Month: July 2021

Lots of confusion about what Provincetown outbreak & CDC guidance mean

Mainly: how to think about spread among the vaccinated

And as importantly, what we know and what we don’t

So a short thread

First, the P-town outbreak unusual

Many thousands of people (some unvaccinated) showed up to celebrate July 4

Leading to packed bars, clubs, and lots of mixing of vaccinated and unvaccinated folks in tight quarters

Ideal conditions for COVID spread

And COVID did spread

And there were a lot of infections, including among vaccinated folks

We’ve seen this before — Singapore airport, Yankees clubhouse

Key issue is: did vaccines fail to

1. Prevent infection?
2. Prevent spread?
3. Prevent severe illness?

1. Did vaccines prevent infections?

Based on CDC’s estimate, Pfizer/Moderna prevent about 75-85% of symptomatic infections from Delta

So if no one had been vaccinated, initial case loads would have been about 5 times higher

Did vaccines prevent spread among the infected?

Don’t know

Study examined Ct values of symptomatic vaccinated and unvaccinated

Ct values were comparable

Driving news headlines

But single set of Ct values only loosely correlated with transmissibility

So we don’t know

Did vaccines prevent severe illness?

Only 4 fully vaccinated folks ended up in hospital

None died

Those are very low rates

Consistent with theme that vaccines prevent severe illness

So yeah, they seem like they did

So what do we not know?

Because Ct values are rough surrogate of transmissibility

We don’t know if actual spread among vaccinated people compare to unvaccinated

And big one: we don’t know if vaccinated asymptomatic folks spread

This is key for mask guidance

Bottom line?

P-town outbreak would’ve been a nightmare if no one was vaccinated

Initial case #s would have been 5X

And past experience says such outbreaks fuel larger regional outbreaks

Instead, this one is fizzling out

I suspect because vaccines are working

End

Originally tweeted by Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) on July 31, 2021.

Also, this:

Very misleading & dangerous. In this analysis, vaccines prevent ~80% of Delta infections (much larger share of sickness). That 80% CANNOT spread the virus. This is only about the other 20%, and even there it’s speculative.

Getting vaccinated protects you and your community! https://t.co/cOztQC1qt2

— Marc Goldwein (@MarcGoldwein) July 30, 2021

Leaked CDC slides on delta variant got you concerned?

I find the slides insightful & largely reassuring

Bottom line

Delta variant is a problem

Vaccines prevent vast majority of infections, transmission

And nearly all hospitalizations, deaths

So let’s talk about what’s in the slides about the delta variant

First, it is really, really contagious

Like more contagious than Ebola, Spanish Flu and probably chicken pox

Really contagious

Second, it appears to cause more serious disease if you get infected

I’ve been worried this is the case but certainly not sure

The data here is suggestive but not definitive

So reasonable to say delta probably more severe

But the vaccines are working.

Let me repeat, the vaccines are working

80-90% effectiveness against symptomatic infection

90-95% effectiveness against severe disease

That’s what the data from other countries say

But what about data from our country??

Glad you asked

Right now, about 35K vaccinated Americans having breakthrough infections weekly

Sound high?

Actually, probably 300K unvaccinated Americans having infections weekly

And given 50% of Americans are vaccinated

That’s a rough vaccine effectiveness of around 88%

Very rough

Oh — and protection against severe infection well above 90%

So yeah, vaccines are working fine

But what about this whole breakthrough infections and spreadability?

Can vaccinated folks with breakthrough spread?

Yes. And this is the bad news

CDC cites several studies (and I’m aware of even more data) showing vaccinated folks with breakthrough infections have similar viral loads to unvaccinated folks with infections

These are viral loads, not actual evidence of similar transmission

But a reasonable assumption

Then CDC has modeling that says universal masking is critically important

But they assume no other behavior change like some folks avoiding large gatherings, etc.

But you know what their model also says would work great?

Near universal vaccinations

So bottom line?

Yeah, delta variant is bad. Like really bad

Our vaccines are good. Like really good

Breakthrough infections happen

Sometimes they may spread to others

But if enough people get the shot

The pandemic does come to an end

Fin

Originally tweeted by Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) on July 30, 2021.

Question: Could you ever get behind a vaccine mandate for everybody?
Ron Johnson: No, not unless there’s some incredibly deadly disease pic.twitter.com/dySLgROgJK

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 31, 2021

Nuff said.

Good lord:

Rep. Madison Cawthorn on mask mandate: "If I am to cowardly bend the knee here, like those on the left wish, then what is to stop you all from taking your tyranny to the rest of this country that I love." pic.twitter.com/INKQTA0xt2

— The Hill (@thehill) July 30, 2021

He’s a dope. But also a bit of a psycho:

A heated confrontation between Reps. Madison Cawthorn and David McKinley over cosponsorship of a bill has escalated to a McKinley staffer filing an ethics complaint against Cawthorn, according to two sources familiar with the move.

The spat began Thursday afternoon when the freshman Cawthorn (R-N.C.) went to find McKinley (R-W.Va.) in his office to discuss what Cawthorn said was his mistaken addition to a bill that he didn’t want his name attached to. But when Cawthorn found McKinley out of the office, the youngest member of Congress instead got into a back-and-forth with the West Virginian’s staff.

The exchange was witnessed by multiple McKinley aides, who saw Cawthorn as raising his voice and dressing down their colleague. At one point, he told the legislative staffer to lower her voice because she was speaking to a member of Congress.

The exact allegation in the new ethics complaint that resulted is unclear, and it now falls on the House Ethics Committee to decide whether or not to investigate the complaint. The Cawthorn-McKinley dust-up, however, is only the latest evidence of fraught relations in the House that have begun causing intra-party as well as across-the-aisle friction, with one House conservative challenging Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Thursday over the chamber’s “bulls—” mask mandate.

Cawthorn and McKinley’s melee continued beyond the latter Republican’s office on Thursday. At one point, the conflict turned into a yelling match on the House floor filled with slights and suggestions of retaliation, according to four sources. One onlooker thought the two men’s floor altercation would devolve into a fistfight at one point; it ended Thursday with Cawthorn taking a shot at McKinley as a career politician in an interview.

Hey Republicans — you wanted these freaks in congress and now you have to deal with them.

The Supremes agreed to take up a draconian Mississippi anti-abortion case next year. It will be decided before the 2022 election. If that majority is made up of true believers, as they all indicated they were, we could see the end of Roe vs Wade. If they decide to be political, there’s a chance they’ll find a way to simply reverse Casey and allow the states to put women through even more hell in order to get an abortion rather than throw it out completely.

On the other hand, the GOP politicians are pushing for the repeal. It appears they believe this is a winner for them — perhaps their voters will turn out in ecstatic celebration? (I doubt it. They are motivated by hatred of their enemies — which is why they love Trump, who expresses that hatred so vividly.)

Anyway:

Nearly 230 Republican members of Congress told the Supreme Court on Thursday that it should overturn Roe v. Wade and release its “vise grip on abortion politics.”The new brief is the latest filing in a dispute that will be heard next term and represents the most significant abortion-related case the justices have taken up in nearly a half a century. The 6-3 conservative court, bolstered by three of former President Donald Trump’s appointees, could gut, or invalidate court precedent, and that’s what the GOP lawmakers are calling for.”Congress and the States have shown that they are ready and able to address the issue in ways that reflect Americans’ varying viewpoints and are grounded in the science of fetal development and maternal health,” lawyers for 228 Republican lawmakers, including leadership in both chambers, told the justices.

Trump’s appointees are turning the Supreme Court to the right with different tacticsAt issue before the court is a Mississippi law that bars most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. There is no exception for rape or incest. The court will render its decision by next June, in the lead up to the mid-term elections.

The lawmakers, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, are supporting Mississippi’s request to allow the law to go into effect. They are represented by the group Americans United for Life.

In Thursday’s brief, they asked the court to “affirm the constitutional authority of the federal and state governments to safeguard the lives and health of their citizens, born and not yet born.”

Here’s the breakdown in public attitudes as of May of this year:

It’s very hard to know what they are really doing with this. But no matter what happens I think it’s going to be a very salient issue in 2022. Obviously GOPers are banking on it going their way and motivating their voters. The question, as always, is if it will motivate the Dems.

The Pew Research analysis of the 2020 election came out last month, but I thought I would link to it again in case some readers didn’t get the top-line info about what they found out about the electorate which gave the Democrats their victory:

A number of factors determined the composition of the 2020 electorate and explain how it delivered Biden a victory. Among those who voted for Clinton and Trump in 2016, similar shares of each – about nine-in-ten – also turned out in 2020, and the vast majority remained loyal to the same party in the 2020 presidential contest. These voters formed substantial bases of support for both Biden and Trump. Overall, there were shifts in presidential candidate support among some key groups between 2016 and 2020, notably suburban voters and independents. On balance, these shifts helped Biden a little more than Trump.

Negative partisanship, specifically loathing of Donald Trump, drove the victory for the Dems. And he’s not going away. I hope they remember that.

And I pray that they will do everything in their power to keep these voters in 2022 and 2024:

Overall, one-in-four 2020 voters (25%) had not voted in 2016. About a quarter of these (6% of all 2020 voters) showed up two years later – in 2018 – to cast ballots in the highest-turnout midterm election in decades. Those who voted in 2018 but not in 2016 backed Biden over Trump in the 2020 election by about two-to-one (62% to 36%).

Both Trump and Biden were able to bring new voters into the political process in 2020. The 19% of 2020 voters who did not vote in 2016 or 2018 split roughly evenly between the two candidates (49% Biden vs. 47% Trump). However, as with voters overall, there was a substantial age divide within this group. Among those under age 30 who voted in 2020 but not in either of the two previous elections, Biden led 59% to 33%, while Trump won among new or irregular voters ages 30 and older by 55% to 42%. Younger voters also made up an outsize share of these voters: Those under age 30 made up 38% of new or irregular 2020 voters, though they represented just 15% of all 2020 voters.

One somewhat unusual aspect of the 2016 election was the relatively high share of voters (nearly 6%) who voted for one of the third-party candidates (mostly the Libertarian and Green Party nominees), a fact many observers attributed to the relative unpopularity of both major party candidates. By comparison, just 2% of voters chose a third-party candidate in 2020. Overall, third-party 2016 voters who turned out in 2020 voted 53%-36% for Biden over Trump, with 10% opting for a third-party candidate. Among the 5% of Republicans who voted third-party in 2016 and voted in 2020, a majority (70%) supported Trump in 2020, but 18% backed Biden. Among the 5% of Democrats who voted third-party in 2016 and voted in 2020, just 8% supported Trump in 2020 while 85% voted for Biden.

The country paid a gigantic price for those third party votes. I think people sobered up substantially about the stakes by 2020.

Here are some of the other key findings from the analysis:

Biden made gains with suburban voters. In 2020, Biden improved upon Clinton’s vote share with suburban voters: 45% supported Clinton in 2016 vs. 54% for Biden in 2020. This shift was also seen among White voters: Trump narrowly won White suburban voters by 4 points in 2020 (51%-47%); he carried this group by 16 points in 2016 (54%-38%). At the same time, Trump grew his vote share among rural voters. In 2016, Trump won 59% of rural voters, a number that rose to 65% in 2020.

Trump made gains among Hispanic voters. Even as Biden held on to a majority of Hispanic voters in 2020, Trump made gains among this group overall. There was a wide educational divide among Hispanic voters: Trump did substantially better with those without a college degree than college-educated Hispanic voters (41% vs. 30%).

Apart from the small shift among Hispanic voters, Joe Biden’s electoral coalition looked much like Hillary Clinton’s, with Black, Hispanic and Asian voters and those of other races casting about four-in-ten of his votes. Black voters remained overwhelmingly loyal to the Democratic Party, voting 92%-8% for Biden.

Biden made gains with men, while Trump improved among women, narrowing the gender gap. The gender gap in the 2020 election was narrower than it had been in 2016, both because of gains that Biden made among men and because of gains Trump made among women. In 2020, men were almost evenly divided between Trump and Biden, unlike in 2016 when Trump won men by 11 points. Trump won a slightly larger share of women’s votes in 2020 than in 2016 (44% vs. 39%), while Biden’s share among women was nearly identical to Clinton’s (55% vs. 54%).

Biden improved over Clinton among White non-college voters. White voters without a college degree were critical to Trump’s victory in 2016, when he won the group by 64% to 28%. In 2018, Democrats were able to gain some ground with these voters, earning 36% of the White, non-college vote to Republicans’ 61%. In 2020, Biden roughly maintained Democrats’ 2018 share among the group, improving upon Clinton’s 2016 performance by receiving the votes of 33%. But Trump’s share of the vote among this group – who represented 42% of the total electorate this year – was nearly identical to his vote share in 2016 (65%).

Biden grew his support with some religious groups while Trump held his ground. Both Trump and Biden held onto or gained with large groups within their respective religious coalitions. Trump’s strong support among White evangelical Protestants ticked up (77% in 2016, 84% in 2020) while Biden got more support among atheists and agnostics than did Clinton in 2016.

After decades of constituting the majority of voters, Baby Boomers and members of the Silent Generation made up less than half of the electorate in 2020 (44%), falling below the 52% they constituted in both 2016 and 2018. Gen Z and Millennial voters favored Biden over Trump by margins of about 20 points, while Gen Xers and Boomers were more evenly split in their preferences. Gen Z voters, those ages 23 and younger, constituted 8% of the electorate, while Millennials and Gen Xers made up 47% of 2020 voters.¹

A record number of voters reported casting ballots by mail in 2020 – including many voters who said it was their first time doing so. Nearly half of 2020 voters (46%) said they had voted by mail or absentee, and among that group, about four-in-ten said it was their first time casting a ballot this way. Hispanic and White voters were more likely than Black voters to have cast absentee or mail ballots, while Black voters were more likely than White or Hispanic voters to have voted early in person. Urban and suburban voters were also more likely than rural voters to have voted absentee or by mail ballot.

New polling shows that a large majority of Americans are in favor of vaccine mandates. And I would suggest that majority is getting very tired of the anti-vaxxer bullshit and are at the point they no longer feel much obligation to protect them from themselves:

Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they’d support federal, state or local governments requiring everyone to get a coronavirus vaccine, according to a new survey conducted by The COVID States Project.

 This kind of blanket mandate hasn’t even been proposed, at any level of government. But more piecemeal requirements are rapidly becoming more popular, and the survey suggests Americans are fine with that.

The big picture: There’s recently been a surge in vaccine requirements for employees among health care organizations, governments and private businesses.

The federal government yesterday became the latest employer to create a new vaccination policy.

But many of these requirements stop short of being actual vaccine mandates, and instead impose additional burdens — such as extra testing — on people who choose to remain unvaccinated. They also only apply to a select group of people, like employees, students or customers.

64% of respondents said in June or July that they’d support government vaccine requirements, a slight bump up from the 62% who said the same in April or May.

70% said they’d support vaccine requirements to get on an airplane; 61% support requiring children to be vaccinated to go to school; and 66% support requiring college students to be vaccinated to attend a university.

A majority of every demographic subgroup except Republicans said they’d support vaccine requirements. Only 45% of Republicans said they approve of such mandates.

A majority of respondents in all but three states — Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota — said they support requirements that everyone be vaccinated.

 Unsurprisingly, vaccinated people are more likely to support mandates, and most of the people who “strongly disapprove” of mandates are unvaccinated, according to Matthew Baum, a public policy professor at Harvard University and one of the report’s authors.

Vaccine mandates — and vaccines themselves — may be controversial, but only among a minority of Americans.

That may help explain why congressional Republicans’ response to new vaccine requirements has been relatively muted, at least compared to their reaction to updated masking guidance.

They know that most people are pissed that they have to go back to wearing masks because of these anti-vaxxers and are trying to twist that into support for Republicans. I hope people realize that it’s because of the right wing refusniks that this is happening. But you never know. There may be people who conclude that the mask thing is Biden’s fault and blame him for it. That’s obviously what the GOP would like to see happen, anyway.

Employer mandates may just be the thing that turns the tide:

I’m reading a lot of anti-COVID vaccine forums, and it’s striking how quickly the posters fold and get the vaccine as soon as it’s mandated by their jobs/colleges/govs. The other posters tell them to go off the grid and live in the woods, but not a lot of takers on that idea.

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) July 29, 2021

Do it.

“Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.’”  — Donald Trump to the Acting Attorney General 12/27/20

Handwritten notes provided by the Department of Justice to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform show the former president pressing two top DOJ officials to declare the 2020 election corrupt. They would carry his water. Donald Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill would do “the rest.” The DOJ refused to play along.

Trump’s actions follow his pattern of pressuring others to allege corruption that he could point to and turn to his political advantage. Doing that on a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy led to Trump’s first impeachment.

The New York Times on Friday reported:

The demands were an extraordinary instance of a president interfering with an agency that is typically more independent from the White House to advance his personal agenda. They are also the latest example of Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging campaign during his final weeks in office to delegitimize the election results.

Typically, the Department fights to keep notes of presidential conversations secret, but in this case they involve potentially illegal efforts by Trump to subvert the 2020 election and that may have led to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

In a statement released by the committee, Chairwoman Rep. Carolyn B.  Maloney (D-N.Y.) comments:

“These handwritten notes show that President Trump directly instructed our nation’s top law enforcement agency to take steps to overturn a free and fair election in the final days of his presidency,” Chairwoman Maloney said.  “The Committee has begun scheduling interviews with key witnesses to investigate the full extent of the former President’s corruption, and I will exercise every tool at my disposal to ensure all witness testimony is secured without delay.”

The then-president referenced debunked claims about fraud and election irregularities and insisted (according to notes), “‘We have an obligation to tell people that this was an illegal, corrupt election,” even after officials told him his information was false.

No, Trump insisted in rubber-and-glue fashion, “These people who saying that the election isn’t corrupt are corrupt.”

Mr. Trump did not name the lawmakers, but at other points during the call, he mentioned Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, whom he described as a “fighter”; Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, who at the time promoted the idea that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump; and Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, whom Mr. Trump praised for “getting to bottom of things.”

Mr. Jordan and Mr. Johnson denied any role in Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department.

Perry did not respond to the Times’ requests for comment.

Trump’s “leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen” suggest a conspiracy to overturn the election.

In May, Lawfare blog considered why the DOJ had not yet charged any Jan. 6 arrestees with seditious conspiracy:

Seditious conspiracy is an example of a “political crime,” a category reserved for crimes that threaten the very stability of the republic.  The category’s importance is not the severity of the punishment; other charges can usually be marshaled to achieve an identical sentence.  Charges for political crimes are symbolic: To shore up the state’s foundations, a political crime brands the criminals as outsiders of the political community whose movement has no role in civic dialogue.  A political crime then is potent medicine.  The challenge is to choose the narrowest political crime to limit side effects that can be fatal for democracy. 

Seditious conspiracy is the wrong political crime to condemn the leaders of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. A sedition charge could open up a Pandora’s box that would criminalize vast swaths of more mundane activity such as certain forms of radical protest, resisting arrest, prison riots or robbing a federal bank.  To avoid this danger while still recognizing the uniquely heinous nature of the Capitol invasion, prosecutors should pursue the narrower and nearly novel political crime of “rebellion or insurrection.” Failing that and as a second best alternative, they should draw up the sedition charges very narrowly. 

Some of the most respected voices in the national security law community have called for sedition charges. Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes has argued that the invasion “doesn’t border on sedition. It is sedition.” 

But seditious conspiracy is a rare charge, Jacob Schulz wrote at Lawfare in February. A federal district judge in the Eastern District of Michigan threw out the charge when levied against members of the Hutaree militia in 2010. There is a high bar for proof. An 1887 Supreme Court decision in Baldwin v. Franks notes, “[F]orce must be brought to resist some positive assertion of authority by the government. A mere violation of law is not enough; there must be an attempt to prevent the actual exercise of authority.” For the charge to stick, a 1921 Eighth Circuit decision in Anderson v. United States added that any plan must involve “the exertion of force against those charged with the duty of executing the laws of the United States.”

So, potentially just simple conspiracy and/or other crimes, as  Harvard Law professor emeritus Laurence Tribe explained Friday evening:

“Well, these contemporary notes by the acting assistant attorney general’s deputy are compelling evidence that the president was committing several different crimes,” said Tribe. “It was violating crimes relating to stealing elections, crimes relating to pressuring government officials to engage in political activity, violations of 18 U.S. Code section 610, violations of 18 U.S. Code section 2383.”

“But the point would really be not to simply enumerate a laundry list of crimes, but we know from firsthand evidence with the cooperation of the new Justice Department that is finally finding its sea legs that the president was engaged in an ongoing conspiracy to overturn the results of a free and fair election,” continued Tribe. “It was the leadup to the insurrection, puts the insurrection in context. It shows what his motives were in rallying people in this violent mob to sack the Congress. It was all part of a plan to say, I don’t care if there was no real corruption, just say there was, say the election was stolen, and then turn it over to me. That is criminal activity.”

That is Donald Trump. It’s what he does. With help.

While perusing YouTube engine animations not long ago, I explained to my wife (mansplained, if you insist) how the four-stroke, internal-cumbustion engine in her car works. She’d been driving cars for decades but never thought much about what was going on under the hood. The car either started when you turned the key or it needed fixing. The particulars were a mystery.

Democracy is like that. People expect it to work when they go to vote but don’t really think about the machinery under the hood. That’s changing, what with Republicans working furiously to monkeywrench elections.

I stopped by our local Democratic headquarters this week to ask about progress on finalizing our list of election judges and poll workers for the next two-year cycle. There was only a receptionist there, a regular volunteer who had no idea what I was talking about. This work happens out of public view when attentions are elsewhere. Even as a veteran volunteer, she’d never heard of it.

In a Facebook thread recently, someone commented on the lack of younger people at party meetings, “Since I have been here, I have seen young people mostly at protests with and for DSA, Sunrise, Reject Raytheon, Free Palestine, Amazon workers, BLM. Young people here seem more attracted to movement politics than party politics.”

That’s because much of what local parties do between elections involves election planning and mechanics that, while critical to sustaining democracy, has less appeal to people whose focus is candidates, legislation and policy. Like recruiting poll workers and election judges, for example. I’ve written before (of a job I no longer have):

The handful of people you see every Election Day don’t appear out of thin air. Precinct leaders from each party recruit them (plus multiple backups) in the odd-numbered years here and provide a list of their names to the county Board of Elections. I spend six weekends every other summer compiling the list for local Democrats. It’s a chore and a half. Four or 5 people per precinct, plus backups. In my county there are 80 precincts. In North Carolina alone there are 2,709 precincts.

That’s over 11,000 people to mobilize for Election Day, just inside the polls. Add to that the three county Board members in each of 100 counties, the Board of Elections staffs in 100 counties, plus the party and precinct officers (volunteers, of both parties) in each of 100 counties, plus the state Board of Elections staff in the capitol, and the Election Protection attorneys on standby, and the thousands of party volunteers with literature who answer questions and greet voters outside the polls.

Combined, we’re talking something like an army division mobilized on Election Day so democracy can happen. And that’s just one of the larger states in the country. The U.S. Elections Assistance Commission counted roughly 185,994 polling places and “at least 845,962 poll workers that worked at polling places on Election Day.” In 2004.

Many younger activists have neither the life flexibility nor interest in that kind of work in between elections, and that’s fine. Oldsters are glad to do it as community service. It’s not sexy. It’s not a political career path (neither is blogging, frankly). It’s not bare-knuckles, ideological battle. Most of it is unpaid, unpublicized grunt work and meetings. But the elections DSA, Sunrise, MoveOn, Indivisible, and other activist groups work their butts off to win don’t happen without it.

I joke that every other new activist who wanders into our local headquarters wants to write the white paper that will remake politics for the Democrats nationwide. But there is no The Democrats. The DNC has virtually nothing to do with what goes on locally. And local parties don’t make state or federal policy. We elect candidates to do that.

The Democratic Party here (as an organization) generally doesn’t organize street protests either, not out of disinterest, but because as soon as we’re involved they become partisan events. Friendly 501(c)(3) groups (as organizations) don’t want any part of that. It puts their nonprofit tax status at risk. So, those of us on the party side attend/supportdonate to their rallies individually, but we generally don’t organize or sponsor them. It’s a misconception that we are supposed to or that we’re doing nothing because we don’t.

But you’ll find us at Moral Mondays, the Women’s March, HKonJ, etc. A friend reminds me he was a DNC member when he was (in an unofficial capacity) the stage manager for Mountain Moral Monday here in 2013 when 10,000 people showed up. Many other party members participated in an individual capacity. That’s how things really work.

I just had to share this one:

This stray Shih Tzu needed a haircut so badly that he was unrecognizable. Now, he's found a forever home. CNN's Jeanne Moos reports. https://t.co/uUZxwoyuj7 pic.twitter.com/sTERdD7SHL

— CNN (@CNN) July 25, 2021

Poor little baby … but at least there’s a happy ending.

Here are some more adorable Shih Tzu rescue pups:

Update:

A woman was scrolling through a list of adoptable pups at her local humane society when she came across a photo that made her heart skip a beat: the dog she lost two years ago https://t.co/bWNtkOwfMJ pic.twitter.com/xe7AvnXynZ

— CNN (@CNN) July 25, 2021

Yay!

“Say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me … Donald Trump to the Acting Attorney General 12/27/20

It’s more and more obvious every day that Trump was knowingly trying to engineer a coup. He was working night and day to persuade people to do what he knew was illegal and unconstitutional:

President Donald J. Trump pressed top Justice Department officials late last year to declare that the election was corrupt even though they had found no instances of widespread fraud, so that he and his allies in Congress could use the assertion to try to overturn the results, according to new documents provided to lawmakers and obtained by The New York Times.

The demands were an extraordinary instance of a president interfering with an agency that is typically more independent from the White House to advance his personal agenda. They are also the latest example of Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging campaign during his final weeks in office to delegitimize the election results.

The exchange unfolded during a phone call on Dec. 27 in which Mr. Trump pressed the acting attorney general at the time, Jeffrey A. Rosen, and his deputy, Richard P. Donoghue, on voter fraud claims that the department had disproved. Mr. Donoghue warned that the department had no power to change the outcome of the election. Mr. Trump replied that he did not expect that, according to notes Mr. Donoghue took memorializing the conversation.

“Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” and to congressional allies, Mr. Donoghue wrote in summarizing Mr. Trump’s response.

Mr. Trump did not name the lawmakers, but at other points during the call, he mentioned Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, whom he described as a “fighter”; Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, who at the time promoted the idea that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump; and Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, whom Mr. Trump praised for “getting to bottom of things.”

The notes connect Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress with his campaign to pressure Justice Department officials to help undermine, or even nullify, the election results.

I have a feeling we only know the tip of the iceberg about what all those hacks he inserted into the pentagon in the final days were up to.