Month: March 2022

So the congress is happy to budget over 800 billion for next year’s defense budget but they are haggling over this? Really?

Senate Democrats and Republicans neared agreement on Thursday to slash an emergency coronavirus response package to $10 billion from $15.6 billion, as they worked to break a logjam over a stalled package of federal money urgently requested by President Biden for vaccines, therapeutics and preparation against future variants.

The day after Mr. Biden pleaded with Congress to approve the money, senators were discussing removing as much as $5 billion in aid for the global vaccination effort as they scrambled to resolve disputes over how to finance the package. Republicans have refused to devote any new funding to the federal pandemic response effort, arguing that unspent money that has already been approved should be used, but the two parties have been unable to agree on which programs should be tapped.

Without that consensus, it was not clear that they would have the votes to move forward in the evenly divided Senate, where 60 votes — including at least 10 Republicans — would be needed.

The package now under consideration would be less than half the White House’s original $22.5 billion request.

I feel like I’m losing my mind. Cutting global vaccination efforts when the virus is still evolving? Are they crazy?

I can’t believe they haven’t signed a blank check to vaccinate the world and keep the virus under control in the US, not to mention preparing for the inevitable next pandemic. What in the world are these people thinking? Are we just going to accept millions of deaths on an ongoing basis? Looks like it.

Apparently, quite a few people think it is. Or, at least, they think that people are lying about it and employers should let them:

Two-thirds of U.S. adults say that most people who claim religious objections to a COVID-19 vaccine are “just using religion as an excuse to avoid the vaccine,” according to a new Pew Research Center survey. About a third (31%) say they think the objectors “sincerely believe getting a COVID-19 vaccine is against their religion.”

At the same time, most Americans do not think those with religious objections to the COVID-19 vaccine – regardless of the sincerity of their beliefs – should lose their jobs. A majority of adults (65%) say employers that require coronavirus vaccinations should “allow employees who have religious objections to keep their jobs even if they decline to get the vaccine.” 

Ok. Basically 65% think employers shouldn’t have the right to mandate vaccines, at all. I say that because just allowing people to lie about their religious beliefs but forcing everyone else to get vaccinated makes no sense. (Either that or about half of them are totally incoherent.)

If I caught COVID and got sick or brought it home to a vulnerable person in my life I would be very angry at a co-worker who lied about having a religious exemption and refused to get the vaccine. But that’s just me, I guess. I feel very sorry for people who have to put up with this irresponsible behavior.

Trans people are our neighbors, family, friends and colleagues—they deserve to live with dignity and be treated fairly in every part of life. Today we celebrate and stand in solidarity with the transgender community as we continue the long march toward equality. https://t.co/jfa8RKZnzY

— Secretary Deb Haaland (@SecDebHaaland) March 31, 2022

This is good:

It’s not a fad or some trend. I’ve known trans people since the 1970s. They are the bravest people I’ve ever known. It’s long past time for the mainstream to stop gawking and accept something that is clearly just another part of human experience.

I will never understand why people are so intolerant of other people’s gender or sexual identity. What’s it to them? I just don’t get it.

The Washington Post is on the trail of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal:

Thousands of emails purportedly from the laptop computer of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, are authentic communications that can be verified through cryptographic signatures from Google and other technology companies, say two security experts who examined the data at the request of The Washington Post.

Oh no! That sounds really bad. Hunter Biden’s laptop is for real and it must have a bunch of incriminating information, right?

The verifiable emails are a small fraction of 217 gigabytes of data provided to The Post on a portable hard drive by Republican activist Jack Maxey. He said the contents of the portable drive originated from Hunter Biden’s MacBook Pro, which Hunter reportedly dropped off at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Del., in April 2019 and never reclaimed.

Hmmm. That seems odd. What accounts for that?

The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post. Neither found clear evidence of tampering in their examinations, but some of the records that might have helped verify contents were not available for analysis, they said. The Post was able in some instances to find documents from other sources that matched content on the laptop that the experts were not able to assess.Advertisement

Among the reasons for the inconclusive findings was sloppy handling of the data, which damaged some records. The experts found the data had been repeatedly accessed and copied by people other than Hunter Biden over nearly three years. The MacBook itself is now in the hands of the FBI, which is investigating whether Hunter Biden properly reported income from business dealings.

Most of the data obtained by The Post lacks cryptographic features that would help experts make a reliable determination of authenticity, especially in a case where the original computer and its hard drive are not available for forensic examination. Other factors, such as emails that were only partially downloaded, also stymied the security experts’ efforts to verify content.

Well I guess that proves that the laptop is a smoking gun that show Joe Biden is a crook, amirite? Well, except for the fact that “the data had been repeatedly accessed and copied by people other than Hunter Biden over nearly three years…” I wonder what that’s all about?

Many Republicans have portrayed this data as offering evidence of misbehavior by Hunter Biden that implicated his father in scandal, while Democrats have dismissed it as probable disinformation, perhaps pushed by Russian operatives acting in a well-documented effort to undermine the elder Biden. Facebook and Twitter in 2020 restricted distribution of stories about the drive’s contents out of concern that the revelations might have resulted from a nefarious hacking campaign intended to upend the election, much as Russian hacks of sensitive Democratic Party emails shaped the trajectory of the 2016 election.

The Washington Post’s forensic findings are unlikely to resolve that debate, offering instead only the limited revelation that some of the data on the portable drive appears to be authentic. The security experts who examined the data for The Post struggled to reach definitive conclusions about the contents as a whole, including whether all of it originated from a single computer or could have been assembled from files from multiple computers and put on the portable drive.

You don’t say? How could that happen?

Anyway, what’s in the emails they could verify?

The verified emails cover a time period from 2009 to 2019, when Hunter Biden was acting as a consultant to companies from China and Ukraine, and exploring opportunities in several other countries. His father was vice president from 2009 to 2017.

Many of the nearly 22,000 verified emails were routine messages, such as political newsletters, fundraising appeals, hotel receipts, news alerts, product ads, real estate listings and notifications related to his daughters’ schools or sports teams. There was also a large number of bank notifications, with about 1,200 emails from Wells Fargo alone.

Other emails contained exchanges with Hunter Biden’s business partners, personal assistants or members of his family. Some of these emails appear to offer insights into deals he developed and money he was paid for business activities that opponents of his father’s bid for the presidency sought to make a campaign issue in 2020.

In particular, there are verified emails illuminating a deal Hunter Biden developed with a fast-growing Chinese energy conglomerate, CEFC China Energy, for which he was paid nearly $5 million, and other business relationships. Those business dealings are the subject of a separate Washington Post story published at the same time as this one on the forensic examinations of the drive.

The drive also includes some verified emails from Hunter Biden’s work with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company for which he was a board member. President Donald Trump’s efforts to tie Joe Biden to the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma led to Trump’s first impeachment trial, which ended in acquittal in February 2020.

The Post’s review of these emails found that most were routine communications that provided little new insight into Hunter Biden’s work for the company.

That comes over a dozen paragraphs into the story.

Then they go into the story of the laptop which Hunter Biden allegedly abandoned and which the shop owner turned over to the FBI when he heard the rightwing screeching about Hunter Biden and then kept a copy of the hard drive for his own protection which he eventually turned over to Rudy Giuliani which sounds totally legit.

As does this:

In June 2021, Maxey, who previously worked as a researcher for Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, delivered to The Washington Post a portable hard drive that he said contained the data. He said he had obtained it from Giuliani.

Responding to findings from news organizations that some material on the drive could be corroborated, Mac Isaac said in a statement: “I am relieved that finally, after 18 months of being persecuted and attacked for my actions, the rest of the country is starting to open their eyes.”

In a nutshell:

In their examinations, Green and Williams found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.

Maxey had alerted The Washington Post to this issue in advance, saying that others had accessed the data to examine its contents and make copies of files. But the lack of what experts call a “clean chain of custody” undermined Green’s and Williams’s ability to determine the authenticity of most of the drive’s contents.

“The drive is a mess,” Green said.

That assessment was echoed by Williams.

“From a forensics standpoint, it’s a disaster,” Williams said. (The Post is paying Williams for the professional services he provided. Green declined payment.)

But both Green and Williams agreed on the authenticity of the emails that carried cryptographic signatures, though there was variation in which emails Green and Williams were able to verify using their forensic tools. The most reliable cryptographic signatures, they said, came from leading technology companies such as Google, which alone accounted for more than 16,000 of the verified emails.

Neither expert reported finding evidence that individual emails or other files had been manipulated by hackers, but neither was able to rule out that possibility.

They also noted that while cryptographic signatures can verify that an email was sent from a particular account, they cannot verify who controlled that account when the email was sent. Hackers sometimes create fake email accounts or gain access to authentic ones as part of disinformation campaigns — a possibility that cannot be ruled out with regard to the email files on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Williams wrote in his technical report that timestamps on a sampling of documents and operating system indexes he examined were consistent with each other, suggesting the authenticity of at least some of the files that lacked cryptographic signatures. But he and Green agreed that sophisticated hackers could have altered the drive’s contents, including timestamps, in a way difficult and perhaps impossible to detect through forensic examination alone.

Analysis was made significantly more difficult, both experts said, because the data had been handled repeatedly in a manner that deleted logs and other files that forensic experts use to establish a file’s authenticity.

“No evidence of tampering was discovered, but as noted throughout, several key pieces of evidence useful in discovering tampering were not available,” Williams’ reports concluded.

Keep in mind that this is supposed to prove that Joe Biden was selling out the country for millions. Yes, that’s what they are saying.

But judging from the cable news media, this story will have legs anyway. It doesn’t matter that it’s completely bullshit.

It’s “butheremails” all over again.

The Republicans are nervous about Rick Scott’s “agenda” being publicized because they know it would be tremendously unpopular. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t their agenda or that they won’t try to pass it if they win.

Jon Skolnik at Salon reports that Scott thinks he’s US Grant. He should be George Pickett with this thing, but who knows?

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., on Thursday compared himself to the union general and former President Ulysses S. Grant in defense of his much-reviled “11-point plan to rescue America,” calling himself an “outsider” who will do whatever it takes to push his agenda forward. 

“I think of myself more like Grant taking Vicksburg, and I think as a result of that, I’m always going to be perceived as an outsider,” Scott told the Associated Press. “I’m going to keep doing what I believe in whether everybody agrees with me or not.” 

Despite receiving considerable pushback from his GOP colleagues, Scott has continued to advocate for a right-wing agenda that clarifies what Republicans stand for. His plan includes provisions like completing Trump’s now-abandoned border wall; limiting federal workers to twelve years of service; providing foreign aid to “countries that are willing to defend themselves, like Israel”; requiring that all children to say the Pledge of Allegiance and stand for the National Anthem; and ending the practice of racial and ethic disclosures on government forms.  

“Hopefully, by doing this, we’ll have more of a conversation about what Republicans are going to get done. Because when we get the majority, I want to get something done,” Scott said in a February interview with Politico. “There’s things that people would rather not talk about. I’m willing to say exactly what I’m going to do. I think it’s fair to the voter.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., by contrast, has insisted that the GOP refrain from spelling out a concrete agenda ahead of this year’s midterms, instead opting to pick apart any action items the Democrats have and will put forward. McConnell made this clear during a private function with Republican donors and lawmakers back in December, according to Axios. 

According to the non-partisan Institution on Taxation and Economic Policy (Itep) Scott’s plan “would increase taxes by more than $1,000 on average for the poorest 40% of Americans.”

Still, Scott has seen praise from a small contingent of Beltway Republicans who stand in support of a more forthright messaging strategy. 

Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., who recently suggested the Supreme Court was wrong to legalize same-sex marriage, defended Scott’s platform in an interview with the Associated Press, arguing that Republican voters need to know what they’re voting for – not just against. 

Republicans should “stake a little ground out that gives independents who elect swing-state senators and the president something other than the party of ‘No,'” Braun said.

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, also gave Scott plaudits, saying that the GOP’s current debate about taxes is “not an honest conversation.”

Hopefully the Democrats will make sure that the voters know about this but you never know. They seem to be completely on the defensive about everything so it’s possible they won’t even bother to mention this because it might interfere with their message of defeatism. But still, it’s just lying there if they want to take it up.

Since July 2021, Biden job approval among whites has gone from 50% to 40%. Among Blacks, it has gone from 88% to 56%. Among Hispanics, it’s gone from 56% to 51%. @pollsandvotes points to the decline among Blacks as particularly striking. #mulawpoll

— MULawPoll (@MULawPoll) March 31, 2022

People seem to be extremely unhappy with Joe Biden. He is loathed by a large majority on every issue.

I’m sure the Republican party and President Trump or DeSantis will be a big improvement. They’ll get right on the biggest problems we face: critical race theory, transgender women in sports and banning “Covid theatre.” Oh, and making sure Hunter Biden faces life in prison and the 2020 election is re-litigated forever.

The latest Q Poll shows that people hold him responsible for everything from the war in Ukraine to male pattern baldness:

More than a month after Russia invaded Ukraine, inflation eclipses the war in Ukraine as the nation’s most urgent issue. Americans say inflation (30 percent) is the most urgent issue facing the country today, followed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (14 percent), and then immigration (9 percent), according to a Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pea-ack) University national poll of adults released today.

There are large differences along party lines. Among Republicans, the top issues are inflation (39 percent), immigration (19 percent), and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (13 percent). Among Democrats, the top issues are Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (16 percent), inflation (15 percent), and election laws (13 percent). Among independents, the top issues are inflation (37 percent), Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (13 percent), followed by climate change (8 percent) and immigration (8 percent).

GAS PRICES

When Americans were asked what they think is most responsible for the recent rise in gas prices, they say:

the Biden administration’s economic policies: 41 percent;(IOW, Republicans)

the war in Ukraine and sanctions against Russia: 24 percent;

oil companies charging more: 24 percent;

the rise in demand as the coronavirus pandemic eases: 5 percent.

Roughly one-third (35 percent) of Americans say they have cut back their spending on groceries so they can pay for gas, while 64 percent say they have not.

Thirty percent of Americans say they have changed their summer vacation plans as a result of gas prices, while 67 percent say they have not.

BIDEN

Americans give President Joe Biden a negative 36 – 55 percent job approval rating with 10 percent not offering an opinion.

Registered voters give him a negative 38 – 55 percent job approval rating with 7 percent not offering an opinion.

On his handling of the economy, Americans give Biden a negative 34 – 58 percent job approval rating.

While 44 percent of Americans approve of President Biden’s handling of the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 45 percent disapprove.

Americans think (51 – 40 percent) that President Biden has not demonstrated strong leadership in his dealings with NATO in regard to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

RUSSIA & UKRAINE

Thirty-nine percent of Americans are either very optimistic (6 percent) or somewhat optimistic (33 percent) that diplomacy will bring an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine, while 57 percent are not so optimistic (27 percent) or not optimistic at all (30 percent) that diplomacy will bring an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine.

A majority of Americans (53 percent) are either very concerned (20 percent) or somewhat concerned (33 percent) that Russia will launch a nuclear weapon at the United States, while 47 percent say they are not so concerned (26 percent) or not concerned at all (21 percent) that Russia will launch a nuclear weapon at the United States.

“Talk won’t do it, say Americans who envision diplomacy as a fruitless attempt to end the war. And the fear of the worst-case outcome is clear in the numbers. More than half of Americans are concerned Russia will target the U.S. homeland with a nuclear weapon,”

added Malloy


.

That is completely incoherent. People believe we should be using lethal military force while they also fear that the US will be targeted with nuclear weapons? What? They do not understand anything and this is a clear indication that our educational system has failed.

A majority of Americans (54 percent) think public figures in the United States who express admiration for Vladimir Putin are being unpatriotic, while 33 percent do not think that.

This small majority is unsurprising. Expressing admiration for Putin isn’t actually about patriotism or lack of it. It’s about expressing admiration for a violent, authoritarian, tyrant which is a matter of morality and ethics.

There is one bright spot:

KETANJI BROWN JACKSON

Americans say 51 – 30 percent that the U.S. Senate should confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, while 19 percent did not offer an opinion.

Americans disapprove 52 – 27 percent of the way Republican Senators are handling the confirmation process of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, while 21 percent did not offer an opinion.

On the other hand, Americans approve 42 – 34 percent of the way Democratic Senators are handling the confirmation process of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, while 23 percent did not offer an opinion.

A vast majority of Americans (72 percent) think the process of confirming Supreme Court Justices is too political, while 21 percent do not think that.

Maybe there’s hope?

This country is in a sour, sour mood. I hold Trump and the pandemic responsible for six straight years of hell. It figures that Biden and the Democrats would get blamed for all that. It’s how these things always work. The Republicans take a wrecking ball to the country and the Democrats have to clean up the mess.

Trump is sui generis. But this is also to be filed in the box of everybody in public life now is really unpopular https://t.co/lmaT9rpxhy

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 31, 2022

As I said, everyone is just sour right now. But I have to admit that I feel happier already just seeing those unpopularity numbers for Trump and his possible successors.

“The Biden administration has been vocal in defending what it calls the ‘rules-based international order,'” began a recent Wall Street Journal opinion, “but there is no such thing.”

Over the past three decades, these regional orders – in Europe, the Middle East and Asia – have been relatively stable and local competition moderate. The resulting impression was of a world order. Liberals saw this global stability as the product of international rules, a growing number of democracies, and increased international trade—a “rules-based order” bolstered by democracies and trade peace. Realists saw a world order guaranteed by a rough balance between the great powers – the United States, Russia and China – with nuclear weapons as an effective peacemaking equalizer.

That is, a rough balance of geopolitical power simply constitutes a contingent order, an interregnum between periods of regional conflicts that have always plagued the planet.

Jakub Grygiel’s focus on nation-state conflict misses other, less-obvious threats than missiles to the stability of a world based on rules. We struggle in this country to enforce them within our own borders. Our collective failure to apply the rule of law to a national and transnational elite who see themselves as above it means, in the end, those that have the gold make the rules. They get the elevator and the rest of us…. The rich are as bulletproof as someone falling-down drunk. Impunity emboldens them to ignore the nominal rules as much as it does Vladimir Putin to violate the supposed rules-based international order. Democracy depends on a balance of power, and ours is seriously out of balance. There exist laws but enforcement is selective.

Anne Applebaum again warns that if we expect to live in a rules-based world, we had damned well better enforce them (The Atlantic):

There is no natural liberal world order, and there are no rules without someone to enforce them. Unless democracies defend themselves together, the forces of autocracy will destroy them. I am using the word forces, in the plural, deliberately. Many American politicians would understandably prefer to focus on the long-term competition with China. But as long as Russia is ruled by Putin, then Russia is at war with us too. So are Belarus, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Hungary, and potentially many others. We might not want to compete with them, or even care very much about them. But they care about us. They understand that the language of democracy, anti-corruption, and justice is dangerous to their form of autocratic power—and they know that that language originates in the democratic world, our world.

This fight is not theoretical. It requires armies, strategies, weapons, and long-term plans. It requires much closer allied cooperation, not only in Europe but in the Pacific, Africa, and Latin America. NATO can no longer operate as if it might someday be required to defend itself; it needs to start operating as it did during the Cold War, on the assumption that an invasion could happen at any time. Germany’s decision to raise defense spending by 100 billion euros is a good start; so is Denmark’s declaration that it too will boost defense spending. But deeper military and intelligence coordination might require new institutions—perhaps a voluntary European Legion, connected to the European Union, or a Baltic alliance that includes Sweden and Finland—and different thinking about where and how we invest in European and Pacific defense.

Applebaum is in her element: foreign affairs. But what has accompanied globalism and the easy flow of (or flight of) capital is the decay of our ability to pass laws that result in order and stability. It is an open secret too rarely addressed openly. Hypocrisy and shame have lost their ability to rein in misbehavior in such a culture.

As we watch Russia attempt to appropriate Ukraine, what are we going to do to enforce a rules-based order at home? The U.S. should perhaps reclaim its leadership role in that.

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When Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” entered the lexicon in 2005, conservatives had been marinating in Rush Limbaugh for nearly 20 years. There was a separate reality under construction in the U.S. in plain sight. Facts (reality) became contingent on their political utility. For the daily purveyors of grievance, what mattered was what “feels right” in your gut. Besides, grievance sold soap. After Barack Obama won the presidency, implacable liberal enemies proliferated in this parallel-dystopia, as did its residents: T-partiers, Birthers, Deathers, Glenn Beck, town hall shouters, etc. Ask Ginni Thomas. Maybe she’ll give you the tour.

On this rock, Donald Trump built his church.

Perhaps the decades-long dissolving of external reality on this side of the Atlantic always bore some Soviet/Russian influence. Orwell described its utility for the totalitarian state in 1949. “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” Voltaire wrote (roughly) in 1765. Rep. Jamie Raskin quoted that at the close of Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial one year ago. Trump convinced millions to believe his absurdities. Countless thousands from his separate reality died believing them before his presidency culminated in atrocity.

Russia simply has more practice at convincing its populace to commit them.

Atop the Twitter feed this morning is this brief thread from NPR’s Eleanor Beardsley:

Incredible testimony on BFMTV from this mayor of Melitopol who was kidnapped for several days by the Russians. He says they had no idea what’s going on. They told him we’re here to get the Nazis – he said I’ve been in this town 30 years and I’ve never met one…. then they said pic.twitter.com/T8aL2DjZwH

— Eleanor Beardsley (@ElBeardsley) March 31, 2022

well we’re here to help the Russian speakers snd he said 95% of us speak Russian and we’re fine. They said they heard that the World War II veterans of the town had been beaten in the patriot day and he said au contraire they’re venerated and there’s not very many of them left.

It seems these Russian soldiers truly thought that. This entire war is being fought on propaganda – for false pretenses. Its not only Putin who doesn’t know what’s going on. This mayor, Ivan Fedorov, said the soldiers were completely unprepared and clueless.

James Fallows this morning reflects on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s message to the Russian people. It was the right message at the right time by the right person, an appeal to return to the universe in which the rest of us live:

What makes this so notable? I think it is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s clear-eyed understanding of what he, as a messenger, could uniquely bring to this, as a message. That is, he recognized the thoughts a broadcast by him would convey, without his having to say them.

Schwarzenegger’s audience was the Russian public, especially its soldiers. And its explicit, spelled-out message was: You are better than this. You Russians have a spirit and culture and character that I admire. You Russian soldiers pride yourselves on defending the motherland, not on being on the attack.

So I am here to warn you: You’re being tricked and misled into actions you will always regret.

Trust me, I know. [I’m still paraphrasing.] My own father was a Nazi soldier, and he was tricked and misled in just the same way. Learn from his shame and failure. Live up to the greatness of your culture and your nation. I know you well enough to be sure that you’d never do the things you’re doing now, if you knew the real facts. Which I’m about to share.

“This is not a war to defend Russia like your grandfathers and your great-grandfathers fought,” he says near the end. “This is an illegal war. Your lives, your limbs, and your futures are being sacrificed for a senseless war, condemned by the entire world.”

That was the out-loud part of the message—the text, if you will. The subtext was: and Arnold Schwarzenegger is telling you these things. Which mattered because of the overlapping identities that go with whatever he says or does.

https://twitter.com/Schwarzenegger/status/1504426844199669762?s=20&t=pWPIiY8hJBnWEVC7hbEd3g

What is Russian for “military target”?

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A long time ago, I had the enormous privilege of co-writing the musical theme to one of Walter Cronkite’s CBS News TV shows. My musical partner and I also wrote a theme for Face the Nation that ran for something like 10 years. As a result, I had an opportunity to hang out with several CBS News reporters, producers, and editors. And yes, I got to meet Mr. Cronkite once (he was incredibly gracious).

I will say flat out that CBS News had the hardest working and most dedicated team of people I’ve ever encountered (and I’ve been lucky enough to work with a lot of great people). To this day, I remain in awe not only of their talent but especially of their integrity.

And that is why this is so personally heartbreaking:

CBS News’s decision to hire former Trump administration official Mick Mulvaney as a paid on-air contributor is drawing backlash within the company because of his history of bashing the press and promoting the former president’s fact-free claims.

But a top network executive seemed to lay the groundwork for the decision in a staff meeting earlier this month, when he said the network needed to hire more Republicans to prepare for a “likely” Democratic midterm wipeout.

“If you look at some of the people that we’ve been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms,” CBS News’s co-president Neeraj Khemlani told the staff of the network’s morning show, according to a recording of his comments obtained by The Washington Post. “A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”

None of my friends work at CBS anymore. But if they did, and Khemlani had spewed this garbage to them, I’m certain half would have laughed in his face. The others would have quit. Aside from the sheer madness of a highly professional news organization hiring a known liar and Trump stooge, Khemlani’s obscene excuse for paying Mulvaney — we need access! — would have been deeply insulting. The folks I knew were perfectly capable of reporting accurately and deeply on a corrupt political party without having to resort to paying one of their members.

It’s not enough for Mulvaney to quit. Khemlani should go, too. This represents a spectacular lapse of judgment on his part.

You’ll recall that Madison “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” Cawthorne recently accused his fellow GOP congressmen (they must have been Republicans because Democrats certainly aren’t inviting him to any parties) of cocaine use and orgy “get togethers” and they didn’t like it much. The minority leader gave him a stern talking to:

GOP leader says: "You can't make statements like that as a member of Congress, it affects everybody else and the country as a whole."

— Olivia Beavers (@Olivia_Beavers) March 30, 2022

Note that Kevin McCarthy did not say Marjorie Taylor Greene lost his trust after she attended a white nationalist rally where they cheered Putin. https://t.co/EgZe2btUib

— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) March 30, 2022

It’s also totally fine to smear a fellow member of congress as a terrorist. Or support insurrectionists and claim their opponents are members of a satantic, blood drinking pedophile ring. But saying that there are coke and orgy parties in the congress is out of line?

I do have to wonder why the Republicans were so agitated about it. Did it hit a little too close to home?