Month: September 2021

But when you’re just another flunky they don’t. It sounds like Trump’s top adviser Corey Lewandowski forgot his place:

Trashelle Odom, the wife of Idaho construction executive John Odom, alleges that Lewandowski repeatedly touched her, including on her leg and buttocks, and spoke to her in sexually graphic terms. Odom said that Lewandowski “stalked” her throughout the evening.

Four people who were first-hand witnesses at the event corroborated Odom’s allegations. POLITICO also spoke with two people — one who was at the event and another who was not — who described conversations they had with Odom about the incidents immediately after they happened.

“On the evening of September 26 in Las Vegas, Nevada, I attended a dinner to support a charity and spend time with wonderful friends,” Odom said in a statement to POLITICO. “He repeatedly touched me inappropriately, said vile and disgusting things to me, stalked me, and made me feel violated and fearful,” she said, referring to Lewandowski.[…]

Odom was one of about two dozen major Republican donors at the Sunday dinner, which was held at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino’s Benihana restaurant. Odom was seated next to Lewandowski during the gathering, part of a four-day conference held by Victoria’s Voice Foundation, a charity devoted to combating substance abuse. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, to whom Lewandowski serves as an informal adviser, was also among the dinner’s attendees.

According to a statement provided by an Odom family attorney, Lewandowski allegedly remarked on the size of his genitalia, described his sexual performance and showed Odom his hotel room key. After the incident, Odom told people that Lewandowski repeatedly spoke about sex while using expletives.

Attendees also observed Lewandowski growing physical with Odom.

“Mrs. Odom stated that over the course of the dinner, Mr. Lewandowski tried to hold her hand, and she pushed his hand away. He touched her leg, and she moved it away. He grabbed her napkin off her lap and tried to touch her leg again, and she pulled her dress over her leg, to move his hand away and cover her skin,” Odom’s attorney wrote in the statement.

“He touched her back and she tried to get away,” the statement continued. “He described an area where he was sore from a workout, on the side of his butt, but he demonstrated this by touching her there—on the upper side of her rear end. Lewandowski tried to touch her approximately 10 times, and Mrs. Odom always rebuffed him.”

Odom left the room but was soon followed by Lewandowski, who remarked that she had a “nice ass,” according to the statement from her attorney and another attendee who heard the comment. Lewandowski also “threw his drink at Mrs. Odom, and it landed all over her shoe and the bottom of her dress,” and “called her stupid,” her attorney stated.

One event attendee who spoke with POLITICO said that Odom gave a detailed retelling of the incidents afterward, describing how she grew fearful for her personal safety as Lewandowski described incidents of violence that took place earlier in his life.

Odom and her husband are relative newcomers to the Republican donor scene, and she told the attendee that she felt intimidated by Lewandowski’s claims that he has control over the former president’s orbit and can determine the fate of those around Trump.

Lewandowski said no candidate receives the president’s endorsement without Lewandowski’s approval, Odom told the attendee.

In the statement from Odom’s attorney, Lewandowski is alleged to have said “repeatedly that he is very powerful and can destroy anyone,” and that he “is close with President Trump and can get anyone elected or can take anyone out.”

“Corey was verbally and physically aggressive and forceful,” Odom alleged in a statement. “I was fearful for my physical safety.” She continued: “I was also fearful that Corey has the power to destroy and ruin everything my husband and I have been working on in our business, personal and charitable endeavors.”

Two of the people present for the dinner described Odom as appearing uncomfortable, and three attendees said Lewandowski appeared to be intoxicated. Photos of the dinner reviewed by POLITICO show Odom posing for selfies with attendees. Several photos showed Lewandowski just above her right shoulder, with his tongue sticking out of his mouth.

Odom then left the restaurant for an after-dinner party in the hotel’s lavish Verona Sky Villa, where witnesses described a chaotic scene. One person who interacted with Odom recalled seeing her in tears and pleading for help. By this time, she had been joined by her sister and stepson, who had accompanied her to Las Vegas.

Attendees said Odom retreated to the other side of the bar with her sister and stepson when Lewandowski came to the villa. Lewandowski followed her, at which point several other attendees tried to shield Odom from him, shepherding her to another part of the bar, according to three people who were present. According to Odom’s attorney, “Corey then moved around the bar with them” and continued “to try to touch Mrs. Odom.”

Attendees said Odom and Lewandowski left the party separately. Odom told one person and later recounted to the family lawyer that she had feared for her physical safety staying at the hotel that evening, because her room was located next to Lewandowski’s. She also told those people she timed her departure the next day to ensure she did not cross paths with him.

It is not the first time Lewandowski has been accused of unwanted touching. In late 2017, singer Joy Villa filed a police report alleging the former Trump campaign manager slapped her buttocks during a holiday party at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Lewandowski was also charged with battery in 2016 after yanking the arm of a reporter, Michelle Fields, at a Trump event. The charges were later dropped, but Lewandowski claimed the incident never happened before video emerged confirming that it did.

Hey, he’s just doing what the Big Boss does when he’s totally sober, amirite? In fact, Stephanie Grisham’s new book says that Trump liked to talk about a young aide’s ass and chatted with her about his penis as well. Lewandowski is just being a good Trump guy.

Lewandowski, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment, has positioned himself as one of Trump’s closest and most loyal advisers — a role he has leveraged to gain access to top Republican donors and claim influence over the direction of the Republican Party. He was Trump’s first presidential campaign manager in 2016, advised him during the presidency and now is part of the circle of aides advising the former president. His duties now include steering a pro-Trump super PAC.

Only the best people.

By the way, Corey tipples. A lot. As do others in Trump’s inner circle:

It’s not just the Great Replacement Theory that’s sweeping the right wing. It’s mingling with all the other crazy stuff that’s already circulating and going mainstream. TPM reports:

But there’s another measure of the conspiracy theory’s reach, researchers told us: its intermingling with other theories popular with the base. Talk of a “great replacement” now mixes freely with QAnon, Critical Race Theory paranoia, and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the dangers of COVID-19 public health measures.

“It’s this real sense of incredible distrust and mistrust of the government,” said Marilyn Mayo, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, explaining the link between the various theories, adding later: “There’s so much interconnectedness going on right now in what’s happening in the country.” 

“There’s a feeling in general of displacement,” Mayo said. “There’s a lot you read about white European civilization being the epitome of civilization, and that those are the people who came here, created America, and made this country great, and somehow that’s all going to be taken away.” 

The ADL offered an example of this crossover in a late-July report: QAnon promoter Ann Vandersteel, greeted with a standing ovation at Clay Clark’s “Health and Freedom Conference” in Tampa, began her remarks by telling the assembled thousands, “it is all connected.” 

“The banking crisis, the human trafficking crisis, the pandemics that we’ve seen over time, especially this shamdemic we’re in right now, the endless wars, the migration that’s taken place all over Europe that has just upended all those beautiful countries that are losing their nationality,” she said. 

Here’s another example: A June survey fielded by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that 8.1% percent of respondents believed both that “The 2020 election was stolen, and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president” and also that “Use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency.” NORC surveyed 1,070 American adults and reported a 4.16% margin of error. But if that 8.1% figure is accurate nationwide, it would represent 21 million American adults. 

Now, the twist: Of those 8.1%, 

63% believe in the great replacement: “African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.”

54% believe in QAnon: “A secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is ruling the US government.”

[Elise] Stefanik, the third-ranking Republican in the House, demonstrated how to fuse the “great replacement” conspiracy theory and the election denial movement. 

The congresswoman released an ad earlier this month warning of a “PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION.” 

“Their plan,” the ad declared, is “to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” 

Stefanik is now a Republican leader in the House of Representatives. This isn’t fringe. It’s the GOP.

The highly anticipated testimony of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the two highest ranking officers in the U.S. military before the Senate Armed Services Committee took place on Tuesday. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was questioned thoroughly about the episodes recounted in the new Bob Woodward and Robert Costa book, “Peril.” From what I can tell, he seems to have set people’s minds at ease regarding what at first looked like dubious departures from the constitutional requirement of civilian control over the military during the final days of the Trump administration.

In particular, there had been serious concerns about Milley calling together senior officers and going over the protocols for a nuclear strike, saying that they should be followed to the letter but also that he had to be involved, which is not technically true. The president has sole authority and would give the order to the secretary of defense, who would convey it to the head of U.S. Strategic Command. (According to PolitiFact, this protocol was created in the early 1960s, “when the advance notice of an incoming nuclear attack had shrunk to just a few minutes.” According to experts, that chain of events would be highly unlikely today. )

Milley explained in his testimony that while he is not in the chain of command for such an order, his involvement, by presidential directive, is in the chain of communication as the president’s primary military advisor. So it appears that Milley did not go rogue, as some suggested, or “pull a Schlesinger,” referring to Nixon-era Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, who was similarly concerned that the president was unstable and ordered military commanders to check with either him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger before following a presidential order to launch a nuclear attack. So that’s somewhat reassuring.

Still, we should be very concerned about the fact that in the seven decades of the nuclear age, we’ve had two presidents with the authority to unilaterally launch nuclear weapons who have been so unstable that people around them felt the need to take steps to assure that they didn’t go off the deep end and try to end human civilization. It’s obviously too much power to put in the hands of one person, and reforms are badly needed.

As far as I know, no congressional action has been taken in this regard as yet, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see some in the next few months. There are a lot of reforms being proposed in the Congress which aren’t getting much attention, thanks to all the other legislative business at the moment, and many of which are long overdue. One of those is the bipartisan National Security Powers Act of 2021, meant to replace the ragged War Powers Resolution of 1973. After everything we’ve been through over the past two decades in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, this is a propitious moment to constrain presidential power to engage in unilateral military adventures. This act would put an end to the absurd notion that any appropriation for military spending amounts to presidential authority for use of force. Instead, presidents would need to secure congressional authorization within 20 days of any action taken, 10 days fewer than the current 30. Perhaps most important in a world of “over the horizon” warfare, this would apply to “remote” and ground deployments alike.

A bill like that should have been passed a long time ago, under either a Democratic or Republican administrations. Perhaps the end of the 20-year Afghanistan saga provides the necessary impetus to make it happen.

If the Trump administration showed us anything, it’s that our democratic system and Constitution are highly dependent on the good faith and decency of the people charge. It was illustrated in living color, day after day, just how easy it is for a corrupt president and his henchmen to abuse the power of the presidency. Last week, House Democrats introduced an updated version of last year’s sweeping reform bill called the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which, as the New York Times writes, “they hope will compare to the overhauls that followed the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War.”

This bill would would curtail the president’s power to use pardons for corrupt purposes; to spend federal money unlawfully, to profit from “emoluments,” including from commercial transactions; to retaliate against whistleblowers or inspectors general; or to evade congressional oversight, including subpoenas.Advertisement:

And that’s just for starters. It would also require presidents to reveal their tax returns, insulate the Justice Department from political interference, limit the use of “acting” officials to avoid Senate confirmation, put restrictions on government employees’ political activity, create barriers to foreign interference in elections and make it easier to prosecute former presidents for crimes committed while in office. In other words, it’s meant to stop any future president from copying the Trump playbook.

According to the Times, the bill is expected to pass the House easily but will face the usual filibuster roadblock in the Senate, where observers expect it will be broken up and added to other bills. You would think that 10 Republicans would actually see the utility of having these rules in place, just in case Donald Trump somehow wins the presidency again. Some restraints of this kind would likely save them a lot of trouble. But the GOP is most likely looking beyond Trump, to the day when a Republican with greater finesse can take advantage of all those newly revealed loopholes and broken norms in ways that benefit the whole team.Advertisement:

The devil is in the details, and this law will undoubtedly raise many questions regarding the separation of powers. No White House will want to see its power ruthlessly curtailed, but Joe Biden ran on a platform of reform and is reportedly “negotiating” with the House. Perhaps they can iron out any concerns before the bill comes to a vote. We can’t forget that this Supreme Court is probably the most pro-presidential power of any in history, so it’s entirely possible that many of these provisions will be shot down in court.

Still, if there’s ever been a time to tackle this, it’s while the abuses and corruption of the Trump administration are still fresh in everyone’s mind. If Congress doesn’t do it now, it’s almost certain that members will come to regret it in the future. Donald Trump’s ignorance and aggressive disdain for democracy left a roadmap for a future right-wing authoritarian to put to use more efficiently. There are already quite a few candidates lining up for the chance to do it. 

Salon

Readers of a certain vintage may recall a paranoid dream I referenced last year from “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him,” the 1968 comedy album by Firesign Theater. As an imagined plague sweeps an imagined city, a cab radio plays:

… in a massive traffic tie-up as the death rate continues to soar. And now let’s go to the river’s edge and Charles B. Smith. 

Ed, it’s an amazing scene here. Like lemmings, the crowds are waiting on the shore, torches blazing, as the long line of shrouded funeral rafts drift lazily into view, great black candles flickering at helm and stern. The excitement is contagious … and so are the Black Cross volunteers as they pass from family to family, pausing now and again to touch a child’s head. I wish I could … but I can’t. So long, Ed.

Leonard Pitts bids so long to Black Cross workers, the anti-vax contingent working in hospitals and public service jobs:

No telling how many of you there actually are, but lately, you’re all over the news. Just last week, a nearly-30-year veteran of the San Jose Police Department surrendered his badge rather than comply with the city’s requirement that all employees be inoculated against COVID-19. He joins an Army lieutenant colonel, some airline employees, a Major League Baseball executive, the choral director of the San Francisco Symphony, workers at the tax collector’s office in Orange County, Florida, and, incredibly, dozens of healthcare professionals.

Well, on behalf of the rest of us, the ones who miss concerts, restaurants and other people’s faces, the ones who are sick and tired of living in pandemic times, here’s a word of response to you quitters: Goodbye.

And here’s two more: Good riddance.

Pitts speaks for many of us exhausted by how the pandemic has constricted our lives for over 18 months now. Even nursing home residents not killed by Covid are seeing their physical and mental health decline from the isolation of being restricted to their rooms, activities curtailed, and from not sharing meals with friends or family visitors. (I’ve seen this firsthand.)

Pitts continues:

We’ve been down this road before. Whenever faced with some mandate imposed in the interest of the common good, some of us act like they just woke up on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. “There’s no freedom no more,” whined one man in video that recently aired on “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah.” The clip was from the 1980s, and the guy had just gotten a ticket for not wearing his seatbelt.

It’s an unfortunately common refrain. Can’t smoke in a movie theater? Can’t crank your music to headache decibels at 2 in the morning? Can’t post the Ten Commandments in a courtroom? “There’s no freedom no more.” Some of you seem to think freedom means no one can be compelled to do, or refrain from doing, anything. But that’s not freedom, it’s anarchy.

When it’s black-clad punks breaking store windows, Trumpists decry that anarchy. When asked to support their communities in eliminating the virus they once claimed did not exist, that kind of anarchy they approve.

Angry, are you? You’ve made the rest of us angry at you.

The difference is, your anger is dumb, and ours is not. Yours is about being coerced to do something you don’t want to do. Like that’s new. Like you’re not already required to get vaccinated to start school or travel to other countries. For that matter, you’re also required to mow your lawn, cover your hindparts and, yes, wear a seatbelt. So you’re mad at government and your job for doing what they’ve always done.

But the rest of us, we’re mad at you. Because this thing could have been over by now, and you’re the reason it isn’t.

That’s why we were glad President Biden stopped asking nicely, started requiring vaccinations everywhere he had power to do so. We were also glad when employers followed suit. And if that’s a problem for you, then, yes, goodbye, sayonara, auf wiedersehen, adios and adieu. We’ll miss you, to be sure. But you’re asking us to choose between your petulance and our lives.

Petulance is for losers. There is plenty of vaccine, but we’re fresh out of sympathy. So are a growing number of hospital systems:

Novant Health, a massive hospital system in North Carolina that has made the COVID-19 vaccine mandatory for its employees, suspended 375 employees across 15 hospitals and 800 clinics last week for not complying with the mandate. But over a five-day period, 200 employees agreed to get the vaccine, Megan Rivers, the hospital’s director of media & influencer relations, said in a tweet. More than 99% of the hospital system’s 35,000 employees are vaccinated, Rivers said. 

The remaining 175 who were suspended last week have been fired, according to CBS affiliate WWAY. 

Novant Health’s terminated join over 150 at Houston Methodist and another 150 at ChristianaCare in Delaware who lost thjeir jobs for refusing employee vaccine mandates. “Simply put, it is essential to ensure the safety of our patients, team members and communities,” Novant said in a statement.

Novant Health has urged the community to get vaccinated. It joined other health systems in the Charlotte area in releasing data this month showing how more than 90 percent of their covid-19 patients had not been vaccinated. David Priest, Novant Health’s chief safety, quality and epidemiology officer, acknowledged to WGHP that the recent wave of covid patients had overwhelmed the hospital system.

“They’re tired. I’m tired. We’re all tired,” he said.

The rest of us? We’re tired and pissed.

Whether Fox News is the propaganda arm of the Republican Party or whether the Republican Party is the political arm of Fox News has remained an open question for some time. But while public attention focused on Capitol Hill’s budget battles, the pandemic and its discontents, and missing White women, Fox’s Tucker Carslon has settled the matter: the Republican Party is the political arm of Fox News.

That was not Mehdi Hasan’s thesis in his commentary Tuesday, but that is the conclusion one might draw. Republican politicians are indeed following Carlson’s lead in bringing the Neo-Nazi “great replacement theory” to the masses. Hasan lays out a string of mass killings inspired by the racist campfire tale of scary brown people comin’ ta git ya. Or at least, to replace ya.

Among Republicans the nods and winks are gone. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) are just three Hasan highlights as promoting rhetoric associated with replacement theory.

https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1443009509711130630?s=20

Hasan explains the threat:

I don’t know if I can overstate this point, but this is a deeply dangerous moment for America. Millions of people every night are watching cable hosts endorse a once-fringe, Neo-Nazi conspiracy about migrants and black and brown people and Jews. Millions of people are voting for politicians who used to be afraid to say the stuff out loud, but are now happily and proudly doing so. We know where this obsession with great replacement theory ends — with people being killed, in synagogues, and mosques, in Walmarts. This is not a story anyone should be telling. 

As the nation’s sane fight to end the Covid pandemic, and the nation’s most heavily propagandized do the virus’ bidding, one wonders what happens when Fox News’ political arm takes full control of the government. Should Republican state legislatures further gerrymander state and federal districts, and should they gain control both of the federal House and Senate after 2022, and through manipulation of 2024 election results return Donald Trump to the Oval Office, it might be them comin’ ta git the rest of us.

Constitutional scholars and democracy advocates who gamed out worst-case scenarios ahead of the 2020 election “were too quick in retrospect to dismiss the outrageous as unlikely to happen in a country like the United States,” writes the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker. Then Jan. 6th happened. Now they must contemplate what a Trump 2024 run might mean:

One real risk, they say, is that four years after the failed Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump and his supporters emerge in 2024 more sophisticated and successful in their efforts to steal an election.

“For me, the scary part is, in 2020, this was not a particularly sophisticated misinformation or disinformation campaign,” said Matt Masterson, who ran election security at the Department of Homeland Security between 2018 to 2020. Referring to some of the outlandish conspiracy theories of ballot fraud posited in the wake of the 2020 election by Trump’s allies, he added: “We’re talking about bamboo ballots and Italian satellites and dead dictators.”

In the future, Masterson said, these sorts of falsehoods are going to become more advanced and nuanced — exploiting genuine areas of confusion in the electoral system — and thus harder to combat.

A Trump victory, however affected, or a Trump acolyte winning office and backed by a Republican congress might mean ” the new president, intent on strengthening his own position and punishing critics, begins remaking the political and electoral system, using legal means to consolidate power and erode democratic institutions,” Parker writes:

“We often think that what we should be waiting for is fascists and communists marching in the streets, but nowadays, the ways democracies often die is through legal things at the ballot box — so things that can be both legal and antidemocratic at the same time,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a professor at Harvard University and the co-author of “How Democracies Die,” who is working on a successive volume. “Politicians use the letter of the law to subvert the spirit of the law.”

But that scenario is more academic and less bloody than the one Hasan foreshadows and Carlson actively foments. Carlson’s GOP would remodel the U.S. to resemble Viktor Orbán’s Hungary where the authoritarian leader’s thumb already weighs heavily on the electoral scales.

With the armed revolt threshold breached on Jan. 6, additional violence is not unforseeable. The former president himself employed eliminationist rhetoric against immigrants and asylum seekers.

Two years ago, a scene of a church massacre from Kingsman: The Secret Service was shown at a conference of Trump supporters and doctored to show Trump slaughtering political adversaries. Trump himself has openly suggested whistle-blowers should die:

A federal judge ruled in April 2017 people were injured as a “direct and proximate result” of Trump’s comments. ABC News in August found “at least 36 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault.”

Parker concludes:

“These are soft guardrails that have constrained politicians in the past, and what the Trump administration has made clear is that we need to harden those guardrails,” Ziblatt said.

But, he added, he worries that some are still too squeamish to come to terms with the potential threat U.S. democracy faces if Trump attempts to regain power.

“If you look at how democracies get in trouble in other places, it’s how executives once in office abuse their office, and I think people just don’t want to think that Trump could get back into the presidency,” Ziblatt said. “There’s a way in which we’re not trying to think of the worst-case scenario, which is Trump gets reelected, but I think what we’ve learned is you have to prepare for the worst-case scenario.”

Ziblatt, Parker and the Washington press corp remain too squeamish to consider the kind of worst case Hasan imagines. But I remember just where I was when news got out of the Rwandan genocide. Most Republican politicians may themselves be too squeamish to go there, but Fox-inspired armed thugs have proved they are not.

Update: Fixed a date in “Trump 2024 run.”

The new Stephanie Grisham book is deliciously dishy:

Little is known about what happened in the 90-minute conversation between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Osaka, Japan, two years ago. But as journalists were quickly ushered out of the room at the 2019 Group of 20 Summit, Stephanie Grisham once again found herself with a close-up view of the action.

She saw Trump lean toward Putin that day and tell him: “Okay, I’m going to act a little tougher with you for a few minutes. But it’s for the cameras, and after they leave, we’ll talk. You understand.” […]

He was such a patsy and they all knew it. It’s amazing we managed to live through it.

Grisham is undeniably one of the Trump originals. She was wrangling reporters on the campaign plane in 2016, before working her way into the Trumps’ inner circles. And she is still viewed widely as a consummate Trump insider.

In Grisham’s telling, Putin seemed to be attempting to throw Trump off his game in Osaka. She writes that Fiona Hill, the White House’s top Russia adviser, told her that Putin brought to their meeting an unusually attractive female translator, whose presence seemed intended to distract the U.S. president.

Putin also seemed to be coughing and clearing his throat an inordinate number of times throughout the meeting. Hill speculated to Grisham that he was probably attempting to trigger Trump’s well-known germaphobe tendencies, Grisham writes.

This is probably true. We know that Putin showed up to a meeting with Angela merkel with a couple of big dogs, knowing that she has a particular fear of them.

Grisham alleges that Trump became obsessed with a young, female press aide who isn’t named in the book. The president constantly asked where the aide was during press events, Grisham wrote, and allegedly once requested that she be brought to his cabin on Air Force One so he could “look at her [behind].”

Trump behaved inappropriately with Grisham, too, she wrote — once calling her from Air Force One to assure her that his penis was not small or toadstool-shaped, as the porn star Stormy Daniels had alleged in an interview.

Grisham wrote that Trump once asked her then-boyfriend, a fellow Trump aide, if she was good in bed.

Obviously, Republicans don’t care if Trump was sleeping with young aides two at a time in the Oval Office. They know what he is. He bragged about it on camera. But it’s still astonishing to see the allegedly GOP, previously obsessed with what they would tell their kids about the immorality of politicians shrugging this stuff off.

And then there is the family. Oh my what a bunch of creepy climbers”

She is particularly negative about the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband Jared Kushner — both of whom held senior White House positions. She wrote that the first lady and White House staff called Ivanka “the Princess” who regularly invoked “my father” in work meetings, and Grisham dubbed Kushner “the Slim Reaper” for his habit of inserting himself into other people’s projects, making a mess and leaving them to take the blame.

Tellingly, Grisham writes that Ivanka and Jared tried to push their way into meeting Queen Elizabeth II alongside the president and first lady, a wild breach of protocol on a state visit, but were thwarted when they couldn’t fit into the helicopter. “I finally figured out what was going on,” Grisham writes. “Jared and Ivanka thought they were the royal family of the United States.”

“I had shared with Mrs. Trump many times my opinion that if we lost reelection in 2020 it would be because of Jared,” Grisham writes. “She didn’t disagree with me.”

By the end of the administration, Grisham says, Kushner was Trump’s “real chief of staff.” He sat next to Pence, the vice president and the newly named head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and ran the first meeting about what Trump should say to the nation about the pandemic. He also apparently dictated much of the president’s first widely criticized televised address about the pandemic — the one that announced travel restrictions before alerting the federal agencies who would have to implement them.

And about that gross jacket Melania wore to visit the children being held on the border:

The first lady had been upset by the situation her husband’s immigration policies had caused and wanted to see it for herself. For reasons that still remain a mystery, she’d ordered a $39 jacket online from Zara. Grisham said she was on her phone ironing out details for the trip and missed the chance to stop Melania Trump from wearing it.

It was just a jacket, Melania said, as she huddled with Grisham for a damage-control session on the plane. As they arrived back at the White House, an aide told them the president wanted to see his wife in the Oval Office. It was the first time he’d ever summoned her in such a way in front of staff. He yelled and asked “what the [expletive]” they thought they were doing. Then just as quickly he came up with a solution. He would tweet out that the jacket was a message to the Fake News Media.

It’s the story that the first lady repeated four months later in her first and only televised interview during the administration.

What a piece of work…

The Melania Trump whom Grisham describes is as stubborn as her husband, but his temperamental opposite. She believed in self-care so much that she’d change into a robe and slippers almost immediately upon boarding Air Force One. Self-consciousness around her accent and her English grammar meant she rarely wrote anything on her own.

The Secret Service gave her a nickname, “Rapunzel,” because she rarely left her tower, a.k.a the White House residence. Agents would request to be placed on her detail so they could spend more time with their families, Grisham writes.

If she wasn’t spending time with her son, Barron, or her parents, she was working on her photo albums, which Grisham calls one of “her two children.” Deep into the pandemic, she spent two hours recreating the ribbon-cutting for the White House tennis pavilion because she hadn’t gotten the right shot weeks earlier. She was working on a photo shoot of a rug during the Capitol riot.

Apparently Melania’s nose was out of joint about the Stormy Daniels thing, but not really all that much:

The airing of Trump’s alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels is what “unleashed” Melania Trump to start publicly contradicting or ignoring her husband — trying to embarrass him as he had embarrassed her. She walked into his first State of the Union address arm-in-arm with a handsome military aide Grisham had hand-selected because, Melania said, the floors of the Capitol were too slippery.

“I laughed to myself because I’d seen the woman navigate dirt roads in her heels,” Grisham writes.

And when Grisham drafted a tweet for Melania requesting privacy, saying she was concentrating on being a mother, wife and first lady, she had Grisham remove the word “wife.”

What the scandal didn’t unleash was an emotional reaction. Grisham wrote that Melania Trump didn’t believe her husband’s denials of the affair, but essentially shrugged it all off:“This is Donald’s problem. He got himself into this mess. He can fix it by himself.”

Obsessed with nothing but her scrap books, she slept through election night. She did agree that the election was stolen though. Of course.

She went along with Trump’s plan to snub Jill Biden rather than invite her over to the traditional first ladies tea welcoming her to the White House, according to Grisham.

And the first lady also pointed out how she’d been criticized for not standing next to Trump the way Jill Biden stood next to her husband on election night. “She said, ‘I don’t stand next to him because I don’t need to hold him up like she does. Can you imagine?’ ” Grisham writes. “That made me laugh.”

How nice. This made me laugh:

Grisham even claims to know dirt on Trump’s hair, which she says he cuts himself with “a huge pair of scissors that could probably cut a ribbon at an opening of one of his properties.”

That explains a lot.

As expected, Democrats are going to have to use Reconciliation to raise the debt ceiling. They don’t want to but the Republicans have decided it’s their best play to jam up the Democrats’ agenda so that’s the way it has to be.

Politico reports:

First, Dems will make one last attempt to avoid having to go the reconciliation route.

— Pelosi said she could bring a clean debt-ceiling increase to the House floor as soon as today.

— Schumer said this morning he’ll ask for unanimous consent to raise the ceiling using a simple majority vote (instead of the typical 60 votes needed to circumvent a filibuster). “If Republicans really want to see the debt ceiling raised without providing a single vote, I’m prepared to have that vote,” he said.

— Their strategy: Make moderate GOP lawmakers squirm by divorcing the debt ceiling from any other partisan priorities — thus depriving them of a shield to explain their “no” votes. Democratic leaders believe that a clean debt-ceiling vote will give them the ability to hammer the GOP for failing totake care of this issue on a bipartisan basis — as has been done for decades — and now setting a new standard by forcing one party to do it alone.

But it appears they’ll have no choice but to resort to reconciliation.

— Sen. TED CRUZ (R-Texas) said this morning that he’ll object to Schumer’s request for unanimous consent, meaning the debt-ceiling vote will not be able to avoid the filibuster unless reconciliation is invoked.

But there seems to be some discord among even Democratic leaders about this approach. Yes, Biden, Pelosi and Schumer discussed using reconciliation Monday, and this morning, House Majority Leader STENY HOYER talked openly about it with reporters. (Read Congress Minutes here about Hoyer.) But …

— The No. 2 Senate Democrat, DICK DURBIN (Ill.), called using reconciliation a “nonstarter” due to the lack of time. (Insert shrug emoji here …)

— Hoyer tweeted out a clarification of his remarks, which raised new questions about the plan of action:“Today I was asked whether reconciliation is an option to address the debt limit. It is certainly not the best option, nor the option we’re pursuing.”

I think Durbin was just operating on the assumption that they’re still publicly trying to pressure Republicans but the writing is on the wall. McConnell and McCarthy are pulling out all the stops to make the passage of Biden’s agenda as painful and difficult as possible. Sadly, some Democrats are more than happy to help them do it which is pathetic. If the Dems worked with one voice — especially if they would eliminate the filibuster, thus solving the debt ceiling crisis right now — the Democrats could have a momentous achievement and make it look easy. Unfortunately, we have a tiny group of Divas who have decided that helping this lunatic cult is in their political/financial interest and that the country would be better off with the Republican Party led by Donald Trump in charge.

I don’t understand how Republicans can believe that much less Democrats. But here we are. Let’s hope that by some form of persuasion or magic, they are persuaded otherwise.

That this is happening in the United States in 2021 is absolutely shameful. And it doesn’t have to. There is a free, accessible, effective preventative for COVID so there is no good reason the hospitals are so full of COVID patients that other people are being left to die. It is unforgivable:

When I got Covid in 2020 and spent weeks in the hospital, it was harrowing. But it was nothing compared to what my family is dealing with now—also as a result of Covid.

This is a Covid horror story in which no one actually gets Covid, and it could still happen to anyone 🧵

In August my dad was living independently in rural New Mexico, as he has for years, in a beautiful place with a view of the mountains. He got vaxxed against Covid as soon as it was available, wore masks, and was waiting out the pandemic like the rest of us.

Then, he had a fall.

When I called and he admitted that he was in the hospital, he was more annoyed than anything else. He tripped, he hurt his leg, couldn’t go home for a week or so. How irritating. How dumb. He blamed himself. He loved me, hoped I was well, he was fine, etc. That was the last call.

What happened was that while in the hospital, my dad caught viral pneumonia that went unnoticed. The whole state was in lockdown, and every hospital ICU was filling up with unvaccinated Covid patients. There weren’t enough resources. The governor begged people to get vaxxed.

My dad was not in the ICU, but in a physical rehab unit of the hospital to help him with his leg. They now say they did not know he had pneumonia at that point. He collapsed on the floor in his room and was left there, unnoticed, for six hours.

When they found him he was blue and had an oxygen level of 50. He did not have Covid. He was taken to the ER and put on a ventilator, but they had to put him in *a storage room* because there physically not enough space due to all the unvaccinated Covid cases.

Twenty-four hours later, he was off the vent and his oxygen levels were restored. My siblings, who live closer, flew in. I spoke to him, and he was out of it but okay. Surely he would get treatment now. We thought that was the worst of it. It was not.

It was later explained to me that this hospital decided to *re-intubate my father* due to a lack of hospital resources. They couldn’t manage. He could not see a cardiologist or a pulmonologist, they were all busy. They could not run the needed tests. So they kept him on the vent.

In normal circumstances, they simply would have transferred my dad to a larger hospital. There were several close by. It would have been routine. But due to Covid, it was impossible—so impossible, they thought, that they didn’t even tell me he needed to be transferred.

A few days later, while I had thought my dad was improving—I kept being reassured by the nurses when I called—I finally called and got an exhausted, angry nurse who said bluntly: “we are tapped out and because of that your father is going to die. Maybe today. I’m sorry.”

I demanded to speak to the doctor and he said more or less the same thing. The state was maxed out. My dad needed a cardiac ICU bed, or at least a cardiologist, and there was nothing for him. There was no hope, and no point even trying. Everywhere was full of the unvaccinated.

Now, there have been other stories like ours in the news over the past month or so. There was the father who was turned away from 43 ICUs and sadly passed away. People were being flown across state lines to try to save them, their families in terror, the health systems in chaos.

My dad’s doctor said that New Mexico’s ICU bed planning was centralized, so there was no point calling NM hospitals, but I could try ICUs in CO, AZ, TX, UT, CA—even though, he said, they had already tried all those. He would try again. I could call. I think he was humoring me.

The doctor said to “send him any leads” so when I called the hospitals, I said I was calling on his behalf. I never said I was his assistant or medical staff, but they talked to me. They were all maxed out. Nothing they could do.

After about five panicked hours of contacting every hospital, every person I could think of, and screaming my helplessness into the maw of the internet to see if anyone, anyone at all could help us, we finally reached a doctor in an ABQ hospital ICU who agreed to admit my dad.

So that was two weeks ago. If he’d gotten to that ICU even hours later, we would have lost him. They had to perform heroic acts to stabilize him. In a week his pneumonia had been brought under control, and he was starting to heal. They talked about a full recovery. However.

By that point my dad had been on a vent for more than ten days, simply because of a lack of access to care. If you’re a med professional, you know why this matters. All signs looked good and so they decided to extubate him. At first he tolerated it, and then…he didn’t.

Three days later, they had to intubate my dad for the third time. They said that doing this could result in a permanent disability. He could fully recover, but he also might not ever be independent again.

They gave me the option of “making him comfortable” instead, and you know what that means. But I’m my dad’s PoA and he’d been clear that he wanted people to fight for him in a circumstance like this, so I said no. I told them to fight and do whatever they could to save him.

To save my dad, they had to perform a tracheostomy for long-term weaning from the ventilator. That means making a hole in his windpipe. “Like Stephen Hawking,” someone said. It might be temporary, it might not. They didn’t know if it would save him, but so far at least, it has.

I think of my dad before all this happened, still working, living in his own (rented) home, looking out at the mountains, calling his children in California and in France.

The doctors and nurses say that a full recovery and getting off the trache is possible, but will be hard.

They also say that none of this would have happened if it were not for the fact that so many people remain unvaccinated against Covid. Even in NM, with a decent vaccination rate, the system is overrun.

Please get vaccinated. Wear a mask. You never know how it will affect you.

If you’d like to help my dad—who is still in the ICU—and help us give him the best chance for a full recovery, you can do so here. Thank you.

I'm sorry to do this. We are fighting to save my father. He was left without care for days due to a medical system overloaded by Covid patients. Please share or help if you can. I know so many are suffering right now, we're just trying to get through this https://t.co/ynCdxWwRMS

— Summer Brennan (@summerbrennan) September 25, 2021

Originally tweeted by Summer Brennan (@summerbrennan) on September 28, 2021.

There was no reason for this surge in hospitalizations and deaths. None. It is an outrage.

Krugman in his newsletter on why McConnell is so sure that his play on the debt ceiling won’t blow back on him:

It has long been clear that voters are far less informed about parties’ policy actions than we’d like to imagine, even when those policies touch their lives directly. Earlier this year most Americans received stimulus checks thanks to the American Rescue Plan, which was enacted by Democrats on a straight party-line vote. Yet a poll of rural voters found that only half gave Democrats credit for those checks; a third credited Republicans, not one of whom supported the plan.

So what do voters respond to? In general, they tend to support the incumbent party when things are going well, oppose it if things are going badly — even if the positive or negative events have no conceivable relationship to that party’s actions.

The political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels like to use the example of the 1916 election, which was much closer than most people expected; in particular, Woodrow Wilson lost his home state of New Jersey. Why? Achen and Bartels make a compelling case that one major factor was the panic created by a wave of shark attacks along New Jersey’s beaches. Whatever you think of Wilson, he wasn’t responsible for those sharks. But voters blamed him anyway.

More prosaically, many presidential contests turn on how the economy was doing in the few quarters before the election, even though presidents usually have relatively little influence on short-term economic developments, certainly as compared with the Federal Reserve. When people voted against Jimmy Carter, they were really voting against Paul Volcker, the Fed chairman at the time, who pushed the economy into recession to curb inflation — but they didn’t know that.

Of course, retrospective voting isn’t new. What is new is the complete ruthlessness of the modern Republican Party, which is single-mindedly focused on regaining power, never mind the consequences for the rest of the country.

So ask yourself: If a party doesn’t care about the state of the nation when the other party is in power, and it knows that its opposition suffers when bad things happen, what is its optimal political strategy? The answer, obviously, is that it should do what it can to make bad things happen.

Sometimes the sabotage strategy is almost naked. Consider Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida. DeSantis has done everything he can to prevent an effective response to the latest pandemic wave — trying to block mask and vaccine requirements, even by private businesses. Yet this hasn’t stopped him from blaming President Biden for failing to end Covid.

And now comes the debt crisis. Nobody has ever accused McConnell of being stupid. He knows quite well just how disastrous failing to raise the debt limit could be. But the disaster would occur on Biden’s watch. And from his point of view, that’s all good.

That is correct.

But you will notice that McConnell has said that they will vote to fund the government separately:

Speaking before the vote Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., reiterated that Republicans would vote for a short-term funding bill that does not raise the debt ceiling.

Government shutdowns do not go well for Republicans. I suspect that’s because everyone knows they are the ones who are hostile to government so most people just assume they are the ones who want to shut it down. He’s wary of that. But anything else he’s more than happy to blame Biden for and then happily run on Democratic failure.

On Chris Hayes’ show he discussed how the Republicans are fighting Biden’s vaccine requirements and why.

Incentives don’t work. Mandates work. …These people are behaving like irrational children and therefore what do you do with children? You have to do what’s best for children.

Now a right winger watching this will say, “Look at that paternalistic, tyrannical person on MSNBC!” But that is the reality in a public health crisis going all the way back to George Washington.

Mehdi Hasan, All In with Chris Hayes 9-20-2021

I’ve developed 6 steps people can take to help make the vaccine mandates happen using the power of social media, existing national corporate HR policies, Federal OSHA reporting methods and local news coverage of the conflict over mandates.

1) Find videos and social media stories of people publicly saying, “I won’t get vaccinated!”
Look for them at school board meetings, protests or of people in public places telling others about their intent.

2) Alert their employer via email, Facebook and Twitter.
Let the company know you will be filing a complaint with *OSHA
(I’ll do a piece on the process and issues of contacting OSHA later, but from OSHA.gov/workers. “anyone who knows about a workplace safety or health hazard may report unsafe conditions to OSHA, and OSHA will investigate the concerns reported.”)

3) After the mandate deadline is reached, resend the video or story to the company and ask for confirmation that the person(s) is vaccinated, is testing weekly, has quit, or was fired.

4) Share on social media what happened with that employee and employer

5) If the company doesn’t act, contact OSHA.
Fines are about $13,000 per violation, and go up to $139,000 to the companies that willfully don’t follow the safety regulations.

6) Share the stories of big fines on social media.

What are the reasons behind these steps?
1) It uses the anti-vaxxed own public statements against them.
2) It avoids retaliation for reporting against an individual they know who could attack them.
Corporate HR policies and OSHA procedures are designed to handle issues of confidentiality, retaliation and due process.
3) These stories are designed for cable TV news, so hosts can talk about enforcement issues.

4) It uses the power of the national corporate HR systems already in place for enforcement in states with bad governors.

5) It uses the power of the Federal government in states with Governors that don’t want to enforce the rule and financial consequences for companies that don’t want to enforces the rule.

The deadlines and the details of the vaccination mandate aren’t out yet, when they are there will be a flurry of new stories. When that happens it will be an opportunity to use existing stories and develop new ones to help enforce vaccination mandates.

Help Vaccine Mandates Happen

Below is an example of me using my 6 steps based on this tweet I saw last week. I contacted the author, discussed her concerns and then followed my 6 step plan. Here’s the letter I sent to Home Depot via email.

Omg. I just left Home Depot. They have sign saying “Wear A Mask”. No one is. I go to checkout and I ask cashier how she’s handling it. She says their choice. She had Covid 2020 and her husband died from it but, “ I’m not letting them spear me with vaccine”. I cried and left.

— Susie (@Homeoffree61) September 16, 2021

OSHA COVID-19 safety rule compliance complaint in Home Depot’s Marietta Georgia store

Craig Menear
Chairman, CEO and President
The Home Depot, Inc.
Dear Craig:

Thank you for signing the Business Roundtable letter supporting the vaccine mandate. Although it hasn’t been implemented yet, I’d like to alert you to a potential employee compliance problem in your Marietta Georgia store that I read on Twitter.

I contacted the author of the tweet who said the clerk got angry when discussing the vaccination mandate and dropped her mask to say, “I’m not letting them spear me with vaccine.”

The author was concerned that other employees might feel the same way and local store managers won’t enforce the vaccination mandate when it is implemented.

I hope they will, but I’ve taken the liberty of copying OSHA’s Region 4 Office on this letter so when the rule goes into effect, they can confirm that all employees have attested to being vaccinated or will test weekly to meet the requirements of the new rule.

Your customers know what can happen when you don’t follow safety rules on the jobsite. Injury and death. You and your shareholders should know the financial cost of willfully ignoring COVID-19 safety rules. 

For example, earlier this year Marietta manufacturer FBS Manufacturing was cited for exposing workers willfully to preventable fall hazards that led to employee’s death.  

“FBS Manufacturing Corp.’s failure to implement legally required safety procedures led to tragedy for a worker and his family,” said OSHA Area Office Director Jeffery Stawowy in Atlanta-West. “The fact that this incident was preventable only deepens their loss. This case should remind all employers that prioritizing production or profits over safety is never an acceptable choice.”

The author has built 3 homes in East Cobb County with Home Depot as her primary source of materials. She was very frightened after the incident and will not return until she reads about the 100% vaccination compliance at your Marietta Georgia store.

You have 90 stores in Georgia. An average of 118 Georgians are dying of COVID-19 everyday. The sooner you act, the more lives will be saved.

As you say in your values statement, do the right thing, take care of people and you’ll increase your shareholder value. 

Keeping your employees alive is good for business. 

LLAP,
Michal Spocko
P.S. The author sent me a copy of the receipt with the date and exact time of the interaction which I have linked to here. 

cc: Eric R. Lucero, Public Affairs, Department of Labor, OSHA, Region 4, Atlanta-West 

The Home Depot
Teresa Roseborough, EVP, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, Chair Compliance Council
Travis Lawrence, Vice President Human Resources
Kathleen Eaton, Vice President Safety
Chris Peters, Senior Manager Human Resources – COVID Strategic Response
Sue Dorsey, OSHA Regulatory Compliance Specialist

——————— # # # —————–

I hope others will try this. I want to learn from what works, adapt based on the reactions, and respond to issues that develop along the way. I expect that there will be a lot of, “But what about…” scenarios. I learned a lot about the HR process in big corps by talking to friends and family. The process for employees to report is another issue to address, they pointed out that most companies have an ethics hotline that can be used for reporting violations of health and safety rules. I’m very grateful for their expertise and time.

If you want to know more, I suggest you read some of the articles below. If you want to discuss this I’m at michalspocko @ protonmail com or you can DM me at @spockosbrain.

*OSHA.gov/workers

Can someone file a complaint for me?

“Yes, a compliant can be filed on your behalf by: an authorized representative of a labor organization or other employee bargaining unit; an attorney; any person acting as a bona fide representative, including members of the clergy, social workers, spouses and other family members; government officials or nonprofit groups; and organizations acting upon specific complaints and injuries from you or your coworkers. In addition, anyone who knows about a workplace safety or health hazard may report unsafe conditions to OSHA, and OSHA will investigate the concerns reported.”

Background on mandates, the law, OSHA rules, and corporate implementation of the rules.

I read dozens of stories about the issues and practicalities of the vaccination mandate, Here are 6 of the best.

OSHA’s Planned Covid Vaccine Rule Has Firms Asking, What’s Next? Bloomberg Law, September 10, 2021
Robert Iafolla, Fatima Hussein, Erin Mulvaney, Ben Penn

EXPLAINER: Employers have legal right to mandate COVID shots AP, July 27, 2021
by Mae Anderson And Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar

Federal Court: Anti-Vaxxers Do Not Have a Constitutional or Statutory Right to Endanger Everyone Else,
By Andrew Tauber on September 23, 2021

How OSHA Will Enforce Biden’s New Vaccine Mandate for Businesses, Healthline, September 16, 2021
by Brian Krans  Fact checked by Dana K. Cassell

From McDonald’s to Goldman Sachs, here are the companies mandating vaccines for all or some employees,
NBC News, Aug. 3, 2021 By Haley Messenger

Is Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate a law? What happens to those who don’t get the shot?, USA Today,
by Scott Gleeson on September 10, 2021

“Abramson said OSHA will not specifically fine or focus on people who are unvaccinated but more so frame it on the company’s responsibility.“

Cross posted to Spocko’s Brain