People claim DeSantis is not dumb, however insane and deadly his Covid policies. But Donald Trump knew the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic impact would harm his reelection chances, so he denied it was a problem and tried to Jedi-mind-trick it away with happy talk. Bodies overflowing morgues forced him into his flailing response that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. He and Republicans aboard the Trump train amped up their base’s distrust of and hostility towards any gummint action on Covid in the name of free-dom until they, like DeSantis, had painted themselves into a corner. Delta be damned. Their base now demands they (and DeSantis) ride this runaway train to the bottom of “Eastwood Ravine.”
Republicans have habit of breeding such tigers to ride. They and their supporters are trapped in a feedback loop of their own creation, Krugman tweets:
DeSantis isn't stupid; he probably realizes what a disaster he's presiding over. But he staked his political fortunes on pro-Covid policies; if he were to back down now, even an inch, he'd have to find a new career 2/
And it goes further back. Climate deniers won't be moved even as much of America and Europe burns, because they're *professional* climate deniers; they have nothing else to do with their lives 4/
So it's not just that one side of most important debates is arguing in bad faith; it's trapped in lies — as I said, con men imprisoned by their own con 6/
Philip Bump observes that Mike Lindell, by his own admission, has invested so much money and personal reputation in the stolen-election fantasy that he cannot escape. It’s the sunk-cost fallacy. Bump references an observation by Dartmouth University sociology professor Brooke Harrington. She cites a 1952 study by Erving Goffman on how these cons inevitably collapse:
“When the blowoff comes, the mark finds that he has no defense for not being a shrewd man,” Goffman wrote. “He has defined himself as a shrewd man and must face the fact that he is only another easy mark. He has defined himself as possessing a certain set of qualities and then proven to himself that he is miserably lacking in them. This is a process of self‑destruction of the self.”
As someone (perhaps his niece, Mary) said about Trump, his world view does not extend beyond his mirror. He needs to feed his self-image by plastering his name on things in gold, by inflating his ratings, by holding rallies in which he bathes in praise, by insisting cabinet members fawn over him, and by obsessing over displays of strength and fears of showing weakness. Self is all he is. He cannot admit he lost reelection. Take that away and he’s a black hole. Lindell, having made himself a celebrity in Trumpworld, cannot walk away either, or else lose face. It would be sad if not for how many other lives they’ll destroy, and perhaps the country, too.
Thus, it took 20 years for the U.S. to exit Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires. As John Kerry famously said in 1971, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
By never admitting the mistake, of course. That’s a sign of weakness, right?
I love it. Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen, automobile smash-ups: “The Death Hour”. A great Sunday night show for the whole family.
-from Network, screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky
Talk about helicopter parenting. Matt Yoda’s documentary Whirlybird is one of those “only in L.A.” stories; specifically the story of the Tur family…broadcast reporter Zoe (formerly Bob), her ex-wife/long-time professional colleague Marika Gerrard, and their two children James and Katy.
It’s tough to pigeonhole a film that runs the gamut from shocking footage of the 1992 L.A. riots and the infamous O.J. Simpson Bronco chase to home movies of a happy mom-to-be carrying future NBC News correspondent Katy Tur. The best I can do for you is “Keeping up with the Kardashians meets Broadcast News.”
Although the “action news” format was established in the 70s, one can credit (or blame) news stringer/helicopter pilot Bob Tur (who transitioned to Zoe in 2014) and then-wife and camera operator Marika Gerrard with popularizing the sensationalist, God’s-eye iteration of “breaking news”…reporting from high aloft the murder and mayhem below.
Tur founded the independent Los Angeles News Service in the 80s, initially running his own camera in addition to doing the reporting. As Marika recalls, it wasn’t too long after she and Tur began courting that he encouraged her to learn how to shoot news footage. More often than not, “date nights” ended up with her tagging along with him to a crime scene, fire, or a car crash anyway, so Marika figured out early on that if she wanted time with Bob, her best bet was to take him up on his offer to be a professional partner as well.
Even once the couple began to build their family, the police scanner remained the soundtrack of their lives. Zoe recalls “driving 110 miles an hour” to get the jump on a breaking story…with her wife and kids in the car.
If that sounds like reckless behavior, Zoe would agree with you. While sheepish about speaking of herself in the third person, she now realizes “Bob” had an overabundance of testosterone. Bob also had anger management issues, as evidenced in outtakes of him berating both Marika and helicopter pilot Lawrence Welk III (I was reminded of the 2010 documentary Winnebago Man).
Nonetheless, the reportage that Tur and Gerrard did over the years adds up to an extraordinary documentation of key historical events in Los Angeles from the late 1980s through the late 1990s “as they happened” (e.g. that is Bob Tur’s voice you hear accompanying that horrific, now-iconic footage of truck driver Reginald Denny being beaten nearly to his death on live television).
The director was given access to the couple’s archive of several thousand Beta tapes. As he plowed through the library, Yoda noticed that there was quite a bit of family footage mixed in among the plane crashes, riots, and police pursuits (Bob and Marika used the work camera for their home movies).
The couple’s marriage ended in 2003; Yoda interweaves family footage with career highlights to create a dual chronology of a city descending into chaos and a relationship becoming increasingly untenable. It’s not necessarily “a great Sunday night show for the whole family”…but it’s an absorbing watch and one of the top docs I have seen this year.
WHIRLYBIRD is streaming on Amazon Prime, Google Play, and other platforms.
Considering recent developments in Afghanistan, the release of Mariam Ghani’s documentary What We Left Unfinished may prove to be timelier than the director intended. Her film offers a behind-the-scenes look at the Kabul-based Afghan film industry, and how it fared during the multi-regime Communist era (from 1978 to 1991).
While it may seem counter-intuitive to consider a 13 year-long period of Communist rule as “the good old days”, the filmmakers who are profiled here view it as a golden age (of sorts)…especially relative to the subsequent years of Taliban rule from 1992 to 2001.
If there was an “up” side to the implementation of the Soviet model during that period, it was state funding of movies. Of course there was a substantial “down” side for filmmakers, in that they did not get final cut…every master print was subject to approval (read: butchering) by government censors before distribution. Those willing to put up with caveats found they had an otherwise surprising amount of resources at their disposal.
Ghani uses restored footage from five unfinished projects to give a sampling of the types of films that were produced during that period. For the most part, they are standard melodramas; and while they contain elements reflecting Afghanistan’s historical turbulence and nods to Communist doctrine, none of them struck me as overtly political.
Ghani enlists writers, actors, producers and directors to reflect on how they finagled to keep the film industry alive during this period, despite the frequent regime changes (sometimes governmental shifts would occur mid-production, which could get awkward).
Some of the filmmakers’ stories are pretty wild. One recalls staging a battle scene in the desert wherein they had to use real bullets (the army provided them with weapons for the film, but didn’t have any blanks). When he called “cut”, he heard additional gunfire and quickly realized that actors and crew were being shot at by a small band of mujahedin, who had been drawn by the sound of their gunfire. They were eventually able to escape.
If you’re looking for the big picture-at 70 minutes Ghani’s film cannot convey the full complexity of Afghan art and politics; but as film preservation it has historical value. It’s not for all tastes, but I think diehard fans of international cinema should find it intriguing.
WHAT WE LEFT UNFINISHED is in select theaters and virtual cinemas nationwide.
Greg Sargent has a great analysis of Tucker Carlson’s interview with Viktor Orban this week:
The first segment of Tucker Carlson’s long-anticipated Fox News interview with Viktor Orban has now aired, and it did not disappoint: It provides a deeply unsettling glimpse into the true nature of the authoritarian nationalist future that Carlson and his fellow travelers envision for our country.
An ugly tension sits at the core of Carlson’s conversation with the Hungarian leader. Carlson fawns over the “free” nature of Hungarian society — contrasting it favorably with the supposed repression of widespread anti-liberal yearnings in American society — while saying little to nothing about the autocratic nature of Orbanism.
In this lurks a sort of dream combination: ethno-nationalism secured via autocracy.
The interview’s central feature is Carlson gushing over Orban’s virulently anti-immigrant policies and demagoguery. Orban describes these as urgent to defending national identity, defined as his country’s “population” and “culture” and “language” and “tradition” and “land,” a right of defense dictated by “God” and “nature.”
Orban also castigates liberal internationalist Western leaders for wanting to intermingle “Muslim” and “Christian” communities, describing the latter as “original inhabitants.” Orban declares that his country decided “not to take that risk.”
Throughout, Carlson treats this vision of national identity as fundamental to Hungary’s success. He even suggests that in Hungary, people are freer than in the United States.
Here, Carlson says, you’ll be silenced by Silicon Valley or hounded from your job if you dare criticize the “orthodoxy” of liberal internationalism and social liberalism — that is, if you yearn for association with a national identity that is culturally insulated and unsullied by socially liberal threats (like “transgender athletes”) to traditional conservative values.
“Who’s freer?” Carlson asks. “If you’re an American, the answer is painful to admit.”
Yet, as Ishaan Tharoor notes, Carlson often has little to say about the autocratic nature of Orban’s rule. Indeed, in Thursday’s broadcast, he blithely dismisses international observers criticizing it as tools of U.S. and liberal internationalist hegemony.
This tension — declaring America a less free society based on paranoid notions of sinister forces repressing anti-liberal-internationalist yearnings, while embracing the autocratic nature of Orbanism — is central to grasping the Carlsonist right’s true dream future.
Though Carlson won’t say it this way, autocratic rule is preferable to democracy because the former, he imagines, is the only route to the closed, ethno-nationalist, culturally reactionary society he wants for the United States. What Carlson and his ilk cannot accept, and are fighting their rearguard action against, is that open, liberal internationalist societies are and can be legitimatelydemocraticcreations.
The future he wants:
“If you care about Western civilization and democracy and families,” Carlson declared this week from Hungary, “you should know what is happening here right now.” He decried the “ferocious assault” on these things by globalist leaders, which Orban has heroically rebuffed.
As Jonathan Chait says, what’s striking is Carlson’s assertion that the defense of democracy requires embracing illiberalism and autocracy. This is an open declaration of an actual vision of what American self-rule should look like.
Orban’s slow destruction of democracy has been widely chronicled. See this Zack Beauchamp piece, which details how facially democratic wins have been followed by a slow autocratic capture of institutions:Today, political scientists see Hungary as a textbook example of something called “competitive authoritarianism”: a kind of autocratic system where elections happen and aren’t formally rigged but are so heavily stacked in the incumbent party’s favor that the people don’t have real agency over who rules them.
Orban openly declares that this illiberal, autocratic turn is not incidental, but essential, to securing the vision of national identity and self-determination he trumpets.
It’s been widely observed that Carlson speaks for a much larger movement on the right that idolizes Hungary to express deep dissatisfaction with immigration, diversification and secularized multiracial democracy at home. Jeet Heer calls this “authoritarian tourism.”
Or as Anne Applebaum puts it, U.S. right-wingers yearning for an Orbanist American future are motivated by dislike of America’s “racial diversity, its modern culture, its free press,” while dreaming of a “white-tribalist alternative.”
The American right’s vision of Hungary and Orban’s own presentation of it have been highly mythologized, as Applebaum shows. But in a way, the reality is unimportant. The aspiration toward that valorized vision of nationality, as well as the open resolution to secure it via illiberal antidemocratic means, is what Carlson admires.
Indeed, for Carlson and friends, what’s truly galling about our open society, receptivity to immigrants and increasing diversity is that it has in large part been secured democratically.
The Great Replacement:
Carlson recently stirred controversy by declaring that Democrats want to “replace” native U.S. citizens with “more obedient voters from the Third World.”
Carlson piously insisted this was race neutral: He merely wants to preserve democracy against “foreigners,” whose presence “dilutes” the voting power of U.S. native citizens by definition. But in saying this, Carlson treated it as given that immigration undermines the integrity of our self rule.
Yet the decision to allow in more immigrants is one that is made democratically, by our legitimately elected representatives. The decision to enlarge the polity to include outsiders, even if it changes our demographic makeup and influences future elections, is one the polity makes democratically about itself.
But for Carlson, this outcome is unacceptable. Only nefarious elite manipulation can be to blame for this. If majoritarian democratic outcomes result in these things, democracy has become self-destroying and no longer legitimate.
The problem, then, is American multiracial democracy itself. Mythologized Orbanism, or ethno-nationalism secured via competitive authoritarianism, is producing a “freer” society — the future the Carlsonist right truly wants.
I hve not had the opportunity to watch this yet. But judging from all I’ve read and written about this twisted relationship, this sounds right. I’m not entirely sure what Carlson’s up to but I have concluded that it’s real. He’s a cynical jackass, but I think he’s now a true believer. And it’s extremely unnerving that he has millions of people following him.
Attorney Leslie Lawrenson was found dead of covid at his home in Dorset, UK in June. At the time, not big news. However, the ‘Evening Standard’ just found a video he posted to Facebook 9 days before he died, saying he was glad he got it so he can prove it isn’t that bad. Watch!
A man who died with Covid after refusing to be vaccinated made a “terrible mistake” which put his family at risk, his partner has said.
Leslie Lawrenson, 58, died at his home in Bournemouth, Dorset, on 2 July.
His partner Amanda Mitchell, 56, who was seriously ill with Covid at the same time, said he thought the vaccines were too “experimental”.
She told the Stephen Nolan programme on BBC Radio 5 live: “I feel incredibly foolish. Les died unnecessarily.”
Ms Mitchell said her partner, a Cambridge University graduate, decided against having a coronavirus jab after reading material on social media.
She said: “It was a daily thing that he said to us: ‘You don’t need to have it, you’ll be fine, just be careful.
“He said to me: ‘It’s a gene thing, an experimental thing. You’re putting something in your body that hasn’t been thoroughly tested.’
“Les was highly educated… so if he told me something, I tended to believe it.”
Ms Mitchell, who has diabetes and hypertension, said her partner appeared to be recovering from Covid-related pneumonia while she became seriously ill.
She said paramedics who attended her at home on 2 July were called back 10 minutes later when her 19-year-old son found Mr Lawrenson dead in bed.
She said: “Les made a terrible mistake and he’s paid the ultimate price for that.”
Ms Mitchell was admitted to hospital the same day and spent a week on a Covid ward.
She said she felt foolish for putting her daughter and older son at risk when they came to help to care for the couple’s 11-year-old son.
Daughter Carla Hodges, 35, said: “[Leslie] was so brainwashed by the stuff that he was seeing on YouTube and social media.
“He said: ‘A lot of people will die more from having the vaccine than getting Covid.'”
Ms Mitchell said she would be having the vaccine as soon as doctors declared her fit enough.
This NYT report on Ron DeSantis’s “approach” to the latest pandemic surge is chilling and not just because he’s a sociopath but because the press is actually treating his reprehensible cavalier attitude as political savvy:
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida snapped this week at a reporter who asked if masks might help keep children safe in a state that now has more Covid-19 hospitalizations, including for pediatric patients, than anywhere else in the nation.
And he touted a new state rule, adopted on Friday, that will counter local school mask mandates by allowing parents to request private school vouchers if they feel that the requirements amount to “harassment.”
Mr. DeSantis has been unyielding in his approach to the pandemic, refusing to change course or impose restrictions despite uncontrolled spread and spiking hospitalizations — an approach that forced him to undertake the biggest risk of his rising political career.
The governor reopened his state’s economy last spring and kept it that way, defying coronavirus surges that filled hospitals, and then celebrated as a statewide vaccination campaign took hold and life in Florida began to look normal.
Now Mr. DeSantis is gambling again. A new virus spike has led to a record number of Covid-19 hospitalizations that have undone some of Florida’s economic and public health gains and again raised the stakes for Mr. DeSantis.
If the latest surge overwhelms hospitals, leaving doctors and nurses unable to properly care for the younger, almost entirely unvaccinated people packing emergency rooms and intensive care units, Mr. DeSantis’s perch as a Republican Party front-runner with higher aspirations could be in serious trouble.
If, however, Florida comes through another virus peak with both its hospital system and economy intact, Mr. DeSantis’s game of chicken with the deadly pandemic could become a model for how to coexist with a virus that is unlikely to ever fully vanish.
Mr. DeSantis successfully sued the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over its requirement that cruise ship passengers be vaccinated, though some of the cruise lines were keeping the mandate anyway. He opposes mandating vaccines for hospital workers, saying that would result in worsening staff shortages.
“We can either have a free society, or we can have a biomedical security state,” Mr. DeSantis said this week in Panama City, Fla. “And I can tell you: Florida, we’re a free state. People are going to be free to choose to make their own decisions.”
These are days with a reporting anomaly. About this data
Florida has the country’s highest hospitalization rate and second-highest rate of recent cases, next to Louisiana. Infection levels have been rising in every state, with especially alarming rates in the South. Many of those governors have also been reluctant to impose new restrictions or require masks.
Now get a load of this BS:
If the latest surge overwhelms hospitals, leaving doctors and nurses unable to properly care for the younger, almost entirely unvaccinated people packing emergency rooms and intensive care units, Mr. DeSantis’s perch as a Republican Party front-runner with higher aspirations could be in serious trouble.
If, however, Florida comes through another virus peak with both its hospital system and economy intact, Mr. DeSantis’s game of chicken with the deadly pandemic could become a model for how to coexist with a virus that is unlikely to ever fully vanish.
Too bad about the thousands of unnecessary deaths, huh? All that matters is that the hospital system and the economy are left intact.
It gets worse:
Florida never instituted a statewide mask mandate. Mayors imposed local ones a year ago; a new state law prohibits them now, but some municipalities have reinstated mask rules in government buildings and mandated vaccines for their employees. The state of emergency that Mr. DeSantis initially declared to deal with the pandemic expired in late June, and he has declined calls to bring it back, though doing so could make it easier for hospitals to hire more doctors and nurses.
In short, Mr. DeSantis said, life will go on even as the pandemic does, too.
“We knew this is something that you’re going to have to live with,” Mr. DeSantis said on Friday, articulating a sentiment that many public officials are beginning to express, publicly and privately, as the pandemic powers through its second summer.
Really? We’re just going to “live with it?” How about “die with it.”
If public officials are saying that we just need to live with thousands of unnecessary deaths when we have life-saving vaccines, we need to get some other public officials. I knew they were nihilists but this is outrageous.
And the New York Times needs to think a lot more clearly about presenting thinking like this as if it’s reasonable pub lic policy.
If we are not moving to wearing blue and gray again, and if shirts-and-skins is impractical, perhap everyone sporting some other visible emblems would put our sociopathic neighbors on notice that they are in the minority.
At this point, I’m willing to wear a mask everywhere I go to distinguish myself from the Trump death cult. Non-maskers and anti-vaxxers are already doing the equivalent. If sensible Americans wore masks, in most populous places Trumpists would find out very quickly how much of a minority they really are.
This post is somewhat technical, but I think it’s important now to distinguish between voter list maintenance and voter list purges. The former is often mistaken for the latter.
My county removed several thousand voters from the local rolls in January. Cleaning up the voter rolls is standard operating procedure after an election. Periodic maintenance. Timing in your state may vary. One of my best friends here is the Elections Board chair, and I’ve worked with/beside the staff for years, so I don’t sweat it.
MSNBC’s Joy Reid last night, however, led off a segment by declaiming a voter “purge” in Georgia. This story via the Atlanta Journal-Constitution prompted it:
Georgia election officials are mailing letters this week to over 185,000 registered voters who haven’t participated in elections for at least five years, a step toward eventually canceling their registrations under the state’s “use it or lose it” law.
Many of them likely moved out of state and are no longer eligible to cast a ballot in Georgia, according to Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office. But the notifications also cover an unknown number of residents who haven’t moved and decided not to vote in recent elections.
The notifications are being mailed as Georgia election officials are preparing to cancel the voter registrations of an additional 102,000 people who filed change-of-address requests with the U.S. Postal Service, had election mail returned as undeliverable or haven’t voted since 2012.
Final address verification notices are going over the next few days to 12,000 people on the Leon County voter rolls who may not be living in Florida anymore based on official records gleaned from a multi-state database.
“Ensuring the accuracy and integrity of our voter rolls is an important responsibility of my office,” Leon Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley said Monday.
This marks the first time that Earley and the rest of the state’s 67 county election supervisors are using the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) since joining two years ago to identify and purge ineligible voters from their rolls.
Some counties have already completed the list maintenance update while others are in the process of doing so or will complete in the next month.
Look, people are justifiably on heightened alert for any and all GOP efforts to disenfranchise Democratic voters. But just because Georgia and Florida are GOP-dominated states does not mean the actions described above are nefarious. Let’s not overplay our hand.
The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) describes voter list maintenance requirements (note section I’ve bolded):
The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA)
While states set policy on voter registration, they do so under a federal framework.
At the federal level, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA, commonly referred to as “motor voter” because it contains provisions about voter registration at department of motor vehicles offices) created a regulatory floor for state maintenance of voter registration rolls (Section 8). These regulations give states rules and guidelines for maintaining voter list rolls. The NVRA allows states to institute other provisions for the maintenance of voter rolls at their discretion above and beyond the NVRA’s requirements, as long as they are uniform and non-discriminatory. The NVRA is a floor, not a ceiling. For more information on the NVRA see this webpage from the Department of Justice.
The NVRA specifies that a voter may be removed from the voter registration list at the request of the registrant. If an election official receives indirect or second-hand information that a voter has moved, it triggers a removal process (rather than the immediate removal of the voter from the list). See the section on Removing Voters from the Registration List below for more information.
The NVRA also requires states to conduct reasonable list maintenance activities to remove deceased persons from the voter rolls (see Removal of Deceased Voters section below). And, it prohibits states from removing registrants from the voter list within 90 days of an election, as a failsafe against accidental removal that would affect a registrant’s ability to vote in the upcoming election.
Note: not all states are subject to NVRA requirements. Six states (Idaho, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Wyoming) are exempt from NVRA requirements because they either had no voter registration requirements or permitted Election Day registration at the time the NVRA was enacted. Even though these states are not subject to the same federal requirements on list maintenance required by the NVRA, they still have state-specific procedures for list maintenance that are similar in many ways.
The Help America Vote Act (HAVA)
In addition to regulations under the NVRA, the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requires states to establish statewide voter registration databases and sets basic requirements for computerized list maintenance (sec. 303(2)). This included coordinating with state agency records on felon status and deaths, and the removal of duplicates from the computerized list. It also initiated basic matching protocols for verifying a new registrant’s information by requiring registrants to provide either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of the applicant’s social security number (sec. 303(5)), which is discussed in the next section.
How about removing nonparticipants from the voter rolls? (Note again section I’ve bolded):
Some states conduct the bulk of their list maintenance right after a big election, others do it in the months before a big election. This timing may be a statutory requirement. Removing voters after an election minimizes the chances that eligible voters will be inadvertently removed. A state that does the bulk of the list maintenance work just before an election improves the accuracy of the list going into the election, but this is a more aggressive approach and runs the risk that eligible voters are removed before a big election. And, the NVRA specifies that list maintenance activities cannot be conducted with 90 days of a federal elections.
States periodically send mailings to voters who have not voted in a couple of cycles to see if they still there. “Unless an election official has received direct information from a voter that he or she has moved, the voter will typically be moved to an ‘inactive’ status rather than removed from the list entirely. A voter who is inactive through two federal elections can be removed from the list,” NCSL states. Being flagged inactive does not mean a voter who shows up to vote will be refused.
Wiping inactive registrations for intermittent voters is less of a big deal if the state has same-day registration and same-day registration requirements are not too onerous. (That’s a big IF.) Some states may require no more than a driver’s license or a power bill showing your current address. If you show up without them and find your registration has been removed … well, that’s onerous for you. (See image at top.)
So what constitutes a purge? Perhaps not the timing or federally mandated maintenance, but the aggressiveness with which states carry it out.
These voters were victims of purges — the sometimes-flawed process by which election officials attempt to remove ineligible names from voter registration lists. When done correctly, purges ensure the voter rolls are accurate and up-to-date. When done incorrectly, purges disenfranchise legitimate voters (often when it is too close to an election to rectify the mistake), causing confusion and delay at the polls.
In essence, one person’s voter roll maintenance is another’s voter purge. It depends on how well the removals are done.
The long-awaited happy event at ZooParc de Beauval has finally arrived!
After long hours of waiting, female Panda Huan Huan, gave birth to twins on Monday, August 2.
The first was born at 1:03am, the second at 1:10am. They are very bright, pink and plump.
The first weighs 149 g. The second weighs 129 g. Everything happened very quickly: the birth took place about thirty minutes Huan Huan’s water broke. Huan Huan is taking great care of her cubs. She took them in her mouth to lick them and clean them. Little cries could be heard! After 8 hours of labor for Huan Huan, the ZooParc team erupted with joy at the sight of these little bears.
This double birth is the happy outcome of a gestation that began last March, following the contact between Yuan Zi and Huan Huan followed by artificial insemination carried out by animal reproduction specialists from Leibniz-IZW Thomas Hildebrandt and Frank Goeritz and by Jella Wauters, Belgian veterinarian from Ghent University and Leibniz-IZW.
At 5 p.m., installed in her farrowing lodge, Huan Huan began going into labor. Then begins the setting up of teams to ensure the best calving conditions for the female. In a corridor, in front of the lodge, the two Chinese carers constantly watch over her and scrutinize her every gesture and attitude. They speak Chinese to her, and gently encourage her. Mao Min took care of Huan Huan and Yuan Zi when they were 6 months old. Both carefully note all observations on a statement. At the same time, they check all the equipment and incubators that will accommodate the little ones.
The veterinarians, Baptiste M and Antoine L, are also at the bedside of Huan Huan to analyze the progress of the labor. They interpret signs and changes in posture. Some healers from the panda sector and an ethologist are also present to note in real time all the attitudes: back against the wall, rolling in a ball, putting on the back … In the screening room, concentration and tension are palpable as the birth approaches. All eyes are on the monitors. Calm is felt. Only whispers break the silence.
“Everyone is focused and knows exactly what to do. You don’t always need to talk to understand each other between caretakers and veterinarians,” declares Delphine Delord, associate director of ZooParc de Beauval, at peace knowing birth can mean waiting long hours.
But suddenly, Huan Huan’s behavior changes. The first contractions appear. They intensify over the hours. The female remains in a seated position most of the time with her head between her paws. The hours pass then, suddenly, the the first baby is born takes place!
Huan Huan reacts very quickly and immediately takes care of her first baby. Her gestures are sure.
“More experienced than 4 years ago, she knows how to go about it, she protects him. Moreover, we see that she does not want to let go,” rejoices Rodolphe Delord, very moved by this double birth. Then after a few minutes, the second is also born very quickly, so much so that it is difficult to see it on the screens.
How many does Huan Huan have in her mouth?!
Finally, the doubt is quickly removed: Huan Huan has 2 babies!
A round of applause then arose.
“We have just experienced a moment of rare intensity. These births are still exceptional, but they also have their share of surprises! We rejoice in the liveliness of babies, felt from their first moments. These births are also the fruit of the efforts of all our teams, who do their utmost to provide the animals with maximum welfare,” explains Delphine Delord, associate director of the Zooparc de Beauval.
Now the night is well under way. A few cries of nocturnal animals can be heard in the distance. It is now time to let Huan Huan rest and let the little ones experience their first moments… under the watchful eye of the teams.
With so much pandamonium happening at Zoo De Beauval @zoobeauval (page officielle) (two baby Pandas were born there last night!) we thought it was a good time to turn up the cute even more. Here’s a short video of the first year of Panda Cub Yuan Meng’s life. Born in August of 2017, this cub was France’s first ever baby Panda!
Ron Brownstein is one of the best political analysts around and this look at the Biden administration’s “outreach” to the GOP is typically astute. Let’s just say that it makes me very nervous:
On one side, the White House, and many party centrists, argue that his pleas for national consensus position him and Democrats for future success by reflecting the public’s desire for unity after the bruising and belligerent presidency of Donald Trump.
“President Biden ran on the message that we need to bring people together to meet the challenges facing our country,” White House senior adviser Mike Donilon wrote last week in a publicly released strategy memo. “And the American people embraced that message. While a lot of pundits have doubted bipartisanship was even possible, the American people have been very clear it is what they want.”
On the other side are Democrats who fear that Biden’s stress on bipartisan cooperation is normalizing the GOP even as the party is radicalizing on many fronts—from restricting voting and defending the January 6 rioters to opposing many public-health responses to the pandemic. These Democrats worry that Biden’s approach makes it easier even for voters who view Trump as unfit for office to back Republicans in upcoming down-ballot races.
Sawyer Hackett, executive director of People First Future, the political organization founded by Julián Castro, expressed that view when he told me that in 2022 and 2024, “it is going to be tough [for Democrats] to run on a message that these people are too dangerous … to be in charge while simultaneously saying, ‘Hey, look what we’re getting done with the Republicans, Washington still works, look at this infrastructure deal we got done.’” He added: “We’re propping these things up as an example of a functioning Washington while the Republican Party is just moving to the right and becoming more extreme.”
The scale of biden’s agenda has drawn justifiable comparisons to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. But in his posture toward the opposite party, Biden’s model seems to be a very different former president: Dwight Eisenhower. Like Eisenhower, Biden is largely positioning himself as an elder statesman who has transcended the partisan fray. A promise to unify the country has been a central pillar of Biden’s messaging since he first announced his candidacy. And he’s rarely looked as happy as he did in late June when he stepped onto the White House driveway, surrounded by senators of both parties, to announce the tentative deal on infrastructure spending.
The Eisenhower analogy extends only so far: The former general, in a much-less-polarized era, received high approval ratings from voters in both parties, while Biden has faced overwhelming disapproval among partisan Republicans from the outset. Yet Biden, with his earnest and unpolished persona, hasn’t inspired the visceral backlash from his opponents that Trump, Barack Obama, or even George W. Bush and Bill Clinton did. While White House officials are closely watching for signs of backlash, they remain optimistic that this August recess won’t produce anything like the grassroots conservative uprising in August 2009 against the Affordable Care Act that crystallized the Tea Party movement.
For those Democrats comfortable with Biden’s approach, the benefits are clear. Sean McElwee, a leading pollster for progressive causes, says Biden has found an effective division of labor: By stressing unity and courting GOP officials, McElwee argues, Biden has made it more difficult for Republicans to mobilize their base. “Biden has made politics boring again,” he says admiringly, while other Democrats can call out the GOP’s turn toward extremism on issues from COVID-19 to voting. “I think it’s possible to walk and chew gum at the same time here,” he says.
To Democrats in this camp, the infrastructure deal “is proof of concept,” especially if Biden can pair it with an ambitious follow-on bill for human-capital investments passed solely with Democratic votes, says Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at the centrist Democratic group Third Way. If Biden can pass those two massive proposals, and contain the pandemic over the coming months, Kessler insists, he’ll be reelected. “And if he gets reelected, that could be the end of Trumpism,” Kessler says.
But critics of Biden’s approach toward the GOP, and even some supporters, acknowledge that it also comes with costs. Many Democratic strategists believe that one reason the party suffered disappointing results in congressional and state legislative races last November was because of Biden’s choice to portray Trump as an anomaly, rather than the culmination of broader GOP trends. That made it easier for voters to support Republicans in down-ballot contests. Hackett, like others, worries that even if Biden’s bipartisan posture helps him personally, his consistent praise of Republicans as reasonable negotiating partners could have the same effect on other races in 2022 and 2024.
Biden’s generally dovish approach to the GOP is also shaping his response to the coronavirus. After Trump feuded with Democratic governors during the pandemic (even publicly threatening to withhold aid from governors who criticized him), Biden prioritized building a close working relationship with leaders in both parties, particularly when it came to distributing the vaccine. Jeff Zients, the White House COVID-19 coordinator, holds a weekly call with governors (now chaired by the Republican governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson) and talks to two or three more each day. “Our approach is to make this nonpolitical, to make this about public health, and to have strong partnerships with Democratic and Republican governors,” said one senior White House official, who asked for anonymity to discuss the administration’s interaction with governors. Republican, as well as Democratic, governors have praised the White House efforts.
But the emphasis on cooperation left the White House somewhat flat-footed when resistance to both vaccinations and public-health protections in multiple red states helped the Delta variant surge across the country. Caseloads have spiked most in Republican-controlled states—particularly Florida, Texas, and others across the Southeast—where vaccination rates remain relatively low and GOP governors, legislatures, or both, have shunned mask mandates and in some cases blocked businesses from requiring proof of vaccination from customers.
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Until this week, though, Biden almost entirely refrained from criticizing red-state governors who have blocked public-health measures, such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Texas’s Greg Abbott. In a White House speech Tuesday, Biden challenged them more directly than before, but still chose his words carefully. Citing Texas and Florida specifically, Biden declared, “I say to these governors, please help. If you’re not going to help, please get out of the way.” As tongue-lashings go, it was delivered more in a tone of sorrow than anger.
The front that will most pointedly test Biden’s restrained approach to red-state governors is the imminent reopening of the nation’s schools. On Monday, the federal Department of Education issued a “road map” for reopening schools that urged all districts to restore in-person learning this fall, but also to require mask wearing for all staff and students in K–12 classes.
That guidance arrived with a huge hole in it: At least nine states, all with Republican governors, have barred school districts from requiring masks on staff and students. Those states—Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Vermont—together enroll almost 12.8 million K–12 students, roughly one-fourth of the nation’s total, according to federal statistics. As long as the state-level prohibitions on masking stand, that means parents in cities as large as Miami, Orlando, Tampa, Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio, whatever their level of concern about the virus, must send their children to schools where they know that not everyone will be masked.
Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, says that in Sunbelt states already seeing cases surge, that’s a formula for more disease and death. “There’s a forest fire raging across the southern United States right now,” he told me. “But in some ways, this is the warm-up act. Schools are opening now, and as schools open, they will start to accelerate things.”
Wen agreed. “Unvaccinated children could spread COVID-19 to other unvaccinated kids,” she said. “Some will become very ill and die; others, if they don’t become ill themselves, could be vectors for transmission and we could see large surges in those communities.”
The Biden administration doesn’t dispute those analyses, but it still believes its best chance of improving conditions in those red states is to emphasize carrots, not sticks. Biden offered sharper words this week, but beyond that, he’s not planning any actions aimed at the GOP local leaders blocking public-health measures. Even with the most recalcitrant GOP governors, the official said, the administration remains focused on providing inducements for cooperation rather than looking for policy mechanisms that might compel it, such as threats to withhold some streams of federal funding. Such direct pressure on red-state governors, the official said, is “not where we think the leverage is … The way we are approaching this is to get as many vaccinated as possible, make schools safe, [and] where there are surges provide resources to the states to deal with those surges.”
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Public-health experts and political analysts alike agree that governors such as DeSantis, Abbott, and Georgia’s Brian Kemp would welcome a confrontation with the Biden administration over masking in schools as a way to rally their electoral base. (DeSantis instantly demonstrated that by lashing back at Biden on Wednesday and then dashing off a fundraising letter about the criticism.) But the White House’s choice not to confront the GOP governors has consequences too: It means that parents in those states who want more protections are in effect abandoned to their governors’ political calculations. Hackett said that while he’s not sure “what the mechanism is” for Biden to most effectively pressure the GOP governors resisting public-health measures, “it seems to me if you are a citizen of any given state … your health and safety shouldn’t be determined by Republican governors who are trying to outflank each other to the right.”
The dynamic unfolding on voting rights is only slightly different. Compared with his relative reticence on state coronavirus actions, Biden has been more forthright in condemning the laws proliferating in red states since the 2020 election restricting access to the ballot: He’s called them “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” But while he has endorsed federal legislation that would overturn many of these restrictions and establish a new nationwide floor of voting rights, he has resolutely refused to endorse the one step that all advocates agree is indispensable to passing such a bill: creating a carve-out from the filibuster for it.
During a recent CNN town hall, Biden even said he believed Republicans eventually would support such federal voting standards. “I want to make sure we bring along not just all the Democrats; we bring along Republicans, who I know know better,” he insisted. “They know better than this.”
That answer infuriated voting-rights advocates who say there’s no evidence that any meaningful number of Senate Republicans—much less the 10 that would be needed to break a filibuster—will support new federal voting-rights legislation; even the handful of Republicans who have rejected Trump’s discredited claims of fraud, such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, have defended the restrictive state laws. Biden’s “comments did everything he could to avoid the reality of what we’re facing,” Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21 and veteran government-reform activist, told me immediately after the town hall. “This is incredibly dangerous for the rights of millions of Black, brown, Native American, other minorities, elderly, young voters, to participate in federal elections in the future.”
Wertheimer’s comments point to the much larger Democratic debate over Biden’s posture toward the Republican Party: Does he truly understand what he’s dealing with in the modern GOP? Kessler says yes; he believes Biden recognizes how many in the GOP have radicalized, but is strategically choosing to position himself as a less partisan figure to advance his goals. “I think Biden is playing a very sophisticated game, sometimes masked with his aw-shucks style,” Kessler says. With the states, for instance, Kessler says, “It seems to me that what Biden is doing is not embarrassing Republican governors who may be doing the wrong thing on masks so that there is space for them to do the right thing and say the right things on vaccinations, because that is the ballgame.”
Others in the party worry whether Biden accepts how much the GOP has changed since the long-ago era when he genially made deals with Senate Republican leaders such as Bob Dole and Howard Baker. When Biden announced the bipartisan infrastructure deal in the White House driveway earlier this summer, he seemed openly nostalgic for those years: “This reminds me of the days we used to get an awful lot done up at the United States Congress,” he exulted.
Yet, at best, the infrastructure deal looks like a one-time exception to a pattern of unstinting Senate Republican resistance that, absent changes in the filibuster, seems destined to doom every Biden legislative priority that can’t be shoehorned into the reconciliation process. The most consequential Democratic priority that could fall victim to Biden’s reluctance to fully confront Republicans is the federal voting-rights legislation meant to combat the red-state moves restricting voting access and providing GOP officials more opportunities to control election procedures.
“Will Joe Biden feel he’s in a good place for reelection when we don’t have the House and Senate, election rules have been transformed in state after state, and we have these [state] election-subversion bills?” asked Hackett, stating publicly what other Democrats are only muttering in private. “His argument about normalizing those relationships with Republicans may be null and void by the time 2024 comes around.”
I understand the argument that the party can divide the labor with Biden being the “conciliator” for the purpose of appealing to moderate voters and others in the party fighting the GOP’s war on democracy. But will that really work? I just don’t know. I do know that taking Biden’s comments at face value is delusional. The Republican agenda is to defeat Democrats at all costs. Even their acquiescence on the infrastructure bill is probably partly a plan to trap him in a bipartisan corner while giving endangered GOP Senators something to run on.
