Enough With The Cutesy Titles, People Are Dead: US Politics January 2021 pt 2

Keep thinking about this piece https://newrepublic.com/article/158977/madison-cawthorn-future-republican-party

These details are all suggestive rather than definitive. But the suggestiveness is telling in and of itself. As countless observers of the far right have noted, part of the game the far right plays online is to maintain what writer Talia Lavin calls “a winking plausible deniability.”

I fucking hate how these people have murdered ambiguity forever.

I hate how they’ve murdered people

(Lay up, sorry)

No, no, it's cool.

as others have pointed out with Frankfurt School cites etc., the "winking plausible deniability" was a characteristic of fascism in its first incarnations, so ambiguity has either been fucked since then, or has survived despite it all.

William Empson weeps.

🐦[Will take a bit for most to realize it. But with this call Trump has made Greene de facto leader of the House GOP caucus. She speaks for him and he supports her. So she is untouchable. Nominal leaders like McCarthy will fall in line and take her lead because they answer to Trump.
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 30, 2021🕸]🐦

Bitcofer working for the Lincoln project and now this...

Usually people running grifts are a little smoother than this. pic.twitter.com/j3BtS1SoRu

— Isaac Chotiner (@IChotiner) January 30, 2021

🐦[Will take a bit for most to realize it. But with this call Trump has made Greene de facto leader of the House GOP caucus. She speaks for him and he supports her. So she is untouchable. Nominal leaders like McCarthy will fall in line and take her lead because they answer to Trump.
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 30, 2021🕸]🐦

BOSTON — A Massachusetts congressman who has received both doses of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine has tested positive for the virus.

The office of U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA 8) said Friday that the lawmaker had had a negative test result before attending President Joe Biden’s inauguration. The office says Lynch’s positive test result came after a staff member in his Boston office tested positive earlier this week.

A statement says Lynch isn’t displaying any symptoms of COVID-19. Lynch will self-quarantine and vote by proxy in Congress in the coming week.

Lynch is the second member of the state’s congressional delegation to test positive in as many days. On Thursday, U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan announced she had tested positive after repeatedly testing negative.

Wonder when he got his second.

Conclusive proof that 95% is not equal to 100%!

Unless "Stimmy" is the name of an underage Ninja Girl with 36DD bewbs in some PS5 Anime game that Reddit is fundraising a "free speech protest" over because Sony insisted she needs to wear a top in the U.S.; I don't think you "get" what this crowd actually cares about 👍 https://t.co/y3K7rjVkPs

— MovieBob Productions (@the_moviebob) January 30, 2021

just wanna say thanks to this weirdo for the new dn

Can’t wait for the post “death of Stalin” hi jinx and power struggle that will ensue once the big (wet) man croaks.

While it's easy to relish the prospect of Schrodinger's Trumpism tearing apart the party's attempts to reconstitute and unbrand, I'd also be wary of a) believing Greene's own tweets at all, let alone ones based on a specific Trumpian formula, or b) giving significant weight to the analysis of JoshTPM.

(NB Raymond, I assure you I did not intend to single you out with that in-context citation.)

Stimmy stimmy koko bop

That said, I would also relish elected Republicans everywhere attempting to jockey for position solely by tweeting context-free assertions about exactly how excellent their largely imaginary phone calls with a big loser were

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-27/biden-issues-dozens-of-oil-drilling-permits-in-first-few-days

The order provoked alarm across the oil industry, as energy companies worried they wouldn’t get approval to drill new wells or swift approval to amend permits for ongoing drilling operations.

So far, there’s no sign of that blockade.

phew

Speaking of vaccines under the bed: obviously the lack of a federal vaccine plan is the major factor in disarray. But lol / fuck at the details in this long report on the techbro who was seen grabbing bagfuls of shots at his own distribution site:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/01/29/962143659/in-philadelphia-a-scandal-erupts-over-vaccination-start-up-led-by-22-year-old

It started out as a group of college friends who wanted to help during the pandemic. They had tech skills, so they used 3D printers to make face shields. Then they organized as a nonprofit, Philly Fighting Covid, and opened a testing site in a Philadelphia neighborhood that didn't have one yet.

But the organization's leader, Andrei Doroshin, had bigger ambitions. Even before the first coronavirus vaccine was authorized, he made plans to be involved. Doroshin is a 22-year-old graduate student in psychology at Drexel University. He has no background in health care.

The marketing plan hinged on inoculating local celebrities like rapper Meek Mill, a Philadelphia native, in order to attract his fan base.

"This is a wholly Elon Musk, shooting-for-the-heavens type of thing," Doroshin said. "We're gonna have a preemptive strike on vaccines and basically beat everybody in Philadelphia to it."

Doroshin described scaling up until they were managing five mass vaccination sites and 20 smaller sites scattered throughout the city. He claimed they could vaccinate between 500,000 and 1.5 million people. And they would make a lot of money doing it.

"This is the juicy slide," said Doroshin, clicking over to the financing plan. "How are we gonna get paid?" He explained that the vaccine doses were free, provided by the federal government. But Philly Fighting Covid could bill insurance companies $24 a dose for administering it.

"I just told you how many vaccines we want to do — you can do the math in your head," he said.

"We're engineers, we're scientists, computer scientists, we're cybersecurity nerds. We think a little differently than people in health care do."

"We took the entire model and just threw it out the window," Doroshin added. "We said to hell with all of that. We're going to completely build on a new model that is based on a factory."

By Jan. 9, Doroshin had a deal with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health and Mayor Jim Kenney's administration.

Let's not do it and be legends.

Kenney was also hopeful that the arrangement would help diversify the racial breakdown of vaccine recipients. At that point, only 12% of vaccinated Philadelphians were Black — in a city where 44% of residents are Black.

"Equitable distribution of this vaccine is extremely important to our entire administration," said Kenney at the Jan. 8 kickoff event.

But in an early sign of trouble, Philly Fighting Covid failed to verify its progress on the equity goal. After that first vaccine event, at which 2,500 doses were administered, City Council President Darrell Clarke requested the demographic breakdown of the recipients. But the health department told him that Philly Fighting Covid had somehow lost all of the racial and ethnic data for the patients.

The investigation revealed that in December, just before Philly Fighting Covid began its vaccination work, it reorganized and became a for-profit company called Vax Populi.

Philly Fighting Covid had spent months organizing city-funded testing events — at which residents reported good experiences. But in January, it abruptly shuttered those operations, leaving partner organizations in the lurch.

The Idaho Statesman has identified several thousand doses of COVID-19 vaccine that were shipped to Idaho, set aside for a federal public-private partnership — and then went unused.

More than 10,000 of the doses are being returned to the state’s control this weekend, for use in upcoming vaccination clinics.

The pharmacies had administered just 6,186 of those 33,150 doses as of Jan. 19, and hadn’t yet reached more than 80 facilities that had signed up for the program, according to a presentation to the Idaho Coronavirus Vaccine Advisory Committee. Walgreens had given 4,490 shots and CVS had given 1,696, the presentation said.

That number grew by a few thousand over the next week and a half. CVS and Walgreens had administered a total of 10,433 doses to Idaho long-term care facilities by Jan. 28, according to federal data. That left more than 20,000 still unused at that point.

Meanwhile, Idaho public health officials and local health care providers have been saying the biggest bottleneck they faced was not having enough vaccine to give to people who wanted it.

haha man oh man is there anything a public-private partnership *CAN* do??

I dont care if Bitecofer works for the LP but I do care that she's fucking annoying, has a bitmoji as her avatar and expects to be taken seriously, and now just seems to be asking for money all the time. I actually stopped paying attention to her back in the fall after she made some stupid claims.

I liked Bitecofer's "there are no swing voters, it's all about the strength of each party's hatred for the other side" analysis. It was correct. More people hated the last president than hated the new one, and nobody was "undecided," just preening for attention.

I don't give money to politicians or political causes, so her current mode doesn't offend me. I am likely to unfollow her on Twitter soon, though. She writes long go-nowhere threads that I don't care about. I'd rather read one big article from her every six months. But that's not how the world works anymore, so.

I'd rather read one big article from her every six months. But that's not how the world works anymore, so.

I get what you're saying, but that's sort of a funny thing to say about someone who is technically an academic political scientist

this is so stupid. people who like checks don't like it. people who don't like checks don't like it. way to go!

.@POTUS will build on the $600 down payment provided by Congress last year, sending an additional $1,400 to households across America, totaling direct payments to $2,000 per person. pic.twitter.com/9zfBJT7t7O

— The Democrats (@TheDemocrats) January 30, 2021

Ladies and gentlemen, the Democrats!

Re: meek mill etc. Wow, so strange that no one until now had thought of using a celebrity influencer as a means of social marketing

Mind blown

Totally an Elon Musk level of innovation going on

Keep it up, bros - surely this groundbreaking outside-the-box innovative thinking will be a game changer

rather have 1400 than 0, especially because it'd be a huge help to my folks (and help me tamp down some foolish debt I amassed), but just silly to not just make it an even 2k. money isn't real and it's a pandemic.

also give this amount every month.

cos right now the Feds suggested Florida close their bars and restaurants and DisingenuSantnis is refusing to issue the order because he's pretending he cares about the livelihood of employees in bars/restaurants, but if the Federal government actually gave them $2k/month to stay home....maybe they fuckin' would! and not have to worry about staying afloat.

I hope this 1400 thing is a manchin/sinema requirement and they’re not really this stupid.

whynotboth.jpg

59-seconds of truth bombs on the requirements of elected leaders in America...pic.twitter.com/N2o00KATDC

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) January 29, 2021

real galaxy brain shit

real galaxy brain shit

Um, are we really going to entertain the idea that we need to put a whole bunch of exclusions on who can or can't participate in law-making? That seems about as wonderful an idea as imposing poll taxes and literacy tests to limit who votes, or taking the vote away from felons, which form of voter suppression she seems to think applies everywhere, but doesn't.

Yeah I'm really unhappy w that spiel and also people baggin on Lauren Boebert for having her GED. Attacking adult learners and people with non-traditional paths to leadership is very profoundly NOT THE WAY.

And incarcerated and formerly incarcerated ppl too, while I'm at it.

You just know that when all the exclusions on who gets in and who's left out get drawn up that incompetents won't be among the first ones denied participation.

Serious Inquiries Only spent a whole episode on the Dunning -kruger effect this week. Which seems pretty topical.

i think "real galaxy brain shit" is a criticism and does not mean milo z is approving of this stupid liberal mom being an asshole in her kitchen and posting it on twitter

none of lauren boebert's problems have to do with her having a GED or having been arrested. she would be a fascist without any of those things.

More annoyed by the blue check sharing it than the suburban mom.

POLI
TICS
GIRL

harbl -- of course. I was reacting to that suburban mom video plus a thread I stumbled over on twitter that was full of men calling Boebert stupid and being like, "Shouldn't have dropped out of high school maybe!" Lil too quick for like 40 men to line up to insult a woman's intelligence. Say that she's a fascist white supremacist who committed treason, and let's figure out how to stop her.

oh yeah i was responding to aimless, sry

Meanwhile!

News — With a little more than a week before his impeachment trial is set to begin, President Trump's legal team is up in the air. Butch Bowers and Deborah Barbier, who were expected to be two of the lead attorneys, are no longer on the team, @GloriaBorger & I are told. Story TK.

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) January 31, 2021

A third attorney, Josh Howard, who was also recently added to Trump's defense team, has also left, I'm told. Trump wanted the attorneys to argue there was mass election fraud and it was stolen from him rather than focus on proposed arguments about constitutionality.

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) January 31, 2021

like getting arrested for murder and wanting to spend the entire trial arguing that you are pretty sure the neighbors stole your lawnmower

but her emails

Can we not do "suburban mom" as an insult?

Like, she could just be a person who's wrong about something

There are lots of those and they live lots of places

Some of them have or don't have kids

thx

Isn't life a blast
It's like living in the past

i wanna be stereotyped
I wanna be classified