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Month: January 2022

Extremists in the schools

Published by digby on January 31, 2022

Here’s just one story of how the schools are being invaded by racist cranks and conspiracy theorists.

This is Stephen Balch.

He’s a conspiracy theorist who called Biden’s election a “literal coup” and pushes White Replacement Theory.

The Texas State Board of Education just picked him to revise our social studies standards. The Big Lie is coming to a textbook near you.

Balch is a former professor who claims the 2020 election was stolen. He urged Trump to “lead his followers into America’s streets” and “stretch institutional bonds.”

He shouldn’t be anywhere near our social studies standards.

Balch has espoused White Replacement Theory, a white nationalist ideology that says immigration policies are designed to replace white people. Balch said Biden has “thrown open” the border as part of “a larger project to transform our civic order through demographic change.”

Balch also called the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage an “attack on our constitutional system of government”. So he’s also willing to “stretch institutional bonds” to protect heteropatriarchy in addition to white supremacy.

Balch has already recommended changing our standards to:

-Erase Mexican-Americans deported during the Great Depression
-Replace “mass incarceration” with “high incarceration rates.”

Putting a positive spin on mass incarceration & racist deportations is historical whitewashing.

This appointment comes just months after Republicans passed a historical whitewashing bill to limit discussions of race in schools. Their “critical race theory” bill removed the language I wrote requiring students learn “the history of white supremacy.”

But that wasn’t enough to keep students from learning the truth about our history. So Texas Republicans launched a partisan investigation to intimidate school librarians and ban books that discuss race and sexuality. From muzzling teachers to banning books, schools are the frontline in the fight for democracy.

The alt-right learned Orwell’s lesson: who controls the past controls the future. The future of pluralistic democracy is imperiled when people like Stephen Balch whitewash the past.

Thank you to the activists at @TFN who brought this story to light.

I’m calling on my colleagues—on both sides of the aisle—to join me in demanding the State Board of Education remove Stephen Balch from his advisory role immediately.Political views should not determine one’s eligibility to advise the State Board of Education. Conservatives, progressives, and everyone in between should be included.

But Stephen Balch’s views are not conservative— they’re un-American.

Originally tweeted by James Talarico (@jamestalarico) on January 27, 2022.

They are literally trying to put a white supremacist in charge pf school curriculum. And I’ll bet he’s not the only one.

Here comes another “investigation of the investigation”

Published by digby on January 31, 2022

The Republicans have big plans for their majority:

Since last year, Republicans have increasingly signaled how they plan to exact vengeance on those who’ve tried to make them and their leader, Donald Trump, pay any price for the coup attempt following the 2020 election. For his part, the twice-impeached former president has his own wish list of conspiracy theory-fueled ideas for how to get even—and he has personally pushed other GOP figures to commit to them.

According to three people familiar with the matter, Trump has privately told GOP lawmakers, congressional candidates, and operatives in recent months that Republicans on Capitol Hill should be prepared to launch a full-blown investigation to “get to the bottom of” how FBI agents supposedly caused violence and mayhem on Jan. 6. The theory that the feds somehow orchestrated or caused the rioting at the Capitol is groundless, but it has nevertheless been embraced in influential spheres of Republican politics, in Trumpland, and in right-wing media and online culture. The appeal, of course, lies in the attempt to shift obvious blame off of the 45th U.S. president and conservatives.

In these conversations, the sources recounted, Trump was emphatic that this should be a priority for GOP lawmakers next year, assuming that Republicans take back the House and Senate after the 2022 midterm elections—and regain all the aggressive oversight and subpoena powers that come with a majority.

Currently, liberals in the Democratic-controlled House are wielding those powers on the Jan. 6 committee, which is still investigating the deadly Capitol riot and the preceding Trump-led efforts to nullify Joe Biden’s 2020 election win. “The [former] president wants the same thing, but for his version of the history,” one of these sources, who’s spoken to Trump about this several times, said.

And Trump’s friends on the right are more than happy to back him up.

“If you’re going to have an investigation into [Jan. 6], then let’s have an investigation,” former Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA), who also served as a Trump surrogate, said on Sunday. “Why is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi off-limits? Why can’t you get all the records in a timely manner? I’d like to see all the FBI informants they were working with, Republican or Democrat, let’s take a look. What was known [before the riot] by the FBI, and why wasn’t it acted on?… It would be good to have that after-action review…Go ahead and put it all on the table.”

Trump’s behind-the-scenes push on this underscores how, a year after the Capitol assault, the Republican Party’s mainstream players have coalesced around a clear strategy: to punish the people probing Trump’s anti-democratic efforts, elevate conspiracy theory over actual accountability, and exculpate the Trumpist perpetrators as fully as they can get away with.

The formula has become one of the biggest factors driving Trump’s own enthusiasm for the 2022 midterms, as well as for the next presidential contest in 2024, when he hopes for a rematch against President Biden. Further, the ex-president’s calls for revenge, and renewed push to “investigate the investigators,” has now cemented itself as one of the right’s guaranteed applause-lines, as the GOP campaigns to end Democratic control in official Washington.

“If I run and if I win [in 2024], we will treat those people from January 6th fairly,” Trump told the crowd at his Texas rally on Saturday night. “If it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”

[…]

Trump’s comments come amid a pattern of rhetorical escalation among his MAGA allies and Republican politicians. The demands for retribution have gotten so routinely and casually extreme that some of these conservative luminaries aren’t satisfied with stopping at the mere dangling of possible pardons.

They’ve embraced the openly authoritarian threat of imprisoning officials who they don’t like, and who they feel have spent too much time bothering Trump and his associates.

In a Fox interview last week, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who informally advises Trump, said, “I think when you have a Republican Congress, this is all going to come crashing down and the wolves are going to find that they are now sheep, and [officials investigating Jan. 6], they’re the ones who are in fact, I think, going to face a real risk of jail for the kinds of laws they’re breaking.”

Gingrich did not specify what “kinds of laws” he supposedly thinks these investigators and lawmakers might be breaking, but that of course didn’t stop other conservative candidates and pro-Trump fellow travelers from jumping on the lock-them-up bandwagon.

“Speaker @newtgingrich is correct,” tweeted John Gibbs, a Trump-endorsed congressional candidate in Michigan. “That’s why if I’m elected…I’ll make sure those who abused their office to target political opponents via the J6 committee, are held accountable.”

In an interview last week with former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon, Rep. Matt Gaetz predictably joined the chorus, as well, telling Bannon, “​​You know what, Newt’s right! We are going to take power. And when we do, it’s not going to be the days of Paul Ryan and Trey Gowdy where the Republicans go limp-wristed, where they lose their backbone, and they fail to send a single subpoena.”

Whether the GOP follows through on these promises to try to imprison their political opponents for investigating Republicans’ coup d’état attempt is, at best, murky. However, the right is already showing that they are more than willing to punish these investigators, if and when they can.

After all, some Republicans aren’t waiting for the 2022 elections to be over, and have started doing it, anyway.

The New York Times reported last week that “the top staff investigator on the House committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has been fired by the state’s new Republican attorney general from his position as the top lawyer for the University of Virginia, from which he was on leave while working on the congressional inquiry.”

The fact that the office of the new Virginia AG, Jason Miyares, insisted that the sacking was not retaliation for the Jan. 6 probe did not impress Democratic state lawmakers.

“This is purely payback for Jan. 6—there is no other reason that makes any sense,” Scott Surovell, a Democratic member of the Virginia Senate, told the Times. “In our state, we normally leave those decisions to the school’s board of visitors and president.”

Regardless, there was one person who was clearly pleased with the sudden firing.

According to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, when former President Trump learned of the news last week, “he was delighted,” and “he said he wants to see more of this.”

I wish I thought this was just Trump whistling past the graveyard but I doubt it. If they take the House, Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan are going to be in charge and both of them have shown they are more than willing to do Donald Trump’s bidding.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon reports that the January 6th Committee has postponed their public hearings until April or May which just allows Trump more time to instill his alternate narrative in the people’s minds. (He knows how to do that — remember “no collusion, no obstruction?”) Marcotte writes:

Trump has a very good reason to delay things as much as possible: It gives him an incredible opportunity to shape the narrative. As usual, it’s an opportunity he is taking full advantage of. While loyal Democratic voters won’t be fooled, low information voters — who also tend to be the swing voters who decide elections — can and already are being manipulated by Trump’s disinformation. Both focus group and polling data show that these kinds of voters have no idea how serious January 6 was, or how much the GOP is covering up for Trump’s crimes while conspiring to make sure the next coup is successful. Troublingly, even Democratic voters routinely underrate the ongoing risks. The longer Democrats fail to educate voters, the more time Trump has to make sure his lies stick. 

She’s right. And one of the most successful GOP tactics out there is to blow a lot of smoke, piggyback on Democratic rhetoric to persuade these low information voters that there must be something to what they’re saying. It could work.

A Pandemic of the Unvaccinated

Published by digby on January 31, 2022

I’m so tired of this conversation but we have to have it. People who are refusing vaccination are killing themselves and endangering the rest of us. They are prolonging the crisis, costing the country vast sums of money and destroying the health care system for ridiculous reasons.

Here is the latest data:

NEW: our big story as trailed on Friday is a detailed analysis of the critical importance of vaccination in beating Covid

Top-line: if US had matched vaccination coverage of leading European countries, it would have *halved* its Covid hospitalisations

https://www.ft.com/content/03aa46e2-ac3a-4c16-82be-431ea4c43e58

This is due to the very steep age-gradient in risk of severe Covid, meaning even small gaps in coverage among the most elderly carry huge risk

Here’s vax uptake and waning among the elderly in the US and several European countries.

Note how that red “unvaxxed elderly” segment extends much further right for the US, with millions still vulnerable well into its summer Delta wave.

Far more severely waned second doses, too

And this is after the US got off to a big head-start, getting second doses into elderly arms well ahead of Europe.

(👀 second row of charts here)

But where the black line rose first, it stopped rising at a much lower level than leading European countries.

So what we’ve done in this story is combine all the data we have on age-specific exposure:
• Baseline pre-vaccine risk of severe disease by age
• Share of age group with x doses, and how much waning
• Vaccine efficacy against Delta and Omicron
• For every day of the last year

The result: population-weighted scores for exposure to hospitalisation over time
• Eng & US started rollouts earlier
• But soon overtaken by EU countries (US because rollout slowed, England because AZ)
• Boosters pushed exposure yet lower
• Omi’s immune evasion caused a bump

And that’s where we get these charts showing how one country’s hospitalisation toll might have looked if it had another country’s vax coverage.

We start with the observed data, here for the US, and then multiply it by the ratio between US and Danish exposure scores every day

We can also flip the comparison around and see, for example, how English Covid hospitalisations would have looked if we had US vaccination coverage.

The answer: much worse, coming quite close to last winter’s peak.

Another interesting counterfactual, as also calculated by @PaulMainwood last week for the Omicron period, is what would things look like without boosters?

In England, hospital occupancy would have (un)comfortably exceeded last winter’s peak.

And here’s England with Polish rates of vaccination 😬

There’s an extensive methodology box on our story, and full reproducible code on GitHub

https://github.com/Financial-Times/data-journalism-covid-hospital-counterfactual

So, why does all of this matter?

Because of this chart.

Covid’s IFR in England has fallen steeply since last winter, but that wasn’t by chance, it was [largely] because of vaccines.

In countries with poor vax coverage, Covid will still be far more than twice as lethal as flu.

For example, here are CFRs for England, Portugal and the US (IFRs are only possible for England, thanks to the @ONS infection survey 🙏)

Just like in hospital exposure chart, poor US vax coverage means its CFR has stayed much higher until Omicron, and remains higher with Omicron

And while Omicron’s intrinsic mildness is good news for us all, invaluable data from France (via @nicolasberrod) shows that vaccines still do more to reduce Covid’s lethality than Omicron does.

This matches what we’re hearing more hospital doctors all over the world: even with Omicron, unvaccinated people remain at substantial risk of severe disease and worse

So as long as large numbers of elderly people remain unvaxxed or have waned protection, Covid will continue to be a major burden.

If we want Covid to be over, and to be able to get on with our lives, we need to get everyone vaccinated.

And as many have said, we must also remember Covid is much more transmissible than flu, so even though its lethality per-infection has fallen, the number of infections in any given year is still far, far higher.

Down to 2x lethality 👍
5x infections 😬

Originally tweeted by John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) on January 31, 2022.

Welcome back Joe McCarthy

Published by digby on January 31, 2022
Joseph McCarthy with Trump’s former lawyer Roy Cohn

Book cancel culture is the latest right wing craze. Greg Sargent brings us up to date:

In recent weeks, it has become inescapably obvious: The mania for muzzling how teachers address race and other topics is only accelerating.

We’re seeing dozens of GOP proposals to bar whole concepts from classrooms outright. The Republican governor of Virginia has debuted a mechanism for parents to rat out teachers. Bills threatening punishment of them are proliferating. Book-banning efforts are outpacing anything in recent memory.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.

Amid this onslaught, a proposed bill now advancing in the New Hampshire legislature deserves renewed scrutiny. It would ban the advocacy of any “doctrine” or “theory” promoting a “negative” account of U.S. history, including the notion that the United States was “founded on racism.”

Additionally, the bill describes itself as designed to ensure teachers’ “loyalty,” while prohibiting advocacy of “subversive doctrines.”

This proposal is drawing heightened attention from teachers and their representatives. With the push for constraints on teachers intensifying, they worry that if it succeeds, it could become a model in other states.

“It’s the next step in their campaign to whitewash our history by rewriting it,” Megan Tuttle, the president of the New Hampshire chapter of the National Education Association, told me in a statement.

If this passes, it will “stifle real discussion” in classrooms, Tuttle said, adding: “Then it’s only a matter of time before similar legislation has the same impact on classrooms around the country.”

This proposal opens a window on much of what’s wrong with the current wave of censoring panic. Many new proposals and laws are sloppily drafted, vaguely defining entire concepts off limits, such as “anti-American ideologies” or anything that deviates from undefined conceptions of the nation’s “authentic founding.”

The vagueness of such prohibitions seems like a feature, not a bug. Taken alongside these proposals’ new punishments for teachers, they seem designed to make teachers feel perpetually at risk of running afoul of the law in ways they cannot anticipate.

This seems to go beyond the exercise of traditional state government authority to shape curriculums. Instead, it treats teachers as subversive elements to be rooted out at the slightest deviation from orthodoxy.

The New Hampshire bill offers a template for advancing this project. By explicitly stating its goal of prohibiting “advocacy of subversive doctrines” and ensuring teacher “loyalty,” it treats as its very premise the idea that a subversive element lurking within must be purged.

“I have not seen any other bill like this one,” Jeffrey Sachs, a political scientist who documents these proposals, told me. While old laws still on the books in some states require teacher loyalty oaths, Sachs said, this bill’s “loyalty” language is unique.

They’re making America great again by instituting “loyalty oaths” for teachers. These are the same people who backed a coup, staged an insurrection and threatened to hang the Vice President. I think the question we need to be asking these people is “loyalty to what?” Or should I say “loyalty to whom?”

Any question why this is happening?

Teachers are educated people. Many of the best of them do the underpaid, disrespected job because it’s a calling. Treating them like traitors will drive them out of the field which I suppose is just another step in the ongoing crusade to destroy public education altogether.

These state legislators and school boards are extremists who are demonstrating the right wing agenda for the rest of us. Their plan is to gain and retain power by any means necessary and use it to impose their worldview on the rest of the country by force. In other words, fascism.

An Admission of Guilt

Published by digby on January 31, 2022

That kind of blows his co-conspirators defense that they were just “sending it back to the states” doesn’t it?

In any case, Pence never had the power. They’re trying to reform the Electoral Count Act because Trump pretended that he did and incited an insurrection:

The bipartisan reform of the Electoral Count Act would make it more difficult for members of Congress to object to certification. (Of course, what will probably happen is that some GOP state legislature will overturn the will of the voters and certify bogus electors but I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it?)

Trump admitted what we’ve known all along. He wanted Mike Pence to overturn the election. As usual, he just said the quiet part our loud.

Trump Summons His Mob

Published by digby on January 31, 2022

If you were wondering if former Donald Trump is feeling the heat from multiple investigations, his comments on Saturday at a rally in the Houston suburb of Conroe, Texas, confirmed it. He is freaked out — and signaling to his faithful followers that he may need them to take to the streets.

The rally featured all of Trump’s greatest hits, as usual. He even did a tedious dramatic reading of “The Snake” for old times’ sake. But he added some new material that not only revealed his current anxiety level over his legal troubles but also suggested he has developed an aggressive new strategy for dealing with them. These comments weren’t just Trump riffing off the cuff, as he often does. They were scripted — he read them off the teleprompter.

If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere, because our country and our elections are corrupt.

They’re trying to put me in jail. These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They’re racists and they’re very sick. They’re mentally sick. They’re going after me without any protection of my rights by the Supreme Court or most other courts.

As he was petulantly whining, “They’re trying to put me in jail,” he also inexplicably claimed that he was being prosecuted by Hillary Clinton’s law firm and the crowd immediately started chanting, “Lock her up.” (Self-awareness is not a strong suit among the Trump fan base.) He went on to suggest to the state attorneys general in attendance — who were in Texas for one of those border photo ops — that perhaps they could help him out and do something to put Hillary away. (One of them was South Dakota AG Jason Ravnsborg, who ran over and killed a man in 2020 and is currently facing impeachment — he’s definitely Trump’s kind of guy.)

But let’s look more closely at what Trump said about these prosecutors. Presumably, he’s speaking of New York Attorney General Tish James’ civil investigation, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s criminal investigation into the Trump Organization (which Bragg inherited from previous DA Cy Vance) and the Fulton County, Georgia, criminal investigation into Trump’s meddling in the election. All three of the prosecutors involved are Black, which explains why Trump bizarrely accused them of being racist on top of being “mentally sick.” I don’t think he’s ever used that as an accusation before and it’s noteworthy when you consider his call for “the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere.”

Perhaps one wouldn’t naturally assume that was a call to violence if it weren’t for the fact that the last time Trump called for a massive protest his supporters, some of them carrying Confederate flags, stormed the Capitol and tried to hunt down the speaker of the House and hang the vice president. If anyone should be a bit more circumspect about inciting people to take to the streets, it should be him. When you put that in the context of what Trump said just a few minutes later it becomes even more obvious:

If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.

I think his followers can feel confident that he will pardon those who committed the Jan. 6 insurrection. If others happen to get into trouble at “protests” against his prosecution, well, I would imagine think they’d be treated “fairly” under a second Trump presidency as well. After all, they would only be doing their patriotic duty in the face of prosecutors who are “vicious, horrible people,” not to mention “mentally sick” racists. .

Again, all of that was on the teleprompter as part of Trump’s scripted remarks, not a spontaneous commentary delivered in the moment. He has thought about this and said it purposefully. Once again, he is telegraphing his intentions right out in public.

Yes, he added enough phony caveats for his defenders to say with a straight face that he wasn’t exactly calling for people to riot if he’s prosecuted or specifically promising to pardon them if he wins the next election. But Trump has a track record of inciting violence. He has pardoned cronies who helped the Russian government interfere in the election his behalf, old friends and political allies like Steve Bannon and even war criminals. Why wouldn’t some of his ardent supporters believe that they have a “Get out of jail free” card as well?

They really should think twice. Politico reported a few months back that judges are taking Trump’s ongoing insistence on the Big Lie into account when they decide whether to release some of the Jan. 6 defendants:

Judges have started citing this argument — as part of broader analysis — in cases where they’ve decided to detain defendants for presenting a threat of future violence, and even in some cases where they’ve agreed to let defendants go free, pending trial. They’ve agreed that Trump’s rhetoric could spur his most radicalized supporters to attack again.

Prosecutors have also cited Trump’s inflammatory lies about the “rigged election” as reason to detain those who continue to believe him, calling them an ongoing threat to the community. It’s fair to say that a lot of the Jan. 6 defendants would be better off if the former president stopped “helping” them.

Of course I don’t know if any of this will come to pass. At this point there are no actual prosecutions of Donald Trump, only investigations. There is every likelihood that he will slither out of trouble once again, as he has done his whole life. If he is prosecuted in civil court, that just means he’ll have to fork over some money, something he’s done many times in the past to cover up his misdeeds. Much as he may resent it, he  considers that a cost of doing business.

The Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, have been indicted for tax fraud in the Manhattan DA’s criminal case, but it doesn’t appear that Weisselberg will testify against his boss. Who knows where the Georgia election case is headed? But it’s clear that Trump is very worried about these cases, so much that he’s preparing to activate the mob to save him. I wonder which one of these has him so spooked?

Salon

Banana Republicans unite!

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 31, 2022

The former president is broadcasting to the world that he intended to overthrow 2020 election results that did not suit him.

As he did ahead of the Jan. 6 insurrection, Donald J. Trump is again calling for massive protests should prosecutors “do anything illegal,” meaning indict him. After Jan. 6, who believes more violence is not implied?

Will Bunch writes:

But two things are clear. The first is that Trump — facing probes over Jan. 6 in Georgia and possibly from the U.S. Justice Department — is committing a form of obstruction of justice in full public view, since the future possibility of a pardon offers an incentive to stay on the ex-president’s good side and not testify against him. The other is that abusing the constitutional power of a presidential pardon — intended by the framers for grace and true clemency — to clear the jails of his political allies is banana republic-type stuff, the ultimate rock bottom made inevitable when Trump was allowed to abuse his pardon powers while in office 2017-21.

It’s no coincidence that Trump mentioned by name the three cities in which he is currently under investigation. It is no coincidence that he calls out as racists the prosecutors and investigators closing in on him. He read, “These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They’re racists and they’re very sick—they’re mentally sick,” off the teleprompter.

Bunch again:

But let’s take a step back and drill down on arguably the most important and alarming word in Trump’s statement: “Racist.” At first blush, it seems to come out of left field, in the sense of what could be racist about looking into a white man’s role in an attempted coup or his cooked financial books? Except that it happens that three of the key prosecutors investigating Trump — the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney, Fani Willis, New York State Attorney General Letitia James, and new Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg — as well as the chair of the House committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, are all Black.

Heather Cox Richardson:

After more than a year of insisting he just wanted to address the problem of voter fraud, which he falsely claimed had stolen the election from him, Trump just came right out and said he wanted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Former U.S. attorney and legal commentator Joyce White Vance wrote: “This is what prosecutors call guilty knowledge. And also, intent.” CNN’s Jim Acosta was more succinct: he tweeted, “Coup coup for Cocoa Puffs.”

I know these investigations are taking time, but Trump is not even trying anymore to hide what he wants and what he’s already done. It’s in tweets. It’s in speeches. It’s in published statements. In Georgia, it’s on tape. The quicker Trump is off the streets the safer we’ll all be.

Meanwhile, Republicans remain silent.

Shifty

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 31, 2022
Panorama of the west facade of United States Supreme Court Building at dusk in Washington, D.C., USA. Photo by Joe Ravi via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

“What do we mean by conservatism?” American Enterprise Institute Fellow Steven Hayward asked a 2005 Princeton conference titled “The Conservative Movement: Its Past, Present, and Future.” Rick Perlstein records that Hayward quoted conservative philosopher Russell Kirk: “belief in a transcendant moral order.” Conservatives, he said, “defend the unchanging ground of our changing experience.” 

Yet, conservatives’ commitment to a transcenant moral order and unchanging principles has proved remarkably fluid. Perlstein went on to cite something Richard Nixon once told a new staffer, “Flexibility is the first principle of politics.” There’s the truth of it.

Flexibility, or rather, shiftiness, is the conservative métier seventeen years later. After America elected a Black president followed by an emotionally damaged, white-nationalist, career criminal.

E.J. Dionne teases out a 2000 quote from a prominent U.S. senator condemning the “imperial judiciary”:

He argued that the “judicial activism” that liberals were regularly accused of was standard operating procedure for the right: “It is now conservative judges who are supplanting the judgment of the people’s representatives and substituting their own for that of the Congress and the president.”

“What is at issue here,” Sen. Joe Biden told the Senate, “is the question of power, who wants it, who has it, and who controls it.”

With the retirement of Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Republicans decry President Biden’s commitment to elevating a Black woman to the Supreme Court as an affirmative action pick.

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern coment at Slate that, “in a neat bit of gaslighting,” they are laying the groundwork to claim for decades to come that Biden’s pick is inferior and that Biden and his supporters “are the real racists.” They did it with Justice Sonia Sotomayor:

In truth, presidents had long nominated judges—and Supreme Court justices in particular—on the basis of demographics. President Dwight Eisenhower nominated Justice William Brennan because he was Catholic, and the White House believed he needed to shore up support among Catholics. The GOP’s revered President Ronald Reagan campaigned on naming the first woman to the Supreme Court; he followed through with Justice Sandra O’Connor, who was openly selected because of her sex. (By today’s standards, O’Connor—a judge on Arizona’s intermediate court of appeals—was underqualified.) Reagan picked Justice Antonin Scalia because he was Italian American. As White House counsel Peter Wallison later recalled, Reagan wanted a justice of Italian “extraction,” explaining, “We don’t have an Italian American on the court, so we ought to have one.”

All of these nominations took place before the conservative legal movement coalesced around a pernicious myth: Any time a Democratic president chooses a non-white-man for the Supreme Court, that nominee is inherently suspect—a presumptive unqualified beneficiary of affirmative action until proven otherwise. This toxic ideology emerged when President Barack Obama put forward Justice Sonia Sotomayor in 2009. Ilya Shapiro, a conservative lawyer and commentator who will soon teach at Georgetown University Law Center, smeared her as a blatant affirmative action pick. In a notorious CNN article published at the time of her nomination, he wrote that Sotomayor “would not have even been on the short list if she were not Hispanic. She is not one of the leading lights of the federal judiciary.” Obama never said he wanted a Latina for the spot, but Shapiro nevertheless deduced that she was selected on the basis of her race and gender. He could not believe Obama would nominate a Latina due to her accomplishments alone.

The smear did not end with her confirmation. For the entire time she has been on the bench, Sotomayor—who graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton—has been derided as a dim bulb affirmative action pick. Conservative commentators accuse her of stupidity and ignorance for making uncontroversial points that could only upset a bad faith pedant. She exists in a space that has no equivalent for a white man on the Supreme Court. She must earn the respect of conservative commentators every single day on the job.

And so it goes. When it was time for Republicans to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Trump “nominated Justice Amy Coney Barrett because she was a woman and a mother of young children.” Suddenly, her pick “was principled commitment to diversity.”

Conservatives’ committment, argues Ian Millhiser at Vox, is to control, with Barrett’s addition teeing up “a Christian conservative revolution.” In Millhiser’s accounting, SCOTUS now gives “religious liberty” cases the highest priority, transforming itself “into a forum to hear the grievances of religious conservatives. And the Supreme Court is rapidly changing the rules of the game to benefit those conservatives.”

Millhiser writes:

The Court also started frequently using the shadow docket to hand down highly consequential decisions well before Barrett joined the Court. Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that the Court was using shadow docket cases to grant “extraordinary” favors to Trump as recently as 2019.

But there’s no doubt that the Court’s new majority is eager to break things and move quickly. Ordinarily, for example, if the Court were going to fundamentally rethink its approach to an important provision of the Constitution, it would insist upon full briefing, conduct an oral argument, and spend months deliberating over any proposed changes. Instead, Roman Catholic Diocese was handed down less than a month after the Court had the votes it needed to rewrite its approach to the free exercise clause.

There are also worrisome signs that the Court’s new majority cares much less than its predecessors about stare decisis, the doctrine that courts should typically follow past precedents. Just look at how the Court has treated Roe v. Wade if you want a particularly glaring example of the new majority’s approach to precedents it does not like.

In its fight over religion, the court holds little regard for established law, contends Millhiser. “That means that a whole lot is likely to change, and very quickly.”

Unchanging ground, indeed. Flexibility is more like it.

A Republican Shares his Wisdom

Published by digby on January 30, 2022

Thomas Massie is a right wing congressman from Kentucky who believes that the 17th Amendment should be repealed and Senators should be chosen by state legislators. He just tested positive for COVID is one of the most vociferous opponents of vaccines. He even angered Trump one time who tweeted that he wanted the GOP to throw him out when he held up the bipartisan COVID relief package back in the spring of 2020. In other words he is an idiot. He’s also an extremist who loves to post offensive tweets.

He later deleted this offensive tweet:

His “philosophy,” such as it is, is pretty obvious. That quote at the top? Not Voltaire:

A May 20 Facebook post claims the 18th-century philosopher said, “If you want to know who controls you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize.” The post has accumulated more than 2,300 interactions.

Voltaire was a critic and public activist, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, but the quote came more than two centuries after his death.

The quote is from neo-Nazi figure

The original quote is worded slightly differently, according to etymologist Barry Popik, and it’s from a 1993 radio broadcast by Kevin Alfred Strom. Strom is an American white nationalist and Holocaust denier, according to AP News.

“To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize?” said Strom in “All America Must Know the Terror That Is Upon Us.” 

USA TODAY searched Voltaire’s correspondence from 1742-1777 in the University of South California’s digital library but did not find any evidence to support the claim.

Strom, one of the founders of the National Vanguard organization, confirmed in 2017 that the quote is indeed his.

“So it’s pretty clear, even to my critics, that I came up with the idea and the quote — and Voltaire never did,” said Strom in the online post.

Strom said it was “kind of flattering” that his words would be paired with “the name of the man who said such witty things.” […]

The claim that Voltaire said, “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize,” is FALSE, based on our research. The quote is from American white nationalist Kevin Alfred Strom. In 2017, Strom confirmed the quote is his, with a slight change in the wording.

These right wingers just have an instinct for white supremacist thinking, almost as if these thoughts are their own.

A Case for Optimism

Published by digby on January 30, 2022

This twitter thread from Dr. Tom Frieden summarizes his case for optimism about the pandemic. (There’s a link at the bottom for his more detailed argument.) Maybe I want it too much, but I was heartened to read it:

Although deadly new Covid variants could emerge, I’m more optimistic today than at any point since the pandemic began. Here’s why.

Despite pandemic fatigue and rough weeks ahead as Omicron crests, we’re better defended against Covid than ever. Vaccines and prior infection steadily strengthened our immune defenses. We now have a wall of immunity, though we have lost far, far too many people to get here.

In 2020, failure to follow public health recommendations greatly increased the death toll in the US and elsewhere. In 2021, failure to reach people with vaccination—resistance and partisan opposition in the US and lack of access in many countries—had lethal consequences.

We’ve lost nearly 900,000 people to Covid in the US alone. Most of those deaths could have been prevented. But now, we can have the upper hand over Covid because our defenses are multilayered and strong, starting with immunity.

Based on antibody seroprevalence among people who donated blood, an estimated 94% of Americans had at least some protection against Covid—either through vaccination or prior infection—in November, BEFORE the Omicron wave. https://bit.ly/3ILxOut

Immunity against severe infection is holding up, especially after boosters. In December, the rate of Covid-associated hospitalization was 16 TIMES higher in unvaccinated adults than among adults who were up-to-date on their vaccination. https://bit.ly/3o9slFV

10 billion doses of lifesaving vaccines have been administered globally in just over a year. That’s a stunning achievement, although vaccine inequity continues to cost lives and create the conditions for wily variants such as Omicron to emerge. What’s wrong with this picture?

We have new drugs that are highly effective at preventing severe Covid. Lab studies suggest they’ll work just as well against Omicron as Delta. Generally, medical treatments don’t have anywhere near the life-saving impact of vaccines, but they help.

These pills could be a life saver for people at high risk of severe Covid, though we must still overcome supply challenges, pair testing with early treatment, and make sure there’s equitable access for everyone who needs them.

Most people understand that masks work, and that better masks (such as N95s) work better. Masks can stop airborne spread of whatever variant Covid throws at us. We can learn from East Asia, masking if we’re sick or vulnerable to resist not just Covid but flu and more.

Although there have been bumps in the road, testing is more widely available, including rapid antigen tests that can be done at home. When Covid is spreading we can test before gathering indoors with vulnerable people or in large groups, or if we feel sick.

Genomic surveillance is another tool that we’ve sharpened. South Africa set a great example by warning the world about Omicron. Many countries have increased their capacity to do robust sequencing. We can stay ahead of the virus by continuing to be on the lookout.

Genomic surveillance alerted us to a version of Omicron, termed BA.2, that’s becoming more common in several countries. This has generated concern, but @UKHSA findings suggest BA.2 doesn’t escape immunity more than the version we’ve been dealing with.

All the above are reasons for optimism, but there are wild cards. Protection from Omicron infection may not be strong or long-lasting. And although vaccine protection has held up well against severe disease, we may need additional doses to stay up-to-date.

Long Covid is another question mark. We don’t yet know how often an Omicron infection leads to long Covid, or how best to treat people who are suffering from the condition, although we’re learning more every day and eagerly await NIH study results. https://nyti.ms/3AEfMaV

A new study suggests that vaccinated people who get infected are much less likely to develop long Covid…another reason to keep your vaccinations up-to-date. https://go.nature.com/3o8YxJI

The biggest wild card: SARS-CoV-2’s ability to mutate. It’s highly unlikely that Omicron will be the last variant. What’s to say a deadly, highly transmissible, immune-escape variant won’t arise? Frankly, it could.

But even if a worse variant emerges, we’re better prepared than ever: More immunity, more vaccines, more treatments, better masks and more of them, better tests, more understanding of Covid, more sequencing. Covid doesn’t have to dominate: soon we can resume many activities.

Another reason for optimism? We have a unique opportunity to put public health systems in place to find, stop, and prevent health threats when and where they emerge, anywhere in the world.

With partners, @ResolveTSL advocates 7-1-7: Every outbreak detected within 7 days, public health notified and investigation started within 1 day, and all essential control measures established in the next 7 days. http://preventepidemics.org/7-1-7

The world has a once-in-a-lifetime chance to boost funding for preparedness. @GlobalFund, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary, has made impressive progress against AIDS, TB & malaria and should play a key role in preventing the next pandemic. https://bit.ly/3ISeD2p

Every country and organization has made mistakes, and challenges remain, but we’ve come a long way. The most important lesson we can learn from Covid is that we’re all in this together. We have a better chance for a safer world than ever in our lifetimes.

I summarized this thread, and a bit more, here:

https://www.tomfriedenpublichealth.net/tom-frieden-blog#why-im-optimistic

Originally tweeted by Dr. Tom Frieden (@DrTomFrieden) on January 29, 2022.

From his lips to God’s ear. I look forward to the day when we can just live as we used to. I will keep my masks handy for when I feel vulnerable or when I feel like I’m coming down with something and don’t want to infect others. But beyond that I’m looking forward to just getting my yearly shots — flu, COVID whatever — and carrying on with life.