Allegedly “moderate” Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin went full Stasi right out of the gate when he opened up a tip line for rabid wingnuts to report teachers for teaching “divisive concepts.”

When the state announced in 2020 that it would launch a new high school-level African American history course, Dianne Carter de Mayo quickly volunteered to teach it.

The Gloucester County history teacher, who as a Virginia school child was taught from a textbook that framed slaves as content under oppression, said she is excited to take her students on a deep dive into the history of Black people in the U.S.

When the class launches in the coming weeks, de Mayo’s excitement will be tempered by the ongoing pushback from conservatives about how teachers should frame lessons on discrimination and racism, including a new tip line Gov. Glenn Youngkin launched for parents to report lessons on “divisive concepts.”

News of the tip line, which Youngkin casually publicized during a radio interview, prompted swift fury from Democrats. On social media, critics of the tip line proposed to flood it with spam. In the legislature, Democrats assailed Youngkin-backed legislation that would codify a ban on “divisive concepts.”

“I understand you found a winning issue in ‘critical race theory,’ once again, using the old Southern strategy to use race as a wedge issue, to use Black bodies as a prop in your campaigns,” Del. Don Scott Jr., D-Portsmouth, said Wednesday during a speech on the House floor. Later on Wednesday, Youngkin met with Scott in the delegate’s office.

Macaulay Porter, a spokesperson for the governor, said the email address was set up “as a resource for parents, teachers, and students to relay any questions or concerns.” Porter described the email address as “customary constituent service.”

De Mayo said that among the educators she knows, reaction to the news was mostly fear: “Someone’s career and livelihood could be endangered,” she said. “It’s scaring people to death.”

The Black educator said she recently got a call from an elementary school teacher who was second-guessing her work amid news of the tip line.

“She had been assigned the bulletin board of the month, which in February would usually be themed for Black History Month,” de Mayo said. “She was saying, ‘What if I get reported to the governor for what I put up?’ It’s horrifying.”

De Mayo, a local Democratic activist, said her curriculum is focused on primary sources and that the students in her overwhelmingly white district often walk away inspired by her history lessons on topics like “freedom of speech, even when you disagree.”

Still, some lessons are tough. “I’m going to teach about Nazis, slavery. These ideas are hard. And not because of who you are,” she said.

I don’t think we want our white children burdened with anything that will make them feel uncomfortable, do you? Their parents are very sensitive about white history and don’t want their little snowflakes to feel bad about anything, ever. They are being groomed to fight the coming civil war for Real America and we don’t want them to be confused by history.

This piece by Margaret Sullivan sends chills down my spine. I guess we should have anticipated it when the Republicans managed to pack the courts despite losing the popular vote in all but one election in the last 34 years. The damage is going to be severe in so many ways. But this one is a biggie:

[M]ore than a year after Trump’s presidential term ended, three volatile lawsuits forged in the culture-war fire he stoked are making their way through the legal system.

All are defamation suits, and the mere names involved suggest just how hot those flames may get: Sarah Palin, the right-wing lightning rod who gleefully slammed the “lamestream media”; Project Veritas, the hidden-camera “sting” outfit that targets journalists and liberals; Fox News, the conservative cable network that morphed into the Trump White House’s propaganda office; and the New York Times, the pillar of elite journalism that became the object of some of Trump’s most scalding attacks — and is now the defendant in two of the cases.

Each case has the potential to alter the media business or the practice of journalism, for better or worse. It’s no coincidence that they come at a time when anti-press sentiment is rampant, and not just among conservatives. Public trust in the news media, as well as other institutions, has plummeted over the past 50 years.

[…]

The cases involving Fox News also reflect the media culture wars, but from the other side of the divide. Two large voting-technology companies — Smartmatic and Dominion — are suing Fox News, claiming that their reputations were unfairly damaged when the network handed a megaphone to conspiracy-theory-spouting guests, including Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani,who falsely accused the companies of helping to rig the 2020 election against Trump.

As big and potentially damaging as they are, the Dominion and Smartmatic suits could end up being settled before trial. Fox News certainly has plenty of motivation to pay to make them go away. (In both cases, Fox News has said that it was simply covering newsworthy comments of public interest, made relevant because the Trump campaign was protesting the results of the election.) But no matter the outcome, they could prompt Fox News and similar media companies to exert significantly more caution about spreading political lies. If so, this would be the rare case of Fox News being held accountable for the damage it does.

The long-term effects of the Project Veritas case — which claims the Times defamed the group with two news articles characterizing their tactics as deceptive and possibly part of a disinformation campaign — are harder to suss out. Already, there has been a major development that worries press advocates: A trial judge ruled that the paper is not allowed to publish certain information it obtained about Project Veritas. Such a ruling, known as “prior restraint,” is highly unusual and cause for legitimate concern.

But perhaps most potentially consequential is Palin’s suit against the Times over a 2017 editorial that inaccurately drew a connection between her political rhetoric and the shooting that gravely injured then-congresswoman Gabby Giffords and killed six others in 2011.

The editorial, aggressively rewritten by an editor on a tight deadline, was assigned in the hours after another mass shooting, this one at an Alexandria, Va., baseball field, in which then-House majority whip Steve Scalise was seriously wounded. The error was corrected after it sparked a Twitter firestorm upon publication. “Are you up? The right is coming after us,” the editor, James Bennet, wrote in a panicky-sounding midnight email to the author of the editorial, as chronicled in the Columbia Journalism Review. (Bennet, former top editor of the Atlantic, resigned from the Times in 2020 after his op-ed section published an inflammatory opinion piece by Sen. Tom Cotton [R-Ark.]; Bennet acknowledged he had not read it first.)

It’s not inconceivable that Palin v. Times could make its way to the Supreme Court. If it does, an unfulfilled promise of Trump’s — that he would “open up” the libel laws — might come to pass. Most legal experts scoffed when Trump, both as candidate and president, declared that he wanted to make it easier for aggrieved public officials, such as himself, to sue news organizations and “win lots of money.”

Despite his bluster, the legal foundation on which those laws are built is still standing. That’s the 1964 Supreme Court ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan that gives significant protections to news organizations when they are sued by public figures, requiring that plaintiffs prove “actual malice” or “reckless disregard” for the truth — in other words, that they published information knowing full well that it was false and proceeding anyway. The Times’s swift correction of its mistake strongly suggests there was no reckless disregard for the truth, just sloppy editing and poor judgment.

But, in today’s fraught atmosphere, it’s an open question whether judges and juries will see it that way.

“It seems like a sure bet that the press-friendly standard for libel the Times v. Sullivan case established is in for a serious challenge,” said Nicholas Lemann, a professor at Columbia Journalism School and staff writer for the New Yorker magazine.

After all, as Lemann noted in an email to me, the current Supreme Court already “has shown that it is eager to revisit, and possibly reverse, the great liberal victories of the 1960s and ’70s,” and Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas both have publicly said they would like to reconsider Times v. Sullivan.

Trump’s appointment of Gorsuch and two other conservative justices could put the former president’s fingerprints all over such an outcome, one that could cause a long-standing press rights standard to be weakened. That would be extremely regrettable, from my point of view. Journalists, being human, inevitably make mistakes; those mistakes should be acknowledged and corrected but, at least when public figures are involved, not harshly punished.

“It would be a bitter irony if Sarah Palin, of all people, proves to be the vehicle through which the media are taken down,” wrote Northeastern University professor Dan Kennedy on Boston’s WGBH last week. Ironic, he explained to me later, because of the emptiness of Palin’s past anti-media rhetoric and the overall weakness of her suit.

The case was moving toward jury selection last week when Palin tested positive for the coronavirus, causing a delay. (Her infected status didn’t keep the former Alaska governor — who announced last year that she would submit to the vaccine “over my dead body” — from dining a second time at a Manhattan restaurant, where she had already flouted a proof-of-vaccine mandate.) The trial is scheduled to start again on Thursday.

It’s bound to be a wild ride. And, in this political atmosphere, it may end up being an extremely consequential one.

If you want to read about the basis for the suit, CJR has a highly detailed rundown. When you read about the error they committed you have to wonder why the right is pushing this case. If a jury finds for Palin, the people who are most at risk of future lawsuits are the right wing media. They lie as easily as they breathe.

Personally, I’m most appalled by the Project Veritas case. They are not media. They are political saboteurs and character assassins. How dare any judge issue a prior restraint order on behalf of these monsters. (I guess I should get used to keeping such thoughts to myself in the future — I could be sued for libel if Sarah Palin succeeds.)

BREAKING: Just over three-quarters of Americans (76%) want Pres. Biden to consider "all possible nominees," while 23% want him to follow through on his commitment to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, per a new @ABC News/Ipsos poll. https://t.co/FHLGrgJg9Z

— ABC News (@ABC) January 30, 2022

Look at the framing: “should Biden look at all qualified people for the bench or should he follow through on his promise to name a black woman. ” In other words, it’s unlikely he could find a black woman qualified enough for the High Court if he follows through on his promise.

I don’t recall any poll questions asking if Trump should name judges drawn up from the list of right wing tools provided to him by the Federalist Society, do you? Or if he should pick two Catholic judges? Or if he should “follow through” on his promise to pick a (white) woman — and then picked one who had never tried a case or made an argument before a court anywhere? He just did it and everyone shrugged.

By now you know that presidents of both parties have been choosing judges partly on the basis of diversity for many, many decades, whether it was religion, region or experience. Until recently, they were all white men, of course, which I guess makes it ok. And once a Republican (Reagan, who made the promise during his campaign as well) put a white woman on the court that became ok as well.

Justice Sotomayor got a boatload of grief, similar to what’s going on currently, so the real problem is choosing a racial or ethnic minority woman for the bench. Why else are they polling this question in this way? What’s the point of it? Just to demean the eventual nominee a “lesser black woman” as the right winger Ilya Shapiro said (and who has since because a right wing martyr for being criticized for his comments.)

This is one of the most blatant examples of a racist double standard I’ve seen in many years. In fact, I admit that I didn’t expect them to be so obvious about it in this day and age. My bad. I should never overestimate their decency.

Update:

Reagan: I’m announcing today that one of the first Supreme Court vacancies in my administration will be filled by the most qualified woman I can possibly find… It’s time for a woman to sit among our highest jurists pic.twitter.com/hFSgqLGkGd

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 30, 2022

I’m old enough to remember getting my polio vaccine in school when I was a very little kid. We all lined up and took it in a sugar cube. I don’t think there was any controversy about that. The whole country was vastly relieved that there was a vaccine to prevent that horrible disease.

Those days are long over:

A Colorado school district said it won’t be letting kids get vaccinated on its campuses after a parent’s campaign to sabotage the school clinic culminated in a video going viral on right-wing Twitter.

Gregg McGough, the father of a 15-year-old high school student, shared a video that showed his son trying to obtain a vaccine at school by lying about his age and providing a fake note of parental consent. McGough told the Colorado Sun that his goal in sharing the video was to shut down the vaccination clinic at Littleton Public School and to prevent other clinics from cropping up in schools in the future, ostensibly by showing that students could obtain inoculations by simply forging notes from their parents.

In addition to a video showing McGough’s son, Owen, apparently misleading vaccine workers, a second video soon emerged showing another student offering up a fake name, “Draper Ensling,” and giving a phony date of birth.

In an interview with Fox News, Owen McGough said he was behind the videos and that he worked with another student to get around requirements for obtaining a COVID-19 vaccine from a clinic hosted at Heritage High School “without very much effort at all.”

“They really didn’t check into the facts,” Owen McGough said.

McGough’s dad did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment on Saturday but he defended the videos in a Facebook post, calling it “disturbing and criminal” that the kids had come so close to getting the vaccines–while insisting that any school district that allowed Tri-County Health Department to offer vaccines on school property is “putting your children at risk.”

“This is subterfuge and indoctrination allowing children to make medical decisions without their parents permission or even being present,” he wrote. “I find this a disgusting overreach on the part of LPSD.”

When asked by Fox News what had prompted him to make the video, Owen McGough replied: “I just don’t like seeing vaccine clinics being put into schools.”

“Bringing the vaccine clinics into schools brings politics into schools as well, and opportunities for social pressure from other students and teachers and staff administrators to get the vaccine and even override parental consent,” he said.

The pair of videos generated fury among vaccine opponents after appearing on the far-right Twitter account “Libs of Tik Tok” as an example of how easily kids could circumvent rules to get the jab. The group published the clip with the claim that the video had been recorded during school hours and featured a 16-year-old “lying about his age,” to nurses who agreed to give him the vaccine without asking him for identification.

A similar video from another student in the district who lied about their age in order to be offered a vaccine without parental consent also appeared on the Libs of TikTok’s Twitter account.

Neither of the videos shows a student getting vaccinated, but the response was swift after McGough sent a letter demanding “the immediate halting of LPS permission for Tri-County Health Department vaccine clinics’ to operate inside Littleton Public Schools.”

In an email to Littleton Public Schools Superintendent Brian Ewert published to the Libs of Tik Tok’s Twitter account, the parent details the bid by two kids who are 15 and 16 years old to see if they can get vaccinated by misleading vaccine staffers.

“The district was on notice regarding the problems with pushing the vaccine to minor children at schools,” he said.

McGough said he had been assured by the superintendent that vaccines would require permission from parents and the presence of a guardian for all doses, but he touted the kids’ “experiments” as proof that was not the case.

“Superintendent Ewert was wrong, and is now on notice for that,” he wrote, insisting that after providing false information the kids were “readily offered the shots and encouraged to get them.”

“Since there have been serious adverse effects to minors taking these shots, including serious cases of myocarditis, real physical harm could have occurred,” he wrote.

Neither child ended up getting vaccinated, as McGough himself confirmed.

Jesus H. Christ.

California has proposed a law that would allow kids 12 and up to get the vaccine without parental permission. Five other states allow minors to choose to be vaccinated:

A new bill in California would allow children to get vaccinated against diseases including COVID-19 without their parents’ consent.

However, the new bill — introduced Friday by state Sens. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and Richard Pan (D-Sacramento) — would allow Californians aged 12 and older to receive vaccines that meet specific federal agency criteria on their own.

Under the bill, adolescents could get vaccinated as long as the shots are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s advisory committee.

As of Wednesday, about 63% of Californians aged 12-17 are fully vaccinated, according to the state department of health — but at least 28% are not.

“There are nearly 1 million teenagers in California who are not vaccinated against COVID-19, and that jeopardizes their own health. It makes our schools less safe,” Wiener told ABC News. “A lot of these teenagers would like to get vaccinated, but their parents either won’t let them or their parents aren’t making the time to go with them to get vaccinated.”

He added, “This legislation will allow teens to protect their own health and to get vaccinated against COVID-19, against the flu and other serious diseases.”

Washington, D.C., currently allows minors to receive vaccines on their own starting at age 11. San Francisco also allows kids aged 12 and older to receive COVID-19 shots without parental consent when consent is unavailable.

Additionally, five states allow minors to get vaccinated without parental consent. Alabama allows teens to receive vaccines on their own starting at age 14; Oregon at age 15; and Rhode Island, North Carolina and Southth Carolina at age 16.

I’d imagine that quite a few of the unvaccinated kids in California won’t get the shot anyway. They probably agree with their wingnut parents. But there might be a few who would like to do the right thing, protect themselves and others, and are prevented from doing so by these rules. It’s cruel to deny them the ability to do that.

These trolls who are running sting operations to “expose” schools, whether it’s using Glenn Youngkin’s “tip line” to report teachers for saying something they don’t like to recording teachers in the class room, as some have suggested, are fighting the culture wars the way they’ve been fighting it for years. Schools have been their favorite battleground for as long as I can remember — I mean, think of the Scopes trial! This is yet another skirmish in a long battle. But defying vaccine requirements that prevent the spread of a deadly disease in order to make a political point takes it to a new level. Good lord.

Here is a problem Sen. Joe Manchin did not consider in his opposition to extending the child tax credit, and one he does not encounter day-to-day. His consituent from Martinsburg, West Virginia has to (CNN):

Losing the enhanced monthly child tax credit pushed Joi Lansdowne to start toilet training her daughter Kaleasi, who recently turned 2. That way, the mom of two could save money on diapers, which run her about $100 every 10 days or so.”

That is a huge expense,” said Lansdowne, 26, who worked as a case worker for the state of Maryland until the fall and had hoped she’d continue receiving the $300 monthly infusion this year. “When you don’t have the funds to cover those things, you’ve got to get creative.”

Lansdowne dropped her cable to help manage her mortgage and is looking for work. Still, child care for Kaleasi and her four-month-old sister eats up hundreds per month.

Her message for Manchin?

“Go speak to the working class and see how they feel,” she said. “I will tell you, it helped a lot. And now I’m in a predicament where I can’t work because there is no child tax credit to help me with day care.”

Five other Senate Democrats have not given up on reviving the program that lifted 3.7 million children out of poverty last month. Those included “737,000 Black children, 1.4 million Latino children and 1.4 million White children, according to estimates by the Center on Poverty & Social Policy at Columbia University,” an estimated 30% decline in child poverty.

The loss of the monthly credit forced Tamara Harris, 48, to take on more hours as a school bus driver in Indianapolis so she could put gas in the car and food in the fridge for her four children, three of whom are in their early 20s. But that means she’s not able to spend as much time taking care of two of her kids who have sickle cell anemia and are frequently in the hospital.

Recently, she paid a friend to take her 17-year-old son to the doctor so she didn’t have to take time off from work. But the doctor then called and said she should accompany him next time.

Tamara Harris added hours at work after losing the monthly child tax credit payment. But now she has to juggle caring for two ill children.

Harris is not sure why there is opposition to extending the enhanced child tax credit, particularly the monthly payments, since many parents plow it back into local businesses.”

Ask the guy who lives on a yacht in D.C. and drives a Maserati.

U.S. Senate and governors’ races in 2022 attract less attention than the doom-saying surrounding Democrats’ prospects for losing their House majority. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s by-the-fingernails grip on control there depends on a handful of scattered races that have yet to draw much attention.

Politico this morning considers the feat of two Black women who have managed to clear the fields in their races and a Senate race in Pennsylvania in which state Democrats declined to clear the runway for any candidate in a crowded field.

Democratic Rep. Val Demings (Fla.) and former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley could make history this fall:

As Black women running in two of the nation’s most closely watched Senate races, Democratic Rep. Val Demings of Florida and former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley are poised to make history if they’re successful in November. But that’s only part of what makes their campaigns stand out this year.

Demings and Beasley have drawn notice — and a heavy dose of respect within their party — for accomplishing a feat that has all-too-frequently eluded candidates of color, especially Black women: Managing to clear their Senate primary fields of heavyweight competition.

Speaking for North Carolina, heavyweights does not describe Beasley’s competition. She’s won statewide office multiple times. Her erstwhile top competitors, both from the state senate, had not, and failed to match her fundraising. But we’ll get to that.

Demings, who is running against GOP Sen. Marco Rubio, and Beasley, who is seeking the seat held by retiring GOP Sen. Richard Burr, still face nominal competition for the Democratic Senate nomination in their home states. But thanks to their political muscle-flexing, they are largely free to focus the bulk of their attention and resources on winning the general election in November.

To see who’s who, checking out OpenSecrets for the last quarter’s numbers is a quick indication of where races like these stand both in terms of who’s getting support and how much of it they’ve spent. Candidates with little money left of what they’ve raised are just trying to keep their candidacies alive.

Demings’ profile as an impeachment manager and landing on Joe Biden’s short list for vice president has helped her raise over $25 million, leaving her nearest rival, Ken Russell (just over $1 million), in the dust. Rep. Stephanie Murphy decided to opt out when Demings was clearly in.

In North Carolina, Beasley’s fundraising has also resonated. She brought in more than $2 million in the last quarter of 2021, outraising both her Democratic and Republican rivals. In late 2021, the other leading candidate in the race, Jeff Jackson, decided to drop out — a move that his campaign said owed in part to his inability to out-fundraise her.

In the days before Jackson suspended his campaign, several party heavyweights — including Democratic Reps. David Price and G.K. Butterfield — had endorsed Beasley.

Beasley’s other nearest rival, former state senator Eric Smith, had proven unable to fundraise in a previous run for Senate in 2020. She dropped out to try for the 2nd congressional district seat left open by Butterfield’s retirement.

“I think the party in North Carolina, and even to some extent nationally, is starting to put their weight behind people of color more than they have in the past,” said Doug Wilson, a Charlotte-based Democratic strategist who was a senior adviser to Jackson’s campaign. “Not that they didn’t like Jeff — Jeff has a lot of respect among the party. I think that the party was saying, ‘we want to have a woman of color at the top of the ticket this go-around.’ That it is time for it.”

In a lower-turnout, mid-term election, Democrats in North Carolina benefit from fielding a candidate who might inspire stalwart Black Democratic woman to motivate friends, family and communities to go to the polls in a state that is nearly 25 percent Black. Beasley lost reelection in 2020 as supreme court chief justice by 401 votes. She is a contender.

Demings has never run statewide and won’t have quite the same cheering section in Florida which is 16 percent Black. But she has a national profile that comes with name recognition she won’t have to buy.

Pennsylvania Democrats in a meeting in Harrisburg on Saturday declined to endorse a candidate in a crowded Senate field, Politico reports:

The non-endorsement is a disappointment for Conor Lamb, who has been trailing behind primary frontrunner John Fetterman, the lieutenant governor, in polls and fundraising. The congressman from western Pennsylvania had hustled behind the scenes to capture the party’s blessing in the Senate race, arguing to Democrats in private calls and several campaign-style mailers that he is the candidate best-equipped to beat the GOP nominee in November.

“No endorsement means no change in the existing trajectory of this campaign,” said J.J. Balaban, a Pennsylvania-based Democratic strategist who is not working for a candidate in the Senate race. “Given that John Fetterman has a substantial lead in the polls and the most money in the bank, he benefits the most from no one being endorsed by the state Democratic Party.”

Not to mention that the other 13 Democrats in the race Fetterman clearly leads can argue in fundraising pitches that they are not out of contention yet.

We knew they would do it but it still shocks to see just how eager they are to make women’s lives more miserable:

Nebraska lawmakers kicked off the new year by introducing a bill to ban all abortions if the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision is overturned. The next day, Florida legislators announced their plan to narrow the window for abortion access from 24 weeks of pregnancy to 15. And later that week in Phoenix, state legislators unveiled the Arizona Heartbeat Act, designed to mimic a Texas law passed last year.

With the U.S. Supreme Court expected to decide in the coming months whether to upend its nearly 50-year precedent that established a constitutional right to abortion nationwide, lawmakers in Republican-led states across the country have moved aggressively in recent weeks to lay the groundwork for a new era of abortion restrictions.

While it’s possible that the high court either will overturn Roe or leave the precedent fully intact, many legal scholars and advocates on both sides anticipate the justices will land somewhere in the middle, instantly changing the standard for abortion legislation. Antiabortion lawmakers are trying to predict what the Supreme Court might do as they craft laws designed to take effect soon after a ruling, whatever the justices decide.

Then the battle will move to the blue states, don’t kid yourself. The activists have defined their lives around this issue and they will not stop until it’s banned. Which it might be. We just don’t know.

Stephanie Cutter is right:

With Justice Stephen Breyer’s announcement that he will retire from the Supreme Court this summer, President Biden has a chance to take the landmark step of putting the first Black woman on the court, while shaping the future of jurisprudence. Thanks to President Donald Trump and the former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, there is a new set of rules in place for Supreme Court nominations that all but guarantees Democrats will succeed.

Unless of course, we mess it up.

In 2009, when President Barack Obama nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the court, our team shepherded the nominee through the halls of the Senate for courtesy calls with 89 senators, most of whom waited to announce their intended vote until the Judiciary Committee did its work in vetting and questioning her. Not until that process was complete could they take the measure of her fitness to serve on the court.

Those days are gone. Mr. Biden shouldn’t look to the process we followed in the Sotomayor nomination. Instead, he should look to the nomination and confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Over Mr. Trump’s term, Republicans distilled the Supreme Court nomination process to pure politics. Instead of spending weeks scrutinizing a nominee’s rulings and parsing legal intricacies for potential hearing questions, they simply rubber-stamped Mr. Trump’s picks. Even before Mr. Trump announced his nominee to succeed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lindsey Graham, declared that he had enough votes to confirm any nominee in both the Judiciary Committee and on the Senate floor.

And within minutes of the president’s nomination of Judge Barrett, Republican senators began to declare their support for her. Thirty-eight days after Justice Ginsburg died, her successor was confirmed. The process exemplified one of the defining features of the modern Republican Party: its laser focus on the judiciary and its extraordinary discipline in filling seats when its members control the Senate — or blocking confirmations when they do not.

While some Senate institutionalists may disagree with this new normal, we would be foolish not to understand it. Qualifications are critical and must be verified. But speed is also essential. Democrats should take a page from Mr. McConnell’s book and move as quickly as possible. Senators who stoke suspense over how they will vote only create fodder for the news media to focus on divisions among Democrats, rather than on the Republicans who are already laying the groundwork to oppose this historic pick. Although Justice Breyer won’t step down until June or July, Mr. Biden should narrow his list and announce his selection as soon as possible, and Senate Democrats should move quickly to confirm her.

In 2017, when Senator McConnell didn’t like Democrats filibustering President Trump’s first Supreme Court pick, for the same seat that he denied Merrick Garland, he blew up the 60-vote threshold so that nominees could be confirmed with just a simple majority. This was, of course, a tit-for-tat response to Senator Harry Reid’s changing those rules for lower-court nominees.

With Vice President Kamala Harris’ vote, Democrats now have the seats they need to confirm a new justice. Despite the new Senate rules being in their favor, Democrats need to eliminate all possible roadblocks. President Biden and Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, have been extremely successful in holding Democrats together to approve a diverse set of judicial appointments, setting a record by confirming 42 in the president’s first year. That’s a sign that Democrats have a winning strategy for filling court seats.

So here’s my message to Democrats: Let’s not overthink this.

There is no reason to drag this out and put the nominee through this kind of ringer. The Republicans changed the rules and the Dems should live by them, especially since the majority is hanging by a thread…

Of course, this assumes that Sinemanchin doesn’t decide that it’s extremely important to spend months on this process so the Republicans can demean and degrade an accomplished Black woman. I’m sure that’s one of the great Senate traditions they believe should be upheld. But assuming they are sated with attention at the moment, perhaps they’ll act like Democrats on this one.

Missouri’s Attorney General Eric Schmitt went on TV and said masks don’t work for kids. He’s spreading dangerous and deadly misinformation.

I don’t believe in the forced masking of 5-year olds. There’s no science behind it. There’s nothing to support it. Families are best to make these decisions, and that’s why we’re fighting so hard on this front. Where we’re at now, I mean the flu is much more dangerous for the 5-year old than COVID is. Those are just facts.

The problem is it’s not based on facts and science. There’s just no, there’s no study that shows any measurable protection for kids wearing masks. In fact, the good news is, um, you know, uh COVID isn’t.. you know It’s hard for kids to contract, transmit, or get seriously ill from COVID. That’s the good thing. Not all viruses are the same.

Eric Schmitt, Attorney General of Missouri, December 12, 2021

Someone needs to correct him and ensure there are consequences if he refuses. I don’t know why @AGEricSchmitt is pushing this misinformation. But people should know he’s running for Senator. Schmitt replaced the previous AG from Missouri who ran for Senator and won, Josh Hawley.

I contacted the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services to see if they contacted the AG to correct him and provide him with studies on the effectiveness of masks. (I haven’t heard back from @HealthyLivingMo, but when I say I write for Hullabaloo, Crooks & Liars and Spocko’s Brain I don’t get a lot of return calls…)

He needs to be called out and told to stop spreading misinformation. Who will do that? Missouri public health professionals? National public health professionals?
(I’d love for @AliNouriPhD or @DrEricDing to correct Schmitt on COVID’s spread and masks. Especially after my tweet of a video showing the spread of COVID-19 in the air got 3.5 MILLION views. )

https://twitter.com/spockosbrain/status/1476380831081918468?s=20&t=K6A31bWBFrhw-kq6I24gNQ

When I investigated state laws about violations of COVID emergency orders, I found multiple public health laws that the Trump campaign broke at their rallies. I also found state and federal laws about intentionally spreading misinformation. I haven’t dug into Missouri’s laws but Schmitt’s misinformation is endangering the public. If I found a Missouri law he violated I’d still need to get someone to charge him. Who? Perhaps he’s broken Federal laws on misinformation, specifically around the CARES act.

But finding a law that he broke, and charging him isn’t going to be enough to stop him. Misinformations has to been stopped on multiple levels. Social media, right wing media and mainstream media. Interestingly, I uploaded the clip of Schmitt with his exact quote as the headline to YouTube for this piece. YouTube removed it for violating its COVID medical misinformation policy!

Did YouTube catch and remove this misinformation in Schmitt’s 12/12/2021 appearance on This Week in Missouri Politics? Did the host, Scott Faughn, challenge it? Did it go back up? Did the @scottfaughn include disclaimers about the AG’s comment after the fact? Doubtful, especially since he appeared to agree with the misinformation.

I’m glad that YouTube caught this, but there needs to be active processes and humans in the media & social media stopping the spread of misinformation. And there needs to be consequences for its deliberate spread.

I called into the Majority Report Thursday to talk about this. They had on John Nichols discussing his new book. Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers: Accountability for Those Who Caused the Crisis 

I strongly agree with one of Nichol’s main points, we have to hold to account people who made decisions and told lies that cost lives that did not need to be lost. He rejects the claims of “the apologists and revisionists who would have us believe that the pandemic was the healthcare equivalent of a ‘natural disaster’ that would have gone badly no matter who was in charge. “

Missouri Schools Are A Hot COVID Mess

I’m not going to totally wade into the Schmitt, school mask mandates and the spread of COVID story. I suggest you read Tony Messenger’s great column about Schmitt suing schools for mask mandates while Missouri’s COVID is at record levels. But you should know:

1. 11 Missouri hospitals are so stressed the Governor begged for help from the Federal government, Congresswoman Cory Bush lobbied for relief and Biden sent Navy medical personnel to help, but only one hospital got help.
2. In December a Missouri state judge stripped local health departments’ ability to impose COVID-19 orders while cases were spiking in the state. It was so bad that,
3. 62 schools closed because of sick teachers in January and then,
4. AG Schmitt sued 36 schools for enforcing mask mandates.

Here’s the deal, Schmitt used his position as AG to enforce the law that mask mandates are no longer in effect. That was appropriate for his position but spreading medical misinformation is not.

Schmitt is not “staying in his lane” enforcing the law, he’s driving his incorrect views headlong into oncoming science and public health traffic. And people in Missouri are dying. As the editorial board of the St. Louis Post Dispatch put it, “Schmitt is doing everything he can to worsen their plight while endangering lives — all for the sake of a Senate seat.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt is lying when he claims there is no study that shows masks protects kids. There are & they do. Here’s one. University of Michigan study shows mask mandates at schools show lower COVID transmission rates

Some parents fed a steady diet of misinformation are against mask mandates. Attorney General Eric Schmitt sought those parents out and used them to go on the attack against masks. Why? He’s running for Senator and wants the Trump base. He wants the kind of people who will threaten school boards with violence. Like this Virgina woman.
(Hypothetical: If parents rioted against a school board in Missouri, could Schmitt be charged for incitement? )

Remember the mom who threatened the school board with guns over a mask mandates?
She was charged with making an oral threat while on school property & released on a $5K bail.
More cops went to all school buildings in the county on both Friday & Monday.https://t.co/QWagozbO9u pic.twitter.com/O1EvHz2zKy

— Spocko (@spockosbrain) January 25, 2022

As Digby points out going to school boards is one of the rights’ favorite strategies and they do it ALL THE TIME. Schmitt’s views about “letting the parents decide” are in line with Gov. Glenn Youngkin executive order delegating to parents the decision on whether children wear masks at school. It’s bad enough when some parents are misinformed by right wing media, but when the misinformation comes from a high-level state official with police power, like the Attorney General, it’s worse.

As I said on the Majority Report. There’s no team of pro-science, pro-vaccine, pro-mask professionals out there arguing with those spreading information and who want to ignore reality so things will “go back to normal.” The public health people aren’t doing it. They aren’t trained to debate misinformers, wrestle them to the ground until they stop their lies. They get death threats just for telling people what needs to be done to save lives!

The press aren’t pushing back hard on misinformation either. As Eric Boehlert said in his brilliant newsletter Press Run.

…the press is turning away from the pandemic story — tens of millions of Americans who have been fed a mountain of vaccine lies refuse to get inoculated, thereby sacrificing themselves on the altar of right-wing misinformation.

3 Covid stories the press is getting wrong right now, Press Run, Eric Boehlert

I could say that Schmitt’s misinformation is part of a larger problem, and it is, But is also a very specific problem with a specific solution.

Don Kauerauf, the director of the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, needs to correct Schmitt’s misinformed comments and convince him to stop making them.

If Schmitt refuses, this needs to be a national story, with negative consequences for Schmitt. I’ve sent this clip to cable news producers, but it’s not “news” unless someone in authority calls him out, demands he stop & holds him accountable for spreading deadly misinformation. If nothing happens it will be another case of lies that will cost lives that did not need to be lost.