Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Sometimes you just have to let things play out for awhile:

More than 15 million people have signed up for health insurance plans offered on the Affordable Care Act’s federal marketplace, a 33 percent increase compared to the same time last year, according to preliminary data released by the Biden administration on Wednesday.

Federal health officials project that more than 19 million people will enroll in 2024 coverage by the end of the current enrollment period next month. That total would include those who gain coverage through state marketplaces, continuing the record-setting pace.

Despite a recent warning from former President Donald J. Trump, the front-runner in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, that he was “seriously looking at alternatives” to the Affordable Care Act, the latest surge in marketplace enrollment is a testament to the law’s enduring power.

Legislation passed earlier in the Covid-19 pandemic increased federal subsidies for people buying plans, lowering the costs for many Americans. The Biden administration also lengthened the sign-up period and increased advertising for the program and funding for so-called navigators who help people enroll.

[…]

On Dec. 15 — the deadline to sign up for coverage that begins on Jan. 1 — nearly 750,000 people opted for a marketplace plan on HealthCare.gov. It was the largest single-day total yet.

Dr. Benjamin Sommers, a health economist at Harvard who served in the Biden administration, said that improved outreach helped explain the record sign-ups. “I’m pleasantly surprised,” he said.

With years of increased subsidies, he added, “it might be this is the natural growth rate over a few years in a new policy environment.”

Kody Kinsley, the top health official in North Carolina, said that his state had gotten creative by using its efforts expanding Medicaid to also sign people up for marketplace plans.

“We’ve had a very broad educational and outreach campaign — with civic organizations, churches, navigators — built around expansion to educate folks about eligibility,” he said in a text message.

He added: “As part of that, we support folks to get coverage on the marketplace, if they’re not eligible” for Medicaid.

The open-enrollment period on Healthcare.gov runs through mid-January, ending at 5 a.m. Eastern time on Jan. 17. People who enroll by then will have coverage beginning in February.

Biden administration officials said that they were encouraging enrollees who were already covered through HealthCare.gov to continue shopping for plans, in case a new option turns out to be better and more affordable.

The Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces have become particularly valuable to the people losing Medicaid coverage this year after a federal policy that guaranteed coverage earlier in the pandemic lapsed in April.

The millions of people dropping off Medicaid rolls has contributed to the uptick in marketplace enrollment, Ms. Cox said, and to surges during normally sleepier periods outside open enrollment. (Certain life events, such as the sudden loss of other health coverage, allow some Americans to get new plans outside the open enrollment period.)

According to federal health officials, from March to September enrollment in marketplace plans increased by 1.6 million people, or 1.5 million more than during the same period last year.

This is really fantastic news. If all those monstrous red state governments would agree to accept the money to expand Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, we might actually be getting close to some kind of universal coverage.

Trump will keep saying what he says because other than terrorizing his political enemies and coddling dictators, his only agenda is reversing all progress of the past century, most particularly anything with Obama’s name on it. And it’s going to hurt him. There are just too many people who have benefited from the program. That’s great!

Happy Hollandaise!

That would be Christopher Rufo:

https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/1737854570842518008?s=20

I had been wondering why there was such out-sized coverage of this issue. I realize that many members of the elite media went to Ivy League schools so it’s of personal interest. But now I see that it’s a right wing hissy fit ginned up by their chief propagandist.

Rufo knows exactly what he’s doing. And I have to assume that the mainstream media knows it too. It’s not as if he’s trying to hide it.

Keep your eye on this as we go into the election year. These mini-scandals have a way of affecting close elections depending on the timing. I can’t help but think of the Comey sabotage in 2016. Thee is good evidence that if it had happened a week or so earlier, Clinton would have recovered in the polls. (They bounced up and down a couple of points throughout the fall campaign.) These folks know how to get the media excited and they’ll find a way to dominate unless the public remains vigilant and calls them out.

Happy Hollandaise!

Semafor reports on a recent meeting by some pretty heavy hitters to strategizde how to stop this sabotage campaign by No Labels:

A coalition of Democratic and Republican anti-Trump groups are organizing an aggressive, multi-front campaign to stop the independent group No Labels from injecting a third major candidate in the upcoming 2024 election.

Their plans, laid out in a private, roughly 80-minute call obtained by Semafor, include legal attacks, opposition research and warnings to potential candidates and donors that involvement with No Labels could make them politically toxic.

No Labels, founded in 2010 by a top Washington political fundraiser, Nancy Jacobson, bills itself as an answer to America’s divisive partisan politics, and has sought to present a poll-tested centrist platform. Democrats believe any such effort is far likelier to pull votes from Biden than from Trump, whose support

The call, organized by the center-left Democratic group Third Way with the help of the progressive Move On, also included representatives of End Citizens United, the Lincoln Project, American Bridge, Public Citizen, and Reproductive Freedom for All. Attendees included prominent anti-Trump Republicans Sarah Longwell and Bill Kristol, former Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, and an aide to the Democratic billionaire Reid Hoffman, Dmitri Mehlhorn.

“Through every channel we have, to their donors, their friends, the press, everyone — everyone — should send the message: If you have one fingernail clipping of a skeleton in your closet, we will find it,” one speaker said during the call. “If you think you were vetted when you ran for governor, you’re insane. That was nothing. We are going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find. We did not do that with Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, we should have, and we will not make that mistake again.”

The group laid out plans to discourage a set of possible candidates, including: former Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Will Hurd; sitting Republican Governors Doug Burgum of North Dakota and Chris Sununu of New Hampshire; former Republican governors Jon Huntsman of Utah and Larry Hogan of Maryland.

They seem to realize that appealing to the No Labels people themselves is probably a fool’s errand. They are focusing on the potential candidates as they should. You’ll notice that the people on that list are all Republicans which in a normal world should help Biden. But the polling shows that it ends up hurting him instead by providing a spot for the swing voters he needs to counteract Trump deluded cult.

They do mention Manchin but one of the people said they’ve heard he’s not going to do it which a spokesman later said wasn’t true. We’d better pray that it is.

This must be stopped. Look at what these saboteurs are talking about now:

No Labels, the organization attempting to assemble a third-party presidential unity ticket, is openly floating the prospect of a “coalition government” forming after the 2024 election if no candidate reaches the 270 Electoral College votes necessary to win the White House.

Officials with the group are mapping out an unlikely and largely unprecedented scenario where they could be in a position to cut deals on policy, Cabinet posts or even the vice presidency if their still-unformed ticket manages to win electoral votes and blocks a major-party nominee from winning the presidency outright.

“It’s possible that if you got to the Electoral College and no candidate had 270 [electoral votes], that there could be negotiation to create a coalition government where electors get traded between different candidates to get somebody over 270,” Ryan Clancy, the chief strategist for No Labels, told reporters on Wednesday. Clancy added: “There are quite a number of states that have what are called ‘unbound electors,’ which is to say: Those electors are not statutorily required to vote for the candidate that won their state at the Electoral College.”

In 33 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, laws prevent “unbound electors,” statutorily requiring electors to vote for the presidential and vice presidential candidates who won their state’s popular vote.

Former Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Davis, a co-founder of No Labels, expanded on the group’s view of this potential scenario in an interview with NBC News on Thursday, suggesting the No Labels ticket could “cut a deal” with one of the major parties’ tickets.

“It could be Cabinet posts. It could be a policy concession. That’s the kind of thing it could be,” Davis said, adding the vice presidential position could also be part of the discussions.

Davis said a “deal could clearly be cut” to “swing faithless electors over” to another ticket’s candidates.

“It could be, for example: ‘We’re going to build a border wall [and] not run deficits.’ Any number of things,” Davis said.

In the video conference call with reporters, Clancy said that a coalition government is not “the plan” of No Labels, which is seeking to place a presidential ticket on the ballot in all 50 states.

“One thing I really want to clarify: This is not No Labels’ plan. This is not No Labels’ strategy,” Clancy said, adding he wants to put forth a ticket that can win the Electoral College outright.

Davis also said that the group is looking at another potential, if far-fetched, outcome: A contingent election in which the president is selected by the U.S. House.

My God. Can it be any worse?

And by the way, look at the agenda he mentions. Basically they are planning to blackmail the Democratic party into passing the Romney agenda. Fuck that.

Grrr. Happy Hollandaise, everyone. We have our work cut out for us.

It’s a real contest but if I had to choose Donald Trump’s most fatuous claim it would have to be that until he became president “nobody could say Merry Christmas anymore.” He said it again just the other day and his ecstatic followers practically went into a collective fugue state and began speaking in tongues they were so thrilled. This war on Christmas has been a theme on the right for many, many years but Trump is the first politician to say that he “won”
it. It was smart. After all, the war didn’t exist in the first place so every time anyone says “Merry Christmas” he gets the credit. Boom!

I have no doubt that his right wing evangelical fans are thrilled by all this. This is one of Christianity’s most important holidays after all. On the other hand, most of them are also fine with Trump evoking Adolph Hitler’s rhetoric so their alleged reverence for Christmas as a religious holiday may be beside the point.

Hitler wasn’t exactly a follower of Jesus but most of his followers were Christians, motivated to support him out of long-standing antisemitism, hostility to the more liberal social and political changes they blamed on the Weimar Republic , anti-communism, rabid nationalism and loathing for the international community. With the exception of the antisemitism the followers of Trump aren’t much different here in America today. And I think we can safely assume that the only reason they aren’t on board with today’s antisemitism is because they believe Jews must be in Israel for the rapture to be triggered.

They’re happy to join in Trump’s racism and bigotry against his chosen “other” which he recently specifically defined as people from Asia, Africa and South America who are “poisoning the blood” of our country. Trump and his supporters also despise Muslims from anywhere, “radical leftist thugs,” LGBTQ people and the media, all of which the Nazi Party also saw as enemies. Let’s just say the historical Nazis shared a whole lot of the same grievances we see in the MAGA movement today.

Christmas was an issue for Hitler as well but in a different way than Trump. Even though the holiday was always a very popular holiday in Germany, Hitler found it to be an insipid drain on the national will, what with all the “peace on earth” folderol. He didn’t want that and he didn’t want the German people to want that. But he couldn’t just ban it. It would have caused a mass rebellion. So instead, the Nazis set about changing its meaning to “holiday of actual domestic national peace” by which they meant peace after all the enemies had been vanquished.

Hitler ordered that Christmas be altered in other ways as well. The Christmas tree was originally a German tradition but he really didn’t like that star on the top which was just a little bit too reminiscent of the Jewish star of David or the five pointed star of the Soviet Union. So they replaced it with a Germanic “sun wheel” or a Sig rune. This was in keeping with the Nazi plan to move Christmas away from a Christian holiday into a more ancient German pagan celebration of the winter solstice, even calling it by a different name: Rauhnacht, the Rough Night (for some reason.)

They even changed the lyrics to Silent Night to make it a celebration of the Führer. It started off with the usual “Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright” but rather than “Round yon Virgin Mother and Child” etc., it took an abrupt turn to, “Only the Chancellor stays on guard, Germany’s future to watch and to ward, guiding our nation aright.” (So much for “sleep in heavenly peace.”) People were also encouraged to sing, “Exalted Night of the Clear Stars” which is all about motherhood, renewal, and holiday fires but no Jesus. He was, after all, a Jew.

Hitler didn’t like Santa either. After all, St. Nicholas was a saint from Turkey (a “sh*thole” country in Donald Trump vernacular) which meant he wasn’t Aryan and that was unacceptable. But the people loved him so the Nazi propagandists cleverly turned it around to say that the beloved mythic figure was actually the pagan god Woton which the Christians had appropriated and now the Germans were taking him back. They called him “Solstice Man” and he wore a slouch hat and a mask.

Over time all these changes became more and more mandatory and any refusal to go along became a political act. “The apparently banal, everyday decision to sing a particular Christmas carol, or bake a holiday cookie, became either an act of political dissent or an expression of support for national socialism,” writes historian Joe Perry. I think we know what happened to dissenters in Hitler’s Germany.

Nazi propagandist Wilhelm Beilstein wrote an article in 1939 explaining the true meaning of Christmas:

“When we celebrate a German Christmas, we include in the circle of the family all those who are of German blood, and who affirm their German ethnicity, all those who came before us and who will come after us, all those whom fate did not allow to live within the borders of our Reich, or who are doing their duty in foreign lands amidst foreign peoples.”

That brings Donald Trump to mind for some reason. Hmmm. I’ll have to think about why that is.

The right has accused the left of waging a war on Christmas for years now, which is really just a joke at this point. Nobody’s trying to prevent anyone from saying Merry Christmas if they want to. “Happy Holidays” is just a way of including people who may not celebrate the Christian holiday. It’s called having manners. But Donald Trump heard about the fake controversy from talk radio and now claims that he fixed the problem that never existed. All of that is silly.

But you can see where the worship of a demagogue can lead a country. People went along with that absurdity because, whether through desire to please or to avoid intimidation, they did whatever Hitler wanted them to do. He persuaded them that maintaining the purity of “German blood” was of paramount importance and everything and everyone had to submit to that priority. With almost half of Republicans telling pollsters that Trump’s rant about immigrants poisoning the blood of America made them more likely to support him, it appears the MAGA movement is headed down that same path.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Trump caught in another recording

Motown’s Berry Gordy might have set the recording to music but Detroit News got there first:

Then-President Donald Trump personally pressured two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers not to sign the certification of the 2020 presidential election, according to recordings reviewed by The Detroit News and revealed publicly for the first time.

On a Nov. 17, 2020, phone call, which also involved Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, Trump told Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, the two GOP Wayne County canvassers, they’d look “terrible” if they signed the documents after they first voted in opposition and then later in the same meeting voted to approve certification of the county’s election results, according to the recordings.

“We’ve got to fight for our country,” said Trump on the recordings, made by a person who was present for the call with Palmer and Hartmann. “We can’t let these people take our country away from us.”

Trump didn’t insist they “find 11,780 votes,” but you get the idea. Special prosecutor Jack Smith and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel will too. Nessel had best increase her personal security before expressing her interest publicly.

McDaniel, a Michigan native and the leader of the Republican Party nationally, said at another point in the call, “If you can go home tonight, do not sign it. … We will get you attorneys.”

To which Trump added: “We’ll take care of that.”

Help me Ronna | Help, help me Ronna

Is it time for McDaniel to lawyer up?

Offering an official something of value (services of a lawyer) in exchange for withholding official action (certifying the Wayne County vote) sounds like a classic case of bribery under Michigan State law. https://t.co/S2LjhgYY88 pic.twitter.com/BiO3uV4NIR

— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) December 22, 2023

Palmer and Hartmann left the meeting without signing the Wayne County certification. The next day, they tried and failed to rescind their votes for certification, Detroit News adds.

McDaniel, a Wayne County resident, said she stood by her past push for an audit of the election in Michigan, a request she and then-Michigan Republican Party Chairwoman Laura Cox made in a Nov. 21, 2020, letter to the Board of State Canvassers.

“What I said publicly and repeatedly at the time, as referenced in my letter on Nov. 21, 2020, is that there was ample evidence that warranted an audit,” McDaniel said in a statement.

But Jonathan Kinloch, who was a Democratic member of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers in November 2020, said what happened on the call with Trump was “insane.”

“It’s just shocking that the president of the United States was at the most minute level trying to stop the election process from happening,” said Kinloch, a Wayne County commissioner.

At another point in the conversation, McDaniel told the pair that if they certified without demanding an audit, people would “never know what happened in Detroit.”

Trump leveled similar fraud accusations against heavily Black communities in Atlanta, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. Trump insisted on social media that in Detroit there were more votes than people. “I win Michigan!” he insisted.

Detroit News reminds readers that Trump’s statement was incorrect.

“If ballots had been illegally counted, there would be substantially more, not slightly fewer, ballots tabulated than names in the poll books,” Jonathan Brater, the director of the state Bureau of Elections, wrote in a 2020 affidavit submitted in response to a lawsuit filed by Sidney Powell of “Kraken” fame.

A spokesman for the RNC declined Politico’s request for comment on the Detroit News story:

“All of President Trump’s actions were taken in furtherance of his duty as President of the United States to faithfully take care of the laws and ensure election integrity, including investigating the rigged and stolen 2020 Presidential Election. President Trump and the American people have the Constitutional right to free and fair elections,” Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the former president, said in a statement to POLITICO.

Comparisons with Trump’s recorded call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger are obvious. Mark Meadows has insisted his participation on the Georgia call was simply part of his role as the president’s chief of staff. Election integrity and all that.

So much criming

Conservative attorney George Conway told CNN on Thursday that the report could lead to additional charges against Trump (Raw Story):

“I mean, there is no factual basis given for the claim there was fraud, and there was intimidation involved,” Conway continued. “And according to the Detroit News article, it’s suggested by a former elections official there that in essence what was happening here, he suggests, is that they were being induced by the — by the promise of legal protection, by the promise of getting attorneys for them to violate their official duties, which potentially could be an additional crime under Michigan law.”

And possibly charges for McDaniel:

Trump and Ronna McDaniel – Offering a thing of value to a public official to violate oath of office = a crime. ⬇️ https://t.co/ovJ6y1g9pj

— Andrew Weissmann (weissmann11 on Threads)🌻 (@AWeissmann_) December 22, 2023

“It’s one big fix”

If someone has set “Everthing Trump Touches Dies” to music, I haven’t seen it. In the meantime….

Update: Fallout

Rove: I think the former president has a problem with this. They had voted to certify the election, he attempted to force them to change their decision, which they tried to do, I think this is what we would call election interference. pic.twitter.com/POLeiVX3Cf

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 22, 2023

Happy Hollandaise!

Churchill just got the color wrong

What better reason to invoke the famous Churchill quote: “Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.”

Happy Hollandaise!

Anti-abortion zealots aren’t going to adopt them, that’s for sure

I brought adoption papers to Anti-Abortion protestors. pic.twitter.com/dPIHYcWeu4

— Walter Masterson (@waltermasterson) December 20, 2023

We know they don’t care about babies once they’re out of the womb. Why would they want to adopt them?

Reminder:

Sixty percent of kids who have lost Medicaid coverage this year came from just nine states, all of which are Republican-led, according to new data from the Biden administration.

And the 10 states refusing the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid to low-income adults have disenrolled more kids than all of the expansion states combined, the administration also reported… Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Dakota and Texas

Some of those states (I’m looking at you Texas and Florida) among those states with the most draconian abortion bans in the nation.

This should be embarrassingly hypocritical to these people but they are shameless. After all, these are the same clinic harassers who whine that the man “harassing” them about adoption is being rude.

I highly recommend reading this piece in In These Times about what happens to people who are forced to have more children than they can afford. This is happening in Mississippi:

I first wrote about Lationna after visiting her in March, when she was still on unpaid maternity leave. She told me then that she had always planned to have a second baby someday, once her life was more stable. She’d wanted to be married, better paid, and for the family to live in a house instead of their cramped apartment in West Jackson, Miss. She’d been planning to go to cosmetology school so she could leave her job — which paid barely above minimum wage at $8.50 an hour — and follow her dreams to start her own beauty business.

But instead, in July 2022, she’d learned she was pregnant — just weeks after the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case that originated in Lationna’s home state. Mississippi’s abortion ban trigger law went into effect less than two weeks later. She contacted the only abortion clinic that remained in the state but never heard back because it had already closed. She didn’t have the money to travel out of state.

Kingsley was born at the end of January. In the early days, Lationna was struggling to adjust to being a new mom when she hadn’t chosen to be, wrestling with sleepless nights, isolation and postpartum depression. After Lationna went back to work, she and Kendall entered a new phase, enjoying a bit more sleep but trying desperately to figure out how to afford raising a child they hadn’t planned for with scant government help. The typical exhaustion and chaos of parenting two young children has been exacerbated by a lack of control over the timing and their economic precarity. Mississippi does virtually nothing to ease that precarity, and despite some pledges from lawmakers to do more to assist children and families after it banned abortion, little has changed in the year and a half since Lationna was deprived of autonomy over her own body.

Now that 21 states have banned or severely restricted abortion, an untold number of people are following in Lationna’s footsteps: trying to piece together enough money to care for a new child they weren’t ready for and navigating government bureaucracies in states that offer families little to no financial relief. Lationna and Kendall have caught a few lucky breaks, but for each advance they make the tide pulls them further backward, barely treading water as their dreams and ambitions drift further and further away. 

These extremists are the destroyers of dreams. It’s heartbreaking.

Happy Hollandaise!

Trump showed the GOP they can be as racist as they want to be

They don’t care about no woke criticism. They’re just going for it:

Donald Trump is getting headlines for saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” But for months the GOP race for president has been shadowed by xenophobia, as some candidates or those backing them have embraced racist and white nationalist themes.

It’s partly a reflection of how Trump has moved Republican politics toward the harder-edged, “us vs. them” view that now dominates the GOP’s base and is reshaping its membership in Congress.

This is from Axios. It’s nice that they’ve noticed it’s not just Trump. It’s very important to report this because there may be a handful of people who have always voted Republican who are not exactly on board with the crudeness of this. (The dog whistles always provided deniability.)

Even as the GOP has recruited more minority prospects for public office — this year’s initial field for the presidential race was historically diverse — more Republicans are latching onto Trump’s racially divisive rhetoric.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the son of Indian immigrants, has won fans among white nationalists for promoting the “Great Replacement Theory,” a racist conspiracy theory that nonwhite people are being allowed into the U.S. and other Western countries to replace white voters. Ramaswamy, who among the GOP candidates has been particularly reluctant to criticize Trump, also has campaigned with former Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican who has said that U.S. culture can’t be restored “with somebody else’s babies” and called for an America “so homogeneous that we look a lot the same.”

Last summer, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ team fired a speechwriter who created campaign material with neo-Nazi imagery, then shared it on a pro-DeSantis Twitter account.

More recently, some far-righters, conservative groups and others have begun calling former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley — whose parents were Indian immigrants — “Nimarata,” her first name, rather than Nikki, the middle name she has gone by for most of her life. The emphasis on Haley’s Indian heritage has escalated as she has risen in GOP polls and cast herself as a less chaotic, more sensitive conservative than Trump. Ramaswamy has called Haley “lying Nimarata Randhawa,” referencing her family name before marriage.

[…]

At the Turning Point’s convention last weekend, some attendees were asked to mark their preference for Trump’s vice presidential pick on a screen, on which Haley was identified as “Nimarata Nikki Randhawa Haley.” On the board, Haley’s face was scribbled over and someone had written “Boo!” next to it. Two others on the informal survey, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson and Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake, were identified only by their first names.

The Turning Point scene was partly a reflection of attendees’ loyalty to Trump, but the emphasis on Haley’s nonwhite heritage was hard to miss. It echoed Trump’s frequent, derisive mentions of former President Barack Obama’s middle name — Hussein — even though Trump never ran against Obama. Critics have called Trump’s tactic a racist dog-whistle.

There’s no containing it now. As Axios reports, they had the chance after their 2012 “autopsy” report which made clear that their racism was hurting the party nationally and depriving it of a future They went with Trump instead. And here we are.

This is going to be very clarifying. You’ll recall the old Lee Atwater admonition to the GOP that the country was changing and their habit of screaming the N-word as they did back in the 50s and then moderating to to talk about “busing” or “welfare” wasn’t going to work forever. Well, this is about to be tested, big time. Trump is openly channeling Adolph Hitler. Republicans are going after one of their biggest non-white stars. It’s only a matter of time before he says the n-word in public. Mark my words.

Happy Hollandaise everyone. Buckle up …

What’s this I hear about Trump running away with the general election?

Nobody on your TV is going to tell you this, so I will:

Tenth poll this past month with a Biden lead. Ten. https://t.co/gBifJreHVQ

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) December 20, 2023

Polls mean nothing right now, as you know. But these are no more meaningless than any of the others.

The sad reality is that this race is inexplicably close and Democrats are going to have to work their asses off. Too many people have forgotten what a nightmare Trump was and unfortunately tens of millions of people loved him then and love him now. (That’s what should keep us up at night…)

Still, considering the relentless doom and gloom about Biden over the past few months, I think we should take heart in the fact that despite the sour mood in the country at least half the people haven’t lost their minds.

Happy Hollandaise!

It couldn’t happen to a nice bunch of zealots

I’m sure you’ll recall that the NRA recently had a little “controversy” when it turned out that their revered leader Wayne LaPierre was livin’ the life of a Clarence Thomas on the members’ dues. Well, things have gotten even worse:

While the events contributing to the NRA’s freefall have been well-documented, a review of the gun rights group’s tax filings and political spending over the last 15 years provides some of the clearest evidence of its downfall—showing just how badly the legal setbacks and mismanagement have ravaged the once-formidable gun lobbying giant.

The NRA’s most recent tax return, filed in November of this year for 2022, reveals dramatic declines along almost every conceivable metric: revenue, assets, member dues, lobbying, and political spending—with conversely sharp increases in legal costs and deficits.

And as the NRA’s power and influence has waned, gun violence has perversely soared, particularly suicides, especially in the wake of the pandemic.

In one view, the NRA’s decline might be seen as a consequence of its own “success,” as its gargantuan lobbying efforts in the early to mid-2010s effectively froze the national gun control debate, diminishing the advocacy group’s utility. Still, that might be changing.

In 2022, 15 GOP senators repudiated the NRA, passing the first meaningful gun control package in decades. That could be a signal of the NRA’s demise, but it also could be interpreted as a reaction to the surging gun violence that continues to this day in part because of the lax gun laws that the NRA advocated for and won over that time.

What is clear is that the NRA today is in a dismal state. On the income side, 2022 was the fourth year in a row that revenue fell, marking its weakest fundraising year since at least 2008. Membership dues are at all-time lows, according to available public data, and staffing is at the lowest point since those costs began their downward plunge in 2016, while the group’s legal costs—largely driven by civil actions alleging rampant mismanagement of funds and self-dealing—are proportionately higher than ever.

I think the gun proliferation zealotry is now so thoroughly inculcated on the right that they are no longer needed. It’s possible that there will be some tweaking around the edges but when the Supremes finally validated the individual right to bear arms in 2008, the deal was pretty well sealed short of a constitutional amendment. Who needs the NRA when you have the high court?

It’s going to take a major sea change to change this status quo. I wish I could see an end to it. Still, it’s a nice Christmas present to see this article. The world is a better place without the NRA running the Republican Party.

Update —
On the other hand, who needs the Republican Party if you have nihilistic fanatics on the court?

A federal judge on Wednesday blocked a California law that would have banned carrying firearms in most public places, ruling that it violates the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and deprives people of their ability to defend themselves and their loved ones.

The law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September was set to take effect Jan. 1. It would have prohibited people from carrying concealed guns in 26 places including public parks and playgrounds, churches, banks and zoos. The ban would apply whether the person has a permit to carry a concealed weapon or not. One exception would be for privately owned businesses that put up signs saying people are allowed to bring guns on their premises.

U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney granted a preliminary injunction blocking the law, which he wrote was “sweeping, repugnant to the Second Amendment, and openly defiant of the Supreme Court.”

The court case against the law will proceed while the law is blocked. The judge wrote that gun rights groups are likely to succeed in proving it unconstitutional, meaning it would be permanently overturned.

Happy Hollandaise!