Jeff Zucker’s resignation from CNN was welcome news to me, at least. I agree with Margaret Sullivan at WaPo:

Zucker, as much as any other person in the world, created and burnished the Trump persona — first as a reality-TV star who morphed into a worldwide celebrity, then as a candidate for president who was given large amounts of free publicity.

The through line? Nothing nobler than TV ratings, which always were Zucker’s guiding light, his be-all and end-all and, ultimately, his fatal flaw.

Yeah, when he was head of NBC Entertainment Zucker helped create “The Apprentice” as a vehicle for Trump. And then as head of CNN Zucker helped make Donald Trump president. Alex Shephard writes at The New Republic,

Speaking to Vanity Fair in 2018, then–CNN chief Jeff Zucker made the case that his decision to transform the network he ran into a near 24/7 Trumpathon was just good business. “People say all the time, ‘Oh, I don’t want to talk about Trump. I’ve had too much Trump,’” he said. “And yet at the end of the day, all they want to do is talk about Trump. We’ve seen that, anytime you break away from the Trump story and cover other events in this era, the audience goes away. So we know that, right now, Donald Trump dominates.”

Zucker was not, I don’t think, the first media executive who sought to package news as entertainment. The networks used to keep the news and entertainment divisions strictly separate and accepted that news coverage would be unprofitable. But that changed in the 1970s. See this 1999 Neiman Reports article for how pressure for television news to be profitable changed television news coverage for the worse.

Before “The Apprentice” debuted in 2004, Trump appears to have been circling the drain as any kind of big-shot executive. He was over his head in debt, and his casinos and hotels were not generating enough money to get out of debt. There were reports he had barely enough cash on hand to keep up daily operations. (See Is Trump Headed for a Fall? from March 2004.) “The Apprentice” literally saved his ass. He still had to walk away from the casinos, dumping his debt load on his gullible investors, but after the show became a hit (or so I’m told; I never watched it) his fortunes looked up. By 2006 he was flush with cash of unknown origin (see Trump’s Mystery Money from May 2018). This was after U.S. banks had stopped doing business with him.

See also Adam Davidson, Where Did Donald Trump Get Two Hundred Million Dollars to Buy His Money-Losing Scottish Golf Club?, The New Yorker, July 2018. By 2018 Trump had spent a few years doing deals all over the world and buying properties with cash, and there literally was no way to know where all that money was coming from. It couldn’t be accounted for through available information. Did “The Apprentice” somehow make all that possible, whatever “all that” was?

And then came the 2016 election, and Zucker was head of CNN Worldwide. In 2017 Warren Olney wrote in the Los Angeles Times that Trump owed his election victory to  Zucker.

During the election season, I saw entire Trump rallies carried live by CNN, interrupted only for mandatory commercials. Not only was there no critical fact-checking, there was no serious effort to provide context for viewers. Never raised, let alone answered, was the question: Why should a developer with a shaky reputation and no relevant experience be seriously considered for the most powerful job in the world?

It wasn’t just CNN, of course, as I described in a 2017 post, Are Our News Media Learning? They all managed to “normalize” Trump, giving him billions of dollars of free air time for the sake of ratings. But CNN led the way.

Then came 2020, and I despaired of anything improving. CNN’s hosting of the 2nd set of Democratic candidate debates in August 2019 was just awful. See John Delaney, Tim Ryan, and Other Tools (about the first night) and CNN’s Hot Mess, Night 2. See also David Dayen, CNN’s Debate Fail. It begins:

Everyone working for CNN should walk into network president Jeff Zucker’s office and resign en masse on Wednesday morning. A “debate” that spent its opening 25 minutes less efficiently than a Super Bowl pre-game show got dramatically worse as the actual questions got started. Jake Tapper then delivered instructions, warning the candidates not to go over time after CNN saw fit to run the national anthem and then a commercial break after the scheduled start time. The only ones wasting time on debate night would be CNN.

It would give Tapper and his other moderators too much credit to say that their relentless right-wing framing of the questions was animated by a desire to protect the insurance industry and the border patrol. But that’s not really it. CNN has no politics. CNN has no understanding of politics or policy. I doubt the combined firepower of the 20-person post-game panel could name a bill currently before Congress. The CNN debate was an inevitable by-product of turning news into an entertainment and cultural product.

So you can assume I’m not weeping any tears over the departure of Zucker. Let’s just hope whoever replaces him isn’t just as bad.

There’s a lot of speculation that the stated reason for Zucker’s resignation, that he’d had a secret relationship with an employee, was not the real reason he left. There is talk that Zucker’s resignation has something to do with the the Cuomo brothers, Chris and Andy. Especially Chris. The Daily Mail thinks that CNN fired Zucker at the insistence of a billionaire stockholder who is also a Trump donor, who wanted to end the network’s “left-wing bias.” To which all one can say, is …

But I really don’t care how it happened. Zucker, the Man Who Made Trump, is gone. Let’s just hope CNN doesn’t get even worse.

In other news: Here’s today’s new Trump insurrection revelation, ironically reported by CNN:  Newly obtained records show Trump and Jim Jordan spoke at length on morning of January 6. This is a matter that has strangely eluded Rep. Jordan’s memory.

I wanted to post this a couple of days ago, but it took me this long to find it. Here is Laurence Tribe on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show Monday night, reacting to Trump’s “overturn the Election!” memo.

Maybe it’s just me, but he seems on the edge of a panic attack.

Recently it seems we get some new details about The Plot to Steal the Election every day. Today’s bit is that Trumpers wanted to seize raw data from the National Security Agency and Defense Department and sift through it for evidence of foreign interference in the election. See also Trumpers Wanted Conspiracy Theorist Help On Proposed NSA Effort To Steal Election at Talking Points Memo.

We don’t know if this idea was ever presented to Trump. However, we do know that Trump was involved in the scheme to seize voting machines.

Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. Mr. Trump wanted him to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states, three people familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Giuliani did so, calling the department’s acting deputy secretary, who said he lacked the authority to audit or impound the machines.

The reporting, by the New York Times, says that on Rudy Giuliani’s advice, Trump rejected the suggestion to ask the Pentagon to seize voting machines. So instead he had Giuliani go to DHS. After being shot down by DHS, Trump asked Attorney General Barr to do it. Barr also shot the idea down. But in the meantime Trump also asked lawmakers in contested states to seize voting machines.

Later in the story —

Mr. Giuliani was vehemently opposed to the idea of the military taking part in the seizure of machines, according to two people familiar with the matter. The conflict between him and his legal team, and Mr. Flynn, Ms. Powell and Mr. Byrne came to a dramatic head on Dec. 18, 2020, during a meeting with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office.

At the meeting, Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell presented Mr. Trump with a copy of the draft executive order authorizing the military to oversee the seizure of machines. After reading it, Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Giuliani to the Oval Office, according to one person familiar with the matter. When Mr. Giuliani read the draft order, he told Mr. Trump that the military could be used only if there was clear-cut evidence of foreign interference in the election.

Hence, the need for a fishing expedition to find evidence of foreign interference.

There’s a long article by Ed Kilgore at New York magazine that lays out the plot(s) to overturn the election. (If you don’t have a subscription, you can probably read it in an incognito or inprivate window. That’s what I do.) I linked yesterday to Philip Bump’s “the sloppy, patchwork, spaghetti-at-the-wall effort to steal the presidency.”  See also Trump’s Words, and Deeds, Reveal Depths of His Drive to Retain Power by Shane Goldmacher at the New York Times. These all go over much the same material. But the point is that there’s a bleeping avalanche of evidence that Trump was actively attempting to overturn the election, and it’s all out in the open. There’s enough stuff out in public to put him away for years, as Laurence Tribe said.

We don’t know if the Justice Department is working on any of this. Maybe it is; maybe it isn’t. Waiting for Merrick Garland to Do Something is an ongoing topic of consternation in the nation’s op eds. Lots of people discuss the virtue of caution. But Trump is out in public telling his followers to violently punish any prosecutors, whether Letitia James, Fani Willis,  or Alvin Bragg, who dare to indict him for anything. Fani Willis asked the Justice Department for protection.

That all three of these prosecutors are Black has not escaped Trump’s notice. Jonathan Chait:

Addressing a rally last weekend, former president Donald Trump presented himself as the victim of racist prosecutors. “These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They’re racists and they’re very sick. They’re mentally sick,” he bellowed. “If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal,” Trump said, “I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta, and elsewhere. Because our country and our elections are corrupt.”

Yesterday, his largest adult son, Eric, took up the refrain with a slightly classier spin, filing suit against New York Attorney General Letitia James for what he called her “third world” conduct.

If you still need a decoder ring, the Trumps habitually attack whomever is prosecuting them as corrupt, but the alleged corruption is usually cast as either akin to Russia (i.e., second world) or embodying the corruption of American institutions Trump frequently alleges. Eric’s “third world” epithet is a specific reminder that the prosecutors in New York are Black and therefore lack the standing to charge his upstanding family with crimes.

I’m rooting for Fani Willis especially. Her taking down Trump on criminal charges would be just about the sweetest thing that ever happened in American history. Everything I hear about her says she is thorough and professional and won’t make a move until she’s got every “i” dotted.

In other news — in a hopeful sign, Trump-endorsed primary challengers to Republican politicans Trump doesn’t like are lagging way behind in fundraising.

Key Trump-backed Republican challengers were heavily outraised by their Republican primary opponents late last year, newly filed financial reports show. …

… The trend was most evident in Wyoming.

The incumbent, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), more than quadrupled the fourth-quarter fundraising haul of her top primary opponent, fellow Republican Harriet Hageman.

Cheney’s $2 million haul, her best-ever fundraising quarter, came as she spearheaded efforts to investigate Trump’s role in the January 6 Capitol attack — triggering the ex-president’s fury.

Hageman reported raising $443,000.

However, Trump’s candidates would be weaker general election candidates, I suspect, so Democrats might be better off if some of them won.

Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis

Aaron Blake writes that two days after his “he could have overturned the Election!” remark, Trump is asking for a mulligan.

That thumping sound you hear comes from Trump’s lawyers banging their heads on walls.

Aaron Blake writes at WaPo,

Citing Sen. Susan Collins’s (R-Maine) support for the push to overhaul the Electoral Count Act, Trump maintained the effort itself betrayed Pence’s actual authority.

Aaron Blake goes on to cite all the people in Trump’s inner circle who said, yeah, this idea about Pence changing the outcome was floating around, but we all knew it was crazy. Nobody took it seriously.

Well, it looks like somebody took it seriously. Blake continues,

Trump, of course, has made little secret that he saw this as a viable path. He floated both options as late as Jan. 5, 2021, saying Pence could “also decertify the illegal and corrupt results and send them to the House of Representatives for the one-vote-for-one-state tabulation.”

He’s now reasserting, more than a year later, that that’s the path Pence should have indeed pursued. He’s advocated something so anti-democratic that his own lawyers and vice president have said it was illegal, “crazy” and “un-American.” That could certainly bear on both the Jan. 6 investigation — in that it reinforces Trump’s true motive — and the Electoral Count Act overhaul effort — in that it actually reinforces the need to clarify this.

This just makes me sad.

This is from Glenn Greenwald’s substack account. It makes me sad because I remember when Glenn Greenwald was a voice of reason on the Left. Now he carps at “liberals” for “censorship” at a time when the Right is campaigning to remove books from school libraries and prevent schools from teaching actual American history. Apparently that’s okay. But if people are refusing to do business with Spotify because Joe Rogan’s podcasts about covid could be getting people killed, this means all of liberalism is about censorship. I can’t even.

Florida school district cancels professor’s civil rights lecture over critical race theory concerns

Republicans Are Trying to Suppress More Than Votes

Conservatives Are Banning Books From Schools While Whining About ‘Cancel Culture’

Art Spiegelman sees the new ban of his book ‘Maus’ as a ‘red alert’

Greenwald pooh-poohs “the vastly overstated claim that vaccines prevent transmission of COVID” which in fact have been supported by solid evidence. But notice that he skips the more critical issue of hospitalizations, now that Omicron has changed the transmission calculations (although “breakthrough” cases of the fully vaccinated are still much, much lower than the rate of cases among the unvaccinated).

As of January 12, data show the unvaccinated are 20 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than fully vaccinated people. Note that since the fully vaccinated population tends to be older, and with more health problems, than the unvaccinated, the actual protective benefits of vaccination for an individual would probably be a lot higher. See also.

https://time.com/6138566/pandemic-of-unvaccinated/

I’m really tired of having to explain this.

Further, let’s consider that the protests of Joe Rogan on Spotify are not coming from government or a political party or dark-money funded organizations, but just people. People voting with their pocketbooks by canceling subscriptions or boycotting businesses is a time-honored way of expressing approval or disapproval of public speech or action. The book and information banning going on right now in public school classrooms and public and school libraries is being organized and funded by conservative donors and enabled by high-level Republican officer holders. This  comes closer to any definition of censorship than people canceling their Spotify accounts.

And the moral is, no matter how smart you are, there still could be a rabbit hole out there somewhere with your name on it. Take care.

Ruth Marcus writes that the reactions to President Biden’s pledge to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court are “racially tinged.” Tinged my ass; the Right’s reaction is reeking with racism. The dog whistles have become megaphones.

Marcus provides several examples and also notes that past presidents have explicitly announced that they intended to nominate a woman (Reagan, who then nominated Sandra Day O’Connor) or a Black (Bush I, who then nominated Clarence Thomas to “replace,” or at least sit in the chair of, Thurgood Marshall).

Paul Waldman also describes The race-baiting response to Biden’s Supreme Court pledge.

Conservative legal scholar Ilya Shapiro tweeted that rather than picking a male candidate Shapiro judged to be the “objectively best pick,” Biden would succumb to the “latest intersectional hierarchy” and choose a “lesser black woman.” (He later deleted the tweet and apologized.)

Do tell.

“They can overtly discriminate against people,” lamented Ben Shapiro. Tucker Carlson issued a ten-minute rant about the injustice of it all, concluding with the suggestion that George Floyd’s sister should be the nominee.

U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is under consideration for the nomination

Here’s a bit of good news — Justice Breyer is retiring. President Biden gets a Supreme Court pick, and Mitch McConnell can’t block it. It won’t change the conservative dominance on the Court, of course.

Now, on to today’s Derp News, Republicans versus Science edition.

Via Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, I learned today about DJ Ferguson, 31, who is hospitalized in Boston and in desperate need of a heart transplant. He is the father of two children, and his wife is expecting a third. He was at the top of the transplant list, but … he refused to get a covid vaccine. So the hospital took him off the list.

The hospital is not just being mean. People who have recently received organ transplants are hugely immunocompromised. Just about any virus infection could kill them, never mind covid. Being fully vaccinated against everything they can possibly catch is a condition for getting a transplant, because it’s a waste of an organ to put it into someone who is at increased risk compared to other patients.

Dr. Arthur Caplan, the head of medical ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, explains that being vaccinated is necessary for this type of procedure.

“Post any transplant, kidney, heart whatever, your immune system is shut off,” Caplan said. “The flu could kill you, a cold could kill you, COVID could kill you. The organs are scarce, we are not going to distribute them to someone who has a poor chance of living when others who are vaccinated have a better chance post-surgery of surviving.”

Okay, that makes sense. But not to DJ Ferguson. His family says he is sticking to principles. His father, David Ferguson, says the family is pursuing other options, but they are running out of time. He may already be too fragile to move to another hospital, assuming there is one that would give him the transplant. As I understand it, the protocols for who gets a heart are not decided by the hospitals.

And while the family says DJ has received great care from doctors and nurses at Brigham and Women’s, they just don’t agree with the heart transplant COVID vaccination policy.

“I think my boy is fighting pretty damn courageously and he has integrity and principles he really believes in and that makes me respect him all the more,” David Ferguson said.

Which is why the family is sticking by his side and hoping for the best. “It’s his body. It’s his choice,” Ferguson added.

So he’ll probably die, and his three children will grow up without their father. And for what “principles”? That “they can’t make me do it what I don’t wanna do it, nyah nyah nyah?” Seriously? What about his responsibilities to his children?

At The Atlantic, Kurt Andersen writes that “The Anti-Vaccine Right Brought Human Sacrifice to America.” At first I thought that was a tad hyperbolic, but now I’m not so sure. JD Ferguson certainly seems determined to sacrifice himself for completely empty “principles.”

In ancient times human sacrifice was driven by political and religious power, fused together; “politics plus faith,” Andersen calls it. Andersen compares people like Ferguson to the folks who drank the Kool-Aid at Jonestown. Some of the people who died at Jonestown did not do so voluntarily, it says here. They literally had guns to their heads, which Ferguson does not, so it’s not a perfect analogy. But it does seem he’s prepared to throw his life away rather than betray his faith in something that he thinks is a “principle.”

“,,, for a long time now the right’s ongoing propaganda campaign against and organized political resistance to vaccination, among other public-health protocols, has been killing many, many Americans for no reasonable, ethically justifiable social purpose,” Andersen writes. “In other words, what we’ve experienced certainly since the middle of 2021 is literally ritual human sacrifice on a mass scale—the real thing, comparable to the innumerable ghastly historical versions.”

Other desperately sick people are choosing death before what they think is dishonor.

A man seeking a kidney transplant has also been denied a place on the active transplant list because he chose not to get vaccinated.

Shamgar Connors, 42, is a patient at University of Virginia Hospital who is now listed as “inactive” on the list for a life-saving kidney transplant. Connors said his entire family had COVID-19 and doesn’t believe he needs the vaccine.

“I’d rather die of kidney failure,” Connors told Dr. Karen Warburton after she asked if he was willing to receive the vaccine, according to Fox News Digital.

Similarly, a Colorado woman was denied a kidney transplant because she refuses to get the vaccine for religious reasons.

Leilani Lutali said she would not get vaccinated because of the role that fetal cell lines have played in vaccine development, according to the Associated Press.

The business about fetal cell lines is a howler, since just about all medications are initially tested using fetal lines that have lived in laboratories since the 1970s. If you were going to be consistent on this you’d have to refuse to take all medicines, including Tylenol. But if Leilani Lutali wants to die on that hill, I’m not personally feeling a strong urge to stop her.

Also from Lawyers, Guns and Money, see Erik Loomis, Why Fox Went All-In on Killing Their Viewers, and Scott Lemieux, The GOP Is a Remarkably Successful Death Cult.

In other covid derp news: Some anti-vaxx governors have made a big deal of offering monoclonal antibody therapies as a treatment for covid, as part of their argument that nobody needs vaccines since they’ve got these treatments. The monoclonal antibody therapies generally do help quite a bit, although they aren’t a sure-fire cure. The federal government bought huge quantities of the stuff to distribute to the states and medical facilities.

However, it has been discovered that two of the most distributed monoclonal antibody therapies, those made by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly, are ineffective against Omicron. So the feds have paused the distribution, since just about everybody is getting Omicron now, and there’s no point wasting the stuff. Another monoclonal antibody treatment, by GlaxoSmithKline and Vir Biotechnology, is effective against Omicron, but there is not yet a big stockpile of it.

Lo, guess who’s having a fit about it.

Floridians have benefited from the state’s treatment sites and their access to treatment shouldn’t be denied based on the whims of a floundering president. https://t.co/Y5nmAV1LCs

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) January 25, 2022

DeSantis is threatening to sue the Biden Administration to get them to release the Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly therapies, even though Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly agree the therapies don’t work against Omicron. And the decision was made by the FDA, not by President Biden. Like most righties, DeSantis is basically an overgrown spoiled child who can’t process not getting everything he wants.

The Aztecs are probably the record holder for mass sacrifice, but the Republicans may top them.

Virginia elected a Republican governor, and now they’ve got a Republican governor who is acting like a Republican governor. Apparently some Virginians are surprised by this. They appear to have thought that Glenn Youngkin wasn’t, you know, like those Republicans.

After campaigning as a nice surburban dad who wouldn’t do anything radical or crazy, he went for the radical/crazy as soon as he took office. Dahlia Lithwick:

On his first day in office, Youngkin issued an executive order granting parents of the commonwealth’s 1.5 million schoolchildren the ability to exempt their kids from their school districts’ mask policies if they so choose. Immediately after the order was signed, several superintendents announced plans to keep their mask requirements. Virginia’s lieutenant governor announced that Youngkin could pull funding from any district refusing to comply, although nobody could say whether that was legal. Parents sued to reverse the order, and then seven school boards filed a lawsuit claiming the masks-optional policy violates both the Virginia Constitution, which provides that “the supervision of schools in each school division shall be vested in a school board,” and a 2021 state law that requires school systems to follow federal health guidelines. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention strongly recommends all students, K–12, wear masks regardless of vaccination status.

And so, all hell has broken loose in Virginia. You’ve probably seen the video of the unhinged Virginia mother screaming that if the school district forced her child to wear a mask, she was bringing “every single gun loaded” to her child’s school. Lithwick:

There’s no point debating who in the complicated mess of parents, schools, local school boards, states, or federal agencies should have the last word on public health measures in a peaking pandemic. That complicated legal question, which will presumably be resolved in the courts, has been temporarily obviated by the choice to say that the wearing of masks is an exigent denial of individual liberty, akin to the wearing of yellow stars in Nazi Germany, and the governor’s decision to empower parents to therefore refuse it. Youngkin, who ran as a “moderate,” entered office with a ban on the teaching of critical race theory (which is not currently taught in K–12 schools in Virginia) and other “divisive” topics. Youngkin’s attorney general has just reversed the state’s position on Roe v. Wade, arguing for it to be overturned this spring at the Supreme Court. This past weekend the AG also fired UVA’s counsel, who was on leave working as the top investigator for the U.S. House panel investigating the Jan. 6 riot—insisting this was not a politically motivated act but not offering any other reason for it.

You wanted Republicans in charge of the state, Virginia, and now you’ve got them. Be careful what to wish for. The new attorney general, Jason Miyares, is a real sweetheart who purged thirty staffers from his office the day before his inauguration. This included the entire conviction integrity unit, which as I understand it investigates possible wrongful convictions.

This past week Youngkin attempted to dial back some of the controversy. “After big-footing his way into a crisis, on Saturday, Youngkin tried to tweet his way out of it with vague platitudes that ultimately contradicted themselves and only added to the confusion: ‘While the legal process continues on the parental opt out of mask mandates for their children in schools, I urge everyone to love your neighbor, to listen to school principals, and to trust the legal process,'” Lithwick wrote.

The problem here is that Youngkin got the order wrong. He was supposed to start with love and respect for school principals, and then build up to rancor and division and threats of violence—it’s so much harder to go in the other direction, as he’s tried to do. Bottling up the outrage after the gun-waving phase proves difficult—ask Donald Trump. By the time parents are marching their kids into schools with copies of a hastily crafted executive order and the directive to refuse to listen to anyone in authority, “love your neighbor” is a fossilized relic of a forgotten time.

Greg Sargent weighs in:

In an interview with influential right wing radio host John Fredericks on Monday night, Youngkin demonstrated why this is happening. The episode, reported by The Post, captures something essential about the pathologies that Trump has unleashed in our politics, and the tendency of so many GOP politicians to eagerly go along with them.

Youngkin laced into “left liberals” and school board “bureaucrats,” blaming them for the turmoil that has erupted in response to his new policy. Youngkin recently signed an executive order allowing parents to opt out of mask requirements without any reason, but dozens of school districts are keeping the mandates in place, arguing that the law requires them to do so.

“I’m not surprised at all to hear these reactions from school boards that have consistently prioritized bureaucrats and politicians over the rights of parents,” Youngkin insisted. He said school districts keeping mask requirements “aren’t recognizing the rights of parents today.”

The part that righties refuse to understand, of course, is that masking works best if everyone does it.  They don’t just reduce the amount of virus that might be breathed in, but also that might be breathed out. If only some people in a vicinity are wearing masks they are much less effective at protecting their wearers, although they offer a bit of protection, so it’s still worth wearing them. But the point is that one parents’ decision to send a child to school unmasked doesn’t just affect that child, but all the children. And, frankly, masks aren’t that big a deal. Anti-mask hysteria is utterly irrational.

It’s also the case that a majority of Virginians, including parents of school children, support masking and other mandates. Once again, a minority is being allowed to bully everyone else. And Youngkin’s blaming of allegedly power-mad school district “bureaucrats” — school boards are elected in Virginia — is par for the course. He is the one overreaching his executive authority, but he blames others.

I’d like to throw out one other part of the problem, which is that Youngkin’s entire career has been in business. He’s been in investment banking and management consulting and eventually was a co-CEO of the infamous Carlyle Group, the company in which the Bushes and bin Ladens were both doing business before September 11. Business leaders are not used to having to deal with layers of authority in their own organization that they do not control. That’s something Trump never got; he spent four years treating everyone in federal government as if they worked for him.

I assume Youngkin is more intelligent than Trump (most vertebrates are) and that he has a theoretical understanding of how government works. But he’s got a learning curve ahead of him if he’s going to change the way he’s always run businesses and adjust to the realities of government. Especially in our diffuse federalist system in which power is not supposed to be centralized, Youngkin’s well-honed CEO skills are not likely to work very well.

I’m reminded of Rex Tillerson, the Exxon-Mobil CEO who was Trump’s first secretary of state. One of the first things he wanted to do is make the State Department more “efficient,” which amounted to gutting it. I’m sure he has a lot of experience in taking over some company or division and redesigning it to his liking, but he seems not to have firmly grasped what it is departments of state do. These guys are not always all that flexible. They’ve got one skill set that worked for them in business, and they tend to stick to it even when it isn’t working.

Glenn Youngkin

The utterly useless Governor of Missouri, the utterly useless Mike Parson, gave a State of the State address a few days ago. The utterly useless governor’s office didn’t release a transcript, and I’m not about to watch it on video, so I’m going by news stories about what he said.

The news lead is that Gov. Useless bragged about the state’s huge budget surplus, as if he had had something to do with it. Missouri is still sitting on $2 billion of unspent federal money from the American Rescue Plan.

Thanks President Biden! Thanks, congressional Democrats! No, Useless didn’t say that. What he did say was “When other states will be filling spending gaps and budget shortfalls, we will be making investments in the future, because in Missouri, we took a common sense approach to the pandemic, never shutdown businesses, and have always had a conservative and balanced budget.”

“Convservative approach” basically means “we’ll let the state rot before we spend money on it.”

Let’s talk about the pandemic, the thing on which money was not spent. Currently, Missouri is somewhere in the middle in the state rankings of covid deaths per 100,000 population. According to the Mayo Clinic, the state currently has a 32.7 percent positivity rate, and 54 percent of residents are fully vaccinated. Omicron hasn’t peaked here yet; hospitalization and death rates are still going up in most of the state.

And what is Parson doing about any of this? Absolutely nothing. Missouri is fortunate in that most of the state is rural and sparsely populated. The urban areas did institute mask mandates and other mitigation efforts to attempt to keep the pandemic in hand. This may be why St. Louis currently is experiencing 142 new cases daily per 100,000 population, while state capitol Jefferson City has 314 cases per 100,000 population every day (source).

Remember also that mostly rural southwest Missouri was the epicenter of a delta surge that spread to several other states.

The Springfield News-Leader reported,

The governor, who throughout the pandemic has advocated for personal responsibility and a hands-off approach at the state level, spoke of the pandemic primarily in the past tense Wednesday. The state “accepted the challenges and prevailed” against the virus, despite “endless critics” who “tell us how we could have done it better.”

Those remarks come as Missouri faces a wave of the virus led by the omicron variant, a defining characteristic of which has been staff shortages and closures at schools. Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt has been an aggressive opponent of masking and quarantine orders in schools, threatening districts with litigation if they continue to enforce such guidelines. House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, a Springfield Democrat, zeroed in on Schmitt’s decision-making with regard to schools while criticizing the administration’s pandemic response Wednesday evening.

This is what makes me crazy. So the state decided not to respond to the pandemic. The state also has fought with county and city governments that do want to respond to the pandemic. St. Louis city and county have practically been at war with state Attorney General Eric Schmitt these past two years. Schmitt wants no restrictions on anyone’s “freedom” whatsoever. Mask mandates have been overturned and re-instated so many times by so many courts St. Louisans practically have whiplash. The most recent ruling responding to one of Schmitt’s many lawsuits has the mask mandate back in place.

And as schools struggle to say open because of Omicron, Schmitt is suing school districts all over the state to end school mask mandates.

The suits allege that school districts do not have the authority to impose public health orders for children. Several parents within the districts are named as plaintiffs in the suits that were filed in the counties where the school districts are located.

The lawsuits are part of Schmitt’s ongoing effort to force Missouri schools to drop mask mandates and other COVID-19 mitigation policies. Schmitt is a Republican running for U.S. Senate.

“Parents and families, not bureaucrats, should have the power to decide what’s best for their children,” Schmitt said in a press release Friday.

In most cases the “bureaucrats” are elected school board members, as in the elected representatives of the people of that city or county. Can’t have people deciding things for themselves, nosirree.

Did I mention Schmitt is running for Roy Blunt’s Senate seat and wants to get his name on Fox News? I believe I have.

CBS reported a couple of days ago that 25 percent of people hospitalized for covid in Missouri are children. See also At least 62 Missouri school districts have temporarily closed in January,

In the state of the state speech, Useless said, “Government should lead, not dictate,” he said. “Government should support, not mandate. And we must all remember that.” That sounds grand, but in truth what that means is that the only policies allowed, at state or local level, are whatever the state Republican Party approves.

Local governments are not allowed to institute local covid policies no matter how desperate the pandemic is at the time.

The state legislature keeps trying to force right-to-work laws on the state in spite of a 2018 referendum in which the voters clearly opposed right-to-work laws.

Voters passed a referendum calling for the state to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and the state refused to do it. They didn’t have the money, they said (see above about $2 billion in unspent federal dollars, plus the feds pay for most of Medicaid). Late last year the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the state had to expand Medicaid, anyway. They are sorta kinda doing it, but the enrollment process is unnecessarily cumbersome (I walked through it myself), and the legislature is considering more restrictions, such as a full-time job or so many hours of volunteer work a month in order to qualify for Medicaid. Those undeserving poor people need to step up, I guess.

Not all of Useless’s proposals for the surplus of money are bad. He wants to raise teachers’ salaries and send more money to schools and state colleges, for example. But the notion that the state doesn’t impose itself on the will of the people is a joke.

See also: The Technowizard Governor and the Hack

When “Actual Innocence” Can’t Get You Out of Jail

Missouri: The Screw Me State

Gov. Mike Parson, who is utterly useless.