Friday, March 19, 2021

ALL THEY WANT IS EVERYTHING

We all know that Republicans would rather troll than govern, but it's now so obvious that even The New York Times has noticed.
When Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was expelled from her congressional committees as punishment for conspiracy mongering and violent statements, she embraced her exile, declaring that she had been “freed” from the obligation to participate in the drudgery of legislating....

Since then Ms. Greene, locked out of the policymaking process, has instead devoted the first weeks of her term in Congress to disrupting House floor proceedings and trolling her colleagues on social media....

A growing number of lawmakers have demonstrated less interest in the nitty-gritty passing of laws and more in using their powerful perches to build their own political brands and stoke outrage among their opponents.
But I think it would be unfair to say that Republicans have completely given up on the idea of legislating. Here was Mitch McConnell a few days ago, warning of all the things Republicans will do if Senate Democrats eliminate the filibuster and the GOP subsequently regains congressional majorities:
“Nationwide right-to-work for working Americans. Defunding Planned Parenthood and sanctuary cities on day one.

“A whole new era of domestic energy production. Sweeping new protections for conscience and the right to life of the unborn.

“Concealed-carry reciprocity in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Massive hardening of security on our southern border....

“So this pendulum would swing both ways — hard...."
The thing is, Republicans don't want anything in between their wish list and the Democrats' wish list. They don't want half-measures. They don't want to compromise. They don't want to pull Democratic legislation a few inches to the right while leaving it mostly intact. They want it all or they want nothing.

Which I think helps explain the favorite politcal fantasy of so many Republicans right now, most recently described by a rising star on the looney right:
Congresswoman Lauren Boebert put a Q-flavored cherry atop an already controversial town hall last Monday night, when she claimed to have insider knowledge of a QAnon-linked conspiracy theory promoted by The Epoch Times that secret documents declassified in the final days of the Trump administration will expose wrongdoing by Trump’s enemies and lead to resignations and arrests, allowing Republicans to gain a majority in the U.S. House and Senate prior to the 2022 election.

Boebert, a Republican, claims her sources for this are close to Trump.

“And this is my opinion with that information that I have, I believe we will see resignations begin to take place. And I think we can take back the majority in the House and the Senate before 2022 when all of this is ended,” Boebert said at the Montrose event.
They love the QAnon mass-arrest fantasy in part because it allows them to imagine a world where they simply don't have to worry about the existence of an opposition party -- the Democratic Party, if their dreams come true, won't be reduced in numbers, it will be all but eliminated as a political force in America. (They've done this already at the legislative level in many states, but they can't seem to do it in Congress yet.)

They don't want to live in a world where the parties share power. They want one-party rule and nothing less.
Posted by Steve M. at 6:44 PM 0 comments

RIGHT-WING SITE: BIDEN DOESN'T WANT TO BE A TRUMPIAN EGOMANIAC, SO WE KNOW HE'S NOT REALLY PRESIDENT

We learned this early last week:
President Joe Biden's signature will not appear on the stimulus checks expected to be sent to Americans once the Covid stimulus plan is passed, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday....

Psaki said during Tuesday's White House press briefing that Biden didn't think the inclusion of his signature on the payments "was a priority or a necessary step. His focus was on getting them out as quickly as possible."
At a site called WeLoveTrump.com, a writer named Noah thinks he knows what it really means.
Add another piece of evidence to the “Biden is not President” column!

It’s really mounting up, isn’t it?

Green screens, fake White House sets, no Air Force One call symbol when he travels, the list goes on and on and on!

And here’s another one.

When President Trump sent out stimulus checks, his big and beautiful signature was right on the check!

You know, exactly like you’d expect!

But this new batch under the alleged “Biden Administration”....?

No Biden signature.
I'm not in the mood to go down every rabbit hole with this guy -- the notion that Biden recently faked an exchange with reporters in front of a green screen was debunked by PolitiFact and others -- but yes, he believes that Biden didn't sign the checks because he's not actually president. I'm sure at least a million other Americans agree with him.

Noah writes:
I love how they try to say that not including Biden’s signature will “speed up the process”.

What a joke!

You morons act like Biden would be personally signing every check!

It’s just a digital upload of his signature onto the printer before it prints the checks.

It would take about an extra 5 minutes.

That is, if you were really, actually President.
But in April, when Trump decided to put his name on the first round of checks, The Washington Post reported that adding the signature was "a process that could slow their delivery by a few days." The Post also noted that this was "unprecedented."
It will be the first time a president’s name appears on an IRS disbursement, whether a routine refund or one of the handful of checks the government has issued to taxpayers in recent decades either to stimulate a down economy or share the dividends of a strong one.
The president isn't authorized to sign the checks, as the Post reported.
... the president is not an authorized signer for legal disbursements by the U.S. Treasury. It is standard practice for a civil servant to sign checks issued by the Treasury Department to ensure that government payments are nonpartisan.

The checks will instead bear Trump’s name in the memo line, below a line that reads, “Economic Impact Payment,” the administration officials said.
Biden didn't want to bother with this -- and your right-wing relatives think it's because he's not really president.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:15 AM 0 comments

Thursday, March 18, 2021

HEY KIDS, LET'S BOTHSIDES THE PANDEMIC!

David Leonhardt of The New York Times tells us we're all equally guilty.


Americans on the right half of the political spectrum have tended to underplay the risk of Covid-19. They have been less willing to wear masks or avoid indoor gatherings and have been more hesitant to get vaccinated....

To many liberals, Covid has become another example of the modern Republican Party’s hostility to facts and evidence. And that charge certainly has some truth to it. Yet the particular story with Covid is also more complicated — because conservatives aren’t the only ones misinterpreting scientific evidence in systematic ways. Americans on the left half of the political spectrum are doing it, too.

That’s a central finding from a survey of 35,000 Americans by Gallup and Franklin Templeton. It finds that both liberals and conservatives suffer from misperceptions about the pandemic — in opposite directions. “Republicans consistently underestimate risks, while Democrats consistently overestimate them,” Jonathan Rothwell, Gallup’s principal economist, and Sonal Desai, a Franklin Templeton executive, write.
So both sides do it? Okay, give me some specifics.
More than one-third of Republican voters, for example, said that people without Covid symptoms could not spread the virus. Similar shares said that Covid was killing fewer people than either the seasonal flu or vehicle crashes. All of those beliefs are wrong, and badly so. Asymptomatic spread is a major source of transmission, and Covid has killed about 15 times more Americans than either the flu or vehicle crashes do in a typical year.
I give Republicans a pass for not knowing how COVID deaths compare to vehicle deaths -- I'd have to look up how many vehicle deaths we have -- but everyone should know by now that the virus can spread asymptomatically.

But the most dangerous false belief here is that COVID has killed fewer people than a typical year's flu. This is a bit of disinformation that's spread relentlessly on the right. It's regularly argued that the official COVID death tolls are massively overstated because most of the dead had comorbidities -- as if people who were medically stable while living with diabetes, or after surviving cancer or a heart attack, can't be described as having succumbed to a deadly illness because their health was less than flawless, so they should be presumed to have had one foot in the grave already. The right never applies this to the flu itself, which mostly kills the elderly. On the right, flu numbers are considered to be absolutely reliable, while COVID numbers need to be reduced by any means necessary. This fallacy is central to right-wing COVID denialism, and therefore right-wing public policy.

Now, what do Democrats believe that isn't true?
Democrats, on the other hand, are more likely to exaggerate the severity of Covid. When asked how often Covid patients had to be hospitalized, a very large share of Democratic voters said that at least 20 percent did. The actual hospitalization rate is between 1 percent and 5 percent.

Yes, 69% of Democrats believe that 20% or more of COVID patients need to be hospitalized -- but 51% of Republicans and 60% of independents believe the same thing. Everyone overstates this.

What else?
Democrats are also more likely to exaggerate Covid’s toll on young people and to believe that children account for a meaningful share of deaths. In reality, Americans under 18 account for only 0.04 percent of Covid deaths.
Yes, but there's almost no difference between Democrats and Republicans on this. Democrats think people 24 and under account for 8.7% of the deaths -- but Republicans think the correct percentage is 7.7%. In every age group except the elderly, Democrats' estimates are only slightly greater than those of Republicans.



By contrast, 40.5% of Republicans think the typical flu causes more deaths than COVID, while only 13% of Democrats do. That's a significantly different estimate of the risk from the disease.

I'd like to see a few more questions. Which party is more likely to believe that the vaccines are dangerous? And let's get specific: Which party is more likely to believe that the vaccines contain microchips or nanoparticles intended to control or monitor our behavior? (I think I know the answer.)

Which party is more likely to believe that the pandemic was a planned event cooked up be (a) the Chinese government, (b) Bill Gates, (c) Anthony Fauci, or (d) all of the above? (Again, I think I know the answer.)

If you can find similarly cockamamie ideas on the left, I'll join you in condemning them. But I bet you won't.

And we know from other surveys that there's great vaccine hesitancy among Republicans, particularly Republican men. Are these the same people who reject mask-wearing and tell us who we should take our masks off because "you can't live your life in fear"? Are they the ones now living in fear ... of the vaccine?

Some Democrats get the risks of the virus wrong. Many Republicans deny that there's any real risk at all, except to the elederly and infirm. Democrats know there's a problem, and are trying to help solve it. Many Republicans just don't bother. So both sides aren't equal.
Posted by Steve M. at 6:37 PM 0 comments

THE FUTILE BUT NEVER-ENDING SEARCH FOR GOOD REPUBLICANS

The New York Times reports:
... in Iowa — a state that’s been trending red for years, and where Donald Trump won by over eight percentage points in November — a new survey by one of the country’s top pollsters suggests that voters are irked by the latest push to curtail voting access.
Irked?
Last week, the state’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, signed a bill passed by the G.O.P.-led state legislature that includes a number of restrictions on voting, including shortening the early-voting period by nine days and closing the polls an hour earlier on Election Day.

The new poll, conducted by Selzer & Co. for The Des Moines Register and released today, found that 52 percent of Iowans were opposed to condensing the early-voting period, and 42 percent were in favor.

There was a deep partisan divide, with 71 percent of Republicans favoring the move and 81 percent of Democrats opposed. Among independents, 51 percent were against the change, while 43 percent were in favor.
We really have no idea whether a majority of voters are "irked" by this provision of the new law. It's opposed by a majority of poll respondents -- but we don't know how strongly they feel about it. My guess is that many non-Republicans contacted by the pollsters hadn't really thought about it until they were asked about it, while many Republicans are strongly in favor of the curtailment. ("The worst are full of passionate intensity" and all that.) Don't forget that Republicans are used to passing laws with minority support -- gun laws in particular, but also the Trump tax cut -- because most Republican officeholders need only GOP and GOP-leaning voters to win reelection. They don't care what the rest of us think. They don't have to. Opponents of Republican policies in red states can rarely muster the anger needed to drive the Republicans who support those policies out of office.

The implication of this Times story is that popular opposition might make this a risky vote for Republicans. But recent experience suggests that Republicans have to shock the conscience -- a la Donald Trump or former Missouri governor Eric Greitens -- in order to alienate enough voters to be forced out of office. Mere opposition to a bill won't do it. (And both Trump and Greitens appear to be planning comebacks.)

This story imagines Republican voters who might be genuinely appalled at their own party's vote suppression efforts. A Times op-ed writer imagines Republicans in the Senate having a similar unimsginable moment of decency.

Bob Bauer, who advised President Biden's campaign, notes that the Democrats' big voting rights bill is unlikely to win the votes of enough GOP senators to pass, but he thinks Democrats could win Republican support for a stand-alone bill that includes one particular provision.
Congress should consider a targeted federal law to counter this march of these draconian state laws. And it could be designed in such a way that some Republicans would support it — or find it uncomfortable to explain why they wouldn’t.

This law would make clear that a state may not revise its rules to restrict voting access in federal elections in specified areas — including the withdrawal of existing vote-by-mail opportunities and reductions in early voting — unless it is done on a bipartisan basis....

In applying a bipartisanship requirement to this proposed measure for restrictive state voting rules, Congress could, for example, provide that a state legislative rule change would have to have the support of at least a third to one-half of the second-largest party of the state legislature.
At Talking Points Memo, John Judis has a similar dewy-eyed proposal:
What I would suggest is that the Democrats boil down their efforts to several measures that would frustrate current voting suppression efforts and that very possibly might command the support of ten Republicans who opposed Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the last election. I am not a legislative expert and cannot say exactly what those provisions would be. My guess would be making general election day a federal holiday, which is very popular, ensuring that polling places are readily available in number and distance. and ensuring that voters can vote by mail. I would stop there at these popular measures.
Bauer and Judis are delusional. The central argument of Republicans as they restrict voting is that any voting provision that has the consent of Democrats will encourage fraud by definition, because Democrats are congenital cheaters who just want to game the system every chance they get. (Yes, this is projection.) Republican election bills are designed to prevent compulsive Democratic cheating. This cheating is imaginary, but the overwhelming majority of rank-and-file Republicans believe it's real, so they'll never support any voting law Democrats support.

No Republican will support the kinds of compromises Bauer and Judis are proposing. None will respond to the Iowa governor or legislators who backed the vote-suppression law by rejecting them at the polls next time.

You can look for good Republicans all you want. You won't find them.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:26 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

MARCO RUBIO IS CONCERNED



That would be this Marco Rubio:


Rubio doesn't say "China virus" or "kung flu" himself. He's just used the pandemic as an excuse to bash China every chance he can. And, of course, he fully backed a president who says "China virus" regularly, most recently in an interview on Fox last night. Rubio's appearance on that March 20, 2020, Hannity broadcast was followed by a segment featuring Karl Rove, who said, "This idea that calling it the Wuhan virus or the China virus is somehow or another racist is just ridiculous." Appearing as Hannity's guest between Rubio and Rove was Nigel Farage, who said, "So, you know, let's be clear -- this is the fault of China."

And now there's an uptick in anti-Asian racism, and Rubio is shocked, shocked.
Posted by Steve M. at 12:56 PM 0 comments

POLITICO DOESN'T EVEN PRETEND THAT NEGOTIATING OVER LEGISLATION IS CONGRESS'S JOB

While the mainstream media expresses dismay at the fact that the COVID relief bill didn't get any Republican votes (as well as at other signs of the apparent lack of bipartisanship in D.C., like President Biden's reluctance to grovel before Donald Trump and beg him to urge his base to get vaccinated), Politico has a story today about the GOP's response to the passage of the relief bill -- a story that doesn't even consider the possibility that Republicans might have actually tried to influence the content of the bill, the kind of negotiating that many people believe is legislators' main job. Instead, the story tells us that the GOP bungled its real job: making Americans hate the bill.
As President Joe Biden embarks on an ambitious plan to sell his massive coronavirus relief package to the public, conservatives are starting to ask: Did we botch this?

The overwhelming sentiment within the Republican Party is that voters will turn on the $1.9 trillion bill over time. But that wait-and-see approach has baffled some GOP luminaries and Trump World figures who expected Republicans to seize their first opportunity to cast newly-in-charge Democrats as out of control. Instead, they fear the party did little to dent Biden’s major victory — a victory that could embolden the administration in forthcoming legislative fights and even the lead up to the midterm elections.

... Republicans were never expected to support the measure and unanimously opposed it when the time came for a vote. But in interviews with top GOP operatives, Trump confidantes, and congressional aides, there was a common refrain that the party could have done more to frame it for the public. Instead, periodic claims that the bill was bloated with progressive add-ons and bailout money for blue states were overshadowed by a more relentless focus on the culture wars du jour.
Democrats are chastised for not winning over any Republicans, but this story assumes that winning them over would have been all but impossible -- of course every Republican opposed the bill, what did you expect? The job of the GOP, we're told, was simply to poison's the public's mind against the bill, and the GOP botched that.
Before the passage of the stimulus bill, Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel criticized the legislation as a “boondoggle” and Democratic “grab bag.” But, all told, the RNC issued just two statements on the bill, both after it had already passed.
The story assumes that no one was negotiating seriously.
For many [White House aides], Biden’s pledge to be a unifying president meant that they had to at least show they were trying to win over GOP votes.

Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), a Biden ally, said he was encouraged when the president sat down with 10 Republicans in the Oval Office in late February. His optimism faded however when the GOP officials, led by Maine Sen. Susan Collins, floated a $600 billion alternative.
And the point of negotiating, for Republicans, was so they could say afterward that Democrats weren't negotiating. The negotiations weren't intended to change the bill -- they were intended to set up a line of attack discrediting the bill. Fortunately for Democrats, that didn't work.
Republicans used the flimsiness of Biden’s outreach to decry that he had reneged on his pledge to seek a middle ground. But inside the GOP, there were concerns that process arguments weren’t moving the needle. A third Senate GOP aide argued that the attack lines surrounding the absence of bipartisan outreach went over the heads of most Americans.
The notion that legislator-patriots are supposed to sit down and work out the details of major bills is never taken seriously in this story. So the press should stop giving Democrats a hard time for lack of bipartisanship. People who know how the system works don't expect it or believe it's possible.
Posted by Steve M. at 9:01 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 16, 2021

THE RIGHT-WING MEDIA DOESN'T REALLY WANT PEOPLE TO DIE OF COVID, BUT IT DOESN'T CARE IF THEY DO

I agree, more or less, with this part of Amanda Marcotte's latest column:
One of the most important tools that cult leaders use is to control their followers to convince them to separate themselves as much as possible from the mainstream. Followers are encouraged to see mainstream society as evil, and to distinguish themselves as much as possible in their political views and personal practices....

This is what the right-wing media is doing with vaccines but on a larger scale.

By encouraging their viewers to see even something as mundane and necessary as a vaccine as "liberal" and therefore contaminated, Carlson and his allies can help accelerate the process of alienating their viewers from anything resembling mainstream society. Viewers are then encouraged, like cult followers, to only trust information coming from Fox News and to reject everything else as part of the "liberal" conspiracy. Paranoia, which is already rampant on the right, becomes the main tool in cultivating this cult-like following.
I don't think this is specific to the way the right-wing media talks about vaccines or the pandemic -- I think it's how the right-wing media talks about everything. You can't trust mainstream sources. Only Fox or Gateway Pundit or, when he was alive, Rush Limbaugh will tell you the real truth.

I'm not sure the pioneers of the modern right-wing media realized back in the 1990s that talking to their audiences this way would turn them into cult followers. I think they believed they were merely offering an alternative to mainstream news, which they regarded as ubiquitous and unavoidable. I don't think Limbaugh or Roger Ailes foresaw that their fans would wall themselves off from all sources of information other than themselves and their ideological soul mates. Limbaugh and Ailes wanted to be successful media figures, and became cult leaders almost by accident. Of course, they never minded being cult leaders, or worried that they were making their fan base ignorant or paranoid.

Which brings me to another part of Marcotte column, which I disagree with:
Tucker Carlson really wants his audience to die. The notorious Fox News host ... was at it again on Monday night, presenting the coronavirus vaccine as some kind of evil conspiracy and discouraging his audience from getting it....

Steve Bannon insisted on his podcast that the vaccines "are not technically vaccines" but instead "experimental gene therapies." (This is a lie. The vaccines work like all vaccines — by training the body to be immune to the coronavirus.) Laura Ingraham accused President Joe Biden of peddling "vaccine propaganda" ...

Carlson, Ingraham, etc. are actively trying to get their own audiences killed.... It's usually not considered particularly smart business practice to get your own customers killed, but that's exactly what Carlson and his fellow travelers are doing.

... there's one obvious reason Fox News is willing to actively kill their own audience: to tank Biden's presidency. So much of Biden's success will depend on getting this pandemic under control. By convincing their own viewers to be disease vectors who keep transmission, hospitalization, and death rates high, Fox News can help keep the pandemic going. It also helps if, by keeping the U.S. from reaching herd immunity, Fox News can keep the country from re-opening.
I don't buy this. Of course all these people want to tank Biden's presidency, but they don't want their own viewers to die.

They simply don't care if they die. That's different.

They don't care in the way petrochemical companies in the Third World, or in parts of America, don't care whether they poison groundwater and cause birth defects. They don't care the way coal companies don't care how safe their mines are. They don't care the way soda companies don't care how fat Americans get drinking sugary beverages. They don't care the way the Sacklers didn't care about the opioid crisis they were creating. They care only to the extent of trying to predict (and control) how much they'll pay if they're held liable for human suffering.

The companies I've named have to pay (inadequate) fines if linked to human suffering. Fox News won't have to pay anything if it leads people to ignore or reject health measures. Fox wants its viewers and their families to blame the Chinese if COVID strikes. For the most part, that will happen.

The right-wing media isn't trying to prevent reopening -- it wants what it's wanted throughout the pandemic, which is reopening with few if any precautions to prevent infection. It wants what Texas and Florida and Mississippi have now. Who cares if people die?

Fox knows that most people won't die from this virus, even in its elderly audience. It wants the survivors to be smug, and to be as indifferent to the ones who don't survive as its hosts are.

It wants its audience to believe that it's pointless to protect yourself, because protecting oneself is what liberals do, and nothing liberals do can ever be anything less than evil.

Marcotte thinks Fox hosts are building a "death cult." I don't agree. They're building a radical-lack-of-empathy cult. Of course, that's what American conservatism has been for decades anyway.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:15 PM 0 comments

WE'RE LIVING IN A POST-TRUMP WORLD, AND REPUBLICANS ARE STILL AWFUL

Josh Marshall recently wrote:
... it’s not too soon to note that some of our assumptions about ex-President Trump’s post-presidency missed the mark. With the exception of his CPAC speech which was generally regarded as a flat, low-energy affair Trump has been almost entirely out of the spotlight. He did pick this fight over whether money should go to GOP party committees or only to him directly. But the follow through has been scattered....
Three months ago, I assumed that Trump would be regularly conducting MAGA rallies now, after holding one on the day of Joe Biden's inauguration to announce a third run for president. I imagined he'd be traveling to the states of officeholders who opposed him, rallying the faithful to vote those traitors out. I thought he'd be back on Fox & Friends every week, or maybe several times a week, spreading falsehoods and burnishing his brand.

None of that is happening. Trump is avoiding the spotlight -- and yet the GOP is no better than it was three months ago.

This is largely because the GOP was horrible long before Trump, in many ways that we incorrectly ascribe to Trump's influence. Does this remind you of anything?


It takes me back:
In 2005, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) claimed in a speech on the Senate floor that prayer rugs and notebooks filled with Arabic writing were being discovered in border regions. But Hutchison didn’t offer any proof of the rugs, saying that she had heard of them only as “stories of suspicious items picked up by local residents.”

Since then, the idea of prayer rugs being discovered on the border as proof of a terrorist invasion has recurred every few years on the right.

In 2014, Breitbart published a story touting the discovery of a “Muslim prayer rug” in Arizona. But a picture of the “prayer rug” showed that it was just a torn Adidas jersey.
Trump tweeted a prayer rug rumor when it showed up in a Washington Examiner story in 2019, but he was playing a cover version of an old classic.

Elsewhere, Trumpism seems to be self-sustaining -- it doesn't appear to require Trump's active presence anymore:
The Alaska Republican Party has voted to censure U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski and will recruit a challenger to run against her in next year’s election....

Under party rules, a resolution of censure is just “an official rebuke and disapproval,” but a copy of Saturday’s resolution explicitly states that the party “will hereby recruit a Republican Party challenger to oppose and prohibit Senator Murkowski from being a candidate in any Republican primary to the extent legally permissible.”
The heresy of anti-Trumpism is now just one more thing right-wingers are aggrieved about:
The resolution cites unhappiness with Murkowski’s votes on the impeachment, votes in favor of abortion rights, a vote against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, a vote against the confirmation of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and votes supporting the confirmation of Deb Haaland as secretary of the Interior Department.
An Anchorage Daily News letter-writer tells the paper that she hopes Sarah Palin jumps into the race, in case you're remembering the pre-Trump GOP as a serious governing party. Palin did threaten to run against Murkowski after Murkowski voted against the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, so who knows? She might be a candidate.)

Apart from that, what's worth noting is that Republicans are on offense. This is what's been exhausting about American politics for decades: Republicans are always on offense. They wake up every morning with a fresh set of slanders to spread and grievances to complain about. They're obsessed with defining themselves (as champions of all that is good and decent) and with defining their opponents (as history's greatest monsters). And they characterize every person or institution they disagree with as a potential destroyer of civilization.

So Fox News is now in its third week of railing against the voluntary withdrawal of six Dr. Seuss books by the Seuss estate and the "cancel culture" this decision supposedly represents. Senator Ron Johnson is complaining that he's being "silenced by the left," in an editorial published by the largest-circulation newspaper in America. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is happily touring Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Long Island, after being invited by a Chovevei Zion, a Brooklyn-based group of Orthodox Republicans whose executive director praised her as "nothing but a friend and ally for our community."

If you've been waiting for the moment when Republicans will start acting abashed, or begin examining their own behavior over the past several years, or acknowledge that their critics have a point about ... well, anything, you're going to have a long wait, because that moment will never come. It might come if Democrats beat Republicans mercilessly in several consecutive election cycles -- but Democrats trounced Republicans in 2006 and 2008 and the GOP only got worse.

Trumpism hasn't supplanted old-school Republicanism. Trumpism has simply been added to all the other toxic strains of Republicanism. And we're getting them all again, full strength.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:54 AM 0 comments

Monday, March 15, 2021

PARAPHRASE-GHAZI!

Here's Becket Adams of the Washington Examiner telling us about what the right regards as a major scandal:
It’s one thing if a single news outlet botches an anonymously sourced “scoop.” It’s another thing entirely if multiple newsrooms claim to have independently “confirmed” the botched “scoop” with anonymous sources of their own....

In January, the Washington Post scored a humdinger of a “scoop.” Then-President Donald Trump, still reeling from the results of the 2020 election, “urged Georgia’s lead elections investigator to ‘find the fraud’ in a lengthy December phone call, saying the official would be a ‘national hero,’” the Washington Post reported, citing a single anonymous source who supposedly “confirmed” the details of the private conversation.

But recently released audio of the phone call shows that Trump never said these things. He never urged the investigations chief to “find the fraud” in Georgia’s presidential election results. He never promised the investigator would be a “national hero.”

The Washington Post got it wrong, plain and simple.
So Trump never said anything remotely like this on the call?

Well, no, that's not what Adams is saying:
The newspaper’s supposedly eye-opening “scoop” has since been updated to include a 130-word editor’s note, which reads:
Correction: Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source. Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or say she would be “a national hero” if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find “dishonesty” there. He also told her that she had “the most important job in the country right now.” A story about the recording can be found here. The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump.
Yes, that's it -- that's the scandal. Trump didn't ask this election official to "find the fraud" -- he asked her to find the "dishonesty." Not the same at all! (He also said, "if you go back two years or four years, you're gonna see it's a totally different signature," which is completely unlike from saying the ballots are fraudulent.) And Trump never said she'd be "a national hero" if she found the fr-- er, dishonesty. He merely said, according to the tape, "When the right answer comes out, you'll be praised.... People will say, 'Great!'"



Adams whines:
If you can believe it, the Washington Post’s dud of a "bombshell” isn’t even the most scandalous thing about this episode in media malfeasance. No, the most scandalous thing is: Several newsrooms claimed they independently “confirmed” the original "scoop" with anonymous sources of their own.
NBC, USA Today, ABC, PBS, and CNN all confirmed the story when it broke, citing their own sources. Shocking!
But Trump never said those things. The sources either were terribly mistaken or lying.
Or paraphrasing, which is exactly like lying .. or would be if most human beings had phonographic memories and could recall every conversation they'd ever had verbatim -- something hardly any of us can actually do.

The right really wants to turn this into a massive journalism scandal (and I'm sure the rank-and-file right will fall for it).



Did Simonson "actually 'wow'"? I bet an audiotape would show that he didn't actually utter the word "wow" -- or any synonym.
Posted by Steve M. at 7:23 PM 0 comments

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY: STILL NOT DEAD, ALAS

Headline of a Washington Post opinion piece:
Democrats have Republicans on the back foot. Now they must keep pushing.
I know, right? The COVID relief bill is popular! President Biden is popular! We're winning! The Republican Party is in deep trouble!

Except that, based on the limited polling I've been able to find, the Republican Party isn't in deep trouble.

* In a St. Anselm's poll of a possible 2022 Senate matchup, Democratic senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire trails the state's Republican governor, Chris Sununu, 47%-41%. In a University of New Hampshire survey released late last month, Sununu led Hassan 48%-46%.

* In a Mason-Dixon poll of Florida, Republican governor Ron DeSantis has a 53% job approval rating (42% disapprove). In potential 2022 matchups, DeSantis leads former governor Charlie Crist, now a Democrat, 52%-41%, and leads Democratic state agricultural commissioner Nikki Fried 51%-42%.

* In an EPIC-MRA poll of the 2022 Michigan governor's race, incumbent Democrat Gretchen Whitmer leads Candice Miller, a Republican ex-congresswoman, by only one point, 46%-45%.

* And in a survey from the right-leaning Trafalgar Group and Insider Advantage, Herschel Walker, the ex-football star who's being touted as a possible Republican challenger for the Georgia Senate seat now held by Raphael Warnock, beats Warnock 47.7%-45.5%. (Warnock beats former congressman Doug Collins by 1 and former senator Kelly Loeffler by 5.)

None of this suggests that Republicans are in disfavor, at least in swing states, or that Democrats are wildly popular. (President Biden's approval numbers are 50%-49% in the St Anselm's poll of New Hampshire and 49%-45% in the EPIC-MRA poll of Michigan.)

Stan Greenberg of the liberal-leaning Democracy Corps decided to change his polling methods to reflect what's happened in recent elections here and in other countries.
I was invited by the Jewish community in Vienna to help Mayor Michael Haupl and the ruling Social Democratic Party fight off a challenge from the Freedom Party led by Jorg Haider that had won an unimaginable and surprising 27.9 percent of the vote five years earlier....

We were able to drive down [Haider's] party’s vote by a third, but you cannot forget that one in five voters in one of the most culturally liberal cities in the world voted for the anti-Semite. So, in all my subsequent polls in Austria, I asked people how they voted in the breakthrough election for the Freedom Party and weighted it up to make sure it was over 21 percent....

During my entire career polling for the Israeli Labor Party, I watched Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing bloc prove the newspaper polls wrong.... Going into the last weekend in 2015, Likud was losing, but Netanyahu declared there will never be a Palestinian state and warned buses are bringing Arabs to create a “left” government. Likud won by five seats.

At every point, I made changes to my polling that favored the right and most important, just locking in the proportion that identified with the “right,” over 60 percent for Jewish voters at last count.
Greenberg has done similar weighting of the U.S. electorate. He writes about his current poll:
... this adjusted survey gives you more modulate[d] positive perceptions of Biden. This poll shows Biden’s approval as 3 points lower than that reported in Real Clear Politics and 538. Biden’s approval at 51 percent is a majority of the country — but just that and no higher than his vote in 2020. (Obviously, this may improve with the passage of his rescue package, but don’t believe those giving him ratings of 60 percent.

... Trump war against Blacks, immigrants, crime, and cancel culture gives him a firm hold on about 43 percent of voters.... Biden is 12 points above water and Democrats have 4-point lead in the generic congressional and larger in the blue wall states (+7) and 2022 Senate and Governors battleground (+11).
So Democratic numbers in Greenberg's survey are good, but they're not spectacular. And pollsters in other states, whether or not they've adjusted their methods, aren't detecting a collapse of the Republican Party -- far from it.

I'll continue to say that things might be different if Democrats hammered home the message that Democrats stand for popular stuff (COVID relief, raising the minimum wage, respecting democracy) while Republicans stand for unpopular stuff. Every Republican in America should feel at risk any time national Republicans do unpopular things, whether it's voting against relief or trying to overturn an election result. For now, though, those bad things aren't linked with the GOP in much of the public's mind. As a result, individual Republicans are doing just fine.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:48 AM 0 comments

Sunday, March 14, 2021

YOUR RIGHT-WING RELATIVES THINK MEGHAN MARKLE IS PART OF THE AMERICAN LIBERAL DEEP STATE

I guess I can't blame your right-wing relatives if they believe this preposterous claim from England's Daily Mail: that Meghan Markle might replace Joe Biden on the Democratic presidential ticket in 2024.
Meghan Markle will use the furore over her interview with Oprah to launch a political career which could take her all the way to the White House, if rumours circulating around Westminster last week turn out to be accurate.

One senior Labour figure – a veteran of Tony Blair's Downing Street administration with strong links to Washington – claimed to The Mail on Sunday that Ms Markle, 39, was networking among senior Democrats with a view to building a campaign and fundraising teams for a tilt at the US Presidency.
(Yes, nothing says "plugged in to contemporary American politics" like a Brit who served the prime minister who left office fourteen years ago.)
... A source said: 'The Blairite, internationalist and Democratic party networks are buzzing with talk about Meghan's political ambitions and potential backers.'
(Only one of those those three "networks" has any say in this matter, and if Democrats are actually talking about this, it's news to me.)

But if right-wingers believe this, they're no dumber than the Vanity Fair readers who fell for the same nonsense in September.
Rumors abound that Meghan could run for president in 2024, and she got the attention of the office’s current occupant, who said in a press conference on Wednesday that he is “not a fan” of the duchess. Donald Trump was responding to a video that she and Prince Harry made to promote Time 100’s list of the most influential people in 2020, in which she declared that November’s election is “the most important election of our lifetime.” ...

“One of the reasons she was so keen not to give up her American citizenship was so she had the option to go into politics,” said a close friend of the royal. “I think if Meghan and Harry ever gave up their titles she would seriously consider running for president.”
(The "rumors" that "abound" in this report come from an even lower-rent British paper, the Express, which cited the Time video, then went on to note that British betting services were offering odds on Meghan's candidacy and election in 2024 --"Betfair have slashed odds on the likelihood of Meghan running for President in 2024 from 66/1 to 20/1.... Ladbrokes have Meghan on odds of 100/1 to become President of the US in 2024." There wasn't much more to the story than that.)

But according to the blog Conservative Treehouse, Meghan's involvement in leftist Deep State skulduggery in the U.S. is far more sinister than this:
Of course she was “networking” with “senior Democrats”, specifically she was networking with Obama’s Chicago crew; and that leads to Oprah, Obama’s biggest narrative engineer.

The Markle interview was purposefully orchestrated, racism claims intentionally injected, recorded, and then timed to be released/broadcast the day before the trial against Derek Chauvin while the George Floyd protestors were activated. This is how the Obama crew operate. This is how the leftists work. None of this is accidental and that statement by the “senior Labour figure” is 100% correct.... except for the cover story to hide the motive.

As we shared last week:
“People who have watched the way the Obama team use pop culture to advance Marxist political objectives have already seen through the ruse of the Meghan Markle comments with Oprah Winfrey. It was not accidental the interview comments about racism were organized, timed and released to coincide with the George Floyd trial in Minnesota. It’s how the cultural Marxists work.

... We have researched the Obama use of racism as a political tool for years; that technique includes using media figures like Oprah. The Chicago fingerprints of the familiar architects are clear as day on this ridiculous story.”

“Considering the Oprah angle; and considering Oprah is one of the primary conduits, advance agents and protectors of all things related to President Obama; it would not be surprising to discover that Obama’s team of Chicago provocateurs are in the close-background of the Markle network. Useful division based on advancement of racist accusations is a classic Maoist approach to achieve modern Marxist outcomes.”
So Oprah -- a billionaire -- is working hand in glove with Obama (net worth $70 million, and now regularly hobnobbing with billionaires) to orchestrate this interview because Marxism. It's all meant to change the outcome in a trial of a cop charged eith murder -- as celebrity interviews with British royals routinely do.

I wish I could reassure you that your right-wing relatives are too smart to believe this, but I can't.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:30 AM 0 comments

Saturday, March 13, 2021

RIGHT-WINGERS: NOT ONLY ARE YOU LIBS HATING CUOMO WRONG, YOU'RE FORCING HIM OUT OF OFFICE WRONG

Last week I told you that conservatives weren't happy to see liberals turning against Andrew Cuomo, because, in their opinion, we were doing it for the wrong reason.



A report in January on Cuomo's efforts to mislead the public about nursing home deaths from COVID was issued by a state attorney general who's a liberal Democrat, but whatever.

So we're hating Cuomo wrong -- and now, according to National Review's Jim Geraghty, we're attempting to force him out of office wrong.
On paper, it should be exceptionally rare for an elected official to commit a wrongdoing that is severe enough to spur members of his own party to call for his resignation, but not quite severe enough to spur an effort to impeach him or remove him from office.

If a scandal, behavior, bad judgement, or crime is bad enough that a lawmaker should resign, it should be bad enough to get him removed, right? That sweet spot of “really bad, but not quite bad enough to get removed from office” shouldn’t cover a wide range of misdeeds....

And yet, that resign-but-not-impeach zone is where Andrew Cuomo currently is with most of his party: “At least 121 members of the state Assembly and Senate have said publicly they believe Cuomo can no longer govern and should quit office now, according to a tally by The Associated Press. The count includes 65 Democrats and 56 Republicans.”
Actually, the article Geraghty quotes doesn't say that Democratic state legislators are against impeachment -- it just says that 65 Democrats want him to quit, presumably because impeachment is a huge undertaking with an uncertain outcome and its goal would be accomplished much more easily if Cuomo would simply take the hint and go away.

(Let's compare and contrast: If Donald Trump had had the decency to resign partway through his term, would you have been upset because Congress never had a chance to impeach him, or would you have opened a bottle of champagne and celebrated?)

And as Geraghty reluctantly concedes, we could very well be moving toward a Cuomo impeachment, even though his party controls both houses of the state legislature.
A handful of Democrats have called for Cuomo’s impeachment, and to their credit, the state assembly’s judiciary committee appears to be prepping an investigation, which would be the first step on the road to impeachment.
Apart from preparing the groundwork for impeachment, Democrats are totally blocking the impeachment process! Is there anything they won't do to protect their own?

Nothing we do will satisfy them. We could bring back the death penalty and put Cuomo in the electric chair and they'll gripe that we should have used a firing squad.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:21 AM 0 comments

Friday, March 12, 2021

NO, REALLY, WHY AREN'T WE POLLING DEMOCRATS AND INDEPENDENTS?

Oh, look -- it's another poll of Republicans. Maggie Haberman reports:
The Republican Party in the era following Donald J. Trump’s presidency is comprised of five “tribes” that have ranging affinity for the former president and different desires when it comes to seeing him continue to lead the party, according to a new survey by Mr. Trump’s former pollster.

The survey of 1,264 voters, who are registered Republicans or identify as Republicans, is the first comprehensive one conducted about G.O.P. voter sentiment since Mr. Trump left office, and as he considers running again in 2024. It was conducted by the Republican polling firm Fabrizio and Lee — which worked for Mr. Trump in his 2020 campaign but does not any longer.
It may be the first "comprehensive" poll of GOP voter sentiment after Trump's departure, but it's certainly not the first poll of Republicans in that time -- USA Today and Suffolk University conducted a poll of Republicans last month, Politico and Morning Consult have polled Republicans a couple of times on Trump and 2024, and there was also the recent CPAC poll of potential 2024 Republican nominees.

I'll say it again: Why aren't the rest of is being polled on Trump and the GOP right now?

Damon Linker speculates on the current moment:
What if while Republicans are busy trying to bait Democrats on culture war issues, those Democrats end up winning public opinion in a big way by refusing to play along, changing the subject, and actually making the lives of most Americans concretely better?
But we don't know whether or not Democrats are "winning public opinion in a big way" because no one is polling Democrats relative to Republicans. We know from polls that the COVID recovery bill is very popular, and that President Biden's has solid job approval numbers. What we don't know is whether the general public is fed up with Trump or the Republican Party as a whole.

It's possible that support for Republicans hasn't changed much. It's possible that, if you polled Trump vs. Biden for 2024, the race would be close, even now.

But we ought to know -- not because a poll of an election three years from now would be credible, but because it would tell us whether the GOP really is alienating most Americans, and whether Democrats are winning over skeptics.

I can't understand why pollsters and the media don't want to measure voter sentiment this way. Do they just prefer the drama of the GOP? The drama of Trump and Greene and Boebert and Gosar and millions of crazy radical conspiracy-theorist voters? Is the party of Biden just too stolid and boring? Does the media just not want to know what we think? Or is the media afraid to discover that those fascinating lunatics in the GOP have alienated the majority of Americans?

I fear that that's not the case -- but I'd like to find out. When you pollsters can tear yourself away from surveying the Republicans, try asking the rest of us a few questions.
Posted by Steve M. at 7:48 PM 0 comments

GIVE TRUMP MORE CREDIT FOR THE VACCINES? WHY?

I don't agree with this reaction to President Biden's speech:



What's the point? Trump doesn't do magnanimity himself, and he doesn't respond to magnanimity in a normal human way. If you want to know how Trump would react, you shouldn't try to imagine how it would go if it involved two psychologically healthy presidents who've been at odds: "Hey, I've been pretty tough on you, but you did a really good job with this." "Thanks, and you're doing a hell of a job now."

That's not Trump. Trump doesn't want to put aside differences. He wants to win. He doesn't like meeting in the middle. Flattery he likes. He wants to be told he deserves sole credit for good things. A couple of days ago, he demanded as much:


I've seen the stories arguing that Biden is building on good work from the Trump administration on vaccines. I think Trump's administration did a better job on vaccine development and distribution than on managing the pandemic, by several orders of magnitude. But Trump did an average job on vaccine develpment, as opposed to the abysmal job he did on every other aspect of this crisis. Any other president would have spent money and developed a team to speed vaccine research and try to get vaccines to the public as quickly as possible once they were declared safe and effective. And scientists and governments around the world wanted a vaccine at record speed. But Trump wants to be told that his unique genius is the only reason we're getting our shots already.

He'd have never been willing to share credit for the rollout with Biden, just as he wasn't willing to join other U.S. presidents in promoting the vaccine:
When President Donald Trump received his Covid-19 vaccine at the White House in January, it was not recorded by official photographers or videographers, according to a person familiar with the matter, who said it wasn't clear there was any photographic documentation of the moment.

That alone would have made it difficult for Trump to be included in the public service announcement of all living former presidents and their wives receiving vaccine shots....

It was a conversation on that January day between former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama that formed the basis of the vaccination campaign, which debuted Thursday. Because Trump made the decision to not join his predecessors in that historic moment, a person close to the project said, he wasn't asked to be involved in the public service announcement.

Trump expressed little interest in joining his predecessors to promote the vaccine, and the team that organized the PSA did not view it as likely that the 45th president would participate, leaving little opening for his inclusion.

"He has made no signals of wanting to be included in these types of moments," an aide to a former president told CNN.
And what's preventing Trump from promoting the vaccines on his own? What's preventing him from barnstorming the country and telling people who admire him that "his" vaccines are great and everyone should get one? What's preventing Republican politicians or the right-wing media from taking that approach? I'd be fine with that -- whatever makes people want to get their shots is okay with me.

But it's not happening. Trump is psychologically incapable of sharing credit. Republicans and the right-wing press seem reluctant to do it because it might run up the hated Joe Biden's vaccination numbers.

Biden shouldn't give Trump 100% of the credit -- and Trump wouldn't cooperate if he got any less. So Biden might as well give him none.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:58 AM 0 comments

Thursday, March 11, 2021

OH, LOOK! GOOD REPUBLICANS (NONE OF WHOM ARE IN OFFICE)!

Republicans want to put restrictions on Democratic voters wherever they can possibly get away with it, but Jon Ward of Yahoo News has decided to write a "yes, there are good Republicans" story, informing us that some party members are apprehensive about vote suppression.
As GOP lawmakers look to pass new voting restrictions, some conservatives are pushing back

There is rising unease among some conservatives about the increasing aggressiveness of Republicans in state legislatures to tighten election laws and erect obstacles to voting.
There is? Okay, let's see which Republicans are uneasy, according to Ward:
“Restricting who can vote by absentee ballot will actually detrimentally impact Republicans,” Erick Erickson, a conservative talk radio host in Georgia, told Yahoo News. “Take, for example, north Georgia. Republicans there love to vote by absentee, which is why the Georgia GOP pushed to get rid of excuses back in the mid-2000s.”

David Kochel, a Republican consultant who ran Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst’s successful reelection campaign last year, expressed reservations as well.

“That’s my fear. The problem is, we don’t have the data to know. I think these restrictions could come back to haunt the party, but we just don’t know enough,” he said.

Other dissident conservatives want to persuade the GOP that making it harder to vote gives it no partisan advantage, erodes its credibility and is inconsistent with conservative principles.

“Republicans are in a bad place, because I think they find themselves arguing, in essence, that there ought to be fewer voters, which is, in my view, wrong, and also the wrong place to be as a political matter,” said Yuval Levin, the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
Republicans are quite openly arguing that there ought to be fewer voters. Here's John Kavanaugh, a prominent Arizona state legislator, who's working on a bill to curb voting by Democrats:
"There's a fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans," Kavanagh said. "Democrats value as many people as possible voting, and they're willing to risk fraud. Republicans are more concerned about fraud, so we don't mind putting security measures in that won't let everybody vote -- but everybody shouldn't be voting."
But notice something about the people quoted in the above excerpt from Ward's story? Not one of them holds elective office. Erickson does talk radio. Kochel is a consultant. Levin is the quintessential "reform conservative," someone who apparently makes a living describing as "Republican," or "conservative," ideas that perhaps 1% of elected Republicans and conservatives would entertain (a few Northeastern governors, maybe Adam Kinzinger, occasionally Mitt Romney).

Levin holds forth for ten paragraphs in Ward's story, even though, as far as I know, he's never had an idea embraced by the national Republican Party in two decades of pontificating.

Who else is quoted here?
The GOP “is hemorrhaging credibility by perpetuating the mythology that there was rampant fraud” in the 2020 election, said Josh Penry, a Colorado Republican consultant who was House minority leader in the state Legislature.
Another consultant. Does Ward quote any Republicans who are actual elected officials? Anyone who might run again in the future in a GOP primary?

Oh, here's an elected official commenting on the Democrats' voting rights bill:
And yet Republicans are already denouncing H.R.1 in the strongest terms. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said it was “written in hell by the devil himself.”
Well! That sure doesn't sound like pushback on the idea of vote suppression!

Don't even bother writing stories like this unless you can find elected officials who oppose what the party's overwhelming majority wants.
Posted by Steve M. at 7:14 PM 0 comments

ALWAYS BE TROLLING (updated)

We pay Lauren Boebert $174,000 a year to do this:
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) faced backlash this week for releasing an ad attacking Democrats and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that ended with a gunshot sound.

In the spot, the QAnon-endorsing first-term lawmaker called on Pelosi to “tear down” the security fence that was put up around the U.S. Capitol following the Jan. 6 insurrection, when a violent mob of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters overran the Capitol building....

The video concluded with audio of a gunshot, followed by the sound of the weapon being reloaded and fired again.


What's the purpose of this? It looks like a campaign ad, but Boebert isn't up for reelection for another twenty months. She's not urging support for a bill to remove the fencing around the Capitol -- she's just editorializing. Maybe she thinks she won't win next time, and this is her auidition reel for a gig on Fox or Newsmax. More likely, it's just the usual Republican messaging: "What's our platform? Nancy Pelosi is evil! That's our platform!"

I can think of three possible reasons that this ad ends in gunshots:
1. Boebert simply believes that guns are awesome, that every True Patriot should carry one at all times, and that carrying and firing guns is never in bad taste or inappropriate under any circumstances.

2. Boebert is branding herself, and will end every ad and social media video with that sound effect.

3. Boebert, who wants the fencing removed from the Capitol and says in the ad that "this is the People's House," believes that there should more January 6-style riots, ideally with many more guns next time, not necessarily because she wants Pelosi or other Democrats shot, but absolutely because she wants them to fear that they might be.
These possible reasons are not mutually exclusive. I suspect all of them are at least partly true.

Boebert is an attention-seeker like Marjorie Taylor Greene, but she's smarter. When you watch the video of Greene stalking Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg, it's clear that Greene is most upset by Hogg's greater access to power. ("He had thirty appointments where you run around and got to talk to senators. I got to talk to none. None!") But Boebert's message isn't "Why won't anyone pay attention to me?" It's one of those semi-clever riffs right-wingers are disturbingly good at. It sounds sensible if you don't think about it for too long. ("You protect what you love. President Trump built a big beautiful wall because he loves America.... Democrats don't want to protect you because they don't care about you. But they'll spare no expense protecting themselves.")

Democrats actually do believe in border security -- just not a wall. And protecting the national legislature from terrorist attacks is an act of patriotism, not egomania.

But the argument has a surface plausibility, and Boebert delivers it well. It's a new twist on the right's usual "Libs want to take away your guns, but Hollywood celebrities have armed security" argument, which the base finds extremely compelling.

This is just trolling, and we should we be upset that the legislators and voters from one of our two major parties think trolling is the most important job members of Congress have, but as long as that's the case, Boebert is a potential star. She's played the game more carefully than Greene -- she hasn't had her committee assignments taken away. There'll be a day or two of controversy about this and then it will die down.

Watch this one. She's going places.

*****

UPDATE: Slate informs me that "Boebert recently introduced a bill that would move the security fencing that currently surrounds the Capitol to the U.S.-Mexico border." So there is legislation -- however, she never mentions it in the ad.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:46 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, March 10, 2021

THE GOP AND THE RIGHT-WING MEDIA WILL JUST KEEP TRYING TO DISCREDIT THE RELIEF BILL

The COVID relief bill has now passed both houses of Congress, without a single Republican vote. It's popular with Democrats, independents, and at least some Republicans.



Jonathan Chait notes that economists like it, too:
... economists overwhelmingly predict that effect will be positive. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal have increased their 2021 growth forecasts by a full point, to 5.95 percent.... They are calculating that quickly restoring full employment will bring rapid wage gains to working-class Americans and produce a wide array of spill-off social benefits.
Chait is baffled by the GOP response to the bill.
The Republican decision to vote against Biden in unison, without building much of a case against his bill, seems like the worst of all possible worlds. They are setting themselves against a bill that enjoys sky-high levels of support from both economic experts and a large chunk of their own base.
But the messaging arm of the GOP -- otherwise known as Fox News -- tells us that Republicans plan to just keep making the case against the bill.
With the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill passed by the House on Wednesday and headed to President Biden’s desk, the legislative battle over the massive measure is ending -- but the PR and political fights are only beginning....

As Fox News first reported on Sunday, the independent non-profit conservative advocacy group, American Action Network, has already placed ads in 11 congressional districts now held by House Democrats targeting the COVID package. The spots slam the legislation as House Speaker "Nancy Pelosi's liberal stimulus."

Veteran Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio tells Fox News that when it comes to the political impact of the COVID package, "the devil’s in the details." "When the fine print finally catches up with them, the American people are going to realize it wasn’t such a great deal," emphasized Fabrizio....

Fabrizio argued that "only 10, 11% of the money actually goes to fighting COVID. The rest of the money goes to a whole bunch of other things, like bailing out states and bailing out cities and pension funds, money that has nothing to do with direct COVID relief."

... Fabrizio noted that this bill "is more of a bailout for big cities and bloated government than it is anything else."
I know -- this is the same messaging the Republicans were doing, in a muted way (compared to their usual braying), while the bill was making its way through Congress. It didn't work then, and I'm not sure it will work any better in the future.

But I guess their plan is to work harder at discrediting it than Democrats will work at boasting about it. And I can see how they might manage that.

If there's any unrest in any city between now and the midterms, they'll say that a Democrat Party giveaway to radical socialist cities and Antifa/Black Lives Matter layabouts paid for it. If there's a controversial play somewhere in America or Drag Queen Story Hours start up again in libraries, that'll be blamed on the stimulus. In other words, if anything whatsoever offends conservatives in the next twenty months, they'll tie it back to this bill.

This will be meant to persuade Republicans and Republican-leaning swing voters, not normal people.

Alternately, the bill might succeed spectacularly. By 2022, it could be widely acknowledged that it's morning in America and life is good again.

In which case, I assume the right-wing media will tell the conservative audience that the reason is that Trump vaccines restored the Trump economy, making the entire recovery a Trump triumph.

Right-wingers will actually believe that. Will anyone else? Probably not. But your Trumpist relatives are very unlikely to tell you next year, "I thought Biden would be a terrible president, but he's done a pretty good job."

The GOP voter base will never give Democrats credit for anything and will forgive Republicans anything except collaboration. The party seems to believe that as a result of gerrymandering, the rural skew of the Senate, and the courts' tolerance of Democratic vote suppression, it doesn't need any other voters, and it will never lose the base as long as the base is sufficiently angry at Democrats and liberalism. So what's the point of voting for a popular Democratic bill? It's much easier use the GOP information bubble to tell the base that the bill was bad. Say that often enough and the apparent risk of voting against it might magically disappear for Republicans. That's the bet, at least.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:38 PM 0 comments

I CAN ASSURE YOUR RIGHT-WING RELATIVES THAT MILITARY MATERNITY FLIGHT SUITS ARE NOT JOE BIDEN'S IDEA

This appears to be the next phony right-wing outrage:
Democrat Logic: Joe Biden Says Military Will Focus on Making “Maternity Flight Suits” — So Pregnant Women Can Drop Into Enemy Territory During Wartime?

... The Biden White House announced on Monday, which happened to be International Women’s Day, that the US military is focusing on “maternity flight suits” for pregant women.

Because it’s important that pregnant women are able to drop into enemy territory during wartime.
Tucker Carlson, of course, is all over the story:



So all this is Joe Biden's fault, right? Well, let's look at some headlines about maternity flight suits frm the military press:
* November 19, 2020, Air Force Magazine: "Pregnant Airmen Needed to Test Out USAF’s Maternity Flight Suits"

* September 14, 2020, Wright-Paterson Air Force Base press release: "Division Leading Efforts to Field Maternity Flight Suits"

* July 24, 2020, Military.com: "Air Force Takes First Step to Buy Maternity Flight Suits"
Notice the dates on those articles? Joe Biden was not president in 2020.

In fact, as that July article notes, the Air Force loosened its restrictions on pregnant pilots in 2019:
Last year, the Air Force announced it had begun allowing some female pilots to stay in the cockpit longer while pregnant without need of a medical waiver.

The change applied to remotely piloted aircrew, missile operations duty crews and certain fully qualified pilot positions without additional restrictions put on their time in service, the Air Force said last September.

Previously, all female Air Force pilots were removed from flight duty after they confirmed their pregnancy, according to spokeswoman Capt. Carrie Volpe. That included drone pilots who work in operations facilities on the ground.

Women would have to file extensive paperwork for a waiver just to be allowed duty time between weeks 1 and 34 of pregnancy, Volpe said at the time....

While the waiver process is no longer required, airmen still need a "return to flight status" check if they fly in an aircraft, which is a precautionary appointment made with a medical professional to certify the pilot for flight.

Pilots are still prohibited from flying in the first trimester of pregnancy, deploying overseas and flying ejection-seat aircraft, such as fighter jets.
And by the way, women have served in some combat roles in China's People's Liberation Army since the mid-1990s, and the PLA trained its first female fighter pilots in 2009. And here's a clip from the 2019 National Day parade in China:

Posted by Steve M. at 7:59 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 09, 2021

THIS IS WHY REPUBLICANS ARE FIXATED ON DR. SEUSS AND MR. POTATO HEAD

So why is this happening?
The Democratic Party is on the cusp of passing a nearly $2 trillion economic package that will expand Obamacare, increase the generosity of food stamps, and establish an unconditional entitlement to cash welfare for all U.S. parents.

And Republicans are talking about Dr. Seuss.

... To be sure, the American right isn’t wholly consumed with frivolous culture-war spats about Dr. Seuss’s lesser works; it’s also made time to defend the masculinity of Mr. Potato Head.
Many have argued that it's happening because the GOP realizes that its policy ideas (low taxes on the rich, tight-fistedness toward the non-rich) are unpopular, even with the party's base. But in the past, the GOP has held on to its non-wealthy voters even while ignoring the interests of those voters and sticking with a pro-plutocrat agenda.

Except that now, according to Reuters, the plutocrats are doing a smaller share of the giving.
Individual donations of $200 or less have made up a growing share of campaign money in recent years, while the share given by corporate America shrinks. That trend has accelerated with the rise of anti-establishment figures on both the right and left, such as Trump and progressive firebrand Bernie Sanders, a Vermont senator.

Reuters examined contributions by more than 45 corporate donor committees.... The review found that the political action committees (PACs) gave about $5 million to the lawmakers during the 2019-2020 election cycle - or only about 1% of the money the lawmakers raised, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) disclosures.

By comparison, Republican fundraising operations supporting Senate and House candidates raked in a combined $15.8 million in January alone on the strength of small-dollar donations. These groups outraised their Democratic counterparts by more than $2 million that month, regulatory filings show....

The waning importance of corporate money reflects a fundamental shift in fundraising over the past decade as the advent of online platforms such as Act Blue and WinRed made it easy to solicit donations from rank-and-file voters. Individual donations, small and large, accounted for two-thirds of funding for last year’s elections.
Reuters confirms what I've been telling you -- that corporate PACs aren't likely to go right back to bamkrolling Republicans who wanted to overturn the results of the election -- but, according to Reuters, corporate money matters less to Republicans than it used to.



It still matters a lot, though, so Republicans will continue to be pro-plutocrat. Nevertheless, small-donor cash can add up -- except that the way to get it if you're a Republican is not to provide good constitutent service, but to inspire rage.

So we may have the worst of both worlds: Republicans are still servants of the wealthy, but while they're increasingly responsive to voters, they're responsive in the most toxic way possible.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:32 PM 0 comments
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