DumFux News

Veterans, active military, guard and reserve comprise a significant segment of voters who typically go with the GOP - almost 2-to-1.

15% of the Jan6 defendants have experience in the US military.

DumFux News has been used to propagandize people in uniform.

Recent revelations should have the effect of stripping off some of that GOP support.

We'll see.

Tea Leaves And Crystal Balls

Information travels at the speed of light, while the systems of government still proceed with all the alacrity, grace, and speed of the average tectonic plate.

There's lots of space to fill on lots of webpages and cable shows, and lots of ads to put in front of lots of people, and lots of demand for lots of opportunity to sell everything from ankle socks to Zyrtec and back to anal beads.

So it seems like we get lots of fairly high-paid fortune tellers "journalists" who try to see into the future and guess what's going to happen, presumably because we're out here expecting our favorite news hounds to pre-inform us so we can - what, exactly? So we can look smarter than average during the argument at the bar next Wednesday? So we can smile knowingly and pretend we had it all figured out ahead of time and that gives us some kind of bragging rights?

I'm not saying we shouldn't know stuff about what's going on. And I'm not saying we shouldn't try to be a little prepared for whatever shit's being rolled down the hill in our direction.

It's just that sitting around waiting for the next shoe to drop can give us a way of rationalizing a tendency to read far more into every little detail than is necessary.

That can be good - checking small things is never a bad idea. But it can have a very negative effect when it builds an expectation that's not realistic, or when you catch one small thing that you don't tag as purely speculative, and then misremember it later as fact, which ends up contributing to general feeling of justice denied, which in turn can give us reason to walk away from something we should be paying a lot of attention to.

Ain't politics a bitch.

Little-Known Lawyer, a Trump Ally, Draws Scrutiny in Georgia

A special grand jury looking into election meddling interviewed Robert Cheeley, a sign that false claims made by Donald J. Trump’s allies loom large in the case.

ATLANTA — At a Georgia State Senate hearing a few weeks after President Donald J. Trump lost his bid for re-election, Rudolph W. Giuliani began making outlandish claims. “There are 10 ways to demonstrate that this election was stolen, that the votes were phony, that there were a lot of them — dead people, felons, phony ballots,” he told the assembled legislators.

After Mr. Giuliani’s testimony, a like-minded Georgia lawyer named Robert Cheeley presented video clips of election workers handling ballots at the State Farm Arena in downtown Atlanta. Mr. Cheeley spent 15 minutes laying out specious assertions that the workers were double- and triple-counting votes, saying their actions “should shock the conscience of every red blooded Georgian” and likening what he said had happened to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

His comments mostly flew under the radar at the time, overshadowed by the election fraud claims made by Mr. Giuliani, who was then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, and by other higher-profile figures. But Mr. Cheeley’s testimony did not end up in the dustbin. He was among the witnesses questioned last year by a special grand jury in Atlanta that investigated election interference by Mr. Trump and his allies, the grand jury’s forewoman, Emily Kohrs, said in an interview last month.

The fact that Mr. Cheeley was called to appear before the special grand jury adds to the evidence that although the Atlanta investigation has focused on Mr. Trump’s biggest areas of legal exposure — the calls he made to pressure local officials and his involvement in a scheme to draft bogus presidential electors — the false claims made by his allies at legislative hearings have also been of significant interest. Mr. Giuliani has been told that he is among the targets who could face charges in the investigation.

“He did testify before us,” Ms. Kohrs said of Mr. Cheeley in the interview.

His appearance left such an impression that Ms. Kohrs began reciting from memory the beginning of Mr. Cheeley’s remarks at the State Senate hearing. Asked if his testimony to the special grand jury had been credible, she said, “I’m going to tell you that Mr. Cheeley was not one that I’m going to forget.”

Mr. Cheeley did not return calls for comment for this article, and he was not present when a reporter visited his office on Wednesday in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta. The fact that he testified before the special grand jury was not previously known.

In an interview in January, he remained steadfast in his belief that President Biden had not won the election fairly. “If we lose confidence in the integrity of the elections, we won’t have a country much longer,” he said at the time.

Mr. Cheeley, who is little known outside Georgia, has a long track record as a plaintiff’s attorney and has been involved in lawsuits brought against Ford, General Motors and other automakers. More recently, his legal work has delved deeply into politics. He is a lead lawyer on one of the last pro-Trump election lawsuits that is still standing, an effort to review tens of thousands of 2020 ballots that are being kept in a Fulton County warehouse.

He has also represented one of the fake electors who tried to circumvent Mr. Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia. And he was a lawyer for David Perdue, a Republican former United States Senator, during Mr. Perdue’s unsuccessful run for governor last year.

Mr. Cheeley appeared at the State Senate hearing on Dec. 30, 2020, the last of three legislative hearings that month about the election at which Mr. Giuliani appeared in person or remotely. In each of the hearings, Mr. Giuliani and other Trump allies laid out a broad array of baseless allegations that the election had been stolen.

John C. Eastman, another Trump lawyer, for example, erroneously claimed at one of the hearings that as many as 66,000 “underaged individuals” were allowed to register in Georgia. A review by The New York Times found only about a dozen Georgians on the 2020 voter rolls who were listed in state records as having been 16 at the time, but even those cases appeared most likely to be data-entry errors.

“We talked a lot about December and things that happened in the Georgia legislature,” Ms. Kohrs said of the special grand jury’s deliberations.

Ms. Kohrs, who gave a brief flurry of interviews last month but has not publicly commented since then, said that the special grand jury had recommended indicting at least a dozen people. Its recommendations were delivered in a final report in January, most of which remains sealed. The report is now in the hands of Fani T. Willis, the district attorney for the Atlanta area, who has been leading the investigation for the last two years.

Ms. Willis will make her own decisions about who, if anyone, she will seek to indict, and will then need to go before a regular grand jury to secure those indictments.

Georgia has laws against making false statements in official settings. Those who testified falsely before the legislature “may also face liability under Georgia’s conspiracy to commit election fraud statute,” said Norman Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment, and who co-wrote a report by the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning research organization in Washington, examining the Georgia case.

Conspiracy charges could be considered for Trump allies who spoke at hearings and other official events, “to the extent their statements and other conduct were part of the larger Trump-led scheme to interfere in the election in the state,” Mr. Eisen said. Ms. Willis has also, according to interviews and court records, weighed the possibility of bringing racketeering charges, which could be broadly applied.

After hearing from a number of nonpartisan elections experts, as well as witnesses like Mr. Cheeley who believe the election was stolen, the grand jurors unanimously found that there was no evidence of significant vote fraud in Georgia in the 2020 election, according to a portion of their final report that was publicly released.

Surveillance footage from State Farm Arena after the 2020 contest shows some election workers running ballots through scanners more than once, leading Mr. Cheeley to claim at the December 2020 hearing that the workers were double- and triple-counting votes from Atlanta, a Democratic stronghold. “One man, one vote, just went out the window at the State Farm Arena,” he told the lawmakers, while talking over video clips.

But Georgia’s Republican leaders, including Gov. Brian Kemp, have repeatedly said that there was no conspiracy to steal the election.

“The standard operating procedure on a high-capacity scanner is that if there is a misread, you take that batch, press a button, delete that batch, and take that batch and put it back in again,” said Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer in the office of the Georgia Secretary of State, in an interview. “We also know, if there had been multiple scans, there would have been a lot more votes than there were ballots.”

As Mr. Sterling, a Republican, once put it: “It’s not like this is an ‘Ocean’s Eleven’-level scheme that was put together in the middle of the night.”

There has been no shortage of sparring over the investigation, including a number of social media posts from Mr. Trump tarring it. The vitriol is likely to grow more intense as Ms. Willis nears her decision over indictments. Last weekend, Mr. Trump hailed Republican state lawmakers for seeking new checks on the power of local district attorneys, who are elected in Georgia.

“They want to make it easier to remove and replace local rogue prosecutors who are incompetent, racist or unable to properly do their job,” he wrote on Truth Social, commending lawmakers for acting “boldly, fairly, and fast!”

Today's PG

Leigh McGowan gets it. She spent some time not long ago complaining about how Democrats kinda suck at messaging. But she's come to understand that most of what was "wrong with the Dems" was a problem with Republicans lying their asses off and media outlets repeating what they said instead of telling us what horseshit was constantly pouring out of their faces.

Tis is good advice.

Today's Best Joke

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may have thought he was mocking those he has railed against when posing with a handmade snowflake. However, its hidden message showed that he was the subject of the joke.

In an image that has gone viral, the Republican seemed unaware of the word "fascist" that appeared in the framed gift handed to him at a GOP political rally in Davenport, Iowa. Steven Goffman of The Washington Post tweeted that the state's Republican Governor Kim Reynolds had also been given the gift.

"My friend makes snowflakes to give to politicians who come to Iowa—there are special messages for odious Republicans—please look at the snowflake carefully," tweeted Iowa Captive of the image. As of Saturday, it had been viewed more than 1 million times, prompting wry comments.

"If the snowflake fits," tweeted the Democratic Senator Bob Duff, who is majority leader, of the Connecticut Senate. Right-wing commentator Laura Loomer wrote on Twitter: "DeSantis got trolled in Iowa. Read the snowflake."

The term fascist has been bandied around to describe some of the actions of DeSantis in running the Sunshine State.

Earlier this March, Florida Democratic congressman Maxwell Alejandro Frost said that DeSantis's policies targeting Black, transgender and LGBTQ people smacked of "fascism."

In 2022, DeSantis signed into law the Parental Rights in Education bill, also known as the "Don't Say Gay" bill. It stopped sexual orientation or gender identity being discussed in kindergarten through third grade and limited such instruction in other age groups.

DeSantis was also criticized for barring the teaching of an Advanced Placement African American studies course in the state-school curriculum.

The Washington Post reported that GOP lawmakers in Florida have proposed legislation that includes requiring teachers to use pronouns of children's sex as assigned at birth.

Although he has not declared his intentions, DeSantis is considered a key contender to be the GOP nominee in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

However, a leading expert on fascism, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, from New York University, warned this month that DeSantis would "destroy our democracy" if he were to take the White House.

DeSantis's Iowa trip faced another glitch when a video truck appeared outside the event, playing clips that showed his conflicting statements on social security. He has distanced himself from his previous support for privatizing the program and raising retirement age.

A DeSantis run for president would involve a clash with Donald Trump, who mocked the Florida governor's visit to Iowa on his Truth Social account. "Very small crowds for Ron DeSanctimonious in Iowa," wrote the former president.

"He's against farmers, Social Security, and Medicare, so why would people show up—other than fake stories from the fake news!"

A Message

My dear friend, President Xi -

Don't fuck with me.

Best Regards,

Joe

What If Peace Breaks Out?

Best be keepin' an eye on them pesky Georgians, Vlad.

Today's Daddy State Bozo

"We are going to start killing people in Mexico who are killing Americans, because they are terrorists. We do it all over the world every night. We have all of the legal authority we need to go after these drug cartels if we change our laws.” --US Sen Lindsey Graham

A sitting US Senator is suggesting we make deadly incursions inside another country's sovereign borders, issuing death threats against the citizens of a foreign nation - a nation which is an important ally and trading partner.

Note: he makes a very Daddy State move, ie: "Let's change US law in order to make the crime of murdering Mexican citizens acceptable". And he does it after the operative phrase, "... start killing people in Mexico ..." which serves two purposes.

1. It gives him cover - he can rant and rave for the benefit of the MAGA gang, and still be relatively assured that nothing he tells them he wants to do will ever be done
2. It plants the seed - if the rabble raise a big enough stink, he can claim leadership on the issue.

Will there be consequences?

Hint: he has the magic (R) next to his name.

Geopolitics is a worldwide poker game

with more than 200 players.

They're all cheating,

and they all know they're all cheating.

The calculus is never simple.

Today's Tweet

The self-own on this one is just too delectable.

The video is from a Tik Tok comic named Walter Masterson, who put this up spoofing the conspiracy fantasy of "Jan6 was an antifa false flag attack".

Now do you believe me? https://t.co/DD5cRJnnV0

— Kevin Sorbo (@ksorbs) March 10, 2023

Overheard

How do you describe Libertarians?

House cats. They insist on believing they're fiercely independent, while being totally reliant on a system they don't respect and can't understand.

COVID-19 Update

NYT finally got around to explaining an item that they must've known they had reported badly.

Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work

The debate over masks’ effectiveness in fighting the spread of the coronavirus intensified recently when a respected scientific nonprofit said its review of studies assessing measures to impede the spread of viral illnesses found it was “uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses.”

Now the organization, Cochrane, says the way it summarized the review was unclear and imprecise, and that the way some people interpreted it was wrong.

“Many commentators have claimed that a recently updated Cochrane Review shows that ‘masks don’t work’, which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” Karla Soares-Weiser, the editor in chief of The Cochrane Library, said in a statement.

“The review examined whether interventions to promote mask wearing help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses,” Soares-Weiser said, adding, “given the limitations in the primary evidence, the review is not able to address the question of whether mask wearing itself reduces people’s risk of contracting or spreading respiratory viruses.”

She said that “this wording was open to misinterpretation, for which we apologize,” and that Cochrane would revise the summary.

Soares-Weiser also said, though, that one of the lead authors of the review even more seriously misinterpreted its finding on masks by saying in an interview that it proved “there is just no evidence that they make any difference.” In fact, Soares-Weiser said, “that statement is not an accurate representation of what the review found.”

Cochrane reviews are often referred to as gold standard evidence in medicine because they aggregate results from many randomized trials to reach an overall conclusion — a great method for evaluating drugs, for example, which often are subjected to rigorous but small trials. Combining their results can lead to more confident conclusions.

Masks and mask mandates have been a hot controversy during the pandemic. The flawed summary — and further misinterpretation of it — set off a debate between those who said the study showed there was no basis for relying on masks or mask mandates and those who said it did nothing to diminish the need for them.

Michael D. Brown, a doctor and academic who serves on the Cochrane editorial board and made the final decision on the review, told me the review couldn’t arrive at a firm conclusion because there weren’t enough high-quality randomized trials with high rates of mask adherence.

While the review assessed 78 studies, only 10 of those focused on what happens when people wear masks versus when they don’t, and a further five looked at how effective different types of masks were at blocking transmission, usually for health care workers. The remainder involved other measures aimed at lowering transmission, like hand washing or disinfection, while a few studies also considered masks in combination with other measures. Of those 10 studies that looked at masking, the two done since the start of the Covid pandemic both found that masks helped.

(emphasis is mine)

The calculations the review used to reach a conclusion were dominated by prepandemic studies that were not very informative about how well masks blocked the transmission of respiratory viruses.

For example, in one study of hajj pilgrims in Mecca, only 24.7 percent of those assigned to wear masks reported using one daily, but not all the time (while 14.3 percent in the no-mask group wore one anyway). The pilgrims then slept together, generally in tents with 50 or 100 people. Not surprisingly, given there was little difference between the two groups, researchers found no difference from mask wearing and declared their results “inconclusive.”

In another prepandemic study, college students were asked to wear masks for at least six hours a day while in their dormitories, but they were not obligated to wear them elsewhere. Researchers found no difference in infection rates between those who wore masks and those who did not. The authors noted this might be because “the amount of time masks were worn was not sufficient” — obviously, college students also go to classes and socialize where they may not wear masks.

Yet despite their inconclusiveness, the data from just these two studies accounted for roughly half of the calculations for evaluating the impact of mask wearing on transmission. The other six prepandemic studies similarly suffered from low masking adherence, limited time wearing them and, often, small sample sizes.

The only prepandemic study reviewed by Cochrane reporting high rates of mask adherence started during the worrying H1N1 season in 2009 in Germany, and found mask wearing reduced spread if started quickly after diagnosis and if a mask was worn consistently (though its sample size, too, was small).

So what we learn from the Cochrane review is that, especially before the pandemic, distributing masks didn’t lead people to wear them, which is why their effect on transmission couldn’t be confidently evaluated.

Soares-Weiser told me the review should be seen as a call for more data, and said she worried that misinterpretations of it could undermine preparedness for future outbreaks.

So let’s look more broadly at what we know about masks.

Crucially, the question of whether a mask reduces a wearer’s risk of infection is not the same as whether wearing masks slows the spread of respiratory viruses in a community.

To use randomized trials to study whether masks reduce a virus’s spread by keeping infected people from transmitting a pathogen, we need randomized comparisons of large groups, like having people in one city assigned to wear masks and not to in another. As ethically and logistically difficult as that might seem, there was one study during the pandemic in which masks were distributed, but not mandated, in some Bangladeshi villages and not others before masks were widely used in the country. Mask use increased from 10 percent to 40 percent over a two-month period in the villages where free masks were distributed. Researchers found an 11 percent reduction in Covid cases in the villages given surgical masks, with a 35 percent reduction for people over age 60.

Another pandemic study randomly distributed masks to people in Denmark over a month. About half the participants wore the masks as recommended. Of those assigned to wear masks, 1.8 percent became infected, compared to 2.1 percent in the no-mask group — a 14 percent reduction. But researchers could not reach a firm conclusion about whether masks were protective because there were few infections in either group and fewer than half the people assigned masks wore them.

Why aren’t there more randomized studies on masks? We could have started some in early 2020, distributing masks in some towns when they weren’t widely available. It’s a shame we didn’t. But it would have been hard and unethical to deny masks to some people once they were available to all.

Scientists routinely use other kinds of data besides randomized reviews, including lab studies, natural experiments, real-life data and observational studies. All these should be taken into account to evaluate masks.

Lab studies, many of which were done during the pandemic, show that masks, particularly N95 respirators, can block viral particles. Linsey Marr, an aerosol scientist who has long studied airborne viral transmission, told me even cloth masks that fit well and use appropriate materials can help.

Real-life data can be complicated by variables that aren’t controlled for, but it’s worth examining even if studying it isn’t conclusive.

Japan, which emphasized wearing masks and mitigating airborne transmission, had a remarkably low death rate in 2020 even though it did not have any shutdowns and rarely tested and traced widely outside of clusters.

David Lazer, a political scientist at Northeastern University, calculated that before vaccines were available, U.S. states without mask mandates had 30 percent higher Covid death rates than those with mandates.

Perhaps the best evidence comes from natural experiments, which study how things change after an event or intervention.

Researchers at Mass General Brigham, one of Harvard’s teaching hospital groups, found that in early 2020, before mask mandates were introduced, the infection rate among health care workers doubled every 3.6 days and rose to 21.3 percent. After universal masking was required, the rate stopped increasing, and then quickly declined to 11.4 percent.

In Germany, 401 regions introduced mask mandates at various times over three months in the spring of 2020. By carefully comparing otherwise similar places before and after mask mandates, researchers concluded that “face masks reduce the daily growth rate of reported infections by around 47 percent,” with the effect more pronounced in large cities and among older people.

Brown, who led the review’s approval process, told me that mask mandates may not be tenable now, but he has a starkly different feeling about their effects in the first year of a pandemic.

“Mask mandates, social distancing, the other shutdowns we had in terms of even restaurants and things like that — if places like New York City didn’t do that, the number of deaths would have been much higher,” he told me. “I’m very confident of that statement.”

So the evidence is relatively straightforward: Consistently wearing a mask, preferably a high-quality, well-fitting one, provides protection against the coronavirus.

It’s also true that the highly contagious Omicron variant is much harder to avoid, especially because even people masking consistently can catch it from others in their social circle. Fortunately, Omicron arrived after vaccines and treatments were available.

Then why all the fuss?

Masks have become a symbol of frustration over shortcomings in the pandemic response. Some see a lack of mask mandates or a failure to wear masks as an abandonment of the clinically vulnerable. The pandemic’s burden has indeed fallen disproportionately on them.

Others have come to think mandates represent illogical rules. To be sure, we did have many illogical rules: mandating masks outdoors and even at beaches, or wearing them to enter a restaurant but not at the table, or requiring children as young as 2 to mask in day care but not during nap time (presumably, the virus also took a nap). Some mask proponents and public health authorities have also used weak studies to make overblown or imprecise claims about masks’ effectiveness.

So how should we evaluate an interview in which the lead author of the Cochrane review, Tom Jefferson, said of masks that the review determined “there is just no evidence that they make any difference”? As for whether N95s are better than surgical masks, Jefferson said, “makes no difference — none of it.”

It’s no surprise that Jefferson says he has no faith in masks’ ability to stop the spread of Covid.

In that interview, he said there is no basis to say the coronavirus is spread by airborne transmission — despite the fact that major public health agencies have long said otherwise. He has long doubted well-accepted claims about the virus. In an article he co-wrote in April 2020, Jefferson questioned whether the Covid outbreak was a pandemic at all, rather than just a long respiratory illness season. At that point, New York City schools had been closed for a month and Covid had killed thousands of New Yorkers. When New York was preparing “M*A*S*H”-like mobile hospitals in Central Park, he said there was no point in mitigations to slow the spread.

In an editorial accompanying a 2020 version of the review — the review is in its sixth update since 2006 — Soares-Wiser noted a lack of “robust, high-quality evidence for any behavioral measure or policy” and said that “when protecting the public from harm is the objective, public health officials must act in a precautionary manner to take action even when evidence is uncertain (or not of the highest quality).”

Jefferson, however, said in the interview that “the purpose of the editorial was to undermine our work.” Soares-Wiser strongly denied this, and asserted that her warning in that editorial would apply to this update as well.

Jefferson has not responded to emailed requests for comment.

As Marr notes, a respiratory virus outbreak with even higher death rates would cut these arguments tragically short. We need to be better prepared in many ways for the next pandemic, and one way is to continue to collect data on mask wearing, despite the challenges.

That, along with an honest assessment of what was done right and what might have been done better, could go a long way in resolving people’s questions and doubts.

Masks are a tool, not a talisman or a magic wand. They have a role to play when used appropriately and consistently at the right times. They should not be dismissed or demonized.