James.galbraith

Multiple Senate Republicans unloaded on an effort led by Sen. Josh Hawley to challenge Joe Biden’s election victory as the party hurtles toward its most consequential confrontation with Donald Trump of his entire presidency.

Hawley (R-Mo.) denied that he was trying to overturn the election by challenging the certification of at least one state and forcing the Senate into an up-or-down vote on Biden’s wins. He said he was merely trying to voice his frustration with the election results, arguing this is his one chance “to stand and be heard.”

But some of his colleagues are thoroughly unimpressed.

“I think it’s awful. I am going to support my oath to the Constitution. That’s the loyalty test here,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) called Hawley’s move “disappointing and destructive. And borrowing from Ben Sasse it’s ambition pointing a gun at the head of democracy.” Sasse (R-Neb.) said this week that "adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government."

“I’m going to vote to certify the election,” said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) of Hawley’s effort. “I don’t think it’s a good idea and I don’t understand his reasoning.”

Already it’s become clear the effort will fail given the public opposition from those senators and others like Sens. Shelly Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who flatly said “no” Friday when asked if he would join Hawley. A simple majority is enough to certify Biden’s win, and there are 48 Senate Democrats.

But the vote on Jan. 6 to certify Biden’s win is viewed within the GOP as a painful litmus test. Republicans either risk blowback or a primary challenge by approving Biden’s win amid Trump’s baseless claims of widespread fraud, or they can align themselves with Trump’s attempt to subvert the election results.

Trump has already shown little regard for those who are criticizing the efforts in the House and Senate to block Biden’s win. The president attacked Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) for the second time this week after Thune said Trump’s efforts to overturn Biden’s win will go down like a “shot dog” in the upper chamber.

The president urged Gov. Kristi Noem (R-S.D.) to run against Thune, though Noem has already said she will not run against Thune. Trump in a tweet called Thune a “RINO” on Friday — a Republican In Name Only.

“Finally, an attack tweet. What took him so long?” Thune, the No. 2 Senate Republican, said of Trump. He said there's been no effort to patch things over: “I’m not sure what I did to be deserving of all that. It’s fine. I’m not sure anything changes his mind once he makes it up.”

Hawley is unlikely to stand alone as Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) did in 2005 when she was overruled in a 74-1 by members of both parties after objecting to George W. Bush’s Ohio electoral votes. Privately Senate Republicans estimate a handful of Republican senators could vote against certification of at least one state alongside Hawley, a smaller percentage than the more than 100 House Republicans that are expected to try and stop Biden’s win.

“I won't tell other folks what to do,” said Hawley, who said he’s had contact with other senators after making his announcement. “I don't have the power to overturn anything. My objective in this is, as I've said repeatedly, is this is my one opportunity in this process to stand and be heard.”

Hawley said he hasn’t decided whether he will only challenge a single state or enough states to change the electoral college result. He specifically mentioned Pennsylvania earlier this week as an example of a state that “failed to follow their own state election laws.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has warned against challenging the election privately and pressed Hawley for an explanation in a conference call on Thursday, though Hawley was not on the call. Hawley responded by asking senators with questions to reach out to him. Capito said Hawley's move is "certainly not what the leader would want, because he's been very explicit about that."

But Republicans aren’t whipping against Trump. Thune said the GOP leadership is letting members “vote their conscience.” He indicated he will oppose the effort absent some unforeseen evidence because Congress has no legal authority to change election results approved by the states and certified by the Electoral College.

“It seems to me this is an exercise in futility,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who said he would offer a longer explanation next week when Trump's efforts are stopped by Congress. “There are probably 70 million people who would rather see Trump elected. So I think it may not be very popular [in the GOP]. But sometimes you’ve got to do unpopular things because it’s the right thing to do.”

Still, not everyone is dismissing the challenge to Biden’s certification. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said earlier this week he supports Hawley’s effort.

And Sens. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) both said they were still weighing their options. Blackburn argued that “people are quite concerned about voter fraud and transparency” and Braun said he’s “still thinking about what to do.”

“It’s a protest vote only. Because in my opinion there’s zero chance that anything will come from it. The House is not going to overturn and I don’t think you’ll even get close in the Senate,” Braun argued.

And several other senators on Friday said they didn’t want to talk about it. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), who opposes challenging the election, said he would address the issue “pretty thoroughly next week.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said he won’t discuss the issue until Jan. 6 and Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) declined to comment.

“Ask me that on Jan. 6. There’s a lot to think about,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the most senior GOP senator.

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This is the best of all possible worlds permitted in this really badly set up universe.

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(253): I can tell just by looking at the wedding photos that the groom has hooked up with at least three of his groomsmen. I would feel bad for her except that she’s hooked up with two of the same ones.

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Michael Pack is Trump's head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the agency that supervises Voice of America and this government's other international broadcasting efforts. He was a Steve Bannon ally back before Steve Bannon found himself indicted, and he has been described as "paranoid" in his management style. Even among Trump agency heads, Pack stands out for his devotion to sabotaging his agency by purging it of the supposedly anti-Trump and disloyal and replacing them with fellow far-right hacks.

He is also taking steps to ensure that the next administration will not be allowed to take the agency back. As a Bannonite fascist, Pack has devoted himself to purging journalists whose reports may make Dear Leader look bad, to summarily ending whatever government rules and regulations prohibit that behavior, packing the agencies with far-right loyalists and now rewriting government contracts to declare that he and those other embedded Trump allies cannot be fired for at least two years.

As reported by NPR, Pack and the new Trump-allied boards of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia have added "binding contractual agreements intended to ensure they cannot be removed for the next two years." The boards were previously bipartisan. Pack fired the bipartisans and installed, of course, unqualified hacks.

This means that while Joe Biden can quickly boot Pack from his role as agency head, Pack and his allies will still be able to sabotage efforts to un-sabotage the networks for at least half of a new Democratic presidency.

Being able to manipulate what news is reported and how it is reported is, in every autocratic regime, essential. Having gained substantial power over how news is reported by U.S.-sponsored radio, or at least having gained the power to remove any journalists whose reporting angers them, the Trumpians are not going to easily give it up.

The frustration that vaccines are not showing up in the quantity, and on the schedule, that states were promised continues to grow. The distribution was called a logistical nightmare months ago, and despite a stack of promises from Donald Trump, that nightmare is coming to pass as federal sources utterly fail to get the vaccine where it’s needed in the appropriate quantity. As a result, three weeks after the first vaccine became available, the rate of vaccination is still running well below the rate of new COVID-19 cases. Getting 80% of the populace vaccinated at the current rate would take a decade … only it wouldn’t matter, because long before then the vaccine would have ceased to function for most of those previously vaccinated.

Handling of the vaccine has been so dreadful that Texas is being forced to throw away thousands of doses because they were allowed to get too warm in transit. Meanwhile, concerns about keeping vaccines frozen have other shipments on hold. Based on current data, Joe Biden’s nominee for surgeon general has indicated that the odds of the vaccine reaching the general public by spring are actually getting worse. Plans to vaccinate 20 million Americans by year’s end now seem to be “out of reach.”

As Bloomberg reports, at least three shipments of the Moderna vaccine had to be rejected after they arrived in Texas with signs that they had overheated en route. Considering that Moderna’s vaccine can tolerate a much greater temperature range than that of Pfizer/BioNTech, which requires deep cold to remain viable, this seems like a serious oversight. Most of the transportation for Moderna’s vaccine was subcontracted to Texas-based pharmaceutical distributors McKesson Corporation, which made the news in 2017 after whistleblowers called the company out on its role as the nation’s largest distributor of opioids.  

While those lost doses were replaced by federal sources, doing so meant tapping into supplies meant for other locations. In addition to the shipments that were lost in transit, more doses of vaccine were delayed after it was found that temperature sensors were either in error or reporting improper storage temperatures.

The concern around cold storage is just one of the reasons for logistical difficulties over the last month. However, none of this should have been a surprise. Both Pfizer and Moderna made the temperature ranges required by their vaccines clear months ago. It should have been no surprise that cross-country shipping of these materials was going to create a demand for dry ice, or that equipment for generating very low temperatures was needed at storage facilities.

As Kaiser Health News reported on Dec. 24, the problems with the vaccine rollout are almost endless:

• Dozens of states didn’t receive nearly the number of promised doses
• Millions of doses sat in storerooms because no one from Trump’s Operation Warp Speed task force told companies where to ship them
• Failure to provide cold storage facilities means that the vaccines are being held far from where they are needed
• Uneven regulations mean that some states—like Florida and Texas—have diverted vaccine from front-line workers to other populations
• Badly written rules mean that in some locations, emergency room doctors were passed over in favor of administrators “even though they work from home and don’t treat patients”

While Operation Warp Speed CEO Gen. Gustave Perna has expressed personal failure and accepted blame for the vaccine issues, Kaiser notes that “it’s really mostly not his fault.” Instead, the problem lies with a fragmented, privatized, profit-based healthcare system that lacks all central authority. Combine that with a federal response that has in all cases done little more than create “recommendations” that states can overlook, and it’s a perfect formula for chaos.

It didn’t have to be that way. Trump could have invoked the Defense Production Act both to help produce and distribute vaccines. He could have issued not “CDC guidelines” but executive orders mandating how vaccines were to be delivered and prescribing the order of care. If he really wanted to use the military, it might have been medics providing vaccinations at thousands of pop-up sites. However, as Kaiser notes:

Instead of a central health-directed strategy, we have multiple companies competing to capture their financial piece of the pandemic health care pie, each with its patent-protected product as well as its own supply chain and shipping methods.

For Moderna and Pfizer, the payday comes when they hand over the vaccine to the federal government. Delivering it to individual facilities, and seeing that it gets into American arms, is really not their concern. Unfortunately, it also doesn’t seem to be Trump’s concern.

Federal prosecutors came to the same conclusion Tuesday that a grand jury reached five years ago when they failed to indict a Cleveland police officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice for playing with a toy gun outside a recreation center—that taking this child’s life was reasonable.

Most of the facts in the case "are undisputed," the Department of Justice said in its factual overview of the case. Tamir was "frequently seen" playing with the black toy airsoft pistol he played with at Cudell Park Recreation Center the day officer Timothy Loehmann killed him on Nov. 22, 2014. Even a 911 caller who reported that a “guy with a pistol” was pointing it on the playground told a dispatcher the guy was “probably a juvenile” and the gun was “probably fake.”  

Still, the dispatcher broadcast the call as a "Code 1," the “highest priority call,” federal authorities said in their investigation. Officers Loehmann and Frank Garmback responded to the scene. “The information the dispatcher relayed to Officers Garmback and Loehmann was ‘there’s a black male sitting on the swing. He’s wearing a camouflage hat, a gray jacket with black sleeves. He keeps pulling a gun out of his pants and pointing it at people,’” federal officials said. “The dispatcher did not relay that the individual might be a juvenile or that the gun might be fake. Thus, the officers believed that they were responding to a playground where a grown man was brandishing a real gun at individuals, presumably including children.” Federal officials noted that Tamir was 5 feet 7 inches tall and 195 pounds, and grainy video footage of the incident didn’t sufficiently capture this.

”Officer Loehmann fired two shots within less than two seconds of opening the passenger door, striking Tamir once in the abdomen,” federal officials said. Both officers on the scene told investigators Tamir was reaching for his gun, and that Loehmann repeatedly told Tamir to show his hands. “In sum, after extensive examination of the facts in this tragic event, career Justice Department prosecutors have concluded that the evidence is insufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Officer Loehmann willfully violated Tamir Rice’s constitutional rights, or that Officers Loehmann or Garmback obstructed justice,” federal officials said.

Backlash started pouring in on social media soon after the Justice Department announced its decision. "It cannot be called the Justice Department if it cannot bring about justice for the murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice,” Congresswoman-elect Cori Bush tweeted Wednesday. “In Tamir’s honor, we say to every Black child: we love you. And we will never stop fighting to protect you.” 

Former Democratic presidential nominee Julián Castro said on Twitter Tuesday: "This is not justice." Rep. Barbara Lee called for an "end to the two systems of justice in this country,” tweeting: “Tamir Rice should be alive today and there should be justice for his family.”

RELATED: Amid massive public outcry, Tamir Rice's killer won't be a cop again after all—for now

The Georgia runoff is Jan. 5. Click here to request an absentee ballot. Early in-person voting ends Dec. 30. 

Let’s give GOP Leader Mitch McConnell the boot! Give $4 right now so McConnell can suffer the next six years in the minority.

Let him mount his pathetic challenge to the electoral college. His defeat will be inspiring.

The calendar will flip over into 2021 with the U.S. well short of its goal of vaccinating 20 million Americans against the coronavirus.

With the pandemic still raging, at least 2.6 million have received the first of two Covid shots while over 12.4 million doses have been delivered to the states, according to the Centers for Disease Control's most recent figures from Wednesday morning. At that rate, it could take years to inoculate 80 percent of the population — the figure public health experts generally say is necessary to achieve herd immunity against the virus.

The Trump administration says the figures don't reflect the reality on the ground due to a significant lag in reporting. But regardless who's right, the pace underscores the enormous challenges awaiting the incoming Biden administration after scientists working at breakneck speed delivered two FDA-backed vaccines less than a year after the genetic sequence of the virus was released.

President-elect Joe Biden this week criticized the Trump administration for “falling behind” on efforts to vaccinate Americans against the coronavirus and pledged more federal involvement under his watch. Amid concerns about the pace of the vaccine rollout, President Donald Trump said the onus is on states to administer inoculations faster.

"The Federal Government has distributed the vaccines to the states," Trump tweeted on Wednesday. "Now it is up to the states to administer."

Critics say Trump's team put too much responsibility for vaccinations on resource-strapped state health departments still grappling with the pandemic, while not pressing Congress for aid sooner. Lawmakers eventually approved nearly $9 billion for vaccine distribution in their year-end relief package, but states say it will take weeks to do things like set up mass vaccination sites and launch public education campaigns.

“They should have done that early. And they should have gotten that money out to the states,” said Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health. “And then they should have worked with states to set up all of these places, so that by the time the vaccines arrived, we had all the sites located for where the vaccinations were going to happen.”

The administration made rosy assessments about what's sure to become the biggest immunization effort in U.S. history, beginning with HHS Secretary Alex Azar's October assertion that the country by year's end could have up to 100 million doses, or enough for 50 million people to be vaccinated with a two-shot regimen. That target was gradually scaled back to having 40 million doses, enough for 20 million people to get vaccinated – a benchmark that federal officials repeatedly cited over the last few months.

As for shots administered so far, "we are certainly not at the numbers that we wanted to be at the end of December,” Anthony Fauci, the government's leading infectious disease expert said on CNN Tuesday. On Wednesday, federal health officials expressed confidence that the pace of vaccinations will pick up as soon as next week.

“We’re launching a vaccine campaign in the midst of a pandemic surge, after a year that’s drained and strained health care providers and public health departments, and we’re launching a vaccine campaign during the winter holidays,” Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said on a press call.

Operation Warp Speed, the government’s vaccine accelerator, says it plans to allocate 20 million shots by the end of the year to states, though the last 5 million won’t actually be delivered until the first week in January. The government is holding another 20 million doses in reserve so people can receive their second shots weeks later.

Moncef Slaoui, the head of OWS, has defended the 20 million goal, saying the government has been true to its word.

“The commitment that we can make is to make vaccine doses available … and I think that commitment is met,” Slaoui said last week, adding vaccinations were happening "slower than we thought it would be."

State officials say it takes time to ramp up any vaccination effort, let alone the enormous Covid undertaking. States and hospitals are hammering out who gets the shots first. The vaccine made by Pfizer must be stored at ultra-cold temperatures. And local officials say they are figuring out how to safely conduct a mass vaccination effort while the virus is still circulating widely.

“I do think also just scaling up these clinics in various settings, it takes some time to work out the kinks. And you want to be careful, because you have to do all of this in a time of social distancing,” said Marcus Plescia, the chief medical officer at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

Some officials familiar with state plans believe the pace of vaccinations will rise in the coming weeks.

“I think we're in a really good place,” said Claire Hannan, the executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers. “The clinics, the administration, the uptake will just continue to grow as we do it more, as people are more comfortable with the vaccine.”

She also noted that states have set aside doses for long-term care facilities, such as nursing homes, which takes time to administer under a new federal pharmacy partnership – and that may contribute to the lag in administered vaccines.

The Trump administration says it’s helped states craft their vaccination plans since September, provides jurisdictions with the necessary supplies and has sent tens of millions of dollars to states. In a statement, Operation Warp Speed spokesperson Michael Pratt wrote that the doses are being sent to states as “quickly as they are available.”

“The rapid availability and distribution of so many doses – with 20 million first doses allocated for distribution just 18 days after the first vaccine was granted emergency use authorization – is a testament to the success of Operation Warp Speed,” he wrote.

Sarah Owermohle contributed to this report.

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Here's a day-brightener if you needed one: Jon Ossoff flipping the script on Fox News' nepotism hire, Peter Doocy, turning the would-be “gotcha” interview into a campaign ad for himself and his colleague, Rev. Raphael Warnock. Doocy’s aim, clearly, was to paint Ossoff as inexperienced and unqualified. What he actually achieved was giving Ossoff a platform to talk about what's at stake in this election for Georgians—even those watching Fox News—and the very serious ethical problems of the two Republicans in the race. Doocy tried to interrupt Ossoff's discussion with reporters about the pain and suffering he is seeing around the state. "Folks have credit cards maxed out and can't make rent payments, car payments, can't afford prescriptions or afford child care. People are in dire straits," Ossoff said, explaining how Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue were standing in the way of help.

"We are live on Fox right now," Doocy says, pulling Ossoff away. And at this point, check out the look on Ossoff's face for what he's planning to do next. Too bad for Doocy he couldn't see what was coming. Instead, he stupidly barges in with "you talk […] about health and jobs and justice all. Why not talk more about your relevant experience?" Doocy asks. "I've made my career fighting injustice, exposing war crimes and injustice," Ossoff replied. "I run a business that's exposed terrorism, that exposed sexual slavery by ISIS, that's exposed judicial corruption. And right now, we have a crisis of corruption in American politics."

We don't just need the Senate, we need smart Democrats like Ossoff in the Senate. Please give $3 right now to send the GOP packing.

We need all hands on deck to win the Georgia Senate runoffs on Jan. 5, and you can volunteer from wherever you are: More than 23,000 Daily Kos volunteers already have. Click here to see the Georgia volunteer activities that work best for you.

That corruption, he continues, is why he's running. "And since we're live on Fox," Ossoff continued, "let me take this opportunity to address directly the Fox audience. We have two United States senators in Georgia who have blatantly used their offices to enrich themselves. This is beyond partisanship." He continues, turning back to Doocy, "the reason, to your question, that I talk so much about health and jobs and justice for all the people, is that we can unite behind that program." He goes on to talk about the closure of nine rural hospitals in the state, the need for an investment in infrastructure, living wage jobs, and for "civil rights and voting rights legislation to secure equal justice for all." Then he turns back to the audience and owns Doocy. "I humbly and respectfully request the support of everyone who is tuned in on Fox right now, and I'd love for you to log on to 'elect jon—elect j-o-n—dot com' that's 'elect j-o-n dot com' make a contribution to our efforts here in Georgia." Boom.

Doocy, stupidly, just couldn't leave well enough alone, having just participated in cutting a television ad for Jon Ossoff live on Fox News. Nope—he continued, creating a huge opening for Ossoff to deliver the coup de grace on behalf of his co-Democratic campaigner, Rev. Raphael Warnock. "One more quick one while we've got you," Doocy says. "Any concern that the allegations of wrongdoing against Rev. Warnock could possibly be a drag on the Democratic ticket?"

"None whatsoever," Ossoff responded. "Here's the bottom line: Kelly Loeffler has been campaigning with a klansman. Kelly Loeffler has been campaigning with a klansman. And so she is stooping to these vicious personal attacks to distract from the fact that she's been campaigning with a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. I mean, we deserve better than that here in Georgia." That's for sure. (In case you missed it, yes, Loeffler posed with not just any klansman at a campaign rally, but with Chester Doles, a former KKK leader who runs the white supremacist American Patriots USA.)

Watch this for the look on Ossoff’s face when Doocy introduces himself. It’s just so good.

The next big day on America’s calendar is actually Jan. 5. That’s the day when a pair of Senate runoff elections in Georgia could strip Sen. Mitch McConnell of his nation-strangling role and open the gates for something actually get done. But just one day later, the spotlight moves back to Washington, D.C., where the big box of votes from the Electoral College are set to be opened and counted. The event should be purely ceremonial. The votes have already been cast. It’s past time for efforts to seat alternative slates of electors, and even the last-ditch effort to persuade “faithless electors” to vote in favor of Donald Trump has come up dry. There’s really not much to do but crack open the box, wait for the clerks to tally the contents, and have Mike Pence announce Joe Biden’s decisive 306 to 232 victory.

Except, of course, it’s 2020. This year Trump is extending his desperate attempt to keep a grip on power through calling on his supporters to come to Washington on that date for a “wild” time. And Louie Gohmert has filed a lawsuit against (checks notes) Mike Pence to force him to not let the clerks count the votes from states that went against Trump. And it can be absolutely, positively expected that Republican members of the House will object to the vote totals reported by the clerks. This won’t matter unless they’re joined by a senator. And now they have been … Missouri’s own Josh Hawley has agreed to be that guy. But he’s not really doing Trump, or Republicans, any favors.

Hawley issued a statement via Twitter, as one does these days when attempting to overturn an American election. In it, he pointed out that Democratic members of Congress objected to election results in 2004 and 2016. Which is true enough. In January 2005, a two Democratic House members objected to the results in Ohio because that state had shut out thousands of voters after Republicans had taken last-minute efforts to shrink voter rolls, cut back on polling places, and impose new restrictions. In 2016, a series of Democrats from the House rose to make perfunctory objections to a series of states where Trump won, including such Republican strongholds as Alabama and South Carolina. 

What Hawley didn’t mention is that these objections were purely for show. Or that the 2016 objections ticked off a clearly done-with-this-whole-thing Joe Biden, who repeatedly cut off attempts to raise objections with statements like, “This is over.” Biden even ordered the microphones turned off on those proposing objections. 

The reason that those objections in 2004 and 2016 came to nothing is because they were only voice objections, and they came only from House members. Compare to this little item right in the middle of the 1887 Electoral Count Act when it comes to dealing with objections. That law says objections “must be made in writing” and those objections must be signed by at least one member of the House and at least one senator. 

In other words, the “objections” made in 2004 and 2016 were pure theater. So was an objection made concerning faithless electors in 1969. If Hawley actually signs on to the objection put forward by House Republicans, it will be the first actual objection under the 1887 law. 

As a genuine objection, this will then require a vote of both the House and Senate. Even though the count is held in front of a joint session of Congress, a separate vote must be conducted in the House and Senate. The objection would have to win in both chambers for any action to result.

That, of course, is not going to happen. 

What could happen is that Mike Pence could determine that the objection isn’t valid. That’s because the law only permits the votes of seated electors to be thrown out in very special circumstances involving votes “not legally certified” by the governor of the state or some irregularity in the way the Electoral College carried out its vote. The idea that the objection could simply be iced immediately is made more possible because the states involved produced a single slate of electors and certified their votes by the “safe harbor” date.

Unlike Biden, who expedited the process in 2016 by repeatedly cutting off vocal objections and getting on with the vote, Pence is likely to go through all the motions of reading the objection into the record. It’s likely to be a long day no matter what happens just because Pence is unlikely to find that mic button to silence objections from Gohmert, or Jim Jordan, or the whole parade of House sub-deplorables.

Finally, if Pence should ignore the law long enough to give Republicans a vote … that’s what they’ll get. With the Boogaloo Bois rampaging outside the Capitol, the House and Senate will vote down the objection. Meaning that the best Hawley will generate by joining the House Republicans in this objection will be an absolute waste of time … and forcing every Republican in Congress to vote yea or nay to overturning the results of the election. 

The U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday that it has closed its investigation of the fatal 2014 police shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, saying no criminal charges would be filed against the officers involved because video of the killing was not good enough to conclusively determine what happened. 

“The video footage is grainy, shot from a distance, does not show detail or perspective, and portions of the incident are not visible because of the location of the patrol car,” the DOJ explained in a statement. “Further, the time lapse footage captures approximately two frames per second at a variable rate, which is incapable of capturing continuous action.”

Tamir Rice would have turned 18 this year.

His life was cut short by the police violence that is woven into the fabric of Black life in America. Lives depend on change.

— ACLU (@ACLU) December 30, 2020

On November 22, 2014 two Cleveland officers, Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, responded to a police dispatch call regarding “a guy with a pistol” seen near the Cudell Recreation Center playground on the city’s West Side. A 911 caller said that the person, “probably a juvenile,” was “scaring the shit out of everyone,” but added that “the gun was probably fake.”

Rice was playing with a replica pellet gun with the orange safety barrel cap removed when Loehmann, a rookie officer, fatally shot him.

A Cuyahoga County grand jury then elected to not prosecute the officers, sparking widespread national outrage and spurring the nascent Black Lives Matter movement.

Such an upsetting case. #TamirRice should be alive today. A tragic reminder, too, of the importance of dispatchers in affecting encounters between the public and law enforcement officers. For research on the topic, see @JessicaGillool1’s excellent work. https://t.co/uvvOreqoe6 https://t.co/A1liShRMXa pic.twitter.com/sADYmi5pWX

— Hakeem Jefferson (@hakeemjefferson) December 29, 2020

In 2016, Rice’s family and the city of Cleveland reached a $6 million settlement, although attorneys for the family said that “there is no such thing as closure or justice” in such situations. 

The Justice Department said that “after extensive examination of the facts in this tragic event, career… prosecutors have concluded that the evidence is insufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Officer Loehmann willfully violated Tamir Rice’s constitutional rights, or that Officers Loehmann or Garmback obstructed justice.”

Trump pardons war criminals who murder Afghan children, war criminals who murder Iraqi children, & now Trump’s justice dept supports men who murder Black children.

All Lives Matter huh?

This hypocrisy & horror is what institutional white supremacy looks like.#TamirRice https://t.co/ByQsj813kK

— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@QasimRashid) December 29, 2020

We must put an end to the two systems of justice in this country. Tamir Rice should be alive today and there should be justice for his family. https://t.co/QxhUbPmfpe

— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) December 30, 2020

Subodh Chandra, an attorney for Rice’s family, issued a statement in the wake of Tuesday’s DOJ announcement claiming the government’s “process was tainted.” 

“It’s beyond comprehension that the [Justice] Department couldn’t recognize that an officer who claims he shouted commands when the patrol car’s window was closed and it was a winter day is lying,” Chandra said. “The Rice family has been cheated of a fair process yet again.”

Story licensed under (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The post Trump DOJ Sparks Outrage, Clearing Cleveland Cop Who Killed 12-Year-Old Tamir Rice appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Nashville bomber Anthony Quinn Warner’s girlfriend told police nearly a year and a half ago that Warner was building bombs in his RV.

The Tennesseean reports: “A Metro Nashville Police Department report from August 2019 shows that local and federal authorities were aware of alleged threats he had made. No actions appear to have been taken to stop Warner, a slender 5-foot-8, 135-pound man who died in the explosion, which injured three others. On Aug. 21, 2019, the girlfriend told Nashville police that Warner ‘was building bombs in the RV trailer at his residence,’ the MNPD report states. Nashville police then forwarded the information to the FBI.”

Police were told to investigate but did little more than visit Warner’s home, where they saw the RV, but left after nobody answered the door.

The post Nashville Bomber’s Girlfriend Told Police a Year Ago That He Was ‘Building Bombs in the RV’ appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

On Tuesday night, McConnell introduced a new bill tying increased stimulus payments to a full repeal of Section 230. From a report: The bill comes amid new momentum for direct $2000 stimulus payments, and increasing pressure on party leaders to appease President Trump's escalating demands. Democratic party leaders criticized the inclusion of Section 230 repeal as an effort to scuttle stimulus talks. "Senator McConnell knows how to make $2,000 survival checks reality and he knows how to kill them," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement Tuesday. "Will Senate Republicans go along with Sen. McConnell's cynical gambit or will they push him to give a vote on the standalone [bill]?" McConnell's bid for a full repeal of Section 230 comes amid increasingly chaotic negotiating over the level of direct payments to be included as part of stimulus efforts. On Sunday, President Trump signed into law Congress' $900 billion COVID-19 relief and government spending package that would provide $600 in stimulus payments to most Americans. In a public statement after signing the bill, Trump urged congressional leaders to hold a standalone vote on increasing direct payments to $2,000.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sen. Bernie Sanders is vowing to filibuster the Senate’s upcoming attempt to override President Donald Trump’s veto of the annual military spending bill in an effort to force a clean vote on House-passed legislation that would provide one-time $2,000 direct payments to struggling Americans.

“This week on the Senate floor [Republican Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell wants to vote to override Trump’s veto of the $740 billion defense funding bill and then head home for the New Year,” the Vermont senator said in a statement late Monday. “I’m going to object until we get a vote on legislation to provide a $2,000 direct payment to the working class.”

“Let me be clear: If Senator McConnell doesn’t agree to an up or down vote to provide the working people of our country a $2,000 direct payment, Congress will not be going home for New Year’s Eve,” Sanders added. “Let’s do our job.”

Sanders’ statement came shortly after the Democrat-controlled House overwhelmingly passed the CASH Act, which would increase the direct payments in the new coronavirus relief law from $600 to $2,000 and include some people who were originally deemed ineligible for the checks, such as adult dependents. The measure passed by a 275-134 vote, with 44 House Republicans joining 231 Democrats in approving the bill.

Following the House vote, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) reiteratedhis intention to try to pass the CASH Act on Tuesday, declaring that “every Senate Democrat is for this relief.”

But McConnell has not committed to allowing a vote on the bill, intransigence that prompted Sanders’ vow to hold up a Senate vote to override Trump’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The House voted to override the president’s veto Monday night.

“At noon tomorrow, McConnell is expected to ask for Unanimous Consent to vote on the veto override of the $740 billion defense bill,” said Warren Gunnels, Sanders’ staff director. “Bernie will object until we get a vote on $2,000 direct payments. We can force the Senate to stay in session until the New Year. This is no bluff.”

In an interview with Politico, Sanders said that “it would be unconscionable, especially after the House did the right thing, for the Senate to simply leave Washington without voting on this.”

“The American people are desperate,” the Vermont senator added, “and the Senate has got to do its job before leaving town.”

Politico noted that “the Vermont independent can’t ultimately stop the veto override vote, but he can delay it until New Year’s Day and make things more difficult for the GOP… Though veto overrides can be filibustered, as Sanders plans to do, it is a rare procedural move because the veto override already requires 67 votes and the filibuster is simply a delay tactic, according to the Congressional Research Service.”

While Sanders may not have the power to single-handedly kill the NDAA veto override, The American Prospect‘s David Dayen wrote Monday that the Vermont senator “has the procedural means at his disposal to keep the Senate in session all the way to New Year’s Day, inconveniencing senators of both parties, particularly the incumbent Republicans from Georgia, who are in their final full week of campaigning for runoff elections on January 5.”

Dayen reported that Sanders will be operating “with the backing of the Senate Democratic caucus.”

Often the only way anything gets done in Washington is if you inconvenience Senators enough. That's the plan here. https://t.co/3shdjnmYDN

— David Dayen (@ddayen) December 29, 2020

As Dayen explained:

In order to get through the week without a clean vote on the $2,000 payments, Senate Majority Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will have to object numerous times to Sanders’ pleas to bring up the bill…

The Senate operates on the principle of unanimous consent. It’s not impossible to get things done if one senator objects, but it’s quite a bit slower. The majority needs to hold votes and waste time to muscle past an objecting senator. For this reason, Sanders can prevent quick passage of the defense bill override, the only thing McConnell really wants to accomplish in the last week of the Senate session.

This ramps up pressure on McConnell to just hold a vote on the $2,000 checks. Senators don’t want to be stuck in Washington on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day if they can prevent it…

McConnell has options to eventually get to the defense bill vote. He can move to end debate, known as a cloture vote, and push past Sanders’ objection. However, he cannot do that on Tuesday, because he won’t have enough senators in the building to win a floor vote.

In a tweet late Monday, Sanders pointed to new Data for Progress polling showing that 78% of likely U.S. voters—84% of Democrats, 73% of Republicans, and 74% of Independents—support a $2,000 direct relief check.

“The House approved a $2,000 direct payment,” Sanders wrote. “Let the Senate vote, Mitch!”

Story licensed under (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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(308): Had a dream last night where I asked you how your Christmas was and your response was, “sex, man. Just lots and lots of sex.”
(206): Good god. A spell so dry your friends actually commit it to their subconscious!

This cartoon originally ran in 2018, but it still holds up after the 2020 election. 

If you are able, please consider joining the Sorensen Subscription Service!

Follow me on Twitter at @JenSorensen

Defeated and pathetic, he has never looked more likely to fade into irrelevance.

Alexa’s recording you. What’s she doing with it?

This holiday season, you’re likely to know someone who buys or receives a smart speaker. One in five US households already have one, and 1.8 million are expected to ship in the last quarter of 2020. Amazon, Google, and Apple make the most popular models, which now include voice-activated headphones, rings, eyeglasses, and doorbells.

But essentially, smart speakers are microphones that connect to the internet. And they come with a hidden cost: some of our privacy. After listening to our questions and demands, these devices send recordings to servers where they can be stored indefinitely. But what do these tech companies do with the recordings?

Watch the video above to learn what we know and don’t know about how smart speakers use our data.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. And join the Open Sourced Reporting Network to help us report on the real consequences of data, privacy, algorithms, and AI.

Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.

By JM McNab  Published: December 27th, 2020 

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Researchers may have found a way to reduce the environmental impact of air travel in situations when electric aircraft and alternative fuels aren't practical. Wired reports that Oxford University scientists have successfully turned CO2 into jet fuel, raising the possibility of conventionally-powered aircraft with net zero emissions. From a report: The technique effectively reverses the process of burning fuel by relying on the organic combustion method. The team heated a mix of citric acid, hydrogen and an iron-manganese-potassium catalyst to turn CO2 into a liquid fuel capable of powering jet aircraft. The approach is inexpensive, uncomplicated and uses commonplace materials. It's cheaper than processes used to turn hydrogen and water into fuel. There are numerous challenges to bringing this to aircraft. The lab method only produced a few grams of fuel -- you'd clearly need much more to support even a single flight, let alone an entire fleet. You'd need much more widespread use of carbon capture. And if you want effectively zero emissions, the capture and conversion systems would have to run on clean energy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week MSNBC published an opinion piece from a researcher on China (who works on internet censorship and freedom of expression issues) from the advocacy group Human Rights Watch. It examines specific exchanges between a China-based Zoom executive and employees at the company's California headquarters (taken from the 47-page complaint filed by America's Justice Department) showing how Zoom disrupted video meetings commemorating the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown: It was a fascinating read, not least because few global tech companies that do business in China have ever made public the details of their communications with Chinese authorities on censorship issues, despite repeated calls to do so from human rights organizations and United Nations experts. What the complaint reveals is Beijing's aggressive pursuit of global censorship of topics deemed sensitive or critical of Beijing, and Zoom's failure to adequately protect its users' rights to free expression and privacy... Beijing has long leveraged market access to compel foreign tech companies to meet its censorship demands, whether in China or abroad. Apple has removed hundreds of virtual private network (VPN) apps from China's App Store. In 2019, it also removed a mapping app widely used by pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong from the App Store. LinkedIn blocked content critical of Chinese authorities for users in China. From the complaint, one can see Zoom's fear that if it didn't terminate meetings or suspend accounts upon request, it risked having its China operation shut down at any time, which loomed large in all of its decisions. Companies understandably want access to China's huge market, but they also have a responsibility to respect human rights under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Zoom said publicly that it is "dedicated to the free and open exchange of ideas," but when Jin repeatedly framed speech critical of the Chinese government as something that could "do bad things" or "illegal activities," and demanded they be censored, he met no resistance or got any questions from his colleagues at headquarters. The article also blames Jin for making false claims to a Zoom colleague that a private Tiananmen commemoration meeting was supporting terrorism/inciting violence, after which "the colleague quickly terminated the meeting and suspended the host account without any investigation into the matter." And it alleges that Jin also forwarded complaints from operatives who'd intentionally joined public meetings with offending content so those meetings could then be reported and shut down, while "a U.S.-based Zoom employee, knowing they were schemes, facilitated it..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the hours after the FBI identified a 63-year-old white man as the sole suspect in the deadly Christmas bombing in Nashville, Tennessee, activists and social media users alike couldn’t help but notice the media narratives that had formed around him. The Tennessean reported that Anthony Quinn Warner, a computer technician initially named a “person of interest” in the bombing, died in the explosion authorities later said he caused. An unnamed law enforcement officer told Newsweek: “He is either a criminal mastermind or a dude who flew completely under the radar. He sounds like an extremely sad guy who wanted to die in an elaborate fashion on Christmas Day."

It’s the kind of description people of color are seldom afforded. President Donald Trump chose to remain silent on the bombing altogether, Kristen Clarke, president of the National Lawyers' Committee for CIvil Rights Under Law, noted in a tweet. She said Warner has leveled a city block and Duke Webb, a white shooting suspect and active military member, is accused of killing three people and injuring three more in Rockford, Illinois. “Trump has used profanity to attack kneeling football players and smeared those protesting racial violence. Silence on this one," Clarke said in the tweet.

Clarke was referring to Trump’s implication that free agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick was a “son of a b---h” at an Alabama rally for Republican Sen. Luther Strange in September 2017. The president has repeatedly condemned Kaepernick’s choice of protest when he kneeled during the national anthem to condemn police brutality often victimizing Black and brown people. Trump, however, has not dedicated a single tweet to the violence that happened in Tennessee on Christmas. 

Author Caroline Leavitt tweeted Sunday: "Anthony Warner was a huge supporter of @realdonaldtrump who has not come out to say anything negative or at all about the Nashville explosion. Need I say more? @GOP voters, you really want Gop in Georgia Senate? No you do not." Human rights attorney Qasim Rashid tweeted Sunday that although CBS News has a photo of Warner, the news agency reported that “‘authorities would not say if the bombing is being considered domestic terrorism.’”

“Imagine being a suicide bomber & STILL not a terrorist #WhereWasHeRadicalized?” Rashid said in the tweet.

Investigative journalist Victoria Brownworth tweeted Monday: “Anthony Warner did not ‘die in the blast.’ He’s a suicide bomber. Anthony Warner is not a ‘lone wolf.’ He's a domestic terrorist. Anthony Warner is not a ‘tragic figure.’ Were it not for six brave police men and women, he'd have killed innocent people on Christmas. Pass it on,” Brownworth tweeted.

Warner was afforded empathy that is simply inaccessible for many people of color. Criminal defense and civil rights attorney Rebecca Kavanagh gave as an example a KTIV-TV headline about a Black man that read "Omaha traffic stop ends with officer fatally shooting suspect." From Kavanagh: "When you're Black and the police shoot and kill you during a routine traffic stop, they describe you as a suspect and publish an old mug shot," she tweeted. “But if you're White, blow up a whole city block, you're a ‘person of interest’ and @USATODAY publishes your elementary school photo. OK.”

MSNBC anchor Ayman Mohyeldin was similarly critical of authorities who told NBC Los Angeles there was no indication anyone but Warner was involved in the bombing. "I love how quickly authorities were able to suggest that no one else was involved," he tweeted. “If this guy was Muslim and happened to catch a taxi a week before that driver would be interrogated and have his life turned upside down for not knowing he transported a would-be suicide bomber.”

RELATED: Police reported to have identified a 'person of interest' related to Nashville terrorist bombing

The Georgia runoff is Jan. 5. Click here to request an absentee ballot. Early in-person voting ends Dec. 30. 

Let’s give GOP Leader Mitch McConnell the boot! Give $4 right now so McConnell can suffer the next six years in the minority.

The United States is facing still-rising pandemic deaths and both a federal government shutdown and the end of supplemental unemployment checks to those newly out of work, but Donald Trump is, of course, currently on vacation. You may be wondering where the ostensible head of the White House coronavirus "task force" has gotten to, since we haven't heard much from him either.

Alleged vice president Mike Pence is in Vail, Colorado. We're in the middle of a nationwide crisis and the guy "in charge" of it is takin' an extended family ski trip. One you're not supposed to know about, apparently.

Fortunately, Pence will not particularly be missed. His primary pandemic task force duty appears to have been reducing media access to government disease experts who had been upsetting Trump's delusional claims with far grimmer facts; given that Dr. Anthony Fauci is on television warning of those grim facts today, it seems Pence is phoning in even his duties as White House Fact Inhibitor.

Of special note, however, is that Pence evidently plans to stay on vacation and out of his Washington office through New Year's. He'll pop back at some point after that to awkwardly chair the joint session of Congress that will accept the votes of the Electoral College, formally confirming Joe Biden's presidential victory. He will then on the same day bolt off to Europe and the Middle East for one last government-funded tour.

In other words, Pence seems to be rather intent on not being in Washington for any more days than he has to, between now and Biden's inauguration on January 20. As Dear Leader rants, rages and threatens to shutdown government in one last pointless tantrum, Mike Pence will be in hiding. As Dear Leader consults with the nation’s least competent attorneys as to whether or not he can call out the actual military to have voting redone in states he lost, Mike Pence will be in hiding.

Good. Finally, we've found something he's good at.

Every editorial page has misfires over the course of a year, but the Wall Street Journal really set itself apart this year as not only publishing its usual reality adjacent pieces, but actually managing to gaslight Americans in advance on two of the biggest betrayals of the year. 

Sure, there was conservative columnist Peggy Noonan spouting off about how “insubstantial” and “embarrassing” Kamala Harris was shortly before she made history as the first woman and person of color to be elected vice president. And who can forget GOP Sen. Tom Cotton longing to turn the U.S. Military on American protesters in the pages of the New York Times? Even so, Wall Street Journal gets my vote for offering two of the most pernicious and misleading op-eds of the year.

In June, Mike Pence, supposed chief of the coronavirus White House task force put pen to paper to assure Americans that the so-called second wave of COVID-19 cases was all just a fictional media narrative. “In recent days, the media has taken to sounding the alarm bells over a “second wave” of coronavirus infections. Such panic is overblown,” Pence wrote in the lede of the piece.

Beyond spouting a bunch of platitudes about Trump’s amazing leadership, Pence said the country was “winning the fight,” cases had “stabilized,” and new outbreaks were being contained through early detection and increased testing. Trump had “rallied the American people to embrace social-distancing guidelines” and, because people had done so, “all 50 states have begun to reopen in a safe and responsible manner,” Pence wrote.

“The media has tried to scare the American people every step of the way, and these grim predictions of a second wave are no different,” he added, concluding, “We’ve slowed the spread, we’ve cared for the most vulnerable, we’ve saved lives, and we’ve created a solid foundation for whatever challenges we may face in the future. That’s a cause for celebration, not the media’s fear mongering.” 

When Pence wrote that op-ed in mid-June, the U.S. has just passed 115,000 COVID-related deaths and was averaging some 750 deaths per day over a 5-day period. At the time of this writing (Dec. 20), the U.S. had surpassed 317,000 deaths due to COVID-19 and the country recorded a record 3,600 earlier in the week. Heckuva job, Mikey. And thanks for Wall Street Journal for lending your pages to the guy who had already botched the coronavirus response from Day 1.

And then there was White House whatever-thingamajig Mick Mulvaney telling all the pearl clutchers in early November that Donald Trump would “concede gracefully” if he lost. Who coulda guessed that the guy who told everyone to just “get over it” after Trump tried to trade foreign aid to Ukraine for a fabricated investigation of his political rival would be so wildly off about Trump’s “graceful” exit. 

Mulvaney asserted that the misguided questions about Trump’s commitment to a peaceful transition of power came from people who “still think he should’ve been impeached, believe the polls, and consider the Washington Post, New York Times and CNN reliable sources.” Totally, Mick—fake news!

Here’s the reality about a month out from Trump’s constitutionally ordained exit:

“Senior Trump administration officials are increasingly alarmed that President Trump might unleash—and abuse—the power of government in an effort to overturn the clear result of the election,” wrote Jonathan Swan of Axios on Dec. 19. “These officials tell me that Trump is spending too much time with people they consider crackpots or conspiracy theorists and flirting with blatant abuses of power.” That’s where Trump was over a month and some 60 consecutive court losses into his epic attempt to engineer a fascist power grab.

But Mulvaney, clearly expecting a loss, was already laying the foundation for Trump’s string of bogus legal challenges. “Voters need this election to be fully litigated. Whoever occupies the presidency cannot have rumors floating around for the next four years about dead people voting or ballot dumps in the middle of the night,” he wrote. “The U.S. needs to know that the winner is actually the winner. And once Americans know that, I have every expectation that Mr. Trump will be, act and speak like a great president should—win or lose.”

Thanks for playing, whatever-thingamajig Mick. Does a “great president” declare martial law because he was too much of a loser to legitimately win? We know—just get over it.

Once he is pulled out of the White House and unprotected by the Department of Justice’s utterly screwed up concept of absolute executive immunity, many people would love to see Donald Trump promptly indicted and convicted on charges of tax fraud. And that’s fine. After all, as people rightly note, after he had evaded prosecution for all other crimes, it was the IRS that finally got Al Capone and sent him off to Alcatraz.

But eventually Capone was released from Alcatraz and went home. Granted, that was in part because he was suffering from the long-term effects of syphilis. Still … I want more when it comes to Trump.

I want Trump to be taken to the The Hague and tried before the International Criminal Court for genocide and crimes against humanity.

To be clear right off the bat, I understand that this isn’t going to happen. The United States is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court (ICC). And while the Obama administration vowed to cooperate with the court, conservatives have been so anti-ICC that under George W. Bush that they even passed a law saying the United States would help to free prisoners being held for trial by the ICC. So … that. 

But that doesn’t mean some appropriate venue for Trump can’t be found. Should be found. Has to be found. Because Trump’s crimes far exceed anything that can be dealt with in a New York state court looking into how he shuffled funds among his 500+ shell companies. 

Arguments might be made that all American executives might be held on such charges. After all, it’s hard to name a leader who hasn’t been involved in war, in sanctions that have cost the lives of thousands or millions, and in providing military assistance to leaders who we know to be just plain vile. Maybe they could all go to trial. And maybe they all should. But what Trump did wasn’t an act of war. It cannot hide behind some claim of national security. There was no delusion that his actions might prevent more deaths in the future. It doesn’t even reach the most base emotional appeal of exacting revenge for some past wrong.

When determining the scale of any crime, motivation plays a key role. There are good arguments to be made that someone who accidentally kills a stranger in a bar brawl is more dangerous to society than the person who sets out to kill a family member over some long-held grudge. But that’s not the way we treat it, either in court or in public opinion.

Likewise, intent is vital. Someone who kills by accident, even when that accident was the result of staggering bad judgment, is not held to either the same level of horror or judgment as those who set out to take a life intentionally. Again, it would be hard to find any executive who could stand up to the rigors of a court that held them accountable for simple mistakes. And again, that is not the case with Trump.

The person who determines to kill with cold knowledge of what they are doing, and with expectation of some personal gain, is regarded as the worst form of killer. And that is exactly what Donald Trump did when he knowingly made the decision to halt plans for national testing and contact tracing. 

Trump understood that aggressive national guidelines on social distancing, the institution of a national testing program, and follow-up with a program of contact tracing could save a large number of lives and restrict the spread of COVID-19. He had examples before him of exactly how successful a program could be.

On March 13, the day that Trump rolled out what was supposed to be a nationwide set of drive-thru testing facilities sited at thousands of “big box” retailers and backed by a website created by “7,000 engineers from Google,” South Korea had just finished utterly crushing the initial outbreak in that country. They had done so using exactly the techniques that were being advocated on that day: widespread testing, detailed contact tracing, strict quarantine of infected individuals, and isolation of those in contact with the infected. It wasn’t just South Korea. Other nations, such as Taiwan, smashed their first surge of cases in the same way, and did so in spite of close proximity and regular contact with the area of China that had seen the original outbreak.

But Trump did not follow the announcement on March 13 with an actual system of either testing or case tracing. The website that he cited did not exist. The testing facilities themselves never went past a handful of poorly supplied locations mismanaged by Jared Kushner and his college buddies. That was not a failure born from ignorance or bumbling, though there was plenty of both to go around. It was an intentional decision made by Trump and his White House staff to allow COVID-19 to ravage the country because he believed it would be to his political advantage.

As Trump watched disaster unfold in New York City, he didn’t think, “What can I do to help?” He thought, “Excellent.” He thought that if he continued to pull his punches against the virus, the death toll would climb primarily in blue states. He thought the blame would fall on Democratic politicians. He thought he could hold on to power by walking over a sea of bodies.

Trump murdered Americans for personal gain, with calculated intent and full knowledge of what he was doing. Whether the United States honors the ICC or not, there is absolutely no doubt that Trump’s actions fit the definition of both genocide and crimes against humanity. He deserves a trial and punishment appropriate to scale of those crimes.

And don’t even get me started on the sedition …

In The New York Times, Neil Irwin points out that there's a straightforward way a new Biden administration could begin clawing back some of the outrageous gains made by the wealthy even if Republicans remain bent on keeping taxes on the wealthy at budget-busting new lows: enforce the existing tax laws. Identify the wealthy tax cheats who, like a certain orange-hued someone, have been abusing tax laws for years and end their cheating.

There's a catch here, though, and it's the obvious and crooked one. Republicans have been defunding the Internal Revenue Service for years in an effort to block exactly those sorts of audits and oversight. The IRS has increasingly targeted lower-income Americans with audits and enforcement, while probes of the wealthy have decreased. Those audits, say criminals allies of the wealthy, would be too difficult and time-consuming because rich people have lots of lawyers. Poor people don't have any lawyers, so it makes sense to concentrate on the poor people. And the wealthy and corporate have in the past decades moved to new tax evasion schemes that the IRS has much more difficulty tracking to begin with.

In order to truly begin prosecuting rampant tax fraud among the lawyered class, it will take restoring money to the IRS to be able to staff those more complex cases and, again, Republicans have been blocking that. Republicans are not dumb—or, to clarify, the lobbyists that write Republican-backed bills are not dumb, and have not missed many tricks in their efforts to free America's wealthy from paying the same tax rates that either their wealthy parents or their poorest gardeners have paid. The result is an upper class that is living fat and happy even through a recession and world-shaking pandemic, an upper class that cannot be dislodged even by calamity, most with financial dealings that look much like Trump's own.

A non-Republican administration could direct the IRS to divert more attention to partnerships, S corporations, and similar vehicles for tax dodging, but it would be taken as an act of war. The nation's wealthy would gang up to sabotage IRS efforts by any means necessary, from the individual act of lawyering each case into the ground to new dark money groups aimed at fomenting so-called "populist" declarations against paying anything in taxes at all.

The heart of the problem here is that the American upper class is awash in financial crimes as a way of life. It is expected, and celebrated. It is seen, by the plastic classes that file through Mar-a-Lago, as cleverness. The Occupy movement had them dead to rights, but could not make headway against a government too keen on collaborating with its own saboteurs.

Appeals to decency or patriotism have never worked. Enforcing the laws already on the books, Republicans often say, is the path to ending out-of-control criminality. Imagine tens of thousands of Donald Trumps squealing like stuck pigs at the news that their tax returns are being genuinely probed; imagine a good chunk of those taking Trump's own path, declaring that if it's the nation versus his own pocketbook, then it is the nation which must go down.

Russia, it seems, is not the most powerful nation that’s under the thumb of an inherently criminal class.