Editors’ Blog
Watch The New Episode Of The Josh Marshall Podcast: On To The Main Event
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is now live! This week Josh and Kate discuss the passing of the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the next legislative push on the docket: a potentially historic reconciliation package to wrap up as much of the Biden administration’s remaining agenda as possible.
Watch below and email us your questions for next week’s episode.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
The Feral Minority and the Schools
As we’ve discussed a number of times, Republican leaders made a clear decision over the winter of 2020-21 to embrace and cater to anti-vax, anti-mandate sentiment to supercharge their midterm election odds. I’ve seen some debate over whether GOP elites convinced GOP voters or GOP voters dragged along the elites. I think it’s a bit of both but mainly a non-issue. Unsurprisingly, elected officials and voters in a political party tend to think in similar ways. They decided to become the anti-vax party and thus helped usher in the fourth COVID wave.
But something happened on the way to the party: the Delta variant.
Where Things Stand: Biden Sends Ventilators To FL. DeSantis Wants Nothing To Do With It 
The Biden administration reportedly sent 200 ventilators and 100 nasal oxygen kits to the state of Florida this week as the state sees an unprecedented spike in COVID-19 cases. As we’ve reported, the number of people hospitalized with the virus increased by 1,173 just in the last two days — putting the total number of confirmed hospitalizations in the Sunshine state at 14,787.
But Gov. Ron DeSantis claims he didn’t ask the feds for the life-saving equipment.
Go Manchin, Joe Manchin
So a few thoughts on Manchin.
We’ve said repeatedly there’s going to be a lot of drama and haggling before this gets settled. Well, see: I was right. Does this change the global picture? I don’t think so.
Many people believed that Joe Biden would never be able to get 10 Republicans to agree to a bipartisan mini-bill deal without also agreeing to jettison most of the rest of his fiscal/infrastructure/climate agenda. They figured that these efforts would eventually fail. Once it had failed, Biden would then go to the bipartisanists and say, “Look, we tried. It didn’t work. Now we pour everything into the reconciliation bill.”
That wasn’t a bad plan. It was just another way to get to passing the agenda. In any case, that’s what many people believed. I was one of them. I was wrong.
This is what I mean by Biden having his cake and eating it too.
Now, to be fair, I didn’t think it was impossible, just unlikely. But they both get you to the same end goal.
Is the Law Coming for the Coup Plotters? At least Dick Durbin Is
Most of us have understandably and rightly been focused on the new House select committee as the investigation that will get to the heart of the January 6th insurrection and the coup plot that preceded and created it. We’re right to. Indeed, before the new committee was impanelled I’d gotten used to hearing about this and that one-off hearing, most focused on security lapses on January 6th itself, and had been semi-tuning them out. But as I’ve learned from my colleagues in recent days, there’s more going on in the Senate than I realized.
You’ve probably noticed we’re making more use of our new live blog feature in recent weeks. That’s along with a number of other changes and fine-tunings we’ve introduced in recent months as we try to evolve and improve TPM – evolve with the news environment, technology and how people most want to consume news. There’s no final state, no best way to do things that doesn’t change. This is our effort to constantly improve how we bring you the news and that’s possible because of your membership. That’s how we finance all of this. And that’s why this month I’m encouraging all Prime members to try the two week free trial we’re offering of Prime Ad Free (AF).
It’s a better version of the site. There’s less clutter because there’s zero ads ever. Ads also ad to site load times. On every front it’s a better experience. If you decide after the trial that you want to upgrade to Prime AF that’s additional revenue that makes it possible to keep doing what we’re doing. Keep improving, remain vital and creative as an organization. They all go together.
Individually, it’s just four bucks a month more for a Prime AF account ($10) compared to a Prime account ($6). But at scale that difference is huge for us as an organization. But like I said, just give it a try, okay? You can test drive it for two weeks with no obligation. If you decide you don’t want to go back, great! A better version of the site for you and more support for our team to keep delivering for you every day. Just click right here to try it out.
Where Things Stand: Mark Meadows, You’re Up
Former White House chief-of-staff Mark Meadows was one of Trump’s top henchmen pushing the DOJ to buy into his conspiracy theory of a stolen election — that is, when Trump wasn’t doing the dirty work himself.
Are We Thinking the Right Way About What Constitutes Infection?
One of the most interesting and clarifying discussions I’ve read in recent weeks is Dr. Monica Gandhi’s discussion of the difference between ‘colonization’ and ‘infection’ in thinking about what counts as a case of COVID. It’s conceptually interesting but also highly relevant both for the choices we make balancing risk as individuals as well as how we approach the vaccine phase of the pandemic in policy terms.
As Gandhi tells it, in many cases a vaccinated individual will be exposed to COVID and have the pathogen briefly colonize their nasal passages. But vaccine-induced immunity will fight and defeat the virus there. Is that an infection or a case? If you take a PCR test, you’ll test positive. But Gandhi says we’re confusing things by treating it as one.
Gandhi is an infectious disease specialist and we spoke with her this morning in an Inside Briefing about this and related topics.
If you’re a TPM member you can watch our full interview after the jump.
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This is perhaps a minor point. But I want to return to it. A key reason we’re experiencing the fourth COVID wave in the US – albeit one that has far less hospitalizations and deaths thanks to vaccines – is that way too many people still haven’t gotten vaccinated. From an epidemiological perspective we’re not nearly where we want to be. But as we talk about the political polarization over vaccines, things are a bit different.
Among Americans over the age of 18 fully 71% have gotten at least one vaccine dose.