Month: January 2022

Greg Sargent spoke to an expert on the Electoral Count Act and the news isn’t good:

Here’s the unsettling reality: If the ECA isn’t revised, under certain scenarios, all it would take for a future effort to succeed is a single corrupt GOP governor and a GOP-controlled House of Representatives.

This pathway to a subverted 2024 election is spelled out in the new paper by legal scholar Matthew Seligman, who has written extensively about the ECA’s history and weaknesses, and the ways Trump tried to exploit them in 2020.

There are several routes for a future effort to succeed. Considering the likelihood of each is central to getting ECA reform right. Right now, efforts in Congress to revise the ECA are focused mainly on the possibility of a rogue House and Senate refusing to count legitimate electors, as Trump attempted to pull off in 2020.

This new paper offers another possibility. This one would simply require Republicans to capture the House and for the right Trumpist Republican to win a key swing-state governorship. Imagine that former senator David Perdue becomes Georgia governor, after winning a GOP primary against Gov. Brian Kemp, who is under fire from Trump supporters precisely because he refused to overturn the 2020 results. Imagine Speaker Kevin McCarthy controlling the House on Jan. 6, 2025.

If a Democrat won the state by a slim margin, and the election came down to it, Perdue could send a rogue slate of electors based on a fake pretext of election fraud, and the GOP-controlled House could simply count those electors. A Democratic Senate might object, but under the ECA, both chambers must object to a slate of electors to invalidate it, so it would stand.

Would courts intervene? Yes, they might command Perdue to send the rightful electors. But the paper suggests that at such a point, someone like Perdue — already far down the road of lawlessness — might ignore the court’s command and send the fake electors anyway. The GOP House could count them regardless of the court’s command, the paper posits. At that point the Supreme Court could decide this is a political question and decline to intervene. Game over.

Is this far-fetched? True, a lot would have to fall into place. But note that Perdue has explicitly said he wouldn’t have certified Joe Biden’s electors in 2020. That means he’s campaigning on an implicit openness to such a scheme. Given that implicit promise, the pressure on him to carry it out would be immense.

Also note that in swing states such as Pennsylvania, GOP candidates for governor are campaigning explicitly on their willingness to side with Trump’s lies about 2020. Would one execute such a scheme where GOP legislatures refused to before? We don’t know, but it’s certainly plausible. And do you want to rely on someone like Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis to do the right thing?

Similarly, well over 100 House Republicans already voted to invalidate Biden’s electors. Some are currently vowing to turn a GOP House into a 24/7 circus of insurrectionist conspiracy-mongering. Can anyone doubt the plausibility of a GOP House counting the fake electors? Still, the point here is not to argue this scenario is likely. It’s to understand the weaknesses in the system in order to reform it. And it’s obvious such glaring weaknesses are not tenable.

Here’s the conclusion that emerges: Reform must thwart corruption at both the state and congressional ends. At the state end, one emerging solution in the Senate would trigger heightened judicial review when a state government fails to follow preexisting procedures in appointing electors.

But as noted, a GOP governor could ignore this, and a GOP House could play along. So Seligman suggests a second backstop: In an ECA reform bill, Congress could explicitly direct the Supreme Court to review Congress’ count after the fact, making it less likely to decline to intervene. Other reforms to the state certification process are also worth considering. The imperative is to take potential corruption of the certification of electors seriously.

Meanwhile, at the congressional end, reform must address the other possible scenario floated above: a corrupt House and Senate refusing to count the correct electors sent by a non-corrupt governor and legislature.

Guarding against that requires raising the threshold for Congress to object to and invalidate electors, and making it ironclad that Congress must count electors that were legitimately certified.

Ultimately, getting ECA reform right will require balancing efforts to address all these threats. This is an extremely difficult problem. Some pundits are having a grand old time mocking those who are thinking through such scenarios. Their time would be more productively devoted to figuring out how to fix the system to avert such a meltdown, however unlikely it seems.

I don’t know how likely this is to happen either but I think one of the lessons of the past few years is that the Republicans have been poking at the weaknesses of our electoral system and they have found the holes. Maybe it will take Donald Trump to actually break through but they’re preparing the ground for his attack throughout the country at various levels. I would not be surprised in the least if they attempt this.

We have seen some tepid proposals to fix the ECA from some Republicans so it’s not entirely impossible that the Senate might be able to pass this. Maybe on some level even Mitch McConnell and his henchmen understand just what a threat this is and they will push reforms through. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

I’m not sure if Matt Gaetz will ever be prosecuted for the federal crime for which he’s being investigated, but it’s ongoing and it certainly appears to be serious:

Justice Department investigators have reached a cooperation agreement with a man whose attorney says he witnessed Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) attend parties involving “a whole lot” of sex and drug use — another potential boon to the sprawling and slow-moving sex trafficking investigation into the congressman.

Joseph Ellicott agreed to plead guilty to two federal criminal charges in a case separate from the probe of Gaetz. But Ellicott also has been talking with Justice Department investigators examining whether the congressman committed sex trafficking of a minor, according to court documents and Ellicott’s attorney, Joe Zwick. Ellicott’s plea agreement requires him to cooperate fully with the government as they explore other potential crimes.

Zwick said Ellicott was a friend of a person close to Gaetz, and because of that he attended events or heard conversations involving the congressman that are of interest to investigators. Zwick said those events were “basically like what you’d expect at a college frat party,” adding that Ellicott witnessed “sex, drugs — a whole lot of it.” But he declined to say whether Ellicott personally observed Gaetz using drugs or having or paying for sex, or committing any crimes.

“He observed a lot of behavior that, if anybody saw it, would not think that it was the behavior you would expect from a U.S. congressman,” Zwick said.

Gaetz’s office said in a statement: “After nearly a year of false rumors, not a shred of evidence has implicated Congressman Gaetz in wrongdoing. We remain focused on our work representing Floridians.”A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

Federal prosecutors have been investigating Gaetz for possible sex trafficking for more than a year and lining up possible witnesses, although the congressman has not been charged with any crimes and has repeatedly denied wrongdoing.

In May, prosecutors notably secured a guilty plea from Joel Greenberg, a friend of Gaetz and former Florida tax collector. Law enforcement officials suspect that Greenberg paid women to have sex with the congressman, according to people familiar with the matter, who have spoken on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation. It was in exploring charges against Greenberg, who pleaded guilty to sex trafficking of a minor, that prosecutors came across evidence potentially implicating Gaetz, the people have said.More recently, prosecutors sought testimony before a federal grand jury in Orlando from a former girlfriend of Gaetz’s, people familiar with the matter said.

Zwick said that Ellicott was a friend of Greenberg and that Greenberg hired him to work in the tax collector’s office. Because of that friendship, Zwick said, Ellicott would be invited to parties when Gaetz was in town and Greenberg was trying to impress the lawmaker.

“I would never say Joe and Gaetz were friends, but he was in the room during a lot of the conversations,” Zwick said. He declined to detail those conversations, saying he did not want to interfere with the ongoing investigation.

“He has sat down with investigators to tell what he does know about those details,” Zwick said, adding later, “he was basically a similar witness to Greenberg on a lot of the details.”

This investigation appears to be accelerating. Earlier this month, Gaetz’s ex-girlfriend was reported to have struck a deal and testified before the grand jury. So something is happening. Where it goes, who knows? But I have a feeling that Gaetz will probably successfully fundraise from the allegedly devout Christians of the MAGA right as if he is Christ himself on the cross.

This man is the Florida Surgeon General quack who is providing Ron DeSantis with his anti-vaccine talking points at his confirmation hearing today. You have to watch the whole thing. It is stunning:

This is one of the most pathetic things I've ever seen. Would be hilarious if it wasn't killing people. https://t.co/ZbZ6Cl0oTT

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 26, 2022

The Florida Democrats walked out of the hearing in disgust. The entire GOP caucus confirmed him.

I’m not reflexive Russia antagonist although I don’t think there is any doubt that Vladimir Putin is a corrupt, authoritarian monster with delusions of grandeur. I do believe that invading countries is wrong whether it’s done by the US or anyone else but I’m certainly not pushing for the US to enter a conflict between Russia and Ukraine. At this point I’m just hoping for some kind of rapprochement at the last minute to avoid war.

Having said that, this is nuts:

During the episode of his Monday show, [Tucker] Carlson pondered: “Why is it disloyal to side with Russia but loyal to side with Ukraine?” Three years earlier, Carlson admitted that he is rooting for Russia in its conflict with Ukraine. He said, in part: “Why do I care… what is going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia? And I’m serious. Why do I care? Why shouldn’t I root for Russia, which I am?”

Facing criticism, Carlson walked back his comments and claimed he was “joking.” In 2022, he is unabashedly pushing the talking points favored by the Kremlin and no longer making excuses. Carlson is going so far to support the Russian propaganda narrative that prominent personalities on the Kremlin-funded state television are concerned about his future in the United States. Last Sunday, one of Russia’s most-watched television networks Channel One played the clip from Carlson’s show, where he argued that Russia’s anger at NATO’s alleged involvement in Ukraine was well-justified. Reporter Ivan Blagoy then noted the Fox News host “is predictably being accused of playing along with Moscow.”

Broadcasting the same translated clip of Carlson last week on Russia’s second most-watched TV network, Rossiya-1, host of 60 Minutes Evgeny Popov fawned over Carlson by describing him as one of the “voices of truth and reason” and complained that the host of the most-watched show in all of cable news with millions of viewers is being “silenced and marginalized.” In 2020, Popov demonstrated his affinity for Carlson by introducing him as “practically our co-host.”

Last Wednesday, Russia’s English-language state media outlet RT published an op-ed by Irish commentator Graham Dockery, who marveled: “Once considered a sewer pipe of neoconservative jingoism, Fox News is now anti-war—or at least its top-rated host is… The picture is clear: When it comes to Ukraine, pundits and commentators from the establishment left to the neocon right only disagree on how quickly and strongly the U.S. should wade in to stop a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine. Only Carlson, considered far-right by American liberals, is in complete opposition to U.S. involvement.” RT’s writer complained “the sole anti-war voice on prime-time cable happens to belong to a man whom liberals believe is a “white supremacist,” thus undermining his considerable influence.

That same day, opposing U.S. intervention against Russia’s aggression, Carlson prodded his audiences by claiming: “You are currently funding a proxy battle in Ukraine against the nuclear-armed Russian military and that could very well erupt into a hot war that includes you, the United States.” The tactic of terrorizing American audiences with the possibility of nuclear war, in order to undermine U.S. support for Ukraine, has been repeatedly discussed by experts on Russian state television. Portraying Ukraine as an insignificant country of no importance to the United States—unworthy of such an alleged risk—Carlson derided it as “a small corrupt nation.”

On Thursday, Carlson reiterated the same slight and described Ukraine—the largest state entirely within Europe and the second largest on the continent after Russia—as “a pretty small country.” He added: “Vladimir Putin is our most dangerous enemy, they scream. We can’t let him hurt Ukraine. So it turns out Russiagate was actually more effective even than we’d realize. The Steele dossier has been debunked, but in Washington, the theme remains in force: Russia, Russia, Russia. Russia is bad. What is this about, exactly? Well, obviously it’s the usual collection of children falling for the usual collection of lies, but why this specific lie?” He later added: “You still have to wonder, invasion or not, why is any of this a profound concern of ours? Why would you even consider risking American lives or sending billions of dollars to stop it?”

Predictably, Carlson’s portrayal of Ukraine as a small, corrupt, insignificant nation that is of no consequence to the U.S. is in perfect alignment with the way Russia’s beleaguered neighbor is being smeared on Kremlin-funded state television, in order to humiliate the fledgling democracy and dissuade it from resisting Russian aggression. This Tuesday, 60 Minutes broadcast a string of translated clips from Carlson’s shows on Fox News. Host Popov added: “Indeed, I can imagine a cattle rancher in Montana. What does he care about Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty? The same goes for at least 320 million Americans. The rest might actually be able to find Ukraine on a map.” Popov dismissed the entire population of the United States as being uneducated or indifferent to the fate of Ukraine—or both.

Proving the Russian propagandist at least partially correct, on Monday New Jersey Congressman Tom Malinowski wrote on Twitter: “My office is now getting calls from folks who say they watch Tucker Carlson and are upset that we’re not siding with Russia in its threats to invade Ukraine, and who want me to support Russia’s ‘reasonable’ positions.”

Last summer, Carlson complained about allegedly being “targeted” by the National Security Agency (NSA) for surveillance, as a consequence of his dealings with “U.S.-based Kremlin intermediaries” in his attempt to secure an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The NSA dismissed Carlson’s accusations by saying that the host “has never been an intelligence target,” likely meaning that any collected communications would have been incidental and targeted not him, but his Kremlin contacts. RT seemed to be no less inflamed than Tucker himself, firing out at least 13 articles on that topic.

U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) described RT and its sister network Sputnik as “critical elements in Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.” One of their aims is to promote the idea that the United States should withdraw from its global leadership position, which would enable Russia to pursue its expansionist goals unabated. Carlson’s talking points appear to be fully aligned with the Kremlin’s pursuits, which is why they are frequently praised by the Russian state media.

Earlier in January, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu asserted that “Russia can’t afford to lose the information war” against the West. It certainly doesn’t hurt to have a major media personality broadcasting propaganda that benefits Moscow directly to millions of Americans.

Russian independent television channel Dozhd, also known as TV Rain, noted Carlson’s bizarre fealty to the Kremlin. On Tuesday, host Ekaterina Kotrikadze pointed out: “Tucker Carlson is one of the brightest personalities of the American conservative television channel Fox News. Sometimes it seems that he attends advanced training courses at the Russian Foreign Ministry.”

“Sometimes it seems that he attends advanced training courses at the Russian Foreign Ministry.” Wow…

You can believe that the US should not be intervening in this conflict while not approving of Putin’s move to annex Ukraine or provide talking points for the Putin regime.

It’s not really traitorous to be a fan favorite of Russian state TV, but it sure is weird. I will never get over the fact that the hard right is now consumed by Russophilia. And I am still stunned at just how far Carlson has traveled outside the mainstream of conservative thought to this very, very strange place.

It’s even more stunning that he’s the most popular right wing celebrity on cable news.

<<<shudder>>>

Stephen Breyer has agreed to step down and let the Democrats replace him. Hallelujah. Biden has promised to appoint a Black woman to the high court and he has an embarrassment of riches from which to choose. There are many, many highly qualified, exceptional such people available.

Assuming that Manchin and Sinema don’t decide to use this as another opportunity to preen and pose, the Democrats have the votes and the new Justice will be confirmed. It remains to be seen if the Senate wingnuts want to make a spectacle out of it in payback for Kavanaugh but it won’t matter in the end.

Ian MiIlhiser at Vox did a retrospective on Breyer that’s worth reading in full. I thought this look back at the bygone era when Breyer was confirmed was particularly interesting:

The story of how Stephen Breyer came to the Court is a reminder of how our politics has changed over the past generation. Nearly three decades ago, Democratic President Bill Clinton and Sen. Orrin Hatch, then the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, had a phone conversation. As Hatch recounted in his autobiography, it was 1993, and Justice Byron White had just announced his retirement. Clinton wanted Hatch’s thoughts on who he should nominate to replace White. And Hatch — here’s the part that is unimaginable in today’s Republican Party — offered two entirely reasonable suggestions to the new president.

Clinton, Hatch told him, should consider nominating Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Stephen Breyer, both federal appellate judges at the time. According to Hatch, the future justices “were highly honest and capable jurists” and “far better than the other likely candidates from a liberal Democrat administration.”

Hatch’s praise for Ginsburg may surprise modern-day readers, who know her as feminist icon the Notorious RBG. But at the time, Ginsburg was widely regarded as a moderate, center-left judge who had even criticized the Supreme Court’s abortion rights decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) for trying to do too much, too fast.

Hatch’s respect for Breyer, meanwhile, was undoubtedly shaped by the future justice’s tenure as a senior aide to Sen. Ted Kennedy.

As one of Kennedy’s top lieutenants on the Judiciary Committee, Breyer formed an unusually close working relationship with his Republican counterpart, minority counsel, and future federal judge Emory Sneeden, recalled Kenneth Feinberg, who worked with Breyer on Kennedy’s staff, in a tribute years ago. Breyer’s children played with the children of Sen. Strom Thurmond, the ranking Republican on the committee.

Breyer arrived at the Senate as a neoliberal consensus was starting to form between the two parties — he helped shepherd legislation deregulating the airline industry, a project that was popular with Republicans skeptical of government power.

The result was that, when a lame-duck President Jimmy Carter nominated Breyer for a seat on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in 1980, Breyer enjoyed broad support even among Republican senators. Breyer was confirmed 80-10, even though Republicans could have filled the seat with one of their own if they’d only waited until Ronald Reagan’s inauguration.

Breyer, who is 83 years old and has served on the Supreme Court since 1994, represents one of the few remaining bridges to an era when meaningful bipartisan consensus was possible and personal relationships could sometimes overcome the drive for partisan advantage. And for many years on the Supreme Court, Breyer played a similar role to the one he played on the Senate Judiciary Committee — quietly hashing out compromises even as the political landscape tilted against his party.

Unfortunately, Breyer’s memories of a bygone age also left him somewhat naïve to what his Court — and American politics more generally — has now become. Many Democrats spent the first half of 2021 pleading with Breyer to retire while his party still controlled both the White House and the Senate, and thus could confirm a replacement. But Breyer initially rebuffed these calls, suggesting that if he timed his retirement to ensure a Democratic replacement, that would needlessly politicize the Court.

As the justice wrote in a 2021 book, “If the public comes to see judges as merely ‘politicians in robes,’” then “its confidence in the courts, and in the rule of law itself, can only decline.”

In any event, Breyer’s decision to retire now must come as a relief to Democrats, who’ve watched the Court become something where the kind of bipartisan deals Breyer remembers so fondly are rarely, if ever, possible. With Ginsburg’s death in September 2020 — and her replacement with the conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett — Breyer leaves a Court with a 6-3 conservative majority, one that shows far less inclination toward compromise than the Court Breyer served on for most of his time as a justice.

It’s past time for a changing of the guard. This is a new era and the liberal justices are almost exclusively going to make their marks dissenting from the majority for the foreseeable future. Compromises are off the table. Hopefully one of the exceptional women he chooses will be well suited for that role.

The FDA has announced that two of the monoclonal antibody treatments that have been useful in treating COVID are not effective in treating the omicron variant, so the government is no longer going to be distributing those treatments. That sounds quite reasonable, right? You don’t want to be giving people treatments that you know don’t work. That would be malpractice.

So naturally, Donald Trump’s mini-me, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, is having a fit over the decision. After all, DeSantis clearly thought he figured out a cunning way to avoid pushing the vaccines and angering the GOP’s rabid anti-vax base while still pretending to offer some solution to the raging pandemic. His entire COVID response has been based upon the idea that the monoclonal antibody treatments are the answer. The fact that vaccines offer the best protection against serious disease in the first place was never of interest to DeSantis. Neither was the fact that monoclonal antibody treatments cost around $2,100. Vaccines, meanwhile, cost about $20-$40. For supposed fiscally conservative Republicans, that’s quite a waste of government money.

DeSantis’ plan was always a little too cute by half and it didn’t work very well as a medical intervention. But as a political strategy, it was quite effective.

Building on his months-long crusade against masks and mitigation efforts he began whining about the federal government’s alleged unfair distribution of the treatments back in September when the Delta variant was still raging. There were plenty of the treatments available but he got tons of praise from the right-wing media anyway and further established his MAGA bonafide. Then in December, the National Institute of Health (NIH) discovered that the treatments were not working against the omicron variant so they advised the government to pause its distribution. Once again DeSantis and company went ballistic, ostentatiously pounding their chests and insisting that the federal government was denying the people of Florida their life-saving treatments. At the time, Delta still made up about 25% of cases so the feds relented and resumed distribution to Florida. Today, omicron makes up 99% of the cases in the U.S. and these treatments remain ineffective against it. Even the pharmaceutical manufacturers who make them agree:

As the DeSantis administration rails against the FDA decision to limit use of monoclonal antibody treatments made by Regeneron and Eli Lilly, worth noting both companies say they agree with the feds that these drugs aren’t effective against omicron.

Regeneron left, Lilly right: https://t.co/3QWxqDC4zC pic.twitter.com/3vDj4ojWjm

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) January 25, 2022

As you can see, DeSantis insists that “there is no clinical evidence” that it doesn’t work as if that has some relevance. Scientists all over the world have come to the same conclusion. As the Washington Post reported, studies in December showed the therapies were ineffective. Scientists at Columbia University working with the University of Hong Kong came to the same conclusion as did German researchers. A more recent study showed that the Regeneron and Eli Lilly therapies “completely lost neutralizing activity against” omicron and “also lacked inhibitory capacity.” The NIH and the FDA, which have a responsibility to ensure that drugs do more good than harm, have both looked at the data and concluded the same thing. In other words, they don’t work.

Nonetheless, DeSantis made the daft claim that some people who are taking the drugs are getting better. Of course they are! Most people who get COVID get better. That doesn’t prove that the treatments are the reason. What it does prove is that people are getting pumped full of expensive, experimental drugs they don’t need — which considering that many of them are among the stubbornly unvaccinated is enough to make you reach for the cheap tequila.

This is nothing new. The Republicans have been pushing ineffective cures from the very beginning of this pandemic. From Hydroxychloroquine to Ivermectin to ingesting disinfectant, bathing in bleach and now drinking urine, they’ve willingly tried it all — except the safe and available vaccines which have been proven to drastically reduce your chances of getting seriously ill.

For all of Desantis’ cheap political caterwauling, there are still plenty of therapeutics being sent to Florida. According to the Miami Herald, while the state will no longer receive the Regeneron and Eli Lilly treatments, the state will get “3,200 doses of the monoclonal antibody manufactured by Sotrovimab; about 4,700 doses of AstraZeneca’s Evusheld treatment meant for high-risk patients and some 26,000 total doses of antiviral pills developed by Merck and Pfizer.” And there is an ample supply of cheap vaccines if anyone chooses to be sane enough to get a couple of simple shots and save themselves the trouble.

Despite all that, DeSantis moved quickly to cover his error in putting all his eggs in the monoclonal antibody basket by going on the offensive. He claimed that the president “has forced medical pros to choose treating their patients or breaking the law” and that Floridians’ “access to treatment shouldn’t be denied at the whims of a floundering president.” His spokesperson retweeted a post by a right wing conspiracy pusher that said “the FDA is trying to make it so that people in Florida die of COVID. They’ll kill people to harm Republicans.” It was quite a performance.

Naturally, the oleaginous Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, got in on the act:

The Biden admin’s track record on COVID is a disgrace. After months of rationing critical antibody treatments, they now entirely pulled the approvals.

Biden needs to put patients first and stop politicizing medicine.

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) January 25, 2022

Cruz has always trafficked in this smarmy, patently obvious sanctimony but Desantis does it better. He combines that with the phony outrage, the histrionic battling with the federal government, the fist shaking and tremulous defenses of the regular folks in the natural voice of a demagogue. He has that knack of being aggressively shameless that the American right just loves so much.

It will be interesting to see how DeSantis’ former mentor down the road in Palm Beach deals with this. Donald Trump blasted those who refuse to admit if they got the booster — DeSantis being the most prominent — for being “gutless” and has, on occasion promoted the vaccines in his ongoing quest to be given personal credit for inventing them. But he also received the monoclonal antibody treatment under a very special dispensation when he had COVID and promised to ensure that every American had access to them — a promise he never fulfilled because he was so busy lying about the election results. Who knows where he will land?

The word is that Trump has been frustrated with DeSantis for failing to show proper deference by promising not to run against him in a primary in 2024. But he may just let this one go since the latest polling shows him running 45 points ahead of his former protege in a primary match up, 57-12. Those numbers have been unchanged for months. As New York Magazine’s Ed Kilgore observes, “if two impeachments and a failed insurrection haven’t shoved him toward the dustbin of history, will Ron DeSantis?”

I don’t think so. And all of the clever positioning to Trump’s right or left, insulting Joe Biden and catering to the anti-vax MAGA faithful on COVID isn’t going to change that. It’s Trump’s base now — all the rest of the GOP presidential hopefuls are just wallowing in it. 

Salon

More than U.S. politics and President Joe Biden’s agenda were on the line in the intraparty fight to pass Build Back Better. The Guardian reports that Sen. Joe Manchin has made himself something of a global pariah:

“He’s a villain, he’s a threat to the globe,” said Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, based in Bangladesh. “If you talk to the average citizen in Dhaka, they will know who Joe Manchin is. The level of knowledge of American politics here is absolutely amazing, we know about the filibuster and the Senate and so on.

“What the Americans do or don’t do on climate will impact the world and it’s incredible that this one coal lobbyist is holding things up. It will cause very bad consequences for us in Bangladesh, unfortunately.”

There are more aware of what American failure to lead on address climate change means:

“I’ve been following the situation closely,” said Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, a low-lying Pacific nation that risks being wiped out by rising sea levels. “We have to halve emissions in this decade and can’t do it without strong, immediate action by the US.”

Stege said the Marshall Islands was already suffering the impacts of the climate crisis and if the US doesn’t slash its emissions “the outcomes for countries like mine are unthinkable.”

Maserati Joe may not be vacationing abroad anytime soon:

“Who is Manchin, the Dem senator from West Virginia who betrayed Biden?” La Repubblica in Italy has demanded. Clarín, a newspaper in Argentina, has called Manchin a “rebelde” and a “tycoon with ties to the mining structure of West Virginia, the other Virginia of the USA”. Helsingin Sanomat, a Finnish newspaper, also noted Manchin’s links to the fossil fuel industry and lamented that he has “disagreed with the most ambitious climate action” put forward by the US.

Rachel Kyte, a Tufts University climate adviser to the UN secretary general, sees Manchin as a feature of a wider problem (a Senate that favors rural-state Republicans?):

Manchin is, in some respects, a “fall guy” for a deeper American political dysfunction over the climate crisis, Kyte said. “If Republicans weren’t in the lock-grip of certain vested interests, if they had a policy on climate adaptation or green jobs for the future, Joe Manchin wouldn’t have the influence he has,” she said.

“Joe Manchin has become the personification of a problem and removing him doesn’t solve it,” Kyte added. “It doesn’t give us a bipartisan agreement of the danger we are in. A political culture that allows you to enrich yourself and your family from industries you regulate and not declare a conflict of interest lies beyond Joe Manchin, it’s bigger than just him.”

“Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us” by Brian Klaas examines that issue. Does power corrupt? Or are corrupt people attracted to power? Or do corrupt systems corrupt good people? Yes, yes, and yes, answers Klaas. Plus, and our still-stone-age brains attract us to leadership characteristics that no longer provide the evolutionary advantage they did 10,000 years ago. Klaas suggests tweaks to how organizations might better attract and select less-corruptible police officers, executives, and politicians, but few plans for how to build a constituency for implementing those changes.

Making us our worst enemies, choosing the Manchins of the world over those better-suited to governance in an age in which our choices in this hemisphere affect not just constituents in West Virginia but across the planet.

Images of human sacrifice have long danced in our heads. Think Abraham and Isaac, Jesus on the cross, the Aztecs, Faye Raye and King Kong, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. But seeing voluntary and “voluntary” human sacrifice occur on a mass scale seemed something out of the history of exotic, remote cultures until the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, one group in our society has, as Jaws‘ Matt Hooper suggested of Amity beachgoers, lined up to be the virus’ hot lunch. Those would be Republicans.

Kurt Andersen writes in The Atlantic that he came to the same conclusion upon seeing a graph generated by Duke University sociologist Kieran Healy that plotted the number of COVID deaths by the degree of Republicanism in the country’s 3,000-plus counties:

In the reddest counties—those where 70 percent or more voted for Trump—the COVID death rates from last June through November were five or six times the death rates in places at the other end of the political scale. And step by step up the blue-to-red scale, the statistical correlation is amazingly consistent—the more Republican your county, the more likely you are to die of COVID.

Through 2020, most of us had little beside masks and isolation for protection. But when by the summer of 2021 vaccines were readily available, protection was there, for free, for the willing. Under the new Biden administration, however, those who bought Donald Trump’s stolen-election lie demonstrated fealty to Trump by rejecting vaccinations and masks in the name of freedom. Refusal, even at the risk of death, became a badge of belonging, of obesisance to their lord and of rejection of the “Democrat” usurper.

The Kaiser Family Foundation found that counting only the “COVID-19 deaths [that] could have been prevented by vaccination,” 163,000 Americans died, Andersen writes, “unnecessarily and avoidably” from last June through November.

Andersen was not the first to invoke mass human sacrifice. Metaphorical references were already in the air. Early in the pandemic, then-president Trump balked at shutting down businesses to control the spread of the deadly virus he was at the time downplaying. “We can’t let the cure be worse than the problem,” Trump said as he sent workers deemed essential, but expendable to their deaths in meat-packing plants. Faced with a viral version of the “trolley problem,” as an American conservative, you save the trolley company. Referencing conservatives whose first duty was to the economy rather than to human life, I posted the Moloch scene from Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis in which workers march to their deaths in the angry god’s fiery maw.

In exploring the history of human sacrifice in scientific research, Andersen found several common features that correspond eerily to our present situation. But aside from social conditions, social stress, and religious elements, there was a political element:

A long-standing theory of human sacrifice, the “social-control hypothesis,” has argued that social elites used it to keep the hoi polloi subservient. But the evidence was scattered and anecdotal, untested by the most rigorous modern scholarship. One big question: What distinguished the cultures that practiced human sacrifice from those that did not? Thanks to a massive historical database of the social and genetic particulars of a hundred traditional societies spread over a sixth of the planet, from the eastern Pacific to Australia and East Asia, in 2016 we got one definitive answer: “Ritual human sacrifice,” an official summary of the research said, “played a central role in helping those at the top of the social hierarchy maintain power over those at the bottom.”

Researchers from the University of Auckland, Australia’s Victoria University, and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History categorized 93 Austronesian societies, 40 of which practiced human sacrifice, according to three levels of socioeconomic fairness—from most egalitarian, where children didn’t inherit wealth or status from parents, to totally nonegalitarian, where children could acquire wealth and status only by inheritance. The results are stark: The less fair a society’s socioeconomic system was, the more likely it was to practice human sacrifice—67 percent of the least egalitarian societies versus only 25 percent of the most egalitarian and 37 percent of those in the middle. More specifically, the researchers wrote, “human sacrifice substantially increased the chances of high social stratification arising,” “increased the rate at which” those societies “gain high social stratification,” and “stabilizes social stratification once stratification has arisen.”

For his part, Trump eventually relented on vaccines, at least. He wants credit for their development and to set himself apart from rival Ron DeSantis. Plus, it dawned on him that vaccine refusal was a losing get-out-the-vote strategy for 2024:

For the past six years, few of his masses of fervent supporters—whether evangelical or irreligious—have objected much to any particular Trump heresy or inconsistency. Indeed, his extreme unpredictability is part of the show. And as he considers running for president in 2024, he must be acutely aware that his margins of victory and loss in 2016 and 2020 were mere thousands of votes in a few states, and that his voters are disproportionately the ones now being sacrificed.

Trump may not be smart, but he is calculating in a feral way as opposed to a “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” way, speaking of social control. He is at best a wannabe autocrat. The real deals are in the wings, waiting.

I wrote about that crazy White House meeting with Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn and the former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne in December of 2020 earlier this week and the question of who wrote that infamous memo calling for a special counsel and deploying the military to seize the voting machines was still very much in question. As of today, the natural suspects all seem to be running for this hills although it’s pretty obvious that Powell was very much involved:

In late 2020, a collective of Donald Trump’s most extreme election-deadenders, led by MAGA attorney Sidney Powell and Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, were loudly telling anyone who would listen—the media, judges, local Republican politicians, and (of course) Trump himself—about their ludicrous plot to deploy the troops, seize U.S. voting machines, and keep then-President Trump in power.

If there was a wild, baseless conspiracy theory about the 2020 presidential election that was animating Trump at the time and fueling his crusade, these MAGA diehards were standing at the ready, prepared to publicly take credit for pushing these ideas and written proposals to the highest levels of government, and getting it in Trump’s ear. And they were prepared to slag any of the Trump administration who stood in their way.

But a year later, as the investigations and lawsuits further intensify, with the subpoenas flying and the legal bills soaring, the Trumpist gang is taking a curious approach to a newly published draft of the Trump executive-order outlining their brazenly authoritarian blueprint.

They now want absolutely nothing to do with it.

In fact, they claim, they don’t even recognize the document, even though it mirrors (almost to a T) the plans they once openly championed.

“I do not recognize it and neither does General [Michael] Flynn,” former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who worked as part of the small group of Trump confidants and associates advising the then-president on seizing machines, told The Daily Beast.

“It is not what we brought over [to Trump] on December 18, [2020],” Byrne added.

A source close to Flynn corroborated that the former Trump national security adviser is privately telling people that he doesn’t recognize the order, a document that is now figuring prominently into the U.S. House’s investigation into the deadly Jan. 6 riot and the lead-up to it. Flynn’s brother, Joseph, who acts as a de facto spokesman for the former top Trump lieutenant, also said he “agree[s] with Mike and Pat,” and claimed not to recognize the text of the order.

The ongoing game of hot potato over the draft EO, with the would-be coup participants all invoking the Shaggy defense, underscores a nagging mystery that investigators on the congressional Jan. 6 committee and lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been trying to solve: Who, exactly, wrote the order for Trump, and what other related schemes did the then-president, along with his aides and cronies, work to turn into reality?

[…]

The identity of the memo’s true author has remained an unsolved mystery even at the upper echelons of Trumpland, and also at its influential peripheries.

In December 2020, Lin Wood, another MAGA lawyer who had worked closely with Powell and at times briefed then-President Trump, had also urged Trump to “exercise his executive power to direct US Marshals to impound voting machines used in [the] 11/3 election.”

When asked last week if he had any hand in writing the draft order, or if he knew who did, Wood tersely replied: “I had no involvement,” adding that he could only “speculate” who was—but declined to do so.

On Monday, Politico reported that Bernie Kerik, who was on the Trump legal team that tried to steal the election from Joe Biden, claimed to the Jan. 6 committee that “former Army colonel Phil Waldron first came up with the idea of Trump issuing an executive order to seize voting machines,” but did not identify the author.

Four sources directly involved with the Trump team during the tumultuous presidential transition told The Daily Beast they could not independently confirm who wrote it… However, each of the four sources said they had assumed it was from Powell at the time, given she was the main driver behind such ideas as commandeering the machines and getting Trump to appoint her his new White House “special counsel” on election-fraud conspiracy theories.

“The president knows this election was stolen but he is not getting the support he, the Constitution, and the republic deserve,” Powell told the Washington Examiner in December 2020—while also claiming credit for groundless theories that China and Iran hacked the election in Biden’s favor. “His own people are misleading and undermining him while protecting their own careers and agendas.”

Powell also insisted, “I have been blocked by White House counsel and others from seeing or speaking to the president since I raised the public formal findings” during the now-infamous Dec. 18 White House gathering. At that meeting, Flynn, Powell, Byrne, and former Trump administration attorney Emily Newman huddled with Trump specifically to discuss their conspiracy-theory-fueled ideas for “investigating” the 2020 election results, rounding up voting machines by force, and illegitimately keeping the 45th U.S. president in office.

Nowadays, Powell—much like her ex-comrades—is slinking away from her plan and “formal findings.” The hardliner MAGA attorney, as well as her own lawyer, did not respond to The Daily Beast’s repeated queries about whether or not she wrote the draft executive-order. Currently, Powell is still dealing with the legal fallout from her efforts, including potentially devastating lawsuits and the heat of a federal investigation.[…]

The assumption that Powell wrote the blatantly anti-democratic missive for Trump—or at least that she had some hand in its distribution within the last administration—could of course end up being wrong. But as independent researchers have pointed out, the document reported on by Politico shares a number of similarities to one published to Powell’s PDF-hosting account on Scribd in December, which has since been removed.

The memo hosted on Powell’s Scribd account is branded as a summary that “established ‘foreign interference” in the United States 2020 elections as defined in [Executive Order] 13848” and is dated December 22—a week after the draft executive order obtained by Politico is dated.

Both memos cite the same passages of a Georgia judge’s ruling in a lawsuit over ballot marking software in Dominion Voting Systems machines, a since-debunked Antrim County, Michigan “forensic report” compiled by the firm Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG), which falsely claimed that Dominion Voting Systems had purposely designed their voting machines to miscalculate vote tallies.

In other places, the two documents share the same exact language while trying to paint Dominion Voting Systems as a stalking horse for foreign adversaries. In one paragraph which appears verbatim in both the draft executive order and Scribd memo, the authors strain to use Dominion’s sale of intellectual property to HSBC, a British bank with a branch in China—in an attempt to establish a nonexistent link between the voting technology firm and the Chinese government…

I made it clear in my piece that it’s obvious Powell and Flynn were involved. Maybe this Colonel Waldron was involved too. But there is still an unanswered question about all of it. It mentions a classified Trump Executive Order that was not public at the time.

So who was helping these people who had a security clearance?

All day I’ve been hearing people speculating that Russia might take down the electric grid or otherwise initiate a cyber attack if this Ukraine crisis escalates. But who needs Russia?

Domestic violent extremists and racially motivated extremists have been developing plans to attack the U.S. electric sector, according to an intelligence bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security that was issued this week and obtained by The Daily Beast.

“DVEs have developed credible, specific plans to attack electricity infrastructure since at least 2020, identifying the electric grid as a particularly attractive target given its interdependency with other infrastructure sectors,” the alert said.

DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis issued the alert to the electric sector Monday, following requests from power companies to take stock of increased threats from domestic violent extremists in 2020 and 2021.

The alert comes as DHS and federal investigators strain to keep up with the threat of domestic violent extremists, and continue to work to charge participants in the Jan. 6 insurrection. The head of DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis John Cohen told lawmakers in recent testimony that, nearly one year after the riot on Capitol Hill, the threat landscape from domestic violent extremists “is one of the most complex, volatile, and dynamic that I’ve experienced in my career.”

DHS has been buckling down on efforts to share more intelligence on domestic violent extremism with the private sector and state and local partners, according to Cohen. Over the last year and a half, the FBI has been pushing more resources to domestic terrorism investigations. And the FBI has more than doubled its domestic terrorism caseload since spring of 2020, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray.

White supremacists expressed interest in “wreaking havoc” on the power grid if President Donald Trump were to lose re-election in 2020. And last year, four men with ties to racially motivated extremists were charged with conspiracy to damage the property of an energy facility in the United States, after using assault-style rifles in an attempt to explode a power substation.

It is interesting that according to Tucker Carlson, the flag waving right is actually on Russia’s side in its unprovoked invasion of its neighbor so maybe they are allies?

We are in a very unstable moment for a lot of different reasons. This is one of them and it’s not reassuring.