Month: November 2021

Krugman’s newsletter today looks at this weird paradox of the public being depressed about the economy when the economy is booming:

By the usual measures, the U.S. economy has been booming this year. Employment has risen by more than five million since January; a record number of Americans say this is a good time to find a quality job, a sentiment reflected in the willingness of an unprecedented number of workers to quit (yes, high quit rates are a good sign).

Yet Americans are, or say they are, pessimistic about the economic situation. For example, here’s the widely cited Michigan index of consumer sentiment, which has slid to a level not seen since the depths of the pandemic slump:

How can people be feeling so bad about a seemingly good economy?

One answer is that Americans are upset about inflation and disrupted supply chains. And that’s surely true. But I’d suggest that it’s only part of the story — that to an important extent, when you ask people about the state of the economy, their replies don’t necessarily reflect their actual experience. Instead, they respond based on what they imagine is happening to other people, a perception that can be shaped by news reports and their own political leanings.

That is, I’m suggesting that public views about the economy are a bit like public views on crime, which many people said was rising even when it was steadily falling.

OK, I don’t want to go all Phil Gramm here. For those who don’t get the reference, Gramm, a former congressman, was an adviser to John McCain during the 2008 presidential campaign, and he made waves by dismissing concerns about the economy. We were, he insisted, only in a “mental recession” and had become a “nation of whiners.”

So for the record, inflation is indeed high by recent standards and supply-chain issues are real, although often overstated. (Retailers are hiring furiously for the holiday season, suggesting that they expect to have plenty to sell.)

Still, when you look into consumer surveys, you find that answers to the question “How is the economy doing?” don’t necessarily track with answers to the question “How are you doing?”

Here’s what the Michigan survey found when it asked people to compare their current financial situation with their situation five years ago; numbers greater than 100 mean improvement. That number has slid a bit since the beginning of this year, but it’s still quite high — in fact, as high as the average for 2019, when the Trump administration was boasting nonstop about the economy:

So Americans, while legitimately troubled by inflation, are feeling pretty good about their own financial situation; their downbeat economic assessment involves a belief that bad things are happening to other people. Where does that belief come from?

To some extent public perceptions may have been shaped by widespread media coverage of preliminary economic reports that suggested a struggling economy. After revisions, the data look much better — most notably, soft preliminary employment numbers for August and September received many headlines, while it’s a good bet that few Americans are aware of later revisions that added more than 200,000 jobs.

And some news organizations have been doing all they can to convey the impression of a troubled economy, whatever the reality. As I suggested, while supply-chain issues are real, their impact is often overstated; empty shelves are actually fairly rare. That, presumably, is why Fox News and Newsmax have been running segments about the Biden economy featuring photos of empty shelves that were taken last year or in other countries.

Which brings me to the effects of partisanship. Republicans and Democrats share the same economy, but their responses to surveys about that economy’s condition are very different. After Donald Trump’s still-not-acknowledged electoral defeat, Republicans turned hugely more negative on the economy, while Democrats turned somewhat more positive:

So why do Americans feel bad about a seemingly booming economy? Inflation and shortages of some goods are real issues, but much of the economic discontent seems to be based on news reports and partisan leanings, that is, it’s disconnected from personal experience.

This has important implications, among other things, for the politics of economic policy. The economy is likely to get considerably better over the months ahead as the pandemic subsides and snarls in the supply chain get worked out. But there is no guarantee that the American public will even notice these gains. If the Biden administration wants to turn perceptions around, an objectively good economy won’t be enough; the good news will have to be sold, hard.

I think we’re all having a pandemic and Trump hangover and it’s reflected in attitides about the economy. But honestly, the real problem is the media. Last August when Biden was being hammered for Afghanistan, the press went nuts on a tepid economic report (that has since been substantially revised upwards as have all the months since then.) The “Biden is a terrible failure” narrative took hold and they gleefully ran with it without looking back.

Inflation fears are real, but inflation isn’t just the price of goods it’s also wage growth which should be a positive for the average American. The supply chain glitches are something we’ve been dealing with for a while.

And the partisan divide on this can be explained by liars like this:

“I worked in that White House for four years. We never even heard of a such of a thing. There was no supply chain crisis” pic.twitter.com/UPmLRFoivJ

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 9, 2021

Those are more of ther “alternative facts.” I’m sure normal people remember the empty shelves, toilet paper and sanitizer shortages and the shocking inability to get PPE to hospitals for months during the early months of the pandemic. But on the right, that didn’t happen and only Joe Biden has been dealing with the pandemic’s supply chain issues.

I have a feeling this will smooth out sooner rather than later. But whether the Democrats will be able to capitalize on a good economy is largely contingent on the media telling that story. So far I’m not sanguine.

Remember when Chris Christie helped Trump with debate prep and got COVID from it and wound up in the hospital? Well, no good deed goes unpunished:

Former President Trump hammered former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) on Monday after Christie called on Republicans to move past Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.

Christie, a former Trump ally, made the remarks at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s conference in Las Vegas, during which he urged the GOP to present “plan for tomorrow, not a grievance about yesterday.” 

“Winning campaigns are always the campaigns that look forward, not backwards,” he said, warning that Republicans would pay a political price if they continue to dwell on the 2020 presidential election.

Christie’s comments drew the ire of Trump, who more than a year after losing his reelection bid has continued to claim that widespread voter fraud and malfeasance cost him a second term in the Oval Office.

“Chris Christie, who just made a speech at the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) in Las Vegas, was just absolutely massacred by his statements that Republicans have to move on from the past, meaning the 2020 Election Fraud,” Trump said in a statement. 

“Everybody remembers that Chris left New Jersey with a less than 9% approval rating – a record low, and they didn’t want to hear this from him!”

I suspect that Christie thinks he is the guy who has the requisite asshole qualities to succeed Trump with the MAGA cult. But I think he misunderstands Trump’s unique appeal. It’s not just hat he’s an obnoxious jerk. It’s that he’s rich and famous, married to a model, has a glamorous (in their eyes) family and hates the Republicans as much as he hates the Democrats. Christie has no glitz and that’s a huge part of what they love about Trump.

Once Trump is off the scene, whenever that is, I’d expect the entire in-your-face jackass contingent to make a play but so far I don’t see anyone with Trump’s special sauce. So it may end up being someone completely different

Pete Buttigieg made a comment last week that is making right wingers heads explode. As you know, they do not believe that structural/institutional racism exists — or has ever existed.

Not true:

Is it possible to get a @GlennKesslerWP fact check that structural engineers purposefully built racist overpasses? @redsteeze @ComfortablySmug https://t.co/H3j9QcE44f

— Just Donna (@Crypsis12) November 8, 2021

Ask an ye shall receive:

This is detailed at length in Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Robert Moses, “The Power Broker.” See especially pages 318-319: “He began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low — too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouraging long and arduous.

For Negroes, who he considered inherently ‘dirty,’ there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, especially to Moses’s beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted off to parks many miles further on Long Island.” There’s much, much more. Easily one of the best nonfiction books ever written.

via @pbump –>

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/08/this-is-why-its-useful-talk-about-historic-examples-institutionalized-racism/

Originally tweeted by Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) on November 8, 2021.

Racists can be very creative people. And the more society becomes aware of and rejects such bigotry, the more creative they are.

This excerpt of Jonathan Karl’s Trump book is … well, just read it:

In late October 2020, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was attending the confirmation hearing for Amy Coney Barrett when his cellphone rang. He answered with a whisper and walked out to the hallway to take the call. What was so urgent as to pull the chief of staff out of a Supreme Court confirmation hearing just two weeks before a presidential election?

On the line was Andrew Hughes, the top staffer at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Meadows had asked him to call because it had been brought to Meadows’s attention that a young assistant at HUD had been caught consorting with the enemy.

She had liked an Instagram post from the pop star Taylor Swift.

The first photo in the post was of Swift with the word VOTE superimposed on it in large blue letters. But a swipe revealed a second photo, of Swift carrying a tray of cookies emblazoned with the Biden-Harris campaign logo. “We really can’t have our people liking posts promoting Joe Biden,” Meadows told Hughes.

Never mind that nearly 3 million other people had liked the post or that the young woman was a Taylor Swift fan who liked just about everything Swift had ever posted. To the enforcers of Trumpian loyalty, this was a sign of treachery in the ranks.

Those enforcers—including the eagle-eyed official who had first spotted the offending “like”—worked for the Presidential Personnel Office, a normally under-the-radar group responsible for the hiring and firing of the roughly 4,000 political appointees in the executive branch. During the final year of the Trump administration, that office was transformed into an internal police force, obsessively monitoring administration officials for any sign of dissent, purging those who were deemed insufficiently devoted to Trump and frightening others into silence. (Many sources for this story asked to remain anonymous so they could talk about sensitive personnel issues.) Some Trump aides privately compared the PPO to the East German Stasi or even the Gestapo—always on the lookout for traitors within.

The office was run by Johnny McEntee. Just 29 when he got the job, he’d come up as Trump’s body guy—the kid who carried the candidate’s bags. One of Trump’s most high-profile Cabinet secretaries described him to me as “a fucking idiot.” But in 2020, his power was undeniable. Trump knew he was the one person willing to do anything Trump wanted. As another senior official told me, “He became the deputy president.”

McEntee and his enforcers made the disastrous last weeks of the Trump presidency possible. They backed the president’s manic drive to overturn the election, and helped set the stage for the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Thanks to them, in the end, the elusive “adults in the room”—those who might have been willing to confront the president or try to control his most destructive tendencies—were silenced or gone. But McEntee was there—bossing around Cabinet secretaries, decapitating the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, and forcing officials high and low to state their allegiance to Trump.

When Trump wasn’t happy with the answers he was getting from White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, McEntee set up a rogue legal team. This back-channel operation played a previously unknown role in the effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the vote. Just days before January 6, McEntee sent Pence’s office an absurd memo making the case that Pence would be following Thomas Jefferson’s example if he used his power to declare Trump the winner of the 2020 election.

More than anyone else in the White House, McEntee was Trump’s man through and through—a man who rose to power at precisely the moment when American democracy was falling apart.

I first met Johnny McEntee when I visited Trump Tower in 2015, not long after Trump announced he was running for president. McEntee was polite, earnest, and eager to please. He identified himself as Trump’s “trip director” and gave me a tour of the campaign headquarters. (He declined to comment for this story.)

McEntee was one of the first full-time staffers on the campaign, and he went everywhere Trump went. When Trump became president, McEntee had a workspace outside the Oval Office—right against the curved wall. The boss liked having McEntee around. A former quarterback for the University of Connecticut, he was good-looking and tall—but not too tall, about an inch shorter than Trump. During the first 14 months of the Trump presidency, McEntee did what he had done during the campaign: He carried Trump’s bags.

In March 2018, it looked for a moment like his Washington career was over. He was fired by then–Chief of Staff John Kelly after a long-delayed FBI background check revealed that he had deposited suspiciously large sums of money into his bank account. It turned out that the money was from gambling winnings. After Kelly himself was fired, McEntee returned to his old spot outside the Oval. It was January 2020, and he wouldn’t be just a body guy for long.

In mid-February, Trump called his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to a meeting. Ominous signs of the coming pandemic were beginning to emerge. Hundreds of Americans who had been evacuated from Wuhan, China, were in quarantine on military bases. The World Health Organization had just reported a frightening new development—a small number of COVID-19 cases in people who had never traveled to China. But the subject of the meeting wasn’t the virus. It was staffing. Trump, newly acquitted in his first Senate impeachment trial, was looking to make some changes.

“I want to put Johnny in charge of personnel,” the president told Mulvaney.

The director of presidential personnel is responsible for vetting and hiring everybody, including ambassadors, Cabinet secretaries, and top intelligence officials. McEntee had never hired anybody for anything. Now he was going to be in charge of perhaps the most important human-resources department in the world?

Mulvaney called his top deputy, Emma Doyle, who oversaw the current director of personnel, into the meeting. “Mr. President,” she said, “I have never said no to anything you’ve asked me to do, but I am asking you to please reconsider this. I don’t think it is a good idea.”

Doyle had spent a lot of time around the president, but she had never seen him as angry as he was about to become.

“You people never fucking listen to me!” Trump screamed. “You’re going to fucking do what I tell you to do.”

A few hours later, Doyle was on Air Force One, along with McEntee, en route to a Trump rally in New Hampshire. She asked him about his interest in the position.

“People have been telling me I should do that for a long time,” McEntee told her. “I didn’t feel ready before, but I am 29 now and I’m ready.” He added, “I’m the only person around here that’s just here for the president.”

McEntee told the president exactly what he wanted to hear: that his political problems were caused by people who pretended to support him but were really against him, the secret Never Trumpers right there in his administration. It was time to root out the “deep state.”

McEntee began scouring federal agencies for people who didn’t support all things Trump. Beginning in June 2020—in the middle of both the pandemic and the presidential campaign—the personnel office informed virtually every senior official across the federal government, regardless of how long they had worked in the administration, that they would need to sit down for a job interview.

A president has a right to expect that his political appointees support his policies and will work to carry them out. These are, after all, political appointees. But most of the people McEntee’s team questioned were already devoted to Trump; they were still putting their reputations on the line to work for him three and a half years into his administration. But that wasn’t enough for the loyalty enforcers.

McEntee’s underlings were, for the most part, comically inexperienced. He had staffed his office with very young Trump activists. He had hired his friends, and he had hired young women—as one senior official in the West Wing put it to me, “the most beautiful 21-year-old girls you could find, and guys who would be absolutely no threat to Johnny in going after those girls.”

“It was the Rockettes and the Dungeons & Dragons group,” the official said.

In fact, one McEntee hire was literally a Rockette; she had performed with Radio City Music Hall’s finest in the 2019 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The only work experience listed on her résumé besides a White House internship was a stint as a dance instructor. McEntee also hired Instagram influencers. Camryn Kinsey, for example, was 20 and still in college when McEntee gave her the title of external-relations director. In an interview with the online publication The Conservateur, she said, “Only in Trump’s America could I go from working in a gym to working in the White House, because that’s the American dream.” (Kinsey went on to work at the pro-Trump One American News Network.)

The interviews with McEntee’s team usually lasted about an hour. They included questions such as “Do you support the policies of the Trump administration and, if so, which ones?” That question was asked of Makan Delrahim, the head of the Department of Justice’s antitrust division. As the person carrying out the president’s antitrust policies, he found the question strange.

Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency and HUD were asked, “Do you support the president’s plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan?” It was a bizarre question, given that neither official had anything remotely to do with Afghanistan policy.

The DOJ spokesperson Kerri Kupec was asked, “What are your political inclinations?” A little amused, she responded, “Are you asking if I am Republican?”

McEntee’s enforcers scoured the social-media accounts and voting records of officials high and low. An office assistant at the DOJ was asked to explain why she had voted in a local Democratic primary a few years earlier. She explained that her parents had told her that’s where her vote would count most, because the Democratic primary winner was all but certain to win the general election. Nonetheless, after the interview, she was denied a promotion and raise that she had been eligible to receive.

McEntee took a particular interest in one job category: White House liaisons to Cabinet agencies. Traditionally, the liaison job is a mid-level position, responsible for coordinating messages between the agencies and the White House. But McEntee didn’t want messengers. McEntee wanted people who would boss around the senior officials and report back to him.

In early November 2020, he installed a conservative activist named Heidi Stirrup as liaison at the DOJ. Stirrup was primarily known as an anti-abortion activist who had worked as a mid-level staffer for Republicans in Congress. She had no legal experience, but she was intensely loyal to Trump—and to McEntee. Her car was easy to spot in the DOJ parking lot; it was covered with Trump bumper stickers—unusual at a department where even the most political of political appointees try to appear to be above the fray.

A few days after the election, in her first full day in the office, she went in to meet a senior official on Attorney General Bill Barr’s team. It didn’t go well. “You need to wake up to the fact this election is being stolen!” she screamed. “It needs to be stopped!” (The Atlantic was not able to reach Stirrup for comment.)

Barr’s team saw Stirrup as more than just annoying; they worried she would snoop into DOJ investigations. This would have been highly unethical—the White House is not supposed to interfere in criminal cases.

The next time Stirrup came around to berate the senior official, he asked her if she would like to deliver her message directly to the attorney general, and with that he brought her in to see Barr. Most people find Barr intimidating, but not Heidi Stirrup. “The election is being stolen,” she lectured him. “You need better people doing these investigations.” And she told him she had a list of people, presumably provided by McEntee, whom he needed to hire.

Barr later told me he’d never seen this kind of behavior. By the end of the week, he had ordered her banned from the DOJ building. Her pass was deactivated, and security was instructed not to let her in.

A similar run-in between a White House liaison and senior leadership had taken place at the Department of Homeland Security a few months earlier. McEntee had installed Josh Whitehouse, a 25-year-old Trump supporter from New Hampshire, at DHS, and Whitehouse immediately started throwing his weight around, often threatening to fire people (though he had no direct authority to do so).

Two people who worked with Whitehouse on the second floor of DHS headquarters told me his mood swings were so wild that they worried he could get violent. He was overheard screaming things into the phone such as, “If they don’t do this, I will literally go to their house and burn it down.” (Whitehouse said the quote sounded “exaggerated” and he didn’t think he had said it.) As one DHS official told me, “I was legitimately worried he was going to come and kill us.” When I asked Whitehouse about this comment, he told me, “They need help.” He added: “I can’t imagine anybody should be afraid of another person working there if they are in it for the right reasons and aligned with the agenda.”

In mid-August 2020, Whitehouse had a loud confrontation with Acting DHS Secretary Chad F. Wolf in front of several witnesses. It happened after Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at DHS, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post criticizing Trump. Taylor wrote that “the country is less secure as a direct result of the president’s actions” and that he would be crossing party lines to vote for Joe Biden.

There are plaques in the office that include the names of all the past secretaries of Homeland Security and their chiefs of staff, each engraved on a metal plate. After the op-ed, Whitehouse set out to remove Taylor’s name. He was in the process of unscrewing the plate when Wolf walked by.

“What are you doing?” Wolf asked him.

“I am removing the name of this traitor,” Whitehouse answered.

“Stop. That doesn’t belong to you. It doesn’t belong to me. And we don’t erase history here at the Department of Homeland Security.”

Whitehouse erupted at the Cabinet secretary: “Miles Taylor is a traitor! This just shows you don’t really support President Trump!”

By the fall, Whitehouse would be reassigned to a more important job: White House liaison at the Pentagon. When the move was announced, he told people, “I’m going to the Pentagon to fire [Defense Secretary Mark] Esper and those deep-state bastards!”

But before he left, he had one piece of unfinished business. At a moment when he saw that Secretary Wolf was out of the building, Whitehouse once again went over to the list of names. He removed Miles Taylor’s plate and flipped it over so the metal face was blank, before screwing it back into the wall.

In October 2020, Whitehouse helped the Presidential Personnel Office write a series of memos identifying nearly two dozen Pentagon officials they thought should be fired, each outlining transgressions allegedly made against Trump.

The memo on Esper, never before made public, provides remarkable insight into the degree to which McEntee’s team was calling the shots. It includes bullet points outlining Esper’s sins: He “bars the display of the Confederate flag” on military bases; “opposed the President’s direction to utilize American forces to put down riots”; “focused the Department on Russia”; was “actively pushing for ‘diversity and inclusion’”; and so on. The memo recommended that Esper be fired immediately after the election and replaced by Christopher Miller, then the director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

Trump followed the script. Six days after the election, Esper was fired and replaced by Miller. McEntee also selected Miller’s senior adviser, Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel and regular guest on Tucker Carlson’s show. As Axios’s Jonathan Swan first reported, McEntee gave Macgregor a handwritten to-do list for the new team at the Pentagon:

1. Get us out of Afghanistan.

2. Get us out of Iraq and Syria.

3. Complete the withdrawal from Germany.

4. Get us out of Africa.

“This is what the president wants you to do,” McEntee told him.

Then he turned his attention to the coup. Read on for more about this little henchman’s work to get Pence to overturn the election.

I have taken a fair amount of grief for calling the MAGA movement a cult and using the term Dear Leader to describe Trump. This is exhibit A.

Michelle Goldberg has a new fan, Christopher Rufo, “architect of the right-wing crusade against critical race theory.” He wanted to gloat:

“I’ve unlocked a new terrain in the culture war, and demonstrated a successful strategy,” said Rufo, a documentary filmmaker-turned-conservative activist. With that done, he was getting ready for a new phase of his offensive.

“We are right now preparing a strategy of laying siege to the institutions,” he said. In practice, this means promoting the traditional Republican school choice agenda: private school vouchers, charter schools and home-schooling. “The public schools are waging war against American children and American families,” he said. Families, in turn, should have “a fundamental right to exit.”

Hyperbole much?

Public schools have been a culture-war battleground perhaps since the 1950s, Goldberg writes, but Covid shutdowns have reinvigorated conservative opposition and played a role in last week’s gubernatorial election in Virginia:

“The failure of our leadership to prioritize public education in Virginia is what’s created this firestorm,” said Christy Hudson, one of the founders of the Fairfax County Parents Association, which grew out of a pro-reopening group that formed in the summer of 2020. Critical race theory, she said, “has certainly added flames to that fire,” but “this is 19 months in the making.”

“It’s a perilous situation for Democrats, the party of public schools,” Goldberg writes. “If they want to stanch the bleeding, they should treat the rollout of the children’s Covid vaccine as an opportunity to make public schools feel lively and joyful again.” Conservatives are ready to pounce. Conservatives like Rufo.

Rufo readily admits that school closures prepared the ground for the drive against critical race theory. “You have a multiracial group of parents that felt like the public school bureaucracies were putting their children through a policy regime of chaos, with Covid and shutdowns, and then pumping them full of left-wing racialist ideologies,” he said. He’s right about the first part, even if the second is a fantasy.

Now Democrats have a choice. They can repair the public schools, or watch people like Rufo destroy them.

It’s hard to describe just how anti-American this conservative drive is to destroy public schools (or how much it grinds my teeth to nubs). Support for public education was a foundational principle of this country since before ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Prior to government’s ability to tax, disposition of public lands was one means of raising revenue. The Land Ordinance of 1785 provided that in breaking up public land for development, “There shall be reserved the lot No. 16, of every township, for the maintenance of public schools …”

As Stuart Stevens found out the hard way, “Republicans never believed what they were saying” about “belief in a transcendant moral order” or in defending “the unchanging ground of our changing experience,” and such. Much less in America’s historical commitment to public education.

So, once again:

John Adams (a tea party favorite) wrote in 1785, “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.”

To that purpose, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (passed under the Articles of Confederation prior to ratification of the U.S. Constitution) called for new states formed from what is now the American Midwest to encourage “schools and the means of education,” and the Enabling Act of 1802 signed by President Thomas Jefferson (for admitting the same Ohio that Santorum visited on Saturday) required — as a condition of statehood — the establishment of schools and public roads, funded in part by the sale of public lands. Enabling acts for later states followed the 1802 template, establishing permanent funds for public schools, federal lands for state buildings, state universities and public works projects (canals, irrigation, etc.), and are reflected in state constitutions from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The practice continued up to and including the enabling act for the admission of Hawaii in 1959 as America’s 50th state, for example (emphasis added):

(f) The lands granted to the State of Hawaii by subsection (b) of this section and public lands retained by the United States under subsections (c) and (d) and later conveyed to the State under subsection (e), together with the proceeds from the sale or other disposition of any such lands and the income therefrom, shall be held by said State as a public trust for the support of the public schools and other public educational institutions, for the betterment of the conditions of native Hawaiians, as defined in the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, 1920, as amended, for the development of farm and home ownership on as widespread a basis as possible for the making of public improvements, and for the provision of lands for public use. Such lands, proceeds, and income shall be managed and disposed of for one or more of the foregoing purposes in such manner as the constitution and laws of said State may provide, and their use for any other object shall constitute a breach of trust for which suit may be brought by the United States. The schools and other educational institutions supported, in whole or in part out of such public trust shall forever remain under the exclusive control of said State; and no part of the proceeds or income from the lands granted under this Act shall be used for the support of any sectarian or denominational school, college, or university.

It’s pretty plain that breaching that trust is just what our flag-waving, conservative friends have in mind. As I explained in that Scrutiny Hooligans post (above) in 2012, business interests hope to coopt religious conservatives into putting a middle-man in every middle school for extracting public education tax dollars:

As reported here and here and here, that same hunger for private profit is behind the widespread assault on public education from education industry and “reform” advocates. It is not about innovation, efficiency, smaller government, lower taxes, deficits, choice, or the Constitution. It is about getting investors a piece of the trillion-dollar K-12 public education action, “the Big Enchilada,” as Jonathan Kozol wrote for Harper’s:

It is this prospect – and the even more appealing notion that companies that start by managing these schools might at some future point achieve the right, through changes in state laws, to own the schools as well – that helps explain why EMOs [Education management Organizations] like Edison, which has yet to turn a profit, nonetheless attract vast sums of venture capital. The “big enchilada” represented by the corporate invasion of public schools, even if it takes place only in progressive stages, is sufficiently enticing to investors to keep the money flowing in anticipation of a time when private corporations will not merely nibble at the edges of the public system but will devour it altogether.

That may not serve the public good. It may not create jobs, improve education or improve the lives of students. Or in any way resemble the founders’ vision. But it might net the right people a lot of public money.

And conservatives are fine with helping them, especially if it owns the libs.

Jonathan Karl spoke with Stephen Colbert Monday night about events surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection. The ABC News Chief White House Correspondent is promoting “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show.”

Peter Weber at The Week recounts:

While the rioters were still ransacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from Donald Trump to President Biden, Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl “he wanted the 25th amendment to be invoked, immediately,” Karl told Stephen Colbert on Monday’s Late Show, and Trump’s Cabinet “should meet right now and they should get him out now.”

Rioters “were trying to stop what makes American democracy democracy,” Karl said.

“They almost succeeded, Karl continued, echoing many other witnesses to the sacking of the U.S. Capitol. The “heroes” of that day were not your traditional heroes, many of them longtime, lower-level Republican functionaries, some of them even “political hacks,” but committed to doing their jobs.

Karl recounts interviewing Trump at Mar-a-Lago after he left office and describes him as

“utterly delusional.” Trump insisted on holding the interview in the resort’s lobby just before dinner to ensure everyone would see him being interviewed.

“I’m with the great Jonathan Karl,” Trump told guests. Trump at other times described Karl in less favorable terms.

In an audio clip, Trump is heard (above lobby noise) responding to a question about the Jan. 6 riot. Trump focuses instead on the crowd size, about how many came at his beckoning.

“Can you imagine?” Karl said. “I’m asking him about a riot, I’m asking about one of the darkest days in American history, and he’s talking about how many people came out to see him.”

Coilbert asked about Karl’s dispute with the former vice president. Karl has been trying to get released photographs taken by a White House photographer of Vice President Mike Pence hiding out in the bowels of the Capitol on that day.

“I have a suspicion that the Jan. 6 committee is going to want to see those photos,” Karl said. The documents are government property the committee will likely review.  

Karl’s “utterly deluional” assessment oversimplifies the knot of personality disorders and maladaptive behaviors that is Donald Trump.

Earlier this year, Alan D. Blotcky, a clinical psychologist and clinical associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham gave his remote assessment of Trump in Salon. Calling Trump delusional provides an excuse for his behavior. He is worse than delusional:

Trump is a megalomaniac who thinks he is smarter, richer and stronger than anyone else. Everything he says and does is aimed at fortifying his grandiose and superior persona. He never admits to a mistake. He never acknowledges a loss. He always doubles down on a position. He does not care a whit about the people of this country. Grifting others is his sport. Despite being impeached twice and losing the national election by 7 million votes, Trump marches on with his false self of grandiosity. That is not a delusion — it is his psychic machinery of self-preservation.

It is a mistake to consider Trump psychotic. That would be to assume that psychiatric medication might alleviate his delusional thinking. But medication cannot fix a psychopath with malignant narcissism. Medication cannot fix a manipulative and exploitative opportunist. Medication does not affect shamelessness and lack of a moral compass. Medication cannot make a self-serving “delusion” disappear.

Trump remains a grave risk to democracy. He will throw anyone and anything under the bus to save his own hide and to advance his personal power and greed. If democracy gets in the way, he is more than ready to smash it or flick it away. Do not forget his glee as he watched the attempted coup against our nation our on television. He thought Jan. 6 might be his de facto coronation as dictator. That was his plan all along. He is an authoritarian, not a psychotic.

But you knew that.

Since the off year elections last week, I’ve posted a few stories about school board elections that don’t fit the narrative of a culture war rout across America.

Here’s a piece by Adam Harris in the Atlantic on this subject. He recapitulates the Youngkin campaign’s use of the “education issue” but believes that it may not be the big winner for the GOP elsewhere that everyone thinks it will be:

[I]n several other well-financed lower-ballot races across the country, an emphasis on similar grievances did not deliver victories to anti-CRT, anti-mask candidates.

For example, four of the seven members of the Mequon-Thiensville School Board in Mequon, Wisconsin, stood to be recalled. Backers of the recall effort had raised nearly $50,000 in their campaign to rid the district of equity consultants and what they described as critical race theory. But as the ballots were tallied late into the evening, it became clear that the push was for naught. Each board member slated for recall retained his or her seat with roughly 60 percent of the vote. Likewise, in Guilford, Connecticut, a group of five insurgent candidates seeking to “keep the evil tenets of CRT” out of their children’s education, as one candidate put it, lost their races. And in Ellsworth, Maine, a candidate who campaigned, in part, on eliminating mask mandates from schools was defeated in an open race. These unsuccessful bids—even if, in some cases, narrowly so—suggest that though the anti-CRT rhetoric is divisive, and could likely push candidates over the top in certain instances, it may not be a winning issue on the local level, at least not yet.

This election was the first time Americans were able to see whether the loudest voices in the room would also be the loudest voices at the ballot box—they were not—and a chance to see whether the enhanced partisanship of the past several years signals a shift in local politics going forward—which it definitely does.

CNN did a poll (before the infrastructure bill was passed) that shows education at the very bottom of people’s concerns:

With the latest wave of Covid-19 infections subsiding and prices on the rise, the economy (36%) outranks the coronavirus pandemic (20%) as the most important issue facing the country. Immigration (14%) and climate change (11%) follow and are the only other issues to land in double-digits, followed by national security (8%), racial injustice (5%) and education (3%).

The nation’s top concerns — like its views on many things — are sharply divided by party. Among Republicans, roughly half (51%) choose the economy as their top concern, with immigration (23%) and national security (13%) far behind. Just 4% of Republicans call coronavirus the nation’s most important problem.

Independents likewise rate the economy tops (38%), followed by coronavirus (18%), immigration (13%) and climate (11%).

Among Democrats, though, 34% name coronavirus as the top problem, followed by the economy at 20%, about even with the climate at 18%. Another 8% say immigration is their top issue.

Just 3% of Democrats cite national security as their top issue, with Republicans similarly unlikely to be focused on climate change, racial injustice or education.

I certainly believe education was a voting issue in Virginia. But this need to extrapolate the mood of the entire country based upon what happened there is a function of political reporters myopically assuming that DC and their own state is representative of the nation as a whole. This isn’t the first time they’ve established such a bogus narrative but it’s wrong.

Holy shit:

The sun rises on January 6, 2021 while a nation is in crisis.

Michigan’s presidential electors are in dispute after a mysterious fire in Detroit destroyed thousands of mail-in ballots, ultimately throwing the election to Congress.

The nation’s capital is overwhelmed by riots organized by left-wing radicals.

A Republican member of Congress is attacked and critically injured in the violence, potentially depriving Donald Trump of the decisive vote.

However, the representative heroically insists on being taken to the House floor. “With IVs and blood transfusions being administered, the member casts the deciding vote, giving Trump 26 state delegations and the needed majority.”

This is the grisly climax of a report by the Claremont Institute and Texas Public Policy Foundation’s (TPPF) called “79 Days to Inauguration,” prepared by “Constitutional scholars, along with experts in election law, foreign affairs, law enforcement, and media . . . coordinated by a retired military officer experienced in running hundreds of wargames.”

Among these luminaries were figures such as John Eastman—lawyer for Donald Trump and author of a memo advising Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally block certification of Joe Biden’s win in order to buy time for GOP-controlled state legislatures to send competing slates of electors—and K.T. McFarland, who served as deputy national security advisor under Michael Flynn in the Trump White House.

Other participants include Kevin Roberts, then-executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (soon to be head of the Heritage Foundation), Jeff Giesea, “a [Peter] Thiel protégé and secret funder of alt-right causes,” and Charles Haywood, a fringe blogger who anxiously awaits an American “Caesar, authoritarian reconstructor of our institutions.”

That is an excerpt of a piece by Christian Vanderbrouk at The Bulwark about the Claremont Institute gaming out how they might be able to overturn the results. It is a stunner.

The author writes

[Despite] the authors’ pretensions to scholarship and rigor—“for a simulation to be valuable, the other side gets a vote and actions must be based in realism”— the final document is a frenzied and paranoid piece of work, revealing of the anxieties and aspirations of the authoritarian right.

Here’s a bit more:

Practically, the report is an instruction manual for how Trump partisans at all levels of government—aided by citizen “posses” of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—could, quite literally, round up opposition activists, kill their leaders, and install Donald Trump for a second term in office.

The scenario begins late on Election Night. The networks have declared Joe Biden the winner, his campaign having upset Trump in the state of Texas. The call is withdrawn moments later, following reports of a cyberattack involving the state’s tabulation system. As it becomes clear there will be no definitive winner on Election Night, attention shifts to a few battleground states with large numbers of outstanding ballots.

Riots break out in more than a dozen major cities . . . 14 law enforcement officers are known to have been shot, with one confirmed death. There are unconfirmed reports of a car bombing of a police precinct building in Philadelphia.

The violence, as imagined by Claremont and TPPF, overwhelms police and fire officials.

Police recede to a defensive posture around their precincts, it is unsafe to maneuver police vehicles down the streets and responding to calls for service, even emergency calls, is suspended. Fire departments are unable to approach buildings on fire without police escorts, which are not happening.

The next day, the federal government announces Operation Spearfish, targeting

Leaders and agitators within the groups associated with BLM, Antifa, Boogaloo, and NFAC . . . with over one thousand arrest warrants issued using federal and state statutes from RICO to disorderly conduct… The decision to obtain arrest warrants even for the barest minimum of probable cause on the lowest of charges is meant to remove the players from the picture, at least temporarily. Social media sources and other intelligence sources were used to find any instances of incitement to violence, threats, or other criminal activity that met federal or local statutes and act on them.

Remember, this narrative is the result of a role-playing exercise in which the participants imagined themselves as key decision-makers in the federal government. The actions described, therefore, might be best understood as a combination of group therapy and suggestions for how they believe the federal government and law enforcement should behave in a moment of constitutional crisis.

Some of the report is revealing. Some of it is sad. Some of it is darkly funny. For instance, the authors’ recommendation for mass, politically motivated arrests “to remove the players from the picture” sits oddly next to the right’s outraged reaction to the prosecution of Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

There’s more irony in how the task force imagines right-wing gangs would operate during such a period: with quiet discipline and in cooperation with law enforcement.

A lack of social media activity and overt action by the rioting by members of the Proud Boys draws the attention of law enforcement officials suspecting they may be operating covertly on the ground in several major urban rioting areas, but their exact involvement is unknown. Reports of militias moving into suburban areas is being monitored. Several groups affiliated with the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers have openly offered to assist law enforcement in putting down the violence via social media, touting significant current and retired law enforcement and military membership.

Which is . . . not how the Trumpist forces behaved during the actual crisis.

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In reading the report, it becomes clear that task force participants see law enforcement as a critical adjunct to the more traditional political actors and that they believe law enforcement could act with greater impunity and force, independent from—and at times in defiance of—elected leaders.

There are rumors that several sheriffs in conservative counties throughout the country are hinting that they may deputize regular citizens into posses should the lawlessness come to their counties. Social media is ablaze with volunteers from Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and Oath Keepers and other Posse Comitatus groups to form posses.

This isn’t an innocent game of “what if?”

Earlier this year the Claremont Institute created a Sheriffs Fellowship program. Claremont claims that this program will offer “training of unparalleled depth and excellence in American political thought and institutions.” But then, this is the same group that produced a report hoping that “several sheriffs in conservative counties” would give groups like the Proud Boys actual legal authority.

Which is it?

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Law enforcement plays an openly insurrectionist role throughout the “79 Days” exercise, defying civilian leaders, refusing to offer them protection, and threatening them with arrest.

For example, the report imagines Chicago police (with vocal backing from their union) abandoning Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s residential block, permitting protesters to set up camp on her front lawn.

In imagined dialogue, the wargame quotes the city’s Fraternal Order of Police president as saying “We have officers risking their lives by not shooting people they should be shooting, or waiting too long because Lightfoot and her Soros-funded prosecutor Kim Foxx seem more interested in arresting cops than criminals.”

The union leader goes on to defend a police sickout (“Foxx and Lightfoot use this department and its officers as political scapegoats all the time, maybe they will enjoy not having us around”) and “excessive force” against rioters (“Take a look out the window there, you tell me, what the hell is excessive right now?”).

The authors use an imaginary appearance by former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke on Fox News to issue an open threat to elected leaders of the political opposition, which is imagined as going “viral”:

“The police are here to protect people and preserve the peace. They will do that. Politicians might get in the way for a while like they’re doing right now, but at some point, cops will remember their oath and will take back their communities for the good, law-abiding people in those communities. You won’t want to be on the other side of that once they have had enough of this nonsense.”

The National Fraternal Order of Police issues a partisan statement attacking Joe Biden’s “irresponsible” call for peaceful protests, “calling on President Trump to assist our men and women in blue in putting an end to the violence and anarchy and to restore law and order.”

At which point the “79 Days” report moves into truly authoritarian wishcasting:

Federal and local law enforcement officials “entered into meetings with Google, Facebook, and Twitter to discuss tracking phones and electronic communication devices that have been traveling together to various cities” to track various “agitator groups.”

Checkpoints are established “along major corridors entering Michigan, Texas, and Florida [to] stop and detain any suspicious caravans or large transport vehicles and to identify passengers for verification in the state fusion centers as members of Antifa and BLM are expected to descend on the capitol buildings in those states.”

The FBI’s elite counterterrorist Hostage Rescue Team is sent to “execute search warrants for weapons in and around Washington, DC… Seven Antifa members are killed by gunfire” during the simultaneous raids with “no injuries to the agents.”

A barely concealed bloodlust runs through the report. During a battle with rioters at a Portland police precinct building, a:

SWAT sniper conducting overwatch shot and killed one of the arsonists as he drew his arm back to throw his device (captured on police surveillance video and released immediately: warning graphic). The Molotov Cocktail exploded when he dropped the bottle and covered several rioters in flames, three injured severely and one dead at the scene.

At a confrontation near the White House, a non-lethal directed-energy weapon called the “Active Denial System” is used against protesters “to great effect with limited, precise application to specific threats. Social media erupts with claims of abuse through military weaponry.”

The body count grows with “officer-involved shootings” related to the RICO-authorized Operation Spearfish, resulting in “at least three suspects dead.” However, “none of the agencies is releasing information on the circumstances or identities of the officers or suspects involved, citing the ongoing investigation.”

These raids, which operate with all the impunity of a death squad, “are executed in middle to upper class neighborhoods where the Antifa and BLM activists/leadership tend to reside.”

The exercise ends with crude myth-making: the noble and sacrificial decision by a “Republican member from an at-large delegation” suffering from “life-threatening wounds” who, “understanding what is at stake, demands to be transported to the House for the state delegation vote and arrives in a heavily guarded convoy.”

This isn’t a serious wargame or a policy study so much as a bowdlerized retelling of The Turner Diaries.

And I thought Trump had a lurid imagination. (There’s more about this report at the link. It’s well worth reading the whole thing.)

Keep in mind that Trump was in close contact with the Claremont Institute’s John Eastman throughout the post election period. I would be very surprised if he never heard about this. Remember, when Pence said on January 5th that he didn’t have the authority to overturn the election, Trump gestured to the crowds that had gathered that night outside the White House and said, “What if they say you do?”

David Leonhardt writes that at the end of 2020 it wasn’t clear if the right’s partisan attack on COVID mitigation efforts had resulted in more deaths among their kind. But all that’s changed:

Then the vaccines arrived.

They proved so powerful, and the partisan attitudes toward them so different, that a gap in Covid’s death toll quickly emerged. I have covered that gap in two newsletters — one this summer, one last month — and today’s newsletter offers an update.

The brief version: The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.

In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened.

Some conservative writers have tried to claim that the gap may stem from regional differences in weather or age, but those arguments fall apart under scrutiny. (If weather or age were a major reason, the pattern would have begun to appear last year.) The true explanation is straightforward: The vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing severe Covid, and almost 40 percent of Republican adults remain unvaccinated, compared with about 10 percent of Democratic adults.

Charles Gaba, a Democratic health care analyst, has pointed out that the gap is also evident at finer gradations of political analysis: Counties where Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote have an even higher average Covid death toll than counties where Trump won at least 60 percent.

As a result, Covid deaths have been concentrated in counties outside of major metropolitan areas. Many of these are in red states, while others are in red parts of blue or purple states, like Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Virginia and even California.

This situation is a tragedy, in which irrational fears about vaccine side effects have overwhelmed rational fears about a deadly virus. It stems from disinformation — promoted by right-wing media, like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, the Sinclair Broadcast Group and online sources — that preys on the distrust that results from stagnant living standards.

A peak?

The future of Covid is uncertain, but I do think it’s possible that the partisan gap in Covid deaths reached its peak last month. There are two main reasons to expect the gap may soon shrink.

One, the new antiviral treatments from Pfizer and Merck seem likely to reduce Covid deaths everywhere, and especially in the places where they are most common. These treatments, along with the vaccines, may eventually turn this coronavirus into just another manageable virus.

Two, red America has probably built up more natural immunity to Covid — from prior infections — than blue America, because the hostility to vaccination and social distancing has caused the virus to spread more widely. A buildup in natural immunity may be one reason that the partisan gap in new Covid cases has shrunk recently.

Death trends tend to lag case trends by a few weeks, which suggests the gap in deaths will shrink in November.

Still, nobody knows what will happen next. Much of the recent decline in caseloads is mysterious, which means it may not last. And the immunity from vaccination appears to be much stronger than the immunity from infection, which means that conservative Americans will probably continue to suffer an outsized amount of unnecessary illness and death.

I just on’t know what to say about this. It’s ridiculous.

What did he do? Everything, apparently:

The brewing culture war over vaccine mandates now threatens to boil over after the Biden administration set a January deadline for all employers with more than 100 employees to require shots or regular testing.

Damn Joe Biden. Damn him all to hell for starting that culture war. Why can’t Democrats stop doing that?

Why it matters: The planned mandates — which also include even more stringent standards for health care workers —would impact more than 100 million Americans, or more than two-thirds of the workforce.

Driving the news: Lawsuits from 15 GOP-led states rolled in mere hours after the administration last week laid out Jan. 4 as the deadline for vaccine mandates at employers with more than 100 workers.

A federal appeals court on Saturday stayed enforcement of the Biden administration’s private-employer vaccine mandate, contending it raises “grave statutory and constitutional issues”

Even a Democratic governor, Kansas’ Laura Kelly, released a statement criticizing the mandates as not the “most effective” or “correct” for her state.

Oh no! More Dems in disarray! Can’t they do anything right? One Democratic Governor criticized it.

The other side: U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy took to ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend the Biden administration’s mandate plan as a workplace safety and economic issue.

“It’s important we take every measure possible to make our workplaces safer,” he said. “It’s good for people’s health, it’s good for the economy, and that’s why these requirements make so much sense.”

That makes sense. It’s a safe, effective, accessible, free vaccine that will make it possible for us to return to some sense of normality. Oh wait. Some dumbshit football player doesn’t want to get one:

But, but, but: NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers took the mantle as a foil to employer vaccine mandates and COVID-19 protocol after it was revealed he was unvaccinated. He’d previously told reporters he was “immunized.”

He defended his decision not to get vaccinated on talk radio over the weekend and said the protocols were aimed at shaming people. “They’re purely trying to out and shame people,” Rodgers said.

Now the Green Bay Packers are facing new scrutiny around how they handled their COVID-19 protocols aimed at keeping players and staff safe.

He broke the rules and he cost his team the game on Sunday. He deserves to be shamed. But I’m going to guess he is a shameless right winger so I don’t know why he’s bellyaching.

Anyone who lies about being vaccinated is a sick piece of work.

The big picture: A recent Axios-Ipsos poll found six in 10 employed Americans agreed their employer should require COVID vaccinations.

But they do not agree on what should happen for those who don’t comply. Support for firing employees was low, at 14%.Americans are torn on whether nothing should happen (25%), employers should place them on unpaid leave (23%), or require them to work from home or an alternate location (20%), the poll showed.

Between the lines: As Axios’ Jennifer Kingson wrote, employer vaccine mandates have already impacted millions of workers, and — rather than leaving in droves — most have either decided to get the shot or have taken advantage of wiggle room offered by their employers.

But vaccine mandates are also sparking deep divides at some employers, as well as within families, as deadlines pass, the Washington Post reported over the weekend.

Whatever. Yes, some people will object to being vaccinated. But I don’t think the federal government mandate changes anything. We have to deal with these people who are acting like stubborn fools either way. So, since the other mandates have resulted in most people getting vaccinated and very few quitting, it’s obviously a good idea.

But according to the media, anything Joe Biden and the Democrats do these days is a disaster even though it isn’t. That narrative has taken hold and the longer they keep at it, the harder it will be to change it.

I just heard a Politico reporter on MSNBC say that the Democrats cannot run on the benefits they deliver to voters, they cannot run on Trump and the GOP’s turn to Trumpism and they cannot run on successfully defeating COVID. He says they have to run on the culture war issues (as Republicans define them) the implication being that they need to capitulate or they will lose everything.

This is all based on the two elections in Virginia and New Jersey which unfolded exactly as these off year elections always do. (Actually the win in New Jersey beat the odds.)

How typical that after Trump nearly destroyed the country (and plans on finishing the job if he gets back in) the Democrats are the ones paying the price for the country’s despair. Same as if ever was.