Kevin McCarthy’s turnabout on a Jan 6th Commission proposal that was negotiated by his chosen negotiator and, by all indications, at his direction is a good reminder – for anyone who needed reminding, and really who are you who needed reminding? – of the reality of bipartisan negotiations in the Trump era. As I noted yesterday, Rep. Katko does not appear to have been freelancing. McCarthy chose him to negotiate on his behalf. And reporting suggests Katko worked from McCarthy’s directives and kept him in the loop. But once the deal was announced McCarthy felt he needed to torpedo it.

I want to take a moment to thank all the former members who’ve rejoined over the last couple weeks. And thanks so much to those of you who’ve become members for the first time. Joining our community and supporting our team’s work is hugely important. It always has been. In many ways though it’s even more meaningful and important now. We get it. It’s been a really long five years of Trump. Trump was brutalizing for some, exhausting for many more. He made news both unwatchable but also unmissable. I long compared the experience of Trump as comparable to life with an abuser. It breeds hypervigilance. Or maybe it’s like news about a sick relative, the last thing you wanted to hear and the first thing you read.

Now that’s done. We don’t know for how long or whether it’s just an intermission. But right now we have a functioning, not-clearly-corrupt executive branch. We even have one that is expansive and reformist in its vision and scope of action. We may have an ex-President at war with the republic … but not a current one. And that, for now, makes all the difference.

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From TPM Reader JO’N …

On Josh’s note of two COVID Americas today, I think he’s right. But one thing to notice about the map, and to account for when making sense of the geography of this, is the huge strides that Native American governments have made in getting their people vaccinated. In Montana, the Blackfeet Tribe was away ahead of the rest of the state, with a particularly aggressive outreach and compliance plan.

It’s not for a lack of access in the U.S.

Republicans are still the main the main demographic unwilling to get the COVID-19 shot.

When it was announced last week that Rep. John Katko (R-NY) had negotiated a deal for a Jan 6th Commission I was not so much skeptical as wondering what it was I was missing. Striking a deal usually means you speak for the people who are agreeing to the deal. I saw no evidence this was the case with Katko. It just seemed to me that one Representative had come up with a deal with one other member of Congress, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS). The fact that Katko was one of only ten members of the House to vote for the President’s impeachment over Jan 6th would, it would seem to me, instantly discredit any deal he struck with most Republicans.

Admittedly, the two are the chair and ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee. So it’s relevant jurisdiction. But committee leaders don’t create commissions. That’s something done by congressional leaders and full caucuses. When Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R) responded with a skeptical wait-and-see approach, it seemed to me that this was less “agreement” than “proposal”, and maybe not a very promising one at that, inasmuch as it was presented to me as largely adopting the Democrats’ demands.

This morning Politico Playbook sheds new light on the situation which manages to make it both more interesting and more clownish all at once.

The Jerusalem Post is an English-language Israeli paper which is probably best described as center-right-ish, though it’s hard to use these terms in a way that maps clearly to the way we use these terms in the US. It’s current editor-in-chief is Yaakov Katz who in a addition to being a journalist was at one point a national security advisor to Naftali Bennett, a key player in the current dance over the next Israeli government.

As I mentioned yesterday, the current crisis – really several overlapping crises – has been a boon for Prime Minister Netanyahu. At least in the short-term it short-circuited all efforts to form a government to replace him. A key part of why is the aforementioned Bennett. Bennett is an erstwhile Netanyahu protege or junior ally. He’s part of the Israeli right and comes out of Religious Zionism, basically Revisionist Zionism koshered with Orthodoxy. Before the last week’s cascade of violence he was negotiating joining a government created by opposition leader Yair Lapid. It likely would have involved the two sharing the Prime Ministership and Bennett taking the position first. (Not bad for a guy whose party garnered only 7 seats out of 120.)

COVID vaccination, for all the slowdown, remains fast moving across the United States. It seems likely we’ll see a brief surge in shots as parents bring their 12-15 year olds in for their shots. But we’re already seeing the emergence of what in the later months of 2021 is like to be two separate Americas as defined by COVID.

This is a map from the CDC vaccine data portal.

I had missed this article about a very sobering study about the post-acute-illness impact of COVID. Most of us are now familiar with ‘long COVID’, people who continue to have various health problems long after they are past the period acute COVID infection. Some people simply don’t fully recover. Other have various knock-on symptoms or what appear to be recurrences of COVID, even if these are not actually new infections and illness. This study catalogs the likely impact of this phenomenon at scale. They say it will be a protracted health crisis for years to come, both in the US and around the world. The study also found that even people with mild cases of COVID have an elevated risk of death in the six months after they recover. This risk increases with the severity of the original illness.

There’s a lot of stunning and yet not at all surprising information in a new big poll out from Democracy Corps. In short, in battleground states Republicans are pretty much totally united and energized behind Trump, the Big Lie-centric posture of congressional Republicans and well-positioned for 2022. That doesn’t mean Democrats won’t also be united and pumped up. But any questions you may have had about Republicans being divided, demoralized or any essence having second thoughts about the events of the last six months … well, they’re not.

Here’s the overview from Democracy Corps and here’s the whole report. The fine points are a bit more nuanced than I put it above. But not much …

We conducted a large, mostly cell phone survey with an oversample of Republicans in the 2022 battleground for the U.S. Senate, governorships, and House, and it is painfully clear Donald Trump, Lindsey Graham, and Kevin McCarthy know their party. The Trump loyalists who strongly approve of him are two thirds of those who identify as, “Republican.” And they are joined by the Trump aligned to form a breathtaking, three quarters of the party in the electoral battleground states and districts that will decide who leads the country.

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson may be one of the most prominent voices spreading vaccine speculation on the airwaves, but social media’s prowess is arguably just as far reaching.

A new study first picked up by NPR has found that there are just 12 people behind much of the spread of disinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine on social media, specifically on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.