Month: January 2022

Peter Meijer of Michigan was recently the subject of a long profile in the Atlantic in which he was portrayed as a rare Republican with conscience who was suffering under tremendous pressure because he voted for Trump’s impeachment and trying mightily to keep his integrity.

He was on MTP today and it’s pretty clear he thinks he’s found a way to thread the needle:blame Joe Biden for failing to be a GOP moderate like Mitt Romney, causing the Republican base to be very mad and back Donald Trump, who he still doesn’t like but now believes is the only game in town. Apparently, that huge bipartisan infrastructure bill doesn’t count.

“In the words of Lindsey Graham, ‘enough is enough.’ I’m out of here, right? I’m done with this, the party is going to move on, Trump’s gonna be left behind. Boy, did that not happen. Why do you think that didn’t happen?” Todd asked Meijer.

Meijer, who was one of 10 House Republicans who voted for Trump’s second impeachment following the Capitol attack, said “there was no alternative, there was no other path.”

He pointed to the party’s pair of losses in the Georgia Senate runoff races and actions taken by Biden in his first year in office.”Given how President Biden when he was elected into office, you know, said he would be moderate and look for bipartisan solutions. But then after, and frankly, I blame the former president for this, after we lost the two Senate seats in Georgia and the Senate flipped, it became an exercise in trying to be an LBJ or FDR style presidency and enact transformational change in the absence of any compelling mandate from the American people to do so,” Meijer said.

“So that gave the rallying signal, that created a very steep divide, and at the end of the day, there’s no other option right now in the Republican Party,” he added.

Pressed by Todd on why the GOP “can’t seem to kick their Trump habit,” and why it is not the responsibility of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Meijer cited the stark polarization between the two parties.

“We have a two party system. And in the best case scenario, each party challenges the other to do better, to be better, to have a scenario where iron sharpens iron,” Meijer said.

“Instead, if you have one party plumbing to the depths and the other just use that excuse to go further, to go more to an extreme, to go more away from any sort of governing consensus and towards trying to enact whatever the will of the most extreme constituency they have is, you know, that is a recipe for both parties to drive further away from anything that resembles serving the American people as a whole,” he added.

Trump endorsed Meijer’s challenger, former Housing and Urban Development official John Gibbs, in the midterm House election. Gibbs is mounting a primary race against Meijer.

The idea that if only Joe Biden had told his base to go to hell and propose entitlement cuts or maybe just propose to do nothing at all, the Trump cult would be much more amenable to leaving their orange Dear Leader and move toward and more decent, rational politics is as delusional as anything Trump ever said.

Of course, it’s probable that he really means Biden should have “triangulated” against his own base by scolding them at every turn as a way to appease right wingers who love nothing more than to see women and racial minorities put in their place. Maybe he’s too young to know that this has been tried and didn’t accomplish anything but make the right stronger and divide the Democrats — which would also strengthen Donald Trump.

No, what we are seeing is the lie the few remaining sane Republicans will tell themselves to come around to supporting Donald Trump: the Democrats made them do it.

In case you don’t have a NY Times sub, here is the editorial everyone is talking about.

One year after the smoke and broken glass, the mock gallows and the very real bloodshed of that awful day, it is tempting to look back and imagine that we can, in fact, simply look back. To imagine that what happened on Jan. 6, 2021 — a deadly riot at the seat of American government, incited by a defeated president amid a last-ditch effort to thwart the transfer of power to his successor — was horrifying but that it is in the past and that we as a nation have moved on.

This is an understandable impulse. After four years of chaos, cruelty and incompetence, culminating in a pandemic and the once-unthinkable trauma of Jan. 6, most Americans were desperate for some peace and quiet.

On the surface, we have achieved that. Our political life seems more or less normal these days, as the president pardons turkeys and Congress quarrels over spending bills. But peel back a layer, and things are far from normal. Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day.

It is regular citizens who threaten election officials and other public servants, who ask, “When can we use the guns?” and who vow to murder politicians who dare to vote their conscience. It is Republican lawmakers scrambling to make it harder for people to vote and easier to subvert their will if they do. It is Donald Trump who continues to stoke the flames of conflict with his rampant lies and limitless resentments and whose twisted version of reality still dominates one of the nation’s two major political parties.

In short, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. No self-governing society can survive such a threat by denying that it exists. Rather, survival depends on looking back and forward at the same time.

Truly grappling with the threat ahead means taking full account of the terror of that day a year ago. Thanks largely to the dogged work of a bipartisan committee in the House of Representatives, this reckoning is underway. We know now that the violence and mayhem broadcast live around the world was only the most visible and visceral part of the effort to overturn the election. The effort extended all the way into the Oval Office, where Mr. Trump and his allies plotted a constitutional self-coup.

We know now that top Republican lawmakers and right-wing media figures privately understood how dangerous the riot was and pleaded with Mr. Trump to call a halt to it, even as they publicly pretended otherwise. We know now that those who may have critical information about the planning and execution of the attack are refusing to cooperate with Congress, even if it means being charged with criminal contempt.

For now, the committee’s work continues. It has scheduled a series of public hearings in the new year to lay out these and other details, and it plans to release a full report of its findings before the midterm elections — after which, should Republicans regain control of the House as expected, the committee will undoubtedly be dissolved.

This is where looking forward comes in. Over the past year, Republican lawmakers in 41 states have been trying to advance the goals of the Jan. 6 rioters — not by breaking laws but by making them. Hundreds of bills have been proposed and nearly three dozen laws have been passed that empower state legislatures to sabotage their own elections and overturn the will of their voters, according to a running tally by a nonpartisan consortium of pro-democracy organizations.

Some bills would change the rules to make it easier for lawmakers to reject the votes of their citizens if they don’t like the outcome. Others replace professional election officials with partisan actors who have a vested interest in seeing their preferred candidate win. Yet more attempt to criminalize human errors by election officials, in some cases even threatening prison.

Many of these laws are being proposed and passed in crucial battleground states like Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the Trump campaign targeted voting results in all these states, suing for recounts or trying to intimidate officials into finding “missing” votes. The effort failed, thanks primarily to the professionalism and integrity of election officials. Many of those officials have since been stripped of their power or pushed out of office and replaced by people who openly say the last election was fraudulent.

Thus the Capitol riot continues in statehouses across the country, in a bloodless, legalized form that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.

This isn’t the first time state legislatures have tried to wrest control of electoral votes from their own people, nor is it the first time that the dangers of such a ploy have been pointed out. In 1891, President Benjamin Harrison warned Congress of the risk that such a “trick” could determine the outcome of a presidential election.

The Constitution guarantees to all Americans a republican form of government, Harrison said. “The essential features of such a government are the right of the people to choose their own officers” and to have their votes counted equally in making that choice. “Our chief national danger,” he continued, is “the overthrow of majority control by the suppression or perversion of popular suffrage.” If a state legislature were to succeed in substituting its own will for that of its voters, “it is not too much to say that the public peace might be seriously and widely endangered.”

A healthy, functioning political party faces its electoral losses by assessing what went wrong and redoubling its efforts to appeal to more voters the next time. The Republican Party, like authoritarian movements the world over, has shown itself recently to be incapable of doing this. Party leaders’ rhetoric suggests they see it as the only legitimate governing power and thus portrays anyone else’s victory as the result of fraud — hence the foundational falsehood that spurred the Jan. 6 attack, that Joe Biden didn’t win the election.

“The thing that’s most concerning is that it has endured in the face of all evidence,” said Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of the vanishingly few Republicans in Congress who remain committed to empirical reality and representative democracy. “And I’ve gotten to wonder if there is actually any evidence that would ever change certain people’s minds.”

The answer, for now, appears to be no. Polling finds that the overwhelming majority of Republicans believe that President Biden was not legitimately elected and that about one-third approve of using violence to achieve political goals. Put those two numbers together, and you have a recipe for extreme danger.

Political violence is not an inevitable outcome. Republican leaders could help by being honest with their voters and combating the extremists in their midst. Throughout American history, party leaders, from Abraham Lincoln to Margaret Chase Smith to John McCain, have stood up for the union and democracy first, to their everlasting credit.

Democrats aren’t helpless, either. They hold unified power in Washington, for the last time in what may be a long time. Yet they have so far failed to confront the urgency of this moment — unwilling or unable to take action to protect elections from subversion and sabotage. Blame Senator Joe Manchin or Senator Kyrsten Sinema, but the only thing that matters in the end is whether you get it done. For that reason, Mr. Biden and other leading Democrats should make use of what remaining power they have to end the filibuster for voting rights legislation, even if nothing else.

Whatever happens in Washington, in the months and years to come, Americans of all stripes who value their self-government must mobilize at every level — not simply once every four years but today and tomorrow and the next day — to win elections and help protect the basic functions of democracy. If people who believe in conspiracy theories can win, so can those who live in the reality-based world.

Above all, we should stop underestimating the threat facing the country. Countless times over the past six years, up to and including the events of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump and his allies openly projected their intent to do something outrageous or illegal or destructive. Every time, the common response was that they weren’t serious or that they would never succeed. How many times will we have to be proved wrong before we take it seriously? The sooner we do, the sooner we might hope to salvage a democracy that is in grave danger.

I’ll just leave this here:

On ABC, Liz Cheney says Jan 6 committee has first-hand testimony that Trump watched assault on the Capitol on TV & resisted pleas from McCarthy & Ivanka asking he call for a stop to the violence.

Cheney adds that she thinks Trump returning to office could be the end of democracy pic.twitter.com/iz8Ibydb3u

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 2, 2022

Or fewer anyway …

Effective January 1st, federal law bans many types of out-of-network medical bills and puts the onus on doctors and health insurance companies to resolve their payment disputes.

Consumers can breathe a sigh of relief because, in many scenarios, they should no longer face unexpected charges from doctors who are not in their insurance networks.

Patients still have to pay in-network copays, deductibles and other cost-sharing, which have been rising, but any additional out-of-network bills are now prohibited for the following services:

Emergency care in a hospital ER, a freestanding ER or urgent care center.

Elective care at an in-network hospital or surgery center, but where doctors — notably anesthesiologists, pathologists, radiologists and assistant surgeons — may be out-of-network. This is also known as “drive-by doctoring.”

Air ambulances.

Ground ambulances are not included in this law, meaning three out of four insured people who take an ambulance ride are still at risk of facing surprise bills.

Instead of sending out bills, doctors and insurance companies have to resolve their differences while holding the patient harmless.If the two sides can’t agree on a payment rate within 30 days, either side can request the federal arbitration process.

The doctor and insurer then go to the arbiter with their best offer, and the arbiter picks one.

The arbiter “must select the offer closest” to the median in-network rate unless other information “clearly demonstrates” the median in-network rate isn’t appropriate, according to the government.

A host of medical providers, including the American Hospital Association and American Medical Association, are suing the government. They argue the median in-network rate shouldn’t be the guiding factor for the arbiter, and the government went against Congress’ intent by doing so.

Consumer protection experts have criticized the lawsuits, saying medical providers don’t want guardrails on the arbitration system so they can extract higher rates.

Because this is a new law, we should expect the health care system won’t get everything right.

“We need to be active bill readers and ask a lot of questions to our providers and insurance companies if there’s a bill we don’t think we should be paying,” said Patricia Kelmar, the health care director at consumer protection group U.S. PIRG.

Patients can direct complaints online or through a 1-800 number.

Out-of-network doctors also must inform patients about what their care might cost, and they may ask patients to sign a form that waives their protections. (Be leery of signing this, consumer rights experts say.)

Heather Cox Richardson’s January 1 newsletter recounts events leading to Lincoln’s January 1, 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. From the war’s outbreak, Blacks knew the war would have to address slavery.

Days after Union troops stopped the Confederate advance in Maryland on September 17, 1862 at the Battle of Antietam, Lincoln prepared a Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation under his war powers. He told a visiting judge, “It is my last trump card…. If that don’t do, we must give up.” 

Striking in Richardson’s account is earlier debate over the value of slaves and of Black labor:

As Confederate armies racked up victories, Republicans increasingly emphasized the importance of Black workers to the South’s war effort. “[I]t has long been the boast of the South…that its whole white population could be made available for the war, for the reason that all its industries were carried on by the slaves,” the New York Times wrote. Northerners who before the war had complained that Black workers were inefficient found themselves redefining them. The Chicago Tribune thought Black workers were so productive that “[F]our millions of slaves off-set at least eight millions of Northern whites.” 

At the same time, Republicans came to see Black workers as crucially important in the North as well, as they worked in military camps and, later, in cotton fields in areas captured by the U.S. military. While Democrats continued to harp on what they saw as Black people’s inability to support themselves, Republicans countered that “No better class of laborers could be found… in all the population of the United States.”

Compensating Southerners for their lost “property” was on the table by December 1862:

Northerners recoiled from the plan. One newspaper correspondent noted that compensated emancipation would almost certainly cost more than a billion dollars, and while he seemed willing to stomach that financial hit, others were not. Another correspondent to the New York Times said that enslavers, who were at that very moment attacking the U.S. government, were already making up lists of the value of the people enslaved on their lands to get their U.S. government payouts.

While Americans considered the financial costs of compensating slave-holders for emancipation, did anyone add up the cost of the lives lost to the war? U.S. deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic now exceed a recent estimate from the Civil War by nearly 100,000. Current estimates place U.S. deaths from Covid at about 825,000. Who is calculating the cost of those lost lives the way southern accountants once summed the value of four million “head” of human chattel?

Do we value human beings by one metric when they are property and by another (or not at all) when they have no cash value? What the question says about a world viewed through a capitalist lens is unsettling. As is the dismissal by some of the Covid body count as no big deal.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” Faulkner wrote in “Requiem for a Nun.” The New York Times Editorial Board may not be brushing up on its Faulkner, but like obituaries papers now keep in digital drawers against the passing of the famous, we may be witnesses to it drafting one. A requiem for a country.

Nothing has returned to normal over the last year. “Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day,” the Board explains:

It is regular citizens who threaten election officials and other public servants, who ask, “When can we use the guns?” and who vow to murder politicians who dare to vote their conscience. It is Republican lawmakers scrambling to make it harder for people to vote and easier to subvert their will if they do. It is Donald Trump who continues to stoke the flames of conflict with his rampant lies and limitless resentments and whose twisted version of reality still dominates one of the nation’s two major political parties.

In short, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. No self-governing society can survive such a threat by denying that it exists. Rather, survival depends on looking back and forward at the same time.

Ron Brownstein (senior editor at The Atlantic) tweets, “This entire @nytimes editorial seems an unusually personal response to some of their own conservative columnists who repeatedly use the ed page real estate to deny the threat to democracy Trump poses so as to justify backing the elected Repubs who enable & support his assault”

What almost all conservative commentators do backflips to avoid admitting: “In short, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends.” https://t.co/KU882OYf6J

— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) January 1, 2022

The violence we all witnessed one year ago was only the visible expression of the will to power exercised by Donald Trump’s allies both outside and reaching into the Oval Office. Republican lawmakers and right-wing media figures urged schemes by which Trump might retain office contrary to the will of the American voter expressed not simply in a clear majority of the popular vote, but in our constitutional contrivance for indirect election of presidents.

Those with “critical information about the planning and execution of the attack are refusing to cooperate with Congress, even if it means being charged with criminal contempt.” Or pleading the Fifth Amendment. Trump himself famously opined, “You see the mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” From the mouth of the would-be dictator himself.

Yet, while a bipartisan committee in the House of Representatives promises a detailed accounting and, presumably, some sort of reckoning report for action by the Department of Justice, time runs short. For the Biden administration and for us all. If Merrick Garland’s D.O.J. is investigating on its own, there is little public evidence to support even speculation. Publicly, Trump allies in and out of Congress attempt to dismiss Jan. 6 as nothing to see here.

In the states, Jan. 6 rolls on. In state after Republican-controlled state, efforts continue to put in place, under cover of law, mechanisms for Republicans to overturn elections results not to their liking. In short, to render democracy a sham.

Some bills would change the rules to make it easier for lawmakers to reject the votes of their citizens if they don’t like the outcome. Others replace professional election officials with partisan actors who have a vested interest in seeing their preferred candidate win. Yet more attempt to criminalize human errors by election officials, in some cases even threatening prison.

[…]

Thus the Capitol riot continues in statehouses across the country, in a bloodless, legalized form that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.

Steven Levitsky in “How Democracies Die” outlined how authoritarians consolidate power. By “capturing the referees, sidelining the key players, and rewriting the rules to tilt the playing field against opponents. Trump attempted all three of these strategies.” His allies are enacting this program in his absence from the presidency.

A key, unwritten foundation of healthy democracy, Levitsky writes, is “mutual toleration, or the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, or the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives.” That is, they accept that sometimes they win and sometimes they lose. Republicans now conspire to return to the kind of rigged system that secured Democrats in uncontested control in former Confederate state for 100 years.

Indeed, it appears that is the goal of Trumpism, as President Benjamin Harrison warned and the Times reminds.

Trump’s party has turned its back on democracy and respect for the will of any other citizens than its own supporters.

So what now? The Editorial Board concludes (emphasis mine):

Whatever happens in Washington, in the months and years to come, Americans of all stripes who value their self-government must mobilize at every level — not simply once every four years but today and tomorrow and the next day — to win elections and help protect the basic functions of democracy. If people who believe in conspiracy theories can win, so can those who live in the reality-based world.

Above all, we should stop underestimating the threat facing the country. Countless times over the past six years, up to and including the events of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump and his allies openly projected their intent to do something outrageous or illegal or destructive. Every time, the common response was that they weren’t serious or that they would never succeed. How many times will we have to be proved wrong before we take it seriously? The sooner we do, the sooner we might hope to salvage a democracy that is in grave danger.

Democrats engage in sophist arguments in defense of traditions protecting the voice of Senate minorities. Meanwhile, efforts, actual efforts, continue in the states to ensure minority rule becomes the rule in a United States creeping toward being a democracy in name only. At least the Times will have the obituary ready in a drawer.

Unearthed Video: TPUSA Senior Manager Driena Sixto training students to secretly record professors and administrators that disagree with their message and “edge them on” in hopes of getting them fired. pic.twitter.com/40k5VJXipx

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) December 31, 2021

Memories:

August 2012: Trump says Black journalist Touré, then a co-host of the MSNBC show “The Cycle,” should be “forced to resign” for comments in which Touré uttered a variant of the N-word while arguing that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was using racially coded language to try to make President Barack Obama seem frightening. (Touré had apologized before Trump’s demand.)

November 2012: Trump suggests the firing of then-MSNBC host Chris Matthews for saying, on the night of Obama’s victory, that he was “so glad” Hurricane Sandy had occurred, because of its political impact. (Matthews had apologized before Trump’s suggestion.)

December 2012: Trump calls for the firing of Vanity Fair magazine Editor Graydon Carter, with whom he had feuded for years, over what he declares the magazine’s “worst ever issue.”

December 2012: Trump says “Scots should boycott Glenfiddich garbage” because the whisky brand selected Michael Forbes, a farmer who refused to sell his land to make way for a Trump golf course, as “Top Scot” of the year.

March 2013: Trump says, “Everyone should cancel HBO until they fire low life dummy Bill Maher! Get going now and feel good about yourself!”

July 2013: Trump asks people to “boycott & cancel subscriptions” to Rolling Stone magazine because of a cover featuring Boston Marathon terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

October 2013: Trump urges “everybody possible” to “cancel their subscription” to New York Magazine over an insulting tweet about Trump’s marriage from Dan Amira, who was online editor at the time.

March 2014: After Trump is left off a CNBC list of the most influential business leaders, he says, “Stupid poll should be canceled—no credibility.”

May 2014: Trump calls for the firing of, or at least an apology from, the person at The Oklahoman newspaper who wrote a headline calling then-Oklahoma City Thunder NBA star Kevin Durant “Mr. Unreliable.” (The newspaper had already apologized.)

June 2014: Trump says people should “Boycott Mexico” until a Marine reservist who was jailed for crossing the border with loaded guns is released from prison. (He was released later in the year.)

April 2015: Trump suggests that conservative writer Jonah Goldberg, then a senior editor of National Review magazine, should be forced to resign for writing that Trump had been “tweeting like a 14-year-old girl” in response to another conservative writer calling Trump a clown. Trump also suggests Fox News anchor Bret Baier should stop having Goldberg on his show.

June 2015: When Spanish-language television network Univision severed its business relationship with Trump after his campaign launch speech, in which he labeled Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, Trump tweets, “Anyone who wants strong borders and good trade deals for the US should boycott @Univision.”

July 2015: Trump calls for a boycott of Macy’s after Macy’s discontinued its business dealings with him over those same comments about people from Mexico. Trump also tweets “Great” when someone tells him that people are canceling their Macy’s credit cards.

August 2015: Trump calls for the firing of the late conservative writer and Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer, a regular Trump critic.

September 2015: After National Review editor Rich Lowry argued on Fox News that rival Republican candidate Carly Fiorina had “cut off (Trump’s) balls with the precision of a surgeon” in a primary debate, Trump says: “Incompetent @RichLowry lost it tonight on @FoxNews. He should not be allowed on TV and the FCC should fine him!” (Lowry responds, “I love how Mr. Anti-PC now wants the FCC to fine me. #pathetic.”)

December 2015: Trump calls for the firing of then-CBS News journalist Sopan Deb and NBC/MSNBC journalist Katy Tur over reporting he disputed about how he handled protesters during a rally speech.

February 2016: Trump says people should “boycott all Apple products” until the company stops fighting a government request to break into the cell phone of a deceased California terrorist.

February 2016: Trump says Fox News should fire Republican strategist and commentator Karl Rove for being insufficiently positive about his victory in the Nevada caucuses.

February 2016: Trump calls on the Wall Street Journal to fire its editorial board, which had criticized him, and its pollster, which showed results he didn’t like.

March 2016: Trump proposes a boycott of Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show, complaining that it is too negative toward him.

September 2016: After the Dallas Morning News and Arizona Republic newspapers endorse Hillary Clinton for president and USA Today declares Trump unfit for the office, Trump says, “The people are really smart in cancelling subscriptions to the Dallas & Arizona papers & now USA Today will lose readers! The people get it!”

September 2017: Trump tweets that NFL players and other athletes who don’t stand for the National Anthem should be told, “YOU’RE FIRED.” He says in another tweet, “Fire or suspend!” And at a rally, he says, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners when somebody disrespects our flag to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired, he’s fired.’ “

October 2017: Suggesting he could use the power of the state against media entities he dislikes, Trump muses about challenging the broadcast licenses of NBC and other networks over their news coverage. (He again broached the subject of reviewing NBC’s license in September 2018.)

November 2017: Trump calls for a boycott of CNN.

August 2018: Trump tweets, “Many @harleydavidson owners plan to boycott the company if manufacturing moves overseas. Great! Most other companies are coming in our direction, including Harley competitors.”

June 2019: Trump suggests people stop “using or subscribing” to AT&T to pressure the company to make changes at CNN, which it owns.

September 2019: Trump suggests that actress Debra Messing should be fired for calling on a news outlet to publish the names of people attending a Trump fundraiser and for a tweet promoting a church sign that said “a black vote for Trump is mental illness.” (Messing had apologized for the tweet about the church sign.)

January 2020: Trump says The New York Times should fire columnist Paul Krugman, a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, for having incorrectly predicted a global recession after Trump’s victory in 2016.

May 2020: The day after Twitter appended a fact check link to dishonest Trump claims about mail-in voting, Trump threatens to shut down social media companies: “Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.”

May 2020: Trump seeks the firing of Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” for the show playing a misleadingly shortened clip of comments by Attorney General William Barr. (Todd apologized, saying it was an inadvertent mistake.) Again broaching the power of the state, Trump tags the accounts of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates television, and its chairman, Ajit Pai.

It’s tempting to think that George Wallace-esque overt racism is dead and we are now mostly dealing with the more subtle forms of institutional and structural racism. It’s vital to deal with those things, of course. They are at the root of racial inequality. But no one should believe that the old-fashioned, in-your-face racism and hate has disappeared.

A case in point:

A Lafayette, Louisiana, city court judge resigned Friday over a video that surfaced earlier this month showing people using racist language at her home.Michelle Odinet apologized and took a leave of absence after the video became public. It showed surveillance footage — being played on a television at her house — of an outdoor altercation with a burglary suspect.As the unseen spectators watch the video, they comment on the footage while repeatedly using a racial slur, CNN has reported.

“I take full responsibility for the hurtful words I used to describe the individual who burglarized the vehicles at my home,” Odinet wrote in her resignation letter to Louisiana Supreme Court Chief Justice John Weimer.

“After much reflection and prayer, and in order to facilitate healing within the community, I hereby resign as judge of the Lafayette City Court effective immediately,” she wrote.

Her language wasn’t euphemistically offensive. It was full-on All-American, Jim Crow-style grotesque racism:

Earlier this month, the Lafayette Police Department said, two vehicles were burglarized in the driveway of a home owned by Odinet and her husband. One of the victims was returning home when she or he saw the suspect exit one of the vehicles, police said. The suspect was pursued, caught and held down till officers arrived, police said.

In the video from Odinet’s home, which circulated online, people appear to be watching footage of the incident on a TV. A male voice is heard saying, “Mom’s yelling n***er, n***er.” A female voice then says while laughing, “It’s a n***er, like a roach.”It’s unknown who recorded the video or how it became public.Odinet apologized and said she’d been “given a sedative,” according to CNN affiliate KATC. She had no “recollection of the video and the disturbing language used during it,” she said.

This woman was a judge. She was a prosecutor before she was a judge. She is an unreconstructed racist. Nobody talks like that who isn’t one.

And yeah, they need to take a look at her cases.

New Orleans’ DA will review old cases that were handled by a prosecutor who’s now a judge over a video with racist language

And I think it’s pretty clear she is far from alone.

Remember this?

Obviously, Trump can’t “grant permission” to Bernie Kerrick to testify. Apparently, Kerrick claims he was working with Giuliani so attorney-client privilege applies to him. But Trump clearly believes that Bernie can run circles around the “Un-select Committee” so he wants him to cooperate anyway.

So he is, sort of. But he’s claiming attorney client privilege in some cases. Go figure. Can he get away with that since Trump “released” him? And in any case, what he is releasing is damning:

A key adviser to Donald Trump’s legal team in their post-election quest to unearth evidence of fraud has delivered a trove of documents to Jan. 6 investigators describing those efforts.

Bernard Kerik, the former New York City Police commissioner and ally of Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, also provided a “privilege log” describing materials he declined to provide to the committee.

Among the withheld documents is one titled “DRAFT LETTER FROM POTUS TO SEIZE EVIDENCE IN THE INTEREST OF NATIONAL SECURITY FOR THE 2020 ELECTIONS.” Kerik’s attorney Timothy Parlatore provided the privilege log to the panel, which said the file originated on Dec. 17, a day before Trump huddled in the Oval Office with advisers including former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, where they discussed the option of seizing election equipment in states whose results Trump was attempting to overturn.

Trump ultimately opted against that strategy, but his consideration of the option is one of the key questions the panel is probing as part of its broader investigation into attempts to overturn the election.

Another document provided by Kerik to the panel included emails between Kerik and associates about paying for rooms at the Willard Hotel. Kerik had been subpoenaed by the panel on Nov. 8 as part of its investigation into the so-called war room at the Willard Hotel, where Trump allies met to strategize about preventing Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory. The panel had originally sent a letter accompanying the subpoena that had incorrectly suggested Kerik was in the war room on Jan. 5, leading Kerik to demand an apology.

The Jan. 6 select committee declined to comment on the new materials.

As part of a seven-page letter to the panel, Parlatore told the committee the former police commissioner would accept a voluntary interview with the panel on Jan. 13, 2022, though he expressed concerns about the conditions of the interview and whether a transcript and recording would be released immediately after, or whether Parlatore could make his own recording of the proceedings.

According to Parlatore, the panel retracted its agreement for a voluntary interview and demanded a deposition instead after he sent his letter to the committee. He expressed dismay at the committee’s retraction of the voluntary interview.

“They seem more interested in creating an appearance of noncompliance than conducting an actual investigation,” he said in a text message.

Another 22-page document, titled “STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS PLAN – GIULIANI PRESIDENTIAL LEGAL DEFENSE TEAM,” describes a 10-day blitz aimed at Republican House and Senate members to pressure them to vote against certifying the 2020 election results. The effort was focused, according to the document, on six swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The document says its primary channels to disseminate messaging on these efforts included “presidential tweets” as well as talk radio, conservative bloggers, social media influencers, Trump campaign volunteers and other media allies. A list of “key team members” supporting the effort included “Freedom Caucus Members” — a reference to the group of hardline House conservatives, some of whom backed Trump’s effort to overturn the election.

Other team members listed include: Rudy Giuliani, “Peter Navarro Team” and “identified legislative leaders” in each of the six swing states.

The document also described a list of actions the group intended to organize, including “protests at weak members’ homes,” “protests at local officials homes/offices” and “protests in DC – rally for key House and Senate members.”

I’m very hard-pressed to understand why Trump thought this would help him. But then, he’s gotten away with everything, both legally and politically, so why not just take credit for the coup and announce that you’ll do it again? What’s anyone going to do about it?

Can you believe it? The House GOP Judiciary Committee tweeted out some trollish bullshit to own the libs, I guess.

They deleted it but why bother? Everyone knows that these people are ghoulish monsters. They’re usually proud of it.

This is killing people.

The tweet received a wave of backlash before it was taken down and came at a time when Covid cases are spiking across the US following the Omicron variant’s emergence, and public health experts are encouraging people to get boosted to protect themselves and others.

While most Republicans have said they support Covid-19 vaccines but oppose mandates, many members of the GOP — especially those on the far-right — have continued to spread disinformation, conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine sentiments. Elected Republicans have crusaded against mandates as part of their resistance to the Biden administration’s pandemic response efforts.

According to CNN’s latest polling, a 65% majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents report having received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine. (By contrast, only about one-quarter see vaccination requirements as an acceptable way to increase the vaccination rate.)

As for booster shots, they do work. Multiple studies from multiple countries show that people who have received booster shots are much less likely to get infected with Covid-19, and if they do get infected, they overwhelmingly have mild illness.

The people filling hospital beds are mostly unvaccinated or were vaccinated months ago, and their immunity has worn off. The vaccines do not fully prevent infection, but they provide very good protection against it and severe disease and extremely high protection against death.

I agree with this, unfortunately:

Unbelievably distressing that there will never be any price paid by the MAGA politicians and media that cynically politicized vaccines in a way that inarguably resulted in many, many preventable deaths. That it still happens is a scandal normalized.

“Get vaccinated, wear a mask indoors,” on the denial of freedom scale is about like, “Cover your privates, don’t grab strangers by theirs.” Of course, Trump rewrote the rules on that too.

And when it’s finally over, they will go all in on accusing their enemies of being wildly hysterical about Covid. We know this, because Ron DeSantis has done this at every temporary reprieve in his state.

Originally tweeted by Schooley (@Rschooley) on January 1, 2022.

This is sadly correct. They will not only fail to be held accountable they will do everything they can, and be pretty successful, at turning their nihilistic, death cult opportunism into evidence they were right all along. Because, you know, the pandemic will be over.

It’s intensely frustrating and I don’t know what to do about it.

I think this says it all:

How all the infectious disease epidemiologists feel. pic.twitter.com/HyMtvxgnZ7

— Dr. Syra Madad (@syramadad) January 1, 2022

Just a few observations about where we are:

On May 1, 2021, the state deaths per 100K weren't far apart:

CA deaths/100K = 154
TX deaths/100K = 173
FL deaths/100K = 168.

FL and TX's vaccination & booster-hostile or skeptical policies mattered. Over the last 8 months, CA added 40 deaths/100K; TX 89/100K; FL 123/100K.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 31, 2021

The under age 65 in particular.
Florida and Texas threw in the towel.
New York, hit so incredibly hard, decided on life.
California, learned at Christmas 2020 just how many could die if they didn’t stay focused.
The results speak for themselves. pic.twitter.com/cdR3lCWwPd

— JusDayDa (@JusDayDa) January 1, 2022

California hasn’t been perfect by any means. There is still plenty of vaccine resistance here. But for the most part it’s done well, with mask mandates and a good vaccine program. Until recently anyway, testing was easily available (I got one couple of weeks ago with one hour notice. — that may have changed since then.) Mostly, the government at all levels has just followed the science as best it could and never really took its eyes off the ball. I don’t know that any big, diverse state has done any better.

But who knows what awaits with this thing? Fingers crossed that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.