As much as I dislike him, I have always believed that Lindsey Graham was smart enough to know his entire career was built on shams and demagoguery to keep the rubes on his side. But now I wonder. At least one of us is a moron, and I don’t think it’s me.

Miz Lindsey did not just whiff on doing his duty in the impeachment vote. He is doubling down on the crazee to help Republicans take back Congress in 2022. Aaron Rupar writes at Vox:

If Graham’s Sunday morning appearance on Fox News Sunday is an indication, his loyalty to the former president is stronger than ever.

“Donald Trump is the most vibrant member of the Republican Party,” Graham said, distancing himself from former UN ambassador Nikki Haley’s comments about Trump not having a future in the GOP. “The Trump movement is alive and well … all I can say is that the most potent force in the Republican Party is President Trump.”

Those comments came at the end of an interview that began with Graham suggesting Republicans will go as far as to retaliate for Trump’s second impeachment by impeaching Vice President Kamala Harris if they take back the House next year.

Rupar goes on to say that “Graham seems to be calculating that Trumpism represents the Republican Party’s best bet to retake one or both chambers of Congress next year.” Maybe, but I question if loyalty to Trump will provide the political capital Graham assumes it will in 2022. I think the political landscape is very much in a state of flux right now. It’s too soon to know what it will look like 20 or so months from now. It may be time for the old dogs to learn new tricks.

Right now congressional Republicans seem to be divided between those who, at the very least, realize the party can’t continue down the same road. That’s the minority. The majority are stubbornly clinging to the shams and demagoguery that have sustained their entire political careers and which have crystallized in the form of blind loyalty to Trump, no matter what he did. See, for example, Dana Milbank, Trump left them to die. 43 Senate Republicans still licked his boots. Among other things, Milbank records this revelatory moment:

On the Senate floor, Sen. Ron Johnson (Wis.), an always-Trumper, was seen pointing at Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) and saying “blame you” in a raised voice. Romney was one of five Republicans who joined all 50 Democrats in voting to allow witness testimony.

See also Colbert King, In rallying to Trump, Senate Republicans sacrificed Pence. Yes, they’re okay with Trump trying to get his own vice president killed. But Pence himself is hardly a profile in courage; he remained at a safe and silent distance from the impeachment trial.

See also Peter Wehner, Why Are Republicans Still This Loyal to a Mar-a-Lago Exile?, at the New York Times. Wehner is a Republican who served in various roles in the Reagan and two Bush administrations. The short answer to the question is “tribal loyalty.” But it goes deeper:

For nearly a half-decade, Republicans became accustomed to saying one thing and thinking another. The impeachment vote was the last, best chance to break decisively with Mr. Trump. Yet once again most Republican lawmakers couldn’t bring themselves to do it. Mr. Trump still seems to haunt them, to instill fear in them. More than that, however: He has become them, weaving himself into their minds and communities so seamlessly that they are no longer capable of distinguishing their own moral sensibilities and boundaries from his, as they might once have done.

In short, too many Republicans have become hollowed-out simulations of human beings, incapable of independent thought or moral agency. But in trusting their fortunes to Trump, they are taking terrible risks. Trump, after all, lost. Not only did the Trump GOP lose the White House; it lost the House and Senate also. This hasn’t happened to Republicans since Hoover.

Further, Trump is facing multiple investigations, both criminal and civil. There could be big, splashy trials that reveal a lot of ugly truths.  There could be criminal convictions. There could also be more terrorist activity by his MAGA-head followers. I see no reason why Trump won’t be at least as much of a liability to the Republican Party as he was in the past two elections. Republicans may assume they can’t win without Trump’s rabid base, but I don’t see them winning with that base, either, outside of already deep red territory.

E.J. Dionne writes that it will be “wrenching … for Republican politicians to appease the GOP’s Trump-supporting majority while pretending to be another party altogether.” Frankly, I don’t think they can do it.

Kevin McDermott, a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, thinks The GOP deserves to have Trump stalking their party for the next four years.

But for now the House Republicans who voted for impeachment, and the Republican senators who voted to convict, are facing censure from their own state parties, revealing how deep the rot goes.

Right now there is a bumper crop of editorials and opinion pieces declaring the Republican Party dead, at least as a political party. I say it hasn’t been a real political party for a long time, at least on the national level, but whatever. Now the current GOP is  finally being recognized as just the zombie version of the party it used to be. Will Bunch has an absolutely magnificent obirtuary at the Philadelphia Inquirer that begins:

The Republican Party was born on March 20, 1854, the green shoots of a political spring. Unlike America’s other parties that were often shotgun weddings of convenience, the Republicans burst forth around moral ideas that were so powerful — ending slavery and making America a world industrial power — that the tail of this supernova lasted for more than 166 years and inspired its eventual nickname, the Grand Old Party.

That GOP died — morally, if not officially — in the late afternoon gloaming of a grey and bitterly cold winter’s day, Feb. 13, 2021. After 43 Republican senators who’d been given a green light to “vote their conscience” on Donald Trump’s impeachment still managed to come up empty — thus enshrining the notion that an end-of-term president can foment a deadly insurrection to thwart a peaceful transition of power and not face any consequences — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell strolled to the well of the Senate. He was presumably holding the bloody knife with which he’d repeatedly stabbed American democracy for a dozen years hidden behind his back.

Do click on the link and keep reading. Toward the end Bunch writes,

There is, arguably, a large opening for a completely new second political party — one that actually promotes the economic interests of a multiracial working class and some of its social conservatism, but embraces ethics and eschews racism — but the stench of the GOP’s corpse may have to get worse before that can happen.

In 2021, the only hope for American salvation is not bipartisanship with a dead body but instead a Democratic Party that is every bit as bold as the Republicans are cowardly.

Can the Democrats be bold? Some of them seem ready; some not. I fear we’re going to be held back by the likes of Kyrsten Sinema, Joe Manchin, and Dianne Feinstein. You want to win in 2022 and 2024, Dems? Kill the filibuster and pass H.R. 1. 

If there was ever a time that same old, same old ain’t gonna cut it, this is it. Who will break out of the old, dysfunctional patterns of the past few years? Who is going to meet the moment?

Probably not Lindsey Graham.

The impeachment trial is over, and seven Republicans voted with the Democrats to convict — Sens. Susan Collins, Bill Cassidy, Richard Burr, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, and Pat Toomey. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough. But I still say this is going to hurt the Republican Party, long term, more than it will hurt Democrats.

And there will be criminal trials ahead for Trump. District Attorney Fani Willis of Fulton County, Georgia, is looking into election fraud charges, for example. Possible civil and criminal charges could come out of New York. Just today, the Wall Street Journal reported that New York state prosecutors are investigating more than $250 million in loans Trump took out on some of his best-known Manhattan properties.

I’m sorry the Dems changed their minds about calling witnesses. David Kurtz at TPM:

Dems seemed to have seized the advantage, backed by five GOP senators, to present at least some witnesses in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump. The fierce reaction of GOP senators to what House impeachment managers and Dem senators wanted to do testified to the the advantage Dems had taken hold of.

But just as quickly, House managers and Senate Dems entered into an agreement whereby Trump was willing to stipulate to what Rep. Herrera Beutler’s statement would be. As a result, there will be no witnesses, no documentary evidence, and no real trial.

It’s possible there’s more to this we don’t yet know about. Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler is, of course, the Republican who testified that Kevin McCarthy had described to her the phone call in which McCarthy had begged Trump to stop the riot, and Trump replied that the mob was “more upset about the election than you are.”

There’s also this:

A former Pence staffer tells CNN that on January 6, then-national security adviser Robert O’Brien was traveling. His deputy at the time, Matt Pottinger, and Gen. Keith Kellogg, Pence’s national security adviser, were both at the White House on the day of the rally and riot. Kellogg confirmed to CNN that he was in the Oval Office with Trump and the President’s children as the riot was raging, during which Pence was forced to flee the Senate chamber.
During the riot, Kellogg was in communication with Pence through the vice president’s staff, which was communicating back to the White House and getting that information to Kellogg, who was with Trump.
“Kellogg was Pence’s national security adviser, so of course they knew exactly what the circumstance was,” said the former Pence staffer.

My impression is that Pence and his former staffers were not willing to testify. How pathetic is that? And how pathetic is is that most Republicans are unwilling to stand up even after they might have been killed?

There’s a must-read at Pro Publica, “I Don’t Trust the People Above Me”: Riot Squad Cops Open Up About Disastrous Response to Capitol Insurrection by Joaquin Sapien and Joshua Kaplan. The writers interviewed police who defended the Capitol. Do read the whole thing. I want to call out a couple of bits.

The interviews also revealed officers’ concerns about disparities in the way the force prepared for Black Lives Matter demonstrations versus the pro-Trump protests on Jan. 6. Officers said the Capitol Police force usually plans intensively for protests, even if they are deemed unlikely to grow violent. Officers said they spent weeks working 12- or 16-hour days, poised to fight off a riot, after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police — even though intelligence suggested there was not much danger from protesters.

“We had intel that nothing was going to happen — literally nothing,” said one former official with direct knowledge of planning for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. “The response was, ‘We don’t trust the intel.’”

By contrast, for much of the force, Jan. 6 began like any other day.

“We normally have pretty good information regarding where these people are and how far they are from the Capitol,” said Keith McFaden, a former Capitol Police officer and union leader who retired from the force following the riot. “We heard nothing that day.”

We know there was intelligence; it just wan’t acted on, or passed on. How much of this was from Trump operatives supressing the intelligence, or how much of it was from the old double standard that says only Black/leftist demonstrations are “mobs” or “rioters,” I do not know. But then there’s this:

On the morning of Jan. 4, members of a civil disturbance unit gathered in a briefing room. A small group of officers were shown a document from Capitol intelligence officials that projected as many as 20,000 people arriving in Washington that week. The crowd would include members of several militia and right-wing extremist groups, including the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Bois and the white supremacist Patriot Front. Some were expected to be armed, according to one officer who attended the briefing. The document anticipated that there could be violence.

For some reason, this information didn’t leave the room and was not shared with other officers.

At lot of details like this:

One officer in the middle of the scrum, a combat veteran, thought the rioters were so vicious, so relentless, that they seemed fueled by methamphetamine. To his left, he watched a chunk of steel strike a fellow officer above the eye, setting off a geyser of blood. A pepper ball tore through the air over his shoulder and exploded against the jaw of a man in front of him. The round, filled with chemical irritant, ripped the rioter’s face open. His teeth were now visible through a hole in his cheek. Blood poured out, puddling on the pavement surrounding the building. But the man kept coming.

So now the Senate has effectively given future losing candidates permission to attempt a coup.

Politico is reporting that Lindsey Graham will be meeting with Trump to talk about the future of the GOP. If those two represent the future of the GOP, we’re all in for a buttload of hurt.  I take it Miz Lindsey will be trying to get Trump to be a better team player. Good luck with that.

Unfortunately, the impeachment was not widely watched, according to CNN business. We cannot let this drop. I agree with David Atkins that there must be House investigations of the attack on the Capitol and Trump’s role in it.

There is still so much that we don’t know about the President’s actions in the lead-up to and the events of January 6th. We don’t know exactly what he knew about how violent it would become. We don’t know exactly why he and his appointees refused to allow more help to the Capitol Police both before the insurrection and during the sacking the Capitol. We don’t know the details of what he said on the phone with legislators before, during and afterward. And crucially we don’t know the timeline of exactly what Trump did, hour by hour, in consultation with his closest aides. … The House must initiate investigations, making liberal use of its subpoena power to force witnesses to Trump’s behavior and state of mind to go on the public record.

Trump, and Trumpism, must be destroyed.

Pro-Trump protesters storm into the U.S. Capitol during clashes with police, during a rally to contest the certification of the 2020 U.S. presidential election results by the U.S. Congress, in Washington, U.S, January 6, 2021. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton – RC2P2L9YHHVX

I didn’t watch any of the Trump lawyers’ presentation, but I’m hearing comments that it was a bad joke. Even so, see this bit in the St. Louis Post Dispatch — Missouri’s Roy Blunt, a juror in the impeachment trial, calls Trump’s lawyers ‘our side’. Grr. But this is about presenting the story of what happened to the people, and for history, more than about expecting Senate Republicans to grow a pair.

Anyway — last night Rachel Maddow mused that there’s nothing stopping a chief prosecutor in the District of Columbia from bringing criminal charges against Trump for the riot in the Capitol. Then there would be a real trial.

Also, if they wish, the House Managers could  still call witnesses. I understand the Trump team claimed that the videos of the violence were manipulated. Let’s call some of the Capitol and District of Columbia police who were there and see what they say.

See Two officers who helped fight the Capitol mob died by suicide. Many more are hurting. by Peter Hermann at WaPo.

Following up a bit from yesterday’s post — today Paul Waldman writes that so far the covid relief bill “looks to be one of the most popular pieces of major legislation in U.S. history.”

A new CBS News poll found that 83 percent of Americans would approve “of Congress passing an additional economic relief package that would provide funds to people and businesses impacted by the coronavirus outbreak.” While 40 percent thought the package being discussed is “not enough,” 39 percent said it is “about the right amount” and only 20 percent said it is “too much.”

A Yahoo News/YouGov poll found 74 percent of Americans supporting $2,000 relief checks, and 69 percent supporting increased funding for vaccinations. Those are two of core pieces of the bill.

A Quinnipiac poll found that 68 percent of Americans support the rescue package, in response to a question that explicitly mentioned Biden (which might be expected to turn off Republicans). And 78 percent of Americans supported relief checks.

Given these poll numbers, I don’t see that the Republicans have the policial capital to whine that nobody is compromising with them.

I have been listening to the impeachment trial and checking in with it from time to time. It seems to me the Democrats are giving a devastating presentation. Not that the Republicans will change their minds. But I hope a lot of people are watching this.

See also I’ve Studied Terrorism for Over 40 Years. Let’s Talk About What Comes Next.by Martha Crenshaw at the New York Times.

I am not watching the impeachment trial. I’m tired of feeling like a raw wound. I’ll catch highlights tonight on cable. Instead, I’d rather focus on something positive and note that Paul Krugman is very, very happy about the Biden covid package.

Krugman begins by citing a column he wrote in January 2009. in which he warned that president-elect Obama’s economic stimulus plan was way too cautious and fell short of what was needed in the wake of the 2008 financial sector meltdown. And while the package did some good, it was widely perceived as a failure. And President Obama didn’t get another opportunity to enact more stimulus.

The good news — and it’s really, really good news — is that Democrats seem to have learned their lesson. Joe Biden may not look like the second coming of F.D.R.; Chuck Schumer, presiding over a razor-thin majority in the Senate, looks even less like a transformational figure; yet all indications are that together they’re about to push through an economic rescue plan that, unlike the Obama stimulus, truly rises to the occasion.

In fact, the plan is aggressive enough that some Democratic-leaning economists worry that it will be too big, risking inflation. However, I’ve argued at length that they’re wrong — or, more precisely, that, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says, the risks of doing too little outweigh any risk of overheating the economy. In fact, a plan that wasn’t big enough to raise some concerns about overheating would have been too small.

“Some Democratic-leaning economists” = Lawrence Summers, I suspect. Summers must be confused about why people aren’t taking him seriously any more. Back to Krugman:

One thing that may be encouraging Democrats, by the way, is the fact that Biden’s policies actually are unifying, if you look at public opinion rather than the actions of politicians. Biden’s Covid-19 relief plan commands overwhelming public approval — far higher than approval for Obama’s 2009 stimulus. If, as seems likely, not a single Republican in Congress votes for the plan, that’s evidence of G.O.P. extremism, not failure on Biden’s part to reach out.

This is an important point. When Biden talks about unifying the country, I believe he means exactly that. Not unifying the Senate or unifying the political parties. It appears so far he’s not even going to try to placate Republicans in Congress; he’s going to do what the people need doing, and if Republicans don’t like it they can go home and explain themselves to their constituents.

From yesterday’s Politico:

Already, there’s talk about midterm attack ads portraying Republicans as willing to slash taxes for the wealthy but too stingy to cut checks for people struggling during the deadly pandemic. And President Joe Biden’s aides and allies are vowing not to make the same mistakes as previous administrations going into the midterms elections. They are pulling together plans to ensure Americans know about every dollar delivered and job kept because of the bill they’re crafting. And there is confidence that the Covid-19 relief package will ultimately emerge not as a liability for Democrats, but as an election year battering ram.

Yes, yes, yes. This is how it’s done, Dems.

Always there are some people who don’t get memos. Some of the “moderate” Dems wanted to be more frugal with the direct payments. But it appears the progressives have defeated this. Cristina Cabrera writes at TPM that “moderate Democrats had proposed lowering the cap to $50,000 for individual filers and $100,000 for couples before the amounts per payment begin to phase out.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-VT) blasted the proposals to lower the thresholds on Saturday.

“It would be outrageous if we ran on giving more relief and ended up doing the opposite,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.

“In other words, working class people who got checks from Trump would not get them from Biden. Brilliant!” Sanders tweeted.

To which some of the “moderates” must have said, oh, yeah. Duh. The former caps remain in place. And yesterday they added a provision that would give millions of families $3,000 per child.

Maybe if Democrats get used to throwing their weight around, next they’ll kill the filibuster. Oh, please ….

Elsewhere — Aaron Blake writes about the sodden mess that is Trump’s impeachment defense.

Watch this video that was shown in the Trump impeachment trial this morning. Just watch it.

The Atlantic has an article by Wendy Parmet titled Employers’ Vaccine Mandates Are Representative of America’s Failed Approach to Public Health. As people discuss mandating covid vaccines, the next question is, who will do the mandating? The government or employers? And right now it looks like we’ll be falling back on employers.

Although important legal questions and limits remain—such as whether vaccines that have received only emergency-use authorization, rather than full FDA approval, can be mandated—the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s recent guidance assumes that employers can require, subject to limitations established by the Americans With Disabilities Act and Title VII, that their workers be vaccinated. This comports with the long-standing view that employers, especially in nonunionized workplaces, have broad power to set the terms and conditions of employment, including requirements that their employees be vaccinated. Doing so might be just the trick to overcoming people’s resistance. Although many Americans rebel when the government tells them what to do, they can, for obvious reasons, be quite acquiescent to the dictates of their employers.

Already some employers are offering bonuses to employees to get vaccinated, which I’m fine with. I understand there’s a real problem with nursing home staff refusing to get vaccinated, and IMO state health departments need to mandate vaccines asap.

Keep in mind that a big problem with U.S. nursing homes is that, while there may need to be a Registered Nurse on duty at all times, most of the staff are either Licensed Practical Nurses — high school graduates with one year of nurse’s training — or Certified Nursing Assistants — high school graduates with four months of training. Depending on the state, there may be more CNAs than anything else, and while they may be very good at helping residents with bathing and other functions, they don’t necessarily know science from salsa. So it shouldn’t be a big surprise that staffers are afraid of the vaccine.

Wendy Parmet’s larger point is that the pandemic is showing us how much public health has been privatized in the U.S. And this is not working.

Unquestionably, the private sector has a role to play in public health—just look at the private companies that produced the vaccines and the private hospitals that have cared for the ill. But to rely on it to protect the public’s health is pure folly. As the pandemic has shown only too well, private and public interests do not always align. Before COVID-19, for example, hospitals focused on their bottom line and failed to stock up on personal protective gear or extra ventilators, even though they knew a pandemic could strike. Once one did, competitive pressures also pushed many businesses, such as restaurants and meatpacking plants, to stay open and overlook the health of their employees and communities, even as they became sources of infection. To depend now on the private sector to increase vaccination rates would further underscore America’s tepid commitment to the basic principles of public health.

This goes along with our insane religious faith in “free markets” to provide for everyone’s needs. It doesn’t work, folks. But the other point, IMO, is that people who don’t like being told what to do are just trading one authority for another. If the government doesn’t make them get vaccinated, their employers probably will sooner or later. I believe that eventually covid vaccinations are going to be required before any of us can do much of anything — hold a job, go to school, travel — and if government doesn’t enforce it, the private sector will step in. And the private sector is much less democratic than government.

What else can I say but … go Chiefs.

Josh Marshall has a members only post at Talking Points Memo that warns us not to think of QAnon as a conspiracy theory.

Q is not a “conspiracy theory”. The faked moon landing was a conspiracy theory. Perhaps birtherism was a conspiracy theory, though one with similarities to QAnon because of its strong ideological valence. But Q is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a fascistic political movement which predicts and advocates mass violence against liberals (and everyone else outside its definition of true Americans) in an imminent apocalyptic political reckoning. What we call the ‘conspiracy theories’ are simply the storylines and claims that justify that outcome. They could easily be replaced by others which serve the same purpose.

I think one way to understand this is that the fantastical stories that make up much of the Q phenomenon are not the source of the problem. The problem is that a whole lot of people are alienated and confused and fearful and enraged and, yes, bigoted, and the Q stories are a post-hoc explanation that justifies their feelings. As Josh Marshall says, another set of completely different stories would serve the purpose.

It’s not a misunderstanding. It’s a form of aggression. Things like the Q phenomenon are just this aggression writ large. I say you’re a pedophile because it is itself an act of aggression but also because it dehumanizes you. It’s a storyline that makes hurting you or killing you make more sense and be more exciting.

In the several years now that I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve written many posts about how the U.S. right wing tends to “think” in symbols, archetypes, and allegories rather than rationally and conceptually. The most recent such post is from November 2020. In this, I quote a friend who points out that if you ask a Trump supporter why they like Trump, they don’t talk about policy or programs, at least not real ones. They talk either about how he makes them feel or who he is going to “own” or “get tough” with (e.g., nonwhites, libs, uppity women, elites, China).* Maybe they’ll claim he built the wall, even though he didn’t, but the only reason they want a wall is to lock out brown people. “While Democrats are calling, texting, trying to persuade—Trumpists just drive around waving his name and snarling,” my friend wrote. “Democrats are talking healthcare and Covid-19–Trumpists are driving around shouting ‘Hunter Biden!’ out their car windows.”

(*I have to note that I observed the same thing to be true of Ronald Reagan supporters in 1980. If you asked them why they were voting for Reagan, the answer was either some variation of how he made them feel, or else “He’s going to kick the bums off welfare!”)

And, of course, the Hunter Biden who lives in their heads is an archetype that represents something; they probably know next to nothing about the actual Hunter Biden. See also Why There Are Trump Trains, also from November 2020.

The social-psychological foundations of all this mess have been with us for a long time. And the Republican Party has been feeding this beast for a long time, because it helps them win elections without having to do anything useful for anybody who isn’t a wealthy capitalist. However, a wise person told me once that anything you feed will grow. Donald Trump didn’t create the beast, but he — on some instinctual level — recognized it and took it over from the party just as it had gotten too big for its cage. And now it’s his.

See also What’s Left Of The ‘Mainstream’ Republican Party Is Looking Around And Getting Nervous by Kate Riga at TPM. Republicans still in office are used to thinking of themselves as the “party of ideas,” even though I doubt they’ve had any new ideas since McKinley. See Lawrence Glickman, Boston Review, December 2020, How Did the GOP Become the Party of Ideas? Glickman writes that the GOP’s celebrated “ideas” from 1970s onward were just warmed-over anti-New Deal talking points. And now that those have run their course as serious governing principles, Republicans have nothing left. But there are a few in the GOP who aspire to be serious policy makers, and they’re looking at Marjorie Taylor Greene and thinking, What the hell happened?

Even if the spell breaks, and his supporters grasp that Trump is not a superhero but just a bumbling con man, I suspect most of them will easily fall behind some other cult leader rather than be restored to sense. The origins of the problem are older than Trump, and bigger than Trump.

Now, let’s move on to How Trump Unleashed a Domestic Terrorism Movement—And What Experts Say Must Be Done to Defeat It by Mark Follman at Mother Jones.

The mob assault on Congress that left five people dead, scores injured, the Capitol building desecrated, and American democracy deeply shaken was the culmination of a campaign of terrorism. It was led by the president of the United States.

The description of Trump as a terrorist leader is neither metaphor nor hyperbole—it is the assessment of veteran national security experts. Trump, those experts say, adopted a method known as stochastic terrorism, a process of incitement where the instigator provokes extremist violence under the guise of plausible deniability. Although the exact location, timing, and source of the violence may not be predictable, its occurrence is all but inevitable. When pressed about the incitement, the instigator typically responds with equivocal denials and muted denunciations of violence, or claims to have been “joking,” as Trump and those speaking on his behalf routinely made.

Do read the article linked in the quote above on stochastic terrorism, a term I just learned. And as Follman writes, addressing this problem, shrinking the beast, is going to take a lot more than law enforcement functions. It’s going to take a whole-government, whole-society approach. And as it’s been festering for a long time, it’s going to take a long time to tone it down.

I also want to call your attention to Movie at the Ellipse: A Study in Fascist Propaganda by Jason Stanley at Just Security. This is an analysis of a slickly produced video shown at the January 5 rally on the Ellipse, before the mob stormed the Capitol. The article begins:

On January 6, Trump supporters gathered at a rally at Washington DC’s Ellipse Park, regaled by various figures from Trump world, including Donald Trump Jr. and Rudy Giuliani. Directly following Giuliani’s speech, the organizers played a video. To a scholar of fascist propaganda, well-versed in the history of the National Socialist’s pioneering use of videos in political propaganda, it was clear, watching it, what dangers it portended. In it, we see themes and tactics that history warns pose a violent threat to liberal democracy. Given the aims of fascist propaganda – to incite and mobilize – the events that followed were predictable.

Before decoding what the video presents, it is important to take a step back and discuss the structure of fascist ideology and how it can mobilize its most strident supporters to take violent actions.

I’ll let the article speak for itself. It’s very good, and very disturbing.

There’s still a lot about what happened January 6 that needs to be investigated and exposed. I trust the Biden Department of Justice will not drop that ball. But yes, the real problem is that we’ve got a large fascistic political movement on our hands.

A woman holds a QAnon flag as protesters gather outside Governor Kate Brown’s residence in Salem, Ore., on April 25, 2020, calling for novel coronavirus restrictions to be lifted so that people can get back to work. (Photo by Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

Before any more time goes by, I want to point to this segment from the February 3 Rachel Maddow Show.

Is there a chance the stranglehold of the oil industry on our democracy is getting looser? See also The First Step Is Admitting You Have a Problem by Michael Patrick F. Smith at the New York Times. He does a magnificent job pointing out how much we are surrounded by petrochemicals, and how much oil industry jobs tend to be short-lived and dangerous. He’s a bit short on solutions, though. I don’t think returning to a hunter-gatherer economy is going to happen right off.

Yesterday I got a call from the county health department telling me I could have a covid shot if that day at a mass-vaccination clinic, if I could be there in an hour. So I hustled at got the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Some advance notice would have been nice, but I’ll take what I can get. They gave me an appointment for the second dose in three weeks.

On to current events. The Senate worked through the night to pass a “budget blueprint” that will allow the covid relief bill to be passed through reconciliation.  The vote was 50-50, with Vice President Kalama Harris breaking the tie at five-something a.m. As I understand it, the blueprint will be used to write the Senate version of the bill.

Li Zhou and Ella Nilsen at Vox explain the next steps. There’s still a lot that needs to be done before the bill becomes law. Dems are aiming to wrap it all up by March 14, when current enhanced unemployment benefits expire.

The bad news is that the provision for raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour was killed in the blueprint, probably to placate Joe Manchin. I feared that would happen. NY Times:

Proponents of raising the wage believe it can still be included in the final plan, forcing a tough vote for Democrats opposed to the increase but who won’t want to vote against the entire stimulus package.

“We need to end the crisis of starvation wages in Iowa and around the United States,” Mr. Sanders said.

He added that he planned to try to get the phased-in wage increase included in the reconciliation bill, which can be approved on a simple majority vote, circumventing a filibuster which requires 60 votes to overcome. But it is not clear whether the effort will succeed given the strict rules of the process, which mandate that any policy changes directly affect federal revenues.

The increase won’t pass in this Senate outside of reconciliation unless they kill the filibuster. Note that a considerable number of workers in West Virginia earn at or below the minimum wage, and that was before the pandemic. West Virginians would have benefited, big time. Way to go, Sen. Manchin.

However, other than the minimum wage provision, I don’t believe any serious damage has been done to the Biden Administration proposal.

Naturally, Republicans are outraged that Democrats would stoop so low as to pass all this stuff through reconciliation. Note that Republicans’ failed effort to kill Obamacare and successful passage of Trump’s tax cuts used reconciliation.

Greg Sargent:

The move does indeed pose a serious challenge to Republicans. But it’s one that runs deeper than merely moving toward passing this one package without them. It also suggests a reset in dealing with GOP bad-faith tactics across the board — and even the beginnings of a response to the Donald Trump era and the ideology loosely described as “Trumpism.”  …

… Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is already denouncing this move. The minority leader railed that Democrats have “set the table to ram through their $1.9 trillion rough draft,” adding: “notwithstanding all the talk about bipartisan unity, Democrats are plowing ahead.”

Get used to it, Mitch. Sargent reminds us that McConnell’s use of filibuster rules effectively destroyed bipartisanship in the Senate for several years. And here is the critical point, for Democrats:

Senior Democrats have begun to articulate the idea that the true way to revitalize faith in government — and in democracy — is by successfully delivering on big-ticket items. Achieving bipartisan cooperation for its own sake will do far less to address deep civic division and disillusionment than robust and effective action on behalf of the common good will.

Exactly. And I also want to quote something Sargent wrote last week:

As political scientist Stephen Skowronek recently told Michelle Goldberg: “The old Reagan formulas have lost their purchase, there is new urgency in the moment, and the president has an insurgent left at his back.”

The skunk at the picnic is Larry Summers, the centrist economist who was dumped from Biden’s economic team last year. Summers penned an op ed at WaPo saying that Biden is ignoring too many risks. However, President Biden doesn’t care.

I’m sure Marjorie Taylor Greene is blissfully unaware that she’s a bigger detriment to the Right than to the Left. It is significant that Mitch McConnell — evil but not stupid — put the word out Monday night that Greene needs to be kept on a short leash, if not in a padded cell. And tomorrow the House will vote on stripping Greene of her committee assignments.

But that’s not all. House Republicans also plan to debate Wednesday whether to retain Rep. Liz Cheney in her leadership position after her Jan. 13 vote to impeach President Donald Trump.

Plus, some House Republicans, who are basically spoiled six-year-olds, offered an amendment to a House bill that would remove Rep. Ilhan Omar from her committee assignments. I understand Rep. Omar is being accused of antisemitism, a charge that an opinion writer for the Forward (“Jewish. Fearless. Since 1897”) says is so much bovine effluvia.

I assume Greene can be removed from her committees by a simple majority vote, in which case she’ll probably be removed. Not that I’m a fan of Liz Cheney, but I do think that if Republicans remove her from her leadership position it would amount to them shooting great big bullets through their own feet. I’m betting Mitch is making some phone calls about that now.

At the Washington Post, Colbert King points to a time when the Republican Party was, relatively, sane, and their problem candidate was David Duke, the neo-Nazi former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard. King writes,

“When someone asserts that the Holocaust never took place, then I don’t believe that person ever deserves one iota of public trust,” Bush said. “And when someone has so recently endorsed Nazism, it is inconceivable that such a person can legitimately aspire to leadership — in a leadership role in a free society. And when someone has a long record, an ugly record, of racism and of bigotry, that record simply cannot be erased by the glib rhetoric of a political campaign.

“So, I believe that David Duke is an insincere charlatan,” Bush continued. “I believe he is attempting to hoodwink the voters of Louisiana, and I believe that he should be rejected for what he is and what he stands for.”

The Democratic candidate, Edwin Edwards, won. And the Republican party of the time seems to have been okay with that.

As recently as 2016, when Duke announced a run for a Senate nomination, no less than human anagram Reince Priebus, then the RNC chair, announced the party would give him no support.

David Duke was bad, but Marjorie Taylor Greene is the distillation of pure, toxic ignorance. And a lot of Republicans in Congress are rallying to her side. See also An ugly truth links Marjorie Taylor Greene to Trump — one the GOP won’t confront by Greg Sargent.

And then we come to the impeachment trial. This will amuse you —

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said Wednesday that he has offered to represent Donald Trump in the former president’s second impeachment trial, asserting that he would be willing to resign from his seat in the House of Representatives “if the law requires it.”

Please, oh please …

Marjorie Taylor Greene