Month: September 2021

Soooo dumb:

Five people in Oregon landed in the hospital after attempting to ward off, or cure themselves of, COVID-19 with ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug that scientists have explicitly warned against as a COVID-cure. According to the Oregon Health & Science University News, the Oregon Poison Center has dealt with 25 Oregonians who opted to use the unproven drug to try to treat or prevent COVID-19 between Aug. 1 and Sept. 14. Five of them had such adverse reactions to ivermectin, they were admitted to the intensive care unit.

Dr. Robert Hendrickson, medical director of the Oregon Poison Center at Oregon Health & Science University, warned of taking the “unproven and potentially dangerous” drug. He urged health care providers to prescribe “treatments that are already carefully tested and approved.”

Doctors who prescribe this for COVID should be sanctioned. At the very least they should be publicly named so that sane people can avoid going to them.

These people could get a free, effective, easily accessible vaccine that has minimal side effects but they would rather do this. It’s inexplicable. And the politicians are egging them on.

This piece by Brian Beutler at Crooked (you can subscribe here) about the cynical, nihilistic right wing strategy to defeat the Democrats by killing their own people is a must read:

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has taken issue with me and a few other liberals who argue that certain conservative and Republican elites have intentionally subverted recovery from the pandemic to undermine President Biden. 

He argues instead that the right’s general bent on the virus “has not fundamentally changed since [Joe] Biden’s election” and asserts that assigning them malicious intent “flies in the face of nearly all the evidence we have.”

The former assertion rests on a huge historical coincidence that makes it difficult to falsify: namely that the government only authorized coronavirus vaccines in the immediate aftermath of the election, after it became clear that Donald Trump would no longer be president. The latter assertion is only true if you ignore copious evidence of sabotage.

Normally I’d let my short-form responses to his article stand on their own, but there’s more at stake in this disagreement than scorekeeping between columnists. If liberals don’t understand the contours of the right-wing elite’s value system they will be unable to anticipate conservative efforts to engineer Democratic governing failures, and their efforts to govern successfully despite that opposition will falter.

Chait’s argument rests on the very real continuity between Republican hostility to pandemic mitigation efforts under both Trump and Biden. “If Republicans had a partisan motive then, it was the belief that opening up the economy and taking the hit to public health would help President Trump,” he writes. “It seems hard to understand how they would suddenly decide the same course of action would hurt President Biden.”

This reasoning elides three key points, which, taken together, make it perfectly easy to understand why Republicans might take a single course of action initially with the goal of helping Trump, then with the goal hurting Biden. First, and most obviously, GOP hostility to COVID-19 mitigation likely cost them the election—that is, their calculation that encouraging COVID-19 spread to avoid economically harmful mitigation measures would redound to the president’s political benefit was wrong. Second, Republicans didn’t have a position on vaccine promotion before this winter, because those vaccines were still undergoing clinical trials. Finally, the main difference between Trump and Biden on this score upends the Republican calculus under Trump: Biden takes the pandemic seriously and promised to crush the virus. 

When you consider all of these confounding dynamics together, the appearance of GOP consistency around opposition to non-pharmaceutical interventions loses almost all of its significance.

To ascertain whether conservative leaders have encouraged COVID-19 spread to damage Biden’s presidency, you need to begin by asking whether their rhetorical and substantive bent on the vaccines would be different than it is if Trump had won. It’s in the nature of counterfactual analysis that nobody can answer that question with total certainty; but I think it strains credulity to imagine that so many prominent conservatives would have embraced anti-vaccine politics even if Trump had won.

It’s true that Republicans elites are divided over whether it’s wise to encourage coronavirus spread. Gov. Phil Scott (R-VT) has overseen a successful vaccine rollout; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been adamantly pro-vaccine—even if he could be louder, and more critical of the anti-vax members in his conference. Because his ego is wrapped up in the apparent success of Operation Warp Speed, Trump himself—occasionally, tepidly—speaks up in favor of getting vaccinated, though he wields the vaccine rejection that his allies have fomented as a cudgel against Biden. “He’s not doing well at all. He’s way behind schedule, and people are refusing to take the Vaccine because they don’t trust his Administration.”

But the novel and highly contagious nature of this virus makes it such that the pro-COVID right doesn’t need unanimity to sabotage the pandemic response. They really just needed a couple cynical governors and influential media figures to mutually reinforce a combination of bad policies and dishonest messaging. When it became clear that Trump would no longer be president, Sen. Ron Jonson (R-WI) invited an anti-vaxxer to testify before the Senate homeland security committee, which he then chaired (and might chair today still had Republicans not gone on to lose the Georgia Senate runoffs). Would he have gone full anti-vax if Trump had been re-elected, and was promoting the vaccines as his pandemic-ending miracle? Would Republican governors be discouraging vaccine uptake? Would Fox News primetime be a nightly anti-vax infomercial? 

I think the answer to all these questions is self-evidently “no,” and if it’s no, then they are indeed spreading COVID to harm the incumbent, and to great effect. This is why the news that Biden would miss his July vaccination target was an applause line at CPAC, and Ron DeSantis is mum on vaccines, but loudly promotes monoclonal antibody therapy, and then blames Biden for not “end[ing] covid.” It’s why Murdoch-owned media is pro-vaccine in the United Kingdom, where the government is conservative, but is the most destructive source of vaccine disinformation here in the U.S. 

The cynicism of these actions has taken on different light as the circumstances since Biden won have evolved. First, it scanned as a group effort to undermine his vaccine rollout; then, when it seemed as if the rollout would nevertheless be successful enough to bring most of the U.S. to herd immunity, it looked more like an effort to free-ride off the grassroots energy of the anti-vaccine right. Finally, when the Delta variant began to feast on those communities, many Republicans briefly disclaimed all association with anti-vax politics, before reverting to form and enjoying the fruits of their efforts.

But nothing about this has been consistent with their position under Trump, because it all took shape after the election. It is simple, but incomplete, to note that many Republicans have been consistently opposed to masking and distancing since last year. It doesn’t complicate things much to fit their anti-mitigation views into a larger framework that includes their turn against the very vaccines that obviate more disruptive interventions.

Last year, Trump loyalists stigmatized mitigation because taking the pandemic seriously meant implying on some level that Trump had failed. The immense toll of that abdication has transcended the moral realm in our national discourse—from tragedy, to crime, to statistic. But to Republicans it also seemed temporary. After all, Trump’s potential re-election, combined with mass vaccination, pointed to a way out of their collective failure. Then Trump lost.

And so instead of embracing the vaccines as a crowning Trump achievement, they—not all of them, but many of them, and way more than enough—turned on vaccines, too. And they did so just as it became clear that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election would fail.

It’s important to come to terms with the fact that this happened, but also to understand why it happened, because as the conservative propaganda apparatus has swallowed more and more of the Republican Party, understanding how it operates has become the key to avoiding huge strategic errors. 

To grasp that Republicans encouraged COVID spread to harm Biden, you don’t have to believe, in a conspiracy-addled way, that they convened in secret and built a playbook for maximizing infections. You simply need to observe that a critical mass of conservative elites view undercutting Biden and Democrats as a political lodestar, and make immensely consequential governing and broadcast decisions on that basis alone. They inhabit a political culture that embraces and even prizes bad faith as a means to acquiring power. I wrote about this value system, and what to do about it, before the election, and believe it remains the cardinal fact of American politics. 

If you understood before the election that reflexive, oppositional demagoguery is the main weapon of Republican partisan warfare, you knew that while Democrats helped pass coronavirus relief during Trump’s presidency, Republicans would refuse to return the favor if Trump lost. Perhaps you implored Democrats to condition their votes for the CARES Act on the inclusion of automatic stabilizers, so that relief would be reciprocal across administrations, and outlays tied to empirical economic and public-health conditions. You also probably recognized that Democrats made a big mistake by not building automatic stabilizers into the American Rescue Plan when they controlled all political branches of government. And—to our point here—you also knew that Democrats should have embraced vaccination inducements, if not outright mandates, from the outset, because the idea that Republicans would subvert the goal of herd immunity under a Democratic administration didn’t strike you as ungenerous or unreasonable. It was just a straightforward application of their strategic worldview. 

When you apply bad-faith strategic thinking—reflexive demagoguery—to the events of the day, you can anticipate all kinds of things that seem to shock the consciences of Democrats and liberals: That Republicans would claim to support a bipartisan investigative commission as an alternative to impeaching and convicting Trump for insurrection, and then, having acquitted him, that they would withdraw their support for any investigation at all. That having supported Trump’s ceasefire deal with the Taliban, they would wave the bloody shirt when Biden implemented it. 

If you can engage in reflexive demagoguery as a thought experiment, you don’t see the point in harping on the obvious contradiction when Kevin McCarthy attacks Biden both for not getting all Americans out of Afghanistan quickly enough but also for not maintaining a permanent force at Bagram Air Base; you aren’t puzzled by the fact that Trump now claims to support re-invading Afghanistan; you know that they know these positions don’t meet any test of principle or consistency—and also that they don’t care. You just want other people to see what you see.

I think that says it all. If the Democrats don’t understand this by now, I’m not sure they ever will. We are not dealing with a normal political faction. The right is now a nihilistic death cult and the officials who know better see feeding it as the only way to maintain power. I would just add that there are quite a few officials who aren’t just cynical manipulators — they are true believers themselves. The death cult is electing their own no.

I don’t wish this on anyone. Fully vaccinated NPR science reporter Will Stone described his breaktrhough Covid infection to “All Things Considered” host Mary Louise Kelly on Friday:

STONE: It was rough, definitely right up there with the worst bouts of flu I’ve ever had. It started with overwhelming fatigue and a sore throat. Then I got a horrible headache. I spiked a 103-degree fever, and I’d wake up in the night just drenched in sweat. And I even lost my sense of smell and taste. So it was five really bad days. And even once that was over, it still took several weeks to get all my energy back.

KELLY: Yeah. And can you smell again? Can you taste again?

STONE: I can. I can.

KELLY: Good. Good, good, good. So again, just to emphasize, you were fully vaccinated, right? So you knew that you were unlikely to end up in the hospital, but were you surprised that you still got that sick?

He was. And even more surprised to hear that doctors considered his a mild case.

Yet, skeptics continue learning about the dangers of the virus by metaphorically laying their hands on hot stoves because they not only don’t trust experts but insist on defying them.

Here’s another of those (Salon):

Far-right anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer said Thursday that she tested positive for COVID-19 and feels like she got “hit by a bus” after dismissing concerns about infection.

Loomer in December wished to get infected so that she can show people it was not dangerous.

“I hope I get COVID just so I can prove to people I’ve had bouts of food poisoning that are more serious and life threatening than a hyped up virus,” she wrote in a post on the right-wing social network Parler. “Have you ever eaten bad fajitas? That will kill you faster than COVID.”

This week, she got what she wished for (via GETTR):

“Just pray for me please,” Loomer wrote. “Can’t even begin to explain how brutal the body aches and nausea that come with covid are. I am in so much pain. This is honestly the worst part about it.”

Igor Derysh adds:

Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist who has worked with Project Veritas and Infowars, drew national headlines in 2018 after she was banned from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, PayPal, Uber, Lyft and other services for spreading hateful messages about Muslims. But her brief moment of fame drew Trump’s endorsement in her campaign for a House seat in Florida, which she ultimately lost by 20 points.

[…]

On Thursday, she complained that she could not get a doctor to prescribe her ivermectin, a drug used to treat parasites in humans and deworm livestock. The FDA says there is no existing data to show that the drug is effective against COVID, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have warned doctors against prescribing it. Some Southern states have seen spikes in poison control calls after people resorted to using the animal version of the drug, which can result in severe side effects.

“A lot of doctors are really weird about prescribing it,” Loomer complained. “This is the insane world we live in.”

On that, we agree.

Politico reports that the roughly 100-member progressive bloc in the U.S. House is preparing to hold up the Senate infrastructure bill (should it reach the House) “unless they’re assured that a mammoth Democrats-only social spending bill will also make it to President Joe Biden’s desk.” This is not new. Both pieces would move together. That has been the deal all along:

“Even if there were Republicans that come along” to help the Senate infrastructure bill pass the House this month, said Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), “we will have more individuals, more Democrats who are going to vote it down without the reconciliation bill.”

Jayapal said more than half of her 96-member caucus has privately indicated they’re willing to block the bipartisan Senate bill without their party-line bill in tow — far more than the roughly two dozen liberals who have gone public with their threat.

It is a chance for progressives to flex their muscle in response to centrist Democrats’ sticker shock and general obstreperousness.

Behind the scenes, progressive members have begun discussing how to wield their influence under the worst-case scenario: passage of the Senate infrastructure bill this month, with little progress on the party’s vast $3.5 trillion social spending plan. Still, even as several liberals vow to oppose the infrastructure bill, many senior Democrats contend it will be much tougher to make good on that threat when it actually comes to the floor.

And that’s the rub, eh? Will they or won’t they? Speaker Nancy Pelosi has committed to passing the bipartisan infrastructure bill by September 27. 

Politico continues:

Instead of publicly battling with their leaders, Jayapal and other senior progressives have leaned hard into their list of policy demands — from climate action to immigration overhauls — and helped those ideas win support across the broader caucus. Central elements of their plan are expected to make it into the Democrats’ final proposal.

Liberals aren’t digging in on the infrastructure vote timing to “make a statement” about their power, Jayapal insisted. “It’s about really being able to say to the American people, we are absolutely 300 percent committed to delivering on what we promised you. They want to see us fight for them.”

Part of progressives’ challenge is the breadth of their caucus in the House; it includes enthusiastic Biden backers, swing-district Democrats and even some members of the centrist Problem Solvers Caucus. And while the group is far bigger than its centrist counterparts, liberals are typically less willing to declare war on party leaders.

Progressives do not have a reputation for playing hard ball. They are committed to doing good, after all, and hostage-taking typically cuts against that impulse. This is why those who do take hostages have the advantage.

I wrote once about George W. Bush:

I used to describe George W. Bush as a Jack Russell terrier playing tug of war with a knotted rope. Once he sank his teeth into something, he simply would not let go. You could lift him bodily off the ground and watch his butt cut circles in the air as he wrestled with his end of it. But in the end you would tire of the game first, let go, and he’d retire triumphantly to his doggy bed with his prize. I was never sure myself whether I meant that as a cut or a compliment.

This how the right wins and we lose. The thing is, conservatives often beat the left, not simply with money, but with sheer relentlessness.

Are progressives that relentless? Or will progressives tire of the tug of war with party moderates first and let go of their demands rather than see Biden’s agenda fail? I honestly don’t know.

A class act as always:

Ex-president Donald Trump made it clear on Friday that he’s gunning to get all 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him for inciting the Capitol insurrection catapulted out of Congress.

“1 down, 9 to go!” Trump crowed in a one-line statement after one of those Republicans, Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH), announced he would not run for reelection in 2022 due to the “toxic dynamics” of his party.

The ex-president had put out a longer statement earlier in the morning declaring that Gonzalez’s retirement “is no loss for Ohio or our country” and railing against the lawmaker’s “ill-informed and otherwise very stupid impeachment vote.”

Trump also emphasized his endorsement of Gonzalez’s primary challenger, Max Miller.

Gonzalez called Trump a “cancer for the country” in a New York Times interview on the day he announced his decision…

Trump’s victory lap highlights his quest for vengeance against the handful of members of Republicans who held him accountable for unleashing a hoard of his supporters upon the Capitol on Jan. 6.

And people think he’s not going to try to avenge the “stolen election” by running again in 2024?

If he has one breath left in his body he will do it …

Guess who said this?

It’s one thing to complain about last-minute and emergency changes in voting procedures in 2020 and to advocate for a system that is secure and tilts toward in-person voting; it’s another to retail unproven allegations that, for most people, will always be associated with Trump’s worst excesses and the rioting at the U.S. Capitol.

The choice that was forced on Elder—admit that Biden won the election and alienate MAGA voters, or say it was stolen and alienate voters in the middle—will be faced by Republican candidates around the country for the duration.

That won’t change as long as Trump has an outsize influence on the party. He’s not letting 2020 go, rather is bent on vengeance against those Republicans he believes betrayed him by not embracing his various conspiracy theories.

Since he never admits the fairness of any loss, the number of allegedly rigged and stolen elections will only increase—the recall, Trump said in a statement, is “just another giant Election Scam, no different, but less blatant, than the 2020 Presidential Election Scam!”

No, not Chris Hayes. Not even Liz Cheney. It’s Rich Lowry, right wing hack.

It’s hard to really know where he stands. He’s with national Review and they did that famous “Never Trump” cover in 2016. But he’s all over the map these days trying desperately to find some middle ground in a party that doesn’t allow that.

But when he’s right, he’s right. And there’s nothing he can do about it.

I have to wonder how close Bannon is to Trump these days. Say what you will about the guy but he does think strategically. And this stuff is a strategy:

Former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has been frequently hosting QAnon conspiracy theorist Toni Shuppe on his podcast to push election lies and advocate for a Pennsylvania “audit” of the 2020 election. 

Toni Shuppe is a founding member and the director of Public Relations of Audit The Vote PA, an “election integrity” group whose goal is to jumpstart an Arizona-style audit of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania. Shuppe and her group have pressured state Senate members repeatedly via social media to advocate for their cause. 

With the recent development of Pennsylvania Republicans subpoenaing personal voter information, Audit The Vote PA’s tactics on the ground, connections to QAnon, and relationships with state senators are starting to closely resemble that of the Arizona election audit. 

Audit The Vote PA’s organizing work and conspiracy theories even led to an election commissioner in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, to receive death threats after one of the group’s leaders instructed her followers to email the commissioner their “thoughts.” This incident also mirrors incidents in Arizona and other states in which federal officials have faced death threats over election audits. 

A June report from Insider detailed Audit The Vote PA’s connection to Pennsylvania Republican state Senator and QAnon adherent Doug Mastriano. Mastriano has appeared at multiple Audit The Vote PA-sponsored events and is listed as the featured speaker on more than one occasion. Insider’s report also described Shuppe’s own history of promoting QAnon hashtags and the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. 

When asked by Insider if Audit The Vote PA was associated with QAnon, the group stated that none of the organizers “consider themselves followers of QAnon” and are “aware” but “not affiliated” with the conspiracy theory.  

However, Shuppe’s history of promoting these conspiracies goes beyond this reporting. 

Based on a Media Matters review, there are multiple online instances of Shuppe using the QAnon hashtag “WWG1WGA,” promoting QAnon literature, posting a 9/11 conspiracy theory meme (claiming the terrorist attack was a distraction from a “gold heist”), and advertising her group’s interview with QAnon influencer RedPill78. (Zak Paine, who uses the pseudonym RedPill78, participated in the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol). 

During a Facebook live on January 8, Shuppe admitted to being “outside” of the Capitol during the insurrection. She claimed she didn’t see any of the “horrific things” because there are “lots of angles” of the building. During her live, Shuppe also pushed the QAnon-linked conspiracy theory that Italy meddled in the 2020 election (they didn’t).

These people are useful idiots. But they are useful…

In your guts, you know he’s nuts:

“America needs fighters. Worse than the radical leftists, the corrupt Deep State, the mainstream media, and Big Tech are the feckless and spineless Republicans who have utterly surrendered…. [T]hose who betrayed President Trump the most were not the leftists but the cowardly Republicans in Name Only…. We don’t need any more insiders or career politicians in Washington, especially not those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party,”

He is the perfect MAGA cultist from QANON on up. Whenever I hear his looney tunes commentary I have to wonder how many others like him are flag officers in the US Military. Michael Flynn was once the  Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Think about that.

Following Trump’s lead Flynn is now endorsing primary candidates against alleged RINOs. Trump did a little victory dance about one today:

Former President Donald Trump on Friday reveled in Rep. Anthony Gonzalez’s decision to not seek reelection rather than face a bruising primary after he voted to impeach Trump earlier this year.

“RINO Congressman Anthony Gonzalez, who has poorly represented his district in the Great State of Ohio, has decided to quit after enduring a tremendous loss of popularity, of which he had little, since his ill-informed and otherwise very stupid impeachment vote against the sitting President of the United States, me,” Trump said in a statement issued by his PAC.

I look forward to all the stories about Republicans in disarray. They’re coming right?

In anticipation of another gathering of Trump followers at the U.S. Capitol on Saturday, the various law enforcement agencies aren’t taking any chances. The fences are back up and officials have called for back-up from local police; the National Guard has already gone out. The rallygoers are gathering to protest the prosecution and incarceration of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. Organizers claim they are being held as political prisoners in cruel conditions, so one can understand why the authorities are concerned.

Most observers of extremist forums seem to think this so-called “Justice for J6” event isn’t going to be very well-attended. Law enforcement reckons maybe 700 people will show up. This is not all that surprising since the organizer Matt Braynard, a former Trump campaign official, has told those who show that will not be allowed to wear their usual MAGA costumes or carry Trump regalia, which would have been like telling Deadheads they couldn’t wear tie-dye or smoke pot at a Grateful Dead concert. He took the fun right out of it for the vast majority of  Trumpers.

There is, of course, the danger that some of the more violent types could attend for their own reasons. (There doesn’t seem to be any prohibition against wearing military gear or Proud Boys t-shirts.) But according to NBC’s Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny, the word has gone forth on extremist Facebook groups and forums such as TheDonald and 4chan that the whole thing is a “false flag” or a “honeypot” by the government designed to bring more patriots to Washington so they can be arrested and thrown into the dungeons with the other “political prisoners.”

Brayand responds that those people are the real false flag and these comments are being planted to deter people from protesting the supposed stolen election and the government’s ill-treatment of the supposedly innocent protesters of January 6th. There seems to be a lack of trust among the paranoid extremists these days. Go figure. 

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Perhaps most importantly, no big names or MAGA stars will be attending, not even attention hogs like Congressional Reps Matt Gaetz, R-Fl, or Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga. Trump himself was thought to be ignoring the whole thing until Thursday when he sent out a statement of support:

Our hearts and minds are with the people being persecuted so unfairly relating to the January 6th protest concerning the Rigged Presidential Election. In addition to everything else, it has proven conclusively that we are a two-tiered system of justice. In the end, however, JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL!

He also told The Federalist in an agitated interview that he too believes the rally to be a “set-up.” But predictably his view is that if a big crowd shows up it will be an excuse for the media to “harass” the protesters and if only a few show up they’ll say it makes him look bad. (His direct quote was”if people don’t show up they’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s a lack of spirit.’)

Always in fear of offending his followers, Trump’s trying to have it both ways. Not that there’s anything new about that.

In the new book “Peril” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, when former House Speaker Paul Ryan demanded that Trump denounce white supremacy in the wake of Charlottesville, Trump reportedly responded, “These people love me. These are my people. I can’t backstab the people who support me.” Evidently, he somehow came to believe that by saying Nazis are bad, but there were “very fine people on both sides,” that he had successfully covered his bases.

He really needn’t worry, of course. His people are still with him — now more than ever.

According to a new CNN survey, 63% of all respondents believe Biden “legitimately won enough votes to win the presidency.” That’s a shockingly low number since it’s obvious that Biden legitimately won and normally this isn’t even in question. But even more shocking is the fact that 78% of Republicans don’t believe it. That’s up from 70% a few months ago. In other words the Big Lie isn’t dissipating. It’s gaining steam.

The Public Religion Research Institute also released a poll that asked who people blame for the January 6th insurrection. 56% of those surveyed hold Trump responsible. Republicans? 15%.

The CNN poll asked if people feel democracy is under attack or is being tested and 93% agreed that it was one or the other. Of course, they are right. The problem is that Republicans believe that it’s Democrats who are doing it when the truth is the opposite. Most distressing is a fatalistic attitude among Democrats who, after seeing Republican partisans change voting rules and pass laws suppressing votes all over the country, are coming to believe that elections will not reflect the will of the people. 90% believed they would in January. It’s down to 69% today and for good reason.

Despite no evidence of fraud and two previous audits of the 2020 election, this week Pennsylvania Republicans issued subpoenas for the names, addresses, driver’s license numbers and the last four digits of Social Security numbers for millions of people who cast ballots in the primary and general election last year. What can they possibly do with that information? It’s hard to see this as anything more than another attempt to undermine confidence in democracy.

And I doubt most Democrats are even aware of the former president latest nefarious activity. As CNN’s Daniel Dale pointed out, Trump’s endorsement this week of Rep. Mark Finchem for Arizona Secretary of State is the latest in a series of moves to place Big Lie supporters into those crucial positions ahead of the 2024 election. This was the third such supporter he’s endorsed in a battleground state — the other two are Michigan and Georgia. 

This isn’t just Trump rewarding his loyal followers. This is a strategic plan. Secretaries of State run elections. No wonder Americans are losing faith in democracy. It’s being actively undermined before their very eyes.

This weekend’s rally at the Capitol may turn out to be a dud. But it would be a mistake to think that the air has gone out of the Big Lie or the MAGA movement. Trump is making sure to take care of his base and they still love him for it. And in the meantime, he and his henchmen are working overtime to ensure that elections are in the hands of those who will take care of him in return.

Salon

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the American left enthused about all the ways the U.S. could make people’s live better with the supposed “peace dividend” that would accrue now that its greatest global adversary was no more. The word for that is naivete.

This country will write a blank check to the military. But when it comes to spending trillions improving ordinary people’s lives, the Beltway’s questions are always, How much does it cost? and How are you going to pay for it?

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Thursday night posed the How much does it cost? questions in “The Price Is Right” terms. As in, it depends on what the prize is. “Eight-hundred dollars’ worth of printer paper would be pretty lousy,” Hayes said. “Seven-hundred dollars for a brand new Corvette would be amazing. But if it’s $700 for a bucket of clams, it’s a rip-off.”

Capitol Hill lawmakers are bandying about all sorts of figures for the Build Back Better infrastructure bill. This figure is too high, say some. This much is too low, say others. Yes, but what is the prize? What are we getting for that money, however much? No one is talking about that.

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont says he wants to pay for it. But pay for what? After going after millionaires and billionaires, Sanders spoke in generalities about how investments in child care, education, etc., pay off down the road. He eventually reframed addressing climate change in simple, national security terms even deficit hawks ought to understand.

“How much is too much when you’re talking about saving the planet? How much?” Sanders asked. “And if the planet goes down in 50 years—well, Gee-whiz—how much should we have spent or not spent?”

“How much is too much when you’re talking about saving the planet? How much? And if the planet goes down in 50 years—well, Gee-whiz—how much should we have spent or not spent?” says @BernieSanders on why the value of the reconciliation package is worth the price. pic.twitter.com/rXihFDNgsv

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) September 17, 2021

By 2014, the U.S. Navy was planning for sea level rise from climate change. Roads were flooding regularly at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, the largest in the world. Budgets submitted for building new dock facilities included extra feet of height. But Navy planners knew not to mention climate change in anything submitted to Congress. Too controversial with some lawmakers.

Joan VanDervort, former deputy director for Ranges, Sea and Airspace at the Pentagon told NBC News, “They try to stay away from the words ‘climate change,’ and use words like ‘natural resources’ and ‘resiliency’ and terms like ‘weather,’ ‘hurricanes.,” adding, “When you omit “climate change as a priority related to our national security, it’s very difficult to get funding.”

NBC News from 2018:

The Navy has long understood the stakes of global warming. It has many coastal facilities, and its forces are often first on the scene of humanitarian emergencies triggered by extreme weather.

A decade ago, the Navy commissioned the National Research Council to study the risks climate change poses to its ability to respond to these crises and keep the country safe. The 2011 report said a thawing Arctic would stress the military’s fleet by opening a vast new arena to police in particularly harsh conditions. The report also found that 56 Naval facilities worth a combined $100 billion would be threatened if sea level rose about 3 feet.

“Every year you wait to make decisions and take actions, the risk goes up.”

The report warned that the Navy needed to begin protecting the most vulnerable facilities immediately, and had only 10 to 20 years to begin work on the rest. Seven years later, there’s been little progress, said retired Rear Adm. Jonathan White, who led the Navy’s Task Force Climate Change before retiring in 2015.

“Many of those recommendations, most if not all, have gone unanswered,” he said. “Every year you wait to make decisions and take actions, the risk goes up. And I think the expense also goes up.”

But if national defense is not enough to get Congress to ante up, perhaps the question should be How much is too much to spend to save Florida? Or just Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Atlantic City, Manhattan, Charleston, Virginia Beach, and parts of Boston.

Not to mention fixing health care and replacing crumbling infrastructure.

Very smart, very progressive people, Hayes notes, insist on repeating the size of the budget reconciliation bill — $3.5 trillion — “to signal the scope of the ambition here.” But without telling voters what’s waiting for them behind the curtain, without selling them on how much better their lives will be if the bill passes, $3.5 trillion is an abstraction with no connection to their lives, no matter how impressive it sounds on Capitol Hill.

Lawmakers and activists with inflated senses of their own smarts should be selling the brownie. But they cannot resist talking about the recipe to show off what skilled bakers they are and how much they know about the chemistry of cooking, etc.

Voters don’t care. How will that $3.5 trillion-dollar brownie taste?

“We need to stop messaging our policy and talk about what our policy achieves.”