I presume he’ll be arrested and tried for treason and extortion now?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. The presidential candidate who infamously claimed he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters is putting his belief in his immunity to the test by openly trying to convince the Georgia secretary of state to change the election results to make him the winner. Just like that. It’s an attempted coup, right in front of our eyes, in a recorded phone call, and the response of a select subset of Republicans (like Cruz and Rubio and Rand) is to refuse to recognize the criminality, and instead conspire to overthrow the certification of the results in the Senate.

The Post reports: “President Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that election experts said raised legal questions.” In the call, Trump asked Raffensperger to change the certified vote that was subject to multiple recounts: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

In fact he threatened him. The Post reports, “During their conversation, Trump issued a vague threat to both Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the secretary of state’s general counsel, suggesting that if they don’t find that thousands of ballots in Fulton County have been illegally destroyed to block investigators — an allegation for which there is no evidence — they would be subject to criminal liability.” Trump, sounding like a mobster as he often does, said, “That’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.” Nice career, there Brad. Shame if anything happened to it.

You can listen to, or read the transcript of, Trump’s hour-long phone call.

It’s an embarrassing spectacle. Trump is whiny and desperate, a rat frantically scratching at the walls of his cage, accusing the FBI and everyone else involved in verifying the results dishonest and incompetent, bringing up every ridiculous conspiracy theory he found on Twitter, just lashing out absurdly. This was Trump’s Captain Queeg moment, and he’s caught in this recording rolling his ball bearings around and looking like a demented fool.

Trump and Meadows dominated the phone call, talking non-stop and mostly incoherently. When he could get a few words in edgewise, Raffensperger quietly shot down all of Trump’s accusations. Here’s a few words from the Georgia secretary of state.

Well, I listened to what the president has just said. President Trump, we’ve had several lawsuits, and we’ve had to respond in court to the lawsuits and the contentions. We don’t agree that you have won. And we don’t — I didn’t agree about the 200,000 number that you’d mentioned. I’ll go through that point by point.

What we have done is we gave our state Senate about one and a half hours of our time going through the election issue by issue and then on the state House, the government affairs committee, we gave them about two and a half hours of our time, going back point by point on all the issues of contention. And then just a few days ago, we met with our U.S. congressmen, Republican congressmen, and we gave them about two hours of our time talking about this past election. Going back, primarily what you’ve talked about here focused in on primarily, I believe, is the absentee ballot process. I don’t believe that you’re really questioning the Dominion machines. Because we did a hand re-tally, a 100 percent re-tally of all the ballots, and compared them to what the machines said and came up with virtually the same result. Then we did the recount, and we got virtually the same result. So I guess we can probably take that off the table.

I don’t think there’s an issue about that.

Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong. We talked to the congressmen, and they were surprised.

But they — I guess there was a person named Mr. Braynard who came to these meetings and presented data, and he said that there was dead people, I believe it was upward of 5,000. The actual number were two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted. So that’s wrong.

Mr. President, they did not put that. We did an audit of that, and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times.

It’s a remarkable criminal performance by the president. It’s going to be our eternal shame if he is not prosecuted for his blatant abuse of power.

Showing their teeth as a sign of smug arrogance

Oh look! It’s Officer Friendly! He looks nice, all clean cut and smiling, like he belongs on a poster for community outreach.

He has a Parler account where he brags about wanting to murder nurses who give vaccines, and an assortment of liberal politicians. He wants to smash down their doors and shoot them.

He has quite the gun collection, naturally.

He has also been fired.

Oh look! It’s a cheerful white woman! She’s some kind of upper-level Karen, though. Notice the Trump hat, and the mask shielding her chin in case it explodes. It’s not obvious from the photo, but she got her picture snapped as she was saying, “Have a nice day, n****r!”

She had boarded a plane in Seattle and refused to wear a face mask during the flight. She just stood there grinning, forcing the airline to disembark all the other passengers so the police could kick them off the plane.

She and her friend have been banned for life from ever flying on Frontier Airlines.

Yeesh. Happy smiling white people are the scariest monsters of them all.

Stupid politics → stupid, pointless death

Luke Letlow was described as a “mainstream Republican”, whatever that means any more. It used to be I’d picture an Eisenhower Republican when I heard those words — a cautious conservative. Now the words say to me “someone not quite as openly racist as Louie Gohmert”. Anyway, Letlow got elected to congress in Louisiana, where he did things like this:

As the coronavirus ravaged Louisiana, Letlow urged residents to follow social distancing guidelines and to listen to doctors, noting that Abraham, a physician, had returned to Louisiana to help treat covid-19 patients.

But photos on his Twitter page show he had an inconsistent record of wearing masks while campaigning, sometimes covering his face at meet-and-greets but also speaking indoors without a mask on to rooms of mask-free residents. At a candidate forum in October, Letlow urged the state to ease pandemic restrictions, saying, “We’re now at a place if we do not open our economy, we’re in real danger.”

You know where this is going. He’s dead of COVID.

After his symptoms worsened earlier this month, Letlow was first taken to St. Francis Medical Center in Monroe, where he sounded a hopeful note on Dec. 21, tweeting that he was “confident” in his recovery. Two days later, he was taken to a Shreveport hospital and placed in an intensive care unit, where he was treated with remdesivir and steroids, according to a statement from his office.

This week, he was in critical condition but showing signs of recovery, G.E. Ghali, the chancellor of LSU Health Shreveport, told the Advocate. But on Tuesday, he suffered a “cardiac event” and died, Ghali said. Asked whether any underlying conditions might have contributed to his death, Ghali said, “None. All covid related,” the Advocate reported.

He was only 41, with two kids, and that’s a hard death. I have sympathy for the man, but not his politics, and it’s his politics that killed him.

Republicans aren’t very good at numbers

We’ve got this vaccine, right? The only problem is getting it to the people. In order to reach that desired state of herd immunity by this summer, a promise the Trump administration has been dangling in front of us, we need to get 3.5 million people vaccinated per day. This isn’t happening. Just the fact that a nurse getting the shot is front page photo op material ought to tell you that. But look at the actual numbers — they’re pathetic. This is a massive job that will require a massive investment in medical infrastructure, and the Republicans can’t do it.

There’s reason to believe the administration won’t be able to ramp up vaccination rates anywhere close to those levels. Yes, as vaccine production increases, more will be available to the states. And Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health at HHS, argued on Sunday that the 2.1 million administered vaccines figure was an underestimate due to delayed reporting. So let’s be generous and say the administration actually administered 4 million doses over the first two weeks.

But even that would still fall far short of the 3.5 million vaccinations needed per day. In fact, it falls far short of what the administration had promised to accomplish by the end of 2020 — enough doses for 20 million people. And remember, the first group of vaccinations was supposed to be the easiest: It’s hospitals and nursing homes inoculating their own workers and residents. If we can’t get this right, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the country.

Here’s what concerns me most: Instead of identifying barriers to meeting the goal, officials are backtracking on their promises. When states learned they would receive fewer doses than they had been told, the administration said its end-of-year goal was not for vaccinations but vaccine distribution. It also halved the number of doses that would be available to people, from 40 million to 20 million. (Perhaps they hoped no one would notice that their initial pledge was to vaccinate 20 million people, which is 40 million doses, or that President Trump had at one point vowed to have 100 million doses by the end of the year.) And there’s more fancy wordplay that’s cause for concern: Instead of vaccine distribution, the administration promises “allocation” in December. Actual delivery for millions of doses wouldn’t take place until January, to say nothing of the logistics of vaccine administration.

The vaccine rollout is giving me flashbacks to the administration’s testing debacle. Think back to all the times Trump pledged that “everyone who wants a test can get one.” Every time this was fact-checked, it came up false. Instead of admitting that there wasn’t enough testing, administration officials followed a playbook to confuse and obfuscate: They first attempted to play up the number of tests done. Just like 2 million vaccines in two weeks, 1 million tests a week looked good on paper — until they were compared to the 30 million a day that some experts say are needed. The administration then tried to justify why more tests weren’t needed. Remember Trump saying that “tests create cases” or the CDC issuing nonsensical testing guidance?

Contrast that with what Germany is doing.

German states plan to set up hundreds of vaccination centers across the country starting in December, the newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported on Sunday.

It said the health ministers of the 16 federal states have drawn up plans to create one to two centers per administrative district — totaling hundreds of centers — as well as employing mobile vaccination teams.

The capital, Berlin, alone is allegedly planning to set up six such centers, Welt am Sonntag said.

Germany realizes that delivering all those doses is a gigantic logistical problem, and is preparing the pipeline. It’s all well and good to have a source for the life-giving vaccine, but if you don’t have a mechanism for delivery, it’s just going to sit in pharmaceutical company warehouses. Or it’s going to dribble out haphazardly to rich greedy people, like some of our members of Congress, before it is delivered efficiently.

I don’t even want to think about what it’s going to take to get through to the hordes of anti-maskers/anti-vaxxers out there, who have found validation in the words and actions of Trump.

Heckuva job, Donny. Worst disaster in American history since the 1918 flu epidemic, and you flopped badly at coping with it. You made it worse.

Moscow Mitch is lying again

The Republicans are trying to spin everything. Now they’re trying to claim the tepid relief bill that made it out the door recently is all their doing, and the Democrats only agreed to prop up the incoming Democratic president-elect.

As Congress passed a new $900 billion economic rescue package on Monday night, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) offered a choice bit of spin on how we got to this moment:

“A few days ago, with a new president-elect of their own party, everything changed,” Mr. McConnell said on Monday. “Democrats suddenly came around to our position that we should find consensus, make law where we agree, and get urgent help out the door.”

Getting the story right here is highly consequential. It will shape the arguments that determine the outcome of the Georgia runoffs — and control of the Senate — and should leave little doubt that continued GOP control means McConnell will strive to sabotage the recovery to cripple Joe Biden’s presidency.

This is what McConnell wants to obscure. Because as he has privately admitted, the failure of Congress to deliver a robust aid package to people is putting his Georgia Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R) and David Perdue (R) at risk.

So McConnell wants voters — especially those in Georgia — to believe Republicans supported generous aid all along, particularly the stimulus checks in the new deal, and that Democrats refused to act, to harm President Trump’s reelection campaign.

It’s an astonishing bit of political theater. He opposed any relief bill, fought against any proposals for months and months, and only now when when he’s trying to provide good news for Republicans in Georgia does he come around.

McConnell even acknowledged that a vote would disrupt plans to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, and refused to commit to a vote before Election Day. That wrecks the story McConnell is telling: He opposed a vote before the election, despite his revisionism that Pelosi did not want compromise to hurt Trump.

It’s projection all around. He accuses Democrats of obstructing relief efforts; it was the Republicans all along. He accuses Democrats of only coming around when they saw political gain for their party; the truth is he’s only supporting it because Loeffler (who opposed all relief!) and Perdue need the help.

How can we hide the fact that Republican conservatives are first in line for the vaccine?

Ross Douthat does it again. He’s spewed out a pointless screed in which he tediously tells us that science isn’t pure, that somehow you have to engage with social values and not just simply calculable formulas of utility, and I can agree with all that. I think I’ve been saying it myself for years, that what we do with science and how we implement is shaped by culture, and there’s no denying it. But Douthat has an agenda lurking under the glurge, and being Douthat he can’t just come out and say what it is. So I read his whole essay, painful as it was, and emerged out the other side wondering what he’s advocating.

And to the extent that trust the science just means that Dr. Anthony Fauci is a better guide to epidemiological trends than someone the president liked on cable news, then it’s a sound and unobjectionable idea.

But for many crucial decisions of the last year, that unobjectionable version of trust the science didn’t get you very far. And when it had more sweeping implications, what the slogan implied was often much more dubious: a deference to the science bureaucracy during a crisis when bureaucratic norms needed to give way; an attempt by para-scientific enterprises to trade on (or trade away) science’s credibility for the sake of political agendas; and an abdication by elected officials of responsibility for decisions that are fundamentally political in nature.

We’re only in the second or third paragraph, and the murk is already growing. What “science bureaucracy” are you objecting to, Ross? There is one, of course — in a society dependent on science, but where the public is generally ignorant and misinformed, it’s inevitable that institutions have to form to provide good information to politicians. I’d love to see greater democratization of science, but the existence of a “science bureaucracy” is a product of the American environment.

But what “political agenda” are you complaining about? What credibility is being traded away? And of course elected officials, politicians, are making political decisions. Isn’t that obvious?

Then, finally, we get the issue that’s got him wound up: it’s the question of who gets the coronavirus first.

But the further you get from the laboratory work, the more complicated and less clearly scientific the key issues become. The timeline on which vaccines have become available, for instance, reflects an attempt to balance the rules of bureaucratic science, their priority on safety and certainty of knowledge, with the urgency of trying something to halt a disease that’s killing thousands of Americans every day. Many scientific factors weigh in that balance, but so do all kinds of extra-scientific variables: moral assumptions about what kinds of vaccine testing we should pursue (one reason we didn’t get the “challenge trials” that might have delivered a vaccine much earlier); legal assumptions about who should be allowed to experiment with unproven treatments; political assumptions about how much bureaucratic hoop-jumping it takes to persuade Americans that a vaccine is safe.

Yes? We know. There are all kinds of regulatory hoops to jump through before you toss a new medication out to the public. The ethics of science are complicated and interact messily with with social values. We didn’t do those “challenge trials” because we have a long established policy of testing with randomized controlled trials before general release, and challenge trials require intentionally exposing subjects to the virus and your relatively untested vaccine simultaneously. Yeah, it’s a political and ethical decision. What do you propose to do instead? I’m still at a loss about what Douthat is complaining about.

Then it turns out that what’s really chafing poor Ross is that the liberals had a hand in making decisions.

Then there’s the now-pressing question of who actually gets the vaccine first, which has been taken up at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a way that throws the limits of science-trusting into even sharper relief. Last month their Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices produced a working document that’s a masterpiece of para-scientific effort, in which questions that are legitimately medical and scientific (who will the vaccine help the most), questions that are more logistical and sociological (which pattern of distribution will be easier to put in place) and moral questions about who deserves a vaccine are all jumbled up, assessed with a form of pseudo-rigor that resembles someone bluffing the way through a McKinsey job interview and then used to justify the conclusion that we should vaccinate essential workers before seniors … because seniors are more likely to be privileged and white.

That “working document”? It’s a set of powerpoint slides that explains how the CDC made decisions about how to prioritize who gets vaccinated. It explicitly points out all the things Douthat has said: that there are issues of science, ethics, and implementation that need to be balanced, and it goes through their process in an abbreviated, powerpointy way. It’s not the clearest way to explain their reasoning, but the whole point of the document is to point out that there are all these non-scientific concerns that must be considered. Again, what is he complaining about? Isn’t that what he was talking about in the first half of the essay?

But then we get to the real issue for Douthat: “the conclusion that we should vaccinate essential workers before seniors … because seniors are more likely to be privileged and white.” It’s all identity politics! They’re discriminating against white people!

Except…the document doesn’t say that.

On one page it lists three ethical principles of concern: “maximize benefits and minimize harms,” “promote justice,” and “mitigate health inequities.” Then, in a table, it assesses each of those principles for essential workers, high-risk adults, and the elderly. And then under “health inequities” and the elderly, it says “Racial and ethnic minority groups under-represented among adults >65”. That’s it. It states a simple fact about demographics of the disease. It was clearly not the major reason for the priorities that were set. It’s just one factor that ought to be considered.

But Douthat (and Matthew Yglesias, but fuck Yglesias) basically wants to claim that this is evidence that it’s the liberals are being racist.

As Matthew Yglesias noted, this (provisional, it should be stressed) recommendation is a remarkable example of how a certain kind of progressive moral thinking ignores the actual needs of racial minorities. Because if you vaccinate working-age people before you vaccinate older people, you will actually end up not vaccinating the most vulnerable minority population, African-American seniors — so more minorities might die for the sake of a racial balance in overall vaccination rates.

No, it’s clear from the table that a major factor in the final decision was the multiplier effect — that benefits to health care workers spread rapidly to assist all the other groups. Sure, we could decide to “mitigate health inequities” by insisting that old black people are first in line, but who is going to give them their vaccine? Who’s going to make sure they follow the protocol? That’s why the CDC puts health care workers in front, because maintaining that group helps all groups. And it’s all the fault of those liberals!

But for liberals, especially blue-state politicians and officials, the failure has more often involved invoking capital-S Science to evade their own responsibilities: pretending that a certain kind of scientific knowledge, ideally backed by impeccable credentials, can substitute for prudential and moral judgments that we are all qualified to argue over, and that our elected leaders, not our scientists, have the final responsibility to make.

This conclusion does not make any sense. Douthat starts this essay by explaining that there isn’t a simple scientific answer for social problems; then he cites a CDC document that shows they are well aware of this problem, and that they are weighing ethical and logistical concerns in addition to the scientific matters; and then he says damn those liberals who want to run roughshod over morality with capital-S Science!

My head hurts. He just wrote a lot of words that didn’t make a coherent point, and he doesn’t say what action is needed to correct for the problem, whatever it is. It’s a lot of finger-wagging at scientists and liberals, with vague intimations that they’re doing a racism against white people, and the implication that their rules for prioritizing the order of vaccinations aren’t good. I don’t get it…wait. There is an explanation for that essay. He’s a conservative, trying to muddy the waters about who should get vaccinated, and claiming the decision-making process is tainted with liberal bias. Why would he do that?

There sure has been a lot of obvious line-jumping by conservative science-denialists lately. Somebody is thinking it would be useful to sow doubt about how the line is ordered.

In that entire CDC working document, they failed to consider the plight of white dumbass pig castrators. LIBERAL BIAS! If they weren’t so infatuated with capital-S Science they would have been able to justify treating these parasites first.

Scratch a rich person, find a crook

Somehow, all the money has ended up in the hands of lunatics. Or maybe getting rich causes the derangement?

The nonprofit group, the Liberty Center for God and Country…

Wait wait wait wait, stop right there. Doesn’t the name alone tell you that this has got to be an evil organization? Just find every group with an over-the-top title touting how good and godly they are, and arrest them on suspicion. You know a little investigation is going to discover all kinds of scumbuggery carried out under the sanctimonious pretext of their name.

But do continue.

The nonprofit group, the Liberty Center for God and Country, paid 20 private investigators close to $300,000 to conduct a six-week probe of alleged illegal ballot retrievals in Houston leading up to the election, the group has said. None of its allegations of fraud have been substantiated.

What did I tell you? There have been so many cockroaches crawling out to feast on the garbage trail left by Republican election lies. As expected, they found nothing, because there is nothing to find, but that just motivates them to make shit up, and carry out extraordinary illegalities to support it.

David Lopez-Zuniga, an air-conditioner installer, had just left his mobile home for his typical predawn commute when he noticed an SUV’s headlights closely trailing his small cargo truck.

Within seconds, the SUV swerved alongside the passenger’s side, striking the truck and forcing Lopez-Zuniga to the side of a highway. There, he said, the SUV’s driver feigned an injury before ordering Lopez-Zuniga to the ground at gunpoint.

“I was very scared,” Lopez-Zuniga, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “I didn’t know who this person was.”

As it turned out, the incident was the extraordinary culmination of a misguided undercover surveillance operation — financed by a conservative nonprofit group and carried out by private investigators — that sought to uncover a massive election fraud scheme before the November election.

Police said that Lopez-Zuniga, 39, was the victim of a bogus conspiracy theory alleging he was involved in transporting 750,000 mail-in ballots fraudulently signed by Hispanic children whose fingerprints could not be traced.

You’ll never guess what they found in the truck. Air conditioning repair equipment! Who woulda guessed it?

The guy who assaulted an air conditioner repairman is an ex-cop who was fired for his abuses, but he’s pleading not guilty. He’s guilty. Of course, the real criminal is the conservative twit who founded the Liberty Center for God and Country, Steven F. Hotze.

The nonprofit was created by Hotze, a natural health doctor and megadonor to Texas conservatives, who has taken a leading role in election litigation in the state. Hotze filed a series of lawsuits before November’s presidential election seeking to limit mail-in voting and dismiss ballots submitted via drive-through voting sites.

Most of Hotze’s recent election lawsuits were unsuccessful. However, the Texas Supreme Court in one case prohibited Harris County from sending out applications for mail-in ballots to all registered voters.

Hotze also has spearheaded anti-gay rights campaigns, claiming in 2015 that the legalization of same-sex marriage would lead schools to teaching kindergartners to “practice sodomy.”

Hotze’s nonprofit group was created “for the purpose of ensuring election integrity primarily,” said Jared Woodfill, Hotze’s personal lawyer and the former executive director of the Harris County Republican Party, the county that includes Houston. Woodfill is listed on state incorporation records as a director of the nonprofit group, along with Jeffrey Yates, the former longtime chairman of the county’s Republican Party. Yates did not respond to phone messages.

“The socialist Democrat leadership in Harris County has developed a massive ballot by mail vote harvesting scheme to steal the general election,” a now-deleted fundraising page for the group alleged. “We are working with a group of private investigators who have uncovered this massive election fraud scheme.”

The group raised nearly $70,000 through a GoFundMe page from Oct. 10 through last week. Hotze has said publicly that he donated $75,000 to the probe and that an unnamed individual had donated another $125,000.

Hotze is a filthy rich quack who seems to have made a fortune with a drug store that peddles “supplements”. He’s a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons — not a credible organization — and QAnon — also not a credible organization. And now he pours his ill-gotten cash into ludicrous schemes to undermine democratic elections. I guess that makes him a True American Patriot™.

Are you feeling rescued yet?

Moscow Mitch has finally corralled his Republican parasites enough to allow a little money to trickle out to the public.

“More help is on the way. Moments ago, in consultation with our committees, the four leaders of the Senate and House finalized an agreement. It would be another major rescue package for the American people,” McConnell said. “As our citizens continue battling this coronavirus pandemic this holiday season, they will not be fighting alone.”

Wow. A Major Rescue Package. $900 billion dollars! How much is that for each of us?

The legislation includes stimulus checks for millions of Americans of up to $600 per person. The size of that benefit would be reduced for people who earned more than $75,000 in 2019 and disappear altogether for those who earned more than $99,000. The stimulus checks would provide $600 per adult and child, meaning a family of four would receive $2,400 up to a certain income.

Woo hoo! I qualify for the full $600, which will immediately disappear into a single mortgage payment, which is nice, I guess. I’m sure Bank of America will appreciate getting the money that I got to briefly hold in my hand. Oh, well. It’s nice to get a cookie.

If they were serious about rescue, though, I’d rather see some major structural changes to how the country is run. Like, how are there billionaires? And how did they get richer during the pandemic? Maybe, instead of a one shot sop, we could permanently siphon more of that American wealth out of the pockets of rich jerks and into the wages of the general public?

There are going to be multiple books written on the Trump response to the pandemic

He’s going to be roasted alive. It’ll be interesting to see comparisons between two presidents who were faced with catastrophic crises during their administrations: Hoover and the 1929 stock market crash, and Trump and the coronavirus pandemic. Trump is going to come off as far worse.

You can get an advance peek at how the world is going to see Trump in a long summary by the Washington Post, The inside story of how Trump’s denial, mismanagement and magical thinking led to the pandemic’s dark winter. It’s grim. You won’t enjoy it.

A few excerpts:

Olivia Troye, a former Pence adviser and task force aide who resigned in the summer and campaigned against Trump’s reelection, said the nation’s trauma is a result of the president’s mismanagement of the crisis early on, and is being prolonged by his disinterest in it now.

“I would love to say that I’m shocked, but I’m not,” Troye said. “This is in keeping with everything he has been.” She added: “People are still dying every day. There’s thousands of cases every day and yet he won’t do the right thing. . . . To see a sitting president directly refuse to help during a crisis is just flabbergasting to me.”

Paul A. Offit, who is director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, a professor of vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory council, said of Trump: “He’s a salesman, but this is something he can’t sell. So he just gave up. He gave up on trying to sell people something that was unsellable.”

Now he’s got a vaccine to sell, though, so he’s trying hard to take credit for it. Trump is not a scientist, but he is a popular politician, and there were things he could have done with his limited skill set, but didn’t.

Skepticism of masks became a hallmark of the Trump administration’s pandemic response. On April 3, when the CDC recommended that all Americans wear masks, Trump announced that he would not do so because he could not envision himself sitting behind the Resolute Desk with his face covered as he greeted visiting dignitaries. The president stressed that mask-wearing was “voluntary,” effectively permitting his legions of followers to disregard the CDC’s recommendation.

In the months that followed, Trump was only seen wearing a mask on rare occasions, instead following the advice of Stephen Miller, Johnny McEntee, Derek Lyons and other trusted aides to think of masks as a cultural wedge issue.

Pence covered his face with somewhat more regularity than the president, but after forgoing a mask during an April 28 visit to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, he drew a public rebuke from the hospital’s leaders. Short then yelled at a hospital official over it, a person with knowledge of the visit said.

“What the Trump administration has managed to do is they accomplished — remarkably — a very high-tech solution, which is developing a vaccine, but they completely failed at the low-tech solution, which is masking and social distancing, and they put people at risk,” Offit said.

Just imagine if the president had told his 70 million MAGA cult followers to wear a mask, and had set an example by wearing one. It would have cost next to nothing, and was the simplest, cheapest way to slow the spread of the disease…but no. He didn’t like how he would look wearing one, and once he made a decision, his stubborn slow brain wouldn’t let him change. Neither would his ego.

In the early weeks, Pence was the frontman at daily coronavirus news conferences. He provided top-line updates, including case and death counts, before turning it over to Fauci, Birx and other health professionals. Short advised the vice president against detailing such dire statistics, but Pence insisted, believing he was obligated to share such facts with the public, according to another official with knowledge of these discussions.

Over time, however, Trump decided he wanted to be the face of the government’s response, so he took over Pence’s role at the briefings. A number of Republican senators privately counseled the president to let the doctors be out front, according to a senior Republican congressional official, but “Trump just couldn’t let someone else get all that attention.”

Trump’s performances were riddled with misinformation, contradictions and indecorous boasts, while also predicting miracles and promoting cure-all therapeutics. Trump often said he was trying to be a “cheerleader” for the country, and a senior administration official explained that the president has said he drew lessons from Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking.”

“What he’s saying there is, ‘I’m going to will the economy to success through mass psychology. We’re going to tell the country things are going great and it’s going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy,’ ” this official said of Trump.

Then they let Scott Fucking Atlas dictate the science.

Scott Atlas found himself in Trump’s orbit the way so many do: through the television screen.

A neuroradiologist with no infectious-disease or public health background, Atlas joined the coronavirus response team in August as a special government employee, after a few senior Trump advisers — Kushner, McEntee and Hope Hicks — were impressed by his appearances on cable news.

Atlas began working out of Kushner’s office suite, and quickly scored a blue badge — the most coveted level of White House access — and a spot on the coronavirus task force. Though many were skeptical of him, the vice president’s team felt that if Atlas was going to be part of the virus response, then he needed to be a full-fledged member of the effort, said two people familiar with the decision.

Atlas pushed a controversial “herd immunity” strategy — of letting the virus spread freely among the young and healthy — and clashed with others on the task force, many of whom described him as combative and condescending. He lorded his seemingly unfettered access to the president over the group and, as one senior adviser said, “The science just got totally perverted with Scott in the room.”

Read the whole thing. It’s depressing, but like I said, there are going to be some great page turners coming out of this — a combination of true crime, bad science, and incompetent bumblers who don’t have a clue what they’re doing.

I protect the galaxy from the threat of invasion from the Evil Emperor Zurg sworn enemy of the Galactic Alliance!

I feel safer in this pandemic and economic meltdown now that Mike Pence has announced the name we must use when addressing members of the Space Force.

This is just such silly-bonkers. There is no space force, except as a line item on a budget that will be funneled off to defense contractors. They’re not guarding us against anything. I hope the Democrats just erase this nonsense off the spreadsheet as soon as they take office (they probably won’t, they love defense contractors, too.)

I do have to wonder what that streak of light on Earth in the bottom left of their logo is. Is that the Guardians launching missiles from Earth at some target in space, or the Guardians bombing some target from orbit?