Josh Marshall
International news orgs reporting that the President of Haiti, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated overnight in an attack on his private residence.
This is a developing story.
Important Info
With the rising demands on the right to release or drop charges against the Jan. 6th insurrectionists and seek retribution against the unnamed cop who shot Ashli Babbitt, Josh Kovensky has some important context about the mounting movement to valorize and make a martyr of Babbitt. Relatedly, Rep. Paul Gosar, Congress’s most prominent white nationalist and antisemite, calls for the unnamed officer to be charged for what he earlier termed Babbitt’s execution. This of course comes just days after the leader of the GOP, ex-President Donald Trump, suggested the unnamed officer should be lynched.
A few more points on Ashli Babbitt.
Trump Demanding Release of Jan 6 Insurrectionists
Yesterday I noted ex-President Trump’s vainglorious recital of events at his two recent rallies in Ohio and Florida. But there were a string of comments he made at his Sarasota, Florida rally that I only learned about after the fact. They are highly important going forward and particularly in the context of the 2022 election. The comments aren’t terribly surprising coming from Trump. They’re perhaps implicit in things he’s said before. But they represent something new. In short, he now seems to be demanding the release of the various insurrectionists facing charges for storming the Capitol on January 6th. “How come so many people are still in jail over Jan. 6?” he asked the crowd.
He also went further and began to suggest or demand (the ambiguity is a central feature of all Trump incitement) the lynching of the Capitol Police officer who shot insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt.
There’s a high bar for nonsensical Trump statements that actually grab my attention. But he seems to be now moving into what I guess we might call his Evita phase. Who talks like this? Who has this kind of messiah complex and who has supporters who don’t laugh when they hear this kind of faux biblical melodrama?
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The post below on the Delta variant has gotten a lot of attention. It’s always important to make a simple point: This isn’t “oh noooeesss, the vaccines don’t work anymore!” All the data suggests they remain extremely effective at preventing serious illness – over 90%. By the standards of almost any other vaccine they remain highly effective against any infection at all. Recent peer reviewed measures of the Pfizer vaccine against the Delta variant suggest efficacy in the high 80s percentage range. This new data out of Israel says it’s in the mid-60s. If you’re vaccinated, especially with one of the mRNA vaccines, there’s no reason for you to worry. The issue is more at the society-wide level, trying to make sense of the various data points suggesting a non-trivial level of reduced vaccine efficacy and how that maps onto how society at large will be operating in the coming months and years.
At the risk of stating the obvious, if you don’t want to die of COVID or end up in a hospital struggling to breath and fearing for your life, get vaccinated. You’ll be covered.
There are a lot of caveats to these numbers. They’re not from a peer reviewed study but rather the latest data from the Israeli health ministry. While the Pfizer mRNA vaccines remains highly effective at preventing hospitalization and serious illness (over 90%), the efficacy against infection with the Delta variant has dropped markedly.
Twenty five years ago the Oklahoma City bombing took the lives of 168 people. The building collapse in Surfside, Florida appears set to mark a death toll with only about 20 fewer lives lost. And it was pretty clear from day one that the tragedy was heading in this direction.
Our Global Real-World Test of Vaccines and the Delta Variant
In the United States, or at least in parts of it, we are moving into a post-COVID era. Or more accurately, we are moving into a post-Crisis COVID era. There’s still COVID. People are still getting sick. People are still dying. But in regions of high vaccination illness and severe disease are becoming rare enough and manageable enough that society can begin to function more or less as normal. Understanding the dynamics of this new era, the precise levels of vaccine efficacy, the specifics of asymptomatic disease and so forth have become a minor obsession of mine. And TPM Reader JL, an academic in the field, has been a helpful.
Here are some basic questions. How effective are the mRNA vaccines and how effective are they against the Delta variant of Covid? To the extent the vaccines are marginally less effective against Delta, do they continue to provide very high levels of protection against symptomatic and severe disease?
From TPM Reader TD from 8:48 AM …
I am currently under a shelter in place order, because, 8 armed men were stopped on a nearby highway.
2 are currently in custody, some are in the nearby woods and others are still in vehicles.
They claim not to be sovereign citizens, but that the laws of the United states don’t apply to them.
New MAGA App Part of Bannon-China Comic Book Spy Drama
Yesterday we were talking about GETTR, a purported Trumpite social network which looked from the visuals more like a hook-up site or worse. It was the project of (apparently) recently canned Trump spokesman and gatekeeper Jason Miller, though Trump himself said he wouldn’t be joining it. There were other oddities beyond the name – like the fact that it seemed to be populated by posts scraped from Twitter.
But overnight things got much more weird.