Month: January 2022

Social distancing and self-quarantining have spiked in recent weeks as Omicron puts the nation in a crouch like last spring before vaccines became widely available, according to the latest installment of the Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Index.

36% of vaccinated survey respondents who have tested positive for the virus or think they’ve had it now say they were infected after being fully vaccinated. That compares with 22% in mid-December, and just 6% last summer.

Nearly nine-in-10 now say they know someone who’s gotten COVID.

We all know or have heard stories about people saying they’d like to just get it over with and get Omicron because it sounds milder than earlier strains.

But the survey results suggest most Americans are worried about Omicron and modifying their behavior to try to minimize exposure and spread.

They also suggest a possible reason for that fear: vaccines aren’t as effective in stopping infections as they used to be before Omicron. (Health officials emphasize that they do significantly decrease the risk of hospitalization and death.)

“It’s ‘America retrenches,'” said Cliff Young, president of Ipsos U.S. Public Affairs. “People all of a sudden are being assaulted again by the virus and therefore they’re changing. And if they’re not, somebody very close to them is.”

“The shifts are so significant across the board,” said Ipsos vice president Mallory Newall. They represent “a revert back to basically last April when people were bunkering because a majority weren’t vaccinated yet.”

A combined 52% of all respondents now say they believe it will be more than a year — or never — before they can return to their normal, pre-COVID lives. That’s the highest since we began asking this question nearly a year ago.

About three-fourths said they feel they face as great a risk or more risk of contracting the virus now than in the spring of 2020.

30% of the unvaccinated said Omicron makes them more likely to get the vaccine, a jump from 19% who said so when we asked in December.

By the numbers: Three-fourths of respondents in the latest wave of our national survey say they’ve received the vaccine. But there’s broad public awareness that even being fully vaccinated and boosted isn’t stopping breakthroughs of this strain.

57% said they socially distanced in the last week, up from 45% last month and the highest level since last April.

13% said they self-quarantined, up from 8% last month and the highest since last April.

46% went out to eat, down from 54% last month and the lowest since last April.

50% visited family and friends, down from 60% last month and the lowest since last March.

More people also reported working from home and being required to wear masks in the workplace.

The share of Americans saying they took a COVID test in the past week was up from December, but not dramatically: 17% compared with 13%.

14% said they’ve tried to get an at-home test in the past few weeks but couldn’t find one.

10% said they tried to get a professional to give them a test but couldn’t get an appointment.

Here’s the best thing I’ve read about the situation in the schools, which tracks closely with what I’ve heard anecdotally:

This latest, highly contagious variant has caused widespread teacher, support staff, and student outages, making it difficult for even the new normal of school (masked, with occasional class quarantines) to persist. And so, whether schools should be open or closed has yet again become a fight about public health, education, and the future of children’s well-being in America.

For one high school student, though, the issue is much more practical. COVID “has completely taken over any function of daily school life,” wrote a sophomore in a Reddit post last week, titled “I Am a New York City Public High School Student. The Situation is Beyond Control.” The post quickly went viral for its level of detail on what school is actually like right now. (The student asked to remain anonymous, so we’ll call him Josh, after his Reddit handle. But we confirmed his identity.) In the post, he describes how his week after winter break was upended by teacher absences, as cases in the city hit an all-time high. The school day is filled with empty classes and extra study hall periods in which students gather in an auditorium where there is “functionally no learning occurring.” (After the second study hall in a row, Josh and some of his peers realized that the “health conditions were safer outside of the auditorium” and left.)

We spoke to Josh on Saturday about how omicron has changed things at his high school, what he wishes administrators would do right now, and what it’s like to have peers test positive during the school day itself. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Advertisement

Slate: What do you hope people get out of reading your Reddit post?

Josh: One of the intents was to, I wouldn’t say laugh, but just recognize a certain level of absurdity in the way that school is being managed right now. I think the most important thing is that when people look at the issue of closing schools, they’re really only looking at the health side of it. It’s a black-and-white discussion—people are either saying “you’re risking students’ health” or “it’s just idiotic to close schools.” It seems that there’s little nuance. But just with the sheer volume of cases, it makes it impossible for there to be actual learning conditions at school.

In the post, and in your tone right now, you sound pretty lighthearted. Are you worried about COVID?

I think some students have a feeling of fear about COVID, in general. For me personally, I had COVID recently, so I suppose in some respects I’m immune to it.

I don’t mean to be lighthearted. I think it’s serious, but I can’t help it because I think there’s just a certain sense of absurdity. I know a student who had six study hall free periods yesterday, and they only had three classes. And in their classes, 50 percent of the students were out. And so for them, it’s just, why did they come to school? Why are they risking health, risking the fact of potentially getting COVID when they could choose to be just not going to school or schools couldn’t be open?

How much of your high school experience has happened during the pandemic, and how has it changed since March 2020?

All of it. In ninth grade, I was on Zoom the entire year. This year, I’d say that other than wearing masks, before this past week, COVID almost felt unnoticeable. Even wearing masks feels normal at this point. You do a health screening every day. When you enter school, you have to show that you haven’t had COVID. But other than that, it felt—nobody ever got COVID. Maybe once a month one student got COVID. But now it’s been a big, big deal.

What are the conversations with your peers like right now?

Before break, I rarely heard COVID talked about ever. Now, nearly every single conversation starts with talking about how we find it absurd that we’re in school. I’d say in the hallway, when I see people I know, the first question anybody asks is, how many study halls did you have? How many something-related-to-COVID did you have today? Everything seems to revolve around it, especially this week.

One of the most striking parts of your Reddit post is the fact that kids are testing themselves at school and getting positive results at school. Can you tell me what that’s like?

There were two moments I wrote about. One was during fourth period, a student tested positive in the auditorium. I didn’t have fourth period study hall at that time, but I heard it from numerous, numerous students who said that people were testing positive with or sharing their positivity within the front of the auditorium, which is just, to me, that’s very concerning.

Then in the hallway and the staircase, a student asked if their faint line was a positive test. It was very jarring because I thought everybody would know that a faint line is a positive test. Interestingly enough, that student ended up actually being negative, but they got a false positive test. That’s another layer. How well are the rapid tests working? How reputable are they? So I think it’s just jarring and scary in general.

I have this sensation often that I’ve had to become a mini epidemiologist in my own life, to figure out what’s going on with cases and tests and everything around me. And I’m getting that sense from you too.

I try, but I’m busy. I read a lot of news pre–2020 election. Honestly I’ve tailed off in what I read about COVID. I think I need to get back into trying to be a little more of an epidemiologist because I didn’t know that they had approved boosters for students ages 12 to 15 on Monday. I learned at school. So I need to work on that a little.

If you had the power right now to do whatever you want with opening school, closing school, setting up Zoom school, making snow days or COVID days where you don’t have to do anything, what would your proposal be?

My suggestion would be to close school for a week. In terms of within school itself, I think teachers are doing the best that they can at enforcing health and trying to give students material to learn on. But with just the sheer amount of people that are out and the number of kids that are out, they’re dealt a deck which is just impossible to manage.

It just seems like if cases keep rising, it’s just going to get worse and worse. Not even in terms of health-related issues. No one’s really getting severely sick. Just in terms of learning loss.

Smart kid. Everyone should pay attention.

Nobody is learning anything in these schools in places where there is high community spread. So the argument that they are being deprived of their instruction is spurious. And schools certainly aren’t the “safest place for kids” because the schools are crawling with COVID and even if they don’t personally get too ill, they are potentially going to expose their families and it is definitely not safe for kids to have sick parents. If the parents are unvaccinated, they could lose them.

I had heard earlier that Pence’s people were in contact with Mar-a-Lago about how to respond to deal with the January 6thy Committee. This piece doesn’t report that but it does show that, once again, Mike Pence is laboring under the illusion that he can repair his reputation in the GOP and become president someday, which is just sad. He keeps trying to find a way to stay relevant and run for office again without acknowledging that Trump made him an enemy and sicced his violent mob on him.

As the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol rushes to gather evidence and conduct interviews, how far it will be able to go in holding former President Donald J. Trump accountable increasingly appears to hinge on one possible witness: former Vice President Mike Pence.

Since the committee was formed last summer, Mr. Pence’s lawyer and the panel have been talking informally about whether he would be willing to speak to investigators, people briefed on the discussions said. But as Mr. Pence began sorting through a complex calculation about his cooperation, he indicated to the committee that he was undecided, they said.

To some degree, the current situation reflects negotiating strategies by both sides, with the committee eager to suggest an air of inevitability about Mr. Pence answering its questions and the former vice president’s advisers looking for reasons to limit his political exposure from a move that would further complicate his ambitions to run for president in 2024.

But there also appears to be growing tension.

In recent weeks, Mr. Pence is said by people familiar with his thinking to have grown increasingly disillusioned with the idea of voluntary cooperation. He has told aides that the committee has taken a sharp partisan turn by openly considering the potential for criminal referrals to the Justice Department about Mr. Trump and others. Such referrals, in Mr. Pence’s view, appear designed to hurt Republican chances of winning control of Congress in November.

And Mr. Pence, they said, has grown annoyed that the committee is publicly signaling that it has secured a greater degree of cooperation from his top aides than it actually has, something he sees as part of a pattern of Democrats trying to turn his team against Mr. Trump.

For the committee, Mr. Pence’s testimony under oath would be an opportunity to establish in detail how Mr. Trump’s pressuring him to block the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory brought the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis and helped inspire the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

What a sad, deluded, little weasel he is.

I’ll just leave this here:

.@chrislhayes on when he realized he wasn’t going to be an NBA player and why Mike Pence should have that moment with the presidency and just cooperate with the Jan. 6 committee. #inners pic.twitter.com/PvgiXMtogc

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) January 11, 2022

Dem pressure campaign on Manchin to use nuclear option and change rules to pass a voting bill isn't working. He told me tonight "I haven't seen" a proposal that he could back to change rules along party lines. "Maybe someone is hiding something. They haven't shown it to me."

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) January 10, 2022

There’s been a peculiar dance in recent weeks with Manchin suggesting that Republicans support some Senate filibuster changes and McConnell reaffirming that no, they don’t.

McConnell today: “The Senate isn’t broken and doesn’t need fixing.”

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) January 11, 2022

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell promises to make the Senate "more inconvenient" than any "in living memory" if Democrats alter filibuster rules to pass voting rights.

He cites infrastructure and hate crimes legislation as bipartisan achievements that would be threatened. pic.twitter.com/Nypt2SNIGL

— The Recount (@therecount) January 11, 2022

Manchin, asked by @LACaldwellDC if he’d support a rule change without GOP support, signals he won’t.

“Rules should be changed with the rules, not breaking the rules,” he says.

Under standing rules, it takes 67 votes to change filibuster. Not gonna happen.

Nuclear option = 50.

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) January 11, 2022

He is completely incoherent. McConnell is not. How do you deal with that?

People seem to be very confused about what’s happening with the voting rights and Build Back Better legislation in Washington. It’s not that Biden doesn’t want them passed or that the Democrats are all sell-out whores to the man. It’s also not that they are doing things in the wrong order or that if only Biden would just “lead” he could get it done.

The problem is two people: Manchin and Sinema. They have all the power and they are using it. They play games from time to time and pretend that they are trying to “get things done” but in reality, they are fine with doing nothing.

Manchin said as much out loud back in October:

After making a series of demands that the White House cut back on President Joe Biden’s ambitious domestic agenda, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, reportedly admitted to his Senate colleagues that he actually wants to scuttle the president’s entire plan.  

According to a report from Axios, Manchin revealed his position at a Wednesday lunch for Senate committee chairs.

Montana Democratic Sen. Jon Tester told Axios he recalls Manchin telling Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders: “I’m comfortable with nothing.” 

It’s perfectly obvious that he was telling the truth.

These people are unwilling to eliminate the filibuster for any reason. Sinema is unwilling to raise taxes on the rich. Manchin is playing games, changing his mind constantly and basically playing along for the cameras. (And no, contrary to what anyone says, he has not maintained any single position — he’s been all over the place. )

If someone can come up with a way to move these two senators the Democrats can pass their agenda. I’d like to hear what that might be. Sure Biden could go the West Virginia and Arizona and give speeches but that would do nothing, I guarantee it. Sinema loves to be maverick and Manchin is functionally a Republican who will be lauded for obstructing voting rights.

We’ve been watching these negotiations for almost a year now and these two are constantly moving the ball and feinting this way and that. It’s like trying to nail jello. But throughout it all they’ve been steady on one issue: they will not agree to eliminate the filibuster. They are completely dug in on that and I cannot see how anyone can force them to change their minds.

So people need to accept this situation for what it is. A 50-50 Senate gives tremendous power to any one Senator and Manchin and Sinema have decided they are the ones to take that power and run with it. They like the attention and they are not inclined to give it up.

It’s still worth it to have the majority so as not to have Mitch McConnell blocking all of Biden’s judges, of course. And they managed to get a couple of things quickly passed in the breach. But basically, without 60 votes the Senate is pretty much out of the legislation business except in extreme circumstances. ( Remember, Obama had 59 votes and they had to pass Obamacare through reconciliation where it only got 56 Democratic votes. )

Unless it is reformed substantially, the US Senate is just a debating society that confirms judges and sign off on budget bills unless there is a deadly emergency. That’s it.

Biden gave a good speech today and maybe it will have an effect. Maybe they can get Manchin to agree to some changes in the filibuster that might make it possible to get something done on voting rights. But I think it’s a long shot. He doesn’t want to do anything. He wants to showboat and please his wealthy doors and Republican friends. Obstructing the Democratic agenda is a perfect way to do that.

Philip Bump deconstructs the heinous lie that went around the world yesterday:

Monday evening brought something special to Fox News’s prime-time lineup. Tucker Carlson’s program was a “special edition,” text displayed at one point on the show’s lower-third suggested, on “the left’s politicization of the coronavirus.” In reality, however, the show was a very good example of its usual focus: Carlson politicizing the coronavirus in service of the political right.

There’s a very concrete example of that effort from Monday’s show. It’s an example that makes obvious how concerned Carlson and his team are about accuracy (not terribly) but also how difficult it can be to uproot misinformation.

You may have seen a snippet of an interview from ABC’s “Good Morning America” in which Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, described the role of comorbidities — other illnesses — in coronavirus deaths. If you didn’t see it, here’s the Republican National Committee sharing it on social media.

Biden’s CDC Director: "The overwhelming number of death, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities." pic.twitter.com/HUDd323sPG

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 10, 2022

It’s worth stopping for a minute and considering why the RNC determined this was worth sharing. Why does a political party view it as useful to elevate an assertion that covid-19 deaths are mainly linked to already sick people? The answer, of course, is that the Republican Party is fully invested in downplaying the danger of the virus to cast President Biden as overreaching. If only the very sick are dying, then efforts to contain the virus broadly are less urgent.

Except, as HotAir’s pseudonymous writer Allahpundit pointed out Monday afternoon, this isn’t what Walensky was saying. She was referring to a study that evaluated the deaths of 1.2 million adults who had been vaccinated, only 36 of whom died of covid-19. It was among those 36 vaccinated individuals that three-quarters (28 in total) had four or more comorbidities.

Part of the problem lies with how “Good Morning America” edited the clip. The RNC’s clip is what aired Friday morning, without the context that Walensky was referring solely to deaths among the vaccinated. The show subsequently released a full version of the interview that made that clear.

Allahpundit’s article was published at about 4 p.m. Monday and began making the rounds on social media. The full interview was published by ABC on YouTube at about 6 p.m. And then, at 8 p.m., Carlson aired the original excerpt from Friday morning to the exact same end as that tweet from the RNC.

Carlson claimed to have emails sent during the Trump administration that showed an official questioning the CDC’s inclusion of certain deaths as being a function of covid-19. This has been a long-standing line of rhetoric among those looking to downplay the effects of the virus, one that is easily debunked. He then pivoted to the Walensky video.

“Now, over a year later, with Trump safely out of office,” Carlson said in introducing the segment, “the CDC is publicly acknowledging: Yeah, they lied.”

Of course even if Walensky had been talking broadly about the role of comorbidities, that’s not a “lie.” The CDC has tracked data on the extent of confounding illnesses since at least May 2020, as you can see in this archived version of their website. From the earliest days of the pandemic, it was understood that older, less healthy people faced a higher risk from the virus.

Here, for example, was President Donald Trump, speaking on Feb. 29, 2020, shortly after the first recorded covid-19 death in the United States.

“Unfortunately, one person passed away overnight. She was a wonderful woman — a medically high-risk patient in her late fifties,” Trump said. (The decedent was actually a man; the CDC took the blame for the mistake.)

“Additional cases in the United States are likely, but healthy individuals should be able to fully recover,” he continued. “ … Healthy people, if you’re healthy, you will probably go through a process and you’ll be fine.”

Over and over, it was recognized that covid was more dangerous for those who were sick and, over and over, that those who were sick or otherwise unhealthy were dying at higher rates. That’s the data the CDC has been collecting. (You can see the current numbers here.)

At the National Review, Philip Klein points out that Carlson wasn’t alone. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) shared the same clip shortly before 9 p.m. Monday, adding a bit of feisty commentary.

“Some of us have been saying this” for two years, Cruz wrote on Twitter. “Dems & corporate media said we [were] nuts. Now, without the slightest hint of shame, they admit it.”

Cruz, without the slightest hint of shame, later deleted his tweet.

The challenge here is not that misinformation spreads readily on social media. That’s known. The challenge is similarly not that “Good Morning America’s” original edit was itself misleading, contributing to the problem. The challenge is that institutions that Americans should be able to rely on as purveyors of accurate information are, instead, serving the opposite role. The problem is that the RNC’s misleading tweet is still up. The problem is that Carlson’s producers pulled the clip from ABC News — but somehow missed that ABC News had already released a fuller version of the interview specifically because it was being misrepresented.

You know who recognized that the clip was misleading? Fox News, which ran an article Monday afternoon in which the context for Walensky’s comments was made clear. Granted, even that article tried to play up some uncertainty in what Walensky had said; her comments, the article’s headline states, “spark[ed] confusion.” But the article included an on-record response from the CDC itself making clear the context — well before Carlson’s show aired.

Perhaps Carlson will issue a correction in his program Tuesday. Or, perhaps, the network will simply rely on its past defense of Carlson: that viewers should know better than to assume that he’s presenting factual information.

It doesn’t matter if he issues a correction. They all got what they wanted. They owned the libs. That’s what they live for.

This is a Senate hearing, you know, the house of congress that’s supposed to be “the saucer that cools the tea.” Today it is a boiling cauldron of toxic swill;

“In usual fashion, senator, you are distorting everything about me … you keep distorting the truth. It’s stunning” — Dr. Fauci and Rand Paul are going at it again.

(Paul is grilling him about his emails.)

“We are here at a committee to look a virus now that has killed nearly 900,000 people. And the purpose of the committee was to try to get things out, how we can help the American public. And you keep coming back to personal attacks on me” — Fauci to Rand Paul

Fauci notes that Paul’s attacks on him result in death threats against him and family as Paul looks on expressionlessly. Fauci also notes that Paul is fundraising on his unhinged attacks on him.

i hope Susan Collins pushed this line of questioning because she wanted an on-record explanation from Dr. Fauci and not because she still hasn’t figured out that the point of getting vaccinated is to protect against severe illness

the dark irony of this Roger Marshall graphic is that the people dying in 2021 disproportionately were Republican voters who listen to Republican politicians

“It really pains me to have to point out to the American public how incorrect you are … once again, you are completely and unequivocally incorrect” — Fauci to Roger Marshall

Fauci to Roger Marshall: “You’re backing down on this?”

Tommy Tuberville: explain this to me, but in football terms

Tommy Tuberville is pushing anti-vax talking points about the flu vaccine

After Paul and Marshall attack Fauci, Romney defends him: “You’re scientists, not politicians. Nevertheless, you’re being made subject to the political whims of various political individuals and that comes at a high cost.”

Walensky explains how she was taken out of context by Republicans when she said that a high percentage of vaccinated people who have died from Covid had significant comorbidities

Tammy Baldin: “If there were to be a true tit for tat on the performance angle, there’s any number of areas we could go. I reflect on proposals for ultraviolet light and drinking bleach … we could go there, but it’s not productive.”

there’s going to be a second round of questioning in the Senate Covid response hearing.

You know what that means: it’s time for Rand Paul vs. Fauci in a Hell in a Cell match

Rand Paul says it’s “insulting” that Fauci would accuse him of inciting threats against him, because Paul was on the ball field when Steve Scalise was shot

wow, RINO

Tina Smith: “Dr. Fauci has been the target of a concerted and coordinated campaign of disinformation and distortion … I think we just need to be honest here. This is being done by some members of the Republican Party that are using it for fundraising.”

Roger Marshall is the Ronny Jackson of Rand Pauls

“You’re so misinformed, it’s extraordinary … what are you talking about” — Fauci to Roger Marshall

wait for it

Originally tweeted by Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) on January 11, 2022.

Update:

HOT MIC MOMENT: After clashing with GOP Sen. Roger Marshall, Dr. Fauci was caught muttering, "what a moron," followed by "Jesus Christ." pic.twitter.com/merKU3BGAJ

— Mediaite (@Mediaite) January 11, 2022

He took the words right out of my mouth.

A poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that management of the coronavirus pandemic , once an issue that strongly favored President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats, is beginning to recede in the minds of Americans. COVID-19 is increasingly overshadowed by concerns about the economy and personal finances — particularly inflation — which are topics that could lift Republicans.

Just 37% of Americans name the virus as one of their top five priorities for the government to work on in 2022, compared with 53% who said it was a leading priority at the same time a year ago. The economy outpaced the pandemic in the open-ended question, with 68% of respondents mentioning it in some way as a top 2022 concern. A similar percentage said the same last year, but mentions of inflation are much higher now: 14% this year, compared with less than 1% last year.

Consumer prices jumped 6.8% for the 12 months ending in November, a nearly four-decade high . Meanwhile, roughly twice as many Americans now mention their household finances, namely, the cost of living, as a governmental priority, 24% vs. 12% last year.

The poll was conducted in early December, when worries about the virus were rising as omicron took hold in the country, but before it sparked record caseloads , overwhelmed testing sites and hospitals and upended holiday travel . Still, in recent follow-up interviews with participants, including self-identified Democrats, many said those developments didn’t shake their views.

“If we say anything along the lines of, ‘Let’s wait until the pandemic dies down,’ well, this son of a gun virus has unlimited ability to mutate,” said Mary Small, a 65-year-old pharmaceutical research contractor in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, who hopes efforts to promote gun safety will take center stage in November’s elections, including her state’s race for an open Senate seat. “We might never be done with this.”

That sentiment reflects the challenge for Democrats at the onset of the election year. The party won the White House and control of Congress in 2020 with pledges to manage the pandemic more competently than the Trump administration. After initially earning high marks — roughly 70% approved of Biden’s handling of the pandemic from late February through mid-July — the virus’ persistence has undermined the new president’s message.

Administration officials acknowledge that the public is growing increasingly weary of COVID-19.

“Pandemic fatigue is real, and all of us feel it at some point,” Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said in an interview. “As a doctor, I’ve certainly seen it with my patients over the years. When you get tired and beaten down by a health problem — whether it’s a personal health problem or a broader public health challenge — it can lead to disengagement.”

The White House says COVID-19′s waning as a preeminent concern actually underscores its success rolling out preventative measures, including vaccines. It argues that economic jitters now exacerbated by the pandemic eventually will ease.

Still, with Democrats likely struggling to campaign on the idea that they’ve now defeated the virus, the other issues gaining attention among voters pose more immediate political headaches.

Judy Kunzman doesn’t blame Biden for the ongoing pandemic, calling it “just one of those events that are impossible to predict and almost as impossible to fix.” But she’s worried about continued supply chain disruptions, which affect “a lot of the other issues that we’re having: The rising food prices. The fact that I can’t buy my new car.”

“Everything has chips and the chips aren’t there,” said Kunzman, 75, of Middletown, Pennsylvania, referring to a pandemic-fueled, global shortage of microchips many electronics depend on. She’s waited months for the car she’d like to become available and noted that her sister faced difficulties finding a new cellphone.

Talk about first world problems …

I don’t know. This poll was taken in early December before Omicron really took hold. But I’d guess it’s probably hasn’t changed all that much. People are sick of thinking about COVID and now that the vaccines are promising that we aren’t all going to ie they want to put it behind them.

They haven’t caught up yet with the good economy. The media was pounding the inflation story when this poll was taken and it’s a legitimate concern. But I’m not sure it’s going to be as salient come this summer. We’ll see.

But you have to love this:

“It’s certainly not the victory the Democrats thought it would be,” Adam Brandon, president of the conservative activist group FreedomWorks, said of the government’s virus response. “We’ll have another wave next year, and I just don’t think anyone’s going to care. I think we’re going to get to a point where everyone’s just going to have to learn to live with it. This will die with a whimper as people just lose interest.”

Cheering for the ongoing death of their own voters is such a self-own I don’t know what to say.

This little ditty popped onto the Asheville Politics FB group on Monday (Associated Press):

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A group of North Carolina voters urged state officials Monday to disqualify U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn as a congressional candidate, citing his participation in a rally last January in Washington that questioned the presidential election outcome and preceded the Capitol riot.

Cawthorn’s office quickly condemned the candidacy challenge, filed on behalf of 11 voters before the State Board of Elections, which oversees the scrutiny of candidates’ qualifications. The voters contend that Cawthorn, a Republican who formally filed as a candidate for the 13th District seat last month, can’t run because he fails to comply with an amendment in the U.S. Constitution ratified shortly after the Civil War.

In addition to confirming that everyone born in this country is a citizen entitled to all the rights pertaining thereto, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment passed during Reconstruction states:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Those of us in the newly renamed and redrawn 14th Congressional District (including more than a few Republicans) don’t want Cawthorn back. It would be sweet irony if he is disqualified from running elsewhere by the 14th Amendment. That is just what Cawthorn’s challengers contend:

The written challenge says events on Jan. 6, 2021 “amounted to an insurrection” and that Cawthorn’s speech at the rally supporting then-President Donald Trump, his other comments and information in published reports provide a “reasonable suspicion or belief” that he helped facilitate the insurrection.

Their filing is here. In it, challengers state:

7. In 1869, the North Carolina Supreme Court issued the leading national precedent on the meaning of “engage” under Section Three. The Court held that a candidate “engages” in a rebellion or insurrection for the purposes of the Disqualification Clause by “[v]oluntarily aiding the rebellion, by personal service, or by contributions, other than charitable, of any thing that was useful or necessary.” Worthy v. Barrett, 63 N.C. 199, 203 (1869).

8. Planning or helping plan an insurrection or rebellion satisfies that definition. So does planning a demonstration or march upon a government building that the planner knows is substantially likely to (and does) result in insurrection or rebellion, as it constitutes taking voluntary steps to contribute, “by personal service,” a “thing that was useful or necessary” to the insurrection or rebellion. And knowing that insurrection or rebellion was likely makes that aid voluntary.

There is nothing I’ve seen to suggest Cawthorn planned or helped plan the rally. He was probably beside himself just to be asked to speak. Egging on the crowd to march on the Capitol is another matter. But it is not clear he did that.

AP continues:

The state board scheduled a meeting Wednesday to create a five-member panel or panels from counties within the proposed 13th District required to hear the challenge. The ruling by such a panel can be appealed to the state board and later to an appeals court. Three of the five state board members are Democrats.

Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama (R-Kevlar) is another matter. He is already being sued over helping inciting the riot. “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass!” Brooks told the crowd on Jan. 6. “Now, our ancestors sacrificed their blood, their sweat, their tears, their fortunes and sometimes their lives … Are you willing to do the same? My answer is yes. Louder! Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America?”

And fight they did. Many, anyway. Not only at Brooks’ urging, but at Trump’s. Perhaps he’ll feel a cold, 14th breeze down his neck.

Gonna drop Charlie Pierce right here:

As the months go on, we may find reasons to drop Section 3 on the heads of a number of Cawthorn’s colleagues, so this action in North Carolina is more than welcome. After all, as Garrett Epps writes in his admirably lucid history of the 14th Amendment and its ratification, Democracy Reborn, nobody in that Congress had any doubt about what Section 3 was aimed at. The majority report from the joint congressional committee on the amendment stated quite clearly that, as Epps puts it:

Southerners had taken advantage of the president’s [Andrew Johnson] leniency to elect “notorious and unpardoned rebels” as prospective members of Congress, and the committee’s interviews with Southeners and federal officials produced “no evidence whatever” among white Southerners “of repentance for their crime” or any real regret “except that they had no longer the power to continue the desperate struggle.”

The entire brief public career of Rep. Madison Cawthorn makes the authors of that report look like Nostradamus. However, there has been a powerful undertow against the Reconstruction Amendments ever since their passage, and it’s become increasingly powerful as the prion disease spread within the conservative collective mind. Which is why I hope this action in North Carolina proceeds steadily upwards.

Speaking for Free Speech for People, the group supporting the Cawthorn challenge, legal director Ron Fein told AP its North Carolina filing will be the first of many qualification challenges it plans to file in states against members of Congress and Trump.

Does the 14th Amendment bite? Or is it simply empty rhetoric?

I love you man, but seriously, Greg?

If Republicans succeed in blocking Democratic efforts to protect voting rights this week, as expected, the push to defend democracy will be anything but dead. That’s because another important proposal to prevent a stolen 2024 election is coming together in the Senate.
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This one may — may — prove harder for Republicans to oppose. At least it should prove harder.

No it won’t. Essentially, the proposal Greg’s talking about is to officially reduce Congress’s and the VP’s role in electoral vote counting to a ceremonial role. The pretend purpose is to forestall Trump’s ability to seek any legal recourse to play the games he tried to play in 2020.

But the real purpose of this bill — as Greg acknowledges at the end of the column even if he refuses to fully believe it — is to provide Manchin with an excuse not to vote for a voting rights carve-out for the filibuster — but still vote for something in that general direction. And of course, once that is dead and buried, any fake Republican support for this Lucy’s football of an electoral college reform bill — which is nearly worthless, given the dreadful state of this country’s governance — will magically disappear. And Manchin will likely not vote for Lucy’s football, either.

if you’re an ER doctor and a person complains about their severely sore throat when all you can notice is that their left arm appears to have been recently amputated and is bleeding severely, you treat the wound first.

We have been hemorrhaging democracy for years. We need voting rights protection and Manchin cannot be given an excuse to weasel out of voting for it. We can’t afford to have the imperfect be the enemy of the badly needed.

Projection is so overused to describe Republicans’ “I know you are but what am I?” stances on, well, almost anything, that I cringe even typing it here. Nevertheless.

Monday night, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported via Politico that Donald Trump supporters in Michigan and Arizona forged and submitted to the National Archives documents purporting to be the official electors — Trump electors — from those two states won in 2020 by Joe Biden. This comes to three instances where this occured. Previously, another Trump group from Wisconsin tried it:

On December 14, 2020, Wisconsin’s duly certified Presidential Electors met at the State Capitol to cast the state’s ten electoral votes in the Electoral College. On the same day, ten other individuals gathered to execute a competing set of documents, purporting to cast Wisconsin’s votes for candidates that lost the statewide election (as confirmed through the recount process and multiple judicial rulings). These “fraudulent electors” acted in violation of state law, which specifies that the people of Wisconsin choose the Presidential Electors through their votes on the November ballot.

These fraudulent electors sent the false documents they created to the U.S. Congress, in an apparent effort to make sure that they would be counted as Wisconsin’s actual ten electoral votes on January 6th.

Politico’s Nicholas Wu uncovered the Michigan and Arizona frauds via a public records request to states for documents being sought separately by House Jan. 6 investigators. Wu cleverly got around the investigation’s secrecy by asking the states for the documents House investigators had requested from the states.

Politico reports:

As Trump’s team pushed its discredited voter fraud narrative, the National Archives received forged certificates of ascertainment declaring him and then-Vice President Mike Pence the winners of both Michigan and Arizona and their electors after the 2020 election. Public records requests show the secretaries of state for those states sent those certificates to the Jan. 6 panel, along with correspondence between the National Archives and state officials about the documents.

Spokespeople for the Michigan and Arizona secretaries of state declined to comment on the documents. The offices confirmed that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, both Democrats, and their staff met with the panel in November.

“They mostly discussed election administration in Arizona, the 2020 elections, threats/harassment directed toward the office, and the Cyber Ninja’s partisan ballot review,” said Hobbs’ spokesperson C. Murphy Hebert.

Benson and her staff took questions from the committee on the 2020 election and events leading up to the Jan. 6 riot, according to Tracy Wimmer, a spokesperson for Benson.

The National Archives sent emails to the Arizona secretary of state on Dec. 11, 2020, passing along the forged certificates “for your awareness” and informing the state officials the Archives would not accept them.

Arizona then took legal action against at least one of the groups who sent in the fake documents, sending a cease and desist letter to a pro-Trump “sovereign citizen” group telling them to stop using the state seal and referring the matter to the state attorney general.

“By affixing the state seal to documents containing false and misleading information about the results of Arizona’s November 3, 2020 General Election, you undermine the confidence in our democratic institutions,” Hobbs wrote to one of the pro-Trump groups.

That group’s leader, Lori Osiecki, had told the Arizona Republic in December 2020 that she decided to send in the certificates after taking part in post-election rallies and after attending a daylong meeting in Phoenix that had included Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.

The group that forged the Michigan certification had not used the state seal, and it appears state officials there took no further action after the Archives rejected it.

"As Trump's team pushed its discredited voter fraud narrative, the National Archives received forged certificates of ascertainment declaring him and then-Vice President Mike Pence the winners of both Michigan and Arizona and their electors… "https://t.co/JkeiPVwolH

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) January 11, 2022

Maddow note similarities between the Michigan and Wisconsin documents, down to language, formatting and fonts. The Arizona forgery is different.

These groups not only “undermine the confidence in our democratic institutions,” as the Arizona secretary of state responded, but could face prosecution.

Was someone coordinating this conspiracy to upset the valid vote count? Maddow asked. “Who believes we’ll find more where this came from? Raise your hand.”

“Trump lost 25 states in 2020,” Maddowblog’s Steve Benen reminds. “How many of them included election opponents willing to send fake documents to government offices?”

When it comes to Republican accusations that it is Democrats who are trying to rig elections and cheat, projection is exactly the right word.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfsVHoFaGAg

UPDATE: Via Twitter, it seems Politico is late to the game. This story came out nearly a year ago and never got traction. And it was seven states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

This is what it’s come to:

Anti-COVID-19 “Vaccine Police” leader Christopher Key has a new quarter-baked conspiracy theory for his anti-vax followers to use to cure themselves of COVID-19: Drink their own urine. “The antidote that we have seen now, and we have tons and tons of research, is urine therapy. OK, and I know to a lot of you this sounds crazy, but guys, God’s given us everything we need,” Key said in a video posted over the weekend on his Telegram account after being released from jail over a trespassing charge.

“This has been around for centuries,” he added. “When I tell you this, please take it with a grain of salt,” the anti-vaccine advocate warned while saying people might now think he is “cray cray.” “Now drink urine!” he continued. “This vaccine is the worst bioweapon I have ever seen,” he concluded. “I drink my own urine!”

Reached for comment by The Daily Beast on Sunday night, Key doubled down on what he calls “urine therapy” and railed against “foolish” people who took the COVID-19 vaccine, which is safe and effective.

Thi has to be an elaborate practical joke, right? He’s trying to make a fool of anti-vaxxers by telling them to do something this inane.

Sadly, no. He’s serious. And I will not be surprised to learn that some in the antivax crowd are doing it. They can’t truth the vaccines despite hundreds of millions of people’s experience with them over the past year. But drinking urine? Sounds like a plan.