Month: December 2021

Sorry, but that’s what this sort of thing is doing:

Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum and House Intelligence Committee Member Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., floated heavily criticized new potential ways to force Americans to submit to the coronavirus vaccine injection, one of which the panel on “The Five” called “despicable.”

Frum, now a writer for “The Atlantic” magazine, wrote a lengthy Twitter thread lamenting the lack of full compliance with vaccine recommendations and edicts, suggesting that one way to force Americans to get the jab would be to send unvaccinated patients to the back of the line if they had to go to the emergency room. 

“Seems the best option is 1) Keep encouraging vaccines and boosters; 2) Impose vaccine mandates where it can be done; 3) Otherwise return to normal as fully as we can, especially the schools; and 4) Let hospitals quietly triage emergency care to serve the unvaccinated last,” Frum wrote over the weekend.

“If, at this point, you are still unvaccinated, you are not a victim. You are a cause of the victimization of vulnerable others,” Frum claimed.

He further described opposition to vaccines as “dumb ass malignity” and lamented the fact that the “malignant minority” is opposed to other potential mandates like “no jab; no fly.”

That idea came in part from Swalwell, who along with Rep. Kai Kahele, D-Hawaii, voiced support for a policy that would essentially ban American citizens from traveling by air if they chose not to get vaccinated, according to Fox Business.

Swalwell pushed the idea of an air travel vaccine requirement on Twitter Sunday, writing a “prediction” that the country “can go from 60% Americans vaxxed to 80% if we require vaccines to fly.”

Kahele’s state has also been home to one of the nation’s strictest coronavirus-era entry requirements. Before the COVID vaccine, travelers from the mainland had to test negative for the coronavirus from a Honolulu-approved test vendor and then file documentation with the state’s “Safe Travels” website.

Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., furthermore recently introduced a bill co-sponsored by Swalwell, Kahele and Hawaii’s other House member, Ed Case, that would “direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to ensure that any individual traveling on a flight that departs from or arrives to an airport inside the United States… is fully vaccinated against COVID–19.”

“Liberals are renewing their push for a forever pandemic,” he said.

“David Frum from ‘The Atlantic’ had a truly despicable idea suggesting treating unvaxxed patients last at hospitals.”

Host Dana Perino further wondered aloud whether Frum and the proponents of the vax-to-fly policy drafted by Torres were paying any attention to the stark message the American people sent them with the recent elections in Virginia and New Jersey where Republicans overperformed in part because of voters’ frustration with both socioeconomic lockdown policies and leftist school curricula.

“And you had this other problem where you have fancy people who can go to a big party and mingle around without a mask, [while] anyone who works there had to wear a mask,” she added.

“There’s a huge disconnect … The inequality of this shaming is really big. We’ve never figured out a way to address natural immunity. We never figured out a way to talk about the fact that we do have [other] treatments. 

“For an example, David Frum’s idea, like as you said, is despicable, and is also ridiculous because there are easy ways to treat it now with amazing advancements in science.”

This is why we have hospitals filling up. The unvaccinated are listening to lies like this.

But hey, they’ve got some elections to win:

Perino concluded by saying that making the liberal firebrand Swalwell “the face of telling Americans that you aren’t allowed to travel” would be the best way to start a nationwide popular backlash.

Thousands of people a day are still dying of COVID. The US has the worst record in the entire world despite readily available safe, effective and free vaccines. And no, there are no easy ways to treat it now, hence the thousands of deaths every day.

I’m sympathetic to the travel ban although the science suggests that airplanes are actually pretty safe. (Airports, however…) And obviously, we can’t refuse to treat unvaccinated people who are sick with COVID in the hospital. It isn’t how our system is designed and changing it would be a slippery slope we don’t want to experience. Even triage means that you must treat the person who has the best chance of survival, not the person who was most responsible about preventing their illness.

But there is no reason that people who refuse to vaccinate themselves and continue to endanger others shouldn’t face other social and economic sanctions. Nobody is guaranteed a job if they endanger their co-workers. And no business should be required to serve people who endanger their customers. And shaming people who do these things is the least a decent society should do. It may not be criminal but it is certainly immoral.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D) of Arizona supports both the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. But not enough to make an exception to the filibuster rule so she can vote to pass them. Yet she approved an exemption to that rule one week ago to allow a vote to raise the debt ceiling.

But doing that again to defend the Constitution against the systematic violations of democracy being passed in the states stretches her oath too far.

Of late, there has been apparent movement towards passage of voting rights legislation by a majority vote, Steve Benen reports:

As of yesterday afternoon, there was enough kinetic political activity to give the appearance of momentum. Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock had made a compelling pitch in support of the idea of a carve-out to the filibuster rule, pointing to other recent exceptions from the last two weeks. The Georgian’s argument found favor with some of his more progressive colleagues, including Hawaii’s Brian Schatz, and some of his moderate colleagues, including Virginia’s Mark Warner.

Soon after, Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper of Colorado also came out in support of changing the filibuster to protect voting rights, reasoning that “if we can change the process on the debt ceiling, then surely we can do the same to protect our democracy.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer met Wednesday with Joe Macnhin of West Virginia, plus Maine’s Angus King, Tim Kaine of Virginia and and Montana’s Jon Tester. Delaware’s Tom Carper and Maine’s Angus King are on board. But not Sinema.

Politico reported:

Kyrsten Sinema supports the elections reform bill that Democrats are considering a year-end push to pass. She doesn’t support a shortcut around the filibuster to get it done. The Arizona moderate is making clear that she intends to keep protecting the Senate’s 60-vote requirement on most legislation and she isn’t ready to entertain changing rules to pass sweeping elections or voting legislation with a simple majority.

Benen is as incredulous as the rest of us:

So why not create an exception to the filibuster in order to protect democracy? Sinema’s office said in a statement to Politico that if Democrats were to take such a course, their voting rights protections legislation could be “rescinded in a few years and replaced by a nationwide voter-ID law, nationwide restrictions on vote-by-mail, or other voting restrictions currently passing in some states extended nationwide.”

The logic here is truly amazing: Democrats can’t pass voting rights protections on their own, because if they do, Republicans might try to undermine voting rights at some future date. And that’s why Sinema intends to do nothing as Republicans undermine voting rights right now.

One of the most frustrating situations for children of the Enlightenment is trying to make sense of unreason using reason. It is pointless. At some point, you train yourself not try. The inevitable headache is not worth it and it gets you nowhere. But it is not as if what’s going with Sinema represents something ineffable as in a work of art or piece of music.

Still, does she play the fiddle?

“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender …” — Winston Churchill

One thing there is to say about the people attempting to end this almost 250-year experiment in democratic self-rule: They are tenacious. Koch Brothers tenacious. George W. Bush wanting to be a “war president” tenacious. Benghazi tenacious. Coup-plotter tenacious.

The New York Times front-pages a story of how Trump loyalists fought not just to spread Trump’s stolen-election lie, but to press at anywhere they thought a soft spot in government where they might gain some advantage in Trump retaining power beyond January 20, 2021. Or else to throw sand into the gears.

Just after Christmas last year an unidentified number on the phone of the Justice Department’s Richard P. Donoghue turned out to be Rep. Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican. Perry had “compiled a dossier of voter fraud allegations that the department needed to vet.” He was yet another obscure but loyal foot soldier pressing the president’s case with anyone who might listen and among a half dozen doing so:

The lawmakers — all of them members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus — worked closely with the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, whose central role in Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn a democratic election is coming into focus as the congressional investigation into Jan. 6 gains traction.

The men were not alone in their efforts — most Republican lawmakers fell in line behind Mr. Trump’s false claims of fraud, at least rhetorically — but this circle moved well beyond words and into action. They bombarded the Justice Department with dubious claims of voting irregularities. They pressured members of state legislatures to conduct audits that would cast doubt on the election results. They plotted to disrupt the certification on Jan. 6 of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.

Other names are more familiar: Jordan, Biggs, Gosar, Goehmert, Brooks.

Congressional Republicans have fought the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation at every turn, but it is increasingly clear that Mr. Trump relied on the lawmakers to help his attempts to retain power. When Justice Department officials said they could not find evidence of widespread fraud, Mr. Trump was unconcerned: “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen,” he said, according to Mr. Donoghue’s notes of the call.

The rest of the article chronicles steps the group took along with Trump’s dye-drenched attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and Team Kraken, to prepare for the final Jan. 6 standoff that ended in riot, mayhem and death and injury at the U.S. Capitol.

Pain-in-the-ass caucus

But even with Watergate-level legal pressures mounting against them, and especially against Freedom Caucus founder and former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, the Freedom Caucus is not hunkering down. It is doubling down, looking to expand into the states, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is making headlines in Washington today, but he’s also looking to make a mark on state legislatures, including Georgia’s, with the launch of the State Freedom Caucus Network.

The network will be an extension of the House Freedom Caucus, the group of conservative House members that Meadows once chaired, which has successfully moved the House GOP agenda to the right since it was founded in 2015.

The network will be supported by the Conservative Partnership Institute, a Washington-based non-profit founded by former Sen. Jim DeMint, where Meadows has been a senior partner since leaving the White House earlier this year.

Also on the CPI staff with Meadows is Cleta Mitchell, a prominent Republican attorney who helped Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

Meadows, we know, was on the infamous Jan. 2 Trump call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to pressure him to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s win there from November. Trump (and perhaps Meadows as well) is under criminal investigation for election interference over that call to Georgia. Meadows is hardly backing off or avoiding Georgia. He spoke before about 200 at the State Freedom Caucus Network kickoff dinner in Atlanta on Tuesday.

Ed Kilgore adds New York Magazine:

DeMint, the former South Carolina senator and Heritage Foundation president, is probably best known in politics for his espousal of “constitutional conservatism,” that absolutist precursor to Trumpism which held that any means were justified to preserve the eternal policy preferences of the divinely inspired Founders.

The State Freedom Caucus Network will start initially with affiliates in 22 states from Connecticut to Alaska, with representatives attending a gala kickoff dinner in Atlanta. Its stated purpose is to organize “principled, America-First conservatives” to focus on “election integrity, critical race theory, school choice, vaccine mandates, and police reform,” issues where “our nation’s most important battles are taking place in state legislatures.” An unstated purpose is to encourage such pain-in-the-ass tactics as legislative hostage-taking, disruption of routine governing practices, and shakedowns of the “Republican establishment,” while serving as outposts for Trump’s efforts to get back to the White House by book or by crook.

This new organization, which will likely spread to other states soon, will help ensure that Republicans state elected officials can’t get away with simply tugging the forelock to Trump and then getting along with their regular business back home. MAGA agitation is a permanent revolution with foot soldiers wherever cultural resentment and political opportunism meet.

Look, normal is gone and any semblance of it is not coming back soon. Thinking back on the Churchill quote that came to mind this morning (at the top), it is not clear to me whether “We” is those who retain a commitment to democracy or those in Trump’s camp who seem bent on ending it. Perhaps both. Whether the coming political war is civil or Civil remains to be seen. But the “Russians” are clearly massing at the border and prepared for a long fight whether the rest of us want it or not. Ignoring it won’t make it go away. If Democrats and you cannot find the stomach to fight it, pack your bags.

Politifact didn’t name the Big Lie, even though it really is the lie of the century. They named the lies about January 6th. It’s a long article so I won’t post it all here but it has a terrific recitation of how the lie unfolded and who is responsible.

This is the conclusion and it says it all about where we are:

The loudest deniers of what happened on Jan. 6 weren’t shouting into a void. As Carlson and others pushed their false narratives about antifa and the FBI, Republican lawmakers responded to the attack with another form of downplay: silence. 

Months after the siege, even those who initially condemned the attack decided that the day was no longer worth talking about. Americans had learned enough about what happened, they said. There would be no need to probe further. Outrage was unnecessary. It was time to move on.

McCarthy and McConnell, both outspoken in the wake of the attack, corralled their members to shoot down a bipartisan bill that would have formed an independent commission in the mold of the body that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. 

“I think we have a pretty good idea what happened (on Jan. 6); I was here,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, in late May. “And this is unlike the 9/11 Commission in that respect.”

“The Jan. 6 commission would have ultimately been one party investigating the other,” Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, said in June. 

The bill was sponsored by Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Ranking Member John Katko, R-N.Y. McConnell said it was slanted because the chair, appointed by the Democrats, would have hired the staff. McCarthy called it “duplicative.”

The bill passed the House in May with support from 35 Republicans, who defied McCarthy’s recommendation to vote against it. The 175 Republicans who opposed the commission included some who had at first spoken out against the rioters, including Gallagher, the Wisconsin representative who told Trump to “call it off” on CNN. About a week later, the Senate’s Republicans killed the bill.

“It isn’t designed to produce a serious inquiry,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., tweeted. “It’s designed to be used as (a) partisan political weapon.”

When the House responded with a measure to form its own select committee, all but two Republicans in the House voted against it. Few stood up to defend their vote during a floor debate. More than two dozen skipped the debate entirely, opting instead to spend the day with Trump at the border.

“We need to spend our time finding solutions and helping Americans, not creating partisan commissions to do work that has already been done competently by the U.S. Senate and by law enforcement,” said Rep. Michelle Fischbach, R-Minn., on the House floor.

The committee that ultimately formed includes just two Republicans, both outliers in their own party. McCarthy withdrew all five of his recommendations after Pelosi rejected two of them.

“We will run our own investigation,” McCarthy vowed in July. 

But he never did. 

“There’s nothing I have that can add to that day,” McCarthy told a local TV station during an interview in September. Pressed about his own phone call with Trump on Jan. 6, he added: “I have nothing to hide, but I have nothing to add.”

It was a stunning about-face for Republicans who have otherwise said they support the police and law-and-order measures.

Despite the claims of partisanship, the goal of the Jan. 6 rioters was to stop a legitimate election process by force, noted Tom Nichols, a former Republican who writes about democracy and politics. 

“I have never seen a situation where elected officials’ lives were in danger, and they downplayed what happened,” Nichols said. “Those protesters did not differentiate between Republicans and Democrats — they were going to hang Mike Pence.”What lies about Jan. 6 tells us about American democracy

Nearly a year later, there is zero evidence to say that Jan. 6 was an antifa operation, a tourist visit, a false flag, or an uneventful day to forget. 

The falsehoods were not without isolated criticism on the right. Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera criticized the “outrageous and uncorroborated” claims in Carlson’s documentary series. The two co-founders of The Dispatch, both Fox News contributors for years, resigned in November from the network over the series. Chris Wallace, the network’s premier journalist, recently left the network; NPR reported that Wallace had expressed concerns to network leadership about the Carlson documentary.

Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who rejected Trump’s false election fraud claims and voted to impeach him over what happened on Jan. 6, is one of two Republicans to serve on the House select committee, and used her standing to blast the “false flag” conspiracy theory. 

“It’s un-American to be spreading those kinds of lies, and they are lies,” Cheney said. 

But the repetition of the Jan. 6 falsehoods demonstrates that a political movement can coalesce around obvious lies — and that, despite the facts, it can be difficult to stand against.

“This is our new world — denial of what your eyes are actually seeing,” said Laura Thornton, director and senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

“The effort to rewrite history in the service of political power goals is not unheard of in America or anywhere else,” said Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist who has studied the Tea Party and anti-Trump resistance. “What is brazen is the history they want to rewrite includes pictures of what actually happened.”

“Because Jan. 6 was not successful, now they have to rewrite history and in some cases they were doing that in 24 hours, saying you didn’t see what you saw,” added Phillipe Copeland, clinical assistant professor at Boston University School of Social Work.

So far, the consequences for what happened before, during and after Jan. 6 have been limited to rioters like the “QAnon Shaman” who were charged or sentenced for storming the Capitol. 

Political leaders and pundits, on the other hand, are going about business as usual. Trump, acquitted in the Senate for a second time, may run again in 2024. McCarthy is angling to take back the speakership. Carlson remains one of the most-watched cable news hosts on TV. 

Meanwhile, Cheney was cast out of the mainstream of the Republican Party when the House removed her in May from her leadership position after her impeachment vote. Similar moves against Republicans who criticized Trump have taken place across the country. 

It’s a sign that elections could remain a contested space for years to come, as Republican grievances about the outcome of the 2020 election fuel the rewriting of election laws around the country. And it’s a sign that Jan. 6 downplay and denial could be hardening into yet another litmus test for Republicans. Primaries in 2022 are shaping up to be contests where pro-Trump loyalists challenge anyone who dissents. 

“We are in an extremely dangerous place,” said Thornton. “An attack on your Capitol where people are threatening to murder the vice president is bad enough, but when you have a political party — one of two in our country — that are downplaying or diverting or misrepresenting, it’s extremely upsetting. I don’t know how we come back from that.”

By the way, as of October of 2012, there were more than seven Congressional probes of the Benghazi attack.  These included:

(1) the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform chaired by then-congressman Mark Meadows

(2) The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

(3) the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

(4) The House Committee on Foreign Affairs

(5) The House Committee on the Judiciary

(6) The House Committee on Armed Services, and

(7) The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

(8) The House Select Committee on Benghazi.

This list does not account for non-Congressional investigations of the terror attack.  

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Greg Sargent reports on yet another mind-boggling example of right wing hypocrisy:

In their frantic efforts to disrupt the work of the House select committee examining Jan. 6, Donald Trump’s co-conspirators have advanced a singular argument: The committee lacks any “legitimate legislative purpose.”

This is ridiculous on its face. Members of the committee have repeatedly said their work may inform efforts to reform the congressional process of counting presidential electors, which Trump sought to exploit. There are other obvious potential legislative purposes as well.

I think maybe their legislative purpose should be to pass a law making it illegal for the president to plot a coup. Apparently we need one.

But this argument has grown even more absurd now that it’s being advanced by the lawyer who may have been most directly involved in plotting how Trump could overturn his 2020 election loss.

We’re talking about John Eastman, who wrote that now-notorious memo advising Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, to refuse to count Joe Biden’s electors from numerous states, to tip the election to Trump.

Eastman has just sued the Jan. 6 committee and Verizon over the committee’s subpoena of his phone records, which the committee is seeking to shed further light on the plot to overturn the election. The lawsuit asks the court to block the subpoena.

Underlying this dispute is something larger than this particular lawsuit’s legal complexities, and larger than the battle between the committee and Trump’s co-conspirators. What’s really at stake is whether this effort to overturn U.S. democracy through extraordinary corruption and then mob violence merits a political and policy response of any kind.

The answer to this question from Trumpworld, and indeed from many congressional Republicans, is essentially, “No.”

Honestly, this level of shamelessness makes me want to crawl under the covers and stay there. How dare they?

These are people who spent month after month, millions of dollars and endless hours investigating the President Clinton’s alleged lying in a civil case that was dismissed and the tragic death of four Americans in a terrorist hot zone for the express purpose (admitted by Kevin McCarthy) of destroying Hillary Clinton. And now they claim that an investigation into a riot that took place inside the Capitol with the purpose of overturning an election is off limits? Get outta here.

And those very same people who reveled in the hacking and publishing of Jon Podesta’s emails, demanded that Hillary Clinton turn over every private message (even exhorting the Russian government to do it for her) are also claiming that the government can’t see their phone records … because they have a 4th Amendment right to privacy.

Caterwauling by people who weaponized congressional investigations decades ago is just too much. No.

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This is what hypocrisy does to an institution:

The secularizing shifts in American society show no signs of slowing. The latest Pew Research Center survey of the U.S. religious composition finds the religiously unaffiliated share of the public is 6 percentage points higher than it was five years ago and 10 points higher than a decade ago.

About three-in-ten U.S. adults (29%) now are religious “nones” – people who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” when asked about their religious identity. Self-identified Christians of all varieties (including Protestants, Catholics, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Orthodox Christians) make up 63% of the adult population, down from 75% a decade ago. In addition, the share of U.S. adults who say they pray daily has been trending downward, as has the share who say religion is “very important” in their lives.

Religious conservatives enthusiastically backing shameless Republicans for years and ecstatically embracing the libertine liar Donald Trump exposed them for what they are. Other religious leaders failing to step up didn’t help. Combined with all the financial corruption and moral rot in churches that molested children and covered it up, it’s taken its toll. People no longer trust these institutions and are questioning the whole enterprise. No one should be even a little bit surprised.

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Vaccination status via new Monmouth poll:

Democrats:
96% already received
2% soon or see how it goes
2% likely will never get

Republicans:
54% already received
9% soon or see how it goes
30% likely will never get

Those Republican refusniks represent tens of millions of COVID spreaders. You need to know nothing more than that if you want to explain why we are among the worst in the world for COVID hospitalizations and death despite easy access to safe and effective vaccines. And all these reckless miscreants are offering themselves up as carriers to vulnerable populations and stressing the health care system to the breaking point. I would bet money that the same people also refuse to wear masks and social distance.

They are killing themselves. And it’s nothing more than a political strategy by the Republican party and its media allies to destroy Biden’s presidency. Sadly, it seems to be working:

 A majority of Americans say they feel “worn out” by how Covid has impacted their daily lives, and nearly half feel “angry” about it. And the public’s exasperation may also be having an impact on how they view their political leaders’ handling of the pandemic, according to the latest Monmouth (“Mon-muth”) University Poll. Support for face mask and workplace vaccine mandates has also declined since the fall when the delta variant started to dominate.

Six in ten Americans feel worn out by pandemic-related changes they have had to make to their daily lives over the past 20 months. This includes 36% who feel worn out a lot and 24% who feel worn out a little. The poll also finds that nearly half of the public feels angry about how Covid has impacted their daily lives – 24% a lot and 21% a little. Republicans (64%) are no more likely than Democrats (63%) to say they feel at least a little worn out by pandemic-related changes to their lives, but they are much more likely to report feeling angry (63% and 34%, respectively)…

“The fact that Americans say they have had enough should be no surprise. Every time we try to adjust to a new normal, another variant pops up to put us on guard again. This perpetual unease is having an impact on how we view those charged with handling the pandemic,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute.

Of course it does. Biden is somehow supposed to get all these fools to get vaccinated and when he tried to impose mandates GOP politicians and judges have a fit and strike them down. And, needless to say, their protestations about “principles” are laughable. They certainly don’t feel the need to adhere to any other principles if it suits their ends.

The American public is now split on whether President Joe Biden has done a good job (46%) or bad job (46%) handling the pandemic. Prior to this poll, though, Biden’s ratings on the pandemic had consistently been in net positive territory including as recently as last month (53% good and 41% bad). Positive ratings for how Biden is handling the pandemic has dropped more among independents (from 50% in November to 38% now) than it has among either Republicans (from 16% to 10%) or Democrats (from 90% to 88%). Also noteworthy is that this decline has occurred mainly in states Biden won in 2020 (from 60% in these states last month saying he has done a good job to 47% now). Opinion of Biden’s performance in the states he lost is stable (from 44% good job in November to 45% in December).

It isn’t just Biden paying the price for these idiots. Democrats are paying a far higher price for it than Republicans in the states, as well:

Ratings for state governors have ticked down as well (to 50% good job and 41% bad job, compared with 60% good and 35% bad in November). In states Biden won, positive governor ratings have dropped from 61% to 49%. In states he lost, they dropped from 58% to 52%. Ratings for how federal health agencies have dealt with the pandemic (48% good job and 41% bad job) remain positive, but have also slipped (53% good and 38% bad in November). Opinion on how the American public is dealing with the pandemic remains largely negative at 27% good job and 56% bad job (35% and 55%, respectively, in November).

A majority of Americans are now against masks and mandates too.

By the way, health care workers and people manning vaccination clinics are being assaulted on top of everything else according to a doctor on CNN:

“It feels like you are drinking from a fire hose with no way to control that flow… Our workforce shortages are extreme, and I think it’s been extraordinarily hard on the workforce to go from being heroes to being questioned to being distrusted, you know to really feeling like they’;re under the gun but also sometimes being assaulted by patients.”

Another one said:

“Not only does the overwhelming work of caring for sick patients, and COVID patients are very sick, they are the sickest of the sick. But also to deal with a cultural movement which denies the basics around care and actively confronts us. We have arrested folks who have assaulted some of our vaccination clinics that are in the public, we have had physical altercations in the hospital by family members who want a different kind of treatment that what is accepted as standard best care. So indeed, it is not only about the demands of this work but also the political and social environment of patients and their families. It is heartbreaking.”

We still don’t know exactly what Omicron is going to bring us. The UK is instituting new mitigation strategies and streamlining their booster program. It may not ending up being a huge deal but right now hospitals are filling up again because these idiots are refusing to get vaxxed.

I’m not quite at the point at which I’m willing to say that maybe we should tell the unvaxxed they’re on their own but it’s tempting. There’s just no excuse at this point.

Wow, the red dot is so far off the chart I missed it at first.

Omicron is going to make a lot of people sick. https://t.co/P0STpc87XN

— Conrad Hackett (@conradhackett) December 15, 2021

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As I look around our culture and politics these days what I see is a society overwhelmed by trauma. Sure we mostly came through the Trump years and their aftermath (for the moment) and while the pandemic has taken 800,000 and counting, a horrific number, obviously the vast majority of Americans have survived, even if we’ve been scarred by it emotionally and spiritually. But it’s obvious that we are a people in deep distress. This experience has America reeling.

I wish I felt super-optimistic that we will emerge stronger than before. After all, our forebears went through worse — world wars, years of depression, pandemics, apartheid, and more. This time is certainly no worse. But something is different right now and I think it has to do with the fact that our political culture is so decadent that we somehow installed a monstrous celebrity as our leader who created an irrational cult that is dominating our shared experiences. It has shaken our faith in our ability to govern ourselves.

It’s not about Trump personally or even the craven opportunists who surround him. It’s our fellow Americans who have been either brainwashed or so consumed by hate for anyone who isn’t like them that they happily signed on with an authoritarian cult that promises to keep them on top. The fact that these people won’t even save their own lives out of devotion to that cult is very disorienting — maybe the most disorienting thing I’ve ever witnessed. I honestly didn’t expect them to die in order to own the libs

What that says to me is that the whiff of violence that underlies our politics in the wake of January 6th, Rittenhouse and all the angry protests and violent threats against public health officials, school board members, election workers and politicians, is not hyperbolic. When I call it a death cult, I’m not kidding.

The mainstream media hasn’t been terrible in covering this but they haven’t been great either. (Today, CNN covered their own poll finding a 50/50 (49/51) approval rating for Biden as terrible news that shows he’s failing on every level.) So independent journalism remains important if you’re looking for analysis that isn’t “he said/ she said” or “both sides do it” and skews the narrative in ways that advantage the slash and burn Republicans.

Blogs like this and newsletters can help to fill that void. I don’t think it’s ever been more important to pay attention, remain engaged and stay informed. If you stop here from time to time to get our perspective on the news that has us all reeling on a daily basis, and are able to help support us in that endeavor, I would really appreciate it.

If you’d like to drop a little something in the Christmas stocking you can hit one of the buttons below or use the snail mail address on the sidebar.

It has been a very bad week for former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows —maybe even the worst week of his life. And it’s not over yet.

Late on Tuesday night, the House of Representatives voted to hold Meadows, a former GOP congressman from North Carolina, in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena issued by the bipartisan Jan. 6th Committee. The vote fell mostly along party lines, with only Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the only two Republicans serving on the committee, being the only two Republicans who voted with every Democrat to hold.

Meadows contempt citation will now be referred to the Justice Department, which will decide whether to prosecute. Most of the TV lawyers seem to think this will be a hard call since Meadows really was in the White House during the period in question, unlike podcaster Steve Bannon, who was referred a few weeks ago on the same charge. On the other hand, before Meadows decided to defy the subpoena, he had turned over around 6,000 documents including many text messages, which the committee claims it wants to ask him about. So Meadows is claiming that they can look at his documents but his knowledge of them is privileged information? That doesn’t make any sense.

The documents he turned over which the committee has released in the last few days have been dramatic and compelling. Among them was the PowerPoint presentation that had been circulated in the White House and to Republicans in Congress and the right-wing media prior to the insurrection. It’s a shocking document that outlined several possible strategies to illegally overturn the 2020 election. Subsequent reporting revealed many GOP officials knew that Trump and his henchmen had cooked up plans to stage a coup and didn’t say anything about it.

Then on Monday, as the committee was preparing to vote, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-WY., read off some of Meadows’ text messages showing that Fox News personalities such as Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity had been frantically texting Meadows during the insurrection asking him to get Trump to call off his troops. Even Donald Trump Jr. exhorted Meadows to tell his daddy that he needed to “lead now” and do an Oval Office address. There were dozens of such texts from people all over Washington, begging the president to tell his followers to stop the violence.

We know that Trump sat on his hands for hours sending out lame tweets about respecting the police until he finally released a video in which he commiserated with the violent thugs and told them that they were very special and he loved them.

We’ve learned that there were texts to Meadows after the fact from unnamed congressional lawmakers telling him they had tried their best but “nothing worked.” On Tuesday night before the floor vote, members of the committee read more, some of which revealed that members of Congress were offering advice on how to carry out the coup even before January 6th:

Don't think this one has fully sunk in yet: A member of Congress suggested that GOP-controlled states anoint Trump electors **before those states were even called.**

This wasn't overturning the election. This was scrapping democracy before the votes were even counted. pic.twitter.com/gzf89U52jD

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) December 15, 2021

The Jan. 6th Committee is planning to start holding public hearings shortly after the new year and the word is that they will release the names of those GOP officials who helped with the coup planning.

One can only imagine what’s happening down at Mar-a-Lago now that Trump has seen that his own son Don Jr. was calling his (formerly) trusted majordomo Mark Meadows on that day, telling him his father had to “lead.” After the recent debacle of Meadows’ book, in which he revealed the former president’s pitiful, weakened state as he was lying to the country about having COVID, Trump now has to grapple with the fact that Meadows inexplicably turned over all these documents to the committee and is only now exerting executive privilege after the cat is out of the bag.

So Trump may be having a worse week than Meadows.

Not only is he dealing with the fallout of Meadows’ document dump, a judge just ruled on Tuesday that he’s going to have to give up his tax returns after all. That the ruling came from a judge who Trump appointed, must really chap his hide. It’s been stayed pending appeal, but the gyrations the higher courts would have to go through may not be worth the trouble. If he runs again in 2024, there’s a good chance the country will at least be able to see what he’s been hiding.

He’s also been called to appear for a deposition by the New York Attorney General’s office in regards to the civil fraud investigation into his real estate business. Since the Manhattan District Attorney is running a parallel criminal investigation, this puts Trump at risk if he is forced to take the Fifth Amendment in the civil case to avoid incriminating himself criminally. In civil cases, you are allowed to infer guilt from a Fifth Amendment plea.

The bad news quickly piled up for Trump this week when the New York Times reported late Tuesday that the prosecutors in the criminal investigation have called his accountant and his longtime banker before the grand jury to determine whether Trump committed fraud when he applied for loans. It appears that these two cases may be coming to a head.

But perhaps even more threatening, for the first time we are seeing the contours of what the January 6th Committee may be leading up to: a criminal referral of Donald Trump for obstruction. Liz Cheney spelled it out on Monday during the Committee hearing to hold Meadows in contempt of congress:

Hours passed without necessary action by the President. These privileged texts are further evidence of President Trump’s supreme dereliction of duty during those 187 minutes. And Mr. Meadows’ testimony will bear on another key question before this Committee: Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’ official proceedings to count electoral votes?

Journalist Marcy Wheeler explains that this seems to be following the same legal framework the DOJ is using to prosecute the most serious January 6th rioters. She writes, “Liz Cheney was stating that Trump’s actions on January 6 may demonstrate that he, along with hundreds of people he incited, had deliberately attempted to prevent the vote count.”

The language Cheney used tracks closely with those other cases, which is a clue that this is how they may be seeing this case going forward. The courts have so far been amenable to this interpretation of the law 18 USC 1512(c)(2) which makes it illegal to obstruct an official proceeding. Whether that holds up through the inevitable appeals process is yet to be determined, but when you look at the evidence it’s clear that Donald Trump spent weeks planning to do just that and when his followers resorted to violence to accomplish it, he sat on his hands for hours and watched them do it.

I am not particularly optimistic that any of these cases will come to fruition. But Trump and his henchmen are feeling the heat right now for what his long-time fixer Michael Cohen always calls “his dirty deeds” and maybe that’s the best we can hope for. 

It’s Happy Hollandaise time. If you’re of a mind to throw a little something in the stocking, I’d really appreciate it.

This speech by Georgia Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock on Tuesday was so good, I’m posting on it again, this time at the top of my second post this morning:

ICYMI from David Leonhardt:

An anti-democratic movement, inspired by Donald Trump but much larger than him, is making significant progress, as my colleague Charles Homans has reported. In the states that decide modern presidential elections, this movement has already changed some laws and ousted election officials, with the aim of overturning future results. It has justified the changes with blatantly false statements claiming that Biden did not really win the 2020 election.

The movement has encountered surprisingly little opposition. Most leading Republican politicians have either looked the other way or supported the anti-democratic movement. In the House, Republicans ousted Liz Cheney from a leadership position because she called out Trump’s lies.

The pushback within the Republican Party has been so weak that about 60 percent of Republican adults now tell pollsters that they believe the 2020 election was stolen — a view that’s simply wrong.

And the pushback from Democrats has been insufficient to match the threat, as Sen. Warnock said so eloquently.

Barton Gellman, who wrote a recent Atlantic magazine article about the movement, told Terry Gross of NPR last week, “This is, I believe, a democratic emergency, and that without very strong and systematic pushback from protectors of democracy, we’re going to lose something that we can’t afford to lose about the way we run elections.”

For the rest of you, Gellman recommends “doing what the Republicans are doing at the precinct and the county and the state level in terms of organizing to control election authorities to ensure that they remain nonpartisan or neutral.”

You don’t get off easy by putting it all on Democrats in Congress.