Month: December 2021

Now I have total faith that the high court will find a way to be completely without principle and strike down the California law even as they uphold the Texas law. After all, there is nowhere to appeal a Supreme Court decision and these people obviously care nothing for the court’s reputation. They are very likely to be just as shameless as the rest of the right. But it’s important to do this anyway. They can’t be allowed to do this without pushback.

Dan Pfeiffer shares my concern that Democrats — possessing neither message nor discipline — will not have what it takes to save our democracy. A “big tent” is fine. But sometimes you need a single, easily conveyed message that encapsulates what you stand for. Obama’s was one word: Hope.

Pfeiffer asks if Democrats can be successful running on saving democracy.

Yes, “Republicans are a danger to democracy and election integrity.” And yes, “their anti-democratic authoritarianism is the greatest danger they pose in the short term.” But will voters vote based on that? If Democrats can package it right?

A CNN poll suggests that 56 percent of Americans perceive democracy under attack. A critical Democratic voting bloc sees more threat:

A recent poll of 18 to 29-year-olds conducted by the Harvard University Institute of Politics suggests that a democracy-focused message might be effective. According to the poll, only seven percent of 18 to 29-year-olds describe the U.S. as a healthy democracy, while a majority describe it as either in trouble or failed. 35 percent of respondents believe there will be a civil war in their lifetime and 25 percent believe they will see a state secede from the union.

So, says Pfeiffer, there is a market for the message. But, says Pfeiffer, “This is where Democrats run into trouble.” A message, any message, unsupported by actions is likely to fail:

If democracy is really in grave danger why aren’t Democrats doing anything about it? Why aren’t more Democrats – including President Biden– more vocal about raising the alarm? Now, there may be nothing that can be done about Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s willingness to sacrifice your right to vote in order to protect Mitch McConnell’s power. No amount of arm-twisting or speech-making may be enough to change their recalcitrant minds. Efforts are still underway to pass Voting Rights and I expect President Biden to become more vocal about these issues once the endless effort to pass his economic plan is behind him. The failure to take action would be a huge problem on every dimension, but I think there are two things Democrats could do to make the message about democracy more credible even absent Senate action on voting rights legislation. 

First, they could get caught trying. That doesn’t mean one vote or a bunch of procedural BS. Democrats must engage in a party-wide effort, from the president on down, to make the case for democracy reform and raise alarms about Republican intentions to subvert democracy. It means real pressure on Manchin and Sinema and a very public push to eliminate the filibuster. Democrats cannot make the case that they will protect democracy if they haven’t clearly fought like hell to do so.

We must also clearly and specifically call out the Republicans. Because if Democrats don’t, we can be damn sure the media won’t do it for us. You lose 100 percent of the arguments you don’t make and not enough Democrats are making the argument that Republicans are a danger to democracy.

Second, we should spend more time talking about preventing election subversion and pushing efforts to reform the process at all levels to prevent politicians from stealing elections. This must include votes on specific pieces of legislation that make it more difficult for Congress to reject certified state election results. Let’s put the Republicans on record as being willing to overturn the will of the voters

Seriously, get caught trying. But can Democrats get caught trying and turn it into a message as easily grokked and as repeatable as “Crooked Hillary”? Without that, it will never catch fire. Democratic audiences were all over the place messaging against Trump in 2016, Pfeiffer notes, using words like “racist,” “misogynist,” “liar,” “dumb,” “crook,” “Russian patsy,” and so forth. Trump sucks at most everything except marketing and branding. Democrats couldn’t agree on calling a dog a dog.

A few days ago, I mentioned I was working through Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century by Daniel Oppenheimer. Among his tales of left-wing apostacy, Ronald Reagan’s conversion to conservatism is an outlier.

From the Washington Post’s 2016 review:

The mainstream liberalism of his younger days was a modest inheritance from his father, one he quickly spent. “Not for Reagan a descent into utopian delusion, followed by a long dark night of the soul, culminating in a baptismal emergence into the light of God, truth, and conservatism,” Oppenheimer admits. “In Reagan’s conversion story there was no conversion at all.” An outlier in this tale, Reagan gradually takes up conservatism and remakes his belief system, informed by Hollywood labor disputes and pro-market promotional work for General Electric during the 1950s and 1960s.

In Oppenheimer’s telling, Reagan’s path, easier and less self-aware, is mirrored by the country he would lead. “For Reagan, and for tens of millions of Americans who would travel with him to the Right, political transformation wasn’t marked by catharsis and epiphany,” he writes. “It rarely even revealed itself as a transformation. It was life, lived year to year, decade to decade,” with a deceptive sense of permanence “that gave more comfort and was less anxious to bear than a story of discontinuity and change would have been.”

What “The Great Communicator” offered voters was political conversion on the cheap, a way for southern Democrats, especially, to become Republicans without having to reject their former selves or basic values. Those were always sound, Reagan reassured. Reagan lived forever with one foot in reality and the other in fantasy, making it possible for him to imagine the Democratic Party had changed but he hadn’t. He sold that to the entire South.

Oppenheimer’s analysis is odd, given how many Reagan supporters were evangelicals for whom eternity in heaven or hell turns on lurid tales of dark nights of the soul where Jesus intervenes in the nick of time. They are “saved” in dramatic stories they love to retell again and again. That may be because while everyone imagines themselves as heroes in their own story, when it comes right down to it, they’d rather not have to exert themselves. How very American. Reagan played to that.

Reagan the story-teller grasped intuitively that people don’t make hard political choices if they aren’t given stories that locate those decisions in their own lives. He told Americans subtly that they were always Republicans, they just didn’t know it. (Of course, by the late 1960s, southern Democrats had other incentives to leave.)

But would that work in the other direction with democracy now on the line? Could Democrats (who don’t believe in marketing) drop their five-point plans and sing as a chorus a siren song of democracy that woos voters to them instead of condemning them?

The problem with many progressives is they want to see conservatives respond to an altar call, to fall to their knees and confess their political and personal sins, admit their error, their white privilege, what-have-you, and come to the light.

“We love being right” too much, says progressive messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio [timestamp 3:09]. “We definitely need everyone to understand that this is true. It’s true!” she mocks.

“I actually don’t care. If I can get you to do the thing I need you to do and you still think climate change is fake,” then that’s your personal problem. “We need to stop choosing to be right and start choosing to be happy. By which I mean win.”

We are in an age of competing stories, Shenker-Osorio says. And Democrats’ incoherent story is losing. Can we learn that lesson in time?

Remember, Reagan used to sell soap.

Let’s revisit that tale of the PowerPoint presentation for overturning the 2020 election that was in documents former Donald Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows turned over to House Jan. 6 investigators. The Washington Post has more this morning:

Phil Waldron, the retired colonel, was working with Trump’s outside lawyers and was part of a team that briefed the lawmakers on a PowerPoint presentation detailing “Options for 6 JAN,” Waldron told The Washington Post. He said his contribution to the presentation focused on his claims of foreign interference in the vote, as did his discussions with the White House.

Waldron told the Washington Post he had visited with Meadows “maybe eight to 10 times” and briefed “several members of Congress” on the eve of the Jan. 6 riot.

Members of Congress? Which members of Congress? Waldron declined to identify them.

“The presentation was that there was significant foreign interference in the election, here’s the proof,” Waldron said. “These are constitutional, legal, feasible, acceptable and suitable courses of action.”

The PowerPoint circulated by Waldron included proposals for Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6 to reject electors from “states where fraud occurred” or replace them with Republican electors. It included a third proposal in which the certification of Joe Biden’s victory was to be delayed, and U.S. marshals and National Guard troops were to help “secure” and count paper ballots in key states.

A lawyer for Meadows claims Meadows did nothing with the PowerPoint after receiving it. But the “wild theories and proposals” circulating among Trump loyalists, plus Meadows asking Department of Justice heads to investigate baseless conspiracy theories, suggests Meadows “was more directly in contact with proponents of such theories than was previously known.”

Waldron, a cybersecurity consultant who specialized in psychological operations during his military career, said that a meeting he and others had with Meadows in the days around Christmas turned to questions about how to determine whether the election had been hacked. He said Meadows asked, “What do you need? What would help?” Waldron said his team developed a list for Meadows with information on IP addresses, servers and other data that he believed needed to be investigated “using the powers of the world’s greatest national security intelligence apparatus.”

Waldron “and others” on his “team”? Which others?

An unnamed source tells the Post that Meadows had “little or nothing to do” with Waldron or any of his documents, but simply passed along information to appropriate parties.

Eight to 10 times?

No one owns up to authoring the PowerPoint. Nor do they know who sent it to Meadows even though Waldron seems to know who provided input:

Waldron has said that the team behind the PowerPoint included former intelligence officers and military veterans and was supported by hundreds of “digital warriors” who provided research. Jovan H. Pulitzer, a Texas-based entrepreneur who is a vocal election denier, told The Post that he contributed material for it.

“It was a pretty wide variety of folks from around this country that jumped in to say how can we help,” Waldron told The Post.

“Violence is absolutely the last thing that anybody on our team espoused,” Waldron told the Post. Perhaps they should have told the losing candidate, The Three Percenters, The Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and others.

Waldron also claims to have briefed Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina in Meadows’s office with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani present and is known to have worked with Trump’s legal team and Giuliani at their Willard hotel war room.

No comments on this Post reporting from :

• Ben Williamson, a Meadows spokesman
• Rudy Giuliani
• Lindsey Graham
• A Trump spokesman

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson (R) on Friday “did not directly address whether Waldron had briefed him and his staff.”

The Post has much more background on Waldron’s background and post-service involvement in cybersecurity. He had post-election involvement with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and advised Arizona Senate President Karen Fann on the hiring of Cyber Ninjas for the bamboo ballots recount in Maricopa County, Arizona.

We once had a major client who operated like these clowns. You knew it was him calling when you heard an office page for the process engineering team leader, then, after a pause, for someone else on the process team, then, after another pause, a page for someone on the piping team, and so on. He would not take responsibility for making his own decisions. He would call around our office looking for someone to tell him what he wanted to hear so he had someone to blame when the stupid thing he wanted to do went to hell. Team Trump, Giuliani, pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, and others kept doing the same with 2020 election results.

How many court decisions and official recounts would it take to prove to Trump and his cadre of seditionists that there was no significant fraud in the election?

∞ x ∞

This piece by Dahlia Lithwick on Chief Justice John Roberts is spot on. He is not in control. It’s Alito’s court now:

When the Supreme Court released its opinions this morning on the two Texas cases around S.B. 8—the vigilante bill that allows anyone to collect $10,000 bounties against suspected abortion providers—there wasn’t a lot of clarity or consistency in the news media on how to frame what had happened. Was it a “win” for abortion rights or another warning of the coming blow to abortion access in this country? The court did allow the plaintiff abortion providers to continue to try to bring suits against a handful of state licensing officials tasked with helping to implement the six-week ban, but it declined to enjoin the law, which has prevented virtually any abortions in the state of Texas after six weeks since Sept. 1 and makes no exceptions in cases of rape and incest.

The trouble that the media is having in settling on a coherent frame for this specific decision is both entirely the problem and entirely beside the point. The real story of the two decisions in U.S. v. Texas and Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson is that Chief Justice John Roberts has now lost control of his court. As was the case in the very first shadow docket order that allowed S.B. 8 to go into effect, despite abundant evidence that it was materially harming pregnant people and clearly violated Roe v. Wade, the vote today was 5-4, again with the court behaving as though there is nothing unusual about the Texas scheme. The chief justice had over three months to change a single mind on the conservative flank of the court. He failed to do so. Writing for those five justices, Neil Gorsuch lays out myriad stumbling blocks and problems with the abortion providers’ theory before granting them very limited relief against four state licensing officials who have some authority to enforce S.B. 8.

The chief justice, concurring in part and dissenting in part, pointed out that the purpose of the law was to evade judicial review: “Texas has passed a law banning abortions after roughly six weeks of pregnancy. That law is contrary to this Court’s decisions in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey. It has had the effect of denying the exercise of what we have held is a right protected under the Federal Constitution.” He describes Texas’ enforcement mechanisms as “an array of stratagems, designed to shield its unconstitutional law from judicial review.” He goes on to note that “these provisions, among others, effectively chill the provision of abortions in Texas.” All of these statements are facts. To address the problems they lay out, he would add the attorney general and a state court clerk back to the list of folks who could properly be sued.

The chief justice’s opinion closes with this grim warning:

The clear purpose and actual effect of S. B. 8 has been to nullify this Court’s rulings. It is, however, a basic principle that the Constitution is the “fundamental and paramount law of the nation,” and “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” Indeed, “[i]f the legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments, the constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery.” The nature of the federal right infringed does not matter; it is the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system that is at stake.

His statement is joined by the court’s three liberals.The mistake lay in believing that Roberts’ worries were both an end in themselves and shared by the imaginary centrists Barrett and Kavanaugh.

Perhaps now is as good a time as any to put to rest the soothing notion, floated last spring, of a 3–3–3 court, with a temperate and amiable Brett Kavanaugh as the median justice and a youthful Amy Coney Barrett inclined to pump the brakes on the most radical elements of the Federalist Society’s pet projects. Neither Barrett nor Kavanaugh appears to be swayed by the chief justice’s concerns for institutional legitimacy or even, in fact, institutional supremacy. If red states want to go ahead and choke off federally protected rights, they have been given the comprehensive road map. We will certainly see red states do precisely this.

The mistake we’ve been making for over a year lay in believing that John Roberts’ worries with respect to the reputation, independence, and legitimacy of the court were both an end in themselves and shared by the imaginary centrists Barrett and Kavanaugh. We have for too long confused Roberts’ concern for the appearance of temperate independence (the “lie better next time” instruction to litigants) with a concern for actual temperate independence. Faced with public outcry about the way in which S.B. 8 was handled on its emergency docket in September (in the dark of night, without explanation), the court scheduled real-life arguments and real-life briefings, then waited yet another month, and then somehow produced a decision with substantially the same outcome. This time it came with an elaborate warning to abortion providers that they can go ahead with their lawsuit but they will likely fail again in the future—while the majority still congratulated itself on having treated the plaintiffs with “extraordinary solicitude at every turn.”

I have used up my quota of the word gaslighting for 2021, but to be clear, abortions after six weeks are still unlawful in Texas. Real people are suffering the real consequences, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor opens in her own partial dissent: “For nearly three months, the Texas Legislature has substantially suspended a constitutional guarantee: a pregnant woman’s right to control her own body.”  Five conservative justices think this is just fine. Clever, even. The stratagems by which Texas’ abortion ban was diabolically effectuated have been blessed yet again by five justices on the Supreme Court, who tell you once again that this enforcement mechanism was just too brilliantly innovative to be enjoined and possibly even too brilliant to be successfully challenged in the future. And only the chief justice seems to be willing to say that this constitutes “nullification” of a fundamental constitutional freedom, and should perhaps be addressed accordingly.

I think it’s time for California to pass exactly the same law for guns and see what happens. It will be worth it if only to see what tortured logic they use to strike it down.

I always thought this 3-3-3 idea was absurd. Kavanaugh is a right wing political operative and Barrett is a haardcore religious zealot. They know what they were put on the court to do. I do wonder if Kavanaugh might be inclined rule against Trump (along with Roberts and the three liberals) simply because th party poohbahs may want him stopped from doing his worst and the Supreme have lifetime appointments and can do it with the fewest potential consequences. But that’s probably wishful thinking. They will most likely back him all the way.

Deep foreign policy and political analysis from our once and future president:

Yeah. He seems to think it’s fine to say that Israel rightfully and literally “owned” congress but now congress is owned by AOC and Ilhan Omar instead. This is a man whose slogan was “America First.”

Once again this sort of thing proves that his supporters aren’t any more incoherent and ignorant than he is. Even after serving as president for four years he still doesn’t understand anything about basic, fundamental precepts of democracy and the American constitution. So of course he attempted a coup when he lost the election. He doesn’t care about legitimacy or consent of the governed because he doesn’t know what that is.

 “They attempted a coup—there’s no better way to describe what happened. Trump and his allies did everything they possibly could, tried every possible avenue to overthrow a democratic election and install an authoritarian ruler in defiance of the people’s will.”

They
– forced an audit

– tried to intimidate the governor into calling a special session

– tried to intimidate the SoS into “finding” the votes to win

– tried to get the US Attorney to announce voter fraud investigations…

– tried to get the DOJ to write a letter announcing the Georgia vote was spoiled and suspect and the state legislature should call a special session

– tried to get a random poll worker to falsely confess to stuffing ballots

– tried to get Pence to reject Biden electors

And when none of that worked, Trump riled up the mob and hurled them at the Capitol hoping (very obviously) it would disrupt and delay the peaceful transfer of power.

Originally tweeted by Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) on December 11, 2021.

This article by Mark Zandi may be optimistic but it tracks with what Krugman and others are saying about this COVID economy:

Covid-19 continues to call the shots in our economy. This past summer, the Delta variant slowed growth and juiced up inflation. After Delta receded, growth rebounded. With the Omicron variant now spreading across the globe, the next few weeks will give us a sense of how much economic peril lies ahead.

While today’s Consumer Price Index report showed inflation rose in November to 6.8 percent for the previous 12 months, there’s compelling evidence that inflation has peaked. Even with the risks of Omicron and other variants to come, there’s reason for optimism that the economy will return to full employment with comfortably low inflation by this time next year.

Booming holiday sales are a clear sign of the economy’s resilience. So far, sales couldn’t be better. It is almost certain that spending on holiday gifts will increase at a double-digit pace over last year (a none-too-shabby year for sales in its own right). Some of the sales strength reflects higher prices. But even after inflation is accounted for, this holiday season may end up among the best, if not the best, ever.

American families should let loose this holiday season. Why? For one thing, a quickly improving job market that has created well over half a million jobs a month this year. If this pace holds, by this time next year, the economy will have regained all the jobs lost during the pandemic, plus those that would have been created if there never had been one.

Given the near-record number of open job positions, there is good reason to think that businesses will continue to add aggressively to their payrolls. The unemployment rate has been falling fast and will soon be back, consistent with a full-employment economy.

Most families — particularly those with higher incomes — have socked away extra savings during the pandemic. This partly reflects the prodigious government support, from stimulus checks to extra unemployment insurance, for those hit hardest by the pandemic.

The savings also reflect that, to avoid getting sick, many Americans have forgone spending on travel, eating out, attending ball games and concerts, commuting and dry cleaning. These extra savings of about $2.7 trillion amount to more than two months of after-tax family income.

Then there’s the parabolic increase in the value of every asset we own. House prices surged to new highs from coast to coast. Stock prices have posted records all year. The increase in cryptocurrency prices is stratospheric. Those two-thirds of Americans who are fortunate to own their homes, the half who own at least some stocks and the most intrepid among us who own crypto have never been wealthier.

Despite all of this, many Americans feel pessimistic about the economy. Consumer sentiment, a measure of how people are feeling about the economy and their own financial situation, has slumped badly since Delta. One prominent sentiment survey is as weak as it has been since the pandemic first hit.

The problem is the surge in inflation. Consumer price inflation in November accelerated to its highest pace since the runaway inflation of the early 1980s. The price of nearly everything, from a tank of gasoline to a jar of peanut butter to rent, is up a lot. Many Americans have never experienced high inflation — and it is unnerving.

But the worst of this inflation may well be behind us. After the costs of fuel and food — which can fluctuate greatly — are excluded, inflation in November rose to 4.9 percent for the previous 12 months.

The cost of gasoline and heating homes, among the biggest contributors to the high inflation in November, have already come down in the weeks since. And they are set to fall more, given the recent decline in oil prices, as global oil suppliers continue increasing production.

Nothing tends to color consumer perceptions of inflation more than gasoline prices. If history is any guide, if those prices fall, sentiment should improve.

What about the aftershocks from the Delta wave?

Prices for goods that surged when the Delta wave scrambled global supply chains are also set to decline as those chains slowly sort themselves out. Shipping rates remain high but are down from just a few weeks ago. Far fewer container ships are stuck waiting to offload their goods at the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach.

The vehicle industry has been the poster child for supply chain problems. Delta contributed to the closure of semiconductor plants in Asia, creating a severe shortage of the chips needed to produce cars and sending the price of cars skyrocketing. But Washington is considering measures that could ramp up domestic manufacturing. That could help bring vehicle prices back to earth next year.

Another factor that should take the edge off inflation: the easing of the acute labor shortage. This shortage has led to runaway labor costs for lower-wage, lesser-educated and younger workers in service businesses that reopened en masse with the Covid vaccines. Many of these workers lost their jobs in the pandemic and have been slow to come back, since they are particularly at risk of getting sick. At the height of Delta, millions of people said they weren’t working because they were sick with Covid-19, taking care of someone who was sick or fearful of getting sick.

But as Delta has receded, people are returning to work. The labor force participation rate for younger people and high school graduates with no college surged in the most recent employment statistics. And many more may soon return to work as they quickly spend down the remaining financial support they received from the government. As workers fill the still considerable number of open positions, wage growth should moderate, as will the pressure on businesses to raise prices.

To be sure, Omicron or future variants of the virus could upend this optimism. But I expect each new wave to be less disruptive to the health care system and economy than the previous one. If populations continue getting vaccinated and taking their booster shots and new antiviral medications and therapies become available, this should help ensure that while many more people will get sick, there will be fewer hospitalizations and deaths.

Businesses, too, are increasingly adept at adjusting to the virus and will be less likely to significantly disrupt their operations when the next wave hits. Those in the supply chains are devising bottleneck workarounds, such as 24/7 seaport operations, that will ensure the chains don’t break again.

The next wave of the virus will undoubtedly slow growth and fan inflation. But as each wave fades, the recovery will quickly revive, and inflation will moderate; this has been our experience for nearly two years.

Yes, the pandemic could take us down a darker path. But there is no reason to expect that it will.

From his lips …

It was late afternoon at the New Age fair. I’d done enough research that day for my mock New Age magazine, Mantra-preneur, and was on my way out. A horn player I’d met asked if I was staying for the presentation by the guy with photos of the Elvis face aliens had built on Mars. 

“You’ve got to stay and see this, Tom,” he said. “You’re going to see pictures not even the government has seen.”

He paused and reframed, “Well, they’ve seen them. But they don’t want us to see them. Who do they think we are, children?”

At a booth around the corner, a woman sat wearing a pyramid of copper wire on her head. I relented.

In the meeting room, the horn player sat to my left and an ultra-attractive couple sat on my right. They knew each other. Talking across me, the ultras began pitching a wonderful new spiritual opportunity they had come across.

The Friends Gifting Network, they said, was a list of people to whom you would gift x amount of dollars. You’d recruit new people to join the network and a flood of cash gifts would come to you in weeks. The “energy” was wonderful. And perfectly legal, they felt a need to add.

A pyramid scheme. Perfect.

A woman they knew had received $10,000 and used it to finance her pilgrimage to Machu Picchu.

Machu Picchu.

The presenter never showed. The next week cops started busting people in the local network.

Scams have been around forever. Left, right or center, it doesn’t matter. People get taken in by hucksters who see them as sheep to be sheared.

Donald Trump, Trump University, the Donald J. Trump Foundation, QAnon, Alex Jones, Dr. Oz, nutritional supplements with claims that “have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.” The problem today is, says Tressie McMillan Cottom, scams have trickled down and become accepted as part of our culture (New York Times):

We would benefit from making the stakes clear. Scams are opportunistic interactions that prey on people’s greed or compassion, replacing cooperation with competition. Scams weaken our trust in social institutions, but their going mainstream — divorced from empathy for the victims or stigma for the perpetrators — means that we have accepted scams as institutions themselves.

That is disastrous for public life. What, for example, happens when the Supreme Court becomes just another scam, a scheme to subject women to conditional personhood for the purpose of political gain? So our discussion of scams is timely. They’re not just about annoying Facebook invites from your college roommate, the one with the bouncy bangs and questionable ethics. Scams are also about the foundation of pluralistic democratic life.

Failing charter schools, tax credit scholarships, celebrity or athlete charities, every illegal robocall warning that the feds will come for you if you don’t press 1 now to be connected to an agent, every call from an unknown number you know by now not to answer, plants another “small seed of social distrust.” And that distrust is as endemic as credulity.

So much of everyday life seems rigged against us. That is reflected in studies, like a 2018 Pew Research survey of Americans and social trust, that support the claim that we just do not trust our institutions or one another. There are the big things, like the outsize role that money and influence play in electoral politics. When I do fieldwork at public political events, I hear over and over again from people across the ideological spectrum just how unheard they feel. How is it possible that an elected representative can get away with meeting with lobbyists but rarely, if ever, talking to his or her constituents?

[…]

Corporations, platforms, politicians, friends and relations have sown so many tiny seeds of distrust that of course we do not trust our social institutions or one another. That is more than a bad investment deal or a shady business practice. That is an indictment of a culture. And that is what we will start talking about in the new year: scam culture. A scam culture is one in which scamming has not only lost its stigma but is also valorized. We rebrand scamming as “hustle,” or the willingness to commodify all social ties, and this is because the “legitimate” economy and the political system simply do not work for millions of Americans.

It becomes easy in this environment for some to believe Hillary Clinton has Satanic sex with and/or eats children, or horse dewormer prevents Covid, or that a presidential election administered by low-level election workers was rigged. Isn’t everything?

Cottom promises in her 2022 dispatches to explore “the nooks and crannies of scam culture” that are eroding our democracy and faith in community itself.

A friend I had not spoken to in years called on Thursday.

“You’re not calling to warn me the warranty on my 20 year-old car is about to expire, are you?”

“There are very few things you can count on in this world, but one thing you can, with the consistency of a Swiss watch, is that at any given moment Donald Trump and his inner circle will be doing something both deeply corrupt and extremely stupid,” writes Bess Levin at Vanity Fair.

To wit, a 38-page PowerPoint document entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” was among the documents the Jan. 6 investigation received from former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows. The presentation included a string of Trump’s options for delaying certification of the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden. Including declaring a national security emergency to stay in power.

It is, however, unclear that Trump aides prepared the document. A similar document circulated online on Thursday. The New York Times confirmed it was simlar to the document turned over to the House Jan. 6 committee. Business Insider found other versions had circulated online before, “including by Fox News’s Lara Logan on January 5 and other proponents of challenges to the 2020 election.”

The New York Times dug into the document’s origins:

Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel and an influential voice in the movement to challenge the election, said on Friday from a bar he owns outside Austin, Texas, that he had circulated the document — titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” — among Mr. Trump’s allies and on Capitol Hill before the attack. Mr. Waldron said that he did not personally send the document to Mr. Meadows, but that it was possible someone on his team had passed it along to the former chief of staff.

It is unclear who prepared the PowerPoint, but it is similar to a 36-page document available online, and it appears to be based on the theories of Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, a Texas entrepreneur and self-described inventor who has appeared with Mr. Waldron on podcasts discussing election fraud.

Waldron and his associates briefed a group of sentors on Jan. 4. The next day, he himself briefed several House members, including on the (debunked) theory that foreign powers had gained control over the vote tallies.

The document also outlined means by which Vice President Mike Pence might delay or overturn the results, the Guardian adds:

Pence could pursue one of three options, the PowerPoint said: seat Trump slates of electors over the objections of Democrats in key states, reject the Biden slates of electors, or delay the certification to allow for a “vetting” and counting of only “legal paper ballots”.

The final option for Pence is similar to an option that was simultaneously being advanced on 4 and 5 January by Trump lieutenants – led by lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, as well as Trump strategist Steve Bannon – working from the Willard hotel in Washington DC.

The Willard Hotel war rooms were bound to turn up here. Meadows’ posession of the document makes it a stretch for him to claim he was unaware such plans were under consideration.

Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, has cited the 38-page PowerPoint as among the reasons he wants to question Mr. Meadows under oath.

Before coming to loggerheads with the panel, Mr. Meadows had provided some useful information to the committee, including a November email that discussed appointing an alternate slate of electors to keep Mr. Trump in power and a Jan. 5 message about putting the National Guard on standby. Mr. Meadows also turned over his text messages with a member of Congress in which the lawmaker acknowledged that a plan to object to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory would be “highly controversial,” to which Mr. Meadows responded, “I love it.”

Like the smell of napalm in the morning, eh?