Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Omicron is declining around the world, but still presents danger

Tim Miller/Bulwark:

Ghostface Trump Lives and Susan Collins Keeps Letting Him

The Good Republican won’t rule out Trump 2024.

It was true in the first impeachment when every Senate Republican except Mitt Romney knew exactly how bad the Ukrainian drug deal was but passed the buck to voters anyway, hoping the people would send Trump packing.

It was true in the second impeachment, when 17 Republican senators had the ability to banish him from federal office permanently but instead made a calculation that the party couldn’t survive the voter backlash. So they made sternly worded speeches while letting Trump off the hook.

It was true when Lindsey Graham was getting shouted down for his Trump apostasy in an airport terminal and then tucked his tail and returned to his dominant’s golf cart.

And it was true this weekend when Good Republican Dan Crenshaw showed up to Trump’s pro-insurrection rally in Texas on Saturday and Double Plus Good Republican Susan Collins sat down with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday.

Amid all those moments of choosing there have been sporadic bouts of courage from a handful of Republicans who really were willing to risk their careers. But they have been the exceptions that proved the rule.

The Omicron wave begins a global descent after >90 million confirmed cases in 10 weeks, more than all of 2020, as reported by @DrTedros @OurWorldInData pic.twitter.com/G7b5EqSG3G

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) February 1, 2022

WaPo:

Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for children under 5 could be available by the end of February, people with knowledge say

Pfizer and its partner, BioNTech, the manufacturers of the vaccine, are expected to submit to the Food and Drug Administration as early as Tuesday a request for emergency-use authorization for the vaccine for children 6 months to 5 years old, which would make it the first vaccine available for that age group. Older children already can receive the shot.

The FDA urged the companies to submit the application so that regulators could begin reviewing the two-shot data, according to the knowledgeable individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The companies in the last few months have been testing a third dose, following disappointing results for the two-shot regimen showing that while the vaccine is safe, two doses did not provide a strong enough immune response in all age groups. But data on a third shot will not be available until at least late March. Once that information is submitted, regulators are expected to authorize a third dose of the pediatric vaccine.

I know the cool kids like to say "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up," but no, really, the crime is the worse part. And you can, in fact, have a crime even if the criminal is too stupid to cover it up. Honest!

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) January 31, 2022

Aaron Blake/WaPo:

Trump toys with the mob — again

In Texas, Trump encouraged people to hold protests over his legal jeopardy and suggested he would pardon Jan. 6 rioters who took such a message to its extreme

What’s the worst that could happen?

Former president Donald Trump on Saturday night sent his strongest signal to date that he will fight his legal problems outside of a court of law. He encouraged people to engage in massive demonstrations in jurisdictions pursuing criminal investigations against him over Jan. 6 and tax-related issues. Then, minutes later, he said that if he’s reinstalled as president, he would consider pardoning some of the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters.

Both Trump comments were, as with many earlier ones about ongoing legal matters, carefully tailored. (Trump seemed to be reading them off a teleprompter rather than speaking extemporaneously.) The combination of the two comments, though, can’t help but conjure a repeat — or at least the suggestive prospect of a repeat — of the kind of lawlessness we saw just over a year ago.

“If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere,” Trump said, “because our country and our elections are corrupt.”

Reply from @keir_starmer in full. To Conservative MPs, he says: "Continuing his leadership will mean further misconduct, cover up and deceit. "It is only they that can end this farce. The eyes of the country are upon them. They will be judged by the decisions they take now." pic.twitter.com/1GQTij3gCA

— Best for Britain (@BestForBritain) January 31, 2022

WaPo:

4.3 million Americans left their jobs in December as omicron variant disrupted everything

The high number of people leaving their jobs came amid immense pressure on workers and parents, many of whom had to juggle multiple responsibilities as case numbers surged at the end of 2021.

The elevated quitting data, which represented nearly three percent of the country’s employed population, is another window into how the labor market’s patterns have been upended by the pandemic.

While the crisis was originally marked by mass joblessness — more than 20 million people lost their jobs in the earliest days of the pandemic, many temporarily — 2021 was defined by a strong labor market recovery as well as complaints by employers about difficulty finding available workers.

That shortage has meant that many companies have been racing to compete with each other for workers, raising wages, adding cash bonuses and sweetening the pot in other ways to try to attract applicants. And that in turn has created a climate for workers to have more leverage and options than perhaps any other time in recent history.

Taking the Trump cue: incorporating violence and intimidation as a core of the strategy for taking and holding power. And hardly any R elected or conservative commentators will acknowledge it’s happening, much less mobilize in opposition to it. Extremist wing too big to confront https://t.co/TScGkmwsik

— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) January 31, 2022

Bill Scher/Washington Monthly:

What Message Should Biden Use in the Midterms?

Blaming Republicans can only get you so far. The president needs to embrace his bipartisan successes and lay out a plan for more.

Biden wants it both ways: He wants credit for breaking partisan gridlock, and he wants to tag Republicans for worsening partisan gridlock. But that doesn’t make for a coherent midterm message. Biden and the Democrats need to choose between selling a bipartisan success story or blaming Republicans and apostate Dems for screwing everything up.

You can understand why Biden attacks Republicans more than he applauds them. Even the most committed compromiser puts on the gloves in campaign season. Moreover, Democrats would like to take the ambitious ideas that hit a wall of Republican opposition in the past year and use them in November to stimulate turnout—ideas such as voting rights protections, paid family leave, and free community college. Running on such a platform requires drawing a clear and partisan contrast.

Yet this sharp-elbowed partisan strategy is out of whack with how Biden ran in 2020 and with what voters still want today.

I write this because as the incumbent party in the midterms we will be assessed on whether we made things better, as promised. And we have. We need to say so. It's not been easy, but things are better. Yes, there is still more to do. But things are better. https://t.co/S3DBwEigoL

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) February 1, 2022

Monmouth Poll:

Time to Accept Covid and Move On?

Fully 7 in 10 Americans (70%) agree with the sentiment that “it’s time we accept that Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives” – including 78% of those who report having gotten Covid and 65% of those who say they have not been infected. The main difference in the sense that it is time to move on is due to partisanship – ranging from 89% of Republicans and 71% of independents to 47% of Democrats. Only one-third of the public (34%) feels the country will get the outbreak under control and return to normal by the end of the year. In fact, more than 1 in 4 (28%) now believe a return to normalcy will never happen, which is up from 22% who felt this way in September and just 6% who were similarly pessimistic exactly a year ago.

“Americans’ worries about Covid haven’t gone away. It seems more to be a realization that we are not going to get this virus under control in a way that we thought was possible just last year,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute.

Four in 10 Americans (40%) report that they have had Covid – or think they have had it – since the pandemic began, including 27% who said their infection was confirmed with a test. About one-third (36%) of people who have been vaccinated report also being infected with Covid (note: the poll did not ask whether infection occurred before or after vaccination) and about 6 in 10 (61%) of those who have not gotten a shot say they have been infected with the virus.

Half the public is either very (23%) or somewhat (27%) concerned about catching one of the new Covid variants. This concern includes 58% of those who have not had Covid, but also includes 38% of those who have already had it. The number of adults who are very concerned about catching a new variant is up somewhat from early December (14%) before the omicron variant really hit the U.S. Similarly, the number of people who are very concerned about a family member becoming seriously ill from the virus (38%) has increased since December (30%), but it is still lower than concern in September (45%) when the delta variant was spreading.

It's fine to question research, seek out opposing viewpoints, test alternative theories, the reason it's dumb to carry on with this w/ vaccines is you have ongoing realtime evidence from literally billions of people all over the entire world and it all keeps saying the same thing https://t.co/15LJ5rMaus

— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) January 31, 2022

Abbreviated pundit roundup: Trump’s coup confession

We begin today’s roundup with Joel Mathis at The Week who urges Democrats to not let Donald Trump and the GOP get away with trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election:

Trump is plainly, openly weaponizing his baseas a threat against any official who might try to hold him accountable for his (alleged) financial and constitutional misdeeds — he even dangled future presidential pardonsas a reward for the Jan. 6 defendants, offering an incentive to followers who might be inclined to commit mayhem in the service of his ambitions. He's not much hiding his real aims anymore: On Sunday, Trump put out a statement that (among other things) grumbled that then-Vice President Mike Pence should have "changed the outcome" of the 2020 election. It's not hard to see where all of this is going.

So what are Democrats going to do about it?

It's not clear. 

[...]  The only real choice is for Democrats to walk and chew gum at the same time. They have to do kitchen table issues and keep Jan. 6 at the forefront of the conversation.

Matt Lewis at The Daily Beast explores Trump’s claim that he would pardon the insurrectionists:

Donald Trump will never stop reminding us of how dangerous a prospect another four years of him in the White House would be. (If only he had been impeached, convicted, and barred from office over inciting a riot!... Oh, wait.)

"If I run and if I win, we will treat [the Capitol rioters] from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly," Trump declared at a rally in Texas on Saturday night. "And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly." [...] Watergate, in hindsight, was a botched “third-rate burglary,” that turned into an attempted White House coverup. Trump’s presidency, in contrast, involved numerous impeachable offenses, two actual impeachments, several serious attempts to strong-arm officials into “overturning” the 2020 election, and (lest we forget) the denouement: the incitement of an attempted insurrection.

At Business InsiderGrace Panetta explores how a governor could help Trump steal an election in the future:

A bipartisan group of lawmakers is trying to reform a 135-year-old law to save future elections from being stolen by their own colleagues. But if their well-intentioned attempts prove successful, they may inadvertently create a pathway for a less discussed but more urgent threat: a rogue governor in a swing state like Georgia single-handedly undermining the democratic process. [...]

The proposed reforms to the ECA are designed to prevent the executive branch and Congress from undermining elections, as Trump and dozens of Republican members of Congress tried to do by raising objections to results at the state level in Arizona and Pennsylvania, and pressuring former Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the ratification of then-candidate Joe Biden's Electoral College victory, leading to the January 6 insurrection.

However, the suggested changes to the law would do little to constrain the power of state and local governments. By overseeing vote counting and certifying election results before they are sent to Congress for ratification, these levels of government arguably have as much power, if not more, than Congress and a sitting president to steal an election.

The New York Times reports on just how brazen Trump was in trying to overturn the election:

Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. Mr. Trump wanted him to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states, three people familiar with the matter said.

And on a final note, there’s this:

When the National Archives and Records Administration handed over a trove of documents to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, some of the Trump White House records had been ripped up and then taped back together, according to three people familiar with the records.

Former president Donald Trump was known inside the White House for his unusual and potentially unlawful habit of tearing presidential records into shreds and tossing them on the floor — creating a headache for records management analysts who meticulously used Scotch tape to piece together fragments of paper that were sometimes as small as confetti, as Politico reported in 2018.

Posted in APR

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Is Boris Johnson facing a no confidence vote?

The Independent:

What is a no confidence motion and what could it mean for Boris Johnson?

Liberal Democrats have called for Conservatives to back vote of no confidence in Boris Johnson

A motion of no confidence has been laid down by the Liberal Democrats as they seek to topple the Boris Johnson administration following a litany of claims of coronavirus rule-breaking in No 10.

Here is a look at what the Lib Dems are proposing, what a no confidence vote entails and how it works.

People are saying “future prime minister” but I’m not sure there’s a need to wait. Give her a go now, Britons.pic.twitter.com/z2stpfB86X

— Niall Stanage (@NiallStanage) January 18, 2022

NY Times:

Omicron cases may be peaking in some U.S. states, but COVID-19 is overwhelming hospitals

The United States is averaging over 790,000 new daily cases, a tally that includes an artificially low count on Monday, when many states did not release new data because of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday. Deaths now exceed 1,900 a day, up 54 percent over the past two weeks.

Even before the holiday weekend, daily cases had peaked in New York and other Northeastern states. According to a New York Times database, cases in the region peaked on Jan. 10-11.

the funniest part of the 2011 comedy "Contagion" is when they invent a lifesaving vaccine at the end, and then everyone takes the vaccine. hahahaha fantastic writing

— Rob DenBleyker (@RobDenBleyker) December 21, 2021

You can get your free at-home test kits here.

Julia Azari/FiveThirtyEight:

What Does It Mean If Republicans Won’t Debate?

What should we think about this development?

For starters, the RNC’s reasons to prohibit participation in the debates are important. And that’s because they fall in line with an important strain of Trumpism: a claim to being the victims of unfair treatment. To be fair, evidence does show that some important cultural institutions, including the news media, are more likely to be populated by Democrats than Republicans, but conflict between presidential campaigns and debate organizers about the journalists who moderate the debates is hardly one-sided — or new. After all, the purpose of debates is to allow voters to see candidates perform under pressure and to evaluate their responses — tension with the campaigns on how to best facilitate this is to be expected. But this move represents the Trumpist Republican Party only further rejecting established institutions and democratic practices.

I just keep coming back to this: The Republican Party has gone stark-raving brown-shirt crazy but is still expected to win back Congress next year and political journalists are going yeah, OK, instead of going WHAT THE FUCK??? AAAAH! https://t.co/Upqqqd9T7O

— Dan Froomkin/PressWatchers.org (@froomkin) January 16, 2022

Ron Brownstein/The Atlantic:

How Manchin and Sinema Completed a Conservative Vision

A nationwide standard of voting rights now seems like a pipe dream.

Those decisions have had an enormous practical impact on the rules for American elections. But many voting-rights advocates say that the rulings have been equally important in sending a signal to Republican-controlled states that the Supreme Court majority is unlikely to stand in their way if they impose new restrictions on voting or extreme partisan gerrymanders in congressional and state legislative districts.

Democrats are still pressing the two senators to reconsider their decision before this week’s votes. Barring an unlikely last-minute reversal of their position, Manchin and Sinema have effectively blocked federal voting-rights legislation by insisting that it remain subject to a filibuster that provides Senate Republicans a veto. And that could trigger a renewed red-state offensive.

Hawley: the mess made itself. https://t.co/wLjrqjJuMQ

— Greg Dworkin (@DemFromCT) January 18, 2022

David Rothkopf/Twitter:

I'm troubled by the argument I've seen to often recently from DC pundit-types, most well-meaning, that the Dems and Biden have made a mistake by embracing a left or progressive agenda and that they should shift to the center, their "true" base. This is based on a fallacy. 
Everything Biden has done has been supported by either all Dems or all Dems minus one or two Dem Senators. Does this analysis mean that 48 out of 50 Senators are "left" and that Biden needs to adjust his policies to suit the other two? 
Does it mean that he should be adjusting his policies to win the votes of so-called "centrist" GOPers. You know, the ones who are uniformly voting against the most basic protections for democracy & who have voted against measure after measure supported by most Americans? 
DC is a donut. There is no "center" in DC politics. There are two parties & a handful of people caught between them. As for the country as a whole, there is of course a center. There are independents & on issue after issue, the things Biden has supported are supported by them. 

France's parliament has approved a law that will ban unvaccinated people from all restaurants, sports arenas, and other public venues. https://t.co/pNeBm3aLQS

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) January 18, 2022

Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:

Dear media: Stop giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt

The story line was set: Democrats blew it by closing schools; Youngkin was “smart” to pose as a normal Republican. As The New York Times cooed: “Many conservatives see his campaign as providing a template for how to delicately embrace Trumpism in blue states.”

Delicately? Youngkin was always serious about the MAGA camp’s culture wars, as he made abundantly clear on day one of his governorship.

Shortly after his inauguration, Youngkin promptly banned critical race theory from Virginia curriculums, even though it isn’t taught in schools, thereby flaunting his willingness to cater to White grievance in a state infamous for its resistance to desegregation. He described what would be removed from school curriculum: “All of the principles of critical race theory, the fundamental building blocks of actually accusing one group of being oppressors and another of being oppressed, of actually burdening children today for sins of the past."

Listening to Youngkin, one might never know that slavery and Jim Crow are woven into the Commonwealth’s history and are relevant to ongoing racial disparities in wealth, education, health and homeownership. His airbrushed version of history is the standard MAGA effort to cater to White supremacists and wreak havoc in the schools. If only the media had taken him seriously during the campaign.

Pretty big difference US vs UK in this wave. Vaccination differences likely a big part of it. pic.twitter.com/qnHvRRb0rE

— Stefan Schubert (@StefanFSchubert) January 16, 2022

A lot of regional charts looking exactly like those South Africa charts from a month ago. https://t.co/bDlGnMx8p2

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) January 18, 2022

Abbreviated pundit roundup: Fighting for voting rights

We begin today’s roundup with analysis of the Biden administration’s strategy on both protecting voting rights and addressing the undemcoratic and archance filibuster:

President Joe Biden is traveling to Atlanta on Tuesday to deliver a major speech on voting rights, looking to turn up the heat on reluctant senators as Democrats face pressure to pass two pieces of pending legislation opposed by nearly all Republicans on Capitol Hill.  [...] 

"The next few days, when these bills come to a vote, will mark a turning point in this nation. Will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadow, justice over injustice? I know where I stand," Biden will say, according to an excerpt of his remarks released by the White House. "I will not yield. I will not flinch. I will defend your right to vote and our democracy against all enemies foreign and domestic. And so the question is where will the institution of United States Senate stand?"

Reuters on filibuster reform:

Democrats plan to vote sometime over the next week to scale back the filibuster so it would not apply to voting-related legislation. But it's not clear whether they have the votes for this either; Manchin said last week that he would prefer to get some Republican buy-in for that change.

On Sunday he said he might support making the tactic more "painful" by requiring senators to keep talking on the Senate floor.

Biden, who spent 36 years in the Senate, long supported the filibuster but has grown more open to changing it as Republicans have blocked several of his major initiatives over the past year.

Herman Wolf makes the argument that the filibuster doesn’t even apply to voting rights legislation, which he says is governed by the Elections Clause of Article 1 Section 4 of the Constitution:

A mere procedural rule should not be able to add a supermajority precondition to consideration or passage of proposed electoral legislation. That would amount to allowing that rule to become a de facto amendment of the Constitution. Throughout the Constitution and our history—indeed in every democracy—legislative outcomes are based on majority rule. When a supermajority is deemed necessary, it is specifically provided for, as with treaties, amendments, and impeachment convictions in our country. A supermajority prerequisite to consideration of all legislation is especially anomalous and, in fact, astonishing, given the framers’ intense hostility to supermajorities and to the minority rule they produce.

Speaking of elections, in case you were wondering what Mike Lindell was up to:

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Lindell says he’s bleeding cash at a rate of a million dollars a month to support a host of groups and right-wing activists.

To add to the bill, the staunch Trump ally says he is shelling out $250,000 a month for a new election-conspiracy group, Cause of America. What makes this Lindell creation unique is that the group is fronted by two women who were in attendance at the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Lindell’s hefty monthly burn rate and the addition of a new group to his portfolio of prolific “Big Lie” activism shows that, months after Arizona’s $6 million audit circus failed to provide much more than embarrassing headlines, there’s still plenty of money available for conservative activists bent on re-litigating the 2020 election with bizarre voter-fraud and election-rigging allegations.

Posted in APR

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: One year later

The thirty-ninth President of the United States and worldwide observer of democratic elections, Jimmy Carter, writes for The New York Times about why he fears for the future of American democracy and proposes steps to halt that downward trajectory.

After I left the White House and founded the Carter Center, we worked to promote free, fair and orderly elections across the globe. I led dozens of election observation missions in Africa, Latin America and Asia, starting with Panama in 1989, where I put a simple question to administrators: “Are you honest officials or thieves?” At each election, my wife, Rosalynn, and I were moved by the courage and commitment of thousands of citizens walking miles and waiting in line from dusk to dawn to cast their first ballots in free elections, renewing hope for themselves and their nations and taking their first steps to self-governance. But I have also seen how new democratic systems — and sometimes even established ones — can fall to military juntas or power-hungry despots. Sudan and Myanmar are two recent examples.

For American democracy to endure, we must demand that our leaders and candidates uphold the ideals of freedom and adhere to high standards of conduct.

First, while citizens can disagree on policies, people of all political stripes must agree on fundamental constitutional principles and norms of fairness, civility and respect for the rule of law. Citizens should be able to participate easily in transparent, safe and secure electoral processes. Claims of election irregularities should be submitted in good faith for adjudication by the courts, with all participants agreeing to accept the findings. And the election process should be conducted peacefully, free of intimidation and violence.

Lynn Schmidt of the St. Louis Post Dispatch asserts that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a big eff’ing deal.

Many on the right suggest that Jan. 6 was no big deal. There were no guns and few lives lost. The U.S. Capitol had been attacked before. Since the building was finished in 1800, there have been several dangerous incidents, including when the British set fire to it in 1814 during the War of 1812.

It is not what physically happened to the Capitol on Jan. 6 or the people working inside it that makes it a big deal in my opinion; it’s the justifications cited by nefarious actors that motivated the insurrection. The emergency comes from the idea that the express will of the people could be completely disregarded.
If a person voted and then that vote was unjustifiably not counted or thrown out, why would the person ever vote again in the future? A core tenet of our democracy is the belief and trust that our votes will be counted. The Trump administration and many in the GOP have injected doubt and cynicism into our electoral process. By subverting the system by which votes are cast and counted, they ensure there can no longer be accountability to voters. That is a very big deal for the survival of American democracy.

“The people working inside” the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 was a big deal to me; after all, as I wrote in the pundit round-up of Jan. 7, 2021, I used to be one of those people.

And I’m still “sad and damned angry” about it.

Wes Moore writes for the Washington Post writes that while American democracy is far from perfect, it’s worth taking democratic actions to keep it.

On this first anniversary of what was unquestionably a concerted assault on the very principles that have enabled the Great American Experiment during the course of these past 245 years, we must determine who was ultimately responsible, and how it came to be that our system of government and the processes that are supposed to safeguard its continuance nearly failed — and still might.

Democracy, it’s been said, is not so much a noun as it is a verb. It’s what we do each and every day to make representative government possible and truly reflective of the needs and aspirations of citizens. It depends on adhering to the laws that govern our society broadly and interactions individually. And it means holding accountable anyone who would flout those laws in ways that undermine public confidence in offices and officeholders for self-serving purposes. It’s about safeguarding the pursuit of the common good and the just application of consequences for those who choose not to.

This system of government that we revere has at times failed the very people it promises to protect and defend. As we know and must reckon with, it’s been slow in granting the full measure of rights and privileges to all it claims to represent. It is, as we have seen, also fragile and subject to the darker agendas of those who would subvert its founding principles for personal aims and partisan ends.

Our painful history of failing to live up to the principles of democracy is not, however, an indictment of the principles themselves.

Renée Graham of the Boston Globe reminds us that there were two insurrections on Jan. 6, 2021.

Never let it be forgotten that there were two insurrections on Jan. 6. The first was the violent breaching of the Capitol that left five people dead and injured about 140 police officers. The second came hours later, also in the same hallowed space, when 147 Republicans voted to overturn the election. That, too, was an attempted breach of democracy and the peaceful transfer of power.

Republicans could have repudiated the Big Lie; instead, it’s become a GOP version of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” A recent national University of Massachusetts Amherst poll found 71 percent of Republicans still denounce the legitimacy of Biden’s victory. They also blame Democrats, Antifa, and the Capitol Police for the insurrection. And, of course, they want investigations into the lead-up to Jan. 6 to stop. In a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll, one third of Americans, including 40 percent of Republicans, said violence against the government is sometimes justifiable.

Meanwhile, the GOP is doing what has happened so often in American history — burying the truth in unmarked graves. That continues with how this planned anti-democratic assault is being discussed as a riot. It was bad enough last May when Republican Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia compared the insurrection to a “normal tourist visit.” But Mike Pence, the former vice president targeted for assassination by those who built a gallows and chanted “Hang Mike Pence,” continues to portray anything about Jan. 6 as some kind of vengeful partisan folly by Democrats.

Ed Pilkington of the Guardian announces the creation of a database, The Insurrection Index, that tracks elected officials involved in attempts to overthrow the 2020 presidential election.

The Insurrection Index seeks to identify all those who supported Trump in his bid to hold on to power despite losing the election, in the hope that they can be held accountable and prevented from inflicting further damage to the democratic infrastructure of the country.

All of the more than 1,000 people recorded on the index have been invested with the public’s trust, having been entrusted with official positions and funded with taxpayer dollars. Many are current or former government employees at federal, state or local levels.

Among them are 213 incumbents in elected office and 29 who are running as candidates for positions of power in upcoming elections. There are also 59 military veterans, 31 current or former law enforcement officials, and seven who sit on local school boards.

When the index goes live on Thursday, it will contain a total of 1,404 records of those who played a role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. In addition to the 1,011 individuals, it lists 393 organizations deemed to have played a part in subverting democracy.

Matt Fuller of the Daily Beast chronicles his memories of a long day at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In the aftermath of Jan. 6, most of the media still hasn’t really figured out how to cover Republicans. I’d include myself in that statement. We mostly just pretend Jan. 6 didn’t happen, as if it’s totally normal to let Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) pontificate about gas prices or inflation while we ignore the lies he continues to spew about who’s actually responsible for the attack—or the role he played in undermining our democracy and endangering those of us who were at the Capitol that day.

It’s difficult to write a story in which you stop in every paragraph to note whether the particular Republican you’re mentioning returned to their chamber the night of Jan. 6, with blood still drying in the hallways, and voted to overturn the will of the people. But maybe we should.

I certainly look at those Republicans differently. Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma—the old John Boehner ally who’d post up in Capitol hallways and deliver colorful quotes about House conservatives—isn’t so funny to me anymore. [...]

Many of these Republicans would have proudly overruled the voters. They are people who not only downplay the violence and the seriousness of the attack but celebrate rioters, who lionize the insurrectionists who paid the ultimate price for believing their lies.

Jean Guerrero of the Los Angeles Times points out that some antecedents to the actions taken on Jan. 6 and since can be found in the run-up to the passage of California’s Proposition 187 in 1994.

What force could make a vast swath of Americans want to hurt others and end our hallmark peaceful transitions of power? The answer is predictable: About 75% of pro-insurrection adults, according to the study, have the delusion that Democrats are importing “Third World” immigrants to “replace” them.

This racist and largely antisemitic conspiracy theory is not relegated to the dark cellars of 8Chan and Telegram. It’s openly promoted by leading conservatives, such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson. And it’s a theory that has violence at its core, inspiring white terrorist massacres.

That’s not a new play for Republican leaders. They opened the Pandora’s box of “replacement” paranoia in California in the 1990s with scaremongering about a decline in the state’s white population and an imagined Mexican “reconquista.” Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller, for one, grew up in California during that time.

That nativist craze took many forms, including border vigilantism and unfounded voter fraud claims — precursors to Trump’s Big Lie. During the 1988 elections, uniformed guards were hired by local Republicans to patrol mostly Latino neighborhoods, where some held up signs saying “Non-citizens can’t vote.” In 1990, ousted San Diego Mayor Roger Hedgecock peddled voter fraud hysteria on his talk show.

I’m not rushing to Jan. 6th without first acknowledging the significance of Jan. 5th. The determination, organizing & resilience of Black voters in Georgia resulted in the election of the first Black Senator since Reconstruction & the first Jewish statewide elected official ever. pic.twitter.com/583ok1fi4I

— Sherrilyn Ifill (@Sifill_LDF) January 5, 2022

Joan Walsh/The Nation

The anniversary of the landmark January 5 Georgia victories, which elected a Black minister and a Jewish activist to the United States Senate, reminds us that Democrats have the majority of voters on their side, across the whole country—at least when they’re able to vote. The anniversary of January 6 reminds us that the minority has most of the racists, the violent people, and those who want to topple not just Democrats but democracy. Also, and maybe most important: It reminds us, or should remind us, of those who insist that they’re not about any of those things but who defend Trump and his insurrectionists nonetheless. Those people, who include almost all Republican leaders, might be the most culpable of all.

Democratic congressional leaders are planning an array of events to commemorate the January 6 tragedy. But Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is orchestrating the most fitting memorial: He plans to introduce voting rights legislation this week.

“Let me be clear: January 6th was a symptom of a broader illness—an effort to delegitimize our election process, and the Senate must advance systemic democracy reforms to repair our republic or else the events of that day will not be an aberration—they will be the new norm,” Schumer wrote in a letter to senators on Monday, in which he laid out his plans to move on democracy reforms and voting rights.

Gregory D. Stevens of STATnews notes that one difference between the reactions of the United Kingdom and the United States to the appearance of the Omicron variant is the willingness of citizens of the U.K. to “protect the NHS.”

In the U.K., for example, which began seeing the effects of Omicron ahead of the U.S., officials from England’s prime minister to managers of top soccer clubs have called on the public to “protect the NHS.” The NHS, or National Health Service, is the U.K’s taxpayer-funded, government-run health system. Although it is impossible to attribute success to a single message, England has been vaccinating people at a rate three to four times greater than the U.S since mid-December.

That loyalty is what makes a message like “protect the NHS” ring true. The system is nearly universally seen as a public good, and in need of protecting. Most people in the U.K. understand that getting vaccinated benefits the NHS precisely because the public has an equal stake in its success. An unvaccinated person who ends up in the hospital takes resources such as beds, doctors, and nurses away from others.

[...]

In the U.S., we like our doctors but are not loyal to the health care system. Many Americans valorize the doctors and nurses working on the frontlines of Covid-19, but you would be hard pressed to find someone who wants to protect the medical groups, HMOs, and other complex insurance convolutions undergirding our system. In fact, just 19% of the public believes the health care system works at least “pretty well,” less than in every other country studied.

I’m not going to argue the merits or demerits of any health care system like single-payer in this space.

I will say that it would take a long time for any system that’s adapted anywhere to become a “national institution” like the U.K.’s National Health Service.

John Cassidy of The New Yorker says that the economy should rebound further in 2022 but beware of the “known unknowns.”

The first known unknown is the virus. Most economic forecasters are assuming that the Omicron wave, like the Delta wave, will recede before too long, leaving behind little lasting damage to the economy. “Omicron could slow economic reopening, but we expect only a modest drag on service spending because domestic virus-control policy and economic activity have become significantly less sensitive to virus spread,” the economic team at Goldman Sachs said, in unveiling its 2022 predictions. That assessment could well turn out to be accurate—let’s hope it is—but it’s too soon to say. Over the weekend, the seven-day average of new covid cases set a record of more than four hundred thousand. Since Christmas Eve, bad weather and Omicron have caused the cancellation of more than fifteen thousand commercial flights. In the last week of December, the number of people eating at restaurants was about thirty per cent below the same period last year, according to data from OpenTable.

Even if the U.S. economy does get through the Omicron wave relatively unscathed, with few or no lockdowns, the new variant could affect production in the Chinese economy, which supplies many components and finished goods to the U.S. China just recorded the largest number of weekly cases since suppressing the initial wave of the pandemic. The spread of Omicron represents the biggest challenge yet to Beijing’s “zero covid” policy. A decision to lock down large parts of China’s economy could exacerbate problems in the supply chain. In a globalized economy, no country—even one as big and powerful as the U.S.—exists in isolation.

Charles Blow of The New York Times writes that “critical race theory” has become the new “Shariah law” of conservatives.

The truth is that critical race theory is generally not taught in grade school, but that was never the point, in the same way that in the 2010s conservative lawmakers were never really concerned about what they called the threat of Shariah law in the United States when they introduced bills to ban it in American courts; what they wanted was to advance a racist, Islamophobic agenda.

As a 2019 report born of a partnership between USA Today, The Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity pointed out, conservative lawmakers had drawn on the same basic rubric for these bills, a model perfected and touted by a network of far-right activists and organizations like the Center for Security Policy, a think tank founded in the 1980s by Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration official “who pushes conspiracy theories alleging radical Muslims have infiltrated the government.”

The report detailed how “at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law.”

Critical race theory is the new Shariah law, a boogeyman the right can use to activate and harness the racist anti-otherness that is endemic to American conservatism.

Finally today, Jeffrey Barg, The Grammarian writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer about a new and controversial addition to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The Oxford English Dictionary has just added cultural Marxism to its records. And that’s a big victory for a lot of people who fearmonger about cultural Marxism but probably don’t even understand what it is. Not because they can now look up the term — rather, the term’s addition to the dictionary means it has gained enough cultural currency that it warrants a definition. People who are worried about cultural Marxism washing over vulnerable, patriotic capitalists talked about it enough that dictionary editors finally took notice.

What is cultural Marxism, and why now, more than 80 years after the term first appeared in print?

The OED’s primary definition is worth reading in full: “Used depreciatively, chiefly among right-wing commentators: a political agenda advocating radical social reform, said to be promoted within western cultural institutions by liberal or left-wing ideologues intent on eroding traditional social values and imposing a dogmatic form of progressivism on society. Later also more generally: a perceived left-wing bias in social or cultural institutions, characterized as doctrinaire and pernicious.”

Those qualifiers speak volumes: “Used depreciatively,” “said to be promoted,” “perceived left-wing bias,” “characterized as.” The OED isn’t saying that cultural Marxism is all of these things, but rather that it’s perceived and presented as such. In other words, the people using this term probably have an agenda, so watch out.

Everyone have a great day!

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The ‘could be better, could be worse’ COVID wave is here

Helen Branswell/STAT:

10 lessons I’ve learned from the Covid–19 pandemic

The guiding principle of outbreak response is hope for the best but prepare for the worst. It has felt too often in this pandemic that people are forgetting about the second part of that maxim. We’re seeing it even now with responses to the surging wave of Omicron cases.

It is true that public health authorities can get hammered if they sound the alarm for something that turns out not to merit it. The World Health Organization was pilloried by the European Parliament after the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic ultimately proved not to be particularly deadly.

But with fast-developing disease outbreaks, if you wait until you’re sure that something is going to be a disaster before seizing every opportunity to alter its trajectory, you’ve made the outbreak much, much worse.

U.S. Covid hospitalizations and ICU admissions: #Omicron versus prior Covid waves. Current hospital and ICU census are substantially lower than reported cases versus prior waves. A portion of current admissions still reflect delta infection. Data 7 day averages. pic.twitter.com/eIabnfNHvP

— Scott Gottlieb, MD (@ScottGottliebMD) December 28, 2021

... in non-ICU hospitalizations, since ICU stays typically come later. And in fact we do see a new signal: our non-ICU ("floor") admits have risen from 10-12 last week to 18 today, a subtle but I think meaningful rise.(12/16) pic.twitter.com/2ATI05UPos

— Bob Wachter (@Bob_Wachter) December 28, 2021

Duaa Eldeib/ProPublica:

They Were the Pandemic’s Perfect Victims

The pandemic killed so many dialysis patients that their total number shrunk for the first time in nearly half a century. Few people took notice

Then COVID-19 struck. Nearly 18,000 more dialysis patients died in 2020 than would have been expected based on previous years. That staggering toll represents an increase of nearly 20% from 2019, when more than 96,000 patients on dialysis died, according to federal data released this month.

The loss led to an unprecedented outcome: The nation’s dialysis population shrank, the first decline since the U.S. began keeping detailed numbers nearly a half century ago.

They were COVID-19’s perfect victims.

London and New York City: New Covid cases and New Covid Hospitalizations - #Omicron versus prior waves. On a relative basis, Hospitalizations are well below what was seen in prior Covid waves. pic.twitter.com/FaUyySGuLO

— Scott Gottlieb, MD (@ScottGottliebMD) December 28, 2021

That’s great but we’re not done. And it is hitting the kids. 

STATNews:

Claims of vaccine hesitancy in African countries are at odds with the reality on the ground

Our work serves as a continuous reminder that local demand for vaccines is high and access is the biggest barrier to increasing full vaccination rates — less than 3% for Uganda and 9% for the entire continent of Africa.

Despite encouraging lab and animal studies on Omicron's potential reduced pathogenicity, there's still plenty to worry about, especially in the US —70 million people unvaccinated, including children —the immunocompromised (>3%), even w/ 3-doses —the unknowns re: #LongCovid pic.twitter.com/LqjwRvb6To

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) December 27, 2021

Amelia Nierenberg/NY Times:

Can Schools Handle Omicron?

The looming wave is shaking the rickety infrastructure that has kept schools running.

Across the nation’s 13,000 districts and 98,000 public schools this week, there are about 600 shuttered schools or districts, according to data from Burbio, a company that has tracked how schools have operated through the pandemic. There are fewer closures now than in November.

But the Omicron variant appears contagious enough to upend the shaky equilibrium that has allowed schools to stay open. Many are in dire need of substitute teachers and bus drivers, and can ill afford an outbreak that would send many staff members home.

Staff outbreaks are the key, from hospitals to airlines to schools.

I appreciate this because @MoNscience talks not just about the numbers, but about his case. "Mild to moderate" SUCKS. You do not want it. https://t.co/XQtWrNC8IU

— Bethany Brookshire (@BeeBrookshire) December 28, 2021

Hugo Lowell/Guardian:

Capitol panel to investigate Trump call to Willard hotel in hours before attack

The chairman said the select committee intended to scrutinize the phone call – revealed last month by the Guardian – should they prevail in their legal effort to obtain Trump White House records over the former president’s objections of executive privilege.

“That’s right,” Thompson said when asked by the Guardian whether the select committee would look into Trump’s phone call, and suggested House investigators had already started to consider ways to investigate Trump’s demand that Biden not be certified as president on 6 January.

It seems people are struggling to believe this @EricLevitz piece, based on @Wertwhile analysis, so let me add a few hard numbers to help clarify https://t.co/rjX6kx6FoS

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) December 27, 2021

Randall D. Eliason/WaPo:

Here’s why a criminal referral for Trump by the Jan. 6 committee is a bad idea

At other times, during the course of its legislative or oversight work, Congress uncovers facts suggesting past criminal conduct unrelated to Congress itself. Again, here a referral alerts the Justice Department to the conduct so it can consider whether investigation and prosecution are appropriate.

But the Justice Department does not need a referral from Congress to be aware of the potential crimes surrounding Jan. 6 — including those potentially committed by Trump himself.

The events leading up to the assault on the Capitol are widely known. They have been the subject of numerous media reports and books, not to mention a full impeachment proceeding. The riot is the subject of what is likely the largest and most complex federal criminal investigation in history, with hundreds of people already indicted. The Justice Department is deeply enmeshed in investigating the events of Jan. 6 and does not need a congressional heads-up.

A criminal referral would be worse than unnecessary — it would be counterproductive.

2/2 Many hope to ignore what is said on right-wing media in hopes of starving it of oxygen. But @GoAngelo of @mmfa warns that if another Jan 6th uprising organizes online, “there will be a whiplash effect. Everyone will say, ‘How did that happen?’ Well, it’s been happening.” https://t.co/FrviLwrUGu

— Evan Osnos (@eosnos) December 27, 2021

Mark Joseph Stern/Slate:

The One Thing Biden Is Doing Exceptionally Well

He is getting judges confirmed at a record pace, and his selections have been incredible.

There are two defining features of Biden’s push to remake the federal judiciary: speed and diversity. Let’s start with speed. In his first year, just 19 of Trump’s judicial nominees had received Senate confirmation. For President Barack Obama, that number was 13; for Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, it was 28. Biden, by contrast, has seen 40 of his judges confirmed already—the most since President Ronald Reagan. Eleven of Biden’s judges sit on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals, where most federal cases are resolved. (For comparison, Obama placed just three judges on the Court of Appeals in his first year.)

Now turn to the other extraordinary aspect of Biden’s judicial nominees: their unprecedented demographic and professional diversity. In a comprehensive report, Alliance for Justice has highlighted the many firsts among this crop of judges: the first openly lesbian judge on the Court of Appeals (Beth Robinson); the first Korean American to sit on the Court of Appeals (Lucy Koh); the first Muslim federal judge (Zahid Quraishi); the first Black judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Tiffany Cunningham); the first woman of color to serve on the U.S. District Court in Maryland (Lydia Griggsby); the first Native American federal judge in Washington state (Lauren J. King)—the list goes on. According to Alliance for Justice, nearly 75 percent of Biden’s judicial nominees are women, and nearly 65 percent are people of color. For comparison, only 24 percent of Trump’s judicial nominees were women, and just 16 percent were people of color.

This is NEJM this week from the NBA showing mean clearance duration is 5.5 days in vaccinated and 7.5 days in unvaccinated individuals. That means the MAJORITY had not completed viral clearance by 5 days. https://t.co/IP1EPXD2Zd

— Haitham Ahmed, MD, MPH (@haithamahmedmd) December 28, 2021

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Why Barack Obama still matters

Peniel Joseph writes for CNN on why the 44th President of the United States (who turned 60 Wednesday), Barack Hussein Obama, still matters.

As he approaches 60, Obama's hair has turned grayer, he looks even thinner now than he did as commander in chief and one can see the impact of time -- and being President -- in the wrinkles and creases that appear visible on a once unlined face.
Last summer, Obama said that "Black Lives Matter" but decried efforts to "Defund the Police" as bad politics that alienated potential allies.
Yet, time out of office has radicalized the preternaturally cautious Obama into calling for an end to the filibuster, if that's what's required to preserve democracy. His characterization of the filibuster as "another Jim Crow relic" offered further proof that Obama 2.0 displays a willingness to confront America's long history of structural racism with the kind of bracing candor he rarely embraced as President.
Obama continues to serve as a Rorschach test for the American political imagination. He likely always will. The first Black president didn't so much as flip the script of American politics as write himself into it. Obama proved to be a fervent believer in American exceptionalism.

E J Montini writes for The Arizona Republic that the four Capitol Police officers who have died by suicide since (and because of) the Jan. 6 insurrection should be remembered as “casualties of war.”

The four officers who responded to the insurrection of Jan. 6 In Washington, D.C., and have since died by suicide – two announced just this week – are casualties of war.

They range in experience from nearly 20 years on the job to barely five. But when the call went out about a mob breaching the U.S. Capitol, they answered. Now they’re gone.

Officer Howie Liebengood, Officer Jeffrey Smith, Officer Gunther Hashida and Officer Kyle DeFreytag.

They will not get proper credit for being casualties of war.

But that is what they are.

And, sadly, they died as a result of a conflict with domestic – not foreign – terrorists.

Mary C. Curtis writes for Roll Call on the tendency of Republican politicians and other “tough guys and gals” to “punch down” at others.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s recent, threatening words involved actual hitting, in this case the speaker of the House and third in line for the presidency, Nancy Pelosi. At a Republican fundraiser in Nashville, Tenn., over the weekend, when presented with an oversize gavel, McCarthy said: “I want you to watch Nancy Pelosi hand me that gavel. It will be hard not to hit her with it.” According to audio, the crowd of about 1,400 laughed.

McCarthy can almost taste the speakership, with voting restrictions in the states and new gerrymandered districts being teed up, and the Supreme Court and a Senate stalled on voting legislation helping to clear the way. He’s already referring to Pelosi as a lame duck. For him and his followers, the angry rhetoric isn’t something to be ashamed of; it’s dessert, a way to rile up the base and rake in the cash.

[...]

Does he remember or care, as he’s piling on, that the rioters particularly targeted Pelosi, defiled her office and called out “Where’s Nancy?” in their best impression of Jack Nicholson’s demented howl in “The Shining”?

Jason Johnson of The Grio (and MSNBC, of course) explains why Nina Turner lost in her bid to succeed Marcia Fudge as the representative for Ohio’s 11th Congressional District.

Turner didn’t lose because of “dark money,” she lost because local voters don’t live their lives on Twitter, don’t read puff pieces in The New York Times and didn’t want the Progressive Establishment carpetbagging into town and telling people how to vote. Not to mention, Shontel Brown is actually a pretty darn good public servant.

If you could liquefy schadenfreude and inject it directly into your veins, I know a lot of Democrats who’d be high as a kite right now after Turner’s loss, but dunking on Turner or the Progressive Establishment doesn’t do anybody any good. The progressive model of success, finding a local activist or politician, training and funding them to run against an out-of-touch or do-nothing incumbent is a good model. That’s how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat Joe Crowley and Jamal Bowman beat Eliot Engel in New York; it’s how Cori Bush beat William Lacy Clay in Missouri, and how Ayanna Pressley beat Michael Capuano in Massachusetts.

The Progressive Establishment model didn’t work in Ohio because Turner wasn’t an underdog and hadn’t been in the district recently but also because mainline Democrats ignore progressives at their peril. At the same time, progressives shouldn’t be calling Black voters in Ohio stupid or blaming outside money when they simply ran a candidate who had every technical advantage but couldn’t reconcile half a decade of attacking the Democratic Party with running in a heavily Democratic district.

Speaking of former Rep. Michael Capuano ... this morning, Mr. Capuano and former Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas jointly penned an opinion piece for The Boston Globe about various ways in which the U.S. might be able to heal a divided nation.

Compiling interviews with public figures — Democrat, Republican, and independent — the report finds that many agree on the major issues from which our political problems stem. One is low voter turnout, especially in primary elections. When turnout is low, it increases the power of the most polarized voters, who are more likely to vote in primaries. This allows a small number of people to have a disproportionate impact on which candidate runs in the general election.

One reason voter turnout in primaries is low is the lack of attention many primary races garner. What may help draw more attention to primaries would be for each region of the country to move all their primaries to the same day. Another option would be for each state to hold its primary on the first Tuesday of the month, mimicking the presidential election. Instead of having primaries scattered over the course of several months on different days, states should coordinate with each other to develop ideas for consolidating primary dates or other changes that would draw increased attention to primaries.

Dana Rubenstein and Katie Glueck of The New York Times report that in the wake of the release of the damning investigative report detailing the repeated pattern of sexual harassment by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whatever political allies that Cuomo had continue to abandon him.

The pillars of Mr. Cuomo’s political base now appear to be cracking beneath him, as he suffers consequential defections from core constituencies, including labor, white suburban lawmakers and Black political leaders.

His only apparent hope is that, during the time it takes to draw up impeachment papers as the State Assembly advances its investigation, the reservoir of public good will he earned early in the pandemic will stifle the sentiment against him in the legislature and elsewhere.

Certainly, in interviews on Wednesday across the state, not all voters saw the report as decisive.

“He is a single man, he is a human being, so mistakes can be made,” said Melissa Edwards, 39, as she began her workout routine in Southeast Queens, suggesting that the accusations paled in comparison to those by women who “are being raped and molested by people — look at Jeffrey Epstein or Bill Cosby.”

Tony Romm and Yeganeh Torbati of The Washington Post report that Infrastructure Week has brought out the lobbyists.

The organizations working to shape the package — ranging from powerful trade associations representing agricultural and energy giants to small-time firms working for cities in Alabama and Kansas — mentioned either “infrastructure” or President Biden’s initial proposal, known as the American Jobs Plan, on their lobbying disclosure forms during the most recent quarter this year, according to an analysis from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit group that tracks money and influence in Washington.

Those groups collectively have spent more than $426 million in their lobbying efforts, which includes trying to sway lawmakers and regulators on far more than just infrastructure, the center’s data show. The activity reflects a dramatic uptick from the same period one year ago, when more than 1,300 lobbying operations sought to target Washington on infrastructure. Their total spending on all issues over that period exceeded $291 million.

Already, these lobbyists have secured a number of victories. A push publicly and privately by conservative advocacy groups including FreedomWorks ultimately helped prompt a bipartisan group of senators to halt efforts to increase new funding for the Internal Revenue Service. Some Democrats, along with the Biden administration, had hoped to include the funding boost as a way of beefing up tax enforcement on corporations and the wealthy, and raising government revenue.

Charles M. Blow of The New York Times writes about two different “kinds” of protest.

One kind of protest is like the massive, unprecedented protests following the murder of George Floyd. They are somewhat organic reactions to an individual outrage that epitomized a pattern of outrages. They are tragedy-specific, breaking-point protests that often have policy grafted onto them after the initial outbursts by smart activists.

But what we have seen recently are different kinds of protest: organized, policy specific protests, sparked not by individual tragedy, but born of plan and strategy. They are nonviolent. Many of their participants and leaders are older. They are crowdsourced on social media and may never go viral.

These protests harken back to the Civil Rights Movement and even borrow some of its language, philosophy and tactics.

As Bishop William Barber II, president of Repairers of the Breach and a co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, told me Wednesday about the difference in protest styles, on the one hand there are those who either “want to ride a wave or have a moment,” and then there are those who engage in protest, “direct actions,” where the act of protesting itself is the thing that “creates tension.”

Phil Galewitz of Kaiser Health News brings the good news that 90% of America’s seniors are now vaccinated against COVID-19.

Amid the latest surge in covid-19 cases and hospitalizations, the United States on Tuesday hit a milestone that some thought was unattainable: 90% of people 65 and older are at least partly vaccinated against the disease.

[...]

Wohl said political leanings that have skewed vaccination rates across the country have had much less of an impact on older adults. “The threat of covid-19 is so real for those 65 and over that it transcends many of the other issues that are complicating vaccination rates,” he said. “Wisdom and fear have really led to impressive immunization rates.”

The pandemic has been especially vicious to older adults. Nearly 80% of deaths have been among people age 65 and up. Nursing homes and other long-term care facilities were hit hard, and many banned family members and other visitors from entering, isolating residents. Even older adults living at home often kept their distance from family and friends as they sought to avoid the coronavirus. So when vaccines became available in December, many states targeted seniors first.

That effort has proved successful, although rates vary among states. Hawaii, Pennsylvania and Vermont vaccinated more than 99% of their seniors, while West Virginia ranks last with 78%.

Stephen M. Walt of Foreign Policy has an interesting take on the positive use of utilizing “nationalism” to defeat COVID-19.

A depressing aspect of the erratic U.S. response to the pandemic is the absence of a powerful, unified, can-do, “we’re all in this together” spirit. To be sure, medical personnel, public employees, and many others have made enormous and courageous sacrifices for the common good, and many others have adjusted their behavior by wearing masks, supporting local businesses, increasing charitable contributions, and taking other steps to help the country defeat the pandemic and move on. But in sharp contrast to the broad spirit of national sacrifice that animated the U.S. response during World War II—like scrap drives, war bond campaigns, rationing, and volunteering for military service—the campaign against COVID-19 has been undermined by widespread selfishness from the start.

It began with Trump, who was more concerned with what the virus might do to his electoral prospects than he was with the well-being of the nation. It continued with the millions of people—most but not all from Make America Great Again-land—who became convinced wearing a simple cotton mask was not a rather trivial sacrifice for the good of their country and community but a dangerous infringement on their liberty. In other words, their personal comfort and egos were more important than either the health of their fellow Americans or the broad common goal of putting the pandemic behind us. And it has continued with all those against vaccinations, whose selfish refusal to be inoculated has allowed the delta variant to spread rapidly and bring the latest wave of infections.

The most despicable of all are the politicianspundits, and grifters who have sought to advance their careers by feeding their audiences patently false information and reinforcing vaccine reluctance. Even worse, such dangerous misinformation comes primarily from some of the same people who have their hair on fire about dangers from other countries and are quick to accuse Black Lives Matter protesters of being unpatriotic. They say they want to “make America great,” but their actions are prolonging the pandemic and weakening the nation relative to others. It may not be treason, but it sure ain’t patriotism.

Megan K. Stack of The New Yorker writes about the near-blackout on press coverage in Afghanistan now that the U.S. is ending their military presence in the country.

I went to Afghanistan in 2001, as a young reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and I’ve recently been talking with others who fought, documented, and studied the war. I spoke with old friends and journalism colleagues, with academics, with people in the military and retired from it. I asked everyone the same question: How will the war be remembered? And, strikingly, they all said the same thing: they don’t know, because an answer requires a coherent understanding of the war’s overarching purpose, which nobody has possessed for more than a decade. An occupation that began as an act of vengeance against the planners of September 11th and their Taliban protectors evolved into something more abstract and impossibly ambitious, a sort of wholesale rebirth of Afghanistan as a stable and thriving country. It was a project that few U.S. leaders knew how to complete, but nobody had the strength to stop. And so the United States will end the longest foreign war in its history, and few can articulate what it was for. Naturally, there is dysfunction among the propagandists.

Finally this morning, of course I am not going to migrate to the Front Page and leave my bestie The Angry Grammarian behind. This morning, he writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer on the evolution of the use of the term “woke.”

Dating back at least to a 1938 folk song by Lead Belly, woke resided in African American Vernacular English to describe “awareness of racial or social discrimination and injustice,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The term’s definition and connotations, along with its usage frequency, were steady because white American English largely ignored it. Published dictionaries didn’t include woke.

Then in the late 2000s, “I stay woke” was the catchy refrain of Erykah Badu’s 2007 song “Master Teacher.” Lead Belly didn’t have Twitter, but after #blacklivesmatter took off as a hashtag in 2014, #staywoke frequently accompanied it. [...]

In 2021, conservatives have cannily identified woke’s catchiness — and they’ve pounced.

Donald Trump never once publicly uttered the adjective woke when he lived in the White House, but he seems to have learned the word recently, calling out “woke” generals in June and saying that “woke politics” accounted for the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team’s disappointing Olympics performance. Since the start of 2021, Republican politicians including Pat Toomey, Brian Fitzpatrick, Scott Perry, Mitch McConnell, Elise Stefanik, Mike Pompeo, Brian Kemp, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, Dan Crenshaw, Rick Scott, Jim Jordan, Lauren Boebert, Rand Paul, Matt Gaetz, and Louis Gohmert — to name a few — have all derided “woke” liberals/socialists/military/culture/mobs/banks/whatever.

Everyone have a great day!

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: It’s infrastructure week… for real.

WaPo:

The quiet Biden-GOP talks behind the infrastructure deal

That embrace of a favored provision hit home with Cassidy. “The president made it clear that that was essential for him,” the senator said. “Since the president had said it must be there, obviously that was very helpful.”

And we have a bill. pic.twitter.com/KyFsLmtFXj

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) August 2, 2021

NY Times:

To Fight Vaccine Lies, Authorities Recruit an ‘Influencer Army’

The White House has teamed up with TikTok stars, while some states are paying “local micro influencers” for pro-vaccine campaigns.

Fewer than half of all Americans age 18 to 39 are fully vaccinated, compared with more than two-thirds of those over 50, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And about 58 percent of those age 12 through 17 have yet to receive a shot at all.

To reach these young people, the White House has enlisted an eclectic army of more than 50 Twitch streamers, YouTubers, TikTokers and the 18-year-old pop star Olivia Rodrigo, all of them with enormous online audiences. State and local governments have begun similar campaigns, in some cases paying “local micro influencers” — those with 5,000 to 100,000 followers — up to $1,000 a month to promote Covid-19 vaccines to their fans.

“These 500 tragedies are independent of the total number of children who contracted the virus. COVID would not be a worse disease if only 1,000 children contracted it, but 50% died. Either way, 500 children are dead. As Dr. Walensky said, “Children are not supposed to die”.

— Dr. Lisa Iannattone (@lisa_iannattone) August 1, 2021

WaPo:

Many parents still haven’t gotten their adolescent kids vaccinated. What are they waiting for?

For individual parents looking at their own kids, however, the choice doesn’t always seem so clear-cut. Abby had a seizure last year that was never fully explained by the slew of medical specialists the family visited, says Kensek, and she occasionally suffers from high blood pressure. It makes Kensek nervous about signing her up for a relatively new vaccine, despite assurances of its safety in general.

“I don’t see the necessity of poking that beast,” she says. “There’s just not enough [data] out there for us yet. The CDC says it’s safe, and that’s great. But how many times have they gone back on their suggestions?”

She’s hardly alone. 

“We’re seeing a lot of first doses right now, a lot of parents coming in, 30 to 40 year old age range bringing their 12-14 year old children as well,” Vanessa Davis, the clinic’s supervisor, said. It‘s reporting an 80% increase in demand from 2 weeks ago. https://t.co/llVJDGrm4w

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) August 1, 2021

AJC:

Georgia health systems hesitate to mandate vaccines

Many health care systems across Georgia have no plans to mandate coronavirus vaccines for frontline workers, despite increasing infections caused by a variant that reportedly spreads as easily as chickenpox.

Nearly 60 major medical organizations called this week for mandatory vaccines for most health care workers, and an internal report surfaced from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that described the highly contagious nature of the Delta variant that is causing the latest increase. Even so, most health care systems in Georgia say that while they will require masks and follow other safety protocols, they’ll continue letting employees decide on their own about vaccinations.

Vaccination rates among health care workers vary widely across the state, although a majority of employees of many major providers have received at least one shot, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found.

NEW: It is widely expected that a #COVID19 vaccine will be authorized for kids under 12 this year. We looked at the size and characteristics of this population. They represent 15% of the US pop, or 48 million. w/@SArtiga2 @_KendalOrgera @tolbert_jen https://t.co/iTMWQbQrDw

— Jen Kates (@jenkatesdc) July 30, 2021

NY Times:

Already Distorting Jan. 6, G.O.P. Now Concocts Entire Counternarrative

In the Republicans’ disinformation campaign, the arrested Capitol rioters are political prisoners and Speaker Nancy Pelosi is to blame for the attack.

n the hours and days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, rattled Republican lawmakers knew exactly who was to blame: Donald J. Trump. Loyal allies began turning on him. Top Republicans vowed to make a full break from his divisive tactics and dishonesties. Some even discussed removing him from office.

By spring, however, after nearly 200 congressional Republicans had voted to clear Mr. Trump during a second impeachment proceeding, the conservative fringes of the party had already begun to rewrite history, describing the Capitol riot as a peaceful protest and comparing the invading mob to a “normal tourist visit,” as one congressman put it.

This past week, amid the emotional testimony of police officers at the first hearing of a House select committee, Republicans completed their journey through the looking-glass, spinning a new counternarrative of that deadly day. No longer content to absolve Mr. Trump, they concocted a version of events in which those accused of rioting were patriotic political prisoners and Speaker Nancy Pelosi was to blame for the violence.

Some Smart Brevity®, from @axios: https://t.co/oHrb8u4xyA pic.twitter.com/eNylkQSvAI

— David Gura (@davidgura) August 1, 2021

Charlie Sykes/Bulwark:

They Really Are Deplorable

Mocking the blue

Our friend Olivia Troye asks: “Mocking the officers, the trauma they lived, and downplaying Jan 6... How do these people sleep at night?” The real answer: it’s not just their business model, it’s become a way of life.

On one level D’Souza’s mockery of police officers injured in the line of duty is just another example of performative assholery, but it also fits a pattern worth noting: Charlie Kirk mocks Simone Biles for “weakness,” Tucker Carlson cackles about critics, and Laura Ingraham ridicules victims of the January 6 riots.

None of this has any relationship to the fight for freedom, limited government, or national greatness, or anything like a coherent set of ideas. But there is a through-line here: a strutting posture of faux toughness, and the celebration of the “strong” as opposed to the weak.

We’ve seen this play before.

Having downplayed Trump's attempts to overturn the election, one must then poo poo worries about future elections. After all, if the GOP really has turned against American democracy, how can a person of integrity who respects the Constitution keep supporting the party? 4/x

— Nicholas Grossman (@NGrossman81) August 1, 2021

Kevin Drum/Mother Jones:

The Real Source of America’s Rising Rage

We are at war with ourselves, but not for the reasons you think.

What accounts for this? It’s here that our popular explanations run aground. It can’t be all about a rise in conspiracy theories, since they’ve been around for decades. It can’t be social media, since Facebook and Twitter have become popular in the political arena only over the past few years. It can’t be a decline in material comfort, since incomes and employment have steadily improved over the past couple of decades. It can’t really be social trends, since most of them have improved too. And most of the specific issues that might cause alarm—immigration, racism, and more—are unlikely candidates on their own. They may be highly polarizing, but in a concrete sense they haven’t gotten worse since 2000. In fact, they’ve mostly gotten better.

To find an answer, then, we need to look for things that (a) are politically salient and (b) have changed dramatically over the past two to three decades. The most obvious one is Fox News.

To an extent that many people still don’t recognize, Fox News is a grinding, daily cesspool of white grievance, mistrust of deep-state government, and a belief that liberals are literally trying to destroy the country out of sheer malice. Facebook and other social media outlets might have made this worse over the past few years—partly by acting as a sort of early warning system for new outrages bubbling up from the grassroots that Fox anchors can draw from—but Fox News remains the wellspring.

WSJ: FDA Advisers and former FDA officials familiar with the process predict that full approval of at least Pfizer’s vaccine could come in September or October. https://t.co/iikXosuYmo

— andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) August 1, 2021

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: A political movement at the Olympic Games?

Good morning, everyone.

Karoun Demirjian, Marianna Sotomayor, and Jacqueline Alemany write for The Washington Post that the select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection still needs to investigate if and how the committee can forces relevant members of Congress to testify through subpoena.

...legal experts said there is little precedent for forcing lawmakers to testify as part of a congressional inquiry if they resist a subpoena, an issue members of the Jan. 6 panel said they have yet to fully investigate or plan for as they plot out the next steps for their probe.

“I don’t know what the precedent is, to be honest,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the committee who oversaw the first impeachment trial of Trump and has one of the heftiest investigative resumes in the House. “Obviously we will have to look into all those questions.”

Members of the executive branch have often avoided or delayed for years appearing before Congress by asserting executive privilege. Members of the Jan. 6 panel are hoping that tactic will be less useful to former Trump administration officials after the Justice Department recently said it would break from tradition and not invoke that privilege with regard to inquires regarding the attack on the Capitol.

But while the steps are clear — if arduous — for compelling administration officials to testify, that’s not the case when it comes to lawmakers.

Shai Akabas of Roll Call writes with familiarity regarding the approaching urgency to extend the federal debt ceiling: Here we go again.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says Republicans won’t provide the votes necessary to further extend the debt limit, while others in his party have demanded that it be paired with equal spending reductions. Democrats insist they won’t negotiate or accept demands from the opposition but may not be able to tackle the issue along party lines. Based on history, we might expect another eleventh-hour deal in which both sides shake hands and agree to do it again next year. But with the full faith and credit of the United States on the line, waiting for one side to blink is a dangerous strategy.

In these conditions, it’s time for both parties to take the off-ramp. While the debt limit was once viewed by many as an opportunity to force action on the country’s unsustainable fiscal path, that illusion should be long dead. Since 2012, debt limit extensions have most often ridden on legislation that actually increased deficits.

As bipartisan infrastructure negotiations and Democratic spending ambitions slog on through the summer, time is of the essence to resolve the debt limit problem. In modern history, the U.S. has never defaulted on its obligations, an outcome most commonly associated with banana republics.

Paul Krugman of The New York Times walks on his “wonky side” to talk about … Keynesian Republicans?

When justifying their own plans for tax cuts, Republicans generally didn’t argue that those cuts would increase demand. Instead, they invoked supposed supply-side effects: Reduced taxes, they claimed, would increase incentives to work and invest, expanding the economy’s potential. Democrats generally ridiculed these claims.

[...]

But a funny thing has happened. Republicans are now warning that Biden’s spending plans will cause the economy to overheat, feeding inflation — which is basically a Keynesian position, although it’s being used to argue against government expenditure. I guess the confidence fairy has left the building. Or maybe G.O.P. economics is situational — Keynesian or not depending on which position can be used to argue against Democratic spending plans.

Democrats, on the other hand, are arguing that their spending plans, while partly about social justice, will also have positive supply-side effects, raising the economy’s long-run potential.

What can we say about these claims on each side?

Mike Littwin of the Colorado Sun feels no sympathy for those Republicans who willfully choose to be misinformed by the GQP and right-wing media. None.

So sympathy? Sure, I understand that many of the vaccine resisters have been manipulated by the Tucker Carlsons of the world, by the Rand Pauls of the world (did you enjoy, like me, Dr. Fauci’s most recent takedown of Paul?), by the many GOP politicians who don’t have the guts to admit to their political base that they and their families have actually been vaccinated, by social media platforms that clearly play a role (although not nearly as big a role as Biden seems to think), by the misinformation and disinformation running rampant across the country.

But misinformation, particularly when it’s opposed in so many forums with valid information, does not survive, and certainly does not thrive, without a willing audience.

So when I’m asked to be sympathetic to the 44% of Republicans who, according to a YouGov poll, believe Bill Gates wants to use the COVID vaccine to implant microchips in people so he can track them digitally, my sympathy quotient all but disappears. This isn’t about anti-vaxxers. It’s about lunacy.

Nicole Hemmer writes for CNN that women athletes at the Tokyo Olympic Games are making bold and perhaps long-lasting political statements.

The deep resistance that seems to emerge every time women athletes advocate for themselves suggests that, even as women's sports evolve, athletes still contend with a continued fear of female autonomy. They are facing a more specific version of what plagues and often prompts backlash against so many women who demand autonomy in all aspects of public life. That struggle has been especially visible at the Olympics, where patriarchal demands are wrapped in the language of nationalism and patriotism, and women athletes stand accused not only of betraying gender expectations but the nation itself.

At the women's gymnastics qualifications on Monday, the German team swapped the traditional high-cut leotards for leg-covering unitards for the team competition, a choice the country's gymnastics federation called a protest "against sexualization in gymnastics." They first debuted the uniforms at the European championships but wanted to bring their message to the world stage at the Olympics, where gymnastics is one of the most watched events. The athletes were clear about their message: They were not arguing that gymnasts should dispense with leotards, but rather wanted to remind gymnasts that they have a choice. "Every gymnast should be able to decide in which type of suit she feels most comfortable," said Elisabeth Seitz, a member of the German team, at the European championships this spring.

Renée Graham of The Boston Globe writes about America’s “empathy gap,” and what constitutes a true show of strength.

On “The Sopranos,” HBO’s much-revered drama, Tony Soprano, a mob boss battling depression and panic attacks, lamented what he perceived as a lost era of stoicism. “Nowadays, everybody’s got to go to shrinks and counselors and go on ‘Sally Jessy Raphael’ and talk about their problems,” he grouses to his psychiatrist. “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper, the strong, silent type? That was an American. He wasn’t in touch with his feelings; he just did what he had to do.”

Tony’s primitive view of the human condition permeates this country. From childhood, we’re conditioned to walk off pain or suck up heartache. Some have compared Biles unfavorably to Kerri Strug, the 1996 Olympian who completed her vault on a broken ankle and sealed the gold medal win for the US women’s gymnastics team. Strug’s actions have long been hailed as an exemplar of American perseverance and grit. Rarely mentioned is how Strug was pressured by her coach, Bela Károlyi, to make a vault she didn’t want to make. After Biles withdrew from some Olympic competitions, Strug tweeted her support.

Strength belongs to those willing to express their fears and emotions, not those who deride someone’s pain — which is also what happened after a bipartisan House select committee hearing to investigate the deadly Capitol insurrection. In sworn testimony, Sergeant Aquilino Gonell and Officer Harry Dunn of the Capitol Police and officers Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges of the DC Metropolitan Police told in shattering detail what they witnessed and endured on Jan. 6. Their recollections left some legislators in tears.

Stephen Leahy, writing for The Atlantic, notes that the June heat wave in the Pacific Northwest did incalculable (and still to be determined) damage to the area’s ecosystem.

Billions of mussels, clams, oysters, barnacles, sea stars, and other intertidal species died during the late-June heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, Christopher Harley, a zoology professor at the University of British Columbia, told me last week. Yes, that’s billions, plural. What I call “extreme, extreme heat events”—because the term extreme events doesn’t quite cover the dire situation—not only kill people; they kill plants and animals. In changing our planet’s climate, we’re permanently altering the natural world that is our life-support system. And we’re seeing this happen in real time.

Harley, who is investigating the extent of the June die-off, has learned from marine scientists at various institutions that an estimated 100 million barnacles died on a 1,000-yard stretch of shore near White Rock, British Columbia. While not all sites are as bad as White Rock, large numbers of dead marine animals have been found along much of the Salish Sea shoreline, from Olympia, Washington, to Campbell River, British Columbia. The situation is so alarming that Harley said it could lead to the collapse of the region’s maritime ecosystem.

Finally today, John Feinstein writes for The Washington Post that, in spite of all the drama of the Tokyo Olympics, he is enjoying watching the athletes. 

For most competitors, the Olympics are a once-in-a-lifetime experience. To tell your kids and grandkids that you were an Olympian — regardless of whether you bring home a medal — is a rare honor, especially in sports that don’t produce dozens of multimillionaires or household names. For archers, table-tennis players, kayakers and fencers, this is the pinnacle.

Delaying the Games in 2020 dashed the Olympic hopes of some athletes. Canceling or again postponing these Games would have ended even more dreams. Most of the athletes who didn’t get to compete in the Moscow Games in 1980, thanks to President Jimmy Carter’s boycott, or the Eastern Bloc’s boycott of Los Angeles in 1984, have never gotten over it.

And it’s not just the competitors who miss out. Dave Gavitt was supposed to coach the 1980 men’s basketball team. Olympic trials were held. Among those who made the team were Isiah Thomas, Mark Aguirre and Maryland’s Buck Williams. None ever got to compete in an Olympics.

Gavitt was preceded as the coach of the U.S. team by Dean Smith and succeeded by Bob Knight — both of whom led the U.S. men to gold medals. “I’d have loved to have done what Dean and Bob did,” Gavitt said in later years

Everyone have a great day!

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: One step closer, I guess

Good morning, everyone!

Last night, the United States Senate voted 67-32 to advance to debate on an infrastructure package. Tony Romm of The Washington Post has the details.

The twin developments marked an early victory for lawmakers who have struggled for years to turn their shared enthusiasm for infrastructure into actual investments in the country’s inner-workings. Several past presidents had called for robust, new public-works spending to replace old pipes and fix cracked bridges, yet only on Wednesday did the Senate actually move toward delivering on those promises.

[...]

The news sparked jubilation at the White House, where Biden this spring put forward a roughly $2 trillion jobs and infrastructure plan funded largely through tax increases that Republicans swiftly rejected. But the administration’s top aides ultimately proved willing to be flexible in the months that followed in how they pursued some of the president’s priorities. Asked about the deal while traveling in Pennsylvania, Biden sounded a hopeful note, telling reporters: “I feel confident about it.”

Yet the progress still threatened to prove politically fragile in a debate that is only just beginning. Lawmakers must still draft their legislation, which had not been written by Wednesday evening, and calibrate it in a way to survive the narrowly divided Senate. The absence of actual legislative text troubled some Republicans, including Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), who said in a speech on the chamber floor he could not vote to forge ahead Wednesday because the bill is “not ready.”

Jeremy Stahl at Slate says that there is a perfectly good reason that the Select Committee investigating the 1/6 Insurrection seemed to run smoothly.

Indeed, after 3½ years of covering Democratic oversight efforts since Democrats took back control of the House majority at the start of 2019, I can honestly say that this is the first and only time I can remember witnessing a hearing into misconduct perpetrated by Trump and his minions that maintained its presence in objective reality the whole time. (While the House Intelligence Committee’s hearings during Donald Trump’s first impeachment were illuminating and powerful, they were consistently derailed by partisan nonsense.)

Instead of the usual circus, Tuesday’s hearing was four consecutive hours of clean fact-finding and emotionally constructive first-person witnessing to the horrors of Jan. 6. This was possible only because Jordan (and to a lesser extent Banks) was kept off of the panel. Jordan has previously found enormous success as an oversight arsonist on the House Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight Committee, and on the House Intelligence Committee during impeachment. I know Jordan would have derailed any fact-finding effort into Jan. 6 because he already announced how he would have done it had he been allowed to participate during a press conference with Republican House leadership on the Capitol steps on Tuesday.

Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post says, in large part, that Beltway journalists need to “reframe” how they cover The Beltway.

Mainstream journalists want their work to be perceived as fair-minded and nonpartisan. They want to defend themselves against charges of bias. So they equalize the unequal. This practice seems so ingrained as to be unresolvable.

There is a way out. But it requires the leadership of news organizations to radically reframe the mission of its Washington coverage. As a possible starting point, I’ll offer these recommendations:

Toss out the insidious “inside-politics” frame and replace it with a “pro-democracy” frame.

Stop calling the reporters who cover this stuff “political reporters.” Start calling them “government reporters.”

Stop asking who the winners and losers were in the latest skirmish. Start asking who is serving the democracy and who is undermining it.

Stop being “savvy” and start being patriotic.

German Lopez of Vox says that the time has come for mandating the COVID-19 vaccine wherever it can be mandated in the U.S. can. 

Unvaccinated people, whether they’re apathetic or resistant, are the reason the coronavirus remains a threat in the US. The country and everyone concerned about the rising case rate should do everything in their power to push these people to get a shot.

The federal government could require vaccination for its own employees, as President Joe Biden is reportedly considering, and offer incentives, financial or otherwise, for others to do the same...

[,,.]

I’ve been talking to experts about mandating vaccines for months. Earlier this year, when I wrote about vaccine passports, many argued that mandates should only be tried as a last resort — we should try improving access and offering incentives first. Only if those options failed should we rely on the more drastic steps.

Well, we’re here. America has made the vaccines much more available to just about everyone who’s eligible. The nation has tried rewards, ranging from free beer to gift cards to a cash lottery, to nudge people to get a shot. Yet we’re stuck. Half of the US population still isn’t fully vaccinated.

It’s time to try that last resort.

Jason DeParle of The New York Times reports that there has been an astonishing drop in poverty across the board but that the historic drop may only be temporary.

The number of poor Americans is expected to fall by nearly 20 million from 2018 levels, a decline of almost 45 percent. The country has never cut poverty so much in such a short period of time, and the development is especially notable since it defies economic headwinds — the economy has nearly seven million fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic.

The extraordinary reduction in poverty has come at extraordinary cost, with annual spending on major programs projected to rise fourfold to more than $1 trillion. Yet without further expensive new measures, millions of families may find the escape from poverty brief. The three programs that cut poverty most — stimulus checks, increased food stamps and expanded unemployment insurance — have ended or are scheduled to soon revert to their prepandemic size.

While poverty has fallen most among children, its retreat is remarkably broad: It has dropped among Americans who are white, Black, Latino and Asian, and among Americans of every age group and residents of every state.

Ben Brasch of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the process has begun to remove the elections chief of Fulton County.

A letter obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows two dozen state senators support a performance review of Fulton elections chief Richard Barron. The letter was written Tuesday, the very same day a front-page AJC story examined the prospect of a takeover of elections in Fulton, home to a tenth of all Georgians.

“We’re asking them to simply correct a record they say is easily corrected. Is it or isn’t it? The people of Georgia deserve answers,” wrote Republican Senate President Pro Tem Butch Miller, who signed the letter.

As written into Senate Bill 202, the State Election Board can replace a county’s election board following a performance review/audit/investigation. Then, a temporary superintendent would enjoy full managerial authority of how the county counts votes and staffs polling places.

Barron was not available for comment due to a scheduling conflict, according to a county spokesman.

A performance review begins upon request of at least two state representatives and two state senators from the county.

Lauren Michele Jackson writes for The New Yorker that she is personally “exhausted” by the ways in which some liberals have chosen to rebut conservative critics of critical race theory.

None of these summations is incorrect, exactly—in an appearance on CNN, Crenshaw herself described critical race theory in similar terms, as a rejection of the idea that “what’s in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it.” And yet there is something about the homogeneity of these definitions, their recourse to coddling cliché, that makes critical race theory seem like just another version of a fluffier and more familiar three-word initialism, D.E.I.—diversity, equity, and inclusion. As with the less robust term “privilege,” the words “structural” and “systemic” are called upon with a suspiciously breezy regularity these days. Rather than carry on the edifying work that these words are meant to undertake—the project of implicating ourselves in the world that contains us—they have become a lullaby by which liberals self-soothe: it’s never you; it’s the system. Ibram X. Kendi, the best-selling author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” told Slate in a recent interview that the divide over critical race theory is based on a misunderstanding that it “seeks to attack white people” rather than “to attack structural racism.” Late last month, Twitter gathered in praise of General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for expressing an “open mind” about critical race theory before the House Armed Services Committee: “What is wrong with understanding—having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?” This expression of tolerance from the seat of power exhibits how defanged the popular apprehension of racial critique has become.

Rasha Younes of The Nation asserts that, in large part, notions of a unified “imagined community” of LGBTQ people is just that: imagined and not based in reality.

While imagined communities serve a purpose, including as a political tool, the assertion that people with a shared sexual orientation or gender identity form a relatively uniform community is depoliticizing. It risks obscuring other intersecting factors that lead to stratification even within the “LGBT community.” Clearly there are issues that affect people based on identity, such as discriminatory laws and policies. But other factors need to be considered when looking at the relative impact of discrimination—almost invariably, those on the social and economic margins are most affected.

Yet, shorthand is necessary, and “LGBT” does help in discussing access to the international human rights framework. To be granted asylum, for example, a queer or transgender person must prove that the basis for their claim is experience of violence or discrimination because of their LGBT identity.

The term “LGBT community” has activist origins signaling political solidarity. But it has also become a convenient acronym in a neoliberal economy where the “LGBT community” has come to be seen as an indispensable niche market—whether for selling rainbow flags or a political candidate. It creates a false dichotomy between “‘in” and “out” groups.

I don’t think that there are many stories that better illustrate what Ms. Younes is saying than our next and final story of this morning.

Two days ago, California-based Democratic donor Ed Buck was found guilty on all charges of a nine-count indictment involving the deaths of Gemmel Moore  and Timothy Dean. L.A.-based journalist and activist Jasmyne Cannick has worked tirelessly on the Ed Buck case for four years.

I have to remind the powers that be that LA’s homeless crisis puts men like Ed Buck’s victims in a position where they feel they have no other choice but to play Russian roulette with their life and subject their bodies to torture just to have a roof over their head–even if just for one night.

Lastly, Black parents, stop kicking out your sons and daughters for being gay or trans.  Men like Ed Buck are waiting to take advantage of them in the worst way. I can’t tell you how many men I interviewed told me that’s why they ended up where they did.

Ed Buck only got away with it for so long because he was white and because we still don’t believe Black victims–even when they tell us what happened to them.

Y’all have no idea of the number of people who were working on documentaries while we were working on getting Ed Buck arrested, tried and convicted. Most of them are white but some Black people lost their minds too.

— Jasmyne Cannick (@Jasmyne) July 29, 2021

Everyone have a good day!