And we’re not yet over the PTSD from COVID-19 As if America needed another reason not to hand the White House again to Donald “88 Counts” Trump. Do we really want Dr. Bleach-and-Light Enemas recommending quack remedies and maskless Everydays should we face another deadly pandemic? NPR: Officially, there is only one documented case of bird flu spilling over from cows into humans during the current U.S. outbreak. But epidemiologist Gregory Gray suspects the true number is higher, based on what he heard from veterinarians, farm owners and the workers themselves as the virus hit their herds in his state. “We know that some of the workers sought medical care for influenza-like illness and conjunctivitis at the same time the H5N1 was ravaging the dairy farms,” says Gray, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. “I don’t have a way to measure that, but it seems biologically quite plausible that they too, are suffering from the virus,” he says. Dr. Irwin Redlener (remember him from 2020?) is concerned: NBC News: The U.S.
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Greg Sargent at TNR: Because Donald Trump must always be seen as wielding absolute mastery over his hapless, flailing opponents, he and his propagandists want you to believe his hush-money trial in Manhattan has proven nothing but a smashing political success for him. On Monday night, Trump posted a video on social media featuring Fox personality Jesse Watters gushing that his trial may win him the White House. Trump also promoted a video of Fox’s Jeanine Pirro insisting that it showcases his ability to “withstand pressure.” Other Fox figures have spun Trump’s buffoonish outbreaks of narcolepsy in court as proof he’s Owning the Libs: Certain of acquittal, he can do some power-napping while showing the trial the contempt it deserves. Greg points out that Trump doesn’t seem quite as sanguine. According to the NY Times he’s been talking trash about Todd Blanche, his previously favorite attorney, because he isn’t being aggressive enough. (He’s also not happy with attorney’s fees…) Apparently, he’s venting that he doesn’t have “a Roy Cohn” again.
Antifa-da is comin’ ta git ya At Dartmouth College Wednesday night, students holding a peaceful pro-Palestine protest on the college green were quickly met with …. well, let Prof. Jeff Sharlett (“The Undertow“) tell it: It wasn’t as dramatic as the police breach of Columbia University carried live from New York. Meanwhile, Brown University administrators reached a negotiated settlement with student protesters: Northwestern did as well. Which do you think will get more press? Which do you think will fuel the right-wing culture war? Okay, likely all of it. Charlie Sykes recalls being a kid at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago when Mayor Daily unleashed his police against Vietnam War protesters. Those clashes helped Richard Nixon win the presidency. “[T]hey hastened the realignment of much of the American electorate. Republicans would hold the White House for 16 of the next 20 years.
A smattering of commentary from the Trump right today: Cool, totally cool.
As everyone wrings their hands over campus protests let’s take a look at the leader of the Republican youth movement’s top leader: Yeah. I think we can all afford to take a deep breath and remember that campus protests are among America’s foremost liberal traditions and calm down about it. (I say that to myself as much as anyone.)
Here’s one: Thanks to a provision in the Secure 2.0 Act, legislation aimed at improving retirement benefits nationwide, in 2024 employers will be able to start counting student loan payments as qualifying contributions toward retirement matching programs. That means if your employer offers to match your 401(k) contributions, you could get that matched money without ever depositing funds in your retirement account. Instead, your monthly student loan payments would count as your “contribution.” The benefit could be especially significant for recent graduates, who often have moderate incomes ($58,000 to start, on average) and high levels of debt (an average of $33,000 for federal borrowers aged 25 to 35). Does anyone know about this? I hope so. The Biden administration has created an unprecedented number of programs to help average people, increase manufacturing and jobs and generally expand the economy from the bottom up. And yet, most people are either unaware of it or frankly, don’t care. And yet all the polling says they do care about it and think Donald Trump is the guy who will give them the things that Biden has already done.
Paul Krugman with a trip down memory lane: You probably remember [the 1990s] as a time of prosperity — low unemployment and rapid economic growth combined with low inflation — marred by irrational exuberance in the stock market. Pets.com anyone? What you might not realize is how closely the economy of early 2024 resembles that of the late Clinton years. People might not be feeling the prosperity — or at least they say they aren’t feeling it, because there’s a huge gap between Americans’ positive assessment of their personal financial situation and their negative assessments of the economy. But by the numbers, things look pretty good. Notably, unemployment is actually a bit lower now than it was at the end of the roaring ’90s. He notes that inflation spiked in 2021-22 but that according to one good measure it’s actually come down to a level that’s barely above the Fed’s target rate. What about interest rates? Well, people have forgotten that interest rates were higher during the 90s and mortgage rates were even higher than they are now: Needless to say, the stock market was soaring as it is today.
“Trump appears to have fallen asleep while listening to testimony — at times appearing to stir and then falling back to sleep. Trump’s eyes were closed for extended periods and his head has at times jerked in a way consistent with sleeping.” Meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers, at his instruction no doubt, refused to stipulate that certain tapes and testimony are admissible. So this is what the prosecution had to do: They had to get the owner of the transcription service in the Carroll trial to testify too. Here’s one of the CSPAN tapes they want admitted. If this trial proves nothing else it shows his performative lies in living color. Just look at how adamantly he denies knowing these women. The trial proves he did.
It’s the vaccines Trump has downplayed his role in the vaccines ever since that incident even though he is dying to take credit for them. He impulsively waded into this again after the State of the Union address and it didn’t go well at all: All hell broke loose: It went on and on and on. There is obviously a group of anti-vax MAGAs who feel so strongly about this they are even willing to defy Dear Leader. Aaron Blake at the Washington Post reports on a new poll about this question: A Monmouth University poll Monday initially asked voters whether they would consider voting for Kennedy. Democrats were slightly more likely than Republicans to say they were. But then the poll asked people whether they were aware that Kennedy “claims that autism is linked to vaccines” and that he has floated a theory that covid was targeted at certain races. (Neither claim is based in fact.) About half of Republicans said they were aware of this; about 6 in 10 Democrats said they were.
Trump’s persona is not even “truthful hyperbole” Ahead of the 2016 election Donald Trump won, The New York Times cited a now-famous paragraph from Donald Trump’s ghost-written “The Art of the Deal.” David Barstow wrote: “I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.” For example, in the now-infamous Trump University litigation, Mr. Trump was asked in a deposition about a script that had been prepared for Trump University instructors. According to the script, the instructors were supposed to tell their students the following: “I remember one time Mr. Trump said to us over dinner, he said, ‘Real estate is the only market that, when there’s a sale going on, people run from the store.’ You don’t want to run from the store.” No such dinners ever took place, Mr. Trump acknowledged. In fact, Mr. Trump struggled to identify a single one of the instructors he claimed to have handpicked, even after he was shown their photographs. Nonetheless, Mr.