Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Now that one of the most outrageous state legislative sessions in US history has mercifully concluded, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is finally set to formally announce his candidacy for president. He has quite a record to run on. In a very short time he’s built a multi-dimensional legacy of repression, abuse of power and intolerance rarely seen in modern politics. Now he wants to take that agenda to the whole country.

Some highlights from the last few weeks include a law to ban abortion at six weeks of pregnancy, a law granting permitless concealed carry, a ban on diversity programs in state colleges, a law to prevent teachers from using pronouns they don’t believe are appropriate, easier access to the death penalty and an expansion of the “Don’t Say Gay” law to block teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity through the 12th grade. That’s just for starters. He’s pulled one culture war stunt after another, from transporting migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, to picking a fight with Disney, the state’s largest employer over LGBTQ rights to creating an “election police force” and having them arrest Black ex-felons who were allowed to vote in error and on and on and on. And he just signed into law a bill allowing the state to take transgender children away from their parents. It seems only certain parents have rights in Florida.

DeSantis took a victory lap this week saying: “I remember saying when I became governor, the first day, sat in the office, I kinda just looked around and I thought to myself, ‘You know, I don’t know what SOB is gonna succeed me in this office but they ain’t gonna have much to do because we’re getting all the meat off the bone.’”

That “meat” was taken out of the hides of LGBTQ children, teachers, students, immigrants, Black people and anyone who isn’t thrilled with the idea of living in an Orwellian dystopia.

Right wing politicians have been running on culture war issues forever, of course, particularly on issues of race and abortion. But DeSantis has taken it to an extreme level that’s verging on bizarre, even for the current GOP and doing it while running for president in political environment that has delivered one defeat after another since they embraced MAGA extremism seems inexplicable. If he were to beat Donald Trump in the primary and become the nominee, his chances of winning the general election once the country becomes familiar with his radical record seems even worse than Trump’s.

So, what’s going on here? Why has he lurched so far to the right that he’s on the verge of falling off the edge?

It’s because of the religious right. As long as I can remember, it’s been a truism that America is an extremely pious country and great deference must be paid to traditional Christian values. . In recent years we learned that the conservative evangelical commitment to those same Christian values was more than a little bit overstated when the Republican Party offered up an openly promiscuous, thrice-married, sexual assaulting, libertine for president and they eagerly joined his flock.

It’s now clear that these Americans are not really a religious group at all but rather a political faction. That political faction is Christian Nationalism and it’s a growing threat to American democracy. As I pointed out earlier, Donald Trump is aware of how important they are to his campaign and he proved it last weekend when he called in to ReAwaken America, one of the largest Christian Nationalist groups in the country. Turning Point USA is another Christian Nationalist Organization to which they all feel obliged to pay fealty. And there’s a good reason they do this. According to a recent Public Religion Research Institute-Brookings Institution poll, Christian Nationalist adherents and sympathizers make up 29% of Americans which adds up to tens of millions of our fellow citizens.

If any GOP candidate wants to win the nomination for president he or she must find a way to extricate them from Donald Trump so DeSantis decided that his best chance of doing that was to make their dreams come true in Florida and promise to do the same to America if he wins. We’ll have to see if he can make that appeal but he and all Republicans should probably take another look at the American religious landscape.

As reported in Politico, The Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies released its 2020 census and found that over the last decade, the share of Americans who associate with religion dropped by 11 points. And guess what? Democrats are gaining in the places where religious affiliation is declining and it’s not the godless coastal blue states. It’s mostly in the middle of the country. The correlation is astonishing.

Across the industrial Midwest, in former Rust Belt states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that are absolutely essential to the Democrats’ firewall in 2024, there is good news for the party — each of those states is much less religious today than it was just 10 years ago.

More bad news for Republicans is that ” new data indicates that nearly half of Generation Z has no religious affiliation while a new Catalyst report finds that Gen Z came out in bigger numbers in 2022 than in 2018 — and over 60% voted for Democrats. The speculation is that this young cohort is so turned off by intolerant MAGA culture crusade that they are not only voting in large numbers but will likely define themselves as Democrats their entire lives, just as earlier Democrats did in the era of Franklin Roosevelt and Republicans did when Ronald Reagan came to power. This is a long term problem for the GOP.

The religion census found that the only metro area in the country that gained religious adherents was Miami, Florida. And the border districts in Texas that went from solid Democratic to purple at best can be explained by a rise in religious believers, mostly newer immigrants who are not especially enamored of abortion of LGBTQ rights. Arizona too has a big share of those same voters who are sympathetic to culture war issues.

You have to wonder whether or not the Christian Nationalists will be able to accept the fact that their future political clout will depend upon welcoming new Hispanic immigrants into their coalition. Because let’s face facts, American Christian Nationalism is really white Christian Nationalism.

The reason the GOP is hitting these culture war issues so hard is because this largest single faction in the party demands it. But they represent only 30% of the total electorate and the rest of the country is overwhelmingly appalled by what the Republicans are doing to appease them. In fact, they are not only destroying the Republican Party it appears they are destroying their religion as well. Let’s hope they don’t succeed in destroying American democracy as well.

Salon

Gotta keep the Irresponsibles in line

If you ever changed your name … ↑ think of the doors it would open ↑. Think of the insurance bullshit you could avoid:

I wish horrible things on everyone who works in insurance. This is from my kids appendectomy. pic.twitter.com/ZtQixbLQtx

— Tallie (@_TallieRose) May 18, 2023

Tallie Rose follows up with, “I called and they can’t even find the claim and had to kick it up to a manager because they can’t figure out WHAT they’re denying. Good stuff.”

This thread by Amy Faith Ho may be unrelated. But it’s related.* When Tallie Rose’s kid ends up in the ER with peritonitis, voila, no pre-authorization required.**

---

Here’s the dirty secret of emergency medicine:

We don’t have to do prior auth. Like ever. We just order what the patient needs, and the patient gets it done in the ED.

But here’s why we care about prior auth anyways:

B/c not a shift goes by where a patient doesn’t land in the…

— Amy Faith Ho, MD MPH (@amyfaithho) May 18, 2023

B/c not a shift goes by where a patient doesn’t land in the ER as a last resort when #priorauth denied or delayed them the outpatient care they needed.

Need your gallbladder taken out electively? Too late (waiting for auth), now you’re in the ED with cholecystitis. Had a “nodule” seen on a CT, but couldn’t get a repeat scan authorized…ever? Now it’s metastatic and you’re in the ED for crippling pain. DVT? No problem, started you on blood thinners. Oh, but your insurance wouldn’t cover it? Wait for it…now you’re hypoxic with submassive PEs. You’ve been having severe migraines, and insurance requires you to do a “trial of meds” before getting a MRI. The meds don’t cut it, you’re in the ED and turns out, you have an aneurysm. And it’s bleeding. The examples go on.

Why does this matter?

1. It’s terrible for patients
2. It stresses the healthcare system in ways it shouldn’t
3. It’s cumbersome and wasteful to insurers and clinicians both

35million priorauths submitted to @MedicareGov#MedicareAdvantage in a year – assuming 5 min/each and $20/hour of staff time (underestimated since this is physician/RN/admin blended time) that’s $58million of just labor cost. Not including denials/appeals…

Citation: https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/over-35-million-prior-authorization-requests-were-submitted-to-medicare-advantage-plans-in-2021/

So why does #priorauth exist?! To “contain costs” by insurers… Doesn’t sound terribly cost effective, does it?

$58 million in labor cost alone of initial submission, not including the labor cost of denials/appeals and not including the cost of ED/hospital stays that results from delays/denials… Sounds like it’s time to get rid of #priorauth, no?

---

That would make too much sense.

* Since Musk took over Twitter, ThreadReader no longer seems to work cleanly with it. I understand he’s some kinda rocket scientist.

** This sounds eerily like the barriers Republicans erect to getting SNAP and other government benefits, doesn’t it? You know, to keep the Irresponsibles from getting anything they don’t deserve.

This is Bob. Bob gets $1,500 a year in food stamps to help feed his family. This is Shell. Shell gets 2 billion a year in subsidies, granted by the government, because it has excellent lobbyists and bribes. pic.twitter.com/KxiLgdCphc

— Amy (she, her) (@DrawingsbyAmy) September 7, 2022

Who offers more spectacle, DeSantis or Trump?

I studied Chinese history at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution. Somewhere I have some artifacts from the period’s inescapable propaganda. Even without that background, it was clear without squinting where this column on “Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution” by Tania Branigan would go by about one and a half sentences in (New York Times):

It would seem impossible to forget or minimize the Cultural Revolution in China, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, resulted in an estimated 1.6 million to two million deaths and scarred a generation and its descendants. The movement, which under Mao Zedong’s leadership sought to purge Chinese society of all remaining non-Communist elements, upended nearly every hallowed institution and custom. Teachers and schools long held in esteem were denounced. Books were burned and banned, museums ransacked, private art collections destroyed. Intellectuals were tortured.

Subtle. Or maybe not. But I had not made the connection before to what political and religious extremists in this country fantasize of imposing: a cultural makeover “as totalizing in scope as the Cultural Revolution.”

Wrong-thinking bureaucrats purged. Racial minorities again bowing and scraping. Women internally exiled — barefoot, pregnant, and confined to domestic chores. Gender nonconformists forced back into the closets where they belong. The educated brought low and/or forcibly re-educated, the rest indoctinated in right-think. Non-Christian faiths tolerated so long as memberships remain low, inconspicuous and undemanding. And guns. Lots of guns.

It is harder to buy the comparison when the right rails about the horrors of intersectionality, but it shows I’m not the first to perceive an attempt to bring about a government-enforced, made-in-America cultural revolution.

When the Cultural Revolution comes up in American conversation, it’s generally in debates over the rise of group think and mob mentalities, performative outrage on Twitter and on college campuses. Parallels certainly exist: Political leaders fomenting cultural wars, polarization reducing differences of opinion to signifiers of ally and heretic, and the media resorting to shouty sloganeering over considered debate.

But Branigan’s book offers an equally important cautionary lesson: the perils of ignoring or distorting history. What a country downplays in its historical record continues to reverberate, whether it’s the Cultural Revolution in China or the treatment of Native Americans and the legacy of slavery in the United States. And just as Xi Jinping can censor China’s recent Covid record, so can America attempt to whitewash events — attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — in its own recent past.

Gov. Ron DeSantis has embarked on his own cultural revolution in Floriduh. There are book bans, purges of academics and wrong-thinking officials, whitewashing of history, efforts to bring capitalists to heel, and targeting of gender nonconformists. The usual. Just a taste of coming MAGA attractions. A visit to China, no passport required.

But DeSantis is as boring as hell. He is clueless enough that he thinks he can win the black hearts of white Christian nationalists ahead of the 2024 primaries merely by abusing people they hate. Donald Trump had a TV show. He has a reality TV family. He has his own jet and a skyscraper with TRUMP emblazoned on it. In gold. Trump may not have a little red book, but he has a cheering sea of red hats and “Trump or Death” tee shirts. He has flag teams in boats and pickup trucks. Can’t have a cultural revolution without spectacle, Rhonda.

It’s not going well for the bad guys:

In the 11 months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Republicans have underperformed in federal, judicial, statewide and local elections across the country.

 Abortion isn’t the only factor driving their election woes, especially in local races. But a toxic party brand can easily trickle down-ballot, and the GOP so far hasn’t been able to navigate the voter backlash that began with a New York special election last August.

Jacksonville on Tuesday elected its second Democratic mayor in 30 years, with Donna Deegan upsetting Daniel Davis — a Republican endorsed by Gov. Ron DeSantis — in Florida’s largest city.

It was the first major election in Florida since DeSantis signed a six-week abortion ban — which a March poll found 75% of Florida residents oppose — in a private ceremony close to midnight last month.

In Colorado Springs, Colorado, independent businessman Yemi Mobolade was elected the first non-Republican mayor since 1979 — a “political earthquake” in a conservative stronghold, according to local media.

In Pennsylvania, Democrats held on to their one-seat state House majority by winning a special election in the Philadelphia suburbs, allowing them to block a GOP-backed referendum on limiting abortion rights.

Across 18 state legislative races held this year, including yesterday, Democrats have outperformed the 2020 presidential results by an average of six points, according to a Washington Post analysis.

In Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election last month, a liberal judge defeated the conservative candidate by 11 points in a race defined by abortion rights.House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is still dealing with the fallout from the GOP’s underperformance in the midterms, which gave him a tenuous four-seat majority.

The multi-layered landscape of elections in this country can’t be simplified to a single issue. But abortion is a proven electoral vulnerability for Republicans — and there’s a strong chance it gets worse.

Yep.

Ron DeSantis had made a pretty smart decision when he signed the 15 week abortion ban. I think it’s a terrible bill but it’s about the only way a Republican can even attempt to thread the needle. But it wasn’t enough for him and he just signed a sex week abortion ban. That was idiotic. And if he does manage to get the nomination he just killed himself in the general election.

These Republicans are tied up in knots over that issue and they don’t seem to be able to figure out what to do about it.

Pete Buttigieg is an interesting fellow. I thought this was an interesting analysis:

[H]ave you followed the masculinity crusade of former TV personality Tucker Carlson—testicle warming and the rest?

I mean, where to begin on this? Fears about masculinity are a way into the fear of displacement. Masculinity establishes a default place, and that place is being shifted and threatened by modernity. A man as the head of the household. The only one who earns income. The default leader in any social or political organization. 

The politicization of masculinity is code for Nothing in your life has to change. The problem is, of course, lots of things have to change. Either because there was something wrong with the old way—or because, even as the old way seemed perfectly fine, it’s not an option. 

This is true with the realities of climate change. If you can’t face that change, you might retreat to the default place of masculinity. Maybe that’s why someone characterized electric vehicles as emasculating. I think it was Marjorie Taylor Greene.

I do believe that Marge may be an expert on emasculation.

The larger point is very true. This stuff is all about fear of change. It’s happening very quickly and these people can’t adapt. It’s not all that different from the period in the 60s when half the country had a hysterical reaction to men growing their hair long and women not wearing bras — or more precisely, the sexual revolution and civil rights which introduced ideas that terrified a lot of people. They lost their minds over it.

Evolution requires adaptation. I don’t think these people are going to make it in the long run.

He’s right there in front of us. Don’t look away:

A confession: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is living in my head.

For nearly three years now, I’ve been fascinated by the performance art of this blustering pettifogger. My first column, published in June 2020, covered DeSantis’ truculent defense of his management of the COVID-19 pandemic in his state.

At the time, he complained that criticism of his record on COVID was nothing but a “partisan narrative.” Within days, Florida would see a record surge in cases. To this day, DeSantis has continued to claim success against the virus, never mind that his state has notched one of the worst COVID death rates in the country.

Following DeSantis and his hijinks has been what could be described as one of my guilty pleasures. Nothing that happened in Florida had real relevance to our lives here in California; appalling as his policies were, we could afford to watch from a safe distance as DeSantis waged war on LGBTQ+ residents, teachers, universities, anti-discrimination laws, gun safety and so many other the institutions and principles that a sane, inclusive society holds dear.

But things have changed. DeSantis is on the verge of announcing his candidacy for the GOP nomination for president, which will require us to weigh him in the balance as a national political figure. That will be a test for society in general.

It also will be a test for our political press, which so far has treated DeSantis indulgently, as a horse in the presidential race and a possible alternative to Donald Trump, without expending much time or effort examining the impact his policy initiatives have had on the residents of Florida.

Press interest has perked up lately, with DeSantis’ policy initiatives becoming more febrile as his announcement draws nigh.

But the press hasn’t begun to devote sufficient attention to the curious experiment DeSantis has launched, based on the hypothesis that it’s possible to win a presidential nomination, not to mention a presidential election, by appealing exclusively to a bloc of racists, antisemites, gun nuts and other nightcrawlers of the far right. An America led by DeSantis as he has portrayed himself thus far would be a dystopian hellhole.

Let the examination begin.

It would be proper to start with scrutiny of DeSantis’ positions on the most important geopolitical issues of our time, if they could be detected.

DeSantis’ efforts to plant his flag on issues such as the Russian war on Ukraine and America’s proper role in that conflict collapsed into incoherence. That led to the first glimmers among conservatives that perhaps he is not ready for prime time, notwithstanding the fruitless efforts of his sycophants to depict his confusion as the product of deep thinking.

Immigration? Certainly an issue worthy of painstaking thoughtfulness by an aspirant to national political office. DeSantis’ approach has been to gauge the performative cruelty and pointlessness of the approach of his fellow Republican governor Greg Abbott of Texas and say, “Hold my beer.”

Abbott has been shipping migrants released from federal custody from Texas to New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Those are places with infrastructures of aid for immigrants (though Abbott sent busloads to be dropped off in front of Vice President Kamala Harris’ D.C. residence in freezing temperatures on Christmas Eve).

DeSantis couldn’t find enough victims to be rounded up in his state, so he sent his agents to Texas to collect them. His Florida-funded transports dropped them off without warning on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., which didn’t have any assistance infrastructure. DeSantis’ agents lied to the passengers about where they were going and what they would find at their destination.

As it turned out, the people of Martha’s Vineyard, apparently selected for their supposed hypocrisy on immigration, responded to the stunt humanely by arranging assistance, presumably to DeSantis’ surprise.

By the way, most if not all the passengers of these transports are in the U.S. legally.

They’re asylum-seekers who have completed the initial step in their processing by government authorities by getting a hearing scheduled, being fingerprinted and subjecting to background checks. Then they’re released to await further processing; if anything, the GOP transports interfered with this entirely legal process, to the asylum-seekers’ disadvantage.

When critics questioned the expenditure of Florida tax revenue in Texas, DeSantis simply had his indulgent state legislators rewrite the law and appropriate $12 million more to transport migrants from outside Florida to Democratic locations.

If one believes that the prime imperative of state governors is to keep their residents safe, DeSantis must be judged an abject failure.

The most important test for contemporary governors has been the pandemic. Nearly from the outset, DeSantis accepted the unfounded claims by a cadre of unqualified theorists that the proper approach was to focus protection on the most vulnerable population — the elderly — and allow the virus to roam free among everyone else in a quest for “herd immunity.”

It didn’t work.

Up-to-date figures place Florida’s COVID death rate of 411 per 100,000 population at 10th worst in the nation; California, with a rate of 259.4, ranks 42nd. If California had Florida’s death rate, its COVID toll would be 161,000, rather than 102,500. Florida has recorded about 88,300 deaths. If it had California’s death rate, about 32,000 Floridians would have been spared.

DeSantis’ defenders point out that Florida has the second-highest percentage of residents 65 and older in the nation. But its death rate is almost twice that of Maine, the state with the oldest demographics, and higher than the nine other states with the highest percentage of residents 65 and older.

The chief distinction between Florida and those other states is DeSantis. He has waged war on anti-pandemic policies. He has demonized Anthony Fauci, who as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was the nation’s most respected epidemiological expert — though a target of the ignorant far right. There was no reason for DeSantis to do this, except to curry partisan favor with the right wing.

DeSantis installed a known COVID “crank,” Joseph Ladapo, as his state’s surgeon general. Together they have mounted an attack on COVID vaccines, which are indisputably safe and effective in reducing illness and death from the virus.

Ladapo has been an advocate of treatments for COVID such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which have been shown to be useless for the purpose. He was recently reported to have personally altered a scientific study to exaggerate the health risks of COVID vaccines for young men; legitimate scientific data show the risk to be negligible, and lower than the risks from contracting the disease.

In March, Ladapo was officially upbraided by the Food and Drug Administration for his campaign of misinformation about the vaccine. Earlier this month, Ladapo was appointed to another term as state surgeon general.

DeSantis’ assaults on schoolteachers, professors and universities have been well documented. His policies and the laws he has signed or advocated aim to eradicate diversity and inclusion programs on campus and restrict free discussion of contentious subjects.

In practice, these strictures elevate a white-oriented historiography to the level of received truth, turning the clock back on decades of pedagogical progress. The laws and regulations are written so vaguely that teachers have no way of knowing when they’ve crossed a line. Their natural inclination is to err on the side of removing books from school libraries and narrowing their curricula.

DeSantis depicts this process as protecting pupils and students from discomfiting discussions. In fact, he’s keeping Floridians from learning the skills of critical thinking and academic inquiry. His view of the university is of a glorified vocational school. In a speech Monday, he sneered, “If you want to do things like gender ideology, go to Berkeley. … We don’t want to be diverted into a lot of these niche subjects that are heavily politicized.” (His obviously hand-picked claque responded with cheers for this vacuous spiel.)

DeSantis has consistently eviscerated LBGTQ+ rights. He has bought into the right-wing hysteria about medical support for transgender youth. Last week, he signed a bill allowing healthcare providers to refuse service to almost anyone due to a “conscience-based objection” — a rule the LGBTQ+ community properly sees as a license to refuse service to them.

Is there no right-wing trope that DeSantis won’t embrace? On Friday, he jumped into the case of Daniel Penny, the white ex-Marine charged with manslaughter for placing Jordan Neely, a Black schizophrenic homeless person, in a chokehold on a New York subway train.

“We must defeat the Soros-Funded DAs, stop the Left’s pro-criminal agenda, and take back the streets for law abiding citizens. We stand with Good Samaritans like Daniel Penny,” he tweeted. Let’s show this Marine… America’s got his back.”

This was a remarkable achievement in Twitterography. It combined three right-wing causes—antisemitism, racism and bloodlust — in a single five-line tweet. Down our way, we call this a hat trick.

The question that will soon confront American voters and the press is whether campaigning of this nature will have legs beyond the hermetic boundaries of Florida. The Republican-controlled legislature in Tallahassee has been content to do DeSantis’ bidding on all these topics, feeding his worst instincts with raw red meat.

Egged on by the conservative peanut gallery, DeSantis has relentlessly pushed himself to the right. Perhaps he has been misled by his obsequious reception in the Florida fever swamps into thinking that the whole country lives up his street.

Possibly DeSantis thinks he has no other chance against Trump except to out-Trump him. He certainly doesn’t have much personal appeal; even his supporters acknowledge that he’s uneasy with the retail politics of kissing babies and making nice to donors. When I wrote recently that DeSantis has all the charisma of a linoleum floor, I received indignant replies from contractors, accusing me of slandering linoleum.

One of the few DeSantis initiatives that has garnered national attention, his stupid fight with the Walt Disney Co. over the latter’s criticism of his “Don’t Say Gay” law, has unnerved even Republican fat cats.

Recent political history suggests that politicians who scurry to the right to appease the GOP’s extremists in primaries find it very difficult to claw their way back to the center to broaden their appeal in general elections on a national level. (Mitt Romney couldn’t do it, for instance.)

It’s too early to know whether DeSantis will be willing or able to moderate his policies and rhetoric for a national audience or to be convincing if he tries. Judging from the record thus far, he’s going to become only more noxious before he’s finally ushered off the national stage.

That’s from Michael Hilzick in the LA Times. I couldn’t agree more.

This man could be president of the United States. And I have come to the conclusion that he is more of a true believer than people realize. I think his “establishment” days were the cynical ones. He’s got the zealot’s gleam in his eye now.

If you’ve been observing politics for a while I’m sure many of you caught House Oversight Chairman James Comer’s not-so-subtle implications that Joe Biden and his “crime family” are killing off his political enemies over the weekend. It’s redolent of the old Clinton Kill List that was an article of faith on the right back in the 1990s.

Tim Miller has the details:

JAMES COMER, THE REPUBLICAN WHO CHAIRS the House Oversight Committee, has been widely mocked for claiming during a Sunday interview with not-yet-fired Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo that the “informant” in his committee’s investigation of the Biden family’s business dealings went “missing,” hampering Republicans’ ability to drop the long-promised “bombshell” evidence.

While this dung-faced performance merited all the mockery it has received, those of us whose sonar is more closely calibrated to the fainter sound waves of the conservative media world caught something more sinister in the congressman’s subtext.

Here’s the transcript, see if you can catch it:

Nine of the ten people that we’ve identified that have very good knowledge with respect to the Bidens, they are one of three things, Maria. They are either currently in court, they’re currently in jail, or they’re currently missing. So, it’s of the utmost importance that the FBI work with us to be able to try to identify what research they’ve done, what investigations they’ve done, because we have people that wanna come forward but honestly, Maria, they fear for their lives.

People mysteriously missing. Others fearing for their lives.

Why exactly? What evidence is there that anyone needs to be worried or that foul play is afoot? It’s not clear.

And yet here we have a GOP committee chairman strongly implying that the Biden family’s intimidation tactics might even go so far as to result in death.

After the Comer interview, Bartiromo asked another guest, the national conservative writer Josh Hammer, to react to these claims, which she described as “chilling.” Hammer says ominously, “Maria, what is actually going on here? You and I both know exactly what is going on here” before laying into a diatribe about how the “Biden Crime Family” and “everyone at the top” of the intelligence community are “pulling out all the stops imaginable” to protect the president. The Washington Examiner followed with a credulous report on Comer accusing the White House of “intimidation.”

For conservative media consumers what Bartiromo et al. are trying to get across is unmistakable. It is part of a long history of vague and not-so-vague accusations that Democratic political elites and the Deep State are willing to go so far as murder in order to silence whistleblowers who might harm the Democratic Party. This tactic was employed most notably against the Clintons with the “Kill List” rumormongering in the 1990s. In the last decade, it was most prominent in the slander surrounding the Seth Rich murder in 2016.

That this was not missed by its intended audience is clear by the response you can see in certain corners of the MAGA internet.

Charlie Kirk, misunderstanding Comer, tweeted about how 9 of the 10 informants are missing, which Kirk also calls “chilling.”

Patriot News Network headlines it “Huge: Biden Family Crime Informant Has Gone Missing!”

On Truth Social the notion that the informant was “Epsteined” and that he or she might be dead was spread by various accounts.

THIS COMES IN THE WAKE of another story last week that you would have seen only in the MAGA media bubble: Tara Reade, who during the 2020 campaign accused Biden of having sexually harassed her years earlier, suggesting that Biden might try to have her killed. “If something happens to me, all roads lead to Joe Biden,” she tweeted. “I am not suicidal.”

“If something happens to me…Biden accuser posts bone-chilling message” was the headline in Conservative Brief, which was shared on Twitter by Chuck Woolery, the conservative crank and former Love Connection host. “Tara Reade fears assassination attempt? All roads lead to Joe Biden” screamed American Action News. Bongino, Rebel News, Breitbart—they all sang from the same hymn book.

Tara Reade always had a strange affection for Vladimir Putin. Lately she’s been pushing the virtues of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. She is one weird person with a knack for getting attention on both the right and left.

All of this just proves that this stuff isn’t a result of Donald Trump’s ignominious reign. They’ve been doing this stuff for decades and the GOP establishment has always been happy to exploit it for their own purposes.

Look at this nonsense:

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley says the results of voting in all 50 states should be announced on Election Night. Haley spoke to a crowd in Ankeny tonight and was asked if she feels elections are fair.

“I don’t mind absentee voting and I don’t mind early voting, but you have to prove you are who you say you are and when those ballots come in, they need to verify signatures and count them as they come in,” Haley said. “There’s no reason any state can’t produce the results on Election Night. There’s no reason whatsoever.”

Haley suggested “a lot of states” are doing things right and she urged the crowd to “keep the faith” about election integrity. “The good thing from COVID is we had a lot of election integrity laws that passed in multiple states,” Haley said. “There are a few states out there that we still have problems with and we’ve got to be careful and they bent the rules and they tried things and we’ve got to make sure that we continue to press those states to do it the right way because integrity in the election process matters.”

She has said in the past that the election was not stolen. Now she’s hedging. Of course. These people are the worst cowards politics has ever produced.

Nobody “bent the rules.” This has all been litigated. There were dozens and dozens of court cases, many of which were heard before right wing judges and none of them found any lack of integrity. We did see a president try to “bend the rules” by strong arming Republican officials into “finding” him the votes he needed to win. We saw him establish a Big Lie that the election was stolen. And we saw him incite an insurrection to stop the peaceful transfer of power. We saw all that. But, no there wasn’t any “bending of the rules” that “we need to keep an eye on” in the states unless she’s talking about Republicans trying to steal more elections.

And adopting the fatuous Trump line that we can always tell the results of the election night is such an enormous pile of nonsense I hardly know what to say. States never “produce results” of an election on election night. It takes weeks to certify elections and she knows that. Media call elections on election night most of the time based on projections — unless they are close. When they are, as ours often are these days, they have to wait for all the votes to be counted — which is not possible between the hours of 8pm and 12 midnight on election night.

This is a Trump line that she’s flogging. He says that no votes should be counted after midnight because Democrats to go out and manufacture votes in the middle of the night to beat him. That’s where this is coming from. And Haley knows it.

These cynical GOP candidates are worse than Trump. They are lending their “moderate” imprimatur to his worst ideas.

Following up on Tom’s post below:

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a horrifying bill Wednesday that will let the state take transgender minors away from their families if they are receiving gender-affirming care.

The new law will allow the state to take custody of a child if they have been “subjected to or [are] threatened with being subjected to” gender-affirming care, which includes puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy. Florida courts could modify custody agreements from a different state if the minor is likely to receive gender-affirming care in that second state. The text refers to gender-affirming care as “sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures” and qualifies this care as a form of “physical harm.”

Medical facilities would have to give the state Department of Health a signed attestation that they neither provide gender-affirming care to any patients under the age of 18 nor refer people to providers that do. Their medical license renewal is contingent upon sending in this attestation.

But the bill also targets trans adults: Only physicians are allowed to offer gender-affirming care (not nurse practitioners). Anyone who violates the law could be charged with a misdemeanor.

Minors who have already begun transitioning will be allowed to continue to do so, but they are no longer allowed to receive care via telehealth, including for prescriptions. Their doctors have to tell them about the “risks” of gender-affirming care, and patients will have to sign an informed consent form, which the ACLU has pointed out often contains misinformation. Doctors who violate any of these new rules could be charged with a felony.

Republicans across the country have introduced bills targeting gender-affirming care, but this is one of the most extreme measures yet. The people who support these bills insist that they are trying to protect children, but forcibly taking a kid from their loving family sounds more likely to traumatize them. What’s more, by passing legislation that describes LGBTQ health care as something that should be penalized, lawmakers are putting people of all ages at risk of real harm.

DeSantis also signed an anti-drag bill the same day, which is expected to end all Pride Parades in the state due to its vague wording. You can read more about that bill here.

This feels more and more like pink triangle time every day.

Of brown shirts and Charles Bronsons

Charlie Sykes writes at The Bulwark, “A few months ago, in a particularly dark mood, I wrote a column suggesting that cruelty was no longer the point in MAGA World…. Trump has already pivoted to brutality, and there is nothing subtle about it.”

“As it turns out, I may have understated the case,” Sykes quips:

Indeed, in April, DeSantis signed legislation to make it easier for juries to recommend the death penalty by eliminating the requirement that jurors have to be unanimous. The right media wing ecosystem exploded with praise. But some wanted to go even further.

Via Media Matters: “Conservative pundits are increasingly open about who they think should be killed.”

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh was among the biggest fans of DeSantis’s death penalty move, but now that his appetite has been whetted, he wants to widen the circle of those who need to be killed.

“If we have this weird rule that we’ve imposed on ourselves that we can only execute one, either murderers or child rapist, like if we had to choose between those two categories of people to execute, then I would say, well, if we don’t do one, then I’d probably murder the — I’d probably execute, rather — execute legally the child rapist,” Walsh said. “But in fact, we don’t have to choose. You know, that’s the wonderful thing.”

“We don’t have to make choices. We can execute all of them,” he continued. “We should be able to, anyway. Execute all the worst people, all of the worst criminals. Just execute them all. And this is the right first step. There’s a lot more that needs to be done. I mean, this is actual criminal justice reform.”

They are not alone, you are not surprised to know.

Stephen Crowder of “Louder with Crowder” weighed in on the killing of homeless Jordan Neely on a New York Subway, declaring, “The second that you are engaging in an activity where someone else is forced to make a decision to save their life or a life of their loved one, completely, by the way, not of their own volition, you’ve put them in that scenario, you forfeit your right to live.”

In essence: When in doubt, take them out.

Trump, Nikki Haley, and Ron DeSantis have all rushed to celebrate Daniel Perry, the man charged with killing Jordan Neely. But DeSantis raised the ante, by calling him a “Good Samaritan,” and raising money for his defense.

Greg Sargent (Washington Post) observed that DeSantis “cast the law enforcement apparatus prosecuting Perry as presumptively illegitimate.” The right is making the case that Penny is a victim of the “deep state,” Sargent observes:

But this is particularly sobering coming from DeSantis; it suggests the two leading contenders for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination — DeSantis and former president Donald Trump — are open celebrators of vigilante “justice.”

[…]

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), for instance, hailed Penny as a “hero” who “stepped in to protect others.” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) suggested that Penny is being persecuted for standing up to “anarcho-tyranny.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page echoed DeSantis, describing Penny as “the Subway Samaritan.” This, of course, is an allusion to the biblical Samaritan who aids a traveler who had been robbed and beaten; the tale doesn’t involve putting the perp in a chokehold until he dies.

Some of these sociopaths are, to be sure, poseurs, the sort of wannabes who get a thrill in their nether regions from dressing in Punisher drag. The problem is, as the neverending bloodbath of mass shootings confirms, some of them will act on their American carnage fantasies. They are egged on not just by podcasters from the lunatic fringe, but assured by leaders the likes of Trump, DeSantis, and the Wall Street Journal that tomorrow belongs to them.

Protesting their innocence later, they will have “ash in their feather dusters.”