Month: December 2021

even when the world’s gone mad

One of the hardest tasks for a politically aware citizen in this polarized environment is to hew to your principles even when your opponent’s ox is being gored. During the Trump years I had to constantly check check my own priors as we observed the actions of the FBI and DOJ working on the various Trump scandals. As it turned out, the Trump administration was unusually reckless and corrupt and the federal law enforcement agencies were actually quite restrained for political reasons so there wasn’t even much accountability, much less overkill. (Mueller, anyone?)

But during the protests in the summer of 2020, we saw them revert to form. The rough treatment in Lafayette Square is the most notorious example but there was plenty of federal overzealous policing going on all over the country under the leadership of Bill Barr and Donald Trump. And I think we can feel pretty confident that even today there are many feds in the various agencies who are hard core right wingers who are very amenable to authoritarian government.

Take this for example:

The F.B.I. set up extensive surveillance operations inside Portland’s protest movement, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and current and former federal officials, with agents standing shoulder to shoulder with activists, tailing vandalism suspects to guide the local police toward arrests and furtively videotaping inside one of the country’s most active domestic protest movements.

The breadth of F.B.I. involvement in Portland and other cities where federal teams were deployed at street protests became a point of concern for some within the bureau and the Justice Department who worried that it could undermine the First Amendment right to wage protest against the government, according to two officials familiar with the discussions.

Some within the departments worried that the teams could be compared to F.B.I. surveillance transgressions of decades past, such as the COINTELPRO projects that sought to spy on and disrupt various activist groups in the 1950s and 1960s, according to the officials, one current and one former, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the debate…

In Portland, federal teams were initially dispatched in July 2020 to protect the city’s federal courthouse after protesters lit fires, smashed windows and lobbed fireworks at law enforcement personnel in the area. One demonstrator had attacked a federal officer with a hammer. But the F.B.I. role quickly widened, persisting months after activists turned their attention away from the courthouse, with some targeting storefronts or local institutions whose protection would normally be up to the local police.

We already knew that a federal task force basically executed an unarmed left wing protester who was accused of shooting a far-right Donald Trump supporters during one of the Portland protests. Trump even took credit for ordering the hit, saying “that’s how it has to be, there has to be retribution.” And there were those stories of unmarked agents gathering up protesters and driving them all over town without telling anyone who they were.

Bill Barr was convinced that Antifa was taking over the country and he sent in federal law enforcement in to stop it. Right wing terrorist militias, not so much.

It’s tempting under those circumstances to become a proponent of the DOJ taking off the gloves and going after the right wing the same way they go after the left. And yes, with their propensity for violence, it’s clear that the authorities should be keeping an eye on what they’re doing. But we can’t lose our perspective either. Political disagreements morphing into political violence is something the United States has seen far too often in our history and the government has far too often overreacted. It never ends well.

I’m glad they are being tough on the most violent of the January 6th protesters. That was a true act of political insurrection. But we can’t let ourselves get too caught up in the idea that this problem will be solved with harsh law enforcement. That way lies authoritarian danger of its own. Our divide is really a political and cultural problem that we must seek political and cultural solutions to bridge.

I’ve always written about these issues going back to the very beginning of this blog believing that it’s important that we remain as clear-eyed and objective as we can when it comes to government police authority. I think it’s going to be even more important going forward as we confront the latest threat of neo-fascist, white nationalism on the right. I will do my best to convey what I see out there with as much clarity as I can.

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cheers — digby

Happy Hollandaise!

By any measure, this is an exceptional politician, regardless of whether you agree with all her positions or not (for the record, I’m hard pressed to find much to disagree with her on, and she is tactically brilliant). She is not the only great national Democrat but she is among them.

It is my sincere hope that the leaders who are proactively sidelining her will soon retire — because if this list is what she can accomplish without any serious support from the party’s leaders, imagine what great things this country could accomplish if she and (her talented peers) had really strong backing from the Democratic party.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you would like to support this site to keep the lights on for another year, you can do so through the buttons below. Thank you so much. I am very grateful. cheers — digby

He “downplayed” the virus but wants credit for curing it.

One of the most notorious moments of the presidency of Donald J. Trump has to be that visit he made to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) on March 6th of 2020. COVID-19 hadn’t even been named yet and the World Health Organization (WHO) hadn’t yet designated it a pandemic but we all knew that something very bad was happening. Cases had shown up in Washington state and California. The whole country was riveted by the plight of a cruise ship sailing off the West Coast with sick people aboard and nowhere to moor. The president was reportedly angry about the whole thing and was resisting dealing with it but finally agreed to travel to the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters for a photo-op to show his concern. It was one of the most astonishing presidential performances of all time:

Trump defends gutting the federal government's pandemic preparedness over his first 3 years in office: "I just think this is something that you can never really think is going to happen." pic.twitter.com/0fzOUSUBYE

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 6, 2020

But perhaps the most memorable of all was this:

You know, my uncle was a great person. He was at MIT. He taught at MIT for, I think, like a record number of years. He was a great super genius. Dr. John Trump. I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, “How do you know so much about this?” Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for President.

Those exchanges illustrated the fundamental bind Trump was in from the beginning of the crisis. He wanted to “downplay” the virus, as he admitted to Bob Woodward around that time, but he also wanted to be the very stable genius who personally solved it. So he wavered back and forth throughout, some days saying the whole thing was just going away by itself and that his political enemies were talking it up to hurt his re-election chances. On other days he promoted snake oil cures, even offering advice to scientists on what they should be researching to treat the virus, apparently convinced that he had brilliant ideas that hadn’t been explored:

"I think a lot of people are gonna go outside all of the sudden" — Trump on DHS's preliminary finding that the coronavirus doesn't do as well in sunlight as it does inside pic.twitter.com/tmMCiCh3tq

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 23, 2020

He grew impatient with the medical professionals who kept telling him bad news and instead turned to the quack remedies like Hydroxychloroquine which people like Fox News personality Laura Ingraham were promoting. He listened to quack doctors like Fox News radiologist Dr. Scott Atlas, who would tell him what he wanted to hear. As his COVID task force coordinator Dr Deborah Birx has testified before Congress, during the final months of his term, Trump completely lost interest in COVID altogether — at least until he came down with it himself.

However, towards the end, the vaccines were coming on line and Trump very much wanted to be given credit for them. He claimed over and over again that everyone said it would take five years but he made sure they were done in record time and nobody could have achieved that but him. In his first press conference after the election he said this:

The vaccines, and by the way, don’t let Joe Biden take credit for the vaccines. If Joe Biden… Joe Biden failed with the swine flu, H1N1. Totally failed with the swine flu. Don’t let him take credit for the vaccines because the vaccines were me and I pushed people harder than they’ve ever been pushed before. But the vaccines, there are those that says one of the greatest things. It’s a medical miracle. Don’t let anyone try and take credit for it.

As you can see, he was desperate to be given credit, as if he had personally spent that previous few months cooking up the vaccines in the White House kitchen. After all, he had a genius uncle who taught at MIT and all the doctors were astounded by his “natural ability.” As he put it, “the vaccines were me.”

We found out later that he and Melania Trump were among the first to be vaccinated while they were still in the White House, although they didn’t announce it or do what all the other politicians were doing by having cameras present to record the moment as a way to reassure the public that they were safe. Nonetheless, over the following months, Trump would from time to time talk up the vaccines, mostly as a way to talk up his part in it, and while always emphasizing that people “have their freedoms.” Last September, he even joined the freedom from sanity club himself saying that he probably wouldn’t get the booster when they became available.

His followers were not convinced.

After all those months of Trump downplaying the virus, refusing to wear a mask and otherwise encouraging his voters to see the mitigation strategies as a Democratic plot to bring him down, they have continued to chase snake oil cures and refused to get vaccinated. They don’t see the “medical miracle” of vaccines as a Trump triumph. They see it as a threat.

This week, Trump told another audience that he had received the booster after all — and he got booed. He took the opportunity to once again try to make the case that he should get credit and that his supporters are “playing into [the Democrats’] hands” by booing him.

“Take credit for it. What we’ve done is historic,” Trump told an audience over the weekend. “If you don’t want to take it you don’t have to, you shouldn’t be forced to take it, no mandates. But take credit because we saved tens of millions of lives, take credit, don’t let them take that away from you.”

He meant, “don’t let them take that away from me.“

Many people have seen those comments as Trump encouraging people to get vaccinated, but it really wasn’t and I doubt any of his followers saw it that way. In fact, he made it clear that he doesn’t care if they do it or not and that all that matters is that he is acknowledged as a big hero. In other words, his comment was really just more of his partisan politicization of the pandemic that’s gotten us into this mess in the first place.Advertisement:

And even if he did make an explicit pitch for people to get vaccinated, it’s unlikely that it would make a difference. Polls show that the resistance to vaccines is now baked into the MAGA psyche, with him or without him. He may have created this problem but he has no power to fix it and I imagine that’s intensely frustrating for him.

Trump yearns to be worshiped as the great leader who single-handedly saved the world but his followers are all inexplicably offering themselves up as human sacrifices instead.  

Update- LOL!

Former President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that it’s tough for him to criticize President Joe Biden after Biden complimented his administration’s success in developing COVID-19 vaccines.

“Thanks to the prior administration and our scientific community, America is one of the first countries to get the vaccine,” Biden said earlier Tuesday during a speech from the White House. “Thanks to my administration, the hard work of Americans, we let, our roll-out, made America among the world leaders in getting shots in arms.”

A few hours later, Trump told Fox News that he was “very appreciative” of Biden’s acknowledgment and that it was difficult to criticize Biden in the wake of his remarks.

“It is a little tough to be overly critical now, because he just thanked us for the vaccine and thanked me for what I did,” Trump said. “You know, that’s a first — so it is very tough for me to be overly critical now.”

Trump also told Fox that he was “surprised” Biden praised his administration for fast-tracking the COVID-19 vaccine, adding, “I think it was a terrific thing, and I think it makes a lot of people happy.”

“I think he did something very good,” Trump said. “You know, it has to be a process of healing in this country, and that will help a lot.”

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And thank you!

“The Guns of the South” (1992) by Harry Turtledove is “speculative fiction” in which the South wins the Civil War. Time-traveling white supremacists from 21st-century South Africa supply Gen. Robert E. Lee and his troops with AK-47s plus the ammunition, training, and military intelligence to win the war. Lee does.

In the end, however, Lee discovers his benefactors’ origins. He becomes president of the Confederacy and, convinced slavery is both wrong and destined to fail, ends slavery himself.

Rebecca Solnit portrays present-day efforts to roll back progress towards greater equality as similarly doomed to fail. The anger and violence we’ve seen comes from people who know they are losing the fight for the future:

In 2018, halfway through the Trump presidency, Michelle Alexander wrote a powerful essay arguing that we are not the resistance. We, she declared, are the mighty river they are trying to dam. I see it flowing, and I see the tributaries that pour into it and swell its power, and I see that once firmly grounded statues and assumptions have become flotsam in its current. Similar shifts are happening far beyond the United States, but it is this turbulent nation of so much creation and destruction I know best and will speak of here.

When a regime falls, the new one sweeps away its monuments and erects its own. This is happening as the taking down of Confederate, Columbus and other statues commemorating oppressors across the country, the renaming of streets and buildings and other public places, the appearance of myriad statues and murals of Harriet Tubman and other liberators, the opening of the Legacy Museum documenting slavery and mass incarceration and housing a lynching memorial.

The “trophies of the ugly old world of sanctified inequality” falling today are replaced with monuments to “heroes of justice and liberation,” Solnit observes. There is no single moment of transformation, just as the Emancipation Proclamation and Appomattox did not end the culture of slavery. Neither did Reconstruction or Brown. Nor did the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts save the souls of those committed both to inequality and to faith in their own superiority. They enforced Jim Crow for a century.

Hearts and minds are as stubborn as Johnny Reb. But most will grow and change. Most have. Or else by now their children’s have. A lot of boys read Ayn Rand in high school. Most of them grow up, too.

• 

• 

So like a river flows progress, Solnit continues:

What’s happening goes far beyond public monuments. The statues mark the rejection of old versions of who we are and what we value, but those versions and values matter most as they play out in everyday private and public life. We are only a few decades removed from a civilization in which corporal punishment of children by parents and teachers was an unquestioned norm; in which domestic violence and marital rape were seen as a husband’s prerogative and a wife surrendered financial and other agency; in which many forms of inequality and exclusion had hardly even been questioned, let alone amended; in which few questioned the rightness of a small minority – for white Christian men have always been a minority in the United States – holding almost all the power, politically, socially, economically, culturally; in which segregation and exclusion were pervasive and legal; in which Native Americans had been largely written out of history; in which environmental regulation and protection and awareness barely existed.

When my family moved south, the signs were barely down off the water fountains and, despite Brown, schools remained segregated. That change took federal action and, in some cases, federal troops.

What we see today is a rearguard action to force progress to flow in reverse by nominal Americans who can recite the words “all men are created equal” but never internalized their meaning. In fact, they reject their meaning. They just sound better than the words in their hearts.

“The right is trying to push the water back behind the dam,” as Solnit sees it, by trying to undo society as it is and return it to some imagined society as it was. The error, as they see it, is not in their hearts, but in Jefferson and in America’s liberal ideals. Some who read colonial news at the signing of the original Declaration were social Darwinists before Darwin. Their children’s children still are.

They have succeeded in passing laws at the state level against voting rights and reproductive rights, but they have not succeeded in pushing the majority’s imaginations back to 1960 or 1920 or whenever their version of when America was great stalled out. They can win the battles, but I do not believe they will, in the end, win the war.

While the right has become far more extreme and has its tens of millions of true believers, it is morphing into a minority sect. This has prompted their desperate scramble to overturn free and fair elections and other democratic processes. White Christians, who were 80% of the population in 1976, are now 44%. Mixed-race and non-white people are rapidly becoming the majority. On issues such as climate, people of color are far more progressive; if we can make it through the huge backlash of the present moment, the possibilities are dazzling.

That change requires agency. And agents. “We – a metamorphosing “we” – are sifting through an old and building a new canon,” Solnit concludes. Building requires builders. (That’s you.)

No doubt, if some of our white-nationalist neighbors could fashion a time machine, they would alter American history. The South would win the Civil War. Lee’s statues in Richmond and in New Orleans would stand for a time. But in the end, the river of progress cuts through stone hearts. It tears down dams and monuments to sanctified inequality. Revanchists cannot hold it back.

We shall overcome. But only if we refuse to “stand back and stand by” as Rebels scramble to erect more dams.

(h/t HCR)

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North Carolina’s state legislature has been one of David Pepper’s “Laboratories of Autocracy” since REDMAP helped Republicans take the majority after the 2010 elections. The next decade, regular readers know, was a string of lawsuits challenging gerrymandered districts again and again. Plus, a voter ID bill a federal court ruled targeted “African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” From the state house to the U.S. Supreme Court and back, from superior court to the N.C. Supreme Court, the Republicans’ plan faced setbacks. Yet, with every defeat, Republican legislators went back to their laboratories, retooled their schemes, and tried, tried again to secure permanent control. Democracy be damned.

A former Ohio Democratic Party chairman, Pepper believes Republican-controlled state legislatures are “the most corrosive danger America faces.” What the right did while the left focused more on federal races was target easy pickups in state legislatures. As Democrats and progressives pour themselves into marquee federal races, Republicans are eating their lunch in the states.

“Republicans figured out that it would be relatively easy to take over at the state level,” David Waldman wrote in a column referencing Pepper’s work. They could then “use that power to make it almost impossible for Democrats to win, locking in their control and creating a playground for special interests.” (I have not yet read Pepper’s book.)

Truman Show legislatures

Mickael Tomasky explains at The New Republic:

But Pepper makes a broader argument: that since the GOP started spending big money to flip and control statehouses, the state governments themselves have become undemocratic. Gerrymandering is the big culprit here. Republican legislators, he argues, “are sitting in power mostly having never won a real election.” They cut themselves districts that are wildly skewed in their direction. They never have to think about swing voters. They worry only about primaries from their right. So they’ve created these Truman Show legislatures that have no serious civic interaction with the public at large.

Dave Neiwert’s Daily Kos interview with Pepper last month blended his studied observations on violent, right-wing extremism with Pepper’s reflections on the increasing autocratic lean of Republican state legislatures. Pepper’s story begins with his experience in Ohio.

“Our statehouse has been named, or our state politics have been named the most corrupt in the country,” Pepper said, “which back in a few years ago I would never have thought we would be named that, and they’re legislating, again, like we’re Alabama or Mississippi, and it’s never changing. It’s this downward spiral of poor outcomes, corruption—lack of democracy in the end, and those go together.”

For every Madison Cawthorn or Marjorie Taylor Greene in Congress, there are hundreds more in state houses, Pepper tells Neiwert. And while Republicans stymie legislation in Congress, in state capitols they are passing anti-abortion laws, anti-voting laws, even making it legal for drivers to run over protesters, Neiwert adds.

David Pepper: Yeah. Yeah. I keep thinking about that last one in particular. If we saw another country do all these, but particularly that one, my guess is we’d almost issue sanctions that this country has fallen away from democracy so badly that we would treat them differently, and what’s frustrating for me is we have a blind spot when it comes to our own country. We just assume that everyone buys into the democratic project, small D, and so when these series of things, attacks on courts and elections offices and independent offices, and trying to crack down on protests of those we don’t agree with, to vigilanteism being encouraged, everything else we’ve talked about, rigging of districts, in our own country … If that was another country, as I said, we would raise the alarm: “My gosh. They’re moving away from democracy.”

In our own country, I worry as I watch … We compartmentalize each one. “Oh, my gosh. There’s that bad law, and there’s this bad law,” and most people are not saying together, these are collectively just an attack on the fundamental pillars of democracy, as you said, and as you said when we started, the lesson of our history here and elsewhere is when all those things happen, you do get autocracy. You see, once you rip all those pillars away and you normalize it, it doesn’t take very long for the place to flip, and that’s what we’ve seen in Hungary and other places. Yeah, it’s a pretty disturbing scene…

And because Republicans have made their elected sinecures unassailable, save by further-right primary challengers, they never face an accounting from voters. Democracy fails. Democrats are not reacting with the urgency circumstances require, Pepper finds. It prompted him to write “Laboratories of Autocracy.“

They think their freedom and democracy are inconsistent, and essentially, mutually exclusive. 

Pepper tells Neiwert what I’ve told readers about our approach to elections:

David Pepper: I mean, they’re literally using these states to undermine national rights, federal rights, and federal law, and then again, in the national sense—and in my book I go through a lot of steps that I hope are very practical for everyday people to act upon, but before we get to those, and those are necessary, but federal action is essential. Without it, the history’s pretty clear. If there’s no federal pushback on this, at least our history tells us the attacks on democracy succeed. That’s what happened that led to Jim Crow. But I also think we need to rethink our politics, because one side—the Koch brothers and ALEC and their allies—this is a war on democracy. They think their freedom and democracy are inconsistent, and essentially, mutually exclusive. So, they’re warring against democracy every year, everywhere.

Our politics is still based on the presidential calendar and the Senate calendar, and the swing states that are in play in those races, or some of the swing congressional districts, which means they’re on offense every year, everywhere. We contest in some states every two, and essentially, every four years. Well, if that’s the terms, they’re going to win. My older kid plays soccer. If one team’s on offense the entire time, and you’re on offense every once in a while, you’re going to lose. So, we have to rethink this all as a long game for democracy that we have to fight everywhere, and we need to schedule our action accordingly. We need to use our resources accordingly. We need to think about running for office accordingly, and we’re catching up in that mindset, but we’re years behind. This sounds a little bit like, “Whoa, you really want to move some money away from the presidential year spending and put it into statehouse races?” The Koch brothers did. Look what happened. It worked.

“If you don’t fight to protect your democracy, you can lose it almost overnight,” Pepper warned in a tweet last month.

VIDEO: the lesson of history couldn’t be more clear. If you don’t fight for democracy when it’s under attack, you can lose it almost overnight.

In “Laboratories of Autocracy,” I walk through the risk to democracy now, and how can all fight back: https://t.co/3uVNk3R7OK pic.twitter.com/uSNI4iWy3p

— David Pepper (@DavidPepper) November 23, 2021

What can Democrats do? What Howard Dean tried and Barack Obama abandoned:

If you took some percentage, 5% or 10% of your presidential year multibillion-dollar spending, and you spread it out among 50 states for four years, you not only would protect democracy better, you’d actually do better in the presidential year because you’d be building something. So, we have to really rethink, I think the way we frame politics, and the other advantage to think about it this way, Stacey Abrams is the best example. Once you define it in this way, you realize it’s a long game. It’s like a John Lewis long game for voting rights, or the suffragists’ long game for women’s suffrage, and then you start to see that the result is not determined by every result of every cycle.

We often have one bad cycle, we quit, we fire everybody, we start over. Stacey Abrams told us, even when she lost her governor’s race for a lot of reasons that she explained were really illegitimate, she gained progress in that loss. She registered people. She fired up people, and that progress carried over to ’20 in a way that we turned Georgia blue, just like running in every single statehouse district in every state. You’re going to lose most of those races. We know that, but we should celebrate the fact that we’re running in every district because every one of those candidates will register voters. They’ll change minds at every door. They will have higher turnout, and maybe in two or four years, if they do it again, and we’ve seen this in states like Virginia, they win the next race.

Listen, losing by less out in rural counties where Democrats struggle is the key to winning back state legislatures and beating back autocracy, if not fascism. There is no Hogwarts-style shortcut. What is required is for Democrats to get their heads out of their asses and fight the fight where it really is. D.C. is not the main event, just the most high-publicized.

As I wrote in 2019:

Many progressives would rather elect presidents before they can elect Democrats to city council or the state legislature. Those un-sexy races develop candidates who might eventually undo state gerrymandering, or become U.S. senators who vote to approve the next Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court or stop the next Brett Kavanaugh. I said often during the 2016 election, President Bernie can’t help me with that. Neither can President Hillary.

Want to fix that? Look in the mirror. Look at counties across southern Georgia, at Louisiana, at Alabama and Arkansas and Oklahoma. Get engaged in rural counties where Democrats are organized. There is a good chance it is barely.

(Watch this space for For The Win, 4th Ed. next month. Join the fight now.)

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Peter Nicholas at the Atlantic spoke with Dr. Fauci about COVID, Omicron and what people should do to stay safe this holidays season. Some excerpts:

Peter Nicholas: Is this the new normal in America? Will we be taking PCR tests and at-home tests next winter?

Anthony Fauci: I do not think it’s going to be the way it is right now. Even with viruses that mutate and change, you reach a steady state where there’s enough infection and/or vaccination in the community that there is enough background immunity that the level of infection is both less in quantity and severe disease.

I don’t think it’s possible that we’re going to eradicate this infection, because we’ve only eradicated one infection in human history, and that’s smallpox. And I don’t think you’re going to eliminate it, because you have to have essentially a universal campaign for vaccination like we did for polio and measles. But what we can do is reach a level of “control” that we can live with—where it doesn’t disrupt society, it doesn’t disrupt the economy, and it doesn’t have us always looking over our shoulder wondering whether we’re going to get infected.

The short answer to your question is: I don’t think by any means we are going to be living with the kind of situation we’re in right now, where everyone is walking around testing themselves and worrying about outbreaks when you go to dinner or a movie. I really don’t see that. I see that there will be persistence of COVID-19, or at least SARS-CoV-2, but there’s not going to be the profound impact that it’s currently having right now in our society. Whether that’s this coming spring and summer or a year from now, I don’t know. But it’s not going to stay the way it is, for sure.

Nicholas: Why is it so difficult to get tested in the U.S. compared with some other countries, and particularly Europe? We’re nearly two years into the pandemic. Shouldn’t we have solved the testing problem by this point?

Fauci: In many respects it is much, much better than it was a year ago, but it still is not at the level that I believe would be optimal. Obviously, if you look at the effort that has been put in over the past year by the administration, it has been substantial. There have been a few billion dollars invested in getting anywhere from 200 million to 500 million tests per month. There are about 10,000 centers that are now going to be giving out totally free tests.

But there is a lot of activity to get to what I hope would be the ultimate endpoint that I’ve been talking about for some time—namely, to flood the system with tests so that anybody can get a point-of-care test anytime you want it. Literally. We’re not there yet.

Nicholas: Should the FDA have a different drug-approval process if we’re confronting such a fast-changing, mutating virus?

Fauci: The FDA has come a long way. Looking back to the days of HIV, when it would take years to get a drug approved, with the help of the AIDS activists we changed that dramatically to be commensurate with the challenge of the disease in question. Most recently, the FDA has gotten better and better at that. Obviously, they continue to reevaluate themselves as to whether or not the process is really appropriate for the nature of the challenge you’re facing. They always can do better, but I think they’ve really done a pretty good job.

Nicholas: The Biden administration has laid blame squarely on the unvaccinated. Here’s what the White House COVID-19 response coordinator, Jeff Zients, said last week: “For the unvaccinated, you’re looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm.” Is blaming people like this the best way to get them to change behavior and get a shot?

Fauci: I didn’t interpret it as blaming. I interpreted it as saying that the most vulnerable by far are going to be the unvaccinated. I think there are going to be plenty of breakthrough infections in people who have been vaccinated—and even some people who have actually been boosted—but the likelihood of their getting severe disease, all other things being equal, is much, much less than the very vulnerable people who are unvaccinated. So I didn’t interpret that as blaming anyone, but warning them to please get vaccinated because you’re very vulnerable.

Nicholas: Why haven’t the Biden administration’s efforts to get more people vaccinated worked? You’ve been on TikTok and social media urging people to get shots. Former presidents have tried. Why aren’t people listening?

Fauci: You’re right. We have not made a major dent in the 50 million or so people who are eligible to be vaccinated who’ve not been vaccinated. We’ve tried trusted messengers; we’ve tried making vaccines very easily available. And yet we’re not where we want to be. And that’s the reason why the administration has had to resort to requirements, a.k.a. mandates. You don’t want to use the word mandate, because it seems to be radioactive. But with requirements, you don’t have any other choice. I wish we could do it in a way that people of their own accord would decide they want to get vaccinated, if not because of their own health but almost as a societal responsibility. You can get infected and not get sick and yet pass it on to somebody else, and that person might be vulnerable enough to get seriously ill.

The Biden administration hasn’t been able to get more people vaccinated because they refuse on ideological grounds or are brainwashed by right wing disinformation cynically being disseminated to create chaos and cause Democratic failure. He can’t say it, but I will: they are human sacrifices for the Republican party. There’s not much anyone but Republican leaders can do about it and it’s probably too late, even for them.

Nicholas: How do Biden and Trump differ in their handling of the pandemic response, in your experience?

Fauci: [Long hard laugh] Peter, you know the answer to that.

Let me try it so it doesn’t get too controversial when people read it. When you look at it historically, there were many aspects of what came out of the Trump-administration response that really were not aligned with scientific principles. There are very good examples of that: claiming that certain interventions worked when it was only anecdotal; listening to people who had no experience in public health. There were contradictory statements, like when [the former COVID-19 response coordinator] Debbie Birx and I spent a lot of time putting together a program of how we can slow the spread and the next day the president comes out and says, “Liberate Michigan; liberate Virginia.” Those are not things that are productive in getting control of an outbreak.

Whereas now we’re not doing everything perfectly, but there’s a full commitment on the part of the administration to let scientific principles be the sole guide of what we do. Absolutely, the underlying core basis of what we do is all science. And we have a very competent team of people with multiple areas of expertise and interest who every single day struggle together with how we can make things better. There wasn’t that kind of totally organized scientific team. There were a couple of people there who were health people—like Debbie Birx and I, and to some extent [former CDC Director] Bob Redfield—but there wasn’t a real core team literally devoting every minute of every day to it. So there’s a big difference, a really extraordinary difference.

Don’t ever forget what they did…

Nicholas: Various conservative critics have targeted you for criticism, saying you’re trampling on people’s liberties. Just within the past couple of hours, I got a note in my inbox from FreedomWorks saying, “Dr. Fauci is an enduring example that liberty once lost is lost forever.” What do you make of such attacks?

Fauci: It’s unfortunate. I certainly don’t like it. Political divisiveness is the enemy of public health. I’m accused of destroying democracy and taking away people’s liberty. Go back over the record. Look at everything I’ve ever said. The only thing I’ve ever said are things to keep people safe and healthy: “Get vaccinated; wear a mask; avoid congregant settings.” So people are saying I’m destroying their liberty? I don’t get that. Maybe someone else does, but I don’t get that.

No rational person would get that. It’s stupid bullshit. Their idea of freedom is actually the selfish, immature freedom of a toddler to stick his hand on the burner and then burn down the house while he’s at it.

If everyone takes these simple steps as the Faucis have done, they can have a nice holiday:

Nicholas: Are you personally gathering with family members outside your household this Christmas? How will you account for Omicron as you celebrate the holidays?

Fauci: Last year, my children, who live in three separate regions of the country, didn’t come in for Christmas. Mostly because they wanted to protect me because of my vulnerability, of my age. But this year it’s different. I’m vaccinated and boosted. My wife is vaccinated and boosted. And my three children are vaccinated and boosted. And they’re all here now; they just came in over the weekend. And they’ll spend the next few days through Christmas. Before they entered the house, they all got tested just to make sure. So they went the extra mile. So I’m going to have a very relaxed, warm family Christmas celebration the way we used to do, literally every year since they were born. We missed one year but we’re back in action.

Nicholas: What do you want for Christmas? What gift would make you smile?

Fauci: I already have the gift. My children are at home.

The idea that they are screeching “lock him up” and calling for his harassment using violent rhetoric is so shameful. He’s a scientist who has served the country for decades. How sick is it that they’ve turned him into an object of their hatred? Of course, that’s why. Science+Government=enemy of the people.

I hope everyone reading this will be able to have a nice holiday with their friends and family like Dr. Fauci. Maybe we have to give up the big New Years Eve party but he thinks we’ll probably be ok next year. I’ll take it.

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…like Joe Manchin

Overwhelmingly, people who have received the child tax credit payments have used it for food, rent, and utilities and to pay off debt, data from the U.S. Census Bureau has found https://t.co/5uu6cyrazV pic.twitter.com/eQSMmiAo7a

— Bloomberg Politics (@bpolitics) December 20, 2021

Joe Manchin told allies that he thinks people who get the Child Tax Credit are using it for illegal drugs. That shows what the so-called man of the people really thinks about the people.

He is wrong.

The fate of monthly child tax credit payments, which are set to expire at the end of this month, is murkier than ever after Senator Joe Manchin on Sunday said he wouldn’t vote for the Build Back Better Act, which would extend regular cash injections. 

The senator from West Virginia has cited the bill’s cost and its potential to exacerbate inflation. He has also said he wants there to be a work requirement to receive the benefit and to limit payments to those making less than $200,000 annually. “I want social reforms to the point that [there is] responsibility and accountability,” he said in an interview with MetroNews on Monday. 

Overwhelmingly, people who have received the child tax credit payments have used it for food, rent, and utilities and to pay off debt, data from the U.S. Census Bureau has found. 

Most parents used the advance payments for necessities

The credit functions as an advance for the tax refund two-parent households making less than $150,000 per year receive. Parents and caregivers get up to $300 per month for every child in their household under six and $250 per month for each older child. Families received the last of the six installments on December 15. The White House is exploring doubling payments in February, if legislation to extend the benefit passes. 

So far, the majority of households making less than $50,000 per year are putting the payments toward debt, an August survey by the U.S. Census Bureau found. Higher income families were more likely to be saving the money.StatusInvestors Press for More LGBTQ Members on Bank Boards

Another report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found 91% of households making less than $35,000 per year used the money to pay for food, shelter, clothing and other necessities. Black and Hispanic families were more likely to use their credits on education-related costs, such as school supplies. 

The Biden administration has touted the initiative as a way to reduce child poverty. A study from Columbia University found that making the payments permanent could reduce child poverty in the U.S. by 40%. After the first credits went out in July, food insecurity in households with kids dropped from 11% to 8.4%, the Census bureau found. 

One in four parents with young children also use the credits to pay for child care, an October survey by the Census Bureau found. The Build Back Better Act sets aside $390 billion for subsidized child-care costs and universal, free pre-school. 

There has always been an impulse in American society to blame the poor for their plight with suggestions they are lazy and corrupt. Needless to say, to the extent a group of “deserving poor” exists, they tend to be white folks.

Only 3.5% of West Virginia is Black, so in Manchin’s case he’s condemning white poor people as well. Certainly he’s denying a number of his own constituents of all races the help they need. West Virginia is a very poor state.

Evan Osnos at the New Yorker wrote this:

Manchin never budged from an unreconstructed conservative talking point: give Americans too much help, such as extended unemployment insurance, and they will be indolent and dependent. All over West Virginia, he told me, businesses “can’t find workers. They won’t come back to work.” Dispensing with the euphemisms a few months later, he told reporters, “I cannot accept our economy, or basically our society, moving towards an entitlement mentality.”

The active ingredients in Manchin’s political calculus have never been a great mystery: he is a Democrat aiming to get reëlected in an increasingly Republican state, and he is among the Senate’s largest recipients of campaign cash from the coal, oil, and gas industries, which have lobbied against the climate-change provisions in the bill he scuttled. But, to the West Virginians who begged him to support the anti-poverty programs in the Build Back Better bill, his rejection reflects a fundamental seclusion from the needs of people which he is no longer willing or able to perceive.

To such critics in the state, Manchin has become an icon of Washington oligarchy and estrangement, a politician with a personal fortune, whose blockade against programs that have helped his constituents escape poverty represents a sneering disregard for the gap between their actual struggles and his televised bromides.

If Manchin’s opposition holds, his vote will be decisive in ending the expanded Child Tax Credit program, which, according to the Treasury Department, last week delivered payments benefitting three hundred and five thousand children in West Virginia. Statewide, ninety-three per cent of children are eligible for the credit, tied for the highest rate in the country. Analysts estimate that, if the program is allowed to expire, at the end of the month, fifty thousand children there will be in danger of falling into poverty. The average payment per family: four hundred and forty-six dollars a month.

Manchin is especially vulnerable to accusations of imperial remove. Photos that circulated online show him chatting over the rail of his houseboat in Washington with angry constituents, who had arrived by kayak. After he persuaded the Biden Administration to drop from the bill the Clean Electricity Performance Program, the centerpiece of efforts to slash greenhouse-gas emissions, climate protesters surrounded Manchin’s silver Maserati.

Jim McKay, the director of Prevent Child Abuse West Virginia, a nonprofit organization that lobbied Manchin to support the bill, told me that the senator was “conspicuously absent” from “personal meetings with West Virginia families.” McKay said, “Unfortunately, while his staff did have some meetings—which we are thankful to have had—personal contacts with Senator Manchin were extremely limited.” Dodging uncomfortable meetings is not unique in politics, but the accusation carries a special sting for Manchin, whose status as a Democrat in a red state makes him especially keen to project an image of a man who refuses to “go Washington.” McKay said, “I look forward to when Senator Manchin reconnects with average people.”

To anyone who knows the details, Manchin’s self-narrative—of a coal-country football star from the tiny town of Farmington—has always passed over his wealth and status. The Manchins are machers; Joe’s grandfather ran Farmington’s grocery store and served, over the years, as its fire chief, constable, justice of the peace, and mayor. His father had a similar stature in local politics, while also expanding the family business from groceries into furniture and carpets. Joe, for his part, has prospered as a coal broker, building a net worth of between four and thirteen million dollars, according to his Senate disclosures. In West Virginia terms, Manchin has been a member of the gentry—corporate, political, and personal—for decades.

Now he is the most powerful man in the US Congress who believes not only that he has the right to dictate his ideology to the entire country but he can also make moral judgments about poor peopleMas he denies food to the children of his state. What a guy.

Manchin is betraying his own constituents whom he clearly believes are a bunch of lazy miscreants. And yet, 93% of the state’s children qualify for this tax credit. Does he think those kids are lazy criminals too? Or does going hungry in their childhood make them honest hard workers when they grow up? Certainly Joe Manchin didn’t ever go hungry as a child. What does that make him?

His attitude is one that many people in this country hold. They believe that since they aren’t going hungry that there’s no reason anyone else should either. In fact, it’s a sign that these poor people are trying to take something from them if they need support. It’s a vestige of the Protestant work ethic which, in today’s majority religious communities, has morphed into the prosperity gospel. It’s an ugly, selfish philosophy of life. Joe Manchin in one of its avatars.

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The NY Times reported yesterday that the January 6th Committee is considering sending a criminal referral of Donald Trump to the Justice department.

According to people briefed on their efforts, investigators for the committee are looking into whether a range of crimes were committed, including two in particular: whether there was wire fraud by Republicans who raised millions of dollars off assertions that the election was stolen, despite knowing the claims were not true; and whether Mr. Trump and his allies obstructed Congress by trying to stop the certification of electoral votes.

I hadn’t heard about the wire fraud case, although that makes sense. (I would imagine it will be hard to prove they didn’t know their claims were not true.) But if I may toot my own horn, I can say I was aware for a while of the possibility of an obstruction case and wrote about just last week:

[W]e are seeing the contours of what the January 6th Committee may be leading up to: a criminal referral of Donald Trump for obstruction. Liz Cheney spelled it out on Monday during the Committee hearing to hold Meadows in contempt of congress:

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

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

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

Marcy was on to this very early when she saw that the DOJ was using this somewhat novel approach to the January 6th prosecutions. As of today, we’ve seen the cases of four more defendants charged under this law pass muster in the courts.

I bring all this up because I think it shows that there is value in the kind of work we do here. Blogs like Marcy’s, or some of the newsletters, epidemiology twitter feeds etc, which are densely reported, provide highly detailed analyses of the important issues of our day while many magazines and websites give us deeply reported stories that illuminate our society. Needless to say, the mainstream news is the main source of information we get about the government and politicians. I read them all. And I think those of us who write daily, following the news cycle, riding the zeitgeist as we do while devoting the time to delve into the details, have a unique capacity to find the threads that bind all this together and synthesize them into an evolving story of our time.

If you come by here every few days, you’re going to get a pretty good snapshot of what’s going on in our political world from a progressive perspective.

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Happy Hollandaise everyone!

I write a lot about the threat of violence that hangs over our politics these days and I think some people believe I’m being hyperbolic. Honestly, I don’t think so.

Check out the rhetoric at this huge gathering of MAGA faithful in Phoenix this week, AmericaFest:

The incendiary, dangerous, violent rhetoric against Dr. Fauci continues at AmericaFest. Fox News host Jesse Watters tells them how to go after him to harass him in public: “Now you go in with the kill shot – deadly. Because, with an ambush, he doesn’t see it coming.”

He was talking about ambushing Fauci in public and recording it, so explicitly endorsing harassment rather than murder. I’m not sure the people listening to him all see the difference.
And keep in mind that Watters was deeply involved with Bill O’Reilly’s harassment of Dr. Tiller, the doctor who performed abortions in Kansas who was assassinated by a right wing zealot.

This is sick.

Meanwhile:

Anti-Fauci email from Ron Desantis today.

They are trying to get him killed. And he knows it:

Dr. Fauci responds to what Jesse Watters said in this clip.

Dr. Anthony Fauci says Fox News’ Jesse Watters should “be fired on the spot” for telling a crowd to “ambush” Fauci with “the kill shot.”

But, he adds: “He’s gonna go, very likely, unaccountable. I mean, whatever network he’s on is not going to do anything for him.” pic.twitter.com/K3X0V3jZdM

— The Recount (@therecount) December 21, 2021

Originally tweeted by Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) on December 20, 2021.

Update —

Following publication, a Fox News spokesperson defended Watters’ remarks in a statement to the Daily Beast, claiming he was taken out of context and merely using rhetorical devices to give advice to the audience.

“Based on watching the full clip and reading the entire transcript, it’s more than clear that Jesse Watters was using a metaphor for asking hard-hitting questions to Dr. Fauci about gain-of-function research and his words have been twisted completely out of context,” the spokesperson said.

Whyn use such a violent metaphor? What’s the purpose? Well, as Media Matters points out, Fauci has been the subject of threatening rhetoric on Fox for months now.

Watters’ comments come as Fox News has led an unprecedented wave of attacks against a leading public health figure. Fox News personalities have attacked Fauci over 400 times just since February 22, according to a Media Matters analysis of Fox’s weekday programming. These attacks can often feature violent rhetoric, as Fox personalities have likened Fauci to historical dictators and Nazis, fearmongered about a “medical deep state,” suggested Fauci should be subject to criminal investigation, and falsely accused him of creating the coronavirus.

If you think this is just blowing smoke, I think you should think again. This threat of violence is everywhere in our politics right now. It’s not the first time but this sort of thing doesn’t usually end well.

Happy Hollandaise everyone. If you’d like to support our work here at Hullabaloo, you can do so by hitting one of the buttons below. Thank you so much for dropping by to read our scribbles. It means the world. cheers — digby

Trump got booed at his event with Bill O’Reilly this weekend when he admitted that he had been boosted. He made the argument that it’s important for him to take credit for the vaccines but I’m not sure his crowd thinks that’s quite as important as he does. He sent the note above to NY Times write Maggie Haberman yesterday when she asked him why he said it.

He really wants people to believe that he personally cooked up the vaccines in the White House kitchen, maybe with the help of Dr. Ronny Jackson and Scott Atlas. I don’t think that message is going to get through, at least not as long as we are in the middle of this. He made the pandemic a political issue when he admittedly downplayed it because he didn’t want the economy to falter during his election year. MAGA went so all in on that that they are even killing themselves to own the libs. Does he think they’ll change their minds now that hundreds of thousands have sacrificed themselves on his alter?

Trump seems to have read the room and immediately retreated to his old stand-by to get the cult excited again:

The mission is to keep them agitated over the election and recast january 6th as a peaceful protest against it. And for GOP officeholders, it is the litmus test:

Five Republican candidates for governor of Minnesota were asked at a forum last Wednesday whether they thought President Joe Biden won a “constitutional majority in the Electoral College.” None of them was willing to utter a plain “yes.”Their responses, which ranged from explicit inaccuracies to feeble dodges, made nationalnews. But they weren’t unusual. The Minnesota candidates sounded like Republican candidates generally tend to sound on the subject of the 2020 election.

A refusal to endorse the legitimacy of Biden’s victory has become a key requirement in Republican primaries across the country. From conservative Alabama to the swing states of the Midwest, numerous Republicans trying to win party nominations in 2022 have joined former President Donald Trump in refusing to publicly admit that Trump just plain lost.

Some candidates are aggressive, turning the lie that Trump was the rightful winner into a central part of their campaign pitches. Other candidates are evasive, straining to sidestep a direct answer on the question of Biden’s legitimacy.

Both approaches are dishonest. And both are evidence of a disturbing fact about the state of the Republican Party: you’ll find it very hard to win a 2022 primary if you decide to openly acknowledge the truth about Biden’s fair-and-square victory.

“You can do that, but understand the consequences. The consequences are probably that you’re going to lose,” Steve Mitchell, a Republican pollster in Michigan, said in an interview. “So if you’re willing to lose based on doing that, go ahead.”

I love that cynical shrug, don’t you? “Hey, if you want to lose, tell the truth.” As if destroying people’s faith in our democratic system by saying that it only works when your side wins is just another political tactic.

That January 6th “press conference” looks to be a coming out party for him. It should be a doozy.

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