Month: April 2021

I was perusing the front page at Talking Points Memo this morning and noted that it’s almost 100 percent dedicated to two subjects: Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and the hold on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine due to concerns about blood clots in a very tiny percentage of women. These are two subjects I haven’t discussed and probably would never discuss.

The issue with Gaetz is that he’s a backbencher in the House of Representatives–one of 435 members–who has very little power or importance. I may have noted his more odious behaviors a few times on this blog, but probably as part of my coverage of a broader story. His media profile is higher than his congressional one, but it still doesn’t amount to much. If a member of the House or Senate leadership, or an important committee chairman or ranking member, were facing possible felony changes for sex trafficking, I’d find it newsworthy for its potential to shake up the power structure in Washington. If a possible presidential candidate were caught up in a similar scandal, I’d cover it because of its obvious impact on the future of the country. But Matt Gaetz could voluntarily retire tomorrow and it’d have about the same impact as him being convicted of taking an underage girl across state lines for sexual purposes.

I do understand that this is a bad story for the Republican Party and that’s there’s some mileage to be made by sticking it in Republicans’ faces. But that isn’t my mission in life or for this blog. I’d consider it an unwelcome imposition on my readers if I turned this place into a breathless 24/7 report on the latest in Gaetz’s legal woes. Maybe the readers of Talking Points Memo feel differently, but I doubt it.

The J&J vaccine story is certainly a worthy topic. It’s an important story from several angles, including the underlying science, the wisdom of the Biden administration’s response, its possible impact on the speed with which we can control COVID-19, and its potential for ramping up or tamping down the publics’ willingness to take vaccines in general.

It’s not that the story is being closely followed by TPM that surprises me but that it’s making up about 50 percent of the site’s content. There’s just not that much to say. There’s a precautionary hold on the vaccine. The decision is under review. A decision will be made that balances risks, and that decision will be made by people with more expertise than I possess or would ever claim to possess. Again, people might want to know the latest status of the story, but there isn’t a lot that merits editorial comment from non-epidemiologists.

Maybe TPM has its finger on the pulse of the country and knows exactly what it’s doing to draw eyeballs and win subscriptions. It’s far better at both of those tasks than I’ll ever be. And maybe that’s a problem I should think about. Should I be choosing my topics with more of a focus on traffic and subscriptions?

I’d rather focus on what I do best, and that’s never been seizing on the hottest story and beating it to death.

This week I’ve been writing about the way the Republican Party is quickly forgetting about January 6 and falling back in line behind Trump. As part of that, I noted that Trump had led the Republican base to a bad place and what’s required is a new leader who can lead them back.

I received the obvious response that the Republican base was awful long before Trump arrived on the scene, and that’s true. But not “storm the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power” awful. Can we at least stipulate to this?

The way I put it is that “Trump recognized all the latent worst tendencies that had been cultivated over the years by the GOP and exploited them.” When I say “all” there, I mean “all.”

Attitudes about race, immigration and policing are foremost, but also basic selfish instincts on foreign aid or greedhead instincts on taxes. Trump ramped up the discomfort many feel about transgendered people and he greatly amplified suspicion and contempt for scientists, experts and reporters.

Some of these things were not particularly latent prior to Trump but most involved some degree of sheepishness or rationalization. On race and immigration in particular, Trump brought new people into the GOP, including former Democrats and many who had not previously been engaged in politics or voting.

I’m reminded of something that struck me back in 2001, in the weeks after the 9/11 and anthrax attacks. At the time, I was working in a corporate job and had known quite a few of my colleagues for several years. In late September and early October of that year, I noticed that a large percentage of the people I worked with had suffered a stress-induced outbreak of sores around the mouth. They had herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1).

I was married at the time, but I still found it unnerving to realize how widespread the virus was, and it really demonstrated how the September 11/anthrax attacks had collectively traumatized the country. I had never seen the latency period of the virus broken before in my colleagues and now the virus had reemerged in so many of them all at once.

This is how I think about how racism and other negative human attitudes work in a political context. It’s always lying there below the surface, but it isn’t always present and it’s seldom contagious. No amount of stress can cause an outbreak of herpes in someone who doesn’t have the virus, but it’s still possible to catch it from someone who does. This is why you don’t want the people exposed to racist leaders and you don’t want leaders who use racial issues to cause stress.

A Republican leader can choose how they want to lead. The choices they make will influence how people feel and how they act. They can cause an outbreak of racism. They can activate latent racist attitudes in people. They can create new racists who will infect their associates. They can also decline to exploit opportunities to do this. John McCain could have run a very racist campaign against Barack Obama, and his contest certainly wasn’t free of racist themes. On the whole, however, McCain himself took a higher road, sometimes even sticking his neck out to tamp down the racism in the base. If nothing else, this prevented things from getting worse.

Trump saw this as weakness. He didn’t understand why McCain, and Romney after him, left tools on the table that might have helped them win. So, he pursued a viral outbreak as the core of his strategy and built a political coalition around it.

As mentioned above, race is only one of several wedges he used, but the point remains consistent with all of them. You can lead people to a bad place. You can make people embrace their worst emotions, feelings and instincts. That is what’s happened to the Republican Party and the Republican base, and it culminated on January 6.

So, yes, the Republican base was always full of deplorables and greedheads, and simply leading them back to where they were before Trump arrived won’t change that. It’s just the minimum that is needed right now.

Hi!

Here we are at another midweek. This Wednesday’s Oblique Strategy: trust in the you of now

Some music from one of the prog rock bands that never seemed to get quite the appreciation that their peers enjoyed:

Jethro Tull had quite a run through the 1970s, and their LP Crest of a Knave managed to win a Grammy for best heavy metal album in 1988 (even though the album in question was very far from metal, and that award pissed off probably everyone but me). They were supposed to tour last year, but a pandemic got in the way of that. They’re set to release their first LP in over 20 years pretty soon.

I’ll leave you with this video, released on the 50th anniversary of the release of Aqualung.

The jukebox is working. The bar is open. Please tip your host generously. It’s been a long week already.

Cheers!

Following on my piece about Rick Scott from yesterday, I notice that Nikki Haley has put her finger in the wind and determined that Donald Trump is still the gatekeeper of the Republican Party. It’s an amazing turnabout for the former ambassador and South Carolina governor who said in February, “We need to acknowledge [Trump] let us down. He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

It’s no secret that Haley has presidential ambitions. Just ask Tim Alberta who profiled her recently for Politico:

Since last fall, I’ve spent nearly six hours talking with Haley on-the-record. I’ve also spoken with nearly 70 people who know her: friends, associates, donors, staffers, former colleagues. From those conversations, two things are clear. First, Nikki Haley is going to run for president in 2024.

But on Monday, at a press conference during a visit to South Carolina State University, she said she won’t run. Or, at least, she won’t challenge Donald Trump if he seeks a non-consecutive second term in the Oval Office.

Former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, often mentioned as a possible 2024 GOP presidential contender, said Monday that she would not seek her party’s nomination if former President Donald Trump opts to run a second time.

“Yes,” Haley said, when asked if she would support a second bid by Trump, in whose Cabinet she served for the first half of his administration.

“I would not run if President Trump ran, and I would talk to him about it,” Haley said, asked by The Associated Press if a possible Trump bid could preclude her own effort, were he to announce first. “That’s something that we’ll have a conversation about at some point, if that decision is something that has to be made.”

I noted on Monday the jarring spectacle of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) giving an award to Trump just two months after seven Republican senators voted to convict him of inciting an insurrection against the U.S. Government. Haley provided a similar spectacle by promising to subsume her obvious lust for the White House if Trump decides to run again.

What these episodes demonstrate is that the people are leading the Republican Party rather than the other way around. It’s obviously a good thing when politicians listen to their constituents and are responsive to their needs. There’s only so far a representative can go if they’re selling something voters don’t want to buy. But we’re talking about a man who set a deluded and violent mob on Congress in an illegal and unconstitutional bid to stay in power after losing a presidential election. Two months ago, there was a consensus that this was an unforgivable act even if there was uncertainty about what to do about it.

Today, it’s clear that no one on the right sees any political future in standing up to Trump or even sounding like they might stand in the way of him resuming his place in the White House. They obviously felt the heat from the Republican base and changed their evaluation of the political landscape.

It’s simple to call this cowardice. But it’s worse than that. The Republican base didn’t start out this way. They were led here by Trump who recognized all the latent worst tendencies that had been cultivated over the years by the GOP and exploited them. The way to fix this is to lead the people back.

I know what they want. What the people want is the problem. You can’t solve that through capitulation. For Haley, it makes you wonder what she thinks is important. Why does she believe so fervently that she should be president? Is it so she can do whatever Trump would have done?

There must be things she’s fighting for that are different. Are none of them urgent enough that they merit at least putting up a fight, no matter how futile the fight might seem?

So, whether it’s Rick Scott in the Senate or Nikki Haley, the lack of leadership is almost dumbfounding.

January 6 was a clarifying moment. It showed just how bad things had gotten on the right in this country. All the nonsense had really serious consequences. It’s in the aftermath that we’re discovering that the no one has the will to even try to fix this problem because the Republican base doesn’t want it fixed.

The solution is still clear. People were led to a bad place. They need to be led back.

Speaking to a gathering of Republican National Committee members and other party dignitaries on Saturday at his Mar-a-Lago private club, former President Donald Trump excoriated Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for allowing the January 6 certification of the 2020 presidential election: “If that were Schumer instead of this dumb son of a bitch Mitch McConnell, they would never allow it to happen. They would have fought it.”

But if you think this means Trump is on the outs with Senate Republicans, consider the following tweet from National Republican Senate Committee chairman Rick Scott of Florida.

This weekend I was proud to recognize President Donald Trump with the inaugural @NRSC Champion for Freedom Award.

President Trump fought for American workers, secured the border, and protected our constitutional rights. https://t.co/4jjy88FRVr pic.twitter.com/A9I2sATdkn

— Rick Scott (@ScottforFlorida) April 12, 2021

Trump was impeached twice, both times with good justification for illegal interference in the constitutional electoral process. He has a heaping list of legal problems that touch on everything from rape to treason. He’s authored an insurrection on the Capitol that risked the life of his own vice-president. And he’s attacking the leader of the Senate Republicans.

Yet, the Senate Republicans have just given him an award for being a champion of freedom and protecting constitutional rights.

On February 13, seven Republican senators voted to convict Trump of “incitement of insurrection.” Less than two months later, they’re presented him with a silver bowl.

I’d like to point out that Rick Scott was the CEO of Columbia/HCA when it committed what was then the largest Medicare fraud in history. In 2000, the company settled with the Justice Department and paid $840 million in criminal fines, civil damages and penalties.

The government settled a second series of similar claims with Columbia/HCA in 2002 for an additional $881 million. The total for the two fines was $1.7 billion.

On Scott’s 2010 campaign website, he admitted to the $1.7 billion fine, though the link is no longer on the site.

I’m still struggling to understand why anyone would vote for Rick Scott. It confused me that he was twice elected the governor of Florida despite being a crook. Then he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2018. I also don’t get why McConnell put him in charge of the RNSC. Maybe he can see now why that was a poor decision.

I’ve been keeping an eye on Derek Chauvin’s trial over the last few days. I keep telling myself that we shouldn’t jump to any conclusions yet because, at this point, the prosecution is still presenting their case. Things could change next week when the defense begins to call their witnesses.

But so far, it is hard to envision how a jury would conclude anything other than Chauvin is guilty of at least second degree murder. Here is some of the evidence that stood out to me.

1. One of the criteria for justifying the use of force against a suspect is the severity of the crime. George Floyd was in the process of being charged with passing a counterfeit $20 bill – a minor nonviolent felony. According to testimony from Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, officers are trained to detain a suspect only in the case of a violent felony. In other words, the entire incident with Floyd was outside department policy from the get-go.

2.  Once a suspect is in police custody, the officers involved have a “duty of care” that requires them to provide basic medical care. According to videos presented at the trial, at one point another police officer told Chauvin that Floyd had no pulse. Rather than attempt CPR or chest compressions, Chauvin continued to keep Floyd in the prone position with a knee on his neck for an additional 2 1/2 minutes.

3. Multiple police officers, including Chief Arradondo, stated that Chauvin didn’t follow police department policies when he held Floyd in the prone position after he was handcuffed and ceased to resist.

4. Multiple expert witnesses, including pulmonary specialists and medical examiners, reviewed the evidence in this case and came to the conclusion that the cause of death was asphyxiation due to the actions of the police officers involved. They all disputed defense claims that Floyd’s death was the result of his heart condition or drug use.

Of course, all the defense lawyers have to do is convince at least one juror that there is “reasonable doubt” that Chauvin caused the death of George Floyd. But at this point, they don’t seem to have reached that bar with their cross examination of prosecution witnesses. We’ll have to wait and see what they come up with next week.

An indication that perhaps the prosecution has made their case quite successfully is demonstrated by articles published at the conservative Washington Examiner both before and after the trial began. In a column from two weeks ago titled, “Convicting Derek Chauvin of George Floyd’s murder won’t be easy,” Eddie Scarry pointed to the fact that the medical examiner’s report showed that Floyd had heart disease and found that he had both methamphetamine and fentanyl in his blood. Scarry also noted that the medical examiner found no injuries on Floyd’s neck or throat. All of those issues were dealt with substantively by experts witnesses for the prosecution.

But Scarry also wrote something that amounts to a lie of omission. He claimed that the medical examiner said that Floyd wasn’t suffocated, “his heart simply gave out.” Here is the testimony of Dr. Andrew Baker, Hennepin County Medical Examiner, about the conclusions he reached in his autopsy report.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the castle scene. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 8×8 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have added a base layer of paint to most of the elements on the canvas. The path in the foreground appears in yellow while all other elements are in blue or green. Note the blue on the castle designating the shadowed portions.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

My contempt for John Boehner is boundless, but I do admire the way he gets revenge. Here’s one good example from his new book.

Mr. Boehner also relays an encounter in his office in which Mark Meadows, then a Republican representative from North Carolina and a leader of the right-wing Freedom Caucus, dropped to his knees to beg for forgiveness after a political coup attempt against Mr. Boehner failed.

“Not long after the vote — a vote that like many of the Freedom Caucus’s efforts ended in abject failure — I was told that Meadows wanted to meet with me one-on-one,” Mr. Boehner recalled. “Before I knew it, he had dropped off the couch and was on his knees. Right there on my rug. That was a first. His hands came together in front of him as if he were about to pray. ‘Mr. Speaker, please forgive me,’ he said, or words to that effect.”

Mr. Boehner says he wondered, in the moment, what Mr. Meadows’s “elite and uncompromising band of Freedom Caucus warriors would have made of their star organizer on the verge of tears, but that wasn’t my problem.”

Mr. Boehner looks down at the man who would later become Mr. Trump’s White House chief of staff.

“I took a long, slow drag of my Camel cigarette,” he writes. “Let the tension hang there a little, you know? I looked at my pack of Camels on the desk next to me, then I looked down at him, and asked (as if I didn’t know): ‘For what?’”

This would be a better story if Meadows hadn’t eventually succeeded in forcing Boehner out and subsequently become, however briefly, the second most powerful man in the world as the president’s chief of staff. Still, this revelation will leave a permanent mark on Meadows, and I thank Boehner for providing us with this service.

I’m less impressed with new admission that impeaching Bill Clinton was a mistake that he should not have supported. I’m glad he’s reconsidered and gone on the record about it, but it does very little to change my thoroughly unfavorable opinion of Boehner’s record as a politician or his character as a person.

The most important thing he’s saying now has to do with the January 6 insurrection:

And he issues a stinging denunciation of Donald J. Trump, saying that the now former president “incited that bloody insurrection” by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and that the Republican Party has been taken over by “whack jobs.”

We actually need Republicans to say this is in precisely this direct and uncompromising way because there can be no legitimate debate about it. So, that’s two things Boehner has done that gratify me, which is two more than I ever thought he’d provide.

The Washington Post reports that things are heating up in Cyrus Vance Jr.’s investigation of the Trump Organization:

Investigators from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, acting on a grand jury subpoena, took possession of financial records Thursday morning from the apartment of Jennifer Weisselberg, the former daughter-in-law of a top Trump Organization officer.

Jennifer Weisselberg was married to Barry Weisselberg — the son of Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg — from 2004 to 2018. She has previously said that she had seven boxes of financial records from both her ex-husband and his father, some of which were obtained through divorce litigation. On Thursday, she loaded three boxes and a laptop computer onto a valet cart and wheeled them from her building to a black Jeep waiting outside.

This isn’t a shock since it’s been known for a while that Vance is coming after Allen Weisselberg. Previously, however, it was assumed that the immediate target was Allen’s son, Barry. The idea being that if Allen won’t flip to protect himself perhaps he’ll do so keep his son out of prison.

Yet, this reports states that some of the subpoenaed items are bank records for accounts held jointly by Allen and Barry, so it could be that this adds to the criminal liability the Trump Organization CFO is facing. That’s important because the elder Weisselberg was granted limited immunity for his testimony in the prosecution of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.

It’s also important to remember that there must be a reason the grand jury wanted to see these bank statements. It appears that the Trump Organization probably violated tax laws by giving non-salary compensation to one or both of the Weisselbergs, and it could be that the easiest way for them to avoid accountability is to cooperate in the broader investigation into the former president’s financial dealings. I know I wouldn’t do jail time to protect Donald Trump, would you?