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Month: March 2021

Oh, the progressivity!

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 14, 2021

Marcy Wheeler’s tweet reminded me to go back and read the piece I brushed off earlier to focus on infrastructure.

Here is how it starts:

If President Biden gets his way, the national minimum wage will be $15 an hour, immigrants without legal status will receive an eight-year path to citizenship, firearms will be harder to purchase, votes will be easier to cast and Americans will head back to work in 10 million new clean-energy jobs.

And that’s just the beginning.

That is supposed to evoke among conservatives the kind of existential dread found in one of Ground Zero’s tracts on nuclear war:

The good news is you will be killed instantly.
The bad news is you might survive.

See, passing a wildly popular agenda that defeats the pandemic, puts Americans back to work, and puts money in their pockets might, you know, create a backlash at the polls in 2022 from people who really, really hate all that.

“Some Democrats” are raising alarms.

Some Republicans might even “portray the president as a left-leaning radical.”

Some “Republicans are hopeful they can exact a political price.”

“It’s classic Democratic overreach,” says a flack for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Then again, other Republicans could not even give away anti-Biden merchandise at CPAC.

Immigration policy could indeed hurt Biden, Wheeler tweets. And it did hurt Trump in 2018. “But immigration is one thing, and giving people money is another thing. The latter is, by all measures, wildly popular. So is taxing the super rich!”

But forget all that. Forget that the “legislation is broadly popular with the majority of the country.” Forget that the rescue package:

… not only provides $1,400 checks to many struggling Americans and money to help ensure that the nation can be fully vaccinated by the end of the year, but it also extends unemployment insurance, helps bail out roughly 185 union pension plans on the verge of collapse, provides aid and debt relief to disadvantaged Black farmers and seeks to cut U.S. childhood poverty in half through expanded tax credits.

O death, where is thy sting?

Giving Americans what they want could all backfire badly somehow?

There is some amount of irony that Biden, who was among the most moderate Democrats in a sprawling field of some two dozen presidential contenders, has emerged as a liberal champion. And the next phase of Biden’s presidency will also test his ability to use a more understated demeanor to sell policies that restructure broad swaths of the U.S. economy and social policy. One of his former opponents, Andrew Yang, said last year that “the magic of Joe Biden is that everything he does becomes the new reasonable.”

Years of Trump mean tweets helped inure Democrats to the reflexive wailing of Republicans still fighting the Cold War they declared Reagan won 30 years ago. Crying socialism as Republicans will just isn’t as flinch-inducing as it once was. Take it from Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders:

“Like Roosevelt understood during the Great Depression, Joe Biden understands this country today faces a series of unprecedented crises,” Sanders, who ran against Biden in the 2020 primary, said in an interview.

“What Joe Biden concluded is that if his administration is going to mean anything, it has got to think big, not small, and it has got to address these unprecedented crises in an unprecedented way. In that regard, he is off to a very, very good start.”

Let the GOP worry about its do-nothing and seditionist wings.

Meeting Americans’ needs from urban to rural

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 14, 2021
Photo showing two girl in Salinas, Calif. using a Taco Bell’s Wi-Fi to do homework went viral last August. (@ms_mamie89)

Not even an interstate bridge collapse in Minneapolis (2007) could shake Americans out of their stupor about the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. Wokeness may get people hot under the collar but “infrastructure week” became a running joke under a president who claimed to build things. Mentioning the persistent lack of rural broadband got a leader I consulted recently hot under his collar. Candidates better not come around here dropping that buzzword again without actual plans for making it happen, he said.

We can land a robotic rover on Mars, but a short drive from Houston’s Johnson Space Center a poor neighborhood had tainted water flowing from its taps. Elsewhere across Texas, Arctic cold had knocked out power to millions and broken water pipes.

In a wide-ranging report, the Washington Post examines how much America’s cutting-edge self-image and its reality diverge:

Historic breakthroughs in science, medicine and technology coexist intimately — and uneasily — alongside monumental failures of infrastructure, public health and equitable access to basic human needs.

America can put a rover on Mars, but it can’t keep the lights on and water running in the city that birthed the modern space program. It can develop vaccines, in record time, to combat a world-altering illness, but suffers one of the developed world’s highest death rates due to lack of prevention and care. It spins out endless entertainment to keep millions preoccupied during lockdown — and keep tech shares riding high on Wall Street — but leaves kids disconnected from the access they need to do their schoolwork.

Just south of California’s Silicon Valley last summer, two schoolgirls sat in a Taco Bell parking lot borrowing its Wi-Fi to do their homework. The photo went viral. But demand for remedying the situation?

The disparities reflect a multitude of factors, experts say, but primarily stem from a few big ones: Compared with other well-to-do nations, the United States has tended to prioritize private wealth over public resources, individualism over equity and the shiny new thing over the dull but necessary task of maintaining its infrastructure, much of which is fast becoming a 20th century relic.

“Let’s face it, we don’t have ribbon cuttings when we replace a pipe. Only when there’s a brand new bridge,” said Joseph Kane, an associate fellow at the Brookings Institution. “That’s the American fascination with bigger and better.”

Politicians have their pictures made at the launching of gleaming, new Navy ships that then lack the supplies to make them fully operational. No one elbows for photos in front of crates of spare parts and ammunition. That problem dates at least from the Reagan administration.

From internet access to health care, distribution is inequitable and quality as well, even around the richest zip codes. The myth that America treats everyone equally regardless of race, color, or creed is as decrepit as the country’s bridges.

Lark Jones lives in the wealthy Washington, D.C. metro region close to the tech corridor where scientists developed the technology behind the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna Covid vaccines. About the time of the announcement, people all around her fell ill with the disease. Her 72-year-old mother survived 2-1/2 weeks in intensive care but with kidney damage that will leave her needing dialysis to stay alive.

A resident of Northeast D.C., Jones lost her job as a home health aide in 2017 and, with it, her job-provided insurance. She found new work, in the form of two part-time jobs for minimum wage. But part-time work — even when it amounts to 17-hour workdays with just one day off a week — doesn’t necessarily provide health insurance. And Jones, who requires regular treatment and medication for diabetes and high blood pressure, can’t afford to buy her own.

In her two part-time jobs — as a youth counselor and as a program assistant at a D.C. homeless shelter — she is considered an essential worker. She’s one of the people who continued to go to work, even as others stayed home and as friends and family began to fall ill. The essential worker designation ultimately made her eligible for a vaccine; this month she received her second dose.

But the irony of it all feels outrageous when she thinks about it. There was never any hazard pay, nor any protection should she get sick.

Democrats began work last week on a long-overdue infrastructure bill. President Biden campaigned on a $2 trillion infrastructure plan he pledged would create a “modern, sustainable infrastructure and an equitable clean energy future.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, a state built atop massive public works projects, last week called infrastructure one of her “favorite subjects.” But for her that means more than the shiny, high-visibility projects:

“It’s not just roads and bridges, mass transit and high-speed rail, it’s also about water systems,” she said. “Some of the water systems we have are over 100 years old.”

And our health system still leaves many Americans behind both in poorer, browner urban neighborhoods and in poorer, whiter rural ones. Making sure no one gets left behind will bridge divides and boost public support even if Biden cannot find it among Republicans in Congress deaf to it. Succeeding in delivering basics all Americans need could make Biden “the most transformative president since FDR.”

Why Dr Seuss and Mr Potatohead?

Published by digby on March 13, 2021

It’s clear that the Republicans have no interest in actual governance anymore. They could barely even raise a peep about the massive American Rescue Act before they raced back to Fox to shriek about Dr. Seuss. They are not going to compete with Democrats on economics or really, any other form of traditional politics. Their ideology is dead. They are going to try to regain power solely on the basis of the culture war.

In 2022, Democrats will point to all the material improvements in people’s lives. The right will point to “cancel culture”, immigration and Black Lives Matter as reason to vote them out. Will it work? It’s hard to say. Sometimes people like to engage in cultural issues when they’re feeling economically comfortable. And sometimes they need someone to blame if they’re not economically comfortable. A lot depends on where we are a year or so from now.

Harry Enten at CNN says there is potency in the culture war arguments, which is why the GOP is pushing it so hard. (Of course, they don’t have anything else…)

While Democrats may mock them, the fear of cancel culture and political correctness isn’t something that just animates the GOP’s base. It’s the rare issue that does so without alienating voters in the middle.We can see this well in the 2020 American National Elections Studies’ pre-election survey. This academic survey asks questions on a bunch of topics. This includes a question about political correctness, which, if anything, is a less extreme version of cancel culture.

Respondents were asked whether they thought people needed to change the way they talked to be with the times or whether this movement had gone too far and people were too easily offended.People being too easily offended won by a 53% to 46% margin over people needing to change the way they talked.Keep in mind, the voters in this sample claimed they had either voted or would vote for Biden over Donald Trump by a 53% to 42% margin. This just gives you an idea of how much more popular the opposition to cancel culture and political correctness is than the baseline Republican presidential performance.

Perhaps more intriguing for the GOP is why political correctness is more popular than the party itself: the age gap on the question, while existent, was quite small.

Among those younger than 30, the two options were split 50% to 50%. Among those age 65 and older, too easily offended won by a 52% to 47% margin. It was the people who fall between those two age brackets who chose the too easily offended option (54% to 46%).

Now compare that to how respondents said they had or would vote in the presidential contest by age. Those younger than 30 favored Biden over Trump by 30 points, which means the cancel culture position was something that attracted youth support at a far higher level than Trump. Voters between the ages of 30 and 64 said they were for Biden over Trump by a 9-point margin. For those over the age of 64, Biden led Trump by 4 points.

What we see is that there was the greatest separation between respondent choices on the cancel culture question and the presidential race, the lower down on the age ladder you go. This means that it’s not only the case that opposition to political correctness and cancel culture won’t age out of the electorate, but it’s something that could conceivably win Republicans a lot more youth support than their baseline.

The fact that the GOP’s position on cancel culture and political correctness is clearly more popular with Americans than a position you might associate with the left is unusual. On most of the big issues, the Republican position is less popular.Take a look at these issues.On abortion, the pro abortion rights position (i.e. abortion shouldn’t always be illegal or be just for cases of rape, incest or health of the mother) beat out the anti-abortion position (i.e. abortion should always be illegal or be just for cases of rape, incest or health of the mother) by a 61% to 35% margin.

On whether the government should spend more and provide more services or spend less and provide fewer services, more spending and a bigger government won by a 23 point margin. That’s in-line with recent polls showing the coronavirus relief package quite popular. On building a border wall with Mexico, opposition was 10 points higher than support.

When it came to the protests against police brutality last year, the conservative position wasn’t popular. When asked what the best way to deal with the problem of urban unrest and rioting, 48% of respondents said it was more important to address racism and police violence compared to 32% who said it was more important to use all force to maintain law and order.

Even on whether the protests were mostly peaceful or violent, Americans were 2 points more likely to say peaceful than violent.In other words, the Republicans really do seem to be making a smart political play. Of course, it may be their only political play.

I don’t know whether all the people who are concerned that cancel culture is going too far will vote on that issue. The wingnuts are all about the red meat outrage fests, of course. But I suspect that among those people who have concerns about it are quite a few who also think the government fixing roads and opening schools and dealing with crises is what the government is supposed to be doing.

Obviously, immigration, racial inequity, voting rights, abortion, policing are all government functions that push many of those same buttons. But I really don’t think anyone believes that these things have anything to do with Dr Seuss and Mr. Potatohead or The Bachelor. Those are cultural issues that will be fought out, legitimately, on other terrain.

And , of course, on Fox News where they have raised them to the level of Pearl Harbor and 9/11, it will be portrayed as an existential threat. But that doesn’t mean the majority of Americans see it that way.

Reaching for outrage

Published by digby on March 13, 2021

Media Matters documented the atrocities:

As Biden concluded his remarks, Carlson broke in to declare it “a very strange address, surreal at points, like the Biden presidency itself,” before going into full attack mode and distorting Biden’s aspirational July 4 celebration.

“But the president said, if you take that shot and wear your mask and listen to Dr. Fauci, it is possible, not assured, but possible, that you might be able to gather in small groups with the ones you love for the Fourth of July,” he said. “We might have to rescind that right, but it’s possible if you’re obedient, you’ll get it,” he added, inserting words into Biden’s mouth.

“Who are you talking to? This is a free people. This is a free country. How dare you tell us who we can spend the Fourth of July with?” asked an angry Carlson.

Carlson’s first guest, serial COVID misinformer Alex Berenson, mocked Biden’s “bizarro speech in this bizarro world where we are all still desperately afraid of the coronavirus, where cases haven’t fallen 90 percent since January and hospitalization 70 percent, where, you know, we know exactly who is at risk from this and how most of us are at very, very low to no risk from this.”

“The only good thing about the speech, from my point of view, was the words ‘zero COVID’ were not uttered,” said Berenson, apparently concerned that Biden wanted to completely eradicate the virus before signaling the ability to safely resume normal life. “So apparently, that fantasy is not one that the White House is going to indulge in, which is really good, and there wasn’t a lot of talk about making vaccines mandatory.”

There wasn’t any talk about making vaccines mandatory, actually. Even so, Berenson and Carlson indulged that conspiracy theory, saying that it wouldn’t “shock” him if the plan is to make vaccines “effectively mandatory.

He isn’t this stupid. He’s a venal, neo-fascist, nihilist. A very dangerous person.

Later in the show, Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow complained that Biden didn’t “talk at all about the fact that this virus came from China. He didn’t talk about the fact that the virus is coming over our borders.” 

Next up, on Hannity, host Sean Hannity whined that Biden didn’t praise former President Donald Trump during his speech. Hannity said that Biden “needs to pick up the phone and I suggest call Mar-a-Lago and, yeah, bring unity to the country, as he says he so desperately wants, and thank President Donald Trump because a few moments ago, he tried to take credit for everything that Donald Trump did on COVID-19. Three vaccines thanks to Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed.”

Hannity then went on to continue to promote conspiracy theories about Biden’s mental well-being, saying that Biden “is a guy who is clearly not doing well and the last three weeks alone have been extremely alarming.”

That stuff is just gross. Biden is fine and it’s clear to anyone with eyes and ears. But thee act like nasty little bitches because it’s what their audience wants.

At the top of The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham criticized Biden for delivering a speech that “was supposed to be inspiring,” but “seemed a tad like a funeral for America.” Ingraham bragged that while Biden’s speech was “a little bit over 20 minutes or so,” Trump “routinely spoke for quadruple that, often going off script whenever we felt like it, because he was confident in his own views.”

Yes, he was confident in his views. That was the problem. I’ll just leave this here:

https://youtu.be/DHkzqejFKbM

Many people would have lived if he had kept his mouth shut. Like when he did this:

Ingraham’s guests, Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway, and Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel all took turns bashing the speech and complaining about how Trump was treated by the media. Hemingway went so far as to say it was “un-American” for Biden to say he hoped that people would be able to safely have Independence Day cookouts with their friends and families.

“And then to pick Independence Day as the day where he says he might allow people to gather is just so un-American, and just — Joe Biden doesn’t get to tell me when I can have a barbecue in my backyard, and certainly not to tie that to Independence Day. It does feel like we’ve lost something as a country that so many people are willing to do this type of draconian restrictions from the government for this level of a problem. If they’re willing to do it for this situation, for this length of time without enough merit, it’s a very bad sign for the days to come.”

On Friday morning’s edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade picked up where Thursday evening’s ragefest left off. Kilmeade accused Biden of obsessing over the past. “Let’s talk about the future moving forward,” said Kilmeade, immediately before hammering Biden for heaping insufficient praise on Trump. “Every time he has a chance to praise the previous administration, he not only doesn’t praise, he kicks them in the groin.”

It’s easy to mock the deranged ramblings of the likes of Carlson, Hannity, Ingraham, and Kilmeade, but they are influential people with loyal fan bases.

Since Biden’s election, Carlson has taken to pushing COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy theories. He called a proposed plan for distribution “eugenics,” has tried to foment anger by playing to conspiracy theories about Bill Gates, allowed his show to become a platform for vaccine misinformation, and recently said that only the “delicate, timid, and effeminate” listen to public health experts.

Just days ago, Ingraham instructed her viewers to “just ignore” public health experts. In addition, she’s speculated that the COVID-19 vaccine is part of a plot to funnel money to the pharmaceutical industry, mocked the virus’s fatality rate, baselessly claimed that “the left perversely loves the pandemic,” and spent much of the past year promoting hydroxychloroquine, a drug touted by Trump that has not been found to be an effective COVID-19 treatment.

For Hannity’s part, he’s been remarkably consistent … in the sense that he’s been consistently wrong about pretty much everything related to this virus. He claimed that “coronavirus hysteria” was a plot to “demoralize” Trump supporters in the run-up to last year’s election, he came to Trump’s defense after it turned out that Trump misled the public about the threat posed by the virus, and he said he was “beginning to have doubts” about getting the COVID vaccine once Biden took office. Most consequentially, Hannity spent the early months of the pandemic making bizarre and false claims, such as suggesting that vaping could prevent people from contracting the virus and that the flu is more dangerous than the coronavirus, as well as outright telling his audience to ignore COVID-19 warnings from Democrats because “everything that you hear and see on television, on the radio, from any Democrat” was actually just about the election.

The administration may have changed, but Fox News’ wildly irresponsible and inaccurate COVID-19 coverage continues. Before Biden spoke a single word, it was obvious that the response from Fox pundits would be to slam him for it. 

For more than a year, Fox has treated the pandemic more as a political problem than a public health one. While Trump was horribly botching the response, Fox hosts cheered him every step of the way. Now that things are improving, they’re doing their best to try to drag down Biden — and claim Trump was right all along.

They are all implicated in a mass death event as far as I’m concerned.

Saying the quiet part out loud

Published by digby on March 13, 2021

Ron Johnson is just letting it all out:

Froomkin makes the point that the Capitol police were, in fact, warned explicitly days before. (This is not the Norfolk FBI warning of the 5th — this came in on the 3rd.) Here’s the memo:

Due to the tense political environment following the 2020 election, the threat of disruptive actions or violence cannot be ruled out. Supporters of the current president see January 6, 2021, as the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election. This sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent. Unlike previous post-election protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counter-protesters as they were previously, but rather Congress itself is the target on the 6th.

As outlined above, there has been a worrisome call for protesters to come to these events armed and there is the possibility that protesters may be inclined to become violent. Further, unlike the events on November 14, 2020, and December 12, 2020, there are several more protests scheduled on January 6, 2021, and the majority of them will be on Capitol grounds.

The two protests expected to be the largest of the day – the Women for American First protest on the Ellipse and the Stop the Steal protest in Areas 8 and 9 —  may draw thousands of participants and both have been promoted by President Trump himself. The Stop the Steal protest in particular does not have a permit, but several high profile speakers, including Members of Congress are expected to speak at the event. This combined with Stop the Steal’s propensity to attract white supremacists, militia members, and others who actively promote violence, may lead to significantly dangerous situations for law enforcement and the general public alike.

Froomkin writes:

The point is that clearly something else was going on in [then chief of the Capitol Police] Sund’s head to reduce his sense of alarm. And if you think about it for just an instant, you know exactly what it was.

As Rep. Cori Bush – a veteran of many Black Lives Matter protests – put it on MSNBC the very evening of the insurrection: “Had it been people who look like me, had it been the same amount of people, but had they been Black and brown, we wouldn’t have made it up those steps… we would have been shot, we would have been tear gassed.”

The reporting on this element of the story – why Sund and the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms, also older white males, weren’t particularly alarmed by the MAGA horde – has been terrible. Nearly nonexistent.

The one exception has been an article by Joaquin Sapien and Joshua Kaplan for ProPublica, based on interviews with 19 current and former U.S. Capitol Police officers. They reported:

The interviews…  revealed officers’ concerns about disparities in the way the force prepared for Black Lives Matter demonstrations versus the pro-Trump protests on Jan. 6. Officers said the Capitol Police force usually plans intensively for protests, even if they are deemed unlikely to grow violent. Officers said they spent weeks working 12- or 16-hour days, poised to fight off a riot, after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police — even though intelligence suggested there was not much danger from protesters.

“We had intel that nothing was going to happen — literally nothing,” said one former official with direct knowledge of planning for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. “The response was, ‘We don’t trust the intel.’”

By contrast, for much of the force, Jan. 6 began like any other day.

“We normally have pretty good information regarding where these people are and how far they are from the Capitol,” said Keith McFaden, a former Capitol Police officer and union leader who retired from the force following the riot. “We heard nothing that day.”

But nobody at the Senate hearing even mentioned the issue of race. Not once.

Nobody asked Sund to compare and contrast his preparedness for Jan. 6 with his preparedness for Black Lives Matter protests that weren’t even nearby. Nobody asked why Sund didn’t give front-line officers tear gas. Nobody asked Sund or the two sergeants-at-arms if the white privilege they shared with the mob had made it seem unthreatening to them, unlike the “other”.

Indeed, the only mention of possible complicity came when Trumpist Sen. Josh Hawley lashed out at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s choice of retired Lt. General Russel Honoré to lead a review of Capitol security. A day after the ransacking of the Capitol, Honoré told a TV station what a lot of people were thinking: “We knew they were coming; everybody knew they were coming,” he said. “I’ve just never seen so much incompetence, so they’re either that stupid, or ignorant or complicit. I think they were complicit.”

BuzzFeed’s Sarah Mimms tweeted:

Hawley ended by asking each of them, “Were you complicit in the attacks on Jan. 6?” They, obviously, each say no. Sund is offended. Hawley: “Of course none of you were.” So that takes care of that.

Reporters from alternative media expressed some skepticism about the hearing and the senator’s questions. Daily Beast reporter Spencer Ackerman noted:

https://twitter.com/attackerman/status/1364253141328408578?s=20

HuffPost reporter Igor Bobcic tweeted:

It’s worth noting no senator has brought up yet in this hearing fact that some Capitol Police officers are under investigation for their roles aiding rioters on Jan 6

And veteran military reporter Sig Christensen complained:

The hearings are going just as I thought they would. Before long, the principal players in this saga will have disinfected the crime scene and declared themselves blameless, and the competing narratives out there will so muddy the waters that no one will know what to believe.

But the mainstream media coverage was awful.

The lack of intelligent, appropriately skeptical reporting on the Capitol Police’s failure of preparedness has been absolutely shocking from the beginning. It was shocking to me on Jan. 13. It’s still shocking six weeks later.

And now, reporters, like the senators, are focusing on that one, one-source FBI report — and on Sund’s excuse that he didn’t have specific intelligence of a coordinated attack. […]

The AP reported:

Faulty intelligence was to blame for the outmanned Capitol defenders’ failure to anticipate the violent mob that invaded the iconic building and halted certification of the presidential election on Jan. 6, the officials who were in charge of security declared Tuesday in their first public testimony on the insurrection.

The Washington Post reported:

An FBI warning of potential violence reached the U.S. Capitol Police on the eve of the Jan. 6 attack, but top leaders testified during a Senate hearing Tuesday that they did not see it.

But everyone paying attention at the time realized the Capitol was going to be the target on Jan. 6. And while in retrospect it all seems inevitable, this momentous event in our history could very likely have been nipped in the bud by better preparation.

Many members of the Capitol police, including the leadership, no doubt felt a sort of kinship with the Trump “protesters.” He certainly had the support of many police around the country. They thought these were their people. It turned out that they were violent, destructive, thugs. Imagine that.

It Ain’t Over til It’s Over

Published by digby on March 13, 2021

The epidemiologist Dr. Tom Friedan catches us up on the latest COVID news:

The U.S. has now hit two milestones in the Covid pandemic: 100 million total Covid infections in the US (most of them undiagnosed), and as reported by the CDC, 100 million vaccine doses administered.

In the race of vaccination vs. variants, we’re gaining on the virus. It’s slow progress that we hope to accelerate as more people get vaccinated. But nobody should declare victory in the third quarter. Safer doesn’t mean safe.

Encouraging progress

@CDCgov reports encouraging progress in its weekly Covid summary and website, both of which continue to get better:

11% decrease in cases this week;

Test positivity rate is down by 11%, to an encouragingly low 4.1%;

Vaccinations up to 2.2 million per day, an 8% increase over the prior week;

65 million people have received at least one vaccine dose and 35 million are fully vaccinated;

Deaths are down 19% – this decrease is faster than the case decrease, and represents thousands of lives saved by vaccination.

But better doesn’t mean good. Rates are lower, but they’re still still very high:

More than 50,000 new cases a day;

Nearly 5,000 hospitalizations last week;

More than 1,400 deaths a day.

Variants remain concerning

Right now we’re in a race between vaccination and variants. Which of them wins will determine whether there’s a 4th surge. Variants are spreading, and may now be responsible for more than half of NYC Covid cases and a growing proportion elsewhere.

Think of the most concerning variants as the “B1 bombers”: the B.1.1.7 variant, first identified in the UK, which is more infectious and likely more deadly, and which is doubling in the US every 10 days; the B.1.351 variant, which emerged in South Africa and reduces the effectiveness of some vaccines; and the B.1.526 variant, which is spreading rapidly in NYC. All of these variants increase the risk that the virus will overcome immunity from natural infection.

Fortunately, per @NEJM: The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine appears to overcome the P.1 variant first identified in Brazil, another of the more concerning variants. But that’s no guarantee new variants won’t escape vaccine-induced immunity. The more the virus spreads, the greater the risk.

Is a 4th surge looming?

Will there be a 4th surge in the US? Those who answered this (admittedly unscientific) poll are optimistic there won’t be.

How well variants do depends partly on the virus, but mostly depends on us. That’s why it’s critical that we continue to wear masks, maintain distancing, and vaccinate quickly. It’s a mistake to lift mask mandates while the virus is still spreading at dangerous levels throughout most of the country.

And, as reported in BMJ this week, the variants may well be more deadly. Now that we can see that there may be an end in sight, we don’t want to let down our guard too soon. The pandemic isn’t over. Not in the US, and certainly not globally.

People who have been vaccinated aren’t out of the woods. We can’t assume that the vaccine has kicked in to provide sufficient protection until 2 weeks after full vaccination.

Getting vaccines into arms

The CDC has issued guidance on what people who have been fully vaccinated can safely do – and what they should not. This guidance, with the science brief that supports it, is a good example of evidence-based recommendations. As noted in this week’s JAMA, we need to have a clear discussion of what this guidance means for people day-to-day. As more data become available and more people get vaccinated, these recommendations will evolve. That’s how science works.

No vaccine is 100% effective. And every vaccine has some rate of adverse reactions – but the risks from vaccines are much less than the risks from infection.

Scaling up vaccination requires using multiple platforms: mass vaccination sites, networks of doctors’ offices and pharmacies, pop-up locations – even mobile vaccination clinics to go door-to-door in hard-hit and hard-to-reach communities.

Soon we will go from having too few vaccines to having too few arms to put vaccines into.

We need to continue to find and address barriers to vaccination: to access, to understanding, and to acceptance. And as a recent poll indicates, there are wide gaps in people’s willingness to get vaccinated.

Re-opening

We should open schools and businesses safely. However, restaurants, bars, and large indoor events are much riskier, especially in places without mask mandates. A new MMWR study shows that masks work, and that places allowing on-premises restaurant dining had higher case and death rates. No worker should be avoidably exposed to Covid, or have to plead with a customer to mask up. OSHA should act.

Approximately 1 of every 200 infections in the US results in death, and therefore, with more than 500,000 deaths, there have been more than 100 million people infected already. (The 100 million estimate is also consistent with serological studies and epidemiologic models suggesting that 25-30% of Americans have been infected.) Globally, with a younger population, there may be one death per 300 or more infections – but we also know that Covid deaths are under-reported. There may have already been a billion Covid infections globally.

Five points to end the week

First: Covid is far from over. Have a look at the map from @NYTimes below. It’s still raining Covid pretty hard out there.

Second: Think about the next generation and how they will be affected by the pandemic in the long term. This cohort was to have been dubbed Gen Alpha, but now maybe they’ll be Gen C (for Covid), skipping A and B after Generations X, Y, and Z.

Third: We need to recognize the failures at local, state, national, and global levels. No institution got it right. U.S. public health systems had pre-existing conditions that increased our vulnerability. We need long-term solutions.

The Trust for America’s Health just released a good report: Ready or Not? Sadly, the verdict right now is NOT. We can change that. We need to improve emergency response, public health, and primary care. In an article in AJPH, I’ve outlined what’s needed broadly and on cardiovascular health. Even BEFORE Covid, US life expectancy was lagging behind other countries’ – more disability, more illness, earlier death.

Fourth: We must build health resilience against Covid and other health threats, including the leading preventable killers. The Biden-Harris Administration can build on success stopping Covid. Start with preventing heart attacks and strokes, which will kill nearly a million Americans this year. As we explain in an article just published in JAMA, most of those deaths can be prevented.

And fifth: Stay safe. Keep masking up. Remember the mantra: patience, discipline, solidarity. The sooner we get to the new normal, the better we will all do.

“It ain’t over ‘till it’s over.”

— Yogi Berra, Great American Philosopher (and Catcher)

He even admitted he had no plan

Published by digby on March 13, 2021

If he had wanted to ensure a plan for distribution the least he could have done is hold a normal transition with the new administration that was going to be implementing it. He refused. He was too busy calling up state employees trying to get them to overturn the election results.

Josh Marshall explains what he was up to:

From the very start of the Pandemic in the first weeks of 2020 the Trump administration consistently sought to disclaim responsibility for things that would be genuinely difficult and could have challenging or bad outcomes. Push the tough tasks on to others and if it goes badly blame them. This frequently went to absurd lengths as when the White House insisted that states short on ventilators at the peak of the spring surge should have known to purchase them in advance of the pandemic. Over the course of the year Trump spun up an alternative reality in which the US was somehow still operating under the Articles of Confederation in which individual states were responsible for things that have been viewed as inherently federal responsibilities for decades or centuries.

But the impetus wasn’t ideological. It was mainly a means of self-protection and risk avoidance: arrange things so that the administration could take credit if things went well and blame states if they went bad. Nowhere was this more clear than in the months’ long crisis over testing capacity. Since the administration was actually hostile to testing in general and couldn’t solve the problem in any case they simply claimed it was a state responsibility.

This is the origin of the White House’s “plan” to not have a plan to inoculate the country. The federal government would manage the relatively easy task of airlifting supplies in bulk to states at designated airports and then let the states figure out how to get them into people’s arms.

It was an incredibly hard task and the best solution was to put it off on someone else so the White House didn’t get the blame. It’s really that simple. The through line to Trump’s Pandemic response from January through his final day in office was protecting himself. It really is as simple and depressing and disgraceful as that.

Trump always takes credit forsuccess that is not his and blames others for his failures. He knew the pandemic was a big problem which none of his flunkies and cronies were capable of fixing so he decided that he would blame the governors. He did that from the very beginning, particularly the governors of the big, blue states. Recall:

This story in Vanity Fair about how Jared Kushner personally took the reins:

And this:

“A stress test of the American justice system”

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 13, 2021
You are not the only one to consider the resemblance (see 2018 tweet below).

“It’s incredibly urgent that Vance prosecutes Donald now,” Mary Trump, a psychologist and Donald Trump’s niece, told The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer. Cyrus Vance, Jr., the Manhattan District Attorney, has Donald Trump under investigation for an assortment of financial crimes with the potential for putting the former president behind bars. “A felony conviction wouldn’t disqualify Trump from a second term,” Mayer writes, “but a prison sentence would certainly make it harder for him to be elected again.”

But more than Trump’s political fortunes are immediately at stake, even if a second lawless Trump presidency might end the republic:

Vance’s office could well be the only operable brake on Trump’s remarkable record of impunity. He has survived two impeachments, the investigation by the special counsel Robert Mueller, half a dozen bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. And his successor, President Joe Biden, so far seems to prefer that the Department of Justice simply turn the page.

As a result, the contest between Vance and Trump is about much more than a financial investigation. It’s a stress test of the American justice system. George Conway, a lawyer and a Trump critic, who is married to the former President’s adviser Kellyanne Conway, said, “Trump is a man who has gotten away with everything his entire life. He’s an affront to the rule of law, and to all law-abiding citizens.” In office, Trump often treated the law as a political weapon, using the Justice Department as a tool for targeting enemies. Now he is pitted against a D.A. who regards the law as the politically blind foundation of democracy. As Conway put it, “For Trump, the law is a cudgel. For Vance, it’s what holds us together as a civilization. And that’s why people who thumb their noses at it have to be prosecuted. If they aren’t, you’re taking a big step toward a world where that is acceptable.”

“The bookkeeper’s no good to us dead.” — quote from The Untouchables

The focus now is on getting a Trump insider to testify against him:

Persuading an untarnished insider to flip against Trump would clearly be a breakthrough. Judging from investigators’ questions and subpoenas, their sights are set on Allen Weisselberg. “I think he’s the key to the case,” Steven M. Cohen, a former federal prosecutor who is close to many top political and legal officials in New York, said. Mary Trump agreed, noting, “Allen Weisselberg knows where all the bodies are buried.” As the man who managed Trump’s money flow for decades, Weisselberg would certainly make a star witness. He originally worked as a bookkeeper for Trump’s father—a job that, Weisselberg’s former daughter-in-law told me, he got after answering a newspaper ad while driving a cab in Canarsie. By the mid-eighties, he was bookkeeping for Trump.

Weisselberg, now the Trump Organization’s CFO, is not believed to be cooperating just yet, Mayer explains. But at 73 and with two sons, Jack and Barry, involved with the Trump Organization, the pressure is on. Former Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen went to prison for falsifying financial records for Trump. He tells Mayer that Weisselberg won’t let his sons go to prison. “And I don’t think he wants to spend his golden years in a correctional institution, either.” Cohen added.

There is speculation that Barry Weisselberg could be on the hook for failure to declare free rent at a Trump apartment on his taxes. If true, that could prove a pressure point. Barry Weisselberg’s ex-wife Jennifer suggests it is:

In Jennifer’s first extensive public remarks, she told me that, when someone works for the Trump Organization, “only a small part of your salary is reported.” She explained, “They pay you with apartments and other stuff, as a control tactic, so you can’t leave. They own you! You have to do whatever corrupt crap they ask.” (The Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.)

How much would her former father-in-law know?

“You walk down the hall, it’s Allen-Donald, Allen-Donald—they don’t do anything separately. Allen would know everything.”

Anne Applebaum, the author of “Twilight of Democracy,” believes failing to apply the law to rich and powerful heads of state “is dangerous—it creates long-term feelings of impunity, and incentives for Trump and those around him to misbehave again.” Vance’s case may not be the ideal way to hold Trump accountable for a lifetime of flaunting the law, but the alternative “is lawlessness.”

The country’s slide toward authoritarianism has been long and slow, beginning perhaps with the slow-building backlash to the New Deal. Later came the strangulation of unions and the deregulation under Reagan. Multiple financial crises demonstrated how virtually immune from criminal penalty were top dogs in most industries, especially on Wall Street. The result is the collapse of faith in equal treatment under law, the growth of conspiracy theories, and eventually Trump’s lawless presidency and an attempt by his cult to overthrow, well, the government itself.

New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat warns, “If we have the chance to make a strong statement that the rule of law matters, and we fail, the message is that these strongmen can get back in power. That’s the lesson for us.”

Allen Weisselberg, Trump père’s former bookkeeper, right now is the key. Watch that face … er, space.

Victory lap

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 13, 2021
Laura Muir of England shatters 32-year-old European Indoor Championships 1500m record in Belgrade, 2017. (Photo: Marko Djurica)

This week it is time to celebrate. It is too easy to dwell on disappointments and not the victories in politics, so let’s not move on to grousing before we have at least counted up all the wins in the American Rescue Plan Act. Emily Stewart at Vox details what is likely a short list. The National Law Review has even more and likely misses a few.

Our friend Anat Shenker-Osorio was on a messaging roll on Friday. It felt almost as good as watching penguins to read through her thread reminding us of the obstacles overcome in the last year.

Not to mention she’s found a Covid vaccine side effect worth having.

UPDATE: AOC has a few thoughts here since she was there.

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on March 12, 2021

We needed these penguins! And they were there for us:

More penguins?

Even more penguins you say?