Month: July 2021

This piece from the Bulwark’s Jim Swift is just — well, depressing:

In the last few weeks, Missouri has become a COVID hotspot, as have parts of its southern neighbor, Arkansas. The spikes in cases there are approaching levels not seen since winter.

The Show Me State has also become a hotspot for COVID journalism tourism, with Politico publishing a long feature article most notable for the revelation that at Lake of the Ozarks, teenagers and twentysomethings will provide you with stupid quotes. For those of you who don’t hail from Missouri, Lake of the Ozarks is a big man-made lake where people take out pontoon boats and get drunk. It’s also the setting of the eponymous Netflix series. Outside of Kansas City and Saint Louis, Missouri doesn’t have much in the way of big metro areas in between, so “the Lake” is one of its big vacation draws, and not just for Missourians, but for neighbors not too far away in Kansas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.

The state’s other rural big vacation draw, Branson, is fueling the Delta variant, too. Branson is often considered “Vegas for evangelicals,” except for that whole gambling thing. Missourians rejected a proposed casino license for the town in 2004, and ever since it’s been relegated to tacky carnival-like attractions, a Titanic museum, and shows in which has-beens perform in aging theaters. You can eat at Yakov Smirnoff’s dinner theater and then stay at Yakov Smirnoff’s Condos at The View at Emerald Pointe, and maybe someday spend your twilight years in a Yakov Smirnoff retirement community. What a country!

In addition to the spread of the more-contagious Delta variant, there are cultural and political reasons those trend lines are climbing.

The Lake and Branson are both Trump country—and then some. You are likely to see the Confederate stars and bars not far from delusional flags claiming that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. And both are places where most people have not yet been vaccinated. Then again, that’s true of the whole of Missouri, where not even one of the state’s 114 counties has had half its population fully vaccinated:

As someone who was eager to get the vaccine, the anecdotal evidence about vaccine hesitancy in Missouri strikes me as perverse and often baffling—as in the case of this CNN story from yesterday about people sneaking off to get the vaccine without letting friends and family know:

Writing from neighboring Arkansas, Monica Potts describes in the Atlantic what it’s like to have the fiery Delta variant come through when only 35 percent of her neighbors have gotten vaccinated. It’s a saddening and angering read:

Many white evangelicals had already begun to shun vaccines altogether, and part of their rationale is this sense of predestination. The message of these anti-vaxxers builds on a basic idea: God built your body, and the immunity that nature gave you is better than any medicine. Sometimes, doctors repeat these messages. Bryan, the local pharmacist, told me that two doctors in our hometown are not discouraging their patients from getting the vaccines, but they are also not advocating for them. Some are more blatant in their opposition—Amy Beard, who practices telemedicine and is licensed in the state, has been outspoken about treating COVID-19 patients instead with medication typically used to prevent heartworms in dogs, cows, and goats. On her Facebook page, she called the shots “mutant factories,” in response to comments about the vaccines creating variants. Someone who had recovered from COVID-19 in January asked her about “natural” immunity; Beard responded, “Before Covid, natural immunity was the BEST immunity. And it still is.”

So as hospitals across Missouri reach capacity, what are government leaders doing about it? What can government leaders do about it?

Let’s start with St. Louis, where mask mandates are back. Well . . . sort of. Last week both the county and the city announced that mask requirements were going to be implemented again.

Earlier this week, Faisal Khan, the acting director of the Saint Louis County Department of Health, testified in support of the mask mandate before the county council:

The house is on fire. . . . We’re standing in front of it debating about which fire hydrant we should connect the fire hose to—whether we should enact mask mandates this way or that way. That is how absurd this situation is.

After leaving the meeting, Khan says he was greeted with physical assaults and racial epithets.

Not to be outdone, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican, filed a lawsuit to attempt to stop the renewed mask mandate. As he told Fox Business on Tuesday:

People have had it; so we’re filing a lawsuit because it is arbitrary and capricious. It is not based on facts, it is not based on science.

In fact, St. Louis City and St. Louis County have the most restrictive regimes in the whole state and their numbers were worse than counties that didn’t have any restrictions at all. They are making this up as they go along and we got to stop them.

Either Schmitt truly doesn’t understand that St. Louis county and city, which have much higher population densities than the rest of the state, are places where infectious disease can spread more rapidly than rural areas and so require different precautions, or his lawsuit is all for show and he’s just positioning himself for higher office. Take your pick.

Also on Tuesday, the county council voted 5-2 to rescind the mask mandate to much applause.

This puts county residents in an odd situation. Who is your government? The county executive, Sam Page, who says the order stands? Or your county council, which claims to have rescinded it? If police are required to enforce the law or a business owner wants the mandate enforced, what happens? It’s a mess—one that will likely be resolved by the courts, but perhaps only after many people needlessly died because of political posturing.

Meanwhile, on the western side of the state, two Republican lawmakers have made a name for themselves by making outlandish claims, as ProPublica reports:

Around Independence Day, State Rep. Bill Kidd, from the Kansas City suburbs, revealed that he has been infected by the coronavirus.

“And no, we didn’t get the vaccine,” he wrote in a post that has since been deleted. “We’re Republicans 😆”

State Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Taney County, home to the tourist destination of Branson, commented on the post by falsely claiming that the virus had been developed by top government scientist Anthony Fauci and billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates. They “knew what was coming,” Seitz wrote.

“The jury is still out on the ‘vaccine’ (who knows what’s in that),” he wrote.

This puerile gullibility, this prideful credulousness is a disgrace to the nickname Show Me State. It is also deeply irresponsible as a matter of government and public health. Let’s hope that many more Missourians, seeing the appalling statistics, get vaccinated as quickly as possible—even if they have to sneak off to get the shot in secret.

Puerile gullibility and prideful credulousness is a very polite way of saying that these people are fools with a death wish. It’s just … oy.

I know this will shock you to hear it, since Donald Trump has so much respect for police:

In the months since the U.S. Capitol assault, Donald Trump has led the GOP efforts to distort and dismiss the realities of the anti-democratic and deadly riot that the former president himself instigated.

In his retelling, Ashli Babbitt—who was shot and killed trying to enter the House chamber on Jan. 6—wasn’t so much a rioter as she was an “innocent, wonderful, incredible woman.” And, in Trump’s mind, some of the police officers who defended the Capitol that day aren’t the real heroes, calling them liberal “pussies” who loathe MAGA, and outliers within a broadly pro-Trump law enforcement community.

In private discussions this summer, Trump has told some people close to him that several of these officers strike him as weak and as “pussies,” according to two sources familiar with the comments and who described them independently. Trump has also maintained that these men seem “broke[n]” by the events of Jan. 6, and that they do not have the supposed toughness or character of the law enforcement officers who, on the whole nationally, still widely support Trump and his policies.

The do still support him, I’m sure. It is notable that so few police have spoken out about what happened that day. In fact, it’s sickening.

Check out this exchange between Jake Tapper and the head of the Fraternal Order of Police:

Tapper: FOP regularly defends police officers. That’s your job.. I don’t see you doing it publicly.. Laura Ingraham was giving out fake academy awards accusing your police officers of acting…
Yoes: …I stopped watching the news
Tapper: That’s not news pic.twitter.com/cTbym2gibx

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 28, 2021

You want an example of a p-word? There you have it.

The Washington Post reported on a leaked CDC document last night. Yikes:

The document is an internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention slide presentation, shared within the CDC and obtained by The Washington Post. It captures the struggle of the nation’s top public health agency to persuade the public to embrace vaccination and prevention measures, including mask-wearing, as cases surge across the United States and new research suggests vaccinated people can spread the virus.

The document strikes an urgent note, revealing the agency knows it must revamp its public messaging to emphasize vaccination as the best defense against a variant so contagious that it acts almost like a different novel virus, leaping from target to target more swiftly than Ebola or the common cold.

It cites a combination of recently obtained, still-unpublished data from outbreak investigations and outside studies showing that vaccinated individuals infected with delta may be able to transmit the virus as easily as those who are unvaccinated. Vaccinated people infected with delta have measurable viral loads similar to those who are unvaccinated and infected with the variant.

“I finished reading it significantly more concerned than when I began,” Robert Wachter, chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, wrote in an email.

[…]

The document presents new science but also suggests a new strategy is needed on communication, noting that public trust in vaccines may be undermined when people experience or hear about breakthrough cases, especially after public health officials have described them as rare.

Matthew Seeger, a risk communication expert at Wayne State University in Detroit, said a lack of communication about breakthrough infections has proved problematic. Because public health officials had emphasized the great efficacy of the vaccines, the realization that they aren’t perfect may feel like a betrayal.

“We’ve done a great job of telling the public these are miracle vaccines,” Seeger said. “We have probably fallen a little into the trap of over-reassurance, which is one of the challenges of any crisis communication circumstance.”

The CDC’s revised mask guidance stops short of what the internal document calls for. “Given higher transmissibility and current vaccine coverage, universal masking is essential to reduce transmission of the Delta variant,” it states.

There’s a whole lot of finger pointing going on over this. The CDC is being blamed for lifting mask mandates in the first place. But seriously people, the super-spreaders were never wearing masks and Delta would have taken off here anyway, just as it did in the UK. People said it would happen and it did.

Nobody knew exactly how virulent any of the variants would be and it was hoped that people would get quickly vaccinated and stomp them out. That didn’t happen because the right is actively rooting for the virus so they can vindicate their Dear Leader and their people are refusing to do anything to stop the spread. They just won’t do it.

Kevin McCarthy’s “argument” says it all:

Without that evidence released though, this week’s mask announcement triggered fierce pushback among many conservatives, including House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy who claimed the CDC’s decision relied solely on research from India that wasn’t peer-reviewed.

But that claim is misleading. The CDC indeed cites research from India on viral loads as adding to global concerns about transmission post-vaccination. The agency, however, also makes clear that other research and additional studies were under way. And at no point does the CDC cite the research in India as the sole justification for its new mask guidance.

“These early data suggest that breakthrough delta infections are transmissible,” the CDC said of the research in India. “Unpublished data are consistent with this, and additional data collection and studies are underway to understand the level and duration of transmissibility from delta vaccine breakthrough infections in the United States and other settings,” the CDC wrote in a science brief posted online.

McCarthy’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the misleading allegation, which was echoed by other Republicans on Twitter.

“Remember what I said about public health officials losing our trust?” tweeted Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw.

There is nothing but the cult for these people. And it is a death cult.

“Following superstar gymnast Simone Biles citing concerns of mental health after shockingly pulling out of the women’s team competition, a number of conservative media figures and pundits attacked her on Tuesday for supposedly being a ‘quitter’ and ‘selfish sociopath’ who had brought ‘shame on her country.’
— The Daily Beast, 7/27/21– – –

McSweeneys

Even keeping in mind that the big reconciliation bill is still in the works, that “Before and After” shows the exact limits of the GOP’s willingness to bend. I’m going to guess that all of that funding will somehow benefit Mitch McConnell’s endangered Senators in 2022.

As I mentioned yesterday, I think Sinema has left herself some room to vote for the reconciliation bill. She just said she wouldn’t vote for that number. But I’m very concerned that what she is going to do it nix anything that was left out of the original proposal in the bipartisan bill as a “betrayal” of that agreement.

The Republicans are all kissing her feet and calling her a great negotiator, blah,blah, blah, giving her the credit for this bipartisan bill. I have to think that by making it her signature achievement they think they can get her to “protect” it by not voting for anything they negotiated out of it.

The only thing we have going for us, if so, is that Sinema is a total weirdo and I don’t think anyone knows exactly how she thinks or what she wants. So who knows?

Notice a theme here this morning?

“Fueled by hostility to the civil rights movement and other societal changes that attempted to give equal rights to Black and brown people, the Republican Party has now fully embraced white supremacy and white identity politics as its dominant strategy for winning and keeping power,” Chauncey DeVega writes at Salon:

If the American people as a group had listened to Black folks’ warnings — and in particular Black women’s warnings — about the danger represented by Donald Trump, he would never have been elected president in the first place. If the mainstream news media and other prominent public voices had listened to Black and brown folks’ warnings about ascendant fascism and white supremacy, the Jan. 6 coup attempt and lethal attack on the Capitol would not have taken place.

Black and brown folks are now trying to warn the Democrats and Joe Biden that American democracy has been imperiled to such an extreme that the 2022 midterms may be the last “free and fair elections” in the United States — and even that is an optimistic prediction.

Black people are demanding the “urgency of now” to save the country’s democracy. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party’s leadership have instead chosen to celebrate “infrastructure” and “bipartisanship” while refusing to end the filibuster.

If America had listened to Black people’s wisdom and warnings across the centuries, it would be a safer, more secure, more prosperous and more free nation today. America’s future depends on heeding that wisdom now. There is no time to lose.

J.D. Vance’s comments last weekend confirm the exclusionary, royalist bent among about 20 percent of Americans that I have argued has been here since before the Treaty of Paris. Speaking before a conservative conference, the Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio “took a swipe at Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and other Democratic politicians by suggesting that people with children should have more voting power than those of the ‘childless left.’”

Specifically, Vance said, “When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our Democratic republic, than people who don’t have kids.”

Move over, poll tax. Stand aside, white, male property owners. Out of the way, “one dollar, one vote.” Adults with children should have bonus political power. Those without lack literal skin in the game, Vance believes.

I don’t think Vance has thought through the demographic implications, do you? Still, if he’s doing performative trolling for his Republican base, he knows what will juice them before they think too much about it.

But the very idea that this occurs to Vance is a tell. Should the new Republican minority sink its hooks more firmly into the mechanisms of formerly democratic governance at the state and national levels, expect new and inventive ways for them to turn what was a the world’s most enduring democratic republic into a one-party state.

Republicans would consider amending the 14th Amendment with a long list of new prerequisites for citizenship. Being “born or naturalized in the United States” will no longer be sufficient in the Republican States of America.

Ari Berman has a dog-bites-man story about where the country is projected to stand after the 2022 elections. Yes, many longtime red states are experiencing a blue shift from demographic change and increasing diversity. Lucy McBath’s 2018 win in Newt Gingrich’s former U.S. House district and Senate wins by Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossof in Georgia are emblematic of that change. But are they durable? Not if the projected Republican minority has anything to say about it.

Berman writes:

Republicans could pick up anywhere from six to 13 seats in the House of Representatives—enough to retake the House in 2022—through its control of the redistricting process in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and Texas alone, according to a new analysis by the Democratic data firm TargetSmart that was shared exclusively with Mother Jones. Republicans need to gain just five seats to regain control of the House. 

The Republican redistricting advantage goes far beyond those four states: They’ll be able to draw 187 congressional districts, compared to 75 for Democrats. (The rest will be drawn by independent commissions or divided state governments.) But those states are at the highest risk of extreme gerrymandering, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, and they have 94 seats, roughly a fifth of the House. Republicans could draw as many as five new GOP congressional districts in Florida alone, giving them control of the House by redrawing maps in just one state. They’re also likely to gain two to three seats through new maps in Texas, one to three in Georgia, and one to two in North Carolina, according to TargetSmart.

Having failed to win control of one legislative chamber over the last couple of elections, North Carolina Democrats can expect another decade Trump-style litigation over district lines. Republicans will draw legally objectionable maps and dare Democrats to challenge them. They will. In court. Republicans will push back, delay, delay, delay, and finally tweak maps just enough to tell the courts they did. Those new maps will still be unaccaptable to the court and judges will order them redrawn again. More delay. Until Republicans run out the clock on the decade and it’s time to redistrict again from scratch. Just like the last ten years.

Thus, did I vote in NC-10 in the 2016 primary and in NC-11 by the time November rolled around. In that time, the district line flipped over my house from the ridgetop to the west to the ridgetop to the east. It moved again by the 2020 election.

Republicans have admitted that gerrymandering is part of their plan to retake Congress, combined with the raft of new state legislation meant to deprive Americans of their freedom to vote and have their voices heard in state and federal legislatures.

Imagine Mensa-reject Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House in 2023 and tremble. Joe Biden can kiss goodbye the last two years of his presidency.

Democrats’ “best hope,” Berman continues, is passage of the sweeping For the People Act passed by the House and collecting dust in the 50-50 U.S. Senate. It would also ban many of the state-level voting restrictions in progress and on the books as well as end partisan gerrymandering. 

A stripped-down version of the For the People Act proposed by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) eliminated some of the voting protections from the original version of the bill but included the ban on partisan gerrymandering. This revised measure, which is expected to be formally introduced in the coming days, may have a better shot at passing the Senate, especially if moderate Democrats like Manchin are willing to create an exemption to the filibuster for this bill and allow passage with a simple majority. (So far, Manchin has said he opposes this exemption.) “At some point we’re going to get to a binary choice between protecting our democracy and protecting an arcane Senate procedure,” [former Obama AG Eric] Holder says of the filibuster. “At the end of the day, you’re not going to get 10 Republicans [to support the For the People Act]. This is something Democrats will have to pass.”

But that legislation will only make a difference on redistricting if enacted before the new maps take effect—giving Democrats a matter of weeks to act.

The Biden White House has said it believes Democrats can “out-organize voter suppression.” But out-organizing rigged districts is something else. “You can’t out-organize the dismantling of a multiracial district in the Atlanta suburbs. Once it’s gone, it’s gone,” says Michael Li of the Brennan Center.

Republican gerrymandering is likely to blunt the impact of demographic changes that should benefit Democrats. Nearly 75 percent of the growth in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas comes from communities of color, but virtually all the new seats drawn by the GOP are likely to be held by white Republicans. As many as six Democratic representatives of color could lose their seats in these four states, according to TargetSmart. “The future of America is multiracial coalitions, and Republicans will have an opportunity to kneecap that,” says Li.

Bottom line?

“A House controlled by one political party solely because of partisan gerrymandering,” Ohio State University law professor Ned Foley wrote recently on the Election Law Blog, “could make all the difference between the survival or death of American democracy.” 

So while Republicans have joined a death cult vis-à-vis Covid and vaccines, Senate Democrats more committed to Senate traditions than to democratic ones risk presiding over the death of the republic if they sit on their hands much longer. They wanted a senator’s power. Will they use it to save the republic they swore to defend against enemies foreign and domestic?

And not just Democrats in the Senate. I wrote last week:

A frustrated President Abraham Lincoln once snidely commented on Gen. George B. McClellan’s reluctance to engage Confederate forces massed near Washington: “If General McClellan does not want to use the army, I would like to borrow it for a time.”

One hundred fifty-nine years later, President Joe Biden declared the G.O.P.’s passage of laws restricting access to voting the “most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.” The question is, Is Biden up to engaging in that fight? Or does he wish to be remembered like McClellan?

Biden will leave the Beltway to stump for his near-and-dear Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework (BIF). But will he rally public pressure to save the republic so he has one to lead beyond 2022? You’ve got weeks to act, Joe.

Watch this space until Republicans ban it.

And here I thought nothing mattered in the GOP base but the Trump brand. Apparently some Texas Republicans weren’t buying it. And now the Trumpers are all blaming everyone but the Dear Leader himself for endorsing a loser:

Donald Trump’s advisers are angry at David McIntosh, president of the conservative Club for Growth, for persuading the former president to endorse a losing candidate in the special election for Texas’ 6th District.

Why it matters: Susan Wright’s defeat Tuesday in a Republican runoff with Navy veteran Jake Ellzey dealt a blow to Trump’s aura of invincibility as a Republican kingmaker. It’s critical to his 2022 midterm endorsements and continued hold on the GOP.

Trump advisers and allies have been ambivalent about the Club’s advice and thought he should stay out of this Republican-on-Republican contest.

They take the long view and are protective of his successful record — so far — in GOP primary endorsements.

McIntosh did not respond to repeated requests for comment from Axios.

Trump himself disputed the result had dented his power. In a phone call with Axios on Wednesday, the former president conceded McIntosh had pushed him to support Wright but blamed Democrats — not the Club for Growth — for Ellzey’s victory.

He also said he actually “won” because Wright had bested Ellzey in the initial primary and the runoff came down to two Republicans he liked.

“I think this is the only race we’ve lost together,” Trump said of McIntosh and the Club for Growth, before catching himself mid-sentence on the word “lost.”

“This is the only race we’ve … this is not a loss, again, I don’t want to claim it is a loss, this was a win. …The big thing is, we had two very good people running that were both Republicans. That was the win.”

Trump is notorious for shifting or refusing to accept blame for any failure, whether as a businessman or a politician.

The Club for Growth spent more than $1 million on the run-off, making it easily the top outside spender.

Behind the scenes: In private conversations with Trump, McIntosh pushed the former president hard to throw his weight behind Wright.

She’s the widow of Rep. Ron Wright (R-Texas), whose death from COVID-19 vacated the seat.

In these conversations with Trump, McIntosh painted Ellzey as non-conservative and anti-Trump, according to sources familiar with their conversations.

McIntosh appealed to Trump’s vendetta-streak by telling him that the Never-Trumper Bill Kristol had previously donated money to Ellzey (it was a paltry $250 in 2018).

McIntosh also mentioned to Trump that Ellzey didn’t want to join the Freedom Caucus — a group of ultra-conservative House Republicans who are fervently pro-Trump.

Between the lines: The Wright campaign and the Club for Growth also cited internal polling to reassure Team Trump of Wright’s strength. The polling proved to be way off.

An early June survey from the Wright campaign had her up by 15 points and a survey last week — by the American Viewpoint research company used by the Wright campaign — had her leading Ellzey by 10 points, 44%-34%, according to a source with direct knowledge of the results.

The Club for Growth’s own polling also had Wright up by double digits, said a source familiar.

What we’re hearing: Trump advisers and allies, including former Texas governor and Trump administration Energy secretary Rick Perry, remain furious at McIntosh.”He [Trump] totally was taken to the cleaners by the Club for Growth,” said Perry, who has a long and close relationship with Ellzey. “There has to be a reckoning for the Club for Growth. …This whole debacle for the president can be centered on the Club for Growth and David McIntosh.”

Perry said he called Trump a few months ago — before he’d endorsed Wright — and told him to stay out of the race because he had a great candidate called Ellzey down in Texas. Trump ignored his advice.

“For the Club for Growth to have actively tried to destroyed this guy’s reputation, …you’ve gotta be shi—ing me,” said Perry, who called Ellzey an “American hero.”

“That’s what I’ve come to understand about David McIntosh and the Club for Growth,” Perry said. “They will say anything, do anything. And they put Donald J. Trump in jeopardy.”

“In the state of Texas, Mr. McIntosh, we care about character and we care about the truth,” Perry added, “and we would just as soon the Club for Growth never darken the state of Texas again.”

Bottom line: A source close to the situation said they think Trump will be more cautious about whose advice he listens to when it comes to intervening in Republican primaries.

Other Trump advisers said the episode has damaged the Club for Growth’s credibility.

So the venerable Club for Growth loses one primary and its credibility is called into question. But it hasn’t damaged the former president who is supposed to have a supernatural political talent that defies all normal boundaries?

This Politico piece says that Trump’s advisers are worried this affects his clout in the party.

I wrote earlier about what this is actually all about: $$$. Trump’s cult sends vast sums of money to the party and other institutions. That’s why they treat him like a king maker when, in fact, his record is very mixed.

There are many people out there who insist that Trump was no more authoritarian than Bill Clinton or Barack Obama so all the agitation against him is purely performative partisanship.

Poppycock:

NEW DATA OBTAINED by The Intercept adds considerable detail to what we already know about former President Donald Trump’s relentless campaign against whistleblowers and leakers in the intelligence community. The Trump administration referred far more media leaks for criminal investigation each year than any of the previous 15 years, with the CIA accounting for the vast majority of such leaks, according to a trove of records released by the Department of Justice to the independent watchdog group Project On Government Oversight, or POGO, in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The DOJ records provide a previously unavailable level of detail on media leak referrals, including the originating agency, the date of the referral, and the classification level of the suspected disclosure. The records also show the CIA accounting for more than 64 percent of all referrals. The next most common agency, the National Security Agency, accounted for just 15 percent. The documents reveal a dramatic spike in the number of such leak referrals — called “crime reports” — from the CIA in 2017, when Mike Pompeo led the spy agency. Many of those referrals pertained to leaks that had taken place months and even years prior during the Obama administration, raising questions about why they were being revisited.

As The Intercept has previously reported, in 2017 the number of criminal leak referrals spiked to 120 — much higher than any other point since 2005. The number of referrals to Trump’s Justice Department in 2018 was 88, with 71 in 2019, still considerably higher than the years before Trump became president. In the first three quarters of 2020, there were 55 referrals. More than twice as many leak referrals were sent to the Justice Department during the first three years of the Trump administration than in any other three-year period in the last decade-and-a-half.

This wasn’t about national security.The administration was almost exclusively concerned with leaks that made Trump look bad.

When they use their power in this way specifically to protect the Dear Leader personally, you are dealing with a different animal, even from the toxic Bush and Cheney years. It’s the pettiness that makes it truly tyrannical.

I have written a lot about the Democratic “mavericks”, usually centrist moderates, who inevitably make legislation all about them. It’s been going on for a very long time. Josh Marshall has a good take on one of our current superstars-in-her-own-mind, Kyrsten Sinema:

Yesterday, just as the bipartisan infrastructure mini-bill was coming together, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) announced she didn’t support the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation plan – where most of the Biden agenda is housed. Freak out? I wouldn’t.

First of all while this was played as a rejection of the bill that’s really not how it reads to me. It’s the vaguest of comments that seems focused on the size of the bill. It leaves all her options open and plenty of room to nitpick a few dollars here and there. I would expect that both Sinema and Manchin will work to shave some spending off the size of the bill over the next couple months. That’s similar to what Manchin did during the passage of the original COVID relief bill.

I think this is best interpreted as Sinema throwing up a flag that she’s going to continue to preen and create drama for the purpose of building a reputation as an uber-‘moderate’ and generally have everyone kiss up to her. She wants to come out of this as the person who wasn’t totally down with Democratic priorities and shaved the numbers down, at least a bit. If she really wanted to stop the process she wouldn’t vote to let it begin, which she is. That tells you the story.

She would be a fool to take any of this too far. She needs Democrats to vote for her in her home state too. And they are losing patience with this crap:

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s support for the Senate filibuster appears to be doing real damage to her political brand back home. The first-term Arizona Democrat has often defended the Senate’s 60-vote supermajority requirement as a necessary check on partisan whiplash, arguing that it forces the chamber to put together “durable” coalitions. But according to a new survey shared with Mother Jones from the progressive polling and policy firm Data for Progress, her stance has left her far less popular in Arizona than either President Joe Biden or her recently elected Senate colleague, Mark Kelly—and perhaps even vulnerable to a primary challenge. 

According to the survey, which was conducted from June 28 to July 6th, Sinema is viewed favorably by 38 percent of voters, compared to 47 percent for Kelly and 51 percent for Biden—all of whom were elected in recent years by similar margins to Sinema. (Republican Gov. Doug Ducey’s favorability sits at 44 percent.) The numbers are more stark when you look at the partisan breakdown. Sinema is viewed favorably by just 42 percent of Democrats (with 39 percent viewing her unfavorably), while Kelly, who was elected narrowly last fall, is at 75 percent favorability with just 17 percent viewing him unfavorably. Biden? He’s doing just fine according to Arizona Democrats, with 95 percent viewing him positively.

There is a big Medicare provision in the Reconciliation bill. There are a lot of retired people in Arizona. You do the math.