, bringing beavers right next to a pistachio orchard would create a conflict for a farmer.

Drought, wildfires

Beaver wetlands are like giant sponges, collecting water from rain and snowmelt during the winter and slowly releasing moisture during the summer and dry periods. As a result, they’re helpful during droughts and against wildfires.

“In my research, I saw it persist for three drought years in a row and then the drought ended,” Fairfax said. “That water can remain accessible year after year after year during drought.”

Fairfax, who published a research paper titled “Smokey the Beaver” about the drought and wildfire implications of beaver restoration projects, said she found evidence of five instances where beaver wetlands stalled the progress of a wildfire including the 2000 Manter fire in California and the 2018 Badger Creek fire in Wyoming.

Wetland vegetation doesn’t turn into the dry, high-risk fuel that feeds wildfires. Instead, the moisture can slow down the wildfire.

“It’s huge when you think about fires in California because time is so valuable,” Fairfax said. “If you can stall the fire, if you can stop it from just ripping through the landscape, even if that beaver pond can’t actually stop the fire itself, just stalling it can give the firefighters a chance to get a hold on it.”

These lush green beaver wetlands also protect wildlife that can’t outrun a wildfire.

“The beavers are creating these patches, these fire refuges that don’t burn anywhere near as intensely,” Fairfax said. “So it’s a relatively safe spot for animals to wait and let the fire pass.”

“We must maintain law and order at the highest level or we will cease to have a country, 100 percent. We will cease to have a country. I am the law and order candidate.”

! ALERT – newly released video court exhibit in US Capitol Insurrection case appears to show police being dragged into the mob.

Trigger warning on this video… it's difficult to watch. This footage was released by US Justice Dept under court order pic.twitter.com/1ZPw9yB2ji

— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) July 9, 2021

One more time:

“We must maintain law and order at the highest level or we will cease to have a country, 100 percent. We will cease to have a country…

When he’s right, he’s right.

Here’s another excerpt of the new Michael Bender book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election. I think the big revelation here is that Kushner has bailed and Don Jr. is now Trump’s top family adviser. Junior must be so happy:

On the morning of Nov. 7, 2020, the Saturday after the presidential election, President Donald Trump had just approached the tee box at the seventh hole of his golf course in Sterling, Va., when an aide’s phone rang with news from Jared Kushner : All of the major media outlets, including Fox News, were about to call the presidential election for Democrat Joe Biden.

Mr. Trump had tweeted on the way to the course that he’d won “BY A LOT!” But he displayed none of that all-caps energy as he pressed the phone to his ear. Wearing a dark pullover and slacks with white golf shoes and a matching MAGA cap, Mr. Trump calmly listened to his son-in-law as he strolled across the manicured grass under a clear blue sky. He hung up, nonchalantly handed the phone back to an aide and finished the final 12 holes, as more than a dozen golf carts filled with government aides and Secret Service agents trailed behind him.

‘Don’t worry,’ Mr. Trump told a group of supporters on Nov. 7. ‘It’s not over yet.’

When Mr. Trump finally pulled up to the clubhouse in his customized cart—complete with a presidential seal stitched into the seat—club members cheered him on the back patio. “Don’t worry,” Mr. Trump told them. “It’s not over yet.”

But the election was, in fact, over. What wasn’t finished was the term he’d won four years earlier, and on Nov. 7, one of the most pressing questions for staffers was how to fill his calendar. “Let’s do all the things we didn’t get to do because of all of the distractions, and have fun,” Hope Hicks, a longtime Trump aide, said to the president’s team gathered inside campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va.

Mr. Trump had won far more votes than his team projected, with surprising support from Black and Hispanic men. He was immediately the runaway favorite for the party’s 2024 nomination, and Ms. Hicks was expressing that vibe with her suggestion for a jaunty curtain call. But around the table in a glass-encased conference room, the eldest Trump sons channeled their father’s reaction. “What you’re talking about isn’t even an option,” responded Donald Trump, Jr., who had called into the meeting. “It’s a nonstarter,” Eric Trump added.

Ms. Hicks wasn’t an outlier, however. After the election was called, Trump World mostly assumed that the president would behave rationally at the end of the day. Vice President Mike Pence and Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, both met with Mr. Trump in early November and separately told others that he just needed space to process the loss. Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter and a senior adviser, left some White House officials with the hope her father would invite Mr. Biden to the West Wing.

But Mr. Trump wasn’t interested in taking a bow. The decision from his team to give him space only created an opening for outside advisers like Rudy Giuliani, and behind the scenes, Mr. Trump was frantically moving personnel in and out of the administration.

[…]

It goes on to relay the bogus Bill Barr hagiography around election fraud, which we’ve already seen.

By then, the president was personally phoning U.S. attorneys—against Justice Department protocol—urging them to focus on election fraud. He’d replaced a lineup of veteran defense and intelligence officials with inexperienced loyalists hungry to appease the boss. Gen. Mark Milley asked some Pentagon officials whether the new hires had ties to neo-Nazi groups.

“The crazies have taken over,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned a colleague. Privately, the nation’s top diplomat worried that foreign adversaries might try to exploit the domestic instability. He conveyed concern to others that Mr. Trump might be more willing to engage in an international conflict to strengthen his political argument for remaining in office. Mr. Pompeo organized a daily call with Gen. Milley and Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff.

Pompeo and Meadows will deny this, no doubt. And Trump will pretend to believe them. But in the back of his mind, he will know …

By January, Mr. Trump’s attention had turned to his vice president, who was responsible for presiding over the Jan. 6 congressional certification of the election. The two men had debated for weeks whether Mr. Pence could reject the results.

But the vice president wasn’t practiced in confronting Mr. Trump. The only example some administration officials could remember was in 2018, when Mr. Pence’s political committee hired Corey Lewandowski, the president’s ubiquitous adviser. Mr. Trump was holding a newspaper article about the hiring and said it made him look weak, like his team was abandoning him as he was probed for his campaign’s role in Russian election meddling. He crumpled the article and threw it at his vice president. “So disloyal,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Pence lost it. Mr. Kushner had asked him to hire Mr. Lewandowski, and he had discussed the plan with Mr. Trump over lunch. Mr. Pence picked up the article and threw it back at Mr. Trump. He leaned toward the president and pointed a finger a few inches from his chest. “We walked you through every detail of this,” Mr. Pence snarled. “We did this for you—as a favor. And this is how you respond? You need to get your facts straight.”

In case you were wondering:

NEW

"The story written by third-rate reporter Michael Bender, that Mike Pence and I had a big fight over Corey Lewandowski, is totally false. No such fight ever happened, it is fiction as are so many others stories written in the vast number of books coming out about me." pic.twitter.com/53ZyphxC06

— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) July 9, 2021

No way was Trump going to stand for any story that refutes the idea that Pence was his quivering lapdog both in public and in private. In fact, it’s essential to his story about the Big Lie — Pence wouldn’t do as he was told on January 6th so everything that happened was his fault.

Three years later, the moment seemed to call for another get-your-facts-straight lesson from Mr. Pence. But the vice president’s team believed he’d been clear with the president that he didn’t have the constitutional authority to overturn the vote. “Anything you give us, we’ll review,” Mr. Pence told the president during a meeting on Jan. 5. “But I don’t see how it’s possible.” Mr. Trump later insisted that his vice president never told him no.

That night, after meeting with Mr. Pence, the president summoned aides into the Oval Office. He opened the door to the colonnade and told staff to sit and listen to his supporters celebrating near the Ellipse, the site of the Save America rally the following day. As aides shivered in the wintry breeze that filled the room, Mr. Trump signed a stack of legislation and bobbed his head to the classic rock blaring outside—precisely the kind of music he’d play ahead of his rallies.

Mr. Trump praised his supporters’ energy and asked his team if the following day would be peaceful. “Don’t forget,” Mr. Trump told them, “these people are fired up.”

He knew. He wanted it. He refused to stop it:

Initially, Mr. Trump seemed to be enjoying the melee. Heartened to see his supporters fighting so vigorously on his behalf, he ignored the public and private pleas from advisers who begged him to quell the riots. Terrified Republican lawmakers called White House aides and the president’s children for help. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser twice personally implored Mr. Meadows to intervene. Mr. Trump didn’t call off the intruders until almost 4:30 p.m. “Go home—we love you, you’re very special,” Mr. Trump said in a social media video, but he didn’t denounce the violence.

This part is interesting because it tracks with every Trump scandal since he came down the escalator:

The backlash against Mr. Trump was immediate. He was suspended from Twitter and Facebook the next day. A flood of White House officials resigned. The House impeached him on Jan. 13 for inciting an insurrection—becoming the only president to be impeached twice—in a bipartisan vote that included support from 10 Republicans. Top Republicans both inside and outside of Trump World believed that the man who had positioned himself as the party’s kingmaker—potentially for the next decade—was now finished.

But days after Mr. Trump left office, polls showed that he maintained high levels of support inside his party. House Republicans who had voted to impeach him found themselves the target of censure and primary challenges. Republican leaders made plans to visit him at Mar-a-Lago—a steady stream of supplicants bowing before their exiled king.

Nothing will change this, that’s obvious. What could it be? They could find watch on tape laughing with K Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton about what a bunch of morons his followers are and how he took them for every penny they had and they would just say it’s fake. He could drop his pants on live TV and run around in circles screaming “Look at my winky!!!” and they’d cheer. Their support is impermeable and every cynical opportunist on the right has decided to try to exploit that for political power and financial gain.

They are not afraid. They are complicit.

Bender interviewed Trump at Mar-a-lago and found a somewhat disoriented and depressed Trump. He wondered if he should run again due to his advanced age and weight. (?) He “found relief in acting as the restaurant maitre d:

Slowly, he found relief in the new routine. He golfed every day and reveled in the attention during the dinner hour at the club. “Did you have the meat or the fish? Was it good?” he asked guests. He lost some weight, and a warm tone had reappeared in his face. He’d just finished golfing with PGA player Ernie Els when I arrived and took a call from Sean Hannity during our interview. Shockingly, he said he was glad to be off Twitter. His prewritten statements, now issued via emails, were “much more elegant.” “It’s really better than Twitter,” Mr. Trump told me. “I didn’t realize you can spend a lot of time on this. Now I actually have time to make phone calls, and do other things and read papers that I wouldn’t read.”

He reads stories about himself, period. Always has. And, like Chauncey Gardner, he likes to watch TV.

Here’s the shadow cabinet. Oh god…

He’d reorganized his inner circle of political advisers. Donald Trump, Jr., replaced Mr. Kushner as the top family adviser. Mr. Trump became less reliant on his final campaign manager, Bill Stepien, and elevated Susie Wiles, who oversaw both Trump victories in Florida. He was in constant contact with Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Sen. Rick Scott, the Republicans in charge of the House and Senate races in 2022.

His advisers have pushed him to carefully cultivate his political power and delay deciding whether to run again in 2024 until after the midterms. Still, Mr. Trump has followed the chatter like a day trader monitoring his portfolio. When Ron DeSantis performed well in a straw poll of an obscure gathering of conservatives last month, Mr. Trump asked advisers whether the Florida governor would challenge him in a primary if he were to run. (The majority opinion was yes.) And he said on Fox News last week that he’d decided whether to run in 2024 but wouldn’t reveal the verdict.

There is no doubt in my mind that his plan is to run to avenge The Big Lie, now that the GOP is wiring the electoral college for him. Anything can happen, of course. He is elderly. But assuming he can, he will.

On June 26, Mr. Trump held his first rally since Jan. 6, drawing thousands to the Lorain County fairgrounds near Cleveland. The event was to support Max Miller, a former aide who has waged a primary challenge against Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, who supported impeachment charges. But Mr. Trump spent much of his 90-minute speech fixated on the 2020 results.

Mr. Trump’s new team could only shrug their shoulders. They, too, will give him space to process the loss, with the hope that he’ll find some measure of closure. His political future may depend on it. “He’ll never move on, but at least it won’t be half of his speech at some point,” one Trump aide said.

“We won the election twice,” Mr. Trump said in Ohio. “And it’s possible that we’ll have to win it a third time.”

He is a very sick man.

Catherine Rampell notes this data point that is actually good news :

“The share of Americans who evaluate their lives well enough to be considered ‘thriving’ on Gallup’s Live Evaluation Index reached 59.2% in June, the highest since Gallup began measuring 13 years ago.”

I know that I spend most of my time wallowing in anxiety and anger. But that is almost certainly a function of all the time I spend on social media and reading about politics. It’s an occupational hazard. But regular people seem to be feeling pretty good right now.

I must admit, looking at that graph, I’m flummoxed as to why some of those external events change their views. It sure seems as though the majority tends to get happier when Republicans win something. On the other hand, it may just be that Gallup chose those events to illustrate their own interpretations of events…

There I go again.

That insurrectionist thinks he should be left off the hook in order to heal the nation. The next time someone complains about liberal snowflakes, think of this:

As hundreds of his fellow MAGA rioters stormed all corners of the Capitol on Jan. 6, Paul Hodgkins headed straight for the Senate chamber.

After walking among the desks once inhabited by lawmakers certifying the presidential election—before being forced into hiding—the 38-year-old Florida man took off his protective eye goggles and snapped a selfie before joining his fellow insurrectionists.

That photograph led to Hodgkins’ February arrest after an acquaintance tipped off the FBI—and his eventual decision to strike a plea deal with prosecutors. Now, his defense lawyers are arguing their “kind” client does not deserve prison time for his one felony count.

And in an unreal turn of events, his attorneys are arguing that a lenient sentence on July 19 for the Tampa resident would actually “heal” the nation.

“This case is the story of a man who represents all that we would want in our fellow Americans,” defense attorney Patrick Leduc argued in a sentencing memo to Judge Randolph D. Moss. “It is the story of [a] man who for just one hour on one day, lost his bearings and his way.”

“A sentence that provides Paul Hodgkins ‘charity’ would go a very long way toward healing a nation in dire need of seeing what undeserved ‘grace’ looks like,” Leduc added.

The claim is among a series of head-scratching arguments made in the 32-page sentencing memo, including the declaration that “Hodgkins should not be cancelled.”

Hodgkins wanted to “cancel” an election. And he happily joined a crowd that wanted to “cancel” the Vice President and Speaker of the House.

Nobody’s calling for this insurrectionist to be “cancelled.” They are calling for him to be held accountable for what he did.

“How this Court deals with Paul Hodgkins can stands as a symbol of what we are and, in the event, ‘charity’ is given, what President Lincoln hoped we would always be: A nation that forgives, gives undeserved grace, and restoration that promotes healing,” Leduc said.

Federal guidelines for the one count of obstructing an official proceeding state Hodgkins could face a sentence of up to 21 months in prison and a fine of $250,000. However, as part of his plea agreement, Hodgkins has already agreed to pay $2,000 in restitution and cooperate with federal prosecutors in their ongoing investigation into the riot.“

[…]

Prosecutors state Hodgkins—sporting a Trump flag, “Trump 2020” shirt, and a backpack with goggles and latex gloves—entered the Capitol around 2:50 p.m. alongside a slew of other rioters. Some 10 minutes later, he entered the Senate chamber and eventually snapped a “selfie-style” photograph with his cell phone.

He then “walked down to the Senate well, where he stood adjacent to an elevated desk and platform,” prosecutors state in a criminal complaint. “A few feet away, several other individuals were shouting, praying, and commanding the attention of others in the Senate chamber.”

Hodgkins walked over to join the group, which included self-described “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley, before raising “his flag in salute.” He was arrested about a month later.

He’s been subject to a scarlet letter? Oh boy:

Since his arrest, his legal team contends in the sentencing memo, Hodgkins has been subjected to the “scarlet letter that many of his fellow citizens will compel him to wear” even though they claim he is only guilty of a misguided mistake that wasn’t violent or premeditated. Despite the public backlash, Leduc wrote, his client has continued to work 40 hours a week at MiTek Industries in Tampa, Florida, and perform hours of unpaid community service.

He was only guilty of a misguided mistake, you see. Not like that woman in texas who mistakenly voted while she was on probation and is now doing five years in jail. But then, this is a Real American white man.

Anyway, here’s where the argument gets downright insane:

Leduc also noted that even though Hodgkins does not have a criminal history and showed “courage and strength of character” to plead guilty, he has been subjected to the societal “pull between grace and vengeance”—referencing Confederate soldiers after the Civil war.

“This Court stands in the shadows of Lincoln and Grant. The rebellion of the south did not deserve the ‘grace’ that Lincoln and Grant would provide. But the malice and humiliation that many might have sought would not heal the nation as both Lincoln and Grant fully understood,” the memo states.

In a statement to The Daily Beast, Leduc said Hodgkins’ sentencing is about “how all of ‘us’ are going to start treating each other” after the insurrection.

“We have become a nation seeking to cancel each other out. We are all standing their [sic] with stones, ready to throw them, ignoring…our own hypocrisy,” the defense lawyer said, adding that “our nation is so busy trying to re-write history….maybe my sentencing memo will serve as a reminder of who we should all strive to be. With malice toward none, and Charity for all.”

I would not think it wise to evoke the civil war and compare your client to confederate soldiers in this situation but what do I know?

Meanwhile, the DOJ filed this in court today in response to another defendant requesting that he be released from his ankle monitor:

“Former President Trump continues to make false claims about the election, insinuate that he may be reinstalled in the near future as President without another election, and minimize the violent attack on the Capitol,” prosecutors wrote in the filing. “Television networks continue to carry and report on those claims, with some actually giving credence to the false reporting.”

Prosecutors continued, linking Trump’s rhetoric to the Capitol rioter’s case: “The defendant in this case is not a good candidate to be out in the community without electronic monitoring to ensure the safety of the community and the safety of democracy in the current environment.”

Following up on the post below, get a load of this:

Coroners in Tunisia—which is experiencing its fourth and worst wave of the COVID-19 pandemic— have run out of space, meaning the dead are often left in crowded hospital rooms alongside still suffering patients for 24 hours. The morgues are full, the health ministry says. Even the dead, it seems, are suffering.

“We are in a catastrophic situation … the boat is sinking,” Tunisia’s health ministry spokesperson Nisaf Ben Alaya told reporters this week. “The health system collapsed, we can only find a bed in hospitals with great difficulty. We are struggling to provide oxygen… Doctors are suffering from unprecedented fatigue.”

Tunisia, in north Africa, has 4 percent of its citizens fully vaccinated, more than twice the average across the continent, where the Delta variant has razed whole towns. Vaccines delivered through COVAX, donated from the world’s wealthiest nations, have arrived in small doses, leaving an already vulnerable part of the world with no defenses. Just over one percent of Africa’s 1.3 billion people are fully vaccinated according to the WHO and vaccines that are scheduled to finally arrive next month will only scrape the surface when it comes to distribution.

“Alarm bells should be going off,” Tom Kenyon, chief health officer at Project HOPE and former director of the Center for Global Health at the U.S. CDC told CNBC. “Given the horrors we just saw in India, that should be cause for alarm and stimulate action.” Kenyon predicts Africa’s worst case scenario will soon be worse than Asia’s.

The World Health Organization on Thursday said the second-largest continent in the world has suffered its “worst pandemic week ever,” logging some 251,000 new infections, up 20 percent from the week before and up 12 percent from the worst of the last wave in January. Now more than 16 African countries, including some of the poorest like Malawi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Senegal, are reporting deadly surges. In some rural areas, there are still no tests available, let alone vaccines.

“A few weeks ago, we projected this milestone would be reached shortly, and it brings me no joy to be right,” WHO regional director Dr. Matshidiso Moeti said at a press conference on Thursday. “For Africa, the worst is yet to come. The end to this precipitous rise is still weeks away. Cases are doubling now every 18 days, compared with every 21 days only a week ago.”

The spike in cases has more to do with wealthy nations holding out on promised vaccines than the Delta variant, which authorities fear may mutate into a stronger African variant.

Just 66 million doses of vaccines have been delivered to all of Africa, which has a population of 1.3 billion. By comparison, more than 332 million shots have been administered in the United States, with a population of 372 million. Had even a quarter of the continent’s people been vaccinated, things might have been different, Moeti said. But there is no turning back the clock now.

My God…

And we have Americans refusing to get the vaccines because they believe bullshit. It’s just … astonishing.

Even aside from the obvious moral necessity of doing everything we can to save as many lives a possible with these miraculous vaccines, I really hope the leaders of the west and the scientific community are feverishly working to deal with this because if they don’t we’re going to eventually get a killer variant and we’ll all be vulnerable again.

There was some excellent news this week about the pandemic. According to modeling done by the Commonwealth Fund, the U.S. vaccination program is a rousing success. They found that “without a vaccination program, by the end of June 2021 there would have been approximately 279,000 additional deaths and up to 1.25 million additional hospitalizations” and that “if the U.S. had achieved only half the actual pace of vaccination, there would have been nearly 121,000 additional deaths and more than 450,000 additional hospitalizations.”

This is a welcome sign that the richest, most powerful country in the world can actually still do something. A year ago, after we watched the disastrous federal response to the crisis, I wouldn’t have bet on that. But it turns out that despite the horrific malfeasance that led to more than 600,000 deaths, the big bet the Trump administration placed on the vaccines paid off. The Biden administration’s much better grasp of how to make the government work as it should led to a rollout of the vaccines that managed to get a majority of adults vaccinated with at least one shot and created a system within weeks in which most people who are willing to be vaccinated have easy access.

These vaccines truly are a marvel of modern science. The MRNA technology underlying the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines was being developed before the pandemic hit, but that event supercharged their progress and brought them to the public in record time. Other vaccines using more traditional techniques came online quickly as well, in in all cases, efficacy and safety are beyond question. They are also free to everyone, which may be the most miraculous thing of all!

This is all such good news that it’s simply mind-boggling that Donald Trump isn’t out there touting these vaccines as the greatest accomplishment of his administration and exhorting his followers to rush out and get them immediately. Unlike 99% of his relentless boasting, it’s not even a lie. Operation Warp Speed was a success. But of course he’s not doing that.

Sure, Trump takes credit for the vaccines as if he had cooked them up himself in the White House kitchen, and frequently suggests that millions more would have died if not for him. But at Trump’s recent rallies, his crowd doesn’t cheer when he brings it up. If there’s anything to which Trump is sensitive (and this is pretty much the only thing), he definitely notices not getting a good reaction from the crowd. Now he’s trying to find a way to work both sides of the issue:

So this is how he's going to straddle the "I am the great vaccine God" and "nobody should take the Devil vaccines" MAGA problem. https://t.co/QYYzTlIFOG

— digby (@digby56) June 17, 2021

Unfortunately, millions of his followers were convinced by his behavior during his last year in office that COVID was not a crisis. No matter what he says today, they remain convinced that the virus was a political attack, a hoax or simply overblown, regardless of the monumental body count. And then there’s the relentless disinformation campaign coming from right-wing media. Here’s a little taste:

Tucker suggests the push for COVID vaccination is somehow a slippery slope to eugenics pic.twitter.com/ZFfB1pql2r

— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) July 9, 2021

On Wednesday night this week, Fox News host Laura Ingraham interviewed a doctor who proclaimed that “unless we really have a compelling case, no one under age 30 should receive any one of these vaccines.” That’s the sort of dangerous fear-mongering conservative viewers see every day, even as thousands of them are still dying.

It appears that’s about to get worse. We are seeing the beginnings of another COVID surge among the unvaccinated, and the largest cohort among them are Trump voters in red states with low vaccination rates. The Kaiser Foundation reported this week:

One of the main factors driving differences in COVID-19 vaccination rates across the country is partisanship. Our surveys consistently find that Democrats are much more likely to report having been vaccinated than Republicans, and Republicans are much more likely to say that they definitely do not want to get vaccinated. In May, just as vaccine supply was starting to outstrip demand, we examined average vaccination rates by county and found that rates were lower in counties that voted for Trump in the 2020 Presidential election compared to those that voted for Biden. Now, two months later, we find that not only does this remain the case, the gap has grown.

This is happening as the CDC reports that more than half the new cases in the U.S. are caused by the far more transmissible and deadlier Delta variant. It’s spreading rapidly among the unvaccinated and many are getting severely ill. (The good news that the vaccines are still effective in preventing serious illness from this strain.) In Missouri, where only 40% of people are even partly vaccinated, the ICUs are filling up again. NBC News quoted one doctor there saying his patients are “shocked” when they end up in the hospital and many of them have regrets. He said many tell him “that they wish that they knew they were going to end up in the hospital this sick and they would have made a different choice and got the vaccine.”

CNN recently reported on a Georgetown University study that found five undervaccinated COVID clusters in the South and Midwest which could put the whole U.S. at risk should a new variant arise within the human petri dish they are providing. According to the Atlantic’s Ed Yeong, most scientists agree that the longer the virus circulates this way, the more likely that is to happen.

These people are held captive by beliefs that make them vulnerable to a deadly disease and you have to feel some sympathy for that. But they are not just putting themselves in danger, and at this point there really is no acceptable excuse. This country is awash in vaccines, and we are so spoiled that millions of people have to be bribed into getting them — and even then many refuse.

Meanwhile, as Yeong points out, the rest of the world is literally dying for them:

Of the 3 billion vaccine doses administered worldwide, about 70 percent have gone to just six countries; Delta has already been detected in at least 85. While America worries about the fate of states where around 40 percent of people are fully vaccinated, barely 10 percent of the world’s population has achieved that status, including just 1 percent of Africa’s. The coronavirus is now tearing through southern Africa, South America, and Central and Southeast Asia. The year is only half over, but more people have already been infected and killed by the coronavirus in 2021 than in 2020. And new variants are still emerging. Lambda, the latest to be recognized by the WHO, is dominant in Peru and spreading rapidly in South America.

The most sickening irony is that many countries that did so much better than the U.S. did in controlling the virus originally are now being battered by the stronger variants and can’t get the vaccines. It is shameful that we have to beg so many Americans to do it.

I’m with Dr. Fauci on this one:

https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1412946878317174785?s=20

Salon

Conservatives are rather selective about the kind of crime they want punished. But you knew that.

Catherine Rampell at the Washington Post takes note:

If you care about “law and order,” if you think unpatriotic hucksters are getting away with scamming Uncle Sam or, heck, if you don’t want your own taxes to increase, you should demand to beef up the Internal Revenue Service.

Yet for some reason the leading lights of the conservative movement are trying to block tax cops from enforcing the law.

Federal tax enforcement has fallen through the floor. IRS budgets have been slashed by more than 20 percent over the last decade (adjusted for inflation) and the number of enforcement positions has fallen 40 percent. Audits of the wealthy and large corporations are vanishingly low.

The tax fraud prosecution pending against the Trump Organization is only one of many brazen cases of the rich flaunting the law with abandon. Now that no one is checking their math, they are even safer from being held to account.

This is important right now because increasing funding for IRS tax enforcement is a key part of the pending bipartisan infrastructure deal. Closing the “tax gap” (the difference between what is owed and what is paid) could offset some of the infrastructure spending without increasing taxes on Americans who already pay theirs.

“… it would not be outlandish to believe that the actual tax gap could approach and possibly exceed one trillion dollars per year.” — IRS Commissioner Charles “Chuck” Rettig

Rampell continues:

And yet: The pseudointellectual brain trust that has long powered the GOP is now lobbying against adequately funding the IRS. Which proves that these anti-tax crusaders are (and have long been) a bunch of unserious grifters — less interested in “generating economic growth” than in lining their own pockets.

Among the backers of the lobbying effort are billionaire Robert Mercer and notorious charlatan Stephen Moore, both of whom have previously run into trouble with the IRS for alleged tax dodges. They’re part of a consortium that once claimed to care about cutting tax rates to supercharge the economy but has apparently dropped the pretense. Making sure taxes legally owed are actually collected is not only fairer; it also helps keeps rates down. When tax compliance is higher, the government can set rates lower and still collect the same amount of revenue.

Donald Trump built his identity around dodging taxes (as did his father), and only after a lifetime of evasion is the law about to catch up with him, maybe. What Trump, Mercer, Moore and Associates don’t pay in taxes they legally owe, you do for them.

The Committee to Unleash Prosperity, FreedomWorks, the Conservative Action Project, the Coalition to Protect American Workers, and the Leadership Institute are determined that things stay that way. They will spend tens of millions in lobbying fees to secure the ability of the rich to violate tax laws unimpeded.

The broader point in the age of George Floyd is how glaring is the presence of the two-tiered system of injustice foisted in this country on the weak by the strong.

“The people fighting to starve the IRS are the people who imagine the law doesn’t apply to them, only to the little people,” writes Rampell. “If you want these thugs to pay what they owe, put more tax cops on the beat.”

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Thursday night offered a monologue/rant on the topic of Republican opposition to increasing IRS enforcement funding. Republicans wail about rumors of Democrats defunding police while they defend defunding the tax police.

“To the institutional Republican Party, the idea that rich people should be able to cheat on their taxes and get away with it is as core and central them as any other principle with the exception that only certain people should vote,” Hayes observes.

He concludes:

Defending the rights of Donald Trumps of the world to not pay taxes while you do is one of the last unifying projects of the morally and intellectually desiccated Republican Party. They have pioneered a certain kind of defunding the police, and defending that is a hill they will absolutely die on no matter how much it costs. Because when it comes to a certain class of criminal there is no one softer on crime than the Republican Party.

My closest brush with that kind of class privilege came decades ago after an old friend with a military background told me how he’d been charged with resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer, and possession of a concealed weapon. His lawyer got him off (IIRC) with probation and community service.

“How the hell did you manage that?” I asked, stunned.

“Because my daddy’s rich and my momma’s good looking,” he replied, grinning.

Both were true. I’ll bet today he votes Republican.

News you didn’t need (CNN):

Pfizer said Thursday it is seeing waning immunity from its coronavirus vaccine and says it is picking up its efforts to develop a booster dose that will protect people from variants.

It said it would seek emergency use authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration for a booster dose in August after releasing more data about how well a third booster dose of vaccine works.”

As seen in real world data released from the Israel Ministry of Health, vaccine efficacy in preventing both infection and symptomatic disease has declined six months post-vaccination, although efficacy in preventing serious illnesses remains high,” the company said in a statement emailed to CNN.

Okay, but not so fast.

In response, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a joint statement saying, “Americans who have been fully vaccinated do not need a booster shot at this time. FDA, CDC, and [the National Institutes of Health] are engaged in a science-based, rigorous process to consider whether or when a booster might be necessary.” 

The agencies added, “We continue to review any new data as it becomes available and will keep the public informed. We are prepared for booster doses if and when the science demonstrates that they are needed.”

Pfizer’s comment (Reuters):

Pfizer’s chief scientific officer, Mikael Dolsten, said the recently reported dip in the vaccine’s effectiveness in Israel was mostly due to infections in people who had been vaccinated in January or February. The country’s health ministry said vaccine effectiveness in preventing both infection and symptomatic disease fell to 64% in June.

“The Pfizer vaccine is highly active against the Delta variant,” Dolsten said in an interview. But after six months, he said, “there likely is the risk of reinfection as antibodies, as predicted, wane.”

So, no need to panic at this time. Good to know.