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Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: July 17, 2021 | Author: | Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: , , , , , , |29 Comments
Cat on a flowery Meadow, Bruno Liljefors

Cat on a Flowery Meadow, by Bruno Liljefors

Good Afternoon!!

Yesterday I wrote about the latest revelations from some of the many Trump books that have been hitting the shelves, as well as an upcoming one by Susan Glasser and her husband NYT reporter Peter Baker. Yesterday Glasser spoke to CNN’s Jack Tapper. From Raw Story: ‘Most terrified I’ve ever been’: Reporter describes learning ‘extremely alarming’ details of Trump’s final days.

Reporter Susan Glasser on Friday told CNN’s Jake Tapper that she felt personally unnerved while reporting out details of former President Donald Trump’s final days.

While discussing her most recent article in the New Yorker about Trump’s fights with General Mark Milley in the waning weeks of his administration, Glasser explained to Tapper that it was unprecedented for American military leaders to view the sitting commander-in-chief as a potential national security threat.

“You know, when I first learned about the level of alarm that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had through the election and all the way into January, I have to say it was probably the most terrified I’ve ever been as a reporter in several decades,” said Glasser, who has also reported from American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

She said she was relieved to see that Milley and other top military commanders had done their best to hold Trump in check, but still found it frightening just how far the twice-impeached former president was willing to go.

The question arises: why are we just now learning about these horrific events and those reported in other books? From The Washington Post: The media scramble at the heart of Trump Book Summer.

The peak of Trump Book Summer, the moment of maximum media intensity, may have come last Wednesday, when reporters scrambled to match a story about a story contained in one of those books.

Around 3 p.m. that day, New York magazine published an article based on a revelation its writer had discovered in the pages of “I Alone Can Fix It,” one of the entries in the current spate of Trump Studies, a copy of which the magazine said it had “obtained” before its official release.

The gist of the magazine’s report — that the book would reveal that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, feared Trump would precipitate a coup to maintain power — was so hot that it in turn triggered a nearly immediate follow-up report on CNN.com, written by no less than five reporters. Which in turn prompted The Washington Post to chase down the same nugget — which was kind of ironic considering the book that produced the scoop was written by two Post reporters and had already generated a prominent excerpt in the paper, with a second to come days later.

wyndham Lewis, A Woman with a Cat

Wyndham Lewis, A Woman with a Cat

The media-on-media scramble, a kind of Russian nesting doll of reportage, attested to both the profound import of the Milley anecdote and the cultural heat of the new syllabus of Trump books. On the same day, “I Alone,” written by The Post’s Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, was the best-selling book on Amazon, which includes preorders for not-yet-released books. The third and fourth bestsellers were also dishy Trump titles, “Landslide,” by the independent journalist Michael Wolff, and “Frankly, We Did Win This Election,” by the Wall Street Journal’s Michael C. Bender, respectively. A fourth book, “Nightmare Scenario,” about Trump’s handling of the pandemic by two other Post reporters, Damian Paletta and Yasmeen Abutaleb, had climbed up the lists the week before….

This spurt doesn’t include another dozen or so Trump books that will be released over the next few months, including one co-authored by Washington Post veteran Bob Woodward, who has already written two Trump tomes, including last September’s predictably best-selling “Rage.”

So why is it OK for these reporters to keep shocking news to themselves so they can use it to sell their books later on? The answer is that newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times allow their reporters to go on leave while writing their books and their research is “walled off from from their daily beat responsibilities,” according to editor Sally Buzbee. 

“Basically, when staffers go on unpaid book leaves, which is the case here, there is an understanding that the reporting they are doing is for the book,” she said. “The Post typically publishes the book’s first excerpt, which gives our readers the first cut at the news. This is our long-standing practice and has served readers of The Post and the reporters well.”

Lilla Cabot Perry (1848-1933)

Painting by Lilla Cabot Perry (1848-1933)

New York Times editor Dean Baquet said he encourages his reporters to “keep in touch” with editors at the paper when they’re working on books, and to alert them when they come up with something worthy of daily publication.

“Sometimes we make the judgment that it is okay to hold [a big scoop], or at least to hold until we publish an excerpt,” he said. Book-writing and daily news reporting aren’t “church and state,” said Baquet, whose star White House reporter Maggie Haberman is at work on a Trump book, “and I do hope reporters break their big news in the Times.”

Rucker noted another constraint on real-time reporting of the news he and Leonnig uncovered: “Many of the officials we interviewed for ‘I Alone Can Fix It’ agreed to speak with us about these events only after Trump had left office and only for the purposes of this deeper history,” he said.

OK then. I have to admit I can’t resist reading these books, even though I’m troubled by reporters keeping these secrets. 

In other news, a Texas judge ruled that DACA is illegal. The Washington Post: U.S. judge blocks new applicants to program that protects undocumented ‘dreamers’ who arrived as children.

A federal judge in Texas has largely halted an Obama administration initiative that grants work permits and reprieves from deportation to undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children — calling the program “unlawful” even as he allowed the more than 600,000 young people already in it to keep their protected status.

U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen sided with Texas and other states in his ruling that President Barack Obama overstepped his executive authority when he created the program.

Hanen’s ruling called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, an “illegally implemented program” and said “the public interest of the nation is always served by the cessation of a program that was created in violation of law.”

He prohibited the Department of Homeland Security from approving new applications, issued a permanent injunction vacating the memo that created DACA in 2012 — when President Biden was vice president — and remanded the issue to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for reconsideration.

Oskar Kokoschka

Painting by Oskar Kokoschka

President Biden said the DOJ will appeal the decision. The White House: Statement by President Joe Biden on DACA and Legislation for Dreamers.

In 2012, the Obama-Biden Administration created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, which has allowed hundreds of thousands of young immigrants to remain in the United States, to live, study, and work in our communities. Nine years later, Congress has not acted to provide a path to citizenship for Dreamers.

Yesterday’s Federal court ruling is deeply disappointing. While the court’s order does not now affect current DACA recipients, this decision nonetheless relegates hundreds of thousands of young immigrants to an uncertain future. The Department of Justice intends to appeal this decision in order to preserve and fortify DACA. And, as the court recognized, the Department of Homeland Security plans to issue a proposed rule concerning DACA in the near future.

But only Congress can ensure a permanent solution by granting a path to citizenship for Dreamers that will provide the certainty and stability that these young people need and deserve. I have repeatedly called on Congress to pass the American Dream and Promise Act, and I now renew that call with the greatest urgency. It is my fervent hope that through reconciliation or other means, Congress will finally provide security to all Dreamers, who have lived too long in fear.

Thanks to all the misinformation Trump and his fans have spread about the Covid-19 and vaccines that prevent infections, we now appear to be entering a fourth wave of the deadly virus. USA Today: The fourth wave of COVID-19 cases is here. Will we escape the UK’s fate? It’s too soon to know, by Karen Weintraub.

A doubling of COVID-19 cases in the last two weeks suggests the United States has entered a fourth wave of the pandemic.

Beaver Meadow, Paul Sample

Beaver Meadow, by Paul Sample

No one knows what the next month or two will bring, but the example of the United Kingdom suggests the infection rate could get quite high, while hospitalizations and deaths stay relatively low.

Instead of the virus raging through entire communities, it is expected to target the unvaccinated, including children, and if rates are high enough, also the most vulnerable of the vaccinated – the elderly and the immunocompromised.

“Since the majority of our population is now immune, it’s unlikely that we’re going to return to the massive nationwide waves we saw back in January,” Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist with the Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said in a Wednesday webinar with media.

But major outbreaks can still occur, particularly in areas with low vaccination rates.

“We’re going to be living in two pandemic worlds, the world that’s vaccinated and the world that’s unvaccinated,” said Dr. Luis Ostrosky,  chief of infectious diseases at UTHealth and an infectious disease specialist at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston.

The three vaccines authorized for use in the United States, from Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson, have all been shown to be highly effective against variants of the virus, including Delta, which now accounts for most of the cases in the U.S.

It’s a long article, so click the link to learn more.

Ed Yong at The Atlantic: Delta Is Driving a Wedge Through Missouri. For America as a whole, the pandemic might be fading. For some communities, this year will be worse than last.

The summer wasn’t meant to be like this. By April, Greene County, in southwestern Missouri, seemed to be past the worst of the pandemic. Intensive-care units that once overflowed had emptied. Vaccinations were rising. Health-care workers who had been fighting the coronavirus for months felt relieved—perhaps even hopeful. Then, in late May, cases started ticking up again. By July, the surge was so pronounced that “it took the wind out of everyone,” Erik Frederick, the chief administrative officer of Mercy Hospital Springfield, told me. “How did we end up back here again?”

Alice Neel

Painting by Alice Neel

The hospital is now busier than at any previous point during the pandemic. In just five weeks, it took in as many COVID-19 patients as it did over five months last year. Ten minutes away, another big hospital, Cox Medical Center South, has been inundated just as quickly. “We only get beds available when someone dies, which happens several times a day,” Terrence Coulter, the critical-care medical director at CoxHealth, told me.

Last week, Katie Towns, the acting director of the Springfield–Greene County Health Department, was concerned that the county’s daily cases were topping 250. On Wednesday, the daily count hit 405. This dramatic surge is the work of the super-contagious Delta variant, which now accounts for 95 percent of Greene County’s new cases, according to Towns. It is spreading easily because people have ditched their masks, crowded into indoor spaces, resumed travel, and resisted vaccinations. Just 40 percent of people in Greene County are fully vaccinated. In some nearby counties, less than 20 percent of people are.

Many experts have argued that, even with Delta, the United States is unlikely to revisit the horrors of last winter. Even now, the country’s hospitalizations are one-seventh as high as they were in mid-January. But national optimism glosses over local reality. For many communities, this year will be worse than last. Springfield’s health-care workers and public-health specialists are experiencing the same ordeals they thought they had left behind. “But it feels worse this time because we’ve seen it before,” Amelia Montgomery, a nurse at CoxHealth, told me. “Walking back into the COVID ICU was demoralizing.”

Those ICUs are also filling with younger patients, in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, including many with no underlying health problems. In part, that’s because elderly people have been more likely to get vaccinated, leaving Delta with a younger pool of vulnerable hosts. While experts are still uncertain if Delta is deadlier than the original coronavirus, every physician and nurse in Missouri whom I spoke with told me that the 30- and 40-something COVID-19 patients they’re now seeing are much sicker than those they saw last year.

Read the rest at The Atlantic.

I’ll add a few more links in the comment thread. What stories are you following today?

29 Comments on “Lazy Caturday Reads”

  1. bostonboomer says:
    July 17, 2021 at 11:25 am

    National Geographic: The unusual Lambda variant is rapidly spreading in South America. Here’s what we know.

    Lambda (also known as C.37) was first detected in Peru in August 2020 and has spread to 29 countries, many in Latin America. And, since January 20, 2021, 668 Lambda infections have been reported in the United States. In Peru, Lambda is now responsible for more than 90 percent of new COVID-19 cases, a steep rise from less than 0.5 percent in December. The country has already suffered the world’s worst mortality due to COVID-19; the disease has killed about 0.54 percent of the population.

    The Lambda variant likely caused the high number of infections during the second wave between the end of March and April, Peruvian Minister of Health Óscar Ugarte said in a news conference. In neighboring Chile, where the primary vaccine is China’s CoronaVac, Lambda accounts for 31 percent of sequenced cases in the last 60 days. The high case numbers are occurring even though 58.6 percent of Chile’s population is fully vaccinated and another 10 percent has received a single dose. The poor efficacy of the vaccine maybe partly to blame. A study by the University of Chile found that a single dose of the CoronaVac vaccine was only 3 percent effective, but that rose to 56.5 percent after both doses….

    The possibility that Lambda might be able to dodge the immune system led the World Health Organization to designate it as a Variant of Interest (VOI) on June 14. WHO categorizes a virus as a VOI when genetic changes in the virus are so significant that they may affect its transmissibility, disease severity, immune escape, diagnosis or therapy; and it spreads rapidly through a community.

  2. bostonboomer says:
    July 17, 2021 at 11:27 am

    President Biden unleashed his growing frustration with social media on Friday, saying that platforms like Facebook were “killing people” by allowing disinformation about the coronavirus vaccine to spread online.

    Mr. Biden’s forceful statement capped weeks of anger in the White House over the dissemination of vaccine disinformation online, even as the pace of inoculations slows and health officials warn of the rising danger of the Delta variant.

    Just before boarding Marine One for a weekend in Camp David in Maryland, Mr. Biden was asked what his message was to social media platforms when it came to Covid-19 disinformation.

    “They’re killing people,” he said. “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that — and they’re killing people.”

  3. Enheduanna says:
    July 17, 2021 at 12:07 pm

    Here’s info from Susie about the Child Tax Credits going into effect today:

    Child tax credit

    • Enheduanna says:
      July 17, 2021 at 12:08 pm

      Oops I guess this is two days old now.

      • NW Luna says:
        July 17, 2021 at 1:31 pm

        Good info to know, regardless of whether it’s today or not. Of course the ‘family values’ Republicans are complaining that this is a handout.

  4. dakinikat says:
    July 17, 2021 at 12:36 pm

    I want to know what the chance of getting it is if you live with someone who refuses to get vaccinated.

    • Minkoff Minx says:
      July 17, 2021 at 1:14 pm

      Yes, me too!

    • NW Luna says:
      July 17, 2021 at 2:30 pm

      Cumulative exposure matters a lot. I’d kick the person out. Your life is being endangered. Even getting a mild case gives you the risk of long-term neuro sequelae.

      • NW Luna says:
        July 17, 2021 at 2:36 pm

        Plus this:

        the 30- and 40-something COVID-19 patients they’re now seeing are much sicker than those they saw last year.

      • quixote says:
        July 17, 2021 at 2:55 pm

        Agree with Luna! It’s all about cumulative exposure. And living with someone is just about the definition of cumulative exposure.

        If this is a relative or dear friend who you can’t / don’t want to ask to leave, get some stringent social isolation rules in place. If it’s anyone else, point out your comorbities and say, “July 19th is the deadline. After that I’ll have to call the police to remove you.”

        It’s that serious.

        • dakinikat says:
          July 17, 2021 at 4:12 pm

          She’s supposed to be leaving in 2 weeks but I’ve heard that before. Most of her stuff is moved. She’s waiting to buy my neighbor’s car and she just went to Seattle for 2 weeks so when she gets back. I really feel at risk.

          • NW Luna says:
            July 17, 2021 at 6:02 pm

            If she won’t get vaccinated for herself, she should do it for you. Best of luck at getting her either out or to see sense. Besides, we don’t want unvaccinated people up here in Seattle!

      • dakinikat says:
        July 17, 2021 at 4:10 pm

        I’ve been trying for about 4 – 5 years. It’s been an orderal.

    • NW Luna says:
      July 17, 2021 at 2:53 pm

  5. dakinikat says:
    July 17, 2021 at 2:05 pm

    Just watched the Tapper/Glasser interview. That’s pretty unnerving! Thank goodness we actually have generals that do care about the constitution and the country!!!

    The pictures are beautiful I love the lady in red holding the cat!

  6. quixote says:
    July 17, 2021 at 3:03 pm

    Yes: infuriating about these [adjective deleted] reporters moneygrubbers coming out with all this stuff now.

    As for the editors…. They’re saying, “Oh, we came up with these rules allowing them to sit on it. So it’s just fine they sat on it.”

    And that makes it okay. Riiiiiiight.

    • NW Luna says:
      July 17, 2021 at 3:13 pm

      Yep.

      So why is it OK for these reporters to keep shocking news to themselves so they can use it to sell their books later on?

      Squatting on info about threats to the country to save for a future book is disgustingly selfish.

  7. NW Luna says:
    July 17, 2021 at 3:08 pm

  8. quixote says:
    July 17, 2021 at 3:10 pm

    Um, re not following in Britain’s footsteps in 4th wave?

    We do know the answer. There’s a fairly simple epidemiological equation that tells you which level of vaccination you need at a given level of speed of spread (R0). For delta that’s around 85% full vaccination.

    States with over approx 80%+ full vaccination won’t follow UK. The others will.

    Knowing what will happen is not difficult. Getting people to stop being idiots, though? Apparently impossible 😡

    • NW Luna says:
      July 17, 2021 at 3:16 pm

      IOW, nearly every state will be swarming with Delta.

    • dakinikat says:
      July 17, 2021 at 4:13 pm

      Our governor and Secretary of Health called us in a 4th wave yesterday. Only lie 39% of Lousiana is vaccinated. It’s about triple that in New Orleans. We have one of the highest vaccine rates for cities in the country and got there early. But, we are surrounded by yahoos.

    • Beata says:
      July 17, 2021 at 7:00 pm

      Covid cases are increasing in Los Angeles and San Francisco as well. In San Francisco, the majority of new Covid cases are among people of color. This is probably true in Los Angeles as well. So the new surge is not simply an idiot Trump supporter problem. It is more complex than that.

      • quixote says:
        July 17, 2021 at 7:34 pm

        Yes. It’s anyone who is unvaxxed. What I’ve read regarding outreach to some of the underserved CA communities what helps is pro-vax messages coming from trusted members of the community: religious leaders, barbers, hairdressers, (I know, kind of funny that they’re all in the group together, but it’s basically “people I’m familiar with”), local doctors, nurses, teachers, etc. It’s lack of time + distrust, and not “own the libs” so they’re not beyond assistance.

  9. NW Luna says:
    July 17, 2021 at 7:58 pm

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