Persuadable voters are breaking towards the party controlling the White House and Congress, which is unlike what we saw in 2010, 2018 or even earlier this year.
Our poll defines “persuadable voters” — representing about 25% of the sample — as registered voters who are not core Democrats or Republicans, meaning that they’re either hard independents or Democrats/Republicans who aren’t reliable party backers.
These voters are disproportionately males, ideological moderates, self-identified independents and those living in the exurbs.
In 2010, our merged polls showed Republicans with a 13-point advantage among these persuadable voters, 38%-25%.
In 2018, our merged polls found Democrats with an 8-point lead, 39%-31%.
And in our combined NBC News polls from January, March and May, Republicans were ahead by 6 points among persuadable voters, 39%-33%.
But in our poll this month, Democrats — the party in power — were up by 3 points among these voters, 40%-37%.
Now this is just one poll. It’s also a group (25% of all registered voters) that has a higher margin of error.
Still, it’s another data point to consider in our future polls heading int November — along with enthusiasm, President Biden’s approval rating and the overall generic ballot.
Males, moderate, and independents living in the exurbs. Except for moderates, this is not the groups I would expect to be moving to the Dems. I’m not totally convinced by this but if the numbers hold up, it definitely says something.
Truth Social, the app launched by Donald Trump as a free speech platform for conservatives, is facing serious financial and legal stress as it tries to survive, Axios Media Trends author Sara Fischer writes.
The app is the former president’s biggest business venture since leaving office — and his best effort to create an alternative populist megaphone after being banned from Twitter.
Truth Social owes a vendor — an internet infrastructure company for conservatives, RightForge — $1.6 million, sources tell Axios.
The situation, first reported by Fox Business, puts Truth Social at risk of losing the cloud hosting it needs to operate.
Beyond financial issues,Truth Social and the blank check company (SPAC) it plans to merge with in order to go public are facing serious legal problems — and regulatory probes — that could derail those plans.
The blank check company,Digital World Acquisition Corp., is under investigation by the SEC for possibly negotiating the deal prior to going public.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office refused Trump’s application for a trademark for “Truth Social.”
An investorsued Digital World Acquisition Corp.’s CEO last year, claiming fraud.
It’s unclear how many people — or exactly who — are working for Truth Social. Most members of Trump’s presidential inner circle aren’t involved in Truth Social’s day-to-day operations.
Its CEO, former Republican congressman Devin Nunes, makes occasional media appearances to discuss the app. A few people say on LinkedIn that they work for Truth Social.
The app’s problems haven’t stopped conservatives from exploring the service, where Trump now posts regularly without fear of being throttled or banned.
As of mid-August, the app had 3 million downloads worldwide across iOS (mostly in the U.S. and a few thousand in the UK), per Data.ai, an app measurement company.
Truth Social saw a surge of downloads in response to the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search.
Reality check: Trump has 4 million followers on the app, compared to the 88 million he had on Twitter before being banned last year.
Truth Social isn’t available on Android, meaning that around 44% of smartphone users in the U.S. can’t download it.
At this point it’s basically just a platform for people to copy and paste Trump posts on other websites when he says something outrageous or semi-meaningful. Mostly his feed is just re-posted memes and stupid gifs. It’s dull as dishwater. If he weren’t the GOP frontrunner for 2024, he would disappear into the ether like summer fog.
Trump is spending his morning on Truth Social directly posting 4chan and Q messages, a day after calling to be reinstated as president. He’s doing explicitly what he used to try to shade or use coded language for. pic.twitter.com/ksCMJnJ8KW
Click on the arrow above to see the scroll of utterly insane Trump posts. Yikes.
Trump is holding a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday. It will be the first time he’s appeared before a crowd since the Mar-a-lago search and he seems to have severely decompensated since that time. It will be interesting.
Biden is appearing in Pennsylvania today which Axios characterizes as a 2020 rematch for some reason. Still, the contrast between the two speeches will be interesting:
Call it a 2020 flashback — or a foreshadow of 2024: Residents of Wilkes-Barre, in northeastern Pennsylvania, are getting dueling visits this week, first from President Biden, then from former President Donald Trump.
Their visits underscore the region’s significance in national politics.
Pennsylvania is one of the biggest political battlegrounds on the midterm map. But Trump-endorsed candidates have jeopardized the GOP’s ability to gain ground in this perennial swing state.
Wilkes-Barre is close to Biden’s hometown of Scranton, a onetime Democratic stronghold that’s become a lot more Republican lately. It’s located in one of the most hotly-contested swing districts on this year’s midterm map.
Biden is holding an official White House event on Tuesday at Wilkes University, giving a speech focused on public safety. Trump holds his first midterm general-election rally on Saturday, at an arena a few miles down the road.
Biden’s visit is the make-up date for July plans that had to be postponed when he got COVID.
Trump is headlining an event with three of his endorsed candidates in Pennsylvania, now the GOP nominees for their respective contests: Doug Mastriano for governor, Mehmet Oz for Senate and congressional challenger Jim Bognet for a House seat.
[…]
The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter moved Pennsylvania’s Senate race to “lean Democrat” this month, citing widespread GOP concerns with the state of Oz’s campaign. Rep. Matt Cartwright, who represents Luzerne County in Congress, is only one of five Democrats left holding a district that Trump carried in 2020.
Bognet, Cartwright’s GOP challenger and a former Republican consultant, has trumpeted his Trump endorsement.
“I was proud to work for President Trump in his administration to advance the America First agenda. I’m the only challenger in Pennsylvania endorsed by President Trump, and I’m excited President Trump is having a huge rally in my district this Saturday,” Bognet told Axios.
But Bognet scrubbed most of the Trump mentions on his campaign website after winning the GOP primary, according to HuffPost — even though Trump carried the district by three points in 2020.
Biden will be back in Pennsylvania on Thursday to deliver a prime-time speech on “the continued battle for the soul of the nation” at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall.
Next week he’ll be in Pittsburgh for a campaign-style Labor Day parade featuring Democratic and union leaders.
Matt Cartwright is a good progressive who unseated a Blue Dog back in 2012 and has somehow survived over and over again in a district in which he shouldn’t have survived. I hope he can make it again. I’m glad to see the party supporting him which they haven’t always done.
I don’t know what “heritage” Doug Mastriano is defending but it isn’t his state’s
It’s bad enough that Republicans in the South are still celebrating the civil war over slavery. In fact, it’s pretty sickening. But a Pennsylvania politician — the home of Gettysburg — celebrating the confederacy is outrageous. WTF?
In one of his regular Facebook livestreams, Doug Mastriano in 2020 approached armed men next to a Confederate flag and thanked them for “being vigilant” in supposedly protecting Robert E. Lee’s statue at Gettysburg. He also praised someone for wearing a half-American, half-Confederate flag, saying he “can’t think of a better cape.”
[…]
Mastriano’s view of the Confederacy has been in focus in recent days after Reuters reported that in 2014, “Mastriano posed in Confederate uniform for a faculty photo at the Army War College. … Mastriano is the only one wearing a Confederate uniform.”
Following that report, Media Matters found 2020 video showing that the Pennsylvania Republican, who serves in the state Senate, has an apparent fondness for people who associate with the Confederacy.
On July 4, 2020, as The Washington Post wrote, “armed militia members, bikers and white nationalists turned up at the grounds of the Gettysburg National Military Park … to defend against a supposed burning of the U.S. flag by leftists.” In reality, the scheduled flag burning was an internet hoax. The Post wrote that the “episode at Gettysburg is a stark illustration of how shadowy figures on social media have stoked fears about the protests against racial injustice and excessive police force that have swept across the nation since the death of George Floyd in police custody on May 25.”
The Post added that “less than a mile away, at the Virginia Monument, hundreds of bikers and armed men gathered around a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.” Mastriano filmed a livestream in which he visited the Virginia Monument and thanked pro-Confederate armed men for standing guard.
During the first part of his Facebook video, Mastriano approached a car with a Confederate flag and thanked people with firearms for being there, stating: “Friends, thanks for being here. I’m Sen. Mastriano. … It’s good to see you guys.” He then spends time making small talk with them and tells them, “Thanks for being vigilant.”
I have to admit that this one is a shocker. Seeing a Pennsylvania politician who represents Gettysburg supporting confederate extremists at Gettysburg is something I never thought I’d see. 51,000 Americans died on that battlefield and you’d think that a man who served in the military for years would have a little more respect.
Remember that the population in 1863 was one-tenth of what it is now. If one were to translate the death toll from the Civil War into today’s population figures, it would not be in the thousands, or the tens of thousands, or the hundreds of thousands. It would be 7.5 million men dead.
This essay about the Gettysburg address came to mind. An excerpt:
The Gettysburg Address is emphatically a war speech — a speech designed to rally the North to stay the course. Many college students today do not pick up on this fact. Not knowing much history, but aware that Lincoln is beloved for his kindliness and his summons “to bind up the nation’s wounds,” they tend to read Lincoln’s Second Inaugural back into the Gettysburg Address. They assume that he is commemorating all the fallen (and they like him for his supposed inclusiveness, especially in contrast to the bombast and arrogance of Pericles). Perhaps their misreading might be excused, since a most unusual war speech it is.
Lincoln never mentions the enemy, or rather he mentions them only by implication. When he speaks of “those who here gave their lives that that nation might live,” his audience then would have been acutely aware that there were others who gave their lives that that nation might die, that it might no longer be the United States. The cemetery that was dedicated at Gettysburg was exclusively a Union cemetery. In fact, in the weeks before the dedication, the townspeople had witnessed the re-interment process, as thousands of the battle dead were exhumed from the shallow graves in which they had hastily been placed by those same local citizens back in the sweltering days of July. As they were uncovered, Union bodies were painstakingly identified and separated from Confederate bodies. While the rebels were simply reburied, coffinless, deeper in the ground where they were found (to be reclaimed later by their home states), the loyal dead were removed, further sorted into their military units, and placed in coffins and tidy lines, awaiting honorable burial in the new cemetery.
Lincoln’s abstraction from the enemy highlights the very abstract character of the entire speech. No specifics are given. There isn’t a proper noun to be found, with the single exception of God. Thus, there is no mention of Gettysburg, just “a great battle-field.” There is no mention of America, just “this continent.” There is no mention of the United States, just “a new nation” and “that nation” and “this nation.” There is no mention of the parties to the conflict, no North or South, no Union or Confederacy, just “a great civil war.” Lincoln speaks of “our fathers,” but no names are given. And although the opening clause, “four score and seven years ago,” does refer to a specific date, Lincoln has obscured it by giving the lapse of time in Biblical language and then by requiring the listener to subtract 87 from 1863 in order to arrive at the date of 1776.
The tremendous abstraction or generality of the speech is part of what explains its ability to speak to people in different eras and cultures who have no connection to the events at Gettysburg, and yet feel, as Lincoln might say, that they are “blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh” of those spoken of there, or more accurately of those spoken to there. The addressees of the speech are identified simply as “we,” “the living.” Refusing to dwell long among the dead, since words are inadequate to the act of consecration, Lincoln redeploys his words, turning them from mere saying into their own form of deed. He summons the living to “the unfinished work” and swears them to “the great task remaining.” He turns an elegy into a call of duty.
The abstraction of the Gettysburg Address is in marked contrast to the impromptu speech that Lincoln gave on July 7th, right after the victory, when residents of the District of Columbia assembled outside the White House to serenade him. This was before the era of the Secret Service and massive barricades around the White House, when interaction between presidents and ordinary citizens was much more intimate. In his brief remarks, Lincoln prefigures points he will make at Gettysburg; however, he does so in very different language — informal and highly specific. After thanking the visitors, he says:
How long ago is it? — eighty odd years — since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that “all men are created equal.” That was the birthday of the United States of America.
After mentioning by name Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, Lincoln goes on to describe the significance of the victory:
and now, on this last Fourth of July just passed, when we have a gigantic Rebellion, at the bottom of which is an effort to overthrow the principle that all men are created equal, we have the surrender of a most powerful position and army on that very day, and not only so, but in a succession of battles in Pennsylvania, near to us, through three days, so rapidly fought that they might be called one great battle on the 1st, 2d, and 3d of the month of July; and on the 4th the cohorts of those who opposed the declaration that all men are created equal, “turned tail” and run. Gentlemen, this is a glorious theme, and the occasion for a speech, but I am not prepared to make one worthy of the occasion.
Four months later, he was ready.
The first Republican president would roll over in his grave at the idea of a Pennsylvania candidate for Governor supporting the confederacy. It’s appalling.
In newly surfaced remarks, Doug Mastriano in 2020 approached armed men next to a truck with a Confederate flag and thanked them for supposedly defending a Robert E. Lee statue at Gettysburg: “Friends, thanks for being here … Thanks for being vigilant.” https://t.co/qcRjEN9WkLpic.twitter.com/efV2oh04Ul
Bivalent Covid vaccines are on the way within weeks, as Digby posted on Monday. Please continue to mask indoors. Get the boosters when you can and it’s time, depending on the time since your last one.
Ignore the idiots who insist that since you can still get Covid even if vaccinated, what’s the point. Every year some people vaccinated against the seasonal flu get it too. That’s no reason not to get the shot. Flu kills people too.
Long Covid is something to avoid. Really. Don’t take my word for it.
I’ve been diagnosed with a form of #dysautonomia called #POTS as part of my care at @MountSinaiNYC’s Post-COVID Clinic. Basically my autonomic nervous system, which controls things like HR, blood pressure, etc. in your body aka things you don’t even think about is messed up.
Then yesterday, I bent down to put something in the garbage, and I lit’rally fainted because my BP dropped so low. Luckily my saint of a husband caught me as I started falling so I am physically unscathed and didn’t hit my head on the way down.
And I’m still early in my Long COVID journey. I might end up being semi-functional with the right symptoms management. Or I might end up as one of the Long COVID folks whose symptoms meet the diagnostic criteria for #MECFS and end up even less functional. Only time will tell.
“Why am I sharing this deeply personal story on the internet?” Sayko writes. “Because I took my eye off the ball for ONE weekend because there seemed to be no urgency in public health messaging in mainstream media. So I thought I was safe because I kept hearing ‘we have all these tools now!’”
Nope. Read on. Long Covid is not something to trifle with.
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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
Who owns your local schools? Pondering an abandoned school in his neighborhood that kids once used as a playground, the Washington Post’s Matt Bai reviews what he considers “basic civics.” His local school system is sitting on the property like “a real estate concern or a conglomerate” rather than turning it into green space “for the greater good.” Local governments “are just as apt to forget that those taxes aren’t meant to perpetuate fiefdoms and amass capital.”
Neither is private capital entitled to pillage the public good for private profit.
My new North Carolina state representative Caleb Rudow is a former Peace Corps volunteer who holds a masters degree in Global Policy Studies from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. The greater good is in his blood. Coincidentally, he tweeted last night about the funding for North Carolina schools.
NC is seriously lagging behind in 2 key areas: teacher pay and per-pupil funding. Our state has some of the most brilliant educators. There’s no excuse for us to be ranked 34th in average teacher pay.
If we’re not investing in our educators and our children, what are we doing?
Here’s what we are doing. The collective We are abetting the investor class in raiding the public purse for its own gain. Investors have coopted religious conservatives to help divert funds from public schools the country has supported since the Articles of Confederation to private school vouchers and to charter schools.
Why? They want the billion$. Public education is required by 48 state constitutions. It’s the largest annual budget item in all 50 states. Here’s a recent one from Noth Carolina. Your state budget looks similar.
If you think the conservative furor over critical race theory and grooming and book bans is about culture war issues, you probably think George W. Bush’s push to privatize Social Security was about getting you, Average Taxpayer, a better long-term return on your paycheck witholdings.
It’s about the money. What stands between the investor class and the hundreds of billions states spend, not-for-profit, on public education annually are teachers and school custodians and school administers and state boards of education. They’ve got to go.
Just as Republicans spent decades undermining public confidence in free and fair elections to pave the way for a one-party state, the investor class has worked quietly at diverting more and more public tax dollars away from public schools to charters and voucher programs. Religious conservatives are useful idiots in the project.
Just as conservative politicians swear that goverment doesn’t work and, once in elected office, set out to prove it, investors mean to hollow out public schools until they dry up and blow away like Matt Bai’s abandoned local school. But since kids still have to be educated and state constitutions require it, the private sector in its magnanimity will step in to provide that service. At a markup, of course. Investors will profit from the predictable, government-guaranteed, near-recession-proof stream of public tax dollars. Your kids are their cash cows.
Jonathan Kozol explained it in Harper’s in August 2007:
Privatizing advocates tend to employ a familiar set of strategies in their campaign to replace public education, which they deride as “Soviet” or “socialist” in nature, with a market system in which public dollars no longer go to public schools but are distributed directly to parents, who in theory will be free to spend the money at either a public school or a private institution.
Private education advocates know what sells. They sell their program as choice, innovation, opportunity. A chance for black and brown children to escape “failing” public schools.
The idealistic motives that are commonly identified with inner-city Catholic schools are seized upon in order to position the discussion on an elevated ground of seemingly unselfish, and high-minded goals. Meanwhile, in writings narrowly directed at investors, all of these higher motives disappear, and other benefits to be derived from vouchers suddenly emerge. This is where the masks come off and all pretenses of altruism.
Let’s get to the meat of it:
Some years ago, a friend who works on Wall Street handed me a stock-market prospectus in which a group of analysts at an investment-banking firm known as Montgomery Securities described the financial benefits to be derived from privatizing our public schools. “The education industry”, according to these analysts, “represents, in our opinion, the final frontier of a number of sectors once under public control” that “have either voluntarily opened” or, they note in pointed terms, have “been forced” to open up to private enterprise. Indeed, they write, “the education industry represents the largest market opportunity” since health-care services were privatized during the 1970s. Referring to private education companies as “EMOs” (“Education Management Organizations”), they note that college education also offers some “attractive investment returns” for corporations, but then come back to what they see as the much greater profits to be gained by moving into public elementary and secondary schools. “The larger developing opportunity is in the K-12 EMO market, led by private elementary school providers”, which, they emphasize, “are well positioned to exploit potential political reforms such as school vouchers”. From the point of view of private profit, one of these analysts enthusiastically observes, “the K-12 market is the Big Enchilada”.
The Progressive sounded the same alarm in August 2014:
Over the last decade, the charter school movement has morphed from a small, community-based effort to foster alternative education into a national push to privatize public schools, pushed by free-market foundations and big education-management companies. This transformation opened the door to profit-seekers looking for a way to cash in on public funds.
In 2010, Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. has been an ALEC member, declared K-12 public education “a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.”
“Venture capitalists and for-profit firms are salivating over the exploding $788.7 billion market in K-12 education,” reads the subhead on Lee Fang’s warning in The Nation the next month. President Donald Trump installed privatizer Betsy DeVos as secretary of education in 2017.
Just as movement conservatives coopted the religious right to further their free-market wet dreams, the investor class has used them to help get its hands on that money. All the rest of the culture war bullshit is just that. A smokescreen.
Americans have supported public schools since before ratifying the U.S. Constitution. The Land Ordinance of 1785 provided in dividing up public lands in new states that “There shall be reserved the lot No. 16, of every township, for the maintenance of public schools.” The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 states, “Schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” By that legislators meant public schools operated in the public good. That was then.
Americans in name only want to see that public-minded tradition in eliminated. They’re working hard at it.
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Richard Nixon famously said “It the president does it, it’s not illegal” by which he meant that a sitting president, as the executive, is a branch of government unto himself and therefor the other two branches have no power over him. Coming from him, of course, it was a braindead comment but it was a constitutional argument, however ridiculous. It’s one that Bill Barr adhered to and which got him the job of Attorney General.
Jonathan Chait takes a look at how that argument has been expanded to simply mean that Donald Trump, the president and the man, is simply immune from all legal accountability. Just because he’s him:
Ever since he was sitting at his father’s knee and refusing repeated demands by the Justice Department to allow Black people to rent apartment buildings, Donald Trump has always believed the law does not apply to him. He acted accordingly both as president and as self-styled president-in-exile, treating any inconvenient law as a mere suggestion. Obstructing justice is a way of life for Trump.
The conservative Establishment has accommodated itself to this reality by developing a legal doctrine that obstruction of justice is not a crime, at least not if Trump is the obstructor.
This novel concept comes through in two documents that appeared last week, both explaining away different episodes of Trump obstructing justice. The first is a memo written at the behest of former attorney general William Barr, arguing against charging Trump with obstructing the Mueller investigation. The memo’s primary argument, which Barr used to dismiss Mueller’s findings, was that Trump’s obstruction of justice was not really obstruction because prosecutors were unable to prove he committed any underlying crime.
The main flaw in this line of reasoning is that Mueller may well have failed to prove a criminal conspiracy precisely because Trump obstructed his investigation. Specifically, he dangled pardons (and then subsequently delivered them) to Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, the two figures involved most directly in coordinating between his campaign and the Russian effort to benefit it.
It is possible, of course, that despite Manafort’s close ties to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian intelligence agent, and Roger Stone’s communication with WikiLeaks, which published the stolen Democratic emails, neither man possessed any evidence implicating Trump. The DOJ memo, and Trump’s defenders, have treated this possibility as a certainty.
“We cannot say that the evidence would prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the President’s statements, most of which were made publicly, were intended to induce any of these witnesses to conceal truthful evidence or to provide false evidence,” the memo argues, “Once again, this conclusion is buttressed by the absence of any clear evidence that these witnesses had information that would prove the President had committed a crime.”
The reasoning here is obviously circular. If Manafort and Stone did have any evidence against Trump, promising to pardon them if they refused to cooperate prevented that evidence from coming to light. Mueller’s inability to get testimony from either man hardly proves they didn’t have any evidence to begin with. Barr’s memo essentially argues that it’s only obstruction if you try to obstruct justice and fail.
It is probably no coincidence that, after engaging in obstruction of justice and then finding his conduct defended by the Justice Department, Trump has proceeded to engage in obstruction yet again. In the latest instance, he appears to have violated the law by taking government documents, lying about his possession of them, and refusing to give them back. The Justice Department’s affidavit claims “probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found” in the papers Trump illegally refused to give back to the government after leaving office.
Trump’s cronies no longer control the Justice Department, so the case against holding Trump accountable for his obstruction falls to his allies outside the government. Here is a remarkable passage from the Wall StreetJournaleditorial page making the case that Trump didn’t really violate the law:
“The affidavit also contains references to comments by Mr. Trump and his associates that didn’t tell the truth about what was classified or what he had turned over to the National Archives before the search. This appears to have frustrated the bureau enough that it felt he might be guilty of obstruction of justice by his lack of cooperation. To put it another way, the FBI thought Mr. Trump was behaving badly, as he so often does.
But that didn’t mean the FBI and Justice Department had to resort to a warrant and federal-agent search that they knew would be redolent of criminal behavior.”
The first two sentences concede that Trump engaged in behavior (refusing to turn over stolen documents and then lying about it) that constitute a clear-cut violation of the law. But then the next sentence reframes these illegal actions as Trump “behaving badly” — as if this description somehow makes his crimes legal.
It then proceeds to complain about the Justice Department taking steps to respond to his defiance of the law that were “redolent of criminal behavior.” Well of course the government seizing stolen files was redolent of criminal behavior! That’s because it was criminal behavior!
Both the Barr memo and the Journal editorial turn Trump’s damaged psyche into an all-purpose defense of his mob-inspired work habits. Barr’s memo suggests Trump really just hated Mueller because he thought the investigation was hurting his agenda in Congress. The Journal insists Trump is simply a bad boy, but what are you gonna do?
The through-line to both these defenses is a belief, unsupported by any proof, that Trump’s obstruction of justice be seen in the most sympathetic possible light. If there is an available explanation for his crimes other than the existence of other crimes, it should be assumed correct, and used to offer leniency. And while Trump’s obstruction may merit a finger-wagging, the primary blame should fall on the authorities attempting to make Trump comply with the law. And when Trump decides to obstruct justice again, they will be blamed.
Trump is a criminal. He may be a stupid criminal — many are — but he is a criminal nonetheless. But because a bunch of equally stupid people love him, the GOP has determined that he should run the country. If he manages to win again and do his worst they will still defend him. After all, he attempted a coup and they let him off the hook.
It’s August 2022 and he’s saying that he should be declared the rightful winner of the 2020 election or there should be a new election called right now. He’s out of his mind.
As you listen to supposedly sane Republican officials argue that the Mar-a-lago search is all political and needs to be more “transparent” keep in mind that they are simultaneously threatening violence and defending a man who wrote that …. today
His cult followers are equally nuts:
I think it’s time we start covering Trumpism for what it is now.
It’s no longer a political movement. It’s a violent fairytale of revenge on political enemies.
Feds could’ve found a body in those Mar a Lago boxes and followers wouldn’t care. It’s about retribution, not facts.
Pro-Trump forums now exist to disseminate weaponizable data on new perceived villains to harass and threaten. One week it’s FBI agents, then IRS agents, then teachers or doctors.
This won’t stop, even if Trump is indicted. But it deserves to be reported on as the pattern it is.
“That’s what Trumpism is now. It’s retribution and revanchism on political enemies and what they view as culture war norms.”
The mainstream Republicans who are enabling this are even more to blame, in my mind. The reflexive defense of a losing former president who incited an insurrection and has now been found to have absconded with Top Secret documents that he has kept for almost two years in an unsecured storage room at his resort hotel and refused to give back is shameful. (Now they’re even screaming about Hillary Clinton again.)
They don’t care. They really don’t care. They may not be the extremists that Ben Collins is talking about in that clip but they are the extremists’ facilitators.
If you’re wondering about the new boosters, here’s a helpful guide
New boosters are on the way and I’m happy to see it. I will get one ASAP since it’s been five months since my last one and I have mercifully escaped COVID so far despite travelling this summer and getting stuck on planes and in airports in crowded conditions. So I want to be fully immunized at all times if possible. But it’s a bit confusing out there about when people should get it and I thought this from The Atlantic was informative:
In less than two weeks, you could walk out of a pharmacy with a next-generation COVID booster in your arm. Just a few days ago, the Biden administration indicated that the first updated COVID-19 vaccines would be available shortly after Labor Day to Americans 12 and older who have already had their primary series. Unlike the shots the U.S. has now, the new doses from Pfizer and Moderna will be bivalent, which means they’ll contain genetic material based both on the ancestral strain of the coronavirus and on two newer Omicron subvariants that are circulating in the U.S.
These shots’ new formulation promises some level of protection that simply hasn’t been possible with the original vaccines. “A bivalent vaccine will have some benefit for almost everybody who gets it,” Rishi Goel, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “How much benefit that is, we’re still not exactly sure.” People who aren’t at high risk could end up only marginally more protected against severe outcomes, and no one thinks the shots will banish COVID infections for good. There is, however, a simple rule of thumb that nearly everyone can follow to maximize the uncertain gains from a shot: Wait three to six months from your last COVID infection or vaccination.
Put that rule into action, and it plays out a little differently, depending on your circumstances.
If you haven’t had an Omicron infection:
If you haven’t had COVID since about November 2021, the advantage of a bivalent booster over the original formula is obvious, and as long as you haven’t gotten boosted recently, there’s every reason to get the new one right away. (If you have been boosted in the past few months, your antibody levels are probably still too high for a new shot to do much for you.) Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington, told me that Americans who have already gotten three or more doses “have probably maxed out the protective capacity” of the original shots. By contrast, the bivalent vaccines offer something new to those who have so far escaped Omicron: a lesson on the spike proteins of the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants, which will help the immune system fight the real thing should it get into your body. “I’m just super excited to get the bivalent vaccine,” says Jenna Guthmiller, an immunologist at the University of Colorado who has not yet had COVID. “I think it’ll be really nice and ease my mind a little bit.”
If you have had an Omicron infection:
Veterans of Omicron infections might still have something to gain from seeing the BA.4 and BA.5 spike proteins—especially if your goal is to avoid getting sick with COVID at all. Past a certain number of shots, boosters’ impact on your long-term protection against severe disease is unclear, Goel told me. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told me he doesn’t plan on getting a booster at all this fall because, after three vaccine doses and an infection, “I think I’m protected against serious illness.” But if you want to stave off infection, Goel said, “the bivalent vaccines, or really any variant-containing vaccines, have real value.” That’s because formulas based on a given variant have been shown to temporarily increase your stock of antibodies that target that variant.
How long that extra-protective state lasts, or whether it’s sufficient to prevent any infection whatsoever, is still a scientific puzzle. The original boosters were shown to increase antibody levels to a peak about two weeks after the shot, then decay steadily over the following three months. We don’t know yet whether a bivalent formula will change that timeline, Goel said.
But you can still use it to estimate approximately when your protection will be at its highest. You might, for example, choose to err on the early side of that three-to-six-month timeline if you have a particularly high-risk event coming up in the next few weeks. “If all we had was the original booster and I was going to an indoor wedding or something, I think it would be reasonable to get that booster,” Pepper said.
If you had an Omicron infection this summer:
“You’re still riding the wave of antibodies that you generated as a result of that infection,” Guthmiller told me, so a shot won’t do much for you yet. That’s true regardless of which Omicron subvariant you might have been infected with, she said, because BA.2 infections have been shown to protect fairly well against today’s dominant strains, BA.4 and BA.5. (BA.2 became dominant in the United States back in March.) The severity of your illness doesn’t really matter either, Goel said. A higher fever and more intense cough might indicate that your immune system got extra revved up, he said, but they could just as easily mean that your body needs more help responding to the coronavirus. In either case, once a little more time has passed, getting the bivalent vaccine could help extend your body’s memory of its last COVID encounter, and keep infection at bay.
If you’re at high risk:
Certain groups of people should get any booster as soon as it’s available to them, the experts I spoke with emphasized to me: immunocompromised people, people over the age of 50 or so, and people with medical conditions that put them at high risk of severe disease. If you fall in one of these categories and haven’t received all the boosters you’re eligible for, “I wouldn’t wait for the bivalent,” Offit said. For people in these high-risk categories who have already gotten the recommended number of boosters, you should get the new one as soon as it’s available to you. (The FDA and CDC have not yet indicated whether they will recommend a waiting period between your most recent shot and the bivalent booster.) Goel recommended waiting at least a month after your most recent infection or shot, but if you’re very worried about your risk, you don’t need to stretch the delay to three months. Your body might still have extra antibodies floating around, but with no practical way to check at scale, “I’m honestly in favor of recommending boosting as a way to maximize individual benefit,” he said.
If you want to wait and see:
Waiting is always an option if you want to know more about how the bivalent vaccines perform. The FDA and CDC are set to green-light the shots based on human data from the existing boosters and other experimental bivalent boosters that didn’t make it to market in the U.S.—plus trials on the new formula in mice. Pfizer and Moderna simply haven’t progressed very far in their human trials. While there’s no reason to suspect that the new shots won’t be safe, Offit recommended opting for the original boosters until more safety and efficacy data are available, which could be as soon as a couple of months after the rollout—as long as the vaccine makers or the government collects that information and makes it public. But Guthmiller and Goel said they weren’t concerned about the lack of human data, and the bivalent shot is almost certainly the better bet.
There is one significant reason to avoid waiting too long for the bivalent shot: It offers the greatest protection against infection from the subvariants it’s actually designed around. BA.4 and BA.5 might be with us through the fall and winter—or they might give way to a different branch of Omicron, or even a variant that’s entirely unlike Omicron. You’d certainly be better off against this new variant with a bivalent booster than no booster at all. But if you want to maximize your anti-infection shield while you have it, consider putting it up against the enemy you know.
