"When we think about seeing Trump on that Platform in Georgia with thousands around him cheering, it is mind blowing to realize that 98% of his message was how he was cheated during the election and that he had not given up, or given in to the Biden victory. He emphasized something that failed in court 39 times, and cases were dismissed and thrown out. He accused the Dems of Election Fraud, which is totally unproven, and fake. The answer is that Biden supporters came out in huge numbers and also chose to vote by mail, since Trump spent months downgrading the process, after he tried to diminish the Post Office process for mail in ballots. He spent two hours spelling out how the election was mishandled, and many of his fans standing behind him cheered at his fake words. 95% of those in the audience did NOT have on masks, and there was NO separation between individuals. This is a major source of the spread of the dread disease. It is significant that we cease following the lies and misrepresentations of this man. Thousands listen to him, believe him, and fail to see his underlying plans and schemes. They follow him hearing his words and interpreting them in their own concepts. This happened also with Kim Jong Un, Putin and Hitler. Those who followed the words of Adolph, accepted the negativity that Jews were cheating and stealing, and he went on with the support of his followers to Kill six million Jewish human beings. No one challenged him, or caused him to stop these actions. Trump has a contingent of followers who likewise accept his fake narrative on stolen election, and Immigrant crookedness, and Rounding the turn on COVID 19, and Jobs for his family in the White House, (Even when they fail Security Clearance.) Trump will leave office and leave behind a mindset of evil killers against those He has labeled, as he had in Charlottesville, VA."
Far from the good start we had hoped for yesterday, the first day of fundraising for December saw a total of “8” donations, totaling $240. The readers are here, the donations however are not.
That of course has never worked and never will. We never get to do what we want to do on fundraising, we invariably end up doing what we must.
Ibram X. Kendi | Stop Scapegoating Progressives Ibram X. Kendi, The Atlantic Kendi writes: "For weeks, President Donald Trump has spread misinformation by playing up the significance of voter fraud during the election without evidence, while playing down the significance of COVID-19, despite the evidence all around him."
Democrats need elected officials to do what Trump never did: Accept responsibility. Absorb criticism. Come back and campaign better.
He has left his followers infected in more ways than one, harming themselves and others.
But misinformation is hardly new for the birther theorist, for the wall builder who said some Latino immigrants were animals and rapists, for the chanter of “Lock her up” and “Send her back,” for the caster of neo-Nazis as very fine people, for the framer of peaceful demonstrators as looters and anarchists, for the denier of climate change and racism.
And misinformation is hardly new for many other Republicans. Long before Trump ran for president, Republicans were claiming that climate change is a hoax, that tax cuts for the rich stimulate the economy, that Black and Latino people benefit the most from government welfare, and that the United States is post-racial—defying all evidence to the contrary.
Trump is the monstrous head of a historically long and politically old snake. Misinforming Americans is what Republicans do.
But what about Democrats? Misinforming Americans is what many Democrats do, too. They are not just like Trump. But in the weeks since the election, they have misinformed the public, like Trump.
Democrats handily won the White House, but unexpectedly failed to flip all 12 state legislative chambers they’d targeted. They lost at least 12 seats in the House of Representatives, and although they made gains in the U.S. Senate, they may still fall short of a majority. Moderate Democrats falling east and west began searching for explanations for these disappointing results in the postelection haze. They could not blame the other swing voters, those who swing between staying home and voting, as they normally do—the surge in turnout included many people who hadn’t cast ballots in 2016 voting for Democrats in 2020.
Moderate Democrats could have pointed to the unprecedented number of Republican voters and the difficulty of defending “very competitive and often Republican-leaning districts in a nationalized election,” an explanation the political scientists Ryan Williamson and Jamie L. Carson advanced. They could have pointed to GOP voter-subtraction policies or Republican gerrymandering, which prevents Democrats from translating their popular-vote edge into electoral victories in congressional and local districts. They could have highlighted all those split-ticket voters who voted for President-elect Joe Biden and congressional Republicans. They could have blamed Biden for not delivering down-ballot wins as he and his allies said he would in the primaries.
All of these factors are grounded in good evidence but not good politics. It appears politically untenable for moderate Democrats to criticize the president-elect or white swing voters in their districts, or to underscore the devastating reach of voter suppression.
Instead some, though certainly not all, moderate Democrats zeroed in on a different factor, one that deflected blame and made overtures toward conservatives in their districts. They blamed the party’s down-ballot losses (or narrow wins) on progressive policies like Medicare for All and slogans like “Defund the police,” which they believe alienated voters. Moderate Democrats generalized anecdotes from constituents and failed to provide any measurable proof to substantiate their claims (outside of perhaps South Florida).
At the same time, Trump blamed his election loss on widespread voter fraud in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Milwaukee, and Detroit. He generalized anecdotes of his supporters and failed to provide any measurable proof to substantiate his claims.
In the postelection period, the American people were told that voter fraud made Trump lose but not down-ballot Republicans, that progressive policy proposals made down-ballot Democrats lose but not Biden. The politics mattered, not the hypocrisy.
In fact, moderate and progressive Democrats came together in 2020 to mobilize more voters than any other national electoral campaign in American history. Progressive policies were likely decisive in mobilizing some individuals to vote, and to vote for Democrats—and they likely alienated some individuals who chose not to vote or to vote for Republicans. However, moderate Democrats have yet to prove that progressive policies alienated more voters than they mobilized. They have yet to prove that Republican misinformation tying moderates to progressives swung a decisive number of voters in swing districts, and didn’t simply give a decisive number of Republican-leaning voters a reason to do what they were going to do anyway.
Perhaps some moderate Democrats, like Biden, ran good campaigns, and that’s why they won handily. Perhaps other moderate Democrats ran bad campaigns, and that’s why they lost or barely won. Perhaps still other moderate Democrats ran excellent campaigns, but barely won or had no chance of winning with Trump on the ballot. In the end, some moderate Democrats refused to recognize the source of their electoral struggles. They looked at the American people and spread misinformation about Democrats, just like Trump did.
In 2016, some Democrats blamed “economic anxiety” for their losses, instead of admitting that racist ideas, more than any other factor, distinguished Trump voters. It was politically sound for Democrats to dismiss the racist ideas of voters they hoped to win over in 2018. In 2020, they are blaming progressives, for much the same reason.
We’re all prone to making mistakes. I was wrong when I feared that a moderate Democrat would lose to Trump. I wrote a book that shared the times I was wrong about race. Progressives can be wrong; moderates can be wrong; conservatives can be wrong. But how many times do politicians admit they were wrong when they lose—that they were wrong for their constituents? It’s far more comfortable to find someone else to blame.
For Trump, the misinformation started long before Election Day. For Democrats, it started two days after Election Day. “The No. 1 concern in things that people brought to me in my [district] that I barely rewon was defunding the police,” Virginia Representative Abigail Spanberger told her colleagues during a heated three-hour House Democratic Caucus conference call, claiming that such concerns had cost the party votes. Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib countered, “To be real, it sounds like you are saying stop pushing for what Black folks want.”
The attacks and counterattacks went on. House Speaker turned peacemaker Nancy Pelosi told her caucus that the results weren’t as bad as they seemed. Democrats held on to 70 percent of the 30 Trump districts they’d won in 2018, she said. But peace did not come. The attacks from moderate Democrats (and the progressive counterattacks) traveled from the postelection call to social media to the news, and into the commentary of pundits, academics, and consultants.
“There has to be a reckoning within our ranks about this because a lot of Justice Democrats don’t give a damn about the Democratic Party,” one anonymous lawmaker toldTheWashington Post. “They’re all about purity and orthodoxy, and it is damaging our opportunities.”
Moderate Democrats wanted the phrase defund the police to be buried, and on the postelection call Spanberger urged her colleagues to “not ever use the words socialist or socialism ever again.” But progressives are all about purity and orthodoxy? The truth is, there are orthodox ideas and policy positions among both moderates and progressives. Instead of acknowledging their differences, moderate Democrats paint progressives as inflexible and divisive and present themselves as flexible and unifying—when both moderates and progressives can be inflexible and flexible, divisive and unifying.
And both can misinform. “Four years ago, Democrats’ final messaging was ‘which bathroom one could use,’” the Democratic consultant Dane Strother toldThe New York Times. “This year it was Defund the Police.” Similarly, the political scientist Bernard Grofman wrote, “‘Defund the police’ is the second stupidest campaign slogan any Democrat has uttered in the twenty first century. It is second in stupidity only to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 comment that half of Trump’s supporters belong in a ‘basket of deplorables.’”
In fact, Clinton did not use “basket of deplorables” as a campaign slogan in 2016. Progressive Democrats hardly used “Defund the police” as a campaign slogan in 2020. Even though a majority of Democrats (55 percent) support defunding the police, only one in 10 Republicans and only one in three Americans support that goal, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll. So few Democratic candidates were actually saying “Defund the police” on the campaign trail that Republican operatives and candidates demanded they “break their silence” on the issue.
Neither moderate nor progressive candidates generally ran on socialism or defunding the police. Republican candidates, though, commonly ran attack ads declaring that all Democrats from Biden to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were far-left socialists seeking to defund the police. But instead of uniting with progressives to attack Republican misinformation after the election, some moderate Democrats attacked progressives, thereby spreading Republican misinformation.
“The far left is the Republicans’ finest asset. A.O.C. and the squad are the ‘cool kids’ but their vision in no way represents half of America,” Strother told the Times. Representative Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania told the Times’ Astead Herndon, “I’m giving you an honest account of what I’m hearing from my own constituents, which is that they are extremely frustrated by the message of defunding the police and banning fracking. And I, as a Democrat, am just as frustrated. Because those things aren’t just unpopular, they’re completely unrealistic, and they aren’t going to happen.”
If the main line of Republican misinformation right now is voter fraud, then the main line of Democratic misinformation is that progressive policies are unpopular. Just as Donald Trump’s claims of fraud have proved to be a self-soothing delusion, moderates’ attacks on progressives are untethered from the reality of increasing support for progressive policies.
Progressive policies succeeded in swing states and red states during this election cycle. Florida voters passed a $15 minimum wage. Voters in Arizona, South Dakota, and Montana legalized recreational marijuana. Arizona raised taxes on the rich to fund public schools. Colorado voters instituted 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave.
Progressive policies, with the exception of defunding the police, are fairly popular. The majority of Americans and the majority of low-income Republicans favor raising the federal minimum wage to $15. The majority of respondents to an Ipsos poll this year, including 46 percent of Republicans and 72 percent of Democrats, said a $1,000-a-month “universal basic income” would make a difference in “their community in building a strong economy that gives everyone a chance to succeed.” A Fox News poll conducted the week before Election Day found that 70 percent of respondents were concerned about the effects of climate change; 77 percent said racism is a serious problem in U.S. society; 72 percent said racism in policing is a serious problem; and 67 percent said the criminal-justice system needs major changes or a complete overhaul. According to a Fox News exit poll, 70 percent of voters favored changing the health-care system to allow Americans to buy into a government-run plan. In another poll, by Climate Nexus, 59 percent of respondents supported the Green New Deal, while only 25 percent opposed it. Two out of three respondents in yet another recent poll supported some form of widespread student-loan forgiveness, including 58 percent of Republicans.
When Herndon pointed out to Lamb that polls show progressive policies to be rather popular, Lamb did not correct himself. “At the end of the day, it’s individual candidates that have to win races, and then work with their fellow officeholders to pass bills into law and change people’s lives,” he said. “So you can tell me all the polling you want, but you have to win elections.”
But candidates in swing districts supporting progressive policies did win. “Every single swing-seat House Democrat who endorsed #MedicareForAll won re-election or is on track to win re-election,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. In the House, California’s Katie Porter, Josh Harder, and Mike Levin; Pennsylvania’s Matt Cartwright and Susan Wild; Oregon’s Peter DeFazio; and Arizona’s Ann Kirkpatrick all supported Medicare for All in swing districts and prevailed.* None of the Democrats who lost their reelection bids for the House supported Medicare for All. Among the 93 co-sponsors of the Green New Deal in the House, only one lost reelection. Four co-sponsors who represent swing districts ranging from very slightly Democrat to moderately Republican won reelection.
Moderate Democratic House candidates in swing districts who did not support progressive policies also won elections. Lucy McBath (Georgia), Jared Golden (Maine), Kim Schrier (Washington), Haley Stevens (Michigan), Andy Kim (New Jersey), and Colin Allred (Texas) all won despite being falsely accused of siding with “extreme liberals who want to defund the police” in Golden’s case, or supporting a “plan for socialized medicine” that “would eliminate 100,000 doctors and nurses” in Stevens’s case, or being a “deranged socialist Democrat” in Schrier’s case. None of these moderate Democrats expressed support for defunding the police, and the majority came out against doing so. Perhaps Democrats should be asking why some moderates won and others lost when they all weathered a similar avalanche of Republican misinformation.
No Democrat faced more Republican misinformation than Biden. “The Radical Left Democrats new theme is ‘Defund the Police,’” Trump tweeted on June 4. “Remember that when you don’t want Crime, especially against you and your family. This is where Sleepy Joe is being dragged by the socialists. I am the complete opposite, more money for Law Enforcement!”
Biden came out against defunding the police in June. But the truth hardly mattered. Trump spent the final months of the campaign framing himself as the “law and order” candidate and Biden as the “defund the police” candidate, consistently fearmongering in speeches and ads with lines like “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”
It didn’t stick. Biden won with a record number of votes.
No one knows for sure what effect Republican misinformation really had at this point, but neither Republican misinformation nor progressive policies were universally fatal for Democrats. If it continues, though, Democratic misinformation will be fatal for Democrats.
I expected GOP misinformation to portray moderate and progressive Democrats as anti-American extremists—which GOP operatives are doing now to the Democrats running for the U.S. Senate in Georgia. I didn’t expect moderate Democrats to first decry GOP misinformation and then turn around and misinform Americans about progressives. I didn’t expect moderate Democrats to contribute valiantly to the remarkable campaign to eject Trump from the White House, then follow that up with a postelection misinformation campaign that could cause a recurrence of Trumpism in the House in 2023, and of Trump himself in 2025.
Freeing American politics of misinformation would help free American politics of Trumpism. Americans can’t just vote out Trump Republicans. Americans must insist that elected officials—no matter how conservative, moderate, or progressive they may be—speak from the evidence even when it is against their political interests. Our representatives in government should admit that their own campaigns are to blame when they lose or barely win. We need elected officials to do what Trump never did: Accept responsibility. Absorb criticism. Come back and campaign better.
I don’t expect elected officials to be perfect. They will misinform. We will misinform. They are not all knowing. We are not all knowing. Their ignorance and our ignorance will breed misinformation. They will make mistakes. We will make mistakes. We must have a forgiving culture. We must have a learning culture, because widespread ignorance makes us vulnerable to widespread misinformation.
But was the postelection misinformation campaign about ignorance? Or was all that misinformation about power? Are we witnessing the craven attempt of Republicans to maintain power amid the rising tide of Democratic voters in this country? Are we witnessing the craven attempt of moderate Democrats to maintain power amid the rising tide of progressive voters in this country? Time will tell.
Right now, it is excruciating to watch a president ignore a viral pandemic and chase down the ghosts of voter fraud. It is harrowing to watch millions of unmasked Americans run with him on the pavement of misinformation—sometimes to their own death, often toward the death of their livelihoods, and always toward the death of democracy.
Yet it is just as harrowing to watch some Americans who ran against Trump paving new paths of misinformation that Trump could use one day to return to office.
Trump did not usher Trump into the White House. We did, by refusing to face the truth. And we’re suffering the consequences.
Trump paid lip service to the importance of voting while at the same time insisting the election was stolen from him.
utgoing President Donald Trump traveled to Valdosta, Georgia on Saturday for a rally that was ostensibly meant to pump up voters and encourage them to support Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue ahead of next month’s runoff elections. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump ended up having a hard time talking about anything but himself and his grievances.
Trump’s trip to Georgia for his first post-election rally came as he continues to push lies about the election being stolen from him — and as he makes a last-ditch push for Republican-controlled legislatures to overturn the election results. Much of Trump’s remarks consisted of variations on these themes, and his insistence that the election was rigged against him in states he lost like Georgia was at tension with the idea it’s important for Republicans to turn out for Loeffler and Perdue.
That incoherency was evident throughout Trump’s speech on Saturday, which began with him brazenly lying that he actually won Georgia.
“We won Georgia, just so you understand,” Trump said, even though his loss in the state has already been certified by Georgia election officials. Trump ended up repeating this lie so many times throughout his speech that by the end of it he was mentioning it in passing as if it’s settled fact.
Despite his insistence that the Georgia Republicans who run the state at best looked the other way while Democrats conspired to steal the election from him, Trump at other points urged his fans to go out and vote for Loeffler and Purdue, saying things like, “If you don’t vote, the socialists and communists win.”
But what the president didn’t bother trying to explain is why Republican voters should have any confidence the runoffs won’t be rigged just like he says the presidential election was, given that they will be run by the same officials.
Both Georgia senators are in tight races, and the slim margin by which Trump lost the state would make it seem that even a slightly depressed turnout could cost Loeffler and Perdue their seats come January. And should they both lose, Democrats will regain control of the Senate thanks to the tiebreaking vote of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. Republicans were counting on the president to help provide both candidates with some momentum.
But the downside of Trump’s difficulty talking about anything other than himself or the alleged terribleness of other people became evident when Loeffler and Perdue took the stage to tepid applause. Their brief remarks were truncated by “fight for Trump!” chants that drowned them out.
The Georgia rally came hours after Trump reportedly phoned Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and asked him to convene a special session of the legislature to overturn the election results. Kemp reportedly turned Trump down, and perhaps as a result, Trump attacked him a number of times throughout his speech, at one point telling his fans, “Your governor should be ashamed of himself.”
Then, toward the end of the rally, Trump outlined the desperate two-front battle he’s trying to fight to overturn the election, saying “hopefully our legislatures and the United States Supreme Court will step forward and save our country.”
But since neither Republican-controlled state legislatures or the Supreme Court has thus far shown much inclination to get involved in an election President-elect Joe Biden clearly won, Trump appears to have a backup plan — one he expressed in a fittingly incoherent manner.
“We’re gonna win back the White House. We’re gonna win it back,” Trump said, teasing a 2024 run, but he then immediately added: “I don’t want to wait until 2024. I want to go back three weeks.”
Unfortunately for Trump, there’s no do-overs. But in the meantime, his refusal to concede has led to a fundraising bonanza that could end up helping him launch a bid to avenge his loss to Biden based on the “they stole it from me” lies he’s been pushing over the month since Election Day.
Health care workers in Houston, Texas, perform a procedure on a patient in the COVID-19 intensive care unit on Thanksgiving. This past week has seen continued steep growth in cases, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19. (photo: Go Nakamura/Getty Images)
'Extraordinary Acceleration': Takeaways From the Pandemic This Week Will Stone, NPR Stone writes: "With the arrival of December, it's now clear the winter surge of the pandemic is materializing in many of the ways that the country's top scientists and health care leaders feared."
On all fronts — cases, hospitalizations and deaths — the U.S. toppled records this week.
For the first time, new infections soared above 200,000 cases in a single day.
"What we're seeing now is less of a curve and more of a vertical climb," says Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "It's really an extraordinary acceleration."
This week, the daily death toll eclipsed even the worst day of the spring, with nearly 2,900 lives lost on Thursday. And hospitals are teetering under the weight of so many critically ill patients.
"This is going to be the biggest stress test of American health care in history," says Dr. Bruce Siegel, president of America's Essential Hospitals, which represents more than 300 safety-net hospitals.
There continues to be very promising news on vaccines — what the National Institutes of Health's Dr. Anthony Fauci calls a "light at the end of the tunnel." Vaccination could truly be weeks away for some people.
But that will not come soon enough to prevent a staggering number of illnesses and deaths in the weeks ahead.
Here's where things stand.
1) U.S. hospitals are staggering under their patient load
More than 100,000 people in the U.S. are now hospitalized for COVID-19. That is double what it was only a month ago. Harrowing stories of packed intensive care units and exhausted health care workers are emerging from all over. "Hospitals are on the brink of being overwhelmed," says Siegel. "It is across the country. It is not just one region."
The West hit an all-time record for hospitalizations this past week. The South is inching closer to its record from the summer. An encouraging sign is that the number of patients coming into hospitals in the Midwest has slowed down recently, after weeks of non-stop growth. Parts of the Northeast, especially Rhode Island and Connecticut, are under strain, but not nearly at the levels seen during the spring.
Some states are setting up field hospitals to care for the overflow of patients, a solution that Siegel calls "far from ideal." There are critical shortages of staff in hundreds of hospitals. By Christmas time, California Gov. Gavin Newsom warned, 112% of his state's ICU beds could soon be occupied. Hospitals are calling off medical procedures and sending COVID-19 patients who aren't seriously ill home.
It's hard to fathom the situation getting much worse, but that's exactly what is predicted. By the end of December, at least a dozen states are forecast to have more than 60% of their ICU beds filled with COVID-19 patients, a level that is astounding and could lead hospitals to ration care.
2) No more "hot spots." It's everywhere
Forget hot spots. "We are way beyond that," says Siegel. The country is now averaging nearly 180,000 new cases per day. So many places have raging outbreaks that it's difficult to point to one region that is particularly bad. Rhode Island has now outpaced South Dakota with new cases per capita; New Mexico rivals Wisconsin, which previously had among the worst rates in the country
On the West Coast and in the Northeast, states that had successfully kept the virus in check are under siege. "The coasts are beginning to see the same kind of uptick as the Midwest," says Dr. William Miller, an epidemiologist at Ohio State University. Cases are growing in every region, with the South leading.
The fall surge arrived earlier in the Midwest than elsewhere, but there has been a notable decline since mid November. But Miller doesn't expect that trend to stick: "The Midwest is continuing at a pretty significant rate, with some variation state to state, so it's not good." In fact, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan have added more cases in the past week than any other states, save for Texas and California, which have much larger populations. And the region's rate of infections per capita is still much higher than anywhere else in the country,
Cases are falling in some states, but experts caution that the holiday has disrupted testing and the declines could soon change.
3) Thanksgiving surge? Time will tell
Will Thanksgiving propel another wave of infections across the country? Almost certainly, say health experts interviewed by NPR. While many Americans did travel and gather over the holiday, it's still too soon to see that in the data. "I think we will see a sharp increase," says Nuzzo, who anticipates the impact of the holiday will be more clear by mid December. And remember that the surging hospitalizations right now reflect people who were exposed two weeks ago. Deaths lag by three to four weeks.
"I don't think we've seen the consequences clinically yet," says Dr Thomas Tsai of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "We clearly saw a continued surge after Labor Day," he says, and there may be a surge "stacked on top of another surge."
Unlike previous holidays, there are reasons to think the wave of infections will be worse this time. The virus is more widespread than ever before and people are spending more time indoors this time of year. A worst case scenario, Siegel says, will be that the Thanksgiving surge will be mounting just as "millions of people are being exposed over the Christmas holidays."
4) Deaths are hitting new records, and it will get worse
This week, the U.S. shattered its single-day record for deaths, which was set in April, logging nearly 2,900 deaths in one day. Nationwide, average daily deaths are pushing 2,000.
Over the summer, death rates fell, in large part because younger people were getting infected, "but eventually the virus finds its way into the groups that are statistically more likely to become hospitalized and to die," says Nuzzo. "Unfortunately, that's what we seem to be seeing right now." Just look at long-term care facilities, which house some of the most vulnerable.
In the final week of November, there was the largest single-week increase in deaths since the summer, according to the COVID Tracking Project. Forecasts offer a harrowing picture of the weeks ahead. Between 9,500 and 19,500 people could die by Christmas, according to an "ensemble" model used by the CDC.
Another model predicts the total U.S. death toll to be more than 435,000 by Feb. 1, with the caveat that the actual total will depend on how much people wear masks and physically distance. Advances in treating patients have contributed to lower death rates, but Nuzzo cautions that's "contingent on there actually being enough resources in the health system."
5) Are new pandemic restrictions working?
In November, states rolled out all kinds of new COVID-19 restrictions. In a few hard-hit places, there are signs that universal mask mandates could be paying off, in particular North Dakota and Iowa, where new infections have dropped. "There seems to be a clear effect in those states," says Siegel. In others, it's not so clear. New Mexico, Oregon and Washington put in place some of the most sweeping restrictions a few weeks ago, but cases are still rising quickly there.
Some states tried to find a middle ground, keeping businesses open to an extent and limiting capacity, including Connecticut and Massachusetts. Both are now seeing record-settinggrowth and doctors are pleading for tighter restrictions. California tried out curfews and lighter restrictions, but is now moving toward more stringent rules.
It may be too early to tell if the changes are making a big difference. Miller worries these public health interventions have materialized too "late on the upswing to have this dramatic effect." It's very hard to flatten exponential growth, which is why other countries have resorted to lockdowns. Plus no state is an island, says Nuzzo, and it's tough to "keep numbers lower when the rest of the country may be struggling."
6) Twindemic? Not yet
There is one glimmer of positive news: So far flu activity is lower than it has been in previous years. If this trend holds, it will be a godsend for overwhelmed hospitals, which had feared a "twindemic" of flu and the coronavirus.
This isn't entirely surprising because countries in the Southern Hemisphere had a lighter flu season, in part perhaps because face masks and physical distancing guard against influenza. A big push to get more people vaccinated this year may also be playing a role.
"The fact that it's flat so far is good news and I'm optimistic that it won't be terrible," says Miller of OSU. "But flu season can be quite unpredictable." Sometimes the flu doesn't really start to surge until January or even February.
Five states have only one abortion clinic left standing.
Over the last eight years, more than 100 independent abortion clinics in the U.S., or more than a third, have closed their doors, according to a Wednesday report from the Abortion Care Network, a membership organization for independent abortion clinics, or clinics that don’t belong to Planned Parenthood. These types of organizations make up roughly a quarter of the nation’s abortion-performing facilities, but they provide 58 percent of all abortions. The vast majority of clinics that offer abortion past the first trimester are independent.
In 2012, there were 510 open independent clinics, the report found. By November 2020, that number had shrunk to 337. This year alone, 14 independent clinics closed or stopped performing abortions.
Now, under the coronavirus pandemic, independent clinics are facing what the report calls an “unprecedented strain.”
“We don’t really know what the long-term impact is gonna be on independent providers,” said Nikki Madsen, the Abortion Care Network’s executive director. “They’ve just adapted, so that people could continue accessing abortion care, but they are struggling financially.”
In Texas, three clinics run by a national company named Whole Woman’s Health have had to pare back their services to focus primarily on offering abortions. Clinics are open in 12-hour shifts, instead of eight, to see the same number of patients, thanks to distancing measures. Sometimes, the clinics have had to stop flying in the doctors who perform abortions; in one case, they even temporarily relocated a doctor to make sure they could see abortion patients.
It’s all expensive.
“It’s absolutely a struggle. I don’t think that we have felt the full effect yet,” said Marva Sadler, director of clinical services for the Texas clinics. “One thing I know about independent abortion providers in the United States is that we often make business decisions that are not best for the business.”
Five states that have just one abortion clinic left standing, and three of those clinics are independent; Louisiana and Wyoming, with three and two clinics, respectively, only have indie clinics. In Arkansas, Nevada, and Georgia, the only abortion clinics that perform surgical abortions are independent. (Unlike medication abortions, which involve pills, these procedures can be performed later on in a pregnancy.)
Madsen said that her group was unable to verify how many clinics may have shuttered due to the pandemic, but said that tight finances frequently lead clinics to close their doors. In late March, the Abortion Care Network asked its 150-plus member clinics how much money they anticipated losing every month. Nearly 27 percent said they faced losing between $50,000 and $99,000; 10 percent anticipated losing upwards of $100,000.
In total, 92 percent of the responding clinics “indicated a need for financial support to continue providing care during the pandemic,” in the words of that March survey. They said that they’d had to add telemedicine services, as well as pause or reduce services like STI treatment or birth control. Although some clinics had started offering more abortions, others had been forced to reduce the number they’d performed or stop them entirely.
For abortion providers, political opposition to their work has compounded the public health and financial crisis of the pandemic. Over the spring, public officials in 11 states cited the pandemic as a reason for abortion providers to stop offering the procedure. For days, access to abortion flickered in multiple states, including Texas.
“There were couple of days in our clinics that we were not able to see patients at all and then there were some days that we were only able to see medication abortion patients,” recalled Sadler, who said some patients had to have their appointments rescheduled up to three or four times. “There was also a time that our three Whole Woman’s Health clinics, along with another independent provider, were the only clinics that were seeing patients at all.”
Eventually, the orders expired or were halted by court orders. But for many, the damage had been done. Patients were forced to travel out of state, at potentially high costs and incalculable public health risk, for the procedure. Sadler’s clinics tried to help, sometimes by sending patients to Whole Woman Health’s sister clinics in Virginia. Clinics from Seattle to Washington, D.C. told the Abortion Care Network that they were taking in patients from Texas.
“You had many women [who] … had to make the decision on what the risk factors were for them and their family and doing the travel,” Sadler said. “In some instances, it just was not an option.”
More recently, abortion providers have had to contend with another political blow: the October confirmation of conservative Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Although Republicans may portray Planned Parenthood as the American abortion bogeyman, independent clinics were responsible for bringing the last two abortion cases to the Supreme Court. In both cases—including a 2016 decision brought by the Whole Woman’s Health organization in Texas—the abortion providers have triumphed in 5-4 rulings.
Now, with a comfortable 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, the next provider to bring a case to the nation’s highest court may not be so victorious.
“It is hard to put a positive spin on things right now,” Madsen said. “We are in a really challenging time for abortion rights—the most challenging time I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, frankly.”
Sunday Song: Bob Dylan | The Death of Emmett Till Bob Dylan, YouTube Excerpt: "Twas down in Mississippi not so long ago. When a young boy from Chicago town stepped through a Southern door. This boy's dreadful tragedy I can still remember well."
Bob Dylan still in Minneapolis around 1960 or 61. (photo: Minneapolis Star Tribune)
’Twas down in Mississippi not so long ago When a young boy from Chicago town stepped through a Southern door This boy’s dreadful tragedy I can still remember well The color of his skin was black and his name was Emmett Till Some men they dragged him to a barn and there they beat him up They said they had a reason, but I can’t remember what They tortured him and did some things too evil to repeat There were screaming sounds inside the barn, there was laughing sounds out on the street.
Then they rolled his body down a gulf amidst a bloody red rain And they threw him in the waters wide to cease his screaming pain The reason that they killed him there, and I’m sure it ain’t no lie Was just for the fun of killin’ him and to watch him slowly die And then to stop the United States of yelling for a trial Two brothers they confessed that they had killed poor Emmett Till But on the jury there were men who helped the brothers commit this awful crime.
And so this trial was a mockery, but nobody seemed to mind I saw the morning papers but I could not bear to see The smiling brothers walkin’ down the courthouse stairs For the jury found them innocent and the brothers they went free While Emmett’s body floats the foam of a Jim Crow southern sea If you can’t speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that’s so unjust Your eyes are filled with dead men’s dirt, your mind is filled with dust Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood it must refuse to flow. For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!
This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man That this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live.
People protest in San Francisco in 2016 in solidarity with the Standing Rock Lakota tribe's fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline. (photo: PAX AHIMSA GETHEN)
The U.S. has largely ignored the nearly 400 treaties signed with tribal nations, but that may be starting to change. And some think that could prevent, or even reverse, environmental degradation.
st month, Michigan officials announced plans to shut down a controversial oil pipeline that runs below the Great Lakes at the Straits of Mackinac. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel, both Democrats, cited several reasons for the decision, including one that got the attention of tribal leaders in Michigan who have been fighting the pipeline for years.
In the shutdown order, Whitmer referenced an 1836 treaty in which tribal nations ceded more than a third of the territory that would become Michigan in exchange for the right to hunt and fish on the land in perpetuity. An oil spill from the pipeline would destroy the state’s ability to honor that right, Whitmer said.
Federal and state officials signed nearly 400 treaties with tribal nations in the 18th and 19th centuries. Threatened by genocidal violence, the tribes signed away much of their land. But they secured promises that they could continue to hunt, fish and gather wild food on the territory they were giving up. Many treaties also include cash payments, mineral rights and promises of health care and education.
For the most part, the U.S. has ignored its obligations. Game wardens have targeted and arrested tribal members seeking to exercise their hunting and fishing rights. Governments and private interests have logged and developed on hunting grounds, blocked and polluted waterways with dams and destroyed vast beds of wild rice.
If Native treaty rights had been honored, the natural landscape of the U.S. might look very different today.
In recent years, some courts, political leaders and regulators have decided it’s time to start honoring those treaty obligations. Some legal experts think that asserting these rights could prevent — or even reverse — environmental degradation.
Bryan Newland, chair of the Bay Mills Indian Community in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, said Whitmer’s order was the first time he had seen political leaders cite treaty rights to support a decision instead of being forced to recognize those rights by a court.
“It is always a struggle to get state governments to recognize the existence of our treaties, our rights and their responsibilities to not impair those rights,” he said. “It’s not enough to recognize our right to harvest. State governments have a responsibility to stop harming and degrading this fishery. This was a big step in tribal-state relations.”
Attorney Bill Rastetter, who represents the Grand Taverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, another Michigan tribe, said tribal members invoking a treaty can make a stronger legal claim than non-Native citizens raising the same issue as an environmental complaint.
“With environmental claims, there is sometimes a balancing test that’s applied between the potential harm and potential good,” said Rastetter, who has been part of efforts opposing the pipeline in Michigan. “But when you’re dealing with the diminishment of a right reserved by tribes, there ought not to be that balancing test.”
Still, tribes have mostly used treaty rights claims to play defense against new infringements by developers and polluters. Some tribal members say new treaty violations are surfacing faster than old ones are being corrected. And it would be a painstaking process to use treaty rights to make a dent in centuries’ worth of construction, resource extraction and government practices conditioned to ignore those rights.
Some legal experts are also wary about making sweeping treaty assertions, for fear that coming up short could set a dangerous precedent.
“There’s been an effort to try to be careful about what you give a court the chance to decide,” Rastetter said. “If they decide against you, you might not get another bite at the apple. We have to not just have a claim, but we have to go through the pragmatic analysis of how it may work out.”
And many political leaders remain hostile to tribal sovereignty. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, has sought to prevent tribes in her state from setting up COVID-19 safety checkpoints on the roads entering their reservations.
Meanwhile, the wording of many treaties leaves the fulfillment of some rights open to interpretation, and with Justice Amy Coney Barrett replacing Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the U.S. Supreme Court, the recent spate of favorable judicial rulings could be in jeopardy.
‘Still at the Tail End’
The foundation for contemporary treaty claims is a landmark 1974 case known as the Boldt decision, a ruling issued in a federal district court and upheld by an appeals court. The case affirmed that tribes in Washington state have a right to fish for salmon in off-reservation waters. It forced the state to abandon its attempts to block Native fishing, making the tribes co-managers of Washington’s fisheries along with state wildlife officials.
“It started bringing to light the fact that these treaties aren’t ancient history,” said John Echohawk, founder and executive director of the Native American Rights Fund, a tribal advocacy group that successfully litigated the case. “They’re the supreme law of the land. If the courts are going to be enforcing those rights, [political leaders] have got to pay attention.”
Treaty rights earned another milestone victory in 2018, with another case involving Washington tribes that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. That year, the court ordered the state to rip out and replace about 1,000 culverts that blocked the passage of migrating salmon, at a cost of billions of dollars. The ruling held that Washington couldn’t uphold its treaty obligations to the tribes simply by allowing access to waters where it had already destroyed the fishery.
Legal experts say that decision has changed the landscape — motivating political leaders in many states to consider whether their decisions could affect treaty-protected hunting, fishing or gathering rights.
“You can’t have a meaningful right to take fish without fish,” said Riyaz Kanji, a leading Indian law attorney based in Michigan, and a founding member of the firm that successfully argued the culvert case. “The notion that tribal treaty rights should be factored into government decision-making is gaining increasing currency.”
The strength of that argument was on display again last month, when leaders in Oregon and California announced plans to remove four dams on the Klamath River. The dam removal will reopen hundreds of miles of the Klamath and its tributaries to restore the river’s dwindling salmon runs. Amy Cordalis, general counsel and member of California’s Yurok Tribe, said tribal fishing rights played a pivotal role in forcing the states to act.
“We can’t continue our lifeway if that river dies, if the fish go extinct, and that’s what’s happening,” Cordalis said. “The last generation of Indian people’s fight was just for the right. My generation’s fight is to conserve the resource on which the right is based. If we don’t have any fish, what good is the right?”
Restorative justice was a “key reason” for the dam removal, Richard Whitman, director of the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, said in a statement provided to Stateline. “These tribes have suffered repeated efforts to take their land, their waters, and their fisheries, and restoring a free-flowing river is a historic reversal that will begin to move the basin back to sustainability for all.”
Regulators at state and federal agencies — which make thousands of permitting decisions about development, resource use and environmental compliance — have begun taking notice as well.
In 2016, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rejected a proposed coal export terminal in Washington state not far from the Canadian border. The port, just north of the Lummi Nation reservation, would have brought giant freighters into waters where Lummi people have fished for thousands of years and have rights to fish today. Those opposed to the terminal also worried about disturbances to archaeological sites and pollution from coal dust.
“The U.S. government — as an immigrant — came to us in 1855 and entered into a partnership,” said Jay Julius, a former chair of the Lummi Nation who was serving as a council member at the time of the coal terminal battle. “We’ve been faced with a failure to honor the contract, the treaty, the supreme law of the land. Catastrophic disruption to the natural world has taken place. The world would be a very different place if the treaties had been honored.
“We weren’t at the table as this pollution-based economy was being developed. What we’re witnessing right now is we’re actually at the table, but we’re still at the tail end.”
Regulators and courts don’t always give the same credence to treaty claims. The Army Corps approved construction of a controversial section of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2017 despite concerns it could jeopardize water, fishing and hunting rights for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. The pipeline battle has gone back and forth in the courts. It was completed and began operating in 2017, but a judge earlier this year shut down the pipeline to allow further environmental review.
Other Battles
While much of tribes’ recent progress has centered around environmental issues, treaty claims on several other fronts could reshape the U.S. government’s relationship with Native tribes.
Earlier this year, a judge ruled that federal agencies violated their treaty obligations when they shut down an emergency room on the Rosebud Sioux reservation in South Dakota. The U.S. pledged to provide health care to the tribe in 1868 when tribal leaders signed a treaty surrendering much of their land.
“One of the great misconceptions is that these treaty rights were some sort of gift or act of kindness from the federal government,” said Brendan Johnson, a former U.S. attorney who represented the tribe in the case. “In reality, these were bargained rights given to tribes to cease military actions. The tribes paid dearly in blood and treasure by way of land. We do find ourselves in the midst of a time where treaty rights are being more respected — at least by the court system.”
Many tribes have similar health care provisions in their treaties, which the federal government largely tries to honor by funding the Indian Health Service. Advocates say the agency is severely underfunded, and it’s been plagued with scandals. For years, IHS hired dozens of doctors with a history of malpractice, leading to disastrous consequences. It has also come under fire for mishandling sex abuse allegations.
Johnson said the problems at IHS could represent a treaty violation, but tribes have been so overwhelmed with fighting the Covid-19 pandemic — which has had a devastating toll in Indian Country — that the issue has yet to come forward as a legal case.
“[Native] health care has been embarrassingly inadequate,” he said. “We need Congress to be aware of this and to take action to fully fund tribal health systems.”
Kanji, the Indian law expert, said he expects to see tribes pushing to reassert regulatory and jurisdictional authority on their own reservations, where many have seen key matters of sovereignty handed to outside authorities.
“The courts over time have chipped away at tribal powers on reservations,” he said. “There’s real tension between what the courts have done and what the courts are saying now. There will be a chance to revivify tribal authority within reservations.”
Some of that hope stems from the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark McGirt Decision, issued earlier this year. The ruling recognized Native reservations across much of Oklahoma that had long been treated as defunct by state and federal authorities, a major win for those who argue that treaties aren’t just “ancient history.” In effect, the decision prevents Native defendants from being tried in state courts for crimes committed on reservations.
Looking Ahead
Some tribal leaders are hopeful that treaty rights could see even greater recognition when President-elect Joe Biden takes office.
“We would like to see an administrative process where they have to examine the impact of an action on our treaty rights so that we can avoid a [legal battle] like the [Washington state] culverts case,” said Newland, the Bay Mills chairman. “There’s absolutely nothing to stop an executive branch agency from adopting this as its own policy.”
Biden’s pledge to select a diverse cabinet has also drawn praise. Many are hopeful he will choose New Mexico Democratic Rep. Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, to lead the Interior Department, which oversees government programs relating to Native Americans.
Treaty claims will still face significant obstacles, including a court system shaped by President Donald Trump’s record appointment of judges. Even in cases where the tribes have won, progress has been slow. Lawmakers in Washington have yet to provide adequate funding to replace the culverts as ordered by the courts. Courts may find that health care shortcomings violate treaty rights, but it’s difficult to make improvements without Congress providing more money to the Indian Health Service.
Undoing what’s already been done could prove difficult. It’s been 40 years since the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. illegally stole South Dakota’s Black Hills from the Sioux Nation in violation of their treaty agreement. Instead of returning the land, the court ordered a payment of $100 million in reparations. The tribe has refused to accept the payment — saying it will settle for no less than the restoration of the land — but there are no signs the territory is close to changing hands.
Still, some Natives say they’ve been heartened by the focus on racial injustice spurred by the Black Lives Matter protests, and by the 2016 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which brought international attention to tribal sovereignty. And many find optimism when they envision what the landscape could look like if their rights were finally honored.
“What does the world look like if those treaty rights are protected?” asked Cordalis, the Yurok attorney. “We start healing our environment and start seeing things being put back together — healthy ecosystems, clean water, healthy forests and rivers. You would start seeing the planet regenerating itself. It’s one way we start pulling ourselves out of the climate crisis. We start asserting rights that protect nature.”
utgoing President Donald Trump traveled to Valdosta, Georgia on Saturday for a rally that was ostensibly meant to pump up voters and encourage them to support Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue ahead of next month’s runoff elections. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump ended up having a hard time talking about anything but himself and his grievances.
st month, Michigan officials announced plans to shut down a controversial oil pipeline that runs below the Great Lakes at the Straits of Mackinac. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel, both Democrats, cited several reasons for the decision, including one that got the attention of tribal leaders in Michigan who have been fighting the pipeline for years.
