COVID-19 Update

(freebie)

‘We are in trouble’: Study raises alarm about impacts of long covid

A new long-covid study based on the experiences of nearly 100,000 participants provides powerful evidence that many people do not fully recover months after being infected with the coronavirus.

The Scottish study found that between six and 18 months after infection, 1 in 20 people had not recovered and 42 percent reported partial recovery. There were some reassuring aspects to the results: People with asymptomatic infections are unlikely to suffer long-term effects, and vaccination appears to offer some protection from long covid.

“It’s one more well-conducted, population-level study showing that we should be extremely concerned about the current numbers of acute infections,” said David Putrino, director of rehabilitation innovation for the Mount Sinai Health System in New York. “We are in trouble.”

Jill Pell, a professor of public health at the University of Glasgow who led the research, emphasized that the study revealed the wide-ranging impact of long covid on people’s lives. “There are lots of different impacts going beyond health to quality of life, employment, schooling and the ability to look after yourself,” she said.

How long covid is accelerating a revolution in medical research

The paper, published Wednesday in Nature Communications, represents the first findings of an ongoing study into long covid — the Long-CISS (Covid in Scotland Study).

The range of reported symptoms and inability to provide a prognosis for patients have perplexed long-covid researchers, even as the breadth of the challenge has become clearer. Between 7 million and 23 million Americans — including 1 million who can no longer work — are suffering from the long-term effects of infection with the virus, according to government estimates. Those numbers are expected to rise as covid becomes an endemic disease.

Previous studies have been challenged by the nonspecific nature of long-covid symptoms, including breathlessness and fatigue, which are also common in the general population. The Covid in Scotland Study, which included a control group, was able to pinpoint which symptoms were linked to covid, Pell said.

“Those who had covid were significantly more likely to get 24 of the 26 symptoms studied compared to the never-infected general population,” she said. For example, those who were infected were 3½ times more likely to be breathless.

Putrino pointed out that between 16 and 31 percent of the control group also suffered those same symptoms — a figure that is similar to the false negative rate of a PCR test, suggesting some of the control group may have been infected. Pell agreed that it is possible that some people with negative tests could have been infected, serving to reinforce the study’s broader findings.

Long hauler symptoms range widely from person to person. In the Scottish study, the most commonly reported symptoms included breathlessness, palpitations, chest pain and “brain fog,” or reduced mental acuity.

Symptoms were worst among people who were sick enough to be hospitalized during the acute infection — a fact that does little to quell experts’ concerns.

“It has always been the case that those who are sicker are more likely to have long-term sequelae,” Putrino said. “What is frightening is that the mild cases by far outnumber the severe, so even a small percentage of mild cases going on to develop long-term sequelae is a massive public health concern.”

Putrino also warned against assuming that asymptomatic infection is not associated with persistent symptoms.

“We have seen many patients who had a confirmed asymptomatic case,” he said. “It happens. It is statistically less common than those with symptomatic infection.”

The study found that the risk of long covid was greater among women, older people and those who live in economically disadvantaged communities. People who already suffered from physical and mental health problems, such as respiratory disease and depression, were also more prone to long covid.

“Crucially, this study also identified a sub-cohort of 11 percent who deteriorated over time. This is something seen often in patient groups but has not been discussed enough in the public conversation,” said Hannah Davis, a member of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, a group of patients who have been engaged in long-covid research.

While the study did not reveal any particular surprises, its nationwide design provides new rigor, Pell said. More than 33,000 people with laboratory-confirmed infections took part, along with 62,957 never-infected individuals.

Throughout the pandemic, U.S. experts, including the president’s chief medical adviser Anthony S. Fauci, turned regularly to British data because it comes from the nationalized health system and reflects trends across the entire population.

Long covid is destroying careers, leaving economic distress in its wake

Using National Health Service records, researchers sent a text message to every Scottish adult who had a positive PCR test as well as a group of people who tested negative for covid to invite them to participate. Those who chose to enroll answered online survey questions about their health before and after infection.

“Being able to access survey data from that single large cohort is very powerful,” said James Harker, an immunologist at Imperial College in London who studies the long-term impact of the coronavirus on the lungs. U.S. studies have largely had to rely on smaller numbers or use several studies to create meta-analyses, which have inherent flaws, Harker said.

Among the issues that deserve more exploration is the degree of protection offered by vaccination, according to Putrino. Recent studies show that vaccination reduces the chance of developing long covid, but not as much as previously thought.

“That is one of the most important things we need to understand next,” Putrino said.

The University of Glasgow team led by Pell worked with Public Health Scotland, the National Health Service in Scotland and the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and was funded by the Scottish government’s Chief Scientist Office and Public Health Scotland.

The researchers plan additional studies, according to Pell. The current study followed up with people at six, 12 and 18 months after infection. Among those who had confirmed covid, 13 percent reported some improvement.

“We trying to look in more detail at those changes in symptoms over time and what factors are associated with them,” Pell said.

Ukraine

Putin is running out of options.

It's possible he ordered that stupid missile attack simply to placate his hardline pundits.

It's just as possible he did it to demonstrate how wrong those pundits are, and that he's the only one anybody should be listening to.

BTW, there's somewhere between 37 and a kajillion different scenarios/options, and ain't none of 'em good for anybody, including Vladimir Putin.

Anyway, Putin has to find a way to give himself an escape pod without looking like he's backing down and abandoning what he told everybody was a must-do thing. So he launches this stupid attack to quiet the criticism, but it does practically nothing to bolster his image.

It does deflects attention from his failures, which buys him time to throw a whole bunch more shit in the air so maybe the citizenry forgets about the problems for a minute.

It also gives him the out he needs because he can blame the whole thing on people who dare challenge him. He can throw up his hands, blame "political interference", clean house, and go back to being a general pain in the ass instead of a world-threatening menace - which gives him a chance to flip the whole thing over and proclaim himself the Great Problem-Solver who ended the war.

🤪

Ben Hodges breaks it all down.

Social Media

The era of Expecting Corporations To Behave Like Responsible Citizens is long dead.

It's possible I was naive enough - or immersed enough in it - to think there was a time when big business was something other than sharks and hyenas dressed up to look like good church-goin' community-minded folks, but if there was, it's been over-n-done-with for at least 40 years.

Ari Melber - The Beat

Today's Nerdy Thing

The guys who wrote the bible did their best to piece it together, and figure it out, and put it into a form that people back then could understand. We have to remember, even the smartest guys on the planet still didn't know where the sun went at night.

Of course over time - and I'll bet dollars-to-dingleberries on this - the politicians (aka that era's clergy) knew they could influence or outright control the rubes' behavior by embellishing the tale and claiming to know what a wrathful god would visit upon them if they didn't do what the politicians/clergy told them to do. But that's a different rant.

Here's an update on something from years ago.

Joe Hanson:

Dick O' The Day

Because the "party of family values" (and their #1 pimp) don't give one empty fuck about families - or values.

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column - explains

Anyone who'd mock a guy for trying to communicate those thoughts to his only remaining child is a scum-eating slug of the lowest form - a "man" who has never been loved at all. He can't imagine what it's like to be loved unconditionally - or to love someone unconditionally, from way deep down in your soul.

If this is the behavior that can be embraced (or shrugged off) by enough people to get Republicans elected, then we are well and truly fucked.

COVID-19 Update

Evidence suggests pandemic came from nature, not a lab, panel says

New report takes sides in debate over COVID-19’s origins

The acrimonious debate over the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic flared up again this week with a report from an expert panel concluding that SARS-CoV-2 likely spread naturally in a zoonotic jump from an animal to humans—without help from a lab.

“Our paper recognizes that there are different possible origins, but the evidence towards zoonosis is overwhelming,” says co-author Danielle Anderson, a virologist at the University of Melbourne. The report, which includes an analysis that found the peer-reviewed literature overwhelmingly supports the zoonotic hypotheses, appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on 10 October.

The panel’s own history reflects the intensity of the debate. Originally convened as a task force of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission, a wide-reaching effort to derive lessons from the pandemic, it was disbanded by Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, the commission’s chair. Sachs alleged that several members had conflicts of interest that would bias them against the lab-origin hypothesis.

Sachs and other researchers who contend the scientific community has too blithely dismissed the lab-leak possibility aren’t persuaded by the new analysis. The task force’s literature analysis was a good idea, says Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center who has pushed for more investigations of the lab-leak hypothesis. But he says the zoonosis proponents haven’t provided much new data. “What we’ve seen is mostly reanalysis and reinterpretation of existing evidence.”

Sachs adds that the task force report does not “systematically address” the possible research-related origins of the pandemic. And he contends there was a “rush to judgment” by the National Institutes of Health and “a small group of virologists” to dismiss the possible research-related origins of the pandemic. In September, The Lancet published a report from his commission that gave equal weight to both hypotheses.

When Sachs launched the Lancet origin task force in December 2020, he tapped conservation biologist Peter Daszak to lead it. Daszak heads the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which has funded work on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Because the first COVID-19 cases were reported in Wuhan, China, some scientists suspect research conducted at WIV led to the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Sachs came to believe Daszak and other task force members who had links to WIV and the EcoHealth Alliance could not assess that possibility fairly and should step down. After fierce infighting over issues including transparency and access to information, Sachs pulled the plug on the task force in September 2021.

But the members continued to meet. “We had a distinguished, diverse group of experts across a whole range of disciplines, and we thought we had something to offer whether or not we were part of the commission,” says Gerald Keusch, an infectious disease specialist at Boston University.

In assembling its report, the task force interviewed researchers who have different perspectives on the pandemic’s origin. It also reviewed the history of RNA viruses, like SARS-CoV-2, that naturally have made zoonotic jumps and triggered outbreaks. And it combed through the scientific literature for papers addressing COVID-19’s origins.

The final product overlaps with the wider ranging Lancet commission report. Both stress the need to address how forces such as growing deforestation and the illicit trade of wild animals increase the risk of viral spillovers. Both emphasize the risk of lax safety measures in labs, as well as in field studies that hunt for pathogens.

But the two reports part ways when it comes to the origin of the pandemic.

The PNAS authors say their literature search revealed “considerable scientific peer-reviewed evidence” that SARS-CoV-2 moved from bats to other wildlife, then to people in the wildlife trade, finally causing an outbreak at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan. In contrast, they say, relatively few peer-reviewed studies back the lab-leak idea, and Daszak notes much of the argument has been advanced through opinion pieces. “The most parsimonious hypothesis is that the pandemic emerged through the animal market system,” Daszak says. “And while the evidence could be a lot better, it’s fairly good.”

He also agrees, however, that the question of how the pandemic began has yet to be answered conclusively. No one has independently audited how viruses were handled at WIV, for example. And no reports exist of scientists testing mammals at animal farms in China that supplied the Huanan market or the humans who handled them. “Absent those two critical pieces of data, you’re left with what’s available,” Daszak says. “What we concluded is that the weight and quality of the evidence is far higher on the natural origins idea.”

The PNAS perspective also stands apart for its recommendations on how to improve warnings that a pandemic is brewing. In a section called “looking forward,” the authors promote “smart surveillance” that would concentrate on transmission hot spots where humans and wild animals frequently come in contact, using cutting-edge technologies to look for novel viruses. Assays now exist that can measure antibodies to an enormous range of viruses, offering evidence of infections that occurred in the past. Wastewater sampling could use new polymerase chain reaction techniques to fish for both known and novel pathogens. And researchers could sample the air on public transport and manure pits on farms.

“For nearly 3 years we’ve been running in circles about different lab-leak scenarios, and nothing has really added to this hypothesis,” says co-author Isabella Eckerle, a virologist at the University of Geneva. “We have missed the chance to say … what can we do better the next time?”

Co-author Linda Saif, a swine coronavirus researcher at Ohio State University, Wooster, says studies of human and animal viral infections remain too siloed and must be combined. “There’s no source of funding for those at this time.”

David Relman, a microbiome specialist at Stanford University who thinks the different origin scenarios are equally plausible, believes the PNAS and Lancet commission reports are “not at all contradictory or inconsistent with each other.” And Relman, who was interviewed by the task force, compliments it for highlighting the need to better prepare for a new pandemic. “At the end of the day,” he says, “this much is true: Spillovers, outbreaks, and pandemics are the result of human activities, for which much greater scrutiny, mindfulness, and insight are desperately needed.”

(pay wall)

Opinion
A winter pandemic wave is looming. Get the booster.

Will there be an autumn or winter wave of covid? Right now, in the United States, daily cases and deaths are gradually declining off a still-high plateau. On the horizon, however, there are worrisome signals of a possible new wave. It is not too soon to grab protection with the bivalent booster.

Europe is a telltale indicator. For the past few weeks, cases among people 65 years and older have been on the rise in 19 of the 26 countries reporting data to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control. Fifteen countries in the group reported rising hospitalizations. Germany, France and Italy have all seen growing caseloads, which often portend a similar jump in the United States a few weeks later. The European center said the main driver appears to be people gathering together inside after summer’s end. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization director general, noted another factor: “Most countries no longer have measures in place to limit the spread of the virus.”

New variants are not yet propelling a wave, but there are new omicron subvariants. They appear to have genetic changes that confer the ability to evade human immunity from vaccines or previous infection. In a paper not yet peer-reviewed, immunologist Yunlong Cao and colleagues at Peking University warned that the new variants mean vaccine boosters and previous infection “may not provide sufficiently broad protection” against the mutated variants and could make existing antibody drugs useless. This could be worrisome if the variant splinters take hold in the population; so far, they have not in the United States, where the older variants BA.5 and BA4.6 still make up 92.8 percent of cases, according to data and modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A wall of immunity, created by the substantial amount of previous infection, might be helping, too.

The new bivalent boosters for those 12 and older are free, widely available and aimed at the prevalent variants. Yet the U.S. public has shrugged. A survey in September by the Kaiser Family Foundation found half of adults had heard “a little” or “nothing at all” about the booster. The Post reports that just over 11 million Americans — or about 4 percent of those eligible — have received a booster shot.

Such hesitancy stems in part from destructive misinformation spread by anti-vaccine campaigns. In recent days, such bad information came from an unexpected source. Florida’s surgeon general, Joseph A. Ladapo, on Friday issued a news release and an “analysis” purporting to show a sizable risk of cardiac-related death among men ages 18 to 39 within 28 days of getting the mRNA booster. Dr. Ladapo claimed risks of the vaccine outweigh the benefits. Researchers soon exposed the “analysis” to be shoddy, based on an extremely small sample, with poor methods, not peer-reviewed, and lacking a named author. But the damage had been done; the message made headlines and spread across social media. That Florida is urging people not to get a potentially lifesaving booster is disgraceful — and deeply irresponsible.

She Is At Home

It's been said, and it bears repeating: The fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene is a leader in the GOP is a very bad sign that should motivate everybody with a living thinking brain to do whatever it takes to stop this nonsense.

If there's any good news here, it's only that the percentage of Republicans voicing approval for freaks like Greene indicates that freaks are about all that's left in that party.

That's right - the "good news" is that one of the two main political parties here in USAmerica Inc has been taken over by the kind of booger-eatin' morons who vote for demagogues and dead pimps every chance they get, just to stick it to the libs.

(pay wall)

Welcome home, Marjorie Taylor Greene

The first time The Washington Post wrote about Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) was in the context of what made her exceptional: She was an avowed adherent of QAnon. And not just of the this guy Q has some interesting thoughts variety; rather, Greene celebrated that “there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out” with Donald Trump in the White House.

This was June 2020, and Greene had simply made it to the runoff in the Republican primary. The article was caveated with ifs about winning the primary and then the general, but it was clear what path she was on. Reporter Colby Itkowitz contacted members of the Republican leadership — including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and the conference’s chair, Liz Cheney (Wyo.) — but they weren’t interested in offering comment.

What seemed to be afoot was that the Republican House caucus was adding another member to its fringe, someone who’d occasionally make headlines for saying something embarrassing or introducing some weird, doomed piece of legislation. That sense was probably reinforced when Greene, as a new member of the chamber, quickly generated headlines for past comments about leading Democrats; the Democratic majority stripped her of any committee assignments, moving her from backbench to no bench.

But that was not the path Greene was destined to follow. Past members of the right-wing fringe who earned spots in Congress responded largely by folding into the white noise of the legislative process. Perhaps in part because Greene so explicitly had no part in that process — or, more likely, because she never had any interest in it in the first place — Greene helped create a new style of fringe Republican legislator. She wasn’t former Texas congressman Ron Paul (R) wanting to eradicate the Federal Reserve and she wasn’t former Iowa congressman Steve King (R) advocating hard-line immigration policies well before Trump. She understood that the platform had more value for communications purposes than legislative ones.

In essence, election to Congress simply gave Greene a louder megaphone to attack the aforementioned cabal (even if she described them differently now). It allowed her to join her power with other fringe House members, such as Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), to engage in an effort that’s equal parts trolling and exaggeration. Trump loved Greene from the outset, and her unwavering fealty to him has earned her the ability to hitch herself to him repeatedly. Trump rallies now regularly feature speeches from the first-term congresswoman from rural Georgia.

This is not because she is broadly popular. YouGov recently conducted polling for the Economist that asked people to evaluate a range of Republicans, from members of the media to politicians. Trump was the most popular among Republicans, followed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. Far fewer Republicans have an opinion of Greene than those more-famous names, but even if we adjust the responses, evaluating favorability just among those with an opinion, Greene was seventh of seven.

Yet, as the Associated Press reported Monday, Greene has been increasingly welcomed back into the mix with the Republican establishment. When McCarthy announced the party’s midterm agenda in Pennsylvania last month, Greene was seated right behind him.

“Greene’s political currency stretches beyond her massive social media following and her ability to rake in sizable sums from donors,” the AP’s Lisa Mascaro reported. “Her proximity to Trump makes her a force that cannot be ignored by what’s left of her mainstream GOP colleagues.”

This is the point: She may not be broadly popular or influential, but she is influential in a place that other Republicans aren’t. She’s popular with a set of Republicans who are antagonistic to people such as Kevin McCarthy.

It’s not entirely clear that McCarthy is extending an olive branch to the fringe. It’s that he can’t afford to let the fringe agitate at the fringe. In the minority (though perhaps not exclusively then), there’s more power in Greene’s approach to serving in the House — shouting into microphones and maintaining an omnipresence in conservative media — than in simply trying to come up with doomed legislation. Greene has some of that, certainly, but it’s often the case that she uses the policy documents to boost her media position and not the opposite. (She’s offered up innumerable impeachment articles, including several targeting President Biden.)

McCarthy, of course, has his own ambitions. If Republicans regain the majority in November, he’d like to be speaker of the House. Allying with Greene and Gaetz and that cadre of legislators will make such an ascension more likely. But it means that his party again shifts to the right, as it has over and over since at least 2010. In 2011, after the tea party wave brought a new contingent of conservatives to Washington, the New York Times profiled McCarthy’s tricky job in corralling their votes as majority whip. That’s still his job today but with a frequently more-extreme caucus. (And spotty success.)

Cheney, freed from the shackles of protecting the Republican caucus, is no longer refraining from comment on Greene. In August, she said she’d rather work with Democrats than with Greene. Of course, by that point she was freed of political shackles entirely, having lost her bid for reelection to a Trump-endorsed Republican primary opponent.

When she was conference chair, Cheney would often stand behind McCarthy as he spoke to the media. Cheney is no longer behind McCarthy. Greene is; her time in exile is coming to an end.

Consider the shift just since 2020. In two years’ time, who will be standing in the background as the leader of the GOP makes an announcement about policy and direction? More importantly, who will the leader be who is making the announcement?

Today's Reddit

The plastic smile, trying to hide a raging paranoid self-loathing turned inside out (?), barely under control, nearly smacking Track (twice), as he interrupts mommy's - whatever the fuck that was.

The GOP thought she was a good choice for VPOTUS. Remember that next time you see Nicolle Wallace or Steve Schmidt on the teevee spoutin' off about their savvy political expertise.

Here Comes The Shit

It's not reassuring to know the fate of American democracy is in the hands of just 5 people - at least three of whom dissembled, or lied outright, during their confirmation hearings in order to get their seats on the court.

This will not be fun.

The saving grace here (assuming there is one), is that it's not unreasonable to expect the court to stand up for itself - to protect the institution's place as a co-equal branch - or at least try to make it look that way.

ie: If SCOTUS decides in favor of the Independent State Legislature hypothesis, then it's effectively saying courts have no power to review and interpret and rule on certain laws passed by a legislature. And that would kinda make the courts unnecessary in a very important way.

So they'd have to make the ruling very narrow. If they don't, then the supremes would be ruling state courts out of part of their job, and moving SCOTUS one big step closer to becoming a rubber stamp for a corporate plutocracy that believes the only thing courts should be doing is settling contract disputes.

I guess that may be what's afoot - SCOTUS will narrow the ruling, chipping away at democracy so we don't get too panicky. It has to be a slow process - incremental - death by a thousand cuts.

The most terrifying case of all is about to be heard by the US supreme court

It is well-known that intense competition between democracy, authoritarianism and fascism is playing out across the globe in a variety of ways – including in the United States. This year’s US supreme court term, which started this week, is a vivid illustration of how the situation is actually worse than most people understand.

A supermajority of six, unelected ultraconservatives justice – five of which were put on the bench by presidents who did not win the popular vote – have aggressively grabbed yet another batch of cases that will allow them to move American law to the extreme right and threaten US democracy in the process. The leading example of this disturbing shift is a little-known case called Moore v Harper, which could lock in rightwing control of the United States for generations.

The heart of the Moore case is a formerly fringe legal notion called the Independent State Legislature (ISL) theory. This theory posits that an obscure provision in the US constitution allowing state legislatures to set “time, place, and manner” rules for federal elections should not be subject to judicial oversight. In other words, state legislatures should have the absolute power to determine how federal elections are run without court interference.

Think about this theory in the context of the last US election. After Joseph Biden defeated Donald Trump resoundingly in both the popular vote and in the electoral college, Trump tried to organize a massive intimidation campaign to steal the election which played out in the storming of the Capitol building on 6 January. But behind the scenes, the legal core of this attempt was to convince the many Republican-controlled state legislatures (30 out of 50 states) to send slates of fake Trump electors from states like Arizona, Georgia and Michigan where Trump actually lost the popular vote.

If Trump had succeeded, he would have “won” the election via the electoral college (itself an anti-democratic relic) and been able to stay in office another term. If the supreme court buys the theory in the Moore case, this could easily happen in 2024 and beyond. In fact, it is possible Republicans will never lose another election again if this theory is adopted as law. Or put another way, whether Republicans win or lose elections via the popular vote will not matter because they will be able to maintain power regardless.

That’s not democracy. And it would put the United States squarely in the same category as authoritarian countries with illiberal leaders like Hungary, Poland, Turkey and Russia. Each of the leaders of those countries ostensibly “won” elections that were structurally rigged to virtually guarantee they could not lose.

It is disturbing that the supreme court used its increasingly diminished credibility with the public to take on a case that has no real purpose other than what I am describing in this column. In the United States, our highest court only rules on approximately 70 cases a year out of the 7,000 petitions for review that are presented. It is a relatively lazy court. In contrast, the supreme court of Brazil rules on approximately 100,000 cases a year. If the US court agreed to accept the Moore case for review, it almost certainly plans to endorse this rogue ISL theory, that could blow up elections and democracy in the United States as we know it.

Context is important. This situation did not just come out of nowhere, but really is the product of a multi-decade strategy by a coalition of corporations and rightwing religious fundamentalists dating back decades to take control of the US government.

Recent US history shows how spectacularly effective rightwing funders, representing wealthy Americans and corporations, have been in essentially buying control over our political system. These forces correctly perceive that if democracy is allowed to exist in an unfettered and neutral way, then corporate profits will be diminished and the powerful fossil fuel industry will be phased out over time. So they are organizing to prevent that from happening.

This rightwing funding network simply could not exist with the enormous power that it has accumulated without the US supreme court’s Citizens United case, which laid the groundwork for the current takeover of the supreme court. One industrialist just turned over his entire $1.6bn fortune to an organization controlled by Leonard Leo, the brilliant mastermind behind the pro-corporate Federalist Society, which essentially put all six of the ultraconservatives on the court.

Should the court endorse the ISL theory, Republican-controlled legislatures also will be able to gerrymander political districts to lock in permanent control of federal elections without judicial oversight. Gerrymandering is a fancy term to describe another method of voter suppression in the United States: setting district maps to guarantee that progressive or minority candidates simply cannot get elected except in pre-approved districts. It explains, for example, why in the state of North Carolina Republicans control eight of 13 seats in the US House of Representatives despite the Democratic party winning well over 50% of the statewide vote in the last several elections.

The Moore case would in practice strip people of the right to fair elections by placing electoral power in the hands of a small group of officials at the state level who set district maps. In a presidential election, these officials could determine what slate of electors gets put forth to the electoral college, regardless of the outcome of the state’s popular vote.

In the gerrymandered map at the heart of the Moore case, an evenly divided popular vote in North Carolina would have awarded 10 of the state’s 14 seats in the House of Representatives to Republicans.

While many are focused on the January 6 proceedings, the real coup has been going on quietly in the supreme court without a single shot being fired. As the judicial branch is set to deliberate a case that could drastically weaken the other branches of government, never has it been more clear that it is time to rein in the power of our least democratic institution.

Today's Tweet

War crimes

My first report from the Russian attack on Kyiv.

This is Russian genocide against Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/nlStehjwYx

— Sarah Ashton-Cirillo (@SarahAshtonLV) October 10, 2022