Month: September 2021

He just gets weirder and weirder. I realize that it’s his schtick and he gets good ratings for this dreck but where does this lunacy end? Does he wind up touting crisis actors and selling erection pills on his podcast like Alex Jones? I just don’t know where he goes from here:

Fox News host Tucker Carlson continued his relentless anti-vaccine crusade on Monday by bizarrely claiming that the military’s new vaccination mandate was an effort by the Biden administration to weed out Christians and “men with high testosterone.”

Following the Food and Drug Administration’s full approval of Pfizer’s coronavirus shot last month, the Pentagon ordered all active-duty military members to be fully vaccinated. According to Carlson, though, the vaccine requirement was a “new political purity test” by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

“This was specifically designed to separate the obedient from the free,” the Fox host grumbled on Monday night. “Can’t have any of the latter category.”

Carlson, who has repeatedly sowed doubt about COVID-19 vaccines’ efficacy and safety, went on to say there was “zero scientific basis” behind requiring soldiers to be vaccinated against the virus that’s killed nearly 700,000 Americans. Never mind that service members have long been subjected to various immunizations, and a surge in the virus could negatively impact troop readiness.

Insisting that “virtually all” of the military is “at extremely low risk of dying from COVID” because they’re mostly young and healthy, the conservative primetime host went on to compare military suicides to coronavirus deaths.

“To this day, only 46 members of the entire U.S. military have died from the coronavirus over the last year and a half,” Carlson stated. “Suicides, by contrast, kill many, many times more. In just a few months last year, 156 service members killed themselves. So, military suicide is an actual crisis that the Pentagon might want to address. Lloyd Austin might want to look into that. But, no, that would get the Democratic Party nothing.”

Having thoroughly dismissed COVID-19 as a concern for the military, Carlson alleged that the vaccine mandate was actually a conspiracy to purge the military of virile, God-fearing men with minds of their own.

“The point of mandatory vaccination is to identify the sincere Christians in the ranks, the free thinkers, the men with high testosterone levels, and anyone else who doesn’t love Joe Biden and make them leave immediately,” he exclaimed. “It’s a takeover of the U.S. military!”

You’d have to think he was joking if you didn’t know better. It’s so absurd that it’s almost as if he’s trolling his own audience. But he isn’t. Hes indoctrinating them into Q-Anon level crackpottery.

“A huge story there… an attack on those of us who are members of the free thinking high testosterone community. We’ll get a team on this blockbuster story tonight” pic.twitter.com/BOJiQTnGkW

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 21, 2021

David Graham of the Atlantic says that Democrats are fooling themselves if they think they’ll be rewarded for passing this big infrastructure package in the midterms because voters rarely care about stuff like this. I think this misses the point. It may not make people come out to vote as a sign of gratitude for all the Democrats have done for them. But failure could mean a serious decline in Democratic enthusiasm.

He says Democrats are unlikely to win in the midterms no matter what they do, which I think is much too pessimistic. In an era of polarization with the Republicans in even more dissaray than the Democrats and a Democratic base agitated about the GOP’s extremism, nothing is preordained.

But he does make a good point here:

This kind of political fatalism is bleak, and it runs counter to the kind of can-do spirit it takes to run for Congress. Political scientists are rarely a hit at any party, especially a political party. Members want to believe they’re representing voters, and if they provide for those voters, they’ll be rewarded with another term. That’s why politicians such as Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who knows the dispiriting history well, still publicly insist that Democrats will hold the House. In reality, members’ fates will be mostly decided by how strongly Democratic their district is.

For the endangered moderates, that’s painful. It’s one thing to say Democrats will probably lose their majority, and another to tell a swing-district House member she’s going to lose her job, no matter what she does now. She’s likely to take any step she can to appeal to moderate and swing voters, even if it means undermining the party’s policy aims, rather than admit that her fate is out of her hands.

But fatalism can be freeing too. If the timing of a bill passing, or even failing, doesn’t matter to your chances of reelection, the stakes of these intramural skirmishes over process are much smaller. Members can stress less about mechanics and more about results. After all, the point of a majority is to enact legislation—not simply to maintain that majority.

I don’t agree that the party won’t win the midterms. However, I do believe that if the Democratic “moderates” think they’ll be rewarded for destroying the Biden agenda, they really need to think again. Moderates won’t win without Democratic votes and suppressing the Democratic vote by tanking the president’s signature program will result in their loss either way. They might as well do the right thing because if they don’t they are the one’s who will lose their seats, not the progressives who voted for it.

Of course, there is always the possibility (probability) that they are calculating they’re going to lose and are setting themselves up for lucrative post political office employment. But that’s a different problem.

This is infuriating:

The coronavirus killed more police officers in America last year, 145, than the 135 who were killed on the job in 2019 by gunfire, heart attacks, car crashes and everything else combined.

This year, COVID-19 is on track to again be the leading cause of death for cops, though the still-climbing death toll could be significantly slowed by the vaccine, which is widely available, highly effective and, not for nothing, a solution the National Fraternal Order of Police asked their 350,000 members be given early access to back in January.

But cops around the country are not only refusing to wear masks where they’re required and when they’ve been ordered to, they’re also vocally opposing vaccine mandates—threatening walkouts, demanding exemptions on specious grounds, and, in many places, filing lawsuits. The grim reality that one out of every 500 people in the U.S. have died of COVID since the pandemic began isn’t apparently enough to motivate many police to get vaccinated.

It’s one more indicator of how little an awful lot of cops care about “public safety,” and a reaffirmation of how many officers see themselves as above the law.

(A similar dynamic is playing out in prisons, where the corrections union has sued to overturn a vaccine mandate in Pennsylvania, while their counterparts in Massachusetts have sworn to investigate “all legal and legislative” options to avoid consenting to a vaccine order. Add in many jail staffers’ reported resistance to even wearing masks, and you have a toxic breeding ground for COVID transmission complete with a captive audience.)

Almost 61 percent of New York City residents have gotten fully vaccinated, but just 48 percent of NYPD employees; almost 70 percent of Los Angeleans, but just 54 percent of LAPD employees are. Even in Rick DeSantis’ Florida, 70 percent of Miami denizens have received both shots compared to just half of police department employees. Vaccination rates aren’t available for most police departments, but those sample numbers explain why five cops died in South Florida in a seven-day period, while last week 22 officers in New Jersey succumbed to the virus.

Police have historically been highly reactionary to outside threats, real or perceived. In the years following the 2014 Ferguson uprisings, as Black Lives Matter protests against police violence became nationally visible, police and conservative media were quick to attack the movement and attempt to quash its very existence. The killings of 10 cops over two years in Dallas, Baton Rouge, and New York City were held up as evidence of what law enforcement around the country had already dubbed—falsely, based on every shred of statistical evidence—a “War on Cops.”

[…]

That mass exodus of police officers never happened, even though police continue to falsely claim it did. But COVID really has made policing more dangerous, as 2020 became the deadliest year for officers since 1974. Yet those blue lives don’t seem to matter so much to the six LAPD officers suing the city over a recently issued vaccine mandate, along with police unions and officers filing similar suits in Oregon, Arizona, South Carolina, Washington state, and elsewhere.

Nearly all of these lawsuits hinge on claims that these mandates violate police officers’ constitutional rights, which is genuinely rich coming from this lot. In New York City, where officials have mandated that officers who refuse to get vaccinated must be tested weekly—the literal least they could do in a job that requires regular engagement with the public—the police union is demanding that officers be tested while on duty or that they be paid time-and-a-half for after-hours testing, while the testing mandate in Los Angeles has been dubbed “highly intrusive” by those behind the lawsuit. (Roughly 3,000 LAPD staff are expected to claim religious exemption from vaccine mandates.)

It’s astounding to watch the same cops who justify atrocities up to murder with the refrain that people should’ve “just complied” pretend to be persecuted when told they’re not allowed to be superspreaders. It lays bare how little the police believe the law applies to them, even when it’s unquestionably the right thing to do.

The inconsistency — and recklessness — is overwhelming. But there is a bright side. We now know which cops are right wing nuts listening to lies and propaganda. (Sure there may be a small minority who are resistant for other reasons, but I would bet it’s less than 5%)

Cops refusing to get vaccinated and playing games like claiming a ‘religious exemption” is a right wing tactic, influenced by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Breitbart News. It’s their right to watch and read whatever they want, but considering that we are dealing with a political faction that is openly authoritarian, it’s very good to know who they are. If the worst were to happen, I think it’s pretty clear that we cannot count on these people to uphold the rule of law.

There are a lot of moving parts and I’m not going to get into the details since everything is in flux. But I think Greg Sargent makes an excellent point here about how the situation is being reported:

The latest standoff concerns the process by which House Democrats will pass the $1 trillion bipartisan “hard” infrastructure bill that passed the Senate, and the $3.5 trillion “human” infrastructure reconciliation bill.

Politico reports on the latest threat from centrist House Democrats:A group of five to 10 House moderates have signaled to leadership that they would be willing to let the infrastructure bill fail rather than be held hostage by liberals over the broader spending bill. It’s a more attractive alternative to them than having to vote for painful tax increases to pay for an unrestrained social safety net expansion, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) has made similar threats. Meanwhile, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) wants a reconciliation “pause.”

This is likely posturing. Centrists want to reduce the spending and taxes in the reconciliation package, and want Democrats to pass the infrastructure bill on Sept. 27 — as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has agreed to try to do. But progressives are vowing to vote down that bill, until the Senate completes a reconciliation one. So such centrist threats seem designed to increase leverage.

The centrists’ story here is that they piously want to get something done. But they are being held “hostage” by progressives in thrall to in-the-clouds ideological fantasies so radical that voting for this would be worse politically for them than imploding Biden’s entire agenda.

This is, to put it mildly, horseshit:

This situation largely flows from the fact that centrists such as Manchin and Sinema insisted on pursuing a bipartisan infrastructure bill in the Senate. Progressives opposed this, believing (correctly) that it would squander valuable time, and because Democrats always could pass everything by reconciliation alone.

But progressives essentially accepted this outcome. Remember: Back in March, progressives reached a general understanding with the White House. They would swallow the need for moderates to try for Republican support on infrastructure, on the understanding that progressive priorities would pass by reconciliation later.

So progressives made accommodations at the outset. The “two track” strategy arose to ensure that the two sides would exert leverage on one another, holding the party together. But a small band of centrists threatened to oppose a procedural vote to start the reconciliation process, forcing Democratic leaders to rupture the two tracks with a planned Sept. 27 infrastructure vote.

There was never any serious rationale for that, but regardless, it is in response to that move that progressives are threatening to vote no. In so doing, progressives are just trying to maintain the original two-track strategy, which is rooted in a hardheaded appraisal of both factions’ needs.

By no means have progressives been blameless. They’re often too quick to accuse moderates of being squishy sellouts. And it’s still unclear whether progressives will accept reductions in the reconciliation bill needed to keep centrists on board. But on balance, progressives have been the true realists here.

Progressives have been compromising all along while the “centrists” do what centrists do and rush in at the end with some pearl clutching about debt and markets and gum up the works. It’s what they do. But it is irresponsible for the media to treat this as a bunch of crazy hippies insisting on the moon.Unless you think Joe Biden and Jon Tester are crazy hippies, this is the Democratic agenda and this “moderate” posturing is putting it all at risk for their own egos.

As usual.

The Atlantic’s Ed Yong, one of the best writers on the pandemic, has teamed up with  Katherine J. Wu and Sarah Zhang to lay out six new rules that will define the next phase of the pandemic. I can’t say it’s particularly reassuring but it’s the most realistic thing I’ve read about all this.

The role of vaccines has changed (again)

The COVID-19 vaccines were originally meant to prevent severe infections. They do so very well. But for a few brief months, we thought they could do even better. Unexpectedly spectacular clinical-trial results from Pfizer and Moderna raised hopes that these vaccines could protect against almost all symptomatic infections and might even be as good as the vaccines against polio and measles, which eliminated transmission of those diseases in the United States.

But, from the very beginning, vaccine experts warned that respiratory diseases are especially tricky to immunize against. The coronavirus first takes hold in the nose, and injections in the arm are just not very good at stimulating immunity in the nose. (They are still good, however, at raising immunity deep in the lungs to protect against severe disease.) Flu shots, for example, tend to be only 10 to 60 percent effective at keeping people out of the doctor’s office. If COVID-19 vaccines end up somewhere similar, they would prevent hospitalizations and death, but the coronavirus would still circulate. Given Delta’s ability to slightly evade vaccines, combined with its extreme transmissibility, this is again looking like the most likely scenario. So we need to adjust our expectations, again.

Vaccines work more like dimmer switches than on/off buttons, and as their protection fades out, there are three thresholds that we care about: protection against infection, against symptoms, and against severe disease. Protection against infection is always the first to erode—either because of new variants or because of waning immune responses over time. Protection against symptoms goes next, but protection against severe disease is the most durable. (One unknown is how much vaccines prevent long COVID, although a recent study found that full vaccination can decrease the risk of long-lasting symptoms.)

We’ve seen this pattern play out: Breakthrough infections are happening with Delta, but they tend to be mild or even asymptomatic. And especially when case numbers get very high—as they are in many parts of the U.S. now—additional layers of protection, including improved ventilation and masks, are necessary to protect people, such as young children, who are still unvaccinated. Vaccinating as many people as possible as quickly as possible is still the most powerful way to control the virus. We can already see how well the vaccines are working.

The proportion of vaccinated people matters, but who they are and how they cluster also matters

Delta caused a new wave of cases in even the most vaccinated countries in the world, but the wave of hospitalizations that followed there have generally been much more modest. In the U.K., for example, where 66 percent of people are fully vaccinated, cases reached 80 percent of their winter peak this summer. But hospitalizations rose less than 25 percent. As U.K. health officials have declared, vaccines are “breaking the link” between infections and hospitalizations. Again, this means the vaccines are working.

The United States seems to paint a different picture. Overwhelmed hospitals are turning patients away. They’re running out of oxygen. They’re once again cramming beds into conferences rooms and cafeterias. It feels like déjà vu—even though 54 percent of Americans are also fully vaccinated.

The difference between the U.K. and the U.S. isn’t just that fewer Americans are vaccinated. It’s that fewer of the most vulnerable Americans are vaccinated, and they tend to cluster together.

Risk of death and hospitalizations from COVID-19 rises sharply with age, and in the U.K. nearly everyone over 65 is vaccinated. A New York Times analysis found very few areas in the U.K. where more than 2 percent of residents are 65 and not fully vaccinated. In contrast, that number is above 10 percent in many counties in the American South and Mountain West. Even small differences in these rates can determine the level of crisis: A community where 10 percent of residents are unvaccinated seniors has essentially five times as many people who might need an ICU bed than a community where that number is only 2 percent.

Vaccine coverage also varies dramatically from county to county in the U.S. The more unvaccinated people are concentrated, the more easily the virus can find its next victim. Imagine three out of four people in every household are vaccinated; the unvaccinated person is unlikely to spread the virus very much at home, says Graham Medley, an infectious-disease modeler at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Now imagine three out of every four households are completely vaccinated; the virus will spread through the unvaccinated households. The overall vaccination rate is the same, but the results are very different. This unevenness also means that …

I think the following is particularly important because it shows that none of us can be completely sure that we are out of the woods. It’s why dealing with this thing is going to require ongoing collection response whether we like it or not:

The people at greatest risk from the virus will keep changing

Since the pandemic’s early days, vaccines have shifted the risk the virus poses to us, at a community level. Older people and health-care workers were among the first in line for the shots—a practical move to protect the people whose underlying conditions or jobs ranked them among the most vulnerable. But younger members of the community had to contend with a slower schedule, and vaccine makers are still figuring out the correct dosages for the youngest among us. That’s all shifted the virus’s burden down to uninoculated children. At the same time, the virus has been evolving into speedier and speedier forms; by the time Delta slammed the world this spring, many of its most viable hosts were at risk not because of their age or circumstances, but in spite of it.

Kids still seem relatively resilient against SARS-CoV-2 compared with adults, as they always have been. But compared with the variants that came before it, Delta is a faster spreader, and therefore a larger threat to everyone who is unvaccinated—which means children are now at greater risk than they were before.

Relative risk will keep shifting, even if the virus somehow stops mutating and becomes a static threat. (It won’t.) Our immune systems’ memories of the coronavirus, for instance, could wane—possibly over the course of years, if immunization against similar viruses is a guide. People who are currently fully vaccinated may eventually need boosters. Infants who have never encountered the coronavirus will be born into the population, while people with immunity die. Even the vaccinated won’t all look the same: Some, including people who are moderately or severely immunocompromised, might never respond to the shots as well as others. The assumptions we first had about whom the virus might hit hardest will keep changing, as will the population of people who fall ill at all.

In July, after a COVID-19 outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a Washington Post headline noted that three-quarters of the people infected were vaccinated. Throughout the summer, many stories have reported similar figures, always with the same alarming undercurrent: If vaccines are working, how could vaccinated people make up such a large proportion of an outbreak?

The answer is simple: They can if they make up a large proportion of a population. Even though vaccinated people have much lower odds of getting sick than unvaccinated people, they’ll make up a sizable fraction of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths if there are more of them around.

Let’s work through some numbers. Assume, first, that vaccines are 60 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infections. (There’s a lot of conflicting information about this, but the exact number doesn’t affect this exercise much.) Vaccinated people are still less likely to get infected, but as their proportion of the community rises, so does the percentage of infections occurring among them. If 20 percent of people are fully vaccinated, they’ll account for 9 percent of infections; meanwhile, the 80 percent of the population that’s unvaccinated will account for 91 percent. Now flip that. If only 20 percent of people are unvaccinated, there will be fewer infections overall. But vaccinated people, who are now in the majority, will account for most of those infections—62 percent.

That is why this particular statistic—the proportion of vaccinated people in a given outbreak—is so deeply misleading. “The better the vaccine uptake, the scarier this number will seem,” wrote Lucy D’Agostino McGowan, a statistician at Wake Forest University. By extension, the safer communities become, the more it will seem like the sky is falling—if we continue focusing on the wrong statistics.

“If you’re trying to decide on getting vaccinated, you don’t want to look at the percentage of sick people who were vaccinated,” McGowan wrote. “You want to look at the percentage of people who were vaccinated and got sick.”

Note percentage. In July, an NBC News article stated that “At Least 125,000 Fully Vaccinated Americans Have Tested Positive” for the coronavirus. In isolation, that’s an alarming number. But it represented just 0.08 percent of the 165 million people who were fully vaccinated at the time. More recently, Duke University reported that 364 students had tested positive in a single week—a figure that represents just 1.6 percent of the more than 15,000 students who were tested. The denominator matters.

The denominators in these calculations also change, dragging the numerators higher along with them. As surges grow, so too will the number of infected people, which means the number of breakthrough infections will also grow. Even if the percentage of breakthroughs stays steady, though, vaccines will feel less effective if the pandemic is allowed to rage out of control, because …

Rare events are common at scale

Throughout the past year and a half, commentators have downplayed a variety of pandemic-related risks because they were “rare”—deaths, long COVID (which isn’t actually rare), infections and multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, and more. But infectious diseases spread, and if they do so widely enough, events that are relatively rare can rack up large numbers: A one-in-a-thousand event will still occur 40,000 times when 40 million people are infected. Such events can’t be written off, especially when they involve decades of lost health or life.

As outbreaks spread, more types of rare events become noticeable as well. A wider pandemic is also a weirder pandemic. Many aspects of COVID-19’s mystique—the range of symptoms and affected organs, the possibility of persistent illness, reinfections—are common to other viral illnesses, but go unnoticed because most illnesses don’t sweep the world in a short span of time. Similarly, as this current post-vaccine surge continues, breakthrough infections will feel more common, newspapers will have more stories to run about them, and more people will know someone who had one.

Our reaction to such events must account for both the denominator and the numerator—both how relatively common they are and how much they cost each affected individual. And that assessment will change as the pandemic waxes and wanes, and as the virus itself continues to mutate.

There is no single “worst” version of the coronavirus

As in every game, who the most formidable opponent is depends on who else is playing, and the nature of the field. Right now Delta, a super-transmissible variant that hops into human airways, copies itself, and blazes back out, is especially well poised to rip through the world’s mostly unvaccinated, mostly immune-naive population—which is exactly what it’s doing. Laxness around masking, distancing, and other infection-prevention measures, in the United States especially, has given Delta plenty of opportunities to hop from human to human, further fueling its rise. The variant, for now, has about as good a home-field advantage as it can get.

But the ideal strategy, from the perspective of the virus, might look drastically different for a population with a lot more immunity. Strong, speedy immune responses will keep the virus from getting by on swiftness alone. In these environments, a stealthy version of the virus that can slip by antibodies unnoticed might be the one that wins out. The virus’s goal will still be to spread, just through different means: Mutations that make the virus less visible will help it stick around in airways longer, and potentially transmit to more people in the process. As the world gradually acquires immunity, variants like Delta might eventually be succeeded by these wilier morphs. But these transitions will likely happen at different rates in different countries, depending on who gets access to vaccines. The definition of most threatening will splinter along borders. (There is, by the way, little incentive for the virus to get deadlier along the way. Viruses want to spread, not kill. Still, some pathogens can get symptomatically nastier as a by-product of transmissibility, or if those symptoms facilitate their spread.)

All variants, though, will have some common weakness: They can be stopped through the combined measures of vaccines, masks, distancing, and other measures that cut the conduits they need to travel. When viruses spread faster, they can be tougher to control. But they can’t persist without us, and our behavior matters too.

It’s pretty clear that our behavior matters. And many of us are behaving very badly. It’s giving the virus much more opportunity to do what it wants to do.

Biden may be struggling at home right now but he’s a big improvement over the former guy. The media may not be able to see it but the rest of the world does.

Here are some excerpts of his UN speech today. He didn’t say “little rocket man” even once or brag about how he has done more for the US and the world than anyone in history. Nor was he laughed at …

President Biden at the UN: “US military power must be our tool of last resort, not our first. And it should not be used as an answer to every problem we see around the world.”

Biden: “We are not seeking — I’ll say it again — we are not seeking a new Cold War, or a world divided into rigid blocks.”

Biden: “As we pursue diplomacy across the board, the United States will champion the democratic values that go to the very heart of who we are as a nation and people — freedom, equality, opportunity, and a belief in the universal rights of all people.”

Biden at the UN: “I am not agnostic about the future we want for the world. The future will belong to those who embrace human dignity, not trample it. The future will belong to those who unleash the potential of the people, not those who stifle it.”

Biden closes his UN speech with this and gets big applause: "I stand here today for the first time in 20 years with the US not at war. We have turned the page … Ladies and gentlemen, we cannot afford to waste any more time. Let's get to work. Let's make our better future now."

Originally tweeted by Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) on September 21, 2021.

This Tennessean article might not come up for all readers, but basically:

The Tennessee state government now recommends nearly all vaccinated residents be denied access to monoclonal antibody treatment in a new effort to preserve a limited supply of antibody drugs for those who remain most vulnerable to the virus, largely by their own choice.

The federal government began capping shipments of these drugs last week because the majority of the national supply is being used by a small number of poorly vaccinated southern states, including Tennessee.

State officials say restricting eligibility to the treatment will reserve the now-limited supply of drugs for those unvaccinated residents most likely to suffer severe complications from a coronavirus infection. But the recommendation is certain to frustrate many vaccinated Tennesseans, who took commonsense steps to help stop the pandemic and, as a result, may now lose access to one of the most effective treatments for the virus.

About 44% of Tennesseans are fully vaccinated. Under the state’s new recommendation, only vaccinated people who are immunocompromised still will be eligible for monoclonal antibody treatment.

It is a recommendation only. Individual providers ultimately make the call.

“Clinically, it makes sense,” Tennessee’s Health Commissioner, Dr. Lisa Piercey, said Friday. But it is sure to be unpopular.

Giving monoclonal antibody treatments to the vaccinated unlikely to get severely sick would be of “limited benefit,” said Dr. Karen Bloch, medical director of the antibody infusion clinic at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

The Tennessean adds:

Antibody drugs cost taxpayers about $2,100 per dose.

The vaccines cost about $20.

The Tennessee state government now recommends vaccinated residents be denied access to monoclonal antibody treatment to preserve supplies for those who are unwilling to get vaccinated and remain most vulnerable by their own choice. A new story from me: https://t.co/ikH6rPKfco

— Brett Kelman (@BrettKelman) September 21, 2021

But sure, reward the irresponsible with cutting-edge treatment if you want to get more of the same behavior. Isn’t that conservatives’ own reasoning? Ah, but that only applies to lessers, children and Democrats, not to the Party of Personal Responsibility.

(h/t VBB)

Catherine Rampell says what we’re all thinking:

Yes, it stinks that Democrats always have to be the grown-ups and prevent infantile Republicans from trashing the Constitution and causing a global catastrophe. But that’s apparently how our government works now.

The sooner Democrats realize this, the better.

Since Rampell covers economic policy, it means it is time once again for another Republican threat to default on U.S. debt. When a Republican holds the White House, Republicans rasing the debt limits is virtually pro forma. But when it’s a Democrat, Republicans see an opportunity to take hostages and threaten default to make Democrats look bad and to keep “socialism” at bay.

Rampell skims the nitty-gritty of why and how we are here again. (A brink-of-default episode in 2011 under Barack Obama led to the first-ever U.S. credit downgrade.) But granting Democrats the Grown-ups in the Room ribbon is perhaps too generous just now.

Intra-party sqaubbling and hostage-taking on the Democrats’ part threatens to kill off President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda. Principal antagonists are centrist Democrats in the U.S. House and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, writes Jonathan Chait:

If you recall, the genesis of this drama began over the summer, when a handful of centrist House Democrats decided to blow up the legislative strategy their party had in place for weeks by refusing to support a budget unless the House passed an infrastructure bill first. That gang, led by Josh Gottheimer, ultimately settled for a promise by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to bring up the infrastructure bill by September 27.

However, the hollowness of that victory became evident to the centrists this weekend, when House Progressives threatened to oppose the bipartisan bill when it comes for a vote. The Gottheimer Gang had simply assumed that bringing the bill to a vote, with Pelosi’s promise to try really, really hard to pass it even though its passage was not in her interest, would ensure passage. It doesn’t. They have simply set up a scenario where the bipartisan infrastructure bill fails, and the Democratic Party looks incompetent.

Naturally, instead of everyone agreeing to play nice, centrists have counter-threatened with “a threat straight out of Blazing Saddles“: Pass our infrastructure bill on Sept. 27 or reconciliation gets it.

Chait continues:

The centrists are claiming that if the bipartisan bill fails next week, their optimal level of social spending will drop from whatever it currently is to zero dollars, and will remain at zero, even if that means the bipartisan bill fails.

If Sinema and the House centrists already oppose a reconciliation bill, then this threat is meaningless: They are demanding a ransom to release a hostage they plan to shoot regardless. The threat only works if they would otherwise pass a budget reconciliation bill, but will refuse out of pique if infrastructure fails.

Instead of everyone issuing escalating threats or risk losing face, Chait offers, Democrats need to agree amongst themselves what they can get through Congress. And the key to untying that knot is Sen. Joe Manchin:

The centrists want to live in a world where negotiations aren’t necessary, and they can simply force liberals to hope that maybe Joe Manchin will decide to negotiate a bill with them one day. The liberals won’t accept those terms, and they’re correct not to. If Sinema and the House centrists want their bipartisan infrastructure bill to pass, the person they need to start threatening is Joe Manchin.

It is not clear how they do that. He is virtually untouchable in West Virginia. But he cannot secure a legacy as a deal-maker witout a deal.

Meanwhile, progressives, now the largest Democratic caucus on Capitol Hill, are done being treated as red-headed stepchildren.

Somebody’s got to stop holding their breath until their faces turn blue or else the planet burns.

GOP voted to suspend debt limit 3 times under Trump as ~$8 trillion was added to the national debt during his presidency https://t.co/p4vzWVkZg0

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) September 20, 2021

Here’s what’s going on. They are, of course, being assholes:

Republicans are standing firm that they will not vote to raise the debt ceiling, claiming that they are driven by fiscal responsibility while threatening to let the United States default on its debts. Okay.

Their real goal here is transparent: force Democrats to include the ceiling hike in the  reconciliation package and, in so doing, manufacture another tension point over which chaos-happy moderates can kill the package.

But Democrats are still planning to force Republicans to publicly abdicate their responsibility with a vote.

“Since 2011, every time the debt limit has needed to be raised, Congress has addressed it on a bipartisan basis, including three times during the last Administration,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) wrote in a Dear Colleague letter on Sunday. “When we take up the debt limit this month, we expect it to be bipartisan once more.”

It remains to be seen if enough sober Republicans will recognize the danger of the fire they’re playing with and back off — or if Democrats will have to go it alone.

The latest:

Democrats are refusing to capitulate to Republican demands on the debt ceiling, and trying to add a bitter pill into the equation.

By wrapping funding the government and suspending the debt limit into one continuing resolution, they’re daring Republicans to risk a government shutdown should they try to force Democrats to deal with the debt ceiling alone.

Republicans’ optimal situation here is to help pass a “clean” continuing resolution to keep the government funded, then force Democrats to deal with the debt ceiling in reconciliation — which would balloon the package’s topline, and increase the chances that centrists will sink the whole thing.

Democrats aren’t caving to that — yet. If Republicans vote against the continuing resolution, blithely threatening both a government shutdown and catastrophic debt default out of their desire to make Democrats’ lives harder, Democrats may have no choice. Republicans have the safety net of knowing that the Democrats have historically not matched their party’s comfort in playing chicken with the debt ceiling and its risk of global economic catastrophe.

You can click the link to TPM to see the “live-blogging” of the legislative sausage-making as it unfolds. Or not. It’s nervewracking. You don’t know how much is kabuki, how much is tactics and strategy and how much is plain old negotiation. But if you’re into that sort of hting, I recommend checking it out. They do a good job.

Lindsey Graham and Mike Lee coddled Donald Trump and his lunatic legal team after the election by pretending that there might be something to it. In doing so they fed the distrust in the results;

In a Jan. 2 meeting arranged by Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and held in his West Wing office, the South Carolina Republican met with Giuliani and his legal team to learn about findings they said could hand Trump a second term.

Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney at the time, put forward a computer whiz who presented a mathematical formula suggesting Biden’s support in certain states was unrealistic. Graham, a lawyer and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, found the reasoning too abstract. He wanted hard evidence. “Give me some names,” Graham said at the Saturday meeting. “You need to put it in writing. You need to show me the evidence.”

Giuliani promised details by Monday — proof that scores of ballots had been cast in the names of dead people and people under 18, among other irregularities.

This scene is recounted in a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward and national political reporter Robert Costa. The book, “Peril,” describes parallel efforts by the South Carolina Republican and his conservative colleague from Utah, Sen. Mike Lee, to personally investigate the president’s claims of voter fraud as the lawmakers prepared to certify Joe Biden’s victory on Jan. 6.

Graham and Lee, both of whom ultimately voted to certify the results, took the claims of election fraud seriously enough to get briefed on the details, involve their senior staff and call state officials throughout the country. But privately, Graham gave the arguments a withering assessment, according to the book, saying they were suitable for “third grade.”

Make no mistake, Lindsey Graham and Mike Lee know very well that the election was legit and they always did. It’s clear to me that they were prepared to back Trump’s play if they could get any traction with the state election authorities. They have certainly backed all the restrictive voter laws that their red state buddies have passed. They are the problem as much as Trump himself.

This is what they’ve wrought:

The preemptive spin is everywhere. Last week it was Larry Elder in California, who — before getting trounced in the GOP’s failed effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom — posted a “Stop Fraud” page on his campaign website. Before that, at a rally in Virginia, state Sen. Amanda Chase introduced herself as a surrogate for gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin and told the crowd, “Because the Democrats like to cheat, you have to cast your vote before they do.” In Nevada, Adam Laxalt, the former state attorney general running to unseat Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, is already talking about filing lawsuits to “tighten up the election” — more than a year before votes are cast. And in Pennsylvania, former Rep. Lou Barletta, who is running for governor after losing a Senate race two years earlier, said he “had to consider” whether a Republican could ever win a race again in his state given the current administration of elections there.

Trump may have started the election-truther movement. But what was once the province of an aggrieved former president has spread far beyond him, infecting elections at every level with vague, unspecified claims that future races are already rigged. It’s a fiction that’s poised to factor heavily in the midterm elections and in 2024 — providing Republican candidates with a rallying cry for the rank-and-file, and priming the electorate for future challenges to races the GOP may lose.

“The fever has not broken,” said Benjamin Ginsberg, an elections lawyer who has represented past Republican presidential nominees. “If anything, it’s spreading. People I knew as rational and principled feel they have to say our elections are not reliable because polls show that is the ante for contested Republican primaries and motivating the base in general elections. California recall results aside, it comes at the expense of the principle that our leaders should not make allegations that corrode American democracy without any credible evidence.