Asked for comment about his management style, and the current state of his campaign, Mr. Trump declined, criticizing the reporters writing this article. “You two wouldn’t know how to write a good story about me if you tried — dream on,” Mr. Trump said in an email relayed by his spokeswoman, Hope Hicks.
So far, Mr. Trump has shown little inclination to adjust to a political world. His penchant for setting up competition and infusing tension between his subordinates has carried over from his real estate company.
“He certainly does love playing people against each other, but in my experience he knew how to make me reach my potential,” said Sam Nunberg, who was fired from the campaign in 2015 after a series of clashes with the campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. “You become very committed in that environment.”
But, as was the case with Mr. Wiley’s dismissal, Mr. Trump is reliant on information he garners himself, and can be swayed by the last person he talked to.
I have worked for a few idiots who think they’re geniuses. It’s not pleasant. And they usually screw up the company.
POLITICO surveyed nearly two dozen GOP chairmen, officials and operatives in key swing states who said the RNC hadn’t delivered on promises, imperiling their ability to launch the robust voter-turnout operation needed in the general election.
It’s a development that could spell trouble for Donald Trump, who trounced his primary competition despite the lack of a traditional field organization but is now relying on the national party for its infrastructure, and it has implications for the fragile Republican Senate majority, which is also depending on the RNC’s ground game.
In traditionally Republican states that could become competitive this election season, concern is mounting. Arizona’s state party chairman, Robert Graham, has only one RNC-paid staffer on hand — and had to fight with the national party to keep that person employed.
“That’s what we have,” Graham said in an interview.
On Thursday, the RNC released a memo saying it intended to double its field staff in battleground states. Top Senate campaign officials reacted with skepticism, saying that even with the boost promised, the GOP is still behind on the timeline. And in the battleground states, party operatives said they remain unclear the added commitment will bring the ground operations to levels promised in the fall.
Trump is firing seasoned presidential campaign operatives in favor of the little friends he made during the primaries and is telling everyone that he doesn’t think he needs a ground operation and has no intention of spending 500 million on the general election campaign.
This is the businessman who’s supposedly going to “make America great again.” I guess if you think bankrupt casinos is a definition of greatness, he’s your man.
It is my habit to refer to the extremists as the T-party (not tea party or Tea Party), but I never explained why. It comes from the Sam Neill line from Jurassic Park.
In John Boehner, T-party just claimed another kill. If Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is any indication, T-party is still hungry:
“That’s one down, that’s 434 more to go,” said Jindal, a former congressman. “Folks, it is time to fire everybody in D.C.”
Frank Bruni comments on John Boehner’s conflict with his “pathologically self-destructive party” over his reluctance to force another government shutdown has led to his demise as Speaker of the House:
Boehner’s looming departure and the rabid right-wing forces that led to it are part of a longer story, developing for years now. His exodus was foreshadowed and even foreordained by the political demise of Eric Cantor, who served under him as the House majority leader until someone more conservative toppled him in a Republican primary in 2014.
One of our two major political parties is hostage to an extreme subgroup that won’t brook compromise, values theatrical protests over actual governing and is adolescent in its ideological vanity.
Republicans, Bruni writes,
… have become the party of brinkmanship, the party of imminent credit defaults, the party of threatened shutdowns, the party that won’t pass a proper transportation bill, the party that is suddenly demonizing the Export-Import Bank, the party of “no,” the party of ire, the party that casts even someone as unquestionably conservative as John Boehner in the role of apostate, simply because he knows the difference between fights that can be won and those that can’t, between standing on principle and shooting yourself in the foot.
In one sense, Republicans are like the dog that caught the car. Catching it, they don’t know what to do with it. A panelist at the Daily Kos Connects Asheville conference yesterday observed that Democrats had controlled the North Carolina legislature for 140 years until the T-party sweep in 2010. Democrats are still figuring out how to act as the minority party. Republicans, having finally caught the car, are in disarray. They don’t know how to lead.
So it is, too, on the national stage, where the T-party has ousted Republican after Republican for not being conservative enough. But other than eating their own and throwing sand in the gears of government, what else have they accomplished?
Bruni continues:
Republicans were supposed to show themselves to be grown-ups, but the current leader of the pack, Trump, does a dead-on impersonation of a defensive, insecure schoolyard bully.
There is a lot of wishful thinking among the Beltway press and less-insane GOP members that Trump will fade, but maybe he won’t. Trump is still dominating the GOP field. For a T-party that wants to fire everybody, Mr. “You’re fired!” seems like just the man for the job.
That’s why when people ask me who I support for president, Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton, I tell them I don’t care. So long as the T-party controls state legislatures and the Congress, who Democrats elect as president won’t matter. If it’s Bernie, a GOP-led Congress will stonewall. If it’s Hillary, a GOP-led Congress will stonewall. Just as they have done with Obama. I care deeply that someone from the saner side of the aisle gets the next three Supreme Court picks. (Good luck getting them past a T-party Senate.) Other than that, I can’t get excited about who will do the picking, so long as the candidate sends lawyers, guns and money to North Carolina. That is where my fight is.
A Bernie Sanders supporter asked yesterday, but what about coattails? Coattails, I cannot quantify. State legislative seats and U.S. House and Senate seats I can count.
It seems the GOP’s base knows that long-term demographic trends are against them. Here, it seems the T-party legislature is determined to ram through every piece of fringe, ALEC, tax-cutting, privatizing, education-slashing, and voter-suppressing measure it can before the public turns against them. I have long said that the Republican Party is acting out one of those dreary murder ballads with America. If they cannot have America for their own, they just might burn it down. John Boehner can relate. That is why Digby quoted Rick Perlstein yesterday: “Take demagogues seriously. Voters love them. And they’re only a joke until they win.”
I took her by her lily white hand
And dragged her down that bank of sand
There I throwed her in to drown
I watched her as she floated down
“Was walking home tween twelve and one
Thinkin’ of what I had done
I killed a girl, my love you see
Because she would not marry me
– from “Banks Of The Ohio” (traditional)
They love their country — it’s THEIR country — and if they can’t have her, nobody can.
Inside Beltway salons, that simply doesn’t compute.
Donald Trump’s attorneys this week argued in a Colorado case brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) that the Constitution does not prohibit him from running for office. Based on Trump’s Jan. 6 actions, CREW hopes to disqualify Trump from the state’s ballot under the 14th Amendment’s Insurrection Clause prohibiting any officer who has “engaged in insurrection” against the United States from holding a civil, military, or elected office unless approved by a two-thirds majority of the House and Senate.
But this is Donald Trump we’re talking about. And Trump attorneys. They argue the Constitution does not apply to him becuase he never took an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” per the amendment’s language (Law & Crime):
“Section Three does not apply to President Trump,” the filing reads. “Section Three disqualifies a person from holding office only if he “previously [took] an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State…’ Because President Trump was never a congressman, state legislator, or state officer, Section Three applies only if he was an ‘officer of the United States.’ But as that term was used in Section Three, it did not cover the President.”
[…]
“[T]he Presidential oath, which the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment surely knew, requires the President to swear to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ the Constitution—not ‘to support’ the Constitution,” the motion reads. “Both oaths put a weighty burden on an oath-taker. However, because the framers chose to define the group of people subject to Section Three by an oath to ‘support’ the Constitution of the United States, and not by an oath to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment never intended for it to apply to the President.”
You read that right.
“If they wanted to include the President in the reach of Section Three, they could have done so by expanding the language of which type of oath would bring an ‘officer’ under the strictures of Section Three,” the Monday motion argues. “They did not do so, and no number of semantical arguments will change this simple fact. As such, Section Three does not apply to President Trump.”
Cleanup on Aisle R
Meantime, with military aid urgently needed by allies Ukraine and Israel, and with threats of a widening war in the Middle East, and with funds for running our own country set to run out in days, the Party of Trump is in ccontrol of the U.S. House without a Speaker authorized to bring such measures for a vote in the House. The party’s lunatic fringe ousted Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California from that position ten days ago.
Things are going well with House Republicans today. Troy Nehls: “… a circus … utter chaos.” pic.twitter.com/LbkJvocGCx
Last night, the apparent frontrunner for the speaker post, House majority leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), withdrew his nomination for lack of support. Scalise narrowly defeated Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio in a caucus vote on Wednesday. He needs 217 votes and saw no path to winning after an hours-long meeting.
Exiting the meeting before it ended, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., openly fretted that his party’s narrow majority may never find the 217 votes necessary to elect a speaker.
He blasted eight Republican “traitors” — a word he used four times in a hallway interview — who voted with Democrats to remove former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and “put us in this situation.” And if those eight decide to back Scalise, Rogers warned, “then there’s just another eight like them” who could create further trouble.
“The bottom line is we have a very fractured conference, and to limit ourselves to just getting 217 out of our conference, I think, is not a wise path,” Rogers told NBC News, adding that Republicans may “absolutely” need some Democratic votes to elect a speaker.
Once again, the GOP needs Democrats to clean up the mess they created.
The Republican chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Mike McCaul of Texas, today told reporters, “Every day that goes by, it gets more dangerous.” He continued: “I see a lot of threats out there, but one of the biggest threats I see is in that room [pointing to where the Republicans were meeting], because we can’t unify as a conference and put a speaker in the chair together.”
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) today said it is “urgently necessary” for the Republicans to “get their act together and elect a Speaker from within their own ranks, as it is the responsibility of the majority party to do, or have traditional Republicans break with the extremists within the House Republican Conference and partner with Democrats on a bipartisan path forward. We are ready, willing, and able to do so. I know there are traditional Republicans who are good women and men who want to see government function, but they are unable to do it within the ranks of their own conference, which is dominated by the extremist wing, and that’s why we continue to extend the hand of bipartisanship to them.”
Journalist Brian Tyler Cohen, who hosts the podcast No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen, summed up the day when he wrote: “The fact that ALL Republicans would rather fight over Scalise (who attended a neo-Nazi event) or Jordan (who allegedly covered up rampant sexual abuse) rather than simply work with Democrats to elect a Speaker says it all.”
The most likely Republican to win the party’s 2024 nomination for president (in case you need reminding) is this guy:
This person is a fucking lunatic, Republicans have just stopped talking him, and everyone is going along as if the next election is business as usual. Strange times. https://t.co/RZvcQbLCV9
In DC Comics, The Joker is the Clown Prince of Crime. In D.C., the title of Clown Prince of Politics is up for grabs. Donald Trump is the clear frontrunner. But he’s hotly pursued by multiple others in Republican ranks.
And should Trump falter, conservatives behind No Labels have a backup plan for thwarting the will of the people.
Just a reminder that the @NoLabelsOrg plan is to deny any candidate 270 Electoral College votes and throw the election into the House. So the Republicans who can’t pick a Speaker will select a president.
It’s insane and will give us four more years of Donald Trump.
Opponents of democracy seem to believe that if they throw enough matches at the Constitution it will catch fire eventually.
It’s not as if Senate Democrats don’t have a member under indictment. Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey stands accused not only of bribery but of being a foreign agent for Egypt. But Senate Democrats in numbers have called for his immediate resignation. The Hill reports “Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) on Thursday called on the full Senate to vote on a resolution to expel” Menendez.
On October 9th, 2020, the Former Occupant of the White House issued an official Columbus Day Proclamation, which read in part:
Sadly, in recent years, radical activists have sought to undermine Christopher Columbus’s legacy. These extremists seek to replace discussion of his vast contributions with talk of failings, his discoveries with atrocities, and his achievements with transgressions. Rather than learn from our history, this radical ideology and its adherents seek to revise it, deprive it of any splendor, and mark it as inherently sinister. They seek to squash any dissent from their orthodoxy. We must not give in to these tactics or consent to such a bleak view of our history. We must teach future generations about our storied heritage, starting with the protection of monuments to our intrepid heroes like Columbus. This June, I signed an Executive Order to ensure that any person or group destroying or vandalizing a Federal monument, memorial, or statue is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
I have also taken steps to ensure that we preserve our Nation’s history and promote patriotic education. In July, I signed another Executive Order to build and rebuild monuments to iconic American figures in a National Garden of American Heroes. In September, I announced the creation of the 1776 Commission, which will encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and honor our founding. In addition, last month I signed an Executive Order to root out the teaching of racially divisive concepts from the Federal workplace, many of which are grounded in the same type of revisionist history that is trying to erase Christopher Columbus from our national heritage. Together, we must safeguard our history and stop this new wave of iconoclasm by standing against those who spread hate and division.
On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we honor the perseverance and courage of Indigenous peoples, show our gratitude for the myriad contributions they have made to our world, and renew our commitment to respect Tribal sovereignty and self-determination.
The story of America’s Indigenous peoples is a story of their resilience and survival; of their persistent commitment to their right to self-governance; and of their determination to preserve cultures, identities, and ways of life. Long before European explorers sailed to this continent, Native American and Alaska Native Nations made this land their home, some for thousands of years before the United States was founded. They built many Nations that created powerful, prosperous, and diverse cultures, and they developed knowledge and practices that still benefit us today.
But throughout our Nation’s history, Indigenous peoples have faced violence and devastation that has tested their limits. For generations, it was the shameful policy of our Nation to remove Indigenous peoples from their homelands; force them to assimilate; and ban them from speaking their own languages, passing down ancient traditions, and performing sacred ceremonies. Countless lives were lost, precious lands were taken, and their way of life was forever changed. In spite of unimaginable loss and seemingly insurmountable odds, Indigenous peoples have persisted. They survived. And they continue to be an integral part of the fabric of the United States.
Today, Indigenous peoples are a beacon of resilience, strength, and perseverance as well as a source of incredible contributions. Indigenous peoples and Tribal Nations continue to practice their cultures, remember their heritages, and pass down their histories from generation to generation. […]
When I came into office, I was determined to usher in a new era in the relationship between the Federal Government and Tribal Nations and to honor the solemn promises the United States made to fulfill our trust and treaty obligations to Tribal Nations. That work began by appointing Native Americans to lead on the frontlines of my Administration — from the first Native American Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and dozens of Senate-confirmed Native American officials to the over 80 Native American appointees serving across my Administration and in the Federal courts. […]
We are also working to improve public health and safety for Native Americans. That is why I signed an Executive Order that helps us respond more effectively to the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous peoples. And when we reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act last year, I was proud to include historic provisions that reaffirm Tribal sovereignty and restore Tribal jurisdiction. I have also requested a $9.1 billion infusion for Indian Health Services and asked the Congress to make that funding a mandatory part of the Federal budget for the first time in our history.
My Administration will also continue using all the authority available to it, including the Antiquities Act, to protect sacred Tribal lands.
Pledging to end the scourge of violence against human beings, but nary a peep about protecting monuments? Preserving sacred Tribal lands while (apparently) letting the National Garden of American Heroes go to seed? Where are your priorities, Joe?!
I mean…come ON, man!
At any rate…in honor of this coming Monday’s Indigenous People’s Day , here are 10 films well worth your time.
Arctic Son — I first saw this documentary (not to be confused with the unrelated 2013 film Arctic Son: Fulfilling the Dream) at the 2006 Seattle International Film Festival. Andrew Walton’s film is a classic “city mouse-country mouse” story centering on a First Nations father and son who are reunited after a 25-year estrangement. Stanley, Jr. was raised in Washington State by his single mom. Consequently, he is more plugged in to hip-hop and video games than to his native Gwich’in culture. Troubled by her son’s substance abuse, Stanley’s mother packs him off for an extended visit with Stanley Sr., who lives a traditional subsistence lifestyle in the Yukon Territories. The initially wary young man gradually warms to both the unplugged lifestyle and his long-estranged father. Affecting and heartwarming.
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith — One of the highlights of the “Australian New Wave” that flourished in the 70s and 80s, writer-director Fred Schepsi’s 1978 drama (adapted from Thomas Keneally’s novel, which is loosely based on a true story) is set in Australia at the turn of the 20th Century.
Jimmie Blacksmith (Tommy Lewis) is a half-caste Aboriginal who goes out into the world to make his own way after being raised by a white minister and his wife. Unfortunately, the “world” he is entering from the relative protective bubble of his upbringing is that of a society fraught with systemic racism; one that sees him only as a young black man ripe for exploitation.
While Jimmie is inherently altruistic, every person has their limit, and over time the escalating degradation and daily humiliations lead to a shocking explosion of cathartic violence that turns him into a wanted fugitive. An unblinking look at a dark period of Australian history; powerful and affecting.
Dead Man — Rhymes with: “deadpan”. Then again, that could describe any film directed by the idiosyncratic Jim Jarmusch. As far as Kafkaesque westerns go, you could do worse than this 1995 offering (beautifully photographed by the late Robby Müller).
Johnny Depp plays mild-mannered accountant and city slicker William Blake (yes, I know) who travels West by train to the rustic town of Machine, where he has accepted a job. Or so he assumes. Getting shooed out of his would-be employer’s office at gunpoint (a great cameo by Robert Mitchum) turns out to be the least of his problems, which rapidly escalate. Soon, he’s a reluctant fugitive on the lam. Once he crosses paths with an enigmatic Native American named Nobody (the wonderful Gary Farmer), his journey takes on a mythic quality. Surreal, darkly funny, and poetic.
The Emerald Forest — Although it may initially seem a heavy-handed (if well-meaning) “save the rain forest” polemic, John Boorman’s underrated 1985 adventure (a cross between The Searchers and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan) goes much deeper.
Powers Boothe plays an American construction engineer working on a dam project in Brazil. One day, while his wife and young son are visiting the job site on the edge of the rain forest, the boy is abducted and adopted by an indigenous tribe who call themselves “The Invisible People”, touching off an obsessive decade-long search by the father. By the time he is finally reunited with his now-teenage son (Charley Boorman), the challenge becomes a matter of how he and his wife (Meg Foster) are going to coax the young man back into “civilization”.
Tautly directed, lushly photographed (by Philippe Rousselot) and well-acted. Rosco Pallenberg scripted (he also adapted the screenplay for Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur).
The Gods Must Be Crazy — Writer-director Jamie Uys’ 1984 cult favorite is a spot-on allegory regarding First World/Third World culture clash. The premise is simple: A wandering Kalahari Bushman named Xi (N!xau) happens upon a discarded Coke bottle that has been carelessly tossed from a small plane. Having no idea what the object is or how it got there, Xi spirits it back to his village for a confab on what it may portend. Concerned over the uproar and unsavory behavioral changes the empty Coke bottle ignites within the normally peaceful community, Xi treks to “the edge of the world” to give the troublesome object back to the gods. Uys overdoes the slapstick at times, but drives his point home in an endearing fashion.
The Last Wave —Peter Weir’s enigmatic 1977 courtroom drama/psychological thriller concerns a Sydney-based defense lawyer (Richard Chamberlain) who takes on five clients (all Aboriginals) who are accused of conspiring in a ritualistic murder. As he prepares his case, he begins to experience haunting visions and dreams related to age-old Aboriginal prophesies. A truly unique film, at once compelling, and unsettling; beautifully photographed by Russel Boyd. Lurking just beneath the supernatural, metaphysical and mystical elements are insightful observations on how indigenous people struggle to reconcile venerable superstitions and traditions while retaining a strong cultural identity in the modern world.
Mekko — Director Sterlin Harjo’s tough, lean, and realistic character study is set in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Rod Rondeaux (Meek’s Cutoff) is outstanding in the lead, as a Muscogee Indian who gets out of jail after 19 years. Bereft of funds and family support, he finds tenuous shelter among the rough-and-tumble “street chief” community of homeless Native Americans as he sorts out how he’s going to get back on his feet. Harjo coaxes naturalistic performances from his entire cast. There’s a lot more going on here than initially meets the eye; namely, a deeper examination of Native American identity,
Powwow Highway — A Native American road movie from 1989 that eschews stereotypes and tells its story with a blend of social and magical realism. Gary Farmer (who resembles the young Jonathan Winters) plays Philbert, a hulking Cheyenne with a gentle soul who wolfs down cheeseburgers and chocolate malts with the countenance of a beatific Buddha. He has decided that it is time to “become a warrior” and leave the res on a quest to “gather power”.
After choosing a “war pony” for his journey (a rusted-out beater that he trades for with a bag of weed), he sets off and is waylaid by his childhood friend (A. Martinez) an A.I.M. activist who needs a lift to Santa Fe to bail out his sister, framed by the Feds on a possession beef. Funny, poignant, uplifting and richly rewarding. Director Jonathan Wacks and screenwriters Janey Heaney and Jean Stawarz keep it real. Look for cameos from Wes Studi and Graham Greene.
This May Be the Last Time — Did you know that the eponymous Rolling Stones song shares the same roots with a venerable Native-American tribal hymn, that is still sung in Seminole and Muscogee churches to this day? While that’s far from the main thrust of Sterlin Harjo’s documentary, it’s but one of its surprises.
Harjo investigates a family story concerning the disappearance of his Oklahoman Seminole grandfather in 1962. After a perfunctory search by local authorities turned up nothing, tribal members pooled their resources and continued to look. Some members of the search party kept up spirits by singing traditional Seminole and Muscogee hymns…which inform the second level of Harjo’s film.
Through interviews with tribal members and musicologists, he traces the roots of this unique genre, connecting the dots between the hymns, African-American spirituals, Scottish and Appalachian music. The film doubles as both history lesson and a moving personal journey.
Walkabout — Nicholas Roeg’s 1971 adventure/culture clash drama introduced audiences to charismatic Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil (who also appears in another film on my list, The Last Wave). Gulpilil is an Aboriginal teenager (“Black Boy” in the credits) who unexpectedly encounters a teenage “Girl” (Jenny Agutter) and “White Boy” (the Girl’s little brother, played by Luc Roeg) while he is on a solo “walkabout” in the Australian Outback. The sun-stroked and severely dehydrated siblings have become stranded as the result of a family outing gone terribly (and disturbingly) awry. Without making any promises, the Aboriginal boy allows them to tag along; teaching them his survival techniques as they struggle to communicate as best as they can. Like many of my selections here, Roeg’s film challenges us to rethink the definition of “civilization”, especially as it pertains to indigenous cultural identity.
Some new information from a well-informed source. The WHO calls it OMICRON:
This pandemic has been all about communicating uncertainty and it doesn’t get more uncertain than early data on new variants.
So a few things to keep in mind the next few days and weeks as the picture around B.1.1.529 becomes clearer and why it’s right to be concerned
Most importantly: We will learn a lot in the coming days but getting good answers takes time, science takes time.
For instance, researchers in SA are growing the virus now for experiments but that can take a week or two (and different variants differ in how well they grow)
Interpreting real world data is difficult. An increase in one variant in one place can have a lot of reasons and they don’t all have to do with the variant. A superspreading event – or a series of them – can also lead to a rapid increase for instance
If it is the variant, then there are still different reasons why it might be outcompeting delta: Is the virus better at re-infecting recovered or vacccinated people or is it inherently more transmissible? Or is it a mix of the two?
Immune escape is easier to parse. First experiments will use other viruses that have been engineered to carry the spike of B.1.1.529 and test how well serum from vaccinees does against these. Later experiments will test the actual virus against these sera.
We can also tell more about immune escape from the genome alone and what we see there is really concerning. For instance, with monoclonal antibody therapies we know precisely what parts of the virus they recognise and some of these are different here.
Great work done by @jbloom_lab has put us in a position to judge the effect of some of these mutations.
For instance, the REGEN-CoV antibody cocktail could be affected by some mutations:
We can also look at some key monoclonal antibodies. the REGEN-COV cocktail is likely to take a hit for the Nu variant, especially the REGN10987 component. (7/n) pic.twitter.com/iZYGxNZl2o
Of course humans don’t just make an antibody or two they are a lot of different ones. But this variant has a lot of changes that could affect a lot of different antibodies, as @jbloom_lab points out:
First, Nu variant has lot of antigenic change. Below are how mutations relate to escape averaged over 36 human antibodies. Many mutations at peak escape sites, especially E484, G446, K417, & Q493. This means even in polyclonal mix, lot of RBD antibodies will be affected. (2/n) pic.twitter.com/YjSifYojIL
But remember that our immune system has more than just neutralising antibodies in store, so none of this tells us just how much this variant is going to escape immunity and if it will mostly affect protection from infection or also severe disease.
Immune escape is not black-and-white, not yes or no, which is why the term immune erosion is generally better.
Transmissibility is harder to measure and we can read much less about this from a genome sequence, so for this experimental data and more real-world evidence is even more important.
Again, the little we know suggests there could be some advantage, but this is very uncertain.
I am most wary of any pronouncements on whether this virus leads to more severe disease or deaths. There can be so many biases in the early data and we really don’t have the numbers to say anything this early on.
So as usual: Beware of anyone who is overly confident on anything about this variant right now. There is a lot we need to find out.
The only thing I know for sure is that I’m back to being a #covid19 variant reporter for now…
And all of this should underscore 2 points:
1. We are all in this together. It does not matter where a new variant pops up it will most likely end up affecting all of us. That’s one reason why the tools to track this virus and fight it need to be distributed equitably.
2. It’s a reminder that any place that has high transmission (like Germany right now) we really really need to drive down transmission.
As @firefox66 put it really well: “The variant is a spark that should not distract us from the fact that we are already in a burning house.”
The political/social upheavals of the last few years send mixed signals. Are they signs civic culture is being reinvigorated or that it is in a death spiral? One might look at the Women’s March, the #MeToo movement, or Black Lives Matter protests and see the former. Others see their way of life (or at least their political dominance) threatened by them.
Raw Story reports that a Republican Idaho state legislator opposes expanding funding for early childhood education because it “makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home and let others raise their child.” One might infer he knows not only that women belong in their dwellings but in what room.
“What year is this?” asked Josh Holland. “Sorry, what century is this?”
Hullabaloo alum David Atkins advised conservatives not to become too attached to social structures that are always evolving, even as American Enterprise Institute Fellow Steven Hayward once opened a conference on movement conservatism with the assertion that conservatives “defend the unchanging ground of our changing experience.”
Basically, anything newer than a few hundred years old is a largely temporary innovation to which people should not be forming major emotional attachments.
That includes isms, social structures, family structures, work schedules, and constitutions.
It is not that civics taught in schools was that rigorous a subject. Mine was taught by the high school’s basketball coach. Still, some see the decline of any kind of civics education (so rumored) as comcomittant with a breakdown in civic comity. Will bringing it back with renewed vigor help reverse the decline in commitment to this democratic republic?
“Our constitutional democracy is ailing,” Danielle Allen and Paul Carrese argue in the Washington Post. If that was not clear before the Jan. 6 Trump insurrection “the lesson was etched into our souls that day.”
As members of the executive committee for the Educating for American Democracy Initiative, they argue for renewing civics education on a roadmap developed “by a diverse and cross-ideological group of scholars and educators.”
They write:
The roadmap is not a national curriculum, nor a set of instructional standards. It recommends approaches to learning that do five critical things at once: (1) inspire students to want to become involved in their constitutional democracy; (2) tell a full narrative of America’s plural yet shared story; (3) explore the need for compromise to make constitutional democracy work; (4) cultivate civic honesty and patriotism that leaves space both to love and to critique this country; and (5) teach history and civics both through a timeline of events and the themes that run through those events.
Our group has done something that wasn’t supposed to be doable in our fractious times — debate disagreements productively across differences of identity, viewpoint and geography, and achieve consensus about what and how to teach for an excellent civic education.
Even as educators found agreement on how to teach English language arts and on math and STEM, cultural polarization has exacerbated disagreements over teaching social studies.
Yet disagreement is a feature, not a bug, of our constitutional democracy; the question is whether we can learn to disagree productively. One of the goals of the Educating for American Democracy Roadmap is to teach young people about our disagreements in ways that can help them productively engage in those debates.
Yet disagreeing productively is not an aspiration for members of a delusional secessionistcult of personality that has possessed a major political party in the world’s greatest military power. Governing has been replaced with owning the libs, with conflict for conflict’s sake, a feature of “morally unconstrained collective egoism,” as Bálint Magyar tells Masha Gessen.
From at least the advent of the T-party, many on the right abandoned the sort of highfalutin conservatism of Buckley’s dreams in 1955 for something more primal and more bare-knuckles. The Party of Trump does not want to be fed. Like T-Rex, it wants to hunt. Neither does it want its radicalism tamed by new civics education.
I wish the Educating for American Democracy Initiative all the best in its endeavors. They will need it.
Update: Replaced image with one bearing Creative Commons license.
One unverified accounting of some of the acting president’s biggest failures puts the average time to failure at 4.6 years. But that is skewed a bit by outliers. The median is 4 years. Donald Trump has had some spectacular failures in his career. But no big problem, he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in 2011: “I’ve used the laws of this country to pare debt. … We’ll have the company. We’ll throw it into a chapter. We’ll negotiate with the banks. We’ll make a fantastic deal. You know, it’s like on ‘The Apprentice.’ It’s not personal. It’s just business.”
Trump fails, someone else eats the losses.
As we come up on the four-year anniversary of the Trump Organization’s acquisition of the White House, he seems on track to drive the business of state into the ground on a familiar schedule.
Jennifer Rubin had a busy Sunday, publishing two columns at the Washington Post critical of the acting president’s mismanagement. The RNC convention last week worked at stoking the fears of white Americans across the country as Trump has his entire presidency. When all else fails, he plays that eponymous card he always plays.
He vowed to keep suburbs (read: White suburbs) safe from integrated housing (read: Black people). He encouraged police not to be “too nice” in handling suspects. He denies systemic racism and instead paints all protesters as anarchists, socialists and violent extremists. He has refused to condemn police officers who kill unarmed Black men and women or White armed groups engaged in violence. He invited to the Republican National Convention a couple charged with a felony for brandishing weapons at Black Lives Matter marchers. President Trump’s senior adviser Kellyanne Conway confesses the more violence in the streets, the better for him.
White supremacists reveling in the violence they themselves stoke has a name — accelerationism — she writes, quoting a Brookings Institution report:
Some white supremacists already see the riots and broader polarization as vindication of this idea, and law enforcement and civil society activists concerned about the growth of extremism should watch to see if this idea takes further hold within white supremacist groups and organizations in the coming weeks and months.
Accelerationism is the idea that white supremacists should try to increase civil disorder — accelerate it — in order to foster polarization that will tear apart the current political order. The System (usually capitalized), they believe, has only a finite number of collaborators and lackeys to prop it up. Accelerationists hope to set off a series of chain reactions, with violence fomenting violence, and in the ensuing cycle more and more people join the fray. When confronted with extremes, so the theory goes, those in the middle will be forced off the fence and go to the side of the white supremacists.
The acting president has white supremacist leanings, but we know by now his only real interest is himself. With over 200,000 projected deaths by Election Day from his failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and with unemployment at Great Depression levels, Trump has all the more incentive for concealing his own failure by setting fire to the business to hide the bodies and collect the insurance money. It’s his M.O.
With his frenzied blast of 89 tweet Sunday morning, Trump is flinging gasoline on a situation already smoldering from protest-adjacent killings in Kenosha, Wisc. and Portland, Ore, over the last week.
Rubin continues:
A few Democrats have figured out what is going on. Appearing on CNN, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) observed, “They believe the violence is helpful to them. And the president is only motivated by one thing: ‘What is in it for him?’ He sees this violence — and his ability to agitate more of it — as useful to his campaign.” He added, “What it does to the country, the loss of life, he doesn’t care.”
Biden is now planning to travel on Monday (not clear where he will go) to — again — denounce the violence. But he should also go on offense. Trump incites violence. Trump encourages vigilantism. Trump refuses to acknowledge that slogans such as Blue Lives Matter can encourage vigilantes. (The White suspect who allegedly killed two people in Kenosha, Wis., apparently attended a Trump rally and brandished the Blue Lives Matter slogan.) Biden should demand Trump denounce shootings of unarmed Black men, stop Republican obstruction to police reform, cease veneration of symbols of white supremacy such as the Confederate flag and decry White armed groups.
Rubin’s earlier post called out the absurdity of believing the fading reality show performer will preserve order at a time twice as many Americans who died on September 11 are dying each week:
No wonder Trump loves to highlight any domestic scene of disorder, mayhem and looting he can to frighten White Americans, arguing that if law enforcement “dominates the streets,” we will have public order. This is preposterous. We cannot go to war with millions of demonstrators. That’s simply impossible, not to mention morally objectionable. The demands of the protesters, among them police reform and voting rights legislation are entirely legitimate. But so long as Trump denies the legitimacy of these concerns and the presence of systemic racism, we will not have domestic tranquility.
Other Americans’ concerns are not his. Making things worse is the hostility of red America to losing control of “their” country. One Portland resident explained an alleged tacit alliance between Patriot Prayer, the Proud Boys, etc., and local law enforcement. The viral thread is captured by Thread Reader:
But part of it is structural.
Our police force is mostly drawn from those same red areas, and is marked by a culture that resents Portland as much (if not moreso) than the folks out in Washougal and Canby.
That creates a remarkably antagonistic relationship with the public.
— The British History Podcast (@BritishPodcast) August 30, 2020
I wish I had something more positive to offer, but these types are seriously threatened. Many are armed. And as Kellyanne Conway said, “the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.” They’re looking for a war, and Trump has made his living off giving the marks what they want.
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Our acting president will have his revenge. He’s sworn to it. Getting even is one of the few rules Donald Trump lives by (only self-serving ones, naturally). With Bill Barr riding shotgun at the Department of Justice, there will be no further investigations into Trump or his campaign without Barr’s approval. Customs and Border Patrol is already getting even with Trump’s former home state of New York for being uncooperative in rounding up unauthorized immigrants. Trump is making an enemies list and checking it twice:
“It’s payback time,” a prominent Republican told me last week. “He has an enemies list that is growing by the day,” another source said. Names that came up in my conversations with Republicans included Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Mitt Romney, and John Bolton. “Trump’s playbook is simple: go after people who crossed him during impeachment.”
A source close to Trump tells Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair that John Bolton tops the list. The White House may attempt to quash release of Bolton’s new book. Sherman’s source says Trump wants Bolton criminally investigated.
Digby wrote yesterday about McCay Coppins’s Atlantic offering on the billion-dollar propaganda and disinformation campaign Trump’s forces have planned for you. It’s chilling. Gird your loins. *
But having just watched Jojo Rabbit, the McCoppins piece reminded me of a progressive messaging campaign that thwarted a T-party putsch to close a local library. You can read about it here. But heading into Oscars weekend it might be more entertaining to just watch a short film:
The 2011 Troy, Michigan “Book-Burning Campaign” was a clever bit of guerrilla marketing carried out in social media and on street corners. But one wonders if inviting people to a MAGA book-burning party after Trump’s reelection would even make a dent in voters’ minds now. It might simply further erode confidence in any and all news amidst what McCoppins describes as “the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history.” But I can dream.
I have no idea how to combat “censorship through noise.” We are in terra incognita. Here be dragons.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
* Update: “Grid you loins” didn’t make sense to me either.
You run into them from time to time: dilettantes with more money than sense who want to “play restaurant.” It is something they always wanted to do. They like eating out. They enjoy the experience of dining in a fine restaurant. With their years of eating experience, they just know they could do it better themselves. Now that they have some change to spare, they decide to open their own restaurant. They won’t make the mistakes others make, no. Their restaurant will be everything they always imagined. Everything will be “just so” — the food, the ambiance, the service. They will get to play host to all their friends and be the talk of the town.
But running a restaurant is a business, not dress-up. They are bankrupt within 18 months, and probably sooner.
Now we have a guy like that playing president. He tried and failed at running casinos. Now he is giving being leader of the free world a go. He always wanted to be leader of the free world. How hard can it be?
The issue before the rest of us is, it is not his money he’s playing with, but our beloved country.
The alarming problem isn’t Trump’s policies, to the extent he has any coherent set of policy positions. This crisis isn’t about conservative governance vs. progressive governance. It’s about soundness of mind and judgment.
The Constitution does not offer much of a playbook for the situation we find ourselves in. Impeachment is reserved for “high crimes and misdemeanors” — a phrase that means anything Congress wants it to mean. Assume special counsel Robert S. Mueller III eventually concludes that Trump obstructed justice or even participated in a collusion scheme with the Russians. Would Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and the Republican majority in the House actually move to impeach the president? Or would they be too fearful of the wrath of the GOP base? Unless the evidence were overwhelming, would there really be enough votes in the Senate to remove Trump from office?
I’m skeptical on all counts. Impeachment is, and will remain, a very long shot.
The biggest obstacle to agreeing to remove him to save ourselves and our country is how divided we are. Not that there isn’t common ground. Michael Gerson writes that the country is divided “between those who think the country is going to hell in a handcart and those who believe the country is going to hell in a handbasket.”
The former speechwriter for George W. Bush observes:
Those of us who remember politics in the Reagan era have a mental habit of regarding conservatism as more optimistic about the American experiment and liberalism as more discontented. But representatives of both ideologies — in their most potent and confident versions — are now making fundamental critiques of American society. They are united in their belief that the United States is dominated by corrupt, self-serving elites. They are united in their call for radical rather than incremental change. While disagreeing deeply about the cause, they see America as careening off course.
Both left and right believe “those who are not permanently enraged are not paying proper attention.” We simply disagree about who is to blame for what we perceive as America’s decline over the past half century. (Except for 60 percent of African Americans and Hispanics who perceive their lots as having improved.) In the left’s narrative, the American Dream is “an exploitative myth” in which eventually the rich eat the poor, while the conservative nostalgia for the 1950s expresses “a damning tolerance for oppression” and a “longing for lost privilege.”
Put another way, the left demands America live up to its ideals. Conservatives pine for it to live down to its past, averting their eyes from its real blemishes and burying their heads in public idolatry surrounding flags and anthems and iconic “Real Americans.”
Gerson’s recommendation is “not to sanitize our country’s history or excuse its manifold failures,” but to follow the examples of “reforming patriots” from Abraham Lincoln to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He quotes Barack Obama’s exhortation to “decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals.”
But to Gerson’s sociological admixture and Robinson’s concern for a man “dangerously unfit” to be president, add a wild-card, Steve Bannon-led strain that wants to tear it all down. As Alfred tells Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight:
… some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
Others just want to play restaurant with other people’s country.
The question Gerson never quite states is, if I may paraphrase, with the house on fire, can we put aside our philosophical differences for after the fire is put out?
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Since Goldwater/Reagan, the G.O.P. has been governed by a free-market, anti-government philosophy. But over the ensuing decades new problems have emerged. First, the economy has gotten crueler. Technology is displacing workers and globalization is dampening wages. Second, the social structure has atomized and frayed, especially among the less educated. Third, demography is shifting.
Orthodox Republicans, seeing no positive role for government, have had no affirmative agenda to help people deal with these new problems. Occasionally some conservative policy mavens have proposed such an agenda — anti-poverty programs, human capital policies, wage subsidies and the like — but the proposals were killed, usually in the House, by the anti-government crowd.
The 1980s anti-government orthodoxy still has many followers; Ted Cruz is the extreme embodiment of this tendency. But it has grown increasingly rigid, unresponsive and obsolete.
Along comes Donald Trump offering to replace it and change the nature of the G.O.P. He tramples all over the anti-government ideology of modern Republicanism. He would replace the free-market orthodoxy with authoritarian nationalism.
He offers to use government on behalf of the American working class, but in negative and defensive ways: to build walls, to close trade, to ban outside groups, to smash enemies. According to him, America’s problems aren’t caused by deep structural shifts. They’re caused by morons and parasites. The Great Leader will take them down.
If the G.O.P. is going to survive as a decent and viable national party, it can’t cling to the fading orthodoxy Cruz represents. But it can’t shift to ugly Trumpian nationalism, either. It has to find a third alternative: limited but energetic use of government to expand mobility and widen openness and opportunity. That is what Kasich, Rubio, Paul Ryan and others are stumbling toward.
Amid all the vulgarity and pettiness, that is what is being fought over this month: going back to the past, veering into an ugly future, or finding a third way. This is something worth fighting for, worth burning the boats behind you for.
More specifically he means it’s worth “burning the party behind you for.”
Well, good luck with that. Republicans like Brooks created this situation standing back while their party stoking the white racist lizard brain for years, demonizing the other side as loathsome monsters, watching as their Party lost its collective mind over many years, from impeachment to illegitimate wars to torture to a total loss of control at the election of a black president. This is the result.
Basically Brooks and others are coming to the conclusion that they will have to build a new party. The question is, who are they going to get to vote for them?
The younger brother of former President George W. Bush and failed presidential candidate Jeb Bush has joined Ted Cruz’s national finance team. Neil Bush and his wife Maria were announced as the newest members of Cruz’s backing team in a Tuesday press release from the Texan senator’s campaign. Jeb Bush, meanwhile, has remained quiet about endorsing any candidates for the March 15 primary in Florida. “We are seeing incredible momentum around our campaign,” Cruz said in the statement, which boasted of former Jeb, Rand Paul, and Rick Perry supporters joining his team.
I wonder if this will actually hurt Cruz. It’s not popular to get “financial support” from people like Bush in this cycle.
Unbelievable.
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