Last Call For Counseling The Counselors

America's mental health care professionals are drowning in patients as we enter Pandemic Year 3. Just as the nation's hospitals are overrun with COVID patients, social workers, counselors, clinical psychologists, therapists, and psychiatrists are overloaded to the point of turning people who truly need help away.

 

As Americans head into a third year of pandemic living, therapists around the country are finding themselves on the front lines of a mental health crisis. Social workers, psychologists and counselors from every state say they can’t keep up with an unrelenting demand for their services, and many must turn away patients — including children — who are desperate for support.

“All the therapists I know have experienced a demand for therapy that is like nothing they have experienced before,” said Tom Lachiusa, a licensed clinical social worker in Longmeadow, Mass. “Every available time slot I can offer is filled.”

The New York Times asked 1,320 mental health professionals to tell us how their patients were coping as pandemic restrictions eased. General anxiety and depression are the most common reasons patients seek support, but family and relationship issues also dominate therapy conversations. One in four providers said suicidal thoughts were among the top reasons clients were seeking therapy.

“I regularly wished aloud for a mental health version of Dr. Fauci to give daily briefings,” said Lakeasha Sullivan, a clinical psychologist in Atlanta. “I tried to normalize the wide range of intense emotions people felt; some thought they were truly going crazy.”

The responses to our survey, sent by Psychology Today to its professional members, offer insights into what frontline mental health workers around the country are hearing from their clients. We heard from mental health providers in all 50 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. (You can learn more about how we conducted our survey at the end of this article.)

While there were moments of optimism about telemedicine and reduced stigma around therapy, the responses painted a mostly grim picture of a growing crisis, which several therapists described as a “second pandemic” of mental health problems.

“There is so much grief and loss,” said Anne Compagna-Doll, a clinical psychologist in Burbank, Calif. “One of my clients, who is usually patient, is experiencing road rage. Another client, who is a mom of two teens, is fearful and doesn’t want them to leave the house. My highly work-motivated client is considering leaving her career. There is an overwhelming sense of malaise and fatigue.”

 

The mental health effects of a multi-year pandemic are just starting to be understood, and it's going to take years, if not decades, to treat the country's serious emotional issues.

We're burned out, folks. We need help.

Help is in short supply.  Take some time out of your day to be nice to yourself and to others. We all need to pitch in.

Ukraine On The Membrane, Con't

The situation in Ukraine just got exponentially worse on Friday. With thousands of Russian troops, tanks, and vehicles on the Ukraine border, Russian President Vladimir Putin is making public his list of demands from NATO and President Biden.

Russia outlined on Friday its demands for a sweeping new security arrangement with the West in Eastern Europe, with the most far-reaching request a written guarantee that NATO will not expand farther east toward Russia and will end all military activity in Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus.

The Russians also said they wanted NATO to remove all military infrastructure installed in Eastern Europe after 1997 — demands that analysts said seemed unacceptable to the West.

Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergey A. Ryabkov, offered the details about the proposal in public for the first time on Friday, in a video news conference in Moscow, amid a Russian troop buildup near Ukraine’s border.

The demands went far beyond the current conflict between Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. And most were directed not at Ukraine, which is threatened by the troop buildup, but at the United States and Ukraine’s other Western allies.

They included a request for a NATO commitment that it would not offer membership to Ukraine specifically. But NATO countries are unlikely to formally rule out future membership for Eastern European countries.

The proposal highlighted starkly differing views in the United States and Russia on the military tensions over Ukraine. Russia has insisted that the West has been fomenting the crisis by instilling anti-Russia sentiment in Ukraine, and by providing weapons. Mr. Ryabkov cast the confrontation in Ukraine as a critical threat to Russia’s security.

The United States and European allies, in contrast, say Russia provoked the security crisis by recently deploying tens of thousands of troops near Ukraine’s border.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia voiced some of the demands more broadly in recent weeks. But this formal Russian offer on Friday for defusing the tensions on Ukraine’s border followed a video call between President Biden and Mr. Putin on Dec. 7. After the call, Mr. Biden said he was willing to hear the Russians out.

Russian officials said diplomats conveyed the proposal to a senior American diplomat, the State Department’s assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, on Wednesday during meetings in Moscow. Afterward, Ms. Donfried said in a video statement that she would relay the ideas to Washington as well as to NATO allies during a stop this week in Brussels.

The Russian Foreign Ministry had said in a statement last week that Moscow was seeking a document with “legal and obligatory character” prohibiting any further expansion of NATO eastward in Europe. The Russian proposal took the form of a draft statement from NATO.

“Member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization accept the obligation to exclude farther expansion of NATO to Ukraine and other states,” the text suggested as an acceptable guarantee for Russia.

 

As I've been saying for some time now, Putin wants a new Soviet Empire, and he wants it at the direct expense of America and the West.  These are hostage demands, straight up: you can let me take Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe without firing a shot, or we can do this the hard way.

It's up to Joe Biden to make the call here. Biden's talking economic sanctions, Putin's talking rolling tanks into Kyiv. It's the Cold War days all over again, the ones that supposedly died when I was in high school and college, but a shooting war in Ukraine is going to kill thousands.

It's important to note that if Trump were still in charge, he'd be on the first plane to Moscow to agree to Putin's hostage deal, and he would use this as his argument that the US needed to drop out of NATO immediately. Ukraine would be on their own.

Biden's way forward -- hitting Putin in the wallet along with the rest of the Western World -- may not work however if China continues to play ball with him.

We'll see.

Climate Of Disaster, Kentucky Edition, Con't

Here in Kentucky, it takes a tornado destroying your home and begging for FEMA assistance to admit that the guy in the Oval Office is your president, and the Democrat in the Governor's mansion in Frankfort actually does care about setting things right.

Cliff Giambrone most certainly didn’t vote for President Biden and, in fact, was outside the U.S. Capitol protesting the election results on Jan. 6. On the trailer hitch on the back of his van, he usually uses two 10-foot poles to fly a flag with a derogatory message aimed at Biden: “Let’s Go Brandon.”

But when the 67-year-old retired construction worker drove from his home in Hamburg, Pa., to help the recovery effort here, he made a conscious decision to leave that flag at home, bringing an American flag instead. “Believe me, part of me wants to wave that flag and smile when he looks at it,” he said. “But I don’t want to be that guy.”

Pausing in his search for a lost photo album in the rubble of a home, Giambrone added, “I am political, but there are times you have to set that aside. This is one of those moments. I hope it’s not temporary. I didn’t vote for him, but he’s still my president. I want to support him.”

As Biden arrived in Mayfield on Wednesday, he came to perhaps the most conservative place he has visited as president, the one where open hostility would be most apparent. He set foot in a county that voted for Donald Trump by nearly a 4-to-1 margin. Many here protested his election, and some still do not accept that he is the rightful president.

But the storms that have transformed parts of western Kentucky suggest that a natural disaster remains one of the few spaces left in American life where, however briefly, many attempt to put their politics aside. Biden’s response to the tornadoes has won praise from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who rarely has warm words for the president. Most here say they welcome Biden’s visit, even if they question how effectively he may be able to help them.

“I didn’t vote for the president, and I’m not a fan of his policies,” said Clayton Howe, a 57-year-old lifelong resident who was assessing damage to his downtown building that Biden would walk past an hour later. “But I appreciate him being here. He’s still the president of the United States.”

Biden carried just two of Kentucky’s 120 counties. Thirteen months after the presidential election, signs of the region’s deep support for Trump remain vivid, even amid the rubble.

In Dawson Springs, a town of 2,500 where an estimated 75 percent of the houses were destroyed, tattered Trump flags still hang outside damaged homes. And even as they picked through the debris, emergency personnel were spotted over the weekend wearing “Make America Great Again” hats.

At least one “Let’s go, Brandon” shout was heard as Biden toured the area, but that reaction was relatively muted. More conspicuous were people like Gary Killian, a 55-year-old who stood in a red Trump 2020 cap but nonetheless said he wanted to hear from Biden.

“You can’t help but have compassion for our town,” Killian said. “I just want to see into his eyes. I want to hear what he has to say. And I can’t say I don’t want to hear him just because I’m from the other side of the aisle.”

Many Mayfield residents appeared to be wrestling this week with their emotions toward Biden, combining a deep-seated disdain and even contempt with a respect for the presidency and a sense that Biden deserved credit for coming. And there was a recognition, grudging for some, that they desperately needed help, or at least money, from the federal government.

Tami Trevarthen, a 58-year-old who works at a deli market and sat outside her brother’s destroyed home, said she approved of Biden’s visit. “He should see what’s going on here. People need help, federal help,” she said.

“He needs to come,” she said, before adding, “But is he coherent?” She recalled that Biden referred to the tornado that swept the area as a hurricane, and she blames him for rising gas prices and the persistence of covid.

Her brother, George Long, agreed for the most part with her assessment of Biden, but the Army veteran added that he is still the commander in chief. “I’d be diligent and courteous” if he met Biden, he said. “I’d even call him president. Everything is too political.”

Trevarthen demurred. “I’d be cordial to him,” she allowed. “Let’s see what he can do for people.”

 

It literally took an unprecedented natural disaster that destroyed 75% of the homes in town for these folks to admit that Joe Biden might not be the monster he has been portrayed as all these long months, and that he might actually be a good person who wants the federal government to work for everyone. 

 

Irving Kristol infamously said that a conservative is just a liberal who has been mugged by reality. I posit a conservative is just a greedy, self-centered asshole who will remain so until a climate change fueled disaster levels his home and suddenly he needs government assistance and demands it.

That's the only way conservatives ever even have a chance of learning human empathy for those unlike them.

 

StupidiNews!

• The workers at a candle factory hit by tornadoes on Saturday have filed a class-action lawsuit, claims of management telling workers they would be fired if they sought shelter from the storm.
• Project Veritas is under investigation for allegedly trying to blackmail President Biden with threats to publish claims in what they say are his daughter's diary unless he agreed to a live interview.
• A federal judge has thrown out a $4.5 billion settlement that would have shielded the wealthy Sackler family from legal repercussions from owning Purdue Pharma maker OxyContin.
• President Joe Biden is warning the unvaccinated that they face a winter of "severe illness and death" due to COVID Omicron, and once again asked all eligible Americans to get vaccinated.
• Washington University researchers have determined that fossil fuel emissions kill up to one million people per year globally, most deaths coming from coal particulate pollution known as PM2.5.
  

Last Call For The Road To Gilead, Con't

This will change the moment we get a GOP president again, but the FDA is approving abortion pills on a permanent basis for use up to ten weeks of pregnancy for women. The larger issue: the second we get a GOP Congress and a GOP president, this goes away in a post-Roe world, and abortion medicine has already been criminalized in 19 states.

 

The federal government on Thursday permanently lifted a major restriction on access to abortion pills. It will allow patients to receive the medication by mail instead of requiring them to obtain the pills in person from specially certified health providers.

The decision, by the Food and Drug Administration, comes as the Supreme Court is considering whether to roll back abortion rights or even overturn its landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that made abortion legal nationwide.

The F.D.A.’s action means that medication abortion, an increasingly common method authorized in the United States for pregnancies up to 10 weeks’ gestation, will become more available to women who find it difficult to travel to an abortion provider or prefer to terminate a pregnancy in the privacy of their homes. It allows patients to have a telemedicine appointment with a provider who can prescribe abortion pills and send them to the patient by mail.

Earlier this year, for the duration of the pandemic, the F.D.A. temporarily lifted the in-person requirement on mifepristone, the first of two drugs used to end a pregnancy. The decision to make this change permanent is likely to deepen the already polarizing divisions between conservative and liberal states on abortion. In 19 states, mostly in the South and the Midwest, telemedicine visits for medication abortion are banned, and these and other conservative states can be expected to pass other laws to further curtail access to abortion pills.

Yet other states, like California and New York, which have taken steps in recent years to further solidify abortion rights, are expected to increase the availability of the method and provide opportunities for women in states with restrictions to obtain abortion pills by traveling to a state that allows them.

“It’s really significant,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University. “Telehealth abortions are much easier for both providers and patients, and even in states that want to do it, there have been limits on how available it is.”

So far this year, presumably in anticipation of such a decision, six states banned the mailing of pills, seven states passed laws requiring pills to be obtained in person from a provider, and four states passed laws to set the limit on medication abortion at earlier than 10 weeks’ gestation, said Elizabeth Nash, the interim associate director of state issues for the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights.

The current practice is that women who live in states that don’t allow telemedicine for abortion must travel to a state that does — although they don’t have to visit a clinic. They may be in any location within that state for their telehealth visit, even a car, and may receive the pills at any address in the state.

But legal experts said they expected supporters of abortion rights to try to find ways to make the pills available without requiring a patient to travel, including possibly filing legal challenges to state laws banning telemedicine for abortion.

In data released last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 42 percent of all abortions — and 54 percent of abortions before 10 weeks — occurred with medication in 2019, the most recent year for which C.D.C. data is available. (The report represents most of the country, but does not include data from California, Maryland and New Hampshire.)

In 2020, some states, including Indiana, Kansas and Minnesota, the method accounts for a majority of abortions, according to state health department reports.

 

This will be criminalized in as many states as possible in the months ahead. Remember, the point is to drive women into second-class citizenship again, and making them dependent on neckbearded incels for anything approaching rights.

This is a good thing the FDA did here, unalloyed, but it will be regulated or criminalized out of existence, along with a lot of other things we're currently taking for granted as "rights".

You only have rights as far as five Supreme Court justices say you do, and that has been the case all your life.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

The Atlantic's Ed Yong, who has been covering COVID for two years now, warns us that COVID Omicron will be the worst wave of the disease yet, and with tens of millions of American simply bored or wary or masking, social distancing, and vaccines, hundreds of thousands are going to die this winter as Republicans and Trump Cultists fail the country again.

Omicron’s main threat is its shocking speed, as my colleague Sarah Zhang has reported. In South Africa, every infected person has been passing the virus on to 3–3.5 other people—at least twice the pace at which Delta spread in the summer. Similarly, British data suggest that Omicron is twice as good at spreading within households as Delta. That might be because the new variant is inherently more transmissible than its predecessors, or because it is specifically better at moving through vaccinated populations. Either way, it has already overtaken Delta as the dominant variant in South Africa. Soon, it will likely do the same in Scotland and Denmark. Even the U.S., which has much poorer genomic surveillance than those other countries, has detected Omicron in 35 states. “I think that a large Omicron wave is baked in,” Bedford told me. “That’s going to happen.”

More positively, Omicron cases have thus far been relatively mild. This pattern has fueled the widespread claim that the variant might be less severe, or even that its rapid spread could be a welcome development. “People are saying ‘Let it rip’ and ‘It’ll help us build more immunity,’ that this is the exit wave and everything’s going to be fine and rosy after,” Richard Lessells, an infectious-disease physician at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in South Africa, told me. “I have no confidence in that.”

To begin with, as he and others told me, that argument overlooks a key dynamic: Omicron might not actually be intrinsically milder. In South Africa and the United Kingdom, it has mostly infected younger people, whose bouts of COVID-19 tend to be less severe. And in places with lots of prior immunity, it might have caused few hospitalizations or deaths simply because it has mostly infected hosts with some protection, as Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at Emory University, explained in a Twitter thread. That pattern could change once it reaches more vulnerable communities. (The widespread notion that viruses naturally evolve to become less virulent is mistaken, as the virologist Andrew Pekosz of Johns Hopkins University clarified in The New York Times.) Also, deaths and hospitalizations are not the only fates that matter. Supposedly “mild” bouts of COVID-19 have led to cases of long COVID, in which people struggle with debilitating symptoms for months (or even years), while struggling to get care or disability benefits.

And even if Omicron is milder, greater transmissibility will likely trump that reduced virulence. Omicron is spreading so quickly that a small proportion of severe cases could still flood hospitals. To avert that scenario, the variant would need to be substantially milder than Delta—especially because hospitals are already at a breaking point. Two years of trauma have pushed droves of health-care workers, including many of the most experienced and committed, to quit their job. The remaining staff is ever more exhausted and demoralized, and “exceptionally high numbers” can’t work because they got breakthrough Delta infections and had to be separated from vulnerable patients, John Lowe told me. This pattern will only worsen as Omicron spreads, if the large clusters among South African health-care workers are any indication. “In the West, we’ve painted ourselves into a corner because most countries have huge Delta waves and most of them are stretched to the limit of their health-care systems,” Emma Hodcroft, an epidemiologist at the University of Bern, in Switzerland, told me. “What happens if those waves get even bigger with Omicron?”

The Omicron wave won’t completely topple America’s wall of immunity but will seep into its many cracks and weaknesses. It will find the 39 percent of Americans who are still not fully vaccinated (including 28 percent of adults and 13 percent of over-65s). It will find other biologically vulnerable people, including elderly and immunocompromised individuals whose immune systems weren’t sufficiently girded by the vaccines. It will find the socially vulnerable people who face repeated exposures, either because their “essential” jobs leave them with no choice or because they live in epidemic-prone settings, such as prisons and nursing homes. Omicron is poised to speedily recap all the inequities that the U.S. has experienced in the pandemic thus far.

Here, then, is the problem: People who are unlikely to be hospitalized by Omicron might still feel reasonably protected, but they can spread the virus to those who are more vulnerable, quickly enough to seriously batter an already collapsing health-care system that will then struggle to care for anyone—vaccinated, boosted, or otherwise. The collective threat is substantially greater than the individual one. And the U.S. is ill-poised to meet it.

 

Yong's theory is that this is a bipartisan failure, when it's clearly not. It is Trump's fault, it is the GOP's fault, it is the fault of Republican state legislatures and Republican governors destroying protections and criminalizing precautions and the Right-Wing Noise Machine cheering them on while screaming THE VACCINE WILL MAKE YOUR DICK FALL OFF to tens of millions.

 

But sadly, the result remains the same. Another pandemic wave will kill hundreds of thousands, and most of America will wonder why the disease won't go away while doing nothing to prevent it, because that's somebody else's job.

Sinema Verite, Con't

As President Joe Manchin finally enters into talks about getting possible filibuster reform rules for voting rights legislation through the Senate, Vice President Kyrsten Sinema stepped in Wednesday night to effectively kill any hope of either passing.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) is doubling down on her support for the 60-vote legislative filibuster, throwing a wrench into a frantic, last-ditch effort to get a deal to change the Senate's rules before the end of the year.

Her statement on the topic comes as a group of Democratic negotiators tasked with leading the discussions have been holding a flurry of behind-the-scenes talks about how to change the rules and break the stalemate on long-stalled voting rights legislation.

But while Sinema is making it clear that she supports voting and election reform bills that have been blocked by GOP senators, she is also standing by her support for keeping the 60-vote legislative filibuster and warning against a carve-out from the rule for voting rights.

John LaBombard, a spokesman for Sinema, said that she "continues to support the Senate's 60-vote threshold" which she believes would "protect the country from repeated radical reversals in federal policy which would cement uncertainty, deepen divisions, and further erode Americans’ confidence in our government."

"Senator Sinema has asked those who want to weaken or eliminate the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation which she supports, if it would be good for our country to do so," LaBombard said, if a weakened filibuster was then used to pass "nationwide voter-ID law, nationwide restrictions on vote-by-mail, or other voting restrictions currently passing in some states extended nationwide."

Sinema's statement comes as Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Angus King (I-Maine), who is a member of the Democratic caucus, have been holding talks for weeks to try to come up with a plan to change the Senate's rules that could win over all 50 Senate Democrats.

The discussions have hit new urgency as Democrats are facing the growing chance that they reach the end of the year with President Biden's Build Back Better (BBB) bill in limbo, and without a clear path forward on voting rights legislation, despite activists and many senators viewing it as a top priority.

Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) is also getting pressure from within the caucus to move voting rights legislation. But because 10 GOP senators are not expected to support a bill, the only way for it to get through the Senate is with a rules change on the filibuster.

 

You have to admit it's a great scam: Manchin "relents" and then Sinema plays the bad guy for a while, then they switch off a couple of weeks later. They've been doing this for six months now, and there's no reason to believe that anything else is going to pass the Senate. This will continue until Dems charge Trump Republicans with federal crimes and make Manchin and Sinema's nuclear option of switching caucuses untenable.

 

 

I repeat…

the games being played by Sinema & Manchin are only viable in a scenario where defection to the GOP is an option.

If the GOP was in serious legal jeopardy, w/cascading indictments & a serious hit to their fundraising,

defection wouldn’t be a threat. S&M would chill

— Pam Keith, Esq. (@PamKeithFL) December 16, 2021

They'll get away with it until that happens.

StupidiNews!

• Broward County, Florida's Parkland school district has reached a $26 million settlement with the victims and families of the 17 killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February 2018.
• The House Transportation committee has found that Donald Trump's multi-million dollar loan from the federal government to buy the now sold DC Old Post Office was a massive mess.
• Canada is the latest country to issue international travel warnings as COVID Omicron continues to spread across the globe.
• Sen. Ron Wyden has blocked legislation to ban US imports of Chinese goods made with Uyghur detainee labor after Sen. Marco Rubio objected to Wyden' child tax credit amendment.
• Internet security experts are scrambling to plug a major exploit in the latest patch of logging utility Log4J, used by thousands of companies on the internet.
  

Last Call For Climate Of Disaster, Kentucky Edition

As President Biden tours the massive damage here in Kentucky, here's a reminder that the sheer cost of clean-up from Saturday's tornado outbreak here in the Bluegrass state is going to run in the hundreds of millions of dollars at the minimum, if not billions.

Kentucky’s recovery from last weekend’s historic tornado outbreak will take “months if not years,” and cost “hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to public officials and experts who are still assessing the full scale of the loss and damage.

“Tens of thousands are still dealing with water, gas, or power outages. Families are in shock and grief over the loss of loved ones,” said Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday. “Rebuilding the areas of Kentucky leveled by this storm will take months, if not years, to complete.”

On Monday, Gov. Andy Beshear said he expected the price tag of a full recovery to be “in the hundreds of millions of dollars at least.”

But the exact amount won’t be known for a while, as government officials and emergency workers continue to focus on searches for the more than 100 who are still missing and providing shelter, food and medical attention to those who have been displaced. The death toll in Kentucky remains at 74.

McConnell reported that at Fort Campbell, FEMA has already supplied 61 generators, 74,000 meals, 135,000 liters of water and thousands of cots and blankets.

“Kentucky will come back from this bigger and better than ever before,” McConnell said. “I will make sure the Senate provides all the assistance we can to make that a reality.”

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told NPR that food, water, communications and shelter were the primary needs of Kentucky residents following his visit to the state.

“We have been going family to family, individual to individual to learn what has happened to each individual and what we can do about it,” Mayorkas said. But he cautioned that several of the hardest hit portions of western Kentucky will require patience for long-term rebuilding efforts.

“Homes need to be rebuilt, schools need to be operating once again, businesses need to be rebuilt and restarted. It really means building a community from the ground up,” he said.

 

It's mildly perverse that McConnell is promising aid, he's not the Senate Majority Leader at all and really has no say in what legislation comes up, but he could sure block aid if he wanted to. At least for his state, he won't. That would be too much even for him to keep his job.

 

He'll block billions for the rest of the country though, count on that. 

He'll also block any climate change and coal plant regulation, so we'll get to repeat this dance until it kills enough people for us to vote people like him out of the Senate, I guess.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

We have a pretty good idea why former Trump WH Chief of Staff Mark Meadows stopped cooperating with the January 6th Committee and is now facing a Contempt of Congress charge: he was right in the middle of Trump's organized coup to steal the 2020 election. David Corn:

As Trump’s brownshirts stormed the citadel of American democracy, Meadows received a flow of messages and cries for help from people inside the Capitol, including legislators. One text informed him, “We are under siege here at the Capitol.” Another read, “They have breached the Capitol.” And another: “Mark, protesters are literally storming the Capitol. Breaking windows on doors. Rushing in. Is Trump going to say something?” A fourth exclaimed, “There’s an armed standoff at the House Chamber door.” A fifth: “We are all helpless.”

Dozens—dozens—of texts, including some from Trump administration officials, pleaded for action. “POTUS has to come out firmly and tell protesters to dissipate. Someone is going to get killed.” “Mark, he needs to stop this. Now.” “TELL THEM TO GO HOME.” “POTUS needs to calm this sh*t down.” Donald Trump Jr. texted Meadows, “He’s got to condemn this shit ASAP.” Meadows replied, “I’m pushing hard. I agree.” But when Trump took no such steps, Trump Jr. texted Meadows repeatedly. In one message, he urged, “We need an Oval Office address. He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand.”

Fox News hosts also pushed Meadows for action from Trump. Laura Ingraham texted, “Mark, the President needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.” Brian Kilmeade beseeched, “Please get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished.” And Sean Hannity sent a message: “Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol.”

What a dramatic afternoon. Meadows was being besieged by lawmakers, fellow Trump officials, the stars of Fox News, and the president’s eldest son. Why would he leave all this out of his book? It’s gripping. It’s suspenseful. And why not reveal to his readers how he reacted to these pleas and what he did—or didn’t do—in response?

Meadows in the book presents no information to counter the impression Trump purposefully dawdled to see if the riot might work to his advantage and forestall the certification of Biden’s win. He does not address the various reports that cast Trump in a dark light: that Trump was practically giddy as he watched the violence on television, that when House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy urged Trump to intervene to halt the rampaging, he replied, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”

Meadows is hiding what happened in the White House on January 6. It’s no wonder he does not want to testify. Trump’s failure to act that day—to heed all those pleas—is also Meadows’ failure.

This book is disinformation. Meadows peddles Trump’s propaganda. “I knew he didn’t lose,” Meadows declares of Trump and the 2020 election. How did he know this? The “excitement of the people” at Trump’s campaign rallies had been “palpable.” He says he had “spoken with dozens of peoples during those rallies” and they were “thrilled to be together.” (They were also “some of the kindest, most generous people I had ever met.”)

He accuses unnamed Democrats of conspiring before Election Day to use fraudulent votes to lock in a Biden victory—without providing any evidence of this plot. He claims there were “thousands of allegations of widespread fraud.” He writes that Trump only raised “legitimate concerns about the way our elections are run,” not bizarre rumors or speculation. And he maintains that Democrats—again, unnamed—had a plan not only to rig the election but to cover up their skullduggery: they used allies within the media to deride Trump claims of ballot fraud as nothing but unhinged conspiracy theories. And, Meadows contends, the media had been preparing for this moment for years by branding Trump and his supporters as crazy and paranoid. “[I]t became clear that the media’s plan—the ‘long con’—had worked,” he writes. “Soon, anyone who had questions about the election was labeled a nutcase.” Get it? The media had been painting Trump and his crew as kooks so that when the Dems steal the election and the Trumpers protest, no one will believe them. That was diabolical.

With his book, Meadows is conning the public. He won’t testify before Congress, but he’s peddling this collection of untruths and non-truths, rehashing Trump’s I-was-robbed swill for his audience of Trump die-hards. Still, Meadows is holding back on them. He’s not telling them—and the world—what he and their champion did on perhaps the most consequential day of Trump’s presidency. Perhaps that’s to be expected. The texts hint at negligence and malfeasance. And what Trump fan is going to pay $28 for that?

 

Meadows went from cooperation to contempt in under two weeks, but the information he did turn over was absolutely damning and contradicts the book he put out earlier. The combination was untenable and he's now on the outside looking in. Besides, at this point the January 6th Committee doesn't need him any longer. 

I just hope we're able to get these charges done before the Committee is forced to disband.  It will have to stop at the end of next year regardless of whether it's restarted again in January 2023.

The Big Lie Comes To Your Door

Trump Big Lie Cultists are conducting their own "audit" of voters, armed with voter registration information, going door-to-door in order to "check" to make sure there's not millions of illegal voters in your attic.

Across the country, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory internet is manifesting itself into knocks at the door. Individual election deniers and grassroots groups are canvassing for election fraud in states lost or even won by former president Donald Trump in 2020, including New Hampshire, Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Utah, and Nebraska. Despite 60-plus court losses and countless official audits and recounts confirming the 2020 election results, many of Trump’s supporters are still so convinced of his lies that they’ve turned to this kind of vigilantism.

It’s all part of a broader effort by Trump supporters — emboldened and given tacit support by Republican Party leaders — to deny the 2020 election results at all costs and cast doubt on elections going forward. When a contractor working on the Arizona Senate’s partisan and farcical “audit” proposed a similar door-knocking scheme last spring, the Justice Department warned that it could violate federal laws on voter intimidation. The Senate backed off, but volunteers did the canvass anyway and put out a sloppy report alleging all kinds of fraud without evidence to back it up. Though reporters quickly debunked their claims — including finding a house on the alleged “vacant” property gracing the report’s cover — the Arizona canvass results went viral on right-wing social media and have inspired copycats.

A member of the far-right Three Percenters militant group is helping lead the canvassing effort in Colorado, where a leader suggested volunteers carrying firearms could help secure the group as they went door-to-door, according to the Colorado Times Recorder. The Utah Voter Verification Project is requiring its volunteer canvassers to sign NDAs before they canvass and has instructed them to record their interactions with voters, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. The sheriff’s office in Buffalo County, Nebraska, posted on Facebook on Nov. 4, warning about similar canvassing efforts and telling voters that the canvassers were not official or affiliated with the county.

The New Hampshire Voter Integrity Group claims to be nonpartisan. Its founder, Marylyn Todd, a 37-year-old from Nashua, told BuzzFeed News in an interview that she is registered as an independent. Todd claimed in a Facebook message that “many” of their canvassers voted for President Joe Biden, but would not name them or connect them with BuzzFeed News. Todd also said that she has expanded canvassing across the state, focusing on towns where the group believes there is the most potential fraud, but she declined to name the towns they’ve visited. The group, she said, “is just trying to get to the bottom of the truth, nothing more, nothing less.”

Members of the group credit Dean, whose last name Todd declined to provide, with creating the app they use to track down voters. (Dean did not respond to questions messaged to his Telegram account nor to questions Todd said she shared with him via email.) The app is designed with a free site that Democrats have used in the past to canvass voters before an election. The app shows canvassers where to find nearby voters, as well as their addresses, whether they voted in 2020, if they voted in person or absentee, and whether they registered to vote same-day. The app asks canvassers to confirm that information and, if they find any discrepancies, to get voters to sign an affidavit and mail it to a P.O. box.

Todd said they are sharing those affidavits with members of the state legislature, “many” of whom are interested in their findings, but declined to provide names. She described affidavits the group collected from two households alleging election misconduct, but declined to share any names or details that could be fact-checked, citing the affiants’ privacy. The Trump campaign used affidavits as part of its failed legal strategy to challenge the 2020 election and held up the sworn statements to try to add some legitimacy to its bogus fraud claims, but, as the Washington Post noted at the time, many of those affidavits were never filed in court and the ones that were filed were often thrown out.

 

So let's call this what it is: mass voter intimidation of Democratic voters on a multi-state scale, of tens, if not hundreds of thousands or more of registered Democrats, with the intent of these assholes trying to accuse Biden voters of fraud.

That's the entire point.

It's a message that if you are a registered Democrat, Trump Cultists know who you are, and know where you live.

It should be ludicrously illegal, but it's not.

Therein lies the problem.

StupidiNews!

• The World Health Organization is warning that COVID Omicron variant is the fastest-spreading variant of the disease so far, and that countries need to take social distancing seriously.
• Members of a German anti-vaccine terrorist group were arrested this week in a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister of the German state of Saxony over COVID lockdowns.
• A federal judge has thrown out Donald Trump's legal case to block release of his tax returns to Congress, citing that Trump's defense gave no valid reason to stop the release.
• All but two House Republicans, January 6th Committee members Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, voted against contempt charges for former Trump WH Chief of Staff Mark Meadows last night.
• OSHA officials are now investigating Amazon over last weekend's tornado disaster where warehouse workers were told they would be fired if they left the work floor to seek shelter.
  

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

The Associated Press deep a deep dive on all potential cases of voter fraud in the five battleground states that the Trump regime swears were all stolen from him, and found at most 475 out of 300,000+ votes that Biden won by in those states, which is of course, nowhere near enough to swing anything to Trump's column.

An Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump has found fewer than 475 — a number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election.

Democrat Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 Electoral College votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president. The disputed ballots represent just 0.15% of his victory margin in those states.

The cases could not throw the outcome into question even if all the potentially fraudulent votes were for Biden, which they were not, and even if those ballots were actually counted, which in most cases they were not.

The review also showed no collusion intended to rig the voting. Virtually every case was based on an individual acting alone to cast additional ballots.

The findings build on a mountain of other evidence that the election wasn’t rigged, including verification of the results by Republican governors.

The AP review, a process that took months and encompassed more than 300 local election offices, is one the most comprehensive examinations of suspected voter fraud in last year’s presidential election. It relies on information collected at the local level, where officials must reconcile their ballots and account for discrepancies, and includes a handful of separate cases cited by secretaries of state and state attorneys general.

 

The closest Trump got was in Arizona, where there were 198 possibly suspicious votes and Biden's margin was over ten thousand, meaning it wasn't even 2% of what Trump needed. 

Anyone who tells you that the 2020 election was stolen is at this point lying on purpose, and needs to be called out on it.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

According to Rolling Stone's Hunter Walker, the January 6th Committee has not one but two golden geese, and they're laying 24-karat eggs full of evidence to use against Trump and his fellow coup-coup birds.

 

Two key organizers of the main Jan. 6 rally in Washington, D.C. are coming in from the cold.

Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lynn Lawrence are set to testify next week before the House select committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol. The pair will deliver testimony and turn over documents, including text messages, that indicate the extensive involvement members of Congress and the Trump administration had in planning the House challenge to certifying Biden’s election and rally near the White House where Donald Trump spoke — efforts that ultimately contributed to a massive and violent attack on the Capitol.

Among the documents the couple is providing are conversations they had with staffers and members of Congress as they planned the main rally that took place on the White House Ellipse that day. Stockton described these discussions as largely logistical and focused on planning the members’ participation in objections to the electoral certification on the House floor and various events that were staged to protest against the election. They include Instagram messages Lawrence exchanged with Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) as she tried to get him to speak at the Ellipse rally. Cawthorn, whose office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, ultimately appeared onstage at that event.

“We’re turning it all over and we’ll let the cards fall where they may,” Stockton says.

It’s the latest revelation from the couple, veteran activists who have spent the better part of a decade specializing in staging political stunts while working for conservative activist groups, Republican campaigns, and Trump’s on-again-off-again strategist Steve Bannon. Stockton and Lawrence were members of the team that led the nationwide “March for Trump” bus tour, which ended with the Jan. 6 rally at the White House Ellipse. In recent weeks, Stockton and Lawrence have participated in an extensive series of interviews with Rolling Stone revealing what they knew about the day.

The pair were the sources for a story that was published in late October, when they said members of Congress were involved in planning Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and the Jan. 6 Ellipse rally. They claimed one of these lawmakers, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), suggested the possibility Trump could get them a “blanket pardon” in an unrelated ongoing investigation if they helped protest the election. (Gosar later suggested that story was “categorically false and defamatory.”) Stockton and Lawrence also say they were told that Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, had communicated with the organizers and was warned about concerns of potential violence.

Nothing in the documents viewed by Rolling Stone or the couple’s statements revealed any planning for, or coordination with, the violent attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters.

Stockton and Lawrence spoke to Rolling Stone on the condition of anonymity for that story due to the ongoing investigation. Now, after receiving a subpoena from the committee, they decided to come forward and testify publicly — in Congress and in the press. The couple say they believe the public deserve answers about what went down on Jan. 6.

“The people and the history books deserve a real account of what happened,” Stockton explains. Lawrence puts it more bluntly: “Violent shit happened,” she says. “We want to get to the bottom of that.”

 

Having said all that, let's remember that Stockton and Lawrence are not the heroes here, but villains solely motivated by the self-interest of not going to prison for decades.

Behind those noble sentiments about why they’re cooperating with the committee is a hard reality: Stockton and Lawrence are running out of options.

On Nov. 22, the committee subpoenaed the pair, demanding they deliver depositions and turn over documents related to their involvement in the rally and communications with members of Trump’s team. Stockton is scheduled to testify on Tuesday, and Lawrence is due up the following day. The duo are keenly aware that Bannon, Meadows, and others who have declined to cooperate with the committee are facing federal charges for contempt of Congress. “We’ve seen what’s happened with Bannon, and we don’t have the resources that a Steve Bannon has,” Stockton says, referencing Bannon’s multimillion dollar fortune. “Our options are, in a lot of ways, limited.”

Stockton and Lawrence have spent the past few weeks on the move, switching between their R.V. and various hotels and hideouts. Apart from Louis, a greyhound-beagle mix who has accompanied them back and forth across the country, the couple have few of their old friends left. The legal drama and infighting have left them cut off from political work; Stockton is keeping them afloat with what he describes as “a variety of side hustles.”

Being caught between those on the right they think might want to silence them and a Democrat-led committee that’s hit them with subpoenas and potentially large legal bills has left them with what Stockton labels “a sense of paranoia.” The couple have packed their things up and switched locations in the middle of the night at least once when they became suspicious of a group of “paramilitary-looking” young men. When they first made contact with the committee, the meeting, they say, was a disaster that left them with real questions about who they could trust. They’ve spent most of the past few months on the run.

It’s been a long, stressful time for Stockton and Lawrence, a pair who were once rising stars in the extended MAGA universe and now find themselves looking constantly over their shoulders. For a lot of people who end up in such a tight spot, it’s tough to look back and pinpoint the moment things started to go wrong. For these two, that question has a fairly straightforward answer.

 

It's a pretty long story here, and it's important to keep in mind that these two were definitely part of a insurrectionist coup to overthrow President Joe Biden's election.

But these two may be the key to bringing all of these bastards down.

Let's hope so.

Worked To Death In Kentucky

"You'll work yourself to death or you'll die trying" is too much even for the most over-the-top trillion-dollar corporate villain, but Saturday in Kentucky, well there you have it.

As a catastrophic tornado approached this city Friday, employees of a candle factory — which would later be destroyed — heard the warning sirens and wanted to leave the building. But at least five workers said supervisors warned employees that they would be fired if they left their shifts early.

For hours, as word of the coming storm spread, as many as 15 workers beseeched managers to let them take shelter at their own homes, only to have their requests rebuffed, the workers said.

Fearing for their safety, some left during their shifts regardless of the repercussions.

At least eight people died in the Mayfield Consumer Products factory, which makes scented candles. The facility was leveled, and all that is left is rubble. Photos and videos of its widespread mangled remains have become symbols of the enormous destructive power of Friday’s tornado system.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said Monday that 74 people were confirmed dead in the state.

McKayla Emery, 21, said in an interview from her hospital bed that workers first asked to leave shortly after tornado sirens sounded outside the factory around 5:30 p.m.

Employees congregated in bathrooms and inside hallways, but the real tornado wouldn’t arrive for several more hours. After employees decided that the immediate danger had passed, several began asking to go home, the workers said.

“People had questioned if they could leave or go home,” said Emery, who preferred to stay at work and make extra money. Overtime pay was available, but it wasn’t clear whether those who stayed were offered additional pay.

Supervisors and team leaders told employees that leaving would probably jeopardize their jobs, the employees said.

“If you leave, you’re more than likely to be fired,” Emery said she overheard managers tell four workers standing near her who wanted to leave. “I heard that with my own ears.”

 

So people stayed in order to save their job.

And then they died for it.

Nothing more American, right?