Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

James Downie discusses the Build Back Better/ Manchin debacle;  here's a long excerpt:

Let’s be clear: Manchin’s excuses for opposing this bill — which would expand child-care and Medicare benefits, fight climate change and provide other supports for low-income Americans — are nonsense. “If I can’t go home and explain it to the people of West Virginia, I can’t vote for it,” he told “Fox News Sunday.” But polls have shown that West Virginians on balance support the BBB, and it would likely help West Virginia more than most states. The idea that Manchin, who’s won statewide election six times, can’t “explain” a popular, useful bill to his constituents is laughable.

The rest of Manchin’s rationalizations aren’t any better. “The inflation that I was concerned about — it’s not transitory, it’s real. It’s harming every West Virginian,” he told Fox News’s Bret Baier. But numerous economists have said the BBB won’t affect inflation. As White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted in an acid statement, the Penn Wharton Budget Model, which Manchin is fond of citing, “issued a report less than 48 hours ago that noted the Build Back Better Act will have virtually no impact on inflation in the short term, and, in the long run, the policies it includes will ease inflationary pressures.” Notably, Manchin did not cite any expert to rebut that view in either his Fox appearance or the statement announcing his stance.  [snip]

Manchin certainly bears much of the responsibility for this debacle, but not all. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) spent much of the year confusing everyone about what she would and wouldn’t support. (Sinema and her staff insisted the White House knew her priorities; somehow they were leak-happy Washington’s best-kept secrets.) House holdouts such as Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) delayed the bill to reinstate the state and local tax deductions for wealthy constituents. And other objectors such as Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) watered down the bill’s attempt to lower prescription drug prices, originally one of its most popular provisions.

Finally, a hefty chunk of the blame must be placed at the feet of the president and congressional leadership. They chose to split the infrastructure and social spending measures into separate bills. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) chose to let other Democrats waste weeks on a spending package in the $3 trillion range, when he and Manchin had signed a letter over the summer saying Manchin wouldn’t go over $1.5 trillion. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the White House chose to ditch the two-track strategy and fatally weaken the BBB’s chances.

No political party operates at perfect efficiency. But there’s a frustratingly common theme to Democratic failures and even some of the party’s muted successes: a refusal to play hardball.

Granted, it's difficult to play hardball when you have a 50/50 Senate and a closely divided House, where the threat to bolt the party is always an option. But the default position during this whole debacle was always to backpedal and cave to the demands of Sinemanchin at the expense of, but with the grudging acquiescence of, Congressional progressives.  It's hard to believe that Maserati Manchin was ever going to vote for the social spending bill, and was rather dragging "negotiations" along until the moment felt right to go on Fox "News" and announce his back- stabbing intentions.

Steve M. has thoughts about the trajectory of the "negotiations" and how his bad faith will play in his dirt poor state and the ramifications for swing-district Dems:

I thought there might still be hope for Build Back Better, in some greatly reduced form, but Joe Manchin just stabbed the president and every swing-district Democrat in the back, as well as every person who would have benefited from the bill, because the people who own him want to keep ordinary people's grubby hands off what they consider their money and want Democrats to lose every election, and Manchin wants whatever they want. [snip]

Presumably he's been planning to do this for months if he couldn't get the White House and the rest of the Democratic Party to give up. I assume he thought he could kill the bill merely by forcing endless negotiations right up until the Democrats' self-imposed deadline, but when they made it clear that they were willing to keep negotiating into 2022, he decided it was time to shiv them. I'm sure his poll numbers will go up in his extremely red home state, particularly among people who would have benefited from this bill the most, because that's the way this country works.

The apparent demise of Build Back Better in its current form had an immediate, negative impact on economic projections:

Senator Joe Manchin's opposition to the Build Back Better Act prompted Goldman Sachs to swiftly dim its US economic outlook.

The Wall Street firm told clients Sunday it no longer assumes President Joe Biden's signature legislation will get through the narrowly divided Congress, citing the West Virginia Democrat's announcement that he's a "no" on the $1.75 trillion bill.

 

"A failure to pass BBB has negative growth implications," Goldman Sachs economists, led by Jan Hatzius, said in the research report.

 

Citing the "apparent demise" of Build Back Better, Goldman Sachs now expects GDP to grow at an annualized pace of 2% in the first quarter, down from 3% previously.

That's enough on the back- stabber for now.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis issued its staff report (which was largely ignored by the corporate media).  It documents what was obvious to all sentient people about the Malignant Loser's deadly botching of the pandemic response, with some new revelations.  Here's part of The Hill's summary:

The Trump administration deliberately undermined the nation's coronavirus response for political purposes, including by weakening testing guidance and championing widespread "herd immunity," according to a new report from the House panel investigating the pandemic response.

The Democratic staff report released Friday was a summation of the year's work investigating political interference in the pandemic response from Trump officials and the former president himself. 

In interviews with officials and from uncovered emails and other documents, the committee found that the former administration failed to heed warnings about supply shortages, blocked public health officials from speaking publicly and neglected the pandemic response in order to focus on the 2020 presidential election and on promoting the lie that the election was "stolen" from Trump through widespread fraud.

New evidence released by the panel Friday highlighted the frustration and anger among senior public health officials with Trump's embrace of the herd immunity strategy.

You can read the subcommittee staff's report here (pdf).

Retiring NIH Director and Nobel laureate Dr. Francis Collins also had something to say in line with the subcommittee's findings:

The outgoing director of the National Institutes of Health said Sunday that he faced political pressure from then-President Donald Trump and other Republicans to endorse unproven Covid-19 remedies such as hydroxychloroquine and to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Dr. Francis Collins, whose last day as NIH director is Sunday, told CBS News that he got a "talking to" by Trump, but that he held his ground and would have resigned if Trump made him endorse remedies for Covid-19 that were not based in science.

 

"I have done everything I can to stay out of any kind of political, partisan debates because it is really not a place where medical research belongs," he said. "I was not going to compromise scientific principles to just hold onto the job."  [snip]

 

Collins also said he fought back calls from Republicans for him to fire Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert who now serves as President Joe Biden's chief medical adviser.

 

"Can you imagine a circumstance where the director of the NIH, somebody who believes in science, would submit to political pressures and fire the greatest expert in infectious disease that the world has known, just to satisfy political concerns?" he said. 

 

Well, we can imagine it coming from a narcissistic, sociopathic moron leading an administration of 10th- rate sycophants. 

Lastly, a visit to Infidel 753's link round- up is recommended for his usual, comprehensive array of links to varied posts from around the Internet.

Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/op eds.

Professor Lawrence Tribe outlines several actions the Attorney General could take to counter the Texas anti- abortion law, among them:

The attorney general should announce, as swiftly as possible, that he will use federal law to the extent possible to deter and prevent bounty hunters from employing the Texas law. If Texas wants to empower private vigilantes to intimidate abortion providers from serving women, why not make bounty hunters think twice before engaging in that intimidation?

For example, Section 242 of the federal criminal code makes it a crime for those who, “under color of law,” willfully deprive individuals “of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

This statute — originally designed to go after the Ku Klux Klan — fits the Texas situation perfectly: The bounty seekers, entitled under the Texas law to collect penalties of at least $10,000, have been made, in effect, private attorneys general of Texas. They act “under color of state law,” and unless and until Roe v. Wade is overruled, they unmistakably intend to prevent the exercise of a constitutional right.

In addition, Section 241 of the federal criminal code makes it an even more serious crime for “two or more persons” to agree to “oppress, threaten, or intimidate” anyone “in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same.” This crime may be committed even by individuals not found to be acting “under color of law” but as purely private vigilantes, as long as they’re acting in concert with others.

Get moving, AG Garland!

James Downie sends a message to elected Democrats:

In short, one party has maximized the power it does have, and is still aiming so high that even the “compromise” version is still a major win. The other has fiddled away its years in power, yet once again is settling for less than half a loaf. This is not a recent phenomenon. The very foundation for Republicans’ looming “success” on abortion is that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — both as majority and minority leader — has squeezed Democrats repeatedly on the judiciary, culminating in the theft of a Supreme Court seat in 2016. While the Manchins of the world whine about decency and decorum, McConnell and company played hardball — and won.

To be sure, Democrats’ current caution might make some sense if Republicans’ priorities were more popular. But the opposite is true. The new Washington Post-ABC poll, for example, found Americans support the reconciliation package by 53 to 41 percent, with an similarly wide gap of 13 percent among independents and a 32 percent gap among self-identified moderates. By contrast, an AP poll found that almost 60 percent believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And yet, maddeningly, Democrats act like they’re the ones on the back foot with the public.

The conventional wisdom in Washington is that voters reward action and punish parties that stray too far from the middle. The first part is true, but as the past decade has shown, the latter is misleading at best. Republicans certainly haven’t paid any price for taking the Supreme Court from delicately balanced to decidedly conservative, nor for making the county’s tax system as unequal as possible. And when Democrats have faced rebuke at the polls, they’ve been hurt more by blunting the effectiveness of their best ideas — the stimulus, the ACA, etc. — rather than doubling down on them.

Stop fretting, Democrats, and use the power you have.

We're proud to be members of the only party supporting democracy in America, but damn, it's  so frustrating, too.

Ed Kilgore has constructed a historical timeline tracing the roots of the January 6 insurrection and the malignant loser's long campaign to stay in office. Here's his intro:

The House select committee’s investigation into the Capitol Riot and the various media ticktocks explaining what Donald Trump and his allies were doing in the days immediately leading up to it are casting new light on an important threat to American democracy. But the intense focus on a few wild days in Washington can be misleading as well. Trump’s campaign to steal the 2020 presidential election began shortly after the 2016 election, and arguably the moment of peak peril for Joe Biden’s inauguration had already passed by the time Trump addressed the Stop the Steal rally on January 6.

A full timeline of the attempted insurrection is helpful in putting Trump’s frantic, last-minute schemes into the proper context and countering the false impression that January 6 was an improvised, impossible-to-replicate event, rather than one part of an ongoing campaign. If Congress fails to seize its brief opportunity to reform our electoral system, the danger could recur in future elections — perhaps with a different, catastrophic outcome.

We have confidence that the select committee will provide a rigorous examination of the machinations of the malignant loser and his Christo-fascist toadies in Congress who attempted to overthrow the results of the election -- and are still at it.  Stay tuned.

E.J. Dionne, Jr., writes about how "freedom" is a purpose of organized labor:

Lane Windham, the author of “Knocking on Labor’s Door,” a history of labor organizing in the 1970s, says that’s precisely the point of the union movement: Without countervailing power to the authority of employers, workers have remarkably few, if any, rights in their workplaces.

In an interview, she argued that in the coming debate over President Biden’s Build Back Better program, one focus of the conversation should be on how assisting workers by providing government help for child care and elder care advances “the freedom that comes from security and peace of mind.”

“We continue to rely on women who are in the workplace to take on the task of unpaid child care,” she said. “They need that infrastructure, they need that support, if we want them to work in the economy. We’ve been patching it together for 40 years.”

One of the contributions of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign was his insistence that progressives must no longer cede to the political right rhetorical control over the word and the idea of “freedom.” Noting the role legal recognition of same-sex marriage played in his life as a gay man, he argued that “the chance to live a life of your choosing” is “freedom in its richest sense.”

His point applies to the world of work as well. Labor Day honors the struggles of American workers to live lives of their own choosing with a degree of prosperity and security. No less than July 4, this September day is a celebration of freedom.

Balloon Juice's Mistermix counters the "don't make fun of the covidiots" argument made by people like writer Elizabeth Bruenig:

I see variants of Bruenig’s “stop making fun” argument all the time. The issue is that many of the vaccine “hesitant” don’t want rational colloquy — they want engagement with their stupidity, so they can trot out their dumb Facebook-inspired ideas. They are thirsty for attention, not for a free, easily obtainable vaccine.

In contrast to Bruenig’s unicorn and rainbows outlook on humanity, let me share two vaccine success stories. One is from a young man that I know who has two elderly grandparents who weren’t vaccinated. They live in NYC. What got them to get their first shots a couple of days ago was the new requirement that you must be vaccinated to dine indoors. There wasn’t a rational conversation. To be fair, these people weren’t nutty Trumpers — in fact, they’re very sweet people. Still, their kids and grandkids trotted out all the usual arguments, and the only thing that moved them was inability to get dinner in places they liked to visit.

So, that’s one approach. Another was related in a comment on the Herman Cain subreddit that I can’t find right now. The gist of it was that a woman was concerned about her friend, an unvaccinated single mom with 5 kids. She began sending her friend instructions on how to claim the burial reimbursement for death from COVID, instructions on how to apply for life insurance, and other useful advice for the vaccine “hesitant”. Her friend texted her a picture of her vaccine card shortly thereafter.

Unlike scaring your friends with almost-certain death, vaccine mandates are scalable. I also think that vaccine mandates and proof of vaccination to travel will work with a good number of these stubborn assholes, no matter how loudly they squeal. Unfortunately, the combination of their loud noisemaking, the unfairness of making essential workers enforce these mandates, and the fact that a lot of the loudest anti-vaxxers are cops who won’t enforce the mandate has slowed us down.

To which we offer a secular "amen."

Finally, you're encouraged to visit Infidel 753's link round-up for a comprehensive digest of links to posts of interest from around the Internet.  He also posts stimulating essays on a variety of topics, so maybe you should bookmark his blog if you haven't already done so?

Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

James Downie offers more evidence that Senate Republicans are dealing in bad faith on a January 6 commission, and that Sens. Manchin and Sinema should smell the coffee.  Here's a lengthy excerpt:

On “Fox News Sunday,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) was full of flimsy excuses. “Commissions often don’t work at all,” he said. “And when they do work, like the Simpson-Bowles Commission produced a good result, nothing happened as a — as part of that result.” By that standard, we might as well not have laws, because some don’t work. He also argued that “it’s too early to create a commission” because the widely lauded 9/11 Commission didn’t begin its work until late 2002. That’s true, but why couldn’t this new commission start its work earlier?  [snip]

[Maine Sen. Susan] Collins’s answer on ABC’s “This Week” got off to an encouraging start for Manchin and company. “I strongly support the creation of an independent commission,” she said. But then came the conditions: “One has to do with staffing, and I think that both sides should either jointly appoint the staff or there should be equal numbers of staff appointed by the chairman and the vice chairman,” she told host George Stephanopoulos. “The second issue is, I see no reason why the report cannot be completed by the end of this year.” Both of Collins’s conditions have also been suggested by Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) — another senator who would be on any 10-vote list Manchin might draw up.

The staffing objection is silly: As Philip D. Zelikow, the 9/11 Commission’s executive director, told The Post, the staffing language in the bill is essentially identical to the language establishing the Jan. 6 commission. The only difference is that President George W. Bush selected the 9/11 Commission’s chair, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) would select the Jan. 6 commission’s chair. Yet Collins, who was a senator when the 9/11 Commission was established, did not have a problem with that commission. What could possibly have changed?

More damning was Collins’s insistence, echoing McConnell, that the commission needs to keep its work out of an election year. At least Blunt’s main objection has historical precedent, and leaves open the possibility of a commission down the line if congressional and Justice Department investigations don’t succeed.  [snip]

Inquiries maintain influence and credibility in the public’s eyes only when they produce damning, incontrovertible findings — think Watergate. Senate Republicans know this, so the only explanation for their opposition to the commission is: 1) They know a full accounting of that terrible day will shame the GOP; and 2) They’d rather once again put their party over the country.

Sens. Manchin and Sinema, this isn’t McConnell telling you there aren’t 10 reasonable Republicans. This is Collins (and Romney) all but screaming it. Ideally, the two Democrats would accept where this road is obviously heading and back filibuster reform now, before the unnecessary theater of trying to sway the unswayable. But at the very least, they should get ready to support changes as soon as the negotiations break down — which they will.

These aren't people committed to a functioning democracy.  They're careerists who place a far higher value on their turkey necks than on the fate of the country.  We can only hope that the public reluctance of some Democrats to come to grips with this reality is only performative, and that they understand the danger and will act with fellow Democrats to do what's right and protect our democracy.

Speaking of negotiations that will likely break down, this re- bid on infrastructure might also be performative on the Administration's part, but it's making some of us nervous:

As the Biden administration’s infrastructure negotiations with Senate Republicans picked up with a $1.7 trillion counteroffer on Friday, some congressional Democrats are getting antsy.

“We move as quickly as we can on going big, we move as quickly as we can on negotiations,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) told Vox on Wednesday. “At some point, if they won’t go where we believe the country needs to go and where the country seems to want to go, then we take off.”

President Biden issued his opening bid last month — the $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan — and the GOP responded with a $568 billion infrastructure counteroffer a few weeks ago. (Separately, the White House also introduced a $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, focusing on child care and education.)

The new $1.7 trillion White House counteroffer settles for the $65 billion Republicans floated for broadband funding, and pares back the amount of funding for roads and bridges from Biden’s initial proposal of $159 billion to $120 billion in new investment. It also cuts research and development from a proposed package, vowing to put it in other congressional bills going forward. But the president’s counter keeps funding for clean energy, removing lead pipes from America’s drinking water systems, and boosting long-term care workers.

The Administration's infrastructure plan polls in the stratosphere.  We're with Sen. Brown (as usual):  we give them a shot, and when they come back in bad faith, we take off.

Looks like Belarus President Alexander "Mini Putin" Lukashenko's forcing a commercial airliner to land in order to arrest a critic is going to have consequences:

European leaders on Monday were considering a plan to sever Belarus from the rest of the continent's airspace, a day after Belarusian authorities forced a commercial airliner to land and arrested a dissident journalist who had been flying from Athens to Lithuania.

Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics said that AirBaltic, a major airline in the region, would no longer fly through Belarusian airspace after a Ryanair flight was forced to land Sunday by a Belarusian MiG-29 fighter jet. The plane was nearing Vilnius, Lithuania, on Sunday before Belarusian authorities turned it around, made it land in their capital, Minsk, and arrested journalist Roman Protasevich, the founder of an opposition media outlet. He faces at least 12 years in prison.

Rinkevics said he would push for a European ban on flights from Belavia, the Belarusian national airline, as well as a tough package of sanctions against Belarusian authorities. European Union leaders plan to meet Monday evening at a previously scheduled summit in Brussels, where the reaction to Belarus will now be the top priority. A ban on Belavia would be a blow to Belarus’s already shaky economy.

The EU needs to step up and show Mini Putin he crossed a big red line.

On the coronavirus front, this is the kind of babbling, venomous talk that gets people killed:

Pastor Greg Locke urged his followers not to get vaccinated, claiming that "political elites" pretend to get vaccinated by getting injected with "sugar water" instead.

Locke, head of the Baptist Global Vision Bible Church in Tennessee, previously predicted on multiple occasions that former President Donald Trump would remain in office—even after it was clear that President Joe Biden had won the election. Earlier this month, Locke claimed that Biden is a "fake president" and that he "stole" the election. During a Sunday sermon this week, the pastor took aim at COVID-19 vaccines.

"I have not changed my stance. I haven't softened my stance. I have strengthened, strictly my stance against the [COVID-19] vaccine," Locke asserted. Right Wing Watch first reported the pastor's remarks.

"I don't care what Pfizer—I don't care what any of the four groups do out there. Look, if you think... for one minute that those political elites actually got that vaccination, you are smoking meth in your mama's basement," the pastor argued, drawing loud applause from those attending the religious service. "Bunch of fake liars is what they are. They didn't shoot nothing in their arm but a bunch of sugar water," Locke insisted.

We're admittedly torn here, given the people involved:  reason won't work, so do we let Darwin do his thing?

We close by again strongly recommending a visit to Infidel 753's link round-up to interesting posts from around the Internet.  Make his blog a regular stop on your web surfing adventures.

Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

The Washington Post has an exposé on the genesis of the election- fraud myth, now an article of faith among Republicans and their cult leader.  It's a deep dive and, as they say, a first draft of history:

Key elements of the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump took shape in an airplane hangar here two years earlier, promoted by a Republican businessman who has sold everything from Tex-Mex food in London to a wellness technology that beams light into the human bloodstream.

At meetings beginning late in 2018, as Republicans were smarting from midterm losses in Texas and across the country, Russell J. Ramsland Jr. and his associates delivered alarming presentations on electronic voting to a procession of conservative lawmakers, activists and donors.  [snip]

Ramsland, a failed congressional candidate with a Harvard MBA, pitched a claim that seemed rooted in evidence: Voting-machine audit logs — lines of codes and time stamps that document the machines’ activities — contained indications of vote manipulation. In the retrofitted hangar that served as his company’s offices at the edge of a municipal airstrip outside Dallas, Ramsland attempted to persuade failed Republican candidates to challenge their election results and force the release of additional data that might prove manipulation.

“We had to find the right candidate,” said Laura Pressley, a former Ramsland ally whose own claim that audit logs showed fraud had been rejected in court two years earlier. “We had to find one who knew they won.”  [snip]

No candidate agreed to bring a challenge, and the idea of widespread vote manipulation remained on the political fringe — until 2020, when Ramsland’s assertions were seized upon by influential allies of Trump. The president himself accelerated the spread of those claims into the GOP mainstream as he latched onto an array of baseless ideas to explain his loss in November.

The enduring myth that the 2020 election was rigged was not one claim by one person. It was many claims stacked one atop the other, repeated by a phalanx of Trump allies...

Of course, the unbalanced, narcissistic former guy was the perfect candidate for this bunch of conspiratorial putschists, and his party of aggrieved, low- information, authoritarian- friendly voters the perfect seed bed.

James Downie discusses the fact that there's no intra- party "battle for the soul of the Republican Party":

... The Republican Party playbook is the same as it ever was: Disguise worshipfully pro-big business, pro-wealthy policies with appeals to the resentments of President Richard M. Nixon’s “silent majority” or Sarah Palin’s “real Americans” or whatever label the party prefers for a specific type of White American. Every liberal project — from Social Security in the 1930s to Medicare and integration in the 1960s to the Affordable Care Act and same-sex marriage in the 2010s — is cast as a mortal threat to freedom pushed by the eggheads, the ivory tower or the coastal elites. The threat of “outside agitators” becomes the peril of “political correctness” becomes the menace of “ridiculous wokeness” — the term Cheney used in her Post op-ed last week. They’re all the same look.

Yes, Trump has turned some of these traits up to 11. The dog whistles became bullhorns; the “executive time” administration plumbed new depths of incompetence. But for Republicans, as televangelist and later right-wing presidential candidate Pat Robertson said 40 years ago, “it’s better to have a stable government under a crook than turmoil under an honest man.” The threat of liberalism outweighs the risk of an inept, amoral or fascistic president. The Trump era — including its culmination in January’s attempted insurrection — was not out of step with that. There’s no “battle” for the party’s soul; there are only the party leaders who will keep swimming in this foul stream leaving behind those that don’t. For the rest of the country, including the media, reckoning with that fact means being honest about it — the sooner, the better.

That's a challenge to the Republican- wired media, most of whom feel safe to revert to their natural anti- government, both sides posture now that Democrats have temporarily fought off the violent insurrectionists on their behalf.

Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog sees a way vaccine- hesitant people might be reached:

So how do we reach them? I'm hoping the numbers change once the vaccines reach full approval -- not just because full approval might persuade a few holdouts that the shots are safe, but because, for once, capitalism might act on behalf of the public good, even if that's not the primary intention. Here's a detail from last week's vaccine news:

Pfizer and BioNTech have begun the process of applying for full approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration of its coronavirus vaccine, the companies announced Friday morning....

If the vaccine is fully approved, it sets the stage for Pfizer and BioNTech to begin advertising the shots directly to consumers....

America is one of only two countries on Earth that allow direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising. (New Zealand is the other.) This combined with the drug industry's relentless marketing of pricey new products to doctors is one reason our healthcare costs are so high.

However, Big Pharma is good at selling us drugs we didn't know we wanted. The drug industry knows how to make us want to walk into our doctors' offices and ask for a new drug we've seen on TV or in Web ads.

So maybe consumer advertising will succeed where earnest entreaties haven't. And if not, there's always free beer. 

It would also be helpful, and humane, for Big Pharma to waive vaccine patents to allow world- wide production, research and development largely paid for by the American taxpayer.  But no one's holding their breath.

In the meantime, the catastrophic death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic was doubtless under- counted:

Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday said he has “no doubt” that the number of Americans killed by COVID-19 is much higher than what has been officially reported, after a recent study counted nearly double the amount recorded by federal health officials.

“We’ve been saying — and the CDC has been saying all along — that it is very likely that we’re undercounting,” Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has placed the number of deaths in the U.S. at around 577,800. In comparison, a study from the University of Washington released Thursday tallied around 905,000 deaths.

“That’s a bit more than I would have thought the undercounting was,” Fauci said of that difference. “I think there’s no doubt ... that we are and have been undercounting. What that tells us is something that we’ve known. You know, we’re living through a historic pandemic, the likes of which we haven’t seen in over a hundred years.”

... not to mention a "Presidency" the likes of which we haven't seen in 232 years. 

Infidel 753 has his usual, excellent collection of links to posts from around the Internet, including how France just got shrunk a little and a commencement address for our time.  Check it out (and bookmark his blog!).

Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

Top Constitutional and First Amendment scholars (144 of them) wrote a letter to Congress undercutting much of the expected legal defense of existential threat Donald "Mango Mussolini" Trump's impeachment lawyers, including:

The First Amendment is no bar to the Senate convicting former President Trump and disqualifying him from holding future office. Although we differ from one another in our politics and disagree on many questions of constitutional law (including First Amendment law), we agree that any First Amendment defense raised by President Trump’s attorneys would be legally frivolous. The First Amendment does not apply in impeachment proceedings. And even if it did, President Trump’s alleged actions—if proven by the Impeachment Managers at trial—would fall well outside the protections of the First Amendment. 

Trump's lawyers and the spineless weasels in the Senate know this, but their defense will follow the aphorism that “If you have the law, hammer the law. If you have the facts, hammer the facts. If you have neither the law nor the facts, hammer the table”.

Meanwhile, one of those spineless weasels is out floating an insane diversionary conspiracy that could only spring from the fevered swamp that is Sen. Ron "Tiny" Johnson's (R-Trump) "brain":

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) argued that 45 Republican senators already believe the Senate trial is “unconstitutional,” when speaking with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on Sunday. He was referring to the vote total on the Senate motion brought by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) in January to dismiss the impeachment trial on the basis that it’s unconstitutional to hold an impeachment trial for a private citizen. Five Republicans joined the Democrats in rejecting the motion, but every other Republican voted in favor of it. (Many legal scholars believe that such a trial is perfectly constitutional — more on that later.)

But Johnson’s subsequent comments on Fox took a more shocking turn — he floated the baseless idea that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was to blame in some sense for the violent assault on the Capitol.

“Is this another diversionary operation? Is this meant to deflect away from potentially what the speaker knew and when she knew it? I don’t know, but I’m suspicious,” Johnson said.

That Wisconsin voters chose this lump of stupid over Russ Feingold twice(!) is a disgrace and a permanent stain on the state that birthed the progressive movement and Sens. Gaylord Nelson, Herb Kohl, Tammy Baldwin, and Feingold.

But he wasn't the only Republican weasel making frivolous or outrageous claims in support of Trump's acquittal, as James Downie reports:

On the mainstream Sunday shows, Republican senators complained instead about the process, the precedents and their political rivals. On “Fox News Sunday,” Paul tried to change the subject, complaining that Sen. Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) had never been held accountable when he warned antiabortion Supreme Court justices last March that decisions that limiting a woman’s right to choose would release “the whirlwind.” Whatever one thinks of Schumer’s comments, though, invoking “the whirlwind” is a far cry from telling people “we’re going to walk down” to the Capitol on the day of electoral college certification.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) complained that “under the Watergate, under the Clinton impeachments, there were truckloads of information. Here, there was a video. There was no process.” Yes, previous impeachments came with detailed reports of special committees and counsels. In this case, the video of Trump on the Ellipse was the only report the world needed to see.

As for the constitutionality of the trial, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) argued on ABC’s “This Week” that “overwhelming weight of history and also precedent indicates that this is not proper.” But he almost immediately admitted that “constitutional lawyers can make an argument on either side.” Paul tried a similar argument on Fox News, only to backpedal when host Chris Wallace pointed out that in 1876 the Senate conducted an impeachment trial of an ex-official.

Keeping anti- democracy jackholes like Johnson out of government should be a prime objective for all of us.  Stacy Abrams writes about how to revive our democracy after its near- death experience:

One of the first steps must be an overhaul of the Senate filibuster, which has long been wielded as a cudgel against the needs of millions who struggle. Today, the parliamentary trick creates a more sinister threat to our nation: the ability of a minority of senators, who represent 41.5 million fewer people than the Senate majority, to block progress favored by most Americans.

Democrats in Congress must fully embrace their mandate to fast-track democracy reforms that give voters a fair fight, rather than allowing undemocratic systems to be used as tools and excuses to perpetuate that same system. This is a moment of both historic imperative and, with unified Democratic control of the White House and Congress, historic opportunity.

The agenda to restore democracy also includes passing the For the People Act to protect and expand voting rights, fight gerrymandering and reduce the influence of money in politics; the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to restore the full protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act; and the Protecting Our Democracy Act to constrain the corruption of future presidents who deem themselves above the law. These landmark bills have broad-based support, and would have passed long ago were it not for obstructionist leaders who fear losing their own influence if the American people have more power of their own.

Further, fixing our democracy requires we finally allow our fellow Americans in D.C. and Puerto Rico, the vast majority of whom are people of color, to have full access to our democracy. That means D.C. statehood and binding self-determination for Puerto Rico.

(ICYMI, check out Infidel 753's essay on "Ten Criteria for Success" for the Biden Administration, which includes several of the points made by Abrams, and more.  Take a look if you haven't already.)

Dana Milbank writes about the Republican Party's embrace of anti-Semitism and violence:

... One hundred ninety-nine Republican members of Congress rallied to the defense of a vile, unapologetic anti-Semite in their ranks who calls for assassination of her opponents.

This is more than a Republican problem; it’s an American problem. You don’t have to be a scholar of 20th-century Europe to know what happens when the elected leaders of a democracy condone violence as a political tool and blame the country’s ills on the Jews.  [snip]

House Republicans refused to sanction her for her outrages, and on Thursday, all but 11 House Republicans voted against a successful Democratic measure to remove her from House committees.

“Marjorie Taylor Greene will be remembered for breaking new ground for her wild anti-Semitism,” Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, told me after the vote. Greenblatt, whose group has tracked all-time-high levels of anti-Jewish incidents during the Trump years, wrote three letters to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) about Greene since her nomination, and he urged McCarthy to remove her from committees. Greenblatt received no reply.

Greene’s ugly pronouncements about Muslims and Black people, and her harassment of school-shooting survivors and families of victims, are no less reprehensible. But the rallying around this unrepentant anti-Semite by Republicans is an ominous new frontier. The Republican Jewish Coalition said it is “offended and appalled by [Greene’s] comments and her actions.”

He's right that it's an American problem, and it's one more reason why the party that supports this evil needs to be crushed at every election from now on.

Once again, we close by recommending a trip over to Infidel 753's link round- up.  It's one of the first places we go every Sunday morning for an array of reading options on many topics.