Climate Of Disaster, Con't

The latest UN report on climate change is out this week and the results are about as grim as it gets. We're no longer in any doubt of man-made global catastrophe, only how many trillions of dollars in fire, storm, flood, and drought damage and how many millions of lives will be lost over the next few decades.

More than three decades ago, a collection of scientists sanctioned by the United Nations first warned that humans were fueling a dangerous greenhouse effect and that if the world didn’t act collectively and deliberately to slow Earth’s warming, there could be “profound consequences” for people and nature alike.

The scientists were right.

On Monday, that same body — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — issued its latest and most dire assessment about the state of the planet, detailing how humans have altered the environment at an “unprecedented” pace and cautioning that the world risks increasingly catastrophic impacts in the absence of rapid greenhouse gas reductions.

The landmark report, compiled by 234 authors relying on more than 14,000 studies from around the globe, bluntly lays out for policymakers and the public the most up-to-date understanding of the physical science on climate change. Released amid a summer of deadly fires, floods and heat waves, it arrives less than three months before a critical summit this November in Scotland, where world leaders face mounting pressure to move more urgently to slow the Earth’s warming.

Monday’s sprawling assessment states that there is no remaining scientific doubt that humans are fueling climate change. That much is “unequivocal.” The only real uncertainty that remains, its authors say, is whether the world can muster the will to stave off a darker future than the one it already has carved in stone.

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres called the findings “a code red for humanity” and said societies must find ways to embrace the transformational changes necessary to limit warming as much as possible. “We owe this to the entire human family,” he said in a statement. “There is no time for delay and no room for excuses.”

But so far, the collective effort to slow climate change has proved gravely insufficient. Instead of the sort of emission cuts that scientists say must happen, global greenhouse gas pollution is still growing. Countries have failed to meet the targets they set under the 2015 Paris climate accord, and even the bolder pledges some nations recently have embraced still leave the world on a perilous path.

“What the world requires now is real action,” John F. Kerry, the Biden administration’s special envoy for climate, said in a statement about Monday’s findings. “We can get to the low carbon economy we urgently need, but time is not on our side.”

It certainly is not, according to Monday’s report.

Humans can unleash less than 500 additional gigatons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of about 10 years of current global emissions — to have an even chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.

But hopes for remaining below that threshold — the most ambitious goal outlined in the Paris agreement — are undeniably slipping away. The world has already warmed more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), with few signs of slowing, and could pass the 1.5-degree mark early in the 2030s.

“Unless we make immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to 1.5C will be beyond reach,” said Ko Barrett, vice chair of the IPCC and senior adviser for climate at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Each bit of warming will intensify the impacts we are likely to see.”

Already, we are living on a changed and changing planet.

Each of the past four decades has been successively warmer than any that preceded it, dating to 1850. Humans have warmed the climate at a rate unparalleled since before the fall of the Roman Empire. To find a time when the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere changed this much this fast, you’d need to rewind 66 million years to the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.

 

But of course no real climate change amelioration will happen, because either people will say "I don't believe it because all of science is corrupt!" and the people who do believe it will say "We can't accomplish this without collapsing the global economy and killing most of us anyway, so why bother?" 

As I said, our grandkids will never forgive us, and they shouldn't. The Zoomers born between 2001 and 2020, I'm sorry to say that we failed you, and as for those born after 2020, catastrophe is all they will ever know.

 

 

We're going to have to try to get out of this, and it'll be up to all of us to do so.

Cuomo's #MeToo Moment, Con't

NY Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo is facing resignation or impeachment in the wake of the devastating state investigation into his repeated sexual harassment of women state employees in and around his office,  and the odds of Cuomo leaving or being forced out of office are high enough that the NY Times is running a profile on the woman who would replace him: Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul.

If the governor steps down or is forced out, Ms. Hochul, 62, will take his place, becoming the first woman to lead New York State — a remarkable rise for someone who has largely toiled in obscurity since joining the governor’s team in 2014.

Mr. Cuomo has a long and deserved reputation for governing by brute force and fear, alienating countless people through his tactics of bullying and intimidation. Ms. Hochul, in contrast, has established deep reservoirs of political good will, spending much of her tenure on the road, highlighting the administration’s agenda and engaging in extensive on-the-ground politicking.

She has taken pride in visiting each of New York’s 62 counties each year and has friends across the state. In a typically frenetic week in September 2019, Ms. Hochul had two appearances in Brooklyn, one in Manhattan, four in Niagara Falls, one in Lockport, another in Pendleton, three in Buffalo, four in Rochester, two in Binghamton and one in Cortland.

She is a practiced, and popular, retail politician who seems to take genuine delight in meeting people, and has always been this way, said former U.S. Representative John J. LaFalce, for whom Ms. Hochul worked in the 1980s.

“More than anything else, she was tenacious,” said Mr. LaFalce, who became Ms. Hochul’s political mentor. “She just turned the stone as many ways as you could to see what was underneath it and she didn’t let it go. By the same token, she was probably the most popular person in the office.”

At the moment, Ms. Hochul (pronounced HOH-kuhl) is keeping a low public profile. She canceled her public events last week, following the release of the state attorney general report, and declined to be interviewed for this article.

But behind the scenes, Ms. Hochul, a Democrat, has been preparing for what may well be the inevitable, consulting with her longstanding circle of advisers, and familiarizing herself with the minutiae of the transition process, should Mr. Cuomo resign or be impeached, according to an administration official. (If Mr. Cuomo is impeached by the State Assembly, he must hand the reins of government to Ms. Hochul while he faces trial in the State Senate.)

Ms. Hochul has been fielding numerous appeals from advocacy groups eager to brief her on their key issues, and from government leaders seeking to establish or expand relationships with her.

A couple of weeks ago, Liz Krueger, a state senator from Manhattan, and Ms. Hochul met at Pershing Square, a restaurant across from Grand Central Terminal. As they shared an avocado salad, Ms. Krueger asked Ms. Hochul how she felt about the possibility that Mr. Cuomo might resign.

“She assured me that she was ready to take over if that was what was required of her,” Ms. Krueger said.

Being prepared has been a hallmark of Ms. Hochul’s more than quarter-century spent in local, state and federal government, beginning with a 14-year stint on the town board of Hamburg, in western New York.

She grew up outside of Buffalo, in a Catholic family that faced economic hardships. She graduated from Syracuse University, received a law degree at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and entered private practice. Ms. Hochul quickly turned to government, serving as an aide to Mr. LaFalce and U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

She returned to western New York and embraced local politics, serving on the Hamburg town board and then as Erie County clerk, where she gained prominence when she challenged a plan by Gov. Eliot Spitzer to issue driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants.

In 2011, she scored a monumental upset in a special election in one of New York’s most conservative Congressional districts, skillfully seizing on voters’ fears that Republicans would eradicate Medicare. By the following year, after a redistricting that made her district even more conservative, she was out. She was defeated by Chris Collins, a Republican who would leave office in disgrace, ultimately pleading guilty in 2019 to charges of making false statements to the F.B.I. and to conspiring to commit securities fraud. President Donald J. Trump later pardoned him.

In 2014, Mr. Cuomo chose Ms. Hochul as his running mate, seeking to shore up his courtship with western New York.

Their relationship, then and now, has been largely transactional. They rarely appear in public together, with Ms. Hochul fulfilling her role as his surrogate around the state in countless radio interviews, panel discussions and ribbon cuttings.

His protege without actually being the part, and smart enough to keep her head down to avoid the inevitable self-immolation of her boss.

Lot worse ways to get promoted.

So is Cuomo really done? I think odds are very good he is. When the paper of record is openly discussing your replacement, you're done for, especially if that paper is as big as the NYT. It's a safe bet.

He won't be missed, frankly.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The Biden administration has issued a Homeland Security alert to law enforcement warning of violent armed Trump cultists taking another bite at the apple over the next month or so.

The Department of Homeland Security issued a warning on Friday: believers in the false conspiracy theory that Trump will be reinstated have increased their calls for violence if the former president isn’t back in the White House soon.

“Some conspiracy theories associated with reinstating former President Trump have included calls for violence if desired outcomes are not realized,” the DHS bulletin, obtained by ABC News, said.

The bulletin went on to say that the recent increase in “public visibility” of liars like the My Pillow guy, Mike Lindell, is the reason for the uptick in violent online chatter.

Lindell continues to relentlessly push the Big Lie that the election was stolen, going so far as to say that he expects the Supreme Court to unanimously rule in favor of reinstating Trump as president in August.

“Over the last few days what has occurred is there’s been much more public visibility, meaning the discussions and these theories have migrated away from being contained within the conspiracy and extremist online communities, to where they’re being the topic of discussion on web forums, or more public web forums, and even within the sort of media ecosystem,” a senior DHS official told ABC News.

The drunk-on-Trump crowd has been triggered so much that Homeland Security says they are concerned about the calls for violence increasing further.

“As public visibility of the narratives increases, we are concerned about more calls to violence… Past circumstances have illustrated that calls for violence could expand rapidly in the public domain and may be occurring outside of publicly available channels. As such, lone offenders and small groups of individuals could mobilize to violence with little-to-no warning,” the bulletin said.

The DHS added that although they do not have specifics of an imminent threat, their “reporting indicates that the timing for these activities may occur during August 2021, although we lack information on specific plots or planned actions.”

Also on Friday, the U.S. Capitol Police said they were aware of an upcoming rally at the Capitol that a former data chief for Trump’s 2016 campaign, Matt Braynard, is promoting. Appearing on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Braynard talked about the #JusticeForJ6 rally, which is planned for September 18, in support of people who have been arrested in connection with the January 6th attack. “We’re going back to the Capitol, right where it started. And it’s going to be huge,” Braynard told Bannon.

 

The last time we got a warning like this, January 6th happened. We should be paying attention. If not August, then September at the Rally for Insurrectionists on the 18th.

 

Be careful out there, folks.

Sunday Long Read: Flipping The Table

This week's Sunday Long Read comes from author and Tulane professor Bernice McFadden, as she discusses getting a seat at the table in life, and how difficult that is just to be present in the halls of power for Black women in America.

I discovered through DNA testing that my first maternal ancestor in the United States came from the country in Africa now known as Cameroon. This Cameroonian ancestor was a member of the Bamileke tribe — an ethnic group which originated in Egypt.

The table and the chair were invented in Egypt around 2500 B.C. Egypt is a country located in Northeast Africa and not in the Middle East as people have been misled to believe. Do you find it ironic that gaining a seat at the table has become a metaphor for the advancement into spaces that are historically and predominately white and male and generally resistant to Black and female representation?

Recently, Black people and women have been crashing those homogenized parties, bringing with them their own chairs or filling vacant ones at those proverbial tables.

Some of the gatekeepers feign acceptance of the racial modifications of these platforms, while others have no qualms conveying their disdain or outright outrage at the presence of a Black person at said table. For example, on Jan. 25, 2012, Jan Brewer, the former governor of Arizona, stood on the airport tarmac and chastised, like a child, one Barack Hussein Obama — a Black man who was, at the time, the sitting president of the United States of America. Moments later, when Brewer was asked about the incident she said, “He was a little disturbed about my book.”

Other gatekeepers are covert with their contempt, preferring to close their arms around unwelcomed Black people in an insincere embrace as they sink a blade into their backs.

I have a longtime friend. She and I are BFFs and are as close as sisters. She is white and Filipino, and we have been friends since 1979, when we first met at our mostly white boarding school in the rural Pennsylvania town of Danville.

We are both the eldest of four children, both raised in two-parent households.

For most of our relationship, race was not a topic of discussion. However, that changed in the early 2000s when she came to New York to spend a weeklong holiday with me. She’d spent the day in Manhattan, catching up with friends and taking in theater. Over dinner that evening, she shared that she’d had an extra ticket for the play she’d seen but hadn’t considered inviting me because she assumed I wouldn’t be interested in a staged production that did not have Black characters.

That statement stalled me. I asked if she thought that because I was Black, that my interest lay only in Black-centered entertainment?

She said yes.

I was stunned by her misconception of me and Black people on the whole. I asked if she, a biracial woman living in America, was only interested in European and/or Filipino art? She confessed that her interests were indeed diverse but couldn’t explain why she presumed it did not hold true for me or others who looked like me.

I explained that contrary to what she’d been told, Black people are not a monolith. I told her that we are diverse in every conceivable way.

This was the conversation that set us off on a journey about the myth of race, systemic racism, and what it’s really like to be Black in America.

 

Consciously or unconsciously, people treat you differently because of being Black, and asking folks to examine their own biases rarely works, because people don't perceive acts as biases. The same goes for gender, for how people treat women, and when you're a Black woman, this is a constant hurricane of being othered, being gaslit, and being shamed for even mentioning it.

 

America has lifetimes to go, it seems, before we get to any sort of real parity, but there's one political party absolutely dedicated to preserving white supremacy, and it sure isn't the Dems.

 

Well, most of the time.

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

In what should be national front page news, former Trump acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Saturday about Donald Trump's efforts to convince the Justice Department to declare the 2020 elections fraudulent, efforts spearheaded by Rosen's own deputy at the time, Jeffrey Clark.

Jeffrey A. Rosen, who was acting attorney general during the Trump administration, has told the Justice Department watchdog and congressional investigators that one of his deputies tried to help former President Donald J. Trump subvert the results of the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the interviews.

Mr. Rosen had a two-hour meeting on Friday with the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general and provided closed-door testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Saturday.

The investigations were opened after a New York Times article that detailed efforts by Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division, to push top leaders to falsely and publicly assert that continuing election fraud investigations cast doubt on the Electoral College results. That prompted Mr. Trump to consider ousting Mr. Rosen and installing Mr. Clark at the top of the department to carry out that plan.

Mr. Trump never fired Mr. Rosen, but the plot highlights the former president’s desire to batter the Justice Department into advancing his personal agenda.

Mr. Clark, who did not respond to requests for comment, said in January that all of his official communications with the White House “were consistent with law,” and that he had engaged in “a candid discussion of options and pros and cons with the president.”

Mr. Rosen did not respond to requests for comment. The inspector general’s spokesman declined to comment.

Mr. Rosen has emerged as a key witness in multiple investigations that focus on Mr. Trump’s efforts to undermine the results of the election. He has publicly stated that the Justice Department did not find enough fraud to affect the outcome of the election.

On Friday Mr. Rosen told investigators from the inspector general’s office about five encounters with Mr. Clark, including one in late December during which his deputy admitted to meeting with Mr. Trump and pledged that he would not do so again, according to a person familiar with the interview.

Mr. Rosen also described subsequent exchanges with Mr. Clark, who continued to press colleagues to make statements about the election that they found to be untrue, according to a person familiar with the interview.

He also discovered that Mr. Clark had been engaging in unauthorized conversations with Mr. Trump about ways to have the Justice Department publicly cast doubt on President Biden’s victory, particularly in battleground states that Mr. Trump was fixated on, like Georgia. Mr. Clark drafted a letter that he asked Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators, wrongly asserting that they should void Mr. Biden’s victory because the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in the state.

Such a letter would effectively undermine efforts by Mr. Clark’s colleagues to prevent the White House from overturning the election results, and Mr. Rosen and his top deputy, Richard P. Donoghue, rejected the proposal.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said Mr. Rosen discussed previously reported episodes, including his interactions with Mr. Clark, with the Senate Judiciary Committee. He called Mr. Rosen’s account “dramatic evidence of how intent Trump was in overthrowing the election.”

 

Clark was Trump's conduit in these meetings, funneling what should have been private DoJ deliberations directly to Trump, and Trump would in return give his orders to Clark to take back to Rosen and Donoghue. Rosen resisted several attempts by Clark and Trump to have the elections declared under investigation for fraud because there was no evidence of it.

That's how close we came to a Trump dictatorship. The man Donald Trump specifically replaced Bill Barr with in order to throw him the election didn't throw him the election.

That's it.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

In six weeks, we've gone from 11,000 COVID-19 cases per day to 110,000, and there appears to be no end in sight as to how bad things will get for the unvaccinated and unmasked.

The U.S. is now averaging 100,000 new COVID-19 infections a day, returning to a milestone last seen during the winter surge in another bleak reminder of how quickly the delta variant has spread through the country.

Health officials fear that cases, hospitalizations and deaths will continue to soar if more Americans don’t embrace the COVID-19 vaccine. Nationwide, 50% of residents are fully vaccinated and more than 70% of adults have received at least one dose.

“Our models show that if we don’t (vaccinate people), we could be up to several hundred thousand cases a day, similar to our surge in early January,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky said on CNN this week.

It took the U.S. about nine months to cross the 100,000 average case number in November before peaking at about 250,000 in early January. Cases bottomed out in June, averaging about 11,000 per day, but six weeks later the number is 107,143.

Hospitalizations and deaths are also increasing rapidly, though all are still below peaks seen early this year before vaccines became widely available. More than 44,000 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19, according to the CDC, up 30% in a week and nearly four times the number who were hospitalized in June. More than 120,000 were hospitalized in January.

The seven-day average for deaths also increased, according to Johns Hopkins University. It rose from about 270 deaths per day two weeks ago to nearly 500 a day as of Friday. Deaths peaked at 3,500 per day in January. Deaths usually lag behind hospitalizations as the disease normally takes a few weeks to kill.

The situation is particularly dire in the South, which has some of the lowest vaccination rates in the U.S. and has seen smaller hospitals overrun with patients. 

Alabama and Mississippi have the lowest vaccination rates in the country: less than 35% of residents are fully inoculated, according to the Mayo Clinic. Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas are all in the lowest 15 states.

Florida makes up more than 20% of the nation’s new cases and hospitalizations, triple its share of the population. Many rural counties have vaccination rates below 40%, with the state at 49%.

 

So once again we're headed for a parabolic rise in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. The difference now is vaccination, and among those who still simply choose to refuse, the results are going to be heartbreaking.

Our Little Right Wing White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

As WaPo's Greg Sargent explains, having Tucker Carlson personally fawn over white supremacist authoritarian Hungarian President Viktor Orban, saying Orban and Hungary are more free than America because Orban has "bravely resisted" diversity, no longer leaves any doubt as to whether or not Carlson's persona on television is an act.

 

The first segment of Tucker Carlson’s long-anticipated Fox News interview with Viktor Orban has now aired, and it did not disappoint: It provides a deeply unsettling glimpse into the true nature of the authoritarian nationalist future that Carlson and his fellow travelers envision for our country.

An ugly tension sits at the core of Carlson’s conversation with the Hungarian leader. Carlson fawns over the “free” nature of Hungarian society — contrasting it favorably with the supposed repression of widespread anti-liberal yearnings in American society — while saying little to nothing about the autocratic nature of Orbanism.

In this lurks a sort of dream combination: ethno-nationalism secured via autocracy.

The interview’s central feature is Carlson gushing over Orban’s virulently anti-immigrant policies and demagoguery. Orban describes these as urgent to defending national identity, defined as his country’s “population” and “culture” and “language” and “tradition” and “land,” a right of defense dictated by “God” and “nature.”

Orban also castigates liberal internationalist Western leaders for wanting to intermingle “Muslim” and “Christian” communities, describing the latter as “original inhabitants.” Orban declares that his country decided “not to take that risk.”

Throughout, Carlson treats this vision of national identity as fundamental to Hungary’s success. He even suggests that in Hungary, people are freer than in the United States.

Here, Carlson says, you’ll be silenced by Silicon Valley or hounded from your job if you dare criticize the “orthodoxy” of liberal internationalism and social liberalism — that is, if you yearn for association with a national identity that is culturally insulated and unsullied by socially liberal threats (like “transgender athletes”) to traditional conservative values.

“Who’s freer?” Carlson asks. “If you’re an American, the answer is painful to admit.”

Yet, as Ishaan Tharoor notes, Carlson often has little to say about the autocratic nature of Orban’s rule. Indeed, in Thursday’s broadcast, he blithely dismisses international observers criticizing it as tools of U.S. and liberal internationalist hegemony.

This tension — declaring America a less free society based on paranoid notions of sinister forces repressing anti-liberal-internationalist yearnings, while embracing the autocratic nature of Orbanism — is central to grasping the Carlsonist right’s true dream future.

Though Carlson won’t say it this way, autocratic rule is preferable to democracy because the former, he imagines, is the only route to the closed, ethno-nationalist, culturally reactionary society he wants for the United States. What Carlson and his ilk cannot accept, and are fighting their rearguard action against, is that open, liberal internationalist societies are and can be legitimately democratic creations.

“If you care about Western civilization and democracy and families,” Carlson declared this week from Hungary, “you should know what is happening here right now.” He decried the “ferocious assault” on these things by globalist leaders, which Orban has heroically rebuffed.

As Jonathan Chait says, what’s striking is Carlson’s assertion that the defense of democracy requires embracing illiberalism and autocracy. This is an open declaration of an actual vision of what American self-rule should look like.

 

Folks, this is textbook fascism from 100 years ago, brought up to date for the 21st digital century. Carlson isn't playing footsie here with the fascists, he's inviting them on his show, going to their countries, giving them free airtime to be watched by millions of Americans. 

This is Tucker Carlson showing us who he is: a white supremacist who wants to see America controlled by white supremacists, with no recourse for those who resist. This is a major cable news personality, openly professing deep respect for, respect he says his viewers should have, of a bloody, authoritarian racist.

This kind of open fascism support is the kind of thing VDARE and Stormfront and Project Evropa could only dream of even a few years ago.

Now it's commonplace, on America's most watched cable news show. We aren't just rocketing toward open violence here in America, we're already making reservations in the graveyard for the results.

 

Last Call For The Vax Of Life, Con't

The Biden Administration is considering measures to make it very financially uncomfortable for those refusing the COVID-19 vaccine who would otherwise be able to receive it, especially for public and private institutions refusing vaccine mandates.

The Biden administration is considering using federal regulatory powers and the threat of withholding federal funds from institutions to push more Americans to get vaccinated — a huge potential shift in the fight against the virus and a far more muscular approach to getting shots into arms, according to four people familiar with the deliberations.

The effort could apply to institutions as varied as long-term-care facilities, cruise ships and universities, potentially impacting millions of Americans, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations.

The conversations are in the early phases and no firm decisions have been made, the people said. One outside lawyer in touch with the Biden administration on the issue is recommending that the president use federal powers sparingly.

There is a particular focus in the discussions on whether restrictions on Medicare dollars or other federal funds could be used to persuade nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities to require employees to be vaccinated, according to one of the people familiar with the talks.

If the Biden administration goes forward with the plans, it would amount to a dramatic escalation in the effort to vaccinate the roughly 90 million Americans who are eligible for shots but who have refused or have been unable to get them.

The discussion at the highest level of government also signals a new phase of potential federal intervention as the White House struggles to control the delta variant of the virus, which is spreading more rapidly than even some of the more dire models predicted.

But such drastic moves are likely to trigger further backlash from many Republican-leaning regions where vaccine hesitancy has been highest, agitating conservatives already skeptical of the Biden administration and its use of federal power. The administration has already said that federal workers and contractors must be vaccinated or wear masks, and the Pentagon is considering similar requirements.

Several experts noted that even if President Biden’s team could force Americans to begin getting shots as soon as this week, it still takes five to six more weeks for mRNA inoculations — which require a second shot — to be fully effective. That means infection rates could keep rising in the short term no matter what steps are taken on vaccinations.

When asked about vaccine mandates after a Thursday event on electric vehicles, Biden said his administration was looking at its options as he encouraged all Americans to get vaccinated. The White House declined to comment for this story.

The talks within the administration come amid calls from many public health experts for a more aggressive federal approach to vaccinations. The country reported more than 100,000 new coronavirus cases Wednesday, an infection rate on par with early February, before vaccines were widely available. On Thursday, the rolling seven-day daily average of new infections was at 95,000 new cases.

“I think wisely using the federal spending power is absolutely right,” said Lawrence Gostin, who directs Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and said he has discussed the idea of using federal funds as an incentive with Biden administration officials.

Gostin said he has suggested the White House use its power judiciously, not by “bludgeoning the private sector” but rather by “starting with high-risk settings with an absolute ethical obligation and legal obligation to keep your workers and your clients safe.”

Other leading experts have publicly floated the idea of using more federal incentives to push for vaccinations as a lever that Biden and his administration could use.

“If you look through history, there are presidents who — even in the absence of legal authority — influence people, you might say,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who recently organized a joint statement from nearly 60 medical groups urging every health facility to require workers to get vaccinated. “We keep referring to this covid thing like it’s an emergency and then we don’t behave like it’s a wartime emergency.”

 

Time to pull out the big guns then. Expecting others to pay the piper when 100 million Americans still refuse to get the vaccine is immoral, and Biden has an imperative to step in here.

 

Here's hoping it's soon.

 

Get the vaccine, folks.

 

Now.

The Return Of Jobapalooza

The Biden jobs economy is in fact ridin' as the country added 943,000 jobs in July, and the unemployment rate dropped to 5.4%, but the rise of delta is almost certainly going to bring this ride to a crawl.

The American economy roared into midsummer with a strong gain in hiring, but there are questions about its ability to maintain that momentum as the Delta variant of the coronavirus causes growing concern.

Employers added 943,000 jobs in July, the Labor Department reported Friday, but the data was collected in the first half of the month, before variant-related cases exploded in many parts of the country.

While the economy and job growth overall have been strong in recent months, experts fear that the variant’s spread could undermine those gains if new restrictions become necessary. Already, some events have been canceled, and many companies have pulled back from plans for employees to return to the office in September.

Still, with schools planning to reopen, at least for now, and Americans continuing to dine out and travel, the economy’s expansion remained on track last month. Some experts foresee a slight cooling on the horizon, but most think unemployment will keep falling as the labor market recovers the ground lost in the pandemic.

“It’s been a sprint in terms of growth, but we may be moving into more of a marathon,” said Scott Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West in San Francisco. “Travel season is winding down, and the Delta variant is a big concern.”

The unemployment rate fell to 5.4 percent, compared with 5.9 percent in June. Before the report, the consensus of economists polled by Bloomberg forecast a gain of 858,000 jobs, with the unemployment rate dipping to 5.7 percent.

Despite the hiring gains, many managers report difficulty in finding applicants for open positions. Jeanine Lisa Klotzkin manages an outpatient addiction treatment center in White Plains, N.Y., and has had only limited success in her search for addiction counselors.

“Normally, we’d have dozens of candidates,” she said. But six weeks after posting an online job ad, her clinic has received four applications. The positions pay $50,000 to $63,000 a year, said Ms. Klotzkin, who added: “These aren’t low-wage jobs. I don’t know where the people went.”

 

Things are moving fast for President Biden and America, and now you see why GOP governors are trying to throw a monkey wrench in the gears on purpose to slow the economy down heading into 2022. The one thing that could derail the Dems next year and turn it into 2014 or 2010 "shellacking" territory is a massive delta spike that lasts into next year.

Guess what the GOP is trying their dead level best to do?

The Big Lie, Con't

Former Yahoo News WH reporter Hunter Walker now has his own blog, The Uprising (Everything comes around again, does that make me a hipster?) and got a hold of The Former Guy's™ "evidence" of election fraud by apparently asking very nicely, and it's hysterically bad stuff.

The Uprising has obtained an unpublished statement from former President Donald Trump detailing his purported evidence that the 2020 election "was shattered with fraud and irregularities.” The information doesn’t prove any plot to manipulate the vote, but it does clearly show the workings of a complex effort to spread false election narratives.

An analysis of Trump’s evidence demonstrates how instrumental the right wing media ecosystem, dark money, and Republican officials are to fueling and spreading the former president’s so-called Big Lie about the 2020 presidential vote.

First, it’s important to explain why the former president’s inaccurate election diatribes matter.

America's largest social media companies deplatformed Trump during his final weeks as president. After leaving office, Trump has continued to promote false conspiracies about his election loss to Joe Biden and now largely relies on allies and emailed statements to spread his messages.

Some argue that Trump’s false election narratives should be ignored completely, but the former president’s communiques are part of a much larger, influential context.

With Trump hosting rallies and holding meetings with what his allies have dubbed a “Cabinet,” it’s clear that questioning the integrity of President Biden’s election victory is a key part of the strategy and messaging for Trump and the GOP going forward.

As Jane Mayer documented in this week’s New Yorker, the spread of Trump’s conspiratorial narrative by elected officials and partisan outlets is happening in parallel with a pre-existing push by well-financed conservative groups to change election laws and infrastructure around the country. And the Big Lie has already had tragic real-world ramifications: Trump’s claims about the 2020 election were a main driver of the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, which is another main subject of misinformation from Trump and other Republicans.

Officials from multiple agencies in Trump’s own administration have confirmed the election was the most secure in American history and that there was no widespread fraud. Trump and his allies filed over forty lawsuits challenging the results. Many were plagued with “elementary errors” and all of them failed. Trump supporters also pointed to statistics to suggest the results were questionable. An analysis by Stanford’s conservative leaning Hoover Institution found none of those statistical claims was “ even remotely convincing.” While experts acknowledge instances of small-scale fraud tend to happen in large elections, it is extremely rare and not a significant enough issue to be decisive on the national level. Nevertheless, conservatives have focused on alleged voter fraud for years as they have advocated for restrictions on voting. And Trump has continued to aggressively promote false claims about his loss last year through personal appearances, interviews with conservative outlets, and written statements emailed to his robust press list.

These email blasts have become Trump’s most frequent mode of communication and effectively replaced his once omnipresent tweets. The former president’s emails sometimes come more than once a day and have covered petty personal feuds, political endorsements, criticism of his successor, and his efforts to cast doubt on the election.

While the content is quite similar to Trump’s past social media streams, his emailed statements don’t generate nearly as much coverage. (That is, in part, due to deliberate decisions by mainstream media outlets who are wrestling with how to handle disinformation spread by Trump and his allies.)

Nevertheless, Trump’s statements reach his base through his personal website and by being laundered through his Republican allies and conservative media. As the following analysis illustrates, Trump’s claims would not be possible without the inspiration and support of opaquely-funded partisan groups and websites, as well as major figures in conservative media and politics.

The Uprising’s journey down the rabbit hole of Trump’s election conspiracy theory industrial complex began on August 1, when the former president issued an emailed statement railing against media outlets who note his fraud claims are made without evidence when covering his remarks.

Trump described this contextualization by journalists as the work of a “crooked and collusive media” and insisted there is “irrefutable evidence” the vote was rigged. But Trump’s 280-word public statement insisting there is “massive and unconditional evidence” contained no actual specific evidence.

The Uprising reached out to Trump’s new spokeswoman, Liz Harrington, to ask if he had any specific evidence for his claims. Harrington, who has her own history of promoting false claims about the election and January 6, responded with a statement — which she described, somewhat paradoxically, as “a recent release we have yet to send out” that includes “numerous examples” of Trump’s evidence. Harrington subsequently confirmed that the document was directly attributable to Trump.

That document, which you can read in full here, included at least 9 individual claims. All of them are baseless, and almost all of the faulty evidence cited by Trump drew on the work of right-wing activists and media outlets. Before (and after) being amplified by Trump himself, many of these false and mischaracterized claims about the election were spread by Republican officials and influential pillars of the conservative media ecosystem — outlets including Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and The Federalist — as well as websites further out on the fringe. The result is a massive disinformation feedback loop capable of reaching millions of Americans.

 

As usual, Trump's biggest weakness is his ego: he can't help but reveal his grand plan to anyone in earshot because he thinks he's the smartest man alive and he has just the plan to prove that if you'll stick around and listen to his 23 hours of garbage.

 

But as Walker points out, this is being devoured by Trump's death cult, and they believe every word of it, up to and beyond the point that it justifies whatever brutal action that they will undeniably choose to take next. It's not evidence, it's a terrorist manifesto.

 

It's time we start treating Trump like he's the man who, I dunno, fomented an armed insurrection at the US Capitol.