Josh Marshall
From TPM Reader RT …
I can’t really say I had a COVID moment. It was a series of COVID moments. The first was when I sat around playing with MATLAB a year ago to understand the implications of what an R0 value of three means. Like many other folks I’d seen the movie Contagion and thought I knew about reproduction numbers. But I really didn’t. I hadn’t really internalized what the mathematics implied. Staring at the numbers in disbelief. Texting my friend who is biostatistician at a major medical college hoping I was wrong. His reply was simply “Do you have enough food to last for three weeks?”. Then the long days of isolation and encounters with the maskless while trying to just simply shop for groceries. Constantly fretting if I got to close. Did I touch anything? What’s that sniffle mean? The slow decent over summer and fall into the illusion that these precautions would keep my family safe.
Then came the phone call the day after Christmas. “I don’t think your father is feeling good, can you put a mask on and come see?”
From TPM Reader LC …
I think my start of COVID era is very common: rumors and rumblings in February, a friend who’s a medical professional telling me that things were going to get bad, realizing that COVID was here when the NBA was canceled and Tom Hanks got sick, and then getting sick myself in March 2020 (I was not sick enough to get tested by March 2020 standards, but I’m 99% sure I had COVID).
However, I rather talk about a more recent, dare I say joyous, COVID moment. Based on my age, occupation, and health status, I didn’t think I’d get a vaccine until May at the earliest. My husband’s a teacher so he would be eligible before me, but my state (Georgia) has fairly strict requirements for eligibility and we weren’t sure that he would get the vaccine before the end of the month. I don’t think Georgia moved into the 1B phase until this week!
There’s some possible good news on the public sales pitch front coming from the White House. As I’ve discussed, for all the boldness and scope of the COVID relief act, it can all amount to very little in political and electoral terms if you do not aggressively sell it. And by sell it, we should understand a broad and consistent messaging operation that connects unfolding events over the next 18 months to the relief bill. That ranges from (we hope) rapider than expected vaccine roll-out and school reopenings to what one hopes will be a vibrant economy in 2022. It also means leaving no doubt about why people are receiving relief checks and cash assistance (which goes well beyond the $1400/$2000 checks), who passed the bill and who stood opposed. The White House is at least telling reporters (Axios most notably) that they’re about to start that kind of operation.
Done right this should involve putting all the resources of the federal government into the effort as well as administration-supporting outside groups.
According to press reports, HuffPost, which was recently acquired by Buzzfeed, is laying off 47 employees. HuffPost’s editorial staff union says that 33 of its members were included in the 47 number, about a third of the entire union. Since lots of these people are people I know from within my professional community, the news hits pretty hard. Yet another in a seemingly endless stream of layoffs at news organizations – just in this case I know a lot of these people.
The brass at Buzzfeed seemed to handle the layoffs in a particularly clumsy way. But we shouldn’t miss the real story here: Many of these news operations simply are not financially viable. They don’t bring in enough money to sustain their expenses. Indeed, many of them – way more than you’ve been led to believe – were never financially viable. They were floated on on-going infusions of new investment money chasing big payoffs that were probably always illusory. Then they hit the brick wall of the rapid consolidation and automation-driven price declines in the ad industry. Indeed, whole territories in the firmament of digital news media were simply based on lies. Not lies that had anything to do with the journalism or the journalists. There was simply no business model there to make the whole thing work.
It’s definitely the moral high ground not to put Joe Biden’s name on the big relief checks that are soon to go out. But I fear it’s a mistake.
TPM Reader MG remembers the frenzied and chaotic day San Franciscans descended on area grocery stores in historic panic …
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From TPM Reader KK …
My wife has Alzheimer’s disease, and is fairly far along in her journey with it. She’s lived in a memory care home for more than four years. My covid moment came almost exactly a year ago, when the evening of March 9 the director of her facility sent a note that included the following:
From TPM Reader FS …
Our COVID moment happened early Saturday morning with my mother-in-law’s passing. Her smoking, diabetes, obesity, age and chronic emphysema made her as high a risk of severe infection as you’d calculate. But her test was negative.
Here’s part two of ex-President Trump’s cease and desist letter to GOP campaign committees, demanding they stop using his name and likeness in their fundraising appeals.
He didn’t start his own party, which is complicated to do and be competitive, but Trump is trying to set himself up as the place where money for Republicans should go as opposed to GOP committees pic.twitter.com/IPaiXTaIEy
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) March 9, 2021
Leaving off the Trump Era we are now headlong into the Joe Manchin Tea Leaf Reading Era. But here from Manchin this morning we have yet more evidence that we’re not in Fiscal Policy Kansas anymore.
In addition to his tour of the Sunday shows yesterday, Manchin sat for an interview with Axios/HBO and Mike Allen. In it Manchin says he’s ready to back a big infrastructure bill – in the neighborhood of $2 to $4 trillion. But he’s got a big demand first.
His demand? He wants a higher corporate tax rate and a rollback of most of Trump’s tax cut. From Axios …