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Michael Gerson/WaPo:
The threat of violence now infuses GOP politics. We should all be afraid.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who has a talent for constructive bluntness, describes a political atmosphere within the GOP heavy with fear. “If you look at the vote to impeach,” she said recently, “there were members who told me that they were afraid for their own security — afraid, in some instances, for their lives.” The events of Jan. 6 have only intensified the alarm. When Donald Trump insists he is “still the rightful president,” Cheney wrote in an op-ed for The Post, he “repeats these words now with full knowledge that exactly this type of language provoked violence on Jan. 6.” And there’s good reason, Cheney argued, “to believe that Trump’s language can provoke violence again.”
Sometimes political events force us to step back in awe, or horror, or both. The (former) third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives has accused a former president of her party of employing the threat of violence as a tool of intimidation. And election officials around the country — Republican and Democratic — can attest to the results: Death threats. Racist harassment. Armed protesters at their homes.
Oliver O’Connell/Independent:
Republican under fire for voting down Capitol riot commission despite his own angry video selfie while sheltering from mob
In January, Representative Mike Gallagher demanded Trump call off rioters
Republican congressmen Mike Gallagher is under fire for voting against setting up a commission to investigate the Capitol riot.
He is being singled out because, as the assault on Congress was under way on 6 January, Mr Gallagher posted an indignant video to Twitter in which he pleaded for Donald Trump to “call this off”.
Locked in his office, sheltering from the chaos that gripped the Capitol, Mr Gallagher tweeted: “We are witnessing absolute banana republic crap in the United States Capitol right now.”
“@realdonaldtrump, you need to call this off.”
Nevertheless, the representative from Wisconsin joined his five fellow Republicans from the state in voting against the creation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the events of that day, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.
…
In a statement, Mr Gallagher said he voted against the commission because he believes that instead, Congress should form “a special investigatory committee whose meetings are closed to the public and whose members and staffers have committed to a gag order.”
IOW, it was all none of your business. And if Republicans were involved, all the more reason to have it behind closed doors.
David Wallace-Wells/New York:
What Really Happened With that Weird Yankees COVID Outbreak
Last week, in very short order, eight members of the New York Yankees, all of whom were apparently “fully” vaccinated, tested positive for COVID-19, confusing and alarming many Americans — not to mention Yankee fans — who had assumed that vaccination would close the book on the pandemic, at least for the vaccinated. Michael Mina, however, was not confused or alarmed. A Harvard epidemiologist who has spent the pandemic advocating for the widespread use of home-pregnancy-style rapid antigen tests, Mina has become, over the past year, one of the most clear-eyed critics of the public-health establishment and the COVID messaging that has emerged from it.
It seems like you don’t think these are “breakthrough” infections and also that you’re not surprised to see them.
The Yankees are testing themselves frequently. When that happens, especially if you’re doing PCR tests, you’re going to find exposures and infections.
Helen Branswell/STAT:
How the Covid pandemic ends: Scientists look to the past to see the future
There may have been a fleeting chance humans could have halted spread of SARS-2 and driven it back into nature, as happened with its cousin, SARS-1. But that door was firmly shut long ago. It also seems that another option — vaccinating our way out of the pandemic — is an expensive toll highway that few countries will be able to access in the near term.
That probably sounds bleak, but don’t despair. The truth of the matter is that pandemics always end. And to date vaccines have never played a significant role in ending them. (That doesn’t mean vaccines aren’t playing a critical role this time. Far fewer people will die from Covid-19 because of them.)
David Brooks/NY Times:
Has Biden Changed? He Tells Us.
What happened to Joe Biden? Many people thought he was a moderate incrementalist, but now he’s promoting whopping big legislative packages that make many on the progressive left extremely happy.
I asked him that when I spoke on the phone with him this week. The answer seems to be — it’s complicated.
The values that drive him have been utterly consistent over the decades, and the policies he is proposing now are similar to those he’s been championing for decades.
It’s the scale that is gigantically different. It’s as if a company that was making pleasure boats started turning out ocean liners. And that’s because Biden believes that in a post-Trump world we’re fighting not just to preserve the middle class, but to survive as the leading nation of the earth.
Seth Masket/Mischiefs of Faction:
California recall: Why this ain’t 2003
To be sure, Newsom’s popularity is nothing to dismiss. His approval rating has been holding steady at around 53 percent this year (contrasted with Gray Davis’ approval rating of 24% shortly before his recall). Only around 40% of Californians say they would support a recall at this point. Republicans claiming he somehow mismanaged a pandemic that will likely decrease in salience as the election approaches just doesn’t seem like the path to his removal.
But another feature of California’s recall elections has not been receiving much attention recently, yet may be just as helpful to Newsom. Like just a handful of other states, California has a recall election that consists of two questions posed on the same ballot: 1) Shall the governor be recalled, and; 2) Who shall replace him if he is recalled? Voters can answer the second question even if they say no to the first. And how people feel about the options on question #2 can affect how they feel about question #1.
Jennifer Bendery/HuffPost:
GOP Lies Fueled The Capitol Riot. Of Course They Don’t Want A Panel To Expose That.
House Republicans opposed to a Jan. 6 commission also spread lies of a stolen election — the same lies that led to the insurrection. They know that.
Some Republicans argued that an independent commission would duplicate ongoing congressional and criminal investigations. But the same was true of the 9/11 commission, which is the model for the proposed Jan. 6 commission.
Some said Democrats just want to use the commission to badger Trump. But, again, it would be an independent, bipartisan panel with outside members, with the singular goal of examining what led to one of the darkest days in American history.
The most obvious reason why so many Republicans voted against creating an independent Jan. 6 commission is because they know they are complicit in what happened that day.
Derek Thompson/Atlantic:
The Texas Mask Mystery
When the governor lifted the state’s mandate, liberals predicted disaster. But it never came. Why?
Decrees from the federal government may not affect Americans any more than local rules do. In a recent announcement, the CDC reversed its guidance for vaccinated individuals in a manner so dramatic that it struck some as the V-E Day of the pandemic. But survey results from The Economist and YouGov show that the big pivot hasn’t dramatically changed people’s masking behaviors. The main drivers of mask wearing have been ideology, partisanship, and vaccination status—which is itself highly, if imperfectly, correlated with ideology. Most people aren’t waiting on the CDC.
Governors don’t reopen or close economies. The CDC doesn’t put masks on or take them off citizens’ faces. A small number of elites don’t decide when everyone else feels safe enough to shop, eat inside, or get on a plane. People seem to make these decisions for themselves, based on some combination of local norms, political orientation, and personal risk tolerance that resists quick reversals, no matter what public health elites say.
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