Editors’ Blog

We’ve mentioned before that the one clean way to avoid a national debt default is a discharge petition in which a small number (at least 6) of House Republicans join with Democrats to force a vote on a clean debt ceiling. Once that happens the two sides can get down to negotiating a budget. But today, Don Bacon (R-NE) – Washington’s favorite GOP ‘moderate’ – came out categorically against the idea. As reporter and TPM alum Sahil Kapur puts it, if Bacon won’t do it probably no Republicans will.

TPM Reader TC has a more optimistic view of the avian flu issue. I don’t think this is really in contradiction with the earlier post. These are not likely scenarios. But the stakes are high enough that we should be prepared even for very unlikely ones. From TC …

Long-time reader here, wanting to throw in my $0.02 regarding Josh’s recent piece ‘Can We Be Ready‘ about the ongoing avian influenza epidemic. For reference, my doctorate focused on improved/next-generation influenza vaccine design. 

Overall, I appreciate Josh’s measured approach to discussing infectious diseases, but would like to make a few additional points:

Perhaps the most important thing about the Chinese surveillance balloon episode is the completely over-the-top reaction to it among the political class, which, in turn, reminds us how the entrenched stupidity of our politics endangers us. I was reminded of this over the weekend when I read this column in the Times by Zeynep Tufekci. If by chance you’re not familiar with her, you should be. She was one of the most insightful and reliable sources of information throughout the pandemic despite not being an epidemiologist or a medical doctor.

Brandon Russell, founder of Atomwaffen, and his girlfriend Sarah Clendaniel have been arrested and charged with a plot to attack a ring of power stations around Baltimore, Maryland in the hope of sowing chaos and triggering the predicted race war at the center of neo-Nazi/white supremacist ideology. FBI Special Agent Thomas J. Sobocinski of the Baltimore field office told reporters there was “no indication” the plot was part of “anything larger.” I assume that’s true as far as it goes. But we’ve seen a wave of these attacks over recent months.

Yesterday we discussed the very limited control you have over a balloon. You have some limited directional control and you control your altitude. But if you’re going east, and you can’t find a wind stream going west, you’re going east. Period. TPM Reader EJ turns out to know a lot about this and he gives us more of a sense of how this works.

I have a commercial license to fly hot air and gas (helium) balloons.

Balloons are ALWAYS at the mercy of the wind they are in. They can NEVER maneuver in any way within that stream of air. However, they have limited ability to maneuver in relation to the ground. They do this by changing to an altitude that has a wind favorable to the direction they want to go. If they want to loiter over an area, they would have to find an altitude where there was zero wind. You almost never find a wind going exactly in the direction you want to go, so you constantly change altitude to, sort of, tack in the direction you want to go, almost like a sailboat trying to sail in a direction upwind.

The Post has an article up that provides a bit more detail on earlier Chinese balloon incursions. The gist seems to be that they’ve skirted U.S. territory a number of times and crossed into U.S. airspace but not as extensively as what happened in this case. The “briefly” in that earlier reference was the key. In a nice bit of additional detail, Florida and Texas were earlier targets.

David Ignatius is a consistently good and informative read. This column is not really an exception. But it’s notable that Ignatius feels the need to kick off with a classic “to be sure” sentence — “an embarrassment for the Biden administration, to be sure” — before going on to explain that shooting the balloon down over the ocean was the most logical course of action and that it will likely yield more intelligence for the United States than for China.

What an embarrassment!

But with so much attention to it I thought it made sense to put together what we actually know and where the story is at.

We officially have an absurd debate over Chinese surveillance balloon toughness. Yes, this is now a thing. A slew of Republicans today lashed out at President Biden for not shooting down the balloon just as the Pentagon carried out his orders to do so. The balloon was shot down by an F-22 firing a sidewinder missile just off the coast of South Carolina.

This was followed by new claims that President Trump never would have allowed a Chinese balloon into U.S. airspace at all. Rep. Joe Wilson, a notorious goober who represents a district in South Carolina, declared: “The catastrophic Chinese Spy Balloon spectacle clearly threatened American families from Alaska to my home community in South Carolina and confirms President Biden and Vice President Harris should resign.”

But according to a Pentagon press release out this afternoon, Chinese surveillance balloons entered U.S. airspace at least three times during Trump’s presidency. He not only didn’t shoot them down, he also, it would seem, kept it a secret.

This week, we obtained leaked audio that gave us a peak at the chaotic way decisions are made inside fabulist Rep. George Santos’ office, and published an in-depth profile of his attention-grabbing chief of operations, Vish Burra. TPM’s Josh Kovensky discusses both pieces on All In with Chris Hayes.

Watch below.

I was half joking in the post below about the unidentified high-altitude balloon over Costa Rica. But the Pentagon now says that it believes that balloon is another Chinese surveillance balloon. WTF?