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The GQP: Trumpist Death Cult


Hugo Stiglitz

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9 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

 Steve Earle did a better job of describing moonshine running in a 3-4 minute song than Dukes of Hazzard did in 147 episodes over 7 years.

Why do think he named his band “Steve Earle & the Dukes”???   DUH!!!

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On 12/26/2022 at 1:47 AM, tx 3 putt said:

 

 

bat shit crazy 

I really wish there was a bearded man in the sky and that after death we could have a conversation.  Mine would go something like this:

GOD:  Why didn't you say JC is my lord and savior and try to run things according to my guidelines?

me:  Maybe cause your guidelines resulted in some pretty fucked up results on Earth you fuckin bum.  Have you been on a 2 million year bender?   Also, do you really think a washed up star of a show about red necks breaking laws was your best messenger? 

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1 hour ago, Horn Dog said:

I really wish there was a bearded man in the sky and that after death we could have a conversation.  Mine would go something like this:

GOD:  Why didn't you say JC is my lord and savior and try to run things according to my guidelines?

me:  Maybe cause your guidelines resulted in some pretty fucked up results on Earth you fuckin bum.  Have you been on a 2 million year bender?   Also, do you really think a washed up star of a show about red necks breaking laws was your best messenger? 

If you’re really all powerful, what do you have to be jealous of? Jealousy is a negative human emotion. It’s a sign of insecurity. What is it about the thought of people worshipping other gods that threatens you? Do you doubt your own omnipotence? Do you fear deep down inside that you’re not good enough, that maybe those other gods are better than you?

Why was “Thou shalt have no gods before me” one of your Ten Commandments, so important that you carved it in stone, and “Thou shalt not rape little children” wasn’t? Does it bother you that so many of the men who represent you rape little children? If you had it to do over again, would you still choose ‘Don’t worship other gods’ over ‘Don’t rape little children?’ If so, why?

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three things.

1.  Rep. Pascrell's voice and cadence reminds me so much of Leo McGarry (RIP)

2.  I would like to yield my time to that blonde over Mnuchin's left shoulder.

3.  Do y'all remember that weird looking dude in the early 2000's who had commercials on late night Austin TV for his apartment finding service?  I always thought he didn't look real.  Like he was an alien in our skin (a la "The Arrival" with the great Charlie Sheen).  Steve looks like that here, like he's one of us..  But not really.  

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On 12/26/2022 at 9:38 AM, YGIFS said:

To be fair, both Trump and Putin attended the same negotiating workshop at the Wichita Airport Sheraton years ago.  The plenary sessions were boring but the breakout panel with Pol Pot and Edie Amin was very interesting and they had warm cookies in the back.  

Featuring the well-known text Getting to Fuck Yourself.

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1 hour ago, Bullneck said:

 

Mnuchin has been under the radar for a couple of years.  Hopefully he gets what's coming to him. 

Just a small point of clarification.  Now that we have judicial interpretations of the tax return confidentiality statute and Congressional inquiries, the nooch's interpretation is no longer permissible.  https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/6103  He was not "breaking the law" at the time, and not in a criminal sense.

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This was talked about in the mid-term thread, and it's a bunch of boring statistics, but yeah:  death rates are higher in GQP counties and states:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/12/covid-deaths-anti-vaccine-republican-voters/672575/

 

Quote

No country has a perfect COVID-vaccination rate, even this far into the pandemic, but America’s record is particularly dismal. About a third of Americans—more than a hundred million people—have yet to get their initial shots. You can find anti-vaxxers in every corner of the country. But by far the single group of adults most likely to be unvaccinated is Republicans: 37 percent of Republicans are still unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated, compared with 9 percent of Democrats. Fourteen of the 15 states with the lowest vaccination rates voted for Donald Trump in 2020. (The other is Georgia.)

 

Quote

We know that unvaccinated Americans are more likely to be Republican, that Republicans in positions of power led the movement against COVID vaccination, and that hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated Americans have died preventable deaths from the disease. The Republican Party is unquestionably complicit in the premature deaths of many of its own supporters, a phenomenon that may be without precedent in the history of both American democracy and virology.

 

 

Quote

Obviously, nothing about being a Republican makes someone inherently anti-vaccine. Many Republicans—in fact, most of them—have gotten their first two shots. But the wildly disproportionate presence of Republicans among the unvaccinated reveals an ugly and counterintuitive aspect of the GOP campaign against vaccination: At every turn, top figures in the party have directly endangered their own constituents. Trump disparaged vaccines while president, even after orchestrating Operation Warp Speed. Other politicians, such as Texas Governor Greg Abbott, made all COVID-vaccine mandates illegal in their state. More recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called for a grand jury to investigate the safety of COVID vaccines. The right-wing media have leaned even harder into vaccine skepticism. On his prime-time Fox News show, Tucker Carlson has regularly questioned the safety of vaccines, inviting guests who have called for the shots to be “withdrawn from the market.”

 

Spoiler

Breaking down the cost of vaccine hesitancy would be simple if we could draw a causal relationship between Republican leaders’ anti-vaccine messaging and the adoption of those ideas by Americans, and then from those ideas to deaths due to non-vaccination. Unfortunately, we don’t have the data to do so. Individual vaccine skepticism cannot be traced back to a single source, and even if it could, we don’t know exactly who is unvaccinated and what their political affiliations are.

What we do have is a patchwork of estimations and correlations that, taken together, paint a blurry but nevertheless grim picture of how Republican leaders spread the vaccine hesitancy that has killed so many people. We know that as of April 2022, about 318,000 people had died from COVID because they were unvaccinated, according to research from Brown University. And the close association between Republican vaccine hesitancy and higher death rates has been documented. One study estimated that by the fall of 2021, vaccine uptake accounted for 10 percent of the total difference between Republican and Democratic deaths. But that estimate has changed—and even likely grown—over time.

Partisanship affected outcomes in the pandemic even before we had vaccines. A recent study found that from October 2020 to February 2021, the death rate in Republican-leaning counties was up to three times higher than that of Democratic-leaning counties, likely because of differences in masking and social distancing. Even when vaccines came around, these differences continued, Mauricio Santillana, an epidemiology expert at Northeastern University and a co-author of the study, told me. Follow-up research published in The Lancet Regional Health—Americas in October looked at deaths from April 2021 to March 2022 and found a 26 percent higher death rate in areas where voters leaned Republican. “There are subsequent and very serious [partisan] patterns with the Delta and Omicron waves, some of which can be explained by vaccination,” Bill Hanage, a co-author of the paper and an epidemiologist at Harvard, told me in an email.

But to understand why Republicans have died at higher rates, you can’t look at vaccine status alone. Congressional districts controlled by a trifecta of Republican leaders—state governor, Senate, and House—had an 11 percent higher death rate, according to the Lancet study. A likely explanation, the authors write, could be that in the post-vaccine era, those leaders chose policies and conveyed public-health messages that made their constituents more likely to die. Although we still can’t say these decisions led to higher death rates, the association alone is jarring.

One of the most compelling studies comes from researchers at Yale, who published their findings as a working paper in November. They link political party and excess-death rate—the percent increase in deaths above pre-COVID levels—among those registered as either Democrats or Republicans, providing a more granular view. They chose to analyze data from Florida and Ohio from before and after vaccines were available. Looking at the period before the vaccines, researchers found a 1.6-percentage-point difference in excess-death rate among Republicans and Democrats, with a higher rate among Republicans. But after vaccines became available, that gap widened dramatically to 10.4 percentage points, again with a higher Republican excess-death rate. “When we compare individuals who are of the same age, who live in the same county in the same month of the pandemic, there are differences correlated with your political-party affiliation that emerge after vaccines are available,” Jacob Wallace, an assistant professor of public health at Yale who co-authored the paper, told me. “That’s a statement we can confidently make based on the study and we couldn’t before.”

Even with this new research, it is difficult to determine just how many people died as a result of their political views. In the “excess death” study, researchers dealt only with rates of excess death, not actual death-toll numbers. Overall, excess deaths represent a small share of deaths. “On the scale of national registration for both parties,” Wallace said, “we’re talking about relatively small numbers and differences in deaths” when you look at excess-death rates alone.

The absolute number of Republican deaths is less important than the fact that they happened needlessly. Vaccines could have saved lives. And yet, the party that describes itself as pro-life campaigned against them. Democrats are not without fault, though. The Biden administration’s COVID blunders are no doubt to blame for some of the nation’s deaths. But on the whole, Democratic leaders have mostly not promoted ideas or enforced policies around COVID that actively chip away at life expectancy. It is a tragedy that the Republican push against basic lifesaving science has cut lives short and continues to do so. The partisan divide in COVID deaths, Hanage said, is just “another example of how the partisan politics of the U.S. has poisoned the well of public health.”

What’s most concerning about all of this is that partisan disparities in death rates were also apparent before COVID. People living in Republican jurisdictions have been at a health disadvantage for more than 20 years. From 2001 to 2019, the death rate in Democratic counties decreased by 22 percent, according to a recent study; in Republican counties, it declined by only 11 percent. In the same time period, the political gap in death rates increased sixfold.

Health outcomes have been diverging at the state level since the ’90s, Steven Woolf, an epidemiologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, told me. Woolf’s work suggests that over the decades, state policy decisions on health issues such as Medicaid, gun legislation, tobacco taxes, and, indeed, vaccines have likely had a stronger impact on state health trajectories than other factors. COVID’s high Republican death rates are not an isolated phenomenon but a continuation of this trend. As Republican-led states pushed back on lockdowns, the impact on population death rates was observed within weeks, Woolf said.

If the issue is indeed systemic, that doesn’t bode well for the future. Other factors could explain the higher death rate in Republican-leaning places—more poverty, less education, worse socioeconomic conditions—though Woolf said he isn’t convinced that those factors aren’t related to bad state health policy too. In any case, the long-term decline of health in red states indicates that there is an ongoing problem at a high level in Republican-led places, and that something has gone awry. “If you happen to live in certain states, your chances for living a long life are going to be much higher than if you’re an American living in a different state,” Woolf said.

Unfortunately, this trend shows no signs of breaking. The anti-science messaging that fuels such a divide is popular with Republican leadersbecause it plays so well with their constituents. Far-right crowds cheer for missed vaccine targets and jokes about executing scientific leaders. In an environment where partisanship trumps all—including trying to save people’s lives—such messaging is both politically effective and morally abhorrent. The data, however imperfect, demand a reckoning with the consequences of such a strategy not only during the pandemic but over the past few decades, and in the years to come. But to acknowledge how many Republicans didn’t have to die would mean giving credence to scientific and medical expertise. So long as America remains locked in a poisonous partisan battle in which science is wrongly dismissed as being associated with the left, the death toll will only rise.

 

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But to acknowledge how many Republicans didn’t have to die would mean giving credence to scientific and medical expertise. So long as America remains locked in a poisonous partisan battle in which science is wrongly dismissed as being associated with the left, the death toll will only rise.

TL;DR Money quote above. 

I’d like someone to look at all the recent very close elections and see if the number of increased dead Republicans may have actually led to an electoral defeat. 

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4 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

This was talked about in the mid-term thread, and it's a bunch of boring statistics, but yeah:  death rates are higher in GQP counties and states:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/12/covid-deaths-anti-vaccine-republican-voters/672575/

 

 

 

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Breaking down the cost of vaccine hesitancy would be simple if we could draw a causal relationship between Republican leaders’ anti-vaccine messaging and the adoption of those ideas by Americans, and then from those ideas to deaths due to non-vaccination. Unfortunately, we don’t have the data to do so. Individual vaccine skepticism cannot be traced back to a single source, and even if it could, we don’t know exactly who is unvaccinated and what their political affiliations are.

What we do have is a patchwork of estimations and correlations that, taken together, paint a blurry but nevertheless grim picture of how Republican leaders spread the vaccine hesitancy that has killed so many people. We know that as of April 2022, about 318,000 people had died from COVID because they were unvaccinated, according to research from Brown University. And the close association between Republican vaccine hesitancy and higher death rates has been documented. One study estimated that by the fall of 2021, vaccine uptake accounted for 10 percent of the total difference between Republican and Democratic deaths. But that estimate has changed—and even likely grown—over time.

Partisanship affected outcomes in the pandemic even before we had vaccines. A recent study found that from October 2020 to February 2021, the death rate in Republican-leaning counties was up to three times higher than that of Democratic-leaning counties, likely because of differences in masking and social distancing. Even when vaccines came around, these differences continued, Mauricio Santillana, an epidemiology expert at Northeastern University and a co-author of the study, told me. Follow-up research published in The Lancet Regional Health—Americas in October looked at deaths from April 2021 to March 2022 and found a 26 percent higher death rate in areas where voters leaned Republican. “There are subsequent and very serious [partisan] patterns with the Delta and Omicron waves, some of which can be explained by vaccination,” Bill Hanage, a co-author of the paper and an epidemiologist at Harvard, told me in an email.

But to understand why Republicans have died at higher rates, you can’t look at vaccine status alone. Congressional districts controlled by a trifecta of Republican leaders—state governor, Senate, and House—had an 11 percent higher death rate, according to the Lancet study. A likely explanation, the authors write, could be that in the post-vaccine era, those leaders chose policies and conveyed public-health messages that made their constituents more likely to die. Although we still can’t say these decisions led to higher death rates, the association alone is jarring.

One of the most compelling studies comes from researchers at Yale, who published their findings as a working paper in November. They link political party and excess-death rate—the percent increase in deaths above pre-COVID levels—among those registered as either Democrats or Republicans, providing a more granular view. They chose to analyze data from Florida and Ohio from before and after vaccines were available. Looking at the period before the vaccines, researchers found a 1.6-percentage-point difference in excess-death rate among Republicans and Democrats, with a higher rate among Republicans. But after vaccines became available, that gap widened dramatically to 10.4 percentage points, again with a higher Republican excess-death rate. “When we compare individuals who are of the same age, who live in the same county in the same month of the pandemic, there are differences correlated with your political-party affiliation that emerge after vaccines are available,” Jacob Wallace, an assistant professor of public health at Yale who co-authored the paper, told me. “That’s a statement we can confidently make based on the study and we couldn’t before.”

Even with this new research, it is difficult to determine just how many people died as a result of their political views. In the “excess death” study, researchers dealt only with rates of excess death, not actual death-toll numbers. Overall, excess deaths represent a small share of deaths. “On the scale of national registration for both parties,” Wallace said, “we’re talking about relatively small numbers and differences in deaths” when you look at excess-death rates alone.

The absolute number of Republican deaths is less important than the fact that they happened needlessly. Vaccines could have saved lives. And yet, the party that describes itself as pro-life campaigned against them. Democrats are not without fault, though. The Biden administration’s COVID blunders are no doubt to blame for some of the nation’s deaths. But on the whole, Democratic leaders have mostly not promoted ideas or enforced policies around COVID that actively chip away at life expectancy. It is a tragedy that the Republican push against basic lifesaving science has cut lives short and continues to do so. The partisan divide in COVID deaths, Hanage said, is just “another example of how the partisan politics of the U.S. has poisoned the well of public health.”

What’s most concerning about all of this is that partisan disparities in death rates were also apparent before COVID. People living in Republican jurisdictions have been at a health disadvantage for more than 20 years. From 2001 to 2019, the death rate in Democratic counties decreased by 22 percent, according to a recent study; in Republican counties, it declined by only 11 percent. In the same time period, the political gap in death rates increased sixfold.

Health outcomes have been diverging at the state level since the ’90s, Steven Woolf, an epidemiologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, told me. Woolf’s work suggests that over the decades, state policy decisions on health issues such as Medicaid, gun legislation, tobacco taxes, and, indeed, vaccines have likely had a stronger impact on state health trajectories than other factors. COVID’s high Republican death rates are not an isolated phenomenon but a continuation of this trend. As Republican-led states pushed back on lockdowns, the impact on population death rates was observed within weeks, Woolf said.

If the issue is indeed systemic, that doesn’t bode well for the future. Other factors could explain the higher death rate in Republican-leaning places—more poverty, less education, worse socioeconomic conditions—though Woolf said he isn’t convinced that those factors aren’t related to bad state health policy too. In any case, the long-term decline of health in red states indicates that there is an ongoing problem at a high level in Republican-led places, and that something has gone awry. “If you happen to live in certain states, your chances for living a long life are going to be much higher than if you’re an American living in a different state,” Woolf said.

Unfortunately, this trend shows no signs of breaking. The anti-science messaging that fuels such a divide is popular with Republican leadersbecause it plays so well with their constituents. Far-right crowds cheer for missed vaccine targets and jokes about executing scientific leaders. In an environment where partisanship trumps all—including trying to save people’s lives—such messaging is both politically effective and morally abhorrent. The data, however imperfect, demand a reckoning with the consequences of such a strategy not only during the pandemic but over the past few decades, and in the years to come. But to acknowledge how many Republicans didn’t have to die would mean giving credence to scientific and medical expertise. So long as America remains locked in a poisonous partisan battle in which science is wrongly dismissed as being associated with the left, the death toll will only rise.

 

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3 hours ago, Gatorubet said:

I’d like someone to look at all the recent very close elections and see if the number of increased dead Republicans may have actually led to an electoral defeat. 

5EB6495C-D8F5-47A5-83EC-65DAEAC4E53B.thumb.png.051d07b2335f41b30236cee1b1bc1b9f.png

If only 281 registered voter Arizona Maggots had gotten vaccinated and/or worn a mask - you might have a Republican Attorney General in Arizona who would help fuck with future election results favoring Democrats.   

Damn shame, really. 

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1 hour ago, Gatorubet said:

If only 281 registered voter Arizona Maggots had gotten vaccinated and/or worn a mask - you might have a Republican Attorney General in Arizona who would help fuck with future election results favoring Democrats.   

Hopefully nobody was encouraging the MAGA types not to get vaccinated and that COVID was fake and they should be out licking doorknobs and getting as close to people who had bad coughs as possible.

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1 hour ago, Gatorubet said:

5EB6495C-D8F5-47A5-83EC-65DAEAC4E53B.thumb.png.051d07b2335f41b30236cee1b1bc1b9f.png

If only 281 registered voter Arizona Maggots had gotten vaccinated and/or worn a mask - you might have a Republican Attorney General in Arizona who would help fuck with future election results favoring Democrats.   

Damn shame, really. 

Oh I have a feeling that many of the deceased still managed to submit a vote- via spouse, sibling, or progeny. Because it’s what they would have wanted, and why should their vote not count just because they died in the last year or two?

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The response to COVID is going to be a huge wedge issue for the Republican primary. A good amount of the anti-vaxxer group thinks Trump didn't fight against lockdowns and policy changes enough, and Desantis can use that to hammer him. I'm hoping we see a lot of shit flinging during the primary.

 

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28 minutes ago, Dutchrudder said:

The response to COVID is going to be a huge wedge issue for the Republican primary. A good amount of the anti-vaxxer group thinks Trump didn't fight against lockdowns and policy changes enough, and Desantis can use that to hammer him. I'm hoping we see a lot of shit flinging during the primary.

DeSantis actually "talked the talk" as far as the anti-vaxxers are concerned, and he's taken potshots directly at Abbott over it, and made thinly-veiled comments that he did what Trump should have done, so it will be entertaining as we watch the Republicans tear each other apart.

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