You may have noticed that, suddenly, after seven months of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s singular aspiration being to inoculate corporations from pandemic complications rather than actual people, McConnell finally reinserted himself back into relief negotiations—significantly boosting the prospects for a deal.
That’s because McConnell finally decided that he himself might have something to lose if he failed to lift so much as a single finger to help millions of Americans at risk of going of hungry and suffering financial devastation. What was that something? His Senate majority.
On a phone call with GOP senators, McConnell told the caucus that their colleagues Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who are both facing runoffs next month, were “getting hammered” over the issue of direct payments for individuals and families, according to CNN’s Manu Raju. Apparently the optics of two of the richest and most corrupt U.S. senators failing to go to bat for people who are actually getting hammered by the pandemic haven’t been great for Loeffler and Perdue—particularly when their leader’s so-called red line is immunizing giant corporations from any financial hardships.
And so, seven months after House Democrats passed the $3 trillion HEROES Act stimulus package, the white-hot inspiration of self-interest spurred McConnell to action. That’s why getting a congressional deal is now on the table and issuing direct payments to help Americans survive the darkest months of the pandemic is suddenly part of the discussion again. Democrats, who had championed another round of such payments for months, had been forced to drop it from talks because the same Republicans who passed a trillion-dollar tax giveaway to corporations in 2017 couldn’t bring themselves to do the same for desperate Americans during the pandemic.
But that’s all changed now. Nothing like the prospect of personal gain to focus the conservative mind. McConnell wants his majority dammit and those two Georgia Senate seats have been worth a pretty penny and then some for Perdue and Loeffler.
And while Democrats are now doing their best to leverage the GOP’s sudden change of miserly heart, the entire episode is a window into the next couple years of gridlock if McConnell manages to keep his precious majority, as The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent pointed out. Because without the immediate threat of an upcoming election to serve as a reminder that elected public servants are in fact supposed to be responsive to their constituents’ needs in a representative democracy, McConnell will revert immediately back to his usual posture of not lifting a finger for anyone but those in the GOP’s elite donor class.
It was expected, once Donald Trump shuffled off stage taking with him plans to overthrow the government and collaborate with dictators, that Republicans would set the outrage bar back to the point where suit color or condiment choice were rant worthy. Just like Republicans can be expected to miraculously recover the ability to comprehend the word “deficit.” What’s surprising is just how fast this reset of delicate sensibilities is kicking into gear.
On Wednesday evening, Republicans dragged their fainting couches out of storage, dusted them off, and promptly sprawled full length in trembling concern because … Joe Biden’s choice to be White House deputy chief of staff called Republicans in Congress “f*ckers” in a yet to be published Glamour Magazine interview. Sorry, folks in the Northeast. Before you take your children out to play, be advised that that’s not a blizzard outside. It’s just Republicans returning to their snowflake form.
As Axios reports, there is widespread concern because Jen O’Malley Dillon called Republicans on Capitol Hill … one of the kinder terms she might have used. Considering that a quick search finds 41 times that Donald Trump referred to people as “idiots” it would seem that Republicans have a decidedly unidirectional thin skin. There are also the 246 times in the last few years that Trump tweeted about someone being “stupid,” including the time when he talked about Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s “stupid wife.” It’s unclear whether this is worse than when Trump insulted Ted Cruz’s wife, which apparently caused Cruz to swear his undying affection. Maybe that, like Trump’s comments to Access Hollywood, was all just “locker room talk.”
According to the Axios story, some donors to Biden are also concerned. They feel like Jen O’Malley Dillon should apologize “to Biden and perhaps to congressional Republicans,” because her statement doesn’t fit with the idea of Biden trying to bring the nation together.
Here’s the problem with those donors … they are also f*ckers.
Yes, Joe Biden intends to run a White House that’s not just progressive but positive, with an intention of showing concern for healing the rift that Trump has spent the last four years prying open with crowbars of racism, intolerance, and generic hate. But that rift will not be healed by ignoring it, or by ignoring how Republicans on Capitol Hill didn’t just stand by, but brought buckets of salt for the wound. You don’t get past a crime by refusing to recognize the criminals.
The Republicans that Biden’s incoming deputy chief of staff called out are those who have aided and abetted Trump in demeaning the press, diminishing the role of medical experts in a time of crisis, and exacerbating both racism and intolerance of the LGBTQ community. Preventing Jen O’Malley Dillon from leveling a nice, meaty Anglo-Saxon term their way isn’t healing a wound, it’s pretending that these people—126 of whom just signed on to an attempt to explicitly overturn the government—are not complicit in Trump’s actions.
Even if these sensitive souls are convinced that America needs a truth and reconciliation committee more than it needs to spend the next four years on an oh-so-satisfying quest to see that everyone who helped Trump grease the slope to authoritarianism gets their day in court (and months in jail), truth and reconciliation starts with truth. Jen O’Malley Dillon was just delivering the truth.
Congress is getting close to a deal for a new round of COVID-19 relief, but, with that package attached to a larger, must-pass government spending deal, the negotiations are unlikely to finish up in time to hit the Friday night deadline to avert a government shutdown. That means that Congress will need to pass another short-term continuing resolution to keep the government open for long enough to finalize something that should have been done months ago.
As a reminder, the House passed the HEROES Act, a $3 trillion stimulus package, in May, and a revamped $2.2 trillion HEROES Act in October. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sat on it until now, with many people set to lose unemployment benefits on December 26.
We still don’t know the final details on the COVID-19 relief that’s expected to pass … sometime soon. The broad outlines of what’s expected continue to include $600 direct payments to individuals below some income threshold, $300 a week in added unemployment benefits, and a 16-week extension of unemployment eligibility. Another round of the problematic Paycheck Protection Program will be part of $300 billion in aid for business. (Disclosure: Kos Media received a Paycheck Protection Program loan.)
The package also includes “$25 billion to help struggling renters with their payments and provide food aid and farm subsidies, and a $10 billion bailout for the Postal Service,” the Associated Press reports. It doesn’t include desperately needed funding for state and local governments, although some money targeted to specific needs like education, transit, and vaccine distribution will reach state and local governments. Republicans did give up a demand for corporate immunity from liability for reckless behavior around coronavirus.
The bill is also likely to include a ridiculous, offensive $120 billion tax giveaway to the wealthy, allowing double-dipping wherein businesses that got PPP loans—a quarter of which went to the top 1% of recipients—can also deduct it from their taxes.
”Steven Rosenthal, a tax attorney and senior fellow at the nonprofit Tax Policy Center had calculated that the earlier version of the double-dip proposal would have amounted to a stealth break of $100 billion to $150 billion, skewed heavily toward the nation’s wealthiest business owners,” Michael Mechanic reports at Mother Jones. “Martin Sullivan, an expert in federal tax law and former staff economist for both the Treasury Department and Congress’ bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, estimated the cost, back of the napkin, at roughly $100 billion.”
Regular people will get just $600, plus $300 a week in extra unemployment if they can pry it loose from their states, to cover unimportant little needs like rent, food, and heat in winter.
And today’s winner for rank BS in coverage of this issue goes to the AP, for “The looming agreement follows efforts by a bipartisan group of rank-and-file lawmakers to find middle ground between a $2.4 trillion House bill and a $500 billion GOP measure fashioned by McConnell.”
If $900 billion sounds like middle ground between $2.4 trillion (that already a compromise from $3 trillion) and $500 billion, you might need to go back to grade school math class. Or just drop the insistence on pretending that the Republican Party is something other than cruel and ruthless.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, and David Beard.
Leading Off
●Pres-by-CD: Our project to calculate the 2020 presidential results for all 435 congressional districts nationwide hits Arizona and Connecticut. You can find our complete data set here, which we’re updating continuously as the precinct-level election returns we need for our calculations become available.
Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in Arizona by a close 49.4-49.1 four years after it backed Trump 49-45, a result that made Biden the first Democrat to take its electoral votes since Bill Clinton in 1996. Before that, the last Democrat to carry the state was Harry Truman in 1948.
Biden managed to win five of the Grand Canyon State’s congressional districts, which was one more than Clinton, while the remaining four went for Trump again; all the Biden seats are represented by Democrats, while the Trump seats remained in Republican hands. Biden also improved on Clinton’s margin of victory everywhere except the 3rd and 7th Districts, which are the most Democratic seats in the state. You can find our map here.
We’ll start with a look at the 1st District, which is the only district that went from Trump in 2016 to Biden this year. This sprawling constituency in the northeastern part of the state had supported Mitt Romney 50-48 before going for Trump by an even narrower 48-47, but Biden took it 50-48 this time. Democratic Rep. Tom O’Halleran, who had previously served in the legislature as a moderate Republican, won a third term 52-48 against Republican Tiffany Shedd in a race that attracted millions in spending from outside groups on both sides.
Biden also made big gains in two seats that were competitive just a few years ago but have quickly veered away from the GOP. The 2nd District in the eastern Tucson area had backed Romney 50-48 before going for Clinton 50-44. The seat continued to move left this time by supporting Biden 55-44, and Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick prevailed by a similar 55-45 margin.
The shift over the last decade was even more dramatic in Democratic Rep. Greg Stanton’s 9th District, which is home to central Phoenix and its eastern suburbs. The seat supported Obama 51-47 in 2012 before going for Clinton by a wide 55-38 margin. Biden took it by an even larger 61-37, which makes this his biggest improvement over Clinton’s margin in any of the state’s nine districts.
Biden performed best in the 3rd and 7th Districts, but as we noted above, his margin of victory was smaller than Clinton’s four years ago even though he took a larger percentage of the vote (and more raw votes). Rep. Raul Grijalva’s 3rd District, which stretches from the Yuma area west to Tucson, moved from 62-33 Clinton to 63-36 Biden.
Rep. Ruben Gallego’s Phoenix-based 7th District went from 72-23 Clinton to 74-25 Biden, which represented a 0.17% drift to the right. Both seats are heavily Latino, a demographic that in many places moved toward Trump, though the shifts were considerably smaller here than they were in several comparable seats in neighboring California.
We’ll turn now to the four Trump seats. National Democrats made a strong effort to unseat scandal-ridden Republican Rep. David Schweikert in the 6th District, a once-safely red seat in Scottsdale and North Phoenix that had moved from 60-39 Romney to 52-42 Trump. Trump’s margin of victory this time shrunk to 51-47, but that was enough to carry Schweikert to a 52-48 victory over Democrat Hiral Tipirneni.
Trump decisively carried the remaining three districts, but Biden made gains in each. Trump’s margin of victory in Rep. Andy Biggs’ 5th District in the Phoenix suburbs of Mesa and Gilbert shrunk from 58-37 to 56-42, his second-largest decline in the state after the 9th. The shift was only a little smaller in another suburban Phoenix seat, Rep. Debbie Lesko’s 8th District, where Trump’s margin sank from 58-37 to 57-41.
Rep. Paul Goser’s giant 4th District in the north-central part of the state, meanwhile, was again Trump’s best seat in the state by far, though Biden still trended up a bit here: While Trump won 68-28 here in 2016, he carried the seat 68-31 this time.
Arizona’s congressional and legislative maps are drawn by a bipartisan commission, but Republicans have done everything they can to eliminate it. In 2015, the Supreme Court upheld the body’s constitutionality by just a 5-4 margin, and since then, the court has moved to the right. If the commission is struck down, the Republican-controlled state government would control the mapmaking process. (You can find our Connecticut calculations in our “Data” section below.)
Georgia Runoffs
●GA-Sen-A, GA-Sen-B: The progressive New Georgia Project has filed lawsuits against four counties—Bibb, Clarke, Houston, and Paulding—saying officials are refusing to provide the required number of days of early voting. Interestingly, while both Bibb (home of Macon) and Clarke (Athens) voted heavily for Joe Biden, Houston and Paulding went for Donald Trump by double digits.
We also have some new polling of both runoffs courtesy FOX 5 Atlanta, and for the first time since Nov. 3, the data comes from a firm, Republican pollster InsiderAdvantage, that’s already been in the field before. That means we have trendlines, though there’s been virtually no change over the last month: In both contests, Republicans hold 49-48 leads over their Democratic opponents; in November, InsiderAdvantage found Kelly Loeffler leading Raphael Warnock by that exact same score while showing a 49-49 tie between Jon Ossoff and David Perdue.
Schmidt worked to elect Republicans for many years, ultimately serving as a top advisor to John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, where he masterminded the selection of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running-mate. However, he grew disgusted with his party as it coalesced around Donald Trump and left the GOP in 2018 to become an independent. The following year, he co-founded the Lincoln Project with other disillusioned Republican strategists, which worked to defeat Trump in the 2020 elections.
Governors
●MA-Gov: Asked whether he might run for governor in 2022, the Boston Herald‘s Lisa Kashinsky reports that outgoing Democratic Rep. Joe Kennedy “laughed” and all but rejected the idea. “I cannot imagine a reality where I am a candidate for office again anytime soon,” said Kennedy, who lost a high-profile primary challenge to Democratic Sen. Ed Markey in September. “Having just done that for a year,” he continued, “taking a breather from that and refocusing my time and space I think is what I’m looking forward to doing over the course of the immediate timeline.” That’s not an absolute “no,” but it’s pretty close.
●MD-Gov: Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski declined to rule out a bid for governor according to the Baltimore Sun‘s Emily Opilo, saying only that he would discuss his plans at some unspecified future date. Olszewski, a Democrat, previously served in the state House and won an extremely tight three-way primary for county executive in 2018 by just 17 votes before going on to easily win the general election.
Meanwhile, Maryland Matters says that former Republican Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, who unsuccessfully ran for the Senate in 2006 and later served as RNC chair, is “thought to be considering the race.” Steele, though, endorsed Joe Biden for president, so if he’s thinking about running in the GOP primary, well, good luck with that.
●OH-Gov: Former Republican Rep. Jim Renacci, who previously refused to rule out a primary challenge to Gov. Mike DeWine, has now confirmed his interest. “I will be either supporting candidates who are taking him on or running against him myself,” said Renacci in a new interview while attacking DeWine for promoting “the same policies” as former Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland.
●SC-Gov: Over the summer, the Post and Courier‘s Andy Shain reported that former state cabinet official Catherine Templeton said she “will likely run for governor again” against Gov. Henry McMaster, whom she unsuccessfully challenged for the Republican nomination in 2018. Templeton came in third in the primary two years ago with 21% of the vote, while McMaster finished first with 42%.
The runner-up in that race, wealthy businessman John Warren, forced McMaster into a runoff and he, too, could run once more. Earlier this year, Warren set up an organization called South Carolina’s Conservative Future ostensibly aimed at helping downballot candidates but which Shane described as having “all the pre-election trappings of setting up another bid for governor.” After taking 28% in the first round, Warren came close to defeating McMaster, who won their runoff by a fairly tight 54-46 margin.
Warren didn’t appear to rule out the possibility of a rematch when he spoke with Shain in August, only saying “that he has no immediate plans to run for office.” In that same piece, Shain also called Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin “a current Democratic favorite to join the race.” Last year, Benjamin declined to rule out a bid, but he doesn’t appear to have said anything on the record recently.
●2022: Politico’s Steven Shepherd and Sabrina Rodriguez take a broad look at all of the gubernatorial races coming up over the next two years and run through actual and potential candidates in each. Many are names that we’ve already covered in the Digest, but a number of possibilities are new to us, including:
Arizona
Republican Kirk Adams, a former chief of staff to Gov. Doug Ducey and a former speaker of the state House who narrowly lost a 2012 primary for the 5th Congressional District.
Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who considered a bid for Senate in 2020 but deferred to eventual victor Mark Kelly.
Maryland
Democratic Rep. Kweisi Mfume, who returned to Congress earlier this year after a 24-year hiatus by winning the special election for the late Elijah Cummings’ 5th District.
Michigan
Republican John James, an Army veteran who lost Senate bids in both 2018 and 2020.
Nevada
Former Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison, who opted not to run for governor in 2018 and later declined to seek re-election. Last month, Hutchison told the Nevada Independent he intends to “think about my political future later,” both in regard to the governorship and a possible Senate bid.
New York
Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, who has long focused on raising her profile in the House and would, like any Republican, be an extreme longshot. She did not, however, appear to rule out the possibility in an interview with The Atlantic last month.
Wisconsin
Former Republican Rep. Sean Duffy, a one-time star of MTV’s “The Real World” who resigned from Congress in 2019 in the middle of his fifth term.
House
●SC-01: In a new interview with E&E News, Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham did not to rule out a rematch with Republican Nancy Mace, who defeated him last month. Earlier this month, Cunningham declined to close the door on a possible run for governor.
Data
●Connecticut: Joe Biden won the Nutmeg State 59-39, which was an improvement over Hillary Clinton 55-41 victory four years ago, though a diminished performance by third-party candidates likely played a role. Biden, like Clinton, also carried each of the state’s five congressional districts, including two that were unexpectedly close in 2016. You can our map here.
The 2nd District in the eastern part of the state supported Biden 54-44 after backing Clinton only 49-46. The seat is held by Democratic Rep. Joe Courtney, who first won the previous version of the district by 83 votes in 2006 but has not faced a close race since then.
The 5th District, which includes northern Fairfield County and northwestern Connecticut, likewise went for Biden 55-44 after supporting Clinton by a much smaller 50-46 spread. The GOP, though, never was able to take advantage of Donald Trump’s relatively strong showing here in 2016. Democrat Jahana Hayes defeated an underfunded Republican 56-44 in an open seat race two years ago, and she won 55-43 this time.
Democrats control the governorship and both chambers of the legislature, but they probably won’t be the ones drawing the new congressional lines. The state constitution requires two-thirds of each chamber to pass a new map for it to take effect, and while Democrats won a supermajority in the state Senate last month, they fell short in the House. If the legislature can’t agree on new boundaries, the task would fall to a bipartisan “backup” commission.
YOU can buy the two new Tom the Dancing Bug books, Tom the Dancing Bug: Into the Trumpverse, and The Super-Fun-Pak Comix Reader! Information here.
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» It’s a little weird that, following a president who promised to drain the swamp and make America great again, President Biden’s two most pressing agenda items starting on January 20th will be draining the swamp and making America great again.
» After the last four years, it is now beyond dispute that the 25th Amendment is the U.S. Constitution’s equivalent of the Maytag repairman.
» Every time you ring a bell an angel gets its wings. Every time you hold in a fart an angel explodes.
Continued…
» If the weather forecasters hadn’t mentioned all this damn snow in their forecast, we wouldn’t be having all this damn snow.
» There needs to be a law that any U.S. senator or representative—accompanied by aides—can conduct a snap, full-access inspection of any immigration detention center or postal facility anytime, anywhere.
Also what I know: this will be the catapulted fruitcake that brings down the tower at Mar-A-Lago.
» A Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movie you’ll never see: The Atheists’ Christmas Miracle.
» One of the things I’m most looking forward to being released by the Biden White House: the entire “perfect call” between Trump and the President of Ukraine. The other is Trump in jail.
» I’m cautiously optimistic that Kamala Harris will bring back the honored vice-presidential tradition of shooting a lawyer in the face while quail hunting.
» This blog has gone zero days without a dreidel-related accident. My bad.
» I’m tired of always having to spell out the entire word blog. From now on, to save time and reduce my susceptibility to carpal tunnel syndrome, I’m condensing it to og.
» I can think of 81,268,867 patriotic, democracy-loving Americans who should each get a Medal of Freedom.
And now, our feature presentation…
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Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, December 17, 2020
Note: Reindeer run over by revenge-seeking zombie grandma with hair matching color of blue and silver candles. Film at 11.
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By the Numbers:
4 days!!!
Days ’til the “Christmas Star” appears—the closest visible conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 800 years: 4
Percent of Americans polled by Fox News who approve of how Joe Biden is handling the transition: 65%
Number of state and local public health leaders who have resigned, retired, or been fired since April, the largest exodus of public health leaders in American history: 181
Amount of covid relief money religious grifter Joel Osteen received from taxpayers like you, after saying he didn’t receive any: $4.4 million
Fine imposed by California against Uber for failing to provide regulators with details about sexual assault and harassment claims: $59 million
Date of the start of the torch relay for the rescheduled Tokyo Olympic Games: 3/25/21
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
Here’s to all the Americans on both sides of this year’s unusually peppy fights over the allowability of religious symbols on public property.
This annual battle, in which the American Civil Liberties Union strives once more to make itself as popular as the Grinch, is over the part of the First Amendment that says the government cannot sponsor religion.
I always liked what former Gov. Ann Richards said when informed there were demands that the large star on top of the state capitol come down.
“Oh, I’d hate to see that happen,” she drawled. “This could be the only chance we’ll ever have to get three wise men in that building.”
CHEERS to expanding the team. President-elect Biden’s cabinet continues to take shape with a fresh slate of smart, honorable, America-aligned patriots who will soon take over for the current sty full of of dumb, evil, Russia-aligned boobs now in the final throes of their super-spreading-the-stupid tenures. And the envelope please…
Transportation Secretary Former South Bend Mayor and 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, who would become America’s first openly-gay cabinet member and the youngest cabinet member, at 38, since Alexander Hamilton.
Deb Haaland, a refreshing change from the likes of Ryan Zinke and whoever the current evil Interior Secretary is.
Interior Secretary New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland, who would become America’s first Native American cabinet member.
Energy Secretary Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm who, like the position suggests, is a human ball of energy.
White House Climate Policy Coordinator Former EPA director Gina McCarthy, a good pick because it’s always useful to have a Bostonian inside the circle to crack skulls and throw around terms like “wicked pissuh.”
First task on their plate: getting rid of the mess, covid infestation, corruption, and rancid stench left behind by their predecessors. Which, if they work 24/7 and everything runs on schedule, should let them start working on their own first-term goals by the start of Joe’s second term.
JEERS to the familiar sound of forehead smacking table. Well thank god the experts waited fifty years to break the news to us, because if we’d only waited twenty or thirty or forty years we may have been premature in our assessment. I’m shocked, shocked…
Tax cuts for rich people breed inequality without providing much of a boon to anyone else, according to a study of the advanced world that could add to the case for the wealthy to bear more of the cost of the coronavirus pandemic.
Only took 50 YEARS to figure this out.
The paper, by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London, found that such measures over the last 50 years only really benefited the individuals who were directly affected, and did little to promote jobs or growth. […] Their findings published Wednesday counter arguments, often made in the U.S., that policies which appear to disproportionately aid richer individuals eventually feed through to the rest of the economy. … “Our research suggests such policies don’t deliver the sort of trickle-down effects that proponents have claimed,” Hope said.
Will we ever be able….to trust Reagan….again?
CHEERS to the original airhead. Happy Wright Brothers Day! On this date in 1903, after paying a $50 luggage fee, shuffling shoeless through security and spending eight-hours on the tarmac next to a screaming baby, Orville Wright made the first controlled, sustained flight in a power-driven airplane at Kitty Hawk on North Carolina’s Outer Banks:
At 10:35…the flyer moved down the rail as Wilbur steadied the wings. Just as Orville left the ground, John Daniels from the lifesaving station snapped the shutter on a preset camera, capturing the historic image of the airborne aircraft with Wilbur running alongside.
This would be the last time a passenger flight had enough leg room.
Again, the flyer was unruly, pitching up and down as Orville overcompensated with the controls. But he kept it aloft until it hit the sand about 120 feet from the rail. Into the 27-mph wind, the ground speed had been 6.8 mph, for a total airspeed of 34 mph. The brothers took turns flying three more times that day, getting a feel for the controls and increasing their distance with each flight. […]
This was the real thing, transcending the powered hops and glides others had achieved. The Wright machine had flown.
The jalopy-of-the-skies was in the air for less than a minute. It would’ve been longer but they ran out of booze.
JEERS to our hunka hunka burnin’ planet. How hot has 2020 been? Hotter than the steam coming out of Trump’s ears as he watched the electors voting. Hotter than the seat a Wall Street bankster sits on at a committee hearing as Rep. Katie Porter says, “My first question to you is…” Hotter than the solemn, lava-like procession of hair dye oozing down Rudy’s face. Yeah…that hot:
NOAA’s calculations show that the first 11 months of 2020 were .02 degrees cooler than record-hot 2016, but there’s a 55 percent chance that 2020 will end up the warmest on record.
If December is as much above normal as November was, then 2020 will at least tie 2016 as the warmest on record, Sanchez-Lugo said. Florida, Virginia and Maryland so far have had their hottest year on record, while California had its hottest fall.
For its part, NASA said 2020 so far is the warmest on record and it’s likely to stay that way. Using NASA data, if December is just 0.59 degrees above the 1980 to 2010 average, 2020 should be the hottest year on record.
November was much more above average than that, and December so far has been 1.16 degrees above normal, said Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist with the Berkeley Earth climate-monitoring group.
But all hope is not lost. The EU climate talks just ended, and in a brave move that took everyone by surprise, the organizing committee suggested to the organizing panel that the organizing subcommittee to the organizing commission inform the organizing task force that they’re throwing the whole thing in Greta Thunberg’s lap. And no ice cream until you fix it, young lady.
JEERS to lame attempts at swaying the tin-foil hat crowd. 51 years ago, on December 17, 1969, the U.S. Air Force closed its Project “Blue Book” by concluding there was no evidence of extraterrestrial spaceships behind the thousands of UFO sightings they’d investigated:
The Air Force supplies the following summary of its investigations:
1) No UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security;
2) There was no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as “unidentified” represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge; and
And yet this case remains an open and ongoing investigation.
3) There was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as “unidentified” were extraterrestrial vehicles.
It might have been more credible if the spokesperson delivering the news, Captain Blurp Oorksplorg, hadn’t been speaking out of a tentacle.
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Ten years ago in C&J: December 17, 2010
JEERS to being behind the curve. Time magazine announced its “Person of the Year” this week and the winner is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook, of course, is just one of a long line of cool grassroots online hangouts that got infested years ago with spam, viruses, overly-complex user agreements, and privacy invasion. So pardon me if I don’t stand and cheer. On the other hand, if he can catch the person who keeps making poopies on my rutabagas in Farmville I’ll give him a polite nod. [12/17/20 Update: Ten years later, Mark Zuckerberg is the anti-Christ and his site has become Disinformation Central. Who knew???]
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And just one more…
CHEERS to saving our celluloid. Twenty-five movies from yesteryear have been inducted into the 32nd class of the National Film Registry. Many of them—Grease, The Blues Brothers, The Dark Knight—are mainstream hits. Others are less known but significant in their own right, such as…
Freedom Riders (2010)
During 1961, more than 400 people from across the nation, black and white, women and men, old and young, challenged state-sanctioned segregation on buses and in bus terminals in the Deep South, segregation that continued after the Supreme Court had ruled the practice to be in violation of interstate commerce laws. Some 50 years later, “Freedom Riders,” a two-hour PBS American Experience documentary made by Stanley Nelson, charted their course in considerable depth as they faced savage retaliatory attacks and forced a reluctant federal government to back their cause.
Not so sure about Shrek.
With Car and Camera Around the World (1929)
Filmed from 1922 to 1929, “With Car and Camera Around the World” (1929) documented the expeditions of Walter Wanderwell and Aloha Wanderwell Baker, the first woman to travel around the world by car. The couple, along with a crew of volunteers, crisscrossed dozens of countries in a caravan of Ford Model Ts, filming people, cultures and historical landmarks on 35mm film.
Mauna Kea: Temple Under Siege (2006)
Produced and directed by Puhipau and Joan Lander of Nā Maka o ka ʻĀina, this documentary about the dormant volcano on the Big Island of Hawai’i examines the development vs. ecological preservation battle between scientists who use the mountain summit as an astronomical observatory and Hawaiians who want the mountain preserved as a cultural landscape sacred to the Hawaiian people.
As ever, I remain hopeful that the all-time greatest movie ever—Cats and Dogs—will one day find itself nestled among the NFR’s pantheon of greatness for its message of universal truth in a world gone mad: “Dogs drool, cats rule.”
Have a nice Thursday. Floor’s open…What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today’s Shameless C&J Testimonial
Cheers and Jeers might not be the best-written blog post, but it’s at least got all the heart, humor, charm and splashy kiddie pool action you could ask for.
John le Carré Told the Truth About Cold War Espionage When Few Others Would, by Emma Steiner. John le Carré died Saturday at age eighty-nine. His novels rejected the glamor and ritz of Cold War–era spy fiction. Instead, he portrayed espionage as a dreary, disturbing machine that ground up innocents for a goal that didn’t justify the human cost.
“Winter represents rest, hibernation, and even death. We humans–driven by our demanding work and school schedules–tend to forget that winter is a time to slow down, but our fellow animals and plants prepare accordingly, allowing themselves a season of rest.” ~~Jill McKeever, The Spirit of Botany: Aromatic Recipes and Rituals (2020)
At Daily Kos on this day in 2017—Trump’s bluster about pardoning Flynn is as idiotic as usual:
Here’s an idea—after admitting that you knew your national security adviser had lied to the FBI and subsequently begging your FBI director to quash his investigation into it only to fire him for not doing so, you float the idea of pardoning the national security adviser who is now widely known to be cooperating with that investigation.
Asked whether he planned to pardon former national security adviser Michael Flynn, Trump said “I don’t want to talk about pardons for Michael Flynn yet. We’ll see what happens.”
Welcome to your Friday installment of Donald Trump’s stupidity. So yeah, this raises all kinds of concerns about presidential power, etc. But the fact of the matter is, most of the damage Flynn can do to Trump is probably already done, otherwise we probably still wouldn’t even know about Flynn’s plea agreement with federal authorities to begin with. Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti laid it out pretty nicely in a tweet thread.
“If Flynn is pardoned now,” Mariotti wrote, “the upside for Trump is much lower than it would have been earlier because Flynn has already told Mueller everything he knows. Additionally, if Flynn accepted a pardon, he couldn’t take the Fifth if called to testify.”
Monday through Friday you can catch the Kagro in the Morning Show 9 AM ET by dropping in here, or you can download the Stitcher app (found in the app stores or at Stitcher.com), and find a live stream there, by searching for “Netroots Radio.”
While the rest of the Senate trundles on in various experiments to see how aggressively they can institutionalize futility and vacuousness, Senator Elizabeth Warren continues to weirdly use the resources that come with being a United States senator to uncover corruption, scandal, and government neglect. This has made her very unpopular with her Republican peers, who instead appear to believe that their offices are best used for trading stocks. Go figure.
Warren’s Senate office is out with another report on nationalized corruption, this time—surprise!—in the U.S. prison system. According to the report, the American Correctional Association has been acting as a “rubber stamp” willing to provide government-required accreditation to any prison willing to pay the fees, regardless of safety issues, abuse, or other behaviors. And it’s behaved as such because the prison industry and its accrediting body are so intertwined that it would be almost impossible to produce any other result.
Says Warren’s office: “The ACA’s dual role as an advocate for the private prison industry and the organization responsible for overseeing conditions at facilities run by private prison companies creates an irreconcilable conflict of interest. This conflict is exacerbated by the additional financial support the ACA receives from private prison and detention companies unrelated to accreditation.”
Explicitly calling the ACA’s accreditation process “corrupt,” the takeaway advice is that the relationship is so flawed that government agencies should, in Warren’s view, end their “reliance” on ACA accreditation and conduct that oversight themselves. The ACA both acts as accreditors and as lobbyists for the prison industry—a fundamental tension, and a sure path to prioritizing prison profits over safety. The ACA is reliant on top private prison companies for the bulk of its own profits; tightening accreditation rules so as to actually catch malfeasance is, as currently designed, in the interests of exactly nobody involved.
Mother Jones has an overview of the report’s conclusions, and notes that the notorious Adelanto Detention Center achieved a near-perfect accreditation score, revealed to be a cesspool of neglect and intentional abuse. Warren has repeatedly called for ending government use of private prison companies entirely, and this report is a direct attack on industry and government claims that those companies can be reformed. They cannot be reformed: Using human imprisonment as a tool for profit is inherently corrupt. It prioritizes cash returns over public safety, prisoner safety, recidivism, and justice itself.
Republicans will likely go to great lengths to ignore this report as they have others; the notion of outsourcing core government duties to for-profit corporate surrogates is a core tenet of Republicanism, because lobbyists have over the decades paid absolute bucketloads of money to make it a core tenet of Republicanism. Expect few senators to acknowledge these findings of corruption.
Except for Georgia’s two Republican senators, of course, who will no doubt adjust their stock portfolios in response.
A new law last year allowing thousands of Liberian immigrants who faced separation following loss of their temporary protections to apply for green cards should have brought some much-needed relief. Should have. Instead, ProPublica reports that the Trump administration has largely undermined the application process, leaving advocates “surprised by how many hoops immigrants were being asked to jump through” as the deadline to apply quickly approaches.
Some difficulties can be pinned to novel coronavirus pandemic. That’s been unavoidable in all aspects of daily life. But Dara Lind reports there’s been a “broad failure” by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the federal immigration agency tasked with processing this paperwork. It’s also been one of many agencies politicized by the administration, as continues to be proven. “There have been obstacles and roadblocks erected every single step of the way,” UndocuBlack Network National Policy and Advocacy Director Patrice Lawrence tells ProPublica.
“Birth certificates, which the federal government had accepted from these immigrants when they had applied for temporary legal status under past presidents, were now deemed insufficient,” ProPublica reports. “So were expired Liberian passports—even though they were being offered as proof of nationality, which doesn’t expire.” In fact, USCIS’ rules were so unclear that even following an informational webinar by legal advocates this past summer, “[n]o one was sure what evidence the U.S. government was accepting to prove that an applicant was actually Liberian.”
“On top of locking out immigrants, USCIS has done little to nothing to address many issues related to the Covid-19 pandemic that could be easily addressed and save the agency money or bring in additional funding,” DHS Watch Director Ur Jaddou said earlier this year, “including virtual naturalization oath ceremonies, deadline extensions, automatic extensions, and deferred action for essential workers.” In fact, immigrants who were nearing the naturalization process had to sue USCIS in order to complete the process.
Trump officials, including unlawfully appointed acting USCIS Director Ken Cuccinelli, also defied court order and refused to reopen the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to new applicants (and the additional fees that would then roll in), finally reinstating the program this month. The month prior, USCIS officials reportedly ordered agency staff to not communicate with President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, days after it had already been clear he’d won.
It’s estimated that anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 Liberian immigrants may be eligible for green cards, with Lind reporting that more than 1,000 had applied by the time officials instituted their mind-boggling rules that are now coupled with some outrageous inaction from the agency. “Several lawyers pointed out to ProPublica that USCIS already had thousands of home addresses of eligible immigrants from their latest filings for temporary status, and could have sent them letters informing them of the new program; it did not,” the report continued.
The application period for eligible immigrants is now closing in just days on Dec. 20. Even that’s coming with fine print, because USCIS is saying that applications have to be received by that date, when in the past it has accepted a postmark for a certain date. “Some members of Congress are working to add an extension to the end-of-year omnibus spending bill,” the report said, but it could end up coming down to the incoming Biden administration to do this, adding to the mountain of anti-immigrant and anti-asylum policies it already has to clean up.
Note: This article includes descriptions of childhood sexual abuse, physical abuse, and intimate partner violence.
Next month, Lisa Montgomery is scheduled to be the first woman executed by the federal government in almost 70 years. She is one of 52 women currently on death row nationwide and the only woman currently on federal death row. To the public, Montgomery’s story began 16 years ago in 2004 when she traveled from Kansas to Missouri after connecting online with Bobbi Jo Stinnett. Stinnett was 23 years old, pregnant with her first child, and operating a dog breeding business outside of her home alongside her husband. Montgomery had arranged to meet with Stinnett to purchase a puppy, but once inside her home, Montgomery murdered the young mother-to-be, removed the 8-month-old fetus from her body, and took the newborn back to Kansas with her. There, she passed the child off as her own. The nature of Stinnett’s murder brought national attention to the case.
In truth, however, the violence and trauma that marked Montgomery’s life and set her on the path to that fatal day, and now her pending execution, began with the earliest moments of her childhood.
While the specifics of her life are unique, Montgomery shares a common story with most women who end up on death row: While they have often committed shocking crimes, nearly two-thirds of the women sentenced to capital punishment experienced regular, ongoing abuse as children and as adults. In many cases—including Montgomery’s—that abuse included sexual assault, intimate partner abuse, and other forms of heinous gender-based violence—violence that was ignored while it was happening, and dismissed by the criminal legal system afterwards. As for the women’s crimes, most were committed either against their abusers in acts of self defense, or against others as a result of the psychological trauma incurred from years of unaddressed abuse. The personal histories of women on death row mirror those of incarcerated women more broadly, a significant number of whom have lived lives marked by years of sexual violence, physical and psychological torment, and domestic abuse.
Instead of investing in care for these women, the U.S. has chosen to greet their trauma and the acts that follow with incarceration and for some, execution.
‘Her story is unique in its horror’
Although Montgomery’s experience is not unusual in its trajectory from abuse to incarceration, the details of her life story reveal particularly intense trauma. She was born in Ogden, Kansas, in 1969, and her older half-sister, Diane Mattingly, has publicly recounted the abuse that the two endured at the hands of Lisa’s mother and how she tried to shield Lisa from it. In a first-person essay written for Elle magazine, Mattingly shared that Lisa’s mother (Diane’s stepmother at the time) would beat the young girls with “brooms, belts, and whatever else she got her hands on,” and often left the two alone with older male babysitters. When Mattingly was 8 years old, one of these older men raped her in the bedroom that she and her sister shared. At just 4 years old, Montgomery bore witness to it all.
When Mattingly was 8 years old, Child Protective Services removed her from home and she was eventually placed with a safe, loving family. Montgomery was left behind with her mother. In the decades that followed, Montgomery would endure almost ceaseless abuse. While she was in kindergarten, her mother remarried Jack Kleiner and the new family moved to a secluded trailer outside of Sperry, Oklahoma. Shortly thereafter, Montgomery’s stepfather began physically abusing both Lisa and his wife. Kleiner built a shed off the side of his trailer and it became the site of ongoing horrors for Lisa. When she was 11 years old, Kleiner raped her for the first time, and over the ensuing years would go on to sexually assault her again and again. Soon, he invited his friends to rape his young stepdaughter as well. In a court declaration, Lisa’s stepbrother stated, “Lisa told me that when these men raped her, she would go away in her mind and try not to be present.”
At the age of 18, Lisa married her stepbrother at the behest of her mother. The two quickly had four children. The marriage itself, much like Lisa’s youth and adolescence, was rife with abuse. After the birth of her fourth child, Lisa was involuntarily sterilized.
“Her trauma history is more severe than any other client I’ve ever represented, male or female,” said Sandra Babcock, the faculty director at the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide and an attorney currently representing Montgomery. “I think her story is unique in its horror and in its ability to quickly allow people to grasp that there is something wrong, and something fundamentally unjust, about putting a person to death who has suffered so much her entire life.”
The harmful dichotomy of victim and perpetrator
While there was a slight uptick in public support for the death penalty in 2018, according to a Pew Research Survey, the percentage of Americans in favor of capital punishment is currently far lower than it was in the 1990s and much of the 2000s. Despite this growing opposition, our social response to women who face abuse and later lash out has yet to evolve. Delphine Lourtau, executive director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, says that this is due in part to the public’s inability to square the complexity of women defendants being both perpetrators of harm and survivors of it.
“It’s difficult for us, I think, to overcome this dichotomy that we’ve developed in our minds between victims and perpetrators,” said Lourtau in an interview with Prism. “The whole underpinning of our very retributive criminal legal system is based on there being a clear distinction between those who deserve punishment and those who are the victims of violence that triggers the need for punishment. In a lot of cases involving women, we are talking about defendants who are both survivors, as well as sometimes perpetrators of violence and holding those complex stories in our minds—there doesn’t seem to be a template for that.”
Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in the U.S. in 1976, there have been close to 1,500 executions—16 of which ended the lives of women. In nine of those cases, the homicide victim was an intimate partner of the defendant. Lourtau says that 42 of the 52 women currently on death row are known survivors of gender-based violence.
‘How do you do gender sensitive mitigation?’
Evidence of past abuse can be surfaced in court during mitigation, a process used during sentencing negotiations where a defendant can identify mitigating factors like childhood trauma or mental illness that would justify a lower sentence. Mitigation processes require collecting special records, conducting interviews with the defendant and those close to them, and securing expert analysis of the evidence gathered. According to “The Forgotten Population,” a 2004 report written by the ACLU and the American Friends Service Committee, in many capital cases with women defendants, there has been independent evidence available to verify their claims of abuse, but defense attorneys failed to present it during trial. Thus, juries were unable to take the evidence into consideration.
That’s what happened in Montgomery’s case. According to advocates, her team of defense attorneys failed to present evidence about her past trauma and history of abuse. Babcock cites a number of factors for that negligence, including the fact that Montgomery had an all-male defense team that was inadequately trained to conduct trauma-informed mitigation interviews that could have sensitively elicited important evidence to present at trial.
“Nobody talks about how you interview women,” said Babcock. “How do you do gender sensitive mitigation? How do you talk to people in a way that makes them comfortable in confiding and sharing details of their abuse, that to them are extremely shameful, and for which they blame themselves?”
Failure to approach these conversations with the necessary level of nuance and sensitivity can severely re-traumatize a defendant, as was clear in Montgomery’s case when she was questioned about her past experiences.
“In Lisa’s case, for example,” said Babcock, “she was curled up in a fetal position on the floor of the jail cell during one of the interviews that her lawyer had with her. She was so traumatized by the way that he interviewed her.”
While the extent of the abuse Montgomery endured was rare and undeniably heinous, it’s hardly the only example of women defendants experiencing extreme violence in their lifetimes and failing to have those experiences meaningfully taken into account at trial.
In 1989, Marilyn Plantz was convicted and sentenced to death along with her lover William Bryson for the murder of her husband, James Plantz. Plantz’s trial and media coverage of her case was deeply colored by not just the nature of the offense itself, but Plantz’s deviation from the “expected” behavior of a mother and wife as well as her extramarital, interracial affair with Bryson, a Black man. However, what was missing from her trial, said Plantz’s advocates, was any discussion of the abuse she had endured both in her childhood and within her marriage. Her attorneys, they say, failed to present evidence that her husband had raped her before their marriage and that she had suffered sexual and psychological abuse from her family during her youth. In a statement to the police, Bryson said, “All I was thinking while I was beating him was all the times [Marilyn] came up to me with a black eye and crying. I didn’t like that.” In June of 2000, Bryson was executed by the state of Oklahoma; less than a year later, Plantz was executed by lethal injection as well.
Trivializing trauma
For defendants who are also survivors of violence, these past histories of abuse place them in a bind even when evidence reflecting their trauma is presented during trial. In those cases, prosecutors often discredit this evidence, downplaying it as “the abuse excuse,” a term coined by attorney and legal scholar Alan Dershowitz. In his 1994 book The Abuse Excuse, Dershowitz wrote that “to understand is not necessarily to forgive … our growing understanding of the causes of violent crime does not necessarily decrease either its incidence or the moral culpability of its perpetrators though some apparently believe it does.” However, the idea that society and courtrooms understand the full impact of trauma on a defendant’s life and decisions is debatable.
In an interview with HuffPost, Katherine Porterfield, a clinical psychologist at Bellevue who evaluated Montgomery while in prison, explained that in the absence of a nurturing adult and access to treatment, children who grow up in a chronic state of fear and terror will train their brain to adapt to survive and can experience dissociation from their feelings and actions. However, according to advocates for women on death row, courts fail to tease out this relationship between one’s crime and their past abuse not in spite of the ubiquity of women’s trauma but because of it. Nearly one out of every six women in the U.S. has experienced some form of sexual violence over the course of their lifetime, and 25% of women have experienced severe intimate partner violence. The expectation that women will have experienced trauma has allowed it to be trivialized during the moments it ought to matter most.
“There is a real temptation for a history of abuse and violence—because they are so commonplace in cases involving violence and in capital cases—to be presented as an excuse that the defense has come up with,” said Lourtau. “[Prosecutors say] ‘this doesn’t justify the violence and the aggravated acts that are that are being tried today’. It’s almost as if how widespread trauma is causes it to lose credibility when in fact it should be the opposite: how widespread trauma is should cause us to seriously rethink who the criminal legal process is targeting and why.”
Those who denigrate “the abuse excuse” also argue that just because a history of abuse may have led someone to commit an act of violence, it does not absolve them of personal responsibility. Dershowitz even argues that to do so would threaten the “foundations of our legal system.” The idea of responsibility, however, raises the question of what duty the legal system and our society have to properly address those harms, and whether choosing to meet violence with more violence poses a greater threat to justice. While it is true that simply understanding the root causes of crime may not prevent it from occurring, understanding and then working to stymie those roots certainly might.
‘There are other Lisas out there’
In the future, both Babcock and Lourtau say it will be critical to train advocates and experts on how to use gender-specific and trauma-informed practices to sensitively elicit and present stories about trauma in court, but that’s not the place to start. Rather, they say, the first and most important step must be stopping abuse when it occurs and providing treatment and healing for survivors in its immediate wake. That preventative work must specifically target those most overlooked in society, like children who grew up in similar circumstances to Montgomery’s. Babcock says that there are other Lisa Montgomery’s out there “who are now being abused, and who nobody is helping, [and] those are the people that we need to be thinking about.”
The divergent life courses taken by Montgomery and her own sister highlight the impact of shielding survivors from further violence, versus the harm that may flow from letting it continue unchecked. In her essay in Elle, Mattingly describes herself as “bruised, but not broken.” The abuse she faced in her youth did not leave her unscathed, but being removed from such a violent environment and placed in a safe and loving home allowed her to rebuild her life and forge a different path than her sister. Montgomery, of course, was not afforded that opportunity. Mattingly and Montgomery’s different outcomes suggest that the harms committed by Montgomery, and so many women like her, are not a result of inherent deviance, but rather of lifetimes of suffering without being seen, let alone saved.
“We have heard from so many women who are directly impacted by incarceration and who were in a situation of domestic abuse or violence, that if only they had had access to the assistance that they needed, then the events that led them to come into contact with the criminal legal system would never have arisen,” said Lourtau. “So I think it’s really important to say upfront that the failures begin long before the police and the courts and the judicial system become involved. The failure is in our collective response to the problem of gender-based violence.”
This story is part of Prism’s series on women and the death penalty in the United States. Next week, we’ll break down how gender stereotypes show up in the courtroom during trial and capital sentencing.
Tamar Sarai Davis is Prism’s criminal justice staff reporter. Follow her on Twitter@bytamarsarai.
Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places and issues currently underreported by our national media. Through our original reporting, analysis, and commentary, we challenge dominant, toxic narratives perpetuated by the mainstream press and work to build a full and accurate record of what’s happening in our democracy. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
