With another coronavirus variant racing across the U.S., once again health authorities are urging people to mask up indoors. Yes, you’ve heard it all before. But given how contagious omicron is, experts say, it’s seriously time to upgrade to an N95 or similar high-filtration respirator when you’re in public indoor spaces.
“Cloth masks are not going to cut it with omicron,” says Linsey Marr, a researcher at Virginia Tech who studies how viruses transmit in the air.
Omicron is so much more transmissible than coronavirus variants that have come before it. It spreads at least three times faster than delta. One person is infecting at least three others at a time on average, based on data from other countries.
“It’s very contagious,” says Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “And the kind of encounter that you could have had with prior versions of the virus that would have left you uninfected, there’s now a good chance you will get infected from it.
The White House Correspondents’ Association has proposed holding the daily briefings on Zoom or some other online platform to avoid face-to-face contact in the White House’s cramped briefing room.
The WHCA is concerned that reporters face an elevated risk of being infected with the highly contagious omicron variant — or infecting their colleagues with it — while congregating in the 49-seat briefing room or the narrow workspaces behind it.
In a memo sent to members on Tuesday, the group’s president, Steven Portnoy, noted that President Biden himself had said in a speech earlier in the day that omicron cases are likely to be widespread in many workplaces, including at the White House.
This is what a Republican used to look like. I’ve never really been into this guy but this is a nice move on his part.
One hell of a guy. Met @Schwarzenegger on the set of "Kindergarten Cop", he's as advertised. This is so great of him to walk the walk…. We need more people who have LOTS to share with those who have nothing. Billionaires in BC take note. https://t.co/3T0w6huBcA
Then there is this story from Rolling Stone. I really wish Krampus would’ve of drug all these people off in his wooden cart. “MAGA Diehards Melt Down Over Trump’s Pro-Vax Push. Anger and confusion reign as Trump endorses vaccines many followers believe are poison”
In fairness to the boo birds, the pro-booster message was an about-face for Trump, for whom consistency has never been a virtue. Over the summer he dismissed the notion of a third jab as “a money-making operation for Pfizer.” This message vibed with the anti-vax fever swamps, which have long decried Big Pharma for raking in profits by pushing vaccines that (they believe against all evidence) poison patients, instead of protecting them.
As the president’s new, unabashed booster endorsement rippled out across right-wing social media, it was met with an combustible mix of anger, confusion, contorted excuses, and denial so pure it’s as if the former president had never uttered a word.
For a sign of just how severely Trump wrong-footed himself with his base by endorsing boosters, look no further than the editorial cartoonist Ben Garrison. The doodler’s devotion to the 45th president has been slavish, but Garrison’s opposition to the vaccine has also been stalwart. His latest cartoon opus shows Trump riding aboard on the “Big Pharma Vaccine Bandwagon” as he’s booed by the MAGA-hatted masses.
There’s a lot of other weirdness in the news today!
The LAPD have proved themselves craven again. This is from the NYT.
They couldn’t have just nabbed the guy without shooting up a retail store during the last-minute holiday shopping crowd?
The teenager had been in the dressing room with her mother, the Los Angeles Police chief, Michel R. Moore, told LAist.com, adding that the shooting was the “worst thing anyone can imagine.” The police did not immediately release the girl’s name.
Chief Choi described the encounter as a “tragic and unfortunate sequence of events” and said it remained under investigation. He said that the investigation had indicated that the girl had been fatally shot by the police.
“Preliminarily, we believe that round was an officer’s round,” he said.
He said investigators had not yet reviewed body-camera video or the store’s security-camera footage, although it appeared the dressing room had been in the officer’s line of fire.
A couple of weeks ago, Donald Trump appeared on Fox News and was asked about the investigation into the Jan. 6 attacks. “Honestly, I have nothing to hide,” the former president said. “I wasn’t involved in that.”
For a guy who has nothing to hide, the Republican continues to invest a lot of effort into keeping Jan. 6 materials hidden. NBC News reported this afternoon:
Lawyers for former President Donald Trump on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to block the National Archives from turning over White House records to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. In a petition filed with the high court, lawyers for Trump said the Washington, D.C., Court of Appeals erred in its ruling earlier this month directing the records to be turned over, and urged the Supreme Court to intervene.
For those who may need a refresher about how we arrived at this point, it was two months ago when the bipartisan House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack requested extensive materials from the White House, prompting Trump to demand absolute secrecy.
In fact, the former president and his team have tried to exert “executive privilege” to block the select committee’s requests. As NBC News recently noted, as a matter of tradition, sitting presidents have shielded White House materials at the request of their predecessors. But not this time: President Joe Biden and his team concluded that there are “unique and extraordinary circumstances” surrounding the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol.
Trump and his team sued both the committee and the National Archives, which houses presidential records.
In November, a federal district court ruled against the Republican, reminding him, “Presidents are not kings.” Two weeks ago, a unanimous federal appeals court came to the same conclusion.
As regular readers may recall, the ruling was unsparing in its rejection of the former president’s arguments. “President Trump bears the burden of at least showing some weighty interest in continued confidentiality that could be capable of tipping the scales back in his favor…. He has not done so,” the three-judge panel wrote. “He has not identified any specific countervailing need for confidentiality tied to the documents at issue, beyond their being presidential communications. Neither has he presented arguments that grapple with the substance of President Biden’s and Congress’s weighty judgments. Nor has he made even a preliminary showing that the content of any particular document lacks relevance to the Committee’s investigation.
The Republican assault on free and fair elections instigated by Donald Trump is gathering pace, with efforts to sabotage the normal workings of American democracy sweeping state legislatures across the US.
A year that began with the violent insurrection at the US Capitol is ending with an unprecedented push to politicize, criminalize or in other ways subvert the nonpartisan administration of elections. A year-end report from pro-democracy groups identifies no fewer than 262 bills introduced in 41 states that hijack the election process.
Of those, 32 bills have become law in 17 states.
The largest number of bills is concentrated in precisely those states that became the focus of Trump’s Stop the Steal campaign to block the peaceful transfer of power after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. Arizona, where Trump supporters insisted on an “audit” to challenge Biden’s victory in the state, has introduced 20 subversion bills, and Georgia where Trump attempted to browbeat the top election official to find extra votes for him has introduced 15 bills.
Texas, whose ultra-right Republican group has made the state the ground zero of voter suppression and election interference, has introduced as many as 59 bills.
“We’re seeing an effort to hijack elections in this country, and ultimately, to take power away from the American people. If we don’t want politicians deciding our elections, we all need to start paying attention,” said Joanna Lydgate, CEO of the States United Democracy Center which is one of the three groups behind the report. Protect Democracy and Law Forward also participated.
One of the key ways that Trump-inspired state lawmakers have tried to sabotage future elections is by changing the rules to give legislatures control over vote counts. In Pennsylvania, a bill passed in the wake of Trump’s defeat that sought to rewrite the state’s election law was vetoed by Democratic governor Tom Wolf.
Anyway, I don’t go back to the podium until next year and I’m celebrating my 4th day in pjs. I hope you get a chance to relax and that the expectations of what should be this time of year don’t overwhelm you! Whatever your plans are, be kind to yourself and the ones around you.!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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The latest scientific speculation on the Omicron variant of Covid-19 is that the disease will eventually become endemic like the flu and common cold. We’re not going to get rid of it; we’ll just have to learn to live (or die) with it. We will have to get regular vaccines and new anti-viral treatments will likely be developed.
In other words, the Covid-19 pandemic won’t have an end date. Rather, a crisis that engulfed the world within months of the coronavirus’s discovery in China will dissipate in fits and starts into something that feels more like normal over the course of years, infectious-disease experts say.
“I don’t think there’s going to be a day where the whole thing feels over,” said Joshua Schiffer, an associate professor in the vaccine and infectious disease division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
How quickly an endemic, steady-state arrives and how disruptive the virus remains will depend on what level of disease officials and individuals decide to tolerate, the precautions they are willing to adopt, and how the virus evolves.
What will that look like?
“We know we have all the tools to use so that we can continue operations that are important, like keeping kids in school,” said Charity Dean, former assistant director of the California Department of Public Health and co-founder of the Public Health Company Group Inc. “We just need to be proactive and put them in place right now.”
New antiviral treatments from Merck & Co. and Pfizer Inc. are also expected to help lessen Covid-19’s burden on society. On the outlook for vaccines, early lab testing indicates a third or booster dose of the vaccines from Moderna Inc. and from Pfizer Inc. and partner BioNTech SE could protect against Omicron. Testing and public-health monitoring are also critical.
“Once we have those really well integrated, we are ready to move to where Covid is no longer disrupting our society,” said Ali Khan, dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
Even then, Covid-19 and its effects won’t be gone. Physical therapist Noah Greenspan opened a rehabilitation clinic in New York City on Monday for patients with lingering Covid-19 symptoms, or long Covid. He had provided online services and a smaller, temporary clinic since October 2020.
“We are planning as if Covid will never go away,” Dr. Greenspan said.
One problem is that immunity from Covid-19 doesn’t last as long as that from colds and flu, so we might have to have more frequent shots. I wonder if the anti-vax crazies would continue to muck it all up though.
Israel is rolling out more booster shots.
Booster shots crushed Israel’s delta wave. It’s betting a fourth dose will do the same to omicron. https://t.co/Og535XALgZ
TEL AVIV —Israel’s decision this week to become the first country to recommend a fourth vaccine dose to combat the highly contagious omicron variant came after health officials concluded that an initial booster had turned the tide this fall against the delta variant.
While they acknowledged that their decision was not based on new scientific data about the omicron variant, officials said they thought it would be prudent to recommend an additional shot because they believe that the ability of the initial booster to prevent infection has been waning over time.
The decision, announced by Israeli officials Tuesday, will make a fourth dose — or second booster — of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine available to people over 60, those with compromised immune systems and employees in the health-care sector. All eligible recipients would need to have had their third dose more than four months prior.
The decision is still awaiting confirmation by Health Ministry Director Nachman Ash before becoming national policy. But facilities across the country are preparing to begin administering the vaccine, with many saying they are ready to start as early as Sunday.
Israel’s national coronavirus advisory committee made its recommendation for the fourth dose Tuesday while still gathering data on the omicron variant, saying it does not have the luxury of time. The omicron variant is believed to be three times more transmissible than previous variants, and while it may be milder — it has not caused massive increases in hospitalizations in the United Kingdom, and infections have plummeted after a surge in South Africa — many Israeli health officials warn that an increase in even moderate cases could overwhelm the country’s hospitals.
More than 62 million Americans have received a booster as of Tuesday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, representing roughly 19% of all Americans and 30% of those who are fully vaccinated. About 55% of fully vaccinated seniors have received an additional dose.
Since the heavily mutated and highly contagious Covid variant was first confirmed in the U.S. on Dec. 1, the nation has seen some of its biggest daily surges in vaccine shots in months. Much of the increase has been driven by boosters, which are being administered more than first and second doses, combined, at an average of more than 800,000 per day over the week ended Dec. 16, according to federal data.
“It’s got over 50 mutations, and because of those mutations just being vaccinated with two doses may not be enough,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith” on Monday. “And so we really do need people to get boosted in order to increase their protection, especially against severe disease and death with omicron.”
WaPo: “Gregg Gonsalves is an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and associate professor (adjunct) at Yale Law School. He is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.” [He is also a long-time activist in the fight against AIDS.]
I’ve lived through two pandemics in my lifetime, first AIDS and now covid-19. From those experiences, I know no one roots for our leaders’ failures in such crises. Their successes can be measured in lives saved.
That’s why it pains me to admit it: President Biden is failing on covid-19.
After weeks of urging by public health and medical experts, Biden spoke to the public on Tuesday about his plan to address the omicron variant, which has swept the world in just a few weeks. Many of us have been asking for a policy “reset” to ramp up U.S. efforts as cases mount across the country. We hoped this would be the moment.
Sadly, what we saw this week was an administration floundering and a president not in command of facts or willing to shift course in any substantial way on the pandemic.
The president’s main call was for Americans to get vaccinated. That’s a fine refrain, except we still have millions without a single jab. The president was eager to point out that under his watch, 200 million people were fully vaccinated — except we know now that we require boosters to protect against omicron and only about 60 million Americans have had that additional jab.
Biden did indeed urge people to get boosted, saying they were free and available, but except for announcing a set of pop-up clinics around the United States, he didn’t articulate the plan to get this done. As for vaccine misinformation, he told its purveyors to “stop it,” which is far from the campaign we need to address the anti-vaccine propaganda circulating widely in the United States and the corporate reticence to take vaccination seriously.
We already know vaccines alone will not solve this problem. The president made a bet in March that vaccination could return the country to some semblance of normalcy, promising a “summer of freedom.” But as the delta variant emerged, the highly transmissible strain tore through the country, outpacing the speed of our vaccination efforts.
Public health experts called for more emphasis on a wider range of interventions, including rapid testing, masking and environmental controls, such as the upgrading of ventilation systems in buildings across the country. Yet such measures remain underutilized here in the United States. White House press secretary Jen Psaki even scorned those who suggested making rapid testing more widely available, dressing down an NPR reporter who made a suggestion of sending tests to every American household.
To its credit, the administration has since announced it would begin to send 500 million rapid tests to Americans in January, although it’s not clear whether the administration has put in an order for such tests. And at the scale promised, every American would receive a one-time delivery of no more than a single test at some point this winter. The president also claimed that schools need to be open and they are safer than ever, pointing out that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has now endorsed a “test and stay” strategy to make this possible. Except, the infrastructure and resources to carry out that strategy are simply not there for many school districts.
The shortage of tests comes as Americans want to know whether they are infected during the holiday season. Credit…Saul Martinez for The New York Times
President Biden promised Americans he is making 500 million coronavirus tests available free of charge, but help is at least weeks away — if not longer — for anxious Americans facing a surge of new virus cases.
Mr. Biden’s administration has not yet signed a contract to buy the tests, and the website to order them will not be up until January. Officials have not said how many tests people will be able to order or how quickly they will be shipped once they begin to be available next month. Manufacturers say they are already producing tests as fast as they can.
As a candidate, Mr. Biden excoriated the lack of testing during the Trump administration, saying in March 2020 that “the administration’s failure on testing is colossal, and it’s a failure of planning, leadership and execution.” But the Omicron variant caught the White House off guard, as the president has acknowledged, and cases have far outstripped the government’s ability to make tests available.
The president’s pledge of a half-billion tests on Tuesday was the centerpiece of a newly aggressive testing effort, announced just days before Christmas, as Americans try to find the hard-to-find tests so they know whether they are infected during the holiday season.
“That’s not a plan — it’s a hope,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which tracks testing trends. “If those tests came in January and February, that could have an impact, but if they are spread out over 10 to 12 months, I’m not sure what kind of impact it is going to have.”
Contracts to purchase tests could be finalized as soon as next week, officials said.
Whether testing manufacturers can now ramp up to produce an extra 500 million at-home tests — and how soon — is unclear. John M. Koval, a spokesman for Abbott Laboratories, a major manufacturer of rapid at-home antigen tests, said in an email message that the company is seeing “unprecedented demand” for its tests, “and we’re sending them out as fast as we can make them.”
Winter Landscape on the Banks of the Seine, Henri Matisse
Happy Winter Solstice!!
When will there be good news? I feel as if I’m living in the apocalypse. In just a couple of weeks, the latest Covid-19 variant has become dominant in the U.S. Once again, new cases are rapidly rising even in fully vaccinated and boosted people. Hospitals are running out of beds and health care workers are overworked and exhausted. Democrats are in grave danger of losing the House and possibly the Senate to Republicans who have lost touch with reality. And, as we all know, Joe Manchin has dashed Democrats’ hope of passing a bill that would have made everything better for Americans who aren’t in the top 1 percent. Can you tell I’m discouraged? Here’s what’s happening:
Omicron has raced ahead of other variants and is now the dominant version of the coronavirus in the U.S., accounting for 73% of new infections last week, federal health officials said Monday.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention numbers showed nearly a six-fold increase in omicron’s share of infections in only one week.
In much of the country, it’s even higher. Omicron is responsible for an estimated 90% or more of new infections in the New York area, the Southeast, the industrial Midwest and the Pacific Northwest. The national rate suggests that more than 650,000 omicron infections occurred in the U.S. last week.
Since the end of June, the delta variant had been the main version causing U.S. infections. As recently as the end of November, more than 99.5% of coronaviruses were delta, according to CDC data.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said the new numbers reflect the kind of growth seen in other countries….
Paul Gaugin Winter Landscape,
Much about the omicron variant remains unknown, including whether it causes more or less severe illness. Early studies suggest the vaccinated will need a booster shot for the best chance at preventing omicron infection but even without the extra dose, vaccination still should offer strong protection against severe illness and death.
“All of us have a date with omicron,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “If you’re going to interact with society, if you’re going to have any type of life, omicron will be something you encounter, and the best way you can encounter this is to be fully vaccinated.”
Like most of my colleagues, I haven’t arrived at this moment unscathed. I weathered the brutal first wave of the pandemic, often witnessing more COVID deaths during my shifts in New York City than I saw working in an Ebola-treatment center in West Africa in 2014.
When I was vaccinated against COVID a year ago, I was already exhausted. But better times seemed close at hand. Perhaps soon we wouldn’t have to endure wearing full personal protective equipment for hours on end. I was wrong.
After two years of dealing with this virus—working extra shifts, watching families sob on grainy FaceTime calls while their loved ones slipped away—many health-care workers are already in a dark place. With a new wave of COVID upon us, we face this grim truth: You can’t surge a circuit that’s been burned out. For frontline providers, there’s simply no new fuse that can fix the fact that we’re fried.
Edvard Munch, Snow Falling in the Lane
Many people are holding out hope for the possibility that the Omicron variant may cause less severe disease. But this is little comfort for those worried about our hospitals and the people who work there: A large surge of even a more mild variant will still produce more patients than our already maxed-out system can handle. Moreover, doctors and nurses will themselves get sick.
The looming tidal wave of Omicron cases comes at an already challenging time for emergency departments across the U.S. The Delta wave never fully subsided, and a lot of ERs are already attending to too many COVID patients. Also making things worse: Emergency-room visits are up for non-COVID illness as well, in part because people have postponed some routine medical care throughout the pandemic. As a result, we head into winter with emergency rooms across the country overwhelmed and over capacity.
Here in Massachusetts, Governor Baker has issued a new mask advisory and activated 500 National Guard members to aid hospitals. He has also asked hospitals to cancel all elective surgeries. He said he won’t issue a mask mandate and says schools must stay open.
President Joe Biden will announce a plan on Tuesday to distribute 500 million free at-home rapid tests to Americans beginning in January as part of an attempt to double down on the spread of a transmissible variant that has hit the U.S. distressingly close to the holidays.
Biden’s new efforts come as the omicron variant became the most dominant COVID strain in the country Monday, accounting for nearly three-quarters of all cases, and just as travel kicks off at nearly pre-pandemic levels for the holiday season.
Sleigh Ride, Winslow Homer
The free at-home rapid tests will be delivered by mail to Americans who request them, a senior administration official told reporters on Monday night in a preview of the speech, marking a slightly different approach from European countries that chose to send tests to all residents.
Americans will have to request the tests through a website that will launch in January, the official said, and its not yet clear how many tests Americans will be able to request per household.
Danger Ahead from the Trumpist Party
Doug Sosnik at The Washington Post: Opinion: As the GOP sheds its moderates, a whirlwind approaches.
We don’t need to wait for the results of next year’s midterm elections to know that a political shock wave is headed toward Washington. The early tremors are already detectable.
Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party will soon be complete, and what had previously been a fringe element within the GOP will emerge fully in control. The two big lies — that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was not serious enough to merit an investigation — are no longer considered radical inside the GOP.
Republicans can be expected to take over the House of Representatives after the midterm elections — most likely by a considerable margin. Trump already dominates the GOP at the state and local levels, and with the notable exceptions of Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), has a vice-like grip on Republican House members. Even if Trump does not run in 2024, his views and policies now represent mainstream Republican thinking.
And even if the Democrats maintain their narrow grip on the Senate, what is left of the reasonable wing of the Republican Senate is about to disappear. The Republican half of the Senate is on the brink of a new, and irresponsible, era. The 2022 election will cement the trend.
Richard von Drasche-Wartinberg, In Deep Winter
The Senate Republican Caucus has been the last remaining guardrail preventing Trump’s complete takeover of the Republican Party. That is about to change. There are five senators from what passes for the “governing wing” of the Republican Party who have announced their retirements: Richard C. Shelby (Alabama), Roy Blunt (Missouri), Richard Burr (North Carolina), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Patrick J. Toomey (Pennsylvania). Because Trump carried all but one of these states (Pennsylvania) in 2020, it is a safe bet all these men will be replaced by more Trump acolytes. In each of these states, the Republican primary has been a referendum on which candidate is most similar to Trump.
It is only because of some of the soon-departing establishment Republicans — and a small handful of others — that President Biden got a hard infrastructure bill on his desk and an increase in the debt ceiling while at the same time allowing the government to remain open.
Because they control the redistricting process in most states, Republicans have been busy redrawing maps and packing swing districts to provide them with more conservative voters. Since winning a Republican congressional primary is tantamount to winning the general election, the GOP will have spent 2021 creating the conditions that will push the party even further to the right.
If you can bear it, three examples of what GOP crazies are up to:
The active ingredients in Manchin’s political calculus have never been a great mystery: he is a Democrat aiming to get reëlected in an increasingly Republican state, and he is among the Senate’s largest recipients of campaign cash from the coal, oil, and gas industries, which have lobbied against the climate-change provisions in the bill he scuttled. But, to the West Virginians who begged him to support the anti-poverty programs in the Build Back Better bill, his rejection reflects a fundamental seclusion from the needs of people which he is no longer willing or able to perceive. To such critics in the state, Manchin has become an icon of Washington oligarchy and estrangement, a politician with a personal fortune, whose blockade against programs that have helped his constituents escape poverty represents a sneering disregard for the gap between their actual struggles and his televised bromides.
Peter Doig’s Cobourg 3 + 1 More (1994)
If Manchin’s opposition holds, his vote will be decisive in ending the expanded Child Tax Credit program, which, according to the Treasury Department, last week delivered payments benefitting three hundred and five thousand children in West Virginia. Statewide, ninety-three per cent of children are eligible for the credit, tied for the highest rate in the country. Analysts estimate that, if the program is allowed to expire, at the end of the month, fifty thousand children there will be in danger of falling into poverty. The average payment per family: four hundred and forty-six dollars a month.
Manchin is especially vulnerable to accusations of imperial remove. Photos that circulated online show him chatting over the rail of his houseboat in Washington with angry constituents, who had arrived by kayak. After he persuaded the Biden Administration to drop from the bill the Clean Electricity Performance Program, the centerpiece of efforts to slash greenhouse-gas emissions, climate protesters surrounded Manchin’s silver Maserati.
Jim McKay, the director of Prevent Child Abuse West Virginia, a nonprofit organization that lobbied Manchin to support the bill, told me that the senator was “conspicuously absent” from “personal meetings with West Virginia families.” McKay said, “Unfortunately, while his staff did have some meetings—which we are thankful to have had—personal contacts with Senator Manchin were extremely limited.” Dodging uncomfortable meetings is not unique in politics, but the accusation carries a special sting for Manchin, whose status as a Democrat in a red state makes him especially keen to project an image of a man who refuses to “go Washington.” McKay said, “I look forward to when Senator Manchin reconnects with average people.”
Sen. Joe Manchin III last week made the White House a concrete counteroffer for its spending bill, saying he would accept a $1.8 trillion package that included universal prekindergarten for 10 years, an expansion of Obamacare and hundreds of billions of dollars to combat climate change, three people familiar with the matter said.
But the West Virginia Democrat’s counteroffer excluded an extension of the expanded child tax credit the administration has seen as a cornerstone of President Biden’s economic legacy, the people said, an omission difficult for the White House to accept in the high-stakes negotiations. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door deliberations.
Manchin’s private proposal to the White House — the details of which have not been previously reported — was made just days before a spectacular public collapse in negotiations between the White House and the senator, marked by bitter and personal recriminations that left the status of the talks unclear.
The White House was weighing how to respond to Manchin’s proposal last week when on Sunday he told Fox News that he would be unable to support the current version of Democrats’ Build Back Better agenda.
Why does Manchin hate children? More details at the link.
Their hopes of enacting an expansive domestic policy bill focused on health care, education and climate change have been dashed. They blame Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), arguing he failed to keep his word to negotiate in good faith with the White House before announcing his opposition to the package on “Fox News Sunday.”
And they are in no mood, at the moment, to think about scaling back their policy ambitions in hopes of getting some part of what they want into law following Manchin’s proclamation that he “can’t get there” on President Biden’s “Build Back Better” proposal.
“Why do we have to acquiesce to what members of another party think we should be doing, what so called moderates think we should be doing, what so called independents think we should be doing? All of that represents a status quo,” said Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.). “Our status quo is rooted in racism, sexism and classism, and us not passing Build Back Better or scaling it back dramatically, even more so than has already been done, is going to disproportionately harm people of color, women, the poor, children and seniors.”
The intense frustration emanating from the most liberal members of Congress adds an extra layer of complication for the White House and Democratic leaders who are scrambling to find a path forward to save some of the roughly $2 trillion domestic policy bill Manchin torpedoed over the weekend.
That’s all I have for you today. I’m sorry I can’t be more upbeat about what’s happening. I can’t give up hope, but I’m exhausted by it all. I don’t know what I would do without all of you Sky Dancers!
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I always felt out of place in the nation’s heartland. The food was boring. The people did inexplicably rude things a lot in terms of what I was taught. I was a bank teller for a while at university and was told that I should call elderly people by their first names. My mother constantly complained when younger people did that to her or Dad feeling it was highly disrespectful. I just couldn’t do it. That was just one of the things she would’ve whooped me over. I used y’all when I taught which confused my students like crazy, People from Minnesota thought I had a southern accent when it was just my mother’s Missouri twang. So, my upbringing made a lot of sense once I got down here.
There are a lot of old-timey niceties and characteristics down here that aren’t as important as other places and they seem dated these days. One of the most cherished characteristics is being a “man of your word”. There’s another saying that “your handshake is as good as your word”. Senator Joe Manchin has monumentally failed that test. He’s not only failed that one but the one where your Senator is supposed to represent his constituent’s interests and not his own. That American Value is broadly shared and understood. I actually believe Joe may jump ship to become republican if the wind blows that way for the next Federal Election. I saw a reporter trying to get him to talk after coming out of Mitch McConnell’s office. I really didn’t believe he was up to anything good so who knows? Mitch certainly is wooing him. Lexi Lonas writing for The Hill wrote this three days ago:” McConnell: ‘It would be a great idea’ for Manchin to switch parties.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Thursday told reporters that “it would be a great idea” for Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to switch to the Republican Party.
“As you know, he likes to talk,” McConnell said of Manchin. “It would not surprise you to know that I’ve suggested for years it would be a great idea, representing a deep-red state like West Virginia, for him to come over to our side.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” McConnell added.
Manchin, a former governor and centrist Democrat from ruby-red West Virginia has quashed thoughts on switching parties often in his time in political office.
Ruby-red West Virginia is right there at the bottom of the list of everything this country has to offer along with a lot of other Southern States including mine. You may notice that I’ve put links on today’s pictures. That’s because each one goes to an article about the hardscrabble life of many West Virginians. Senator Manchin has just taken jobs from their adults, food from their children, and health and education for everyone with his statements on Fox News on Sunday.
After months of haggling with President Joe Biden and other Democrats, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) dashed his party’s hopes on Sunday by announcing he wouldn’t vote for the Build Back Better legislation.
Publicly, his biggest gripes are about the cost of the bill. But privately, Manchin has told his colleagues that he essentially doesn’t trust low-income people to spend government money wisely.
In recent months, Manchin has told several of his fellow Democrats that he thought parents would waste monthly child tax credit payments on drugs instead of providing for their children, according to two sources familiar with the senator’s comments.
Continuing the child tax credit for another year is a core part of the Build Back Better legislation that Democrats had hoped to pass by the end of the year. The policy has already cut child poverty by nearly 30%.
Manchin’s private comments shocked several senators, who saw it as an unfair assault on his own constituents and those struggling to raise children in poverty.
Manchin has also told colleagues he believes that Americans would fraudulently use the proposed paid sick leave policy, specifically saying people would feign being sick and go on hunting trips, a source familiar with his comments told HuffPost.
Manchin’s office declined to comment for this story.In a statement on Sunday, he said he opposed the Build Back Better agenda largely because of its cost.
Schumer’s gambit — and how, maybe, it gets Democrats & Manchin to a revised BBB that can pass. @ThePlumLineGS lays it out here https://t.co/rbFzLmaVwn
Early Monday morning, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced that the Senate will vote early next year on a new version of Build Back Better, after Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) declared his intention to torpedo the proposal.
That’s a reference to Manchin’s decision to sink the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda on Fox News. Schumer says the Senate will debate a “revised version.”
There aren’t particularly strong grounds for optimism that a vote alone will pressure Manchin to shift. However, the fact that Schumer is telegraphing a vote on a new version is consistent with a scenario in which BBB is revised in keeping with Manchin’s concerns.
If there is any way to move Manchin to yes — and this is a very big “if” — it would be this one.
Which is why we should pay more attention to the news that Goldman Sachs has downgraded the U.S. growth forecast, in response to Manchin’s opposition to BBB. This is an indication of how isolated Manchin has become, and points to a new vulnerability in his position.
In its note, Goldman declared it had reduced its projection of gross domestic product growth to 2 percent from 3 percent for the first quarter of 2022, and reduced it by a bit less for the second and third quarters.
Note why Goldman did this. As it argued, this slowdown will be mainly because fiscal stimulus from the covid-19 rescue package earlier this year will wind down. Goldman projects that if BBB does not pass, that fiscal picture will be “more negative” than it might have been.
As one example, Goldman cites the expanded child tax credit, which was part of the covid relief package and now sends checks to most American families. If BBB fails, it will expire.
This blows up a key element of Manchin’s justification for opposing BBB. He says it will feed inflation and the debt, though as Jim Tankersley demonstrates, many economic experts think BBB won’t feed either.
President Joe Biden was at home in Delaware Sunday when Sen. Joe Manchin appeared on Fox News to abruptly declare he could not support his sweeping social and climate plan. “I’ve tried everything humanly possible,” the West Virginia Democrat said, appearing remotely. “I can’t get there. This is a no.”
Biden, who learned of Manchin’s plans only minutes before the TV appearance, tried quickly to get the senator on the phone. But his attempts were unsuccessful.
In an equally surprising step, the White House torched Manchin afterward in a statement bristling with resentment that shattered the amity Biden had sought to cultivate.Biden personally signed off on the blistering statement issued by press secretary Jen Psaki after Manchin’s announcement on Fox News, according to a source familiar with the matter. While staff drafted language addressing Manchin’s specific concerns — on inflation, climate provisions and how the plan was paid for — Biden specifically instructed them to add that if Manchin stood by his comments, he had violated his word to the President.
Manchin is the topic du jour. Axios argues that Manchin may go Independent.
NEW: Joe Manchin today blamed White House staff for the breakdown of Build Back Better negotiations:
"This is not the president, this is staff…I just got to the wit's end." https://t.co/Nx3qeFFEWH
What he’s saying: Manchin also said if Democrats want to try and tackle a smaller package, they would need to put new legislation through committees and hold hearings on the programs.
He also criticized leadership’s strategy, arguing they wrongly assumed “surely we can move one person, surely we can badger and beat one person up.”
“Well, guess what? I’m from West Virginia. I’m not from where they’re from, and they can just beat the living crap out of people and think they’ll be submissive, period,” Manchin said.
Manchin also said he made clear to Democratic leadership that he disagreed with their approach of treating legislation “as if you have 55 or 60 senators that are Democrats, and you can do whatever you want.”
“I said, I’m not a Washington Democrat,” Manchin told Kercheval.
Joe Manchin’s net worth, according to the money-in-politics website Open Secrets, was $7.6 million in 2018, when he last sought reelection. Median household income this year in the state of West Virginia, according to the St. Louis Fed, is $51,615. That’s nearly $30,000 below the national average.
And this, in a nutshell, is American politics generally and the United States Senate particularly: a multimillionaire old white guy telling poor people that they just need to get off their asses and work and the government shouldn’t be helping them.
Although there’s still a chance Manchin may support some version of the Build Back Better Act, his announcement Sunday morning—on Fox News, natch—that he couldn’t vote for the existing version of the bill is politically devastating for his party and the president he presumably supported and voted for. That will be the focus of most of the punditry. But it’s even more devastating for the people of West Virginia, who are falling further behind the rest of the country with each passing decade and who have been sold a fantasy about the source of their problems and how they will be fixed.
The only thing I can say is that most rural ruby-red states are mixed up in the Trump Cult and Manchin’s state is likely no different. This is from Newsweek written by David T Freedman: “Millions of Angry, Armed Americans Stand Ready to Seize Power If Trump Loses in 2024” This feels like reading about those Confederate Deadenders that still run around the backwoods but many are also up in the plains states and other blue states with backwoods of their own that cling to a white christianist identity.
Mike “Wompus” Nieznany is a 73-year-old Vietnam veteran who walks with a cane from the combat wounds he received during his service. That disability doesn’t keep Nieznany from making a living selling custom motorcycle luggage racks from his home in Gainesville, Georgia. Neither will it slow him down when it’s time to visit Washington, D.C.—heavily armed and ready to do his part in overthrowing the U.S. government.
Millions of fellow would-be insurrectionists will be there, too, Nieznany says, “a ticking time-bomb” targeting the Capitol. “There are lots of fully armed people wondering what’s happening to this country,” he says. “Are we going to let Biden keep destroying it? Or do we need to get rid of him? We’re only going to take so much before we fight back.” The 2024 election, he adds, may well be the trigger.
Nieznany is no loner. His political comments on the social-media site Quora received 44,000 views in the first two weeks of November and more than 4 million overall. He is one of many rank-and-file Republicans who own guns and in recent months have talked openly of the need to take down—by force if necessary—a federal government they see as illegitimate, overreaching and corrosive to American freedom.
The phenomenon goes well beyond the growth of militias, which have been a feature of American life at least since the Ku Klux Klan rose to power after the Civil War. Groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, which took part in the January 6th riot at the Capitol and may have played organizational roles, have grown in membership. Law enforcement has long tracked and often infiltrated these groups. What Nieznany represents is something else entirely: a much larger and more diffuse movement of more-or-less ordinary people, stoked by misinformation, knitted together by social media and well-armed. In 2020, 17 million Americans bought 40 million guns and in 2021 were on track to add another 20 million. If historical trends hold, the buyers will be overwhelmingly white, Republican and southern or rural.
America’s massive and mostly Republican gun-rights movement dovetails with a growing belief among many Republicans that the federal government is an illegitimate tyranny that must be overthrown by any means necessary. That combustible formula raises the threat of armed, large-scale attacks around the 2024 presidential election—attacks that could make the January 6 insurrection look like a toothless stunt by comparison. “The idea that people would take up arms against an American election has gone from completely farfetched to something we have to start planning for and preparing for,” says University of California, Los Angeles law professor Adam Winkler, an expert on gun policy and constitutional law.
You may continue to read the long and depressing read. What’s to be done with thee deadenders?
Anyway, I’m hoping you have a great week and holiday for those who have one to celebrate! Happy Christmas to you! I really hope this week doesn’t sent us way backward in the progress we made this year in fighting the pandemic.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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I’m beginning to accept that we are never going to return to “normal.” After 6 years of dealing with Trump and his domination of the Republican party, after 2 long years of Covid-19 and the loss of more than 800,000 lives, we now face the threat of losing our democracy as we deal with a new Covid variant that is already spreading rapidly and is likely to kill many more Americans. And I haven’t even touched on the dangers we face from climate change.
On the threats to U.S. democracy:
The Washington Post: Opinion: 3 retired generals: The military must prepare now for a 2024 insurrection, by Paul D. Eaton, Antonio M. Taguba, and Steven M. Anderson
As we approach the first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, we — all of us former senior military officials — are increasingly concerned about the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and the potential for lethal chaos inside our military, which would put all Americans at severe risk.
In short: We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time.
One of our military’s strengths is that it draws from our diverse population. It is a collection of individuals, all with different beliefs and backgrounds. But without constant maintenance, the potential for a military breakdown mirroring societal or political breakdown is very real.
Le Chat Van Gogh by Toni Goffe
The signs of potential turmoil in our armed forces are there. On Jan. 6, a disturbing number of veterans and active-duty members of the military took part in the attack on the Capitol. More than 1 in 10 of those charged in the attacks had a service record. A group of 124 retired military officials, under the name “Flag Officers 4 America,” released a letter echoing Donald Trump’s false attacks on the legitimacy of our elections.
Recently, and perhaps more worrying, Brig. Gen. Thomas Mancino, the commanding general of the Oklahoma National Guard, refused an order from President Biden mandating that all National Guard members be vaccinated against the coronavirus. Mancino claimed that while the Oklahoma Guard is not federally mobilized, his commander in chief is the Republican governor of the state, not the president.
The potential for a total breakdown of the chain of command along partisan lines — from the top of the chain to squad level — is significant should another insurrection occur. The idea of rogue units organizing among themselves to support the “rightful” commander in chief cannot be dismissed.
Every time the January 6 committee holds a hearing, it seems clearer and clearer that Donald Trump was trying to keep control over the government after losing reelection. The past week alone produced the “how to coup” PowerPoint, widely circulated in Trumpworld, and a slew of text messages, including this sorry we weren’t able to pull off a coup note from an unidentified lawmaker to Mark Meadows: “Yesterday was a terrible day. We tried everything we could in our objection to the 6 states. I’m sorry nothing worked.” It’s pretty clear what Trump was up to: trying to reinstall himself as president and end American democracy as we know it.
Trump’s crew surely knew how bad the events of January 6 were even as they were unfolding. “The president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home … he is destroying his legacy,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham wrote to Mark Meadows in a text message read by Republican Representative Liz Cheney during the opening statements of the Jan 6 committee meeting on Monday night. A range of journalists sent similar messages. Actual reporter Jake Sherman—who had been stuck in the Capitol during the riot, and who released his texts with Meadows “out of transparency”—wrote, “Do something for us. We are under siege in the [Capitol].” Another “journalist” exchanging texts with Meadows at the time: Fox propagandist Sean Hannity, who wrote, “Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol.”
We are not alone, Greeting card by Alison Friend
It’s a long piece, but here’s the conclusion:
But how you safeguard democracy when only one party supports it is a riddle. How do Democrats permeate the Fox and Facebook anti-fact chamber, which paints Trump as the real victim of the insurrection he helped instigate?
I don’t know how you get Republicans to see past this election, to understand that losing democracy is about more than just a win for their guy. Some members of the mainstream media have been defensive, saying they aren’t covering the threat to democracy because lawmakers aren’t talking about it. But here’s the thing: It’s the media’s job to make people care, to highlight the stories that matter. We don’t look to elected officials to tell us what to write about. We journalists may be the bulwark that keeps America from resembling Hungary or Turkey in a few years. Keeping democracy shouldn’t be a partisan fight, but it is, and perhaps that’s the most damning thing of all.
Okay, then how do we get the most powerful newspaper–The New York Times–to care about democracy?
Members of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol believe that former Texas Governor and Trump Energy Secretary Rick Perry was the author of a text message sent to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows the day after the 2020 election pushing an “AGRESSIVE (sic) STRATEGY” for three state legislatures to ignore the will of their voters and deliver their states’ electors to Donald Trump, three sources familiar with the House Committee investigation tell CNN.
Kitty Librarian, by Liselotte-eriksson on DeviantArt
A spokesman for Perry told CNN that the former Energy Secretary denies being the author of the text. Multiple people who know Rick Perry confirmed to CNN that the phone number the committee has associated with that text message is Perry’s number.
The cell phone number the text was sent from, obtained from a source knowledgeable about the investigation, appears in databases as being registered to a James Richard Perry of Texas, the former governor’s full name.
The number is also associated in a second database as registered to a Department of Energy email address associated with Perry when he was secretary. When told of these facts, the spokesman had no explanation.
Ali Alexander, who founded the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement and attended the rally that preceded the Capitol attack, told congressional investigators that he recalls “a few phone conversations” with Rep. Paul Gosar and a text exchange with Rep. Mo Brooks about his efforts in the run-up to Jan. 6, his lawyers confirmed in a late Friday court filing.
Alexander also told the Jan. 6 House select committee that he spoke to Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) in person “and never by phone, to the best of his recollection,” his lawyers say.
The description of the testimony comes in a lawsuit Alexander filed to block the committee from obtaining his phone records from Verizon. Alexander says in the suit that the records include contacts with people protected by privileges: religious advisers, people he counsels spiritually and his lawyers. He also indicated that he already shared more than 1,500 text messages with investigators, in addition to sitting for an eight-hour deposition. The Brooks text, he indicated, is among the texts he turned over.
Cat in a box, by Ruskin Sphere
Alexander’s testimony underscores the degree to which the select committee continues to probe the roles of their Republican colleagues in efforts to promote former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud — and their potential support for fringe figures who helped gather people in Washington on Jan. 6, the day Congress was required to certify the 2020 election results.
The panel hasn’t formally requested testimony from any of the GOP lawmakers yet but has continued to ask witnesses about Gosar, Biggs, Brooks and Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who helped push a strategy to use the Department of Justice to promote the fraud claims.
Per Alexander’s attorneys Jonathon Moseley and Paul Kamenar, members of Congress may have been on an organizing call with him in early January. Several were invited but he did not take attendance, the lawyers said.
When will these Congressional seditionists be brought to justice?
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – The omicron variant of the coronavirus is moving faster than surveillance systems can track it and has so unnerved some medical experts that they’re starting to put the brakes on preparations for their holiday gatherings.
“Personally, I’m reevaluating plans for the holidays,” Bronwyn MacInnis, director of pathogen genomic surveillance at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, said on a call with reporters Tuesday. “It’s the responsible thing to do and what feels right given the risk.”
She and a handful of other Massachusetts-based researchers on the call said they’ve been stunned by the pace by which omicron has been crowding out other variants and taking over the pandemic.
By Tetsuo Takahara
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that about 3% of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. are omicron. But MacInnis said she believes that number was probably an underestimate on Dec. 11 – just three days ago – when the CDC first announced it, and now it’s likely much higher.
“At the rate that it seems to be spreading, there isn’t a surveillance system on the planet truly that could keep up with it,” MacInnis said.
In some parts of the country, there are hints omicron already accounts for about 15% of cases, said Jeremy Luban, a virus expert at the UMass Chan Medical School .
Omicron has been moving “faster even than the most pessimistic among us thought that it was going to move,” said Dr. Jacob Lemieux, an infectious disease expert at Massachusetts General Hospital. “There’s a high likelihood that it will come to your holiday gathering.”
It’s been about a month since scientists first detected the highly mutated coronavirus variant dubbed “omicron.”
Since then, scientists have come to learn that omicron spreads faster than the delta variant and is the quickest-spreading variant the world has yet faced. It also has a huge ability to bypass immune protection and cause breakthrough infections.
The big open-ended question right now centers on omicron’s severity: Does omicron cause milder disease, compared to previous variants? Does it thereby lower the risk of severe disease and hospitalization?
There’s no doubt everyone wants this to be the case. And some recent data out of South Africa sure makes it look like that might be the case. Researchers there have found that South Africans infected with omicron are, on average, less likely to end up in the hospital, and they also appear to recover more quickly from illness, compared to the other variants.
However, as many scientists have been pointing out, that evidence from South Africa could be misleading. The omicron variant may end up acting differently in the U.S.
COPENHAGEN — In a country that tracks the spread of coronavirus variants as closely as any in the world, the signals have never been more concerning. Omicron positives are doubling nearly every two days. The country is setting one daily case record after another. The lab analyzing positive tests recently added an overnight shift just to keep up.
Tea Cats, by Francesca Buchko
And scientists say the surge is just beginning.
As omicron drives a new phase of the pandemic, many are looking to Denmark — and particularly the government institute devoted to testing, surveillance and modeling — for warnings about what to expect.
The emerging answer — even in this highly vaccinated, wealthy northern European country — is dire. For all the defenses built over the last year, the virus is about to sprint out of control, and scientists here expect a similar pattern in much of the world.
“The next month will be the hardest period of the pandemic,” said Tyra Grove Krause, the chief epidemiologist at Denmark’s State Serum Institute, a campus of brick buildings along a canal.
Ever since the omicron variant emerged in November, the best hope has been that it might cause less severe sickness than the delta version it is competing with, which in turn might make this wave more manageable and help the transition of covid-19 into an endemic disease. But Denmark’s projections show the wave so fully inundating the country that even a lessened strain will deliver an unprecedented blow.
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
WAPO reports 
They couldn’t have just nabbed the guy without shooting up a retail store during the last-minute holiday shopping crowd?
Ed Pilkington–writing for The Guardian–sums up a report showing just how much Republicans in state and local governments are trying to destroy democracy
The president’s main call was for Americans to get vaccinated. That’s a fine refrain, except we still have millions without a single jab. The president was eager to point out that under his watch, 200 million people were fully vaccinated — except we know now that we require boosters to protect against omicron and only about 60 million Americans have had that additional jab.
Manchin’s private proposal to the White House — the details of which have not been previously reported — was made just days before a 
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