click to begin
Apr 6, 2021
An Unsurprising Surprise
I suspect a lot of us are thinking that having gotten rid of Trump, we avoided sliding ass-first into a fascist catastrophe, and that means we can relax a little.
But it seems the party that wants to drown government in the bathtub in order to put us all under the control of corporations &/or private holdings (ie: plutocrats) has decided to go ahead with their attempts to kill democracy outright and in the open.
In late March, Georgia passed a restrictive new voting law that, in effect, permits the Republican state legislature to put partisan operatives in charge of disqualifying ballots in Democratic-leaning precincts. The law is one of at least eight proposals from GOP lawmakers in state legislatures around the country for increasing partisan influence over electoral administration — and one of more than 360 state bills that would curtail voting rights in one way or another.
New political science research suggests this wave of attempts to restrict the franchise is not an anomaly: Republican control over state government is correlated with large and measurable declines in the health of a state’s democracy.
The paper, by University of Washington professor Jake Grumbach, constructs a quantitative measure of democratic health at the state level in the US. He looked at all 50 states between 2000 and 2018 to figure out why some states got more democratic over this period and others less. The conclusions were clear: The GOP is the problem.
“Results suggest a minimal role for all factors except Republican control of state government, which dramatically reduces states’ democratic performance during this period,” he writes.
While many researchers have attempted to quantify the health of democracy in different countries around the world, Grumbach’s paper is the first effort to develop some kind of ranking system for US states. It’s still in working paper form, which means it has not been peer-reviewed. But Grumbach’s work has been widely praised by other political scientists who had read a draft or seen him present it at a conference.
“This is one of those papers that makes me proud to be an empirical political scientist. It’s important, carefully done, and just plain smart,” writes Vin Arceneaux, a professor at Temple University. “It helps us not only understand American politics but democratic backsliding in general.”
And it’s yet another piece of evidence that the Republican Party has become an anti-democratic political faction.
Just eyeballing the map, you can pick up on the clear pattern of states with Republican governments scoring lower in 2018 than they did in 2000. That year, the average GOP-controlled state was slightly more small-d democratic than its average Democratic-controlled peer. Over the next two decades, the average Republican score declined dramatically.
There could be all sorts of reasons why this is happening. Maybe Republican states had high levels of demographic change, causing white voters to embrace voter suppression in response. Maybe Republicans won power in states in which the parties were highly polarized, which raised the stakes of political conflict and caused incumbents to try to secure their hold on power.
To test these theories, Grumbach ran a series of regression analyses designed to isolate correlations between a state’s democracy score and variables like percentage of nonwhite voters and measures of state-level polarization. Strikingly, these things either barely mattered or didn’t matter at all.
Only two things really did: whether a state was controlled by Republicans and whether Republicans had gained that control recently. Republican-controlled states in general were far more likely to perform worse in the State Democracy Index over time; Republican states with a recent history of close elections, like Wisconsin and North Carolina, were especially likely to decline from 2000 to 2018.
“Among Republican controlled states ... those whose recent elections have been especially competitive are the states to take steps to reduce their democratic performance,” he writes.
The paper’s findings suggest a consistent national Republican policy on democracy being enacted at the state level to make it harder for voters to take away their power.
“Regardless of the particular circumstances or geography, state governments controlled by same party behave similarly when they take power,” Grumbach writes. “The Republican controlled governments of states as distinct as Alabama, Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina have taken similar actions with respect to democratic institutions.”
The GOP’s anti-democratic agenda is real
To be sure, this is just one study and not yet peer-reviewed, to boot, so it shouldn’t be taken as definitive. And skeptics can certainly poke holes in some of Grumbach’s choices.
For instance, one could question just how bad the anti-democratic infractions Grumbach cites really are. Voter ID laws, to take one example, counted against many Republican states — but the evidence on whether they actually reduce voter turnout is surprisingly mixed. A conservative might object that Grumbach is making a mountain out of a molehill: creating a metric that makes Republican states look worse than Democratic ones when, in reality, the differences just aren’t that big.
But methodological quibbles aside, the paper does seem to capture something real. One of its most valuable contributions is the way it treats gerrymandering.
Drawing lines to give your party a leg up disproportionate to its numbers is one of those practices that no one can really defend in democratic terms. Elected authoritarians abroad, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, have abused gerrymanders to ensure that they maintain a hammerlock on national power despite winning less than a majority of national votes.
The SDI shows that, in the United States, gerrymandering is not a “both sides” problem. It uses 16 different measurements of gerrymandering to assess how prevalent the tactic is in different states; 10 of these measures are the most heavily weighted factors in a state’s ultimate democracy score. These metrics show that Republican legislators abuse gerrymandering in a way that Democrats simply do not.
Some of this abuse has happened quite recently. Take a look at North Carolina’s SDI score over time — it starts to plunge shortly after Republicans drew new maps in 2011, ones that allowed them to win 77 percent of the state’s House seats in 2018 with just under 50 percent of the state vote:
(It’s worth noting that one of the worst abuses by North Carolina’s Republican legislature — stripping Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper of key powers after his 2016 victory — doesn’t factor into the state’s score, as Grumbach hasn’t decided on a satisfactory way to quantify it. A similar maneuver performed by the Wisconsin state legislature after Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’s victory in 2018 also doesn’t count against the state’s already dismal SDI score.)
Offering empirical ballast for a phenomenon we’ve observed in real time these past few years, Grumbach’s paper is another passage in the dominant political story of our time: the Republican Party’s drift against democracy. And, crucially, it’s a drift that began before Trump and his allegations of fraud in 2020. Republicans didn’t need Trump to enact extreme gerrymandering after the 2010 census; his anti-democratic instincts helped bring out something that was already there.
We have every reason to expect things will get worse, not better.
Georgia’s law, for example, is more worrying than even voter ID laws. It gives Republicans more direct control over election administration, allowing them to bend the rules in their favor: enforcing strict standards for ballot disqualification in Democratic-leaning precincts and lax ones in Republican-leaning ones, for example.
Once 2020 census data is available, states will do another round of redistricting. This time, those who want to tilt the field in their favor will have a freer hand due to a 2019 Supreme Court ruling that partisan gerrymanders can’t be stopped by courts.
There’s a reason that Grumbach calls states, in the paper’s title, “Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding.” Republicans have been engaging in a series of grand experiments in rigging a political system one state at a time — one that is, slowly but surely, undermining the foundations of America’s free political system.
In late March, Georgia passed a restrictive new voting law that, in effect, permits the Republican state legislature to put partisan operatives in charge of disqualifying ballots in Democratic-leaning precincts. The law is one of at least eight proposals from GOP lawmakers in state legislatures around the country for increasing partisan influence over electoral administration — and one of more than 360 state bills that would curtail voting rights in one way or another.
New political science research suggests this wave of attempts to restrict the franchise is not an anomaly: Republican control over state government is correlated with large and measurable declines in the health of a state’s democracy.
The paper, by University of Washington professor Jake Grumbach, constructs a quantitative measure of democratic health at the state level in the US. He looked at all 50 states between 2000 and 2018 to figure out why some states got more democratic over this period and others less. The conclusions were clear: The GOP is the problem.
“Results suggest a minimal role for all factors except Republican control of state government, which dramatically reduces states’ democratic performance during this period,” he writes.
While many researchers have attempted to quantify the health of democracy in different countries around the world, Grumbach’s paper is the first effort to develop some kind of ranking system for US states. It’s still in working paper form, which means it has not been peer-reviewed. But Grumbach’s work has been widely praised by other political scientists who had read a draft or seen him present it at a conference.
“This is one of those papers that makes me proud to be an empirical political scientist. It’s important, carefully done, and just plain smart,” writes Vin Arceneaux, a professor at Temple University. “It helps us not only understand American politics but democratic backsliding in general.”
And it’s yet another piece of evidence that the Republican Party has become an anti-democratic political faction.
What the paper found
When I spoke to Grumbach on the phone about his work, he explained that his approach was inspired by V-Dem, the political science gold standard for quantitatively measuring democracy in countries around the world.
V-Dem breaks down democracy into individual component parts, like whether the press is free or the people can assemble peacefully, which can be measured and added together to produce an overall “democracy” score for any one country. You can’t just apply this to American states directly; no place in the United States is violently repressive in the way that China or Russia is, so the measurements might not be precise enough to clearly illustrate differences between states.
Grumbach’s State Democracy Index (SDI) is the first attempt to use a V-Dem-style approach to measure the more subtle ailments afflicting democracy in the United States. Metrics include the extent to which a state is gerrymandered at the federal level, whether it permits same-day voter registration, and whether felons are permitted to vote. He also includes criminal justice indicators, like a state’s Black incarceration rate, that are designed to measure state coercion.
To turn these metrics into an actual score, Grumbach uses a process that’s part subjective and part algorithmic.
The subjective part strives to determine whether an individual practice, like voter ID laws, is helpful or harmful to democracy. Grumbach then uses an algorithm to determine how much each of these practices should count toward a state’s overall score, either negatively or positively. This automated process ended up downplaying the criminal justice metrics, which barely factor into a state’s ultimate score. By contrast, the algorithm gave significant weight to electoral practices like gerrymandering (negative) and same-day registration (positive).
With a system in hand, Grumbach then proceeded to score all 50 states in every year between 2000 and 2018, from -3 (worst) to 2 (best). The following maps show the changes in state scores; the lighter the color, the worse the score is.
When I spoke to Grumbach on the phone about his work, he explained that his approach was inspired by V-Dem, the political science gold standard for quantitatively measuring democracy in countries around the world.
V-Dem breaks down democracy into individual component parts, like whether the press is free or the people can assemble peacefully, which can be measured and added together to produce an overall “democracy” score for any one country. You can’t just apply this to American states directly; no place in the United States is violently repressive in the way that China or Russia is, so the measurements might not be precise enough to clearly illustrate differences between states.
Grumbach’s State Democracy Index (SDI) is the first attempt to use a V-Dem-style approach to measure the more subtle ailments afflicting democracy in the United States. Metrics include the extent to which a state is gerrymandered at the federal level, whether it permits same-day voter registration, and whether felons are permitted to vote. He also includes criminal justice indicators, like a state’s Black incarceration rate, that are designed to measure state coercion.
To turn these metrics into an actual score, Grumbach uses a process that’s part subjective and part algorithmic.
The subjective part strives to determine whether an individual practice, like voter ID laws, is helpful or harmful to democracy. Grumbach then uses an algorithm to determine how much each of these practices should count toward a state’s overall score, either negatively or positively. This automated process ended up downplaying the criminal justice metrics, which barely factor into a state’s ultimate score. By contrast, the algorithm gave significant weight to electoral practices like gerrymandering (negative) and same-day registration (positive).
With a system in hand, Grumbach then proceeded to score all 50 states in every year between 2000 and 2018, from -3 (worst) to 2 (best). The following maps show the changes in state scores; the lighter the color, the worse the score is.
Just eyeballing the map, you can pick up on the clear pattern of states with Republican governments scoring lower in 2018 than they did in 2000. That year, the average GOP-controlled state was slightly more small-d democratic than its average Democratic-controlled peer. Over the next two decades, the average Republican score declined dramatically.
There could be all sorts of reasons why this is happening. Maybe Republican states had high levels of demographic change, causing white voters to embrace voter suppression in response. Maybe Republicans won power in states in which the parties were highly polarized, which raised the stakes of political conflict and caused incumbents to try to secure their hold on power.
To test these theories, Grumbach ran a series of regression analyses designed to isolate correlations between a state’s democracy score and variables like percentage of nonwhite voters and measures of state-level polarization. Strikingly, these things either barely mattered or didn’t matter at all.
Only two things really did: whether a state was controlled by Republicans and whether Republicans had gained that control recently. Republican-controlled states in general were far more likely to perform worse in the State Democracy Index over time; Republican states with a recent history of close elections, like Wisconsin and North Carolina, were especially likely to decline from 2000 to 2018.
“Among Republican controlled states ... those whose recent elections have been especially competitive are the states to take steps to reduce their democratic performance,” he writes.
The paper’s findings suggest a consistent national Republican policy on democracy being enacted at the state level to make it harder for voters to take away their power.
“Regardless of the particular circumstances or geography, state governments controlled by same party behave similarly when they take power,” Grumbach writes. “The Republican controlled governments of states as distinct as Alabama, Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina have taken similar actions with respect to democratic institutions.”
The GOP’s anti-democratic agenda is real
To be sure, this is just one study and not yet peer-reviewed, to boot, so it shouldn’t be taken as definitive. And skeptics can certainly poke holes in some of Grumbach’s choices.
For instance, one could question just how bad the anti-democratic infractions Grumbach cites really are. Voter ID laws, to take one example, counted against many Republican states — but the evidence on whether they actually reduce voter turnout is surprisingly mixed. A conservative might object that Grumbach is making a mountain out of a molehill: creating a metric that makes Republican states look worse than Democratic ones when, in reality, the differences just aren’t that big.
But methodological quibbles aside, the paper does seem to capture something real. One of its most valuable contributions is the way it treats gerrymandering.
Drawing lines to give your party a leg up disproportionate to its numbers is one of those practices that no one can really defend in democratic terms. Elected authoritarians abroad, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, have abused gerrymanders to ensure that they maintain a hammerlock on national power despite winning less than a majority of national votes.
The SDI shows that, in the United States, gerrymandering is not a “both sides” problem. It uses 16 different measurements of gerrymandering to assess how prevalent the tactic is in different states; 10 of these measures are the most heavily weighted factors in a state’s ultimate democracy score. These metrics show that Republican legislators abuse gerrymandering in a way that Democrats simply do not.
Some of this abuse has happened quite recently. Take a look at North Carolina’s SDI score over time — it starts to plunge shortly after Republicans drew new maps in 2011, ones that allowed them to win 77 percent of the state’s House seats in 2018 with just under 50 percent of the state vote:
(It’s worth noting that one of the worst abuses by North Carolina’s Republican legislature — stripping Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper of key powers after his 2016 victory — doesn’t factor into the state’s score, as Grumbach hasn’t decided on a satisfactory way to quantify it. A similar maneuver performed by the Wisconsin state legislature after Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’s victory in 2018 also doesn’t count against the state’s already dismal SDI score.)
Offering empirical ballast for a phenomenon we’ve observed in real time these past few years, Grumbach’s paper is another passage in the dominant political story of our time: the Republican Party’s drift against democracy. And, crucially, it’s a drift that began before Trump and his allegations of fraud in 2020. Republicans didn’t need Trump to enact extreme gerrymandering after the 2010 census; his anti-democratic instincts helped bring out something that was already there.
We have every reason to expect things will get worse, not better.
Georgia’s law, for example, is more worrying than even voter ID laws. It gives Republicans more direct control over election administration, allowing them to bend the rules in their favor: enforcing strict standards for ballot disqualification in Democratic-leaning precincts and lax ones in Republican-leaning ones, for example.
Once 2020 census data is available, states will do another round of redistricting. This time, those who want to tilt the field in their favor will have a freer hand due to a 2019 Supreme Court ruling that partisan gerrymanders can’t be stopped by courts.
There’s a reason that Grumbach calls states, in the paper’s title, “Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding.” Republicans have been engaging in a series of grand experiments in rigging a political system one state at a time — one that is, slowly but surely, undermining the foundations of America’s free political system.
Today's Tweet
Sportsball and politics
Gotta feel happy for conservative fans who are boycotting all the pro sports leagues and now get to rally behind a Baptist university that covered up a sexual assault scandal under President Ken Starr.
— Tim Miller (@Timodc) April 6, 2021
Today's GOP Hypocrisy
A case went before SCOTUS in 2003, and the decision was named after Mitch McConnell - because Mr McConnell was a driving force behind the effort to make sure companies could continue their out-sized influence in shaping national policy.
‘Stay out of politics,’ Republican leader McConnell tells U.S. CEOs, warns of ‘consequences’
U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell lashed out at corporate America on Monday, warning CEOs to stay out of the debate over a new voting law in Georgia that has been criticized as restricting votes among minorities and the poor.
In a sign of a growing rift in the decades-old alliance between the conservative party and U.S. corporations, McConnell said: “My advice to the corporate CEOs of America is to stay out of politics. Don’t pick sides in these big fights.”
McConnell warned companies there could be risks for turning on the party, but he did not elaborate.
“Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order,” McConnell told a news conference in his home state of Kentucky.
Big business ties with Republicans began fraying under former President Donald Trump’s leadership and the party’s focus on voting restrictions has soured businesses embracing diversity as key to their work force and customer base.
Major Georgia employers Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines have spoken out against the law signed by Governor Brian Kemp, and Major League Baseball pulled the 2021 All-Star Game out of the state over the law strengthening identification requirements for absentee ballots and making it a crime to offer food or water to voters waiting in line.
“I found it completely discouraging to find a bunch of corporate CEOs getting in the middle of politics,” McConnell said.
Trump spent months after losing his reelection bid falsely claiming that his defeat was the result of widespread fraud. He failed in dozens of legal challenges. Nonetheless, lawmakers in 47 states this year have introduced 361 bills imposing new restrictions on voting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
The Georgia law brought a backlash from some U.S. companies with strong ties to the state.
Coca-Cola Co. Chief Executive James Quincey called the law “unacceptable” and a “step backwards.” Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said: “The entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie: that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 election.”
Independent reviews have repeatedly shown that voter fraud is rare in the United States, and state and federal probes found no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election which the Republican Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Corporate America has long thrown its political muscle behind Republican candidates and officeholders, often funneling more campaign contributions to conservative candidates than Democratic ones.
Now Mitch is showing us - again - that he's king of the colossal hypocritical assholes.
And that he intends to continue his Daddy State ways, trying to impose his whimsy regarding what anybody can and can't do in politics.
‘Stay out of politics,’ Republican leader McConnell tells U.S. CEOs, warns of ‘consequences’
U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell lashed out at corporate America on Monday, warning CEOs to stay out of the debate over a new voting law in Georgia that has been criticized as restricting votes among minorities and the poor.
In a sign of a growing rift in the decades-old alliance between the conservative party and U.S. corporations, McConnell said: “My advice to the corporate CEOs of America is to stay out of politics. Don’t pick sides in these big fights.”
McConnell warned companies there could be risks for turning on the party, but he did not elaborate.
“Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order,” McConnell told a news conference in his home state of Kentucky.
Big business ties with Republicans began fraying under former President Donald Trump’s leadership and the party’s focus on voting restrictions has soured businesses embracing diversity as key to their work force and customer base.
Major Georgia employers Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines have spoken out against the law signed by Governor Brian Kemp, and Major League Baseball pulled the 2021 All-Star Game out of the state over the law strengthening identification requirements for absentee ballots and making it a crime to offer food or water to voters waiting in line.
“I found it completely discouraging to find a bunch of corporate CEOs getting in the middle of politics,” McConnell said.
Trump spent months after losing his reelection bid falsely claiming that his defeat was the result of widespread fraud. He failed in dozens of legal challenges. Nonetheless, lawmakers in 47 states this year have introduced 361 bills imposing new restrictions on voting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
The Georgia law brought a backlash from some U.S. companies with strong ties to the state.
Coca-Cola Co. Chief Executive James Quincey called the law “unacceptable” and a “step backwards.” Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said: “The entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie: that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 election.”
Independent reviews have repeatedly shown that voter fraud is rare in the United States, and state and federal probes found no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election which the Republican Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Corporate America has long thrown its political muscle behind Republican candidates and officeholders, often funneling more campaign contributions to conservative candidates than Democratic ones.
COVID-19 Update
World
USA
Vaccination Scorecard
U.S. appoints new global coronavirus coordinator as Biden steps up efforts to combat pandemic
The United States said Monday it was stepping up efforts to combat covid-19 worldwide, appointing a veteran diplomat to run the Biden administration’s global coronavirus response and pledging to support the more equitable production and distribution of vaccines.
“This pandemic won’t end at home until it ends worldwide,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in remarks Monday announcing the appointment of Gayle Smith, former director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, as global covid-19 coordinator.
He said the United States will “work with global partners on manufacturing and supplies to ensure there will be enough vaccine for everyone, everywhere.”
“We have a duty to other countries to get the virus under control here in the United States,” Blinken said. “But soon, the United States will need to step up our work and rise to the occasion worldwide.”
New Cases: 479,061 (⬆︎ .37%)
New Deaths: 7,404 (⬆︎ .26%)
USA
New Cases: 56,742 (⬆︎ .18%)
New Deaths: 500 (⬆︎ .09%)
Vaccination Scorecard
Total Vaccinations: 107.5 million (⬆︎ 1.22%)
Total Eligible Population: 40.2%
Total Population: 32.4%
It's possible that Biden is signaling there's a fair probability that some form of COVID threat will be with us for a good long time, even as we adapt to it.
U.S. appoints new global coronavirus coordinator as Biden steps up efforts to combat pandemic
The United States said Monday it was stepping up efforts to combat covid-19 worldwide, appointing a veteran diplomat to run the Biden administration’s global coronavirus response and pledging to support the more equitable production and distribution of vaccines.
“This pandemic won’t end at home until it ends worldwide,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in remarks Monday announcing the appointment of Gayle Smith, former director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, as global covid-19 coordinator.
He said the United States will “work with global partners on manufacturing and supplies to ensure there will be enough vaccine for everyone, everywhere.”
“We have a duty to other countries to get the virus under control here in the United States,” Blinken said. “But soon, the United States will need to step up our work and rise to the occasion worldwide.”
Apr 5, 2021
Today's Econ 200
John Oliver - with a message about The National Debt from our children and grandchildren...
"... grow the fuck up."
COVID-19 Update
World
USA
Vaccination Scorecard
Fauci pushes back on GOP criticisms, calling claims ‘bizarre’
Facing criticism from several high-profile Republicans in recent weeks, the country’s top infectious-disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci, pushed back on some of the claims, calling the remarks flat-out “bizarre.”
The most recent slight came Friday from Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who in a series of tweets urged Fauci to visit the U.S.-Mexico border, where authorities are grappling with an influx of migrants, and asked him to witness firsthand what he called the nation’s “biggest super spreader event.”
Graham claimed thousands of Central American migrants are spreading the virus while being detained in overcrowded facilities.
The migrants, he said, are staying “on top of each other” and “dumped off in Texas” and elsewhere in the country. “If you are worried about the spread of COVID, you should be gravely concerned about what is happening at our southern border,” Graham wrote.
Homeland Security officials have said all migrants who are brought into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody are tested and, when needed, isolated or quarantined. The government also has said it is working closely with the Mexican government and international organizations who are helping test migrants before entering the United States. Yet federal officials have admitted there have been “instances” in which migrants have been released without a coronavirus test because of the soaring numbers of migrants coming in.
Some of the arriving migrants who tested positive are being directed to local hotels for isolation in Texas, according to the Associated Press.
Later on Friday, Fauci told Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto that the senator was attempting to link him to issues he has no connection with.
“I have nothing to do with the border,” the White House chief medical adviser said, adding that he acknowledged there is a “very difficult situation at the border” that the Biden administration its “trying as best as they can” to solve.
Fauci also rejected Graham’s suggestion to go down to the border: “Having me down at the border, that’s really not what I do,” he said.
In the same interview, Fauci addressed attacks by other Republicans figures — such as Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows — saying that he found the criticisms “a little bizarre” and suggesting that he had become a sort of scapegoat for Republicans.
“I’ve become sort of, for some reason or another, a symbol of anything they don’t like” related to anything “contrary to them or outside of their own realm,” he said.
In his own Fox News interview last week, Navarro was asked about Fauci’s recent remarks about his decision to start trying to work on a coronavirus vaccine in January 2020.
Navarro responded with a slur against Fauci, calling him “a sociopath and a liar” who “had nothing to do with the vaccine.”
“What is Fauci the father of?” he continued. “Fauci is the father of the actual virus.”
Fauci also reacted to those comments Friday.
“How bizarre is that? Think about it for a second. Isn’t that a little weird? I mean, come on,” he said.
Also last week, Meadows questioned why the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has not been more vocal regarding the potential dangers from the coronavirus at the southern border.
“There was no policy, medical or otherwise, that Dr. Fauci wouldn’t weigh in on when President Trump was in the White House,” the Republican wrote on Twitter. “Curious we haven’t heard from the same Dr. Fauci on Joe Biden releasing thousands of COVID untested migrants into the U.S.”
In late February, Rubio tweeted that Fauci’s job was “not to mislead or scare” the American people into doing “the right things,” referring to following recommendations such as the use of face masks. Fauci said that it was hard to respond to that “without sounding hostile” but denied that he was trying to sow fear in people. Rather, he said, he was giving recommendations based on science and data.
Asked whether the attacks bothered him, Fauci tried to brush them off, arguing his is too busy “trying to preserve the health and safety the American people that I cannot be bothered with getting distracted with these people that are doing ad hominems.”
New Cases: 535,137 (⬆︎ .41%)
New Deaths: 6,791 (⬆︎ .24%)
USA
New Cases: 36, 983 (⬆︎ .12%)
New Deaths: 270 (⬆︎ .05%)
Vaccination Scorecard
Total Vaccinations: 106.2 million (⬆︎ 1.92%)
Total Eligible Population: 39.7%
Total Population: 32.0%
And in keeping with their usual idiotic approach to everything, Republicans can't seem to help running their mouths - making shit up.
WaPo:
Fauci pushes back on GOP criticisms, calling claims ‘bizarre’
Facing criticism from several high-profile Republicans in recent weeks, the country’s top infectious-disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci, pushed back on some of the claims, calling the remarks flat-out “bizarre.”
The most recent slight came Friday from Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who in a series of tweets urged Fauci to visit the U.S.-Mexico border, where authorities are grappling with an influx of migrants, and asked him to witness firsthand what he called the nation’s “biggest super spreader event.”
Graham claimed thousands of Central American migrants are spreading the virus while being detained in overcrowded facilities.
The migrants, he said, are staying “on top of each other” and “dumped off in Texas” and elsewhere in the country. “If you are worried about the spread of COVID, you should be gravely concerned about what is happening at our southern border,” Graham wrote.
Homeland Security officials have said all migrants who are brought into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody are tested and, when needed, isolated or quarantined. The government also has said it is working closely with the Mexican government and international organizations who are helping test migrants before entering the United States. Yet federal officials have admitted there have been “instances” in which migrants have been released without a coronavirus test because of the soaring numbers of migrants coming in.
Some of the arriving migrants who tested positive are being directed to local hotels for isolation in Texas, according to the Associated Press.
Later on Friday, Fauci told Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto that the senator was attempting to link him to issues he has no connection with.
“I have nothing to do with the border,” the White House chief medical adviser said, adding that he acknowledged there is a “very difficult situation at the border” that the Biden administration its “trying as best as they can” to solve.
Fauci also rejected Graham’s suggestion to go down to the border: “Having me down at the border, that’s really not what I do,” he said.
In the same interview, Fauci addressed attacks by other Republicans figures — such as Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows — saying that he found the criticisms “a little bizarre” and suggesting that he had become a sort of scapegoat for Republicans.
“I’ve become sort of, for some reason or another, a symbol of anything they don’t like” related to anything “contrary to them or outside of their own realm,” he said.
In his own Fox News interview last week, Navarro was asked about Fauci’s recent remarks about his decision to start trying to work on a coronavirus vaccine in January 2020.
Navarro responded with a slur against Fauci, calling him “a sociopath and a liar” who “had nothing to do with the vaccine.”
“What is Fauci the father of?” he continued. “Fauci is the father of the actual virus.”
Fauci also reacted to those comments Friday.
“How bizarre is that? Think about it for a second. Isn’t that a little weird? I mean, come on,” he said.
Also last week, Meadows questioned why the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has not been more vocal regarding the potential dangers from the coronavirus at the southern border.
“There was no policy, medical or otherwise, that Dr. Fauci wouldn’t weigh in on when President Trump was in the White House,” the Republican wrote on Twitter. “Curious we haven’t heard from the same Dr. Fauci on Joe Biden releasing thousands of COVID untested migrants into the U.S.”
In late February, Rubio tweeted that Fauci’s job was “not to mislead or scare” the American people into doing “the right things,” referring to following recommendations such as the use of face masks. Fauci said that it was hard to respond to that “without sounding hostile” but denied that he was trying to sow fear in people. Rather, he said, he was giving recommendations based on science and data.
Asked whether the attacks bothered him, Fauci tried to brush them off, arguing his is too busy “trying to preserve the health and safety the American people that I cannot be bothered with getting distracted with these people that are doing ad hominems.”
Nobody's denying the problems posed by migrating people. We've known this is the kinda shit coming our way for a good long time. And it's global - this is not just a thing at our southern border.
The political and economic upheavals driven by migration are ongoing - we're never without that phenomenon. We were expecting to get slammed because of Climate Change, and the pandemic just amplified the problems.
But this typical Republican obstructionist behavior is making it all worse.
Apr 4, 2021
Today's Tweet
Daddy State Awareness - Rule 1:
Every accusation is a confession
Why is it that every time you shake a pedophile/sex trafficking tree a Republican with close ties to the former guy falls out?
— George#VotesBlueAlways (@Numbers28) April 3, 2021
COVID-19 Update
World
USA
Vaccination Scorecard
Johnson & Johnson takes control of COVID vaccine output in Baltimore
Johnson & Johnson announced late Saturday that it's "assuming full responsibility" for manufacturing its COVID-19 vaccine at a Baltimore plant where 15 million doses were ruined last week.
Of note:
New Cases: 545, 394 (⬆︎ .42%)
New Deaths: 8,708 (⬆︎ .31%)
USA
New Cases: 66,154 (⬆︎ .21%)
New Deaths: 807 (⬆︎ .14%)
Vaccination Scorecard
Total Vaccinations: 104.2 million (⬆︎ 2.36%)
Total Eligible Population: 39.0%
Total Population: 31.4%
Biden's gang remain ever mindful that too many of us are gullible enough (or stoopid enough) to see every little glitch in the process as a confirming warning sign that Bill Gates is trying to do whatever weird shit they think he's trying to do - and to make sure there's as little real trouble as possible...
...Axios:
Johnson & Johnson takes control of COVID vaccine output in Baltimore
Johnson & Johnson announced late Saturday that it's "assuming full responsibility" for manufacturing its COVID-19 vaccine at a Baltimore plant where 15 million doses were ruined last week.
Of note:
AstraZeneca said Saturday night it is in "full cooperation with the U.S. government" moving production from the facility, run by Emergent BioSolutions, which been producing both vaccines.
Why it matters:
Why it matters:
The Biden administration took the "extraordinary" step of intervening as officials were "worried" the error would "erode public confidence in the vaccines," notes the New York Times, which first reported the news Saturday.
Driving the news:
Driving the news:
Both Bloomberg and Reuters report that the Department of Health and Human Services "facilitated" the move.
- J&J said in a statement that it's "adding dedicated leaders for operations and quality, and significantly increasing the number of manufacturing, quality and technical operations personnel to work with the company specialists already at Emergent."
- AstraZeneca, which has yet to receive FDA approval, said in a statement Saturday night it "will work with the U.S. Government to identify an alternative location."
The plant has yet to receive authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for either vaccine and the error is unlikely to impact the U.S. government's acceleration of the vaccine rollout.
- President Biden is stepping up plans to enable every American adult to have access to a dose by May, but the mix-up underscores how manufacturing issues "could complicate the rollout," per Bloomberg.
&J said in its statement it "expects to deliver nearly 100 million single-shot doses of its COVID-19 vaccine to the U.S. Government by the end of May."
What they're saying:
What they're saying:
Emergent spokesperson Nina DeLorenzo told the Washington Post Saturday that the company had been told of AstraZeneca's relocation plans and would stop manufacturing the vaccine in "the next few days."
- "We are welcoming additional Johnson & Johnson personnel on-site at Bayview for their technical expertise and support," DeLorenzo added.
- Representatives for Emergent and the Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to Axios' request for comment.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)