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Month: January 2023

In case you were wondering if they learned their lesson

Published by digby on January 30, 2023

They did not

The tiny red trickle last November was a coincidence, apparently. They’re all-in on the forced pregnancy thing.

The Republican National Committee passed a resolution Monday urging party members at both the state and federal levels to pass the most aggressive anti-abortion legislation possible in the run-up to 2024. 

It specifically points to heartbeat bills, which usually translate as six-week gestational bans — before most women know that they’re pregnant — and “fetal pain” legislation, premised on the anti-abortion myth that embryos and fetuses can feel pain far before they’ve developed the structures that would allow them to. 

The resolution also blames Republicans’ historically weak midterms performance on candidates failing to push their anti-abortion bona fides hard enough.

You read that right. They didn’t press their out of the mainstream, anti-abortion beliefs hard enough which evidently led to people voting for Democrats instead?

Actually, they clearly believe they failed on turnout which is incorrect. Republicans had great turnout it’s just that Independents and some Republicans actually did vote for Democrats instead — because they disagreed with their anti-abortion beliefs.

They are still deluding themselves and that’s just fine. But sure Gopers, please make your throwback views even more clear to American voters. Surely they’ll be much more motivated to vote for you.

Are there any emails?

Published by digby on January 30, 2023

If not, this is just fine. Carry on.

Former President Donald J. Trump’s golf courses will host three tournaments this year for the breakaway league that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is underwriting, deepening the financial ties between a candidate for the White House and top officials in Riyadh.

LIV Golf, which in the past year has cast men’s professional golf into turmoil as it lured players away from the PGA Tour, said on Monday that it would travel to Trump courses in Florida, New Jersey and Virginia during this year’s 14-stop season. Neither the league nor the Trump Organization announced the terms of their arrangement, but the schedule shows the Saudi-backed start-up will remain allied with, and beneficial to, one of its foremost defenders and political patrons as he seeks a return to power.

This man, his half-wit spawn and all of his followers are trying to turn Hunter Biden’s old business dealings into a major corruption scandal and he’s doing this right in front of everyone’s eyes while he’s running for president. Nobody makes the connections, at least not in any systematic way as they’ve done with Biden. The press reports it and then just lets it go, very few making the point that this what they accused the Clinton Foundation of doing except in this case the money is going directly into Donald Trump’s personal bank accounts.

I guess this level of open corruption is just too much for the media to handle. It needs to be vague and unprovable for them to be interested. Trump’s open graft just can’t sustain the interest of either the media or the democratic establishment.

Trump is committed

Published by digby on January 30, 2023

He’s back and angrier than ever.

I’m talking about Donald Trump, of course. In what is being billed as his first official event since he announced his run for the 2024 GOP nomination, Trump said so himself:

“They said he’s not doing rallies, he is not campaigning. Maybe he’s lost his step. I’m more angry now and I’m more committed now than ever.”

He was referring to the fact that most of the media have been commenting on his lackluster performance ever since that boring announcement speech more than two months ago. The growing consensus is that he’s lost his mojo. So when he scheduled two small events this past weekend, first in New Hampshire at the annual GOP meeting and then at South Carolina’s Capitol building, both before crowds of about 400 people each, it reinforced that assumption. Gone were the days when he would land in his shiny Trump jet or Air Force one to rapturous crowds numbering in the tens of thousands. Now he’s just another Republican presidential hopeful hanging around diners and glad-handing the local officials.

His speeches in these two early voting states were vintage Trump rants including many greatest hits. He even did the tired riff on how windmills are killing all the birds, adding a flourish that they’re also killing planes and oceans which is a bit baffling. He complained about the border, of course, even reprising the line about how they’re sending murderers and rapists and bragged that he’d come up with the word “caravan” to fearmonger about people seeking asylum. He rambled on about “renegotiating” the debt with China, making no more sense today on that subject than he did back in 2016.

He complained about “mandatory stoves” and gave an especially tart riff on electric cars that is sure to thrill his fan Elon Musk to no end:

“The cars go for like two hours. What are you going to do? Everyone’s going to be sitting on the highway. We’re all going to be looking for a little plug-in. Does anybody have a plug-in? My car just stopped. I’ve been driving for an hour and 51 minutes. It’s ridiculous.”

That would be his update of the “hard to flush” toilet line he loved so much in the 2020 campaign.

This new one’s probably not going to make it into the act:

He was all-in on the latest culture war obsessions, thundering, “We’re going to stop the left-wing radical racists and perverts who are trying to indoctrinate our youth, and we’re going to get their Marxist hands off of our children — we’re going to defeat the cult of gender ideology and reaffirm that god created two genders called men and women.” That got the crowd very aroused.

Of course, he attacked Biden as one would expect. But his inevitable stab at Biden’s son Hunter was downright weird:

He went on about the “witch hunts” against him for some time and deployed the new House GOP jargon — “weaponization of government” — to declare that he plans to finally “drain the swamp” and fire massive numbers of federal employees when he takes office to ensure that this can never happen again. He whined about the Mar-a-Lago warrant claiming that the National Archives are a “radical left” agency. The usual.

All of that breathless horse race coverage also omitted the most salient fact about Trump: He planned a coup and incited an insurrection.

Probably the most disturbing moments, as is so often the case with Trump’s campaign speeches, were his discussions of foreign policy and national security. In the days before these two speeches, he posted a video in which he said that President Biden is starting WWIII and promising to build an impenetrable dome to protect America from nuclear war if elected president:

He has said repeatedly that Russian President Vladimir Putin would never have invaded Ukraine had he remained in office. He insisted that he could simply pick up the phone and solve the conflict in 24 hours (raising the question of why he doesn’t do it.) His delusional, grandiose belief in his international acumen remains intact despite the dozens of reports since he’s left office, even from some of his closest aides and allies, that he was even more of an embarrassing, dangerous dolt than we could see while he was in office.

The mainstream media reported these appearances as being somewhat dull, which is fair enough. It’s not as if there’s any novelty in watching Trump blather on for an hour. Their big takeaway, instead, was the horse race, with endless references to a poll in New Hampshire showing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis leading Trump, and discussions about how local GOP officials aren’t rushing to endorse the former president.

Trump himself made his first foray into the primary battle — but did so with reporters instead of behind the podium. He said that former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, whom he appointed as the US ambassador to the UN, called him and he told her to go with her heart, but then made sure to mention that she’d previously told him that she wouldn’t run “against her president.” For Desantis, Trump had harsher words:

On Saturday, Trump took his sharpest swings at DeSantis to date, accusing the governor of “trying to rewrite history” over his response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump said DeSantis, who has been openly skeptical about government efforts to vaccinate people against the virus, “promoted the vaccine as much as anyone.” He praised governors who did not close down their states, noting that DeSantis ordered the closure of beaches and business in some parts of the state.

Trump considers DeSantis to be very disloyal. He insists that DeSantis wouldn’t be a two-term governor if it weren’t for him. As we know, Trump is very offended by disloyalty to him despite his total lack of loyalty to anyone else.

But for all the horse race coverage there was virtually no mention of the most interesting aspect of Trump’s emergence back onto the campaign trail: He seems to have forgotten the Big Lie.

What was once the dominant theme of every speech, sometimes in tedious detail that would go on for hours, has all but disappeared. One has to assume that this is the result of the thrashing his election-denialist candidates got in the November elections. Even Trump seems to have realized that the message had penetrated as much as it was going to penetrate and nobody wants to hear about it anymore.

Perhaps most disturbingly, all that breathless horse race coverage also omitted the most salient fact about Trump: He planned a coup and incited an insurrection.

It doesn’t appear that the media considers that to be particularly relevant to his candidacy, which is a stunning development. How quickly they have decided that today Donald Trump is just another Republican, standing in front of a crowd, asking them to love him.  

Wuhan and the nature of belief

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 30, 2023

The helpless and their power-ups

Photo: Arend Kuester/Flickr

Why do people believe what they do? Why are conspiracy theories so attractive?

Slate’s John Ehrenreich examines the persistence of the Wuhan lab leak theory behind the emergence of COVID-19. Yes, “Running Man” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.)* is one of the first to suggest it. But in the end, why did the story take off on the right when most scientists find the disease’s animal origin more plausible?

For one, Ehrenreich suggests, the lab leak theory plays into the right-wing distrust of “experts” and elites. Plus:

People also generally prefer simple, straightforward stories that give them a sense of control over complex ones filled with ambiguity and complexity that foster a sense of helplessness. The lab-leak story is simple. Short version: Someone in a lab in China doing research on deadly viruses screwed up. The actions to take are clear: Blame China. Demand reparations. Tighten up regulation of laboratories doing research on disease-causing microbes. Bar gain-of-function research that alters viruses to make them more deadly.

The animal-origin story is much more complex: What animals are natural reservoirs for the virus? Why didn’t those animals die before passing the disease on to us? What other kinds of animals did they transmit it to? How did the animal disease evolve to become deadly to humans? How did people come into contact with sick animals? Why are diseases that start in animals occurring more often and spreading more rapidly than in the past? If the disease were already in animals, why didn’t people catch it sooner? Why are there reports of people who may have been ill with what was later called COVID-19, several months before the pandemic emerged? Why haven’t we found animals in the Wuhan wet market with the virus? And so forth.

The answers to these questions are not simple. They lie in the complex interactions among climate change, deforestation, the growing trade in wildlife and wildlife products, factory farming, urbanization and the expansion of slums worldwide, and globalization. At best, the actions needed to address these are complex, prolonged, expensive, and disruptive to existing social and economic institutions and processes. At worst, we are left feeling helpless.

Finally, we seek explanations of events that are consistent with what we already believe about other things and with what our family, friends, and neighbors believe. Political convictions and allegiances can also bias information processing and what we believe. Conservatives are likely to agree with Republican politicians who have strongly argued for the lab-leak hypothesis and for hostility to “experts,” while liberals are likely to agree with Democratic politicians, who are more likely to be concerned with issues such as global warming, loss of biodiversity, and the ethics of factory farming.

People who feel helpless and beaten down by life seek a power-up. Conspiracy theories fill the bill:

Posessing secret “truths” gives conspiracy theorists a false sense of power in a world beyond their control. When life feels as if you have awakened locked in the trunk of a car careening down a rutted mountain road, you want to believe – you need to believe – that someone, anyone, is sitting behind the wheel. Even a diabolical someone is better than no one at all.

Because identifying the baddies provides a sense that they can be taken down and the world set right by the righteous. Often, however, the baddies are innocents, scapegoats.

Many conspiracy theories are relatively hamless. The moon landings were faked, etc. The Satanic panic of the 1980s was not; people’s lives were ruined. The QAnon cult fed the paranoia undergirding the Jan. 6 insurrection. The proliferation of conspiracy theories over time, however, erodes reality in a political system designed to be maintained and run by an educated populace.

Ehrenreich concludes:

Whatever the conscious intentions of the proponents of a lab leak as the source of COVID-19, their arguments and their insistence on playing and replaying the debate have become dangerous. They shift responsibility for the U.S.’ disastrous handling of the pandemic away from the failures of our political system, our politicians, and our health and public health systems and to a geopolitical rival. They are a partisan political cudgel, diverting attention from the real sources of danger of future pandemics and delaying action on what could be an existential threat to humans.

The problem these days is that humans are an existential threat to humans.

* Whoops. The running man is Josh Hawley. I get the two confused. (h/t CC)

Wishful thinking won’t cut it

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 30, 2023

The question is what will?

Medea Escaping by Marilyn Belford.

McKay Coppins presents a gallery of Republican donors and operatives eager to see Donald Trump gone before he can do more harm to the Republican Party. What’s left of it anyway. They just lack the guts to take on Trump and his (proven violent) cult members frontally. Their strategy is to hope Trump, 76, just dies. As his mother did at at 88 and his father at 93. Plying him with hamburgers and fried chicken may be a sounder plan.

Former Michigan Republican congressman Peter Meijer “termed this strategy actuarial arbitrage.”

Other Republicans hope indictments will take Trump out of the picture. Not a good plan either (The Atlantic):

Michael Cohen, who served for years as Trump’s personal attorney and now hosts a podcast atoning for that sin titled Mea Culpa, grudgingly told me that his former boss would easily weaponize any criminal charges brought against him. The deep-state Democrats are at it again—the campaign emails write themselves. “Donald will use the indictment to continue his fundraising grift,” Cohen told me.

They are hoping for a deus ex machina to appear. “It’s like 2016 all over again, only more fatalistic,” said one consultant who requested anonymity.

Coppins writes:

The GOP’s defenestration of long-held conservative ideals in favor of an ad hoc personality cult left Republicans without a clear post-Trump identity. Combine that with what Meijer calls “the generalized cowardice of political figures writ large,” and you have a party in paralysis: “There’s no capacity [to say], ‘All right, let’s clean the slate and figure out what we stand for and build from there.’”

But since admitting failure (showing weakness) is the kiss of death on the right, that’s not likely to happen. The GOP is a nihilistic organization that rejects democracy, the bedrock principle behind the Constitution Republicans allegedly revere. Just as Trump cast off any dog-whistle pretense about the party’s racial animus, Republicans have loosed the rest of the demons from its closet. They won’t be put back easily.

Schadenfreude aside, the GOP’s problem is our problem. What Trump awakened, what the financial collapse and Great Recession awakened, what shifting demographics and the migrant and climate crises awakened, is a nascent fascist movement hungry for authoritarian strongmen to stop the changing world authoritarian followers want to get off. That hunger will not die with Trump, whenever that is. Because it is not just here in the United States. It is global.

We are in great danger.

The kookiest proposal from the House kooks yet?

Published by digby on January 29, 2023

I don’t know if you’ve heard about the latest Republican “economic proposal” to abolish the IRS but the details are simply stunning. It’s going to get bottled up in committee most likely because even some of the loons are nervous about it.

If you want to see the caliber of “policy” coming from these loons, check this out from the American Prospect:

During the negotiations for the recent election of Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as Speaker of the House, one of the demands of the extremist Freedom Caucus was for a vote on the so-called Fair Tax proposal. This would abolish the IRS along with all existing federal taxes, and replace them with a 30 percent national sales tax.

The bill is a political dead letter. Not only could it never possibly pass the Senate, let alone be signed by President Biden—Axios reports that he will deliver a big speech Thursday lambasting the idea—but McCarthy himself recently came out against the plan. It might not even make it out of committee in the House.

Nevertheless, it’s still worth digging into the “Fair Tax” plan as an example of the bug-eyed lunacy that passes for policymaking in right-wing circles. People’s Policy Project founder Matt Bruenig has the full details in a video analysis, but in brief, such a sales tax would be an administrative disaster, lead to gigantic tax evasion, and most importantly be monstrously unfair.

At first blush, most would wonder how, if the Freedom Caucus would abolish the IRS while also standing up a huge new tax, the government is going to collect it. The answer is that first they would ask state governments to collect it for them, but in case states don’t want to (as several states don’t currently have a sales tax) and can’t be forced to do so under the Constitution, the law would set up two new federal tax agencies, an Excise Tax Bureau and a Sales Tax Bureau. So right out of the gate, we’re “abolishing the IRS” only to replace it with IRS 2.0 under a different name.

Administrative problems don’t stop there. This single tax is supposed to replace all the vast revenues from income and payroll taxes, but according to a rough analysis from the Brookings Institution some years ago, it would actually require a rate of about 60 percent to raise that much money. Moreover, the Fair Tax bill says that the 30 percent rate will only hold for the first year, after which the Social Security Administration is supposed to figure out how much money they would have collected from the existing payroll tax, and the sales tax rate would be adjusted to compensate. Yet it’s hard to see how the SSA could possibly do this without the income data produced by existing tax filings.

Then there is the problem that a sales tax is easy to cheat. Because it is imposed only at the point of sale to the final customer, only two parties would have to agree to evade it—and it would be a big temptation given how enormous the tax is. Scofflaw businesses would be able to offer their customers a giant discount for paying cash under the table. This is why European countries with consumption taxes have long since ditched the old-fashioned sales tax for a value-added tax, which is collected at each point in the supply chain based on the difference between what someone paid for a good and what they sold it for. That way there is de facto mutual surveillance between all parties in the supply chain, instead of just having to trust the final retailer.

But the most important aspect of this sales tax is how mind-blowingly regressive it would be. The income tax is quite progressive (at least in terms of rate structure), the Medicare payroll tax has an extra 0.9 percent rate on income over $200,000, and insofar as estate taxes and capital gains taxes are paid at all, they affect the rich almost exclusively. Bruenig collects expenditure data broken down by income quintile to roughly calculate what would happen if we replaced the status quo with a 30 percent sales tax. The result is that the poorest fifth of the American people would pay something like 70 percent of their income, the second-poorest would pay about 38 percent—but the richest fifth would pay just 17 percent. Now, probably those figures would change somewhat if this actually happened, because people would change their behavior, but this basic breakdown is certainly correct. It is an obvious and well-demonstrated fact that the more money people make, the more they save, and so the less they would pay in sales tax.

Calling this turkey a “Fair Tax” is a bad joke. Passing it would be by far the greatest upward redistribution of income in American history.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the Fair Tax idea originally comes from—wait for it—Scientology. Years ago, that group was in a dispute with the IRS over the agency not allowing it to be categorized as a religion, which would have granted it numerous tax benefits. So in characteristic fashion, Scientology operatives proposed the Fair Tax idea essentially as an attack on the IRS. Later, it did obtain religion status, but its idea made it into the conservative policy mind palace, where it remains.

That’s how looney this idea is.

Needless to say, even if it were to get a floor vote it won’t pass the Senate or get Biden’s signature.

Don’t tell the House MAGA fools who think that if they vote for something it immediately becomes law.

How sick can they get?

Published by digby on January 29, 2023

Very, very sick

I’m not talking about COVID patients. I’m talking about COVID deniers:

A Midvale plastic surgeon and three other Utahns were indicted on conspiracy charges last week after prosecutors say they dumped nearly 2,000 doses of COVID vaccine down a drain, distributed fake vaccination cards — and, at the request of some parents, injected children with saline to convince the young patients that they had been vaccinated.

Dr. Michael Kirk Moore Jr., 58, allegedly ran the scheme out of the Plastic Surgery Institute of Utah, located at 7535 Union Park Ave., along with two other institute employees — Kari Dee Burgoyne and Sandra Flores. Moore’s third codefendant, Kristen Andersen, is his neighbor, court documents state.

Andersen and Moore were both members of an unnamed private organization “seeking to ‘liberate’ the medical profession from government and industry conflicts of interest,” court documents state.

Investigators say Moore in May 2021 initially signed an agreement with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to distribute COVID-19 vaccines and vaccination cards from the plastic surgery practice.Moore and Burgoyne then ordered “hundreds” of COVID-19 vaccine doses from the CDC between May 2021 and September 2022, court documents state.

As doses began arriving at the practice, Moore and Burgoyne notified individuals who were seeking a fraudulent vaccine card that they could receive a completed card from the Midvale practice without actually receiving any vaccine doses if they paid $50 cash, or directed $50 donations to the private organization of which Andersen and Moore were members.

Burgoyne managed the daily logistics of the scheme, documents state, referring people interested in acquiring fake vaccination cards to Andersen. Andersen would then screen anyone referred to her, requiring that they provide the name of another person whom the practice had already given a fraudulent vaccination card.

Once the individual had been screened, Andersen would then provide them with a link to the privateorganization that she and Moore were a part of, and require them to make a $50 donationper person for each vaccine “appointment” in order to receive a fraudulent vaccine card.

The individuals would then pick up the cards from the practice, where Flores and other employees would fill out and stamp the cards to falsely indicate that vaccine doses had been administered to patients, according to investigators.

Some of the people seeking fake vaccine cards were parents, and in some cases, they wanted fake vaccine cards for their children. In such cases, at a parent’s request, Moore, Burgoyne and Flores would administer saline shots to children so they would think they had been vaccinated, court documents state.

Burgoyne would then upload the names of all purported vaccine recipients to the Utah Statewide Immunization Information System — falsely reporting that the practice had administered 1,937 doses of vaccine, including 391 pediatric Pfizer doses. That amounts to about $28,028 worth of actual vaccine doses, which the defendants allegedly drew from bottles with a syringe and squirted down a drain, documents state.

The scheme was revealed after an undercover agent in March 2022 went through the process of acquiring a fraudulent vaccination card from the practice, investigators say.

After the agent completed the screening process and was told to pick up the fraudulent card at the practice, a second agent that month attempted to acquire a fake vaccination card.

When the second agent received their fraudulent card, the agent asked Flores if his children could also receive a similar COVID-19 vaccination card. In response, Flores wrote on a Post-it note that “with 18 & younger, we do a saline shot,” court records state.

In total, the value of the fraudulent CDC vaccination cards plus the dumped vaccine doses amounted to $124,878.50 in government property, according to court documents.

They actually had their kids injected with saline in order to fool both their kids and their schools? Wow.

Friendly reminder: 1,132,254 people have died of COVID in the United States. I guess they must have deserved it?

You can’t negotiate with toddlers or terrorists

Published by digby on January 29, 2023

Yes, I’m talking about the House Republicans

Former Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer on the looming debt ceiling hostage situation in his newsletter today. (You should subscribe if you can — it’s always good.)

He knows whereof he speaks. And so does Joe Biden (hopefully):

I worked in the West Wing during a financial crisis, a pandemic, multiple active terrorist plots, once-in-a-century storms, and the rise of ISIS. None of those threats were anywhere near as frightening as the two times the House Republicans tried to take the full faith and credit of the United States hostage. In both cases, a group of radical extremists with a faint grasp on reality led by a weak Speaker almost stumbled ass-backward into a global financial crisis that would make 2008 look like an economic head cold.

Well, here we are again.

A group of radical House Republicans led by a Speaker in name only is threatening a confrontation over raising the debt limit. Like President Obama in 2013, President Biden is refusing to negotiate with House Republicans. And like in 2013, all of the usual voices are raising concerns about that strategy.

What’s the harm in talking?

Won’t the President look small by refusing to sit down?

Won’t the Democrats look unreasonable?

This concern-trolling was embodied by a recent CNN interview where West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin called President Biden’s stance “unreasonable.” If you feel like your blood pressure is too low, feel free to watch the interview for fuller context.

I should note that Manchin’s recollection of those Congressional negotiations and President Biden’s role in the 2011 crisis are factually incorrect. 

Manchin’s personal politics and his rudimentary, deeply naive understanding of national politics in the Trump era make such comments inevitable. But Manchin will not be the only one to complain about Biden’s posture. If Kyrsten Sinema ever deigns to speak in public, she will likely say the same thing. Calls for President Biden to engage with Kevin McCarthy and his band of bad-faith nuts will grow louder as the days count down to a possible default later this summer.

On its face, avoiding negotiations with the other party seems like a hard position to defend. And a particularly hard position to defend for Joe Biden, whose brand is unity and working with Republicans. However, substantively and politically, Joe Manchin (and everyone else) is wrong, and Joe Biden is right.

To understand why we are at an impasse, it’s important to understand how we got here.

The Lessons of 2011 and 2013

The last real confrontation over the debt ceiling was a decade ago. The national attention span is barely ten minutes, let alone ten years. Many of the people who work in or write/tweet about politics weren’t around back then. So, some of the ignorance and confusion is understandable.

Let’s start with the first debt ceiling fight in 2011. This is the one where Obama agreed to negotiate with Republicans as part of a process to resolve the crisis. Ron Brownstein wrote a thorough history of that decision in The Atlantic. I would encourage everyone to read the whole thing, but this is a key point:

The White House didn’t view the debt-ceiling increase primarily as a bargaining chip—they viewed it as the eventual legislative vehicle for moving through Congress whatever agreement the fiscal negotiation produced.

Even with that difference, the talks were serious and, for a while, productive. Biden praised Cantor and Cantor reciprocated. But in late June, the effort collapsed when it hit a familiar rock: The Republicans involved refused to consider raising taxes and Democrats would not agree to spending cuts unless they did.

To add a little context, Obama knew that engaging with then-Speaker John Boehner was a gamble and that negotiations might blow up in his face. But Obama — and the staff looped into the secret negotiations — did not view this Grand Bargain primarily as a vehicle for dealing with deficits. We viewed it as our only way to get Republicans to agree to additional stimulus to help create jobs and grow the economy during a painfully slow recovery from the 2008 Financial Crisis. It was a risk, but it seemed like a risk worth taking to help the people still suffering. Ultimately, the whole thing blew up in our faces. The country came within inches of default. To avoid that outcome, we made a deal that we would come to regret deeply. The economy was damaged, and the U.S. suffered its first-ever credit downgrade.

[Some of us knew that would happen because we knew the Republicans were bad faith actors and had been for a very long time — and we didn’t understand why these professionals didn’t see that too. But anyway.]

At the time, Obama pledged privately that he would never go down that path again. He would always be open to compromise and negotiation, but never with a gun to his head. You don’t negotiate with terrorists.

In 2013, Senator Ted Cruz and a group of Freedom Caucus members refused to fund the government or lift the debt ceiling unless the Affordable Care Act was defunded. This was legislative terrorism. The Republicans would blow up the economy if President Obama didn’t agree to repeal his signature initiative — a program that had been a central issue in the President’s winning campaign less than a year prior.

This time, Obama pledged not to negotiate. If they held a meeting, he wouldn’t come. If they called him on the phone, he would (politely) hang up. Raising the debt ceiling was Congress’s job — they would either do it or face the consequences. Obama made sure the public knew who would be to blame if default happened. He stared them down. In the end, the Republicans faced such backlash from the public that they blinked, reopened the government, and passed a clean debt limit increase. The ass-kicking was so emphatic that the Republicans walked away from this sort of brinksmanship… until now.

Why Biden is Right

President Biden and much of his senior staff were around in 2011 and 2013. They understand the dangers of allowing the full faith and credit of the United States to be used as leverage. But the reasons to avoid negotiating go beyond ‘negotiating DIDN’T work in 2011, and not negotiating DID work in 2013.’ There is a more important principle at stake. President Biden’s ability to govern is at stake.

Divided government is filled with fights, big and small. That’s the nature of the beast. We cannot — and should not — expect a Democratic President and Republican House to agree on much. Of course, the President’s more ambitious legislative priorities died the day the Republicans won the majority. But even if there can be no agreement on how to solve the country’s big challenges, a handful of must-pass bills will require negotiation — government funding, disaster aid, money for Ukraine. On those, there will need to be negotiation and compromise from both sides. That’s the outcome that the public (kinda, sorta) chose when they voted for a Republican House while the Senate and White House are in Democratic hands.

But the debt ceiling is different.

First, the debt ceiling is not new spending or new policy — the sorts of things parties fight over. The debt ceiling is a simple, anachronistic mechanism to allow the Treasury Department to pay for spending that has already happened. It has nothing to do with the future or even with debts or deficits. Previous Congresses put a bunch of stuff on the credit card, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen just needs Congress to okay her paying that bill. When the Republicans agreed to fund the government, they agreed to lift the debt ceiling. You can’t do one and not the other.

Second, with whom would Biden negotiate and over what?. Kevin McCarthy may be Speaker, but his power is so diminished that right now he only has marginally more power and influence than George Santos. There is no evidence or reason to believe McCarthy could deliver on any deal he negotiated. In fact, given the new motion to vacate rules, he is more likely to lose his job than ratify a deal that Biden signs off on. That presumes that McCarthy would operate in good faith and there is not a lot of evidence to suggest that he would. The Republicans have no coherent list of demands. Many of them want to cut Social Security and Medicare, but others say it’s off the table. Some want to cut the military, others want to increase military spending. Kevin McCarthy wants to eliminate funding for something called “woke-ism.” Jim Jordan wants to defund the salmon. The point is, Republicans want a fight for the sake of a fight. They clearly don’t know or care about what incited the fight.

Finally, and most importantly, Biden’s ability to govern is at stake. Republicans represent one half of one of the three branches of government. In other words, the public has awarded the Republicans with a little less than 17 percent of political power. If that minority representing a minority is able to extort the nation into policies that the public rejected at the ballot box, the entire system collapses.

If the MAGA Republicans can force cuts to Social Security and Medicare by putting a gun to the head of the U.S. economy, what will happen when the debt ceiling comes up again? Will they demand a federal abortion ban? National voter suppression laws? The resignation of cabinet officials?

This was the lesson President Obama learned from his experience in a similar situation. And it’s why President Biden is 100 percent correct not to engage with the Republicans in this rigged game. Not negotiating may annoy Joe Manchin and the putatively objective media that talk about politics for a living, but it’s the only option. We must aggressively and publicly back his position to balance out the pundit peanut gallery whose obsession with bipartisanship blinds them to the true dangers of MAGA extremism.

This has been true for a very long time. The far right has taken control of the Republican Party and they cannot be dealt with when they decide that they have a God-given right to run the country from the minority. They have never been worse than they are now just having staged an insurrection because they didn’t win an election!!!

They’re batshit crazy and when they pull this hostage gambit the president must show them the hand. You can’t negotiate with toddlers and terrorists.

The red state killing fields

Published by digby on January 29, 2023

Via Axios

The murder rates in Trump-voting states from 2020 have exceeded those in Biden-voting states every year since 2000, according to a new analysis by ThirdWay, a center-left think tank.

Why it matters: Republicans have built their party on being the crime-fighting candidates, even as murder rates in red states have outpaced blue states by an average of 23% over the past two decades.

Four reliably-red states consistently made the top of the list — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri.

Driving the news: Third Way’s report analyzed homicide data for all 50 states from 2000 through 2020, using CDC data.

They used the 2020 presidential election results to characterize “red states” from the “blue states.”

The findings build on a previous Third Way report that only analyzed murder rates from 2019-2020. This time, they write, they wanted “to see if this one-year Red State murder epidemic was an anomaly.”

Zoom out: In Oct. 2022 — just before the 2022 midterm elections — a record-high 56% of Americans said there was more crime where they live, per Gallup.

That included 73% of Republicans and a whopping 51% of Independents.

Both parties rushed to spend tens of millions of dollars on crime ads that month.

Between the lines: The political implications don’t always match the reality.

“Crime has historically been a very potent political issue. It’s also very anecdote driven,” said Jim Kessler, Third Way’s executive vice president for policy.

Murder isn’t the only crime committed or discussed, but Third Way hopes to combat the “media and political narrative that crime is a Democratic problem, occurring mostly in big blue cities and fueled by lax policies,” they write.

Democrats are not allowed to make this point because it’s disrespectful of Real Americans in red states. Only Republicans can insult people who live in cities and blue states calling them depraved hellholes infested with criminals and deviants. It’s the law. Weirdly, Third Way is usually one of the “centrist” institutions that enforces it.

    Trump back on the campaign trail

    Published by digby on January 29, 2023

    They say he’s going more mainstream…

    You be the judge:

    “Through weakness and incompetence, Joe Biden has brought us to the brink of World War III. We’re at the brink of World War III, just in case anybody doesn’t know it. As president, I will bring back peace through strength.”

    Donald J. Trump campaigned during his first presidential race in a distinctly audacious style, giving free helicopter rides to children at the Iowa State Fair and using his Trump-branded 757 jetliner as an event backdrop.

    For his third campaign, it’s back to basics — for the first time.

    More than two months after formally opening his White House comeback bid, the 76-year-old former president will hold his first two public events on Saturday. Both are the type of textbook campaign stops he mostly skipped in his first two runs for office.

    I confess that I will enjoy this part:

    On Saturday, Trump took his sharpest swings at DeSantis to date, accusing the governor of “trying to rewrite history” over his response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump said DeSantis, who has been openly skeptical about government efforts to vaccinate people against the virus, “promoted the vaccine as much as anyone.” He praised governors who did not close down their states, noting that DeSantis ordered the closure of beaches and business in some parts of the state.

    “When I hear that he might [run] I think it’s very disloyal,” Trump said.

    As for the polls showing DeSantis beating him in key nominating states, Trump was dismissive.

    “He won’t be leading, I got him elected,” he said. “I’m the one that chose him.”