NEW COVID VARIANT LEADS TO NEW REPUBLICAN CONSPIRACY THEORY. Before arriving on Capitol Hill, US Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) was a decorated veteran, a retired Navy rear admiral, and a presidential physician. Ideally, he’d have something valuable to contribute to the public discourse, especially on matters related to medicine and public service.

In practice, however, it’s not quite working out that way. The HuffPost reported (11/28): “The former White House doctor who raved about Donald Trump’s ‘excellent’ health to a skeptical public is now claiming that the disturbing new COVID-19 variant omicron is nothing but a midterm election ploy by the Democrats. Dr. Ronny Jackson, now a Republican MAGA congressman from Texas, scoffed at the variant the World Health Organization has deemed ‘highly transmissible’ and ‘concerning.’”

In a tweet published over the weekend, Steve Benen noted at Rachel Maddow’s blog (11/29), Jackson wrote, “Here comes the MEV — the Midterm Election Variant! They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election - but we’re not going to let them!”

He did not appear to be kidding.

To be sure, Benen wrote, there were some conservative media figures who also seemed eager to suggest there’s some kind of weird political connection to the omicron variant, but Jackson used his position of authority to go further than most.

“His deeply strange allegation leads to all kinds of questions. Does Jackson have any evidence to support his election conspiracy theories? If Democrats were going to somehow create a dangerous viral variant as part of a 2022 electoral scheme, wouldn’t those rascally conspirators have picked a better time?

“Perhaps most importantly, how exactly did Democrats manage to coordinate this amazing conspiracy with the World Health Organization and public health networks across the planet? Are nations around the globe shutting down flights and scrambling to prepare because they’re focused on mail-in balloting in the United States 11 months from now?

“As the world learned of the omicron variant, responsible figures considered the strain’s transmissibility, severity, and strength relative to existing vaccines. The congressman from Texas’ 13th district skipped these concerns and went straight to voter suppression,” Benen added..

“The fear, of course, is that there will be some Americans who don’t realize that Jackson’s conspiracy theory is absurd. They’ll see his background, consider him credible, and believe his bonkers ideas about elections and viral variants have merit.

“They do not. What they instead do is perpetuate a problem that leads too many people to make dangerous choices related to public health and democracy.”

HOUSE GERRYMANDERING PROCEEDS. Eighteen states — most recently Illinois — have now finished redrawing their congressional maps (not counting the six states with only one congressional district). And several other states are already deep into the process. Of particular note, California and Florida, home to 80 congressional districts between them, both released their first-draft maps in November, Fivethirtyeight.com reported (11/23).

At this point, Democrats have gained six seats nationally from the redistricting process, Republicans have gained two, and the number of competitive seats has dropped by five. Democrats have gained seats in part because of their control over redistricting in states like Illinois — whose new map creates 13 blue seats, three red seats and just one competitive seat — but also because Republicans in states like Texas gave Democratic incumbents safer districts in order to shore up their own seats. Republicans have also converted light-red districts into safer seats in states like Indiana, Oklahoma and Utah.

Some of the most heavily biased maps of the cycle have been enacted by Republicans in North Carolina and Ohio, but they are also so extreme that they run the risk of being overturned in court. There are already lawsuits alleging that they are partisan or racial gerrymanders.

A few states are running into more trouble redrawing their lines, particularly those where the two parties share redistricting power. The bipartisan redistricting commissions in both Virginia and Washington failed to meet their statutory deadlines to approve a map, kicking their redistricting processes to their respective state supreme courts. And redistricting looks destined to be decided by a court in Wisconsin, too, where the Democratic governor has vetoed the map passed by the Republican legislature.

MAJORITY OF REPUBLICANS WANT ANOTHER TRUMP RUN, BUT HE’S TOXIC TO EVERYONE ELSE. A Marquette Law School poll suggests that even though Donald Trump is likely a shoo-in for the GOP nomination in 2024, he also has a decent likelihood of repelling a lot of voters in the general election, Kerry Eleveld noted at DailyKos (11/27).

Among Republicans in the survey, 60% say they want Trump to make a 2024 bid, but fully 40% of Republicans say they don’t want him to run.

The numbers for Trump are far worse among independents, with 73% saying they don’t want Trump to run again while just 26% indicate they do hope he runs.

Not surprisingly, 94% of Democrats want Trump to take a long walk off a short pier. And among all respondents, just 28% wish Trump would run again while 71% hope he doesn’t.

A Democrat’s perception of whether those data are good news or bad news comes down to whether one wants to face Trump again in the 2024 general election.

As anti-Trump Republican Sarah Longwell tweeted, “It’s bad news. 60% of Republicans actively want Trump to run in 2024. He wins the nomination in a walk. And what are the chances he doesn’t take that opportunity?”

Zero chances, if he’s still alive.

However, if you’re a Democrat and like the odds of running against someone who divides Republican voters and alienates nearly three-quarters of independents, then maybe you don’t mind the idea of Trump throwing his hat in the ring again.

Win or lose, Trump is a curse on America. His White House tenure was horrific, and the nation is still digging out from under it. But his 2020 loss was arguably equally as harmful to US democracy as his four years in the Oval Office were. Trump’s delusional fraud claims and his cultists’ unquestioning embrace of them will haunt us for years, if not decades.

BIDEN ADMINISTRATION PROPOSES OIL AND GAS REFORMS THAT PRIORITIZE MONEY OVER CLIMATE. The Department of the Interior in a long-awaited report on the country’s federal oil and gas leasing program signals that, as long as federal courts won’t let the administration stop oil and gas leases, the administration will seek a better return on investment from some of the world’s worst polluters. In a news release, Secretary Deb Haaland said, “Our nation faces a profound climate crisis that is impacting every American. The Interior Department has an obligation to responsibly manage our public lands and waters—providing a fair return to the taxpayer and mitigating worsening climate impacts—while staying steadfast in the pursuit of environmental justice. This review outlines significant deficiencies in the federal oil and gas programs, and identifies important and urgent fiscal and programmatic reforms that will benefit the American people.”

The report found that onshore royalty rates haven’t been raised in a century and that there’s an imbalance between royalty rates being imposed on federal versus state lands. Bonding levels have stayed stagnant for half a century while the federal minimum bids and rents for onshore federal oil and gas projects haven’t changed in 30 years. “These antiquated approaches hurt not only the federal taxpayer but also state budgets because states receive a significant share of federal oil and gas revenues,” the Department of the Interior concluded.

Offshore leasing looks to be a better financial investment for the country, as leases are far pricier than their onshore counterparts. There’s also little to no barrier to entry besides capital which, as the department noted, means that “companies with poor environmental, safety, or reclamation histories are still allowed to bid for leases or acquire them from other companies.”

Environmental groups complained that the plan would let oil and gas companies continue to wreak havoc on the environment and harm the very groups Haaland and others claim to care about, and is an about face from Biden’s initial moratorium on on federal oil and gas leases, which he ordered shortly after taking office.

That moratorium was overturned in June after multiple states and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry (R) filed a lawsuit against the president’s action. It doesn’t look as if the Biden Administration is very focused on fighting back against that judgment, especially as sagging poll numbers tied to rising gas prices has Biden releasing emergency oil reserves instead of rethinking how we power our country, April Siese noted at DailyKos (11/26).

LABOR DEPARTMENT ANNOUNCES $15 MINIMUM WAGE FOR FEDERAL CONTRACTORS IN JANUARY. Around five million people work on federal government contracts, and up to 390,000 of them will be getting a raise starting Jan. 30, 2022. In April, President Joe Biden signed an executive order directing the minimum wage for federal contract workers be raised to $15 an hour, and in November, the Labor Department announced the final rule putting Biden’s order into effect, Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos (11/25).

The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour for more than a decade, though many states and cities have raised their minimum wages. The $15 minimum for contract workers will be indexed to inflation, so it won’t stagnate. The new rule also includes disabled workers and eliminates the tipped worker subminimum wage by 2024.

The Economic Policy Institute’s Ben Zipperer laid out some possible benefits in addition to 390,000 people getting a raise:

“We estimate up to 390,000 workers will benefit, half of whom are Black or Hispanic … Annual pay will rise by $3,100 for the average year-round contract worker.”

Also, he noted, “federal affirmative action requirements increased the Black share of employees at firms with contracts ... even after they were no longer federal contractors!” and “higher contractor wages may cause other firms in the local labor market to raise wages,” he said, noting “Recently Amazon’s $15 starting wage increased pay in other low-wage occupations according to research …”

Another benefit of raising the minimum wage is to improve the efficiency of the federal contracting system as higher wages leads to easier recruitment and a more experienced workforce, as fewer workers leave their jobs.

“We know from @KristaRuffini’s research that higher minimum wages increased the productivity of nursing homes:

“Lower employee turnover improved nursing home quality and patient health, in this case literally saving lives …

“All in all this the new $15 minimum wage for federal contracts is excellent policy, another step to fixing a labor market that doesn’t deliver adequate wages.”

JOHN BUELL R.I.P. John Buell of Southwest Harbor, Maine, a columnist for The Progressive Populist for nearly 25 years, died Nov. 4 at age 76.

A native of Detroit, Mich., Buell was a graduate of Grosse Pointe University School, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Amherst College and hoped to receive a Ph.D. in American Studies from Columbia University, but a low number in the draft lottery during the Vietnam War cut short that plan. At Columbia, John scrambled to finish a masters degree in one year and got a teaching job at a prep school, thus avoiding the draft. He eventually got his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Massachusetts.

John was an associate editor of The Progressive magazine for 10 years, followed by 10 years teaching at the College of the Atlantic. He joined The Progressive Populist as a columnist in February 1997. He has written several books, including “The End of Homework,” co-authored with Etta Kralovec; “Closing the Book On Homework,” “Liars, Cheaters, Evildoers,” “Sustainable Democracy.” “Democracy by Other Means” and “Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age.” All are available.

John is survived by three children and his wife, Susan Covino Buell, who noted he was a lifelong athlete, playing tennis and swimming many times a week. “He was brilliant, kind and generous. He enjoyed hearing the other person’s point of view, and was always gracious in political discussions,” she wrote.

BIDEN APPOINTEES TO POSTAL SERVICE BOARD APPEARS TO MAKE POSMASTER GENERAL A LAME DUCK. President Joe Biden announced two nominees for the US Postal Service Board of Governors to replace outgoing Governors Ron Bloom and John Barger.

“Yes, current board chair Ron Bloom—Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s greatest champion—will not be returning when his term is up on Dec. 8. Thank you, President Biden!” Joan McCarter wrote at DailyKos (11/19)

Biden is nominating Daniel Tangherlini, former administrator of the General Services Administration in the Obama administration, to replace Bloom. Derek Kan, Republican former deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, would replace Republican Barger. The board is made up of nine members, and is bipartisan. There are currently four Democrats, four Republicans, and one Independent. Biden will have appointed five members once these nominations are confirmed.

The Board of Governors has the power to remove DeJoy—they’re the only ones that can do it and now two of DeJoy’s biggest boosters will be gone. The White House has made it clear that they’re not happy with DeJoy, with White House press secretary Jen Psaki saying back in February, “I think we can all agree, most Americans would agree, that the Postal Service needs leadership that can and will do a better job.”

McCarter noted: “Is Tangherlini going into this with the expectation that he’ll hasten DeJoy’s departure? I’m pretty sure that’s a yes. DeJoy has been a walking, talking conglomeration of corruption since he took office, straight from his big donations to Republicans and the Trump convention through to his investments with Bloom’s investment firm. On the way, the company he founded and still has a financial interest in has gotten some sweet USPS contracts.

“If the corruption wasn’t bad enough, there’s the destruction of the Postal Service during a pandemic—the delayed mail, the dismantling of post office infrastructure, the 10-year plan to purposely make mail delivery a lot slower and cost more—all of this. DeJoy seemingly bribed his way into the job, and Trump put him there to screw up the mail ahead of the 2020 election. DeJoy has got to go, and now it looks like his days in the office are numbered.”

REP. CAWTHORN SEEMS TO CALL FOR VIOLENT GOVERNMENT OVERTHROW ON TWITTER, HUMILIATES HIMSELF INSTEAD. It’s been 25 years since the last mass shooting in Australia, when a lone gunman killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania, with military-style weapons and caused authorities to ban all semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns and required thousands of unlicensed firearms to be surrendered under a gun amnesty under a firearm “buyback” plan. Australia decided: no more. As a result, last April, Australia celebrated their 25-year stretch of living without fear of a school shooting or other horrific large-scale attack. How did US Rep. Madison Cawthorn respond?

“Next time a leftist asks you why we need the Second Amendment, say ‘Australia’ and walk away,” he tweeted (11/28).

Christopher Reeves wrote at DailyKos (11/29): Australians, and Americans in Australia, were left wondering: What the hell is this guy talking about? What he is talking about are new restrictions placed on Australian citizens to protect them from COVID. This seems to imply that if only Australian residents had guns, they would be eager to go to their government and start murdering people to overthrow their government. Now, it is rather odd to have a US Representative indicate that the violent overthrow of a government—any government—is something they want to encourage, but here we are in 2021.

Australians, though, and others weren’t having any of this, at all.

Dr Audrey Glover tweeted, “Lived in Australia for a number of years (post Port Arthur massacre). They don’t seem to have the need or want to take an AR-15 to get bread and milk. Not once was I worried about a stray bullet hitting me.”

FormerlyEventuallyTrumpsLawyer tweeted, “I just want to assure you and everyone else in the USA that you don’t need the right to bear weapons because of Australia. We are not going to launch an armed attack at you anytime soon.”

Nyadol Nyuon tweeted, “We already walked away, you lost us at Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

Reeves concluded, “It appears if you attempt to overthrow another government or point out how great guns are in our own environment, and you do so in such a wildly cryptic manner that not only will no one get you right away, but that you will embarrass yourself along the way.”

See more Dispatches at populist.com.

CONTENDER FOR GREATEST MESS IN CONGRESS SEEKS TO BECOME GREATEST MESS IN TEXAS. US Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), the legendary bomb-thrower who carried the far right’s banner in Congress before the Tea Party wave and the Donald Trump era reshaped the Republican caucus, announced (11/22) that he would challenge scandal-ridden Attorney General Ken Paxton in the March primary rather than seek a 10th term, Jeff Singer noted at DailyKos (11/23).

Gohmert joins Land Commissioner George P. Bush and former state Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman in the Republican primary trying to deny renomination to the Trump-endorsed incumbent. If no one wins a majority of the vote, a primary runoff would take place in late May.

Gohmert, like Paxton’s other foes, is hoping the attorney general’s many ethical woes will give him a natural opening: The congressman attacked his new opponent as someone who only “started working harder after so many of his most honorable and very top people in the AG’s office left, complaining of criminal conduct.”

Paxton has been under indictment since 2015 on a state charge of securities fraud (the case is still awaiting trial) and is reportedly under FBI investigation over unrelated allegations that he used his office to aid a wealthy ally in exchange for favors. He’s also facing a whistleblower lawsuit from several former senior aides who say they were fired after they reported Paxton’s actions to law enforcement.

To date, though, Paxton has very much looked like the primary frontrunner over both Guzman, who isn’t well-known, and Bush, who is—but has his own weaknesses with the party’s nativist base. An October YouGov poll showed Paxton beating Bush by a giant 54-18 margin, while a newer UT Tyler poll gave the attorney general a smaller 46-32 edge.

Gohmert, for his part, surprised pretty much everyone on Nov. 9 when he revealed that he was trying to raise $1 million in 10 days for a potential campaign against Paxton, though in true Gohmert fashion he tried to unveil his plans with a link to a livestream that didn’t work. His website also failed at basic math by asking “100,000 citizens to send $100 each (or any other amount to get to $1,000,000) by Nov. 19.”

The congressman was supposed to make an announcement on Nov. 19 on conservative radio host Mark Davis’ show, but he never called in. On Nov. 22, though, Gohmert finally divulged his intentions, and for once, his unveiling appears to have gone off without a hitch. He also declared that he’d “reached our initial goal of raising $1 million,” though he didn’t say whether he’d managed to do so during his self-imposed 10-day window.

JOHN KENNEDY WENT FULL JOE McCARTHY. John Kennedy (No Relation) of Louisiana is one of the Senate’s great phonies, an Oxford-educated tower of ambulatory artificial cornpone who’s as bone-deep a reactionary as Tom Cotton or Ted Cruz, but who is occasionally mistaken for being charming by people who never got over their pre-adolescent crush on Jethro Bodine, Charles P. Pierce noted at Esquire.com (11/18). On Nov. 18, he was questioning Dr. Saule Omarova, the administration’s choice to be the comptroller of the currency.

Omarova is one of those immigrant stories that used to be an American standard, before our politics drifted into a boundless sea of poison. She was born and raised in Kazakhstan when it was still part of the Soviet Union, when the Soviet Union was still part of the world. She was a star pupil within the educational system of that defunct nation. This sent her to Moscow State University on a scholarship named after Vladimir Lenin. In 1991, while at Moscow State, she came to the University of Wisconsin as an exchange student, and I can’t imagine the culture shock of exchanging Soviet Moscow for Madison. While she was there, the USSR collapsed and she was stranded here.

She stayed and became a citizen. She became an expert in the area of banking regulation and financial law. She’s currently a professor of corporate law and regulation at Cornell Law School. She has written extensively—and innovatively—about banking regulation. From NPR:

*In one paper, Omarova suggests the federal government could offer a bank account to every American through the Federal Reserve. Supporters of that proposal say it would reduce the number of “unbanked” persons significantly. Critics argue it would undermine commercial banks. In another article, she calls for the creation of an agency not unlike the Food and Drug Administration, that would be charged with approving or rejecting new financial products.*

This kind of thing has set off explosions in the highly volatile brains of Republican senators. Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania had the first public cranial detonation.

*During an interview last month on the Fox Business channel, Toomey said Omarova’s interest in these topics and others could have been shaped by her upbringing. “You could ask yourself, ‘Where would a person even come up with these ideas?’” he said. “Well, maybe a contributing factor could be in if a person grew up in the former Soviet Union, and went to Moscow State University, and attended there on a Vladimir Lenin Academic Scholarship.”*

Actual experts in the field laughed off Toomey’s cheap red-baiting for the performance piece it was. On Nov. 18, however, as Omarova met the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Jubilation T. Cornpone zapped new life into it in the clumsiest way possible. First, Kennedy demanded to know if Omarova had written a formal letter of resignation from her membership in the Komsomol, a Soviet youth organization to which Omarova had belonged when she was a kid in Kazakhstan. Then he went full [House Un-American Activities Committee]. You never go full HUAC.

“Let me tell you, I’ve spent a lot of time on your record and here’s what I found. This is America, you can believe what you want. But we can’t just let anybody be comptroller of the currency. You wrote your thesis in college at Moscow State University on — the title was ‘Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in the Capital.’ But you won’t send Senator Toomey a copy.

“You studied at university, at Moscow State University, scientific Communism, which is the science regarding the working class struggle and the socialist agenda. In 2019, not 30 years ago, in a Canadian documentary, you called the financial services industry, quote, a quintessential asshole industry. You wrote a paper called systemically significant prices, calling for the federal government to set wages, food, gas prices.

“In 2020, you wrote a paper called ‘People’s Ledger’ where you said we need to abolish bank accounts and have everybody set up an account at the Fed where the federal government will have access to your data. In 2020 you wrote another paper called ‘The Climate Case for a National Investment Authority,’ where you said what we need to do to the oil and gas industry is have the federal government bankrupt them so we can tackle climate change. In 2019, you joined the Facebook group, a Marxist Facebook group, to discuss socialist and anticapitalist views.

“Now, that’s what I see from your record. And you have the right to believe every one of these things. You do. This is America. But I don’t mean any disrespect. I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade.”

Omarova more than held her own.

“Senator, I’m not a Communist. I do not subscribe to that ideology. I could not choose where I was born. I did not — I do not remember joining any Facebook group that subscribes to that ideology. I would never knowingly join any such group. There is no record of me ever actually participating in any Marxist or Communist discussions of any kind. My family suffered under the Communist regime. I grew up, half of my family, my grandmother herself escaped death twice under the Stalin regime. This is what is seared in my mind. That’s who I am. I remember that history. I came to this country. I’m proud to be an American. And this is why I’m here today, Senator. I’m here today because I’m ready for public service.”

And then, after Kennedy had wrangled with committee chairman Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Senator Professor Warren parked Foghorn Leghorn deep into the bleachers.

“Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Professor Omarova, I know that the giant banks object to your willingness to enforce the law and that you may cut into big bank profits, so they and their Republican buddies have declared war on you. The attacks on your nomination have been vicious and personal. We’ve just seen them. Sexism, racism, pages straight out of Joe McCarthy’s 1950s red scare tactics, it’s all there on full display. Welcome to Washington in 2021 …

“… These banks want to avoid accountability, and they certainly want to avoid personal liability for their executives, and they’re willing to do whatever it takes to block you. Opposition to Professor Omarova has nothing to do with her qualifications or her ability to do this job. Professor Omarova will be an honest cop on the beat. She will not grovel to banks and big tech companies. This is a vicious smear campaign, coordinated by Republicans who are doing the bidding of giant banks that want to keep gobbling up smaller competitors, want to keep ripping off their customers, and want to keep getting away with it. Wall Street feels threatened, so they have launched an ugly, personal assault on a respected person who never sought the spotlight. It is disgusting. And anyone who participates in this malicious character assassination should be ashamed of themselves.”

Pierce concluded: “Senator Kennedy, who still may be Bless-Your-Heart’ing Sherrod Brown, is not some avuncular sh*tkicker. He’s a smart, vicious Republican of the new school, and no amount of sweet tea can obscure the taste of bile.”

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2021

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