Forty of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) Republican colleagues voted against her motion to adjourn the House this morning, a wave of intra-party pushback on a pellucid delay tactic designed to do little but stall the passage of the crucial COVID-19 relief bill.

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 …

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.

The House is set to vote on President Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill tomorrow, sending it to the President’s desk. The bill is stuffed with a litany of underreported positives for the progressive agenda — putting more than $7,000 into the pockets of the average family of four, reducing health care costs, and at least temporarily addressing child poverty.

Yet the Republican rhetoric surrounding the bill has become increasingly bizarre — perhaps that’s how you know it’s good.

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

Russian intelligence, it appears, are attempting to sow distrust in the U.S. COVID-19 vaccine in order to bolster the sale of its own supply.

According to a new Wall Street Journal report, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center has identified at least four publications that have been used as Russian intel fronts in the past that are publishing articles questioning the safety of the Pfizer vaccine and other Western vaccine companies.