Today's Keith

SPECIAL COMMENT:

His whores in the House of Representatives led by Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Elise Stefanik have inadvertently admitted that Trump HAS been DISQUALIFIED from being president under the language of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. They have introduced a bill in the House declaring that Trump did not engage in insurrection and J.D. Vance did the same in the Senate and why does that sound SO FAMILIAR?

Oh, right! The final sentence of the 14th Amendment!

"Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

No they’re not CALLING it that; they may not even understand that THAT is what it IS, but they have just introduced measures in the House and the Senate to legally or symbolically enact the Congressional override OF The Disqualification Clause of the 14th Amendment AS PROVIDED IN the The Disqualification Clause of the 14th Amendment.

And to DO that you are admitting, explicitly or tacitly, that the 14th Amendment APPLIES TO TRUMP. Why declare him “not an insurrectionist” if it doesn’t matter whether anybody CALLS him an insurrectionist?

And the only reason you would actually INTRODUCE such a bill is if you A) were just told that the Supreme Court may very well agree that the Constitution is clear and Colorado is right and Trump is ALREADY disqualified and you had damn well better at least TRY to legislate him OUT of disqualification… OR – more likely - B) if you had just become convinced that all the other phony-baloney arguments saving Trump from disqualification like “he’s not an OFFICER” were falling apart and that this battle – in the Supreme Court, or in the legislature of every state of the union – is going to revert back to, is going to BOIL DOWN to, whether or not Disloyalty J. Trump “engaged in insurrection or rebellion or given aid or comfort to the enemies” and you need to give your master something – anything – a fig leaf, a cheeseburger, with which to cover himself for the battle to come.

Maybe a diaper.

A Letter

... to the editors at WaPo, from Alan Guttman in Hampton VA:

Opinion

The border bill shows the House is political theater

Regarding the Feb. 5 front-page article “Senate reveals border package”:

While Republican senators continue to work with their Democratic counterparts and President Biden to hammer out legislation to address issues around immigration and border security, more and more House Republicans are jumping on board former president Donald Trump’s ark toward injustice.

The convening of the House Homeland Security Committee to take up articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, along with the announcement from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) that a proposed Senate bill on immigration and border security would be “dead on arrival” in the House, is not political theater; it is insidious reality. These actions signal that many House Republicans have now chosen to follow the dictates of a U.S. citizen charged with 91 felonies rather than work with Mr. Biden, the only person who can sign their bills into law.

The former president’s harmful actions and inaction on Jan. 6, 2021, continue to fester within the same legislative body that was attacked on that day three years ago. Rather than doing his job and addressing the crisis at our southern border, Mr. Johnson has made clear his plans to essentially hold the House and the American people hostage at least until after the November election.

Mike Johnson is the latest in a string of malignantly incompetent GOP Speakers. And I lump him in with John Boehner and Paul Ryan, who seemed at the time to be trying to bring some regular order to a House that was rapidly degenerating into the Big Fuckin Mess it is now, because I think they both knew where it was headed, but they didn't get up on their hind legs and call it out.

And I think they were unable or unwilling to publicly criticize the rabble (then the Tea Party and now MAGA) because the establishment plutocrats were telling them to let it go, thinking the rubes were doing the work, and the fat cats would reap the rewards.

Even though more people are starting to recognize the danger, we could see the end of American democracy unless these next few election cycles go to the Blue side in a big way.

There's likely a thought that Trump has given us a taste of how bad the bad cop can be, and now it's time to send in the good cop - Nikki Haley.

Project Plutocracy is still on. Don't get cocky and start thinking it's all good, and we can go back to ignoring everything but our hobbies, funny animal videos, and our crazy friends on Instagram.

Democracy is not something we have

if it's not something we do

Win Or Lose

It can't be much fun to lose the vote to "None Of The Above".

So why is Nikki Haley willing to subject herself to all this?

She might be the most interesting aspect of this election cycle. 

• Why is she sticking with it?
• What's her strategy here?
• Is the point just to be a thorn in Trump's side?
• Is she really running for 2028?
• Are we seeing a kind of secret revolt of the GOP Normies?

Nikki Haley suffered an embarrassing defeat in Nevada’s Republican primary.

What happened?

She lost to an option to vote for “none” of the candidates listed. Trump skipped yesterday’s non-binding contest for tomorrow’s caucuses. (See full results here)

In the Democratic primary:

Biden won decisively. It was another step toward renomination, despite concerns about his age and how he’d fare against Trump in November.

Maybe we need to talk about that headline: "...Haley suffered an embarrassing defeat..."

Why can't the Press Poodles step outside their hidebound habit of reporting only on the ground-level obvious, and seem never to dig a little deeper - to ask a few of the questions that occur to some rank-amateur-random-nobody-blogger with no training or expertise?

The Portable Panic Room

The New Republic lines it out in good shape. I think it means we've developed a sense of special entitlement that has us thinking we get to set the rules according to our own worldview - and we get to back it up with a personal vigilantism that seems to be triggered by a kinda of permanent paranoid delusion.

Add to that a 30-year drumbeat of "government is worthless - you're on your own", which is courtesy of a very well-funded, nearly omnipresent wingnut media cartel that happily (and purposefully) feeds those delusions, and you've got a large part of the country ready to shoot anybody who crosses some imaginary line.

We’re All Bad Neighbors Now

What explains the rise of noise complaints and get-off-my-lawn violence in America? Research points to one intriguing possibility.

The limits of self-defense and the nature of vigilantism are both perennial American debate topics, but this spring, they boomed louder than ever. In March, a woman in the Bronx stabbed her neighbor to death over a noise complaint. In April, a 20-year-old woman was shot and died after she accidentally turned into the wrong driveway. In May, Daniel Penny, a white ex-Marine, put Jordan Neely, a Michael Jackson impersonator and mentally ill Black man, in a 15-minute-long headlock on a subway in New York City, killing him. It’s anyone’s guess what June will bring.

Trying to make sense of this senseless and ubiquitous violence, whether on the national news or in your nearest NextDoor group, inevitably leads to a handful of rote explanations: There are too many guns, Fox News profits off paranoia, structural racism and impoverishment breeds “random violence.” Or, something is wrong in the minds of Americans, “a mental health crisis grips the city,” people need opportunities to safely express their inner anger. Or both. All we know for certain is that you either die young or you live to become the bad neighbor.

For that is the real crux of the issue: Our definition of “personal space” is expanding, with dire political consequences. The “get off my lawn” logic of a Clint Eastwood movie, the enshrined rights of the “homeowner,” and the cult of personal property have infiltrated even the most public of spaces: the sidewalk, the city bus, the grocery store parking lot. Intrusion of any kind registers as a cataclysmic event for the person trapped inside their own portable panic room. This rageful individualism shows up in more subtle ways too: Everyone is setting boundaries with the “toxic people” in their lives. Every day is Beef, or The Banshees of Inisherin. And the bigger your bubble is, the bigger its inevitable burst.

In the 1960s, anthropologist Edward T. Hall posited that there are four concentric invisible circles radiating outward from every human being. The smallest ring, within 1.5 feet of the subject’s skin barrier, he named the “intimate.” The next circle, radiating outward from 1.5 feet to about four feet, was “personal.” From there, stretching out to about 12 feet, existed the “social.” The final ring, from about 12 to 24 feet, was the “public.”

Researchers in proxemics—that is, the study of the human use of space—have always understood that the radii of our personal circles “are not static,” says Vikas Mehta, a professor of urbanism at the University of Cincinnati. Proxemic boundaries shift in response to numerous stimuli: motion, touch, volume, body angle, and even skin temperature. These lines of demarcation also vary widely across cultures: Peruvians get much closer than Romanians; Americans are, perhaps surprisingly, somewhere in the global middle, with an average personal space bubble clocking in at 3.1 feet. But everyone has some amount of “personal” territory—and, it follows, territoriality.

This flexibility is useful. Though populated by strangers, a rush hour city bus is the definition of “intimate.” To cope with this crushing proximity, people may use noise-canceling headphones, hold an open newspaper between themselves and the world, or opt for what one researcher in 1999 called the “New York non-person phenomenon”—in essence, a strategic dissociation.

Conversely, and less helpfully, our sense of what’s ours can expand outward. “Road rage” only makes sense if we accept that the driver’s body has, in some meaningful way, grown to encompass their SUV.

More recent findings suggest that Covid-19 changed our spatial reality. During the early phases of the pandemic, millions were confined to their homes and asked to remain hypervigilant in public settings. Anything closer than six feet of distance between strangers implied contamination, both literal and metaphorical, Mehta says. One 2021 study, conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital with just 19 participants, who were tested before and during the pandemic, found that the subjects’ perception of their personal space expanded by 40 to 50 percent on average in response to these public health measures. What was once a roughly three-foot-wide bubble grew, by the second assessment, to about 4.1 feet around. Other senses may also have been affected: Noise complaints have been on the rise for the last half-decade in some cities. The world temporarily quieted in the lockdown, but our sensitivity to sound seems to have only grown in the post-vax period, if noise complaints data in 2021 is anything to go by.

It’s unclear how widespread or long-lasting these trends really were; the current body of pandemic proxemic research is too small to generate any robust conclusions. But it’s hard not to wonder, when surveying the available data, whether many people may still be experiencing a kind of post-pandemic culture shock, without ever having left their neighborhood.

Or, put another way: If Hall’s second circle—the personal—is expanding, Mehta says it likely comes at the expense of the third sphere: the ever-shrinking social.

The “social” space between humans, extending from four to 12 feet, is the domain in which much of modern life unfolds: Store aisles are often between three and five feet wide. Sidewalks may be as little as five feet across. Even in parking lots, drivers rarely have enough room to fully open their doors. So we slip, slide, and squeeze our way through life—usually without incident.

But personal space “invasions” can elicit a range of negative emotions, from squirming discomfort to simmering rage. Sometimes these strong reactions are justified, as in the case of violations like sexual assault, abuse, or physical intimidation. No one has the right to invade another person’s personal space, however defined. Just as often, however, the way people react to close encounters with strangers can feel disproportionate to the situation—as if pent-up anger from other aspects of life were brought to the surface simply by the heat of so many bodies.

While fearmongering about the “state of our cities” is undeserved, anyone who claims not to have witnessed this widespread pain and anger is simply not paying attention. Even the privileged few who have managed to shelter in their stylized homes are showing their social maladjustment: What is the fixation on setting boundaries with “toxic people,” or over-identifying with Ali Wong in Beef, or the widespread claim of “overstimulation,” if not the bourgeois manifestation of these larger obsessions with protecting personal space above all else?

In many ways, our current way of relating to one another feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. In summer 2020, in the midst of the nationwide protests over the murder of George Floyd, we heard ceaseless reports framing property damage as “violence”—as if a police station or a bank storefront were a vulnerable person. Now, when strangers attempt to use property deemed personal—whether a car in a public lot, a driveway to a private home, or, in the minds of some, even a subway car—this is treated as a form of bodily “violence,” an implicit threat to life and limb.

But this version of personal property rights is also co-opting narratives that felt, at one time, diametrically opposed to individualism. In the pandemic, there was an increased focus on cooperation and neighborliness. In the wake of the virus, conversations sprang up nationally about the importance of being involved in one’s community, offering mutual aid, protecting and supporting each other—doing the work of being what Jane Jacobs once called “the eyes on the street.” For every think piece about the benefits of remote work, one can find three or four insisting that adult dormitories, or co-working spaces, or other means of building community are the only answer to Americans’ “loneliness crisis.”

Now it’s clear that these ideals, however noble, can branch off in unexpected ways. You can be the “eyes on the street” for the police. You can use the rationale of “protecting others” to kill someone. While many are mourning Neely, others are valorizing the man who killed him. “You don’t have to wait until some innocent person is stabbed or killed to spring into action,” a letter to the editor of the New York Post read. “The victim made threats and was acting in a belligerent manner. Daniel Penny is a total hero.”

The most potent solutions for our current social crisis—like a weapons ban, or constraints on the purchase of ammunition—feel all but impossible politically. In the absence of hope for collective action, people waste time and money on individualistic fads, like anger management classes. Or worse, they opt out of the social sphere, as part of the “agoraphobic fantasy” of bourgeois ownership, Zoe Hu writes in Dissent.

But at least as far as proxemics are at play, there are opportunities to modify our built environments for the better, without reducing density. Cities could offer tax breaks or other subsidies for people who want to install noise-insulated windows and acoustic wall panels. Investments in public transit—with an eye toward more and more frequent trains or buses, and design modifications like removing middle seats—could free up space. And to help foster safer interactions between neighbors, municipalities should focus on advertisements in public spaces, or even online and in-person workshops, about what bystander intervention is (and what it isn’t).

Most importantly, citizens must remain present in public spaces—especially those who might otherwise have the money to opt out and spend more time in private spheres. Social space only works with other people in it. When an entire class opts for Ubers over light rail or blood-spattered tabloid stories over the reality on the street—essentially an in-situ white flight—the social sphere can tip from rumored decay to real disaster. As always, it’s the people who can’t afford another option who will suffer most. So if there’s one story we tell ourselves, let’s hope it’s this: We must fight to protect the bubble we share.

The Terrorists Are The Republicans

TRUMP'S RIGHT:
IN BORDER BILL, 100% CHANCE OF REPUBLICAN TERRORISM

2.6.24
SERIES 2 EPISODE 117: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT:
When Trump says “there is now a 100% chance that there will be major terror attacks in the USA” he is right and after the weekend and yesterday, now we KNOW WHY he is right and what he means: He means terror attacks BY the Republican Party.

Trump for once is right: terrorism is here, and the terrorists are the Republicans.

The GOP under Trump is now the party of blackmail and extortion and destruction and terrorism: vote for us or we’ll destroy whatever we can get our hands on. Joe Biden agrees to a draconian overreaction to the migration issue that is more than the most xenophobic, most dogmatic Republican Fascist could ever DREAM of living long enough to see actually enacted, and instead of passing it before lunch just in case Biden changes his mind, they have lied about it, and attacked it, and killed it, and exacerbated the EXACT problem they claim to be fighting, and if they are correct IN THE SLIGHTEST about the gravity of the border and immigration situations, they – the Republican Party – THEY will kill Americans. THEY, the Republicans, will be ushering the criminals they claim are seeking a home here. THEY, the Republicans, will be carrying in and distributing the fentanyl they claim the immigrants are all carrying. THEY, the Republicans, will be killing Americans. And then they’ll run on the crisis THEY have caused.

If a foreign country, or a jihadist group, or a re-born Al-Qaeda, or a pack of wild communists managed to interrupt America’s control of her own border, and successfully interfered with America’s financial and military aid to its own allies around the world, and blocked our humanitarian aid to civilian war victims, and infiltrated and radicalized and made into THEIR agents some of our political leaders who then made public promises to derail, and disrupt, and SABOTAGE our Senate and our House and our Government… this nation under the leadership of either political party or a combination of them would immediately use the means provided by our laws of national self-defense… to STOP them. To STOP the terrorists.

Plus: Trump now thinks he's...Elvis?

B-Block (20:15) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS:
It's all TV News news: CNN blows up the morning again as the new boss damages his staff more than even Licht did. Tucker Carlson is in Moscow because you CAN fool all of the Tucker all of the time. And I think this qualifies as a national security crisis AND a brain drain AND a journalism crisis: reportedly, President Biden has come to rely on the advice of Joe Scarborough, who 30 years ago was loyal to Newt Gingrich and 8 years ago was trying to mainstream Trump and get his Vice Presidential slot and would say anything to anybody if it got him power. Plus, he's turned MSNBC's morning show into the equivalent of Sean Hannity advising Trump. It, and he, stinks.


C-Block (43:00) OOOH A TEASE:

Brian Ray and John Philip Shenale are about to debut new music for the show!

About That Retribution Thing

It never fails. People get behind a guy like Trump, and it's like they assume he's going to behave the way they would if the roles were reversed - at least giving them the benefit of the doubt, or keeping a scorecard so he can trade on favors later if he needs to.

But of course he doesn't. The man has no honor - and he demonstrates that almost daily - so it's more than a little stupid to expect honorable behavior from him.

🤪 duh 🤨

Republicans fear they will be targets in Trump’s ‘retribution’ campaign

The former president is already attacking those who have endorsed his GOP opponents or have crossed him in other ways

Donald Trump has promised a presidency of “retribution” if he wins another term in office. Many Republicans fear they might face the brunt of it.

The former president has threatened to have donors to his Republican opponent Nikki Haley “permanently barred” from his orbit. A top adviser has vowed to destroy the career of Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), House Freedom Caucus chair, after he endorsed another Trump challenger, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The Trump campaign has also attempted to condemn former aides who worked for his rivals during the GOP nomination fight and have twisted arms demanding endorsements, telling lawmakers that Trump will remember exactly when they backed him.

“MAGA disowns her and anyone else that associates/works with her,” read a recent Trump campaign social media message targeting the Trump campaign’s 2020 communications director for working last year to elect DeSantis. “TRAITOR!”

Even new House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has been dragged into the crossfire. One of his top political consultants, Jason Hebert, works for Axiom Strategies, a consulting company that advised the DeSantis presidential effort. A Trump adviser called Johnson after he won the speakership to warn him not to work with Axiom, according to multiple people familiar with the call, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal details. Hebert, a college friend of Johnson’s, is expected to start billing his work for Johnson through a company not tied to Axiom, one of the people said.

The high-dollar donor community, which has been told in various ways to rally quickly behind Trump, has taken notice.

“People took that as, ‘I am going to be president and I am going to investigate you,’” said Katon Dawson, a former South Carolina GOP chairman and Haley backer, when Trump threatened to punish her donors. “There is always a threat. If you are not for him he’s against you.”

Trump’s top advisers say the efforts to cajole and punish within the party are not a central part of their strategy, and some close to Trump point out that the former president can be quick to forgive when it is in his interest. Trump has long distinguished himself as both surprisingly vicious and disarmingly transactional, often willing to forgive intractable enmity for short-term gain.

Hours after DeSantis endorsed him, Trump dropped use of his vicious nicknames — saying he was retiring them — and praised the Florida governor. This past week, Trump’s top aide, Susie Wiles, addressed some of the country’s most affluent donors in Palm Beach, Fla. In her presentation, Wiles did not make threats, and instead shared data and attempted to woo the donors with a carrot-more-than-stick approach, people with knowledge of the meeting said.

“The campaign is singularly focused on one thing — beating Crooked Joe Biden and winning back the White House,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, in a statement.

Trump has complained repeatedly to advisers that Republicans are not loyal enough and often shares more anger for Republicans who buck or criticize him than for Democrats. In 2021 and 2022, he made it a near-singular mission to defeat Republican lawmakers who voted for his impeachment and who publicly disputed his claims of election fraud.

There are other signs that Trump’s team has used a heavy hand. His campaign sent word to other operatives that if they worked for DeSantis, they would no longer be able to work for Trump, according to people with knowledge of the comments. One message sent to former aide who did not heed the warnings read, “RIP,” according to a person familiar with the exchange.

The former president’s advisers have discussed trying to change personnel at the Republican National Committee to install people they view as more in line with Trump and controlled by Trump’s campaign, according to people familiar with the discussions. It is unclear exactly how they would do this, but Trump said in a Sunday morning interview with Fox Business that there would be changes at the RNC. The former president has discussed trying to immediately remove Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) from his Senate leadership post should he be reelected, and has told advisers that he would want to immediately fire Christopher A. Wray, who was appointed by Trump as FBI director, following multiple federal investigations since he left office.

Some allies have kept lists of Republicans who have been critical of Trump in a bid to block them from getting jobs in a second term, according to a person with knowledge of the list. “You have a lot of people who want to come back in, but we remember what people have said in the past,” one longtime Trump ally said.

During a grueling primary, Trump has told advisers that he wants to make sure Ron DeSantis is not the GOP presidential nominee in 2028 and that he wanted to make his 2024 loss painful, people who heard his comments said. He has floated attacking lesser-known senators for not immediately endorsing him, according to people who have spoken to Trump.

Trump’s team turned up the pressure on endorsement holdouts ahead of the Iowa caucuses, and the former president quickly embraced the January endorsement of Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R) just months after calling him “hopeless” in a social media post. Trump warned Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R), who resisted calls to endorse Trump in 2021, that he “must be very careful” about his 2024 reelection race in a December social media post, while aides leaked word that Trump was talking of doing something more to punish his former 2016 rival. Cruz endorsed Trump after the Iowa caucuses, and Trump embraced the move as “wonderful.”

Texas House speaker Dade Phelan (R) led the impeachment effort against Texas attorney general Ken Paxton (R), a Trump ally, and later endorsed Trump’s presidential campaign. Just days later, Trump endorsed Phelan’s opponent, saying in a social media post that Phelan’s support did “not mitigate the Absolute Embarrassment Speaker Phelan inflicted upon the State of Texas and our Great Republican Party!”

He obliquely threatened Haley during his speech in New Hampshire, saying she would soon be under investigation for various things — without naming them — and allies of Trump have fanned rumors about her personal life.

Haley, as Trump’s last opponent for the nomination, has tried to make Trump’s efforts to punish fellow Republicans a central message of her campaign. She has said she represents a different, more unifying kind of politics.

“That’s a president who is supposed to serve every person in America, and you are deciding that you are going to have a club and actually ban people from being in and out of your club?” she said in a recent Fox News interview.

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R), a major backer of Trump, joined the pressure game during an appearance in New Hampshire with Trump, when he took a jab at his own state education superintendent, Ellen Weaver, for being the only statewide elected official who has not yet endorsed the former president. Trump advisers and allies in South Carolina have pressured Weaver, who has demurred, saying she did not want to take a position in the race, people with knowledge of the talks said.

“She’s a rookie and she will figure it out before long,” McMaster said about Weaver. Since those comments, Weaver and McMaster spoke privately, according to people familiar with the call.

Other conflicts have been fueled in public by Trump’s staff, who made a point of attacking consultants and supporters of DeSantis last year as part of a campaign to create discord within his operations. Chris LaCivita, a top aide to Trump, repeatedly attacked Axiom strategist Jeff Roe, who had previously auditioned for a role in the Trump campaign.

Trump has told advisers that his opinion of Roe, who he once praised publicly as a formidable strategist, has changed after watching the now-shuttered DeSantis campaign because he now views him as a “loser,” in Trump’s words. Trump has nonetheless endorsed a number of candidates who have Axiom as a consultant.

Several Axiom employees who worked for Trump in 2020 went to work for DeSantis. When one of them, Erin Perrine, appeared on Fox Business in January she was immediately targeted by the Trump campaign’s social media account, which called her out after Fox chose to identify her as a former Trump adviser.

“She chose to side with DeSanctimonious and nothing can ever wash that foul stench,” the Team Trump post said, using a derogatory Trump nickname for the Florida governor.

LaCivita was also behind a recent attack on Good, a congressman from his home state of Virginia for endorsing DeSantis. Aides were upset by Good’s suggestion that DeSantis had a better chance than Trump of winning a general election.

“Bob Good won’t be electable when we get done with him,” LaCivita said in a text message to Cardinal News, a publication that covers politics in southern Virginia.

Such moves have cast a pall over the Republican caucus, quieting public challenges to Trump’s control of the Republican Party. One of the reasons more Senate Republicans have begun endorsing Trump, according to a strategist with knowledge of the talks, is they would prefer to avoid his wrath if he becomes the nominee. Trump’s endorsements in 2022 Senate races were decisive in multiple contested primaries, though several of those candidates later lost the general election.

Johnson has told people that he speaks to Trump regularly and tries to solicit Trump’s opinion.

People close to McConnell say he has assiduously avoided fighting with Trump even when goaded by others to do so — or even when Trump has attacked his wife, former transportation secretary Elaine Chao. After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, McConnell held Trump responsible, calling his actions beforehand “a disgraceful dereliction of duty” and “unconscionable behavior.” McConnell described Trump’s political clout as “diminished” after the 2022 elections. The two men have not spoken since 2020, and McConnell has largely avoided even saying Trump’s name.

McConnell has yet to endorse Trump, but he has also refrained from making any recent critical statements. “I’ve stayed essentially out of it,” he told reporters on the day of the New Hampshire primary. “And when I change my mind about that, I’ll let you know.”

After Trump won the New Hampshire primary, McConnell began referring to the former president as “the nominee.”

Today's Beau

It's Trump's fault.

Today's Today

Four years ago, we had no idea what shit was coming our way.

 (Before CNN went completely in the tank)

A seemingly healthy woman’s sudden death is now the first known US coronavirus-related fatality

By Sarah Moon, CNN
April 24, 2020

A 57-year-old Northern California woman whose February 6 death has become the first known coronavirus-related fatality in the US had been in relatively good health, her brother told CNN.

She was Patricia Dowd, a Bay Area woman who worked as a manager for a semiconductor company and who “exercised routinely, watched her diet and took no medication,” the Los Angeles Times first reported Wednesday.

Rick Cabello, Dowd’s older brother, told CNN she didn’t smoke and was in good health.

“She was an athlete in her high school days, she was always active,” Cabello said Wednesday. Her sudden death was a shock to family members. They all believed it was a heart attack, Cabello said.

California’s Santa Clara County had announced Tuesday that tissue samples confirmed two people who had died in early February tested positive for coronavirus – well before the United States’ previously understood first coronavirus-related death on February 29 in Washington state.

One victim was a 57-year-old woman who died on February 6, and the other was a 69-year-old man who died on February 17, the county said. The county did not name the woman, but Cabello told the Los Angeles Times and CNN that she was Dowd, his sister.

Neither patient had a recent history of travel that would have exposed them to the virus, Santa Clara County Department of Public Health Director Dr. Sara Cody said in a Wednesday news conference, and officials are presuming both cases represent community transmission.

‘She had flu-like symptoms’

Before Dowd was found dead February 6, “she had flu-like symptoms for a few days, then appeared to recover,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

“She wasn’t feeling well, which was very unusual for her,” Cabello said. “I remember her specifically saying ‘I’m not feeling well,’” he added.

She also had canceled plans to go a weekend funeral, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Dowd started working from home as her condition improved and had been in touch with a colleague around 8 a.m. on the day of her death. She was found dead about two hours later, according to the Los Angeles Times.

A traveler and ‘everybody’s rock’

Dowd was a frequent world traveler, her brother said.

She had planned to travel to China later this year and went abroad “multiple times a year to different global locations,” a family member told the Los Angeles Times. Dowd had a history of foreign travel, as did her coworkers at Lam Research, the newspaper also reported.

Dowd was “hardworking, loyal, and caring,” Cabello told the Los Angeles Times.

“She was the energy person in her large network of friends,” her brother said. “She was everybody’s rock.”

In a tribute wall set up for Patricia Dowd by the Cusimano Family Colonial Mortuary, a coworker wrote, “I’ll always remember the kindness and generosity of her spirit. She was genuinely caring and had an amazing energy.”

TIME LINE

• December 31, 2019: China reports mysterious pneumonia cases to the World Health Organization.
• January 7, 2020: China says the cases were caused by a new coronavirus.
• January 17: US starts screening for symptoms at certain airports.
• January 21: First US case confirmed in Washington state.
• January 31: US says it will deny entry to foreign nationals who’ve traveled in China in the last 14 days.
• February 6: A person in California’s Santa Clara County dies of coronavirus; link not confirmed until April 21.
• February 17: A second person in California’s Santa Clara County dies of coronavirus; link not confirmed until April 21.
• February 26: CDC announces what’s then thought to be the first possible US case of community spread, in California.
• February 29: A patient dies of coronavirus in Washington state – then believed to be the country’s first novel coronavirus death.

Neither of the two victims who died in February had been tested for the virus at the time of their deaths because testing capacity was limited, Santa Clara County officials said Tuesday in a news release.

Tests were only available through the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and were restricted to people who had a known travel history and showed certain symptoms.

Both of the victims who passed away in February had flu-like symptoms before dying, county officials said.

“Because there was continued suspicion by the medical examiner that these deaths were caused by Covid-19, the medical examiner sent autopsy tissue to the CDC for definitive testing,” the coroner’s office said in a statement.

As the county investigates more deaths, it’s likely that more will be tied to the virus, officials said. And that adds to evidence that suggests the current case and death tallies across the country may be significant undercounts.

A Podcast

If you like the way it's going in Russia, you're gonna fucking love the next time a Republican wins the White House.

They're not bothering to hide it or dog-whistle it - they're saying it all out loud and as often as possible.

Charlie Sykes is good at pretending all the bad stuff that's been happening in the GOP started when Trump came down the golden escalator.

Trump did not remake the GOP in own image. He's the perfect reflection of what that party has been morphing into for decades.

Bedfellows

There was a time I would've been on the same side with this lady - with a few exceptions. Of course, that was a jillion years ago when it was still OK to be a Pro-Choice Progressive Republican.

Before the GOP lost its fucking mind. Glad I'm out, and I fully expect I'll never be able to return.

The 91-year-old Republican suing to kick Donald Trump off the ballot

Norma Anderson, a trailblazing former GOP legislator, is among the Colorado voters who have challenged the Republican front-runner’s candidacy in a case that will be heard by the Supreme Court

LAKEWOOD, Colo. — Norma Anderson left the Colorado legislature nearly two decades ago but she still keeps a copy of the state’s statutes in her home office. She carries a pocket Constitution in her purse. She has another copy, slightly larger with images of the Founding Fathers on the cover, that she leaves on a table in her sitting room so she can consult it when she watches TV.

She’s turned down a page corner in that copy to mark the spot where the 14th Amendment appears. She has reread it several times since joining a lawsuit last year that cites the amendment in seeking to stop Donald Trump from running for president.

Anderson, 91, is the unlikely face of a challenge to Trump’s campaign that will be heard by the Supreme Court on Thursday. She was a force in Colorado politics for decades, serving as the first female majority leader in both chambers of the legislature. She is a Republican but has long been skeptical of Trump and believes he is an insurrectionist who crossed a verboten line on Jan. 6, 2021, that should bar him from holding office again.

“He tried to overturn an election,” she said. “The very first time I ever ran, I didn’t win. I didn’t go out and try to change the election. I said, ‘Whoops, work harder next time, lady.’”

The 2024 election could turn on whether the Supreme Court agrees with Anderson and five other Republican and independent voters who persuaded Colorado’s top court to rule that Trump is ineligible to run again. The justices — three of whom were nominated by Trump — are expected to quickly decide the historic Trump v. Anderson case, with their ruling likely to apply across all 50 states.

Although considered a legal long shot, a decision in Anderson’s favor would jolt American politics by preventing the GOP front-runner from continuing his campaign. However the justices rule, they are likely to displease a large chunk of an intensely polarized electorate.

The case is built on the 14th Amendment, which was adopted three years after the end of the Civil War to guarantee rights for the formerly enslaved and to prevent former Confederates from returning to power. That latter provision, known as Section 3, is written broadly to say those who engage in insurrection after taking an oath to support the Constitution cannot hold office.

Anderson’s lawsuit, brought with the help of the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), argues Trump can’t appear on Colorado’s March 5 primary ballot because he engaged in insurrection before and during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Colorado’s high court agreed in a 4-3 ruling in December, and Trump appealed the case to the Supreme Court.

Section 3 was dormant for more than a century but received new attention after Jan. 6. CREW spearheaded a lawsuit in 2022 that bounced a county commissioner in New Mexico out of office because of his role in the attack on the Capitol.

Eric Olson, an attorney for the group of Colorado voters, argues the case before the state Supreme Court in December. (David Zalubowski/AP/Pool)
The debates over whether Section 3 can block Trump from office have not always followed clean ideological lines. Some prominent conservative scholars have contended Trump should be deemed ineligible for office, even as some liberals have argued the best way to shore up democracy is to defeat Trump at the ballot box.

Polls show the country is split on whether Trump should be disqualified. The former president has called the attempts in Colorado and other states to remove him from the ballot an anti-democratic attempt to interfere with the election.

Before attorney Mario Nicolais approached Norma Anderson to be part of the lawsuit seeking to bar Trump from the ballot, he asked Pam Anderson, the 2022 Republican nominee for Colorado secretary of state. She decided not to do it but suggested Nicolais try her mother-in-law. Nicolais, a research analyst for Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign who is now working with CREW, was thrilled to learn a Republican luminary might consider signing on and called Norma Anderson. She agreed on the spot.

“The short answer was ‘Yes,’” Nicolais said. “And the long answer was ‘Hell yes.’”

Also signing on to the suit were a former Republican member of Congress from Rhode Island who now lives in Colorado; a teacher; a former deputy chief of staff to a Republican governor; a former executive director of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Larimer County; and a conservative columnist for the Denver Post.

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung called CREW a “front group” for Democrats that is using plaintiffs who are RINOs — Republicans in name only — to give themselves political cover. In a written statement, he noted legal efforts to kick Trump off the primary ballot in other states have failed. “We believe a fair ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States will keep President Trump on the ballot and allow the American people to re-elect him to the White House,” Cheung said.

Raised a Republican, Anderson said she was attracted to the party’s belief in fiscal restraint, personal responsibility and a strong national defense. She hosted a reception for Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona years before he became the 1964 Republican nominee for president. She oversaw Republican caucuses as a party committeewoman. And she knocked on doors to help GOP candidates long before mounting campaigns of her own.

She won a seat in the Colorado House in 1986, four years after losing her first bid. Her status as the first female majority leader means less to her, she said in an interview in her suburban Denver home, than what she considers her legislative accomplishments — creating the Colorado Transportation Department, rewriting the state’s school funding system and establishing a visiting nurse program.

During her tenure in the legislature, Anderson was considered a conservative who could work with others but knew how to get her way, said Dick Wadhams, a political consultant and former chairman of the Colorado Republican Party.

“Once she decided where she was on an issue, she stuck to that,” he said. “She didn’t waver. And I think that’s one of the reasons why she was so popular at the time with Republicans, because she was strong. Nobody pushed Norma around.”

Mike Beasley, who worked with Anderson when he was the chief lobbyist for Gov. Bill Owens (R), said he had “watched her bring in the biggest bullies in politics and lock that door in her office and say, ‘Here’s how it’s going to be, boys. We’re going to work this out. We’re going to figure it out.’ And 9 out of 10 times she got her way 100 percent.”

Anderson surprised her colleagues when she abruptly quit the state Senate in 2006, a year before her term was up. She stayed active in politics but began to have reservations about a party that she believed was focusing too much on people’s personal lives.

When Trump was the party’s presidential nominee in 2016 and 2020, she voted for third-party candidates. She quit the Republican Party in 2018 because of Trump but rejoined it in 2021. “I thought, you know, I’m the Republican. They aren’t,” she said.

She said her Republican friends have supported her decision to join the lawsuit. “There’s other Republicans that think I’m a RINO,” Anderson said. “It doesn’t bother me.”

The justices on Colorado’s top court faced a wave of threats after they issued their ruling, as did Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D) after she decided Trump should be kept off the ballot in her state. (Bellows’s decision was put on hold by a state court until the Supreme Court decides the Colorado case.)

Anderson said she knew she could face harassment when she signed up for the lawsuit but would not be deterred. “I don’t frighten very easily,” she said.

Krista Kafer, a Denver Post columnist who is another plaintiff, studied up on the case, prayed about it and consulted with her mother before deciding to join the lawsuit. She said she did so in part because she would want Democrats to do the same if a leader of their party did what Trump did after losing an election. And if Trump isn’t barred from running, she said, future presidents may incite violence if they lose their reelection bids.

“Only this time it’s not going to be, you know, a guy with Viking horns and a bunch of people with poles and makeshift weapons,” she said. “If this becomes the new normal, what does the next one look like? Bigger crowd, better weapons.”

Friends have been supportive, but some acquaintances have cut ties with her because of the lawsuit, she said. A neighbor told her she was worried she would go to hell. Others have taken to social media to label her, variously, a Nazi, a communist, a Satanist and a RINO.

Kafer left the Republican Party when Trump became the nominee in 2016 and voted for a third-party candidate that year. In 2020, she said, she reluctantly voted for Trump, figuring he was better than Joe Biden. She said she was horrified when Trump refused to concede and relentlessly repeated lies about the election that fueled the attack on the Capitol.

Part of what brought her back to the Republican Party during Trump’s time in office was his appointment of conservatives to the bench. She said she thought Democrats treated Brett M. Kavanaugh unfairly when they considered his nomination to the Supreme Court by focusing on allegations, which he strenuously denied, that he sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford when both were teenagers.

Now, Kavanaugh will be among the justices hearing the case about Trump’s future, as will the other two Trump nominees, Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. Kafer is not worried they’ll be swayed by who nominated them, saying she views the justices as fair brokers.

“They love the Constitution and they love the country, and they also know they’re under a microscope,” she said. “Anything that’s human is flawed, but the Supreme Court seems to me to be the most functional part of our system right now in that you don’t see them bad-mouth each other. They don’t tweet.”

Another justice, Clarence Thomas, has faced calls to recuse himself from cases involving Trump because his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, urged the Trump White House and lawmakers to overturn the election.

Anderson said she understood she might lose the case, but believed that bringing the lawsuit was worth it regardless.

Either way, she said, the challenge will help more people “realize how serious January 6th was and the fact that dear Donald was part of it.”