Month: December 2021

President Joe Biden last week attended fall graduation ceremonies at South Carolina State University, a historically black, land-grant university in Orangeburg, South Carolina. House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn graduated from there decades ago. Orangeburg is the hometwon of The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson. White state troopers killed three students there during a demonstration in 1968 demonstration, known today as the Orangeburg Massacre.

Robinson explains that the event seemed to give Biden renewed energy in support of voting rights:

Speaking to an overwhelmingly Black audience, Biden found his voice — and his passion — when he turned to Republican attempts to curtail the voting rights of African Americans, Hispanics and other people of color. “I’ve never seen anything like the unrelenting assault on the right to vote,” Biden thundered. “Never. I don’t think any of you have, on this stage, ever seen it.”

Oh, some have, Robinson writes, citing the 1968 killings.

“It’s not just about who gets to vote or making it easier, as we used to try to do, to make people eligible to be able to vote,” Biden told the assembled graduates and their proud family members. “It’s about who gets to count the vote or whether your vote counts at all.”

“This new sinister combination of voter suppression and election subversion — it’s un-American, it’s undemocratic,” he added.

Except it is very American, Robinson reminds readers. As it was a century ago, so it is today.

The fight for voting rights has ebbed and flowed over the last half-century-plus but never ended. Echoing the expression “two steps forward, one step back,” Bishop William J. Barber II exhorts members of the Poor People’s Campaign and civil rights advocates today with “Forward together, not one step back!”

Nevertheless, we have seen multiple steps back just this year. Nineteen states have passed 33 laws limiting voting this year according to the Brennan Center’s October summary:

The 2020 federal election drew the United States’ highest voter turnout in more than a century, breaking records despite the Covid-19 pandemic and efforts to undermine the election process with the Big Lie of a stolen election.

In a backlash to this historic voter participation, many state lawmakers have proposed and enacted legislation to make it harder for Americans to vote, justifying these measures with falsehoods steeped in racism about election irregularities and breaches of election security.

In a story about Stacey Abram’s second run for governor in Georgia, the Associated Press reports:

This year, Republicans pushed through a new voting law in Georgia which, among other things, cuts days for requesting an absentee ballot, shortens early voting before runoff elections and limits drop boxes.

Democrats fear it will chip away at their gathering strength in Georgia, where President Joe Biden won the state’s 16 electoral votes and then Warnock and fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff won runoffs in January, delivering control of the U.S. Senate to their party.

Republicans argue the law is fair to all and was necessary to restore confidence in the state’s elections after claims of fraud by then-President Donald Trump inflamed many GOP voters. Those claims have been debunked and repeatedly rejected by courts.

The Bad Faith Party is nothing if not as consistent as it is persistent. At least since Operation Eagle Eye in the early 1960s (referenced since Digby’s earliest days here), Republicans have worked assiduously to undermine faith in election administration to justify new voter suppression laws under the rubric of restoring confidence they themselves eroded. Right-wing talk radio, Fox News, and social media supercharged their efforts over the last 30 years.

Democrats’ weakness in the countryside away from heavily Black counties like Orangeburg mean Republicans dominate state legislatures across much of the country. Some of us are working to remedy that, but it will be a long slog.

Can you be as relentless as a Republican operative? Sure, we knew you could.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here:

There’s a lot of complaining these days about Biden’s inability to vanquish COVID. There are some good reasons to be disappointed — the testing program remains insufficient and the decision not to hand out home tests like candy is inexplicable. But really, the problem here is that we have a huge majority of people who are refusing to get vaccinated and most of them are doing it for political reasons that make no sense. I don’t know what Biden could have possible done about that other than make the vaccines available, order mandates and that’s what he did.

But he has done nothing like this. It’s downright criminal:

The outgoing director of the National Institutes of Health said Sunday that he faced political pressure from then-President Donald Trump and other Republicans to endorse unproven Covid-19 remedies such as hydroxychloroquine and to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.Dr. Francis Collins, whose last day as NIH director is Sunday, told CBS News that he got a “talking to” by Trump, but that he held his ground and would have resigned if Trump made him endorse remedies for Covid-19 that were not based in science.”I have done everything I can to stay out of any kind of political, partisan debates because it is really not a place where medical research belongs,” he said. “I was not going to compromise scientific principles to just hold onto the job.”

Trump frequently touted hydroxychloroquineas a potential Covid-19 cure, and he claimed while in office to have used it himself even as medical experts and the US Food and Drug Administration questioned its efficacy and warned of potentially harmful side effects. In June 2020, the FDA revoked its emergency use authorization for both hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for the treatment of Covid-19, saying it determined the drugs were unlikely to be effective in treating Covid-19 based on the latest scientific evidence.

CNN has reached out to the office of the former President for comment on Collins’ interview.

Collins also said he fought back calls from Republicans for him to fire Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert who now serves as President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser.

Can you imagine a circumstance where the director of the NIH, somebody who believes in science, would submit to political pressures and fire the greatest expert in infectious disease that the world has known, just to satisfy political concerns?” he said.

Fauci has faced harsh criticism from Republicans, including Trump, during the pandemic, with the longtime public servant being assailed for what they see as an overly cautious approach to the crisis and his occasional reversal on some key issues, including mask-wearing.

Collins said on Sunday that during his 12 years serving as NIH director, one thing he would have studied more carefully is hesitancy.“I did not imagine there would be 60 million people who, faced with compelling evidence of the life-saving nature of Covid vaccines, would still say, ‘No, not for me,'” he said.

It shocks me too and I thought I couldn’t be more cynical about the right.

You can study “hesitancy” all you want but I don’t think anyone could have anticipated that the president of the United States would try to sabotage the public health response to a lethal pandemic for political purposes and in the process indoctrinate his followers into the idea that the virus is a political weapon— a suicide bomb.

I’ll never stop being shocked by it.

It’s Hullabaloo Happy Hollandaise fundraiser time. If you’d like to toss a little something into the Christmas stocking I would be most grateful. Cheers — digby

Unfortunately, Senator Elizabeth Warren has tested positive for COVID. I join millions of other Americans in wishing and praying her symptoms continue to be mild and that she recovers quickly.

Also in the article is this mind boggling and heartbreaking sentence:

On CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said that cases will increase steeply over the next couple of weeks and that the country could soon see 1 million new cases a day of omicron, dramatically exceeding the record of about 250,000 new cases per day set in January.

That is an impossible stat for me to process right now. It’s just too much.

Please stay safe, people. And if Airplane isn’t your speed, I humbly suggest that Tampopo, the first (and I believe only) Ramen Western will surely brighten your day.

Adding: There is nothing funny about the tragic horror of the pandemic. But the stress is monumental and we all need a break. These two films invariably do it for me and for those who haven’t seen them, you are in for several hours of sublime silliness. You deserve it.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here:

Oh my, this is juicy:

Longtime Republican operative Roger Stone pleaded the Fifth earlier this week in front of the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot, but Sunday morning he tossed Steve Bannon under the bus.

Stone, who has long been at odds with Bannon over the latter “testify[ing] falsely” against him during his criminal trial, took to the far-right messaging platform Telegram to suggest Bannon was behind the call to “breach” the Capitol building on Jan 6. “It is highly likely that [Steve] Bannon really gave the order to breach the capital [sic] and maneuvered patriots into dangerous positions,” he wrote. “A neophyte Steve Bannon was willing to try crazy things like this to curry favor with Trump who had a [sic] no interest in Bannon’s bullsh*t.”

On Saturday evening, appearing on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ InfoWars program, Stone advised Jones, who is currently cooperating with the House committee, not to take the committee’s inquires seriously. Stone added the advice doled out by him was not an effort to “obstruct justice,” but rather “friend to friend” legal advice.

Two Trump pardoned criminals at each others’ throats? You love to see it.

I do have one question though. If Bannon “gave the order” to breach the capitol, who exactly did he give the order to? And since when did Trump have no interest in Bannon’s bullshit? Bannon was at the Willard hotel with all the other insurrectionist nutcases whose buillshit Trump obviously did have a great interest in.

They are both disgusting human beings with long histories of character assassination. It’s nice to see them turning their nefarious talents on each other.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time! If you’d like to throw a few coins this way it would be most appreciated:

She can always be counted on to make the dumbest comment possible:

Sarah Palin showed up in Phoenix this morning to tell that crowd “it will be over my dead body” that she gets vaccinated. Then she encourages others to “stiffen their spines” and fight back. “There is an empowerment in a group like this where we can kind of feed off each other.” pic.twitter.com/t47oxxrGtB

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 19, 2021

She actually said, “It’ll be over my dead body that I’ll get a shot. I won’t do it and they’d better not touch my kids either.”

You cannot make this stuff up. Seriously.

*And I don’t know why they kept the camera on Charlie Kirk there, but I think something was going on with Palin’s mouth … weird.

Happy Hollandaise, everyone!

Joe Manchin sure dumped a huge lump of West Virginia coal in our stockings this Christmas didn’t he? It figures that after all the sturm und drang over the past 8 months he finally ended up going on Fox News just before the holiday to announce he was tanking the Democratic agenda. What a guy.

It’s depressing, to be sure, but what else is new? For some reason the fates have determined that we should get hit with a virulent new COVID variant just as people were planning to visit their families for the holidays. What an awesome end to 2021.

Half the country is reeling from all this but the other half is happy. In fact, they are ecstatic. Every bit of terrible news takes them one step closer to regaining power in Washington and restoring their once and future Dear Leader to the White House. And they are willing to sacrifice their lives to make that happen.

And it isn’t that hard to figure out why. As someone remarked to me recently, recall that hundreds of thousands of confederates sacrificed their lives in the 1860s in order to protect their “way of life” by which they meant slavery. Their heirs, having been convinced that their “way of life” is similarly under threat are doing the same thing. It’s not unprecedented. In fact, it’s an American tradition.

There’s a lot of talk about tribalism these days, which isn’t exactly new. I’ve been writing about this since the early days of this old blog because it’s one of the most interesting ways of looking at why we are where are. There have always been two tribes in this country and they’ve changed parties and stances over the years as politics required. But as this famous map shows, they haven’t changed much for a most of our history:

Here’s 2020:

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose … amirite?

There used to be members of both tribes in both parties which made progress possible at least in certain moments. Due to the rube goldberg federalist system we have, that always favors rural America, unfortunately, but it did work from time to time. But now we are in a period of extreme polarization in which the two tribes have divided almost perfectly along party lines. That situation makes it even more difficult to enact progressive legislation as we can see with our deep red state senator Joe Manchin basically vetoing the Democratic agenda (with a little help from his delusional friend Kyrsten Sinema) and the Republicans voting in lock step against it.

My point is that this has been a feature of American politics forever and it always disadvantages progress. In times of crisis or some run of good luck, the progressive tribe manages to get something through. Think about Obamacare, which was pulling teeth for months — and the Democrats had 60 votes through most of it, 59 when it barely passed through reconciliation. It is very difficult, no matter what and it doesn’t pay for us to be silly and assume it’s always a matter of bad political strategy and terrible corrupt politicians. It’s our system. And, yes, it sucks.

Anyway, all this is to say that we are going to have a rough few months ahead of us as they try to piece back some kind of agenda in advance of 2022 and hopefully avoid the kind of circular firing squad that kills majorities. I don’t think the stakes have ever been higher and I mean that. When you look at that 1860 map up there you can see that we’re back to square one. And we are dealing with much the same mentality that led to that horrifying clash — the same underlying issues are driving the divide today: race and grievance.

And the threat of political violence is in the ether. After January 6th can we doubt it?

Tom Sullivan, Dennis Hartley, tristero, spocko, batocchio and I will be here every day tracking it and trying to keep some perspective on events so that we don’t lose our minds. (By that I mean our own minds as much as yours…)

If you value what we do and think it’s worthwhile to help us keep doing it, you can support our work by donating through one of the buttons below or using the address on the sidebar. I am so grateful to have had the privilege to do this all these years and we’ll keep writing as long as you keep reading. — digby

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

This is a helpful approach to salvaging what’s left of Build Back Better if Emperor Manchin hasn’t completely thrown in with MAGA. I don’t know if this particular mixture of programs is the right one, although it sounds right to me. Let’s hope they move fast:

.@RonWyden releases outline for the pillars of an updated BBB that might fit Sen. Manchin’s criteria while also bringing along progressives.

-Long-term expansion of the current child tax credit
-Tech neutral energy tax incentives
-Rx drug price control

It is not unreasonable for Democratic critics of Build back Better to complain that the plan to simply shorten the funding window of its programs to fit under the 1.75 trillion umbrella was always going to be non-starter. Anyone who felt sure that Democrats would be in charge once they expired in five years or that Republicans would be compelled to keep those programs going was fooling themselves. Hope is not a plan.

The truth is that once Sinema nixed the tax hikes on the wealthy and Manchin continued playing his reindeer games, it was clear probably they were going to have to pare down the bill. It’s ok. If they could get these three programs it would be a fantastic achievement that would make a huge difference in the lives of tens of millions of people. And tomorrow is another day.

I don’t know if it can happen. Manchin has been moving the goalposts throughout the process so he may very well move them again. But there’s still a chance to move something through reconciliation and this approach appears to be the only thing left on the table.

Fingers crossed.

It’s Hullabaloo Happy Hollandaise fundraiser time. If you like to support this site and keep us going as we face this very contentious and difficult year ahead, I’d very much appreciate it. You can hit the buttons below or the address on the sidebar. — digby

You’ve probably heard that he went on Fox news this morning and proclaimed the Build Back Better Bill dead. He said:

“I can’t move forward. I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation, I just can’t.I tried everything humanly possible. I can’t get there. … This is a no.”

That strange high pitched sound you heard this morning was the ecstatic shrieks of delight by every MAGA cultist in the land. Yay! Joe Biden’s presidency is dead! Thanks Kyrsten. Thanks Joe. (I mention Kyrsten because she’s the one who killed the tax hikes that would have paid for the whole thing.)

Ok, I think we all have to take a breath. All is not lost. Remember, just this week, Biden said something quite strange that made me shake my head at the time:

Biden said last week after talking with Manchin that the West Virginia senator had reiterated “his support for Build Back Better funding at the level of the framework plan I announced in September.” 

It’s an awkward statement that suggested to me that Manchin was still on board with the money but the bill itself was in trouble. I don’t know if that’s true, but it might be, which means that this piece by Dave Dayen in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago may be in play:

The Build Back Better Act’s strength is also its weakness. Tackling health care coverage, prescription drug prices, family care, education, housing, poverty, the climate crisis, pandemic preparedness and fair taxation in one bill makes it wondrously comprehensive, and gives every Democratic constituency some hope that their dream policy could finally be enacted.

But that also makes it wrenching to cut anything from the bill while keeping everyone on board. A couple of Democratic senators (and a handful of other party members hiding behind them) demanding stingier social spending, lower taxes on the wealthy and corporations, higher drug prices and more burning of carbon have created an impossible dilemma for the party. Should they still try to address all of the issues they care about, with roughly half the funds required to do the job properly? Or should they choose what stays and what goes, and focus on executing what remains?

To me, the answer is clear: To be successful, not only in this legislation but in revitalizing Joe Biden’s presidency and his party, Mr. Biden must enact permanent, simple, meaningful programs, and connect them to his argument about how government can work again.

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.

Many progressives believe the best way to reverse this dynamic is to start work on all the problems at once, betting that the public will reward their efforts and keep them in power to finish the job. Some have suggested sunsetting key programs after a few years, turning future elections into a referendum over making them permanent. Once the public gets some real help, they argue, it will be politically impossible for lawmakers to roll these programs back.

Take paid leave, which might be on the precipice of falling out of the bill in negotiations. It would not only be vital but long overdue to allow workers to take time off for the birth of a child or the care of a family member without it harming them financially. But the version of paid leave that passed a House committee is a mess.

The lowest paid workers would receive 85 percent of their pay while on leave. But there is no minimum benefit set at the poverty level, which would force the working poor into the unlikely scenario of sacrificing 15 percent of their income to take extended time off. To use the benefit, workers must learn whether their employer or their state offers paid leave or whether they are eligible for federal assistance, and then apply with the proper entity, turning in some combination of pay stubs, tax information and work history evidence to comply with numerous eligibility requirements. According to Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project, these kinds of obligations to show work history prior to taking time off could leave behind around one-third of new mothers.

Worst of all, the proposal reimburses employers for setting up their own paid leave plans, which usually involves hiring life insurance companies for benefit management. Rather than a fully public plan funded through a small payroll tax, this labyrinthine hybrid system puts paid leave largely in the hands of private insurers, which make profits through denying benefits and avoiding workers who are either more likely to take leave or eligible for more money when they do.

This is a recipe not only for significant public funds siphoned into corporate treasuries but also for endless frustration and hassle, much like our private health insurance system. And all this for just four weeks of paid leave (the length presently being considered), a fraction of what every other industrialized nation offers. It’s not enough to pass something that can merely be called “paid leave” if its primary function is to anger people who want to take time off from work.

Unfortunately, much of the bill now works this way, thanks to demands made by the likes of Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, among others. Means testing in the child care program creates similar bureaucratic hurdles, and a money-saving phase-in of subsidies keeps some middle-class families out of the program for the first three years, and maybe permanently with the rumored income cap. Funding for elder care and housing has been slashed by about half of what was previously proposed. Mr. Manchin wants a cap on the advance-payment Child Tax Credit at $60,000 in family income as well as work requirements. And instead of adding a dental benefit to Medicare, seniors might get an $800 coupon.

These policies aren’t worth selling to a skeptical public. After grinding an expansive agenda into paste, Democrats should not expect voters to re-elect the pastemakers so that they can sculpt the paste into something useful.

Mr. Manchin actually understands how to create policy that the public rallies around. He has put no means-testing restrictions on the universal prekindergarten provision, allowing all families to get two years of early development and instruction for their children. Why? Because he instituted a similar program while he was the governor of West Virginia, and he knows that making it complicated or exclusionary doesn’t sell well.

That model of hassle-free, permanent programs should animate the entire project. All of the hazardous choices in this bill are fixable, but these fixes would make it cost more. And if cost is an insurmountable political barrier to passage, then the only way to rebuild faith in government action is by embracing fewer programs, freeing funds to enact them in the simplest and best ways possible.

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.

Even if Congress manages to renew the half-measures it’s currently working on implementing, typically, permanent programs are the only ones that can actually get repaired in Washington. Temporary ones can’t, because the fight is always focused on the program’s survival, not its merits. The Affordable Care Act’s permanence has made it harder to dislodge and easier to rejigger; there’s an effort to do so in this bill, by increasing the act’s subsidies. By contrast, Republicans allowed the 10-year federal assault weapons ban to expire in 2004 and paid no price at the polls. And that wasn’t a program that made citizens traverse dizzying bureaucracy.

What programs should stay? The relatively unsullied pre-K plan is an obvious candidate, and the future of the planet necessitates the boldest possible set of actions that can meaningfully reduce carbon emissions. But the best path is to refashion the agenda of building back better based on what the phrase was intended to signify.

Despite the incomprehensible messaging of the Build Back Better Act, there’s a compelling argument for the idea underlying it. 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.

He is not wrong. This may actually be a better approach. Of course the politics of that are difficult but it helps to have someone like Dayen, a respected lefty, making that argument. It won’t be easy to find consensus on which programs to fully fund with that money and there will be big fights. But it’s worth seeing if it can be done.

So don’t despair. The West Virginia King of the Divas may have shut the door on the bill we’ve all been talking about. But it’s possible that Manchin will go along with some big targeted spending that’s fully funded. I don’t know that but he’s gone back and forth so many times it’s clear that no doesn’t necessarily mean no with this guy.

But man. This guy …

Happy Hollandaise everyone! If you’d like to throw some change into the old Christmas stocking, you can do so below or use the address on the sidebar. Thanks so much for reading and supporting our efforts.

cheers — digby

Our democracy is in jeopardy. Passing voting rights legislation through Congress would help stem the downward spiral, but punishment for those plotting democracy’s demise would be a more immediate tonic.

Nearly a full year after the Trump-inspired assault on the U.S. Capitol, a federal court last week sentenced a Florida man to over five years in prison for assaulting police during the breach. It is the longest sentence to-date for the nearly 700 charged in the attack:

By a little before 5 p.m., Mr. Palmer found himself amid the most severe fighting at the lower west terrace, where an almost medieval form of hand-to-hand combat had erupted. There, prosecutors say, he threw a wooden plank-like spear at the police, sprayed a fire extinguisher at officers and then hurled the empty canister at them.

Before his sentencing hearing in Federal District Court in Washington, Mr. Palmer, 54, wrote a letter to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, saying that he had come to recognize that Mr. Trump and his allies had lied to their supporters by “spitting out the false narrative about a stolen election and how it was ‘our duty’ to stand up to tyranny.”

Palmer is still one of the small fry. If this country is going to put the brakes on the antidemocratic contagion spreading through the country like a coronavirus, bigger fish need to be brought to justice. A number the Trump White House’s bootlicks deserve serious scrutiny. Whether the Biden Justice Department will have the stones to prosecute them, if evidence warrants, remains in doubt. But if Texas believes it necessary to make an example of Crystal Mason for voting for president in error in a state where it would not count, justice demands punishment for those who plotted a coup to overthrow a national election. And it would be good for our collective mental health.

Before that happens, the state of New York could make an example of their boss.

“I anticipate they’re going to bring a racketeering charge against Trump,” investigative journalist David Cay Johnston told MSNBC host Yasmin Vossoughian Saturday afternoon. Johnston believes that will be the outcome of the Manhattan District Attorney’s investigation of Donald Trump and his family’s company. But there could be tax charges as well.

The charges will likely relate to Trump’s manipulation of his property valuations, inflating them to obtain favorable loans in some cases and lowering them to avoid taxes in others.

“So what they’re doing is showing that Trump knowingly, deliberately, with malice aforethought and intent to deceive, was manipulating the system,” Johnston said. “And when you take out a mortgage loan, in particular, you usually sign under penalty of perjury.”

“Certainly Trump’s team, when he’s indicted, and I’m certain he will be indicted, is going to try to lay the blame on everybody else, and so what the prosecutors want to show that is if (Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer) Allen Weisselberg phonied up documents, it was at the direction of Donald Trump.”

Are you sure about that? asked Vossoughian. Raw Story:

“Oh, yeah,” Johnston responded. “They would not have done all of this and know how much they know … if they weren’t going to do this. Yeah, they will indict him. Exactly when? I don’t know. I don’t expect it will be on a straight tax charge. I think there will be a tax charge, but the key charge will be racketeering.”

He added that the timing of the indictment will depend on how long it takes prosecutors to go through five million pages of documents that were handed over by the Trump Organization.

“Once he’s indicted, Trump will have to surrender himself to be booked. I’m sure he will be released on his own recognizance, and then we will see a campaign of trying to delay trial,” Johnston said. “You will see Donald say, ‘This is corrupt, the prosecutors are corrupt, the police are corrupt, the auditors are corrupt,’ because that’s what Roy Cohn taught him when he was a young man — accuse law enforcement, and then delay, delay, delay.”

Perhaps Trump’s current wife can give him tips on how to perp-walk like a supermodel.

Been looking for some good news to share this morning and finding little. But there is some good snark.

HOW MANY SHOTS WILL WE NEED TO GET? pic.twitter.com/4hECKNvvkZ

— Brittlestar (@brittlestar) December 17, 2021

Staring down the calendar at another winter of pandemic, President Joe Biden has some blunt words for Americans (CNN):

“For the unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated — for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm. But there’s good news: If you’re vaccinated and you have your booster shot, you’re protected from severe illness and death,” the President said.

He’d determined ahead of time that his message would be muddled if he answered any questions afterward, so he sat uncharacteristically silent as reporters peppered him on their way out.

[…]

Already, cases and hospitalizations are surging in some parts of the country, leading to a 31% increase in cases and a 20% increase in hospitalizations from two weeks ago.

Leaving his words hanging in the air was probably a good move on Biden’s part. People are pandemic-weary enough by now that Covid advice from officials begins to sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher, an unintelligible blurr of words. The fewer blunt ones there are, the more likely they are to stand out in the daily blurr.

There are daily more revelations of the depravity of one of our major political parties. Its leaders are under the car cutting the country’s brake lines and under the hood ripping out the spark plug wires. On the other side of the aisle, gifs of Charlie Brown taking another run at the football are circulating as Democrats keep trying to slip major legislation by its most obstreperous senators. News of climate change’s effects will soon become as much a blurr as the daily mass shooting. The weary are discarding their masks and discounting the mounting death toll.

Will God forgive us? Will we forgive ourselves for our creeping nihilism? asks Sarah Jones at New York Magazine.

Might need to go rewatch the Christmas episode of Ted Lasso.