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.

Last Call For The Vax Of Life, Con't

As Louisiana faces the tide of delta variant cases with the state's vaccination rate well under 50%, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards is instituting a mask mandate indoors and in schools and workplaces, and begging residents to get vaccinated. Some folks are finally listening.

 

Demand for the shots has nearly quadrupled in recent weeks in Louisiana, a promising glimmer that the deadly reality of the virus might be breaking through a logjam of misunderstanding and misinformation.

The new push for vaccinations has been driven by an explosion in coronavirus cases. But it takes time for vaccines to bolster immune systems, and the state — which now leads the country in new cases — could still be weeks away from relief.

Hospitals are overflowing with more Covid-19 patients than ever before. Even children’s hospitals have packed intensive care units. And the Delta variant has alarmed doctors, who described seeing patients in their 20s and 30s rapidly declining and dying.

“These are the darkest days of our pandemic,” said Dr. Catherine O’Neal, the chief medical officer at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge.

The Delta variant has unleashed a rush of diagnoses across the United States, but Louisiana has emerged as a troublesome hot spot, with the highest per capita rate of cases in the country and a beleaguered health care system straining to keep up.

“That’s a miserable place to be, I know it,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said, describing the swirl of frustration and shame expressed by government officials, epidemiologists and frontline medical workers as their state suffers the catastrophic consequences of a failure to vaccinate more people.

The state is averaging more than 4,300 new cases per day, according to New York Times data. Resources have been taxed — especially in the state’s southeastern corner — as cases have surged from the Gulf Coast into the northern reaches of the state.

In Baton Rouge, one hospital called in the kind of federal emergency support staff usually reserved for the aftermath of a hurricane. In Hammond, a city of some 21,000 people in the toe of Louisiana’s boot, nurses were ordered to pick up extra shifts.

Vaccination rates are increasing in many states, as employers and universities have started requiring the shots to return to work and class. In the Southeast, where vaccinations have lagged behind the national rate, those upticks have come in states like Mississippi and Florida just as reported cases began spiking.

In an effort to help temper the spread of the virus in Louisiana while pushing for more vaccinations, Governor Edwards reinstated a statewide mask mandate that went into effect on Wednesday, requiring anyone 5 or older to cover their face indoors.

But the governor’s orders have produced fierce resistance from the outset of the pandemic. On Monday, exasperation bled into his voice as he urged residents to heed the mask order and listen to the parade of doctors and hospital officials he had summoned to describe the growing crisis.

“Do you give a damn?” Mr. Edwards asked. “I hope you do. I do. I’ve heard it said often: Louisiana is the most pro-life state in the nation. I want to believe that.”

 

It didn't take a virologist or public health expert to tell you that the delta variant was going to be a disaster, it just needed anyone with eyes open enough to see the politicization of vaccination by the GOP to the point where it was worth dying in order to own Biden and the libs.  But that's where we are with Republicans.

Florida Man Pretends State Is On The Border

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to talk about anything else other than his plummeting approval ratings and rising delta variant COVID cases, the worst in the nation by far, by pretending the real issue is President Biden's "failure" on "illegal" immigrants in Texas, or something. Steve Benen:

So, a few things.

Right off the bat, it's worth emphasizing that Biden didn't single out Florida; Florida singled out Florida with its intensifying crisis. As NBC News reported, "The state has become the new national epicenter for the virus, accounting for around a fifth of all new cases in the U.S."

In fact, roughly a year and a half into the pandemic, conditions in Florida are effectively as bad now as they've ever been, which is bound to get noticed, whether the governor of the Sunshine State likes it or not.

But more broadly, what we saw from DeSantis was a clumsy effort, not to defend his record, and not to help protect his own constituents, but to dramatically change the subject. The COVID crisis isn't the story the Republican wants to talk about, so the governor, embracing "whataboutism" to an absurd degree, tried to shift the focus to a story he likes better.

Forget the pandemic; forget Florida's maxed out hospitals; forget rapidly rising infection tallies; forget lagging vaccination rates. Ron DeSantis would prefer to talk about immigrants and the U.S./Mexico border.

In fact, the ambitious GOP governor's political operation even sent a fundraising letter to his supporters yesterday, suggesting "migrants" are responsible for climbing COVID numbers.

At this point, we could explain that the border is not, in reality, the problem. We could also explain that Florida is one of the hemisphere's largest peninsulas -- it's largely surrounded by water -- and it shares a border with Georgia and Alabama, not Mexico.

But there's ultimately no real point in even taking DeSantis' rhetoric seriously as a substantive argument, because it's not. The governor doesn't have a plan to deal with his state's intensifying public-health crisis; he opposes policies that might help for purely political reasons; and he's on the defensive after the president helped expose his indifference.

And let's not pretend DeSantis cares about his constituents, either. He's facing 100,000 new cases per week in his state alone and he won't lift a finger to stop it, but he'll yell at Biden all day, and send out STOP THE FAUCISTS emails to fundraise.

He honestly doesn't care if people die, he can blame Biden.

That's what makes him the non-Trump frontrunner in 2024 in the Death Cult party.

Cuomo's #MeToo Moment, Con't

President Biden has called on New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo to resign in the wake of yesterday's investigation report finding the sexual harassment allegations of 11 female former Cuomo staffers and other state employees to be credible.

President Joe Biden called on Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to resign Tuesday, following a report that Cuomo sexually harassed 11 women.

“He should resign,” Biden told reporters at the White House.

Asked whether Cuomo should be removed from office if he refuses to resign, Biden said, “I understand the state legislature may decide to impeach, I do not know that for a fact.”

Shortly after Biden’s response, New York State House Speaker Carl Heastie (D) announced the launch of an impeachment inquiry.

In calling on Cuomo to step down, Biden joined nearly every other major Democratic lawmaker in both Albany and Washington. But from atop the party leadership, Biden’s demand carries more weight than others.

Cuomo’s press office did not respond to a request for comment from CNBC on the president’s remarks.

 

Cuomo tried to dismiss the report Tuesday afternoon, but that was before Biden dropped the hammer later in the day.

A somber but defiant Cuomo strongly denied some of those allegations later Tuesday, and said that other examples of his alleged misconduct had been mischaracterized or misinterpreted.

The 165-page report, which comprises interviews with 179 witnesses and a review of tens of thousands of documents, also said that Cuomo’s office was riddled with fear and intimidation, and was a hostile work environment for many staffers.

The women Cuomo is accused of harassing included members of his own staff, members of the public and other state employees, one of whom was a state trooper, the report found.

The wave of demands that Cuomo resign Tuesday represented a stunning fall from grace for a politician who made no secret of his national ambitions, and was widely seen as a potential 2024 Democratic presidential nominee should Biden decide not to run for re-election.

 

Multiple New York state legislators and politicians are calling for Cuomo to step down, and frankly he's in real danger of facing expedited impeachment and removal.

Speaker Carl Heastie says that, following a conference involving the Attorney General's report concerning sexual harassment allegations against Governor Cuomo, the governor has "lost the confidence of the Assembly Democratic majority and that he can no longer remain in office."

This, after the New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced the findings of a five-month investigation into the governor Tuesday morning.

Heastie also says that once they "receive all relevant documents and evidence from the Attorney General, we will move expeditiously and look to conclude our impeachment investigation as quickly as possible."

 

I think should that become abundantly clear later this week, Cuomo will hang it up and let Lieutenant Gov. Kathy Hochul take over. Or not, Cuomo will probably force them to do it,

Understand that New York Republicans will immediately declare Hochul as worse than Cuomo the day after his resignation, but I'm pretty sure she can take it.

Last Call For School Of Hard Right Knocks, Con't

As I said before, the true goal of Republicans screeching endlessly about Critical Race Theory is to criminalize the teaching of accurate American history to the point where teachers simply refuse to even bring up the "bad parts" at all. Slavery? What's that? In Tennessee schools, Republicans want discussing race to carry up to a five million dollar fine.

Tennessee aims to levy fines starting at $1 million and rising to $5 million on school districts each time one of their teachers is found to have “knowingly violated” state restrictions on classroom discussions about systemic racism, white privilege, and sexism, according to guidance proposed by the state’s department of education late last week.

Teachers could also be disciplined or lose their licenses for teaching that the United States is inherently racist or sexist or making a student feel “guilt or anguish” because of past actions committed by their race or sex.

The guidance received immediate backlash from advocates of students of color in the state who say it would have a disproportionate impact on already underfunded, majority Black and Latino school districts.

“There’s also a fear for young students of color who are in districts that are majority white and now there’s no protection for them and their white student peers in learning about truthful history and racism,” said Cardell Orrin, the executive director of Stand for Children Tennessee, a group that advocates for historically disenfranchised students.

The new guidance lays out the complaint process that a current student, parent, or employee can initiate against a district if they believe an educator has violated the law, but it does not elaborate on what specifically school districts are banned from teaching, as many teacher advocates had hoped. Instead, it cites 11 broad concepts that teachers can’t teach or use materials to promote. For example, students can’t be told that they are “inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously,” or bear responsibility for past actions committed by members of their race or sex. Experts have called the language of these laws vague.

Tennessee’s department of education will allow the public to weigh in on the rules until Wednesday, Aug. 11, according to the Tennessean.

Tennessee is one of 11 states this year that have drastically curtailed the ways that districts can fight systemic and individual acts of racism, homophobia, and sexism in the classroom and how teachers can talk to students about the ways America’s government has historically discriminated against minorities. Another 16 states have similar bills that are set to be considered during next year’s legislative session.

Advocates of the bills argue that public school districts are indoctrinating students with teachers’ political agendas and, through their equity initiatives, giving students of color an unfair advantage over white students.

Opponents of the bills argue that school districts can no longer ignore longstanding academic disparities between white students and students of color and are obligated to teach all students a more complete and nuanced version of America’s racist past.

In most instances, the laws spell out which anti-racist initiatives districts are no longer allowed to practice and what “divisive” concepts teachers are no longer allowed to discuss, but state legislatures left room for state departments of education to determine how to enforce the laws.

 

Criminalizing what can and can not be taught to students involving accurate history because of purely political reasons is quite literally textbook fascism, guys. 

Of course, Republicans aren't being subtle about their intent, either.

Naked hatred will be on a Kansas election ballot Tuesday.

Josh Wells, a Hutchinson-area man with Proud Boys and other alleged right-wing extremist ties, is nostalgic for the good old days when the U.S. was a “pro-white country with a protected white majority.” He’s running for the Haven USD 312 Board of Education.

A group calling itself the Midwest Youth Liberation Front unearthed Wells’ avowed longing to establish a “white nationalism and or a pro-Western Christian theocracy with a protected white majority status. Whichever one is more obtainable.” Because “every race deserves a homeland.”

“Wells’ admitted goal of his new Midwest Nationalist Party is to establish a white ethno-state,” the liberation front wrote on Twitter. “Wells openly praises the death of Black people, spreads Nazi Germany symbolism, and thinks non-White people don’t belong in America.”

It’s another hot, sleepy August election. Turnout is always low. But “you wouldn’t want somebody with that mix of hate and anger and misinformation preferably in any kind of leadership, let alone on a school board,” says state Sen. Cindy Holscher, Democrat of Overland Park, who has been monitoring political races for extremism, especially in school board elections. “I suspect there are more individuals like this person, maybe not quite as vocal. And that’s concerning.”

 

The white supremacist terrorists are openly running for school boards, folks. Get involved or they will win.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

"America's CEO" ran the country like a business, which apparently entailed trashing the place, blaming everyone else, and running away with the loot.

It was the whopping-yet-still-disappointing 6.5% annualized growth number for the second quarter that got most of the attention when the U.S. gross domestic product report came out Thursday. But the data release from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis also included revisions to GDP and related measures back to 1999, making this an opportune time to take another look at economic growth under Donald Trump and his predecessors.

This is, let’s be clear from the start, not a perfect way of measuring presidential economic performance. There are lots of things that determine economic growth rates other than who is in the White House, and when a president does make a difference the results may be felt long after he’s left Washington. Still, it’s a widely used metric and Trump was downright obsessed with it, so here goes.






OK, maybe that GDP obsession didn’t work out so well for Trump. The chart starts with Dwight Eisenhower because his was the first presidency for which the BEA has full quarterly GDP data. Annual GDP numbers go back to 1929, and if you measure from Herbert Hoover’s first year in office (1929) to the year he left (1933), annualized growth was negative 7.4 percent. So Trump did a lot better than that! But his was the worst GDP performance since then (measured the same way as with Hoover, annualized GDP growth was 9.1% under Franklin Roosevelt and 1.8% under Harry Truman).

This does seem a bit unfair, given the pandemic and all. Trump didn’t always rise to the challenges posed by Covid-19, but thanks in part to legislation he signed and a vaccine-development program his administration put in motion, the U.S. economy has experienced one of the world’s quicker recoveries. Lots of other presidents have suffered economic setbacks due to events outside their control, of course, and you can’t just ignore a quarter or two because they were affected by bad economic luck. But there is something to be said for trying some other ways of measuring growth during his term.

One is to adjust the timing. For the above chart I’ve taken real GDP in the quarter a president entered office and the quarter he left, and calculated the compound annual growth rate from one to the other. Here’s what it looks like if you shift that back or forward by a quarter.



It looks a lot better for Trump (not to mention Barack Obama, and Gerald Ford) if you shift a quarter later, although this still puts him behind everyone but George W. Bush. There’s an argument for shifting the measurement period even later, given how long it can take for the effects of economic policies to be felt, but there’s also a point beyond which that starts to get a little ridiculous, plus we don’t have the data yet to do that for Trump.

 

Trump was the worst in my lifetime by far, economically, morally, and criminally.  And unless you've hit the century mark yourself (and if you have, gratz!) he's been the worst economic president at least in your lifetime too.

The criminal and moral part isn't up for debate.