Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

The Trump regime knew full well that there was no election fraud with Dominion voting machines in 2020, and they said as much.

Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump.

But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on Monday evening.

By the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump’s campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue.

The court papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless.

The documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Mr. Trump.

According to emails contained in the documents, Zach Parkinson, then the campaign’s deputy director of communications, reached out to subordinates on Nov. 13 asking them to “substantiate or debunk” several matters concerning Dominion. The next day, the emails show, Mr. Parkinson received a copy of a memo cobbled together by his staff from what largely appear to be news articles and public fact-checking services.

Even though the memo was hastily assembled, it rebutted a series of allegations that Ms. Powell and others were making in public. It found:

• That Dominion did not use voting technology from the software company, Smartmatic, in the 2020 election.
• That Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Mr. Soros.
• And that there was no evidence that Dominion’s leadership had connections to left-wing “antifa” activists, as Ms. Powell and others had claimed.

As Mr. Coomer’s lawyers wrote in their motion in the defamation suit, “The memo produced by the Trump campaign shows that, at least internally, the Trump campaign found there was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories regarding Dominion” and Mr. Coomer.

 

This is of course the Trumpies hanging Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani out to dry in the wind, along with Newsmax, for Dominion's defamation suit.  The election fraud nonsense was complete horse shit all along, and the existence of this memo only proves that Trump was covering his ass when his plan A, Mike Pence stealing the election for him on January 6th, failed. The plan B "voting machine fraud" failed too, and Dominion is set to win billions in lawsuits as a direct result.

But none of that will come from Trump's pockets, after all, this memo says the White House didn't believe any of it.

Of course, it means the ongoing state investigations are all nonsense and garbage too, but Plan C was always to rig the 2024 contest ahead of time with a boatload of new voter suppression and election-stealing measures in key battleground states, and that has already succeeded. No Democrat will ever win Georgia, Texas, or Florida again, and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin Republicans are still trying to make the Big Lie into the truth in their respective states. 

It's still far from over, but of course they knew they were lying, and the court documents prove it.

Stop Calling Iowa A Battleground State

Iowa's as red as Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana these days, and Democrats need to accept it and move on.

Fewer than one third of Iowans approve of the job Joe Biden is doing as president, a steep drop from earlier this year.

Thirty-one percent of Iowans approve of how Biden is handling his job, while 62% disapprove and 7% are not sure, according to the latest Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll.

That’s a 12 percentage point drop in approval from June, the last time the question was asked. Biden's disapproval numbers jumped by 10 points during the same period. In June, 43% approved and 52% disapproved.

Biden’s job approval has not been in net positive territory in Iowa since March, when 47% of Iowans approved of his performance and 44% disapproved.

"This is a bad poll for Joe Biden, and it's playing out in everything that he touches right now,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer.

The partisan breakdown of the poll shows Biden has nearly no support from Republicans. Just 4% of Republicans say they approve of his job performance as president, while 95% disapprove. Among Democrats, that number is largely reversed, with 86% approving and 7% disapproving. A majority of political independents disapprove, at 62%, while 29% approve.

Biden's job approval rating is lower than former President Donald Trump's worst showing in the Iowa Poll. The former Republican president's worst job approval was 35% in December 2017. Other recent presidents' worst Iowa Poll results: Barack Obama, 36%, in February 2014, and George W. Bush, 25%, in September 2008.

The poll of 805 Iowa adults was conducted Sept. 12-15 by Selzer & Co. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

 

Iowa is as much Trump Country now as the rest of the Midwest.  Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan are battlegrounds, but let's stop pretending Iowa's in any better shape than Kentucky right now. Biden doing worse now, today, than Trump ever did in the state is everything you need to know about the spread of cultism out there.

It's depressing, but true.

September Break

It's that day again.

 

Carry on.

StupidiNews!

• The Justice Department has charged two Trump campaign operatives with illegally funneling $25,000 into the Trump campaign from Russian sources.
• A New York City pizzeria forced visiting Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to eat outside after he refused to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination.
• Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is expected to hold power but with a coalition government in parliament as election returns from Monday show
• US officials are expected to allow vaccinated passengers from other countries to travel to the US, no word on whether vaccine requirements will be extended to domestic passengers.
• The Securities and Exchange Commission is opening a federal civil rights probe into game maker Activision Blizzard, following a California state probe into harassment and discrimination.
  

Last Call For The Road To Gilead, Con't

The Texas Functional Abortion Ban is highly unpopular among Americans, as you might expect.

Key aspects of the new Texas law restricting access to abortions receive a thumbs down from a broad majority of Americans, especially the so-called “bounty” payment provision. The latest Monmouth (“Mon-muth”) University Poll also finds public approval of the U.S. Supreme Court has dipped in the past five years while most Americans support keeping access to abortion legal and do not want the nation’s highest court to revisit the Roe v. Wade decision.

A majority of the public (54%) disagrees with the Supreme Court allowing the Texas law that effectively bans abortions after six weeks to go into effect. Another 39% of Americans agree with the court. Most Democrats (73%) disagree with the decision while most Republicans (62%) agree. Democrats (77%) and independents (61%) are more likely than Republicans (47%) to say they have heard a lot about this new law.

Two unique provisions of the Texas law are broadly opposed by the public. Seven in ten Americans (70%) disapprove of allowing private citizens to use lawsuits to enforce this law rather than having government prosecutors handle these cases. Additionally, 8 in 10 Americans (81%) disapprove of giving $10,000 to private citizens who successfully file suits against those who perform or assist a woman with getting an abortion. The vast majority of Democrats and independents oppose both provisions. Republicans are split on having private citizens enforce the law (46% approve and 41% disapprove), but most GOP identifiers (67%) take a negative view of the $10,000 payment aspect.

“The American public is largely pro-choice, although many would accept some limitations on abortion access. This Texas law goes way too far for most people. The ‘bounty’ aspect in particular seems objectionable,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute.

Currently, 6 in 10 Americans say abortion should be always legal (33%) or legal with some limitations (29%). Another 24% say it should be illegal except for rape, incest, or to save the mother’s life and 11% say it should always be illegal. These results are nearly identical to a Monmouth poll taken two years ago. There is a slight gender difference in support for legal access to abortion, but this is primarily among people of color – 76% of women compared with 51% of men in these demographic groups support legalized abortion. Among non-Hispanic white Americans, 61% of women and 63% of men are in support.

Similarly, 62% of Americans say the Supreme Court should leave the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision as it is while just 31% want to see the decision revisited. Among those who support legal abortion access, 20% support revisiting Roe and 76% are opposed. Among those who want to make all or most abortions illegal, 51% support revisiting Roe and 40% are opposed.

“For most Americans, including many of those who support restricting abortion access, Roe v. Wade should be considered settled law. We’ll probably see in the next year whether a majority of the Supreme Court agrees,” said Murray.

 

Of course, the only poll that matters is what five of nine Supreme Court Justices are willing to state. The Roberts Court will hear Mississippi's abortion case -- setting up the very possible end of Roe and safe abortion access for more than half of American states -- on December 1.

 

The Supreme Court will hear a case concerning a Mississippi abortion law on December 1, the court announced on Monday, teeing up one of the most substantial cases of the term in which the justices are being asked to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

The Mississippi case -- the most important set of abortion-related oral arguments the court has heard since 1992 -- comes as states across the country, emboldened by the conservative majority and the addition of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the high court, are increasingly passing restrictive abortion-related regulations, hoping to curb the constitutional right first established in 1973 in Roe and reaffirmed in 1992 when the court handed down Planned Parenthood v. Casey. 

Roe v. Wade is the 1973 landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion nationwide prior to viability, which can occur at around 24 weeks of pregnancy. 

Mississippi's Gestational Age Act, passed in 2018 but blocked by two federal courts, allows abortion after 15 weeks "only in medical emergencies or for severe fetal abnormality" and has no exception for rape or incest. If doctors perform abortions outside the parameters of the law they will have their medical licenses suspended or revoked and may be subject to additional penalties and fines. 

In a brief filed in July, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, a Republican, argued that Roe v. Wade was "egregiously wrong" and should be overturned. 

"The conclusion that abortion is a constitutional right has no basis in text, structure, history, or tradition" Fitch told the justices. 

 

Except, you know, 45+ years of precedent by this very Supreme Court. Unfortunately the court has been whittling away at it all my life, and it looks like the last few strands will be cut away in June 2022.

It remains that the argument that both Texas and Mississippi want to use to allow individual states to void abortion can be used to void just about all other civil rights enshrined since 1962. We'll be right back to the bad old days, and I don't think enough people realize this yet.

Getting rid of safe access to abortion is the beginning of the road to Gilead, not the end.

The Big Lie, Con't

This month's Bob Woodward/Robert Costa Trump book "Peril" continues to be a hot property in pundit circles because of the salaciousness of Tang the Conqueror's final few months, but as Greg Sargent points out, the book also details the efforts by the Trump GOP to explicitly use loopholes in the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to have VP Mike Pence openly steal the 2020 election.

The revelations come from the new book “Peril,” by The Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. The headline: Two GOP senators — Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mike Lee of Utah — took Trump’s lies about election fraud seriously enough to devote real resources to vetting them.

But for our purposes, the more important revelation involves how those lies were supposed to interlock with the broader scheme cooked up by Trump and his co-conspirators.

The key takeaway: Gaping holes in the Electoral Count Act — the 1887 law that governs how Congress counts electoral college votes — were central to the chances that their scheme might succeed.

The book recounts that four days before Jan. 6 — when Congress counts the electoral votes — Lee received a White House memo outlining how Vice President Pence could scuttle the process.

Because Republicans in several swing states had voted to send sham electors for Trump to Congress, it argued, Pence could simply set aside the actual electors from those states for President Biden. Both sets would be invalid, and Pence could count the remaining electors, designating Trump winner of a majority of them.

Though the memo ultimately advised against this process, it did suggest it as a potential option. And it did recommend that Pence use objections by GOP lawmakers to Biden’s electors to delay the process. The book reports that Pence explored this idea before rejecting it.

Let’s be clear: The fact that these ideas were considered this seriously was made possible in part by the absurd ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act, or ECA.

First, because the ECA provides that a state can appoint new electors if the election “failed” — which is defined very vaguely — the idea was to use “election fraud” lies to declare that popular voting “failed” to render a clear outcome. GOP legislatures could then appoint electors for Trump, regardless of their state’s popular votes.

Second, because the ECA makes it easy for Congress to object to electors — only one lawmaker from each chamber can force votes on whether to count them — the idea was to get congressional Republicans to invalidate Biden’s electors in key states. Trump would prevail with a majority of remaining electors.

Third, because the ECA does not clearly define the vice president’s role (as president of the Senate) as purely ceremonial, the idea was to get Pence to somehow rule in favor of the objections to electors, or at least to delay the count.

That would either result in Trump prevailing with a majority of electors, or buy enough time for GOP legislatures to send rogue electors. Remember, getting Pence to rig or delay the count was precisely what Trump incited the Jan. 6 mob to accomplish.

In a great new draft paper, election law scholar Richard L. Hasen warns that we face “serious risk” of “election subversion” or an “actual stolen election.” Hasen discusses reforms that could avert such scenarios, which will also be the topic of a conference on Friday.

In the last election, no GOP legislature appointed rogue electors, a majority of Congress voted to uphold Biden’s electors, and Pence ultimately backed away from the plot. But some GOP legislators did consider this scheme, around 150 congressional Republicans did vote to subvert Biden’s electors, and Pence did explore the outer limits of what he might do for Trump.

 

It certainly looks like the sole reason we're not stuck in a successful Trump coup right now is because Mike Pence got cold feet.  There's not any doubt anymore that this was Trump's plan since November 6th and Pence failed to execute.

That's it. The Republic was spared because Pence is a coward.

Needless to say, the Dems have to fix the ECA or Trump (or worse) will steal the election in 2024. They continue to set the stage for doing just that well ahead of the next election.

The Wisconsin Republican leading the state’s partisan inquiry into the 2020 election results on Monday warned election clerks that they would face subpoenas if they did not cooperate and defended the investigation’s legitimacy by declaring that he was not seeking to overturn President Biden’s victory in the state.

“We are not challenging the results of the 2020 election,” Michael Gableman, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice overseeing the investigation, argued in a video posted on YouTube. The inquiry, he said, “may include a vigorous and comprehensive audit if the facts that are discovered justify such a course of action.”

The video from Mr. Gableman comes after he and Wisconsin’s Republican legislative leaders have faced increasing criticism from both their party’s far-right and from Democrats. The right has accused Mr. Gableman of not doing enough to push lies about the 2020 election propagated by former President Donald J. Trump. Democrats have painted the $680,000 inquiry into the election as a waste of state resources and a distraction from other needed business.

Mr. Gableman was assigned to look into Mr. Trump’s false claims that the state’s election was stolen from him by Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, nearly three months ago. The five-minute video released Monday was the first extensive public statement Mr. Gableman has made outlining the scope and aim of his investigation.

The Republicans’ continuing effort to re-examine the 2020 results in Wisconsin comes as Trump allies elsewhere have gone to great lengths to undermine Mr. Biden’s victory. Arizona Republicans are near the end of a monthslong review of ballots in Maricopa County. Pennsylvania Republicans last week approved subpoenas for driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers for every voter in the state. And 18 states, including Texas this month, have passed laws this year adding new voting restrictions.

In recent weeks, Trump-allied conservatives in Wisconsin have shown public frustration at the pace and transparency of Mr. Gableman’s investigation. This month, a group led by David A. Clarke Jr., a former Milwaukee County sheriff who has been a prominent purveyor of false claims about the election, held a rally at the State Capitol in Madison to protest what it argued was insufficient devotion by Mr. Gableman and the state’s Republican leaders to challenging the 2020 results.

Mr. Gableman said on Monday that his investigation would require the municipal officials who operate Wisconsin’s elections to prove that voting was conducted properly. He said local clerks would be required to obey any subpoenas he might issue.

Election clerks in Milwaukee and Green Bay ignored previous subpoenas issued by the Republican chairwoman of the Assembly’s elections committee for ballots and voting machines. Mr. Vos had declined to approve those subpoenas.

“The responsibility to demonstrate that our elections were conducted with fairness, inclusivity and accountability is on the government and on the private, for-profit interests that did work for the government,” Mr. Gableman said. “The burden is not on the people to show in advance of an investigation that public officials and their contractors behaved dishonestly.”

 

Two important points here.

 

First, the declaration that Wisconsin Republicans "aren't trying to overturn Biden's election" is important in the context that the goal is 2022 and especially 2024.

Second, good government practices or not, the assumption that election officials in a state must prove they held the election and tabulated the results fairly, that is, the burden of proof is on election officials to prove they did not cheat, is wildly destructive, anti-democratic and authoritarian. It's the kind of things dictators say right before they suspend such elections as "corrupt" and seize power.

To start at "Elections are rigged" as a social construct is one thing. To do that as a legal maxim, well, that's how you end up not being a modern democracy anymore.

The Suppuration Of Church And Trump

There's little evidence that Trumpism is driving away American evangelical Christians, who still make up a solid one-quarter of Americans, but at least some of them are openly talking about the fact maybe Trump isn't the best spokesman for that whole Jesus forgiveness thing.

Even as evangelicals maintain their position as the most popular religion in the U.S., a movement of self-described "exvangelicals" is breaking away, using social media to engage tens of thousands of former faithful.

The big picture: Donald Trump's presidency, as well as movements around LGBTQ rights, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, drew more Americans into evangelical churches while also pushing some existing members away.

What they're saying: Blake Chastain, the Exvangelical podcaster who's also credited with starting the use of the hashtag #exvangelical, tells Axios that, in the old days, people "might meet at a bar and speak in hushed tones about 'how weird that church was.’” Now, Chastain said, those kinds of discussions are far more public and ripple across larger networks of people because of social media.

What we're watching: There's a growing subculture of the "deconstructed" — a buzzword with a range of meanings, from stepping back from a certain kind of Christian culture or politics, to leaving organized religion altogether. 

Instagram accounts like "Dirty Rotten Church Kids” and "Your Favorite Heretics" are providing an online community for those questioning or rejecting the evangelical church tradition. Podcasts including Exvangelical, Almost Heretical and Straight White American Jesus are garnering big followings.Google searches for "religious trauma" and "exvangelical" are on the rise, according to Google Trends.

How we got here: There were always diverse views among evangelicals, but "Trump's four years in the White House made painfully clear just how deep these divisions ran," said author Kristin Du Mez. 

Du Mez wrote the 2020 book "Jesus and John Wayne," which chronicles ideas about masculinity in the white Evangelical church and politics. It has sold more than 100,000 copies. The differences within evangelicalism "can no longer be papered over with the kind of religious language of 'we're all in this together,'" Du Mez told Axios.

By the numbers: About a quarter of Americans describe themselves as evangelical protestants — that's tens of millions of people — according to polling by Pew Research Center. 

14% are white evangelicals, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, and the evangelical population grew among white Americans over the past four years.
There's no concrete data on the size or demographics of the exvangelical population, or how fast it's growing. There’s also no data that would quantify how much of that movement has been driven by opposition to Trump, versus other political and cultural trends.

In the past five years, the white evangelical church in America has faced its own MeToo movement (#churchtoo) and massive cultural shifts in its pews over LGBTQ rights and systemic racism.

 

I've talked before how religious affiliation in America is stalling out, especially among younger Millennials and Zoomers.  There are a lot more people willing to admit in America these days that they are non-affiliated, agnostic (like myself), or completely atheist.

It's good to see that people are joining churches in order to advance civil and human rights, and it's also kind of sad to see people leaving religions because they realize the people in charge of those religions are wholly uninterested in religious inclusiveness. Then again, it's not like that hasn't been a major problem with organized religions for the last couple millennia or so.

Still, if the numbers aren't concrete, it means that the inflow and outflow are close enough that one isn't overpowering the other, and considering how much damage white evangelicals do in general, I'm okay with that.

StupidiNews!

• 2021 is on track to be the deadliest year in decades for gun violence, with nearly 15,000 firearm homicides as of September 15.
• California power utility company PG&E is warning residents that dangerous wildfire conditions mean that rolling safety blackouts will be coming in order to prevent new blazes.
• US auto safety officials have opened a probe into as many as 30 million vehicles made in the last 20 years over defective Takata Corporation airbag inflators.
• British PM Boris Johnson says internet retail giant Amazon must pay its "fair share" of taxes in the UK and will seeks the means to make the company do so.
• An FDA advisory group has given the green light to COVID-19 vaccine booster shots for Americans over 65, but has rejected the idea of requiring a booster shot for anyone younger.
  

The Vax Of Life, Con't

 Republican "leadership" at the state level in the era of COVID is literally killing off their constituents.

 

For the first time in Alabama’s known history, the state had more deaths than births in 2020 — a grim milestone that underscores the pandemic’s calamitous toll.

“Our state literally shrunk in 2020,” Dr. Scott Harris, Alabama’s state health officer, said at a news conference on Friday. There were 64,714 total deaths in the state last year, compared to 57,641 births, Dr. Harris said.

Such a gap had never been recorded, not even during World War I, World War II and the flu pandemic of 1918, Dr. Harris said. Going back to the earliest available records, in 1900, “We’ve never had a time when deaths exceeded births,” he said.

Nationally, the birthrate declined for the sixth straight year in 2020, and some experts say the pandemic may be accelerating that trend. A study from the University of New Hampshire found that half of the 50 U.S. states had more deaths than births in 2020, compared with only five states with more deaths than births in 2019.

In Alabama last year, 7,182 deaths were officially attributed to Covid, according to data from the Alabama Department of Public Health.

On Wednesday, in a town hall discussion with Al.com, Alabama’s largest digital news site, Dr. Harris dismissed arguments that Covid deaths were being misrepresented.

“We get skeptical people who go, ‘Oh well, those were just older people who were going to die anyway, and you’re just attributing their deaths to Covid,’” he said. “That is not the case.”

Alabama has recently averaged about 60 deaths a day, according to a New York Times database, and only 41 percent of the state’s eligible population is fully vaccinated.

 

I guarantee you that the numbers for 2021 in all of these states with GOP ghouls running the show will be much, much worse.  These buffoons and monsters should be run out of town. Instead, "serious" pundits are asking which one of these clods will replaced Joe Biden in 2024.

Turns out though that Americans are noticing that Republican governors are butchering them.

A look at the polling in California and nationally reveals that Republicans would be wise to come up with a better message on the coronavirus, or else they could be throwing away a clear pathway to a strong 2022 midterm election. 

The number one issue for California voters in last week's recall was the coronavirus. Nearly a third (32%) of the electorate said it was the top issue in the exit poll, which was the runaway for most important. The "no" side on the recall -- against the removal of Newsom -- won among these voters by a 81% to 19% margin. 

The coronavirus being the number one issue matches what we've seen nationally as well. CNN's last poll conducted by SSRS showed that 36% of Americans said the coronavirus was the most important issue facing the country. The next closest was the economy at a mere 20%. 

When we look at the generic congressional ballot, Democrats lead among voters who said the coronavirus was the top issue by a 63% to 27% margin. Among all other voters, they trail by a 52% to 36% margin.

 

And hey, let's be honest: the people who are worried about COVID will be alive to vote in 2022. The people who think the virus is a hoax and the vaccine is worse, well, there won't be as many of them around in November of next year, now will there?

 

Sunday Long Read: Fighting On The Southern Front

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes to us from Scientific American, where an ICU nurse, Kathryn Ivey, describes her experiences in the ICU as a rookie.

I saw my name followed by “RN” for the first time on July 27, 2020. The next day, my instructor, or preceptor, and I were assigned to the COVID intensive care unit at our hospital in Nashville, Tenn. I read the assignment sheet with a strange knot in my chest. It wasn’t fear or dread rising into my throat but something much harder to name.

For months, as a nurse intern, I’d watched the battle-weary nurses emerge from COVID rooms, taking off their PPE like warriors stripping off armor, their faces lined from the pressure of the respirators. There was something etched in their faces I couldn’t fully understand at the time, something that ran deeper than sadness, some terrible weight that came from caring for these patients. Now it was my turn for what became a grim initiation into the world of nursing and medicine. I learned how to be a nurse behind a respirator and a yellow gown amid the constant beeping and hissing of ventilators that couldn’t support failing lungs. I learned how to be a nurse with death constantly at my heels.

Because I was so new, I had no baseline for what normal nursing looked like; I just had a vague sense that it couldn’t look like this. The unit was bleak, and everything we did felt futile, and I realized at some point I felt more like a ferryman to death than anything else. Some people lived—if they never got to the point they needed continuous BiPAP, a type of face mask that constantly pushes air into the lungs. Most didn’t live. By the time they came to us, they were too sick and were beyond the power we had to heal. They were in renal failure, respiratory failure, liver failure, cardiac failure. One organ system would fall, and it brought down the next and then the next like dominos, a horrible cascade that we could predict but not stop.

I watched, feeling helpless, as patient after patient progressed through the stages of the disease, each requiring a higher level of oxygen support: nasal cannula to Vapotherm to BiPAP. Then, when their chests started heaving and they started sweating despite the BiPAP mask forcing the strongest possible concentration of oxygen into their lungs, I knew with heavy dread that soon they would be intubated. I remember every single time I made the call to the doctor to tell her that it was time. Then came the quiet acquiescence on the end of the line and the flurry of activity as we prepared the ventilator and the medications that would keep them comfortable after. I remember every single 2 A.M. phone call to family members so they could hear the voice of the person they loved at least one more time.

“Is she going to be okay?” they would ask. I tried not to lie, not to give false hope. I heard too many voices cracking on the other end of the line, the family beset with helplessness and with grief. “We’re going to do everything we can,” I would say.

There are places we can’t call you back from—places you go where we can’t follow. And this is one of them. The ICU felt like purgatory, like a punishment, like we were torturing these people whose bodies were wrecked beyond hope. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were failing them. The feeling of wrongness was so pervasive that it followed me home and would have choked me if I let it. So I didn’t let it. I got used to the death. I walled it off, pushed it down and did my job. I advocated for death with dignity, with as much kindness and comfort as we can muster, and I accepted very early on that we can't save everyone.

Every time I try to describe the COVID unit in anything more than metaphor and allusion, I falter. I can tell you that for a while, walking into work felt like Dante following Virgil past the gates and the warning inscribed there. I can talk about Charon and the river Styx and how the nurses flitted between worlds, crossing that river of death every time we entered a COVID room. What I’m saying is dramatic and probably pretentious, but language fails here. I don’t think there are words for what this is. The COVID unit is mottled limbs and scorching skin; bloody secretions and constant alarms from one patient after another going into abnormal heart rhythm;. It is the beeping of the Prismaflex delivering continuous renal replacement therapy because the circuit pulling the patient’s blood outside of their body to filter it, as the failing kidneys should do, has clotted yet again. The ventilators sound the alarm from inside the rooms for 1,000 reasons, some of them fixable, some not. Room after room of patients are on life support, silent except for the relentless chiming and beeping that remind us that they are dying, we are failing. Those alarms ring in my head when I get home, reminding me of every way I couldn’t save them. We are haunted by failures now, starting with the failures of policy that allowed human lives to be sacrificed on the altar of the economy and ending with us telling a family that we can do no more. COVID has made martyrs of us all.

 

Zandarmom is a retired nurse, and I just scream when I read accounts like this and think of the absolute, infantile selfishness of the anti-vaccine fools. I don't want to bring them into the fold, I want to wring their damn necks.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The anger and rage at the "Justice for J6" rally in DC was definitely there, the people that showed up hoping for another armed insurrection definitely wanted one, but the problem was there were only a handful of clowns there and a whole hell of a lot of Capitol Police.  The clowns had plenty to say, though.

 

Mike Collins is one of just two Congressional candidates announced as a speaker for the incredibly shrinking "Justice for J6 rally" at the U.S. Capitol tomorrow. And he's using the moment to go full wingnut.

Collins, a trucking company owner, ramped up wild rhetoric Friday at what was billed as a "campaign kickoff" in Jackson GA -- even though Collins had announced his candidacy more than three months ago on June 8.

Collins "promised to stand up to 'liberal left-wing wackos, RINOS, elites — and even the Republican establishment," including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), promising to vote against him becoming Speaker of the House if Republicans take control of the chamber in 2023,' Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) reported Friday.

"And if by some odd chance he becomes speaker and he doesn't want to give me a committee assignment, then I'm fine with that," he said. "I'll make a great teammate for Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene."

He added: "The time for civility, the time for compromise, that's over with; the time for bipartisanship is done," he told. "There is no compromising."

Collins is among just a few speakers being billed for the diminished rally. But he's undaunted about that.

"He said his attendance at the D.C. rally is about fighting back against political persecution and tweeted that "America should not have a government that holds political prisoners," GPB reported.

"These people deserve their day in court; everybody deserves their day in court," he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "And I'm going up there to say to these people need their day in court, and it's time for it to happen."

Collins is the son of the late Rep. Mac Collins, who served in Congress from 1993 to 2005, leaving to mount an unsuccessful 2004 U.S. Senate race. The elder Collins died in 2018.

 

Thankfully my worst fears did not come to pass. Nothing happened other than a couple dozen fools made themselves readily available for identification later.

Without Trump covering for them, these guys are much, much less aggressive. But with the media covering them, they don't always have to be aggressive. Just threatening.

Still dangerous. But I don't think another January 6th is going to happen anytime soon. That's good, believe me, I am glad to be completely wrong on this, and I admit it. All bullies are at heart, cowards.

But cowards can still be deadly once in a great while. We still need to be careful.

Not scared or afraid, but careful.

The French Correction

France is so unhappy with America's decision to sell Australia nuclear sub technology that for the first time in the history of the US and France, Paris has recalled its Ambassador to Washington for consultations, in what amounts to yet another major international incident on President Biden's plate.

The rift between the Biden administration and the oldest U.S. ally widened Friday, as French President Emmanuel Macron ordered the recall of France’s ambassador to Washington in response to this week’s announcement of a secretly negotiated U.S.-British deal to sell nuclear-powered submarines to Australia.

Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called the unprecedented move an “extraordinary decision” that “reflects the exceptional seriousness” of the situation.

What he called “a new partnership” excluding France, and the resulting cancellation of a $66 billion Australian contract to buy diesel-powered French submarines, “constitute unacceptable behavior among allies and partners,” Le Drian said in a statement.

France also recalled its ambassador to Australia.

In a statement, the White House played down the breach. “We have been in close touch with our French partners. . . . We understand their position and will continue to be engaged in the coming days to resolve our differences, as we have done at other points over the course of our long alliance,” National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne said in a statement.

“France is our oldest ally and one of our strongest partners, and we share a long history of shared democratic values and a commitment to working together to address global challenges,” Horne said.

 

France is pissed, and if you're wondering why, well, here you go.  

There are a number of reasons. For one, the deal was of virtually unrivaled economic significance to France’s defense sector, said Pierre Morcos, a French visiting fellow at the D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The deal was crucial for “a whole network of small and medium enterprises” in France that were supposed to benefit from it, he said. The economic significance of the Australia deal has been compared to a landmark 2015 agreement between India and French company Dassault Aviation to supply 36 Rafale fighter jets.

Second, France stands to lose strategically as a result of Australia bowing out of its previous commitment. When the deal was struck, the French government celebrated a “strategic partnership … for the next 50 years.”

“This overall framework is now jeopardized,” Morcos said.

A third key reason for the French anger is the way the deal between Australia, Britain and the United States was announced. A French official said Thursday that Paris learned of the decision only through media reports — even though it had been negotiated among the three participants for months.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that France was “aware in advance” of the new agreement, although Secretary of State Antony Blinken indicated that awareness came only in the past day or two.

The fact that the Biden administration did not apparently anticipate the furious French reaction means that “we are heading toward difficult times between Paris, Canberra and Washington,” Morcos said.

France’s unusually blunt reaction to the deal suggests that it could have longer-term implications for President Biden’s pledge to reset transatlantic relations after four tumultuous years under President Donald Trump.

Within the European Union, the fallout could play into the hands of those calling for the bloc to boost its defense capabilities and to be less reliant on the United States. Such demands had already gained momentum over the past weeks amid the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen endorsed calls for a 5,000-person rapid-deployment force and announced two new measures: a forthcoming declaration from the E.U. and NATO, and a summit focused on European defense with French President Emmanuel Macron, who has been one of the most persistent proponents of “strategic autonomy” for the bloc. 

Of course, the big winner in all of this diplomatic mess is China, who is licking its chops and looking right across the Taiwan Strait.

Taiwan is a "sea fortress" blocking China's expansion into the Pacific and is willing to share with other democracies its knowledge of countering Beijing's efforts to undermine it, Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told a U.S. audience on Wednesday.

The United States, like most countries, does not have formal diplomatic ties with Chinese-claimed Taiwan, but is the democratically ruled island's most important international backer and arms supplier.

China has stepped up military and diplomatic pressure against Taiwan since President Tsai Ing-wen first won office in 2016, seeking to force Taipei to accept Beijing's sovereignty claims, to the alarm of both Taipei and Washington.

Addressing an online forum organised by the Global Taiwan Institute on Taiwan-U.S. relations and attended by several former senior U.S. officials, Wu said Taiwan played a "significant role" in ensuring freedom of navigation in the strategically important Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.

"Both of them are critical to peace and stability in the Indo Pacific region," he said. "Most importantly, a democratic Taiwan serves as a sea fortress to block China's expansionism into the wider Pacific."

China claims Taiwan as its territory to legitimise its aggression and expansionism, Wu said, adding: "Isn't this irredentism precisely what gave rise to the Second World War?"

Taiwan faces not only military threats from China, but also cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns and other "grey zone" tactics, he added.

"Taiwan has learned valuable lessons and developed various means to tackle the threat to democracy, and we are more than willing to share this knowledge with fellow democracies."

There was no immediate response to his comments from China.

Earlier on Wednesday, China's Taiwan Affairs Office repeated warnings for Taipei's government not to try and seek formal independence for the island, saying such "wanton provocations and evil acts" would only threaten peace and stability.

 

France is throwing a fit, but the country's time of being a major naval power has been over for basically all of my life. The only folks who didn't know it were, well, Paris.

We'll see how Biden handles this. It seems like amazing Gallic pique, but okay then.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

What the anti-choice crowd wants is control over women, and more importantly control over their bodies, and control over their lives. They keep revealing their hand to the world, and every keeps going "Oh, no, that would never happen here" and voters continue to vote for the GOP ghouls anyway.

The legal architect of the Texas abortion ban has argued in a supreme court brief that overturning Roe v Wade, the landmark decision which guarantees a right to abortion in the US, could cause women to practice abstinence from sexual intercourse as a way to “control their reproductive lives”.

Former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, who played a pivotal role in designing the legal framework of the state’s near-total abortion ban, also argued on behalf of anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life that women would still be able to terminate pregnancies if Roe was overturned by traveling to “wealthy pro-abortion” states like California and New York with the help of “taxpayer subsidies”.

“Women can ‘control their reproductive lives’ without access to abortion; they can do so by refraining from sexual intercourse,” Mitchell wrote in the brief. “One can imagine a scenario in which a woman has chosen to engage in unprotected (or insufficiently protected) sexual intercourse on the assumption that an abortion will be available to her later. But when this court announces the overruling of Roe, that individual can simply change their behavior in response to the court’s decision if she no longer wants to take the risk of an unwanted pregnancy.”

The supreme court is due to hear a Mississippi case this term that experts say could lead to the reversal of the Roe decision by the court’s conservative majority. The argument was made in an amicus, or “friend of the court”, brief in which outside parties can present arguments on cases before the court. The brief was filed on 29 July, about four weeks before Texas’s abortion ban went into effect.

In the same brief, which calls for Roe to be overturned, Mitchell and co-counsel Adam Mortara, an anti-abortion activist and lawyer who clerked for the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, said such a decision could open the door for other “lawless” rights and protections to be reversed, including the right to have gay sex and the right to same-sex marriage.

The lawyers argued that while it was not necessary for the high court to immediately overrule the legal cases that enshrine those rights, “neither should the court hesitate to write an opinion that leaves those decisions hanging by a thread”.

Those cases (Lawrence, which outlawed criminal sanctions against people who engaged in gay sex, and Obergefell, which legalized same-sex marriage) were “far less hazardous to human life”, they said, but just “as lawless as Roe”.

It is common for high-profile cases such as the Mississippi abortion case to elicit amicus briefs by activists and lawyers who are seeking to weigh in on the legal debate.

But Mitchell and Mortara’s brief is significant because conservatives on the high court recently ruled in a controversial 5-4 decision to allow a Texas law to stand that was designed by Mitchell and in effect bans abortions after about six weeks, before most people know they are pregnant.

While the majority of the justices stressed that they had not yet ruled on the constitutionality of the Texas law itself, the ruling showed that the majority was receptive to Mitchell’s legal strategy.

 

Here's the thing, it's not going to stop at abortion, it's going to lead to the outlawing of birth control and a lot more. If they get the win on Roe, they can reverse same-sex marriage and even criminalize sex itself between two people of the same sex (again).

It's not going to end at "Well, states should be able to make their own decisions on the legality of abortion" either. Your rights will vary wildly by where you live in the years ahead, just replace "legality of abortion" with "legality" of a host of other things.

When I say what they want is the tend of the civil rights era, this is what I mean. Your rights will be determined by what state you live in, not the fact that you're living in America, the country.

Then we stop being a country, but warring states.

Again.

Last Call For It's About Suppression, Con't

Three North Carolina state judges have ruled 2-1 that the state's Voter ID law is still "motivated at least in part by an unconstitutional intent" to target Black voters as the legal battles continue over the NC GOP's ongoing Black voter suppression efforts.

North Carolina judges struck down the state’s latest photo voter identification law on Friday, agreeing with minority voters that Republicans rammed through rules tainted by racial bias as a way to remain in power.

Two of the three trial judges declared the December 2018 law is unconstitutional, even though it was designed to implement a photo voter ID mandate added to the North Carolina Constitution in a referendum just weeks earlier. They said the law intentionally discriminates against Black voters, violating their equal protections.

The law “was motivated at least in part by an unconstitutional intent to target African American voters,” Superior Court Judges Michael O’Foghludha and Vince Rozier wrote in their 100-page majority opinion.

“Other, less restrictive voter ID laws would have sufficed to achieve the legitimate nonracial purposes of implementing the constitutional amendment requiring voter ID, deterring fraud, or enhancing voter confidence.”

The majority decision, which followed a three-week trial in April, is now likely headed to a state appeals court, which had previously blocked the law’s enforcement last year while the case was heard. The law remains unenforceable with this ruling.

With a similar lawsuit in federal court set to go to trial this January and another state court lawsuit now on appeal, it’s looking more unlikely that a voter ID mandate for in-person and absentee balloting will happen in the 2022 elections.

The ruling reflects “how the state’s Republican-controlled legislature undeniably implemented this legislation to maintain its power by targeting voters of color,” said Allison Riggs, the plaintiffs’ lead attorney.

Spokespersons for Republican legislative leaders, House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate leader Phil Berger, didn’t immediately respond to email requests for comment.

 

Southern states increasingly aren't "red" states, they are "states where Black and brown voters are kept from voting "states. Losing Virginia to the Democrats was bad enough, but if Republicans lost Georgia, NC, Florida and Texas, their national ambitions would be done.

They know this.

Everything going forward is the GOP maintaining their power through white supremacist tricks as old as America itself.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

The violence by anti-vax cultists continues against the rest of America, and it will continue for some time, unfortunately.

Three people were arrested for allegedly assaulting a New York City restaurant hostess on Thursday after she asked a group of diners visiting from Texas to show proof they had been vaccinated before seating them.

Cellphone footage obtained by NBC New York shows a brawl involving several people outside Carmine's Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side. Staff and bystanders intervened to break up the melee after it broke out around 5 p.m. ET, the station added.

The hostess, who has not been identified, was repeatedly punched and her necklace broken, police said.

One unspecified patient was taken to the Mount Sinai Hospital, the New York City Fire Department said, without stating their condition.

The three suspects, whose ages are 21, 44 and 49, were taken to NYPD's nearby 24th precinct station house, police said.

The attack comes as New York City this week became to first major U.S. city to require hospitality, entertainment and fitness businesses to ask customers for proof of vaccination to gain access to indoor venues. Any business that fails to comply could face a $1,000 fine.

Carmine's said in a statement to NBC New York that it was "shocking and tragic situation when one of our valued employees is assaulted for doing their job — as required by city policies — and trying to make a living."

Gale Brewer, the Manhattan borough president, said on Twitter the incident was "completely unacceptable."

In a separate tweet she added: "There’s no place for this kind of violence to be perpetrated against our essential workers."

 

I know the right is going to scream "Discrimination!" and make idiotic and repulsive yellow star of David comparisons blaming Mayor de Blasio as a "bigot" but nothing excuses the assault of a restaurant employee or anyone over this.

I honestly expect people to be killed over this, and soon. The next time there's violence against a restaurant worker or another person enforcing mandates like this I'm afraid it will lead to someone getting badly hurt or killed, especially if that worker is Black or brown. 

It's only a matter of time.