Month: December 2021

The Republicans have been caterwauling about “voter fraud” for years. It’s what made Trump’s Big Lie so easily believed by the GOP base — they have been warned it was going to happen by top GOP politicians and pundits on a loop and they just figured the commie-libs finally pulled it off.

This TPM piece looks at one of the mainstream legal luminaries who are working this problem and how they plan to exploit Trump’s Big Lie to finally achieve the goal they’ve been working toward for years:

After listening to every single episode of conservative election lawyer Cleta Mitchell’s podcast, “Who’s Counting?” a simple truth emerges: This isn’t about Donald Trump. 

Yes, you may know Mitchell for advising Trump on his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. (She chimed in frequently on the call in which Trump pressured Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” the votes he needed to win.) Trump also blurbed Mitchell’s podcast last month, saying that the show “exposes our Corrupt and Rigged voting systems.”  

But Mitchell also has institutional cred among conservatives that goes back decades, the kind of swing that can land you a post-insurrection seat on a government elections advisory board without much public fuss, even during the Biden administration. When Mitchell’s current home, the Conservative Partnership Institute, brought her on to lead its “Election Integrity Coalition” in March, it called her, archly, the “consigliere to the vast right-wing conspiracy.” 

And they didn’t mean the QAnon kind. CPI, the post-White House home of former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, is part of a web of deep-pocketed right-wing influence operations seeking to steer the Republican Party during the Trump Age. And Mitchell is all business: Conservatives, she says, need to spend their time and energy taking back control of America’s elections from a runaway left wing. 

“We’re going to take those election offices back, and we need you to help us,” Mitchell told listeners at the end of her first episode.

In an echo of Steve Bannon’s effort to install right-wingers at low-level election posts around the country, one repeated theme of Mitchell’s show is that listeners should get involved in their local elections — and, more specifically, that they should try to get hired to count ballots, not simply as volunteer observers.

Unlike Bannon, however, Mitchell’s influence extends well beyond Trump die-hards, into the real institutional funders of the American right, like The Bradley Foundation. Several of her podcast guests have professional connections to Mitchell through groups like the Public Interest Legal Foundation. In other words, when Mitchell speaks, there’s a decent chance she’s broadcasting the priorities of the GOP’s money men. 

“Most of us should have figured out in about the third grade kickball that if you get to make the rules, you get to pick who wins the game,” Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center and a guest on the show’s sixth episode, said during his appearance — describing Democrats, of course. 

“That’s true!” Mitchell beamed. 

To understand Mitchell’s position on the 2020 election, you need to understand what claims she’s actually made about the election. She asserts that there were more illegal ballots cast than the Biden margin of victory in multiple states. “I don’t think I would use the word stolen and I don’t think I have — but I do know that the left manipulated the process to pre-determine the outcome,” she told TPM via email.

She was also a key figure in the assertion that Fulton County, Georgia election workers “made everybody leave” a counting room on election night, giving them the opportunity to count thousands of illegal ballots.

The state looked into this and found no evidence that any improper ballots were scanned. And two election workers are suing an online publication that boosted the conspiracy theory for defamation. Mitchell, however, is still pushing the story.

“There are some who have watched it who say they’re running the same ballots through multiple times,” she said of the incident in her first podcast episode, which was released in October 2021. 

With other theories, though, she seems to draw a line.

On the question of whether Chinese hackers messed with American voting machines for example — a favorite of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — Mitchell said, “you can make yourself crazy doing that.” 

“We don’t have any proof of it,” agreed her guest, Wall Street Journal editorial board member Kim Strassel. 

But the pair ultimately split the difference, pursuing a strategy that old guard Republicans around the country have for the past year, seeking both to satiate Trump fans and deflect criticism for their attacks on voting rights: The policies we want are necessary because people believe Trump — regardless of the reality, the argument goes, they have taken Trump at his word that elections are corrupt.

“It is a very serious cause for alarm if citizens decide not to vote because they think their vote will not be counted due to all the irregularities and manipulation that the left has come up with over the past decade,” Mitchell told TPM.

That line of thinking — and the need to take action to dispel Republicans’ fears — crops up throughout the podcast. The post-election voting restrictions passed by Georgia Republicans, Strassel said, were necessary to ensure “integrity” and “faith in the system.” That, in turn, can “squash down these theories of Chinese hacking, because it just discourages people to go out in the end.” 

Mitchell went further, seemingly making the case for publicly challenging election results as an electoral strategy in itself. She recalled the case she made to the Republican establishment ahead of the January 2021 Georgia U.S. Senate elections. 

“I said, ‘People, if the Trump voters don’t see you walking barefoot across broken glass about what happened last Tuesday, number one, the Democrats are going to do it again, and number two, they’re not going to want to vote again.’” 

If the right-wing outrage over Trump’s election loss is ammunition, Mitchell and others on the establishment right are training their fire on typical bugaboos — requiring photo IDs, restricting mail-in and early voting — as well as some newer fixations, such as the hundreds of millions of dollars from Mark Zuckerberg that funded election offices’ efforts amid the pandemic. 

They’re also on high alert over Democrats’ attempt to expand voting rights at the federal level, in bills like the “For The People Act,” which, like all voting rights legislation, has hit a brick wall in the Senate filibuster. 

The bill would set national standards for things like voting by mail, automatic voter registration and redistricting. But to hear Mitchell describe it, Democrats are after nothing less than an authoritarian power grab. 

Democrats, she worried at one point, are saying to themselves, “We’re going to fix the elections so we put ourselves beyond the reach of the people.” 

The definition of “the people,” as always, is a bit fluid. Rudy Giuliani infamously said a few days after Trump’s 2020 loss that the incumbent had essentially won re-election, “if you take out Wayne county,” home to Detroit, a majority-Black city. Mitchell has repeatedly denied any racist intent in her push for election integrity — though she told The New Yorker in August that Democrats were “using Black voters as a prop to accomplish their political objectives.”

“It’s the large urban counties that we need to be worried about,” she told The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway in the third episode of “Who’s Counting?”

And what’s the best way to keep an eye on those counties? Count their ballots, of course. Mitchell spoke several times in multiple podcast episodes about the need for Republicans to get behind the scenes as election volunteers, or, better yet, paid staffers.

“So you’re inside counting the ballots rather than outside with your nose pressed to the glass,” Mitchell told J. Christian Adams, a fellow election lawyer and a long-time booster of the myth of widespread “voter fraud,” with whom Mitchell has deep ties. 

Mitchell recalled drawing a figure of a bullseye for a grassroots organization to illustrate the point. 

Mitchell has been working these issues for years. She kept a low profile during the post-election period even as she was advising Trump, I suspect in order to keep some shred of credibility. She was pushed out of her law firm once her fellow lawyers saw that she was on Trump’s bogus calls to election officials in Georgia.

This is a serious right wing strategy. It’s not just about the Big Lie. It’s using the Big Lie to do what they have been building toward for 60 years.

Perhaps the most famous Republican election lawyer in the country, Ben Ginsberg, has different ideas. He is working with Bob Bauer, former WH Counsel under Obama, on a new group dedicated to defending elections officials from the likes of Cleta Mitchell:

​​”Election officials face an increasing wave of state laws subjecting them to criminal penalties for performing their professional duties, while at the same time facing threats of violence to themselves and their families. This comes in the wake of the 2020 election and its aftermath, despite that election being the most secure and transparent election in American history, with record turnout, during a global pandemic. These attacks on election officials, the referees in democracy, must be fought and election officials need to know they are not alone. The Election Officials Legal Defense Network will provide these public servants with the advice and protection they need, at no cost.”

Sadly, there aren’t many Ginsbergs out there. Most of the GOP legal community seems to be falling in line behind the Big Lie. That’s where the money is.

I thought this video from Salon editor D. Watkins had some interesting insights on what five “big cases” of 2021 showed us. From the rial of singer R. Kelly, to bringing the three killers of Ahmaud Arbery to justice, Watkins shares why each case is a lesson about putting pressure on the system and being persistent:

I wonder what the January 6th cases will show us?

The jobs claims this week came in much lower than expectations — it’s at a 52 year low! But nobody seems to care. We are in a bad news vortex and there’s no getting out of apparently.

Dana Milbank’s column takes a look at one of the reasons:

For months, the GOP-Fox News axis forecast the bluest of Christmases.

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy joined 159 House Republicans in a letter to President Biden saying his policies “will certainly ensure that this Christmas will not be merry” because of a “supply chain crisis” and inflation.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.

Chairman Jim Banks of the House Republican Study Committee, citing the same reasons, wrote to colleagues: “Our job as Republicans is to explain to the American people what the grinches at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave did to ruin Christmas.”

Fox News told viewers that “Christmas presents for your kids may not arrive on time or even at all” (Sean Hannity), that the president is “the Biden Who Stole Christmas” (Laura Ingraham) and that Biden is “facing a nightmare come Christmastime,” when “gifts are going to cost a fortune, and that’s even if you’re lucky enough to snag anything” (Jesse Watters).

Breitbart News trumpeted a Trump campaign adviser’s forecast for “a frankly miserable Christmas … the Biden Blue Christmas.” Newsmax foresaw “Biden’s Blue Christmas: Shortages, Frustration, Economic Malaise.”

And then — a Christmas miracle!

Holiday retail sales were the highest ever, jumping 8.5 percent from last year and nearly 11 percent from pre-pandemic 2019, as “consumers splurged throughout the season,” Mastercard reported Sunday.

Stores were stocked. Package deliveries were overwhelmingly on time. Inflation, though a serious concern, clearly didn’t deter shoppers, and holiday motorists found gas prices 14 cents a gallon lower than in November.Story continues below advertisement

So, did GOP leaders and Fox News acknowledge they fearmongered in error? My closed-caption search might have missed something, but I found only three passing mentions on Fox News of the holiday sales triumph, amid a new round of doomsaying (“it looks like things are about to get a lot worse in the new year”). Republican Twitter guns were similarly silent.Advertisement

After a year of such deception, the United States is experiencing the worst economy we never had. The economy is going gangbusters — historically so. Yet Americans, particularly Republicans, expressa gloom not matched by economic reality — or by their own spending behaviors. Polls and consumer-confidence indices show an economic pessimism as grim as when millions lost jobs in the pandemic shutdown. This is, in large part, because disinformation has prevailed. Partisanship long colored economic views, but now Republicans, in addition to occupying a parallel political reality, are expanding an alternate economic universe.

“America’s economy improved more in Joe Biden’s first 12 months than any president during the past 50 years notwithstanding the contrary media narrative contributing to dour public opinion,” Matthew Winkler, former editor in chief of Bloomberg News, wrote last week. Among the gains: The economy expanded an estimated 5.5 percent in 2021 (fourth-quarter growth dramatically outpaced Europe and even China). Unemployment plunged to 4.2 percent. Record-setting U.S. stock markets (the S&P 500 is up nearly 30 percent) outperformed the world. Productivity jumped. Corporate profits are the largest since 1950 and corporate debt the lowest in 30. Consumer credit expanded. Confidence among CEOs is the highest in 20 years. The American Rescue Plan cut child poverty in half.Story continues below advertisement

“The force of the American expansion is also inducing overseas companies to invest in the U.S., betting that the growth is still accelerating and will outpace other major economies,” added the Wall Street Journal.

The fly in the ointment is inflation estimated at 5.6 percent for the year — the highest in 40 years — which is suppressing disposable income.This causes real pain for consumers, particularly low-income Americans buying groceries and gas and anybody buying a car. But studies show that, among the lowest earners, wage gains outpaced inflation.Also, inflation is less than half what it was 40 years ago, and, unlike then, today’s bond yields signal investors don’t expect inflation to worsen. Forty years ago, stagnant growth combined with inflation to cause “stagflation.” Now the economy is roaring.

Yet a Gallup poll out last week found that “Americans’ confidence in the economy has dropped to where it was in April 2020, when nationwide shutdowns brought on by the covid-19 pandemic plunged the nation into a recession.”Story continues below advertisement

The reason is clear. As The Post’s Philip Bump explained, Republicans in April 2020 were evenly split on whether the economy was in excellent/good condition or fair/poor. Now, despite dramatic improvements, 91 percent of Republicans say the economy is in fair/poor condition. (The Democratic shift, in the opposite direction, was smaller.)

This happened — surprise! — during Fox News’s hysterical coverage of inflation, gas prices and supply chain problems. It invoked inflation roughly twice as often as CNN and MSNBC. Now, as Bump reported, three-quarters of Republicans say prices are the most important measure of the economy’s health (only one-quarter did a year ago), eclipsing unemployment, personal finances and the stock market.

In post-truth America, the economy is just another target for fakery.

He’s being way too easy on the MSM. They have been pushing the gloom and doom too and are hardly touting the good news. Fox may be worse, but that doesn’t let the rest off the hook. They are not giving the American people the truth about the economy as Milbank lays it out above. And since it feels like the world is going to hell in a handbasket in other ways (pandemic, politics) this good news doesn’t penetrate with the tepid coverage its getting.

I would normally assume that reality will bite at some point but I’m beginning to wonder if that’s true anymore. Lies and omissions seem to have more traction than truth these days.

We’re hearing nothing but hysteria on TV right now with these cases rising so fast and the strain on the hospital system. Here’s some good news from a couple of the experts:

My latest tweets have mostly been bad news, which saddens me, particularly during holiday season. Today I’ll take you to my Happy Place, with some thoughts on why we could be in good shape – and maybe even great shape – in 6-8 weeks.

Let’s start by agreeing that the current state is awful, and likely to get worse. Case rates are skyrocketing (Fig L), hospitalizations are going up fast (but not nearly as fast as cases; R), it feels like everybody’s infected or recently exposed, & there are shortages of key tools, including testing (both PCR & antigen) & therapies (mostly Sotrovimab [the monoclonal Ab that works vs. Omicron] & Paxlovid, the Pfizer oral antiviral with outstanding efficacy in preventing serious illness in outpatients with Covid).

But there are some positive trends peeking out from behind the fog of gloom. Let’s explore them

First, the case-hospitalization dissociation is now solid. Omicron’s relative mildness is both due to inherent properties of the virus (increasingly shown thru animal studies and epidemiologic data) and fact that high levels of vax-induced immunity — while less protective vs. mild Covid – are quite protective vs. severe cases. Sadly, unvaxxed are sitting ducks, wholly dependent on inherent “mildness” of the variant, which’ll protect them a little but not a lot. But the vaxxed/boosted should feel good about their odds.

With yet another in vivo study of Omicron infection today, it sure is looking that this variant has less virulence, less chance of inducing Covid pneumonia👍
New report: https://t.co/6gj5WmCpRt
Added to our immunity wall and T cell defense, this is all good. pic.twitter.com/qhc767nuCK

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) December 29, 2021

This means that those hospitalized for Covid are mostly those who have made a (bad) choice to remain unvaccinated. They deserve our compassion and care (and, in my experience, they’re getting it), but it was a choice for which they should have appreciated the risks.

With Omicron this infectious, many vaxxed people will get mild breakthrough cases which should leave them even more protected vs. another infection.

And virtually all unvaxxed people, unless they’re being uber-careful, will get infected shortly.

Most of the unvaxxed who get Covid will get lucky and have a relatively mild case, others will have a more serious case but survive (& be left w/ a measure of immunity), & a few will die. In any case, society’s overall immunity to Omicron should be far higher in 4-6 weeks than it is today – both from additional people getting vaccinated and the consequences of having had Omicron, both in vaccinated (where the infection will act like another booster) and unvaxxed individuals.

We’ll have to see how well a case of Omicron protects vs. recurrence, but I’m quite hopeful that it will offer major protection.(Protection may decay over time, which may lead to a resurgent threat by winter 2022. But this is my Happy Place, so let’s stick to the spring).

More good news: by late January, I expect two of the key bottlenecks will have eased: the testing bottleneck (particularly as the feds ramp up free rapid testing). And the supply of Paxlovid will grow so that the pill is available, at least for high-risk Covid outpatients.

It’s looking like Paxlovid will work as well on Omicron as it did on Delta. Assuming this, & that it’s available, in a month we could find ourselves with an outpatient pill that lowers hospitalization & mortality rate of high-risk patients by ~90%.

So we may be in a position where most high-risk pts have strong immunologic protection (via vax, & some from a breakthru), and newly infected high-risk patients can get rapid dx via testing & a pill that lowers chance of a severe case to 1/10th of what it would have been.

And vaxxed and boosted people who have managed to avoid infection with Omicron will be protected by falling numbers of cases (as the immunity wall grows) and reassured by solid evidence that they are quite well protected against severe cases by their vax/booster combo.

One final bit of good news: adding to the experience in South Africa, where cases peaked & began falling after ~2 months, we may now be seeing a rapid plateau in London (Fig), one of the hardest hit cities in Europe. As usual, it’s hard to tell how much of this is…

… from increased population-level immunity vs. more careful behaviors (likely it’s both). In any case, the early evidence of a London plateau – if it persists – may portend a similarly early plateau in U.S. cases and the possibility of falling case numbers in 6-8 weeks.

Let’s be clear: I’m NOT in my Happy Place now, given the potential for overwhelmed hospitals & some ongoing uncertainty re: Omicron’s risks. It’s time to be more careful – to avoid crowded indoor spaces (sorry, New Year’s Eve), & wear N95s. The current threat is very real.

But by early February, we could be in a place where Covid is, in fact, “like the flu” – with the vast majority of the U.S. protected through vaccines or recent infections, folks at higher risk having ready access to an oral treatment that markedly lowers their risk, and a healthcare system no longer stressed to the point of perilousness – for both Covid patients & others needing our services. At that point, allowing folks to go “back to normal” might be a reasonable posture – while recognizing that higher risk people – or those who have contact with them (eg, parents of unvaxxed toddlers, people who live or work with the immunosuppressed) – may logically choose to continue their cautious behavior, such as masking and avoiding crowded indoor spaces.

Am I SURE that we’ll end up in my Happy Place in February? Sadly, no – there’s no guarantee that our pattern will mirror South Africa’s or London’s. We might still face big shortages of Paxlovid or testing, or we may learn that Long Covid is a real threat after Omicron.

But these risks feel like fairly low probability events. As dire as things look now, I think the likeliest outcome is a pretty good situation in February which – if we’re lucky (and there hasn’t been much luck in 2020-21) – will be our durable state by 2nd quarter, 2022.

At that point, “I’m over this!” might no longer be a sign of exhaustion, confusion, or political affiliation, but rather a perfectly rational and evidence-based way of approaching Covid, and life.

Fingers crossed.

Originally tweeted by Bob Wachter (@Bob_Wachter) on December 29, 2021.

And more good news — for the world:

Here’s our official announcement from @TexasChildrens @BCM_TropMed on our partnership with @biological_e to vaccinate the world beginning with this EUA in India 🇮🇳

Here’s why this is a BFD:
1. BioE now has 150 million doses ready now, and will be making 100 million per month.
2. In so doing our @TexasChildrens Vaccine Center has just matched or DOUBLED the US Government current commitment to global vaccine equity.

3. We technology transferred our vaccine and helped in its co-development with BioE with NO PATENT and no strings attached.
4. As a result it should be the least expensive COVID vaccine available yet

5. It uses an older recombinant protein yeast fermentation technology similar to that used for the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine which has been around for 40 years.
6. It was authorized based on superiority studies to another well established COVID vaccine.
7. This vaccine can be made locally all over the world, and we’ve now technology transferred our Texas Children’s vaccine to producers in India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Botswana.
8. Our Texas Children’s Center does not plan to make money on this, it’s a gift to the world

This was an effort of a team of 20+ scientists @TexasChildrens @BCM_TropMed co-led by me and my brilliant science partner for the last 20 years @mebottazzi

Originally tweeted by Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) on December 28, 2021.

No patents, sharing the formula with the whole world is the way it should have been from the beginning. But at least someone is doing it now.

Maybe 2022 really will be the end of this thing? God let’s hope so.

I honestly don’t know who these people are (below). There is not much on the Net except in chats.

The string of videos resembles an episode of “Dr. Who.” But what’s the plot? Aliens have taken over the bodies of antivaxx activists in Liverpool? Or antivaxxers have uncovered an alien conspiracy by the National Health Service to kill off old people under the guise of administering treatment for Covid? And where’s The Doctor?

Police eventually stop the removal of the patient. But sovereign citizen conspiracies are rapidly spreading.

This is the third case of sovereign citizens attempting to remove a patient from hospital in three months; two in the UK and one in Ireland.https://t.co/qtEIgJzSGu

— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86) December 30, 2021

Sifting through these videos, it seems members of this British group are invoking vague, common-law authority to take the law into their own hands. Or else to ignore laws they don’t like. Or something. Wonkette spotted stirrings in 2016.

Did you know they’ve “arrested” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson? No? Me neither.

Our “sovereign citizens” last December tried to submit a fake slate of electors to the National Archives:

Copies of the documents obtained by The Arizona Republic show a group that claimed to represent the “sovereign citizens of the Great State of Arizona” submitted signed papers casting votes for what they want: a second term for Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.

Mesa resident Lori Osiecki, 62, helped created a facsimile of the “certificate of ascertainment” that is submitted to formally cast each state’s electoral votes as part of an effort to prevent what she views as the fraudulent theft of the election.

But hey, no British accent, Lori, no backstage pass to The Doctor’s Tardis.

i spy with my little eye Phil Mcloughlin the sovereign citizen extremist who tries to pull sick elderly people from hospital with his mates including Aaron Walton. pic.twitter.com/YcEQRge7rY

— Mohammed Shafiq (@Mohamme09073545) December 30, 2021

If there is any saving grace to this lunacy, it is that at least Americans do not have a monopoly on crazy. Oh, and they are not heavily armed. But is it just a matter of time before this behavior makes it across The Pond to our own antivaxxers who are?

“We all hoped and prayed that the vaccines would be 100% effective and 100% safe, but they’re not! We know that fully vaccinated individuals can catch covid, they can transmit covid, so what’s the point?!” — Sen. Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin

Each year, a few people wearing coats die of hypothermia in places like Wisconsin, “So what’s the point?” Johnson did not add. Maybe next time, he’ll ask why we bother with vaccines, what with Covid’s low mortality rate.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): "We all hoped and prayed that the vaccines would be 100% effective and 100% safe, but they’re not! We know that fully vaccinated individuals can catch covid, they can transmit covid, so what’s the point?!" pic.twitter.com/9V6rqBT9ey

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) December 28, 2021

Former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt has heard enough bullshit from my Republican congressman, Rep. Madison Cawthorn. Cawthorn is back in the news for a Daily Caller interview he did in 2020 in which he recounts a trip to Russia that eventually resulted in him meeting his soon-to-be ex-wife in Miami. Schmidt likens Cawthorn to fictional con-man Tom Ripley. But Schmidt was just getting warmed up:

https://twitter.com/SteveSchmidtSES/status/1476230476205473795?s=20

(Albrecht Muth was a social-climbing German intern and fabulist for “a lesser-known Republican senator.” Muth at 26 married a Georgetown socialite 44 years his senior. He eventually strangled and bludgeoned her to death. There is a Miami connection to Muth’s story, too.)

https://twitter.com/SteveSchmidtSES/status/1476230478038388737?s=20

We have tried. But while Asheville contains a large block of blue votes in the district (old and new), mounting an effective campaign in this otherwise red district takes money, organization, and name recognition no Democrat has had since Heath Shuler.

Please resist the temptation to think that because these politicians are idiots that they are not a threat to the republic. The Asscociated Press covers the slow-motion insurrection still in play a year after the attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump:

In battleground states and beyond, Republicans are taking hold of the once-overlooked machinery of elections. While the effort is incomplete and uneven, outside experts on democracy and Democrats are sounding alarms, warning that the United States is witnessing a “slow-motion insurrection” with a better chance of success than Trump’s failed power grab last year.

They point to a mounting list of evidence: Several candidates who deny Trump’s loss are running for offices that could have a key role in the election of the next president in 2024. In Michigan, the Republican Party is restocking members of obscure local boards that could block approval of an election. In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the GOP-controlled legislatures are backing open-ended “reviews” of the 2020 election, modeled on a deeply flawed look-back in Arizona. The efforts are poised to fuel disinformation and anger about the 2020 results for years to come.

All this comes as the Republican Party has become more aligned behind Trump, who has made denial of the 2020 results a litmus test for his support. Trump has praised the Jan. 6 rioters and backed primaries aimed at purging lawmakers who have crossed him. Sixteen GOP governors have signed laws making it more difficult to vote. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll showed that two-thirds of Republicans do not believe Democrat Joe Biden was legitimately elected as president.

The result, experts say, is that another baseless challenge to an election has become more likely, not less.

“It’s not clear that the Republican Party is willing to accept defeat anymore,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die.” “The party itself has become an anti-democratic force.”

I am catching up with Levitsky’s book now, and it’s got me pretty spooked. Donald Trump will devour the Republican Party from within, David Frum warned in January 2018, and they will reject democracy. They have. Even then, Frum was late to his own party. Republicans are no longer going through the motions but, under cover of law, attempting to neuter democracy and replace it with an authoritarian state.

Democrats, perpetually outgunned in messaging against Republicans, are failing to drive home to their voters the stakes in coming elections.

“The most motivated voters in America today are those who think the 2020 election was stolen,” said Daniel Squadron of The States Project. “Acknowledging this is afoot requires such a leap from any core American value system that any of us have lived through.” Such a leap that average, less-engaged Americans cannot wrap their brains around it.

Reacting to Schmidt’s tweets, one Twitter user responded with the Joseph Heller quote at the top. Up-is-downism and Trump’s grifting has penetrated much of the Republican Party. The next few years are going to be a rough ride.

Trump on Ghislaine Maxwell: I just wish her well frankly. I’ve met her numerous times over the years especially since I lived in Palm Beach and I guess they lived in Palm Beach but I wish her well pic.twitter.com/wCfzsZfjTT

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 21, 2020

He knew exactly where they lived:

Maxwell was found guilty today on sex trafficking charges. There is every chance she will die in jail. Epstein, of course, checked out of his own accord and never had to face any earthly accountability. I guess Maxwell will be the only one to pay that price.

Disney’s Bambi traumatized me as a child. I cried and cried and was inconsolable. As you know, I have a soft spot for animals so I suppose it’s not surprising. But this revelation makes me realize it’s about much more than that, even if the people who wrote the movie didn’t know it. After reading this I wonder if that trauma may have primed me for empathy toward the downtrodden and marginalized:

It’s a saccharine sweet story about a young deer who finds love and friendship in a forest. But the original tale of Bambi, adapted by Disney in 1942, has much darker beginnings as an existential novel about persecution and antisemitism in 1920s Austria.

Now, a new translation seeks to reassert the rightful place of Felix Salten’s 1923 masterpiece in adult literature and shine a light on how Salten was trying to warn the world that Jews would be terrorised, dehumanised and murdered in the years to come. Far from being a children’s story, Bambi was actually a parable about the inhumane treatment and dangerous precariousness of Jews and other minorities in what was then an increasingly fascist world, the new translation will show.

In 1935, the book was banned by the Nazis, who saw it as a political allegory on the treatment of Jews in Europe and burned it as Jewish propaganda. “The darker side of Bambi has always been there,” said Jack Zipes, professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota and translator of the forthcoming book.

“But what happens to Bambi at the end of the novel has been concealed, to a certain extent, by the Disney corporation taking over the book and making it into a pathetic, almost stupid film about a prince and a bourgeois family.”

Salten’s novel, Bambi, a Life in the Woods, is completely different he said. “It is a book about survival in your own home.” From the moment he is born, Bambi is under constant threat from hunters who invade the forest and attack indiscriminately. “They kill whatever animal they want.”

It soon becomes apparent that the forest animals are living out their lives in fear and that puts the reader constantly “on edge”: “All the animals have been persecuted. And I think what shakes the reader is that there are also some animals who are traitors, who help the hunters kill.”

After Bambi’s mother is murdered, so is his beloved cousin Gobo, who had been led to believe he was special and the hunters would be “kind” to him. Bambi is shot too, but survives thanks to the old prince, a majestic stag who treats him like a son (and may well be his father). But then, sadly, the old prince also dies, leaving Bambi utterly bereft. “Bambi does not survive well, at the end. He is alone, totally alone … It is a tragic story about the loneliness and solitude of Jews and other minority groups.”

There is a sense at the end that Bambi and all the other wild animals in the forest are merely “born to be killed”. They know they will be hunted – and they know they will die. “The major theme throughout is: you don’t have a choice.”

Salten, who had changed his name from Siegmund Salzmann during his teens to “unmark” himself as a Jew in Austrian society, earned his main income as a journalist in Vienna. Zipes thinks he could see the direction in which the political winds were blowing. “I think he foresaw the Holocaust. He had suffered greatly as a young boy from antisemitism and at that time, in Austria and Germany, Jews were blamed for the loss of the first world war. This novel is an appeal to say: no, this shouldn’t happen.”

At one point in the novel, two leaves on a tree discuss why they must fall to the ground and wonder what will happen to them when they do. “These leaves talk very seriously about really dark questions humans have: we don’t know what is going to happen to us when we die. We don’t know why we must die.”

By writing a story about animals and wildlife, Salten could get past the negative preconceptions and prejudices many of his readers held about Jews and other minorities: “It enabled him to talk about the persecution of the Jews as freely as he wanted to.” Without being didactic, he could encourage the reader to feel more empathy towards oppressed groups – and Bambi could openly question the cruelty of their oppressors. “Many other writers, like George Orwell, chose animals too because you’re freer to tackle problems that might make your readers bristle. And you don’t want them to bristle, you want them to say, at the end: this is a tragedy.”Advertisement

Importantly, the new translation, which will be published on 18 January by Princeton Press, attempts to convey in English for the first time the way that certain characters in Salten’s novel have a Viennese “flair” when they talk in German. “The animals have wonderful ways of talking, which makes you feel as though you are in a Viennese cafe. And you immediately recognise that they’re not talking how animals talk. These are human beings.”

By contrast, the original English translation, which was published in 1928, toned down Salten’s anthropomorphism and changed its focus so that it was more likely to be understood as a simple conservation story about animals living in a forest. This was the version read by Walt Disney, who loved animal stories.

When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Salten managed to flee to Switzerland. By then, he had sold the film rights for a mere $1,000 to an American director, who then sold them on to Disney: Salten himself never earned a penny from the famous animation. Stripped of his Austrian citizenship by the Nazis, he spent his final years “lonely and in despair” in Zurich and died in 1945, like Bambi, with no safe place to call home.

The funny thing about this is that Walt Disney was a right wing creep and a standard issue racist, even if he wasn’t the total monster he’s been painted as. I wonder in how many kids his classic “Bambi” may have subliminally created empathy for minorities and the downtrodden without him realizing it?

What a fascinating story. It makes me want to try to watch it again now that I know what it was really about. Hopefully parents can use it to teach their kids the larger lesson as well.

Back when the blogosphere was small but weirdly influential, I had the great pleasure of interviewing Harry Reid on Firedoglake for his book, “The Hard Fight” back in 2008. The interview is lost in the digital mists, but my introduction remains. It’s interesting to see my rather jaded take on his tactics at the time as compared to how we view them now.

Here’s the intro I wrote:

“Ours is a time of great political disaffection, and I understand it, because so far in this new century, we have failed the people of this country. We’ve got a lot of damage to repair. There are no magic bullets. Future generations will look back on this period as a very dark one if we fail. But heaven help us if we don’t try.”
Harry Reid, The Good Fight: Hard Lessons From Searchlight To Washington.

No kidding.

I didn’t know much about Harry Reid’s background before I read his memoir other than that he came from a small town, had boxed in his youth and served on the Nevada gaming commission before going into politics. I assumed I wouldn’t be reading the usual up-by-his-Sperry top-siders from Andover to Yale that usually characterizes political biography in this country but I have to say that this wasn’t what I expected either:

I come from a mining town.

But by the time I came along – December 2, 1939 – the leading industry in my hometown of Searchlight, Nevada, was no longer mining, it was prostitution. I don’t exaggerate. There was a local law that said you could not have a house of prostitution or a place that served alcohol within so many feet of a school. Once, when it was determined that one of the clubs was in violation of this law, they moved the school.

As a boy, I learned to swim at a whorehouse. Nobody in town had ever seen such a fancy inground tiled pool in their lives as the pool at the El Rey. Or any pool at all, for that matter. At least nobody that we knew. The El Ray was the main bordello when I was growing up in Searchlight. Every Thursday afternoon, the whoremonger in town, a kindly bear of a man by the name of Willie Martello, would ask the girls who worked the El Rey to clear out, and he’d invite the children in town, usually no more than a dozen or so at a time, to swim in his pool. And we would live the life of Riley for a couple of hours, splashing in the azure blue of that whorehouse pool. This was a rare luxury in a hard town. When I was coming up, there were several other brothels in Searchlight – the Crystal Club, Searchlight Casino, Sandy’s – thirteen in all, and no churches to be found.

In my home, we had no religion. None, zero. And when I say none, I don’t mean 10 percent religious, I mean none. It wasn’t that my parents were atheists or something, it was that religion just wasn’t part of our lives. But Franklin Roosevelt was. In our little home, my mother had a navy-blue embroidered pillowcase with a little fringe on it, and she put it up on the wall. On it, in bright yellow stitching it read, “We can. We will. We must. – Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” And that was my religion.

That’s just not your average political biography in our culture of idealized small town life of white picket fences and Fourth of July picnics. It’s a really rough story, with parents who drink too much, acute poverty, spousal abuse and finally suicide. It’s a childhood out of Jack London. Or maybe Dickens’ London. You can’t help but be somewhat horrified. And inspired. How does someone crawl out of that beginning to become one of the most powerful people in the country? This is a truly self-made man.

As it turns out, this matter-of-fact recitation of grit and self-reliance is a quintessentially American story. He hitch-hiked to high school across the desert because he desperately wanted to improve his lot in life. He worked his way through George Washington Law School, with a young family, as a police officer. He became a defense lawyer in Nevada, which meant he defended some very colorful characters and then he famously took on the mob as head of the Nevada Gaming Commission during the Casino era. When you see him speak, it’s really hard to believe that this soft spoken fellow is the guy who did all that.

The Good Fight turns out to be a breezy read and I frankly didn’t expect it to be. It’s structured in an interesting way, juxtaposing the recent congressional fights during the Bush Administration with the life story, which I would guess was done as a way of illustrating the “fighter” in both instances. I’m not sure that really works, since Reid patiently explains throughout just how much compromise, hand-holding and outright horse trading is required of a Senate leader. The fighting we see is nearly all of the sheerly defensive type since the Bush Republicans adopted an unprecedented form of Senatorial brinksmanship to serve the ambitions of the likes of Bill Frist and Karl Rove.

Those of us who’ve followed the Senate battles of the last few years will find some of what Senator Reid reports to be surprising. (For instance, that Joe Lieberman had to be convinced repeatedly to stay with the Gang of Fourteen.) His view of the Senate is that of a person who holds the rules and traditions to be somewhat sacrosanct (which might be surprising coming from libertarian Nevada, but when considered in light of his upbringing makes much more sense.) He believes strongly in the necessity of a branch of government that balances out the powers of the large states with the small — a Madisonian concern about the tyranny of the majority.

His fight against the Republicans employing the nuclear option was based upon preserving the integrity of the Senate. The fact that they were threatening it in order to place radical, right wing judges on the court seems to have been less of an incentive. Senator Reid was concerned about preserving our system for the long run. Of course, as John Maynard Keynes said (and George W. Bush famously mangled) “in the long run, we’ll all be dead.” The legacy of the Bush appointments are going to affect all of us for the rest of our lives. Senator Reid succeeded in preserving the filibuster for the next generations. (Considering that the Republicans of this Congress have now used it more frequently and capriciously than any minority in history, one can’t help but wonder if he might have a few second thoughts.)

The book is written in that flat laconic way of hardscrabble westerners, no frills, just the facts ma’am. It has, at times, the feeling of a soliloquy or a voice-over in one of those quiet western cinematic tone poems, like Tender Mercies. He doesn’t bare his soul or let us into his inner life, but then he doesn’t have to. His life story stands as a testament to the American dream and that’s something that speaks for itself.

Nobody could say that Reid was an ‘elite” who didn’t understand Real America.

Keep in mind that piece was written in 2008. The next year he shepherded the ACA through the Senate and it wasn’t easy. By 2013, Reid had changed his mind and he nuked the filibuster for lower court judges after watching the GOP obstruct nearly all of Obama’s nominations. He ended his tenure fighting for the Senate by ruthlessly fighting the Republicans. In 2019 he said the Senate should scrap the filibuster altogether.

I wish we had more like him today. He really understood what we are up against.

I don’t know that we would have predicted this a decade ago but I’m sure there’s a lesson in that somewhere:

A record number of Americans — 13.6 million — have signed up for health plans through the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces for 2022. The major reasons for the rise appear to be: Congress lowered the cost of Obamacare insurance; the Biden administration increased advertising for the program; and the pandemic disrupted many Americans’ employer-provided coverage.

The Covid-19 public health emergency helped usher in an era of greater generosity and expanded outreach to the uninsured that many of Obamacare’s original authors had long called for.

The increased enrollment, covering at least two million more Americans than in any previous year, was particularly pronounced in states like Georgia and Texas that have high rates of uninsurance and declined to expand Medicaid to cover their poorest adults.

“What a great day it is to really see how the programs are working as they are intended,” Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told reporters on a conference call.

The Biden administration has invested heavily in promoting the availability of insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. It also quadrupled the network of professionals available to help people enroll. But Ms. Brooks-LaSure said she thought the main driver of the enrollment increase was the lower prices most Americans would pay.

A stimulus bill passed by Congress in March made many more Americans eligible for financial assistance in buying Obamacare plans. For most people with low incomes, comprehensive coverage is currently available for no premium. Some middle-class people earning higher incomes became eligible for subsidies for the first time.

Taken together, the policies have represented an expansion and a reimagining of the Affordable Care Act, what some policy experts have called Obamacare 2.0. The enrollment numbers suggest that these changes have substantially increased enrollment in the program, counteracting coverage declines from falling employment during the pandemic.

That is really good news. Unfortunately the expanded benefits only go through 2022 and the needed extension is in the Build Back Better Bill that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have personally sabotaged. So we’ll have to see.

Still it’s great news. America can’t seem to get much done anymore but this was an imperfect achievement that seemed precarious at the moment but which has hung on and seems safe, at least in some form. We shouldn’t have to fight so hard for things like this but we do. And it’s worth it.