Stephan: Here is the sad and sorry tale of how Russia played the racism, hate, and antisemitism of White Americans to create the QAnon movement that has taken over the Republican Party.
QAnon
The cult of QAnon is at a crossroads. Adherents of the conspiracy theory/new religious movement convinced themselves that Donald Trump was poised to purge the cannibal pedophile cabal and its traitorous enablers in a cleansing burst of political violence. But with Joe Biden in the White House, and Capitol rioters facing charges for their insurrection of January 6, prophecy has apparently failed. QAnon has been banished from major social media platforms. You can’t even sell Q merch on Etsy anymore. True believers are struggling to make sense of it all. Q himself has fallen silent. It has been over a month since his last dispatch to the faithful.
In just three years, QAnon has exploded from an anonymous post on 4chan to a household word. The FBI has declared QAnon a domestic terrorist threat and the QAnon ideology has been the impetus for numerous terrorist attacks, not even counting the major role played by QAnon adherents in the assault on the US Capitol. QAnon has fractured families and destroyed lives. Astonishingly, we still don’t know who Q is.
Stephan: The people of South Dakota elected, Kristi Noem, an incompetent Republican ideologue for their governor and that's the performance they got from her. The question this story leaves you with is this: Is she just incapable of living in a fact-based reality world, or is she just not intelligent enough to understand facts? Either way, the people of South Dakota have no one to blame but themselves. And this is yet another proof that Republican governance is always inferior.
Incompetent Republican Governor Kristi Noem
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) appeared on Fox News Tuesday evening, claiming that under her “unique approach,” she was able to help her state get through the pandemic better than “virtually every other state.”
The problem, however, is that South Dakota actually did among the worst in the nation when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Looking at the Center for Disease Control of data since Jan. 2020, South Dakota has had 12,244 cases per 100,000 people. To put that in context, New York has only had 7,378 cases per 100,000 people. California has had 8,247 cases per 100,000. Even Texas is lower than South Dakota […]
Stephan: Tonight as I was preparing dinner I was listening to MSNBC cover the funeral of officer Brian Sicknick who was killed by the Trumpian insurrectionists on 6 January. Lawrence O'Donnell, who had worked for years as a Senate staffer almost broke up as he reported on what we were seeing as President and Dr. Biden come to honor the fallen officer.
My wife came into the kitchen and said, "How do you think Fox is reporting this?" So we changed the channel to Fox, and they weren't covering it at all. Lou Dobbs, whom I find a particularly odious propagandist was whining about how the Senate Republicans were not being aggressive enough in stopping Trump's impeachment trial. Not a word or a single image covered the ceremony in the Capitol -- only the third time in history such a thing has ever happened.
Juliet Eilperin, Senior National Affairs Correspondent - The Washington Post
Stephan: More good news from the Biden administration. They went to court so that the EPA could get back to operating on science and not the Trumpian crap of the last four years. This is an essential change.
Trumpian orc and former -EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler at the White House in May 2019. Credit: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post
The ruling by Judge Brian Morris, chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana, Great Falls, marked a victory for environmental groups and public health advocates. Just two weeks before Biden’s inauguration, EPA finalized a rule requiring researchers to disclose the raw data involved in their public health studies before the agency could rely upon their conclusions.
The rule, which was made effective immediately, would assign less weight to studies built on medical histories and other confidential data from human subjects where the underlying information was not revealed. That sort of research — including dose-response studies, which evaluate how much a person’s exposure to a substance increases the risk of harm — have […]
Stephan: A few weeks ago I posted a paper, The Failure of Conservative Politics to Foster Wellbeing, I had written for a peer reviewed journal showing factually that Republican state governance, based on social outcome data, is universally inferior to Democratic governance. Here is the same comparison at the presidential level. The facts are clear: Republican governance at both the state and federal level is inferior. Anyone who votes Republican is voting against their own wellbeing.
Presidents and their economic performance. Graphics by Yaryna Serkez
A president has only limited control over the economy. And yet there has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century. The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.
It’s true about almost any major indicator: gross domestic product, employment, incomes, productivity, even stock prices. It’s true if you examine only the precise period when a president is in office, or instead assume that a president’s policies affect the economy only after a lag and don’t start his economic clock until months after he takes office. The gap “holds almost regardless of how you define success,” two economics professors at Princeton, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, write. They describe it as “startlingly large.”
Annual G.D.P. growth rate
Starting president’s economic clock…Start of the termSix months laterYear later0%2468RooseveltKennedyJohnsonClintonReaganCarterFordNixonEisenhowerObamaG.H.W. BushTrumanG.W. BushTrumpNote: Real G.D.P. adjusted for inflation and seasonal fluctuations.·Source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Since 1933, the economy has grown at an annual average rate of 4.6 percent under Democratic presidents and 2.4 percent under […]
