Spot the mistakes

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Governors may make good presidents

But not ‘imperial governors’ like DeSantis

Raymond Scheppach, University of Virginia

Nearly all are present or former governors. By Bill Day

Many people believe governors make good presidents. In fact, a 2016 Gallup Poll found that almost 74% of people say that governing a state provides excellent or good preparation for someone to be an effective president. As a result, many political commentators have tried to explain why Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is stumbling in his campaign for president.

Some say it is because he is stiff or awkward on the campaign trail, or his path to the nomination is not really to the political right of former President Donald Trump, or he needs to step up and directly confront the former president.

But as the former executive director of the National Governors Association for 27 years, I have worked with well over 300 governors. During that time I have been part of many conversations with governors regarding other governors running for president. 

So I know that some current and former governors on both sides of the aisle would have another reason for why DeSantis is stalling. If you were to ask them, I expect they would mostly smile and say quietly, “It is because he has become an imperial governor” – one who believes he is all-powerful and that all his decisions will be just applauded and never questioned or opposed.

And they're off!

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GOP debate wrap-up

 

There was a time when at least some Republicans cared about the environment

Putting the “conserve” back in “conservative”

Peter Dykstra, Environmental Health News

Last Sunday, an influential British conservative sent up a red flag in the Times of London. Sensing a sharp turn in the policy direction of new Prime Minister Liz Truss, William Hague wrote “conservatives must always be environmentalists.”

In other words, the British Right is in deep trouble if it follows the path of America’s Right.

But — from Teddy Roosevelt to Richard Milhous Nixon to Ronald Reagan — it wasn’t always that way here.

So, in this sharply divided country, how do we get back to a time when millions of us don’t equate clean air with bad taste? Maybe a tour of more than a century of Republican history could guide us.

What do Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie and Ben Carson have in common?

Giuliani leaves hospital after getting drug 'cocktail' so rare states distribute it by lottery

Mark Sumner, Daily Kos Staff

By Nick Anderson

Ten months into the pandemic, the monoclonal antibody “cocktails” developed by Eli Lilly and Regeneron are one of the few treatments proven to be highly effective against COVID-19. 

Unfortunately they are both expensive and difficult to manufacture, which made Donald Trump’s promise to make these drugs available to everyone for free even more ridiculous than his usual lies. 

The total number of available doses is not enough to treat the Americans who test positive for coronavirus on a single day.

In the real world, these drugs are so scarce that states and hospitals distribute them by lottery. Medical organizations are hastily convening ethics boards to determine how to hand out drugs that are both highly effective and extremely limited. 

It might seem that they could be reserved for only those in most dire circumstances, but that’s not the way they work. The drugs are most effective when administered early, before the onset of serious symptoms. 

The tiny fraction of patients who receive these drugs have much improved odds of never developing serious issues like those now plaguing millions of Americans. They just have to get very, very lucky … like Donald Trump, Chris Christie, Ben Carson, and Rudy Giuliani.  

How Your Brain Tricks You Into Taking Risks During the Pandemic

Our brains demand clarity and certainty
By Marshall Allen and Meg Marco for ProPublica

It was mid-February and Maria Konnikova — a psychologist, writer and champion poker player — was on a multicity trip. From her hotel room in New Orleans, she called her sister, a doctor, to discuss the emerging COVID-19 pandemic. 

Konnikova saw there were early cases in Los Angeles, where she was headed for a poker tournament.

The odds of Konnikova getting infected or spreading the virus by participating in a large indoor event were unknown. 

But as a poker player she had a lot of experience thinking through the probable risks associated with different decisions. So she played it conservatively. She cut short her trip and went home to quarantine in New York.

Konnikova’s psychology expertise tells her that most people have a hard time thinking through the uncertainty and probabilities posed by the pandemic. People tend to learn through experience, and we’ve never lived through anything like COVID-19. 

Every day, people face unpleasant and uncertain risks associated with their behavior, and that ambiguity goes against how we tend to think. “The brain likes certainty,” she said. “The brain likes black and white. It wants clear answers and wants clear cause and effect. It doesn’t like living in a world of ambiguities and gray zones.”

Many months into the pandemic, even as the nation faces its highest average daily case counts to date, people still don’t agree on how to live in the era of COVID-19. We know how to protect ourselves — washing our hands, wearing masks and staying socially distant — but many people still take unnecessary risks, even at the highest levels of government.

Has Donald Trump had his Joe McCarthy moment?

FINALLY, the media realizes they don't have to air or publish Trump lies 

Chris Lamb, IUPUI

The moment Lester Holt of NBC News cut into a statement from President Donald Trump. NBC News via YouTube

When CBS, NBC and ABC cut away from President Donald Trump’s news conference at the White House on the evening of Nov. 5, they took pains to explain why they were shutting off the nation’s commander-in-chief.

It was a moment that for me, as a journalism historian, carried echoes of the 1954 takedown of another flamboyant populist demagogue, Sen. Joe McCarthy.

Making false accusations

The key reason, the networks explained, was that Trump had made false claims about the integrity of Tuesday’s presidential election. As ballot counting signaled the increasing likelihood that he would lose to former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump accused the Democrats of trying to steal the election from him.

“They’re trying to rig an election, and we can’t let that happen,” Trump said.

The networks’ anchors criticized the president for peddling false claims to support his vanishing hopes for retaining the presidency. So did some of Trump’s staunchest allies.

The Prosecutor Has A Little List

Mueller Zeroes In on the Trump-Kremlin Connection

By David Cay Johnston, DCReport Editor-in-Chief

Those 43 issues that Robert Mueller wants to ask Donald Trump about tell us that the special prosecutor’s focus is not on financial crimes Trump has committed, but on the nature of his relationships with the Kremlin and Russian-speaking influencers.

That’s significant because Mueller’s charter as special prosecutor is to examine Russian interference in the 2016 elections and, secondarily, any other crimes uncovered along the way.

Trump has repeatedly warned Mueller to stay away from his business deals, many of them richly funded by Russians and smelling of money laundering and payoffs. 

However, the 43 questions, assuming the list is complete, indicate that Mueller is focused on Russian interference, not squirrelly and economically nonsensical deals with Russians that put cash in Trump’s accounts.

Among the issues Mueller wants to probe is the effort by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, to use secret Russian embassy equipment to communicate with the Kremlin. 

Ponder what would be leading Fox News every day since late 2016 had, say, an Obama aide made such a request and how often the word “traitor” would appear in the pages of The Wall Street Journal editorial pages and their like, as well as the Congressional investigations that would be underway using its power of subpoena.

Yep

New Jersey needs to figure out how to remove beached whale

New Jersey beaches closed to all, except Gov. Chris Christie.

Stuck in a stand-off with the state legislature, Gov. Chris Christie allowed state government to be shut down. 

That included the state's beaches, an important part of the state's economy during the summer. 

But every problem is, at least for Christie, an opportunity in disguise, as it allowed the Governor to have the beaches all to himself. Here he is, with family members. Christie admitted to the media that, yes, he did go to the beach, but no, he didn't get any sun.

Check out the photo and ask yourself, who ya gonna believe, Trumpnik Chris Christie or your own lying eyes?

This would make perfect sense

This would actually make sense since the criteria for becoming a Trump Administration appointee is be either be:

• A retired general or
• Completely unqualified to do the job or
• Have no experience in or knowledge of the area you are supposed to manage or
• Openly hostile to the mission of the programs you will manage and the people you will sure and as a bonus
• Be totally crazy

Quess who is the biggest liar?

New career after politics

Rejected by Trump, hated by New Jersey voters, Chris Christie tries out for the Bigs

Till the end of time

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Yeah, sorry Chris

There's no such thing as 100 percent safe.

By pretending there is, GOP makes things more dangerous

By Ian Reifowitz  

Republicans just can't quit him.

It’s still all about Dick Cheney. When it comes to the Republican approach to national security and terrorism, it is his philosophy that governs. As quoted in Ron Suskind’s book The One Percent Doctrine, here’s the ‘brains’ behind the invasion of Iraq (you remember that one—the worst decision in the history of U.S. foreign policy and the reason we now have ISIS):

If there's a 1 percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response.

Suskind elaborated further: “At this moment the Vice President officially separates analysis from action, allows for an evidence-free model to move forward, and says suspicion may be all we have to use the awesome powers of the United States.”

It was deeply disturbing to hear Republican candidates channel this Cheney-ite thinking during last week’s presidential debate (or just about any other time they open their mouths). 

They hyperventilated about how we should respond to terrorism—at least when it’s committed by Islamic radicals, because when right-wing Christian zealots commit such acts of murder the only response, apparently, is prayer.

That Whiff of Hypocrisy

Watching the 2016 GOP primary season unfold beats seeing Hillary run against herself.

By Donald Kaul

DonkeyHotey/Flickr

Baseball has spring training, football’s got its training camps. But for a political junkie like me, nothing compares with the opening of the presidential primary season.

Some 19 candidates, give or take, recently swarmed a Republican forum in New Hampshire in search of a kind word and a smile from voters there. They spent much of their time arm-wrestling each other over who hated Hillary Clinton more.

Candidates who couldn’t even spell Benghazi, let alone find it on a map, emerged as experts on the death of our ambassador in a terrorist attack there in 2012. Hillary’s fault, naturally.

I thought it was great.

Looking forward to the presidency of Chris Christie

President Chris Christie, Day #100

By Ruben Bolling

Click here to see what the future holds.

Gandhi would be proud

A typical day

By Tom Tomorrow

Click here to find out how the Bridgegate scandal REALLY happened.