StupidiNews!

• A magnitude 7.0 earthquake rocked Southern Mexico late Tuesday near Acapulco, officials say damage is light in Mexico City, but could be extensive near the Pacific coast.
• West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin say he will cut President Biden's proposed $3.5 trillion infrastructure budget reconciliation bill by more than half, slashing "at least" $2 trillion.
• Secretary of State Tony Blinken will face hostile lawmakers from both parties next week demanding answers to questions surrounding the Biden administration's pullout from Afghanistan.
• Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is announcing USDA farm worker and meatpacker benefit money with a $600 COVID package relief payment coming later this month.
• Idaho is appealing to the Biden administration for federal help as an overload of COVID ICU cases have now forced the state's hospitals to ration care and triage patients.

Last Call For That Poll-Asked Look, Masks Off Edition

Axios commissioned a poll to see which battleground states had the highest parent opposition to mask mandates in schools, and it turns out it's neither Texas nor Florida, but Iowa and Ohio.

Most parents back mask mandates, but the states where GOP parents are most opposed aren't the ones we always hear about, according to a new Axios/Momentive poll.

Why it matters: While plenty of attention has centered around debates around the public health measures in schools in states like Texas and Florida, the poll offers a glimpse at how much more widespread opposition is across the country.

As expected, individuals' feelings on mask mandates fell along party lines, with 85% of Democrats, 66% of independents, and 32% of Republicans supporting mask mandates for all students and staff at their child’s school. 

But rather than states where school mask mandates bans have been in the national spotlight, such as Texas and Florida, opposition to school mask mandates is highest in Colorado (37%), Minnesota (38%), and Ohio (43%) — as well as Iowa (44%), which does have a ban. 

Drilling down even deeper, fewer than half (46%) of Republicans in Texas —which has been especially hard hit by COVID in recent weeks — oppose all mask mandates. In comparison, 70% of Colorado Republicans oppose the mandates. 

In Florida, more than half of Republican parents (52%) say they oppose all mask mandates. In comparison, Republican parents oppose the mandates by margins ranging from 2:1 to 3:1 in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois, the poll found.

What they're saying: "The cross-state variability in Republican sentiment is notable," Jon Cohen, the chief research officer for Momentive told Axios. "School politics is ultimately local too, so a deeper dive within the states is a clear next step."

By the numbers: Overall, nearly 60% of parents backed the broadest school mandates, nearly twice as many as the number who say they oppose all mask mandates.
Another 10% of parents with children age five to 17 say they support mask mandates only for those students and staff members who are unvaccinated.

 

What this tells me is that Republicans in states where school mask mandates are present and working are the most likely to be against mask mandates in school.  On the other hand, you have states like Ohio where there are some districts with mask mandates but not all, and they haven't been hit as hard by COVID as say, Texas or Florida to make them think any differently.

In both cases, Republicans are against mandates because their states haven't been flooded by COVID.

That of course is changing in Ohio, at least.

The Ohio Hospital Association reports the strain on the state’s hospitals is getting tighter due to coronavirus.

Currently, 1 in 7 patients in the hospital is being treated for COVID-19.

A week ago, that number was 1 in 8.

To give you an idea of how fast those numbers are climbing, 2 months ago 1 in 101 patients admitted to the hospital were being treated for coronavirus.

There are 2,933 people hospitalized for COVID-19 in Ohio.

67 of those admitted in the last week are children 17 and under.

That’s an increase of 81.1% from a week ago.

The data shows that those numbers are still climbing and have not hit a plateau.

Admissions are up in all age groups.

 

So yes, expect Ohio and the rest of the Midwest to get crushed by COVID this month.

Marvel Is Back, Baby

After the box office and streaming success of Black Widow, and the Disney+ series (WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki) it looks like Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has people back at theaters, hopefully safely and masked.

The movie industry is still in an extended period of recovery as the ongoing effects of the covid-19 pandemic make bringing audiences back to theater seats—and even just getting movies made and out to those theaters in the first place—a challenge. But in spite of that, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has proved that Marvel Studios’ continuous grasp on the collective cultural psyche can overcome even a lot of the weirdest challenges the last 18 months has thrown at the box office.

Final figures for Destin Daniel Cretton’s martial arts adventure over the Labor Day weekend have come in (via Deadline), and Shang-Chi has drawn in just over $90 million for its four-day debut. It was previously estimated to pull around $50-60 million, due to the extenuating factors. That includes relative audience hesitancy to return to theaters as rising cases of the Delta variant of covid-19 have seen mask mandates and vaccination card checks hit key theater markets over the past few months. The figures are record-breaking, not just for the pandemic-era box office, but full stop: Shang-Chi is now the biggest Labor Day weekend opening at theaters since 2007's launch of the Rob Zombie Halloween remake, nearly tripling its take of $30.6 million.

Internationally, the film has been harder to judge. Current totals stand at around $146 million for Shang-Chi, which is still very impressive, but not as seemingly grand as other pandemic releases recently, including Marvel’s own Black Widow. While Shang-Chi did better domestically (Widow opened to $80 million in the U.S.), Black Widow performed slightly better internationally, earning $158 million across 46 international territories. But there are extenuating factors here as well: Shang-Chi opened in slightly fewer international markets (42), and neither movie was released in the Chinese market, which has become increasingly valuable for Disney. But in Black Widow’s case, the film also debuted simultaneously on Disney+—and is now currently at the center of a major legal battle between its star Scarlett Johannson and Disney because of it—as part of the streamer’s $30-a-movie “Premiere Access” option, which the studio leveraged in box office reporting to give Widow a combined $215 million opening weekend total.

Whether or not Shang-Chi will see the same rapid drop-off as Widow did at the box office in the weeks to come remains to be seen. But no matter which way you slice it, it’s very good news for a movie whose release Disney previously touted as an “experiment” for the studio to test the waters of audience confidence (to the ire of star Simu Liu), as the covid-19 pandemic continues across the world. Its success has already had an impact beyond Disney itself—yesterday Sony announced that instead of delaying the release of Venom: Let There Be Carnage again as previously rumored, it would instead shift the release of its Marvel movie forward two weeks, to an October 1 debut. Even as the uncertainty around the rest of the fall movie release window seems to remain as in flux as it has for the past 18 months, Shang-Chi’s overwhelming defiance of expectations has provided a shot in the arm to an industry still trying to navigate its way to a future beyond the current “new normal” of the pandemic.

 

I'm definitely looking forward to both Hawkeye and Ms. Marvel on Disney+ (and What If...? continues to be excellent) but I wonder if The Eternals will be Marvel's first box office misstep in November, I just don't have a good feeling about that film.

Then again, Kevin Feige has made several billion, so maybe he has a good thing going.

We'll see.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

All indications are that right-wing vengeance porn festival on September 18 , the DC "Justice For J6" rally, could be as violent as the January 6th insurrection that it's being called in vengeance for by the white supremacist domestic terrorism community.

Or, you know, worse. Even former Trump-era officials are warning that President Biden and Democrats in Congress need to absolutely be prepared for violence.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said Monday evening that law enforcement needs to take the upcoming right-wing rally in support of jailed January 6 rioters "very seriously" as concerns mount about more potential violence on Capitol Hill.

"I think they should take it very seriously. In fact, they should take it more seriously than they took the same sort of intelligence that they likely saw on January 5," McCabe, a CNN contributor, told CNN's Poppy Harlow on "Erin Burnett OutFront."

Law enforcement members in Washington are steeling themselves against possible unrest at the "Justice for J6" rally -- planned for September 18 -- which aims to support the insurrectionists charged in the riot.

The event, organized by a former Trump campaign staffer, has prompted security concerns on Capitol Hill, and some precautionary measures will be in place. However, it's unclear how many protesters plan to attend. The rally is also taking place on a Saturday, when the House will be on recess, so far fewer lawmakers or staff will be around.

A law enforcement source previously told CNN that the Metropolitan Police Department will be fully activated, which includes canceling days off for sworn officers and putting Civil Disturbance Units on standby. The source said the department will monitor open source information -- like online chatter and travel bookings -- to gauge the potential crowds.

Homeland Security Intelligence chief John Cohen told CNN last month that online extremist rhetoric is strikingly similar to the buildup to the January 6 attack, with increasing calls for violence linked to conspiracy theories and false narratives.

The security preparations for September 18 underscore the tense environment on Capitol Hill following the January 6 attack. In August, a man critical of Democrats was arrested after an hours-long standoff near the Capitol during which he claimed to have an explosive device; the event ended without incident but still sent a chill through Capitol Hill and provided law enforcement with yet another example of the risks of a toxic political climate. In April, a Capitol Police officer was killed after a man rammed a vehicle into a police barricade.

The charged environment has led lawmakers to invest in body armor and security systems, while the US Capitol Police is opening field offices in cities around the country.

McCabe goes on to say that the biggest difference will be that President Biden isn't Donald Trump, and that while Trump will be almost certainly instigating violence ahead of September 18th, he won't be in a position to delay the Capitol and DC police, the DC National Guard, and the FBI like he was in January. 

At least, I hope not.

StupidiNews!

• El Salvador's Supreme Court has ruled that President Naybi Bukele can run for a second consecutive term as Bukele's party has removed critical judges and the Attorney General.
• Texas's second special legislative session this year has ended with the signing of voter suppression laws by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, another is expected to redraw state legislative maps.
• Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, trailing in polls, is going on the attack against Conservatives before general elections in Canada later this month.
• The military junta that has led a coup in Guinea has reopened air traffic as former Presidential security personnel are being restricted to barracks outside the capital, Conakry. 
• Be careful checking that company email after the long Labor Day weekend, the FBI has issued a cyber alert warning that holiday weekends are prime time for ransomware attacks.
  

The Big Lie, Golden State Edition

Of course California Republicans are going to drown the state in lawsuits and "citizen investigations" of the "corrupt" recall election as the polls show Democratic Gov. pulling away and keeping his job. The point was never actually getting rid of Newsom, it was justifying the violence coming after the recall and to lat the groundwork to terrorize Democrats in the biggest blue state of them all.

Looking to oust the governor? Ed Brown has just the right merch for you.

Camouflage Recall Newsom hats and Recall Newsom masks. He’s got Recall Newsom yard signs. A stack of Recall Newsom pamphlets.

But just days before California voters decide whether to push Democrat Gavin Newsom from office, the trailer off Golden Chain Highway was mostly a shrine to former President Trump.

“As far as I’m concerned, Trump is the president,” said Brown, 67.

And as for the recall election?

“They’ll probably do something to cheat,” he said of Newsom’s supporters, adding that he will vote for Larry Elder because “he’s more like Trump; he’s for the people.”

The Republican-backed recall election could not be more consequential for California. Set amid a deadly wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, with record-breaking wildfires and a relentless drought drying fields and faucets, it gives the GOP its best shot in over a decade at governing the nation’s most populous state.

And if there’s a symbolic heart of recall mania, it may be here in Amador County in the Sierra foothills, where about 1 in 5 registered voters signed petitions to give Newsom the boot. That’s the highest concentration in California.

The most fervent support for the recall has come from Northern California, where rural conservatives say that their voices are drowned out in Sacramento by urban Democrats and that they would be better off seceding to form their own state called Jefferson.

And yet, in many ways, this election is still about a man named Donald J. Trump.

Conservatives talk about the recall effort through the lens of Trump’s lies that he won the 2020 election. By and large, they refuse to cast their ballots by mail, believing his false claims that mail-in voting leads to rampant voter fraud. If Newsom prevails, many won’t trust the results — just as they didn’t after Trump lost.

In Newsom, they have found an avatar for the Democratic Party and everything they hate about it — a political entity in opposition to many of the things they hold dear, including (and sometimes especially) Trump.

“In many ways, the recall was never really about Gavin Newsom in particular,” said Kim Nalder, a political science professor at Cal State Sacramento.

Rather, she said, recall supporters are fueled by a “laundry list of complaints that Republicans had about liberals.”

“If you’re a Republican, especially a Trump-supporting Republican, in California, it’s a rough time in state politics,” Nalder said. “You feel really disenfranchised, and [if] you combine that with the high anxiety we all have about the fires and the pandemic and homelessness, you get a high level of motivation to do something about it.”

 

The "something" is violence, deadly, mass political terrorism. It's coming.  The recall is the excuse. "We tried the ballot box. Now we use the bullet box."

From the Bluest state to the reddest state, Republicans simply don't believe elections where Democrats win are legitimate, and this illegitimacy will absolutely be used to fuel violence against Democrats and their voters.

We've already seen it.

More is coming, and it will be a lot worse.

Labor, Dazed And Confused

This Labor Day weekend, we look at the US labor market, and how the pandemic accelerated decade-long changes into a year or two. As millions of Americans lose extended unemployment benefits this week, we're going to see how long American workers hold out from going back to jobs they gave up for various reasons in the last 18 months.

At heart, there is a massive reallocation underway in the economy that’s triggering a “Great Reassessment” of work in America from both the employer and employee perspectives. Workers are shifting where they want to work — and how. For some, this is a personal choice. The pandemic and all of the anxieties, lockdowns and time at home have changed people. Some want to work remotely forever. Others want to spend more time with family. And others want a more flexible or more meaningful career path. It’s the “you only live once” mentality on steroids. Meanwhile, companies are beefing up automation and redoing entire supply chains and office setups.

The reassessment is playing out in all facets of the labor market this year, as people make very different decisions about work than they did pre-pandemic. Resignations are the highest on record — up 13 percent over pre-pandemic levels. There are 4.9 million more people who aren’t working or looking for work than there were before the pandemic. There’s a surge in retirements with 3.6 million people retiring during the pandemic, or more than 2 million more than expected. And there’s been a boost in entrepreneurship that has caused the biggest jump in years in new business applications.

“The economy is going through a big shift overall and that has ramifications,” said Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chair from 2006 to 2014. “We are reallocating where we want to work and how we want to work. People are trying to figure out what their best options are and where they want to be.”

It doesn’t help that the abundance of job openings right now are not in the same occupations — or same locations — where people worked pre-pandemic.

There is a fundamental mismatch between what industries have the most job openings now and how many unemployed people used to work in that industry pre-pandemic. For example, there are 1.8 million job openings in professional and business services and fewer than 925,000 people whose most recent job was in that sector. Leisure and hospitality, as well as retail and wholesale trade, also have more openings than prior workers, and many workers who lost jobs in those industries have indicated they don’t want to return.

There’s a similarmismatch in education and health services, where there are 1.7 million job openings and only 1.1 million people whose last job was in that sector.

In recent months, heath care workers and educators have quit their jobs at the highest rate on record, stretching back to 2002, Labor Department data show.

“This is typically the time of year we recruit for the upcoming school year, but we literally can’t get enough candidates, and we’re seeing tenured people leave,” said Cindy Lehnhoff, a 36-year veteran of the child care industry who currently heads the National Child Care Association. “If you get one good candidate, there are 10 others contacting that same person. It’s a crisis. People can’t work without child care.”

Lehnhoff has been helping a child care center in northern Virginia recruit more staff. Their infant room remains closed, because they don’t have enough people, and one of their veteran workers was just poached by a nearby elementary school. As she spoke with The Washington Post, Lehnhoff pored over the Indeed.com job portal. It showed more than 2,000 job posts in the Fairfax County, Va., area for child care teaching assistants. Most paid $12 to $13 an hour, a bit less than many nearby fast food restaurants and retail stores.

Nationwide, most industries have more job openings than people with prior experience in that sector, Labor Department data show. That’s a very different situation than after the Great Recession, when the number of unemployed far outstripped jobs available in every sector for years. To find enough workers, companies may need to train workers and entice people to switch careers, a process which generally takes longer, especially in fields that require special licenses.

While companies say they are struggling to find workers, many unemployed say they are having trouble getting hired, especially if they haven’t worked for a year.

Forklift driver Brandon Harvey and his wife used to work in a warehouse outside Atlanta that closed during the pandemic and never reopened. Harvey, 33, searched for a job for months, looking online and driving around South Fulton. He submitted countless applications but rarely got calls back.

“I fear that employers are pretty hesitant to give you an opportunity right now if you haven’t worked in a while,” Harvey said over the summer, when his search seemed especially frustrating.

 

Counting on the market being flooded in September with workers who need jobs now, employers are betting on "everything goes back to 2019" rules, where long-term unemployed have to take near-minimum wage jobs and have to take whatever opportunities they are offered. 

But it won't be that way for everyone. We'll see, but it's going to take time for all this to be sorted out, maybe years.

The Vax Of Life, Kentucky Edition, Con't

Kentucky Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear is calling a special session of the General Assembly in order for Republicans who control the state House and Senate completely to deal with the state's runaway COVID-19 delta variant pandemic, as the same KY GOP legislature stripped Gov. Beshear of almost all emergency powers relating to health and safety executive orders earlier this spring.

 

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear is calling for a special session of the General Assembly to address the commonwealth's alarming rise in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

The session will begin Tuesday at 10 a.m. at the state Capitol in Frankfort.

Beshear's call comes two weeks after the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled a lower court was wrong to block new laws limiting the scope of the governor's emergency powers, giving the Republicans' legislative supermajority a substantial say over any new policy measures to address the pandemic.

The governor's call for a special session follows more than a week of negotiations with Republican leaders over the scope of a potential session and what pandemic-related legislation both could support.

Beshear began Saturday's announcement with a warning about the severity of the current surge in cases and hospitalizations due to the delta variant.

"In previous surges, the governor — me — was empowered to act. To do what is necessary to stop the spike, to flatten the curve, to save lives. But a recent state Supreme Court decision has changed that," he said. "Now that burden will fall in large part on the General Assembly.

"They'll have to carry much of that weight. To confront unpopular choices and to make decisions that balance many things, including the lives and the possible deaths of our citizens."

Under the Kentucky constitution, the governor has the exclusive power to both call a special session and set the agenda of any legislation it considers.

 

So, the good news is that the KY GOP can't add a Texas-style abortion ban to the special session, or any other nonsense that Beshear hasn't specifically asked the General Assembly to take up, as that's a state constitutional provision of the governor's power.

 

The bad news is the KY GOP will almost certainly do nothing substantive to stop the pandemic, other than to force the state to offer livestock dewormer and other non-COVID medicines to those who want to use it as a "treatment".

That is unfortunate, as especially in rural counties, schools are now unraveling under entire districts flooded with thousands of kids and educators sick with COVID delta.

About a fifth of Kentucky’s school districts have had to temporarily close since classes began last month because of coronavirus infections, an indication of the dire impact the most recent wave of the virus has had on the state.

Kentucky has recently reached its highest levels of cases and hospitalizations since the start of the pandemic, largely because of the highly infectious Delta variant. Hospitals are becoming overwhelmed, and Governor Andy Beshear said on Thursday he was deploying the National Guard to help medical professionals.

The rise in cases has also affected Kentucky’s schoolchildren, hundreds of thousands of whom are under 12 and so not eligible for vaccination. “More kids are getting Covid right now than we ever thought imaginable,” Mr. Beshear said at a news conference on Monday.

As of Friday, 34 of the state’s 171 school districts had closed at some point during the new school year because of infections and quarantines, said Josh Shoulta, a spokesman for the Kentucky School Boards Association.

 

The emergency COVID orders that Beshear put into place all expire on Friday, but that means everything from that point on is on KY Senate President Robert Stivers and House Speaker David Osborne.  

Don't expect much from these two clowns.

Sunday Long Read: Lyrical Miracles

This week's Sunday Long Read comes to us from over at Longreads.com, where Adrian Daub gives us more on the most underrated part of a great film: the lyrics of the movie's soundtrack and who actually writes those swelling choral strains that transfix us in the theaters.

When a new trailer for the Marvel film Black Widow dropped in April of this year — after the movie had been repeatedly moved back due to the pandemic — the producers seemed intent on reminding people about why they’d been excited about the movie before the lockdowns started. They did so by closing the promo with a new version of the theme from The Avengers, probably to call back viewers to a different, less socially distanced time. How could you know this was a new version of the motif? It was choral, but that was a well Marvel had gone to before. This time it had lyrics. As best I can tell, for the first time.

As fans welcomed the callback in online comments, I was brought back to a question that I’d had when Game of Thrones did something similar at the end of its fourth season and again at the very end of the show. It’s something of a trend these days to take a highly recognizable instrumental theme and make it choral. And I get why: The gesture is big and bold and epic. But my question concerned something comparatively pedestrian: Who decides what the lyrics are? What language are they even in? And who writes them? I decided to find out.

Those of us who listen to soundtracks obsessively do so knowing that that’s not how soundtracks are intended to work on us. Whoever mixed in a chorus for a few seconds of the Black Widow trailer was going for an emotional reaction, not some new layer of meaning to be disentangled. “When I do a film score,” the late James Horner said in a TED talk in 2005, “I am nothing more than a fancy pencil” executing the vision of a filmmaker. You’re not meant to listen to a soundtrack in isolation from the image. It is music in service of the moment.

But one place where this fancy pencil has more autonomy is when it comes to the text that a chorus sings. Perhaps it’s better to say that the pencil is condemned to freedom. When the composer John Ottman was hired to score the 2008 Tom Cruise film Valkyrie, he realized that he needed a break in the texture of the soundtrack at the very end of the film. That’s because in the final scenes of the movie basically all of the even remotely redeemable characters get executed. After they had all died and the credits rolled, Ottman decided he wanted a “sense of release, because there had to be a different feeling as the audience walks out of the theater.” So he hit upon the idea of a self-contained choral piece. “The problem was though, what on earth would they be saying?”

What on earth indeed? It’s a moment where blockbuster filmmaking — always so anxiously in control of its meanings — seems to be at a bit of a loss. And it’s a moment where we as an audience suddenly get a sense for how films make meaning, and how it isn’t always the meaning they intend to make.

So who decided what the lyrics to the theme from The Avengers were? The short answer is that I still don’t know. But the long answer to my pedestrian question leads into the high-pressure, highly collaborative world of film scoring. A world in which composers often have just a few weeks to write music that pleases the studio and the director, and potentially even test audiences. And in which they toil with assistants, orchestrators, sound editors, and many, many session musicians to find a sound for a film that is still in the process of evolving. I wanted to find out who among this massive group would be the one to say “hey, let’s add a chorus and have it sung in Sanskrit” or something along those lines.

The answer turns out to be: Pretty much any of them can and sometimes do. What film choruses offer us is a perfect synecdoche for the collective, frenzied, and deeply mercenary magic that creates movies in the first place. It’s as likely that a director had the screenwriter invent specific lyrics early in post-production as that a subcontractor, assistant composer, or orchestrator jotted down some words or went on a Wikipedia deep-dive eight weeks out from release in a desperate late-night quest for a non-copyrighted text to use with a cue that might please a bunch of suits half a world away.

Yes, sometimes choral lyrics really are nonsense that happens to sound pretty damn cool in a theater with booming explosions and frenetic action.

Who knew?

The Democrats' Complete Power Outage

Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman is right: Republicans use every ounce of power given them to destroy Democrats and their voting coalition. Democrats meanwhile twiddle the goddamn thumbs and apologize to Republican voters.

Democrats look like they’re the ones with the greater share of political power in America today, holding both the White House and Congress. So why do they so often seem weak and ineffectual, while Republicans ruthlessly employ every shred of power they have?

You could hardly have asked for a more vivid illustration than what’s happening right now. In Congress, a couple of key Democrats, especially Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), proclaimed their intention to sabotage the party’s agenda if it isn’t drastically pared back, lest anyone think it’s too “partisan.” They could unshackle themselves from the filibuster and actually do what they were elected to do, but they choose not to.

Meanwhile, Republican-run states are rushing to create a far-right dystopia where every customer at your local supermarket is packing heat, school boards and election boards are run by QAnon lunatics, mob rule is valorized and institutionalized, voting rights are dramatically restricted, and abortion is outlawed.

And they’re doing it with the help of a conservative Supreme Court majority that barely bothers to pretend that it cares about precedent, the Constitution, the law or anything other than remaking America to conform to its ideological agenda.

We’re seeing what a profound difference there is in how Democrats and Republicans view power. When Democrats have it, they’re often apologetic, uncertain and hesitant to use it any way that anyone might object to. Republicans, on the other hand, will squeeze it and stretch it as far as they can. They aren’t reluctant, and they aren’t afraid of a backlash. Whatever they can do, they will do.

Think of how the two parties react when presented with an obstacle to getting what they want. Democrats often issue statements of regret: We’d like to move forward, but what can we do? This is how democracy works.

Republicans, on the other hand, react to obstacles by getting creative. They search for loopholes, they engineer procedural workarounds, they devise innovative ways to seize and wield control. When they come up with an idea and someone says, “That’s madness — no one has ever dared try something like that before,” they know they’re on the right track.

There’s a line of jurisprudence establishing the right to abortion? What if we outlaw the procedure, but pull a switcheroo by putting enforcement in the hands of millions of potential vigilantes so you can’t sue the government to overturn the law? Does that sound cynical and crazy? Don’t worry, we’ve got five votes on the Supreme Court who’ll give it the rubber stamp.

That’s the kind of creative use of power Democrats don’t even contemplate. Think back to the decision that led directly to this latest stage in the assault on abortion, when then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refused to allow President Barack Obama’s nominee to be considered for a Supreme Court vacancy, holding it open for nearly a year so it could be filled by a Republican president.

McConnell didn’t worry about how many stern editorials condemned his action. He didn’t care about whether polls showed that if you asked them the right way, the public would disagree with what he was doing, because he knew that they were barely paying attention.

Critically, nearly all of his Republican Senate colleagues got on board with the strategy. They didn’t care that what they were doing wouldn’t be seen as sufficiently “bipartisan.” They wanted that seat, and they were going to get it. Now they have it — and two more, thanks to the fact that Donald Trump was elected in 2016 winning a minority of the vote — and they’re damn sure going to use it.

You can trace the roots of these differing conceptions of power very far back, but the most critical moment was the 2000 election controversy in Florida, not only for the tactical chasm that separated the parties throughout that battle, but for the way it ended. Five conservatives on the Supreme Court simply handed George W. Bush the presidency, not because it was what the Constitution demanded or even because there was a remotely persuasive legal argument for it, but because the outcome itself was what they wanted.

They could do it, so they did. Republicans learned a vital lesson: If you have the power to get what you want, use it. Don’t worry that you’ll pay some karmic price down the road, because you probably won’t.

 

Republicans tell Democratic voters how they will be harmed, persecuted, even killed if they don't join the "winning" side, warnings of retribution and destruction are daily occurrences for the GOP.  Democrats meanwhile apologize for governing the country as a whole and constantly ask how they can make things easier for the voters who increasingly want to see them swinging from the gallows or shot dead, tied to a firing squad post.

One side will do anything it takes to win, up to and including disinformation to kill its own supporters just to drum up constant, inchoate rage.

Our side vows to bring cookies.

 

It's been like this for the entire run of Zandar Versus the Stupid, and indeed for my entire adult lifetime, going back to Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America when I was a college freshman.

 

When we tried to use power in 2010, for the Affordable Care Act, it cost us 80 House seats and a dozen Senate seats over two midterm elections, not to mention half the state legislatures.  The backlash of white supremacy against a party that gave us a Black president continues to this day and will do so for the rest of my life, and right now, that backlash is winning.

If Trump was even slightly more competent, the GOP would still have total control of America. We got extraordinarily lucky, and we're acting like it's business as usual with filibuster footsie and squealing about national debt, while Republicans are openly talking about putting Democrats in cages and graves.

It's war. Open war. And if the Democrats don't win, we're all doomed.

It's long past time we started fighting like it.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

Deliberate misinformation on COVID by the Republican party continues to cause lethal damage across the country to real people, but it's also causing the Biden administration lots of political damage as well. Like it or not, Joe Biden is President, and when things are bad, people blame the guy in the Oval Office, as Cook Political Report's Amy Walter explains.

For the last couple of weeks, I've been watching focus groups. Two of those groups included independent-leaning voters who don't align themselves strongly with either party. One other group was comprised of so-called Democratic "surge" voters; people who vote infrequently or only in presidential elections. In other words, these are the swing voters that we will be watching closely in the midterm elections.

At this point, however, listening to these voters is helpful not for predicting the outcome of the 2022 election, but for understanding how they are processing the world around them. They are often much less interested in the topics and policies that get chewed over on Twitter or cable TV. Many times they also see those issues very differently than we assume they do.

My main takeaway was the prominence of COVID as their dominant concern. When asked about how they felt about the state of the country, almost all of them replied with a pessimistic comment. And, that negativity was almost universally centered around issues of the virus and the vaccine.

They are "overwhelmed" with the deluge of conflicting information they are getting about the virus from the news media, friends and Facebook.

"First, they tell you to get the shot. Then you get it," said a woman from Chicago. "But people are dying who got the shot. [I'm] scared to get it but you want to get it, because some places want proof."

A man from Columbus, Ohio echoed these concerns about vaccines, saying there's "too much information out there — especially on social media that's what leading to the confusion about whether it's safe or not safe."

"There's so much information out there about COVID it's crazy," said another woman from Florida.

They are frustrated that more than a year later — and with vaccines available to all — we are still battling this virus.

"I'm disappointed," said a woman from Texas, "I thought we'd be in a better place with vaccines. I think we could be in a better spot than we are."

Another woman in this group echoed her concerns: "I wish it had been gone by now. I wish that COVID had been extinguished. I wish that people had listened to science. I wish COVID was over."

A number worried about a fall/winter where we are once again shutting down schools and the economy.

One man from suburban Chicago lamented that he and his family are finally in a good spot financially, and couldn't afford another year like 2020. A woman from Dallas said that as a gig-worker, "another lockdown worries me."

And, they are upset about the polarization over and politicization of vaccines. Many described strained relationships with family members and friends over the issue.

"I don't understand how vaccines got to be such a political issue," said one woman.

 

Again, the deliberate disinformation is being spread across social media and cable TV on purpose with the intent of hurting as many people as possible so that people blame Biden and the Democrats, and meaning Republicans can retake power.  It became a political issue because at every juncture, Republicans and their allies made it a political issue, and they had no problem with thousands of Americans paying a fatal price for GOP political ambitions.

 

It works and continues to work. Americans continue to refuse the vaccine in the name of political tribalism and Trump cultism, and they die for it. God help me, I don't know how to beat people who are willing to slaughter as many thousands as it takes to win. I can only protect myself.

Last Call For Kabuki Politics

Japanese PM Yoshihide Suga is resigning as the country reels from COVID delta, a stagnant economy, and a sub-30% approval rating for his government, with the choice of resignation or a no-confidence vote no doubt being offered. 

 

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said in a surprise move on Friday he would step down, setting the stage for a new premier after a one-year tenure marred by an unpopular COVID-19 response and sinking public support.

Suga, who took over after Shinzo Abe resigned last September citing ill health, has seen his approval ratings drop below 30% as the nation struggles with its worst wave of COVID-19 infections ahead of a general election this year.

Suga did not capitalise on his last major achievement - hosting the Olympics, which were postponed months before he took office as coronavirus cases surged.

His decision not to seek reelection as ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) president this month means the party will choose a new leader, who will become prime minister.

There is no clear frontrunner, but the popular minister in charge of Japan's vaccination rollout, Taro Kono, intends to run, broadcaster TBS said on Friday without citing sources. Former foreign minister Fumio Kishida has already thrown his hat in the ring.

Before Abe's record eight-year tenure, Japan had gone through six prime ministers in as many years, including Abe's own troubled first one-year term.

Tokyo stocks jumped on news of Suga's decision, with the benchmark Nikkei (.N225) rising 2% and the broader Topix (.TOPX) hitting its highest levels since 1991.

"I want to focus on coronavirus response, so I told the LDP executive meeting that I've decided not to run in the party leadership race," Suga told reporters. "I judged that I cannot juggle both and I should concentrate on either of them."

He said he would hold a news conference as early as next week.

Suga's abrupt resignation ended a rollercoaster week in which he pulled out all the stops to save his job, including suggestions he would sack his long-term party ally, as well as plans to dissolve parliament and reshuffle party executive and his cabinet.

He is expected to stay on until his successor is chosen in the party election slated for Sept. 29. The winner, assured of being premier due to the LDP's majority in the lower house of parliament, must call the general election by Nov. 28.

Suga has been an important ally for U.S. President Joe Biden in pushing back against China's increasingly assertive behavior and he was the first foreign leader Biden welcomed in person at the White House in April. read more

A State Department spokesperson said Biden was grateful for Suga’s leadership and partnership on shared challenges, including COVID-19, climate change, North Korea, China, and preserving peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.

"The U.S.-Japan alliance is and will remain ironclad, not just between our governments, but our people," the spokesperson said.

Really can't underestimate the importance of Suga being the first foreign head of state to visit the Biden White House for an official visit with President Biden, and for Suga to then resign as Biden faces his own growing domestic problems. Biden did this to emphasize Japan as a counter to China's ambitions. Somehow I think China believes it can continue to do whatever it damn well pleases after the events of the last few weeks.

That's not going to be good in the short or the long run.

Klep-Trump-Cracy Update, September 2021 Edition

With The Former Guy gone, we're still finding out examples where Trump officials engaged in open grift and pay-for-play with the goal of enriching their Orange Emperor at the expense of our closest international neighbors.

 

Kelly Craft, who was appointed to two ambassadorships under President Donald Trump, directed government business to Trump’s hotel in Washington while in office, emails released by the State Department show.

In November 2018, Craft — then the U.S. ambassador to Canada — received an email about an upcoming conference in Washington for ambassadors and other chiefs of mission. The email included a list of five recommended hotels in Washington that had blocks of rooms set aside for conference attendees, along with specially negotiated rates between $119 and $181 per night.

Craft apparently ignored those recommendations.

“Is this a meeting I should attend? If so, I would prefer the TRUMP HOTEL,” Craft wrote after forwarding the email to a staffer, referring to the Trump International Hotel, which was owned by Trump’s company and in a building leased from the federal government.

The staffer replied that the conference was one Craft would “definitely” want to attend.

“I’ll make reservations at the Trump Intl Hotel,” the staffer added.

Craft’s emails were obtained from the State Department by the nonprofit legal watchdog group American Oversight through a records request under the Freedom of Information Act, and they were reported earlier Thursday by Forbes. The watchdog group accused Craft of using her position as an American diplomat “to line the president’s pockets” and said it was “an example of the casual corruption that permeated the Trump administration and undermines confidence in the United States.”

“Ambassador Craft’s apparent eagerness to direct business to a Trump-owned hotel sends a signal that U.S. foreign policy is pay-to-play,” American Oversight spokesman Jack Patterson said in a statement.

Craft could not be reached for comment Thursday.

It was not the first time Craft showed an affinity for the hotel owned by Trump’s company. According to the emails, Craft stayed at the Trump International Hotel multiple times while in Washington. On Jan. 8, 2018, a staffer sent a “friendly reminder” for Craft to provide the name and contact details for the Trump hotel manager “so that I could arrange a suite for you” later that month.

In April 2018, the obtained emails showed Craft had a reservation at the Trump hotel to catch an event with Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.

In June 2018, Craft was scheduled to attend a conference at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Md., about 10 miles away from the Trump hotel in Washington. According to the emails, a staffer asked Craft in May if she would be interested “in a boutique hotel near the Gaylord” for the conference.

“Let’s keep TRUMP Hotel,” Craft replied from her BlackBerry device.

On June 18, 2018, Craft and her husband, Joe Craft, were expected to check in to the Trump hotel in Washington for a three-night stay, according to an internal hotel “VIP Arrivals” list obtained by The Washington Post. The list, which allowed hotel staff to recognize important guests, listed the Crafts as repeat customers paying a “high rate,” and as gold-level members of the company’s Trump Card rewards program.

Separately, The Post obtained government receipts showing more than $3,500 in spending by the State Department or its employees at the Trump International Hotel in Washington during Trump’s term. None of those receipts referenced a stay by Craft, but they give a sense of the rates that the Trump hotel charged the State Department: In those cases, it was between $175 and $251 per night.

During Trump’s term, millions of government and GOP dollars flowed to his properties, and high-ranking Republican officials and newsmakers could often be seen at his luxury hotel in Washington, less than a mile from the White House. Even after leaving office, Trump has continued to direct taxpayer dollars to his businesses, in May charging the Secret Service nearly $10,200 for agents’ rooms at his Florida resort.

Trump appointed Craft to two ambassadorships while in office: as ambassador to Canada in 2017 and as ambassador to the United Nations in 2019. Craft has since continued to tout her connections to the Trump administration and to praise the former president as she reportedly eyes a run for Kentucky governor.

Yes, Craft is from right here in Kentucky, and if you think the fact she's corrupt as hell in the name of Donald Trump is going to in any way hurt her chances of being the state's next governor, you're out of your mind. Republican primary voters here in Kentucky expect GOP politicians to serve Donald Trump as his vassals. That's what ambassadors are supposed to do, you see.

No doubt Trump will reward her with an endorsement, which is how American politics works these days.

And that's the point. Politics of open vassal states to the high lord.

The Vax Of Life, Local Edition

Here in Kentucky we're now topping 5,400 new cases of COVID-19 daily, and there seems to be no end in sight. Hospitals in the state, especially in the rural west and east, are facing critical staffing, supply, and oxygen shortages as ICU beds increasingly maxed out due to unvaccinated COVID patients.

Officials with Kentucky hospitals and nursing homes appealed for help Thursday from state lawmakers to fight the coronavirus pandemic that is overwhelming their facilities.

The officials primarily raised concerns about staffing shortages. A nursing home official said the closure of some nursing homes in the state is possible without help, noting that a nursing home in Oldham County already has closed because of COVID-19.

State legislators are preparing for a special session on COVID-19 that could begin early next week. Gov. Andy Beshear has said he wants to call a special session soon due to a recent Kentucky Supreme Court decision last month that said COVID-19 emergency measures need legislative approval, not just the governor’s say.

Members of the legislature’s Health and Welfare committees heard nearly three hours of testimony Thursday on steps to deal with the pandemic.

Senate Health and Welfare Chair Ralph Alvarado, R-Winchester, told the hospital and nursing home officials that they can expect funding to help retain and recruit nurses, aides, respiratory therapists and EMS personnel.

Alvarado, a physician, also said the legislature will look at expanding what paramedics can do in hospitals, proving more rapid testing of COVID-19 for hospitals and nursing homes, finding ways to administer more treatment for the virus, helping certain health-related boards to recruit retired people to help, and extending liability protection.

Nancy Galvagni, president of the Kentucky Hospital Association, gave the lawmakers some grim statistics about Kentucky hospitals and the pandemic.

She said COVID-19 hospitalizations in the state are at a record high, growing from just over 500 patients at the end of July to 2,267 on Sept. 1.

COVID-19 patients are now occupying one-half of all intensive care unit beds in the state, she said, adding that as of Wednesday, there were only 135 open and staffed ICU beds statewide.

Many hospitals are postponing medically necessary procedures, such as knee replacements, hernia repairs and certain cancer treatments, said Galvagni.

 

Kentucky Republicans can do whatever they want to, as they can simply override any Beshear veto with a simple majority in both the state House and Senate, and control two-thirds of the House and nearly 75% of the Senate. The question is what the KY GOP will decide on doing. They control 100% of the state's COVID response now, and they passed the very laws making that the case.

Meanwhile more than 10% of Kentucky school districts have already closed at least one day this year after being overwhelmed by COVID in the first weeks of the 2021 school year. And nobody's wearing masks here.

Nobody.

 

At Thursday's meeting, testimony also focused on masks in child care centers, vaccines and immunity to COVID-19 as lawmakers continued to map out ideas for the possible session.

Sen. Danny Carroll, R-Paducah, led the child care discussion, saying he's working on a proposed bill to clarify how child care centers would operate "as we move forward with the pandemic."

While the bill is a "work in progress," Carroll said he anticipates proposing changes that include giving families and day care owners more control over operations at centers.

Most were closed temporarily at the start of the pandemic under emergency orders by the Beshear administration and, when allowed to reopen, did so with strict requirements on capacity, staffing, masks and other measures.

Much of the child care discussion focused on current state rules requiring masks for children age 2 or older in child care programs.

Carroll brought as a witness Jennifer Washburn, owner of iKids child care center in Benton, who said masks present a problem for younger children at her center.

The children, especially 2-year-olds, take off the masks, throw them away, take masks off other children or chew on or play with them, Washburn said.

"Teacher are continually struggling with keeping the masks on the faces of our toddlers, our 2-year-olds," she said. "It has become increasingly more difficult to become the enforcer, especially of our 2s and 3s, of mask wearing."

Carroll, CEO of Easterseals West Kentucky, oversees a child care center and said he questions the benefit of requiring masks for the youngest children.

"The children simply aren't wearing them properly, and they take them off throughout the day,"' Carroll said.

A few members on the committee appeared to share Carroll's concerns about masks, including Rep. Danny Bentley, R-Russell.

Bentley, a pharmacist, questioned whether masks are effective against microscopic viruses and whether they can actually spread COVID-19 by accumulating germs.

"Most of masks are made in China," Bentley said. "Are we guaranteeing these masks are pure?

 

So nothing will be done, and everyone will blame Beshear, and he'll be replaced by a lunatic Republican in 2023, but by then there won't be a lot of things in Kentucky, like working hospitals, open schools, civil rights, or women's bodily autonomy, or bridges, so really it's all for the best.

StupidiNews!

• Dozens are dead in the Northeast after remnants of Hurricane Ida flooded NYC, New Jersey, and New England.
• Six Germans have been charged by Dresden police in connection with a major 2020 museum heist, including stealing the famous Dresden White Diamond.
• Social media mobile app WhatsApp is facing a record 225-million-euro fine from Ireland over privacy violations, WhatsApp says it will appeal to the Hague.
• Israel is blasting US State Department plans to reopen the American consulate in Jerusalem closed by the Trump regime in the course of moving the US Embassy to Tel Aviv.
• Astronomers have discovered a new stellar object that appears to be a dual-system star that "ate" its neutron star sibling, and then exploded.