There’s a lot of back and forth going on over a new study that people say suggests masks are useless to stop the spread of an aerosol based virus. The NY Times, which has been a bastion of COVID mitigation skepticism, featured an op-ed by Brett Stephens that’s as misleading as what you can find on Breitbart any given day. Here’s Dr Tom Friedan: Masks have been an effective tool throughout the Covid pandemic, despite erroneous claims to the contrary. The widely cited Cochrane review on masks was poorly done and even more poorly communicated. Regrettably, researchers analyzed the wrong datasets, in the wrong way, and overstated their conclusions—leading to sweeping and inaccurate characterizations. Many nuances around mask type, setting, behavior, and policy are explained in this helpful piece by @dr_kkjetelina. http://bit.ly/3ErwuNN 3/ The CDC did an excellent review citing extensive evidence that masks are effective, from multiple studies.
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Catalyzing $1.7 trillion in private investments Venture capitalist @NickHanauer (of TED talk infamy and Pitchfork Economics) draws attention to the transformational nature of the Biden administration’s infrastructure plans. Readers of a certain age may recall a time before interstate highways and the impact of that national project. “Buckle up, America. I’m just back from dozens of meetings at the Whitehouse and Capitol Hill. The amount of investment headed for the American economy is beyond anything we have every [sic] experienced,” Hanauer tweeted. Hanauer adds, “In two years, the Biden administration made up for most of the last 50 years of policy malpractice. Between CHIPS, IRA, and INFRASTRUCTURE, and the anti monopoly EO’s, we are going to get done what we should have been doing all along.” Hanauer retweets Jay Turner who follows environmental politics and policy at Wellesley College. Turner follows investments in the electric vehicle (EV) supply chain. “The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it will inject $374 billion into the clean technology sector over the next decade,” CleanTechinca reports.
How many doubling-downs is it? It’s not enough that the AR-15 is the weapon of choice for mass shooters, no. Republicans in Congress think that’s cause for celebration. In fact, Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia (what a guy!) handed out AR-15 lapel pins to Republican colleagues “during National Gun Violence Survivors Week,” writes Steve Benen at MaddowBlog: H.R.1095 has as of now three Republican co-sponsors. Pistol-packin’ Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Troll-in-Residence Clyde, and International Man of Mystery, Rep. George Santos of New York, all think The United States of Freakin’ America is incomplete without an official mass-murder weapon. They’re trolling, Benen is sure, as that seems to be why they think voters sent them to Congress on your nickel and mine. “If your instinct is to be disgusted by politicians who’d respond to mass shootings by celebrating the weapon used in too many of the slayings then the Republicans championing this bill are no doubt delighted,” Benen writes: So why not ignore it?
Not really As with every other week for the past few months, the big question of the week among the chattering classes has been whether former president Donald Trump still has his mojo among the MAGA crowd. With the ambitious Florida dreamboat Gov. Ron DeSantis committing one culture war assault after another, the entry of former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley into the race getting a lot of attention and what appears to be a long line of Republican wannabes undaunted by his former dominance preparing to enter the race, Trump is said to be rocked back on his heels, reeling like an out of shape boxer who’s past his prime. Is that true? And if it is, does that even matter? The Washington Post interviewed 150 of Trump’s fans to find out. What a treat. We haven’t had an in-depth report on the average Trump voter in weeks so it’s a big relief to see the media venture out into the heartland once again to take the temperature of these Real Americans.
Blast from the past William Saletan discusses the current state of disarray in the GOP over Ukraine and points out that Fox is pushing for disengagement hard. He also mentions a tiny group of GOP officials who are fighting back when they go on the network and says there are more of them. 1. Rep. Nancy Mace, Hannity, Tuesday. Hegseth, sitting in for Sean Hannity, begins the interview by complaining that Biden is spending more time in Ukraine than on the border or the train disaster in Ohio. He asks: “If you’re the American people, are you confident in this endless endeavor this administration is undertaking?” Mace parrots the Fox view. She says Biden’s policy is “Ukraine first, and it’s America last.” But halfway through the segment, when Hegseth asks what America is getting for “the billions we’re spending” in Ukraine, Mace turns serious. She points out that in 1994, we guaranteed Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for its agreement to surrender its nuclear weapons. And she says we can shorten the war by accelerating aid to hasten Ukraine’s victory.
Right to life only really applies to the zygotes, embryos and fetuses. No one else need apply “Right to life” zealots insist that pregnant patients must be bleeding out and literally on the verge of death before a doctor can provide life saving procedures: In Tennessee, Republican lawmakers are considering whether patients should be forced to continue dangerous pregnancies, even while miscarrying, under the state’s abortion ban — and how close to risking death such patients need to be before a doctor can legally intervene. At a legislative hearing last week, a lobbyist who played a dominant role in crafting the state’s abortion legislation made his preference clear: A pregnant patient should be in the process of an urgent emergency, such as bleeding out, before they can receive abortion care. Some pregnancy complications “work themselves out,” Will Brewer, who represents the local affiliate of the anti-abortion organization National Right to Life, told a majority-male panel of lawmakers Feb. 14.
And the stupid crazy Ron Brownstein interviewed Simon Rosenberg of the NDN , one of the few Democratic analysts who saw that the 2022 Red Wave was hype. Here, he explains how he knew that: Brownstein: There was a widespread narrative in the media about the red wave. I spoke on the weekend before the election to half a dozen top-level Democratic operatives and pollsters who were anticipating disaster. You and a couple others were really the conspicuous exceptions to that. I’m wondering why the general wisdom, not only in the media, but in much of the party, was so off? And what are the implications of that for 2024? Rosenberg: When I look back at what happened, I go back to something we’ve been discussing, which is the power of the right-wing propaganda machines to bully public opinion into places that it shouldn’t be going. And I think there was never a red wave, and there needs to be a lot more public introspection done by those of us who do political analysis about why so many people got it wrong. The only way you could believe that a red wave was coming was if you just discounted the ugliness of MAGA.
In a large majority of states, most people think the vast majority of abortions should be legal: The immediate constriction of access to abortion that followed helped Democrats overperform in the 2022 midterms and probably continues to power Democratic electoral strength. In part, this is because Democrats have a new, potent organizing argument: protecting access to abortion. In part, though, it’s because most Americans — including a majority of people in most states won by former president Donald Trump in 2020 — think abortion should be legal. PRRI conducted a huge, national poll on views of abortion, covering respondents in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It found that not only that do most Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, but most people in most states hold that position. Even Republicans are more than twice as likely to say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases than to say it should be banned completely. The results of the state-by-state poll are shown below.
A new invisible empire strikes back The backlash to the “created equal” decisions and policies of the last century percolated along for decades. First, resistance to 1954’s Brown v. Board decision with the growth of segregation academies. Then the blue to red flip of former Confederate states in the wake of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 under LBJ. Then the promotion of the religious right by the conservative movement. By the end of the last century, the internet and right-wing media facilitated isolated cranks and bigots bonding with others of their kind, including flat earthers and other conspiracy theorists. The election of a Black man to the White House threw accelerant onto white grievances building for half a century. What has grown into a white grievance industrial complex pairs racial and ideological goals with commercial ones supported by YouTube, Fox, and other social media. Charles Blow examines the next generation of efforts by unsettled whites to turn back the clock and return nonwhite minorities to their proper places at the bottom of the social order.
They’re clowns, yes, but…. Following up on my post below on the right’s decades-long war against “created equal” and against everyone not conforming to their narrow view of who counts as a Real American™, here is a long Brynn Tannehill thread (at Heather Cox Richardson’s suggestion) of where it could lead if the American left cannot screw itself up to vigorously fight back and now: I’ve seen a lot of people jump on Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s comments about needing a national divorce. Based on other (seemingly unrelated, but not really) events, this is way more complicated than “We had one civil war already.” 1/n When Marjorie Taylor Greene Says ‘National Divorce,’ She Means Another Civil WarGreene in effect wants a new Confederate States of America, but like the old one, it won’t emerge peacefully.https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/marjorie-taylor-greenes-national-divorce-was-the-civil-war.html First, it needs to be acknowledged that the US is going in a bad direction. The GOP wants to assume authoritarian control over the US, and Gov.