Month: August 2021

A new spike in COVID-19 hopsitalizations and deaths, a failed insurrection, an attempted coup, vaccine protests, and blowback against addressing systemic racism. Some mornings it is hard to know where to start.

Younger, sicker, quicker

“This to us feels like an entirely different disease,” Dr. Cam Patterson, chancellor of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences tells the New York Times. The COVID-19 Delta variant is everywhere:

Doctors working in Covid-19 hot spots across the nation say that the patients in their hospitals are not like the patients they saw last year: The new arrivals are younger, many in their 20s or 30s.

These patients — almost all of them unvaccinated — also seem sicker than younger patients were last year. And they are deteriorating more rapidly.

Earlier in the pandemic, patients would come into the hospital after spending a week or two at home with symptoms. Often they were treated on a regular floor before needing intubation or intensive care, but doctors report some younger patients are experiencing more severe symptoms now.

Physicians have coined a new phrase to describe them: “younger, sicker, quicker.” Some have no underlying health conditions that would make them more susceptible. The culprit, many suspect, is the Delta variant, which now makes up 80 percent of cases nationwide.

Daddy Dearest

The “daddy party” once prided itself on it’s finely honed spider sense for danger. All the better to protect you and yours from harm those pansy Democrats would let git ya. Not anymore (CBS News):

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said Tuesday that his state will not shut down again despite a record-breaking influx of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, making the Sunshine State the nation’s new virus epicenter. 

“We’re not shutting down,” DeSantis said Tuesday at a press conference. “These interventions have failed time and time again throughout this pandemic, not just in the United States but abroad. They have not stopped the spread. And particularly with Delta, which is even more transmissible, if it didn’t stop it before, it definitely ain’t going to stop it now.” 

“[M]alevolent, depraved displays of hostility toward the public good” are the latest in seasonal Republican fashion. New policies in Florida and Texas “allow children to attend school maskless and bar vaccine mandates by local governments and state agencies,” Greg Sargent observes. Even with Florida being the epicenter of the latest Covid spike, DeSantis is all public safety be damned. Enjoy your cruise.

It’s fine, fine, everything’s fine

All that white grievance and bluster masks thins skins and deep-seated insecurity. (Resemble anyone you know?) “Shit’s fucked up, y’all,” tweets Chris Savage of Eclectablog, pointing to Education Week:

Tennessee aims to levy fines starting at $1 million and rising to $5 million on school districts each time one of their teachers is found to have “knowingly violated” state restrictions on classroom discussions about systemic racism, white privilege, and sexism, according to guidance proposed by the state’s department of education late last week.

Teachers could also be disciplined or lose their licenses for teaching that the United States is inherently racist or sexist or making a student feel “guilt or anguish” because of past actions committed by their race or sex.

Y’all, pay no attention to the chart at the top of this post. Find some sand and bury your heads.

The Purge

These last few years have played like a bad dystopian-future film. DeSantis hopes that should Donald Trump’s dreams of a presidential comeback fade, he’ll be the clear Republican frontrunner in 2024. He seems to be auditioning for the next installment of The Purge.

My god:

On Tuesday, ABC News reported that Jeffrey Bossert Clark—the Justice Department official who spearheaded an effort to overturn the 2020 election—sought to convince the Georgia General Assembly to throw out the actual results of the race and award its electoral votes to Donald Trump instead. In a draft letter, sent last December, Clark alleged that mass voter fraud had compromised the legitimacy of Georgia’s election, in which Joe Biden narrowly prevailed. As a remedy, Clark, speaking on behalf of the Justice Department, advised the state legislature to call itself into a special session, investigate the alleged fraud, and appoint “a separate slate of electors” who would cast their votes for Trump. Clark’s superiors ultimately quashed this attempt to nullify millions of valid votes.

This scheme marked just one of Clark’s several desperate, last-minute maneuvers to overturn the election. But none of these well-documented, corrupt, anti-democratic plots seems to have hurt his career prospects. To the contrary, after leaving the Justice Department, Clark landed a position as Chief of Litigation and Director of Strategy at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a conservative-libertarian law firm that battles “the administrative state.” (Its latest actions: supporting a law professor who refuses to get the COVID vaccine and opposing the federal eviction moratorium.) Clark’s transition back into the conservative legal movement illustrates once again that there have been virtually no professional consequences for the many Republican attorneys who tried to steal the election for Trump.ADVERTISEMENT

Until he launched a direct assault on American democracy, Clark’s résumé looked much like that of countless conservative lawyers. He clerked for Judge Danny Boggs, a hard-right Ronald Reagan nominee, and worked at the big law firm Kirkland & Ellis. Naturally, he joined the Federalist Society, frequently participating in the organization’s events and serving as chair of its environmental law and property rights practice group for seven years. Clark also taught at George Mason University School of Law (now Antonin Scalia Law School), a hub of conservative-libertarian legal studies lavishly funded by the Koch brothers. When he entered Trump’s Justice Department in 2018, he served as assistant Attorney General of the Environment and Natural Resources Division; in that position, he sought to weaken federal environmental protections, freeing polluters to disregard long-standing regulations.

So far, par for the course. But Clark took a turn in the final months of the Trump administration, when he ascended to acting Assistant Attorney General of DOJ’s Civil Division. In the wake of the 2020 election, Clark latched onto the lie that mass voter fraud had tainted the results, and that Trump was the true victor. He scrambled to throw the Justice Department behind Trump’s machinations to toss out millions of votes and seize an unearned second term. Documents obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform show Clark urging the Justice Department to investigate conspiracy theories about voter fraud in Georgia. (In one email, Clark noted that he was on the phone with a pro-Trump activist who claimed to have filmed proof of voter fraud in Atlanta. The alleged video evidence never materialized.) He also pressured U.S. Attorney BJay Pak to probe these nonsensical allegations, leading Pak to resign abruptly.

Moreover, Clark appears to have been involved in the campaign for the Justice Department to sue ​​Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin. The lawsuit would’ve asked the Supreme Court to nullify the election results in each state and award their electors to Trump rather than Biden. It included claims—made infamous by Sidney Powell’s “Kraken” litigation—that Dominion Voting Systems somehow facilitated voter fraud.Until he launched a direct assault on American democracy, Clark’s résumé looked much like that of countless conservative lawyers.

When these efforts failed, Clark launched a conspiracy to oust acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who declined to facilitate his various plots. Trump and Clark devised a plan: The president would fire Rosen and elevate Clark as acting attorney general; Clark would then inject the Justice Department into Trump’s mad dash to overturn the election. (Recently released contemporaneous notes confirm that the president considered putting Clark in charge of the entire agency.) This coup only failed when DOJ officials threatened to resign en masse upon Rosen’s termination.

He is, quite simply, a traitor. There’s really no other way to describe him. And yet he’s a member in good standing of the Republican establishment, even as some of the Trump stalwarts like Bill Barr checked out when Trump’s shenanigans became too much for them. There is no accountability for people like Clarke and that is a very serious problem. He will be there the next time. And there will be a next time.

This is what happens when wingnut conspiracies and “owning the libs” become governing principles:

Crowd boos & berates Arkansas GOP Gov Hutchinson & state vaccine official Dr. Jennifer Dillaha for saying there is no medical evidence that the COVID vaccines impact fertility.

They’ve been radicalized by FOX & right wing media & we’ll all suffer for it😐pic.twitter.com/RP3R9rDOBd

— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@QasimRashid) July 27, 2021

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson said he regrets signing a bill into law that bans state and local government authorities from implementing mask mandates amid a surge in COVID-19 cases in the state.

He said during a media briefing on Tuesday that he signed the bill because cases were at a “very low point.”

“I knew that it would be overridden by the legislature if I didn’t sign it,” he said. “I had already eliminated our statewide mask mandate.”

Hutchinson, a Republican, said now that cases are increasing in Arkansas, he wishes the ban “had not become law.” He said that there are only two ways to change the law—either the state legislature could amend it, or it could be ruled unconstitutional in the courts. He said he would prefer for the legislature to change the law to limit confusion.

“If it’s up to the courts, and the courts strike down that law as unconstitutional, that could mean we could have counties and cities all doing their thing,” he said. “That would be confusing. It would be bad for business. It would be bad for the public understanding and our concentration on vaccinations.”

He also called on students who are able to get vaccinated to do so.

“They need to get vaccinated, he said. “Parents can make the choice, the students could make the choice to get vaccinated.”

Nice try. If you really give a damn about any of this Asa, you need to switch parties. Of course, you will lose your political career, but you’ve got a great resume. I have no doubt you can go into the private sector and make a ton of money. Maybe you should do that. Or better yet, apply yourself to making up for all the harm your politics have caused all these years.

As America grapples with yet another surge of COVID-19 and the ongoing erosion of its democracy at the hands of the Republican Party, Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson is off getting tips from Europe’s most successful anti-democratic leader, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán:

We’re in Budapest all this week for Tucker Carlson Tonight and a documentary for Tucker Carlson Originals. Don’t miss our first show here starting tonight at 8pm ET on #FoxNews pic.twitter.com/avZLoc0fD0

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 2, 2021

Carlson is in Hungary for MCC Feszt, a conference convened by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a government-funded association dedicated to creating a right-wing future. He is set to deliver a speech on Saturday with the fatuous title “The World According to Tucker Carlson,” which, to paraphrase the late, great Molly Ivins, would no doubt sound better in the original Hungarian.

Carlson is one of a handful of right-wing elites who are in thrall to what Orbán calls his philosophy of “illiberal democracy,” which includes government support for churches, (he calls Hungary a Christian democracy) a program to coerce women to have more “true Hungarian” children so as to reduce any need for immigrant labor and a ban on legal rights for transgender people. He even built a wall on his country’s southern border to keep immigrants seeking asylum from entering the country in the name of preserving Hungary’s (white) national character.

In other words, Orbán is a great general in the culture wars which makes him a hero to quite a few right-wing intellectuals. For instance, prominent blogger Rod Dreher is one of Orbán’s most passionate defenders and has written numerous posts exalting his program. He was even planning to take up a fellowship in Hungary before COVID turned the world upside down. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp described Dreher’s admiration for Orbán in this piece about the Hungarian prime minister’s American fan club:

A sense of persecution at the hands of secular globalist elites is at the center of the mindset held by Dreher and much of the modern intellectual right. The contemporary fusion of religious and nationalist ideas has created a unified field theory of global cultural politics, defined by a sense that cosmopolitan liberal forces are threatening the very survival of traditional Christian communities.

All of this suggests that the main accomplishment of Viktor Orbán is his open pursuit of the right’s list of cultural grievances. But there is a method to his madness and it presents a far greater danger to America and other liberal democracies.

Orbán serves as a model for the modern autocracy that is now being tried in the U.S. He has successfully made it almost impossible for his party to lose elections with tactics such as rewriting campaign finance laws to benefit his Fidesz party, packing the courts and election bureaucracy with his supporters, extreme gerrymandering and completely taking over the media. The effect is that his “Christian democracy” is no longer a democracy at all since the opposition has been rendered electorally impotent. Sound familiar?

While it appears that Orbán is inspiring the American right, it is actually much more complicated than that. As Sarah Posner reported in The New Republic in 2019, Orbán’s program was heavily influenced by Republican strategists and lobbyists from the very beginning. In 2008, Orban hired the legendary right-wing strategist and provocateur Arthur J. Finkelstein, a master of culture war politics and character assassination, to help him win the 2010 election. Posner wrote:

In his work for Orbán, Finkelstein took his signature strategy of political polarization and masterminded a campaign that cast Hungary as a victim suffering at the hands of the United States, the United Nations, and other purveyors of Western liberal democracy. Finkelstein was, according to Politico, behind the anti-immigration billboards that have proliferated in Hungary over the past decade. Thanks at least in part to Finkelstein’s strategy, Orbán won his reelection bid in 2010.

According to Posner, Orbán also hired some high-powered GOP lobbyists to help him craft his appeal to U.S government officials. It’s pretty clear that the Hungarian Prime Minister has been as influenced by the American right as the American right has been influenced by him.

But while Tucker Carlson and others have been lauding Orbán for his anti-wokeness, they apparently have not been paying close attention to the actual results of his program. Dalibor Rohac pointed out in The Bulwark that the Putinesque economic polices of “renationalization” have produced an economy that has real incomes lower than its neighbors and that for all of the blather about national pride there has actually been a substantial exodus of Hungarians to other countries in Europe. Despite the push for Hungarian women to stay home and do their duty to repopulate the motherland, their fertility rate remains significantly lower than in countries such as Sweden, France and Denmark. To top it all off, less than 20% of the population in Orbán’s “Christian democracy” considers itself religious.

That’s not even the worst of it, as Rohac writes:

Finally, there is the ugly stuff—the incumbent entrenchment, which has forced the entire opposition, from left liberals to former neofascists, to join forces in order to stand a fighting chance in the 2022 election; the grotesque corruption, which is worse than in other countries of the region; the siding with Russia, Belarus, and China against its neighbors and allies. Just this past weekend, thousands of Hungarians took to the streets of Budapest to protest against the planned construction of a new campus of China’s Fudan University in Hungary. The project is expected to cost $1.8 billion, more than the annual budget of all Hungarian universities combined, funded largely by a Chinese loan.

That’s a high price to pay for owning the libs.

Before the last election and the events of January 6th, one might have thought that people like Carlson were taking the Orbán line for theatrical purposes. After all, it’s pretty much just repurposed American conservative movement strategy, jazzed up as 21st-century right-wing populism. But after witnessing their reaction to Trump’s Big Lie and the events of January 6th, it’s clear there’s something much more insidious about this relationship. Orbán has successfully degraded Hungary’s democracy in the same ways that we are seeing the Republicans attempt to do here in the U.S. If they manage to get back into power, we are likely to see what “the world according to Tucker Carlson” really looks like and I doubt we’re going to like it very much. 

Salon

Here’s a very real, practical reason that the vaccine resistant may just succumb to reality a some point. From the Kaiser Family Foundation’s  Elisabeth Rosenthal and Glenn Kramon:

Getting hospitalized with covid in the United States typically generates huge bills. Those submitted by covid patients to the NPR-Kaiser Health News “Bill of the Month” project include a $17,000 bill for a brief hospital stay in Marietta, Georgia (reduced to about $4,000 for an uninsured patient under a “charity care” policy); a $104,000 bill for a 14-day hospitalization in Miami for an uninsured man; and a bill for possibly hundreds of thousands for a two-week hospital stay — some of it on a ventilator — for a foreign tourist in Hawaii whose travel health insurance contained a “pandemic exclusion.”

Even though insurance companies negotiate lower prices and cover much of the cost of care, an over $1,000 out-of-pocket bill for a deductible — plus more for copays and possibly some out-of-network care — should be a pretty scary incentive.

In 2020, before covid vaccines, most major private insurers waived patient payments — from coinsurance to deductibles — for covid treatment. But many if not most have allowed that policy to lapse. Aetna, for example, ended that policy Feb. 28; UnitedHealthcare began rolling back its waivers late last year and ended them by the end of March.

More than 97% of hospitalized patients last month were unvaccinated. Though the vaccines will not necessarily prevent you from catching the coronavirus, they are highly effective at assuring you will have a milder case and are kept out of the hospital.

For this reason, there’s logic behind insurers’ waiver rollback: Why should patients be kept financially unharmed from what is now a preventable hospitalization, thanks to a vaccine that the government paid for and made available free of charge? It is now in many drugstores, it’s popping up at highway rest stops and bus stops, and it can be delivered and administered at home in parts of the country.

A harsher society might impose tough penalties on people who refuse vaccinations and contract the virus. Recently, the National Football League decreed that teams will forfeit a game canceled because of a covid outbreak among unvaccinated players — and neither team’s players will be paid.

But insurers could try to do more, like penalizing the unvaccinated. And there is precedent. Already, some policies won’t cover treatment necessitated by what insurance companies deem risky behavior, such as scuba diving and rock climbing.

The Affordable Care Act allows insurers to charge smokers up to 50% more than what nonsmokers pay for some health plans. Four-fifths of states follow that protocol, though most employer-based plans do not do so. In 49 states, people caught driving without auto insurance face fines, confiscation of their car, loss of their license and even jail. And reckless drivers pay more for insurance.

The logic behind the policies is that the offenders’ behavior can hurt others and costs society a lot of money. If a person decides not to get vaccinated and contracts a bad case of covid, they are not only exposing others in their workplace or neighborhoods; the tens or hundreds of thousands spent on their care could mean higher premiums for others as well in their insurance plans next year. What’s more, outbreaks in low-vaccination regions could help breed more vaccine-resistant variants that affect everyone.

Yes, we often cover people whose habits may have contributed to their illness — insurance regularly pays for drug and alcohol rehab and cancer treatment for smokers.

That’s one reason, perhaps, that insurers too have so far favored carrots, not sticks, to get people vaccinated. Some private insurers are offering people who get vaccinated a credit toward their medical premiums, or gift cards and sweepstakes prizes, according to America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry organization.

Tough love might be easier if the Food and Drug Administration gives vaccines full approval, rather than the current emergency use authorization. Even so, taxpayer-financed plans like Medicaid and Medicare must treat everyone the same and would encounter a lengthy process to secure federal waivers to experiment with incentives, according to Larry Levitt, executive vice president of KFF, a nonprofit focusing on health issues. (Kaiser Health News, where Rosenthal is editor-in-chief, is one program under KFF.) These programs cannot charge different rates to different patients in a state.

KFF polling shows such incentives are of limited value, anyway. Many holdouts say they will be vaccinated only if required to do so by their employers.

But what if the financial cost of not getting vaccinated were just too high? If patients thought about the price they might need to pay for their own care, maybe they would reconsider remaining unprotected.

Personally, I don’t think health insurance should be able to charge more for “self-inflicted” illness. But when it comes to people who are endangering public health, I think it’s more akin to requiring reckless drivers to pay more for car insurance. It’s one thing to put your own health at risk. It’s quite another to put others at risk. The cost to individuals and society at large is massive and knowingly exposing people to a deadly disease is not acceptable.

Ron DeSantis is doubling down on being an insufferable jerk:

DeSantis held events in Sarasota and Miami Tuesday amid a record-setting spike in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, but said the situation is not as dire as some have portrayed it and focused on other data to make his case.

The governor said “the best indicator” of what’s happening with COVID-19 is emergency room visits for COVID-19-like illness.

“That has basically leveled off since last week,” he said. “I’d like to see that go down. Once that starts going down then the other indicators will follow.”

Florida is a national epicenter for the latest wave of COVID-19 cases, but unlike with previous waves there has been little effort at the state or local level to mitigate the surge in cases. DeSantis opposes restrictions on businesses and statewide mask requirements, and also has limited what local governments can do.

Vaccinations have been starting to climb again in Florida after falling for months, but are nowhere near the April peak.

DeSantis was active in vaccination distribution efforts earlier this year, but has been criticized for not doing more lately to promote the vaccine. The governor touched on how effective the vaccines are Tuesday, noting 25,000 vaccinated individuals have been hospitalized in Florida since May 1.

“What you’re seeing is the severity is much less in those cases,” he said.

The governor also emphasized his strategy of getting vaccines to seniors first, touting the fact that the vast majority of Florida seniors are vaccinated, which could prevent the latest surge from being as deadly.

Florida had 11,515 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 Tuesday, according to the Florida Hospital Association, the third straight day of record hospital cases.

Some Florida hospitals have been struggling to manage the increase in cases. The AdventHealth hospital system in Central Florida recently went to “black” status and announced that elective surgeries are being delayed.

Many hospitals have also limited visitors.

DeSantis said Florida’s hospital system isn’t overwhelmed.

“Obviously media does hysteria, you try to fearmonger, you try to do this stuff and when they’ll talk about hospitalizations, our hospitals are open for business,” DeSantis said in Miami, adding: “I don’t want to see a repeat because of the media hysteria where people who have heart problems or stroke are not going in to get care”

This attitude isn’t going over well:

The latest surge of COVID-19 might be catching up with Gov. Ron DeSantis.

A new poll from St. Pete Polls finds the Governor’s approval rating has sagged considerably, with more Floridians now saying they do not approve of the job DeSantis is doing than those who say they approve.

The poll, which was conducted Monday and Tuesday among 3,952 likely Florida voters through an automated phone polling system, also found DeSantis falling behind one Democratic rival for the 2022 gubernatorial election, trailing Democratic U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist. DeSantis has a slight lead on Democratic Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried in the poll.

The poll also shows Floridians are not in agreement with DeSantis when it comes to his opposition to mask mandates for school children.

DeSantis drew just 44% of Florida voters saying they approve of the job he is doing, while 49% said they do not approve of his job performance. The rest were unsure.

That is a huge swing from the job approval numbers DeSantis received in a Florida Chamber of Commerce poll in May. That  survey gave him a 55% approval for his job performance, with 40% not approving.

In the St. Pete Polls survey, DeSantis nearly broke even among partisan voters, with Republicans not quite overcoming the Democrats’ opinions.

For Democrats, 74% said they do not approve of his job performance and 19% said they do. For Republicans, 71% said they approve, while 22% said they do not.

Independent voters broke against him, with 39% saying they approve of his job performance, and 51% saying they do not approve.

DeSantis received positive marks from White, non-Hispanic voters, with 51% approving and 43% not approving. But he was underwater among Hispanic voters, among Asian or Pacific Islander voters, and especially among Black voters.

His job performance drew negative results among both men, a 44% to 49% split; and women, with a 44% to 48% split.

He also is not doing well within any age category except voters age 70 or older. The youngest set, those ages 18-29, posted 39% approval and 52% disapproval. The next youngest, those age 30-49, were not far off, with 40% approving and 51% disapproving. Those over 70 showed 49% approval, still not a majority, but more than the 43% who said no, they do not approve.

DeSantis still is viewed favorably in North Florida markets from Pensacola to Jacksonville, and is holding his own in Tampa and Fort Myers. Panama City voters gave him 71% approval against 20% disapproval. Tampa barely broke his way, with 48% saying they approve and 46% saying they don’t.

But the Governor is underwater in Orlando, Gainesville, West Palm Beach and Miami. In Orlando, 44% said they approve of his job performance, while 48% said they do not. In Miami, just 31% of voters said they approve, while 61% said they do not.

The St. Pete Polls survey also gives President Joe Biden a slight positive nod, with Florida voters favoring him at 49%, as 46% gave the President poor marks.

The survey’s unusually large sample size gives it a margin of error of 1.6%, meaning the key findings are falling outside the margin.

The President-in-exile at Mar-a-lago is no doubt relieved to see it. He was reportedly getting annoyed at DeSantis’ popularity.

I have little doubt that he will recover his popularity once this crisis has passed. The state seems to love a roaring assholes and therefore has become the center of Trumpism in America. But that depends upon how bad this gets. He’s obviously counting on being able to maintain his reputation as a smartass, tough guy to win his re-election campaign, so his cavalier attitude about his voters getting sick and dying will pay off in the long run. I guess we’ll see.

Meanwhile, in California we are recalling the Governor even though he’s handled the crisis quite well. American politics are ridiculous right now.

… as Todd Rundgren might say.

Senator Warren congratulates Congresswoman Bush pic.twitter.com/CJmbgsyqG4

— Haley Talbot (@haleytalbotcnn) August 3, 2021

The Washington Post on Rep. Cori Bush’s eviction protest:

Wind whipped along the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Sunday night as rain pattered, slowly soaking Rep. Cori Bush’s sleeping bag. She struggled to get warm — a familiar feeling, she said. Two decades earlier, the Missouri Democrat, who then lived in her car, spent sleepless nights shivering as she held her two young children in her arms.

This time, Bush chose to brave the elements. For three nights, she slept outside the Capitol, joining activists and fellow Democratic lawmakers protesting the lapse in the federal eviction moratorium, which had protected renters during the pandemic. The move drew national attention, forcing the White House to respond to Bush’s demands to temporarily halt evictions after Congress went on recess without addressing the issue.

On Tuesday, Bush’s campaign succeeded.

The Biden administration announced a 60-day eviction ban for U.S. counties with “substantial and high levels of community transmission,” according to a news release from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With the virus’s delta variant quickly spreading throughout the United States, renters in about 90 percent of the country qualifyfor the new moratorium, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement.

She took a stand. She made a difference. Insecurity? She’s lived it.

BIG: CDC is adopting an eviction moratorium for the vast majority of the population.

Thank you to everyone who kept a spotlight on this—particularly @CoriBush who understands what it’s like to lose your home and turned passion into action.pic.twitter.com/tGDQkJVhPA

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) August 3, 2021

For those who need reminding, Bush served as a triage nurse during the protests in Ferguson, Mo. over the killing of Michael Brown (Washington Post, Dec. 22):

“We never stopped protesting because it’s always somebody else getting murdered,” she said. She’s grieved half a dozen of her fellow Ferguson activists, dead of suspected murders, suicides and a drug overdose — deaths that some in the community (though not the police) view as being connected, given the threats some involved with BLM have faced. Late one night, back in the summer, someone shot Bush’s car, putting bullets through a tire and a door handle.

Bush, 44, got sick of asking public officials to make sweeping changes, particularly regarding criminal justice. So she ranfor Congress, winning on her third try. [Not only] the first Black woman to represent Missouri in her state’s 200-year history, but also as the first day-in-and-day-out BLM protester to earn a seat in those hallowed halls. 

Imagine that. Not born of privilege. Not independently wealthy. With lived experience matching many in her district. Not another white man. She came to make change.

“It hurts,” Bush said, “that . . . people who want to be leaders of this country don’t know the struggles that are happening to Black people in this country.”

She knows about struggle. Bush has been uninsured, unemployed and unhoused, forced to live in a car with her then-husband and two babies when she couldn’t pay rent. She described running from a violent abuser: “One day I remember hearing bullets whiz by my head and . . . wondering, ‘How do I make it out of this life?’” She raised her daughter Angel, 19, and son Zion, 20, largely on her own. She’s entering office with medical debt from a suspected bout with covid-19. She understands that justice is not synonymous with law enforcement; she said she was “stomped” and “kicked like a rag doll” one night in 2014 by six to eight police officers while trying to help a woman who appeared to be having a heart attack.

“The People’s House” need more common people.

We’ve been waiting so long….

No, not New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. He’s done. Elizabeth Spiers’s New York Times epitaph for his career reads in brief: “Mr. Cuomo is not a nice guy” whose daughters “don’t appear to loathe him.”

Cuomo just another in a long line of political jerks and bullies. We have seen his kind before and will again. But Donald Trump and his cult are threats to the republic if not to western democracy. Trump’s political career cannot end soon enough. It’s the waiting as his zombie cult shambles relentlessly toward autocracy that’s nerve-wracking.

Emails from December 28, 2020 reveal Jeffrey Clark, then acting head of the Department of Justice civil rights division, attempting to coax department higher-ups to place the department’s thumb on the election to overturn Trump’s November loss to Joe Biden. Clark sent a draft letter to then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue urging Georgia’s governor to call a special legislative session to investigate Trump’s fraud claims (ABC News):

“The Department of Justice is investigating various irregularities in the 2020 election for President of the United States,” the draft letter said. “The Department will update you as we are able on investigatory progress, but at this time we have identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia.”

The draft letter states: “While the Department of Justice believe[s] the Governor of Georgia should immediately call a special session to consider this important and urgent matter, if he declines to do so, we share with you our view that the Georgia General Assembly has implied authority under the Constitution of the United States to call itself into special session for [t]he limited purpose of considering issues pertaining to the appointment of Presidential Electors.”

In other words, urging Georgia Republicans to overturn the presidential results there.

The DOJ provided the emails to the House Oversight Committee investigating events surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection. Meanwhile, the DOJ investigator general is investigating whether any department officials took actions to overturn the election results.

The Department had uncovered no evidence of “irregularities,” and Attorney General William Barr had said as much publicly. Neither had an historic audit of the Georgia results completed in mid-November. But Trump and loyalists such as Clark would not accept the loss, graciously or otherwise.

Clark attached the draft letter in an email to Rosen and Donoghue telling them “I think we should get it out as soon as possible.”

“Personally, I see no valid downsides to sending out the letter,” Clark wrote. “I put it together quickly and would want to do a formal cite check before sending but I don’t think we should let unnecessary moss grow on this.”

Donoghue responded that issuing the letter was “not even within the realm of possibility,” citing Barr’s prior statements. Rosen also dismissed the draft as a non-starter.

The New York Times revealed in January that Clark then devised a plan with Trump to oust Rosen and install Clark to “wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.” Department officials threatened to resign en masse if Trump fired Rosen. Trump relented only after a White House meeting “two officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump’s reality show ‘The Apprentice.’”

As the House begins its investigation into events surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection, it is clearer still that Trump and his allies will go to any length and corrupt any democratic process to ensure Republicans control the outcome of future presidential elections. The groundwork for seizing control of the Electoral College process from the voters is happening in various Republican-controlled states now.

The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer followed the dark money behind the drawn-out, privately funded election audit in Arizona. The goal (as I’ve written for a decade) is not to uncover the truth, but to obscure it in the way voter fraud fraudsters travel the country flinging figurative smoke bombs into news rooms to create in the public’s mind the impression of fire, somewhere, where there is none.

Mayer writes:

Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the country’s foremost election-law experts, told me, “I’m scared shitless.” Referring to the array of new laws passed by Republican state legislatures since the 2020 election, he said, “It’s not just about voter suppression. What I’m really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count.”

As with previous decades of voter fraud promotion, the goal of promoting election audits is to support legislation to disenfranchise voters who do not vote Republican. Only now, by monkey-wrenching the vote count directly.

Watch the Chris Hayes monologue from Tuesday.

Due process for Trump and his cohort, of course, but can we speed it up?

Nobody wants to wear masks if they don’t have to. It’s the unvaccinated who are making us do it. Obviously:

It seems like ancient history right now, but there was a time in which a vast majority of Americans agreed on certain things when it came to the coronavirus pandemic. And high on that list was masks. Even as then-President Donald Trump was eschewing them last year, Americans were on a very different page. An Associated Press-NORC poll in July 2020 showed that fully 75 percent of Americans supported not just wearing masks, but requiring them in public when you were around someone else. Just 13 percent disagreed. Even Republicans agreed with mandates, 58-27.

Then, as vaccinations took hold, health officials somewhat surprisingly relaxed those mandates and guidelines. And now, as they attempt to ramp them up again in response to outbreaks, the sledding is looking much tougher.

A new Monmouth University poll released Monday morning shows only a little more than half of Americans support “instituting, or reinstituting, face mask and social distancing guidelines in your state.” The split is 52 percent in favor vs. 46 percent opposed. And the partisan divides are about what you’d expect: While 85 percent of Democrats support this, about one-quarter of Republicans agree.

And this, it bears emphasizing, is a considerably lower bar than a mask mandate; it’s merely reinstituting mask and social distancing guidelines. It’s logical that could lead to mandates in some areas, and it has coincided with mandates in places such as Washington, D.C., Sacramento, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Mo., and New Orleans. But it doesn’t require them itself. Yet this earns the support of only around half of Americans — far less than the three-fourths who supported full mandates as recently as December.

It’s also not the only evidence of declining appetite for mask mandates or even re-masking more broadly. A late-July poll showed that strongly blue California supported a statewide mask mandate just 49-39. That’s far shy of the overwhelming national support a year ago, as well as the 70 percent support in another California poll back in October. Support for an indoor mask mandate was higher recently in San Diego County, at 60 percent, but again that’s a bluer area of a blue state.

We were all fine with mask mandates when it was all we had to protect us from the virus. Now that we have the vaccines, we’re not thrilled that the unvaccinated have made us wear them again!

Therefore:

Interestingly, there might actually be as much or more appetite for a more intrusive mandate: vaccination. One survey released last month found that 64 percent of Americans support requiring everyone to get a coronavirus vaccine. Another also showed the number around 6 in 10.

Ihm… yeah. For obvious reasons.

It’s incontrovertible that vaccination is much, much more effective than masking. If you’ve gotten vaccinated yourself, you probably believe that’s the much simpler and better solution. But there are of course the very thorny issues of mandating people getting an injection — a much thornier issue than making them put a piece of cloth over their face in public. At least for now, that personal rights issue appears to be taking a back seat, with Americans favoring a more-intrusive mandate because it’s more effective and gets others to comply with a mitigation measure they’ve already taken…

But that doesn’t necessarily fully account for the increased resistance to masking and mask mandates.

Yeah, actually, it does.

There are probably many causes here, including the aforementioned resentment of the unvaccinated, exhaustion with masks, the continued anti-mask drumbeat on the right, and oftentimes changing and even conflicting guidance from health officials on masking. But the sum total is that it’s looking very difficult to convince a public that was once very much onboard with universal masking to go back to that place.

People who have been responsible and protected themselves and others from the virus have a “right” to be pissed that the irresponsible have provided an opening for the much more easily transmissible Delta to run rampant through the country making this masking necessary again. In fact, it’s infuriating.

I will wear a mask even though I’m vaccinated because I don’t want to help spread this thing. But I don ‘t have to like it. And at this point I think vaccine mandates are necessary, whether it’s from the government or private employers. This is ridiculous.

The latest from the dumbest US Senator is really something.

A Republican senator suggested in a private conversation Saturday, without evidence, that the FBI knew more about the planning before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot than it has revealed so far, according to a video obtained by The Washington Post.

The comments from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), made after a political event at a Wauwatosa, Wis., hotel, reflect the spread of an unfounded claim that has traveled from far-right commentators to Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to the highest levels of the GOP.

“I don’t say this publicly, but are you watching what’s happening in Michigan?” Johnson said while discussing the Capitol attack with some of the event’s attendees. “. . . So you think the FBI had fully infiltrated the militias in Michigan, but they don’t know squat about what was happening on January 6th or what was happening with these groups? I’d say there is way more to the story.”

Johnson’s Michigan comment appears to be a reference to the alleged kidnapping plot targeting Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) that was disclosed by state and federal authorities in October. Some defendants have recently argued in court that they were entrapped by FBI operatives who stoked their anger against Whitmer, facilitated meetings and paid for hotels and other costs related to the scheme. Without that involvement, those defendants have argued, they would have had no intention of harming Whitmer.

No credible evidence has emerged that the FBI had detailed foreknowledge of a violent assault on the Capitol or that its agents or operatives played a role in fomenting it. No specific claim of FBI involvement has surfaced in court filings made in the hundreds of cases filed against alleged Capitol assailants.

But the allegations have persisted in recent weeks as Republican supporters of former president Donald Trump, who falsely claimed the 2020 presidential election was stolen and encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol as Congress counted electoral votes on Jan. 6, have consistently sought to finger other culprits for the breach of the Capitol.

In the early hours and days after the riot, some Trump supporters sought to blame left-wing provocateurs. More recently, House Republicans have made the claim that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is at fault.

And Johnson, one of Trump’s most fervent congressional supporters, has for months raised numerous questions about the circumstances surrounding the attack, including the security failures and the nature of the events. He has taken exception, for instance, with describing the attack as an “armed insurrection.”

In the recording captured Saturday, Johnson explained his view that “by and large those folks were peaceful protesters” and that the news media and Democrats are “painting 75 million Americans who voted for Trump as attached with domestic terrorists.”

“I’m just pushing back on that narrative,” he said, adding that he was “not happy with those guys that stood on the Capitol and created the acts of violence. . . . I’ve said that repeatedly and strongly.”

Johnson’s comments questioning the FBI’s knowledge before the riot, however, are new.

While an FBI field office in Norfolk issued a report the day before the riot that warned about calls for violence at the Capitol on an Internet message board, it went unheeded by Capitol Police and other agencies. The report did not reference confidential informants or undercover agents.

A report that two Senate committees issued in June cited “critical breakdowns involving several federal agencies,” including the FBI, and it faulted those agencies for not issuing more-formal warnings that could have improved the security posture. It said the FBI did not take seriously other online messages that suggested violence at the Capitol was a real possibility.

Asked whether Johnson believes the FBI played a role in encouraging the attack or sat by while it was planned and executed, Johnson spokeswoman Alexa Henning pointed to the Senate report’s findings indicating that the Justice Department, of which the FBI is part, had failed to create an “integrated security plan” and said the senator was simply asking key questions in his comments over the weekend.

“The revelation of the depth of the FBI’s involvement in the Governor Whitmer plot raises questions as to whether it had infiltrated Jan. 6 agitator groups as well,” Henning said in a statement. “The senator continues to call on the FBI and DOJ to be transparent. To date, they have not been.”

The FBI declined to comment. Director Christopher A. Wray defended the bureau in March, saying the Norfolk report was appropriately handled as “unverified” information, but he said internal intelligence-sharing practices would be reviewed in light of the violence on Jan. 6.

The alleged Michigan plot does illustrate that the bureau has attempted to infiltrate and disrupt domestic extremist groups, which Wray called a “metastasizing” threat in testimony to Congress.

Right-wing websites first claimed in June that undercover FBI agents or informants were among those who breached the Capitol, allegations that spread quickly through the conservative media ecosystem.

The claims were based on the false assumption that those named in numerous court filings as “unindicted co-conspirators” were federal agents or informants. Carlson, for instance, said on his June 15 show that “in potentially every single case, they were FBI operatives.”

In fact, under federal case law, federal prosecutors cannot refer to federal operatives as “co-conspirators,” because they are acting on behalf of the government, not as part of the conspiracy. Instead, “unindicted co-conspirators” are referred to as such for other reasons, including a lack of evidence to file charges or an after-the-fact cooperation agreement with prosecutors.

But some far-right House Republicans have spread the claims, including Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who sent a letter to Wray the day after Carlson’s show aired asking “to what extent” the agency had infiltrated key “militia groups” and whether operatives were “merely passive informants or active instigators” on Jan. 6.

A day later, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) repeated the allegations on the House floor, calling them “scary stuff” and “Putin kind of activity.” Gaetz has not received a reply to his letter, an aide said Monday.

But those suggestions have not publicly spread into the ranks of Senate Republicans, who have been less inclined than their House colleagues to question the evidence-based narrative surrounding Jan. 6.

That’s good. But I won’t be surprised it it does.

It is certainly the case that the FBI has in the past entrapped some deluded Muslim “lone wolf” extremist types into breaking the law. But the idea that the “deep state” is responsible for the insurrection is really far-fetched, particularly since Donald Trump was the one who incited it. Was he in on the plot?

The good news is that he may not run again. I’m sure he’ll either be a big Fox News star or the head of a major right wing think tank if he decides to retire, though. This kind of stupidity is extremely valuable to the burgeoning GOP neo-fascist movement.

Meanwhile, he continues to be a blight on public health:

“It’s time for Americans to reclaim their freedom,” he said in a recent statement opposing President Biden’s vaccination rules for federal employees.

Kurt is heard addressing Johnson at the end of the four-minute recording: “I just want to let you know there truly is a surge in Georgia. I work in hospice. So I just want to make sure you’re encouraging people to get the vaccine.”

“I’m not going to do that,” Johnson responded as his supporters jeered Kurt. “I don’t encourage or discourage.”

Before leaving the room, Kurt said: “But you’re saying things that are counterproductive and not scientific. So I just wanted you to know.”

He is very dim. He knows nothing.