Month: July 2021

The COVID-19 Delta variant is more infectious, doctors say, than the original strain. But how much compared to two other plagues loose in the land?

“Bothsides beltway journalism, folks,” Josh Marshall tweeted, illustrating with clips from a Washington Post story:

No. House Republicans led by prospective material witness Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) took his Confederate flag and went home after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected two of his five committee picks. McCarthy takes with him prospective material witness Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Jim Banks (R-Ind.). He could have submitted two other names and chose instead to pitch a well-planned hissy fit in which he declared the investigation had lost “all legitimacy and credibility.”

Pelosi was able to veto his picks because Senate Republicans previously rejected “an evenly divided 10-member bipartisan commission, with both parties having veto power over subpoenas.” McCarthy, Banks and Jordan voted against that. Somehow, three Post reporters seem not to have noticed Republicans made this bed for themselves. Two other Post writers (on the opinion side) acknowledge that McCarthy’s temper tantrum means the House investigation “will both have more integrity and be more likely to undertake a valuable accounting.”

E.J. Dionne writes about the GOP attempt to sabotage the investigation:

It’s past time to recognize the disqualifying extremism of the Trump-era Republican Party. Politics as usual just isn’t possible anymore. Pretending that today’s GOP is the same Grand Old Party of even a decade ago is dysfunctional and misleading.

That contagion has spread far beyond the Beltway.

Thus, a post from Michigan Advance caught my eye this morning. Editor Susan J. Demas writes:

Republicans — with the help of four cowardly Democrats — celebrated their ignoble victory Wednesday over common sense and public health, as they ditched a 76-year-old law that makes it easier for governors to respond to catastrophes.

The Detroit Free Press reports that the Michigan House along mostly party lines voted Wednesday to support initiative petition language repealing the 1945 Emergency Powers of the Governor Act (EPGA) in a move Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) cannot veto. Whitmer used those powers to fight the COVID-19 pandemic that has (as of today) sickened 1 million Michiganders and killed over 21,000.

Demas observes:

One of the biggest obstacles to getting coronavirus under control is that too many policymakers have obsessively attempted not to anger the very vocal minority of COVID conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and far-right activists who have dominated news stories far more than they deserve to. 

You know, like the self-styled militiamen who allegedly plotted to kidnap and kill Whitmer last year over her health orders. Or like the fine AR-15-wielding folks who invaded Michigan’s Capitol last April during yet another GOP vote to yank Whitmer’s powers. That would later be called a “dress rehearsal” for the violent pro-Trump insurrection at the U.S. Capitol when our democracy teetered on the brink for several hours as right-wing activists tried to hunt down members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence to stop Biden from being certified as the rightful winner of the 2020 election.

That would be the insurrection U.S. House Democrats want to investigate, both for its origins and in the interests of future prevention. Echoing Dionne, Demas has advice for Michigan Democrats that those inside the Beltway would do well to heed (emphasis mine):

There’s no reasoning with folks like that who don’t believe in the social contract or even democracy itself. The sooner we accept this, the sooner we can start crafting policy solutions that work for the reasonable, sane majority.

But with leaders assiduously trying not to inflame those who have behaved the worst during the pandemic, like lifting mask mandates for the vaccinated but requiring zero proof because vaccine passports would hurt the feefees of conspiracists constantly egged on by GOP politicians, it results in an endless stupidity loop. 

That’s the problem. One of our major parties has stopped participating in democracy and has opted instead to join an authoritarian cult. Republicans have abandoned the social contract and democracy itself, except as bad conceptual theater. It is the Republican Party that has lost all legitimacy and credibility. They mean to take the rest of the country with them.  

If you missed Digby’s post Wednesday about young, unvaccinated people dying of Covid in Alabama, please read it.

Axios reports:

Clinical trials showed both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine to be 94-95% effective at preventing serious illness and death. There will be people in the other 5-6%. That does not mean the vaccines don’t work; those cases are noteworthy precisely because they are rare.

Even Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) who just received the vaccine on Sunday admitted, “When you talk to people who run hospitals, in New Orleans or other states, 90% of people in hospital with delta variant have not been vaccinated. That’s another signal the vaccine works.”

The flood of new Covid infections (Delta variant) across the U.S. is among the unvaccinated. It seemed the pandemic was subsiding earlier this spring. But with Delta being more transmissible, it is back as deadly as ever.

Axios again:

Where it stands: Nationwide, the average number of new cases per day was up 55% over the past week.

• New cases increased in 46 states, and many of those increases are substantial.
• Florida is now averaging just under 6,500 new cases per day — by far the most of any state, and a 91% jump from the week before.
• New cases more than doubled over the past week in Mississippi — from about 320 per day to about 660 per day. The state has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country; just 34% of its residents are fully vaccinated.

“Breakthrough infections” among those already vaccinated tend to be non-life-threatening. Right now, 97% of new cases are among the unvaccinated whom right-wing influencers have heavily propagandized — in the name of freedom — to resist getting one of the readily available vaccines.

Even they are suddenly “woke” to the threat of the Delta variant. Something has gotten their attention since nothing is likely to have pricked their consciences. One might speculate it is climbing death rates in red states, but it is more likely the GOP’s approval polling.

Nothing takes away your freedom like losing your life.

Oy. This is just tragic:

Dr. Brytney Cobia said Monday that all but one of her COVID patients in Alabama did not receive the vaccine. The vaccinated patient, she said, just needed a little oxygen and is expected to fully recover. Some of the others are dying.

“I’m admitting young healthy people to the hospital with very serious COVID infections,” wrote Cobia, a hospitalist at Grandview Medical Center in Birmingham, in an emotional Facebook post Sunday. “One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late.”

My greatest fear was of getting the virus once the vaccines were available but before I qualified. These people are living that nightmare. Or should I say, dying that nightmare. Horrible.

Just in case you doubt that the “voter fraud” BS is nothing but crude, rank racism, here is the evidence:

And views follow a similar pattern in relation to constituent voter groups. People who perceive widespread election fraud attribute more of it to Black communities (a group that largely votes Dem) than White communities (a group that largely votes Rep). pic.twitter.com/7XZ9ltpQb5

— CBS News Poll (@CBSNewsPoll) July 21, 2021

Only a quarter of these MAGA extremists even have the presence of mind to lie and say they think white people are the cheaters. They are so comfortable in their racism that they just say it out loud.

These attitudes represent tens of millions of our fellow Americans.

I’ve been remiss in not covering the Tom Barrack scandal more closely and I think it’s kind of a big deal. We knew that Trump had corrupted American foreign policy for his own political and financial ends. But this takes it to a whole other level.

David Kurtz at TPM:

Okay, let’s jump right into the Tom Barrack scandal. We’ll break it into two parts: key takeaways from the unsealing of the case + what the implications might be. Still a lot to unpack on this story.

Key takeaways from the criminal filings:

Trump Role? President-elect Trump was directly touched by the scandal, with Barrack allegedly succeeding in arranging calls between Trump and UAE officials. Trump is actually portrayed by prosecutors as a victim, betrayed by his friend and confidante Barrack (more on this in a moment).

Hubris Kills: Barrack voluntarily talked to investigators and then allegedly lied to them, leading to a whole set of charges in addition to the violations of FARA.

Curious Timing: The charged conduct took place from 2016-18. Barrack allegedly lied to investigators in an interview in June 2019. It took more than two years after that for an indictment. Was this case bottled up in the Trump Justice Department?

How Far Does the Barrack Scandal Reach?Rotten To The Core: The contours of the case suggest a thorough and deep corruption of U.S. foreign policy under Trump. Duh, I know.

So THAT Explains It: The scandal potentially sheds new light on previously inexplicable Trump administration policy toward UAE, Saudi, and Qatar–and on other countries’ behavior toward the U.S. It doesn’t take long for word to get around that you gotta pay to play.

Who Played Whom? Was Trump really a victim of Barrack, as prosecutors say? A pro-UAE tilt and a thumb on the scale for its close ally Saudi Arabia was the order of the day in the Trump administration, and that involved a lot of people in the Trump orbit across an array of issues. Just one example:

What a surprise that Pompeo was such a relentless advocate for the Saudis and UAE. https://t.co/Q0PM2QQjK0

— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) July 21, 2021

More from Josh Kovensky:

For the odd melange of foreign policy and nakedly transactional deal-making that characterized the Trump administration, Tom Barrack was a fit.

But from what prosecutors allege in an indictment unsealed on Tuesday and an accompanying memorandum demanding that he remain in federal custody, Barrack crossed the line. In doing so as brazenly as he allegedly did, Barrack has inadvertently helped reveal how foreign policy in the Trump administration’s early years began to form.

Barrack, a longtime Trump confidante and founder of investment firm Colony Capital, has been charged with crimes related to an alleged scheme from 2016-18 to illegally lobby the Trump White House on behalf of the United Arab Emirates. Prosecutors described him as an “extremely wealthy and powerful individual” who allegedly acted at the direction of senior UAE officials.

To some in the D.C. foreign policy community, the allegations fit with some of the more surprising things that came out of the Trump administration’s approach to the Middle East.

First off, Trump came out of the gate in early 2017 hot on Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Aaron David Miller, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a longtime adviser to secretaries of state from both parties, pointed out to TPM that Trump was exceptional in that his first foreign trip was to Saudi Arabia.

“The Emiratis – and Tom Barrack was the embodiment of this – the Emiratis probably couldn’t believe how easy it was to establish relations with this administration,” Miller said. “They were pushing on a very, very open door.”

Hussein Ibish, a scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, told TPM that UAE and Saudi leaders had “recognized” something of themselves in the Trump administration.

“They saw in him an American president who conducted politics in a way that they recognized the most,” Ibish said. “And he was looking to sell stuff, and they were looking to buy it, so there was a meeting of the minds there.”

Ibish added that for the first year of the Trump administration, it was unclear to many foreign nations who in Washington they should call to gain access and influence in the White House.

Barrack, Ibish added, appears to have filled that role for the UAE.

“It’s not just who do you call, but who can call on your behalf – that’s where someone like Barrack becomes a useful lobbyist, and an actual advocate,” Ibish said.

It’s not clear how much influence Barrack actually wielded within the White House, and how many policies Trump would have pursued regardless of the influence of his longtime friend and confidante.

Prosecutors, for example, detail how Barrack tried to prevent any U.S. action after the UAE and Saudi Arabia embarked on a political and economic embargo of Qatar in October 2017.

“They clearly used Barrack to try to scuttle any high-level effort by the Trump administration to get involved in moderating or brokering the politico-economic siege,” Miller said, adding that he was unsure if Trump, freed of Barrack’s influence, could have made a difference in the matter.

“It probably did influence policy to a certain degree, but since that rift was unhealable in 2017, I’m not sure it would have mattered if Trump, the self-styled greatest negotiator in history, had gotten involved,” Miller added.

From that standpoint, Barrack was less a cause of the Trump administration’s willingness to acquiesce than he was a symptom.

When it came to the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, for example, it’s unclear whether that may have been an example of anyone’s specific influence or instead general willingness born of the Trump administration’s own nihilism when it came to the idea of any interest greater than a whim of the moment.

“I spent 25 years in government, I believe there is something called the national interest,” Miller said. “But there was no effort to hide the fact that the national interest was being willfully, preternaturally subordinated to Trump’s domestic politics, his business interests, and his own sense of personal vanity.”

Trump and his cornies didn’t invent this sort of thing. But they sure as hell are the first one’s to so blatantly make a profit at it.

for clarity, my point isn’t that reporters shld be cheering on the committee. It’s flawed as an analytic judgement. another example of how establishment DC journalism remains wired for the GOP.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 21, 2021

It’s so dumb. The Republicans always planned to turn this into a partisan exercise, which is obvious since they refused a FAIR, NON-PARTISAN COMMISSION THAT GAVE THEM AN EQUAL AMOUNT OF POWER!

Please!!! It’s obvious what they’re doing and Pelosi did exactly the right thing in rejecting those two evil henchmen, Banks and Jordan, undoubtedly knowing very well that Kevin McCarthy (known to Trump as “my Kevin”) would pull the rest of the Republicans from the committee. Now they can have serious, substantive hearings that may feature some shenanigans from the audience (they’ll have their own MAGA Code Pink, I’m sure) but they won’t have sabotage from within the committee or screaming matches on the dais.

I expect she knew that this would happen and it isn’t at all surprising. The Republicans made it clear that they wanted to sabotage any investigation into their Dear Leader’s coup attempt. It had to be partisan. They left them no choice.

It appears that the Grim Reaper is starting to get quite concerned that Republicans are killing their own voters:

Get vaccinated!

These shots need to get into arms as rapidly as possible, or else we're gonna be back in a situation this fall like what we went through last year. pic.twitter.com/J4o6yL5cn4

— Leader McConnell (@LeaderMcConnell) July 20, 2021

When he says, “what we went through last year” he means when he lost the Senate.

But hey, whatever works, amirite?

Eric Boehlert brings up something in today’s Press Run (subscribe here) that’s been bothering me over the past couple of months:

Sexist double standards don’t come any brighter, or more well defined, than the eager, nonstop coverage Trump continues to receive months after losing his White House election, compared to how the Beltway press gleefully tried to run Hillary Clinton out of town after her 2016 loss.

For the media, Trump the man remains a captivating topic who provides endless angles of intrigue and who is treated as a looming star of American politics. This, after becoming only the ninth president in U.S. history to lose a re-election bid. Clinton the woman though, was treated as an incompetent has-been who threw away a sure-fire win, and one who needed to get off the national stage immediately. Trump has receiving very little media second guessing.

“I was really struck by how people said that to me, ‘Go away, go away,'” Clinton observed in 2019, “They never said that to any man who was not elected.” Trump’s media treatment this year confirms her claim and that the tough coverage she received was tailor made for the first woman nominee.

Against the backdrop of President Joe Biden’s “boring” administration, journalists seem eager for the chaos and clicks that Trump creates. The coverage seems to swell with each passing day, as the press marvels at Trump’s lasting power. This was a breathless Business Insider headline this week, even though it would been more timely in 2017: “The Definitive Oral History of How Trump Took Over the GOP, as Told To Us By Cruz, Rubio, and 20 More Insiders.”

The premise to virtually all the coverage is, of course Trump will run again. By contrast, the first woman White House nominee was treated quite differently after her defeat as journalists angrily, and irrationally, demanded she “go away”:  

• “Hillary Clinton Just Won’t Go Away” (National Journal)

• “Why Won’t Hillary Clinton Just Go Away?” (Washington Examiner)

• “It’s Time for Hillary Clinton To Go Away Forever” (Toronto Star)

• “Can Hillary Clinton Please Go Quietly into the Night?” (Vanity Fair)

• “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Hillary?” (Politico)

• “Hillary, I love you. But please go away” (Los Angeles Times)

The issue was so vexing, a New York Times column asked, “What’s to be done with Hillary Clinton, the woman who won’t go away?” Not long after, an annoyed Michelle Cottle at the Times published “Hillary Clinton’s Master Class in Distraction,” perturbed that the day’s most famous Democrat was giving media interviews and speaking out against Trump.

Following the election came constant pundit hand wringing that Clinton, “doesn’t place enough blame on herself,” the Times stressed. Media men in particular focused on  pressing Clinton to acknowledge her mistakes. Journalists today demand almost no self-reflection from Trump regarding his lopsided loss to Biden.  

Of course not. It’s a given that the woman who won the popular vote by 2 million and lost by 30,000 electoral votes across 3 states was an unparalleled loser who needed take up knitting and STFU. She, of course, conceded on the day after the election and there was no violence so I guess that means she needed to slink off the stage in shame. Trump on the other hand is expected to be an asshole so there is just as much attention lavished on him as there ever was even though he lost the election by 7 million votes as the same number of electoral college votes as Clinton, because he is an asshole who refused to concede and is still contesting the election results 7 months after the Biden inauguration.

There’s a lesson in that somewhere. And it isn’t good.

As Boehlert points out:

Clinton ran on one of the most decorated resumes in American history: First Lady, U.S. Senator, Secretary of State. But the post-election media message was simple: She was a poorly-advised, “bad” candidate who just didn’t get retail politics in America.

By contrast, how many in-depth reports have you read about how and why Trump lost Georgia and Arizona, two longtime Republicans bastions? “I’ve yet to see reporters from NY Times, WaPo, Politico etc chide Trump for not running a good campaign in Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia the way they spoke about Hillary and Wisconsin/Ohio/Etc,” Oliver Willis tweeted last week.

Boehlert also rightly points out that this attitude allowed the press to ignore their own sexist attitudes during that campaign.

It will happen again, especially to any Democrats. Just look at the difference in coverage of Harris and Biden today.

As Boehlert says, “sexism is a helluva drug.”

On Monday night, there was a brief moment of serious consternation at the news that the Department of Justice (DOJ), under Attorney General Merrick Garland, had declined to prosecute former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for lying to Congress after the department’s Inspector General forwarded a serious referral presenting evidence that Ross had lied. The next day, the Associated Press, which published the report, issued a correction to say that it was actually the William Barr Justice Department that had issued the declination, not Garland which was a welcome relief for those who have been growing more and more concerned about whether there will be any real accountability for the Trump administration’s lawlessness. After what he did with Roger Stone, no one expected William Barr’s Justice Department to hold any Trump crony accountable. It remains to be seen if Garland will reverse that decision — but he certainly should.

Garland did announce some good news on Monday, however, formally reversing many decades of DOJ policy when he announced that, with some limited exceptions, the department would prohibit the seizure of journalists’ records in leak investigations. This is a power that was egregiously abused in the last administration but was used liberally by administrations of both parties. Getting rid of it is a good step.

Garland’s other recent decision to double the size of the voting rights enforcement staff to vigorously combat efforts to restrict ballot access and prosecute those who threaten or harm election workers was also very welcome. Unless and until the filibuster fetishists in the U.S. Senate agree to pass new voting rights legislation, these will be the only tools the federal government will have to protect the electoral system.

And the decision to reinstate the moratorium on federal executions, which Trump and Barr had dropped after almost two decades so they could go on a killing spree in the last year of Trump’s term, is another huge step back from the moral abyss.

But there is reason to be worried about Garland’s DOJ still.

The decision to support Trump’s claim that he was performing his official duty when he demeaned and degraded E. Jean Carroll’s integrity and her physical appearance as he denied her accusation that he’d raped her in a department store dressing room before he was president was inexplicable. This claim of immunity because he was doing his job is based upon a law that holds that an individual government employee cannot be held personally liable for what he or she does in the course of their duties. It’s ridiculous that anyone would agree that being a disgusting boor is in the presidential job description, but it’s even more worrisome that this concept is now being taken up by at least one of his henchmen and it could have very far-reaching consequences.

Alabama Republican Congressman Mo Brooks is now citing the same immunity in a lawsuit brought against him for helping to incite the January 6th insurrection. Brooks stood on the stage at the “Stop the Steal” rally and proclaimed that was the day “American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.” He says he was just performing his official duty, under the same legal theory that Trump used to excuse his crude defamation of E. Jean Carroll, a claim excoriated by Donald Ayer, deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration, Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project On Government Oversight, and Norman Eisen, special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment, who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times this week exhorting the Attorney General not to accept Brooks’ claim:

It is difficult to imagine an act that falls farther outside the scope of a sitting congressman’s official duties than what he is accused of doing: helping to provoke a crowd to lay siege on the center of our federal government, putting his fellow members at risk of physical harm and ultimately disrupting the vital constitutional process of certifying presidential election results…Certification that Mr. Brooks acted within the scope of his job would leave the United States government defending the right of its elected representatives to foment insurrection against itself.

They point out that if Garland grants this certification, then it is only a matter of time before Trump himself claims it in one of the many legal cases pending such as the one in Georgia in which he is being investigated for pressuring election officials to “find” the votes he needed to win the electoral college, in which case it will be the law of the land that politicians are immune from any legal accountability for attempting a coup. Or as Harvard Law professor Lawrence Tribe wrote in a piece making a similar argument, “to embrace that proposition is to embrace the quintessential dictatorial premise that the chief executive is the state.” 

I have never been very optimistic that there would be any legal accountability for important Republicans, particularly Donald Trump. For quite some time there has been a widespread understanding in the political establishment that even in the face of outright criminal behavior, it would be dangerous to “lock up” high-level members of the government because it would start a cycle of retaliation. This idea certainly informed the Obama administration which made the decision not to “look in the rearview mirror” on the torture policies of the Bush administration. But as former congresswoman Elizabeth Holzman, D-NY, pointed out in a recent interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, it wasn’t always so.

During Watergate, a large number of high-level administration officials went to jail. The attorney general himself (and a close personal friend of the president) did 19 months in federal prison after being convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury. (The perjury charge, by the way, was for lying to Congress, which is what former Trump Cabinet member Wilbur Ross is accused of doing.)

I might have held out some hope that Congress would have been able to at least get to the bottom of the events of January 6th since it was such a grievous assault on the constitution and a physical attack on the capitol itself. However, the Republicans’ rejection of the eminently fair Bipartisan Commission proved that they will obstruct any attempt to seriously investigate. With this week’s appointment of at least four GOP supporters of both Donald Trump and the insurrection itself to the House select congressional committee, it’s not looking very promising. One of them, Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio, was obviously chosen for his penchant for histrionics in committee hearings which virtually guarantees that he and his cohorts will be playing to the audience of one, holed up in one of his presidential palaces in exile.

Meanwhile, the DOJ is dutifully prosecuting the actual insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol, so there is that. People are going to do time for what they did that day and you can’t help but think of the words of Donald Trump himself who told journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker: “Personally, what I wanted is what they wanted.” Of course, it was. But it looks like they’re the only ones who will have to pay a price for it.

This thread came across Twitter on Tuesday. Be sure, it would not have if Anat Shenker-Osorio had not found that it moves voters.

But now, the very same Faction that let the perpetrators of the deadly attack on our Capitol get away with it, is blocking every bill Americans support from protecting our freedom to vote to creating jobs to making care affordable.

— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) July 20, 2021

This is a turning point for our nation. Our leaders must exercise their majority, eliminate the filibuster, and pass the For the People Act and the American Jobs and Families Plans so we can make a better for all of us, no exceptions.

— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) July 20, 2021

Let us never forget what we can do acting together.

— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) July 20, 2021

It should not escape you that freedom shows up three times. It is one of those words that, while cheapened by the right to mean to do whatever the hell I want and screw you, still connects with Americans. It’s one of those American-y things the left needs to not be shy about taking back.

“To sustain long-term movements, we must shift from cataloging what we’re against to painting a desirable portrait of the world we seek,” ASO writes on her website. It appears there is new messaging advice there for combating the Republican bills being floated to take away our freedom to vote.

In particular, avoid abstractions that do not connect with voters.

“Voting rights” is one of those. It’s “process-oriented – not tangible and personal.” It’s no mistake that Republicans personalize their message about invisible, unwashed brown people stealing your vote.

There is much more at the link on messaging around the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and for avoiding the pitfalls of arguing on our opponents’ terms. Freedom must be our frame, not theirs.