I hear that Kilolo Kijakazi just got tapped by President Biden to be the new acting Commissioner of the Social Security Administration. She replaces Commissioner Andrew Saul who President Biden fired this afternoon.
Saul, who was appointed to a six year term in 2019, is out immediately, though he doesn’t appear to accept that he was fired. Deputy Commissioner David Black also appears to be out, according to notifications that went out within the agency today.
For all we’ve heard, videos like this capture what happened on January 6th in a way words simply cannot. It’s new video of officers being dragged out into the mob for what turned out to be severe beatings. We’ve seen other views of this. But this video was just released by DOJ under court order.
Personality cults and the political dynasties that come in their wake have a way of entwining all politics into familial politics. Policy and political disputes get played out through familial and entourage factions and those family and entourage dynamics in turn shape the politics. These amount to court factions, many woven into Trump’s immediately family, each seemingly with their own MAGA-themed super PAC and associated money gravy trains. Politico’s Playbook newsletter this morning reports that Guilfoyle is on the outs with Trump, who finds her increasingly “annoying.” The tension is centered on the fact that Guilfoyle has signed on with disgraced former Governor Eric Greitens of Missouri in his comeback bid to run for the Senate seat left vacant by the retiring Roy Blunt.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) warned his colleagues on Friday that their beloved August recess may be in flux if they are unable to tackle his ambitious agenda in time.
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We got two key announcements yesterday in the on-going story of mRNA vaccine efficacy and the Delta variant.
Pfizer announced that it plans to seek regulatory approval in August for a COVID vaccine booster shot. A very preliminary trial (a couple dozen people) provided such clear evidence of increased efficacy from a booster shot that the company said it’s highly confident of what a more extensive trial will show. Specifically the announcement reported “high neutralization titers against the wild type and the Beta variant, which are 5 to 10 times higher than after two primary doses.”
I’ve struggled a bit with the vocabulary here. “Analog” doesn’t quite capture it. But it’s close. A couple decades ago I might have used the word “meme”. But with the rise of the Internet that word has now taken on a very particular meaning which is distinct from what I’m talking about. For me, and I suspect for you, there are certain movies – perhaps also TV shows or novels – which contain certain iconic or resonant moments that not only stick with us but then provide analogs which shape our understanding of real life moments. They also allow us to communicate our perceptions of those moments to others through this visual or analogic shorthand.
There’s a lot going on in that sentence so let me provide an example. For me one of those movies is The Godfather (really the whole trilogy). There’s Michael telling Sen. Geary his offer is “nothing.” There’s Vito Corleone dressing down the undertaker Amerigo Bonasera and then accepting his offer of “friendship.” Particularly Godfather I and II have countless exchanges and plot twists like this. They are mostly about the economy of power and how it interacts with friendship and loyalty.
Good breakdown here of how the Ashli Babbitt martyr narrative migrated from neo-Nazi and white supremacist websites to far right members of Congress and finally to Trump’s mouth.
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is now live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss where things stand on the six-month anniversary of the January 6 insurrection.
Watch below and email us your theme song submissions and questions for next week’s episode.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
When did Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football become a staple of political speech and analogies? Kate Riga dug into the story.
They just don’t want to admit it.
It’s not as if you couldn’t speculate — we now know House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) blamed Trump for the insurrection the night it happened, only to crawl back to Trump’s side for the midterms. Several other prominent Republican leaders have taken similar about-face paths since January.
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