Tim Miller/Bulwark:

CPAC Was the Real Republican Party All Along

It turns out that the conservative Star Wars bar was actually representative of the Republican base.

CPAC didn’t misrepresent the conservative base because the real Republican voters out there were more normal and serious suit-and-tie types. It misrepresented the Republican voters in the other direction: CPAC attendees were more policy oriented than your median Republican voter. But as a matter of weirdness and tribal antipathy, they were actually a pretty good reflection of the right, broadly speaking.

By nature of being in or around Washington and drawing people who were passionate about policy—sometimes insane policies, but policies nonetheless—CPAC over-indexed away from the GOP’s core demo: the middle- and working-class exurban Boomer dittoheads who were the beating heart of the party all along.

And it turns out that those voters didn’t give a hoot about John Barasso’s Obamacare Replacement Plan or Ludwig Von Mises or the Fourth Great Awakening.

They just wanted their anti-elite grievances validated in the most entertaining (and/or bullying) way possible.

Elizabeth Dye/Above the Law:

After SCOTUS Green Light, Mazars Finally Hands Over Trump’s Bigly Amazing Tax Returns He probably fought so hard to keep them hidden out of, ummm, modesty.

And now … we wait. Maybe there will be evidence of rampant criminality in those returns. Or maybe everything is by the book and Trump just tried to hide them because he’s given away so much money to charity that he didn’t want to embarrass Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg for their paltry donations. (Yeah, probably not.)

But in the meantime, as (Cyrus) Vance pointed out in his response to Trump’s certiorari motion, the New York Times has already seen the returns and published a whole series of articles about them. So whatever happens with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, we already know that Trump is about to face a day of reckoning with the Joint Committee on Taxation, the bipartisan congressional panel tasked with reviewing all IRS refunds to individuals which exceed $2 million.

Zeynep Tufekci/Atlantic:

5 Pandemic Mistakes We Keep Repeating

We can learn from our failures.

This pessimism is sapping people of energy to get through the winter, and the rest of this pandemic. Anti-vaccination groups and those opposing the current public-health measures have been vigorously amplifying the pessimistic messages—especially the idea that getting vaccinated doesn’t mean being able to do more—telling their audiences that there is no point in compliance, or in eventual vaccination, because it will not lead to any positive changes. They are using the moment and the messaging to deepen mistrust of public-health authorities, accusing them of moving the goalposts and implying that we’re being conned. Either the vaccines aren’t as good as claimed, they suggest, or the real goal of pandemic-safety measures is to control the public, not the virus.

Five key fallacies and pitfalls have affected public-health messaging, as well as media coverage, and have played an outsize role in derailing an effective pandemic response. These problems were deepened by the ways that we—the public—developed to cope with a dreadful situation under great uncertainty. And now, even as vaccines offer brilliant hope, and even though, at least in the United States, we no longer have to deal with the problem of a misinformer in chief, some officials and media outlets are repeating many of the same mistakes in handling the vaccine rollout.

WaPo:

Most House Republicans voted not to certify some election results. Democrats are still seething.

Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), who won a GOP-held seat in 2018, said he still counts some Republicans from that class as friends and “potential partners” in legislation. But he drew a sharp contrast with the new Republicans.

“I’ll say this about the 2018 Republican freshman class: None of them tried to kill me or overthrow the United States government. So the only thing I could possibly have against them is an occasional disagreement,” Malinowski said.

WaPo:

What’s in the House’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus plan

The House on Saturday passed the American Rescue Plan, marking a crucial step towards the White House’s first major piece of legislation.

Here’s what is in the House version. These breakdowns and estimates were compiled from Congressional summaries and reports, as well as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

LA Times:

Why your place in the COVID-19 vaccine line depends on where you live

When the first doses of COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out in the United States, the choice of who should receive them was fairly obvious — and widely accepted.

They would go to healthcare workers, who are highly exposed to the coronavirus and keep the medical system functioning, and people living in nursing homes, who have made up a third of all COVID-19 deaths nationwide.

Since then, the choices have gotten tougher: Teachers, farmworkers, senior citizens and dozens of other groups have made compelling arguments for why they should go next. For leaders making those decisions, it is effectively a zero-sum game: giving priority to some means fewer doses for others.

Though the nation’s vaccine availability will probably improve substantially in the coming months, officials at this moment are wading through what could be the most contentious phase of the rollout — a collision of relentless demand and constrained supply.

David Mastio and Jill Lawrence/USA Today:

Is Donald Trump a declining parody or a terrifying threat?

David: Trump’s CPAC comeback speech revealed a sad little man, angry at local courts and politicians and disappointed in the federal judges he seated, but who “didn’t have the guts or the courage” to bow to him. Trump tried to carry on as if he hadn’t been impeached after the Capitol was ransacked by a mob, but even the lies seemed faintly ridiculous. “We will win. We’ve been doing a lot of winning,” was the wacko fib he launched his speech with, as if he hadn’t cost Republicans control of the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House. Trump Republicans know that truth.