Month: March 2022

When it comes to dirty GOP politics, Rick Wilson knows whereof he speaks, as he admits in the piece below. He has joined the popular front against encroaching GOP fascism and has a warning for Democrats which they no doubt already know but are unwilling to properly confront:

Republicans slapped blue-and-yellow flag pins on their Jos. A. Bank suits and took a short break from anti-vaccine bleating and blaming President Biden for global inflation. This moment of unity looked promising; who could miss all those congressional Republicans cheering as loudly as Democrats during Volodymyr Zelensky’s address to Congress?

It cannot last. Republican leaders are desperately trying to find a weak spot in Biden’s handling of this war. Even if there is unity for a moment, they will soon lay any mistake, or misstep, or outcome where the Russians prevail at Biden’s doorstep.

If that sounds cynical, I would ask: Have you met my former party?

It wants to play the most beloved game in the GOP playbook: that the Democrats are weak on defense. In my decades as a GOP ad maker and strategist, I made some pretty notorious ads about it. And I can tell you they work.

Democrats too often miss the optics and politics of foreign policy, hoping good choices will outweigh the dark, emotional games Republicans like to play when it comes to national security.

Republicans specialize at turning Democratic successes overseas into disasters. It’s a slow-burn strategy designed to trigger an outrage culture that doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. GOP leaders don’t care about reality; their audience doesn’t care about the truth, and their political media apparatus always stays on message.

Donald Trump bungled the 2020 negotiations ending the war in Afghanistan, freeing the Taliban at scale and setting a date certain for U.S. withdrawal. When Biden stuck with that commitment to exit, Republicans leveraged the inevitable chaos in Kabul into a cataclysmic political fable; if only the weak Democrats had held on for another year, victory was ensured.

Similarly, the terrorist attack on the Benghazi facilities in 2012 was another faux scandal-in-a-box because it gave Republicans — me included — a populist tale to be weaponized, embedded in the right’s mythos and deployed repeatedly. I distinctly recall being in a focus group that year and watching the pollster tease from participants how Benghazi could be used to offset the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden under Barack Obama and transformed into a political millstone for Hillary Clinton.

Democrats haven’t sorted out a simple reality yet; the GOP will soon try to flank Biden on Ukraine. Some, like Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), will try to box him in on a no-fly zone — ignoring the negative externality of a nuclear exchange — while others will push him further than he wants on lethal aid to Ukraine. Win or lose, the GOP will declare that Biden blew his main chance. Even many sober foreign policy thinkers in the GOP will try to leverage Democratic “weakness” in Ukraine in the 2022 elections.Advertisement

But let’s also be honest about the landscape: A not-so-secret faction of the GOP is rooting for the bad guys in this one. We’ve already heard that from the Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) wing of the party. Many Republican base voters are dictator-curious and believe Russian President Vladimir Putin is the savior of White, straight, law-and-order Christianity; the virus of Trumpian hyper-nationalism, with its constant call to reject alliances, diplomacy, smart power and multilateral action, has deeply infected the GOP.

Not long ago, the two parties worked together to face down, contain and repudiate Russian aggression and Moscow’s oppression of free peoples. From Truman to Eisenhower, from JFK to Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the Soviets respected American resolve. A few Republicans might yet hear the call to that unity in the face of Putin’s war, aware that Biden is leading thefight about the shape of the world in the coming century.

But if you think the majority of today’s GOP will leave politics at the water’s edge much longer, think again.

Of course they won’t. The right wing muscle memory on national security and foreign policy is strong and their instinct will always be to say that Democrats are a bunch of weaklings who can’t keep America safe or lead the world. Unfortunately, this meme also plays into their existing line on Biden which is that he’s a drooling old man who can barely stand up.

Democrats always think that the truth will set them free but it just doesn’t work out that way. I really hope they are preparing a counter narrative or this one could be powerful, even with the demented, Putin-loving weirdo they all worship out there making it clear that he’s completely out of his depth.

Which he is:

This observation by the Intercept’s Robert Mackay is very important.

Russia lied about documents stolen from Ukrainian labs doing public health research, by calling them proof of secret bioweapons lab. What makes this disinformation is an orchestrated campaign to spread lies and innuendo about what’s in authentic documents

In 2016, the FBI review of emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop from his wife’s boss, Hillary Clinton, revealed zero evidence of crimes by Clinton, but it created the perception of criminality, stoked by Trump’s lies about what was on the laptop

“Pizzagate” was essentially a desperate (and wildly successful) effort to spread disinformation by lying that authentic but innocuous emails stolen from the Clinton campaign were secretly coded evidence of an imaginary child sex trafficking ring

In 2020, Trump supporters like Giuliani sought to create the impression of criminality by Joe Biden, first by seeking to force Zelensky to announce an investigation and then with lurid rumors about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Does the laptop prove criminality or not is what matters.

And we know that creating the appearance of criminality by one or both Bidens was the focus Trump’s pressure on Zelensky, because the demand was for him to deliver lines on CNN prepared for him by two US diplomats acting on orders from Trump and Giuliani

Originally tweeted by Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) on March 21, 2022.

This is not some organic phenomenon. It crops up from the fever swamps and from foreign agents but cynical political actors are the one’s exploiting it. And I think you know who I’m talking about.

Trevor Noah says it all:

I’m actually pretty shocked by the Fox news editorial line over this stuff. It’s one thing to be critical of “Biden’s handling” of the crisis. That’s totally expected for a partisan outfit. But criticizing the country that has been invaded for having Nazis in its population when Russia is a powerful dictatorship and has these guys:

or the US has these guys, for that matter:

The rise of the global far right, in all its permutations, in the last few years has been well documented. But when it comes to repressive, authoritarian nationalism, there are a few stand-outs and Ukraine isn’t one of them. Russia, on the other hand, is at the top of the list.

The pro-Putin faction in America is pretty slick. They are always “just asking questions” and giving “both sides” of the story, but needless to say, the emphasis and narrative tells the story they want to tell, even if they leave themselves an out when confronted with what they are doing.

Ukraine has a colorful fringe group of Nazis, it does, and they are good at getting attention. But they are not running anything in Ukraine, whether government or miilitary. There’s always a chance that Ukraine could go authoritarian when all is said and done. War opens up all kinds of opportunities for violent fascists. But Ukraine is not a fascist country at the moment which should be obvious.

And ask yourself why these Russia apologists would be upset about fascism all of a sudden when they love the Hungarian authoritarian leader Viktor Orban and seem to have nothing bad to say about Vladimir Putin.

This group is very confused. And that is being used very efficiently by Russian propaganda.

I thought I would share this short review of Timothy Snyder’s book of that name from Jamie Mayerfield:

If you want to understand Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I strongly recommend Timothy Snyder’s 2018 book “The Road to Unfreedom,” which I recently finished rereading. The Russia-Ukraine conflict is the book’s main topic, with a focus on the sources and motives of Putin’s behavior. Snyder’s prescient analysis makes powerful sense of what is happening now.

The book’s main theme is a warning against the “politics of eternity” on the one hand and “the politics of inevitability” on the other. The former constructs an innocent nation eternally victimized by eternal enemies. The latter holds up a simplistic formula, such as free markets, that is thought to set nations on a path of unstoppable progress, with no need of moral agency. (You can think of this as Snyder’s critique of neoliberalism.)The politics of eternity perfectly describes the Russian imperialist thought that has guided Putin and his advisors. Snyder spotlights the role of Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), the avowed Russian fascist quoted and venerated by Putin. The Russian imperialists are obsessed with Ukraine, and cannot bear the thought of it leading an existence apart from Russia.

A key turning point was 2011-12, when Putin used fraud to win presidential and parliamentary elections and was faced with widespread democratic protests. He responded by increasing domestic repression while ramping up imperialist discourse and figuring the West as Russia’s implacable enemy.Snyder argues that Putin saw the subversion of Western democracy and the European Union as necessary for his domestic political project. Snyder gives us the essential concept of “schizo-fascism” to describe the practice of actual fascists calling their opponents fascist. He provides many examples.

Turning to Europe, Snyder punctures “the fable of the wise nation,” a false history of self-contained nation states learning from experience to renounce war. In actual history, these were former imperial powers that could survive in a post-imperialist age only by means of regional integration.

Snyder reminds us that for decades the Russian government has been built on a foundation of slick propaganda and media manipulation. He dissects the false framing that Russia successfully exported to the rest of the world regarding Ukraine.

He is unsparing in his criticism of the right-wing and left-wing pundits – including Seumas Milne, John Pilger, Stephen Cohen, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Lyndon LaRouche, and Ron Paul – who spread Kremlin propaganda. He writes: “Those who spoke so freely of conspiracies, coups, juntas, camps, fascists, and genocides shied from contact with the real world. From a distance, they used their talents to drown a country in unreality.”In 2013-14, ordinary Ukrainians came together in large numbers to defend their freedoms. At an immense cost they succeeded in bringing about a democratic revolution. But Westerners circulating Kremlin propaganda erased their achievement by casting the event as a Western-backed Nazi coup.

Snyder writes: “The Maidan began as Ukrainian citizens sought to find a solution for Ukrainian problems. It ended with Ukrainians trying to remind Europeans and Americans that moments of high emotion require sober thought. Distant observers jumped at the shadows of the story, only to tumble into a void darker than ignorance.”

He continues: “It was tempting, amidst the whirl of Russian accusations in 2014, to make some kind of compromise, as many Europeans and Americans did, and accept the Russian claim that the Maidan was a ‘right-wing coup.’”The last chapter is an indictment of inequality in the United States. Snyder understands the Trump phenomenon as the product of the politics of inevitability leaving a desolate social landscape that creates the conditions for a politics of eternity (Make American Great Again). He reminds us of the close ties between Trump and Putin-backed oligarchs in Russia.

Snyder emphasizes the danger of lies and propaganda, so blithely encouraged by the Republican Party. “Many Americans did not see the difference between someone who constantly lied and never apologized and someone who almost never did and corrected his or her mistakes. They were accepting the description of the world offered by Surkov and RT: no one really ever tells the truth, perhaps there is no truth, so let us simply repeat the things we like to hear, and obey those who say them. That way lies authoritarianism. Trump adopted the Russian double standard: he was permitted to lie all the time, but any minor error by a journalist discredited the entire profession of journalism.”

The book is very informative, so you will learn crucial factual background to current events. It is also theoretical rich. I think that scholars in my own subdiscipline of political theory can learn by studying and engaging with Snyder’s ideas.

I am anything but an expert on this subject but I have read a lot of Timothy Snyder (not this one, yet) and I find him to be very persuasive. I am confident that whatever he has to say on this subject is worth reading.

When people will do anything to make money, no matter how unproductive, like using money to make money from money for the masterbatory purpose of making even more money, we’ve really disappeared down the behavioral sink.

Michael Lewis once described the blowback he received from Wall Street over “Flash Boys.” The book describes men who exploit computers and super-fast internet connections (high frequency traders, HFT) to make millions off stock trades. It works not unlike the way The Sting‘s Henry Gondorff and Johnny Hooker used delay the delay of “the wire” to con Doyle Lonnegan. They cheat.

Lewis explained that “anyone in an established industry who stands up and says ‘The way things are being done here is totally insane; here is why it is insane; and here is a better way to do them’ is bound to incur the wrath of established insiders, who now stand accused of creating the insanity.”

Like bitcoin mining. US News explains it for those interested. Frankly, it’s not worth my time. But in East Tennessee about 40 miles north, it’s become an immediate nuisance (Washington Post):

LIMESTONE, Tenn. — It started as a low hum one day last spring. Then it got louder, and soon some residents said the noise was like a jet engine idling on a nearby tarmac.

The unincorporated clutch of homes and churches at the base of the Appalachian Mountains offers expansive vistas of lush farmland, thick woods and towering ridges in all directions. Neighbors know one another. Most residents have family bonds spanning generations or moved to this tranquil patch to escape city noise.

Instead, the noise came to them in April last year when the Tennessee-based firm Red Dog Technologies opened a plant in Limestone to mine (or create) new bitcoin, the original and still-largest cryptocurrency.

The process relies on massive computers performing complex calculations — all while kept at a constant temperature by equally massive cooling fans — and that can get noisy.

The Limestone mine operates day and night, growing louder at night and on weekends when bitcoin’s electricity-hungry computers can take advantage of down time and lower prices on the electricity grid and ramp up their algorithmic-solving power.

And the social benefit is what? Keeping neighbors awake at night? Limestone has only buyer’s remorse. The county has sued Red Dog.

Kent Harris, a Washington County commissioner, looks back on his vote authorizing the Limestone crypto mining operation and shakes his head.

“It looks like a German POW camp,” Harris said of the bitcoin mine, which is surrounded by barriers, cameras and fencing topped with razor wire.

Forget the sounds of birds chirping and creeks (branches) babbling that people in rural areas cherish. There’s funny money to be made. In Cherokee County, N.C. in an abandoned factory in Marble about 80 miles east, there’s another bitcoing mining operation:

Phoebe Thompson, a Bowdoin College environmental and oceanic sciencesgraduate, moved to the adjacent town of Murphy two years ago. Her family founded the publication Bird Watcher’s Digest and are active environmentally. She laments the damage to the area’s wildlife and peaceful character.

“I grew up where I heard birds, insects, frogs; the quiet here was a huge draw for me,” Thompson said. She said the quiet has been smothered by the whir of the mine and created an “ecological dead zone” that disorients wildlife.

[…]

“The mine operator said this mine was in the middle of nowhere, but to us, it is not the middle of nowhere; it is our home,” Harris said.

Tough. You snooze (or don’t snooze), you lose.

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

People are dropping their masks in the Cesspool of Sin. The Covid positivity rate here has dropped below 5%. Hospitalizations and ICU utilization remain low. About half the customers wore masks at the grocery store on Saturday. (A week earlier, I didn’t see if the local stopped trying to enter Trader Joe’s with his seeing-eye miniature horse* wore one, or his horse.)

But just when you thought it was safe to go back into the brew pub, another Omicron variant is headed around. It’s been about six months since the last boosters. A knowledgable friend (a.k.a DocDawg) is looking for another:

April was too late for this gentleman:

Jeff Wise writes at New York magazine:

Omicron BA.2 is similar to the variant that caused this winter’s spike, BA.1. But it has 20 different mutations, four of them on a crucial region of the spike protein. These disparities are likely part of the reason BA.2 appears to be considerably more transmissible than the original Omicron — 33 percent, according to one Danish study. BA.2 is also thought to infect vaccinated people more easily than its forebear, though, fortunately, it does not appear to be any deadlier. First detected in the Philippines in November, the variant spread widely in South Africa and India in December and has since become the dominant strain around the world.

As unworldly as it seem out there lately, the U.S. is still part of it. It will show up in your town.

A couple of epidemiologists Wise cites urge calm. The new variant is not that much changed and the old vaccines still protect against it. B…u…t CDC wastewater monitoring has picked up an increase in SARS-CoV-2 RNA at a quarter of its sites over the last 15 days, an early indicator another rise in cases is coming:

If U.S. cases follow Europe’s trend, what lies in store for us might well be worse than for them. U.S. vaccination and booster rates are significantly lower than most European countries. No more than two-thirds of eligible Americans have been fully vaccinated, and about half of the Americans eligible for a booster shot still haven’t gotten one, including a third of seniors. America’s relatively low vaccination rates probably explain why the first Omicron wave hit much harder here than it did in Europe. During the peak of that wave, the U.S. suffered ten times as many COVID deaths as Germany, despite having only four times as many people.

Don’t toss the N95s just yet.

Fourth shots may finally be on the way as well. Just this week, both Pfizer and Moderna announced they were seeking emergency FDA authorization for a second booster shot.

It may be time to go shopping for one.

* That’s how the TJ’s staffer described the encounter to another shopper.

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

I’ve written quite a bit about the Independent Legislature Theory over the past year or so and it really does look like it’s going to be seriously contemplated by the Supreme Court. This is a pretty good explainer on what that might mean:

Legal experts and voting rights advocates warn the independent state legislature doctrine could radically alter election administration across the country, and siphon power away from courts and toward the legislatures that write election law. That would leave partisan politicians, rather than independent administrators, overseeing elections — possibly even overturning results they don’t like.

Constitutional scholars have widely panned the theory, arguing that it advances an inaccurate interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and pointing out that it has never been embraced in past rulings. State courts, they contend, have long been able to act as a check on the state legislatures, ensuring lawmakers follow the spirit of the state’s constitution.

“The legislature is created by the state constitution, so it must be limited by it,” said Carolyn Shapiro, a professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. “The notion that [lawmakers] are freestanding entities to do anything they want in this context is inconsistent with constitutional democracy.”

If U.S. Supreme Court justices were to legitimize the theory in a ruling, the move would transform the way elections are governed, virtually giving state legislatures a blank slate to set voting rules and to draw congressional maps, said Joshua Douglas, professor at the J. David Rosenberg College of Law at the University of Kentucky.

“It’s concerning for our concept of representation,” he said. “It means that those who are most self-interested in retaining their positions also have the most power now in dictating the rules of the game.”

This is where it’s heading:

The Pennsylvania lawsuit pits a group of Republicans, including a county commissioner who helps oversee local elections, against Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and his administration. The GOP group is represented by Jonathan F. Mitchell, the lawyer behind a six-week abortion ban in Texas that is enforced by private citizens. The U.S. Supreme Court has so far allowed that law to stay in place.

The justices declined to hear the Pennsylvania Republicans’ emergency map petition on technical grounds. The case was assigned to a three-judge federal court panel.

At issue is a citizen-submitted congressional map picked by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in February following months of debate and an impasse between the Republican-led legislature and Wolf, who vetoed a GOP-passed proposal because of its partisan bias.

Citing the independent state legislature doctrine and population differences among districts, the Pennsylvania plaintiffs filed an emergency application asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reject the map and instead implement at-large elections — which would let all of a state’s voters cast ballots for each seat — for the 2022 midterm elections.

Attorneys for the Wolf administration argue that at-large congressional elections are illegal under federal law and that courts are obligated to redraw maps when the state legislatures fail to do so. The lawyers cite a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a similar case in Mississippi, in which the legislature failed to pass a new map and a federal district court adopted one.

In 1967, Congress passed a law that banned at-large congressional elections following a series of election changes that included the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“The problem with [at-large congressional elections] is that it violates federal law,” said Bertrall Ross, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law who studies constitutional law. “I don’t see how that remedy can be adopted.”

For that reason, he said, it’s unclear what would happen if the U.S. Supreme Court removed state courts from the redistricting process and a governor and legislature reached an impasse on a map.

At the request of the Wolf administration and the citizen group that proposed the map selected by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, the federal district court recently dismissed much of the suit — including the claims citing the doctrine. The Republican plaintiffs lacked standing, the court found.

In North Carolina, the state’s high court earlier this year ruled the congressional map picked by the GOP-led legislature was gerrymandered. A superior court in Raleigh adopted a new map, and the state Supreme Court refused to block it.

The North Carolina Republican lawsuit argues that the state court’s actions were unconstitutional and, under the doctrine, only Congress has oversight over state election rules.

The group filed an emergency application asking the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the map. The court rejected that request, but four justices appeared open to considering a formal appeal next year — enough to potentially secure the case’s place on the calendar.

It’s a big roll of the dice for the Supreme Court to hear this case. Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch are ready to go. Kavanaugh didn’t go with it this time but indicated that he was open to it. All they need is Barrett or Roberts and we will have taken a giant leap into the abyss.

Yeah:

Here’s a little primer on Peter Thiel, the vampiric Big Tech fascist who is making his presence felt in the fascist GOP. Tim Miller’s “Not My Party” is the most enjoyable way to learn about such creepy phenomenons.

Except for missing “compassionate conservatism”, which I don’t, I agree with everything in this thing. There have always been very wealthy wingnuts backing the Republican Party and they’ve often very fringe. But this guy is something else.

Seriously, he is just so incredibly dumb:

Donald Trump claimed that there is “a lot of love” behind Russian President Vladimir Putin’s devastating invasion of Ukraine, which has already resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties. 

The former president’s bizarre remarks came during a Sunday radio interview with Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, who asked Trump about the deadly incursion. 

“He’s got a big ego,” Trump said of Putin. “Again, I know him very well … I understand he’s gotten rid of a lot of his generals.” 

Trump also speculated that the Russian president felt “cornered,” suggesting that Putin might commit “unspeakable” acts of warfare if the invasion doesn’t go his way. 

Later in the segment, the former president argued that Putin is on a conquest to restore the Soviet Union. 

“You say, what’s the purpose of this? They had a country,” Trump explained. “You could see it was a country where there was a lot of love and we’re doing it because, you know, somebody wants to make his country larger or he wants to put it back the way it was when actually it didn’t work very well.”

WTF does that even mean? And why is this man in politics?

I will never get over the fact that tens of millions of people and the entire Republican establishment think this cretinous moron was a good president and should be president again. It makes me feel crazy. It’s like a recurring bad dream.