Month: September 2021

When it comes to Democrats, “disarray” trips off the fingertips more freely in major newsrooms. Democrats have a talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. But while Joe Biden’s margin of victory last November was clear to everyone not besotted on Trump kool aid, his party’s margins in Congress are not in clear victory territory. With a 50-50 Senate, moving any legislation to Biden’s desk will take real finesse. Do they have what it takes?

Democrats seem at least to understand (somewhat) what is at stake not only for Biden’s agenda, their own political fortunes, and the fate of the planet. Enough to huddle at the White House on Wednesday. News coverage settles (naturally) on disagreements within the caucus at a time raising the debt limit faces a time limit (New York Times):

“We are on schedule — that’s all I will say,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters after meeting with Mr. Biden for more than an hour. “We’re calm, and everybody’s good, and our work’s almost done.”

Of course, she would say that. But then again, she is Nancy Pelosi and not to be underestimated. Sen. Bernie Sanders was singing from the same hymnal.

“When you’ve got 50 votes and none to lose, and you’ve got three to spare in the House, there’s a lot of give and take — that’s just the way it is,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who is chairman of the Budget Committee. “It’s tough. But I think at the end of the day, we’re going to be fine.”

At the crux of the stalemate is a leadership commitment to a group of moderate Democrats that the House would take up the Senate-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill by Monday. Liberal House Democrats say they will vote down the measure until their priority legislation first clears both the House and Senate.

Those Democrats say the infrastructure bill, which omitted most of their top priorities including major provisions to combat climate change, cannot be separated from the $3.5 trillion package, which contains many of those elements, such as a shift to electric power. Beyond the climate portions, the social policy measure would, among many other things, extend child care and child tax credits, expand free prekindergarten and community college and fortify Medicare.

Might this effort fail like the Clinton health plan? Or might it squeak past the goal line like Obamacare? Hell if I know. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes does not either:

And of course, saboteurs gonna saboteur.

Trump, of course, has no problem spelling it out explicitly. Republicans should destroy the country unless Democrats unconditionally surrender their governing agenda. So let’s be clear: This IS a hostage situation, and there IS a ransom demand. pic.twitter.com/42loqT3Vei

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) September 22, 2021

From the activist bubble, it is hard to read how the rest of the country sees this legislative struggle. It is exhausting to watch. Failure may not be an option. But it still could be the outcome. Premature capitulation is what Republicans count on. One can only hope there is as much “array” in the caucus as Pelosi and Sanders want us to believe.

To be honest, I’d forgotten about the Downing Street Memo. In taking to task major press outlets for giving “conservative legal heavyweight” John Eastman’s “Trump coup memo” the big ignore, Dan Froomkin recalls that Bush II-era document:

It all reminds me a little bit of the “Downing Street Memo.” That memo, which dated back to 2002, was essentially a smoking gun in which a British intelligence official asserted that George W. Bush was manipulating intelligence to build support for war with Iraq — and that he was already set on invasion long before acknowledging as much in public. The Sunday Times of London published a leaked version on May 2006. It took six weeks for the American mainstream media to touch the story, and even then, only with distaste.

The Trump coup memo “provides step-by-step instructions for a coup,” Froomkin writes, yet merited no coverage in the New York Times or network news. “Editors at the Times evidently feel the coup attempt is behind us, dealt with, old news,” Froomkin writes. He offers much more at Press Watch.

Media Matters noted Wednesday afternoon that ABC, CBS, and NBC morning and evening news broadcasts all ignored the memo:

Reporters at The Washington Post and CNN obtained a two-page version of the memo, which CNN published on Monday. On Tuesday, CNN reported that Eastman claimed that document was a “preliminary” version and published a six-page version dated January 3 that the lawyer had provided.

That longer version lays out a series of “alternatives” using the Trump campaign’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and “illegal actions by state and local election officials” during the election as a pretext for Pence and congressional Republicans to throw out electors from as many as seven states that President Joe Biden won. His argument was legally preposterous, but dangerous ambiguities in federal law left the election vulnerable if Republicans were willing to act.

“BOLD, Certainly,” Eastman comments in the memo after laying out the plot. “But this Election was Stolen by a strategic Democrat plan to systematically flout existing election laws for partisan advantage; we’re no longer playing by Queensbury Rules, therefore.”

The “Trump coup memo” was not the only hard evidence this week of post-election treachery from the lame-duck president and his team.

Within two weeks of Joe Biden’s election, the Trump campaign investigated conspiracy theories about rigged electronic voting machines, the Washington Post reports:

The researchers soon returned with an answer: a 14-page memo that refuted various claims, including that Dominion Voting Systems worked with election software maker Smartmatic and Venezuela to defeat President Donald Trump, according to records that emerged in a lawsuit this week.

Nonetheless, days after that memo was circulated, pro-Trump lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell held a news conference in Washington to publicize the same conspiracy theory about Dominion, Smartmatic and Venezuela.

First reported Tuesday by the New York Times, the documents, which were included in a defamation suit in Colorado brought by a former Dominion executive against the Trump campaign and others, reveal that as early as mid-November, staffers for the Trump campaign formally vetted and disproved key allegations that later fueled efforts to overturn President Biden’s victory.

Coomer’s lawyers explain that it is not clear if Rudy Giuliani ever saw the memo. Nor do they know how widely it circulated within the campaign. But true to form, the boss wanted to run with the lie, known today as The Big Lie, that the 2020 election was stolen. From him, and only from him. The truth was not working, so he and his closest associates spread the stolen-election lie. For months. His campaign sat on its findings.

There was an insurrection. Perhaps you saw it on TV?

Neither Powell nor Giuliani responded to requests for comment by the New York Times for its Tuesday story. Nor did Trump’s representatives.

For the record, the Post adds:

The researchers noted that they could find no relationship between Dominion executives and antifa and no business relationship between the company and Venezuela. They also reported no evidence Dominion used Smartmatic technology in their voting machines in 2020, noting that the companies began a partnership in 2009 that ended in 2012 “on rocky terms.”

Five days after the memo was prepared, Giuliani and Powell held a news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in D.C. to advance an array of conspiracy theories, including the claims about Dominion and Venezuela.

There is no benefit of the doubt left to give Trump, his family, his lawyers, his campaign, or his supporters inside or outside government. Treachery is their first resort and lies their primary weapon. They can speak the truth but, like the Devil, only when it furthers their agenda.

Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s now-famous new book ends with, “Peril remains.”

Yeah.

Dan Froomkin at Presswatch has some words about the way the press is portraying the legislative standoff:

Predictably, the Washington Post on Tuesday headlined its story “U.S. careens toward shutdown, financial crisis amid congressional stalemate.” Reporter Tony Romm describes — but doesn’t question –the “political standoff” in which Republicans “refuse to raise the cap out of opposition to President Biden’s broader agenda — even if it means grinding the country to a halt.”

And if the blame is generally apportioned to both sides, it nevertheless seems like the onus is always on Democrats to fix the problem.

As Romm’s Washington Post colleague Jeff Stein writes, “The White House is in a bind” because “GOP lawmakers refuse to help Democrats avert a national financial catastrophe, leaving the administration with few easy answers as time runs out.”

Stein notes that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell “has not communicated any requests to the administration of what he wants in exchange” for Republican votes. Then Stein decries the fact that “there are no negotiations to resolve the impasse.”

The Associated Press characterized the Democratic effort to push ahead with a vote as “all but daring Republicans who say they will vote against it despite the risk of a fiscal crisis.”

And rather than acknowledge that threatening shutdown and default is a now a go-to for an increasingly anti-government Republican Party, the AP benignly calls this “an all-too-familiar stalemate.”

Democrats chose to combine stopgap legislation to keep the government funded with the debt ceiling suspension – neither of which should be remotely controversial. New York Times  reporters Emily Cochrane describes the move as “setting up a clash with Republicans.”

Coming pretty darn close to putting the blame entirely on Democrats, Cochrane writes that “the decision by Democratic leaders to attach it to legislation lifting the federal debt limit through Dec. 16, 2022 could ultimately jeopardize a typically routine effort to stave off a government shutdown, heightening the threat of fiscal calamity.”

Bloomberg headlined its piece “Democrats Dare GOP, Link Debt Limit to Vital Spending Bill.” Reporters Erik Wasson and Billy House write that “neither side has articulated a strategy for getting past the standoff and avoiding a default, which Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned would cause ‘irreparable harm’ to the U.S. economy.”

Another advantage for the GOP is the distraction that this debate creates from actually serious issues that Democrats are trying to address. It also gives reporters the opportunity to write about Democrats in disarray. From a Monday Post article by Tony Romm:

For now, the political eruption sets up a furious, last-minute sprint for [Democratic leaders] Pelosi and Schumer in the final weeks of September, a period during which they had hoped to focus their attention on securing roughly $4 trillion in new initiatives targeting healthcare, education, immigration, infrastructure and climate change. It also marks one of the most significant tests to date for Democrats’ narrow yet powerful majorities — as well as Biden’s political prowess in keeping his party together.

Former New York Times reporter Catherine Rampell is now free to point out the obvious, as an opinion columnist for the Washington Post. “Democrats always have to be the grown-ups and prevent infantile Republicans from trashing the Constitution and causing a global catastrophe,” she writes. “[T]hat’s apparently how our government works now.”

Rampell also explains why Democrats aren’t keen on shoving the debt ceiling increase into the budget package they intend to pass with a simple majority vote in the Senate, using the “reconciliation process.” “The reconciliation process… allows only raising the debt limit to a specific number, not suspending it. Democrats worry that Republicans will exploit voter confusion and mount (misleading) attacks against Democrats about that scary new number,” Rampell writes.

So it’s really all about campaign ads.

How can the Republicans be so confident that the mainstream media won’t make it clear who’s to blame? Because it’s so damned predictable.

In 2013, when Senator Ted Cruz and his fellow Republicans shut down the government for 16 days in an attempt to defund Obamacare, the Washington Post blamed it on a “bitterly divided” Congress that “failed to reach agreement,” while the New York Times called it “a bitter budget standoff” left unresolved by “rapid-fire back and forth legislative maneuvers.”

As I wrote at the time, how can democracy self-correct if the public does not understand where the problem lies? And where will the pressure for change come from if journalists do not hold the responsible parties accountable?

Sadly, he’s right. Yesterday, the CNN chyron all afternoon said the progressives are “tanking” the Biden agenda. Except, of course, that they are the ones who want to vote for the whole thing.

Some things never change.

This passage in the latest piece by Susan Glasser of the New Yorker brought me up short:

[Biden] came into office promising an end to the pandemic and a return to competent, commonsense governance. It’s why he beat Trump. But his first nine months in office have shown pretty conclusively that it is not possible to beat covid in a political environment that has arguably got worse, not better, since January. Consider the news this week that now one in five hundred Americans has died in the pandemic; total deaths in the country approach seven hundred thousand. What’s worse, covid deaths—the vast majority of them preventable, avoidable deaths, now that science and the federal government have provided us with free vaccines—are continuing to rise across large swaths of vaccine-resistant Trump country.

This is not a tragic mistake but a calculated choice by many Republicans who have made vaccine resistance synonymous with resistance to Biden and the Democrats. The current average of more than nineteen hundred dead a day means that a 9/11’s worth of Americans are perishing from covid roughly every thirty-eight hours. To my mind, this is the biggest news of the Biden Presidency so far, and it has nothing to do with Afghanistan, or the fate of the budget-reconciliation bill, or Bob Woodward’s new book.

America spent twenty years fighting wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East because of 9/11. The 2001 attacks reordered American foreign-policy and national-security thinking for a generation. Does anyone believe that something comparable will happen as a result of the pandemic’s catastrophic death toll, which is far vaster than that of any other crisis in the modern era? It’s hard to imagine, especially because the continuing loss of life is a result of G.O.P. political strategies that intentionally undermine the success of Biden’s policies. How can this President, or any President, reset from that?

Glasser is political establishment royalty. The fact that she’s on the record with such a stark statement says something about where the conventional wisdom is right now. Will it last? I don’t know. But what’s bleak about this is that the political establishment seems to be throwing up its hands and just … watching it happen. It’s a slight improvement from the Clinton and Obama years when it was just accepted that the Democrats were a bunch of feckless hippies and the Republicans were the adults in the room. (That was wrong — the GOP has been the extremist party for 30 years at least.) But they seem helpless in the face of this and that’s not a good place to be.

I wrote this morning about the Enabling Act of 1933 in which Hitler seized dictatorial powers. He did this despite a political establishment that knew what he was. There were some who were happy to go along with the program but a large number simply couldn’t think of a way to deal with it.

We have a party that is, as Glasser says, killing large numbers of Americans, for political purposes. I don’t know who’s going to stop them.

We knew that Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort shared private polling data with the Russian government which was hacking into the Democrats’ computers and running a social media campaign against Trump’s opponent. We knew members of the Trump family were thrilled that the Russians were doing this.

But it wasn’t just the Trump campaign involved in all this. It was one of Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul’s top operatives:

Imagine for a moment if it had come out during the 2016 campaign or in the first year of the Trump presidency that GOP political operatives were accused of illegally funneling Russian money into the Trump campaign.

Now, some five years later, that’s precisely the accusation federal prosecutors are making in a new case in DC.

What took so long?

According to an indictment unsealed Monday in D.C. federal court, a pair of GOP operatives allegedly conspired to conceal their scheme — and siphon thousands of dollars in illegal foreign money from a Russian businessman into Trump campaign coffers.

All this took place as the national media and FBI scoured the Trump campaign for any potential source of Russian ties or, more importantly, infusions of Russian cash. Allegations like these would have been explosive and politically damaging to Trump.

But now, five years since some of the alleged crimes took place, the Justice Department decided to charge the case.

Former prosecutors and campaign finance experts told TPM that the delay was unusual.

“It seems like the kind of case that doesn’t require five years of investigation,” Barb McQuade, a former U.S. attorney, told TPM, adding that the allegations themselves didn’t suggest the kind of complicated financial dealings that may require years of probing to unspool.

“It seems like the transactions were finite and complete by, at the latest, early 2017. So it’s a fair question why someone did not charge this,” she added.

“When you’re dealing with high-profile people in a case like this, then it’s justified to be more suspicious of the timing,” Larry Noble, a former FEC commissioner, told TPM.

Here’s what the indictment is all about:

The indictment itself says that Jesse Benton, a Kentucky GOP political operative who helmed Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)’s 2014 re-election campaign and who has worked closely with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), acted as a straw donor to siphon $25,000 into Trump Victory, a PAC formed by the RNC and the Trump 2016 presidential campaign.

Benton, who was later pardoned by Trump for his conviction in an unrelated campaign finance scheme, allegedly plied his connections to secure a photo op between Trump and a Russian businessman in Philadelphia on Sept. 22, 2016.

Prosecutors said that Doug Wead, a conservative author, helped Benton do that, and introduced him to the Russian. The person was allegedly a business partner of Wead’s, and was the source of the contributions. Prosecutors are silent on the identity of the Russian businessman, saying only that he was a business partner of Wead’s.

The Russian allegedly wired $100,000 from a Vienna bank account in September 2016, $25,000 of which Benton allegedly spent on a contribution to the Trump campaign in October 2016. Benton pocketed the remaining $75,000, the indictment alleged.

It sounds like Parnas Furman stuff. I wonder how much of this stuff went on that remains undiscovered? These foreigners all really wanted Donald Trump to be president.

So why the delay? Nobody knows for sure:

“There are a lot of reasons cases can be stalled,” Noble said.

But to McQuade, the timing — along with everything else that the country saw under the Trump administration over the past several years — suggests that something made the prosecutors “scramble” to file the case before the five-year limit began to run out this month. The allegations themselves went to the heart of what was under investigation from 2016 onwards.

“It advances the notion that Russia supported Trump, and we’ve seen that, not only in the Mueller indictments, the efforts by Russia to support Trump, but here again we have Russia business influence,” she said.

They just loved him, they really loved him.

Yes, yes we are.

Asked Elizabeth Warren if Dems will just raise debt limit on their own after GOP blocks the stop-gap bill, and she fired back: "Are we hostage to Republicans who are threatening to blow up a part of the economic system because they want to do that for politics?" pic.twitter.com/LfhpzvXJpA

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) September 22, 2021

You may have noticed that the reporter here just accepting that the Republicans want to punish Democrats for their agenda and “not own the toxic politics” of raising the debt ceiling. That[‘s just how they are. It’s up to the Democrats to save the country. Again.

What is left unsaid is that the debt ceiling is stupid (America should just pay its bills) and the debt that has been incurred happened when both parties were in charge. And yet Democrats bailed them out on this even when they had the majority and Trump was in office.

The big question will be if McConnell is willing to shit down the government again. It hasn’t worked out well for Republicans in the past but I guess old Mitch thinks it’s worth another shot.

I knew Raffensperger was not someone who saw the full picture of the GOP’s descent into madness. He just didn’t like being told that he didn’t do a good job:

Raffensperger wholly refuses to engage with the substance of @chrislhayes’ line of inquiry. It’s almost like the myth of mass voter fraud has been beneficial to the GOP for decades, but some leaders just found Trump’s clownish, ham-fisted stretching of the myth embarrassing. https://t.co/rm6zTMbjOT

— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) September 22, 2021

He’s fine with vote suppression and election manipulation. He just doesn’t want to be told that he blew it and allowed a bunch of fraud to take place.

One of the most important lessons of the 2020 election is just how easy it would be for someone with a little bit more savvy to upend the constitution and prevent the peaceful transfer of power in the future. Democracies don’t always crumble as a result of violent revolution. It’s often done by manipulating the law and using intimidation to ensure compliance.

The most famous example is the German Enabling Act of 1933, also known as The Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich. That law allowed Adolph Hitler to enact other laws, including ones that violated the Weimar Constitution, without the approval of either parliament or Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, effectively making Hitler a dictator. Through some adroit maneuvering and the detention of certain members of the Parliament, he was able to gain the two-thirds majority required and the courts all went along with it. The rest, as they say, is history.

Donald Trump is no Hitler, of course. He is not that clever. But he does have some of the same impulses, particularly when it comes to seizing power.

This week we learned, through the new Woodward and Costa book “Peril,” that one of Donald Trump’s closest legal advisers, a law professor by the name of John Eastman, had prepared a memorandum to serve as guidance for the Vice President to overturn the election on January 6th. The memo laid out a six-point plan:

First: The Vice President begins the counting with the state of Alabama as usual.

Second: When Pence gets to Arizona, he sets the electoral votes aside under the premise that there was an alternate set of electors that had been submitted. Likewise, he also sets aside the votes of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and New Mexico under the false assertion that they too had sent alternate Trump electors. (They had not.)

Third: Pence then declares that the alternate states will not be included and since Trump then “won” the remaining votes, he has been reelected.

At that point he predicted the Democrats would “howl” and Pence would then compromise and decree that the vote could go to the House as the constitution allows in case of a tie. This would simply confirm a Trump victory since the Republicans controlled 26 out of 50 state delegations. Easy Peasy.

The remaining two points regarded commissioning Ted Cruz or Rand Paul to ensure that the filibuster remained intact so they could at least create a “stalemate” and allow states “more time to weigh in to formally support the alternate slate of electors.” (This explains the frantic calls by Rudy Giuliani and Trump even as the insurrection was in full effect to Senator Tommy Tuberville, R-AL exhorting him to “try to just slow it down so we can get these legislatures to get more information to you.”)

But most importantly, Eastman insisted that Pence not ask anyone for permission to do any of this and instead just declare that he had the authority and that was that. The course for Trump’s dictatorship would be set.

As we know, however, Pence dithered about all this before eventually asking former Vice President Dan Quayle what he should do. Quayle told him he had to follow the Constitution and perform his ceremonial duty as all previous Vice Presidents have done in this situation. (If his conscience didn’t already tell him that he needs to turn in his little American flag pin and enter another line of business.)

What we didn’t know until now was that this memo was circulated in January to some of Trump’s staunchest Republican defenders in Congress, Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Utah Senator Mike Lee, both of whom took it very seriously and had their top expert staff members look it over. They concluded that it was unconstitutional and in Graham’s words, “third grade.”

I guess we should be grateful that Trump’s lawyers were so lame because it’s quite clear that if they had been able to legally engineer this coup more professionally, people like Graham and Lee might very well have gone along with it. How do we know this? Because even though there was no evidence of voter fraud in the election, they didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand. They were apparently open to the idea that Pence really could overturn the election on January 6th. They’re both lawyers. They’re both conversant with the Constitution and, more importantly, with the concept of democracy in which the loser of the election accepts the results and bows out gracefully. And yet they didn’t object publicly to Trump’s Big Lie until thousands of rioters stormed the Capitol. Of course, there were dozens of other Republican officials also saying there were reasons to “investigate” and pushing various aspects of the Big Lie as well. But these two knew what Trump was trying to do and they said nothing.

The lawyer who came up with this mad plot, John Eastman, gave a speech at the insurrection rally that told the whole story. In fact, one might even suggest it was the primary inspiration for the riot. He said he had petitions before the Supreme Court and he babbled a litany of false voter fraud claims before ending with this:

All we are demanding of Vice President Pence is this afternoon at 1:00 he let the legislators of the states look into this so we get to the bottom of it, and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government, or not. We no longer live in a self governing republic if we can’t get the answer to this question. This is bigger than President Trump. It is a very essence of our republican form of government, and it has to be done. And anybody that is not willing to stand up to do it, does not deserve to be in the office. It is that simple.

I don’t know if he believed that or if he’s just a Trump partisan willing to win by any means necessary. But it doesn’t really matter. This was a coup attempt. It was unsuccessful, but only because of the sloppiness with which it was put together, not because of the attempt itself. The Big Lie has since metastasized, largely at the hands of Republican officials who believe it will be useful to them in trying to regain power. Does anyone think that a more elegant “Enabling Act” wouldn’t be supported by most of them?

Trump’s greatest legacy may end up being that he was the fellow who showed Republicans just how dependent our democracy is on the goodwill and decency of the people who run it. He and his legal flunkies just left a roadmap for other unscrupulous authoritarians to follow. 

Salon 

If the redistricting public hearing at Western Carolina University Tuesday night was a shirts-and-skins pick-up game (shirts being mask-wearers), shirts outnumbered the skins by about 110 to 10. Mask-wearers were not exclusively left-leaning, but most public comments offered to a panel of mostly Republican North Carolina legislators leaned that way.

Republicans retain control of the legislature and redistricting in 2021, a process over which Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, has no veto. Public hearings being held in each of 13 existing congressional districts (a 14th will be added this year) are pro forma. Everyone knows that. It did not prevent over one hundred from driving some distance to give legislators advice or a piece of their minds. Even if Republicans have already made up theirs.

The first speaker of afternoon, Jake Quinn of Asheville (a personal friend), challenged state legislators to draw districts this time that will not immediately draw legal challenges. The state and voting rights groups spent the last ten years litigating the Republican maps drawn in 2011 and redrawn under court order multiple times over the decade.

“Exorcise the ghost of Thomas Hofeller,” Quinn said.

“Doggone it, we wouldn’t need a meeting like this if the process was fair,” said another man from Buncombe County over an hour to the east.

The legal costs and voting turmoil of last 10 years of legal fights were on many minds. As was the prospect for having counties split to satisfy the partisan impulse for gerrymandering districts again with “surgical precision.” Speakers demanded fairness, transparency, and an opportunity to provide input after draft maps are finally released. As of now, the public can only comment in the dark. Several called for nonpartisan redistricting commission.

Speakers complained that the hearings were too few, too hard to get to, and neither streamed online nor translated into Spanish:

Sergio Fernandez said he drove an hour and 40 minutes to attend the public hearing. Fernandez, executive director of the Latino Advocacy Coalition out of Henderson County, offered to attend, livestream and translate into Spanish the rest of the planned public hearings.

“We’ll be there. It’s a plan,” Fernandez said. “It’s my job as a community leader to help our community understand what’s going on.”

The panel displayed a distinct lack of diversity, Fernandez added. While Henerson County has a growing Latino population, NC-11, now represented by Republican Madison Cawthorn, is overall very, very white, even including the reservation of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee. Statewide, however, Latinos make up over one million of the state’s 10 million residents, Fernandez said, and are likely undercounted in the new census.

Of the few speakers not obviously left-leaning, one man found it “unconscionable” that districts would be drawn using a census that excluded distinguishing betwen citizens and noncitizens. This means large counties would be overcounted, he argued without citing evidence or awareness that noncitizens reside in rural areas as well as urban.

This was the second time since the pandemic hit that I’ve been in a large roomful of people (with masks). Now we wait, hoping not to incubate.

Invoking Joseph Welch‘s immortal put-down from the McCarthy hearings is trite by now. Like comic book villains, the Republican Party and its axis of media have long since strangled any vestigial sense of decency in them. They’ve embraced shamelessness as their superpower, as Digby has said for over a year.

That should be news. Programming their supporters to stare COVID-19 in the face and die should be news. Brainwashing Americans to shun basic health precautions during the deadliest pandemic since 1918 should be news. As should encouraging them to conduct medical experiments on themselves with feed-store medications.

Still, a media “nervous about offending conservatives” tiptoes around labeling the madness madness the way it refused to brand Donald Trump’s lies lies, writes Eric Boehlert this morning:

National Public Radio relayed more shocking Covid news on Monday: “In 2020, for the first time in recorded history, more people died in Alabama than were born in the state.” The pandemic has shrunk the red state. Yet local Republican leaders still oppose mask and vaccine mandates, leaving the Trump outpost exposed to more fatalities.

But like so many news outlets, NPR missed the real story. The pile of Alabama deaths continue to mount not simply because of Covid. But because so many people in the Trump-friendly state have been brainwashed by bad-faith partisan actors and they refuse to get inoculated. Anti-science Republicans seem determined to spread the virus among their own voters, which seems inconceivable.

Millions of conservative Americans are being brainwashed about the pandemic, and thousands are killing themselves in the process. Yet the media downplay the huge story, framing it simply as “vaccine hesitancy.”

The dying are described merely as “vaccine hesitant,” “vaccine-reluctant,” or “vaccine skeptics,” Boehlert complains:

Within the media, there’s lots of tsk-tsking commentary about vaccine “misinformation.” But the press continues to look away from the consequences of mass brainwashing —millions of Americans believe the vaccine is more dangerous than the virus. And they’re lashing out in public, staging deranged acts of civil disobedience, often inside restaurants and at local school board meetings, where the white-rage screaming and name-calling commences.

The number of Americans who are dying every 36 hours from Covid now surpasses the total number of U.S. soldiers who were killed during 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan. It’s an entirely preventable crisis, yet it rages because we have people like the red state restaurant owner who is kicking out patrons if they refuse to take off their masks. It’s pure nihilism.

Walter Sobchak: Nihilists! F*** me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.

It’s not as if previous vaccines raised this level of opposition. But there is fringe, anti-vax activism on the one hand and then the suicidal, mass, mindless tribalism of Covid vaccine refuseniks crazy enough to blame their self-immolation on opponents’ tricksy malevolence.

Boehlert concludes:

Brainwashing itsn’t [sic] typically a topic that’s covered when dissecting mainstream American politics. Sadly, it needs to be. And fast.

Each year of the Trump presidency, I wondered if we would survive it. Even with him gone, I wonder.