Dahlia Lithwick:

If he were anyone else, one could say that former President Donald Trump has been having an exceedingly bad week. Indeed, were he anyone else, one might well be saying that it sure looks like the walls are closing in on him. But Donald Trump has been living in the Republic of Walls-Closing-Inistan for so very, very long that it’s difficult to know whether the former president will once again get away with simply lying about the square footage of the forever-shrinking penthouse.

That’s how I feel. I don’t want to get my hopes up that this time will turn out any differently. But it does seem he’s closer to disaster than he has been so far.

For example, David French writes at The Atlantic that Georgia Has a Very Strong Case Against Trump. By “Georgia,” of course, he means the Fulton Count District Attorney, Fani Willis. DA Willis wants a special grand jury in order to issue indictments to the many people refusing to testify otherwise. She may have enough evidence with the tape of the infamous Raffensperger phone call, but she may want to be sure she has an ironclad case. She might also be going beyond just the phone call.

New York Attorney General Letitia James is pursuing civil charges, which are easier to prove than criminal charges. AG James wants to be able to compel the Trumps, including the Donald himself, to submit to depositions about the conflicting claims they’ve made about their finances. The Trumps will probably take the 5th, because anything they say might be used against them by the Manhattan District Attorney, who is investigating criminal charges, as is the Westchester County District Attorney.

Meanwhile, thousands of Rudy Giuliani’s communications have been turned over to the Manhattan U.S. attorney.

Predictably, there are headlines today that declare Democrats are divided. For example, there’s a headline at the Los Angeles Times declaring that “Biden Is Stuck With a Divided Party.” The article is behind a paywall, unfortunately. But in fact I’ve never seen the Democrats so united as they were yesterday. lt’s not party division we’re seeing, but sabotage on the part of two outliers. The party itself is unified, for a change.

And there is the usually blaming of “the Left.” Ruy Teixeira published something under the headline How Not to Build a Coalition: The Left’s Theory of the Case Falls Apart in which he said “Biden has repeatedly tried to mollify the left, especially the House’s Progressive Caucus, as he desperately tried to craft a successful legislative agenda.” Excuse me? It was the Progressive Caucus that supported Biden’s agenda and worked their butts off for it. It was a small group of Clinton-era “New Democrat” holdovers who refused to read the memo.

(Ruy Teixeira is one of the guys who promised us An Emerging Democratic Majority back in 2002. We’re still waiting.)

And the Progressives were right that the only hope Dems had for passing the Build Back Better bill was by keeping it tied to the infrastructure bill. The progressives eventually accepted everyone’s assurance that Lucy would not jerk the football away this time, and let infrastructure pass. And then the Build Back Better bill was dead. (See also Paul Waldman, Stop Blaming the Left for Biden’s Problems.)

Paul Waldman thinks the Democrats, along with hitting bottom, may also have reached a turning point. “It was absolutely a defeat, for Biden, for his party, and most of all for voters,” he wrote. “But it also represented a significant shift within the Democratic Party. That’s because every single Democrat apart from Manchin and Sinema supported setting aside the filibuster.”

Democrats are no longer waiting for Republicans to come to their senses, says Waldman. They now know that’s not going to happen. Even Joe Biden, Mr. Reach Across the Aisle himself, knows this. Waldman:

At his Wednesday news conference, President Biden was asked whether he had over-promised and what he planned to change in the remainder of his term. In response, he said, “I did not anticipate that there’d be such a stalwart effort to make sure that the most important thing was that President Biden didn’t get anything done.”

And he added: “Name me one thing they’re for.” And the answer is, defeating Democrats. That’s it. Remember that they didn’t even bother to write a new platform in 2020? That was a clue, Joe. What they want is to “own the libs.” They haven’t planned any further.

We might complain that President Biden really should have noticed this sooner. He ran for President in 2020 as if there were still reasonable Republicans left, somewhere. I don’t know if that was just campaign talk or whether Biden really believed it, of course. But he knows now that there aren’t.

Added to the absolutely terrible news coverage of yesterdays debates and votes and of the President’s news conference — and by “terrible” I mean the coverage bears little resemblance to what really happened — the Republicans will pay no penalties for the wrecking ball they are taking to democracy. These are dark times.

But if the Democrats are finally pissed off enough, and discouraged enough, to fight for a change, we may see an energized party.

Breaking news: CNN is reporting that Trump campaign officials, led by Rudy Giuliani, oversaw fake electors plot in 7 states. Rachel Maddow has been pushing this story for a few days.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution — Fulton DA requests special grand jury for Trump probe

The Guardian — Trump held secret meetings in days before Capitol attack, ex-press secretary tells panel

[Update: SCOTUS has rejected Trump’s demands to shield White House documents from the January 6 Committee. The National Archives is free to hand it all over to the committee.]

While we’re waiting for the vote in which Manchin, Sinema, and 50 Republican senators kill voting rights and democracy in America, let’s take a look at the court filing from New York Attorney General Letitia James. This was not, I was disappointed to learn, a filing of actual criminal charges against the Trumps. (Note that James says she isn’t planning criminal charges, but civil ones, but we can hope.) Instead, it “seeks a court order enforcing testimonial subpoenas issued to Donald J. Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., and Ivanka Trump, as well as the production of documents held by Donald J. Trump. … Earlier this month, the Trumps filed a motion to quash these interviews, and the papers filed today by the Attorney General oppose that motion.”

It does appear that James has documentary evidence up the wazoo that the Trumps have engaged in fraudulent activity. The Trumps, of course, dismiss James’s evidence as just politics and animus against the poor, put-upon Trumps.

Philip Bump writes at WaPo that The Trumps always wiggle out of whatever they’ve done wrong.

Ol’ Donny Trump’s ability to wriggle out of jams has long depended heavily on the support of his allies and supporters — and, in some cases, attorneys. There is a massive ecosystem dedicated to helping Trump pry himself free from controversy, an ecosystem that is, by now, extremely well-versed in how to make that happen. It has been strained, as with the “Access Hollywood” tape or the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but no wriggle-proof jam has been identified yet.

So, yeah, until there are indictments I’m not going to hold my breath. One does wonder what holds the massive ecosystem of Trump support together, though. I know part of it is made up of his deluded supporters, and part of it is made up of people who see Trump as their ticket to their own power and money, somehow (even though this rarely if ever works). But unless there are other people further up the chain, people even Trump is afraid of, I question whether this ecosystem would have held so tightly together for so long. Trump is not that wealthy, you know. There are many other people on the planet who could buy and sell him several times over, I’m sure. And Trump is certainly not that smart.

People who attach themselves to Trump often find this association doesn’t turn out well — ask Rudy Giuliani or Brian Kemp about that — and now it may be the Oath Keepers’ turn to be tossed out with the trash. They’re in a heap o’ trouble. A filing today by the U.S. Attorney for D.C. includes photos showing Edward Vallejo carting what prosecutors say are weapons, ammunition and essential supplies to last thirty days into the QRF hotel in Virginia. Vallejo is one of the Oath Keeper leaders who has been indicted for seditious conspiracy. He and some other men at the hotel were a heavily armed Quick Reaction Force planning to move on the Capitol when signaled to do so by the guys in the Capitol buidling. What happened on January 6 was supposed to be just the spearhead of a larger effort.

Josh Kovensky writes at Talking Points Memo that the Oath Keepers were working with a Serbian national in Texas, who pointed them toward the 2000 ouster of Slobodan Miloševic as president of the Republic of Yugoslavia. Miloševic had tried to stay in power after a disputed election, meaning that he lost, but wouldn’t admit it. Mass demonstrations took place; armed police moved against him and persuaded him to retire. In the minds of the Oath Keeprs Joe Biden is Miloševic, even though Trump is a much closer match. In any event, they started planning the violent overthrow of the election in November, according to Kovensky.

New York Attorney General Letitia James

As I understand it, the plan is for Democrats to make one more attempt to get through a couple of thick skulls, and then they will schedule a roll call vote on the voting rights bill tomorrow. The Republicans will fillibuster, and Chuck Schumer is expected to introduce a bill on the rule change. And then all the votes on the filibuster will be on the record. Manchin and Sinema will vote no, but I question whether they understand — Sinema almost certainly doesn’t — that they’ve destroyed the last residue of good will toward them from within their own party.

And then the Democrats will have to salvage the midterms and convince voters that if they had just two more Senators and can keep the House, they really could get things done next time. Cross their hearts.

Yesterday, watching Martin Luther King Day interviews on MSNBC, it seems to me that a lot of people were being more open in their disgust with the Deadly Duo than they have been. Democrats are beyond fed up with them. There’s always a chance they’ll switch parties, of course, which is a concern, but I doubt Manchin would do that. He’s smart enough to know that once he joins the Borg Collective becomes a Republican, he has no more individual power, and there will be no reason for anyone to give a rat’s ass about him or how he votes. Sinema may be too much of a ditz to grasp that.

Other people are fed up in other ways. Out in the wider world, a big backlash is going on against the unvaccinated. Yasmeen Serhan writes in the Atlantic that recently French President Emmanuel Macron caused an uproar when he vowed to antagonize the unvaccinated of France.

But what looked like a risky move for Macron could prove to be a more politically shrewd calculation, not because of whom it alienates, but rather because of whom it doesn’t. In France, and in other democratic countries around the world, the unvaccinated make up a relatively small segment of the population. Macron and his peers in countries such as Australia and Italy have calculated that condemning this group could be more politically effective than pandering to it. Even world-famous celebrities such as tennis star Novak Djokovic, whose unvaccinated status dashed his hopes of defending his Australian Open title, have become the targets of politicians’ ire. By taking a tougher line on the unvaccinated, Macron and other democratically elected leaders facing elections this year may be courting an energetic new voter base: the vaccinated, and ever more impatient, majority.

And on Sunday, the Parliament of France followed through and passed a law, by a vote of 215-58, that bans unvaccinated people from all restaurants, sports arenas, and other venues. More than 90 percent of French adults are vaccinated, so it’s probably safe to say that most French voters will not mind. Polls show that two-thirds of French adults support the bill. Similar restrictions on the unvaccinated were established in Italy recently and enjoy broad support. People are fed up with the unvaccinated.

The recent drama involving pro tennis player Novak Djokovic is another example. His deportation from Australia had overwhelming support from the Australian public. No 21st grand slam title for you, jerk. Djokovic will probably find himself barred from the French Open and possibly from the Spanish Open as well. It appears kicking Djokovic around is popular with voters in many parts of the globe, although perhaps not with hard-core tennis fans.

I don’t think restricting the unvaccinated would work the same way in the U.S. — too bad — but I do think it’s past time for Democrats to employ the same principle and go on the offensive against the Right. No more cowering in a corner because people on Fox News might say nasty things about them.

Democrats have been with the majority opinion on most issues, from covid mitigation to abortion rights to voting access. It’s time they started acting like it. It’s also way past time to take their message to people directly, because news media do a piss-poor job reporting on issues in this country.

The January 6 committee is planning televised hearings that, Rep. Raskin promises, will “blow the roof off the House.” They’ll be like the Watergate hearings, he says. Let’s hope. That may be an opening for the Democrats to go after right-wing extremism directly. And loudly. If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade this summer, as expected, Dems need to use that, too.

So, as Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain said at Gettysburg — charge.

Let’s talk about stupid. According to Rep. Jamie Raskin, several  people called Nancy Pelosi’s office on January 7, 2021 to ask about things they had lost while they were rioting.

Rioters were calling “asking whether there was a lost and found because they forgot their phone there, or they left their purse or what have you,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told Insider on Friday in a Q&A.

Police officers swiftly took down information from the callers, Raskin said.

“The officers quickly got on the phone and said, yeah, just give us your name, your address, your social, you know, and we’ll tie up those loose ends,” Raskin said.

Derp on steroids. But what this tells us is that these people hadn’t yet realized they had done something wrong. Rep. Raskin, a constitutional scholar, observed that many insurrectionists had no concept of the separation of powers and didn’t understand that a president has no constitutional authority to invite people to break into the Capitol and interfere with Congress. They seemed to think if they were doing what the President asked, then it was okay. And I suspect he is right.

Righties fetishize the Constitution the way they fetishize the Bible. Invoking either the Constitution, or the Bible, is simply to claim authority for their position, whatever it is, even if there is no connection between their position or either document. These documents have a mystical power that confers special privilege and authority on conservative white people, you see.

Another constitutional scholar wrote a couple of years ago that the alt-right has created an alt-constitution.

The Alt-constitution – in sharp distinction from the real Constitution – tolerates no restrictions on speech, guns or private property, does not concede that federal laws trump state and local law – although the supremacy clause of Article 6 of the Constitution clearly indicates otherwise – and incorporates the principle of separate but equal.

For the far right, the meaning of every provision in the Constitution is plain or discerned easily by appealing to what the Founders intended. Or failing that, to Holy Scripture.

Of course, they have no idea what the Founders intended, as they also have developed an alt-history that bears no resemblance to what really happened at the Constitututional Convention. And they don’t know Holy Scripture any better. Often the two documents weirdly merge in their minds, as when they decide the Second Amendment protects a “God-given right” to carry any firearm they want to carry, without restriction. That’s a position that’s indefensible either by “original intention” or in the Bible, which was written before the invention of firearms.

Here’s some more derp. Someone in the Virginia legislature, trying to head off the evil Marxist influence of Critical Race Theory in public schools, proposed a bill that listed what parts of American history children ought to know. These include, the bill said, the famous debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Which, of course, never happened. Lincoln debated Stephen Douglas, who was a nationally known big shot in his day and who had a big impact on U.S. history. Alas, Stephen, we hardly know ye now.

There is a knee-jerk assumption — and I’ve run into self-identified Democrats who hold it also — that American history as it has been taught in American schools, from elementary school through undergraduate Ameerican History 101, is simply the accurate and unbiased version of history, and to introduce any part of Critical Race Theory would be to introduce politics and dogma to history, instead of simply teaching history.

But the fact is, history as it is taught to American’s school children is nothing but the bastard offspring of a whole lot of politics and dogmas going back to the beginning of the nation. The Thanksgiving Story we all learned and drew crayon pictures of way back when is mostly just a myth, for example.

Another example is Reconstruction. When I was a public school student of the 1950s and 1960s, we were taught the Gone With the Wind revisionist version of Reconstruction, in which a vengeful North sent evil carpetbaggers to the South to oppress the poor plantation owners. Absolute garbage. But now it appears Reconstruction is not being taught at all.

In social studies standards for 45 out of 50 states and the District of Columbia, discussion of Reconstruction is “partial” or “non-existent,” according to historians who reviewed how the period is discussed in K-12 social studies standards for public schools nationwide. In a report produced by the education nonprofit Zinn Education Project, the study’s authors say they are concerned that American children will grow up to be uninformed about a critical period of history that helps explain why full racial equality remains unfulfilled today.

If you aren’t a history nerd and don’t know much about Reconstruction, you probably can’t appreciate what a shocking mess that period devolved into, and how much a lot of it is relevant to what’s going on today. I’m sure the biggest reason it isn’t taught is that white racists can’t bear to hear about it.

The Civil War also isn’t taught well at all, which has allowed many generations of white children to be able to blissfully deny that the war was about slavery. As I wrote in another post in 2020,

The Lost Cause is, of course, a mythology that grew in the South after the Civil War. And at the hands of generations of Southern historical scholars, the mythology supplanted the real history of the war, as well as the real history of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and a lot of other things. The Lost Cause denied that the primary — and secondary, and tertiary — reason so many slave states seceded and formed the Confederacy was to protect the institution of slavery. Instead, the myth insisted, the Civil War was fought to preserve some noble, agrarian way of life that was principled and free. Seriously. And this way of life was ripped away from the poor victimized South by those dirty northern industrialists for some vague reason that never made coherent sense. And if you know anything at all about the real history, you know what a pile of excréments de taureau that is.

It’s only been over the past 40 years or so that new scholarship has challenged the Lost Cause myth and corrected the record. So if today you are an American history major or take graduate level classes in American history, you probably get well documented facts that paint a very different picture than most of us were taught. But I don’t know this has trickled down to what freshmen learn in American History 101. The article on Reconstruction teaching says, “In interviews, teachers said they had barely learned about the period themselves and would need more professional development to feel comfortable teaching it in-depth.”

Reconstruction probably can’t be taught without pissing off a lot of the parents, who are likely to show up at School Board meetings while exercising their God-given right to carry firearms. For that reason, I don’t blame schools for wanting to skip it. But if you don’t know Reconstruction, or why the institution of slavery forced the nation into civil war, or the truth about the Jim Crow period, then you don’t know American history. Not really.

Another way that politics and dogma colors what’s taught in schools is through the textbooks. Textbook publishers are great big companies that are in the business to sell books. That doesn’t make them bad. But it also means they tend to create products that their market — especially the state textbook adoption committees — will buy.

A big chunk of my so-called career was in the textbook industry. Over several years I worked for a now-eliminated company called Silver Burdett, then Prentice Hall, then Simon & Schuster. Once separate companies, the education departments of those three companies all merged and are now called Pearson Education. I also worked for Scholastic and McGraw Hill. Most of that time I did production management, which means I wasn’t doing writing and editng but pulling all the pieces of the books together and getting them typeset, printed, and bound. But it gave me a great front-row seat on how textbooks happen, and how the publishers are very, very careful to create textbooks that won’t be too “conroversial” to sell. A lot of self-censorship goes on.

Some states have textbook adoption committees, which is usually a panel of people appointed by the governor who review textbooks and decide which ones may be used in that state. If a textbook is not adopted, the publisher loses the entire public school market in that state. And if it’s a big state, like Texas or California, that gives the textbook adoption committees a lot of power about what goes in textbooks. I got my first textbook job in the 1980s, and this was a long-running issue then already.

The Texas textbook adoption committee is especially notorious. I’ve written about this before. See:

• Texas and Textbooks, 2009
• The Trouble With Textbooks, 2010
• The Textbook Tango, 2011
• Texas Textbooks Up the Crazy, 2014

Textbook publishers do produce state-specific editions, although for cost reasons the differences are minor and, back in my day, accommodated by a black plate change during the press run.

El-hi (elementary through high school) books are heavily illustrated — in color! — and much of the cost in producing them is in what’s called pre-press, or getting ready to print. Although technology is always changing, I believe big print runs of many tens or of thousands of books at a time are still done using four-color process, which means printing with four plates — cyan, magenta, yellow, black. If you’re only changing a little bit of text here and there, you can change black plates as needed, but the color illustrations have to remain where they are. Changing all the plates for each state edition would drive the cost up more than you can imagine. So that puts limits on what the publisher can do, editorially. If Texas demands specific language that absolutely will not sell in California that can be accommodated, but only if it’s just a few sentences here and there.

Bottom line, the textbooks end up tip-toeing around any topic that might piss off anybody — especially race and evolution, but not limited to that — which means the textbook adoption committess really do dictate what is taught in all the states.

And the moral is, American history as it has been taught since before any of us were born is a sorry-ass thing incrusted by many layers of politics and dogma and bullshit. So now we’ve got school boards and parents, most of whom don’t know American history from a toaster, up in arms about Critical Race Theory, which isn’t even a thing that would be “taught” outside of graduate schools. And they’re using that as an excuse to push even harder against real history. What they really want to do is indoctrinate children with even more alt-right mythology and propaganda than the kids are learning already. And I bet the kids still won’t learn about separation of powers, either.

I’ve learned a lot about “seditious conspiracy” over the past several hours. It’s a very rare charge, and it’s an even rarer conviction. Looking at the handful of trials over the past century or so, it appears Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Muslims are convicted, but Whites are not. No big surprise.

In an article published in Mother Jones a few days before yesterday’s indictments were announced, Anthony Conwright wrote that American tradition casts violent white nationalism as “well-meaning patriotism gone awry, instead of as an ideology antithetical to our best aspirations.” The last couple of times right-wing whites were charged with seditious conspiracy were in 1988 (white supremacists) and 2010 (Christian “patriot” millitia members). All acquitted.

The 1988 trial was in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and the defendants were affilliated with the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nation, and the like. They had elaborate plans to overthrow the U.S. government, or at least break off the northwest part of it to establish a whites-only nation. The plans included the murders of a judge, FBI agents, and a founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center. At least one of the defendants had separate murder convictions, so it’s not unreasonable to think they would have tried it. Anthony Conwrite said,

The prosecution had 113 witnesses and FBI wiretap transcripts capturing the accused coordinating about stockpiling weapons and conducting armored car robberies, assassinations, and municipal sabotage. Before the verdict, the judge told the jury, “The fact that you may think it was impossible for the defendants to overthrow the government is not a defense to the charge.”

Despite that instruction and mountains of evidence, the 14 white supremacists were acquitted by an all-white jury. One juror went on to marry a defendant; another told a reporter he agreed with many of the white supremacists’ ideas. But what may have sealed the acquittal was that the jury did not find the argument that the defendants were dangerous credible. In other words, they did not believe white supremacy was a coherent pathway to topple the American government—or they did not care if it was.

One of the defendants was Richard Snell, who had previously been convicted of murdering a pawn shop owner (Snell suspected he was Jewish) and a state trooper.

Snell was executed for his earlier charges on April 19, 1995, the same day Timothy McVeigh blew up Oklahoma City’s federal building, which Snell had previously plotted to bomb himself.

Oh, and another Fort Smith defendant went on to kill three people outside a Jewish Center. He died in prison.

See also this Twitter thread by Kathleen Belew. A lot of screwy things went on in the Fort Smith trial. The prosecutors didn’t seem to want to prosecute all that much.

Belew is the author of a book titled Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard University Press, 2018). In 2018 she wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which she argues that the White Power movement is far more integrated and organized than most people realize, and they are capable of doing a lot of damage. But the FBI persists in treating White Power types as individuals, or “lone wolves,” not part of a movement. She wrote,

Indeed, the F.B.I. established a policy to pursue only individuals in white-power violence, with, according to F.B.I. internal documents, “no attempts to tie individual crimes to a broader movement.” This strategy not only obscured the Oklahoma City bombing as part of a social movement but, in the years after McVeigh’s execution, also effectively erased the movement itself from public awareness.

See also Lone Wolves Connected Online: A History of Modern White Supremacy in the New York Times, January 2021, by Laura Smith.  She also writes that McVeigh was not any sort of lone wolf but was well connected into a larger movement that, for some reason, the public never heard about.

The Murrah building had long been a potential target for white supremacists. Kerry Noble had cased the premises with other C.S.A. members as early as 1983. They had even begun building bombs, but one of them exploded in a C.S.A. member’s hand, which the group considered a sign from God to wait. When McVeigh did carry out the bombing, Mr. Noble was working as a vacuum cleaner salesman in Texas. He saw the news on television and recognized the plot instantly. “They did it,” he remembered thinking. “They finally have done it.”

In a legal irony, McVeigh’s defense team essentially argued what the prosecution in the Fort Smith trial had argued: that the bombing was orchestrated by a complex network of white supremacists and far-right militia members. According to Mr. Jones, three weeks before the bombing, McVeigh called someone living in Elohim City, a far-right compound in Eastern Oklahoma with connections to the C.S.A., the Aryan Nations and the Order. “His supply chain plus his travels indicated a fairly sophisticated group of people,” Mr. Jones said. “It was our opinion that most of the ones that he associated with were either the Midwest bank robbers or people at Elohim City.”

He added: “I was convinced after talking to him, analyzing carefully what he said through numerous interviews, that he was trying to protect others, and assuming all the responsibility himself.”

But only McVeigh and one immediate accomplice, Terry Nichols, were convicted in the bombing. The government’s case, Mr. Jones argued, missed a big part of the story.

“They never referred to Tim McVeigh as a terrorist,” Mr. Jones said. “It was a murder case. And so they avoided the political connotation.”

This is the first time I have heard most of that.

Fast forward to January 6, 2021. The insurrection has not been packaged as a White Supremacist undertaking, but there’s a lot of evidence that it largely was. Kathleen Belew recently wrote for the Washington Post, Militia groups were hiding in plain sight on Jan. 6. They’re still dangerous.

The invasion of the Capitol is best understood as the collision of three streams of right-wing activity: the Trump base (itself containing a range of extremism), the QAnon movement, and white power and militant right groups. This third segment — although probably smaller than the others involved that day — was highly organized, connected, outfitted with tactical gear and weapons and well-trained. These activists often led the charge, and they were the first to breach the Capitol. Their own ideology, which descends from decades of violent white-power organizing, reveals them to be dangerous, intent on the destruction of democracy and the propagation of race war.

Why was Washington so unprepared? Why was the FBI, the Capitol police, and others, so unprepared? One does suspect that the mindset that simply doesn’t take white nationalist activists/terrorists seriously is part of it. That has to stop.

I’d like to believe that if the three meatballs who murdered Ahmaud Arbery could be so righteously convicted and sentenced in Georgia, it’s possible some of the January 6 perps could be convicted of sedition and get serious jail time. Which would be a good thing for all of us.

Wow, what a news day. I was going to write something about inflation, but it’ll have to wait.

Highlights:

As expected, the Supreme Court ended the Biden Administration’s covid mandates on large employers. However, health care workers at facilities that recieve Medicare and Medicaid funds, which is probably pretty much all of them, must still get vaccinated. I have not read the decision, but here is one commentary from Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Meanwhile in not so good news, John Roberts and the Furious Five have ruled that because in 1970 Congress didn’t have the foresight to pass a statute that specifically said that Joe Biden could tell OSHA in 2021 to issue a vaccine mandate because of COVID-19, Joe Biden can’t do that. This is a consistent application of the Republican Supreme Court’s doctrine that statutes written in general terms to deal with a wide variety of issues can only be enforced by Republican administrations.

I expect that’s about right.

On a happier note, the U.S. Justice Department has indicted the founder of Oath Keepers and a bunch of other Oath Keeper types on seditious conspiracy, folks. Yes, they used the “s” word. Let me boldface that — seditious conspiracy. A beautiful thing. The FBI arrested them today. “This case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the Department of Justice National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section,” the Justice Department says.

You lose some, but sometimes you win some.

There was a news story saying that Prince Andrew has been stripped of his royal titles, which suggests he is no longer “Prince” Andrew unless Prince is really his first name. But the BBC, which probably gets this stuff right, just says Andy can’t be called His Royal Highness any more, and he’s also been stripped of military titles. Poor baby.

The RNC wants to pull out of future presidential debates. These are the debates between the party nominees run by the bipartisan presidential commission, not the primary debates, which were a hot mess last time. “The Republican National Committee is preparing to change its rules to require presidential candidates seeking the party’s nomination to sign a pledge to not participate in any debates sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates,” the New York Times says. The commission is unfair! It is unfair to Republicans! say the Republicans.

One suspects Trump is behind this. Donald Trump’s two debates with Joe Biden were a disaster for Trump, you might recall, and Trump refused to take part in one of the scheduled debates because he was recovering from covid and it was going to be remote.

So that’s today’s news roundup. Stay safe.

Update: Oops, I wasn’t done. After all the effort of President Biden and others to get a voting rights bill passed, today the deadly duo of Manchin and Sinema pretty much shot it down. I want them both gone. I don’t know what else there is to be done.

Recently a neighbor dropped by, and in the course of the conversation she told us she had been fired as a health care worker because she refused to be vaccinated. (Imagine me taking a few steps back. Also, she called herself a “nurse,” but her apparent lack of knowledge of how infectious diseases work inspires some skepticism.) In this particular case she might have some claim to a medical exemption, which was a past history of Guillain-Barre Syndrome (although Guillain-Barre is a known possible complication of covid infection, also). But in conversation it became clear she was terrified of the injections and talked about side effects she had heard about. Which can be rough for some people — for a day or two — but not as rough as covid.

Risk assessment, people. This is an easy one. According to Bloomberg, as of today more than 9.51 billion covid shots have been administered worldwide. “In the U.S., 520 million doses have been given so far. An average 1.17 million doses per day were administered over the last week,” it says. If even 1 percent of those vaccines had resulted in long-term, serious impairment or deaths, we’d have millions of impaired and dead people as a result. I think someone would have noticed.

As it is, the science people do acknowledge that it’s not impossible for a covid vaccination to be fatal. But most of the time if a person dies within a few days of receiving a covid shot, it’s very difficult to know if the shot was a factor. The guy who had the heart attack may have had a heart attack, anyway. So it requires investigation. Here is an article from the UK Office of National Statistics (since nobody wants to believe the CDC) on why it’s difficult to know if a recent vaccine was a factor in assessing a death. The nice lady with the title ONS Head of Mortality Analysis said that by August 2021 they had determined there had been nine deaths in the UK that involved the covid vaccine.

(As tragic as that is, it’s pretty much a given that any medical procedure comes with some risk. People have died from routine dental treatments, for example. It’s extremely unusual, but it has happened. On the other hand, an infected tooth — left untreated — can result in multiple organ failure. You go with the odds.)

The visiting “nurse” neighbor said she had heard that two people in Florida had died after getting vaccines. Even if this were true, it’s kind of not in the ball park of “a rational reason to not get vaccinated.” This is especially true since, according to Johns Hopkins, as of today there have been 61,983,723 confirmed cases of covid in the U.S. and 841,123 deaths. So let’s compare 841,123 deaths to maybe two guys in Florida. Hmm.

Most of the claims by anti-vaxxers about covid vaccination deaths are based on VAERS data, which I explained in an old post written before anyone had heard of covid. VAERS is a CDC database of adverse vaccine reactions to which anybody can report. Doctors, patients, crackpots, drunken college students, anti-vaxxers who need juicier statistics to scare people with can all make reports and add to the database. It is all unverified. The people who allegedly died by vaccination may have been hit by a bus. Or they may still be alive, or maybe they never existed. The CDC attaches all kinds of disclaimers to the database about how it is all unverfied. They only use it as a means to maybe spot trends. Anti-vaxxers believe it like gospel anyway.

The Omicron virus is causing more breaththrough infections, much to the glee of the anti-vaxxers. The New York Times has an article on the growing gap in outcomes between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. This graph shows what’s happened to infected people in New York City and Seattle.

It shouldn’t take a genius to understand that vaccinated is better.

Republicans are dedicated to the opposite proposition. They are more interested in demonizing Dr. Fauci (the latest example, from today) and opposing all mitigation efforts because freedom. Of course. The deaths from covid are explained away in various ways. A big one is to misread death certificates. If the cause of death is “pneumonia,” for example, and covid is only the underlying cause of death, then they will argue the person didn’t die of covid but from pneumonia. Of course, the covid caused the pneumonia, a detail one cannot explain to a wingnut. They will not listen.

It doesn’t help that some Republican medical examiners around the country are refusing to put “covid” on death certificates for political reasons. Covid deaths are no doubt being seriously undercounted as a result.

Another trick is to misquote scientists. Recently CDC Director Rochelle Walensky spoke about a study that evaluated the deaths of 1.2 million adults who had been vaccinated. It turned out that only 36 of of the 1.2 million died of covid-19, and 28 of those 36 had four or more comorbidities. That means other medical problems, like diabetes or heart disease.

Naturally, Tucker Carlson told his audience that Dr. Walensky had “admitted” that most people who die of covid have comorbidities. He left out the detail about the people in the study being vaccinated. He led his audience to believe that this data applied to all covid deaths. So why bother getting vaccinated? Indeed, if you are healthy, throw out the masks and get on with your life. Covid is just a scam.

Now, Tucker Carlson is smart enough to know better. And since Tucker works for Fox News, we know he is fully vaccinated. He just doesn’t care who dies because of his bad advice. He just wants to see the Biden Administration fail. If I believed in hell, I would expect a special place for Tucker in it.

Risk assessment requires accurate data. Righties have enough trouble dealing with risk assessment when they do have accurate data. When they don’t, forgeddaboutit.

Even now, from time to time a television pundit will look at the camera, and with a knowing smile assure us that Joe Manchin knows how to win elections in West Virginia. He knows his voters. The unspoken message here is that this is how it has to be. If we want a Democratic senator from West Virginia, he has to be way to the Right of the rest of the party. So sad, but we just have to work with what we’ve got.

I can’t argue that Manchin doesn’t know how to win elections in West Virginia, since he does win them, but “knowing his voters” isn’t necessarily part of the formula.

There’s a major exposé of Manchin in Rolling Stone by Jeff Goodell headlined “Manchin’s Coal Corruption Is So Much Worse Than You Knew.” (If you aren’t a subscriber, and I’m not, trying to read an article in Rolling Stone is a precarious thing. Sometimes you will be blocked by a firewall, but sometimes it will let you read an article, or at least give you a few minutes before the firewall comes up. I did a quick copy-and-paste into a Word file so I could read it without fighting with it. Do give it a try, though. This is juicy stuff.)

A representative paragraph:

The truth is, Manchin is best understood as a grifter from the ancestral home of King Coal. He is a man with coal dust in his veins who has used his political skills to enrich himself, not the people of his state. He drives an Italian-made Maserati, lives on a houseboat on the Potomac River when he is in D.C., pals around with corporate CEOs, and has a net worth of as much as $12 million. More to the point, his wealth has been accumulated through controversial coal-related businesses in his home state, including using his political muscle to keep open the dirtiest coal plant in West Virginia, which paid him nearly $5 million over the past decade in fees for coal handling, as well as costing West Virginia electricity consumers tens of millions of dollars in higher electricity rates (more about the details of this in a moment). Virginia Canter, who was ethics counsel to Presidents Obama and Clinton, unabashedly calls Manchin’s business operations “a grift.” To Canter, Manchin’s corruption is even more offensive than Donald Trump’s. “With Trump, the corruption was discretionary — you could choose to pay thousands of dollars to host an event at Mar-a-Lago or not,” Canter tells me. In contrast, Manchin is effectively taking money right out of the pockets of West Virginians when they pay their electric bills. They have no say in it. “It’s one of the most egregious conflicts of interest I’ve ever seen.”

Goodell explains that Manchin’s grift is not unique to Manchin. It is a standard feature of West Virginia politics going way back. The politicians and the coal mine owners are on the same team. And this takes us to the second point, which is that there would be no coal mining industry left if it weren’t for corrupt politicians like Manchin protecting it. Otherwise it would have gone the way of the horse and buggy by now and been replaced by newer, less expensive (and environmentally damaging) technologies.

Yes, West Virginians do vote for Manchin. Until recently the United Mine Workers supported Manchin. He was better for coal miners than his Republican opponents. But now the union is demanding Manchin change his votes, and his attitude.

Jonathan Weisman writes in the New York Times,

For years, burly men in camouflage hunting jackets have been a constant presence in the Capitol Hill office of Senator Joe Manchin III, their United Mine Workers logos giving away their mission: to lobby not only for the interests of coal, but also on more personal matters such as pensions, health care and funding to address black lung disease.

So when the miners’ union and the West Virginia A.F.L.-C.I.O. came out last month with statements pleading for passage of President Biden’s Build Back Better Act — just hours after Mr. Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, said he was a “no” — the Capitol took notice.

With the miners now officially on the opposite side of the mine owners, it signaled the escalation of a behind-the-scenes struggle centered in Mr. Manchin’s home state to sway the balking senator, whose skepticism about his party’s marquee domestic policy measure has emerged as a potentially fatal impediment to its enactment.

Let us be clear; Manchin is not “skeptical.” Let’s stop saying he is “skeptical.” He doesn’t want the gravy train to stop. He doesn’t want to lose all that coal money, including the half million in coal industry dividends he receives every year.

Weisman says the unions in the past have fought any policies that would have hastened a transition away from coal. But coal jobs have been diminishing for years, anyway, and they are not coming back. Build Back Better provides a lot of stuff that would help West Virginia union members, much of which Manchin has supported in the past. For example, BBB provides funds to help miners with black lung disease. BBB includes billions of dollars in incentives to bring manufacturing jobs to former coal mining regions. BBB provides penalties for employers that block union organizing. And, of course, it provides a lot of help for all low-income workers, of which West Virginia has an overabundance.

The unions have seen the future, and they are not going to stick with coal mine owners until the last scrap of coal is mined, and then end up with nothing.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton said “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” To be fair, this was taken out of context, but Trump took the quote and ran with it, and he promised to bring back coal jobs. “He did not keep that promise,” Weisman writes, “and coal mining employment, which was at about 51,000 jobs when he took office, had fallen to a nadir of 39,000 by the time he was denied a second term.” It has to be said, though, that Trump won West Virginia in 2020 with a nearly identical vote percentage (68.62%) as in 2016 (68.50%). This suggests to me that Democrats could be doing a better job of outreach in West Virginia. But maybe the union will help with that.

Greg Sargent writes that coal mine owners are fighting BBB’s tax incentives to bring new industries to coal minining communities. They see this as hastening their own demise, which it probably is, but the demise is coming one way or another.

Of course he could explain BBB to West Virginia, unless he is a drooling idiot. He just doesn’t want to. But somebody else should have already.

I have not mentioned climate change, which hasn’t been part of the discussion in West Virginia. The mine workers are skeptical of climate change. But, of course, it’s happening, and ending coal power is a critical step that has to be taken now if we’re going to save the planet.  The stakes couldn’t be higher. But Manchin appears to be siding with coal money, against workers, against his party, against his nation, and against the planet.

In a recent Senate committee hearing about oversight of the Capitol police, Ted Cruz called the January 6 insurrection a “violent terrorist attack.” And boy, did he catch grief for that.

From the Texas Tribune:

After spending a day being slammed by TV pundits and fellow conservatives for describing last year’s U.S. Capitol insurrection as a “violent terrorist attack,” U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz walked back his comments on Thursday.

The Texas Republican attempted to clarify his intent on FOX News program “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” calling his own words “sloppy” and “frankly dumb.” Cruz insisted he was referring only to the rioters who attacked police during the breach of the historic building.

The Right vilified Cruz for apostasy, so Cruz got on Fox News last night to do explain himself and seek forgiveness. Greg Sargent:

Sen. Ted Cruz is facing a vicious backlash from Tucker Carlson and the right for describing the Jan. 6 assault as a “violent terrorist attack.” So on Thursday night, the Texas Republican gamely ventured into Carlson’s Fox News sanctum, where he plainly hoped to do his penance and move on.

Instead, Carlson placed Cruz in the stocks and administered a brutal whipping.

The Right does not tolerate even the least deviation from canonical dogma. In this case, Carlson made it clear that none of the January 6 perps were to be called “terrorists,” no matter what they did that day. Righties are the same people who claim to be in favor of “freedom” and against “cancel culture,” mind you. And Tucker has no problem calling Black Lives Matter activists “terrorists.”

Terrorism is defined in the Code of Federal Regulations as “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives” (28 C.F.R. Section 0.85). Kind of sounds like what happened last year on January 6. So far none have been charged with terrorism, but as A.G. Garland said the other night, the big fish have yet to be processed.

Greg Sargent writes that Carlson’s whipping of Cruz is part of the effort to deny that the January 6 insurrection was an insurrection. “The valorization and mythologizing of Jan. 6, which Carlson traffics heavily in — indeed, this led to the resignation of two Fox contributors — require erasing the degree to which it constituted a genuine effort to thwart a legitimately elected Democratic government from taking power, an effort to fundamentally subvert our constitutional arrangements,” Sargent writes. Only the Left, especially Black Lives Matter, are threats to America. Not the Right. Only the Left is capable of terrorism. This is what must be believed.

It’s the key to valorizing the underlying goals of the Jan. 6 rioters and to the mythologizing of them as heroes and patriots. It lays the foundation for treating what they call the “regime,” i.e. democratically elected Democratic governments, as illegitimate, justifying Jan. 6, corrupt procedural efforts to overturn elections, the flirtation with political violence, and who knows what future acts in response.

And, if you are part of the Right, you had better watch what you say. No thinking for yourself; no coloring outside the lines. You may say only what the Party, or whatever the Right is these days, allows you to say.

And these people fancy themselves to be defenders of “freedom.”

Cruz has meekly returned to the fold of political correctness (in the original sense of the term), and if he is careful he will be allowed to remain in the good graces of the Party. But it does underline the Right’s Orwellian understanding of “freedom.”

In other news —

From The Hill: “Cyber Ninjas, a firm hired by the Arizona state Senate to conduct a review of Maricopa County’s election results, on Thursday announced that it is shutting down after a county government report slammed the firm and a judge ordered it to pay $50,000 a day in fines.” We weep and we mourn.

Amaud Arbery’s killers have been sentenced to life in prison, two without parole. Finally.

QAnon Star Who Said Only ‘Idiots’ Get Vax Dies of COVID

Orange County Deputy DA Kelly Ernby, an anti-vax crusader, also died of COVID. You’d think these people would learn to take a hint.