I’m just putting this here for safekeeping until the next time the right wingers assault Democrats for misbehaving at funerals, as they often do.
One thing I’ll say for him. He left no doubt that he wrote that himself.
"what digby sez..."
Month: October 2021
Dennis Prager is 73 years old. He smokes cigars. He is also a daredevil, thrillseeker, living on the edge kind of guy:
Radio talk show host Dennis Prager informed his audience on Monday that not only does he have Covid-19, but he was trying to get infected in order to achieve “natural immunity.”
The 73-year-old said he tested positive last week and has not required hospitalization, thanks in part to receiving monoclonal antibodies. These can be effective in treating Covid for people with mild to moderate symptoms who also have a high risk of progression. But Prager also rattled off the unproven Covid Treatments They Don’t Want You To Know About™ that have become popular among many conservatives.
“I have, of course, for years – a year and a half, not years – been taking hydroxychloroquine from the beginning, with zinc,” he said. “I’ve taken z-pack, azithromycin, as the Zelenko protocol would have it. I have taken ivermectin. I have done what a person should do if one is not going to get vaccinated.”
The “Zelenko protocol” refers to a highly dubious regimen developed by a doctor in rural New York who claimed that he cured 100% of the Covid cases he treated using unproven remedies.
Prager then described how he deliberately and recklessly attempted to get infected with Covid:
It is infinitely preferable to have natural immunity than vaccine immunity and that is what I have hoped for the entire time. Hence, so, I have engaged with strangers, constantly hugging them, taking photos with them knowing that I was making myself very susceptible to getting Covid, which is, indeed, as bizarre as it sounded, what I wanted, in the hope I would achieve natural immunity and be taken care of by therapeutics. That is exactly what has happened. It should have happened to the great majority of Americans.
Prager then accused the Centers for Disease Control of opposing therapeutics thanks to “the corruption of the belief in the value of vaccine and only vaccine.”
I will never understand why these people are so hostile to the vaccine but will lilterally take anything some crackpot freak tells them to take and are happy to take the experimental, emergency use monoclonal antibody treatment that costs thousands of dollars compared to the $20 vaccine. And this is in spite of the fact their Dear Leader wants nothing more than to take credit for the miracle cure of vaccines and his people just won’t have it.
It’s one of the most bizarre cultural phenomena I’ve ever seen.
Chris Hayes looked into the “natural immunity is better” thing last night. It’s is also tryuly bizarre:
HAYES: As we reported last week, one of the anti-vax candidates for governor of Texas, Republican Allen West ended up hospitalized with COVID. Today, we are happy to report he`s out of the hospital, has recovered from this infection. But while he was still in the hospital, he tweeted something that caught my eye. “I now have natural immunity and double the antibodies. And if you`ve been paying attention to Republican politicians, the right-wing media, you might notice that natural immunity has become a sort of buzz term. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. TOM COTTON (R-AR): The mandate is overbroad as well. It makes no accommodation for instance of people who have had Coronavirus and who have natural immunity.
BRIAN KILMEADE, CONTRIBUTOR, FOX NEWS CHANNEL: Look at the fact that they refuse to take in natural immunity even though more and more studies are showing it`s probably better than the vaccine.
SEN. RON JOHNSON (R-WI): The fact that this ministration won`t recognize natural immunity in these mandates.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is infinitely preferable to have natural immunity than vaccine immunity.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Why would I get vaccinated? Why would I get vaccinated when you know I have better immunity than someone who`s been vaccinated?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: The argument they make is essentially if you get sick with Coronavirus and survive, your immune system produces antibodies. And so, the logic follows that if that`s the case, why do you have to get a vaccine on top of that. And I`ve been following this discussion. It actually made me think, wait a second, what does the science say about what vaccines do for people who recover from Coronavirus? How necessary is it for them? And which last longer, vaccination or antibodies from an infection?
To get the bottom of that, I want to talk to Dr. Syra Madad, an infectious disease epidemiologist, Senior Director of the Special Pathogens Program at New York Health and Hospitals system. So, Doctor, let`s sort of start with the top line about what we know about the immunity conferred by having gotten through about of COVID and the immunity conferred by the vaccines.
SYRA MADAD, INFECTIOUS DISEASE EPIDEMIOLOGIST: Well, first, you know, I think we`re not talking apples to apples. So, there`s a big difference. The first one, we talked about natural infection, you know, generated from COVID-19 infection. First, you know, getting infected itself, you`re putting yourself at risk for severe disease, hospitalization, and death. That`s not even talking about the potential of long COVID.
So, first when you have natural infection, it is very variable to person to person and that`s two things that I`ll point out. First, it`s actually generating a robust immune response, and the second is the strength and durability of that immune response, and how long that will live.
So, first, we focus on generating that immune response to people that are naturally infected, it differs from person to person. There`s a lot of variability. It depends on the severity of the illness. It also depends on the immune system and the response that it generates.
The second aspect of it is durability of the thing. And that varies, you know, between age and health status. And so, there`s a lot of, you know, unpredictability with natural infection. And that`s not to say that individuals that have natural infection don`t have a robust response. You know, we have seen that.
Some studies have shown that 10 to 36 percent don`t even convert, meaning they don`t have a long term response, you know, immune response. So, that`s, that`s concerning.
HAYES: Yes, there`s so — that`s — I mean, my understanding to the point you said that — so, there`s a huge chunk of people, a really significant chunk, and again, the data here goes all over the place that do get COVID, who come out of it, and don`t really have the presence of the antibodies that you would anticipate and expect. So, they`re not really immunized as far as we know.
And then there`s a really question — there`s a question about how long they last. And what do we know about how long — if you do create these antibodies in your body, like how long that lasts versus the vaccine?
MADAD: The longevity of, you know, our immune response, you know, is one of those things that we`re still finding out both with natural infection and with vaccination. But the one thing to note is that with vaccination, you can boost your immune response safely to have a better — you know, a robust immune response and to counter, you know, the central infections.
With natural infection, you can`t boost that, right? So, that means you`re going to have to naturally get reinfected again. And no one wants to go through that for the reasons I mentioned, because you`re risking a lot there. It`s like playing a game of Russian roulette. There`s a big gamble right there.
HAYES: Yes, that — this is a key point. I want to sort of give the top line to this one Nebraska medicine health system study that was published. More than a third of the COVID infections resulted in zero protective antibodies. Natural immunity fades faster than vaccine immunity. Natural immunity alone is less than half as effective as natural immunity plus vaccination.
So, there`s two points that seem to be important there. There`s actually as far as we can tell an additive effect if you`ve had COVID of also getting vaccinated in terms of the total level of protection you`re getting, whereas the argument being made you saw with Joe Rogan and others there is like, well, why do I need it because I`ve already got it?
To the best that we can describe, it seems like there`s actually a cumulative positive effect to get vaccinated. Is that the — is that our understanding right now?
MADAD: That`s correct. It`s unfortunate that natural immunity is being politicized, just like massacre flip sides, so it`s really unfortunate. But, you know, the bottom line is that vaccination is the safest way to build that immune response without risking illness, infection, and disease.
And if you`ve had natural infection, you get — a COVID-19 vaccine, you have an even better immune response. I`m actually in that category. I was, unfortunately, naturally infected last year. And you know, I — you know, and I`m fully vaccinated, so I have a pretty, you know, robust immune response. So, you know, a really great data on that as well.
HAYES: Well, so there`s a very interesting point here that I want to make, right? What you`re saying, and what a lot of people in public health are saying is that there`s this — there`s something sort of insidious in this idea of like natural immunity, because the way that you get natural immunity is you get COVID.
And what we`ve seen a little bit is the old sort of like chicken pox party idea. In fact, there`s even people who have cited that, right? Like — and Dennis Prager who was on the microphone saying, I have COVID right now, and that is infinitely preferable. The kind of logic that they`re actually propounding is like, it`s OK to get COVID, and then you`ll get it, and you`ll get natural immunity. And actually, we let the things spread.
And that`s precisely the sort of herd immunity idea we saw from Scott Atlas, the Trump advisor that was so disastrous in terms of guiding policy here in the U.S.
MADAD: That`s exactly right. It`s really unfortunate that this is a — you know, the debate that we`re having again, and again. And the science really speaks for itself right now in terms of which one is better, which one is giving you a more predictable and reliable outcome.
You know, through natural infection, you`re risking a whole lot, not just yourself, but you know, for the community. The one point that I`ll make is that a lot of these studies that we`re seeing first, they were pre-Delta. So, Delta was definitely a big game changer here in terms of the infection as well.
But as we`re looking at, you know, the studies that were conducted, a lot of them are looking at the survivors, right? They`re not looking at the people that died. Over 700,000, you know, Americans died of COVID-19. So, they`re basing it on survivors. And that also is variable as well.
So, if we look at just the number of people that have died, I mean, that`s majority through natural infection. So, that`s speaking volumes right there.
HAYES: Right. The classic example of survivor bias right there. I guess the final — the final point here would just be that there`s a sort of either collective reason, a policy reason, but even at the individual reason, there`s very — there`s good data suggest that if you`ve had COVID, getting vaccinated make sense. It boosts your protection against reinfection and also provides a comprehensive way to boost immunity in the future that is just, you know, a natural reinfection.
MADAD: That`s absolutely much more reliable. It`s much more durable. And as we learn more, we`ll probably see the longevity of our immune response. And you`re able to boost more, you know, in case that`s needed. Right now, obviously called that protecting against severe hospitalization and death.
Since these loons like Prager who are out there trying to get the virus obviously don’t wear masks they probably spread it all over the place once they get it. So that’s nice. I’m sure they will say they are helping give people the virus for their own good.
Yet, 700,000 people are dead in a year and a half for some reason.
I’m vaccinated and generally feel pretty safe going out in public. I observe the rules about masks and social distancing. But these people are making me much more nervous and while I’m still participating in the world within those parameters, I’m thinking twice about doing some things. In other words these fools are holding back the economic recovery by threatening to kill people with their ignorance and hostility — and are actually killing people in the process.
The Virginia Governor’s race is an interesting case because not only do these issues reflect the national zeitgeist, they are very specific to the state as well.
I think this is well done:
Here’s one from the Lincoln Project:
The California recall nationalized the race and won it with big turnout from Democrats. Of course it’s California. Virginia is the next test case for turning out Dems by tying this reprobate GOP to their Dear Leader and his minions. They can try to run from him while trying to maintain his support but it won’t work. They’re either in or they’re out. We’ll have to see if Democrats really understand the stakes.
For people who watch Fox and Newsmax exclusively, it’s a very reasonable accusation despite the fact that their Dear Leader literally spent about a third of his presidency at his properties when members and guests paid to be in his presence. They are, after all, brainwashed and either don’t know that Trump spent all that time away from the White House playing golf or simply don’t believe it. They are living in another reality:
When Donald Trump was first running for election in 2016, he offered repeated disdain for President Barack Obama’s golf habit.
“I think he’s played 300 rounds of golf or something like that, more than 300,” he said that September. “That’s more golf than many members on the PGA Tour. Okay?”
Were he elected, Trump promised, he’d be “working for you,” as he said that August. “I’m not going to have time to go play golf.”
It took two weeks for President Trump to find the time. On the first weekend in February 2017, his third weekend as president, Trump traveled to his private company’s resort in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, heading out on both Saturday and Sunday for rounds of golf at his nearby club. He did the same thing the following weekend and then the weekend after that.
As with so many other aspects of Trump’s presidency, Trump’s reneging on his pledge to avoid the links and his incessant stops at his privately held properties spurred outrage briefly before fading into background noise. We are now no more surprised that Trump visited a Trump Organization property than we might be that he disparaged a political opponent. These are simply things that happened in the Trump presidency.
Here are Trump’s visits to his properties by the numbers:
Trump has visited a Trump Organization property on 428 days of his presidency, or one visit every 3.4 days. That means that he has visited on about two days of every week of his presidency.
Normally, those two days are weekend days. It was common for him to head to his golf club in Sterling, Va., on warmer weekends when he was in Washington. He visited that club on 106 days, probably playing golf on 103 of them. It was the property to which he paid the most visits.
He was president for 418 weekend days. He visited one of his properties on 240 of those days, or on 57 percent of them.
Trump probably played 261 rounds of golf as president. This is just an estimate because, unlike Obama, his team often wouldn’t report whether he was playing golf at his properties. If accurate, though, that’s a round every 5.6 days. By contrast, Obama played 333 rounds of golf — over twice as many years. That’s about once every 8.8 days.
Trump spent the most time at Mar-a-Lago. He was there for all or part of 142 days of his presidency over 32 visits. He was at his private club in Bedminster, N.J., on 106 days, the same number as the visits he paid to Sterling.
The course where Trump played the second-most rounds was Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., a short drive from Mar-a-Lago. He played there an estimated 87 times.
As president, he visited 14 Trump properties in seven states, the District of Columbia and three countries, including Scotland and Ireland. He only played two rounds of golf that weren’t at Trump properties; both were in the company of then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Japan.
The amount of government money spent shuttling Trump to his properties and then spent at the properties remains a bit murky. We know that Trump’s first four trips to Mar-a-Lago cost about $14 million, mostly in the costs of operating the aircraft necessary for the trip. If we assume that each trip to the resort costs about $3.4 million, that’s $109 million just for the Mar-a-Lago trips alone.
Not all of that money goes to Trump, of course. The Washington Post reported in October that the government had been billed about $2.5 million by Trump properties since he had taken office.
Interestingly, Trump only visited the Trump hotel in Washington about two dozen times, despite its proximity to the White House. He returned to Trump Tower in New York only eight times.
I realize this may seem like a silly story to even think about considering the scope of Trump’s malfeasance, dishonesty and corruption. But it’s a perfect example of the “up is down,black and white” nature of reality on the right these days and a simple illustration of the concept of projection as played by the Trumps and Fox News. This stuff is as disorienting to me today as it was in 2016 when Trump became president. But I suspect that many people don’t even notice it anymore because it’s so ubiquitous. And that’s why it’s so dangerous.
The economy should serve people, not the other way around. The Occupy Movement sent that message worldwide with its advocacy for “the 99%.” But the message was quickly all but forgotten. Until Covid.
People isolated by business closings in 2020 had the scales lifted from their eyes. They had time to reevaluate their lives and especially their conditions of employment.
Tiffany Chen, 30, wanted to be a clothing designer. She studied fashion at New York City’s Parsons School of Design. But after two years in the industry, the long hours and the ethics of the business made her question that career path. She now works for less as a freelance photographer.
We deserve better
“Less money does come with its own stresses, but I would rather deal with those than the stresses of the previous work environment,” she told Michael Blackmon of Buzzfeed News:
And she’s not the only person who feels this way. In a mass exit dubbed the “Great Resignation” by psychologist Anthony Klotz, nearly 4 million people left jobs this past June, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Another 4 million left in July, the fourth consecutive month of such high departure rates. In August, 4.3 million people left their jobs, a record number, according to CNBC. Labor economist Julia Pollak, who works for ZipRecruiter, told me that in normal times, “there are typically 3.5 million people quitting a job any month … That’s a substantially higher number, and employers are really feeling it.” Karin Kimbrough, chief economist at LinkedIn, told me in a recent interview that the “social contract [of] work is being rewritten,” and the balance of power that exists between employer and employee “is shifting towards the worker.”
The horror.
“People shouldn’t be working eighty hour weeks. They shouldn’t have to beg for a single day off. This isn’t life. This isn’t even remotely okay,” tweets Jared Yates Sexton, author of “American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People” (2020). We deserve better.”
Opining on Sen. Joe Manchin’s fixation on “producerism,” Jamelle Bouie writes at the New York Times that Manchin’s view holds up wage slavery as some kind of Protestant state of grace (emphasis mine):
As I argued earlier this month, the West Virginia senator appears to be committed to a conservative producerism that treats the market as a crucible in which ordinary workers prove their moral worth. We are not an “entitlement society,” says Manchin; we are a “reward” society. To thrive, you must work. And if you do not work, then you forfeit whatever help the government might deign to give. To give help without work — to shield ordinary workers from the market in the name of security or dignity — is to undermine and weaken the very fiber of society.
In fairness to him, Manchin made it clear that this was his perspective at the start of the year, before Biden was even in office. “I don’t ever remember F.D.R. recommending sending a damn penny to a human being. We gave ’em a job and gave ’em a paycheck. Yeah. Jesus criminy, can’t we start some infrastructure program to help people, get ’em back on their feet? Do we have to keep sending checks out?” as Manchin put it to The Washington Post.
There was an irony in Manchin’s decision to invoke Franklin Roosevelt, one worth examining as Manchin takes a stand against the effort to expand the social safety net without forcing ordinary Americans to “earn” the support they need to live their lives. Animating the New Deal, Mike Konczal writes in his book, “Freedom From the Market: America’s Fight to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand,” was a “new idea of freedom that limited and constrained markets” and put limits on “market dependency.”
To be completely dependent on markets was to exist in a state of unfreedom, subject to the overbearing weight of property and capital. Konczal quotes a Roosevelt administration official, the great labor lawyer Donald Richberg, who made this point in explicit terms when he said that when workers are “compelled by necessity to live in one kind of place and to work for one kind of employer, with no choice except to pay the rent demanded and to accept the wages offered — or else to starve — then the liberty of the property owner contains the power to enslave the worker. And that sort of liberty is intolerable and cannot be preserved by a democratic government.”
A senator from West Virginia should understand that. Apparently not.
Power concedes nothing…
Bouie continues:
The market, in other words, was made for man, not man for the market, and after a generation spent running away from this insight — which also helped animate Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” — Democrats are finally coming back to the idea that people are entitled to a basic standard of living, regardless of whether they work or not.
A basic standard of living is about more than money. It is, as I’ve written, about who wields power in this supposed democracy and who refuses to share both political and economic power. Watching employers and conservative pundits freak out over the new difficulty in finding workers willing to work themselves to death for low wages while being treated as disposable “resources” is as satisfying as it is long overdue. Again, their anxiety is not just about profits, but about losing their power to dictate terms of employment and to maintain a system that makes workers slaves to the economy and employers their masters.
Blackmon profiles more workers who refuse to take it anymore.
Amber (not her real name) lives in North Carolina near the Outer Banks. She has left three restaurant jobs in the last year.
“I’m constantly having the fact that I’m replaceable just being shoved in my face,” she said. “I would love to work for a place I was loyal to, but I don’t think that that exists anymore.”
Blackmon concludes his profiles with this:
Millions of people are reevaluating what kind of life they want to have. From working-class individuals who refuse to continue letting a 9-to-5 burn them out to white-collar workers deciding it’s time to unplug for a while, people are on a journey to rediscover who they are outside of their skills as workers. As Chen, the photographer living in New York City, put it, “I think we’re kind of remixing the American Dream.”
“As I’ve gotten older, work is definitely [still] really important, but I think I’ve started to see it less as my identity,” she said. “What’s really important to me is to be able to carve out the time and the space to build important things for me outside of work.”
Hereditary royalty is not the only kind with which America has to contend. The economic kind is far more entrenched.
Following up from yesterday on Lost Causes, Rex Huppke recounts at the Chicago Tribune statements made to the FBI by one of Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 dupes foot soldiers. Daniel “D.J.” Rodriguez joined thousands of self-anointed defenders of antidemocracy. But he broke down in tears when speaking with FBI agents after being apprehended.
“I’m so stupid. I thought I was going to be awesome. I thought I was a good guy,” Rodriguez said:
Now the California man stands charged with, among other things, tasing U.S. Capitol police Officer Michael Fanone, who was beaten and suffered a heart attack during the insurrection. Rodriguez is facing the possibility of decades in prison and nobody should feel sorry for him.
But it’s worth reading the nearly 200-page transcript of Rodriguez’s March 31 interview with FBI agents to see the shameless mental havoc wreaked by people like Trump and every Republican politician and pundit pimping, or even playing footsie with, a profoundly false election narrative.
It’s a con transparent as a freshly cleaned window. And it’s dangerous.
The insurrectionist’s lawyers tried to suppress the transcript of his interview, alleging Rodriguez was not properly Mirandized.
Rodriguez is one of the hundreds charged in the Jan. 6 domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol. He was arrested after being identified by online “sedition hunters” who pored over videos and photos from the attack.
Rodriguez told the FBI:
“Trump called us,” he said. “Trump called us to D.C.”
He later said: “My story is just that we thought that we were going to save America, and we were wrong.”
Rodriguez revealed he had been told by conspiracy sites such as Inforwars — which he had followed for years — that a civil war was about to happen. Trump and other prominent Facebook conspiracists had fully convinced him the election was stolen.
He told the agents “we felt that they stole the election. We thought they — we felt that they stole this country, that it’s gone, it’s wiped out. America’s over. It’s destroyed now.”
“I thought that Trump was going to stay president and they were going to find all this crooked stuff and … we thought that we did something good,” Rodriguez said. “It was rumored that Nancy Pelosi got her laptop stolen and that they found all this evidence on it and it was a secret plan. … And then we could just bust everything and find the truth and it’ll be all exposed and we’ll see that she’s corrupt or some kind of evidence. And we thought we were being a — we were part of a bigger thing. We thought we were being used as a part of a plan to save the country, to save America, save the Constitution, and the election, the integrity.”
Good intentions are not a “Get out of jail free” card.
Huppke as no sympathy:
You see similar statements in the transcripts of other law enforcement interviews with Jan. 6 attackers and you hear similar words in court hearings. Again, I have no sympathy for these people. They tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power and directly attacked the heart of our democracy. Throw the book at them.
But beyond the crimes of these individuals, it’s important to pay close attention to these cases and see the insidious mental games an entire political party is playing with a huge swath of American voters.
Rodriguez, like most who attacked the U.S. Capitol, was convinced — by Trump, by the things he heard in right-wing media, by the like-minded people he associated with online — that an election was stolen and America was on the brink of a new civil war. He was willing to risk his life to that end and in doing so felt he was part of something bigger than himself.
It’s clear from the interview that it gave him meaning and purpose. You need only scan social media a few moments to see how these lies do the same for so many. And on Fox News and on Infowars and in the Facebook feeds of conspiracy profiteers and in the words and tweets of many gutless elected Republicans, you see those lies still tossed out like chum.
They were played for suckers by Trump and his allies who persist to this day in preying upon others for power and profit.
“The truth is, we need $45 from EACH Patriot … if we are going to have the necessary resources to solve the election fraud of 2020,” read an email sent out by Trump’s Super PAC days after Trump threatened the Republican Party that his supporters would sit out the 2022 and 2024 elections if they did not (somehow) undo the 2020 elections and (somehow) restore him to the Oval Office as emperor (or something).
Why has public education been under attack by the right since the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling began school intergation? Because racial discrimination aside, breeding more dupes and dopes is in con men’s interests. The more they can keep people from learning to think critically, the easier the con man’s job.
Trump’s stolen election con was as “transparent as a freshly cleaned window,” yet millions are still his dupes. Now they are too invested to admit to themselves they were hoodwinked by mountebanks and corrupt politicians. The country remains in peril as much from comicbook super villains as their hapless goons.
Here’s the full story on Lindsey Graham’s weird comments about tens of thousands Brazilians with Gucci bags invading Connecticut:
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham, an outspoken critic of President Biden’s immigration policies, said affluent Brazilians were illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and heading to Connecticut “wearing designer clothes and Gucci bags.”
In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday, Graham (R-S.C.) was critical of the administration’s order to halt large-scale immigration arrests at job sites, with plans for a new approach to target employers who pay substandard wages and engage in exploitative labor practices.
“Now, what [Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas did today, calling off all the raids of worksite, is going to be another incentive for people to come, because the word is out,” Graham said. “You come, you claim asylum, you never leave. The policy choices of Biden are all over the world now.”
The senator, who recently visited the border in Arizona, added: “We had 40,000 Brazilians come through the Yuma Sector alone headed for Connecticut wearing designer clothes and Gucci bags. This is not economic migration anymore.”
“People see an open America,” he continued. “They’re taking advantage of us. And it won’t be long before a terrorist gets in this crowd.”
In an interview with The Washington Post on Wednesday, Graham elaborated on his comments.
“Usually when you go to the border, you see people who are dressed really haggardly and who look like they’ve been through hell,” he said. “This time at Yuma, there were dozens that looked like they were checking into a hotel — and smartly dressed.”
“This is something new,” he added. “I would advise the Biden administration to do what the Obama administration did and fly them back.”
Graham said Connecticut was a destination, along with two other states that he could not remember based on what a Border Patrol agent told him about the growing Brazilian communities.
Kevin Bishop, a spokesman for Graham, had defended the senator’s comments, citing what he saw during his recent trip to the border and news reports about Brazilian immigrants. Bishop also provided photographs of luggage and shoes taken at the border.
“They have had thousands of Brazilians coming through there,” he said. “As Senator Graham noted in Yuma, the luggage was nicer than his own.”
None of the luggage in the photos provided to The Post appeared to be Gucci. The most obvious clothing in the photos was a pair of fairly clean Puma tennis shoes without shoelaces.
He’s completed the metamorphosis. He is no longer just a Trump sycophant. He’s a full Trump clone.
Speaking of legacies, this one is irreparable:
For the past 15 years, former U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman has never spoken publicly about the secret help that he received from Republicans Karl Rove and Elizabeth Dole to help him defeat Democrat Ned Lamont in the contentious 2006 Senate race.
But in a new book and an interview, Lieberman says that Rove, the chief political strategist for then-President George W. Bush, told him that he would do anything possible to help Lieberman against Lamont, an anti-war Democrat at a time when the Iraq War was highly controversial.ADVERTISING
Lieberman, now 79, says Rove’s help was crucial in helping him to defeat Lamont in a three-way race in which the Republican candidate, Alan Schlesinger, received less than 10% of the vote.
The fact that Rove had contacted Lieberman at the time was leaked to the press, but the full details had not come out until now.
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It all started on the afternoon of the August 2006 primary when Lieberman was sitting with his family in the Goodwin Hotel in Hartford — just hours before Lieberman lost to Lamont. The phone rang, and the family was stunned to learn that Rove was on the line.
Lieberman told Rove that the race could go either way.
“That’s what we have heard,” Lieberman quoted Rove as saying in “The Centrist Solution,” a book scheduled to be released Tuesday. “And that’s why the ‘Boss’ asked me to call you and tell you that if you don’t win today, he hopes you stay in as an independent. He thinks the country needs you in the Senate and knows that the political problems you are having are because you have stayed strong on the war in Iraq. So, he wanted me to tell you that if you lose today and run in November, we will help you in any way we can.”
Stunned, Lieberman said he did not know precisely what to say, but he soon learned that national Republican big-hitters were suddenly raising money for him and contributing to the campaign.
“After the Rove call, it is hard to believe the White House didn’t encourage Connecticut Republicans to stay out of the Senate race,” Lieberman says in the book. “Also, in a twist of fate, the chair of the Senate Republican Campaign Committee that cycle was Sen. Elizabeth Dole, wife of Bob Dole. They were both close friends of ours. Elizabeth later told me proudly that her committee had given no support, financial or otherwise, to Schlesinger.”
The support came because the conservative Lieberman was close to Bush, and Republicans did not want another anti-Iraq War Democrat in the U.S. Senate.
“That call on primary day was really surprising to me,” Lieberman said in an interview. “It did help, and it showed on Election Day. I got a stunning vote among Republicans in Connecticut in the exit poll. I got a solid majority of independents and about a third of Democrats. I’m grateful.”
Lamont’s campaign manager, Tom Swan, said Lieberman would never have won the race without Republican support as Schlesinger got one of the lowest Republican totals in Connecticut history for a statewide race. He described Lieberman as “the most vocal cheerleader for the war in either party” in the nation.
“It was a smart move — yet despicable — by Rove and Bush to do this,” Swan said. “If Lieberman had not been propped up by them, Ned could have been the star — going all over the country, reminding Democrats and voters across the board that the war was immoral and unpopular and they needed to vote for people to change it. It was clear, in retrospect, that the reelection of Joe Lieberman was the most important race for Karl Rove and George Bush in 2006.”
He paid them back in spades when he single-handedly tanked the lowering of the Medicare age and the Public Option in the Obamacare negotiations — a position he had previously supported. He was doing the work of Republicans during those last years in the Senate. We knew it, but it was never clear if he was just petulant over being challenged by the left or if he was literally trying to sabotage Democrats on behalf of the GOP. Now we know.
By the way, don’t be too surprised if we find out similar stories about Manchin and Sinema. Mitch McConnell has said he prays for them to be strong and hold out against their own party. You have to wonder if he and others in the party aren’t “helping” them the way Rove helped Lieberman.
I wrote the other day about Trump and the pee tape and my Salon colleague Amanda Marcotte pointed out that it was actually more damning than I had thought:
Oh man, it’s even worse than @digby56 says! Because, like the lifelong liar, fraud and cheater he is, Trump uses a common non-denial denial tactic of denying he does something no one accused him of.
The dossier did not say that Trump enjoys being peed on, by his wife or anyone else. It says he paid sex workers to pee on a bed that Obama slept in. That’s not a kink of self-degradation. That’s about degrading those women and Obama, an act of domination.
I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s memorable because it fits everything we know about Trump: He enjoys degrading women. He has a racism-infused Salieri-style obsession with Obama, for being a Black man is everything he’s not: Smart, decent, handsome, accomplished.
Originally tweeted by Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) on October 16, 2021.
Well, in case you are wondering why all this is coming up again:
Former British spy Christopher Steele defended the contents of his Donald Trump dossier in his first major TV interview since his bombshell allegations came to light years ago.
Steele gave an interview to George Stephanopoulos for ABC News’ upcoming multi-part documentary, Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier. The series will reflect on Steele’s discredited claims that Trump conspired with Russia to win the 2016 election, and that the Russians had salacious blackmail to use against the former president.
Stephanopoulos’ conversation with Steele was previewed on ABC’s This Week, where he was shown confronting Steele with the FBI’s assessment that the dossier’s claims about Michael Cohen were not true. The claim was that Cohen, formerly Trump’s personal lawyer, traveled to Prague in 2016 and secretly met with Kremlin agents.
Steele rejected the FBI’s findings on the alleged meeting, so Stephanopoulos remarked that “it defies logic” for Cohen to keep it a secret after turning against Trump and getting swamped in all of his legal troubles.
“He’s told every single story. Why wouldn’t he admit to this?” Stephanopoulos asked
“Because I think it’s so incriminating and demeaning,” Steele answered, “And the other reason is he may be scared of the consequences.”
“Do you think it hurts your credibility at all that you won’t accept the findings of the FBI in this particular case?” asked Stephanopoulos.
“I’m prepared to accept that not everything in the dossier is 100 percent accurate,” said Steele. “I have yet to be convinced that that is one of them.”
Inevitably, the preview arrived at the dossier’s claim that the Russians had a tape of Trump in a hotel room while Russian hookers partook in “golden showers” and other disgusting sex acts in front of him. This part showed Stephanopoulos asking Steele “today, do you still believe that this tape exists?”
“I think it probably does, but I would not put 100 percent certainty on it,” Steele answered.
“How do you explain if that tape does, indeed, exist, it has not been released?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“It hasn’t needed to be released,” said Steele, “because I think the Russians felt they’d got pretty good value out of Donald Trump when he was president of the U.S.”
Steele’s comments come shortly after a report about how Trump made fun of the “golden shower” allegation during a recent retreat with donors and GOP lawmakers.
Watch above, via ABC.
If it’s true, it’s no mystery why they would hold it back. Having it to hold over his head is where he power is. And it’s clear that this is a story he doesn’t like one little bit.
You’re going to start hearing some specious arguments against the voting rights bills that are coming before the Senate. Be advised:
The U.S. Senate will vote on the Freedom to Vote Act this week & on the John Lewis Act soon. An argument being used against them is that Congress shouldn’t pass voting standards. That’s a false argument contradicted by the U.S. Constitution & our political history.
The Constitution establishes it. Here’s Act 1, Section 4 “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.”..States are laboratories of democracy. Congress then acts to establish national norms. Examples: constitutional amendments establishing suffrage eligibility across all states: 15th Amendment for men of all races, 19th amendment for women, 26th amendment for 18-year-old plus the 14th “equal protection” amendment establishing penalties for denial of suffrage & the 24th amendment prohibiting states from having poll taxes. Congress regularly passes statutes on voting as well….
Examples include: (1) the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and extensions in 1982 and 2006; (2) having the federal Election Day be the 1st Tuesday after the 1st Monday of November; and (3) the NVRA “motor voter”) law on voter registration…
Congress has regularly regulated congressional redistricting and a 1967 law today mandates single-member districts (which the Fair Representation Act would replace with a better requirement for proportional ranked choice voting in all states with more than 1 seat)…
Bottom-line: As our Constitution’s framers anticipated, there are times when federal voting norms are right for all American voters. Let’s debate these proposed federal bills on their merits, not on false arguments designed to avoid accountability.
Originally tweeted by Rob Richie (@Rob_Richie) on October 17, 2021.
It seems to me that “the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” is pretty clear.