Month: January 2022

Sen. Joe Manchin has caught a world of grief from his caucus over his refusal to budge on modifying or eliminating the Senate filibuster. The West Virginia Democrat has received enough attention to make former would-be-President-for life Donald Trump envious. Democratic celebrities from former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to Oprah Winfrey and a raft of other centrist figures have called to urge Manchin to yield in the name of saving the United States from descent into autocracy. (Maybe not in so many words.)

Trump should feel envious. All Manchin’s attention must not seem fair. But the overwhelming attention Manchin (and to a lesser degree Sen. Kyrsten Sinema) is receiving really is undeserved. The people who should be getting more attention are the 50 members of the Republican caucus who have sold their American birthright for a mess of Trumpism.

There is a faction on the left whose default setting is “Democrats suck.” Because the only targets of their ire inside the Beltway with any chance of being moved by them are the Democrats. Activists are disappointed in Democrats because they are the only officials in Washington, D.C. who can disappoint them. The Republican Party is all in on Trumpism and anti-democracy.

The real crime is how little attention, comparatively, individual members of the Senate Republican caucus receive for their anti-Americanism. There was a time when half the Senate betraying the country would garner banner headlines.

Poor Joe Manchin. Is Manchin a pain in the ass? Sure. But consider that any among the 50 members of the Republican Senate caucus could vote with Democrats to modify the filibuster. Any one or two Republican senators could help put brakes on the bald-faced efforts by state Republican legislators to erect obstacles to democratic participation they justify with phony claims of restoring confidence in our elections (that they themselves have spent decades undermining). Any one or two could help restore teeth to the Voting Rights Act gutted by the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby. Not so long they were nearly unified in reauthorizing it.

We’ve just given up on any notion that their souls are savable. The press has just given up asking why Republicans hate their country so much that they are lining up to nominate a career criminal, sociopath, and wannabe dictator as their presidential candidate in 2024. They’d rather spotlight divisions in the Democratic caucus than the unified pro-autocracy of Republicans. Because Republicans might say mean things about the press. But Democrats are in disarray, dontcha know. And Joe Manchin. Pay no attention to the Confederates in front of the curtain.

Get ready for the rest of the world to give up on us if we cannot save ourselves.

She learned to fly again:

This, by the Atlantic’s Ed Yong, is why some people (both left and right) need to be a little bit less cavalier about the pandemic right now and stop insisting that we just “let ‘er rip” because they are sick of dealing with it and think that everyone will get Omicron anyway so why are we even bothering to use mitigation strategies:

When a health-care system crumbles, this is what it looks like. Much of what’s wrong happens invisibly. At first, there’s just a lot of waiting. Emergency rooms get so full that “you’ll wait hours and hours, and you may not be able to get surgery when you need it,” Megan Ranney, an emergency physician in Rhode Island, told me. When patients are seen, they might not get the tests they need, because technicians or necessary chemicals are in short supply. Then delay becomes absence. The little acts of compassion that make hospital stays tolerable disappear. Next go the acts of necessity that make stays survivable. Nurses might be so swamped that they can’t check whether a patient has their pain medications or if a ventilator is working correctly. People who would’ve been fine will get sicker. Eventually, people who would have lived will die. This is not conjecture; it is happening now, across the United States. “It’s not a dramatic Armageddon; it happens inch by inch,” Anand Swaminathan, an emergency physician in New Jersey, told me.

In this surge, COVID-19 hospitalizations rose slowly at first, from about 40,000 nationally in early November to 65,000 on Christmas. But with the super-transmissible Delta variant joined by the even-more-transmissible Omicron, the hospitalization count has shot up to 110,000 in the two weeks since then. “The volume of people presenting to our emergency rooms is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before,” Kit Delgado, an emergency physician in Pennsylvania, told me. Health-care workers in 11 different states echoed what he said: Already, this surge is pushing their hospitals to the edge. And this is just the beginning. Hospitalizations always lag behind cases by about two weeks, so we’re only starting to see the effects of daily case counts that have tripled in the past 14 days (and are almost certainly underestimates). By the end of the month, according to the CDC’s forecasts, COVID will be sending at least 24,700 and up to 53,700 Americans to the hospital every single day.

This surge is, in many ways, distinct from the ones before. About 62 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated, and are still mostly protected against the coronavirus’s worst effects. When people do become severely ill, health-care workers have a better sense of what to expect and what to do. Omicron itself seems to be less severe than previous variants, and many of the people now testing positive don’t require hospitalization. But such cases threaten to obscure this surge’s true cost.

Omicron is so contagious that it is still flooding hospitals with sick people. And America’s continued inability to control the coronavirus has deflated its health-care system, which can no longer offer the same number of patients the same level of care. Health-care workers have quit their jobs in droves; of those who have stayed, many now can’t work, because they have Omicron breakthrough infections. “In the last two years, I’ve never known as many colleagues who have COVID as I do now,” Amanda Bettencourt, the president-elect of the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, told me. “The staffing crisis is the worst it has been through the pandemic.” This is why any comparisons between past and present hospitalization numbers are misleading: January 2021’s numbers would crush January 2022’s system because the workforce has been so diminished. Some institutions are now being overwhelmed by a fraction of their earlier patient loads. “I hope no one you know or love gets COVID or needs an emergency room right now, because there’s no room,” Janelle Thomas, an ICU nurse in Maryland, told me.

Here, then, is the most important difference about this surge: It comes on the back of all the prior ones. COVID’s burden is additive. It isn’t reflected just in the number of occupied hospital beds, but also in the faltering resolve and thinning ranks of the people who attend those beds. “This just feels like one wave too many,” Ranney said. The health-care system will continue to pay these costs long after COVID hospitalizations fall. Health-care workers will know, but most other people will be oblivious—until they need medical care and can’t get it.

The Patients

The patients now entering American hospitals are a little different from those who were hospitalized in prior surges. Studies from South Africa and the United Kingdom have confirmed what many had hoped: Omicron causes less severe disease than Delta, and it is less likely to send its hosts to the hospital. British trends support those conclusions: As the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch has reported, the number of hospitalized COVID patients has risen in step with new cases, but the number needing a ventilator has barely moved. And with vaccines blunting the severity of COVID even further, we should expect the average COVID patient in 2022 to be less sick than the average patient in 2021.

In the U.S., many health-care workers told me that they’re already seeing that effect: COVID patients are being discharged more easily. Fewer are critically ill, and even those who are seem to be doing better. “It’s anecdotal, but we’re getting patients who I don’t think would have survived the original virus or Delta, and now we’re getting them through,” Milad Pooran, a critical-care physician in Maryland, told me. But others said that their experiences haven’t changed, perhaps because they serve communities that are highly unvaccinated or because they’re still dealing with a lot of Delta cases. Milder illness “is not what we’re seeing,” said Howard Jarvis, an emergency physician in Missouri. “We’re still seeing a lot of people sick enough to be in the ICU.” Thomas told me that her hospital had just seven COVID patients a month ago, and is now up to 129, who are taking up almost half of its beds. Every day, about 10 patients are waiting in the ER already hooked up to a ventilator but unable to enter the ICU, which is full.

During this surge, record numbers of children are also being hospitalized with COVID. Sarah Combs, a pediatric emergency physician in Washington, D.C., told me that during the height of Delta’s first surge, her hospital cared for 23 children with COVID; on Tuesday, it had 53. “Many of the patients I’m operating on are COVID-positive, and some days all of them are,” Chethan Sathya, a pediatric surgeon in New York, told me. “That never happened at any point in the pandemic in the past.” Children fare much better against the coronavirus than adults, and even severely ill ones have a good chance of recovery. But the number of such patients is high, and Combs and Sathya both said they worry about long COVID and other long-term complications. “I have two daughters myself, and it’s very hard to take,” Sathya said.

These numbers reflect the wild spread of COVID right now. The youngest patients are not necessarily being hospitalized for the disease—Sathya said that most of the kids he sees come to the hospital for other problems—but many of them are: Combs told me that 94 percent of her patients are hospitalized for respiratory symptoms. Among adults, the picture is even clearer: Every nurse and doctor I asked said that the majority of their COVID patients were admitted because of COVID, not simply with COVID. Many have classic advanced symptoms, such as pneumonia and blood clots. Others, including some vaccinated people, are there because milder COVID symptoms exacerbated their chronic health conditions to a dangerous degree. “We have a lot of chronically ill people in the U.S., and it’s like all of those people are now coming into the hospital at the same time,” said Vineet Arora, a hospitalist in Illinois. “Some of it is for COVID, and some is with COVID, but it’s all COVID. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter.” (COVID patients also need to be isolated, which increases the burden on hospitals regardless of the severity of patients’ symptoms.)

Omicron’s main threat is its extreme contagiousness. It is infecting so many people that even if a smaller proportion need hospital care, the absolute numbers are still enough to saturate the system. It might be less of a threat to individual people, but it’s disastrous for the health-care system that those individuals will ultimately need.

Other countries have had easier experiences with Omicron. But with America’s population being older than South Africa’s, and less vaccinated or boosted than the U.K.’s or Denmark’s, “it’s a mistake to think that we’ll see the same degree of decoupling between cases and hospitalizations that they did,” James Lawler, an infectious-disease physician in Nebraska, told me. “I’d have thought we’d have learned that lesson with Delta,” which sent hospitalizations through the roof in the U.S. but not in the U.K. Now, as then, hospitalizations are already spiking, and they will likely continue to do so as Omicron moves from the younger people it first infected into older groups, and from heavily vaccinated coastal cities into poorly vaccinated rural, southern, and midwestern regions. “We have plenty of vulnerable people who will fill up hospital beds pretty quickly,” Lawler said. And just as demand for the health-care system is rising, supply is plummeting.

The Workers

The health-care workforce, which was short-staffed before the pandemic, has been decimated over the past two years. As I reported in November, waves of health-care workers have quit their jobs (or their entire profession) because of moral distress, exhaustion, poor treatment by their hospitals or patients, or some combination of those. These losses leave the remaining health-care workers with fewer trusted colleagues who speak in the same shorthand, less expertise to draw from, and more work. “Before, the sickest ICU patient would get two nurses, and now there’s four patients for every nurse,” Megan Brunson, an ICU nurse in Texas, told me. “It makes it impossible to do everything you need to do.”

Omicron has turned this bad situation into a dire one. Its ability to infect even vaccinated people means that “the numbers of staff who are sick are astronomical compared to previous surges,” Joseph Falise, a nurse manager in Miami, told me. Even though vaccinated health-care workers are mostly protected from severe symptoms, they still can’t work lest they pass the virus to more vulnerable patients. “There are evenings where we have whole sections of beds that are closed because we don’t have staff,” said Ranney, the Rhode Island emergency physician.

Every part of the health-care system has been affected, diminishing the quality of care for all patients. A lack of pharmacists and outpatient clinicians makes it harder for people to get tests, vaccines, and even medications; as a result, more patients are ending up in the hospital with chronic-disease flare-ups. There aren’t enough paramedics, making it more difficult for people to get to the hospital at all. Lab technicians are falling ill, which means that COVID-test results (and medical-test results in general) are taking longer to come back. Respiratory therapists are in short supply, making it harder to ventilate patients who need oxygen. Facilities that provide post-acute care are being hammered, which means that many groups of patients—those who need long-term care, dialysis, or care for addiction or mental-health problems—cannot be discharged from hospitals, because there’s nowhere to send them.

These conditions are deepening the already profound exhaustion that health-care workers are feeling. “We’re still speaking of surges, but for me it’s been a constant riptide, pulling us under,” Brunson said. “Our reserves aren’t there. We feel like we’re tapped out, and that person who is going to come in to help you isn’t going to, because they’re also tapped out … or they’ve tested positive.”

Public support is also faltering. “We once had parades and people hanging up signs; professional sports teams used to do Zooms with us and send us lunches,” Falise told me. “The pandemic hasn’t really become any different, but those things are gone.” Health-care workers now experience indifference at best or antagonism at worst. And more than ever, they are struggling with the jarring disconnect between their jobs and their communities. At work, they see the inescapable reality of the pandemic. Everywhere else—on TV and social media, during commutes and grocery runs—they see people living the fantasy that it is over. The rest of the country seems hell-bent on returning to normal, but their choices mean that health-care workers cannot.

As a result, “there’s an enormous loss of empathy among health-care workers,” Swaminathan said. “People have hit a tipping point,” and the number of colleagues who’ve talked about retiring or switching careers “has grown dramatically in the last couple of months.” Medicine runs on an unspoken social contract in which medical professionals expect themselves to sacrifice their own well-being for their patients. But the pandemic has exposed how fragile that contract is, said Arora, the Illinois hospitalist. “Society has decided to move on with their lives, and it’s hard to blame health-care workers for doing the same,” she said.

The System

In the coming weeks, these problems will show up acutely, as the health-care system scrambles to accommodate a wave of people sick with COVID. But the ensuing stress and strain will linger long after. The danger of COVID, to individual Americans, has gone far past the risk that any one infection might pose, because the coronavirus has now plunged the entire health-care system into a state of chronic decay.

In Maryland, Milad Pooran runs a center that helps small community hospitals find beds for critically ill patients. Normally, it gets a few calls a night, but “now we’re getting two an hour,” he told me. In Swaminathan’s emergency room, “we routinely have 60 to 70 people who are waiting for six to 12 hours to be seen,” he said. Other health-care workers noted that even when they can get people into beds, offering the usual standard of care is simply impossible. “Yes, sure, if you’re the patient who puts us at 130 percent capacity, you still technically get a bed, but the level of care that everyone gets is significantly diminished,” Lawler said. Some doctors are discharging patients who would have been admitted six months ago, because there’s nowhere to put them and they seem temporarily stable enough.

To be clear, these problems are not affecting just COVID patients, but all patients. When Swaminathan’s friends asked what they should be doing about Omicron, he advised them about boosters and masks, but also about wearing a seat belt and avoiding ladders. “You don’t want to be injured now,” he told me. “Any need to go to the emergency department is going to be a problem.” This is the bind that Americans, including vaccinated ones, now face. Even if they’re unconcerned about COVID or at low personal risk from it, they can still spread a variant that could ultimately affect them should they need medical care for anything.

These conditions are contributing to the moral distress that health-care workers feel. “This pandemic is making it almost impossible to provide our best care to patients, and that can become too much for some folks to bear,” Ranney said. A friend recently told her, after seeing a patient who had waited six hours with a life-threatening emergency, “How can I go back tomorrow knowing that there might be another patient in the waiting room who might be about to die and who I don’t know about?”

From outside the system, it can be hard to see these problems. “I don’t think people will realize what’s happening until we fall off that cliff—until you call 911 and no one comes, or you need that emergency surgery and we can’t do it,” Swaminathan said. The system hasn’t yet careened over: “When the trauma patients, the cardiac arrests, or the strokes come in, it’s a mad shuffle, but we still find a way to see them,” said Kit Delgado, the Pennsylvania emergency physician. “I don’t know how sustainable that’s going to be if cases keep rising everywhere.”

Measures that worked to relieve strain in earlier surges are now harder to pull off. Understaffed hospitals can hire travel nurses, but Omicron has spread so quickly that too many facilities “are pulling from the same labor pool—and if that pool is sick, where are the reinforcements?” Syra Madad, an infectious-disease epidemiologist in New York, told me. Hospitals often canceled nonemergency surgeries during past surges, but many of those patients are now even sicker, and their care can’t be deferred any longer. This makes it harder for COVID teams to pull in staff from other parts of a hospital, which are themselves heaving with patients. Brunson works in a cardiac ICU, not a COVID-focused one, but her team is still inundated with people who got COVID in a prior surge and “are now coming in with heart failure” because of their earlier infection, she said. “COVID isn’t done for them, even though they’re testing negative.” Hospitals aren’t facing just Omicron, but also the cumulative consequences of every previous variant in every previous surge.

Newer solutions are limited, too. Joe Biden has promised to bolster hard-hit hospitals with 1,000 more military personnel—a tiny number for the demand. New antiviral drugs such as Pfizer’s Paxlovid could significantly reduce the odds of hospitalization, but supplies are low; the pills must also be taken early on in the disease’s course, which depends on obtaining rapid diagnostic tests, which are also in short supply. For people who get the drugs, “they’ll be great, but at a population scale they’re not going to prevent the system from being overwhelmed,” Lawler said. So, almost unbelievably, the near-term fate of the health-care system once again hinges on flattening the curve—on slowing the spread of the most transmissible variant yet, in a matter of days rather than weeks.

Some experts are hopeful that Omicron will peak quickly, which would help alleviate the pressure on hospitals. But what then? Ranney fears that once hospitalizations start falling, policy makers and the public will assume that the health-care system is safe, and do nothing to address the staffing shortages, burnout, exploitative working conditions, and just-in-time supply chains that pushed said system to the brink. And even if the flood of COVID patients slows, health-care workers will still have to deal with the fallout—cases of long COVID, or people who sat on severe illnesses and didn’t go to hospital during the surge. They’ll do so with even less support than before, without the colleagues who are quitting their jobs right now, or who will do so once the need and the adrenaline subside. “Right now, there’s a sense of purpose, which lets you mask the trauma that everyone is experiencing,” Pooran said. “My fear is that when COVID is done with and everything does quiet down, that sense of purpose will go away and a lot of good people will leave.”

There’s a plausible future in which most of the U.S. enjoys a carefree spring, oblivious to the frayed state of the system they rely on to protect their health, and only realizing what has happened when they knock on its door and get no answer. This is the cost of two years spent prematurely pushing for a return to normal—the lack of a normal to return to.

I am hoping fervently for a carefree spring. But right now people need to get a grip and understand what the stakes are in this thing when they harangue everyone to just accept COVID and move on. People are dying unnecessarily and the system is failing.

We have to grow up and accept that it just isn’t over yet. And fergawdsakes have a little empathy for the people who have to go out and swim in this toxic pond of Omicron, whether it’s nurses or teachers or frontline workers.

Mary Trump thinks one element of President Joe Biden’s speech on Thursday marking the anniversary of the U.S. Capitol riot was aimed at getting right under the skin of her uncle, former President Donald Trump.

Trump and MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell noted on Thursday that Biden used the word “lost” multiple times in his address.

“It made me think of the way the intelligence community briefs the president before talking to people like (Russian President) Vladimir Putin about what might irritate them … what might make them feel uncomfortable,” said O’Donnell.

“This seemed to have some passages in there that were absolutely true and important for America to hear, but the White House and the president had to know would go straight into Donald Trump’s heart,” he suggested.

Trump, a fierce critic of her uncle, agreed.

“I thought it was masterfully done and exactly, as you say, along the lines of a psy-op, if you will,” she said.

He did not like it one little bit. After putting out several petulant, near hysterical statements yesterday, his advisers obviously persuaded him to let someone write a slightly less shrill response for him:

You have to admire the projection in that statement. It is a work of art. And his people believe every word of it.

It appears that Trump’s repetitive lies about the 2020 election have worked like a charm on the people who voted for him:

All credible evidence tells us that the 2020 election was very secure. Experts on both sides of the political aisle, and even President Donald Trump’s own Justice Department, have confirmed that 2020 was a free and fair election. Even a Republican-sponsored audit of Arizona’s results found no evidence of fraud or malfeasance.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of Republican voters say they agree with Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the election was stolen. In our most recent University of Massachusetts at Amherst poll, fielded online Dec. 14-20 by YouGov among a nationally representative sample of the U.S. voting-age population, only 21 percent of Republicans say Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate. This is nearly identical to what we found in our April poll, in which just 19 percent of Republicans said Biden was legitimately elected. Other universities, media outlets and polling firms have found nearly identical results.

How could the “big lie” campaign convince so many Republicans that Trump won an election he so clearly lost? Some observers wonder whether these beliefs are genuine or just an example of expressive responding, a term social scientists use to mean respondents are using a survey item to register a feeling rather than express a real belief. In this case, it would mean that these Republicans, upset about Biden winning, say his victory was not legitimate even though they know deep down that it was.

What does the evidence tell us?

While it is difficult to firmly establish what respondents truly believe, clues suggest this is a genuine belief. One piece of evidence is that the result is nearly identical in phone surveys and online surveys. When people respond to phone surveys, those responses are often biased by what social scientists call “social desirability,” in which respondents say what they think makes them look good — even if that is not what they actually believe. Web-based surveys are known to reduce social desirability bias.

Other survey responses appear consistent with a true belief that the election was stolen. In our December UMass Poll, we asked those who said Biden’s presidential victory was illegitimate to select all the reasons they believed so from a list of conspiracy theories floated by those pushing the “big lie.” As you can see below, fully 83 percent say that “fraudulent ballots supporting Joe Biden were counted by election officials”; 81 percent that officials counted “absentee ballots from deceased people”; 76 percent tell us that “non-citizens and other ineligible voters were allowed to vote for Joe Biden”; 69 percent that the victory was illegitimate because “some states changed election rules in ways they should not have”; and 65 percent that election officials destroyed ballots supporting Trump.

In other words, not only do they say that Biden’s victory was not legitimate, but they endorse several (though not all) specific theories about how fraud was perpetrated.

Further, Republicans in our UMass Poll say they would be more likely to vote for 2022 GOP congressional candidates who questioned Biden’s victory and less likely to vote for those who concede that Biden won. Using a conjoint experiment, an approach likely to reduce social desirability bias and expressive response, political scientists Vin Arceneaux and Rory Truex found that Republicans do indeed reward and punish candidates in this way.

Trump has established firm control over his party with the Big Lie. It seems ridiculous that anyone could do that, but he has the instinct of a cult leader and he knows what his people need to hear.

Democrats say over and over again that they just have to win (and yes, win bigger than is even remotely fair) in order to fight this phenomenon. But after we just relived the events of january 6th this week, isn’t the real question, “what will happen when they lose?”

Aaron Rupar tells another sad sordid tale of right wing humiliation and masochism:

One day after Tucker Carlson lambasted Republican Sen. Ted Cruz for describing the January 6 Capitol insurrection as a “violent terrorist attack,” Carlson invited Cruz on his show on Thursday night and thoroughly emasculated him.

The scene had the same vibes as the infamous 2016 image of Cruz phone banking for Trump after Trump insulted his wife and accused his dad of being involved in the murder of JFK.

Cruz made his fateful “violent terrorist attack” remark during a Senate hearing on Wednesday, and for once he was totally right. The attack on the Capitol, which left five dead and hundreds of people injured (including 140 police officers), clearly meets the FBI’s criteria for “domestic terrorism,” which the bureau defines as “violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences,” such as trying to install a defeated candidate in an elected office.

But for Carlson — who has spent a year defending insurrectionists, downplaying the January 6 attack, and even pushing an absurd conspiracy theory about the whole thing being an FBI trap — Cruz’s comments were insulting. And he made sure to remind him who’s boss.

Carlson’s producers teased the interview with chyrons that gave away where things were headed: “SEN CRUZ WILL BE HERE TO EXPLAIN HIMSELF,” blared one. Early during the interview, another asked “WHAT ON EARTH WAS TED CRUZ THINKING?”

Carlson came out of the gates swinging, accusing Cruz of lying about January 6 “on purpose” and demanding he account for this purported deception.

Cruz immediately began groveling.

“Well, Tucker, thank you for having me on. When you aired your episode last night, I sent you a text shortly thereafter and said, listen, I’d like to go on because the way I phrased things yesterday, it was sloppy and frankly, it was dumb,” Cruz said, prompting Carlson to jump in and say he wasn’t buying it.

“So Tucker, as a result of my sloppy phrasing, it’s caused a lot of people to misunderstand what I meant,” replied Cruz, going on to explain that when he referred to January 6 rioters as terrorists, he was only referring to those who assaulted police officers.

“Wait a second, hold on, what you said doesn’t even make sense,” interjected Carlson. “So if somebody assaults a cop, he should be charged and go to jail, I couldn’t agree more. I’ve said that for years. But that person still isn’t a terrorist!”

To shore up credibility with the Tucker set, Cruz made sure to point out that he was one of eight Republican senators who voted against certifying the election in the hours after the attack on the Capitol. He went on to try to blame the media for “twisting words,” even though what he said couldn’t have been any clearer.

The entire public shaming is worth watching.

While Cruz wanted Carlson’s viewers to believe his “violent terrorist attack” comment was a one-time mistake, journalists quickly pointed out that Cruz has used that language repeatedly in his public statements about January 6.

Watching the interview, it’s hard not to feel some schadenfreude, especially since it shows so clearly why Cruz is extremely unlikely to ever be the Republican nominee for president. He exudes weakness, and, as Trump demonstrated, Republican voters love a strongman.

Rupar’s newsletter is really good by the way.Nobody covers right wing media like he does,.

Meanwhile, here’s a blast from the recent past. Tuck was talking about the George Floyd protests, of course:

The word in right wing circles today is that Tucker is running for president. They love seeing him destroy Ted Cruz. Nobody likes that guy.

Greg Sargent has the good news:

Throughout last year, many analysts and panicked Democrats alike concluded that Republicans would win the House in 2022 because of their outsize control over the redrawing of district lines. Some suggested Republicans could take the House on the strength of extreme gerrymanders alone.

But that conventional wisdom just took a big hit with the release of a new analysis by the Cook Political Report. It concludes that the redistricting wars are shaping up as a wash and that the map may be somewhat better for Democrats than during the past decade.The analysis finds that in the 34 states that have completed redrawn House district lines thus far, President Biden would have carried 161 of 293 districts based on the 2020 vote totals versus 157 under current lines.

That means the national House map, as of now, is slightly more favorable to Democrats than before. As the analysis puts it, the map is “slightly less biased in the GOP’s favor than the last decade’s.”

While Republicans will remain clear favorites in 2022, the national map could continue to improve for Democrats. As of now, redrawn lines account for more than two-thirds of House seats, and lines still remain to be decided in some places, but those provide more openings for Democrats.

There are several reasons for all this. In some places, Republicans opted to shore up safe seats rather than gerrymander as aggressively as possible. Meanwhile, where Democrats could, they aggressively gerrymandered themselves.

To understand the full picture, I spoke to Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, who conducted the analysis along with Amy Walter. An edited and condensed version of our conversation follows.

Greg Sargent: What’s the top line finding when it comes to the map in 2022?

David Wasserman: There will be a few more Biden-won seats after redistricting than there are now. However, many of those seats will be such narrow Biden margins that Republicans are still clear favorites for House control.

Sargent: You say in your analysis that in many places, Republicans didn’t gerrymander as aggressively as they could have and instead opted to shore up a bunch of safe seats. Why do you think Republicans pulled their punch?

Wasserman: In many cases, they had to. The paradox is that the places where Republicans still have control over the process tend to be their legacy Sun Belt states, like Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia.

Those are also places where we’re seeing demographic shifts benefit Democrats (with the possible exception of Florida), particularly in suburbs. So Republicans are playing keepaway. A number of their own districts have become more vulnerable over the past 10 years. They’ve had no choice but to focus on shoring those districts up.

Keep in mind that in Texas, where there are currently 23 Republicans and 13 Democrats, nine of the 23 Republican-held seats are seats where Biden won more than 47 percent of the vote.

Sargent: To take that paradox and run with it, we often talk about Republican gerrymandering as this big fortress that they’re building against inexorable demographic change. But here the story is more subtle: Precisely because of that demographic change, Republicans couldn’t gerrymander that aggressively.

Wasserman: That’s right. Look, let’s be clear. If there were nonpartisan processes in Texas and Georgia and North Carolina, we’d be talking about much more equitable maps than the ones Republicans passed.

However, demographic change was a constraint on Republican designs. And that’s part of the reason we’re seeing a slight net gain for Democratic performance under the new maps nationally.

Sargent: By shoring up some of these safe seats, does this mean some of these House Republicans — in districts that they might be vulnerable in — now are more free to embrace MAGA obsessions and under less pressure to appeal to middle-of-the-road and independent voters?

Wasserman: In many cases that is true. There are always trade-offs. There are bound to be a few more Democratic-leaning seats in the next decade than there are now. The far more dramatic effect of redistricting is that there’s a decline in competitive seats.

Sargent: Does that mean the trade-off Republicans embraced is as follows: They allowed for the creation of a few more districts that went for Biden than before, in order to further insulate their incumbents from having to appeal to the middle?Story continues below advertisement

Wasserman: They did so to keep those seats in their own column regardless of the ideology of their own member. Republicans moved a lot of their own seats to higher ground to ensure that they’d remain in the party’s column.

But the effect of that is districts that are ideological cul-de-sacs where most Republican candidates will be playing to the MAGA base only.

Sargent: You say in there that if Biden’s approval remains at 45 percent or below, the House is almost certainly lost for Democrats. Is that right?

Wasserman: Yes, but I would say for Democrats to have a good chance of winning the House back, Biden’s approval has to be closer to 50 than 45.

Sargent: Making a reasonable extrapolation out to what the map might look like based on what you’ve seen up to now, what does the national popular vote have to be for Democrats to hold the House?

Wasserman: Six or seven years ago, I would have said Democrats need to win the popular vote by four points to win the House. A couple of years ago, after Democrats got favorable court rulings striking down Republican maps — in North Carolina, Virginia, Florida and Pennsylvania — I would have said two points.

Under the new maps, there might be a slight Republican bias still, but I think the House vote and House seats are going to align more closely during the next decade than they do today.

If Democrats were to win the House vote by a point, there’s a good chance they’d hold control.

Sargent: What’s your bottom line on what we still don’t know about the national map?

Wasserman: There are three big variables left to go. The first is court rulings in North Carolina and Ohio, where partisan control of two to three seats in each state is likely in play. The second is Florida — how much can Republicans get away with in terms of maximizing their seats, considering the state’s anti-gerrymandering law?

The third — and this is the biggest one — is New York. Do Democrats seize the opportunity to purge as many as five of the remaining Republican seats from the state?

Sargent: Let’s say Democrats do decently on all these three fronts. What happens?

Wasserman: Then we might be talking about the potential for Democrats to hold on to the majority. But I think all of these big variables would need to break their way, on top of a rebound of Biden’s approval, for that to happen.

It’s still unlikely. Everyone is in a terrible, surly mood and that doesn’t bode well for the party in power. But this shows at least it’s possible, particularly if the pandemic lets up and the economy keeps roaring. But it will be a heavy lift and the Democrats need to get their message together right now, remain flexible and take it to the Republicans.

I don’t think anyone has ever said that Joe Biden is a great orator. In fact, he’s probably one of the least gifted presidential speakers I can remember. Maybe George Bush Sr. was equally mediocre, but that’s not saying much. However, yesterday, on January 6th, Joe Biden gave the best speech I’ve ever heard him give and I suspect it may actually be remembered as an important one. The speech marked a shift in both tone and substance on a matter of monumental importance that hopefully signals a new strategy to try and save our democracy.

Despite opening his campaign in 2019 with a strong condemnation of President Trump’s unprincipled behavior and a call to “restore the soul of America,” Biden hasn’t really talked much about the ongoing Republican threat to democracy since he’s taken office. And he has scrupulously avoided talking about Donald Trump because the White House reportedly felt feared further elevating the disgraced former president. But the anniversary of January 6th was the day they decided to put democracy at the top of the agenda — and it was none too soon.

Biden’s speech was fiery and rhetorically effective. Despite never using his predecessor’s name, he took the fight to Trump, something that simply cannot be avoided any longer whether the White House likes it or not. Biden went right for the jugular, evoking Trump 16 times in the speech, calling him a “defeated former president” (emphasis on the word defeated), declaring that Trump’s outsized ego won’t allow him to admit he lost. And that’s the truth – Donald Trump is the greatest sore loser in the history of the world.

The former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election. He has done so because he values power over principle. Because he sees his own interest as more important than his country’s interest, than America’s interest. And because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution. He can’t accept he lost.”

Biden almost certainly had some real hope that he could bridge the bipartisan divide when he took office and he was determined to give it the old college try. He’s thrown in the towel. He made it clear that the Republican Party is just as guilty as Trump. While praising those who have stood up for democracy (which we can count on one hand), he said this about the rest:

Too many others are transforming that party into something else. They seem no longer to want to be the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, Reagan, the Bushes.”

They don’t even want to be the party of the prince of darkness Dick Cheney, who showed up in the Capitol for the commemoration and stood next to his daughter, the only two Republicans to attend. (Right-wing media immediately went for his throat, of course.)

RELATED: Democrats embrace Dick Cheney during Jan. 6 remembrance event

He didn’t let the MAGA cult off either, which I think was gutsy:

Those who stormed this Capitol, and those who instigated and incited, and those who called on them to do so, held a dagger at the throat of America and American democracy. They didn’t come here out of patriotism or principle. They came here in rage — not in service of America but rather in service of one man.

You cannot love your country only when you win. You can’t obey the law only when it’s convenient. You can’t be patriotic when you embrace and enable lies.”

Naturally it was instantly slammed by Republicans fatuously clutching their pearls and claiming it was “divisive” (nothing new in that) and whining that Biden was “politicizing” January 6th which is hilarious. Nobody but former House Speaker Newt Gingrich had the brass to evoke Lincoln to slam Biden, however — and mess it up so badly:

Gingrich needs to read that speech again:

Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.

Basically, it was “we can put the country back together but if you think we’re going to go back to the way things were you’ve got another thing coming.” Interestingly, in response to a reporter’s question, Biden did echo Lincoln’s famous words “let us strive to bind up the nation’s wounds” when he said, “the way you have to heal, you have to recognize the extent of the wound” which is something Lincoln, after four years of bloody civil war, already knew, but he would certainly have appreciated Biden’s understanding of the situation.

The modern Republican Party’s undisputed leader Donald Trump himself issued a flurry of hysterical statements in which he said Biden “used my name today to try to further divide America,” and claimed that listening to him was “very hurtful to many people.” (He also went through his usual litany of lies about the 2020 election in tedious, obsessive detail as he does most days.)

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-F., and his pal Rep Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga., held a little press conference that nobody watched in which they threw out conspiracy theories about the FBI starting the insurrection and otherwise babbled incoherently:Advertisement:

Biden said that we are at an inflection point in history and I agree. Our politics are not normal and they aren’t getting any better. If anyone thought that Trump leaving office would “break the fever” they need a new thermometer. The question now is what is he — and what are we -— going to do about it?

Biden is headed to Georgia next week to talk about voting right legislation and the desperate need to shore up our electoral system. Will he be able to rally the two Senate divas, Kyrsten Sinema, D-Az., and Joe Manchin, D-WV., to the cause and persuade them to allow an exception to the filibuster to save our democracy? At this point that really is the only question, isn’t it? 

Salon

Stonekettle (a.k.a., Jim Wright) on yesterday’s Jan. 6 anniversary spoke about his career in military intelligence, about learning to overcome one’s biases and to see and present facts, data, as they are. He spoke about the men he came to respect who trained him. Reflecting on last year’s riot yesterday, he asked, besides “guys like Karl goddamn Rove,” well, “How did we get here?”

President Barack Obama. 

Because the election of a young, dynamic, smart, educated, articulate, kind, compassionate, and funny liberal black man galvanized the foul racist mean underbelly of this country like nothing else ever had. 

Those who attacked the Capitol a year ago today. They are in almost every regard, the antithesis of Barack Obama, mean, crude, uneducated, ill spoken, filled with rage and blind ignorant loud blustering false patriotism. 

And those men I had admired? Those veterans I respected? 

Like me, they were trained to be objective. To put aside their own bias. To demand proof. To require evidence. To check and doublecheck the information. 

And they threw all of that away, all of it, when a black man took office.

They forgot everything they ever knew. 

They forgot who they had been. 

They watched Fox News all day and they lost their humanity. They lost their objectivity. Without the supporting structure of the military and the purpose it gave them and the impartiality our profession had imposed upon their worldview, they lost their very identity. 

They became, literally became, different people. 

It was horrifying. Like watching a loved one eaten alive by Alzheimers. 

They included me on increasingly insane email chains that quoted Nancy Grace, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck as fact. They sent me racist mails quoting the comedian Jeff Foxworthy as if that guy was some sort of expert on anything. They posted racist memes to their Facebook pages and said with a sly wink, it’s not really racist if it’s true. Heh heh. They sent me dire proclamations from the NRA how the negro in office was somehow coming to take their guns — these were men who’d been trained in firearms by professionals, who’d served honorably in war, who laughed at a bunch of unholstered swaggering goons like the National Rifle Association and yet here they were now suddenly quoting Ted Nugent. 

And it got worse. 

It got so much worse. 

They joined the fucking Tea Party. They began to trade in the most insane and ridiculous of conspiracy theories. There was no lunacy too great, no rage so unhinged, that they couldn’t embrace it if it came from Rush Limbaugh. And then when the next election came, these men that I had once so admired, who had served steely-eyed in war and who would have once risked it all for the truth, who had once led every day by steady example and who had been supremely contemptuous of those blustering frauds, the paper warriors, those of stolen valor and empty bravado, suddenly these same men were cheering … Sarah Palin. 

How did we get here? 

That’s how. 

There is much more, both before and after what’s quoted above. And it’s powerful. What’s more important now, though, is “how we get out of here.” 

This is the moment, right here, right now. 

This is the moment where history turns on a single sharp pivot and the very fate of civilization hangs in the balance.

And rarely — if ever — is that moment so clear while it’s happening as it is right now. THIS is history, this moment right here, and what we do in this moment is how history will remember us.

A century ago, Germany could not stop its slide to destruction and those people, the craven cowards and the innocent and the monsters alike, had to ride the horror all the way down. 

But we have their terrible example before us and we don’t have to suffer the same fate. 

We can stop it. 

We can restore democracy and save The Republic. 

But the time for half measures is long, long past. It is time now for bold action. This is our nation. This is our democracy. It’s worth fighting for and it’s time we take it back from these miserable sons of bitches and send them back to the fringe where their rotten ideology belongs. 

As much as it pains me to say it, Karl Rove is right. 

Those Republicans who still believe in democracy and their duty to The Republic, if there are indeed any such left, have a duty to condemn the riot and those who refuse to acknowledge it.

There can be no soft-ped­al­ing what hap­pened and no ab­so­lu­tion for those who planned, en­cour­aged and aided the at­tempt to over­throw our democ­racy. 

Love of coun­try de­mands noth­ing less. 

That is true patriotism.