Month: October 2022

Looks like Newtie’s Shenanigans are on the agenda

In the 1994 midterms, halfway through Bill Clinton’s first term Democrats lost both the House and Senate, giving the GOP the House majority for the first time since 1954. Conventional wisdom had it that Republicans won because they nationalized the race six weeks before election day with their “Contract With America,” written by soon-to-be House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia and his right-hand man, Rep. Dick Armey of Texas. Whether that was really responsible for the victory is open to interpretation — Clinton was very unpopular at the time — but it was a novel strategic approach and the political media ate it up, lending the contract an almost mythic status.

It was an interesting document, based in part on Ronald Reagan’s 1985 State of the Union address and made up of various culture-war slogans and longstanding conservative policy goals. The GOP promised to implement a slew of procedural changes to how the House would be run, from changing seniority rules to cutting committees. After 40 years of uninterrupted control, it was like a political earthquake.

But the Republicans’ contract featured much more than that. They promised floor votes on 10 major policy changes within the first 100 days, a list that included all our favorite right-wing policies of yesteryear: tax cuts (of course), term limits, a balanced budget requirement, tort “reform,” welfare “reform” and the biggie, “entitlement reform.” Most of those things didn’t pass the Congress in any case, or were vetoed by Clinton, but that was beside the point. It was the beginning of the right’s “performative politics,” which continues to this day.

Related

Who’s a “conservative”? Not these folks — the word has become meaningless

Their most audacious performance came when Gingrich decided that his best bet to ensure Clinton would lose re-election in 1996 would be to shut down the government and blame the president for it. This wasn’t the first time the government had been shut down over budgetary matters. It had happened several times since the 1970s over various policy differences — but this one was deliberately engineered for strictly political purposes. Gingrich and the Republicans sent Clinton a budget that committed the federal government to balance the budget within seven years and drastically cut environmental regulations. They purposefully stepped on the third rail of American politics by proposing to raise Medicare premiums. Clinton vetoed it, of course, and the standoff began.

After a couple of false starts and failed negotiations, nearly the entire federal workforce was furloughed from Dec. 16, 1995, to Jan. 6, 1996, the longest shutdown in history up until that point. Reports of national parks being closed, government offices being shuttered and thousands going without pay at Christmas took their toll. But the most damning story of all came from Gingrich himself. NPR reported:

According to the polls Republicans quickly bore the blame for shutting the government down. Their hand was weakened when Gingrich told reporters he had forced a shutdown in part because the president made him exit Air Force One by the back door after returning from the funeral of slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

That poorly thought-out comment resulted in this famous front page.

Clinton easily won the election in 1996 (over Sen. Bob Dole, by contemporary standards an entirely “mainstream” Republican) largely because the GOP had been tainted by such shenanigans.

Did Republicans learn from that debacle? They did not. They shut down the government under Barack Obama in a 2013 standoff over raising the debt ceiling, risking a default on government debt and the potential destruction of the government’s credit rating, this time over the Affordable Care Act. That did not work either. The New York Times reported at the time that “the shutdown sent Republican poll ratings plunging, cost the government billions of dollars and damaged the nation’s international credibility.” Yet another award-winning performance by the Republicans.

Fast forward to December 2018, and this time it was a Republican president, after having decisively lost the House in that November’s midterms, who engineered the longest government shutdown in history with his petulant demand that Congress fund his ridiculous border wall or else. Democrats refused and the GOP lost that one too.

I guess they just love losing. Republicans are already planning to do it again if they take the majority in November. Rep. Jason Smith, the Missouri Republican who hopes to be the next chair of the Ways and Means Committee, told Axios that Republicans plan to demand that President Biden reverse all his “radical” policies or they will refuse to raise the debt ceiling. “If Republicans are trying to cut spending, surely [Biden] wouldn’t try to default,” Smith said. “If we were trying to bring down inflation… trying to secure our border, surely he wouldn’t default.”

Other equally radical Republican leaders think the nation is eager to take on that old perennial: “entitlements.” The Republican Study Committee has a plan to raise the retirement age to 70, punish those who retired early and, you guessed it, start on the path to privatizing Social Security. I guess it’s time to roll that out again. It’s been 16 years since they last got their asses handed to them for trying.

Why do Republicans think the public will fall for this pathetic gambit this time around? Maybe they just don’t care: Most of them have totally lost the plot and just want to blow stuff up.

I don’t know why they think the public will blame the Democrats this time when voters never have fallen for this pathetic gambit before. I also suspect they really don’t care anymore. Most of them have totally lost the plot and just want to blow stuff up. But assuming they don’t succeed in causing a global economic meltdown with their silly game, they will have to face the voters again in 2024 on a record of trying to cut Social Security and Medicare, something that their “favorite president” — the one who still hopes to get back to the White House, despite his legal problems — was savvy enough to avoid.

Even so, Democrats need to nip this in the bud. The world economy is already unstable and teetering on the brink of recession, and this debt-ceiling ploy is dangerous even in the best of times. If Democrats lose one or both houses of Congress in November, they must raise the debt ceiling in the lame duck session after that — and raise it enough so they don’t need to do it again anytime soon. In fact, the debt ceiling should really be eliminated altogether — it should not be a matter of negotiation whether or not the government pays its bills.Until that’s resolved, Republicans will continue to use this failed tactic, which apparently makes them feel good for some reason. They never gain from it politically, but at some point this stupid brinkmanship could tip over into a real disaster.

Donald Trump has been loudly demanding that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell sabotage Biden’s agenda by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, so the ex-president is apparently all for going to DEFCON 1, even though that didn’t work for him the first time. But despite all the hand-wringing about Trump demolishing our norms and rules, this particular destructive tactic wasn’t his idea. It was weaponized long ago by those “normal” Republicans from back in the day, the ones who are now valorized as the loyal opposition who worked across the aisle in good faith for the good of the country. Trump wasn’t the first chaos agent by any means. He was just following their lead. 

Salon

Digital witch trials, torches and pitchforks

Public Notice retells this story of intimidation:

On the evening of August 30, operators at Children’s Hospital in Boston took a call from a woman who didn’t identify herself but who had a chilling message: “There is a bomb on the way to the hospital. You’d better evacuate everybody, you sickos.”

In a way, the bomb scare wasn’t a surprise. For weeks, Children’s Hospital had been on the receiving end of threats after right-wing social media accounts started spreading lies about the hospital, which boasts a pioneering pediatric adolescent and trans health program. For example, they claimed — falsely — that the hospital was performing hysterectomies on children as part of gender-affirming care. The hospital does not perform hysterectomies on people under 18. 

Facts don’t matter on the right (you may have heard) when whipping up hysteria is the goal. The usual suspects got involved.

New in Public Notice: @nberlat on the harassment campaign against Boston Children's Hospital and what it shows about how the right uses social media to crowdsource fascist violence https://t.co/aDWpUmcKjw

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 12, 2022

Among the large social media accounts targeting trans health care are Brooklyn real estate agent Chaya Raichik, who posts under the name Libs of TikTok, Daily Wire contributor Matt Walsh, and right-wing activist Christopher Rufo. In a longstanding and deliberate media strategy, these false claims are picked up by other, even bigger, conservative outlets, like the Daily Wire and the Post Millennial. Eventually, in the case of Boston Children’s, they made their way onto Fox News, where they were amplified by Tucker Carlson.

The woman behind the bomb threat faces 10 years in jail.

In response, many children’s hospitals, afraid that the online vitriol will lead to attacks on staff and patients, have started to remove information about gender-affirming care from their websites. This will make it harder for trans people in distress to find health care information. Such is the intended goal of the right, which wants to isolate trans people and force them out of the public sphere.

But there’s an even more sweeping agenda at the heart of these attacks: To build fascist power in the United States. Using the internet as an organizing tool, these operations establish and cultivate leaders, information networks, talking points, tactics, and shock troops. They create a blueprint for violent activism and give far right agitators a chance to practice and perfect intimidation and hatred.

In Michigan, Republican attorney general candidate Matthew DePerno under investigation for violating the law is running to administer it.

It’s a situation unprecedented in Michigan political history: A candidate for statewide office is running under the possibility of being indicted by the very office that he’s seeking, with a vow to indict the current officeholder if he wins. https://t.co/x2xhfocR9U

— Susan J. Demas (@sjdemas) October 12, 2022

“DePerno and eight others, including state Rep. Daire Rendon (R-Lake City) and Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf, conspired to illegally obtain and tamper with voting tabulators,” reports Michigan Advance. DePerno is running on prosecuting his incumbent opponent Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel for supposed crimes against Donald Trump.

If DePerno attacks her on her office’s investigation, she’ll ethically be unable to respond:

“I have every reason to believe Mr. DePerno will interject on this subject, whether asked about it or not,” Nessel said. “And in abiding by my oath of office, I will — for all intents and purposes — be drawn into a boxing match with one hand tied behind my back, unable to speak about the matter and unable to repudiate any untruthful or misleading statements Mr. DePerno may assert.”

Yes, it’s nuts. And it’s widespread. Prion disease has eaten away the frontal lobes of the GOP. What’s left is conspiracy theories and a thirst for vengeance. Among other antisocial behaviors. Let’s hope enough uninfected (or recovering) voters of all stripes have seen enough to stop them.

You’ve been warned.

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A choice between “a better America and a rising autocratic movement”

A new ad from the Lincoln Project popped up first thing this morning bluntly laying out what’s at stake on November 8th.

“It’s a choice between compassion and conspiracy,” actor Mark Hamill begins, “between hope for a better America and a rising autocratic movement.”

"If we don't turn out in this election… it could be our last."#VOTE https://t.co/V8JuBPPcYc

— Mark Hamill (@MarkHamill) October 11, 2022

Democracy is on the line. A violent and deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 proved that. We shouldn’t need missiles falling on our cities to drive the point home. And yet….

Lincoln Project senior advisor Stuart Stevens (“It Was All a Lie“) appeared Tuesday evening on “All In with Chris Hayes” to echo Hamill’s sentiment.

The Republican Party fully embraced and legitimized the racist, anti-American beliefs of the MAGA autocratic movement. They are now one and the same, and we only have one more chance to defeat them in November. @StuartPStevens on MSNBC. pic.twitter.com/dhpQs7m3ux

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) October 11, 2022

“There are those of us who believe that the [Republican] party would expand, that it had to expand if only because America was changing, but we were wrong,” Stevens said. 

“Everything that is happening now is very anti-American on the right. It’s an authoritarian movement, not a normal political party.”

Indeed, many on the right now vocally support Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin. Or else support allowing him to overrun Ukraine and further threaten European democracies in NATO. They are “patriotically” rooting for an authoritarian strongman and for the demise of democracy.

Instead of expanding, the Republican Party contracted. A black man won the White House in 2008. Conservative heads exploded and their party collapsed in upon itself the way after exploding a massive star forms a black hole.

MAGA Republicans? The only thing American left about you is your birth certificate.

A few Republicans escaped the Trumpian gravity well. They adapted.

Those outside the autocratic event horizon have to adapt as well.

Karen Tumulty suggests that, seeing the clown show candidates Republicans placed on ballots this fall, some voters will adapt. Some polls show ticket-splitting may be making a comeback. Perhaps a few Republican voters, enough to make a difference, will vote for Democrats.

But Americans (including Democrats) accustomed to sitting out midterm elections need to adapt as well. Those apathetic about voting or cynically comfortable with not voting at all need to adapt.

Unless they’d care to wake up soon in Russia.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us

There’s little point in the friendly US Saudi relationship at this point

This has been a long time coming and it’s overdue:

President Biden will re-evaluate the relationship with Saudi Arabia after it teamed up with Russia to cut oil production in a move that bolstered President Vladimir V. Putin’s government and could raise gasoline prices in the United States just before midterm elections, a White House official said on Tuesday.

“Certainly in light of recent developments and OPEC Plus’s decision about oil production, the president believes that we should review the bilateral relationship with Saudi Arabia and to take a look to see if that relationship is where it needs to be and that it is serving our national security interests,” the official, John F. Kirby, told reporters on a conference call.

Mr. Kirby, the strategic communications coordinator for the National Security Council, signaled openness to retaliatory measures proposed by Democratic congressional leaders who were outraged by the oil production cut announced last week by OPEC Plus, the international cartel. Among other things, leading Democrats have proposed curbing security cooperation with Saudi Arabia, including arms sales, and stripping OPEC members of their legal immunity so they can be sued for violations of U.S. antitrust laws.

“He is willing to discuss this relationship with members of Congress,” Mr. Kirby said of Mr. Biden. “He knows that many members have expressed concerns on both sides of the aisle.”

In an earlier appearance on CNN, Mr. Kirby sounded a note of urgency: “The timeline’s now, and I think he’s going to be willing to start to have those conversations right away. I don’t think this is anything that’s going to have to wait or should wait quite frankly for much longer.”

The comments came a day after Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, assailed Saudi Arabia for effectively backing Russia in its brutal invasion of Ukraine. The senator called for an immediate freeze on “all aspects of our cooperation with Saudi Arabia,” vowing to use his power to block future arms sales.

“There simply is no room to play both sides of this conflict — either you support the rest of the free world in trying to stop a war criminal from violently wiping off an entire country off of the map, or you support him,” Mr. Menendez said. “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia chose the latter in a terrible decision driven by economic self-interest.”

Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, said on Tuesday morning that Saudi Arabia clearly wanted Russia to win the war in Ukraine. “Let’s be very candid about this,” he said on CNN. “It’s Putin and Saudi Arabia against the United States.”

Mr. Biden’s willingness to consider retaliatory measures represents a significant shift for a president who had sought to improve relations with Saudi Arabia in recent months and reflected deep anger in the White House about the decision last week by OPEC Plus, which is led by the Saudis, to cut oil production by up to two million barrels a day.

Still, it was not immediately clear how far Mr. Biden was willing to go, or whether he was using the public comments as a warning to Saudi Arabia or as an effort to quiet domestic critics who have faulted him for being soft on the kingdom. No special team of aides was established to conduct a formal review; no deadline was set for a conclusion; and no options were mentioned for consideration.

Some foreign policy veterans cautioned Mr. Biden against drastic action. “The United States should seek a new strategic compact with Saudi Arabia rather than a divorce,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former diplomat in the Middle East who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations. “We need a more responsible Saudi leadership when it comes to oil production and regional behavior. They need a more reliable U.S. security understanding to deal with the threats they face. We should both step back from the brink.”

Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who also spent many years in government dealing with Middle East affairs, said Mr. Biden needed to weigh the potential drawbacks of a break with Saudi Arabia, a vital ally to the United States in fighting terrorism and countering Iran in the region.

“Biden will have to decide whether the objective is to punish Saudi Arabia to pre-empt domestic criticism or to try to alter M.B.S.’s behavior,” he said, using the nickname for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “The latter will be hard, even if Biden moves to suspend all arms sales — a response that could impact U.S. policy in the Gulf with regard to Iran.”

The president was subject to withering criticism for visiting Saudi Arabia in July and giving a fist bump to Prince Mohammed, despite a campaign promise to make the kingdom an international “pariah” for the killing of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The C.I.A. has determined that Prince Mohammed ordered the operation that led to the 2018 murder and dismemberment of Mr. Khashoggi, who was a columnist for The Washington Post and a resident of the United States.

Overcoming his own reservations, Mr. Biden went along with advisers who had argued that it was worth the political hit to restore ties with Saudi Arabia for a variety of reasons, such as the need to bolster energy markets given the effort to isolate Russia, one of the biggest oil producers in the world. While no specific announcements were made during Mr. Biden’s visit to Jeddah in July, U.S. officials said at the time that they had an understanding with Saudi Arabia that it would increase oil production in the fall and lower gasoline prices heading into the crucial congressional elections.

The Saudi decision to do the opposite last week in defiance of American entreaties was a blow to Mr. Biden and opened him to further criticism even from fellow Democrats who argued that Saudi Arabia should be punished. Three House Democrats announced legislation requiring the removal of U.S. troops and defensive systems from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

After falling for more than three months, gas prices are rising again, increasing by 12 cents a gallon on average over the past week to $3.92, according to AAA. The White House was counting on falling gas prices to buttress Democratic efforts to keep control of both chambers of Congress.

The anger in Washington at Saudi Arabia was exacerbated in the past couple of days by Russia’s latest strikes against civilian targets across Ukraine. The Saudi alignment with Russia came even as China and India have put more distance between themselves and Moscow over the war in Ukraine.

Democrats increasingly framed the dispute with Saudi Arabia in terms of the kingdom’s willingness to aid Mr. Putin’s aggression.

“This is not the time for business as usual with Mr. Putin or the Kremlin,” Mr. Kirby said.

The relationship has been fraught for many years. 9/11 probably should have been the breaking point. But with the new regime under Mohammed bin Salman (such as the assassination and dismemberment ofJamal Khashoggi) with his total flouting of international norms and cozying up to Putin and Trump (who both Putin and MBS sees as a personal puppet) there’s no point in continuing to pretend that they are an ally, They never really have been but there was a sense of mutual interest. That would seem to be gone, at least on their part. It’s time for the US to recognize that and behave accordingly.

Following up on the post below about Elon Musk’s ignorant attempts at international relations, here’s Joe Cirincione, someone who knows what he’s talking about:

I want to end the week with some of the analysis that @chrislhayes and I did on his show, @allinwithchris, this Friday night. I got quite a bit of positive feedback from people and suggestions that I write it up. So here we go.

We started with Pres. Biden’s comments and Chris cites my WashPost article. “What do you think, Joe, of the President saying that this is the most imminent threat of nuclear weapons deployment since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis?”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/26/putin-nuclear-threat-bluff-us-biden-response/

Me: President Biden is correct that we are closer to the intentional use of nuclear weapons now than we’ve been in the 60 years since those terrifying 13 days in October 1962. The President is absolutely correct in his assessment.

Chris: So one thing I’ve heard is this: Putin’s military has performed very poorly…As his forces lose ground, Putin is reaching for a nuclear threat as a means of getting people to come to the negotiating table to arrest those loses and basically get a settlement that lets him keep some of the territory he’s won before it gets lost. And, if you take his threat seriously, you’re playing into his hands of using this as a tool of coercion. What do you think about that argument?

Me: We do have to take his threat seriously. This is not a bluff. (1) He has the means to do this. He has over 6,000 nuclear weapons. We failed to eliminate nuclear weapons after the Cold War, so we left him with this arsenal…

(2) He has the method to use them. Russian doctrine explicitly calls for using nuclear weapons first in a conventional battle in order to turn the tide of war. (3) He’s got the motive. He’s not only losing the war in Ukraine terribly – the Russian Army looks very fragile – but now he’s opened up a second front in Russia and he’s losing that. In part, being attacked by his right-wing base, who are urging him to use nuclear weapons. So, means, method, motive. This is quite serious.

That doesn’t mean we give into it. That means we have to do what I think President Biden is doing: Building up a global response to try to deter Putin from going down this nuclear road.

Chris: Well, what does deterrence look like right now?

Me: It’s a combination of things. Most importantly demonstrating to Putin that this is not a winning move. This will not end the war. this will lose it for him.

So:

(1) He will be diplomatically isolated.
(2) He thinks economic sanctions are tough now? Wait until he is cut off from the international banking system and all energy supplies are banned from purchase from Russia. (3) There are military options, including conventional military strikes on the army in Ukraine…

In an extreme case you could bring NATO directly into conventional warfare. (4) There are cyber options. I don’t want to get too over the top, but we could turn Moscow dark with cyber warfare. (5) There’s psychological warfare. You could be reaching out directly to Russian political and military leaders. Reminding them that we know where they live. That we can reach out and touch them. And that there is life after losing a war, if they break with Putin.

Chris: OK so you have just listed a bunch of deterrence that one could articulate, that are plausible, that are non-nuclear deterrence, right? So, just do a quick mutual assured destruction recap here…

Chris: The doctrine that comes out of the work on MAD, following Tom Schelling’s work, is: You fire nukes; we fire them all; the world gets obliterated; nuclear winter; bye-bye. That means that no one ever tries to use one. It seems to me that we’re in a different world now.

Me: That’s exactly right! The world you described is 60 years ago, October 1962. This is a different world where you’re tempted to use a nuclear weapon in a limited way. 1, 2, a half dozen, to try to stop the war in its tracks. You try to break the European support for Ukraine..

You try to play into so-called peace sentiments in the US and split American support for Ukraine. That’s what you’re trying to do if you’re Putin.

So, you’ve got to try to counter that in a way that doesn’t bring you – the US – to the brink of using a nuclear weapon. Here’s the other thing President Biden was correct about: There is no safe way to use a tactical nuclear weapon that doesn’t bring us down this road.

War games repeatedly show that when you start down this road there are major escalatory risks. That’s what Biden is trying to do: Deter Putin from doing it and prepare response should he do it.

Chris: That was very illuminating, if not slightly terrifying. And that’s our show!

BONUS: Here is a video of the last two minutes of his show with Chris on deterrence theory in the Cold War and me, with deterrence theory now.

Joe Cirincione (@Cirincione) on October 10, 2022.

I know that Elon can get his good buddy Vlad on the horn whenever he wants, but that’s because he’s a useful idiot. Cirincione is not. Listen to Cirnicione.

He’s becoming a very destructive force

WTF is this????

Elon Musk spoke directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin before tweeting a proposal to end the war in Ukraine that would have seen territory permanently ceded to Russia, it has been claimed.

In a mailout sent to Eurasia Group subscribers, Ian Bremmer wrote that Tesla CEO Musk told him that Putin was “prepared to negotiate,” but only if Crimea remained Russian, if Ukraine accepted a form of permanent neutrality, and Ukraine recognised Russia’s annexation of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

According to Bremmer, Musk said Putin told him these goals would be accomplished “no matter what,” including the potential of a nuclear strike if Ukraine invaded Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. Bremmer wrote that Musk told him that “everything needed to be done to avoid that outcome.”

Last week, Musk posted essentially the same points on Twitter, although he suggested that the referendums in the annexed territories slammed as sham votes by Ukraine and the West be redone under supervision by the United Nations.

Ukraine-Russia Peace:

– Redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision. Russia leaves if that is will of the people.

– Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake).

– Water supply to Crimea assured.

– Ukraine remains neutral.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2022

Musk earlier this year challenged Putin to single combat and said that he had spoken to Putin via video conference last year, making no mention of this more recent reported chat with the Russian president. He became popular in Ukraine in the early stages of the war by dispatching his Starlink internet terminals to keep the country’s military connected after Russia’s invasion. 

Bremmer wrote that Musk said he had refused a Ukrainian request to activate Starlink in Crimea. According to UK newspaper the Financial Times, Ukrainian forces have reported connectivity issues as they continue their counteroffensive into areas previously held by Russian forces in the east and north-east of the country. Musk responded by criticising the FT’s reporting, saying that what happens on the battlefield is “classified.”

The Ukrainian response to Musk’s Twitter peace proposal was succinct – one diplomat told him to “fuck off,” while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted his own Twitter poll.

Which @elonmusk do you like more?

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) October 3, 2022

Meanwhile the Kremlin welcomed Musk’s “positive” proposal to end the war, while his tweets were also cited by Russian state media.

Musk says he is still pro-Ukraine, but just trying to avoid nuclear war.

Good of him to understand that nuclear war is bad. He is a genius, after all. But this infantile, diplomatic, sophistry is not going to solve anything. He has no understanding of the different moving parts here — not the least of which is the desire of the people of Ukraine to keep its country from being sold off by some fucking car manufacturer to an imperialist tyrant.

Musk is an innovator but it’s clear that he’s something of an idiot savant. What he knows about foreign policy and national security could fit in a small shot glass.

40% of Americans lied about COVID

Gee, I wonder why we had so many more deaths from COVID per capita of any industrialized country?

Four of 10 Americans surveyed report that they were often less than truthful about whether they had COVID-19 and/or didn’t comply with many of the disease’s preventive measures during the height of the pandemic, according to a new nationwide study led in part by University of Utah Health scientists. The most common reasons were wanting to feel normal and exercise personal freedom.

The study, which appears in the Oct. 10, 2022, issue of JAMA Network Open, raises concerns about how reluctance to accurately report health status and adherence to masking, social distancing, and other public health measures could potentially lengthen the current COVID-19 pandemic or promote the spread of other infectious diseases in the future, according to Angela Fagerlin, Ph.D., senior author of the study and chair of the Department of Population Health Sciences at U of U Health.

“COVID-19 safety measures can certainly be burdensome, but they work,” says Andrea Gurmankin Levy, Ph.D., a professor of social sciences at Middlesex Community College in Connecticut. As co-lead author of the study, she worked in collaboration with Fagerlin and other scientists at U of U Heath as well as researchers elsewhere in the United States.

“When people are dishonest about their COVID-19 status or what precautions they are taking, it can increase the spread of disease in their community.” Levy says. “For some people, particularly before we had COVID vaccines, that can mean death.”

The researchers decided to assess how truthful Americans were being about their COVID-19 disease status and/or compliance with COVID-19 preventive measures after they noticed several media stories about people who were dishonest about their vaccination status, Fagerlin says.

In the survey, conducted in December 2021, more than 1,700 people from across the country were asked to reveal whether they had ever misrepresented their COVID-19 status, vaccination status, or told others that they were following public health measures when they actually weren’t. The sample size is far larger and asked about a broader range of behaviors than previous studies on this topic, according to Fagerlin, who is also a research scientist at the Veteran Affairs Salt Lake City Healthcare System.  

Screening questions allowed the health service researchers and psychologists who designed the study to evenly divide the participants: one-third who had had COVID-19, one-third who had not had COVID-19 and were vaccinated, and one-third who had not had COVID-19 and were unvaccinated.

Based on a list of nine behaviors, 721 respondents (42%) reported that they had misrepresented COVID-19 status or failed to follow public health recommendations. Some of the most common incidents were:

-Breaking quarantine rules
-Telling someone they were with, or were about to see, that they were taking more COVID-19 precautions than they actually were
-Not mentioning that they might have had, or knew that they had, COVID-19 when entering a doctor’s office
-Telling someone they were vaccinated when they weren’t
-Saying they weren’t vaccinated when they actually were

All age groups younger than 60 years and those who had a greater distrust of science were more likely to engage in misrepresentation and/or misrepresentation than others. About 60% of respondents said that they had sought a doctor’s advice for COVID-19 prevention or treatment.

 However, the researchers found no association between COVID-19 misrepresentation and political beliefs, political party affiliation, or religion.

“Some individuals may think if they fib about their COVID-19 status once or twice, it’s not a big deal,” Fagerlin says. “But if, as our study suggests, nearly half of us are doing it, that’s a significant problem that contributes to prolonging the pandemic.”

I guess I’m not surprised. It’s clear that dishonesty is no longer considered to be a negative character trait among many in American life. In fact, plenty of people think you’re a sucker if you think it is. Still, this seems like a problem. Combined with our “every man for himself” ethos, the chances of future pandemics being handled any better seems slim.

She jumped into Trumpism head first

The recent story about Trump attorney Christina Bobb speaking with federal prosecutors and making sure she wasn’t left holding the bag with the FBI may sound as if we are looking at another Cassidy Hutchinson but I wonder. She seems like a Trumper to the end:

This spring, one of the lawyers representing former President Donald J. Trump made an urgent, high-stakes request to Christina G. Bobb, who had just jumped from a Trump-allied cable network to a job in his political organization.

The former president was in the midst of an escalating clash with the Justice Department about documents he had taken with him from the White House at the end of his term. The lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, met Ms. Bobb at the president’s residence and private club in Florida and asked her to sign a statement for the department that the Trump legal team had conducted a “diligent search” of Mar-a-Lago and found only a few files that had not been returned to the government.

Ms. Bobb, a 39-year-old lawyer juggling amorphous roles in her new job, was being asked to take a step that neither Mr. Trump nor other members of the legal team were willing to take — so she looked before leaping.

“Wait a minute — I don’t know you,” Ms. Bobb replied to Mr. Corcoran’s request, according to a person to whom she later recounted the episode. She later complained that she did not have a full grasp of what was going on around her when she signed the document, according to two people who have heard her account.

Ms. Bobb, who relentlessly promoted falsehoods about the 2020 election as an on-air host for the far-right One America News Network, eventually signed her name. But she insisted on adding a written caveat before giving it to a senior Justice Department official on June 3: “The above statements are true and correct to the best of my knowledge.”

Her sworn statement, hedged or not, was shown to be flatly false after the F.B.I.’s search of Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, which recovered about 100 additional highly sensitive government documents, including some marked with the highest levels of classification. And prosecutors are now investigating whether her actions constitute obstruction of justice or if she committed other crimes.

On Friday, Ms. Bobb sat for a voluntary interview with Justice Department lawyers in Washington, according to three people familiar with the situation. She told them that another Trump lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, contacted her the night before she signed the attestation and connected her with Mr. Corcoran. Ms. Bobb, who was living in Florida, was told that she needed to go to Mar-a-Lago the next day to deal with an unspecified legal matter for Mr. Trump.

In her meeting with the department — a development reported by NBC News on Monday — Ms. Bobb emphasized that she was working as part of a team rather than as a solo actor when she signed the statement attesting to the return of all the documents, the people said.

Mr. Corcoran, she told the Justice Department, had walked her through how he had conducted a search of a storage facility at Mar-a-Lago for the documents. She said she had believed at the time she signed the attestation in June that it was accurate, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.

Ms. Bobb has made clear that she is not taking an adversarial position toward Mr. Trump in answering the Justice Department’s questions. She told investigators that before she signed the attestation, she heard Mr. Trump tell Mr. Corcoran that they should cooperate with the Justice Department and give prosecutors what they wanted — an assurance that would come to ring hollow as the investigation proceeded and became a bitter court fight.

See what I mean? She may have thrown the other lawyers under the bus but her mission is to protect Dear Leader and she will do it come what may.

Ms. Bobb’s trajectory is a familiar one in Mr. Trump’s orbit: a marginal player thrust by ambition and happenstance into a position where her profile and prospects are elevated, but at the cost of serious legal and reputational risk.

But she stands out for a varied background — she is a former Marine who served in Afghanistan and a failed political candidate who jettisoned a conventional career to become a far-right cable news host — and for the tensile strength of her baseless conviction that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump.

In the past two years, Ms. Bobb has emerged as one of his truest of true believers, embracing conspiracy theories with a fervor that have at times seemed over the top even to her colleagues, according to interviews with a dozen people who have worked with her over the past several years. Ms. Bobb has not been shy about expressing her opinions on conservative news outlets, speaking expansively about the court-authorized F.B.I. search and her low opinion of those who executed it. “I don’t believe that there was any classified material in there, though I’m sure the F.B.I. will say that there is,” she said in an interview with the conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza two days after the warrant was executed. Another conservative activist, Mike Farris, asked if she was concerned by the Justice Department’s aggressive approach. “I’m not too worried about it,” she replied. “They are all a bunch of cowards; they don’t have anything.”

Ms. Bobb was present in the pro-Trump “command center” at the Willard Hotel in Washington before the Capitol attack, along with Rudolph W. Giuliani and other Trump stalwarts. She acted as Mr. Giuliani’s go-between with state officials in Arizona and helped fund-raise for a recount in Maricopa County that Republican leaders called a “sham.” She drafted a memo and participated in meetings to discuss a plan to appoint alternate slates of electors to reverse legitimate state election results. And Ms. Bobb created the computer file used to draft a proposal, never carried out, for Mr. Trump to issue an executive order for the federal government to seize voting machines.

Dominion Voting Systems is suing Ms. Bobb and OAN for promoting unsubstantiated claims that the company was part of a vote-switching scheme to favor Joseph R. Biden Jr. The House committee investigating the Capitol riot subpoenaed Ms. Bobb in March to testify about her “attempts to disrupt or delay” certification of the election and her reported involvement in drafting the executive order. She complied, but provided no proof when pressed on her claims about the election, according to a congressional aide with knowledge of her testimony.

She offered a dour after-action report of the failed attempt to appoint alternate electors to overturn the election in a previously undisclosed memo she sent to Mr. Trump on March 29, 2021, while working for OAN. The memo, obtained from a person to whom it was later forwarded, was marked “ATTORNEY CLIENT PRIVILEGE” even though she was not on Mr. Trump’s legal team at the time. “If three states changed their electors, the result of the election would have flipped,” Ms. Bobb wrote, adding a caveat at the end: It was “unclear” whether the Supreme Court would have supported the elector scheme.

It is not known if Mr. Trump read it. He seems to have a mixed opinion of Ms. Bobb’s on-air work, however, grousing that she was too flattering to him in several OAN interviews, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

Ms. Bobb, a standout soccer and volleyball player during her high school years in the Phoenix area, graduated with a joint business and law degree from San Diego State University and California Western School of Law in 2008. She enlisted in the Marine Corps, completing a grueling basic training course in May 2010 as one of 16 women in a class of 280. She served in the Judge Advocate General’s office, representing Marines in disciplinary hearings, and was assigned for a time in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, as an operational law attorney consulting combat commanders on the legality of military operations.

Those experiences, Ms. Bobb has suggested, were front of mind as she stood in the sweltering Mar-a-Lago parking lot angrily observing F.B.I. agents carrying out the search warrant. “Every service member can tell you that you have an affirmative obligation to disregard an unlawful order,” she told Mr. Farris in August.

Ms. Bobb left the Marines after two years to work for a law firm in San Diego, where she served as a junior lawyer in three trademark infringement cases brought by CrossFit against local gym operators, according to court records.Ms. Bobb, second from right, during a meeting about a ballot review at the Arizona Senate in Phoenix in July 2021. In the postelection period, she blurred the lines between her work for One America News and her advocacy of Mr. Trump. Around that time, she made her first foray into politics, running as an independent for a House seat in a predominantly Democratic district in San Diego. She kept a defiantly low profile, criticizing politicians who craved the “limelight,” maintaining a bare-bones website and raising no money. “I understand that it might not work, but it might,” she told a reporter covering the race in 2014.

It did not. Ms. Bobb finished last in a field of eight, with 929 votes. She did not challenge the result.

A few years later, she moved to Washington; in mid-2019, she was selected for an administrative job at the Department of Homeland Security — executive secretary. She served as a conduit for external correspondence, and her name was often attached to important memos, largely drafted by others, such as a list of locations where Mr. Trump’s border wall was to be built.

The job also entailed another responsibility: ensuring compliance with federal records laws. Colleagues remember Ms. Bobb as hardworking and professional, with a bearing more military than political (she retained the habit of referring to superiors as “sir” and “ma’am”). But it soon became clear that the department’s leadership, while satisfied with her work, was not wowed with it and had no intention of promoting her, two former co-workers said.

In late 2019, she requested a position in the policy unit of Customs and Border Protection but left after only a few months, they said. At that point, Ms. Bobb made an abrupt career shift, applying for a job with the San Diego-based OAN, where her connection to homeland security seemed to have been a selling point. The network’s conservative owners viewed immigration as their top priority and wanted to bolster their coverage. Ms. Bobb’s first on-air interview was with her former boss Chad Wolf, the acting homeland security secretary.

It was after Election Day 2020 that she seemed to find her calling, airing multiple reports of unproven electoral fraud, culminating in a lengthy February 2021 segment, “Arizona Election Heist,” which promoted debunked and dubious claims about her home state. After the election, Ms. Bobb was also a fixture at meetings where Trump hard-liners like John Eastman and Sidney Powell discussed plans to reverse the results — which initially raised questions about whether she was embedded for reporting purposes or committed to the cause. Participants quickly concluded it was the latter, according to one of them.

By December, she was back-channeling requests from Mr. Giuliani to Republican state officials in Arizona, pressuring them to authorize a recount of the Maricopa voting, despite a statewide canvass that confirmed Mr. Biden’s 10,000-vote margin of victory. “Mayor Giuliani asked me to send you these declarations,” Ms. Bobb wrote to one leader, accompanied by affidavits, according to an email obtained by American Oversight, a left-leaning watchdog group.

By March 2022, Ms. Bobb decided to leave OAN and relocated to Florida to be closer to Mr. Trump and some of the senior leadership of the Trump-affiliated Save America PAC, taking a staff job that paid $144,600 a year, according to federal campaign finance records. While she has been a fixture on the airwaves and social media, Ms. Bobb requested that her name be redacted from the signed attestation about the documents when it was unsealed in late August, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.

It leaked anyway.

I think she’s actually a true believer but you never know with these people. She’s a woman in a very big hurry who hitched her wagon to Trump because it’s pretty easy. He’s always in the market for a lawyer, especially one who can do TV. It was a good career move and she took to it with gusto.

By the way, she also hosts all the Trump rallies on Right Side Broadcasting for which, I assume, she’s been paid. If you’re curious about her tune in some time. You will not see a more enthusiastic sycophant in the crowd. You’ll see why even Trump finds her praise a little bit too effusive.

Not this time

After watching Donald Trump’s two back-to-back rallies this weekend, one in Nevada and another in Arizona, it’s hard to escape the idea that he must want to be prosecuted. It’s unimaginable that anyone who is under investigation by the FBI would say the things he said if he didn’t. Of course, most observers will simply say that it’s the usual Trump hyperbole, meant to convince his followers of his innocence — but he’s in the maw of the criminal justice system now, and it doesn’t work that way. Trump’s running commentary must have the leadership of the Department of Justice asking themselves if there will be still be such a thing as the rule of law if he gets away with it.

We learned a couple of weeks ago that Trump’s most competent attorney, Christopher Kise (who he paid $3 million up front, which is highly uncharacteristic) was advising him to shut his mouth and start thinking about ways to negotiate with the DOJ regarding the stolen documents. The Washington Post reported:

Turn down the temperature with the Department of Justice, Kise — a former Florida solicitor general — counseled his famously combative client, people familiar with the deliberations said. Federal authorities had searched Trump’s Florida residence and club because they badly wanted to retrieve the classified documents that remained there even after a federal subpoena, Kise argued, according to these people. With that material back in government hands, maybe prosecutors could be persuaded to resolve the whole issue quietly.

Justice Department officials would hear a former president out, even if he’d stolen numerous classified documents, because of the political sensitivity of the case even if an average American caught doing something like that would get the book thrown at them. In fact, federal prosecutors and the FBI have already handled Trump with excessive delicacy, first asking politely for months for him to return the materials, then resorting to a subpoena when they suspected he had lied to them (which would also land a regular citizen behind bars) and finally having to obtain a search warrant to reclaim the government documents he’d taken to Mar-a-Lago. I believe that Donald Trump is literally the only person in America who would be treated with such kid gloves.

Nonetheless, the man who has led countless “Lock her up” chants about Hillary Clinton and told her during a presidential debate that if he became president “you’d be in jail” is now whining like an injured child that he’s being unfairly persecuted. He is also admitting to committing crimes.

After complaining that the FBI or the National Archives had planted documents in his stash, claiming that Bill Clinton absconded with White House recordings by putting them in his socks, and bizarrely declaring that George H.W. Bush hid classified information in a Chinese restaurant (and/or bowling alley), he says that what he did was not a crime:

Trump: I had a small number of boxes in storage… There is no crime. They should give me immediately back everything they have taken from me because it’s mine. pic.twitter.com/nSR2MjmAMk

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 10, 2022

It’s difficult to know where he came up with these bizarre ideas about former presidents all stealing classified documents and keeping them in random locations (he has also claimed that Clinton stashed some in a used car lot in Arkansas) but that’s just fan service for his supporters’ consumption. Stealing classified documents is a crime, and people are prosecuted for it all the time. Despite Trump’s elaborate lies, no other former president has ever done anything like that.

Trump: Just look at how every other President has been treated when they left office. They’ve been treated beautifully. All they need to do is leave office.. pic.twitter.com/oypZ417OI6

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 10, 2022

No other president has refused to concede that he lost an election, attempted a coup and incited an insurrection and then stolen hundreds of government secrets on his way out the door. He always says there’s never been anyone like him, and it’s true.

It remains to be seen if the Jan. 6 investigations will lead to criminal charges against Trump. But this document theft is another story. As Just Security’s Ryan Goodman, an NYU law professor and former Defense Department special counsel, wrote recently on Twitter, “There is more than ample evidence to indict Trump for the crimes listed in the FBI search warrant. The question will come down to aggravating factors for Garland DOJ to consider.” He adds that Trump’s “outrageous, open defiance of the law” with his insistence that the documents he took from the White House are his property and must be given back, “must rank high among those factors.” Former Russia investigation prosecutor Andrew Weissmann similarly observed:

This is what we call a summation exhibit.
Proof from the defendant’s own mouth. And on video. https://t.co/896a89GJdj

— Andrew Weissmann (weissmann11 on Threads) (@AWeissmann_) October 10, 2022

Up until now it was pretty much unthinkable that a former president would be indicted, not only because none of them were ever accused of criminal behavior (at least not since Ulysses S. Grant was cited in Washington for speeding in his horse-drawn carriage) but because democratic societies feel a natural squeamishness about criminalizing political behavior. An escalating cycle of revenge is the likely outcome, and the specter of the defeated opponents of tyrants around the world languishing in prison hangs heavily over any healthy political system. It’s crucial to tread carefully in this unexplored terrain.

But this isn’t simply about abstract justice and punishing Trump for his evident crimes. His ongoing behavior presents a real threat to the rule of law. He is out there admitting that he did the crime while flagrantly lying about the law and trying to incite his followers into believing that he is being persecuted. He is openly promising pardons to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and making no secret of his plans to destroy his political enemies if he gets back to the White House. He’s encouraging his followers to do everything they can to prevent free and fair elections. The threat is only escalating, not receding.

There can be good reasons for prosecutors to refrain from bringing charges, even where adequate proof exists. But the consequences of letting Donald Trump off the hook again are likely to be extreme. Rather than worrying about whether his supporters will become angry and lash out, authorities should be concerned that allowing Trump to skate will only validate his fans’ belief that he is a superhero, untouchable and unstoppable. Sending a clear message that this individual is above the law makes his cult following more dangerous, not less.

In a time when unequal justice is already at the forefront of many Americans’ concerns, seeing this man escape accountability again and again is fatally poisoning the culture. From his blithe confession about not paying taxes to his grotesque sexual assaults, corrupt business dealings and massive abuse of power of as president, Trump is demonstrating to the country and to the world that the rich and the powerful are exempt from the law no matter how blatantly they violate it. If Donald Trump gets away with stealing national security secrets, I’m not sure this country can recover. 

Pours sour milk in gig economy’s coffee

The Biden administration this morning proposed new interpretive guidelines for who qualifies as a gig employee, making it “more likely for millions of janitors, home-care and construction workers and gig drivers to be classified as employees rather than independent contractors.” The proposed rule “lowers the bar” from the Trump administration’s definition for who qualifies as an employee. Employers are required to cover employees’ expenses, pay minimum wage and overtime, and contribute to workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance. Gig workers? Not so much.

New York Times:

“While independent contractors have an important role in our economy, we have seen in many cases that employers misclassify their employees as independent contractors,” the labor secretary, Martin J. Walsh, said in a statement. “Misclassification deprives workers of their federal labor protections, including their right to be paid their full, legally earned wages.”

Uber and Lyft have said in federal filings that having to treat drivers as employees could force them to alter their business models, and some gig economy officials have estimated that their labor costs would rise 20 to 30 percent.

The proposal also defuses growing pressure from activists supporting gig workers, who complained that the administration had been too slow to intervene to protect ride-hail drivers and other app-based workers.

The proposed rule is not final.

Companies, unions, workers and other members of the public will have a month and a half to formally comment on the proposal before the department incorporates feedback into a final rule.

Corporate capitalists want their profits no matter what they cost employees. We saw that again during the pandemic’s height when they coordinated with the Trump administration to send workers back into meat-packing plants before the development of Covid vaccines. Hundreds died.

Tom Sawyer conned friends into paying him for the privilege of painting his aunt’s fence. Tom Sawyer, Inc. is not far behind. These greedsters won’t be satisfied until we are paying them to work for them. It’s their wet dream. Dying is not too much for them to ask.

Uber, Lyft and other gig companies exploit weak points in labor laws to squeeze more profit from workers by paying them like independent contractors. Good for the CEOs. Not so good for struggling Americans working their second or third jobs. Sustaining the gig economy’s predatory business model is not exploited workers’ problem.

Joe from Scranton and ‘Mahty’ from Boston get that.

Republicans? Not so much.

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