Big Myth About Donald Trump, GOP Leaders Is Busted In Blistering New Ad
Lee Moran September 30, 2021
Progressive PAC MeidasTouch calls out the “malignant force” of the GOP in its blistering new ad.
The 2 1/2-minute spot, released Wednesday, slams the Republican Party for becoming a “misguided personality cult” in honor of ex-President Donald Trump.
The video highlights Trump’s catastrophic mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, noting how some GOP governors continue to “recklessly” ignore facts and sacrifice lives “in the callous pursuit of votes.”
“These aren’t leaders of a political movement, they’re leaders of a cult. And they kill,” the PAC, founded by attorney Ben Meiselas and his two brothers in 2020, captioned the clip with the hashtag #TrumpCultKills.
📺 NEW VIDEO
These aren’t leaders of a political movement, they’re leaders of a cult.
Both the video and the hashtag have gone viral on Twitter, joining otherhard-hittingclips from the PAC to garner hundreds of thousands of views online.
A federal judge canceled major oil and gas leases over climate change
Nathan Rott – January 28, 2022. – Heard on Morning Addition
A man fishes near docked oil drilling platforms in 2020 in Port Aransas, Texas. A federal judge has revoked oil and gas leases sold in the Gulf of Mexico in November, saying the Interior Department did not take into account its impact on climate change.Eric Gay/AP
Late last year, just days after pledging to cut fossil fuels at international climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, the Biden administration held the largest oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history.
On Thursday, a federal judge invalidated that sale in the Gulf of Mexico, saying the administration didn’t adequately consider the costs to the world’s climate.
The administration used an analysis conducted under former President Donald Trump that environmental groups alleged was critically flawed.
The decision represents a major win for a coalition of environmental groups that challenged the controversial sale, calling it a “huge climate bomb.”
Eighty million acres — an area twice the size of Florida — were put up for auction in November.
Climate groups urged the Biden administration to stop the sale, but the Interior Department said it was compelled to move forward after a different federal judge struck down the administration’s temporary moratorium on new oil and gas lease sales. Oil and gas companies only ended up bidding on 1.7 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico.
Those leases will be vacated by the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia’s decision, and the Interior Department will have to conduct a new environmental analysis if it decides to hold another sale.
“We are pleased that the court invalidated Interior’s illegal lease sale,” said Earthjustice’s senior attorney, Brettny Hardy. ”We simply cannot continue to make investments in the fossil fuel industry to the peril of our communities and increasingly warming planet.”
Roughly a quarter of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions come from fossil fuels extracted from public lands.
The Biden administration has promised to review the country’s oil and gas leasing program to better account for its contribution to climate change.
Shortly after taking office, it temporarily blocked all new oil and gas leasing on public lands while it conducted its review, but the moratorium was struck down after being challenged by more than a dozen Republican-led states.
Scheduled lease sales resumed after that decision, including the massive sale in the Gulf, which elicited nearly $200 million in bids.
The climate impact analysis used by the Biden administration was actually conducted under Trump. It argued that not leasing the acreage would result in more greenhouse gas emissions because it would increase fossil fuel production abroad.
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras wrote that the Interior Department acted “arbitrarily and capriciously in excluding foreign consumption from their greenhouse gas emissions,” adding that the “error was indeed a serious failing.”
“The U.S. offshore region is vital to American energy security and continued leases are essential in keeping energy flowing from this strategic national asset,” said Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, in a statement.
The Biden administration could choose to do a new analysis and put the section of the Gulf of Mexico up in another lease sale. Environmental groups would be waiting.
“The fight is not over,” said Hallie Templeton, legal director at Friends of the Earth. “We will continue to hold the Biden administration accountable for making unlawful decisions that contradict its pledge to take swift, urgent action on ‘code red’ climate and environmental justice priorities.”
Sequela: Long after a pandemic is ‘over’, new and terrible symptoms can appear.
Mark Summer, Daily Kos Staff January 26, 2022
Health care workers conducting rounds within an ICU filled with COVID-19 patients
“Sequela” is a word that few Americans recognize today. Unfortunately, it’s a word that is much more likely to become familiar over the next few years… even decades. A sequela is a long-term pathological effect resulting from exposure to a disease. When the pandemic ends, the damage is not going to be over.
There’s often a tendency in the media—and in social media—to try to frame the damage of COVID-19 to an either-or situation. Someone gets sick for a few days, and they either recover and are fine, or they die and count among the ever-growing total deaths. It’s that sort of all-or-nothing approach that allows people to say things like, “Well, the survival rate is 99.9%, so …” Add more nines to the end of that number, depending on how many right-wing news programs you watch.
Nationally, the actual survival rate is something closer to 98.8%, but that’s not the point. Studies have already indicated that 43% of those who have had at least one symptomatic COVID-19 infection tend to have issues that persist over an extended period. For those who have required hospitalization, the number jumps to 57%. In the United States alone, that’s something over 15 million people who are now suffering protracted illness due to a single, nonlethal infection from COVID-19.
Those suffering these persistent symptoms aren’t really going through a never-ending infection with SARS-CoV-2. “Long COVID” is a sequela—a long-term pathological effect resulting from exposure to COVID-19. For some of these 15 million, the damage is minor and transient. For others, it is debilitating and possibly lifelong.
Many sequelae aren’t obvious. And they may not show up for years.
What kind of long-term effects can be generated by an infection is difficult to predict. As an example, mumps is a viral infection that’s mostly focused on the salivary glands. The primary symptoms include pain on the sides of the face, difficulty in swallowing, fever, headache, and fatigue.
But mumps can also cause temporary or permanent hearing loss. That loss can be subtle. It can be severe. It can affect one ear. It can affect both. Most importantly, hearing loss can have an onset that begins at the same time as other symptoms of the disease, but it can also not appear until months after other symptoms have passed.
Shingles may be one of the best-known sequela. Unusual in that it represents a continuous infection of the herpes zoster virus over a period of years or decades, shingles can even produce its own sequela in the form of postherpetic neuralgia: debilitating pain that persists for months or years after the typical shingles rash has disappeared.
Similarly, highly infectious measles is primarily a viral infection of the respiratory system. However, it can generate horrific damage to the central nervous system that doesn’t become evident for years. Among the possible consequences of a measles infection is subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSP), which is described as “a progressive, disabling, and deadly brain disorder.” This disorder is relatively rare, but when it does appear in measles patients, the SSP comes seven to 10 years after that first infection.
An infectious disease places an enormous strain on the body. In the case of a viral disease, cells in the affected area are hijacked to produce millions of copies of the invading virus. Then those cells are torn apart as the virus particles escape. It’s also not unusual for this replication process to fail, leaving behind fragmentary bits, proteins, and the contents of all those exploded cells. In the case of a large, rapid mutation—like the omicron variant—a virus may generate a large number of transcription errors, resulting in a lot of “junk” floating around the system.
The long-term results of tissue damage, viral fragments, and the efforts of the body’s own systems attempting to control the infection are hard to judge. But this much should be clear: A large-scale pandemic has consequences that can appear well after the infection itself has been brought under control. In the case of a novel virus that suddenly infects a large portion of the population in a short period, the resulting sequelae can be expected to be significant, both in terms of the number of cases, and their effect on every aspect of society.
In particular, neurological sequelae are frequently associated with epidemics and pandemics.
Nervous system infection or dysfunction during pandemics is common and its enduring consequences, especially among vulnerable populations, are frequently forgotten.
After the 1918 flu pandemic, whole new waves of symptoms appeared in flu survivors years after the immediate threat was past. One of the first sequela to be noticed in the United States was a big increase in miscarriages, stillbirths, premature delivery, and maternal mortality that peaked a year after the flu was gone.
More mysteriously, the years after the 1918 flu saw a wave of fatigue and depression that spread around the world. Sometimes, the symptoms were easy to miss—after all, this was a society just moving on from World War I—and there was a tendency to connect the cases that appeared afterward with similar symptoms that had happened years before.
But the wave of what would come to be known as “La Von Economo’s encephalitis lethargica,” which peaked in 1923, went beyond some kind of international weltschmerz or even an outbreak of depression. Those suffering the disorder presented with a whole spectrum of symptoms, among which was a sleepiness so profound that patients would drift into a fugue at any time of the day. After a week or two, patients improved. Or they got worse, tumbling toward coma and death. Those affected were described as having “corpse-like” faces that were rigid and devoid of emotion, 50% of those affected died.
In some areas, the wave of encephalitis lethargica generated a secondary wave of famine because the “debilitating lethargy” left people unable to plant and harvest crops.
How far into the future can the sequelae from the COVID-19 pandemic stretch? The consequences will literally be with us for the lifetimes of all those infected. Possibly longer. Male babies born during the 1918-1919 flu pandemic were at increased risk of heart disease six decades later.
Calculating the loss of lives, much less quality of lives, seems impossible.
What kind of sequelae can we expect from this pandemic? We don’t know. Studying those suffering “long COVID” may provide some clues. So should a look at the consequences of past pandemics. But because the SARS-CoV-2 virus infects so many parts of the body, nasty surprises can be expected for a long time.
The problem with such a broad pandemic is that even rare side effects can generate enormous numbers. Encephalitis affects 1 out of 1000 mumps patients. But with 73 million COVID-19 cases in the U.S. alone, a rare problem is going to be way too common. Any planning for health care in the future should be made based on the assumption that the 2020-2022 pandemic is going to cast a long shadow down the decades, one that will extend through generations.
Death of a Sales Barn: How Corporations Took Over Our Food System
A new report explains how a handful of agribusiness firms came to dominate U.S. agriculture, how they’re ruining rural America, and how we can stop them.
Zoe Pharo January 26, 2022
GETTY IMAGES
Joe Maxwell, a fourth-generation hog farmer in Mexico, Missouri, used to sell his pigs at the Mexico sales barn, which held livestock auctions almost every day of the week. Today, the barn only hosts a sale once a week. Maxwell remembers the decline this way: “When we got ready to sell our pigs, there got to be fewer and fewer people wanting to buy,” he says, “until there was just about one.”
The death of the small-town sales barn, not to mention other local businesses, illustrates the dramatic changes that have consumed U.S. agriculture in recent decades. These changes have transformed farming from a decentralized model largely in the public arena — with local livestock auction houses and publicly-funded agricultural research — to a highly-concentrated model in the private arena — in which seeds, research, and equipment software are seen as intellectual property and guarded by dominant agribusiness firms.
As of 2020, 2 million farmers and 21 million food and farm workers stand on one side of the U.S. food system while 325 million eaters stand on the other. In between them are a handful of multinational companies — Tyson, JBS, Bayer, to name some of the biggest — who manage nearly every step of how food gets from producer to consumer.
But if this concentrated, corporatized food system seems inevitable or inescapable, it isn’t. In a new report, titled “Bigger Is Not Better: The High Cost of Agribusiness Consolidation,” the international human-rights federation ActionAid explains how we got here and details the nearly 70 years of policy decisions that created our industrial food system.
Today’s consolidation, according to the report, can be traced back to the post-World War II period, when politicians worked to dismantle the New Deal Agriculture framework. This included programs like the Agricultural Adjustment Act, Roosevelt’s economic recovery program, which paid farmers to limit their crop production. The legacy of the New Deal model is complicated — it discriminated against Black farmers and encouraged mechanization and consolidation — but it did set up generations of farmers for success.
In the 1950s, inspired by technological innovation, business groups worked to address the “inefficiencies of farming,” and according to the report, they saw the primary problem as an excess of labor — in other words, too many farmers. These groups aimed to replace a third of family farms, which numbered in the millions, with a few larger farms, capable of producing commodities with less labor and more technology. As Earl Butz, Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, famously put it, “get big or get out.”
A series of federal farm bills brought more acres into production and lowered price floors (the lowest legal price that can be paid for a good) which allowed agribusiness companies to pay less for farm goods than they cost farmers to produce. As farmers scrambled to make up for lost revenue and increase their volume, federal enforcement of antitrust laws, which prevent unlawful mergers and business practices and encourage competition among buyers, declined under both the Carter and Reagan administrations.
In 1996, the U.S. Farm Bill, known as the “Freedom to Farm Act” (or, to many farmers, as the “Freedom to Fail Act”) put the nail in the coffin of small holders. This law ended the last vestiges of supply management, once the dominant farm policy in the United States.
Supply management, says Gary Hoskey in a video by ActionAid, can be described as “don’t raise more than what can be consumed.” Its necessary components are a floor price for commodities based on the cost of production, a commodity reserve that fluctuates depending on crop success, and conservation programs that take agricultural land out of production — allowing farmers to remain in production during long periods of low prices.
Instead, the new farm bill further entrenched industrial farming practices by encouraging farmers to plant chemical- and machinery-dependent monocrops like corn and soybeans. Around this time, meatpacking companies began investing in hog confinement and moving to vertical integration. According to the report, their model was that of Don Tyson, the former president of Tyson Foods, in which his company owned all parts of the supply chain except the riskiest: the farm.
These days, the largest food retailers are getting into livestock and dairy markets themselves, cutting out farmers altogether. For example, in 2019, Costco opened its own, fully vertically-integrated meatpacking plant in Nebraska to produce its $4.99 rotisserie chickens. As firms grow, according to the report, they prefer to source from fewer companies in their supply chain, as this simplifies ordering, transport, and other processes.
Even cooperatives, “farmer-run organizations formed to give farmers a better shot against big corporations,” the report says, “now too often look like corporations themselves.” Many now own processing facilities as well, making them both the buyer and seller, which undercuts farmers in the same way as vertically-integrated companies. In the late 2000s, farmers filed two class action lawsuits against Dairy Farmers of America (DFA), the nation’s largest dairy cooperative, but settled out of court.
As processors have concentrated, sales have shifted from open cash markets — like sales barns — to contract arrangements between processor and grower. “While contracts can guarantee a secure future price for a farmer,” the report notes, “the reality is that the buyer generally sets the terms, which can be extremely restrictive for and unfavorable to the farmer.” For livestock, for example, the company supplies specific feed, medicine, and other inputs.
As a result of these forces, farms these days are fewer and bigger, and mid-sized farms have been the hardest hit. A quick measure that economists use to see whether a market is freely competitive or subject to manipulation is to look at the percentage controlled by the top four firms. When four companies control over 40%, the market is considered uncompetitive, and over 70% indicates a monopoly. Today, the top four companies control 85% of the beef market, 85% of the corn seed market, and 90% of grain trade. Meanwhile, 20% of farms control nearly 70% of U.S. farmland.
Political Promises to Farmers
In 2008, when Barack Obama campaigned on enforcement of antitrust rules and breaking up agribusiness power, the message resonated in rural areas and farming communities. During his campaign, Obama said he planned to “reinvigorate antitrust enforcement.””As president, Obama allowed for the continued consolidation of corporate power in the food system. This is a large part of why Trump won Dunn County decisively in 2016 and in 2020.”
After he was elected, Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched a landmark, year-long investigation into the issue in 2010. Thousands of farmers testified and submitted public comments, the ActionAid report says, often at great risk to their livelihoods. However, the inquiry ended quietly: the release of a 24-page memo in which the federal government simply reiterated its “commitment to vigorous antitrust enforcement in the agricultural sector” but took no serious action.
In fact, in the decade since, agribusiness consolidation has only increased. According to ActionAid, the DOJ has since greenlighted many major agribusiness mergers, including those that shrank the “Big Six” seed and chemical companies down to the “Big Three” and those that further consolidated the meatpacking industry.
Democrats’ failure to address agribusiness consolidation, some argue, has real political consequences. Bill Hogseth, who lives in a rural Wisconsin county that went for Obama twice before swinging to Trump in 2016, put it this way in an essay for Politico: “Rural voters appreciated Obama’s repeated campaign promises to challenge the rise of agribusiness monopolies. But as president, he allowed for the continued consolidation of corporate power in the food system…. [T]hese moves signaled that his administration did not have the backs of family farmers. This is a large part of why Trump won Dunn County decisively in 2016 and in 2020.”
Politicians on both sides of the aisle have reason not to push policies distasteful to agribusiness. The largest multinational corporations — including Bayer, Smithfield, and grain dealer Archer Daniels Midland — spend millions in direct lobbying and political donations, according to the report.
These corporations have cleverly styled themselves as the “farm lobby” and have a great deal of influence in Washington, D.C. and state capitals, using farmers as a front to push their agenda. The Farm Bureau, for example, has state-level chapters in all 50 states and claims to be “the voice of agriculture,” but its real business is selling insurance through FBL Financial Group.
The Farm Bureau is not the only group claiming to represent family farmers while supporting big businesses. ActionAid reports that almost two dozen commodities have research and promotion boards funded by “checkoffs,” a mandatory tax collected from farmers, for every animal or pound of raw goods they sell. Though not explicitly political, these boards have financial connections with trade groups that lobby for specific state laws — for example, those that exempt concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and other large-scale operations from environmental regulations.
The Environmental Impact of Consolidation
The corporate consolidation of farming also has devastating environmental impacts, according to the report. Industrial livestock production, one of the most consolidated and technology-dependent parts of the food system, is responsible for 14.5% of total global greenhouse gas emissions, which is comparable to the entire global transportation sector. “You couldn’t design a better system to breed deadly diseases.”
Pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and manure from CAFOs can also damage water and air quality. Four companies control 70% of the global agrochemical market, and the chemicals they manufacture are linked to water contamination and serious health effects — and are often banned in other countries. U.S. regulatory oversight generally depends on voluntary self-monitoring and manufacturer reporting, and decisions are driven by cost-benefit analyses that place a monetary value on health weighed against the financial benefits of chemical use.
With climate change making water and arable land even more scarce, investors and multinational corporations have identified farmland as a lucrative asset class and are buying up farmland around the world. For example, TIAA, the retirement fund manager with close to $1 trillion in assets, is now the world’s largest land investor, with holdings from Brazil to Illinois. The report says these farmland investments are often more subtle than traditional land grabs, in which a corporation or government simply seizes land from its original owner or steward without negotiation or payment, but raise many of the same ecological, legal and human rights concerns.
In addition to damaging the land, industrial agriculture is a major public health hazard. According to evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, farming monocultures of genetically similar animals and plants, increasing deforestation and the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria via the widespread use of antibiotics in CAFOs all make people more vulnerable to future epidemics. “You couldn’t design a better system to breed deadly diseases,” Wallace says in the report.
This system locks countries into the production of particular goods for export — in the United States, corn and soybeans — which undermines each country’s own food security and sovereignty. The report notes that a highly specialized and concentrated supply chain is vulnerable to shocks and bottlenecks. During the pandemic, for example, shuttering just three pork packing plants impacted 10% of the nation’s pork supply — hog prices plummeted and farmers had to euthanize their animals, while shoppers faced shortages.
In April 2020, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to force meatpacking plants to reopen but did not mandate any worker protections. According to the report, by September 2020, more than 44,000 plant workers had tested positive for Covid-19 and at least 210 had died, with rural areas becoming some of the worst virus hot spots in the nation.
How We Can Really Feed the World
Farming in the United States, once dependent on diversification and complex ecosystem knowledge, is now highly mechanized and dependent on fossil-fuel based technology, ranging from chemical fertilizers and pesticides to genetically-modified seeds, GPS-guided precision agriculture techniques, and automated climate-controlled barns. 70% of the world’s population still successfully relies on small-scale or peasant farmers for their food.
Agribusiness frequently promotes these innovations and consolidation as the only way to feed the world, but this system still fails us: at least 720 million people, including 42 million in the United States, still go hungry, according to the report. And, despite the reach of consolidation, 70% of the world’s population still successfully relies on small-scale or peasant farmers for their food. The report puts it this way: “It is actually a network of localized and regionalized farmers and markets that most efficiently feeds the world, community by community.”
Though agriculture has great potential to support ecosystems and benefit the environment — by raising fewer animals, using cover crops, rotationally grazing, saving seeds from year to year and using food waste as feed, to name a few regenerative methods — these practices are generally discouraged by the current agricultural regime. Instead, agribusiness has so far responded to climate change by proposing market-based mechanisms, like soil carbon markets and “green finance,” that, according to the report, do not protect against further consolidation.
To begin undoing the consolidated power block that is corporate agribusiness, the report has a few suggestions. First, an immediate moratorium on agribusiness mergers and on all mergers and acquisitions for agribusiness companies. Revisiting the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act, last introduced in 2019 by Sen. Cory Booker, would be a start, and would allow time to develop new, stricter procedures for mergers and acquisitions.
Other helpful steps, according to the report, could include creating land trusts to provide land access to young and marginalized farmers, ensuring living wages for farmers and farmworkers, establishing incentives for conservation practices and developing a new federal farm program that guarantees farmers a fair price based on the costs of production. ActionAid adds that the USDA and EPA must enforce protections for farmers, workers and the environment, including stronger Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA) rules.
A sustainable future for agriculture may not look like a return to the days of the sales barn but, as this report makes clear, it doesn’t look like corporate control, either. Instead, ActionAid’s report makes the case that we need to move towards a decentralized food system with re-localized economies, and quickly.
Zoe Pharo is a Chicago-based writer and In These Times editorial intern. She holds a degree in political science from Carleton College.
DeSantis’ Demented Doc Is About to Get the Grilling He Deserves
Michael Daly January 26, 2022
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a politician by profession, so he easily puts politics above all else, even when it concerns the fight against a virus that has killed 870,000 Americans, including 61,000 of his constituents.
DeSantis went so far as to say, “This indefensible edict takes treatment out of the hands of medical professionals and will cost some Americans their lives. There are real-world implications to Biden’s medical authoritarianism – Americans’ access to treatments is now subject to the whims of a failing president.”
But Dr. Joseph Ladapo, appointed by DeSantis appointed as the state’s surgeon general and now awaiting lawmakers’ confirmation to that post, is a physician. Ladapo therefore had the moral and professional responsibility to set people straight regarding the clinics that were opened by the health department he heads. He instead affirmed the governor’s fiction.
“The federal government has failed to adequately provide the United States with adequate outpatient treatment options for COVID-19,” Ladapo said. “Now, they are scrambling to cover up a failure to deliver on a promise to ‘shut down the virus.’”
The truth is that the treatment options being offered by the clinics had been rendered all but useless by the Omicron variant. The manufacturer of one of the two main monoclonal treatments acknowledged that in a statement on Tuesday.
“The original REGEN-COV antibody cocktail has been administered to millions of people, and we are extremely proud of the critical role this medicine has played during the pandemic. However, it does not work against #Omicron in lab tests, which tells us that unfortunately it is also not going to work in people infected with this variant,” a Regeneron spokesperson said. “According to the CDC, over 99% of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. are now caused by the Omicron variant, and thus we believe the FDA’s decision to amend the Emergency Use Authorization was appropriate at this time.”
Ladapo just ignored this inconvenient reality. He had at other times described reliance on vaccines and face coverings and testing as “the trifecta of stupidity.” And he gave no indication he would not simply further his reckless and irresponsible nonsense on Wednesday, when he is scheduled to appear at a confirmation hearing by the Health Policy Committee of the state Senate.
Early misgivings about his suitability arose during a “get acquainted” visit to the Senate after his appointment in October. The senators Ladapo visited included Democrat Tina Polsky, who has a sign on her door asking all who enter to wear a mask. He and two men with him strode inside and stood in the waiting area with their faces uncovered.
Polsky asked Ladapo to put on a mask. He suggested there were alternatives such as going outside.
“I said, ‘No, I would like to sit here in my office where I have chairs and a comfortable setting, but I would like you to wear a mask,’” she recalled to The Daily Beast.
Ladapo balked and seemed to seek a debate.
“But I wouldn’t engage in it,” she remembered, “And it just went on and on.”
Polsky had particular cause for concern. She had recently undergone surgery for breast cancer and was about to begin a regimen of radiation that would be disrupted if she tested positive for COVID-19
“I said. ‘I have a serious medical condition’’’ she remembered. “He said, ‘We can talk about that.’ I said, ‘No.’ I kept backing up into my aide’s office because I was so uncomfortable. I had my mask on, of course.’”
Ladapo continued to refuse.
“I didn’t talk to him about any substantive issues because he wouldn’t put on a mask so I could sit down and have a conversation with him about his credentials,” she remembered.
She realized that he was likely just to go on and on.
“I said, ‘You can leave now, if you’re not going to wear a mask. I know everything I need to know about you and your role as the top medical professional in the state,’” she recalled.
Ladapo departed.
“The real kicker was when he left, my other aide was outside and heard him say something like, ‘I love to rile up those liberals,’” Polsky told The Daily Beast.
When word of the encounter reached the press, DeSantis defended Ladapo, saying Polsky had just been playing politics. But the president of the state Senate, Wilton Simpson, is a gentleman as well as a Republican.
Simpson sent a memorandum to all the senators and their staff with the subject “Respect and Decorum in the Senate.” He reported that he had learned of an “interaction” in Polsky’s office “during which her request that visitors… wear a mask was not respected.”
“This incident is even more disappointing given the health challenges Senator Polsky is currently facing,” the memo said. “However, it should not take a cancer diagnosis for people to respect each other’s level of comfort with social interaction during a pandemic. What occurred in Senator Polsky’s office was unprofessional and will not be tolerated in the Senate.”
Ladapo said nothing until six days after the incident. He offered no apology.
“It is important to me to communicate clearly and effectively with people,” he tweeted. “I can’t do that when half of my face is covered.”
As there is no mandate in the senate, Ladapo would not be required to cover any of his face when he appeared before the Health Committee. The Democratic members include Sen. Janet Cruz, who promised she will “ask many questions” about Ladapo’s positions.
“In my opinion, he’s proven time and time again that data and science are not on the top of his mind when making decisions about the health and wellness of Florida,” she told The Daily Beast.
“So much misinformation is flying around, it’s important to have Florida’s top doc, if that’s what you want to call him, grounded in fact and not in extreme political rhetoric. His rhetoric does not line up with the reality,” she said, adding that “he takes this direction from a governor that feels the same way.”
Cruz noted that Ladapo attended Harvard, but wonders if this is proof that sometimes an Ivy League education does not stack up to “just plain common sense.”
“Or is it just a straight up opportunist who will say and do anything to advance his career?” she wondered. “I don’t know, but I’m disappointed. I’ve been disappointed by many of his comments.”
Cruz spoke of a friend whose 42-year-old nephew failed to get vaccinated and ended up critically ill with COVID in a small community hospital. The friend called to ask Cruz to help get him transferred to a hospital in Tampa that could better treat him.
“I said, ‘Yeah, let’s try,’” Cruz recalled.
But the nephew died before he could be moved. Cruz noted that the nephew’s wife had gotten vaccinated and was fine, but now a widow.
“That’s the kinda stuff that makes me nuts, when I have a Harvard-trained physician that will not recognize the power of the vaccine,” Cruz said.
Cruz noted that her husband is a retired nephrologist, a specialist who was sought out by other specialists with difficult cases.
“I watched him devote 50 years of his life to saving sick patients,” she said. “I’ve watched this man get up at four o’clock in the morning and try to go save someone… And then I see a physician who won’t stand up for a vaccine. I just can’t believe that someone could go to one of the finest medical institutions in the country and perhaps the world and deny the efficacy of a vaccine and the fact that it saves lives.”
Cruz is nonetheless all but certain the Health Policy Committee will approve Ladapo. He will then appear before the Ethics and Elections Committee, whose members include Polsky. The whole Senate will then vote on the appointment. And it seems likely the Senate will impugn its own dignity by approving Ladapo as Florida’s top doctor.
The ultimate question is whether he should be a doctor at all.
As white nationalists, January 6th extremists embrace Christian nationalism, even darker forces revive
David Neiwert, Daily Kos Staff January 28, 2022
White nationalist ‘Groyper’ leader Nick Fuentes holds aloft a crucifix at an anti-vaccination rally in New York City in November.
Most of the far-right extremist movements that arose online and then in real life over the past decade—the alt-right, white nationalists, and other authoritarian proto-fascists—have been generally ecumenical and areligious in their rhetorical appeals and organizing, other than their frequent expressions of antisemitism. But that’s beginning to change, as Jack Jenkins explored this week at TheWashington Post.
With “Groyper” leader Nick Fuentes leading the way, it’s becoming much more common to hear them embracing Christian nationalism—an ideology long embraced by the larger radical right, particularly the so-called “Patriot” movement. Moreover, a number of these white nationalists appear to be pushing even farther into a particularly ugly—and previously stagnant—brand of religious nationalism: Christian Identity, the bigoted theological movement claiming that white people are the true “Children of Israel,” that Jews are the literal descendants of Satan, and that all nonwhite people are soulless “mud people.”
As Jenkins reports, since the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, Fuentes’ white nationalist “America First” organization has increasingly employed Christian nationalist rhetoric: chanting “Christ is King” at the antiabortion “March for Life” last week and at anti-vaccine protests, using crucifixes as protest symbols, and similar rhetorical appeals. In a speech at the America First conference in Orlando in March at which he declared America “a Christian nation,” Fuentes warned his audience that America will cease to be America “if it loses its White demographic core and if it loses its faith in Jesus Christ.”
“Christian nationalism—and even the idea of separatism, with a subtext of White, Christian and conservative-leaning [influences]—took a more dominant role in the way that extremist groups talk to each other and try to propagandize in public,” Jared Holt of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab told Jenkins.
Christian nationalism has long been a feature of the nation’s extremist right, dating back to the original Ku Klux Klan of the 1860s and its later version in the 1920s. Fuentes’ rhetoric “could have come word-for-word from a Klan speech in 1922,” historian Kelly J. Baker told Jenkins. “The Klan’s goal here was patriotism and nationalism, but it was combined with their focus on White Christianity.”
This worldview was a powerful animating force at the Jan. 6 insurrection, embodied by the moment when the self-described “Patriots” entered the vacated Senate chambers, took over the dais, and proceeded to share a prayer led by Jacob “QAnon Shaman” Chansley.
A video captured by The New Yorker shows the moment: One insurrectionist shouts, “Jesus Christ, we invoke your name!” The men bellow “Amen!” Then Chansley begins to lead them in prayer, saying: “Thank you heavenly father for gracing us with this opportunity to stand up for our God-given inalienable rights.” He also thanks God for allowing them to “exercise our rights, to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists and the globalists that this is our nation, not theirs.”
He concluded: “Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government.”
A final precondition for the coup attempt was the belief, among the target population, that the legitimacy of the United States government derives from its commitment to a particular religious and cultural heritage, and not from its democratic form. It is astonishing to many that the leaders of the Jan. 6 attack on the constitutional electoral process styled themselves as “patriots.” But it makes a glimmer of sense once you understand that their allegiance is to a belief in blood, earth and religion, rather than to the mere idea of a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
A number of the groups, notably the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who led the insurrection similarly voiced their affinity for Christian nationalism. The morning of Jan. 6, as Jenkins reports, a group of Proud Boys led by Ethan Nordean—the primary leader of the men who later spearheaded the siege of the Capitol—were seen praying together.
At a gathering of Proud Boys near the Washington Monument on Dec. 11 captured on video by independent journalist Dakota Santiago for Religion News Service, Nordean had spoken about “sacrificing ourselves for our country” while speaking at an impromptu Proud Boys rally near the Washington Monument, according to footage provided to Religion News Service (RNS) by independent journalist Dakota Santiago.
Nordean—a notorious street brawler nicknamed “Rufio Panman”—described an epiphany he had during a protest about Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross:
I had a moment of realization where I was like, “You know what, I’m going to be diehard about everything in my life. I’m gonna be real.” Because everything that we have sacrificed—because you know how hard it is in this environment that we live in—it is time that you rise to the occasion. Be real.
Now you may not believe in that, but it’s important in the very least for my case for me, because this man did this thing. Just as we sacrifice ourselves for our country. A man provides and protects even when he’s not loved. That is what we do. We are hated but we do it in anyway, we keep showing up every day and we protect these people from these tyrannical dictators.
The same religious fervor has intensified in the aftermath of the insurrection, particularly as Patriot movement believers and their mainstream Republican enablers have doubled down with a gaslighting narrative insisting that what happened Jan. 6 wasn’t an insurrection, it was a righteous protest by Real Americans.
That narrative has been ardently adopted by Christian nationalists like the Trump supporters interviewed earlier this month by NPR:
Outside on the walkway, Murray Clemetson stands with an armful of hand-made signs he brought to church, such as, “Set the DC Patriots Free” and “We Are Americans, Not Terrorists.” The law-school student and father of three —all home-schooled— was at the “Stop The Steal” rally in Washington, D.C., last year.
“The only insurrection that happened on Jan. 6 was by the agent provocateurs, paid actors, and corrupt police and FBI,” he says, disputing all the evidence made public in the more than 700 criminal cases that the rioters were Trump fanatics.
The church the interviewers reported from is Ken Peters’ Patriot Church in Tennessee, one of the nation’s most prominent Christian nationalist congregations. Peters is a rabidly pro-Trump pastor who has appeared onstage in recent months with Mike Lindell, the “My Pillow” conspiracy theorist who claims Donald Trump was the victim of election fraud. Peters also spoke to the crowd gathered in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 5 at a pre-rally for the next day’s “Stop the Steal” protest that devolved into the Capitol insurrection.
Peters’ predilection for linking arms with violent white nationalist thugs like the Proud Boys manifested itself in summer 2021 in Salem, Oregon, outside a Planned Parenthood clinic targeted by Peters’ “Church at Planned Parenthood” campaign. A phalanx of Proud Boys provided “security” for the event, including notorious brawler Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, who is currently in jail awaiting trial on assault charges.
The sermon Peters delivered during NPR’s visit to his church turned a similarly convenient blind eye to Donald Trump’s manifest flaws as a Christian hero. “We consider the left in our nation today to be a giant bully,” Peters said. “And when there is a bully on the schoolyard and somebody rises up and punches back, ‘Hallelujah!’ So we are thankful for Trump.”
Then he added: “But you know what? If Trump passes away tomorrow, God forbid, does that stop us? Does that slow us down? Not one bit. We’ll be looking for the next guy to lead the way.”
Indeed, the long-term determination of Christian nationalists to impose a narrow sectarian view on American government and society are reflected in its legislative assault on state laws, an attempt to reshape U.S. laws from the ground up as well as the top down. Their program “Project Blitz,” revealed by journalist Frederick Clarkson in 2018—a detailed and complex system of proposed legislation with which Christian nationalist beliefs are gradually embedded within state laws—is only one example of the breadth and depth of their assault on liberal democracy.
“The use of Christian symbols, iconography, Scripture in efforts to dominate and exclude are as old the republic itself,” Rev. Fred Davie, executive vice president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, told Trevor Hughes of USA Today. “It’s deeply baked into our nation. It’s deep, but it’s also been proven time and time again to be wrong.”
While many Christian nationalists are grounded in more traditional evangelical views, there is also a component who are cynically embracing religious fervor as a way of broadening their community of white supremacists and expanding their recruitment base.
“For them, it’s just shorthand for identity,” Edward Ahmed Mitchell, deputy executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told Hughes. “There absolutely is a connection between far-right political extremism and far-right religious extremism, but I doubt these people are showing up at church every Sunday and reading their Bibles.”
Research sociologist Matthew DeMichele told Hughes that many of today’s religious displays are an “intense redeployment of old tactics.”
“People don’t want to say that this is a country founded on white supremacy. But we know that to be true,” DeMichele said. “It’s very important to understand that it’s not new for white supremacists to have a Christian identity. But it is intriguing there has been the strengthening overlap of the white nationalists and those of Christian Identity.”
The striking aspect of the surge of Christian nationalism has been its ability to unify sectors of the radical right, from militia-oriented Patriots to bigoted white nationalists to conspiracists like the authoritarian QAnon cult. Alex Newhouse, deputy director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies Besides faith, told Jenkins that social media had been a powerful vector for this confluence.
“This unification is pretty unprecedented,” Newhouse said. “The infusion of Christian nationalism throughout that unification process has been particularly interesting and, in my opinion, is going to end up being pretty dangerous.”
Newhouse particularly has noticed a sudden uptick, since 2019, of interest in Christian Identity, the infamous religious movement long associated with neo-Nazis, particularly the Aryan Nations operation in the northern Idaho Panhandle between 1978 and 2000, which was an Identity church. Newhouse noted that Christian nationalist appeals may “disguise a much more dangerous uptick in adoption of Christian Identity.”
One of the leading voices in this resurgence of Identity beliefs, Newhouse says, is Kyle Chapman, the cofounder of the Proud Boys-affiliated Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knights who later attempted to create an explicitly racist and antisemitic offshoot called “Proud Goys.” (Chapman is currently awaiting trial in Idaho on charges of assaulting a health care worker when he was hospitalized last November.)
Newhouse said Chapman has been interacting with Christian Identity influencers on the encrypted chat platform Telegram, while “blasting out Christian Identity propaganda.” Another key Trumpist figure—QAnon influencer GhostEzra, who has 300,000 followers on Telegram—posted explicit Identity messages. Identity theology—including references to the “two seedline theory,” which claims that Eve also mated with Satan in the Garden of Eden and thus gave birth to Jews—has been popping up with regularity on QAnon and Proud Boys channels on Telegram, Newhouse reported.
“There’s this gradual move toward a more revolutionary, burn-it-all-down posture, and I think Christian Identity for a lot of these people has become a way for them to organize their thoughts,” he said.
As Stewart explained in TheNYT, Christian nationalist beliefs are not merely spreading among far-right extremists. Perhaps even more pernicious is their spread among mainstream conservatives in the media and especially within the Republican Party:
National organizations like the Faith & Freedom Coalition and the Ziklag Group, which bring together prominent Republican leaders with donors and religious right activists, feature “Seven Mountains” workshops and panels at their gatherings. Nationalist leaders and their political dependents in the Republican Party now state quite openly what before they whispered to one another over their prayer breakfasts. Whether the public will take notice remains to be seen.
As I’ve observed previously (while reviewing Stewart’s excellent review of Christian nationalism, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism): When viewed through the lens of its real-world outcomes, fundamentalist Christianity is less a coherent theology than it is a form of spiritual or religious totalitarianism, one that requires abject submission to what is actually a very perverse and narrow interpretation of the meaning of scripture.
This approach translated naturally into political authoritarianism—the kind that Donald Trump practices. And Trump in turn has proven very adept at feeding the psychological needs of the kinds of personalities that adhere to such movements.
Many leaders of the Christian right like to dress up in red, white, and blue and announce themselves as true patriots. But they are the same people who seek to pervert our institutions, betray our international alliances, treat the Constitution as a subcategory of their holy texts, demean whole segments of the population, foist their authoritarian creed upon other people’s children, and celebrate the elevation of a “king” to the presidency who made a sport out of violating democratic laws and norms.
We can only be grateful that he is out of power now. And it will be incumbent on everyone who treasures their democratic institutions to do everything in their power to defend them against this lethal tide of extremism now.
Poll: Nearly 6 in 10 Republicans say they will not vote for any candidate who admits Biden won ‘fair and square’
Andrew Romano, West Coast Correspondent January 27, 2022
Joe Biden is sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 2021. (Andrew Harnik/Pool via Reuters)
Despite a mountain of evidence showing the 2020 presidential contest wasn’t rigged against Donald Trump, nearly 6 in 10 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (57 percent) now say they will not vote in upcoming elections for any candidate who admits that Joe Biden won the presidency “fair and square.”
Only 17 percent say they would consider voting for a candidate who accurately characterizes Biden’s victory as legitimate.
These numbers underscore the degree to which Trump’s “big lie” claiming Biden cheated his way into the White House — a falsehood that three-quarters of Trump voters (74 percent) now believe — has become a litmus test for the entire GOP, crowding out other issues and strengthening Trump’s grip on the party ahead of the 2022 midterms.
For his part, Trump has made it clear that supporting his election fabrications is key to his own personal endorsement. Indeed, the former president is backing primary candidates against state officials who bucked his attempts to overturn the election.
The poll data also helps explain why Republican presidential hopefuls such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis now want to spend millions of dollars on special “election crimes” police units tasked with finding fraud where they previously insisted there was none.
“The way Florida did it, I think, inspired confidence,” DeSantis said immediately after the 2020 election. “That’s how elections should be run.”
The survey of 1,568 U.S. adults, which was conducted from Jan. 20 to 24, found that when asked which issue they want future candidates to focus on the most, the share of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who say “stopping Democrats from rigging and stealing elections” (17 percent) — something that Democrats are not doing — is statistically equivalent to the share who say “bringing down inflation” (19 percent).
A flag at a campaign rally with President Donald Trump and Sen. Kelly Loeffler in Dalton, Ga., on Jan. 4, 2021, the eve of Georgia’s Senate runoff election. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)
Other core conservative policies don’t even come close: “ending COVID restrictions” (10 percent), “fighting crime” (8 percent), “outlawing abortion” (5 percent), “cutting taxes” (5 percent), “appointing Supreme Court justices” (2 percent) and “giving parents more controls over schools” (2 percent). Only “securing the border” (23 percent) ranks higher.
Likewise, if the GOP wins control of Congress in November, 56 percent of Republicans say they want the party to launch yet another investigation of the 2020 presidential election — twice the number (28 percent) who say the opposite.
Trump remains the GOP’s most powerful and influential figure. Looking ahead, 56 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners say Trump’s endorsement is more important than that of “other Republican leaders” (23 percent) when they are deciding how to vote. Half (50 percent) say Trump was “the best Republican president” — far better than George H.W. Bush (4 percent) and his son George W. Bush (9 percent), and significantly better even than conservative icon Ronald Reagan (37 percent). Eighty-two percent rate Trump favorably, and 83 percent say they would vote for him in a rematch with Biden.
For the broader population of voters, Biden’s job approval rating continues to sink. Fifty-three percent of Americans disapprove of how he’s handling the presidency, compared with 40 percent who approve, and a mere 2 points now separate him (42 percent) and Trump (40 percent) in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup. In the Dec. 13 Yahoo News/YouGov poll, Biden (45 percent) led Trump (38 percent) by 7.
Trump delivers his first State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Jan. 30, 2018. (Win McNamee/Pool via Reuters)
There are signs that at least some Republicans are open to alternatives to Trump. More than a quarter (27 percent) say he should not run again. Sixteen percent say they would consider voting for centrist West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin if he were to run for president as an independent, more than the number of Democrats (10 percent) or independents (15 percent) who say the same. And 21 percent already say they would vote for DeSantis over Trump in the GOP primary; other potential candidates — including former Vice President Mike Pence (6 percent), former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley (6 percent) and Fox News host Tucker Carlson (2 percent) — combine for another 19 percent of the vote, and 12 percent say they’re not sure.
DeSantis’s unfavorable rating among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (12 percent) is also lower than Trump’s (15 percent). More than half (51 percent) rate the Florida governor “very” favorably, on par with the far more familiar Trump (57 percent).
As a result, less than half of Republicans and GOP-aligned independents (46 percent) currently say they would vote for Trump in the 2024 GOP primaries. Still, it’s worth noting how close that number is to the 45 percent of the popular vote that Trump won across all Republican primaries in 2016 — enough to secure him the nomination and ultimately propel him to the White House.
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The Yahoo News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,568 U.S. adults interviewed online from Jan. 20 to 24, 2022. This sample was weighted according to gender, age, race and education based on the American Community Survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, as well as 2020 presidential vote (or nonvote) and voter registration status. Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. adults. The margin of error is approximately 2.8 percent.
Biden urges Congress to act now on Equal Rights Amendment
Susan Heavey January 27, 2022
WASHINGTON, Jan 27 (Reuters) – President Joe Biden on Thursday called on Congress to immediately enshrine the Equal Rights Amendment in the U.S. Constitution and formally protect women’s rights nearly a century after lawmakers first raised them.
In a statement, Biden urged Congress “to pass a resolution recognizing ratification of the ERA,” saying recent legal analysis showed there was nothing preventing lawmakers from acting.
The Democratic president’s call comes amid jostling over the deadline to enact the ERA, which passed Congress in 1972 with a 1982 deadline to be enacted if 38 state legislatures voted to approve. Nearly 100 years have passed since it was first introduced in 1923.
Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives separately unveiled a resolution to enshrine the ERA, but it could fall short of the 60 votes needed in the Senate, where Democrats control just 50 seats.
While supporters say the ERA is needed to protect against sexual discrimination and would help achieve equal pay, opponents argue the original timetable has passed and that the amendment is no longer needed.
Virginia became the 38th state in 2020 to adopt the ERA, but Republican then-President Donald Trump sought to block ratification with a legal memo saying the process must begin anew.
A new Justice Department legal analysis, however, allows the process to move forward and “makes clear, there is nothing standing in Congress’s way from doing so,” Biden said.
House oversight panel Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney and other Democrats argue that the ERA made clear it takes effect two years after the final state’s ratification, with Thursday marking two years since Virginia’s vote.
The resolution “reaffirms what we already know to be true: the Equal Rights Amendment is the 28th amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Maloney said.
The issue also remains entangled in the federal courts: Virginia, Illinois and Nevada sued to have the ERA declared valid.
In a statement, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration said it would abide by the Justice Department’s legal opinion unless otherwise directed by a final court order. (Reporting by Susan Heavey; Additional reporting by David Morgan and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Tomasz Janowski and Jonathan Oatis)
State lawmakers proposes bill that would let Arizona legislature nullify presidential elections
Aldous J Pennyfarthing – January 27, 2022
Who are these folks who can’t wrap their minds around the fact that Donald Trump legitimately lost the 2020 election? Where did they ever get the idea that this logorrheic lout was invincible? The guy was laid low by bone spurs, FFS—and he only survived COVID-19 because he was given access to extraordinary life-saving measures. It’s not like he was Teddy Roosevelt regaling his charges with bracing tales about his days with the Rough Riders. At best, Trump’s rough rider tales were just tedious screaming jeremiads about the thread count and awkward fit of his underpants.
But by now it’s an article of faith among “loyal” (read: cultish) Republicans that the 2020 election was stolen from the guy who never polled above 50% approval at any time during his presidency. And once again, Arizona is at the vanguard of the Big Lie boobery. This time it’s Republican state Rep. John Fillmore, who’s proposed a bill that would make Arizona legislators a backstop against election fraud a Republican presidential candidate ever losing the state again.
The bill, introduced by state Rep. John Fillmore (R), would substantially change the way Arizonans vote by eliminating most early and absentee voting and requiring people to vote in their home precincts, rather than at vote centers set up around the state.
Most dramatically, Fillmore’s bill would require the legislature to hold a special session after an election to review election processes and results, and to “accept or reject the election results.”
It’s interesting that this comes from Arizona, the state that authorized a fake, pro-Trump audit that nevertheless confirmed Joe Biden’s victory. (Dead-enders who still dream of a thousand-year Galactic Trumpian Empire have cited the Cyber Ninjas’ post-fraudit “questions” surrounding the election as reasons to keep up the 2020 fight, but those were dismissed with remarkable ease by Maricopa County’s crew of experienced election officials.)
For his part, Fillmore isn’t buying into all this “Biden won” tomfoolery. He saw those boat parades and superspreader rallies with his own eyes, and that trumps a full hand recount of ballots any day. “I don’t care what the press says. I don’t trust ABC, CBS, NBC or Fox or anybody out there. Everybody’s lying to me and I feel like I have a couple hundred ex-wives hanging around me,” Fillmore said at a committee hearing on Wednesday. “We should have voting in my opinion in person, one day, on paper, with no electronic means and hand counting that day. We need to get back to 1958-style voting.”
Hmm, judging by his “ex-wives” crack, I have a feeling the voting system isn’t the only thing he’d like returned to 1958.
So … one day to vote? Does that mean he’ll support an Election Day holiday and a big boost in the number of polling places so people of color don’t have to wait in line for four hours to exercise their sacred constitutional rights? Erm. For some reason I doubt that.
And while Fillmore’s bill is unlikely to pass, it’s still alarming how brazenly the GOP is attempting to rewrite the rules to a game they’d be losing far more frequently if those rules were fair.
Fillmore’s legislation is unlikely to gain much traction, but it is a sign that some Republicans have embraced the idea that legislators should have veto power over the will of the voters if they do not like the results.
Before Trump came along, such initiatives would be rightly seen as hair-on-fire emergencies for Western liberal democracy. Now? Just another Wednesday.
We’re in a fraught moment, folks. I hope we’re all awake and ready to push back at these fatuous fascists every time they try this nonsense. If not, get ready for McRib sandwiches to be permanently classified as a vegetable by the USDA. Because that’s what freedom tastes like in the Trump Reich.
Believe it or not, the economy grew last year at the fastest pace since 1984
Scott Horsley January 27, 2022
People shop in The Galleria mall in Houston during Black Friday on Nov. 26, 2021. The economy grew strongly last year but at an uneven pace because of the pandemic.Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Last year saw the fastest economic growth since Ronald Reagan was president. But for many people, 2021 felt less like “Morning in America” and more like a restless night, dogged by fitful dreams about the ongoing pandemic.
The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the nation’s gross domestic product grew 5.7% last year — the biggest increase since 1984. But the growth arrived in fits and starts, with hopes for a steady recovery repeatedly dashed by successive waves of infection.
And now, uncertainty continues in the year ahead, as the omicron variant continues to spread. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is gearing up to raise interest rates, perhaps aggressively, in an effort to combat stubbornly high inflation.
“It wasn’t a straight line for the economy last year, for sure,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics. “The economy remains tethered to the pandemic.”
Business last year boomed in the spring and early summer, as millions of Americans got vaccinated and felt free to travel and dine out more. In June and July alone, employers added more than 2 million jobs — nearly a third of the year’s total job gains.
“It was crazy. It was a roller coaster,” says Dave Krick, who owns three restaurants in Boise, Idaho.
Krick had high hopes for the end of the year, after a busy October, and he was making plans to resume hosting private parties in his restaurants, only to pull the plug when the infection rate started to soar again as the omicron variant started to spread.Article continues after sponsor message
“It was a teaser. We though the holiday season was going to be really good,” Krick said. “Those holiday parties for us are a big part of making the year work. And we basically canceled it all.”
A flight information display system shows cancelled flights at the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Dec. 27, 2021, in Arlington, Va. Flight cancellations became a regular occurrence in December as the omicron variant infected staff at airports and airlines.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
An economic bang – and a whimper
The Commerce Department said GDP grew at an annual rate of 6.9% in the last three months of the year, thanks in part to stronger exports and a buildup of inventories.
But the fourth quarter was as uneven as the nine months that came before.
“Q4 started with a bang and ended with a whimper,” said Zandi. “October was a fantastic month for the economy — consumer spending, investment — everything was kind of firing on all cylinders. And then by December, omicron came on the scene quickly and did a lot of damage.”
And forecasters expect that weakness to continue into the beginning of the new year.
Initial claims for unemployment benefits in recent weeks suggest some employers are cutting jobs in response to the omicron wave.
Help wanted signs such as this one outside a retailer in Hattiesburg, Miss., on March 27, 2021, were a common sight last year as busineses struggled to recruit workers.Rogelio V. Solis/AP
Even though last year’s economic growth was the strongest in decades, it fell short of what economists once hoped for. Following passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, some forecasters were predicting growth as high as 7%, fueled by widespread vaccinations and pent-up demand.
“There were just too many people who didn’t get vaccinated,” Zandi said. “It’s admirable how well the economy did perform, despite the fact that vaccines didn’t exactly solve the problem.”
“Even though we had a lot of demand, we weren’t able to do as much with it as we had hoped,” said Krick, the restaurant owner.
His labor costs have risen sharply this year, thanks to higher wages and new health benefits. The restaurant’s food costs are up as well.
“Our supply chains don’t like this roller coaster,” Krick said. “We have a hard time predicting what we’re going to get and not get, so we have to adjust quickly with menus and that takes a lot of our energy and time. And the costs are definitely difficult.”
The price of restaurant meals nationwide was 6% higher in December than a year ago, while overall inflation reached 7% — the highest level since 1982.
Will 2022 be better?
The new year will likely continue to be marked by the path of the pandemic – as well as the fight against inflation.
The Federal Reserve signaled Wednesday that it plans to begin raising interest rates at its next meeting in March, in an effort to keep a lid on prices, and markets expect three additional rate hikes over the course of the year.
The central bank’s challenge is not to hit the brakes too hard and slow the economy too much — a tricky feat considering some economists believe the central bank waited too long to tackle inflation.
“We do expect some softening in the economy from omicron, but we think that that should be temporary,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell told reporters. “We think the underlying strength of the economy should show though fairly quickly after that.”
Supermarkets such as this one in Orlando, Fl., are experiencing a shortage of some products as the omicron variant infects workers and worsens supply chain woes.John Raoux/AP
Zandi expressed confidence that the central bank could gradually withdraw its easy-money policies without stalling the recovery.
“I think they’ll be able to do it and land the economic plane on the tarmac,” he said. “It might be a little bumpy here. There’s a lot of cross-winds in the economy.”
Most of the federal relief programs that pumped trillions of dollars into people’s pockets during the pandemic have also now expired, although restaurants are petitioning Congress for additional help.
Zandi thinks the economy will continue to expand in 2022, albeit at a slower pace of around 4%.
“All of us are getting better at kind of navigating the virus and learning how to live with it and manage through it,” Zandi said. “Hopefully, we have another good year in 2022.”
Krick is also hopeful that business will continue to rebound, but he’s not making any firm predictions about the year ahead.
“One thing we know right now is we don’t know what 2022 is going to bring us,” he said. “We’re bleeding a lot of cash, hoping that this spring and summer will be better, mainly because we don’t have any choice. It’s a weird time to be running a restaurant.”
