D-Day, 9/11, Pearl Harbor

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday was a day of hope in the fight against COVID-19 as an Advisory Panel to the Centers for Disease Control approved the emergency use of a new vaccine.  However, this good news was overshadowed by the number of Americans who die of the disease becomes gloomier than ever: Over 3,000 American coronavirus deaths in a single day were recorded on Wednesday, more than the number of Americans who died on D-Day, 9/11, or the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The crisis across the country is pushing medical centers to the breaking point and leaving staff members and public health officials burned out and plagued by tears and nightmares.

All told, the crisis has left more than 290,000 people dead nationwide, with more than 15.5 million confirmed infections.

The U.S. recorded 3,124 deaths Wednesday, the highest one-day total yet, according to Johns Hopkins University. Up until last week, the peak was 2,603 deaths on April 15, when New York City was the epicenter of the nation’s outbreak.  

Wednesday’s toll eclipsed American deaths on the opening day of the Normandy invasion during World War II: 2,500, out of some 4,400 Allied dead. And it topped the toll on Sept. 11, 2001: 2,977.  And the toll during the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941: 2,041.

New coronavirus cases per day are running at all-time highs of over 209,000 on average. And the number of people in the hospital with COVID-19 is setting records nearly every day.

A U.S. government advisory panel yesterday endorsed widespread use of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine to help conquer the outbreak. Depending on how fast the FDA signs off on the panel’s recommendation, shots could begin within days, inaugurating the biggest vaccination campaign in U.S. history.

As reported by the Associated Press, here are stories from around the country of how Americans are dealing with the worsening crisis.

In St. Louis, respiratory therapist Joe Kowalczyk said he has seen entire floors of his hospital fill up with COVID-19 patients, some of them two to a room. He said the supply of ventilators is dwindling, and the inventory is so thin that colleagues on one shift had to ventilate one patient by using a BiPAP machine, similar to the devices used to treat sleep apnea.

When he goes home to sleep during the day at the end of his grueling overnight shifts, he sometimes has nightmares.

“I would be sleeping and I would be working in a unit and things would go completely wrong and I would shock myself awake. They would be very visceral and very vivid,” he said. “It would just really spook me.”

In South Dakota, Dr. Clay Smith has treated hundreds of COVID-19 patients while working at Monument Health Spearfish Hospital and at Sheridan Memorial Hospital in neighboring Wyoming.

He said patients are becoming stranded in the emergency room for hours while they await beds on the main floor or transfers to larger hospitals. And those transfers are becoming more challenging, with some patients sent as far away as Denver, 400 miles (644 kilometers) from the two hospitals.

“That is a huge burden for families and EMS systems as well when you take an ambulance and send it 400 miles one way, that ambulance is out of the community for essentially a whole day,” he said.

Smith added that some patients have gone from thinking “I thought this was a hoax” to “Wow, this is real and I feel terrible.” But he also has seen people with COVID-19 who “continue to be disbelievers. It is hard to see that.”

“At the end of the day the virus doesn’t care whether you believe in it or not,” he said.

New Orleans’ health director, Dr. Jennifer Avegno, described a recent visit to a hospital where she watched doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists and others risk exposure to the disease in a long, futile attempt to save a dying COVID-19 patient. Some broke down in tears afterward, she said.

“These are seasoned emergency and critical care personnel,” she said. “We do not cry very often — and especially not a number of us all at once.”

In Illinois, where authorities recorded an additional 196 deaths Thursday, Dr. Meeta Shah at Rush University in Chicago said medical workers are already beleaguered and waiting for the “other shoe to drop” from holiday gatherings.

“Every day you think, ‘Today is going to be awful,’” Shah said.

In Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam, a doctor by training, announced a midnight curfew and expanded mask rules to require face coverings be worn outdoors, not just inside.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf temporarily halted school sports and other extracurricular activities, ordered gyms, theaters and casinos to close and banned indoor dining at restaurants.

In Idaho, Gov. Brad Little didn’t order a statewide mask mandate or enact additional restrictions despite the public health agency announcing that COVID-19 is now the leading cause of death in the state. But the Republican governor warned that if hospitals continue to fill and the state has to initiate “crisis standards of care” — when life-saving treatment would be reserved for patients most likely to survive — car crash victims could be treated in hospital conference rooms and diabetics with infections could be denied beds.

Little was among the first governors to publicly wear a mask in the spring and has encouraged others to do so, but anti-mask sentiment is intense in the conservative state.

In New York City, which was ravaged by the virus in the spring, one doctor sounded a note of relative optimism, saying that at least physicians are more capable of managing the virus now.

“Early in the spring we did not know enough,” said Dr. Jolion McGreevy, who directs Mount Sinai Hospital’s emergency department. “We really are operating from a place of knowledge, now — which is a big leap from where we were in the spring.”

Let’s hope that the new vaccine is deployed efficiently and we can stem this tragedy.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, who defeated President Donald Trump in one of the most bitter presidential elections in U.S. history, are Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2020. The selection was announced yesterday by NBC News’ Lester Holt.

Trump, who continues to make baseless fraud claims and continues to challenge an election that has already been certified by all 50 states, was on Time’s shortlist.

Biden and Harris were in a crowded field of other contenders including  Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading epidemiologist, who survived a White House attempt to discredit him, and the health care, postal and sanitation workers who put their lives on the line during the Covid-19 crisis, Time said.

Also on the shortlist, Time said, were the racial justice movements that organized nationwide demonstrations after the death of George Floyd in police custody, members of which Trump disparaged repeatedly as “thugs” and “anarchists.”

But in the end, Time’s editors decided that Biden, who was President Barack Obama’s vice president, and Harris, the nation’s first woman and first Black and South Asian American elected vice president, were the people who had the most influence on the world during a year when the presidential contest became for many Americans a referendum on Trump’s much-criticized pandemic performance.

Congratulations to Biden and Harris!

Well-deserved!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House Task Force on the coronavirus pandemic, is supposedly seeking to have a role in the Joe Biden administration.  She had a sterling reputation as a former U.S. Army physician, a globally recognized AIDS researcher and an Obama administration holdover, before her involvement with Donald Trump.  As has been the case with so many others during his administration, it appears Trump has damaged her reputation or at least frayed it a bit.  In the early months of the pandemic, she and Anthony Fauci were frequently brought before the press to inform and make recommendations about dealing with the pandemic.  When their professional judgements ran counter to Trump’s ideas, they had to take professional stands.  Fauci did.  Birx did not.  Both were then relegated to secondary roles in the pandemic fight.  Fauci has been able to maintain an audience for his views but Birx has stayed in the shadows. Below is an article describing her situation, courtesy of the Associated Press.

Tony

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The Associated Press

December 10, 2020

WASHINGTON (AP) — When Dr. Deborah Birx was brought into President Donald Trump’s orbit to help fight the coronavirus pandemic, she had a sterling reputation as a former U.S. Army physician, a globally recognized AIDS researcher and a rare Obama administration holdover.

Less than 10 months later, as Trump’s time in office nears its end, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator’s reputation is frayed. And after serving every president since Ronald Reagan, her future in the incoming Joe Biden administration is uncertain.

Over the course of the pandemic, Birx drew criticism from public health experts and Democratic lawmakers for not speaking out forcefully against the Republican president when he contradicted advice from medical advisers and scientists about how to fight the virus.

On everything from Trump’s aversion to masks to his dangerous suggestion that ingesting bleach might ward off the virus, critics and backers say Birx stepped carefully to try to maintain her influence in hopes of pushing the president to listen to the scientists.

“The president’s departure from reality become so extreme that it put her and others on the task force in an untenable position,” said Michael Weinstein, who heads the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and got to know Birx professionally after she was named the global AIDS coordinator in 2014.

“History will have to judge whether they enabled the president by giving him credibility based on their expertise or whether she and the others did more in helping prevent more people from being hurt by the craziness,” he said.

Birx has made clear that she wants to stick around to help the Biden administration roll out vaccines and persuade the American people to be inoculated.

She has reached out to Biden advisers in recent days as she tries to make the case for a role in the incoming Democratic president’s virus response effort, according to a person familiar with the Biden team’s personnel deliberations and a Trump administration coronavirus task force official. Both spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions.

Birx has conveyed that, at best, she envisions herself in a scaled-back role as Biden shapes his own team. Biden has already appointed transition co-chair and Obama administration alumnus Jeffrey Zients to serve as White House coronavirus coordinator. But Birx’s reluctance to publicly challenge Trump when he downplayed the virus has left some in Biden’s transition skeptical that she retains credibility with the public, according to the person familiar with Biden transition deliberations.

Speaking at a Wall Street Journal CEO conference on Tuesday, Birx, a public servant for 40 years, said she planned to remain in government but has yet to hear from the Biden transition team about how or if she’ll be used on the pandemic.

Birx was pulled away from her ambassadorial post as the U.S. global AIDS coordinator to assist the task force. She worked alongside her mentor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, who was less hesitant to directly contradict questionable statements by Trump. She was appointed to the AIDS post in 2014 by President Barack Obama, and it is up to Biden whether to return her to that position.

“I think the one thing I bring to this is really understanding epidemics around the globe,” she said.

The Biden transition team declined to comment. A White House task force spokesman said Birx was unavailable for comment.

Birx certainly had fans in Biden’s orbit before and immediately after she was tapped to serve as coronavirus coordinator in the Trump White House.

Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, called Birx “great.” Former Secretary of State John Kerry, who will serve as a special envoy on climate for Biden, described Birx at her 2014 swearing-in ceremony to serve as the U.S. global AIDS coordinator as someone who “embodies the best of what it means to be a pioneer, to be a practitioner, and a public servant all rolled into one.”

In her coronavirus task force role, Birx faced criticism for defending Trump after he suggested during an April briefing that ultraviolet light and ingesting disinfectants could serve as treatment for the virus. Birx explained that Trump “likes to talk that through out loud and really have that dialogue.”

Birx urged Trump to follow the data as he pushed to relax social distancing restrictions. She wasn’t above flattering the president. She faced criticism after she said in a television interview early in the crisis that Trump’s “ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues.”

Jeremy Konyndyk, now a member of the Biden transition’s Health and Human Services team, applauded Birx’s appointment early in the crisis. But Konyndyk, who led USAID’s Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the Obama administration, soon became a critic.

“My confidence in Dr. Birx has been eroding in recent weeks,” Konyndyk tweeted after Birx defended Trump’s decision in April to suspend funding for the World Health Organization. “But with this, it is lost. This statement is not credible as public health analysis, and is clearly not intended to be.”

Weeks later, Konyndyk tweeted that Birx “has repeatedly undermined her scientific credibility, publicly, in order to shield the President.”

By late summer, Birx’s stock in Trump’s eyes also diminished.

Trump was irate with Birx for what he called a “pathetic” response to criticism from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The Democratic speaker said in early August that she had “no confidence” in Birx for not pushing back harder on the president as he repeatedly diminished the impact of the virus.

Days later, Trump brought on as a pandemic adviser Dr. Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist and fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution and a critic of virus-related restrictions on the economy. Birx’s public role at the White House was sharply reduced after that, and she spent recent months traveling the country urging states to be more aggressive in fighting the virus.

In recent days, Birx has herself become more pointed in her criticism of Trump.

Asked during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday about officials in the Trump administration repeatedly flouting public health experts’ pleas for Americans to avoid large gatherings and commit to wearing face masks, Birx voiced concern about leaders “parroting myths.”

“And I think our job is to constantly say those are myths, they are wrong and you can see the evidence base,” Birx said.

 

Dear Commons Community,

Leonard Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch have a new book coming out in January entitled, The New Ph.D.: How to Build a Better Graduate Education.  This morning they have an op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education that provides a look at the state of the Ph.D. and make recommendations for improving it for the sake of students, most of whom will never be able to get academic appointments in colleges and universities.  The op-ed opens:

“Imagine an entering cohort of eight doctoral students sitting around a table in a seminar room or a laboratory conference room. They’ve just arrived at graduate school, and they’re eager to see what their new adventure will hold. They all know that the academic job market is depressed, but most are hoping for a college or university teaching job of some kind.

Now let’s flash-forward in time. According to recent statistics, four of the eight (50 percent!) will not complete the Ph.D. — and those are pre-Covid-19 numbers. Of the four who do finish, two will not get academic positions and will seek jobs elsewhere. The remaining pair will get full-time faculty jobs, most likely at teaching-intensive institutions. Perhaps they’ll get tenure-track assistant professorships, though the chances for those positions have been shrinking. And maybe one of the two will get a tenure-track position at a research university like the one where those eight students assembled years earlier.

Yet all eight of the first-year students at the table will be trained according to the professional needs of that single one who might snag a job at a research university. The curriculum of most graduate programs in the arts and sciences emphasizes research, above all, and is contoured to prepare students to compete for the rarest and most competitive jobs that sit atop the academic status pyramid.

This status quo presents a picture of incoherence of process and goals. The Ph.D. simply isn’t working right now. The degree is taking longer and longer; graduate-student cohorts are less diverse than in most social sectors; the curriculum is frequently haphazard, and so, too, is the way doctoral students are advised and trained to teach. No one is really in charge, and assessment is almost entirely lacking.

But above all, this most prestigious of degrees isn’t serving students because it doesn’t prepare them for the realities that they will face in their professional lives. We should expect holders of the highest academic degree not simply to know a great deal but to know what to do with it, both within academe (teaching, for instance, is one enactment of knowledge) and beyond it.”

They proceed to make recommendations for making the Ph.D. more valuable for doctoral students.

“We need a Ph.D. that looks outside the walls of the university, not one that turns inward. There’s nothing new about a public-facing Ph.D. Its roots lie in the American academic past, before the Cold War expansion of academe created a temporary demand for professors, along with the illusion that this demand would endure forever. Engagement of multiple and diverse publics is a much older aim of American education than the model of pure scholarly replication.

Such an emphasis on public use and usefulness is coiled into the DNA of American higher education. Most private colleges and universities were founded by religious groups seeking to improve society through learning and the good works of their educated students. And the public good was a prime tenet in the founding of state universities beginning in the 19th century.

This idea of usefulness explicitly included the arts and sciences. Public universities fulfilled the language of the 1862 Morrill Act, which calls for both “liberal and practical education.” As John Dewey put it in 1917, a discipline “recovers itself … when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method cultivated by philosophers for dealing with the problems of men” (and women, we would add). That’s a worthy credo for the tradition of American higher education.

And it is one that the Ph.D. can fulfill splendidly — if we let it. Graduate students and Ph.D.s are highly resourceful people, but we don’t see their resourcefulness often or broadly enough. Doctoral students learn to work with information in sophisticated ways and to communicate to different kinds of audiences. But too many can get stuck because they aren’t aware that they possess those skills.”

I think Cassuto and Weisbuch are providing important insights into an issue that higher education has to address.  The present pandemic may hasten its response.

Tony

Dear Commons Community.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has compiled a gender and race snapshot based on recent U.S. Department of Education data on the makeup and salaries of full-time faculty members in higher education.  Below is an excerpt.

Tony

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This data snapshot provides an updated demographic profile of full-time faculty by academic rank and institution type, highlighting disparities among women and people of color in an effort to analyze demographic breakdowns and salary differences. The snapshot draws upon data from the provisional release of the Fall 2018 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) Human Resources survey component and from foundational research by Martin Finkelstein, Jack Schuster, and Valerie Conley to understand the demographic breakdown of the faculty and the disparities that persist. Throughout the report, we have followed the terminology used by IPEDS for ease of data comparison.

This analysis shows that the proportion of women faculty members in academia is increasing, but that disparities remain.

• Even though women now account for 47 percent of full-time faculty members (compared with only 32 percent in fall 1991), they are overrepresented in non-tenure-track positions (see figure 2 below).
• Further disparities are apparent in the representation of women among full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty members within higher academic ranks, as only 32.5 percent of full professors are women.
• Salaries for full-time women faculty members are approximately 81.2 percent of men’s, with women earning $79,368 and men earning $97,738, on average (see figure 3 below).

A comparison of the proportions of full-time faculty members in each IPEDS race and ethnicity category with the broader US adult population (ages 24–64) shows that the composition of the faculty does not mirror the US population as a whole.

• Underrepresented minority (URM) individuals—those falling in IPEDS race and ethnicity categories other than white or Asian—make up only 12.9 percent of full-time faculty members across the country, despite making up 32.6 percent of the US population aged twenty-four to sixty-four (see figure 7 below).
• Among full-time URM faculty members, underrepresentation is particularly pronounced among the Hispanic or Latino and Black or African American categories.

The AAUP’s analysis confirms that women faculty members continue to face unique challenges in academia with respect to employment, advancement, salary, and job security, and that higher education is by no means immune from systemic racism. The pay and opportunity gaps identified in this data snapshot are the result of many factors beyond gender, race, and ethnicity, and closing them will require innovative and sustained efforts.

Dear Commons Community,

Scott Carlson has a sobering article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, reporting on the financial position of colleges and universities as seen by two major investment ratings agencies.  To sum up, “it ain’t good.” Here is an excerpt from the article.

“Two financial outlooks for higher ed appeared yesterday, and their most compelling parts were the longer-term prospects for the nation’s colleges and universities — because the near-term picture should be clear to nearly everyone by now. It is not promising

In their predictions, both Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings note the various ways that institutions are in pain right now: The pandemic has undercut tuition revenue, as colleges have seen sliding enrollment or have had to discount tuition heavily to bring in students. The proceeds of auxiliary services — such as student housing and dining — “remain the hardest-hit revenue stream,” Moody’s says, given that such income can account for 5 to 30 percent of a college’s operating revenue.

The years ahead for higher ed could be tough.

The result will be revenue declines of 5 to 10 percent across the sector in 2021, both credit-rating agencies predict. Some universities have been able to refinance debt or borrow so they have more cash on hand, a step that will be “critical” to their survival, Moody’s says. But colleges’ and universities’ high fixed costs — the salaries of faculty and staff members, for example, or debt and lease obligations — limit their ability to reduce expenses to absorb the shocks and “fundamental changes” coming for the sector, the agency says.

And that’s where things get a bit more interesting. Here are some of the key themes about the longer-term forecast:

Financial strain on all sides. Among those fundamental changes is the macroeconomic slowdown. The loss of businesses and jobs will plague the nation’s economy well beyond the arrival of a vaccine. “We expect that it will take until 2022 in the U.S. before economic activity fully returns to pre-virus (4Q19) levels,” write the analysts at Fitch, a pattern that could affect state and family budgets alike.

Even if economic activity quickly reverts to normal in the summer and fall of 2021, the recovery may be uneven and hampered by “any lingering economic impact and consumer caution,” says Moody’s. “Net tuition revenue and state funding are likely to remain suppressed in fiscal 2022, holding back a sharp sector rebound.”

Moody’s also predicts that research funds will dry up. The largest research sponsors are preparing for budget declines, recognizing the challenging revenue environment. That will further strain budgets as universities decide how best to support research through the lean funding years ahead.

Colleges’ endowment managers could also have to wrestle with a volatile investment market, with unclear effects on donors’ generosity.

So, in short, this will be a long haul.

A few glimmers of hope — potentially. “Meaningful changes” in higher-education policy — student-loan forgiveness, say, or another stimulus package — could sharply raise colleges’ prospects, Fitch notes. But the rating agency also expects that the administration of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will run into resistance from Republicans, and a stimulus package is likely to be capped at $1 trillion.

The new focus on hybrid learning could lead to new revenue streams, but it will also increase competition. “Virtual learning is here to stay, but is not expected to evolve into the primary academic mode of delivery post-pandemic,” says the Fitch report.

Colleges’ futures will diverge more sharply. The reports don’t discuss consolidation in the sector, but that is a prospect beneath the surface. For years now, the rating agencies have released reports indicating that colleges will struggle perpetually into the future if they are less selective, under-endowed, or located in rural or demographically declining areas. Many of those colleges — smaller private institutions highly dependent on a residential experience — now face pressures to merge with larger and stronger institutions, or to close.

Meanwhile, the sector’s winners will continue to win. This year, “the strongest institutions with the most prominent market positions saw stable to growing enrollment, though growing price sensitivity was evident across the sector,” Fitch’s report says. “We expect the more highly selective and flagship research universities to weather these challenges better due to their strong demand profiles, greater revenue diversity, and typically larger financial resources.”

Of the above, I believe that mergers and consolidations are in store for many small private, tuition-driven colleges.  I also believe we will see major consolidation of academic, administrative, and student services in the public university systems.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,  

The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday handed a defeat to Republicans seeking to throw out up to 2.5 million mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania as they try to undo President Donald Trump’s election loss, with the justices refusing to block the state from formalizing President-elect Joe Biden’s victory there.  The court in a brief order rejected a request made by U.S. Congressman Mike Kelly, a Trump ally, and other Pennsylvania Republicans who filed a lawsuit after the Nov. 3 election arguing that the state’s 2019 expansion of mail-in voting was illegal under state law.  CNN reported that the justices deliberated only forty minutes to reach their decision.

As reported by Reuters.

Pennsylvania was one of the pivotal states in the election, with Biden, a Democrat, defeating Trump there after the Republican president won the state in 2016. State officials had already certified the election results.

There were no noted dissents from any of the justices on the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority including three Trump appointees. Trump had urged the Republican-led Senate to confirm his most recent nominee, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, before the election so she would be able to participate in any election-related cases.

Trump has falsely claimed that he won re-election, making unfounded claims about widespread voting fraud in states including Pennsylvania. Democrats and other critics have accused Trump of aiming to reduce public confidence in the integrity of U.S. elections and undermine democracy by trying to subvert the will of the voters.

The Republican plaintiffs argued that the universal, “no-excuse” mail-in ballot program passed by the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania legislature in 2019, enabling voters to cast ballots by mail for any reason, violated the state’s constitution.

It appears that judicial challenges by Trump and company to the presidential election in various state, federal and now the U.S. Supreme Court have been dismissed.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump and his bullies are intimidating election officials.  These cowards are going to people’s homes and places of business to scare and harass  officials for being honest and doing their jobs. As reported by Reuters.

“Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s top election official, had just finished hanging Christmas decorations with her young son on Saturday night when a crowd demanding November’s presidential election result be reversed gathered outside her home to denounce her as a “traitor” and a “criminal.”

The demonstrators, some armed and holding up placards saying “Stop the Steal”, clustered on the sidewalk outside Benson’s Detroit home as security and police officers looked on, video broadcast live on Facebook by one of the participants showed.

“Through threats of violence, intimidation, and bullying, the armed people outside my home and their political allies seek to undermine and silence the will and voices of every voter in this state,” Benson, Michigan’s Democratic Secretary of State, said in a statement on Sunday.

The demonstration was the latest of what election authorities across the United States describe as a tide of intimidation, harassment and outright threats in the charged aftermath of the Nov. 3 election, which Republican President Donald Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

Trump has made unsubstantiated claims of widespread electoral fraud and is trying but failing to overturn Biden’s victory, challenging the outcome in court in multiple states while also pressing state officials, lawmakers and governors to throw the results out and simply declare Trump the winner.

Courts have so far rejected those requests.

Supporters of Trump in recent weeks have staked out election officials’ offices in Georgia, mounted armed protests in Arizona and left menacing telephone messages for election officials across the country, producing political turmoil unlike any other in modern U.S. history.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said that the baseless fraud claims and subsequent threats against election officials are “very damaging to our democracy. I hope it’s not the end of our democracy.”

“We cannot allow our elected officials to live in fear at all times whenever someone doesn’t like how they believe they’ve perform their job duties,” Nessel told Reuters.

Michigan, Arizona and Georgia were among a handful of hotly contested battleground states that Biden won, helping to secure his 306 to 232 advantage in the Electoral College that will officially select the next president on Dec. 14.

But the threats have not been confined to places where the election was close. In Vermont — a state no Republican presidential candidate has won since 1988 — election officials said they received a voice message threatening them with “execution by firing squad.”

“No public servant should ever have to feel threatened or concerned for their safety while they are doing their work,” Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos, a Democrat, told Reuters.

“The conspiracy theories and unfounded rhetoric that are being pushed by the president and his campaign team really could inspire some dangerous behavior somewhere in this country. It starts at the top and it really needs to stop.”

Asked to comment, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, Tim Murtaugh, said: “No one should engage in threats or violence, and if that has happened, we condemn that fully.”

He added that the campaign’s lawyers had themselves been “inundated with threats from leftist Biden supporters” and their personal information posted online.

Trump and his political backers have blasted Republicans leaders and election officials in Georgia and Arizona for certifying Biden as the winner in their states.

Trump himself has described Georgia’s Republican secretary of state as an “enemy of the people”, and one of his lawyers, Joe diGenova, said last week the administration’s former election cybersecurity chief should be “taken out at dawn and shot” for publicly defending the integrity of the election.

Several election workers contacted by Reuters said they did not want to speak about the threats they had received for fear it would make things worse.

Georgia officials were similarly reticent until last week, when threats online targeted a young contract worker for Dominion Voting Systems, whose voting machines were used in the state. One post on Twitter included a swinging noose.

That day, Gabriel Sterling, the Republican in charge of the voting machines, walked to a podium visibly angry and demanded that Trump “stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence.”

In an interview with Reuters, Sterling said that he personally had received a message calling him a him “traitor” that included his home address. Someone else wished him a happy birthday in a tweet saying it would be his last.

After his local police chief suggested he notify his neighbors, he posted on a local Facebook page urging them to call authorities if they saw anything suspicious.

“I shouldn’t have to do that,” he said.

On Monday, Georgia again certified that Biden had won after counting ballots for a third time.

Let’s be clear here.  Trump is a pathetic clown-like figure who is a cowardly bully.  Slap him in the nose and he would run home crying to Melania.  He is acting out so badly because he cannot stand the fact that he LOST the presidential election to Joe Biden.

Tony

Paul Krugman

Dear Commons Community,

Borrowing a line from the movie, A Few Good Men, Paul Krugman in his column this morning focuses on Republicans who back Donald Trump “dangerous delusions” about who won the presidential election. Entitled, Republicans Can’t Handle the Truth, Krugman describes how Trump and most Republicans have engaged “in malicious, democracy-endangering lies.”  He references a survey by The Washington Post, where “only 27 Republican members of Congress are willing to say that Joe Biden won.”  And despite the complete lack of evidence of significant fraud, a majority of self-identified Republicans said in a Reuters/Ipsos poll that the election was rigged.

Krugman concludes:

“The point is that once a party gets into the habit of rejecting facts it doesn’t want to hear, one fact it’s bound to reject sooner or later is the fact that it lost an election. In that sense there’s a straight line from, say, the Republican embrace of climate denial to the party’s willingness to go along with Trump’s attempts to retain power.

And the G.O.P.’s previous history of dealing with inconvenient reality gives us a pretty good idea about when the party will accept Joe Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election — namely, never.”

Below is the entire column. Krugman “can handle the truth!”

Tony

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New York Times

Republicans Can’t Handle the Truth!

Paul Krugman

December 8, 2021

President Trump’s continuing attempts to overturn an election he lost decisively more than a month ago is, like so much of what he’s done in office, shocking but not surprising. Who imagined that he would go quietly?

What some people may not have been fully prepared for is the way Trump’s party as a whole has backed his dangerous delusions. According to a survey by The Washington Post, only 27 Republican members of Congress are willing to say that Joe Biden won. Despite the complete lack of evidence of significant fraud, two-thirds of self-identified Republicans said in a Reuters/Ipsos poll that the election was rigged.

But you really shouldn’t be surprised by this willingness to indulge malicious, democracy-endangering lies. After all, when was the last time Republicans accepted a politically inconvenient fact? It has been clear for years that the modern G.O.P. is a party that can’t handle the truth.

Most obviously, Republican refusal to accept the election results follows months of refusal to acknowledge the dangers of the coronavirus, even as Covid-19 has become the nation’s leading cause of death, and even as a startling number of people in Trump’s orbit have been infected.

Sure enough, virus denial and vote denial converged almost perfectly on Saturday, when Trump addressed a large, mostly unmasked crowd in Georgia — creating a potential superspreader event — and demanded that the governor overturn the state’s election results. The next day Rudy Giuliani, who has been directing Trump’s efforts to cling to office, was hospitalized with the virus.

The thing is, Republican rejection of reality didn’t start in 2020, or even with the Trump era. Climate change denial — including claims that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by an international cabal of scientists — has been a badge of partisan identity for many years. Crazy conspiracy theories about the Clintons were mainstream on the right through much of the 1990s.

And one half-forgotten episode in particular seems to me to have foreshadowed much of what we’re seeing right now: Republican reactions to the mostly successful introduction of Obamacare.

The Affordable Care Act went into full effect in 2014, amid dire predictions by Republicans. The act, they claimed, would drive insurance premiums sky-high, fail to reduce the number of uninsured, and have a devastating effect on employment.

None of that happened. Instead, millions of Americans gained health insurance coverage. Job creation continued, with three million jobs added in the year following the A.C.A.’s implementation. Obamacare may have fallen somewhat short of its sponsors’ hopes (although nobody expected it to yield universal coverage), but from the beginning it helped many Americans, and was nothing like the disaster opponents predicted.

As far as I can tell, however, no prominent Republican was willing to admit that the party’s apocalyptic warnings had been proved false, let alone talk about why they were wrong. Nor, of course, did Republicans make any effort to come up with a better health plan. (It has been almost 11 years since Obamacare was signed into law, and we’re still waiting.) Instead, party leaders simply pretended that the promised catastrophe had, in fact, materialized.

For example, John Boehner, the speaker of the House at the time, insisted that there had been a “net loss” of people with health insurance. After that three million-job gain, Jeb Bush (remember him?) insisted that Obamacare was “the greatest job suppressor in the so-called recovery.”

Paul Krugman’s Newsletter: Get a better understanding of the economy — and an even deeper look at what’s on Paul’s mind.

And in a move that prefigured the Trump team’s desperate attempts to find evidence for election fraud, right-wing groups went in search of health care horror stories, tales of ordinary Americans devastated by Obamacare.

To be fair, while there is no evidence of significant electoral fraud, some people really were hurt by health reform — mainly young, healthy individuals who previously had cheap policies and made too much money to be eligible for subsidies. But these weren’t the victims Republicans were looking for. Instead, they peddled tales of older, working-class Americans who supposedly had lost access to affordable insurance.

None of these tales stood up to scrutiny. But that didn’t matter to the G.O.P. As I wrote at the time, Republicans had already — pre-Trump — entered the era of post-truth politics.

Now, there’s obviously a big difference in immediate impact between refusing to accept evidence that contradicts your policy preconceptions and refusing to accept the results of an election. But the mind-set is the same.

The point is that once a party gets into the habit of rejecting facts it doesn’t want to hear, one fact it’s bound to reject sooner or later is the fact that it lost an election. In that sense there’s a straight line from, say, the Republican embrace of climate denial to the party’s willingness to go along with Trump’s attempts to retain power.

And the G.O.P.’s previous history of dealing with inconvenient reality gives us a pretty good idea about when the party will accept Joe Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election — namely, never.