Carlson’s rant carried a more hateful edge than usual, a kind of shrill fury. Perhaps that’s because Zelensky’s presence before Congress was far more humiliating to Carlson and his ideological comrades than to anyone else: It demonstrated how badly they misjudged Ukraine’s will to resist Russian conquest and the durability of the U.S. commitment to our beleaguered ally.

This represents the failure of a worldview, a strain of far-right authoritarian populism, that goes well beyond Ukraine. A whole lot of things have happened that — in Carlson’s mental universe — were not supposed to happen......

In his diatribe, Carlson depicted Zelensky as little more than a sleazy street thug who had come to “demand money” from Congress, telling his audience that the lawmakers “love him much more than they love you.” He exaggerated Ukraine’s conditions for ending the war, depicting Ukraine as the unreasonable party.

Carlson has long insisted that Ukrainians are “pawns” in the United States’ quest for “regime change” in Russia, predicting our warmongering would trigger nuclear catastrophe. He has trivialized the invasion as a faraway “border dispute,” and has scoffed that Democrats are hypnotizing Americans into feeling “hate” for Russia.....

Carlson’s show also promoted 18 GOP candidates who went on to lose, as tallied by Matthew Gertz of Media Matters. And while Carlson backed Ohio Sen.-elect J.D. Vance, he also hawked Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters as “the future of the GOP.” That’s almost certainly because Masters’s demonization of migrants (including ads featuring machine-gun fire at the border) was peerless. But Masters lost by 5 points — in a border state.

Outside our borders, Carlson also lionized Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro as one of the great illiberal populist hopes of the Western Hemisphere. This year, Bolsonaro was ousted after one term. (To be fair, Carlson was able to celebrate a hard right victory — in Italy.).....

But a year ago one couldn’t have predicted that Carlson’s brand of politics would be repudiated in so many ways. If that prompts a bit of, dare we say, Carlson-grade smugness from his critics, well, it’s well deserved.

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.).....

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......

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.”......

Unfortunately, this trend shows no signs of breaking. The anti-science messaging that fuels such a divide is popular with Republican leaders because 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.

Kari Lake's attorneys are asking Judge Peter Thompson to not "punish" them for bringing the Election Contest, suggesting that if he does award the nearly $700,000 asked for by defendants, it will cause an erosion of "trust in the election process."

"Trust in the election process is not furthered by punishing those who bring legitimate claims as Plaintiff did here. In fact, sanctioning Plaintiff would have the opposite effect."

Plaintiff repeats many of the claims that it failed to prove, but argues that the 2-day trial demonstrated that the legal action was brought in good faith and not simply to harass.

However, the Response also continues to make claims that Lake has not been able to back up, saying that the issues on Election Day in Maricopa County "injured Plaintiff and millions of Arizona voters." The Response also claims that Maricopa County "reported" 25,000 additional ballots the day after the election, even though testimony showed that the earlier report was an "estimate".

Finally, the Response misstates what Ms. Lake tweeted within the past 24 hours. She quoted a commentary by Rachel Alexander claiming that Judge Thompson's December 24 Minute Entry had inappropriately been "ghostwritten" by one of the defense attorneys. More than simply retweeting Ms. Alexander, Lake amplified it in the body of her own tweet. (A sideshow, indeed, but it was cited by Maricopa County as reason for sanctioning Lake.)

Former Arizona Republican candidate Kari Lake reportedly deleted a tweet attacking Maricopa County Judge Peter Thompson.

According to the non-profit group AZ's Law, Lake deleted the tweet on Monday shortly after defense lawyers filed for sanctions against the former candidate and her attorneys following their unsuccessful attempt to overturn the 2022 election for governor.

"@KariLake has just deleted her tweet accusing Judge Thompson of having @marceelias 'ghostwriting' his ruling denying Lake's Election Contest claims," AZ's Law noted. "Her amplifying the baseless accusations was not good for her in the pending sanctions proceedings."

Lake's accusation amounted to "accusing @MarcElias (an atty in the case) of having an inappropriate ex parte communication with the judge."

https://twitter.com/arizonaslaw/status/1607440326054268929

Ukrainians are about to celebrate Christmas for the first time since the Russian invasion began on Feb. 24. But which Christmas, exactly?

Earlier this year, the Orthodox Church in Ukraine (OCU), which represents tens of millions of worshipers, announced that member churches would be free to celebrate Christmas on Dec. 25, the same as Western Catholics and Protestants.

That would place many of Ukraine’s Orthodox faithful at odds with the practice of other members of Eastern Orthodoxy who celebrate Christmas on Jan. 7 (according to the old Julian calendar). But that is precisely the point.

“Many Ukrainians are now moving toward celebrating Christmas on Dec. 25. And that’s only natural, because it’s part of our European choice,” Serhiy Prytula, a Ukrainian philanthropist and TV personality, told me. “We were always part of Europe before Soviet rule, so it’s obvious and logical that people in Ukraine are ready and willing to celebrate Christmas together with the European family of nations to which we historically belong.” A recent poll shows that the number of Ukrainians willing to adopt the Western date has risen from 26 percent to 44 percent over the past year......

The embrace of Dec. 25 mirrors a larger cultural, political and economic reorientation. In 2013, tens of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets to protest then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to scrap an economic cooperation agreement with the European Union. Yanukovych’s subsequent downfall prompted Putin to seize Crimea and send Russian troops into eastern Ukraine in 2014.

Since then, however, the Kremlin’s aggressiveness has only accelerated Ukrainians’ determination to reject everything it stands for. Close economic and political ties with Europe are now taken for granted. Once ardently pro-Russian politicians have morphed into Ukrainian patriots. And Ukraine’s once-tentative military cooperation with the West has attained a scale unimaginable just 12 months ago.

Arizona’s Governor-elect Katie Hobbs (D) asked a judge on Monday to sanction defeated rival Kari Lake (R) and her lawyers for filing a lawsuit aiming to overturn the results of the Grand Canyon State’s 2022 gubernatorial midterms.

“Courts are established by Arizona’s Constitution and statutes to resolve actual disputes between parties,” Maricopa County Deputy Attorney Thomas P. Liddy wrote in a 15-page memo. “They do not exist so that candidates for political office can attempt to make political statements and fundraise. And they should not be used to harass political opponents and sow completely unfounded doubts about the integrity of elections. All of those things happened in this matter.”

Hobbs’s legal team joined Maricopa County’s motion for sanctions, court records show.

“Enough really is enough. It is past time to end unfounded attacks on elections and unwarranted accusations against elections officials,” the memo states. “This matter was brought without any legitimate justification, let alone a substantial one.”

Arizona’s Governor-elect Katie Hobbs (D) asked a judge on Monday to sanction defeated rival Kari Lake (R) and her lawyers for filing a lawsuit aiming to overturn the results of the Grand Canyon State’s 2022 gubernatorial midterms.

“Courts are established by Arizona’s Constitution and statutes to resolve actual disputes between parties,” Maricopa County Deputy Attorney Thomas P. Liddy wrote in a 15-page memo. “They do not exist so that candidates for political office can attempt to make political statements and fundraise. And they should not be used to harass political opponents and sow completely unfounded doubts about the integrity of elections. All of those things happened in this matter.”

Hobbs’s legal team joined Maricopa County’s motion for sanctions, court records show.

“Enough really is enough. It is past time to end unfounded attacks on elections and unwarranted accusations against elections officials,” the memo states. “This matter was brought without any legitimate justification, let alone a substantial one.”