Month: October 2021

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With some wailing and gnashing of teeth among progressives, Democrats may be nearing a draft of President Joe Biden’s spending bill to which party conservatives will agree. Not the originally floated $6 trillion. Not the heavily reported $3.5 trillion. But somewhere approaching the $1.5 trillion that Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia insists was his final offer. Fellow conservative(?), Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona offered nothing except noes.

Associated Press:

With party leaders eager to cut a deal and start moving the legislation in days, progressives are grudgingly assessing whether it’s time to be pragmatic, back a compromise and declare victory.

An agreement would bring another bonus — freeing for final House approval a bipartisan, Senate-approved $1 trillion package of road, water and broadband projects that progressives have sidetracked to pressure moderates to back the larger economic bill.

“Of course I don’t like it,” said progressive Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, of the outsize influence moderates have had in compressing the package and erasing some of its provisions. “These are all things that we’ve been fighting for. For decades.” But she said with Democratic unity needed, the party should use the bill to “open the door” to its priorities and then try extending and expanding them later.

With the slimmest of margins is the House and none in the Senate, Democrats have little room to negotiate with conservative Senate Democrats determined to, as Donald Trump once said, “Use your leverage.”

“So the question is would we prefer not getting anything, or would we prefer something that can at least be a down payment on some of the transformational programs that we want,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., chairman of the House Rules Committee.

Don’t let the perfect, etc.

And enemies of the good? For their part, Manchin and Sinema don’t seem familiar with the expression, “Don’t shit where you eat.”

“At some point, you have to realize that legislating requires respect for the rest of the people you’re working with,” Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., a progressive and chairman of the House Budget Committee, said of Manchin and Sinema. “And when you have forced a 50% cut essentially in a giant program, I think you’ve done a disservice to all the people you serve with.”

“I’m pissed off, man,” said freshman Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., one of the party’s most progressive members, singling out Manchin. “It’s just unacceptable to me that one person from one state can have all this power and make these decisions that will crush my district and districts like mine across the country.”

Sinema’s electoral fate in Arizona is uncertain, but Manchin need not worry about being Liz Cheneyed. Senate Democrats still need him.

David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, recommended in the New York Times on Tuesday that if two of their own prevent Democrats from passing the sweeping legislation of their dreams, Biden and his party should “enact permanent, simple, meaningful programs, and connect them to his argument about how government can work again.”

In essence, build less better:

For too many years, Congress has tried to resolve longstanding policy issues by erecting complicated systems that an untutored public must navigate. Ordinary people who qualify for benefits — usually because they are in great financial need — are drafted into becoming unpaid bureaucrats, forced to spend time and effort to access what the system owes them. It’s confusing and exasperating, and it has sapped the faith that Americans once had in their government. Simply put, Democrats cannot continue to campaign on solving big problems and then fail to deliver without destroying their political project and alienating voters.

Hybrid public-private, means-tested and sunsetted programs simply reinforce Ronald Reagan’s epigram that I won’t repeat here. Efforts to massage out any supposed moral hazards simply add to the cost and line the pockets of insurance executives. Keep it simple, stupid, is still good advice, and Dayen offers it here.

Democrats could subsequently run on a record of actually solving problems, rather than gesturing in their direction. If all the programs were functional yet time-limited, there could be an argument for trying to win elections on extending them. But the path Democrats are going down now, hoping to mobilize voters around poorly designed programs that lock out many of the middle-class suburban voters they have just started to attract again, is a much bigger risk.

Better to prove government can make more people’s lives better than to make a hash of doing too much poorly, says Dayen.

The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted fissures in our society that had festered for decades: the lack of child care when schools shuttered, the lack of shelter during a shelter-in-place order, the lack of health insurance when people lost jobs, the lack of sick leave when workers fell ill with Covid, the lack of at-home care amid tragic outbreaks at nursing homes, the lack of even $400 to cover emergency expenses when disaster struck. Build Back Better represents an effort to never again make citizens so vulnerable, in the next pandemic or in an enduring emergency like the climate crisis.

The Build Back Better Act cannot be enacted as envisioned because of a few corporate Democrats. But Mr. Biden could ensure that what survives actually fills those critical gaps — in family care, in health care, in housing, in cash assistance — not with half-measures but with real relief. That would align the agenda with why voters gave Mr. Biden the presidency in the first place: to get America back to normal, and to make normal better. It would also establish Democrats as worthy of America’s trust.

In essence, Democrats may have to build back trust before they can build back more. Lasting upgrades to the welfare state that apply universally will do that better than time-limited and “undercooked” programs no matter how precious.

Democrats are likely to lose their majorities in both houses of Congress in 2022. They have to prove they can govern for the public good now. Then message the hell out of it if they expect any chance to do it again over the remaining decade. Proving they can do that may be an even greater challenge than passing any bill.

… anything upsetting.

Virginia GOP gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin put out a 60-second ad yesterday of a Very Concerned Mother who somberly recounts how her son showed her his school reading material, and how her “heart sunk” because the reading was “some of the most explicit material you can imagine.

”Lawmakers’ “faces turned bright red” upon reading the material when the mother, Laura Murphy, brought it to them, she claims.

Curiously enough, the ad never mentions which book it was or how old Murphy’s son was at the time.

It turns out the book was Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel “Beloved,” according to the Washington Post’s 2013 report on Murphy’s plight. It was assigned to her son in his AP English class when he was a high school senior, and Murphy attempted to get the book banned.

The student told the Post at the time that the book had given him nightmares because it was “disgusting and gross” and “hard for me to handle.” He is now an associate general counsel for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

What's it like to have Terry McAuliffe block you from having a say in your child's education?

This mom knows – she lived through it. Watch her powerful story. #VAgov pic.twitter.com/u8EjmMQX0n

— Glenn Youngkin (@GlennYoungkin) October 25, 2021

When I took AP English we read “Crime and Punishment”, “Darkness at Noon”, “Catch-22” “Brave New World” among others that were pretty” hard to handle.” But we were college bound high school students taking a college level course so we didn’t go crying to mommy that it was all gross and upsetting.

My parents were arch conservatives. But they weren’t ignorant cretins so they would have told me to read the books and learn something. Which I did.

These right wing parents are out there screaming “fuck Joe Biden” and worshipping a man who brags that he grabs women by the pussy but they are worried about dear little Johnnie having to read great literature that they find “gross and upsetting.” Jesus H. Christ.

They cut taxes and then everything goes to hell and the Democrats take over to clean up their mess:

When it comes to the deficit, Americans have endured a remarkably consistent pattern for four decades.

It starts with a Republican presidential candidate denouncing the deficit and vowing to balance the budget if elected. That Republican then takes office, abandons interest in the issue, and expresses indifference when the deficit becomes vastly larger. Then a Democrat takes office, at which point GOP lawmakers who didn’t care at all about the deficit suddenly decide it’s a critical issue that the new center-left president must immediately prioritize.

During the Democratic administration, the deficit invariably shrinks — a development Republicans tend to ignore — at which point the entire cycle starts over with a new round of national GOP candidates denouncing the deficit and vowing to balance the budget if elected.

A Roll Call report from Friday suggests the 40-year pattern remains intact.

Surging tax revenues as the U.S. economy rebounded from the coronavirus-driven downturn helped reduce the budget deficit for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the Treasury Department and White House budget office announced Friday. The fiscal 2021 deficit clocked in at a still-massive $2.8 trillion, although that’s down $360 billion from the previous year’s shortfall and it’s $897 billion less than the Biden administration predicted in February.

The article added that the deficit was smaller than expected thanks in part to tax receipts reaching their highest level as a share of the economy in 20 years. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement, “Today’s joint budget statement is further evidence that America’s economy is in the midst of a recovery.”

To help contextualize the data, I put together this chart, with red columns from Republican administrations, blue columns from Democratic administrations, and red-and-blue columns from fiscal years that included both Republican and Democratic administrations.

This isn’t quite the picture Donald Trump had in mind. As regular readers may recall, in February 2016, the future president appeared on Fox News and assured viewers that, if he were president, he could start paying off the national debt “so easily.” The Republican argued at the time that it would simply be a matter of looking at the country as “a profit-making corporation” instead of “a losing corporation.”

A month later, in March 2016, Trump declared at a debate that he could cut trillions of dollars in spending by eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Asked for a specific example, he said, “We’re cutting Common Core.” (Common Core is an education curriculum. It costs the federal government almost nothing.)

A month after that, in April 2016, Trump declared that he was confident that he could “get rid of” the entire multi-trillion-dollar debt “fairly quickly.” Pressed to be more specific, the future president replied, “Well, I would say over a period of eight years.”

Don’t worry, if the deficit does goes down during Biden’s term Trump will take credit for that too.

By July 2016, he boasted that once his economic agenda was in place, “we’ll start paying off that debt like water.”

As The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell explained before the Covid-19 crisis, “Federal deficits have widened immensely under Trump’s leadership. This is striking not only because he promised fiscal responsibility — at one time even pledging to eliminate the national debt within eight years — but also because it’s a historical anomaly. Deficits usually narrow when the economy is good and we’re not engaged in a major war…. Trump’s own policies are to blame for this aberration.”

That was plainly true. The White House and congressional Republicans swore up and down in late 2017 that they could slash taxes for the wealthy and big corporations without increasing the deficit because, as they repeatedly insisted, “tax cuts pay for themselves.” We didn’t need additional evidence that their ridiculous belief was, and is, wrong, but the evidence soon followed anyway.

Once the pandemic hit the deficit naturally increased. If Trump had not cut all those taxes the deficit would be much smaller in any case. Just look at the chart above.

This is an old story. We already hear Republicans and functional Republicans like Joe Manchin caterwauling about deficits. It doesn’t seem to have much salience at the moment but it will, you know it will. They just want to wait until the Infrastructure and Reconciliation bills pass.

I would love to think we could change this dynamic but I honestly don’t know how. People are so brainwashed these days that it’s hard to see how to penetrate it.

That’s always been the perennial question about Trump’s acquisition of golf courses in Scotland. We might just be about to find out:

In 2006, Donald Trump purchased a 1,400-acre swath of the old Menie Estate in Aberdeenshire, a rambling property situated on Scotland’s rugged and remote northeastern coast. Trump pledged to develop a world-class golf resort replete with luxury villas there, and he vowed to revitalize the region with more than a billion dollars of investment. Though not an obvious location for a glitzy development—the area is mostly known for its offshore oil industry, and it rains more than a third of the year—Aberdeenshire was to be the beachhead of the mogul’s ambitious plan to insert his family name among the storied golf courses of Scotland, the birthplace of the sport, and attain for his brand the kind of old-world prestige that had eluded Trump in the United States.

The development seemed particularly important to Trump, whose mother hailed from the Isle of Lewis, a far-flung island in the Outer Hebrides. And it was unlike anything he had undertaken before. He often licenses his name to projects financed by others. And the self-proclaimed “king of debt” typically takes out large loans to finance the ventures he does bankroll. In this case, Trump’s company proceeded with the development on its own. And it says it paid for everything in cash.

Such was also the case for Turnberry, the historic golf resort, an hour south of Glasgow, that Trump purchased in 2014 for $60 million. His large expenditures in Scotland were notable because they came during a rocky financial stretch for Trump. The year before purchasing the Aberdeenshire estate, he was ousted as CEO of his thrice-bankrupted casino business; in 2008, he defaulted on a large Deutsche Bank loan tied to a development in Chicago.

Like other Trump wagers, his Scottish gamble has so far not worked out. Both resorts are bleeding millions annually. Meanwhile, he and his company have spent years viciously skirmishing with various locals and government agencies that resisted Trump’s plans to build luxury housing on the fringes of the resorts, which the Trump Organization seems to view as vital to profitability.

If business was lackluster before, it’s dismal now that the coronavirus pandemic has all but halted the Scottish golf season, at least as far as international travelers are concerned. To make matters worse, as Trump’s hospitality empire grapples with the fallout of COVID-19, it also faces a series of maturing debts, loans amounting to nearly a half-billion dollars, which need to be paid down or refinanced over the next four years.

Recently, a new—and perhaps bigger—threat to Trump has emerged in Scotland. Scottish lawmakers are pushing to peer into Trump’s finances using an anti-money-­laundering statute typically employed against kleptocrats, oligarchs, and crime kingpins. Their question: Where did the hundreds of millions Trump poured into his Scottish courses actually come from?

The article goes on to note that Trump stole a coat of arms from some other family in a lame attempt to create an “old world” image and were sanctioned by the government. Of course.

And he fought the installations of wind turbines off the coast, as we know. He just hates wind.

At a hearing in 2012, a member of the Scottish Parliament asked Trump, who appeared in person, for evidence that the turbines would damage Scottish tourism.

“Well, first of all, I am the evidence. I’m more of an expert than the people you’d like me to hire…I am considered a world-class expert in tourism,” Trump declared without missing a beat, as the room broke out in laughter and audience members rolled their eyes.

Trump eventually sued the Scottish government but lost so resoundingly that in 2019 he was ordered to pay its legal fees. The wind farm had been completed the previous year.

He went on to antagonize the community in a dozen different ways, not the least of which was to harass homeowners who did not want to sell to him (for the lowball prices he offered) including trying to get the government to take them.

But it’s the money that intrigues:

He spent nearly $13 million purchasing the land for the Aberdeenshire course, and as much as $50 million developing the property. All, apparently, in cash. According to Trump, after purchasing Turnberry in 2014 for $60 million from a holding company owned by the government of Dubai, he dished out as much as $200 million rehabbing the venerable property.

Neither has ever turned a profit. Turnberry, considered one of the top Scottish courses, has seen its golf business decline. When it opened in 2012, Aberdeenshire was touted as a technically interesting and highly challenging course, but it has struggled to attract crowds. Milne says that over the last few years he’s found it so sleepy it rarely bothers him.

“To be quite honest, it’s not a major issue to me,” he says. “The car park is very rarely more than half full.”

The size of Trump’s wealth is a source of great debate, but two things are fairly well known—the period between 2006 and 2014 included some of his lowest points, financially speaking, and even in the best of times, the amount he splurged in Scotland would be a ton of cash for him to have on hand, let alone spend so freely. And Trump made these Scottish investments amid a $400 million cash spending spree, documented by the Washington Post, in which he also purchased a golf club in Ireland, five courses in the United States, and several pricy homes.

The New Yorker estimated that Trump would have spent half his available cash on the purchase of Turnberry alone, concluding there wasn’t “enough money coming into Trump’s known business to cover the massive outlay he spent” renovating the property.

And the mystery deepens. Martyn McLaughlin, a Glasgow-based reporter for the Scotsman newspaper, discovered that in 2008 Trump approached a Scottish bank asking for a $63 million loan to buy and renovate a historic hotel overlooking the final hole of St. Andrews, the most famous golf course in the world. The terms he proposed were so ludicrously favorable to him that bank executives concluded Trump was asking for a “free loan,” and doing business with the developer was “too risky.” Meanwhile, Trump was touting his “very strong” cash position and his representatives were telling the Scottish public that he had more than $1 billion available to spend in their country. (The Trump Organization did not respond to questions from Mother Jones.)

This February, a group of Scottish Parliament members began making the case that Scotland should use an investigative tool under UK law called an Unexplained Wealth Order (UWO) to scrutinize Trump’s transactions. It can’t be wielded against just anyone; it’s designed to make inquiries into the finances of “politically exposed persons” suspected of money laundering. It has been invoked several times in London; for example, examining how the wife of a jailed ex–Azerbaijani government official had managed to afford a 16 million-pound shopping spree at Harrods.

Patrick Harvie, a Scottish Parliament member and co-leader of Scotland’s Green Party, has led the campaign for a UWO against Trump. “This is not someone who inspires confidence in sound finances and sound business,” he says. “The fact that there are many allegations floating around that the US authorities have investigated, whether it’s in relation to Russia or his political dealings domestically—you don’t have to sniff the air very long to see there’s something that smells.”

We know Trump is the ultimate con man and has been scamming and skimming in various high-end and low-end grifts for years. But 400 million dollars cash is a lot of money and during this period when he was putting his name on cheap perfume and water bottles, he was strapped.

He has always squirmed out of every legal hassle and he may very well squirm out of this as well. But it’s nice to see him getting squeezed from all directions, especially as his top guy, Allen Weisselberg, is on the hotseat.

I’ve been trying to read all the reports on The Facebook Papers and I confess I’m now a little bit lost. I would imagine that I’m not the only one. There is just so much and it’s all flooding the zone to the point that it’s becoming white noise which is not a good thing.

Still, it’s a very big story and we have to try to understand the implications. Here are a few pieces that synthesize what we know:

Key Takeaways from the New York Times
Explainer: Just what are the Facebook Papers Anyway?
An aggregation of all the stories
“History will not judge us kindly” — The Atlantic
Amid the Capitol Riot, Facebook faced its own insurrection

Tech reporter Charlie Warzel’s newsletter has a great deal of information and analysis about what we’ve seen and what we will be seeing and he concludes with this:

The Facebook Papers are clearly important. They are internal documented proof of things that reporters and researchers have been ringing alarms about for years. It’s vital work. And the scale of the coordinated roll-out feels commensurate with the scale of the platform it is trying to hold accountable (It’s fascinating to imagine what the total number of Facebook Files/Facebook Papers pageviews is). That matters.

And yet I’m not sure what’s going to come of it. In a hopeful imagining, the revelations kick off genuine, creative, only semi-partisan regulatory conversations about the platform. Or perhaps they force mass resignations inside the company that lead to some kinds of reforms to retain talent. Perhaps something truly wild happens that creates legal trouble/liability for the company’s executive leadership. Who knows?!

The dismal imagining is that revelations from the Facebook Papers confirm a lot of what everyone from activists to journalists to lawmakers knew or suspected and lawmakers don’t react proportionally. Other grim potential outcomes are that there’s simply information overload from too many stories at once or that this cycle is eventually lost to the very algorithmically driven, fast-churn news cycles that Facebook helped create. I am curious and unsure, for example, about what happens to any regulatory Facebook momentum if the former president decides to launch a political campaign in earnest soonish.

If the regulatory reformers get their wish, there’s a whole host of thorny questions and contentious debates waiting in the ‘How Do You Fix Facebook’ category. There are all kinds of interesting ideas — I suggest you read Will Oremus on ideas for congress to regulate Facebook’s algorithms. I include myself in the camp of people who are quite worried that potential platform ‘fixes’ might jack up the internet in unforeseen ways. Just two weeks ago Democrats proposed a new Section 230 “reform” bill that Fight For The Future director, Evan Greer noted would “function more like a 230 repeal than reform, because it opens the floodgates for frivolous lawsuits claiming algorithmically amplified user content caused harm (a wildly broad category for an enormous amount of content).” This is merely one very small example to highlight that we’re in complicated and still treacherous territory even if/when there’s consensus to ‘fix Facebook.’

Of course you can’t really ‘fix Facebook’ — at least not in any tidy/quick way. You can certainly make it safer (though as years of reporting and Haugen’s ‘Papers’ show, that would require rather substantially making Facebook less like Facebook). And if this week’s reporting has shown anything, it’s that even people inside the company who were hired to study and provide guidance on ways to make the platform safer have found it nearly impossible to push for change at the necessary scale, thanks to executive leadership.

I was struck recently by a line in the opening post of Max Read’s new Substack. “To consider…Facebook only in terms of a value proposition — net good or net bad for humanity — is to miss that it shapes the world as much as the world shapes it.” This sounds simple but it’s actually a dizzying idea that’s almost impossible to unpack without living outside of our current history. Big Tech has largely succeeded in re-imagining and re-making parts of our culture, government (Republican politics is legitimately like 51 percent professional shitposting), and economy.

But Big Tech doesn’t just act on these institutions/forces, they are all horrendously interwoven, making each node in the tangled ecosystem…worse? More complicated? You can make Facebook or YouTube safer. But you can’t necessarily change the ways all this shit has changed us or the ways it will continue to distribute/re-distribute money, power, influence, culture, and information. You can probably find ways to ameliorate the inequalities some but ‘fix’ is an impoverished word when it comes to Facebook. Fix…what exactly? And how exactly? Can we even decide and agree on what to fix and how? You tell me. But before you do, here’s what the Republican leader in the House said yesterday in response to the Facebook Papers:

The Facebook Papers reports illustrate that Big Tech and Legacy Media companies are not just hysterically anti-conservative—they are against any idea that doesn’t fit their narrative.

What they are doing is a particularly dangerous practice of misinformation. My full statement: pic.twitter.com/Sl1orXmhdH

— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) October 25, 2021

For those uninterested in reading the tweet above (I get it!) he’s basically ignoring the content and making up his own (false) takeaways to justify his politics. Classic!

I will just interject here that this makes a great deal of sense for Republicans. They can offer Zuckerberg and company an easy fix: enable conservatives and you’re good to go. In fact, I think it’s pretty clear that Facebook has already gotten that message, they just didn’t know that they would have to endure being beaten up by conservatives anyway. That’s the deal.. But it will, in all likelihood, prevent them from being regulated if they continue to ensure that right wing disinformation and extreme ideology continue to be widely disseminated on the platform.

Warzel continues:

I don’t know what comes next but I’m concerned. I’m concerned that Facebook is too big. I’m concerned that people might tuning out due to over-saturation. I’m concerned that the ‘fixes’ that could come from this momentum are going to be extremely treacherous, too. I’m also concerned that we’re late (not too late…just late). It strikes me as noteworthy that we’ve caught up to what Facebook hath wrought (2012-2020) and Mark Zuckerberg and executive leadership seem to regard that version of Facebook as almost an outdated node of the company. They’ve got a new digital realm to colonize: The Metaverse!

Also, Mr. Zuckerberg doesn’t seem, at present, to be budging (just say ‘fake news,’ Mark!):

"My view on what we are seeing is a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to create a false picture about our company." — Mark Zuckerberg, on earnings call, regarding the last month of leaks

— rat king 🐀 (@MikeIsaac) October 25, 2021

But I’m also worried because it’s going to be hard to untangle Facebook and the rest of the platforms from, well, everything else, including the way these platforms have changed us — the way that the architecture and nature of these platforms act on us and how we, even reluctantly or unwittingly, absorb some of their characteristics. That reckoning will be particularly painful and I’m not sure we fully possess the language or countervailing institutions or historical hindsight to start that work in earnest right now.

Read the whole thing if you can.

Facebook is the internet within the internet. The global influence is overwhelming, and as Warzel points out earlier in his piece, the US actually has the “good ” version of it, to the extent one even exists. The malign influence it has on other countries is truly dangerous.

It’s a huge problem, beyond my ken to understand it. But it’s hard for me to see how it can continue as the behemoth it is nor can it be adequately regulated without a whole lot of unintended consequences. It simply has to be broken up and even willfully destroyed in some ways.

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Bartiromo: Yes, and not only that, but in a situation where there’s  crime spiking across the country, the president of the union, police union, in Chicago is estimating that 3,200 Chicago police are defying the vaccine, and they will be off the job. That means off the streets.
What is that doing to the American people and their feeling of safety? It’s very concerning. Your thoughts on where this is going. I mean, is he just trying to insist that this is a law, so that companies follow, before it could be adjudicated and confirmed to be unconstitutional.

DeSantis: Well first, I think it’s important to point out, on a scientific basis, most of those first responders have had COVID and have recovered. So they have strong protection. 

And so I think that influences their decision on a lot of this, that they have already had it and recovered. And so they’re making no accommodations for that. They’re still pretending like that doesn’t even exist.

And so that’s really, really troubling when you see that. But I can tell you, Maria, in Florida, not only are we going to want to protect the law enforcement and all the jobs. We’re actually actively working to recruit out-of state law enforcement, because we do have needs in our police and sheriff’s departments.

So, in the next legislative session, I’m going to hopefully sign legislation that gives a $5,000 bonus to any out-of-state law enforcement that relocated to Florida, So, NYPD, Minneapolis, Seattle, if you’re not being treated well, we will cover you better here.

That exchange is the context of Ron DeSantis’ insistence that he wasn’t inviting unvaccinated police to move to Florida and collect $5,000 , he was just inviting all cops to move to Florida.

Sure he was. It’s obvious what he was saying. But like his mentor Donald Trump he lies as easily as he breathes.

Charlie Sykes had this in his newsletter this morning:

Over the weekend, Florida’s Ron DeSantis suggested that his state would offer $5,000 signing bonuses to out-of-state cops who left their jobs because they had defied vaccine mandates.

Now DeSantis is furiously insisting that he did no such thing. “It’s for officers, period,” he now claims. “It has nothing to do with their vaccination status.” And anyone who suggests otherwise, is peddling a “false narrative.”

Well, you can take your own dive into DeSantis’ fancy fandango on the issue. Here’s a transcript of his conversation with Maria Bartiromo, where he talks about the bonuses quite clearly in the context of the vaccine mandates.

DeSantis is upset that you missed the subtlety, because the governor is all about nuance these days, as he executes his own tortured (some would say “cynical and reckless”) balancing act on the vaccine issue.

For months now, as Philip Bump notes, “DeSantis has tried to walk a line between the skepticism about vaccines that’s common in a very vocal part of the Republican base and the need to, you know, try to keep Floridians alive.”

His defenders insist that DeSantis has endorsed the use of the vaccines, and they take umbrage at any suggestion that the Florida wunderkind is playing political games with the lives of his own constituents. They prefer that you don’t pay attention to the rest of his elaborate dance. “Any time a member of the media writes about DeSantis’s approach to the vaccine,” Bump notes,” a member of his staff will huffily insist that the governor encouraged Floridians to get vaccinated. And he has. But he’s also been careful not to alienate the hard-right base on the subject.”

DeSantis is trying to pull this off by deploying a logic pretzel: He is not actually anti-vax. He is Pro-Anti-Vax, which (as Bump notes) is functionally the same thing.

What this means, as Jonathan Chait writes, is that, despite his angry denials, DeSantis “has clearly decided the anti-vaccine movement is his constituency. And if his actions cause Floridians to die, it’s a price he’s willing to pay to advance his political career.”

Chait lays out the case:

You can see DeSantis’s progression from anti-anti-anti-vaxxer to simple anti-vaxxer by observing the increasingly strident tone and content of his stances. DeSantis has:

– blocked cruise lines from requiring their customers to be vaccinated. This stance is both a violation of traditional conservative deference to property rights (why should a business owner be forced to permit onto his property infected customers he doesn’t wish to serve?) and a practical economic threat to an important Florida industry (who in their right mind would set foot on a cruise ship that didn’t require everybody to have a vaccine?)

– blocked cities from requiring that their public employees get a vaccine. DeSantis threatened to impose a $5,000 fine per infraction on any Florida town that imposed a vaccine mandate on its city employees

– refused to participate in a federal plan to give $100 checks to everybody who got a vaccine

– appeared at a rally beside an anti-vaxxer who told the audience the vaccine “changes your RNA” and then declined to contradict this absurd claim when his turn came to speak

And then there is his new surgeon general, who has repeatedly voiced doubt about vaccines.

Here’s what he said, as DeSantis looked on:

“People being forced to put something in their bodies that we don’t know all there is to know about yet. No matter what people on TV tell you, it’s not true. We’re going to learn more about the safety of these vaccines. We’re finding that some of these vaccines, the protection from infection is less than 40 percent,” he said, “We’re going to learn more about the safety of these vaccines, right?”

It’s interesting that Chait is saying that. Until recently he was convinced that Republicans weren’t actually trying to prolong the pandemic for political purposes. He’s obviously changed his mind, at least as far as DeSantis is concerned.

I think DeSantis is banking on the pandemic being more or less controlled by the time he has to run for re-election or, more importantly, for president. He will sell himself as someone who didn’t succumb to the pressure of the pointy headed scientists and woke media when he defied all the advice and it turned out that there are plenty of people who lived through it. So he’s a hero. Also, he’s demonstrated that he’s a roaring asshole bully which is the greatest asset a GOP politician can have.

Never mind the pile of bodies. Republicans just don’t care.

“Republicans are not a threat to the republic because they want to ban water distribution in voting lines and drive-through voting. They are a threat to the republic because they have found a potentially fatal weakness in the constitutional order that they are perfectly willing to exploit,” writes former Bush II speechwriter Michael Gerson.

Fatal.

Gerson’s complaint is that Democrats are doing too little beside talking to defend the constitutional order they have sworn to uphold. Gerson imagines Joe Biden as Henry V at Harfleurstrongly recommending his men go once more into the breach. But perhaps Biden as Lincoln would make a more apt parody had Abe’s letter to George McClellan urged him to pursue Lee’s army if it isn’t too much trouble.

That’s not a stretch. After offering lots of tactical advice, Lincoln finished, “This letter is in no sense an order. Yours truly, A. LINCOLN.” Yeah, Biden might have written that.

It will take more than stern language and hints to save the republic. With reason, Gerson is not convinvced Democrats are serious about it. He provides some pros and cons on reforming the filibuster rule that stands in Democrats’ way, digressing to cite experts who believe voter turnout neither helps nor hinders either party.

“[Republicans] certainly intend to cheat,” Gerson offers, “but that doesn’t make them effective cheaters.” More important is that Democrats’ proposed voting rights remedies “are only partially responsive to GOP recklessness.”

But even confronted by clear evidence that Donald Trump and his co-conspirators contemplated a constitutional coup this year, Democrats seem to lack Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “fierce urgency of now.”

Gerson concludes:

What is the proper response when an authoritarian has found a constitutional self-destruct button and can’t wait to press it? Surely this is a reason for Democrats to find a common approach that not only modifies Senate rules to pass the Freedom to Vote Act but also confronts the antidemocratic lawlessness at the heart of Republican ideology. A little more unity, urgency and clarity, please.

And a lot more fierceness.

MSNBC’s documentary, “Civil War,” seems to have left little ripple in the currents of the internet since airing late Sunday on the east coast.

The documentary by executive producers Brad Pitt and Henry Louis Gates, and director Rachel Boynton is not about the history of the war as much as the history of its history: What is taught; what is not; and how southern traitors turned their loss into the noble “Lost Cause” still remembered today in monuments and collective selective memory.

The lesson, for those willing to learn it, is that not coming to terms with the past, not holding those accountable for their crimes, means they have a nasty way of resurfacing generation after generation. Or never really going away in the first place.

A friend who grew up in an abusive family once told me he was determined to confront his family’s history of abuse and break the chain lest he perpetuate it with his children. “This stops with me,” he said.

Dahlia Lithwick addresses American reluctance to confront the past as an expression of a naive optimism about the future. America is constantly being renewed, we tell ourselves. “Civil War” refutes that notion.

The admonishment to “get over it,” she writes is a colorless expression of privilege, even if mostly White:

For years after handing the 2000 election to George W. Bush, then-Justice Antonin Scalia would tell people who inquired about the court’s thin, poorly reasoned opinion in the case to “get over it.” It was easy for him to say that. His decision may have led to the disastrous war in Iraq, but he wasn’t fighting there. It’s a useful lesson to bear in mind when we contemplate what allows powerful people to instruct less powerful people that it is high time to move on: A lack of personal stake in the mess they seek to leave behind. We see this same dynamic when, after every shattering school shooting, politicians with the power to change laws, like Ted Cruz, explain that it is instead time to move on. It’s easy for Ted Cruz to move on when his children are still alive.

“Time to move on” has unsurprisingly come to represent the bulk of the GOP response to Donald Trump’s actions, both while he was in office and after. “Let’s move past this” was the best response to the behaviors that triggered both the first and second impeachments, and the behaviors that helped foment an insurrection at the Capitol that continue to undermine public confidence in the vote. “Let us look forward, not backward,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said on the House floor during the debate over Trump’s second impeachment, last January. “Let us come together, not apart. Let us celebrate the peaceful transition of power to a new president, rather than impeaching an old president.” Never mind that the failure to hold him to account in the first impeachment led to the horrors of a mass effort to subvert the election (an effort that we are still only starting to fathom) and also led to a failed second impeachment. No, the effort to impeach him most recently was still met with the insistence by the bulk of his party that it was time to move on. Of course it was easy for them to suggest that it’s time. It’s always time to move on if your life is unchanged by what came before.

The admonishment comes today from various Republican characters who, since they were or their families were not killed or injured in the Jan. 6 Trump insurrection, had no skin in the game. They think it wise to ignore George Santayana’s advice and simply just move on.

What Ted Cruz, and Condoleezza Rice, and all the generals of the move on army thus perform here isn’t just a cynical manipulation of tempting forward-looking ideas about “unity” and “priorities” and “real world problem solving.” This is, after all, the party of Benghazi and But Her Emails. It’s also a show of the kind of untouchable advantage they hold because they always remain wholly unaffected by what has occurred. To be able to ignore the Iraq War, to be free to ignore Trump’s pitiless immigration policies, to have the luxury of closing the door on January 6, is not so much a marker of an open mind, an objective and temperate worldview, or a more capacious perspective on what the country needs to see happen next. It is also a mirror of which classes of people were harmed by those events and who remained untouched by them. If you are unable to just “get over” the Trump team’s assaults on the levers of democracy themselves, it’s not necessarily because you are vengeful and bloodthirsty or transactional. It may simply be, as Chauncey DeVega wrote last winter in Salon, that “to put oneself outside or above this present moment is to exercise the privilege of being separate and apart from history and its pushes and its pulls, successes and failures, joy and pain, lived consequences and experiences.”

As soon as Whites reclaimed political power across the South after Reconstruction, they set about redeeming their ill-fated and deadly effort to preserve the economic system fueled by slavery by any means necessary. They crafted the Lost Cause narrative that still pertains a century and a half later, as “Civil War” demonstrates, and that sustained a system of apartheid across the South and elsewhere for a century after the supposed “War of Northern Aggression.”

The same flexible morality that prevented the country from confronting the crimes of the rebellion the South initiated in 1861 now presses us to move on from the insurrection we all witnessed on Jan. 6. Republicans don’t want to move on as much as memory-hole it and whitewash their parts in it the way the South rewrote treason as a patriotic rebellion.

There is a difference “between processing, addressing, and remediating past wrongs, and being directed by those in power to forget them,” Lithwick writes:

The former is the work of justice; the latter is the province of bullies. And as we enter another week in which the actions of January 6 are being probed and evaluated by a select committee that has been stymied by those who insist that it’s time we all move forward, or else, it’s worth saying out loud that this isn’t about one half of the country that seeks to look forward as another doggedly remains stuck in the past. This is, instead, about picking between two alternate stories we tell about the same past. One such story might at least pave a path forward to healthier democratic institutions. The other seems ever more destined to drag us into a future in which we are seemingly doomed to keep repeating the very horrors we are being told to forget.

We can confront what happened, punish and purge it, or let the pattern of patriotic rebellion persist another generation. It needs to stop with us.

You’ve got to love it:

President Donald Trump and those around him threw a multitude of voter-fraud conspiracy theories at the wall after the 2020 election. And few were as pervasive as the idea that people rose from the dead to help defeat Trump’s reelection bid.2021 Election: Complete coverage and analysis

Unlike many of the often-nebulous claims, these ones carried the benefit of often having been rather specific — citing actual dead people, by name, who supposedly voted. This made them actually verifiable.

Nearly a year later, those specific claims have provided a case study in — and a microcosm of — just how ridiculous this whole exercise was.

The specific dead people cited by Trump and his allies have, in most cases, proved to not actually have been cases of dead people’s identities used fraudulently to vote. And in several other cases, in which a dead person was actually recorded as voting, the culprit has been identified: not a systemic effort to inflate vote totals for President Biden, but rather a Republican.

On New Year’s Day, the conservative Daily Signal ran down some of the names that had been cited. The Trump campaign had named four people in Pennsylvania and four in Georgia, including in a series of news releases called “Victims of Voter Fraud.” The Nevada Republican Party cited another two in that state, calling one of them “concrete” evidence of irregularities. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson then laundered those names and another in a segment on dead people supposedly voting, saying, “What we’re about to tell you is accurate. It’s not a theory. It happened, and we can prove it.”

Of the 11 names cited in all of this, though, none has been shown to involve the identities of dead people used to vote for Biden. Most have been either debunked or pointed in the opposite direction.

We’ll recap the examples below, with the supposed dead person voting in bold.

The latest example involves a man in Nevada who said someone had voted in the name of his dead wife, Rosemarie Hartle. This was hailed widely on conservative media. It was the case the Nevada GOP said showed the “concrete” evidence of irregularities. We learned late last week that there might have been fraud involved, but the alleged fraud was perpetrated by a Republican with ties to the Trump campaign. The man, Donald Kirk Hartle, has been charged with voting in his dead wife’s name.

The situation was much that same with another name the Trump campaign cited in Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Bartman. Not long after it lifted that case up, Bartman’s son Bruce admitted he had registered and voted in his long-dead mother’s name to help Trump. He pleaded guilty.

Two others follow the pattern. Also in Pennsylvania, registered Republican Francis Fiore Presto was charged with requesting and casting a ballot for his dead wife, Judy Presto. Also in that state, the family of Denise Ondick said her ballot was filled out shortly before she died close to the election. A family member said their mother intended to vote for Trump.

Last week the Texas Lieutenant Governor finally paid out a reward to someone who found voter fraud. Much to his chagrin it was to someone who uncovered a Republican who voted twice. Of course.

It’s all projection.

And what we can learn from that experience:

The United Kingdom is highly vaccinated against COVID, but it also has the worst rate of new COVID infections in all of Western Europe right now. Eight times the rate in France. Six times the rate in Germany. Twenty times the rate in Spain.

To a vaccine-skeptic, that might seem like evidence that the jabs don’t work. It’s not. The vaccines are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do: reducing the rate of severe illness and keeping people out of hospitals.

The problem is that, as high as the U.K.’s vaccine rate is, it’s not high enough to block the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s transmission pathways and achieve population-level “herd immunity,” especially considering that vaccine uptake is slowing fast. And many of those who are already vaccinated are about to lose some of their protection as their antibodies and T-cells fade.

Making the problem worse, people are gathering in big groups again and shrugging off masks. And authorities aren’t trying very hard to stop them. The government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson lifted most mandatory social-distancing rules back in July and has resisted calls to at least partially reinstate them.

And then there are the kids under 12. Around 10 million of them, all unvaccinated, packing fully reopened schools.

Oh, and all of the above is happening right as a possible new form of SARS-CoV-2—a sun variant of the Delta variant known as AY.4.2—has appeared in the U.K., worrying authorities.

It’s a perfect storm of ambivalence and disease. “The population has given up face masks, government messaging on the continued importance of social distancing is poor and, most importantly, [there’s a] raging epidemic in school children,” Sir Roy Anderson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, told The Daily Beast.

The numbers are staggering. Officials have logged around 45,000 new COVID cases every day for several days now. That’s only slightly fewer than they counted on a daily basis during the peak of the previous surge in infections back in late summer.“Vaccinations have stalled.”

[…]

Today 67 percent of the 67 million people living in the U.K. have gotten at least one dose of vaccine. That’s 86 percent of the eligible population, ages 12 and up.

But 67 percent isn’t enough for herd immunity. Experts differ on what proportion of a given large population would need to be vaccinated to end transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Some say 75 percent. Some say 90 percent. Some say you’d have to vaccinate practically everyone.

Slow vaccine uptake among younger residents is pushing herd immunity out of reach. The vaccine rate for 18-to-29-year-olds has plateaued at around 60 percent. Pre-teens and teens between 12 and 17 likewise are getting jabbed very slowly. In the six months since authorities cleared this group to get vaccinated, fewer than one in three has stepped up.

“Vaccinations have stalled,” Edwin Michael, an epidemiologist at the Center for Global Health Infectious Disease Research at the University of South Florida who has run simulations of COVID in various countries, told The Daily Beast.

At the same time, U.K. residents are gathering without masks more and more often. In April, 91 percent of people reported they always avoid groups larger than two people, according to one Imperial College London survey. In September, that slipped to 40 percent, despite the spread of the more-dangerous Delta variant of the virus.

In the survey, around 60 percent of respondents reported wearing a mask outside the home. That’s lower than in France, Italy and Spain, where at least 80 percent of people reported wearing a mask.

Public health measures began to collapse at the worst possible time. The school year began in early September. Six weeks later, a staggering 8 percent of all secondary school students have been infected. More than 200,000 kids were out of school for COVID-related reasons this week, Reuters reported.

“Schools are certainly a major driving force in the U.K. surge because they are efficient transmitters within their families and communities,” Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University global health expert, told The Daily Beast.

The urgency is growing for U.K. officials to authorize COVID shots for children, Anderson said. “You need to vaccinate all [people] over the age of 2 to stop the spread.” But it’s not clear when U.K. authorities might allow younger kids to get jabbed. Pfizer submitted vaccine data for under-12s to American regulators late last month, but those officials have yet to act.“People should look at England and seriously relook policies.”

SARS-CoV-2 is running rampant through U.K. schools. But that’s not London’s only problem as the pandemic approaches its third year. Immunity might be waning for the millions of people in the U.K. who got their initial shots early in the vaccine rollout last winter.

Delta and other more virulent variants are a factor, of course. But so is time. Few vaccines have effects that endure forever.

U.K. residents who got vaccinated earliest probably now need booster shots. But booster uptake is sluggish, too. Authorities so far have authorized around 8.5 million people in certain high-risk age and health categories to get a third shot of the Pfizer, Moderna, or AstraZeneca vaccines.

But just 3.7 million people have gotten a booster since third shots got the initial greenlight last month. That’s less than half of the eligible population. Compare that to Israel, which swiftly boosted 4 million people. That’s 80 percent of the eligible population and nearly half the total population. “Israel’s rates of COVID have since come way down” as a result, Gostin explained.

If there’s a silver lining in the COVID storm clouds gathering over the U.K., it’s that the vaccines have blunted the very worst outcomes. Yes, the rate of new cases is disturbingly high. But it’s lower than the 60,000 cases a day the country registered during the bleakest weeks of the pandemic back in January.

Hospitalizations and deaths are way down, too. U.K. hospitals were admitting more than 4,000 COVID patients a day back in January. Now hospitalizations are fewer than 1,000 a day. For a few days in early February, around 1,200 U.K. residents died of COVID every day. Now just 130 die daily, on average.

The high-quality COVID vaccines work, in the U.K. and everywhere else. But they’d work much better if more eligible people would get their initial jabs and, later, their boosters—and if officials would make sure more kids were vaccinated before throwing schools wide open.

The U.K.’s struggle should serve as a warning, Michael said. “People should look at England and seriously relook policies regarding third boosters, child vaccinations and the need for at least mask-wearing until the pandemic is brought under control.”

The warning says that the US should keep pushing vaccines for younger people and kids as soon as they are ok’d by the FDA and CDC. Everyone who can should get a booster. My experience says it’s much easier than it was when the vaccines rolled out last winter and spring. And we should keep wearing masks in public places and using common sense when we’re around people if we don’t know they are vaccinated.

This is doable. If it weren’t for the idiot refusniks who keep spreading this around, we would be way ahead of this already.