James.galbraith

"A new study finds that Microsoft's companywide shift to remote work has hurt communication and collaboration among different business groups inside the company, threatening employee productivity and long-term innovation," reports GeekWire: That's one of the key findings in a peer-reviewed study of more than 61,000 Microsoft employees, published Thursday morning by Microsoft researchers in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.... The researchers call it a warning sign for other companies, as well. "Without intervention, the effects we discovered have the potential to impact workers' ability to acquire and share new information across groups, and as a result, affect productivity and innovation," they write in an accompanying blog post. "In light of these findings, companies should be thoughtful about if and how they choose to adopt long-term work-from-home policies." The Microsoft study says remote work has also changed the way employees communicate, causing them to rely more frequently than before on asynchronous communication, such as email and instant messages, and less frequently than before on synchronous communication, such as audio and video calls. "Based on previous research, we believe that the shift to less 'rich' communication media may have made it more difficult for workers to convey and process complex information," the Microsoft researchers write. The study is based on an analysis of anonymized data about emails, calls, meetings, and other work activities by Microsoft employees. At about the same time, Microsoft published a blog post summarizing the results of its own surveys of Microsoft employees — an opt-in survey of a random sample of 2,500. Some highlights: - In a year when we sent 160,000 people home to work and remotely onboarded 25,000 new employees, the share of people who report feeling included at Microsoft is at an all-time high of 90%. According to surveys, employee confidence and support from our managers is also at an all-time high... - Our ongoing research shows employees crave more in-person time with their team but wish to keep the flexibility of remote work... And Microsoft's LinkedIn also surveyed more than 500 C-level executives in the U.S. and U.K., "to better understand how employers are thinking about navigating this new world of work." Top of mind for executives is the same thing on the minds of employees — flexibility. With 87% of people saying they would prefer to stay remote at least half the time, a majority of employers are adapting: 81% of leaders are changing their workplace policies to offer greater flexibility. Despite all the change, leaders feel like there are opportunities ahead — more than half (58%) are optimistic that flexibility will be good for both people and the business.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

She had the gall to claim to be above politics speaking at an event honoring Mitch McConnell.

In the days after the Sept. 11 attacks—launched by a group of Islamist terrorists (al-Qaida) given safe haven and protection in Afghanistan by the Taliban—most Americans did not harbor positive feelings toward that regime. Yet somehow, 20 years later there is one group, right-wing white Christian nationalists, who now sing the Taliban’s praises. If you were prescient enough to see that one coming, well, that’s some serious Professor Trelawney-level talent.

For some time now, these right-wing extremists who (falsely) claim the mantle of patriots have been just raving about the Taliban. Why? Because both groups hate LGBTQ folks, Jews, women, liberals, a non-theocratic society, and "globalism," for starters. The hard right also hates Muslims, but they mostly concern themselves with Muslims here in the U.S., not so much Muslims in other parts of the world—so long as they stay there.

There are plenty of receipts, some of which were assembled by New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, a long-standing expert on the extreme Christian right whose 2006 book broke new ground. She provided examples that demonstrate the ideological affinity built around the concept of hating a common enemy. Earlier this summer an “alt-right” bunch created a Twitter account that tracked and lauded the Taliban’s successful step-by-step conquest of Afghanistan. One retweet auto-translated a message that read: “Liberalism did not fail in Afghanistan because it was Afghanistan, it failed because it was not true. It failed America, Europe, and the world [sees] it.”

Along similar lines, white nationalist “Groyper” Nick Fuentes—he’s also a close chum of Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar—wrote on the encrypted app Telegram: “The Taliban is a conservative, religious force, the U.S. is godless and liberal. The defeat of the U.S. government in Afghanistan is unequivocally a positive development.” The fact that the Taliban’s victory came on President Biden’s watch only added to the general glee on the right. Joanna Mendelson, associate director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, noted that a dangerous number of right-wing extremists are displaying “almost this infatuation and admiration” for the Taliban. She added: “the fact that the Taliban at the end of the day could claim victory over such a world power is something that white supremacists are taking note of.”

An account linked to everyone’s favorite assholes, the Proud Boys, put this message out on Telegram: “These farmers and minimally trained men fought to take back their nation back from globohomo. They took back their government, installed their national religion as law, and executed dissenters ... If white men in the west had the same courage as the Taliban, we would not be ruled by Jews.” I expect the Proud Boys don’t want to turn the U.S. completely into Afghanistan, with its incredibly high poverty rate, but they don’t seem to make the connection between a society based on religious freedom, equal rights, and pluralism and the level of development our country has managed to achieve. Just sayin’.

Here’s another one, from a blog post connected to Atomwaffen Division and the National Socialist Order, a neo-Nazi terrorist group: “NATO is pulling out of Afghanistan after 20 years of war with the Taliban and losing. ...This should in fact be celebrated as a victory against the Jewish-controlled world. While the Taliban does have its faults, they are nonetheless a marked enemy of the Jews.”

Antisemitism is a common theme in these right-wing messages, which also typically denigrate Islam overall, despite their kind words for the Taliban. Intellectual consistency isn’t exactly a hallmark for these guys. Ultimately, the enemy of their enemy is their friend.

These sentiments don’t just appear on encrypted apps and blog posts; they reflect mainstream thinking in today’s Trump Republican Party. Don’t believe me? Here’s Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, one of the twice impeached former guy’s strongest allies (he’s also officially under investigation for sex trafficking and, unofficially, for being the smarmiest looking guy in America whose name doesn’t begin with T and end with UMP).

He sees the Taliban as more legitimate than the duly elected president of the United States. No snarky comment can do justice to how disgusting that statement is.

Then there’s the leading media voice of Trumpism, Tucker Carlson. He’s almost giddy about having the opportunity to bash liberalism (oddly, he calls it “neoliberalism,” a mostly economic term that centers on the principles of democratic capitalism, but accuracy has never been his strong point) and specifically its “gender studies symposium” as a major factor in helping the Taliban defeat the previous government. He blathered on about the notion that “men can become pregnant” as somehow being a fundamental value that was pushed by the U.S. on Afghanistan’s traditional society.

I wonder, was this notion also being pushed under Trump, the guy who actually signed the surrender agreement pulling our troops out of that country under the terms of what one conservative foreign policy expert called “one of the most disgraceful diplomatic bargains on record”? Either way, Carlson praised the Taliban’s overall views on gender politics, saying that at least “they don’t hate their own masculinity. They don’t think it’s toxic. They like the patriarchy.” It certainly seems as if Tucker does, too.

One of the other core ideas animating right-wing trash-talking on Afghanistan relates to refugees—people who, in case anyone forgot, risked their lives working with the U.S. Carlson hit this point hard as well, lying about “millions of foreign nationals whose identities we can’t confirm mov[ing] here,” and warning ominously about “many refugees from Afghanistan resettling in our country . . . probably in your neighborhood.” Because what else would you expect a xenophobic, fearmongering fuckface like Tucker to say. He then spoke of incoming refugees numbering in “the millions” before concluding: “First we invade, then we’re invaded.”

John Cohen, chief of the Homeland Security Department's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, expressed a number of chilling facts on a call with law enforcement officials to which CNN gained access. First, right-wing white Christian nationalists see the victory of the Taliban as a “success” that can serve as a template for their violent takeover of the U.S. government. Second, a number of these extremists are also connecting events in Afghanistan, in particular the migration to our country of a significant number of Afghan refugees to “the great replacement concept."

This nakedly white supremacist claptrap, also promoted on his Fox News show by the aforementioned Grand Wizard Carlson, centers on the fear that immigrants are changing our country’s demographics and replacing the white Christians who are the only real Americans, depriving them of their rightful place as the people in charge of America. Most often the focus has been on Mexicans, but Afghan Muslims are both brown and non-Christian, so they can do double damage on this front. Cohen warned “there are concerns that those narratives may incite violent activities directed at immigrant communities, certain faith communities, or even those who are relocated to the United States.”

This anti-immigrant bile is also an element of common antisemitic hate connecting these Taliban-loving right-wingers and the anti-immigrant hate that sparked, for example, the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue massacre where 11 Jews were murdered. At the center of all these hatreds stands the Great Replacement, which Jews are supposedly facilitating with their liberalism and globalism—seen both in their support for “brown” Latino immigration and bringing in “brown” Afghan refugees.

I know this doesn’t make a lot of sense to most of us. Unfortunately, it made enough sense to motivate the Pittsburgh terrorist, along with another synagogue shooter in Poway, California, who killed one worshipper in 2019. You may also recall the Charlottesville neo-Nazi ralliers who chanted “Jews will not replace us.” Those are the lovelies Trump referred to as “very fine people.” These strands of right-wing hate all really do run straight through Mar-a-Lago.

Another through-line is the clear rejection of democracy and open support for dictatorship on the right—as long as it’s a dictator they like, such as The Man Who Lost an Election And Then Tried To Steal It. QAnon and other pro-Trump online communitiies have straight-up called for a Myanmar-style military coup that would put Trump back in power. Trump’s own former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, when asked about the prospect at a QAnon event, agreed, stating “it should happen here.”

This embrace of authoritarianism—a direct rejection of the democracy that stands at the core of the American experiment in self-government—is yet another point where Carlson and Trump echo their most extreme followers. We’ve seen Fuck a l’Orange show his love for authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinpiang, among others, on many occasions.

Just last month Tucker had his own lovefest with Hungary’s right-wing would-be dictator Viktor Orban. He visited Budapest, conducted a fawning interview, and then told his Fox News audience that Orban leads a “small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.” Like mucking around with his country’s independent judiciary, crushing media that doesn’t toe the party line, and forcing universities who teach things he doesn't like to close or leave the country. When the political and intellectual leaders of a movement act this way, it’s not hard to understand why a chunk of their acolytes go along the same path, one that leads to the profoundly anti-democratic notion that the Taliban are worthy of praise. If Trumpists can worship Putin, Orban, and the Taliban, one can only imagine what kinds of characters they’ll be cuddling up to next. Talk about strange bedfellows.

Hate begets hate. So many forms of hate intertwine in the dessicated web of right-wing extremism that it can be hard to keep them straight. They want their brand of white Christian nationalism to dominate America, which means they want to keep out Muslim refugees fleeing Afghanistan—whom they hate. But they also admire the most extreme Islamists in Afghanistan, the Taliban, who drove those refugees out in the first place, who hate Christians as infidels, whose forces fought and killed U.S. soldiers in that country for twenty years and who, oh yeah, helped facilitate the 9/11 attacks. It’s almost incomprehensible. Until you remember what’s changed in American life since Sept. 11, 2001.

We elected a Black president, who won with a resounding majority not seen in a generation. And not just any Black president—although surely any would have been enough to generate a powerful backlash—but one named Barack Hussein Obama. Despite the fact that he centered his entire political career on the idea that people of different backgrounds could come together as one unified American people, those opposed to a truly multiracial democracy struck back, and propelled his polar opposite into the White House in 2016. In another sense, those extreme right-wing forces emerged with such explosive energy not in spite of Obama’s powerful advocacy of democratic pluralism, but rather because its potential success threatened their power all the more.

How one of our two major political parties got taken over by people who reject the basic principles of democracy most Americans thought were a requirement of patriotism will be a question we as a society will be grappling with for the foreseeable future. Actually, that’s assuming we’ll remain free enough to substantively grapple with it at all—rather than, if those forces win a comprehensive victory, be forced to accept such a development as the final stage in America’s political journey.

Trumpism brought to the fore, and into the mainstream, a form of hatred that has long lurked on the American right—hatred of anything that differs from what they see as traditional white Christian America. Whether that’s hatred of brown people, of equal rights for women or, heaven forfend, LGBTQ Americans, of progressive ideology more broadly, or, of course, hatred of the always handy scapegoat/stalking horse for radicalism—the Jooz. At its essence, this hatred is ideological in nature. These right-wingers love the idea of authoritarianism built around a strictly conservative dogma, and the Taliban qualifies for sure. They envy the Taliban for being able to exercise absolute power, eliminating anyone that disagrees. That’s what Trumpists want for themselves.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of  The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)

It’s hard to understand what Joe Manchin is doing these days, other than forcing Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell to fight over who gets to loofah his undercarriage as he dithers in the bath over infrastructure spending. Of course, the real question is whether either of those two can loofah more lovingly than the fossil fuel industry, because just eight months ago, Manchin didn’t balk at $4 trillion in infrastructure spending—so it may just be that his recent concerns have more to do with what the money will be spent on than how much we spend.

To be fair, the budget reconciliation package the Democrats are hoping to pass over Manchin’s all-too-strident objections comes to $3.5 trillion. Along with the already passed (though still-unsigned) $1.2 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill, the total cost to the Treasury would be $4.7 trillion. But, hey, are we going to blow up America’s (and the world’s) hopes and dreams over $700 billion?

MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan recently unearthed a clip in which Manchin endorsed, all on his lonesome, an appropriately robust infrastructure investment—up to $4 trillion. And strangely enough, at the time, he wasn’t worried about inflation so much as the significant opportunity costs of not passing meaningful infrastructure legislation.

Watch:

HASAN: “According to Axios, Manchin is privately telling the White House he might only back as little as $1 trillion in spending. Manchin will tell whoever’s listening that he’s worried about debt and deficits. But, hey, Joe Manchin, this you?”

MANCHIN (CLIP): “The most important thing, do … big infrastructure. Spend $2, $3, $4 trillion over a 10-year period on infrastructure. You want to put everybody back to work? There’s a lot of people that lost their jobs, but those jobs aren’t coming back. They need a place to work and make a living. Every state can start an infrastructure program.”

HASAN: “What a difference eight months can make.”

So what’s changed? Since this interview aired on Jan. 19, Congress passed President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. But that was about keeping our country’s head above water in the midst of a still-raging pandemic. The rest of Biden’s economic plan is decidedly forward-thinking. Maybe Manchin needs to explain to his constituents, whose lives would be significantly improved by this bill, what exactly he doesn’t like about it.

Or maybe he just needs to explain to those constituents—who will be working in industries other than coal sooner or later no matter what President Biden and the Democrats do—why greening the economy is apparently a far less urgent priority than greening his own wallet.

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Pour me a Mint (king of the Jews)lep.

Today's News:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett expressed concerns Sunday that the public may increasingly see the court as a partisan institution.

Justices must be “hyper vigilant to make sure they’re not letting personal biases creep into their decisions, since judges are people, too,” Barrett said at a lecture hosted by the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center.

Introduced by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who founded the center and played a key role in pushing through her confirmation in the last days of the Trump administration, Barrett spoke at length about her desire for others to see the Supreme Court as nonpartisan.

Barrett said the media’s reporting of opinions doesn’t capture the deliberative process in reaching those decisions. And she insisted that “judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties.”

“To say the court’s reasoning is flawed is different from saying the court is acting in a partisan manner,” said Barrett, whose confirmation to the seat left open by the death of the liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cemented conservative control of the court. “I think we need to evaluate what the court is doing on its own terms.”

Barrett’s comments followed a high-profile decision earlier this month in which the court by 5-4 vote declined to step in to stop a Texas law banning most abortions from going into effect, prompting outrage from abortion rights groups and President Joe Biden.

Barrett was asked about that decision by students who submitted questions in advance and also asked about another recent decision by the court in which it refused to block a lower court ruling ordering the Biden administration to reinstate a Trump-era program informally known as Remain in Mexico. Barrett said it would be “inappropriate” to comment on specific cases.

Several supporters of abortion rights demonstrated outside the Seelbach Hotel, where the private event was held.

Barrett, 49, also spoke about her introduction to the court in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, saying it “certainly is a different experience.” The court has for more than a year been hearing arguments by telephone though it recently announced a return to the courtroom in October.

Barrett described the court as a “warm, collegial place.” She said that after she was confirmed a colleague brought Halloween candy for her children. The first mother of school-age children on the nine-member court also spoke about balancing her job and family life.

“I have an important job, but I certainly am no more important than anyone else in the grocery store checkout line,” Barrett said, describing how her relationship with her children — who are not “particularly impressed” with her high-profile post — helps her stay grounded in her “regular life” where she is busy “running carpools, throwing birthday parties, being ordered around.”

When asked what advice she would give to young women who would like to pursue a career in public service, the justice said she would like young women to know it is possible to raise a family and be successful.

Barrett was confirmed by the Senate in a 52-48 vote last year, a little over a month after Ginsburg’s death.

Democrats opposed her nomination, arguing that the process was rushed and that the winner of the 2020 presidential election should have been able to choose Ginsburg’s replacement. McConnell’s decision to move forward with Barrett’s nomination was a contrast to the position he took in 2016, when he refused to consider President Barack Obama’s choice to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February of that year. McConnell blocked hearings for then-judge Merrick Garland, now Biden’s attorney general, saying the choice should be left to voters in an election year.

The lecture was held in celebration of the McConnell Center’s 30th anniversary. Founded in 1991, the nonpartisan center provides educational and scholarship opportunities to students at the University of Louisville. Three other Supreme Court Justices, most recently Justice Neil Gorsuch, have spoken at the center.

Zeke Miller/AP:

Sweeping new vaccine mandates for 100 million Americans

In his most forceful pandemic actions and words, President Joe Biden on Thursday announced sweeping new federal vaccine requirements affecting as many as 100 million Americans in an all-out effort to increase COVID-19 vaccinations and curb the surging delta variant.

Speaking at the White House, Biden sharply criticized the roughly 80 million Americans who are not yet vaccinated, despite months of availability and incentives.

“We’ve been patient. But our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us,” he said, all but biting off his words. The unvaccinated minority “can cause a lot of damage, and they are.”

Link to NYT graphic on vaccination and hospitalizations.

The Bulwark:

The Conspiracy Theorists Are Coming for Your Schools

QAnoners and anti-maskers are embedding themselves into our political and civic life.

The moments documented in these videos are mostly expressions of real anger, frustration, and confusion. But they must be understood in the broader context of what has been happening to the American right—the messy, overlapping sets of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies about the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election. We started the year with an attempted coup, laden with QAnon symbolism and apocalyptic rhetoric. The internet meme prophet “Q” may have disappeared, but like any good apocalypse QAnon didn’t die, it just changed. Deadlines for the QAnon doomsday (“The Storm”) and the extraconstitutional reinstatement of Donald Trump to the presidency have come and gone, but most of the instigators and spreaders of these ideas are still there. Some are now campaigning for office. Some are still trying to overturn the 2020 election. And now some are trying to overthrow our schools.

WaPo:

Biden administration to extend vaccine mandate to U.S. companies

President Biden is announcing sweeping new vaccine mandates Thursday that will affect tens of millions of Americans, ordering all businesses with more than 100 employees to require their workers to be inoculated or face weekly testing.

Biden also will require all health facilities that accept Medicare or Medicaid funding to vaccinate their workforces, which the White House believes will impact 50,000 locations.

And the president plans to sign an executive order that would require all federal employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus — without an option for those who prefer to be regularly tested instead — in an effort to create a model he hopes state governments and private companies will adopt.

The cluster of new policies comes as the country grapples with the highly contagious delta variant, which has sent cases surging to more than 150,000 a day and is causing more than 1,500 daily deaths. The White House has struggled to convince hesitant Americans to get vaccinated and has been increasingly shifting toward requirements.

Spencer Ackerman/NY Times:

How Sept. 11 Gave Us Jan. 6

Ever since insurrectionists invaded the Capitol, we’ve heard that Jan. 6 closed a chapter in American history. No longer should America’s most threatening enemies be understood as foreign — a euphemism for Muslim — but instead as domestic, a euphemism for primarily white Americans on the far right. “The ‘post-9/11’ era, where our greatest threats to national security were external, is over,” said Representative Elissa Slotkin, Democrat of Michigan and a former C.I.A. and Pentagon official.

But Jan. 6 is less a bookend to the Sept. 11 era than a manifestation of it.

The war on terror accustomed white Americans to seeing themselves as counterterrorists. Armed white Americans on the far right could assemble in militias, whether in Northern states like Michigan or on the southern border, and face little in the way of law-enforcement reprisal. Such impunity led to situations like one in 2016, recounted in a relatively rare criminal complaint, when members of a Kansas militia with the revealing name the Crusaders plotted to murder their Somali-American neighbors. “Make sure if you start using your bow on them cockroaches, make sure you dip them in pig’s blood before you shoot them,” one stated. They considered themselves to be doing what America was doing all this time: combating terrorism, since, as patriots, they couldn’t be committing terrorism.

EJ Dionne, Jr./WaPo:

We best remember 9/11 by moving beyond it

Briefly, we were united as a nation. For some time, partisan politics very nearly disappeared.

Among Democrats, President George W. Bush’s approval rating was just 27 percent in a Gallup survey taken Sept. 7-10, 2001; in less than a week, it soared to 78 percent. It was even higher among independents and Republicans.

But the unity would not last. If the decision to attack the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was broadly popular, the use of 9/11 to justify the invasion of Iraq was not. Americans rallied around the flag when the war in Iraq started, but they had grave doubts going in, and those mushroomed as the war dragged on.

The way Bush administration officials made the case for intervening in Iraq sowed seeds of division that blossomed into today’s rancid politics.

Will Bunch/The Philadelphia Inquirer:

We knew America would never be the same after 9/11. We didn’t know how bad.

America responded to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks with paranoia, distrust that turned on foreigners, immigrants, dissidents and finally one another.

“It was 8:46 a.m.,” I wrote as night fell on 9/11, “and America would never be the same again.”

Looking back two decades later, I can’t decide which is weirder — that I wrote this in the darkness of that confusing day, or that somehow I got it right. America was changed forever and — despite those initial days where we hoped the sadness and the rubble would give rise to national unity and a sense of purpose that had felt missing in the detached irony and greed of the go-go 1990s — for the most part it has changed for the worse. Those drivers going every which way at cross purposes on Vine Street weren’t just a traffic jam, but a metaphor for the road ahead.

Ronald Brownstein/The Atlantic:

The California Recall Could Be a Road Map for Democrats

Gavin Newsom’s strategy has momentum, and it provides a crucial template for his fellow Dems in 2022.

One key reason the president’s party historically fares so poorly in midterm elections is that its supporters turn out at lower rates than voters of the party not in the White House. Polling earlier this summer showed that Newsom faced an especially acute version of that challenge; California Democrats displayed far less interest in, or even awareness of, the recall than did Republicans.

But the large number of mail ballots already returned by Democratic voters, as well as the latest poll results, signal that Newsom has mostly closed that enthusiasm gap, placing himself in a strong position to defeat the recall when balloting concludes next Tuesday. And he has done so in a manner that could provide a crucial template for Democrats nationwide in 2022: Newsom has focused less on selling his accomplishments than on raising alarms that his Republican opponents will exacerbate the coronavirus pandemic by repealing the public-health protections, such as vaccine and mask mandates, that he has imposed to fight it. He’s linked the GOP candidates running to replace him not only to Donald Trump but also to Republican governors such as Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in Texas, who have blocked mandates and other measures to combat the disease.

The latest tell-all from a former Trump associate promises to be a real barnburner and/or barf-bagger, depending on your current tolerance for the perpetually eye-popping evidence of Donald Trump’s treachery and bottomless bad taste.

At this point in the game, it’s difficult to envision what sort of scandal, if any, could possibly change anyone’s mind about Trump. If openly attempting to shiv American democracy didn’t permanently pummel his approval numbers into thin gruel, it’s hard to see what would. If Trump removed his factory-seconds, discount-bin Mrs. Doubtfire Halloween mask to reveal his true galactic reptilian overlord face, I’m thinking he’d lose about three voters. Maybe. And “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for the Flesh-Eating Nonterrestrial Underground Human-Embryo Farmer” swag would proliferate in right-wing redoubts such as Frankspeech.com and Steve Bannon’s War Room.

So, admittedly, books like this may just be catnip for those of us on the left—and some of us may be overstimulated already.

CNN:

Stephanie Grisham, whose career with the Trump administration included stints as East Wing communications director, White House press secretary and chief of staff to Melania Trump, has written a book that will be released next month, two people familiar with the project tell CNN.  

Grisham began working on Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2015, first as a press wrangler and later followed the Trumps to the White House, where she was hired by Melania Trump to oversee messaging, media and, ultimately, all of the former first lady's East Wing operations. From June 2019 through April 2020, Grisham served as White House press secretary, where she was roundly criticized for never having held a public press briefing.  

[...]

Grisham's book, according to both sources, will likely include her insight on several of the more notorious headlines from the Trump White House years, including the behind-closed-doors effects of the Stormy Daniels scandal and other allegations of sexual misconduct against the former President.

Grisham, who somehow conducted zero regular White House press briefings during her eight-month tenure as the White House press secretary, was nevertheless taking mental notes of her own, and people close to Grisham are expecting fireworks.

Axios:

• A former West Wing colleague of Grisham's tells Axios: "When I heard this, all I could think about was Stephanie surrounded by a lake of gasoline, striking a match with a grin on her face."

A source close to the publication told Axios: "Grisham knows where all the bodies are buried because she buried a lot of them herself."

• The source says Grisham "has receipts ... she was a press person and it was her job to make sure she knew what was happening."

Will those receipts put Trump’s ocher arse in stir? Because that’s what we really want to see.

Likely not, but it’s hard to get much more tantalizing than this: “There isn’t enough water on earth to contain the fire she could set to all of Trump world, including parts like the first lady’s orbit, which not many people are in a position to illuminate,” the West Wing insider told Axios’ Jonathan Swan. “It’s hard to articulate how much anxiety this is going to cause.”

According to Axios, Grisham told only a handful of people about the book while she was working on it, and “has deliberately kept a low profile since she resigned on Jan. 6.”

Will she give further insight into why she resigned? Did she have a window into Trump’s mood and behavior on that fateful day? 

I could see the answer to that question not only moving the needle of public perception, but also being of keen interest to the House select committee currently looking into Trump’s infamous bumblefuck putsch.

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
All examples from the book Noise, by Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein, which I'm enjoying right now.

Today's News:

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Google is announcing even more Workspace features today, part of an increased cadence of changes to the company's office and communications software suite over the past year or so. From a report: Today's announcement is a bit of a milestone, however. Although there is still the smattering of small and coming-soon updates, the bigger change is that Gmail is getting a redesign that reveals its true nature in Google's eyes: the central hub for every Google communication app. To begin, Google is adding the ability to "ring" another Google user with Google Meet -- but inside the Gmail mobile app, not inside the Meet app. When the feature rolls out and turns on, your Gmail app will be able to be called just like any other VOIP app (in addition to being able to join Google Meet meetings). Google says the standalone Meet app will get the same ability to place calls, not just create group meetings, at some point in the future. That Gmail was the first place Google thought to put its calling feature reveals how important Gmail has become to the larger changes happening within Google Workspace.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PayPal, the U.S. fintech company, announced an acquisition of Paidy, a Japanese buy now, pay later (BNPL) service platform, for approximately $2.7 billion (300 billion yen), mostly in cash, to enhance its business in Japan. From a report: The transaction completion including the regulatory approval is expected in the fourth quarter of 2021. After the acquisition, the Japan-based company will continue to operate its existing business and maintain the brand while the leaders, Paidy's president and CEO Riku Sugie and founder and executive chairman of Paidy Russel Cummer, keep their positions. Japan is the third largest e-commerce market in the world, and so this is a significant move by PayPal to gain more market share both in the country and the region, specifically in the area of providing deferred payment services as an alternative to credit cards.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook is a menace. COVID-19 is a menace. Conservatism is a cesspool. Together, those three ingredients have created a toxic stew of malevolent death and devastation. We can talk about all those things in the abstract, look at the numbers and statistics, and catch the occasional whiff of seditionist right-wing rhetoric. But I hadn’t really fully understood just how horrifying that combination of right-wing extremism, Facebook, and a killer virus was until I became a regular at the Herman Cain Awards subreddit. This series will document some of those stories, so we are aware of what the other side is doing to our country.

Today’s cautionary tale is Lisa.

Lisa was your run-of-the-mill anti-vaccine right-wing Christian. 

Looked up this guy. He’s yet another Rush Limbaugh wannabe on local conservative talk radio, this one in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. That said, posting a meme with “get vaccinated or pay the price” would prove quite prophetic, given that the very next day, this happened:

The crowd that sneers at the idea of Islam being a “religion of peace” also calls themselves the “prayer warriors.” 

OMFG. They’re now “making” their own Hydroxychloroquine? No, this doesn’t work! (Neither does the actual drug.) Yet one day into her COVID symptoms, Lisa was still well enough to post that idiotic meme, presumably make some of this …. concoction, and continue shit-posting anti-vaccine memes. 

“Hi, nurse who is trying to save my life and those of my family and neighbors and community. I have zero interest in said efforts to save said lives. I’m too busy boiling lemon peels. Why? I saw a meme on Facebook. Now get out. I’m assembling prayer warriors.”

Proof that when these people say, “I did my own research,” they actually mean “I asked randos on Facebook.” I mean, she’s posting instructions on boiling citrus peels by “Dr. Betty Martini”! 

Five days after her wanting to see her doctor, the disease had progressed significantly. She was back in the hospital, and soon thereafter, on a ventilator. That’s never a good sign. And in this case, it ended poorly. That was her last post, ever. 

It is remarkable how these people will endanger themselves and their families (Nana was also infected!) based on Facebook memes. 

Take, for example, that “boil your lemon and orange peels” nonsense. The source? Dr. Betty Martini. The name alone should’ve been a big red flag! “Hi markos, your doctor today will be Dr. Jimmy Vodka.” Me: “Hold on, gonna have to do a little research first….”

Turns out, it should be “Dr.” Betty Martini, who has been on the conspiracy-theory circuit for over 20 years. 

Martini is the founder of Mission Possible World Health International, which is “committed to removing the deadly chemical aspartame from our food.” She is also anti-vaccine, anti-fluoride, anti-MSG, a conspiracy theorist, and thinks she was once cured of breast cancer by an herbal formula.

Martini has of course no expertise in any relevant field. She refers to herself as “Dr. Martini”, but this is based on an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree awarded by an unaccredited religious institution.

Imagine googling her name, arriving at her about page, and thinking “she seems legit!”?

Vaccination idiocy aside, what might’ve happened if Lisa had gone straight to the hospital, instead of complaining about nose swabs and trying out bullshit home remedies pushed by hucksters and grifters? Heck, what might’ve happened had she not been freaking out about nurses knocking on her door, or listening to noxious conservative talk radio? 

She’d likely still be alive. About the only silver lining to this story is that Nana pulled through, and wasn’t taken down by her daughter’s irresponsibility. I just hope her daughter, who seems genuinely lovely, is vaccinated or has learned from the ordeal the importance of being vaccinated. 

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If you support a full reckoning with Jan. 6, you're an enemy of the party.

Facebook is a menace. COVID is a menace. Conservatism is a cesspool. Together, those three ingredients have created a toxic stew of malevolent death and devastation. We can talk about all those things in the abstract, look at the numbers and statistics, and catch the occasional whiff of seditionist right-wing rhetoric. But I hadn’t really fully understood just how horrifying that combination of right-wing extremism, Facebook, and a killer virus was until I became a regular at the Herman Cain Awards subreddit. This series will document some of those stories, so we are aware of what the other side is doing to our country.

Today’s cautionary tale is Crystal.

“Let us die and y’all can defund police and shit.” That’s called “foreshadowing.” 

Of course, the problem isn’t QAnon assholes dying: It’s the strain it’s putting on our health care system, it’s the chances to infect vaccinated people (since no vaccine has ever promised 100% protection), it’s the millions of extra opportunities for the virus to mutate, and it’s a basic humanity that says, “No, we don’t want people to die unnecessarily for easily preventable reasons.” 

Had Trump tweeted “get the vaccine or wear a mask,” we’d all be ecstatic! We’d be like, “Holy shit he’s finally taking his job seriously!” Some dumbass pundit, somewhere, would say that “Today is the day that Donald Trump finally became president.” And we wouldn’t even attack that dumbass pundit for saying that! We’d be like, “Okay okay, that’s going too far, but seriously, good thing he’s finally urging vaccination and mask usage.” 

Meanwhile, if you really want to know what the Bible says about this situation, read this.

No vaccine is 100% effective, and even less so against new variants given life because … people won’t vaccinate. No one is contesting that. But this is never about the effectiveness rates of vaccines. If they really believe it is “the mark of the beast,” then what does the effectiveness rate have to do with anything? 

Of course, this all assumes that there’s an underlying consistent logic to all of this. Clearly, there is not. 

The coronavirus isn’t really transmitted via surfaces. It’s transmitted via air droplets. Whether that plexiglass screen actually protects from those droplets might be debatable, but that has nothing to do with touching groceries. Science figured that out last year.

Now, let’s fast-forward all the way to ONE WEEK after hyperventilating about New York City’s vaccine passport ...

She left behind THREE kids. Three!  And for what?! For a lie propagated by assholes, recklessly disseminated on Facebook? “Let us die” so we could defund the police, she said, and still we begged her and people like her to take the vaccine, to avoid this exact outcome! 

Her last Facebook message hits hard. Many of these stories end with family members claiming their loved ones passed “peacefully.” Yet that’s not the reality of this disease. She was screaming and crying out to her god, desperate for life, yet unsure she would make it. I can’t fathom what that pain, suffering, and fear must’ve felt like, especially knowing that three kids would be left behind motherless. There is nothing peaceful about this process: It’s a freakin’ nightmare. 

That’s why we need people to vaccinate and behave responsibly. That’s what we’re begging these people to do, not for us and our “defund the police” efforts, but because we aren’t a death cult like this wretched excuse for a political movement.

The Supreme Court didn’t just silently overturn Roe v. Wade by allowing a Texas law banning abortion at six weeks to go into effect. The Supreme Court, with its three Trump justices—two of them appointed through precedent-shattering Republican maneuvering—allowed Texas to put a bounty on the heads of anyone involved in any way in an abortion performed after six weeks gestation. (And never forget that six weeks is six weeks after the first day of a woman’s last period—meaning many women don’t yet know they’re pregnant at that time.)

In a must-read Twitter thread, legal analyst Jay Willis spells out the ways the new Texas law enables anti-choice vigilantes. That starts with the fact that anyone, whether or not they have ever met the woman obtaining medical care, can sue anyone who “aids and abets” an abortion. If the vigilante wins in court, they get $10,000 and their attorney’s fees. Someone who’s wrongly accused and proves it in court gets … to pay their own attorney’s fees. But it gets worse.

Please help Daily Kos fundraise so that West Fund, Fund Texas Choice, Frontera Fund, The Bridge Collective, Clinic Access Support Network, Lilith Fund, Texas Equal Access Fund, Jane’s Due Process, and Support Your Sistah at the Afiya Center can continue to ensure people can access the care they need—and protect their own staff and volunteers from legal threats.

“SB8 also allows lawsuits against people who INTEND to perform abortion or ‘aid or abet’ abortion,” Willis writes. “This is an open invitation to anti-choice activists to file lawsuits against everyone they don't like and try to drown them in frivolous litigation.” And since the anti-abortion right has been funding networks of lawyers for years, they’re equipped for a lot of frivolous litigation. On top of all of the abusive ex-boyfriends and ex-husbands seeking to use the law to continue victimizing and controlling women who have left them. 

Not only that, Willis explains, ”People can bring suits up to FOUR YEARS later. And if a court decision briefly protects the right to abortion and then gets overruled, defendants can't rely on that, EVEN IF the decision was good law at the time. Perpetual threat of devastating liability.” That’s not the only failsafe Republicans built into the law to make any victory over it fragile and temporary, either: “the law specifies that any court ruling that any part of SB8 is unconstitutional is temporary and can be overruled as soon as a friendlier court comes along. Utterly deranged, but also, what the conservative legal movement has been working for for decades.”

Banning abortion at six weeks is an extreme attack on women’s right to make decisions about their own bodies. But it wasn’t enough for Texas Republicans. They went ahead and hedged it around with financial penalties even for the falsely accused, and attached to it a license for personal cruelty. 

This law is just one of a series of laws Texas Republicans have just passed to turn the state into a dystopian hellscape in which violence, ignorance, and vigilantes rule:

The Supreme Court just made it absolutely clear that they're ready to toss the one thing Democrats have been running on since 1973, the year Roe v. Wade was decided—protecting women's right to choose an abortion and have control over their own bodies. By refusing to act to uphold Roe in Texas, the conservative majority played their hand. Without a signed order, with no action whatsoever, they’ll be able to show us what they are capable of doing in session when they hear a case from Mississippi this fall.

Any one of the conservative six could have intervened and asked Justice Samuel Alito to grant the application of Texas abortion providers to at least temporarily halt the most restrictive abortion law in the nation from going into effect. None did. And what we get from President Biden is a statement saying, "My administration is deeply committed to the constitutional right established in Roe v. Wade nearly five decades ago and will protect and defend that right."

He'll defend a right that has literally just been taken away in Texas.  How, President Biden? How are you going to stop Texas? How are you going to stop every single red state in the nation from passing that exact same bill and the Supreme Court allowing it? How?

Sign and send the petition: Expand the Supreme Court to protect and expand abortion access.

Those questions go for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, too.

And Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

We're "fighting," they say. So do all the Democratic lawmakers (except Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, who are remarkably silent on the issue on Twitter). Like Sens. Patty Murray, Tina Smith, Catherine Cortez Masto, Tammy Baldwin, Maggie Hassan, Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, Michael Bennet, Raphael Warnock . . . you get the idea. All of them are talking about "fighting" to "defend the right" that the Supreme Court just effectively ended.

Worse, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee released a statement about how it intends to campaign on the issue. "This attack on women's health care is a powerful reminder of the stakes in next year's election—and why we must defend a Democratic Senate majority with the power to confirm or reject Supreme Court justices."  

Here's a suggestion to the DSCC: Don't run on the promise to do something. DO IT and RUN ON WHAT YOU JUST DID. To wit, the senator who gets it right:  

So does Rep. Mondaire Jones:

They've got the legislation to do just that, legislation that hasn't got a floor vote in the House and will require ending the filibuster in the Senate to pass.

That will take the full commitment from Joe Biden, from Nancy Pelosi, from Chuck Schumer, and every single Democrat who insists that they are fighting to stop talking and start doing. If it means threatening committee assignments and campaign help to Manchin, Sinema, and whoever is fighting filibuster reform, so be it. Put them on defense. All those other Democrats who keep insisting they're fighting aren't off the hook either. They need to be fully engaged in pressuring an end to the filibuster and expanding the Supreme Court.

The court has been spending the last few weeks showing the nation, and Democrats, exactly how dangerous it is. They struck down the Biden administration's eviction moratorium in another unsigned shadow docket decision. That followed the precedent-breaking order from the court attempting to direct Biden's foreign policy and force him to retain Trump's cruel Remain in Mexico policy. And finally, this. Killing Roe and Casey from the shadows by simply refusing to act.

The Supreme Court has to be reformed, and it has to be expanded, period. Biden and Schumer, and  Pelosi have to do everything in their power to make that happen. What's the point of having control of the House, the Senate, and the White House, along with the biggest bully pulpit in the world, if you won't use it to secure the future of democracy? Because if they don't, if the status quo continues, there won't be a Democratic majority in either chamber or a Democrat in the White House again for the foreseeable future.

We used to think the Supreme Court was hesitant to overturn it completely. Not anymore.

McCarthy's obscene threats relating to Jan. 6 require a forceful Democratic response.

On Tuesday, Texas House Republicans were able to push through a final version of their new voting restrictions. The bill, created during Gov. Greg Abbott’s “emergency” session, took three legislative sessions to pass. While the state faces real emergencies from the surge in COVID-19 cases, Gov. Abbott and his Republican crew spent their emergency energies on figuring out ways to suppress mostly Black and brown votes from being counted in their state.

The bill is expected to pass through the state Senate shortly and Gov. Abbott is ready to sign off on the legislation that, among other things, will:

• Place limits on mail-in voting as well as create punishments for officials who freely offer up mail-in voting as a safe and simple alternative to in-person voting.
• End drive-through voting as well as 24-hour voting.
• Restrict voting initiatives “championed by Harris County that were disproportionately used by voters of color — while expanding access in more conservative, rural areas.”

Besides the changes listed above, the new legislation will create new voter ID requirements, a time-tested voter suppression tactic by the right wing of the country. The law also allows partisan poll-watchers the right to freely move around polling places. Many people believe this will open up in-person voting to the kinds of bigoted bullying and intimidation that places like Texas practiced in the not-too-distant past.

Also added in this bill is a “monthly citizen check,” which is basically the same thing Texas tried before and ended with the secretary of state resigning after it became clear that he was wrongly targeting Latino voters. This new legislation tries to use language that Texas was censured for when the previous bit of voter suppression ended up in a huge legal settlement with citizens whose rights were being trampled on by white Republican officials.

Finally, the new legislation will make it far more difficult to provide assistance to someone in filling out their ballot. Critics point out that this is a direct attack on citizens with disabilities. 

Texas statehouse Democrats tried hard to delay and draw attention to the horrendous voting legislation rushed through by the Lone Star State’s GOP officials. They broke quorum three times, preventing the state legislature from passing the bill. They weathered having warrants sent out for their arrests, a move supported by the GOP-controlled legislative and judicial branches of Texas. Democrat state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer told news outlets that Democrats would "shift our focus from lawmaking to litigating" while still hoping a more serious federal voting rights act would get passed.

Reporter and activist Laura Windsor has been doing a very good job of getting Republican operatives and elected officials to admit the truth on camera. She has used her The Under Current show to expose how cynical and counterproductive to democracy the GOP is at this point in time. On Tuesday, Windsor released some video of Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin admitting there was no election fraud going on in Wisconsin during the 2020 elections. This is quite the admission from one of the biggest promoters of Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election results came out of some kind of massive voter fraud campaign run by Democratic operatives.

At first, Windsor presents herself as someone who does not believe President Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in Wisconsin. Johnson asks her if she even knows what the vote totals in Wisconsin were. She says she does not know what they were. Johnson then chastises her, saying she can’t even “state that opinion” if she doesn’t even have the basic information. Coming from Johnson, that’s pretty rich. Just consider the level of misinformation that Johnson has promoted to the nation in all aspects of the “Stop the Steal” election fraud and subsequent attempted coup d’etat on our government.

Johnson goes on to explain that a recount was done; according to him, the recount showed that Republicans did very well Wisconsin. In fact, Johnson says the GOP did better than they ever have in Wisconsin, and that even though Trump did better than previous GOP candidates, he didn’t do well enough to overcome Biden. This kind of Election Day reality, of course, has been a real tough hurdle for the conspiracy theorists to jump. And then, bringing his voice down—because Ron Johnson is nothing if not a coward and a snake-oil salesman—Johnson gives up the ghost: “The only reason Donald Trump lost Wisconsin is that 51,000 Republican voters didn’t vote for him. They voted for Republican candidates.”

Windsor says with feigned disbelief that she can’t imagine Biden won “fair and square,” to which Johnson replies, “Well, look at the totals. it’s certainly plausible there’s nothing obviously skewed about the results.” And then, very matter-of-factly, he adds, “There isn’t.” Now that’s a fact. Johnson goes on to prove that while he seems like an incompetent person, he can still do simple math, explaining that if Trump had gotten all of the votes that went to Republicans in House races in Wisconsin, “he would have won.” Trump received about 1.61 million votes in the Cheese State. Republican House members received a total of about 1.659 million votes. Trump lost by about 20,000 votes to President Joe Biden.

So the Big Lie is … a … big lie? You don’t say, Ron.

This is an interesting admission from Johnson since facts have never gotten in the way of Johnson’s ability to lie to the American public about our national security, especially for his own political gain. He has also enjoyed playing a very racist game of promoting the concept that MAGA-types being unhappy about losing an election and trying to overthrow the democratic process is fine and legal as long as they’re mostly white. More recently, Ron has been out and about promoting terrible pandemic science, the kind of anti-vaxxer and anti-public health information that would lead one to believe Johnson had figured out a way to escape the laws of physics and scrape beneath the bottom of a barrel.

On Tuesday afternoon, President Joe Biden stepped in front of the cameras to address the nation on the end of the war in Afghanistan. Anyone who turned up the volume expecting Biden to be quietly introspective or spend this time in apologetic contemplation is now deeply regretting that decision, as Biden made what might be the boldest, least political decisions in recent American history — he told the truth, nothing but the truth, and the whole damned ugly truth when it came to ending this war.

A forceful, determined, and deadly serious Biden faced the camera and made it clear that what America has done in the last two decades was largely a mistake. The primary objective of the invasion, ending the haven for al Qaeda, was complete within weeks of the war’s outset. The secondary objective, to kill Osama bin Laden, was completed over a decade ago. 

This may be the first time that the nation got a speech that wasn’t all about justifying the actions in Afghanistan—or any war, for that matter. Biden bluntly spelled out the cost in injuries, the cost in lives, and the incredible cost in dollars that came with every single day of an occupation that no one knew how to “win.” Biden made it clear that the only choices he had were to ignore the deal made with the Taliban and go back into Afghanistan with tens of thousands of troops and no end in sight, or to leave as quickly and efficiently as possible.

And in the process, he delivered a solidly pro-military and anti-war speech, celebrating the soldiers for their sacrifice while making it clear that the point of all that sacrifice was not worth it. Biden’s message was both strong and unflinching, "I was not going to extend this forever war, and I was not extending a forever exit," declared the President of the United States.

Throughout the speech, Biden repeated the same sets of facts driving home that the soldiers, diplomats, and intelligence teams on the ground had done outstanding work. They had given their all, and they deserve the nation’s gratitude. The fault with Afghanistan was not in the military or Afghanistan; it was in Washington D.C., and with an American government that, having locked itself into an undefined task, couldn’t find its way to a definitive end.

Until now. If there was any doubt, it has been removed. Joe Biden ended the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Decisively.

And then he took a big red marker and underlined exactly why in a way that may have been shocking to Americans who become accustomed to a soup of lies and platitudes. “To those asking for a third decade of war in Afghanistan, I ask, ‘What is the vital national interest?’” said Biden. “I simply do not believe that the safety and security of America is enhanced by continuing to deploy thousands of American troops and spending billions of dollars in Afghanistan.”

Biden was explicit in saying that the mission had started with a purpose but lost that purpose long ago, turning into something that could only generate endless expense in pursuit of an unattainable goal. “We saw a mission of counterterrorism in Afghanistan … morph into a mission of counterinsurgency, nation-building, trying to create a democratic and cohesive and united Afghanistan — something that has never been done in many centuries.” 

Where Republicans and media—and not just right-wing media—have been taking apart every aspect of the Afghan airlift and wearing out their keys for spelling “chaos” and “disaster,” Biden praised all those involved and trumpeted the airlift as both an extraordinary success and another example of how everyone on the ground in Afghanistan had put their lives and hearts into making things right. Biden pushed back on all those who tried to treat the accomplishments of the airlift as anything less than a massive success and again lavished praise on both the military and diplomatic teams involved.

In two decades, no president has been as forthright in explaining the need to take action as Biden was today in describing the end of this war, and no president has been as unflinching in laying out the cost.   

“We no longer had a clear purpose in an open-ended mission Afghanistan. I refuse to send another generation of America’s sons and daughters to fight a war that should have ended long ago,” said Biden. “After more than $2 trillion spent in Afghanistan … a cost estimated to be over $300 million a day for twenty years.” To underline this astounding number, Biden hit it again. “Yes, the American people should hear this: $300 million a day for two decades.”

“What have we lost as a consequence, in terms of opportunities?” asked Biden. “I refuse to continue a war that was no longer in the vital national interest of our people. And most of all, after 800,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan … after 20,744 American servicemen and women injured, and the loss of 2,461 American personnel—including 13 lives lost just this week—I refuse to open another decade of warfare in Afghanistan.”

It’s not a speech that’s likely to get widely replayed. It wasn’t a speech full of poetry. It didn’t celebrate the glories of war or pound the drum of patriotism. But in many ways, it was the best and most important speech anyone has delivered since the war began. The only problem is that it’s a decade too late.

On Tuesday, the Bradenton Herald noticed something covered here for the last three weeks—Florida has changed how it reports deaths to paint a falsely positive picture of events in the Sunshine State. Rather than reporting deaths on the day they’re recorded by the state, Florida says it is reporting deaths “on the day they occurred.” This action follows one that Florida took near the beginning of the pandemic when it ordered medical examiners to stop reporting deaths publicly and ordered county officials to instead turn data over to the state.

As a result, Florida now has complete control of how and when it reports deaths. What kind of difference can that make? Well, yesterday, Florida reported just 14 deaths, a number that puts it far, far down the charts from states like North Carolina, which logged 93, or Texas, which recorded 56. But those 14 deaths aren’t even close to the complete picture. Florida has been backfilling deaths, adding them onto previous dates in a hit-or-miss, erratic fashion. That means that no day is ever really finished. It’s how on August 15, the state reported just 8 deaths, but the total for that same day now stands at 234.

Is that the real total for August 15? There is literally no way to know. The state may be done adding losses to that day, or it may have another stack set aside to add later. As the Herald shows, this kind of reporting isn’t just allowing Florida to report individual days as if they’re astoundingly free from the consequences of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ actions; it’s projecting back for weeks. Through Monday, Florida claimed to be averaging just 46 new deaths per day, a number that’s dutifully reported in their data and on the data they relay to the CDC dashboard. But the truth is, over the same period, Florida actually averaged 262 deaths per day if they were reporting deaths the same way as other states—a number that makes Florida, by far, the deadliest state in the nation when it comes to how it’s handling the delta wave.

To see what’s going on in Florida, these two charts help to paint the picture. First, here’s the chart of daily new cases of COVID-19. Those cases are at a record high in the state, and for weeks, Florida has been running well ahead of any other state.

But here’s what Florida is presenting when it comes to reporting daily deaths.

That abrupt decline in Florida’s reported deaths, which starts two weeks ago, is entirely an artifact of how the state is now reporting deaths. If you looked at it last week, the chart would look remarkably the same — showing an abrupt decline that started about two weeks earlier. A casual glance at the rate of COVID-19 deaths in Florida always shows that 1) Today wasn’t bad at all, and 2) Things are rapidly improving. Neither of these is true. But they’re exactly what the state is showing to the nation and world.

Some other states report their data in this way, but they’ve done so since the start of the pandemic. Florida is unique in changing its reporting just as cases in the state spiked. Deaths in Florida are now … whatever Florida says they are.

That’s extremely convenient for Gov. Ron DeSantis, who began talking about how the state changed the way it reports the information in the same week that the “leading indicators” were all looking up. As Florida Politics reported at the time, DeSantis bragged on August 10 that his leading indicators showed that things were rapidly improving. DeSantis repeated this claim over several days, and when reporters tried to question that assertion, pointed again to those mysterious “leading indicators.” The worst of the summer wave was over, insisted DeSantis, who said he was “happy with seeing those trends, and we think they’re likely to continue doing that.” 

It might be worth noting that DeSantis gave this upbeat message at a conference in Jacksonville, where he was supposed to be joined by the county sheriff. However, as the Florida Times-Union reports, the sheriff was busy. Being sick. With COVID. 

On Monday, DeSantis was still tweeting upbeat news and pushing his education department to attack schools that try to protect children, but he was actually in New Jersey. As the New Jersey Globe reports, DeSantis was in the Garden State for the second time, at a big-dollar fundraiser for his all-but-announced 2024 presidential run.

DeSantis isn’t running away from his handling of COVID-19 in Florida. He’s running on it. His refusal to allow businesses, including cruise ships, to check for vaccination, and his attack on schools that require students to wear masks, is the standard position for Republicans who hope to snag the nomination for the next cycle. Both vaccine and mask mandates are broadly popular with the American people, but DeSantis does give a flying fig about the American people. He’s working for the Republican base and only for the Republican base, which, in 2021, has become an entirely different animal.

As Jamelle Bouie writes in The New York Times, it’s not clear if DeSantis is running against safe schools and public health. He may be actively working for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Rather than work with him to vaccinate the country, Biden’s Republican opposition has, with only a few exceptions, done everything in its power to politicize the vaccine and make refusal to cooperate a test of partisan loyalty. The party is, for all practical purposes, pro-Covid. If it’s sincere, it is monstrous. And if it’s not, it is an unbelievably cynical and nihilistic strategy. Unfortunately for both Biden and the country, it appears to be working.

Killing their own supporters to own the libs isn’t just a sick joke. It’s a sick reality. 

What amounts to a Republican effort to prolong the pandemic shows no sign of abating. It may even get worse, as powerful conservative media personalities spread vaccine skepticism and embrace dubious miracle cures like ivermectin, a drug typically used to treat parasitic worms in livestock, not viruses in humans.

Of course, this doesn’t mean low-level conservative personalities like radio hosts. Because those people —the true believers—are dying. The people pressing for unproven cures like ivermectin or for supposed cure-alls that are pricey and of limited availability, as the antibody cocktail from Regeneron. are those who already have safely been vaccinated and those who, like the workers at Fox, carefully monitor vaccination and potential exposure.

Ron DeSantis is subjectively pro-virus, objectively pro-virus, and every other -ectively pro-virus. 

Which is the same thing as being anti-American.

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And the loss of abortion rights may not even be the most alarming aspect of this case.

Last May, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed a state law that effectively bans abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy — sooner than many people learn they are pregnant. This law violates Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which protects “the right of the woman to choose to have an abortion before viability and to obtain it without undue interference from the state. But it will nonetheless take effect on Wednesday unless a court blocks it.

In one sense, the fight over Texas’s anti-abortion law, known as SB 8, is familiar. A Republican-led state enacted a restriction on abortion that violates existing Supreme Court precedents. Pregnant people in the state lose access to reproductive health care — in this case, many clinics have drastically reduced abortions even before SB 8 takes effect. Meanwhile they, and the rest of us, have to wait to see if an increasingly right-wing judiciary will enforce its past decisions or continue to chip away at that precedent.

But the fight over SB 8, which is now before the Supreme Court in a case called Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, presents of maze of procedural complexities that are rarely seen in even the most complicated litigation. SB 8 appears to have been drafted to intentionally frustrate lawsuits challenging its constitutionality. And Texas, with an assist from a right-wing appellate court, has thus far manipulated the litigation process to prevent any judge from considering if SB 8 is lawful.

The stakes in this case are astronomical. Six weeks into a pregnancy is often very soon after a pregnant person misses their first menstrual period. So they may not even be aware that they are pregnant until it is too late. According to the abortion providers who are suing to block SB 8, at least 85 percent of abortions in Texas take place after the sixth week of pregnancy. If the Supreme Court does not intervene before Wednesday, Texas’s law will take effect, and these abortions will become illegal.

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Indeed, SB 8 imposes such draconian sanctions on abortion providers that all 11 of Texas’s Planned Parenthood clinics stopped scheduling abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy in mid-August, even though SB 8 is not yet in effect. Some other clinics in Texas plan to continue providing their ordinary slate of services until Wednesday, but they will almost certainly cease doing so once SB 8 takes effect.

And the stakes in Whole Woman’s Health stretch far beyond abortion. SB 8 is drafted to frustrate judicial review before the law takes effect. If the Supreme Court embraces this tactic, other states are likely to copy it, potentially allowing states to enact all kinds of unconstitutional practices that can’t be challenged until after an unconstitutional law takes effect.

Finally, it’s worth noting that this case arises on the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other expedited cases that do not receive full briefing or oral argument. Historically, the Court was reluctant to hand down major, precedent-setting decisions on its shadow docket because of the risk that the justices will hand down an erroneous decision without fully understanding its consequences.

Because altering the Court’s approach to a contentious issue such as abortion in a shadow docket case would be an extraordinary departure from the Court’s normal procedures, it’s possible that a majority of the justices will decide to block SB 8 — at least temporarily. But this Court has a 6-3 conservative majority that is very hostile to abortion rights, so it is at least as likely that the Court will let the law take effect, and effectively overrule key prongs of Casey and Roe v. Wade.

The question in Whole Woman’s Health, in other words, isn’t just whether abortions will remain available in Texas. It is whether the ordinary procedural rules that are supposed to govern all litigation will still be honored by the nation’s highest Court.

SB 8 was drafted to prevent courts from reviewing it

SB 8 is a truly bizarre law.

The way it’s written, a Texan who objects to SB 8 may have no one they can sue to stop it from taking effect.

For one, abortion rights plaintiffs can’t sue their state directly. The ordinary rule is that when someone sues a state in order to block a state law, they cannot sue the state directly. States benefit from a doctrine known as “sovereign immunity,” which typically prevents lawsuits against the state itself.

But they also can’t really follow the same path that most citizens who want to stop laws do. That path relies on Ex parte Young (1908), a decision in which the Supreme Court established that someone raising a constitutional challenge to a state law may sue the state officer charged with enforcing that law — and obtain a court order preventing that officer from enforcing it. So, for example, if Texas passed a law requiring the state medical board to strip all abortion providers of their medical licenses, a plaintiff could sue the medical board. If a state passed a law requiring state police to blockade abortion clinics, a plaintiff might sue the chief of the state’s police force.

Part of what makes SB 8 such a bizarre law is that it does not permit any state official to enforce it. Rather, the statute provides that it “shall be enforced exclusively through . . . private civil actions.”

Under the law, “any person, other than an officer or employee of a state or local governmental entity in this state,” may bring a private lawsuit against anyone who performs an abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy, or against anyone who “knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.” Plaintiffs who prevail in such suits shall receive at least $10,000 from the defendant.

SB 8, in other words, attempts to make an end run around Young by preventing state officials from directly enforcing the law. Again, Young established that a plaintiff may sue a state official charged with enforcing a state law in order to block enforcement of that law. But if no state official is charged with enforcing the law, there’s no one to sue in order to block the law. Checkmate, libs.

It’s worth noting that this tactic cannot prevent anyone from ever challenging SB 8. If the law takes effect, abortion providers (plus anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion, a vague term that is not defined in the statute) will undoubtedly be bombarded with lawsuits seeking the $10,000 bounty authorized by the new state law. These defendants will then be able to argue in court that they should not be required to pay this bounty because it is unconstitutional.

But they will do so under the threat of having to pay such a bounty to anyone who brings a lawsuit against them. Even if abortion providers prevail in all of these suits, moreover, they will still have to pay for lawyers to defend themselves in court. And the suits seeking a bounty under SB 8 will likely be numerous and endless, because literally “any person” who is not a Texas state officer can file such a suit.

Once the law takes effect, in other words, it will be too late. Unless abortion providers can obtain a court order blocking SB 8 before it takes effect, those providers are likely to be crushed by a wave of lawsuits that they cannot afford to litigate.

So where does Whole Woman’s Health stand now?

A coalition of abortion providers, advocacy groups, and private individuals did file a lawsuit challenging SB 8 and seeking to block it before it takes effect. The lawsuit names a hodgepodge of defendants, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), who has some power to bring enforcement actions against abortion providers after a court determines that such a provider violated SB 8.

The lawsuit also names a Texas judge and a clerk of a Texas court, on the theory that private lawsuits filed under SB 8 will be heard by Texas courts, and thus court officials are the proper defendants under Young. Although lawsuits against judges are typically disfavored, the Supreme Court established in Supreme Court of Va. v. Consumers Union of United States (1980) that judges may sometimes be sued if there is no other way to challenge a state law.

And yet, even though a federal district court determined that the Whole Woman’s Health plaintiffs may sue Texas judges in order to block SB 8, no court has actually reached the core question at the heart of this case: whether SB 8 is unconstitutional.

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The reason is dizzyingly complex, and difficult to summarize in a concise way. A somewhat oversimplified explanation is that, shortly after the district court ruled that the Whole Woman’s Health litigation could proceed against state judges, but before the district court decided whether to block SB 8, Texas filed an appeal in the right-wing United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The Fifth Circuit then ordered the district court not to decide this case.

The plaintiffs are now in the Supreme Court asking the justices to allow this case to actually be decided either by the original district court of by the Supreme Court itself. Perhaps the justices could decide themselves to block SB 8 — although that outcome is unlikely given the Court’s anti-abortion majority. Alternatively, the justices could lift the Fifth Circuit’s order and instruct the district court to rule on whether SB 8 is constitutional.

This is not how litigation is supposed to work

If you are confused by this morass of procedural aggression, countermeasures to procedural aggression, dueling appeals, and court orders forbidding other court orders, you should be. This is not how the judiciary is supposed to function.

Litigants who face an imminent risk of harm unless a state law is blocked should be given an opportunity to challenge that law before they violate it and risk legal consequences. Appeals courts should wait for lower courts to decide a case before they reach a different conclusion than the lower court might reach. Doctors who provide medical care that, at least for the time being, is still protected by decisions like Roe and Casey should not risk an unending wave of harassing lawsuit brought by people seeking to collect a bounty.

If a court does not intervene before tomorrow, SB 8 will take effect. That means that, if the justices do nothing in this case, they are effectively choosing to rewrite the nation’s abortion jurisprudence without receiving full briefing, hearing oral argument, or taking more than a couple of days to even consider the case.

Just as significantly, they will bless a tactic that could be used to undermine virtually any constitutional right. Imagine, for example, that New York passed an SB 8-style law allowing private individuals to bring lawsuits seeking a $10,000 bounty against anyone who owns a gun. Or, for that matter, imagine if Texas passed a law permitting similar suits against anyone who criticizes the governor of Texas.

Procedural rules exist for a reason. They ensure that every litigant has an opportunity to have their case heard, even if the litigant ultimately does not prevail. They also ensure that courts do not hand down haphazardly decided cases that could impact millions of people.

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in 2020, after her Court handed down a series of unusual shadow docket orders benefiting the Donald Trump administration, shadow docket cases “force the Court to consider important statutory and constitutional questions that have not been ventilated fully in the lower courts, on abbreviated timetables and without oral argument.” They also “upend the normal appellate process, putting a thumb on the scale in favor of” a particular party.

Perhaps most importantly, obedience to procedural norms is a sign of judicial humility. They are the way that judges show us that they are bound by rules, even if individual judges disagree with the outcome dictated by those rules.

There is a case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, currently pending before the Court, that presents the conservative justices with an opportunity to overrule Roe v. Wade. That case will receive full briefing and an oral argument, and will likely be decided next June. If the justices want to make abortion illegal in Texas, they only have to wait a few months and they will get their chance to do so through the Court’s ordinary procedures.

If they choose to let SB 8 go into effect this week, by contrast, the justices will send a clear signal that they don’t think the ordinary rules should apply to litigants they dislike. If that happens, it is a terrifying sign about the future of the rule of law.

This is what it looks like when conservative individualism is taken to an extreme degree in the middle of a pandemic.