Month: August 2021

Senate Democrats early this morning approved their $3.5 trillion budget resolution for expanding the social safety net. Twitter followed along as senators debated the measure and Republicans tried to weaken it and add poison-pill amendments (CNN):

The vote was 50-49 and the measure passed after a lengthy series of amendment votes known as a “vote-a-rama,” which started on Tuesday afternoon and went until just before 4 a.m. ET.

The Democratic-controlled House must next take up and pass the budget resolution. Majority Leader Steny Hoyer sent a letter to colleagues Tuesday saying the chamber planned to return the week of August 23 to consider the budget resolution.

Passage of the budget resolution by both chambers will unlock the ability for Democrats to use a process known as budget reconciliation to pass legislation on a party-line vote addressing health care, aid for families, the climate crisis and more. Tuesday’s vote is only the first step in what will be a lengthy process. The resolution needs to be approved by both chambers before Democrats can move on to the reconciliation plan, which still must be drafted and will be considered in the fall.

The blueprint will need fleshing out over weeks before the final appropriations bill is ready for a vote in both House and Senate. And in a 50-50 Senate, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will have to contend with keeping moderate Democrats Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia from blowing up the bill from the inside.

According to a summary of the resolution, Democrats plan to invest in four major categories: families, climate, health care, and infrastructure and jobs. Among other provisions, the measure seeks to establish universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds and make community college tuition-free for two years. It calls for the establishment of a Civilian Climate Corps, adds new dental, vision and hearing benefits to Medicare coverage and would make a “historic level” of investment in affordable housing. The resolution also aims to lower the cost of prescription drugs and provide “green cards to millions of immigrant workers and families.”

Congressional Democrats are pursuing a dual-track strategy to passing major infrastructure and economic legislation and have worked to advance both bipartisan and partisan packages. Earlier on Tuesday, the Senate passed a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill following painstaking and drawn-out negotiations between a bipartisan group of senators and the Biden administration. The push to pass a separate legislative package on a party-line vote will allow Democrats to enact key Biden priorities left out of the bipartisan deal that go beyond the traditional definition of physical infrastructure.

Of course, he did

This from those wee hours via Axios:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) blocked Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) attempt to pass Democrats’ signature voting rights package — a revised version of the “For the People Act” — in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

Why it matters: The sweeping federal elections overhaul is intended to combat a wave of new voting restrictions in Republican-led states, but has no chance of winning the 60 votes needed to overcome the filibuster.

• Schumer attempted to pass the bill via unanimous consent, which requires just one senator to object in order to kill the vote.
• Senate Republicans filibustered the “For the People Act” for the first time in June. Moderate Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has also voiced his opposition to some elements of the package.

Let my people go, said Moses.

Let our people vote, said Democrats.

Hell no, said Republicans.

“This bill would constitute a federal government takeover of elections. It would constitute a massive power grab by Democrats,” said Texas Republican, Sen.Ted Cruz.

“Here in the dead of night, they also want to start tearing up the ground rules of our democracy and writing new ones of course on a purely partisan basis,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch “The Grim Reaper” McConnell of Kentucky.

Meanwhile in the light of day, 17 Republican-controlled states and Nevada have enacted at least 30 new laws this year to make it harder for Americans to vote, some more eggregious than others, the Brennan Center assesses.

Republicans are all about freedom — the freedom to refuse vaccination and masks, the freedom to irresponsibly spread the deadly Covid virus to the nation’s children, the freedom to dispense medical advice on Facebook, and, of course, to carry firearms everywhere (unless you are Black). Until it comes to the freedom for non-Republican-voting Americans to participate in the democratic process. Then conservative America is all paranoia and white knuckles if not nooses and insurrection.

Josh Marshall points out that the GOP is positioning itself as the party for the unvaccinated, identifying with them and championing their “cause.” . And that is a much, much smaller party than the vaccinated party:

 A key reason we’re experiencing the fourth COVID wave in the US – albeit one that has far less hospitalizations and deaths thanks to vaccines – is that way too many people still haven’t gotten vaccinated. From an epidemiological perspective we’re not nearly where we want to be. But as we talk about the political polarization over vaccines, things are a bit different.

Among Americans over the age of 18 fully 71% have gotten at least one vaccine dose.

As an epidemiological matter we need all that 71% to get both their shots. Currently that fully vaccinated number is 61%. And that should shift significantly over the next few weeks as many of those people get their second shots and then wait for two more weeks for the full immune effect to take hold. But as a proxy for being for or against vaccines, even the single shot is a good measure. And that means that an overwhelming majority of the people who participate meaningfully in the national political conversation and have even the right to vote are vaccinated.

This becomes even more the case when you add in the age factor. Voter participation almost universally goes up with age. The same is true with COVID vaccines. 90% of Americans over 65 have had at least one shot. And in basically every age segment from age 12 on up the vaccination rate gets higher. Point being, among the voting public the vaccinated already overwhelmingly outnumber the unvaccinated.

The Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday about how vaccination status is increasingly dividing Americans. “From family gatherings to weddings to workplaces, vaccinated Americans are drawing new, sharper lines around who they choose to spend time with amid the rise of the highly-transmissible Delta variant. And the unvaccinated are growing testy over being excluded and feeling judged for exercising their right to make their own health choices.”

“Growing testy over being excluded and feeling judged” might stand as a good summation of Trumpite politics generally. But that’s for another post.

These divisions obviously have political implications too. But it’s important to remember that the voluntarily unvaccinated are overwhelmingly outnumbered in political terms and growing more so.

Actually, this may work out exactly as they want it to. Unfortunately. Paul Waldman at the Wapo explains:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is watching as the delta variant ravages his state, causing an explosion in new coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Courts are rebuking his appallingly reckless covid decisions. School districts are rebelling against his efforts to prevent them from taking steps to minimize transmission of the virus. The president of the United States has singled him out as a particularly vivid example of state government irresponsibility and failure. His approval rating is falling.

It’s all going according to plan.

In fact, more than any other Republican, DeSantis may have cracked the code of how to position oneself to lead the GOP in a new era that is simultaneously post-Donald Trump and defined by Trumpism.

Any politician can be an Internet troll concerned with nothing so much as Owning the Libs, and many in DeSantis’s party think that’s their most fruitful path to success. But to really capture the hearts of the party base, you have to show your willingness to do actual harm to people’s lives as you wage war against the other side. And that’s where DeSantis is excelling.

Not that he’s above trolling. DeSantis sells T-shirts attacking Anthony S. Fauci and is now blaming the covid crisis in his state on undocumented immigrants in Texas; presumably we’re supposed to believe they cross the border near El Paso, walk to Corpus Christi, then dive in the Gulf of Mexico and swim to Tampa, a superhuman covid triathlon that is now filling Florida’s hospitals.

That kind of idiocy aside, no governor in America has done so much to make the spread of covid more likely. DeSantis signed a law nullifying local public health measures and banning private companies from requiring customers to show proof of vaccination. In a case brought by Norwegian Cruise Line, which hopes to prevent its cruises from becoming floating superspreader events, a judge just blocked the law’s implementation.

And in an escalating battle with local officials, he instructed school districts not to require masks and even threatened to withhold funding from any district that does so.

Each of these moves creates conflict and headlines, and each one is guaranteed to produce outrage on the part of liberals and anyone else who actually would like to see the pandemic end, which enables DeSantis to position himself as a chief antagonist in the politicized struggle over covid.

To be clear, DeSantis has encouraged people to get vaccinated. But the bulk of his public focus has been on attacking efforts to actually slow the spread of the virus. “We can either have a free society or we can have a biomedical security state, and I can tell you, Florida, we’re a free state,” he says.

With a state government so determined not just to do as little as possible itself to prevent the spread of the virus but to actively prevent anyone else from doing anything either, it isn’t surprising that the delta variant found particularly friendly ground in Florida. It’s now experiencing its worst covid surge since the pandemic began last year; last week the state registered an average of 19,000 new covid cases and 1,800 new hospitalizations every day. It accounts for an incredible one in five cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the entire country.

Yet the fact that Florida has become Delta Ground Zero has apparently only increased DeSantis’s determination to allow covid to continue spreading. He knows full well that at gatherings of Republicans the crowd cheers any mention of low vaccination rates.

DeSantis’s approval has taken a hit: A new poll finds him with approval falling to 44 percent and losing a matchup with Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.), a potential opponent in his reelection bid next fall. But that probably doesn’t worry DeSantis too much. That’s because the way we’ve traditionally judged governors looking to run for president may no longer be operative in today’s Republican Party.

In the past, governors with presidential ambitions from either party would tell a story in which smarts, hard work, integrity and managerial acumen produced such extraordinary success in their state that they garnered admiration from all their constituents. It’s what George W. Bush said, and Bill Clinton before him, and Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter before them.

DeSantis won’t be saying that in 2024. His pandemic story will likely be central to his presidential bid, but his case will be less “I achieved great success” and more “I never stopped fighting with the people you hate,” whether that means President Biden, Fauci, local governments, teachers, businesses that wanted to prevent customers from exercising their “freedom” to infect other customers, or anyone else.

Other GOP governors contemplating presidential runs, including Greg Abbott of Texas and Kristi L. Noem of South Dakota, will try to make a similar case for themselves. But as of now, no one has assembled quite the portfolio of disaster that DeSantis has.

If that’s your approach, you don’t actually want high approval ratings, since that would show that some Democrats like you, too; the proof that you’re doing it right is that all Republicans love you and all Democrats loathe you. Just like Trump.

Just don’t call it a death cult…

Part one is done:

The Senate gave overwhelming bipartisan approval to a $1 trillion infrastructure bill on Tuesday to rebuild the nation’s deteriorating roads and bridges and fund new climate resilience and broadband initiatives, delivering a key component of President Biden’s agenda.

The legislation would be the largest infusion of federal investment into infrastructure projects in more than a decade, touching nearly every facet of the American economy and fortifying the nation’s response to the warming of the planet.

It would provide historic levels of funding for the modernization of the nation’s power grid and projects to better manage climate risks, as well as pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the repair and replacement of aging public works projects.

The vote, 69-30, was uncommonly bipartisan; the yes votes included Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, and 18 other Republicans who shrugged off increasingly shrill efforts by former President Donald Trump to derail it.

This is good. But it’s only the beginning:

But the measure now faces a potentially rocky and time-consuming path in the House, where the speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the nearly 100-member Progressive Caucus, have said they will not vote on it unless and until the Senate passes a separate, even more ambitious $3.5 trillion social policy bill this fall.

For Democrats, passage of the bill opened the way for consideration of their ambitious, $3.5 trillion budget plan, which is expected to be packed with policies to address climate change, health, education and paid leave. It will also include tax increases — and it is expected to generate unanimous Republican opposition.

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, has said he intends to move immediately to take up the budget blueprint, unveiled on Monday, that would put Congress on track to pass that larger package unilaterally, using a process known as reconciliation that shields it from a filibuster.

The infrastructure legislation faces a tricky path in the House, where Ms. Pelosi has repeatedly said she will not take it up until the Senate clears the reconciliation bill.

The ultimatum has prompted mixed reactions in the House, as eight moderate Democrats, including Jared Golden of Maine and Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, circulated a letter to Ms. Pelosi calling for a swift vote on the bipartisan deal.

But leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, in a letter to Ms. Pelosi, warned that a majority of its 96 members confirmed they would withhold their support for the legislation until the second, far more expansive package cleared the reconciliation process in the Senate.

“Whatever you can achieve in a bipartisan way — bravo, we salute it,” Ms. Pelosi said on Friday. “But at the same time, we’re not going forward with leaving people behind.”

I think Pelosi has this in hand. It’s the sort of thing she knows how to do to well.

But fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bloody fight. If the Democrats win, it could be the most productive legislative session since the New Deal. It’s huge.

But right now I’m listening to pundits blather on endlessly about Andrew Cuomo resigning. If this sort of thing continues (following the bright shining object) I’m not sure anyone’s going to know about it…

Andrew Cuomo resigned. Good. I guess he thought he was Donald Trump leading the Republican Party and therefore could get away with anything. This was a mistake. Democrats don’t play that way.

Even if they did, he had no allies because he acted like this. From Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker today:

In April, 2014, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo placed a call to the White House and reached Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama. Cuomo was, as one official put it, “ranting and raving.” He had announced that he was shuttering the Moreland Commission, a group that he had convened less than a year earlier to root out corruption in New York politics. After Cuomo ended the group’s inquiries, Preet Bharara, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, issued letters instructing commissioners to preserve documents and had investigators from his office interview key witnesses. On the phone with Jarrett, Cuomo railed against Bharara. “This guy’s out of control,” a member of the White House legal team briefed on the call that day recalled Cuomo telling Jarrett. “He’s your guy.”

Jarrett ended the conversation after only a few minutes. Any effort by the White House to influence investigations by a federal prosecutor could constitute criminal obstruction of justice. “He did, in fact, call me and raise concerns about the commission,” Jarrett told me. “As soon as he started talking, and I figured out what he was talking about, I shut down the conversation.” Although Cuomo fumed about Bharara’s efforts, he did not make any specific request before Jarrett ended the call. Nevertheless, Jarrett was alarmed and immediately walked to the office of the White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, to report the conversation. Ruemmler agreed that the call was improper, and told Jarrett that she had acted correctly in ending the conversation without responding to Cuomo’s complaints. “I thought it was highly inappropriate,” the member of the White House’s legal team told me. “It was a stupid call for him to make.” Ruemmler reported the incident to the Deputy Attorney General, James M. Cole, who also criticized the call. “He shouldn’t have been doing that. He’s trying to exert political pressure on basically a prosecution or an investigation,” Cole told me. “So Cuomo trying to use whatever muscle he had with the White House to do it was a nonstarter and probably improper.”

The whole story here of Cuomo’s corruption really says it all. The sexual harassment may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back but there is a very long history of his misdeeds and many people are very glad to see him go.

And, just to prove that he can’t help being an asshole:

"Oh, Democrats in D.C. are about to pass a major legislative accomplishment right after demanding that I resign? Be a shame if something happened to your news cycle…" https://t.co/aMHuBDJpyL

— Matt Ford (@fordm) August 10, 2021

Is it just me or is everything getting more and more surreal?

"There should be no mandates — zero — concerning Covid'' — Ted Cruz pic.twitter.com/oY0wpmTQCi

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 10, 2021

As a resurgent coronavirus is forcing states to address soaring cases and hospitalizations, Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Rand Paul (Ky.) denounced health mandates against the virus at a time when the nation recorded its highest single-day number of new cases since January.

The United States reported nearly 160,000 cases on Monday, pushing the seven-day average to almost 115,000 daily, according to data compiled by The Washington Post. It was the most severe day for new cases in the country since Jan. 29, when coronavirus vaccines were not widely available. Hospitalizations are also up to nearly 70,000 as businesses and schools grapple with mandates for vaccinations and masks during the fourth wave of the pandemic.

But Cruz told Fox News host Sean Hannity that no health regulations are needed to help curb a nationwide surge fueled by the highly transmissible delta variant and the millions who remain unvaccinated.

“There should be no mandates — zero — concerning covid,” Cruz said. “That means no mask mandates, regardless of your vaccination status. That means no vaccine mandates. That means no vaccine passports.”

Cruz’s call for no coronavirus mandates of any kind came hours after he and Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) introduced two bills that would ban mask and vaccine mandates. The measures would countermand recent guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommends that people wear masks indoors regardless of their vaccination status.

Texas, Cruz’s home state, is experiencing a rise in new infections that is limiting the availability of hospital beds. A Houston hospital system is preparing huge tents to treat an overflow of patients, while a doctor there said intensive care units in the city resembled a “war zone.” The state is averaging more than 13,500 new cases a day, trailing only Florida.

Yet Cruz accused Biden, without evidence, of “imposing unscientific and burdensome mandates.”

“Thanks to vaccinations and the natural immunity of Americans who have recovered from covid-19, America is reopening,” Cruz said. “America is recovering, our kids are going back to school and small businesses are returning as our nation’s economic heartbeat.”

Cruz joined Paul in denouncing mandates amid the resurgence in cases and hospitalizations. The senator from Kentucky — who has fashioned himself as the Senate’s chief skeptic of Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s top infectious-disease doctor — released a video Sunday that urged people to resist the regulations implemented by health experts and elected officials to help prevent the spread of the deadly delta variant.

“It’s time for us to resist. They can’t arrest all of us,” Paul said. “They can’t keep all of your kids home from school. They can’t keep every government building closed, although I’ve got a long list of ones they might keep closed or ought to keep closed.

Coronavirus cases in Kentucky are up by 50 percent in the past week, data shows. Almost every county in Kentucky has “high community transmission,” according to the CDC.

School districts in the state have expanded virtual offerings as classes start again. In Jefferson County Public Schools, which includes Louisville, data shows that nearly 53 percent of the more than 95,000 students in the district will not be old enough to be vaccinated, according to the Louisville Courier Journal.

Paul, who Fauci has said does not know what he’s talking about when it comes to the pandemic, called the CDC’s mask guidance “anti-science.”

“Will we allow these people to use fear and propaganda to do further harm to our society, economy, and children?” Paul tweeted. “Or will we stand together and say, absolutely not. Not this time. I choose freedom.”

What the hell????

These people are losing their minds.

By the way, I’m sorry people re feeling judged for failing to get vaccinated. But as far as I’m concerned they are as subject to judgement in the same way that people who drive drunk are subject to judgement. They aren’t only risking their own lives, they are risking the lives of others and it’s just not ok.

I mean …

Despite taking almost no actions to stop the spread of COVID in his state, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has sent a letter to the Texas Hospital Association asking hospitals to postpone elective medical procedures to increase capacity for COVID patients.

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) August 10, 2021

This piece by Tim Miller is too much:

“The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.” – Hal Holbrook

After months of being promised by the former President and his stooges that Dominion Voting Systems had RIGGED the election, we finally have our first credible investigation into voting machine tampering.

The lede in Monday’s Grand Junction Sentinel brings the Kraken: “The Mesa County Clerk’s Office is under investigation…for a breach in security over its election system.”

A breach! It’s Happening!!!

But no, the breach wasn’t coming from the anti-Trump deep state. Instead, the clerk who is under investigation for tampering with the county election system is Tina Peters, a fervent supporter of Donald Trump and amateur vaccine science aficionado, who appears to have executed a self-own of historic proportion.

Last week Gateway Pundit reported that Q himself…errr “CodeMonkeyZ” Ron Watkins…posted a video and a few screenshots to his Telegram that had been provided by a “whistleblower.” The posts were supposed to demonstrate that Dominion Voting Systems machines could in fact be connected to the internet, which is a necessary but not sufficient element in support of their bat guano theory of election fraud.

The grainy, shaky video presented a conversation between an election official and a Dominion employee, in which the election official asks a series of leading questions in order to demonstrate how, with the help of someone on the inside, the machine could hypothetically be tampered with over the internet using the BIOS motherboard settings.

When the official shared this “bombshell” video with CodeMonkey Watkins they included in it an image of their election system’s BIOS password, which is, of course, a massive breach of voting system security.

And in doing so they stepped on a pretty large rake – because the password in the video was unique, which allowed the Colorado Secretary of State’s office to identify which county the leak came from and during which meeting it was recorded.

Oops. 

---

It turns out the election hacker was not Antifa or a Hugo Chavez apparition but a real live human in the office of Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters.

Peters was not exactly a surprising suspect. She had previously gained notoriety through a series of social media posts during the January 6th insurrection that attested to how easy it might be for a criminal to tamper with election equipment. This latest leak appears to have been an attempt to verify her premise.

Her posts shamed Republican Senators like Pat Toomey who were not going along with President Trump’s effort to overturn the result of the November election with the fervor that she had hoped. Among her since-deleted tweets,

“Their intent is not to ‘overturn’ the election. This was not an election. This was planned fraud on a grand scale. If you refuse to acknowledge that you WILL NOT be re-elected. We need others in your place that uphold the Constitution and preserve our Republic.”

“Shame on you! As one that administers elections in my county, you apparently have no idea how it is possible to 1) tabulate more than once ballots favoring a candidate 2) change algorithm in a voting machine (see Eric Coomer from Dominion’s Facebook ranks) UR Dirty or ignorant.”

“You would be wise to learn the Constitution that you swore to uphold and to protect us from enemies ‘foreign and domestic.’”

“Also, the vaccines are troubling in the mechanics in the RNA. I don’t want anyone messing with my RNA, my DNA or anything else – MY BODY, my right!”

While it is not yet clear whether Peters herself was involved in the breach, the tweets certainly indicate she was sympathetic to the Gateway Pundit/Qanon/CodeMonkey worldview. And according to the Sentinel, the “security information” that was posted was only accessible by “state and county election workers who have passed background checks,” meaning it was sourced from one of a very small number of people in her office. 

In short, in an attempt to demonstrate that Donald Trump was still the rightful president, a county clerk tweeted that the election machines she was in charge of overseeing were in fact vulnerable, and in order to prove it someone in her office allegedly carried out the very breach she was falsely claiming must have been committed by anti-Trump forces. 

Now that’s some legendary criming. 

It doesn’t exactly fill one with confidence to know that it is people like Peters who will be in places of authority the next time Trump or an acolyte tries to steal an election.

This is funny. But it’s also frightening. These are the people the Trump Cult will hire as election authorities.

These are people convinced they and their frat brothers are best qualified to run the world’s largest economy.

The economics of this are mindboggling. A real vaccine card (which has the advantage of preventing you from dying!) is free. A fake one, which exposes you to potential legal liability and doesn't prevent you from dying, costs $400. https://t.co/2PEIqjO55W

— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) August 9, 2021

Associated Press:

An Instagram account with the username “vaccinationcards” sells laminated COVID-19 vaccination cards for $25 each. A user on the encrypted messaging app, Telegram, offers “COVID-19 Vaccine Cards Certificates,” for as much as $200 apiece.

An increasing number of inquiries to these sites and similar ones appear to be from those who are trying to get fake vaccination cards for college.

A Reddit user commented on a thread about falsifying COVID-19 vaccination cards, saying, in part, “I need one, too, for college. I refuse to be a guinea pig.”

But they’ll play Covid Roulette, no problem.

In April, a bipartisan coalition of 47 state attorneys general sent a letter to the CEOs of Twitter, Shopify and eBay to take down ads or links selling the bogus cards.

Amanda Marcotte observed, “Paying $400 and getting sick for the privilege of ‘owning the libs’. Makes me long for the slightly less moronic right wingers of my youth, who just tried to foist Ayn Rand novels on you.”

We see once again that voter fraud hucksters are so committed to their hustle that, just to prove cheating is possible, they will commit the very election crimes they claim are committed by legions of Others.

Tim Miller explains the “all-time self-own” at The Bulwark:

The lede in Monday’s Grand Junction Sentinel brings the Kraken: “The Mesa County Clerk’s Office is under investigation…for a breach in security over its election system.”

A breach! It’s Happening!!!

But no, the breach wasn’t coming from the anti-Trump deep state. Instead, the clerk who is under investigation for tampering with the county election system is Tina Peters, a fervent supporter of Donald Trump and amateur vaccine science aficionado, who appears to have executed a self-own of historic proportion.

Last week Gateway Pundit reported that Q himself…errr “CodeMonkeyZ” Ron Watkins…posted a video and a few screenshots to his Telegram that had been provided by a “whistleblower.” The posts were supposed to demonstrate that Dominion Voting Systems machines could in fact be connected to the internet, which is a necessary but not sufficient element in support of their bat guano theory of election fraud.

The grainy, shaky video presented a conversation between an election official and a Dominion employee, in which the election official asks a series of leading questions in order to demonstrate how, with the help of someone on the inside, the machine could hypothetically be tampered with over the internet using the BIOS motherboard settings.

When the official shared this “bombshell” video with CodeMonkey Watkins they included in it an image of their election system’s BIOS password, which is, of course, a massive breach of voting system security.

What the “whistleblower” did not realize was that the password was unique. The office of Secretary of State Jena Griswold traced it to the county behind the leak and, eventually, to Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters, who is now under investigation.

Hilarious Update: When posting the Mesa County election breach leak, Qanon Ron Watkins cautioned "individual frames must be redacted very carefully. A minor slip-up could dox the whistleblower."

Oops. His post did exactly that. h/t @QOrigins https://t.co/M4cczdIMec pic.twitter.com/1uF82wpksz

— Tim Miller (@Timodc) August 9, 2021

Denver Post:

Griswold says the posts do not imminently threaten Colorado’s election security but require investigation. She has ordered Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters to allow the Secretary of State’s Office to change equipment passwords and turn over all surveillance footage of the election equipment between May 24 and Aug. 9, along with access logs and chain-of-custody logs.

The sweeping order also requires Peters to hand over any communications, including texts and voicemails, in which she or her staff discussed Dominion or the alleged breach, along with all background checks on clerk’s office employees. Peters must do so by Thursday.

Peters, a Republican, had posted a series of since-deleted, full-on-MAGA tweets claiming the 2020 election was “planned fraud on a grand scale,” that ballots can be counted more than once, and Dominion Voting machines easliy hacked. And voting in her office? Days after the election, she reported everything had gone cleanly and her audits passed with flying colors, according to the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.

It is another self-own in the grand tradition of James O’Keefe, Professional Person Impersonator. O’Keefe and three accomplices were arrested and convicted in 2010 for passing themselves off as telephone repairmen to gain access to the federal office of Sen. Mary Landrieu in New Orleans.

O’Keefe in 2016 secretly videoed himself impersonating one “Brian Dickerson,” a columnist for the Detroit Free Press at Dickerson’s polling place in a Detroit suburb. Cindy Rose, a veteran poll worker who knew the real Dickerson, suggested that if he had lost his driver’s license on a hunting trip (as O’Keefe claimed), he could sign an affidavit attesting to being Dickerson and cast a provisional ballot. (Rose had already called the city clerk’s office to verify that the real Dickerson had already cast his ballot. ) Had O’Keefe signed, that act would have been a felony, as both Rose and O’Keefe well knew. O’Keefe walked out instead.

Voter fraud fraudsters are so desperate to prove election crimes occured that they will commit them themselves just to prove it. Most are less slick than O’Keefe.

This is bad:

Too many people are dying right now.

A few weeks ago, in a back-of-the-envelope calculation during an interview with Eric Topol of Scripps, I suggested that because of widespread vaccination of the most vulnerable elderly, we may have reduced overall mortality risk in the country by 90 percent. Topol thought that was a little high, but agreed that vaccines were delivering great protection against death and hospitalization, and while we would likely see some of each during the Delta wave, “it won’t be like the monster third wave.” More recently, the Dartmouth economist Andrew Levin, who early in the pandemic did major work calculating mortality risk by age, estimated in an interview with my brother that the effect was probably 75 percent — that given the same number of cases, we’d probably see about one quarter as many deaths as we would’ve seen a year ago, without vaccines.

The U.S. numbers are a bit wobbly these days, and there are huge variations state to state, reflecting disparities in vaccination rates, among other things. But at the national level, at least for the moment, the reduction of mortality risk seems to be considerably smaller. In the worst of the winter surge, the country was registering 250,000 new cases per day; at its peak, that surge was killing roughly 3,000 Americans each day (often a bit above, but with a few dips below). Today, we have a bit more than 100,000 new cases each day, though the numbers are still rising as part of the Delta wave. If we had reduced mortality risk by 75 percent, that would mean about 300 daily deaths. If we had reduced it by 90 percent, it would mean 120. Instead, in our seven-day average, we just passed 500.

That’s from David Wallace Wells. And unless you have a good strong drink in your hand, you do not want to read the rest. It’s and interview with Topol on the current state of affairs. It’s the most pessimistic thing I’ve read about this surge for vaccinated people.

And it makes me livid.

Just one bit:

These numbers are disorientingly grim to me. How are you thinking about what’s going on?
Well, I’m trying to use the other countries that have been through this already, or are concurrently going through it as a reference or an anchor. And I think our rate of rise of hospitalizations is really alarming. We saw quite a bit of hospitalization increase in the U.K. But this is so far worse than that. And many of those people are going to die.

Just looking at the U.K. and Israel, which had been our guideposts, I thought we would keep the hospitalizations pretty darn low — maybe a fourth of where we’d been in prior waves. And deaths 10 percent of prior waves. But we’re not doing that at all. If you look at the log charts of the U.S. and the U.K, you’re starting to see some real separation for death. It’s certainly going in the wrong direction, and it had been tracking incredibly closely, until recently.

Now, we are under-testing, too, compared with those other countries. That might be giving us a distorted picture of what’s happening here. But I just don’t know where we’re headed.

What I just can’t understand is why all three things are all moving up together so rapidly. Given everything we’ve seen in other countries and everything we think we know about the vaccines, even if cases rose dramatically, we’d expect much lower rates of hospitalization and death. But we’re not. 
It’s like we didn’t have vaccines. Or worse. I was just putting this talk together and I made the same observation. I’m looking at the four waves, and, as you know, in the monster wave, we got to 250,000 cases per day. And at that time we had 120,000 plus hospitalizations [per day]. About half. What’s amazing is, we’re at about 120,000 cases now, and we’re over 60,000 hospitalizations.

It’s the same ratio.
Yeah. So when I look at that, I say, what happened to the vaccines?

Now, the rate of rise is being driven by several states, as you well know, not the whole country. And I guess the real issue here is, I don’t know if what is going so bad in places like Louisiana and Florida is going to become a diffused pattern, throughout the country. But there are some indicators that it might be.

[…]

But holding all else equal, if vaccines were still doing a good job preventing severe disease but a considerably worse job preventing spread, wouldn’t that drive the gap wider between cases and hospitalizations, or cases and deaths? 
Yeah. But —

It’s a lot to hold equal.
What I’m hearing — and I’ve been helping with a bunch of patients — is that people who are breaking through are getting very sick. They’re getting Regeneron antibodies.

There may be something to this waning immunity story. It’s fuzzy, but the people who are getting hit are more apt to be people who were vaccinated very early. I had a patient in recent days, who’s in her 70s. She got vaccinated in January. And, I mean, she almost died. I mean, it’s just terrible. I think — I hope — the monoclonals are going to save her life. But she was a healthy 70-year-old lady, and just following her case was illuminating — she thought she was protected, but she also wore masks everywhere. She was on guard and still got infected and desperately ill.

Most people aren’t being that careful.
The vaccinated — who are now a very slight majority — those people just think the pandemic’s over. There’s still this sense that if you’re vaccinated, you’re good to go. I mean, I’ve even seen on television, you know, some of our leading house experts, tell people it’s perfectly okay to have indoor gatherings among vaccinated people. Well, it’s not true. So we’re getting bad advice.

This booster thing is yet another issue, because we don’t even know if they’re going to protect against a Delta. I mean, everybody’s assuming it, but there’s no data. You know, there’s some neutralizing antibodies from the Pfizer report in 23 people and there’s an Israeli pre-print, it says there’s waning immunity without any neutralizing antibodies. So we’ll see. But these are just classic spike-protein boosters. There’s nothing special about them to handle Delta. So I don’t know. I mean, I suspect they’re going to provide some protection, but I’m not sure I’m so confident it’s going to be great.

There’s more … unfortunately.

Even OG Villager Ruth Marcus is alarmed:

What happened on Jan. 6 was horrifying: an attempted coup, inflamed by social media, incited by the defeated president and televised in real time. What happened before Jan. 6, we are coming to learn, was equally horrifying: a slow-motion attempted coup, plotted in secret at the pinnacle of government and foiled by the resistance of a few officials who would not accede to Donald Trump’s deluded view of the election outcome.

That is the unnerving picture that is only beginning to fully emerge of what was happening behind the scenes as Trump, enraged by his loss, schemed to overturn clear election results with the connivance of not only top White House aides but also senior officials at the Justice Department who were maneuvering around their chain of command to bolster Trump’s efforts.

Which raises the most disturbing question: What if? What if the senior Trump-installed officials at the Justice Department, notably acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, had been more willing to put loyalty to Trump over the rule of law? What happens, God forbid, next time, when the outcome may be further muddied thanks to changed state laws shifting power from election officials to partisan legislators?

I try not to be alarmist, but it is difficult to read the latest accounts and not be alarmed. The drip-drip-drip evolution of this story has served to mask how serious the threat was and how close it came to fruition.

We have known for months that Trump — heedless of constraints on hijacking Justice Department operations to his own political ends — had pressed Justice officials to intervene on his behalf. For example, he urged Rosen to appoint special counsels to investigate unfounded claims of voter fraud.

We knew that when Rosen balked, Trump entertained a plan to oust Rosen and replace him with Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the civil division, who was more willing to push Trump’s fanciful assertions of fraud. We knew that Trump was deterred only after threats of mass resignations from other officials.

We knew that Clark had drafted a letter to Georgia state legislators asserting that the department was investigating claims of fraud in the state.

The cockamamie letter itself recently emerged. Dated Dec. 28, 2020, it stated that the department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia.” This despite the conclusion by Attorney General William P. Barr, before he resigned that month, that the department’s investigation had not uncovered “fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

The Clark letter not only urged Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) to call the legislature into special session to consider “this important and urgent matter” but also advised the legislature of its “implied authority under the Constitution of the United States to call itself into special session for the limited purpose of considering issues pertaining to the appointment of Presidential Electors.” It was to be signed by Rosen, acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue and Clark himself.

Clark had insisted that his dealings with the White House were “consistent with law” and that he had merely participated in “a candid discussion of options and pros and cons with the president.”

This is not how things are supposed to work. At a normal Justice Department, the head of the civil division, rungs down the organization chart, does not end-run the attorney general to have “candid discussions” with the president. At a normal Justice Department, there are guardrails in place to prevent this sort of improper interference by the president.

Now we are getting accounts of what happened in those frenzied final days from Rosen himself. Over the weekend, he hastened to testify to the Justice Department inspector general and the Senate Judiciary Committee before Trump could seek to interpose assertions of executive privilege. Rosen’s former deputy, Donoghue, also appeared before the Senate panel. The testimony was behind closed doors, but as we learn more of what was said, I suspect there will be even more reason to be concerned about what might have been.

Will that always be the case? Will the country be able to dodge future bullets, from Trump or his successors? I would like to think so. But if there is anything the past five years have shown, it is the disappointing fecklessness of too many of those in power in the face of the Trumpist onslaught.

My favorite aspect of this is the fact that the coward Bill Barr ran out on his responsibility to stop all this and left the mess to Rosen and his deputy. What a guy.