Meghan McCain has had a revelation:

Meghan McCain had a baby and now realizes that the US needs paid maternity leave, she explains on The View. She says personal experience helped open her eyes. https://t.co/z2gYgmJUSd

— Emily Peck (@EmilyRPeck) January 4, 2021

In my little corner of the twittersphere, this has mostly generated mockery. Typical Republican. Can’t understand anyone else’s problems unless it happens to them too.

There’s an old saying that conservatives look for converts while liberals look for heretics. What this means is that when liberals see the light, conservatives welcome them to the fold. But when conservatives see the light, liberals sneer until they’ve proven themselves for a decade or three.

This is self destructive behavior. It is, after all, human nature—not conservative nature—for people to become more attuned to problems when they experience them personally. If you’re rich and your husband dies of prostate cancer, you start up a charity aimed at prostate cancer. Parents of autistic kids try to draw attention to autism. Movie stars who go through drug rehab dedicate themselves to funding drug rehab charities.

When we find an ally, we should welcome them even if they’re allies only on one or two issues. So welcome to the fold, Meghan. The next step is for you to help us figure out how to convince other conservatives that paid maternity (and paternity!) leave is a good idea.

This is Glen Canyon Dam, just outside of Page, Arizona. It’s one of the many hydroelectric dams built on the Colorado River during the great dam-building era that stretched from the ’30s into the ’50s and ’60s. The dam forms Lake Powell, which I’m told is quite beautiful, though environmentalists would like to dismantle the dam and revive Glen Canyon, which was also quite beautiful before it got flooded. For now, though, the dam is here to stay.

Kevin Hagen/Getty

Over the weekend we learned that President Trump had begged and cajoled and threatened the Georgia secretary of state to manufacture a few extra votes so that Trump would be the winner of the state. Was that illegal? IANAL, but it sure seems illegal to me! And if it’s not, it should be.

Meanwhile, Sen. Ted Cruz was acting as the leader of an even dozen Republicans who said they would vote to delay Senate approval of the Electoral College results on Wednesday. But that’s not all! Asked about this, he had the gall to say that everyone was getting too bent out of shape about it and we should all calm down.

Mean-meanwhile, several senators, including four Republicans, wrote a letter saying they would vote to approve the Electoral College results. In one sense this is a relief: four Republicans plus all the Democrats is a majority in the Senate, which means the results are certain to be approved and we can all move on.

But! Four Republicans. That’s it. Apparently the letter writers couldn’t dig up any more than that. So what’s going to happen on Wednesday? Are a bunch of Republican senators going to join up and give the Electoral College results a firm approval? Or are the four letter signers going to be it, providing us with the banana republic spectacle of a 51-49 approval?

All of this reminds me of two things that I’ve mentioned before:

• All of the buffoonery and conspiracy theorizing surrounding the election has been led by Republican politicians who have no actual authority over election results. It’s just hot air. Conversely, every official who’s actually in charge of vote counting has acted honorably.
• Whenever I look below the surface at something like this, I end up concluding the same thing. It’s not the Republican Party per se that’s gone nuts, it’s the right-wing media empire. It’s Fox News and OAN and Mark Levin and all the rest of the insane talkers whose only objective is to keep their ratings high by competing to see who can keep their listeners the most outraged. Republican politicians are in thrall to these voices and don’t dare to cross them.

As long as Fox News exists in its current form, American politics is going to be broken. But what’s the answer to that?

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through January 3. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Shealah Craighead/White House via ZUMA

Apparently Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, recorded his most recent conversation with President Trump and it somehow made its way to the Washington Post. It is truly an emblem of our times:

The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking “a big risk.”

….At another point, Trump said: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”…“There’s no way I lost Georgia,” Trump said, a phrase he repeated again and again on the call. “There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”

….The secretary of state repeatedly sought to push back, saying at one point, “Mr. President, the problem you have with social media, that — people can say anything.”

“Oh this isn’t social media,” Trump retorted. “This is Trump media. It’s not social media. It’s really not. It’s not social media. I don’t care about social media. I couldn’t care less.” At another point, Trump claimed that votes were scanned three times: “Brad, why did they put the votes in three times? You know, they put ’em in three times.” Raffensperger responded: “Mr. President, they did not. We did an audit of that and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times.”

….Trump: “Do you think it’s possible that they shredded ballots in Fulton County? ’Cause that’s what the rumor is. And also that Dominion took out machines. That Dominion is really moving fast to get rid of their, uh, machinery. Do you know anything about that? Because that’s illegal.”

Germany responded: “No, Dominion has not moved any machinery out of Fulton County.”

Trump: “But have they moved the inner parts of the machines and replaced them with other parts?”

Germany: “No.”

Trump: “Are you sure? Ryan?”

Germany: “I’m sure. I’m sure, Mr. President.”

It was clear from the call that Trump has surrounded himself with aides who have fed his false perceptions that the election was stolen. When he claimed that more than 5,000 ballots were cast in Georgia in the name of dead people, Raffensperger responded forcefully: “The actual number was two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted.”

But later, Meadows said, “I can promise you there are more than that.”

For fucks sake.

Jeez, how should I know? Do I look like a billionaire to you?

But Warren Buffett is a billionaire and his favorite metric is the Buffett Indicator, which shows total stock market capitalization as a percent of GDP. The chart below is a modified version that uses total corporate equities plus liabilities rather than market cap, but it’s nearly identical to Buffett’s version:

I dunno, looks kinda high to me. But maybe this time is different?

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through January 2. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Christopher Brown/ZUMA

Ted Cruz, who doesn’t have Louie Gohmert’s excuse of being a moron, says he will vote to delay the Senate’s confirmation of Joe Biden’s presidential victory. Here’s part of his reasoning:

The most direct precedent on this question arose in 1877, following serious allegations of fraud and illegal conduct in the Hayes-Tilden presidential race. Specifically, the elections in three states — Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina — were alleged to have been conducted illegally. In 1877, Congress did not ignore those allegations, nor did the media simply dismiss those raising them as radicals trying to undermine democracy. Instead, Congress appointed an Electoral Commission — consisting of five Senators, five House Members, and five Supreme Court Justices — to consider and resolve the disputed returns. We should follow that precedent.

For those of you who slept through history class, here is the briefest possible explanation of the Hayes-Tilden race:

• Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote but received only 184 electoral votes—one less than a majority.
• Results from three Southern states (plus one elector from Oregon) were in dispute.
• Republican Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to end Reconstruction, withdraw federal troops from the South, and hand back control of the Southern states to their white leaders if Democrats agreed to declare him the winner.
• Democrats agreed to this and voted to award all the disputed electoral votes to Hayes. He won 185-184.

This was one of the most disgraceful and explicitly racist episodes in American history—and Cruz knows it. I suppose he figures that none of his followers know or care about this, but it’s contemptible that he’d look to the Hayes-Tilden race for any kind of guidance on anything.

Reader LL emails to ask a question: “I read a lot of stories lately of reporters being assassinated. How does the current rate compare with past years?”

That made me curious myself. Here’s the answer, via Reporters Without Borders:

In 2020, a total of 51 reporters were killed, the smallest number since 2004. The trendline over the past 16 years is slightly down.

There’s more to journalist security than just killings, so don’t take this as more meaningful than it is. Still, it means something, and I think most of us would be surprised by these numbers. But that’s the best kind of data, isn’t it?

As usual during holiday weekends, it’s best not to take the mortality data too seriously right now. The end of next week is probably the earliest that everyone will be caught up and the trendlines will match up with reality.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through January 1. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.