Month: December 2021

Last year at this time we were all counting down the days until the delusional lame duck president would finally be out of office and the world would tilt back on its axis. He and his clown car full of MAGA lawyers were pushing conspiracy theories all over the country while judge after judge was knocking down their arguments in court. And we had been told by people close to him (anonymously of course) that poor Donald Trump was just having a hard time accepting his fate and the best thing to do was just let him cry it out, after which he’d fade into the woodwork as all defeated president do.

The MAGA movement seemed to have come to the end of the line. They had a good run and the reverberations would be felt for many years to come, but it was over. Their last hurrah, planned for January 6th when the faithful all planned to gather in Washington D.C. for one last Trump rally, promised to be the last of its kind. After what transpired that day we can now only hope that’s true. But there is little guarantee of that. The MAGA movement is anything but dead. In fact, it’s thriving.

Current polling shows that Trump managed to convince tens of millions of Americans that the election was stolen and his hardcore followers are still as rabidly enthusiastic about Trump himself as they ever were. And a new set of MAGA leaders emerged this year to carry the banner in DC. Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia, Madison Cawthorn, R-NC, Lauren Boebert, R -Co, Matt Gaetz, R-Fl., Arizona’s Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar among others, have stepped up to troll, insult and otherwise cause chaos on behalf of the MAGA Movement in the Congress. Green distinguished herself very early on when the House voted to strip her of her committee assignments after she “endorsed the executions of Democrats and spread dangerous and bigoted misinformation” — and was proud of having done so. The MAGA faithful immediately began sending her huge sums of money, showing just how profitable being an obnoxious, Trumpist cheerleader in Congress could be.

Later in the summer, she and Gaetz, currently under investigation by the DOJ for possible underage trafficking, took their act on the road with “Peaceful Protests Against Communism” events to entertain the troops. They weren’t welcome in certain places, but that just gave them even more MAGA street cred. Boebert made a name for herself by ostentatiously displaying her gun collection during zoom committee hearings and calling Democrats jihadist terrorists on the House floor and at fundraisers. Gosar sent out an animated video showing himself killing fellow Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and got himself censured for doing it. His faithful followers couldn’t love him more.

Meanwhile, across the nation, Trump voters dug in their heels and staged ongoing tantrums, threatening public health officials and school administrators who were trying to keep people safe during the pandemic and harassing election officials to say the election was stolen. They refused to get vaccinated, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary COVID deaths, instead putting their faith in the kind of snake oil cures Trump pushed relentlessly when he was president.

They are so dug in that they even booed Trump himself when he begged them to let him have credit for the vaccines. And they are shocked and dismayed that he subsequently said the vaccines actually save lives. (I’ll be shocked if he pushes that line again — the backlash from his faithful supporters was fierce.)

The MAGA media even had its own odyssey this year.

According to the Washington Post, Fox News had been contemplating moving away from Trumpism after the election, something which Trump sensed and tweeted about relentlessly. He promoted the small time rivals OAN and Newsmax and it had an effect. Fox lost viewership and quickly learned its lesson. It went back to all MAGA all the time and it’s ratings have never been better.

On the social media side, the results have been less stellar.

90 percent of the top-rated Facebook pages are Trumpist but the man himself has been banned from Facebook and Twitter so he is forced to send out what would formerly have been tweets as “statements” directly to his followers via email. There are a number of alternative right-wing sites, like GAB, Parler and Rumble backed by major corporate figures and billionaires but the former president is saving his essence for the new social media company called “Truth Social” he has conned some other rich marks into backing. (It will probably be better than his earlier attempt, which was basically an embarrassing blog that nobody read. )

Has Trump’s golden image tarnished a bit among his followers? Maybe just a little. But considering that he continues to this day to insanely insist that he actually won the 2020 election in a landslide and suggests that he could still somehow be reinstated, it’s amazing that his hold on the Republican Party is as tight as ever. Now he and his top henchwoman Marjorie Taylor Green and her congressional clique have big plans afoot to pull the rope even tighter.

Trump has made it clear that he plans to participate in GOP primaries against incumbents he considers his enemies. The list of them is long. From Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wy., to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Trump is pledging to take out any Republican who crossed him in the past and/or refuses to say the election was stolen. Just this week, he informed Alaska Governor Steve Dunleavy that he would only endorse him if he agreed not to back incumbent Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski for re-election. The litmus test couldn’t be more clear: Trump then, Trump now, Trump forever.

Green and fellow MAGA Caucus member Madison Cawthorn, R-NC., are ready to rumble too, endorsing candidates who are interested in helping them build power in the GOP. According to the Washington Post, they are working against any Republican incumbents who are deemed disloyal to the former president. Even more importantly, the candidates this group is backing say they are uninterested in fighting Democrats — they want to come to Congress to shame Republicans. One candidate told the Post that he wants to “force Republicans into tough votes, starting with articles of impeachment against President Biden and a full congressional inquiry into the 2020 presidential election, which he says was stolen from Trump.”

They seem like a terrific bunch. And I doubt that any new GOP House speaker, whether it’s Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Ohio congressman Jim Jordan or Donald Trump himself will be able to control them. This group will make the House Freedom Caucus look like mild-mannered institutionalists by comparison.

MAGA is still kicking and it’s more powerful than ever within the Republican Party. In fact, in 2022 it may be gathering enough power that it doesn’t actually need Trump himself. I suspect Trump may know that, too. Those boos he got last week must have him kicking himself for failing to slap the Trump name on the movement the way he’s slapped his name on everything else he’s ever done. Without that brand is it really his? 

Progress, however defined, is rarely an unalloyed good. The Law of Unintended Consequences is as unforgiving as Murphy’s.

One downside to blogging while employed is too little time for the sessile act of reading printed books. A downside to blogging even more is so much time spent online that it is even harder to sit still with a book. So, now it’s audiobooks while exercising. Recently, “I Alone Can Fix It” (2021), “Exit Right” (2016), and currently “How Democracies Die” (2018).

Early in that third one, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt recount how our two major parties once held a tight grip on their presidential nominating processes. Smoke-filled rooms, while limiting grassroots input, provided a gatekeeper function to keep out fringe candidates. But post-1968 reforms created the primary process we see today. More democracy is good, right? Except when it’s not.

Levitsky told NPR’s Dave Davies:

Well, the belief among political scientists – and I think it was true for a while – was that winning primaries was hard. This was particularly before the days of social media, when you needed the support of local activists. You needed the support, maybe, of unions in the Democratic Party. You needed the support of local media on the ground in each state in order to actually win primaries. You couldn’t just get on CNN and expect to win a primary somewhere in the West because of what you – or what you tweeted.

You had to have some kind of an infrastructure on the ground. I’m talking about the 1970s, 1980s, even the 1990s. And so the belief among political scientists was you still needed the support of party insiders to win the primaries, to win – to cross the country and accumulate enough delegates, winning state by state by state. You really needed to build alliances with local Democratic or Republican Party leaders, committees, senators, congresspeople, mayors, et cetera.

That became less and less true over time in large part because the nature of media – the rise of social media and the ability of outsiders to make a name for themselves without going through that process, without going through that invisible primary. So Donald Trump demonstrated, you know, beyond any doubt in 2016 that at least if you have enough name recognition, you can avoid building alliances with anybody, really, at the state or local level. You can run on your own. You can be an outsider and win.

Social media was good. Until it wasn’t. Eliminating smoke-filled rooms was a democratizing good. Until Donald Trump. The upside to no gatekeepers is more democracy. The downside is demagogues.

Richard H. Pildes this morning examines how political fragmentation inside traditional parties the rise of scores of new ones has democracies floundering (New York Times):

Large structural forces have driven the fragmentation of politics throughout the West. On the economic front, the forces include globalization’s contribution to the stagnation of middle- and working-class incomes, rising inequality and outrage over the 2008 financial crisis. On the cultural side: conflicts over immigration, nationalism and other issues.

Since the New Deal in the United States and World War II in Europe, the parties of the left had represented less affluent, less educated voters. Now those voters are becoming the base of parties on the right, with more affluent, more educated voters shifting to parties on the left. Major parties are struggling to figure out how to patch together winning coalitions in the midst of this shattering transformation.

The communications revolution is also a major force generating the disabling fragmentation of politics. Across Europe, it has given rise to loosely organized, leaderless protest movements that disrupt politics and give birth to other parties — but make effective government harder to achieve.

In the United States, the new communications era has enabled the rise of free-agent politicians. A Congress with more free agents is more difficult to govern. Even in their first years in office, individual members of Congress (like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ted Cruz) no longer need to work their way up through the party or serve on major committees to attract national visibility and influence.

Fragmentation “reflects deep dissatisfaction with the ability of traditional parties and governments to deliver effective policies.” And at the same time makes it more difficult to deliver.

I’m not one of those who believe that when “The Democrats” fail to deliver everything on progressives’ wish list it is because, as supposed corporatist stooges, they secretly want to fail despite all the long hours of legislative wrangling. It is not that there aren’t a few members of both parties in bed with corporate sponsors. You know who they are. But few of us as kids got everything we wanted for Christmas, yet didn’t tag Santa with a corporatist agenda.

Under present circumstances, with the narrowest of Senate margins and with a couple of wild cards gumming up the works, it is going to be tough for Democrats to give me everything on my wish list. But I didn’t expect that of Santa, either. Nor did I attribute that to his foul motives.

This is one difficult puzzle to solve, with no single key to solving it. “Democracies must figure out how to overcome the forces of fragmentation to show they once again can deliver effective government,” Pildes writes. It is not clear just now that they can. And if they do, there will be unintended consequences. There always are.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, the saying goes. The same is true of misinformation. We head into our third year of the global pandemic, in part, because of cocksure freedomistas who refuse vaccination because they’ve heard COVID-19 has a roughly 2% mortality rate. They are not like the “sheep” threatened by that, no sir. But they are super-side-eye concerned about taking a vaccine with a 0.0022% mortality rate. And about wearing masks. And screw you for accepting a minor inconvenience to protect your neighbors.

That attitude has consequences.

This alarming post from @travelingnurse grabbed my attention Tuesday. In a big way.

“no bed means no fucking beds” Everyone watch this. #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/2bqGVTgWEt

— Jamie (@jnquincy) December 28, 2021

You or someone you know could die at home because there is no bed for you at hospitals filled to overflowing with unvaccinated Covid patients. The world is bigger than the free exercise of your right to be a jerk. But that truth might not come home to vaccine refuseniks until they or a family member has a stroke, a heart attack, or a car accident.

The Washington Post front-pages this threat:

Health officials’ recommendation this week to shorten the isolation period for people with asymptomatic coronavirus infections to five days was driven largely by the concern that essential services might be hobbled amid one of the worst infection surges of the pandemic, said senior officials familiar with the discussions.

Even though the highly transmissible omicron varient has milder symptoms than other strains, high case levels could drive up absenteeism among “thousands of police, firefighters, grocery workers and other essential employees.”

Another Post front-page story reinforces @travelingnurse’s tale.

Iowan Dale Weeks developed a case of sepsis requiring hospitalization last month:

But at a time when unvaccinated covid-19 patients have again overwhelmed hospitals because of the fast-spreading omicron variant, finding an available bed at a large medical center able to give him the treatment he needed proved to be difficult. Weeks was being treated at a small, rural hospital. He had waited 15 days to be transferred to a larger hospital with better treatment options, because facilities throughout Iowa did not have an open bed for him as a result of the latest hospital surge of unvaccinated patients, his children told The Washington Post.

“It was terribly frustrating being told, ‘There’s not a bed yet,’ ” Jenifer Owenson, one of his four children, said Tuesday. “All of us were talking multiple times a day, ‘Why can’t we get him a bed?’ There was this logjam to get him in anywhere.”

When Weeks was finally able to have surgery more than two weeks later, his condition from sepsis had worsened. Weeks died Nov. 28 of complications after surgery. He was 78.

Owenson added, “The thing that bothers me the most is people’s selfish decision not to get vaccinated and the failure to see how this affects a greater group of people. That’s the part that’s really difficult to swallow.” Local hospitals are overwhelmed with unvaccinated patients.

This story is from last week (Business Insider 12/20):

There is not enough room for all the sick and injured people in Minnesota to receive the emergency care they need.

Hundreds are waiting, some on the floor, in hopes that a bed or operating table might open up. On Tuesday morning, 246 patients statewide had been waiting for more than four hours for a bed.

It’s a backlog created by yet another surge of COVID-19 cases. Doctors and nurses say there’s no end in sight, and people are likely dying in the shadows of this wave of infections.

Every time it seems the light at the end of the tunnel gets brighter, it recedes.

Check out this clip of Reid confronting mobster Frank Rosenthal when he was on the Nevada gaming commission:

If you’ve seen Casino, you are familiar with this scene.

He was one of the giants.

We’re all feeling a little sense of relief that Omicron doesn’t appear to be as deadly as the previous strains, but there are still plenty of questions. This thread from one of my “go-to” epidemiologists takes a look at where we are and what might come:

I haven’t written much about omicron, because 1) there’s a lot we still don’t know; 2) others have written good shit that I’ve been RTing; and 3) I feel like I’m repeating myself from …everything I’ve written before. But maybe a few words on what’s concerning me right now.

What we definitely know about omicron right now: it spreads easier and faster person to person. It seems to have a shorter incubation period and people seem to move more quickly from exposed to positive.

What there is some evidence for: more mild infections in individuals with immunity, either from prior infection or those previously vaccinated. But it also shows more ability to escape immunity than delta & cause infections in immune individuals (even if not severe).

What’s still unclear IMO: average severity of infections in immunologically naïve individuals. & as many others have pointed out, even if omicron *is* less severe as a whole, if it causes more infections, that can still further overwhelm our hospitals.

Again, this is why your vaccine status or your mask-wearing matters to others. Hospitals are so full of COVID patients, it's becoming increasingly difficult to find space for other emergencies. https://t.co/vUoGL6pucW

— Dr. Tara C. Smith (@aetiology) December 26, 2021

Omicron & kids: seeing a spike in hospitalizations in kids in NYC (eg https://abc7ny.com/covid-in-kids-vaccine-omicron-variant-children-with/11393287/). Most of this is in unvaccinated children. Also have seen recent ⬆️ nationwide in deaths in children–spike predates omicron so unclear delta vs omicron, but either way concerning.

Booster protection for kids 12-16: not yet authorized. Recent boosters do seem to provide better protection versus omicron but many in this age group are 6 months or more out from vaccination, and are heading back to school soon.

Rapid tests. In lab, antigens from omicron seem to work well w/ most rapid tests. But concern is that if dynamics of omicron viral replication are different than alpha or delta, are we detecting it as well? Some (anecdotal!) suggestions throat might be better than nose swab.

This needs an evidence base ASAP because some people are using these tests in ways that they’re not designed or authorized currently–but also the govt response in Jan (and some schools) will rely heavily on testing to reduce exposures. Are they working as they have before?

With increased transmissibility, key message from many PH folks has been that better masks are needed for protection. CT is sending many out (https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/connecticut/articles/2021-12-27/connecticut-to-distribute-at-home-covid-19-tests-n95-masks); I haven’t seen anything from other states. Issues of affordability & access still problematic…

…as many who are out working jobs in retail, customer service, food service etc. may not be able to afford good ones, order ones from valid places, replace them as needed, etc. (I usually offer @projectn95 as a place to start but govt assistance would be welcomed).

Some places have re-instituted mask mandates to slow spread. Others have almost no chance of doing so (hi Ohio). So many won’t wear them in any case since it’s so divisive. As I noted last year, that means spread will go on longer in these areas.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-11-23/vaccine-wont-end-pandemic-rural-america

And that includes in schools. While some areas are all-in on masks and test-to-stay policies (which, back to point 7–will these work as expected?), many schools lack mask requirements. Add that to low vaccination rates in these areas & = January may be really bad.

My kid’s school did require masks all school year, which has kept transmission low, but with omicron I’m concerned it won’t be enough. A pivot to remote school for at least some kids could de-densify classrooms, but I don’t think school boards will approve.

So there are things we know to do that could help. ⬆️ vaccination in those who haven’t yet gotten any doses, but it’s getting harder for folks to change minds as attitudes have hardened. Boost. ⬆️ mask use but we’re back to 2020 with little support for that from authorities.

Increase ventilation but that’s a long game and with winter here, some of our local schools are barely heating their buildings as it is.

And so it’s back down to personal responsibility once again, and we’ve seen how well that works at the population level.

So once again, we’re hunkered down, undecided about what we will be doing with 8yo’s schooling next week(!), and with our university going back to fully in-person classes mid-January. 🙃

A possible bright side: the oral therapeutics, esp paxlovid. But will that be enough to replace some of the monoclonals that don’t seem to work well with omicron? Will we have enough? Will rapid tests detect early enough (& be available in an equitable manner?)

& concerned also about the new isolation guidelines (just one thread of many https://twitter.com/meganranney/status/1475627322363494400). Employers are already urging people to come in even if positive–worried this will put more pressure on workers to come back earlier. *Still* not enough freaking paid leave.

And this is obviously US-centric. We still need to vaccinate globally on top of everything else.

So, those are my thoughts for now. Probably incomplete–hit me up with what I missed in the comments.

Originally tweeted by Dr. Tara C. Smith (@aetiology) on December 28, 2021.

Ok. I think I’ll just stay home for a while. That’s fine. Plenty to do right here.

Republicans are shameless and have absolutely no compunction about being inconsistent. Hypocrisy is a useless concept in those circumstances:

At least five Republican-led states have extended unemployment benefits to people who’ve lost jobs over vaccine mandates — and a smattering of others may soon follow.

Workers who quit or are fired for cause — including for defying company policy — are generally ineligible for jobless benefits. But Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Kansas and Tennessee have carved out exceptions for those who won’t submit to the multi-shot coronavirus vaccine regimens that many companies now require. Similar ideas have been floated in Wyoming, Wisconsin and Missouri.

Critics contend that these states are incentivizing people to skip shots that public health experts say offer the best line of defense against the coronavirus. Business leaders and industry groups have argued against the rule changes because, they say, companies would shoulder much of the costs. And the efforts are playing out as the Biden administration is pressing immunization rules for private companies and as coronavirus cases are surging again because of the fast-spreading omicron variant.

Observers say it’s a mark of the politicization of the coronavirus — with fights flaring over business closures, mask mandates and more — and how it has scrambled state politics and altered long-held positions. It wasn’t long ago, they note, that two dozen Republican-led states moved to restrict unemployment aid to compel residents to return to the workforce and ease labor shortages.

“These governors, who are using the unemployment insurance system in a moment of political theater to make a statement about the vaccine mandate, are the same folks who turned off unemployment benefits early for millions of workers over the summer,” said Rebecca Dixon, the executive director of the left-leaning National Employment Law Project. Arkansas, Iowa, Tennessee and Florida cut federal unemployment aid in June.

But backers insist that Americans should be able to decide for themselves whether to get vaccinated. Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson (R) has broadly criticized vaccine mandates as ineffective and unfair, at one point tweeting: “Kansans have made it clear that they choose freedom over Faucism” — a play on the name of the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci, whose masking and vaccination guidance during the pandemic has made him a target for the right.

These GOP governors had a fit over the unemployment benefits being extended during the pandemic because they said it encouraged dependence and harmed businesses. Now this. But if you were to confront them with this hypocrisy, they would just say, “it’s completely different, I know you re but what am I” and move on. If you showed them the facts, they just say, “it’s my opinion” or “I’ve done my own research.” There is no way to persuade people like this with logic because they don’t acknowledge that it exists.

If anyone has good ideas about how to deal with people who are completely unmoored from any kind of morals or principles, I’d be interested to know what they are.

Shhh, don’t tell anyone but the sky may not be falling as soon as we thought:

The Democratic House majority was supposed to die in redistricting. For months now, pundits and political forecasters have predicted that Republicans could win back the House next year without flipping a single voter. After all, the GOP controls far more state governments than the Democrats, and this is a post-Census year, when states redraw their congressional maps. Republicans boast sole authority over the boundaries of 193 congressional districts, while Democrats command just 94. Given the slimness of Nancy Pelosi’s majority, several analyses projected that GOP cartographers would generate enough new, safe “red” seats to retake the House through gerrymandering alone.

This has been a foundational premise of much of my own commentary. And it’s an assumption that’s animated the progressive movement’s push for a package of democracy reforms that would, among other things, forbid partisan redistricting.

But it’s starting to look wrong.

The new House map is more than half finished. And in many states where maps haven’t been finalized, the broad outlines are already visible. Taken together, the emerging picture is far more favorable for Democrats than most anticipated. As of this writing, it looks like the new House map will be much less biased in the GOP’s favor than the old one. And according to at least one analyst, there is actually an outside chance that the final map will be tilted, ever so slightly, in the Democrats’ favor.My Week In New YorkA week-in-review newsletter from the people who make New York Magazine.

For proponents of equal representation, the key criterion for congressional maps is partisan fairness: Is each party’s share of a state’s congressional delegation roughly proportional to its share of the statewide vote? Right now, in many closely divided states, it isn’t. And typically, Republicans mine disproportional representation from the inequities. For example, in 2020, Joe Biden won more than 50 percent of the two-party vote in Wisconsin — but Democrats claimed just 37.5 percent of the state’s House seats. That discrepancy did not reflect widespread ticket-splitting but rather, the concentration of Democratic voters within three heavily urban congressional districts.

On a national level, a fair congressional map would be one in which the “tipping point” congressional seat — the one that puts either party over the top in assembling a majority — has a partisan lean roughly similar to that of the nation. In 2020, Joe Biden won the popular vote by about 4.5 points. Thus, on a fair map, about half of all House districts would have voted for Biden by more than 4.5 points, while the other half would have either given him a smaller margin than that, or else gone for Trump.

In a recent analysis for the progressive think tank Data for Progress, Joel Wertheimer applied this criterion to the 25 states that had finalized their House maps. In the chart below, a House district “leans Democratic” if its voters supported Biden by more than 4.5 percent in 2020 and “leans Republican” if Biden’s margin was smaller than that (or nonexistent). Across all the revised maps, the number of seats to the left of the nation as a whole increased by 16.

This does not mean that 2022 is a shoe-in. Anything but. But it’s just one of the vote suppression mechanisms that may not be as potent as we might have thought it was. If it’s a red wave, this won’t help that much. But if it’s tighter, there’s a possibility that the Democrats may be able to hang on.

Every little bit helps.

This is good news:

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol plans to begin holding public hearings in the new year to tell the story of the insurrection from start to finish while crafting an ample interim report on its findings by summer, as it shifts into a more public phase of its work.

The panel will continue to collect information and seek testimony from willing witnesses and those who have been reluctant — a group that now includes Republican members of Congress. It is examining whether to recommend that the Justice Department pursue charges against anyone, including former president Donald Trump, and whether legislative proposals are needed to help prevent valid election results from being overturned in the future.

“We have to address it — our families, our districts and our country demand that we get as much of the causal effects of what occurred and come up with some recommendations for the House so that it won’t ever happen again,” committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) said in a recent interview.

The committee has taken in a massive amount of data — interviewing more than 300 witnesses, announcing more than 50 subpoenas, obtaining more than 35,000 pages of records and receiving hundreds of telephone leads through the Jan. 6 tip line, according to aides familiar with the matter who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe details of the panel’s work.

The panel has made splashy headlines with its aggressive legal posture toward former White House aides Stephen K. Bannon and Mark Meadows and the possibility it could recommend the Justice Department investigate Trump for his role in the attack and efforts to overturn the election results.

Trump and Republican leaders have opposed an investigation into the attack from the start and have called the committee’s work a partisan exercise meant to damage the former president and the GOP ahead of the midterms. If Republicans were to take control of the House after November’s elections, they would almost certainly shut down the probe.

This has added a sense of urgency to the panel’s work, including the need for hearings and to show that the information gathered amounts to more than what is already publicly known.

The public business meeting earlier this month, where panel members revealed a sliver of the 9,000 documents and records provided by Meadows, was a taste of what it hopes to accomplish in hearings throughout 2022: a dramatic presentation of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Trump, his allies and anyone involved in the attack or the attempt to overturn the election results.

“We want to tell it from start to finish over a series of weeks, where we can bring out the best witnesses in a way that makes the most sense,” a senior committee aide said. “Our legacy piece and final product will be the select committee’s report.”

The rough timeline being discussed among senior committee staffers includes public hearings starting this winter and stretching into spring, followed by an interim report in the summer and a final report ahead of November’s elections.

“I think we may issue a couple reports and I would hope for a [full] interim report in the summer, with the eye towards maybe another — I don’t know if it’d be final or another interim report later in the fall,” said a second senior committee aide.

The five teams behind the investigation have begun to merge their findings. The topics include: the money and funding streams for the “Stop the Steal” rallies and events; the misinformation campaign and online extremist activity; how agencies across the government were preparing for the Jan. 6 rally; the pressure campaigns to overturn the election results or delay the electoral certification; and the organizers of the various events and plans for undermining the election.

That sounds promising, particularly the pressure campaigns which implicate the White House.

This seems beyond the scope of this committee but who know? Maybe they’ll come up with something interesting:

Investigators said they are also pursuing questions outside of these lanes, including how Trump has been able to convince so many of his supporters that the election was stolen despite having no evidence to support that claim.

“I think that Trump and his team have done a pretty masterful job of exploiting millions of Americans,” said the second senior committee aide. “How do you get that many people screwed up that deeply? And continue to screw them up? Right? And what do we do about that? So there are some big, big-picture items that go well beyond the events of [Jan. 6] that the committee is also grappling with.”

This strikes me as perhaps the most important consequence of this investigation:

Investigators have consulted with experts as they attempt to understand what might have happened if the electoral count was not completed that day and “we ended up in a constitutional gray zone,” said the first senior committee staffer.

With this in mind, the panel is expected to recommend legislative and administrative changes. Members have begun reviewing the Electoral Count Act, the 19th century law that dictates the procedure for counting electoral votes during a joint session of Congress. Legal scholars across the political spectrum have said the law is in need of reform.

In addition, members of the panel have said they plan to review laws that provide a president with emergency powers, so those powers cannot be abused if a future election is contested.

This is where the anomaly of Trump himself comes in. These weaknesses have always been there it’s just that it took a shameless, narcissistic, pathological liar in the White House to actually exploit them. And, needless to say, a political party so power mad that they are running with it now that they’ve been revealed.

The laws must be reformed because there is simply no doubt that Trump and many Republican politicians are prepared to do whatever it takes to overturn legitimate elections in the future.

I look forward to the public hearings. I just hope they are able to present them in a compelling way without a lot of the usual grandstanding. So far, the committee has shown itself to be a serious body and without the wingnuts on the right turning them into the usual circus, they might just break through.

I guess a violent insurrection would qualify :

A former Trump White House official says he and right-wing provocateur Steve Bannon were actually behind the last-ditch coordinated effort by rogue Republicans in Congress to halt certification of the 2020 election results and keep President Donald Trump in power earlier this year, in a plan dubbed the “Green Bay Sweep.”

In his recently published memoir, Peter Navarro, then-President Donald Trump’s trade adviser, details how he stayed in close contact with Bannon as they put the Green Bay Sweep in motion with help from members of Congress loyal to the cause.ADVERTISING

But in an interview last week with The Daily Beast, Navarro shed additional light on his role in the operation and their coordination with politicians like Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX).

“We spent a lot of time lining up over 100 congressmen, including some senators. It started out perfectly. At 1 p.m., Gosar and Cruz did exactly what was expected of them,” Navarro told The Daily Beast. “It was a perfect plan. And it all predicated on peace and calm on Capitol Hill. We didn’t even need any protestors, because we had over 100 congressmen committed to it.”

That commitment appeared as Congress was certifying the 2020 Electoral College votes reflecting that Joe Biden beat Trump. Sen. Cruz signed off on Gosar’s official objection to counting Arizona’s electoral ballots, an effort that was supported by dozens of other Trump loyalists.

Staffers for Cruz and Gosar did not respond to requests for comment. There’s no public indication whether the Jan. 6 Committee has sought testimony or documents from Sen. Cruz or Rep. Gosar. But the committee has only recently begun to seek evidence from fellow members of Congress who were involved in the general effort to keep Trump in the White House, such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA).

This last-minute maneuvering never had any chance of actually decertifying the election results on its own, a point that Navarro quickly acknowledges. But their hope was to run the clock as long as possible to increase public pressure on then-Vice President Mike Pence to send the electoral votes back to six contested states, where Republican-led legislatures could try to overturn the results. And in their mind, ramping up pressure on Pence would require media coverage. While most respected news organizations refused to regurgitate unproven conspiracy theories about widespread election fraud, this plan hoped to force journalists to cover the allegations by creating a historic delay to the certification process.

I guess a violent mob chanting “hang Mike Pence” could be considered “pressure.”

It’s astonishing how these guys are all so proud of their coup planning, writing books about it proclaiming their guilt to everyone who will listen. I suppose that those who simply aren’t delusional conspiracy theorists may just be doubling down to save face. But I think what’s most stunning about all of it is the fact that they are so confident that can act with total impunity.

They have no fear of accountability. None. Why is that?

The United States has one of the lowest Covid vaccination rates in the developed world, a result of our other pandemic: delusion.

Sophia A. McClennen considers at Salon why conservative thought leaders across the U.S. are actively sowing vaccine distrust among their ranks when it is literally killing off their own. She gives the response a name: Victimized Bully Syndrome.

Some of you will be familiar with DARVO, an acronym for deny, attack and reverse victim and offender. DARVO describes the behavior of psychological abusers when they are being held accountable for their behavior. Donald Trump and his supporters clearly exhibit DARVO habits. Rather than accept blame for anything they do, they turn around and accuse those blaming them of creating the problem. Victimized Bully Syndrome (VBS), as I’m describing it, though, is slightly different from DARVO. With DARVO the abusive behavior comes first and DARVO only emerges if the attacker is asked to take responsibility. But with VBS the cries of being victims come first and are used to justify the underlying bullying behaviors. The bully under VBS is always already acting in self-defense.

Tell President Joe Biden on Christmas Eve, essentially, to go f*ck himself, and then complain your freedom of speech is under attack when people condemn you for it.

A U.S. Senate candidate suggests the government’s COVID-19 vaccine and masking protocols victimize citizens and “limit our freedom.” 

Similar to the “sore winner syndrome” we saw emerge in the wake of former President Trump’s election, VBS posits that those on the right are all the time being victimized by their government and that it makes perfect sense to respond aggressively.

Kyle Rittenhouse, for example:

In a post-verdict statement issued by the victims’ parents, they nail the dangers of Rittenhouse’s VBS. The verdict, according to them, “sends the unacceptable message that armed civilians can show up in any town, incite violence, and then use the danger they have created to justify shooting people in the street.

VBS, then, isn’t only being used by the right to foster a public health catastrophe, it is literally being used to justify armed murder and armed insurrection. As long as we allow the right to continue to describe themselves as victims who have been harmed, injured, threatened and therefore need to act aggressively in self-defense, the closer we get to civil war. In fact, a recent Public Religion Research Institute poll showed that 30 percent of Republicans believe that “true American patriots” might need to resort to violence in order to save the country. Nearly 40% still think the election was stolen.

McClennen sees Victimized Bully Syndrome as a serious threat not only to public health but to the health of our democracy. But she offers no way to neutralize it, just that we should.

There is an old rhetorical ploy — a loaded question, really — expressed in, “When did you stop hitting your wife?” It’s a form of logical fallacy, but those with VBS have rejected logic anyway. And since we’re talking about tamping down abusive behavior, perhaps some version of that question would work.

Like, “When did you stop hating your country?’ or “When did you stop advocating sedition?”

Someone more clever than me might want to tackle the problem.