Month: March 2022

Joe Manchin has come out against Biden’s pick to head the Fed, Sarah Bloom-Raskin because she believes in climate change and he’s worried about inflation. Or something. Anyway, it’s corruption all the way down.

Here’s the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer:

As the American economy faces market turmoil fuelled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the highest inflation rate in forty years, and continuing damage from the covid-19 pandemic, the Federal Reserve System’s board of governors has become a ghost ship. There are multiple vacancies on the panel, and its chairman, Jerome Powell, is awaiting Senate confirmation to a second four-year term. Last month, instead of voting on the confirmation of President Biden’s slate of five nominees to run the world’s most powerful central bank, the Republican members of the Senate Banking Committee staged a boycott.

The G.O.P.’s parliamentary maneuver was an almost unheard of act of obstruction. Its aim was to deprive the Senate committee, which is split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, of the quorum necessary for a vote on Biden’s nominees to take place. The Republicans’ goal was to block a single nominee: Sarah Bloom Raskin, Biden’s pick for vice-chair for supervision. Had they met to vote as scheduled, her nomination would likely have survived a party-line tie, which under the Senate’s current rules would have advanced it to the Senate floor for the full body’s consideration. Instead, after the twelve Republicans on the committee failed to show up, the meeting adjourned, and the Senate soon after went into recess. This left not just Bloom Raskin but all five of Biden’s top nominees for the Fed in limbo, including Powell.

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, Biden demanded that the panel confirm his nominees to the Federal Reserve, which, he said, “plays a critical role in fighting inflation.” The Senate Banking Committee’s chairman, Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, told me that he plans to bring Bloom Raskin’s nomination back up for a committee vote as soon as possible, but so far one hasn’t been scheduled. “We just want them to show up for work,” he said of his Republican colleagues. “In the midst of an attack, the Russians attacking Ukraine… they’re saying we’re not going to confirm the chair of the Federal Reserve, the vice-chair of supervision, the vice-chair of the Fed, and the other two governors.” He added, “We can’t run the Senate this way.”

A boycott to stop a vote is extraordinary under any circumstances, but experts said they were stunned, given the magnitude of the country’s current economic challenges. “It’s an enormous dereliction of duty,” Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, told me. Stiglitz, a progressive professor at Columbia University who has advised Democratic presidents, stressed that “the Federal Reserve is the most important economic institution in the U.S., and the U.S. is the most important economy in the world. To leave this many vacancies is just mind boggling to the rest of the world. It is just amazingly irre

sponsible.”

Raskin is more than wualified. She’s served on the Fed Board of Governors and as Deputy Treasury Secretary. She’s an expert in cyber security. She’s also married to Jamie Raskin which is probably part of it, at least for the neanderthals on the committee.

But weirdly, the banking sector is fine with her which would generally be the industry most concerned about a wild-eyed extremist since that’s the industry the Fed regulates. And despite a bunch of lies and innuendo about how she is corrupt (she is most certainly not corrupt) and nonsense about needing to “answer questions” from that Club for Growth zealot Pat Toomey, it turns out it’s something else entirely, which also explains Joe Manchin’s opposition:

So what, exactly, is the problem? In Stiglitz’s view, “It’s very simple: special interests.” In speeches and op-ed pieces, Bloom Raskin has described climate change as a potential threat to global economic security. Moreover, she’s personally expressed the view that the Fed should have resisted pressure from climate-polluting fossil-fuel companies who wanted pandemic-related bailouts, and instead encouraged a shift to renewable energy sources. Earlier this week, a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that intensifying heat waves, droughts, and floods will affect billions of people, as well as animals and plants, across huge swaths of the planet. Yet Democrats say America’s fossil-fuel industry sees Bloom Raskin as a threat and is distorting her record in order to block her confirmation.

The fossil-fuel industry would have seemingly little say over who runs the Federal Reserve, but it has donated generously to the campaigns of all twelve Republican members of the Senate Banking Committee. According to OpenSecrets, the nonpartisan campaign-finance watchdog group, the industry has contributed more than eight million dollars to the collective campaigns of the dozen senators. The industry appears to be using this leverage to send a message that it will not tolerate the Fed, or any other financial regulators, treating climate change as a potential systemic economic risk.

[…]

In reality, the Fed has little if any authority over environmental policy. Its mandate is to try to insure economic stability and full employment. But Bloom Raskin would become the central bank’s vice-chair for supervision, a powerful new position that was created after regulators disregarded the reckless lending that led to the 2008 economic crash. Its explicit role is to assess long-range, systemic economic risks. What the oil, gas, and coal producers oppose is the possibility that Bloom Raskin might push for the Fed to identify climate change as one such risk. If the Fed did so, banks could be required to take greater precautions when lending to firms that have particularly large financial exposure to climate risks. To the consternation of the industry, as a private citizen, Bloom Raskin has suggested that it could be advisable for banks to consider the value of stress tests for extreme climate scenarios, or even to limit how many especially vulnerable businesses they include in portfolios of loans.But during her nomination hearing, Bloom Raskin made clear that, if confirmed, she had neither the intention or the legal authority to take any such steps. “I have no desire, and if I had the desire, I couldn’t accomplish it,” she promised one of the Republican senators who was pressing her.

The industry’s fears were made clear at the end of January, when a coalition of forty-one energy-business trade associations that opposed Bloom Raskin’s nomination wrote a letter to the committee in which they called Bloom Raskin “a strong advocate for debanking” fossil-fuel companies. It’s rare for the special interests that hold Congress back from action on climate change to show their hands so openly. (The full text of the letter and the list of signatories are below.) Few of the associations are household names. Many of them represent small, private companies that operate without shareholder pressure, or, indeed, much public scrutiny. In their letter, the associations called Bloom Raskin an environmental “alarmist” with “a crisis mentality” because she has stated that climate change could result in “an unlivably hot planet.” They expressed outrage that she had described the fossil-fuel industry as “dying.”

Watchdog groups said that the potential derailing of Bloom Raskin’s nomination sets a dangerous precedent. “What you have are extreme elements of the industry, ones that are in financial trouble and have sought federal bailouts in the past that are trying to kill this nomination,” said David Arkush, a managing director of Public Citizen. “It’s a risky sector to lend to, and they want regulators that actively push banks to loan to them.”

Carter Dougherty, the communications director of Americans for Financial Reform, a nonpartisan progressive group that follows regulatory issues closely, pointed out that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has also thrown its considerable weight against Bloom Raskin. “The U.S. Chamber,” he told me, acts as “a smokescreen” for companies including the big Wall Street banks, “who want to shy away from” waging publicly unpopular fights. The Chamber’s board of directors also includes executives from such major oil concerns as Chevron, Phillips 66, ConocoPhillips, and Shell Oil.

Yet the irony is that much of Wall Street shares the view that climate change poses financial risks. Last week, Bloomberg reported that the private-equity giant Blackstone, following in the footsteps of several big banks and asset managers, is telling clients that it will no longer invest in the exploration and production of oil and gas. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that some of the largest banks in the country, including Bank of America and Wells Fargo, had formed a consortium to confront the risks that climate change poses to financial institutions.

“When you think about climate change, and then you think about what the science is telling us is going to happen, it will literally have implications and impact across a broad spectrum of industries,” Mary Obasi, a global climate-risk executive at Bank of America who chairs the consortium, told the Journal. “This is an enormous problem for us all to tackle,” added Nancy Foster, the president of the Risk Management Association, a group that helps financial institutions analyze their liabilities. “I think it’s so important for banks to lead, as opposed to react.”

The Biden Administration is pushing banks as well. Last year, Michael Hsu, the acting Comptroller of the Currency, warned that all banks, not just the largest ones, needed to begin closely monitoring potential climate-associated risks that could undermine their financial stability. At last year’s COP26 conference in Glasgow, many of the world’s largest banks and their regulators signed a pledge to direct funding toward efforts to control carbon emissions.

Stiglitz said that Congress, not Bloom Raskin, is out of step and causing the U.S. to lag behind other nations. “It’s the United States that’s an outlier in this discussion. The central banks and economists all over the world realize there’s a climate risk.” He argues that even climate skeptics ought to pay attention to the potential risks, if only to guard against the possibility that they could be proven wrong. “Sarah Bloom Raskin is a lawyer, and she knows that it’s not the Fed’s responsibility to ‘de-fund’ the fossil fuel industry,” Stiglitz said. “But she also knows that the Fed has responsibility for financial stability, and you can’t provide that if you turn a blind eye to the possibility that the prices might be wrong of some assets.” Stiglitz added, “Banks are supposed to assess risk.”

Yet, on February 16th, ten Republican senators sent a strongly worded letter to President Biden demanding that he withdraw Bloom Raskin’s nomination. It accused her of being “an activist, not someone who should be placed in a supervisory role at the independent, non-partisan central bank.” They argued that “the Federal Reserve was explicitly structured to be as removed and insulated as possible from changeable political whims.”

Right. Climate change is a “political whim.” Good luck with that.

Here’s what the right’s dear leader is saying about climate change these days:

Millions of Americans are going to be displaced and suffer financial ruin as more and more coastal property becomes uninhabitable, but Trump thinks its all a big joke. https://t.co/QMLhU7lwPz

— John Iadarola (@johniadarola) March 14, 2022

And here’s what our good pal Joe Manchin has to say about it:

Manchin says he’s reluctant to support the proliferation of electric vehicles https://t.co/PLEsWzSzuN pic.twitter.com/hDOg1o1dzD

— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) March 14, 2022

Yes, they are both brain dead.

Former president Donald Trump had another of his interminable rallies this weekend. He said the usual things delighting his South Carolina crowd and boring the rest of us into a coma. This time, however, he did add one memorable new line to the script which got people’s attention:

“For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.” https://t.co/jqW9JX3jCp

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) March 13, 2022

As we watch the horrific carnage unfolding in Ukraine and the repressive crack down in Russia, comments like that are all the more chilling. He truly does want to emulate Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un. As the Washington Post reported recently, he has repeated his earlier admiration for Kim’s “total control” as well:

He espoused praise for North Korea’s brutal leader, marveling at how Kim’s generals and aides “cowered” when the dictator spoke to them. “Total control,” Trump said of how Kim ran the country, describing generals snapping to attention and standing up on command. “His people were sitting at attention,” he added. “I looked at my people and said I want my people to act like that.”

I have little doubt that if he wins another term, he will be much worse than he was in the first. He won’t make the mistake of hiring people who might stand in his way a second time.

However, as we know, Trump isn’t really serious about governing and wouldn’t know how to do it efficiently even if he were. It doesn’t make him any less dangerous, of course. His chaotic narcissism can do as much damage as a serious ideological authoritarian could. But he’s laid out a style template for someone who is serious, showing them exactly the attitude that appeals to the MAGA base. And nobody in GOP politics is as ready to seize the mantle as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump 2.0.

The personality and affect have been evident since DeSantis won the governor’s seat back in 2018. The Trumpian pettiness, the contempt, the reflexive hostility seem to come naturally to him. He treats the press like dirt and thinks insults are the highest form of humor. If he has any personal warmth or human compassion it’s certainly well hidden. He even gestures like Trump. 

But with DeSantis, it’s more than just style. He’s got the Republicans in Florida working together like clockwork to enact the most authoritarian agenda in the country, calibrated perfectly to appeal to the base in advance of his re-election campaign — and a potential presidential run in 2024.

Florida has been at the leading edge of COVID denialism from the very beginning, but in recent days DeSantis and his hand-picked science-denying surgeon general have taken it to a new level. They had already turned masks into a battleground with the governor taking it upon himself earlier this month to scold high school kids for wearing them in his presence, declaring that it’s time to end the “COVID theatre.” This was ironic since it turned out that many of the kids had been told by their parents to wear them and DeSantis’ numerous assaults on education over the past year have been rationalized as a defense of “parental rights.” Then last week the surgeon general went even further, defying the CDC and most physicians by recommending that kids not get vaccinated for COVID-19. DeSantis and his medical henchman seem determined to keep the virus circulating as long as they can.

Meanwhile, the legislative season just coming to a close has produced such an astonishing array of right-wing culture war victories delivering on Desantis’ “anti-woke” agenda that it’s hard to know where to start. Building on last year’s education wrecking ball in which they banned Critical Race Theory from schools despite the fact that they were not teaching it, instituted a requirement that schools teach about the “evils of communism” and passed a higher education law that allows for budget cuts to colleges based on student and faculty surveys about “viewpoint diversity” (which DeSantis defines as “indoctrination”) this year they took it to a whole new level. Salon’s Amanda Marcotte offered this tart analysis of the “Stop WOKE Act” “

The legislature also passed the “Stop WOKE Act,” which bars both schools and businesses from having any training or program that supposedly causes an “individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.” This has been largely covered as a ban on any kind of diversity training, but it’s even more expansive than that. As I note in Friday’s Standing Room Only newsletter, conservatives can also block anti-sexual harassment trainings by claiming it’s guilt-tripping men to tell them that ass-pinching is not allowed in the workplace.

The “fuck your feelings” crowd sure are sensitive snowflakes, aren’t they?

Maximum leader DeSantis also got his wish for a first in the nation election police force which will report directly to him. I’ve got a tip for them: it turns out that the Republican Party in south Florida changed the registrations of hundreds of Democrats to Republican without their permission. That’s a crime. In fact, DeSantis might end up regretting this one. If the election police are on the level (which is unlikely, I know) it’s almost certain they will be putting many more Republicans behind bars than Democrats. Even Trump’s Chief of Staff just blatantly committed it in the last election.

And then there is the grotesque “Don’t Say Gay” law which prohibits teachers from discussing the subject in grades K-3. But because it uses the new vigilante system of civil law harassment, and is written so poorly, it will result in a chilling effect on all school districts and will result in small kids with gay parents being treated like aliens and many LGBTQ kids being shoved in the closet. If you doubt their intentions, just listen to DeSantis’ vile press secretary:

If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children. Silence is complicity. This is how it works, Democrats, and I didn’t make the rules.

— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) March 4, 2022

Those of you who are of a certain age will hear the echoes of one of Florida’s original homophobic crusaders Anita Bryant whose “Save Our Children” campaign was based upon the noxious lie that gays were “recruiting” the nice Christian children of the sunshine state.

Under pressure, the CEO of Disney, the state’s largest employer and a major DeSantis donor belatedly objected to the bill and spoke to the Governor about it. DeSantis didn’t budge and Disney announced that they will be suspending all political donations in the state of Florida after which the governor had a full blown meltdown:

In a video exclusively obtained by @FoxNews Digital. @GovRonDeSantis slams #Disney saying “In Florida, our policies got to be based on the best interest of Florida citizens, not on the musing of woke corporations.” pic.twitter.com/Op87xgsLzB

— Kelly Laco (@kelly_laco) March 10, 2022

Florida Republicans believe these Commie Symp mega corporations have no right to criticize them.

GOP takes dramatically new position on corporate speech https://t.co/f9ldREbBOV

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 12, 2022

There was a time when business property rights were sacrosanct in the GOP as a matter of principle. But in the new authoritarian right, if a business doesn’t toe their bigoted line, the government “won’t stand for it.”

Donald Trump is still likely to get the nomination and we can only hope and pray he doesn’t win. His dictatorial impulses are well known. But Ron DeSantis is the future of the Republican Party and he’s figured out how to take all that right-wing hate and grievance and put it into practice. You don’t want to know what he could do on a national level. 

Salon

Following up on the post below about competence and accountability fostering trust, Marcy Wheeler this morning observes that having a career diplomat running the CIA is paying off. Our selective declassification of intelligence to disrupt Russian disinformation on Ukraine has proved effective even if the “triumphalism” of commentary surrounding it may prove premature:

But for now, such declassification has been tremendously successful. It allowed the US and its European partners to repeatedly undercut Russian efforts to gain surprise or legitimize their invasion with disinformation. It has exposed specifics about China’s support for the invasion, raising the costs of such support and, potentially, providing leverage to convince China to distance themselves both publicly and privately from Russia’s efforts. And it seems to have provided a basis for Western countries to unify quickly.

CIA Director William Burns told Sen. Susan Collins last week:

In all the years I spent as a career diplomat, I saw too many instances in which we lost information wars with the Russians. In this case, I think we have had a great deal of effect in disrupting their tactics and their calculations and demonstrating to the entire world that this is a premeditated and unprovoked aggression, built on a body of lies and false narratives. So this is one information war that I think Putin is losing.

Wheeler adds:

Among other posts Burns served in, he was Ambassador to Russia in the final years of the Bush Administration (months before Russia’s invasion of Georgia) and he served as Deputy Secretary of State during Russia’s response to Viktor Yanukovych’s ouster, including its annexation of Crimea.

“[A]fter the two decades of paranoid secrecy that followed the Iraq intelligence debacle, the United States is actually using the intelligence it makes such efforts to collect,” Wheeler writes. And gaining tactical advantage. “After years of Russian intelligence operations designed to split American alliances, that has had the effect of raising US credibility with allies.”

This is exactly what the last administration sought to undercut by appointing yes-men, cronies and loyalists to posts that require long experience and commitment to government service.

The 2019 impeachment hearings testimony of former Director for European Affairs for the United States National Security Council (NSC), Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, and former NSC Russia adviser Fiona Hill modeled what public service looks like when practiced by people more committed to their country than to their personal interests.

Round of applause in the room as Lt. Col. Vindman explains why he's confident in his decision to come forward, despite the risks.
"This is America. This is the country I've served and defended. That all of my brothers have served. Here, right matters." #impeachmenthearings pic.twitter.com/82xCLavlrC

— Indivisible Guide (@IndivisibleTeam) November 19, 2019

Trumpism is so perverse, it sees heroes as traitors.

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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.

Numerous reports suggest that police and military ranks contain an unknown number of racists, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, etc. They probably always have. Like other social ills, reporting on them is just better these days. Plus, social media makes them more visible. Torches and white robes aren’t the only giveaway anymore.

It is not surprising, therefore, that as Trumpism urged them crawl out from under their rocks, that we would find them in more places. Dan Gilmore, a National Security Agency contractor, tells Jeff Stein of Daily Beast that a Twitter-like, internal messaging platform run by the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), “eChirp,” has since 2016 become a “dumpster fire” of hate speech:

“I was the admin of this application and after a couple years, it became a dumpster fire,” Gilmore, a 30-year veteran of Navy and NSA cryptologic systems, wrote Thursday in an extraordinary public post on his own web site. “Professionalism was thrown out the window, and flame wars became routine.”

[…]

“Hate speech was running rampant on our applications,” wrote Gilmore, whose identity and credentials have been vouched for by another Pentagon contractor. “I’m not being hyperbolic. Racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamaphobic [sic], and misogynistic speech was being posted in many of our applications.”

Even more startling, Gilmore alleges, “there were many employees at CIA, DIA, NSA, and other IC agencies that openly stated that the January 6th terrorist attack on our Capitol was justified.”

Gilmore says that “more than a few government employees at many different IC agencies” grew “concerned about the content that Intelink was allowing to be hosted.”

The NSA (once known jokingly a No Such Agency) did not comment.

Gilmore says he was eventually fired over harassment case in which he was copied on complaints filed with a top IC official.

“I wanted to tell everyone that there is a cancer within the government and when I tried to weed it out, I got fired,” Gilmore wrote. “It was just easier for government management to get rid of me rather than to deal with the underlying issue.”

An anonymous NSA contractor relates that MAGA-types engaged in unprofessional behavior, some serious, kept their jobs while others were terminated for minor infractions. If Donald Trump reaches the Oval Office again, he will bring a new coterie of incompetent loyalists with him, fire whom he pleases, and make that practice official. Ask Marie Yovanovitch how that works.

A friend on an online forum just argued that the way to rebuild faith in government is to restore competence and accountability. We’ve seen accountability slide and corruption metastasize since Ford pardoned Nixon. People know in their guts that the rich get the elevator and the poor get the shaft. They’ve seen banksters crash the economy and draw bonuses even as they put millions of ordinary American families out of their jobs and homes. No clever messaging will counter that even if bickering Democrats could manage it.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren made a credible run for president by promising real reform.

Donald Trump won the presidency by focusing people’s anger on immigrants and minorities. Their enemies may be imaginary, but their anger is real.

People don’t trust and don’t believe in the U.S. not only because they see a Frank Wilhoit double-standard in who’s held accountable and who’s not, but because they feel hung out to dry by their country. Repeatedly. Routinely. Stallone voiced the sentiment at the end of the first Rambo movie in 1982:

John Rambo: I want, what they want, and every other guy who came over here and spilled his guts and gave everything he had, wants! For our country to love us as much as we love it! That’s what I want!

We’ve built a culture in which it is gospel to tell people the military represents the best of America. Leave no one behind. So, why does “all-for one and one-for-all” represent Americans’ highest virtue, a code of honor, inside the base perimeter fence, but set one foot outside and the American ethos is dog-eat-dog, every man for himself, and “fuck you, I’ve got mine”? What kind of country is that? Who wants to live there?

People may boast that they want nothing from the government and for it to stay out of their lives, but that is a conceit born of cynicism and libertarian propaganda. People want to live in an America that has their back.

Maybe give them one. Don’t just promise them.

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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.

It was cold last night in South Carolina so Dear Leader cut short his usual long-winded rally speech. I couldn’t face it this week and only saw clips. But Rolling Stone did a nice write up. It sounds like the usual blather. This was a bit disturbing, however:

He wants to be a dictator & does absolutely nothing to hide it. https://t.co/wFhxXIymi2

— David Roberts (@drvolts) March 13, 2022

https://twitter.com/Sifill_LDF/status/1503073457239691267

He also made it clear, once again, that he’s running in 2024 — as if there was any doubt:

Donald Trump didn’t even speak for an hour during his rally in Florence, South Carolina, on Saturday night, but he still managed to lay out a sufficiently terrifying vision of what the United States could look like should he run for and win the presidency in 2024, while cycling through the gamut of right-wing talking points about Ukraine, Biden, and beyond.

The former president railed against President Biden’s handling of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and once again failed to condemn Vladimir Putin; he bashed Democrats for advocating for a more humane immigration policy and acknowledging the reality of climate change; and went on an extended rant about the 2020 election, claiming that not only is there evidence the election was rigged (there isn’t), but that the matter is “beyond the standpoint of evidence” (it’s not). “I ran twice, I won twice, and I did much better the second time,” Trump said of the election he lost by over seven million votes.

The takeaway from all of this is what Trump has hinted at repeatedly since he left office: “We may have to run again,” he said to what may have been the loudest applause of the night.

The rally was Trump’s first since Russia invaded Ukraine, and he spent the beginning of it recycling several of the points he’s made in recent weeks. He claimed the invasion is Biden’s fault and would have never happened if he was still in office. He wasn’t so harsh on Putin, whom he described as someone who is “driven to put it together.” Trump, again, took credit for the Ukrainian resistance, touting the military assistance sent to the nation during his administration. He did not mention that he delayed said military assistance in an effort to extort Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky into digging up dirt on Biden and family.

Trump was in South Carolina to support House candidates Katie Arrington and Russell Fry, as well as the Republican Party as a whole ahead of the midterms in November. He thusly spent plenty of time bashing Democratic policy initiatives.

He dismissed the idea that climate change is anything to worry about. “The oceans are going to rise 1/100th of an inch in the next 300 years and it’s going to kill everybody,” he said sarcastically. “It’s going create more oceanfront property, that’s what it’s going to do.”

He fear-mongered at length about how “Joe Biden has thrown the gates open to these murderous cartels” across the border, noting how “bloodthirsty criminal gangs” are “torturing and slaughtering hostages,” insinuating you and everyone you love may be next if the Democrats keep control of Congress.

He also claimed that Democrats are to blame for empty store shelves, which they aren’t, of course, because store shelves aren’t empty. “This all came out of the stench of the Biden administration,” Trump said.

The most terrifying part of Trump’s speech may have been not only his relentless insistence that he won the 2020 election (“It was a fraudulent election and the proof is beyond anybody’s wildest expectation”), but the preview he offered of what another Trump administration might look like, should he win in 2024. He’ll have fashioned a Congress that is far more compliant with his authoritarian impulses than the one he took office with in 2017, and that wouldn’t really have a problem with him deciding, say, that he should be able to just go ahead and get rid of anyone in the executive branch who isn’t sufficiently loyal.

“We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States,” Trump said. “The deep state must and will be brought to heel. It’s already happening.”

Trump seems like he fully intends to be in a position to wield that power. “In 2024 we are going to take back that beautiful, beautiful White House,” he said. “I wonder who will do that. I wonder. I wonder.”

He is refusing to announce because the campaign finance laws would require him to file financial disclosures. So he does this and everyone has to pretend he isn’t in the race. It’s ridiculous but what else is new?

He’s getting more and more extreme and sadly, I think his loyal followers are all in.

New polling from CBS. It’s good news that there is wide bipartisan support for the sanctions on oil and gas. Unfortunately, it does lose 14 points if people have to pay more. Still, it’s a hefty majority which is mildly surprising.

CBS reports:

The overwhelming support for sanctions on Russia’s oil and gas, and the willingness to pay more as a result, is the kind of widespread sentiment we don’t always see in public opinion these days: bipartisan, cutting across race, region, and even income. And it is driven, Americans say, by a desire to help Ukraine and punish Russia.

Some economic pain now might be seen as a hedge against bigger problems later, if it stops Russia, because Americans largely believe Russia has designs on invading other countries beyond Ukraine. People who think so are even more likely to support oil sanctions. 

Punishing Russia economically still finds favor over military options. For instance, even though many initially say they would back a no-fly zone, support for it drops off once Americans consider that it could be taken as an act of war and lead to a direct U.S.-Russia conflict.

This is refreshing common sense from a majority of Americans. They are not completely deluded by the asinine conspiracy theories that are all over the place right now.

But the rest is debatable:

No one can know that. I don’t see why people are so sure of themselves on these questions. Is it possible? Of course! And that’s frightening. So are these other things:

That’s why a no-fly zone is so risky, which people seem to realize when they stop to consider the real possibilities:

The US has no choice but to do the following, although the Trump voters should all realize that if their Dear Leader were in the White House he would very likely disagree (blaming it on their unpaid “dues.) He was relentlessly hostile to NATO and Europe in general complaining that the US shouldn’t be participating in their defense. But, of course, the last history book he read was in the 3rd grade so his knowledge of the stakes in a European war is exptremely limited.

The following is just sad. You can hate Biden all you want but he’s done a terrific job in keeping the coalition together and garnering global support for Ukraine and condemnation for Russian invasion. That was not a given. And he’s done it very deftly by not showboating and running around making bellicose claims or putting the US at the center of the situation, which keeps the temperature lower than it would be otherwise.

Of course that means he’s getting no credit and most people see it as weakness but that’s just the state of our stupid politics. He has done the right thing.

By the way, I think it’s clear that he wants those MIGs to go to Ukraine it’s just that he is treading very carefully on the concept of NATO escalation. It’s horrifying to watch the carnage but as former Obama state department official Congressman Tom Malinowski (who was born in Poland) pointed out on MSNBC, a limited no-fly zone is next to useless, and a real no-fly zone requires a willingness to shoot down Russian planes and take out ground air defenses in Russia in order to be effective. Moreover, this isn’t an air war, it’s being fought on the ground.

Personally, I think Zelensky and everyone else knows this and is “begging” for a no-fly zone largely as a way to keep the pressure on Europe and the US to keep supplying them with the weapons and humanitarian supplies they need. I expect he is the last person to want to risk nuclear war — his country will be ground zero.

The sanctions are already unprecedented and crippling. I don’t think people understand that. The supplies are going in as fast as they can send them. But at least it’s only a small minority of Americans who want WWIII. Small favors.

I don’t understand that but I guess it’s par for the course. It probably includes all Republicans and a few anti-war types who think the US caused the problem. Or something. As I said, Biden has done a very good job managing this difficult situation so far. But this sour mood just lays every unfortunate turn of events on him. I expect that from Republicans but it’s disappointing that some Dems and Dem leaning Indies can’t see that. I’d like to ask them what they would have done differently.

Anyway — the sour mood persists:

I guess the following is good news. But to me the threat from “other Americans” is still the biggest:

And yes … of course. sigh…

As I say in the title, Americans are somewhat sane but still misinformed. I guess that’s progress.

This piece on lessons learned from the handling of the pandemic by Zeynep Tufekci is sobering, particularly since I really doubt we will doubt we will do anything differently. It’s long, so read the whole thing if you can. Here are just a couple of her observations:

As the pandemic enters its third year, we must consider those moments when the river branched, and nations made choices that affected thousands, millions, of lives.

What if China had been open and honest in December 2019? What if the world had reacted as quickly and aggressively in January 2020 as Taiwan did? What if the United States had put appropriate protective measures in place in February 2020, as South Korea did?

To examine these questions is to uncover a brutal truth: Much suffering was avoidable, again and again, if different choices that were available and plausible had been made at crucial turning points. By looking at them, and understanding what went wrong, we can hope to avoid similar mistakes in the future.

What happened after China covered up: The world failed to heed warnings and take action.

On Dec. 30, 2019, ProMED, a service that tracks infectious disease outbreaks globally, warned of “unexplained pneumonia” cases in Wuhan. The veteran infectious disease reporter Helen Branswell shared the news alert on Twitter the next day and said it was giving her “#SARS flashbacks.” That same day, Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control — with its close contacts on the ground in China — fired off an email to the W.H.O. with its concerns that patients were being isolated in Wuhan — a clear sign of an outbreak with person-to-person spread.

On Jan. 11, 2020, a Chinese scientist bravely allowed an Australian colleague to upload the virus’s genome to a gene bank, without official authorization. This meant that the whole world could now see this was a novel coronavirus, closely related to SARS. The next day, the scientist’s lab was shut down.

Doubts over whether the virus was capable of spreading from person to person should have been swept away in mid-January 2020 by reports that a woman in Thailand and a man in Japan had tested positive without having been to the Wuhan seafood market that Chinese authorities had said was the center of the spread. Meanwhile, despite such clear evidence of the virus’s transmissibility, the number of cases that China reported remained at 44. (We’d later learn that medical professionals weren’t even allowed to report cases that weren’t connected to the seafood market.) Yet the W.H.O. kept repeating China’s line that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission.

It wasn’t until China shut down Wuhan on Jan. 23, 2020, that the rest of the world could see how serious the threat was — even then, the global response remained feeble.

What could have happened: The world sees through China’s deception and takes action.

How could nations have gotten around China’s smokescreen? They could have done what Taiwan did.

On Dec. 31, 2019, the same day Taiwan officials sent that email to the W.H.O., they started boarding every plane that flew there directly from Wuhan, screening arriving passengers for symptoms like fever.

“We were not able to get satisfactory answers either from the W.H.O. or from the Chinese C.D.C., and we got nervous and we started doing our preparation,” foreign minister Joseph Wu told Time magazine.

Masks were rationed, to ensure there were enough for the entire population, and were distributed to schools. Soldiers were put on production lines at mask factories to increase supply. The country quickly allocated money to businesses that lost customers and revenue.

For most of 2020, Covid was rare in Taiwan. On 253 consecutive days that year there were no locally transmitted cases there, even though there had been extensive travel to China, including Wuhan, before January 2020. With extensive testing and tracing, they squashed two major outbreaks — one that started in March 2020, and more impressively, a major outbreak of the more transmissible Alpha variant in summer 2021 — bringing local cases back to zero. That shows what was possible with an early and robust response.

Taiwan has suffered 853 deaths. If the United States had suffered a similar death rate, we would have lost about 12,000 people, instead of nearly a million.

Taiwan shows that even in early January, there was enough information to be concerned about the virus, and the potential to suppress any outbreak.

What happened after the outbreak went global: The real contagious threat was ignored.

On the precipice of a pandemic, too many important officials failed to understand how the virus was spreading, despite emerging evidence, keeping them from effectively limiting its spread and costing thousands of lives.

On Feb. 3, 2020, the cruise ship Diamond Princess was ordered to stay in Yokohama harbor, in Japan, two days after a passenger who had disembarked in Hong Kong tested positive for Covid. After 10 other people on the ship were found to be infected, the ship was quarantined. Eventually there would be 712 cases, about 19 percent of those on board, with 14 deaths.

Nine public health workers attending to the ship were infected. It seemed quite unlikely, the Japanese virology professor Hitoshi Oshitani noted, that all these professionals with expertise in infection control had failed to take the recommended precautions.

At that point the guidelines from the W.H.O. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were based on the assumption that this virus was spread by large droplets from the nose and mouth that quickly fell to the ground or to surfaces, because of their size. People were advised to keep enough distance from others to stay out of the range of these droplets, and to wash their hands in case they picked them up from surfaces.

If the workers became infected despite those precautions, and if passengers were infected even when they were quarantined, Oshitani suspected that the virus was probably spread by airborne transmission of tiny particles — aerosols — that could spread more widely, float around and concentrate, especially indoors.

This case for aerosol spread strengthened after 61 people attended a choir practice in Skagit, Wash., on March 10, 2020. The church followed droplet-based guidance by propping the door open so nobody would touch the door knob and avoiding handshakes or hugs. No one was six feet in front of the person suspected to have been the single initial source. Nevertheless, 52 people — 85 percent of those present — became infected.

Many Western experts, including in the United States and Europe and at the W.H.O., discounted these and other evidence of airborne transmission. Countries like the United States did not require masks to limit airborne spread but worried instead about germs spreading on people’s mail and groceries.

After more evidence, and organized attempts by hundreds of aerosol scientists, minor course corrections started later in 2020, but they were halting, incomplete and underpublicized. For example, it wasn’t until December 2020 that the W.H.O. started recommending that masks be worn indoors regardless of distance, and even then only if the space was poorly ventilated, and it wasn’t until December 2021 — two years after it all began — that it recommended highly protective masks for health care workers.

It was also assumed that only people with symptoms — like fever — would be infectious, even though evidence to the contrary had emerged early.

On Jan. 26, 2020, the Chinese minister of health gave a news conference warning that people without symptoms could transmit the virus. The same week an article in The Lancet had documented a case in which infection was visible in the lungs of a patient who had shown no symptoms. An article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, also the same week, noted cases presenting only mild symptoms, with the authors stressing that this would make it easy to miss them. Multiple reports from German scientists soon disclosed similar conclusions based on cases there.

However, many health authorities ignored, denied and even belittled evidence of spread without symptoms. It took until well into March for officials in the United States, for example, to accept that people without symptoms could be infectious.

The failure to acknowledge this type of transmission meant that the urgency for mass testing wasn’t realized and the virus spread silently, without critical precautions being taken, until explosive growth occurred in places like New York City. The need to identify and quarantine people who had come in contact with those who were infected was considered unnecessary and alarmist in the United States. The C.D.C. and the W.H.O. initially recommended masks only for the sick.

Another crucial misstep was the failure to recognize the virus’s dominant pattern of spread, in large bursts.

That February, Oshitani and his colleagues concluded that a vast majority of infected people didn’t transmit at all, while a small number of individuals were superspreading, in closed indoor settings like restaurants, night clubs, karaoke bars, gyms and such — especially if the ventilation was poor. They developed new approaches to trace infections to their origin, to find cluster transmission and thus look for other cases.

What could have happened: Officials put in place effective and early mitigation strategies.

The rest of the world could have understood the virus as Japanese officials did. Based on their understanding, which was arrived at in February 2020, that Covid was airborne, spread without symptoms and driven by clusters, by early March they were recommending mask-wearing, emphasizing the need for ventilation and advising the public to avoid the three Cs: closed spaces, crowded places and close-contact settings.

Americans, on the other hand, were disinfecting their groceries, and the W.H.O. kept emphasizing hand-washing and social distancing, or remaining six feet apart. Japan has had about 25,000 Covid deaths, which would be the equivalent of just under 66,000 in a country the size of the United States.

Mass testing could have detected people who were infectious before they even knew they were sick and sometimes those who never had symptoms at all. Ventilation and air filtration could have kept indoor spaces safer.

Instead of closing parks, activities could have been moved outside weather permitting, since natural ventilation more effectively dissipates the virus. The key role of masks would have been understood earlier, along with the benefits of higher quality masks. Rather than wasting money on plexiglass barriers — which can’t fully block aerosols and can even create dead zones for ventilation, increasing infection risk — schools would have begun updating their ventilation and HVAC systems, and installing HEPA air filters, which can filter viruses. Japan’s cluster-busting strategy could have been adopted.

Also, even though epidemics are easier to suppress with early action, it’s silent spread and superspreading that make a timely response even more important, as shown by South Korea’s early response.

South Korea experienced major superspreading events in February 2020, including one in a secretive church that accounted for more than 5,000 infections, with a single person suspected as the source. The country had the highest number of cases outside of China at that point.

South Korean officials sprang into action, rolling out a mass testing program — they had been readying their testing capacity since January — with drive-through options and vigorous contact tracing.

South Korea beat back that potentially catastrophic outbreak, and continued to greatly limit its cases. They had fewer than 1,000 deaths in all of 2020. In the United States, that would translate to fewer than 7,000 deaths from Covid in 2020. Instead, estimates place the number of deaths at more than 375,000.

She concludes with this:

What needs to happen

When the pandemic is over, the temptation will be to move on and reclaim what had been normal life. For individuals that will be fine. But the cracks revealed in our governments and public health institutions by two years of inertia, mistakes and resistance to evidence make it crucial that a broad, tough dissection of what happened take place if we are to choose the correct course in future challenges.

National and international commissions need to help us see where we went wrong, without scapegoating, and how to respond to future outbreaks, without defensively excusing what public health authorities and national leaders did this time, even if well-meaning. In some countries, it would be easy to focus only on political leaders like President Donald Trump, who severely damaged America’s response. But top public health officials, high-level scientists and state governors made many missteps along the way. At a time of growing international distrust we need to work to increase trust and mutual cooperation. We need to better understand how to rapidly incorporate evidence into scientific policy and to better understand human response to such major, complicated events.

If we can do that, to save lives and ease suffering in the future, it will not make up for all the loss and hardship we have endured in the last two years. But we can at least say we did our best to learn from it, and let that be the one positive legacy of all this.

The congress just removed all COVID funding from the omnibus spending bill for 2023. The Republicans refused to participate en masse unless states were forced to return any unspent money from previous relief bills (and there was only a small handful that agreed even then) — and the Democrats from those states balked so that’s that.

What are the chances the US and the world does any of what Tufecki suggests? As far as I can tell the decision has already been made that we are going to tolerate hundreds of thousands of deaths any time a COVID-19 variant or even a new pandemic comes along. It’s every man for himself. (Thank goodness for the vaccines.)

They seem to love being conned:

Former President Donald Trump in recent weeks asked his supporters for money as part of a promotion to eat dinner with him in New Orleans last Saturday. The only problem was that no one actually got to eat dinner with Trump, The Washington Post reported Friday, citing four people familiar with the matter.

A series of email pitches to small-dollar donors offered up what any loyal Trump supporter would undoubtedly appreciate. “We’ll cover your flight. We’ll cover your very nice hotel. We’ll cover your dinner,” one email read. “All you have to do is enter.“

It’s unclear how much money the pitches raised for Save America PAC, the former president’s political action committee, or how many people donated. But similar contests brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars, people involved with them told the Post. A Trump spokesperson chalked up the lack of a winner in this contest to an “administrative error.”

“President Trump has awarded more than 100 prizes to contest winners across America, but due to an administrative error in this individual circumstance, the contest winner was not properly notified for last weekend’s event in New Orleans,” Taylor Budowich told the Post. “Consistent with the rules of the sweepstakes, a substitute prize will be awarded to the winner.”

Budowich didn’t specify what this substitute prize would be. According to Save America PAC, the value of the original prize is about $3,000.

It’s certainly possible an “administrative error” is responsible, as Budowich claimed, but this also isn’t the first time this has happened. The Post‘s story echoes a 2019 report by Popular Information which found that Trump’s campaign held at least 15 online contests for a chance to win a meal with him — but no one appeared to have actually done so. (Trump’s communications director claimed then that “people win the contests each time,” yet didn’t offer proof.)

Trump’s shady fundraising tactics don’t end there. He and the Republican Party were forced to refund millions of dollars they acquired last year through deceptive email blasts, specifically by having donors unwittingly opt in to recurring payments. The recurring donation box was pre-checked earlier this week, as well, when Save America PAC solicited supporters to fund a new private plane for the former president.

“Do you remember Trump Force One?” the pitch read. “Before becoming the greatest President of all time, I traveled the Country in my plane, known as Trump Force One. I have a very important update on my plane but I need to trust that you won’t share it with anyone: my team is building a BRAND NEW Trump Force One.”

The email blast came shortly after it was reported that Trump’s flight out of New Orleans on Saturday was forced to make an emergency landing.

It was just reported last week that he just got a big $100 million loan. But this is a guy who never picks up a tab so getting his cult to pay for his new plane is par for the course.

Mother Jones has the receipts:

On March 3, as Russian military forces bombed Ukrainian cities as part of Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of his neighbor, the Kremlin sent out talking points to state-friendly media outlets with a request: Use more Tucker Carlson.

“It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally,” advises the 12-page document written in Russian. It sums up Carlson’s position: “Russia is only protecting its interests and security.” The memo includes a quote from Carlson: “And how would the US behave if such a situation developed in neighboring Mexico or Canada?”

The document—titled “For Media and Commentators (recommendations for coverage of events as of 03.03)”—was produced, according to its metadata, at a Russian government agency called the Department of Information and Telecommunications Support, which is part of the Russian security apparatus. It was provided to Mother Jones by a contributor to a national Russian media outlet who asked not to be identified. The source said memos like this one have been regularly sent by Putin’s administration to media organizations during the war. Independent media outlets in Russia have been forced to shut down since the start of the conflict. 

The March 3 document opens with top-line themes the Kremlin wanted Russian media to spread: The Russian invasion is “preventing the possibility of nuclear strikes on its territory”; Ukraine has a history of nationalism (that presumably threatens Russia); the Russian military operation is proceeding as planned; Putin is protecting all Russians; the “losing” Ukrainian army is shelling residential areas of eastern Ukraine controlled by Russia; foreign mercenaries are arriving in Ukraine; Europe “is facing more and more problems” because of its own sanctions; and there will be “danger and possible legal consequences” for those in Russia who protest the war. The document notes that it is “necessary to continue quoting” Putin. It claims that the “hysteria of the West had reached the inexplicable level” of people calling for killing dogs and cats from Russia and asks, “Today they call for the killing of animals from Russia. Tomorrow, will they call for killing people from Russia?”

A section headlined “Victory in Information War” tells Russian journalists to push these specific points: The Ukrainian military is beginning to collapse; the Kyiv government is guilty of “war crimes”; and Moscow is the target of a “massive Western anti-Russian propaganda” operation. It states that Russian media should raise questions about Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s state of mind and suggest he is not truly in charge of Ukraine. And it encourages these outlets to “broadcast messages” highlighting the law recently passed by the Russia Duma that makes it a crime to impede the war effort or disseminate what the government deems “false” information about the war, punishable for up to 15 years in prison. This portion instructs Russian journalists to emphasize that these penalties apply to anyone who promotes news about Ukrainian military victories or Russian attacks on civilian targets.

This is the section of the memo that calls on Russian media to make as much use as possible of Tucker Carlson’s broadcasts. No other Western journalist is referenced in the memo.

I’m sure Tucker is very proud.

Unless you reside in Arizona or Hawaii, you woke up on Daylight Savings Time. You “lost” an hour overnight and get to have your circadian rhythm, your body’s internal clock, disrupted for several days.

Someone must have written a song using circadian rhythm as a theme. It was not hard to find one. In fact, it’s pretty good.

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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.