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‘A dark, empty place:’ Public officials face personal threats as tensions flare
Over the weekend, demonstrations by Trump supporters in D.C.; Olympia, Wash.; and elsewhere turned violent, with four people stabbed in the nation’s capital and one person shot in Olympia. These kinds of conflicts, coupled with increasingly personal attacks on public officials, are raising fears of worse to come.
What do the polls say in GA? Essentially tied race x 2. (Seriously, and GA polling in 2020 was pretty good with a predicted 1.2% Biden win and an actual 0.2% win). So the point is that these are races we can win.
[PSA: use polls wisely, they are not toys. Focus when you read polls and don’t be distracted. Follow all polling signals and poll safely. Do not drink and poll. ]
AP:
Pandemic backlash jeopardizes public health powers, leaders
Tisha Coleman has lived in close-knit Linn County, Kansas, for 42 years and never felt so alone.
As the public health administrator, she’s struggled every day of the coronavirus pandemic to keep her rural county along the Missouri border safe. In this community with no hospital, she’s failed to persuade her neighbors to wear masks and take precautions against COVID-19, even as cases rise. In return, she’s been harassed, sued, vilified and called a Democrat, an insult in her circles…
Across the United States, state and local public health officials such as Coleman have found themselves at the center of a political storm as they combat the worst pandemic in a century. With the federal response fractured, the usually invisible army of workers charged with preventing the spread of infectious diseases has become a public punching bag. Their expertise on how to fight the coronavirus is often disregarded.
Zeynep Tufecki:
Vaccines and Decision-Making with Imperfect Data
It’s trade-offs all the way down
But there’s a very important question lurking in this chart, one that goes straight to the heart of decision-making under uncertain conditions involving significant trade-offs. As can be seen, the incidence of Covid-19 drops off dramatically about 10 days after the first dose (look at the chart on the top left). However, the trial is designed to measure the efficacy of two doses: a prime and a booster. Eyeballing (we don’t have the underlying data), the first shot seems to have 65-80% efficacy in the full group—but we don’t know for how long that lasts. Hence, we have durability of immunity data—for three more months, to day 119—only with the booster shot.
Given the shortages, the potential for single dosing—at least for some populations—or more time between the doses is an important question. It’s possible that a single dose—one that can cover twice the number of people—would provide a significant benefit to the recipients, though we would be unsure about whether the immunity protections last as strongly three months later. This is no minor question. The United States is already planning to withhold vaccination from people unless a second shot has already been secured. If we get fifty million doses now, that’s 25 million people who could be vaccinated now who won’t be even though the doses are sitting in storage.
Bottom line is it’s probably best to give less people two shots and protect them more vs more people with one shot and protect them less, but it’s a discussion that should be had, with data and modeling. One thing “Warp Speed’ means is no time for difficult questions like this one.
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
Should Biden Call Out Trump’s Lawlessness?
The president-elect has mostly ignored his opponent’s attacks on democracy. That’s probably for the best.
The contemporary Republican Party is hardly the first in U.S. history to have a faction that actively opposed democracy. Segregationist Democrats did so in the former Confederate states for decades. But there’s something very different about that situation, or recent Republican efforts to restrict the franchise, and a president who doesn’t even pretend to abide by the basic rules of the system. Especially since he’s also eager to restrict the vote — or to just eliminate it entirely when it doesn’t go his way.
Until Monday, Biden had dealt with this situation by downplaying it as much as possible. I think that was the best strategy. And so I think his decision to address it on Monday night after the Electoral College reaffirmed his victory was probably a mistake. Even giving such a speech was a concession of sorts to Trump’s illegitimate challenges. In normal years, everyone treats the gathering of the electors as purely ceremonial. Which is quite correct: Ever since the early days of the republic, the electors have done nothing more than tally what was already decided by their state’s voters. But Trump and his allies are doing what they can to establish new norms, in which partisan judges, state governments and eventually congressional majorities all are free to ignore voters and substitute their own preferences. One challenge for Biden is to strengthen the assumption that voters choose.
Paul Blumenthal/HuffPost:
Donald Trump Has Hidden Evidence Of His Crimes For Years. Joe Biden Can Expose It.
The new administration should open the books and expose the Trump administration’s misdeeds.
While Biden admirably does not intend on echoing Trump’s undemocratic “lock them all up” chants, his administration can simply allow independent prosecutors to make their own decisions by opening the books on the Trump administration to expose wrongdoing, self-dealing and unlawful activity.
This will require the adoption of an affirmative policy to release and disclose information both in response to requests from Congress, oversight entities, journalists and the public — something the Trump administration did not do almost as a matter of policy. But in other respects it will involve the proactive implementation of policies through executive order or agency directive that would allow for the release of documents suppressed by the Trump administration. Much of the evidence of the Trump administration’s malfeasance is not yet in the public sphere, and by simply disclosing it Biden could begin the process of holding the soon-to-be ex-president accountable for his misdeeds.
CBS News:
Most feel election is “settled” but Trump voters disagree
Views expressed by Trump voters appear to be more than just the result of disappointment at the outcome. When we offered people a chance to explain why they would not view Mr. Biden as legitimate and offered the option that they were simply not ready to do so at the moment, few took it, saying instead it was because there was “fraud or inaccuracies,” in their view. Trump voters also largely reject the idea that the president is himself making these claims simply because he’s upset by his loss, with 85% saying he has “hard evidence of widespread vote fraud.”
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